From the archive, 7 April 1941: The eating habits of poet Shelley revealed

The poet Shelley was not one who would have worried about short rations. “He took no thought,” says a biographer, “of sublunary matters”:

Dinner seems to have come less by forethought than by the operation of divine chance; and when there was no meat provided for the entertainment of casual guests the table was supplied with buns, procured by Shelley from the nearest pastry-cook. He had already abjured animal food and alcohol; and his favourite diet consisted of pulse or bread, which he ate dry with water, or made into panade.

Hogg relates how, when he was walking in the streets and felt hungry, he would dive into a baker’s shop and emerge with a loaf tucked under his arm. This he consumed as he went along, very often reading at the same time. He could not comprehend how any man should want more than bread.

“I have dropped a word, a hint,” says Hogg, “about a pudding. ‘A pudding,’ Bysshe said, dogmatically, ‘is a prejudice.’”

During the last years of his life Shelley took no heed of food. Mrs. Shelley used to send him something to eat into the room where he habitually studied, but the plate frequently remained untouched for hours upon a bookshelf, and at the end of the day he might be heard asking, “Mary, have I dined?”

Thomas Jefferson Hogg, a close friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, an unfinished biography which was poorly received when the first two volumes were published in 1858.