Shelley was born as the fourth child of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, his namesake, and his wife, author Mary Shelley. His elder siblings, consisting of a premature girl who died at a few weeks old and a brother and a sister who died in childhood, left him as the only surviving child after his mother suffered a miscarriage in 1822. His parents lived in Italy for several years, until his father drowned near
Livorno (then known to the English as Leghorn), whereupon his mother moved back to England with him. Mary Shelley never remarried; Percy had no further siblings. He joined
Harrow School in 1832, and went up to
Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1837. Shelley inherited the
Shelley baronetcy upon the death of his grandfather,
Timothy Shelley, in 1844, becoming the 3rd Baronet, of
Castle Goring, Sussex. In 1845, giving his address as
Putney (then a riverside village in
Surrey just upstream of
Clapham), he was elected to the
Royal Thames Yacht Club. On 22 June 1848, he married Jane Gibson, one of nine illegitimate children of Thomas Gibson, a wealthy
Newcastle banker, by Ann Shevill; Jane was the widow of the Hon. Charles Robert St. John, son of the
3rd Viscount Bolingbroke and the Viscountess Bolingbroke, Baroness Hompesch. The couple had no children, although they adopted Jane's niece, Bessie Florence Gibson, the youngest child of Jane's brother Edward Gibson. Bessie Gibson married Lieutenant-Colonel Leopold James Yorke Campbell Scarlett (grandson of the
1st Baron Abinger, a politician and judge), He was appointed
High Sheriff of Sussex in 1865. According to
Yachting World, Shelley was a member of the prestigious and exclusive
Royal Yacht Squadron at
Cowes on the
Isle of Wight. Shelley died 5 December 1889 at Bournemouth, and was buried in the family vault in the churchyard of
St Peter's Church, Bournemouth, reputedly with the heart of his father alongside him. In that vault, in addition to the patrilineal family, lie the remains of his maternal grandparents, namely
Mary Wollstonecraft and
William Godwin; Shelley and his wife were instrumental in moving their bones from
St Pancras Old Church in London. The Shelley baronetcy passed to his first cousin,
Edward Shelley (1827–1890), of Avington House, Hampshire, a Captain in the
16th Lancers, son of John Shelley (1806–1866),
JP,
DL, of Avington House,
High Sheriff of Hampshire in 1853, the younger brother of
Percy Bysshe Shelley. == Passion for theatre ==