The story of Shelley's youth is the story of his life, but not only because of his untimely death at the age of 29. His biographer immediately has to begin to defend or attack Shelley's intellectual and political seriousness. Early precociousness becomes indistinguishable from other characteristically impulsive identifications with interests radically different from those normally associated with his station in life. Hostile critics always find these gestures extravagant: Romantic in a pejorative or otherworldly sense, immature. For William Hazlitt, Shelley's speculative social solidarities were so implausible that they replaced one system of prejudice, the upper-class snobbery he should have had, with another. For others, he was the essence of magnanimity, and, latterly, the type of that vanguard of revolution that sought the dissolution of its own privilege in the success of its emancipatory political mission. Precocious again, on principle. How did this exorbitant habit begin?

By all accounts Shelley enjoyed a happy childhood in the Sussex countryside as the son of a recently established landowning family living at Field Place, a fine house outside Horsham. Shelley's father, Timothy, inherited a baronetcy when grandfather Bysshe died in 1815. He became a Whig MP, capping a fairly adventurous family history with the dogged respectability of the shires. Shelley's mother, Elizabeth, although affectionate and intelligent, also reinforced the gentry stereotype. From this comfortable existence, fêted by sisters and retainers, Shelley was cast into the barbarity of the English public-school system, first at Syon House near Brentford, thereafter at Eton. He survived inventive bullying, eventually becoming liked for the singularity that had provoked his persecutions. At Eton, he was befriended by a Dr James Lind, who allowed him access to a library good enough to ground him in the many literary, scientific, and philosophical sources of his early poetry. He fell in love with his cousin, Harriet Grove, but the relationship broke up when the radicalism of his views on politics and religion became known to her parents. Their interferences, along with the resistant temperament developed in schoolboy conflicts, helped determine him in the antiauthoritarian attitudes for which he became famous. These took a definitive turn during the six months he next spent at University College, Oxford.