Shelley and His Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics

Shelley and His Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics Kim Wheatley UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS Shelley and His Readers ...

Author: Kim Wheatley

18 downloads 927 Views 867KB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Shelley and His Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics

Kim Wheatley

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS

Shelley and His Readers

This page intentionally left blank

Shelley and His Readers Beyond Paranoid Politics

Kim Wheatley UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS

COLUMBIA AND LONDON

Copyright © 1999 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 03 02 01 00 99 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wheatley, Kim, 1960– Shelley and his readers : beyond paranoid politics / Kim Wheatley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8262-1221-2 (alk. paper) 1. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792–1822—Criticism and interpretation—History. 2. Politics and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Authors and readers—Great Britain—History—19th century. 4. Criticism—Great Britain— History—19th century. 5. Poetry—History and criticism—Theory, etc. I. Title. PR5438.W48 1999 821'.7—dc21 99-25961 CIP ⬁ ™This paper meets the requirements of the 䡬 American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.

Designer: Stephanie Foley Typesetter: BOOKCOMP Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Adobe Garamond This book has been published with the generous assistance of a contribution from the College of William and Mary.

For my mother, Jacqueline Everson


Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations

ix xi

Introduction

1

1. Paranoid Politics I.

The Quarterly and Edinburgh Reviews

II.

Shelley and the Tory Reviewers

2. Contagion and Personification in Queen Mab and Its Reception I.

Contagion and Conspiracy

II.

Personifications and Personal Attacks

3. Prometheus Unbound: Reforming the Reviewers I.

Defying Heaven

II.

“Nonsense”

III.

“Beautiful Idealisms”

4. The Elegiac Reception of Adonais I.

Forms of Consolation

II.

“A Poetical Character”

III.

The Circle of Mourners

Notes Works Cited Index

13

58

109

151

197 259 273


Acknowledgments

My first intellectual debt, as far as this book is concerned, is to my undergraduate teacher of Romanticism, Sita Narasimhan, who taught me to attend to the strangeness of Shelley’s poetry. To Jerome Christensen and Frances Ferguson, who directed the doctoral dissertation from which this book emerged, I owe a more profound debt. Their brilliance and generosity have inspired me throughout the project. I am also indebted to my friends who have read and criticized portions of the manuscript in draft: Meg Russett, Neill Matheson, Charles Dove, Adam Potkay, Paula Blank, Christy Burns, and John Morillo. My writing and thinking have benefited immensely from their feedback, Meg’s in particular. I would also like to thank various other friends and colleagues for their advice and encouragement: Eileen McWilliam, Meredith McGill, Julia Walker, Deborah Morse, Monica Potkay, and Liz Barnes. Writing this book has brought me into contact with many supportive fellow-Romanticists. Among them special thanks are due to Orrin Wang for inviting me to present material to the Washington-Area Romanticists’ Group, and David Latané for inviting me to give a talk at Virginia Commonwealth University. Thanks also to Frank Cass Publishers for allowing me to republish as the first part of Chapter 1 a revised version of my article, “Paranoid Politics: The Quarterly and Edinburgh Reviews,” which appeared in Prose Studies volume 15, in December 1992. A few pages of the second section of my first chapter rework material that was first published in my article, “The Blackwood’s Attacks on Leigh Hunt” in Nineteenth-Century Literature volume 47, in June 1992; permission to reprint was given by the Regents of the University of California. A paper based on earlier segments of Chapters 1 and 3 appeared online in Romantic Praxis volume 1, in September 1997 (available via the Romantic Circles website at http://www.rc.umd.edu). ix

x

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the College of William and Mary for awarding me three summer grants, in 1993, 1994, and 1998, to support this project. I would also like to acknowledge the helpfulness of my editors at the University of Missouri Press, Clair Willcox, Jane Lago, and Julie Schroeder, and the useful comments of the anonymous readers who evaluated my manuscript for the press. Thanks finally to Emily Council for confirming what I had long suspected: that it would be more fun to have a child than to write a book. Loren Council has read and reread every word of the manuscript, offered numerous invaluable suggestions for improving it, and provided various other kinds of assistance, tangible and intangible. He deserves the most thanks of all.

Abbreviations

BL BLJ BM ER H L MWSL PJ PL Prose PW QR RR,A RR,C

SC SPP Works WR

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria Byron’s Letters and Journals Blackwood’s Magazine Edinburgh Review Newman Ivey White, The Unextinguished Hearth: Shelley and His Contemporary Critics The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness Paradise Lost, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poetical Works Quarterly Review Donald H. Reiman, The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers, Part A: The Lake Poets Donald H. Reiman, The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers, Part C: Shelley, Keats, and London Radical Writers Kenneth Neill Cameron and Donald H. Reiman, eds., Shelley and His Circle, 1773–1822 Shelley’s Poetry and Prose William Hazlitt, Works Westminster Review


Introduction

“Poetry . . . acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness” —A Defence of Poetry, 486

This book explores the dialogue between the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and its immediate public reception, which I claim registers the impact of Shelley’s increasingly idealistic “passion for reforming the world.”1 I see the vituperative rhetoric of the poet’s hostile contemporary reviewers as a historically specific version of the “paranoid style,” a heightened language of defensiveness and persecution. I use the phrase “paranoid style”—taken from Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965)— to characterize not only the violent attacks that Shelley himself inspired, but also the aggressive language of elitist reviewers’ attacks on reformist writers in general in early-nineteenth-century England. Defining the paranoid style, Hofstadter describes “a style of mind, not always right-wing in its affiliations, that has a long and varied history” (3). He points out that he is “not speaking in a clinical sense” but rather “borrowing a clinical term” to suggest “qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” (3). Crucially, despite the paranoid rhetorician’s grandiose vision that entire systems of values are being jeopardized by an imminent crisis, he interprets large-scale events personally, psychologizing historical agency as “the consequences of someone’s will” (32). He takes individuals to be capable of manipulating large numbers of people, controlling their actions completely. Paranoid thinking leaves no room for unpredictability or ambiguity. Hofstadter observes however that the enemy is also 1

2


paradoxically a projection of the self, an object onto which one’s own illicit fantasies can be projected. Hence some of the inconsistencies of paranoid rhetoric. Obsessed with what they perceive as the threat of revolution, users of the paranoid style—conspiracy theorists by definition—ascribe to their enemies the power to effect large-scale social and political change.2 Within the Romantic-era version of paranoid politics, both Tory and Whig reviewers translate their intense partisanship into a vocabulary of moral absolutism. Adopting the Miltonic and apocalyptic imagery of English political rhetoric, these spokesmen for the establishment characterize their adversaries as Satanic rebels against orthodoxy. They tend to pin the blame for actual or potential social unrest on one person or a small band of conspirators, singling out radical writers, including Shelley, for personal attacks and accusing them of stirring up revolutionary violence. Since in early-nineteenth-century England, the publication of reformist texts was a key element in extraparliamentary political activity, this particular version of the paranoid style involves a preoccupation with the efficacy of the printed word. Writers for the reviewing periodicals make what Hofstadter calls the “characteristic paranoid leap into fantasy” (11) when describing the influence of reformist publications, whether prose or poetry. The reviewers envisage seditious sentiments not only automatically affecting readers, but also magically reaching even the illiterate, by means of the contagious power of ideas. Their apparent belief in a depersonalized contagion conflicts with their stress on the predominance of individual agency, but the paranoid rhetoric of the Romantic period is not undermined by its contradictions, it is strengthened by them. This extravagant and unstable discourse is exemplified by the rhetoric of the Tory Quarterly Review, which, along with its Whig counterpart, the Edinburgh Review, figured their shared political antagonists—reformers— as diabolically powerful and threatening. The reviewers’ obsession with the danger of reformist texts extends to a more ambivalent concern over the supposedly deleterious effects of blasphemous or seditious poetry. Although Shelley’s own political stance is more elusive than that of popular reformers, his contemporary reviewers often treated it as merely an extreme version of popular radicalism. The Quarterly and other voices of the establishment excoriated Shelley in terms similar to those used against radical journalists such as William Cobbett and Richard Carlile. However, the personal attacks to which they subjected Shelley tend to be more elaborate than their jibes at radicals. Moreover, as we will see, the reviewers

Introduction

3

vacillated over whether Shelley’s innovative and elitist poetic language renders his radicalism more or less dangerous. On the one hand, the audience for poetry belongs to an elite happily resistant to contagion; and on the other hand, the “beauties” of poetry may make it even more insidious than openly expressed revolutionary sentiments. Either way, establishment reviewers write as if under siege, magnifying the threat of their essentially powerless radical opponents, including poets. Their attacks—and the counterattacks they generated—lock both perpetrators and victims into mutually sustaining positions. In what I call the Satanic scenario, reformers play the part of Satan in Paradise Lost, not realizing that they are allowing establishment writers to dictate the terms of public debate. My sense of the relationship between God and Satan takes for granted what Marjorie Levinson calls “the lesson we first learned from the Romantics. Namely, that Satan is always God’s product, structural complement, and support-system.”3 That is to say, the stance of a defiant rebel tends to uphold the orthodoxy that it purports to challenge, as Shelley powerfully dramatizes in Prometheus Unbound (1820). From a rhetorical point of view, to identify with Milton’s Satan is to identify with his impotence. In the early nineteenth century there were also historical reasons for a rebellious political stance to be an ineffectual one, in that there was as yet no coherent alternative language of politics available to reformers. I argue that Shelley’s early, explicitly radical poem Queen Mab (1813) reveals its limitations in welcoming a derivative Satanic position, a position that the poem’s contemporary reception confirms. I go on to show that insofar as Shelley’s later poems—specifically Prometheus Unbound and Adonais (1821)—antagonize establishment reviewers, they also take their place within the simultaneously enabling and disabling dynamics of the Satanic scenario. The central claim of my argument, however, is that these later poems, in dialogue with the reviewers, succeed in avoiding a merely oppositional stance. Why were the Reviews so nasty? How, that is to say, can one account for what Terry Eagleton calls the “scurrility” and “sectarian virulence” of the Quarterly and Edinburgh Reviews? Eagleton and other materialist critics working on the Romantic period, notably Levinson in Keats’s Life of Allegory, tend to explain the reviewers’ excesses with reference to class anxieties: they assume that “sectarian virulence” is grounded in something other than political partisanship—in this case “the pressures of mounting class struggle in society as a whole.”4 Qualifying this assumption, I suggest that

4


there are rhetorical as well as historical reasons for the British Romanticera phenomenon of paranoid rhetoric, and that no single ground for the reviewers’ extremism can be identified. It is all too easy to see the irrationally defensive tone of the reviewers as a paranoid overreaction to an exclusively political or class-based threat. Impassioned language need not be the result of some hidden (or not so hidden) anxiety: it may invent a threat rather than—or as well as—respond to one. Any analysis of an outbreak of cultural paranoia needs to take into account a rhetorical confusion between real and imagined, since paranoia by definition involves not only exaggeration but fictions taking on the force of the literal. The translation of figurative into literal is built into the clinical understanding of paranoia. Victims of the psychosis enjoy megalomaniac fantasies while suffering delusions of persecution, which they perceive as real. They project their own threatening impulses onto an imaginary hostile external world and then defend themselves from that world, which they people with malign intentions.5 Although this confusion can be deliberately exploited, the cultural paranoia of early-nineteenth-century England is neither just a consciously assumed rhetorical strategy nor a collective delusion. The distinction becomes a false one, since persecution can both absorb multiple motivations and generate more of the same, crossing from one frame of reference to another. As I will suggest in my first chapter, motives based on class, politics, marketing considerations, and personal animosity intersect and become indistinguishable from each other. In addition, each of these motivations may be subordinated to the impulse to entertain: persecution is fun! The paranoia of Romantic-era reviewers thus occludes rather than reflects real power relations between the ruling classes and reformers. It is virtually impossible to identify the main cause of the reviewers’ embattled tone, because original causes get left behind. Instead, one extravagance generates another, just as accusations of conspiracy generate proliferating counteraccusations, feeding on themselves. Because the paranoid rhetorician’s voice is always pitched at an extreme, he invites his opponents to take a stance at the other extreme. Fittingly, in view of the paranoid rhetorician’s reliance on tropes of contagion, paranoid fictions are themselves contagious. Hence the power and pervasiveness of paranoid rhetoric. In a letter to Robert Southey, Shelley asserted, “I do not profess paper warfare” (L, 2:204); however, this claim is misleading. Merely to publish in early-nineteenth-century England was in some sense to engage in paper warfare, as Shelley implicitly acknowledges with his at once defiant and

Introduction

5

conciliating attitude towards the reviewers.6 And throughout his career, from 1810 until his death in 1822, Shelley went out of his way to publish his writings, often evidently with the reviewers, rather than other readers, in mind. Shelley professed not to care about reviews, but when writing from Italy to his publisher, Charles Ollier, he often asked about the public reception of his works, especially Prometheus Unbound and Adonais, which he considered to be his best poems. On one occasion he emphasized his interest in the hostile reception of his poetry, saying, “If any of the Reviews abuse me, cut them out and send them. If they praise, you need not trouble yourself ” (L, 2:174). Shelley’s interest in verbal abuse may follow from his conscious and unconscious manipulation of his own Satanic persona. He was also intrigued by extreme reactions to his poetry, whether positive or negative. On another occasion he asked Ollier to send “any review of note [that] abuses me excessively, or the contrary” (L, 2:269). Most contemporary reviews of Shelley fall into one or both of those categories; I will show that according to the logic of the Satanic scenario, the “abuse” predictably at once empowers and circumscribes Shelley, but that at the same time the reviewers’ comments—favorable and unfavorable—on the style of his later poems register Shelley’s challenge to the assumptions underlying paranoid rhetoric. The reviews of Shelley that I will be examining display both the reviewers’ resistance to verbal idiosyncrasy and their reluctant interest in Shelley’s experiments with poetic form, syntax, and diction. Ironically, the reviewers themselves generate the terms for a nonparanoid reading of the poetry. Shelley’s movement beyond paranoid politics is also a movement towards transcendental idealism. Eager to substitute collaborative for personal responsibility, Shelley faces the problem of how to write poetry capable of reforming the world without replicating either the reviewers’ emphasis on individual volition, or their dependence on the inexorable power of the printed word. Hypothesizing a truly radical sense of community, his boldly innovative later poems display his commitment to an ethical and aesthetic idealism. In line with an ethos of non-coerciveness, however, Shelley leaves open how exactly his poetry will transform its readers.7 Shelley idealistically assumes that a poet should leave his readers free to misinterpret his work, but that the interaction between poetry and the “spirit of the age” (508) remains positive.8 Instead of attempting to trace lines of cause and effect (direct or indirect), I identify the interplay between the later poems and their reception as itself a historically contingent enactment of

6


Shelleyan idealism. I argue that hostile reviewers and would-be defenders of Shelley’s poetry alike collaborate with Shelley’s poetry in momentarily sidestepping the oppositional structure of the Satanic scenario, producing not so much an alternative language of politics as an alternative to politics— the aesthetic. I see a turn to aestheticism and aesthetic appreciation on the part of Shelley and his early readers respectively as a way out of the selfperpetuating God-versus-Satan dynamic. The contemporary reception of Shelley’s poetry participates in a larger cultural shift towards the recognition of an aesthetic realm separate from politics, a shift that has been routinely identified with the Romantic period by literary historians. An eventual byproduct of this shift is Matthew Arnold’s image of Shelley as a “beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”9 However, in context, Shelley is effectual precisely because he helps to bring about the division between the aesthetic and the political that Arnold’s own statement continues to widen. In seeing a move to the aesthetic as a manifestation of Shelley’s idealism, I might seem to downplay the ethical component of that idealism—fittingly perhaps in the light of Shelley’s own sense that the effects of poetry should not and cannot be predicted. Nevertheless, I claim that the very act of opening up a nonpartisan aesthetic space can be seen as offering a way out of a rigid and morally bankrupt political discourse. Even if a split between the aesthetic and the political results in escapist claims of transcendence, in Shelley’s particular historical moment the very gesture to divide the two is ethical in the sense of inventing an alternative to paranoid politics. Statements from Shelley’s prose works may be used to illuminate his idealism, bearing in mind that his prose statements tend to make emphatic assertions only to undercut them. While acknowledging in A Defence of Poetry (1821) that “conceptions of right and wrong” (488) are historically specific, Shelley identifies the “eternal truth” (485) of poetry with both virtue and aesthetic appreciation.10 He articulates the ground of his ethics in the context of a discussion of poetry’s beneficial effect on humanity: “The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own” (487). To love is to love “the beautiful,” but although Shelley relativizes “conceptions of right and wrong,” he assumes, both here and in the prefaces to Prometheus Unbound and Adonais, that the beautiful needs no definition. So either the aesthetic grounds Shelley’s ethics, or morality determines beauty, or—since they seem to be

Introduction

7

mutually defining—love and “the beautiful” are grounded by each other. Alternatively, the statement’s emphasis may fall on “a going out of our own nature,” the process that merges love and the perception of the beautiful. This “going out” may itself be purely ideal, like the hypothetical “cloud of mind” (124) mentioned in the preface to Prometheus Unbound and the “chain of linked thought” celebrated by the Earth in act 4 of Prometheus Unbound (4:394). Despite the word “our,” the idea of a “going out of our own nature” may not necessarily suggest a shared or collective act of aesthetic appreciation (the next sentence of the Defence begins “A man . . .” [487]), but the definition of love in Shelley’s prose fragment “On Love” (1818) insists on the blurring of self and other: “Love . . . is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive or fear or hope beyond ourselves when we . . . seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves” (473). Shelley’s ethics then rest on a response to “the beautiful” that involves if not the creation of then at least the imagination of “a community.” This community is constituted by a transcendent act of self-effacement.11 By claiming that Shelley and his early readers compose such a community, needless to say I am not arguing that they can be seen to reach what William Ulmer calls “actual ontological transcendence”;12 rather, I aim to show that they provide a fleeting yet tangible enactment of Shelley’s own statements of belief in transcendence. In foregrounding the issue of how to hold onto Shelley’s idealism, I seek to pull together the two main strands of Shelley criticism, formalist and historical. The first of these often takes Shelley’s poetry to anticipate the concerns of poststructuralism, but it tends not to approach his own self-deconstructions in their historical context.13 The second stresses Shelley’s political involvements, but without taking into full account the specificities of his literary language.14 For both camps of Shelley critics, the poet’s later expressions of idealism tend to be an embarrassment. Like them, I take it for granted that Shelley’s allegiance to idealism inevitably remains vulnerable both to deconstructive analysis and to so-called ideology critique.15 My own argument—in conceding the challenge to idealism from deconstruction in one direction and from historicism in the other—nevertheless finds that certain highly charged episodes in the reception history of Shelley’s poetry constitute a temporary bringing to life of his idealism. Those episodes offer the opportunity to combine close textual analysis (both of what Shelley’s readers say and of the passages they single out for commentary) with a means of confronting

8


Shelley in his own historical moment. Besides negotiating between the two major schools of Shelley criticism, my project also participates in broader debates between proponents of formalist versus materialist approaches to literature. Modifying recent materialist claims that even the Romantic period’s most apparently apolitical and transcendentalizing poetry can be grounded historically, I see the dialogue between a text and its readers as capable of taking on a momentum of its own and thus in some sense as eluding contextual determination.16 At the same time, my analysis of the cultural paranoia of the early nineteenth century shows that to confront a text in its historical specificity may diminish rather than enhance its political potential. My claim that Shelley’s poetry to some extent is circumscribed by its own Satanic stance therefore suggests a need to reinterrogate the supposed “subversiveness” of many reformist texts of the Romantic era. However, my emphasis on the recovery of idealism offers an alternative understanding of reformism, though one that is not transferable to other historical periods. While certain new historicist critics—notably Jerome McGann in The Romantic Ideology—have deplored the opening up of a separate aesthetic space in the early nineteenth century on the grounds that it is a form of political escapism, I celebrate the coming into being of that space insofar as it enables Shelley’s poetry momentarily to evade paranoid politics. My argument also suggests the possibility of recovering the idealism of Romantic poets other than Shelley. Although the dialogue between Prometheus Unbound and its reception offers a particularly apt illustration of the shift in the reviewers’ terms from a partisan to a nonpartisan notion of the aesthetic, a similar interaction could be traced between the reviews and other literary texts of the period. By contrast, my chapter on the early posthumous reception of Adonais as another enactment of Shelley’s idealism addresses an unrepeatable nexus of events: Shelley’s decision to write an elegy about a dead poet, his own sudden death the following year, and the impulse of the Shelley circle to memorialize their dead friend. I show that the comments by Shelley’s friends linking him with Adonais themselves play out the contradictions within that poem’s idealist vision. Shelley and his early readers thus move beyond paranoid politics in both exemplary and unique ways. Despite its centrality for any would-be political reading, the question of how exactly poetry affects readers tends to remain underexplored in twentieth-century criticism of the Romantics, partly because definite answers are bound to remain elusive, and partly, I suspect, because critics

Introduction

9

have difficulty in distancing themselves from the Romantic poets’ own revisionary and sophisticated—yet also nebulous—notions of didacticism. Critics tend to accept rather than interrogate William Wordsworth’s claim, for example, in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800) that poetry enlightens the “understanding” of readers and strengthens and ameliorates their “affections” (745); the same can be said of Shelley’s declaration in A Defence of Poetry that poetry “awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought” (487). The spirit behind these impossible-to-disprove remarks persists into the work of even the most skeptical present-day critics perhaps because they confirm Romanticists’ own desire for texts (including their own) to make a difference. Without attempting to distance myself from such a desire (since why else choose to write on Shelley, the radical poet par excellence), I offer no certainty about how published writings (Shelley’s, other reformers’, or the reviewers’) have an effect, but instead insist throughout this study on standing back from any and all unquestioning assertions of textual efficacy. Nevertheless I offer a particular understanding of efficacy in attempting to recapture a historically specific interplay between texts and their actual readers. While Shelley’s deliberate attempts at collaborative writing were rather limited, the story this book tells is one of sometimes unwitting collaboration between the poet, his reviewers, and eventually the Shelley circle. This collaboration at one extreme encompasses conscious replies and rejoinders and at the other extreme extends to temporal juxtapositions that can only be significant in retrospect, like the connection in Prometheus Unbound between Asia’s question, “When shall the destined hour arrive?” and Demogorgon’s reply, “Behold!” (2.4.128). Like many books on Shelley, this study examines the trajectory of a single author’s career and organizes its argument around detailed analyses of individual poems, but its focus on reception de-emphasizes both Shelley’s own conscious aims and the implied intentions of his works. Although the book has an overarching argument concerning the ultimate evasion of paranoid rhetoric by Shelley and his readers, it does not provide a monolithic account of Shelley’s career as a whole but consists rather of a series of case studies designed to bring alive the nuances of particular instances of reception. The focus on reception also downplays Shelley’s unconscious motivations. This is not a study of Shelley’s own personal paranoid tendencies, although some of the reviews that I will be discussing suggest the difficulty of distinguishing between psychological and cultural

10


paranoia. Shelley’s antagonistic relationship with Robert Southey, for example, invites a psychoanalytic interpretation, but I leave such an interpretation to other critics. The connection between Shelley and Southey is important to my argument, given that I treat Southey in my first chapter as the leading spokesman of the early-nineteenth-century paranoid style. I approach their relationship, however, not so much as a conflict between two individuals as a continuing poetic response by Shelley to the paranoid assumptions that Southey articulates in his Quarterly essays.17 The narrative of this book thus logically extends beyond Shelley’s death, but it does not wholly ignore the poet’s own calculating attitude to publication and reception that can partly be traced in his works themselves and partly identified in his letters.18 I show that the reactions of the reviewers and later readers both collaborate with and resist Shelley’s treatment of his real and projected audiences. Nevertheless, although I occasionally refer to Shelley’s letters and other biographical material, in general I restrict my analysis to texts that were published and reviewed during Shelley’s lifetime, since my concern is with the poetry’s interaction with its immediate public context in the Romantic era. Major Shelley works such as “Peter Bell the Third,” A Philosophical View of Reform (both written in 1819), and A Defence of Poetry were not published until the Victorian period or even later, and so did not enter into public dialogue with the early-nineteenth-century discourse that helped to shape them. Even among poems published before Shelley’s death, my approach is highly selective. However, I would suggest that the terms of the contemporary reception of Shelley affected and continue to affect the interpretation and evaluation of his works as a whole. The book is organized as follows. The first half of my first chapter analyzes examples of the paranoid style from the two reputedly most influential early-nineteenth-century reviewing periodicals, the Quarterly Review and the Edinburgh Review. The articles discussed in this chapter provide the wider public context with which in my later chapters Shelley’s poems will be seen to interact, the context of paranoid politics that his poetry eventually circumvents. In the second half of the first chapter I go on to analyze the Quarterly’s attacks on Shelley, which display and complicate the continuities between the paranoid political rhetoric of the reviews in general and the hostile reception of Shelley. Shelley’s most conscious dialogue with the reviewers involves the Quarterly’s attacks, in that both the preface and text of Prometheus Unbound contain public replies to the Quarterly.19 Chapter 1 ends by turning to the intriguingly mixed reviews of

Introduction

11

Shelley that appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine; in these reviews we can see some evidence of a nonpartisan and nonparanoid aesthetic appreciation of Shelley, which I explore more fully in Chapters 3 and 4. Although in my first chapter I focus only on the major reviewing periodicals—the Quarterly, the Edinburgh, and Blackwood’s—in subsequent chapters I show that their terms are recapitulated and in some cases rendered more extreme by lesser periodicals in reviewing Shelley, particularly in attacks on Queen Mab, the subject of Chapter 2. Chapter 2 argues that Queen Mab and its contemporary reviewers fail to challenge the assumptions underlying paranoid rhetoric. Both the poem and its early readers conflate conspiracy and contagion, reflecting a contemporary cultural confusion over the definition of contagious disease. While this ambiguity intensifies the self-righteousness of Shelley’s reviewers, it traps the poem in a parasitic and denunciatory mode. Queen Mab, that is to say, embraces the subordinate position in the Satanic scenario. Chapter 3 shows that Prometheus Unbound revises rather than rejects the paranoid belief in the inexorable power of texts, aiming to change its readers with “beautiful idealisms of moral excellence” (127). By the time he wrote Prometheus Unbound, Shelley had recognized that even to dictate the terms of a utopia is tyrannical. My reading engages with the problem of how the poem can continue to reflect Shelley’s “passion for reforming the world,” given that it refuses to specify in what ways change should take place. By approaching Prometheus Unbound via the responses of the reviewers, I recover the participation of a collective audience in the process of change. The reviewers’ objections to the stylistic peculiarities of the lyrical drama register the strategies by which Shelley tries to redefine his readers’ tastes. At the same time the reviewers’ enthusiasm for the “poetical beauties” of Prometheus Unbound (RR,C, 139) enables a recuperation of a Shelleyan aesthetic by itself developing into “a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful.” My final chapter, on Adonais, offers another example of the recovery of idealism, one that in this case is a function of genre as well as produced by the conditions of reception. The object of aesthetic appreciation this time is not so much the poem as the dead Shelley himself, interpreted in the light of Adonais. The reception of Shelley’s elegy on John Keats thus participates in the poem’s genre, in that responses to it by members of the Shelley circle take the form of narratives of loss and consolation, identifying prophecies of Shelley’s death in the text and a relationship of “sublime fitness” (PW, 679) between that death

12


and the poem. Shelley’s friends, in themselves constituting a procession of mourners commemorating a dead poet, realize a historically and generically determined manifestation of the elegy’s own complex revision of Shelley’s aesthetic idealism. Neither the transition from devil to angel nor the eventual sidestepping of that dichotomy by Shelley and his readers are entirely linear processes, so that the unfolding of my argument is not strictly chronological. The reviews analyzed in the first half of Chapter 1 are from the period 1812– 1820, while the attacks on Shelley dealt with in the second half of that chapter date from 1818–1821. My chapter on Queen Mab takes the reader back to 1813, moves to the at once outraged and enthusiastic reception of the pirated edition of Queen Mab in 1821, and ends with some of the hostile comments on Shelley’s death in 1822. The chapter on Prometheus Unbound focuses more on a particular historical moment, concentrating on the dialogue of that poem with its initial reviews of 1820 and 1821. Chapter 4 pays some attention to the contemporary reception of Adonais but is more concerned with the way in which the elegiac impulse of Adonais is played out in the Shelley circle’s idealizing posthumous recuperation of the poet after his death in 1822 and on into the beginning of the Victorian period—as some would have it, over Shelley’s dead body.

1

P a r a n o i d Po l i t i c s

Their spite still serves His glory to augment. —PL, 1.385–86

I. The Quarterly and Edinburgh Reviews In March 1818, Blackwood’s Magazine featured “Remarks on the Periodical Criticism of England—in a Letter to a Friend. (Translated from the German of Von Lauerwinkel.)”1 According to these “Remarks,” the major periodicals of the day exercise “despotical” (BM 2:672) control over writers and their audiences. The article sets out to describe “those strange Reviews, which at present rule the authors and readers of the freest country in Europe, with as arbitrary and merciless a sway as was ever exerted over the civil and political world by a sportive Nero, or a gloomy Tiberius” (BM 2:670). The fictitious Von Lauerwinkel contends that “An oligarchy is always a tyrannical government; and such is at this moment the constitution of [the reviewers’] literary empire. The oligarchy is made up of two parties, who detest each other with a virulence of hatred” (BM 2:672). These two unnamed parties are the Tories and the Whigs, represented respectively by the Quarterly Review and the Edinburgh Review, whose differing political allegiances are reflected in their criticism. Von Lauerwinkel claims that the writers for these periodicals routinely set aside authorial intention: “It is no matter although the poor author be a man who cares nothing at all about politics, and has never once thought either of Pitt or Fox, Castlereagh or Napoleon, during the whole time of composing his book. . . . The book itself is perhaps as far, both in subject and spirit, from politics, as can well be imagined. The Reviewer does not mind that: 13

14


when he sits down to criticise it, his first question is not, ‘is this book good or bad?’ but it is, ‘is this writer a ministerialist or an oppositionist?’ ” (BM 2:671). The reviewing periodicals, that is to say, entirely surrender objective judgment to political partisanship. Von Lauerwinkel stresses the at once self-aggrandizing and annihilating effect of this impulse: “The author is a mere puppet in the hands of the critic. . . . My dear friend, the author is nothing—the Reviewer every thing” (BM 2:671). But Von Lauerwinkel’s own account is not as objective as it at first appears. While deploring the “bigotry” (BM 2:673) of the Quarterly Review, and the “ill-natured abuse” (BM 2:672) of its editor William Gifford, Von Lauerwinkel expresses approval for its political stance. The writers of that periodical “deserve well of their country, and of Europe, for the tone of decided opposition which they always maintained towards the ambitious schemes of the common enemy of Christendom” (BM 2:673). The “common enemy” referred to here is not the devil but the Satanic figure of Napoleon, who, despite his wickedness, did not, according to Von Lauerwinkel, merit the “terms of exaggerated and insulting rancour” (BM 2:673) applied to him by the Quarterly Review. Reflecting the Tory bias of Blackwood’s, Von Lauerwinkel’s description of the “elder and still more important” Edinburgh Review—and its editor Francis Jeffrey—is less flattering.2 He claims that the Edinburgh reviewers, “unawed” by the “sacred cause” of the war against Napoleon, and “possessing, to an astonishing degree, the public ear, have devoted their exertions to the unworthy purpose of deriding the zeal and paralysing the efforts of their generous nation” (BM 2:677).3 Not only does the Edinburgh Review exert a subversive influence, it also relentlessly attempts to undermine Christianity, “if not with the same open violence, at least with the same rancour of hostility” (BM 2:677). Von Lauerwinkel’s tone becomes heightened as he envisions large-scale corruption: “This journal has never ventured to declare itself boldly the champion of infidelity; but there is no artifice, no petty subterfuge, no insidious treachery, by which it has not endeavoured to weaken the influence which the Bible possesses over the minds of a devout and meditative people” (BM 2:677). The Tory writer’s attack on the religious opinions of the Edinburgh Review follows automatically from his disagreement with its political views: “Does any one imagine, that he who undertakes to be the regular instructor of his countrymen in science, in ethics, in politics, in poetry, can avoid being either the friend or the foe of their religion?” (BM 2:678). In equating judgments concerning


15

politics with attitudes towards religion, Von Lauerwinkel invokes the longstanding English belief in the interdependence of Church and state. But he also goes further in implying that secular issues are to be seen as a conflict between good and evil, embodied by warring individuals: “friend” and “foe.” Despite his critique of the Quarterly and Edinburgh reviewers for assimilating every text they encounter into a polarized set of oppositions, Von Lauerwinkel performs a similar maneuver. He does not object to the ruthless exercise of power per se; rather he prefers it to take a particular direction. The self-consciousness of Von Lauerwinkel—a pseudonym of the young Tory reviewer, John Gibson Lockhart—only confirms his claim that the reviews exert an “arbitrary and merciless sway.”4 Lockhart’s tongue-in-cheek essay points to and itself performs typical moves of the reviewers’ rhetoric, a rhetoric that I see as this period’s version of the “paranoid style.” As I explained in my introduction, the paranoid style casts conspiracy theory in terms of moral absolutism, pitting the all-powerful yet threatened defenders of virtue against an equally allpowerful yet also contemptible enemy. The paranoid rhetorician’s tone of impassioned hostility goes along with a simplified sense of how a revolution can be brought about by a single demonic individual or a small group of conspirators. In early-nineteenth-century England the irrational element of the paranoid style involves a preoccupation with the way in which readers are affected by reformist publications, a category that is extended by Lockhart to include the antiministerial Edinburgh Review. Not only the Tory and Whig reviewers but also their radical political opponents believe—or purport to believe—in the quasi-magical efficacy of the printed word. This assumption can be seen in Lockhart’s own article in that he imagines the Edinburgh Review to be capable of “paralysing the efforts” of the whole “nation” and unsettling the established religion of an entire “people.” Von Lauerwinkel’s claim that the Edinburgh has “a circulation far beyond any periodical work in England” (BM 2:674) does not completely account for his tone of dismay concerning the potential effects of its “insidious treachery.” Making a transparently false claim to judge periodical criticism from a distance, Lockhart in his essay relies on a paranoid notion of the efficacy of texts even while he both mocks and affirms his persona’s insistence that political partisanship is the sole actuating factor behind the reviewers’ vituperative rhetoric. With comic overstatement typical of the playful Blackwood’s style, he conjures up a dark, sinister world saturated with politics. It is true, as this and my subsequent chapters

16


will stress, that early-nineteenth-century reviews appear overwhelmingly partisan. As I have already suggested in my introduction, however, political partisanship is only one of several intersecting reasons for the violent language of the reviewing periodicals. These reasons include but are not limited to an incipient class consciousness, marketing considerations, and personal animosity. Paranoid rhetoric, with its atmosphere of suspicion, fear, accusation and counteraccusation, can be a matter of habit or a means of making money, or it may take on its own self-generating momentum, since paranoia inevitably involves escalating exaggeration. My qualification above (“purport to believe”) therefore makes a false distinction between genuine belief and pretended belief. It is paradoxically its underpinning by multiple disparate frames of reference that gives the discourse of paranoia its homogeneity and its impression of endlessly renewable energy—an energy that would seem to be politically motivated but is not necessarily so. In a sense, however, the reviews are as totalizing as Von Lauerwinkel implies because once the expectation of partisanship has been established, it remains in place, so that the very possibility of a nonpartisan review is cast in doubt. Moreover, although what I call paranoid politics—print warfare fought with paper bullets—is perpetuated by other forces in addition to politics, the reviewers’ tone of moral absolutism can always be read as partisan; in some sense, therefore, politics are everywhere and nowhere in the reviews. To illustrate my claims about the paranoid style, I will look in detail at some essays that appeared in the Quarterly Review and the Edinburgh Review during the immediate postwar period. Lockhart’s “Remarks on . . . Periodical Criticism” do not distinguish between the two types of article appearing in the two major quarterlies: these consisted of weighty essays on such subjects as politics, economics, and theology—essays that used the books under review as mere “pegs” for wider-ranging disquisitions— and more conventional shorter reviews focusing on individual works of literature, travel writing, biography, and so on. I have chosen relatively ambitious essays that deal explicitly with politics, but reviews of books on any topic would display the same aggressive partisanship alongside an impulse to depoliticize by displacing politics onto moral and religious concerns. Seeing the contemporary political situation as a battle between forces of good and evil, the periodical writers regard the act of publication as intrinsically dangerous. They envision radical poems and newspapers provoking lower-class readers into forming conspiracies, either through


17

the efforts of would-be revolutionaries, or, more insidiously, by contagion, according to a relentless though unspecified logic. These writers cast their opponents in the role of Satanic rebels, a role that reformers such as William Cobbett accept, responding with a language of denunciation that shares the assumptions of the paranoid style. That is to say, the writers for the quarterlies do not merely use this rhetoric against each other; the Tories effectively dictate the terms of public debate, not only to the Whigs but also to reformers. As mentioned earlier, I call this situation the Satanic scenario because, like God and Satan in Paradise Lost, the practitioners of the paranoid style lock each other into mutually sustaining positions. In the second half of this chapter, I will begin to show how Shelley’s relationship with the major Tory reviewers at once exemplifies and complicates paranoid politics.5 The Quarterly’s personal attacks on Shelley illustrate the continuities between the reviewers’ antagonistic treatment of radical journalists and their notoriously “slashing” reviews of Romantic poets, including Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, and Keats. My analysis of Shelley’s response to the Quarterly will suggest an awareness (though not necessarily Shelley’s own personal awareness) that through their use of paranoid rhetoric the Tory reviewers magnify the threat of reformers— including Shelley himself—while at the same time disempowering them. Finally, at the end of this chapter I will confront the limits of paranoid reading and political partisanship when I turn to the anomalously favorable reviews of Shelley—written, as it happens, by Lockhart—that appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine. As a Tory, Lockhart in his “Von Lauerwinkel” essay overstates the differences between the Quarterly and the Edinburgh and inflates the power of the Edinburgh to imply that the Tories are on the defensive.6 In 1819 William Hazlitt commented in the Preface to his Political Essays, “I cannot find out the different drift (as far as politics are concerned) of the ********* and ********* Reviews, which remind one of Opposition coaches, that raise a great dust or spatter one another with mud, but both travel the same road and arrive at the same destination” (Works, 7:20). We will see that slight differences of emphasis on political issues and fluctuations between articles are less conspicuous than the quarterlies’ shared assumptions and rhetorical strategies. In a later essay on Francis Jeffrey, Hazlitt contrasts the Quarterly with the Edinburgh (for which he himself wrote on occasion) because the latter, despite having “principles . . . by no means hostile to existing institutions” is written in a “tone” of

18


“studied impartiality” or “sceptical indifference” (Works, 11:127). But the Edinburgh does not always succeed in maintaining this “tone.” Hazlitt and his fellow Edinburgh reviewers do their share of mud spattering. Both periodicals disclaimed partisanship, but the Quarterly Review had been established in 1809 as a Tory corrective (or counterblast) to the Edinburgh Review, founded seven years earlier, even though the Edinburgh’s reputation for being “jacobinical” was highly exaggerated.7 The exchange of letters in 1808 and 1809 between the original founders of the Quarterly Review shows that they flattered themselves as the upholders of “sound English principles”8 in contrast with that mere party tool, the Edinburgh Review. The original Quarterly reviewers—whom Walter Graham labels a “group of Tory conspirators”9—aimed to create the illusion that they were not concerned with politics.10 Plotting to establish the Quarterly in the utmost secrecy, the “conspirators’ ” exchange of letters lumps together all opponents of the government, or rather tars the Edinburgh reviewers with the same brush as reformers such as Cobbett. The Tory publisher John Murray wrote to Stratford Canning: “We need, indeed, the exertion of great energy to counteract the baneful effects of the widely circulating and dangerous principles of the E. R. which becomes, if possible, more immoral and certainly more openly Jacobinical—and the sale of this work has arisen to the enormous extent of eleven thousand! ” Walter Scott thought the Edinburgh Review (to which he had formerly contributed) to be hastening a revolution in Britain.11 Recent critics tend to take for granted the capacity of the Quarterly and the Edinburgh to shape public opinion; I am more interested in the perception that this was the case, a perception promoted by what Blackwood’s called their “most insolent tone of superiority” (BM 8:139) and the impression that they present a highly homogenized discourse, an impression formed both by the anonymity of the reviewers and the format of the two quarterlies.12 The flip side of their grandiose tone is an equally factitious air of defensiveness and vulnerability, which goes along with the misleading implication that the periodicals are competing against reformist writings for influence over a single unified public. Jon Klancher, in The Making of English Reading Audiences, emphasizes the way in which the journalism of the day divided the public up into disparate but overlapping readerships.13 I would stress instead the claim of earlynineteenth-century periodical writers to address a single public sphere, a claim that contradicts their own emphasis on class differences. As we will


19

see, a central inconsistency of their rhetoric involves confusion over exactly what kinds and numbers of readers can be reached and affected by a given published discourse. One event that triggered the panic of Tory and Whig reviewers alike was the publication by William Cobbett of a cheap version of his Political Register (“Twopenny Trash”) in November 1816. However, the reviewers’ paranoid preoccupation with the corrupting effect of seditious texts predates the advent of this first mass-circulation radical newspaper. Four years before Cobbett started publishing the cheap edition of his Political Register, Robert Southey, writing in the Quarterly Review, had already insisted somewhat illogically on the widespread impact of the more expensive Register. As one of the most prolific contributors to the most influential Tory periodical, Southey can be seen as a self-appointed spokesman for the age, a derivative version of Edmund Burke. Southey’s 1812 article “Inquiry into the Poor Laws”14 was the first of a remarkable series of essays on the morally corrupt state of the English lower classes; he referred to it privately as an attack on the “Cobbetts & Hunts, who have produced the Luddite feeling in the mob.”15 Cobbett’s Political Register, begun as a Tory publication in 1802, had been attacked by Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review in 1807 not only for its inconsistency but for irresponsibly trying to stir up revolution.16 Yet, like Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, founded in 1808, Cobbett’s Register was in 1812 still directed at a middle-class audience. The Examiner continued to address a select audience of reformist intellectuals throughout the Regency period,17 yet the establishment reviewers habitually lump Leigh Hunt with more populist reformers such as Cobbett, William Hone, and Richard Carlile, implying that their newspapers are all equally likely to spark a revolution. Despite the limited audience addressed by both the Examiner and the Political Register, Southey in his 1812 essay imagines these publications being read in taverns to the presumably illiterate mob: The weekly epistles of the apostles of sedition are read aloud in tap-rooms and pot-houses to believing auditors, listening greedily when they are told that their rulers fatten upon the gains extracted from their blood and sinews; that they are cheated, oppressed, and plundered. . . . These are the topics which are received in the pothouse, and discussed over the loom and the lathe: men already profligate and unprincipled, needy because they are dissolute, and discontented because they are needy, swallow these things when they are getting drunk, and chew the cud upon them when sober. The

20


lessons are repeated day after day, and week after week. If madder be administered to a pig only for a few days his bones are reddened with its die; and can we believe that the bloody colouring of such ‘pigs-meat’ as this will not find its way into the system of those who take it for their daily food? (QR 8:342)18

The latter image turns the title of Thomas Spence’s journal Pig’s Meat (1793–1796) back onto the “uninstructed multitude” (QR 8:343) themselves to imagine them ingesting and internalizing the “bloody colouring” of the reformist press; the metaphor of a pig’s bones being dyed red substitutes for any rational explanation of the connection between the literal consumption of radical ideas and the inevitable prospect of bloodshed. Southey claims that the weekly press is a source of “contagion” (QR 8:351) that has “already produced . . . conspirators against life, property and social order” (QR 8:349). The essay also includes a more elaborate and perhaps even more melodramatic version of conspiracy. In Southey’s formulation, writers conspire together without even intending to do so: If one political writer vilifies every measure of the existing administration; if another reviles all parties in their turn with equal virulence; if a third systematically holds up the Royal Family to derision and abhorrence; and a fourth labours to bring the whole system of government into contempt and hatred; though the first should merely be the faithful adherent of a political faction; though mere malevolence should be the influencing motive of the second; the third be actuated by mere humour, or by neediness acting upon a profligate mind; and the fourth be led astray by juvenile presumption, or mistaken zeal; though these persons should be utterly unconnected, or even hostile to each other, they co-operate as effectually together to one direct end as if they were bound by oaths and sacraments, and that end is as directly the overthrow of their country as if all four were the salaried instruments of France. (QR 8:341)

Not only do readers (and auditors) apparently lack any will of their own— merely absorbing ideas that automatically drive them to violence—the writers themselves do not realize that their unconscious collaboration makes them agents of the “overthrow of their country.” Conspiracy is not even identifiable from results (since despite Southey’s dire tone, England is not yet destroyed); it lies in a positing of cause and effect. Hence conspiracy can be found wherever one chooses to see it. This passage from


21

Southey also raises the question of the motives behind what he alleges to be unwittingly subversive writings. In his account of the differing motives of four hypothetical political writers he identifies a variety of actuating factors: political opinions, “mere malevolence,” mood, financial necessity, and “juvenile presumption, or mistaken zeal.” Missing from this list is the as yet inchoate conception of social class, which has been seen as influencing the rhetoric of both the reformers of this period and their establishment opponents. But as I mentioned in my introduction, the supremacy of class conflict as an explanatory framework for conspiratorial rhetoric can be challenged. I would suggest that Southey’s list can be turned back upon establishment reviewers as follows: Though the first should be inspired by sincere political opinions or unconscious class animosity; though personal malevolence should in fact influence the second; the third be actuated by economic considerations either of his own or of the journal for which he writes; and the fourth adopt a persecutory tone for the purposes of professional advancement; these writers cooperate as effectually on a shared homogeneous discourse of paranoia as if they all genuinely believe that England is on the brink of a revolution.19 The first number of the twopenny version of Cobbett’s Political Register, published on November 2, 1816, contained an address, “To the Journeymen and Labourers,”20 which illustrates the way in which the stance taken by reformers is dictated by spokesmen for the establishment. The very name, “Twopenny Trash,” implies that Cobbett is working within terms set by his political opponents, just as reformist journals in the 1790s had adopted titles such as Hog’s Wash and Pig’s Meat in imitation of Burke’s reference to “the swinish multitude” in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).21 I will now look briefly at this text before analyzing some essays from first the Quarterly Review and then the Edinburgh Review that react to the contemporary political situation in paranoid terms. Rather than envisaging alternatives to the current administration, Cobbett’s “Address” merely attacks it, reinforcing its hegemony.22 The targets of his harangue include Malthus’s theory of overpopulation, heavy indirect taxation of the poor, and government support of “sinecure placemen and pensioners.”23 The latter two issues had constituted the mainstay of Cobbett’s political message since he had turned from a Tory to a reformer sometime between 1802 and 1807. It could be argued that, writing in the absence of mass political consciousness, Cobbett is forced to make his points negatively. But his attitude to his readers is problematic because he shares the assumptions

22


about lower-class behavior held by more elitist writers. Like them, Cobbett obviously fears that the masses may erupt into violence; he explicitly warns his readers against what he euphemistically calls “confusion” (“Address,” 12). Reiterating unflattering epithets used about the lower classes by Tory journalists, he reminds his audience, “You have been represented by the Times newspaper, by the Courier, by the Morning Post, by the Morning Herald, and others, as the scum of society” (“Address,” 9). This statement ostensibly aims to arouse the indignation of Cobbett’s readers, but it also keeps them in their place. After writing, “The insolent hirelings call you the mob, the rabble, the scum, the swinish multitude, and say, that your voice is nothing” (“Address,” 9), he confirms this judgment rather than challenging it. As Raymond Williams points out, Cobbett speaks to an audience of laborers, yet these are precisely the people whom he wished to exclude from the franchise.24 He begins by asserting that “The nation, as described by the very creatures of the Government, is fast advancing to that period when an important change must take place” (“Address,” 2), and ends by referring to “the blood which is now boiling in the veins of the people of this kingdom” (“Address,” 16). Yet he insists, “We want great alteration, but we want nothing new” (“Address,” 12)25 and claims that revolutions only benefit selfish tyrants such as Robespierre. So although Cobbett hints at the desirability of direct action, he also backs away from the idea. This uncertainty concerning revolution suggests that Cobbett shares Tory fears that the dissemination of radical ideas will inevitably lead to violence.26 We will encounter this ambivalent attitude to the prospect of revolution in only a slightly different form in the Quarterly Review and the Edinburgh Review. Some critics describe the radical journalism of this period as if it uses completely different strategies from those of the supporters of the two parliamentary parties. E. P. Thompson, in The Making of the English Working Class, criticizes Cobbett for personalizing political issues (751) and for inventing “a martyrology and demonology” with himself as “the central figure of the myth” (753): “The cause of reform was personalised into the encounter between William Cobbett and Old Corruption” (627). But as Thompson himself acknowledges, “Successive acts to raise the tax on newspapers and periodicals, and to tighten the law of seditious libel, were aimed in large part at Cobbett himself ” (627). Likewise, Klancher, in The Making of English Reading Audiences, suggests that radical discourse is locked into the language of cursing, while “middle class” discourse is not.


