Blasphemy and Politics in Romantic Literature: Creativity in the Writing of Percy Bysshe Shelley [1st ed.] 9783030465698, 9783030465704

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-x
Introduction (Paul Whickman)....Pages 1-16
Blasphemy and Copyright in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1695–1823 (Paul Whickman)....Pages 17-59
Blasphemy and the Shelley Canon: Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna (Paul Whickman)....Pages 61-96
Vulgar Anthropomorphisms: Blasphemy, Power and the Philosophy of Language (Paul Whickman)....Pages 97-136
The Promethean Conqueror, the Galilean Serpent and the Jacobin Jesus: Shelley’s Interpretation(s) of Jesus Christ (Paul Whickman)....Pages 137-180
Conclusion (Paul Whickman)....Pages 181-189
Back Matter ....Pages 191-212

Citation preview

Blasphemy and Politics in Romantic Literature Creativity in the Writing of Percy Bysshe Shelley pau l w h ic k m a n

Blasphemy and Politics in Romantic Literature “Paul Whickman’s valuable study opens up insightful new ways of considering the slippery relationship between blasphemy and politics in the Romantic period. Focusing on Percy Bysshe Shelley, Whickman reveals the value of situating him within a broader context and how Shelley’s poetry responded to the intersection of political and religious power.” —Madeleine Callaghan, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Sheffield, UK

Paul Whickman

Blasphemy and Politics in Romantic Literature Creativity in the Writing of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Paul Whickman University of Derby Derby, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-46569-8 ISBN 978-3-030-46570-4  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46570-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

This book has benefitted from the generous support and insights of a huge number of individuals and organisations to whom I remain eternally grateful. My Ph.D. supervisors at the University of Nottingham, Lynda Pratt and Matthew Green, helped me steer a course through the difficult early stages of this project and my career ever since, while the insights of Nicholas Roe and Brean Hammond have helped me shape this into the book it has become. Nick’s leading role in The Wordsworth Conference Foundation should also be acknowledged; the regular Summer Conference in Rydal and, previously, Grasmere, have been wonderful collegial events. Not only have I shared nascent ideas that have informed the direction of this book, I have more importantly made many good friends and colleagues. Among these was Richard Gravil, the founder of the Wordsworth Conference Foundation, who was kind and supportive to me as a young academic; his death in 2019 was keenly felt. The University of Derby has graciously supported me in bringing this book to completion, providing funding and teaching relief where necessary. Paul Elliott, Erin Lafford, Ruth Larsen, Tom Neuhaus and Robin Sims all aided me in this way, while Ian Whitehead guided me in my early days as a lecturer and has been a good, and very silly, friend ever since. Indeed, regular Derby ‘lodge meetings’ with Robin and Ian have certainly formed a valuable part of my ‘intellectual’ and ‘cultural’ development. Most importantly, I am privileged to teach students at Derby who inspire me with their intuition, erudition and enthusiasm, consistently reminding me why I do what I do. v

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My editorial team at Palgrave, formerly Ben Doyle and latterly Rachel Jacobe and Allie Troyanos, have been patient and enthusiastic about the project, while the insightful and diligent anonymous reader comments have most certainly helped to polish the finished product. Giuseppe Albano and the rest of the staff of the Keats-Shelley House, Rome, not only gave me essential access to their collections but were wonderful hosts on the occasions I visited. Thanks also to the British Library as well as Hallward Library, Nottingham, whose holdings and staff expertise have proven invaluable. Gratitude is also duly paid to the pubs, cafes and bars of the cities of Nottingham and Derby where I both wrote, and escaped from, various passages of this book. By far the most important people are the friends and family who have supported me in both my career and personal life and have been the encouragement I needed to finally get this written. Ed Downey’s beer and burger evenings remain an excellent source of both intellectual and distinctly unintellectual conversation. Ed’s excellent humour is matched by his acumen, and he really should not have to be reminded of this. Dave Peplow remains one of the few academics with whom I can simultaneously discuss the torment of supporting a struggling Premier League football team, dreadful ‘80s and ‘90s pop culture and the merits of literary fiction. My brother, Mark Whickman, keeps me grounded with his preposterous humour but also because, more prosaically, he will simply always be cleverer than me. My mother, Elaine Whickman, gave me a wonderful childhood and instilled in me a love of reading and education that has shaped my career. She has continued to support all my decisions as an adult and remains one of my most enthusiastic cheerleaders in everything I do. My wife, Rachel Whickman, makes me happier than any human deserves to be; her joie de vivre is infectious, but her intelligence and her ability to succeed at whatever she puts her mind to make me deeply proud. I thank her for her encouragement, belief and patience as I lost evenings and weekends to this book, listening to my many complaints. Most of all, though, I am thankful that I have her in my life. This book is dedicated to my loving grandmother, Hilda Steel, who passed away as the manuscript neared completion. You are sorely missed.

Note on Texts

and

Abbreviations

There are currently two different on-going scholarly editions of Shelley’s poetry that are not yet complete. As a result, I have referred to various editions where appropriate. For most of the poetry I have consulted Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1989—. The Poems of Shelley. 5 volumes (currently 4 available). Ed. Matthews, Geoffrey; Everest, Kelvin; Donovan, Jack; Duffy, Cian and Rossington, Michael. London & New York: Longman.—(when necessary, cited as Poems, and volume number, in parenthesis)

For poetry not yet available in the above edition, and for some of Shelley’s prose, I have referred to Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 2002. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Reiman, Donald H. and Fraistat, Neil. London & New York: W. W. Norton & Company.—(when necessary, cited as Poetry & Prose in parenthesis)

In addition, I have made use of the following incomplete edition of Shelley’s prose Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1993—. The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 1 volume. Ed. Murray, E. B. Oxford: Clarendon Press.—(cited as Prose in parenthesis)

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NOTE ON TEXTS AND ABBREVIATIONS

and the following complete, albeit older, edition Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1954. Shelley’s Prose Or, The Trumpet of a Prophecy. Ed. Clark, David Lee. Albuquerque, N.M: The University of New Mexico Press.—(cited as Prose, Clark, in parenthesis)

For Shelley’s letters, I have used Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1963–1964. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 2 volumes. Ed. Jones, Frederick L. Oxford: Clarendon Press.—(cited as Letters, and volume number, in parenthesis)

All biblical references are to the following King James Version 2008. The Bible: Authorized King James Version. Ed. Carroll, Robert and Prickett, Stephen. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Contents

1 Introduction 1 1.1 Blasphemy: History and Definition 4 1.2 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Blasphemy and Creativity 7 1.3 Shelley and Romantic Religion 11 2 Blasphemy and Copyright in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1695–1823 17 2.1 Licensing of the Press and Religious Tolerance, 1698–1710 19 2.2 Copyright, Censorship and Class: The Statute of Anne and ‘Bad Language’, 1710–1745 25 2.3 Blasphemy, Obscenity or Sedition: John Wilkes to William Hone, 1745–1817 35 2.4 Chancery and the Dissemination of ‘Injurious’ Texts, 1817–1823 43 3 Blasphemy and the Shelley Canon: Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna 61 3.1 Queen Mab: Readership, Reputation and ‘Respectability’ in the 1820s 64 3.2 Censoring Queen Mab in the (Il)legitimate Press: William Clark, Richard Carlile, Mary Shelley 72

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CONTENTS

3.3 From ‘God’ to ‘Power’ : Laon and Cythna to the Revolt of Islam 3.4 Conclusion: The Contemporary Shelley Canon

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4 Vulgar Anthropomorphisms: Blasphemy, Power and the Philosophy of Language 97 4.1 Anthropomorphising the Abstract: Lockean Scepticism of Language in Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna 99 4.2 The Vitality and Epistemology of Language: ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘Mont Blanc’ 110 5 The Promethean Conqueror, the Galilean Serpent and the Jacobin Jesus: Shelley’s Interpretation(s) of Jesus Christ 137 5.1 Secularising and Demystifying Jesus 139 5.2 A Jesus in History: Jesus as Reformer, Jacobin and Blasphemer 149 5.3 Prometheus Unbound: Suffering, Faith and Atonement in the Gospel According to Percy Bysshe Shelley 157 6 Conclusion 181 6.1 From Infidel to Canonisation: Shelley’s Posthumous Reputation 185 Works Cited and Further Reading 191 Index 207

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

On 25 March 1811, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his future biographer, Thomas Hogg, were expelled from University College, Oxford. While history commonly records that the two undergraduates were excluded for atheism, the precise reason was ‘for contumaciously refusing to answer questions proposed to them, and for also repeatedly declining to disavow’ a pamphlet for which both had been responsible.1 The pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism (1811), was far less provocative than its title suggested; to have apparently advocated atheism, however, was enough to risk criminal charges for violating common and statute law against blasphemy. The opportunity to ‘disavow’ the work had been granted as a possible way both undergraduates might have ameliorated any future criminal proceedings. Prosecution for The Necessity of Atheism never materialised for either men, but the Oxford episode remains an important touchstone in Shelley’s biography and criticism. Indeed, it is an event that, along with the disparaging reactionary accounts of Shelley’s death in 1822, are commonly taken as bookending Shelley’s ‘atheistical’ adult life and career. The nature of Shelley’s (ir)religion remains a matter of some debate, but the ‘atheist’ tag has nevertheless persisted in popular perceptions of this major member of the ‘Big 6’ Romantic poets. It is therefore easy to see how ‘the issue of “atheism”’, as Martin Priestman has argued, remains central to the history of canonical Romanticism.2 In sharing Priestman’s position, my present study is concerned with the broader and more amorphous term ‘blasphemy’. While the charge of blasphemy © The Author(s) 2020 P. Whickman, Blasphemy and Politics in Romantic Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46570-4_1

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encompasses atheism in the period, my reason for this wider focus is fourfold. Firstly, Priestman has already offered a thorough examination of more specific atheistic tendencies within Romantic poetry.3 Secondly, to investigate blasphemy is to offer a more comprehensive account of heterodox religious opinions that may not necessarily come from a position of unbelief.4 Thirdly, the broader irreverence that the term implies suggests important creative possibilities for a writer. Finally, the very lack of specificity of the word ‘blasphemy’ is itself worthy of comment, as it enabled authorities to define it as they saw fit in moments of political exigence. While ‘atheism’ was among the charges levelled at political enemies, this was only one amid the multitude of religiously inflected allegations under the umbrella of a purposefully ill-defined ‘blasphemy’. My approach, therefore, is one that not only recognises the intersection of (ir)religion and politics, but also between c­ensorship, print history and creativity. To blaspheme in a text, or at least to be perceived as blaspheming in it, determines its materiality and dissemination in the period as much as it explains its aesthetic or thematic content. To appreciate this necessitates a methodology that simultaneously considers historical context—political, legal and material for example—as well as formal attention to the text(s) in question. For instance, while the intersecting philosophical and political themes of a poem such as Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813) may in itself lead a critic to identify the connection between its politics and its supposed blasphemy, the fact that it was frequently sold in the 1820s alongside texts of a more obviously political or obscene nature similarly affirms an association. In 1823, Richard Carlile even complained how the ‘enemies of Reform’ would connect him to ‘immorality’ by highlighting that his shops sold blasphemous and obscene texts alongside his more overtly political ones.5 Although Carlile denied this to be the case with the shops he was personally responsible for, he claims to ‘have been informed that copies of […] amatory publications from Mr. Benbow’s Press […] have been sold at the shop in Giltspur Street under my name’ (p. 35). It is important, then, to recognise the socio-historical realities of print while considering the formal manifestation of blasphemy within literary works. Richard Cronin describes his approach in The Politics of Romantic Poetry (2000) as one that attempts to reconcile New Historicist with ‘New’ Formalist approaches to Romanticism. He writes

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The urgent task for the critic of Romantic poetry is not, it seems to me, to choose between these two apparently antithetical approaches [i.e. between Historicist and Formalist approaches], for both remain too valuable to be rejected. The need is rather to find a critical manner through which the two may be reconciled […] a criticism of Romantic poets is possible that does not choose between attention to the language of a poem or attention to its historical context, but seeks rather to show that it is through their language that poems most fully engage with their historical moment.6

My approach in this book is similar to Cronin’s, although I consider these different approaches to be not only valuable but necessary in fully understanding the manifestation of blasphemy in Romantic-period literature. While Cronin is critical of Jerome McGann’s monumental Romantic Ideology (1983), McGann’s reminder that ‘poems are social and historical products’ informs my approach here, without overshadowing the centrality of close, textual analysis.7 McGann’s notion of ‘bibliographical codes’, first coined in his later The Textual Condition (1991), is similarly useful in illustrating how ‘producing editions is one of the ways we produce literary meanings’ and that it is ‘as complex as all the others’.8 This is important in appreciating that perceptions of blasphemy and other forms of transgression both shaped, and were shaped by, the reality of the physical printed text and the resulting influence on the Romantic-period reading public. While a study of literary blasphemy is necessarily multifaceted, my main argument is that Romantic-period blasphemy is primarily a political crime or transgression; the fact that it was frequently prosecuted both on the grounds of potential audience and the manner—rather than the matter—of its expression attests to its close interrelationship with both class and aesthetics. Like many ‘subversive’ cultural forms such as pornography, blasphemy has a curious relationship with the mainstream literary canon, existing outside and yet profoundly shaping and responding to it. This is evident in blasphemy’s association with the development of intellectual property and copyright in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with copyright acting first as a form of proxy censorship before counterintuitive Chancery rulings such as Southey v. Sherwood (1817) ultimately aided the proliferation of blasphemous, obscene and seditious texts. This impacted the size and nature of the Romantic-reading public and, I argue, the nature of the Romantic canon.

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1.1  Blasphemy: History and Definition Blasphemy is, on the one hand, easy to define; the OED’s definition reads that it is ‘[p]rofane speaking of God or sacred things; impious irreverence’, clearly determining it to be something subversive that is expressed rather than merely thought.9 Yet this classification allows for a rather broad range of possibilities. It does not, for instance, establish what an act of blasphemy would actually entail, reliant instead on abstract conceptions of ‘reverence’ and ‘the sacred’ that such an act is said to subvert. Alain Cabantous is right then to note the difficulty for researchers in the broad disciplines of the human sciences who ‘are aware more than most how semantically tricky blasphemy proves to be, how slippery as anthropological objects go’.10 One of the issues is that what is deemed ‘sacred’ or to be paid due reverence is arbitrary, meaning, in both senses of the word, something determined by mere chance and also by autocratic ‘arbiters’. The ‘sacred’, for instance, may be established by cultural factors, religious denomination or socio-historical context but also by legal and political authorities. When considering the historical legal definitions of blasphemy between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, it is apparent that often what is understood by ‘blasphemy’ should be more appropriately termed ‘heresy’. As the OED defines it, heresy is Theological or religious opinion or doctrine maintained in opposition, or held to be contrary, to the ‘catholic’ or orthodox doctrine of the Christian Church, or, by extension, to that of any church, creed, or religious system, considered as orthodox.11

Despite its significant difference from ‘blasphemy’, ‘heresy’ is commonly considered as its synonym in this period. This semantic blurring serves a useful political purpose; while ‘heresy’ suggests a hierarchically imposed orthodoxy, evoking connotations of the religious persecutions of the early Christian church, ‘blasphemy’ appears less partisan. What is deemed blasphemous is not a matter of simple doctrinal disagreement but the profaning of something indisputably sacred; a matter of common sense and ‘good taste’. Preferring the term ‘blasphemy’ over ‘heresy’ therefore gives the illusion of maintaining a pretence of religious toleration while, in fact, working to delineate the limits of politically endorsed orthodoxy. The 1648 ‘Ordinance for the punishing of Blasphemies and Heresies’

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passed during the Interregnum is at least open with its targeting of perceived heresy, but its doctrinal specificity is nevertheless remarkable. Not only does it list every book of the canonical Bible in turn, arguing that it is blasphemy to deny that these are the Word of God, it painstakingly details that blasphemers are also those who question the perfect omnipotence of God, the doctrine of the Resurrection, the divinity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity.12 Despite this doctrinal precision, the policing of religious belief was historically more socio-political than it was theological. An act passed in 1650 called ‘An Act against several Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrable Opinions, derogatory to the honor of God, and destructive to humane Society’ was a development of the 1648 act, moving to additionally criminalise those individuals who bestowed fallible human attributes onto the deity. Examples of this include declaring one’s self or another ‘meer Creature’ to be either equal to God, or God himself, or that ‘acts of Uncleanness, Prophane Swearing, Drunkenness, and the like Filthiness and Brutishness, are not unholy and forbidden in the Word of God’.13 The legislation’s common appellation as ‘the Act against Ranters’ reveals its target; the Ranters were an extreme Antinomian sect who rejected the concept of sin because they believed man to have been redeemed by Christ. Ranters were perceived as a threat to ‘humane Society’ because not only were many of them libertines, frequently engaged in public nudity and other lewd acts, but because of their disdain for authority. Other Christian sects such as Quakers were similarly criminalised due to their ‘levelling’ politics rather than their theological predilections. Quakers refused to use the formal ‘you’ in addressing a social superior, to swear oaths and often to recognise any earthly authority at all. While these laws were declared null and void following the Restoration (1660), new legislation emerged that simply reasserted pre-Civil War Anglican hegemony. For instance, 1662 saw the passing of both the so-called ‘Quaker Act’ and the ‘Act of Uniformity’. The former effectively denied Quakers freedom of worship and criminalised their refusal to swear oaths, while the latter required all churches to have a copy of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, to perform Anglican Rites, and clergy were expected to publicly declare their ‘unfeigned assent & consent to the use of all things in the said Booke contained and prescribed in these words and no other’.14 Risking oversimplification, the motivation was more to ensure political rather than religious obedience following the re-establishment of the Church of England. The King’s

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authority, as head of the Church, ensured, and was ensured by, the Church of England’s primacy among all Christian denominations. ‘The Conventicles Act’ of 1664, for instance, that outlawed all non-Anglican religious assemblies, was explicitly political, framed to enable ‘speedy Remedyes against the growing and dangerous Practises of Seditious Sectaryes and other disloyall [sic] persons (my emphases)’.15 What was clear, as Leonard Levy contends, was that ‘[a]nyone not a member of the Church of England was a potential subversive’.16 The years after the Restoration, therefore, re-laid the groundwork for the tight conflation between the religion of the state and the state itself. This is particularly evident in a case of 1676 known as Rex v. Taylor. For Elliot Visconsi, this was ‘to become one of the most influential pieces of common-law jurisprudence to emerge from the later Stuart period’.17 Indeed, its impact was profound and long-lasting, and was still so regularly cited in blasphemy trials as late as the nineteenth century that an article in The London Magazine in 1827 poked fun at it, suggesting that it had become clichéd.18 The case concerned John Taylor, a yeoman from Surrey, who was successfully prosecuted for blasphemy. The presiding judge, Lord Chief Justice Hale, declared that Taylor’s ‘wicked blasphemous words were not only an offence to God and religion, but a crime against the laws’ as, crucially, ‘Christianity is parcel of the laws of England; and therefore to reproach the Christian religion is to speak in subversion of the law’.19 Hale’s judgement set the precedent that explicitly determined the legal relationship between Church and State in matters of blasphemous expression. A glaring issue with the ruling is noted by The London Magazine. Referring to the trial of another Mr. Taylor in 1827 that had cited Hale, the author remarks that Lord Tenterden, who presided over the recent case, ‘spoke not then of any of the many sects into which opinions had divided [Christianity]’.20 The precedent’s ambiguity often proved politically useful, even if what it deemed to be ‘Christianity’ was at times narrowly interpreted. Hale’s ruling in Rex v. Taylor should of course be understood within the immediate context of a newly assertive, post-Restoration Anglicanism. At the same time, its conflation of Church and State was hardly historically unique, a phenomenon pre-dating Henry VIII’s establishment of the Church of England in 1534. In the Old Testament book of Numbers, for instance, Korah’s rebellion against Moses and Aaron is presented both as seditious and blasphemous, with each implying the other. After Moses separates the rebels from the rest of the people of Israel, the earth swallows

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them up. This proves the legitimacy of Moses’s and Aaron’s rule since the rebellion had ‘provoked the LORD’ (16:30). To question Moses’s authority then is to blaspheme and, conversely, to blaspheme against God is to oppose his earthly, political representatives. In March 1717, an antiNonconformist article appearing in the conservative Pro-Anglican periodical The Scourge interprets the story of Korah as one of the preservation of state power and of the dangers of religious schism: when Korah and his Accomplices made a Disturbance in the Congregation; the Design of the Mutiny was pretended only against the Pontifical Dignity and the Episcopal Preheminence [sic] of Aaron; but the Prophet perceiv’d that they aim’d at the Civil Power […] he dealt with them as State-Rebels, foreseeing what began in Schism, would end in Rebellion.21

The author takes Korah’s rebellion to be political from its outset, with any apparent theological dispute simply concealing the rebels’ true objectives. Nevertheless, the article reveals a common eighteenth-century perception that the interdependence of religious and state power was both necessary and to be expected, exemplified through the Hale ruling of 1676. In short, if God is taken to be infallible, his supposed earthly representatives can argue the same for their political authority.

1.2  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Blasphemy and Creativity What The Scourge’s defence of the prevailing religious authority of the age does not account for is the historical influence ‘blasphemers’ have had on the political and religious culture of Europe. Plato, for instance, records that the Athenian authorities accused Socrates of asebeia, or ‘impiety’; one of a number of charges that led to Socrates’s suicide. Most importantly, Jesus Christ’s crucifixion was the result of his conviction for blasphemy, instigated by the prevailing religious and political authorities of his time. It is to this contradiction, of persecuting religious outsiders in the name of those who were themselves similarly persecuted, that Percy Bysshe Shelley consistently drew attention. His pamphlet A Letter to Lord Ellenborough (1812), written in response to the prosecution and punishment of the radical activist, author and publisher Daniel Isaac Eaton for blasphemous libel, is an early example of this. Shelley compares Eaton’s trial to that faced by Christ in first-century Judea. His intention is not to paint Eaton as a Christ-like figure, but to divest ‘blasphemy’

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of any meaning beyond a subjective, context-specific application. Noting the disjunction between a once persecuted blasphemer becoming recognised as the Messiah in nineteenth-century Christianity, he writes ‘Time rolled on, time changed the situations, and with them, the opinions of men’ (Prose, Clark, p. 77).22 Shelley also heavily implies that the persecution of Eaton reveals the government of his age to be like the corrupt and tyrannical authorities of Christ’s. Shelley’s consistent recognition of the interrelationship of political and religious hegemony in his works makes him an appropriate writer for a study of this kind. Indeed, I would argue that it is in fact central to his philosophy. In 1816, Shelley wrote in the registers of three hotels in the Vale of Chamonix that his occupation was ‘Democrat, Philanthropist and Atheist’ and that his destination was ‘Hell’. As Timothy Webb has put it, ‘[i]n Shelley’s mind the three characters – lover of mankind, democrat and atheist – were logically connected, each one implying the other two’.23 While for Shelley to be a religious subversive is to be a political subversive and vice versa, it is more complex than simple cause and effect. In a contemporary response to Shelley’s entries, appearing in The Commercial Chronicle and The London Chronicle in 1819, the word ‘atheist’ is the only one of Shelley’s ‘occupations’ that is mentioned: Mr Shelley is understood to be the person who, after gazing on Mont Blanc, registered himself in the Album as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Atheist; which gross and cheap bravado he, with the natural tact of the new school, took for a display of philosophic courage; and his obscure muse has been since constantly spreading all her foulness of those doctrines which a decent infidel would treat with respect, and in which the wise and honourable have in all ages found the perfection of wisdom and virtue.24

The author’s distaste for Shelley’s declared atheism is obvious but it is also important to note that Shelley’s supposed philosophical superficiality is connected to his aesthetic judgement; to remain an atheist despite ‘gazing on Mont Blanc’ is to imply a failure to ascribe the sublime to the hand of the Creator. Not only, then, does religious subversion imply political subversion and vice versa, but it is also commonly tied to questions of creativity and aesthetics. David Nash is right to urge caution in too readily identifying blasphemers ‘as trail-blazers whose confrontation with a slower moving

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moral climate makes them “ahead of their time”’, but there is nevertheless the possibility that literary ‘blasphemy’ has the potential to stimulate a new aesthetic.25 While writing in an innovative way to perhaps ‘avoid the censor’ is one example of potential ingenuity, the irreverence engendered in literary blasphemy implies a scepticism of accepted or existing standards of ‘correctness’. Lord Byron’s famous attack on the ‘cant’ of his age for instance is not only a simple indictment of hypocritical moralising. In describing it as ‘verbal decorum’, Byron implies that exposing cant is an act of indecorus linguistic demystification. He writes The truth is, that in these days the grand “primum mobile” of England is Cant—Cant political—Cant poetical—Cant religious—Cant moral—but always Cant—multiplied through all the varieties of life—It is the fashion—& while it lasts—will be too powerful for those who can only exist by taking the tone of the parts—I say Cant because it is a thing of words—without the smallest influence upon human actions—the English being no wiser—no better—and much poorer—and more divided amongst themselves—as well as far less moral—than they were before the prevalence of this verbal decorum.26

Exposing prevailing codes of moral authority as ‘Cant’ is to reveal these systems to be mere empty words. Such exposure may well begin as a simple act of irreverence—think of Byron’s later comments to Douglas Kinnaird that ‘the Cant is so much stronger than Cunt’—but it also encourages a new aesthetic, to consider whether always ‘saying the right thing’ ever has any tangible politically progressive implications.27 In this light, one might, at least analogously, reflect on how describing a writer as ‘revolutionary’ has several connotations; such a writer could either be one that writes on politically revolutionary themes—a potential ­political subversive—or a writer that is aesthetically revolutionary, in that they write in a new or exciting way. Conversely, the aesthetic is perhaps inextricable from the political, in that in order to challenge an existing status quo necessitates a new artistic approach. This explains the nature and purpose of Shelley’s irreverence towards the Christian God in his works. In The Necessity of Atheism and the notes to Queen Mab, for instance, Shelley determines ‘God’ to simply be a word or metaphor, and argues that seeing it as otherwise has dangerous political implications. For a poet who later authored A Defence of Poetry (1821), identifying ‘God’ as a mere metaphor is akin to preparing for

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the poet’s task of necessarily creating ‘afresh the [linguistic] associations which have been thus disorganized’ (Poetry & Prose, p. 512) In short, a political or religious problem becomes one of artistic representation. Such ‘blasphemy’ then allows for the possibility of new expression and the revitalisation of the language that shapes humanity’s political and religious life, concerns of such works as ‘Mont Blanc’ (1817), Laon and Cythna (1817) and Prometheus Unbound (1820). At the same time, it is nevertheless important to recognise that in cases of blasphemy, obscenity and sedition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries focusing on the manner of expression frequently offers a useful way by which defenders of prevailing religious, moral and political positions can easily dismiss such works without engaging with their ideas. It becomes possible, for instance, to declare that it is acceptable to discuss the divinity of Christ while labelling works that do so as ‘impolite’. This was a common conservative tactic employed during the so-called Woolstonian Controversy of the 1730s for instance. If partly analogously, this also explains the later discussion of the aesthetic merits of the ‘Cockney school’ of second-generation Romantic writers. Indeed, Jeffrey Cox’s summary of the conservative attacks on authors such as Leigh Hunt, John Keats and William Hazlitt shows how their literary style was taken as ‘a sign for both aesthetic and political inadequacy’.28 While this recognises the association of linguistic style with political persuasion, Olivia Smith’s work has similarly helped to show the class-bound nature of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century approaches to language. She describes the period’s perception that ‘to speak the vulgar language demonstrated that one belonged to the vulgar class; that is, that one was morally and intellectually unfit to participate in the culture’.29 It is in these ways that social class, and conceptions of ‘vulgarity’, play an important role in the perception of blasphemy; blasphemy is both ‘vulgar’ in the manner of its expression but also because of the perceived ‘vulgarity’ of those who read or produced it. Indeed, a supposedly ‘blasphemous’ work written in a manner deemed likely to attract a popular, working-class readership or, alternatively, made available in a cheaper edition, was far more likely to attract the attention of the authorities. That Shelley’s textual but nevertheless ‘highbrow’ blasphemy was deemed more of a threat when his readership began to include those from a more ‘vulgar’ background should therefore be borne in mind.

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11

1.3  Shelley and Romantic Religion Religion and religious politics in Romantic-period writing is now well-trodden ground in literary criticism, with much contemporary scholarship benefitting from the earlier insights of M. H. Abrams and his Natural Supernaturalism (1972). Abrams’ work highlights how apparently secular Romanticism frequently appropriates a more distinctly ‘religious’ register. One of the implications of this has been a tendency to imagine an amorphous and homogenous ‘Romanticism’ that is not dissimilar to T. E. Hulme’s much earlier characterisation of Romantic ‘spilt religion’. That is, the ‘concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experiences’; essentially, religion is both everything and nothing.30 While positing Romanticism as a secularised religion is nevertheless useful in helping to distinguish between expressions akin to religious sentiments and genuine religious belief in Romantic-period literature, this has not been without its problems. Critics have not, for instance, always taken on board that citing, echoing or alluding to scripture does not imply belief, a point made by Martin Priestman in Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought (1999).31 Indeed, Bryan Shelley’s Shelley and Scripture: The Interpreting Angel (1994) opens with an important intervention on Biblical echoes, asserting that ‘the new context [of an allusion] determines its significance’ noting that, in the case of Shelley, ‘the Romantic poet intentionally deviates from the orthodox understanding of the text’.32 As Shakespeare’s Antonio remarks in The Merchant of Venice, ‘The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose’.33 To count a poet’s allusions to religious texts then is of limited use in arguing for a poet’s religious predilections. At the same time, to argue for allusions to scripture or broader religiosity in an author’s work as always being insincere, parodic, subversive or otherwise ‘not literal’ is similarly unconvincing. In his The Romantic Reformation (1997), Robert Ryan describes the above inclination in Shelley criticism as dividing ‘into those who take his assertions of atheism as the deepest truth about him and those who find a contrary tendency to religious affirmation present in the poetry from the start’.34 Indeed, despite literary criticism’s reputation for respecting nuance and difficulty, Shelley scholarship has occasionally become preoccupied with definitively determining whether Shelley was an atheist or not.

12  P. WHICKMAN

Aside from the impossibility of discerning, at least from their work, an author’s personal (un)belief, I argue that such essentialism does not tell us much about the literature itself; the evidence for or against Shelley’s ‘atheism’ can be read out of the work and then reflexively read back in to it, with the life and literature essentially working to ‘prove’ the other. In this book, then, I am less interested in definitively categorising Shelley as a ‘blasphemer’ than I am by the fact he was perceived to be one. Instead, this book’s focus is on investigating not only why occurrences of perceived blasphemy were read in the way that they were but also why they were of interest to Shelley, particularly how they relate to his broader philosophy, politics and poetics. At the same time, while Shelley remains the focus of my study, situating him within a broader context enables an appraisal of literary blasphemy within the Romantic period and the ‘Long Eighteenth Century’ more generally. In my second chapter, for instance, I trace the active statute law against blasphemy in the Romantic period back to its origins in the late seventeenth century; doing this helps to reveal the consistent interrelationship of the law of copyright with censorship. While this had a significant influence on the dissemination of eighteenth-century texts, I also show that this continues well into the nineteenth century. The fact that, following Southey v. Sherwood (1817), texts of an ‘injurious’ nature no longer benefitted from the protection of copyright meant that such works were commonly cheaper, and far more widely distributed, than more ‘legitimate’ publications. Not only did this shape the nature of the Romantic canon, it also determined Romantic-period readership, with such works essentially enfranchising readers from a broader range of social classes. Chapter 3 explores this in relation to the dissemination and readership of the work of Shelley in particular, focusing primarily on Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna. The ‘blasphemy’ and ‘atheism’ of Queen Mab cost it its copyright protection, and it became Shelley’s most widely read work as a result. This, I suggest, profoundly influenced Shelley’s late and posthumous reputation, with Queen Mab’s primary distribution through the illegitimate press affecting more legitimate publications both of the poem and Shelley’s work more broadly. I focus, too, on early pirated versions of the poem exploring both the publication decisions made during their production and, most importantly, the nature of passages that were commonly censored. This reveals much about the perceived sensibilities of readers and early nineteenth-century legal authorities, deemed more likely to react strongly to blasphemous than other transgressive

1 INTRODUCTION 

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sentiments. In a similar fashion, the chapter ends with a reading of the authorised revisions made to Laon and Cythna towards it becoming The Revolt of Islam. My argument is that, while these are partly pragmatic instances of self-censorship, they also serve as a further example of Shelley’s increasing recognition of the intersection of political and religious power and as signalling a reformulation of his poetic approach. In Chapter 4, I argue that Shelley’s irreverence towards religious and political power is manifested aesthetically in his poetry. In other words, a philosophical problem becomes a poetical one; to ascribe both the problem of causality and the nature of the sublime to a deity for Shelley is not only philosophically and aesthetically inadequate, but also has significant political implications. Shelley’s aesthetic resistance to the ‘fixity’ offered by the word ‘God’ is central to his philosophical scepticism and shows how blasphemous irreverence can engender new creativity. In fact, Shelley’s aim to revitalise language in his poetry necessitates revisiting seemingly sacrosanct terms, positing irreverence to be at the heart of his poetic project. Mont Blanc is where I suggest this is most evident, but Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna both offer a poetic ‘diagnosis’ or blueprint that is reworked in other poems. My final chapter continues to argue for the importance of Shelley’s resistance to fixity, although the focus is on his representation of Jesus Christ. Shelley’s admiration for Jesus is at odds with his antipathy towards the religion that bears his name. The literary portrayal of Christ was a significant factor in blasphemy prosecutions throughout the Long Eighteenth Century, and the fact that Jesus was, in Shelley’s eyes, himself crucified for blasphemy means that an appraisal of Shelley’s treatment of the figure is necessary for this study. I argue that Shelley’s Jesus was indeed a ‘blasphemer’ in the sense that he opposed the prevailing religious and political authorities of his age. While Christ’s teachings are valuable however, he is best understood as a political reformer rather than the Messiah of Christian tradition. Shelley’s position is that it is this very deification of Christ that has led to the development of a corrupted Christianity; the very faith system Jesus himself sought to abolish. Jesus becomes an important influence on Shelley’s idealised political and spiritual revolution against tyranny in Prometheus Unbound (1820). Prometheus’s resistance necessitates he learn not only Christ-like forgiveness but also the risks of good deeds becoming corrupted into dogmatic faith systems. His success in the drama is achieved by not embodying—or ‘fixing’—the power of the defeated Jupiter within himself. That Prometheus’s non-violent

14  P. WHICKMAN

defiance is posited as being against ‘Power, which seems omnipotent’ (IV. l. 572), determines it to be an act of religious and political irreverence. This reaffirms my thesis that blasphemy is both political and religious for Shelley, and that such irreverence is a necessary aspect of his ‘revolutionary’ poetics.

Notes



1. Cited in Sedley, Stephen. 2019. ‘Dumb Insolence’. In Letters 41.2. 24 January. London Review of Books. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/ v41/n02/letters. Accessed 29 December 2019. 2.  Priestman, Martin. 1999. Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 2. 3. James Bryant Reeves’ book, forthcoming at time of writing, promises to offer a similarly thorough account of literary atheism in the earlier eighteenth century. See Reeves, James Bryant. 2020. Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century: A Literary History of Atheism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 4. It is important to note that, alongside atheism, Priestman’s book does consider what he calls ‘softer versions of unorthodoxy’; see Romantic Atheism, p. 3. 5. Carlile, Richard. 1823. ‘Sedition and Blasphemy Have No Connection with Obscenity’. The Republican, 7:2. 10 January, p. 33. 6. Cronin, Richard. 2000. The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, pp. 13–14. 7. McGann, Jerome. 1983. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, p. 3. 8. McGann, Jerome. 1991. The Textual Condition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 33. 9.  Oxford English Dictionary Online. http://www.oed.com/view/ Entry/19934?rskey=SWfk2a&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid. Accessed 29 December 2019. 10.  Cabantous, Alain and Rauth, Eric (trans.). 2002. Blasphemy: Impious Speech in the West from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 1. 11.  Oxford English Dictionary Online. http://www.oed.com/view/ Entry/86195?redirectedFrom=heresy#eid. Accessed 29 December 2019. 12. Firth, C. H. and Rait, R. S. 1911. ‘May 1648: An Ordinance for the Punishing of Blasphemies and Heresies, with the Several Penalties Therein Expressed…’. In Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642– 1660. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report. aspx?compid=56264. Accessed 29 December 2019.

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13. Firth, C. H. and Rait, R. S. 1911. ‘August 1650: An Act against Several Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrable Opinions, Derogatory to the Honor of God, and Destructive to Humane Society…’. In Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=56410. Accessed 29 December 2019. 14. Raithby, John. 1819. ‘Charles II, 1662: An Act for the Uniformity of Publique Prayers and Administrac[i]on of Sacraments & Other Rites & Ceremonies and for Establishing the Form of Making Ordaining and Consecrating Bishops Preists and Deacons in the Church of England…’. In Statutes of the Realm: Volume 5: 1628–80. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=47307. Accessed 29 December 2019. 15. Raithby, John. 1819. ‘Charles II, 1664: An Act to Prevent and Suppresse Seditious Conventicles’. In Statutes of the Realm: Volume 5: 1628–80. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=47357. Accessed 29 December 2019. 16. Levy, Leonard. 1993. Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 206. 17.  Visconsi, Elliot. 2008. ‘The Invention of Criminal Blasphemy: Rex v. Taylor (1676)’. Representations 103, p. 31. 18.  Anonymous. 1827. ‘The Law of Blasphemy’. The London Magazine. November, p. 360. 19. Cited in Visconsi, Elliot. 2008. ‘The Invention of Criminal Blasphemy: Rex v. Taylor (1676)’. Representations 103, p. 31. 20. Ibid., p. 361. 21. Anonymous. 1717. The Scourge, Designed as a Modest Vindication of the Church of England. 11 March, p. 2. 22. The deployment of Christ as an example of an individual persecuted for blasphemy forms an essential part of Chapter 5. This comment is also a provocative echo of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man; provocative since Eaton’s prosecution was for publishing Paine’s The Age of Reason: ‘circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of men change also.’ See Paine, Thomas. 1998. Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings. Ed. Philp, Mark. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 95. 23.  Webb, Timothy. 1977. Shelley: A Voice Not Understood. Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 140. 24. Anonymous. 1819. ‘Review of New Publications’. Commercial Chronicle. 3 June, p. 626. 25. Nash, David. 1999. Blasphemy in Modern Britain: 1789 to the Present. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, p. 6.

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26. Byron, Lord George Gordon. 1991. The Complete Miscellaneous Prose. Ed. Nicholson, Andrew. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 128. 27. Byron, Lord George Gordon. 1976. Letters and Journals, volume 6. Ed. Marchand, Leslie. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 232. 28. Cox, Jeffrey. 1999. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 27. 29. Smith, Olivia. 1984. The Politics of Language, 1791–1819. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 2. 30.  Hulme, T. E. 1975. ‘Romanticism and Classicism’. In Romanticism: Points of View. Ed. Gleckner, Robert F. and Enscoe, Gerald E. Detroit, MI: Wayne Street University Press, p. 58. 31.  Priestman, Martin. 1999. Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 5. 32.  Shelley, Bryan. 1994. Shelley and Scripture: The Interpreting Angel. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. viii. 33. I. iii. l. 96. 34.  R yan, Robert. 1997. The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 193.

CHAPTER 2

Blasphemy and Copyright in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1695–1823

The active statute against blasphemy in the Romantic period was an act passed almost 100 years before. The context of the so-called ‘Blasphemy Act’ of 1698 or, to give it its full name, ‘An Act for the more effectual suppressing of Blasphemy and Profaneness’, both illustrates the peculiar nature of long eighteenth-century legislative responses to ‘blasphemy’ and also signals a transition towards the crime being considered primarily as one of print. Aside from the centrality of blasphemy to concerns regarding press freedom, the emergence of copyright law in the eighteenth century profoundly influenced, and was influenced by, the nature of ‘blasphemous’ publications in the period. Indeed, the authorities’ increasing focus primarily on the dissemination of not only blasphemous but seditious and obscene material meant that such texts were tested under a nascent culture of intellectual property as much as they were in the criminal courts. My argument here then takes its cue in part from Foucault’s position in ‘What is an Author?’ (1969), that a text’s ‘status as property is historically secondary to the penal code controlling its appropriation’.1 Indeed, in his analysis of the ‘author’ as a ‘function of discourse’ Foucault establishes the historical relationship between the question of property in a text and its potentially transgressive nature. He writes Speeches and books were assigned real authors […] only when the author became subject to punishment and to the extent that his discourse was considered transgressive. In our culture – undoubtedly in others as well – discourse was not originally a thing, a product, or a possession, but an © The Author(s) 2020 P. Whickman, Blasphemy and Politics in Romantic Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46570-4_2

17

18  P. WHICKMAN action situated in a bipolar field of sacred and profane, lawful and unlawful, religious and blasphemous. It was a gesture charged with risks long before it became a possession caught in a circuit of property values. But it was at the moment when a system of ownership and strict copyright rules were established […] that the transgressive properties always intrinsic to the act of writing became the forceful imperative of literature. It is as if the author, at the moment he was accepted into the social order of property which governs our culture, was compensating for his new status by reviving the older bipolar field of discourse in a systematic practice of transgression and by restoring the danger of writing which, on another side, had been conferred the benefits of property. (pp. 305–306)

Whether one fully accepts Foucault’s argument for transgression as ‘intrinsic’ to the very notion of ‘authorship’, by tracing the nascent development of copyright in the eighteenth century we can nevertheless observe its consistent intersection with censorious impulses. This obviously had a significant influence on dissemination albeit in strikingly different ways; the case of Burnet v. Chetwood (1721), for instance, ultimately restrained publication of the text in question, while the seemingly counterintuitive ruling in the much later Southey v. Sherwood (1817) had the opposite effect. What is important is that neither case was heard in a criminal court and neither were the transgressive or criminal nature of the texts involved reason for the cases being brought in the first place. The professionalisation of authorship due to the invention of copyright may have helped to democratise a broader publishing and reading public but this presented dangers. Not only were there anxieties concerning the potentially harmful material being disseminated more widely than ever before, but there were concerns, too, regarding the perceived degradation of literature. Alongside the question of intellectual property’s relationship to transgressive material, then, is the issue of distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. That blasphemous or criminal material was deemed more of a threat if consumed by the masses rather than a few discerning readers is important, but I argue that this is inextricable from aesthetics; the manner of expression is frequently more important than the matter under discussion. This is certainly class inflected, and the concern for ‘expression’ is a commonly employed red herring to disguise genuine intolerance of opposing opinions. My point, though, is to emphasise the intersection of aesthetics and the more practical questions of readership in contemplating the perception of ‘blasphemous’ material. My reading of the prosecutions of figures such as Thomas Woolston,

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John Wilkes and William Hone help to make this clear. At the same time, these cases also reveal how blasphemy was consciously invoked to discredit specifically political, rather than religious, opponents. Blasphemy, then, is commonly the prosecutor’s trumped-up crime of choice when wishing to censor expression, even when such speech could be described more accurately as seditious or obscene.

2.1  Licensing of the Press and Religious Tolerance, 1698–1710 Following the restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, the new government wasted little time in passing the ‘Licensing of the Press Act’ in 1662. This was essentially a replacement for the earlier ‘Licensing Order’ (1643) that had been introduced following the abolition of the crown’s Star Chamber—whose remit included censorship—in 1641. Both acts legislated for pre-publication censorship on all written works, but where the 1662 act differed from its predecessor was its explicit reference to, and concern for, blasphemy. As detailed in its lengthy preamble: [M]any evil disposed persons have been encouraged to print and sell heretical schismatical blasphemous seditious and treasonable Bookes Pamphlets and Papers and still doe continue such theire unlawfull and exorbitant practice to the high dishonour of Almighty God the endangering the peace of these Kingdomes and raising a disaffection to His most Excellent Majesty and His Government.2

The act notes that not only texts containing ‘blasphemy’ of an inadequately defined nature were to be censored, but also those that express opinions ‘contrary to Christian faith or the Doctrine of the Church of England’.3 It therefore insisted upon the orthodoxy of written expression on matters of religion; note, for instance, the conflation of ‘blasphemous’ not only with ‘seditious’ and ‘treasonable’ but with ‘heretical’ and ‘schismatical’. Nevertheless, an increasing interest in issues regarding freedom of speech following the passing of the ‘Bill of Rights’ in 1689, which ruled, among other things, that no member of Parliament could be impeached for remarks made in parliamentary proceedings, led to Parliament’s refusal to renew the ‘Licensing Order’ in 1695 and thus to its expiration. This effectively ended pre-publication censorship, resulting in a

20  P. WHICKMAN

vast increase in publications and to what Ronan Deazley describes as ‘an emerging and increasingly unruly press’.4 John Feather notes how even ‘the messenger of the press, Robert Stephens, could not keep track of all publications, especially when the multiplication of newspapers increased the flow to a flood’.5 Despite the end of this censorship regime—ended both for practical and ideological reasons—there still ‘remained a strong perceived need for opinion to be controlled by the state’.6 To this end, after the expiration of the act and most especially towards the end of the eighteenth century, the law of libel became the chief means for the state to exert its control of public opinion. Deazley notes that ‘In May 1695, barely a month after the 1662 Act had lapsed, the Lord Justices declared that the offences of criminal and seditious libel were, when detected, still punishable at common law’ (p. 5). Material deemed to be ‘blasphemous’ risked prosecution in a similar fashion. It is within the context of the end of pre-publication censorship that the 1698 Blasphemy Act emerged. There were no fewer than twelve attempted bills in the ten years after 1695 that would have re-introduced some form of statutory regulation of the press (Deazley, p. 2). Of these, only the Blasphemy Act became law, indicating parliament’s singular appetite for combatting blasphemous expression in particular. The act in fact declares itself to be a response to those who ‘have of late Years openly avowed and published many blasphemous and impious Opinions contrary to the Doctrines’, suggesting it to be a response to a specific perceived threat.7 This is the view of critics such as Alain Cabantous and others, who cite works such as John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), known as ‘the Deist’s bible’, as those most obviously targeted by it.8 Nevertheless, this threat was still one that manifested in print, with the act explicitly focused on written expression. A blasphemer is defined as [A]ny Person or Persons having been educated in or at any time having made Profession of the Christian Religion within this Realm shal [sic] by writing printing teaching or advised speaking deny any one of the Persons in the Holy Trinity to be God or shal [sic] assert or maintain there are more Gods than One or shal [sic] deny the Christian Religion to be true or the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be of Divine Authority.9

Blasphemy is clearly a crime of language both written and spoken: ‘writing printing teaching or advised speaking’. Like the previous acts of 1648 and 1650, this latest one determined blasphemers to be those who

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disbelieved in the doctrine of the Trinity, the Divinity of Christ and the divine origins of scripture. One new addition, however, was the act’s explicit reference to ‘unbelief’, a broader remit that now included deists and atheists. Despite this, the act was largely inadequate; prosecutions required a witness reporting the ‘blasphemy’ within four days of it occurring and it did not explicitly specify whether, for instance, private thoughts written in a journal were as criminal as those intended for broader dissemination. Nevertheless, it signalled a move towards treating blasphemy as an abuse of press and speech freedom rather than targeting belief or practice. The conflation of press freedom with questions concerning religious toleration is made particularly apparent in the response to the attempted ‘Bill to Restrain the Licentiousness of the Press’, first presented to the Commons on 13 January 1704. The bill ultimately failed after two readings on 13 and 18 January, but it is clear that the intention was to re-introduce a measure of pre-publication censorship, less than ten years after it had ended.10 The proposed bill’s opponents included John Locke, Daniel Defoe and, intriguingly, Quakers. A group of Quakers even proceeded to publish a single page pamphlet entitled Some Considerations Humbly Offered By the People Called Quakers, Relating to the Bill for the Restraining the Licentiousness of the Press. This pamphlet suggests that a curtailment of press freedom and the re-introduction of pre-publication censorship would result in a specific targeting of those individuals whose religious difference would single them out for persecution. It argues on the one hand that To Prevent the Printing and Publishing of Seditious or Treasonable Books against the Government, and Scandalous Pamphlets tending to Vice and Immorality, is the Wisdom of all Good Governments, and must be the Desire of all Good Men.11

Simultaneously, however, the pamphlet argues against pre-publication licensing of religious texts: [T]o Limit Religious Books to a License, where the Tolerated Perswasions [sic] are many, they Conceive, seems altogether Unsafe to all, but that whose Opinion the Licenser is of, who by this Bill hath Power to Allow what he shall judge Sound and Orthodox, or Reject what he shall construe to be either Heretical, Seditious or Offensive. (p. 1)

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Not only does the passage deem this period ‘the Age of Toleration’ it also emphasises the many religious differences existing among individuals within the Kingdom. The problem with re-introducing pre-publication licensing of religious texts, the pamphleteers argue, is that any licenser possesses the power to dismiss religious books solely on the grounds of their own religious beliefs or prejudices. Thus, the licenser has the power to declare what is blasphemous and what is not. As summarised in the final paragraph, the pamphlet suggests that, should the said bill succeed, it would damage the fragile tolerance enjoyed by those from a religious minority, and that they ‘humbly hope, that nothing may be Enacted that will lessen the Toleration, which they thankfully enjoy under the Favour of this, as well as the late Government’ (p. 1). The freedom of the press is therefore seen as closely tied to the freedom of religious expression. Daniel Defoe’s ironic, satirical essay The Shortest Way With Dissenters; Or Proposals for the Establishment of the Church (1702), allied to Defoe’s own Presbyterian dissenter upbringing, would perhaps suggest that his response to the proposed Licentiousness Bill would largely follow the pattern set by the Quakers. Nevertheless, his An Essay on the Regulation of the Press (1704) takes a rather different view; in fact, Defoe is concerned about the dangers of religious subversion in the press most particularly. While the Quaker pamphleteers emphasise religious difference as a key argument against the return of the Licenser, Defoe instead highlights political difference in much the same way: [S]uppose this or that Licenser, a Party-Man, that is, One put in, and upheld by a Party; suppose him of any Party, which you please, and a Man of the opposite Kidney, brings him a Book, he views the Character of the Man, O, says he, I know the Author, he is a damn’d Whig, or a rank Jacobite, I’ll license none of his Writings.12

Texts are hypothetically refused a licence due to the differing political persuasions of the licenser and the licensee. Despite their differences, both pamphlets help in summarising a common concern that a return to pre-publication licensing represents a threat to the post-licensing act age of improved press freedoms and political and religious tolerance. The main concern of Defoe’s essay is how to ‘Restrain the Licentious Extravagance of Authors’ without putting ‘a general stop to publick [sic] Printing [which] would be a check to Learning, a Prohibition of Knowledge, and make Instruction Contraband’ (p. 2). A return to the

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pre-publication censorship of the Licensing Order era as suggested by the proposed bill is too great a restraint on liberty for Defoe, who writes To Cure the ill Use of Liberty, with a Deprivation of Liberty, is like cutting off the Leg to cure the Gout in the Toe, like expelling Poison with too Rank a Poison, where both may struggle which Poison shall prevail, but which soever prevails, the Patient suffers. (p. 8)

To this end, rather than preventing publications guilty of an ‘ill use of liberty’, which Defoe likens to a person being punished for a crime before it has been committed, ‘’tis enough to make Laws to punish Crimes when they are committed’ (p. 7). Defoe’s solution, therefore, is that the ‘Legislative Authority’ should make an Act that no Man shall, by Writing or by Printing, Argue, Dispute, Reflect upon, or pretend to vindicate such and such Points, Persons, Bodies, Members, &c. Of the State of the Church, or of any other Matter or Thing as the Law shall mention, and they will be such as the Law-makers see proper to insert […] [and] That if any shall presume to [break this law] they shall be punish’d in such or such a manner. (p. 14)

This is an accurate summary of the way in which the Government and law courts did indeed work to restrain the ‘extravagant’ freedom of the press, through prosecutions for libel after publication and distribution of the ‘libellous’ material had already occurred. Defoe’s essay is revealing in the emphasis he places on the need to regulate blasphemous expressions in particular, declaring ‘the prodigious looseness of the Pen, in broaching new Opinions in Religion, as well as in Politicks [sic], are real Scandals to the Nation, and well deserve a Regulation’ (p. 3). The syntax of this sentence implies that the regulation of more explicitly politically seditious material is an afterthought to the greater threat posed by religious subversion. Even if this is considered simply a matter of style, it is nevertheless important that Defoe then chooses to illustrate his point, expressing his shame that Britain should disproportionately produce such texts compared with other nations, by only giving examples of a blasphemous, rather than of a solely political, nature:

24  P. WHICKMAN No Nation in the Christian World, but ours, would have suffered such Books as Asgill upon Death; Coward against the Immortality of the Soul; ____ on Poligamy; ____ against the Trinity; B____t’s Theory; and abundance more tending to Atheism, Heresie, and Irreligion, without a publick Censure, nor should the Authors have gone without Censure and Punishment, in any place in Europe, but here. (p. 4)

Among others, Defoe refers to William Coward who, in 1702, had published Second Thoughts Concerning the Human Soul. This disputed the idea that humans possessed a separate soul and that, upon the Resurrection, the whole human, body and soul, would be resurrected as one. Condemned as blasphemous by a specially appointed committee within the House of Commons, Coward’s works were ordered to be publicly burned by the hangman in March 1704.13 Otherwise, however, Coward remained unpunished and even proceeded to publish the second edition of his book. Defoe’s answer to the problem of press regulation is to introduce a system of copyright. This stems partly from Defoe’s call for the requirement that all published texts should contain the name of the author and, if not, the authorship should be assigned to the final seller of the book. Doing this, Defoe argues, makes it easier to track down and prosecute authors of controversial material without the need for the re-introduction of pre-publication censorship. Assigning responsibility to the booksellers, he argues, should aid in preventing the dissemination of anonymously authored subversive material since booksellers would be unwilling to sell such works knowing that they could be held accountable for the book’s contents. Furthermore, Defoe writes This Law would also put a Stop to a certain sort of Thieving which is now in full practice in England, and which no Law extends to punish, viz. Some Printers and Booksellers printing Copies none of their own. (p. 19)

The failure to regulate press piracy leads to not only what is tantamount to theft, but also ‘robs Men of the due Reward of Industry, the Prize of Learning, and the Benefit of their Studies’ since pirated texts are often ‘imperfect’ containing ‘innumerable Errors, by which the Design of the Author is often inverted, conceal’d, or destroy’d’ (p. 19). Thus, for Defoe, the issue of press piracy is not solely an issue concerning an individual’s property in books, but one of what could be regarded as a sort

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of ‘quality control’. Defoe’s point is that eliminating piracy ensures that published material is indeed attributable to the author, in both sense and design, and that what is presented has not been abridged to the detriment of the subject or to knowledge. Defoe’s argument regarding the introduction of a right to copy in books is in fact fairly typical. As Deazley puts it: ‘In the early part of the eighteenth century, the booksellers presented the author as public benefactor and private beneficiary’ (p. 94). Defoe’s call for copyright protection is prescient. In 1710 a new act was passed that finally established copyright in printed material largely along the lines that Defoe presented in his essay.14 The world’s first-ever full copyright statute, commonly known as the ‘Statute of Anne’ or, ‘An Act for the Encouragement of Learning by vesting the Copies of printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned’, became law on 5 April 1710.15 For the first time, ‘the author of any book or books already printed’ or those ‘persons who hath or have purchased or acquired the copy or copies of any book or books’, such as booksellers and printers, had ‘the sole right and liberty of printing such book and books for the term of [21] years’.16 The authors or copyright holders of books printed in the future also had the same right for fourteen years following initial publication. Those individuals who proceeded to print texts without the permission of the copyright holder faced a punitive fine of ‘one penny for every sheet which shall be found in his, her or their custody, either printed or printing, published or exposed to sale’. In order to benefit from the protection of copyright, the publication and the proprietor’s name must be entered into the Register Book of the Company of Stationers, and upon delivery of ‘nine copies of each book or books, upon the best paper’ to the ‘Warehouse-Keeper of the said Company of Stationers’ for the use of various libraries.17

2.2  Copyright, Censorship and Class: The Statute of Anne and ‘Bad Language’, 1710–1745 The theory that underpinned the ‘Statute of Anne’ had two essential elements. Firstly, as seen by the act’s full title, the act worked to encourage learning through the distribution of nine copies of a newly published work to various libraries. Secondly, it rewarded writers with the sole right to copy due to their own private labour and because they

26  P. WHICKMAN

had contributed to public knowledge. The Statute of Anne, at this stage, worked in theory to protect all writers and publishers regardless of content. That copyright was awarded to writers, however, has a crucial bearing on future copyright cases concerning seditious and blasphemous material since the ‘reward’ of copyright could essentially be seen to legitimise subversion. The case of Burnet v. Chetwood of 10 October 1721, the first copyright case following the Statute of Anne not involving a work protected by letters patent, happened to concern a text proffering controversial religious positions.18 In 1692 Thomas Burnet published, in Latin, Archaeologiae Philosophicae sive Doctrina de Rerum Originibus or, in English, The Ancient Doctrine Concerning the Origin of Things.19 In 1721, Burnet’s surviving brother and executor secured an injunction that prevented William Chetwood and Richard Franklin from re-­printing the work in translation. The case was granted to the plaintiff, as was a second action regarding another of Burnet’s works. Two ­ important issues emerge from this. Firstly, the question of copyright for translated works, determining whether a translation is a second and therefore different piece of work from the original. Secondly, the case draws an explicit connection between ‘blasphemous’ material and the law of copyright. A factor behind Burnet’s success was that translating his brother’s works into English would expose ‘unlearned’ men to ‘strange notions’. Indeed, Burnet’s work, among other things, had questioned the Biblical fall of man as a literal, historical event. As a result, Lord Chancellor Macclesfield, who presided over the case, is reported to have observed that his ruling was beyond a simple question of property: […] this being a book which to his knowledge, (having read it in his study,) contained strange notions intended by the author to be concealed from the vulgar in the Latin language, in which language it could not do much hurt, the learned being better able to judge of it, he thought it proper to grant an Injunction to the printing and publishing it in English.20

Moreover, Macclesfield declared the case to have set a precedent in which Chancery now ‘had a superintendency over all books, and might in a summary way restrain the printing or publishing any that contained reflections on religion or morality’ (Merivale, v. 2, p. 334). This had an important effect on broadening the remit of future Chancery rulings.

