Shenstone's chief independent publications were:
- 'A Practical Introduction to Chemistry,' 1886; 3rd edit. 1892.
- 'The Methods of Glass Blowing,' 1886; 3rd edit. 1894; a German translation was published at Leipzig, 1887.
- 'Justus von Liebig: his Life and Work,' 1895.
- 'The Elements of Inorganic Chemistry,' 1900.
- 'The New Physics and Chemistry,' 1906, a reprint of a series of essays contributed to the 'Cornhill Magazine.'
On 8 March 1901 he gave a lecture at the Royal Institution on 'Vitrified Quartz,' detailing important practical applications of the material for laboratory apparatus. For Henry Watts' s 'Dictionary of Chemistry' he wrote the article 'Ozone.'
[Proc. Roy. Soc. vol. lxxxii. A; Journ. Soc. Chem. Industry, vol. xxvii.; Proc. Chem. Soc. vol. xxiv. No. 336; Trans. Chem. Soc, vol. xcv.; Proc. Inst. Chemistry, 1908, Pt. 2; Pharmaceut. Journ., 8 Feb. 1908; Poggendorff's Handwörterbuch, 1904; Roy. Soc. Catal. Sci. Papers; Nature, 13 Feb. 1908; The Times, 7 Feb. 1908.]
SHERRINGTON, Madame HELEN LEMMENS- (1834–1906), soprano vocalist. [See Lemmens-Sheerington.]
SHIELDS, FREDERIC JAMES (1833–1911), painter and decorative artist, born at Hartlepool on 14 March 1833, was the third of the six children of John Shields, a bookbinder and printer, by his wife Georgiana Storey, daughter of an Alnwick farmer. His brothers and sisters all died in infancy. His father, after fighting as a volunteer in Spain for Queen Isabella (1835–6), removed to Clare Market in London, where the boy's mother opened a dressmaker's shop.
Frederic attended the charity school of the parish of St. Clement Danes until the age of fourteen. Having shown an early talent for drawing, he worked from the antique at the British Museum for a few months after leaving school, and on 4 Oct. 1847 was apprenticed to Maclure, Macdonald & Macgregor, a firm of lithographers. His indenture was for a term of three years, but after about a year he was sent for by his father, who had obtained work at Newton-le-Willows, although he was unable to provide for his family. He helped Frederic to find employment at 5s. a week with a firm of mercantile lithographers in Manchester.
An ingrained piety, a love of literature, and a passion for sketching enabled Shields to face stoically nine years of grinding poverty and of uncongenial drudgery at commercial lithography. In 1856 he obtained a better engagement in the like trade at Halifax at 50s. a week. There the first opportunity of book illustration was offered him, and he prepared fourteen illustrations for a comic volume called 'A Rachde Felley's Visit to the Grayt Eggshibishun.' The proceeds of this work enabled him to give up lithography, and he accepted the offer of C. H. Mitchell, a landscape painter at Manchester, to put figures and animals into his pictures. He was much influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite works which he saw at the great Manchester Exhibition of 1857. On a sketching tour in Devonshire with Mitchell he executed many successful water-colour drawings, for which he found purchasers, while his commissions for drawings on wood grew. In 1860 he received an important though badly paid commission for a series of drawings illustrating the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' some plates for which he sent to Ruskin in 1861, and they evoked the art critic's enthusiastic praise. To Ruskin' s teaching, he wrote later, he owed 'a debt of inexpressible and reverential gratitude' (Bookman, Oct. 1908, p. 30). He also corresponded with Charles Kingsley, who encouraged him. After spending some time on water-colour work at Porlock and occasionally engraving for 'Once a Week,' Shields established his fame as an illustrator by his designs for Defoe's 'Journal of the Plague Year,' which were engraved in 1863. A water-colour version of his illustration of Solomon Eagle for this work is in the Manchester Art Gallery. In 1865 he was elected associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours. From 1864 onwards he spent some time each year in London, and there met Dante Rossetti and Madox Brown, as well as Ruskin, Holman Hunt, and Burne-Jones. With Rossetti and Brown his relations grew very close. He was with Rossetti through has fatal illness at Birchington in 1882, and designed the memorial window in the church there. But from 1867 to 1875 Shields's headquarters were lonely houses at Manchester, until 1871 at Cornbrook Park, and then at Ordsall Hall. After some time at Blackpool, he made a tour in Italy early in 1876, and on his return settled in London. For the next twenty years he resided at Lodge Place, St. John's Wood, whence he moved in 1896 to Wimbledon.
In later life Shields neglected that illustrative work for which his gifts eminently fitted him, and devoted himself to more ambitious decorative designs and oil-painting,
