Edward John Trelawny

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Edward John Trelawny, portrait by Joseph Severn, 1830

Edward John Trelawny (born November 13, 1792 in Cornwall , † August 13, 1881 in Sompting ) came from an old Welsh family of landed gentry and was an English sailor, adventurer, biographer and writer. He became friends with the romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron .

Life

At the age of just 13 he joined the Royal Navy as a midshipman. Allegedly he deserted during a trip in Bombay and from then on led a life as a corsair in the Indian Ocean. In fact, he was honorably discharged from the Navy on August 18, 1812. In 1813 he married the beautiful and “well-behaved” Caroline Addison against the wishes of his and her parents; The marriage resulted in two daughters, but the marriage failed. She left him in 1816 for a man twice her age, a certain Captain Coleman. London's gossip press covered the incident, and Trelawny, feeling humiliated, left England in 1819 for Switzerland. From now on he referred to himself as “Captain Edward Trelawny, Royal Navy, Retired”, with a respectable private income. In 1822 his friend Edward Ellerker Williams , who died in the same year with Percy Bysshe Shelley on a boat trip together, introduced him to the circle of friends in Pisa, to which Lord Byron also belonged. After the bodies of Shelley and Williams were washed ashore and initially covered with sand on the beach, Trelawny took care of their fate after the Italian authorities released the dead. On the beach near Viareggio, he piled pinewood into a pyre and burned Williams' body first and Shelley's body the next day in the presence of several people, including Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt . Trelawny later ensured that Shelley's ashes were buried in the Protestant cemetery (Cimitero Acattolico) in Rome. He gave the ashes of Williams to his wife Jane; the urn was only buried in her grave in the Kensal cemetery in London after her death . Trelawny himself followed Byron to Greece and participated together with him in the Greek liberation struggle against the Turks. Here, too, he took care of Byron's body when he died in Missolonghi .

During his stay in Greece, Trelawny was supposedly married to Tersitsa, the 13-year-old half-sister of Odysseas Androutsos , one of the most prominent fighters in the Greek fight for freedom.

In 1828 he returned to England, where he visited stepsisters Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont . His relationship with Mary, who portrayed him as an uneducated flail, worsened, and when he tried to write a biography about her husband, but she denied him access to letters and other documents, the estrangement was complete. After her death, he followed her with snappy comments. In England Trelawny was a well-known man because of his experience reports. He moved in the world of politics and society until he got tired of this life and retired to the small town of Sompting on the south coast of England, where he lived with his daughter Laetitia. There John Everett Millais painted the 78-year-old as an old sea dog for his picture The North-West Passage .

Edward John Trelawny's ashes were buried next to his friend Shelley's grave in Rome in the cemetery at the Pyramid of Cestius (Cimitero Acattolico in the Testaccio district ), which he had acquired in 1822.

plant

  • I was a pirate; Title of the English original: Adventures of a younger son. Werner Dietsch Verlag / Leipzig Translated from English and edited by Dr. Karl Konrad 1938

Web links

Commons : Edward John Trelawny  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ I was a pirate. Retrieved April 20, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Trelawny, Edward John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English sailor, adventurer and writer
DATE OF BIRTH November 13, 1792
PLACE OF BIRTH Cornwall
DATE OF DEATH August 13, 1881
Place of death Sompting