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The refusal to grant Chetwood and Franklin the rights to translate and publish the text for a non-Latin speaking audience was essentially an act of censorship. Not only did Burnet v. Chetwood show that the content of a work could influence decisions to deny publication through injunctions, but that the nature or class of those who might have read it had a similar effect. More educated individuals, such as those who could read Latin, were seen as less likely to be corrupted by a subjectively ‘morally questionable’ text than those from less educated backgrounds. Thus, if a text were targeted at less educated individuals, it became regarded as a greater threat with writers and publishers punished accordingly. Factors such as a book’s price and its presentation or ‘bibliographical codes’ came to be seen as indicative of its targeted audience. At the same time, a work’s aesthetic or linguistic style could similarly imply a wider mass readership and thus be deemed more of a threat. Crimes such as obscenity and blasphemy were essentially crimes of ‘bad language’. While such a phrase indicates vulgar language or blasphemous swearing, it also evokes connotations of quality or content of expression. As a writer, to be accused of using ‘bad language’ is suggestive not only of offensiveness but of style. As a result, obscenity and blasphemy intersects with subjective conceptions of literary aesthetics, between different understandings of ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature and, therefore, of social class. At the same time, it is important to emphasise that attacking a writer’s style became a convenient critical red herring that concealed a commentator’s often conservative moral or religious position so as not to be seen to object to the discussion of controversial ideas in themselves. This is in part analogous to the phenomenon identified by Olivia Smith where, towards the end of the eighteenth century, ‘vulgarity’ became sufficient grounds in itself for a government to resist reform. She argues, for instance, that ‘[t]rials for sedition, discussions in Parliament, comments in newspapers, and responses to petitions relied on the notion of vulgarity to argue against the concept of extended or universal male suffrage’.21 The intersection of aesthetics, class and criminality is easily ­discerned from the situation concerning the notorious publisher Edmund Curll. Curll’s 1727 prosecution in Rex v. Curl [sic] led to the creation of ‘obscene libel’ as an offence. Curll is now most widely remembered as one of the ‘dunces’ so ruthlessly satirised in Alexander Pope’s ­mock-epic poem The Dunciad (1728–1743). There was intense personal bad feeling between Pope and Curll. The two men had clashed over Curll’s

28  P. WHICKMAN

illegitimate publication of Court Poems (1716) resulting in Pope s­piking his rival’s drink with an emetic. They also had a long-running copyright dispute over the publication of Pope’s private correspondence.22 Yet, Pope not only disliked Curll personally but took particular exception to what he represented. Born into poverty, he was one of a new breed of self-made professional publishers and was a particularly unscrupulous one. Curll not only continually violated copyright law, or sailed rather close to the wind, he became known for his willingness to publish any text—regardless of content—as long as he was convinced it would sell. Alongside often illegitimate works of the foremost writers of his day, Curll sold pornographic and other ‘immoral’ texts. He became so associated with this perceived literary immorality that Defoe coined the term ‘Curlicism’ to refer to any act of literary licentiousness. In a piece entitled ‘Against Printing Indecent Books’ (1719), Defoe blasts the corrupt nature of the books of his day determining Curll to be the individual most responsible for their dissemination: Hast thou ever heard among the Roll of Sodom, crimes of the Sin of CURLICISM? Know then, this is the Sodomy of the Pen; ‘tis writing beastly Stories, and then propagating them by Print and filling the Families and the Studies of our Youth, with Books which no Christian Government that I have read of, ever permitted […] There is indeed but one Bookseller eminent among us for this Abomination; and from him, the Crime takes the just Denomination of Curlicism: The Fellow is a contemptible Wretch a thousand Ways; he is odious in his Person, scandalous in his Fame, he is mark’d by Nature, for he has a bawdy Countenance, and a debauch’d Mein [sic], his Tongue is an Echo of all the beastly Language his Shop is fill’d with, and Filthiness drivels in the very Tone of his Voice.23

Defoe’s personal attack on Curll is arguably classist. This is evident in the connection drawn between Curll’s own language to ‘the beastly Language’ of the immoral books he stocks in his shop, with Curll’s ‘Tone of […] Voice’ resembling the written style of the books he sells. Such a class-inflected depiction of Curll is similarly apparent in his treatment by Pope, the poet through whom he is most well known. For Paul Baines and Pat Rogers, the concerns of the literary culture of the age are typified by the dispute between the two men, which they see as a

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clash between Pope, the uncrowned laureate of his age, representative of high classical culture and urbane values, and Curll, a self-made bookseller with a reputation for piracy, deviousness, and obscenity. Curll became the most visible and unrepentant exponent of a new art of publicity in the early eighteenth century, which for Pope and his circle represented the absence of civilized discrimination between high and low culture, an intrusive interest in the private lives of the famous, and a mechanization of the art of writing.24

For Brean Hammond, this very ‘discrimination between high and low culture’ was largely down to Pope himself, as instituted and dramatised in satiric poems such as The Dunciad: It was Pope as much as anyone else who established the distinction between ‘classic’ and ‘popular’ writers and writing […] what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ literature, what is ‘classic’ and what ‘popular’ is not given in the nature of things […] The Dunciad is a potent vehicle for promoting a value-system under which certain literary forms and practices appeared as praiseworthy and others as corrupt.25

Pope’s literary opponents in The Dunciad—of whom Curll was one— are dismissed as ‘dunces’ due to them being inferior writers or as otherwise corrupting the literary and cultural landscape. For Hammond, Pope makes this distinction seem one of natural good taste: ‘What gives him the right to treat the dunces as he does? In the text itself (as opposed to the introductory paraphernalia), Pope would like the reader to think that the matter is a straightforward, aesthetic one’ (p. 127). Curll appears in The Dunciad Book II, at a games held in honour of ‘head dunce’ Colley Cibber, where he proceeds to race with the rival publisher Barnaby Bernard Lintot (Lintot was a much more scrupulous publisher of ‘high’ literature than Curll). Curll’s race ends abruptly, as he slips in something rather unpleasant: Full in the middle way there stood a lake, Which Curl’s Corinna chanc’d that morn to make: (Such was her wont, at early drawn to drop Her evening cates before his neighbour’s shop,) Here fortun’d Curl to slide; loud shout the band, And Bernard! Bernard! Rings thro’ all the Strand. Obscene with filth the miscreant lies bewray’d, Fal’n in the plash his wickedness had laid.26 (II. ll. 69–76)

30  P. WHICKMAN

Amidst the crowd cheering his rival Lintot, Curll falls in a puddle of urine that had earlier been deposited by his ‘Corinna’. Corinna, a name commonly used in Classical love poetry, is likely an ironic reference to the female protagonists in Curll’s pornographic or ‘amatory’ publications. Falling in the ‘lake’ of urine is just deserts for the ‘miscreant’ Curll’s ‘wickedness’ and obscenity, essentially reaping what he has sown. Indeed, the poet ironically refers to ‘Curl’s chaste press’ (I. l. 40) in Book I of the poem. Not only does Pope establish Corinna’s vulgarity in urinating in the street, however, the very fact he mentions that it is in front of a shop draws attention to Curll’s position as a commercial, bourgeois bookseller rather than an ‘aristocratic’, amateur writer like Pope himself.27 The reference to Curll’s lower social status is further emphasised in the notes to this part of the poem in which, in apologising for the ‘low and base’ scenario depicted, the poet refers to the ‘meaner degree of Booksellers’ and how ‘the politest men are sometimes obliged to swear, when they happen to have to do with porters and oyster-wenches’ (pp. 500–501 n). Issues of morality and questions of taste in literary practice are conflated with class discourse, with ‘Swearing’ or ‘bad language’ posited as the language of the ‘lower orders’. Curll’s ‘wickedness’ and ‘[un]chaste press’ soon caught up with him and led to his imprisonment. In 1724, he published a translation of Jean Barrin’s Venus in the Cloister; or, The Nun in Her Smock.28 Venus in the Cloister was a series of erotic fictionalised dialogues between two nuns in which the elder of the two, Angelica, attempts to sexually initiate the younger Agnes through discussions of both heterosexual and homosexual encounters. Curll’s case led to the creation of ‘obscene libel’ as an offence which, as David Saunders points out, is odd since Venus in the Cloister libelled no individuals (p. 436). This much is made apparent in a 1755 published account of the legal debates surrounding the case. Venus in the Cloister is thought by one Judge to not be a libel as the text did not speak ill ‘against the publick or some private person’ and Curll is thus not punishable in a ‘temporal’ court.29 As well as being the first case of obscene libel, Rex v. Curl was the first prosecution ‘which found the act of publication of a book to be criminally obscene’ setting a number of important precedents (Saunders, p. 436).30 In fact, it was not so much the content of Venus in the Cloister that led to Curll’s prosecution but its physical reality as a book: ‘’tis libellus from it’s [sic] being a book, and not from the matter of it’s [sic]

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contents’ (Strange, p. 789). As Saunders illustrates, for ‘Curll’s publication of Venus in the Cloister to be a crime and not a sin, there had to be a public offence, not merely a private immoral act’ (p. 437). Saunders defines Curll’s ‘public offence’ as follows: What made Curll’s action criminal in the view of the judges was a contingent technological circumstance: the publication was a printed work, and as such it was capable of widespread public distribution. The court found that, as a printed book, Curll’s publication ‘goes all over the kingdom,’ threatening ‘morality in general,’ as the Attorney General claimed in prosecuting, because it ‘does, or may, affect all the King’s subjects’. (p. 437)

In the account of the case itself, not only does the Attorney General emphasise the corrupting and injurious impact of Venus in the Cloister on wider society, but also significantly establishes the particular themes that would be seen as similarly injurious in future libel cases: this is an offense at common law, as it tends to corrupt the morals of the King’s subjects, and is against the peace of the King. Peace includes good order and government, and that peace may be broken in many instances without an actual force. 1. If it be an act against the constitution or civil government; 2. If it be against religion: and, 3. If against morality. (Strange, p. 790)

Essentially the three types of libel mentioned are sedition, blasphemy and immorality (or obscenity); all three, in written form, are associated as equally dangerous to society despite their lack of ‘actual force’. Not unlike Burnet v. Chetwood, the most significant issue at stake in Rex v. Curl was one of distribution and audience. The two cases of Burnet v. Chetwood and Rex v. Curl in the 1720s had a significant theoretical impact on the later publication of subversive, blasphemous or obscene material. The Burnet case in particular set the precedent that copyright could be refused on the grounds of a text’s moral content, in the belief that to award copyright would legitimise the writer’s subversive work, rewarding the author with the right to copy in the process, and therefore, in fact, aiding in its distribution. This was an important development since the refusal to grant copyright to controversial material could in fact lead to increased distribution through piracy, since pirates knew that they could not be sued for breach of copy. This becomes most apparent with the case of Southey v. Sherwood (1817). Essentially, the

32  P. WHICKMAN

two cases of Burnet and Curll changed the concept of copyright law as determined by the ‘Statute of Anne’ that had granted copyright to texts regardless of content or quality. From the end of the 1720s, however, copyright became conditional upon subjective interpretations of conventional morality. Saunders neatly summarises this issue: English copyright law has treated literary masterpieces and their authors indifferently from railway timetables, football pools coupons, computer software, and exhaust-pipe specifications and their producers. However, this principle is contradicted by the civil obscenity doctrine which makes protection dependent upon a quality in the work (absence of “immorality”). (p. 435)

Moreover, Rex v. Curl illustrated that, despite the removal of pre-publication licensing, the publication of controversial material could result in prosecution. Saunders makes the point that in ‘1710 writers acquired the capacity to occupy the status of owner of a copyable commodity; in 1727, they acquired the capacity to be held criminally responsible for the publication of an obscene matter’ (p. 437). While Saunders is right to highlight that Rex v. Curl led to issues concerning criminal responsibility for printed material, his focus on the writer rather than publisher is misleading. In Rex v. Curl, it was Edmund Curll the publisher and not Robert Samber the translator who was punished for Venus in the Cloister. This case was by no means unique in this regard, and successive trials throughout the eighteenth century similarly targeted publishers rather than writers. Since the verdicts in both Rex v. Curl and Burnet v. Chetwood suggest a legal system more concerned with limiting distribution of subversive material rather than its composition per se, it appears logical to focus on publishers since it is they, and not authors, who are responsible for dissemination. An example of a writer, rather than a publisher, who was prosecuted for blasphemy in the same decade as the Burnet and Curll cases was Thomas Woolston in 1729, a former member of the clergy and former Fellow of Sidney College, Cambridge. Though Woolston had written texts expressing similar notions before, leading to his dismissal from the clergy, it was his The Moderator Between an Infidel and an Apostate (1725) that was the major spark behind the controversy. Woolston argued that parts of scripture should be interpreted allegorically rather than literally and disputed the argument for Jesus’ divinity as proven by

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miracles. Citing the Epistles of Paul, Woolston argues that ‘such citations out of St. Paul are a sufficient Vindication or Apology for the allegorical Interpretation of the Law and the Prophets’.31 Most controversially, although at great pains to illustrate that he himself did not disbelieve it, Woolston challenged the notion that the doctrine of the Virgin Birth should be considered to be indisputably true: I do believe the Virginity of the Mother of our Lord, and will by no Means be induced to write against it: But it is ridiculous, very ridiculous and absurd to imagine, that God should give forth a Prophecy of the Conception of a Virgin, which is subject to Counterfeit, and in its completion liable to unanswerable Exceptions against it. Who can prove the Mother of Jesus to have been a Virgin, otherwise than upon her own word, and the good Opinion her Relations had upon her? (p. 66)

Though Woolston is careful to not express his disbelief in the Virgin Birth, he argues that it can be proven to be false and is thus inadequate proof of the truth of the divinity of God; the Resurrection is challenged in a similar fashion. In spite of his caution, however, Woolston’s statements were taken to be blasphemous. Woolston’s book, as well as his later Six Discourses on the Miracles of Our Saviour (1727–1729), was interpreted as having effectively denied the divinity of Christ and the divinity of scripture, key terms of the 1698 Blasphemy Act. In 1729, Woolston was charged and successfully prosecuted for blasphemous libel, remaining in prison until his death in 1733. The response to Woolston’s writings and his prosecution, which became known as the ‘Woolstonian Controversy’, was ferocious, with some historians putting the number of books and pamphlets written on the issue at over sixty. Indeed, ‘A catalogue of all the books that have been wrote, pro and con, in the Woolstonian Controversy’, appeared prefixed to the second edition of a work entitled Free Thoughts on Mr Woolston and His Writings in 1730, lists just under sixty pamphlets and volumes immediately contemporary to Woolston’s prosecution.32 While some of the participants in the ‘Woolstonian Controversy’ were supportive of Woolston—even some of those who disagreed with him did not condone his punishment—it is Woolston’s opponents that are of particular interest. A letter appearing under the pseudonym Philo-Libert in The Grub Street Journal on 18 June 1730, for instance, argued that Woolston’s work

34  P. WHICKMAN did not proceed from an honest and sincere desire of removing error, and re-establishing truth: for then he would have written with good nature, modesty and decency. But since his Pieces are full of malicious reflections, arrogant boasts, and scurrilous banters; since he has treated not only his Adversaries, but his Subject, the most sacred Person, and the most sacred Things with a most audacious and blasphemous ridicule; it is evident the true motive of his undertaking was only to gratify the irregular passions of his own depraved heart.33

Not only is Woolston accused of being blasphemous in ridiculing the ‘most sacred Person’ and the ‘most sacred Things’, but also of treating his opponents with contempt. Essentially, the author is closing down the suggestion that his dismissal of Woolston is based on a denial of free inquiry into religion. Note, for instance, that he does not attack Woolston for having undertaken his work in the first place; rather he attacks him for being motivated by ‘the passions of his own depraved heart’. Woolston’s failing, the author alleges, is on the grounds of poor literary manners, having not written ‘with good nature, modesty and decency’. A criminally libellous production is therefore seen to be written in subjectively stylistically ‘bad language’. Not only that, Woolston also makes an appearance in Book III of The Dunciad. In a footnote, the poet glosses Thomas Woolston as ‘an impious madman, who wrote in a most insolent style against the miracles of the Gospel’ (III. l. 212 n).34 Again, Woolston is attacked as much for his ‘insolent’ writing ‘style’ as he is for his impiety. On the one hand, Woolston’s opponents may have had a point; describing the notion of the virgin birth as having been pre-ordained as ‘ridiculous, very ridiculous and absurd’, is hardly measured in tone. It goes without saying that had Woolston written abrasively in defence of the ‘indisputable’ virgin birth no prosecution would have ever been brought. Woolston’s style, then, became a useful way for opponents to dismiss him without appearing to be against free enquiry into religion. The Grub Street Journal article, for instance, though not ruling out prosecution for speaking against core doctrinal beliefs, suggests that to only prosecute without properly answering the blasphemous text serves to turn the ‘blasphemer’ into a martyr for his cause:

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Such prosecutions seem to carry in them an intimation, which is always propagated as much as possible by the sufferers, that there is something extraordinary in what he has advanced, which cannot be answered by argument, and therefore this coercive method is pursued. And thus a Person is often rendered very considerable in the eyes of the world, who was either altogether obscure, or even contemptible before; and his writings and notions are much farther diffused by those very means which intended to suppress them. (p. 1)

Instead, the first step in opposing such ‘blasphemers’ as Woolston is to ‘publish a proper answer to them’ (p. 1). To prosecute a writer without addressing his contentious work in print is seen to strengthen and legitimise the work by implying that the writer’s arguments are so convincing that they cannot be answered. Prosecution, therefore, is interpreted perversely as a sign of weakness if used in isolation. Furthermore, the increased publicity that prosecution brings, of both the work in question and its author, serves to disseminate the controversial material to a wider audience when previously such writers could be dismissed as insignificant. To this end, any response to a blasphemous text should not come from ‘a person who is in a much higher station in the world’ than the writer of the original, since this ‘raises an obscure adversary to a kind of equality with his opponent’ (p. 1). Moreover, while the author appears to express at least a modicum of sympathy elsewhere in the article for Woolston’s punishment, his main aim is to consider how ‘to prevent the mischief which would probably arise from suffering [blasphemous works] to be spread abroad among the people with impunity’ (p. 1). The author fears that government efforts to stamp out blasphemy through prosecutions may instead lead to greater dissemination of it.

2.3  Blasphemy, Obscenity or Sedition: John Wilkes to William Hone, 1745–1817 If blasphemy is to speak ‘profane[ly]…of God or Sacred things’, and to speak profanity is also to speak in a ‘ribald, coarse [and] indecent’ fashion, then blasphemy, by its very definition, is inextricably linked to issues of obscenity.35 Furthermore, if coarseness of expression is akin to profanity, then the ‘insolent’ writing style of Thomas Woolston infers the connection of form and content in considering issues of blasphemous

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expression in literary texts. In 1745, Parliament introduced ‘An Act more effectually to prevent profane Cursing and Swearing’, known in short as the ‘Profane Oaths Act’, and was to take effect on 1 June of the following year. The law’s preamble states: For as much as the horrid, impious, and execrable vices of profane cursing and swearing (so highly displeasing to Almighty God, and loathsome and offensive to every Christian) are become so frequent and notorious, that unless speedily and effectually punished, they may justly provoke the Divine vengeance to increase the many calamities these nations now labour under.36

Swearing is not only ‘horrid’ and ‘execrable’ but ‘impious’; and it is not only ‘loathsome and offensive to every Christian’ but ‘displeasing to Almighty God’. Swearing and cursing therefore, which in modern Britain is regarded mainly as a Public Order offence, was not simply a social misdemeanour but an offence against God and religion, seen as a threat to wider society through the provocation of divine vengeance. Even by the hyperbolic standards of the preambles of other eighteenth-century statutes, this is still a remarkable instance. Significantly, the act does not define precisely what is to be understood by swearing or cursing as it does not give examples of particular offensive terms that are to be deemed in violation of the act. Bearing in mind the apocalyptic language of the preamble, therefore, this lack of definition implies that all subjectively determined ‘bad language’ is deemed to be an offence against God. After all, the act does not distinguish between explicitly ‘blasphemous’ language, such as ‘taking the Lord’s name in vain’, and crude sexual language. The Profane Oaths Act should be considered in light of the near contemporaneous emergence of obscene, seditious and blasphemous libel following Rex v. Curl and the Woolstonian controversy. Its appearance at a time, as we have seen, in which the language or style of a text played as much or even greater a role in determining a text’s libellous nature, and that such an understanding disproportionately focused on those texts aimed at, or produced by, those from the ‘lower orders’ of society further emphasises the cultural anxiety at the time concerning ‘bad language’. This I mean in all senses of the phrase, and such an interest in style and its more than passing relation to conceptions of obscenity has significant implications in considerations of, and prosecutions for, literary blasphemy.

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The association of blasphemy with other crimes such as obscenity can be observed in the case of John Wilkes in the 1760s. John Wilkes was MP for Middlesex, editor of The North Briton, libertine and a fierce campaigner for freedom of speech.37 In 1763, Wilkes criticised a speech made by George III in The North Briton 45, though his main target was the Prime Minister Lord Bute. Wilkes’ criticism of the crown largely focused on its favouring of Bute, who had become Prime Minister, and, for Wilkes, an enemy of liberty,38 precisely because of the King’s preference: The personal character of our amiable sovereign makes us easy and happy that so great a power is lodged in such hands; but the favourite [i.e. Bute] has given too just cause for him to escape the general odium. The prerogative of the crown is to exert the constitutional powers entrusted to it in a way not of blind favour and partiality, but of wisdom and judgment. This is the spirit of our constitution. The people too have their prerogative, and I hope the fine words of DRYDEN will be engraven on our hearts. Freedom is the English Subject’s Prerogative.39

As a result, The North Briton 45 was declared a seditious libel and ordered to be burned. This ironically proved Wilkes’ point. At the same time, in a further attempt to damage his reputation, Wilkes was charged with blasphemy. The case against him in this instance was contrived and politically motivated; his clever parody of Pope’s Essay on Man (1734)— entitled An Essay on Woman (1763)—was more obviously obscene than blasphemous, including an image of an enormous phallus on the front page. The poem was also dedicated to the critic, editor of Pope and Bishop of Gloucester, William Warburton. Arthur Cash describes the contrivance of the Earl of Sandwich in ensuring Wilkes’ prosecution: Sandwich spoke privately to Earl Henley, who as Lord Chancellor presided in the House of Lords. Would his lordship allow the matter of the Essay on Woman to come before the house as a case of blasphemy? No, he would not, but he would agree to hear Bishop Warburton if he complained that his parliamentary privilege was violated, and then the house could take it where it would. On 5 November, Lord Sandwich showed the Essay and title page to Warburton, who was horrified. A “heap of diabolic lewdness and blasphemy,” said his grace the bishop. To Sandwich he wrote the next day, “I thank God I can heartily forgive him, heartily forgive him, but though I forgive Mr. Wilkes, it is no reason the public should, who is the appointed avenger of God’s violated Majesty, and of the King’s.” Sandwich soon was reporting that his grace “comes heartily into

38  P. WHICKMAN the affair, says he will not only authorize me to complain in his name of this outrage, but will take any part in it himself that shall be judged proper by the King’s Administration, and he seems much pleased with the scheme in general.”40

The poem was not published at the time and was not initially intended for public distribution. In fact, it was quite by chance that Wilkes’ opponents had come across the manuscript.41 Cash goes as far to suggest that the government assembled what we now know to be the text themselves to create an exaggerated ‘government edition’ that worked to incriminate Wilkes further (p. 148). A particular stanza that became a key part of the case against Wilkes was the last, from a section entitled ‘The Maid’s Prayer’: Immortal Honour, endless Fame, Almighty Pego! To thy Name; And equal Adoration be Paid to the neighbouring Pair with Thee, Thrice blessed Glorious Trinity.42

Although not as obscene as much of the rest of the poem, the passage’s blasphemy is clear. Not only is the phallus to be worshipped as if it were a God, the penis and the testicles are considered together in a crude subversion of the Trinity. As Cash points out, however, this stanza was one of the government modified passages and not Wilkes’ original (p. 148). Moreover, many of those involved in prosecuting Wilkes, such as Sandwich and Warburton, had themselves been lampooned either in the poem or The North Briton. Wilkes was eventually found guilty, not of blasphemy, but of a seditious libel against Warburton and was forced into exile. Nonetheless, much of Wilkes’ public support recognised his prosecution as outrageously political. Barbara Benedict writes Wilkes became a hero for his championship of people’s liberty: his arrest for printing An Essay on Woman was considered the spurious excuse of the royalist party for preventing the people from choosing their own political representative. After his return to London 4 years later, the populace repeatedly elected him to serve as MP for Middlesex, but each time the King’s party prohibited his taking a seat in Parliament.43

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The perception of Wilkes as an important defender of free speech is demonstrated through William Hone’s invocation of him in 1817. The Wilkes case emphasises the conflation of blasphemy and obscenity as well as the political motivation of blasphemy prosecutions. That Wilkes was at different points charged with blasphemy and sedition, for a single text that was more accurately obscene, demonstrates the authorities’ desperate reaching after the appropriate politically expedient crime by which to charge him. His case also shows how prosecutions for blasphemy frequently backfired, often serving the offending work’s dissemination. Wilkes did not intend, it appears, to have An Essay on Woman publicly printed, but the government’s assembling of the work in fact led to its pirating and wider availability. As Cash puts it: Only three eighteenth-century copies of the Essay survive, all pirated from this corrupt second government edition. How ironic that the ministry that said it was determined to suppress this blasphemous work and to keep it out of the hands of copyists should have provided the channel through which it was passed to the twenty-first century. (p. 149)

As with attempts to censor media in the modern day, commonly referred to as the Streisand Effect, government attempts to clamp down on perceived blasphemy were ineffective and even counterproductive, inadvertently drawing wider publicity to the very works they attempted to censor.44 In the case of Wilkes, the government essentially released the text into the public domain themselves. In the decades after the 1760s, prosecutions for blasphemy largely quietened down. The charge of blasphemy, however, re-emerged amid the rise of prosecutions for ‘seditious words and seditious libel’ following the French Revolution. As John Barrell and Jon Mee note, prosecutions rose from two a year in the earlier eighteenth century to ‘well over one hundred around the country in the 1790s (with at least nineteen in 1792 alone), not to mention related prosecutions for lesser offences and other forms of legal harassment’.45 In such a climate, the perceived atheism of the French Revolutionaries became a label to level at, and thus discredit, English pro-revolutionaries. James Gillray’s famous print ‘A Peep into the Cave of Jacobinism’ (1798) shows that when ‘Truth’ peeps into the cave she not only sees ‘Libels’, ‘Defamation’, ‘Sedition’, ‘Ignorance’ and ‘Anarchy’ but also ‘Atheism’.46 ‘The Contrast’ (1793) functions in a similar manner, emphasising the contrast between French and British

40  P. WHICKMAN

‘Liberty’, with British liberty associated with ‘Religion’ and French with ‘Atheism’.47 An article appearing in the Oracle and Daily Advertiser of 23 August 1799 similarly bemoans that the latest French ‘import’ is blasphemy, having replaced the fashions of the French Court: Formerly we used to import from Paris the fashions of the most brilliant Court in Europe. Now, it seems, we receive nothing from that quarter but the declamatory fustian and bombastic blasphemy of an immense banditti.48

Also, an article penned by ‘A Liveryman of London’ in The True Briton a few months later argues that, for a Jacobin, ‘Religion may be represented as Blasphemy’.49 Religious difference, therefore, became a key signifier of partisan revolutionary debates of the period. In this way, blasphemy became a useful charge to level at political opponents in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, even if it did not always succeed. This was most certainly the case with the prosecution of the radical bookseller, writer and editor of The Reformist’s Register William Hone in 1817. Almost simultaneous with the publication of Robert Southey’s Wat Tyler, Hone produced his three ‘Liturgical Parodies’. These parodies, The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism of a Ministerial Member, the Political Litany and the Sinecurist’s Creed, led to Hone’s imprisonment and subsequent trials for blasphemous libel at the end of the year. Although these parodies were based on elements of the Book of Common Prayer such as the Church Catechism, the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments, they were political rather than religious satires, apparent from Hone’s invoking of Wilkes and, it is inferred, Wilkes’ commitment to free speech. As a result, Joss Marsh claims that Hone’s parodies’ ‘political pedigrees shrieked from their titles’.50 While The Late John Wilkes’s Cathecism does include a parody of the Lord’s Prayer, its satiric intention is clearly political rather than blasphemous: OUR Lord who art in Treasury, whatsoever be thy name, thy power be prolonged, thy will be done throughout the empire, as it is in each session. Give us our usual sops, and forgive us our occasional absences on divisions; as we promise not to forgive them that divide against thee. Turn us not out of our Places; but keep us in the House of Commons, the land of Pensions and Plenty; and deliver us from the People. Amen.51

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Hone’s decision to employ such a form for his political satires is due to the broader familiarity of texts such as the Lord’s Prayer rather than any intent to blaspheme. As both Kyle Grimes and Olivia Smith argue, the familiarity of such scriptural texts among different social classes, even among the illiterate, attests to Hone’s efforts to have as wide a readership as possible.52 It is this accessible language, combined with their low cost, that made Hone’s parodies such a threat. The nature of Hone’s works meant that he was initially charged with blasphemy and sedition. The Attorney General Sir Samuel Shepherd, however, eventually decided to prosecute Hone for blasphemy alone. This is because, as Grimes contends, he thought ‘that it would be easier to secure guilty verdicts on charges of blasphemy against the Church rather than sedition against an already unpopular government’ (p. 143). Hone therefore faced three separate trials for blasphemous libel, one for each parody, on consecutive days between 18 and 20 December 1817. Shepherd’s tactic of convincing the Jury of Hone’s blasphemy while denying Hone’s political tendency can be gleaned from his opening remarks in Hone’s first trial concerning The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism. Shepherd significantly invokes the 1698 Blasphemy Act: [The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism] is charged, and, as I think, justly charged, with being a profane and blasphemous, and impious libel. It has nothing of a political tendency about it, but it is avowedly set off against the religion and worship of the Church of England, as established by Act of Parliament.53

The decision to charge Hone with blasphemy, however, backfired spectacularly. Hone was able to defend himself by arguing that his parodies attacked the state rather than the church. Olivia Smith sums up this unusual situation concisely: ‘Inappropriately charged with blasphemy, Hone was probably the only radical in history who could legitimately defend himself by claiming that he had attacked the state’ (p. 180). Hone was found not guilty on all three counts. Despite Shepherd’s claims to the contrary, this blasphemy prosecution was certainly political. This is in fact unconsciously revealed by Shepherd himself, through his invoking of the 1676 Rex v. Taylor case affirming the legal connection between church and state. In doing so, Shepherd alludes to a number of rulings and acts previously discussed:

42  P. WHICKMAN It has been over and over again said by the most eminent judges, and particularly by one who was the most learned man that ever adorned the bench – the most even man that ever blessed domestic life – the most eminent man that ever advanced the progress of science – and also one of the best and most purely religious men that ever lived. I speak of Sir Matthew Hale. It was by him in one sentence said that ‘the Christian Religion is parcel of the Common Law of England’ [sic]. The service of the Church of England is also part of the statute law of England; for in the reign of Charles the Second, for securing uniformity of public prayer in the Church of England, a book, commonly called “The Book of Common Prayer” was not composed, but collected, and annexed to an Act of Parliament then framed, as part of the enacted form of the Liturgy of the Church of England. If to revile that – if to bring it into contempt, be not a libel, then Christianity no longer is what Sir Matthew Hale described it – “parcel of the Common Law of England”, nor this sacred book a part of the statute law of the land, because in such an event the law must declare its inability to support its own provisions. (pp. 188–189)

Although keen to play down the political motivation for Hone’s trials, Shepherd inadvertently attaches political significance to them. By writing parodies of ‘The Book of Common Prayer’, Shepherd alleges, Hone is guilty of violating both Hale’s ruling in Rex v. Taylor and the 1662 ‘Act of Uniformity’. Because of this, Hone is not just violating the laws of the land but attempting to sever the ties between Church and State. Essentially, Shepherd is arguing for the crime of blasphemy to be an apolitical one while simultaneously, and contradictorily, arguing that a crime against established religion is a crime against the State. Whether or not a contradiction, Hone’s trials nevertheless had a profound effect on early nineteenth-century print culture. The pursuit of Hone through the courts, a solitary man, not in the greatest of health, of little means and with a family to support, was regarded in some quarters as an astonishing act of victimisation or bullying by the authorities. Even individuals who found Hone’s parodies distasteful or offensive themselves believed the State was wrong to pursue Hone in such a manner. Coleridge, for instance, wrote that ‘I loathe parodies of all kinds… Yet I exult in Hone’s acquittal and Lord Ellenborough’s [who took over the trials after the first day] deserved humiliation’.54 Coleridge’s stance was a fairly common one. Hone received support from people of all walks of life; from working men and fellow booksellers to aristocrats, poets and aristocratic poets. Marsh notes, for instance, how the ‘Earl of Sefton sat

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up on his deathbed to protest, to the tune of one hundred guineas, the “spiteful imbecility” that had motivated the trials’ (pp. 24–25). Keats also exulted in Hone’s acquittal, feeling he had done ‘all writers a service’ and wrote and sent his poem ‘Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream’ to Hone in response (cited in Marsh, p. 24). Following his trials, Hone attracted a large number of subscriptions and donations covering both his legal costs and the necessary financial support for his family. These included, as mentioned, the Earl of Sefton, working men, a jury man from the trials themselves and, significantly for the purposes of this study, a certain ‘P.B. Shelley [of] Marlow’ for five pounds (Marsh, p. 24).55 Shelley had at least a passing connection to Hone, and considered Hone an appropriate publisher for his pamphlet A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote (1817), writing to him on the matter in March of the same year (Letters. i. 392).56 Hone’s case of 1817 not only demonstrates the connection between issues concerning freedom of speech on religious matters in the Romantic period and the legacy of seventeenth and ­eighteenth-century legislation, but also how the political motivation behind blasphemy prosecutions persisted into the post-Napoleonic period. Despite this, the failure of Hone’s prosecution demonstrates the difficulty, if acting within the law of course, in pursuing blasphemous libel cases. The fact that trial proceedings were exempt from charges of sedition, blasphemy or obscenity, meant that Hone could read out his parodies in court and then publish and sell them without fear of further prosecution. This he did successfully. Criminal blasphemy prosecutions were commonly ineffectual, working to disseminate the material much further and at a much lower cost. In fact, beginning almost contemporaneously with Hone’s ‘Liturgical Parodies’, copyright rulings in Chancery similarly led to increased dissemination of blasphemous works.

2.4  Chancery and the Dissemination of ‘Injurious’ Texts, 1817–1823 The first and most significant of these cases concerned the then poet laureate Robert Southey. Southey had composed his play Wat Tyler in 1794 when he was just nineteen. Leaving the manuscript in the hands of Robert Lovell and later the radical printer James Ridgeway, Southey eventually seemed to forget all about it, the particular sentiments that motivated the composition fading over time. On 13 February 1817, however,

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the now forty-two year old Poet Laureate was embarrassed to find that the firm Sherwood, Neely & Jones had published Wat Tyler without his permission. Southey instructed his attorneys, Shadwell and Hart, to obtain an injunction from Lord Chancellor Eldon in the Court of Chancery in an attempt to prevent further publication. The resulting case, Southey v. Sherwood brought on 18 March, had significant implications concerning the dissemination of seditious and blasphemous material. Frank Hoadley highlights that Southey’s conservative, ­pro-Government article on ‘Parliamentary Reform’ in the Quarterly Review appeared ‘almost at the very moment when the anti-royal Wat Tyler was rolling off the press’.57 Indeed, although Southey’s Quarterly Review piece is dated October 1816, it did not appear for sale until February 1817. A disjunction between the views of the younger Southey expressing sympathy for the sentiments of the French Revolution and the older, more conservative Poet Laureate was thus immediately apparent. One passage of Southey’s article is particularly striking in contrast to Tyler’s address to ‘the Mob’ in Wat Tyler. Southey writes: How often have we heard that the voice of the people is the voice of God, from demagogues who were labouring to deceive the people, and who despised the wretched instruments of whom they made use! But it is the Devil whose name is Legion. 58

From having an apparent ‘demagogue’ addressing a ‘Mob’ as his hero in Wat Tyler, to subsequently dismissing such individuals as deceitful and equating ‘the people’ with the devil, Southey’s opinions had certainly changed. It was this perceived hypocrisy or even ‘apostasy’ that became the target of his critics, with the Morning Chronicle of 22 March 1817, for instance, objecting to Southey’s ‘violence towards those who maintain the doctrines which he himself advocated’.59 Hone, himself a key pirate of the text, took a similar stance in his own review of Wat Tyler, savaging Southey in the process: Wat Tyler is attributed by the Morning Chronicle, to no less a person than the Poet Laureate, one Mr. Robert Southey, a gentleman of credit and renown, and, until he became Poet Laureate, a Poet. The present poem appears to have been written many years ago, when Mr. Southey had not merely reforming opinions, but very wild notions indeed. […] Poor Southey! a pensioned Laureate! compelled to sing like a blind linnet by a sly pinch, with every now and then a volume of his old verses flying into his face, and putting him out!60

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Hone’s comments, however, allied to his own decision to publish Wat Tyler himself, implies praise for the text while simultaneously trashing its author. Much like Byron’s grudging acceptance in the ‘Dedication’ to Don Juan of poets such as Southey—who despite their faults are ‘poets still, /And duly seated on the Immortal hill’ (ll. 47–48),—Hone concedes that the pre-Laureateship Southey was ‘a Poet’.61 Although Hone may have emphasised the radicalism of Wat Tyler to attack and embarrass Southey, its sympathy with the leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt, ‘the Mob’ and its portrayal of a corrupt King and established church is still likely to have appealed to Hone’s own radicalism at that time. The fact that Southey’s sentiments had now altered substantially became a key part of Shadwell’s and Hart’s case. As claimed in The Observer’s report of the trial, Lord Chancellor Eldon personally accepted this, though claimed he could not rule on it as evidence: ‘If you ask me whether I think he holds the opinions he formerly did, I answer that I do not believe he does; but as a Judge I have no right to say so’.62 To a twenty-first century observer, however, Shadwell’s and Hart’s case seems complex. On the one hand, they needed to emphasise the potential mischief of Wat Tyler in order to justify Southey’s motivation for wishing to cease publication as well as the potential danger of the text should it be allowed to be published. At the same time, Southey’s ownership of the text had to be asserted while simultaneously distancing his present day self from the text’s sentiments to avoid any potential criminal prosecution. Southey may well have also wished to assert that the publication was intended to embarrass or libel him although it appears that there is little evidence that this was the case. Sherwood, Neely & Jones were not like the ‘unrespectable’ Hone and usually published sermons. Eldon continually asserted that presiding over a court of Chancery meant that he did not have the power to criminally prosecute either party nor to judge whether a text was intended to injure character; he only had the means to determine the rights to property in this instance: This Court does not interfere in the way of injunction to punish or prevent damage to character. It leaves the party to his remedy by action. It is to prevent the use of that which is the exclusive property of another, that an injunction is granted.63

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Shadwell and Hart need not have worried, therefore, about any potential prosecution facing their client. Nevertheless, Hart, according to The Observer, was at pains to distance Wat Tyler’s setting from the contemporary period as an attempt to play down any potential criminality. Hart, forced on the defensive by Sherwood’s lawyers Romilly and Montague, is said to have […] asked whether there was any analogy between the present times and the times of Richard the Second, when the mass of the people were in complete vassalage; the state of society was now quite the reverse. Surely there was nothing reprehensible in the author of a poem, the scene of which was laid at a remote period, putting sentiments and expressions into the minds and mouths of the actors, which were congenial to their respective characters at the time; no one ever thought of censuring Shakespeare for the profligate wit of Falstaff, or Dr. Brown for the impieties of Barbarossa.64

Hart’s comments are common to those defending texts subject to scrutiny regarding alleged seditious or blasphemous content in the period, whether in court or the wider court of public opinion. Hart’s citing of literary precedents—the references to Revd. Brown’s Barbarossa: A Tragedy, a play first produced in 1755 and performed at Covent Garden throughout the 1770s, and Shakespeare’s Falstaff—was a tactic employed by William Hone in his trials later that year. Lord Byron, responding to accusations that his play Cain was blasphemous, similarly cites the example of Milton in an 1821 letter. Byron writes: If “Cain” be blasphemous, then “Paradise Lost” is blasphemous; and the words… “Evil, be thou my good!” are from that very poem, from the mouth of Satan, - and is there anything more in that of Lucifer, in [Cain]? “Cain” is nothing more than a drama, not a piece of argument. I could not make Lucifer expound the Thirty-nine Articles, nor talk as the Divines do: that would never have suited his purpose.65

Byron’s reference to Milton simultaneously draws attention to another of Hart’s defences of Wat Tyler. Being a play, or a dramatic poem, it is argued that the words spoken and sentiments expressed are those of the characters represented rather than the author himself. For Byron, it would be highly inappropriate to have his character, the arch-fiend Lucifer, express similar sentiments to that of an Archbishop. Such a

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tactic is to paint Wat Tyler as a play about sedition rather than a seditious play. The play makes it clear, however, where our sympathies as readers or audience members lie. Tyler is an unambitious and reluctant revolutionary, becoming one of the leaders of the revolt only after killing a tax collector who had threatened the chastity of his daughter. In a speech to the Mob at the end of the first act, Tyler emphasises the personal, domestic and chivalric impulses for his actions while stressing that the grievances he has suffered personally are simply one of a number of sufferings endured by the community as a whole. Tyler asks the people to similarly view their own personal wrongs collectively: Oh do not call to mind my private wrongs, That the state drain’d my hard-earn’d pittance from me; That, of his office proud, the foul Collector Durst with lewd hand seize on my darling child, Insult her maiden modesty, and force A father’s hand to vengeance; heed not this: Think not, my countrymen, on private wrongs, Remember what yourselves have long endured. Think of the insults, wrongs, and contumelies, Ye bear from your proud lords – you plow the earth, You sow the corn, you reap the ripen’d harvest, They riot on the produce! (I. ll. 266–279)66

This passage reads as an inversion of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, particularly Burke’s famous depiction of the revolutionaries breaking into the palace and threatening the King’s family.67 Appealing to sentiments surrounding the domestic space, Southey/Tyler instead uses them to justify further subversive action. Similarly, while Burke famously emphasised the individual case of the French Royal family—an episode he in fact invented—Southey’s Tyler is at pains to stress the collective wrongs endured by those Burke depicts as the ‘swinish multitude’. Southey clearly responds to the contemporary culture of his day. Hart’s claim that there is little analogy between the period in which Wat Tyler is set and the present day, therefore, is particularly misleading; for a start, the ‘present day’ for a text written in 1794 was already two decades out of date in 1817. Aside from this, Southey’s setting is clearly intended to draw analogies to the 1790s. In Wat Tyler, England is engaged in an unpopular war with France that is paid for through increased taxation; an historical allusion that has an obvious parallel in the political climate of 1794.

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Although Romilly’s and Montague’s tactics of emphasising the criminality of Wat Tyler seem fruitless considering the court was a court of Chancery, their reasoning was in fact sound. Both were hopeful of drawing a connection to an earlier Chancery case of 1802 presided over by Lord Chief Justice Eyre. Known as Walcot v. Walker, this also concerned an injunction sought to prevent publication of an unauthorised edition of the plaintiff’s work. The plaintiff was John Wolcot, also spelt Walcot, the famed eighteenth-century satirist behind the nom-de-plume Peter Pindar. John Walker, the defendant, was Wolcot’s usual publisher but had released two editions of the author’s works without permission. Wolcot’s injunction failed, partly because of the potentially criminal nature of the material. Lord Chancellor Eldon had himself commented on Walcot v. Walker and Romilly made sure to cite his findings verbatim in the Wat Tyler hearing. Eldon had argued that ‘It is the duty of the [Chancery] Court to know, whether an action at law would lie’ before awarding the author’s injunction: ‘it is not possible to grant the injunction until the right of the Plaintiff has been tried in an action [in a criminal court]’.68 This is because, if the author’s work be proven to be a ‘libellous publication’, the ‘law [i.e. as established by a criminal court] will not permit him to consider [it] his property’.69 Though not cited by Romilly in Southey v. Sherwood, Eldon had also said of Walcot v. Walker that ‘the facts may alter the effect of the agreement at law; and that must be looked to as to the right in equity’.70 Eldon reveals he would look into such works and ‘determine upon the nature of them’ ruling that if ‘upon inspection the work appears innocent I will act upon that submission; if criminal, I will not act at all; and, if doubtful, I will send that question to law’ (ibid.). Eldon’s view of Walcot v. Walker, therefore, was that the question of the right to property was dependent upon its perceived criminality. An injunction sought to prevent publication of an alleged pirated text would not be granted if the text in question was deemed to possibly be subject to other criminal proceedings, since the injunction could subsequently be stripped by a criminal court. In addition, the fact that any pirate of such texts could be similarly criminally guilty for the dissemination of such material was not relevant in Chancery and was not sufficient justification in granting an injunction to the plaintiff and/or author. Sherwood’s lawyers’ citing of Wolcot v. Walker paid off and Southey’s attempted injunction failed. At the end of the first day’s proceedings of Southey v. Sherwood on 18 March, Eldon accepted the comparison to

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the earlier case stating that he would read Wat Tyler and decide upon its nature. The next day, Eldon delivered his verdict: I am led, I may say judicially, to suspect that the nature of the work formed the principal reason for its non-publication [in 1794]. It has been left, then, for twenty-three years, and has now been published by the defendants. – Taking all these circumstances, therefore, into my consideration, having consulted all the cases I could find touching the question and entertaining precisely the same opinion as my Lord Chief Justice Eyre, it appears to me that I cannot grant this injunction until Mr. Southey has maintained his right to this property by action.71

The ruling therefore largely adhered to the precedent set by Walcot v. Walker, with Southey’s injunction refused on the grounds that his work was potentially criminal. Immediately following Eldon’s verdict, Shadwell is reported as saying That so sensible was Mr. Southey of the indecency, impropriety, and dangerous tendency of this work, that he had thought it right to undergo the disgrace of acknowledging it to be his own production, in order that it might be totally supressed.72

Shadwell appears to contradict his colleague Hart’s earlier claim for Wat Tyler as not being a seditious work, yet his comment emphasises a key issue surrounding the Wat Tyler case; that of dissemination. Eldon himself acknowledged that by not granting Southey his injunction could potentially increase proliferation, not just of Wat Tyler but other ‘mischievous’ texts, stating that ‘it is very true, that in some sense it might opererate [sic] as to leave persons at liberty for to [sic] multiply copies of such mischievous publications’.73 Both Eldon’s and Shadwell’s suspicions were proved right. Although the victorious firm of Sherwood, Neely & Jones, ‘in deference to the Lord Chancellor’s opinion of [Wat Tyler’s] mischievous tendency’, decided to no longer sell the work, the damage had been done (Hoadley, p. 85). The publicity surrounding the case, combined with the denial of copyright, led to an explosion in piracy and printing of the play. Indeed, William St. Clair has identified six separate pirate editions of Wat Tyler from 1817 alone, accounting for sales of approximately 60,000 copies. As well as Sherwood, editions appeared from radical printers and publishers such as John Fairburn, William Sherwin, J. Bailey and, most

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famously, Richard Carlile and William Hone.74 Southey, of course, did not at that time benefit financially from the commercial success of his play at all. The extent of Wat Tyler’s sales were not just due to its aesthetic merits, or the scandal and publicity surrounding it. The fact that it was not protected by copyright allowed it to be printed very cheaply and sold for a fraction of the cost of ‘legitimate’, copyrightable works of similar length. While a normal text the length of Wat Tyler would normally have expected to have sold for about ten and half shillings, the pirated editions frequently sold for less than one tenth of this. Hone’s edition sold for a shilling while Sherwin’s sold for as little as three pence (St. Clair, p. 318). The ‘seditiousness’ of Wat Tyler essentially enfranchised a new readership that had been previously excluded by prohibitive costs. Importantly, Lord Eldon’s verdict in Southey v. Sherwood not only impacted the dissemination of Wat Tyler alone but had a profound influence on the later piracies of nineteenth-century texts. St. Clair even goes as far as to suggest that the case was ‘the most decisive single event in shaping the reading of the romantic period’ (p. 316). Eldon had inadvertently engineered a situation in which non-copyrightable seditious or criminal texts were now disseminated more widely and more cheaply than ever. Deazley establishes in legal terms the implications of Southey v. Sherwood and subsequent cases: The somewhat counterintuitive result of this judicial refusal to protect what would otherwise be copyright protected, is that anyone is free to make use of such materials without permission, safe in the knowledge that the courts will not grant relief to author of those materials – de facto, they reside within the public domain. (p. 116)

As a result, such texts became those most commonly available, purchased and read. This presents a challenge to more contemporary considerations of Romantic canonicity. The texts that were the most widely circulated works of an individual canonical author may differ widely from their established ‘canon’. The 60,000 copies sold of Wat Tyler, for instance, meant that it became Southey’s biggest selling and most widely read work by quite some margin. A work that Southey had actively tried to suppress paradoxically became his most widely read text precisely because of its perceived criminality.

