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The return to England was marred by tragedy. Fanny Kemble, a member of Godwin's household, killed herself in the late Autumn. In December, 1816 Harriet Shelley committed suicide. On December 30, 1816, Shelley and Mary Godwin were married. Only a few weeks had passed since Harriet's body was recovered from the Serpentine River in Hyde Park, London. The marriage was intended, in part, to help secure Shelley's custody of his children by Harriet, but it was in vain: the children were given over to foster parents by the courts.
The Shelleys took up residence in the village of Marlow, Buckinghamshire where lived Thomas Love Peacock , a friend of Percy. Shelley took part in the literary circle that surrounded Leigh Hunt, and during this period came to know John Keats. Shelley's major production this year was Laon and Cythna, a long narrative poem in which the two principal figures were incestuous lovers and which attacked religion. It was hastily withdrawn after only a few copies were published, then edited and reissued as The Revolt of Islam in 1818. Shelley also wrote two revolutionary political tracts under the nom de plume of "The Hermit of Marlow."
Early in 1818, the Shelleys and Claire left England in order to deliver the daughter of Byron and Claire to Byron, who had taken up residence in Venice. Again contact with Byron encouraged the production of Shelley's poetry. In the latter part of the year he wrote Julian and Maddalo, which describes boat trips and coversations pursued by a couple of Venetian friends, and then relates a visit to a madhouse. He then began the long verse drama Prometheus Unbound, which features talking mountains and a petulant demon who overthrows Zeus. Tragedy struck in 1818 and 1819, when his infant daughter and son died of climate-related illnesses.
The Shelleys moved around various Italian cities during these years. Shelley completed Prometheus Unbound in Rome, and spent the summer of 1819 writing a tragedy, The Cenci, in Leghorn. In this year, propmpted among other causes by the Peterloo massacre, he wrote his best-known political poems, The Masque of Anarchy, Men of England and The Witch of Atlas, probably his best-remembered works during the 19th century, and the essay The Philosophical View of Reform, his most thorough exposition of his political views.
In 1821, inspired by the death of John Keats, Shelley wrote the elegy Adonais .
In 1822 Shelley arranged for James Henry Leigh Hunt, the British poet and editor who had been one of his chief supporters in England, to come to Italy with his family; he intended that the three of them—himself, Byron and Hunt—would create a journal, to be called The Liberal, with Hunt as editor, which would disseminate their controversial writings and act as a counter-blast to conservative periodicals such as Blackwood's Magazine and The Quarterly Review .
On July 8, 1822, Shelley drowned in a sudden storm off Leghorn in the Bay of Spezia , while sailing back from Pisa and Leghorn to Lerici in his schooner, the Don Juan. He was returning from having set up The Liberal with the newly-arrived Hunt. The name "Don Juan", a compliment to Byron, was chosen by Edward Trelawny, a member of the Shelley-Byron Pisan circle, but according to Mary Shelley's testimony, Shelley changed it to " Ariel". This annoyed Byron, who caused "Don Juan" to be painted on the mainsail, giving offence to the Shelleys, who felt that the boat now looked like a coal barge. The vessel, an open boat designed from a Royal dockyards model, was custom-built in Genoa for Shelley. It did not capsize but sank; Mary Shelley declared in her "Note on Poems of 1822" ( 1839) that this design had a defect and was never seaworthy.
Shelley's body was washed ashore and later cremated on the beach near Viareggio . His heart was snatched, unconsumed, from the funeral pyre by Edward Trelawny, and kept by Mary Shelley until her dying day, while his ashes were interred in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome.
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