Percy Bysshe Shelley is expelled from the University of Oxford for publishing the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism.

Oxford expelled him for a pamphlet he could not prove he had written, though everyone knew he had. Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg distributed "The Necessity of Atheism" to every bishop, college head, and bookseller in Oxford in February 1811. The pamphlet was short, logically structured, and devastatingly provocative: it argued that no rational basis existed for belief in God. On March 25, 1811, both young men were summoned and expelled. Shelley was 18, a first-year student at University College, and already a troublemaker. He had arrived at Oxford fascinated by chemistry, gothic novels, and radical philosophy, and he had spent his first months ignoring coursework in favor of scientific experiments and political arguments. "The Necessity of Atheism" was not a firebrand polemic but a surprisingly calm philosophical argument: belief, Shelley contended, was involuntary, and since no evidence compelled belief in God, atheism was the only intellectually honest position. The university gave both men a chance to recant or simply deny authorship. They refused. Shelley's father, a wealthy baronet and Member of Parliament, was mortified and cut off his son's allowance. Within months, Shelley eloped with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, further alienating his family. The expulsion, combined with his elopement, set Shelley on a course of permanent social exile from the English establishment. The banishment freed him. Over the next eleven years, Shelley produced "Ozymandias," "Prometheus Unbound," "Ode to the West Wind," and "A Defence of Poetry," works that established him as one of the English language's greatest poets. He drowned in a sailing accident in Italy at age 29, unrecognized in his lifetime, his Oxford expulsion still officially standing. The university did not formally acknowledge its error until 2014, when it unveiled a memorial to him.