Shuttleworth, who was mainly brought up by his mother's relatives, was sent to school at Geneva, first under Rodolphe Töpffer, and afterwards under the botanist Nicolas Charles Seringe, keeper of the De Candolle Herbarium.
From the autumn of that year until the end of 1832 he studied in the medical faculty of the University of Edinburgh, walking the hospital during the first outbreak of cholera, making a vacation tour in the Scottish highlands, and helping his elder stepbrother Blake on his estate at Renville in the west of Ireland during the famine of 1831 and 1832.
Here Shuttleworth collected on the Grimsel and the Oberland, and worked particularly on red snow and other freshwater algae, until weakness of the eyes compelled him to abandon the microscope.
Shuttleworth spent money freely on his researches, sending, at his expense, the collector Blauner of Bern to Corsica, the Canaries, and ultimately to Puerto Rico, where he died of consumption.
Shuttleworth usually wintered in the south, owing to his tendency to gout, and, despite frequent disablement, ransacked the rich botanical hunting-ground of Var and Alpes-Maritimes.
Many of his botanical discoveries were in part due to his constant comparison of French with Italian types, while his letters to his friends Meissner, Godet, Guthnick, and others, and the notes in his herbarium evince the critical caution which made him apt in botany, as in conchology, to insist on minute differences.
), the Royal Society's Catalogue enumerates eighteen papers by Shuttleworth, beginning with a description in German of some North American species of Valerianella in Flora, vol.
Gesellschaft of Bern, and ending with an Essai critique sur quelques espèces du genre Cyclostoma in the Journal de Conchyliologie for 1856 (vol.