23

Differentiating radical journalism from the elitist periodicals, Klancher refers to the “Black Dwarf ’s incantatory language of blood, sacrifice, and demonology” (118). But we will find that both sides use what Thompson calls the “wholly unconstructive rhetoric of denunciation” (623). Thompson also criticizes the radical leaders of this period for their exaggerated reliance on the power of the printed word to effect political reform (638).27 But in seeing a simple causal relationship between the making available of radical views on the one hand, and social and political change on the other, Cobbett was merely following the lead of his political opponents. A more recent analyst of the radical press, Kevin Gilmartin, has suggested the extent to which Cobbett and his fellow reformers operate within a “closed system” even while having a real “effect” in the sense that they shaped and galvanized a new audience.28 Given that, as Gilmartin implies, historical accounts of the circulation of the cheap Political Register rely on Cobbett’s own claims, the role played by actual lower-class readers remains uncertain. In his essay, “ ‘This Is Very Material’: William Cobbett and the Rhetoric of Radical Opposition,” Gilmartin adds, “Cobbett’s claim that ‘more than two hundred thousand ’ of his first cheap Register had been circulated suggests how an extra-parliamentary movement tried to forge a constituency out of a reading audience. Certainly, this was the view taken by its enemies” (92– 93). The latter sentence draws attention to the way in which Cobbett’s act of playing on the paranoia of his opponents is an “effect” as significant as the creation of a new radical audience.29 Moreover, by emphasizing circulation figures, Cobbett accepts the premise underlying Tory paranoia that the widespread dissemination of reformist ideas would prove contagious.30 I am not denying that papers may have been passed from hand to hand and read aloud in gathering places, or that Cobbett found the largest audience since the publication of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791– 1792), but I would emphasize that the “closed system” continued in the sense that despite claims about shaping new audiences, the reformers’ most vocal readers were the Quarterly Review and the Edinburgh Review, both of which repeatedly reviewed works on reform and referred obsessively to the influence of the radical press.31 Illustrating the interaction between establishment and reformist writing, an early response to Cobbett’s new Political Register came, not from the journeymen and laborers themselves, but from Southey, whose essay on parliamentary reform in the Quarterly for October 1816 reviewed Cobbett’s twopenny Political Register along with other reformist works.32

24


Southey’s attitude towards the writers of these texts is contemptuous, yet he gives the impression of deferring to their complaints. In attempting to justify retrospectively England’s war against France, his tone is defensive rather than defiant. He also offers the standard establishment argument against parliamentary reform, claiming that the present system of representation allows for a balance of interests. But his essay is not a measured rejoinder to Cobbett’s polemic. Adopting the party line involves evoking an atmosphere of panic and hysteria: Southey insists repeatedly that England is in a state of unprecedented “crisis” (QR 16:226).33 England’s recovery after its glorious war is threatened by “the apostles of anarchy” (QR 16:226), meaning reformers. Taking for granted that his readers will agree with him, Southey asserts that universal suffrage would “inevitably and immediately lead to universal anarchy” (QR 16:256). He guarantees a revolution one way or another, since according to him, in the absence of reform, demagogues, “possessed with the spirit of faction” (QR 16:249), are conspiring to arouse the ignorant and easily impassioned lower classes. Southey’s relentlessly polarizing rhetoric opposes “party-feeling” to “right English spirit” (QR 16:236), affirming the distinction between French insanity and English virtue, and the corresponding analogy between French and English “Revolutionists” (QR 16:273).34 He refuses to “lacerate the feelings of the reader” by “particularizing” the “infernal measures” of that “tyrant,” Napoleon (QR 16:242), but his prose becomes heightened when he refers to Bonaparte’s “falsehood, treachery, frantic pride and remorseless barbarity”: “Witness Portugal . . . where . . . [the French] committed crimes and cruelties of so hellish a character, that it might almost be deemed criminal to recite them. Witness Spain!” (QR 16:241). With denunciation taking the place of evidence, a tension emerges between Southey’s insistence on the absolute difference between good and evil and his belief in tainting by association: he wants to condemn reformers while suggesting that the very act of condemnation might be “criminal.” But the intensity of Southey’s preoccupation with the prospect of revolution blinds him to his own lapses in logic. He contrasts the English “liberty of the press” with Napoleon’s intolerance for “seditious publications” (QR 16:234), even though he himself is obsessed with the danger of radical newspapers. “Evil-minded and insidious men, who in former times endeavoured to deceive the moral feelings of the multitude, have now laboured more wickedly and more successfully in corrupting them” (QR 16:226). The “breath” of these men is “venomous” and “every page”


25

they produce “carries with it poison to the unsuspicious reader” (QR 16:227). Such newspapers transmit a “virus” (QR 16:227). Southey asks why laws against “poisoning the minds of the people” (QR 16:275) are not as well enforced as those against poisoning their bodies, implying that his reference to “political contagion” (QR 16:230) is to be taken almost literally. In the same vein, he quotes Burke’s reaction to the “venomous diatribes” (QR 16:248) of reformers. Burke had asked whether such writings are indeed “operative poisons” or whether they are merely the “disgusting symptoms of a frightful distemper” (QR 16:248). Are reformist publications the creators or the creations of disease? For Southey the question is unimportant, because one bad thing leads to a worse one, by definition: “men of real talents, when those talents are erroneously or wickedly directed, prepare the way for men of no talents, but of intrepid guilt. . . . Marat and Hebert followed in the train of Voltaire and Rousseau; and Mr. Examiner Hunt does but blow the trumpet to usher in Mr. Orator Hunt” (QR 16:248). Despite the bathos of this comparison, and the distinction it implies, Southey later refers to Leigh Hunt, whose Examiner supported moderate reform, as “this flagitious incendiary” as if he were a diehard revolutionary (QR 16:273). Key elements of the paranoid style are here—the sense of immediate danger, sinister and powerful conspirators, an atmosphere of persecution, a belief in the subversive effect of the printed word. In spite of Southey’s insistence on the effects that radical publications have on their readers, he seems to want to titillate his audience with the outrageous claims of radicals. Southey discusses Spencean levelers at some length and quotes a pamphlet attacking landownership. He also reacts with horror to the radical Monthly Magazine’s estimate of the number of deaths caused by England during the wars. “Not Buonaparte—but this country, reader, England!—our country,—our great, our glorious, our beloved country, according to this Magazine, has been the guilty cause of all this carnage!” (QR 16:247). Why not just ignore the magazine’s supposedly subversive point of view? Southey presumably takes his own readers to be incorruptible; nevertheless, his thorough treatment of opinions diametrically opposed to his own carries a hint of perversity. This is particularly evident in his reference to the old theory that the Gunpowder Plot was a “ministerial plot, just as the anarchists reason at present” (QR 16:249). Southey’s statement that “the history of that conspiracy is authenticated beyond all future controversy” (QR 16:249) begs the question; the passage

26


seems calculated to remind readers of the postwar government’s reliance on the political exploitation of paranoia.35 The language of Southey’s essay, characterized throughout by superlatives, exclamations, and rhetorical questions, becomes even more impassioned towards the end. “Of all engines of mischief which were ever yet employed for the destruction of mankind, the press is the most formidable” (QR 16:273). “The very existence of social order itself is involved” (QR 16:275). These totalizing statements imply that revolution would constitute not just a localized disturbance but the most fundamental change of all—apocalypse. Southey’s vehemence rises to a climax: 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. Vox Populi, vox Dei! When or where has it been so? Was it in England during the riots in 1780? Has it been in France during the last six and twenty years? Or was it in Spain when the people restored the Inquisition?—for it was the people who restored that accursed tribunal, spontaneously and tumultuously—not the government, which only ratified what the people had done; . . . Vox Populi, vox Dei! —Was it so in the wilderness when the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron and said unto him, Up, make us Gods which shall go before us? Was it so at Athens when Socrates and Phocion were sacrificed to the factious multitude? Or was it so at Jerusalem when they cried, Crucify Him! crucify Him! The position is not more tenable than the Right Divine, not less mischievous, and not less absurd. God is in the populace as he is in the hurricane, and the volcano, and the earthquake! (QR 16:276)

This passage illustrates at once the sophistication and the crudity of the paranoid style. It is mob oratory for the literate. The identification of “the people” with “the Devil” relies on a symmetrical presentation of emotive images. The passage also shows a fierce impulse to make every point work to its advantage. Southey contradicts himself in his eagerness to see the threat of revolution wherever he looks. He first makes “demagogues” responsible for outbreaks of revolutionary madness by describing them as insidiously pretending to work for the people’s welfare while actually manipulating them for their own devious ends. But he then implies that the people themselves form factions and generate violence. Demagogues apparently lose control of that “engine of mischief,” the press, and are taken over by it. Southey’s examples of mass malevolence also create conflicting impressions.


27

He places the worst mob violence in the past by going backwards through Western history to the crucifixion as if descending to the nadir of depravity. But at the same time his list equates the Gordon riots with the classical and biblical incidents, contradicting his own suggestions elsewhere in the same essay that England is currently undergoing its worst crisis. Southey tries to give paranoia a history, but it is a history in which all threats are the same. The comparison between Jacobitism and radicalism is paranoid in implying that the two ends of the political spectrum meet.36 Southey’s shift from outrage to dismissiveness intensifies the melodrama of his final exclamation. He gives the impression of having been carried away by his own vehemence. It is surely not orthodox Anglicanism to deny that God is responsible for natural disasters; users of the paranoid style end up lapsing into the Manicheism of which they accuse their opponents. The October 1816 issue of the Quarterly Review was not actually published until February 11, 1817.37 The pirate publication of Southey’s early republican drama, Wat Tyler (1794), in February 1817 coincided with the publication of this essay, and provoked many attacks on Southey by reformers, including Hone, Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt.38 Southey’s political apostasy could not have been more flagrantly illustrated than by the discrepancy between the extremes of Wat Tyler and the “Parliamentary Reform” essay, the authorship of which was an open secret. Southey was attacked by William Smith in a debate in the House of Commons on March 14, 1817, and retaliated with A Letter to William Smith, Esq., M.P. (1817), a fine example of the paranoid style, in which he ironically reiterates his concern over “seditious” publications.39 Although the incident tends to be seen as a victory for reformers, all the attacks as well as Southey’s response share the underlying assumptions of the “Parliamentary Reform” essay. For example, Thomas Love Peacock’s novel Melincourt (1817) mocks the views expressed in Southey’s essay by repeating and footnoting actual statements from it in the highly topical chapter, “Mainchance Villa.” But Peacock recapitulates Southey’s conspiratorial thinking by accusing him and his fellow Tories of exploiting alarmist rhetoric for the sake of upholding the system from which they benefit financially. Southey is satirized—without originality—as Mr. Feathernest, who joins in a refrain of “We’ll all have a finger in the CHRISTMAS PIE.”40 Peacock parodies the Quarterly’s irrational defensiveness with another refrain, “The church is in danger! The church is in danger!” (2:402), which he exposes as a self-consciously hypocritical ploy to preserve the status quo. His Mr. Vamp (Gifford)

28


comments, “Keep up that. It is an infallible tocsin for rallying all the old women in the country about us, when every thing else fails” (2:402). Peacock treats the reviewers sardonically, but does not challenge the premise that a few individuals can manipulate public opinion. It is not clear whether “old women” read the Quarterly or whether their beliefs affect the political situation.41 The Quarterly, at any rate, continued to voice the alarm, with or without hypocrisy. In the next issue of the Quarterly Review, Southey returned to the subject of imminent revolution, in an essay entitled “The Rise and Progress of Popular Disaffection.”42 One of the works that the article lists for review is Shelley’s pamphlet, A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote throughout the Kingdom, published in March 1817 under the pseudonym, “The Hermit of Marlow,” although the pamphlet is not referred to explicitly in the body of the article. Southey begins by at once distancing himself from and identifying with contemporary politics. He claims that “poets and philosophers” need normally have nothing to do with politics, but that “when worse dangers than invasion are designed and threatened, it becomes the duty of all those who have any means of obtaining public attention, to stand forward” (QR 16:512). According to him, the current existence of treacherous and seditious “designs” (QR 16:512) requires no proof.43 He blames the “symptoms of a revolutionary spirit in the deluded multitude” (QR 16:514) on “demagogues” (QR 16:515) who exploit the “deleterious spirit of party” (QR 16:521) to create “enemies at home” (QR 16:516). Southey’s argument assumes a discrepancy between upper- and lower-class responses to subversion. Olivia Smith has pointed out that establishment writers in this period perpetuated a distinction between the “refined” elite and the readily manipulated “vulgar” lower orders.44 Since, according to Smith, “refined” people saw the “vulgar” as fickle, easily impassioned, and incapable of abstract or moral thought, the educated elite considered the masses to be dangerously susceptible to seditious influences. Southey’s conviction that the efficacy of texts is class-specific supports his claim that the danger of revolution is unprecedented, given “the great and momentous change which the public press has produced in the very constitution of society” (QR 16:513). Mass circulation newspapers really are a new phenomenon. But Southey announces his solution to the problem in metaphoric terms: “if the bones are tainted, they must be searched till the joints are loosened—how else should the poison be expelled?” (QR 16:513). This ominous statement suggests that the


29

defenders of the status quo will go to any lengths to preserve the health of the body politic. Southey’s insistence that the current crisis represents a decisive break with the past, and therefore calls for desperate measures, is at odds with his attempt to contain the threat of revolution by placing it in the context of a long domestic tradition of subversion. Surveying the history of factionalism in England, he implies that the terms party zeal, opposition, and subversion are practically synonymous. He identifies a line of sedition running from Titus Oates, the fabricator of the Popish Plot, through John Wilkes, and culminating with Henry Hunt. Oates’s false allegations against Catholics, whom he claimed were plotting to assassinate Charles II, show that spreading rumors of conspiratorial activity generates real persecution. People imbued with the “spirit of faction . . . believe or disbelieve, according to their inclination and their will” (QR 16:523). Southey of course thinks of himself as exempt from this risk. The anonymous contributors of the Quarterly Review place themselves above “selfish” and “merely political” views (QR 16:524). Despite his emphasis on the insidious spirit of party,45 Southey paints a complacent picture of the happy prosperity of the reign of George III. Unfortunately, however, the progress of society was accompanied by the expansion of the popular press. In a digression, Southey laments the fact that “literary composition” has become a “trade” (QR 16:538) because “mere men of letters” almost inevitably end up as revolutionaries (QR 16:541). (He omits to mention that he himself writes for a living.) Kenneth Neill Cameron has argued convincingly that Shelley may have taken Southey’s attack on men of letters to be directed at him, a fact that would account for Shelley’s extreme hostility towards Southey (though not necessarily for his later mistaken belief that Southey was the author of two of the Quarterly’s attacks on him).46 Cameron suggests that Southey’s apparently irrelevant description of the death of an atheist (QR 16:540 n) may have been a warning to Shelley. This circumstance exemplifies the way in which personal and political motives overlap in the discourse of paranoia, just as they do in Shelley’s later exchange of letters with Southey (discussed in the second half of this chapter). Southey himself implicitly acknowledges the confusion of public and private when he goes on to argue that popular political writers do not just delude their readers, they make personal attacks that are implicitly related to the dangerously individualistic tendencies of factions.47 The last section of the essay blames individuals for this state

30


of affairs, attacking contemporary radical journalists—Hone, Cobbett, Leigh Hunt, Carlile. Typically, Southey both treats them with dismissive hostility and depicts them as the ultimate threat. Claiming that Cobbett’s “charges . . . against his country” are at once “absurd” and “atrocious” (QR 16:548), he refuses to “sully our pages” with “the coarse and disgusting language” of Cobbett, implying the possibility of contamination, but then immediately quotes an insulting remark by Cobbett about the king (QR 16:549).48 Southey’s main concern is with Cobbett’s effect on his purportedly huge audience. He reports Cobbett’s boast that he “had sold more than a million of his papers within the last six months, and that a single paper frequently served for an hundred auditors,” insisting, “The flood-gates of sedition are still open” (QR 16:551). Writing with increasing urgency, Southey imagines ever-proliferating reformist publications being read aloud to the illiterate masses. This paranoid vision encompasses all types of reformist writing, regardless of actual circulation figures. Southey quotes from the Examiner — which, as mentioned earlier, had a literate metropolitan audience of fewer than ten thousand—on the discrepancy between the interests of the “great” and those of the “community,” and exclaims, “Such are the doctrines and such the language which this convicted libeller [Leigh Hunt] sends into the pot-houses of manufacturing towns and of the remotest villages!” (QR 16:545). Southey seems to envisage the following train of events: A subversive text gets into the wrong hands—those of a would-be revolutionary— who transmits its message to others, leading automatically to the formation of a conspiracy to overthrow the government. Persuasion is automatic, and one author is capable of influencing the behavior of an entire society. But Southey also imagines a different model of communication. Once published, the content of a text can reach even illiterate members of society by contagion, which may not need a human mediator, with the same disastrous results. He describes the spread of revolutionary ideas from America to France—an international conspiracy theory—in terms of contagious sickness. “The intellectual atmosphere had received its taint: and as an influenza beginning in Tartary travels throughout the whole inhabited part of the old continent, so was this moral pestilence to run its course” (QR 16:534). On the one hand, the power of individual agency (that of the author and instigator of conspiracies) is magnified, and on the other hand, it is de-emphasized by the belief in contagion, which ascribes the recipients of texts no will of their own. Southey goes on to quote Hunt’s


31

contention that the “only” thing that can prevent a revolution is “the liberty of the press, which Mr. Southey calls sedition” (QR 16:551). Southey concludes: “All the other confluent causes of discontent are trifling in themselves and light in their consequences compared to the seditious press” (QR 16:551).49 It can be seen that both radicals and conservatives share a belief in the almost magical efficacy of the printed word. They merely disagree as to its effects: the Tories think the press will destroy humanity, the reformers think the press will preserve it. Entrenched in power, the Tories act defensively, seeing the threat of revolution everywhere. They indirectly acknowledge the discrepancy between their stance of superiority and their air of vulnerability by both insisting on the magnitude of the threat and at the same time dismissing it.50 Two more essays by Southey, published in the Quarterly in 1818, exemplify the way in which the paranoid style vacillates between insisting on the reality of the prospect of revolution and denying that it exists.51 These essays review reports on the poor laws, offering the standard Tory line on behalf of voluntary charitable contributions as opposed to the public support of the poor. Southey begins with his usual ostensible displacement of political issues onto questions of morality, claiming that this topic transcends “feelings of party” (QR 18:260). He objects to parish relief because the transfer of wealth from the rich to the undeserving poor causes the moral deterioration of the latter, which in turn leads to the undermining of the state. Southey insists that the future of private property is at stake. With humorless exaggeration he pictures England as heading towards catastrophe, poised on the brink of communism, about to become a “paupers’ farm” (QR 18:261). The present liberal state of the poor laws “must ere long undermine the very structure of human society, in the very heart of the British empire” (QR 18:262). The system of taxing landowners “threatens at no very distant time to destroy agriculture, and by inevitable consequences to annihilate all the institutions of human policy and human civilization” (QR 18:265). Southey does not spell out the logic that connects the prospect of domestic unrest with the fate of civilization. His attitude towards the lower classes is ambivalent. He refers to them patronizingly as if they resemble children or animals, but at the same time he represents them as a terrifying enemy. Yet he harshly dismisses those who predict the “ruin of this kingdom” (QR 19:79), even though he himself is notoriously pessimistic about the possibility of revolution.

32


Both essays return to the subject of the corruption of the people by radical journalists. Due to the “indefatigible zeal with which the most pernicious principles of every kind are disseminated . . . all that constitutes the happiness of the British nation is in danger of being . . . lost” (QR 19:93). Southey blames newspapers for the increase in “devilish” crimes because the details of murders have “a contagious influence” (QR 19:113). He refuses to make a distinction between common criminals and political radicals: “Guilt is a skilful sophist: the veriest wretch who subsists by pilfering, or closes a course of more audacious crimes at the gallows, forms for himself a system which is, in its origin and end, the same as that of Buonaparte, and the other philosophers of the Satanic school” (QR 19:86). The accusation of sophism, or persuasion by illegitimate means, recalls the specious rhetoric of the fallen angels in Milton’s Pandemonium. The orthodox do not try to refute the sophistry of the irreligious and the subversive; labeling it as such is sufficient condemnation. Members of the Miltonic elect always know that they are in the right. Southey will later reuse his phrase “the Satanic school” to refer to Lord Byron and probably Shelley, in his preface to A Vision of Judgement (1821).52 In that text he makes plain the continuity between the threat posed by the seditious press and the offense involved in the publication of “lascivious” poems: Men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society, and hating that revealed religion which, with all their efforts and bravadoes, they are unable entirely to disbelieve, labour to make others as miserable as themselves, by infecting them with a moral virus that eats into the soul! The school which they have set up may properly be called the Satanic school; for though their productions breathe the spirit of Belial in their lascivious parts, and the spirit of Moloch in those loathsome images of atrocities and horrors which they delight to represent, they are more especially characterised by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety, which still betrays the wretched feeling of hopelessness wherewith it is allied.53

This passage insists that an irreligious poem is an inexorable source of contagion, a “moral virus,” without any suggestion that poetry might work upon its readers in a different way from a prose publication.54 Southey continues, “This evil is political as well as moral, for indeed moral and political evils are inseparably connected” (769). He concludes


33

his digression (in the middle of a discussion of metrical innovation) by accusing unnamed writers of “labouring to subvert the foundations of human virtue, and of human happiness” (769). The apocalyptic tone is familiar; Southey’s paranoid rhetoric spills over from his Quarterly essays into his other writings. In his Quarterly Review essays, Southey combines self-consciousness about the manipulation of paranoia (in his references to the possibility of ministerial plots, for example) with a paranoid ability to be frightened by his own inventions. His fears of revolution are based on unarticulated theories about how authors transmit ideas to their readers, what sort of people those readers are, and the unmediated translation of individual agency into multiple agency. Although the belief in the centrality of individual agency conflicts to some extent with the belief in contagion, the users of the paranoid style are blind to this inconsistency, because they use the term interchangeably to mean both a model of direct communication and a form of agency beyond human control: it implies both person-to-person contamination and multicausal epidemics.55 These same contradictory assumptions underlie attacks on radicals by other Quarterly reviewers; there is a series of essays on emigration to the United States, for example, by William Gifford, John Barrow, and others, that share Southey’s exaggerated concern over the threat of “Jacobinical” publications.56 Paranoid assumptions also underlie the Quarterly’s attacks on reformist poets—and not just Shelley, though those on Shelley are perhaps the most violent. The same rhetoric can be seen in a host of lesser Tory journals, some of them more extreme than the Quarterly, as we will see when I examine the reviews of Queen Mab in my second chapter. But the paranoid style is not merely the province of Tory reviewers. The rhetoric of establishment reviewing periodicals in general in early-nineteenth-century England is at once persecutory and defensive, polarizing reality into self and other, good and evil. It is self-aggrandizing even as it objects to self-aggrandizement in all its forms. The users of paranoid rhetoric exaggerate the power of evil while contradictorily insisting on the future triumph of virtue: they view their enemies as invincible while proclaiming themselves the ultimate victors. Southey’s essay on the “Rise and Progress of Popular Disaffection,” for example, with its sense of impending doom, ends, “The laws are with us—and God is on our side” (QR 16:552). A similar version of this tension between dread and self-congratulation can be found in essays on politics in the Edinburgh Review.

34


At first sight the calm prose of most Edinburgh Review articles on politics seems different in kind from the impassioned rhetoric of Southey (and that of other Tory reviewers such as John Taylor Coleridge and John Wilson Croker, who attacked Shelley and Keats, respectively). The Edinburgh reviewers also explicitly repudiate conspiratorial thinking, as if the ability to identify another position as extreme automatically establishes their own judgment as normative. But this move is misleading, because the Edinburgh reviewers share the assumptions underlying the paranoid style, including the Quarterly reviewers’ preoccupation with the threat of revolution. In the first essay of the first issue of the Edinburgh Review, in 1802, Francis Jeffrey had rejected Abbé Barruel’s theory that the French Revolution had been brought about by the philosophes, the freemasons, and the illuminati.57 Jeffrey argues both that historical events have multiple causes, and that the writers supposed to have influenced the French “may have produced effects very different even from what they intended, and very different even from what their works might seem calculated to produce” (ER 1:9).58 Despite this apparent rejection of the premises of paranoid rhetoric, Jeffrey does however insist that the causes of the Revolution included “the contagion caught in America” (ER 1:8) and that the writings of the philosophes must have helped bring about the Revolution, even though there is no proof.59 A later essay by Jeffrey, commenting on the political situation in 1809,60 argues that the country faces the threat of “sanguinary revolution” (ER 15:520) due to the increase in popular discontent as evidenced by “the prodigious sale, and still more prodigious circulation, of Cobbett’s Register, and several other weekly papers of the same general description” (ER 15:509). As in Southey’s 1812 essay discussed earlier, Jeffrey claims that the masses have access to Cobbett’s doctrines long before Cobbett increased the circulation of the Register. Jeffrey himself privately admitted that in this essay he had deliberately “stated the dangers of the thing coming to a crisis too strongly,” a detail that confirms my point about the mixed motives underlying paranoid rhetoric.61 Essays by Jeffrey and his fellow Whigs in the postwar period react in even less balanced terms to contemporary political events, especially the suspension of Habeas Corpus from March 1817 to January 1818—a response by the government to supposedly subversive activities by reformers.62 The Whigs’ stance towards revolution differs from the Tories’ only in imagining an added twist to the hypothetical train of events leading ineluctably to the outbreak of mass violence: they argue that the government, not the


35

reformers, will be responsible for the revolution if it happens. One essay in the Edinburgh Review attacks the government for taking the small, ineffectual conspiracy of the Spenceans in 1817 as a pretext for suspending Habeas Corpus, and ridicules the alarmist notion of “a system of secret association” extending to Scotland.63 However, the essay ends on its own alarmist note in predicting the “final and speedy dissolution” of the British Constitution (ER 27:543) as a result of government oppression. Another Edinburgh reviewer is opposed to universal suffrage on the grounds that it would drive landowners, who “must be in a state of permanent conspiracy against an extreme democracy” to persuade the government towards absolutism, which “in most other circumstances . . . would lead to a violent subversion of government. This, however, is not the evil which we think in this country most probable.”64 The Edinburgh reviewers vacillate just as much as the Quarterly reviewers over whether or not a revolution is likely, though for different reasons. The Whigs need the threat of revolution to give urgency to their claims, but at the same time they do not want to admit that the government is powerful enough to provoke violence.65 An Edinburgh Review essay published in 1818, a review by Henry Brougham of a book on the spy system at Lyons in 1817, explicitly addresses the subject of conspiracy theory.66 This article relentlessly compares persecution by French local government officials with the English government’s use of spies and informers in the same year. The reviewer refers rather obliquely to recent events in England, but he presumably has in mind the Pentridge uprising of 1817, which had been instigated by the Home Office spy, Oliver.67 His essay relates how a riot in Lyons was “magnified” into “a horrible conspiracy, deeply planned, and powerfully armed with resources for overthrowing the government” (ER 30:174). Brougham continues, The English reader will at once recognise the language of our own secret committees in the following passage. . . . ‘Numerous bodies’ (they said) ‘were organized in every direction; arms were distributed to them; considerable sums of money were provided and set apart for their pay; they had bold and enterprising leaders; and this was only one of the ramifications of an immense plan’ (we believe Lord Sidmouth’s word was vast ) ‘which embraced not merely the neighbouring departments, but the whole of France.’ Here the Gallican reporters, we must confess, go a step beyond our own in the wildness of their imaginations, or the acumen of their sense for seeing plots, and tracing their mutual connexions. ‘It seems,’ they add, ‘that these movements are combined with the conspiracy at Lisbon, and the

36


revolution in the Brazils!’ . . . In vain did the facts of the case bear irrefragable testimony to the utter falsehood of all these fables. (ER 30:174)

We saw that Southey associated English revolutionaries with French ones; here, without accusing Home Office agents of actually trying to bring about a popular rebellion, the Edinburgh reviewer aligns false accusations of conspiracy by French officials with those of the English government. He at once insists on the analogy between the French and the English, and preserves the distinction between them by pointing out that French conspiracy theories are more outrageous, although the expression “a step beyond” suggests that French and English “fables” are on a continuum. Brougham analyzes the power of plot logic: “Whoever chuses to say a plot exists, may persist in his assertion in spite of all negative evidence: For he has only to repeat that it is a plot, and of course a secret one; and though it has not yet been discovered, it is indubitably on the very point of explosion” (ER 30:174). This comment shows insight into the way in which paranoid rhetoric uses persistent repetition to create a sense of precariousness; Brougham adds that “there was at last reason to apprehend a real revolt, from the effects of such exasperating treatment” (ER 30:175), spelling out the thinking behind the Whig fear of revolution: the masses are goaded into violence by an oppressive government.68 Brougham welcomes the opportunity to make the “English reader” realize “that he suffered himself to be deluded by the fabrications of our plot-mongers, and under that influence to join in wounding the liberties of his country” (ER 30:175). Despite his awareness of the dynamics of conspiratorial thinking (he admits that some people may have “an interest in pretending” [ER 30:172] to fear revolution), this reviewer does not choose to recognize that his insistence on the necessary connection between conspiracy theory and historical change is itself another version of conspiracy theory. Arguing along somewhat different lines, the essay immediately following the one on the spy system at Lyons, an analysis by the same author of the state of the parties in England, claims that the reformers are conspiring against the Whigs.69 Unsurprisingly, Brougham (himself a Whig politician) discovers that the Whigs are “formidable” (ER 30:197) while the Tories are “contemptible” (ER 30:198). He then tries to account for why, despite this, the Tories are in power. He argues that the Whigs are victims of “the delusions which have been practised upon the publick by a third


37

class of persons, insignificant in numbers and still more contemptible in weight”: We allude to the faction of the Cobbets [sic ] and Hunts. . . . Of late years, they have only succeeded with the lowest and most ignorant parts of the community. But, by constant misrepresentation, weekly repeated by some, and daily and industriously echoed by the hirelings of the Government, they at one time were too successful in making many . . . believe all they said against the Whigs. . . . We think that the Whigs acted unwisely in not taking more decisive steps to defend their characters, thus wantonly and unremittingly invaded;—we think that their supporters in the . . . daily press, showed a most culpable slowness to expose the vile falsehoods propagated concerning them, probably from an unworthy dread of being personally attacked by those who spared neither high nor low. (ER 30:198–99)

Insisting on the influence of reformist journalism over party politics (the “mob and their leaders” are the “best allies” of the Crown [ER 30:192]), Brougham does not explain why the “contemptible” reformers were so successful at discrediting the Whigs, although he suggests that personal attacks are particularly persuasive because they can only be counteracted at the risk of inviting further personal attacks. Nor does he explain how the Whigs broke free of this double bind to reach the point where, as he concludes, they “must speedily triumph” (ER 30:206); his essay implies that the “base dealers in vulgar sedition” (ER 30:204) are disappearing as mysteriously as they came. Bringing together the two versions of conspiracy theory offered in the 1818 volume, an essay by Jeffrey in the October 1819 Edinburgh Review entitled “State of the Country” implies both that the “wicked and designing” reformers could incite the ignorant masses to revolt against the government and that the government itself might provoke a revolution.70 Jeffrey begins by picturing England as in a state of unprecedented ferment. He reminds the Tories that the people still have rights even though they cannot be trusted with the vote. He attacks “alarmists” like Southey “who see a civil war in every provincial tumult” (ER 32:300) but ominously predicts that if the government attempts to put down supposed revolutionaries by force— “then indeed we may soon enough have a civil war among us . . . a war of the rich against the poor” that would lead to the “subversion” of the constitution (ER 32:301). Conceivably alluding to the Peterloo massacre, though probably just playing on his readers’ fears, Jeffrey adds, “We do not

38


actually believe that there is any hazard of such desperate counsels being acted upon in the present emergency,—although reports reach us, as we are writing, that would justify our worst apprehensions” (ER 32:302). Like Southey, whose language he echoes, Jeffrey is preoccupied with the power of the press. He complains about radical writers who “drive a vile traffic in sedition, immorality, and infidelity, seeking a sordid gain by feeding or exciting some of the worst passions of human nature” (ER 32:305). They are “the worst enemies of the cause they pretend to espouse” (ER 32:305). The Whigs routinely accuse radicals of endangering the cause of reform.71 They find advocates of revolution such as Carlile particularly obnoxious, not because they are capable of directly influencing the lower classes (though the reviewers vacillate on this point), but because they allegedly provide an excuse for the Tories to clamp down on reformers, which in turn could incite the masses to revolution. Jeffrey contradictorily sees radicals as dangerous in themselves but also dangerous only because they antagonize the Tories. His attitude towards the masses is equally ambivalent. Either way, the Whigs stand alone, beseiged on the one hand by the excesses of arbitrary power and on the other by the threat of mob violence. The Quarterly and Edinburgh reviewers, then, are paranoid readers; for them, there is no moment when there is not something crucial at stake. They always find what they expect to find yet when they find it they react with outrage, and a little outrage goes a long way. The same thing is true of these periodicals’ reviews of books on topics other than politics: even an unpromising subject such as the publication of new law books provokes a hysterical embittered tone and the suggestion of extreme emotions barely held under control.72 The vocabulary of filth, sin, contagion, and especially “evil,” is used to express even mild disagreements over apparently innocuous issues. Another essay by Southey, on the Copyright Act, objects to the idea that libraries should accept “sedition and blasphemy, filth and froth, the scum of the press, the lees and the offal.”73 One might expect this intense vehemence to become counterproductive and for the reviewers’ insults to become exhausted. References to the state of crisis tend to sound at times impassioned, at times routine. Southey refers casually to “that principle of evil which is at work night and day for the destruction of laws, monarchy, religion, and social order” (QR 19:114). Essays in the Edinburgh Review on medieval history and Scottish local government refer in passing to revolutions and subversion, calling


39

them evil as a matter of course.74 Elsewhere, the reviewers resort to such uncompromising terms that they almost demand to be refuted. But their air of conviction is intensified rather than diminished by the instability of their rhetoric. The inconsistencies into which they often lapse, instead of exposing their leaps in logic, enable them to pin everything down and give the impression of being right all the time, reinforcing their claim to represent the forces of good besieged by the powers of evil. Their version of the paranoid style is not weakened by its contradictions, it is sustained by them. I suggested at the beginning of this chapter that the terms of public debate in this period are dictated by the spokesmen for the establishment to the reformers. By accepting the centrality of individual agency and the interdependence of politics, religion, and morality, the reformers cast themselves in the role of Satanic rebels and disable themselves from challenging those in power. But although the Satanic scenario is potentially self-perpetuating, the use of paranoid rhetoric is also self-destructive. We have seen that the way in which the users of the paranoid style resort to violent denunciation, intensified by images of contagion, pollution, and disease, gives their enemies a power they would not otherwise have had. Because the rhetoric of revolution encourages a belief in the possibility of a sudden switch in power, the Tories and Whigs, despite their moments of self-awareness, are forced to generate the threat of revolution. The reviews that I analyzed from the Quarterly and the Edinburgh might even suggest that the Tories have more revolutionary energy than their opponents: the extremist tone of the Quarterly is certainly more compelling than the caution of the Edinburgh. I would not want to argue, however, that the use of paranoid rhetoric, by creating a false impression of the precariousness of the Tory government, actually preserves existing power relations. The impulse to seek single-cause explanations is itself paranoid. But I do want to argue for the monolithic persuasive power of the paranoid style, the irresistibility of its claim to represent a collective mentality. Although a writer may self-consciously exploit paranoid rhetoric, he is forced by it into believing what he says, because this rhetoric blurs the distinction between genuine and factitious moral outrage. It is both literal (the users of this rhetoric really do fear revolution) and figurative (the fear of revolution is a screen for other fears). It is at once a rhetorical strategy and a symptom of fears that are sometimes real, sometimes imaginary.

