In 1885, an article appeared in The Athenæum suggesting the ‘heart’ was actually Shelley's liver. Perhaps, but it hardly mattered. It was nothing more than dust and ashes, and was not long for this world, nor was Sir Percy Florence Shelley, who died on 5 December 1889. His wife apparently placed the remaining fragments of the ‘heart’ in his coffin before it made its way to the family mausoleum at St Peter's Church in Bournemouth. In a handwritten note in his copy of Trelawny's Recollections, E. Gambier Parry claimed the heart was long ago buried at Christchurch Abbey by Canon Ferdinand St John of Gloucester Cathedral. No one knows, but the heart lives on in mythologized form. Shelley's heart continues to enjoy an independent life, as fetish, source of power, symbol of the manner in which the culture cannibalizes itself.