What Shelley Means to Me

Introduction to Oliver

Years ago when my interest in the revolutionary writer Percy Bysshe Shelley was revived, my first instinct was to create a community. I wanted to share my passion for Shelley with a wide audience. And so this site was born.

I devoted a lot of time and money to building it. But I very quickly discovered that the dictum "build it and they will come" did not operate in cyberspace! And so I needed to develop strategies to engage a wider non-academic audience. To do that I created companion amplification outlets on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The effect was catalytic, and my audience grew rapidly around the world. For example, one of the largest audiences I have on Facebook is in Italy.

But I wanted more! And so I hired technical experts to help me with the search engine optimization of the site. It worked. Almost immediately The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley became more visible and easy to find in the audience grew again.

One audience, however, proved elusive: the younger generation. Where were they? How was I to find them? Did I have to create a TikTok site!? Perhaps I do. In any event, one day I got lucky.

Allow me to introduce you to Oliver. Oliver (they/them) is a high school student living in Midwestern United States. They popped up one day on my Twitter feed. Oliver was inquisitive and eager; asking all kinds of questions and for book recommendations among other things. They seemed particularly interested in Shelley’s more radical, political poetry and essays which was very gratifying to me personally. WhileI know they were nervous at first, that didn't prevent them from rapidly integrating into the community and interacting with an incredibly wide range of Shelleyans; including some of the most distinguished academic scholars in the world! We started to joust with Shelley-pals like Bysshe Coffey on a wide range of subjects.

It's suddenly occurred to me, that I should be asking a young person such as Oliver to write for this site. And so I did. And Oliver agreed! And am I ever glad I did and they did! What Oliver produced was heartfelt, poignant and uplifting. If I never do anything again with this site, this will be enough and I will be happy. Having fired a young person’s mind with a passion for Shelley is more than I could've hoped for. There is a forest in every acorn.

Thank you, Oliver, for you fearless, inquiring mind, thank you for taking a chance; and thank you for writing this beautiful essay. Onward!!

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What Percy Bysshe Shelley Means to Me, a Young Person From Minority and Marginalized Groups

by Oliver

Shelley to me is a person who could see hope and light in the darkness that surrounds people. To me he feels like someone who was a protector. And not just a protector of his loved ones alone, but also of people who have faced harsh words from others who in order to feel better about themselves bring others down.

That man was not a poet who just wrote about politics and nature but a writer and poet for the people who can’t get up in the morning because depression and anxiety are pushing them down. He is a guardian to lost children and teenagers who have to face the fact that their parents are struggling and not listening to their needs. Shelley speaks for those who aren’t listened to by authority figures. 

To me, Percy is the poet of the different and silenced people of oppressed groups. He spoke in words that may be hard to understand to some but which nonetheless get the meaning across. He writes for the lost and hurt - people who have suffered because of their oppressors. His poetry is something that should be cherished by the people for whom it was written. And it also deserves attention from the wider general public.

I look at my small collection of books I have about him and by him. They sit on my shelf and it feels like he’s always been there for me. I read his poems and seek to learn his messages. I believe that he’s been here since I first experienced loss in my life. He feels like a spirit that watches over us and swoops into our minds whenever he is needed. It seems like he’s always there when it feels like I can’t do anything right and yet I’m trying so hard to do things the right way. I learned from him that I don’t want to do everything that adults and authority figures say I must. He supports my belief that I’m my own person and don’t have to follow their way of thinking just because I’m a teenager. He supports my belief that I don’t have to conform to their ways of thinking; because I’m not like them at all. I am not a student of my school, I feel like I am a student of Shelley and my mentors in these studies. 

This isn’t everything I want to say about Percy Shelley and definitely is not the last of how I’ll write and speak of him. Hopefully we will see no end to people sharing his words with others and speaking them in times when it seems right and. His legacy will be kept alive in this way!

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Oliver is a high school student living in Michigan. Their favourite poem by Shelley is The Mask of Anarchy and right now they are reading Richard Holmes biography of PBS: “Shelley, The Pursuit.” However, Oliver’s favourite biography is the one by James Bieri. When asked what question they might ask Percy were they to meet him, Oliver suggested this: “How do you think people will see your life once you’re gone.” I would love to get an answer to that myself! Oliver would one day like to be a writer and a member of the Keats Shelley Association of America. You can find Oliver on Twitter here.

“Fear not for the future - Percy Shelley”

Shelley in a Revolutionary World

Ciarán O’Rourke

The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley welcomes back Ciarán O’Rourke. He last wrote for the site in late January about Paul O’Brien’s new edition of Redwords collection of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s verse and prose from the year 1819: Shelley’s Revolutionary Year. The collection was introduced (and I assume curated) by the great crusading journalist and Shelley devotee, Paul Foot. You can read his brilliant speech about Shelley to the London Marxism Conference of 1981 here.

Ciarán is a thrilling young poet and Marxist from Ireland. He is the founder and editor of the online archive Island's Edge Poetry which features interviews with contemporary Irish poets about their work and craft. His first collection, The Buried Breath, is available from Irish Pages Press. He is based in Dublin, Ireland (www.ragpickerpoetry.net/). I can personally attest to the vibrancy and beauty of his poetry. After sampling some verse on line, I immediately ordered The Buried Breath.

"Ciarán was born in 1991 and took a degree English and History at Trinity College, Dublin. He received a Masters in English and American Studies from Oxford in 2014, and completed his PhD on William Carlos Williams at his alma mater in Dublin in 2019. A winner of the Lena Maguire/Cúirt New Irish Writing Award, the Westport Poetry Prize, and the Fish Poetry Prize, he is a widely published poet. His first collection, The Buried Breath, is available from Irish Pages Press

Ciarán’s prose is as crisp and insightful as his poetry. And I love the way that a new generation of revolutionary-minded writers are embracing Percy Shelley. Much like the battlers of previous generations, for example Paul Foot, Eleanor Marx and Pauline Newman, the writers I have featured embrace the revolutionary spirit of PBS and appreciate the full extent of his modern relevance. Writers like like Ciarán; Paul Bond (read his excellent article, “The Peterloo Massacre and Percy Shelley”); Arielle Cottingham (read my article about her poetry, “Let Liberty Lead Us”); and Mark Summer (read “Revolutionary Politics and the Poet”).

Another real world example of how Shelley’s rhetoric and revolutionary sentiment has been harnessed by members of the public is the recent viral thread on Twitter authored by @AshaRangappa. Asha is a Senior Lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and a former Associate Dean at Yale Law School. Prior to her current position, Asha served as a Special Agent in the New York Division of the FBI, specializing in counterintelligence investigations. Asha has been a contributor on numerous television and radio outlets, and is now a legal and national security analyst for CNN. Her thread, which you can find unspooled here, began in this way:

It is important to take note and be prepared for the unprecedented actions Trump says he intends to take after the election. But it is also important not to allow his *wishful* reality to *become the reality.

But things got really interesting for we Shelleyans when she reached her 10th tweet. She wrote,

To close, some stanzas from Percy Bysshe Shelley's "The Masque of Anarchy," which you should read in its entirety, whenever you need to refocus.

Asha then proceeded to quote 10 full stanzas from the poem. Fabulous. There were tens of thousands of retweets and comments, many of them referring specifically to Shelley’s poem, many making references to Ozymandias. It is easy to underestimate the burst of Shelleyan-awareness among the general public that this caused. This is Shelley in action; Shelley at the barricades; Shelley redux.

Paul Foot certainly knew exactly why Shelley could be so easily recruited to a new generation’s fight for liberty and equality:

“Of all the things about Shelley that really inspired people…the thing that matters above all is his enthusiasm for the idea that the world can be changed. It shapes all his poetry. And when you come to read “Ode to the West Wind” where he writes about the “pestilence-stricken multitudes” and the leaves being blown by the wind, then you understand that he sees the leaves as multitudes of people stricken by a pestilence. You begin to see his ideas, his enthusiasm and his love of life. He believed in life and he really felt that life is what mattered. That life could and should be better than it is. Could be better and should be better. Could and should be changed. That was the thing he believed in most of all.”

Ciarán succinctly sums it up in his own way rather poetically:

“There’s something in the Romanticism of Percy Shelley that seems always on the verge of breaking down the gate-posts of history and gusting into our world….His work is subversive, and multiplicitous: often notable not so much for its resemblance to that of his immediate fellows and forebears, than for its ease of access to revolutionary fervours, past and future. Shelley prefigured radicals, and listened to the crowd.”

Precisely. In our quest to interest a new generation of readers in a poet such as Shelley, it is best to listen to exactly how he is being perceived. How are his words, his beliefs being put into action. In fact, I think we would be better off if we reclassified Shelley as a radical philosopher who happened to write some of his ideas down in poetry. He was probably the most coherent and sophisticated English philosopher of his times. If we want to save departments of English, and to ensure that professors are hired to teach romanticism, let’s ask what it is from that era that speaks to our world now. It is not esoterics…it is revolutionary fervour, as Ciarán puts it - and Shelley has that in buckets. So does, Ciarán O’Rourke.

Ciarán’s article is filled with surprising and delightful revelations about James Connolly (strongly influenced by Shelley), Rosa Luxemberg. and Thomas Kinsella. Perhaps most astonishing was his discussion of the Industrial Workers of the World, which, in the words of Pluto Press,

was a union unlike any other. Founded in 1905 in Chicago, it rapidly gained members across the world thanks to its revolutionary, internationalist outlook. By using powerful organising methods including direct-action and direct-democracy, it put power in the hands of workers. This philosophy is labeled as ‘revolutionary industrial unionism’ and the members called, affectionately, ‘Wobblies’.

If Ciarán whets your appetite to learn more about the Wobblies (as he did mine!), check out “Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW”, edited by Peter Cole, David Struthers, Kenyon Zimmer.

Ciarán also offers one the the best explanations I have ever read of what Shelley meant when he wrote, “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

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Percy Shelley in a Revolutionary World

by Ciarán O’Rourke.

There’s something in the Romanticism of Percy Shelley that seems always on the verge of breaking down the gate-posts of history and gusting into our world. The archival shackles in which the academic humanities prefer to keep their spectral versifiers and yawping hobgoblins enclosed seem especially frangible and ill-suited to the reluctant baronet’s “sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.” Shelley is present in our efforts to meet and counteract the predicaments of our moment (from the mendacious mis-rule of government elites to the devastation of natural habitats for profit) in a way that Wordsworth, scrummily in awe of Nature and his own perception of it, is not – or at least, not so fluently.

Shelley’s writings are world-spanning in their scope of interest, and yet also vividly individual – expressing an apparently instinctive disdain for established mores alongside a faith (shared by few of his contemporaries with equal intensity) in the power of downtrodden communities to shape a common future. “Sow seed—but let no tyrant reap”, he urged, “Find wealth—let no imposter heap: / Weave robes—let not the idle wear: / Forge arms—in your defence to bear.” His work is subversive, and multiplicitous: often notable not so much for its resemblance to that of his immediate fellows and forebears, than for its ease of access to revolutionary fervours, past and future. Shelley prefigured radicals, and listened to the crowd.

Rosa Luxemberg

Relentless, clear-eyed, valuably capable of both rebel joy and analytical despair, Rosa Luxemburg’s life shares something of this same quality, flashing across our human skies like a burning comet-trail of light and fire. Her incisive political praxis – with its insistence on mass, proletarian democracy over the self-sustaining party committee as the necessary engine of social change – was grounded in what can be described, without piety or exaggeration, as a dynamic sense of oneness with the world about her. In late 1917, incarcerated for her agitation and opposition to the First World War, she wrote to Sonia Liebknecht of the activity in the prison yard, including the arrival of a cart-load of supplies, dragged by a team of buffaloes. “They are black, and have large, soft eyes”, she told her friend, in a passage worth quoting at length:

[They] are war trophies from Romania [....] Unsparingly exploited, yoked to heavy loads, they are soon worked to death. The other day a lorry came laden with sacks, so overladen indeed that the buffaloes were unable to drag it across the threshold of the gate. The soldier-driver, a brute of a fellow, belaboured the poor beasts so savagely with the butt end of his whip [….] At length the buffaloes succeeded in drawing the load over the obstacle, but one of them was bleeding. You know their hide is proverbial for its thickness and toughness, but it had been torn. While the lorry was being unloaded, the beasts, which were utterly exhausted, stood perfectly still. The one that was bleeding had an expression on its black face and in its soft black eyes like that of a weeping child – one that has been severely thrashed and does not know why, nor how to escape from the torment of ill-treatment. I stood in front of the team; the beast looked at me: the tears welled from my own eyes [....] Far distant, lost for ever, were the green, lush meadows of Romania. How different there the light of the sun, the breath of the wind; how different there the song of the birds and the melodious call of the herdsman. Instead, the hideous street, the foetid stable, the rank hay mingled with mouldy straw, the strange and terrible men – blow upon blow, and blood running from gaping wounds. Poor wretch, I am as powerless, as dumb, as yourself; I am at one with you in my pain, my weakness, and my longing.

There’s arguably more poetry in this single letter by Red Rosa than many writers manage in an entire lifetime (of course, Shelley himself believed that the “distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error”). The passage also sheds light on her socialism, so feared and demonised by the state that eventually killed her, as one expression of what was evidently a passionate, deep-rooted love for life and the living, akin, perhaps, to that force described so memorably by Shelley: “a powerful attraction towards all we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when [we] seek to awaken in all things [a] community with what we experience within ourselves.” You can read an engaging account of Red Rosa’s life in Kate Evans graphic biography: Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg.

Certainly, the Shelleyan spirit (or perhaps, that quickening world-spirit to which Shelley proved himself so attuned) was pulsingly alive in Red Rosa’s time. Across the United States, troubadours and labour organisers associated with the Industrial Workers of the World – founded in 1905 by such agitational luminaries as “Big Bill” (William) Haywood and “Mother” (Mary Harris) Jones – shook the foundations of American capitalism with their militant, often carnivalesque strikes and free-speech campaigns, earning them and others vicious reprisals in the form of state-sanctioned murders, beatings, and deportations. “There is but one bargain that the IWW will make with the employing class”, said one member, “complete surrender of all control of industry to the organized workers.” The world over, from Mexico to Russia, peasant and industrial populations mounted daring, sometimes epoch-changing attempts to seize control of the means of subsistence and production, in incendiary movements sparked and fuelled, in many cases, by the self-activity of women.

James Connolly, later executed for his role in Dublin’s “Easter Rising” against British imperialism in 1916, expressed the revolutionary promise of these disparate global insurgencies concisely, in his rebuttal to placid reformists and capitalist overlords alike:

Some men, faint-hearted, ever seek

Our programme to retouch,

And will insist, whene’er they speak

That we demand too much.

’Tis passing strange, yet I declare

Such statements give me mirth,

For our demands most moderate are,

We only want the earth.

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“Fighting and Hoping”, James Connolly

Connolly in fact drew on Shelley’s work repeatedly for inspiration in the ferment of radical politics into which he plunged his time and energy. “The freedom of the worker is freedom to sell himself into slavery to the class which controls his supply of food”, he wrote in one essay, “he is free as the wayside traveller is free of clothes after highwaymen have robbed and stripped him”, amplifying the thunderous music of this perception with a quote from the forerunning English agitator:

What is Freedom? Ye can tell

That which slavery is too well,

For its very name has grown

To an echo of your own.

’Tis to work, and have such pay,

As just keeps life, from day to day,

In your limbs as in a cell

For the tyrants’ use to dwell.

One of Connolly’s most powerful legacies today is his belief in the necessity of a world free of landlordism, bossery, and royalty; his dream of a nation ruled and embodied by a risen people. Addressing himself to “tenant farmers”, “wage workers”, and “to every one of the toiling millions upon whose misery the outwardly-splendid fabric of our modern civilisation is reared”, Connolly declared himself on the side of the Irish masses, with an eloquence that still resounds:

[The] Republic I would wish our fellow-countrymen to set before them as their ideal should be of such a character that the mere mention of its name would at all times serve as a beacon-light to the oppressed of every land, at all times holding forth promise of freedom and plenteousness as the reward of their efforts on its behalf… a rallying point for the disaffected, a haven for the oppressed, a point of departure for the Socialist, enthusiastic in the cause of human freedom.

If Connolly had a gift for synthesising the various strains of domestic disquiet and worldly revolt, casting distinctively Irish hopes in the language of propulsive, proletarian internationalism, he also wrote and spoke with poetic fire, carrying a Shelleyan rhetoric of visionary illumination and material change into the modern day. After all, for Shelley, likewise, Ireland had stood as“the isle on whose green shores I have desired to see the standard of liberty erected, a flag of fire, a beacon at which the world shall light the torch of Freedom!”

Importantly, and as is true of his work in general, Shelley was not concocting a mysticism of social betterment here: his political utopianism stemmed from a full-blooded apprehension of very real, if temporarily buried, revolutionary currents in his time. When he wrote these lines, he was conscious of the Irish insurrections against colonial hegemony that had been crushed in 1798 and 1803, among other global rebellions, having in fact befriended more than a few former members of the underground organisations, the United Irish Men and Women, on his sojourn to Dublin after being expelled from Oxford in 1811. If Shelley conceived of poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, a great part and purpose of this role lay, for him, in the capacity to perceive and express the radical aspirations of the toiling “many” (in Ireland and farther afield).

“The Mask of Anarchy”, of course, (the source of that ringing recognition, “ye are many – they are few”) has itself been riffed and iterated, adopted and embraced, at innumerable moments in the human story: by the garment workers striking for better pay in New York in 1909, for example, as well as the so-called Corbynistas, who briefly swept Britain’s electoral sphere with a message of social democratic empowerment in 2017. In a clear affirmation of Shelley’s astuteness of political portraiture (of “Murder” with “a mask like Castlereagh”) and perennially lucid understanding of power and its abuse in the modern world, the poem also served as a kind of originary prototype for Thomas Kinsella’s visceral accusation of empire, “Butcher’s Dozen”.

The latter was composed in the aftermath of the British army’s killing of fourteen Northern Irish civil rights marchers in Derry in 1972, an atrocity that echoed in chilling detail the act of violent class warfare against peaceful demonstrators denounced by Shelley in 1819, the Peterloo Massacre. “I went with Anger at my heel / Through Bogside of the bitter zeal”, Thomas Kinsella writes, “a murder smell that stung and stained” still lingering in the streets. Echoing the rhythm of Shelley’s verse, the poem unfurls with a slow burn of fury, as the imagined ghosts of victims speak:

The thing is rapidly arranged:

Where's the law that can't be changed?

The news is out. The troops were kind.

Impartial justice has to find

We'd be alive and well today

If we had let them have their way.

Yet England, even as you lie,

You give the facts that you deny.

Spread the lie with all your power

– All that's left; it's turning sour.

Friend and stranger, bride and brother,

Son and sister, father, mother,

All not blinded by your smoke,

Photographers who caught your stroke,

The priests that blessed our bodies, spoke

And wagged our blood in the world's face.

The truth will out, to your disgrace….

Revisiting Kinsella’s pained, compulsive lines today, almost fifty years after the bloodshed of their occasion, is in many ways a sobering experience. Since then, populations from Fallujah to Gaza have suffered the arrogance and brutality of imperialist violence on an even larger scale, while in Derry, as the veteran campaigner, Eamonn McCann, has noted, the Saville report (into the events known as “Bloody Sunday”) “cleared the dead and wounded” of wrongdoing, “and this was rightly welcomed,” but “stopped short of admitting the truth about the role of the most senior soldiers” in the butchery, including General M. Jackson, since knighted for his services to the Crown. As is partly true of “The Masque of Anarchy”, Kinsella’s political elegy aches and quivers with the burden of its own music:

I stood like a ghost. My fingers strayed

Along the fatal barricade.

The gentle rainfall drifting down

Over Colmcille's town

Could not refresh, only distil

In silent grief from hill to hill.

There is a grim knowledge, powerfully affirmed, in Kinsella’s stance: that wherever the state and rule of law are most bloodthirsty in their assertion, refusing all redress, the people they would suppress from view nevertheless continue on, their words, their pain, their struggle living still, with a continuity through history (a “silent grief” moving “from hill to hill”), which the poet can honour, but not heal.

There is also Shelleyan permanence to the rage of “Butcher’s Dozen”, a justice gleaming in its memorial process that is all the more compelling for its absence outside of the verse itself (a justice reached for, and only imperfectly held, within it). If nothing else, indeed, reading the poem throws into sharp relief Shelley’s will to witness and transform “the else unfelt oppressions of the earth”: the frequent cost and urgent necessity of this project. The “rushing light of clouds and splendour” and “sense awakening, yet tender” that Shelley envisioned as lifting humankind to a radical equality in class and nature are far from guaranteed, as Kinsella sees, and easily quenched. But beneath the silence of grief and seemingly irreparable dispossessions of our time, the music of the masses can be heard, stirring: for justice, for peace, for the earth reclaimed and won. We live entangled in the dialectic. “Ye are many – they are few.”

The Peterloo Memorial in Manchester.

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 Ciarán is founder and editor of the online archive, Island's Edge Poetry, which features interviews with contemporary Irish poets about their work and craft. His first collection, The Buried Breath, is available from Irish Pages Press. He is based in Dublin, Ireland (www.ragpickerpoetry.net/).

Eleanor Marx Speaks!!! "Shelley's Socialism"

Editor’s Introductory Note

According to Marx’s biographer Yvonne Kapp, Shelley’s Socialism was first published by To-day: The Journal of Scientific Socialism in 1888 (Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx, p. 450). It also appeared as a pamphlet in an edition of only twenty-five copies published (presumably by the Shelley Society) for private circulation under the title Shelley and Socialism. In 1947, Leslie Preger (a young Manchester socialist who had fought in the Spanish Civil War) arranged to have it published, with an introduction by the Labour politician Frank Allaun through CWS Printing Work. The Preger edition can be found online through used book services such as AbeBooks. The version published by Preger and that which appeared in To-Day are somewhat different. The version which appears in To-Day appears to have been lightly edited and omits several selections from Shelley’s poetry that appear in the Preger edition. My assumption is that Preger reproduced the pamphlet version released by the Shelley Society. The version I have made available (see link below) is based on Preger and thus is the only complete and “authoritative” version of the speech (as delivered) available on line.

In their speech, Marx and Aveling refer to a second part which they intended to deliver upon some future occasion. Either the second installment has been either lost or perhaps it was never delivered. However, Kapp tantalizingly points out that Engels in fact translated the second part into German for publication in Germany by Die Neue Zeit (Kapp p. 450). No trace of it appears to exist - a loss for us all given the intended subject matter discussed in the speech.

Frank Allaun, author of the preface to the Preger edition, offered this encapsulation of the speech: “A Marxist evaluation of the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley.” He concludes his preface with this sage assessment:

“Shelley, who died when his sailing boat sinking a storm in 1822, lived when the Industrial Revolution was only beginning. The owning class had not yet "dug their own graves" by driving the handloom weavers and other domestic workers from their kitchens and plots of land into the "dark satanic mills" alongside thousands of other operatives. Conditions were not ripe for the modern trade union and socialist movement. Had they been so Shelley would have been their man.”

Of the authors, George Bernard Shaw said "he (Aveling) was quite a pleasant fellow who would've gone to the stake for socialism or atheism, but with absolutely no conscience in his private life. He said seduced every woman he met and borrowed from every man. Eleanor committed suicide. Eleanor's tragedy made him infamous in Germany". Shaw added, "While Shelley needs no preface that agreeable rascal Aveling does not deserve one.”

Eleanor Marx was an extraordinary person who deserves far more attention from our modern society. According to Harrison Fluss and Sam Miller writing in Jacobin, Marx was

born on January 16, 1855, Eleanor Marx was Karl and Jenny Marx’s youngest daughter. She would become the forerunner of socialist feminism and one of the most prominent political leaders and union organizers in Britain. Eleanor pursued her activism fearlessly, captivated crowds with her speeches, stayed loyal to comrades and family, and grew into a brilliant political theorist. Not only that, she was a fierce advocate for children, a famous translator of European literature, a lifelong student of Shakespeare and a passionate actress.

To which we can add that she was also devotee of and influenced by Percy Shelley. Both Eleanor and Aveling were immersed in culture - much like Karl Marx himself. This was not Aveling’s first foray into the subject matter. In 1879 he had given a speech about Shelley to the Secular Society - described by Annie Besant as a “simple, loving, and personal account of the life and poetry of the hero of the free thinkers..” (Kapp, p. 451) This assessment, by the way, is yet another indication of the high regard accorded to Shelley by the socialist community. According to her Wikipedia entry, Besant was was a

“British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer, orator, educationist, and philanthropist. Regarded as a champion of human freedom, she was an ardent supporter of both Irish and Indian self-rule. She was a prolific author with over three hundred books and pamphlets to her credit.”

That she considered Shelley to be the “hero of freethinkers” is telling and a further reminder of the influence Shelley had on 19th century socialists. Kapp perceptively points out that:

“There can be no doubt that this lecture, though delivered by Aveling, was it to collaboration between two people who had long and devotedly studied the poet with equal enthusiasm, Aveling primarily as an atheist, Eleanor as a revolutionary…”

You can read a wonderful encapsulation of Eleanor Marx and her legacy in the Jacobion, here. And you can buy Kapp’s biography of Eleanor Marx here, though I strongly suggest you instead order it through your local bookseller.

Read my analysis of this speech here.

- Graham Henderson

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"We claim him as a socialist" - Eleanor Marx to the Shelley Society, April 1888

Shelley’s Socialism

by Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling

Introduction

This paper is, in the first place, an attempt at the treatment of an important subject on the plan that seems to its writers the one most likely to lead to results at once accurate and fruitful. That plan is based upon the co-operation of a man and a woman, whose sympathies are kindred, but whose points of view and methods of looking at facts are as different as are the positions of the two sexes to-day, even in the most favourable conditions, under the compulsion of our artificial and unhealthy society. That which one of us is about to read to you has been talked over, planned, followed in truth written by both of us; and although I am the reader, it must be understood that I am reading the work of my wife as well as, nay more than, of myself.

Only a few of the students of Shelley can lay claim to that encyclopaedic knowledge of all relating to him that is the happy gift of someone or to members of your society, who have fortunately a method equally happy of making all of us cool partners with them in their excellent possession. But many of the rank and file in this army of posey may have a special knowledge of the special subjects considered by the poet-leader. They may know by rule–of–some, perhaps, what he divines by intuition. And just as in the study of browning, help is given when the painter, the musician, or the man of science touches upon Browning’s poetry from the point of view of the specialist, we have thought there may be some interest in a study of Shelly and his writings by those who hold economic and political ideas that are in the main identical with his.

The question to be considered is not whether Socialism is right or wrong, but whether Shelley was or was not a socialist. Whilst at other times and in other places we are perfectly willing to discuss the arguments for or against socialism, at this time and in this place, we can only discuss the position of Shelly in regard to this phase of historical development. It may not be unfair to contend, that if it can be shown that Shelley was a socialist, a prima facia case at least, is in the judgment of every Shelley lover, is made out in favour of Socialism.

That the question at issue may be clearly understood, let us state in the briefest possible way what socialism means to some of us:

(1) That there are inequality and misery in the world;

(2) that this social inequality, this misery of the many and this happiness of the few are the necessary outcome of our social conditions;

(3) that the essence of these social conditions is that the mass of the people, the working class, produce and distribute all commodities, while the minority of the people, the middle and upper classes, possess these commodities;

(4) that this initial tyranny of the possessing class over the producing class is based on the present wage-system, and now maintains all other forms of oppression, such as that of monarchy, or clerical rule, or police despotism;

(5) that this tyranny of the few over the many is only possible because the few have obtained possession of the land, the raw materials, the machinery, the banks, the railways - in a word, of all the means of production and distribution of commodities; and have, as a class, obtained possession of these by no superior virtue, effort or self-denial, but by either force or fraud; and lastly

(6) that the approaching change in “civilised” society will be a revolution, or in the words of Shelley “the system of human society as it exists at present must be overthrown from the foundations.” [a] (Letter to Leigh Hunt. 1May 1820.) The two classes at present existing will be replaced be a single class consisting of the whole of the healthy and sane members of the community, possessing all the means of production and distribution in common, and working in common for the production and distribution of commodities.

Again let us say that we are not now concerned with the accuracy or inaccuracy of these principles. But we are concerned with the question whether they were or were not held by Shelley. If he enunciated views such as these, or even approximating to these, it is clear that we must admit that Shelley was a teacher as well as a poet. The large and interesting question whether a poet has or has not a right to be didactic as well as merely descriptive, analytical, musical, cannot be entered upon now. In passing we may note that poets have a habit of doing things whether they have the right or not. If the gentleman who read some months back, the exceedingly "tedious – brief" paper on a poem of some magnitude, Laon and Cythna, will allow us we should contend that while there is no reason that a poet should of necessity be didactic, there is equally no reason why of necessity he should not be a teacher of the intellect and moral nature as well as of the sense and imagination and although, as has been said, we do not propose to discuss this question tonight, much of our work will serve, as we believe, to strengthen the general position here taken into controvert the extraordinary statement of a speaker at the April meeting and printed in the Notebook of this society that Shelley's "ethics were rotten".

For the purpose of our study the following plan is suggested [for today]:

(1) A note or two on Shelley himself and his own personality, as bearing on his relations to Socialism;

(2) On those, who, in this connection had most influence upon his thinking;

(3) His attacks on tyranny, and his singing for liberty, in the abstract;

(4) His attacks on tyranny in the concrete;

(5) His clear perception of the class struggle; and

(6) His insight into the real meaning of such words as “freedom,'’ “justice,” “crime,” “labour,” and “property”.

We cannot hope today to deal with more than the above. If opportunity offers we shall consider upon some future occasion the following four topics.

(7) His practical, his exceedingly practical nature in respect to the remedies for the ills of society;

(8) His comprehension of the fact that a reconstruction of society is inevitable, is imminent;

(9) His pictures of the future, “delusions that were no delusions,” as he says; and lastly

(10) A reference to the chief works in which his socialistic ideas found expression.

1. Shelley’s own Personality

He was the child of the French Revolution. “The wild-eyed women” thronging round the path of Cythna as she went through the great city [b] were from the streets of Paris, and he, more than any other of his time, knew the real strength and beauty of this wild mother of his and ours. With his singular poetical and historical insight he saw the real significance of the holy struggle. Another singer of that melodious time, Byron, was also a child of the same Revolution. But his intellectual fore-runners were Voltaire and his school, and the Rousseau of the Nouvelle Héloise, whilst those of Shelley were [François-Noël] Baboeuf and the Rousseau of the Contrat Social. It is a wise child that knows his own father. As Marx, who understood the poets as well as he understood the philosophers and economists, was wont to say: “The real difference between Byron and Shelley is this: those who understand them and love them rejoice that Byron died at thirty-six, because if he had lived he would have become a reactionary bourgeois; they grieve that Shelley died at twenty-nine, because he was essentially a revolutionist, and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism.”

The outbreak of the Revolution was only three years in advance of Shelley’s birth. Throughout Europe in the earlier part of this century reaction was in full swing. In England there were trials for blasphemy, trials for treason, suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, misery everywhere. Shelley saw — not as Professor Dowden alternately has it, “thought he saw” — in the French Revolution an incident of the movement towards a reconstruction of society. He flung himself into politics, and yet he never ceased singing.

Every poem of Shelley’s is stained with his intense individuality. Perhaps for our purpose the Lines written on the Euganean Hills, the Lionel of Rosalind and Helen, and Prince Athanase afford the best exemplars. But let us also keep in remembrance Mary Shelley’s testimony to the especial value of Peter Bell the Third, in respect to the social and religious views of her husband.

“No poem contains more of Shelley’s peculiar views with regard to the errors into which many of the wisest have fallen, and of the pernicious effects of certain opinions on society ... Though, like the burlesque drama of Swellfoot, it must be looked on as a plaything, it has ... so much of himself in it that it cannot fail to interest greatly, and by right belongs to the world for whose instruction and benefit it was written.” [c]

And now having quoted her we may quote himself upon himself. Whether wholly unconsciously, or with the modest self-consciousness of genius he has written, lines and lines that are word-portraits of himself. Of these only one or two familiar instances can be taken.

He was one of:

“The sacred few who could not tame
Their spirits to the conquerors.”
- Triumph of Life [d]

“And then I clasped my hands and looked around —
But none was near to mock my streaming eyes,
Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground —
So without shame, I spake: — “I will be wise,
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
Such power, for I grow weary to behold
The selfish and the strong still tyrannise
Without reproach or check.” I then controlled
My tears, my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold.
“And from that hour did I with earnest thought
Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore,
Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught
I cared to learn, but from that secret store
Wrought linked armour for myself, before
It might walk forth to war among mankind;
Thus power and hope were strengthened more and more
Within me, till there came upon my mind
A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined.”
- Laon and Cytha [e]

He was one of:

“Those who have struggled, and with resolute will
Vanquished earth’s pride and meanness, burst the chains,
The icy chains of custom, and have shone
The day-stars of their age.”
- Queen Mab. [f]

The dedication of The Cenci to Leigh Hunt may be taken as if Shelley was communing with his own heart:

“One more gentle, honourable, innocent and brave; one of more exalted toleration for all who do and think evil, and yet himself more free from evil; one who knows better how to receive and how to confer a benefit though he must ever confer far more than he can receive; one of simpler, and, in the highest sense of the word, of purer life and manners I never knew.”
- Dedication of The Cenci [g]

For nought of ill his heart could understand,
But pity and wild sorrow for the same;-
Not his the thirst for glory or command,
….
For none than he a purer heart could have,
Or that loved good more for itself alone;
Of nought in heaven or earth was he the slave.
….
Yet even in youth did he not e'er abuse
The strength of wealth or thought, to consecrate

Those false opinions which the harsh rich use
To blind the world they famish for their pride;
Nor did he hold from any man his dues,

But, like a steward in honest dealings tried,
With those who toiled and wept, the poor and wise,
His riches and his cares he did divide.

Fearless he was, and scorning all disguise,
What he dared do or think, though men might start,
He spoke with mild yet unaverted eyes;

- Prince Athanese

Pure-minded, earnest-souled, didactic poet, philosopher, prophet, then he is. But add to this, if you will rightly estimate the immense significance of his advocacy of any political creed, the fact already noted of his extraordinary political insight; and add also, if you will rightly estimate the value of his adherence to any scientific truth, the fact that he had a certain conception of evolution long before it had been enunciated in clear language by Darwin, or had even entered seriously into the region of scientific possibilities. Of his acuteness as historical observer, one general instance has already been given in connection with the French Revolution. Yet another less obvious but even more astounding example is furnished by his poems on Napoleon. Shelley was the first, was indeed the only man of his time to see through Napoleon. The man whom every one in Europe at that period took for a hero or a monster, Shelley recognised as a mean man, a slight man, greedy for gold, as well as for the littleness of empire. His instinct divined a “Napoleon the Little” in “Napoleon the Great”. That which [Jules] Michelet felt was true, that which it was left for [Pierre] Lanfrey to prove as a historical fact, the conception of Napoleon that is as different from the ordinary one, as an ordinary person is from Shelley, this “dreamer” had.

In 1816 we find him writing:

“I hated thee, fallen tyrant! I did groan
To think that a most unambitious slave,
Like thou, shouldst dance and revel on the grave
Of Liberty.” [h]

And in 1821, the year of Napoleon’s death.

“Napoleon’s fierce spirit rolled,
In terror, and blood, and gold,
A torrent of ruin to death from his birth” [i]

By instinct, intuition, whatever we are to call that fine faculty that feels truths before they are put into definite language, Shelley was an Evolutionist. He translated into his own pantheistic language the doctrine of the eternity of matter and the eternity of motion, of the infinite transformation of the different forms of matter into each other, of different forms of motion into each other, without any creation or destruction of either matter or motion. But that he held these scientific truths as part of his creed, there can be no doubt. You have the doctrine, certainly in a pantheistic form, but certainly there, in the letter to Miss Hitchener:

“As the soul which now animates this frame was once the vivifying principle of the lowest link in the chain of existence, so is it ultimately destined to attain the highest.”
- Letters VI., p.12 [k]

In Queen Mab:

“Spirit of Nature! here!
In this interminable wilderness
Of worlds, at whose immensity
Even soaring fancy staggers,
Here is thy fitting temple.
Yet not the lightest leaf
That quivers to the passing breeze
Is less instinct with thee
Yet not the meanest worm
That lurks in graves and fattens on the dead
Less shares thy eternal breath “[l]. (Book 1, 264-274)

How wonderful! that even
The passions, prejudices, interests,
That sway the meanest being--the weak touch
That moves the finest nerve
And in one human brain
Causes the faintest thought, becomes a link
In the great chain of Nature! (Book 2, 102-108)

'How strange is human pride!
I tell thee that those living things,
To whom the fragile blade of grass
That springeth in the morn
And perisheth ere noon,
Is an unbounded world;
I tell thee that those viewless beings,
Whose mansion is the smallest particle
Of the impassive atmosphere,
Think, feel and live like man;
That their affections and antipathies,
Like his, produce the laws
Ruling their moral state;
And the minutest throb
That through their frame diffuses
The slightest, faintest motion,
Is fixed and indispensable
As the majestic laws
That rule yon rolling orbs.' (Book 2, 225-243)

Of the two great principles affecting the development of the individual and of the race, those of heredity and adaptation, he had a clear perception, although they as yet were neither accurately defined nor even named. He understood that men and peoples were the result of their ancestry and of their environment. Two prose fragments in illustration of this. One is:

“It is less the character of the individual than the situation in which he is placed which determines him to be honest or dishonest.”
- Letter to Hunt. [m]

The other is:

“But there must be a resemblance which does not depend upon their own will, between all the writers of any particular age. They cannot escape from subjection to a common influence which arises out of an infinite combination of circumstances belonging to the times in which they live, though each is in a degree the author of the very influence by which his being is thus pervaded. Thus, the tragic poets of the age of Pericles; the Italian revivers of learning; those mighty intellects of our own country that succeeded the Reformation, the translators of the Bible, Shakespeare, Spenser, the dramatists of the reign of Elizabeth, and Lord Bacon, the colder spirits of the interval that succeeded; all resemble each other and differ from every other in their several classes. In this view of things Ford can no more be called the imitator of Shakespeare, than Shakespeare the imitator of Ford. There were perhaps few other joints of resemblance between these two men, than that which the universal and inevitable influence of their age produced. And this is an influence which neither the meanest scribbler, nor the sublimest genius of any era can escape, and which I have not attempted to escape.” (Preface to Laon and Cythna) F. I. p.57-58).

This extraordinary power of seeing things clearly and of seeing them in their right relations one to another, shown not alone in the artistic side of his nature, but in the scientific, the historical, the social, is a comfort and strength to us that hold in the main the beliefs, made more sacred to us in that they were his, and must give every lover of Shelley pause when he finds himself parting from the Master on any fundamental question of economics, of faith, of human life.

2. The People Most Immediately Influencing Him

We are always speaking of Shelley to-night in relation to his political and social thinking.

A word again upon Byron here. In Byron we have the vague, generous and genuine aspirations in the abstract, which found their final expression in the bourgeois-democratic movement of 1848. In Shelley, there was more than the vague striving after freedom in the abstract, and therefore his ideas are finding expression in the social-democratic movement of our own day. Thus Shelley was on the side of the bourgeoisie when struggling for freedom, but ranged against them when in their turn they became the oppressors of the working-class. He saw more clearly than Byron, who seems scarcely to have seen it at all, that the epic of the nineteenth century was to be the contest between the possessing and the producing classes. And it is just this that removes him from the category of Utopian socialists, and makes him so far as it was possible in his time, a socialist of modern days.

We have already referred to the influence of Baboeuf, (probably indirect), and of Rousseau. To these must of course be added the French philosophes, the Encyclopaedists, especially [Paul-Henri Dietric] Baron d’Holbach, or more accurately his ghost [Denis] Diderot — Diderot [who was] the intellectual ghost of everybody of his time.