40


II. Shelley and the Tory Reviewers “The quarterly is undoubtedly conducted with talent great talent & affords a dreadful preponderance against the cause of improvement. If a band of staunch reformers, resolute yet skilful infidels were united in so close & constant a league as that in which interest & fanatisism [sic ] have joined the members of that literary coalition!” In this passage from a letter to Thomas Love Peacock (L, 2:81), Shelley recognizes the hegemonic power of the Quarterly Review; he implies that the skill of its writers enables it to resist “the cause of improvement,” as if the periodical directly affects the state of public affairs. But he also belittles the writers for the Quarterly by claiming that they are bound together both by financial “interest” and (apparently political) fanaticism. Presumably thinking of himself as a quasi-Satanic “resolute yet skilful infidel,” he suggests that the way to counteract the influence of the Quarterly’s “literary coalition” would be to oppose one cabal with another. Elsewhere, in his mature poetry, however, Shelley implicitly questions both the worth of conspiratorial activity and the straightforward political efficacy of the printed word. But his challenge to paranoid rhetoric occurs in dialogue with his reviewers, including the writers for the reactionary Quarterly. I will discuss the Quarterly’s attacks on Shelley later in this chapter. Shelley responded to these attacks both publicly, in the preface and text of Prometheus Unbound, his major confrontation with the dynamics of the Satanic scenario, and privately, in a letter to his publisher, Charles Ollier. In analyzing these exchanges, I will be arguing for a sort of permeability between Shelley and the reviewers: they respond paranoically to him while anticipating his challenge to their assumptions, and at the same time, ironically, he privately embraces the Quarterly’s own demonizing rhetoric. Before turning to the dialogue between Shelley and the Quarterly, however, I will briefly place it in the context of attacks on other Romantic poets, which tap into the same free-floating rhetoric of paranoia that I have analyzed so far. This will help to reinforce my earlier suggestion that there is a discrepancy between the mixed motives underlying the paranoid style and the impression of strict partisanship that it creates. So although the Quarterly’s attacks seem politically motivated, they are not exclusively so. I make this point not in order to explain in turn a movement away from partisanship in the Blackwood’s reviews of Shelley, with which I conclude the chapter, but in order to emphasize that what looks like a shift from


41

partisanship is also a shift from a powerful rhetoric sustained by forces other than simply partisanship. Since paranoid rhetoric has multiple underlying causes, it becomes all the more remarkable that Blackwood’s veers away even momentarily from the appearance of fierce partisanship that goes along with that rhetoric. In the first half of this chapter I looked at examples of paranoid rhetoric reacting to the contemporary political scene. The distinction between the political and the literary, however, is far from clear-cut, as Shelley’s reference to “that literary coalition” suggests. Despite routine gestures of separating politics from literature and other aesthetic categories, both reviewers and poets themselves in this period assume that the two are intertwined.75 They deplore what Hazlitt calls “political criticism” (Works, 8:220), but, like Lockhart in his “Remarks on the Periodical Criticism of England,” they take for granted that any text may be read in terms of political partisanship. In his essay “On Criticism” in Table Talk (1821–1822), Hazlitt facetiously claimed that hostile criticism tends to be politically motivated, while favorable criticism is the result of “personal” feelings rather than a genuine appreciation of “beauties”: “Many persons see nothing but beauties in a work, others nothing but defects. . . . The first are frequently actuated by personal friendship, the last by all the virulence of party-spirit” (Works, 8:220). The matter is of course not that simple; for one thing, political partisanship can presumably lead to praise rather than blame, and it is possible for a reviewer to be actuated by personal vindictiveness as well as “personal friendship.” But it is all too easy to see the heightened and defensive tone of the reviewers as a paranoid reaction to an exclusively political threat. Vituperative language is used even when attacks on poets cross party lines, like the attack by the new Blackwood’s Magazine on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817). In cases when hostile reviews of poets can be referred to a political cause, commercial and other considerations intervene.76 Although Francis Jeffrey, in his notorious series of attacks on the Lake poets in the Edinburgh Review, explicitly objects to the Lyrical Ballads, for example, on political, class-based, and artistic (neoclassical) grounds,77 he has been seen as indulging in persecution in order to increase the circulation of the Edinburgh—which in turn has the political motive of spreading the Whiggish principles of that periodical.78 Similarly, the attacks in Blackwood’s on Leigh Hunt, Keats, and other members of the “Cockney School” are fiercely partisan but go beyond straightforward partisanship. Keats, for instance, is attacked

42


by Tory reviewers presumably for political purposes but more likely for what might be called guilt by association: Keats is singled out because he is a friend of Leigh Hunt, himself of course a vocal reformer as well as a poet.79 Blackwood’s Magazine in fact announced an editorial policy of publishing vituperative criticism not for the sake of punishing its ideological opponents but for the sake of its entertainment value.80 So although on one level the Quarterly’s attacks on Shelley are simply more elaborate versions of the kind of attacks made on Cobbett and other radicals for political reasons, they also take their place in a discourse of paranoia that has no single ground. A quick look at some remarks on the reviewers by Hazlitt and Coleridge, themselves both victims of personal attacks, will indicate the various causes to which these two Romantic writers (who were also reviewers at opposite ends of the establishment political spectrum) attributed the venom of literary reviews in their period. No sooner do these writers put forward one explanation than they offer another, a circumstance that itself suggests the overdetermined nature of the paranoid style in their particular historical moment. In chapter 21 of Biographia Literaria, “Remarks on the present mode of conducting critical journals,” Coleridge presents an analysis of the failings of the Edinburgh Review, one of which is an extension of its “damnatory style” to include personal attacks (BL, 2:108). In chapter 3 of the Biographia, Coleridge had previously asked the question of why he himself had attracted so many attacks from reviewers and had concluded with the disingenuous and self-consciously unsatisfactory answer that he was attacked merely because “I was in habits of intimacy with Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Southey!” (BL, 1:55). In his ostensibly more general “Remarks” Coleridge points to both the “too frequent interference of NATIONAL PARTY” and “PERSONAL predilection or aversion” (BL, 2:111). However he also offers two other possible reasons for the reviewers’ abusive style, one of which is “still worse” than mere “personal malignity,” a “habit of malignity in the form of mere wantonness” (BL, 2:109). The impulse to persecute, that is to say, perpetuates itself, leaving original causes behind. Coleridge then however offers another reason for malignity, one that suggests careful calculation rather than unthinking “habit”: he refers to “a cold prudential pre-determination to increase the sale of the Review by flattering the malignant passions of human nature” (BL, 2:112). Like Coleridge, Hazlitt offers a variety of reasons for the virulence of the reviews. In his “Letter to William Gifford, Esq.” (1819), he accuses the


43

editor of the Quarterly Review of being a party tool, “the oracle of Church and State” (Works, 9:15), whose “conduct” is “part of a system” (Works, 9:49); both in this pamphlet and in his essay on “Mr. Gifford” in The Spirit of the Age Hazlitt also implies, with every scathing phrase, that Gifford is merely a nasty person.81 In the “Letter” Hazlitt also, like Coleridge, mentions the force of habit: “every indulgence of his hired malignity makes him more disposed to repeat the insult and the injury” (Works, 9:17). However, in a later essay, “The Periodical Press,” published in the Edinburgh Review in 1823, Hazlitt, again echoing Coleridge, identifies another reason for the reviews’ reliance on vituperative rhetoric: “It is equally well known and understood too, that this savage system of bullying and assassination is no longer pursued from the impulse of angry passions or furious prejudices [implying that it was at one time], but on a cold-blooded mercenary calculation of the profits which idle curiosity, and the vulgar appetite for slander, may enable its authors to derive from it” (Works, 16:239). The discrepancy between what Coleridge calls “mere wantonness” and what Hazlitt calls “cold-blooded mercenary calculation of . . . profits” again raises the question of whether paranoid rhetoricians believe in what they are saying or are self-consciously adopting a “style.” As I have already suggested, the distinction becomes a false one because persecution generates more of the same for rhetorical reasons as well as ideological ones. Coleridge’s term “habit” could be seen as displacing onto a bodily mechanism what might be viewed alternatively as a depersonalized inbuilt tendency of paranoid rhetoric. Both Coleridge’s and Hazlitt’s attacks on the reviewers partake of the very “mode” that they claim to separate themselves from: in their own analyses, ideological, personal, and financial considerations combine with “habit” just as they are alleged to do in the reviewing periodicals. Hazlitt, for example, repeatedly protests his “independence”—especially in his “Letter to William Gifford”—but this posture is undermined by his recommended response to attacks: to engage in reprisals, of which the “Letter” is his own most virulent example.82 Indulging in an extended attack on Gifford, Hazlitt announces paranoically, “You are the Government Critic, a character nicely differing from that of a government spy—the invisible link, that connects literature with the police” (Works, 9:13).83 He also concedes Gifford’s power: “abuse is not without effect, because undeserved, nor is a thing utterly impotent because it is thoroughly despicable. You, Sir, have power which is considerable, in proportion as it is despicable!” (Works, 9:29).

44


In attacks on poets, considerations of literary merit come into play, but merely as one cause among several, and one that is itself highly problematic. Coleridge gives as another reason for the reviewers’ vitriolic style their lack of critical principles or “fixed canons of criticism” (BL, 1:62). He complains that both the Edinburgh and the Quarterly make no “reference to any general grounds or rules from which the faultiness or inadmissibility of the qualities attributed may be deduced” (BL, 2:113).84 According to Coleridge, these periodicals are guilty of “the substitution of assertion for argument” and “arbitrary and sometimes petulant verdicts” (BL, 2:113)— terms that apply not only to the reviews of Shelley and other poets but also to the reviewers’ treatment of nonliterary works.85 Hazlitt follows Coleridge in claiming, in a later essay on Jeffrey, that “in matters of taste and criticism” the Edinburgh has no “settled standard” (Works, 20:244), but he adds that “Still there was a general bias and direction, favourable to the clear, the polished, the manly, the intelligible, and looking cold askance on the puny, the affected and obscure” (Works, 20:245). Hazlitt’s list, “the clear, the polished, the manly, the intelligible,” refers to the supposedly Augustan critical principles of the reviewers, who, according to the standard account, display a time lag in the shaping of taste, coming into conflict with the innovative styles of Romantic poetry.86 Critics are divided over the extent to which the reviewers upheld or relinquished such principles during the Romantic period.87 I make a distinction between the shaping of taste and the shift to a new understanding of the aesthetic as something totally distinct from other areas of knowledge. Both are manifested throughout the period in various instances of production and reception, but the change in taste emerges dialectically from the dialogue between poets and reviewers whereas the turn to the aesthetic belongs to a larger paradigm shift. I will show in later chapters that Shelley’s early readers participate in both, and in both cases in spite of themselves. The Quarterly attacked Shelley three times, in 1818, 1819, and 1821. Just as Keats would probably not have been noticed by the reviewers if it had not been for his association with Leigh Hunt, the same can be said for Shelley, though of course in Coleridge’s words from the Biographia, “This, however, transfers, rather than removes, the difficulty” (BL, 1:55). Regardless of the initial impetus for the attacks, from the vantage point of the reviewers, Shelley turns out to be the ideal object for politically motivated personal attacks. His life exemplifies the connection between radical opinions, lax moral principles, and immoral behavior. Since Shelley


45

is a wicked man, it follows that his poetry is perverted. Before it even reviews his work, the Quarterly blasts Shelley’s reputation. However, in the case of Shelley, the reviewers’ own demonizing rhetoric ironically anticipates Shelley’s own attempts to undermine the centrality of individual agency. We will see that those most resistant to Shelley’s poetry thus can be seen as collaborating with its challenge to the main premise underlying paranoid rhetoric. At the same time, as we will see from Shelley’s private reaction to the Quarterly, these personal attacks teach the poet, on the one hand, the impossibility of directly evading the self-perpetuating logic of the Satanic scenario, and, on the other hand, the potential benefit to be gained from the reviewers’ efforts at character assassination. The Quarterly’s first personal attack on Shelley occurred in January 1818 in a hostile review of Hunt’s Foliage.88 Shelley’s name is not actually mentioned in the review, but the critic takes Hunt’s sonnet “On the Degrading Notions of Deity” (addressed to Shelley) as evidence of the irreligion of a whole “new sect” (RR,C, 759).89 At first he attacks Shelley obliquely by melodramatically announcing “the systematic revival of Epicureism” (RR,C, 759). Hunt, as the mere “author of a dangerous moral tenet” has not abandoned himself entirely to sensual pleasure, partly because of his “namby-pamby disposition” (RR,C, 759), but Shelley is by implication a disciple who has taken his master’s teachings to excess. The critic refers pointedly to “he, if such there be, who thinks even adultery vapid unless he can render it more exquisitely poignant by adding incest to it” (RR,C, 760). The events of Shelley’s life conclusively prove the corrupting effect of Hunt’s poetry. Most of the review relies on a tone of such ponderous sarcasm that it undercuts its emphasis on the political threat posed by Hunt, the stirrer up of “discontent and sedition” (RR,C, 763). The critic’s elaborately offhand and convoluted prose practically obscures the thrust of jibes such as the following: “we have still a reluctance to condemn as a low prejudice the mysterious feeling of separation, which consecrates, and draws to closer intimacy the communion of brothers and sisters” (RR,C, 760). This statement could merely refer to the incestuous relationship in Laon and Cythna, or it could refer to Shelley’s supposed “League of Incest” in Switzerland.90 But the tone of the review becomes unexpectedly heightened when the writer refers more explicitly to Shelley: We may be very narrow-minded, but we look upon it still as somewhat dishonourable to have been expelled from a University for the

46


monstrous absurdity of a “mathematical demonstration of the nonexistence of a God”: according to our understandings, it is not proof of a very affectionate heart to break that of a wife by cruelty and infidelity; and if we were told of a man, who, placed on a wild rock among the clouds, yet even in that height surrounded by a loftier amphitheatre of spire-like mountains, hanging over a valley of eternal ice and snow, where the roar of mighty waterfalls was at times unheeded from the hollow and more appalling thunder of the deep and unseen avalanche,—if we were told of a man who, thus witnessing the sublimest assemblage of natural objects, should retire to the cabin near, and write brfpt ( after his name in the album, we hope our own feeling would be pity rather than disgust. (RR,C, 760)91

This startlingly energetic and lucid description of Shelley in the Swiss Alps builds on a rumor apparently started by Southey, who had seen Shelley’s inscription in an inn’s guest book.92 The attack of course depends on the commonplace notion that sublime mountain scenery confirms orthodox Christians in their faith.93 The passage contains an assortment of standard natural images (clouds, mountains, waterfalls) yet the aggressively opinionated stance of the reviewer is momentarily suspended by his own rhetorical evocation of a sublime experience. His contemplation of what is to him Shelley’s crucial moment of Satanic rebellion unexpectedly produces not an image of supremely audacious individualism but rather something like a distinctively Shelleyan response to the external world. The “man” passively “placed on a wild rock” is already “among the clouds” yet dizzyingly looks up to even higher peaks as one extreme boundary gives way to another. Perceptions slide in and out of focus as the waterfalls and avalanches are intermittently “unheeded” and “unseen.” The reason the writer of the passage pulls himself up short and repeats “if we were told of a man” is that by this point the human being has been eliminated from the picture. The instance of defiance—the observer’s self-description—comes only after the observer has become absorbed into the landscape from which he is accused of being unnaturally detached. This personal attack at once establishes Shelley’s notoriety and unsettles the individual identity of the hypothetical “man” who represents him. Shelley read this review in October 1818 and replied to it in act 2 of Prometheus Unbound, written in early 1819. Timothy Webb has convincingly argued that Asia’s description of an avalanche was inspired by the Quarterly’s image of Shelley in the Swiss Alps.94 I will discuss this passage in my chapter on Prometheus Unbound. Published before this reply by the


47

poet, the Quarterly’s first full-length article on Shelley (which insults Hunt only in passing) was a review of The Revolt of Islam.95 The reviewer snidely remarks that some people prefer “infamy” to “obscurity” (RR,C, 771), which is disingenuous, given that his attacks practically created Shelley’s notoriety.96 His attitudes towards both Shelley and his poem fluctuate in the course of the review. He begins by suggesting that Shelley’s radicalism is so extreme that it can do no harm: “he might almost be mistaken for some artful advocate of civil order and religious institutions” (RR,C, 770).97 The reviewer also claims that The Revolt of Islam is too dull to be popular and is therefore not dangerous (RR,C, 771–72). But he calls the poem “poison” (RR,C, 771) and assumes it to be capable of tainting its author, since he sets out legalistically to use Shelley’s “own evidence against himself ” (RR,C, 771). Despite his insistence that “though not in Mr. Shelley’s school,” he can “discriminate between a man and his opinions” (RR,C, 775), he obliquely accuses Shelley and Mary Shelley of incest by identifying them with the characters of Laon and Cythna.98 He also indulges in innuendo designed to titillate the imaginations of his readers, feigning bewilderment about the meaning of Shelley’s word “Love” (RR,C, 774). Towards the end of the article, the reviewer grants Shelley and his poem a power that he had earlier denied. “He has indeed, to the best of his ability, wounded us in the tenderest part.—As far as in him lay, he has loosened the hold of our protecting laws, and sapped the principles of our venerable polity; he has invaded the purity and chilled the unsuspecting ardour of our fireside intimacies” (RR,C, 775). The poem itself has performed these quasi-sexual assaults on society and domesticity, but the reviewer goes on to imagine Shelley, by extension, as the possessor of monstrous vanity, “desperate malignity,” and “a proud and rebel mind” (RR,C, 776). He then predicts Shelley’s death by drowning: “Like the Egyptian of old, the wheels of his chariot are broken, the path of ‘mighty waters’ closes in upon him behind, and a still deepening ocean is before him:—for a short time, are seen his impotent struggles against a resistless power, his blasphemous execrations are heard, his despair but poorly assumes the tone of triumph and defiance, and he calls ineffectually on others to follow him to the same ruin—finally, he sinks ‘like lead’ to the bottom, and is forgotten” (RR,C, 776). After associating Shelley with the sublime in the article on Foliage, the same reviewer here connects him with a potentially sublime though also melodramatic scene from Exodus. This passage is unstable, not so much because its language is hyperbolic but because its imagery and syntax

48


work against each other. The initial biblical metaphor is disconcertingly concrete: Shelley himself particularly enjoyed the broken chariot wheels.99 At the same time, the Quarterly’s attack makes the poet the pretext for an abstract moral fable representing the fate of all blaspheming sinners. As such, Shelley the individual is incidental to the reviewer’s narrative, which might be why he is described with a surprising lack of agency. The sentence’s ostensible subject is Shelley, but it begins without attaching the opening comparison to a main clause. Shelley suddenly becomes “him,” pursued by the “waters.” The passive verbs “are seen,” “are heard,” confirm the futility of Shelley’s “struggles” but they also make him elusive, especially since one next finds that he has been metonymically reduced to “despair.” When Shelley finally emerges as the subject of the sentence it is only because by then he is on the point of being submerged in the “ocean.” The final image of sinking attempts to dispose of Shelley, but despite the biblical allusion it leaves the reader with such an impression of bathos that it undercuts its own containment of the already rather ludicrous Satanic figure. Shelley’s private response to this passage, in a letter to Ollier dated October 15, 1819, is suggestive: I was amused, too, with the finale; it is like the end of the first act of an opera, when that tremendous concordant discord sets up from the orchestra, and everybody talks and sings at once. It describes the result of my battle with their Omnipotent God; his pulling me under the sea by the hair of my head, like Pharaoh; my calling out like the devil who was game to the last; swearing and cursing in all comic and horrid oaths, like a French postillion on Mount Cenis; entreating everybody to drown themselves; pretending not to be drowned myself when I am drowned; and, lastly, being drowned. (L, 2:128)100

Shelley imaginatively embellishes the scene conjured up by the Quarterly, filling it with activity. For the reviewer’s solemn description of an encounter with death, he substitutes a noisy, crowded spectacle. In a rapid succession of lively similes, he translates the reviewer’s insinuations into a humorous “battle” between himself and a personally vindictive God who physically drags him beneath the waves. The poet who is so passive in the reviewer’s account becomes an energetic “devil” who instead of persuading “others” to be damned, politely entreats “everybody” literally to “drown themselves.” Shelley’s added detail, “pretending not to be drowned myself when I am drowned,” transfers agency to himself at the moment of complete loss of control. His willful misreading of the passage in the Quarterly shows him


49

eagerly accepting his position in the Satanic scenario, while the reviewer’s own uneasiness with that scenario oddly anticipates Shelley’s later attempts to evade it. Shelley’s embrace of this picture of himself as the devil implies an appreciation of the limited but lively power to be gained by Satanic defiance. The review of The Revolt of Islam concludes with this dark hint about Shelley: “if we might withdraw the veil of private life, and tell what we now know about him, it would be indeed a disgusting picture that we should exhibit, but it would be an unanswerable comment on our text” (RR,C, 776). Whereas previously the text of the poem was a sufficient comment on Shelley’s life, the critic claims here that details of Shelley’s private life would be an “unanswerable” confirmation of the review. The damaging biographical information that the critic chooses to withhold presumably consists of the same facts that he had already mentioned in his review of Foliage—Shelley’s abandonment of Harriet Shelley and his description of himself as an atheist. (The reviewer does repeat the fact that Shelley had been expelled from Oxford.) This information therefore actually only validates the review of The Revolt of Islam because it is not articulated, because it leaves the readers of the Quarterly Review free to envisage some new, literally unspeakable crime. The only other article on Shelley in the Quarterly during the poet’s lifetime, a very hostile review of Prometheus Unbound (which I discuss at more length in Chapter 3)101 emphasizes that “Of Mr. Shelley himself we know nothing, and desire to know nothing. Be his private qualities what they may, his poems (and it is only with his poems that we have any concern) are at war with reason, with taste, with virtue, in short, with all that dignifies man, or that man reveres” (RR,C, 786). The Quarterly Review goes from knowing facts about Shelley, to pretending to know information that cannot be disclosed, to knowing nothing whatsoever about the man himself.102 We will see that the case of Shelley also provokes Blackwood’s into contradicting itself over the question of the appropriateness of personal attacks. Shelley’s first reaction to the insinuations in the Quarterly’s review of The Revolt of Islam took the form of a letter to William Gifford, which remained unfinished. Referring to the reviewer’s claim that he “now knows” something that would constitute an “ ‘unanswerable comment[’] on the text,” Shelley wrote, “I hereby call upon the Author of that Article or you as his responsible agent publickly to produce your proofs of that assertion” (L, 2:130). The fact that this note was not sent suggests Shelley’s own

50


realization of the futility of this demand. A year later Shelley wrote a longer fragment of a letter to Gifford, which was also, according to Mary Shelley, “never sent” (L, 2:253). This letter refers to the review of The Revolt of Islam as a “slanderous paper” and adds rather contradictorily, “I never notice anonymous attacks” (L, 2:251).103 As mentioned earlier, however, Shelley did “notice” this particular attack to the extent of responding to it obliquely in Prometheus Unbound. He also, in the summer of 1820, wrote two letters to Southey concerning the authorship of the attack on The Revolt of Islam. The following at once calculating and disingenuous sentence places Shelley’s correspondence with Southey squarely within the persecutory dynamics of the Satanic scenario: That an unprincipled hireling, in default of what to answer in a published composition, should, without provocation, insult the domestic calamities of a writer of the adverse party—to which perhaps their victim dares scarcely advert in thought—that he should make those calamities the theme of the foulest and falsest slander—that all this should be done by a calumniator without a name—with the cowardice, no less than the malignity, of an assassin—is too common a piece of charity among Christians (Christ would have taught them better), too common a violation of what is due from man to man among the pretended friends of social order, to have drawn one remark from me, but that I would have you observe the arts practised by that party for which you have abandoned the cause to which your early writings were devoted. (L, 2:204)

The final jibe in this passage makes the standard reformist accusation that Southey is a political apostate; Shelley repeats this hackneyed insult at the end of a self-pitying sentence in his second letter to Southey: “I cannot hope that you will be candid enough to feel, or if you feel, to own, that you have done ill in accusing, even in your mind, an innocent and a persecuted man, whose only real offence is the holding opinions something similar to those which you once held respecting the existing state of society” (L, 2:231). (Southey’s reply to the latter declaration tartly distinguishes between Shelley’s guilt and his own: “That, sir, is not your crime, it would only be your error; your offence is moral as well as political” [L, 2:233].) Shelley and Southey both make the routine gesture of contrasting their own pure motives with their opponents’ impure ones; Southey does this explicitly, claiming that his concern for Shelley’s spiritual welfare stems neither from “party animosity” nor “personal illwill”


51

but that Shelley is “too much under [the] influence” of party himself (L, 2:205). Just as both “party animosity” and “personal illwill” influence the public discourse of paranoia, both presumably—despite such disavowals—feed into Shelley and Southey’s private conflict.104 I discuss Shelley’s public reply to Southey and the Quarterly Review—Adonais—in my fourth chapter. I turn now to the first four reviews of Shelley that appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine, in order to foreshadow the argument about a collaborative shift to the aesthetic on the part of Shelley and his early readers that unfolds later in this book. Given the hostile attitude of Blackwood’s Magazine towards Hunt, Keats, and Hazlitt, one might have expected that journal to lead the way in attacking Shelley, but surprisingly, its four reviews of Shelley’s poetry during 1819 and 1820 were all fairly favorable. Apart from Hunt’s notices in the Examiner, these reviews, published anonymously of course but written by John Gibson Lockhart, were some of the most positive ones that Shelley received in his lifetime. They are especially intriguing in that they contrast markedly with the Blackwood’s attacks on the Cockney School, most of which were by Lockhart. As the chief collaborator on this series of articles by the anonymous Z, Lockhart had indulged in violent personal attacks on Hunt in particular, and had imagined Hunt’s allegedly licentious poetry corrupting young and lower-class readers. I have argued elsewhere that Lockhart’s persecutory attacks on Hunt are the exclusive result neither of political allegiance, class antagonism, nor a personal vendetta, but are due to the tendency of fictions—in this case Lockhart’s rendering of the character of Leigh Hunt—to take on a life of their own.105 Lockhart’s reviews of Shelley display a different kind of logic. These four articles, like the articles on Hunt and his fellow members of the Cockney School, take on a momentum of their own in the sense that they acquire a homogeneity rare in the effervescent pages of Blackwood’s. But their most striking feature is a language of aesthetic appreciation that is presented alongside more familiar paranoid rhetoric. Various nonaesthetic factors evidently contribute to this language of appreciation. But Lockhart’s praise for Shelley can also be seen as evidence of the shift to a new notion of the aesthetic at odds with the appearance of rigid partisanship that is characteristic of the earlynineteenth-century paranoid style. In referring to such a shift, I am not merely pointing to a change in the reviewers’ taste (though my third chapter will also show that such a change can be identified); I am suggesting that

52


Lockhart articulates momentarily a conception of poetry as something transcending paranoid politics. Lockhart’s review of The Revolt of Islam in Blackwood’s, which appeared in January 1819, before the Quarterly’s attack on that poem, acknowledges that “Mr Shelly [sic ] is of the ‘COCKNEY SCHOOL,’ so far as his opinions are concerned” (RR,C, 96–97). It is clear from his account of The Revolt of Islam that Shelley’s political beliefs are far more radical than Hunt’s. But, according to Lockhart, “the base opinions of the sect have not as yet been able entirely to obscure in [Shelley] the character, or take away from him the privileges of the genius born within him” (RR,C, 97). Given Shelley’s “noble and majestic . . . genius,” he says, “We are very willing to pass in silence the many faults of Mr Shelly’s opinions, and to attend to nothing but the vehicle in which these opinions are conveyed. As a philosopher, our author is weak and worthless;—our business is with him as a poet, and, as such, he is strong, nervous, original” (RR,C, 97). Lockhart claims that “what [Shelley] probably conceives to be the most exquisite ornaments of his poetry, [his political opinions,] appear, in our eyes, the chief deformities upon its texture” (RR,C, 97).106 It is strange that Lockhart emphasizes this distinction between politics and poetry, since his criticism of Hunt and Keats never allows that poetic language can be dissociated from the ideas that it expresses. Donald Reiman comments, “Lockhart uses the terms ‘vehicle’ and ‘texture’ in almost the way a modern critic might” (RR,C, 96). What kind of a modern critic? and why “almost”? Reiman seems to be saying that Lockhart’s willingness to separate poetic style (vehicle or texture) from politics is a praiseworthy anticipation of twentieth-century formalism, as if the roots of (say) New Criticism can be traced back to their sources in the work of the most intelligent earlynineteenth-century reviewers. Not all “modern” critics would be willing to acknowledge that Lockhart’s aestheticizing approach represents progress: recent critics are more likely to stress the material underpinnings of that approach than to applaud Lockhart’s separation of style and content. While on one level both Lockhart and Shelley can be seen to embrace what Jerome McGann dismissively calls the Romantic ideology, at this point I would emphasize the significance of the move to a new sense of the aesthetic rather than the long-term repercussions of that move. That Lockhart’s approach to Shelley is a newly aestheticizing one is confirmed by various other ways in which his reviews of Shelley conflict with his articles on the Cockney School. In his review of The Revolt of


53

Islam, Lockhart contradicts his former assumption about the validity of biographical criticism. In one of his attacks on Hunt he had claimed, “There can be no radical distinction allowed between the private and public character of a poet. If a poet sympathizes with and justifies wickedness in his poetry, he is a wicked man” (RR,C, 87). By contrast, in the review of The Revolt Lockhart seems disinclined to dredge up incriminating details about Shelley’s private life: “Mr Shelly [sic ], whatever his errors may have been, is a scholar, a gentleman, and a poet” (RR,C, 103). He concludes by promising more praise if Shelley will find better companions than the editor of the Examiner and “Johnny Keats” (RR,C, 103). Lockhart also contradicts himself in that whereas his reviews of The Story of Rimini find incest (between a sister- and brother-in-law) to be unmentionable, in his review of Shelley’s Rosalind and Helen (1819) he openly—though disapprovingly— refers to incest between siblings: “What is it that he can propose to himself by his everlasting allusions to the unnatural loves of brothers and sisters?” (RR,C, 110). Rather than joining John Taylor Coleridge in spreading rumors about Shelley’s private life, however, Lockhart chooses to see Shelley as less, not more, dangerous than Hunt. In November 1819, Lockhart belatedly reviewed Shelley’s Alastor (1816) in Blackwood’s, partly in order to take issue with the Quarterly for its treatment of Shelley: “His Reviewer there, whoever he is, does not shew himself a man of such lofty principles as to entitle him to ride the high horse in company with the author of the Revolt of Islam” (RR,C, 123). Writing in the first person plural as the “sincere though sometimes sorrowing friends of Mr Shelley,” Lockhart goes on, at the risk, as he says, of being exposed to “the charge of personality” (RR,C, 123), to compare the conduct and intellect of the critic unfavorably to Shelley’s. Lockhart mocks the way in which the Quarterly reviewer “seems to shudder with the same holy fear at the violation of the laws of morality and the breaking of college rules” (RR,C, 124). This is an amazing accusation coming from Lockhart, given that his own reviews of Hunt combine insinuations about Hunt’s personal morals with petty jibes at innocuous aspects of Hunt’s behavior. Lockhart even objects to the Quarterly’s “dark and oracular denunciations against the Poet” (RR,C, 124). Here is further proof, were any needed, that Lockhart has completely different sets of standards for the two poets. It might be objected that Lockhart’s contradictions are the product of the deliberately inconsistent ethos of Blackwood’s, a matter of editorial policy. Blackwood’s certainly later went on to contradict itself outright

54


where Shelley was concerned: its review of Adonais was written not by Lockhart but by another writer and is wholly negative, unsubtly scathing, and probably entirely motivated by political partisanship. But that review only serves to highlight the very different language used in the articles by Lockhart. It is not that Lockhart’s reviews of Shelley display a totally new set of standards but that two sets of standards coexist within these reviews, making them unstable even while they possess a characteristic tone of authority. Each of his four reviews of Shelley combines extravagant praise with typically vehement strictures upon Shelley’s immorality. On the one hand, Shelley is “a man of genius” (RR,C, 104) and “a great poet” (RR,C, 123) whose “mind” is “intensely poetical” (RR,C, 103) and whose works display “exquisite beauty” (RR,C, 110); and on the other hand, he is accused of “pernicious purposes” (RR,C, 96), “monstrous perversity” (RR,C, 104), and “a diseased mind” (RR,C, 110). But the latter remarks are so typical of paranoid rhetoric that when juxtaposed with nonpartisan praise they go unnoticed: Contemporary commentators, including Shelley himself, were struck only by the extravagance of the praise. In a letter to Ollier, perhaps referring to the review of Alastor, Shelley claimed that “the praise would have given me more pleasure if it had been less excessive” (L, 2:163). Some commentators have tried to give Lockhart credit for recognizing that Shelley was a better poet than either Hunt or Keats in 1818–1819, but to acknowledge the perceptiveness of a particular individual does not tell the whole story.107 Contemporary periodical writers, when speculating as to the motives behind the favorable attitude to Shelley in Blackwood’s, did not include the possibility of aesthetic appreciation. In 1820 a periodical called The Honeycomb commented on the inconsistent praise of Shelley in Blackwood’s. The writer implies that he himself is capable of disinterested criticism, but he refuses to believe that Blackwood’s could be capable of it: Mr. Shelley . . . has been favoured with sundry high commendations, though we do not believe that his real poetical merits have been the cause of them. The principles which he professes, and the views of things which he takes, so contrary to the principles, if they may so be called, which distinguished that magazine, would be fully sufficient to counter-balance in the minds of the persons who contribute to that work, the harping of an Angel’s Lyre. There is therefore undoubtedly some secret machinery of which we are not aware, some friend


55

behind the scenes, or some working of personal interest, which thus induces that magazine for once to throw aside the trammels of party prejudice, and to do justice to a man who even advocates the French Revolution.108

Although this writer claims to be able to value Shelley’s “merits” as they deserve, he takes for granted here that political opposition in a fiercely Tory publication like Blackwood’s would outweigh its capacity for aesthetic appreciation, even if the idea that it would be impervious to the “harping of an Angel’s Lyre” is a sardonic exaggeration (the phrase ironically foreshadows posthumous attempts by Shelley’s supporters to turn him into an angel). The writer entertains the notion of a split between aesthetics and politics only to insist that in this case, politics inevitably transcends aesthetics instead of the other way around. There must then be “some friend behind the scenes” or some “secret machinery.” If we were to agree that aesthetic appreciation could not of itself account for the discrepancy between the Blackwood’s attitude to Hunt and its attitude to Shelley, it would be tempting to identify the “secret machinery” immediately as class solidarity, given that Lockhart stresses that Shelley is a “gentleman.”109 More specifically, Lockhart’s emphasis on the beauty of The Revolt of Islam suggests that Shelley is acceptable because the fact that his language avoids the supposedly colloquial diction of Hunt proves him to be a “man of rank,” and, as Lockhart remarks in an attack on Hunt, “All the great poets of our country have been men of some rank in society” (RR,C, 50). That is to say, for Lockhart social status and aesthetic merit are bound up, but on the other hand if aesthetic appreciation were reducible to class bias, presumably other reviewers including the Quarterly’s would have reacted more positively to Shelley. Class cannot in and of itself be a sufficient explanation for why Lockhart defends Shelley. Another reason for his enthusiasm could be that he aims to distinguish himself from other reviewers: he mentions repeatedly that other critics have neglected or attacked Shelley and takes on a tone of self-congratulation at rescuing Shelley from others’ smears. Can aesthetic appreciation then be considered, as it often has been, a residue that is left over after all other ideological motivations have been accounted for? I am not claiming that Lockhart is capable of an aesthetic appreciation that transcends the ideologies by which he and Shelley are bound. Nevertheless, Lockhart’s insistence on a distinction between aesthetics and politics where Shelley

56


is concerned is significant because for most of the reviewers, Shelley’s extreme radicalism prevents them from seeing him as anything other than a threat. It might be objected once again that Lockhart is merely a particularly sensitive and perceptive reader of poetry, but on the other hand, as noted previously, the writer in The Honeycomb does not even raise the possibility of distinguishing the reviewer from the journal for which he writes. Shelley’s private reaction to the reception of his poetry by Blackwood’s is interesting in this regard. On December 15, 1819, he wrote to Ollier, “Do you know, I think the article in Blackwood could not have been written by a favourer of Government, and a religionist. I don’t believe any such one could sincerely like my writings. After all, is it not some friend in disguise, and don’t you know who wrote it?” (L, 2:163). Given Shelley’s implicit recognition in an earlier letter to Ollier that the Tories’ use of the paranoid style could be potentially counterproductive while at the same time helping to provide an effective obstacle to the cause of reform, it is at once fitting and ironic that he should refer to John Gibson Lockhart as a “friend in disguise.” Lockhart was of course “a favourer of Government, and a religionist”: Shelley’s comment shows that even he himself could not imagine a nonpartisan reading of his poetry. Mary Shelley reacted similarly, remarking in a letter to Maria Gisborne that Blackwood’s is “a publication as furious as the quarterly but [that it] takes up the arms singularly enough in Shelley’s defence—We half think that unless it is Mitching Mallecho . . . it must be by Walter Scott who is the only liberal man of that faction” (quoted in L, 2:163). This comment identifies two possible causes for the leniency of Blackwood’s: calculatingly insincere praise for the purposes of presumably playful “Mitching Mallecho”110 or genuine sympathy for Shelley’s “liberal” sentiments. While Blackwood’s was certainly capable of the former, it was equally certainly not capable of the latter. Yet Lockhart’s review of Prometheus Unbound in September 1820 takes the same tone as his previous three reviews of Shelley, combining harsh censure with extravagant praise. Again he focuses on the discrepancy between the beauty of Shelley’s language and the perversion of his political principles. In the same sentence Lockhart waxes enthusiastic about the “poetical beauties” and “moral sublime of eloquence” to be found in Prometheus Unbound, and describes the poem as a “pestiferous mixture of blasphemy, sedition, and sensuality” (RR,C, 139). In my third chapter I will argue that the partly favorable reception of Prometheus Unbound


57

by Lockhart and other reviewers enacts a cultural transition from the paranoid political mode of reading to a more aestheticized view of poetry. Meanwhile, in my second chapter I will examine more fully the dynamics of the Satanic scenario as exemplified by the interplay between the thoroughly Satanic Queen Mab and its thoroughly paranoid contemporary reviewers, sympathetic as well as hostile.

2

C o n t a g i o n a n d Pe r s o n i f i c a t i o n i n Queen Mab and Its Reception

“There is no God,” the atheist cried: And when the daring blasphemy Ascended from his lips to thee, Where were thy tardy lightnings, Heaven, Thy dread reply in thunder given, To blast him to his native hell, And in his punishment to tell The impious wretch, he lied! The lightnings then remained at rest; No answer to the wretch from high, In pealing thunder, shook the sky; For well the Almighty Father knew, Who pierces Nature with his view, In all creation’s ample round, So fierce a hell could not be found, As glowed within his breast. —“The Atheist” by “C.” ([1821], quoted in H, 345)

I. Contagion and Conspiracy H. Buxton Forman has described Queen Mab as “a receptacle wherein [Shelley] enshrined earlier poetical efforts, a mine wherein he dug for later poetical efforts, a work which he did not abandon readily after getting it into print as he did many a better work, and finally a creation which, when he had abandoned it, he found by no means disposed to abandon him.” 58

Queen Mab a nd Its Reception

59

Forman goes on to compare the poem to Frankenstein’s monster, figuring Shelley as a victim of Gothic persecution.1 With these statements Forman refers to the eventful publication history of Queen Mab, Shelley’s early “philosophical poem” consisting of an attack on the past and the present, followed by a description of a utopian future, in the form of a vision shown by the fairy Mab to the spirit of the virtuous Ianthe. The first edition of the poem, in 1813, circulated only privately, but Shelley put the poem to other uses, both private and public, including naming his first child after Ianthe, and rewriting and publishing selected passages from the poem and its notes between 1813 and 1816. In 1815 the poem was enthusiastically reviewed in a liberal periodical with which Shelley himself had connections. Forman’s comment about Shelley being pursued by his “abandoned” creation mainly alludes to the idea that Queen Mab played a damaging role in Shelley’s 1817 Chancery trial for the custody of his two children by his first wife, Harriet. Forman’s Frankenstein analogy also refers to the fact that later, in 1821, pirate editions of the work were put on sale without Shelley’s consent by radical publishers. This unauthorized publication solidified Shelley’s reputation as a figure of diabolical wickedness, because Tory reviewers responded with more than typical outrage to the radical political and religious opinions expressed in the poem and its notes, especially its explicit atheism (“There is no God!” [7:13]).2 We have already seen that the establishment reviewers in early-nineteenth-century England cast their reformist opponents in the role of Satanic rebels against orthodoxy, thus magnifying them into dangerous revolutionaries. In the Satanic scenario, reformers embrace the part of Satan in Paradise Lost, not realizing that in putting the spokesmen for the establishment in the position of God, they are allowing them to dictate the terms of debate. I would suggest that Queen Mab is the quintessential Satanic text; hence its continued popularity among radicals during the first half of the nineteenth century. Shelley’s hostile contemporary reviewers would have enjoyed Forman’s idea of an anthropomorphized Queen Mab turning against its creator as if by an inevitable logic. As we have seen, for both conservative and reformist users of the paranoid style, individual agents wield an almost magical autonomous power, texts have tangible as well as intangible effects, and those effects can be both wholly predictable and frighteningly unpredictable. We will see that for Shelley’s contemporary reviewers—hostile and sympathetic alike—Queen Mab confirms the assumptions underlying their extravagant rhetoric: the idea that individual reformers can automatically

60


effect large-scale change, and the notion that such change can be brought about by means of the printed word, both directly through one-on-one communication and indirectly through a more depersonalized contagion. As I noted in my analysis of essays from the Quarterly and Edinburgh Reviews, the belief in the centrality of individual (and conspiratorial) agency seems to conflict with the idea of contagion, because the first blames individuals for an actual or potential state of social crisis, while the second implies that the message of a text can spread ineluctably despite its author’s intention and despite a limited circulation. Nevertheless, as I also suggested, the difference between what I will for convenience call conspiracy and contagion is blurred by paranoid rhetoricians, because they see contagion itself as at once an image of person-to-person contamination, and as something that spreads independently of human agency. This ambiguity over how texts have effects corresponds to a contemporary confusion over the nature of contagion in a more scientific, literal sense that was itself perpetuated by nonspecialist reviewers. I will show that both Queen Mab and its early readers—like paranoid rhetoricians in general—tend to treat contagion as a supplement to conspiracy rather than or as well as an alternative to it. While this ambiguity intensifies the self-righteousness of Shelley’s reviewers (both friendly and unfriendly) as well as that of Queen Mab itself, it does not carry over to the poem’s vision of change, which fails to imagine or inhabit a benign equivalent to contagion. Lacking a sense of its own audience, Queen Mab assumes that denunciation of existing conditions is enough: people will read the poem and know how to act. Whereas the later Prometheus Unbound avoids offering an agenda for reformers because coercion would be tyrannical, Queen Mab fails to outline an agenda because it conceives of individuals as acting mechanically; once their perceptions are altered, their behavior will correspond. In what follows I will discuss the dialogue between the implicit and explicit claims of the poem and its early readers, including its use in the Chancery trial, in order to reveal how that dialogue exemplifies the dynamics of paranoid politics and at the same time hints at a way out only to re-embrace those dynamics. But before approaching Queen Mab through the lens of its complicated initial publication history, I will briefly discuss some reviews of the socalled contagionist controversy in early-nineteenth-century England, since their unsuccessful attempts to define contagion will help to clarify the contradictory treatment of human and nonhuman agency in both the poem and its immediate reception.