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Although critics frequently emphasise the significance of Wat Tyler’s seditious nature as affecting Southey’s copyright, the ruling was less specific. Eldon, in his final ruling, referred only to general ‘criminality’ and to the text’s ‘injurious’ nature. Obscene, libellous and blasphemous texts would, therefore, also be affected as all would be similarly susceptible to criminal charges. A Quarterly Review article of April 1822 emphasises, from a more conservative perspective, the undesirable repercussions of the case: ‘Southey v. Sherwood, gave a notoriety to the rule, to which much of the evil, that has since flowed from it, may be attributed’.75 One particular case that tested the example set by Southey v. Sherwood was Murray v. Benbow of February 1822, again overseen by Eldon. Brought by Byron’s publisher John Murray, this case again involved the seeking of an injunction to prevent publication of a pirated text. The text in question was Byron’s play Cain (1821), pirated by the radical publisher and bookseller William Benbow. Rather than sedition, the case explicitly revolved around Cain’s supposed blasphemy. In his verdict, Eldon declares that ‘[t]his court, like other courts of justice in this country, acknowledges Christianity as part of the law of the land’ and if Cain is a text ‘intended to vilify and bring into discredit that portion of scripture history to which it relates […] the party could not recover any damages in respect of a piracy of it’.76 As with Southey v. Sherwood, Murray’s injunction was refused until he could prove the text was not criminally blasphemous through an action: ‘I cannot grant the injunction until you show me that you can maintain an action for it’ (p. 130). Of the plaintiff’s allusions to Paradise Lost, as discussed above, Eldon said that ‘it appears to me that the great object of [Milton] was to promote the cause of Christianity’ and ‘it is clear that the object and effect were not to bring into disrepute but to promote the reverence of our religion’ (p. 129). Regarding Cain, however, Eldon said he had what he hoped was a reasonable doubt about whether Cain’s ‘manner of treating the subject, particularly with reference to the fall and the atonement, […] be as innocent as that of the other with which you have compared it’ (p. 129). In this case, the plaintiff’s citing of literary precedent failed to convince. Cain was deemed to be of a much different character than Paradise Lost. Although prior to Murray v. Benbow there were numerous pirates who took their lead from Southey v. Sherwood to publish potentially blasphemous texts, it was the latter case that specifically established that they were exempt from copyright protection. Despite the finding that

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Cain was potentially injurious to the public, Eldon was fully aware, just as with Southey v. Sherwood, that his mode of dealing with the work, if [the work] be calculated to produce mischievous effects, opens a door for its wide dissemination, but the duty of stopping the work does not belong to a court of equity, which has no criminal jurisdiction and cannot punish or check the offence.77

The Quarterly Review goes further than this to highlight how the situation is also potentially damaging to individual authors who find their work suspected of criminality and thus stripped of copyright: One of the peculiarities of this doctrine is, that where it applies, it must necessarily do mischief – to the author, if the work should ultimately be held innocent – to the public, if it should be proved criminal. (p. 132)

The situation of copyright in ‘injurious’ texts was such that some pirates were particularly proactive in exploiting it. Rather than pirating a copyrighted text and hoping the owner would lose any resulting Chancery case or fail to bring one, some, like the pornographer and pirate William Dugdale, instigated the cases themselves. In 1823, knowing ‘the implications of the Wat Tyler decision’ (St. Clair, p. 324) and wishing to publish his own edition of Byron’s Don Juan, Dugdale took Murray to court. He did this to prove that Byron’s poem was injurious to the public and thus not subject to copyright. By emphasising the poem as ‘immoral, and licentious, and calculated to produce the worst effect on the minds of those inexperienced persons who read it’,78 Dugdale persuaded Eldon to dissolve Murray’s existing injunctions preventing piracy of the six cantos then in print. Following the case, known as Murray v. Dugdale, Dugdale grasped his opportunity almost immediately and released his own edition of all the Don Juan cantos that were currently available (St. Clair, p. 325). Although the rulings of the above cases seem counterintuitive, as both Deazley and the Quarterly suggest, Eldon’s verdicts make sense from a jurisdictional perspective. As The Quarterly Review laments: it is no longer the province of the chancellor to legislate; the maxims of his court are as fixed as those which govern inferior jurisdictions, and the common distinction between law and equity is now useful only as a means of technically classifying rules, all of which are laws, but are legal, or equitable, with reference to the court in which they are administered. (p. 132)

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The author does not blame Eldon for this situation, declaring ‘we wish […] to disavow the intention of casting any blame […] on the great judge to whom the office of applying it has fallen’ (p. 132) and in fact goes on to praise Eldon’s restraint in not overstepping the bounds of his office: To break in upon these rules, where he thinks them inexpedient, to administer the law, not as it is, but as he thinks it ought to be, to rectify it in one case by a conduct which unsettles it in all others, and thus to do particular good at the expense of general evil is the besetting sin of every judge; and one of the first of Lord Eldon’s many claims to our admiration and reverence is the firmness with which he has resisted a temptation, which must always be strongest in the most powerful mind. (p. 132)

Had Eldon found in favour of Southey and Murray, which would have limited the dissemination of Wat Tyler, Cain and a whole slew of other such texts, Eldon would have essentially awarded copyright when a criminal prosecution may have made this problematic. Nevertheless, regardless of the legal position, there do seem to be apparent contradictions in Eldon’s rulings. Despite Eldon’s constant claim that he could not determine criminality of texts, their authors or publishers as it was beyond his powers, his repeated decisions to not award the injunctions were based on his subjective opinion that the texts in question were potentially seditious or blasphemous. Paul Zall contends that Eldon partly saw ‘his position as censor […] since he felt obliged to judge on the heterodoxy of the work’.79 Indeed, Eldon’s claim in Southey v. Sherwood that he had ‘nothing to do with the nature of the property’ is clearly untrue since it was Wat Tyler’s very nature that led to Southey’s injunction being refused. Southey v. Sherwood and Murray v. Benbow are similar to 1721’s Burnet v. Chetwood in that the nature of the texts, rather than a question of simple ownership, had a significant bearing on the verdicts. The results, however, were rather different. While the nature of the text encouraged the awarding of the injunction in Burnet v. Chetwood in order to limit accessibility to the Latin language text and to prevent wider dissemination, Eldon’s rulings had the opposite effect.

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Notes











1.  Foucault, Michel. 1992. ‘What Is an Author?’ In Modernity and Its Discontents, eds. Marsh, James L. and Caputo, John D. New York: Fordham University Press, p. 305. 2.  Raithby, John. 1819. ‘Charles II, 1662: An Act for Preventing the Frequent Abuses in Printing Seditious Treasonable and Unlicensed Bookes and Pamphlets and for Regulating of Printing and Printing Presses’. In Statutes of the Realm: Volume 5: 1628–80. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=47336. Accessed 29 December 2019. 3. Ibid. 4. Deazley, Ronan. 2004. On the Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement of Copyright Law in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1695–1775). Oxford and Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, p. 5. 5.  Feather, John. 1983. ‘From Censorship to Copyright: Aspects of the Government’s Role in the English Booktrade 1695–1775’. In Books and Society in History, ed. Carpenter, Kenneth E. New York: Bowker, p. 187. 6. Barrell, John and Mee, Jon. 2006. Trials for Treason and Sedition, 1792– 1794, volume 1. London: Pickering & Chatto, p. xiii. 7. Raithby, John. 1819. ‘William III, 1697–8: An Act for the More Effectual Suppressing of Blasphemy and Profaneness. [Chapter XXXV. Rot. Parl. 9 Gul. III. p.6.n.4.]’. In Statutes of the Realm: Volume 7: 1695–1701. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=46921. Accessed 29 December 2019. 8. Cabantous, Alain. 2002. Blasphemy: Impious Speech in the West from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century. Trans. Rauth, Eric. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 75. See Toland, John. 1702. Christianity Not Mysterious: Or, a Treatise Shewing, That There Is Nothing in the Gospel Contrary to Reason, Nor Above It: And That No Christian Doctrine Can Be Properly Call’d a Mystery. London. 9. Raithby, John. 1819. ‘William III, 1697–8: An Act for the More Effectual Suppressing of Blasphemy and Profaneness. [Chapter XXXV. Rot. Parl. 9 Gul. III. p.6.n.4.]’. In Statutes of the Realm: Volume 7: 1695–1701. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=46921. Accessed 29 December 2019. 10. Deazley discusses the attempted bill at length. See On the Origin of the Right to Copy, pp. 26–28. 11. Anonymous. 1704. Some Considerations Humbly Offered by the People Called Quakers, Relating to the Bill for the Restraining the Licentiousness of the Press. London. 12. Defoe, Daniel. 1704. An Essay on the Regulation of the Press. London, p. 7.

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13. See Levy, Leonard. 1993. Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 276. 14. Although recorded as 1709, the Act was not passed into law until 5 April 1710. 15. Trevor Ross points to the full title of the Statute of Anne as hinting at the eventual, if unintentional, creation of the public domain. See Ross, Trevor. 1992. ‘Copyright and the Invention of Tradition’. Eighteenth Century Studies 26:1, p. 2. 16. ‘An Act for the Encouragement of Learning by vesting the Copies of printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned’ (8 Ann. c. 19). 17.  The books were distributed to the Royal Library, the libraries of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the libraries of the four Universities of Scotland, the library of Sion College in London and the Library of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh. 18. Nutt v. Gibson (1714) and Stationers v. White (1716) were two examples of cases preoccupied with the question of copyright in works protected by patent grants or ‘letters patent’. These were when a monarch granted an individual the right to publish a work relating to the monarchy or matters of state and government. 19. Coleridge includes a passage from Burnet’s book as an epigraph to Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). 20. Merivale, John Herman. 1825. Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Chancery: Commencing the Michaelmas Term, 1815 [to the End of the Michaelmas Term, 1817], volume 2. New York: G. Lamson, p. 334. 21. Smith, Olivia. 1984. The Politics of Language, 1791–1819. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 29. 22. Curll’s edition of Dean Swift’s Literary Correspondence, ‘containing letters to and from Pope and Jonathan Swift as well as further letters from Dr John Arbuthnot, Lord Bolingbroke, John Gay, and others’ was the focus of an important copyright case known as Pope v. Curll (1741). This determined that copyright in a letter belonged to the writer but crucially not the recipient. See Rose, Mark. 1992. ‘The Author in Court: Pope v. Curll (1741)’. Cultural Critique 21, pp. 197–217. 23. Defoe, Daniel. 1869. ‘Against Printing Indecent Books’. In Daniel Defoe: His Life, and Recently Discovered Writings, volume II, ed. Lee, William. London: John Camden Hotten, Piccadilly, p. 31. 24. Baines, Paul and Rogers, Pat. 2007. Edmund Curll, Bookseller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 1. 25. Hammond, Brean. 1986. Pope. Brighton: Harvester Press, p. 129.

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26. Pope, Alexander. 1985. The Dunciad. In Poetical Works, eds. Davis, Herbert and Rogers, Pat. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 425–619; p. 500. 27. As Hammond, is at pains to point out however, Pope had himself profited from his writings, particularly his translations of Homer, and was therefore not dissimilar from the publishers and writers he attacks. As Hammond puts it ‘the means he employed to achieve his social position were not so different from [“the dunce’s”] own, but that Pope was now despising his own heritage and kinship’, p. 130. 28. Although the original French text of Venus in the Cloister was published anonymously, both David Saunders and Kevin L. Cope assign authorship to Jean Barrin. See Saunders, David. 1990. ‘Copyright, Obscenity and Literary History’. ELH 57:2, p. 436; Eighteenth Century British Erotica: Volume 2, ed. Cope, David L. London: Pickering & Chatto, p. 157. 29. Strange, John. 1755. Reports of Adjudged Cases in the Courts of Chancery, King’s Bench, Common Pleas and Exchequer, from Trinity Term in the Second Year of King GEORGE I to Trinity Term in the Twenty-First Year of King GEORGE II in Two Volumes, volume 2. London: John Strange, p. 789. 30. Previously, issues of morality and obscenity were spiritual, religious or private matters and dealt with according to the jurisdiction of canon law. 31. Woolston, Thomas. 1725. The Moderator Between an Infidel and Apostate. London, p. 32. 32. Astley, Thomas. 1730. Free Thoughts on Mr Woolston and His Writings, in a Letter to a Gentleman of Leyden; To Which Is Prefixed CATALOGUE of All Books Wrote, Pro and Con, in the Woolstonian Controversy: With the Names of Their Several Authors; Their Respective Prices and by Whom Sold. London: Rose, St. Pauls, pp. 1–6. 33. ‘Philo-Libert’. 1730. The Grub Street Journal. 18 June. 34.  Pope, Alexander. 1985. The Dunciad. In Poetical Works, eds. Davis, Herbert and Rogers, Pat. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 539. 35. The OED also indicates an explicit connection to blasphemy, noting that to be profane can also mean to be ‘not respectful of religious practice; irreverent, blasphemous, impious’. See Oxford English Dictionary Online. http://www.oed.com/view/ Entr y/152024?rskey=Ajq4CR&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid. Accessed 29 December 2019. 36. Evans, William David. 1836. ‘An Act more effectually to prevent profane Cursing and Swearing (19 Geo. II, c.21)’. In A Collection of Statutes Connected with the General Administration of the Law Volume 8. London: Thomas Blenkarn, p. 271. 37. Wilkes was a famously ugly man who was evidently not self-conscious about his appearance. In fact, one can almost discern Wilkes’ commitment to free speech from his willingness to allow less than flattering portraits of him to appear in some of his works.

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38. In a letter addressed to Bute appearing in the St James Chronicle or the British Evening Post, on 12 April 1763, Wilkes claimed that ‘The Liberty of the Press, the Liberty of ALL Liberties […] has been scandalously infringed under your lordship’s administration’. See Wilkes, John. 1763. ‘Letter to Bute’. St James Chronicle or the British Evening Post. 12 April. 39. Wilkes, John. 1763. ‘Genus ORATIONIS atrox, & vehemens, eui opponitur lenitatis & mansuetudinis’. The North Briton, 45. 23 April, p. 320. 40. Cash, Arthur. 2006. John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, p. 147. 41. Wilkes’ house had been raided following The North Briton case. Cash, Arthur. 2006. John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 96–142. 42. Wilkes, John. 2002. ‘An Essay on Woman’. In Eighteenth-Century British Erotica, volume 4. Ed. Benedict, Barbara M. London: Pickering & Chatto, p. 32. 43. Benedict, Barbara M. 2002. Eighteenth-Century British Erotica, volume 4. London: Pickering & Chatto, p. 1. 44. In 2003, the actress and singer Barbara Streisand sued the photographer Kenneth Adelman who owned photographs of the coastline of Malibu, California, including an image of Streisand’s home. Readily available online, Streisand claimed this was a violation of her privacy. The resulting publicity, however, meant that enormous numbers of people began to access the image, soon dwarfing the handful who had seen it prior to the suit. By losing the case, Streisand ended up violating her own privacy far more than if she had done nothing. 45. Barrell, John and Mee, Jon. 2006. ‘Introduction’. In Trials for Treason and Sedition, 1792–1794. Ed. Barrell, John and Mee, Jon, volume 1. London: Pickering & Chatto, p. xiii. 46. Gillray, James. 1798. ‘A Peep into the Cave of Jacobinism’. Victoria and Albert Museum Collection, E.215–1989. 47.  Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers. 1793. ‘The Contrast. British Liberty. French Liberty. Which is Best?’ British Museum Collection, BM Satires 8284. 48.  *****, Henrietta. 1799. ‘The Breakfast Table’. Oracle and Daily Advertiser. 23 August. 49. ‘A Liveryman of London’. 1799. ‘For the True Briton’, The True Briton, 2134. London. 23 October. 50. Marsh, Joss. 1998. Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, p. 31. 51. Hone, William. 1817. The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism of a Ministerial Member. London: William Hone, p. 6.

58  P. WHICKMAN 52. Grimes, Kyle. 2000. ‘Spreading the Radical Word: The Circulation of William Hone’s 1817 Liturgical Parodies’. In Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775–1848: Essays in Honour of Malcolm I. Thomis, ed. Davis, Michael T. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, pp. 145–146 and Smith, Olivia. 1984. The Politics of Language, 1791–1819. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 183. 53. Shepherd, Samuel. Cited in Tegg, William. 1999. ‘The First Trial’. In The Three Trials of William Hone. In Parodies of the Romantic Age, Volume 3: Collected Prose Parody, ed. Stones, Graeme. London: Pickering & Chatto, p. 188. 54. Stones, Graeme. 1999. ‘Introductory Note to the Three Trials of William Hone’. In Parodies of the Romantic Age, Volume 3: Collected Prose Parody, ed. Stones, Graeme. London: Pickering & Chatto, p. 185. 55. See also Letters, i. p. 446. 56. Byron also appears to allude to Hone’s trials in a response to an article appearing in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1820 that had accused the author of Don Juan of blasphemy. Byron specifically refers to parodies of the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer. While Byron himself includes ‘poetical commandments’ in Don Juan (I. ll. 1633–1648), it is apparent that he is speaking more broadly. He writes ‘All depends on the intention of such a parody. – If it meant to throw ridicule on the sacred Original it is a Sin; - If it be intended to burlesque the profane subject or to inculcate a moral truth it is none’. See Byron, Lord George Gordon. 2003. ‘Some Observations Upon an Article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine’. In Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Nicholson, Andrew. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 118. 57. Hoadley, Frank Taliaferro. 1941. ‘The Controversy Over Southey’s Wat Tyler’. Studies in Philology 38:1, p. 81. 58.  Southey, Robert. 1816. ‘Art. XI. 1. An Inquiry into the Causes of the General Poverty and Dependance of Mankind… [“Parliamentary Reform”]’. Quarterly Review 16:31. October, p. 276. 59. Anonymous. 1817. Morning Chronicle. 22 March. 60. Hone, William. 1817. Reformists’ Register and Weekly Commentary. 22 February, pp. 157–158. 61. Byron, Lord George Gordon. 2008. ‘Don Juan’. In The Major Works, ed. McGann, Jerome J. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 374. 62. Anonymous. 1817. ‘Court of Chancery.–Tuesday, March 18’. The Observer. 23 March. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Byron, Lord George Gordon. 1976. Letters and Journals, volume 6. Ed. Marchand, Leslie. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 215. It is interesting to note that the citing of the irreverent language of Milton’s

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Satan as a literary precedent for the language of Byron’s Lucifer is undermined by Byron’s admittedly disingenuous and playful remarks in his preface that serve to play down his debt to Milton: ‘Since I was twenty I have never read Milton; but I had read him so frequently before that this make little difference’. See Byron, Lord George Gordon. 1991. The Complete Poetical Works, volume 6. Ed. McGann, Jerome J. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 228. 66.  Southey, Robert. 1817. Wat Tyler: A Dramatic Poem. London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones, p. 21. 67.  Burke, Edmund. 2009. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Mitchell, L. G. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 71–72. 68. Lord Chancellor Eldon cited in Vesey, Francis. 1827. Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Chancery: From the Year 1789 to 1817, volume VII. London: Samuel Brooke, Paternoster Row, pp. 1–2. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 71. Anonymous. 1817. ‘Court of Chancery.—Tuesday, March 18’. The Observer. 23 March. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 74. St. Clair, William. 2007. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 318. 75.  Senior, Nassau William. 1822. ‘Cases of Walcot v. Walker; Southey V. Sherwood; Murray v. Benbow, and Lawrence v. Smith’. Quarterly Review 27:53. April, p. 126. Jonathan Cutmore cites evidence convincingly attributing authorship of the article to Nassau William Senior. Cutmore, Jonathan, Quarterly Review Archive (Index). Romantic Circles. http:// www.rc.umd.edu/reference/qr/index/53.html. Accessed 29 December 2019. 76. Eldon, Lord Chancellor. Cited in Senior, Nassau William. 1822. ‘Cases of Walcot v. Walker; Southey V. Sherwood; Murray v. Benbow, and Lawrence v. Smith’. Quarterly Review 27:53. April, p. 129. 77. Ibid., p. 130. 78. Dugdale, William. Cited in St. Clair, William. 2007. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 325. 79. Zall, Paul M. 1953. ‘Lord Eldon’s Censorship’. PMLA 68:3, p. 440.

CHAPTER 3

Blasphemy and the Shelley Canon: Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna

One of the authors similarly affected by Eldon’s rulings of the late 1810s and early 1820s was Percy Shelley. In 1817, like Wat Tyler, Cain and Don Juan, Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813) similarly found itself appraised in the court of Chancery. Following the suicide of Shelley’s first wife Harriet Westbrook on 10 December 1816, Shelley and Westbrook’s family fought for custody of the couple’s children. Known as Shelley v. Westbrooke [sic], the case was heard in a Chancery court since, by the standards of the day, the custody of children was considered a matter of property. This was again presided over by Lord Chancellor Eldon, with the Westbrooks represented by Samuel Romilly. Shelley’s religious and political opinions became a key part of the Westbrooks’ case to portray Shelley as an unsuitable father. Queen Mab, that had been dedicated to Harriet and even included a dedicatory poem ‘To Harriet *****’, became their main piece of cited evidence. In January 1817, a bill filed in Chancery by the Westbrooks’ lawyers claimed that Percy Bysshe Shelley avows himself to be an Atheist and that since his said Marriage [to Harriet Westbrook] he has published a certain work called Queen Mab with notes and other works and that he has therein blasphemously derided the truth of the Christian Revelation and denied the existence of God as the Creator of the Universe.1

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Shelley references this bill in a letter to his second wife Mary, to whom he was newly married, noting the difficult legal situation in which he found himself: They have filed a bill, to say that I published Queen Mab, that I avow myself to be an atheist & a republican; with some other imputations of an infamous nature. This by Chancery law I must deny or admit upon oath, & then it seems that it rests in the mere discretion of the Chancel[l] or to decide whether those are fit grounds for refusing me my children. (Letters, i. p. 527)

In a similar vein to many criminal blasphemy and sedition trials of the 1790s, Queen Mab’s ‘blasphemy’ was not in dispute; all that mattered was whether Shelley had indeed produced it, which he had to either admit or deny under oath.2 This put Shelley in a difficult position. Not only would admitting to writing Queen Mab influence Shelley’s right to custody in the present case, but he was also concerned, having consulted a lawyer, that confessing to the blasphemy and republicanism of the poem could potentially leave him facing future criminal charges: If I admit myself or if Chancery decides that I ought not to have the children because I am an infidel; then the W[estbrook]s will make that decision a basis for a criminal information or common libel attack. (Letters, i. p. 527)

The Westbrooks’ plan paid off, and Eldon delivered his verdict on 17 March, finding against Shelley. Eldon argued that the father’s principles cannot be misunderstood, in which his conduct, which I cannot but consider highly immoral, has been established in proof, and established as the effect of those principles; conduct nevertheless which he represents to himself and others, not as conduct to be considered immoral, but to be recommended and observed in practice, and as worthy of approbation. I consider this, therefore, as a case in which the father has demonstrated that he must, and does deem it to be matter of duty which his principles impose upon him, to recommend to those whose opinions and habits he may take upon himself to form, that conduct in some of the most important relations of life, as moral and virtuous, which the law calls upon me to consider as immoral and vicious conduct which the law animadverts upon as inconsistent with the duties of persons in such relations of life, and which it considers as injuriously affecting both the interests of such persons and those of the community.3

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As with his other Chancery verdicts discussed in the previous chapter, Eldon refers to the effect of Queen Mab’s principles as ‘injurious’. For Eldon, the values of Queen Mab represented Shelley’s own deeply felt blasphemous and republican ideologies that he would doubtless be inclined to impart to his children. In the eyes of the court, this made him an unsuitable father. Aside from Eldon’s forceful language, the fact that it was generally rare for a man in Chancery to lose custody of his children in the period indicates Eldon’s strength of feeling. The identification of the author with the principles advocated in his text is of course not limited to Shelley. Nevertheless, Queen Mab is a poem that has played a particularly significant role in shaping its author’s personal and literary reputation as well as the nature and breadth of his readership. This influence is even more striking when considered in the light of the poem’s once marginalised position within Shelley’s oeuvre. Jack Donovan goes as far as to suggest that the poem remains s­ide-lined to this day, and that ‘[a]cademic criticism has continued to assign Queen Mab a notably modest place in the Shelley canon’.4 Most recently though, aside from Donovan, the poem has benefitted from the insights of such scholars as Eric Weinberg, and it would certainly be inaccurate to say Queen Mab does not receive sufficient attention.5 While Weinberg certainly attests to its merits, whether other critical attention sufficiently addresses the poem as poetry, however, is another question. This present chapter does not help in this regard, with a reading of the poetry forming a central part of my following one. Instead, my focus here on Queen Mab and, latterly, Laon and Cythna (1817), is to draw attention to the role played by Shelley’s ‘blasphemy’ in shaping not only his readership more broadly, but the very nature of the published, physical printed texts of Shelley’s works. In the case of Queen Mab, the peculiar situation concerning literary copyright following Southey v. Sherwood played a significant role in its early dissemination by literary pirates. Jason I. Kolkey argues that piracy ‘helped make Romantic authorship’, and it is this understanding that also informs much of my argument here, albeit with a slight difference in emphasis.6 While the illegitimate press undoubtedly helped to shape the Romantic-period reading public, aided by the vagaries of contemporary property law, it is the criminal nature of the texts themselves that enabled their broad dissemination in the first place. That ‘blasphemy’ was particularly subject to censorship is worthy of comment. As for Laon and Cythna, the pre-emptive ‘censorship’ of the poem reveals much about the perceived religious sensibilities of

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Romantic readers. Moreover, focusing on these poems enables consideration of two Romantic-period case studies of ‘blasphemous’ texts subject to censorship; one censored by its various publishers and editors, the other by the author and his friends. By attesting to blasphemy’s significance in shaping the readership and works of a ‘Big Six’ canonical Romantic poet, I aim to show the surprisingly close intersection between legitimate and illegitimate publications, or the ‘mainstream’ and its underground double.

3.1   Queen Mab: Readership, Reputation and ‘Respectability’ in the 1820s Both during and after Shelley v. Westbrooke in 1817, Shelley was, as his correspondence shows, fearful of criminal prosecution. In a letter to Claire Clairmont on 30 January, Shelley seems convinced this was an inevitability, stating ‘I have little doubt in my own mind but that they will finally succeed in the criminal part of the business. I mean that some such punishment as imprisonment and fine will be awarded me, by a jury’ (Letters, i. p. 531). By April, however, Shelley’s fears had begun to subside having heard little on the matter since the Chancery case. In a letter Shelley wrote to Byron informing him of the birth of Byron’s daughter Allegra, Shelley discusses the loss of custody of his children and his thoughts on further prosecution: I wrote to you last under the impression of some horrible circumstances which had occurred to me; and in the midst of a legal persecution, the most material blow of which I need not inform you has taken effect, though another, viz. that of criminal information against ‘Queen Mab’ yet remains suspended. (Letters, i. p. 539)

Despite this, Shelley began to again grow worried later in the year that there would be renewed interest in bringing a prosecution; he feared that this could deny him custody of his and Mary’s child William. In a further letter to Byron, Shelley writes that ‘It is possible the interference exercised by Chancery in the instance of my two other children might be attempted to be extended to William’ (Letters, i. p. 547). These fears remained with Shelley throughout 1817 and was a potential influence on his acquiescence in the revisions made to Laon and Cythna later that year.

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The importance of 1817 in Shelley’s life and publishing career is down to the aftereffects of both Shelley v. Westbrooke and Southey v. Sherwood. While Shelley did not ultimately face prosecution for Queen Mab, his Chancery case was nevertheless seen to indicate the poem’s potential criminality. As a result, four years later in 1821, the poem was pirated. Having been privately published in 1813 with a print run of only 250, Queen Mab became, like Southey’s Wat Tyler, Shelley’s most popular work. The first two piracies of 1821 were Queen Mab, A Philosophical Poem published by ‘Erasmus Perkins’—believed to be the alias of an unknown associate of William Benbow—and William Clark’s expurgated version of Queen Mab. These two were followed in 1822 by Richard Carlile’s unexpurgated version based on Clark’s and, in 1823, by William Dugdale’s ‘Queen Mab by Shelly’ [sic], the evidence for which exists only in an advertisement.7 Queen Mab was the only text of Shelley’s in print at the time of his death in 1822 and was, as St. Clair reminds us, ‘by far, Shelley’s most easily available, most frequently printed, cheapest, and most widely read book’ (p. 320). The success of these unauthorised Queen Mab editions meant that Shelley was identified with the poem almost to the exclusion of his others. Many reports and obituaries written after his death, for instance, refer to him simply as the ‘author of Queen Mab’, seen either as a stain on his character or as a sign of his genius. On 16 August 1822, Richard Carlile’s The Republican reports that the ‘celebrated author of “Queen Mab” is no more! We sincerely regret the premature death of so great a genius so well applied’.8 Of course, the fact that Carlile had an edition of the poem on sale that year may explain his effusive praise of its author. Others such as The Literary Chronicle certainly had Queen Mab’s principles in mind when referring uncharitably to Shelley’s flaws and perceived ‘unholiness’ at his death: ‘there is nothing in his death that redeems the errors of his life, nor does the grave sanctify that which is in itself unholy’.9 Having learnt of William Clark’s piracy and, aware of potential criminal ramifications, Shelley wrote to his publisher Charles Ollier from Pisa in June 1821: I hear that a bookseller named Clarke [sic] has published a poem which I wrote in early youth, called Queen Mab. I have not seen it for some years, but inasmuch as I recollect it is villainous trash; and I dare say much better fitted to injure than to serve the cause which it advocates. (Letters, ii. p. 298)

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Shelley’s comments are disingenuous. Not only was his opinion of Queen Mab not as negative as implied here, he also exaggerates how young he was when he wrote it. Similar is seen in a letter to The Examiner, written the same month but printed 15 July, where Shelley writes that the poem ‘was written by me at the age of eighteen’, describing it as ‘perfectly worthless in point of literary composition’ and as ‘crude and immature’ (Letters, ii. p. 304). Despite his claims, Shelley was at least twenty years old when Queen Mab was completed between 1812 and 1813. Nevertheless, Shelley has frequently been taken at his word. Mary Shelley gives Shelley’s age as eighteen in her 1839 note to the poem, leading some critics such as Martin Priestman to repeat the claim.10 Shelley’s own emphasis on the poem as a flawed product of his immaturity, however, was a calculated attempt to distance himself from Clark’s publication rather than necessarily reflecting his true opinions of the text. In his letter to Ollier, Shelley was keen to be seen disowning Clark’s text, instructing Ollier to ‘give all manner of publicity to my disapprobation of this publication; in fact protest for me in an advertisement in the strongest terms’ (Letters, ii. p. 298). Moreover, despite his apparent dismissal of the poem in his letter to The Examiner, he is still able to declare himself ‘a devoted enemy to religious, political, and domestic oppression’, key themes of Queen Mab (Letters, ii. p. 305). In both letters Shelley makes clear his wish to seek an injunction from Chancery to prevent Clark’s publication and cites the example of Southey as to why his case was likely to fail. To Ollier, Shelley writes ‘I have written to my attorney to do what he can to suppress it, although I fear that, after the precedent of Southey, there is little probability of an injunction being granted’ (Letters, ii. p. 298). Shelley expresses a similar sentiment in The Examiner explicitly linking Queen Mab with Wat Tyler as texts produced with hot-headed ‘enthusiasm’. Shelley is less forceful in his dismissal of the poem than in his letter to Ollier, seeking to ‘restrain’ publication rather than to ‘suppress’ it outright: I have directed my solicitor to apply to Chancery for an injunction to restrain the sale; but after the precedent of Mr. Southey’s ‘Wat Tyler’ (a poem, written, I believe, at the same age, and with the same unreflecting enthusiasm), with little hope of success. (Letters, ii. p. 305)11

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By publicly declaring he was seeking an injunction, Shelley could hopefully mitigate his responsibility for the text’s dissemination should it ever come to trial. While Shelley did in fact instruct his friend and fellow writer Horace Smith to seek this injunction, Smith informed him that this was likely to fail. Not only that, should he pursue it, he risked exposing himself to the very criminal charges he feared following Shelley v. Westbrooke; Clark’s private prosecution by the Society for the Suppression of Vice made this abundantly clear. Smith wrote to Shelley on the matter on 15 June 1821: As I expected, the Society for the Suppression of Vice have prosecuted Clarke for Queen Mab, and the Grand Jury have found a true bill. Meantime he goes on selling it, so that it will come to trial, and your name will be bandied about with every species of abuse. Several of the minor papers and reviews have followed the hue and cry of the “Literary Gazette”, and I have often been stopped in the streets, and asked whether you are really guilty of all the enormities laid to your charge. Of course, I assert their utter falsehood, but the good Christians never stick at confirming one another’s lies against a common enemy as they consider you. Clarke called on Hunt, I find. I wish this affair had not occurred, but I don’t see what you can do now, except to withhold your sanction from the publication, which I trust you have done. (Letters, ii. p. 301 n 3)

Shelley was in a difficult position. If he pursued an injunction, likely to fail because both Clark’s prosecution and Shelley v. Westbrooke had proved Queen Mab’s criminality, this risked criminal charges being brought against him. If Shelley did not pursue an injunction, he was essentially sanctioning ‘unrespectable’ piracies that would have a devastating impact on his personal and literary reputation. Indeed, Smith’s reference to The Literary Gazette is to a scathing review of Queen Mab that appeared in the journal on 19 May 1821. Shelley had suffered at the journal’s hands on previous occasions, with it producing harsh reviews of both The Cenci and the Prometheus Unbound volume the previous year.12 The violent and inflammatory language of The Literary Gazette’s review is striking, targeting both Shelley’s personal flaws and his principles. The author nevertheless acknowledges Shelley’s evident poetic talents that have, in contrast to Carlile’s later appraisal, been misapplied. Quoting the opening of the poem extensively, the reviewer remarks how the poem ‘opens with great beauty’ is filled with ‘genuine poetry’ and

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compares it favourably with Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer.13 Despite this, the following is indicative of its general inflammatory, hyperbolic and rather poetic tone: We have spoken of Shelley’s genius, and it is doubtless of a high order; but when we look at the purposes to which it is directed and contemplate the infernal character of all its efforts, our souls revolt with tenfold horror at the energy it exhibits, and we feel as if one of the darkest of the fiends had been clothed with a human body, to enable him to gratify his enmity against the human race, and as if the supernatural atrocity of his hate were only heightened by his power to do injury. So strongly has this impression dwelt upon our minds, that we absolutely asked a friend who had seen this individual, to describe him to us – as if a cloven foot, or horn, or flames from the mouth, must have marked the external appearance of so bitter an enemy to mankind. (p. 305)

So shocking are Queen Mab’s ideas the reviewer imagines Shelley to be a demonic, and even satanic, enemy of mankind. As with Shelley v. Westbrooke, the text’s principles are ascribed to the character flaws of the author. Indeed, in alluding both to the case and Harriet Westbrook’s suicide, the reviewer suggests Queen Mab, and the principles for which it stands, to be at fault for the loss of custody of his children: it is a frightful supposition, that [Shelley’s] own life may have been a fearful commentary upon his principles – principles, which in the balance of law and justice, happily deprived him of the superintendence of his infants, while they plunged an unfortunate wife and mother into ruin, prostitution, guilt, and suicide. (p. 305)

Shelley’s passages celebrating free love, both in the poem and its notes, are taken as evidence for his wanton and destructive libertinism. This, the reviewer subtly implies, explains his desertion of Harriet and the rumours regarding his relationship with Claire Clairmont: A disciple following his tenets, would not hesitate to debauch, or, after debauching, to abandon any woman: to such, it would be a matter of perfect indifference to rob a confiding father of his daughters, and incestuously to live with all the branches of a family whose morals were ruined by the damned sophistry of the seducer; to such it would be sport to tell a deserted wife to obtain with her pretty face support by prostitution; and, when the unhappy maniac sought refuge in self-destruction, to laugh at the fool while in the arms of associate strumpets. (p. 308)

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The vociferousness of The Literary Gazette’s review indicates the journal’s perception of Queen Mab both as a threat to society and as revealing the appalling character of its author. The reviewer, though, importantly reflects on the poem’s propagation, wondering whether the journal’s ‘silence could have prevented its being disseminated’ (p. 305). Since, however, ‘the activity of the vile portion of the press is too great to permit this hope’, the review is offered as ‘a bane and antidote before the public’ (p. 305). What makes Queen Mab such a threat is not the blasphemous and immoral content of the poem alone but the printed text’s wide availability. The reviewer refers to its lack of copyright protection, ironically because of its blasphemous and immoral nature, as contributing to its wide dissemination and ultimately its status as a dangerous text: this is a book of so blasphemous a nature, as to have no claim to the protection of copy-right; it may be published by Scoundrels at all prices, to destroy the moral feeling of every class of the community. (p. 305 n)

Although The Literary Gazette is a bombastic example of responses to the public appearance of Queen Mab, other contemporary reviews convey similar attitudes, even if expressed more measuredly. The Literary Chronicle, for instance, sees Queen Mab as a blasphemous, immoral work that is again a waste or misapplication of Shelley’s evident ‘enlarged intellectual powers’: Mr. Shelley furnishes one of the most striking and melancholy instances of the perversion, or rather prostitution of genius, that we have ever met with. With talents that, if properly directed, might have made him universally admired and esteemed […] we feel disgust at his licentiousness and incestuous principles and horror at his daring impiety.14

As with The Literary Gazette, The Literary Chronicle references Shelley v. Westbrooke which is seen as proof of Queen Mab’s criminality. The reviewer expresses hope that, because of the damage the poem has had on his personal life and reputation, Shelley would repent of it: Of the character of this poem, we might have been spared the labour of criticism, since a court of equity deemed its principles such, that the author ought not to be intrusted with the guardianship of his own children, of

70  P. WHICKMAN which he was in consequence deprived. A man of Mr. Shelley’s cultivated mind, cannot but possess strong feelings, and he must sometimes reflect on the ruin he has brought on himself and on the probable injury he may have done to society. (p. 345)

The vociferous nature of the above reviews demonstrates why Shelley’s performative distancing from Clark’s piracy was a necessity even if it did not entirely succeed. Despite the personal attacks, both reviewers did at least concede that Queen Mab’s public dissemination was not the fault of Shelley, with The Literary Chronicle speculating whether his decision to only publish the poem privately in 1813 reflected his concern for the potential ‘injury’ it could cause: The history of the poem of ‘Queen Mab’ is as curious as the subject is impious. Whether, when it was first written some years ago, a trader in blasphemy was not to be found, or that the author felt some dread at the injury a general diffusion of his work might occasion we know not. (p. 344)

The reviewer goes on to note that Queen Mab’s appearance was ‘without the knowledge of the author’ (p. 345) while The Literary Gazette states that ‘the author has not, we imagine, been consulted’ (p. 305). Even if Shelley was not deemed responsible for its ­ dissemination, Queen Mab’s notorious reputation in the years before and after Shelley’s death still led to a perception of Shelley as an immoral, ­blasphemous and, ultimately, ‘unrespectable’ writer. While Queen Mab’s notoriety did increase interest in Shelley’s other works following his death in 1822, there was nevertheless much to be done in order to salvage his reputation. Mary Shelley began the task in 1824, and hoped that by publishing an edition of her late husband’s works entitled Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824), she could show how her late husband could ‘write without shocking anyone’.15 The quality printing of 1824, and its prohibitively high cost of fifteen shillings, is evidence of the plan to establish Shelley as a writer palatable for a more ‘respectable’ bourgeois readership than those attracted by the recent cheap piracies of Queen Mab. The chosen publishers—Leigh Hunt’s brother, John, and his son Henry Leigh—indicate political liberalism, but they were not unrespectable members of the ­ gutter press, having recently produced authorised versions of the later cantos of Byron’s Don Juan in two differently priced editions. Moreover, 1824 was, as Neil Fraistat points out,

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crucially not a complete works.16 Because of this, Mary Shelley was able to exclude the more controversial works of her late husband’s oeuvre, with Queen Mab, The Cenci, The Revolt of Islam, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, ‘England in 1819’ and even ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ being left out (although ‘Mont Blanc’ was included).17 Aside from Queen Mab, The Cenci, Shelley’s most commercially successful ‘legitimate’ publication, was regarded as particularly scandalous by The Literary Gazette when first published in 1819, with the reviewer commenting that ‘of all the abominations which intellectual perversion, and poetical atheism, have produced in our times, this tragedy appears to us to be the most abominable’.18 Excluding The Cenci from a publication that aspired towards ‘respectability’ in such a climate was a sensible decision. Mary Shelley’s emphasis on her husband’s lyric poetry helped to establish Shelley as a poet of great lyrical prowess but also, as Fraistat suggests, her inclusion of ‘translations from Homer, Euripides, Moschus, Calderón, and Goethe vividly claim[ed] for Shelley the cultural high ground, without being ideologically contentious’ (p. 412). The ‘bibliographical codes’ of 1824— its expense, quality and its ‘highbrow’ emphasis on translations of classical or canonical authors—helped establish it as what Fraistat has called a ‘cultural performance’ towards rescuing Shelley’s reputation from unrespectability (Fraistat, p. 410). The edition was swiftly withdrawn following objections made by Percy Shelley’s father, who at that time did not wish his son’s works to appear in print while he was alive. The immediate posthumous attempt at salvaging Shelley’s reputation, then, was forcibly put on hold. In fact, 1824 formed the basis of an 1826 pirated edition that threatened to once again plunge Shelley back into unrespectability. This was Miscellaneous and Posthumous poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, published by William Benbow. This was the Benbow who had pirated Byron’s Cain and was the defendant in the resulting Chancery case of Murray v. Benbow. It was cheap at only five shillings sixpence (Fraistat, p. 413) but was of much poorer quality than 1824. It was carelessly printed with type that was frequently askew on the page, on much cheaper paper and in a smaller duodecimo rather than octavo book. Benbow also added to the poems of Mary Shelley’s edition—including, for example, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ that had first appeared in The Examiner in January 181719—but importantly removed the classical translations that were a key part of 1824’s ‘highbrow’ cultural performance. Nevertheless, Benbow’s edition was primarily based on 1824 and still did not include some of Shelley’s

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more controversial poems such as The Cenci, The Revolt of Islam and Queen Mab. The edition was, however, a commercial failure, apparently selling ‘so poorly that Benbow decided to give up his plan to produce a collected edition of Shelley’ (Fraistat, p. 415). One of the issues with Benbow’s edition was that its bibliographical codes—cheap price, printing and low quality—did not align with the poems it contained, that had been earlier chosen by Mary Shelley to convey her husband as a more bourgeois, ‘respectable’ poet. In a contemporary article written by Derwent Coleridge, Coleridge attributes the failure of Benbow’s edition to the relative sophistication of Shelley’s poems saying that they ‘have no charm for the ignorant or half-informed’ and are ‘addressed to the higher order of readers’.20 If we accept Coleridge’s statement that Shelley’s poetry was ‘too difficult’ or not to the taste of less ‘sophisticated’ readers, then the commercial failure of Benbow’s edition is indicative of the text falling between two different reading cultures or cultural spheres; between ‘high’ and ‘low’ or ‘respectable’ and ‘unrespectable’. Shelley’s lack of popularity at this time among the ‘radical’ or ‘lower class’ press—with the popularity of Queen Mab excepted—contrasts with Byron’s among such a readership. Piracies of Byron sold well, and many of his radical publishers tried to claim him as ‘one of their own’ in arguing against the middle-class and capitalist practice of copyright.21 Benbow’s edition of Shelley, then, was a misjudgement of his readership. His edition’s bibliographical codes positioned Shelley as a radical subversive, while the poems themselves, largely selected of course by Mary Shelley, suggested a rather different figure. Those more radically inclined, ‘less respectable’ readers wishing to read something like Queen Mab may therefore have been a little disappointed.

3.2  Censoring Queen Mab in the (Il)legitimate Press: William Clark, Richard Carlile, Mary Shelley Following Sir Timothy Shelley’s decision in 1838 to finally allow publication of his son’s poems, Mary Shelley instructed the publisher Edward Moxon to produce the 1839 four-volume The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1839) that she edited. This was followed by a single-volume edition the same year and a further edition of 1840 (1840). Although Queen Mab had been excluded from 1824, it was placed front and centre as the opening text of both 1839 and 1840. As these were complete works, Mary Shelley was of course likely to include

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Queen Mab, but its placement attests to her eventual belief in the poem’s significance in the Shelley canon. This differs from Thomas Hutchinson’s later approach in his 1904 version of her edition, who placed Queen Mab among Shelley’s ‘Juvenilia’ and claimed it not to be ‘at the forefront of the poems of Shelley’s maturity’.22 In her note to the poem in 1839 Mary Shelley states that since it has been ‘frequently reprinted’ and ‘it is too well known, and the poetry is too beautiful’ it could not possibly have been ‘omitted’.23 While she did not believe that her husband would have published Queen Mab as it stood in 1813, she felt he was largely proud of the work: [Shelley] never doubted the truth or utility of his opinions; and in printing and privately distributing Queen Mab he believed that he should further their dissemination, without occasioning the mischief either to others or himself that might arise from publication. (p. 96)

Despite the note’s emphasis on the poem’s fame or infamy, Mary Shelley is nevertheless at pains to stress its beauty, coherency and its consistency with Percy Shelley’s later poetry. Despite the declared admiration for the work, 1839’s Queen Mab was not complete, with several passages redacted. Mary Shelley says of these that ‘such portions are omitted as support, in intemperate language, opinions to which at that age he was passionately attached’ (p. 97). The sections removed are those that involve the most explicit attacks on organised religion and, unsurprisingly, are those that receive most of my attention in the following chapter of this book. These are the entirety of Canto VII, 18 lines of Canto IV (ll. 203–220), at least one unsignalled line of Canto VIII (l. 165) and more than three quarters of Canto VI (ll. 54–238). The corresponding notes to the redacted lines are also omitted. The 1840 edition subsequently restored the missing passages, but it nevertheless demonstrates that, as late as 17 years after his death, Shelley’s religious iconoclasm remained a major factor behind the publication decisions concerning his published poetry and, it follows, his poetry’s bibliographical codes. Mary Shelley’s decision to include Queen Mab, even while she stressed the poem’s merits, did at least partly stem from the numerous illegitimate editions that already existed of the poem; not including it would have been an obvious omission. In this way, the illegitimate press arguably shaped legitimate and ‘high-brow’ authorised editions of Shelley’s

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work more than is often acknowledged. Kolkey, for instance, helpfully details the way that pirates of texts, of Queen Mab in particular, negotiated with laws of copyright in ways that both altered their editions’ own bibliographical codes and moulded the broader Romantic-reading context. The influence they subsequently had on the form and content of legitimate editions, however, is less obviously emphasised. Kolkey writes each version of a work produced as a result of such piracies displays unique features, whether subtle modifications or blatant departures from the author’s expressed preferences, that alter its meaning and personal or political impact. In this way, conflicting intellectual property norms directly affected the shape of early nineteenth-century literature, actually marking the physical features and paratexts of pirated editions. (p. 534)

After considering the nature of the differences between these editions of Queen Mab, it becomes apparent that they commonly pertain to those passages that are most contentious, generally concerning matters of religion. William Clark’s expurgated 1821 edition is a case in point, with differences from Shelley’s original found in both the paratext and the poem itself.24 While censorship of the text’s blasphemy and atheism accounts for most of Clark’s variants, however, this does not explain them all. It is important to acknowledge these for reasons that will become clear. A common alteration in Clark’s edition is the ‘modernising’ of many of Shelley’s spellings even when this is inappropriate. For instance, in 1813, Shelley writes The chains of earth’s immurement        Fell from Ianthe’s spirit; They shrank and brake like bandages of straw    Beneath a wakened giant’s strength.25 (I. ll. 188–191)

Clark changes the third line’s ‘brake’ to ‘break’ even though the context seems to suggest, as most modern editors have noted, that Shelley intends an antiquated past tense here, of which ‘brake’, meaning ‘broke’, is a more faithful rendering. Several others are less significant; Canto II sees Clark change ‘antient’ to ‘ancient’ (II. l. 166) for example, while a frequent amendment is the addition of ‘u’ to words such as ‘honor’, ‘clangor’, and even, in one instance, ‘control’.26 A more significant

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alteration is Clark’s addition of an ‘e’ to Shelley’s ‘Falshood’, such as in his paratextual dialogue poem ‘Falshood and Vice’, inserted among Queen Mab’s notes. There are also several small presentation and punctuation variants. The following, for instance, is the opening of ‘Falshood and Vice’ in 1813: WHILST monarchs laughed upon their thrones To hear a famished nation’s groans, And hugged the wealth wrung from the woe That makes its eyes and veins o’erflow,— (ll. 1–4)

In the 1821 version, these lines read as follows (alterations emphasised): Whilst monarchs laughed upon their thrones To hear a famished nations groans, And hugged the wealth wrung from the woe That makes its eyes and veins o’erflow, (ll. 1–4)

As well as the full capitalisation of ‘whilst’, Clark has lost the em dash following ‘o’erflow,’ and the possessive apostrophe on ‘nation’s’. While this is partly stylistic, the loss of the possessive seems to be an error, as this is not consistent with his treatment of possessives elsewhere in the volume. By far the most common and serious punctuation differences concern Clark’s heavy use of the comma. The additional Oxford comma Clark adds after ‘life’ in ‘Light, life and rapture from thy smile’ (IX. l. 211) is not so significant, but such trigger-happy punctuation elsewhere has a detrimental effect on the poem’s prosody. This is particularly apparent in the following example from Canto IX, which I have quoted in context: Woman and man, in confidence and love, Equal and free and pure together trod The mountain-paths of virtue, which no more Were stained with blood from many a pilgrim’s feet. (IX. ll. 89–92)

Clark’s version has three commas on the second line and loses the conjunction, rendering it ‘Equal, and free, pure, together trod’. Not only does this detract from the prosodic aspects of the line, it even arguably affects the sense, with the additional commas partially obscuring who it is that is to tread ‘the mountain-paths of virtue’.

