Percy Florence Shelley: A Tale of bodies and body parts [by Simon Strickland-Scott]

CW; femicide/violence

Mary Shelley had only one child who survived infancy.  Percy Florence Shelley was born in 1819 and named after his father, Percy Bysshe and the Italian city of his birth.

When he was only two and a half his father, the famous poet and radical, drowned in a boating accident and was cremated on the beach at Viareggio, Italy with his ashes later being buried in Rome.  Strangely his heart survived the incineration and was retrieved from the funeral pyre.  Shelley had suffered from tuberculosis and so doctors believe that his heart may have partly calcified and it is thought that it was this that saved it from being consumed in the flames at Viareggio.  An alternative theory is that it was his liver which survived and not his heart but that sounds far less romantic.

Despite this early tragedy, Percy Florence grew up enjoying the family’s wealth, inheriting the estate from his grandfather in 1844 to become a baronet.  A man of leisure, Percy Florence enjoyed amateur theatricals and, despite the cause of his father’s death, he became an enthusiastic sailor and a member of two exclusive yacht clubs, both with royal patronage; the Royal Thames Yacht Club and the Royal Yacht Squadron, the latter based in Cowes on the Isle of Wight.

Percy Florence married Jane Gibson St. John.  Percy’s mother, Mary; suffering from long term illness, often lived with them until in, 1851, she died.  Mary had asked to be buried at St. Pancras with her parents but Percy and Jane apparently didn’t like the graveyard and arranged instead for her burial to take place at St. Peter’s Church in Bournemouth, near one of their houses.

Percy then organized the costly process for the remains of his grandparents; Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin to be exhumed from St. Pancras and transported to Bournemouth for reburial alongside their daughter.  The remains of Mary Godwin (née Claremont), William Godwin’s second wife who had also been buried in the same plot at St. Pancras were left undisturbed.

Having successfully reunited his ancestors in death, Percy Florence’s association with moving the remains of the dead was to have an unsolicited and horrific sequel.  Between 1887 and 1889 a series of murders occurred in London which became known at the time as the Thames Torso Murders.  There may well have been three earlier victims going back to the 1870’s, but the four in the late 1880’s were definitively linked by police forensic experts at the time. The victims were all women whose bodies were dismembered and the parts distributed over a wide area of London but typically within a short distance of the River Thames.  Other parts appear to have been planted in strategic locations as if the murderer was taunting the police.  Indeed the torso and other parts of the second victim was planted in the newly dug basement of New Scotland Yard which was then under construction in Whitehall.  The Torso of the fourth victim, killed in 1889, was found in Pinchin Street, Whitechapel, in very close proximity to, and exactly twelve months after the so called Jack the Ripper killings had ended.  Whether this was intended as a message to the police, to link the murders or maybe just to confuse the investigation will never be known because the killer was never caught.

Between these two murders, the third Torso killing was the only one in which the identity of the unfortunate victim was confirmed.  Elizabeth Jackson, poor and heavily pregnant at the time of her murder, had spent her whole life living in the vicinity of Battersea.  Jackson’s right thigh was found in the garden of Percy Florence’s London estate backing on to the Thames in Chelsea.  Although it appeared to have been thrown over a fence rather than deliberately placed, the fact of its location was still thought by some to be significant.  Thus it has been speculated that this too was some kind of message. After all Percy’s mother had found fame for writing Frankenstein, a novel about a scientist who created a monster out of random body parts gathered from graveyards and from anatomical laboratories.  Indeed, lacking even identification, some of the earlier possible ‘victims’ of the Thames Torso murderer were thought by some to have not been murdered at all but rather were cadavers of women who had died naturally or accidentally, then been acquired for medical research and finally planted by medical students as a ghoulish prank.  Though in the case of Elizabeth Jackson, this was not the case, as she was definitely murdered.

Shelley himself was absent at the time of the gruesome discovery but speculation remains that the depositing of part of Elizabeth Jackson’s body in his garden was far from coincidence.

Shelley died later that same year, 1889, and was naturally buried at the family plot he had created at St. Peter’s, Bournemouth.  

It is widely believed that when Percy Florence Shelley was interred, so too, was the heart of his father.  As stated, this had survived incineration in Italy and eventually passed to Percy Bysshe’s widow, Mary who had kept it until her death before their son took possession of it.

Jane Gibson Shelley lived for a further ten years, dying in 1899 and she too was buried at St. Peter’s.  The family’s grave, topped with an engraved capstone can still be visited there today.

This blog is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. It was made by New Unity and Simon Strickland-Scott. Find out more: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.