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Edward Dawkins was the Secretary to the Legation in Tuscany, who made the arrangements with the Lucchese and Tuscan governments to permit the disinterment and cremation of Shelley and Williams. He is here writing on behalf of Mary Shelley to John Parke, the British Consul at Rome, to ensure that the widow’s desire to have Shelley’s remains interred close to that of their infant son, William, are satisfied. William Shelley had died in 1819 aged three and buried in what would later be referred to as the ‘Parte Antica’ of the Non-Catholic Cemetery (where Keats’s tomb also is). Because by the time of Percy Shelley’s death the cemetery had been just allowed a new enclosure, his ashes were eventually located to that new area (now called ‘Parte Vecchia’); in order to fulfil Mary Shelley’s wish, Joseph Severn and John Freeburn (the acting British Consul in Rome) requested and obtained the permission to exhume the body of William and rebury him together with his father in the new burial ground. However, on opening the tomb they found a five-and-a-half-feet skeleton. Awed by the idea of disturbing strangers’ graves in a foreign land, they proceeded with depositing Percy Shelley’s ashes alone (21 January 1823). Later, in April 1823, Edward Trelawny would move Shelley’s ashes to a more dignified spot in the same area.

Dawkins, William (sender)
Parker, John (recipient)

1822 August 22

3 sheets

manuscript

paper

eng

autographs (manuscripts)
letters (correspondence)

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792-1822

Cimitero degli stranieri acattolici al Testaccio

cemeteries

Rome (Italy)

1822

Gift of Colonel and Mrs Call to the Keats-Shelley Memorial House (KSMH), 1924.

KSH

Terrace Room

SHL-2.27