Shelley Memorial

Memorial to the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Shelley Memorial is a memorial to the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) at University College, Oxford, England, the college that he briefly attended and from which he was expelled for writing the 1811 pamphlet "The Necessity of Atheism". Although Shelley was expelled from the college, he remains one of its most famous alumni and is now held in high honour there. In 2005, the college acquired some of Shelley's letters to further enhance its connection with the poet.

The memorial consists of a white marble sculpture of a reclining nude and dead Shelley washed up on the shore at Viareggio in Italy after his drowning, sculpted by Edward Onslow Ford, associated with the New Sculpture movement. It is set on a decorative plinth in a small domed late Victorian room designed by Basil Champneys, behind ornamental railings that protect it from students. The statue was commissioned by Shelley's daughter in law, Lady Shelley. It was originally intended to be located in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome where Shelley is buried, at the request of adventurer Edward John Trelawny, a friend of Shelley. Trelawny wanted to have a monument of the poet next to his own. However, Trelawny's descendants thought that Ford's statue was too large and thus did not consent to his wishes. Eventually the statue ended up at University College, donated by Lady Shelley, with a formal opening ceremony on 14 June 1893. Among others, Lady Shelley, Onslow Ford, Champneys and Benjamin Jowett were present at the opening ceremony. The memorial has been the victim of a number of pranks over the years. The college's chemistry don, E. J. Bowen, had to clean paint off the statue, for example. The room in which it is housed has also been flooded and infested with goldfish. The statue was a key element in the meeting of two main characters in the 1997 film The Saint, starring Val Kilmer and Elisabeth Shue, and also features in an episode (And the Moonbeams Kiss the Sea) of the British TV drama, Lewis.