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As previously stated though, Clark most obviously departs from Shelley’s original through his numerous expurgations of the most controversial or blasphemous passages. The character of these redactions can be discerned from the small changes Clark makes to the following lines of Canto IV, as Mab describes how the words ‘God, Hell and Heaven’ work to strengthen the tyrannical rule of corrupt earthly power (Clark’s redactions emphasised): They have three words: — well tyrants know their use, Well pay them for the loan, with usury Torn from a bleeding world! — God, Hell, and Heaven. A vengeful, pityless, and almighty fiend, Whose mercy is a nick-name for the rage Of tameless tygers hungering for blood. (IV. ll. 208–213)

Clark omits ‘God’ from line 210 and ‘almighty’ from ‘almighty fiend’ on line 211, signalling each redaction with a single em dash. Clark’s decision to redact ‘almighty’ may seem over-cautious here; in Shelley’s original, it is not capitalised and does not explicitly indicate the God of Christian conception. The decision to redact ‘God’, however, is consistent with other instances of censorship encountered in Shelley’s life and publication history, such as with the revisions made to Laon and Cythna and Charles Ollier’s redactions of Hellas. The following passage, from Canto VI, is one of the more blasphemous of the poem. While Clark retains ‘God’, he nevertheless redacts almost three entire lines (redactions emphasised): The self-sufficing, the omnipotent, The merciful, and the avenging God! Who, prototype of human misrule, sits High in heaven’s realm, upon a golden throne, Even like an earthly king; and whose dread work, Hell, gapes forever for the unhappy slaves Of fate, whom he created in his sport To triumph in their torments when they fell! (VI. ll. 103–110)

Again, it is the association of God with political tyranny, the ‘prototype of human misrule’, that Clark moves to censor. Most shocking, perhaps, is Mab’s notion of God as wilfully malevolent, a god who has purposefully created Hell so he can ‘triumph’ in the suffering of those

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condemned to it after death for ‘sport’. The fact that this ‘God’ is more the mistaken anthropomorphised conception of God, as I discuss in my following chapter, is beside the point. Clark again signals these redactions with dashes, with five dashes per line (there are four on the partially retained l. 108). Although each dash does not correspond to a single word or syllable, we can in this context simply read these dashes as collectively signalling missing lines. Clark is nevertheless inconsistent when marking his omissions. From the line ‘One curse alone was spared — the name of God’ (VIII. l. 165), Clark omits the final four words and highlights their absence with four dashes. While this corresponds to the number of redacted words, the same cannot be said of Clark’s censoring of ‘omnipotence’ from the line ‘Accomplice of omnipotence in crime’ (VII. l. 103), where the three dashes used do not correspond either to the word or syllable count. To contextualise, this line is spoken by the Wandering Jew, Ahasuerus, in an extraordinarily blasphemous passage where Moses is depicted as a murderer, and ‘Accomplice’ to the real villain, God: […]A murderer heard His voice in Egypt, one whose gifts and arts Had raised him to his eminence in power, Accomplice of omnipotence in crime, And confidant of the all-knowing one’. (VII. ll. 100–104)

Censoring ‘omnipotence’ helps to conceal that Ahaseurus is referring to God—even if ‘the all-knowing one’ continues to allude to God’s supposed omniscience—while nevertheless retaining the blasphemous depiction of Moses as murderer. Clark appears inconsistent, too, in how he signals the redaction of ‘Religion’. At VI. l. 69, Clark retains the first letter while signalling the missing letters with a single dash, while in the paratextual poem ‘Falshood and Vice’, it is similarly marked but with the whole word removed. This, however, might be explained by the fact that ‘Religion’ is the first word of the Canto VI line and could be a conscious, stylistic decision rather than editorial inconsistency. As they offer Shelley’s most explicit articulation of his ‘atheistic’, but also anti-matrimonial and republican principles, the notes to the poem are subject to Clark’s most extensive censorship. This is not always obvious from a cursory glance, as the redactions are in fact far more extensive than Clark signals. Clark’s version of Shelley’s note to ‘I will beget a Son’

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(VII. ll. 135–136), for instance, appears to have the equivalent of two short lines omitted. Closer comparison to Shelley’s original, however, reveals that the entire following paragraph has been removed where only one line is signalled: That, four thousand years after these events, (the human race in the mean while having gone unredeemed to perdition,) God engendered with the betrothed wife of a carpenter in Judea (whose virginity was nevertheless uninjured), and begat a Son, whose name was Jesus Christ; and who was crucified and died, in order that no more men might be devoted to hell-fire, he bearing the burthern of his Father’s displeasure by proxy. (note to VII. ll. 135–136, ll. 9–16)

Considering Shelley’s derisory tone in questioning the divinity of Christ, the Virgin Birth and Christ’s death as redeeming mankind from sin, it is not surprising that this was omitted. My extended focus on Clark’s edition is due to the significance it had on subsequent Queen Mabs, both legitimate and illegitimate. His inconsistency in indicating his redactions is all the more marked by those omissions that he does not signal at all, particularly important for those publishers who subsequently based their own editions off of Clark’s volume. There are examples of this in the notes, with Clark not indicating two censored sentences concerning God in the note to Canto I’s ‘Whilst round the chariot’s way’. In the poem itself, Clark does not include an em dash in place of the missing ‘fiend’ from ‘These slaves built temples for the omnipotent fiend’ (VII. l. 97). While this could be a simple error, since ‘fiend’ makes the line particularly long, it is certain to have been an intentional omission considering the line’s subject matter and its context within the blasphemous speech of Ahasuerus. Despite Clark’s numerous expurgations and errors, his edition was nevertheless effective in broadening Shelley’s readership. At a cost of 12s. 6d., it may have ‘remained a luxury item’ (Kolkey, p. 542), but it was still cheaper than Shelley’s original 1813 publication, that had been designed to ‘catch the aristocrats’ (Letters, i. p. 361). Aside from its pricing, Clark’s inclusion of additional paratextual elements, particularly the translations of Shelley’s non-English notes, demonstrates his commitment to enfranchising a more universal readership than Shelley’s original. Indeed, Clark’s prefatory comment inserted before Shelley’s notes attests to this aim:

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It will be seen by the author of QUEEN MAB, and those few gentlemen who have a copy of the former edition, that I have been studious in adhering to the original copy. The notes in French, Latin, and Greek are printed verbatim, as the classical scholar would prefer them in the language they were originally written in, and the general reader in translation. (p. 92)

These translations are provided as footnotes with further glosses provided for unfamiliar terms. This is not an edition, then, aimed solely at a lower-class, less ‘respectable’ readership and neither can it be deemed ‘elitist’. There are even small corrections made to the French of d’Holbach and the Latin of Spinoza from Shelley’s lengthy note to ‘There is no God!’ (VII. l. 13). The original sees Shelley mistakenly render ‘aux’ as ‘coux’ (1813, p. 181) and ‘eatenus’ and ‘quatenus’ as ‘eatemus’ and ‘quatemus’ (1813, p. 185), respectively. While it is unclear whether these errors are Shelley’s own or whether they are simple printer’s errors, that Clark’s edition amends these still speaks to the editor’s attentiveness. One of the many publishers who followed in Clark’s footsteps was editor of The Republican and notorious radical publisher Richard Carlile. Shelley had written a letter to The Examiner in 1819, ultimately unpublished, in defence of Carlile who was then facing trial for blasphemous libel after publishing Paine’s Age of Reason (Letters, ii. p. 143). After he was found guilty, Carlile was fined and imprisoned for three years, which became six when he could not pay the fine. He nevertheless continued to edit The Republican as well as run his publishing business from prison. His own edition of Queen Mab was published in 1822, but it was essentially a copy of Clark’s version albeit with the expurgations restored. Indeed, in a letter appearing in The Republican on 27 December 1822, Carlile compares his edition to Clark’s ‘imperfect’ one, which ‘consists in the exclusion of all those words and sentences some simpleton considered libellous’ (p. 979).27 This criticism of Clark’s version is a little rich, considering Carlile kept all the translations and paratextual materials that Clark added, even retaining the comments introducing Shelley’s notes. The translations are not attributed to Clark in this letter, with Carlile stating that the ‘difference in the original [i.e. 1813] and my present edition is, that the notes of the latter are all translated’ (p. 979). In this way, despite not acknowledging Clark’s role, Carlile nevertheless uses its additions to market the supposed distinctive merits of his own volume.28 The 1822 text is so similar to Clark’s that it maintains identical pagination until page 146; even then it eventually realigns, with both

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volumes containing only 184 pages. The reason the pagination begins to diverge at this point is because of the restoration of Clark’s expurgations. The individual words or lines restored to the poem itself make little difference to the typographical composition of the surrounding text, but when the redactions from Shelley’s notes are rescinded, this begins to significantly impact the placing of the surrounding material. Only the passages that had been clearly signalled as having been subject to censorship are reinstated however, meaning that, for instance, ‘fiend’ is not restored to ‘almighty fiend’ of VII. l. 97 and there remain small omissions from the notes. Carlile’s edition also reproduces the same error of Clark’s in not recognising the beginning of a new verse paragraph between IX l. 37 and l. 38. It is apparent when consulting the original 1813 version that this is an easy mistake to make, with the beginning of the new verse paragraph concealed by a page break. While the 1813 Queen Mab was clearly consulted in preparing Carlile’s edition, Clark’s was nevertheless heavily leant on, with Carlile reproducing the same punctuation patterns and small errors of Clark’s, even while he claims to offer a version much closer to the original. Despite their apparent association, Carlile was more radical than Clark, and his decision to reinstate Clark’s expurgations likely stems both from his own self-declared atheism and his deeply held commitment to the freedom of the press.29 In a review-cum-advertisement of Queen Mab appearing in The Republican 1 February 1822, Carlile refers to the anti-matrimonial comments from Shelley’s notes, likely the note to ‘Even Love is Sold’ (V. l. 189). Not only were these remarks a target of Clark’s prosecutors the previous year, Carlile declares that, despite disagreeing with them, he argues strongly against their censorship: we would prefer to support the Author without coinciding with all his views, than to give the least encouragement to the hypocrites and villains who would stifle all discussion.30

Carlile was already in prison and Clark was privately prosecuted by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, was heavily fined and imprisoned for four months. Clark in fact suffered badly for his part in Queen Mab’s publication. He appeared in front of the King’s Bench in November 1822, with the report of the case in The Examiner of 1

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December indicating that Clark heroically refused to give up the name of his printer and gained the respect of the judge.31 Clark had in fact already begun, sometime before September 1821, to regret his part in Queen Mab’s publication. He wrote to The Literary Gazette who, in their words, he accused of ‘being the source of prosecution and threatened ruin to him and his family’. This letter was cited in The Literary Gazette’s review of the apparently anonymously written Reply to the Anti-Matrimonial Hypothesis and Supposed Atheism of Percy Bysshe Shelley as laid Down in Queen Mab (1821) that Clark had just published. Despite its supposed anonymity, it seems likely that Clark himself had written it, with The Literary Gazette pleased to see that ‘Mr Clarke is disposed to do all he can to remedy the evil of which he was the propagator’.32 Clark’s 76-page pamphlet is split into two chapters or parts; the first concerning Shelley’s ‘Anti-Matrimonial Hypothesis’ and the second his ‘Supposed Atheism’. Despite the redactions from Clark’s edition centring almost entirely on those sentiments seeming to advocate atheism and other forms of blasphemy, here much greater emphasis is placed on Shelley’s comments on marriage. Indeed, the second part is pre-occupied with downplaying the text’s atheism and blasphemy, declaring that when it is ‘reduced to its real nature, and stripped of its mystic veil, in which [Shelley] endeavours to shroud it, it will be found as harmless, as it appears monstrous’.33 Clark even goes as far as to argue quite unequivocally that Shelley is ‘not an atheist, even where he fancies himself one’ (p. 54).34 The first section, however, is a much more forceful attack on Shelley’s ideas concerning marriage and free love, concluding that ‘to the juvenile mind of either sex, the possible evils [of these principles] are so extensive, and so palpable, as naturally to alarm all who are anxious for the happiness of woman or the peace of man!’ (p. 38). Clark’s apparent disdain for such principles mirrors Carlile’s. However, by redacting only the more blasphemous passages from the poem itself while retaining those passages concerning marriage and free love suggests that it is the former he deemed most legally problematic. Since Clark’s Reply functions both as a defence and as a means to distance himself from Shelley’s positions, it seems likely that downplaying the atheism or blasphemy of Queen Mab and leading with the ‘AntiMatrimonial Hypothesis’ is simply a way to throw the authorities off the scent.

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3.3  From ‘God’ to ‘Power’: Laon and Cythna to the Revolt of Islam Clark’s strategy of deflecting attention away from the more egregious passages of a censored work is analogous to Shelley’s own remarks concerning the decisions taken in regards another of his poems. In fact, Laon and Cythna’s (1817) relationship to Queen Mab is striking. Far from simply being a product of youthful exuberance containing ideas that Shelley later distanced himself from, Queen Mab’s principles, as Geoffrey Matthews remarks, have ‘a continuous development throughout Shelley’s subsequent work’.35 In this way, Queen Mab’s importance in shaping the Shelley canon goes beyond the fact that it was widely read. According to both Mary Shelley’s journal and Percy Shelley’s correspondence, Laon and Cythna was written not long after Shelley v. Westbrooke and completed on either 22 or 23 September 1817 (Letters, i. p. 556).36 Despite his fears of possible criminal proceedings, Shelley declares in a letter to Lord Byron that his new poem is ‘in the style and for the same object as “Queen Mab”’, stressing that it is ‘more interwoven with a story of human passion, and composed with more attention to the refinement and accuracy of language, and the connexion of its parts’ (Letters, i. p. 557). While Shelley anticipates repercussions for the publication, he nevertheless paints himself as a stoical, almost Christ-like martyr, writing ‘I am careless of the consequences as they regard myself. I only feel persecution bitterly, because I bitterly lament the depravity and mistake of those who persecute’ (Letters, i. p. 557). This apparent bravery, of course, is most likely an example of performed confidence for his peer poet’s benefit. The Shelleys were based in Marlow, Buckinghamshire at the time meaning Shelley was able to travel to London quickly upon completion of the manuscript. Printing began in December: after copies were published under the title Laon and Cythna; Or, The Revolution of The Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century however, Shelley’s publisher Charles Ollier soon decided against further publication and it was subsequently suppressed. Shelley reacted angrily to Ollier’s decision, and in a letter dated 11 December 1817 argued that this made finding an alternative publisher difficult:

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The instances of abuse and menace which you cite were such as you expected, and were, as I conceived, prepared for. If not, it would have been just to me to have given them their due weight and consideration before. You foresaw, you foreknew all that these people would say. You do your best to condemn my book before it is given forth, because you publish it, and then withdraw, so that no other bookseller will publish it, because one has already rejected it. (Letters, i. p. 579)

It is clear from this letter that Shelley’s impression of Ollier’s decision to suppress resulted from being made aware of the text’s blasphemous or otherwise offensive content and the resulting fear of prosecution. Shelley’s anger at the refusal to proceed with publication prompts him in the same letter to persuade Ollier that his retraction is a sign of weakness, drawing further attention to the poem’s nature. Shelley importantly emphasises how Laon and Cythna is a refined, high-brow work and therefore, on its own terms, likely to have resisted criminal charges: I don’t believe that if the book was quietly and regularly published the Government would touch anything of a character so refined and so remote from the conceptions of the vulgar. They would hesitate before they invaded a member of the higher circles of the republic of letters. But if they see us tremble, they will make no distinctions; they will feel their strength. (Letters, i. p. 579)

By engaging in dichotomies of ‘high’ and ‘low’ or, as he puts it, ‘higher circles’ and ‘the vulgar’, Shelley not only reveals his own class prejudices but his awareness of the authorities’ own, with ‘high’ art being deemed less of a threat. Nevertheless, Ollier—and his printer who first drew attention to the poem’s content, Buchanan McMillan—had every reason to be cautious. Aside from Shelley’s own problems with Shelley v. Westbrooke, 1817 saw the suspension of Habeas Corpus in February, and March saw the passing of the so-called ‘Gagging Acts’, known individually as the ‘Treason Act’ and the ‘Seditious Meetings Act’.37 A bookseller of Portsea named J. Williams had been convicted, heavily fined and imprisoned for blasphemy as recently as 25 November.38 It was also not known that William Hone would ultimately be found not guilty, and his three trials for blasphemous libel were to begin the following week, between 18 and 20 December. Laon and Cythna, then, could not have appeared at a worse time.

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Despite this, Ollier was in fact willing to proceed with publication of the poem subject to revisions. Ollier it seems convinced Shelley that the changes required to the text were minimal. Shelley ultimately accepted this, but Thomas Love Peacock nevertheless maintained that Shelley ‘contested the alterations step by step’ and felt his poem ‘spoiled by the revisions’.39 Shelley in fact writes of these in a letter to Thomas Moore on 16 December: The present edition of ‘Laon and Cythna’ is to be suppressed, & it will be republished in about a fortnight under the title of ‘The Revolt of Islam’, which consist in little than the substitution of the words friend or lover for that of brother & sister. The truth is, that the seclusion of my habits has confined me so much within the circle of my own thoughts, that I have formed to myself a very different measure of approbation or disapprobation for actions than that which is in use among mankind; and the result of that peculiarity, contrary to my intention, revolts & shocks many who might be inclined to sympathise with me in my general views. – As soon as I discovered that this effect was produced by the circumstance alluded to, I hastened to cancel it – not from any personal feeling of terror, or repentance, but from the sincere desire of doing all the good & conferring all the pleasure which might flow from so obscure a person as myself. (Letters, i. p. 582)

It is difficult to discern Peacock’s claims of Shelley’s resistance to the changes here. Instead, Shelley minimises the revisions expected, arguing they concerned only the question of suspected incest between the two eponymous characters and that the ‘message’ of the poem was ultimately preserved. While the revisions were indeed minimal, concerning fewer than fifty lines in a poem of almost 5000, only seven of the amendments focused on passages that implied incest. Shelley’s claim that these formed most of the alterations is therefore false. Nora Crook’s and Stephen Allen’s suggestion that Shelley likely collaborated on these revisions, however, with Peacock taking a central role, may mean that Shelley is not intentionally being disingenuous and is perhaps simply ignorant of those changes for which he himself was not responsible.40 Nevertheless, the focus on the censoring of incest is a convenient misdirection; not only was incest far less of a taboo in the period than is often implied, it draws attention away from the more serious passages concerning God and religion that were the focus of the bulk of the revisions. This is not unlike Clark’s remarks concerning

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Queen Mab that attempt to direct attention towards Shelley’s views on marriage as opposed to his blasphemy and atheism. Shelley’s letter to Moore then simultaneously plays down the controversial nature of his original poem as well as the extent of his amendments should he be accused of not sticking to his principles. The revisions were made quickly—allegedly over a single day on 15 December—and, as Shelley declares in a letter to Byron sent on 17 December, expected publication imminently (Letters, i. p. 584). The revised poem, The Revolt of Islam; A Poem, in Twelve Cantos, appeared as early as 12 January 1818. The rapidity of these alterations does cast some doubt on their rigour. Jack Donovan for instance argues that Shelley ‘only consented to those changes against his will and as a last resort’, suggesting that this claim is ‘borne out by the character of the alterations themselves. On examination, they appear (with one exception: lines 3624–7 and note) no more than functional expedients produced for the occasion and without either intellectual integrity or artistic merit’.41 Donovan’s clear preference for Laon and Cythna contrasts with Anahid Nersessian’s position that ‘some of the rewritten passages in The Revolt […] are simply better as poetry’.42 The question of the aesthetic merits of either poem—and, indeed, whether they should be considered separate poems at all—is ultimately subjective. Nevertheless, the textual differences between the two are important to consider not only because of what they reveal about the perceived religious and political sensibilities of the Romantic-reading public, but also because of the insight gained into Shelley’s broader poetic and religious philosophy. Despite the suppression of Laon and Cythna, The Quarterly Review obtained a copy and published a review in April 1819 that compared both versions. The reviewer was Coleridge’s nephew and a contemporary of Shelley’s at Eton, John Taylor Coleridge, who notes that the revisions made were slight.43 Coleridge does not believe the alterations to have affected the perceived malevolent spirit of the poem, and instead sees the changes simply as a way to disguise the sentiments to benefit Shelley’s reputation. Coleridge writes: Laon and Cythna is the same poem with The Revolt of Islam—under the first name it exhibited some features which made ‘the experiment on the temper of the public mind’, as the author calls it, somewhat too bold and hazardous […] Accordingly Laon and Cythna withdrew from circulation; and happy had it been for Mr. Shelley if he had been contented with his failure, and closed his experiments […]

86  P. WHICKMAN Laon and Cythna has accordingly re-appeared with a new name, and a few slight alterations. If we could trace in these any signs of an altered spirit, we should have hailed with the sincerest pleasure the return of one whom nature intended for better things, to the ranks of virtue and religion. But Mr. Shelley is no penitent; he has reproduced the same poison, a little and but a little, more cautiously disguised, and […] intended only to do the more mischief at less personal risk to the author.44

Coleridge’s comments support the notion that the alterations were indeed ‘functional expedients’ that benefitted Shelley’s reputation. On the other hand, Coleridge’s assertion that the new poem still retained the original’s spirit, for good or ill, suggests the revisions did not ultimately elide the poem’s thematic preoccupations. Most of the differences between Laon and Cythna and The Revolt of Islam are to be found in Cantos VIII and X, accounting for 23 of the poem’s revised lines; 11 are found in Canto VIII and 12 in Canto X. That these two, in a poem of 12 cantos, account for almost half of the total revisions, attests to the attention given to passages concerning God and religion. Canto VIII, for instance, is where Cythna offers her strongest critique of superstition and organised religion while Canto X paints the counter-revolutionary religious authorities as murderous tyrants. The changes to the text are generally simple word switches, with occasional adjustments made to compensate for metre. The most common and, indeed, significant is Shelley’s replacement of the word ‘God’ in Laon and Cythna—unambiguously the God of Abrahamic conception—to ‘Power’ in The Revolt of Islam, retaining the upper-case letter. This also sees alterations to third-person pronouns and possessives where required. The opening passages of Canto VIII, where Cythna relates her earlier speech to the mariners on superstition, includes five successive stanzas referring to ‘God’ in Laon and Cythna that are subsequently changed to ‘Power’ or ‘that Power’. For instance, ‘What then is God?’ becomes ‘What is that Power?’ in The Revolt of Islam and, accordingly, ‘his will’ becomes ‘its will’ in the same (see ll. 3226–3270). It is important to note that ‘Power’ is considered to have only one syllable here, much like hour, and therefore functions as a straight replacement rather than a metrically awkward one. Indeed, John Walker’s A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1822) establishes ‘power’ as a mono-syllabic diphthong which involves ‘pronouncing two vocal sounds in succession so rapidly and so closely as to go for one syllable in poetry’.45 Such a word choice, then, is not metrically detrimental in itself.

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‘Power’ is in fact an effective replacement for ‘God’ as its very generality does not necessarily imply an attack on establishment Protestant Christianity. Not only is this important in the context of existing blasphemy legislation that was designed to ‘protect’ only the Church of England, but such broad attacks on ‘superstition’ could equally come from an ‘enlightened’ church supporter as it could from a blaspheming opponent. Beyond the switching of ‘God’ to ‘Power’, references to Christianity are elided in other ways. In Canto X, the ruling ‘Princes’ and ‘Priests’ of the reactionary forces who have defeated the rebellion call on various names for gods and prophets to spare them from plague and famine. They invoke the names of ‘Oromaze, and Christ, and Mahomet, / Moses, and Buddh, Zerdusht, and Brahm, and Foh’ (Laon and Cythna, ll. 4063–4064). The reference to Christ is removed entirely in The Revolt of Islam, rendering the passage: ‘Oromaze, Joshua, and Mahomet, / Moses, and Buddh, Zerdusht, and Brahm, and Foh’ (ll. 4063–4064, my emphasis). This alteration, especially in the light of the poem’s new title, implies that it is these other faiths that are mere superstitions with Christianity importantly being spared. Indeed, these other faiths are Zoroastrianism (‘Zerdusht’ and ‘Oromaze’); Islam (‘Mahomet’); Judaism (‘Moses’ and ‘Joshua’); Buddhism (‘Buddh’); traditional Chinese religion (‘Foh’) and Hinduism (‘Brahm’). It is important, too, to note that the original Laon and Cythna passage is an echo of Queen Mab, that similarly lists ‘Seeva, Buddh, Foh, Jehovah, God, or Lord’ (VII. l. 30) as examples of the various arbitrary names by which the tyrannical ‘God’ is known. While the elision of criticism of Christianity is characteristic of Shelley’s revisions, an important retention is the bigoted, fanatical priest of Canto X. A major difference, however, is that the ‘Christian Priest’ of Laon and Cythna is an ‘Iberian Priest’ in The Revolt of Islam (l. 4072). Also, instead of working to ‘quell the rebel Atheists’, in the revised poem he ‘quell[s] the unbelievers’ (l. 4075). No longer explicitly a Christian it is implied he is nevertheless a Catholic, coming as he does from the Catholic Iberian Peninsula. The new anti-Catholicism suggested by such a revision is far less provocative than the broad anti-Christian representation of the original poem. Not only that, the decision to make this revised figure ‘Iberian’ rather than ‘Italian’—a word that would fit the metre just as well—adds a thematic richness to this character that is not so discernible in Laon and Cythna. Nigel Leask, for instance, has noted this priest’s resemblance to the Spanish Jesuit in Sydney Owenson’s

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novel The Missionary (1811), and the significance of Shelley’s priest’s Spanish/Iberian heritage becomes clear in light of Shelley’s later invocation of the tyranny of the Spanish Inquisition in a poem such as ‘A Letter to Maria Gisborne’ (1820).46 Diego Saglia has in fact argued that British ‘Fictions about Spain [in the period] indeed negotiate – that is, reinvent, propose or abolish – ideas about the nation [and] established religion and the church’.47 Shelley’s refiguration of his priest, then, works in a similar way and has multiple effects. His critique of the Church of his own nation is veiled by his apparent critique of another’s, a critique that is aligned with contemporaneous, bigoted assertions of Protestant supremacy. Yet there is also an uneasy ‘othering’ enacted here, made even more apparent by knowledge of the original identity of the priest in Laon and Cythna, which suggests a closer association between the Inquisition and the establishment Church in England than what is perhaps comfortable. That this priest unifies all religions in opposition to Laon and Cythna’s revolutionaries suggests all faiths, including protestant Christianity, are equally complicit in reactionary tyranny without explicitly saying so. The fact that Laon and Cythna are no longer ‘Atheists’ but ‘unbelievers’ in The Revolt of Islam means that Shelley’s readers no longer support outright atheists while nevertheless being asked to call into question the policing of belief more broadly. Although my reading of the Iberian priest attests to the richness of Shelley’s revisions, it is fair to say that not all of his amendments are as effective. A key example is the following stanza from Canto VIII: ‘“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, ay, 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, Though truth and virtue arm their hearts with tenfold steel. (Laon and Cythna, ll. 3253–3261)

In The Revolt of Islam, the above stanza is altered to the following (changes emphasised):

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‘“Men say that they themselves have heard and seen, Or known from others who have known such things, A Shade, a Form, which Earth and Heaven between Wields an invisible rod – that Priests and Kings, Custom, domestic sway, ay, all that brings Man’s freeborn soul beneath the oppressor’s heel, Are his strong ministers, and that the stings Of death will make the wise his vengeance feel, Though truth and virtue arm their hearts with tenfold steel. (The Revolt of Islam, ll. 3253–3261)

The reference to God specifically is removed, becoming a ‘Shade’ or a ‘Form’ rather than a monarchical figure. Also, while this abstract force now ‘Wields an invisible rod’ indicating its sovereignty, it is no longer explicitly a lawmaker or giver. There are nevertheless no corresponding revisions to the third-person pronouns and possessives in the final three lines here. The fact that these alterations are not made confuses the message of the original poem, even though Nersessian proffers the first four lines as examples of The Revolt of Islam‘s better poetry (p. 37). ‘His’ does not correspond to anything in the revised stanza, unless we are to read the ‘Shade’ or ‘Form’ as gendered, which is inconsistent with the gender-less ‘Power’ elsewhere in the poem. The original Laon and Cythna passage underlines the false legitimacy and authority that ‘God’ grants to ‘Priests and Kings’, who in turn uphold faith in the very deity that justifies their status. The revised stanza, though, does not explain who is responsible for the ‘stings/Of death’ and ‘vengeance’ that are necessary to maintain order, unclear as it is whether this ‘Shade’ or ‘Form’ is male. Nevertheless, this is an isolated example. Indeed, Laon and Cythna’s recognition of the collusion of political with religious tyranny means that the alteration of ‘God’ to ‘Power’ in The Revolt of Islam makes this connection more explicit. In this way, the revisions generally enhance, rather than detract from, a primary theme of the poem. Cythna’s recalling of her speech to the mariners in Canto VIII includes an attack on a vengeful Christian God, whose threat of hell and arbitrary determination of right and wrong is a model for anti-democratic political authority on Earth:

90  P. WHICKMAN ‘“And it is said, that God will punish wrong; Yes, add despair to crime, and pain to pain! And his red hell’s undying snakes among, Will bind the wretch on whom he fixed a stain, Which, like a plague, a burden, and a bane, Clung to him while he lived; - for love and hate, Virtue and vice, they say are difference vain– The will of strength is right -This human state Tyrants, that they may rule, with lies thus desolate. (Laon and Cythna, ll. 3262–3270)

In The Revolt of Islam, the stanza reads as follows (changes emphasised): ‘“And it is said this Power will punish wrong; Yes, add despair to crime, and pain to pain! And deepest hell, and deathless snakes among, Will bind the wretch on whom is fixed a stain, Which, like a plague, a burden, and a bane, Clung to him while he lived; - for love and hate, Virtue and vice, they say, are difference vain– The will of strength is right. This human state Tyrants, that they may rule, with lies thus desolate. (The Revolt of Islam, ll. 3262–3270)

Not only does the change of ‘God’ to ‘Power’ help to universalise power into one notion, the small alteration of ‘whom he fixed a stain’ to ‘whom is fixed a stain’ similarly emphasises the arbitrary nature of the ‘fixing’ of such charges, as it is not specified as to who authorised them. This helps to deconstruct the notion of an infallible origin of political authority in a manner beyond what is suggested by the word ‘God’ and its corresponding possessive pronouns. In this way, The Revolt of Islam stanza is arguably the more effective of the two. It of course remains a matter of personal taste as to which of the two versions of the poem is preferable, but it is nevertheless significant that ‘Power’ as opposed to ‘God’ becomes a far greater preoccupation for Shelley as his career develops, as I discuss in the following chapter. While it is easy to dismiss this simply as Shelley continuing to express greater restraint following the challenging responses to Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna, both poems’ concern for the interrelationship of political and religious power is extended in his later works. The revised The Revolt of Islam, in which ‘God’ has been exchanged for ‘Power’, is not, then, mere censorious compromise.

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3.4  Conclusion: The Contemporary Shelley Canon The Revolt of Islam is in fact the text preferred by Mary Shelley in both 1839 and 1840 and, aside from major academic editions, this is generally how the poem had been printed until Nersessian’s Broadview edition of 2016.48 While this does raise questions concerning the grounds upon which Laon and Cythna has become the official scholarly preference, it was nevertheless The Revolt of Islam that became the more ‘legitimate’ poem in the nineteenth century, endorsed as such by Mary Shelley, with revisions that had ultimately been authorised by the author. What is commonly considered the ‘legitimate’ version of Queen Mab in contemporary Shelley editions, however, is a little more complex. The lack of a full Queen Mab manuscript means that editors are often reliant on Shelley’s original 1813 publication as well as 1839 and 1840. Mary Shelley had a copy of the 1813 Queen Mab and, it is assumed, this is the edition she referred to when preparing her 1839 and 1840 volumes.49 Despite her likely access to the original printed poem, and further to the redactions of 1839 as noted above, Mary Shelley’s versions differ slightly from the 1813 original, including the modern spelling of ‘falsehood’ that was previously adopted by Clark and Carlile as well as slight punctuation variants.50 The corrections that Clark’s translator had made to the French and Latin notes of the 1813 original are also observed in Mary Shelley’s edition, although there is no evidence to suggest that these were not corrections she made herself. Nevertheless, these small coincidences are similarly observed in the work of later, more contemporary editors, who also share the inclination to modernise Shelley’s 1813 spellings. Furthermore, through their inclusion of translations of Shelley’s non-English notes, one can argue that contemporary, legitimate and ‘canonical’ Queen Mab editions have in fact more in common with the illegitimate publications of Carlile and Clark than they do with the 1813 original. While I am cautious of overstating the impact of what could be explained away by coincidence or other factors, it is nevertheless apparent that blasphemy has played a significant role in determining Shelley’s readership and the nature of the Shelley canon. Due to Southey v. Sherwood, Shelley v. Westbrooke and other Chancery cases, Queen Mab became the text most widely read and by which Shelley was most well-known in the years after his death. Blasphemy essentially enfranchised a new class of Shelley readers, with literary pirates such as Clark

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and Carlile taking advantage of the lack of copyright protection to produce cheaper editions with additional, accessible paratextual material. Shelley could therefore subsequently be co-opted into a radical milieu or, to quote The Literary Gazette’s review of Prometheus Unbound, be accused of ‘cockneyism’, despite his initial plan to produce an edition to ‘catch the aristocrats’.51 Yet, as both 1824 and Benbow’s failed 1826 piracy highlight, Shelley’s reputation was not so easily fixed in either direction. Mary Shelley’s successful attempts with 1839 and 1840 to produce a legitimate canon of Shelley’s works are nevertheless coloured by the illegitimate editions of Queen Mab, with Mary Shelley even acknowledging them in her note to the poem. The ‘blasphemy’ of Laon and Cythna similarly shaped its subsequent publication and reception, as the revised The Revolt of Islam not only posthumously became the version preferred by Mary Shelley, but the enforced revisions also signalled a reconfiguration of Percy Shelley’s poetic and philosophical thought while he was alive. More prosaically, these two case studies of Shelleyan literary censorship reveal that it was the poems’ supposed blasphemy, rather than their politics or incest, that were deemed to be the most objectionable to contemporary readers and legal authorities.

Notes



1.  Medwin, Thomas. 1913. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Forman, Harry Buxton. London: Oxford University Press, p. 464. 2. Since this was not a criminal trial, Fox’s 1792 ‘Libel Act’ did not apply. 3. Eldon, Lord Chancellor. Cited in Burch, Rousseau A. 1903. ‘The Case of Shelley v. Westbrooke’. The American Lawyer 11, pp. 380–381. 4.  Donovan, Jack. 2013. ‘Epic Experiments, Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna’. In The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. O’ Neill, Michael, Howe, Anthony and Callaghan, Madeleine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 260. 5. See, for instance, Weinberg, Alan. 2016. ‘Freedom from the Stranglehold of Time: Shelley’s Visionary Conception in Queen Mab’. Romanticism 22:1, pp. 90–106. 6.  Kolkey, Jason I. 2014. ‘Venal Interchanges: Shelley’s Queen Mab and Literary Property’. European Romantic Review 25:5, p. 533. 7. William St. Clair reproduces this advertisement in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. As well as being sold alongside works by Byron and Moore, this also includes pornographic or ‘Amatory’ publications such as Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray’s Chevalier Faublas (1787–1790)

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that included ‘elegant Amatory Engravings’. St. Clair, William. 2007. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 326. 8. Carlile, Richard. 1822. ‘Death of Percy Bysshe Shelley’. The Republican 6:12. 16 August, p. 380. 9. Anonymous. 1822. ‘Elegy on the Death of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Review)’. The Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review, 178. 12 October, p. 643. 10. Shelley, Mary. 1839. ‘Note on Queen Mab’. In The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, volume 1, ed. Shelley, Mary. London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street, p. 96 and Priestman, Martin. 1999. Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 220. Mary Shelley reproduces her husband’s letter to The Examiner in full at the end of her note to the poem and so likely took that as her source for his age, having not met Shelley until after the poem was first produced. See ‘Note on Queen Mab’, pp. 105–106. 11. The similarity between the two texts, and thus their authors, that Shelley emphasises here appears reasonable. Both authors were of similar ages when their respective texts were written—Southey was nineteen and Shelley was twenty—and, when visited by a young Shelley in Keswick in December 1811, Southey commented that he saw his younger self, ‘my own Ghost’, in this aspiring poet. Not only this, Southey writes ‘He is just what I was in 1794’, explicitly drawing a connection between Shelley and the sentiments behind Southey’s Wat Tyler. See Southey, Robert. 2013. ‘Letter 2012’. In The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Part Four: 1810–1815, eds. Packer, Ian and Pratt, Lynda. http://www.rc.umd.edu/ editions/southey_letters/Part_Four/HTML/letterEEd.26.2012.html. Accessed 29 December 2019. 12. See Anonymous. 1820. ‘Review of New Books: The Cenci: A Tragedy in Five Acts’. The London Literary Gazette, 167. 1 April, pp. 209–210 and Anonymous. 1820. ‘Review of New Books: Prometheus Unbound; A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts with Other Poems’. The London Literary Gazette, 190. 9 September, pp. 580–582. 13.  Anonymous. 1821. ‘Review of New Books: Queen Mab’. The London Literary Gazette, 226. 19 May, pp. 305–306. Shelley expressed admiration for Thalaba and Queen Mab shares many of its formal characteristics such as unrhymed lines and irregular stanza structures. The opening few stanzas are particularly similar in both poems, with Mary Shelley remarking in her note to Queen Mab from 1839 that ‘the rhythm of Queen Mab was founded on that of Thalaba, and the first few lines bear a striking resemblance in spirit, though not in idea, to the opening of that poem’ (p. 102). Shelley himself lists Thalaba as an influence on Queen Mab’s verse form in a letter to Hogg, see Letters. i. p. 352. For further discussion of Southey’s influence

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on Shelley’s poetry—and Queen Mab in particular—see O’ Neill, Michael. 2011. ‘Southey and Shelley Reconsidered’. Romanticism 17:1, pp. 10–24 and Duff, David. 1994. Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 54–114. 14. Anonymous. 1821. ‘Queen Mab’. The Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review 3:27. 2 June, p. 344. 15.  Shelley, Mary. 1980–1988. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, volume 1. Ed. Bennett, Betty T. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, p. 397. 16. Fraistat, Neil. 1994. ‘Illegitimate Shelley: Radical Piracy and the Textual Edition as Cultural Performance’. PMLA 109:3, p. 411. Fraistat’s research on the early editions of Shelley is without parallel and I am therefore heavily indebted to his work. 17.  Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1824. Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Shelley, Mary. London: John and Henry L. Hunt. 18. Anonymous. 1820. ‘Review of New Books: The Cenci: A Tragedy in Five Acts’. The London Literary Gazette, 167. 1 April, p. 209. The focus on The Cenci’s atheism or incest by conservative reviewers is a likely cover for their true objection to the play which focused on the play’s critique of patriarchy and social hierarchy more generally. 19. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1817. ‘Original Poetry’. The Examiner, 473. 19 January, p. 41. 20. Coleridge, Derwent. Cited in Fraistat, Neil. 1994. ‘Illegitimate Shelley: Radical Piracy and the Textual Edition as Cultural Performance’. PMLA 109:3, p. 415. 21. See Colligan, Colette. 2005. ‘The Unruly Copies of Byron’s Don Juan: Harems, Underground Print Culture, and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Nineteenth-Century Literature 59:4, pp. 433–462. 22. Hutchinson, Thomas. 1991. ‘Preface’. In Poetical Works, ed. Hutchinson, Thomas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. vii. 23. Shelley, Mary. 1839. ‘Note on Queen Mab’. In The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, volume 1, ed. Shelley, Mary. London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street, p. 96. 24. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1821. Queen Mab. London: W. Clark. The redacted volumes I consulted were likely from later printings. Kolkey suggests that Clark only censored the poem after he first came under legal pressure, even if these ‘later editions’ were still dated 1821. See (Kolkey, p. 543). 25. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1813. Queen Mab. London: P. B. Shelley. 26. Lines that are subject to such changes include IV. l. 44 and VII. l. 115. As for ‘control’, this becomes ‘controul’ on VIII. l. 201 in Clark’s edition. 27. Carlile, Richard. 1822. ‘Queen Mab’. In The Republican, Volume VI: From May 24th to December 27th 1822. London: Richard Carlile, pp. 978–979.

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28. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1822. Queen Mab. London: R. Carlile. At 7s. 6d., Carlile’s edition was also cheaper than Clark’s. 29. See Thompson, E. P. 2013. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin, pp. 791–803. 30.  Carlile, Richard. 1822. ‘Queen Mab’. The Republican, 5. 1 February, p. 148. 31. Anonymous. 1822. ‘LAW: The Court of King’s Bench. Monday, November 25. “Queen Mab”—King v. Clarke’. The Examiner. 1 December, pp. 764–765. 32.  Anonymous. 1821. ‘Reply to the Anti-Matrimonial Hypothesis and Supposed Atheism of Percy Bysshe Shelley as laid Down in Queen Mab (Review)’. The Literary Gazette, 244. 22 September, p. 597. 33.  Clark, William. 1821. Reply to the Anti-Matrimonial Hypothesis and Supposed Atheism of Percy Byssche Shelley as Laid Down in Queen Mab. London: W. Clark, p. 42. The work’s reference to the indictment seem to support the suggestion that Clark himself wrote it. In disputing that Queen Mab VII ll. 197–219 is atheistic or blasphemous, the author writes ‘I am […] at great loss to guess why these lines are included in the indictment’ (p. 55). 34.  What is striking about Clark’s comment here is its echo of Robert Southey’s alleged comments to Shelley regarding the latter’s ‘atheism’ following their meeting in Keswick in December 1811. In a letter to Elizabeth Hitchener of January 1812, Shelley writes that Southey ‘says I ought not to call myself an atheist, since in reality I believe that the universe is God’ (Letters, i. p. 215). 35. Matthews, Geoffrey. Cited in Poems, i. p. 268. 36. See also Shelley, Mary. 1995. The Journals of Mary Shelley. Ed. Feldman, Paula, R. and Scott-Kilvert, Diana. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, p. 187. 37. 57 Geo. 3 c. 6 and 7. 38. See, Anonymous. 1817. ‘Court of King’s Bench’. The Examiner, 518. 30 November, pp. 764–768. 39. Peacock, Thomas Love. 1933. Memoirs of Shelley, volume 2. Ed. Wolfe, Humbert. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, p. 365. 40. Crook, Nora and Allen, Stephen. 2013. ‘The Marlow Expurgation’. The Times Literary Supplement, 5734. 22 February, p. 14. 41. The Poems of Shelley, ii. p. 19. 42.  Nersessian, Anahid. 2016. ‘Introduction’. In Laon and Cythna, ed. Nersessian, Anahid. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, p. 37. 43. Shelley suspected Southey of being the review’s author and it is this suspicion, along with Shelley’s paranoia that Southey was behind most of his bad reviews, that ultimately soured the polite relationship between

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the two poets. See Letters, II. 570, and Southey’s response in July 1820; Southey, Robert. 2017. ‘Letter 3517’. In The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Part Six: 1819–1820, eds. Packer, Ian and Pratt, Lynda. https://romantic-circles.org/editions/southey_letters/Part_Six/ HTML/letterEEd.26.3517.html. Accessed 29 December 2019. 44. Coleridge, John Taylor. 1819. ‘Art. VII. 1.—Laon and Cythna, or the Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century in the Stanza of Spenser. By Percy B. Shelley. London. 1818. 2. The Revolt of Islam: A Poem, in Twelve Cantos. By Percy Bysshe Shelley. London. 1818’. Quarterly Review 21:42. April, p. 461. 45.  Walker, John. 1822. A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary. London: J. Richardson & Co., p. 30. 46. Leask, Nigel. 1992. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 115–118. I discuss ‘A Letter to Maria Gisborne’, specifically ll. 25–35, in Chapter 5. 47.  Saglia, Diego. 2000. Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, p. 60. 48. Even Harry Buxton Forman’s edition of Shelley’s poetry, which reproduces the Laon and Cythna version of the poem, notes that it is ‘usually known as The Revolt of Islam’. See Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1882. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, volume 1. Ed. Forman, Harry Buxton. London: Reeves and Turner, pp. 80–303. The Longman and Johns Hopkins editions of Shelley’s works prefer Laon and Cythna. 49. A cutting from a catalogue entry for an auction of rare books is pasted into the back of the 1813 Queen Mab held by the Keats-Shelley House in Rome (H h 34). This entry describes a different copy of the 1813 edition that purportedly contains an inscription to the then ‘Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin’ signed by ‘P.B.S’. There is also apparently an inscription in Mary Shelley’s hand dated ‘July 1814’, the very month of their elopement. 50. While not adopting the heavy-handed commas of Clark’s, Mary Shelley’s editions are nevertheless more heavily punctuated than 1813. For instance, 1840 punctuates ‘Equal and free and pure together trod’ (IX. l. 90) with a single comma after ‘pure’. This is effective in terms of sense; ‘together trod’ begins a new clause that is enjambed on to the next line. This also has the effect of resisting the awkward prosody of Clark and Carlile’s heavily punctuated line with three additional commas. 51. Anonymous. 1820. ‘Review of New Books: Prometheus Unbound; a Lyrical Drama in Four Acts with Other Poems’. The London Literary Gazette, 190. 9 September, p. 580.

CHAPTER 4

Vulgar Anthropomorphisms: Blasphemy, Power and the Philosophy of Language

Shelley’s concern for nomenclature is a significant aspect of his c­ ritique of organised religion and it ultimately informs his aesthetics. The alteration of the term ‘God’ to ‘Power’ between Laon and Cythna and The Revolt of Islam for example is not simply just an example of selfenforced censorship but is also thematically significant. In The Revolt of Islam, ‘Power’ has a negative connotation; having replaced the word ‘God’ following revisions made to the suppressed Laon and Cythna, it stands for all examples of hegemonical tyranny. Similar is encountered at the end of Prometheus Unbound (1820), where Demogorgon implores readers to emulate the example of Prometheus and to ‘defy Power which seems Omnipotent’ (IV. l. 572). The word is nevertheless a positive one in several of Shelley’s other works, particularly ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ (1817) and ‘Mont Blanc’ (1817). As to what Shelley means by ‘Power’ in these 1817 poems is a matter of critical debate. Some ­critics identify it with his doctrine of ‘Necessity’, while others are keen to emphasise it as highlighting the intersection of Shelley’s philosophical scepticism with his imaginative musings on the source of poetic creativity.1 My understanding of Shelley’s ‘Power’ owes much to these interpretations. Nevertheless, my argument is that ‘Power’ is an appropriate and crucially indefinable term for sublime experience that neatly avoids expression in the language of more conventional religion and faith. While the temptation is to simply read ‘Power’ as a neat replacement for ‘God’, essentially the same deity by a different name, Shelley importantly © The Author(s) 2020 P. Whickman, Blasphemy and Politics in Romantic Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46570-4_4

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does not imbue it with the equivalent anthropomorphic characteristics. In discussing the possibility of an existing generative ‘power’ in his later Essay on a Future State (1818–1819), Shelley clarifies that ‘when we use the words principle, power, cause, &c., we mean to express no real being, but only to class under those terms a certain series of co-existing phenomena’ (Prose, Clark, p. 177). Such caution with nomenclature in describing diffuse elements of causality is characteristic of Shelley’s writing. This is quite removed from the Christian use of the term ‘God’ that, in Shelley’s eyes, not only too definitively explains complex phenomena, but is also a word that ultimately leads towards imagining, and positing, a real being. As Shelley explains in ‘On Christianity’, ‘where indefiniteness ends, idolatry and anthropomorphism begin’ (Prose, i. p. 253). This fault is described more emphatically in the notes to Queen Mab. He writes It is probable that the word God was originally only an expression denoting the unknown cause of the known events which men perceived in the universe. By the vulgar mistake of a metaphor for a real being, of a word for a thing, it became a man, endowed with human qualities and governing the universe as an earthly monarch governs his kingdom. (Queen Mab, note to VI. l. 198, ll. 137–142)

This concisely delineates the key concerns of this chapter. For Shelley, the Christian conception of God is the result of a semantic error, of mistaking ‘a word for a thing’. While the term ‘God’ was originally a mere metaphor of causality, theists have reified and subsequently deified it into a living divinity. In July 1812, Shelley wrote to Godwin arguing that such a misuse of words can have profound consequences: […]words are the very things that so eminently contribute to the growth & establishment of prejudice: the learning of words before the mind is capable of attaching correspondent ideas to them, is like possessing machinery with the use of which we are so unacquainted as to be in danger of misusing it. But [although] words are merely signs of ideas, how many evils, & how great spring from the annexing inadequate & improper ideas to words. (Letters, i. p. 317)

While words might simply function as mere signs of our ideas, they also possess their own dangerous power. Indeed, for Shelley, it is in the failure

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to recognise ‘God’ as a mere word that lies behind the historical development of a corrupt religious establishment. This has political implications. As the passage from Queen Mab’s notes illustrates, Shelley argues that in identifying the mere word ‘God’ with an ‘earthly monarch’, theists risk bestowing the perception of infallibility as well as authoritarian attributes on to human political systems. Nevertheless, while in the Queen Mab passage Shelley is not talking specifically about his own writing, it does help to highlight how a sceptical poet may wish to approach the language of his poetry. Since it is a problem with the misapplication of language that leads to misidentifying an anthropomorphic God as the answer to difficult epistemological questions, a potential solution can be found in appropriate poetic utterance. In other words, Shelley’s creative decisions both inform, and are informed by, his philosophical scepticism. In earlier works such as Queen Mab, this scepticism informs the poem’s identification of the corrupt philosophical anthropomorphisms that are taken to justify religious and political authority. Works such as ‘Mont Blanc’ and ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1820), I suggest, move beyond simple diagnosis and illustrate how the revitalising of the language of poetry and the sublime can avoid politically and religiously fraught anthropomorphism.

