Chapter 1 - Family and Education

Summary

Shelley’s poetry was shaped not only by his formal education and privileged position as a member of the Whig-supporting landed gentry class but also by the architecture of his family home and the farming environment of rural Sussex. The paradoxes of his early experiences (unconventional family members coexisting with the conventional moral training of a young patrician; his father’s mildly progressive politics combining with corrupt practices; security at home intercut with violent bullying at school) formed his early conceptions of tyranny and his mission to oppose it. Ossified and limited school and university curricula that nevertheless provided opportunities to pursue areas of knowledge lying outside it together with encouragement to write and freedom to read anything he wanted – these experiences co-mingled to make him at once scholar, gentleman, revolutionary, and philosopher.