Percy Bysshe Shelley, the great English romantic poet, was a litigant in a landmark child custody case. By way of background, he was a prominent radical thinker who wrote pamphlets and essays espousing atheism, non-violence, and the rejection of monarchy and marriage as an institution. None of this made him very popular with the English establishment.

He was no hypocrite in his personal life. In 1811, the 19-year-old Shelley eloped with the 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook. His father, Sir Timothy Shelley, broke off relations with his son and they never reconciled. Unfortunately, the marriage was unhappy, perhaps because poor Harriet was not his intellectual equal, or perhaps because he fell in love with Mary Godwin, daughter of his mentor. (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley became a novelist and biographer in her own right, still famous as the author of the Gothic novel, Frankenstein). Shelley abandoned Harriet in favor of Mary, now enraging a second father, the philosopher William Godwin. Society was scandalized.

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