4.1   Anthropomorphising the Abstract: Lockean Scepticism of Language in Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna Critics often read Shelley’s approach to language in the light of numerous philosophical and historical influences. Shelley’s reading of Enlightenment-era empirical philosophers such as Locke and Hume, for instance, is commonly emphasised as playing an important role in his poetical and philosophical development.2 Such influences nevertheless present Shelley with difficulties. Since the philosophical and linguistic scepticism these texts offer suggests that language, particularly ­non-literal language, is to be mistrusted, this poses a problem for a sceptical writer of poetry. This issue is often established as a tension between two different conceptions of language that apparently influence Shelley in contrasting ways. While Shelley may have ‘inherited a philosophy of Enlightenment that included a belief in language as rational and empirical’, useful in undermining the positions of establishment Christianity,

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‘it fails to provide him with a sympathetic account of poetic ­creativity’.3 This is partly addressed by Shelley’s simultaneous inheritance of a more recognisably ‘Romantic’ language of the imagination and sublime, espoused by such first-generation poets as Wordsworth and Southey (Lee, p. 169). These two approaches may seem, as Angela Leighton puts it, ‘antagonistic’ (p. 1), but it would perhaps be more accurate to suggest that both provide ‘resources’ Shelley draws on in his writing in different ways. Neither approach serves his poetical and philosophical task alone. Shelley’s celebration of ‘indefiniteness’, for instance, begins from the position of an enlightenment-inspired sceptic, in that it does not definitively ascribe meanings to terms they should not possess. At the same time, however, his subsequent refusal to systematise—therefore ultimately preserving this indefiniteness or ‘mystery’—is arguably more ‘Romantic’. An illustrative example of the complexity of Shelley’s approach to language is to be found in his seemingly contradictory statements regarding the relationship of words to thoughts or things, as first highlighted in his notes to Queen Mab. Focusing on A Defence of Poetry (1821), for instance, William Keach writes On the one hand, Shelley argues in the Defence that language is entirely a product of mind and is therefore more fully and precisely expressive of thought than any other medium. On the other hand he implies in certain passages of the Defence and explicitly elsewhere that words, once they are spoken or written, separate themselves from the mind that produced them and are therefore inherently imperfect signs of thoughts. (p. 2)

Shelley’s concern for the relationship between ‘words’ and ‘things’ in his poetry then certainly finds its origins in his reading of Locke, yet it is not something he absorbed uncritically.4 The evidence of Shelley’s letters indicates that he frequently read and critically engaged with the philosopher, particularly in his early career.5 A letter dated 3 December 1812 that Shelley wrote to his The Necessity of Atheism (1811) collaborator, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, illustrates that Shelley’s relationship to Locke’s work was complex. The fact that this was written during the composition of Queen Mab is not insignificant: I certainly am a very resolved republican (if the word applies) and a determined sceptic; but although I think their reasonings very defective, I am

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clearly aware that the noblest feelings might conduct some few reflecting minds to aristocracy and episcopacy. Hume certainly was an aristocrat, and Locke was a zealous Christian. (Letters, i. p. 335)

Although Shelley saw Locke as a man with beliefs quite different to his own, he was still able to regard him as a philosopher with the ‘noblest feelings’. Indeed, Shelley sees much in the writing of this ‘zealous Christian’ to justify his own scepticism of Christianity, earlier describing an original version of The Necessity of Atheism, for instance, as a Lockean ‘systematic cudgel for Xtianity’ (Letters, i. p. 47).6 The fact that much of The Necessity of Atheism found its way into the notes to Queen Mab therefore indicates the clear Lockean influence on the poem itself. Shelley makes much use of Locke’s scepticism of language, of the gap between the signifier and the signified, as developed in Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). Locke notes how much philosophical error comes from mistaking words for things in themselves: ‘How much names taken for Things, are apt to mislead the Understanding, the attentive reading of philosophical Writers would abundantly discover’.7 Instead, ‘Words should be taken for what they are, the Signs of our Ideas only, and not for Things themselves’ (p. 317). This is much the same mistake Shelley, in the notes to Queen Mab, sees Christianity as having made in its conception of God. The reconfiguration of a Lockean approach to language towards scepticism of belief in God is a notion Shelley likely arrived at via Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason (1794–1807). Shelley had certainly read this text, especially considering his remarks in an unpublished letter of 1819 written to The Examiner in defence of Richard Carlile, who had been charged with blasphemous libel for printing and publishing the work. Although Shelley’s remarks on The Age of Reason deem it to be less ‘learned & systematically complete’ (Letters, ii. p. 143) than that of other writers, he nevertheless made much use of Paine in his younger years. Indeed, Shelley’s letters reveal he was reading Paine in January 1812 (Letters, i. 158)—he began writing Queen Mab in the April—and Paine was a likely influence on Shelley’s decision to have An Address to the Irish People printed cheaply (Letters, i. pp. 238–239).8 In The Age of Reason, Paine’s religious scepticism is rigorously Lockean in its approach to language. By way of example, Paine begins his enquiry by questioning the term ‘revelation’ when applied to religious scripture:

102  P. WHICKMAN As it is necessary to affix right ideas to words, I will, before I proceed further into the subject, offer some other observations on the word revelation. Revelation, when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man.9

The reference to ‘affix[ing]’ the correct ideas to words certainly alludes to Locke. In this instance, Paine challenges the notion of scripture as a revelation from God since it is not immediate; a necessity in an act of revelation by definition. Through the recording of human chroniclers and scribes over time, the reader of scripture is further distanced from the initial revelation event and thus cannot claim to regard the scripture itself as revelatory. Paine applies similar rigour to the word ‘God’, arguing for the inadequacy of the human language of scripture in attempting to describe a perfect, infinite being. He writes If we permit ourselves to conceive right ideas of things, we must necessarily affix the idea, not only of unchangeableness, but of the utter impossibility of any change taking place, by any means or accident whatever, in that which we would honor with the name of God cannot exist in any written or human language. (p. 24)

Since ‘[h]uman language is local and changeable’, it cannot be used ‘as the means of unchangeable and universal information’ (p. 31). The human word ‘God’, therefore, cannot convey divine attributes. The only idea that can be affixed to the word ‘God’ for Paine is the notion of the first cause of the universe. While it is ‘incomprehensible and difficult’ for humans to conceive of a first cause, this is still less improbable than conceiving of none (p. 33). Paine may appear to posit a teleological argument when he suggests that ‘everything we behold carries in itself the internal evidence that it did not make itself’, yet he is not arguing for the God of traditional Christian conception. Instead, ‘God’ is simply a label given to the unknown cause of the universe: ‘this first cause man calls God’ (p. 33). Those who have then claimed to have affixed ideas of perfection and divinity onto this mere word are therefore guilty of mistaking a mere word for a thing or abstract concept in and of itself. What the expression ‘God’ signifies for Shelley is two-fold. Firstly, ‘God’ is a simple metaphor for the unknown cause of the universe as we have seen. Yet Shelley takes this further than Paine, following Locke’s

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convention that philosophy or ‘sophistry’ serves not to necessarily elucidate abstract notions for wider understanding but is, in fact, commonly obscurantist.10 As Shelley argues in the notes to Queen Mab, this is readily apparent with philosophical conceptions of the ‘being called God’ who by no means answers with the conditions prescribed by Newton; it bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar. Words have been used by sophists for the same purposes. (Poems, i, note to VII. l. 13, ll. 119–123)

Such an attitude is discernible in the poem itself; Mab responds to Ianthe’s spirit’s story of having once witnessed the burning of an atheist, declaring that ‘human Pride / Is skilful to invent most serious names / To hide its ignorance’ (VII. ll. 24–26). Human ignorance of the ‘first cause’ leads prideful philosophers to anthropomorphise a mere expression for it, that expression being ‘God’. Shelley’s reference to Newton is followed by a clearly enlightenment-inspired advocacy of empiricism. God, Shelley declares, is simply ‘an hypothesis, and as such, stands in the need of proof’ (note to VII. l. 13, l. 104). By doing this, the burden of proof is laid at the feet of the theist. It is here that Shelley deviates from the deistical Paine. While Paine argues for the inconceivability of non-existence and thus concedes the necessity of a creative ‘first cause’, this inconceivability for Shelley points instead towards no such singular point of origin. This is particularly apparent with Shelley’s doctrine of ‘Necessity’ in which Necessity’s observable ‘immense and uninterrupted chain of causes and effects’ does not require divine intervention (Queen Mab, note to VI. l. 198, ll. 3–4). In the case of Shelley’s Mab, nature and mankind are infinite and of an infinite chain of generations:                               There is no God! Nature confirms the faith his death-groan sealed: Let heaven and earth, let man’s revolving race, His ceaseless generations tell their tale; Let every part depending on the chain That links it to the whole, point to the hand That grasps its term! let every seed that falls

104  P. WHICKMAN In silent eloquence unfold its store Of argument: infinity within, Infinity without, belie creation. (VII. ll 13–22)

The ‘ceaseless generations’ of man and nature ‘belie creation’ since they have always been, and thus there is no creative first cause. At the same time, if ‘creation’ is understood also to mean a single, historical and crucially knowable act of creation, what is ‘belied’ is simply the knowledge of its cause. The paradoxically ‘silent eloquence’ of the seed prefigures the silent ‘voice’ of ‘Mont Blanc’ that ‘repeal[s] / Large codes of fraud and woe’ (ll. 80–81). A challenge to a teleological argument is presented here, in that the evidence of nature—its silent voice—does not point to a creator but neither is a singular point of origin made known. In the first part of Queen Mab, the revelation of the ‘innumerable systems’ (I. l. 253) and infinite nature of the universe supports this. Indeed, in his note to this part of the poem, Shelley argues that The plurality of worlds, -the indefinite immensity of the universe is a most awful subject of contemplation. He who rightly feels its mystery and grandeur, is in no danger of seduction from the falsehoods of religious systems, or of deifying the principle of the universe. (note to I. ll. 252–253, ll. 1–5)

Those individuals who contemplate the infinite nature of the universe— the ‘wise, and great, and good’ of ‘Mont Blanc’ (l. 82)—are less likely to look elsewhere for an infinite ‘first cause’ and thus ‘deify’ a mere hypothesis or abstract concept. For Shelley, the reference in Queen Mab to the ‘immeasurable Past’ (I. l. 169) and the ‘innumerable systems’ of the universe indicate an impossibility not only to fully comprehend infinity, but also of the inadequacies of language in attempting to express it. In this sense, the attempt to come to terms with this infinity through the anthropomorphism of an expression such as ‘God’ is inadequate and flawed. In the sixth part of Queen Mab, we find that the criticism of the labelling of the first cause of the universe with the word ‘God’ becomes reconfigured as a Pantheistic criticism of neglect for a true appreciation of nature. The issue of anthropomorphised concepts is highlighted through the Fairy Mab’s own rhetorical anthropomorphising of the term ‘Religion’11:

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Religion […] […] Thou taintest all thou lookest upon! – the stars, Which on thy cradle beamed so brightly sweet, Were gods to the distempered playfulness Of thy untutored infancy: the trees, The grass, the clouds, the mountains, and the sea, All living things that walk, swim, creep or fly, Were gods: the sun had homage, and the moon Her worshipper. Then thou becam’st, a boy, More daring in thy frenzies: every shape, Monstrous or vast, or beautifully wild, Which from sensation’s relics, fancy culls: The spirits of the air, the shuddering ghost, The genii of the elements, the powers That give a shape to nature’s varied works, Had life and place in the corrupt belief Of thy blind heart: yet still thy youthful hands Were pure of human blood. Then manhood gave Its strength and ardour to thy frenzied brain; Thine eager gaze scanned the stupendous scene, Whose wonders mocked the knowledge of thy pride: Their everlasting and unchanging laws Reproached thine ignorance. Awhile thou stoodst Baffled and gloomy; then thou didst sum up The elements of all that thou didst know; The changing seasons, winter’s leafless reign, The budding of the heaven-breathing trees, The eternal orbs that beautify the night, The sun-rise, and the setting of the moon, Earthquakes and wars, and poisons and disease, And all their causes to an abstract point Converging, thou didst bend, – and called it GOD! (VI. ll. 69–102)

In what is an ironic inversion of Kant’s famous statement that ‘Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity’, Mab tracks the progress of the anthropomorphised religion as if it were growing to adulthood.12 ‘Religion’ in its ‘untutored infancy’ is innocent. Religion simply views the stars, trees and clouds, and all things in nature as ‘gods’. As it reaches boyhood, Religion grows ‘more daring in [its] fancies’ and assigns a place for abstract and imagined notions of

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nature—‘the genii of the elements’, etc.—in its worship. These abstract notions, the Fairy argues, are ‘cull[ed]’ by ‘fancy’ from ‘sensation’s relics’. In a passage that prefigures ‘Mont Blanc’, engaging with nature that is either inexplicable in its vastness or wildness leads to fancied notions of spirits, ghosts and genii that are believed to ‘give a shape to nature’s works’. At this point, although to do this is a ‘corrupt belief / In a blind heart’, it is still relatively harmless; the youthful Religion’s hands remaining ‘pure of human blood’. By the time Religion reaches maturity, however, the unknowability of the sublimity of nature, allied to ‘Pride’ and the ‘strength and ardour’ of its ‘frenzied brain’, leads Religion to merely summarise the mass diversities of nature and ‘bend’ all its causes to a single ‘abstract point’. This ‘point’, Religion calls ‘God’. Citing the passage in full helps to emphasise the awkwardness of ‘bend[ing]’ such a list of the multiple diversities of nature into only a single point of origin. Such a convergence towards a single ‘abstract point’ labelled ‘God’ leads to negative consequences for political rule on Earth: The self-sufficing, the omnipotent, The merciful, and the avenging God! Who, prototype of human misrule, sits High in heaven’s realm, upon a golden throne, Even like an earthly king; […] […] Earth heard the name, earth trembled, as the smoke Of his revenge ascended up to heaven, Blotting the constellations; and the cries Of millions, butchered in sweet confidence And unsuspecting peace, even when the bonds Of safety were confirmed by wordy oaths Sworn in his dreadful name, rung through the land; Whilst innocent babes writhed on thy stubborn spear, And thou didst laugh to hear the mother’s shriek Of maniac gladness, as the sacred steel Felt cold in her torn entrails! (VI. ll. 103–121)

In visceral language common to Shelley’s earlier poetry, the anthropomorphised Christian conception of God has led to countless deaths and much suffering for mankind throughout history. Again, God becomes reduced to a simple ‘name’, and those who worship this name as if it

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were a being themselves engage in linguistic acts, as they swear ‘wordy oaths’ to God’s ‘dreadful name’. Despite such swearing, religious intolerance prevails, with those swearing to the wrong name facing persecution and even bloody slaughter. The fact that this God is both ‘merciful and avenging’ highlights the tension between the different ‘Gods’ presented by the Old and New Testaments as well as the hypocrisy of his worshippers.13 This ‘God’ also serves as the ‘prototype of human misrule’; such a conceived being that possesses contradictory attributes and has led to countless deaths is a poor model for authority on earth, a notion Shelley returns to in poems such as Laon and Cythna. Mab’s construction of the anthropomorphised Religion as developing in a manner analogous to human growth and ageing however leads to an optimistic outlook, since Religion is to age and pass away. To return to Kant’s understanding of enlightenment then, this is achieved in Shelley through an apparent dying out rather than a Whiggish growing to maturity. Indeed, the end is already nigh: Religion! Thou wert then in manhood’s prime: But age crept on: one God would not suffice For senile puerility; thou framedst A tale to suit thy dotage, and to glut Thy misery-thirsting soul, that the mad fiend Thy wickedness had pictured, might afford A plea for sating the unnatural thirst For murder, rapine, violence and crime, That still consumed thy being, even when Thou heardst the step of fate; - that flames might light Thy funeral scene, and the shrill horrent shrieks Of parents dying on the pile that burned To light their children to thy paths, the roar Of the encircling flames, the exulting cries Of thine apostles, loud commingling there,        Might sate thine hungry ear        Even on the bed of death! But now contempt is mocking thy grey hairs; Thou art descending to the darksome grave, Unhonoured and unpitied, but by those Whose pride is passing by like thine […]. (VI. ll. 122–142)

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Although generally optimistic, in the sense that enlightenment is to send Religion into the unenlightened ‘darksome grave’, this is tempered by the final reactionary violence of Religion and its supporters before it passes. As Religion is threatened, its tyranny is extended, much like the reactionary forces’ violence in Canto X of Laon and Cythna. Echoing the second part of Paine’s The Age of Reason, Religion continues to satiate its long ‘unnatural thirst / For murder, rapine, violence and crime’.14 Instead of passing away quietly having ‘hear[d] the step of fate’, it resisted, prolonging mankind’s suffering. Everest and Matthews’ reading of ‘one God would not suffice / For senile puerility’ contextualises this within the Trinitarian conflict of early Christianity (Poems, i. p. 326 n). The lines also bear a more contemporaneous significance when we realise that 1813 saw the passing of the ‘Doctrine of the Trinity Act’ which, along with Trinitarianism more widely, had been much discussed in both parliament and the press the previous year. Significant in this vein is Shelley’s A Letter to Lord Ellenborough (1812), parts of which were re-used and extended in the notes to Queen Mab. This was a passionate defence of the radical bookseller Daniel Isaac Eaton who had been prosecuted for blasphemy following his publication of Thomas Paine. Eaton was probably an Unitarian or a Deist—reports vary as to his precise beliefs—and while Leonard Levy argues Eaton’s Unitarianism ‘had nothing to do with his prosecution for blasphemy’ (p. 341), this was not the view held by Shelley, who saw the prosecution as evidence for a persecutory Trinitarian Christian establishment. Queen Mab then is perhaps more attuned to contemporary debates than is often acknowledged. As is made evident through examination of the revisions made between Laon and Cythna and The Revolt of Islam, ‘God’ is anthropomorphised abstract ‘Power’ for Shelley. In Canto VIII of the poem, when Cythna speaks of her return to the Golden City and of the speech she gave to the superstitious mariners with whom she sailed, she offers a sceptical summary of objections to the idea of a creative deity: ‘What then is God? Ye mock yourselves, and give / A human heart to what ye cannot know: / As if the cause of life could think and live!’ (VIII. ll. 3235–3237). Not only, as is the case with Queen Mab, does Cythna challenge the hypothesis of the Christian God as the cause of the universe, she also reflects on how Christianity has reified, deified and, indeed, anthropomorphised an abstract concept. The significance of this ‘cause of life’ being given a ‘human heart’ becomes clear as Cythna’s speech

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to the mariners progresses. This is because the term ‘God’ is not only applied to causality but becomes an expression of man’s own soul: What then is God? Some moon-struck sophist stood Watching the shade from his own soul upthrown Fill Heaven and darken Earth, and in such mood The Form he saw and worshipped was his own, His likeness in the world’s vast mirror shown. (VIII. ll. 3244–3248)

The Old Testament notion that ‘God created man in his own image’ (Genesis 1:27) is therefore reversed, with man in fact responsible for creating God. T. E. Hulme’s critique of Romantic religion, in which ‘You don’t believe in a God, so you begin to believe man is a god’, seems strangely appropriate here, as this is essentially what Cythna argues, with true ‘divinity’ to be found within the heart and soul of man and not projected onto, or anthropomorphised into, an external divine being.15 This should not be understood as indicating narcissistic self-worship by mankind; rather the term ‘God’ is simply a metaphor to express the seemingly inexpressible complexity of the consciousness—or soul—of man. A neo-platonic idea of an ‘up-thrown soul’ that is deemed of such infinite complexity and ineffability that it ‘Fill[s] Heaven’ and ‘darken[s] Earth’ becomes crudely labelled with the term ‘God’, obstructing free enquiry. Cythna in fact, importantly, attributes the creation of the term ‘God’ not to a ‘universal soul’ of mankind but the ‘moon-struck’ sophist’s individual soul. Should this figure be in a position of authority, he is able to definitively determine the ‘true’ nature of this deity. This ‘affixing’ of the term ‘God’ to the abstract idea of man’s soul may begin as a harmless, poetic metaphor but it soon leads to the growth of a poisonous tyrannical faith: […]‘twere an innocent dream, but that a faith Nursed by fear’s dew of poison, grows thereon. And that men say, God has appointed Death On all who scorn his will, to wreak immortal wrath. (VIII. ll. 3249–3252)

The conception of God that began as a poetic, anthropomorphic but ultimately harmless metaphor for man’s soul has, over time, developed into a vengeful figure that has cultivated a poisonous and tyrannical faith.

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Not only is such anthropomorphism an empirical error, it is also a dangerous one. As with Queen Mab, this mistake has terrestrial repercussions, since this vengeful God who deals in death becomes the model for earthly power: 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, ay, 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, Though truth and virtue arm their hearts with tenfold steel. (VIII. ll. 3253–3261)

The will of this God is the basis of all human law, a law that ensures the oppressive political position of priests and kings or God’s ‘strong ministers’. Since this God is a mere word, he has been defined and constructed entirely by those whose positions are dependent on his existence. As described earlier in Queen Mab, Tyrants ‘Have crept by flattery to their seats of power / Support the system whence their honours flow / They have three words […] / God, Hell and Heaven’ (IV. ll. 206–210).16 These three words resemble a Trinity reaffirming terrestrial power. This emphasises further the connection between political and religious tyranny that is central to much of Shelley’s thought. Political power is reliant on abstracted religious notions, or ‘things’ / ‘ideas’, becoming conflated with their signifying words. Shelley, therefore, reconfigures Locke’s conception of language, via Thomas Paine, to emphasise that the imprecise application of abstract notions of power with words leads to tyranny.

4.2  The Vitality and Epistemology of Language: ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘Mont Blanc’ While Queen Mab and its thematic successor Laon and Cythna appear to diagnose the problem of an anthropomorphised ‘God’, ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘Mont Blanc’ demonstrate a poetic means by which to avoid such a linguistic anthropomorphism. Although Locke is a clear influence

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on Shelley, the greater scepticism of David Hume, as seen in such works as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), is of increasing relevance to Shelley’s writing as his career progresses. Despite this, in the months following the publication of Queen Mab in 1813, Shelley determines Hume’s empiricism to be simply a continuation of Locke’s. He writes I have examined Hume’s reasonings with respect to the non-existence of external things, and, I confess, they appear to me to follow from the doctrines of Locke. What am I to think of a philosophy which conducts to such a conclusion? (Letters, i. p. 380)

Although Hume is less explicitly concerned than Locke with the relationship between words and things, his discussion of the problems of art and representation is useful for Shelley’s poetics. Hume’s critique of Locke’s understanding of ‘ideas’—which Hume felt did not adequately explain the vast difference between physical sensations and mere ‘contemplation’ of these in the mind—informs his position on art and poetry. As described in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) All the colours of poetry, however splendid, can never paint natural objects in such a manner as to make the description be taken for a real landskip [sic]. The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation.17

To read poetic description of a landscape is far removed from experiencing such a landscape for one’s self. The language of poetry may be beautiful, moving or even ‘realistic’ but it is inadequate in determining knowledge of a sensation in comparison to experiencing the sensation the language attempts to convey. Essentially, poetic, aesthetic or simply rhetorical language is particularly suspect in conveying knowledge. As Leighton argues In general, the tradition of empirical philosophy, with its emphasis on theories of representative perception, seeks to expel language as far as it can from the domain of knowledge. Above all, it seeks to expel any rhetorical or aesthetic language, which obscures the mind’s ideas by moving the passions. (p. 5)

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Language is mistrusted as a precise conveyor of knowledge, and poetic language especially so, as it further obscures true knowledge by ‘moving the passions’. Leighton notes how the empirical philosophy of Locke and Hume ‘denounces as antagonistic to the cause of truth […] non-literal language, which has for its object, not clear perception but emotional effect’ (p. 4). Furthermore, highlighting the emphasis enlightenment philosophy places on sight perception in determining knowledge, Leighton argues ‘it is the very fact that words tend to interpose and mediate between the mind and the visible truth that makes them suspect. They interfere with the act of seeing’ (p. 6). Seeing is an important part of Shelley’s philosophy and poetics, with the ambiguous nature of the term ‘vision’ proving to be particularly important in exploring the relationship between ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Romantic’ conceptions of language. The empirical concern for, and scepticism of, the accuracy of poetic language in conveying knowledge correlates with Shelley’s religious scepticism. For Leighton, the greatest challenge to the empirical position that ‘ideas are not shaped or created by the mind’ (p. 2) but are instead learnt through experience, is to be found in the realms of imagination and the sublime, which she sees as seeming to ‘out-distance the grounding effort of empiricism’ (p. 2). If, as Shelley claims in A Defence of Poetry, poetry is the ‘expression of the Imagination’, then the problem of the imagination ‘out-distancing’ empiricism becomes one of poetic utterance (Poetry & Prose, p. 511). Even if one were to consider the sublime or the imagination as notions separate from religion, the Christian conception of God would itself appear to ‘outdistance’ empirical consideration, since God is considered beyond the realm of human experience. Yet, both Hume and Locke fall short in challenging the existence of God. For Hume, the problem of what he refers to as ‘the idea of God’ can be circumvented through his ‘copy principle’. Although the mind or the imagination may appear to be boundless and innate, it is in fact reliant on the experiences of the senses, as Hume illustrates: But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience. (p. 13)

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Hume therefore encompasses the imagination within the realm of empiricism; its seeming limitlessness is merely an extension and perception of sensory experiences by the mind. The mind ‘copies’ these sensations and extends them, or ‘compounds’ disparate ideas. Hume’s example of a golden mountain is a case in point. Although an individual can have no sensory experience of a golden mountain since none exist in the world, one can nevertheless be imagined, since very common ideas stemming from experiences of ‘gold’ and ‘mountain’ can simply be juxtaposed. Most significantly, Hume overcomes some of the empirical difficulties in conceiving of the existence of both the sublime and of God in a similar fashion. We can perceive of a perfectly good and intelligent being as we have experience of both ‘goodness’ and ‘intelligence’, even if it is of a much more limited nature than that possessed by the God of Christian conception (p. 14). Hume therefore makes an empirical consideration of God possible in a manner not too dissimilar to the empirical or scientific grounding he gives to art and the imagination. If Shelley’s ‘Philosophy and Politics are presented as problems of poetic utterance’ (Leighton, p. viii), then there is a relationship between Shelley and Hume in terms of their approach to the problem of God in an empirical world, even if their conclusions significantly differ. For Hume, the ‘problems’ of explaining or justifying the imagination, the sublime or God are overcome in similar ways. For Shelley, the ‘problem’ of God is approached as an aesthetic problem, and the problems of the inexpressibility of art and the sublime are not dissimilar to his problems with the inexpressibility of God; they are ‘problems’ considered linguistically. Hume’s focus on empiricism and reason does not involve discrediting the imagination. In a similar fashion, in the opening to his A Defence of Poetry (1821), Shelley is careful to not dispel reason from the realm of poetry, establishing imagination and reason as equally influential on the operations of the mind. He writes According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action, which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another, however produced, and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts so as to color them with its own light, and composing from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity. The one is the το ποιεῖν, or the principle of synthesis, and has for its objects those forms which are common to universal nature and

114  P. WHICKMAN existence itself; the other is the το λογιςειν, or principle of analysis, and its action regards the relations of things simply as relations; considering thoughts, not in their integral unity, but as the algebraical representations which conduct to certain general results. Reason is the enumeration of qualities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those qualities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance. (Poetry & Prose, pp. 510–511)

Shelley argues for the mind as created by the ‘compounding’ of interacting ideas and thoughts that in turn generate further thoughts. This is arguably not dissimilar to Hume’s ‘copy principle’; the imagination is still dependent upon the influence of reason, even if Shelley does not go as far as to consider reason’s reliance on solely empirical, sensory experiences. Where Shelley and Hume differ is that although reason and the imagination are equal and interdependent for Shelley, it is imagination that is the ‘substance’ to reason’s ‘shadow’ and ‘the agent’ to ‘the instrument’. This seemingly equal and interdependent relationship between reason and imagination in Shelley’s conception of poetry is analogous to the relationship of his poetics or aesthetics to his philosophical ideas. Shelley’s anxiety regarding his own language, determined by his philosophic scepticism, not only manifests itself aesthetically within the poetry itself, but also within his own statements concerning the poetic process. Keach for instance notes how ‘[w]hat Shelley says about language is sometimes genuinely contradictory and obscure’ (Shelley’s Style, p. 3) and, indeed, in A Defence of Poetry Shelley argues for both the power of artistic language, in that ‘A Poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth’ (Poetry & Prose, p. 515), while simultaneously arguing for language as ‘arbitrarily produced by the Imagination’ and as mere ‘hieroglyphics [sic] of thoughts’ (Poetry & Prose, p. 513). Shelley, then, argues for the power of poetry as an enlightening ‘truth giver’ while simultaneously acknowledging language, the medium of poetry, as possessing only an arbitrary connection to the thoughts, ideas or ‘truths’ that it attempts to express or bring to light. Shelley’s reference to ‘hieroglyphics of thoughts’ recalls William Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses demonstrated on the Principles of a Religious Deist (1737–1741). It is likely Shelley had read this work, as

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Shelley refers to Warburton in a letter he wrote to Thomas Hogg regarding Christianity on 26 April 1811. The letter implies that Shelley was familiar with Warburton’s arguments in Book 1 of the Divine Legation regarding the morality of atheists (Letters, ii. p. 69). Book 4 section IV of the work, which considers Egyptian hieroglyphs, has attracted attention from theorists such as Jacques Derrida, who wrote a preface to a French translation that appeared in essay form in 1979 (renamed ‘Essai sur les Hieroglyphs des Egyptiens’).18 As opposed to Locke and Hume, Warburton makes a distinction between written and spoken forms of language, or between ‘sounds’ and ‘figures’. Whereas ‘sounds’ are ‘momentary and confined’—or transient and finite—‘figures’ are seen to make the conceptions of the mind ‘lasting and extensive’ and able to ‘perpetuate’ the mind’s conceptions at a ‘Distance’.19 To record ideas beyond the transient moment, therefore, necessitates a means of communication beyond the spoken. Warburton’s thesis is that it was such a desire as this that prompted mankind to make use of pictorial ­representation, or ‘figures’. This, Warburton argues, is the birth of writing, which began simply as pictures of the ideas or things which were being conveyed. The development of a written form of language over history for Warburton goes through a series of ‘Abridgements’. Beginning with the pictorial representations of the ‘Mexicans’, to the hieroglyphs—which Warburton calls ‘hieroglyphics’—of the ancient Egyptians—that are both ‘a Picture and a Character’—to the ‘marks’ of Chinese characters before finally arriving at the ‘wonderful Artifice’ of European ‘Alphabets’ (vol. II. IV. pp. 70, 76, 79). Warburton’s depiction of the development of written language highlights the representative power of words that Shelley takes issue with. While for Locke words and things are clearly distinct from each other, Warburton’s tracing of the development of written language attempts to re-establish the direct connection of words to the things and ideas they are supposed to represent: ‘these Marks, however now disguised, do yet betray their Original from Picture and Images’ (vol. II. IV. p. 76). Yet, the progression towards an increasingly sophisticated system of hieroglyphics, to Chinese marks and then to letters through a process of ‘abridgement’, is one of increasingly metaphorical representation that becomes further removed from the idea or object such figures are supposed to represent. Warburton’s examples of the simplest hieroglyphs—for instance, ‘two Hands, one holding a Shield, and the other a Bow’ representing ‘battle’—in which ‘the principal Circumstance

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of the Subject stands for the whole’ is an example of metonymy or, more precisely, synecdoche (vol. II. IV. p. 71). The smaller, though related ‘circumstance’ of arms in battle stands for the entirety of it. With increasing abridgement and more complex hieroglyphs, however, metonym gives way to outright metaphor, in which ‘the Instrument of the Thing, whether real or metaphorical, [stands] for the Thing itself’ (vol. II. IV. p. 72). The fact that the examples used by Warburton in this regard are ‘God’s omniscience’ and ‘Monarch’ (vol. II. IV. p. 72) are, of course, particularly striking. The metaphorical image of an eye as representative of the abstract notion of God’s omniscience comes, over time, not simply to represent God but to stand for, and to almost assume the authority of, God. The mere idea of there being a supernatural omniscient being becomes physically realised in the production of the written or representative text. Further ‘abridgements’ to produce the language of western alphabets, providing us with the word ‘God’ in the Greco-Roman alphabet, are a move away from a mere expression, or metaphor. It becomes imbued with a representative power or ‘truth’ that it does not strictly have. This is essentially the criticism Shelley levels at Christian conceptions of God in his notes to Queen Mab, with words and ‘things’ having become confused. Keach highlights how, for Shelley, this development of language, in which words, over time, become increasingly removed from the objects or ideas that they signify, leads to their ‘deadness’: […]Language as we know it, and use it every day – even as poets know it and use it – depends upon the evolution of vital metaphors into signs. But for Shelley this tendency of language leads to deadness, and ‘through time’ it increasingly becomes the poet’s task not just to ‘mark’ new relations of things but to revitalize old markings ‘to create afresh the meanings which have been …disorganized’ in the course of linguistic evolution. (Shelley’s Style, p. 8)

The task of the poet then is to reinvigorate the potential power of words through recreating their connection both to their original meaning and to establish new relations of, and to, things. For a poet like Shelley an awareness of the ‘deadness’ of language is a coming to terms with the falsity of the power these ‘dead’ words possess. To explore the issue of the vitality/deadness of language one must also consider Shelley’s conception of the relationship between words and

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thoughts. Shelley appears contradictory on this front; his belief in the strength and power of language is allied to an acknowledgement of its inadequacy. Shelley, however, is a poet unafraid to admit that he does not know. Often, as he, or ‘the poet’, reaches the point of enlightenment, the point of all knowledge, he collapses in on himself. This is apparent at the end of Epipsychidion (1821), as the poet fails in his attempt to realise the perfect spiritual union with Emily: The wingèd words on which my soul would pierce Into the height of Love’s rare Universe, Are chains of lead around its flight of fire— I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire! (Poetry & Prose, ll. 588–591)

The poet’s ‘wingèd words’ which are to aid his soul in piercing ‘love’s rare universe’ in fact become ‘chains of lead’ around the soul, preventing it from reaching or attaining this knowledge, leading to an ­anti-climax expressed as a poetic early orgasm or ‘little death’. Language in Epipsychidion then is the means of attaining knowledge as it is on ‘wingèd words’ that the soul hopes to journey towards this enlightened state. Yet language is also an impediment to this attainment, becoming ‘chains of lead’ around the soul’s flight. Conversely, in Laon and Cythna, Cythna talks of the power of her words in her prophesying, noting how ‘wingèd thoughts did range, / And half-extinguished words, which prophesied of change’ (Poems, ii. ll. 3521–3522). Here, it is ‘thoughts’ rather than ‘words’ that are ‘wingèd’, while words become ‘half-extinguished’ following delivery. In a similar vein, whether thoughts are pre-discursive or vice versa is markedly different between two texts of such close contemporaneity as Prometheus Unbound (1820) and A Defence of Poetry (1821). In the former, Shelley seems to have made his mind up, with Asia claiming that ‘Prometheus gave man speech, and speech created thought / Which is the measure of the Universe’ (II. iv. ll. 72–73) whereas, in A Defence of Poetry, words are imperfect conveyors of thoughts that, over time, have become dead and worthless requiring a poet to reinvigorate them. This is a key concern of Shelley’s poem ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1820) in which we find, at first reading, that it is thoughts rather than words that are ‘dead’. The poem ends with the poet instructing the west wind to aid him in spreading his reformist message across the universe:

118  P. WHICKMAN Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened Earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? (Poems, iii. ll. 63–70)

It is in this final section of the poem in which the connection is e­ xplicitly drawn between the leaves driven by the west wind earlier in the poem and the thoughts of the reformer-poet figure at the poem’s end. Here, thoughts are ‘dead’ and likened to ‘withered leaves’, while the poet’s words are ‘Ashes and sparks’ from ‘an unextinguished hearth’. A cursory reading would suggest, therefore, that it is words that possess true power and agency. It is words that serve to ‘awaken’ these dead thoughts or, as Shelley puts it, the ‘sparks’ that set dry, dead leaves aflame. Although there is, in a Lockean sense, a disconnect between words and the thoughts that they signify in Shelley’s writing, we find conversely that in ‘Ode to the West Wind’ thoughts and words are seen as interrelated. Shelley is here acknowledging the potential power of language as a force for good, giving power and agency to the poetreformer’s thoughts. Without words thoughts are useless and ‘dead’. Yet, as Keach points out, although the poet’s task is to enflame and invigorate thoughts with the power of words, it is in fact existing linguistic structures that create the deadening of thoughts; ‘misuse’ of language is responsible for ‘killing’ thoughts in the first place: language inevitably tends to harden into a system in which verbal signs limit thought to a sphere of established, habitual, ‘dead’ relations, a tendency which it is the poet’s work to counter. (Shelley’s Style, p. 2)

‘Ode to the West Wind’, which Murray Roston argues to be ‘Shelley’s poetic credo’, shows the poet’s call or desire for the inspiring power of the west wind to enable him to do just this, to counter current linguistic trends.20 This is a poetic manifesto for future change, not a description of present linguistic reality. Words do not necessarily invigorate thoughts,

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rather the poet wishes that they did. In a sense then, Shelley is highlighting the potential of language as a force for good while simultaneously acknowledging its present dangers and problems. Keach argues that the present ‘deadness’ of language is something that happens over time, something language ‘hardens into’. Like Warburton’s depiction of words as evolving over time into signifiers that are increasingly metaphorical and increasingly less literal, they are progressively more removed from the thoughts and things they attempt to convey. The poet’s role, as we see at the end of ‘Ode to the West Wind’, is to reverse this trend; to reverse language’s increasing ‘deadness’ that results from its increasing disconnection with that which it signifies. The development of this ‘trend’ is also dramatically realised in the ‘Ode’. The poem opens with an almost literal depiction of the Autumnal west wind blowing dead leaves at the onset of winter. Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, the comparison of thoughts and words to leaves and fire respectively at the end of the poem grants this opening greater significance than a more literal-minded reading would initially offer. The first section, or terza-rima sonnet, is quoted in full: O Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill: Wild Spirit, which art moving every where; Destroyer and Preserver; hear, oh, hear! (ll. 1–14)

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The opening is dense and rich in allusion. The first image we are presented with is of the ‘West Wind’ simultaneously heralding the arrival or onset of the new season, and of signalling the dying breath or ‘death rattle’ of the old. But it is the second image, of the wind as ‘an enchanter’ driving away the dead leaves as if they were ‘ghosts’ that is most striking. If these dead leaves are representative of thoughts, as they are at the end of the poem, then it is tempting to see this image as analogous to the problems with the increasing ‘deadness’ of thoughts and language as language evolves over time. In this image, the leaves are ‘driven’ away by the west wind rather than ‘borne’; they are ‘ghosts’ that ‘flee’ from it. If these leaves are representative of thoughts, ideas or even people,21 then the image presented to us is one in which they are purposefully driven away from the wind that is both poetic muse and divine inspiration. This wind or breath that is sought, becoming that which sounds ‘The trumpet of a prophecy’ (l. 69) later in the poem, at this point blows away the thoughts or ideas it attempts to capture. Nevertheless, these thoughts that are currently like corpses within their graves are still ‘wingèd seeds’ ready to be awakened. Seeds are ‘dead’ but contain within them the potential for new life. A similar metaphor of something dead possessing potential for future change and new life is seen in the concluding couplet to ‘England in 1819’ in which the poet speaks of ‘graves from which a glorious Phantom may / Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day’ (Poems, iii. ll. 13–14). The movement from death to life explains why the wind is both ‘Destroyer and Preserver’, simultaneously heralding the death of the old season and the birth of the new. There is also allusion to both Hindu and Christian conceptions of the divine; the two Hindu gods Shiva and Vishnu— destroyer and preserver, respectively, in the Trimarti, or ‘Great Trinity’, doctrine in some branches of Hinduism—and the Christian idea of God as both ‘Alpha’ and ‘Omega’. Despite this wind’s apparent divinity and the poem’s quasi-religious status however, Webb notes how ‘there is no sense of a personal deity’.22 Instead, the west wind’s incorporeality, its ‘unseen presence’ (l. 2), suggests it to be closer to the ‘Power’ of the earlier ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and ‘Mont Blanc’. As I have argued elsewhere, Shelley’s attempts to articulate such an ‘unseen Power’ (l. 1), without making the linguistic and philosophical errors of organised religion, is a central concern of ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’.23 Warburton’s depiction of words as becoming increasingly

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metaphorical over time, and thus further removed from the things or ideas they originally signified, is helpful in understanding this scepticism of metaphorical language. As Queen Mab reminds us, this has significant philosophical and political repercussions. In the Hymn, Shelley is therefore cautious with his use of metaphorical language in describing sublime experience; he insists, for example, on simile rather than outright metaphor in the opening stanza. The ‘shadow’ of ‘Power’ may be ‘Like’ ‘hues and harmonies of evening’, ‘clouds in starlight widely spread’ and ‘memory of music fled’, respectively, but it is crucially not definably fixed by any of these alone (Poems, i. ll. 1–10). These successive approximations—or ‘likes’—demonstrates the difficulty in defining this force while simultaneously avoiding the philosophical imprecision of metaphor. While ‘Mont Blanc’ shares ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’’s concerns for the problems with figurative language in its treatment of the sublime, its focus, as Angela Leighton puts it, is on ‘the problem of personification’ more specifically.24 My reading is one that centres on the poem’s resistance to the ‘fixity’ that implies, or is implied by, such anthropomorphism. Indeed, Michael O’Neill’s comment that Shelley’s lyric or shorter work offers a ‘fascinating openness to interpretation’ in which close reading will discover no ‘fixities or definites’ is helpful in this regard.25 In ultimately not settling for fixed certainties in his poem, Shelley resists ascribing a sublime experience to a God-like divinity. This is important when we consider the context of its 1816 composition. Shelley wrote the poem following his experiences of the beautiful Vale of Chamonix which, as Richard Holmes reminds us, had a reputation ‘among the travelling English […] as a natural temple of the Lord and a proof of the Deity by design’.26 Such cultural baggage ensures that Shelley’s religious doubt is therefore not easily extricable from his own aesthetic appreciation of, and response to, the landscape. Essentially, a non-theistic engagement with the sublime becomes a problem of aesthetics that Shelley ‘works through’ in the poem’s formal choices. Like its sister poem, ‘Mont Blanc’ is commonly read as a response to Wordsworth and Coleridge, with the poem’s subtitle ‘Lines written in the Vale of Chamouni’ seeming to confirm its relationship to Coleridge’s ‘Hymn Before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni’ (1802). Despite ‘Mont Blanc’’s apparent allusion to and difference with Coleridge however, the opening section in fact offers subtle echoes of Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) collaborator Wordsworth:

122  P. WHICKMAN The everlasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls it rapid waves, Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom— Now lending splendour, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings Of waters,—with a sound but half its own, Such as a feeble brook will oft assume In the wild woods, among the mountains lone, Where waterfalls around it leap for ever, Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves. (Poems, i. ll. 1–11)

The depiction of a ‘sound but half its own’ alludes to the lyrical ballad Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, that similarly posits the human mind and senses as creative in the presence of the sublimity of nature.27 The fact that ‘presence’ means both ‘in the company of’ and a spirit or ghost is appropriate for Wordsworth; the source of the sublime is indeed a ‘presence’ that is both a ‘spirit’ and, ultimately, a personified force: […] I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye and ear, both what they half-create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognize In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being. (ll. 94–112)28

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While in this passage the source of the sublime begins as indefinite, as ‘something’ that ‘disturbs’ the speaker’s thoughts, the passage concludes with it becoming arguably more definitive, not only as an ‘anchor’ to these same thoughts but as an anthropomorphised ‘nurse’, ‘guide’ and ‘guardian’ for them. Shelley’s response to Wordsworth in the opening to ‘Mont Blanc’ goes beyond simple allusion and is an example of conscious engagement with the older poet and his poem. While, as mentioned, the ‘sound but half his own’ reflects Wordsworth’s ‘half create’, both poems also describe a sensation or force that ‘rolls’.29 For Wordsworth, it is the ‘spirit’ or ‘motion’ that ‘rolls through all things’ whereas for Shelley it is in fact the ‘everlasting universe of things’ that ‘flows’ and ‘rolls its rapid waves’ through the mind. Shelley’s refiguration of this serves to detach the source of the sublime from something that is found to be both readily fixable and apparently possessing independent agency in Wordsworth’s poem. By doing this, Shelley is able to resist the Wordsworthian move towards personification that, for an apparent atheist, risks reification—and deification—of the mountain or its sublimity. Shelley’s references to water and the sound of water also recall Wordsworth’s ‘anchor’ albeit ironically. In Shelley’s poem, instead of being anchored by this spirit of the sublime against the rivers and waterfalls, the water crashes and ‘burst[s]’ its metrically prescribed bounds. Enjambment on ‘springs / The source’ (ll. 4–5) and ‘river / Over its rocks’ (ll. 10–11) are obvious examples of this, but similar is achieved through the longer, 11 syllable lines of lines 3, 9 and 10. At the same time, the fact that Shelley is not tempted to end the section with a longer line that both describes water breaking bounds and is preceded by two eleven syllable lines resists a formal ‘fixing’ of the imagined scene’s effect/affect; it resists a singular aesthetic mode in the depiction of a sublime landscape.30 Indeed, as William Keach rightly puts it, ‘Mont Blanc’ creates ‘the impression of blank verse’, highlighting ‘its massive periods and very frequent enjambment’.31 That Shelley approximates the form of Wordsworth’s poem while also disrupting this with frequent albeit irregular rhymes points to Shelley’s simultaneous engagement and dissatisfaction with his predecessor poet’s treatment of the sublime subject matter. Such fluidity between blank verse and rhyme effectively resists definitiveness and conclusion. The effect, as Keach has concisely put it, is that ‘Shelley’s rhyme becomes both a stay against and a means

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of marking the chaos and blankness which are Mont Blanc’s special concerns’ (p. 196). Shelley’s uneasy accommodation with blank verse also acknowledges the presence of Coleridge’s blank verse ‘Hymn’, which importantly purports to be a response to the same landscape encountered in Shelley’s poem. While ‘Mont Blanc’’s opening section recalls Wordsworth, its final line, depicting a river that ‘ceaselessly bursts and raves’, is pure Coleridge. The opening to Coleridge’s poem is as follows: Hast thou a charm to stay the morning-star In his steep course? So long he seems to pause On thy bald awful head, O Sovran Blanc, The Arve and Arveiron at thy base Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful Form! Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines, How silently! Around thee and above Deep is the air and dark, substantial, black, An ebon mass: methinks thou piercest it, As with a wedge! But when I look again, It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine, Thy habitation from eternity! O dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee, Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer I worshipped the Invisible alone. (my emphasis, ll. 1–16)32

As is quite evident, and noted as such by Leighton, the poet personifies the mountain almost immediately, addressing it with intimate ­second-person pronouns thee, thy, thou and thine.33 This personification is striking when considered alongside ‘Mont Blanc’. Shelley’s allusion to, and refiguration of, Coleridge, as I have emphasised, effectively summarises the departure between the two poems. Coleridge’s mountain is not only anthropomorphised but serves as the enthronement of power. This is obvious in it being addressed as a Miltonic ‘Sovran’ perhaps, but this is also reflected through the mountain’s ‘majesty’ in other ways; it remains a ‘fixed’ source of the God-like sublime in contrast to the amorphous and fluid environment that surrounds it. It not only almost ‘stay(s) the morning-star’—further emphasising its Miltonic allusion in its echo of Lucifer of course—but subjects the pines and sky to its dominance, seeming to ‘rise’ from or ‘pierce’ them respectively, despite its stasis.34

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Shelley’s departure from this ‘fixing’ of the source of power is apparent in his opening section’s displacement of the imagined topography of Coleridge’s poem, with his ‘ceaselessly’ raving river not corresponding to the specific Arve and its tributary the Arveiron. Without the focus of a sublime, ‘Sovran’ mountain that seemingly ignores the raving rivers at its base, the ‘ceaseless’ waters of Shelley’s opening section are instead deployed to illustrate an extended simile of the half-creative possibilities of the human mind. While there is, in fact, a ‘source of human thought’ it is not enshrined or fixed in something readily definable. This is further emphasised in how Shelley’s extended simile begins to approach mimesis or topography, appearing to reflect the environment surrounding Mont Blanc as described or imagined as such by Coleridge in his poem. That it ultimately isn’t a depiction of a literal natural scene while nevertheless remaining at the very least suggestive of one, creates a further destabilising of both the poetic vantage point and certainty of the origins of the sublime. The fact this account of the development of human thought is inclined towards natural imagery reflects the uncertain weighting of either ‘nature’ or ‘the human mind’ in the generation of sublime experience. In this light, it is tempting, if speculative, to read the ‘springs’ of line 4 as either a noun or a verb, as doing so further unsettles this human/nature binary. It is ‘Mont Blanc’’s second section where we begin to see an extended engagement with, and departure from, Coleridge’s ‘Hymn’. It begins as follows: Thus thou, Ravine of Arve—dark, deep Ravine— Thou many-coloured, many-voiced vale, Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail Fast cloud shadows and sunbeams: awful scene, Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne, Bursting through these dark mountains, like the flame Of lightning through the tempest;—thou dost lie, Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging, Children of elder time, in whose devotion The chainless winds still come and ever came To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging To hear—an old and solemn harmony; Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep Of the etherial waterfall, whose veil

126  P. WHICKMAN Robes some unsculptured image; the strange sleep Which when the voices of the desart fail Wraps all in its own deep eternity;— Thy caverns echoing to the Arve’s commotion, A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame; (ll. 12–31)

Although this includes the intimate second-person pronouns seen in the ‘Hymn Before Sunrise’, these are addressed to the ‘Ravine of Arve’ rather than the ‘Sovran Blanc’.35 It would be a mistake, though, to suggest that the poet’s discourse with the ‘Ravine of Arve’ results in the same personification seen in Coleridge. As Leighton has discussed, the poem risks becoming an exercise in empty rhetoric if Shelley’s choice to avoid personification in figurative language leaves him unable to give ‘voice’ to the landscape as a potential ‘sign of a greater Power’ (p. 61). The poet’s intimate address here results in a much more ­diffuse personification, focusing not on a singular, fixed, God-like mountain, but on multiplicity; on many colours and voices, suggestive of the first section’s ‘universe of things’. The subject/object relationships in this scene are unsettled by what approximates passive voice; ‘Over [the vale’s] pines, and crags, and caverns sail / Fast cloud shadows and sunbeams’ (ll. 14–15). The effect of this, combined with an elegant enjambment, is to further displace the fixed, animate and active source of the sublime, with the Ravine’s vales acted upon as much as they are the passage’s focus. Indeed, the ravine is not foregrounded, and essentially disappears into the background between lines 14 and 19. Even in moments of apparent ‘dominance’ over the surrounding landscape, it is the pines that are actively ‘clinging’, a clear departure from Coleridge’s mountain, that ‘rises’ from the pines that surround it. Where it at first seems difficult to read this poem as an ‘atheistic’ or ‘anti-Christian’ response to Coleridge and, to a lesser extent, Wordsworth, lies in its reference to ‘Power’. Yet, in the light of Shelley’s remarks concerning ‘Power’ in Essay on a Future State as cited above, we can read the term as self-consciously figurative. In this way, by referring to ‘power’ in ‘Mont Blanc’ Shelley heeds his own warnings regarding an anthropomorphic metaphor detailed in his notes to Queen Mab, purposefully keeping it indefinable. When, in ‘Mont Blanc’’s second section, we are first introduced to ‘Power’, it is importantly ‘in likeness of the Arve’ rather than the Arve itself. While this ‘Power’ is apparently male, leaning dangerously close to a male God of Christian conception,

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it is nevertheless syntactically ambiguous as to whether it is the Arve that is so gendered. It is important, for instance, that the four further occurrences of ‘Power’ in the poem address ‘power’ as an ‘it’ or with a definite article, and it is treated on at least two of those occasions as a common rather than a proper noun. As well as approximating blank verse, the second section begins with an enclosed rhyme, despite the rhyme scheme’s apparent irregularity.36 Lines 12–15, ending ‘Ravine’, ‘vale’, ‘sail’ and ‘scene’, respectively, create an effect reminiscent of a Petrarchan sonnet. The pararhyme of ‘throne’ / ‘down’ (ll. 16–17) that immediately follows, by contrast, is suggestive of the middle couplet of a Spenserian stanza, a stanza form that Shelley would employ contemporaneously to great effect in Laon and Cythna and the later Adonais (1821). The section then begins to emulate the opening quatrain of a Shakespearean or Spenserian sonnet, with lines ending ‘sweep’, ‘veil’, ‘sleep’ and ‘fail’, respectively (ll. 25–28); these rhymes are partially disguised by enjambment comparable to blank verse. The four lines that follow seem to produce another sonnet quatrain, but the rhyme patterning does not ultimately hold, with lines ending ‘eternity’, ‘commotion’, ‘tame’ and ‘motion’ (ll. 29–32). These lines are not enjambed, with punctuation emphasising the ‘commotion’/ ‘motion’ rhyme in a manner quite distinct from the veiled rhymes that precede it. Furthermore, while Judith Chernaik has convincingly argued for the formal influence of Milton’s Lycidas on ‘Mont Blanc’, Keach has subsequently noted the important differences in rhyme between the two poems.37 That Shelley simulates multiple stanza forms, including blank verse, while ultimately committing to no one form in particular, is important both in a poem concerned with multiplicity of voice, and in a section that ultimately turns to reflect on poetic inspiration. The second section continues: Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion, Thou art the path of that unresting sound— Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee I seem as in a trance sublime and strange To muse on my own separate phantasy, My own, my human mind, which passively Now renders and receives fast influencings, Holding an unremitting interchange With the clear universe of things around; (ll. 32–40)

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In Coleridge’s ‘Hymn’, the poet recalls how the mountain ‘blend[ed] with’ his ‘thought’, as the sublime experience subsequently elevated his soul that is said to have ‘swelled vast to Heaven!’ (ll. 19, 23). The poet then calls on the ‘Voice of sweet song’ and the ‘Green vales and icy cliffs’ to ‘join [his] Hymn’, as he seeks the necessary poetic ­inspiration to praise or approximate the sublime experience within his poetry (ll. 24, 27, 28). The above passage from ‘Mont Blanc’ has a similar impulse. Where Shelley’s account differs is not only in terms of temporality—the sublime experience and the consideration of poetic inspiration are simultaneous—but also hierarchy and multiplicity. In Coleridge’s account, while the poet’s sublime experience led to his ‘dilating Soul’ becoming elevated, this was because it was ‘transfused, / Into the mighty vision’ (ll. 21–22). In this way, the ‘soul’ is only elevated through it being subsumed into something greater, essentially eliding the human element. In Shelley’s poem, the separation between the poet’s mind and the sublime ‘phantasy’ are clearly signalled, with the line ‘My own, my human mind’ (l. 37) emphatic in establishing human autonomy. Instead of the ‘human mind’—or ‘thought’—becoming ‘blend[ed]’ or ‘transfused’ into an overwhelming sublimity, the mind of Shelley’s poet holds ‘an unremitting interchange’ with the ‘clear universe of things around’ (ll. 39, 40). While ‘unremitting interchange’ echoes the ‘ceaseless motion’ of the Arve only 7 lines before, it is crucially different, so as not to be a direct imitation. As well as preserving human—or the poet’s—agency, this ‘interchange’ also deconstructs the apparent hierarchy established in Coleridge’s text. Here, as with ‘Mont Blanc’’s first section, a neat distinction between activity and passivity is unsettled, as the human mind actively ‘renders […] fast influencings’ but does so ‘passively’. Importantly, though, as the human mind ‘renders’, it simultaneously ‘receives’, as Shelley again carefully resists the temptation to enthrone the human mind in the Power’s stead. As the poem begins its consideration of poetic inspiration, the importance of Shelley’s earlier echo and approximation of multiple verse and stanza forms becomes clear. In meditating on the ineffability of Power and the strength of words as they relate to thoughts, Shelley’s emulation of other poets such as Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth and Coleridge reflects the multiple ‘voices’ that have served as previous valuable attempts to come to terms with the great ‘universe of things’. This is in contrast to Coleridge’s poem, where the various ‘voices’ of the landscape and of poetry are called to ‘join [the poet’s] hymn’; such a call

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is to inevitably result in a single ‘voice’ that has subsumed all others, not unlike the earlier recalled sublime experience, where the poet’s humanity became transfused into something greater. The second section concludes One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings Now float above thy darkness, and now rest Where that or thou art no unbidden guest, In the still cave of the witch Poesy, Seeking among the shadows that pass by Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast From which they fled recalls them, thou art there! (ll. 41–48)

These lines’ depiction of ‘wild thoughts’ as having ‘wandering wings’ align this passage with other poems in Shelley’s oeuvre. As discussed above, Shelley often imagines poetic composition as an attempt to harness either ‘winged/éd’ words or thoughts. The lines’ reference to ‘Ghosts’ or ‘phantom[s]’, and the fact that the poet’s thoughts that had been ‘seek[ing]’ them once ‘fled’ the poet’s breast, pre-empts ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in particular. In this poem, the blown leaves— symbolising either words or thoughts—are, after all, first likened to ‘ghosts from an enchanter fleeing’ (l. 3). Yet, as with the ‘Ode’, the poet in ‘Mont Blanc’ ultimately works towards capturing these thoughts, ‘recall[ing]’ what once had evaded him. ‘Recall’ is particularly apposite; it implies both remembering and re-voicing simultaneously, and is a word Shelley employs in a similar manner in the later Prometheus Unbound.38 The context of the section would suggest that ‘recall’ concerns not only the poet’s own thoughts but his recollection of the lines and voices of his poetic predecessors. The simultaneous ‘re-voicing’, therefore, that is to turn these thoughts into words, is paralleled by the heterogenous form of the poem, that works as poetic re-articulation rather than simple imitation. It is important to note that throughout this musing on the source of poetic inspiration, ‘Power’ remains apart. Also, as to whom or what is addressed by the poet’s second-person pronouns continues to be difficult to discern. This latter difficulty is connected to the first point and emerges from what Leighton describes as the poem’s separating of an inaccessible ‘Power’ from the landscape that nevertheless is seen to ‘bear’ its ‘message’ (p. 64). Power, or Power’s ‘likeness’ (l. 16),

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is distinguished from the poet’s mind in a similar fashion. Despite the poet ultimately bearing Power’s ‘message’ as he declares ‘thou art there!’ (l. 48), the ‘One legion’ of winged thoughts that rest in the cave of the ‘witch Poesy’ is set apart from the ‘thou’ corresponding to Power or Power’s likeness on line 43. A likely influence here is Book VII of Plato’s Republic, with Hugh Roberts noting that Shelley ‘was taken with the imagery of Plato’s cave’, and he indeed reuses it frequently in his poetry and prose.39 In ‘seek[ing] among the shadows that pass by’ the poet’s thoughts are not unlike Plato’s prisoners, whose experience of reality is limited to observing only the shadows cast upon the cave wall. Having heeded the message of Plato’s allegory, the poet is therefore aware that his thoughts can only ever hope to capture ‘some shade’ […], / Some phantom, some faint image’ (ll. 47–48) of Power. Subsequently, the poet’s language is similarly limited. This acknowledgement, that the poet does not possess all the answers and that access to this ‘Power’ is ultimately impossible, is central to the poem’s scepticism. Indeed, we are reminded again in the poem’s fourth section that ‘Power dwells apart in its tranquillity / Remote, serene, and inaccessible’ (ll. 96–97). The earlier allusion to Plato’s cave is useful, since it functions as an admonishment to those who have claimed to have obtained such access and to therefore possess insight into an unambiguous, singular ‘truth’. This is clear when we again consider ‘Mont Blanc’ as a poem in engagement with Coleridge. In Coleridge’s ‘Hymn’, the source of the Vale of Chamonix’s sublimity is apparently obvious: Ye Ice-falls! ye that from the mountain’s brow Adown enormous ravines slope amain— Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice, And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge! Motionless torrents! silent cataracts! Who made you glorious as the gates of Heaven Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flowers Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?— God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations, Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God! God! sing ye meadow-streams with gladsome voice! Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds! And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow, And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God! (ll. 49–63)

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It is likely Coleridge was inspired by the Danish poet Frederike Brun’s Sunrise at Chamouny (1791) here, even leading to accusations from Thomas de Quincey and others that he plagiarised or, at the very least, inadequately acknowledged his sources. Indeed, these lines are very like Brun’s much shorter poem, with Coleridge ultimately preferring ‘God’ to Brun’s ‘Jehovah’.40 In what appears to approximate a theologian’s teleological argument for the existence of God, the elements of the sublime landscape all answer the poet’s questions concerning causality with the word ‘God’. While this passage apparently offers multiple ‘voices’, these become subsumed into one; it is a community of ‘voice’ rather than ‘voices’. Such forced homogeneity risks the awkward ‘bend[ing]’ of ‘abstract points’ to a singular source called ‘God’ that we are warned about in Queen Mab. By contrast, Shelley’s apparent allusion to Coleridge’s passage in the third section of ‘Mont Blanc’ is striking for its lack of answers: […] Is this the scene Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea Of fire envelope once this silent snow? None can reply—all seems eternal now. The wilderness has a mysterious tongue Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild, So solemn, so serene, that man may be, But for such faith, with nature reconciled; Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood By all, but which the wise, and great, and good interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel. (ll. 71–83)

The poet refuses to settle upon the same philosophically inadequate answers as Coleridge’s, that, for Shelley, amount to epistemological shortcutting. Instead, the poet is willing to accept that these questions cannot, and perhaps should not, be answered definitively. Despite the landscape’s silence—‘None can reply’—the wilderness has a ‘mysterious tongue’ and Mont Blanc itself has a ‘voice’. That these voices are paradoxically silent is important. Indeed, such a construction is prefigured by the ‘silent eloquence’ of the seed that ‘unfold[s] its store / Of argument’ in Queen Mab (VII. ll. 20–21). These ‘voices’ can teach ‘awful doubt’, or scepticism, and can repeal ‘Large codes of fraud or woe’ precisely

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because they do not offer answers that serve to fix, reify and deify abstract concepts into a monarchical God. It is tempting in this light, as I suggest above, to read Shelley’s ‘wise, and great, and good’ as corresponding to those ‘who rightly fee[l]’ the universe’s infinite ‘mystery and grandeur’ described in the note to Queen Mab I. ll. 252–3. They are those individuals who, as a result of their insight, do not seek and advocate for an anthropomorphised ‘cause’ for the universe. ‘Mont Blanc’’s final section sees a return of Power: ‘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’ (ll. 127–129). Again, it would appear in only reading the first of these lines that power is located specifically and singularly with Mont Blanc. This ‘power’, however, is a common rather than a proper noun, and it is a power of indefinable multiplicity, made up of ‘many sights’ and ‘many sounds’. The power may be ‘there’, but it is not ‘there’ alone, resisting simple, fixed definition. This advocacy of multiplicity and indefinability is in stark contrast to the final lines of Coleridge’s ‘Hymn’. Coleridge depicts Mont Blanc as a ‘kingly Spirit’ (l. 81) and ‘Great hierarch (l. 83)’ who, although distinguished from God, is nevertheless ‘dread ambassador from Earth to Heaven’ (l. 82). The poet instructs this ‘ambassador’ to ‘tell the stars’ (l. 84), ‘the silent sky (l. 83)’ and ‘yon rising sun’ (l. 84) of their supposed origins. As a result, while the poem ends with a ‘thousand voices’, these all ‘prais[e] God’ (l. 85). Not only does this reduce multiplicity to something singular, this praising appears forced, resulting primarily from the poet and the ‘ambassador’ mountain’s evangelism. Shelley’s resistance to fixity in an aesthetic sense, then, is inextricable from his philosophical scepticism. His decision to not represent the sublimity of the landscape through strict adherence to blank verse in ‘Mont Blanc’ is not solely a formal decision, as to fall into the same aesthetic modes of his predecessor poets, and particularly Coleridge’s, is to risk making the same philosophical and theological mistakes. Shelley’s ‘Power’ is not simply akin to God or the ‘Sovran Blanc’ of Coleridge by a different name either, as much early criticism often assumed. Shelley’s ‘Power’ importantly resists being readily personified or, indeed, explained. In ‘Mont Blanc’, a philosophical problem becomes one of aesthetics, since ascribing sublime experience to the word ‘God’ is also poetically inadequate for Shelley. While this scepticism is informed by Enlightenment-era philosophy, Shelley’s poetry’s resistance to fixity is

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distinctly ‘Romantic’. There is a continuation from Shelley’s ‘diagnosis’ of the dangers of an anthropomorphised abstract concept in Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna to his revitalisation of this language in ‘Mont Blanc’ and ‘Ode to the West Wind’. The seed of Queen Mab that unfolds its argument in ‘silent eloquence’ and ‘belies creation’ becomes the ‘winged seeds’ of ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘England in 1819’ which, like the silent, ‘mysterious tongue’ of the wilderness of ‘Mont Blanc’, offer a blueprint for political change. What begins as simple linguistic scepticism in Shelley’s career then becomes reinvigorated, demonstrating the progressive, and not solely regressive, possibilities of language. In this way, Shelley enables and arguably necessitates a new ‘atheistical’ poetics.