61

A preoccupation with the contagious power of ideas coincided with the revival in Regency England of a long-standing debate over whether or not the plague was a contagious disease.3 Since it was not yet known that the plague was carried by fleas on rats, the hypothesis that the plague was contagious through some invisible means was open to speculation and hotly contested. An outbreak of the plague at Malta in 1813 followed by the publication of tracts for and against quarantine regulations provoked in 1819 a parliamentary inquiry into the contagiousness of the plague, which led to a more general controversy over what the Edinburgh Review had called in 1802 “that many-headed monster, contagion” (ER 1:245).4 Reviews of the various texts arguing for and against contagion show that not only are each of the extreme positions open to serious objections, they appear to collapse into each other to some degree. Like participants in the debate, the reviewers attack each other for using circular logic and for assuming exactly what needs to be proved. They also make distinctions only to blur them with their choice of vocabulary. The main issue under debate is whether the plague is communicated from person to person or whether it can spread independently of human beings. One of the ways in which this issue is complicated involves the interchangeable use of the term contagion to mean both the source and the transmission of disease.5 Even those who believed in contagion were uncertain whether it was a means of communicating the plague or itself the origin of the plague. The confusion in the articles that I will be discussing (which no doubt reflects a confusion in the medical texts they are trying to popularize) illuminates paranoid reviews of literary texts—especially Shelley’s—because the latter use a similar disease- and contagion-related terminology with even less self-consciousness about how ambiguous that terminology can be. An 1822 report of the controversy by Robert Gooch, writing in the Quarterly Review, divided the participants into “contagionists, anti-contagionists and moderates” (QR 27:526).6 According to Gooch, believers in contagion— though not Dr. Thomas Hancock, the moderate under discussion—“give to [the power of contagion] abstract qualities” (possibly meaning no more than that although it is invisible, it definitely exists) and “conceive it to be the sole agent by which pestilence is generated and diffused” (QR 27:531).7 Following Hancock, Gooch also identified a perhaps more extreme and hypothetical stance—that of the “hypercontagionist” who imagines the plague infecting via a “specific something” (QR 27:538). At the opposite extreme, anticontagionists insist that plague epidemics are

62


caused by unhealthy states of the atmosphere, while the moderates have it both ways, believing that contagion is transmitted from person to person and affected by atmospheric conditions.8 There would seem then to be three (possibly four) different positions, one of which—the moderates’— combines two of the others, but these positions are more similar than they at first appear. Although contagionism would seem to focus on the role of human beings in transmitting disease, while anticontagionism would seem to downplay human influence, this distinction is unstable. Contagion theory itself lacks any explanation of how disease spreads. An 1819 Edinburgh Review essay,9 which addresses typhus rather than plague epidemics but which anticipates the concerns of the contagionist debate, mentions transmission by saliva, through the skin, and via “inhalation by the lungs” (ER 31:421–22), while other writers question whether direct touch is necessary for infection to take place. According to the Quarterly, the contagionist Sir Brooke Faulkner maintains “that plague may actually be transported both by persons and articles of merchandize” (QR 27:536), while himself admitting that “non-susceptibility may exist to a great extent in many individuals” (QR 27:538). Even the contagionist side of the debate, that is to say, does not hold onto a strict person-to-person model of contamination. The anticontagionist position also blurs the distinction between human and nonhuman agency. The most vocal and strenuous anticontagionist, Charles Maclean, would appear to take a highly deindividualizing position in claiming that “the influence of atmospheric change” is responsible for “each and every case of plague” (QR 27:534). Yet his views as represented by the Quarterly invoke not only personal vulnerability but also conspiracy theory. First, Maclean argues that the “doctrine” of “transmission” by contagion (QR 27:532) originated in a papal conspiracy of the sixteenth century.10 Second, Maclean stresses that the fear of contagion actually contributes to the spread of disease, so that even though contagion is a fantasy, its effects are real.11 Third, Maclean reinstates individual predisposition in claiming that he himself caught the plague (from which he recovered) not because of his contact with plague victims but because “the malign influence of the plague atmosphere . . . was materially aided by [his own] mental agitation” (QR 27:534). As we have already seen in Southey’s articles in the Quarterly, the question of levels of susceptibility is central where contagion is concerned. Reviewers of medical, political, and literary texts alike tend to assume that certain members of the community are more


63

vulnerable—especially lower-class people and young people—while at the same time they emphasize that no one is really safe from infection: as the Edinburgh Review says, “epidemical sickness is an evil that threatens indiscriminately every class of the community” (ER 31:414–15).12 As with other articles on the controversy, the Quarterly essay by Gooch foregrounds the difficulty of defining terms and adds to, rather than dispels, the lack of clear-cut distinctions between the various positions. Gooch himself uses the terms contagion and infection “antithetically,” as he puts it, but then claims that the former “implies” the latter (QR 27:527).13 The varied semimetaphorical vocabulary that this writer uses to allude to the communication of disease also confuses the distinctions that he so carefully tries to set up. He refers to the “seeds of the distemper” being “made to germinate” (QR 27:531 n), a “taint from [a] specific virus” (QR 27:536), “atmospheric malignity” (QR 27:543), “impregnation by infectious miasmata” (QR 27:552), and “the malign agency of contagious poisons” (QR 27:553). All these word choices blur the difference between person-to-person contamination and a more depersonalized propagation of disease.14 The term taint, for example, suggests both traceable origins and the uncontrollable spread of disease by noxious vapors that cannot be contained. By the same token, the idea of poisoning may be a way of containing or circumscribing the unpredictability built into an environmentbased theory of epidemic disease, but it can easily slide into the perhaps more threatening notion of mass poisoning: it suggests a definite single source but also imagines a means for one person to reach many and thus mediates between individual and multiple agency.15 As if to dramatize the slipperiness of the issue, the Quarterly Review shifted its ground to take a more contagionist stance in a later article—also by Gooch—of 1825.16 Attacking anticontagionists, Gooch demanded, “Is a man able to plant himself in the midst of a sick district, draw round him a magic wand, and say to the noxious atmosphere, so far shalt thou come, and no farther? Moses’s out-stretched hand had not more power over the waters of the Red Sea, than is here attributed to human volition over a contaminated atmosphere” (QR 33:246). Yet Gooch also invokes both human agency and complete independence from one-on-one contact by imagining the plague at Malta originating in “the unfolding of the [smuggled] cloth, and the escape of the contagious vapour” (QR 33:231). Human hands are needed to unfold the cloth (and smuggle it in the first place), but a “contagious vapour” is presumably uncontainable. This article leans more

64


to contagionism than the earlier article in the Quarterly, ostensibly in response to evidence presented at the 1824 government hearings but also apparently in a partisan reaction to the liberal Westminster Review, which had defended the opinions of the anticontagionist Maclean in two articles of 1825. The Westminster ’s articles, like the Quarterly’s, insist on distinctions only to confuse them with their choice of terminology. In his first article, the reviewer, Thomas Southwood Smith, claims that “In the whole range of politics, nay, even in that of theology itself, there is no subject on which such vague notions have prevailed; none respecting which men’s minds have been so completely and so generally mystified, as that of contagion” (WR 3:135).17 His article sets out to distinguish between contagious and epidemic diseases, claiming that “The cause of a contagious disease is a specific animal poison” (WR 3:134–35) that is transmitted “from person to person” (WR 3:135), whereas “the cause of an epidemic disease is, or rather is supposed to be, a certain condition of the air” (WR 3:135). In the course of his attempt to demystify the topic of contagion he rejects as “truly unphilosophical” a distinction between diseases communicated by “palpable matter” and those communicated by “invisible effluvia” (WR 3:135). He also asserts that “no disease which is not contagious at its commencement can become contagious in its progress” (WR 3:140), a statement that begs the question of how a “virus” not only “retains its energy” (as he puts it) but also eventually loses it (WR 3:140). Smith claims that the “laws” (WR 3:139) of the two types of disease—contagious and epidemic—are diametrically opposed. According to him, contagious and epidemic diseases have been “confounded” (WR 3:146) because of a failure to distinguish between “an epidemic constitution of the air, and a corruption of it” (WR 3:148–49). Smith’s term “corruption” seems problematic because of its political connotations: the word was of course most often used by radicals to describe the establishment status quo, but it was also turned back upon them by Whig and Tory writers and lined up with any number of nebulous disease-related terms such as plagues, blights, poisons, decay, defilement, filth, tinctures, taints, exhalations, and putrefaction.18 Smith’s second Westminster article objects to the misleading figurative language used by contagionists,19 but in proposing a new term, “CONTAMINATIVE” (WR 3:521), as a halfway point (not exactly a middle ground) between contagious and epidemic, it seems to undercut its own insistently anticontagionist stance: “An epidemic disease depends


65

upon a morbid state of the air, or upon some other cause not ascertained; it cannot, however often it be affirmed, become contagious in its progress, because every disease that is contagious must depend upon a specific poison; but it may become contaminative; that is, in its progress it may so contaminate the air of the apartment in which the patient is confined as to produce fever in those who breathe it” (WR 3:521). Such an argument seems to reinstate one-on-one contagion even in dismissing it, as Blackwood’s Magazine implied by pointing out that the “practical question” is whether the disease is “communicable” (BM 19:131).20 As if to confirm the Quarterly’s complaint that the debate is “marked by extremes of . . . intolerant dogmatism” (QR 27:526), the Westminster follows Maclean in calling contagion a “phantom” (WR 3:529).21 We will see that various features of the articles on the contagionist controversy are anticipated or replicated by both Queen Mab and its reviewers in ways that exemplify the antagonism between early-nineteenthcentury radical texts and their readers. These features include the confusion of symptoms with origins; the reification of contagion as a literal substance that can exist independently of human beings, coexisting with appeals to models of invisible and quasi-magical contamination; ambiguity concerning how contagion is transmitted and who is vulnerable; uncertainty over the question of whether the dread of contagion is itself dangerous; and potentially misleading analogies between contagion, poisons, staining, and pollution. The imprecise vocabulary that links so-called moral and physical contagion—and that, as we have just seen, is not restricted to literary texts and reviews—encompasses putrefaction, decay, impregnation, taints and tinctures, noxious gases, and germination.22 The use of such language in Queen Mab, other reformist texts, and early-nineteenth-century reviews generally tends to be overlooked by critics, perhaps because it is so ubiquitous as to seem transparent.23 References to poison, stains, venom, germs, corruption, pestilence, cankers, blights, and pollution pervade Queen Mab and infect (so to speak) its contemporary reception. My argument in this chapter ultimately connects this equivocal language of contagion to another, often overlooked, stylistic feature of both Queen Mab and its hostile reviews—the use of personifications. Queen Mab exploits personified abstractions—at once a hackneyed literary device (at least according to Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads) and a staple ingredient of radical rhetoric—to image both vice and virtue.24 The poem denounces chastity, marriage, wealth, morals, faith, war, custom, religion, commerce, slavery,

66


falsehood, sensualism, and selfishness. Opposed to this catalog of horrors is an assortment of equally abstract nouns with positive connotations: virtue, nature, wisdom, benevolence, truth, reason, bliss, peace, happiness, harmony, humility, sympathy, loveliness, equality, freedom, and joy. Some of these abstract nouns (both vicious and virtuous) are personified, with varying degrees of detail and vitality. At the same time, in their personal attacks conservative reviewers of Queen Mab turn Shelley himself into a personification of evil. In connecting contagion and personification in Queen Mab, on the simplest level one could argue that although the personifications of virtue are figured in terms of health while those of vice are figured in terms of disease, the latter images proliferate as if at the expense of the former: the poem’s utopianism therefore remains subordinated to its denunciatory mode.25 Meanwhile, and also on the simplest level, the contagion imagery and personal attacks on Shelley in unfavorable reviews perform the dual function of publicizing the poem and selling more reviews. My argument however will go further in suggesting that while the ambiguous language of contagion in both the poem and reviews confirms their mutual paranoia, the more developed examples of personification (including the demonized Shelley himself ) offer a momentary glimpse of a nonparanoid standpoint—an alternative to the equation of conspiracy and contagion—only to retreat finally from making any movement beyond the constraining dynamics of the Satanic scenario. A quick look at some biographical materials will provide an initial explanatory context for my analysis of the interplay between Queen Mab and its reception, which will then proceed chronologically. In my discussion at the end of the previous chapter we saw that Shelley’s 1819 response to the personal attacks on him in the Quarterly Review showed a recognition (though not necessarily his conscious awareness) of both the power and the limitations of Satanic defiance. As I will argue in Chapter 3, Shelley continues to exploit an oppositional and antagonistic stance even in Prometheus Unbound, the poem that dramatizes the ineffectuality of such a stance. However, Shelley’s early letters and pamphlets show that at the period when he wrote Queen Mab, he tends to embrace a Satanic position without seeking any vantage point outside the Satanic scenario. In 1811 he proposed to Leigh Hunt “a scheme of mutual safety and mutual indemnification for men of public spirit and principle, which if carried into effect would evidently be productive of incalculable advantages”: the formation of “a methodical society which


67

should be organized so as to resist the coalition of the enemies of liberty.” Shelley’s language is ponderous and vague, but the sort of society that he has in mind is indicated by his casual reference to “the very great influence, which some years since was gained by Illuminism” (L, 1:54). Still an undergraduate at Oxford, Shelley had been reading that classic work of conspiracy theory, the Abbé Barruel’s Memoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme (1797–1798). According to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Shelley had swallowed “with eager credulity the fictions and exaggerations of that readily believing, or readily inventing author.”26 While he may or may not have accepted Barruel’s outrageous claims, in his letter to Hunt, Shelley is obviously reacting perversely to the book by identifying with the bad guys: the Illuminati were a secret society that Barruel saw as part of a vast conspiratorial network plotting to destroy civilization.27 At this point in his career Shelley accepts Barruel’s contention that a few individuals can work together in league to bring about large-scale revolution, but from his politically radical perspective he naturally sees this as a cause for celebration rather than dismay. Shelley’s correspondence with William Godwin in 1812—the year before Shelley wrote Queen Mab—also suggests that in addition to explicitly advocating conspiracy, at this period in his life Shelley automatically conflates conspiratorial and contagious models of textual efficacy. My brief examination of the correspondence between Shelley and Godwin will suggest, like my discussion in Chapter 1 of Shelley’s later correspondence with Robert Southey, that the assumptions and rhetorical moves of the paranoid style are not confined to the public discourse of reviews. Shelley had just published two political prose pamphlets in Dublin, An Address to the Irish People (1812) and Proposals for an Association of . . . Philanthropists (1812).28 The very title of the latter text flies in the face of Godwin’s insistence in Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) that association is “an instrument of a very dangerous nature” (PJ, 1:212) because of the way in which “the sympathy of opinion catches from man to man” (PJ, 1:208).29 Godwin recommends instead fireside discussions.30 Moreover, although in Political Justice Godwin had written, “Books have by their very nature but a limited operation . . . their efficacy ought not to engross our confidence” (PJ, 1:213), by 1812 his fear of associations had become reinforced by a new belief in the power of printed texts. Reacting to an advertisement for the Proposals for an Association, Godwin wrote, “Shelley, you are preparing a scene of blood!” (L, 1:270). Godwin is appalled to find that his supposed

68


disciple has misread Political Justice so drastically. In his letter he points out the “inconsistencies” in Shelley’s position (L, 1:269), meaning that it is impossible to advocate associations without risking violence. Godwin had already warned Shelley, “I never was at a public political dinner . . . that I did not see how . . . the flame caught from man to man, how fast the dictates of sober reason were obliterated by the gusts of passion” (L, 1:261). The image of spreading flames suggests that enthusiasm for reform inevitably gets out of control. Godwin had also claimed that Shelley’s Association pamphlet “has no very remote tendency to light again the flames of rebellion and war” (L, 1:261). Godwin now refers to the “electric fluid” (L, 1:269) that shoots through a group of assembled men, stimulating them to action. He implies that associations will be formed as a direct cause of Shelley’s pamphlet and that dire consequences will automatically follow: the “people of Ireland . . . will rise up like Cadmus’s seed of dragon’s teeth” (L, 1:269)—an image that suggests an unmediated relationship between the publication of a text and the automatic appearance of a “scene of blood.”31 Godwin is responding to the Proposals for an Association rather than the Address to the Irish People, which he had read earlier,32 even though Shelley had told him that the language of the Address had been “wilfully vulgarized” (L, 1:258) for the benefit of Irish peasants, whereas the Proposals was intended for a “different class” of more educated readers (L, 1:259). But Godwin ignores the text’s targeting of a particular audience: his images of flames, electricity, and the sowing of seeds all elide the exact connection between acts of communication and acts of violence. Godwin implies that, once published, Shelley’s pamphlet will cause harm whether or not it is actually read by the “Irish mob,” whom Shelley claims are “reduced . . . to machines” (L, 1:267). Publication is intrinsically dangerous. Godwin describes his letter to Shelley in melodramatic terms as an “effort to save yourself and the Irish people from the calamities with which I see your mode of proceeding to be fraught” (L, 1:269). Although he had not heeded Godwin’s initial warnings, Shelley responded promptly to these harsh reproofs, denying the likelihood that “a peasant would attentively read my address, and arising from the perusal become imbued in sentiments of violence & bloodshed” (L, 1:276). This statement assumes that a text actually has to be “attentively read” in order to have an effect. In the same letter Shelley told Godwin that “if [Political Justice ] had been as general as the Bible human affairs would now have exhibited a very different aspect” (L, 1:277). Both assertions assume that a


69

book needs to be widely circulated in order to have a widespread influence.33 However, Shelley next announced his intention to “make myself the cause of an effect which will take place ages after I shall have mouldered into dust” (L, 1:277). He now invokes a more intangible kind of causality, implying a model of remote and indirect communication. Such a model had been envisaged by Godwin in an 1797 reference to Milton and Shakespeare: “The poorest peasant in the remotest corner of England, is probably a different man from what he would have been but for these authors. Every man who is changed from what he was by the perusal of their works, communicates a portion of the inspiration all around him. It passes from man to man, till it influences the whole mass. I cannot tell that the wisest mandarin now living in China, is not indebted for part of his energy and sagacity to the writings of Milton and Shakespeare, even though it should happen that he never heard of their names.”34 Although superficially Shelley’s version of this theory of contagion involves self-abnegation, with his emphatic “I” Shelley continues to insist on the centrality of the writer’s own agency. (Shelley also ignores the possibility of a message being distorted in the course of transmission, a possibility that Godwin’s strictures seem to take for granted.) Shelley strikes an even more self-aggrandizing pose when he adds, “I need not observe that this resolve requires Stoicism. To return to the heartless bustle of ordinary life, to take interest in its uninteresting details—I cannot. Wholly to abstract our views from self undoubtedly requires unparalelled [sic ] disinterestedness, there is not a completer abstraction than laboring for distant ages” (L, 1:277).35 Shelley’s self-congratulatory tone belies his claim that he has already achieved this “abstraction.” Announcing, “I shall address myself no more to the illiterate” (L, 1:277), Shelley also neglects to take into account the possibility of contagious communication imagined in Godwin’s passage on Milton and Shakespeare. In his reply Godwin accused Shelley of running “from one extreme to the other” (L, 1:278), but the extremes meet. Shelley had written Queen Mab with a more select audience in mind than those he envisaged for either of his Irish pamphlets, yet his early comments on the poem’s possible impact on its prospective audience are still equivocal. In March 1813, Shelley sent the manuscript of Queen Mab to his publisher, Thomas Hookham, writing, “If you do not dread the arm of the law, or any exasperation of public opinion against yourself, I wish that it should be printed and published immediately.” He added that the notes to the poem would be “Anti Christian.—this will be unnoticed in

70


a Note,” and concluded, “I expect no success.—Let only 250 Copies be printed. A small neat Quarto, on fine paper & so as to catch the aristocrats: They will not read it, but their sons & daughters may” (L, 1:361). These statements are rather ambiguous. By saying “I expect no success” Shelley could mean either that Queen Mab will not achieve a wide circulation or (and perhaps for that reason) that it will fail to bring about the renovation of society. But the references to the “arm of the law” and the “exasperation of public opinion” suggest that he anticipates certain tangible effects: either the threat of prosecution or the notoriety of a public outcry, even though he had claimed in a previous letter to Hookham that “a Poem is safe” from “attack” by “the iron-souled Attorney general” (L, 1:324). These effects would involve instant recognition of the poem’s subversiveness, whereas the idea that the poem’s “Anti Christian” aspect would go “unnoticed in a Note” implies that would-be censors, if not the poem’s intended audience, could be deceived by the book’s innocuous appearance.36 Shelley’s choice of an fairy tale–like title for his poem corresponds with the latter implication.37 Shelley’s instructions to Hookham about the physical appearance of the book also suggest that the poem will work insidiously rather than directly, taking its innocent—or precocious—young audience by surprise. Shelley is assuming, like hostile reviewers of many Gothic novels as well as of antiestablishment poems, that young people in general are an especially susceptible audience.38 Shelley’s comments to Hookham envisage the poem affecting its audience (though without articulating how or to what purpose) even while they unsuccessfully attempt to reassure the publisher that he runs no risk. In the event Hookham—unwilling, presumably, to confront the “arm of the law”—refused to publish the poem. Shelley “privately distributed” about 70 of the 250 copies that had been printed (L, 1:368), apparently without provoking any response. Soon after the failed attempt at publishing Queen Mab, Shelley named his daughter after the poem’s heroine, Ianthe. This biographical fact might seem irrelevant in an account of the poem’s early public life, except that Queen Mab would later be used to help question the boundary between private and public. Shelley had already anonymously published one of the notes to Queen Mab as a separate essay on vegetarianism, A Vindication of Natural Diet, with the subtitle, Being one in a Series of Notes to Queen Mab, a Philosophical Poem (1813). In another pamphlet, the anonymous A Refutation of Deism (1814), he also reused material from the notes to the poem. Neither was reviewed, but the latter was republished in 1815


71

in a mysterious short-lived periodical, the Theological Inquirer. In July 1814, Shelley sent a copy of Queen Mab to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin to let her know that he had “not forgotten” her, two weeks before their elopement.39 Under the dedication to his wife, Harriet, Shelley wrote “Count Slobendorf was about to marry a woman who, attracted solely by his fortune, proved her selfishness by deserting him in prison”—a melodramatic piece of self-allegorization that Newman Ivey White calls a “cryptic indictment of Harriet.” It is also an ironic comment on the dedication, which opposes the “love” of Harriet (“my purer mind”) to the “poisonous arrow” of the world’s scorn, setting up the poem’s fundamental distinction, which as already mentioned is between virtue, associated with health and purity, and the evils of the world, routinely described in terms of poison, stains, and contagion (ll. 1–9). Shelley’s changed attitude to Harriet suggests the vulnerability of this fundamental distinction even while that changed attitude ironically confirms the statement in Queen Mab’s note attacking marriage that “to promise for ever to love the same woman, is . . . absurd” (147). Harriet Shelley’s later death by suicide would be seized on by hostile reviewers as one means among many of discrediting the author of Queen Mab. Also in July 1814, according to a story that Shelley allegedly told to Thomas Medwin, Queen Mab earned Shelley an improbable follower. Medwin claimed that the “night before” Shelley’s elopement with his future wife, Mary, “a married lady, young, handsome, and of noble connections” announced her intention to “follow [Shelley] through the world” and to “attach [her] fortune” to his own.40 In Medwin’s fictionalized account, this would-be disciple told Shelley, “I have long known you in your Queen Mab . . . your virtues, removed from all selfish considerations, and a total disregard of opinion, have made you in my eyes the beau ideal of what I have long sought for in vain. I long for the realisation of my day and night dream. . . . I have renounced my husband, my name, my family and friends” (205). Although the poet politely turned down the lady’s offer, she followed him to “the Continent” and “used to watch him with her glass in his water parties on the lake” (207). Medwin further claims that Shelley and the lady met at Naples (where Shelley was living with Mary Shelley from December 1818 to February 1819). There is no evidence to confirm the existence of this woman.41 Whether or not Shelley or Medwin invented the anecdote, it tries to affirm the didactic power of Queen Mab: The story suggests that the mere act of reading the poem would make even

72


an aristocrat an instant convert to its author’s radical views. Moreover, the story implies that a true convert validates a commitment to certain political and religious principles by means of his or her private conduct rather than through public political action—conduct that involves an unorthodox personal relationship. These assumptions would eventually be turned against Shelley himself. Shelley continued to exploit Queen Mab; in 1815 he seems to have participated in the production of the Theological Inquirer, the first four numbers of which contained an enthusiastic review of the poem followed by an “Ode to the Author of ‘Queen Mab’ ” which, like the review, was signed “F.”42 A fifth number contained the address to Necessity from canto 6 of Queen Mab, under the heading “Original Poetry.” As mentioned above, this periodical reprinted Shelley’s A Refutation of Deism. It also printed a letter from “Mary Ann” commenting evasively on the Refutation.43 The Theological Inquirer thus tries to publicize Shelley’s work without actually naming him and without printing Queen Mab’s most outspoken passages.44 Such a strategy might suggest that the writers of the Theological Inquirer (including perhaps Shelley himself ) are working self-consciously within the limitations of the Satanic scenario, taking care not to antagonize their establishment opponents because of the real possibility of a prosecution for blasphemous libel from the authorities. But that self-consciousness does not prevent them from duplicating Queen Mab’s own defiant, Satanic, and impotent stance. In doing so, the Theological Inquirer ’s appreciative review virtually set the terms for the contemporary reformist response to the poem. In this section of my argument I will be making two basic claims about F’s presentation of the poem: First, he reproduces Queen Mab’s contradictory treatment of the relationship between conspiracy theory and the poem’s two versions of nonconspiratorial agency (Necessity and contagion), collapsing them back into individual agency. Second, in doing so he domesticates the poem’s dramatization of social and historical change, mainly because—more so than some later reviews—his account of the poem elides the potential discrepancy between the poem’s conflation of conspiracy and Necessity and its conflation of conspiracy and contagion. F’s version of paranoid rhetoric is simpler than that of Queen Mab itself and some of its other reviewers who draw more attention to how the poem’s use of contagion imagery and personifications complicates the assumptions that the poem makes about the way in which it will change the world.


73

Insofar as F takes a stance on contagion, it is an ultra- or hypercontagionist one that sees contamination in terms of poison—something tangible that works one-on-one (a stance that is highly consistent with his conspiratorial bias). We saw that according to the articles on the contagionist controversy, hypercontagionists insist that contagion (invisible or not) actually exists. Contagionists, taking a less firm stance, ascribe to notions of one-on-one contamination as well as to more nebulous models of disease transmission, and thus resemble more than they differ from so-called moderates, who combine contagionist with miasmatic—that is to say, anticontagionist— theories. To the extent that Queen Mab and its early readers line up with positions in the contagionist debate, we will see that later reviewers bring out more than F does the poem’s mingling of images of individual poisoning, mass poisoning, and atmospheric contamination. In the meantime, I will linger over this long review by F, as its extensive quotations from the poem will enable me to establish a basic reading of the collaborative dialogue between Queen Mab and its initial reception, a reading that, as I will go on to show, can then be extended and modified by an analysis of the subsequent publication history of the poem during Shelley’s lifetime. In line with my reception-oriented approach, my interpretation will be based on those passages from the poem that are actually quoted or referred to by the reviewers. On one level the Theological Inquirer ’s long review of Queen Mab engages in domestication as a calculated strategy. As if to titillate his reader’s interest, despite making repeated references to the radicalism of the poem (which he calls “bold to the highest pitch of daring” [RR,C, 850]), F aims to arouse curiosity about the poem while protecting the identity of its author; he even disingenuously adds, “The copious and elegant notes to the poem, it is not within my design to call your attention to” (RR,C, 860). But these gestures ultimately remain rather hollow; F’s self-censored account of the poem is self-serving in focusing more on censorship than on the political issues raised by the poem. He begins by relating an improbable story about “an excursion on the Continent” during which “the celebrated Kotzebue put into my hands an English poem, which he doubted if I had seen in my own country, as he considered it too bold a production to issue from the British press” (RR,C, 850). The story explicitly contrasts British repression with continental freedom, exemplified presumably by the works of the “celebrated Kotzebue.”45 The reviewer adds that “I afterwards purchased six copies of [Queen Mab] at Berlin” (RR,C, 850), but this blatantly false

74


suggestion that the poem is freely available abroad only serves to underscore the story’s inauthenticity. F regrets that he is “under the necessity of omitting some of [the poem’s] greatest beauties” due to the “shackled” state of “our press” (RR,C, 850). However, if the poem is impossible to get hold of in England, as he claims, the apparent object of generating more interest in the poem is self-defeating. The writer mainly seems to be using the poem to reiterate the point that “in this country, . . . the freedom of the press is little more than an empty name” (RR,C, 858), as if promoting that freedom is an end in itself.46 That this is the case is confirmed by his concluding remark that “surely my selections must interest the soul of fancy, the heart of feeling, to such a degree, that the energies of resolution will be impelled with increased force to the accomplishment of that great object the complete freedom of the press in matters of public opinion” (RR,C, 860). Unlike the writer of Queen Mab, the reviewer has a specific agenda in mind, but it is one that might leave untouched the various other social and political abuses that the poem attempts to expose. A self-conscious impulse to domesticate can also be seen in the way in which F divides the “author’s ability as a poet” from his role as a “philosopher” (RR,C, 858) in order to reemphasize that his review must for safety’s sake dwell on Queen Mab’s poetry rather than its politics because of the latter’s “boldness” (RR,C, 858). Twentieth-century readers might see this distinction as escapist because it opens up a supposedly nonpolitical aesthetic space; however, when Shelley’s later poetry and its readers open up such a space, in the context of paranoid print warfare this is not an escapist gesture but a liberating one. In practice F does not invoke a separate aesthetic space because his conception of “beauties” (RR,C, 850)—like that of many of Shelley’s contemporary reviewers—seems to be influenced by political partisanship.47 In fact, whether friendly or hostile, almost all of the later reviews of Queen Mab in 1821 waxed enthusiastic about the beauty of Shelley’s poetic language. A reviewer in the Aurora Borealis wrote, “The Poem is written in Lyrical blank verse and contains passages, which for beauty, sublimity, imagination and poetic ardour, are not surpassed by any poet of past or present times.”48 This writer claims to speak of Shelley “only as a poet,” though the echoes in his article of the much longer 1815 review in the Theological Inquirer suggest that political affiliation underlies his ostensibly aestheticizing claims. But reviewers antagonistic to Shelley’s political and religious views also readily admired what the Literary Chronicle referred to as the “many beautiful passages” (H, 62) of Queen Mab. Does


75

that mean that they are all participating in a shift to nonpartisan aesthetic appreciation? More likely, hostile reviewers admired the language of Queen Mab because to see Shelley as capable of producing “poetical beauties” (H, 58) makes him a more threatening opponent (conforming to the Satanic stereotype of one who is prostituting his God-given talents). That this is the case is suggested by a statement in the review from the Tory Literary Gazette, which claims that passages of poetic merit will only be quoted to show that “however gifted with talents, he has only heaped coals of fire upon his head by their perversion, and is a writer to be shunned, loathed, and execrated by every virtuous mind, as dangerous to the ignorant and weak, hateful to the lovers of social felicity, and an enemy to all that is valuable in life, or hopeful in eternity” (RR,C, 528).49 Moreover, the reviewers’ virtually unanimous enthusiasm for Queen Mab may merely reflect the conservatism of the reviewers’ aesthetic judgments, given that the language of Queen Mab is less innovative than that of Shelley’s later poems. The Literary Gazette commented, “The rythm [sic ] is of that sort which Mr. Southey employed so forcibly in his Thalaba, and other poems; and it is no mean praise to observe, that in his use of it, Mr. Shelley is not inferior to his distinguished predecessor” (RR,C, 527). The same reviewer went on to claim that “The first Canto opens with great beauty, in the same way as Thalaba” (RR,C, 527): How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleep! (1.1–2)

These statements imply that if early-nineteenth-century readers admired Queen Mab, it was because the poem reminded them of their favorite romances by Southey, especially Thalaba the Destroyer (1801).50 The only hostile remark about the language of Queen Mab, in the Monthly Magazine, suggests the same thing: “The text of the work is in measured lines, of unequal length, which being divided into parcels, by means of Roman numerals, have the appearance of so many odes, but without rhyme. It is in the Thalaba style, which has been so bepraised by the poetasters of the present day” (RR,C, 668). (This writer’s impression of Queen Mab as a series of odes is suggestive; I will return to this aspect of the poem.)51 Although none of the reviewers comment on the genre of Queen Mab, their admiration presumably also responds to Shelley’s reworking

76


of the allegorical dream vision.52 By contrast, the Theological Inquirer ’s reviewer, F—possibly due to lack of interest in literary sources—does not concern himself explicitly with stylistic and generic innovations or the lack thereof; in line with standard reviewing conventions of the day he provides a summary of the poem interpolated with substantial quotations and minimal comment. In the course of his introduction F claims that “The doctrine of NECESSITY, abstruse and dark as the subject is generally believed, forms a leading consideration in this poem, and is treated with a precision of demonstration, and illumined with a radiance of genius, far beyond expectation itself ” (RR,C, 850). Yet, rather than proving Shelley’s “precision of demonstration,” F’s quotations from Queen Mab draw attention to the way in which the poem rewrites Godwin’s Political Justice in terms of conspiracy theory, collapsing the impersonal force of Necessity into a Satanic and individualistic conception of human agency, epitomized by the “Kings, priests, and statesmen” (4.104) who are blamed for the corrupt state of society according to the standard reformist line.53 The wording of the address to Necessity at the end of canto 6—which F quotes separately as if it needs no comment or perhaps because the heading, “Original Poetry,” allows him to print the passage with impunity— undercuts the poem’s attempt to set Necessity apart as an amoral, impersonal force. Necessity is the “SOUL OF THE UNIVERSE!” (6.190), anthropomorphized as the “mother of the world” (6.197) and a “spirit” (6.177) pervading the universe.54 As many critics have since pointed out, although Necessity is presented as an alternative to a tyrannical God it remains simply that—an alternative or a substitute, another object of worship with its own “shrine” (6.226).55 As we will see, other personifications in Queen Mab problematize the poem’s treatment of social and historical change, but Necessity is merely a new authority figure exerting total control over its “passive instruments” (6.215). A human projection, the agency of Necessity is that of a “machine” (6.164), which, once set in motion, is an unstoppable force—like the inevitable chain reaction by which individuals persuade their fellow-conspirators to act. Hence the poem’s failure to specify the connection between the efforts of a virtuous elite and the inevitable social transformation that it imagines taking place. F implicitly sanctions this incoherence by enthusiastically quoting passages such as the following, part of Mab’s initial address to Ianthe:


77

Soul of Iänthe! thou, Judged alone worthy of the envied boon, That waits the good and the sincere; that waits Those who have struggled, and with resolute will Vanquished earth’s pride and meanness, burst the chains, The icy chains of custom, and have shone The day-stars of their age;—Soul of Iänthe! Awake! arise! (1.122–29)

The protagonist granted a vision of history in a reformist work is conventionally selected for his or her eminence in virtue.56 Shelley suggests here that Ianthe is a member of a tiny elite of the “good and the sincere,” but “alone worthy” implies that she constitutes its only member—or perhaps the only one virtuous enough to be rewarded by the “envied boon.” Mab equivocates here and elsewhere over how the promised utopia will come about: will it be as a result of the struggling and vanquishing by the “good and the sincere,” or will it occur independently of these activities? It is not clear how or whether Ianthe herself has “burst” the “icy chains of custom.” It is also not clear whether “boon” refers merely to the vision of the future or to the utopian future itself. Untroubled by these ambiguities, the reviewer apparently identifies with the reasoning that sees a small number of individuals as responsible for major historical events—an inverted version of the conservative paranoid rhetorician’s “leap in imagination” from imagining the subversive activity of a single reformer or group of conspirators to envisaging subsequent social and political anarchy. He also readily assents to the equation between virtuous people and the fallen angels in Milton’s hell; the phrase “Awake! arise!” echoes Satan’s shout to his companions on the burning lake: “Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n” (PL, 1.330). The phrase “resolute will” in the passage quoted above also evokes Satanic defiance.57 F also sanctions Satanic defiance by quoting, in the final instalment of his review, Shelley’s initial description of Ahasuerus, a dauntless Satanic figure of “inexpressible woe” (7.80) and “unalterable will” (7.258) who is “inessential” (7.71), like Milton’s Death. F explains, This is that suppositious character, who, for insulting Christ on his way to the place of execution, is said to be condemned to a restless existence on earth till the day of judgment; the vengeful acrimony of his disposition, naturally produced by this severe decree, pervades the

78


whole of his long harangue to the fairy and the spirit, so as to render it imprudent to submit it here. (RR,C, 858)

F’s comment reproduces the contradictoriness of Shelley’s conception of the so-called Wandering Jew. F calls him a “suppositious character” but the explanation that his “vengeful acrimony” was “naturally produced” (RR,C, 858) by his punishment seems to ascribe to him an independent existence. That is to say, F accepts the fictionality of Ahasuerus, insisted upon by Shelley in lines quoted by F; Ahasuerus is: The matter of which dreams are made Not more endowed with actual life Than this phantasmal portraiture Of wandering human thought. (7.272–75)

Reiman and Powers gloss these lines: “Ahasuerus has reality only as an aberrant human idea” (SPP, 58)—a notion that F hints at with his adjective “suppositious.” Yet Shelley’s poem tries to have it both ways: Ahasuerus is seen as an oppressive delusion, yet the reader is also invited to join him in cursing the God who inflicted such an unreasonable punishment upon him—even though it logically follows that God too is nothing more than an aberrant idea. In a similar manner, one of the notes to Queen Mab tries to have it both ways: “All that miserable tale of the Devil, and Eve, and an Intercessor, with the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews, is irreconcileable with the knowledge of the stars. The works of his fingers have borne witness against him” (126–27). The last line ascribes creative power to God even while the existence of God is being denied: Shelley wants to annihilate God but also blame him for everything wrong—an extremely Satanic posture. The discrepancies suggest that Shelley is not yet recognizing the power of fictions. A comment by F on the denunciatory middle cantos of the poem (which he discusses in less detail so as not to incriminate himself ) reproduces the poem’s inability to theorize its own effect upon its audience. He quotes part of the attack on the past from Queen Mab, presenting it as evidence that, whether it records the “mad blow of the conqueror’s ambition” or the decay caused by “the consumptive influence of moral corruption . . . yet is the glow of patriotism ultimately benefited, and every virtue strengthened and improved” (RR,C, 853). This assertion sounds like wishful thinking. F does


79

not explain how denunciation brings about the improvement of virtue, just as the conservative users of the paranoid style neglect to spell out how the denunciation in radical texts results inevitably in subversion. Nor does he question the connection between these two accounts of how historical change takes place: through the agency of one man (“the conqueror”) or generalized “corruption.” Presumably one might complicate the other, but F shows his willingness to be content with a mere reversal of existing power relations when he quotes, Falsehood’s trade Shall be as hateful and unprofitable As that of truth is now! (3.136–38)

He implies that a direct switch of one for the other is all that is needed. He also approvingly quotes the succeeding passage emphasizing the idea of an abrupt switch from tyranny to its absence: “To-morrow comes!” (3.146). This phrase suggests that the mere passage of time will bring about what F contradictorily calls “alas! unhoped-for changes” (RR,C, 860). F repeats that “the author is a powerful advocate of NECESSITY” (RR,C, 855) but the “extract” (RR,C, 855) that he quotes in support of this claim, the address to a quasi-divine “Spirit of Nature!” (3.214) from the end of canto 3, registers the elision of human agency in bringing about these “unhopedfor changes” even while it gives the Spirit a “will” (3.234). The one denunciatory passage that F does feel able to risk singling out, the attack on “Commerce,” confirms his at once mechanistic and individualist reading of the poem. Negative personifications of course embody the paranoid impulse to pin the blame for social ills on a single individual. F shares such an impulse when he introduces the attack on commerce by calling it “the demon of trade; that enemy of virtue, that monster whose breath chills the ardor of sensibility” (RR,C, 857).58 The passage that he quotes shows the same eagerness to pinpoint responsibility by describing the personified commerce as having actively “set the mark of selfishness, / The signet of its all-enslaving power, / Upon a shining ore, and called it gold” (5.53–55). The attack on commerce also personifies “Gold” as “a living god [that] rules in scorn / All earthly things but virtue” (5.62–63). At the same time, however, the passage hints at the possibility of an alternative form of agency with its routine yet also suggestive use

80


of contagion imagery. Commerce is imagined as spreading a “poisonbreathing shade” (5.44) and described as a “blighting bane” (5.193). If poison is taken to work one-on-one, these images confirm rather than refine the attempt to identify single causes, but they could also be read as suggesting a more threateningly nebulous conception of causation. The idea of poisoning as diffusive and potentially uncontainable rather than working one-on-one seems to be set aside however by the passage’s nonmetaphorical references to “disease” and “pestilence.” Not only are victims of trade “poisoned body [as well as] soul” (5.51) in that they die prematurely from literally eating too much—“full-fed disease” (5.49)— but they are seen as succumbing to “pestilence” (5.194) in the sense of sexually transmitted diseases resulting from the fact that “Ev’n love is sold” (5.189). In literalizing contagion, the passage would seem to take a straightforwardly hypercontagionist position, unlike parts of the poem that pull together different models of disease transmission and thus destablilze individual agency. As I have shown, F’s implicit reading of Queen Mab duplicates its overt contradictions without drawing much attention to the effects of its two chief rhetorical devices, contagion imagery and personification. I suggested earlier that although the poem holds together inconsistent models of vice— both individualized and deindividualized—it does not imagine any means of mediating between personal and impersonal models of virtue. This limitation can be seen in one of the passages that F cites from the last canto of the poem, which starts off with some standard negative personifications before proclaiming the triumph of virtue: First, Crime triumphant o’er all hope careered, Unblushing, undisguising, bold and strong; Whilst Falsehood, tricked in virtue’s attributes, Long sanctified all deeds of vice and woe, Till done by her own venomous sting to death, She left the moral world without a law, No longer fettering passion’s fearless wing, Nor searing reason with the brand of God. Then steadily the happy ferment worked; Reason was free; and wild though passion went Through tangled glens and wood-embosomed meads, Gathering a garland of the strangest flowers, Yet like the bee returning to her queen,


81

She bound the sweetest on her sister’s brow, Who, meek and sober, kissed the sportive child, No longer trembling at the broken rod. (9.41–56)

