In part 1 of his "Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley" (Fraser's Magazine , June 1858), Thomas Love Peacock recalled a familiar scene from nearly half a century before:

At Bracknell, Shelley was surrounded by a numerous society, all in a great measure of his own opinion in regard to religion and politics, and the larger portion of them in relation to vegetable diet. But they wore their rue with a difference. Every one of them adopting some of the articles of the faith of their general church, had each nevertheless some predominant crotchet of his or her own, which left a number of open questions for earnest and not always temperate discussion. I was sometimes irreverent enough to laugh at the fervour with which opinions utterly uncondusive to any practical result were battled for as matters of the highest importance to the well being of mankind; Harriet Shelley was always ready...