Notes







1. Pulos, Christos E. 1962. The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley’s Scepticism. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, p. 62 and Leighton, Angela. 1984. Shelley and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 62. 2. See, for instance, Keach, William. 1984. Shelley’s Style. New York and London: Methuen and Leighton, Angela. 1984. Shelley and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 3. Lee, Monika. 1993. ‘“Nature’s Silent Eloquence”: Disembodied Organic Language in Shelley’s Queen Mab’. Nineteenth Century Literature 48:2, p. 169 and Leighton, p. 1. 4.  While Keach emphasises Shelley’s interest in Locke, setting him apart from others such as Blake and Coleridge, Michael O’Neill warns how ‘it is potentially over-simplifying to see Shelley as a child of Enlightenment thought’ alone. See Keach, William. 2004. Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language and Politics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, p. 2 and O’Neill, Michael. 2011. ‘“A Double Face of False and True”: Poetry and Religion in Shelley’. Literature and Theology 25:1, p. 38. 5. See Letters, ii. p. 478. 6. In a letter to Shelley’s father in the month prior to Shelley’s expulsion from Oxford, Shelley attempts to explain away Locke’s Christianity as being at odds with his materialist empiricism. See Letters, i. 45. 7.  Locke, John. 2008. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Phemister, Pauline. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 316–317. 8. For further references to Paine in Shelley’s letters, see Letters, ii. p. 481.

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9. Paine, Thomas. 1984. The Age of Reason, Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, p. 9. 10. See An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, pp. 315–316. 11. This passage is reproduced in the Alastor volume (1816) as a standalone poem called ‘Superstition’. Reiman and Fraistat helpfully remind us that the ‘process of abstraction described in these lines was already a radical commonplace’ and is discernible in the writing of d’Holbach, Volney and Blake. See Poetry & Prose, p. 49n. Shelley also extensively reproduces d’Holbach in his notes to the poem. 12.  Kant, Immanuel. 2009. An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? Trans. Nisbet, H.B. London: Penguin, p. 1. 13. This is subject to further discussion in Chapter 5. 14. See, for example, Paine’s discussion of the Bible in The Age of Reason’s second part: ‘the Bible is filled with murder’ (p. 88) and ‘As to the character of the book, it is horrid; it is a military history of rapine and murder’ (p. 95). 15.  Hulme, T. E. 1975. ‘Romanticism and Classicism’. In Romanticism: Points of View, ed. Gleckner, Robert F. and Enscoe, Gerald E. Detroit: Wayne Street University Press, p. 58. Timothy Webb has said of Shelley’s later theology that he relocates ‘the centre of power in man rather than God’ and ‘enthrone[s] man as his own divinity’. See Webb, Timothy. 1977. Shelley: A Voice Not Understood. Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 171. 16. Shelley also has a ‘Trinity’ of names in ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ that the poet figure sees as both obscuring human access to knowledge and as philosophically inadequate: ‘No voice from some sublimer world hath ever / To sage or poet these responses given– / Therefore the name of God and ghosts and Heaven, / Remain the record of their vain endeavour’ (ll. 24–27). See Whickman, Paul. 2016. ‘The Poet as Sage, Sage as Poet in 1816: Aesthetics and Epistemology in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”’. The Keats-Shelley Review 30:2, pp. 147–148. In that article I erroneously referred to Laon and Cythna rather than Queen Mab, which attests to the thematic similarities between the two poems if not my carelessness. 17. Hume, David. 2007. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Millican, Peter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 12. 18.  Derrida’s preface appears as an article. See Derrida, Jacques. 1979. ‘Scribble (Writing-Power)’. Trans. Plotkin, Cary. Yale French Studies, No. 58, In Memory of Jacques Ehrmann: Inside Play Outside Game, pp. 117–147. 19. Warburton, William. 1738. The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, on the Principles of a Religious Deist, From the Omission of the Doctrine of a

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Future State of Reward and Punishment in the Jewish Dispensation in Six Books, volume 2. London: Fletcher Gyles, p. 67. 20. Roston, Murray. 1965. Prophet and Poet: The Bible and the Growth of Romanticism. Evanston, IL: North Western University Press, p. 193. 21. Some commentators point out that the colours of leaves Shelley highlights—yellow, black, pale and red—‘represent the traditional four races of humans – Mongoloid, Negroid, Caucasian and American Indian’, see Poetry & Prose, p. 298n. 22.  Webb, Timothy. 1977. Shelley: A Voice Not Understood. Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 177. 23.  Whickman, Paul. 2016. ‘The Poet as Sage, Sage as Poet in 1816: Aesthetics and Epistemology in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”’. The Keats-Shelley Review 30:2, pp. 142–154. 24. Leighton, Angela. 1984. Shelley and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 61. 25. O’Neill, Michael. 2002. ‘Shelley’s Lyric Art’. In Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, eds. Reiman, Donald H. and Fraistat, Neil. London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, p. 617. 26.  Holmes, Richard. 1995. Shelley: The Pursuit. London: HarperCollins, p. 342. 27. Harold Bloom cites ‘Tintern Abbey’ as a significant influence on ‘Mont Blanc’ in Bloom, Harold. 1971. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, p. 293. Byron is alleged to have recalled that Shelley ‘used to dose [him] with Wordsworth physic’ in the Summer of 1816; it is therefore not unlikely that Shelley had Lyrical Ballads in mind when composing his poetry at that time. See Medwin, Thomas. 1824. Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron: Noted During a Residence with His Lordship at Pisa, in the Years 1821 and 1822. London: Henry Colborn, New Burlington Street, p. 192. 28. Wordsworth, William. 2000. The Major Works. Ed. Gill, Stephen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 134. 29. ‘Mont Blanc’ was originally published at the end of the Shelleys’ History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817), but a different manuscript version of the poem, found in a notebook that had once belonged to Byron’s friend Scrope Davies in 1976, has some important variations. One of these is ‘not all’ for ‘but half’ on line 6, which is a less obvious allusion to Wordsworth. See Chernaik, Judith and Burnett, Timothy. 1978. ‘The Byron and Shelley Notebooks in the Scrope Davies Find’. The Review of English Studies 29:113, pp. 36–49. 30. ‘Mont Blanc’’s curious form has led to a number of critics referring to the poem as either having verse paragraphs or stanzas. The poem’s

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presentation of numbered sections in most editions determines my preference for the more neutral term ‘section’, even if this remains aesthetically unsatisfying. 31. Keach, Shelley’s Style, p. 195. 32. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1997. The Complete Poems. Ed. Keach, William. London: Penguin, p. 323. Further references to Coleridge’s poem are to this edition. 33. Leighton, Shelley and the Sublime, p. 61. 34. It is important to qualify this reading by noting that the poet only first thinks the mountain ‘piercest’ the ‘dark’ air, before turning to acknowledge the air as its ‘habitation from eternity’. 35. In fact, Mont Blanc itself does not appear until line 61 of the poem. It is perhaps ironic that Coleridge’s poem opens with an address to Mont Blanc while Shelley’s poem, called ‘Mont Blanc’, does not introduce the mountain specifically until almost halfway through. 36. ‘Mont Blanc’ is in fact heavily rhymed, with Keach suggesting that only three of the poem’s lines end in words with no corresponding rhyme elsewhere. On Shelley’s rhyme in ‘Mont Blanc’, see Shelley’s Style, pp. 194–200. 37. Chernaik, Judith. 1972. The Lyrics of Shelley. Cleveland, OH and London: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, p. 288 and Keach, Shelley’s Style, p. 195. 38. This further emphasises the connection between ‘Mont Blanc’ and ‘Ode to the West Wind’, as the latter poem was published in the same volume as Prometheus Unbound in 1820. 39. Roberts, Hugh. 1997. Shelley and the Chaos of History: A New Politics of Poetry. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, p. 328. 40.  For a discussion of Coleridge’s influences and borrowings in ‘Hymn Before Sunrise’, see Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 2001. Poetical Works. Ed. Mays, J. C. C. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series 75, 16. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, vol. I. ii, pp. 717–722.

CHAPTER 5

The Promethean Conqueror, the Galilean Serpent and the Jacobin Jesus: Shelley’s Interpretation(s) of Jesus Christ

Shelley’s interest in the figure of Jesus Christ is of fundamental importance in investigating ‘blasphemy’ in his works. Not only is the belief in the divinity of Christ and the Trinity more generally central to both legal and philosophical conceptions of blasphemy in the period, but Shelley invokes Jesus Christ in his writing on the issue. Since Jesus was himself accused of and crucified for the crime, he becomes, along with other famous ‘good blasphemers’ such as Socrates, associated and identified with the ‘blasphemers’ of Shelley’s day. Shelley is not the only writer to make this connection. Yet, while for other commentators this comparison is primarily a rhetorical one, used to question and problematise blasphemy as a crime or to divest the word of its infernal associations, Shelley extends this. For Shelley, Jesus Christ was punished for blasphemy because of his reformist sentiments, his ‘crimes’ being political rather than based in simple theological difference alone. Not only then does Shelley’s reference to Jesus’ blasphemy emphasise the absurdity of blasphemy prosecutions in the Christian society of Shelley’s day, it also confirms the crime to be political. If blasphemy is to be defined as simply expressing contrary opinions on matters of religion—and, by extension, politics—then, for Shelley, Jesus was indeed a ‘blasphemer’ of his day rather than one who had simply been falsely accused. While Shelley’s position serves to undermine the validity of ‘blasphemy’ as a term then, Shelley also explores why Jesus’s sentiments were deemed so threatening. © The Author(s) 2020 P. Whickman, Blasphemy and Politics in Romantic Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46570-4_5

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Crucial to Shelley’s Jesus’ reformist ideas is a desire to overthrow much of the teaching of the Old Testament. These include the ­doctrine of ‘an eye for an eye’, replaced by Jesus’ teachings of the Sermon on the Mount or Plain, and, most importantly, the Old Testament conception of God. For Shelley, Jesus’ God was one more akin to Shelley’s own notion of ‘Power’ seen in poems such as ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and ‘Mont Blanc’ rather than the notion of God the king and the father. Jesus’ challenge to this idea of God then is entwined with a critique of patriarchy more generally, with his death becoming an example of patriarchal tyranny of the father over the son; Jesus is the son sacrificed to atone for the sin levelled at Adam by God the father. Shelley therefore challenges the Christian doctrine of Atonement, of Jesus dying for mankind’s sin, as serving to predicate a religion based on suffering, further emphasising the Church to be the model upon which tyrannical hierarchical power structures are based. Most importantly, Shelley’s own political philosophy is clearly informed by the doctrines of Jesus Christ, with critics such as Harry White and Robert Ryan suggesting Jesus’ influence on Shelley exceeds even that of William Godwin.1 It is important to note, however, as Bryan Shelley reminds us, that this Jesus is very much Shelley’s own (re)construction, largely, in fact, ‘a projection of his own self-image’.2 Far from being a simple misreading, there is an element of willful manipulation of Jesus to suit Shelley’s political ends. Jesus is retrospectively made ‘to fit’ the philosophy as much as he is an out-and-out inspiration for it. While his principles are very much evident, the character of Jesus also figures in a number of Shelley’s poems including Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound, Hellas, and The Triumph of Life.3 There are numerous ­Christ-like characters in Shelley’s works too such as Prometheus, Laon, Cythna, Adonais, Beatrice Cenci and even Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew. The similarity of these characters to Christ is often provocative because they are frequently anti-religious or even Satanic. Shelley, too, also employs Christ-like imagery or themes even in those poems without a recognised character. It is open to question whether these echoes are less of Jesus Christ specifically and more of the New Testament generally or, indeed, whether these allusions are in fact to other writers who themselves had used scripture.4

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5.1  Secularising and Demystifying Jesus Shelley’s admiration for Jesus Christ is not without philosophical difficulties or apparent inconsistency. In an incomplete prose piece alternatively titled ‘On Christianity’ or ‘Essay on Christianity’—likely composed in 1817 alongside Laon and Cythna—Shelley describes Jesus as ‘the being who has influenced in the most memorable manner the opinions and the fortunes of the human species’ (Prose, i. p. 246).5 This is the same Shelley who, in 1811, wrote to Thomas Hogg claiming he could ‘scarcely set bounds to [his] hatred of Xtianity’ (Letters, i. p. 71). Neither is this contradiction easily explained by Shelley simply having changed his mind over the six years. Although Robert Browning famously suggested that had Shelley lived longer he ‘would have finally ranged himself with the Christians’,6 as late as April 1822 Shelley wrote to Horace Smith complaining of Byron’s ‘delusions of Christianity’ (Letters, ii. p. 412).7 Rather than simply altering his opinions and becoming reconciled to Christianity, Shelley found much to admire in the figure and doctrines of Jesus Christ while, importantly, remaining dismissive of the religion that bears his name. Both Robert Ryan and David Fuller note how Shelley distinguishes the two, with Fuller in fact arguing that the theological connotations of the word ‘Christ’ make it inappropriate in reference to Shelley’s Jesus.8 Shelley nevertheless refers to both ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’ interchangeably throughout his works, and the separation of the man from the religion that bears his name is not always easily achieved. In ‘Ode to Liberty’, appearing in the Prometheus Unbound volume (1820), the poet refers to the emergence of Christianity as Liberty’s enemy, invoking Jesus Christ in the process: When from its sea of death, to kill and burn, The Galilean serpent forth did creep, And made thy world an undistinguishable heap. (Poems, iii. ll. 118–120)

While the reference to Galilee recalls the man from Galilee known as Jesus Christ, both Donovan et al. and Reiman and Fraistat read the ‘Galilean serpent’ as representing the Christian religion rather than Christ explicitly (Poetry & Prose, p. 310 n; Poems, iii. p. 400 n). This is in spite of the fact that Jesus the man is nevertheless referred to as a

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Galilean in Luke 23:6: ‘When Pilate heard of Galilee, he asked whether the man were a Galilean’. Indeed, Donovan et al. concede that Shelley also uses the term ‘Galilean’ to disparagingly refer to Jesus in a letter to Hogg, not long after both men had been sent down from Oxford for producing The Necessity of Atheism: The Galilean is not a favorite of mine. So far from owing him any thanks for his favors, I cannot avoid confessing that I owe a secret grudge to his carpentership the reflecting part of the community, that part in whose happiness we have so strong an interest, certainly do not require his morality which when there is no vice fetters virtue.—Here we agree—let this horrid Galilean rule the Canaille then. (Letters, i. p. 66)

Shelley’s letter is playful, but it nevertheless reveals his seemingly conflicted response to Jesus as well as his own class prejudices. His resignation that the ‘horrid Galilean’ should rule over ‘the Canaille’, or, ‘the masses’, is contrasted with his grudging acknowledgment of Jesus’ influence on the ‘reflecting part of the community’. That this figure can be responsible both for apparently populist bigotry as well as more intellectual contemplation is not dissimilar to Shelley’s positions on Christ more generally. The phrase ‘Galilean Serpent’ from ‘Ode to Liberty’, for instance, draws attention to the historical confounding of Christianity with Jesus Christ; if Christianity bears the name of its founder, the figurative expression ‘Galilean serpent’ simply connects the religion’s origins to its founder in a similar fashion. The problem of the association of the ‘good’ Jesus with corrupt establishment Christianity is most explicitly articulated in the notes to Queen Mab, where Shelley details the two competing conceptions of Jesus Christ. The first of these is a hypocritical Daemon, who identifies Himself as the God of compassion and peace, even whilst he stretches forth his blood-red hand with the sword of discord to waste the earth [and] the other who stands in the foremost list of those true heroes who have died in the glorious martyrdom of liberty. (Poems, i. p. 397)9

The first notion is of the ‘Christ’ of dogmatic Christian faith, invoked by those Christians who have brought tyranny and abuse of power in Christ’s name. The second is Shelley’s perception of the historical,

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good and heroic Jesus, Jesus the man, whose martyrdom and teachings are a positive influence on mankind. In the later Prometheus Unbound, this disjunction between Christ’s noble doctrines and the religion that came after is articulated as a lament for the wasted opportunity following Jesus’ good works: One came forth of gentle worth Smiling on the sanguine earth; His words outlived him, like swift poison    Withering up truth, peace, and pity. Look! where round the wide horizon     Many a million-peopled city Vomits smoke in the bright air.— Hark that outcry of despair! ‘Tis his mild and gentle ghost      Wailing for the faith he kindled. (Poems, iii. ll. 546–555)

Jesus’ words that survived his death became poisonous as they were corrupted into the faith-based dogma of Christianity, leaving ‘his mild and gentle ghost / Wailing for the faith he kindled’. Although an initial reading suggests a clear-cut distinction between Jesus’ good deeds and the dogmatism of the Christian faith that followed, the last line reads like an accusation or indictment. Christianity is ‘the faith [Jesus] kindled’ and even if the ‘fire’ of the modern Church is far removed from Jesus’ teachings, it was nevertheless Jesus who began or ‘kindled’ it. Importantly, though, the above passage is spoken by the Chorus prior to the Furies’ torment of Prometheus, an episode discussed below. The Furies torture Prometheus by showing him the image of the suffering Christ, the purpose being, as Fuller contends, ‘not to show the sufferings of Jesus as simply valueless [rather] [t]hey have been counterproductive: they have given rise to Christianity’ (p. 218). In their mockery, the Furies insinuate that Prometheus’ ‘fate will be the same’ (p. 218). The Chorus’ words, then, may simply be part of the Furies’ tortures, working to exaggerate the culpability of Christ in his poisonous legacy. Even so, it remains difficult for Shelley to completely dissociate Jesus from Christianity in a positive manner. A method Shelley employs in order to attempt this separation—or ‘de-Christianisation’—is by emphasising Jesus’ humanity, often by downplaying, marginalising or even dismissing claims for his divinity. While in

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A Letter to Lord Ellenborough (1812) Shelley does not explicitly ­dismiss the divinity of Jesus, he nevertheless laments how Jesus’ divinity and the reportedly supernatural elements surrounding stories of his life are considered as indisputable facts protected by law: The vulgar, ever in extremes, became persuaded that the crucifixion of Jesus was a supernatural event, and testimonies of miracles, so frequent in unenlightened ages, were not wanting to prove that he was something divine. This belief, rolling through the lapse of ages, acquired force and extent, until the divinity of Jesus became a dogma, which to dispute was death, which to doubt was infamy. (Prose, Clark, p. 77)

Shelley’s comments are perfectly worded here. While a cursory r­eading would suggest he is clearly disputing the veracity of miracles and the resurrection, he is in fact only explicitly questioning the lack of free inquiry into religion. The case that had inspired Shelley to write this epistle, Daniel Isaac Eaton’s 1812 prosecution for blasphemous libel, arose from Eaton’s publication of a supposed third part of Paine’s Age of Reason. Shelley understood Paine’s work to have questioned the divinity of Christ, arguing Paine had challenged ‘the miracles, the resurrection, and ascension’, and had called the scriptures ‘fable’ (Prose, Clark, p. 76). Shelley’s considered tone on this issue is an act of self-preservation, as it was still technically illegal to question the Trinity or to dispute the divinity of Christ; the ‘Doctrine of the Trinity Act’, which decriminalised such pronouncements, was not passed until 21 July 1813. Even by the time Queen Mab was first published, in which the above paragraph appears in a note, any comments concerning Christ’s divinity could have strayed into illegality.10 The 1813 Act resulted from a bill introduced by the abolitionist MP William Smith.11 Smith was an English Dissenter and Unitarian, and his Act, as its full title reveals, sought to relieve those with unconventional views on the Trinity from prosecution.12 A key element of the 1698 ‘Blasphemy Act’ criminalised those who denied ‘any One of the Persons in the Holy Trinity to be God’ and this was central to numerous blasphemy prosecutions throughout the eighteenth century. The 1813 Act removed this clause, while also amending the earlier 1689 ‘Act of Toleration’ to include non-Trinitarian Dissenters. Although the Doctrine of the Trinity Act worked to grant a level of toleration to Unitarians, this ultimately did not extend to deists and

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atheists, despite Smith’s efforts. Writers therefore still had to remain cautious when writing on Christ’s divinity. As with A Letter to Lord Ellenborough, 1817s ‘On Christianity’ avoids direct discussion of Jesus’ godliness or his supposed ‘supernatural’ abilities: I protest against any prejudication of the controversy (if indeed it can be considered a disputable point) as to whether Jesus Christ was something divine or no. I make an abstraction of whatever miraculous or mysterious is connected with his character and his history. (Prose, i. p. 246)13

Shelley further distances Jesus’ character from the Messiah figure of Christianity, arguing that ‘the supposition of [Jesus’ miracles’] falsehood or their truth would modify in no degree the hues of the picture which is attempted to be delineated [in this essay]’ (p. 261). Whether Jesus is divine or not is irrelevant in considering and learning from his doctrines. Shelley had previously shown interest in separating Jesus’ teachings from the trappings of dogmatic Christianity in a letter he wrote to his friend Elizabeth Hitchener on 27 February 1812, describing his plan to write the now lost ‘Biblical Extracts’. Shelley declared that ‘I have often thought that the moral sayings of Jesus Christ might be very useful if selected from the mystery and immorality that surrounds them’ (Letters, i. p. 265). The fulfilment of this desire in ‘On Christianity’, therefore, enables the possibility of admiring Jesus without the trappings of the superstition and dogma of the Christian faith and does so without risking prosecution. Although Jesus’ humanity is less explicitly asserted, and with greater complexity, in Shelley’s poetry than in his prose, it nevertheless remains an important concern. In Hellas (1822), the Chorus refer to Jesus as ‘A Power from the unknown God / A Promethean Conqueror’ whose ‘mortal shape […] / Was like the vapour dim / Which the orient planet animates with light’ (Poetry & Prose, ll. 211–212, 215–217). This figure initially seems far from human; he is established as a ‘Power’ sent from God, equated with the mythical Titan Prometheus and who sees mortal life as a Venusian ‘vapour’ obscuring some greater immortal existence.14 This is complicated, however, by Shelley’s prose notes to the poem in which he refers to the ‘sublime human character of Jesus Christ’ (Poetry & Prose, p. 464). In a similar fashion to his notes to Queen Mab, Shelley goes further to write of the

144  P. WHICKMAN imputed identification of [this figure] with a Demon [i.e. the God of Christian conception], who tempted, betrayed and punished the innocent beings who were called into existence by his sole will; and for the period of a thousand years the spirit of this the most just, wise, and benevolent of men, has been precipitated with myriads of hecatombs of those who approached the nearest to his innocence and his wisdom, sacrificed under every aggravation of atrocity and variety of torture. (Note 8, Poetry & Prose, p. 464)

Shelley’s disdain for the conflation of Christ with the divine and vengeful God of Christianity emphasises his view of Jesus’ humanity, lamenting that those who are most like Jesus, this most ‘benevolent of men’, are ultimately punished. It is important, too, to read Shelley’s reference to Jesus’ ‘sublime human character’ with appropriate emphasis on character rather than the being himself. Whereas Christian theology bestows this sublimity on the man, essentially deifying him, Shelley limits this to Jesus’ personal attributes, the deeds he committed and his exemplary nature and influence on mankind. This focus on the supposed sublimity of Jesus’ personal qualities and doctrines is something Shelley argues for as early as the notes to Queen Mab: It is of importance […] to distinguish between the pretended character of this being as the Son of God and the Saviour of the world, and his real character as a man, who, for a vain attempt to reform the world, paid the forfeit of his life to that overbearing tyranny which has since so long desolated the universe in his name. (p. 396)

The lines from Hellas certainly demonstrate Shelley’s good knowledge of astronomy, highlighting his awareness of Venus’ gaseous surface.15 They also importantly reveal Shelley’s Jesus’ non-divinity, even if his greatness exceeds that of his fellow men. Although Jesus’ mortal shape is likened to mere ‘vapour’, it is nevertheless ‘animate[d]’ by the ‘orient planet’’s ‘light’. While the light may not find its origins in this vapour, it is still this that in fact ‘enlightens’ those who observe it. The mortal Jesus then is not only likened to a light-sharing ‘vapour’ but he is in fact the connection and the means by which one accesses the realm beyond human empirical experience. The elevated prophet or sage-like status that Jesus possesses, however, does not mean he himself is divine; the ‘light’ is importantly not located with him alone and he is not its source. The immortal realm indicated by the orient planet which then animates

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the shape of Jesus’ mortal life with light is also much like the posthumous Christian legacy of Jesus that has ‘back-lit’ Jesus’ mortal life and falsely bestowed him with a divine status. Having learnt from his earlier dealings with Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna, Shelley wrote to Charles Ollier in November 1821 regarding his new poem Hellas: ‘If any passages should alarm you in the notes, you are at liberty to suppress them; […] the Poem contains nothing of a tendency to danger’ (Letters, ii. p. 365). Ollier duly obliged, cancelling passages from the notes, preface and even the poem itself, despite Shelley’s reassurances. Shelley was happy with the publication if we are to believe a list of errata he sent to Ollier on 11 April 1822; he obviously either did not check the proofs carefully or ultimately tolerated the minor redactions from the poem itself (Letters, ii. p. 698). From the preface, which in part detailed the deficiencies of Western European powers in opposing the Turkish oppression of Greece, Ollier removed a paragraph which appeared to support rebellion in England and equated the Government with the despots Shelley writes of in the poem itself.16 Ollier’s editing not only protects himself and Shelley from accusations of sedition, but also brings the preface into alignment with the poem’s more measured and implied criticism of general tyranny. In addition, not only does Ollier remove the criticisms of the Christian conception of Christ from Note 8, he also heavily redacts the penultimate stanza of the poem itself (the redacted words emphasised): Saturn and Love their long repose    Shall burst, more bright and good Than all who fell, than One who rose,    Than many unsubdued; Not gold, not blood their altar dowers But votive tears and symbol flowers. (ll. 1090–1095)17

In what is a complex passage both syntactically and thematically, Shelley stresses the apparent superiority of the Pagan deities Saturn and Love over an usurping Christ figure. The structure and sentiment of this passage is similar to that of 1820s ‘Ode to Liberty’. In the ‘Ode’, Shelley sees the height of mankind’s Liberty to be at the time of Grecian—and most particularly Athenian—civilisation (ll. 61–90), before declining with the rise of Rome (ll. 91–105) and later becoming an ‘undistinguishable heap’ (l. 120) following the rise of Christianity.18

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In the notes accompanying this passage in Hellas, Shelley writes ‘Saturn and Love were among the deities of a real or imaginary state of innocence and happiness’ (p. 464) and later whimsically adds that ‘The Grecian gods seem indeed to have been personally more innocent, although it cannot be said that as far as temperance and chastity are concerned they gave so edifying an example as their successor’ (p. 464). Shelley here establishes Christianity as the direct and seemingly inferior successor to Grecian Paganism, with the result being that Ollier removed all allusions to Christianity. Ollier also removed the note to the redacted l. 1092 of the poem which further establishes this Christ figure as usurper: ‘the One who rose or Jesus Christ, at whose appearance the idols of the Pagan world were amerced of their worship’ (p. 464). The term ‘amerced’ indicates anything but a peaceful transition here, with connotations of arbitrary punishment for an offence. The implication is not that one tyrannical religious system is replaced by another that is equally as bad, rather it is implied that the emergence of vengeful Christianity destroyed ‘innocent’ Paganism, and the pagan followers, that preceded it. It is not as simple as one religion being preferred to another. What Shelley admires about Grecian Paganism is his perception that it is not a religion based on a concrete faith in something literally existent.19 Whereas Christianity demands tributes of ‘gold’ and ‘blood’ (l. 1094), Grecian Paganism requires only ‘votive tears and symbol flowers’ (l. 1095). For Shelley, the attraction of Paganism in this sense is that it is self-consciously ceremonial and symbolic rather than dependent on ­faith-based commitment. After all, in the notes to Queen Mab, he similarly laments how ‘Christianity inculcates the necessity of supplicating the Deity’ (Poems, i. p. 399). Shelley’s conception of ‘innocent’ religion in both Laon and Cythna and Queen Mab then is an important point of comparison. In Laon and Cythna, Cythna argues that the idea or metaphor of God began as ‘an innocent dream, but that a faith / Nursed by fear’s dew of poison, grows thereon’ (ll. 3249–3250). Similarly, in Queen Mab, Mab describes the anthropomorphised Religion’s ‘playfulness’ in its ‘untutored infancy’ that, in adulthood, leads to ‘millions, butchered in sweet confidence’ (VI. ll. 74–75, 115). It is this reification of not only an abstract concept, but a purely symbolic or metaphorical one, that Shelley finds most objectionable. While it may simply appear to be this metaphoric or symbolic notion of God that is anthropomorphised and made literal, the penultimate stanza of Hellas reveals a clear conflation of Jesus—the ‘One who rose’—with the religion that bears his name;

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like the concept or metaphor of God, Jesus has been similarly falsely deified. The sublime nature of Jesus’s doctrines, his ‘sublime human character’ as Shelley puts it in the notes to the poem, have led to the man himself being deified. The acceptance of Pagan symbolism over the supposed literalness of Christian faith in Hellas has a curious parallel in Prometheus Unbound, as the Furies torment Prometheus with an image of the suffering Christ. The Furies instruct Prometheus to Behold an emblem – those who do endure Deep wrongs for man, and scorn and chains, but heap Thousand-fold torment on themselves and him. (I. ll. 594–596)

For the Furies, the image of the crucified Jesus is ‘an emblem’ used to break Prometheus’ resolve, to show that his sufferings, like Christ’s, are in vain. That the crucified Christ is ‘an emblem’ is suggestive of allegory rather than something literal and sacred. There is an important echo of Book 9 of Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814) here, when Wordsworth’s Solitary reflects on the now extinguished ‘gypsy fire’ that represents the previous day’s pleasures.20 Wordsworth writes: […] the Solitary said In a low voice, yet careless who might hear, “The Fire, that burned so brightly to our wish, Where is it now? Deserted on the beach It seems extinct; nor shall the fanning breeze Revive its ashes. What care we for this, Whose ends are gained? Behold an emblem here Of one day’s pleasure, and all mortal joys! And, in this unpremeditated slight Of that which is no longer needed, see The common course of human gratitude!”21

The Shelleys’ disappointment with the conservative politics of Wordsworth’s poem is well-documented, with Mary Shelley even writing in her journal in September 1814 that Wordsworth had become ‘a slave’.22 Percy Shelley’s sonnet ‘To Wordsworth’ (1816) may be the most famous example of Shelley’s ‘grief’ at the loss of the older poet’s youthful radicalism, but the Prometheus Unbound passage can be read in a similar, albeit, more hopeful fashion. The Furies’ temptation of

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Prometheus towards despair not only reminds the Titan of how the good work of Jesus has become corrupted by Christianity, the allusion to Wordsworth is to remind the poet that they or their words may similarly become ‘corrupted’. This association, between poet and mankind’s benefactor, is explained by Shelley’s famous celebration of poets as the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’ (Poetry & Prose, p. 535) in A Defence of Poetry, a role his Jesus similarly occupies.23 The Solitary’s reading of the ashes from the gypsy fire as emblematic of past pleasures, however, means the Furies’ allusive words offer a hidden, ironically hopeful message. Christ’s doctrines, like the earlier words of the now-conservative poet, nevertheless retain something of value. As Shelley puts it in A Defence, the poetical doctrines of Christ ‘outlived the darkness and the convulsions’ of the epochs that followed (Poetry & Prose, p. 524); the allusion to Wordsworth, then, is to similarly emphasise how his earlier words may ‘outlive’ the establishment conservatism that poems such as The Excursion seem to point towards. The passage’s depiction of Jesus as ‘emblem’ directs readers away from literal readings of a divine Christ. Jesus’ humanity is similarly emphasised just before this passage, with the on-looking Ione and Panthea discussing what the image is that the Furies present to Prometheus: Ione […] Darest thou observe how the fiends torture him? Panthea Alas, I looked forth twice, but will no more. Ione What didst thou see? Panthea                        A woeful sight—a youth With patient looks nailed to a crucifix. (I. ll. 582–585)

Jesus is here a mere ‘youth / With patient looks’ rather than the divine Messianic figure of Christian conception. By emphasising Jesus’ vulnerable humanity, Shelley engenders appropriate levels of pathos; this is important both aesthetically and thematically. Although the suggestion is that the immortal Titan Prometheus is to see his own situation in the image of the suffering Christ, there is no indication Ione, Panthea, Prometheus or even the Furies recognise Jesus as divine.

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5.2   A Jesus in History: Jesus as Reformer, Jacobin and Blasphemer For Robert Ryan, Prometheus’ pity for Christ is of a ‘benefactor of mankind discovering how much he had in common with another’.24 The suggestion that Prometheus identifies himself with Christ is a persuasive one, particularly since the Furies’ torments are intended to have him think as much. One crucial difference between the figures is uncovered, however, when Prometheus contemplates the impossibility of his own death following this temptation:           […]Peace is in the grave— The grave hides all things beautiful and good— I am a God and cannot find it there— Nor would I seek it. (I. ll. 638–640)

The grave is inaccessible to Prometheus since he is an immortal Titan and cannot die. He is, therefore, rather different from the human ‘youth’ fixed to a crucifix. Yet, while Jesus’ humanity is emphasised and his divinity downplayed, what he shares with Prometheus is his sacrifice for the benefit of all mankind. The sublimity of Jesus’ doctrines as stressed in Hellas help in signalling his significance as a human reformist philosopher rather than as embodied divinity. This is precisely what Shelley argues in the earlier ‘On Christianity’: The honour of the human race rests not solely on the atchievements [sic] of a being concerning whom it is disputed whether it is God or man. It is the profound wisdom and the comprehensive morality of his doctrines which essentially distinguish him from the crowd of martyrs and of patriots who have exulted to devote themselves for what they conceived would contribute to the benefit of their fellow men. (Prose, i. p. 247)

Jesus is admired for his benevolent deeds and teachings, with Shelley elsewhere in the essay explicitly referring to him as a ‘reformer’ three times.25 Bryan Shelley even goes as far as to refer to Shelley’s Christ as the ‘Jacobin Jesus’,26 and this view of Christ as a political reformer or revolutionary is strengthened through Shelley’s historicising of the figure, as he places emphasis on the difficult socio-political context of Jesus’s lifetime:

150  P. WHICKMAN The birth of the Christ occurred at a period which may be considered as a crisis the most stupendous and memorable in the progress of the human race. The splendor of the Roman name, the vital spirit of the Roman power had vanished. A race of despicable usurpers had assumed the dominion of the world, and power was no longer distributed but as the price of the basest artifices of slavery. Sentiments of liberty and heroism no longer lived but in the lamentations of those who had felt, but had survived their influence; even from those were speedily effaced. Accumulations of wealth and power were inordinately great. The most abject of mankind, freedmen, eunuchs, and every species of satellite attendant on a court became invested with inexhaustible resources. The consequences of this system speedily became manifest, and they accurately corresponded to the pernicious character of their cause. (Prose, i. p. 247)

Jesus Christ’s appearance signalled an attempt to challenge the political status quo and the social ills of his age. This focus on his ­socio-political situation helps to construe Jesus as a terrestrial human being t­emporally fixed in, and subject to, a specific historical context. Far from seeing Jesus’ teachings as irrelevant beyond his time, Shelley’s perceived awareness of historical context allows us to move away from the divine and ahistorical Jesus of Christian conception. Establishing Jesus as reacting to the earthly concerns of his day allows Shelley to draw parallels both between Jesus and other reformer figures, and between the ­ socio-political context of Jesus’ time and Shelley’s own. Because of this specific historical emphasis, Shelley is in fact more able to make Jesus’ teachings seem relevant, and a benefit, to a contemporary situation than otherwise offered by traditional Christianity. The ahistorical, divine Christ of Christian conception, conflated with a divine and infallible God transcending time, may appear to be applicable to multiple periods and contexts but he in fact speaks to none. He is fixed in temporal permanence, his doctrines are ‘a book sealed’ (‘England in 1819’, l. 11) unavailable for reinterpretation. That Christ was accused of blasphemy enables Shelley to draw a connection to the contemporary ‘blasphemers’ of his day. Indeed, in the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus’ crucifixion was for blasphemy, and Jesus is in fact explicitly accused of this in Matthew 26:65, Mark 14:64 and Luke 22:65.27 On 2 June 1812, Lord Ellenborough sentenced Daniel Isaac Eaton—approaching seventy at the time—to 18 months in Newgate prison for his selling and publication of the supposed third part of Paine’s ‘blasphemous’ The Age of Reason. In the week prior to this, on

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26 May, Eaton was placed in the prison’s pillory for one hour. In Eaton’s case, however, far from being pelted with vegetables, rotten fruit and faeces, Eaton was showered with cheers of support from a large crowd. As The Examiner reported a few days later: No sooner was Mr. Eaton brought out from prison, than he was greeted by a distinct cheer of approbation, which was repeated every ten minutes during the scene; and when he had been exhibited an hour, he was reconducted to prison amidst the waving of hats and cheering of the assembly! — During the period of his punishment, not a single voice or arm was raised against him; —on the contrary, those who were silent, appeared to take an interest in his sufferings; and those who spoke, —and there were many who did,—exclaimed against the harshness of the sentence, talked of its utter uselessness as to any good end, and of the folly of attempting to support the Christian Faith by the prison and the pillory.28

Not only did Eaton’s situation generate increased public sympathy for him and his cause, it even led to further dissemination of the offending text. As Michael T. Davis records ‘the narrative of [Eaton’s] trial was sold at the scene and those who were interested but had missed out “flocked to Eaton’s shop” to purchase a copy’.29 One handbill titled Behold the Man, distributed among the crowd, was particularly controversial. As Davis notes: Since [Eaton] had been convicted of a blasphemous libel, this bill was particularly daring with its heading an obvious allusion to the Biblical incident where Pontius Pilate paraded Christ in a crown of thorns before the Jews, exclaiming ‘behold the man’. In an indirect and irreverent manner, then, Eaton was comparing himself to Jesus Christ or, at least, to his public suffering. (p. 127)30

The comparison of Eaton to Christ was a practice not limited to Eaton and his followers alone. Not long after his sentence began, Shelley wrote to Godwin of Eaton’s harsh treatment on 11 June comparing the motive behind Eaton’s punishment, if not his character, to the punishments of Jesus Christ and Socrates: What do you think of Eaton’s trial & sentence. I mean not to insinuate that this poor bookseller has any characteristics in common with Socrates or Jesus Christ, still the spirit that pillories & imprisons him, is the same which brought them to an untimely end. (Letters, i. pp. 307–308)

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Shelley’s views led him to begin ‘addressing the public on the s­ubject’ (Letters, i. p. 308) resulting in his A Letter to Lord Ellenborough. Although pre-dating Queen Mab, the principles expressed remain a key part of much of Shelley’s later writing on both the treatment of those convicted or accused of blasphemy as well as his conception of Christ.31 In drawing the connection to the ‘blasphemy’ of Jesus, Shelley’s writing reflected much of the discourse and arguments expressed by other writers and commentators of the period. In 1817, a contributor known as Homely wrote an article entitled ‘What is Blasphemy?’ in the Unitarian periodical Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature commenting that ‘Of this horrid crime [i.e. blasphemy], Sir, our Saviour was frequently accused by the Jews, who were so blindly attached to their established Church’.32 Similarly, Theophilus Mann, a Quaker writing three years later in The Examiner in 1820, wrote ‘Our blessed lord himself was charged with [blasphemy], and suffered for it’.33 Even Lord Byron, who was himself accused of blasphemy34 for the first five Cantos of Don Juan (1819–1821) as well as his play Cain (1821), wrote an 1823 preface to Cantos VI, VII and VIII of the poem again invoking the name of Christ and, as with Shelley, Socrates: The hackneyed and lavished title of Blasphemer—which, with radical, liberal, Jacobin, reformer, &c. are the changes which the hirelings are daily ringing in the ears of those who will listen—should be welcome to all who recollect on whom it was originally bestowed. Socrates and Jesus Christ were put to death publicly as Blasphemers, and so have been and may be many who dare to oppose the most notorious abuses of the name of God and the mind of man.35

Byron—as with Shelley, Homely and Mann—establishes Jesus Christ as an example of an individual accused of blasphemy, thus discrediting it as a crime, undermining its linguistic power and, essentially, exposing it as ‘cant’. The fact that the ‘good’ Jesus Christ was termed a blasphemer highlights how blasphemy is simply a title that is ‘lavished’ upon an individual by his or her enemies. It is important, too, that Byron considers this ‘lavished title’ alongside those of a more ostensibly political nature such as ‘radical’, ‘Jacobin’ and ‘reformer’. In this sense, Jesus and Socrates, as blasphemers, thus become loosely associated with political reform.

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Nevertheless, while Byron and Shelley are certainly on the same side on this issue, Shelley takes this further. Byron engages in the typical Byronic practice of linguistic demystification without, in this instance, interrogating these terms in full. Byron goes on to say: With [a blasphemer’s] opinions I have nothing to do—they may be right or wrong—but he has suffered for them, and that very Suffering for ­conscience-sake will make more proselytes to Deism than the example of heterodox Prelates to Christianity, suicide Statesmen to oppression, or over-pensioned Homicides to the impious Alliance which insults the world with the name of ‘Holy’! (p. 297)

While expressing sympathy for those who are accused of being blasphemers, also suggesting that such persecution is a counterproductive measure in terms of public opinion, this sympathy does not extend to an appraisal of blasphemy, even whether ‘blasphemous’ opinions are ‘right or wrong’. Neither does Byron reflect on Jesus or Socrates as blasphemers beyond the fact they were so labelled by their enemies. He also does not unpick the relationship between the various ‘lavished titles’ of blasphemer, Jacobin and reformer. Although Shelley’s initial response to Eaton’s punishment as expressed in his letter to Godwin, in which he compares Eaton’s suffering to that of Christ, is simply a rhetorical one similar to Byron’s Preface, the resulting A Letter to Lord Ellenborough offers a far more thorough examination of both blasphemy and of the significance of its relationship to Jesus. Shelley uses the example of Jesus to emphasise the enlightening possibilities of blaspheming and to construct ‘blasphemers’ as potential political progressives or radicals. A Letter to Lord Ellenborough begins simply enough, with Shelley suggesting that Eaton was a victim of a mistrial. Ellenborough had instructed the jury to decide only whether Eaton had indeed published the text or not, without giving them the power to decide whether or not it was blasphemous, in defiance of Fox’s 1792 ‘Libel Act’. Shelley draws attention to this in a footnote to a question challenging the verdict’s constitutionality: ‘Wherefore did not you, my Lord, check such unconstitutional pleading, and desire the jury to pronounce the accused innocent or criminal?’ (p. 74). A key aspect of Shelley’s defence of Eaton is on the question of religious difference, with Shelley arguing that his prosecution resulted from simple religious disagreement between Eaton the Deist and Ellenborough the Christian:

154  P. WHICKMAN [Y]ou persecute him because his faith differs from yours. You copy the persecutors of Christianity in your actions and are an additional proof that your religion is as bloody, barbarous, and intolerant as theirs. If some deistical bigot in power (supposing such a character for the sake of illustration) should in dark and barbarous ages have enacted a statute making the profession of Christianity criminal, if you, my Lord, were a Christian bookseller and Mr. Eaton a judge, those arguments which you consider adequate to justify yourself for the sentence which you have passed must likewise suffice, in this suppositionary case to justify Mr. Eaton, in sentencing you to Newgate and the pillory for being a Christian. Whence is any right derived but that which power confers for persecution? (p. 74)

The analogy Shelley draws between Ellenborough’s actions and the persecutors of early Christianity reflects many of the arguments presented in periodicals of the time. An article appearing in The Examiner in 1818 for instance similarly frames blasphemy accusations as resulting from simple disagreement: Take two men of irritable mould, set them a talking about God, and thence necessarily about his attributes: the moment any difference of opinion has place between them,—and that moment will never be far distant, —each becomes, in the eyes of the other, a blasphemer: to each it therefore becomes clear that the other ought to be punished.36

Theophilus Mann, writing a couple of years later in 1820, establishes blasphemy prosecutions to simply be an example of the dominant, law-protected ‘Sect’ persecuting minority religious groups: Rulers may take cognizance of the conduct of men who break the laws, who unlawfully speak against, or ill-treat the persons of their fellow men; but if they are allowed to punish men for anything so indefinite as is the word Blasphemy, what Sect shall be safe? Except the Sect which happens to be established by law. At one period the world charged us (the Quakers) with Blasphemy; the Jews have often been so reviled, and thou knowest that the Unitarians have laboured under the same heavy imputations. The like foolish charge was brought by the Heathens against the early Christians, and by the Roman Catholics against our Protestant Reformers and thus thou seest the charge goes round.37

The listing of successive religious minorities who have been persecuted by the dominant religion as ‘blasphemers’—emphasising how ‘the charge

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goes round’—mirrors Shelley’s comments concerning how prevailing religious opinion is rooted in a specific historical context having simply superseded that which went before. Although Shelley says he ‘mean[s] not to compare Mr. Eaton with Socrates or Jesus’ (p. 79), what Eaton and Shelley’s Jesus do share is that both were punished for opposing the established religion, or prevailing religious opinion, of their respective eras. Shelley’s arguments here are central to his thinking on Christ’s teachings and he re-uses and develops these in his note to ‘I will beget a Son’ in Queen Mab: Jesus Christ was crucified because he attempted to supersede the ritual of Moses with something more moral and humane—his very judge made public acknowledgement of his innocence, but a bigoted and ignorant mob demanded the deed of horror. Barabbas, the murderer and traitor, was released. The meek reformer Jesus was immolated to the sanguinary Deity of the Jews. Time rolled on, time changed the situations, and with them, the opinions of men. […] Christianity is now the established religion; he who attempts to disprove it must behold murderers and traitors take precedence of him in public opinion, though, if his genius be equal to his courage, and assisted by a peculiar coalition of circumstances, future ages may exalt him to a divinity, and persecute others in his name, as he was persecuted in the name of his predecessor in the homage of the world. (pp. 77–78)

Shelley’s reference to the mutability of opinions over time echoes Thomas Paine’s comment in the first part of Rights of Man that ‘The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of men change also’.38 Christianity has become for Shelley the very institutional religion that Jesus came to reform and is clearly established as distinct from the Old Testament or ‘Jewish’ conception of God. His death is imagined, in fact, as a sacrifice to this very God in being ‘immolated to the sanguinary Deity of the Jews’. The exaltation of this martyred figure of Christ to a divinity, punished and persecuted for blaspheming the religious opinion of the day, leads in turn to the emergence of a faith that engages in the very persecution that ended the life of its founder. Although Shelley does not dwell too much on Eaton’s own religious opinions besides noting he is a deist and a victim of Christian persecution, Shelley’s Jesus is established as a reformer figure clearly intent on ‘supersed[ing]’ the old Mosaic code rather than simply defying it. This is

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an important aspect of his later writings on Jesus as seen both in Queen Mab but most particularly in ‘On Christianity’. There is also a clear political dimension in this stance, summed up by John Archer’s suggestion that the old ‘Mosaic code’ both for Shelley and Shelley’s Jesus was ‘one of the models for tyranny because it exemplifies a completely contingent, positive law posing as “divine law”’.39 The supposed infallibility of political and priestly power is precisely what Jesus came to reveal as false thus offering a firm challenge to hierarchy and hegemony. This challenge is closely connected to Shelley’s Jesus’ idea of God which is one far removed from both Old Testament and contemporary Christian conception. Jesus’ ‘God’ for Shelley is one more akin to the ‘Power’ of ‘Mont Blanc’ and ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’. As Shelley writes in ‘On Christianity’, ‘It is important to observe that the author of the Christian system had a conception widely differing from the gross imaginations of the vulgar relatively [sic] to the ruling Power of the Universe’ (Prose, i. p. 250). In particular, Shelley is at pains to stress that Jesus’ God is not an anthropomorphic deity ‘subject to passion’ but is instead an indefinable Power ‘mysteriously and illimitably pervading the frame of things’ (Prose, i. p. 250). Shelley adds: According to Jesus Christ God is neither the Jupiter who sends rain upon the earth, nor the Venus thro’ whom all living things are produced [rather] the word God according to the acceptation of Jesus Christ […] is the interfused and overruling Spirit of all the energy and wisdom included within the circle of existing things. (Prose, i. p. 250)

The reference to Jupiter is of course particularly significant in relation to Prometheus Unbound. For now, the way this understanding of God is highlighted as a challenge to existing political power is made evident in Shelley’s reading of Jesus’ teaching concerning spiritual fulfilment. Shelley interprets Matthew 5:8, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’, as referring to those who ‘have preserved internal sanctity of soul […] are the same in act as they are in desire’ and ‘who are faithful and sincere witnesses before the tribunal of their own judgement of all that passes within their mind’ (my emphasis, Prose, i. p. 250). In contrast to Queen Mab, where Christianity is seen to necessitate ‘supplicating the deity’, the true teaching of Jesus renounces the necessity of devotion to a monarchical God. This is clearly seen in Shelley’s understanding of Jesus’ philosophy of spiritual attainment beyond death:

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What! After death shall their awakened eyes behold the King of Heaven, shall they stand in awe before the golden throne on which he sits, and gaze upon the venerable countenance of the paternal Monarch. Is this the reward of the virtuous and the pure? These are the idle dreams of the visionary or the pernicious representations of impostors who have fabricated from the very materials of wisdom a cloak for their own dwarfish and imbecile conceptions. Jesus Christ has said no more than the most excellent philosophers have felt and expressed – that virtue is its own reward. (Prose, i. pp. 250–251)

Here Shelley distances Jesus from the teaching that good deeds are rewarded after death through deference to, and at the good grace of, a kingly God. This God is very much the one of Queen Mab, described as ‘prototype of human misrule’ who ‘sits / High in heaven’s realm, upon a golden throne, / Even like an earthly king’ (VI. ll. 105–107). Explicitly dismissing the notion of God as a ‘King’ and a ‘Monarch’ from Jesus’ teachings, Shelley also describes this God as ‘paternal’, emphasising the triple connection between patriarchal, political and religious tyranny. Elsewhere in the essay, Shelley determines Jesus to have been a figure working towards ‘the abolition of artificial distinctions among mankind’, and his doctrine of universal love, in which ‘you ought not to love the individuals of your domestic circle less, but to love those who exist beyond it more’, is seen to make ‘distinctions of property and power […] vanish’ (Prose, i. pp. 264, 269).40 Jesus is therefore less a fulfilment of Messianic prophecy and more a political radical, attacking political and social hierarchy by revealing the arbitrariness of social distinctions. At the heart of social inequality for Shelley is the malign influence of the ‘one shape of many names’ (Laon and Cythna, ll. 363, 3276), representative of the amorphous, corrupt power of which a monarchical and kingly God is its clearest exemplar. Shelley’s Jesus’ dismissal of such a figure is therefore not solely theological, but has significant political implications.

