Percy Florence Shelley Bysshe Shelley, his namesake, and his wife author Mary Shelley. His elder siblings, consisting of a premature girl who died at few weeks old and a brother and a sister who died in childhood left him as the only surviving child as his mother suffered a miscarriage in 1822. His parents lived in Italy for several years, until his father drowned off Livorno, whereupon his mother moved back to England with him. Mary Shelley never remarried; Percy Florence had no further siblings. He joined Harrow School in 1832, and went up to Trinity College, Cambridge in October 1837. Shelley inherited
Mary Shelley the spacious surroundings of Baxter's house and in the companionship of his four daughters, and she returned north in the summer of 1813 for a further stay of 10 months. In the 1831 introduction to "Frankenstein", she recalled: "I wrote then—but in a most common-place style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered." Mary Godwin may have first met the radical poet-philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley in the interval between her two