On an Italian beach in the summer of 1822, a group of famous writers cremated their 29-year-old friend, whose decomposed body had washed ashore after a shipwreck, and watched his heart refuse to burn. That heart belonged to Percy Bysshe Shelley, remembered today as a peak of English Romantic poetry but regarded in his own time as a dangerous radical monitored by government spies. This deep dive explores how a man born into a baronetcy and immense privilege became a champion of atheism, free love, and nonviolent resistance who influenced figures from Karl Marx to Mahatma Gandhi.

The episode follows Shelley from the bullying at Eton that earned him the name Mad Shelley and his gunpowder experiments on the family estate, to the atheism pamphlet he mailed to every college head and bishop at Oxford and the expulsion and disinheritance that followed. It examines his elopement with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, his abandonment of her for Mary Godwin, Harriet’s suicide, the custody ruling that declared him morally unfit, the rainy Geneva summer of 1816 that produced Frankenstein, the deaths of his children in Italy, his essays on vegetarianism and passive resistance after Peterloo, the storm that sank the Don Juan, and Mary Shelley’s decades-long campaign to rehabilitate his legacy.

• How questioning electricity and chemistry led Shelley to question religion, monarchy, and class
• Whether his philosophy of free love was a genuine conviction or an intellectualized excuse for abandoning responsibility
• Why he argued that grain fed to livestock for the wealthy could feed the starving, tying diet to inequality
• How his argument for peaceful mass protest against tyranny reached Gandhi a century later
• Why modern medical historians believe his heart resisted the flames, and how Mary softened his edges for the Victorians