Early in May the Shelleys arrived in London, where they were soon joined by Eliza, from whose increasingly irksome companionship the poet had recently enjoyed a few weeks’ respite.  After living for a short while in hotels, they took lodgings in Half Moon Street.  The house had a projecting window, where the poet loved to sit with book in hand, and catch, according to his custom, the maximum of sunlight granted by a chary English summer.  “He wanted,” said one of his female admirers, “only a pan of clear water and a fresh turf to look like some young lady’s lark, hanging outside for air and song.”  According to Hogg, this period of London life was a pleasant and tranquil episode in Shelley’s troubled career.  His room was full of books, among which works of German metaphysics occupied a prominent place, though they were not deeply studied.  He was now learning Italian, and made his first acquaintance with Tasso, Ariosto, and Petrarch.

The habits of the household were, to say the least, irregular; for Shelley took no thought of sublunary matters, and Harriet was an indifferent housekeeper.  Dinner seems to have come to them 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 panada.  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, and dodging the foot-passengers with the rapidity of movement which distinguished him.  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.”  This indifference to diet was highly characteristic of Shelley.  During the last years of his life, even when he was suffering from the frequent attacks of a painful disorder, he took no heed of food; and his friend, Trelawny, attributes the derangement of his health, in a great measure, to this carelessness.  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?” His dress was no less simple than his diet.  Hogg says that he never saw him in a great coat, and that his collar was unbuttoned to let the air play freely on his throat.  “In the street or road he reluctantly wore a hat; but in fields and gardens, his little round head had no other covering than his long, wild, ragged locks.”  Shelley’s head, as is well known, was remarkably small and round; he used to plunge it several times a day in cold water, and expose it recklessly to the intensest heat of fire or sun.  Mrs. Shelley relates that a great part of the “Cenci” was written on their house-roof near Leghorn, where Shelley lay exposed to the unmitigated ardour of Italian summer heat; and Hogg describes him reading Homer by a blazing fire-light, or roasting his skull upon the hearth-rug by the hour.