5.3   Prometheus Unbound: Suffering, Faith and Atonement in the Gospel According to Percy Bysshe Shelley Key to the dismissal of an anthropomorphised God is Shelley’s Jesus’ opposition to the vengeful God of the Old Testament, a being who inflicts suffering on his enemies. Shelley writes:

158  P. WHICKMAN The absurd and execrable doctrine of vengeance seems to have been contemplated in all its shapes by this great moralist [Jesus Christ] with the profoundest disapprobation. Nor would he permit the most venerable of names [i.e. God] to be perverted into a section for the meanest and most contemptible propensities incident to the nature of man. (Prose, i. p. 253)

Christians have misrepresented Jesus’ conception of this figure, noting how Jesus’ teachings concerning God’s benevolence are at odds with the eternal punishment of non-Christians and sinners beyond death: Jesus would hardly have cited as an example of all that is gentle and beneficent and compassionate a being who shall deliberately scheme to inflict on a large portion of the human race tortures indescribably intense and indefinitely protracted. (Prose, i. p. 253)

Shelley develops this argument to further show how far the doctrine of a punishing and vengeful being is at odds with the teachings and examples of Jesus Christ: Jesus Christ, [sic] instructed his disciples to be perfect as their father in Heaven is perfect, declaring at the same time his belief that human perfection required the refraining from revenge or retribution in any of its various shapes. The perfection of the human and the divine character is thus asserted to be the same: man by resembling God fulfils most accurately the tendencies of his nature, and God comprehends within itself all that constitutes human perfection. Thus God is a model thro’ which the excellence of man is to be measured, whilst the abstract perfection of the human character is the actual perfection of the divine. (Prose, i. p. 259)

Since this God is merely an abstract exemplar of human perfection, he is not a real, anthropomorphic being, and his apparent vengefulness does not correspond with the human perfection that Jesus’ doctrines teach humanity to attain. The perfect human for Shelley’s Jesus, and therefore the one who is closest to ‘God’, is essentially one who ‘turns the other cheek’. As Leigh Hunt claimed, for ‘his Christianity [Shelley] went to the gospel of St James, and to the Sermon on the Mount by Christ himself’.41 Shelley in fact misquotes part of this sermon, from Matthew 5:44–45, in ‘On Christianity:

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Love your enemies, bless those who curse you that ye may be the sons of your heavenly Father who makes the sun to shine on the good and on the evil, and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust. (p. 253)42

Jesus’ message in the Sermon on the Mount is one that challenges the notion of like for like punishment, or the ‘eye for eye, tooth for tooth’ doctrine of the Old Testament (Exodus 21:24). Jesus of course explicitly addresses and challenges this notion in the same sermon, saying ‘You have heard that it was said, “Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.” But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also’ (Matthew 5:38–39). On the other hand, punishment in the Old Testament for Shelley Is to be done, not because it is supposed (and the supposition would be sufficiently detestable) that the moral nature of the sufferer would be improved by his tortures. It is done because it is just to be done. My neighbour or my servant or my child has done me an injury and it is just that he should suffer an injury in return. Such is the doctrine which Jesus Christ summoned his whole resources of persuasions to oppose. (Prose, i. p. 253)

Although Shelley concedes that the Old Testament understanding of punishment does not imply that suffering is morally improving, there is nevertheless the implication that becomes a ‘just act’ if a punishment for sin. It is this that Jesus opposes for Shelley, and it is an attitude that helps explain Shelley’s interest in the Book of Job, as recorded by Mary Shelley in her notes to The Revolt of Islam in 1839.43 As Fuller explains, this was because it represented an attack on other ‘Old Testament wisdoms which affirm a theology of just suffering’.44 Despite Jesus’ teaching to the contrary, Shelley’s perception of the Christianity of his day is of a religion that not only perpetuates the notion of ‘just suffering’ as punishment for sin but is in fact a religion pre-occupied with suffering. This is not just because of its tyrannical persecution of ‘blasphemers’ or ‘unbelievers’, but because of its key belief in Christ’s crucifixion and his atonement for mankind’s sins predicates Christianity on a single event of immense physical suffering. This is a view that has persisted into the contemporary world, with commentators such as Jack Miles describing the crucifix as ‘a violently obscene icon’ that Elaine Scarry sees as having become ‘the primary sign and summary

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of the entire religion’.45 The violent image of a man nailed to a cross has become more than just a mere symbol of remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice but Christianity’s entire summation, far more than the simple ‘emblem’ of Prometheus Unbound. The connection drawn between the pain of the Crucifixion and the persecution of religious ‘outsiders’ is made evident, if a little tongue-in-cheek, in Shelley’s epistolary poem ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ (1820/1824). In a passing reference to the Spanish Inquisition, echoing, too, the ‘Iberian Priest’ of The Revolt of Islam, the poet considers the tortures that would have been committed by the Inquisition in the name of Christ, hoping to ‘convert’ English Protestants had the Armada of 1588 succeeded: […] that man of God, St. Dominic, To convince Atheist, Turk, or Heretic; Or those in philanthropic council met, Who thought to pay some interest for the debt They owed to Jesus Christ for their salvation, By giving a faint foretaste of damnation To Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser and the rest Who made our land an island of the blest, […] With thumbscrews, wheels, with tooth and spike and jag. (Poems, iii. ll. 25–32, 35)

Shelley is doing more than simply noting the atrocities carried out in Christ’s name here, however, and in fact draws together three seemingly disparate threads. As well as listing the instruments used to inflict suffering on those the Inquisition hoped to convert in the final line, the poet considers this physical earthly torture to be a ‘faint foretaste of damnation’ to which, in Christian doctrine, ‘sinners’ and ‘non-believers’ are subject after death. The reference to torture as a means of ‘pay[ing] some interest for the debt / […] owed to Jesus Christ for their salvation’ though is a particularly provocative critique of a key aspect of Christian doctrine. Not only is Christianity predicated on Christ’s crucifixion, an event of physical suffering, such a misplaced focus gives rise to the perceived tyranny of historical Christianity. The idea of ‘paying a debt’ may seem curiously vengeful, but the fixation on the suffering body of Christ also serves to embody abstract notions of divinity within the flesh of a man.

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Since Christian salvation is predicated on the celebration or commemoration of an act of torture for Shelley, it is an inevitability that the religion’s followers would themselves become persecutory. Prometheus Unbound, a drama concerning the sacrifice and suffering of its protagonist, is Shelley’s attempt to stage a ‘revolution’ like the one begun by Jesus Christ, but without making the same mistakes as Christianity. In Hellas, Christ is described as a ‘Promethean Conqueror’ (l. 212), and it is easy to see how Prometheus in Prometheus Unbound indeed shares attributes with Jesus Christ. Not only are Prometheus’ epiphanies and his peaceful resistance easily paralleled with the teachings of Shelley’s Jesus, Prometheus Unbound’s socio-political and philosophical themes are certainly analogous to those encountered in Shelley’s other works. Prometheus Unbound, while containing ‘numerous strains of atheist thought and imagery’, nevertheless has been read as possessing a curiously religious purpose.46 W.B. Yeats said of the work, after having read it for the first time in a number of years, that ‘it seems to me to have an even more certain place than I had thought among the sacred books of the world’.47 Yeats’ comment is more than simple appreciative melodramatic praise. Indeed, as Alan Gregory puts it, Prometheus Unbound works as a piece of revisionist scripture: Despite Shelley’s aversion to didactic poetry, Prometheus Unbound is decidedly instructive. Much of it is proclamation, and it ends in the mode of sermonic exhortation. It appears that humanity cannot do without Scripture and Shelley has set about writing a new one, the authority of which, because it is in harmony with human hope, good, and destiny, requires no threatenings.48

This new ‘Gospel’, Gregory goes on to say, is a ‘reworking of the Christian virtues of “faith, hope and love”’ in which ‘Shelley ransacks the imagery of biblical hope and Christian salvation to create his humane, atheist vision’ (pp. 109–110). It would be more precise, however, to say that it is the doctrines of Christ specifically rather than the Christian religion more broadly that Shelley ‘ransacks’, as he attempts to move beyond the trappings of establishment religion corrupt Christianity and to connect with the benevolent, humanist and reformist sentiments of Jesus the man. The Classical source material and allegorical style of Prometheus Unbound meant it did not suffer the same legal or censorious

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attention as Queen Mab or Laon and Cythna but it is nevertheless easy to discern where it may have run into trouble. As Bryan Shelley has pointed out, the eponymous character is a ‘Titan to whom Shelley ascribes both Christ-like and diabolical characteristics’ (p. 105). The association of Christ with Satan certainly risks offence, but it is important to note that these ‘diabolical characteristics’ are those of Milton’s Satan rather than the antagonist of Christian myth. Indeed ‘[a]lthough Prometheus Unbound is based on the drama of Aeschylus, several biblical and Miltonic sources have a bearing on the opening act’ (p. 104). As Shelley writes in his oft-quoted preface The only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgement, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage and majesty and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandisement, which in the Hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest. The character of Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those who consider that magnificent fiction with a religious feeling, it engenders something worse. But Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends. (Poems, ii. pp. 472–473)

Shelley does not highlight Prometheus’ similarity to Jesus in the Preface, and the Titan is comparable to Satan only up to a point. Shelley is no different to other Romantic poets, such as Blake, in identifying Satan as the ‘hero’ of Paradise Lost. However, he remains a flawed character whose personal ambition, hubris and, crucially, desire for revenge make him a poor exemplar of heroic resistance to seemingly omnipotent tyranny. By contrast, Shelley’s Prometheus is a superior example because he eventually comes to resist Jupiter’s tyranny through humility and without resorting to revenge or personal ambition. Peter A. Schock notes the quasi-Satanic nature of Shelley’s Prometheus to stem from the increasing ambivalence with which Shelley envisioned the means of political and social change after 1817. The center of this concern is found in the syncretic construction of the Titan, where Shelley merges Prometheus with Milton’s Satan through allusions that emphasize the

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violent rhetoric of the latter. By satanizing Prometheus, Shelley produces an unstable mythic compound displaying his dual efforts – to incorporate into the hero the portent of insurrectionary vengeance while refining it into the shape of ‘some unimagined change’, as the preface puts it, in social conditions.49

For Schock, Prometheus’ Satanism aligns him with the politically charged Satanic figures associated—by their choice or otherwise—with political radicals of the 1790s.50 At the same time, Shelley’s anxiety of the violence suggested by such a figure necessitates a softening of him. As Schock contends, this explains Shelley’s ‘compound[ing]’ of his Satanic Prometheus with the Prometheus of Aeschylus. A further, necessary mythic source for Shelley’s Prometheus is the peaceful, non-vengeful Jesus Christ. The drama, like Paradise Lost, begins in medias res, with Prometheus bound to a precipice in the Caucasus and his opening speech echoing Milton’s Satan. Not only is it in blank verse and situated after the initial apparent ‘defeat’ of the protagonist, there are also clear thematic echoes of Satan’s equivalent opening speech in Milton’s poem: Monarch of Gods and Daemons, and all Spirits But One, who throng those bright and rolling worlds Which Thou and I alone of living things Behold with sleepless eyes! Regard this Earth Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou Requitest for knee-worship, prayer and praise, And toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts, With fear and self-contempt and barren hope. (I. l. 1–8)

The description of Jupiter here appears to be as Timothy Webb notes ‘shaped, in part at least, by the Jehovah whom Shelley [and Shelley’s Jesus] encountered in the Old Testament’.51 Shelley indeed uses the very name ‘Jupiter’ in his ‘Essay on Christianity’ to describe a figure that is most unlike the God described by Jesus (Prose, i. p. 250). Jupiter has made slaves of the world and, like the Christian requirement of ‘supplicating the deity’ as seen in Queen Mab, demands ‘knee-worship’ from his subjects. Prometheus’ depiction of Jupiter’s omnipotence, however, is not one that determines Jupiter’s de facto reality. Instead, Prometheus establishes that this is a façade or a manufactured omnipotence fabricated

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by Jupiter’s tyranny. Prometheus is the ‘One’ who Jupiter does not control and ‘with sleepless eyes’ sees Jupiter’s power for what it is. This defiance of seemingly omnipotent power is similarly central to Satan’s opening speech of Paradise Lost, in which he refers to the ‘Tyranny of Heaven’, and scorns God’s demand for supplication: […]To bow and sue for grace With suppliant knee, and deify his power Who from the terror of this arm so late Doubted his empire, that were low indeed, That were an ignominy and shame beneath This downfall; (my emphasis, I. ll. 111–116)52

The very ‘suppliant’ worship of God is what ‘deif[ies]’ him. Although Satan notes how God militaristically ‘the stronger proved / […] with his Thunder’ (I. ll. 92–93), his claim that his rebellion led to battles in Heaven that ‘shook [God’s] throne’ (I. l. 105) suggests that God’s power is not infallible and can be challenged. The Son, however, later reveals that Satan did not in fact trouble God’s position, revealing that Satan is lying in his first speech: ‘under his burning wheels / The steadfast empyrean shook throughout, / All but the throne itself of God’ (my emphasis, VI. ll. 832–834). Milton’s deity is therefore understood to be genuinely omnipotent, unlike the aspirational, false omnipotence of Shelley’s Jupiter. There are also two key differences between Satan and Prometheus. The first is Satan’s infamous hubris; his distaste at having to bow down to God is because of his personal ‘ignominy and shame’. It is a stand, therefore, made not on behalf of others but one born of his personal egoism and ambition. The second difference lies with his methods, shown by his actions throughout Paradise Lost, and his motivation for continuing his resistance to God: […]What though the field be lost? All is not lost; the unconquerable will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield: And what is else not to be overcome? That glory never shall his wrath or might Extort from me. (I. ll. 105–111)

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Satan’s will and firm resistance is based on his hatred for God and desire for revenge. This is in stark contrast to Prometheus who, despite the severe torture at Jupiter’s hands, loses his hatred and begins in fact to feel pity: […] yet to me welcome is Day and Night, Whether one breaks the hoar frost of the morn, Or starry, dim, and slow, the other climbs The leaden-coloured East; for then they lead Their wingless, crawling Hours, one among whom —As some dark Priest hales the reluctant victim— Shall drag thee, cruel King, to kiss the blood From these pale feet, which then might trample thee If they disdained not such a prostrate slave.— Disdain? ah no, I pity thee. What ruin Will hunt thee undefended through the wide Heaven! How will thy soul, cloven to its depth with terror, Gape like a Hell within! I speak in grief Not exultation, for I hate no more As then, ere misery made me wise.—The Curse Once breathed on thee I would recall. (I. ll. 44–59)

For many critics, this early passage is nevertheless the ‘crucial ­turning-point of the poem’ (Poems, ii. p. 480 n) depicting, as Stuart Sperry puts it, ‘the hero’s change of heart, from hatred toward love’.53 For Ronald Duerksen, Prometheus’ success in the drama is the sudden realisation of his own ‘moral failure’ in his earlier disdaining of Jupiter, enabling Prometheus to articulate pity for his tormenter.54 In spite of his tortures, Prometheus patiently waits for ‘the Hour’ in which Jupiter shall fall rather than violently seeking his downfall; he declares that he will ‘hate no more’ and wishes to ‘recall’ the ‘Curse’ he levelled. In defeat, Jupiter is to ‘kiss the blood / From these pale feet’ which, if they did ‘not disdain’ such a ‘prostrate slave’, would ‘trample’ him. This is not a threat of physical domination by Prometheus. Rather, especially since Prometheus’ feet are still bound at this point, the ‘battle’ against Jupiter is one of Blakean ‘mental fight’.55 The image of pale feet covered in blood importantly recalls Christ on the cross. Bryan Shelley, however, sees these lines (I. ll. 49–51) as echoing Psalm 2:12: ‘Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath

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is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him’.56 Although a pre-Christian, Old Testament reference to ‘the Son’ rather than Jesus, this allusion nevertheless strengthens the connection between Prometheus and Christ. Despite being bound and seemingly defeated, Prometheus senses victory. This ‘victory in defeat’ is encountered in another Romantic treatment of the Prometheus myth, Byron’s poem ‘Prometheus’ (1816), where the protagonist is praised for being able to ‘mak[e] Death a Victory’ (l. 59).57 The concept of a victory in, or over, death is commonly associated with the Christian doctrine of Christ’s resurrection. Prometheus’ eventual achievement in Shelley’s drama then is obtained more through his Christ-like rather than his Satanic qualities. The power of the Christ myth in Western thought means that, as Jack Miles puts it, ‘there remains lodged deep in the political consciousness of the West a readiness to believe that the apparent loser may be the real winner unrecognized’ (p. 4). In Prometheus Unbound, it is perhaps more accurate to describe the apparent victor as the real loser. Following his torture and torment at the hands of the Furies, Prometheus declares ‘though dread revenge / This is defeat, fierce King, not victory!’ (I. ll. 641–642). Jupiter’s torture of Prometheus as punishment for his rebellion is self-defeating and is a mirror to the vengeful violence of bloody revolution. As Prometheus declares ‘The sights with which thou torturest gird my soul / With new endurance’ (I. ll. 643–644). That this episode follows Prometheus’ final temptation at the hands of the Furies is significant. To reiterate, the Furies torture Prometheus by showing him the image of the suffering Christ, the implication being that Prometheus’ sufferings are to lead to a similar outcome and the establishment of a tyrannical faith system. Despite the benevolent example of Jesus, as the final Fury is keen to remind Prometheus, mankind has remained far from his example: In each human heart terror survives The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear All that they would disdain to think were true: Hypocrisy and custom make their minds The fanes of many a worship, now outworn. They dare not devise good for man’s estate, And yet they know not that they do not dare. The good want power, but to weep barren tears. The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.

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The wise want love, and those who love want wisdom; And all best things are thus confused to ill. Many are strong and rich,—and would be just— But live among their suffering fellow men As if none felt: they know not what they do. (I. ll. 618–631)

These evils, the Fury notes, are ‘unheard, unseen’ (I. l. 617), lying within the heart of man. Yet, in this ‘final temptation to despair’ (Poetry & Prose, p. 229 n) the Fury crucially echoes Jesus’ forgiving words on the cross: ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do’ (Luke 23:34). Many critics have interpreted this Fury’s echo of Christ as deliberate; it is a mocking ‘cruel irony’ (Poems, ii. p. 515 n) or, as Webb puts it, an attempt to catch Prometheus in an ‘imprisoning negative’ or as an example of ‘historical nihilism’.58 Significantly, however, this temptation to despair is a failure. It is this very line, ‘they know not what they do’, the final line of the final temptation, that essentially ensures Prometheus’ victory: Prometheus Thy words are like a cloud of wingèd snakes; And yet, I pity those they torture not. Fury Thou pitiest them? I speak no more! (I. l. 632–634)

The fact that Prometheus immediately turns to pity after the echo of Christ’s line is striking. While the Fury intends this allusion to mock the futility of Jesus’ sufferings, Prometheus recognises Jesus’ words as an exemplary and supreme act of forgiveness. The Fury’s listing of humanity’s faults punctuated with Christ’s inspirational words in fact creates hope and ‘new endurance’ within Prometheus. If humanity is unaware of its failings, since they ‘know not what they do’, this allows for the possibility of future change. Mankind can be taught the error of its ways and change for the better. From a position of apparent victory, Jupiter’s torments via his Furies sow the seeds of his defeat. Like the Furies’ earlier echo of Wordsworth’s The Excursion, intended to tempt Prometheus to despair, the allusion in fact reminds the poet/Prometheus of the value of the words echoed, and is in fact encouraged to seek inspiration where he can.

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Prometheus had to himself learn forgiveness by revoking the curse he placed on Jupiter. In his opening speech, Prometheus wishes ‘The Curse / Once breathed on thee I would recall’ (I. ll. 58–59). The term ‘recall’ means both remembering the curse but also revoking it, with ‘recall’ and ‘revoke’ possessing a shared etymology. The repeat of the curse by Jupiter’s phantasm later in the act reveals that this revocation, as the term suggests, necessitates a ‘re-voicing’. The sufferings wished upon Jupiter importantly allude to both Jesus and Milton’s Satan: But thou who art the God and Lord—O thou Who fillest with thy soul this world of woe, To whom all things of Earth and Heaven do bow In fear and worship—all prevailing foe! I curse thee! let a sufferer’s curse Clasp thee, his torturer, like remorse, Till thine Infinity shall be A robe of envenomed agony, And thine Omnipotence a crown of pain To cling like burning gold round thy dissolving brain. Heap on thy soul by virtue of this Curse Ill deeds, then be thou damned, beholding good. (I. ll. 282–293)

Whereas Everest and Matthews note the connection to Paradise Lost I. ll. 209–220 (Poems, ii. p. 494 n), the final lines also echo Satan’s declaration of his unholy revenge and mission against God: If then his providence Out of our evil seek to bring forth good, Our labour must be to pervert that end, And out of good still to find means of evil. (I. ll. 162–165)

Satan’s wish to turn good to evil is echoed by Prometheus’ curse of Jupiter that similarly confuses good and evil; ‘beholding good’ is to lead to ‘ill deeds’. Prometheus’ curse is a vengeful and self-pitying one. He claims that, because he is a ‘sufferer’, his ‘sufferer’s curse’ becomes that more powerful. This essentially encapsulates a doctrine of revenge and just suffering that Prometheus must, and ultimately does, learn to repudiate. The image of ‘the crown of pain’ and the ‘robe of envenomed agony’—importantly levelled at Jupiter—recall Christ’s crown of thorns

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and the scarlet robe of the Passion (Luke 23:11; Matthew 27:28–29). This allusion is significant. Webb notes how at this point in the play, Prometheus and Jupiter are identified. It is therefore entirely appropriate that, when Prometheus asks to hear the curse which he once invoked on Jupiter, the words of that curse are spoken by the Phantasm of Jupiter himself. Prometheus cannot recall them since he has now cast out hatred but the Phantasm is more than an ironical dramatic device; its appearance actually suggests that in cursing Jupiter, Prometheus became identified with him. (pp. 147–148)

Prometheus’ vengeful curse, symbolic of political revolutionary violence, is of the same sentiment that leads the replacement of one tyrant for another. In cursing and wishing pain upon Jupiter, Prometheus becomes the very being he opposes. Indeed, Webb sees Prometheus Unbound as ‘a critique of violent revolution, the crude instinct to hit back as soon as one is hurt – a reaction which will only help to perpetuate the meaningless cycle of violence’ that was observed in the failure of the French Revolution (p. 208). The fact that the imagined sufferings of Jupiter resemble Christ’s is a similar reminder of how good is turned to ill. To ‘pay a debt’ for the sufferings of Christ is to be identified with his murderers and serves to identify him with the deity he opposed; the very deity whose followers put him to death. Like the rebel Prometheus’ potential to become a new tyrant, the benevolent doctrines of Jesus Christ have become perverted into a bigoted faith system. This episode reveals the connection between religious and political power; Jupiter is to Prometheus as the Old Testament God is to Jesus. In Prometheus’s original voicing of the curse, he ‘knew not what he did’. Hearing the curse again, Prometheus is able to learn of his error and repents: It doth repent me: words are quick and vain; Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine. I wish no living thing to suffer pain. (I. ll. 303–305)

While Prometheus was previously blind or ‘eyeless in hate’ (I. l. 9) he has now seen the error of his ways. The rhyming of ‘pain’ with ‘vain’ underscores Prometheus’ rejection of a doctrine of just suffering, as if all acts of violence are inevitably misguided and useless.

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The revocation of the curse ensures that Prometheus does not become the new embodied deity and political tyrant. In fact, none of the characters take power at all. This is an essential element of the drama, asserting the play’s philosophy of the corrupting influence of power. For Stuart Sperry, Prometheus represents an odd kind of hero. He is peculiarly passive and does not actively work to enact change and serves simply as the medium for it. It is in fact Demogorgon, for instance, who finally overthrows Jupiter while Prometheus relies on Hercules to free him from his bonds. Sperry writes: Shelley’s presentation leaves open the view of his hero as the necessary medium and earliest expression of universal change, as distinct from the primary cause of that change. […] It is Prometheus’ task to endure, to preserve the vital spark of human independence from extinction. It is not in his power either to release himself or to kindle the new blaze.59

Instead, ‘Prometheus is only a link in a larger chain of causality’ (p. 246), recalling Shelley’s doctrine of Necessity. Although Sperry is dismissive of ‘critical attempts to convert Prometheus into a Christ figure virtually from the opening of the play’ (p. 246), he is thinking more of the Christian Christ rather than the Jesus of Shelley’s conception. Shelley’s Jesus is, after all, simply a man and not the Messianic, divine hero of Christianity. Jesus does not single-handedly enact the changes or reforms he preaches for Shelley, and neither does his crucifixion entail supernatural power serving to atone for man’s sins. The implication of Sperry’s argument is that Prometheus does not embody a form of divine salvation within himself. Instead, he is simply an aspect of this change or the medium through which transformation works to influence others. To see Prometheus as like Shelley’s Jesus then is to actually help support Sperry’s position. The drama achieves the desired removal of Jupiter from power without enshrining a new power in his stead. For Earl R. Wasserman Prometheus Unbound ‘ridicules Christianity’s belief that the Godhead can be embodied’.60 Alongside this, it also mocks ‘the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation’ (p. 98). It is worth noting, for instance, that Demogorgon, or ‘people monster’, the agent by whom Jupiter is overthrown, is not an embodied and physical being. Upon first encountering Demogorgon, Panthea says

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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—yet we feel it is A living spirit. (II. iv. ll. 2–7)

Demogorgon, then, is not only like Milton’s Death—‘If shape it might be call’d that shape had none / Distinguishable in member’ (Paradise Lost II. ll. 667–668)—but also the ‘awful Power’ of ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and ‘Mont Blanc’ that is ‘unseen’ yet still ­present. It is a non-deity and a non-physical essence. The defeat of Jupiter by this non-embodied power is not only a political revolution therefore but also a philosophical and religious one. It represents a challenge to the perceived divinity and omnipotence of a monarchical and anthropomorphised God. At Jupiter’s defeat by Demogorgon, as he realises Demogorgon’s power, Jupiter begs for mercy: […] Mercy! Mercy! No pity, no release no respite!… O, That thou wouldst make mine enemy my judge. Even where he hangs, seared by my long revenge On Caucasus—he would not doom me thus. Gentle, and just, and dreadless, is he not The monarch of the world? What then art thou? (III. i. ll. 63–69)

This alludes to Satan’s appeals to Christ in Paradise Regained. Satan, fearing the tyranny and vengeance of God, hopes the new ‘reign’ of the Son ‘would stand between me and [his] Father’s ire’ (III. 216, 219).61 Jupiter here, like Satan with the Son, recognises the power of Prometheus’ Christ-like forgiveness and mercy. As a result, Jupiter’s earlier declaration, ‘I am omnipotent’ (III. i. l. 3), is proven to be false. While it is Prometheus who resembles Satan at the play’s opening, it is Jupiter who most resembles Milton’s antagonist by the third act. This shared likeness may associate the victim with his persecutor but it also helps to remind us what Prometheus would have become had he followed his more Satanic rather than Christ-like instincts. Jupiter, by contrast, is the corrupt, vengeful Satan. Prometheus’ resemblance to Satan is of the heroic figure of the early books of Paradise Lost, while Jupiter resembles the fully corrupted figure of Paradise Regained. Jupiter is unable to comprehend that there should be no ruler following

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his defeat, asking whether Prometheus is ‘The monarch of the world’. As Demogorgon replies however, ‘The tyranny of Heaven none may retain, / Or reassume, or hold, succeeding thee’ (III. i. ll. 57–58). Demogorgon and Prometheus’ revolution, therefore, is one that enshrines no anthropomorphised power in Jupiter’s stead. For Shelley, this idealised revolution is precisely the opposite of what occurred in mainstream Christianity’s conception of Christ. Jesus’ reforming words and example have not only failed to inspire humanity fully for the better, but they have led to the perception of Jesus as God— or power—Incarnate. He becomes, therefore, the physical embodiment of the very power structure he sought to oppose. Wassermann emphasises this issue of embodiment or incarnation as central to the drama, again asserting the association of Prometheus with Jesus: To Shelley Christ is the highest form of mind in the realm of being, not the personification of Power; and therefore he is properly represented in Prometheus. The error of Jupiter, the disfigured shadow of Mind, is not only his belief that he himself is Power; it is also Christianity’s error of believing that its fictional creation is Power and that this Power can ever be incarnate as the Son in the realm of being. (p. 99)

While Jupiter is not the personification of power, this does not mean Prometheus is either. Similarly, if Shelley’s Jesus reveals the falsity of an anthropomorphic God, that does not mean he is God in its place. This connection between Jupiter/Prometheus and God/Jesus is more than simply analogous or inferred since the issue of Jesus’ physical embodiment is a key part of the Fury torment scene. Upon being shown the image of the suffering Jesus, Prometheus says: Remit the anguish of that lighted stare; Close those wan lips; let that thorn-wounded brow Stream not with blood—it mingles with thy tears! Fix, fix those tortured orbs in peace and death, So thy sick throes shake not that crucifix, So those pale fingers play not with thy gore. O, horrible! Thy name I will not speak, It hath become a curse. (I. ll. 597–604)

Prometheus may simply be shielding his eyes from the horrific suffering of Jesus on the cross, yet the successive negatives become imperatives;

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not only, it seems, are they aimed at Jesus but those who follow him. While these negatives are certainly sympathetic—Prometheus wishes ‘peace and death’ upon Jesus so his sufferings continue ‘not’—they are also a call to end the fixation and focus on Jesus’ physical body. In particular, the call for Jesus to ‘shake not that crucifix, / So those pale fingers play not with thy gore’ not only alludes to Macbeth’s command to Banquo’s Ghost but also the appearance of Jesus before his disciples following the resurrection in John 20:19–31.62 As Jesus appears, he ‘shewed unto them his hands and his side. Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the Lord’ (20:20). Jesus here demonstrates his divinity by ironically emphasising his wounded human physicality. It is upon seeing the wounds that the disciples are themselves able to declare him to be ‘Lord’. When the disciples tell this to their fellow disciple Thomas, who was absent at Jesus’ initial appearance, he does not believe them and declares he will not believe until ‘I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side’ (20:25). Jesus later appears to Thomas and says to him ‘Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing’ (20:27). Upon doing as Jesus asked, Thomas replies ‘My Lord and my God’ (20:28). Despite the fact that it is physical verification of the wounds that leads all the disciples to declare Jesus as their Lord and God, Jesus says ‘Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed’ (20:28). Jesus purposefully highlights the physicality of his wounds as empirical evidence of his resurrection and divinity yet, on the other hand, argues for the superiority of blind faith. Immediately after this passage, the Gospel author says ‘you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name’ (20:31). Salvation is to be achieved through belief and faith in Christ as Son of God rather than anything learnt through his doctrines or reformist sentiments. The episode in fact forms part of the then nascent Christian doctrine of Jesus as God and thus God Incarnate, embodied in a physical shape. Prometheus Unbound’s allusion to, and subsequent dismissal of, this episode is a challenge to the doctrine of Christ as anthropomorphised salvation. By attempting not to focus on Jesus’ wounds and physical body, Prometheus downplays the doctrine of atonement for sin suggesting instead that any positive influence of Jesus be confined to his good

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deeds and teachings. Like Sperry’s conception of Prometheus’ heroism, this Jesus does not himself bring about the change or salvation he preaches. He is simply the first expression of change serving as its necessary catalyst rather than embodying it within himself. Not only does Prometheus call for a movement away from the fixation on the physical Jesus, Prometheus also avoids calling him by name: ‘Thy name I will not speak / It hath become a curse’ (I. ll. 603–604). In fact, the name ‘Jesus Christ’ does not appear in Prometheus Unbound at all. Prometheus’ aversion to naming Jesus aligns with Shelley’s broader scepticism of nomenclature as consistently argued throughout this book. By refusing to name him, Prometheus can disassociate Jesus Christ from the religion that bears his name. Moreover, the fact that this name ‘has become a curse’ is not only suggestive of blasphemous swearing but also refers back to Prometheus’ recently revoked curse of Jupiter. Not only did Prometheus’ curse allude to Jesus’ sufferings—Jesus did indeed therefore become a ‘curse’63—it also threatened to turn Prometheus into the very tyrant he opposed. The ‘curse’ of Jesus’s name then is clearly paralleled by Prometheus’ curse of Jupiter; the fact that the latter was revoked is a way of ensuring that Prometheus’s rebellion does not suffer the same fate as Jesus’s own, that had ultimately led to the creation of Christianity. In language reminiscent of Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna, the nature of this oppressive faith is revealed as Prometheus’ speech develops: […] I see, I see The wise, the mild, the lofty, and the just, Whom thy slaves hate for being like to thee, Some hunted by foul lies from their heart’s home, An early-chosen, late-lamented home, As hooded ounces cling to the driven hind; Some linked to corpses in unwholesome cells; Some—hear I not the multitude laugh loud?— Impaled in lingering fire: and mighty realms Float by my feet like sea-uprooted isles, Whose sons are kneaded down in common blood By the red light of their own burning homes—(I. ll. 604–615)

This hyperbolic depiction of the terror that Christianity inflicts is crucially levelled at those who are most ‘like to thee’, that is, Jesus Christ. These are ‘The wise, the mild, the lofty and the just’. Although

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Prometheus does not quite explicitly identify blasphemy with these positive attributes, Christianity’s persecution of so-called ‘blasphemers’ is nevertheless persecution akin to that which Jesus himself felt. In his defiance of the established religious and political order of the day and his challenge to the notion of an infallible anthropomorphic power, Jesus is a blasphemer. The Church then has become precisely what Christ came to abolish; a vengeful, persecuting faith system. Prometheus’ victory in the drama is one that avoids the establishment of such a system. Alan Gregory’s suggestion that Prometheus Unbound is a piece of revisionist scripture ending with a ‘sermonic exhortation’ is borne out by Demogorgon’s speech at the close of the drama: To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night;     To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;    Neither to change, nor falter nor repent: This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory. (IV. ll. 570–578)

Demogorgon’s message, of love, forgiveness and endurance, reflects the qualities of Jesus. Where this differs from Christian doctrine however is the absence of ‘Faith’, with greater emphasis stressed on the more applicably secular ‘Hope’. This victory is crucially not achieved through Prometheus himself but the practice of individuals. Such behaviour is ‘like [Prometheus’] glory’ but it is distinct from him. In this way, Demogorgon avoids the development of a faith system in Prometheus’ name as it is not in ‘supplication’ to this figure that one is to succeed. Rather, it is in emulating his example.

Notes



1. Ryan, Robert. 1997. The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 209 and White, Harry. 1982. ‘Relative Means and End in Shelley’s Social-Political Thought’. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 22:4, p. 625. 2.  Shelley, Bryan. 1994. Shelley and Scripture: The Interpreting Angel. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 57.

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3. To say Jesus is necessarily a ‘character’ in these works would be misleading. On the other hand, to say Jesus is simply alluded or referred to would not illustrate his clear thematic significance. 4. Shelley’s frequent references to ‘thorns’ echoes Christ’s crown of thorns on the one hand, yet, simultaneously, these can often be read as echoes of the wood of thorns from Canto XIII of Dante’s Inferno. See, for instance, ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (l. 54) and Hellas (ll. 213–214). 5. Shelley’s comment here echoes the first part of Paine’s The Age of Reason: ‘Nothing that is here said can apply, even with the most distant disrespect, to the real character of Jesus Christ. He was a virtuous and an amiable man. The morality that he preached and practiced was of the most benevolent kind [whose teachings have] not been exceeded by any’. Paine, Thomas. 1984. The Age of Reason, Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, p. 12. 6. Browning, Robert. 1981. The Complete Works of Robert Browning with Variant Readings and Annotations, volume. 5. Ed. King, R. A. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, p. 147. 7. Browning’s comments are easy to read as an example of Robert Ryan’s critique of Shelley’s readers ‘who want their religion and their favorite lyric poet too.’ See Ryan, Robert. 1997. The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 193. 8. Ryan, Robert. The Romantic Reformation, p. 195 and Fuller, David. 1993. ‘Shelley and Jesus’. Durham University Journal 85, p. 211. 9. The passage from the poem itself, spoken by Ahasuerus, posits Christ’s crucifixion as saving only an elect few and enshrining their and God’s/ Moses’ hegemony. See VII. ll. 134–157. 10. Note to ‘I will beget a son’, (VII. ll. 135–136). 11. William Smith had also accused Southey of being a ‘renegado’ over the Wat Tyler affair of 1817. 12.  ‘An Act to Relieve Persons Who Impugn the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity’, 53 Geo. III c. 160. 13. The essay’s emphasis on Christ rather than Christianity more generally in fact suggests that a more appropriate title would be ‘On the Doctrines of Christ’, which Murray gives as a title to a fragment related to the essay. See Prose, pp. 272–273. 14. In Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode, the location of Heaven—or ‘God who is our home’ (l. 66)—is in the east, which corresponds with Hellas’ ‘orient planet’. Although, throughout mortal life, ‘The Youth, who daily farther from the East / Must travel’ (ll. 71–72), suggests a movement ‘away’ from the east, this is still figured as a return in the poem. P ­ re-existence and post-existence are both located in this eastern, immortal realm. See

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Wordsworth, William. 2000. The Major Works. Ed. Gill, Stephen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 299. 15. Shelley also notes the distance of the Sun from the Earth as ‘95,000,000 miles’ in his notes to Queen Mab which, if inaccurate, nevertheless demonstrates a keen interest in and knowledge of astronomy. See Poems, i. p. 360. 16. As Reiman and Fraistat have noted, the redacted paragraph was first published in H. Buxton Forman’s ‘Aldine Edition’ of Shelley’s poetry (Poetry & Prose, p. 432 n). See Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1892. Shelley’s Poetical Works (‘Aldine Edition’), volume 4. Ed. Forman, Harry Buxton. London: George Bell, pp. 41–42. 17. See Ollier’s first edition, Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1822. Hellas: A Lyrical Drama. London: Charles and James Ollier, Bond Street. ll. 1090–1095, p. 464. 18. Although Christianity is posited as the enemy of Liberty, it is worth noting that Martin Luther is seen as attempting to catch Liberty’s ‘wakening glance’ (l. 141) in the poem, implying again that it is primarily unreformed Catholic Christianity that Shelley takes most issue with. 19. Shelley may have had the term ‘hellene’ in mind when writing on Grecian Paganism. This was a term used in the early Christian Church to describe non-Christians and is similar to ‘pagan’, or ‘gentile’ in Judaism. As the name suggests, ‘hellene’ found its origins with early Christians attempting to distinguish themselves from followers of Greek polytheism, even if this eventually became more widely applied to all non-Christians. The term is also used in some translations of the New Testament occurring, for instance, in Mark 7:26 and John 12:20–23. 20. It was Madeleine Callaghan who first alerted me to this Wordsworthian echo. See Callaghan, Madeleine. 2020. ‘Shelley’s Excursion.’ Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 60:4 (in press). 21. Wordsworth, William. 1814. The Excursion. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, p. 412. 22. Shelley, Mary. 1995. The Journals of Mary Shelley. Ed. Feldman, Paula, R. and Scott-Kilvert, Diana. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, p. 25. 23. Shelley refers to the ‘poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ’ in A Defence of Poetry (Poetry & Prose, p. 524). 24. Ryan, Robert. 1997. The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 203. 25. See Prose, i, pp. 246, 261, 262. 26. Bryan Shelley titles his chapter on Shelley’s Jesus ‘The Jacobin Jesus’. See Shelley and Scripture, pp. 56–74.

178  P. WHICKMAN 27.  The same episode in John 19:30 sees Jesus referred to only as a ‘malefactor’. 28. Anonymous. 1812. ‘Daniel Isaac Eaton’. The Examiner, 231. 31 May, p. 352. 29. Davis, Michael T. 2000. ‘“Good for the Public Example”: Daniel Isaac Eaton, Prosecution, Punishment and Recognition, 1793–1813’. In Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775–1848: Essays in Honour of Malcolm I. Thomis, ed. Davis, Michael T. Basingstoke, Hants.: Macmillan, p. 127. 30. The episode alluded to is John 19:5. ‘Behold the man’ in Latin is, of course, Ecce Homo. 31. Shelley re-used and reworked much of the text in his notes to Queen Mab, particularly the long note on the line ‘I will beget a Son’. See Poems, i. pp. 395–404. 32. ‘Homely’. 1817. ‘What Is Blasphemy?’. Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature 12:139. July, p. 404. 33. Mann, Theophilus. 1820. ‘Trials for Blasphemy’. The Examiner, 677. 17 December, p. 813. 34. Byron was likely reacting to a review appearing in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine that had accused the author of Don Juan of blasphemy. Byron had earlier written on this in ‘Some Observations Upon an Article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine’ (1820). See Byron, Lord George Gordon. 1991. The Complete Miscellaneous Prose. Ed. Nicholson, Andrew. Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 88–119. In this piece, Byron appears to allude to the 1817 parodies and trials of Hone (pp. 118–119). Southey’s preface to A Vision of Judgement, accusing poets such as Byron and Shelley of being part of a ‘satanic school of poetry’, was also another likely influence on the Canto VI preface. See Southey, Robert. 1838. The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, Collected by Himself, volume 10. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans. pp. 202–207. 35. Byron, Lord George Gordon. 1986. Don Juan: ‘Preface to Cantos VI, VII and VIII’. In The Complete Poetical Works, volume 5, ed. Jerome J. McGann. Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 296–297. 36. Anonymous, 1818. ‘On Blasphemy [Concluded from Last Week]’. The Examiner, 526. 25 January, p. 52. 37. Mann, Theophilus. 1820.‘Trials for Blasphemy’. The Examiner, 677. 17 December, p. 813. 38. 1998. Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings. Ed. Philp, Mark. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 95. Paine questions the notion of an ancient political system essentially ruling from the grave, ‘government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it’ (p. 95). Although Paine is speaking more

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explicitly of a political government, Shelley’s argument follows the same principle. 39. Archer, John. 1987. ‘Authority in Shelley’. Studies in Romanticism 26:2, p. 263. 40. Shelley is possibly writing with Luke 14:26 in mind: ‘If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.’ 41.  Hunt, Leigh. 1828. Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries: With Recollections of the Author’s Life and of His Visit to Italy, volume 1. London: Henry Colburn, New Burlington Street, pp. 323–324. See also Bryan Shelley, Shelley and Scripture, p. 59. 42. According to the King James Bible, this passage should read as follows: ‘But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.’ 43. Shelley, Mary. 1839. ‘Note on The Revolt of Islam’. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, volume 1. Ed. Shelley, Mary. London: Edward Moxon, p. 374. 44. Fuller, David. 1993. ‘Shelley and Jesus’. Durham University Journal 85, p. 214. 45. Miles, Jack. 2002. Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God. London: Arrow Books, p. 3 and Scarry, Elaine. 1987. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 214. 46.  Priestman, Martin. 1999. Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 232. 47. Yeats, William Butler. 1903. Ideas of Good and Evil. New York: Macmillan. 48.  Gregory, Alan. 2005. ‘Philosophy and Religion’. In Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Roe, Nicholas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 109. 49. Schock, Peter. 2003. Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley and Byron. Basingstoke, Hants.: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 126. 50. See Schock, pp. 11–40. 51.  Webb, Timothy. 1977. Shelley: A Voice Not Understood. Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 144. 52. Milton, John. 1991. Paradise Lost. Ed. Fowler, Alastair. London and New York: Longman. pp. 50–51. 53. Sperry, Stuart M. 1981. ‘Necessity and the Role of the Hero in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound’. PMLA 96:2, p. 242.

180  P. WHICKMAN 54.  Duerksen, Roland A. 1978. ‘Shelley’s Prometheus: Destroyer and Preserver’. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 18:4. p. 626. 55. Blake, William. 1977. ‘Milton: A Poem’. In The Complete Poems. Ed. Ostriker, Alicia. London: Penguin. p. 513. 56.  Shelley and Scripture, p. 184. 57. Byron, Lord George Gordon. 2008. ‘Prometheus’. In The Major Works. Ed. McGann. Jerome. J. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 266. 58.  See Webb, Timothy. 1983. ‘The Unascended Heaven: Negatives in Prometheus Unbound’. In Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference. Ed, Everest, Kelvin. Leicester: Leicester University Press. pp. 44–45 and 1977. Shelley: A Voice Not Understood. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977, p. 208. 59. Sperry, Stuart M. 1981. ‘Necessity and the Role of the Hero in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound’. PMLA 96:2, p. 246. 60.  Wasserman, Earl R. 1965. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: A Critical Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 99. 61. Milton, John. 1817. Paradise Regained by John Milton, with Select Notes Subjoined, to which is Added, a Complete Collection of His Miscellaneous Poems, Both English and Latin. London: F.C and J. Rivington, p. 56. 62. Macbeth instructs the Ghost of Banquo to ‘never shake /Thy gory locks at me’ (III. iv. ll. 49–50). Shakespeare, William. 2006. Macbeth. In The Arden Shakespeare: Complete Works. Ed. Muir, Kenneth. London: Thomson Learning, p. 787. 63. There is also the suggestion that this line functions as a further act of remorse on Prometheus’ part. The image of the suffering Jesus reminds him again of the cruel words he spoke that allude to the very sufferings to which he is now witness.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion

In a letter to a potential publisher written after the composition of Laon and Cythna in October 1817, Shelley referred to his new work as a tale illustrative of such a Revolution as might be supposed to take place in an European nation, acted upon by the opinions of what has been called (erroneously as I think) the modern philosophy, & contending with antient notions & the supposed advantages derived from those who support them. It is […] the beau ideal as it were of the French Revolution. (Letters, i., pp. 563–564)

This passage has attracted much scrutiny from critics particularly concerning what Shelley understands by ‘beau ideal’.1 If ‘beau ideal’ is intended to refer to a perfect or ‘ideal’ revolution, then this begs the question as to why Laon and Cythna’s uprising, after initial success, eventually fails at the hands of reactionary forces. As Cian Duffy notes, attention to the phrase has failed to take into account the possibility of its relation to Shelley’s notion of ‘intellectual beauty’ that he developed around the same time (p. 126). Duffy importantly relates this to Shelley’s notion of ‘beautiful idealisms’ seen in the preface to Prometheus Unbound (Poems, ii, p. 475). He writes The retrospective focus here (‘my purpose has hitherto’) effectively identifies Laon and Cythna as a ‘beautiful idealism’, and confirms the role of these ‘idealisms’ – the product and sustenance of the cultivated (‘highly © The Author(s) 2020 P. Whickman, Blasphemy and Politics in Romantic Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46570-4_6

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182  P. WHICKMAN refined’) imagination – in promoting the moral and intellectual revolution that Shelley, following Godwin, believed to be the necessary pre-requisite of any lasting change in political institutions. (p. 127)

While this is helpful in positioning Prometheus Unbound as a development of concerns articulated in the earlier Laon and Cythna, it also reminds us how Shelley’s ‘revolutionary’ politics first necessitates a reimagining of existing political structures and, it follows, a recognition that such structures are not omnipotent, as Demogorgon declares at the end of Shelley’s drama. Shelley’s revolutionary politics then is entwined with a revolutionary poetics since a new aesthetic is necessary in order to demystify the language that enshrines political power. That the Christian conception of God is ‘prototype of human misrule’ for Shelley determines why his irreverent, ‘blasphemous’ interrogation of the word is manifested aesthetically and is also politically necessary. Prometheus’ defiance of Jupiter is an act of irreverence akin to Shelley’s opposition to a fixed ‘Power’ in ‘Mont Blanc’; the poet’s resistance to ‘fixity’ in that poem resembles in turn Prometheus’ resolution that neither he nor anyone else become the newly embodied power following the defeat of Jupiter. The fact that this non-violent, ‘beautiful ideal’ revolution is simultaneously a religious, theological or philosophical one further emphasises the connection between political and religious power. It also illustrates that Shelley’s key issue with organised religion, specifically Christianity, is in its emphasis on enforcing and maintaining political power structures rather than the ideals of its founder, Jesus Christ. Throughout this book, I have consistently argued that blasphemy is a political, rather than solely theological, construct that is arbitrarily determined and reliant upon specific historical contexts. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are no exception to this contextual specificity, with the cases of Daniel Isaac Eaton and William Hone, in 1812 and 1817, respectively, for instance, illustrating the political motivation behind such prosecutions. The very indefinability of the term ‘blasphemy’ itself helped to serve this function, as it allowed the government to define it precisely as it saw fit to suit its political advantage. At the same time, however, this led to blasphemy charges being easily defensible, as demonstrated most particularly in Hone’s three successful defences of December 1817. John Wilkes’, Hone’s and Eaton’s ‘crimes’, of course, were also ones of print. By the latter half of the eighteenth century, authorities were

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not particularly interested in policing personal or private belief; rather, they wished to contain expressions of unconventional views that implied a threat to the political status quo. Blasphemy therefore became closely tied to the realities of print and punished under the law of libel, with prosecutions focusing on those individuals most responsible for dissemination. Indeed, the development of copyright law in relation to blasphemy and sedition demonstrates the significance of such sentiments in the emergence of a reading public in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The fact that ‘blasphemous’ texts were free of copyright meant that they remained in the public domain and were therefore cheaply available for a wider and ‘lower-class’ readership. Following Southey v. Sherwood and the prosecutions of Hone, Joss Marsh in fact contends that law ‘now allowed any man to issue anything he thought Chancery might think was criminal without the issue going before a jury. And the crime of choice was blasphemy’.2 Not only does Marsh emphasise the role blasphemy played specifically in enfranchising a readership formerly excluded due to the prohibitive cost of books, it also highlights how ‘blasphemy’ was actively exploited by ‘lower-class’ publishers. Laws surrounding copyright in blasphemous texts provided ‘another strategy [for] the aspirant disenfranchised’ (Marsh, p. 100). The ‘strategy’ of printing perceived blasphemy therefore played a key and active role in shaping Romantic reading and print culture. As I have shown, these printing realities concerning blasphemy also had a profound impact more specifically on the works of Shelley. His Queen Mab, a work not included in Mary Shelley’s Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824), became by far Shelley’s most widely read work and an established part of the 1820s ‘radical canon’. Following its piracy in 1821, Queen Mab not only impacted on the printed realities of Shelley’s works but was also the most pivotal text in establishing Shelley’s posthumous reputation. As I have suggested, this reputation was determined in two interrelated ways. The ‘blasphemous’ content or themes of Queen Mab itself certainly influenced this reputation, but the fact that it was pirated and sold cheaply by radical and ‘less respectable’ publishers further impacted on Shelley’s standing as a respectable, high-brow poet. In this way, a text’s ‘bibliographical codes’ cyclically inflect our interpretation of the text: because the contents of a text were regarded as blasphemous, establishing it as free from copyright, this meant that it would be pirated and sold cheaply, further influencing interpretation both of

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the original’s respectability and that of its author. Form, content and the printed, physical text are interrelated and, I would argue, inextricable. Not only did Queen Mab’s bibliographical codes influence Shelley’s reception, the themes of the poem itself also set the template for much of the philosophy of his later works. The citing of Queen Mab in Shelley’s 1817 Chancery case, for instance, impacted the revisions made to Laon and Cythna primarily because the two poems shared thematic parallels. The ‘blasphemous’ themes of Queen Mab therefore both strongly informed the philosophy of Shelley’s later poetry while also determining the environment in which the work was received. As seen in Queen Mab, Shelley’s belief in the relationship between political and religious hierarchy—all examples of ‘Power’ being facets of the same—is one learnt through both his philosophical reading and his awareness of the political zeitgeist. Shelley’s conviction of the political nature of blasphemy is evident in his prose and correspondence but, as I have demonstrated, this also manifests itself within the poetry both thematically and aesthetically. The treatment of Shelley’s Jesus in his prose and poetry, for instance, are similar; Jesus is both a political and religious reformer prosecuted for blasphemy and one whom Shelley compares to the persecuted political reformers of his age. Jesus is established as human, ‘a youth’ (Prometheus Unbound, I. l. 584), whose death led to the creation of Christianity. This religion’s present and historical persecution of blasphemers is one of ‘hate [of those] being like to [Jesus]’ (Prometheus Unbound, I. l. 606). These ‘blasphemers’ are ‘like’ to Jesus since Jesus was himself a blasphemer, punished by the overarching religious and political establishment of his day. Christianity has then become the very belief system Jesus came to oppose. It was in Chapter 4 that I most extensively argued for the manifestation of Shelley’s political and philosophical scepticism within his aesthetics. While his reading of enlightenment philosophy influences this scepticism, Shelley uses this to create a new sceptical but distinctly ‘Romantic’ poetics. As seen with the contemporary response to Shelley’s hotel register entries in the Vale of Chamonix cited in my introduction, Shelley’s self-declared atheism, despite him having visited Mont Blanc, is as much a question of taste—in not seeing in the sublimity of Mont Blanc definitive proof of the deity—as it is of religious infidelity. Shelley’s religious scepticism in ‘Mont Blanc’ is one that informs a revolutionary

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new poetics. In opposing the established discourse on the origins of the sublime, the divinity of Jesus and of the religiously determined sacredness of established political structures, Shelley has a problem he resolves creatively, in the writing of his poetry.

