Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Revolutionary

To really appreciate the work of Percy Shelley you have to understand the political and cultural context of his time. This book takes you there. Humankind needed Shelley back then, and this book reminds us of how much we need him now. It is an honest, straightforward, revolutionary look at a truly revolutionary life. The world needs more Shelley, the world needs this book.

Benjamin Zephaniah

Fresh, clear and compelling, this is the best compact account of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s revolutionary life currently available. Jacqueline Mulhallen places Shelley vividly in his own times, and shows how and why his imagination, vision and new exciting art offer such inspiring examples to us now.

Nicholas Roe, Professor of English Literature,

University of St Andrews

In this compelling and eye-opening study, Jacqueline Mulhallen demonstrates how Percy Bysshe Shelley’s passionate humanitarianism enlightens every aspect of the revolutionary agenda that informs all his writing, poetry and prose alike. Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, Mulhallen’s book reminds us anew of that great Romantic’s robust socio-political vision, a vision that remains as relevant and vital for our own volatile times as it was for his some two centuries ago – if not even more so.

Stephen C. Behrendt, George Holmes

Distinguished Professor of English, University of Nebraska

Full of suggestive insights and highly readable, this is an absorbing study of Shelley’s life, thought, and writing. Jacqueline Mulhallen has written a valuable book; she is especially good on Shelley’s revolutionary significance.

Michael O’Neill, Professor of English, Durham University

This book provides a fresh and impassioned account of the significance of Shelley’s radical life and writings. It handles an array of historical and biographical contexts with clarity and skill, and takes on board the findings of recent scholarship. A fine and highly readable achievement.

Michael Rossington, Professor of Romantic Literature,

Newcastle University

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Revolutionary Lives

Series Editors: Sarah Irving, University of Edinburgh;

Professor Paul Le Blanc, La Roche College, Pittsburgh

Revolutionary Lives is a series of short, critical biographies of radical figures from throughout history. The books are sympathetic but not sycophantic, and the intention is to present a balanced and, where necessary, critical evaluation of the individual’s place in their political field, putting their actions and achievements in context and exploring issues raised by their lives, such as the use or rejection of violence, nationalism, or gender in political activism. While individuals are the subject of the books, their personal lives are dealt with lightly except insofar as they mesh with political concerns. The focus is on the contribution these revolutionaries made to history, an examination of how far they achieved their aims in improving the lives of the oppressed and exploited, and how they can continue to be an inspiration for many today.

Also available:

Salvador Allende:

Revolutionary Democrat

Victor Figueroa Clark

Hugo Chávez:

Socialist for the Twenty-first Century

Mike Gonzalez

Frantz Fanon

Philosopher of the Barricades

Peter Hudis

Leila Khaled:

Icon of Palestinian Liberation

Sarah Irvin

Jean Paul Marat:

Tribune of the French Revolution

Clifford D. Conner

Sylvia Pankhurst:

Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire

Katherine Connelly

Paul Robeson:

A Revolutionary Life

Gerald Horne

Ellen Wilkinson:

From Red Suffragist to Government Minister

Paula Bartley

Gerrard Winstanley:

The Digger’s Life and Legacy

John Gurney

www.revolutionarylives.co.uk

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poet and Revolutionary

Jacqueline Mulhallen

First published 2015 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Jacqueline Mulhallen 2015

The right of Jacqueline Mulhallen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN   978 0 7453 3462 2   Hardback

ISBN   978 0 7453 3461 5   Paperback

ISBN   978 1 7837 1702 6   PDF eBook

ISBN   978 1 7837 1704 0   Kindle eBook

ISBN   978 1 7837 1703 3   EPUB eBook

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England

Text design by Melanie Patrick

Simultaneously printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK

and Edwards Bros in the United States of America

To William Alderson and Dritan Dauti

Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

1. Shelley’s Family Background and Education: 1792–1811

2. The Lake District, Ireland and Devon: 1811–13

3. Tremadog , Queen Mab and the ‘Hermit of Marlow’: 1813–18

4. Italy and Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: 1818–19

5. Satire and Drama: 1819–22

6. The Legacy of a Revolutionary

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

Firstly, many thanks to Alex Snowdon for suggesting that I write an article about Shelley for www.counterfire.org and to Neil Faulkner for suggesting that I develop this article into a book and for continuing to encourage me. Many thanks, too, to Nicholas Roe, Peter Vassallo and Ivan Callus for inviting me to read a paper on Shelley’s reform pamphlets at the wonderful 2014 Encountering Malta conference, and Peter Vassallo for subsequent advice. I would also like to thank those at the September 2013 ‘William Cobbett at 250 Colloquium’ at Nuffield College, Oxford, where I had helpful discussions on Shelley, Spence and Cobbett, especially with John Gardner and Malcolm Chase.

I am very grateful to Jeremy Knight, Curator of Horsham Museum, for sharing with me new information about Timothy Shelley’s parliamentary career, and to Brian Alderson for telling me about the Godwins and children’s publishing and showing me the books in his collection.