“Falsehood” (organized religion) dying through its own “venomous sting” presents the reader with an image of automatic self-destruction—again, contagion is domesticated as a straightforward poison. A less straightforward substitute for or analogue of contagion, however, is invoked in the line, “Then steadily the happy ferment worked.” A “ferment,” the origins and processes of which are occluded, is a more depersonalized image. In line with the poem’s inability to explain progress, the ferment simply happens: “Then.” Yet the personified reason and passion, the freeing of which accompanies the “happy ferment,” may constitute the poem’s most lively usage of benign personifications. With these images the poem suddenly and temporarily shifts into a different register, at odds with the tired counters of “Crime” and “Falsehood.” The metaphor of passion as a “sportive child” collecting the “strangest flowers” while restraining herself “like [a] bee” is a more vital personification than those discussed so far. Steven Knapp has claimed that personifications dissolve “the boundaries between literal and figurative agency.”59 While Knapp is interested in how such images can contaminate (as it were) other figurative agents with fictionality, his distinction between literal and figurative can presumably line up with the tension between individual persons and abstract agency that exists in any personification. Here the unexpected anthropomorphization of reason and passion serves to mingle personal and impersonal agency in a way that complicates the poem’s general tendency to take larger, more depersonalized ways of imagining change and flatten them into conspiracy. Where the poem continues to show its limitations, however, is in remaining unable to imagine a benign counterpart to contagion in the sense of something that would pull together individual and deindividualized modes of change. If “happy ferment” is too vague, the “sportive child” is too concrete, leaving the passage juxtaposing two modes instead of reconciling them. I will analyze more sustained examples of the poem’s personified abstractions— vices not virtues—when I discuss the 1821 reception of Queen Mab. Meanwhile, although some of F’s quotations cloud the explicit claims he makes for the poem, F repeats his ready conflation of potentially conflicting models of change in his “Ode to the Author of ‘Queen Mab,’ ” which

82


appeared further on in the July number of the Theological Inquirer (H, 339–40). The poem reiterates the reviewer’s reference to a “shackled press” (l. 19) but claims “Yet is that time in progress when thy theme / Shall universal spread as day’s bright beam” (ll. 21–22). The “Ode” goes on to suggest a direct causal connection between the availability of the poem and widespread transformation: “Then shall the bloody brand of ire / Quenched in love and peace expire” (ll. 23–24). The intermingling of abstract and more concrete metaphoric language avoids specifying how exactly “ire” will be quenched by “love,” though the following lines suggest revolutionary violence: “Their mitres, cowls, and crosiered staves / Be torn from man-deluding knaves” (ll. 25–26). The next two lines, however, hint instead at self-destruction: “The gorgeous canopies of tyrant-might / Sink and o’erwhelm him [sic ] in eternal night” (ll. 27–28). By contrast, the final stanza of the poem resembles Queen Mab’s account of Ahasuerus in displaying the impulse to blame God: And oft I cursed “th’almighty fiend,” Who from his empyrean lean’d And poured the venom’d vial of strife To damp the hope of human life. (ll. 37–40)

F sees evil as produced by a wicked God, a mirror-image of the devil; his metaphor, “the venom’d vial,” implies that a single anthropomorphic being is capable of poisoning the whole of humanity. The image takes agency away from human life even while making God into a demonic individual with a calculated destructive power. The notion of a “venom’d vial” encapsulates F’s tendency to equate individual and multiple agency (one source of poison contaminates the whole mass by the same mechanism with which it contaminates an individual victim). Later reviewers of the poem will draw attention to passages that problematize this account of the origin of evil. For Queen Mab and its early readers, however, virtue merely remains polarized into the alternatives of a “happy ferment” and a “sportive child.” Despite its length, the review in the Theological Inquirer would appear to have provided very little publicity for Queen Mab, although as already mentioned this review influenced the later reformist reception of the poem (a fact that may indicate efficient channels of communication within a small circle of radical author-publishers rather than wide availability).60


83

Meanwhile, Queen Mab was still only in private circulation. In 1816 Shelley published a revised version of the first two cantos of the poem. This fragment, entitled “The Daemon of the World,” appeared in Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude: and Other Poems, as did a section of the attack on religion from canto 6 of Queen Mab, reworked as a separate short poem, “Superstition.”61 None of the 1816 reviews of Alastor mentioned “The Daemon,” but John Gibson Lockhart, when reviewing Alastor belatedly in Blackwood’s Magazine in November 1819, quoted the opening forty-seven lines of “The Daemon” and called them “exceedingly beautiful,” despite finding the poem “strange and unintelligible” (RR,C, 122)—perhaps one more piece of evidence for a shift to nonpartisan aesthetic appreciation by Blackwood’s that I have already identified. Early in 1817, Queen Mab featured in Shelley’s Chancery trial for the custody of his children by his first wife, Harriet, who had committed suicide two years after Shelley had left her to live with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. Queen Mab was exploited indirectly in the court proceedings by Harriet’s father John Westbrook and her sister Eliza to make the point that a connection could be drawn between Shelley’s religious opinions as expressed in Queen Mab, his treatment of Harriet, and his adulterous relationship with Mary Godwin; this connection in turn was held to validate the claim that he was unfit to bring up children.62 The Westbrooks’ bill states that “the said Percy Bysshe Shelley avows himself to be an Atheist and that since his said Marriage he has written and 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.”63 Insofar as Queen Mab was invoked by Harriet’s family, that is to say, it was used, as in the Theological Inquirer review, to support the notion that one individual can readily influence another; the question of the extent to which a printed text could influence more widely was not addressed in the Westbrooks’ petition because the case was not a prosecution for blasphemous and seditious libel. Moreover, contrary to the claim that it had been “published,” Queen Mab was not yet freely available. The leading prosecution lawyer did however bring up the larger issue of the “interests of society,” according to the Examiner: “Sir S[amuel] Romilly moved for an order to prevent the defendant exercising any guardianship over his children, on the grounds of his Deistical principles. It appeared the defendant had some time since written a book, called Queen Mab, which openly avowed the principles

84


of Deism, and in such a case he could certainly not be considered a proper person for educating youth. The interests of society would obviously be endangered were persons of these principles permitted to instil them into their children” (Examiner, January 26, 1817, 60). In his response, Shelley’s defense lawyer did not challenge the assumptions underlying this statement. He did not object to the premise that the principles avowed so “openly” by the poem would automatically be capable of corrupting children. Nor did he object to the larger claim that the “interests of society” would “obviously” be endangered by such acts of corruption. Instead he implicitly conceded that Queen Mab could contaminate children and that, once transmitted to a few children, irreligion could spread through society as a whole, presumably undermining loyalty to the state. In Shelley’s defense he simply claimed that “as his client had written this work merely for his own amusement, without the most distant idea of his children seeing it, it was extremely hard that he should be deprived of the exercise of his parental rights, as the work was a mere effusion of imagination” (Examiner, January 26, 1817, 60). The phrase “merely for his own amusement” implies that Shelley had never intended to publish the poem, and that the poem could not do any harm without being published. A book would have to pass from the private to the public sphere before it could act as a source of contamination. But the appeal to authorial intention regarding the poem’s projected audience—Shelley had not intended his children to see Queen Mab—is beside the point because the question of the children actually reading the poem was never at issue.64 The question of the link between Shelley’s supposedly immoral behavior and his declarations of atheism in Queen Mab was soon set aside by the prosecution in favor of an alleged link between Shelley’s defiance of the marriage laws and his attack on the institution of marriage in the text and notes of Queen Mab.65 The brief for Shelley’s defense had also referred to the denunciation of marriage in the poem, pointing out that since Shelley had married twice before he was twenty-five, “It is hoped that a consideration of this marked difference between his speculative opinions and his actions, will induce the Lord Chancellor not to think very seriously of this boyish and silly, but certainly unjustifiable Publication of Queen Mab.”66 The connection between Shelley’s “opinions” and his “actions” emerges here as the key issue in the case: Shelley’s counsel seized on the discrepancy between them, but Shelley lost the case because he was perceived to exemplify the connection between principles and practice.


85

White summarizes Lord Eldon’s self-justification: “The Lord Chancellor’s judgment [against Shelley] was based not upon Shelley’s opinions either religious or moral, nor upon his entering into an irregular union with Mary Godwin, but upon the fact that in his case immoral opinions had led to conduct that the court was bound to consider immoral.”67 The implication is that neither the evidence of Shelley’s opinions nor that of his conduct would have been decisive by themselves, but that the two together prove the dangerous nature of the opinions: Shelley it would seem had been corrupted by his own beliefs.68 The later hostile reviews of Queen Mab also take Shelley’s private life as proof of the dangerous effect of his political and religious opinions, although they are more interested than the Chancery trial prosecution in the potentially widespread contaminating effect of the poem. Unlike F in the Theological Inquirer and the participants in the Chancery trial, these readers were confronted with the actual publication of Queen Mab.

II. Personifications and Personal Attacks In May 1821, William Clark, a radical publisher, brought out a pirated edition of Queen Mab, which was—in the words of Richard Carlile— “pounced upon” (RR,C, 788) by the Society for the Prevention of Vice. Although Clark voluntarily took his copies of Queen Mab off the market, he was prosecuted for blasphemous libel and subsequently found guilty, and sentenced to four months’ imprisonment. Other pirated editions soon appeared, taking advantage of the loophole in the law that, following the precedent of Southey’s Wat Tyler, allowed a book to be sold with impunity after it had been pronounced libellous, because an author was not entitled to the copyright of an illegal publication.69 Shelley’s own private reactions to the piracy were mixed, which means that critics have used them to claim on the one hand that he was secretly pleased that his most outspoken work was finally reaching an audience, or on the other hand that by 1821 he had repudiated the extreme radicalism of Queen Mab.70 Shelley also wrote a public letter concerning the piracy of Queen Mab, which appeared in the Examiner on July 15, 1821, and in the Morning Chronicle the next day. The letter first exaggerates his youthfulness when he wrote Queen Mab, and misleadingly claims that “even then [the poem] was not intended for publication” (L, 2:304). Shelley’s sardonic linkage of his own name with Southey’s in his reference to “Mr. Southey’s ‘Wat

86


Tyler’ (a poem, written, I believe, at the same age, and with the same unreflecting enthusiasm)” (L, 2:305) is a sharp jab at Southey, perhaps undercut somewhat by the fact that Southey had made the same inaccurate claim concerning a former lack of intent to publish Wat Tyler when it was pirated in 1817. Shelley’s letter shows that despite his ostensible disavowal of “opinions hostile to existing sanctions, under the form, whatever it may be, which they assume in this poem” (L, 2:305), Shelley was exploiting the circumstance of the unauthorized publication of Queen Mab to make the defiant gestures typical of a Satanic stance. The sarcastic conclusion of his letter reaffirms his radical religious and political position: “it is scarcely necessary for me to protest against this system of inculcating the truth of Christianity and the excellence of Monarchy however true or however excellent they may be, by such equivocal arguments as confiscation, and imprisonment, and invective, and slander, and the insolent violation of the most sacred ties of nature and society” (L, 2:305). Stephen Behrendt claims that this statement characterizes the “official response to the poem (and its author)” as “typifying the paranoid frenzy with which the oppressors of liberty persecute the true ‘friends of liberty,’ ” as well as a reference to the outcome of the Chancery trial.71 In this context, Shelley’s statement in the letter that “I fear [Queen Mab] is better fitted to injure than to serve the cause of freedom” (L, 2:305) deplores but also draws attention to the way in which the Tory government justified repressive legal measures by invoking the extremism of radicals—a source of Whig paranoia as we saw in my first chapter.72 The very notion that a poem has the capacity to “injure” confirms the continuity between Shelley’s rhetoric and that of the reviewers. Shelley was right to suspect that the poem would provoke further outbreaks of paranoia. The 1821 piracy attracted some of the most hostile reviews he ever received, confirming and enhancing Shelley’s public image as a fiend, though as usual the demonizing process is somewhat unstable. With the news of Shelley’s sudden death in 1822, however, which coincided with a renewed sense of Shelley as a dangerous conspirator in the guise of a collaborator upon the Liberal with Byron and Hunt, the conservative reviewers’ comments on Queen Mab take a wholly predictable turn, insisting on Shelley’s identity as a devil subject to punishment by an avenging and all-powerful God. Less predictably, the 1821–1822 reviews of Queen Mab, while exemplifying the paranoid style, collaborate with Shelley in arriving at a slightly more complex understanding of historical change than we saw


87

in the earlier reception, and even gesture briefly beyond paranoid politics. The 1821 reception of Queen Mab divides mostly along partisan lines, even though, as mentioned earlier, nearly all the reviews praise the beauty of the poem’s language. Favorable reviews appeared in John Bull’s British Journal (in a short article apparently predating the piracy), the Aurora Borealis,73 and Wooler’s British Gazette. The first two of these regurgitate parts of the 1815 review in the Theological Inquirer; all three follow F in implicitly identifying with the rebellious stance of the poem. The same stance was later adopted by Carlile, who announced in his newspaper, the Republican, that Queen Mab is “remarkably strong in its exposure and denunciation of Kingcraft and Priestcraft” (RR,C, 788).74 Two reformist journals that might have been expected to defend Shelley, the Monthly Magazine and the Literary Chronicle, published hostile notices, the latter declaring the poet “out of the pale” (RR,C, 508). By contrast, the Whig London Magazine (Gold’s) gave a mixed review, refusing to “intermeddle” with the “opinions” of the work—which it states are “palpably absurd and false” (RR,C, 639)—and restricting itself to a discussion of Shelley’s “poetical merits” (RR,C, 639).75 Meanwhile, Tory reviewers attacked Queen Mab in extravagantly hostile terms. While the Quarterly and Blackwood’s did not notice the poem, presumably agreeing that Shelley was now beyond the pale, vituperative reviews appeared in the Literary Gazette, the Beacon, and later (in a posthumous review of 1822), the Investigator. The lengthiest contemporary response to Queen Mab—not a review, but definitely part of its reception—took the form of an anonymous pamphlet, a Reply to the Anti-Matrimonial Hypothesis and Supposed Atheism of Percy Bysshe Shelley as Laid Down in Queen Mab, published in 1821 by William Clark and cited at his trial “as evidence,” according to Newman Ivey White, “that his purpose was not to advance Shelley’s ideas” (H, 62–63).76 Not surprisingly given the unusual publication history of Queen Mab, several of the reviews reflect explicitly on issues of publicity and censorship as well as their usual central preoccupation, the efficacy of texts. The Monthly Magazine commented on what it saw as the hitherto favorable reception of Shelley: Advocates, as we are, for a very extended freedom of the press, we fear commenting further on this work, lest we should, unintentionally, assist in that powerful criticism, to which, we fear, it will soon be subjected. We have observed, of late, a seeming design to lure the unwary author to his destruction. The public journals, not even

88


excepting the Quarterly Review, have lauded Mr. Shelley as a poet,— as a genius of the highest order! The other panders of corruption speak of his “powerful talents!” What can all this flattery mean, if it be not to decoy the witless bird, and to catch him in the snare? (RR,C, 668–69)77

This reviewer shows an exaggerated fear of the political manipulation of paranoia, and thus helps to perpetuate it. His first sentence implies that the act of reviewing Queen Mab might bring it to the attention of Shelley’s political opponents: “powerful criticism” presumably refers to personal attacks as if they are capable of silencing their victim. The reviewer perceives a plot in what he sees as the major Tory periodicals’ praise of Shelley (though such praise is barely discernible in the Quarterly’s attack on The Revolt of Islam, the only full-length review of Shelley published in the Quarterly at this point; by the “other panders of corruption,” the reviewer presumably means Blackwood’s Magazine). Rather than finding genuine admiration of Shelley in these journals (and I have already suggested in Chapter 1 that Blackwood’s at least does express such admiration) this review finds “a seeming design to lure the unwary author to his destruction.” The melodramatic wording of this passage is as “dark and oracular”—to repeat Lockhart’s strictures on the Quarterly Review in Blackwood’s—as the Quarterly’s insinuations concerning Shelley in its review of The Revolt of Islam. In what sense could the “public journals” damage the poet more than they already had done? This reviewer seems to give them a limitless and insidious power to discredit Shelley—though one might think he had been fully discredited already. “Flattery” for this writer cannot possibly be sincere but only a “decoy,” thus giving a paranoid interpretation of texts that, as I have argued, certainly look paranoid but that are not necessarily the product of a conscious plan by a set of devious conspirators, as the Monthly Magazine would have its readers believe. At the other end of the political spectrum, the reviewer in the Tory Beacon—an Edinburgh weekly—imagined the exploitation of paranoia recoiling upon itself according to an inevitable logic: It is to be hoped that no such person as Percy Bysshe Shelley the author, exists, and that the atrocious poetry committed in his name is but the well-intentioned device of some fiery moralist, who employs the name of Lord Byron’s friend and pupil to show, by a species of reductio ad absurdum, the infernal portal to which his Lordship’s system pushed to its limit will necessarily lead. But if such be the case, never was


89

a stronger illustration of the danger of tampering with the arms of Satan, than the publication of Queen Mab presents. By whomsoever or for whatsoever purpose written, it has been safely pirated, (for to the product of crime our laws afford no protection), and is now publishing in a cheap form by Benbow, the former partner of Cobbett, the fellow labourer of Wooller, and the colleague of Mr Hobhouse; with what designs the name and connexions of the publisher place beyond a doubt. (RR,C, 39)

The reviewer echoes the Quarterly’s claim concerning The Revolt of Islam, that Shelley “might almost be mistaken for some artful advocate of civil order and religious institutions” (RR,C, 770). The Beacon goes a step further, however, in inventing a “fiery moralist” writing under the name of “Percy Bysshe Shelley the author,” that subsidiary member of the Satanic School. Queen Mab, that is to say, may well have been written to demonstrate the extreme of moral degradation, but in spite of the writer’s worthy motives, the poem has been appropriated by a cabal of radicals for the purposes of subversion. The reference to “a cheap form” also insists on a real danger—the price of a book was an important consideration in prosecutions for blasphemous libel in this period; an inexpensive book was of course more accessible to lower-class readers, who were held to be more easily corrupted.78 The anonymous pamphlet, the Reply to . . . Queen Mab, at first sight seems to be a far more self-conscious and measured response to the poem. The Reply argues against the “Supposed Atheism of Queen Mab” (H, 80) on the grounds that Shelley’s Necessity and Spirit of Nature are described in theistic terms. It also takes issue with Shelley’s attack on marriage, on the grounds that women, who cannot look after themselves, need to be protected by men from the “contaminating lust” (H, 75) of other men. Although the former claim would seem to anticipate the readings of twentieth-century critics of Queen Mab (including my own analysis of the Theological Inquirer ’s dialogue with the poem), the anonymous author’s apparent concern is to domesticate Shelley in the course of refuting the poet’s views so as to ensure his own safety from prosecution. A related concern of his is that standard radical preoccupation, censorship, as shown by a digression in favor of the public circulation of texts on the grounds that “A work openly sold, is open to reply; and the antidote may be circulated with the poison. But where suppression is attempted, the poison circulates alone, with as much rapidity, and with tenfold effect” (H, 79). (This

90


statement sounds like a veiled threat.) Suppressed works, according to this author, pose particular dangers to youthful readers: “Young men, in particular, almost devour the contents of such works” (H, 79). (This line also sounds like a threat.) Ironically given that he later insists that “The material and the moral world are essentially different” (H, 91), with his poison imagery the writer tries to counter the usual paranoid notion of texts disseminating their ideas inexorably by means of print culture. However, his alternative vision of corrupting ideas (such as Shelley’s opinions on marriage) spreading even more powerfully through not being officially published is perhaps even more improbable. His image of manuscript extracts passing “from hand to hand, with inconceivable rapidity” (H, 79) holds on to a one-on-one model of contamination.79 Self-servingly seeking to vindicate Clark’s piracy, this extravagant claim rests on the same questionable assumptions as those of the conservative attackers of Queen Mab. In other 1821 reviews published prior to the Reply, both defenders and opponents of Shelley draw attention to passages in Queen Mab that slightly destabilize the straightforwardly paranoid scenarios conjured up by the writers for the Monthly Magazine, the Beacon, and the author of the Reply. I will look first at a passage cited approvingly by Wooler’s British Gazette. Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; The subject, not the citizen: for kings And subjects, mutual foes, for ever play A losing game into each other’s hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys. Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate’er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame, A mechanized automaton. (3.170–80)

In my earlier discussion of the contagionist controversy we saw that the contagionist position itself encompasses various conflicting opinions: contagion is real and unreal but still efficacious; it spreads by direct or indirect contact; it can be communicated from one person to another like poison or from one person to many others by analogy with mass


91

poisoning; it can be confused or combined with what is technically an opposing position, the belief that epidemic diseases are caused and spread by the atmosphere. So far we have seen that Queen Mab and its readers restrict their accounts of contagion to ones involving individual human beings or groups of individuals. At first sight the contagion imagery in this passage goes no further, until one considers the point that it is being used to make about the pervasiveness of “Power.” The dynamic described in this passage is the Satanic scenario, the participation of the oppressed in their own oppression. The statement that the “man / Of virtuous soul” stands outside this master-slave relationship explicitly identifies a position outside this mutually destructive dynamic.80 But if this man “commands not, nor obeys,” what does he do? The very act of defiance binds him negatively to the process he wishes to evade, and in that sense power “touches” him. The oppositional stance taken by a defiant band of rebels falls back into the terms of the Satanic scenario. If “Power . . . Pollutes whate’er it touches” then its influence cannot be resisted. Similarly, the evil, “obedience,” poisons “all genius”—it inevitably “makes slaves.” Here virtue and other abstractions are set against the mechanization of the “human frame,” although earlier in the poem the human body itself was described as a “machine” (1.155). The discrepancy might seem to hold open the possibility that mechanization can be avoided, but the images of “pestilence” and “Bane” work against that suggestion. The clauses, “Power . . . Pollutes” and “obedience . . . Makes slaves” may or may not be equivalent: they are parallel syntactically but the idea that “Power . . . Pollutes” may be more all-encompassing than the mechanizing effects of “obedience.” In this case the passage would seem to imagine contagion to be an alternative or supplement to the poisonous process of mechanization. On the other hand, the use of a metaphor (“Bane”) over against a simile (“like . . .”) may imply that the notion of a poison that automatically turns “men” into machines is even more fundamental than the polluting effects of power. Either way, the passage’s insistence on the interdependence of power and obedience suggests that the notion of a “man / Of virtuous soul” who is immune to defilement is merely a hypothetical possibility. There is no positive metaphorical or nonmetaphorical equivalent to oppose to the images of pestilence and pollution, and there is no escape from contagion, since it works both predictably and unpredictably, literally and figuratively. The extremely hostile 1821 review of Queen Mab in the Tory Literary Gazette, like the poem itself, displays the same empoweringly and

92


disablingly inconsistent treatment of contagion. The review also contains a violent personal attack on Shelley that is so sustained as to replicate and invert the way in which the poem’s own negative personifications complicate paranoid notions of agency. In looking in detail at this highly suggestive and entertaining review, I will first examine the anonymous reviewer’s own thematization of contagion. In analyzing his personal attack on Shelley followed by Queen Mab’s attacks on the personified Selfishness and Religion (to which the reviewer draws attention), I will be arguing that all three attacks paradoxically leave “persons” behind and thus gesture towards a space outside paranoia. I will claim that ultimately, however, for different reasons both the reviewer’s and the poem’s personifications of evil collapse back into the terms of paranoid rhetoric. The reviewer implicitly invokes the contagious power of Queen Mab in the first sentence of his article by suggesting that the boundary between text and reader may already have broken down. He stresses that he (or rather they) may be unable to adopt a sufficiently derogatory tone due to the emotional turmoil caused by the poem: “The mixture of sorrow, indignation, and loathing, with which this volume has overwhelmed us, will, we fear, deprive us of the power of expressing our sentiments upon it, in the manner best suited to the subject itself, and to the effect which we wish our criticism to have upon society” (RR,C, 527). The reviewer obviously does not doubt that the effect of a review can counteract the effect of a poem, though he leaves open the possibility of failure on his part, implying that he himself has been so affected by the poem as to be incapable of offering correct moral guidance. This move may seem to detract from his credibility, but it also seems calculated to arouse his readers’ curiosity. According to this reviewer, Queen Mab is beautiful but poisonous: “Our desire is to do justice to the writer’s genius, and upon his principles: not to deny his powers, while we deplore their perversion; and above all, when we lay before our readers the examples of his poetry, to warn them against the abominable and infamous contagion with which in the sequel he poisons these splendid effusions” (RR,C, 527). This reaction is typical of the way in which partisan attacks on Shelley admit his “genius” not in order to give him his due but to give the devil his due: that is, to make him seem more Satanic—at once all the more to blame for perverting his genius, and all the more powerful; the implication is that Queen Mab is particularly dangerous because it begins by seducing its readers with “splendid” poetry. The “abominable and infamous contagion” that the


93

reviewer will (perhaps vainly) try to protect his readers from has more than one possible referent. It may allude to the poem’s atheistic statements or to a more generalized corruptive tone pervading the middle cantos of the poem. Either way, Shelley the demonic individual is with this statement put fully though momentarily in control of the contagion: as one who “poisons,” he is the source and manipulator of the contagious matter, even though the reviewer’s first sentence has already hinted that avoiding such contagion may not be as simple as heeding a warning. At this point, although contagion is imagined as having a single source, its targets may be less specific. The reviewer’s next sentence, in which he makes a show of hesitation, confirms that he too is implicated in the spreading of contagion: “We have doubted whether we ought to notice this book at all; and if our silence could have prevented its being disseminated, no allusion to it should ever have stained the Literary Gazette” (RR,C, 527). Although the reviewer has already suggested that he can help his readers resist contagion, he implies here that the mere act of reviewing Queen Mab involves inevitable contact with pollution. The reviewer now announces his intention to lay “the bane and antidote before the public” (RR,C, 527). Again, as in the Reply to . . . Queen Mab, this image is ambiguous. Will the “bane” (the poem) and the “antidote” (the condemnatory review) cancel each other out, or is the reviewer planning to give a little poison in order to inoculate his readers against the possibility of being more severely poisoned by reading the poem? If the Literary Gazette is “stained” then the purity of the “antidote” is inevitably undermined. Already in the review we can see contagion being treated as both containable and noncontainable, extinguishable and elusive. If contagion is something that will inevitably carry over from the poem to the review, it will also automatically spread from the review to its readers. The reviewer’s tone of relish (“abominable and infamous”) betrays his desire to intrigue his readers by threatening to expose them to contagion: the notion that he himself as well as his own audience may be in danger is exploited by the reviewer to add spice to his article. Perhaps the statement that the Literary Gazette itself is “stained” is calculated to attract more readers; as I argued in Chapter 1, marketing considerations factor in to displays of paranoid rhetoric. In fulminating over the effect that he claims the pirated Queen Mab will have over its audience, this reviewer makes the standard double move of flattering his own readers by figuring them as immune to contamination and attempting to titillate them with the

94


possibility that contagion cannot be resisted. He calls on “those to whom the conservation of public morals is entrusted, to prohibit the sale of this pernicious book” (RR,C, 529), but points out, “As 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. In the present instance the author has not, we imagine, been consulted” (RR,C, 527). The reviewer insists that the dissemination of Queen Mab is inexorable: the lack of legal protection literalizes the contagious power of the poem. As mentioned earlier, the price of a book not surprisingly entered into considerations of how far its influence could extend. With the phrase “every class of the community”— clearly referring to the most lowly potential purchasers—the reviewer hints that the “moral feeling” of upper-class readers is also at stake, though the destruction of lower-class morals would be more disastrous. Like physical disease, moral contagion was often considered to be class-specific, but the reviewer (who, like the author of Queen Mab, never actually pauses to define contagion and how it works) creates the thrill of possible danger by implying either that Shelley’s poem is so outrageously evil that it can break through the barrier of refinement and education, or that contagion in this case is truly indiscriminating in its reach. His acknowledgment that the book has been published without Shelley’s permission does not prevent him from blurring the distinction between text and author, and holding Shelley fully responsible for the effects of his poem. Although the Literary Gazette reviewer’s treatment of contagion is exemplary in that his various double moves can be seen in many hostile responses to Shelley and other radical writers, the lengthy personal attack in which he next indulges is not quite so predictable. This spirited harangue on one level can be seen as complementing the contagion imagery: playing out the familiar logic of the Satanic scenario it at once gives Shelley publicity and presumably gives the readers of the Literary Gazette what they want. But at the same time, the elaborate attack (like those in the Quarterly that I analyzed in Chapter 1, though in a different way) has a quasi-literary element that warrants further scrutiny: 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,


95

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. We were almost disappointed to learn that the author was only a tall, boyish looking man, with eyes of unearthly brightness, and a countenance of the wildest cast: that he strode about with hurried and impatient gait, and that a perturbed spirit seemed to preside over all his movements. It is not then in his outward semblance but in his inner man, that the explicit demon is seen; and it is a frightful supposition, that his 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 superintendance of his infants, while they plunged an unfortunate wife and mother into ruin, prostitution, guilt, and suicide. (RR,C, 527)

The first sentence emphasizes Shelley’s “genius” only to make him more demonic, confirming that this reviewer’s later praise of the beauty and sublimity of Queen Mab is far from pure aesthetic appreciation. This remarkable passage presents one kind of personal attack (equating Shelley with a fiend) followed by another (publishing details about the poet’s private life). Not only is the connection between the two somewhat problematic, but the first, sustained attempt to present Shelley as evil displays the blurring of “literal and figurative agency” that, as mentioned earlier, Steven Knapp has identified with the literary use of personification.81 The reviewer’s train of reasoning is incoherent. He first imagines that a fiend must have been “clothed with a human body”: the poet’s “enmity against the human race” is clearly Satanic but apparently it can only work through “human” means. Yet despite the supposition of a “human body” he expects his “friend” who has seen Shelley to list the conventional attributes of the devil. Although Shelley turns out “only” to be “a tall, boyish looking man,” the description of his “unearthly” physical appearance suggests that he really is a creature from hell. But the reviewer takes Shelley’s lack of a Satanic (or Byronic) “cloven foot” as confirmation that Shelley is literally rather than metaphorically a devil indeed: “It is not then in his outward semblance but in his inner man that the explicit demon is seen.” The “explicit demon” can be “seen” even though a “perturbed spirit” only “seemed” to be directing Shelley’s “movements.” This part of the passage is at first sight merely a

96


more sustained example of the routine demonizing of Cobbett and other radicals by Tory reviewers. The emphasis on the “infernal”—Shelley is an “enemy to mankind”—appears to respond in an almost knee-jerk fashion to the invitation held out by Queen Mab: to label its author Satanic.82 But by vacillating—is Shelley a man or a devil?—the attack (like the Quarterly’s attacks on Shelley in its articles on Foliage and The Revolt of Islam) implicitly questions the extent to which human and demonic agency can be lined up. Although this passage therefore momentarily undercuts the straightforward equation between “individual” and “demon” that is central to paranoid rhetoric, it retreats from the implications of its convoluted claims by sliding from a concern with the Satanic Shelley’s quasi-supernatural “power to do injury” to more tangible effects—Shelley’s loss of custody of his children in the Chancery trial and the alleged results of his abandonment of Harriet. If the connection between the two modes of attack in this passage is problematic, this is because of the reviewer’s dual agenda: to prove the “inevitable consequences” (RR,C, 527)—as he puts it in the next paragraph—of Shelley’s views as regards their effect on Shelley’s own behavior, and to claim that such views are capable of achieving a more widespread and less tangible corrupting effect. But instead of stating that Shelley himself has led others astray and that he is therefore an “enemy of mankind,” the reviewer first makes grandiose and unsubstantiated claims about Shelley’s “power to do injury” and then presents, as if it were conclusive proof, information (the rumor that Shelley drove Harriet Shelley to suicide) that only provides evidence of the poet’s direct influence over his family. The idea of Shelley’s crimes recoiling back upon himself is of course Satanic, but Shelley’s loss of the custody of his children in the Chancery trial is not so much a proof of the effect of his principles as evidence of an external judgment concerning that effect, while the claim about Shelley’s principles driving his wife to ruin, and so on—resounding though it is—sounds anticlimactic because it begs the question of whether it was not merely Shelley’s ill treatment that produced such an outcome. Despite the enticement of biographical scandal, the reviewer’s allegations cannot compete with the glamour of the Satanic. In personifying Shelley as Satanic this passage had momentarily confronted a conception of human agency more akin to the complexity of contagion than to the simple paranoid notion of a demonic individual as a source of poison. By the end of the paragraph, however, Shelley, in shriveling to a mere person, paradoxically comes to represent figurative agency rather than literal agency


97

or an unsettling mixture of the two. The details of Shelley’s “own life” are too specific to preserve him as the embodiment of evil, while the connection between that “life” and Shelley’s fiendish character is reduced to mere “supposition.” A preference for the figurative rather than a blending of the literal and the figurative is shown again in a footnote to the passage quoted above. The reviewer adds, We are aware, that ordinary criticism has little or nothing to do with the personal conduct of authors; but when the most horrible doctrines are promulgated with appalling force, it is the duty of every man to expose, in every way, the abominations to which they irresistibly drive their odious professors. We declare against receiving our social impulses from a destroyer of every social virtue; our moral creed, from an incestuous wretch; or our religion, from an atheist, who denied God, and reviled the purest institutes of human philosophy and divine ordination, did such a demon exist. (RR,C, 527)

Like other reviewers, this writer claims that Shelley’s extremism places him outside normal conventions concerning revelations of “personal conduct”: the “appalling force” with which his “most horrible doctrines” are expressed implicitly places all potential readers in danger. The reviewer implies that by exposing the behavior to which Shelley’s “doctrines” have “irresistibly” driven him, he is illustrating the falsity of the doctrines, which are so forcefully expressed that if a reader did not know about Shelley’s personal life, he would easily be deceived by them. Once inculcated those doctrines lead inevitably (“irresistibly”) to crimes, or rather “abominations.” As in the previous quotation, however, a general statement gives way to a much more specific and pointed one: the final sentence resorts to name-calling (Shelley is an “incestuous wretch”). The conclusion of this passage is surprising, as the attack on Shelley suddenly becomes hypothetical: with “did such a demon exist” it turns out that although the doctrines can only be counteracted by exposing the behavior, such behavior is too demonic to have really taken place. The reviewer insists on the evil effects of Shelley’s life while presenting that life as a fictional invention. The shift to a hypothetical mode is presumably a strategy to avoid libel, but it is as if in holding Shelley up as a specific example and using him to make more general claims, the reviewer cannot decide whether horror lies in the literal or the figurative. In coming down on the side of the figurative rather than the literal this writer backs away from confounding the two. Shelley the demon is safely

98


imaginary even while the reviewer has it both ways in suggesting that because Shelley is an agent of the devil, the Literary Gazette is authorized to spread scandal to prevent his work from having any effect. Later in his article, the Literary Gazette reviewer expands upon the stock paranoid theme of Shelley as a source of corruption, developing his personal attack on Shelley in hypothetical and circular terms that confirm his preference for a figurative villain rather than one who disconcertingly might draw attention to the fiction-making element involved in attempts at character assassination: It is hardly worth while to ask how a theorist of Mr. Shelley’s class would act in the relations between man and man. It can hardly be doubted but his practice would square with his principles, and be calculated to disturb all the harmonies of nature. 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. (RR,C, 529–30)

These oblique allegations probably refer, as White claims, to “the stories afloat about the association of Byron, the Shelleys, and Claire [Clairmont] at Geneva in 1816” (H, 55).83 The use of insinuations is again presumably a device to avoid prosecution for libel, but it also has the effect of calling into doubt supposedly real behavior; Shelley’s actions are displaced here onto those of an imaginary “disciple,” and the refusal to name names helps make the disciple seem almost supernaturally successful, capable of seducing not just one or two women, but many. As before, the reviewer makes a standard paranoid move in conflating the issue of the supposed effect of Shelley’s principles on his own life with the issue of his danger to others, elevating Shelley into a larger-than-life Satanic figure, capable of superhuman feats of corruption. At the same time, however, the idea that Shelley influences an imaginary version of himself keeps biographical “facts” in a provisional mode. It would seem that the reviewer’s warning of danger gets left behind as the personal attack continues to be embellished for entertainment purposes rather than for putative moral instruction (not that the two can ever finally be separated in paranoid rhetoric). One might interpret this


99

passage then as an instance of how the Satanic persona of Shelley takes on a life of his—or its—own. Confirming such an impression, the Literary Gazette reviewer goes on to assert that some of the notes to the poem “are the production of a noble lord, who once lived in unrestrained intimacy with the author, and partook of the pleasures of his free mode of testifying to the sincerity of his professed opinions” (RR,C, 530). The rumors about incest are here given extra spice by a hint of a homosexual relationship between Shelley and Byron. Queen Mab seems to have provoked an unprecedented proliferation of (often false) biographical information about Shelley.84 Is the fictional Shelley then eluding the reviewer’s attempts to confine him? I would argue that this is not the case because the biographical details seem overdetermined: they all work to perpetuate the Satanic image of Shelley. Paranoid rhetoric can generate fictions that appear to take on an independent life, but that “life” remains restricted to the dynamics of the Satanic scenario. After his violent attack on Shelley, the Literary Gazette reviewer turned to Queen Mab itself and enthusiastically praised the “great beauty” (RR,C, 527) and “genuine poetry” (RR,C, 528) of the opening cantos, though claiming that the poem “speedily degenerates into affectation and bombast” (RR,C, 527). The Literary Gazette reviewer at this point anticipates objections: “We are afraid that we may be obnoxious to censure, for giving nearly all the brilliant parts of this poem, as they may excite a desire to peruse the whole: but our object in so doing (besides that truth demands it, and that we cannot help indulging a slight hope that the fiend-writer may yet be struck with repentance) is, that in our pages all that curiosity could long for might be gratified, and the impious volume whence we derive these extracts, be allowed to fall into oblivion, with all its deep pollutions and horrid blasphemies” (RR,C, 529). The writer’s multiple self-justifications belie his claims. He clearly has no regard for “truth” and no hope whatsoever that the “fiend-writer” will repent; rather the reverse, since the example of Shelley vindicates the task of the reviewer. It is not the “brilliant parts” of Queen Mab that would excite a desire to read the whole poem, so much as the impassioned, highly derogatory language of the review. Queen Mab is obviously not going to fall into “oblivion” after the sort of publicity provided by the Literary Gazette. The reviewer acknowledges that “curiosity” might still arouse a desire in some people to read the whole poem, but, he adds, “let them, we adjure them, be satisfied with what follows” (RR,C, 529). He then quotes

100


the beginning of Shelley’s attack on selfishness: “The fairy instilling her poisons, thus speaks of that balm of afflicted souls, the Christian faith—” (RR,C, 529): Twin-sister of religion, selfishness! Rival in crime and falsehood, aping all The wanton horrors of her bloody play. (5.22–24)

The reviewer also quotes the beginning of Shelley’s attack on religion: Religion! but for thee, prolific fiend, Who peoplest earth with demons, hell with men, And heaven with slaves! Thou taintest all thou lookest upon. (6.69–72)

In a footnote to the latter quotation, the reviewer states, “This is the beginning of the mixture of poetry, bombast, and blasphemy, entitled an Ode to Superstition, in ‘Alastor’ ” (RR,C, 529). In fact, the poem “Superstition,” which had appeared in the Alastor volume in 1816, does not have the word “Ode” in its title. The attacks on selfishness and religion do, however, resemble eighteenth-century odes on personified abstractions. According to Knapp, the sublime personifications in late-eighteenth-century odes are powerful because of their “reflexiveness” (88): they are “self-consciously obsessed with the grounds of [their] own allegorical being” (3).85 Even in these short quotations it can be seen that Selfishness and Religion possess a vitality that the poem’s earlier personifications lacked. We saw that Death and Sleep at the beginning of the poem were ornamental rather than active; Commerce and Gold were active yet relatively simple examples of the paranoid tendency to translate social ills into personal malignity. The attacks on Selfishness and Religion also cast what Shelley considers to be a social evil in terms of personal vindictiveness. The energy of Selfishness is directed inwards, however; “aping” religion’s “bloody play,” her mimicry is turned in upon itself as she imitates her twin. Similarly Religion, itself a personification, destroys by being “prolific,” by peopling the world with malign personifications. In addition, the line, “Thou taintest all thou lookest upon!” raises the question of the relationship between personification and contagion. The Literary Gazette reviewer does not quote the rest of the


101

attacks on Selfishness and Religion, but I will look in more detail here at these two personifications in order to suggest that although Selfishness and Religion thus typify the paranoid rhetoric of Queen Mab they also, like the Literary Gazette’s attack on Shelley himself, gesture beyond it only to retreat again. The continuation of the first passage quoted above anatomizes the self-destructive power of Selfishness: Twin-sister of religion, selfishness! Rival in crime and falsehood, aping all The wanton horrors of her bloody play; Yet frozen, unimpassioned, spiritless, Shunning the light, and owning not its name Compelled, by its deformity, to screen With flimsy veil of justice and of right, Its unattractive lineaments, that scare All, save the brood of ignorance: at once The cause and the effect of tyranny; Unblushing, hardened, sensual, and vile; Dead to all love but of its abjectness, With heart impassive by [sic ] more noble powers Than unshared pleasure, sordid gain, or fame; Despising its own miserable being, Which still it longs, yet fears to disenthrall. (5.22–37)

Like the sublime personifications described by Knapp, Selfishness is paradoxically self-referential, both “agent” and “patient” of its own “fanatic power.”86 If anything even more tautologous than other personified passions, Selfishness is at once energetic and frozen; it is afraid to own its name and forced to hide its “unattractive lineaments,” yet at the same time it is “Unblushing, hardened, sensual, and vile”; it loves nothing except its own “abjectness” but also despises itself. Selfishness is both attracted and repelled by itself, “Which still it longs, yet fears to disenthrall.” As such, Selfishness complicates the poem’s paranoid notions of agency and causality, suggesting that paranoid rhetoric can actually be challenged within its own terms. Whereas other passages in Queen Mab juxtapose single and multiple agency, assuming that one person can influence many and that many act as one, the attack on selfishness implies a different, more collective concept of agency, whereby the effect of many people’s behavior is more destructive than the sum of each person’s actions. This self-generating

102


momentum does not necessarily have to be set in motion by an individual. Selfishness is “at once / The cause and the effect of tyranny” and one cannot tell which came first. Personification then offers a more self-conscious version of contagion’s unsettling of individual responsibility. The form of agency that it figures is merely negative, in line with the denunciatory mode of Queen Mab, but Shelley’s later poems will envisage more positive versions of collectivity. Meanwhile, the depiction of Selfishness fleetingly anticipates the combination of excessive anthropomorphism and what the reviewers call “a want of human interest” (RR,C, 494), which as we will see is one means by which Shelley evokes such responsibility in Prometheus Unbound. The second-person address to the personified figure of Religion is similarly reflexive. Like its self-serving twin sister, Selfishness, Religion is both agent and acted upon. It is both superstitious and superstition; it is the object of worship and at the same time its “heart” (6.87) indulges in “corrupt belief ” (6.86). Shelley’s account of the life cycle of religion is an allegory of its development from the relative innocuousness of pagan pantheism to the horrific violence committed in the name of Christianity. Religion begins by projecting outwards its own narcissistic divinity; the “stars” (6.72) that beamed on its “cradle” (6.73) are made into gods by the infant’s “distempered playfulness” (6.74). A human projection, it generates a more threatening human projection: 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; .................................. And all their causes, to an abstract point Converging, thou didst bend, and called it GOD! 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 for ever for the unhappy slaves