Into any inquiry concerning the writer, that influenced Shelley’s politics and sociology the name of [William] Godwin must necessarily enter prominently. Bowden’s Life, has made us all so thoroughly acquainted with the ill side of Godwin that just now there may be a not unnatural tendency to forget the best of him. But whatever his colossal and pretentious meannesses and other like faults may have been, we have to remember that he wrote Political Justice, a work in itself of extraordinary power, and of special significance to us as the one that did more than any other to fashion Shelley’s thinking. Much has been made, scarcely too much can be made, of the influence of Godwin’s writings on Shelley. But not enough has been made of the influence upon him of the two Marys: Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. It was one of Shelley’s “delusions that are not delusions” that man and woman should be equal and united; and in his own life and that of his wife he not only saw this realised, but saw the possibility of that realisation in lives less keen and strong than theirs. All through his work this oneness with his wife shines out, and most notably in the dedication to that most didactic of poems, Laon and Cythna. Laon and Cythna are equal and united powers, brother and sister, husband and wife, friend and friend, man and woman. In the dedication to the history of their suffering, their work, their struggle, their triumph and their love, Mary is “his own heart’s home, his dear friend beautiful and calm and free.”

“And what art thou? I know, but dare not speak:
Time may interpret to his silent years,
Yet in the paleness of thy thoughful cheek,
And in the light thine ample forehead wears,
And in thy sweetest smiles and in thy tears,
And in thy gentle speech, a prophecy
Is whispered, to subdue my fondest fears;
And thro’ thine eyes, even in thy soul I see,
A camp of vestal fire burning internally.”

And in the next stanza to the one just quoted that other Mary is besung.

“One then left this earth
Whose life was like a setting planet mild,
Which clothed thee in the radiance undefiled,
Of its departing glory, still her fame
Shines on thee thro’ the tempests dark and wild,
Which shake these latter days.”

In a word, the world in general has treated the relative influences of Godwin on the one hand and of the two women on the other, pretty much as might have been expected with men for historians.

Probably the fact that he saw so much through the eyes of these two women quickened Shelley’s perception of women’s real position in society, and of the real cause of that position. This, which he only felt in the Harriet days, he would have understood fully of himself sooner or later. That this understanding came sooner, is in large measure due to the two Marys. One of them at least before him had seen in part that women’s social condition is a question of economics, not of religion or of sentiment. The woman is to the man as the producing class is to the possessing. Her “inferiority,” in its actuality and in its assumed existence, is the outcome of the holding of economic power by man to her exclusion. And this Shelley understood not only in its application to the most unfortunate of women, but in its application to every woman. Truly in Queen Mab he writes:

'All things are sold: the very light of heaven
Is venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love,
.....
Are bought and sold as in a public mart
Of undisguising Selfishness, that sets
On each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign.
Even love is sold; the solace of all woe
Is turned to deadliest agony, old age
Shivers in selfish beauty's loathing arms, (Book V, 178-179 and 186-191)

But note how in the Laon and Cythna it is (F. I. 108, xxi) “woman, [i.e. woman in general] outraged and polluted long.” Now truly he understands the position of woman, and how thoroughly he recognizes that in her degradation man is degraded, and that in dealing out justice to her man will be himself set free, the well-known Laon and Cythna passage will serve to illustrate.

“Can man be free if woman be a slave?
Chain one who lives, and breathes this boundless air
To the corruption of a closed grave!
Can they whose mates are beasts, condemned to bear
Scorn heavier far than toil or anguish, dare
To trample their oppressors? in their home
Among their babes, thou knowest a curse would wear
The shape of woman — hoary crime would come
Behind, and Fraud rebuild religion’s tottering dome.” [n]

It is interesting to compare this and kindred fiery outbursts of practical teaching in Shelley with the uncertain sound and bated breath of the washed out, emasculated, effeminated Shelley, Tennyson, Tennyson. The breath is bated in the latter case because it is that of a respectable gentleman, and the sound is uncertain, as we think, because Lord Tennyson does not grasp the real meaning of the relative positions of man and woman in to-day’s society.

3. Tyranny and Liberty in the Abstract

With these in the abstract the poets have always been busy. They have denounced the former in measured language and unmeasured terms. Yet they have been known to refuse their signatures to petitions asking for justice on behalf of seven men condemned to death upon police evidence of the worst kind. They have sung paeans in praise of liberty in the abstract, or in foreign lands. Yet they have written hymns against Ireland and for the Liberal Unionists. Shelley has not, to use a forcible colloquialism, “gone back on himself.” When we read the Ode to Liberty, or the 1819 Ode for the Spaniards, or the tremendous Liberty of 1820, we have not the sense of uneasiness that we have when reading Holy Cross Day or The Litany of Nations. [Note to Reader: Marx puts Browning and Swinburne squarely in her sites with this reference]

LIBERTY

I.
The fiery mountains answer each other;
Their thunderings are echoed from zone to zone;
The tempestuous oceans awake one another,
And the ice-rocks are shaken round Winter's throne,
When the clarion of the Typhoon is blown.

II.
From a single cloud the lightening flashes,
Whilst a thousand isles are illumined around,
Earthquake is trampling one city to ashes,
An hundred are shuddering and tottering; the sound
Is bellowing underground.

III.
But keener thy gaze than the lightening’s glare,
And swifter thy step than the earthquake’s tramp;
Thou deafenest the rage of the ocean; thy stare
Makes blind the volcanoes; the sun’s bright lamp
To thine is a fen-fire damp.

IV.
From billow and mountain and exhalation
The sunlight is darted through vapour and blast;
From spirit to spirit, from nation to nation,
From city to hamlet thy dawning is cast,--
And tyrants and slaves are like shadows of night
In the van of the morning light.

This man is through and through a foe to tyranny in the abstract and in the concrete form.

Of course in much of his work the ideas that exercise a malevolent despotism over men’s minds are attacked in general terms. Superstition and empire in all their forms Shelley hated, and therefore he again and again dealt with them as abstractions from those forms. Superstition, or an unfounded reverence for that which is unworthy of reverence, was to him, at first, mainly embodied in the superstition of religion.

To the younger Shelley, l'infâme of Voltaire’s ecrasez l'infâme was to a great extent, as with Voltaire wholly, the priesthood. And the empire that he antagonised was at first that of kingship and that of personal tyranny. But even in his attacks on these he simultaneously assails the superstitious belief in the capitalistic system, and the empire of class. As time goes on, with increasing distinctness, he makes assault upon these, the most recent, and most dangerous foes of humanity. And always, every word that he has written against religious superstitions, and the despotism of individual rulers may be read as against economic superstition and the despotism of class. “The immense improvements of which by the extinction of certain moral superstitions [for moral we can also read economic] human society may be yet susceptible.” [Preface to Julian and Maddalo] [o].

4. Tyranny in the Concrete

We must pass over, with a mere reference only, the songs for nations — for Mexico, Spain, Ireland, England. Of his attacks upon Napoleon mention has been made. In the Mask of Anarchy, Castlereagh, Sidmouth, Eldon, are all personally gibbeted. In each case, not only the mere man but the infamous principle he represents is the object of attack. Just as the Prince Regent to Shelley was embodied princeship, and Napoleon embodied personal greed and tyranny, so Castlereagh (the Chief Secretary for Ireland before he was War Minister), was embodied war and government; Sidmouth, Home Secretary at the Peterloo time, embodied officialism, Eldon embodied Law. He is for ever denouncing priest and king and statesman:

Kings priests and statesmen, blast the human flower,
Even in its tender bud; their influence darts
Like sudden poison, through the bloodless veins
Of desolate society.— (Queen Mab) [p]

But he scarcely ever fails to link with these the basis on which nowadays they all rest — our commercial system. See the Queen Mab passage beginning: —

Commerce has set the mark of selfishness,
The signet of its all-enslaving power,
Upon a shining ore, and called it gold;
Before whose image bow the vulgar great,
The vainly rich, the miserable proud,
The mob of peasants, nobles, priests and kings,
And with blind feelings reverence the power
That grinds them to the dust of misery.
But in the temple of their hireling hearts
Gold is a living god and rules in scorn
All earthly things but virtue.

‘Since tyrants by the sale of human life
Heap luxuries to their sensualism, and fame
To their wide-wasting and insatiate pride,
Success has sanctioned to a credulous world
The ruin, the disgrace, the woe of war.
His hosts of blind and unresisting dupes
The despot numbers; from his cabinet
These puppets of his schemes he moves at will,
Even as the slaves by force or famine driven,
Beneath a vulgar master, to perform
A task of cold and brutal drudgery; -
Hardened to hope, insensible to fear,
Scarce living pulleys of a dead machine,
Mere wheels of work and articles of trade,
That grace the proud and noisy pomp of wealth! [q]

It is not for nothing that in Charles I the court fool puts together the shops and churches.“ The rainbow hung over the city with all its shops — and churches."[r] This leads us to our next point.

5. Shelley’s Perception of the Class-Struggle

More than anything else that makes us claim Shelley as a socialist is his singular understanding of the facts that to-day tyranny resolves itself into the tyranny of the possessing class over the producing, and that to this tyranny in the ultimate analysis is traceable almost all evil and misery. He saw that the so-called middle-class is the real tyrant, the real danger at the present day. Those of us who belong to that class, in our delight at Shelley’s fierce onslaughts upon the higher members of it, aristocrats, monarchs, landowners, are apt to forget that de nobis etiam fabula narratur- of us also he speaks. This point is of such importance that more quotations than usual must be taken to enforce it. From Edinburgh, in his first honeymoon he writes: — “Had he [Uncle Pilfold] not assisted us, we should still have been chained to the filth and commerce of Edinburgh. Vile as aristocracy is, commerce — purse-proud ignorance and illiterateness — is more contemptible [s].” From Keswick a few months later he writes of the Lake District: — “Though the face of the country is lovely, the people are detestable. The manufacturers, with their contamination, have crept into the peaceful vale, and deformed the loveliness of nature with human taint [t].” Or take this quotation from the Philosophic View of Reform (sic):

One of the vaunted effects of this system is to increase the national industry, that is, to increase the labours of the poor and those luxuries of the rich which they supply. To make a manufacturer work 16 hours when he only worked 8. To turn children into lifeless and bloodless machines at an age when otherwise they would be at play before the cottage doors of their parents. To augment indefinitely the proportion of those who enjoy the profit of the labour of others, as compared with those who exercise this labour.

Note how he quotes Godwin:

It was perhaps necessary that a period of monopoly and oppression should subsist, before a period of cultivated equality could subsist. Savages perhaps would never have been excited to the discovery of truth and the invention of art, but by the narrow motives whch such a period affords. But surely, after the savage state has ceased, and men have set out in the glorious career of discovery and invention, monopoly, and oppression cannot be necessary to prevent them from retiurning to a state of barbarism. (Godwin’s Enquirer, Essay II. See also Political Justice, Book VIII, Chapter 2).

At the end of a Keswick letter, 1811, to Miss Hitchener: — “The grovelling souls of heroes, aristocrats, and commercialists.” Even when he uses the phrase “privileged classes” in the Philosophic View of Reform [u], it is clear he is thinking of them as a whole in contradiction to the class destitute of every privilege. Two or three last quotations in this connection to show how he understood the relative positions, not only above and below but antagonistic of these two classes [v].

Ay, there they are-
Nobles, and sons of nobles, patentees,
Monopolists, and stewards of this poor farm,
On whose lean sheep sit the prophetic crows,
Here is the pomp that strips the houseless orphan,
Here is the pride that breaks the desolate heart.
These are the lilies glorious as Solomon,
Who toil not, neither do they spin, – unless
It be the webs they catch poor rogues withal.
Here is the surfeit which to them who earn
The niggard wages of the earth, scarce leaves
The tithe that will support them till they crawl
Back to her cold hard bosom. Here is health
Followed by grim disease, glory by shame,
Waste by lame famine, wealth by squalid want,
And England’s sin by England’s punishment.

- Charles I, Act I, Scene 1

“Wales,” he wrote to Hookham on 3 December 1812 in an indignant mood,

“is the last stronghold of the moist vulgar and commonplace prejudices of aristocracy. Lawyers of unexampled villainy rule and grind the poor, whilst they cheat the rich. The peasants are mere serfs and are fed and lodged worse than pigs. The gentry have all the ferocity and despotism of the ancient barons, without their dignity and chivalric disdain of shame and danger. The poor are as abject as Samoyed, and the rich as tyrannical as bashaws.”

[See also] the chorus of priests in Act II, scene 2 of Swellfoot the Tyrant: “Those who consume these fruits through thee grow fat; those who produce these fruits through thee grow lean.” For a taste of the consequences to all and sundry, to whichever class they belong, of this class-antagonism a few stanzas from Peter Bell The Third :

Hell is a city much like London --
A populous and a smoky city;
There are all sorts of people undone,
And there is little or no fun done;
Small justice shown, and still less pity.
…….
There is a Chancery Court; a King;
A manufacturing mob; a set
Of thieves who by themselves are sent
Similar thieves to represent;
An army; and a public debt.
…….
Lawyers -- judges -- old hobnobbers
Are there -- bailiffs -- chancellors --
Bishops -- great and little robbers --
Rhymesters -- pamphleteers -- stock-jobbers --
Men of glory in the wars, --

Mary’s words may be quoted as summing up his position:

“Shelley loved the people, and respected them as often more virtuous, as always more suffering, and, therefore more deserving of sympathy than the great. He believed that a clash between the two classes of society was inevitable, and he eagerly ranged himself on the people’s side.” (Notes on the Poems of 1819. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Edward Moxon 1874)

6. Shelley’s Understanding of the Real Meaning of Things

His acuteness of vision is not only seen in his marking off society into the two groups, but in his understanding the real meaning of phrases that are to most of us either formulae or cant. Let us take as many of these as space allows.

Anarchy. — Shelley saw and said that the Anarchy we are all so afraid of is very present with us. We live in the midst of it. Anarchy is God and King and Law in the Mask of Anarchy, and let us add is Capitalism.

Freedom. — The extraordinary statement that England is a free country was to Shelley the merest nonsense. “The death-white shore of Albion, free no more. … / The abortion with which she travaileth is Liberty, smitten to death.” (To — Corpses are Cold in the Tomb). And he understood the significant fact in this connection that those who talk and write of English freedom and the like know they are talking and writing cant. The hollowness of the whole sham kept up by newspaper writers, Parliamentary orators, and so forth, was as apparent to him sixty years ago as it is to-day to the dullest of us [aa].

'The tyrants of the Golden City tremble
At voices which are heard about the streets;
The ministers of fraud can scarce dissemble
The lies of their own heart, but when one meets
Another at the shrine, he inly weets,
Though he says nothing, that the truth is known;
Murderers are pale upon the judgement-seats,
And gold grows vile even to the wealthy crone,
And laughter fills the Fane, and curses shake the Throne.

- Revolt of Islam

Custom. — The general evil of that custom which is to most of us a law, the law, the only law of life, he was never weary of denouncing. “The chains, the icy chains of custom (Queen Mab). The “more eternal foe than force or fraud, old custom” (Fall of Bonaparte). And with the denunciation of custom, followed merely because it is custom, is the noble teaching of self-mastery, and the poet’s contradiction of the statement that under the new regime men will be machines, uniformity reign, and individuality be dead [cc].

Nor happiness, nor majesty, nor fame,
Nor peace, nor strength, nor skill in arms or arts,
Shepherd those herds whom tyranny makes tame;
Verse echoes not one beating of their hearts,
History is but the shadow of their shame,
Art veils her glass, or from the pageant starts
As to oblivion their blind millions fleet,
Staining that Heaven with obscene imagery
Of their own likeness. What are numbers knit
By force or custom? Man who man would be,
Must rule the empire of himself; in it
Must be supreme, establishing his throne
On vanquished will, quelling the anarchy
Of hopes and fears, being himself alone.

- Sonnet, Political Greatness

Cruelty of the governing class. — A tyrannical class like a tyrannical man stops at nothing in order to maintain its position of supremacy. No means are too insignificant, no weapon too ponderous. From the policeman’s “nark,” or spy not a member of the police force, to the machinery of a trial for treason, nothing comes amiss to the class that governs. Shelley knew what a mockery for the most part is a trial instituted by a government, whether in Ireland or in England. “A trial I think men call it” (Rosalind and Helen)

In June 1817, a few operatives rose in Derbyshire. A score of dragoons put down the Derbyshire insurrection, an insurrection there is reason to believe put up by a Government spy. On November 7th 1817, three men, Brandreth, Turner, Ludlam, “were drawn on hurdles to the place of execution, and were hanged and decapitated in the presence of an excited and horror-stricken crowd” (Dowden’s Life)

Against this judicial murder Shelley’s voice was lifted up, as it would be now in like case. For like cases are occurring, still occur in increasing numbers as the class struggle intensifies. In Ireland at Lisdoovarna, Constable Whelehan was murdered recently in a moonlighting raid. The raid had been planned by Cullinane, a Government spy. On Monday Dec. 12, 1887, one man was condemned to ten years’, four others to seven years’ penal servitude for an offence planned by a government spy. Against this sentence Shelley, were he alive, would, we are certain, protest. So would he have protested against the direct murders by the police at Mitchelstown, and Trafalgar Square. So would he have protested against the recent judicial murder in America of four men and the practical imprisonment for life of three others. The Chicago Anarchist meeting differed even from the Derbyshire insurrection of 1817. There was no rising, no talk of rising, no use of physical force by the people, no threat of it. Yet seven men were condemned on the evidence of the police, evidence that those who have read every word of it feel was not only insufficient to prove the guilt, but absolutely conclusive as to the innocence of the accused. Had Shelley been alive he would have been the first to sign the petition on behalf of the Chicago Anarchists.

Crime. — This phenomenon Shelley recognized as the natural result of social conditions. The criminal was to him as much a creature of the society in which the lived as the capitalist or the monarch. “Society,” said he, “grinds down poor wretches into the dust of abject poverty, till they are scarcely recognizable as human beings." (From Memoir of Shelley, William Michael Rossetti, p 96). In his literal discussions with Miss Hitchener, Shelley more than once asks whether with a juster distribution of happiness, of toil and leisure, crime and the temptation to crime, would not almost cease to exist. And much that is called crime was to Shelley (the Preface to Laon and Cythna is but one evidence) only crime by convention.

Property. The opinion of Shelley as to that which could be rightly enjoyed as a person’s own property and what could only be enjoyed wrongly, will be in part gathered from the following quotation:

But there is another species of property which has its foundation in usurpation, or imposture, or violence, without which, by the nature of things, immense possessions of gold or land could never have been accumulated.Labour, industry, economy, skill, genius, or any similar powers honourably and innocently exerted are the foundations of one description of property, and all true political institutions ought to defend every man in the exercise of his discretion with respect to property so acquired....

- A Philosophical View of Reform

We do not think the meaning of this quotation is strained if it is paraphrased in the more precise language of scientific socialism thus:

“A man has a right to anything that his own labour has produced, and that he does not intend to employ for the purpose of injuring his fellows. But no man can himself acquire a considerable aggregation of properly except at the expense of his fellows. He must either cheat a certain number out of the value of it, or take it by force.”

Again, note the conception of wealth in the Song to the Men of England: “The wealth ye find another keeps.” The source of all wealth is human labour, and that not the labour of the possessors of that wealth.

People of England ye who toil and groan,
Who reap the harvests which are not your own,
Who weave the clothes which your oppressors wear,
And for your own take the inclement air;
Who build warm houses....
And are like gods who give them all they have,
And nurse them from the cradle to the grave....

- Fragment; To the People of England

As to that for which the working class work he quotes Godwin in the fifth note to Queen Mab:

“There is no real wealth but the labour of man….The poor are set to labour - for what? Not the food for which they famish: not the blankets for want of which their babies are frozen by the cold of their miserable hovels; : not those comforts of civilization without which civilized man is far more miserable than the meanest savage; oppressed as he is by all insidious evils, within the daily and taunting prospect of its innumerable benefits assiduously exhibited before him: no; for the pride of power, for the miserable isolation oif pride, for the false pleasures of the hundredth part of Society.”

Let us take as our last example of his understanding of the central position of socialism, a quotation to be found in a letter to Miss Hitchner, dated December 15th, 1811. Shelley is discussing the entailment of his estate: “that I should entail £120,000 of command over labour, of power to remit this, to employ it for beneficent purposes, on one whom I know not." (Letter to Elizabeth Hitchener, 15 December 1811)

We cannot expect even such a man as Shelley to have thought out in his time the full meaning of labour-power, labour, and the value of commodities. But undoubtedly he knew the real economic value of private property in the means of production and distribution, whether it was in machinery, land, funds, what not. He saw that this value lay in the command, absolute, merciless, unjust, over human labour. The socialist believes that these means of production and distribution should be the property of the community. For the man or company that owns them has practically irresponsible control over the class that does not possess them.

The possessor can and does dictate terms to the man or woman of that non-possessing class. “You shall sell your labour to me. I will pay you only a fraction of its value in wage. The difference between that value and what I pay for your labour I pocket, as a member of the possessing class, and I am richer than before, not by labour of my own, but by your unpaid labour.” This was the teaching of Shelley. This is the teaching of socialism, and therefore the teaching of socialism, whether it is right or wrong, is also that of Shelley. We claim him as a Socialist.

Tonight we have discussed the question whether he held our scientific principles. On some other occasion, if your courtesy allows us, we shall be glad to discuss the practical remedial measures that Shelley advocated, and the possible future that he anticipated. Here, again, we shall find him in harmony with modern socialistic thought. Finally, we propose on that future occasion to discuss certain of his chief works in the light of the investigation that has been commenced this evening.

The Peterloo Massacre and Percy Shelley by Paul Bond

In the early autumn, my online “Shelley Alert” trip wire came alive with a link to an article published by Paul Bond on the World Socialist Web Site (“WSWS”) under the auspices of the International Committee of the Fourth International (“ICFI”). Paul, it turns out, is an active member of the Trotskyist movement and has been writing for the WSWS since its launch in 1998. It also turns out he is an ardent admirer of Percy Shelley. That someone like Paul would be interested in Shelley and that the ICFI would publish his article about Shelley did not surprise me in the least. Though I suspect it might arouse the curiosity of a goodly portion of Shelley’s current fan base.

Before we delve further into this, let’s find out exactly what the WSWS is? Understanding this may explain a lot:

The World Socialist Web Site is published by the International Committee of the Fourth International, the leadership of the world socialist movement, the Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.

The WSWS aims to meet the need, felt widely today, for an intelligent appraisal of the problems of contemporary society. It addresses itself to the masses of people who are dissatisfied with the present state of social life, as well as its cynical and reactionary treatment by the establishment media.

Our web site provides a source of political perspective to those troubled by the monstrous level of social inequality, which has produced an ever-widening chasm between the wealthy few and the mass of the world's people. As great events, from financial crises to eruptions of militarism and war, break up the present state of class relations, the WSWS will provide a political orientation for the growing ranks of working people thrown into struggle.

We anticipate enormous battles in every country against unemployment, low wages, austerity policies and violations of democratic rights. The World Socialist Web Site insists, however, that the success of these struggles is inseparable from the growth in the influence of a socialist political movement guided by a Marxist world outlook.

The standpoint of this web site is one of revolutionary opposition to the capitalist market system. Its aim is the establishment of world socialism. It maintains that the vehicle for this transformation is the international working class, and that in the twenty-first century the fate of working people, and ultimately mankind as a whole, depends upon the success of the socialist revolution.

You can learn more about them here.

For those of you familiar with the radical Percy Shelley, this will, of course, make sense. Shelley has been an inspiration to those on the left from the early 1800s. I have written extensively about this in my articles “My Father’s Shelley: A Tale of Two Shelleys”, “Percy Bysshe Shelley in Our Time” and “Jeremy Corbin is Right: Poetry Can Change the World”.

I think the fact that the WSWS has published an extensive article exploring Shelley’s radicalism is an important and salutary moment. It should help to reconnect Shelley to a new generation of radicals. The principal reason that Shelley remains relevant today is almost exclusively connected to his radicalism. His love poetry is exquisite and reminds us that PB was a three dimensional person. But there is an enormous amount of brilliant love poetry out there; and precious little radical poetry - having said that a great deal of Shelley’s love poetry is in fact a very radical variant of love poetry.

But it is Shelley’s radicalism that makes him stand out as a giant among his contemporaries. Little wonder then that Eleanor Marx proudly declaimed in a famous speech in 1888: “We claim his as a socialist.” Shelley’s radicalism inspired generations of activists and radicals; radicals who, explicitly inspired by Shelley, went on to change the world for the better. Is there a better example of this than the effect Shelley had on Pauline Newman, one of the founders of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union? You can read more about this in my article “The Story of the Mask of Anarchy: From Shelley to the Triangle Factory Fire”. And please read Michael Demson’s brilliant graphic novel of the same name. Links to buy it are in my article.

Two of the best biographies of Shelley were written by life-long members of the left. The first, Kenneth Neill Cameron (an avowed Marxist), penned The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical. The other, Paul Foot (the greatest crusading journalist of his generation), authored The Red Shelley. You can read Paul Foot’s spellbinding address to the 1981 International Marxism Conference in London here. It took me over two hundred hours to transcribe and properly footnote his speech!

For both Engels and Marx, Shelley was an inspiration:

Engels:

"Shelley, the genius, the prophet, finds most of [his] readers in the proletariat; the bourgeouise own the castrated editions, the family editions cut down in accordance with the hypocritical morality of today”

Marx:

The real difference between Byron and Shelley is this: those who understand them and love them rejoice that Byron died at thirty-six, because if he had lived he would have become a reactionary bourgeois; they grieve that Shelley died at twenty-nine, because he was essentially a revolutionist, and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of Socialism.

Eleanor Marx supplied the principle reason for these assessments of Shelley. She wrote,

More than anything else that makes us claim Shelley as a Socialist is his singular understanding of the facts that today tyranny resolves itself into the tyranny of the possessing class over the producing, and that to this tyranny in the ultimate analysis is traceable almost all evil and misery.

This grim portrayal of the tyranny faced by the citizens of Shelley’s and Marx’s eras has an equally grim, modern resonance. One need to look no further than Marxist-inspired writers such as Astra Taylor (The People’s Platform) and Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism) to come to grips with the fact that the situation has, if anything, got worse. Our modern “possessing class” of digital overlords threaten not simply to strip the people of their labour, but to turn our very lives into the raw materials that feed the rapacious, insatiable demands their modern “surveillance capitalism”.

However, let me turn the floor over to Paul Bond whose essay is something of a tour de force that encapsulates Shelley’s reception by the radicals of his era down to those of today. His article is wonderfully approachable, sparkles with erudition and introduces the reader to almost the entire radical dramatis personae of the 19th Century. I think it is vitally important for students of PBS to understand this radical legacy. And who better to hear this from than someone with impeccable socialist credentials: Paul Bond. You can follow Paul on Twitter @paulbondwsws and the World Socialist Web Site @WSWS_Updates.

The caption photo at top is of Eleanor Marx (middle) with her two sisters - Jenny Longuet, Laura Marx, father Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Eleanor was a champion of PBS.

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The Peterloo Massacre and Shelley

by Paul Bond

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This year marks the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre, a critical event in British history. On August 16, 1819, a crowd of 60,000 to 100,000 protestors gathered peacefully on Manchester’s St. Peter’s Field. They came to appeal for adult suffrage and the reform of parliamentary representation.The disenfranchised working class—cotton workers, many of them women, with a large contingent of Irish workers—who made up the crowd were struggling with the increasingly dire economic conditions following the end of the Napoleonic Wars four years earlier.

Shortly after the meeting began, local magistrates called on the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry to arrest the speakers and sent cavalry of Yeomanry and a regular army regiment to attack the crowd. They charged with sabres drawn. Eighteen people were killed and up to 700 injured.

On August 16 of this year the WSWS published an appraisal of the massacre.

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The Peterloo Massacre elicited an immediate and furious response from the working class and sections of middle-class radicals.

The escalation of repression by the ruling class that followed, resulting in a greater suppression of civil liberties, was met with meetings of thousands and the widespread circulation of accounts of the massacre. There was a determination to learn from the massacre and not allow it to be forgotten or misrepresented. Poetic responses played an important part in memorialising Peterloo.

Violent class conflict erupted across north western England. Yeomen and hussars continued attacks on workers across Manchester, and the ruling class launched an intensive campaign of disinformation and retribution.

At the trial of Rochdale workers charged with rioting on the night after Peterloo, Attorney General Sir Robert Gifford made clear that the ruling class would stop at nothing to crush the development of radical and revolutionary sentiment in the masses. He declared: “Men deluded themselves if they thought their condition would be bettered by such kind of Reform as Universal Suffrage, Annual Parliaments, and Vote by Ballot; or that it was just that the property of the country ought to be equally divided among its inhabitants, or that such a daring innovation would ever take place.”

Samuel Bamford (1788–1872), 'The Radical', Silk Weaver of Middleton by Charles Potter

Samuel Bamford, a reformer and weaver who led a contingent of several thousand marchers to Manchester from the town of Middleton, said he spent the evening of the massacre “brooding over a spirit of vengeance towards the authors of our humiliation.” Bamford told the judge at his trial for sedition that he would not recommend non-violent protest again.

Workers took a more direct response, even as the military were being deployed widely against the population. Despite the military presence, and press claims that the city had been subdued, riots continued across Manchester.

Two women were shot by hussars on August 20. A fortnight after Peterloo, the most affected area, Manchester’s New Cross district, was described in the London press as a by-word for trouble and a risky area for the wealthy to pass through. Soldiers were shooting in the area to disperse rioters. On August 18, a special constable fired a loaded pistol in the New Cross streets and was attacked by an angry crowd, who beat him to death with a poker and stoned him.

There was a similar response elsewhere locally, with riots in Oldham and Rochdale and what has been described by one historian as “a pitched battle” in Macclesfield on the night of August 17.

Crowds in their thousands welcomed the coach carrying Henry Hunt and the other arrested Peterloo speakers to court in Salford, the city across the River Irwell from Manchester. Salford’s magistrates reportedly feared a “tendency to tumult,” while in Bolton the Hussars had trouble keeping the public from other prisoners. The crowd shouted, “Down with the tyrants!”

While the courts meted out sharper punishment to the arrested rioters, mass meetings and protests continued across Britain. Meetings to condemn the massacre took place in Wakefield, Glasgow, Sheffield, Huddersfield and Nottingham. In Leeds, the crowd was asked if they would support physical force to achieve radical reform. They unanimously raised their hands.

These were meetings attended by tens of thousands and they did not end despite the escalating repression. The Twitter account Peterloo 1819 News (@Live1819) is providing a useful daily update on historical responses until the end of this year.

A protest meeting at London’s Smithfield on August 25 drew crowds estimated at 15,000-40,000. At least 20,000 demonstrated in Newcastle on October 11. The mayor wrote dishonestly to the home secretary, Lord Sidmouth, of this teetotal and entirely orderly peaceful demonstration that 700 of the participants “were prepared with arms (concealed) to resist the civil power.”

The response was felt across the whole of the British Isles. In Belfast, the Irishman newspaper wrote, “The spirit of Reform rises from the blood of the Manchester Martyrs with a giant strength!”

A meeting of 10,000 was held in Dundee in November that collected funds “for obtaining justice for the Manchester sufferers.” That same month saw a meeting of 10,000 in Leicester and one of 12,000 near Burnley. In Wigan, just a few miles north of the site of Peterloo, around 20,000 assembled to discuss “parliamentary reform and the massacre at Manchester.” The yeomanry were standing ready at many of these meetings.

The state was determined to suppress criticism. Commenting on the events, it published false statements about the massacre and individual deaths. Radical MP Sir Francis Burdett was fined £2,000 and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for “seditious libel” in response to his denunciation of the Peterloo massacre. On September 2, he addressed 30,000 at a meeting in London’s Palace Yard, demanding the prosecution of the Manchester magistrates.

Richard Carlile

Radical publisher Richard Carlile, who had been at Peterloo, was arrested late in August. He was told that proceedings against him would be dropped if he stopped circulating his accounts of the massacre. He did not and was subsequently tried and convicted of seditious libel and blasphemy.

The main indictment against him was his publication of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man. Like Bamford, Carlile also concluded that armed defence was now necessary: He wrote, “Every man in Manchester who avows his opinions on the necessity of reform should never go unarmed—retaliation has become a duty, and revenge an act of justice.”

In Chudleigh, Devon, John Jenkins was arrested for owning a crude but accurate print of the yeomanry charging the Peterloo crowd when Henry Hunt was arrested. A local vicar, a magistrate, informed on Jenkins, whose major “crime” was that he was sharing information about Peterloo. Jenkins was showing the print to people, using a magnifying glass in a viewing box. The charge against Jenkins argued that the print was “intended to inflame the minds of His Majesty’s Subjects and to bring His Majesty’s Soldiery into hatred and contempt.”

Against this attempt to suppress the historical record there was a wide range of efforts to preserve the memory of Peterloo. Verses, poems and songs appeared widely. In October, a banner in Halifax bore the lines:

With heartfelt grief we mourn for thoseWho fell a victim to our causeWhile we with indignation viewThe bloody field of Peterloo.

Anonymous verses were published on cheap broadsides, while others were credited to local radical workers. Many recounted the day’s events, often with a subversive undercurrent. The broadside ballad, “A New Song on the Peterloo Meeting,” for example, was written to the tune “Parker’s Widow,” a song about the widow of 1797 naval mutineer Richard Parker.

Weaver poet John Stafford, who regularly sang at radical meetings, wrote a longer, more detailed account of the day’s events in a song titled “Peterloo.”

The shoemaker poet Allen Davenport satirised in song the Reverend Charles Wicksteed Ethelston of Cheetham Hill—a magistrate who had organised spies against the radical movement and, as the leader of the Manchester magistrates who authorised the massacre, claimed to have read the Riot Act at Peterloo.

Ethelston played a vital role in the repression by the authorities after Peterloo. At a September hearing of two men who were accused of military drilling on a moor in the north of Manchester the day before Peterloo, he told one of them, James Kaye, “I believe that you are a downright blackguard reformer. Some of you reformers ought to be hanged; and some of you are sure to be hanged—the rope is already round your necks; the law has been a great deal too lenient with you.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Clint (after Amelia Curran) c. 1829

Ethelston was also attacked in verse by Bamford, who called him “the Plotting Parson.” Davenport’s “St. Ethelstone’s Day” portrays Peterloo as Ethelston‘s attempt at self-sanctification. Its content is pointed— “In every direction they slaughtered away, Drunken with blood on St. Ethelstone’s Day”—but Davenport sharpens the satire even further by specifying the tune “Gee Ho Dobbin,” the prince regent’s favourite. (These songs are included on the recent Road to Peterloo album by three singers and musicians from North West England—Pete Coe, Brian Peters and Laura Smyth.)

The poetic response was not confined to social reformers and radical workers. The most astonishing outpouring of work came from isolated radical bourgeois elements in exile.

On September 5, news of the massacre reached the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) in Italy. He recognised its significance and responded immediately. Shelley’s reaction to Peterloo, what one biographer has called “the most intensely creative eight weeks of his whole life,” embodies and elevates what is greatest about his work. It underscores his importance to us now.

Franz Mehring, circa 1900

Even among the radical Romantics, Shelley is distinctive. He has long been championed by Marxists for that very reason. Franz Mehring famously noted: “Referring to Byron and Shelley, however, [Karl Marx] declared that those who loved and understood these two poets must consider it fortunate that Byron died at the age of 36, for had he lived out his full span he would undoubtedly have become a reactionary bourgeois, whilst regretting on the other hand that Shelley died at the age of 29, for Shelley was a thorough revolutionary and would have remained in the van of socialism all his life.” (Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, Harvester Press, New Jersey, 1966, p.504)

Shelley came from an affluent landowning family, his father a Whig MP. Byron’s continued pride in his title and his recognition of the distance separating himself, a peer of the realm, from his friend, a son of the landed gentry, brings home the pressures against Shelley and the fact that he was able to transcend his background.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s childhood and education were typical of his class. But bullied and unhappy at Eton, he was already developing an independence of thought and the germs of egalitarian feeling. Opposed to the school’s fagging system (making younger pupils beholden as servants to older boys), he was also enthusiastically pursuing science experiments.

He was expelled from Oxford in 1811 for publishing a tract titled “The Necessity of Atheism.” That year he also published anonymously an anti-war “Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things.” This was a fundraiser for Irish journalist Peter Finnerty, imprisoned for libel after accusing Viscount Castlereagh of mistreating United Irish prisoners. Long thought lost, a copy was found in 2006 and made available by the Bodleian Library in 2015.

Ireland was a pressing concern. Shelley visited Ireland between February and April 1812, and his “Address to the Irish People” from that year called for Catholic emancipation and a repeal of the 1800 Union Act passed after the 1798 rebellions. Shelley called the act “the most successful engine that England ever wielded over the misery of fallen Ireland.”

Shelley’s formative radicalism was informed by the French Revolution. That bourgeois revolution raised the prospect of future socialist revolutionary struggles, the material basis for which—the growth of the industrial working class—was only just emerging.

Many older Romantic poets who had, even ambivalently, welcomed the French Revolution as progressive reacted to its limitations by rejecting further strivings for liberty. Shelley denounced this, writing of William Wordsworth in 1816:

In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, —
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.

In 1811, Shelley visited the reactionary future poet laureate Robert Southey. He had admired Southey’s poetry, but not his politics, writing, “[H]e to whom Bigotry, Tyranny, Law was hateful, has become the votary of those idols in a form most disgusting.” Southey furnished Shelley with his introduction to William Godwin, whose daughter Mary would become Shelley’s wife.

Mary Shelley, 1849, Richard Rothwell

Godwin’s anarchism reflects the utopianism of a period before the emergence of a mass working class, although his novel Caleb Williams (1794) remains powerful. Shelley learned from Godwin, but was also attuned to social, political and technological developments.

Shelley’s 1813 philosophical poem Queen Mab, incorporating the atheism pamphlet in its notes, sought to synthesise Godwin’s conception of political necessity with his own thinking about continuing changes in nature. Where some had abandoned ideas of revolutionary change because of the emergence of Napoleon after the French Revolution, Shelley strove to formulate a gradual transformation of society that would still be total.

He summarised his views on the progress of the French Revolution in 1816, addressing the “fallen tyrant” Napoleon:

I did groan
To think that a most unambitious slave,
Like thou, shouldst dance and revel on the grave
Of Liberty.

He concluded:

That Virtue owns a more eternal foe
Than Force or Fraud: old Custom, legal Crime.
And bloody Faith the foulest birth of Time.

This was a statement of continued commitment to radical change and an overhaul of society. Queen Mab’s radicalism was recognised and feared. In George Cruikshank’s 1821 cartoon, “The Revolutionary Association,” one placard reads “Queen Mab or Killing no Murder.”

Eleanor Marx (middle) with her two sisters - Jenny Longuet, Laura Marx, father Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

What marks Shelley as revolutionary is his ongoing assessment of political and social developments. He was neither politically demoralised by the trajectory of the French Revolution nor tied to outmoded ways of thinking about it. He was able to some extent to carry the utopian revolutionary optimism forward into a period that saw the material emergence of the social force capable of realising the envisaged change, the working class.

His commitment to revolutionary change was “more than the vague striving after freedom in the abstract,” as Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling wrote in 1888. It was a concrete striving that had to find direct political expression.

This is what makes Shelley’s response to Peterloo significant. Hearing the “terrible and important news” he wrote, “These are, as it were, the distant thunders of the terrible storm which is approaching. The tyrants here, as in the French Revolution, have first shed blood. May their execrable lessons not be learnt with equal docility!”

