This is the first installment of the first real "High School of the Damned" storyline: "Percival and the Brain." Which actually takes place almost entirely before the characters even get to high school, but that's kind of how this works -- if you want to understand an adult, go back to high school, to understand a high school student, junior high, and so on. You want to understand an infant, go back to the dawn of time.

Shelley and Byron had interesting, scandal-filled lives and died young after creating enduring art, which was very rock star of them. Byron was a classic cad -- he would seduce absolutely anybody, and abandon them completely when they started to bore him. Even if they were pregnant. (Although he did have one legitimate child, Ada Lovelace, who worked with Charles Babbage on his proposed Analytical Engine)

This sort of thing led to him being described as "Mad, bad, and dangerous to know" by Caroline Lamb.

Shelley wasn't quite as infamous, though he did get kicked out of Oxford for being an atheist. He merely practiced free love, whether or not his wife agreed. So, during the summer of 1816 (when Mary famously got the idea for Frankenstein and John Polidori -- one of Byron's many romantic castoffs -- got the idea for The Vampyre) Mary and Percy were not actually married. They wouldn't get married until after they returned to England and his first wife killed herself.

Any time somebody tries to tell you that people conducted themselves better in the old days? Don't believe it for a second.