103

Of fate, whom he created in his sport, To triumph in their torments when they fell! (6.88–95, 101–10)

The passage can be read as both a critique of and an instance of paranoid thinking. Religion, fulfilling the paranoid desire to name a single cause, created God as an explanation of “causes,” and God in turn created torments for human beings. God is at once the “prototype of human misrule” and he is modeled on human tyranny, “like an earthly king.” These lines that accuse God of creating hell belong in the Satanic mode of denunciation, but they also draw attention to the dynamic whereby rebels help to perpetuate the tyranny by which they are oppressed. God is a “mad fiend . . . pictured” (6.126–27) by religion as an excuse for murder and other crimes, but he then takes on a reality of his own, like Jupiter in Prometheus Unbound, who, once given authority by Prometheus, takes on an independent existence and cannot be overthrown merely by Prometheus’s recognition of his responsibility. The passage resembles the attack on Ahasuerus in canto 7 of Queen Mab, a figure who insists on the reality of a “vengeful” God (7.85) but does not realize that God is a projection of his own hatred, just as Ahasuerus himself is a “phantasmal portraiture / Of wandering human thought” (7.274–75). Both these sections of the poem then expose the self-generating power of fictions (thus standing momentarily outside the Satanic scenario) while at the same time falling into the same trap—in the case of Religion, by taking both God and hell literally. The personifications of Selfishness and Religion fulfill the paranoid impulse to pin the blame on individuals, while at the same time they diffuse responsibility, calling into question the centrality of individual agency, because they are neither literal persons nor empty abstractions. The balancing act between literal and figurative is not sustained in the case of either Selfishness or Religion, however, for Shelley’s personifications turn out to be subject to the same limitations as individual human beings. Although the account of selfishness might lead one to expect an escalating series of effects and causes, canto 5 ends by announcing, But hoary-headed selfishness has felt Its death-blow, and is tottering to the grave. (5.249–50)

104


The effects of selfishness are not self-perpetuating but are eliminated by decay. Similarly, Religion is subject to old age and death: But now contempt is mocking thy gray hairs; Thou art descending to the darksome grave. (6.139–40)

Queen Mab evokes the power of collective agency (as opposed to multiple agency) only to reinstate individual weakness. Selfishness and Religion die, not because virtue is imagined as stronger than vice—on the contrary— but because Shelley’s poem takes literally its own personifying imagery just as it literalizes its contagion imagery: the personifications of selfishness and religion are ultimately no more powerful than real persons. Whereas the sublime personification that is the demonic Shelley is created as a threatening projection by the Literary Gazette reviewer and then defused of its power through insistence on its fictionality, these personifications in Queen Mab point beyond the poems’ conspiratorial conception of historical change only to collapse back into individual persons because they are too literalized. Continuing its retreat from the more complex elements of both personifications and personal attacks, the Literary Gazette review ends by returning to its characterization of Shelley as a “demoniac proscriber of his species, and insolent insulter of his Maker” (RR,C, 529). After quoting the beginning of the address to Religion, the article continues, “And what substitute have we for piety, good-will to man, religion, and a God? The answer of this incarnate driveller is, a ‘Spirit of Nature!’ ” (RR,C, 529). He then quotes the apostrophe to Necessity, claiming that it “deprive[s] us of words to speak our detestation of its author.” This, however, does not prevent him from continuing: But the blaster of his race stops not here: in the very next page—we tremble while we transcribe it—he desperately, insanely asserts— “THERE IS NO GOD.” Miserable worm! Pity pleads for thee; and contempt, disgust, and horror, are tempered by compassion for thy wretched infirmity of mind. But an overwhelming passion rises when we gaze on the hideous blasphemy of thy more prolix commentary on this detestable text. We hardly dare copy it; but it is our duty to show to what monstrous extent the author carries his impious profanation. (RR,C, 529)

And he quotes the passage beginning,


105

The name of God Has fenced about all crime with holiness, Himself the creature of his worshippers. (7.26–28)

The reviewer gives the impression that he has been carried away by the intensity of his feelings; after claiming that he had quoted “the brilliant parts” of Queen Mab in order to prevent his readers from wanting to see more, and begging them to “be satisfied” with the attacks on selfishness and religion (RR,C, 529), he now insists on his readers knowing the worst. As usual, he protests too much: the reviewer stresses the otherness of Shelley—he is insane, a worm, a monster— but these epithets at once express, and are likely to generate, an attitude of fascination towards the poet. As suggested earlier, on this basic level the review exemplifies a paranoid response to the poem, confirming both the power and the weakness of Shelley’s self-appointed Satanic role. The next sentence of the review reads like a straightforward advertisement for the poem: “We cannot proceed: pages of raving atheism, even more atrocious than what we have quoted, follow; and the blasphemer revels in all the pruriency of his disordered and diabolical fancy” (RR,C, 529). This review inspired two poems, one of which I quoted as the epigraph to this chapter. The other appeared in a letter to the Literary Chronicle signed J. W. D. (John Watson Dalby): Percy Bysshe Shelley! the unearthly brightness And wild expression of thy fearful eye Prove thou hast forfeited thy bosom’s whiteness, And leagued thy soul to shame and perfidy. And then thy “gait perturbed,”—its wondrous lightness,— Thy long unequal strides—all these supply The clearest proofs, that if thou’rt not the devil, Thou art his equal in all kinds of evil. Percy Bysshe Shelley! while almost a child, You wrote a profligate and wicked book, At which it seems you ne’er were weak and wild Enough to let the public have a look; But one it seems has printed it, beguiled By hope of gain,—and so, by hook or crook,

106


We’ll heap on you slander, reproach, and shame, And play the very devil with your name. (quoted from White, Shelley 2:615)

With his mockery of demonization Dalby claims a vantage point outside paranoid politics, though his allegation that the publishers of Queen Mab are motivated by “hope of gain” oversimplifies print warfare. Such sardonic self-consciousness only draws attention to the way in which, whether or not they are the products of what the Literary Gazette reviewer calls “diabolical fancy,” God and the devil confront each other in a battle that never seems to end. Except that God triumphs in this case, at least according to the more hostile public comments on Shelley’s death in 1822, a year after the piracy of Queen Mab. In these comments, the reviewers’ determination to damn Shelley was only checked (and at the same time intensified) by their insistence on the contaminating power of his poem. Queen Mab, the poem that insists on identifying causes, was itself seen as the cause of its author’s death. The Tory John Bull implied that the storm that capsized Shelley’s boat was a punishment for his plot against Christianity: “Mr. Bysshe Shelley, the author of that abominable and blasphemous book called Queen Mab, was lately drowned in a storm somewhere in the Mediterranean. His object in visiting that part of the world, it was said, was to coalesce with some others of his opinions to write down Christianity. The visitation is, therefore, striking; and the termination of his life (considering his creed) not more awful than surprising ” (H, 325). Quoting “There is no God” and “Himself the creature of his worshippers” from Queen Mab, the John Bull, responding the following week to praise of Shelley by a rival Whig magazine, commented, “These lines are selected from amongst others much more appalling, which we literally dared not quote” (H, 323). Another reviewer, writing in the Investigator, described the effect that the poem had had on him, in terms that also sound very familiar: “Our blood curdled in our veins as we waded through nine cantos of blasphemy and impiety, such as we never thought that any one, on the outside of bedlam, could have uttered; nor dare we transcribe any portion of it in our pages, save one of the very mildest of its author’s attacks upon religion, the slightest of his insults to his God, whom again and again—our hand trembles as we write it—the impious wretch has dared to brand as a tyrant, a murderer, a cheat, a demon, and a fiend” (H, 98). After quoting the lines describing


107

the death of religion, the reviewer announced, “But we must desist; we cannot quote the shortest passage referring either to the Creator or the Redeemer of mankind, which is not so awfully horrible in its blasphemy, that even to transcribe it for the mere purpose of holding it up to the execrations of mankind, must be in itself a sin” (H, 99). The assertion that simply quoting from Shelley’s poem would be sinful is a routine gesture that affirms the power of contagion at least in the sense of direct poison: a reader may reject Shelley’s opinions, but mere contact with the poem could corrupt his morals. This reviewer, like the one in the Literary Gazette but with the benefit of hindsight, gives into temptation when, after imagining Shelley’s sudden death and his spirit standing in front of God’s throne waiting for judgment (“That judgment we presume not to pronounce” [H, 103]), he quotes “There is no God,” and then remarks, “Such a death to such a man is awful in the extreme and ought to be impressive—or call it Providence—or call it chance” (H, 103). The claim is disingenuous: as my chapter on Adonais will show, neither Shelley’s enemies nor his friends are capable of seeing his death in other than purposeful terms; they cannot “call it chance.” One could argue, however, that the subsequent publication history of the poem suggests the unpredictability of poetic effects. Queen Mab was the only long poem by Shelley ever to find a wide audience. After his death, inexpensive editions of the poem continued to be read by radicals. There were “at least fourteen” pirated editions between 1821 and 1841,87 when Edward Moxon, the publisher of Shelley’s Collected Works (1839) was prosecuted and found guilty of blasphemous libel in a test case that proved to be the last of its kind in England.88 In the 1830s the poem was popular among Owenites and Chartists.89 If the wide circulation of radical texts is itself seen as a political effect, then the poem, with this unexpected afterlife, could be seen as breaking free of the Satanic stance that confined it during Shelley’s lifetime. But there is no reason to believe that Queen Mab’s nineteenth-century radical readers admired it for any reasons other than those originally identified by “F” in the Theological Inquirer review: for its conspiratorial notion of historical change, its defiance, and its denunciation, especially its attack on corruption. And whether the poem actually inspired political action—as opposed to consciousness-raising—is not known.90 I would suggest then that insofar as the poem takes on a sort of Frankenstein’s-monster life of its own in the nineteenth century, it is one prescribed by the original context in which it was produced and received,

108


that of paranoid politics. Yet one can also see the poem as taking on a more unpredictable life, which may or may not have been scripted by its status as a Satanic text. For the poem was also read by nonradicals: the cheap conservative working-class journals of the 1830s quoted Shelley’s poetry, though not his explicitly political passages, and recounted biographical anecdotes about Shelley and Byron. For the benefit of this audience a book called The Beauties of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1830) included, according to its subtitle, a “revised edition of Queen Mab, free from all the objectionable passages.” 91 The fictional representation of Shelley as a fiend flipped over into the well-known Victorian image of the poet as an angel, a process that I will explore in my final chapter. Fifty years after Shelley’s death, Queen Mab was safe reading for ladies. Lizzie Eustace, the amoral heroine of Anthony Trollope’s novel The Eustace Diamonds (1873), at one point memorizes the passage describing Ianthe’s soul: “ ‘Instinct with inexpressible beauty and grace, Each stain of earthliness Had passed away, it resumed Its native dignity, and stood Immortal amid ruin.’ Which was instinct with beauty, the stain or the soul, she did not stop to enquire, and may be excused for not understanding. . . . ‘All beautiful in naked purity!’ . . . How perfectly that boy poet had understood it all. ‘Immortal amid ruin!’ She liked the idea of the ruin almost as well as that of the immortality, and the stains quite as well as the purity.”92

3

Prometheus Unbound Reforming the Reviewers

“Thus I am answered: strange!” —Prometheus Unbound, 2.4.155

I. Defying Heaven “The predominating characteristic of Mr. Shelley’s poetry,” according to the Quarterly Review’s article on Prometheus Unbound, “is its frequent and total want of meaning” (RR,C, 780). The Quarterly concedes that, “Upon a question of mere beauty, there may be a difference of taste” (RR,C, 780). “Taste,” which gives one the capacity to identify beauty, is of course classspecific, even while the principles underlying the distinction between good and bad taste are held to be immutable.1 “But the question of meaning, or no meaning,” continues the reviewer, “is a matter of fact on which common sense, with common attention, is adequate to decide” (RR,C, 780). This distinction between taste and “common sense” opposes two faculties of the human mind, one learned, the possession of a privileged few, and the other inherent, possessed by all. Sarcastically granting to the poet and his “coterie . . . all sound taste and all genuine feeling of the beauties of nature and art” (RR,C, 780), the reviewer claims that common sense will be sufficient to expose Shelley’s lack of “poetical merits” (RR,C, 781).2 However, towards the end of the article, the category of taste reenters, implying that the artistic preferences of the reviewer and the class to which he belongs are identical with common sense, or that the Quarterly’s common sense is only taste in another guise.3 Succinctly summarizing the grounds of its hostile attitude towards the author of 109

110


Prometheus Unbound, the Quarterly concludes, “He professes to write in order to reform the world. The essence of the proposed reformation is the destruction of religion and government. Such a reformation is not to our taste” (RR,C, 786). The first of these sentences alludes to Shelley’s provocative statement in the preface to his lyrical drama: “Let this opportunity be conceded to me of acknowledging that I have, what a Scotch philosopher characteristically terms, ‘a passion for reforming the world’: what passion incited him to write and publish his book, he omits to explain” (126). The sardonic ending of Shelley’s statement implies that “a passion for reforming the world” is the only worthwhile reason for publishing a book, but the sentence does not necessarily suggest that a desire to reform the world automatically involves an attempt to reform the world. The reviewer chooses to ignore the fact that, in the same paragraph of the preface, Shelley qualifies his assertion: “But it is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any degree as containing a reasoned system on the theory of human life. Didactic poetry is my abhorrence” (126). Shelley goes on to justify this dual move, whereby he proclaims the reformist impulse behind Prometheus Unbound while simultaneously repudiating didacticism in poetry, when he adds, “My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarize the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence” (127). Shelley here warns his readers not to imagine reform in merely pragmatic terms, though he leaves open what he means by “moral excellence,” and what the connection, if any, might be between his “beautiful idealisms” and the reformation of the world. The Quarterly’s reaction, however, exemplifies the willingness of Shelley’s contemporary reviewers to interpret his reference to reform as a threat of revolution. The patronizing remark, “Such a reformation is not to our taste,” conflates a political stance with the artistic evaluation of a certain class, a maneuver wholly in line with the impression of intense partisanship created by the reviewing periodicals’ paranoid rhetoric. I will argue that Prometheus Unbound cannot challenge that rhetoric directly, but that the poem leaves behind the reviewers’ underlying assumptions through its “beautiful idealisms,” which at once redefine readers’ taste and attract a more purely aesthetic appreciation. Shelley wrote to Leigh Hunt in May 1820, “Have you read my Prometheus yet? but that will not sell—it is written only for the elect”

Prometheus Unbound: R eforming the Revie wers

111

(L, 2:200). Even when corresponding with his publisher, Charles Ollier, Shelley emphasized the limited appeal of the work, which he described as “the most perfect of my productions” (L, 2:127). Shelley told Ollier, “the ‘Prometheus’ cannot sell beyond twenty copies” (L, 2:174). Two years later Shelley informed John Gisborne that “ ‘Prometheus’ was never intended for more than 5 or 6 persons” (L, 2:388). By this point one might imagine that the prospective audience for the poem consists only of Shelley’s immediate circle of friends. If this were really the case, however, why did Shelley take the trouble to have Prometheus Unbound published in the first place? Why did he not merely distribute printed copies privately to selected individuals, as he had done in 1813 with the dangerously outspoken Queen Mab and as he suggested Ollier do with the esoteric Epipsychidion (1821)? Shelley’s elitist reference to an audience of “5 or 6 persons” has been interpreted as a defensive response to the hostile critical reception of his poems. Nevertheless, while Shelley may have written Prometheus Unbound for the “elect,” he published it (along with the nine other poems that made up the volume) to be read by a slightly wider audience, the reviewers. Shelley’s mention of “5 or 6 persons,” though he clearly has in mind readers who are already sympathetic to his experiments, can also be taken to refer to the writers of the various reviews of the Prometheus Unbound volume that appeared when it was published in 1820. Whether or not Shelley’s contemporary reviewers actually belonged among the “more select classes of poetical readers,” their responses obliquely illuminate the revolutionary “purpose” of the poem that Shelley wrote for the “elect.” Recent critics have explained that Shelley’s mature poetry does not contain what he calls in the preface a “reasoned system on the theory of human life,” because by the time he wrote Prometheus Unbound, Shelley had recognized that for those without power to dictate the terms of a utopia is not only futile, but also replicates the tyranny that they oppose.4 Shelley cannot offer solutions nor envisage an alternative politics because to do so would be to fall back into the very terms that are being critiqued. This claim of course assumes that the poem can have a tangible effect—though whether or not this is possible remains at issue—while putting the poet in the paradoxical position of someone who wishes to promote reform yet makes no attempt to ensure that the effect of his poem is positive rather than negative. Some critics argue that the poem raises readers’ level of awareness, preparing them to act but not telling them how to act.5 Such a sentiment invokes the existence of individuals willing to take action, and

112


the possibility of future social reformation, if not revolution. It therefore depends on assumptions that Shelley tries to undermine in Prometheus Unbound: assumptions concerning the relationship between individual and multiple human agency as well as linear causality. The poem challenges traditional—or “common sense”—conceptions of agency and movement through time. As one hostile reviewer suggestively noted, “Common sense has nothing to do with ‘the beautiful idealisms’ of Mr. Shelley” (RR,C, 525). In analyzing the interaction between Prometheus Unbound and its initial reception, I will be arguing that with this poem—which contains his public reply to attacks on him in the Quarterly—Shelley continues to provoke the reviewers, but that he also succeeds in moving beyond the antagonisms of paranoid rhetoric. Yet Shelley revises rather than rejects the notion that an individual—in his case, the writer of a poem—can magically effect change through the publication of a reformist text. In attempting to challenge the assumptions underlying the reviewers’ rhetoric, Shelley aims to refine his readers’ taste in order to redefine their ethics. Although the reviews—including the one in the Quarterly—react with predictable hostility to its theme of revolution, their objections to the innovative style of the poem register the way in which its language circumvents their terms. In addition, more favorable reviews of Prometheus Unbound hint at a more radical change in conceptions of beauty. Approaching Prometheus Unbound and its reception in terms of a transition from partisan politics—the politics of taste—to nonpartisan (and nonparanoid) aesthetic appreciation, I aim to specify the impact of the poem at a particular historical moment, without insisting on direct cause and effect. In the first section of this chapter, I will show briefly how Shelley continues to exploit the Satanic scenario in Prometheus Unbound, an exploitation that is confirmed by the denunciatory comments of the reviewers. I will then look at Shelley’s critique of the reviewers’ paranoia in the poem and its preface. This first section as a whole will suggest that Shelley is self-conscious about the power dynamics of the Satanic scenario but that he also takes advantage of them, just as the reviewers sometimes show awareness of the contradictions of their own rhetoric but continue to perpetuate them. At the same time, as I have already stressed, Shelley refuses to try to control the nature of change, but despite this refusal, he hypothesizes a progressive dynamic interplay between text and world. He also assumes that what he calls in the preface “some unimagined change” will take place inevitably as the result of the works


113

of the “great writers” of the “age” (124). These two understandings of change—dynamic interplay and “unimagined change”—will be explored in the second and third sections of this chapter. The second section will show that the poem’s experiments with language and genre challenge the assumptions concerning the power of individual agency—or rebellion— that underlie Satanic thinking and paranoid rhetoric. The reviewers’ mostly negative responses to the poem will provide some evidence of a reformulation (or reformation) of taste, which, while not necessarily caused by the poem, emerges through a dialogue with it. The third section of my argument will show how the poem and some of its reviewers move more fully beyond paranoid politics by participating in a wider cultural reformulation of beauty as something that transcends material concerns, including politics. The plot of Prometheus Unbound itself addresses the principle underlying the mutually disabling antagonism between early-nineteenth-century spokesmen for the establishment and their political opponents. It clearly exposes the inevitability with which oppressor and oppressed become interdependent, but does not necessarily succeed in distancing itself from such a dynamic. As countless critics have pointed out, Jupiter is a projection of Prometheus’s own worst self, but one that cannot simply be willed away, because once in place he takes on a reality of his own.6 The conflict between Prometheus and Jupiter is potentially self-perpetuating, for it cannot be resolved in their own terms—hence the necessity for Jupiter’s overthrow by the mysterious Demogorgon, whom the Quarterly reviewer irritably described as the “only agent in the whole drama” (RR,C, 782). Demogorgon—variously interpreted as Necessity, Eternity, or some other impersonal force such as “potentiality”7—destroys Jupiter in a one-onone struggle, “twisted in inextricable fight” (3.1.73). In announcing, “I am thy child, as thou wert Saturn’s child” (3.1.54), Demogorgon could be perceived as putting himself (or rather, itself ) in terms that Jupiter can understand. But, as several commentators have stressed, the fact that Jupiter is a victim of violence remains problematic, given Shelley’s distrust of coercion.8 If the new, nonindividualistic and even nonanthropomorphic form of revolution still depends on violence, then in what sense is it an improvement over the Satanic scenario? The continuation of violence suggests that Shelley is having it both ways: Prometheus renounces his curse against Jupiter, yet Jupiter still has to be expelled, since he will not forgive Prometheus.

114


The limitations of the violent overthrow of Jupiter, moreover, are reinforced by the Spirit of the Hour’s account of the revolutionized world at the end of act 3. Twentieth-century critics have argued that the pervasive use of negatives in the Spirit of the Hour’s speech implies that the new world is still dependent on terms set by Jupiter.9 The Spirit simply rejects Jupiter’s insistence on hierarchy, for example, and advocates the absence of hierarchy instead. In its final form, Shelley’s lyrical drama, of course, does not end with the speech by the Spirit of the Hour, though it did as he originally conceived it.10 The apocalypse of act 4 represents an escape from the masterslave conflict dictating the relationship between Prometheus and Jupiter. Act 4’s celebration of love, unlike the revolution described at the end of act 3, tries to avoid perpetuating prevailing social structures in negative terms. It imagines a vision of humanity as a collective entity rather than a collection of individuals: “one harmonious Soul of many a soul” (4.400)— as if in recognition that such a vision could not be realized. Some of the reviewers themselves acknowledged that explicitly political passages like the speech by the Spirit of the Hour are the exception rather than the rule in Prometheus Unbound. Alongside its attack on Shelley’s political views, the Quarterly Review remarked, “The subject of [the poem] is the transition of Prometheus from a state of suffering to the state of happiness; together with a corresponding change in the situation of mankind. But no distinct account is given of either of those states” (RR,C, 783). However, the lack of a “distinct account” is precisely the point. The poem, except in certain “Satanic” passages like the Spirit of the Hour’s indirectly denunciatory speech, refuses to specify in what ways change should take place.11 Yet not surprisingly, most of Shelley’s reviewers, ignoring act 4, used the Spirit of the Hour’s lengthy account of the revolutionized world to support their opinion that Prometheus Unbound subverts religion, government, and morality—held by establishment writers and reformers alike to be interdependent. Several of the reviewers took the Spirit of the Hour’s speech to be a straightforward statement of Shelley’s own views.12 From the reviewers’ perspective, that is to say, Shelley’s claim in his preface that his works do not “in any degree” contain a “reasoned system on the theory of human life” is not an evasion of political and moral debate but a calculatedly misleading statement. Accusing Shelley of “infidelity and sedition” (RR,C, 653), the Lonsdale Magazine, for example, found in the poem “destructive theories” (RR,C, 652) aimed at “the subversion of social, religious, and political order” (RR,C, 653). For the reviewers, Prometheus Unbound does


115

contain a “system,” but it is completely the reverse of the one that they value. To them, the phrase “moral excellence” in Shelley’s preface refers to his reformist political and religious opinions; the concept is therefore obnoxious, particularly as the reviewers consider the poem to be capable of transmitting those opinions to its readers. The reviewers’ determination not to be taken in may have something to do with the fact that Shelley’s allusion to the “more select classes of poetical readers” ostensibly defers to their assumptions. In my first chapter I mentioned how writers for the early-nineteenth-century periodicals divided readers into a refined elite and a more susceptible mass audience. The Tory and Whig reviewers considered that a reformist text could only inflict harm if it reached the latter readership, since the morally superior elite is incorruptible. By insisting that he is writing for an elite, Shelley could be seen as disarming potential objections to the seditious content of his poem. Some reviewers did point out that Shelley’s work could do no harm because of its limited appeal. Gold’s London Magazine, while regretting the “political bearing” of the “Ode to Liberty,” printed at the end of the Prometheus Unbound volume, added, “It is not, however, addressed to minds whom it is likely to injure” (RR,C, 638)—a comment that assumes that the size of the audience is significant. But others were not impressed by Shelley’s claim, because they took for granted that accounts of revolution are capable of inciting readers into subversive behavior.13 In its review of Prometheus Unbound, the Quarterly wrote of Shelley: “We care not about his intentions, or by what epithet he may choose to characterize them, so long as his works exhale contagious mischief ” (RR,C, 786). The function of the review is ostensibly to stem this tide of corruption, but its image of Shelley’s works exhaling “contagious mischief ” suggests, as in the Literary Gazette’s review of Queen Mab, that the poem’s evil principles may spread ineluctably not only despite the poet’s intention but also despite the reviewer’s resistance. Although, as I will show, Shelley’s preface takes issue with this paranoid model of literary efficacy, to the extent that the poem offers a reformist agenda, however negatively expressed, Prometheus Unbound takes its place in the Satanic scenario alongside other denunciatory reformist works, including Shelley’s own Queen Mab. Although he does not embrace the role of the Satanic rebel as he had done in Queen Mab, in the opening paragraphs of the preface Shelley encourages assimilation to the oppositional structure of the Satanic scenario when he implies that his retelling of the Prometheus myth will oppose

116


representatives of good and evil: “in truth, I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind” (120). In claiming that the “moral interest” of the story would be “annihilated” (120) if the rebel were to give in to the tyrant, Shelley implies that in his revision, their places are merely reversed, at least in the sense that one character wins out over the other. Describing Prometheus as “the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature” (133), Shelley also misrepresents his poem by inviting straightforwardly allegorical readings that align the characters and action of the poem with human institutions and historical events. Instead, the human relevance of the protagonists and the plot remains ambiguous. Some critics have thought that in the preface, Shelley deliberately domesticates his poem, as if to placate hostile reviewers and draw in unsuspecting readers.14 It is true that Shelley invites readings that focus on the characters (although Prometheus Unbound is notoriously lacking in human interest) and that look for a story that unfolds over the course of the drama (although Prometheus Unbound is notoriously lacking in action).15 If this was an attempt to domesticate, however, it failed to deceive the poem’s early readers, as the responses of Shelley’s contemporary reviewers show. Moreover, Shelley’s description of Prometheus as resembling Milton’s Satan can be seen as designed to annoy the reviewers. Shelley explicitly contrasts the two characters, but the prose of this passage is so obfuscating that the preface has been read as expressing a Romantic identification with Satan.16 Shelley takes the Romantic reading of Satan as a given even as he dismisses it, condemning while taking for granted the “pernicious casuistry” that causes “us” (121) to sympathize with the character whom, following Dryden and others, Shelley calls Milton’s “Hero” (120).17 Shelley also seems to be trying to provoke the reviewers when he refers to Paradise Lost as a “magnificent fiction” (121). The Blackwood’s reviewer (Lockhart) rose to the bait by reacting indignantly to Shelley’s appropriation of Milton to the devil’s party: “He talks in his preface about MILTON, as a ‘Republican,’ and a ‘bold inquirer into Morals and religion.’ Could any thing make us despise Mr Shelley’s understanding, it would be such an instance of voluntary blindness as this!” (RR,C, 146).18 But whether he is seen as Satanic or anti-Satanic, Shelley is in the preface still reinforcing the dynamics of the Satanic scenario, in which the oppressed collaborate in their own oppression. At the end of the preface Shelley points out that personal attacks create notoriety for their victims. He addresses the reviewers in a


117

move ostensibly intended to ward off further attacks, or, as the Quarterly Review put it, “objects to criticism” with the “prophetic voice of a misgiving conscience” (RR,C, 785): “if his attempt be ineffectual, let the punishment of an unaccomplished purpose have been sufficient; let none trouble themselves to heap the dust of oblivion upon his efforts; the pile they raise will betray his grave which might otherwise have been unknown” (128). Although this statement—distanced from Shelley’s own experiences by the use of the third person—might look like an attempt to convince the reviewers that their attacks may be counterproductive, the Quarterly took it as an invitation (or at least a pretext) for a further diatribe in its review of Prometheus Unbound: “Are evil spirits to be allowed to work mischief with impunity, because, forsooth, the instruments with which they work are contemptible? Mr. Shelley says, that his intentions are pure. Pure! They may have been so in his vocabulary; for, (to say nothing of his having unfortunately mistaken nonsense for poetry, and blasphemy for an imperious duty,) vice and irreligion, and the subversion of society are, according to his system, pure and holy things; Christianity, and moral virtue, and social order, are alone impure” (RR,C, 785–86). By denouncing the subversiveness of Prometheus Unbound, the Quarterly reviewers were responding predictably to Shelley’s attempt to drive them on to further excesses. The second half of the preface, however, critiques the belief in individual autonomy that underlies the stance of defiance. Shelley engages selfconsciously with the reviewers in the last five paragraphs of the preface, written after he read the Quarterly’s attack on The Revolt of Islam, which accused him of imitation. Shelley had tried to preempt such a charge in the preface to The Revolt, where he explains: “There must be a resemblance, which does not depend upon their own will, between all the writers of any particular age. They cannot escape from subjection to a common influence which arises out of an infinite combination of circumstances belonging to the time in which they live; though each is in a degree the author of the very influence by which his being is thus pervaded” (PW, 35). This statement deprives the writers of “will” and then gives it back again: they invent or supply the very source of their own “subjection”—the source that Shelley will later call the “spirit of the age.” Despite these claims, Shelley in a letter to Peacock of April 6, 1819, claimed that Prometheus Unbound is “a drama, with characters & mechanism of a kind yet unattempted” (L, 2:94); in a letter to Ollier of September 6, 1819, he said that it is not “an imitation

118


of any thing that has gone before it” (L, 2:116).19 Yet in one of the letters to Ollier, in which he made fun of the Quarterly’s attack on him, Shelley commented, The only remark worth notice in this piece is the assertion that I imitate Wordsworth. It may as well be said that Lord Byron imitates Wordsworth, or that Wordsworth imitates Lord Byron, both being great poets, and deriving from the new springs of thought and feeling, which the great events of our age have exposed to view, a similar tone of sentiment, imagery, and expression. A certain similarity all the best writers of any particular age inevitably are marked with, from the spirit of that age acting on all. (L, 2:127)

In this passage the “spirit” of the “age” acts on the poet, suggesting the indistinguishability of the individual’s “spirit” from wider social influences. Wordsworth and Byron exploit “new springs of thought and feeling,” but they are only new in that they have been “exposed to view” by the “great events” of the age.20 Again explicitly addressing the issue of literary influence, Shelley develops these remarks in the second half of the preface to Prometheus Unbound. The following passage was cited disapprovingly by the Literary Gazette, which complained that the preface is “nearly as mystical and mysterious as the drama” (RR,C, 524): It is impossible that any one who inhabits the same age, with such writers as those who stand in the foremost ranks of our own, can conscientiously assure himself, that his language and tone of thought may not have been modified by the study of the productions of those extraordinary intellects. It is true, that, not the spirit of their genius, but the forms in which it has manifested itself, are due less to the peculiarities of their own minds, than to the peculiarity of the moral and intellectual condition of the minds among which they have been produced. Thus, a number of writers possess the form, whilst they want the spirit of those whom, it is alledged, they imitate; because the former is the endowment of the age in which they live, and the latter must be the uncommunicated lightening [sic ] of their own mind.

The reviewer, assuring his readers he had “quoted verbatim,” merely added sarcastically, “Mr. S. may rest assured, that neither his language, nor tone of thought, is modified by the study of productions of extraordinary intellects” (RR,C, 524). Such a comment implies that Shelley’s poetry is so bad (or


119

mad, or evil), that it must be original, whereas Shelley is calling into question the possibility of originality in the conventional sense. In this passage Shelley denies that he has imitated unnamed writers, claiming a distinction between “spirit,” which comes from the individual, and “form,” which is “the endowment of the age.” “Form” in this sentence does not necessarily refer to genre but to what Shelley calls “language and tone of thought,” perhaps even to the poet’s choice of themes, though I will later consider the implications of this passage for an understanding of Shelley’s generic mixture of lyric and drama. Shared poetic “forms” are brought to life by the writer’s strangely “uncommunicated lightening.” The image of “uncommunicated lightning” emphasizes individual inspiration, but Shelley balances his reference to the individual “spirit” of the poet with a reference to the “peculiarity” of “minds” in general. He therefore makes the point that poetic creativity takes place through a dynamic relation between internal and external influences. Shelley also enlarges the question of influence to one of the connection between literature and historical change: “The great writers of our own age are, we have reason to suppose, the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition or the opinions which cement it” (124). Although the reference to “great writers” concedes the power of individuals, their agency is downplayed by their inability to imagine the nature of the future “change.” In forecasting “some unimagined change,” Shelley refuses to specify the effect on society of particular poetic forms, but—given the inflexible “opinions” of the age (exemplified by those of the reviewers)— he implies that change can only be for the better, that is, reforming. This change will come about through an entity even more deindividualized than the interplay of spirits and forms: “the cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning” (124). As if already fulfilling his prediction of change on an admittedly very small scale, not all the reviewers were alienated by these remarks in Shelley’s preface: in contrast with the Literary Gazette’s dismissive attitude, the two relatively liberal London Magazines, Baldwin’s and Gold’s, both approvingly quoted the sentences concerning “some unimagined change” and the “cloud of mind,” Baldwin’s italicizing the latter to stress the “power” (H, 217) of Shelley’s prose.21 I will suggest later that the positive reaction of Gold’s London Magazine (in particular) to Prometheus Unbound itself participates in an “unimagined change” in aesthetic appreciation. Ever resistant to change in any shape, the Literary Gazette reviewer, on the other

120


hand, found the next paragraph of the preface to be just as nonsensical as the previous one. This reviewer went on to ridicule Shelley’s definition, “A poet is the combined product of such internal powers as modify the nature of others; and of such external influences as excite and sustain these powers; he is not one but both.” Like the passage quoted above, this definition de-emphasizes the individuality of the poet, stressing instead the interdependence of “internal” and “external” forces. Since these generalizations about poets turn out to apply to everyone (“Every man’s mind is, in this respect, modified” [125]), what is at stake is not just the question of if any writer can avoid imitation in the sense in which Shelley has defined it (“Poets . . . are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age” [125]), but whether or not any writer can avoid having an effect on his readers, and whether or not he can be held responsible for that effect. Shelley is here repudiating the paranoid view of the poet as one who has power to influence readers automatically, but he is retaining the idea of shared responsibility implied by the interplay of spirits and forms. The notion that collective responsibility coexists with a more mysterious “cloud of mind” is extended in the next paragraph of the preface, the paragraph concerning Shelley’s “passion for reform”—as the reviewers’ reactions help to indicate. We have already seen that the Quarterly attacked Shelley’s reformist impulse, evidence that Shelley succeeded in antagonizing the reviewers even while attempting to challenge their understanding of literary efficacy. In a similar spirit, as if to cast doubt on Shelley’s ostensibly humble didactic ambitions, the Literary Gazette reviewer italicized “simply” (RR,C, 524) when quoting the sentence in which Shelley states that his purpose “has hitherto been simply to familiarize the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence.” The vague phrase “beautiful idealisms of moral excellence” was interpreted somewhat differently by different reviewers. Both the Literary Gazette and the Quarterly took it to refer to Shelley’s allegedly perverse political and religious views (RR,C, 524, 785). If the phrase is read as alluding to Shelley’s political opinions, including his egalitarianism and atheism, Shelley’s claim clearly reinforces the Satanic reading of the reviewers (whom it is designed to irritate despite its flattery). According to this reading, the self-deprecation suggested by “simply” must be disingenuous given that the poem is an attempt to publicize obnoxious views by clothing them in beautiful language. But “beautiful idealisms of moral excellence” can also be read more sympathetically: Gold’s London Magazine agreed in


121

interpreting the phrase as opinions, though took it to signify approval for the worthy Christianity of past times. Later in the same essay Gold’s used the phrase to refer to the dramatic characters, specifically Prometheus (H, 259–60), presumably taking him to be a moral exemplum in line with the hint in the preface.22 I will come back to the implications of this suggestion. Besides referring to the revolutionized world described by the Spirit of the Hour, “idealisms of moral excellence” could also allude to the images of collective humanity in act 4—images that I see as pointing to a state of transcendence, not an earthly utopia. “Moral excellence” would then refer to a truly radical collectivity, incapable of empirical realization, which would break down the boundaries between individual selves. If the phrase is read this way then the passage eschews any kind of direct didacticism since the mere depiction of—or the familiarization of the imagination with—such idealisms is obviously not going to bring the idealisms about. The long sentence in which the reference to the beautiful idealisms of moral excellence occurs may however hold onto some kind of indirect didacticism. Shelley asserts that his “purpose” is to “familiarize” the “highly refined imagination” of select readers with the beautiful idealisms, adding, “aware that until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness” (127). (The syntax of the sentence attributes awareness to a “purpose” as if reflecting uncertainty about the role of authorial intention.) There may or may not be a causal relationship between the two halves of the sentence. On the one hand, although Shelley leaves unarticulated the relationship between beautiful idealisms and reform in any shape, he implies that the process of familiarization could itself be seen as a means of learning how to love, admire, trust, hope, and endure. On the other hand, the wish to familiarize readers with idealisms, whatever they may be, could possibly be independent of belief in a future state wherein those readers—or rather “the mind”—will love, admire, and so on. Shelley may be insinuating either that the world is not yet ready to act upon his notion of “moral excellence,” or that it could not literally be acted upon. At the same time he holds onto the notion that at some unspecified time, a shift to “love” will take place, with or without the benefit of Prometheus Unbound. Depending on whether the process being described is one of gradual familiarization or a more abrupt shift, the “refined” imagination is not necessarily the same thing as the

122


“mind.” If it is the same thing, the “mind” could belong to members of particular classes, with particular poetic tastes. Those select readers would therefore line up with the “minds” of the contemporary writers alluded to earlier in the preface. Shelley’s redefinition of their taste would help gradually bring about some change in their “social condition.” But the mind is also the “cloud of mind,” discharging its “collected lightning,” a hypothetical collective entity. In political terms this mind represents a movement beyond individuals and beyond classes. In artistic terms it represents a rejection of specific tastes in favor of a universal aesthetic sense. Since it is independent of any kind of gradual learning process, this latter mind might not ever love and admire the “beautiful idealisms” of Prometheus Unbound. After all, refined minds by definition have already been taught what beauty is, but unless the collective mind can already love and admire, how will it recognize beauty? If there is a causal connection between the familiarization of the imagination and the mind’s ability to love, then it is not enough for the “select classes of poetical readers” to appreciate the “beautiful idealisms” of Prometheus Unbound as individuals or even as classes; the “idealisms” need to be admired by (and hence identified with) a collective “mind” that does not exist prior to the beauty of the poem, but cannot be caused by it.23 The preface then advances two models of change, one a relatively straightforward account of the dialectical relationship between spirits and forms, into which fits the notion of Prometheus Unbound as reforming through familiarizing a certain class-specific “imagination” with beauty. The other model of change is even less in control of either poet or readers. It involves a discontinuity between an imperfect present and an improved future. Both types of change depend on idealized notions of beauty and morality, which for Shelley are mutually defining. The “cloud of mind” is as nebulous as it sounds, but Shelley uses this hypothetical collective entity to ground both his ethics and his aesthetics. Both love and aesthetic appreciation involve self-transcendence, the value of which Shelley takes for granted. As in the Defence of Poetry, the “love” of which the “mind” is apparently capable is a transcendence of self-other dynamics that can only be imagined, not actualized. Nevertheless Shelley proceeds as if his “idealisms”—whatever they may be—do exist: even while the wording of his statements relativizes their essentialist claims, he writes and publishes Prometheus Unbound on the assumption that beauty cannot be separated from what he calls “love,” that the “beautiful”


123

needs no definition, that beautiful idealisms can change the world directly or indirectly, and that the effect on the world will automatically be beneficial. The poem itself contains analogies for both change as a dynamic interplay (rather than the product of an individual will) and change as a paradigm shift. The gradual process of change can be perceived through an interaction between what John Rieder calls the plot of purification (in which Prometheus is read as developing psychologically) and the plot of Necessity: an interaction that involves Asia undergoing a learning experience in her encounter with Demogorgon.24 On the other hand, Prometheus’s turn from hatred of Jupiter to pity in act 1 may involve an abrupt break with what precedes it: nothing adequately prepares for the line, “Disdain! Ah no! I pity thee” (1.53). Similarly, the exclamation, “Behold!” with which Demogorgon greets the “destined hour” that will liberate Prometheus (2.4.128) has no necessary relationship with his preceding dialogue with Asia.25 Both understandings of change are also illustrated at a local level in the text. Since these two shifts cannot be pinned down to any particular moment in Prometheus Unbound, I am going to restrict my discussion to passages that either engage explicitly with the reviewers or that the reviewers themselves single out for comment. This approach will avoid turning a poem that critiques linear narrative into a chronological sequence.26 As I mentioned earlier, the text of Prometheus Unbound contains a reply to the attack on Shelley in the review of Hunt’s Foliage that I discussed in my first chapter, a review that Shelley read in October 1818. Timothy Webb has shown that part of a speech of Asia’s was provoked by the Quarterly’s image of Shelley in the Swiss Alps, taking a posture of atheistical defiance despite such evidence of the hand of God as “the deep and unseen avalanche” (RR,C, 760).27 Webb deciphered Shelley’s notation on the draft manuscript copy of this passage: “This was suggested by the [Quarterly Review]” (13). Asia’s speech ends: Hark! the rushing snow! The sun-awakened avalanche! whose mass, Thrice sifted by the storm, had gathered there Flake after flake, in heaven-defying minds As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth Is loosened, and the nations echo round, Shaken to their roots, as do the mountains now. (2.3.36–42)

124


Asia’s image of the avalanche calls into question the oppositional stance that Shelley’s reviewers accused him of taking. The phrase “heaven-defying minds” gives an impression of Satanic defiance, but the passage as a whole represents a far less individualized, less deliberate form of human agency. Because of the apparent inversion of tenor and vehicle—the avalanche is compared to a mental revolution instead of the other way around—this simile has been taken to exemplify Shelley’s description in the preface of his own imagery as “drawn from the operations of the human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed” (121).28 The second part of the sentence is ambiguous, though critics tend to assume that it confirms rather than counteracts an emphasis on the psychological.29 But both the poetic image and the line from the preface blur the distinction between mental and nonmental events, or “external actions.” Asia’s “there” refers both back to the avalanche and forward to “minds,” giving the avalanche an external as well as an internal location. The phrase “in heaven-defying minds” at once qualifies “Flake after flake” and “As thought by thought is piled,” unsettling the boundary between the two. The concentration of participles (“rushing,” “awakened,” “sifted”) locates energy in the avalanche as well as in the “heaven-defying minds,” but the passive verbs, “is piled,” “Is loosened,” avoid ascribing intention or will either to the “minds” or the snow. Instead of the avalanche being anthropomorphized, the social and political revolution to which it is compared takes on the inevitability and unpredictability of a natural phenomenon.30 Asia’s speech implies that change is not the result of individual—or conspiratorial—acts of rebellion, but the widespread recognition of an already existing “truth.” “Some great truth” echoes “some unimagined change” in the preface, and the passage therefore evokes change as discontinuity in addition to change as the product of exchange between inner and outer forces. This passage, that is to say, calls into question the straightforward notion of cause and effect implied by the reviewers’ conspiracy-theory rhetoric. The interplay between active and passive verbs and between tenses de-emphasizes the temporal progression implied by “till” and “after.” The avalanche is “awakened,” not by an abrupt, violent event like the “storm” that has “sifted” it “thrice,” but by the warmth or light of the sun, an automatic daily occurrence. Asia’s speech begins in the present tense with the “rushing snow,” but immediately shifts to the “mass” that “had gathered” before the avalanche was in movement. The gathering of snowflakes has already taken place but it is aligned with the accumulation


125

of thoughts, a continuing process, confusing the line between past and present. The human revolution to which the avalanche is analogous makes the “nations echo round,” apparently in the present, but the phrase that returns to the avalanche, “as do the mountains now,” hints that the impression of immediacy was misleading. Instead of restoring the reader to the “reality” of the drama’s action, “as do the mountains now” could be taken as an image inside an image, making the mountains a figure of speech.31 The parallel between “Is loosened” and “is piled” suggests that instead of entailing a break with the past, change is on a continuum with the paradoxically unwilled preparation for the change. The “heavendefying minds” do not cause the revolution, but neither do they merely accompany it. Even if the piling up of thoughts is seen to result in the loosening of “some great truth,” this outcome turns out to be less decisive than one might expect: “some” sounds vague, as if whether the truth is beneficial or destructive is irrelevant.32 At the same time the loosening of the “truth” can be seen as something that happens arbitrarily instead of—or in addition to—purposefully. Asia’s speech rewrites revolution as an impersonal process that cannot be pinned down to a particular time or place. Rather than simply oppose one image of Satanic defiance with another, then, the passage undoes the notion of defiance as both a stance taken by an individual and as an ongoing purposeful activity taking place over time. In illustrating the limitations of the reviewers’ terms, Asia’s avalanche speech questions the notion of predictable outcomes.33 However, once the possibility of willed rebellion is challenged, revolution can just as easily be wholly destructive as ultimately beneficial. Of course, the revolution dramatized in this text is both. Expressing Shelley’s ambivalence over the exploitation of violence even for the sake of freedom, Asia’s speech is twice recapitulated, first by Jupiter at the beginning of act 3 and once by the Moon in act 4. Jupiter echoes Asia’s words when proclaiming his triumph over the “soul of man” (3.1.5), which continues to resist “tho’ my curses thro’ the pendulous air, / Like snow on herbless peaks, fall flake by flake, / And cling to it” (3.1.11–13). Jupiter goes on to proclaim the imminent “fall” (3.1.17) of humanity—ironically, considering that he himself is about to be overthrown by Demogorgon. Unlike the thoughts referred to by Asia, which were passively “piled,” yet led mysteriously to “some great truth,” Jupiter’s curses here actively “cling,” foreshadowing, though not causing, the impending revolution. Jupiter’s reference to his curses falling “flake by

126


flake” confirms the implications of Asia’s speech by unconsciously signaling the fact that he is to be the victim of the impersonal process towards what Asia called “some great truth.” Looking back, we can recognize that Demogorgon’s violent expulsion of Jupiter confirms the latent violence in the avalanche image. Yet the outcome is positive, as emphasized by another echo of Asia’s speech in the celebratory dialogue between the Moon and the Earth in act 4: “The snow upon my lifeless mountains / Is loosened into living fountains, / My solid oceans flow, and sing, and shine” (4.356–58). Asia’s passive verb “Is loosened” is repeated only to give way to active verbs with positive connotations: “flow and sing and shine.” The celebration of this triumph over Jupiter, however, is problematic. As mentioned earlier, the use of violence lowers the Demogorgon-driven revolution to Jupiter’s level. Also, if the change is not brought about through individual (or even collective) volition, then the fact that its outcome is positive rather than negative must be arbitrary, a matter of poetic fiat. As such, the transition seems too easily achieved, replacing cause and effect with wishful thinking. Surely the centrality of individual agency and linear causality cannot be challenged simply by switching from passive to active verbs? One could object that the activity that is revalorized in the Moon’s speech is continuous with the defiance that Asia’s speech undercut. Similarly, in response to the various readings of Prometheus Unbound that see act 4 as cleansing perception, one could object that various terms used in act 4—such as “rules” (4.397), “will” (4.406), “defy” (4.572), “Empire,” and “Victory” (4.578)—retain their hierarchical associations.34 And whether this speech improves on Asia’s revision of revolution or denies it, we still need to specify the relationship between the poem’s dramatization of revolution and any kind of extraliterary reformation.

