01 April 2012

The cremation of Percy Bysshe Shelley


I have firmly expressed my desire for my corpse to be cremated, so it was with some interest that I encountered this painting at Sloth Unleashed.  The image is of an 1889 oil painting by Louis Édouard Fournier, entitled The Funeral of Shelley.   I was startled to see the apparent "low-tech" methodology, which seemed more suited to Delhi than to Tuscany.

The source for the image is Frankensteinia: The Frankenstein Blog, where an extended discussion explains that the painting depicts fantasy more than the reality of the cremation.
Fournier’s 1889 painting depicts a bleak, windswept beach, the witnesses swaddled in heavy coats against the cold. At the back, Mary Shelley kneels in prayer. In the foreground, friends and fellow authors Edward John Trelawny, Hunt and Byron strike dramatic, grieving poses. A peaceful Shelley, as if asleep, is stretched out on his smoking pyre. But it’s all wrong.

July 18 was actually a hot, sunny day. Mary Shelley, as was the custom of the times, did not attend. Leigh Hunt sat out the event in a nearby carriage. Byron, upset at the proceedings and suffering from the heat, cooled off in the surf, eventually to swim out to his own boat, leaving Trelawny alone on the beach. Shelley’s body, badly decomposed, the face and hands gone, was burned in a metal furnace lugged out to the shore by hired help.

In the end, Trelawny plucked Shelley’s carbonized heart from the ashes as a gruesome souvenir for himself, but he was eventually persuaded to give it to Mary, who preserved the relic for the rest of her life. Contrary to various reports, the heart was not returned to Shelley’s grave or buried with Mary, in 1851. It was interred with their son, Percy Florence Shelley, in 1889, the very year that Fournier painted The Funeral of Shelley.

There was nothing of the romantic gesture, suggested by Fournier’s art, in the actual cremation of Shelley’s remains. His friends had gathered in respect and duty, to oversee the proper and speedy disposal of his body.
I'll have more to say about Shelley's heart in some future post.   The Frankensteinia blog has lots of good stuff for those interested.

Addendum:  Reposted from 2010 to add this most interesting text found by reader Bulletholes, in a post by kissyface at Charm School:
After the fire was well kindled we repeated the ceremony of the previous day; and more wine was poured over Shelley's dead body than he had consumed during his life. This with the oil and salt made the yellow flames glisten and quiver. The heat from the sun and fire was so intense that the atmosphere was tremulous and wavy. The corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull, where it had been struck with the mattock, fell off; and, as the back of the head rested on the red-hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time...

The fire was so fierce as to produce a white heat on the iron, and to reduce its contents to grey ashes. The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull, but what surprised us all, was that the heart remained entire...
Some additional details in the comments, or at the text source: Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, by Edward John Trelawny

12 comments:

  1. I love the description here of Shelleys heart being an "iron machine"...

    After the fire was well kindled we repeated the ceremony of the previous day; and more wine was poured over Shelley's dead body than he had consumed during his life. This with the oil and salt made the yellow flames glisten and quiver. The heat from the sun and fire was so intense that the atmosphere was tremulous and wavy. The corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull, where it had been struck with the mattock, fell off; and, as the back of the head rested on the red-hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time.
    Byron could not face this scene, he withdrew to the beach and swam off to the Bolivar. Leigh Hunt remained in the carriage.
    The fire was so fierce as to produce a white heat on the iron, and to reduce its contents to grey ashes. The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull, but what surprised us all, was that the heart remained entire.
    In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt; and had any one seen me do the act I should have been put into quarantine.
    After cooling the iron machine in the sea, I collected the human ashes and placed them in a box, which I took on board the Bolivar. Byron and Hunt retraced their steps to their home, and the officers and soldiers returned to their quarters. I liberally rewarded the men for the admirable manner in which they behaved during the two days they had been with us. As I undertook and executed this novel ceremony, I have been thus tediously minute in describing it.

    Extracts from Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron
    Edward John Trelawny

    By the way, the Hebrew words for "Heart" and "Fire" are well connected!
    Love scrolling through your blog on a lazy Saturday afternoon!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. And thank you for that excellent addition, which I think may be worthy of a separate blog post.

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    2. Post updated and reposted. Thanks, Bulletholes.

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  2. Thanks for the tip, Ty, but of course I found it somewhere as well....my old blog pal kissyface posted the text and image about 5 years ago...CLICK HERE

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. (link doesn't seem to be clickable)

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    2. Here's a bulletproof link you can paste if you like...
      http://beautifulcandy.blogspot.com/2007/03/promethean-fire-unbound.html

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    3. Credit added to the post. Tx, bulletholes.

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    4. I’m afraid that the “iron machine” was not Shelley’s heart. It refers to the box, a sort of steel cage in which Shelley’s body was placed for cremation, as required by local sanitation laws. It had to be submerged and cooled so that it could be taken away.

      Trelawny burned his hand retrieving what he believed was the heart and sprinkled some water over it (see “Trelawny: A Man’s Life” by Margaret Armstrong). Byron wanted to save the skull, but it had broken apart.

      Equally unromantic, some historians now believe that the carbonized lump taken from the ashes could not have been the heart but rather some fused organs, perhaps what remained of the liver.

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    5. Aw Pierre, you almost ruined it for me! I can see Trelawney dunking the heart, hissing and steaming, into the sea. I can still see it. So, you almost ruined it for me, but not quite!
      Hi Pierre!

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  3. I saw this a few days ago at the Walker art gallery, Liverpool.

    http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/collections/19c/fournier.aspx

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  4. wow! what a blast from the past. I really need to return to the blog world... this is great info, thanks!

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