He began work immediately on a series of poems and essays, which he intended to be published together. In The Masque of Anarchy: Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester, he identified Murder with “a mask like Castlereagh,” (Lord Castlereagh, the leader of the House of Commons, responsible for defending government policy), Fraud as Lord Eldon, the lord chancellor, and Hypocrisy (“Clothed with the Bible, as with light, / And the shadows of the night”) as Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth. The poem’s Anarchy is “God, and King, and Law!” Shelley’s “Anarchy we are all so afraid of is very present with us,” wrote Marx and Aveling, “[A]nd let us add is Capitalism.”

Its 91 stanzas are a devastating indictment of Regency Britain and the poem’s ringing final words—regularly trotted out by Labour leaders, with current party leader Jeremy Corbyn adapting its last line as his main slogan—still reads magnificently despite all such attempts at neutering:

And that slaughter to the Nation
Shall steam up like inspiration,
Eloquent, oracular;
A volcano heard afar.
And these words shall then become
Like Oppression’s thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again—again—again—
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.

Shelley was not making holiday speeches. The shaking off of chains is found across the Peterloo poems, and Shelley was grappling with how this might be achieved. In the unfinished essay “A Philosophical View of Reform” he tries to understand the sources of political oppression and the obstacles to its removal. There are indications he was moving away from the gradualism of Queen Mab—“[S]o dear is power that the tyrants themselves neither then, nor now, nor ever, left or leave a path to freedom but through their own blood.”

This is a revolutionary appraisal.

Shelley saw the poet’s role in that process. In the “Philosophical View,” he advanced the position, “Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” He later incorporated this into “A Defence of Poetry” (1820), explaining, “[A]s the plowman prepares the soil for the seed, so does the poet prepare mind and heart for the reception of new ideas, and thus for change.”

The Peterloo poems adopt various popular forms and styles. Addressing a popular audience with his attempt at a revolutionary understanding suggests a sympathetic response to the emergence of the working class as a political force, and the poems are acute on economic relations. As Marx and Aveling said: “…undoubtedly, he knew the real economic value of private property in the means of production and distribution.” In Song to the Men of England( 1819), he asked:

Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
Those rich robes your tyrants wear?

Leigh Hunt; portrait by Benjamin Haydon

Shelley sent the collection to his friend Leigh Hunt’s journal, but Hunt did not publish it. Publication would, of course, have inevitably resulted in prosecution, although other publishers were risking that. When Hunt did finally publish The Mask of Anarchy in 1832, he justified earlier non-publication by arguing that “the public at large had not become sufficiently discerning to do justice to the sincerity and kind-heartedness of the spirit that walked in this flaming robe of verse.”

Advanced sections of the working class, however, understood the poems as they were intended. Shelley’s poetry was read and championed by a different audience than Hunt’s radical middle class.

As Friedrich Engels wrote in 1843 to the Swiss Republican newspaper: “Byron and Shelley are read almost exclusively by the lower classes; no ‘respectable’ person could have the works of the latter on his desk without his coming into the most terrible disrepute. It remains true: blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven and, however long it may take, the kingdom of this earth as well.”

The next major upsurge of the British working class, Chartism, drew explicitly on Shelley’s inspiration and work. The direct connection between the generation of Peterloo and the Chartists, many of whom were socialists, found a shared voice in the works of Shelley.

Manchester Hall of Science, c. 1850 (formerly toe Owenite Hall of Science).



Engels continued:

While the Church of England lived in luxury, the Socialists did an incredible amount to educate the working classes in England. At first one cannot get over one’s surprise on hearing in the [Manchester] Hall of Science the most ordinary workers speaking with a clear understanding on political, religious and social affairs; but when one comes across the remarkable popular pamphlets and hears the lecturers of the Socialists, for example [James] Watts in Manchester, one ceases to be surprised. The workers now have good, cheap editions of translations of the French philosophical works of the last century, chiefly Rousseau’s Contrat social, the Système de la Natureand various works by Voltaire, and in addition the exposition of communist principles in penny and twopenny pamphlets and in the journals. The workers also have in their hands cheap editions of the writings of Thomas Paine and Shelley. Furthermore, there are also the Sunday lectures, which are very diligently attended; thus during my stay in Manchester I saw the Communist Hall, which holds about 3,000 people, crowded every Sunday, and I heard there speeches which have a direct effect, which are made from the special viewpoint of the people, and in which witty remarks against the clergy occur. It happens frequently that Christianity is directly attacked and Christians are called ‘our enemies.’” (ibid.)

Richard Carlile published Queen Mab in the 1820s, and pirated editions produced by workers led to it being called a “bible of Chartism.”

Chartist literary criticism provides the most moving and generous testament to Shelley’s legacy in the working class. The Chartist Circular (October 19, 1839) said Shelley’s “noble and benevolent soul…shone forth in its strength and beauty the foremost advocate of Liberty to the despised people,” seeing this in directly political terms: “He believed that, sooner or later, a clash between the two classes was inevitable, and, without hesitation, he ranged himself on the people’s side.”

Friedrich Engels in his early 20s.

Engels was a contributor to the Chartist Northern Star, which had a peak circulation of 80,000. In 1847, Thomas Frost wrote in its pages of Shelley as “the representative and exponent of the future…the most highly gifted harbinger of the coming brightness.” Where Walter Scott wrote of the past, and Byron of the present, Shelley “directed his whole thoughts and aspirations towards the future.” Shelley had summed up that revolutionary optimism in Ode to the West Wind (1820): “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

Shelley found his champions in the working class, quite rightly, so it is worth concluding with the stanza Frost quoted from Revolt of Islam (1817) as a marker of what should be championed in Shelley’s work, and the continued good reasons for reading him today:

This is the winter of the world;—and here
We die, even as the winds of Autumn fade,
Expiring in the frore and foggy air.—
Behold! Spring comes, though we must pass, who made
The promise of its birth—even as the shade
Which from our death, as from a mountain, flings
The future, a broad sunrise; thus arrayed
As with the plumes of overshadowing wings,
From its dark gulf of chains, Earth like an eagle springs.

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Paul’s article is reproduced with both his and the kind permission of the World Socialist Web Site. You can find the original here and here (in two parts).

‘Your sincere admirer’: the Shelleys’ Letters as Indicators of Collaboration in 1821

INTRODUCTION

This article was originally published on 25 February 2019. It was written prior to the publication of Anna’s book on the subject matter of her essay. The book is every bit as good as I had anticipated and can be purchased directly from the publisher here. Please avoid Amazon at all costs. Another alternative is to simply place the order with your local bookshop. A full review will follow at some point in the future. In the meantime treat this post, and the linked article, as something to whet your appetite.

From the publisher’s description:

How did Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, two of the most iconic and celebrated authors of the Romantic Period, contribute to each other’s achievements? This book is the first to dedicate a full-length study to exploring the nature of the Shelleys’ literary relationship　in depth. It offers new insights into the works of these talented individuals who were bound together by their personal romance and shared commitment to a literary career. Most innovatively, the book describes how Mary Shelley contributed significantly to Percy Shelley’s writing, whilst also discussing Percy’s involvement in her work.

A reappraisal of original manuscripts reveals the Shelleys as a remarkable literary couple, participants in a reciprocal and creative exchange. Hand-written evidence shows Mary adding to Percy’s work in draft and vice-versa. A focus on the Shelleys’ texts – set in the context of their lives and especially their travels – is used to explain how they enabled one another to accomplish a quality of work which they might never have achieved alone. Illustrated with reproductions from their notebooks and drafts, this volume brings Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley to the forefront of emerging scholarship on collaborative literary relationships and the social nature of creativity.

And now the original article from 25 February of this year:

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2018 was a bad year for the reputation of Percy Shelley (as opposed to the boom year of 2017 about which I wrote in Shelleyan Top Ten Moments - 2017). 2018 was the year we celebrated the bicentennial of Frankenstein. There were conferences, commemorative coins, plays, movies, articles, readings and even biographies. Most of them were truly amazing. For example, the extraordinary, world-wide Frankenreads event staged on Hallowe’en by the Keats-Shelley Association of America (I wrote about that in Frankenstein Is Coming To Your Neighbourhood ). It was truly a joy to see so many people coming together to discover celebrate Mary’s genius. It could also have been used as an opportunity to shine a light on Mary’s collaborator and husband, Percy Shelley. But that did not happen.

The history of Percy’s reception by the pubic has varied widely over the centuries and has been a subject of many a book. Almost unknown during his life, he came to be lionized by the Victorian public for almost all the wrong reasons - presented as a somewhat simpering, juvenile poet who was yet capable of feats of great lyrical accomplishment. This is a false image of Percy that has persisted to this day. Meanwhile the working class has their own version of Shelley - the fire-breathing radical known to Owens, Engels, Ghandi and Marx of whom the latter remarked, “[Shelley] would always have been in the vanguard of socialism”. I wrote about this phenomenon in My Father’s Shelley: A Tale of Two Shelleys. Then came TS Eliot and the New Critics in the early part of the 20th Century. Whether through malice or sheer carelessness these folks focused on the fake Shelley created by the Victorians and set out, consciously and deliberately, to destroy his reputation forever. And they very nearly succeeded. Shelley disappeared from sight for decades. The process of recovery only began in the 1950s and 60s thanks to scholars such as Milton Wilson (with whom I had the luck to later complete my masters at the University of Toronto), the great Kenneth Neill Cameron and Earl Wasserman. The recovery was for the most part limited to the academic setting.

After 2017, there was reason to hope that Percy would re-enter the mainstream with an assist from his now much more famous wife. Such hope was founded on the fact that Percy played a small but universally acknowledged role in the creation of Frankenstein. That we understand his role in the creation of the novel is thanks to the meticulous research of Charles Robinson whose book The Original Frankenstein (Penguin Random House) was published with the byline: “Mary Shelley with Percy Shelley”. Perhaps, I had hoped, by shining a light on this fact, we might be able to lead the public to a better understanding of his own profound contributions to our culture. Alas no, and in some cases the portrait that was created in 2018 of Percy departs so far from the truth as to be laughable - as in the case of Haifaa al Mansour’s lamentable teen-angst bio-pic Mary Shelley. I reviewed this movie in my post, The Truth Matters. Those who have had the misfortune of watching this movie may have noticed that I have taken one of the stills from the movie to use as the background to the title page of my post. This image which shows Mary and Percy actually in love with one another may be one of the only accurate details from the entire movie.

Anna Mercer, on the other hand, is an expert a relatively new field: understanding the extent of the collaborative literary relationship that existed between Percy and Mary from their initial meeting in 1814 through to Percy’s death in 1822, as well as considering Mary’s later work. Dr. Mercer is about to publish a book (with Routledge) that aims to identify the textual connections between the works of the two authors, considering the Shelleys’ relationship in terms of literary and stylistic ideas, as opposed to purely biographical studies. 

What follows will offer you an insight into her incisive and fascinating work. I can’t wait for the book.

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‘Your sincere admirer’: the Shelleys’ Letters as Indicators of Collaboration in 1821 — by Dr. Anna Mercer

The Shelleys’ collaborative literary relationship never had a constant dynamic: as with the nature of any human relationship, it changed over time. In my research I aim to identify the shifts in the way in which the Shelleys worked together, a crucial standpoint being that collaboration involves challenge and disagreement as well as encouragement and support. The Shelleys’ collaborative peak was the work on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1816-1818 (to which Percy Shelley made corrections and alterations). Interest in the Shelleys’ relationship post-1818 suggests that they were not working as closely in the four years immediately preceding Percy’s death in 1822. Fascinating and insightful biographies of the couple, such as Daisy Hay’s Young Romantics, suggest that Mary worked alone on her novel Valperga (published in 1823), and Percy increasingly engaged in literary discussions with others. Evidence for this is in part based on the significance of Percy’s 1821 semi-autobiographical poem Epipsychidion, ‘an idealised history of my life and feelings’,[1] which not only contains a thinly-veiled criticism of Mary’s character, but is in many ways a love poem addressed to another woman, Emilia Viviani. Percy actively hid the poem from Mary. She did not fair copy the poem, and it arrived at the publishers in Percy’s own hand; this is unusual in that Mary was Percy’s ‘usual copyist’.[2] Daisy Hay writes of the Shelleys in 1821:

Shelley’s interest in Emilia slowly waned over the course of 1821 and dissipated by the time of her marriage to an Italian nobleman in September of that year. But the interlude widened the developing rift between Shelley and Mary, and made her more cautious in both her emotional and her intellectual engagement with him.[3]

However, despite this suggesting that the creative process of composition becomes something Percy hides from Mary, I want to suggest that the shift in collaboration is not so black-and-white as to reduce the Shelleys’ relationship to one simply of alienation in the later years of their marriage. One step towards doing this is to consider the Shelleys’ extant letters to each other in these later years. This blog focuses in particular on the letters of 1821 in order to support my suggestion.

Percy Shelley by Amelia Curran. National Portrait Gallery.

Percy’s letters to Mary show a keen intellectual interest in the progress of written work, the potential growth of his own mind, and Mary’s development as a novelist. Entangled within this are demonstrations of remarkable intimacy and tenderness. It is the combination of intellect and genuine affection that marked the Shelleys’ relationship from their initial meeting and dramatic elopement in 1814. A letter from Percy to Mary in July 1821, shows this combination of love and intellectual musings:

My dearest love – […] I spent three hours this morning principally in the contemplation of the Niobe, & of a favourite Apollo; all worldly thoughts & cares seem to vanish from before the sublime emotions such spectacles create: and I am deeply impressed with the great difference of happiness enjoyed by those who live at a distance from these incarnations of all that the finest minds have conceived of beauty, & those who can resort to their company at pleasure. What should we think if we were forbidden to read the great writers who have left us their works. – And yet, to be forbidden to live at Florence or Rome is an evil of the same kind & scarcely of less magnitude. […] Kiss little Babe, and how is he – but I hope to see him fast asleep to-morrow night. – And pray dearest Mary, have some of your Novel prepared for me for my return.[4]

Percy’s ekphrastic descriptions of his reaction to the statues in the Uffizi Palace, Florence are divulged to Mary here in detail. Beyond expecting Mary to understand this response to such artwork, the consideration of the sculptures in Italy is meant to conjure up for his wife a sense of shared experience: they had been living in the country since 1818 and had been on travels together in Europe since the year that they met. In describing his pleasure of experiencing Italy, Percy conveys to Mary his satisfaction in their living there, crucially in relation to the intellectual stimulation it offers, and in turn more subtly by implying her presence there adds to this satisfaction. Percy shows affection for his young son (something he is often criticised for failing to do) and signs off the letter by reminding Mary of her own toil in literature: the anticipation of her novel, Valperga, implies Percy’s interaction with Mary on this work, too. Another letter from Percy to Mary dated August 10th 1821 explores Percy’s interest in Mary’s work:

How is my little darling? And how are you, & how do you get on with your book. Be severe in your corrections, & expect severity from me, your sincere admirer. – I flatter myself you have composed something unequalled in its kind, & that not content with the honours of your birth & your hereditary aristocracy, you will add still higher renown to your name.[5]

Percy is at once concerned with his wife’s progress in writing: ‘expect severity from me’ implies Percy will be critiquing the work. Yet he is also her ‘sincere admirer’ and sees her future legacy as something dependent on her own genius and not just because of her famous literary parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Mary Shelley by R. Rothwell. National Portrait Gallery.

Unfortunately there is only one extant letter from Mary Shelley to Percy Shelley written in 1821. However, also in 1821 Mary Shelley writes a postscript on Percy’s letter to Thomas Love Peacock on March 21st showing a shared intimacy in communication with others. Likewise, Percy completes Mary’s letter to Claire Clairmont a few days later in April.[6] The one letter from Mary to Percy we have from this particular year is less concerned with intellectual affairs but shows the Shelleys’ reliance on one another in a time of crisis. Following the discovery of the ‘Hoppner scandal’, in which the Shelleys were accused of various wrongdoings (the complex details of which I cannot explore fully here, but are well worth reading up on; this is an intriguing unsolved mystery in the Shelleys’ biography), Mary Shelley writes to her husband:

Shocked beyond all measure […] I wrote to you with far different feelings last night – beloved friend – our bark is indeed tempest tost but love me as you have ever done & God preserve my child to me and our enemies shall not be too much for us.[7]

This letter explicitly recalls a much earlier letter written by Mary in 1814 to Percy:

we will defy our enemies & our friends (for aught I see they are all as bad as one another) and we will not part again.[8]

This shows a united front and a defiance that prevails in the Shelleys’ relationship: Mary sees ‘enemies’ as something to be challenged by the Shelleys as a couple, in both 1814 and 1821.

The Grave of Percy Shelley, Non-Catholic Cemetery, Rome.

However, there is evidence elsewhere that intellectual discussions remained a primary concern for Mary in 1821. Mary Shelley writes to Maria Gisborne in November: ‘Do you hear anything of Shelley’s Hellas?’ Hellas was completed by Percy in late October, and is one of the few works of Percy Shelley’s to be published in his lifetime (it was published in February 1822). Although, like Epipsychidion, the manuscript fair copy of Hellas wasn’t sent to the publishers in Mary’s hand,[9] the inclusion of Mary’s queries on the work in this letter show her awareness and possible involvement in the toil required in order to bring this poem to press. In this letter to Maria Gisborne from 1821 Mary also writes: ‘Ollier [the Shelleys’ publisher in England] treats us abominably – I should much like to know when he intends to answer S-’s last letter concerning my affair. I had wished it to come out by Christmas – now there is no hope.’[10] The Shelleys’ literary affairs – in Italy where composition occurs, and back in London where they attempt to publish – are as entangled as ever.

Perhaps most telling in Mary’s letter to Maria Gisborne is the wistful sentence: ‘If Greece be free, Shelley and I have vowed to go, perhaps to settle there, in one of those beautiful islands where earth, ocean, and sky form the Paradise’. Written in November 1821, how strongly this recalls Percy Shelley’s own letter to his wife on 16th August 1821 expressing the wish to relocate to a remote island paradise:

My greatest content would be utterly to desert all human society. I would retire with you & our child to a solitary island in the sea, would build a boat, & shut upon my retreat the floodgates of the world. – I would read no reviews & talk with no authors. – If I dared trust my imagination, it would tell me that there were two or three chosen companions beside yourself whom I should desire. – But to this I would not listen. – Where two or three are gathered together the devil is among them, and good far more than evil impulses – love far more than hatred – has been to me, except as you have been it’s object, the source of all sorts of mischief. So on this plan I would be alone & would devote either to oblivion or to future generations the overflowings of a mind which, timely withdrawn from the contagion, should be kept fit for no baser object.[11]

The Grave of Mary Shelley, The Parish Church of St Peter, Bournemouth.

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END NOTES

[1] P B Shelley, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley Vol. II ed. by Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964) 18 June 1822, p. 434.

[2] Newman Ivey White, Shelley Vol II (London: Secker and Warlburg, 1947), p. 255.

[3] Daisy Hay, Young Romantics (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), p. 206.

[4] P B Shelley, Letters Vol II 31st July 1821, p. 313,

[5] P B Shelley, Letters Vol II 10th August 1821, p. 324.

[6] Mary W Shelley, The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (3 vols) Vol I ed. by Betty T. Bennett (London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 repr. 1991), pp. 186-187.

[7] Mary W Shelley, Letters Vol I, p. 204.

[8] Mary W Shelley, Letters Vol I, p. 5.

[9] It was in the hand of Edward Williams.

[10] Mary W Shelley, Letters Vol I, p. 209.

[11] P B Shelley, Letters Vol II 15 August 1821, p. 339.

[12] Mary W Shelley, Letters Vol I, p. 210.

[13] Mary W Shelley, Letters Vol I, p. 450.

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This article was originally published in Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840 on 8 June 2015. It was published under a Creative Commons licence pursuant to which “all content is available without charge to the user or his/her institution. You are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from either the publisher or the author.”

More about the Journal: “Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840 is an open-access journal that is committed to foregrounding innovative Romantic-studies research into bibliography, book history, intertextuality, and textual studies. To this end, we pubRomanticlish material in a number of formats: peer-reviewed articles, reports on individual/group research projects, bibliographical checklists, biographical profiles of overlooked Romantic writers and book reviews of relevant new research. Find out more by clicking here.”

Paul Foot Speaks: The Revolutionary Percy Bysshe Shelley!!!

"Shelley and Politics Week" continues at The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley with a republication of my transcript of Paul Foot's speech to the London Marxism Conference in 1981. I offer an introduction, the complete transcript and a link to a recording of the speech itself.

Introduction

By Graham Henderson

Me with Mont Blanc in the background!

In 1981, Paul Foot (1937-2004), the “finest campaigning journalist of his generation,” delivered an epic 90-minute speech on the subject of his hero, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Appearing at the London Marxism Conference, Foot’s speech was delivered extemporaneously from notes and has become legendary.[1] Amazingly, it has never been published. We are fortunate that it was recorded and that an online copy of the speech exists. Using this recording, I have managed to transcribe what was said. The transcription follows this introduction.

But first, a word about Paul Foot. Foot was, as his obituary in The Guardian noted,

“the finest campaigning journalist of his generation. He had everything: a ferociously forensic brain, deep compassion, a prodigious capacity for work, great courage, a healthy and permanent distrust of politicians of any party, a sharp wit, a devastating pen and principles as deep, wide and awe-inspiring as the Grand Canyon.”

         Foot died at the age of 66, laid low by an aortic aneurysm. We lost him far too early. That Shelley was his hero and inspired much of his work and his political philosophy is amply evidenced by his grave stone which bears a quote from The Mask of Anarchy.

The Guardian’s obituary continues:

Foot's Grave in Highgate Cemetery.

“In a world where allegiances, principles, prejudices and beliefs change with easy cynicism, Paul Foot was a steadfast beacon of integrity. He may have tilted at a few windmills, and his politics remained unapologetically tangled in the barricades of the 1960s. Yet, like Shelley's west wind, he was a “spirit fierce,” who stood against the vested interests of the corrupt, the power hungry, the liars, cheats, hypocrites and shysters. He did not always win, but the great and good thing was that he never stopped trying, and our trade was immeasurably more noble for it.”[2]

         Just prior to his speech, Foot had in fact published a book on Shelley, The Red Shelley. The book is a fervent, polemical summing up of his life-long passion for the poet.[3] Dismissed by some ivory-tower critics as lacking in academic rigor, The Red Shelley is nonetheless one of the truly great books on the subject of Shelley’s political radicalism. The prose is breathless, thrilling and at times incandescent. His interpretations of some passages of Shelley’s poetry (such as the role of Demogorgon in Prometheus Unbound) have been quibbled with, but what is beyond question is the fact that Foot presented, almost for the first time to the general reading public, a coherent, radical view of the poet Shelley. 

         What was it about Shelley’s ideas that so inspired Paul Foot? What was it about the poet that caused Foot to act as part evangelist and part exhorter? Why did he consider Shelley so damned important and relevant? In Shelley, Foot found a kindred spirit—a radical, political animal who fought with every fiber of his being for the rights of the working class and the disadvantaged.

         Now, I think it is fair to say that Foot read some of his own personality and radical beliefs into his Shelley. But he was not the only one to see into the heart of Shelley’s fervent radicalism. The Chartists, Robert Owen, Engels, Marx, Shaw and many other progressives have been, to a greater or lesser extent, inspired by Shelley’s ideas. It has been said that Robert Owen is the father of modern British socialism; if this is true, Shelley can rightly be said to be its grandfather; such was his influence on Owen.

         The great German philosopher and socialist Friedrich Engels, for example, remarked, “Shelley, the genius, the prophet, finds most of his readers in the proletariat; the bourgeoisie own the castrated editions, the family editions cut down in accordance with the hypocritical morality of today.” (Foot has much to say about these two “versions” of Shelley.) Engel’s collaborator Karl Marx also weighed in, saying,

“The real difference between Byron and Shelley is this: those who understand and love them rejoice that Byron died at 36. Because if he had lived he would have become a reactionary bourgeois; they grieve that Shelley died at 29 because he was essentially a revolutionist and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism.”

         More recently, Michael Demson, in his amazing graphic novel, Masks of Anarchy, traces the influence of Shelley’s great poem to the founding of one of the greatest labour unions in the history of America, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. You can read about Demson's book here.

         There has also been speculation about Shelley’s influence on Ghandi’s philosophy of nonviolence. Whether the influence was direct or indirect, the evidence seems clear that Ghandi encountered Shelley’s poetry and philosophy while in England between 1888 and 1892. The socialists he became acquainted with included members of the Fabian and Shelley Societies, including H.R. Salt and G.B. Shaw. Geoffrey Ashe, one of Ghandi’s biographers, speculates that The Mask of Anarchy may have directly influenced Ghandi’s concept of mass civil disobedience and passive resistance.[4] Regardless of the question of influence, there are uncanny resonances between the philosophy of the two men. As Art Young pointed out, “Shelley is a poet-prophet of non-violence as a philosophy of life and a philosophy of action.”[5]

           Finally, we have the example of the recent election in the UK where the Labour Party rode a manifesto inspired in part by Shelley’s egalitarian ideas to an extraordinary upset of the status quo. Their motto “For the Many. Not the Few” was directly inspired by The Mask of Anarchy. Corbyn’s election culminated with an electrifying speech in his home riding during which he name-checked Shelley and quoted the concluding stanza of The Mask of Anarchy; on cue, the audience joined Corbyn in reciting the magnificent final line and then stood in a prolonged, rapturous ovation. You can watch it here; the "Shelley moment" begins at approximately 30:00 minutes. The significance of Shelley's role here is not to be underestimated. The slogan seems to have had a catalytic effect. And we need to pause and think about the fact that a major election was just fought, and arguably won, on principles outlined 200 years ago by Shelley, by a radical poet. This has to be one of the most significant and effective uses of poetry in an election in memory.

           Foot is one of the most recent, but by no means the last, figures in a long line of revolutionaries to find inspiration in Shelley’s writing. Like Marx and Engels, Foot found in Shelley a free thinker willing to challenge his society’s most sacred idols—King, God, and Mammon—the forces of inequality and tyranny. But here is also a second, far less political version Shelley that has come down to us. At the outset of his speech, Foot introduces his subject by pointing out that two very distinct Shelleys exist in the public imagination. Foot unpacks the curious history of Shelley’s reputation which bifurcated very quickly into two distinct versions, those alluded to by Engels above. We can think of them as the “Radical” Shelley and the “Lyrical” (or what Foot and Engels have called the “castrated”) Shelley. Foot savages the sanitized, “Lyrical” version of Shelley created by conservative Victorians, wary of the period’s revolutionary movements and eager to downplay Shelley’s politics. Here is a visual example of that Shelley:

Joseph Severn, Posthumous Portrait of Shelley Writing Prometheus Unbound (1845)

Look closely. This is Joseph Severn’s famous portrait completed after Shelley’s death—it was not painted from life. He is pictured almost as a child. This is the “castrated” Shelley of which Engels spoke.

         Many people played a role in the creation of this infantilized version of Shelley, drained of virtually everything remotely political or radical. Michael Gamer traces the early history of Shelley's reputational arc in his new book, Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry (which you can find here—but order it through your local book store). Sadly, Mary Shelley, Percy’s wife, may also have played a role (whether intentional or not) in creating the “Victorian Shelley.” Look closely at the following image:

           The painting on the right is one of dozens of images based on the famous 1819 painting of Shelley by Amelia Curran (left). It is an out and out fantasy. Shelley’s appearance is infantilized in a way that bears absolutely no relation to reality. It is an embarrassment.

           Paul Foot laboured long and passionately to recover the Radical Shelley, what he considered to be the real Percy Bysshe Shelley. He presents him to us both in his incisive, polemical and passionate book, The Red Shelley, and here in his speech. After his initial consideration of the development of Shelley’s reputation, Foot investigates Shelley's atheism and feminism. But he also reminds us that Shelley was by no means perfect, and he unflinchingly canvasses Shelley’s weaknesses. The portrait of Shelley that emerges is at once electrifying and sympathetic, and it tells us almost as much about Paul Foot as it does about Shelley. I will be honest and confess that Foot’s Shelley is MY Shelley—that is to say, I am firmly in the “Footian tradition.” You can read one of my articles on the subject here: “My Father’s Shelley: A Tale of Two Shelleys.”

           Foot hated authority just as Shelley did. When, early in his speech, he speaks about Shelley’s contempt for Britain’s ruling classes, he might as well have been talking about himself:

“He hated the whole damn lot of them. Every single one of them that fell into any one of those categories or any other category which are parasitical, in one way or another, upon the working people. He loathed and hated them. The whole of his poetry reeks with that hatred. But the other point is this: that it wasn’t just a simple hatred of authority. He understood the reasons for that authority—he understood the central cause of that authority.” 

           Eventually Foot turns to an aspect of Shelley’s writing that has dogged his reputation for years: Shelley’s apparent fear that his political agitation could lead to uncontrolled mob action. Foot suggests that Shelley's predilection for gradual change manifested itself in his failure to embrace universal suffrage. But Foot is careful to point out that Shelley himself was ambivalent about whether change should about gradually or all at once. Foot asserts that at times, Shelley appeared to argue for gradual non-violent responses to tyranny while at others he seemed to favour actual violence.

           Foot seeks to bring to a resolution this dichotomy in Shelley’s work. This part of the speech involves a discussion of Prometheus Unbound, in which Foot relies heavily on the interpretation of Shelley’s biographer, Richard Holmes. Foot is determined to demonstrate that Shelley understood that revolutionary change might also involve potentially violent action by the “masses.”

           Much of Foot’s language (particularly later in his speech) will strike the modern ear as somewhat dated and mired in the rhetoric of post-war Marxism and socialism. But this is because he was speaking to an audience of Marxists and socialists in 1981. I will confess that researching and footnoting some of his more obscure references was quite a challenge. He is anxious to connect Shelley directly with the Marxist and socialist traditions by introducing Marx’s own opinion of Shelley as it comes down to us through his daughter Eleanor's reminiscences. You can read more about this here. He then explains how later, in the 1930s, Marxists came to disown Shelley and completely misunderstand him; an echo, in effect, of the whitewashing of Shelley by anti-revolutionaries in the Victorian era.

           Foot’s objective is to reconnect the left with Shelley. He does so in a surprising and original manner which is altogether convincing. Foot ably and competently traces the evolution of the modern left and demonstrates how it became disconnected from “the masses,” from real people with real-world concerns and issues. He longs for the “enthusiasm” that Shelley brought to the table. If ever there was a convincing “call to arms” that involves educating one’s self in the philosophy of a poet dead for 200 years, this is it.

           Below, you will find a complete transcription of Foot’s speech. As I mentioned, Foot delivered this speech extemporaneously. As a result, he at times wanders or struggles to find the right words. This required me to lightly edit his speech to ensure coherence. My changes will be invisible to the eye, and therefore, I will publish another version which shows what has been added or edited.  By listening to Foot's speech while you read (and believe me this is necessary given the poor quality of the recording), you can see what I have done for yourself. My draft was reviewed and ably edited by Jonathan Kerr. Jon received his PhD in English in 2017 from ny old alma mater, the University of Toronto with specialization in the British Romantics. I recently hired Jon to assist me part time in managing the increasing volume of activity associated with managing this site.  Jon is interested in Romantic ideas about nature and how those in the nineteenth century attempted to understand various forms of human difference. He is also currently at work on a project about Romantic-era asylum memoirs. He is a brilliant young academic and I was lucky to find him.

In his speech, Foot routinely references events and individuals whose names have been long forgotten. I have therefore provided footnotes to aid modern readers in their understanding as well as links to online biographies and source documents. Foot also speaks with enormous passion and heat; at times his words drip with sarcasm, while at others he speaks with revolutionary zeal. This I simply cannot communicate in writing and I therefore urge you to listen to this great orator as he delivers one of the most remarkable, passionate, polemical tributes Shelley has ever got, or ever will get. Buckle up and prepare for the ride of your Shelleyan life.

---

Paul Foot’s Speech to the London Marxism Conference, 1981

Paul Foot

Comrades, I think that Percy Shelley, if he was here today, would be pretty pleased by the turn out. We’ve had quite a few meetings in this series and I think it is true to say, I am actually quite confident it is true to say, that the reason we took this large hall was that we thought the meeting which would get the biggest amount of people in spite of all the important subjects that are being discussed would be the meeting about a poet who died about 170 years ago. And that might appear to be very remarkable. Why have we got a big socialist meeting on Shelley? After all, I imagine that for many of you, and certainly for many of the people that aren’t here, Shelley is just another of those poets that is taught to us in the schools. You have to read a lot of rather twee stuff about skylarks and clouds and west winds; and you have to learn it by heart and recite it properly to the teacher. And it doesn’t seem to have any relevance whatever to the tradition[6] out of which we come. And so, what are we doing here? And what is the purpose of this meeting? 

           And I want to say, first of all, that there are in the history of English literature, two Shelleys.[7] And the two Shelleys are very accurately portrayed by a couple of meetings that took place a very, very long time ago. In 1892 as a matter of fact, in London, on September the 4th 1892 to celebrate the hundredth year of Shelley’s birth.

           Now the first meeting I am going to talk about was held in Horsham in 1892.[8] I don’t know if anybody here has ever been to Horsham. I’ve been to Horsham a couple of times and I didn’t see anything moving. I think on one occasion a man crossed the street and that was regarded as a sensation. Horsham is a place where rich people live and come to buy things in the marketplace. It’s a very, very—and was in 1892 just as it is now—a very, very rich place, a place for wealthy people, and yet a meeting was held there to celebrate the hundredth year after Shelley’s birth because this is the area in which Shelley was born. He was born the son of a rich, aristocratic landowner there; a nice, decent Whig family. He was the son of Sir Timothy Shelley, who also was a baronet and somebody of very great importance indeed; he was even from time to time, when he felt like it, a member of Parliament. [laughter]

Shelley's home near Horsham

           And the meeting which was held there was a very important meeting. All the important literary people of the time were there. Melvin Bragg[9] was there [laughter], or rather the Melvyn Bragg of his time was there, and Lady Antonia Fraser [laughter] was there, and all those people had come to celebrate the Shelley of Sussex, Sir Timothy’s son.[10] And one of the people that was there was Bernard Shaw. He was somebody who knew a little bit about Shelley. And he wrote an essay about that meeting,[11] which I think sums up very well what the atmosphere was there. Quoting Shaw:

“On all sides went up the cry, ‘We want our great Shelley, our darling Shelley, our best, noblest highest of poets. We will not have it said that he was a Leveller, an Atheist, a foe to marriage, an advocate of incest. He was a little unfortunate in his first marriage; [laughter] and we pity him for it. He was a little eccentric in his vegetarianism, but we’re not ashamed of that, we glory in the humanity of it (with morsels of beefsteak fresh from the slaughterhouse, sticking between our teeth) [laughter]. We ask the public to be generous—to read his really great works such as the “Ode to a Skylark”; and not to gloat over those boyish indiscretions known as Laon and Cynthia, Prometheus Unbound, Rosalind and Helen, The Cenci, The Mask of Anarchy, etc., etc.[12] Take no notice of the Church papers,[13] for our Shelley was a true Christian at heart. Away with Jeaffreson; for our Shelley was a gentleman if there ever was one.’”[14]

If you doubt it, ask Lady Antonia or Melvin.[15] Or you could ask Edmund Gosse,[16] who was the man who came particularly on that occasion to talk[17] about the Shelley that they were celebrating there. And this was all very odd because in his lifetime, Shelley had been hounded and ignored by all of literary lords and ladies of his time. And in the whole period of his life, he was only 30 when he died,[18] but in the whole of that period, despite the enormous amount of material that he wrote, practically none of it was published. He made nothing at all. Literally nothing from all of those poems which were celebrated at that Horsham meeting. They made him nothing. All those poems made nothing. He couldn’t find a publisher to distribute his work and little of what he wrote was published at all. He was hounded by the Home Office and spies from the Home Office[19] hounded him out of a number of the places in which he went to live. Everything he wrote was read by spies in the Home Office. When his first wife committed suicide, his children were denied him by Lord Eldon, because he was an atheist. One of the obituaries that was written about Shelley read like this: “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, is dead. Now he knows whether there is a God or not.”[20] That was the attitude of the times in which he lived. 

           And the meeting in Horsham has a lot of common ground with the Shelley that was hounded and brutalized and exiled and pushed out of different places where he went to live when he was alive. Because just as the lords and ladies of literature hounded Shelley when he was alive, so they patronized him sixty or seventy years later when he was good and safe and dead.[21] And they patronized him in a whole number of different ways, and they’re still patronizing him today. I have here a book by Richard Hughes.[22] This is not a book that I’m recommending, it is a book that I remember with some bitterness because it is the book that we had to learn at school. It's a school textbook about Shelley by Hughes. One of the ways in which Shelley was patronized, one of the convenient ways in which he was patronized, was to quietly censor any ideas that he may have had, any ideas at all, from the textbooks. And you can read right through this little book, and you’ll find quite a lot of poetry, some of it very good poetry, but you won’t find one single idea. You won’t find one single poem—of the many, many poems he wrote—which features his ideas about the society in which he lived.

           There’s another book here if I can find it. This is the Penguin edition of Shelley, which was edited by a very fine lady of letters, a very nice Tory lady called Isabel Quigley. She says in her introduction that “No poet better repays cutting [laughter]. No great poet was ever less worth reading in his entirety than Shelley.”[23] And she is set to work with the shears and the scissors [laughter]. You look through here, and you can’t find any ideas. All the poems in which he had ideas are gone. What about a very long poem he wrote called The Revolt of Islam? This is a poem about revolution and about what revolution involves—there’s only about seven or eight stanzas of that in Quigley’s Penguin edition. What about Queen Mab, which is one is of the greatest revolutionary poems ever written in the English language? She has included three or four lyrical stanzas from right at the beginning of the poem and none of the ideas—none of the ideas which went into the poem. 

           And here is the Nonesuch edition.[24] This is a very beautiful book, very beautiful. Very expensive, and you can buy it at a second-hand book shop. It is a very fat book with more than a thousand pages. It’s published on very, very nice rice paper and edited by Professor A.S.B. Glover who is a professor of literature or somewhere other. I hope he’s still alive, and I hope he’s here tonight because then he can hear what I have to say [laughter]. Says Glover: “Peter Bell III and Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant are mainly of interest as proofs that a great lyric poet may fail lamentably outside of his own proper field, especially in work of a genre which requires a sense of humour.”[25] I don’t know when Professor Glover last laughed [laughter] but I believe it to be thirty or forty years ago. He doesn’t have a word to say about one of the funniest poems ever written in the language: Shelley’s Peter Bell III. This is a wonderful satire about the people who were in charge of society at that time—and not a single word appears in this edition.

           Perhaps the most famous textbook on Shelley, is the work of Edward Dowden, a professor of literature from Cambridge, needless to say.[26] This is a book which all the way through suggests that Shelley is a wonderful person, that he was really a saint. Really! Shelley was a saint! And one of the reasons we can say he was a saint is because we can ignore his ideas. [laughter] From Dowden: “This book, Queen Mab, may be regarded as the last expression of that contentious, argumentative side of Shelley’s nature.”[27] As for Peter Bell III, which is a tremendous attack on the apostasy of Wordsworth, on Wordsworth giving up all of his ideas about the French Revolution, Dowden even has to have a word of criticism on that. Quoting Dowden: “we cannot regret that a piece of criticism more than half unjust in its reference to Wordsworth remained unprinted.”[28] How dare he attack Wordsworth? Thus, a professor of English will have his revenge on Shelley by patronizing him in this enormous six-hundred-page work—a book which hardly mentions a single one of Shelley’s ideas.

Edward Dowden

           Now that’s, that’s one view of Shelley. That is the way in which they managed to censor him. They took the words, the ideas that he had, and simply cut them out. There’s a book here called A Philosophical View of the Reform. It is, I think, the only edition of this book that was ever published. If you look inside, you’ll see the date is 1920, which is a hundred years after it was written. It’s a tremendous polemical pamphlet about the political situation at the time, calling for revolt in all different ways, right through the society. Yet it was censored. And not only censored during his life, but when Mary Shelley wanted to include it in her collected works of Shelley[29] after Shelley was dead, she was told by her father-in-law Sir Timothy that he would no longer support her and her child if she did so. And therefore, for a hundred years, this essay remained unpublished—censored.