I want to thank Dominic Alexander and John Gardner for reading chapters of the book and for their very helpful comments and Nora Crook for reading nearly all of it in a very short time and giving me excellent advice. I also thank William Alderson, my husband, for patiently reading complete drafts many times and making useful suggestions.

There would have been no illustrations without the kind help of my friends. John Gardner sent me a copy of his own print of The Radical Ladder, Angus Graham-Campbell permitted William to photograph his copy of Eton Sketched and showed us both round Eton College, including a visit to the Library, and Nora Crook allowed William to photograph some of the books and pamphlets in her fascinating collection. I am very grateful to John, Nora, Angus and William.

Living in a Norfolk village without public transport meant that my Carlyle membership of the London Library was invaluable. I am grateful to all the staff there but especially those in Country Orders Department, who promptly sent me books, and Gosia Lawik very kindly answered my queries. I also thank the staff at Cambridge University Library for their help.

Thanks too to all my friends and comrades in StoptheWar nationally for following Shelley’s advice about ‘great assemblies’ and, locally, to those in King’s Lynn and Wisbech StoptheWar. In Wisbech the tradition of protesting against racism, war and attacks on workers continues under the Thomas Clarkson Memorial.

Thanks to David Castle who gave me crucial advice, to Robert Webb, Emily Orford and all at Pluto Press who have been working on this book, and to the anonymous readers of my proposal who gave me such very encouraging feedback.

Finally, I would like to especially thank William, who encouraged my writing another book about Shelley, helped with computer difficulties and compiled the index (needless to say, any mistakes are mine alone). He gave time which he could have spent on his own innumerable interests, including writing his fine poetry, in order to give me the time I needed to complete the book. Thanks just doesn’t cover my appreciation of what he has done. I would like to think I could repay him, but I owe him too much for that.

Prologue

It is 21 May 2015. A film opens in cinemas across the UK. It is a documentary by Amir Amirani about the origins and consequences of the international protest on 15 February 2003 against the Iraq war. On every continent – even Antarctica – people demonstrated in the largest protest the world had ever seen. Dismissed by some with a ‘Well, we didn’t stop them, did we?’, the protest actually had a continuing profound influence on events across the world, particularly in Egypt. The title of the film is We Are Many, and it opens with the final stanza of The Mask of Anarchy by Percy Bysshe Shelley:

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’s revolutionary ideas did not escape his contemporary reviewers, and he was famously attacked in the right-wing journal The Quarterly Review. On the other hand, his poem Queen Mab was circulated so enthusiastically among radicals and the emerging working class that it was known as ‘The Chartists’ Bible’. Afraid of the influence of his ideas, critics seized on Shelley’s atheism to condemn him as a wicked man. His desertion of his first wife, Harriet, and his desire to set up a second family with Mary Godwin, was considered abundant confirmation of this, even though many men kept mistresses and visited prostitutes without challenge. Even today, when he is less likely to be attacked for his atheism, his love-life and financial difficulties are used to undermine him and his revolutionary ideas. His bicentenary brought diatribes as well as varying degrees of praise.

Despite the international fame he gave to ‘We are many, they are few’, Shelley is still seen by some left-wing commentators as being politically and poetically negligible. They wonder whether his poetry is too obscure to communicate to a mass audience, and whether poetry even should ‘make sense’ in the way prose does, or just communicate imagery and emotion like painting and music. Some writers (including those who are divorced) have accused him of sexism because he deserted his first wife. Others, like the left-wing journalist Paul Foot, have suggested that he would have been a greater political poet if he had remained in England. It is true that he might have been more successful in getting his political poetry published if he had not had to rely on others to act for him, but without his union with Mary Godwin, or his life in Italy, Shelley might never have written his greatest poems, nor Mary her famous novel, Frankenstein.

It is often suggested that Shelley did not sincerely wish to overthrow the system, as he was born an aristocrat. He could not easily rid himself of an aristocratic manner which embarrassed Leigh Hunt and caused Byron to describe him as ‘perfect a Gentleman as ever crossed a drawing room’.¹ Although Shelley ‘loved the people’, he did not want to be a worker. He needed time for writing and political activity and, as he explained to Godwin, workers did not have the time or the education.² He tried to find a middle way, rejecting his full inheritance, sharing what money he had, and mixing with journalists, doctors and other professionals rather than aristocrats. Whilst he employed servants, he seems to have accorded them more respect than was common then – or now. For example, he took Elise Duvillard, one of the children’s nursemaids, to the opera and praised the other nursemaid, Milly Shields, for her prowess in astronomy.³

In the 1980s three books were published about Shelley’s politics: P.M.S. Dawson’s The Unacknowledged Legislator, Paul Foot’s Red Shelley and Michael Scrivener’s Radical Shelley. They were all valuable and illuminating studies, but much more material has come to light since then. Dawson saw Shelley as a Foxite Whig and Godwinian whose revolution was far in the future. Scrivener and Foot connected Shelley more firmly to Thomas Paine, William Cobbett and the radicals. In fact, Shelley was also indebted to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the French revolutionary writers, to the British empiricist philosophers, and even to John Gale Jones’s British Forum and the Society of Friends (Quakers). He was very open-minded and considered political ideas from all sources, and the links between all these figures and their followers were greater, after all, as the population was so much smaller than now.