II. “Nonsense” I now return to the dialogue between the reviewers and the poem, which illustrates both the process of familiarization mentioned in the preface and a more unpredictable paradigm shift. The reviewers’ negative comments on the language of Prometheus Unbound show their resistance to the educative process to which Shelley tries to subject them, but at the same time their objections illuminate the strategies by which Shelley tries to redefine his readers’ tastes. We will see that these negative comments reflect the boldness—and the ultimate limitations—of Shelley’s stylistic and generic


127

innovations. The reviewers’ clear grasp of what they take to be Shelley’s opinions is remarkable, considering that many of them found the poem to be “pure unmixed nonsense” (RR,C, 724), “absolutely and intrinsically unintelligible” (RR,C, 780), and “drivelling prose run mad ” (RR,C, 785).35 We saw that the Quarterly Review found a “frequent and total want of meaning” in the poem alongside its passion for reform. The Literary Gazette’s attack on Prometheus Unbound exemplifies these divergent responses to its style and content: the reviewer complained that “Prometheus is little else but absolute raving” but then added that Shelley’s “principles are ludicrously wicked” (RR,C, 524). The writer for the Monthly Review registered the same discrepancy when he described the poem as “generally unintelligible . . . though some of it can be understood too plainly” (RR,C, 724). Presumably Shelley’s unintelligibility merely reinforces his subversiveness because it shows he is insane (Bedlam is mentioned)—radicalism also being a clear sign of insanity. Yet although most of the reviewers emphasized the wickedness of Prometheus Unbound, not all of them found its language to be nonsensical. Several of the reviewers enthusiastically complimented the style of the poem. The Monthly Review, for example, despite complaining of Shelley’s “Manichean absurdities” (RR,C, 724), pronounced his “language” to be “beautiful” (RR,C, 725). For the reviewer in the Lonsdale Magazine, it was precisely the coexistence of subversiveness and beauty in Prometheus Unbound that made it threatening. This writer commented that when Shelley “envelope[s]” his revolutionary views “in language, both intended and calculated to entrance the soul by its melodious richness . . . then it is that the unwary are in danger of being misled, the indifferent of being surprised, and the innocent of being seduced” (RR,C, 652). Such a statement insists that the text is capable of leading its readers astray. In describing Prometheus Unbound as a mixture of subversion, unintelligibility, and beauty, the reviewers react predictably to Shelley’s engagement with the terms of their rhetoric. They stress that the poem is dangerous because of its openly subversive passages, and that Shelley writes nonsense because he is a radical and therefore insane. From this perspective, the reviewers’ claim that Prometheus Unbound is beautiful (just like the reviewers’ claim that Queen Mab is beautiful) simply makes Shelley a worthy opponent—all the more Satanic and all the more insidious because his beautiful language threatens to seduce his readers. The reviewers’ stance is not quite as monolithic as this summary suggests, however. The charges of unintelligibility are not just knee-jerk reactions

128


to Shelley’s supposed insanity: they go beyond hostility to Shelley’s politics and display a new interest in Shelley’s innovative poetic style, including what the reviewers call, in implicit contrast with Shelley’s all-too-obvious political allegory, “the besetting sin of his poetry, its extreme vagueness and obscurity, and its tendency to allegory and personification” (RR,C, 834).36 The reviewers support their objections to the unreadability of Prometheus Unbound with some unusually detailed attention to Shelley’s syntax and imagery. Even more suggestively, as I will argue in the third section of this chapter, the enthusiasm of the reviewers for the beautiful language of Prometheus Unbound seems to leave behind any politically motivated attempt to assimilate Shelley to their terms. The present section of this chapter will show how the reviewers’ allegations of “nonsense” are bound up with a refinement of their taste. The reviewers connect the charge of unintelligibility to the objection that Prometheus Unbound lacks human interest. The Quarterly reviewer commented, “As Mr. Shelley disdains to draw his materials from nature, it is not wonderful that his subjects should in general be widely remote from every thing that is level with the comprehension, or interesting to the heart of man. He has been pleased to call Prometheus Unbound a lyrical drama, though it has neither action nor dramatic dialogue” (RR,C, 783). Although the reviewer’s complaint is belied by his own admission that the plot does involve a “change” (RR,C, 783) effected by Demogorgon, his remark raises the question of what to expect of the mixed genre of lyrical drama. The reviewer’s refusal to find any “dramatic dialogue” in the poem could reflect the way in which, rather than juxtaposing dramatic and lyric passages as might at first appear, Shelley lyricizes drama or dramatizes lyric. Lyrical drama, that is to say, can be seen as a genuine hybrid rather than a weaving together of two rather contradictory forms. If the distinction between lyric and drama does get broken down, this is partly accomplished by Shelley’s refusal to create characters who are completely discrete from one another. Hence various complaints from reviewers that the characters cannot be differentiated. The paragraph just quoted from the Quarterly Review goes on to comment that “Prometheus is a being who is neither a God nor a man,” and adds, “Apollo, Mercury, the Furies, and a faun, make their appearance; but have not much to do in the piece. To fill up the personae dramatis, we have voices of the mountains, voices of the air, voices of the springs, voices of the whirlwinds, together with several echos [sic ]. Then come spirits without end: spirits


129

of the moon, spirits of the earth, spirits of the human mind, spirits of the hours; who all attest their super-human nature by singing and saying things which no human being can comprehend” (RR,C, 783). The fact that the characters are all supernatural does not in itself result in a lack of human interest (Keats’s Hyperion perhaps comes to mind). But for the reviewers, in Shelley’s poem, the indistinguishability of the characters confirms and completes the sense of their incomprehensibility. Attacking the poem on the same grounds, the Literary Gazette listed not the dramatis personae but the “dramatis impersonae”: “Prometheus, Jupiter, Demogorgon, the Earth, the Ocean, Apollo, Mercury, Hercules, Asia, Panthea, Ione, the phantasm of Jupiter, the Spirit of the Earth, Spirits of the Hours, other Spirits of all sorts and sizes, Echoes, substantial and spiritual, Fawns, Furies, Voices, and other monstrous personifications” (RR,C, 524). These dismissive lists give the impression that Prometheus is equivalent to the “monstrous personifications,” whereas the characters can be seen to exist on a continuum, the major ones being relatively autonomous and the various spirits, voices, and so on fading into each other. I have already mentioned that one admiring reviewer took Prometheus himself to be an idealism of moral excellence. The phrase from the preface could presumably also refer to the local strategies with which Shelley aims to alter his readers’ taste and therefore—according to his understanding of taste—their morals. Registering such strategies, the tension between the suggestive phrase “dramatis impersonae” and “monstrous personifications” reflects the way in which Shelley’s attempt to etherealize exists alongside the opposite tendency, the impulse to de-etherealize.37 The charge that Prometheus Unbound lacks human interest is made alongside the objection that Shelley disconcertingly reifies the unearthly. The paragraph quoted above from the Quarterly Review continues with the claim that the “basis” and the “materials” of the poem are “mere dreaming, shadowy, incoherent abstractions” (RR,C, 783–84). The otherwise favorable review in Gold’s London Magazine made the same point when it objected that Shelley’s “opinions are but skeletons, and he does not sufficiently embody them to render them intelligible” (H, 262).38 The complaint that Prometheus Unbound lacks human interest has even been made by recent critics who claim that it cannot have any political relevance if it does not have any human relevance.39 But contemporary reviewers of Prometheus Unbound also complained that Shelley’s lyrical drama tends to “embody” too much

130


rather than or as well as not enough. Hazlitt, commenting anonymously on Prometheus Unbound in an 1821 Table Talk essay in Baldwin’s London Magazine, objected: “to embody an abstract theory, as if it were a given part of actual nature, is an impertinence and an indecorum.”40 Hazlitt expanded upon this point, saying that Shelley “gives us, for representations of things, rhapsodies of words. He does not lend the colours of imagination and the ornaments of style to the objects of nature, but paints gaudy, flimsy, allegorical pictures on gauze, on the cobwebs of his own brain, ‘Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimeras dire.’ He assumes certain doubtful speculative notions, and proceeds to prove their truth by describing them in detail as matters of fact. This mixture of fanatic zeal and poetical licentiousness is not quite the thing” (London Magazine 3:370). Prometheus Unbound is unreadable, not just because Shelley substitutes “words” for “things,” but because he makes monsters into things. The “flimsy, allegorical pictures on gauze” are objectionable not so much per se as because those pictures are made real: he literalizes the ideal. (By contrast, Mary Shelley, in her 1839 note to Prometheus Unbound, claimed that Shelley “loved to idealize the real” [PW, 272].) Many of the images that the Literary Gazette reviewer objected to in Prometheus Unbound are ones that are either nonvisualizable or perhaps disconcertingly visualizable, while others contain unexpected hints of anthropomorphism. These include what the reviewer called “ ‘villanous compounds [sic ],’ ” such as “twilight-lawns,” “stream-illumined,” “windenchanted,” “sky-cleaving,” and “thaw-cloven,” quoted from Asia’s description of a misty vale (2.3.19–36) in the speech that ends with the image of the avalanche (RR,C, 525). The reviewer also quoted as instances of the lack of connection between nouns and adjectives in Prometheus Unbound, “sleep-unsheltered hours,” “crawling glaciers,” “veiled lightening [sic ] asleep (as well as hovering),” “unbewailing flowers,” “odour-faded blooms,” “semi-vital worms,” “unerasing waves,” “unpavilioned skies,” and “void abysms” (RR,C, 525). Some of these use participles to give energy to natural phenomena while others involve the coining of negative terms (“unpavilioned”) to express the infinite through the finite.41 Such examples show that as if in reaction to the depersonalization of the characters, there is concreteness at a local level, but rather than counteracting the shadowiness, it may reinforce it. Instead of figures in the sense of characters and figures in the sense of poetic images being brought together (or brought closer) they may represent two different kinds of extremism. Hence the contradictory


131

claims that Shelley’s poetry disembodies and at the same time embodies too much. An example of the effects of this pull in two opposite directions can be seen in a passage singled out by the writer of the review of Prometheus Unbound in the Literary Gazette. This reviewer complained that in Shelley’s poem “glimpses of meaning . . . are soon smothered by contradictory terms and metaphor carried to excess” (RR,C, 525). To illustrate this point the reviewer quotes the Sixth Spirit’s speech from act 1: Ah, sister! desolation is a delicate thing: It walks not on the earth, it floats not on the air, But treads with silent footsteps, and fans with silent wing The tender hopes which in their hearts the best and gentlest bear; Who, soothed to false repose by the fanning plumes above, And the music-stirring motion of its soft and busy feet, Dream visions of aerial joy, and call the monster Love, And wake, and find the shadow pain. (1.772–79)

The reviewer’s italics support his claim that Shelley uses “contradictory terms,” by drawing attention first to the incongruity of calling “desolation” a “delicate thing,” and then to the apparent discrepancy between the adjective “silent” and the idea of “music-stirring motion.” 42 The Literary Gazette reviewer apparently objects to Shelleyan oxymoron, or what he calls “opposition of words, phrases, and sentiments, so violent as to be utter nonsense” (RR,C, 524). But in what sense can the passage be said to contain “metaphor carried to excess”? The reviewer’s emphasis on desolation’s “footsteps” and “feet” suggests that he is objecting to the way in which Shelley elaborates upon his initial personification. Although desolation is an abstract “thing,” it (not he or she) is developed with vital details— “fanning plumes” and “busy feet”—which rather bizarrely bring it to life. It might seem strange that a poet whose works are attacked for their “want of human interest” should also attract the complaint that his imagery is too anthropomorphic. A later reviewer of Adonais remarked that Shelley “extracts tears from every thing, and makes moss and mud hold regular conversations with him” (RR,C, 148). Shelley, that is, does not just use personifications (a standard, if outdated, poetic device, after all); he does not know where to stop. Leigh Hunt echoed the Literary Gazette reviewer’s

132


charge when he called Prometheus Unbound “apt to be too wilful and gratuitous in its metaphors” (H, 312).43 The idea of “willful metaphors” both problematizes agency (whose will? the poem’s, the poet’s, or the metaphors’?) and captures the sense in which Shelley’s figures unsettlingly slide towards independence from the concepts that they embody. In my second chapter I suggested that the sublime personifications of Queen Mab reflect the paranoid impulse to project destructive life onto abstractions, which take on a reality of their own, persecuting their inventors. I have already mentioned that the relationship between Prometheus and Jupiter in Prometheus Unbound dramatizes this dynamic. At the same time, like the sublime personifications of late-eighteenth-century poetry, Queen Mab’s personifications are paradoxically self-referential, both agents and acted upon. The reflexive energy of Queen Mab’s Selfishness and Religion calls into question the paranoid assumption that individuals are directly responsible for social ills. The cycle of oppression, which makes Selfishness “at once / The cause and the effect of tyranny” (5.30–31), involves a collective agency more efficient than the sum of any individuals’ actions. I claimed that Queen Mab’s sublime personifications, however, turn out to be overliteralized, in that their life cycles are finite, making them too much like mere persons, and therefore ultimately ineffectual. By contrast, the image of “desolation” is more elusive. Reflecting Shelley’s effort in Prometheus Unbound to avoid the impulse to attach persons to causes, the figure of desolation possesses all of the power of the personifications in Queen Mab without their weakness. As with Religion and Selfishness, there is a reciprocal relationship between this “delicate thing” and the individuals—here, the “best and gentlest” (presumably human beings, since the Spirits are the “guardians” of “mortality” [1.673–74])—who give it credence and who are in turn cruelly treated by it. Also as in Queen Mab, one cannot tell whether the belief creates the tyranny or vice versa: desolation is suspended in the present tense, and the chronology of the paratactically presented details of this passage is as ambiguous as that of Asia’s avalanche image, with its shifting temporal markers.44 The passage moves from a focus on desolation’s actions to those of the “best,” which not only emphasizes the reciprocity of their relationship, but even casts doubt on the extent of desolation’s tyranny. The personified desolation insidiously nourishes its victims’ “tender hopes” and soothes them to “false repose.” But when the “best and gentlest . . . call the monster Love,” are they imagining a benign alternative to desolation, or are they bringing the


133

“monster” desolation into being by giving it a name, “Love”? “Monster” could refer to “Love” in the sense of something illusory, but it could also refer to desolation in the sense of something threatening. The idea of love may be indirectly created by the evil actions of desolation, recoiling upon it.45 The syntax of the passage reinforces the impression of desolation’s elusiveness and the accompanying spiral of delusion: “its,” in the sixth line, is so far from the logical referent, “thing,” that the pronoun could also be taken to refer forward to “Love.” It is not clear whether the “best” would “bear” any hopes at all, independent of their collaboration with the “shadow pain”; upon their waking, the “visions of aerial joy” may be retrospectively invented. The transfer of energy from desolation to the “best and gentlest” parallels a slide from the personification’s “silent footstep” to the rhythm of the verse itself, so that desolation’s “busy feet” become analogous with the poetic feet that carry the willing—not willful—reader along.46 Shelley puts the reader momentarily in the position of the “best and gentlest,” betrayed into experiencing the same cycle of expectation and disillusionment. But to see the “best and gentlest” as representing the select readers of Prometheus Unbound is problematic, because of the way in which, as I have argued, the passage confounds moral opposites. The image of desolation goes beyond the personifications of Queen Mab, which are clearly an attack on the existing state of society, in at once encouraging and resisting a narrowly allegorical reading. The “visions of aerial joy” referred to by the Sixth Spirit could correspond to the poem’s visions of a revolutionized world, but in context, it is impossible to tell whether these visions are being celebrated as offering hope for the future, or condemned as hopelessly idealistic, or both. The passage has been read as showing the victory of “love and hope” over “despair.”47 More specifically, and in complete contrast, it has been seen as referring to the failure of the French Revolution.48 Such disparate interpretations can only be synthesized by a reading that empties out the possibility of either victory or failure. Shelley does not just emphasize the inextricability of hope and disappointment, as some critics have claimed;49 he makes them indistinguishable from each other. The image of desolation therefore problematizes the model of progressive dynamic interaction in the preface, apparently conflicting with Shelley’s assertion of his passion for reform. Even while the Sixth Spirit’s Song underlines the poem’s vulnerability to a deconstructive reading, it exemplifies Shelley’s attempt to refine his readers’ taste by redefining dramatic action.

134


Although the reviewers’ term “nonsense” seems like a label to close down discussion, we have already seen that the reviewers do pay some detailed attention to the text even in dismissing it. In order to show that Shelley’s challenge to his readers does not end with the “desolation” passage, I will now examine another suggestive adverse reaction by a reviewer. The Quarterly Review actually distinguished between different levels of nonsense. The reviewer commented, “In Mr. Shelley’s poetry all is brilliance, vacuity, and confusion. We are dazzled by the multitude of words that sound as if they denoted something very grand or splendid: fragments of images pass in crowds before us; but when the procession has gone by, and the tumult of it is over, not a trace of it remains upon the memory” (RR,C, 780). The term “brilliance” suggests that the reviewer is drawn to Shelley’s dazzling “multitude of words,” but “vacuity” implies that he resents finding nothing behind them. “Fragments” are not objected to per se—presumably the reviewer refers to Shelley’s tendency to offer flurries of images—but their evanescence is troubling.50 Just as the Quarterly’s previous attacks on Shelley anticipated the later development of his poetry, here the reviewer’s evocation of crowds, a tumultuous procession, and memory loss foreshadows the imagery of The Triumph of Life (1822). The reviewer seems to be saying he wants something to remember, presumably either something strikingly expressed or something visual. The Dublin Magazine made the same complaint, claiming that “of all [Shelley’s] gorgeous images . . . scarcely one is retained in the memory” (RR,C, 315). The Quarterly reviewer, however, identifies shades or gradations or levels of unintelligibility. Even while asserting that he cannot make sense of Shelley’s words, he reads distinctions in. The reviewer continued, “The want of meaning in Mr. Shelley’s poetry takes different shapes. Sometimes it is impossible to attach any signification to his words; sometimes they hover on the verge between meaning and no meaning, so that a meaning may be obscurely conjectured by the reader, though none is expressed by the writer; and sometimes they convey ideas, which, taken separately, are sufficiently clear, but when connected, are altogether incongruous” (RR,C, 781). The anticipation of later critical vocabularies—New Critical and deconstructive—suggests that the Quarterly’s “common sense” dismissal of the poem opens itself up to later appropriation by readings hitherto “unimagined” (to borrow Shelley’s word).51 One might ask how lack of meaning can take a shape. If it does so, that would belie the idea that some words might have no meaning whatsoever. The reviewer’s acknowledgment


135

that some words hover on the brink of no meaning may recognize Shelley’s attempt to break past the limitations of language with coinages and neologisms. And of course, incongruity rather than clarity may be exactly what Shelley is trying to achieve. The Quarterly reviewer next quotes a passage that he claims “exhibits in some parts the first species of nonsense, and in others the third” (RR,C, 781): Lovely apparitions, dim at first, Then radiant, as the mind, arising bright From the embrace of beauty, whence the forms Of which these are the phantoms, casts on them The gathered rays which are reality, Shall visit us, the immortal progeny Of painting, sculpture, and wrapt poesy, And arts, tho’ unimagined, yet to be.52 (3.3.49–56)

These lines are from the speech in which the freed Prometheus describes the life he intends to live henceforth with Asia in a sheltered cave. The reviewer commented, “Let any man try to ascertain what is really said, and he will immediately discover the imposition that has been practised. From beauty, or the embrace of beauty, (we know not which, for ambiguity of phrase is a very frequent companion of nonsense,) certain forms proceed: of these forms there are phantoms; these phantoms are dim; but the mind arises from the embrace of beauty, and casts on them the gathered rays which are reality; they are then baptized by the name of the immortal progeny of the arts, and in that character proceed to visit Prometheus” (RR,C, 781).53 The reviewer’s impatient paraphrase, picking up on the indication of forward movement in “at first” and “Then,” creates a narrative out of Prometheus’s clogged syntax, which, like that of Asia’s avalanche speech, gives an impression of instantaneousness at variance with the use of the future tense, and therefore complicates cause and effect. Yet his paraphrase also circles back on itself, first making “beauty, or the embrace of beauty” (as if the latter could somehow stand alone) the independent source or origin of the “forms,” rendering the “mind” less central, and then returning to the embrace of beauty when reaching the mind’s ability to cast rays on the phantoms (the latter being conflated with the apparitions). The stepby-step gloss of the passage reduces its contents to a series of seemingly

136


random events. Yet “as” could imply “while,” or “like”: are the apparitions as radiant as the mind or are they made radiant by the mind? Although the reviewer draws attention to the “ambiguity” of “the embrace of beauty” (which seems to frustrate his desire to ground his narrative), he ignores the ambiguity of “whence” (where do the “forms” come from? “the mind” or “the embrace of beauty”?) and “them” (“apparitions,” “phantoms,” or “forms”?) with their suggestion that all these versions of “reality” are brought into simultaneous coexistence. Beauty and the mind may or may not have their own independent existence. “The mind” could refer to that of the creator of a work of art (since Prometheus is describing the spectacle of human time in contrast with his and Asia’s own immortality), Prometheus’s mind, or even “the mind” in the same sense as “the cloud of mind” in the preface, referring to the spirit of the age or a transcendent collective audience. The passage restates the problematic passage in the preface referring to the beautiful idealisms and the “love” of “the mind”— with the next few lines of the speech referring to the “unimagined” future “arts” as the “mediators” of “love” (3.3.58–59) that increase in beauty “as” humanity progresses: “swift shapes and sounds, which grow / More fair and soft as man grows wise and kind, / And veil by veil, evil and error fall” (3.3.60–62). Again, “as” is ambiguous, suggesting both “while” or “in the same way as”; the passage thus preserves the distinction between gradual and abrupt change implied by the preface.54 Despite its mockery, the reviewer’s narrative ends on a suggestive note. His account of “certain forms” being “baptized by the name of the immortal progeny of the arts”—and “in that character” visiting Prometheus—implies that the act of identifying the forms gives them an independent life. The reviewer’s wording literalizes the slight hint of anthropomorphism in Shelley’s lines. Beauty is on one level a personified abstraction, and the “Lovely apparitions” are described as visitors to Prometheus and Asia from the human world. The Quarterly reviewer’s reactions show an impulse not only to trace a narrative where none exists but to read anthropomorphically. His skeptical reference to “certain forms” brings out another possible meaning of the word “forms” in the passage: not just shapes, inspirational dreams, or transcendent ideas (idealisms?), but personages or personifications.55 Prometheus and Asia themselves are “forms” in the sense of characters who, visiting the mind of the reader, populate the lyrical drama in the shape of “poetical abstractions” (124, a phrase from the preface). In attempting to paraphrase the passage, the reviewer refers to the forms visiting Prometheus


137

as if he and they are on the same ontological level, thus collaborating with Shelley’s blurring of the distinction between figures in the sense of images and in the sense of characters. But even while registering Shelley’s effort to reeducate readers to think in collective rather than individual terms, the reviewer resists it in displaying the impulse to anthropomorphize and to impose a narrative or at least some sense of temporal progression. His reading attempts to contain and humanize a shifting collection of images that for Shelley are only grounded by the depersonalized “embrace of beauty.” For the reviewer, Shelley’s experimental juxtaposition of characters who are not like persons with images that are too alive therefore fails, as it has continued to do for every reader who has found a lack of human interest and action in Prometheus Unbound. The redefinition of taste can only go so far: the world may not be ready for lyrical drama.56

III. “Beautiful Idealisms” I turn now to the more favorable reactions to Prometheus Unbound, which do not pay as much close attention to the text as the attacks on the poem. The reviewers who praise Prometheus Unbound single out passages as if they are self-evidently beautiful according to their own and their readers’ usual understanding of the term, yet the content of their quotations suggests that they are revising their sense of the beautiful, whether consciously or not, in response to Shelley’s attempt to familiarize them with what he calls beautiful idealisms. One 1822 commentator on Prometheus Unbound provided no quotations from the poem, but asserted that “The recurrence of these [unintelligible passages] has led some readers to stigmatize his works generally as incomprehensible, whereas they are only blemishes which disfigure them, and which are far more than repaid by countless and exquisite beauties” (H, 315). What, then, counts as a “beauty”? For eighteenth-century reviewers, and for many of their successors, beauties and its correspondent term, defects, were used routinely without definition— hence presumably Coleridge’s complaint in the Biographia that the reviewers of his day have no fixed principles. Though vague, the term beauty, for reviewers still influenced by Augustan poetics, would seem to mean the following: a beauty often evokes the classics; its verse is smooth and harmonious; its diction, while never prosaic, is clear and easy to follow; and its imagery represents some recognizable reality and constitutes a striking, memorable picture. (These same demands clearly

138


underlie the reviewers’ objections to coinages, far-fetched imagery, and extravagant—that is, nonreferential—conceits.) Reflecting the practice of anthologization in the period, beauties are conceived of as isolatable pearls that can be extracted from the text.57 Reviewers who find things to admire in Shelley continue to use the same terminology of “beauties,” without indicating that their definition of beauties must be changing. Seemingly exemplifying the vagaries of taste, what count as “beauties” for one reviewer are unintelligible to another. Some of the reviewers singled out for praise the very passages that others singled out for ridicule.58 The Quarterly itself claimed: “The proofs of Mr. Shelley’s genius, which his admirers allege, are the very exaggeration, copiousness of verbiage, and incoherence of ideas which we complain of as intolerable” (RR,C, 784). But while beauties and nonsense may be interchangeable from a stylistic point of view, they are to some extent asymmetrical from a political point of view. The reviewers might think that these two features of poetry are not automatically reversible because whereas common sense serves to identify nonsense, a specialized taste is required to appreciate beauties. A specialized taste, however, is bound to feel like common sense to those who possess it. I would suggest that the difference lies in whether or not the reviewers see the beauty as devoid of any potential to effect change—that is, apolitical. Some hostile reviewers saw beauty mixed in with unintelligibility and subversiveness, but they tended to see it as reinforcing the subversiveness rather than as offering an alternative to it. We have already seen that the Lonsdale Magazine commented on the “melodious richness” of Shelley’s language (RR,C, 652), only to imagine paranoically that this would make his “destructive theories” more likely to mislead the “unwary,” surprise the “indifferent,” and seduce the “innocent” (RR,C, 652). Even the Dublin Magazine mentioned Shelley’s “eloquent use of language” while stressing his “evil purposes” (RR,C, 315). Similarly, the Monthly Review, in attacking the “nonsense” of Asia’s encounter with Demogorgon, conceded that its “language” is “beautiful” (RR,C, 725). As with the Lonsdale, this fact makes him a force to be reckoned with even while the reviewer claims to be dismissing him; the Monthly remarks that Shelley “has power to do good, or evil, on an extensive scale” (RR,C, 724). For these reviewers, Shelley’s “poetic powers” (RR,C, 652) as manifested in Prometheus Unbound confirm his power as a political opponent. By contrast, the reviews that appeared in Blackwood’s and Gold’s London Magazine praised passages of the poem without automatically expressing fears that they might be


139

dangerously seductive. I will examine these reviews in more detail, in order to consider the extent to which they engage in an aesthetic appreciation that transcends politics. The article on Prometheus Unbound in Blackwood’s was the last of four reviews of Shelley by John Gibson Lockhart. As we saw in my first chapter, another periodical, The Honeycomb, in seeking to account for the relatively favorable attitude of Blackwood’s towards Shelley, speculated as to whether it was influenced by aesthetic appreciation only to dismiss this as a possible explanation. As we also saw in my first chapter, the case of Shelley led Lockhart to contradict himself outright. Despite arguing in his attacks on Leigh Hunt that “There can be no radical distinction allowed between the private and public character of a poet” (RR,C, 87), in dealing with Shelley he insisted by contrast on the invalidity of personal attacks, and despite chastising his “Cockney” opinions, proclaimed him a “scholar, a gentleman, and a poet” (RR,C, 103).59 Lockhart’s review of Prometheus Unbound confirms that part of what helps Shelley evade censure is indeed his social status as confirmed by his classical education: Lockhart opens the review with a display of his own knowledge of Aeschylus. His implicit appreciation of Shelley’s learning is in marked contrast to his mockery of Keats and Hunt’s limited knowledge of classical mythology. Lockhart then goes on to attack what he calls Shelley’s treatment of the story’s “allegory” (RR,C, 139): “There is no occasion for going round about the bush to hint what the poet himself has so unblushingly and sinfully blazoned forth in every part of his production. With him, it is quite evident that the Jupiter whose downfall has been predicted by Prometheus, means nothing more than Religion in general, that is, every human system of religious belief; and that, with the fall of this, he considers it perfectly necessary (as indeed we also believe, though with far different feelings) that every system of human government also should give way and perish” (RR,C, 139).60 On one level, these claims are an example of the reviewers’ assimilation of Prometheus Unbound to the terms of their rhetoric, which equates politics, religion, and morality. Yet Lockhart also differentiates himself from other reviewers in that he recognizes that Shelley’s attack on tyranny is not restricted to the unsubtle messages of the speech by the Spirit of the Hour. He even reads the cosmic sexual encounter of act 4 as directly political: “It appears too plainly, from the luscious pictures with which his play terminates, that Mr Shelly [sic ] looks forward to an unusual relaxation of all moral rules” (RR,C, 139). Given that Lockhart is prepared to read the entire poem

140


(“every part”) as political, it is especially interesting that he goes on to distinguish sharply between its alleged subversiveness and its “beauties.” The sentence in which Lockhart sums up his view of Prometheus Unbound is worth quoting in full: “In short, it is quite impossible that there should exist a more pestiferous mixture of blasphemy, sedition, and sensuality, than is visible in the whole structure and strain of this poem—which nevertheless, and notwithstanding all the detestation its principles excite, must and will be considered by all that read it attentively, as abounding in poetical beauties of the highest order—as presenting many specimens not easily to be surpassed, of the moral sublime of eloquence— as overflowing with pathos, and most magnificent in description” (RR,C, 139). The phrases “beauties” and “specimens” refer to detachable parts that could be extracted from the poem and appreciated out of context, like the pieces in the various anthologies of poetry that had been popular since the late eighteenth century. Lockhart therefore gives the impression that his conception of “beauties” is traditional, but by giving extracts from revisionary poems such as “The Sensitive Plant,” he appears to be modifying that conception. Before turning to the volume’s so-called “beauties,” however, he emphasizes its “pestiferous” aspect. Lockhart first quotes the Spirit of the Hour’s speech from the end of act 3, italicizing lines that he finds particularly “reprehensible” (RR,C, 139). But he then comments, “It is delightful to turn from the audacious spleen and ill-veiled abomination of such passages as these, to those parts of the production, in which it is possible to separate the poet from the allegorist—where the modern is content to write in the spirit of the ancient—and one might almost fancy that we had recovered some of the lost sublimities of Aeschylus” (RR,C, 140). In this sentence Lockhart makes a clear distinction between politics and aestheticism (“sublimities”). Separating the poet from the allegorist means identifying passages in which Shelley writes like an “ancient,” as if to write like an ancient is not only to conform to an aesthetic ideal, but to avoid political controversy. As an example of Aeschylean sublimity, Lockhart quotes what he calls “the magnificent opening scene” (RR,C, 140), which includes the Earth’s account of Jupiter’s blighting effect upon her inhabitants. Presumably this speech constitutes part of Shelley’s attack on religion, in line with Lockhart’s own allegorical reading of the poem, which equates Jupiter with “every human system of human belief ” (RR,C, 139)—suggesting that the boundary between poetry and (political) allegory is not as clear-cut as Lockhart implies. Nevertheless Lockhart goes


141

on to compare Shelley’s poetry with that of more classical authors, as if the evocation of the classics gives Shelley a mark of respectability. Yet classicism, like beauty, is of course in the eye of the beholder; Lockhart compares the next passage that he praises, the Semichorus of Spirits from act 2, scene 2, to both Euripides and Pindar. The Quarterly by contrast claimed that Shelley’s “productions have not one feature of likeness to what have been deemed classical works, in any country or in any age” (RR,C, 784). I will look at the semichorus later in connection with Gold’s London Magazine’s enthusiasm for the same passage. Meanwhile, I would suggest that in finding certain passages in Prometheus Unbound classical Lockhart perceives them as innocuous—in contrast with the obnoxious allegory that he finds elsewhere in the poem. For him, beautiful language therefore performs a very different function than it does for the majority of his fellow reviewers: whereas they think it reinforces Shelley’s ability to do harm, he implies that it can be enjoyed for its own sake. The most wholeheartedly enthusiastic contemporary review of Prometheus Unbound was in the relatively short-lived Gold’s London Magazine. This periodical had ambivalently reviewed The Cenci earlier in 1820, classing Shelley as one of the Cockney School, but its review of Prometheus Unbound was extremely favorable, as was its 1821 essay, “On the Philosophy and Poetry of Shelley,” which also referred to Prometheus Unbound. The authors of these articles have not been identified.61 The discrepancy between the reviews of The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound suggests that these two may have been written by different people; regardless, the impression given by the magazine to its readers is that the impact of Prometheus Unbound is sufficient to create a real shift in its attitude to Shelley. Nevertheless, although the review of Prometheus Unbound is very complimentary, most of it, like Hunt’s remarks on Shelley’s poetry in the Examiner, is on a continuum with the negative responses of other reviewers, since the writer does not establish a separate ground from which to defend Shelley. However, as we will see, at one or two moments it finds new terms in implying the existence of a nonpartisan aesthetic space. To a large extent, though, the Gold’s review is the mere antithesis of hostile reviews: it illustrates the way in which the same assumptions underpin both positive and negative judgments of poetic merit. The reviewer begins, “This is one of the most stupendous of those works which the daring and vigorous spirit of modern poetry and thought has created” (RR,C, 629). The almost Shelleyan wording (the poem is created not by the poet but by

142


the “spirit” of the age) is suggestive. According to this reviewer, the poem is “a vast wilderness of beauty” (RR,C, 629). Yet in reading Prometheus Unbound as an allegory of “the peaceful triumph of goodness over power” (RR,C, 629), Gold’s gives a Christianizing reading of the poem; in calling Prometheus, in its later essay on Shelley, “a type of religion oppressed by the united powers of superstition and tyranny” (H, 260), this periodical simply inverts the allegorical reading in the Blackwood’s review. Whereas Blackwood’s sees Jupiter as a symbol for what Shelley thinks are the evils of religion, Gold’s sees Prometheus as an uncorrupted version of religion. The reviewer disagrees only with Shelley’s “attempt to realize in an instant his glorious visions” (RR,C, 630), as if the poem could actually bring about what it depicts and cause harm by doing so too quickly. The hope of effecting immediate change is nowhere expressed in the text of course; perhaps the reviewer, like the Quarterly Review, takes Shelley’s reference in the preface to his passion for reform as a threat. Like other reviewers, the writer for Gold’s assumes that the poem can have a direct effect on his readers: for him, the effect will be good, not bad, as long as it is put off to the distant future.62 Many of the London Magazine’s words of praise represent the flip side of other reviewers’ objections not only to the content of Prometheus Unbound but to its style.63 For example, whereas the Literary Gazette complained of Shelley’s “talent for manufacturing ‘villanous compounds’ ” (RR,C, 525), the London Magazine expresses approval for his “profusion of felicitously compounded epithets” (RR,C, 629). Similarly, whereas the Quarterly complained of Shelley’s inability to visualize “definite forms” (RR,C, 784), the London Magazine reviewer praises the “clear and lucid shapes” of Prometheus Unbound (RR,C, 629). Also, in contrast with other reviewers’ attacks on Shelley’s incoherent metaphors (RR,C, 782) and “harsh and unmusical” rhythm (RR,C, 780), the London Magazine describes Prometheus Unbound as “replete with clear, pure, and majestical imagery, accompanied by a harmony as rich and various as that of the loftiest of our English poets” (RR,C, 630). The London Magazine’s tendency to admire what others reject is typified by its enthusiastic assertion: “We lose sight of persons in principles, and soon feel that all the splendid machinery around us is but the shadow of things unseen” (RR,C, 629).64 The approving claim that “We lose sight of persons in principles,” seems to respond to the depersonalizing impulse of lyrical drama that as we have seen was registered by other reviewers’ objections to Shelley’s figurative language.65 The later essay in


143

Gold’s itself joins in the complaint when it says that Shelley “does not sufficiently embody [his opinions] to render them intelligible” (H, 262). As this ambivalence suggests, readers’ acceptance of excessive personification combined with excessive depersonalization is even less secure than the acceptance of other features of Shelley’s style.66 As I have said, in a sense the Gold’s review is merely the antithesis of hostile reviews in relying on the same assumptions about the connection between poetics and politics; however, at moments it breaks free of those assumptions. In contrast to his allegorical reading, the London Magazine reviewer singles out as beautiful passages that he perceives as apolitical: the implication is that they are apolitical because beautiful, as well as the other way around. In summarizing the poem scene by scene, aided by lengthy extracts from the poem—perfunctorily labeled “tremendous” (RR,C, 631), “intense” (RR,C, 632), and “ravishing” (RR,C, 636)—he approvingly quotes the second, third, and fourth spirit songs from act 1 with the remark: “We give part of their lovely chaunt in preference to the ravings of the Furies, though these last are intensely terrible” (RR,C, 633). Further comments by the same reviewer confirm that this “preference” for the apparently innocuous songs of the spirits over the “ravings” of the Furies (which mention the perversion of Christianity and the failure of the French Revolution) is a predilection for the insistently lyrical rather than the openly partisan. This reviewer refrains from quoting Shelley’s controversial descriptions of the revolutionized world, announcing, “Our readers will probably prefer reposing on the exquisite description given by Prometheus of the cave which he designs for his dwelling, to expatiating on the wide and brilliant prospects which the poet discloses” (RR,C, 637). He clearly reads the emphasis on aesthetic appreciation in Prometheus’s speech on the cave (which he quotes in full) as symbolizing a withdrawal from politics,67 although as we have seen, its account of the connection between the cultivation of the arts and the improvement of humanity insists on the moral function of beauty. In drawing attention to his selective use of quotations, the London Magazine reviewer implies that there are certain passages in the poem that would jeopardize his defensive reading of Shelley. It is because of the existence of these (Satanic) passages that the reviewer is able to see the rest of the poem as apolitical. Whereas the impulse to separate art and politics is not new, the impulse to make beauty and the apolitical mutually defining would seem to take part in a cultural change that is retrospectively identified with Romanticism.