           There’s an introduction to the poem Hellas—it’s all about Greece. All the stuff about Greece was left in Mary's edition, but there is a paragraph in there about Britain. Shelley talks about how the situation in Greece which was being repressed by the Ottoman Empire reflects what’s going on in Britain.[30] That paragraph, just that one rather nasty little paragraph, was cut out for ninety-six years after the poem was published—just simply censored. And therefore, you see, all the way—all the way through the history of Shelley, that Shelley—the Radical Shelley—who was patronized by convention, by the Lords and ladies of literature, that Shelley was censored.

           If you go to University College, Oxford, and I’m not recommending that anyone should do that [laughter]. And if by any chance, you want to go play football at the University College, Oxford, you’ve got to walk down an alley, and you’ll pass an enormous, huge tomb like operation with a really disgusting white, naked statue of Shelley borne up by the angels of the sea and sea lions, all in this wonderful, emblazoned tomb.

Shelley statue at Oxford University

           And there you’ll see a little notice on the side, telling you that Shelley was at University College, Oxford in 1811, and that he is one of the great alumni of that College; one of the people that they look back upon with pride. What it doesn’t say is that he wasn’t very long at University College, Oxford [laughter]. He was there for one term and a half—and half way through the second term he was expelled for writing the first document to be published in English which attacked religion: The Necessity of Atheism. He distributed it around Oxford; he sent it to the Master of the College, [laughter] and he sent it to the local Bishop [laughter]. He sent it to a few people at that time, and asked, “I would like your views on this [laughter]. I’ve thought about the problem, and I’ve come to the view that there is no God. What do you think? I’d like to have little debate about it.” He was hauled up before the Master of his college, asked if he had written it, and he was immediately expelled. There’s no reference to that at University College, Oxford! If you were to go up to a Don, an old Don who was alive in 1811 (most of them were) [laughter], and you were say to them, “Excuse me a moment, what is this about Shelley getting expelled?” They’d say, “Oh was he expelled? I’m sorry about that, we’ll have to put that right” [laughter]. 

           Now that is one version of Shelley and this is the tradition that’s been passed down through the ages; passed down through the textbooks, particularly in schools and universities. Shelley has now been scrubbed off the A level syllabus, but when he was on the A level syllabus, he was brought to the A level syllabus by books by Richard Hughes, Isabel Quigly, Glover and all the rest of those people. They introduced him as someone who was an entirely neutered, lyrical poet. Occasionally, I read this about him: “Occasionally he was disturbed by a recurring pain in his side, and that really is the explanation for his argumentative problems; and then there was an unfortunate homosexual experience when he was a boy” [laughter].[31]That’s really it, isn’t it [laughter]? We can dismiss it all: the fellow was odd from time to time. The trouble was that he couldn’t really be placed in the bosom of that Orthodox heterosexuality for which Horsham stands. This is the tradition of Shelley which has come down to us.

           Now there’s another Shelley and that’s really the focus of this meeting tonight. There’s another Shelley; altogether a different Shelley. There’s an atheist and a republican and a feminist Shelley. This is the real Shelley. The Shelley who had ideas, who had revolutionary ideas. The whole of his writings was inspired by those revolutionary ideas and to separate those revolutionary ideas from Shelley is to do no more than to neuter and castrate the poet himself.

           Bernard Shaw went away from that meeting in Horsham a bit sick. He was a bit sick [laughter]. He said that the only reason he hadn’t intervened[32] was that they were raising money for a free library. When he left the meeting, he looked at the free library, and he saw that there was a statue of Shelley outside with a Bible in his hand [laughter]. And he said he wished he had intervened.[33]

         At any rate, Shaw later went to another meeting[34] that was held not far from here in the East End of London in Shoreditch, not far from Covent Gardens. There were a lot of workers in attendance; Oh, a hundred, two hundred workers came to the meeting, workers from the East End of London who had come out or a meeting about Shelley. And there were people speaking there that were atheists and republicans. There were Irish republicans. There were people of that kind speaking at the meeting. At the end of the meeting one of the workers in the hall rose and read, or recited because he knew it by heart,[35] a quite different poem, a poem which starts like this:

“Men of England, wherefore plough

For the lords who lay ye low?

Wherefore weave with toil and care

The rich robes your tyrants wear?

Wherefore feed and clothe and save

From the cradle to the grave

Those ungrateful drones who would

Drain your sweat—nay, drink your blood?”[36]

           Seven or eight verses; straightforward; simple; not very lyrical but talking about the way in which the men of England at that time worked and sweated for the drones who would drain their sweat and drink their blood. And the worker knew that and recited that. That was a different kind of Shelley. And how was it that the son of an aristocratic land owner in Sussex, the son of a Whig MP, somebody who went to Eton and Oxford, how was it that somebody so young could come to all these revolutionary ideas? How was he able to write poetry of that kind?[37] And the answer to that is very, very simple. It has to do with the times in which he wrote, something which will also never be discussed by any of these people that write or talk or teach about Shelley in the schools today. It has to do with the time into which Shelley was born in 1792, three years after the French Revolution. And the fact that the French Revolution had inspired right the way throughout Europe and indeed right the way throughout the Americas, whole new ideas. And people began to stand up and to think: “maybe all the superstitions and all the ideas that passed on from above weren’t right. Maybe that wasn’t the way in which you should view society.” And all the poets of that time, whenever they were born, and all the people with any ability whatsoever, all of them at the outset were infected with the enthusiasm of that revolution: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, Southey.

           All these people that you read and people read in schools and universities and all those people that were writing at the same time, in just about that period: in those twenty or thirty years, all these people were infected with enthusiasm for the French Revolution, and wrote about the revolutionary upsurge. Even Wordsworth in his youth used to write about the menace of gold and the power of reason. People used to talk about how reason could be used to undermine superstition; how individual working people are as good as the people who dominate them and so on and so on. And those things happened because of the French Revolution. And the French Revolution, of course, terrified people in England, particularly as it went on and developed, and as the left in the French Revolution began to seize power and consolidate it.

           And what happened in the British ruling class was a great terror took them, seized them with terror. They were terrified that the Jacobin ideas, the revolutionary ideas, the ideas of reason as opposed to superstition would start to grip people in Britain. And therefore, they moved troops into the cities, and they unleashed the most terrible repression right across the whole country. All different kinds of spies were put into the cities; put into workplaces in order to detect whether or not there was any evidence of any Jacobin or revolutionary ideas of one kind or another.

Commemoration to the 1819 Peterloo Massacre in Manchester.

           And Shelley developed in that atmosphere. This is the point even at Eton where he refused to take part in the fagging[38]operation. Even at Oxford where he challenged the rights of people to tell him whether he should believe in God or not. Those ideas developed in his mind because of the French Revolution. And what comes out of all his poetry? The first thing that comes out of all his poetry is a deep, intense hatred and contempt for authority. For people who put themselves in authority without any responsibility for the people over whom they put themselves in authority. A contempt for those who have become masters of other people, not because the people have chosen them but as a result either of some superstition or most of all because of their wealth. All of his poetry is about that. Queen Mab, which is the poem that he wrote when he was eighteen, bursts with rage and fury at all the drones, the sycophants, the parasites and the people who were in charge. I can’t read these poems out to you in full. I might one day have to have a meeting about eight or nine hours long, and then all these poems can be read out in full. But the whole purpose of this meeting is to get you to go back and get hold of Queen Mab and read it—particularly the central cantos. It’s a story of a young woman asleep and a faerie coming from above, a great spirit coming and taking her so that she ca look upon the world. He takes her right out into the stratosphere so that she can look down upon the world and see all the things that go on: all the kings and priests and statesmen and parasites that operate there. The whole of his poetry bursts out in rage. All the way through his life, he couldn’t stand the idea of illegitimate authority.

           And then there is his greatest poem of all: The Mask of Anarchy, the poem that he wrote about the massacre at Peterloo in 1819 when the trade unionists who were meeting in the fields outside Manchester were mowed down by the yeomanry on the orders of the local magistrate.

           Shelley wrote in this poem about the Tory government that was in power at that time; about Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary; about Sidmouth the Home Secretary; about Eldon, the Lord Chancellor.[39] He wrote about these people in language which is so furious and so simple that it has come down to us all the way through the ages. Quoting Mask of Anarchy:

"And the little children, who

Round his feet played to and fro,

Thinking every tear a gem,

 Had their brains knocked out by them.

 Clothed with the Bible, as with light,

 And the shadows of the night,

 Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy

 On a crocodile rode by.

 And many more Destructions played

 In this ghastly masquerade,

 All disguised, even to the eyes,

 Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.”[40]

“I met Murder on the way—

He had a mask like Castlereagh—

Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might

Be in admirable plight,

For one by one, and two by two,

He tossed them human hearts to chew

Which from his wide cloak he drew.

Next came Fraud, and he had on,

Like Eldon, an ermined gown;

His big tears, for he wept well,

Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

           He hated the whole damn lot of them. Every single one of them that fell into any one of those categories or any other category which are parasitical, in one way or another, upon the working people. He loathed and hated them. The whole of his poetry reeks with that hatred. But the other point is this: that it wasn’t just a simple hatred of authority. He understood the reasons for that authority—he understood the central cause of that authority. 

Princess Caroline

          Shelley wrote a pamphlet in 1817[41] in reaction to the Derby Insurrection.[42] Those of you that have read that great book by Edward Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class,[43] will have received a very clear outline of the trials that took place of those Derbyshire workers. Thompson describes it as the first real sign in Britain of proletarian insurrection. The Derbyshire workers came together to fight against the oppression that had been imposed upon them by the government. The authorities arrested three of them, tried them and then hanged them. And on the day that they hanged them, Princess Charlotte died and the whole world, and all of the women’s magazines, Women’s Own, Women’s Journal [laughter], all these papers, organs of the influence among the bourgeoisie of the time, wept tremendous tears for Princess Charlotte.[44]

          And Shelley wrote an essay, a really magnificent essay, comparing the reactions to the death of Princess Charlotte, on the one hand, and the death of the Derby insurrectionists on the other. And in the essay, you get an understanding of what Shelley thought the central causes which perpetuated that tyranny were. Here is just an example: 

“The labourer, he that tills the ground and manufactures cloth, is the man who has to provide, out of what he would bring home to his wife and children, for the luxuries and comforts of those, whose claims are represented by an annuity of forty-four million a year levied upon the English nation. Before, he supported the army and the pensioners, and the royal family, and the landholders; and this is a hard necessity to which it was well that he should submit. Many and various are the mischiefs flowing from oppression, but this is the representative of them all; namely, that one man is forced to labour for another in a degree not only not necessary to the support of the subsisting distinctions among mankind, but so as by the excess of the injustice to endanger the very foundations of all that is valuable in social order, and to provoke that anarchy which is at once the enemy of freedom, and the child and the chastiser of misrule.”[45]

          This understanding of the source of tyranny is present all the way through Queen Mab; all the way through The Mask of Anarchy; and all the way through the Revolt of Islam. All the way through his poems and the prose. Shelley understood that at the root of exploitation is the fact that man feeds on man.[46] I wish I could read to you all the different ways in which he demonstrates that the exploitation of the worker was the central source of tyranny.

William Godwin

          The other thing that set Shelley apart from almost everyone else then and even now, even those who understand the nature of authority, the cause of authority and of exploitation, is that he wanted to do something about it. He got a lot of inspiration from a man called William Godwin, who was a writer of a considerable note who wrote Political Justice.[47]

          This was in many ways a quite revolutionary work that talked about inequality and the exploitation that was going on in society. But the point about Godwin is that he was not prosecuted. Why not? Almost anyone that was challenging authority at that time was prosecuted. Godwin was not prosecuted for a very simple reason: when Prime Minister Pitt was asked whether Godwin should be prosecuted, he asked, what was the price of Political Justice? He was told that it was 6 guineas. When he heard this, he said that there was no point prosecuting Godwin because no one who mattered from the government’s point of view was going to read it. In other words, it was a bourgeois work, a book written for the bourgeoisie and not directed at the working class.[48]

          And when Shelley was in Ireland,[49] protesting and trying to form associations of people in Ireland to protest against the British oppression in Ireland, he and Godwin had a correspondence which underlined the difference between them. Godwin said, “you must explain these ideas to people at the fireside. Do it gently and do it with people of intelligence, people who understand things. People who understand things. Do it that way. Whatever you do, don’t try to form associations. Don’t try to form political parties because you will end up with violence. Shelley! You are preparing a sea of blood.”[50] And Shelley wrote back this:

“Will truth alone convert the world without generous advocates of the truth united to press its claim upon an unheeding generation? It is nearly twenty years since Political Justice was first published. What has followed? Have men ceased to fight? Has misery been banished from the earth? Have the fireside communications which it recommends taken place? I think of the last twenty years with impatient scepticism after the progress of which the human mind has? made during this period. I will own that I am eager that something should be done.”[51]

In Queen Mab, he writes Godwin directly into the poem[52]:

Whom the morn wakens but to fruitless toil;

Whoever hears his famished offspring's scream;

Whom their pale mother's uncomplaining gaze

Forever meets, and the proud rich man's eye

Flashing command, and the heart-breaking scene

Of thousands like himself; —he little heeds

The rhetoric of tyranny; his hate

Is quenchless as his wrongs; he laughs to scorn

The vain and bitter mockery of words,

Feeling the horror of the tyrant's deeds,

And unrestrained but by the arm of power,

That knows and dreads his enmity.”

“The man of ease, who, by his warm fireside,

To deeds of charitable intercourse

And bare fulfilment of the common laws

Of decency and prejudice confines

The struggling nature of his human heart,

Is duped by their cold sophistry; he sheds

A passing tear perchance upon the wreck

Of earthly peace, when near his dwelling's door

The frightful waves are driven, —when his son

Is murdered by the tyrant, or religion

Drives his wife raving mad. But the poor man

Whose life is misery, and fear and care;

Shelley could clearly see the difference between the reformism of Godwin sitting there by the fireside churning out the six guinea works, which people could discuss at fashionable soirées and the hatred, the anger, the unquenchable fury of working people who have nothing and who are beaten down by the power of the ruling class. He understood not only the exploitation, but he understood the need to do something about it, and he also understood that the will to do something about it can only really come in the end from the people who were most oppressed. For Shelley, it was not enough to talk about the problem of exploitation and tyranny. He wanted to do something about it.

Paul Foot

          But he applied himself all the time to the problem of tyranny, and perhaps there are lessons for us regarding the ideas which underpin tyranny. He could see, just as we can see, that the tyranny that exists in the society doesn’t sustain itself by proclaiming itself. Tyranny doesn’t say, “we are profiteers, we are exploiters, we are speculators; we love to speculate from the mountains” [laughter]. “What you have to do you navvies, is you have to agree to be speculated by us and profiteered and lynched, and robbed and looted. We’re looters and you are the looted, so let’s carry on like that. That's a fair form of society isn't it?” [laughter] That’s not how authority sustains itself at all. That is not how authority sustains itself. It sustains itself with a whole number of different ideas, which it imposes through its media— through the people who write and talk for authority. It imposes those ideas, and gets those ideas current among the people that it is trying to oppress, and therefore and thereby finds oppression much easier.

          And Shelley took a number of these ideas and dealt with them all the way through his poetry. The first of them perhaps was the idea of God. The idea of religion. Perhaps not quite so central now to us in terms of holding people back. But then it was absolutely fundamental. As I say the very first essay that was ever published against religion, against organized and established religion in this country, was The Necessity of Atheism. And when I say “published,” I mean that Shelley used his father’s funds, which were not given for that purpose I can assure you [laughter]. He used his father’s funds to publish a just few copies and distribute them to the bishops of Oxford. That’s the level to which that got “published.” But Shelley understood that if people talk about God and take their command from a supernatural power and believe somehow that there is another world that they can go to and that any rewards that exist in society, exist not in this world but in another world, then that paves the way for authority and tyranny. That is an opening for people to be able to say: “Nothing you can do about it. Absolutely nothing you can do about it. All you have to do is believe.” Quoting The Revolt of Islam.

“Men say they have seen God, and heard from God,

Or known from others who have known such things,

And that his will is all our law, a rod

To scourge us into slaves—that Priests and Kings,

Custom, domestic sway, aye, all that brings

Man’s free-born soul beneath the oppressor’s heel,

Are his strong ministers, and that the stings

Of death will make the wise his vengeance feel,

Tho’ truth and virtues arm their hearts with tenfold steel.[53]

          All the way through The Revolt of Islam there is a attack on religion, on God. But the proclamation of atheism was censored from the end of The Revolt of Islam. Where the people who come up to be finally chained and burned to death by the authorities shout that they want to show how atheists and Republicans can die. And that was cut and carved out for about a hundred and fifty years after he wrote it. But those ideas, against God, against religion, are central to it. All the way through Queen Mab again is that attack upon the priests, the people that come in the name of God and in the name of some supernatural power from outside and who get rich and fat as a result of other people not noticing that they’re getting rich and fat because they are distracted by a philosophy based on the supernatural.

     And then there was Shelley’s attitude to women. See, it wasn’t just that he noticed, that he saw all around him, that a part of human race was held in a particular form of tyranny. A particular form of contempt. It wasn’t just that he could see the result of that kind of domestic tyranny. Not only in the upper circles of society but all the way through the society. It’s not just that he wrote these very, very famous lines:

  “Can man be free if woman be a slave?

            Chain one who lives, and breathes this boundless air,

            To the corruption of a closéd grave!

   Can they, whose mates are beasts condemned to bear

            Scorn heavier far than toil or anguish, dare

            To trample their oppressors? In their home,

            Among their babes, thou knowest a curse would wear

            The shape of woman-hoary Crime would come

            Behind, and Fraud rebuild Religion's tottering dome.”[54]

          It’s not just that he saw that women were oppressed in the society, that the women were oppressed in the home; it’s not just that he saw the monstrosity of that. It’s not even just that he saw that there was no prospect whatever of any kind for revolutionary upsurge if men left women behind. Like, for example, in the 1848 rebellions in Paris where the men deliberately locked the women up and told them they couldn’t come out to the demonstrations that took place there because in some way or other that would demean the nature of the revolution. It wasn’t just that he saw the absurdity of situations like that. It was that he saw what happened when women did activate themselves, and did start to take control of their lives, and did start to hit back against repression. Shelley saw that what happened then was that again and again, wome seized the leadership of the forces that were in revolution! All through Shelley’s poetry, all his great revolutionary poems, the main agitators, the people that do most of the revolutionary work and who he gives most of the revolutionary speeches, are women. Queen Mab herself, Asia in Prometheus Unbound, Iona in Swellfoot the Tyrant, and most important of all, Cythna in The Revolt of Islam. All these women, throughout his poetry, were the leaders of the revolution and the main agitators. The person who says, “Can man be free if woman be a slave” is Cythna in The Revolt of Islam! She is taken captive and then she goes to her captors and calls on them to free her and the other prisoners and join with the revolution: “This need not be; ye might arise, and will / That gold should lose its power, and thrones their glory.”[55]

         And that comes from a woman. And he understood, just as we had better understand, and we better understand it fast, because it is a prejudice that goes back deeper than any other prejudice that exists in society today. We’d better understand that point: that when the women start to take control, and it’s not just the question of understanding oppression, paying lip service to the oppression, but the possibility of taking part and sharing in the revolutionary upheaval, actually of leadingit. That, I think, is one of the most inspiring parts of Shelley’s poetry.

Eugene Delacroix, Le 28 Juliet. La Liberté guidant le peuple.

          And it follows from that, that when these people talk about Shelley, the Horshams,[56] the lords and the ladies of literature throughout the ages, the Rossetti circle in the 1880s sitting and reading their Shelley by the fireside (perhaps one or two people might object to my being a bit cynical about that), they seemed to believe that Shelley was only concerned with love. A wonderful thing love, particularly for Victorian gentleman [laughter]. It was a thing, the relationship between men and women, that was founded on prettiness and obsequiousness and fawning and looking after your man and seeing that he has all the things that he needs and living your life through your man. That’s really what love meant to the people who read Shelley to themselves in the 1880s and 1890s. And they could pick out the pieces and little bits of love poetry. And Shelley was pretty guilty of it, you know: “what are all these kisses worth, if thou kiss not me.”[57] They used to read this to one another. And really it was no more than just a seductive poetry of the worst kind if you want to know. But, they used to read it and say that Shelley was very interested in love; he was interested in that kind of love. He was interested in wooing. Young men wooing their young women in high society at that time always used to have a little copy of Shelley’s love poems, suitably censored [laughter], which they would perhaps read in the moonlight to one another in a romantic kind of way.

          And of course he did write marvelous poetry and not that kind of drivel of which I’ve just spoken. He wrote very, very marvelous love poetry, including some descriptions of the sex act which in my view are some of the greatest ever written. The Victorians used to read these kinds of things to each other and titillate themselves and propose after the right kind of poetry had been said to one another. All that kind of thing.

          And this is the most intolerable thing of all. Because the one thing that he did stand for, much more than anything else and he did write a great deal about the relationship between men and women and not only the relationship between men and women, but the relationship between men and men, and women and women. And men and women and children. And the relationship between human beings in general. The one thing that he understood perhaps more than anything, and it drove home more than anything, is that what is central to any real love, any real affection, and any real respect between human beings, is the lack of constraints. All the way through, that runs all the way through his poetry. And it’s not just Queen Mab, it’s not just the poem (which is magnificent), it’s the notes to the poem. I tell you, I read the notes to the poem when I was thirty-seven, and I spent the first two hours after reading them dreaming around the place thinking that this was absolutely fantastic [laughter]. And I spent the next two years after I read them wondering why the bloody hell hadn’t I read them before [laughter]? Absolutely appalling! Most of you had the opportunity of reading them before you were thirty-seven, but you missed the opportunity—and that is the most appalling thing you’ve ever done [laughter]. Quoting Queen Mab:

"The present system of constraint through marriage does no more, in the majority of instances, than make hypocrites or open enemies. Persons of delicacy and virtue, unhappily united to one whom they find it impossible to love, spend the loveliest season of their life in unproductive efforts to appear otherwise than they are, for the sake of the feelings of their partner or the welfare of their mutual offspring: those of less generosity and refinement openly avow their disappointment, and linger out the remnant of that union, which only death can dissolve, in a state of incurable bickering and hostility. The early education of their children takes its colour from the squabbles of the parents; they are nursed in a systematic school of ill-humour, violence, and falsehood. Had they been suffered to part at the moment when indifference rendered their union irksome, they would have been spared many years of misery: they would have connected themselves more suitably, and would have found that happiness in the society of more congenial partners which is forever denied them by the despotism of marriage. They would have been separately useful and happy members of society, who, whilst united, were miserable and rendered misanthropical by misery. The conviction that wedlock is indissoluble holds out the strongest of all temptations to the perverse: they indulge without restraint in acrimony, and all the little tyrannies of domestic life, when they know that their victim is without appeal. If this connection were put on a rational basis, each would be assured that habitual ill-temper would terminate in separation, and would check this vicious and dangerous propensity.”[58]

          I can’t tell you what kind of subversion that represented when it was written. And I can’t tell you the kind horror that ran through the minds of the people who wrote in the New Statesman, and the Spectators and the Couriers, and all the people of that time when they read that kind of thing. They felt the whole foundation of their miserable world was being undermined by that kind of writing. All the way through (there’s three or four pages of it) Shelley is talking about the indissolubility of the constraints, the economic constraints and the domestic constraints that exist in society. These constraints trap love, making it impossible for any kind of real relationships between human beings of any description to exist.

Another appalling presentation of the Victorian Shelley. This is a sculpture at Univesity College, Oxford. Foot ridiculed it earlier in his speech.

          And of all the insults, which have been leveled against Shelley throughout of all these years, there is none to touch this one: the idea that he wrote about love as though it fitted with the Victorian ideal of love. That ideal of love comes out of a society which depends upon potentates at the top and potentates all the way through. Little despots and dictators all the way down from top to bottom. That ideal of the relationship exists in our society, and nothing comes clearer from Shelley’s poetry than that. 

          And I should say this, just in case anyone thinks at any stage that I think Shelley was a saint or a marvelous creature that was blameless in his own life or in his writings. Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, that little bit of drivel and doggerel that I quoted earlier about the kisses and the seductions. That type of thing runs through not only his poetry but also through a lot of his life. I think from time to time, and the fellow was prepared to “help himself,” he wasn’t prepared to assume responsibility. It was easy enough for him to say: “the answer is separation,”[59] but the problem is, do both parties want to be separated?—that often is the problem. And he didn’t always apply his mind to that, in the terms of the equality of people. And therefore, I think that when you look at his life, and the way he lived his life, there is none of the perfection and the stringency of the ideals that appear in his poetry.[60] And although there is some of it in his life, he certainly doesn’t live up to it.

          But the point really is this, that the poetry and the writings and the things that he believed in, were there. There is a guide and a marker as to how people should determine their lives and how people could determine their lives if society wasn’t founded on constraint right the way through—all those economic restraints and domestic constraints that exist. And then people say, and they say it often with a lot of justifications, that there is a lot of talk about Shelley as a great revolutionary poet that doesn’t fit the facts; it doesn’t fit a lot of the things that Shelley wrote about. There were many, many aspects of Shelley’s writing, which appear to us to be quite crudely reformist, revisionist, if you want to use that kind of language, or even elitist if you want to use that kind of language. But there’s a whole number of things that he wrote, which indicate a rather different kind of approach when compared to the one that I have been talking about. Can I find it?

An early printing of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound.

          What he wrote in the Preface was that he was interested in reform and change in society. And he said he wanted to write only for an educated and intelligent group of people so that they can understand his intentions.[61] There’s a whole lot of his writing which talks about the dangers of the mob and dangers of doing things too fast. For example: the pamphlet that I mentioned earlier, A Philosophical View of Reform, and another one very similar to it which he wrote in 1817 called A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote. As a matter fact in these writings, Shelley comes out against universal suffrage, against the thing which many other reformers were advocating; reformers who were much less revolutionary in my opinion than Shelley. He comes out against universal suffrage on the ground that no one wants to move too fast, that you can’t be quite sure about what the mob will do because they are not educated people and they’re not intelligent or sensitive people and they might make nonsense of universal suffrage and therefore, we ought to be careful about it.

          And it is no good talking about Shelley in an idealistic or utopian matter—hagiography, writing about the man as though everything that he said fitted into the proper Socialist Workers Party line. In fact a lot of things go right against the kinds of things that I’ve been supporting. How can such clearly contradictory ideas such as those he espouses in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound, for example opposing universal suffrage, how can they be reconciled with the rest of his radical philosophy. Let me put it this way: a number of people, and particularly people who come to the revolutionary cause out of the ruling classes—a species, with which I have some familiarity[62]—people such as this are like Shelley, who was all his life, or most of his life, very much isolated from the working people about whom he wrote and for whom he wanted to change the world. Such people, according to the degree to which they’re isolated from the working class, can have a “fear of the mob.”[63]

          Now, I don’t know, but there may be one or two people here that have not read a novel by George Eliot[64] called Felix Holt. Now, some people have boils and some people have piles, and that’s very unfortunate. And some people haven’t read Felix Holt and that is also unfortunate [laughter]. The good news is that you can put that right. You can read it; but you don’t have to tell anyone that you haven’t read it before, and you can read it and pretend you read it ten years ago [laughter]. I know that’s what most you should have done because it’s a marvelous novel, a wonderful radical novel. 

          Felix Holt is about a man who is perhaps the nicest man ever written about in the whole of literature. You can’t help reading Felix Holt without feeling a fantastic affection for him. He was lovely. Everybody loved him. He wanted to change the world. He wanted to be with the workers, and he didn’t like all the hypocrisy of the society, and he was wonderful. There was one thing about him and there is also one thing about George Eliot, and that was they both had this “fear of the mob”; uncertainty about unleashing the mob. The same uncertainty Shelley expresses in A Philosophical View Reform.  Shelley was uncertain about universal suffrage and had debates with Willian Godwin about universal suffrage. Godwin being a Methodist minister was in favour of universal suffrage. Like Felix Holt, Shelley was afraid of the mob. And if there is one nightmare, the traditional nightmare of the bourgeois novelist or poet, or for that matter the average Labour Member of Parliament [laughter], it is the nightmare of the mob in action. There is a passage in Felix Holt I want to point out. It is a Saturday, and he’s sitting there thinking about his ideas, and he realizes there is an election underway and that there is a riot[65] [laughter]!  He thinks, “Oh my God, there’s a riot!,” and he leaves home to keep the people in check, and he talks to them about what they should do. But a lot of people are stampeding, demanding and picketing, and kicking Clive Jenkins in the balls[66] [laughter] and all that kind of thing. Shouting down Albert Booth.[67] All these things are happening and he’s telling the people, “For god’s sake, watch it, don’t do it. You can’t do this! It’s the mob!” And he’s standing there and here come the yeomanry, and they shoot him because they think he’s the leader [laughter]!

An early edition of Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical, first published in 1866.

            That’s the terror of every bourgeois radical. That's the nightmare that they have: they wake up sweating in the night [laughter]. All the Labour MPs, all the reformers, they wake up and think, “My god, have we unleashed the mob by what we’re doing? [Laughter.] Shelley! You’re preparing the sea of blood! Remember what Godwin said? Perhaps that’s what’s gonna happen. The mob! We’ve got to watch out for the mob! The mob aren’t intelligent!” And all these prejudices sank in to the ruling class mind, that sensitive, intelligent and ruling class mind, the one that doesn’t go along with his class’ ideology. But then that sort of person comes to some other ideology, some reforming or radical ideology, and then he finds he’s worried about what he unleashes. Just like the people who 40 years later read Felix Holt. Nice, radical bourgeois people read George Eliot, read Felix Holt and thought oh it’s the nightmare! The mob, the election riot and Holt who is shot through the shoulder and then put in prison, by the way, for leading the riot in the first place[68] [laughter].

          And that sort of idea is in some of Shelley. People aren’t—they aren’t perfect. And they don’t have ideas which are pure. And there’s some part of Shelley all the time forging its way out, here and there, in some of his poems. You know, there’s a passage in The Mask of Anarchy where he says the answer to violent oppression is to fold your arms when the yeomanry come next time.[69] He’s talking about the people that had been mowed down at Peterloo, women and children, murdered at Peterloo. And he says, “next time, fold your arms resolutely, thinking about the laws of England, the good old laws of England. Stand there and talk about the law of England, and stand there and let them mow you down and then maybe everything will be all right but whatever you do, don’t unleash yourself.”

          And that was one part of him. Of course, there was another side of him, the side that I talked about already, the side of him that says, “Yes. You’ve got to get them [laughter]. You’ve got to move and get them.[70]” There are two sides to his personality, constantly coming out. 

          Shelley wrote a whole series of letters to a woman called Elizabeth Hitchener when he was a young man. He had a long correspondence with her. And I’ll just read out one section of it but this is typical of his other side, a side that was different from the reformist side, the side that was worried about the mob. There was another side to him as well. Shelley wrote: “They may seethe and they may riot, and they may sin at the last moment. The groans of the wretched may pass unheeded till the latest moment of this infamous revelry (of the rich), till the storm burst upon them and the oppressed take ruinous vengeance on their oppressors.”[71] “Ruinous vengeance”? What the hell is that? That’s Felix Holt saying exactly what you shouldn’t do! [laughter]. In Shelley’s poem Swellfoot the Tyrant, which is a wonderful poem, which has been sneered at by a lot of people who think it isn’t funny,[72] what he has, is a lot of pigs. [laughter]. The pigs are snorting away and doing everything they are told and then suddenly the pigs turn into people and all the oppressors, all the priests and the parasites and speculators and industrialists and people of that kind and commercialists, they turn into pigs. And the pigs turn into people. And then you have a fantastic scene at the end of the poem in which he has the pigs driven out and killed. What happened to all this talk that you must never take people’s lives, that you mustn’t be a retributionist and you mustn’t seek revenge?[73] And then he goes completely out of school, and now he’s ultra-left in his attitude to what they should do to the pigs[74]: get them out, drive them out, pin them down and stick them in the back! Anything! Just get them! When Shelley is aroused to fury by what he sees going on around him, you see a very different attitude to violence.

          And really it comes to a climax, this division, this contrast between the way in which he thought about revolutions and oppressions and the mob: all these things come to a climax when he writes Prometheus Unbound. Now that’s a very difficult poem to read. I have lots of people who’ve come up to me since we had the meeting at Skegness[75] last year and they say, “Well, I tried to read this thing, this Prometheus Unbound, but it is very difficult to read.” And so it is. It is very difficult to read. But the most important thing about it in my view, is that it brings that contradiction—between his fear of the mob and the need for revolution—to a head and forces it through to some kind of conclusion.

          And this is the story of Prometheus. I was a Greek scholar. I’ll admit it [laughter]. I was a Greek scholar at school. I was very, very good at Greek; we didn’t have to be good at anything else. And, well, I’m not actually all that good at it [laughter]. But anyways, I was a Greek scholar, and we were taught this about Prometheus[76]: we were taught that it was a Greek legend. And it was simply this: that there was a man, Prometheus, who dared to say that Jupiter was not god of the Earth. We were taught this was an absolute scandal, and that Prometheus was a really revolting, subversive figure. And he was treated in a way in which subversive figures ought to be treated. He defied Jupiter, he dared to invent fire, and he had the idea that the science of this invention might advance the cause of mankind instead of advancing the cause of Jupiter. Jupiter’s view was that the science was really a radical idea in the first place, that we would be better off without science of any kind in order that his rule could be more secure. But Prometheus disobeyed Jupiter, invented fire and gave science to humanity and he was treated in a way in which all naughty school boys ought to be treated, which is to be chained to a rock for seven million years [laughter]. And every evening a vulture came and gnawed out his liver which would grow again by the following morning and then the vulture would come again and gnaw it out again. And it was extremely painful. I understand the Turkish authorities in Cyprus are looking into this form of dealing with recalitrants of one kind or another [laughter].

          And the whole thing was taught to us in that way. The original story was written, as a matter of fact, by a man called Aeschylus and it was called Prometheus Bound and Prometheus Unbound.[77] And he did have an idea about how people should rebel against authority. But we were not taught that. I read the whole bloody thing in Greek.[78] I never came to that conclusion; I never even started to come to that conclusion. But anyways, there we are. Here is a man in revolt against authority and he’s chained to a rock.

          Shelley writes a poem about this man chained to the rock and how his lover Asia seeks to get him off the rock. He represents oppressed mankind. Now Asia loved militants. Richard Holmes, whose book is the only one worth reading on the subject,[79] describes her love as militant. She is trying to get him out of there. That’s the point: how the hell do you get him out of there? What do you do to get him out of that situation?[80]

          It’s very interesting the way in which critics write about Prometheus Unbound. Because there is another character in this play; in this play/poem.[81] Prometheus Unbound contains some of the most beautiful poetry ever written in the whole history of English literature. But you have here another character called Demogorgon.[82] But what is Demogorgon? You can read all the books you want. You can try looking him up in the index. Everybody discusses it. Who is this Demogorgon? They tell you it is a spirit, some kind of weird thing that Asia goes to and appeals to, to help her save Prometheus. You see her man is in trouble [laughter]. And in the same way you would go to an altar or to some deity and say: “now who can help me save my man” [laughter].

          But actually the original Greek actually assists us here. Because the word “Demogorgon,” as I understand it and as Richard Holmes understands it and as no one else has yet understood it [laughter], comes from two words in Greek: demos, that means “the people” and gorgon, which means “the monster.” He is the “people monster” [laughter].

          Now where does Asia go to save Prometheus? She goes to the “people monster.” She goes down to his cave in Act 2, Scene 4 of Prometheus Unbound which is one of the most fantastic passages in the whole of literature. I am going to find this even if it takes me half an hour to find it. I bloody well got to find this. Act 1 is extremely difficult to read and I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t read it and if I were you I would go straight to Act 2, Scene 4 [laughter]. Quoting Prometheus Unbound:[83]

“Act 2, Scene 4—The Cave of Demogorgon. Asia and Panthea.

            Panthea: What veiléd form sits on that ebon throne?

            Asia: The veil has fallen.

            Panthea:         I see a mighty darkness

              Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom

              Dart round, as light from the meridian sun.

              — Ungazed upon and shapeless; neither limb,

              Nor form, nor outline; yet we feel it is

              A living Spirit.

            Demogorgon: Ask what thou wouldst know.

            Asia: What canst thou tell?

            Demogorgon:              All things thou dar’st demand.

             Asia: Who made the living world?

             Demogorgon:              God.

             Asia:                                        Who made all

              That it contains? thought, passion, reason, will,

              Imagination?

            Demogorgon:              God: Almighty God.

 Asia: Who made that sense which, when the winds of Spring

              In rarest visitation, or the voice

              Of one belovéd heard in youth alone,

              Fills the faint eyes with falling tears which dim

              The radiant looks of unbewailing flowers,

              And leaves this peopled earth a solitude

              When it returns no more?

            Demogorgon:              Merciful God.

            Asia: And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse,

              Which from the links of the great chain of things,

              To every thought within the mind of man

              Sway and drag heavily, and each one reels

              Under the load towards the pit of death;

              Abandoned hope, and love that turns to hate;

              And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood;

              Pain, whose unheeded and familiar speech

              Is howling, and keen shrieks, day after day;

              And Hell, or the sharp fear of Hell?

            Demogorgon:              He reigns.

            Asia: Utter his name: a world pining in pain

              Asks but his name: curses shall drag him down.”

And Asia whips him with agitation, whips him with it. She asks a simple question first: “Is it God who done it? Well, then, what about all the dirty things that are going on? What are you gonna do about that?” All the way through this passage she is whipping him and agitating him.

“Asia: Whom calledst thou God?

          Demogorgon: I spoke but as ye speak,

            For Jove is the supreme of living things.

           Asia: Who is the master of the slave?”

Asking the question, “who is the master of the slave?” And on and on and on until she says:

            “Prometheus shall arise

            Henceforth the sun of this rejoicing world:

            When shall the destined hour arrive?”

Richard Holmes, author of Shelley: The Pursuit.

          And what happens after all of her agitation, her constant agitation?  What happens after Asia demands that Demogorgon bring new ideas to her that he come out of his old religious superstitions and backward ideas, his old racist ideas? What happens? What happens is that two cars emerge out of the cave. Two cars representing change, representing the powers that are going to go after Jupiter and who? deal with him. In one way or another, they’re going to deal with him. I’m not gonna read that out to you. I’ll leave that for you to read. But what I will read is Richard Holmes’ description of what those two cars mean, what they represent. And here is the synthesis, if you like, the coming to grips with the problems that he had all his life about the masses. Would the masses respond and what would happen if they did? What was the problem of the mob? All these things. [Quoting Holmes]:

“There are two chariots mentioned: the one that brings Demogorgon to Jupiter is undoubtedly terrible and violent: Jupiter, authoritarian government, is to be overwhelmed by massive force, and the process in society is to be like a volcanic eruption and an earthquake which “ruins” cities. The etymological reading is surely relevant here. It is the eruption of ‘Demogorgon,’ the ‘people monster.’

         Yet there is also the second chariot with its “delicate strange tracery,” and its gentle charioteer with “dove-like eyes of hope.” This is the chariot which carries Asia and Panthea back to Prometheus, and it seems to indicate that political freedom transforms man’s own nature and substitutes an ethic of love for the ideology of revenge and destruction represented by Prometheus’s curse. The end of Act II leaves both those possibilities open historically. Revolution will come, but how it will come depends on man himself. There are always two chariots. In either case it is inevitable, and it is to be celebrated.”[84]

From the 1813 Queen Mab edition published by Shelley himself. Foot no doubt has a beautifully bound copy from a later time.

