SHAW, HENRY WHEELER ("JOSH BILLINGS”) (1818-1885).—­Humorist, b. in Massachusetts.  After working on steam-boats and farming, he became an auctioneer, and settled at Poughkeepsie.  Stripped of the fantastic spelling by which he first succeeded in catching the public attention, the shrewd and droll maxims of his Farmers’ Allminax have something in common with Franklin’s Poor Richard.  Other books with the same features are Josh Billings’ Sayings, Everybody’s Friend, Josh Billings’ Trump Kards, etc.

SHELLEY, MRS. MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (GODWIN) (1797-1851).—­Novelist, b. in London, the only child of William Godwin (q.v.) and Mary Wollstonecraft, his wife (q.v.).  In 1814 she went to the Continent with P.B.  Shelley (q.v.), and m. him two years later.  When abroad she saw much of Byron, and it was at his villa on the Lake of Geneva that she conceived the idea of her famous novel of Frankenstein (1818), a ghastly but powerful work.  None of her other novels, including The Last Man and Lodore, had the same success.  She contributed biographies of foreign artists and authors to Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia, and ed. her husband’s poems.

SHELLEY, PERCY BYSSHE (1792-1822).—­Poet, s. of Sir Timothy S., was b. at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, and ed. at Brentford, Eton, and Univ.  Coll., Oxf., whence for writing and circulating a pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, he was expelled.  One immediate result of this was a difference with his f., which was deepened into a permanent breach by his marriage in the following year to Harriet Westbrook, the pretty and lively dau. of a retired innkeeper.  The next three years were passed in wandering about from place to place in Ireland, Wales, the Lake District, and other parts of the kingdom, and in the composition of Queen Mab (1813), the poet’s first serious work.  Before the end of that period he had separated from his wife, for which various reasons have been assigned, one being her previous desertion of him, and the discovery on his part of imperfect sympathy between them; the principal one, however, being that he had conceived a violent passion for Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (see Shelley, Mrs. M.W.), dau. of William Godwin (q.v.), with whom he eloped to Italy in 1814, and whom he m. in 1816, his first wife having drowned herself.  The custody of his two children, whom he had left with their mother, was refused him by the Court of Chancery.  In Switzerland he had made the acquaintance of Byron, with whom he afterwards lived in intimacy in Italy.  Returning to England in 1815 he wrote his first really great poem, Alastor (1816), followed by the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Prince Athanase, Rosalind and Helen, and Laon and Cythna, afterwards called the Revolt of Islam (1817).  In 1818 he left England