6.1  From Infidel to Canonisation: Shelley’s Posthumous Reputation In my third chapter I considered the role played by Shelley’s supposed ‘blasphemy’ in influencing his readership, reputation and the publishing realities of his works both while he was alive and in the years after his death. Shelley’s perceived religious views have also had a significant impact on his critical legacy up until the present day and are arguably more influential than even his explicitly political beliefs. In 1841, the publisher Edward Moxon found himself in court charged with blasphemous libel following his role in the production of 1840’s Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. The resulting case, known as Queen v. Moxon, focused on passages from that most troublesome of Shelley’s poems Queen Mab. Nevertheless, although Moxon was found guilty, he faced little punishment and was required only to have the offending brief passages removed from subsequent printings. Reports of the case, such as that which appeared in The Examiner, emphasised not only Moxon’s ‘respectability’ but also how the ‘blasphemy’ of the work was isolated to only a very few instances.3 The Examiner records The passages which had been made the subject of prosecution were extracted from a book containing 20,000 lines, of which the selected portions composed not the three hundredth part. They presented, therefore, a very sorry and inadequate impression of the whole, which was the history of a great moral and intellectual phenomenon of the several successive stages of a great poetical genius from its infancy through its maturity to its early and sudden extinction. The effect which would be produced by a perusal of the whole to be therefore entirely different from that of some particular passages where taken out of their connexion with the rest; whilst it was to be observed, in addition, that the whole work would be only sought by persons who were likely to be capable of appreciating the combination and effect of the several parts upon each other, as well as the general tendency of the entire composition.4

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As well as emphasising the ‘high-brow’, ‘respectable’ bibliographical codes of Moxon’s edition, the author does not challenge the accusations of blasphemy levelled at the passages in question. Rather, the author apologises for them or explains them away. They are deemed exceptions, either not relevant to the poetical genius of Shelley as a whole or simply instances of philosophical experimentation or development in the life of a sensitive poet that was tragically cut short. The Examiner goes on to report that Lord Denman, overseeing the case, had noted Shelley’s apparent youth at the time of Queen Mab’s composition, having been led to believe Shelley had ‘grown out’ of such sentiments as his poetic career developed: It had been said that the extraordinary poem in question was the composition of a youth of 18, and that it in many places contradicted itself. This was certainly true: that could not prevent the poem from being very mischievous and offensive. It was also observed, that the later poems of the same author had shown a change in his sentiments, and had qualified the effects of his earlier publications. (p. 412)

While Queen Mab was nevertheless still taken to be mischievous, Denman’s appraisal was at least more positive than Eldon’s in 1817s Shelley v. Westbrooke. Although Shelley had not really ‘grown out’ of the sentiments of Queen Mab in his later works, the opinion that he had the potential to do so nevertheless influenced much of his ­mid-nineteenth-century posthumous reputation. In 1851, Robert Browning in his ‘Essay on Shelley’ even declared that had Shelley lived longer he ‘would have finally ranged himself with the Christians’.5 Browning suggests that Shelley’s disdain of religion was the result of ‘mistaking Churchdom for Christianity’ (p. 147). Browning’s comments are insightful since, as this study has shown, it is to organised religion rather than the doctrines of Christ specifically that Shelley was most opposed. Nevertheless, while it is of course impossible to know what Shelley’s views would have been had he lived longer, he was less naïve than Browning implies. It is no coincidence that Browning’s essay was first published as a preface to a book of possible Shelley letters, later found to be forgeries, in an edition produced by Edward Moxon. Having learnt from his 1841 prosecution, Moxon likely included Browning’s essay as an act of pre-emptive self-preservation. There is the suggestion, therefore, that much of the ‘Christianising’ of Shelley in the

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Victorian period was borne of similar sentiment; it becomes a way to advocate for Shelley’s abilities as a poet while distancing oneself from any suggestions of sympathy for blasphemous or politically radical opinions. Robert Ryan has described such tendencies in the history of Shelley criticism as a temptation ‘to qualify or sentimentalize the meaning of religion until the term is broad enough to accommodate atheism—too often the tactic of readers who want their religion and their favourite lyric poet too’.6 Shelley’s Victorian-era admirers included Arthur Hallam and Alfred Lord Tennyson, who found, for instance, Shelley’s Adonais (1821) to have inspired their interest in the poem’s subject John Keats. Yet the desire to distance Shelley from his political and religious views led to the creation of a sanitised figure far removed from the man, as discussed in Chapter 3, so vehemently attacked by reviewers in his lifetime. In fact, the nature of Shelley’s reputational recovery is akin to a saintly ‘canonisation’.7 In 1851, for instance, Matthew Arnold said of Shelley that ‘[i]t is his poetry, above everything else, which for many people establishes that he is an angel’ before declaring Shelley to have been a ‘beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain’.8 Shelley’s popularity among the Chartists of the 1840s, on the other hand, suggests he was far from politically ‘ineffectual’, although Eleanor Marx’s later description of the movement’s ‘Shelley-worship’ similarly suggests a quasi-canonisation of this apparently atheistic poet. It is not simple coincidence that canonisation and canonicity are semantic bedfellows. Although towards the end of the nineteenth century Shelley still had literary champions such as George Bernard Shaw, his legacy began to suffer in the early twentieth. With the exception of W. B. Yeats, who described Prometheus Unbound as one of the world’s ‘sacred’ books, the Modernist era saw a checking of Shelley’s admission into the canon. T. S. Eliot, for instance, had very little time for the poet and while most scholars note how the New Critics disliked Shelley on the grounds of their own ‘social and political conservat[ism]’ (Poetry & Prose, p. 544), Peter Lowe instead emphasises the influence of Eliot’s staunch Christianity.9 Shelley did still have a number of enthusiasts in the first half of the twentieth century, but it was not until the late 1950s, and the publication of Harold Bloom’s Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959), that his reputation was salvaged from the negative opinion of the New Critics. In Bloom’s later book The Visionary Company (1961), he lambasts this school for claiming to dislike Shelley on aesthetic grounds when this served simply as a mask for their disdain for his political, religious and moral views:

188  P. WHICKMAN it is to be hoped that such enemies will in time cease to misrepresent Shelley’s poetry, and not continue to pretend to an aesthetic condemnation that is usually a mask for their own sense of moral and religious outrage.10

Bloom’s comments could have just as easily been written in response to those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commentators who similarly feigned ‘aesthetic condemnation’ when confronted with supposedly ‘blasphemous’ texts. Nevertheless, particularly in the case of Shelley as I have argued, religious politics and aesthetics are not readily separable; a ‘sense of moral and religious outrage’ can still therefore be an aesthetic judgement. Indeed, while a detailed consideration of the term lies beyond the scope of this study, the very notion of ‘taste’ implies both the ability to discern what is quality art and what is deemed offensive or socially unacceptable. In fact, both these definitions require an understanding of prevailing, conformist standards that ‘bad taste’ either does not adhere to or recognise. The work of Bloom and others to recuperate Shelley into the literary canon solely on aesthetic grounds is not easily achieved then without a corresponding modification in ethical and moral perspectives. The act of literary canonisation therefore explains, if not necessitates, at least partial ‘canonisation’ of the spiritual or religious kind. While I have strongly argued, and continue to argue, for Shelley’s poetry’s irreverence and revolutionary potential, the danger of canonicity for a poet like Shelley lies in him becoming representative of an establishment. A de-fanged, canonical and canonised Shelley risks becoming part of the very poetical, political and spiritual authorities that he opposed. Having reflected on the ‘blasphemer’ Jesus Christ’s doctrines becoming perverted into Christianity and observing the once radical poets Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth increasingly turn towards poetical and political reaction, Shelley was at least aware of these dangers. As I have argued, Shelley’s irreverence and blasphemy are at the heart of his political and poetic project. Critics, therefore, need to be wary that to canonise him is to risk the very thing that gives his poetry its distinctiveness; to make Shelley a ‘sacred’, reverential figure, is to do precisely what his politics and philosophy teaches us to avoid.

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Notes





1. Duffy, Cian. 2005. Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 125–128. 2. Marsh, Joss. 1998. Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth Century England. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, p. 100. 3. Moxon was an acquaintance and publisher of such important or emerging literary figures as Samuel Rogers, Lamb, Wordsworth and Tennyson. 4. Anonymous. 1841. ‘Court of Queen’s Bench’. The Examiner, 1743. 26 June, p. 412. 5. Browning, Robert. 1981. ‘Essay on Shelley’. In The Complete Works of Robert Browning with Variant Readings and Annotations, volume 5. Ed. King, R. A. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, p. 147. 6.  R yan, Robert. 1997. The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 193. It is also worth noting that while Ryan explains such motivations in terms of a reader’s personal belief, self-preservation against criminal charges is an equally significant motive. 7. Richard Holmes’ discussion of the Shelley myths that arose after his death also suggests this. See Holmes, Richard. 2004. ‘Death and Destiny’. The Guardian, 24 January. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/ jan/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview1. Accessed 29 December 2019. 8. Arnold, Matthew. 1961. ‘Shelley’. In Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold. Ed. Culler, A. Dwight. Boston, MA: Houghton Miffin, p. 380. 9. Lowe, Peter. 2006. Christian Romanticism: T. S. Eliot’s Response to Percy Shelley. New York: Cambria. 10.  Bloom, Harold. 1971. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, p. 284. T. S. Eliot at least acknowledged that his disdain for Shelley’s poetry was largely down to Shelley’s ideas and the inability to separate them from the work. See Eliot, T. S. 1933. ‘Shelley and Keats’. In The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. Eliot, T. S. London: Faber & Faber, pp. 87–102.

Works Cited

and

Further Reading

Primary Material Shelley Editions Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1813. Queen Mab. London: P. B. Shelley. ———. 1817. ‘Original Poetry’. The Examiner, 473. 19 January, p. 41. ———. 1821. Queen Mab. London: W. Clark. ———. 1822a. Hellas: A Lyrical Drama. London: Charles and James Ollier, Bond Street. ———. 1822b. Queen Mab. London: R. Carlile. ———. 1824. Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Shelley, Mary. London: John and Henry L. Hunt. ———. 1839. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 4 volumes. Ed. Shelley, Mary. London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. ———. 1840. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Shelley, Mary. London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. ———. 1882. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 2 volumes. Ed. Forman, Harry Buxton. London: Reeves and Turner. ———. 1892. Shelley’s Poetical Works (‘Aldine Edition’). 5 volumes. Ed. Forman, Harry Buxton. London: George Bell. ———. 1954. Shelley’s Prose or, the Trumpet of a Prophecy. Ed. Clark, David Lee. Albuquerque, NM: The University of New Mexico Press. ———. 1963–1964. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 2 volumes. Ed. Jones, Frederick L. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 P. Whickman, Blasphemy and Politics in Romantic Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46570-4

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192  Works Cited and Further Reading ———. 1989–. The Poems of Shelley. 5 volumes. Ed. Matthews, Geoffrey, Everest, Kelvin, Donovan, Jack, Duffy, Cian and Rossington, Michael. London and New York: Longman. ———. 1991. Poetical Works. Ed. Shelley, Mary and Hutchinson, Thomas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1993. The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 1 volume. Ed. Murray, E. B. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2002. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Reiman, Donald H. and Fraistat, Neil. London and New York: W. W. Norton. ———. 2016. Laon and Cythna. Ed. Nersessian, Anahid. Peterborough, ON: Broadview.

Further Primary Material ‘A Liveryman of London’. 1799. ‘For the True Briton’. The True Briton, 2134. 23 October. London. Anon. 1651. The Ranter’s Creed: Being a True Copie of the Examinations of a Blasphemous Sort of people, commonly called Ranters. London: James Moxon. ———. 1652. The Tryal of the Ranters. London. ———. 1704. Some Considerations Humbly Offered by the People Called Quakers, Relating to the Bill for the Restraining the Licentiousness of the Press. London. ———. 1717. The Scourge, Designed as a Modest Vindication of the Church of England. 11 March. ———. 1812a. ‘Daniel Isaac Eaton’. The Examiner, 231. 31 May, p. 352. ———. 1812b. ‘Daniel Isaac Eaton’. The Scourge, or Monthly Expositor of Imposture and Folly. June, pp. 484–491. ———. 1817a. Morning Chronicle. 22 March. ———. 1817b. ‘Court of Chancery—Tuesday, March 18’. The Observer. 23 March. ———. 1817c. ‘Article 2’. The Observer. 21 December. ———. 1817d. ‘Court of King’s Bench’. The Examiner, 518. 30 November, pp. 764–768. ———. 1818a. ‘On Blasphemy’. The Examiner, 525. 18 January, pp. 34–35. ———. 1818b. ‘On Blasphemy [Concluded from Last Week]’. The Examiner, 526. 25 January, p. 52. ———. 1819. ‘Review of New Publications’. Commercial Chronicle. 3 June, pp. 625–626. ———. 1820a. ‘Review of New Books: The Cenci. A Tragedy in Five Acts’. The London Literary Gazette, 167. 1 April, pp. 209–210. ———. 1820b. ‘Review of New Books: Prometheus Unbound; a Lyrical Drama in Four Acts with Other Poems’. The London Literary Gazette, 190. 9 September, pp. 580–582.

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———. 1821a. ‘Reply to the Anti-Matrimonial Hypothesis and Supposed Atheism of Percy Bysshe Shelley as laid Down in Queen Mab (Review)’. The Literary Gazette, 244. 22 September, pp. 596–597. ———. 1821b. ‘Art. VIII—Prometheus Unbound, a Lyrical Drama, in Four Acts; with Other Poems. By Percy Bysshe Shelley’. Quarterly Review 26:51. October, pp. 168–180. ———. 1821c. ‘Review of New Books: Queen Mab’. The London Literary Gazette, 226. 19 May, pp. 305–307. ———. 1821d. ‘Queen Mab’. The Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review 3:27. 2 June, pp. 344–345. ———. 1822a. ‘Elegy on the Death of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Review)’. The Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review 178. 12 October, pp. 643–644. ———. 1822b. ‘On Blasphemy and Sedition’. The Examiner, 776. 17 November, pp. 721–723. ———. 1822c. ‘LAW: The Court of King’s Bench. Monday, November 25. “Queen Mab”—King v. Clarke’. The Examiner. 1 December, pp. 764–765. ———. 1827. ‘The Law of Blasphemy’. The London Magazine. November, pp. 360–362. ———. 1841. ‘Court of Queen’s Bench’. The Examiner, 1743. 26 June, p. 412. ———. 2008. The Bible: Authorized King James Version. Ed. Carroll, Robert and Prickett, Stephen. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Arnold, Matthew. 1961. Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold. Ed. Culler, A. Dwight. Boston, MA: Houghton Miffin. Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers. 1793. ‘The Contrast. British Liberty. French Liberty. Which Is Best?’ British Museum Collection, BM Satires 8284. Astley, Thomas. 1730. Free Thoughts on Mr Woolston and His Writings, in a Letter to a Gentleman of Leyden; to Which Is Prefixed CATALOGUE of All Books Wrote, Pro and Con, in the Woolstonian Controversy: With the Names of Their Several Authors; Their Respective Prices and by Whom Sold. London: Rose, St. Pauls. Barrin, Jean. 2002–2004. Venus in the Cloister; or, The Nun in Her Smock. Trans. Curll, Edmund. In Eighteenth Century British Erotica: Volume 2, ed. Cope, David L., pp. 157–354. London: Pickering & Chatto. Blake, William. 1977. The Complete Poems. Ed. Ostriker, Alicia. London: Penguin. Browning, Robert. 1981. The Complete Works of Robert Browning with Variant Readings and Annotations. volume 5. Ed. King, R. A. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Burke, Edmund. 2009. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Mitchell, L. G. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Byron, Lord George Gordon. 1973–1994. Letters and Journals. 13 volumes. Ed. Marchand, Leslie. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

194  Works Cited and Further Reading ———. 1980–1993. The Complete Poetical Works. 7 volumes. Ed. McGann, Jerome J. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1991. The Complete Miscellaneous Prose. Ed. Nicholson, Andrew. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2008. The Major Works. Ed. McGann, Jerome J. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carlile, Richard. 1820. ‘More Trials for Blasphemy and Sedition’. The Republican 2:2. 21 January, pp. 47–51. ———. 1822a. ‘Queen Mab’. In The Republican, Volume VI: From May 24th to December 27th 1822. London: Richard Carlile, pp. 978–979. ———. 1822b. ‘Queen Mab’. The Republican 5. 1 February, pp. 145–148. ———. 1822c. ‘Death of Percy Bysshe Shelley’. The Republican 6:12. 16 August, pp. 380–381. ———. 1823. ‘Sedition and Blasphemy Have No Connection with Obscenity’. The Republican, 7:2. 10 January, pp. 33–35. Clark, William. 1821. Reply to the Anti-Matrimonial Hypothesis and Supposed Atheism of Percy Byssche Shelley as Laid Down in Queen Mab. London: W. Clark. Coleridge, John Taylor. 1819. ‘Art. VII. 1—Laon and Cythna, or the Revolution of the Golden City. A Vision of the Nineteenth Century in the Stanza of Spenser. By Percy B. Shelley. London. 1818. 2. The Revolt of Islam. A Poem, in Twelve Cantos. By Percy Bysshe Shelley. London. 1818’. Quarterly Review 21:42. April, pp. 460–471. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1997. The Complete Poems. Ed. Keach, William. London: Penguin. ———. 2001. Poetical Works. 3 volumes in 6. Ed. Mays, J. C. C. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series 75, 16. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Defoe, Daniel. 1702. The Shortest Way with the Dissenters: Or Proposals for the Establishment of the Church. London. ———. 1704. An Essay on the Regulation of the Press. London. ———. 1869. ‘Against Printing Indecent Books’. In Daniel Defoe: His Life, and Recently Discovered Writings, Volume II, ed. Lee, William. London: John Camden Hotten, Piccadilly, pp. 30–33. Evans, William David. 1836. ‘An Act more effectually to prevent profane Cursing and Swearing (19 Geo. II, c.21)’. In A Collection of Statutes Connected with the General Administration of the Law, Volume 8. London: Thomas Blenkarn, pp. 271–273. Gillray, James. 1798. ‘A Peep into the Cave of Jacobinism’. Victoria and Albert Museum Collection, E.215-1989. ‘Homely’. 1817. ‘What Is Blasphemy?’ Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature 12:139. July, pp. 404–406.

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Hone, William. 1817a. The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism of a Ministerial Member. London: William Hone. ———. 1817b. Reformists’ Register and Weekly Commentary. 22 February, pp. 157–158. Hume, David. 2007. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Millican, Peter. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hunt, Leigh. 1828. Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries: With Recollections of the Author’s Life and of His Visit to Italy. 2 volumes. London: Henry Colburn, New Burlington Street. Kant, Immanuel. 2009. An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? Trans. Nisbet, H. B. London: Penguin. Keats, John. 1982. Complete Poems. Stillinger, Jack. London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Locke, John. 1689. A Letter Concerning Toleration. London: Awnsham Churchill. ———. 2008. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Phemister, Pauline. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mann, Theophilus. 1820. ‘Trials for Blasphemy’. The Examiner, 677. 17 December, pp. 813–814. Medwin, Thomas. 1824. Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron: Noted during a Residence with His Lordship at Pisa, in the Years 1821 and 1822. London: Henry Colborn, New Burlington Street. Merivale, John Herman. 1825. Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Chancery: Commencing the Michaelmas Term, 1815 [to the End of the Michaelmas Term, 1817]. 3 volumes. New York: G. Lamson. Milton, John. 1817. Paradise Regained by John Milton, with Select Notes Subjoined, to Which Is Added, a Complete Collection of His Miscellaneous Poems, Both English and Latin. London: F.C and J. Rivington. ———. 1991. Paradise Lost. Ed. Fowler, Alastair. London and New York: Longman. Paine, Thomas. 1984. The Age of Reason, Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology. Amherst and New York: Prometheus Books. ———. 1998. Rights of Man, Common Sense and other Political Writings. Ed. Philp, Mark. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peacock, Thomas Love. 1933. Memoirs of Shelley. 2 volumes. Ed. Wolfe, Humbert. London: J.M. Dent & Sons. ‘Philo-Libert’. 1730. The Grub Street Journal. 18 June. Pope, Alexander. 1985. Poetical Works. Ed. Davis, Herbert and Rogers, Pat. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Senior, Nassau William. 1822. ‘Cases of Walcot v. Walker; Southey V. Sherwood; Murray v. Benbow, and Lawrence v. Smith’. Quarterly Review 27:53. April, pp. 123–138. Shakespeare, William. 2006. ‘Macbeth’. In The Arden Shakespeare: Complete Works, ed. Muir, Kenneth. London: Thomson Learning.

196  Works Cited and Further Reading Shelley, Mary. 1980–1988. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. 3 volumes. Ed. Bennett, Betty T. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press. ———. 1995. The Journals of Mary Shelley. Ed. Feldman, Paula, R. and ­Scott-Kilvert, Diana. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press. Southey, Robert. 1816. ‘Art. XI. 1. An Inquiry into the Causes of the General Poverty and Dependance of Mankind… [“Parliamentary Reform”]’. Quarterly Review 16:31. October, pp. 225–278. ———. 1817. Wat Tyler: A Dramatic Poem. London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones. ———. 1838. The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, Collected by Himself. 10 volumes. London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans. Strange, John. 1755. Reports of Adjudged Cases in the Courts of Chancery, King’s Bench, Common Pleas and Exchequer, from Trinity Term in the Second Year of King GEORGE I to Trinity Term in the Twenty-First Year of King GEORGE II in Two Volumes. London: John Strange. Toland, John. 1697. A Letter to a Member of Parliament, Shewing, That a Restraint on the Press Is Inconsistent with the Protestant Religion, and Dangerous to the Liberties of the Nation. London: J. Darby. ———. 1702. Christianity not Mysterious: Or, a Treatise Shewing, That There Is Nothing in the Gospel Contrary to Reason, Nor Above It: And That No Christian Doctrine Can Be Properly Call’d A Mystery. London. Vesey, Francis. 1827. Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Chancery: From the Year 1789 to 1817, Volume VII. London: Samuel Brooke, Paternoster Row. Walker, John. 1822. A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary. London: J. Richardson & Co. Warburton, William. 1738. The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, on the Principles of a Religious Deist, From the Omission of the Doctrine of a Future State of Reward and Punishment in the Jewish Dispensation in Six Books. 2 volumes. London: Fletcher Gyles. Wilkes, John. 1763a. ‘Genus ORATIONIS atrox, & vehemens, eui opponitur lenitatis & mansuetudinis’. The North Briton, 45. 23 April, pp. 317–320. ———. 1763b. ‘Letter to Bute’. St James Chronicle or the British Evening Post. 12 April. ———. 1768. English Liberty Established: Or, the Most Material Circumstances Relative to John Wilkes Esq; Member of Parliament for the County of Middlesex. London. ———. 2002. An Essay on Woman. In Eighteenth-Century British Erotica. volume 4. Ed. Benedict, Barbara, M. London: Pickering & Chatto, pp. 1–32. Woolston, Thomas. 1725. The Moderator between an Infidel and Apostate. London. Wordsworth, William. 1814. The Excursion. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown.

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———. 2000. The Major Works. Ed. Gill, Stephen. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yeats, William Butler. 1903. Ideas of Good and Evil. New York: Macmillan. *****, Henrietta. 1799. ‘The Breakfast Table’. Oracle and Daily Advertiser. 23 August.

Secondary Material Abbey, Lloyd. 1979. Destroyer and Preserver: Shelley’s Poetic Skepticism. Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press. Archer, John. 1987. ‘Authority in Shelley’. Studies in Romanticism 26:2, pp. 259–273. Baines, Paul and Rogers, Pat. 2007. Edmund Curll, Bookseller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barcus, James E. 1975. Shelley: The Critical Heritage. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Barrell, John. 2000. Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–1796. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— and Mee, Jon. 2006–2007. Trials for Treason and Sedition, 1792–1794. 8 volumes. London: Pickering & Chatto. Bennett, Betty T. and Curran, Stuart. 1996. Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press. Bloom, Harold. 1969. Shelley’s Mythmaking. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1971. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———, De Man, Paul, Derrida, Jacques, Hartman, Geoffrey H. and Miller, J. Hillis. 1979. Deconstruction and Criticism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Burch, Rousseau A. 1903. ‘The Case of Shelley v. Westbrooke’. The American Lawyer 11, pp. 380–383. Cabantous, Alain. 2002. Blasphemy: Impious Speech in the West from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century. Trans. Rauth, Eric. New York: Columbia University Press. Callaghan, Madeleine. 2020. ‘Shelley’s Excursion.’ Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 60:4 (in press). Cameron, Kenneth N. 1941. ‘A Major Source of The Revolt of Islam’. PMLA 56:1, pp. 175–206. Canuel, Mark. 2002. Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cash, Arthur. 2006. John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Chernaik, Judith. 1972. The Lyrics of Shelley. Cleveland, OH and London: The Press of Case Western Reserve University.

198  Works Cited and Further Reading ——— and Burnett, Timothy. 1978. ‘The Byron and Shelley Notebooks in the Scrope Davies Find’. The Review of English Studies 29:113, pp. 36–49. Clark, David Lee. 1951. ‘Shelley’s Biblical Extracts’. Modern Language Notes 66:7, pp. 435–441. Colligan, Colette. 2005. ‘The Unruly Copies of Byron’s Don Juan: Harems, Underground Print Culture, and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Nineteenth-Century Literature 59:4, pp. 433–462. Cox, Jeffrey. 1999. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cronin, Richard, 1996. ‘Keats and the Politics of Cockney Style’. Studies in English Literature 36:4, pp. 785–806. ———. 2000. The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan. Crook, Nora and Allen, Stephen. 2013. ‘The Marlow Expurgation’. The Times Literary Supplement, 5734. 22 February, pp. 14–15. Curran, Stuart (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, 2nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Davis, Michael T. 2000a. ‘“Good for the Public Example”: Daniel Isaac Eaton, Prosecution, Punishment and Recognition, 1793–1813’. In Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775–1848: Essays in Honour of Malcolm I. Thomis, ed. Davis, Michael T. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, pp. 108–130. ———. 2000b. Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775–1848: Essays in Honour of Malcolm I. Thomis. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan. ——— and Pickering, Paul A. 2008. Unrespectable Radicals? Popular Politics in the Age of Reform. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate. Deazley, Ronan. 2004. On the Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement of Copyright Law in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1695–1775). Oxford and Portland, OR: Hart Publishing. ———. 2008. Rethinking Copyright: History, Theory, Language. Cheltenham, Gloucestershire: Edward Elgar. Derrida, Jacques. 1979. ‘Scribble (Writing-Power)’. Trans. Plotkin, Cary. Yale French Studies, No. 58, In Memory of Jacques Ehrmann: Inside Play Outside Game, pp. 117–147. Donovan, Jack. 2013. ‘Epic Experiments, Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna’. In The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. O’ Neill, Michael, Howe, Anthony and Callaghan, Madeleine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 256–271. Duerksen, Roland A. 1978. ‘Shelley’s Prometheus: Destroyer and Preserver’. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 18:4, pp. 625–638. Duff, David. 1994. Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duffy, Cian. 2005. Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Eliot, T. S. 1933. ‘Shelley and Keats’. In The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, ed. Eliot, T. S. London: Faber & Faber, pp. 87–102. Emsley, Clive. 2005. Crime and Society in England: 1750–1900. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education. Feather, John. 1983. ‘From Censorship to Copyright: Aspects of the Government’s Role in the English Booktrade 1695–1775’. In Books and Society in History, ed. Carpenter, Kenneth E. New York: Bowker, pp. 173–198. Foucault, Michel. 1992. ‘What Is an Author?’ In Modernity and Its Discontents, ed. Marsh, James L. and Caputo, John D. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 299–314. Fraistat, Neil. 1994. ‘Illegitimate Shelley: Radical Piracy and the Textual Edition as Cultural Performance’. PMLA 109:3, pp. 409–423. Fuller, David. 1993. ‘Shelley and Jesus’. Durham University Journal 85, pp. 211–223. Gregory, Alan. 2005. ‘Philosophy and Religion’. In Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Roe, Nicholas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 102–113. Grimes, Kyle. 2000. ‘Spreading the Radical Word: The Circulation of William Hone’s 1817 Liturgical Parodies’. In Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775–1848: Essays in Honour of Malcolm I. Thomis, ed. Davis, Michael T. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, pp. 143–156. Hall, Spencer. 1983. ‘Power and the Poet: Religious Mythmaking in Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”’. Keats-Shelley Journal 32, pp. 123–149. Hammond, Brean. 1986. Pope. Brighton: Harvester Press. Highes, Daniel. 1978. ‘Prometheus Made Capable Poet in Act One of Prometheus Unbound’. Studies in Romanticism 17, pp. 3–11. Hoadley, Frank Taliaferro. 1941. ‘The Controversy over Southey’s Wat Tyler’. Studies in Philology 38:1, pp. 81–96. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1977. The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848. London: Abacus. Hodson, Jane. 2007. Language and Revolution in Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine, and Godwin. Aldershot: Ashgate. Holmes, Richard. 1995. Shelley: The Pursuit. London: HarperCollins. Hopps, Gavin and Stabler, Jane. 2006. Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hubbell, J. Andrew. 2002. ‘Laon and Cythna: A Vision of Regency Romanticism’. Keats-Shelley Journal 55, pp. 151–197. Hulme, T. E. 1975. ‘Romanticism and Classicism’. In Romanticism: Points of View, ed. Gleckner, Robert F. and Enscoe, Gerald E. Detroit, MI: Wayne Street University Press, pp. 55–65. Jager, Colin. 2010. ‘Shelley after Atheism’. Studies in Romanticism 49, pp. 611–631. Keach, William. 1984. Shelley’s Style. New York and London: Methuen.

200  Works Cited and Further Reading ———. 1986. ‘Cockney Couplets: Keats and the Politics of Style’. Studies in Romanticism 25:2, pp. 182–196. ———. 2004. Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language and Politics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. ———. 2010. ‘Romanticism and Language’. In The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, 2nd Edition, ed. Curran, Stuart. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 103–126. Kent, David A. and Ewen, D. R. 1992. Romantic Parodies, 1797–1831. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses. Kolkey, Jason I. 2014. ‘Venal Interchanges: Shelley’s Queen Mab and Literary Property’. European Romantic Review 25:5, p. 533. Knight, Mark and Mason, Emma. 2006. Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leask, Nigel. 1992. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, Monika. 1993. ‘“Nature’s Silent Eloquence”: Disembodied Organic Language in Shelley’s Queen Mab’. Nineteenth Century Literature 48:2, pp. 169–193. Leighton, Angela. 1984. Shelley and the Sublime: An interpretation of the Major Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levy, Leonard. 1993. Blasphemy: Verbal Offense against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Lowe, Peter. 2006. Christian Romanticism: T.S. Eliot’s Response to Percy Shelley. New York: Cambria. Marsh, Joss. 1998. Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. McCalman, Iain. 1998. Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McGann, Jerome. 1983. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1991. The Textual Condition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Medwin, Thomas. 1913. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Forman, Harry Buxton. London: Oxford University Press. Miles, Jack. 2002. Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God. London: Arrow Books. Nash, David. 1999. Blasphemy in Modern Britain: 1789 to the Present. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate. Newlyn, Lucy. 1993. Paradise Lost, and the Romantic Reader. Oxford: Clarendon Press. O’Neill, Michael. 2011. ‘“A Double Face of False and True”: Poetry and Religion in Shelley’. Literature and Theology 25:1, pp. 32–46.

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———. 2002. ‘Shelley’s Lyric Art’. In Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Reiman, Donald H. and Fraistat, Neil. London and New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 616–626. ———. 2011. ‘Southey and Shelley Reconsidered’. Romanticism 17:1, pp. 10–24. ———, Howe, Anthony and Callaghan, Madeleine. 2013. The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Petit, Alexander and Spedding, Patrick. 2002–2004. Eighteenth Century British Erotica. 10 volumes. London: Pickering & Chatto. Prickett, Stephen. 1976. Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church. Cambridge, London, and New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1986. Words and The Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996. Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Priestman, Martin. 1999. Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pulos, Christos E. 1962. The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley’s Scepticism. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Reeves, James Bryant. 2020. Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century: A Literary History of Atheism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reiman, Donald H. and O’Neill, Michael. 1997. Fair-Copy Manuscripts of Shelley’s Poems in European and American Libraries. New York: Garland. Rieder, John. 1985. ‘Description of a Struggle: Shelley’s Radicalism on Wordsworth’s Terrain’. Boundary 2: On Humanism and the University II: The Institutions of Humanism 13:2/3, pp. 267–287. Roberts, Hugh. 1997. Shelley and the Chaos of History: A New Politics of Poetry. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Rogers, Neville. 1967. Shelley at Work: A Critical Enquiry. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rose, Mark. 1992. ‘The Author in Court: Pope v. Curll (1741)’. Cultural Critique 21, pp. 197–217. Ross, Trevor. 1992. ‘Copyright and the Invention of Tradition’. Eighteenth Century Studies 26:1, pp. 1–27. Roston, Murray. 1965. Prophet and Poet: The Bible and the Growth of Romanticism. Evanston, IL: North Western University Press. Ruston, Sharon. 2005. Shelley and Vitality. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Ryan, Robert. 1997. The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

202  Works Cited and Further Reading Saglia, Diego. 2000. Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. Saunders, David. 1990. ‘Copyright, Obscenity and Literary History’. ELH 57:2, pp. 431–444. Scarry, Elaine. 1987. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schock, Peter. A. 1995. ‘The Satanism of Cain in Context: Byron’s Lucifer and the War against Blasphemy’. Keats-Shelley Journal 44, pp. 182–215. ———. 2003. Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley and Byron. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Shelley, Bryan. 1994. Shelley and Scripture: The Interpreting Angel. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, Olivia. 1984. The Politics of Language, 1791–1819. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sperry, Stuart M. 1981. ‘Necessity and the Role of the Hero in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound’. PMLA 96:2, pp. 242–254. St. Clair, William. 2007. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stones, Graeme. 1999. Parodies of the Romantic Age, Volume 3: Collected Prose Parody. London: Pickering & Chatto. Tegg, William. 1999. ‘The First Trial’. In The Three Trials of William Hone. In Parodies of the Romantic Age, Volume 3: Collected Prose Parody, ed. Stones, Graeme. London: Pickering & Chatto, pp. 183–251. Thompson, E. P. 2013. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin. Turley, Richard Marggraf. 2002. The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Visconsi, Elliot. 2008. ‘The Invention of Criminal Blasphemy: Rex v. Taylor (1676)’. Representations 103, pp. 30–52. Wasserman, Earl R. 1965. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: A Critical Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Watson, J. R. 1993. ‘Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and the Romantic Hymn’. The Durham University Journal 85:2, pp. 203–209. Webb, Timothy. 1977. Shelley: A Voice Not Understood. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 1983. ‘The Unascended Heaven: Negatives in Prometheus Unbound’. In Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference, ed. Everest, Kelvin. Leicester: Leicester University Press, pp. 37–62. Weinberg, Alan. 2016. ‘Freedom from the Stranglehold of Time: Shelley’s Visionary Conception in Queen Mab’. Romanticism 22:1, pp. 90–106.

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Whickman, Paul. 2016. ‘The Poet as Sage, Sage as Poet in 1816: Aesthetics and Epistemology in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”’. The Keats-Shelley Review 30:2, pp. 142–154. White, Daniel E. 2006. Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, Harry. 1982. ‘Relative Means and End in Shelley’s Social-Political Thought’. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 22:4, pp. 613–631. Worrall, David. 1992. Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1790–1820. New York: Harvester. Zall, Paul M. 1953. ‘Lord Eldon’s Censorship’. PMLA 68:3, pp. 436–443.

Internet Resources British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk. Accessed 29 December 2019. Cutmore, Jonathan. Quarterly Review Archive (Index). Romantic Circles. http:// www.rc.umd.edu/reference/qr/index/53.html. Accessed 29 December 2019. Firth, C. H. and Rait, R. S. 1911a. ‘June 1643: An Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing’. In Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=55829& strquery=licensing%20order%201643. Accessed 29 December 2019. ———. 1911b. ‘May 1648: An Ordinance for the Punishing of Blasphemies and Heresies, with the Several Penalties Therein Expressed…’. In Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660. British History Online. http:// www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=56264. Accessed 29 December 2019. ———. 1911c. ‘June 1650: An Act for the Better Preventing of Prophane Swearing and Cursing…’. In Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642– 1660. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=56404. Accessed 29 December 2019. ———. 1911. ‘August 1650: An Act Against Several Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrable Opinions, Derogatory to the Honor of God, and Destructive to Humane Society…’. In Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642– 1660. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=56410. Accessed 29 December 2019. Holmes, Richard. 2004. ‘Death and Destiny’. The Guardian, 24 January. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jan/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview1. Accessed 29 December 2019. Oxford English Dictionary Online. www.oed.com. Accessed 29 December 2019.

204  Works Cited and Further Reading Pyle, Forest. 1999. ‘Frail Spells: Shelley and the Ironies of Exile’. In Irony and Clerisy: Romantic Circles Praxis Series, ed. White, Deborah. http://www. rc.umd.edu/praxis/irony/pyle/frail.html. Accessed 29 December 2019. Raithby, John. 1819a. ‘Charles II, 1662: An Act for Preventing the Mischeifs and Dangers That May Arise by Certain Persons Called Quakers and Others Refusing to Take Lawfull Oaths…’. In Statutes of the Realm: Volume 5: 1628– 80. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=47304. Accessed 29 December 2019. ———. 1819b. ‘Charles II, 1662: An Act for the Uniformity of Publique Prayers and Administrac[i]on of Sacraments & Other Rites & Ceremonies and for Establishing the Form of Making Ordaining and Consecrating Bishops Preists and Deacons in the Church of England…’. In Statutes of the Realm: Volume 5: 1628–80. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report. aspx?compid=47307. Accessed 29 December 2019. ———. 1819c. ‘Charles II, 1664: An Act to Prevent and Suppresse Seditious Conventicles’. In Statutes of the Realm: Volume 5: 1628–80. British History Online.     http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=47357. Accessed 29 December 2019. ———. 1819d. ‘Charles II, 1678: (Stat. 2.) An Act for the More Effectuall Preserving the Kings Person and Government by Disableing Papists from Sitting in Either House of Parliament’. In Statutes of the Realm: Volume 5: 1628–80. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report. aspx?compid=47482. Accessed 29 December 2019. ———. 1819e. ‘William and Mary, 1688: An Act for Exempting Their Majestyes Protestant Subjects Dissenting from the Church of England from the Penalties of Certaine Lawes. [Chapter XVIII. Rot. Parl. pt. 5. nu. 15.]’. In Statutes of the Realm: Volume 6: 1685–94. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=46304. Accessed 29 December 2019. ———. 1819f. ‘Charles II, 1662: An Act for Preventing the Frequent Abuses in Printing Seditious Treasonable and Unlicensed Bookes and Pamphlets and for Regulating of Printing and Printing Presses’. In Statutes of the Realm: Volume 5: 1628–80. British History Online.http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report. aspx?compid=47336. Accessed 29 December 2019. ———. 1819g. ‘William III, 1697–8: An Act for the More Effectual Suppressing of Blasphemy and Profaneness. [Chapter XXXV. Rot. Parl. 9 Gul. III. p.6.n.4.]’. In Statutes of the Realm: Volume 7: 1695–1701. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=46921. Accessed 29 December 2019. Sedley, Stephen. 2019. ‘Dumb Insolence’. In Letters, 41.2. 24 January. London Review of Books. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n02/letters. Accessed 29 December 2019.

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Southey, Robert. 2013. ‘Letter 2012’. In The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Part Four: 1810–1815, ed. Packer, Ian and Pratt, Lynda. http://www.rc.umd. edu/editions/southey_letters/Part_Four/HTML/letterEEd.26.2012.html. Accessed 29 December 2019. ———. 2017. ‘Letter 3517’. In The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Part Six: 1819–1820, ed. Packer, Ian and Pratt, Lynda. https://romantic-circles. org/editions/southey_letters/Part_Six/HTML/letterEEd.26.3517.html. Accessed 29 December 2019.

Index

A Abrams, M.H., 11 Natural Supernaturalism, 11 Acts and Bills of Parliament ‘An Act against several Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrable Opinions, derogatory to the honor of God, and destructive to humane Society’ (1650), 5 ‘Act of Toleration’ (1689), 142 ‘Act of Uniformity’ (1662), 5, 42 ‘Blasphemy Act’ (1698), 17, 20, 33, 41, 142 ‘Conventicles Act’ (1664), 6 ‘Doctrine of the Trinity Act’ (1813), 108, 142 ‘Gagging Acts’ (1817), 83 ‘Licensing of the Press Act’ (1662), 19 ‘Licentiousness Bill’ (1704), 22 ‘Ordinance for the punishing of Blasphemies and Heresies’ (1648), 4 ‘Profane Oaths Act’ (1745), 36 ‘Quaker Act’ (1662), 5

‘Statute of Anne’ (1710), 32 Aeschylus, 162 Allen, Stephen, 84 Arnold, Matthew, 187 atheism, 1–2, 5, 8–12, 24, 61, 77, 85, 87, 94, 100–101, 126, 140, 187 as political charge in 1790s, 40 B Baines, Paul, 28, 55 Barrell, John, 39–40, 54 Benbow, William, 51–52, 61–72 Miscellaneous and Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 71–72 blasphemy, 1–2, 4, 5, 10–11, 18–19, 31–33, 70–71, 150, 152–153, 174 definition of, 4–5, 20–21 and ‘vulgarity’, 9–10, 30, 34, 36–37, 83–84 Bloom, Harold, 135, 187, 188 Shelley’s Mythmaking, 187 The Visionary Company, 135, 187, 189

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 P. Whickman, Blasphemy and Politics in Romantic Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46570-4

207

208  Index Browning, Robert, 186–188 Brun, Frederike, 131 ‘Sunrise at Chamouny’, 131 Burke, Edmund, 47 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 8–9, 45, 46, 51, 58, 64, 71, 72, 82, 85, 92, 94, 135, 139, 152–153, 166 Cain, 46, 51, 71, 152 on ‘cant,’, 8–9, 152 Don Juan, 45, 52, 61, 70, 152, 178 ‘Prometheus,’, 165 C Cabantous, Alain, 4, 20 Callaghan, Madeleine, 177 Carlile, Richard, 2, 50, 65, 67, 72, 79–81, 91–92, 101 Cash, Arthur, 37–38, 57 censorship, 2–3, 12, 27, 63, 64, 80, 94 pre-publication, 19––22 Chancery, 26, 43, 45, 47–48, 52, 58, 61–64, 66–68, 71, 182–184 Burnet v. Chetwood (1721), 18, 26–27, 31–32 Murray v. Benbow (1822), 51–53, 71 Murray v. Dugdale (1823), 52 Shelley v. Westbrooke (1817), 61, 64, 67–69, 82, 83, 91, 186 Southey v. Sherwood (1817), 12, 18, 31, 44–45, 51, 53, 63–64, 91 Walcot v. Walker (1802), 48–49 Chernaik, Judith, 127 The Lyrics of Shelley, 127 Christ, Jesus, 7, 13, 87, 137–161, 167–169, 172–176, 182, 186–188 as blasphemer, 137, 150–153, 175 death of, 78

divinity of, 5, 10, 21, 32, 78, 134, 137, 141–143, 149, 160, 171 doctrines of, 148, 157 Clairmont, Claire, 64, 68 Clark, William, 65–67, 70, 72, 74–81, 84, 90–91 Reply to the Anti-Matrimonial Hypothesis and Supposed Atheism of Percy Byssche Shelley as laid Down in Queen Mab, 80–81 ‘Cockney School’, 10, 92 Coleridge, Derwent, 72 Coleridge, John Taylor, 85 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 42, 121, 124–128, 130–132, 188 ‘Hymn Before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni’, 121, 124–128, 130–133 Copyright law, 3, 12–13, 17–18, 24–26, 31–32, 49–52, 63, 69, 182–184 Coward, William, 24 Cox, Jeffrey, 10 Criminal cases Queen v. Moxon (1841), 185 Rex v. Curl (1727), 27, 30–32, 36 Rex v. Taylor (1676), 6–7, 41 Cronin, Richard, 2–3 Crook, Nora, 84 Curll, Edmund, 27–32, 55 ‘Curlicism’, 28 D Davies, Scrope, 135 Davis, Michael T., 58, 151 Deazley, Ronan, 20 Defoe, Daniel, 21–24, 28 Essay on the Regulation of the Press, 21–24 Shortest way with the Dissenters, 22 de Quincey, Thomas, 131

Index

Derrida, Jacques, 115 Donovan, Jack, 63, 85–86 Duerksen, Roland, 165 Duffy, Cian, 181 Dugdale, William, 52, 65 E Eaton, Daniel Isaac, 7, 8, 108, 142, 150–151, 153–155, 178, 182 Eldon, Lord Chancellor, 44, 48–53, 61, 186 Eliot, T.S., 187 Enlightenment philosophy, 99–102, 111–113, 132 F Feather, John, 19–20 Foucault, Michel, 17–18 ‘What is an Author?,’, 17–18 Fraistat, Neil, 70–71 Fuller, David, 139 G God, 4–7, 19, 35, 76–77, 86–87, 89, 97–99, 101–113, 115–116, 130–133, 146, 155–157, 171–172 God as ‘word’, 13, 84, 97–99, 103–107, 109, 113, 116, 132, 146, 176, 182 Godwin, William, 98, 138, 151, 153, 182 Gregory, Alan, 161, 179 Grimes, Kyle, 41, 58 H Hammond, Brean, 29–30, 55, 56 Hazlitt, William, 10

  209

Hogg, Thomas Jefferson, 1, 93, 100, 115, 139–140 Holmes, Richard, 121 Hone, William, 19, 35, 39–45, 50, 57, 83, 178, 182, 183 Late John Wilkes’s Catechism, 40–41 Political Litany, 40 Shelley’s connection to, 43 Sinecurist’s Creed, 40 trials, 40–42 Hulme, T.E., 11, 109 Hume, David, 99, 111–113 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 110–113 Hunt, Henry Leigh, 70 Hunt, James Henry Leigh, 10, 70, 158 Hunt, John, 70 I Irreverence, 8–10, 13–14, 182 K Kant, Immanuel, 105–107 Keach, William, 100, 114, 118–120, 123, 127, 133 Shelley’s Style, 116, 118–119, 136 Keats, John, 10, 43, 187 Kolkey, Jason I., 63, 74, 78 L Leask, Nigel, 87 Leighton, Angela, 100, 111–112, 121, 124–125, 129 Levy, Leonard, 6, 55, 108 Locke, John, 21, 99–103, 110–112, 115

210  Index Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 101 Lowe, Peter, 187 M Marsh, Joss, 40, 42, 183 McGann, Jerome, 3, 58 ‘bibliographical codes’, 3, 27, 61–72, 183, 184, 186 Mee, Jon, 39, 54 Miles, Jack, 159, 166 Milton, John, 46, 51, 58, 59, 124, 127, 161–163, 168 Lycidas, 127 Paradise Lost, 46, 51, 161–164, 168–169, 171–172 Paradise Regained, 171 Moore, Thomas, 84–85 Moxon, Edward, 72, 93, 94, 179, 185–187 Murray, John, 51–53 N Nash, David, 8 Nersessian, Anahid, 85, 89, 91 Nicholson, Andrew, 58 O Ollier, Charles, 65–67, 76, 82–83, 145 O’Neill, Michael, 121, 133 Owenson, Sydney, 87 P Paine, Thomas, 15, 79, 101–103, 108, 110, 133, 134, 142, 155, 176 Age of Reason, 15, 79, 101–103, 108, 134, 142, 150, 176 Rights of Man, 15, 155

Peacock, Thomas Love, 83–84 Pindar, Peter, 48 Plato, 7, 109, 130 allegory of the cave, 130 Republic, 130 Pope, Alexander, 27–31, 55, 56 The Dunciad, 27, 29, 34 ‘Power’, 85–89, 97, 98, 108, 110, 120, 121, 124–127, 128–130, 131–132, 156, 169–172, 182 Priestman, Martin, 1, 2, 11, 66 Romantic Atheism, 11 Q Quakers, 5–6, 21 R Roberts, Hugh, 130 Rogers, Pat, 28 Romilly, Samuel, 46, 48, 61 Roston, Murray, 118 Ryan, Robert, 11, 138–139, 149, 187 The Romantic Reformation, 11 S Saglia, Diego, 88 Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia, 96 Sandwich, Earl of, 37–38 Saunders, David, 30–32, 56 Scarry, Elaine, 159 Schock, Peter A., 162 Senior, Nassau William, 59 Shakespeare, William, 11, 46, 127– 128, 160, 180 Shaw, George Bernard, 187 Shelley, Bryan, 11, 138, 149, 161, 165, 175

Index

Shelley and Scripture, 11 Shelley, Mary, 61–72, 82, 88–91, 183 The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1839/1840), 72–73, 93 Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 70–71, 183 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 7–13, 61–83, 89–91, 97–101, 113–115, 117, 118, 123, 124, 126–128, 132, 137–140, 151, 152–154, 155–158, 160–163, 176 Adonais, 127, 138, 187 as ‘atheist,’, 1, 8, 11, 61, 62, 77, 81, 126, 187 Canonicity, 63–64, 82, 188 The Cenci, 67, 70–71, 93, 94, 138 Chartists’ opinion of, 187 Defence of Poetry, 9, 100, 112, 113–114, 117, 148 doctrine of Necessity, 103–104, 170 ‘England in 1819’, 71, 120, 133, 150 Epipsychidion, 117 Essay on a Future State, 98, 126 Hellas, 76, 138, 143–147; redactions, 76, 145 ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, 71, 97, 120, 138, 156, 171 Laon and Cythna, 10, 12–14, 61, 63–64, 76, 79–81, 83–88, 92, 97, 99, 106–111, 117, 127, 133, 139, 145, 146, 162, 181, 182; incest in, 83–85; influence of Queen Mab, 82; revisions to, 82–88, 92, 97 A Letter to Lord Ellenborough, 7, 108, 141–143, 152, 153 ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, 88, 96, 160 The Mask of Anarchy, 71

  211

‘Mont Blanc’, 8, 10, 13, 71, 97, 99, 104, 106, 110, 120, 123–133, 138, 156, 171, 182, 184 Necessity of Atheism, 1, 9, 100–101, 140 ‘Ode to Liberty’, 139, 145 ‘Ode to the West Wind’, 99, 110, 117–120, 129, 133 ‘On Christianity,’, 98, 139, 143, 149, 156, 158, 163 Prometheus Unbound, 10, 13, 67, 92, 93, 97, 129, 138–139, 141, 147–148, 155–162, 165–175, 179, 181, 182, 184, 187; volume, 67 Queen Mab, 12, 61–77, 87–90, 97–99, 100–101, 102–108, 131, 132, 143–145, 146, 156, 161–164, 183–185; blasphemy of, 63, 70; publication, 64, 66, 72–74; redactions, 73–78 The Revolt of Islam, 13, 70–71, 81–89, 92, 97, 108, 159–160 The Triumph of Life, 138 ‘To Wordsworth’, 147 Sherwood, Neely & Jones, 44, 45, 48–50 Smith, Horace, 139 Smith, Olivia, 10, 27, 41 Socrates, 7, 137, 151–152 Southey, Robert, 40, 48–50, 51–52, 58, 59, 65, 66, 68, 100, 127–128, 176, 188 Thalaba the Destroyer, 68 A Vision of Judgement, 178; ‘satanic school of poetry,’ 178 Wat Tyler, 40, 43–52, 58, 61, 65, 66, 176 Spenser, Edmund, 127–128, 160 Sperry, Stuart, 165, 170, 174 St. Clair, William, 49, 50, 65

212  Index The sublime, 8, 13, 97, 99, 112–114, 121–129, 131, 132, 143, 144, 147, 185 Swearing, 5, 27, 30, 36, 107 T Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 187, 189 Toland, John, 20, 54 Trinitarianism, 108, 142 W Walcot/Wolcot, John, 48–49 Warburten, William, 37–38, 114–116, 120, 134 Divine Legation of Moses demonstrated on the Principles of a Religious Deist, 114, 134 Wasserman, Earl R., 170, 172 Webb, Timothy, 8, 120, 163, 167, 169

Weinberg, Eric, 63 Westbrook, Harriet, 61, 62, 68 Wilkes, John, 19, 35, 37–38, 40, 56, 182 Essay on Woman, 37–38 ‘Woolstonian Controversy’, 10, 33, 36 Woolston, Thomas, 18, 32–35 Wordsworth, William, 100, 121–124, 126, 128, 147, 167, 188 The Excursion, 147–148, 167 ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, 123–124 Ode, Intimations of Immortality, 176 Y Yeats, W.B., 161, 187 Z Zall, Paul, 53