         Now we don’t say that it is inevitable. But the point is this: that in either case the synthesis there, the dialectic if you like, of the argument about the mob—that the mob might go and supersede itself—is really met in that great passage there. Everyone says that it is the greatest passage ever, but nobody understands what it’s about! They don’t understand what’s going on in his head because they have separated Shelley from his ideas. They don’t understand what the imagery is about. They say: “this is a very beautiful passage; learn it off by heart and shut up.” If you ask any questions they’ll tell you: “Demogorgon, yes that’s all very interesting, Demogorgon’s rather like Mary, the mother of Jesus, that’s the sort of creature Demogorgon is.” They unleash all kinds of fanciful ideas about what Demogorgon stands for.[85] But the fact of the matter is, that you do have a synthesis there coming out of the dialectic of the argument. The fact of the matter is that when you rise up, you can have civil war, bloody revolution and all kinds of violence on the one hand. On the other hand, if you’re strong enough, powerful and forceful enough, you can do it by cutting down on the amount of violence and do it with that gentle “dove-eyed charioteer.”[86] Either way, probably, if the truth be known, it will be a mixture of both. But either way it is to be celebrated. Either way it has to be supported. And the point about Shelley is this: that although there is his statement about writing for elites that aren’t gonna do the job,[87] there is no conclusive proof that whenever he came to test the two ideas.[88] that he came out on that side.[89] There is no evidence at all for this. You read for instance Stephen Spender. Oh, Stephen Spender [laughter]. Stephen Spender, you know, that old Stalinist hack from the thirties who couldn’t even bear to be a Stalinist and who gave that up and then just sort of driveled on in the Times Literary Supplement. And he writes that there’s lots of proof that Shelley at the end of his life gave up his revolutionary ideals.That’s not what happened at all. Prometheus Unbound was written right at the end of his life. There are also all the great poems of 1819 including The Mask of Anarchy and other shorter poems including one that starts off, “An old mad, blind, despised and dying king.”[90] That’s not the line of a man who’s giving up the struggle. His attacks on the Castlereagh administration comes right at the end of his life. Those things happened. And the people that understand Shelley, understand that he would have gone on to develop these themes. The tragedy is that he did die when he did, otherwise he would have gone on to develop his ideas among the rising working-class movement that was taking place.

            One person who understood it, thankfully, is Karl Marx who was writing at the same time as all these drivellers who were mucking about in Horsham [laughter]. Or a little earlier at any rate. This book is the Franz Mehring biography of Marx.[91] One thing did come out of that dreadful series on Eleanor Marx that was on the television recently.[92] Only one or two tiny little scraps of information and importance came out. One of the things was that Marx and his family were great lovers of literature and weren’t people that looked back on literature in the way in which some sectarian people do: as though it were something all belonging to the bourgeois class, as if all real literature starts from the revolution. He was someone who looked back and reveled in the great literature that had been written. Quoting Mehring:

“After Marx had become permanently domiciled in London, English literature took first place and the tremendous figure of Shakespeare dominated the field. In fact, the whole family practiced what amounted to a Shakespearean cult. Unfortunately, Marx never at any time dealt with Shakespeare’s attitude toward the great questions of his day. Referring to Byron and Shelley, however, he declared that those who loved and understood those two poets must consider it fortunate that Byron died at the age of 36. For had he lived out his full span he would have undoubtedly have become a reactionary bourgeois. Whilst regretting on the other hand that Shelley died at the age of 29. For Shelley was a thorough revolutionary and would’ve remained in the van of socialism all his life.”[93]

He did, although dead, remain in the van of socialism.

          The greatness of that book by Richard Holmes is that it traces this other Shelley, that revolutionary Shelley, that Shelley who would have remained in the van of socialism all of his life. It traces that Shelley through the years that followed his death. It traces him through the period of the Chartists.[94] I have a book here, the nicest book I’ve got that is not on loan to anybody. This is a publication of Queen Mab, which is dated 1831.

          It was published without Shelley’s permission by a man called William Clark who was one of the many people at that time that started to publish literature on the streets, in the stalls, outside the ordinary publishing houses, without the necessary stamps and without the necessary government approval.[95] They sold books and essays by the millions. And this copy of Queen Mab was a book like that. It didn’t look like this in those days, it was just a leaflet which was dished out. Between 1821 and 1841 there were fourteen separate editions of Queen Mab published by working class publishers for working people. They were sometimes given away or sold at very cheap prices in bookstalls and places of work all around the places and the neighborhoods where working class people lived. No one knows how many copies were sold, but we have a better idea about how many editions there were. These were just the fourteen editions that Richard Holmes has discovered. But there were many, many more, no doubt, than that, including pirate editions of The Mask of Anarchy and the Address to the People on the Death of Princess Charlotte.[96]

          All these wonderful words were published not by the bourgeois publishers who on the whole tried to keep Shelley’s work for themselves and instigated all kinds of prosecutions against the people.[97] Richard Carlile[98] was hounded off the streets. He was prosecuted and sent to prison for three years for publishing Queen Mab. 

The radical publisher Richard Carlile. Shelley championed him and, later, Carlile championed Shelley.

          Richard Carlisle published all of Shelley’s work in his journal, The Republican. He also sold copies of Shelley’s works in Ireland. Richard Carlile spent years and years and years in Dorchester prison, still giving orders that these sorts of publications should be published.[99] That tradition goes all the way through the 1830s and through the 1840s and on. Thomas Cooper, the “Chartist Rhymer,” used to deal with the fact that many people could not read by going to the workers’ meetings and reading poetry. They read out Queen Mab, The Mask of Anarchy, “Men of England,” “1819” and the rest of Shelley’s radical poems. They used to read those things out to people and people used to learn them and pass them on to their families. And that’s a tradition which is varied from the bourgeois publishers, a tradition that comes down through that Bernard Shaw meeting in 1890 and right up to the earliest Communist movement in the 1920s when Shelley again was a great favourite.

          And I say the “earliest communist movement” in the 1920s, because the later communist movement does not find Shelley a favourite. Where’s the book? Here is a disgusting book by a man called David Daiches[100] [laughter] who is I think still a professor of literature somewhere or other. It was published in the good old days by the Left Book Club[101]; they published two hundred and fifty-seven books which is quite a considerable feat of publishing except so much of it is utter drivel. And here is the response to Shelley of what I think you might call the left/labour/communist tradition in 1938. Quoting Daiches’ Literature and Society:

Thomas Cooper, engraving by J. Cochran.

“In Shelley’s poetry, he’s continually stressing the inevitability of man’s natural goodness eventually destroying the bonds that enslave the world. He thinks chiefly of the ideal rather than the means for its attainment. Although later socialist thinkers may look on him as a forerunner, he is in no way a political thinker in the modern sense. He had the outlook on life of a sensitive and intelligent child. He never faced the real problems of earthly existence, though on the other hand he never consciously retired into a dream world. If he did spend time in an unreal world, he did not realize it; he thought it was the real world and judged accordingly.”[102]

          That is why Shelley, for all of his great lyrical faculty, is a poet that he finds sooner or later to be unsatisfying. This a book called Literature and Society. And that is the passage devoted to Shelley by a man who is part of a movement which had lost its lust for the activity of human beings, of real human beings; lost its enthusiasm and vigor in terms of the operation of masses of people. An intellectual movement which is cut off from the tradition of Thomas Cooper and the Chartists, Richard Carlile, Bernard Shaw and the early communists, even people like Willie Gallacher[103] who used to run around the Clyde shouting the poems of Shelley. And then there is a little review of Holmes’ book in the Morning Star[104] the other day which is even more revolting than David Daiches, because they too have lost the vigor and the enthusiasm which Shelley had for the people.

          And that really, ah, brings us to this meeting and why we’re here. We have forgotten that we are part of a tradition which goes back to Shelley. So, let me just end off by saying one or two things about the importance of that tradition and why it’s important that we talk and read about Shelley. See, I think we—most of us here—come out of a more modern political tradition, which is part of a sectarian world. A modern tradition where reaching people was not our problem because no one appeared to want to be reached. A tradition in which we were isolated from the masses. And as we were isolated from the masses, it became necessary for us to turn inward to people who shared the same, or roughly the same, revolutionary ideas. And we developed, therefore, a manner of speaking and writing and a language which is very much separated from the speaking or reading of the masses. And we isolated ourselves and developed what I like to call a kind of internal “bulletinese”—a sort of language which was always worried about the great hideous party line. We worried whether we were in order with the party line, and if we weren’t in order with the party line we knew we’d better trim our language and correct what we said so that is conformed to the party line. We worried about whether or not we had got the right way of saying things so that we wouldn’t get stabbed in the back by members of the IMG[105] or the SLL[106] who happened to be sitting around in the meeting. But there was no one real in the meeting at all. There was no one real in the meeting, and it was all unreal and therefore you had to develop a language that was unreal. We developed an absolutely disgusting party line filled with political bile and also a way of denouncing people. We became very, very good at denouncing other people. Always smashing them, exposing them: “alien-agents of the Pentagon.” We developed a way of talking about people as though they were hostile to us. And we thought that everyone was hostile to us. We came out of that tradition.

          Now everybody knows that this is changing. Changing very, very fast and changing faster than we can cope with sometimes. And the point is we have to develop a language which suits the change because we are for mobilizing the masses. We are for doing what Asia and Demogorgon did. But we can only do that if we develop a language which is suited for that purpose, a language which the people can understand. A language which has some bite and zest and enthusiasm. That’s what we have to do and that’s why I think reading great revolutionary poets like Shelley is fundamentally important. It is filled with all kinds of images, all kinds of similes and metaphors, ways of saying things; different ways of saying things. The great masters of language really understood language and could use it like great musicians use the piano. These are things we need to soak up. We need to really go back and soak it up. Particularly when those great masters of language are in line with our politics.

          And then I would say another thing. You see this happen when you see people talking and arguing with one another in the streets. You see them arguing about, I don’t know, say austerity or something like that. And they are talking in a normal fashion until they see somebody coming up, say a member of the Central Committee[107] or a member of some other faction or something of that kind. And then you absolutely, really do see people change in midstream. They were talking away about people’s children and their lives and they were trying to get them to understand something and trying to be on the level with them, and someone from the Central Committee comes along and they’ll suddenly snap into the old routine, bloody, ritualistic rhetoric. And then you see the worker they were talking to get that confused look of embarrassment. And they are thinking, “My God! What the hell is all this about? It’s nothing to do with me. I have to get away. I’ve found the perfect excuse to get away and pay no attention to this person.” These things matter. Yes, people say a lot of the time that Shelley is difficult to read. People often say his poetry is difficult to read. But it is worth it. The value that you get out of reading it is to be able to turn it around and use the language: the metaphors and the similes.

            And there is something else about the way we have grown up politically. I think because we[108] were so small and isolated from the outside world, we developed a skepticism.[109] This came from observing people who said that they were going to do things and then didn’t do those things. For example, politicians who promised they would do things after the election if they were elected to office and then did not do those things. Communist party people who were very sentimental about freedom and liberty but didn’t appear to be doing anything about freedom or liberty. And therefore, we developed a skepticism. A skepticism which, to some extent, shaped our language and our attitudes. We were skeptical all the time and we worried about the tendency to say one thing and do another and therefore we were able to grow out of that phase. It wasn’t a healthy thing. The fact that we’re here at all is because people held the line. They held their line through their skepticism and they were able to say “We don’t approve of that kind of thing, that bloody sentimentalism. And we don’t approve because that’s reformism and opportunism. We don’t go for those kinds of things.”

          But the problem now is much more serious than that. The problem is that there is a line drawn between skepticism and cynicism, and that line is an extremely narrow one. It’s very, very easy for the skeptic to topple over into being a cynic. And a cynic can never be a revolutionary. It is absolutely impossible for a cynic to be a revolutionary because they don’t see the possibilities—they don’t believe that it’s possible that working people can change their lives and change society. And therefore, there’s a danger that we might hold on to our skepticism and hold on, if you like, to what we believe to be the party line. If we do this there is a danger we will not undertake the task that’s most important for us, which is, among the working people of this country, to unlock the enthusiasm, the excitement that exists in every human being. And that’s what changes people more than anything else, just allowing people to be enthusiastic and to have the enthusiasm and the energy to change society. To come away from that dreary skepticism by which we on the left managed to keep ourselves together, during that period in which we were isolated from the people, and going to the masses with the enthusiasm, with the feeling, that society can be changed. That every militant in the factory can change the world.

        I was in a blanket factory the other day talking to a woman of fifty-nine and now crippled with arthritis. She was losing twenty-five pounds a month because she refused to take her pension so she could fight to save the factory.[110] You sit opposite this woman, and you feel that there is nothing that the stooges could do to curb her. Nothing. And you feel that we are absolutely together in the battle. Her enthusiasm was incredible. She was saying, “I want to fight! I’m not having these bastards on my back, I’m with you.” And then I felt a little bit embarrassed about saying who I was, where I was from and what paper I represented. Because I felt cut off from her fighting tradition. We have to find a way to harness the enthusiasm of people like her. I think enthusiasm is the centrepiece. All the time—enthusiasm.

          Of all the things about Shelley that really inspired people in the 160 years since his death, the thing that matters above all is his enthusiasm for the idea that the world can be changed. It shapes all his poetry. And when you come to read “Ode to the West Wind” where he writes about the “pestilence-stricken multitudes”[111] and the leaves being blown by the wind, then you understand that he sees the leaves as multitudes of people stricken by a pestilence. You begin to see his ideas, his enthusiasm and his love of life. He believed in life and he really felt that life is what mattered. That life could and should be better than it is. Could be better and should be better. Could and should be changed. That was the thing he believed in most of all.

          And the thing that make me most furious is when people say that he committed suicide. That he ran that ship into the storm on purpose. Nothing could be further from the truth. There he was in Leghorn[112] on the 8th of July 1822 rushing around and arranging his plans for a political quarterly with Leigh Hunt and rushing hurrying to get back to Jane Williams[113] and meet other people. The sky was beautiful, and the weather was good and he loved his boat. He loved life. He loved life all the time. And all the time that he loved it, he saw the way in which it was damaging masses and masses of people around him. And he saw the need to change it.

          It is a little like lying in bed on a Sunday morning with no meetings and no demonstrations to go to. And you think life is terrific. You’re lying there and you’re drinking your one cup of coffee a week, and you’re thinking, “well this is great” [laughter]. And the sun is coming through the window and you’re bantering with your children and you think “well, you know, life is pretty good, really. It’s pretty good. Everything is all right and I don’t have anything really to complain about.” And then you pick up the bloody Sunday Times or the Observer, and you read there about some people in Chile or in Cyprus or about some woman whose body has been broken at the hand of some torturer or executioner. And then you begin to feel the rage, the fury boiling up in you. You begin to feel that fury. But a light comes on that represents what could be and a light comes on that represents what should be. And you think about what could be and what should be on the one hand and what is, on the other hand, and it is intolerable. It has to be changed, and it can only be changed by the action of the masses.

The Casa Magni in San Terenzo where Shelley spent his last days.

          It was the same for Shelley basking in the sunlight in Leghorn[114] in 1819, coming down for breakfast, chatting to his family and enjoying life - thinking of the boat trip that he was gonna take that day, thinking of the winds and the sun, the stars. And suddenly, the papers come in from England and the papers tell the story of the massacre of women and children at Peterloo. And Shelley flies up into the attic in a fury. And raging and furious he writes The Mask of Anarchy and he didn’t have a Socialist Workers Party to activate, he didn’t have an organization and that was part of his problem—he had no one around him. But he had the ability to write. He had the ability to write an appeal for revolution, which all of us must feel.

Images from Michael Demson's Masks of Anarchy. Here we see Shelley reacting to the news of Peterloo. Buy this amazing graphic novel here.

‘Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number—

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you—

Ye are many—they are few.’”[115]

[Quoting Mask of Anarchy:]

            “‘And that slaughter to the Nation

            Shall steam up like inspiration,

            Eloquent, oracular

            A volcano heard afar.

            ‘And these words shall then become

            Like Oppression's thundered doom

            Ringing through each heart and brain,

            Heard again—again—again—

Paul Foot (1937-2004)

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My thanks to Jon Kerr for editorial assiatance. In 2017, Jon received his PhD from the University of Toronto having written a dissertation on Shelley.  Jon provided valuable editorial assistance in the finalization of this publication.  During the summer of 2017 I had previously published Foot's speech in three parts on my website. This edition is the first time the entire speech has been available in one place.  It was a gargantuan effort involving hundreds of hours of listening, researching and writing.  I dedicate this to the memory of the late, great Paul Foot - we miss you Paul, thank you.

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Notes

[1] This speech appears to be a variation of a paper Foot wrote in 1975 called “Shelley: The Trumpet of a Prophecy.” You can find this paper here. Another version was delivered as a speech in 1992 and can be found here.

[2] You can read his obituary here.

[3] It was selected by Julian Roach in The Guardian as one of the top 10 books about Shelley. You can enjoy an excellent review of Red Shelley, more of an appreciation, by William Keach in International Socialism, the journal of the Socialists Workers Party (of which Foot was a founding member).

[4] Geoffrey Ashe, Ghandi, New York: Stein and Day, 1968. 103-105. Art Young, Shelley and Non-Violence, The Hague: Mouton, 1975. 23. Roland Duerksen, Shelley: Political Writings, New York: Appelton-Century-Crofts, 1970. vii.

[5] Young, 163.

[6] Socialism.

[7] Foot is now going to expound on one of the major issues in Shelley studies: the fact that two very different versions of Shelley have appeared in the years after his death. One of these versions focused on his lyric and love poetry; the other focused on his radical political beliefs. In my notes, I will refer to them as the “Lyrical Shelley” and the “Radical Shelley.” You can read more about this here. It has been the subject of countless books and articles. Most recently, Michael Gavin weighed in on the extraordinary effect Mary Shelley’s early collection of Shelley’s works, entitled Posthumous Poems, has had on his reputation as a love poet.

[8] Foot is now about to relay what took place at two different meetings, held on the same day, to celebrate the centenary of Shelley’s birth. Foot’s account relies exclusively upon an article by George Bernard Shaw which appeared in the Albermarle Review, September 1892, called “Shaming the Devil About Shelley.” The first meeting took place in Horsham, near where Shelley was born. The organizers were launching a subscription to raise the funds build a free Shelley Library and Museum in Horsham. Libraries in those days were membership-only affairs and could be quite costly. The point behind a “free” library was to make it available to the working classes. The second took place the same evening in what Shaw described at the “easterly parish of St Luke’s.” This meeting, characterized by Shaw as a “proletarian celebration,” was called by G.W. Foote, the President of the National Secular Society, and was attended by members of the working class. The two meetings thus served as a point of contrast for Foot.

[9] Melvyn Bragg and Lady Antonia Fraser, members of the English “literati,” are clearly being lampooned here by Foot, held up as modern representatives of the Victorian upper classes.

[10] Foot is being derisive. Shelley’s father had disowned him for his atheism. Foot is suggesting that the people who came to the meeting came to worship the Lyrical Shelley, the one which Foot calls the “neutered, castrated Shelley.”

[11] “Shaming the Devil About Shelley,” in Pen Portraits and Reviews. London. Constable and Company 1932. Pages 236-246.

[12] Again, more heavy sarcasm from Foot.

[13] Referring to Shelley’s attacks on religion, such as The Necessity of Atheism.

[14] John Cordy Jeaffreson (1831-1901), author of the biography The Real Shelley (1885).

[15] “Shaming the Devil About Shelley,” page 241.

[16] Sir Edmund Goss (1849-1928) was an English man of letters who belonged to the Shelley Society. He was obviously not a favourite of Foot’s, and his Encyclopedia Britannica entry seems to suggest Foot did not miss his mark: “Unfortunately, Gosse was active just before the modern revolution in standards of scholarship and criticism, so that much of his critical and historical output now appears amateurish in its inaccuracies and carelessness.”

[17] Goss delivered the “keynote” speech on that occasion.

[18] He was in fact 29 when he died.

[19] The Home Office was formed in 1782. Among its many functions was the operation of the secret service.

[20] Foot is referring to the obituary that appeared in The Courier, a Tory newspaper.

[21] Foot’s point is that the people who idealized Shelley in the Victorian period were as bad as the people who vilified him during his life. In either case, Shelley loses, because the picture of him that is presented to the world is false.

[22] Richard Arthur Hughes (1900-1976).

[23] See Quigley’s Introduction to her edited volume Selected Poetry, first published by Penguin in 1956.

[24] Foot here refers to a 1951 edition of Shelley’s writings edited by Nonesuch Press, entitled Shelley: Selected Poetry, Prose, and Letters.

[25] See Glover’s introduction to the Nonesuch Press collection.

[26] Edward Dowden was the author of The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, published in 1886. A controversial figure in Shelley studies, he was the first to have gained access to Shelley’s manuscripts and letters, thanks to Sir Percy Florence’s wife, Lady Shelley. Fiercely protective of Shelley’s reputation, and a proponent of the Lyrical Shelley, she never actually showed Dowden the manuscripts, merely her own edited, and, as some alleged, perhaps forged versions. Nonetheless, Dowden’s book was the first to reveal what Matthew Arnold (in his essay “Ineffectual Angel”) euphemistically called Shelley’s “irregular relations.” Oxford’s Regius Professor of History, Edward Freeman, wrote, “After reading Dowden it was no longer possible to read Shelley on love and liberty with the same pleasure as before and no longer possible to study him without dragging unpalatable biographical facts into the critical assessments. The poetry was tarnished by the biography.” (See Freeman’s 1887 speech “Literature and Language”). For Foot, Dowden’s sin was to ignore the Radical Shelley in favour of the Lyrical Shelley.

[27] From Glover’s introduction to his 1896 edition of The Life of Percy Shelley, page 213.

[28] On page 289 of Glover’s The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 2, published by Keagan and Paul in 1886.

[29] The four-volume edition of Shelley’s poetry issued by Mary in 1839.

[30] In Hellas, Shelley maintains that England needs the same sort of revolutionary inspiration that was influencing the Greek fight for freedom.

[31] I haven’t been able to find Foot’s source here.

[32] Shaw has refrained from debating the vision of Shelley presented by the Horsham organizers for fear of jeopardizing the successful launch of the fund to build a free library for the working people.

[33] This is not quite correct. As Shaw tells it, he left early in order to catch the train to London so that he might attend the other meeting. Further, there was no such statue yet built; it was in fact a relief that had been proposed by the Horsham committee. Shaw described it as follows: “a relief representing Shelley in a tall hat, Bible in hand, leading his children on Sunday morning to the church of his native parish” (page 243).

[34] Foot now returns to the “proletarian meeting” which took place in London in St Luke’s parish.

[35] This is also not accurate. It was the President of the National Secular Society, G.W. Foote who recited the poem. See Shaw’s account of this in “Shaming the Devil about Shelley,” page 244. For obvious rhetorical purposes, Foot would have preferred the poem to be recited by heart by a worker.

[36] Shelley’s “Men of England,” lines 1-8.

[37] This may have resonated profoundly with Foot as he also came from an upper-class background.

[38] Foot is referring to the fact that Shelley refused to participate in the ritual hazing to which new students were subjected.

[39] Foot refers here to Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh (1769-1822), British Foreign Secretary and Chief Secretary for Ireland; and John Scott, Lord Eldon (1751-1838). As Lord Chancellor, Scott denied Shelley custody of his children following his first wife's suicide.

[40] Lines 5-29.

[41] Foot is referring to “An Address to the People on The Death of the Princess Charlotte.” This was a political essay written by Shelley in 1817 that was not published until 1843. Shelley contrasted the outpouring of grief over the death of Princess Charlotte in childbirth with the complete absence of public concern for the execution of three laborers who were hanged and beheaded for taking part in the Derby Insurrection.

[42] You can read more about the Derby Insurrection here.

[43] The Making of the English Working Class can be purchased here. But why not order it through your local bookshop?

[44] Princess Charlotte of Wales (1796-1817), Daughter of King George IV, who died following childbirth.

[45] From Shelley’s “Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte.”

[46] That is, that authority takes its sustenance from the exploitation of the working class and from the wealth that is robbed from the working class

[47] Foot now tries to distinguish between the radicalism of Shelley and what he calls the “reformism” of Godwin. He ridicules Godwin repeatedly for avoiding the real issues afflicting the working classes. Foot also contrasts Godwin’s bourgeoisie-friendly “fireside” reform programme with Shelley’s understanding that change can only come when the people revolt.

[48] Foot’s point is that the book was too expensive for the working class and was therefore unlikely to be read by anyone likely to cause trouble for the government. It could therefore be ignored by the authorities.

[49] Shelley visited Ireland in 1812. Most biographers and commentators treat this excursion as a youthful indiscretion and pay little heed to it. Kenneth Neil Cameron, however, writing in The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical, accords it very serious attention and believes it constitutes an essential stage in the development of Shelley’s radicalism. William Keach also has an excellent article on this phase of Shelley’s career. Cameron advances much evidence to suggest that the Irish themselves treated his ideas quite seriously. He writes: “But his trip to Ireland was not in vain, for Irishmen later looked back with pride that one of the great English poets had joined in their cause, and were surprised at his insight; and the Irish at the time, while aware of his errors and limitations, regarded him with sympathy.”

[50] Foot paraphrases Godwin here.

[51] This is from a letter Shelley wrote to Godwin on 24 February 1812.

[52] You can tell that Shelley has Godwin in mind in Queen Mab, I think, because of the reference to the fireside.

[53] Revolt of Islam, Canto VIII, Stanza VII.

[54] Revolt of Islam, Canto II, Stanza XLVIII.

[55] Revolt of Islam, Canto VIII, Stanza XVI.

[56] Foot is referring back to the people who live in the district of Horsham whom he ridiculed in Part 1.

[57] Foot misquotes from Shelley’s poem “Love’s Philosophy,” lines 15-16.

[58] From note 111 to Queen Mab.

[59] Foot is likely referring to Shelley’s highly controversial separation from Harriet, his first wife.

[60] Foot means that Shelley captured his philosophical ideas about equality in his writings, but perhaps not in his life.

[61] Foot is referring to a famous and controversial passage in his Preface to Prometheus Unbound in which Shelley suggests he is writing for a tiny elite of educated readers in England: “My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarize the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that, until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness.”

[62] Foot is referring to his own upper-class background. Foot’s grandfather (Isaac Foot) and uncles (Dingle and John Foot) were Liberal MPs, and a third uncle (Michael Foot) was leader of the Liberal Party. Foot’s father, Hugh Foot, Lord Caradon, was a diplomat and colonial servant.

[63] Foot is referring to Shelley’s well know concern that too much change, too fast, could result in bloody revolution. Shelley was likely thinking about the end-result of the French Revolution. There is an excellent discussion of Shelley’s fear of “mob violence” in both The Red Shelley and Kenneth Neil Cameron’s The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical.

[64] Foot is referring to George Eliot’s famous novel, Felix Holt: The Radical. The novel is set in England in the early 1830s, at the time of agitation for passage of the Reform Bill, a measure designed to reform the electoral system in Britain. You can read more about this here:.

[65] Foot is being heavily sarcastic here. He is suggesting that people like Holt (and perhaps Shelley) view elections as tantamount to riots.

[66] Clive Jenkins was a wealthy Labour MP whom Foot lampoons here. You can read his obituary at this link:

[67] Booth was another Labour MP. He was a “respected leftwing politician of high principle who sacrificed his own parliamentary career to his political beliefs,” as the Guardian wrote in its obituary to Booth in 2010. You can read his obituary here. I wasn’t able to find out why Foot chose to attack him.

[68] Foot’s point is that liberal-minded members of the upper classes, like Shelley and Eliot, flirt with radicalism, but then panic at the idea that they might unleash a violent mob that might ultimately undermine the goal of social change.

[69] Foot here mocks one of the most famous aspects of The Mask of Anarchy: Shelley’s idea that violent oppression should be met with massive, non-violent protest. Shelley instructs, for example, that “if then the tyrants dare / Let them ride among you there, / Slash and stab, maim and hew” (lines 344-346). This was an idea that inspired generations of pacifists; however, apparently Foot finds this form of passive resistance preposterous.

[70] Foot is suggesting that Shelley had another side, a side which understood that violence might be necessary when opposing tyranny. It is possible to see this in Prometheus Unbound, which Foot is about to discuss. This is one of the more controversial aspects of Shelley’s philosophy: did he advocate or promote the violent response to tyranny or not?

[71] Foot here quotes from a letter Shelley wrote to Hitchener on 26 December 1811. Shelley would have been 19 when he wrote it.

[72] Foot refers here to the Victorians who he has mocked earlier in his speech.

[73] Foot refers back to the Mask of Anarchy and Shelley’s many other pacifist statements.

[74] In Swellfoot the Tyrant, the pigs represent the priests and oppressors.

[75] Skegness is a seaside town near Lincoln in the English Midlands that was home to many socialist and Marxist meetings.

[76] Foot now launches into a heavily sarcastic version of the Promethean myth as taught by his school masters in England.

[77] Foot is referring to a trilogy of plays by Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and Prometheus the Fire-Bringer. Only the first survives. Shelley derived much of his understanding of the second and third from Cicero’s commentary on it. From Wikipedia: “In Prometheus Unbound, Heracles frees Prometheus from his chains and kills the eagle that had been sent daily to eat the Titan's perpetually regenerating liver. Perhaps foreshadowing his eventual reconciliation with Prometheus, we learn that Zeus has released the other Titans whom he imprisoned at the conclusion of the Titanomachy. In Prometheus the Fire-Bringer, the Titan finally warns Zeus not to lie with the sea nymph Thetis, for she is fated to give birth to a son greater than the father. Not wishing to be overthrown, Zeus would later marry Thetis off to the mortal Peleus; the product of that union will be Achilles, Greek hero of the Trojan War. Grateful for the warning, Zeus finally reconciles with Prometheus.”

[78] Foot could be referring either to Prometheus Bound, the only surviving play Aeschylus wrote about Prometheus, or Prometheus Unbound, of which only fragments now exist.

[79] Foot is referring to Shelley, The Pursuit. This book was published in 1975 and was the first full-life biography to emerge about Shelley since the 1940s. It created something of a sensation because of the favourable, serious treatment it accorded Shelley, whose reputation had been in decline for decades.

[80] The “situation” is Prometheus’s predicament: he is eternally chained to the rock by Jupiter. Foot’s point here is that Asia is the sort of revolutionary heroine he had been talking about earlier. She isn’t in love with Prometheus in a romantic, “Victorian” manner: she is militantly in love with him and wants to do something about his predicament.

[81] Prometheus Unbound is what Shelley called a “lyrical drama.” Critics have fussed over this for decades: is it primarily a poem or a play? Foot simply calls it a “play-poem.”

[82] The question of what Demogorgon represents has bedeviled critics for centuries. Foot mocks the problems they have had in figuring it out, suggesting that they have all come to trite, non-revolutionary conclusions. He then maps out his own straightforward interpretation.

[83] Foot quotes from Prometheus Unbound, Act 2, Scene 4, lines 1-128.

[84] Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, pages 504-505.

[85] Foot is mocking the non-radical, non-political response to Demogorgon. He suggests that many scholars acknowledge the beauty of the language but fail to ask the proper questions. If asked political questions, these readers deflect to mythic nonsense.

[86] Foot misquotes Asia’s description of the “wild-eyed charioteer” in Prometheus Unbound, Act 2, Scene 4, line 132.

[87] Foot is referring back to Shelley’s statement in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound, where he says that he is writing the poem for the members of the societal elite.

[88] These two ideas are violent revolution (on one hand) and peaceful revolution (on the other).

[89] That is, the side of the elites.

[90] Foot is referring to “England, 1819.”

[91] Once considered the classic biography of Marx, today some consider it more hagiography than biography. Published in German in 1918, it was finally translated into English in 1935.

[92] Eleanor Marx was the daughter of Karl Marx and was married to Edward Aveling. In 1888, she and her husband delivered two lectures to the Shelley Society entitled “Shelley’s Socialism.” Copies are virtually impossible to obtain, and the one version that was produced contained only the first lecture. You can find my article on it here. Later in his passage, Foot uses the term “sectarian” which he uses in the sense of “factional.” Marxism by this point had split into dozens if not hundreds of factions.

[93] From Mehrig’s Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, published by Routledge in 2003. Page 504.

[94] Chartism was one of the principal vehicles by which Shelley’s radical tradition was passed down to the modern world. From the Encyclopedia Britannica: Chartism refers to the “British working-class movement for parliamentary reform named after the People’s Charter, a bill drafted by the London radical William Lovett in May 1838. It contained six demands: universal manhood suffrage, equal electoral districts, vote by ballot, annually elected Parliaments, payment of members of Parliament, and abolition of the property qualifications for membership. Chartism was the first movement both working class in character and national in scope that grew out of the protest against the injustices of the new industrial and political order in Britain. While composed of working people, Chartism was also mobilized around populism as well as clan identity.” Read more here.

[95] Foot is possibly confused: the last British law requiring that publishers obtain government approval before printing a work expired in 1694. When Queen Mab was first published by Shelley in 1813, he printed 250 copies. Approximately 70 were bound and distributed personally by Shelley. William Clark, who was a bookseller, stored the rest in his shop. Years later, in 1821, Clark distributed the remaining copies without Shelley’s permission through the black market. Government agents confiscated the copies, arrested Clark, and sent him to prison for 4 months.

[96] You can find this here.

[97] Foot may be conflating two issues here. On the whole, there were very few copyright-based prosecutions against the pirate editions of Shelley’s work. On the other hand, the government actively prosecuted anyone publishing words considered seditious or threatening to the government, which basically meant ALL of Shelley’s poetry and essays. Much of this activity took place after Shelley’s death.

[98] Richard Carlile (1790-1843) was a republican and a radical who championed freedom of the press. He spent many years in jail for his publishing activities, which included publishing most of Shelley’s radical poetry and essays. Read more about him here.

[99] Foot is alluding to the fact that even while he was in prison, Carlile managed to publish his journal, The Republican.

[100] David Daiches (1912- 2005) was a well-respected Scottish literary historian and literary critic, scholar, and writer. He wrote extensively on English literature, Scottish literature and Scottish culture. read more about him here.

[101] Foot, in true polemical form, pours scorn on what was one of the most important leftist publishing initiatives of the 1930s. From Wikipedia: “Pioneered by Victor Gollancz, The Left Book Club offered a monthly book choice, for sale to members only, as well as a newsletter that acquired the status of a major political magazine. It also held an annual rally. Membership peaked at 57,000, but after the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact of 1939, it disowned its large Communist element, and subsequent years of paper-rationing, during and after the war, led to further decline. It ceased publishing in 1948.” Read more here.

[102] From Literature and Society, pages 198-199.

[103] William Gallacher (1881-1965) was a Scottish trade unionist, activist, and communist. He was one of the leading figures of the Shop Stewards' Movement in wartime Glasgow (the “Red Clydeside” period) and a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He served two terms in the House of Commons as the last Communist Member of Parliament. Read more about him here.

[104] The Morning Star is the only socialist daily newspaper published in England. It was originally called The Daily Worker and was first published in 1930.

[105] The International Marxist Group (IMG) was a Trotskyist group in Britain between 1968 and 1982. Foot for most of his life had a deep and abiding affection of Trotsky. It was the British Section of the Fourth International. It had around 1,000 members and supporters in the late 1970s. In 1980, it had 682 members; by 1982, when it changed its name to the Socialist League, membership had fallen to 534. Read more here.

[106] Socialist Labour League was an openly Trotskyist organization, although most of its members remained active in the Labour Party. The SLL was formally announced at the end of February 1959. Membership was “open to all who want to see the vigorous prosecution of the class struggle and the achievement of working class power.” Read more here.

[107] Foot is referring to senior members of the party hierarchy.

[108] I am not sure who Foot is referring to. He might be alluding simply to the leftwing movement in England at large. 

[109] In a difficult passage that is tied very much to the circumstances of the time, Foot now discusses the atmosphere on the left from the 1930s through the 1970s. His point is that the left had abandoned action for rhetoric; the left became divorced from (and hence isolated from) the people; the left became “sentimental.” This last charge is a curious one. I think he means the left was attached to ideas of freedom but lacked the will to do anything about it. He asserts that this pattern of behaviour caused more modern leftists to become skeptical and demanded change. And out of this skepticism grew the modern labour movement. 

[110] She would have foregone her pension so that she could remain employed and hence continue to work as a union organizer.

[111] From “Ode to the West Wind,” line 5.

[112] Modern-day Livorno.

[113] This is a rather risqué assertion. Jane Williams was the wife of his friend Edward (who perished with him). In the last months of his life, Shelley developed something of an infatuation with her, despite the fact they all lived together under one roof in San Terenzo: Mary, Percy, Edward and Jane. Shelley wrote poetry to her and Mary was quite deeply aggrieved by this. Whether they conducted an actual sexual affair in unknown. But Foot’s point here is that Shelley was very much engaged in life and had much to look forward to.

[114] Foot is now talking about the moment Shelley heard of the massacre we now call “Peterloo.” This event took place not in Livorno, but rather in San Terenzo at the Villa Magni.

[115] Shelley, Mask of Anarchy, 360-372.

“What Art and Poetry Can Teach Us about Food Security”: A TED Talk on John Keats and John Constable by Professor Richard Marggraf Turley.

In his TED Talk “What art and poetry can teach us about food security,” Professor Richard Marggraf Turley dives deep into two classic works of British Romanticism: John Keats’ poem “To Autumn” (1819) and John Constable’s painting The Hay Wain (1821). Both present picturesque scenes from the English countryside that, on initial glance, appear far removed from the period’s volatile political debates. But Professor Turley encourages us to look closer. Both works, he suggests, bear the mark of one of the major social problems of the time: hunger. Both Keats and Constable lived through times in which the English countryside underwent considerable change: food prices, growing at a rapid rate, brought wealthy speculators to England’s agricultural areas, many of whom bought up large swaths of the land. The results were devastating: families who had tilled the ground for generations found themselves pushed off the land as early versions of industrial farming took root. Mass unemployment ensued, inflated food prices soared even higher, and much of the country went hungry. 

Constable's The Hay Wain (1821), completed a year after the publication of Keats' great poem, "To Autumn" 

          As Professor Turley fleshes out the deeper layers of each work, he shows us how even the most seemingly apolitical subjects, like a solitary artist’s contemplation of nature, bear the weight of major political controversies. He also shows us how these artists can help us to have our own conversations about hunger and poverty today: in our time as in the Romantic period, many in the middle and lower classes regularly struggle to put food on the table. Have a listen to Professor Turley’s talk to learn more about how writers like Keats and painters like Constable can help us face our greatest obstacles, as food waste, soil erosion, and economic turmoil create a whole new set of hunger problems in the twenty-first century.

Richard Marggraf Turley is Aberystwyth University's Professor of Engagement with the Public Imagination. He has published and taught widely on the Romantics, and he is one of the organisers of the International Keats Conference. He is also a blues guitarist and velocipedist.

Ginevra: A Shelley-Inspired Animation by Tess Martin and Max Rothman. By Jonathan Kerr

As Shelley enthusiasts, we are living through very exciting times. The bicentenaries marking the Shelleys’ legendary summer at Villa Diodati, the publication of Frankenstein, the Peterloo Massacre, and the composition of some of P.B.’s finest writing have brought with them a whole slew of Shelley commemorations. The 2017 Shelley Conference—the first of its kind since 1992—offered fascinating new perspectives for understanding the Shelleys and the issues that most dearly affected them. New graphic novels by Michael Demson and “Polyp” recreate some of the most pivotal events shaping Percy’s life and writing; feature-length films (here and here), a television production, and even a fashion show have found innovative ways to reimagine the Shelleys' life and times. Whether you’re a Shelley specialist, a costume-drama fanatic, a history buff, or a casual reader, the wave of interest in the Shelleys will certainly have something for you!

