Percy Bysshe Shelley Is Born

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on August 4, 1792, at Field Place in Warnham, Sussex, the eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, a Whig Member of Parliament and heir to a baronetcy. He spent the next three decades scandalizing that family, from his expulsion from Oxford for atheism to his elopements and radical politics. In March 1812, at nineteen, he adopted a vegetable diet alongside his first wife, Harriet Westbrook, and kept to it, with lapses, for the rest of his life. The following year he wrote "A Vindication of Natural Diet," arguing that killing animals for food required a kind of violence that coarsened everyone who ate the result, and that only the rich could afford the habit while the poor starved to sustain it. It was one of the first widely circulated English essays to connect what's on the plate to who suffers for it.