Jan 19 1812 Percy Bysshe Shelley

In the Biographical Sketch, at the beginning of The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1901), George Edward Woodberry notes a curious incident involving the poet: 

At Keswick, too, occurred the first of the personal assaults on Shelley, which tried the belief of his friends. He had begun the use of laudanum, as a relief from pain, but he had recovered from the illness which discloses this fact, before the incident occurred. On January 19, at seven o'clock at night, Shelley, hearing an unusual noise, went to the door and was struck to the ground and stunned by a blow. His landlord, alarmed by the noise, came to the scene, and the assailant fled. The affair was published in the local paper, and is spoken of by Harriet [his wife] as well as Shelley. Some of the neighbors disbelieved in it, but his simple chemical experiments had excited their minds and made him an object of suspicion, and it is to be said that the country was in a disturbed state.

Laudanum was a form of opium. It could be a potent narcotic. In the nineteenth century it was used in many patent medicines. It was prescribed for a variety of ailments. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the famous laudanum addicts.

January 4 1812: Southey on Shelley

On January 4, 1812, Robert Southey (12 August 1774 – 21 March 1843) well known poet, biographer, historian, reviewer and in general a complete man of letters wrote to his friend, Grosvenor Charles Bedford (1773-1839), about the recent visit of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.  He wrote, in part, as follows:

...Here is a man at Keswick, who acts upon me as my own ghost would do. He is just what I was in 1794. His name is Shelley, son to the member for Shoreham; with 6000l. a year entailed upon him, and as much more in his father’s power to cut off. Beginning with romances of ghosts and murder, and with poetry at Eton, he passed, at Oxford, into metaphysics; printed half-a-dozen pages, which he entitled ‘The Necessity of Atheism;’ sent one anonymously to Coplestone, in expectation, I suppose, of converting him; was expelled in consequence; married a girl of seventeen, after being turned out of doors by his father; and here they both are, in lodgings, living upon 200l. a year, which her father allows them. He is come to the fittest physician in the world. At present he has got to the Pantheistic stage of philosophy, and, in the course of a week, I expect he will be a Berkleyan, for I have put him upon a course of Berkeley. It has surprised him a good deal to meet, for the first time in his life, with a man who perfectly understands him, and does him full justice. I tell him that all the difference between us is that he is nineteen, and I am thirty-seven; and I dare say it will not be very long before I shall succeed in convincing him that he may be a true philosopher, and do a great deal of good, with 6000l. a year; the thought of which troubles him a great deal more at present than ever the want of sixpence (for I have known such a want) did me. . . . . God help us! the world wants mending, though he did not set about it exactly in the right way. God bless you, Grosvenor!