Michael Demson's graphic novel Masks of Anarchy (2013) tells the story of the Peterloo Massacre and Shelley's response to it.

            I recently had the opportunity to sit down and talk with two filmmakers who have contributed something truly remarkable to the Shelley revival. Tess Martin and Max Rothman have created Ginevra (2017), a short animated film that beautifully recreates one of Percy’s poems (also titled “Ginevra”) about the marriage and death of a young Italian woman. Created in cut-out animation with a voiceover narrator reciting lines from the original poem, Ginevra reimagines Shelley’s story, picking up where blanks appear in the unfinished manuscript. As it does so, it takes Shelley’s story in a bold, imaginative new direction.

            I want to get to what Tess and Max had to say about "Ginevra"—what attracted them to Shelley, and what made them want to recreate this little-known poem. First, however, I want to introduce you to Ginevra herself, and to the legend that has fascinated storytellers from the Renaissance to the present. 

            Over the centuries, the story of Ginevra has come together like an old wall, the kind you might see lining the streets of an ancient city. Early stories—our wall’s base—first emerge over the Renaissance as a Florentine legend about a woman named Ginevra degli Almieri. There were many stories of Ginevra circulating, but the most important one to Shelley, and the animation film it inspired, comes down to us from Marco Lastri's L'Osservatore Fiorentino, first published in 1776-78. In Lastri's telling, Ginevra is betrothed by her father to a nobleman named Francesco Agolanti. Ginevra lives unhappily with her husband for several years until, one day, relatives find her collapsed and unresponsive. Thinking that Ginevra has died, relatives arrange a funeral and lay the young woman to rest in a cathedral. Ginevra is not dead, however; after awakening in her tomb, Ginevra manages to escape the crypt and quickly heads for home. What follows is surprisingly comic by the standards of urban legends: thought to be a ghost by both her husband and father, Ginevra is refused entry to both households and left an exile on Florence’s streets. She eventually visits Antonio, her former lover, who promptly takes the destitute woman in. Ginevra’s husband, soon informed of the recent turn of events, angrily petitions a Florentine court for restitution; however, since Ginevra had been declared legally dead, the marriage had already been nullified. Ginevra, meanwhile, has been given “second life,” and is free to remarry. She and Antonio marry and, according to Lastri's story, live happily ever after. 

"Ginevra degli Almieri," a Renaissance urban legend, tells of the burial and "afterlife" of a Florentine woman. (Caption: Antoine Wiertz, The Premature Burial, 1854.)

            Mary and Percy read Lastri's strange tale, in addition to other Italian legends about premature entombment and "resurrection." A cursory glance through whatever Shelley volume may reside in your library will give you a sense of just how deep ran Shelley's appreciation for Dark Age tales of horror and the macabre! 

            As Shelley engages with this particular story, he transforms it in really interesting ways. Unlike Lastri's heroine, Shelley’s Ginevra is not a victim of superstition or medical malpractice; rather, she dies under mysterious circumstances. Shelley writes Ginevra's life and death in a deliberately ambiguous and open-ended fashion: is Ginevra murdered by her husband on account of her love affair with Antonio? Does Ginevra, dejected about her forced marriage, choose to end her life? However we choose to read Ginevra's story, it bears the mark of some of Shelley's most characteristic preoccupations as a writer: the need to confront the weight that age-old customs and their institutions place upon people's self-conception, worldview, and decisions; the challenges involved overcoming power structures and living a self-determined life; and the especially oppressive conditions that European societies placed upon the most vulnerable, like (in Ginevra's case) women and the young. 

            Whatever we choose to make of Ginevra's mysterious fate, the dirge recited at Ginevra's funeral hints at some sort of rebirth for the heroine. Like Lastri's version of the story, Shelley’s poem gestures to a second life for Ginevra, then, although what that might mean is left unclear. As Shelley cryptically writes,

"She is still, she is cold
On the bridal couch,
One step to the white deathbed,
And one to the bier,
And one to the charnel—and one, oh where?"

            Ginevra (2017), the latest addition to our wall, weaves the Renaissance urban legend and the Romantic poem together. In a way, it “completes” Shelley’s poem by filling in scenes where the manuscript breaks off. But it also contributes something totally original to this centuries-old tale. Ginevra might strike you as both very historical and very current. I won’t give you many details about the short film, since I don't want to spoil it; you should watch it for yourself and form your own experience with this little gem. But I will give you a little bit of the discussions I’ve recently had with two people from the Ginevra team: Tess Martin, the director, and Max Rothman, the producer. Tess and Max opened up about what drew them to Shelley's little-known poem and why they were inspired to complete Ginevra's transition from a bit of Italian folklore, to a forgotten classic of British Romanticism, to a work of animated film.

          Ginevra came together with the spirit of collaboration in mind—fitting, given the story’s layered history. Shelley's poem first drew the interest of Max, a film producer who previously worked with NBC’s news department. He mentioned to me that the poem was perfect for the Campfire Poetry Project, a new initiative he’s working on that brings older poetry together with new art forms like animation, painting, and dance. The poem has a brooding atmosphere that Max recognized would lend itself nicely to visual illustration (the beautiful stills included below give you a nice idea of this); the unfinished poem also has a number of gaps that could free up an animator to take the story in interesting new directions. 

A still from Ginevra.

            Max brought the poem up with Tess, the director behind Ginevra. Shelley’s poem was one of 10 or 12 they discussed working on together. She, like Max, was attracted to the poem’s cliff-hanger ending. “It is interesting to think how Shelley would have finished his poem had he himself not died suddenly at sea,” she said. “In his poem, a bride dies on her wedding night. Would he have had her resurrect?”

More from Ginevra.

            After doing some research into Shelley’s “Ginevra” and the Italian folk stories that inspired it, Tess set to work adding her own unique angle to the story. Ginevra’s fate is very different in all three versions, but all three also deal, in one way or another, with Ginevra’s rebirth into a new kind of life. I brought up with Tess how preoccupied Shelley was with forms of Old World tyranny, and particularly with the violence that marriage institutions permitted men to inflict against women and children—The Cenci, “Ginevra,” and Queen Mab all come to mind. Is this something that Tess wanted to explore as she depicted Ginevra’s death and rebirth? “Definitely there’s a feminist angle,” she told me, something that Tess also noticed in the Renaissance urban legend. In the original story, Ginevra finds a way to avoid her forced marriage, although “she still had to marry someone”; by contrast, something far more independent and strange awaits Tess’s Ginevra.

            Max noted how interested he is in the overlap between the older kinds of stories told by poets and the newer techniques adopted by today’s filmmakers. “They’re working with the same storytelling archetypes we use now,” he says. In Ginevra’s case, the overlap is thematic as well. There’s something sadly current about Tess and Max’s animation, despite the old feel of Shelley’s language and the film’s Renaissance setting. All fairy-tales (and Ginevra certainly has a fairy-tale quality, despite its R-rating!) are timeless to one degree or another, since they are “about people trying to escape oppressors and be free,” Tess says.

Tess mentioned to me that for version of Ginevra's story, she wanted to evoke the tale's original Renaissance setting.

Tess had Blade Runner (1982) in mind when creating Ginevra. 

            When I asked Tess about whether she had any other films in mind when making Ginevra, she gave me an interesting one: Blade Runner. It surprised me initially, but it made more sense the more I thought about it. In Blade Runner, the more we look at the hyper-modern (or futuristic) problems encountered by the movie’s central figures, the more we realize that these problems—colonialism, gender inequality, the hubristic desire for too much knowledge or power—are in fact very old ones. It is just this interplay between history and the present that might have attracted Shelley to the first stories told about Ginevra degli Almieri. Shelley’s writing often captures the paradoxical sense that his period is both liberated from, and dominated by, history. This paradox also follows the story of Ginevra through the ages: a proto-feminist and victim of Old World violence, her story evokes both hope and fear about people's prospects for leading self-determined lives and creating change in the world.

           How then would Shelley have finished his poem? Would Ginevra have emerged triumphant, liberated from her time and evolved into something "rich and strange" (to borrow lines from Shelley's epitaph)? Would Shelley have given us "Ginevra Unbound"? Or would the poem capture the possibility that history might be too strong for any one hero to combat on their own?

          I, for one, am happy that these questions are left unresolved in Shelley's great, mysterious poem. From the gaps and fragments of Shelley's original have emerged new, exciting ways of engaging with his story. Tess and Max have returned to a classic Shelley poem, but they have also taken their heroine into bold and unpredictable territory. Looking back, in other words, has enabled them to imagine a new kind of future—for Ginevra, certainly, and perhaps for others as well. This, I think, would have made the Romantic rebel proud.

Jonathan Kerr is a university teacher and writer. He has recently completed his PhD from the University of Toronto with specialization in Shelley and other Romantics.

Tess Martin is an animator and film writer based in the Netherlands. She has received numerous grants, prizes and artist residencies in support of her work, which can be seen at festivals and in galleries worldwide. Learn more about Tess’ work here.

Max Rothman is a producer, editor, and filmmaker based in New York. He is the founder of Monticello Park Productions, a film production company that works with established and emerging auteurs from around the world. You can find more about Max’s work here.

Since its premiere in 2017, Ginevra has screened at a number of prominent film festivals and won several awards in film animation. Watch and learn more about Ginevra here. 

"Ginevra," left incomplete on Shelley's death in 1822, was first published in Posthumous Poems (1824), a collection of Percy's poetry put together by Mary Shelley. You can read the poem in its entirety here. 

Professor Michael Demson on the Real-World Impact of Shelley's Writing. A Summary by Jonathan Kerr.

Michael Demson, “‘Let a great Assembly be’: Percy Shelley’s ‘The Mask of Anarchy,’” published in The European Romantic Review, Volume 22, Number 5, p. 641-665

a précis by Jonathan Kerr.

---

In “‘Let a great Assembly be,'” Michael Demson unearths powerful evidence for the real-world impact of Shelley’s writing. Many literary scholars throughout history have dismissed Shelley’s politics as naïve, out-of-touch, or disingenuous, a kind of adolescent posturing. By contrast, Demson not only reasserts Shelley’s deep commitment to radical causes; he also demonstrates that Shelley’s political poetry had concrete social impact in the decades and centuries following the poet’s death. Far from an elite writer speaking only to learned readers, Shelley used his poetry to expose and redress problems afflicting everyday people—and this effort paid off.

The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), whose labour activism was influenced by Shelley's writing.

            Demson makes his case by investigating the role Shelley’s writing played in America’s early twentieth-century unions, and New York’s International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) in particular. Shelley’s poetry, Demson argues, gave American workers a kind of writing that helped them to understand the political and economic forces to which they were subjected. “The Mask of Anarchy” was especially important in this context: written in easy-to-understand language, this poem attacks the power imbalances that helped to keep the powerful empowered and the poor disenfranchised. The conditions that made this sort of thing possible when Shelley lived—corrupt legal systems, unequal access to education, and working conditions that kept labourers underpaid and vulnerable—remained largely unchanged a century later in America. This is why, Demson alleges, a poem like “The Mask of Anarchy” could act as such a catalyzing force for New York’s industrial workers. In Demson’s words, “the language of ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ became the common tongue among workers, not only articulating their miserable conditions in a manner that brought them together, but also providing the terms of and for their protest” (651). As Demson suggests here, a poem like “The Mask of Anarchy” not only offered common people a language for understanding their problems, but also helped workers to build a sense of community from culture and shared political goals.

Pauline Newman (), whose labour activism was influenced by "The Mask of Anarchy."

            No figure in New York’s labour movement was more influential than Pauline Newman (1887-1986) for organizing workers and forcing workplace reform. At the same time, no writer was more important to Newman’s efforts than Percy Shelley. Newman, born in modern-day Lithuania to Jewish parents, fought anti-Semitic and misogynistic laws in her home country and America to win herself an education; following the Newmans’ move to New York City’s Lower East Side, she worked at several factories in order to help her family stay afloat; in fact, Newman was just nine years old when she took her first job. This experience gave her a first-hand understanding of the dismal conditions afflicting lower-class workers. As she worked long hours in New York’s factory grind, Newman taught herself English and quickly became interested in Socialism. While still in her early twenties, Newman rose to prominence as an organizer for the ILGWU, helping to lead the cause toward unionization in America’s blue-collar industries. It was around this time that Newman also became introduced to Shelley’s writing by an English professor at New York’s City College.

            As Demson shows, Newman believed that true change for workers required not only new laws and systems of regulation, but education and literacy: these were the tools required for achieving a cultural (and not merely legislative) sea change. Newman helped to organize union reading groups that brought workers (and particularly female workers) together. Shelley was an especially popular author for these reading groups. This is because poems like “The Mask of Anarchy” addressed the major problems affecting labourers in Shelley’s time and in Newman’s: low pay, dangerous working conditions, and degrading treatment by employers. But by bringing people together through culture, Demson argues, Shelley also inspired class pride and even helped to build bridges between New York’s immigrant populations.

            Pauline Newman was not the only influential unionist who championed Shelley. Demson points out that Shelley’s writings were also extremely popular subjects of study at the Workers’ University, an institution founded in 1918 by the ILGWU. Demson writes that “Shelley’s poetry was taught at the… Workers’ University to hundreds of laborers as the first poet in history to voice their struggles” (646). This helped to build the growing image of Shelley as a poet of the people, and his writings increasingly acted as a source of education, community-building, and protest for workers across America. Shelley’s influence on these circles of labour organizers and reformers leads Demson to a powerful conclusion: “‘The Mask of Anarchy’ played a very real role to bring about substantive change in the… realities of countless laborers in a time of political crisis” (646).

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Cell from Michael Demson's, Masks of Anarchy

            Demson argues that Shelley was not writing primary for the downtrodden of his own time: rather, “Shelley may have conceived of the reception of ‘The Mask of Anarchy,’ and his commitment to reform, in a larger… historical framework” (644)—that is to say, when Shelley wrote, he may have had in mind future communities of readers, taking up his revolutionary call generations after his own death. Shelley’s readers in the workers’ unions and universities explored by Demson answered such a call. As they did so, they confirmed Shelley’s view that the truth of a work like “The Mask of Anarchy” means that its power will be felt not only in its own time, but in the decades and centuries after.

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Want more? In Masks of Anarchy, a graphic novel published by Verso Books, Demson gives us a fictionalized account of how Shelley’s great poem inspired reformers and changed history. You can find it at local book stores everywhere; you can also find more about Demson’s novel here.

Jonathan Kerr has recently obtained his PhD in English from the University of Toronto. His research explores changing ideas about nature and human nature in the writings of Shelley and his contemporaries. He is currently at Mount Alison University on a post doc.

Frankenstein, a Stage Adaptation. Review by Anna Mercer

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Directed by Donald T. Sanders. A Production of Ensemble for the Romantic Century. Performed at the Irene Diamond Stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center, New York City.

A review by Anna Mercer.

The last stage production of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein I saw was a wonderful experience. The Royal Opera House’s ballet version of the novel was captivating and reflected the text’s themes of pursuit and terror with a striking intensity.[i] I’m always wary of adaptations of things I love, but after my positive experience at the ballet in London, I decided to go along to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when I was visiting New York. This new production by Ensemble for the Romantic Century was held in the Pershing Square Signature Center, a lovely venue. But the play itself was a disappointment overall, with only a few redeeming features.

The Royal Opera's adaptation of Frankenstein, which ran from 2015-16.

            One of the many differences between this play and the ballet was the inclusion of Mary Shelley herself as a character. It is always exciting to hear Mary Shelley’s words read aloud on stage, and in this case it was not just the text of her “hideous progeny,” but also excerpts from her letters and journals that were dramatized onstage. However, there were some strange modifications. The composition of the novel is moved to 1819. This is clearly because those behind the production had chosen to emphasise that famous interpretation of Frankenstein as a thinly-veiled account of Mary Shelley’s grief at the loss of her young children. Such readings are outdated and limited, but they create tension and emotion onstage, something played to full effect here by the actors (who, incidentally, use American accents). Other reviewers also disliked the representations of Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley – The New York Times critic Laura Collins-Hughes wrote that “Mia Vallet’s Mary and Paul Wesley’s Percy are jarringly contemporary in affect and lack a vital spark.”[ii]

            Moreover, the play – as sadly seems to be the norm in dramatisations of the Shelleys’ lives – pits Percy and Mary against each other. This seems to be for two reasons. Firstly, the tension creates “comic” effect; secondly, it works to champion Mary as a hidden genius underappreciated by her husband. Mary is trying to write, but is visibly exasperated by the comments made by Percy. There is some truth in this – he did suggest adding more polysyllabic, Latinate terms to the Frankenstein manuscript, as you can see for yourself by visiting the (free) online Shelley-Godwin Archive.[iii] However, Mary’s eye-rolling in this scene is added for dramatic effect; the writer/director encourages the audience’s laughter because of her exasperation. We are meant to see Percy’s suggestions as unhelpful, to Mary, to anyone. The lack of any mention of Percy’s literary achievements (besides some short lyrics – none of the longer, philosophical poems) makes his input seem even more arrogant. The play seeks a cheap laugh by entreating a modern audience to mentally respond with: “that’s no improvement! What a pompous guy that Shelley is.”

From "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," which ran at the Irene Diamond Stage until January 7.

            The result is a negative image of both authors. Although space does not permit me to explain more here, most Shelley scholars now agree that Mary and Percy were two participants in a reciprocal collaborative exchange. Mary Shelley invited Percy’s comments on Frankenstein, her first novel. Seek out the work of Charles E. Robinson, a late English Professor who knew the Frankenstein manuscripts better than anyone, and you will find that his commentary explains the two-way creative discussions that went into producing the text.[iv] Percy’s alterations were accepted and included by Mary and they appear in the final published version. As such, any implication that Mary disapproved of his involvement is condescending to her, as it paints her as a pushover and a victim. In presenting Percy as a patronising partner to Mary, the play actually ends up patronising Mary herself.

The National Theatre's stage production of Frankenstein premiered in 2011.

            Mary’s father William Godwin is similarly represented as a bully. However, there were some positive aspects of the production as a whole: the set was gorgeous and complex (I speak as someone with no experience in theatre production and set design, I might add!), and the Creature – as is often the case – steals the show. Robert Fairchild’s writhing movements onstage were striking, and his performance was clearly very much influenced by the Danny Boyle production at the National Theatre with Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch. The score – including works by Liszt, Bach, and Schubert on oboe, piano, organ, and harpsichord – and Fairchild’s obvious talent as a dancer made certain scenes from the novel a real success. The mezzo soprano (Krysty Swann) was also a delight.

            I understand that tension and misery of experience, including death and isolation, create more drama for a theatre production than an account of the social nature of creativity or the true story behind the genesis of one of the greatest novels in English literature. But I am disappointed by this work of art that ends up crippling another work of art. Those who are unfamiliar with Mary’s oeuvre and talents would leave misinformed and uninterested. For Mary Shelley fans, there were no new insights here, nor was it particularly enjoyable. The focus on Frankenstein and literally nothing else she ever wrote (besides her letters and journals) is becoming perhaps a little tiring, but I hope such a trend is peculiar to this bicentenary year, and that things might improve in the future.

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Footnotes

[i] For more on the Royal Opera’s adaptation of Frankenstein, see my review here.

[ii] You can find the New York Times’ full review here.

[iii] Find this excellent archive here.

[iv] Professor Robinson’s long list of books includes an edition of Frankenstein manuscripts, entitled The Frankenstein Notebooks and The Original Frankenstein. You can find an excellent version of Frankenstein, with an introduction written by Robinson, here – but please, buy it from your local bookstore!

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Anna Mercer completed her PhD on the collaborative literary relationship of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley at the University of York in 2017. She has also studied at the University of Cambridge (Jesus College) and the University of Liverpool. She currently works at Keats House, Hampstead and as the Director of Communications for the Keats-Shelley Association of America. Her first monograph will be published by Routledge in 2019. She is on Twitter (@annamercer_) and you can visit her blog here:

The Politics of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Shelley is a poet and thinker whose ideas have uncanny application to the modern era. His atheism, humanism, socialism, feminism, vegetarianism all resonate today. His critiques of the tyranny and religious oppression of the early 19th century seem eerily applicable to the early 21st century. He is the man who first conceived the concept of massive, non-violent protest as the most appropriate and effective response to authoritarian oppression. I have written about this in Shelley in our Time and What Should We Do to Resist Trump?  But it may come as a surprise to many to learn Shelley also turned his mind to issues such as economics and the English national debt. For example:

"I forbear to address you as I had designed on the subject of your income as a public creditor of the English Government as it seems you have not the exclusive management of your funds...In vindication of what I have already said allow me to turn your attention to England at this hour. [There follows a detailed examination of the national debt and the unstable political situation in England] The existing government, atrocious as it is, is the surest party to which a creditor can attach himself - he may reason that "it may last my time" - though in the event, the ruin is more complete than in the case of popular revolution."

- Shelley to John and Maria Gisborne, Florence, 6 November 1819

This quote is drawn from a series of letters from Shelley to his friends John and Maria Gisborne. Shelley is discussing the fact that John had invested his money in "British Funds". These were a sort of "savings bond" used to finance England's staggering national debt. By 1815 the national debt had risen to over a billion pounds -- more than 200% of the GDP.  Compare this to the modern era:

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To the end of his life, Shelley continually pestered John to remove his money from the Funds - he expected ruin for his friend. Shelley's letters demonstrate that his genius extended far beyond poetry and philosophy. The letter also contains the first reference to A Philosophical View of Reform, which Shelley wrote between November 1819 and May 1820: he notes that he had "deserted the odorous gardens of literature to journey across the great sandy desert of Politics." And what an epic journey it turned out to be.

Click here to visit Pluto Press

This letter shows a side of Shelley that few have ever seen. and today's guest article by Jacqueline Mulhallen brings this side into sharp focus. The article appeared on the website of Pluto Press, publisher of Jacqueline's book, Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Revolutionary. You can find it here.  And you can read my own review here. Without further ado, here is the article.

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A Philosophical View of Reform: The Politics of Percy Bysshe Shelley

by Jacqueline Mulhallen

Today, the British government frames the argument around national debt by referring to the need for ‘us’ to make sacrifices or the fact that ‘we’ have been living beyond ‘our’ means and need austerity to survive economically. Despite evidence to the contrary, this ideology resonates with many people who think that in some way, we are all responsible for the financial crisis. We live within this widespread, false ideology, and some of us fight against it. However, a look back to the nineteenth century reveals that this fight was already taking place, and that capitalism was employing many of the tricks it still uses today. Jacqueline Mulhallen looks at the political life of the radical romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in her new biography and reveals that there was much more to him than first meets the eye.

-  Introduction from Pluto Press

Debt in the Time of Shelley

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Shelley's drawing affixed to his copy of A Philosophical View of Reform. It demonstrates a quite extraordinary gift for draughtsmanship.

‘In 1819, Percy Shelley was writing A Philosophical View of Reform. In its pages, he is clear about whom he considered responsible for the national debt, which at that time was bigger than it had ever been before – in 1815 the interest amounted to £37,500,000. Shelley, like many people today,  fought against the common consensus and blamed the bankers and the nation’s financial institutions. He clearly expressed his contempt in them; the ‘stock jobbers, usurers, directors, government pensions, country bankers: a set of pelting wretches who think of any commerce with their species as a means not an end’ and whose position in society he believed was based on fraud. Shelly himself surprisingly came from the landed aristocracy, however he had no love for this class either, as their existence was built upon force and was what he labelled ‘a prodigious anomaly’. He also talked of the rise of the newly wealthy as a different form of aristocracy who created a double burden on those whose labour created ‘the whole materials of life’. He could see that they together formed one class – ‘the rich’.

It was obvious to Shelley that the national debt had been contracted by ‘the whole mass of the privileged classes towards one particular portion of those classes’ – just as is the case today. ‘If the principal of this debt were paid … it would be the rich who alone could, as justly they ought, to pay it … As it is, the interest is chiefly paid by those who had no hand in the borrowing and who are sufferers in other respects from the consequences of those transactions in which the money was spent’.

Austerity and War in the Nineteenth Century

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A Page from A Philosophical View of Reform.

Shelley also expressed what he saw as a clear connection between austerity and war. The national debt was ‘chiefly contracted in two liberticide wars’, against the American revolutionaries and then the French revolutionaries. The money borrowed could have been spent in making the lives of working people better. As it was, the majority of the people in England were observed by Shelley as ‘ill-clothed, ill-fed, ill-educated’. After the Napoleonic Wars unemployment soared and returning soldiers were often found begging in the streets. The condition of all the classes ‘excepting those within the privileged pale’ was ‘singularly unprosperous’, allowing Shelley to comment, ‘The power which has increased is the power of the rich’.

Shelley also believed that anyone whose ‘personal exertions’ were ‘more valuable to him than his capital’ such as surgeons, mechanics, farmers and literary men (people often described as middle class) were only ‘one degree removed from the class which subsists by daily labour’ and therefore should not be classed with the rich. However, Shelley returned again and again to his obsession, the situation of the worker. His essay A Philosophical View of Reform, which on the surface was about the possibilities of reforming the English parliament to make it more representative, contained within it a message about how reform would not be enough. Why demand universal suffrage, he asks, when you can demand a Republic: ‘the abolition of, for instance, monarchy and aristocracy, and the levelling of inordinate wealth, and an agrarian distribution, including the parks and chases of the rich?’

The Radical Questions of the Day

As a boy, Shelley was probably involved in anti-slavery activity in his home town of Horsham in Sussex.  His father had been elected to Parliament as an MP to support the anti-slave trade bill in 1790, although some corrupt practices meant that he lost his seat before he was able to vote on the question.  But in 1807, the year the slave trade was abolished, the inhabitants of Horsham were particularly active, with a close family friend of the Shelleys standing on an anti-slavery platform.

Shelley also supported the independence of Ireland, arguing that the repeal of the Act of Union with England was a more important issue than Catholic Emancipation (although he supported the campaign for Catholics to sit in the British Parliament). Shelley admired Thomas Paine, the author of The Rights of Man and Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women.  He went so far as to try to renounce his inheritance as a member of the wealthy landowning class in favour of his sisters, though he only succeeded in transferring some of this wealth to his brother. He supported women writers including his own wife, Mary Shelley, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and author of Frankenstein.

Percy Shelley believed that equality was the natural state. He was ahead of his time. And yet, in the twenty-first century we still labour in an unequal, class society, and we still live with racism, exploitation and sexism. As is well known, the gap between the rich and the poor has widened to become greater than at any time in the last fifty years.

Legacy

Despite living 200 years ago, Shelley’s legacy is very much with us today, even if it was ignored and ridiculed in his lifetime. He attempted to get A Philosophical View of Reform published in England, but the publisher he submitted the manuscript to ignored him. Not having other contacts in England, Shelley left the essay unfinished. It was not published until 100 years after his death and so was never read by his contemporaries, although he recycled parts of it into his Defence of Poetry. Even nowadays it is not often read or discussed, and it deserves to be better known. Shelley should be honoured as a political thinker, as well as a magnificent poet. In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley describes poets as the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’ and his example shows the way in which poets can be closely involved with the political issues of the day.

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Jacqueline Mulhallen wrote and performed in the plays Sylvia and Rebels and Friends. She is the author of The Theatre of Shelley (Open Book Publishers, 2010) and contributed a chapter on Shelley to The Oxford Handbook to Georgian Theatre (OUP, 2014), which was shortlisted for the Theatre Book Prize 2015.

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Revolutionary is available to buy from Pluto Press. The foregoing article is reproduced with their kind permission. Visit Jacqueline's website here.

Keats’s Ode To Autumn Warns About Mass Surveillance

Introduction.

In his wonderful graphic novel, Masks of Anarchy (reviewed by me here) Professor Michael Demson offers a glimpse into the sort of surveillance ("spying") to which Shelley was subjected. His letters were read, he was followed, he was the subject of specific investigatiuons authorized by Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary who presided of England's massive spying apparatus. Sidmouth was an arch-conservative figure in the Georgian period. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica:

As home secretary in the ministry of the earl of Liverpool, from June 1812 to January 1822, Sidmouth faced general edginess caused by high prices, business failures, and widespread unemployment. To crush demonstrations both by manufacturers and by Luddites (anti-industrial machine-smashing radicals) he increased the summary powers of magistrates. At his insistence the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended in 1817, and he introduced four of the coercive Six Acts of 1819, which, among other provisions, limited the rights of the people to hold public meetings and to circulate political literature.

These measures are among the most draconian anti-democratic measures ever enacted by an English government. It is easy to see why Shelley fell afoul of the authorities. From a very young age he was constantly and openly rebelling against the government and social conventions of the day.  Much of his prose and poetry explicitly reacts to actions taken by Lord Sidmouth and in fact Lord Sidmouth is one of the three named agents of Anarchy in the Mask of Anarchy:

Clothed with the Bible, as with light, / And the shadows of the night, / Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy / On a crocodile rode by. And many more Destructions played / In this ghastly masquerade, / All disguised, even to the eyes, / Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

Shelley learning of Peterloo. Imagined by Michael Demson in Masks of Anarchy. Buy it here.

Note the specific reference to spies here. This now famous poem, which had enormous political influence over succeeding generations, was never published in his life time - directly as a consequence of laws enacted by Lord Sidmouth.  PMS Dawson  and Kenneth Neill Cameron (among others) offer penetrating insights into the effect this had on Shelley.  He came to the attention of the authorities very early thanks to his visit to Ireland in 1812 (when he was 20) to support the cause of separation and the repeal of the Act of Union. A trunk of his, containing letters and copies of his Address to the Irish People, was detained at the border and forwarded to the Home office where its contents were inspected by Lord Sidmouth who personally authorized the surveillance of Shelley. Shelley never once stopped publishing (or attempting to publish) excoriating critiques of the government. For example: Letter in Defence of Richard Carlile, A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote, An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte and A Philosophical View of Reform.

The effect of the government's attention however made Shelley fearful and at times even (justifiably) paranoid. It is surely one of the principle reasons he went into a self-imposed exile in Italy.  If we do not understand just how pervasive and intrusive government surveillance was during this period, we cannot understand the poets and essayists of the time.

Richard Marggraf Turley (see below) has now offered a tantalizing, penetrating and brilliantly written insight into the effect of Lord Sidmouth's repressive laws on another famous poet of the period: John Keats.  Keats reacted to the government's mass surveillance in a very different way, and I will turn it over now to Richard to tell the story.

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Keats’s Ode To Autumn Warns About Mass Surveillance and Social Sharing.

by Richard Marggraf Turley

Richard Marggraf Turley. Photo: Sara Penrhyn Jones

John Keats’s ode To Autumn is one of the best-loved poems in the English language. Composed during a walk to St Giles’s Hill, Winchester, on September 19 1819, it depicts an apparently idyllic scene of harvest home, where drowsy, contented reapers “spare the next swath” beneath the “maturing sun”.

The atmosphere of calm finality and mellow ease has comforted generations of readers, and To Autumn is often anthologised as a poem of acceptance of death. But, until now, we may have been missing one of its most pressing themes: surveillance.

The opening of the second stanza appears to be a straightforward allusion to personified autumn: “Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?” But that negative is odd, and hints at a more troubling side to the famous poem. Keats, a London boy, was walking in Winchester’s rural environs to get away from it all – but rather than describing a peaceful stroll, the poem seems to form an anxious meditation on the impossibility of privacy.

St Giles’s Hill, Winchester, in 2010. Peter Trimming/Geograph.org, CC BY-SA

Seen thee

We might assume mass surveillance is a modern phenomenon, but “surveillance” is a Romantic word, first introduced to English readers in 1799. It acquired a chilling sub-entry in 1816 in Charles James’s Military Dictionary: the condition of “existing under the eye of the police”.

But why would Keats have been thinking about spies in the St Giles cornfield? Rewind six days to September 13, 1819, when Henry “Orator” Hunt was entering London to stand trial for treason.

The political reformer had been arrested in Manchester for speaking at the Peterloo Massacre. Hunt was welcomed to the capital by a crowd of 300,000, with Keats, whose literary circle included political radicals, among those lining the streets to catch a glimpse of the government’s greatest bugbear.

London was on lock down. The Bank of England had closed its doors, the entrance to Mansion House was packed with constables and the artillery was on standby. Spies mingled with the Orator’s supporters, listening out for murmurs of popular uprising.

These were dangerous times, which To Autumn perhaps acknowledges with its opening allusion to close conspiracy and loading (weapons): Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun / Conspiring with him how to load and bless / With fruit …

Usually a garrulous letter writer, Keats waited until September 18 – the day before he wrote his ode – to describe Hunt’s procession to his brother and sister-in-law, and then in only the sketchiest terms. He notes the huge numbers but carefully distances himself from the cheering crowds, claiming it had taken him all day to feel “among men”.

Keats is uncharacteristically circumspect, almost as if he feared his correspondence might be intercepted – and perhaps for good reason.

Keats posted two letters during Hunt’s pageant, to his fiancé Fanny Brawne, and to his friend Charles Brown. The first letter arrived without mishap, but Brown’s went missing for 11 days. Later, Keats told him he believed the letter “had been stopped from curiosity” – that is, read by third parties.

The Massacre of Peterloo. George Cruikshank/Wikimedia

The truth was more mundane: Keats had got Brown’s address wrong, and the missive duly turned up on September 24. The letter has since been lost, and we can only guess at its contents, but it’s not inconceivable that, in the midst of Hunt’s maelstrom, Keats had been more candid about his support for the “hero of Peterloo”.

What we do know is that when Keats was writing his great ode on September 19, he suspected his private correspondence, posted during one of the most controversial political marches of the age, was in the hands of government spies.

Spies and informers

Keats’s creative antennae were already attuned to the issue of surveillance before this incident. His long poem Lamia, finished that same September, describes its heroine being tracked through the streets of Corinth by “most curious” spies (compare the phrase Keats used to refer to his missing letter: “stopped from curiosity”). That poem opens with a queasy scene in which Hermes transforms Lamia from serpent to woman. The price is information: Lamia agrees to give up the location of a nymph’s “secret bed” to the priapic god.

A rosy-hued Winchester cornfield might seem a long way from buzzing Corinth, or the violent scenes at Peterloo, or indeed the convulsed capital itself. But the field’s apparent calm is actually a fault line in Keats’s supposedly idyllic poem: the reapers, whose hooks lie idle, ought to be working flat out.

Landowners often grumbled about the laziness of Hampshire’s (poorly paid) casual labourers. It could be that Keats’s ode unwittingly drops the delinquent reapers in it, the poem’s lens giving them away at their “secret bed” (to recall Lamia’s betrayal of the sleeping nymph).

To Autumn is full of directed acts of invigilation: looking (patiently), watching (hours by hours), and seeking abroad (Keats’s first draft was more ominous: “whoever seeks for thee”). All the while those poor labourers were oblivious to the fact that their furtive nap was being observed, and carefully recorded.

Because let’s not forget, Keats is describing actual workers, real people whose slacking off he reports as unthinkingly as we might share our own peers’ political views or locations on social media. As casually as a Google car might capture a moonlighting worker up a ladder outside someone’s house.

When we take all this into account, To Autumn begins to read as an all-seeing optic, internalising the very surveillance culture Keats worried about, and itself becoming a spy transcript.

The ode is an early example of how art and literature process the psychological impacts of intrusive supervision. Written (in Keats’s mind) under surveillance, and bearing the marks of that imaginative pressure, the poem offers itself as a powerful document of what happens to communities, to social groups – to sociability itself – when watching, informing and being informed on become the norms of human interaction.

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Richard Marggraf Turley is an award-winning Welsh writer and critic, author of Wan-Hu's Flying Chair and The Cunning House, as well as books on the Romantic poets. He was born in the Forest of Dean and lives in West Wales, where he teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. He is the University’s Professor of Engagement with the Public Imagination. You can find him on Twitter and here on the web. This article was originally published by The Conversation and you can read it here. It is republished here under a Creative Commons Licence and with the permission of the author. Thank you, Richard.

Why the Shelley Conference? By Anna Mercer

The Shelley Conference takes place in London at Institute for English Studies on the 15th and 16th of September. 

The keynote speakers are Prof. Nora Crook (Anglia Ruskin University), Prof Kelvin Everest (University of Liverpool) and Prof. Michael O’Neill (Durham University). The conference is open to everyone - which is just how Shelley would have liked it.  He would have also liked the fact that he and his wife are treated as co-equals and creative collaborators.  I myself am honoured to be part of the conference and will be speaking on what I call "Romantic Resistance" - Shelley's strategies for opposing political and religious tyrannies.  They are surprisingly applicable to our times!  Here is co-organizer Anna Mercer on how this amazing conference came to be:

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Why the Shelley Conference? By Anna Mercer

Anna Mercer

I was motivated to create ‘The Shelley Conference 2017’ because of my own frustration with the fact that there is no regular event, academic or otherwise, dedicated solely to the study of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s works. Neither is there such an event for Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The other Romantics enjoy fantastic annual symposiums where experts and lovers of great literature meet; for example I have been lucky enough to attend the Keats Conference in Hampstead and the Coleridge Conference in the South West (held in Bristol, or Somerset). These carefully planned gatherings of world-renowned speakers and literature enthusiasts include walks and other activities in the surroundings loved by Keats and Coleridge. They encourage postgraduate participation, and are jovial and create a sense of community. I know there is also a similar event for Wordsworth in Grasmere; why is there no such event for PBS or MWS?

My research (on the collaborative literary relationship of PBS and MWS) led me to develop the idea of a conference that celebrated both authors. Contemporary criticism thankfully no longer wastes time belittling MWS as minor in comparison to PBS’s genius, or depicting PBS as a tyrannical, corrupt editor of her work. The birth of ‘The Shelley Conference’ was set to chime with this refreshing lack of conflict in contemporary study, something that I admit my work in particular seeks to broaden and develop, particularly through the use of manuscript evidence, in order to understand how the Shelleys worked in a reciprocal literary exchange.

The Shelleys in popular culture, however, remain separated and many misconceptions about their relationship persist in the public consciousness (see for example my review of ‘The Secret Life of Books: Frankenstein’ broadcast on BBC4). I have become increasingly aware that now such Shelley-related events are not limited to a small group of academics, and with social media and the help of other Shelley platforms (including this one!), the Shelleys can be identified for what they are actually are, and what they actually sought to represent: that is, two incredibly talented authors, who dedicated their lives to the study and writing of radical and innovative literature.

The Shelley of the conference title remains ambiguous. Furthermore, I have clearly stated that the conference is two days on the works of PBS and MWS. Our speakers will pay attention to biographical details in order to gauge how their shared lives (and also their shared travels) influence their texts, as opposed to the texts revealing truths about their lives. Can we remove the damaging opinion that the Shelleys’ relationship was something defined by scandal, infidelity, gossip, and anti-establishment teenage pursuits? They certainly would have wished we could do so. Let us return to their writings, and not the many, many biographical speculations created by scholars and other writers, some with good intentions, some without.

It is for this reason that I am delighted to announce the breadth of papers that we have at the conference. We have panels that address philosophy, translation, the reception of these authors, editing, the Shelleys in Italy, the Shelleys and science, radical Shelley (including Graham Henderson’s paper on ‘Romantic Resistance’), utopia and dystopia, and even the Shelleys’ diets. We have speakers from all over the world including Canada and mainland Europe, and we have postgraduates speaking at various stages in their career, as well as more established academics, and other writers: novelists, independent scholars, and poets. Some panels include papers on PBS and MWS side-by-side, others focus solely on one author, with the presumption that the Q&A discussion at the end of the presentations will be broad and energetic, reaching into different spheres of knowledge, and addressing the wider Shelley circle – for example Peacock, Hogg, Claire Clairmont, the Gisbornes, and Byron.

