 According to poet Edwin Thumboo, an emeritus professor of the National University of Singapore, Shelley "was a sensitive and acute observer of life. Because he started writing late, the material that generated his fiction was well digested. He brought to bear on it all the insights of an engineer, businessman, administrator, public servant and a person who loved life. His character analysis was therefore penetrating, and his range of characters are fully reflective of the society he wrote about." Associate Professor Kirpal Singh of the Singapore Management University, himself a writer and literary editor, has commented that although Shelley's impact on the Singapore literary scene had been "much less than it ought to be", his body of work was significant for both the Eurasian community and the wider Singapore society:
