The Mary Shelley Pub Bournemouth Dorset
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley probably did not spend a lot of time in pubs, as in very few casual meetings or clandestine trysts of “meet me for a pint”, though in her travels she certainly stayed in many inns of one kind or another, as in a few scenes in “Frankenstein Diaries: The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley“, but 200 years after creating the classic of Frankenstein she finally has a pub named for her.
Mary Shelley is buried in the Shelley family vault in the graveyard of St Peter’s Churchyard in Bournemouth, where she was interred by her son Sir Percy Florence Shelley after her death in London in 1851. The family tomb, now primarily a large marker also holds some remains of her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley (his heart, as family legend has it, brought back from Italy where his body was burned after he died of drowning). St Peter’s was the Shelley family parish church near Boscombe Manor, now part of Bournemouth and Poole College. Sir Percy Shelley bought Boscombe Manor, a modest estate in 1849 and renovated it with the intent of its being a home for his mother away from the industrial air of Victorian London, but she died before it was finished, so Sir Percy and his wife made it their home, and would have uncovered the Mary Shelley Secret Memoirs and private letters of the Frankenstein Diaries while assessing her belongings on the move from London.
While not the half-timber historic sort of pub from days past, but rather a new and modern restaurant and part of the Wetherspoon’s chain of pubs, The Mary Shelly is located directly across from the Parish Church of St Peter’s and the Churchyard. The menu of budget family dining and ales probably would have appealed to Mary as her tastes rather lent themselves to the frugal and functional, while her step-sister Claire might have found it rather more modest than her ambitions. Apparently the Sirloin beef is quite the specialty of Wetherspoons and Mary might have appreciated the story of the knighting of the beef by King James.