Also, excitingly it is now, in the first part of the 21st century, that the most detailed comprehensive editions of PBS’s works are in production (The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley ed. Donald Reiman, Neil Fraistat and Nora Crook is already well advanced, with Vol VII published soon, and The Poems of Shelley ed. Kelvin Everest, G. M. Matthews, Michael Rossington and Jack Donovan is nearing completion). Michael Rossington and Nora Crook will deliver short presentations on the progress of these editions in an optional session during the lunch break on Friday.

I would like to add that I am indebted to Kelvin Everest, an academic mentor to me since my undergraduate days. He was the pioneer of the first Shelley conferences in Gregynog, and his collection of essays that came from that time can be found here. I am honoured to say that he has been an invaluable advisor to me during this conference, and will also be delivering a keynote lecture, alongside the other plenary talks by Michael O’Neill and Nora Crook.

I also thank Michael Rossington, who similarly has delivered advice and guidance, and my coorganiser Harrie Neal (she speaks on Saturday, with a paper on ‘Mary Shelley’s post-capitalist ecology’).

See the detailed programme here.

Thank you to our sponsors – who, amongst other things, have made it possible for us to charge the reduced fee of £15 only for postgraduates and unwaged delegates:

Thanks also to the support from our host institution, the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies (CECS) at the University of York, and our venue, the Institute for English Studies (IES) in London.

I sincerely hope that the Shelley Conference may occur again in years to come – watch this space.

Sir Humphrey Davy and the Romantics - an Online Course

I am pleased to introduce Sharon Ruston to my readers. Sharon is a Shelley and Romantics scholar who is the Chair of the English Department at Lancaster University.  Her main research interests are in the relations between the literature, science and medicine of the Romantic period, 1780-1820. Her first book, Shelley and Vitality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), explored the medical and scientific contexts which inform Shelley's concept of vitality in his major poetry. Her most recent book, Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science, and Medicine of the 1790s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) has chapters on Mary Wollstonecraft's interest in natural history, William Godwin's interest in mesmerism, and Humphry Davy’s writings on the sublime. Sharon is currently co-editing the Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy and his Circle, to be published in four volumes by Oxford University Press.

Sharon Ruston, Chair, Department of English, Lancaster University.

Sharon is offering a free online course through Future Learn called "Humphry Davy: Laughing Gas, Literature, and the Lamp".  These types of course are fun and informative. If you are interested in Shelley you will want to learn more about Davy because Shelley studied him closely.  Shelley was one of the last great polymaths - he was well versed with a range of subjects that dwarfs most of his famous contemporaries.  Science was one of them.  To understand Shelley fully, you need to understand his interest in science - this course can help you to do this.

You can find Sharon on Twitter @SharonRuston and at Lancaster University. Here is her guest column.

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This autumn you can participate in a free, online course on a man of science whom P. B. Shelley greatly admired, Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829).

Sir Humphry Davy. Thomas Phillips National Portrait Gallery, London

Anyone can sign up and all are welcome from people who know nothing about Davy to those who are already aware of just how fascinating a figure he is. Shelley was certainly interested in Davy: Shelley made copious, extensive notes on one of Davy’s most popular works Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (1813) sometime around 1820. I have speculated on why Shelley was so interested in these in my book Shelley and Vitality, which more generally considered Shelley’s interest in science and medicine.

Davy was a friend of S. T. Coleridge, Maria Edgeworth, William Godwin, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and many other poets and novelists of the period. He was the first person to inhale nitrous oxide – when it was thought to be fatal to do so – and he did this in Bristol with a circle of radical figures. Anna Barbauld even tried it (and Davy appears in her poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven), as did Peter Mark Roget, the physician who would write the Thesaurus. Davy isolated more chemical elements than any other person has before or since and he did this using the new science of electrochemistry, something that Shelley was extremely interested in.

At Oxford University, T. J. Hogg reported that Shelley possessed ‘an electrical machine, an air-pump, the galvanic trough, a solar microscope, and large glass jars and receivers’ with which to create various chemical and medical preparations. Hogg ridiculed Shelley’s vision of a galvanic battery of ‘colossal magnitude, a well-arranged system of hundreds of metallic plates’, but in doing so only revealed his own lack of scientific knowledge. Davy built such a battery, a pile of 2000 plates, with which to conduct his experiments. Davy was also the friend of Byron, meeting him in London and Ravenna, and indeed he wrote two poems about Byron, one written after he heard of Byron’s death. Byron immortalized the miners’ safety lamp that came to be known as the ‘Davy Lamp’ in Canto One of Don Juan, writing: ‘Sir Humphry Davy's lantern, by which coals / Are safely mined for’.

The Davy Lamp which saved countless lives.

Mary Shelley noted in her journal that she read one of Davy’s books almost every day in 1816. This is exactly when she was writing Frankenstein.

Laura E. Crouch, writing in the Keats-Shelley Journal in 1978 suggests the book she read was Davy's A Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry. Crouch suggests this work accurately reflects "the scientific ideas presented in the novel and the scientific optimism that shaped the character of the young Frankenstein and thus led him to undertake his "monstrous" project. She also observed the similarities between Victor Frankenstein’s and Professor Waldman’s pronouncements on nature and the progress of modern science:

"The spirit of enthusiasm that Davy conveyed to his fashionable London audience was the same spirit that led Frankenstein to begin his scientific experiments. The feeling of awe concerning the potential for scientific discovery was excited in Frankenstein during the introductory lecture to M. Waldman's course in chemistry at the university at Ingolstad." (38)

Davy and his wife, like most English aristocrats of their time were well aware of second generation romantics like Shelley and Byron. And we have some indication of what they thought of them.  We have, for example, a letter from Sir Humphry’s wife to friends in Geneva written during the summer of 1816. This was the so-called “year without summer” and the year when Byron and the Shelleys had taken up summer residence at the Villa Diodati across the lake from Geneva.

The Villa Diodati

Clearly word of the allegedly scandalous behavior at the Villa had travelled to London because Lady Davy wrote to her friends alluding to it. She wrote:

‘I conclude all our late publications have reached you, from the very many English who must have lately been at Geneva. (some of them say little for our morality or good nature, & indeed that Readers of Libel & Indecency scarcely escape the weight of censure due to the Authors. Helenism is our last poetical flower, neither very potent nor sweet in my opinion; but Sir H’s sentence on its merits is very favourable & & he may be more just.’

Lady Davy was clearly unimpressed by the kind of poetry being written by the Shelley-Byron circle (which she curiously refers to as “Helenism”), whereas, as she admits, Davy was more in its favour – “his sentence on [meaning opinion of] its merits is very favourable…” I am sure that such a verdict from someone they so highly respected would have gratified Percy and Mary.  It is uncertain whether Davy ever actually met Percy and Mary, though they were in Rome at the same time in April 1819 (Shelley arrived in Rome on 5th March 1819 and left Rome on 10th June), but if they had it seems likely they would have had lots to talk about. 

The online course ‘Humphry Davy: Laughing Gas, Literature, and the Lamp’ will explore some of the many connections between Davy and the Romantic poets. We will look at Davy’s relationship with key writers of the day such as Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Byron and Coleridge. Perhaps the most innovative thing about the course is the emphasis it gives to Davy’s poetry: many of his poems can be read and heard on the course. Davy will be considered as a Romantic poet himself, and his poems on Mont Blanc, Cornwall, ‘genius’, and ‘life’ put into this context for all to enjoy.   

You can buy Sharon's book, Shelley and Vitality, here:

I heartily recommend buying this book from your local bookseller.  Just send them this link and ask them to order it for you. Support your local community.

David, or The Modern Frankenstein: A Romantic Analysis of Alien: Covenant by Zac Fanni

I was very excited to hear that Shelley's poem Ozymandias features prominently in the new movie in the Alien franchise: Alien: Covenant.  The poem's theme is woven carefully into the plot of the movie, with David (played again by Michael Fassbender) quoting the famous line, "Look on my works ye mighty and despair."

David, as followers of the movies will know, is a xenomorph - a "synthetic humanoid" - one in a long line of such creatures, one of the most famous being Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

That David quotes the poem without a trace of irony is central to the question of whether or not these creatures are fully human or not. For David not to see that Shelley is employing one of his trademark ironic inversions, suggests that something is not quite right with him.  That he mistakenly attributes the poem to Byron is another twist altogether.

What immediately drew me to Zac Fanni's excellent article was his discussion of the Ozymandias scene.  However, what I found amounted to so much more.  We are offered a kaleidoscopic array of classic romantic allusions including some which are more obvious, for example Frankenstein and Rime of the Ancient Mariner; and some that are decidedly less so: Shelley's Alastor makes an unexpected appearance!

Now, does this make the movie an expression of Shelley's philosophy or values? Alas no. The movie strikes me more as an empty repository of romantic motifs and riffs than anything else. Some of these are undoubtedly extremely clever, others are surely accidental or unconscious. The philosophy which underpins the movie is one of profound cynicism and nihilism. Shelley was a skeptic, not a cynic and certainly not a nihilist. As Paul Foot observed, "It’s very, very easy for the skeptic to topple over into being a cynic. And a cynic can never be a revolutionary.  [It is] absolutely impossible for a cynic to be a revolutionary because they don’t see the possibilities - they don’t believe that it’s possible that working people can change their lives and change society." Read more about this here.

One point of overlap between the many Alien movies and Shelley is that women take the lead.  Foot observed this of Shelley when he wrote, "All through Shelley’s poetry, all his great revolutionary poems, the main agitators, the people that do most of the revolutionary work and [who he gives] most of the revolutionary speeches, are women. Queen Mab herself, Asia in Prometheus Unbound, Iona in Swellfoot the Tyrant, and most important of all, Cyntha in The Revolt of Islam." In the case of the movie franchise we have Alien's Ripley (Sigorney Weaver), Prometheus’ Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Covenant’s Dany Branson (Katherine Waterston).  These are all strong women, but there the similarities end.  Shelley imagines his female leads as engaged in important revolutionary work, they are gradually but inexorably changing the world for the better.  The same is not true of Ripley, Shaw or Branson, as Fanni himself notes. Ripley makes a lonely, solitary escape, while the other two die miserably in the grasp of an overweening, inexorable fate. This is distinctly un-Shelleyan.

But what about the links to Alastor? Certainly, I think we have to take as a starting point that not one single person connected with the movie has ever read or even heard of Alastor. But that does not mean that the themes of Alastor do not resonate, and Fanni makes a very compelling case for this. Roland Duerksen, in his short but brilliant book, Shelley Poetry of Involvement, makes the point that 'Shelley's art always brings us round to a direct confrontation of what it really means to live - which for him is synonymous with really to love." Fanni's version of this is this: "In “Alastor,” Shelley shows us our two conditions: first, that the poverty of our language and imagination causes us to be deeply, metaphysically anxious about our nature; and second, that pursuing answers to these mysteries entails transcending the self, a form of death where you become part of the great design." 

The term "alastor", which suggests a pursuing vengeful spirit, was suggested to Shelley by his friend Thomas Love Peacock. Duerksen's conclusion is, therefore, that Shelley must have thought of "separateness or alienation" as that just that vengeful spirit. Very clearly alienation and separateness are one of the central themes of Covenant, indeed all of the Alien movies. The difference, however, between David and the young poet of Alastor, is that the latter aspires to be something more. That he fails is the tragedy of the poem. And he shares a fate very different from that of David in Covenant - he dies. Duerksen describes the poet's "propensity toward unloving, isolated existence" as his great failing.  Had he detected it earlier he would have awakened to the potential for what Duerksen calls "human, imaginative identification" with the world.

David, on the other hand, seems to revel in his isolation, learns nothing from it and yet ultimately triumphs. Whereas Shelley extols the maternal power of nature in Alastor, in the world of Covenant, David has absolutely overmastered nature; in fact almost sterilizing it. In one of the great passages from A Defense of Poetry, Shelley contends that love "is an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own." In other words, love is empathy. He later defines imagination as the act of putting oneself in the "position of another."  Empathy again - or what Duerksen calls "involvement".  The world of Covenant is utterly devoid of any empathy whatsoever and David is utterly lacking in imagination.  The xenomorph learns virtually nothing from his exposure to humans.  This point is brought home in what Fanni calls "One of the most disturbing moments of the film," which, he continues, "involves no aliens at all: our protagonist, Dany Branson is physically overpowered by David, who bends over her with a pantomimed kiss, threatening sexual violence by whispering, “Is this how it is done?” No empathy, no identification with the other and no imagination. Just the horror of the vacant abyss of self-involvement.

The principal difference between the young poet of Alastor and David is that the poet at least attempts, as Duerksen says, to expel "solitude and silence, replacing them with imaginative union and creative expression." The message of Alastor is ultimately hopeful and uplifting.  And the full flowering of this optimism came later in in poems such as Prometheus Unbound and The Triumph of Life. We can see the possibility for growth and development.  On the other hand, Covenant presents us with a nihilistic vision almost completely devoid of the possibility for human redemption.

So my conclusion is that while Covenant has many roots in the world of the romantic poets (as Fanni has so ably demonstrated) its fruit is poisoned, sterile and antithetical to everything dear to that world, and in particular to Shelley.

Zac Fanni is a Toronto-based freelance writer and college professor teaching in the Humanities. He tells me he is convinced of two things: that Penny Dreadful is the best television show to have ever aired, and that he will one day get a tenured position at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. Both of these things, he says, are probably unlikely.  You can find him on twitter here, and on Youtube here.

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And now this spell was snapt: once more
I viewed the ocean green,
And looked far forth, yet little saw
Of what had else been seen—

Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread. (442-451)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Dread is the fear that lingers, the fear that condenses into an apprehension so tangible that it becomes a part of our environments: once the literal visage of death has been witnessed (in the female, male or double-mawed alien form), the mariner’s ship, the scientist’s laboratory and the space jockey’s stasis pod all become stained and saturated with its horrific presence. This is what 1979’s Alien achieved so thoroughly: it made the familial warmth of the Nostromo’s cafeteria congeal into an intimate terror of a subliminal nightmare birthed from the human body.

Part of the perfection of Alien lies in its totality, as it is a film that needs no sequel, no franchise, no epilogue to Ripley’s final log entry. And while we received the obnoxiously competent Aliens, the resulting entries have deadened us to our beloved xenomorph. Yet with the brave and imperfect Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s creatures became more than a perfected source of physical dread–they emerged as the grotesque manifestations of our deep existential dread about our origin, mortality, and meaning. Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), founder of the company that launches the franchise’s ill-fated missions, opens Alien: Covenant by asking the “only question that matters: Where did we come from?”

As it was with the xenomorph in the previous films, the dread surrounding this question begins with an encounter: the archaeological depictions of alien visitations that form the opening shots of Prometheus both inspire and foreshadow the film’s central quest, a quest that ends when Peter Weyland is bludgeoned to death by the creator he spends his life searching for. This demise provides us with a secularized version of humankind’s fall in Milton’s Paradise Lost, where mankind, seeking godhead, loses all. Killed by his search for immortality, a search that is decidedly male in this franchise (our female heroes avoid this kind of solipsism), Weyland whispers, “there’s…nothing.” It is David (Michael Fassbender), Peter’s android “son,” who alone realizes the dark irony: the questions that matter have no answers. David responds to those final words by telling his creator-father, “I know.”

Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant brilliantly steps forward from this point by focalizing the familiar “Jaws in space” story around the lost android of Prometheus. In Covenant, David is a mythopoeic creature whose knowledge of the metaphysical nothingness lurking just beyond our comprehension drives him to create an answer for it. In the process, David becomes both Frankenstein and his creature (finalizing the series’ chain of created beings who seize that Promethean power for themselves), Milton’s Satan (preferring to reign in his necropolis than serve in civilization), and an unironic version of Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias (commanding his victims to “Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” while creating and using the “lone and level sands” that surround the shattered remains of those endeavors) (11, 14). And while the film’s trailers tell us directly that “the path to paradise begins in hell,”it is their encounter with its ruler that hints at the horrifying truth: there is no paradise to ascend to.

By using David’s metamorphosis to frame the familiar transmogrifications suffered by the Covenant’s hapless crew, Alien: Covenant presents a horrifying inversion of the Romantic pursuit of the sublime – not only are there no meaningful answers to our deepest questions, but the very pursuit of those answers consumes us from the inside out, leaving a literal manifestation of Frankenstein’s “wrecked humanity” to float alone in void of space (Shelley 165). Our survivors, like Coleridge’s Mariner, are condemned to forever “walk in fear and dread” as they recount their tale to reluctant, doomed ears. If, as Percy Shelley wrote, poets “measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature” (850), David does so to the point of nihilism: he reveals that those depths are empty and capable of reflecting back an inner (and literal) monstrosity.

Before we are even exposed to the film itself, the metaphysical dread of Alien: Covenant is prefigured in its marketing. Consider what might just be the best film poster of the year:

The poster retains the inky corporeality of an engraving print, and visually signifies the inverted ascension that becomes the central motif of our prequel films: the xenomorph emerges triumphantly into the sole source of light, atop the suffering, subdued bodies that evoke Giovanni da Modena’s depiction of Dante’s Inferno. These neoclassical figures (where specific personalities are eschewed in favor of an “ideal” human form) also imply a universality–these aren’t characters from the film or franchise, but bodies that instead represent humanity as a category.

There are innumerable parallels that can be drawn with this image, but Gustave Doré’s engravings for Paradise Lost provide a strong starting point of comparison, especially considering that Ridley Scott once claimed that Alien: Paradise Lost would be the name of the Prometheus sequel. Let’s examine these two illustrations in particular: the first depicts archangel Michael casting Lucifer and his fallen angels out of heaven (1.44-45), while the second depicts Lucifer hurtling towards Earth, eager to corrupt Man and his realm (3.739-41).

In our first illustration [on the right], the vertical arrangement is more traditional: good triumphs, literally, over top evil, with the light source both illuminating the sacred and casting the profane into shadow. In other words, it is the opposite of Alien: Covenant’s poster arrangement, where there is no cosmic ideal to represent–all that exists is a darkness within humankind that emerges into the light, a twisted creature that erupts from the subliminal spaces of our minds and bodies.

In the second illustration [on the left], Satan descends from the heavens to corrupt humankind, God’s new (and perfect) creation. The source of light again both locates the heavens in a more literal way, and (again) frames Satan in contrast to the sacred ideal (the contrast between his dark figure and the heavenly light is particularly extreme), making his descent a direct personification of the Fall (from grace, perfection, etc.) soon suffered by prelapsarian humanity. Again, Alien: Covenant represents an inversion of this motif: evil is not something that arrives from without, but is something that violently, inescapably erupts from within ourselves and as our selves. The nothingness that the franchise’s expeditions seek to confront, the nothingness that Peter Weyland faces as a reward for his life’s labors, is what makes monstrosity possible: seeking to close that existential void engenders our fall, allowing a figure of pure, savage atavism to emerge in our place.

It is no coincidence that Paradise Lost figures heavily in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein–Milton’s poem is the very text through which Victor Frankenstein’s creature comes to understand his own monstrosity. Understandably, the creature identifies with Milton’s Satan, seeing Lucifer as the “fitter emblem” of his condition, and he even envies the fallen angel, telling his creator, “my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred” (132, 133). While the abhorred form draws an obvious parallel to the xenomorph (whose human resemblance constantly reminds us of our bodies’ horrendous mutability), the creature’s more likely analogue in Alien: Covenant is David; what figure other than the android has taken a more coveted place in our collective imagination, precisely because its resemblance to us (in both a physical and metaphysical sense) disrupts our sense of what we are? Our ontological uniqueness, in other words, is threatened by the humanity that can be created.

If you decide to use some sort of Voight-Kampff test to determine your subject’s humanity, the eyes would make for an intuitive starting point – as in Blade Runner, Alien: Covenant features an extreme close-up of a (human?) eye, which we soon realize is David’s. Eyes are an obvious symbolic starting point, as they are the simultaneously the site of both empathy and expression: we observe the subjectivity of others while revealing our own. When characters shield their eyes (as, for example, agents do in the Matrix films), it is a clear symbol for soullessness. This is no different in Mary Shelley’s novel. Victor Frankenstein, after a seemingly fruitless toil to “infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing” before him, sees “the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.”

The creature’s eyes signify his life, but also a life that is cast as nonhuman: “the dull yellow eye” reflects an ontological dullness imposed by Frankenstein, who labels the creature as a ‘monster’. It is no mistake that Frankenstein keeps returning, almost obsessively, to the creature’s eyes: he notes that the “luxuriances” of the creature’s lustrous hair and pearly-white teeth only form “a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes,” and when the creature seeks Frankenstein’s company by invading his bedroom (a scene of horrific, tragic proximity perfectly captured by Bernie Wrightson in his comic book adaptation of the novel), Frankenstein notes that the creature’s “eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed” on him. It is only the creature’s words that inspire compassion from Frankenstein, who narrates that the creature’s story of profound, imposed loneliness (itself a tragic version of the Romantic preference for isolated contemplation) “had even power over my heart” (58, 59, 212).

The creature’s experience is shared by our own version of him: the android. David’s perfect diction, posture and figure (which Billy Crudup’s character threatens to “fuck up” in the film) are “luxuriances” that only call attention to his nonhuman ontology. As with Frankenstein, it is our proximity to our created entity that shatters our metaphysical preconceptions and causes us to be deeply unsettled: “now that I had finished,” narrates Frankenstein, “the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” Victor is “unable to endure the aspect of the being” that he creates (58), and it is this proximate encounter that causes him to flee into the rain-drenched street of Ingolstadt, reciting Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to express the dread that pushes him forward (“on a lonesome road”) while preventing him from looking back (446).

Likewise, David’s uncanny humanity (his creepiness factor goes unchecked in Alien: Covenant) propels us away, and the entire plot of the film’s latter half is moved forward by escalating scenes of discoveries about David’s experimentation and intention. One of the most disturbing moments of the film involves no aliens at all: our protagonist, Dany Branson (played impeccably by Katherine Waterston), is physically overpowered by David, who bends over her with a pantomimed kiss, threatening sexual violence by whispering, “Is this how it is done?” This is Covenant’s version of the creature’s bedroom invasion in Frankenstein, replete with threat of sexual invasion endemic to the Alien films. David not only calls direct attention to his uncanny difference, but also construes that difference as a threat.

It is this knowledge of the human-like creature gained from this kind of close encounter that causes the heart to palpitate in the “sickness of fear” (Shelley 60). Even the word ‘monster’, a word used by Frankenstein against the creature and a word that is often thrown at our ‘malfunctioning’ androids, is rooted in the Latin word monstrum, meaning to exhibit, or make known. The most horrific monsters, therefore, are the ones that are familiar to us – Frankenstein’s creature, David the android, and the xenomorph terrify us because our proximity to them reveals the similarities that accentuate their differences, making them an unsettling (and often direct) threat to our sense of self. We feel as if we have no choice, and cast them out into the “deep, dark, deathlike solitude” found in the wilderness, or on a barren planet, or in the depths of outer space (93). In this way, the disfigurement suffered by Frankenstein’s creature and David is ontological, in that we reject their subjectivity, finding ourselves unable to accept their facsimiles of humanity. Frankenstein, for instance, warns Captain Walton (Victor’s rapt listener) that the creature’s “soul is as hellish as his form, full of treachery and fiendlike malice,” which may be a more accurate description of David than it is of the tragically spurned creature (212). Even David’s confrontation with his ‘brother’ Walter (the ‘improved’ version of the android accompanying the Covenant crew) is itself an encounter that accentuates difference through similarity, and David (like Frankenstein) finds the reflection of his own identity unpalatable. Before attempting to murder him, David says to Walter, with a kiss, “No one will ever love you like I do.” It is precisely because David understands Walter so well that he is driven to destroy him – in Walter is everything David is threatened by (i.e. amenable, claustrophobic servitude), just as we see in the android the metaphysical emptiness that threatens us. David condemns Walter, his mirror image, as thoroughly as we condemn the humanlike figure resurrected in the android.

Whether human or android, encounters with created beings prompt your own existential anxieties – you become akin to Frankenstein’s creature, asking yourself unanswerable questions: “What does this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?” (131). Alien: Covenant replicates this likeness directly: humanity discovers itself to be the creation of beings who seem to find us monstrous, in that they find us to be a dreadful mimicry of themselves, and we thus share in the experience of the android, wondering about a greater meaning that must lie somewhere out in the vast infinity of space. And, as we witness during Peter Weyland’s final scene in Prometheus, the answer to these questions is a nihilistic one: there is nothing awaiting the search for our origin, identity and meaning. These recurring questions, as Frankenstein’s creature finds out, are “answered only with groans” (124).

While David is aware of this metaphysical nothingness in Prometheus, evoking the absurdist irony at the heart of humanity’s quest for meaning, he is also responsible for unleashing it in both Prometheus (where he infects Charlie’s drink with the seemingly omnipotent alien gel, leading to the brilliantly twisted med-pod birth scene) and Alien: Covenant (where he creates a literal dark cloud of death that consumes all life on the planet). And while the ‘inky death cloud’ bio-weapon causes us, perhaps understandably, to bemoan a lack of creativity in the film, it does function as a clear metaphor: the dark nothingness awaiting our most urgent questions is not just a vacuum in this franchise, but a dreadful entity waiting to possess and mutilate our very being. And David, whose non-humanity inoculates him against this darkness, is the ‘person’ who emerges capable of fashioning an answer to this void: he seeks to create “the perfect organism.” David is not just a Frankenstein creature to be abhorred as a monster – he is Frankenstein himself, a being obsessed with creating a “new species” who would exalt him “as its creator and source.” And, again, this obsession is really an inversion of that pursuit: while Frankenstein imagines that “many happy and excellent natures would owe their being” to him (55), David imagines a creature who, to use the words of his fellow android, is “perfect” in its “purity. A survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.”

This is the Alien franchise’s version of the Romantic pursuit of the sublime, a word that shares its Latin root with ‘subliminal’: limus (muddy, oblique) and limen (threshold, limit). To the Romantics, the sublime was an experience of the incomprehensible, an experience of crossing the threshold of human understanding and transcending the boundary of the intelligible. Edmund Burke cites this experience as a form of “astonishment,” which includes feelings of terror and despair–beholding nature’s vast wonders, for example, inspires a sensation of existential terror where we realize our smallness and insignificance in relation to the cosmic forces that shape our world. The poet John Keats termed this our “negative capability”: experiencing, or “being in,” mystery without trying to use our reason to entrap or solve it (194). For the Romantics, this paradoxical conception of the inconceivable is, to borrow Wordsworth’s phrase, a way to actively engage with the burdens of “all this unintelligible world” (40). Published alongside “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” cites the speaker’s debt to the “forms of beauty” bestowed by nature:

To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lighten’d:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things. (37-49)

This recollection of beauty, an experience of the ineffable power surrounding us, allows the speaker to transcend the self and touch the periphery of infinity – the speaker approaches that eternal sleep of death, where blood almost stops flowing, to become a “living soul” that takes part in the greater “life of things.” This transcendent experience becomes the “anchor” of the speaker’s “purest thoughts,” forming the “soul” of all his “moral being” (109-111).

20th Century Fox

This is precisely the “moral being” formed by Frankenstein’s creature in Shelley’s novel, where we are provided with an almost evolutionary account of the human experience: the creature is first subject to “a strange multiplicity of sensations,” then discovers and learns the “godlike science” of language, and finally refines his understanding through literature. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives and Milton’s Paradise Lost teach the creature about the experience, language, and history of the human condition. This experience and exploration of the sublime, however, does not lead to a harmonious suspension of self. Instead, the creature is afflicted with an indescribable agony, where his “sorrow [is] only increased with knowledge.” This causes the creature to wish to “shake off all thought and feeling,” which comes from the ability to see himself, for the first time, as a monster, “a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled.” The sublime is also lost to Victor Frankenstein, who throughout the novel grows increasingly akin to his creature – again showing that our creation of other beings precipitates a deeply unsettling disruption of identity. Victor’s experiment causes him to see himself as a “miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity,” where “the sight of what is beautiful in nature” and the experience of what “is excellent and sublime in the productions of man” hold no refuge (105, 115, 123, 165). Thus Frankenstein, like many of the Alien films, explores the human destruction that occurs when there is a collapse of the aesthetic distance between the self and the sublime – grasping the incomprehensible, in all its terror, beauty and power, is an annihilating experience without that distance. Without it, Wordsworth’s sleep-like suspension becomes mortally final: our identities and bodies are obliterated by forces as unceasing as they are insatiable, as devoid of remorse as they are of morality.

Alien: Covenant is similarly occupied with this kind of collapse–the xenomorph is a “perfected” personification of those amoral, perennial forces. However, David’s pursuit of the sublime, of that “perfect organism,” is not a process that destroys him as it does Frankenstein, to reveal a lesson about the perils of aspiring to godhead (the sin that afflicts both Satan and humankind in Paradise Lost). Rather, it is David’s ‘other’ ontology, the fact that his identity is not unitary, that allows him to face the indifferent, annihilating forces behind the “the life of things” and use those forces for his own ends. With David, there is nothing to dismantle. Again, he acts as a Frankenstein figure even while he inverts it: unlike the Covenant and Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory, spaces that build the hope and possibility for new life, David’s spaceship contains only the promise of death and oblivion. As a dark inversion of the Romantic poet, David does not seek the sublime as an end. He seeks instead to harness it as an answer to the nothingness rotting at the heart of human existence. And in creating the xenomorph, David’s response seems clear: if nothingness awaits us at the end of all this spiritual, existential yearning, what use is the ability to ponder it? Our thoughts, our anxieties, and our very cultures, are centered around an aimless, purposeless striving that clouds our natures as organisms.

In executing his vision, David doesn’t just embrace the pride of Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias, commanding all of life to behold his terrible works, but also enacts and seizes the “colossal Wreck” around which the “lone and level sands stretch far away” (13-14). David’s necropolis is the ruin from which he builds his xenomorph, and both feel like grotesque expressions of subliminal fears and anxieties (H.R. Giger’s presence is heavily felt in Alien: Covenant, and the necropolis seems to be heavily derived his work on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unrealized Dune). In this way, David acts as the speaker of Percy Shelley’s Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, itself a poem about a poet’s relentless pursuit of the sublime.

The speaker claims to be ever gazing “on the depth” of nature’s “deep mysteries,” and says,

I have made my bed
In charnels and on coffins, where black death
Keeps record of the trophies won from thee,
Hoping to still these obstinate questionings
Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost
Thy messenger, to render up the tale
Of what we are. (23-29)

Percy Shelley has his speaker recognize that examining the causes and conditions of life requires, in the words of Frankenstein, a “recourse to death” (Shelley 52). In “Alastor,” Shelley shows us our two conditions: first, that the poverty of our language and imagination causes us to be deeply, metaphysically anxious about our nature; and second, that pursuing answers to these mysteries entails transcending the self, a form of death where you become part of the great design. David offers a horrific inversion of this: he knows that nothing lies at the heart of these mysteries, which exposes the vanity and absurdity of the human expeditions he is a part of, and he uses this metaphysical void to create a being that personifies and perfects the terror at the heart of the sublime. The helplessness one feels when beholding nature’s majesty becomes a literal, fatal helplessness in the face of a perfected hostility.

This is what makes the final scene of Alien: Covenant so disturbing: David places the embryos of his creation alongside the human embryos of the Covenant, collapsing the distance (in a very literal and necessarily fatal way) between humanity and the ineffable forces that move like leviathans at the very edge of our experiences. David is thus literalizing and accentuating the doom that awaits all human beings, a doom that is engendered at birth. And instead of escaping from or clarifying that condition, we have allowed it to invade our most intimate spaces. This is the deep nihilism that the Alien prequels rest upon, as each of our female protagonists (Prometheus’ Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Covenant’s Dany Branson) do not share in Ripley’s hopeful, if solitary, escape. Both Elizabeth and Dany are forced to rest in full view of the horror that has pierced the veil, the gaping maw that greets their most profound questions. In this way, the final scenes of both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant are perfectly captured by the speaker’s final words in Shelley’s Alastor: after recounting the inevitable death of the poet who strove for the sublime and was lost in that “immeasurable void” (a permanent, troubling version of Wordsworth’s sleep-like suspension), the speaker notes:

It is a woe too “deep for tears,” when all
Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit,
Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves
Those who remain behind, not sobs or groans,
The passionate tumult of a clinging hope;
But pale despair and cold tranquillity,
Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things,
Birth and the grave, that are not as they were. (713-720)

For Alien: Covenant, the spirit that leaves, the spirit that adorns the world with its light, is the empty specter of spiritual, metaphysical wholeness. It is no coincidence that both prequel films have deeply religious characters who lose (or at least conflict with) their faith: there is no hope to cling to in such a universe, just the “pale despair” and “cold tranquility” of “Nature’s vast frame.” There is nothing to return to–the constants by which we measured our lives “are not as they were,” and our female heroes depart each film heavy with this knowledge. This has always been the deeply horrific epilogue of the Alien franchise: our surviving woman, weighted by her encounter with the perfect monster, retires from the unceasing struggle unsure if she will survive the night.

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Zac Fanni is a Toronto-based freelance writer and college professor teaching in the Humanities. He tells me he is convinced of two things: that Penny Dreadful is the best television show to have ever aired, and that he will one day get a tenured position at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. Both of these things, he says, are probably unlikely.  You can find him on twitter here, and on Youtube here. This article was originally published by http://www.audienceseverywhere.net and was reproduced with their kind permission. If you wish to view the original article you can find it here.

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Sources

• Burke, Edmund. “A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.” Harvard Classics, vol. 24, part 2, 2001, http://www.bartleby.com/24/2/. Accessed 20 May 2017.
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The Norton Anthology of EnglishLiterature: Volume D. 8th ed., edited by Jack Stillinger and Deidre Shauna Lynch, W.W.Norton & Company, 2006, pp. 430-446.
• Doré, Gustave, illustrator. Paradise Lost. By John Milton. Arcturus, 2005.
• Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats: Volume I. Edited by Hyder Edward Rollins, CambridgeUniversity Press, 1958, pp. 193-94.
• Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Penguin Classics, 2003.
• Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defence of Poetry.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume D. 8th ed., edited by Jack Stillinger and Deidre Shauna Lynch, W.W.  Norton & Company, 2006, pp. 837-850.
• Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume D. 8th ed., edited by Jack Stillinger and Deidre Shauna Lynch, W.W.  Norton & Company, 2006, pp. 745-762.
• Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Ozymandias.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume D. 8th ed., edited by Jack Stillinger and Deidre Shauna Lynch, W.W. Norton & Company, 2006, 768.
• Wordsworth, William. “Lines Composed A Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume D. 8th ed., edited by Jack Stillinger and Deidre Shauna Lynch, W.W. Norton & Company, 2006, pp. 258-262.

Shelley Lives - Taking the Revolutionary Poet Shelley to the Streets.

One of the goals of my site is also to gather together people from all disciplines and walks of life who are interested in Shelley. One such person is Mark Summers. You have encountered his writing on my site: The Political Fury of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Revolutionary Politics and the Poet. Mark Summers came late to Shelley - he first encountered him when the newly discovered Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things was published for the first time in late 2015. But he was a quick learner, and I think he has a better sense of Shelley than many people who have been studying him for thirty years.

Mark is an e-Learning specialist for a UK Midlands based company and a musician specializing in experimental and free improvised forms. An active member of the Republic Campaign which aims to replace the UK monarchy with an accountable head of state, Mark blogs at at www.newleveller.net which focuses on issues of republicanism and radical politics and history. You can also find him on Twitter @NewLeveller.

Mark's writing has a vitality and immediacy which is exhilarating.  What I love most about it is his ability to put Shelley in the context of his time, and then make what happened then feel relevant now.  Both Mark and I sense the importance of recovering the past to making sense out of what is happening today. With madcap governments in England and the United States leading their respective countries toward the bring of authoritarianism, Shelley's revolutionary prescriptions are enjoying something of a renaissance; and so they should, we need Percy Bysshe Shelley right now!

One of Mark's dreams was to "take Shelley to the streets". There has been a long history of this, most recently during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. Then there was the early 20th Century union organizer Pauline Newman who deployed Shelley's poetry to great effect while founding the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. I wrote about that in Masks of Anarchy by Michael Demson.  I also recently reported on a highly unusual but effective use of Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy by English fashion designer John Alexander Skelton: Shelley Storms the Fashion World With Mask of Anarchy.

Well, last fall Mark Summers did something absolutely fantastic: HE ACTUALLY TOOK SHELLEY'S POETRY TO A STREET PROTEST.  What follows is his moving account of his experience.  There are lessons for all of us in his experience - including some very practical ones such as the correct use of a megaphone!  I think Mark's article is one of the most important I have published - and every student or teacher of Shelley needs to pay close attention to what Mark did.  It is easy for us to chat amiably about Shelley in seminar rooms or at conferences, to comment on our FaceBook pages or Twitter accounts - it is entirely another thing altogether to go to a protest and read Shelley aloud to demonstrators. Yet this is EXACTLY how I think Shelley would have wanted his poetry to be heard.  The closest I have come to Mark's experience pales in comparison: I have taken to working Shelley into all my speeches.  And what I have taken away from the experience is very similar to what Mark learned.  So grab a coffee or a whiskey (or both) and settle in for a terrific read.

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Suits, Poetry and Megaphones; My Experience with Shelley at #TakeBackBrum 2016 - by Mark Summers

In previous posts and articles I have described some of the ways in which the works of the great philosopher and poet Percy Bysshe Shelley have stood the test of time. My central point is that beneath the establishment whitewash, Shelley’s work is as relevant to radical politics now as it was two centuries ago; his concerns are our concerns. So it has been an idea of mine to take Shelley back to where he belongs – the streets of Britain, via a megaphone!

Protest and Poetry

This year the Conservative Party held its annual conference in central Birmingham between the 2nd and 5th October. As a means of protesting the Government’s austerity measures which has seen the poorer and more vulnerable members of society paying for the excess and incompetence of a broken financial system, the People’s Assembly organized a weekend of protest in the city. With our presence at the start of the Sunday protest march, the Birmingham branch of Republic Campaign drew attention to the fact that monarchy is one of the few institutions completely shielded from the cuts inflicted on the rest of society. This presented the perfect opportunity to debut my ‘Street Shelley’ plan especially as between 10,000 and 20,000 people would be queuing up to march past.

Deciding that road transport and parking would be a nightmare I took the train into Birmingham. It was an almost surreal experience as protestors laden with banners, flags and leaflets rubbed shoulders (literally in the case of a crowded train) with conference delegates in suits and carefully coiffured hair!. I had chosen my poems beforehand, England in 1819, Masque of Anarchy and Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things. Three of the most radical and hard hitting of Shelley’s pieces. The major problem I needed to overcome was a total lack of experience of poetry recitation! My original plan had been to include some stanzas from the great chartist poets such as Gerald Massey.

Gerald Massey, Chartist, mid 1850's. From Samuel Smiles' Brief Biographies, 1876. 

But powerful as these works are (I must get around to writing about them very soon) they proved far trickier for a novice to handle than the fluid lines of Shelley. Considering the fact that I was also using a megaphone in a restless crowd I decided to play safe by letting the words of the poems do the work.

Learning Quickly

As a shorter sonnet, England in 1819 was suitable for reading in its entirety. But the longer poems needed more careful consideration. One of the delights of reading both Mask of Anarchy and Poetical Essay at your leisure is the way in which Shelley structures his material, diverting now this way, now that way to provide background and develop his theme. This would simply not work for a shifting crowd where the aim is for impact in an environment with competing demands for attention. The best plan would be to choose portions in the hope of hooking people in to discover more. Selecting the material from Mask of Anarchy was a relatively straightforward task with Shelley deftly creating distinct points of tension within its tripartite structure. This means that groups of 10 or 12 stanzas are distributed through the poem which have both internal coherence and impact. So, for example, the following section works as a unit, especially as it contains one the most famous lines in radical poetry "Ye are many—they are few."

Men of England, heirs of Glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty Mother,
Hopes of her, and one another ;

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number.
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.
…….

