Visiting Mary Shelley’s Grave

Did you know that Mary Shelley, author of the novel, Frankenstein, is buried in Bournemouth? I found this out when doing some research for my trip to Dorset. I was going to be at a conference in Bournemouth, but always want to make time to see a few things even when I’m somewhere for work reasons. On one of the days, I had an early breakfast and on the way to the conference centre made a detour to the graveyard at St Peter’s Church.

St Peter’s Church is right in the town centre, near all the shops, and so very easy to find. In case you do have any difficulty, it’s just near the Wetherspoon’s called ‘The Mary Shelley’. There are also markings on the pavement so you know you’re in the right vicinity.

As the graveyard is in such an ‘urban’ location I was expecting it to be quite bland, but it’s actually a real oasis.

There are lots of interesting looking gravestones and tombs nestled on the slopes among the trees and daffodils and several of them are the resting places of quite notable people. Mary Shelley’s grave is probably the one most visitors come to see though.

The grave is marked by more of a tomb than a gravestone and is at the top of a low hill. You get a good view of the church and the rest of the graveyard from there.

Mary isn’t the only one in her tomb. Her parents and son are there, as is the heart of the man who was her her lover, father of her children, and later her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Mary and Percy ran away to France together when she was only 16. Percy was older and already married with a child. They were only able to marry when his wife died. When Percy died in 1822, Mary had his heart removed and kept it in a silk pouch which she apparently carried everywhere with her.

This wasn’t for a short time, but for thirty years. I’m trying not to imagine what this must have looked like, let alone smelt like. It was found in her desk about a year after her own death and interred with her.

As for her parents, I thought I’d visited the grave of prominent early feminist and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, when I went to see the Hardy Tree in London’s Old St Pancras Burial Ground. She was buried there with her husband, the novelist and journalist, William Godwin.

However, it turns out that although they were originally buried there, their daughter had always wished to be buried with her parents and so their bodies were moved to be with that of their daughter. Wouldn’t it have been easier just to bury Mary with them rather than digging them up and schlepping them all the way down to Bournemouth?

Later, in 1889, Mary and Percy’s son, Percy Florence Shelley, joined them in the grave.

But why Bournemouth? Mary Shelley seems to be far more associated with the town since her death than she was during her life. Supposedly, she had only ever visited a few times. Her son, however, was building a new house a short way along the coast at Boscombe when she died. And I suppose it made sense for him to want his mother’s grave nearby to his new home.

Hearts in bags, digging up bodies – it all sounds rather gory. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised, as Mary Shelley is the creator of Frankenstein after all.

I did a bit of reading around to try to understand why someone like Mary Shelley, a middle-class young woman in a time when ladies were expected to be genteel and proper, would have had the imagination to write such a novel as Frankenstein and came across this article in Jstor which gives a lot of context and background to Mary’s fascination with death and graveyards.

Her mother died a few days after giving birth. As Mary got a bit older she took to regularly visiting her grave and talking to her and sitting reading and studying in the graveyard. Reading her mother’s works as she sat beside her grave was how she got to know her. It was also in the Old St Pancras Burial Ground that she and Percy first declared their love for each other (and supposedly where they first had sex). In her own novel, Victor Frankenstein spends a lot of time in cemeteries.

Also this was the time that necroromanticism, or necro-tourism, became a thing. This was the visiting of places, including the graves, associated with the well-known dead. Mary’s father, William Godwin, was one of the first to write about this and document this new pastime.

[The dead] still have their place, where we may visit them, and where, if we dwell in a composed and a quiet spirit, we shall not fail to be conscious of their presence.

William Godwin, Essay on Sepulchres

So maybe it’s understandable that Mary, who had grown up with death and graveyards, felt comfortable, as well as able, to write such a novel.

I do recommend a visit to Mary Shelley’s grave in St Peter’s Church graveyard if you’re ever in Bournemouth. Even if you’re not interested in Shelley or her grave, it’s such a lovely tranquil place for a wander or to sit and read for a while.

So are you a necro-tourist? Would you like to visit Mary Shelley’s grave? What graveyards and cemeteries have you found to be particularly worth a visit? Which graves of famous people have you visited? Share your thoughts and recommendations in the comments below.

Like this? Read these next:

• The Hardy Tree in Old St Pancras Burial Ground
• An Afternoon at the Russell-Cotes Museum
• An Evening Wander from Bournemouth to Sandbanks

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