Location: Cimitero acattolico, Rome, Italy
Cause of death: Accidental - fall
Photo taken by: Dbprell
Buy books by Edward John Trelawny
English biographer and and adventurer who is best known for his friendship with the Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron.
After serving in the Navy he moved to Italy where he met Shelley and Byron. He became friends with the two poets, and helped teach them about sailing. After Shelley's death, Trelawny identified his body and arranged the cremation. After Shelley's body was cremated, Trelawny removed what he thought was Shelley's unburned heart from the fire. He arranged to have a memorial built at Shelley's final resting place in Rome and also reserved a spot for himself in the same cemetery. Trelawny then travelled to Greece with Lord Byron in order to fight in the Greek War of Independence. After Byron died, Trelawny oversaw the preparations for the funeral and the return of his body to England.
Trelawny wrote a memoir titled Adventures of a Younger Son (1831) which has subsequently been proven to be more fiction than fact. In 1858 he published Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, which was better received than previous biographies of Shelley, although he had only known Shelley for six months. In 1878 Trelawny's memoir was reissued under the title Records of Shelley Byron and the Author.
In August 1881 he suffered a fall while out on a walk. He was bedridden and died two weeks later. At his request his grave marker bears a quote from Shelley's poem Epitaph:
These are two friends whose lives were undivided:
So let their memory be, now they have glided
Under the grave: let not their bones be parted,
For their two hearts in life were single-hearted.
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