Edward John Trelawny

One of the old cottages at Sompting is known as Trelawny's cottage; it is the house in which Edward John Trelawny died. Edward John trelawny, son of a Cornish family with military traditions, was a born adventurer with a passion for writing, particularly about his own doings.

He was born in London in 1792 and at 13 joined the navy, arriving in the neighbourhood of Trafalgar a few weeks after the battle. He served afterwards in a king's ship bound for the East Indies, but deserted at Bombay.

However, he made his way to the Eastern Archipelago and did not return till he was 21. His experiences, then and later, vividly described in his Adventures of a Younger Son, owe so much to a romantic imagination that they cannot all be accepted as sober fact. He was odd and unreliable.

When he was 27 he chanced to meet in Switzerland Thomas Medwin, a cousin of Shelley, and with them was another chance friend named Williams. Medwin so greatly interested Trelawny and Williams by his accounts of the poet, who was then in Italy, that Williams went into Italy and made Shelley's acquaintance, and later Trelawny joined them; they met Byron there, and Leigh Hunt.

Shelley and Williams were both lovers of the sea, and spent many hours on it. On July 8, 1822, they left Leghorn to go to Spezzia in a little sailing vessel. Trelawny was at Leghorn in Byron's yacht but did not accompany them.

He watched them with a telescope till the vessel was obscured by a heavy squall. When it cleared the vessel had disappeared. The vessel had sunk and Shelley and Williams were drowned, with a young sailor. Ten days later Shelley's body was cast ashore. It was recognised by two books in the pockets, one a volume of Keats and the other of Sophocles. Byron, Hunt, and Trelawny cremated the poet's body on the shore.

Trelawny was the man of action in all that followed Shelley's death. He arranged the cremation, snatched the poet's heart from the flames, and afterwards gave it to Shelley's wife, gathered the ashes and buried them in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, and provided the money for Mary Shelley's return to England. It was these services that have given his own name a place in the story of literature and an interest he would not otherwise have had for posterity.

The next year Trelawny went with Byron to Greece to help the Greeks in their war for independence from Turkish domination, had many adventures, was severely wounded, and married a Greek wife. Afterwards he lived abroad for many years, continuing an interesting correspondence with Mrs Shelley, who helped him with his book of Adventures.

From time to time he appeared in London, where his picturesque figure, unconventional talk, and literary associations gave him a place of his own in social circles that welcomed romance. He was a familiar figure at the Reform Club.

 

The last 35 years of his life were chiefly spent in rural surroundings, first in South Wales and afterwards at Sompting, with husbandry and horticulture as his hobbies, but he also wrote, as part of his own autobiography, his impressions of Shelley and Byron as he knew them in their last days.

 

He died of old age in his 89th year, and his ashes were laid by Shelley's grave. Trelawny was a flamboyant romanticist of the Byron type, whose fire and vigour swept him through widely varied company and experiences, a picturesque but erratic personage.

 

See Also 'Shelley Letter's' & 'Tragic Shelley'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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