With the repressive measures of the 1790s, the United Irishmen and the London Corresponding Society members were silenced and their ideas derided by the ruling class, but within 20 years the slave trade had been abolished and the reform movement was reviving. Shelley supported these campaigns and supported people who attempted to spread education, better living conditions and technological advances. He rejected the dominance of ‘the few’ and insisted on the need for equality, but he also opposed violence, inspiring Gandhi, and leading many to believe that he was a pacifist. These days fewer people than ever own more of the world’s wealth than ever before, and Shelley’s arguments about violence are still important. He reasoned that it was to be avoided if possible because its use by ‘the many’ might have a corrupting adverse effect because it is the weapon of ‘the few’ in defence of their power and inequality.

That violence has forced more and more people to desperately flee war and persecution, with Muslims in particular being attacked and their religion misrepresented in order to feed divisions. It is worth remembering that Shelley hoped that ‘the Mahometan, the Jew, the Christian, the Deist, and the Atheist will live together in one community [. . .] united in the bonds of charity and brotherly love’. He would have been proud to have his poetry associated with the expression of unity in opposition to war and violence which was the demonstration of 15 February 2003. Shelley has been dead for nearly 200 years, but he was with us on that day.

1

Shelley’s Family Background and Education: 1792–1811

It may seem strange for a political biography of Shelley to begin like a Victorian novel by asserting that its hero was a gentleman from an old, distinguished family, but this fact clearly makes a difference to Shelley’s enemies. They state that he was not, and therefore when he rebelled against the aristocratic, landowning class it hardly mattered, since he was nouveau riche and so never really of that class.¹ The Shelley family, however, dated back to the eleventh century, included a Knight of Malta and Catholic martyrs, and was connected by marriage to most of the prominent families in Sussex. Shelley’s great-grandfather was a third son who had emigrated to America, but he sent Bysshe, his second son named after his grandmother, Hellen Bysshe, back to England to be brought up by his grandparents. Bysshe Shelley inherited property from them and when his uncles and his own elder brother died he inherited their estates too. He increased his property by marrying wealthy heiresses. Bysshe had four children by his first marriage and seven by his second, but most of the estate was to go to his eldest son, Timothy, and was intended to be eventually inherited by Timothy’s eldest son, our hero, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Within twelve days of the birth of this heir on 4 August, 1792, Bysshe had had his fourth child by his ‘dear friend’, Eleanor Nicholls. He remarked, ‘Ran Tim Damned hard Age Considered’. He was 61, and regarded a very handsome man.²

His grandson said of him, ‘He has acted very ill to three wives. He is a bad man.’³ Percy Bysshe Shelley made no distinction between the women his grandfather married legally and Eleanor Nicholls, whom he did not marry. His own father, Timothy, had an illegitimate son not much older than his legitimate son and heir, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Percy Bysshe would inevitably have seen the hypocrisy when Timothy told him that ‘he would provide for as many natural children as he chose to get, but that he would never forgive his making a mésalliance’.⁴ It was not an unusual attitude in the upper classes of the eighteenth century: marriages were usually made not for love but to unite estates. No woman had much control over important aspects of her life, including marriage; it was important for well-off families to be able to control women’s marriages so that properties could be thus united. An upper-class woman, if she did not marry, with few exceptions, remained at home with no career or independent social life and certainly no sex life. Women rarely had much education and if they had any the only work they were likely to find would be as a governess. A woman from a rich family was often left in poverty after her male relative died, and women had no right to keep either inheritance or earnings if they married. Divorce was extremely rare and required an Act of Parliament: desertion was not grounds. A man could divorce his wife for adultery but a woman could not divorce her husband without evidence of exceptional brutality. If she left, she lost all rights to her children. Most people had a vicious attitude towards those women who lived independent lives or who broke the conventions of marriage, although men got away with it. Although there was no organised movement, women were increasingly demanding the right to be educated, to choose their husband and to work as they wished. Some women, such as Mary Wollstonecraft who wrote the influential A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, had successful lives as writers.

Field Place, an old manor house, was developed in the eighteenth century into a spacious residence with large grounds, woods and fields. Horsham, near Gatwick Airport and the M25, now has numerous large offices smothering what was in Shelley’s time a pretty market town, close to the ports and a prosperous centre for ‘agriculture and its associated industries, like tanning and brewing’. It had good roads to London, at least one theatre, bookshops, banks and legal offices, even a model gaol. Shelley’s family patronised the local theatre and events such as May Day, celebrated with children’s dancing, garlands of flowers and ‘Jack in the Green’, or fairs with roundabouts, shooting galleries and a Fat Lady or Living Skeleton. Similar families in the area included an Indian lady, Mrs Beauclerk, a stepsister of the United Irishman Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and French émigrés who had fled the Revolution.⁵

The French Revolution

The French Revolution was a defining event and shaped the world in which Shelley grew up. It had succeeded initially because the bourgeois class had allied against the aristocracy with the working people and were supported by the peasants,