[Through to]
……

Paper coin—that forgery
Of the title-deeds, which ye
Hold to something from the worth
Of the inheritance of Earth.

’Tis to be a slave in soul
And to hold no strong control
Over your own wills, but be
All that others make of ye.

Reciting the poetry was an experience with very steep vertical learning curve. For example, I quickly discovered that it was more effective to actually turn down the megaphone volume and raise the volume of my voice. In this way I realized just how well it works as a visceral language with a weight capable of projection. Lines such as

’Tis to see your children weak
With their mothers pine and peak,

could be delivered with energy and passion, the whole thing becoming quite a cathartic experience. Strangely, despite having spent much time over the past few months with these works I discovered that the meaning of a few words and lines were less obvious than I originally thought.

Image from Michael Demson's Masks of Anarchy, a brilliant graphic novel that can be purchased here.

Shelley Lives!

The reaction of the protestors was mixed. Many of them were simply bemused, but I did draw a small round of applause at one point. More gratifyingly were the people who came up to me and enquired further about the poems which fulfilled a central aim of piquing interest. One person in particular wanted me to place Shelley in the historical sweep of radical dissent. The surprising and depressing fact was that he was an English History graduate for whom radicalism was presented as a half-hearted account of Marxism in the 19th Century! The majestic sweep and variety of radical thought over four centuries had largely passed him by – what an indictment of the education system.

Will I continue – absolutely! The sense of catharsis may have just been simply the result of over-oxygenation of course, but the surge of energy was wonderful. It was also a humbling experience to be a vessel for ideas and emotions far beyond my own abilities to articulate. I felt a great sense of connection, as though the past two centuries had simply evaporated and the man himself was still amongst us. I discovered patterns and connections which had not occurred to me when reading the material quietly and alone. I hope Shelley would have approved of what I had done to his poetry.

For me the work of Shelley is not an artifact to be studied and analyzed but a continuing personal inspiration for my political engagement. I am sure it will be the same for many more people when we release him from the sanitized, gilded cage in which the establishment has trapped him.

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Let me tell you something Mark, Shelley, who went to his grave without seeing Mask of Anarchy published, would be overjoyed.  Overjoyed because he wrote his poetry to inspire people to change the world the way you have been inspired.  But I think his joy would be profoundly tinged with sadness, a sadness which stems from the realization that the world has not changed so very much from his times; the poor are still oppressed, and the rich have grown ever wealthier. Shame on us all.

Mark's article can be found here at his terrific website, New Leveller.  It is reprinted with his permission. The banner image at the top of the post comes from Michael Demson's Masks of Anarchy, abrilliant graphic novel that can be purchased here.

Revolutionary Politics and the Poet. By Mark Summers

One of the goals of my site is also to gather together people from all disciplines and walks of life who are interested in Shelley. One such person is Mark Summers. You have encountered his writing here before.  One of Mark's stated goals is to "take Shelley to the streets".  I have more to report about this later.  There has been a long history of this, most recently during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.  Mark is an e-Learning specialist for a UK Midlands based company and a musician specializing in experimental and free improvised forms. An active member of the Republic Campaign which aims to replace the UK monarchy with an accountable head of state, Mark blogs at at www.newleveller.net which focuses on issues of republicanism and radical politics/history. You can also find him on Twitter @NewLeveller. Mark's writing has a vitality and immediacy which is exhilarating. I first discovered him as a result an article of his which appeared in openDemocracy. I re-published here recently.

What I love about Mark Summers' writing is his ability to put Shelley in the context of his time, and then make what happened then feel relevant now.  Both Mark and I sense the importance of recovering the past to making sense out of what is happening today. With madcap governments in England and the United States leading their respective countries toward the bring of authoritarianism, Shelley's revolutionary prescriptions are enjoying something of a renaissance; and so they should, we need Percy Bysshe Shelley right now!.

What comes next is Mark's follow-up to his important openDemocracy piece. Mark wrote his article in the summer of 2016; since then Donald Trump was elected President of the United States - making Mark's article prescient and even more compelling.  Enjoy!

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Revolutionary Politics and the Poet

"Ye are many, they are few!"

The anniversary of two events of primary importance in England's radical history occur in August; the birth of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley on the 4th (in 1792) and the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, England on the 16th (in 1819).  Last summer (27 July 2016) my thoughts Shelley’s great Poetical Essay on the State of Things was published on openDemocracy and it is a suitable moment to consider the relevance of another of his great works inspired by events in Manchester, the Mask of Anarchy (you can read it here).  Like the openDemocracy article, this post is neither intended as a literary study of Shelley’s work nor an account of the origins of Shelley’s radical opinions. There are many people far better qualified for this task and I can only draw your attention to two examples, Paul Foot’s excellent article from 2006 or the materials on this fascinating blogsite by Graham Henderson. In both my openDemocracy article and the present post I have two aims. Firstly to outline my claim to Shelley as part of the tradition with which I identify and secondly to assess the importance of Shelley’s work and the invaluable lessons it has for us now.

Although popular pressure had been building for reform since the start of the French Revolution in 1789, economic depression and high unemployment following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 intensified demands for change. In 1819 a crowd variously estimated at being between 60,000 and 100,000 had gathered in St Peters Field in Manchester to protest and demand greater representation in Parliament. The subsequent overreaction by Government militia forces in the shape of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry led to a cavalry charge with sabres drawn. The exact numbers were never established but about 12 to 15 people were killed immediately and possibly 600-700 were injured, many seriously. For more information on the complex serious of events, go to this British Library resource and this campaign for a memorial. [Editor's note: For more on the Mask of Anarchy, follow this link to my review of Michael Demson's graphic novel, Masks of Anarchy]

Shelley was in Italy when news reached him of the events in Manchester and he set down his reaction in the poem Mask of Anarchy which contains the immortal lines contained in the title of my post. The work simmers over 93 stanzas with a barely controlled rage leading to a call to action and a belief that the approach of non-violent resistance (an approach followed by Gandhi over a century later) would allow the oppressed of England to seize the moral high ground and achieve victory. Such was the power of the poem that it did not appear in public until 1832, the year of the Great Reform Act which extended the voting franchise.

Detail from Michael Demson's Masks of Anarchy.

Anarchy – Chaos and Confusion as a Method of Control

An excellent place to start thinking about the relevance of the poem is with the eponymous evil villain, Anarchy. He leads a band of three tyrants which are identified as contemporary politicians, Murder (Foreign Secretary, Viscount Castlereagh),  Fraud ( Lord Chancellor, Lord Eldon) and Hypocrisy (Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth).  But Shelley widens the cast of villains in his description to include the Church, Monarchy and Judiciary.

Last came Anarchy : he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood ;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown ;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone ;
On his brow this mark I saw—
‘I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!’

The promotion of anarchy with its attendant fear of chaos and disorder was one of the most serious accusations which could be levelled at authority. The avoidance of anarchy was also a concern of English radicals ever since the Civil War in the 1640s and Shelley was making the gravest personal attack with his explicit individual accusations.  But Shelley’s attack is pertinent, the implicit threat of confusion and chaos to subdue a population for political ends is something which we experience today.   The feeling of powerlessness which can result from an apparently confusing and chaotic situation is something which the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has termed ‘oh dearism’.  In our own time he has identified recent Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne as deliberately using such a tactic. Likewise the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has been variously accused of being a threat to national security or a threat to the economy .

The 1819 Peterloo massacre occurred at a time of heightened external tension with fear that the French revolution would spread to Britain. The fear was not unfounded and various groups around the country emerged with such an intent, in many cases inspired by Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man which the Government had been trying to unsuccessfully suppress. The existence of an external threat combined with homegrown radicals was explicitly used as a reason for a policy of political repression and censorship. Likewise today an external threat, Islamic State combined with an entirely separate perceived internal threat (employee strike action) has been cited as justification for a whole range of measures including invasive communication monitoring (so called ‘Snoopers Charter’) without requisite democratic controls and a repressive Trade Union Bill seeking to shackle the ability of unions to garner support and carry out industrial action.

Detail from Michael Demson's Masks of Anarchy.

The Nature of Freedom

The nature of freedom is a problem which has bothered both libertarians and republicans for generations. In Mask of Anarchy where Shelley is enumerating the injustice suffered by the poor he clearly defines freedom in terms of the state of slavery, a core republican premise:

What is Freedom? Ye can tell
That which Slavery is too well,
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own

The essence of freedom which has financial independence as a core component is clearly articulated over a number of stanzas, starting with:

‘’Tis to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
In your limbs, as in a cell
For the tyrants’ use to dwell,

‘So that ye for them are made
Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade,
With or without your own will bent
To their defence and nourishment.

In our own time freedom is frequently constrained by insufficient financial resources as a result of hardship caused by issues such as disability support cuts, chronic low wages and a zero-hours contract society. Shelley would have no problem with identifying Sports Direct owner Mike Ashley, playing with multi-million pounds football clubs while his workforce toil in iniquitous conditions for a pittance; or Sir Philip Green impoverishing British Home Stores pensioners to pile up a vast fortune for his wife in Monaco.

Disgustingly the only thing we need to update from Shelley's Mask of Anarchy is the cast of villains, the substance is unchanged!.

Non-Violent Resistance – A Way Forward

I pointed out that in the 1811 Poetical Essay, Shelley was searching for a peaceful way to elicit change in an oppressive hierarchical society.  By 1819 Shelley has settled on his preferred solution of non-violent resistance.

Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war,

‘And let Panic, who outspeeds
The career of armèd steeds
Pass, a disregarded shade
Through your phalanx undismayed.

Nonviolent resistance is not an instant solution and takes years of persistent and widespread enactment to be successful. A partial victory was secured in the 1830s with the Great Reform Act (1832) and the Abolition of Slavery Act (1834). But history has proved that it is a viable strategy, the independence of India being an eloquent testament.

Detail from Michael Demson's Masks of Anarchy.

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This article is republished with the kind permission of the author.  It appeared originally on Mark's superb blogsite (www.newleveller.net) on 7 August 2016.

In the Footsteps of Mary and Percy Shelley. By Anna Mercer

My Guest Contributor series continues with another travel feature by Anna Mercer. Anna as readers of this space will known has studied at the University of Liverpool and the University of Cambridge. She is now in completing her thesis as an AHRC-funded doctoral candidate at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York.  Her research focuses on the collaborative literary relationship of Percy and Mary Shelley. She won the runner-up Keats-Shelley Prize in 2015 for her essay on the Shelleys, which was published in the Spring 2016 issue of the Keats-Shelley Review. A new article on this subject is due to appear in the forthcoming issue of the same magazine.

One of the great things about studying Shelley is where it can take you if you are intrepid. In the course of his short life he traveled to Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Devon, France, Switzerland and Italy - and some of the places he visited are among the most sublime and picturesque in Europe.  I have an important trip planned to Lerici in Italy where he died and have both written and audio-visual material planned for publication in May. 

In the meantime enjoy Anna's record of her visit to Geneva and Chamonix.  I myself made this trip and I can tell you it is absolutely stunning at any time of the year.  You can watch my VLOG about my visit to the Villa Diodati here.

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In June 2016 I made a pilgrimage to an area in Europe known for its sublime scenery. I have read so much about the snowy peaks of the Alps and the shores of Lake Geneva, primarily from two sources that figure in my life because of my PhD research at the University of York. I am studying Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, two Romantic authors who, before their marriage but after their romantic union, spent the summer in the environs of Geneva and Chamonix in 1816, exactly 200 years before I arrived there.

Percy Shelley had originally thought of leaving England for Italy. The Shelleys were instead convinced to head to Cologny near Geneva by their travellng companion Claire Clairmont, Mary’s step-sister, who in London had begun an affair with Lord Byron.

On 13 May 1816 the Shelleys and Claire arrived in Geneva, followed on 25 May by Byron and his physician Dr. John Polidori. By June, both parties had taken residences close to each other on the shores of the lake; Byron stayed at the Villa Diodati. Incessant rain often prevented them from going out on the water in the evenings, and even stopped Percy, Mary and Claire from returning to their own lodgings.[1] The eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 has devastated the weather across Europe, and 1816 is recalled now as ‘the year without a summer’.

I also arrived to an atmospherically rainy Geneva:

The weather eventually cleared, and we explored the town.  Like the Shelleys, we were intrigued by the literary greats who had graced the city, among the Rousseau.

During the 1816 summer, Percy, Mary and Claire stayed at Maison Chapuis but often spent time at Byron’s grander lodgings nearby. Geneva is where Mary Shelley began writing her most famous and enduring novel, Frankenstein (first published in 1818). Mary’s terrifying novel – according to her 1831 introduction – was ostensibly inspired by a ‘waking dream’ she had after hearing Percy and Byron’s discussions on ‘the nature of the principle of life’ to which she ‘was a devout but nearly silent listener’. This account of her literary genius is characteristically modest, as her silence is in all likelihood overplayed; the community at Geneva in 1816 offered a stimulating intellectual environment and Percy and Mary collaborated on the novel as well as many other works.

Mary began writing Frankenstein in June 1816. The Shelleys met Byron on 27 May, and he took up residence at Diodati on 10 June, and by June 22 Percy Shelley and Byron went on a tour of Lake Geneva together. So, although Mary only recorded the composition of Frankenstein in her journal in July, it is likely the novel was started between 10-22 June.[2]

In a previous post here at www.grahamhenderson.ca, I reviewed the excellent exhibition on Frankenstein at the Bodmer Foundation Library and Museum: Frankenstein: Creation of Darkness. We were treated with a walk around the grounds of the Villa Diodati itself.

Percy and Mary included descriptions of their travels in the 1817 publication History of a Six Weeks’ Tour. Mary’s view of Geneva was muted to say the least:

There is nothing […] in it that can repay you for the trouble of walking over its rough stones. The houses are high, the streets narrow, many of them on the ascent, and no public building of any beauty to attract your eye, or any architecture to gratify your taste. The town is surrounded by a wall, the three gates of which are shut exactly at ten o’clock, when no bribery (as in France) can open them (101-2).

However, the dramatic weather offered her respite:

The lake is at our feet, and a little harbour contains our boat, in which we still enjoy our evening excursions on the water. Unfortunately we do not now enjoy those brilliant skies that hailed us on our first arrival to this country. An almost perpetual rain confines us principally to the house; but when the sun bursts forth it is with a splendour and heat unknown in England. The thunder storms that visit us are grander and more terrific than I have ever seen before. We watch them as they approach from the opposite side of the lake, observing the lightning play among the clouds in various parts of the heavens, and dart in jagged figures upon the piny heights of Jura, dark with the shadow of the overhanging cloud, while perhaps the sun is shining cheerily upon us. One night we enjoyed a finer storm than I had ever before beheld. The lake was lit up—the pines on Jura made visible, and all the scene illuminated for an instant, when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder came in frightful bursts over our heads amid the darkness (99-100).

I am particularly fascinated by this jointly-authored publication History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, Mary’s first foray into print (besides her early light verses published in her father’s library). The text of this volume is an intermingling of voices, the provenance of each section being drawn from a joint journal, numerous letters and original words composed for the edition. I will be discussing the History in a paper at the British Association for Romantic Studies conference in York in July, 2017.

On our first day in Geneva, after wandering around and dodging the rain, we immediately set off to cross the border. We were staying in an idyllic, isolated chalet in France, and the first place we wanted to visit the next day was the site of many inspirations for both Percy and Mary: the town of Chamonix, which rests under the imposing gaze of Mont Blanc, Europe’s highest peak.

Our travels from Geneva to the French Alps reminded me of Mary Shelley’s third novel, The Last Man (1826), in which the protagonist Lionel and his companion Adrian (a Percy Shelley-esque figure) make a similar trajectory:

We left the fair margin of the beauteous lake of Geneva, and entered the Alpine ravines; tracing to its source the brawling Arve, through the rock-bound valley of Servox, beside the mighty waterfalls, and under the shadow of the inaccessible mountains, we travelled on; while the luxuriant walnut-tree gave place to the dark pine, whose musical branches swung in the wind, and whose upright forms had braved a thousand storms – till the verdant sod, the flowery dell, and shrubbery hill were exchanged for the sky-piercing, untrodden, seedless rock, “the bones of the world, waiting to be clothed with every thing necessary to give life and beauty”*

* Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Norway.

This excerpt concludes with a quotation taken from Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. Her Letters written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark  inspired Mary in her own travel writing. This was a text in which the author sought ‘to let my remarks and reflections flow unrestrained’ (Advertisement). The writing of Mary Shelley’s radical parents (her father was William Godwin) were some of the texts the Shelleys were both reading – occasionally aloud together – in 1814, the year of their elopement, and their first journey to the continent. Texts included Letters written during a Short Residence by Wollstonecraft and Caleb Williams by Godwin.[3]

On the day of our arrival in Chamonix, the mountains were not only seemingly inaccessible, but invisible. Low cloud prevented us from identifying Mont Blanc above us, but did not damage the charming nature of the town, now a popular ski-resort, and the drive into the Valley was still dramatic:

Despite the cloud, we decided to get the train to the ‘Mer de Glace’. Perhaps bad weather would have prevented tourists from making the journey in the Shelleys’ day, but in 2016 the Montenvers Railway (opened 1909) takes you right up to the viewing platform.

On arrival, we were sorely disappointed, as we couldn’t see a thing. Mildly upset that we had traveled all this way up and wouldn’t see the glacier itself, my companion convinced me to take the cable car that descends into the mist despite the slightly miserable conditions.

When we landed at the bottom, the glacier was in full view. I will firstly give you Percy Shelley’s description of this natural wonder:

We have returned from visiting the glacier of Montanvert, or as it is called, the Sea of Ice, a scene in truth of dizzying wonder. The path that winds to it along the side of a mountain, now clothed with pines, now intersected with snowy hollows, is wide and steep. […] We arrived at Montanvert, […] On all sides precipitous mountains, the abodes of unrelenting frost, surround this vale: their sides are banked up with ice and snow, broken, heaped high, and exhibiting terrific chasms. The summits are sharp and naked pinnacles, whose overhanging steepness will not even permit snow to rest upon them. Lines of dazzling ice occupy here and there their perpendicular rifts, and shine through the driving vapours with inexpressible brilliance; they pierce the clouds like things not belonging to this earth. The vale itself is filled with a mass of undulating ice, and has an ascent sufficiently gradual even to the remotest abysses of these horrible desarts. It is only half a league (about two miles) in breadth, and seems much less. It exhibits an appearance as if frost had suddenly bound up the waves and whirlpools of a mighty torrent. We walked some distance upon its surface. The waves are elevated about 12 or 15 feet from the surface of the mass, which is intersected by long gaps of unfathomable depth, the ice of whose sides is more beautifully azure than the sky. In these regions every thing changes, and is in motion. This vast mass of ice has one general progress, which ceases neither day nor night; it breaks and bursts for ever: some undulations sink while others rise; it is never the same. The echo of rocks, or of the ice and snow which fall from their overhanging precipices, or roll from their aerial summits, scarcely ceases for one moment. One would think that Mont Blanc, like the god of the Stoics, was a vast animal, and that the frozen blood for ever circulated through his stony veins.

We dined (M***, C***, and I) on the grass, in the open air, surrounded by this scene. The air is piercing and clear. We returned down the mountain, sometimes encompassed by the driving vapours, sometimes cheered by the sunbeams, and arrived at our inn by seven o’clock (History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, 164-168).

However, we were not just relieved to be able to see more than cloud, but shocked by the lack of glacier before us.

Carl Hackert, ‘Vue de la Mer de Glace et de l’Hôpital de Blair’ (1781) (Centre d’iconographie genevois).

Percy Shelley’s premonition that Buffon’s ‘sublime but gloomy theory’ that ‘this globe which we inhabit will at some future period be changed into a mass of frost’ (161-2), was entirely unfounded. We knew that the ice was melting – the majority of us do (I am avoiding any political comment here) – but we were still affected by this huge difference across the decades. You can read more on this subject at the British Romantic Writing and Environmental Catastrophe website, an AHRC-funded project at the University of Leeds.

You can now go inside the glacier itself:

When we went back up in the cable car, the clouds had cleared and we had an astounding view of the Mer de Glace and surrounding peaks. This reminded me of Volume II, Chapter II of Frankenstein, as Victor makes the same ascent. He makes it alone, because ‘the presence of another would destroy the solitary grandeur of the scene’. Just as in our visit, in the novel the clouds clear from the protagonist around midday:

It was nearly noon when I arrived at the top of the ascent. For some time I sat upon the rock that overlooks the sea of ice. A mist covered both that and the surrounding mountains. Presently a breeze dissipated the cloud, and I descended upon the glacier.

From the side where I now stood Montanvert was exactly opposite, at the distance of a league; and above it rose Mont Blanc, in awful majesty. I remained in a recess of the rock, gazing on this wonderful and stupendous scene. The sea, or rather the vast river of ice, wound among its dependent mountains, whose aerial summits hung over its recesses. Their icy and glittering peaks shone in the sunlight over the clouds. My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy.

On our way back to Chamonix, we had the same luck again – an overwhelming sight.

We returned two days later in marginally better weather to take the cable-car that made the ascent of Mont Blanc itself. To be honest, the cloud had left me confused as to where the peak of this infamous mountain was.

A ride up the side of the mountain to the Aiguille Du Midi took my breath away. This trip is a must for any visitor to the area. We were warned that the visibility would be bad at the top, but when we arrived the clouds cleared and left us with spectacular views. If you are a lover of the Shelleys, you will be further mystified in wondering just what those two incredible authors would have made of the sight, if they could have ascended to 3,842m and see the ‘vast animal’ Mont Blanc this close.

Mont Blanc appears in both of the Shelleys’ works (such as Mary’s Frankenstein and The Last Man), but it is Percy Shelley’s poem dedicated to the mountain that reveals the full extent of their awe. You can read the full poem here, but I will leave you with its final lines:

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there,
The still and solemn power of many sights,
And many sounds, and much of life and death.
In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,
In the lone glare of day, the snows descend
Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,
Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,
Or the star-beams dart through them:— Winds contend
Silently there, and heap the snow with breath
Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home
The voiceless lightning in these solitudes
Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods
Over the snow. The secret strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind’s imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?

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This article is reprinted with the kind permission of the author.  It originally appeared 6 February 2017 on her excellent blog which you can find here.

[1] All details from MWS Journals, 103-108. Nb. No journal by Mary (lost) from 13 May 1815 – 21 July 1816.

[2] ‘The impression given by these accounts [Mary Shelley’s intro, PBS’s preface and Thomas Moore] is of a leisurely time-scheme, yet it must in fact have been fairly brief: Byron met Shelley’s party at Sécheron on 27 May, and did not move to the Villa Diodati until 10 June; the journey round Lake Leman began on 22 June, and the novel must have been started between these last two dates’. M. K. Joseph ‘The Composition of Frankenstein’ in Frankenstein ed. J. Paul Hunter (London: Norton, 1996 repr. 2012), 171.

[3] MWS, Journals, 22, 26, 649-50, 684.

The Political Fury of Percy Bysshe Shelley - by Mark Summers

Part of a new feature at www.grahamhenderson.ca is my "Throwback Thursdays". Going back to articles from the past that have new urgency, were favourites or perhaps overlooked. This article falls into the first category.

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The real Percy Bysshe Shelley was a political animal for whom politics were the dominating concern of his intellectual life. His political insights and prescriptions have resonance for our world as tyrants start to take center stage, countries retreat into nationalism and theocracies dominate entire civilizations.  Dismayingly, the problems we face are starkly similar to those of his time, 200 years ago. For example: the concentration of wealth and power and the blurring of the lines between church and state.

Some of you will have read my review of Michael Demson's history of Shelley's Mask of Anarchy.  The reason poems like this are so important is that once upon a time the galvanized people to action. And they can again. People merely need to be inspired. As Demson demonstrates, The Mask of Anarchy is important because "unmasked" the true nature of the political order that was crushing England. Shelley's call for massive, non-violent protest was decades ahead of it's time and influenced unionorganizers and political leaders across the globe. But the more things change the more they seem to stay the same. Guest contributor Mark Summers comment on the Mask of Anarchy says it all: "Disgustingly the only thing we need to update from Mask is the cast of villains, the substance is unchanged!."

For Castlereagh read Rex Tillerson; for Eldon read Stephen Bannon, for Sidmouth read Michael Flynn and for Anarchy itself, Trump:

I met Murder on the way--
He had a mask like Castlereagh--
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight, 
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew

Which from his wide cloak he drew.
Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem, 
Had their brains knocked out by them.

Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.

And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw--
'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!'

To someone today concerned with issues such as social and political equality, Shelley therefore offers two things; firstly a shocking wake up call to the fact things have changed so little, and secondly a storehouse of remarkably sophisticated ideas about what to do about this.

One of the goals of my site is also to gather together people from all disciplines and walks of life who are interested in Shelley. One such person is Mark Summers. One of his stated goals is to "take Shelley to the streets".  I hope to have more to report about this later.  There has been a long history of this, most recently during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.  Mark is an e-Learning specialist for a UK Midlands based company and a musician specializing in experimental and free improvised forms. An active member of the Republic Campaign which aims to replace the UK monarchy with an accountable head of state, Mark blogs at at www.newleveller.net which focuses on issues of republicanism and radical politics/history. You can also find him on Twitter @NewLeveller. Mark's writing has a vitality and immediacy which is exhilarating. I first discovered him as a result of the article I am republishing below.  It was written for openDemocracy. Mark has gone on to write more about Shelley.  I hope this is only the beginning.

On his blog, Mark notes that:

"I take inspiration from the radical and visionary Leveller movement which flourished predominantly between the English Civil Wars of the mid 17th Century. In a series of brilliant leaflets and pamphlets the Levellers articulated their commitment to civil rights and a tolerant social settlement. I consider the ideals of justice and accountability expressed by this movement to be of continuing importance and their proposed solutions provide valuable lessons for meeting contemporary challenges. Clearly the 21st Century is vastly different to the 17th and it is my aim to apply the spirit of Leveller thinking rather than a simple reiteration of their demands. As such I espouse the aims of Civic Republicanism, church disestablishment along with the pursuit of social equality and inclusion." 

To that, I say hear, hear! Now, allow me to introduce you to his fast paced prose which betrays great admiration and affection for the work and life of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

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The Political Fury of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Imagine discovering a new set of string quartets by Beethoven or a large canvas by Turner that was thought to be lost. In either case, the mainstream media would have been agog, just as they were for the discovery of an original Shakespeare folio in April 2016.

So it’s remarkable that the release to public view of a major work by a near contemporary of both these artists on November 10 2015—the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley—was met with an air of such disinterest (The Guardian newspaper excepted).

There were brief mentions and some excerpts were read out on BBC Radio 4, but no welcoming comments appeared from government ministers including the UK’s Minister for Culture, Media and Sport. So much for a significant early piece by one of Britain’s most revered poets.

The work in question was a pamphlet by Shelley entitled the “Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things,” written anonymously in 1811 in support of Irish journalist Peter Finnerty who was imprisoned for libel after criticising the British military command during the Napoleonic Wars. Although a thousand copies of the pamphlet were printed, it is not known how successful the poem turned out to be in terms of raising money; what’s clear is that the work disappeared from view.

During the 1870s, some expert detective work positively identified a surviving example of the poem as the work of Shelley. Much more recently in 2006, a single copy was re-discovered by the scholar H.R.Woudhuysen, but it was lodged in a private collection so the work remained hidden from public view.

That was the position until 2015, when this private copy was acquired by the Bodleian Library in Oxford. You can now read (and even download) a copy from the Bodleian Library website. Poet and ex-children’s Laureate Michael Rosen had been campaigning for the release of the work for some time previously. In a blog post he gave his thoughts about why, in his words, the poem had been ‘suppressed,’ and why he had campaigned to get it released to the public.

Rosen argues that confusing the artistic substance of the pamphlet with the ownership of the physical artifact had meant that only a few privileged people could access the full content—a scandalous situation in his view.

What about the pamphlet itself? The Poetical Essay consists of a prose introduction along with a 172 line poem followed by accompanying notes. The nature of the work is clear: it’s a reasoned and passionate response to the perceived ills and injustices of the world by an 18 year old radical.

First and foremost the young Shelley issues a pointed condemnation of the militaristic stance of the British establishment, along with stanzas that are vehemently anti-monarchist and implacably opposed to the abuses of wealth that were prevalent at the time:

“Man must assert his native rights, must say; 
We take from Monarchs’ hand the granted sway;”          

The range and scope of his criticism is impressive, including a keen censure of the role of the media. Going way beyond simple anti-monarchism, the introduction to the poem reveals a subtle understanding of the kind of secular republican society that Shelley desires.  For example, he states that: 

“This reform must not be the work of immature assertions of that liberty, which, as affairs now stand, no one can claim without attaining over others an undue, invidious superiority, benefiting in consequence self instead of society.” 

In this passage he correctly identifies the problem of equating liberty with an unrestrained personal freedom—what the philosopher Isaiah Berlin labeled as “positive liberty” in the 1950s.  This remains a central concern of republicanism today.  Likewise he warns clearly about the dangers of violent revolution in advancing the cause of egalitarianism:

“…it must not be the partial warfare of physical strength, which would induce the very evils which the tendency of the following Essay is calculated to eradicate; but gradual, yet decided intellectual exertions must diffuse light, as human eyes are rendered capable of bearing it.”

Interestingly, Shelley uses the words “patriot” and “patriotism” three times in the body of the poem. On each occasion he makes it clear that the duty of a patriot is to attempt to shine a light on the corruption and secrecy that surrounds autocratic government. For example:

“And shall no patriot tear the veil away
Which hides these vices from the face of day?” 

But this range of criticism is, ironically, also a source of weakness in the work.  As John Mullen pointed out in The Guardian, Shelley’s targets are hidden behind abstractions. The poem doesn’t deliver the punch of some of his later works such as the sonnet “England in 1819”, and the poem “Masque of Anarchy,” where the focus is on a single event—the outrage of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre.  Interestingly, both of these works were also suppressed until the 1830s.

Was the public’s 200 year long wait for the poem worthwhile? For me the answer is ‘yes’, once I had become accustomed to the language and phrasing that Shelley uses.  As Rosen says in this article by Alison Flood:

“…the poem was full of ‘portable triggers, lines of political outrage for people to catch and hold’. He added: ‘Political writing is often like that, but in times of oppression and struggle, this is no bad thing: a portable phrase to carry with us may help.’” 

Ultimately, the concealment of Shelley’s Poetical Essay highlights a number of important contemporary issues about the values of our own society, including the rights of possession and access to important cultural artifacts.

Undoubtedly, the pamphlet contains explosive ideas which the British establishment might continue to regard as dangerous. It would be crass and superficial not to acknowledge that the situation in which Shelley found himself in 1811 is very different from the one we inhabit in the second decade of the 21st Century. Yet in some respects the poet would be depressed to see how certain aspects of social and political life have barely changed. 

First, the poem was written to help raise money for a journalist—Finnerty—who was critical of Britain’s military commanders and who was imprisoned for libel as a result. With the increasing focus on military issues in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere can we be sure that important criticisms of the military are not being similarly gagged today? Note how the failures of the British Army in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, for example, have been suppressed, including those highlighted by servicemen who were directly involved. News continues to be managed and the opinions of pacifist ex-servicemen are still marginalised.

Second, a central concern of Shelley and other critics in 1811 was the way in which the poor were made to bear the costs of military activity, while the glory and spoils of war were garnered by the establishment. What would his poem say if it were to be written today about the commitment of the UK government to spend two per cent of GDP on the military, or to give tax cuts to the wealthy, or to protect trusts and tax havens while cutting disability benefits, some of which affect ex-servicemen?

Finally, Shelley’s concern with the methods by which society can be moved from a position where privilege holds power to one where power is distributed throughout society and held accountable is just as real today. But here he runs into the same problems as everyone else who is seeking radical change. 

Shelley claimed that the actions he was proposing in his pamphlet did not infringe on the interests of Government, but this was surely naive. Taking power from those who possess it is itself a revolutionary act. He needed to have looked no further than recent history (for him) in the form of the American Revolution for confirmation of this fact. 

As Shelley put it in his poem:

“Then will oppression’s iron influence show; The great man’s comfort as the poor man’s woe.” 

How to achieve peaceful and lasting change in modern societies remains an unanswered question, and one that’s ripe for fresh action and inspiration. Dangerous ideas from poets are just what a genuinely open society should be able to encompass and discuss, not conceal, ignore or suppress. 

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This article originally appeared on 27 July 2016 and can be found here.  It is reprinted with the permission of the author and openDemocracy. My thanks to both.

Frankenstein at the fondation Martin Bodmer in Geneva, review by Anna Mercer

My Guest Contributor series continues with another article by Anna Mercer. Anna as readers of this space will known has studied at the University of Liverpool and the University of Cambridge. She is now in her third year as an AHRC-funded doctoral candidate at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York.  Her research focuses on the collaborative literary relationship of Percy and Mary Shelley. She won the runner-up Keats-Shelley Prize in 2015 for her essay on the Shelleys, which was published in the Spring 2016 issue of the Keats-Shelley Review. A new article on this subject is due to appear in the forthcoming issue of the same magazine.

I myself made this visit, twice in fact, and an attest the the extraordinary character of this exhibition. This January I will be introducing an audio-visual component to this space in the form of a series of VLOGs. The inaugural VLOG will focus on the time the Shelley's spent at Diodati and what I believe Diodati stands for. But enough of that, let me turn the podium over to Anna!

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In June 2016 I spent five days in Geneva and south east France, travelling in the footsteps of the Shelleys (the details of which – including the Shelleys’ experience, and my own experience, of the Mer de Glace – will be a future blog). On the third day I met Prof. David Spurr from the University of Geneva at the Bodmer Foundation Library and Museum. Spurr had kindly agreed to show us around the current exhibition: Frankenstein: Creation of Darkness, which he curated.

As my partner and I drove across the border from France into Switzerland, and around the beautiful Cologny area of Geneva, we caught a glimpse of Mont Blanc in the distance, a momentous sight; our trip to Chamonix the day before had been so cloudy, rainy and misty that it had seemed as if the mountain was determined to hide from our view. We welcomed the sunshine and we arrived at the Bodmer, which is in a stunning location, and well worth a visit. It opened in 1951, and was initially a research library, but in 2003 an exhibition space was opened, which in itself is an amazing piece of architecture.

View fullsize

Spurr’s tour of the Frankenstein exhibition took us through the manuscripts, books and pictures on show as a story of the text’s history and conception, and all the many literary and artistic influences on Frankenstein, as well as those things which have been influenced by it. The exhibition has (of course) been set up to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the writing of Mary Shelley’s iconic novel. The blurb tells us that the exhibition considers ‘the origins of Frankenstein, the perspectives it opens and the questions it raises.’

The exhibition provides a journey, in which you firstly encounter the Shelleys’ works, and then the connections within those works to Geneva itself. We are presented with contemporary scenes of Geneva (in order to understand the Swiss town as Mary would have seen it), and the more unchanging forms of the French Alps.

Cologny, view of Geneva from the Villa Diodati by Jean Dubois, late 19th century / Centre d’iconographie genevoise, Bibliothèque de Genève

These images are placed on the wall alongside a large glass cabinet holding the treasure of the exhibition: the Frankenstein draft notebooks. The pages on show include the section that would become Vol II, Chapter II of the 1818 Frankenstein where Mary Shelley quotes Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Mutability’. It was exciting to see the original draft of this page, as I often use the manuscript facsimile version in my research. What is fascinating here is that Mary inserts poetry so seamlessly into her dense prose descriptions of Victor’s solitary Alpine travels and fluctuating moods. Moreover, that poetry is composed by her partner Percy Shelley, who then goes over the draft of the novel and makes occasional suggestions to aid her in her task. Within the Frankenstein notebook (which can be also be viewed online at the Shelley-Godwin Archive), you can see how Percy Shelley glosses Mary’s original language, something which is endlessly fascinating.

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!-yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest. – A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise. – One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same!- For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.

P B Shelley, ‘Mutability’ (1816). Verses 3 and 4 appear in Frankenstein.

Another particular highlight for me was Mary Shelley’s journal – open on the page which shows her first reference to the composition of Frankenstein – ‘write my story’ (24 July 1816). The bicentenary of this journal entry will be celebrated at an upcoming event I am organising at York and the Keats-Shelley House this month. The choice of which pages to display from these hugely important holographs has been executed wonderfully at the Bodmer exhibition. Mary’s journal has no facsimile (although there is a brilliant print edition, edited by Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert), so to see a volume of it was a powerful reminder that it is a tiny book, heavily worn and containing some of her less decipherable jottings.

The exhibition does not only explore the history of the novel’s author and the scenes that she visited and then used in her text, but also places Frankenstein in a wider literary and socio-political context. As the exhibition explains:

“Mary Shelley’s novel continues to demand attention. The questions it raises remain at the heart of literary and philosophical concerns: the ethics of science, climate change, the technologisation of the human body, the unconscious, human otherness, the plight of the homeless and the dispossessed.”

Some of the exhibits on display are on loan from libraries in the UK, such as the Bodleian and the British Library. Others belong to the Bodmer’s own collection. I was particularly excited to see Mary Shelley’s inscription in the copy of the novel she sent to Lord Byron. This was on sale a while ago at Forbes and eventually went for at least £350,000. She writes: ‘To Lord Byron / from the author’ . Her characteristic modesty is evident here, and to be confronted with this edition reminded me of the complex relationship Mary Shelley actually had with Lord Byron, as she was a major copyist for his works, including The Prison of Chillon and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III. Also on show at the exhibition is the letter from Lord Byron to John Murray explaining that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein (Murray being the publisher who first rejected the work). Frankenstein was published anonymously on January 1, 1818: Byron’s choice to reveal her authorship here is testament to his respect for Mary Shelley as a writer, and his determination to deliver her the credit she deserves.

The signed copy of Mary Shelley. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus which went on sale for £350,000. Photo: Peter Harrington

Other literary texts from the period are displayed, including Jane Austen’s Emma (which first appeared in 1816), Polidori’s diary (a subjective record of the infamous events at the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816), and a copy of Fantasmagoriana (the collection which prompted Byron’s decision to announce a ghost-story competition). Other more idiosyncratic items include the weather report from Geneva in the summer of 1816, showing low temperatures of 7-10 degrees: indeed, it was the year without a summer. Considerable attention is also paid to the relics of Frankenstein as a stage production, including the various castings of the creature.

Spurr gave us fantastic anecdote-enforced fragments of the Shelleys’ history and the story of the exhibition, and then took us along to the Villa Diodati (a 5-minute walk), where we were treated to a stroll round the gardens. The house is privately owned, but beautifully cared for (as we were told) in a way that is in keeping with its momentous history.

It is worth noting just how well the literary texts were placed on display at the exhibition in Geneva, a difficult feat for any curator, as old books are not as blatantly striking as other forms of artwork. This many Shelley texts have not been on display together since Shelley’s Ghost at the Bodleian.

Other non-Shelleyan exhibits include a display of the texts the creature initially reads and learns from: Milton’s Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutach’s Lives, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Editions of Rousseau remind the visitor that Lord Byron and the Shelleys were also literary tourists when they first travelled to Switzerland in May/June 1816. The exhibition does a superb job in asserting the powerful contribution and legacy these authors created by composing their own works right there, in Geneva, taking their inspirations from the scenes around them. Moreover, it emphasises the creative stimulation provided by the social environment of reading and intellectual discussion at the Villa Diodati.

(Unless mentioned otherwise, all photos are the author’s own).

The Frankenstein exhibition as featured in other articles from the web:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/switzerland/articles/on-the-frankenstein-trail-in-switzerland/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3rvWSR2rhndMTylClzGzTDy/frankenstein-freak-events-that-gave-birth-to-a-masterpiece

This post first appeared on the blog of the Wordsworth Trust on 3 July 2016 and is reproduced with their kind permission. The original post can be found here