144


I will end by looking at a passage from Prometheus Unbound that was admired by both Blackwood’s and Gold’s London Magazine, the chorus of spirits from act 2, scene 2. Lockhart quotes the first two parts of this chorus, offering it as his main example of the poem’s delightful poetry as opposed to its abominable allegory. The London Magazine reviewer quotes the same chorus, including the third part, with the prefatory comment, “the Spirits of the Wood, in a choral song thus magnificently describe its recesses” (RR,C, 634). One cannot know for certain why the reviewers singled out this passage as “beautiful” (RR,C, 142), but one reason may be that, like Prometheus’s speech on the cave, it can be read as self-referential: if the passage strikes an early-nineteenth-century reader as poetry rather than allegory that may be because it offers an allegorical account of the autonomy of art, with the song of the nightingales in the woods representing the isolation of artistic creation from the outside world. An understanding of art as self-referential is however only one possible component of the new sense of the aesthetic with which I am concerned. Given my argument, moreover, the passage is intriguing because its images of the autonomy of art are intertwined with images of the efficacy of art. The latter images pull together what I have called the idea of change as a dynamic interplay and change as a more radical paradigm shift. The three choruses look forward to Prometheus’s speech on the cave, in linking artistic expression with the poem’s theme of change, while figuring revolutionary agency in terms that recall those of the desolation song. The first two parts read as follows: SEMICHORUS I. OF SPIRITS. The path thro’ which that lovely twain Have past, by cedar, pine and yew, And each dark tree that ever grew, Is curtained out from Heaven’s wide blue; Nor sun, nor moon, nor wind, nor rain, Can pierce its interwoven bowers, Nor aught save when some cloud of dew, Drifted along the earth-creeping breeze Between the trunks of the hoar trees, Hangs each a pearl in the pale flowers Of the green laurel, blown anew; And bends, and then fades silently, One frail and fair anemone: Or when some star of many a one That climbs and wanders thro’ steep night,


145

Has found the cleft thro’ which alone Beams fall from high those depths upon Ere it is borne away, away, By the swift Heavens that cannot stay, It scatters drops of golden light, Like lines of rain that ne’er unite; And the gloom divine is all around; And underneath is the mossy ground. SEMICHORUS II. There the voluptuous nightingales Are awake thro’ all the broad noon-day, When one with bliss or sadness fails— And thro’ the windless ivy-boughs, Sick with sweet love, droops dying away On its mate’s music-panting bosom; Another from the swinging blossom, Watching to catch the languid close Of the last strain, then lifts on high The wings of the weak melody, ’Till some new strain of feeling bear The song, and all the woods are mute; When there is heard thro’ the dim air The rush of wings, and rising there Like many a lake-surrounding flute, Sounds overflow the listener’s brain So sweet, that joy is almost pain. (2.2.1–40)

The first part of the chorus describes a path through a dark wood, lit only by dewdrops in laurel flowers, a solitary anemone, or the light of a single star that “scatters drops of golden light / Like lines of rain that ne’er unite.” It is unclear whether this momentary illumination is necessary for the guidance of “that lovely twain,” Asia and Panthea; the proliferation of images may be entirely superfluous from a narrative point of view.68 The interlude ostensibly describes Asia’s and Panthea’s journey to the cave of Demogorgon, but the “lovely twain” seem to be left behind as the visual images acquire their own impetus, each referring to a seemingly separate event yet connected by the chorus’s sentence structure. The syntax of the first semichorus is characteristic of the mature Shelley: the first main verb, “Is curtained out,” comes in the fourth line, but the sentence is prolonged

146


for another 19 lines, various new main clauses being introduced with paratactic and s and a Miltonic or. Enhancing the impression that the sentence could extend itself indefinitely, the modifications to the darkness at first sound random: “some cloud of dew” recalls “some unimagined change” and Asia’s “some great truth.” The wood can be penetrated neither by “sun nor moon nor wind nor rain” yet the “breeze” that causes the “cloud of dew” to drift emerges as if from nowhere. The causal connection between the dewdrops and the growth of the “frail and fair anemone” is uncertain; “bends” may or may not be a transitive verb. “Some star of many a one” is another image of randomness, yet this star, which eventually casts “beams” through the one possible “cleft” in the leaves, also acts purposefully: it “climbs” as well as “wanders.” The shining of the star onto the path requires a combination of circumstances (the position of the star being lined up with the single “cleft”), so that although the “lines of rain that ne’er unite” is an image of discontinuity, the passage also foregrounds interconnectedness, just as the separate clauses are held only loosely together syntactically, yet are “interwoven” (like the “bowers”) by the repeated rhymes. The self-extending syntax imitates and enacts the dispersal of light, more clauses being tacked on right at the end to emphasize the way in which the images of light serve to accentuate the “gloom divine.” The “pearl”-like dew and the “drops of golden light” have highly positive connotations but the association between the light imagery and beauty or illumination is unsettled by the implication that the darkness is necessary for the song of the nightingales in the second part of the chorus. The first semichorus has described what seems to be both an essential conjunction of circumstances and a merely contingent setting for the “song” that follows.69 If in the first semichorus discontinuity prevails over continuity, in the second one the opposite is initially the case: the death of one nightingale through “bliss or sadness” (as if it does not matter which) does not cause the failure of song since one bird takes over from another automatically. Intensifying this impression, the substitution apparently generates “some new strain of feeling,” a larger force that seems to absorb the songs of particular nightingales, especially since (as in Asia’s avalanche speech) “Till” may be temporal rather than causal. Discontinuity—the raindrops that never meet in a Lucretian swerve—gives way to continuity: the song is kept up regardless of the failure of individual birds. Yet “some new strain of feeling” is also another hint of discontinuity, giving the song a different direction. The swerve, when it happens, involves both


147

the interaction of and the fusion of “one” and “some”: foreshadowing the next stanza, the “wings of the weak melody” take over from the birds themselves and become a collective “rush of wings,” which may belong either to the nightingales or to “the lovely twain” (Asia and Panthea). The “new strain of feeling” also seems to bring into being an unnamed “listener” (“there is heard”). This apparently disembodied listener may line up not only with the fauns who appear in the second half of this scene and comment on the “delicate beauty” of the song, but also with the reader of Prometheus Unbound. The ambiguity over the extent of the involvement in the second semichorus of both this listener and Asia and Panthea leaves open the inclusiveness of the “new strain”: is it the product of the cooperative efforts of the nightingales or does it transcend them? The alternatives tie into the question of whether or not the “song” of semichorus 2 and the “sound” (2.2.48) through which “Demogorgon’s mighty law” (2.2.43) takes effect in the next semichorus are one and the same—the vehicle through which the law is communicated and that becomes indistinguishable from it. To consider how the nightingales’ song can be seen as at once bound up with and distinct from Demogorgon’s law, we need to look at the third part of the chorus (quoted by the London Magazine though not by Blackwood’s): SEMICHORUS I. There those inchanted eddies play Of echoes, music-tongued, which draw, By Demogorgon’s mighty law With melting rapture or sweet awe, All spirits on that secret way; As inland boats are driven to Ocean Down streams made strong with mountain-thaw; And first there comes a gentle sound To those in talk or slumber bound, And wakes the destined soft emotion, Attracts, impels them: those who saw Say from the breathing earth behind There steams a plume-uplifting wind Which drives them on their path, while they Believe their own swift wings and feet The sweet desires within obey: And so they float upon their way, Until still sweet but loud and strong

148


The storm of sound is driven along, Sucked up and hurrying as they fleet Behind its gathering billows meet And to the fatal mountain bear Like clouds amid the yielding air. (2.2.41–63)

The impression that the apparently purposeless song is continuous with the presumably purposeful law is encouraged by the repetition of “There” and by the way in which the third part of the chorus three times echoes “sweet,” picking up on the “sweet love” of the nightingales. Yet many critics have claimed that “Demogorgon’s mighty law” is Necessity and that the third part of the chorus illustrates the triumph of determinism over free will.70 The “law” ultimately “drives” the “destined” to the “fatal mountain”— the home of Demogorgon—while giving its agents the illusion of selfdetermination. Insofar as this reading is valid, however, the passage does not undermine the possibility of willed change, since the “law” itself is a coercive agent.71 That is to say, on one level, this passage, like the address to Necessity in Queen Mab, in ostensibly depicting a stance antithetical to that of Satanic defiance, remains dependent on Satanic logic. Because the “destined”—Asia and Panthea—“Believe their own swift wings and feet / The sweet desires within obey,” they could be viewed as the pawns or victims of a larger impersonal force. To some extent then the passage regresses to a simpler understanding of change. But the semichorus also presents images of collaboration—Demogorgon’s law interacts with the “destined” who are caught up by it—as well as suggesting an unpredictable slippage between action and outcome. The “gentle sound” that actively “wakes the destined” can be seen as merging with them into the “storm of sound,” which is passively “driven.” Alternatively, as in both Asia’s description of the avalanche and Prometheus’s description of the cave, the proliferation of subordinate clauses helps to cast doubt on the orderly temporal progression implied by “first” and “Until.” The “plume-uplifting wind,” which appears to be external to the characters, comes from “behind” them while they are not in front of but “Behind” the “storm of sound.” The lack of punctuation between “destined” and “soft” in the first edition that is quoted by the reviewer helps to blur the line between cooperation and arbitrariness: the “emotion” both “impels them” and momentarily (in the process of reading) replaces “them.” Given the uncertain referent of


149

“those in talk or slumber bound,” the “destined” could point not merely to Asia and Panthea but also to the “best and gentlest” who “wake to find the shadow pain” in the Sixth Spirit’s song; they could even be stand-ins for the select readers of Prometheus Unbound. The interdependence of poetic images and dramatic characters—hinted at by the shared “wings and feet” of the personified desolation and the figures of Asia and Panthea—can extend to an analogy between characters and readers. The way in which readers can be pulled into the spiraling imagery and logic of the passage is suggested by the reference in the semichorus to unidentified witnesses, “those who saw,” and the way in which these select witnesses themselves overlap with the “they” and “them” who are caught up by the seemingly all-encompassing “storm of sound.” At the same time, the connection between “a gentle sound” and “The storm of sound” and their privileged listeners can only be inferred, like the link between the nightingales’ song and Demogorgon’s law, and the assumption that the song and the law are benign forces rather than neutral ones.72 The passage can be read as a poetic celebration of Shelley’s idealist belief in the power of poetry (in the widest sense) to effect change, which signals the vulnerability of that belief through its elusive syntax and imagery. As such it exemplifies the “beautiful idealisms” of Prometheus Unbound. The choruses of spirits thus dramatize the process by which the collective mind of Shelley’s contemporary reviewers undergoes a shift—if not because of, then alongside—the aestheticism of Prometheus Unbound. In singling out this chorus as “beautiful” (RR,C, 142), Shelley’s reviewers were themselves performing a swerve—from their paranoid-style aggressively politicizing way of reading to a more purely aestheticized conception of poetry. The responses of the reviewers that I have explored in this chapter therefore enact the two types of change implied in Shelley’s preface. In the reviewers’ attacks, we have seen resistance to Shelley’s poetic innovations, even while their specific complaints register the strategies by which Shelley tries to redefine readers’ taste: not only the stylistic idiosyncrasies that we now call Shelleyan, but, specifically in the case of Prometheus Unbound, the combination of excessive depersonalization and excessive anthropomorphism that makes the poem neither lyric nor drama. The reviewers’ more positive comments suggest that these features of Prometheus Unbound are appreciated as well as rejected, but their reactions continue to assume that Shelley’s poetry is capable of effecting direct change. We also saw, however, that the reviewers of Prometheus Unbound vacillate between

150


insisting that beautiful language is an agent of evil (or good) and holding it up as a more purely aesthetic object of admiration. The shift towards the opening up of a separate aesthetic space is one that Shelley himself would neither have predicted nor desired—appropriately enough given his refusal to dictate change. On the other hand it is a highly fitting manifestation of the “going out of our own nature” with which Shelley in the Defence associates aesthetic appreciation. My chapter on Adonais and its posthumous reception will discuss a more complex, less generalizable instance of such a “going out.” Eventually the shaping of a new Romantic taste will combine with the notion that art can be separated from politics and morality to form Matthew Arnold’s image of Shelley as a “beautiful and ineffectual angel.” In a later context, that is to say, the preference for the apparently apolitical would not be political, except insofar as it signified a turning away from politics altogether. But within the context in which Shelley published Prometheus Unbound, a move from partisan taste to aesthetic appreciation is reforming, a freeing of the collective mind from paranoia. Given the initial inflexibility of the reviewers’ taste, the very movement is significant. To insist on a causal connection between the beauty of Shelley’s poem (or any particular part of it) and this cultural transition would be to fall back into the terms of the reviewers. But in their particular historical moment, the reviewers, while bound into a collective voice by their impulse to resist reformation, at the same time participate with Shelley’s poem in “some unimagined change.”

4

The Elegiac Reception o f Ad o n a i s

His fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity! —Adonais, ll. 8–9

I. Forms of Consolation According to a “theory” that Shelley once proposed to Thomas Love Peacock, “in everything any man ever wrote, . . . is contained, as it were, an allegorical idea of his own future life, as the acorn contains the oak” (L, 2:192). Shelley’s tongue-in-cheek “theory” suggests a counterintuitive understanding of the link between a writer’s work and his subsequent history. Yet some of Shelley’s early readers did draw such connections, not between this man’s writings in general and his future life but between his poetry, particularly Adonais, written and published in 1821, and his death the following year. In focusing on a single biographical event—Shelley’s death by drowning off the coast of Italy—these commentators tended to find the poetry directly prophetic rather than containing a presumably more oblique “allegorical idea,” but we will see that from their retrospective standpoint the idea of prophecy also helped them to find the poet’s death pleasingly appropriate. This shared sense of meaningfulness played an important part in the process whereby, after Shelley’s death, his friends succeeded in changing his public image as a devil—created by hostile reviewers—into that of a beautiful, unearthly, and eventually ineffectual angel. In this chapter I will examine ways in which sympathetic responses to Adonais overlapped with reactions to its author’s death. I will show 151

152


that Shelley’s elegy on John Keats does contain an “allegorical idea” of his “own future life” not so much in the sense of his earthly fate as in the sense of his immediate afterlife—the comments on his fate that laid the foundations of his posthumous fame. These responses by the poet’s friends to the intertwining texts of the dead Shelley and Adonais constitute a united assertion of poetic taste that is on one level merely a reaction against the reviewers’ demonizing of Shelley. On another level, however, such responses transcend the polar opposition of devil versus angel by reproducing the poem’s own complicated identification with the beautiful. Reflecting in the summer of 1822 on her husband’s recent death, Mary Shelley claimed in a letter, “Adonais is not Keats’s it is his own elegy” (MWSL, 1:249). Shelley’s elegy can be “his own” as well as Keats’s because part of the consolation offered by Shelley’s elegy is an idealizing revision of Keats cast in Shelley’s own image. Insofar as Mary Shelley and the other members of the Shelley circle interpret Shelley in terms of his image of Keats, they remain caught within the aggressively partisan and relentlessly individualizing rhetoric of the reviewers. However, Shelley’s friends also go beyond the task of restoring the poet’s damaged reputation, leaving behind their preoccupation with the beauty and worth of an individual poet to collaborate on a new work of art that itself takes on an independent life. In making this argument, I will show that the reception of Shelley’s “own elegy” participates in the poem’s genre. The various public responses to Adonais and Shelley’s death by members of the Shelley circle recapitulate the consolatory strategies of Shelley’s elegy, which at once insist on the immortality of a beautiful dead poet, and imagine him being assimilated into a more all-encompassing beauty. In doing so, the posthumous reactions to Adonais constitute both a historically specific and a genre-influenced manifestation of Shelley’s idealism. Before analyzing those reactions, I will take a quick look at the few contemporary reviews of Adonais, to suggest how an argument similar to that of my previous chapter could be made concerning the effects of the interaction between the poem and the initial public responses to it. After discussing Adonais itself in term of the tradition of elegy, the rest of this chapter will turn to the sympathetic posthumous reception of Shelley’s poem. We will see that the dialogue between Adonais and Shelley’s mourners fleetingly actualizes the poem’s own complex version of transcendence in a way that is a function of genre as well as a reaction to the particular circumstances of Shelley’s death. Whereas in my account of Prometheus Unbound I addressed the

T h e El e g i a c Re c e p t i o n o f Ad o n a i s

153

“reforming” of taste and the coming to life of Shelley’s aesthetic idealism as two distinct events, in the case of the posthumous reception of Adonais they cannot be so easily disentangled, a circumstance that complicates without ultimately jeopardizing the recovery of the poem’s idealism. Shelley himself made a sweeping aesthetic judgment about his elegy, declaring, “I know what to think of Adonais, but what to think of those who confound it with the many bad poems of the day, I know not” (L, 2:406). With this assertion Shelley preempts posterity’s opinion of Adonais, as well as contradicting the poem in expecting contemporary reviewers to appreciate poetic merit. (However, as my discussions of Queen Mab and Prometheus Unbound showed, the reviewers did not always confuse Shelley’s works with what he called “the many bad poems of the day.”) Shelley’s confident “I know what to think” implies a fantasy of creating his own fame, but on other occasions he acknowledged that making a bid for fame involves putting oneself in the hands of others: “The decision of the cause whether or no I am a poet is removed from the present time to the hour when our posterity shall assemble: but the court is a very severe one, & I fear that the verdict will be guilty death” (L, 2:310).1 Adonais itself depicts the process whereby an antagonistic relationship between reviewers and poets is left behind by aesthetic appreciation, in the form of poetic fame, which is ambivalently consigned to a transcendent realm, beyond the specificities of actual reception. Shelley’s idealism in this case is explicitly aesthetic rather than ethical: literalizing the shift to the aesthetic that I discussed in the previous chapter, the poem’s commitment to the possibility of transcendence rests not so much on a belief in the “Love, all Love” celebrated by Prometheus Unbound (4:369) as on an eternal “loveliness” (l. 379)2 both personal and impersonal. But although Adonais does not present itself, like Prometheus Unbound, as the product of Shelley’s “passion for reforming the world,” it can be seen as a further example of the “beautiful idealisms of moral excellence” with which Shelley tries to refine the taste (and therefore the morals) of his readers. Some critics contend that Shelley turns away from politics and the world in his final poems. Shelley’s letters give ample evidence that by 1821 he was becoming discouraged by his apparent inability to find an audience, the hostile public reception of his poems, and the capacity of political tyranny to sustain itself, as seen in continuing abuses of power by the Tory government.3 Shelley’s sense of neglect and persecution was partly unjustified, although as we saw in my second chapter, in 1821 he was

154


widely reviled due to the pirate publication of Queen Mab. Shelley wrote to Peacock in August 1821, “I write nothing, and probably shall write no more. It offends me to see my name classed among those who have no name. If I cannot be something better, I had rather be nothing, and the accursed cause to the downfall of which I dedicated what powers I may have had—flourishes like a cedar and covers England with its boughs” (L, 2:331). Shelley also mentioned using poetic composition as a means of escape from “the stormy mist of sensations which are my habitual place of abode” (L, 2:296). Escapist or not, once published, needless to say Shelley’s poems could not evade real readers. In letters to Ollier, Shelley inquired more than once about the public reception of Adonais, showing that he was interested in what he called the “effect produced” (L, 2:372) by the poem. The first two of the three different levels of response that we saw in the reception of Prometheus Unbound can readily be identified in the dialogue between Adonais and its early reviewers. First, Adonais positions itself squarely within the Satanic scenario, in the sense that it is partly a violent attack on the reviewers, specifically the Tory reviewers, and even more specifically Robert Southey.4 Both its use of exaggeration—in its claim that the reviewers killed Keats—and its reliance on denunciation are typical of paranoid rhetoric (as well as typical of the genre of elegy).5 Adonais also calculatingly sets out to provoke the reviewers, a strategy that certainly succeeded, although the poem was not widely reviewed.6 The two major reviews of Adonais, in the Literary Gazette and Blackwood’s, were both wholly negative, displaying knee-jerk paranoia. As evidence of Shelley’s “ferocious blasphemy” (RR,C, 532), they both quoted his reference to “the envious wrath of man or God” (l. 42) and the line from the self-portrait linking together the names of Cain and Christ.7 Echoing the preoccupation with contagion in its review of Queen Mab, the Literary Gazette added, “We are scarcely satisfied that even to quote such passages may not be criminal” (RR,C, 532). Both periodicals ridiculed the idea of Keats being “slaughtered by a criticism” (RR,C, 148), pointing out that “If Criticism killed the disciples of that school, Shelley would not have been alive to write an Elegy on another” (RR,C, 532).8 This intransigent attitude to Shelley was actually a new departure for Blackwood’s: the Blackwood’s article was by George Croly—to whose poem Paris in 1815 (1817) Shelley refers pejoratively in the preface to Adonais—instead of John Gibson Lockhart, whose relatively supportive reviews of Shelley’s earlier poetry I have discussed in Chapters 1 and 3.


155

Despite their hostile attitude, however, both Blackwood’s and the Literary Gazette showed the same reluctant interest in stylistic innovation that we saw in the second level of reaction to Prometheus Unbound, implicitly responding to Shelley’s attempt to create the taste by which his poetry is to be enjoyed. Pronouncing the language of Adonais to be “contemptible” (RR,C, 532) and “unintelligible” (RR,C, 148), the reviewers both nevertheless lingered over the stylistic peculiarities of the poem and, instead of summarizing its content, offered rather intriguing selections of its various kinds of “Nonsense” (RR,C, 532) and “Absurdity” (RR,C, 150).9 The Blackwood’s writer, like several reviewers of Prometheus Unbound, objected to Shelley’s extravagant use of anthropomorphism, claiming that Shelley “extracts tears from every thing, and makes moss and mud hold regular conversations with him. ‘A goosepye talks,’—it does more, it thinks, and has its peculiar sensibilities,—it smiles and weeps, raves to the stars, and is a listener to the western wind, as fond as the author himself ” (RR,C, 148). This reviewer went on to point out that “Death . . . is alternately a person, a thing, nothing, &c” (RR,C, 151), thus registering the unsettling potential of Shelley’s innovative use of personification in Adonais.10 He did not attach that potential, however, to the poeticized figures of Keats and Shelley, who, dead or alive, are nothing more than irresistible targets for personal attack.11 Showing that their taste remains strictly partisan, the Blackwood’s and Literary Gazette reviews both denied Adonais any literary merit whatsoever. By contrast—and this is the only evidence in the reviews of a third level of response—the only other periodical that reviewed Adonais in the year of its publication, the Literary Chronicle, gave a possible hint of the shift to a nonpartisan aesthetic appreciation that we saw in certain reviews of Prometheus Unbound. This periodical quoted most of the poem without comment, announcing: “Of the beauty of Mr. Shelley’s elegy we shall not speak; to every poetic mind its transcendant merits must be apparent” (RR,C, 511). However, this enthusiastic remark may merely reflect the periodical’s liberal politics, rather than responding—as Shelley’s friends would—to the poem’s genuinely transcendentalizing claims. Before I turn to the poem itself and its genre, I will very briefly readdress the vexed issue of Shelley’s idealism, in order to illuminate what I have just called the genuinely transcendentalizing claims of Adonais. The image in Shelley’s letter to Peacock (quoted earlier) of the acorn as somehow containing “an allegorical idea” of the oak anticipates this passage in Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, written two months before Adonais: “All high

156


poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed” (500). The notion of endlessly multiplying veils lines up with the “divine effluence” of the “ever overflowing” fountain with which Shelley equates a “great Poem” (500). It has therefore been taken as evidence of Shelley’s skepticism, his acknowledgment that what he calls the “inmost naked beauty of the meaning” may be forever inaccessible.12 As I mentioned in my introduction, many critics see Shelley’s poetry as skeptical—regretfully or otherwise—about the possibility of achieving or even representing transcendence. But the image of ever-receding veils is only half the story. A conception of poetry as inexhaustibly proliferating permutations of meaning coexists in the Defence with a conception of a poem as “the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth” (485). As I also mentioned in my introduction, recent critics have pointed out that the Defence maintains at least two conflicting arguments simultaneously: it is at once relativistic and essentializing. Shelley’s phrase “allegorical idea” then can be seen to register the clash between, in Shelleyan terms, “veil after veil,” and the “eternal truth.” The phrase encapsulates the tension between allegory in the poststructuralist sense of the unstable proliferation of meanings—what Paul de Man calls a “rhetoric of temporality”—and idealism in the sense of belief in a transcendental absolute. Although, as my readings of certain passages in the poem will suggest, the confrontation between the two remains unresolved in Adonais, a deconstructive interpretation would of course see the former prevailing over the latter. What follows is not a full-scale assault on deconstructive or skeptical (as opposed to idealist) readings of Adonais. Here, as in Chapter 3, I concede that Shelley’s expressions of idealism are highly vulnerable to deconstruction, just as they invite new historicist ideology critique.13 However, as mentioned earlier, my study revises de Man’s notion of allegory in stressing the effects of the vagaries of reception. While reception may disfigure a writer’s meaning, it can also momentarily realize a text’s idealism. The present chapter extends the de Manian notion of allegory to encompass what might be termed the allegorical unfolding of generic convention. In the case of Adonais, the temporal proximity between the publication of the poem and its author’s death provided the occasion for its genre to be perpetuated by the poem’s sympathetic early readers. My central claim in this chapter is that the comments of these readers, in proliferating allegorically through an unrepeatable set


157

of circumstances, approximate to the “eternal truth” of transcendence as presented by Adonais. At this point I will consider a formalist issue—how Adonais both conforms to and reworks its genre—before showing, in the second and third sections of this chapter, how the sympathetic reception of Adonais replicates the elegiac maneuvers of the poem both before and after Shelley’s death. Adonais follows elegiac convention in offering a narrative of loss and consolation and in making an abrupt swerve from one to the other, so that whereas Prometheus Unbound needs an alternative conception of agency— symbolized by Demogorgon—in order to dramatize the evasion of Satanic thinking, Adonais seems able to free itself from its adversarial stance towards the reviewer simply by virtue of its genre.14 The question remains however whether the forms of consolation introduced in the last third of the poem can avoid being tainted with Satanic rhetoric.15 As far as more earthly forms of consolation are concerned, I have already mentioned that Shelley rewrites Keats in his own image. By affirming the immortality of this beautiful Shelleyan figure, Adonais engages in the standard consolatory strategy of insisting on the fame of the dead poet. This strategy involves a highly traditional interplay between self-elevation and self-effacement, which is built into the pastoral elegy as inherited by Shelley. Adonais follows elegiac convention in aggrandizing both the mourner and the mourned at each other’s expense. The historical origin of the genre in the fiction of a singing contest between shepherds suggests that the relationship between the elegist and the elegized is as much one of competition as of sympathy. In commemorating a dead poet, the elegiac speaker implicitly advances that poet’s claims to merit over his own, even if—or especially if—that poet is one like Edward King of Lycidas who has died before fulfilling his potential. Yet the elegiac speaker draws attention to his own survival and his own merits in the very act of glorifying his fellow poet. Similarly, in Adonais, in a manner that is authorized by the tradition of elegy, Shelley kills off the younger poet all over again in the act of resurrecting him, rendering him more dead, as it were, than before.16 In doing so he “consumes” Keats, acquiring strength from his weakness.17 Side by side with its familiar insistence on the fame of the dead poet, Adonais offers a more radical transcendent form of consolation. In the elegy as inherited by Shelley, consolation can take various earthly forms: the revival of nature, the blunting of grief through the passage of time, and the therapeutic participation in funeral rites. In Milton’s Lycidas, Shelley’s

158


chief English model of the pastoral elegy, all these secular forms of solace are overshadowed—at least on the surface—by the redemptive power of “him that walk’d the waves” (l. 173).18 Adonais of course eschews this particular route to redemption. Earthly versions of consolation would seem to fall far short of the apotheosis of classical elegy or the Christian belief in an individual afterlife invoked by Renaissance elegy. One might therefore expect Adonais to focus on the revival of mourners, as even Lycidas does to some extent: “To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new” (l. 194). But instead Adonais rewrites and extends the elegiac tradition by offering as consolation an idealized conception of eternal postmortal existence, identified with a seemingly Platonic or neoplatonic “One”: “The One remains, the many change and pass” (l. 460). It dwells on distorted contemporary judgments of poetic merit (those of reviewers) only to repudiate them, putting the recognition of poetic achievement on what appears to be a totally different plane from that of actual writers and readers, the plane of eternity as opposed to time. The transcendental absolute that is the One is itself a beautiful idealism that casts beauty into oblivion.19 Twentieth-century critics disagree over whether the poem’s apparent commitment to belief in a transcendental absolute is to be taken at face value. The conflicts of idealism versus allegory and idealism versus history are played out in recent critical discussions of the “One.” Is it to be read literally—and if so, what happens to Shelley’s skepticism?—or is it merely figurative? (From a skeptical standpoint, the distinction itself would be a false one.) In Shelley’s Process, Jerrold Hogle lists those critics who “propose a unity outside process as the true origin and destination of the fallen poet” (389 n. 41). One of the most influential critics in this camp is Earl Wasserman, in Shelley: A Critical Reading.20 More recently, deconstructive readings of Adonais have struggled to challenge what looks like Shelley’s aesthetic idealism, finding the essentialized claims of the poem a stumbling block but not an insuperable obstacle.21 In contrast with those who take a formalist approach to the poem, historicist critics, arguing for a continuity between what they see as the reformist, millennial Shelley of the earlier poems, up to and including Prometheus Unbound, and the seemingly apocalyptic Shelley of Adonais, dismiss the One as a “poetically useful fiction.”22 Granting the same premise, some twentiethcentury critics equate the One with the elegy’s more self-conscious gestures of consolation.23 These include the fact that the composing of the poem can be seen as a form of solace and, more importantly, the supposition


159

that the poem itself will function as a memorial in conferring fame on the mourned, and by extension create fame for the mourner. In other words, the immortality that is identified with the One is seen as an image for a conventional form of consolation: the fame that a poet acquires from his works.24 The problem with this reading is that the kind of afterlife envisaged by the poem offers an ambiguous consolation because the One does not necessarily involve individual immortality. Several critics have pointed out that Adonais contradictorily celebrates fame as both a personal and an impersonal phenomenon: it imagines the survival of Keats and other poets such as Milton while also celebrating the poetic fame of those “whose names on Earth are dark / But whose transmitted effluence cannot die” (ll. 406–7).25 The “enduring dead” (l. 336) include Chatterton, Sidney, and Lucan, but they also include poets who have “perished” (l. 41) in the sense of not acquiring fame. Apparently a poet can cheat death without achieving any renown on earth. Whereas Lycidas distinguishes between the earthly fame that is “That last infirmity of Noble mind” (l. 71) and individual “fame in Heav’n” (l. 84), Shelley’s version of transcendent fame leaves behind the individual as well as everything else, including poetry. Ironically, although fame supposedly arises from the appreciation of poetic merit, the fame celebrated by Adonais may involve the disappearance of both poet and poem—perhaps the logical conclusion of Shelley’s idea in the Defence of “a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful.” Yet the One itself is potentially fissured: It is not clear whether the “burning fountain” (l. 339) to which Adonais returns and the “loveliness” of which he is “a portion” (l. 379) are to be equated with the One. Moreover, the poem contrives to give the impression that Keats lives on as an individual in a postmortal afterlife: “The soul of Adonais, like a star, / Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are” (ll. 494–95). The poets “whose names on Earth are dark” have retained enough individuality to be described as “robed in dazzling immortality” (l. 409), and they point to a “kingless sphere” (l. 411) reserved for Adonais: “Assume thy winged throne, thou Vesper of our throng!” (l. 414). The phrase “the one Spirit’s plastic stress” (l. 381) pulls together the notion of a depersonalized immortality and the proclaimed survival of an individual “Spirit.” Shelley’s own paradoxical notion of an “immortality of oblivion”26—though it is exactly what the earthbound Shelley does not want—points to the way in which the idealism of the poem encompasses both individual immortality

160


and eternal, transcendent, self-obliterating immortality, making such a state an end to be feared as well as desired. The first of these forms of immortality may or may not be equated with poetic fame (in which case it would be the product of collective aesthetic appreciation by living survivors), but the second threatens to make fame meaningless. Following convention, then, Adonais shows a traditional infatuation with the dead poet and an equally conventional repudiation of what Shelley in a letter to Hunt called “self —that burr that will stick to one” (L, 2:108– 9). The poem also involves a concern with the survival of the individual poet, whether through fame or in an afterlife. At the same time, and less conventionally, Adonais consoles through mingling the at once selfaggrandizing and self-effacing claim that the dead poet lives on in another world with the partially contrasting claim that he has been absorbed into the One. I will show that the treatment of the dead Shelley by members of his circle recapitulates both these sets of consolatory maneuvers. The conventional dynamic whereby “self ” is at once asserted and denied lines up with both the poem’s and its sympathetic readers’ dependence on the terms of hostile reviewers, their confinement by Satanic rhetoric. Shelley’s friends also collaborate on their own revisionary elegiac narrative, which reproduces the poem’s own slippages between self-serving claims of individual survival and a radical emptying out of the poet. Although the angelic Shelley would appear to be scripted in advance, the Shelley circle’s quasi-literary treatment of the angel is not quite so overdetermined. Their memorials do not repeat the poet’s transcendentalizing vocabulary, but in tracing the way in which their tributes combine to offer a unique form of consolation, we can catch them in the paradox of a historically specific act of transcendence.

II. “A Poetical Character” The Shelley circle (as distinct from the Pisan circle of 1821–1822) was retrospectively invented after Shelley’s death, through the joint efforts by Leigh Hunt, Mary Shelley, Thomas Medwin, and Edward John Trelawny, to capitalize on a shared property: the personal knowledge of Shelley, especially Shelley in his later years.27 According to Trelawny, “The fine spirit that had animated and held us together was gone! Left to our own devices, we degenerated apace.”28 The Shelley circle may have “degenerated,” but it was also “animated” and “held . . . together” as much by Shelley’s absence


161

as by his presence. Shelley’s friends degenerated in the sense that they squabbled over his bodily remains and over each other’s accounts of the man and his death. But on a simple level at the same time the circle itself can be seen as a phenomenon that is more powerful (and enduring) than the sum of the individuals who made it up.29 The separate responses of these readers follow a remarkably unanimous agenda considering that the Shelley circle was composed of some extremely egotistical people, who promoted themselves in the act of investing in their dead friend. I suggest that this unanimity is the result of a shared impulse to elegize Shelley, and that both the friends’ self-abnegation and their self-promotion are authorized by their unconscious choice of genre. Collapsing the distinction between Shelley and the elegiac speaker of Adonais, their accounts of the poem focus on passages that they find to be biographical: Shelley’s self-portrait, the speaker’s curse on the unnamed reviewer who supposedly killed Keats, and the concluding stanzas in which the speaker describes his “spirit’s bark” being “driven” (l. 488) far from the shore.30 As mentioned earlier, Shelley’s own self-characterization in Adonais contributed to the version of the dead poet created by his friends. In this section and the following one, I will be focusing on the ways in which Shelley’s friends attempt to console themselves and their readers not only by turning Shelley into an angel but by elaborating creatively on the fitting circumstances of his death (in the case of Hunt, even before the death occurs). These two distinct but interwoven fictions took on their own momentum, prescribing the terms of a fame that eventually became independent of the circumstances that produced it. The development of a momentum independent of the descriptions of mourning that provided its impetus is itself in line with elegiac convention. The terms of the sympathetic posthumous reception of Shelley and Adonais were established in Leigh Hunt’s review of the poem, even though the review appeared in Hunt’s Examiner on the day before Shelley’s death. (By this time Hunt himself had gone to Italy, in order to collaborate on The Liberal with Shelley and Byron.) I will look in some detail at Hunt’s article, so as to anchor my discussion of the posthumous reception of Adonais in the final section. This enthusiastic review of Adonais is typical of Hunt’s articles on Shelley in that, setting out to defend Shelley against the negative responses of establishment periodicals, especially the Quarterly Review (as his frequent references to it attest), Hunt accepts their premises. While hostile reviewers exploit the events of Shelley’s life to stigmatize

162


both the poet and his poetry as fiendish, Hunt, like other members of the Shelley circle, uses his personal knowledge of his friend to vindicate the poetry and the man. This practice of biographical evaluation shares the reviewers’ impulse to read Shelley the man in terms of the style of his poetry.31 But whereas the reviewers see Shelley as a dangerous madman because his language is allegedly nonsensical, Hunt initiates a process of reinterpreting the reviewers’ stylistic complaints in positive rather than negative terms that serve to confirm the partisan impulse behind the poet’s stylistic experiments. Yet I will argue that in beginning the work of mourning and its accompanying search for consolation, Hunt’s blurring of the boundaries between poet and poem slightly circumvents to some extent the assumptions underlying the terms of his political opponents. I will also use Hunt’s quotations as an opportunity to examine certain key passages in the poem, including Shelley’s self-portrait, in which one can find a hint of the poem’s own resistance to the reviewers’ assumptions. In sharing the presuppositions of those who deny Shelley’s poetic merits, Hunt’s introductory remarks on Adonais partake of the conventional power dynamics of an elegiac stance. Hunt’s defense of his friend’s work exerts control over Shelley by offering modified praise, in line with the move whereby the elegiac poet places in perspective the work of his successor. Hunt immediately concedes that Adonais is “not a poem calculated to be popular” (H, 298). Apologizing for Shelley, Hunt aggrandizes himself, much as Shelley exalts himself at Keats’s expense by suggesting that he published his work prematurely: “Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men / Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart / Dare the unpastured dragon in his den?” (ll. 236–38).32 Explaining why the poem will appeal only to “the few,” Hunt states that “Adonais, in short, is such an elegy as poet might be expected to write upon poet” (H, 298). In making this claim, Hunt seems to have in mind both Shelley’s knowledge of the elegiac tradition—which he takes for granted33—and the esoteric and innovative nature of his style. Hunt’s discussion of Shelley’s style typifies the way in which the terms of his review are dictated by those of less sympathetic reviewers, whose attacks on Shelley had connected his stylistic idiosyncrasies with the alleged perversity of his political views. By praising the “abstract and subtle” qualities of Adonais (H, 298), Hunt grants what detractors of Shelley’s poetry would call its lack of human interest. That lack of human interest will eventually be projected back onto Shelley the person.


163

Elaborating upon Shelley’s style, Hunt asserts that his friend, “in the stanza of the most poetical of poets, Spenser, has brought his own genius, in all its etherial beauty, to lead a pomp of Loves, Graces, and Intelligences, in honour of the departed” (H, 298). The idea of Shelley’s “etherial beauty” marks a new and influential step in Hunt’s ongoing partisan effort to counter the insults of Tory reviewers by substituting an angel for a devil, seeing Shelley’s “genius” in terms of an innocuous reading of his distinctive style. Ironically it applies to Shelley the kind of description with which in the poem he both identifies with and distances himself from Keats. The preface to Adonais claims that “The genius of the lamented person to whose memory I have dedicated these unworthy verses, was not less delicate and fragile than it was beautiful; and where cankerworms abound, what wonder if it’s [sic ] young flower was blighted in the bud?” (p. 4).34 The wording of this sentence distinguishes between Keats the person and Keats the genius, yet it also implies that the young Keats himself was as vulnerable as his poetic ability. Early in the poem Adonais is referred to as a “pale flower” (l. 48) and a “broken lily” (l. 54), images that at once disempower Keats by etherealizing him and foreshadow Shelley’s own characterization in his self-portrait, turning Keats into an extension of Shelley’s own self-representations. In the course of collaborating with his fellow reviewers and with Shelley’s own partisan gestures, Hunt draws attention to the extent to which the poem itself relies on the tactics of Shelley’s political opponents, especially those of Southey. Southey had not written the Quarterly Review’s attacks on Keats and Shelley himself as Shelley mistakenly believed, but as we saw in my first chapter the Tory spokesman’s Quarterly articles on politics employ the kind of vituperative rhetoric that is echoed rather than challenged or circumvented by Shelley’s denunciation of the anonymous reviewer whose attack on Endymion purportedly sent Keats to an early grave. The story of Keats’s death—of which Shelley was the chief publicist, if not the inventor—literalizes the reviewers’ fantasy of silencing an objectionable writer by attacking him.35 The section of the poem attacking the reviewer is in keeping with the tradition of pastoral elegy in that it broadcasts the poet’s political views in the midst of the seemingly apolitical act of expressing grief. It corresponds to the topical section of Lycidas in which Milton attacks the corrupt clergy of his day. The resort to cursing is also a standard elegiac move.36 Nevertheless, Shelley’s attack on the reviewer seems personally motivated as well as thoroughly generic.37 The myth that

164


Keats was killed by an article in the Quarterly Review enables Shelley to project onto the younger poet his own sense of persecution at the hands of the reviewers.38 Instead of questioning this strategy of Shelley’s, Hunt sanctions it by devoting some of his article to jibes at the Quarterly Review; he also displays a preoccupation with those passages of Adonais and its preface that condemn the reviewers. Hunt’s impulse to express hostility towards the killer of the mourned—even though Shelley is not yet dead— replicates Shelley’s own elegiac maneuver. Moreover, although Hunt is the only member of the Shelley circle whose response to Adonais explicitly discusses its genre, he assumes that the attack on the reviewer is to be read in biographical rather than generic terms, and thus replicates the reviewers’ assumption that the poet’s moral stance is identical with the man’s. Hunt draws attention to his own—and apparently Shelley’s—acceptance of the reviewers’ rhetoric when, in the course of a sarcastic harangue against the Quarterly Review, he dwells on the stanza containing the curse on the murdering reviewer: Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame! Live! fear no heavier chastisement from me, Thou noteless blot on a remembered name! But be thyself, and know thyself to be! (ll. 325–28)

This curse makes Adonais seem regressive in comparison with Prometheus Unbound, which dramatizes how the individual who curses (Prometheus) becomes dependent on the object of the curse (Jupiter). The paradox whereby the reviewer is described as a “noteless blot on a remembered name” indicates that in attempting to confer fame on Keats, the poem may also be memorializing his alleged destroyer.39 Is the poem unable to break past this disabling identification with a figure of impotence? That this threatens to be the case is implied in another stanza quoted approvingly by Hunt. Relying on a swerve that is characteristic of the pastoral elegy, it constitutes the poem’s turning point in the transition from loss to consolation: Nor let us weep that our delight is fled Far from these carrion kites that scream below; He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead; Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now.


165

Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the Eternal, which must glow Through time and change, unquenchably the same, While thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame. (ll. 334–42)

This stanza shows how the speaker’s rhetoric threatens to trap him within the terms used by Shelley’s political opponents, who, as we have seen, routinely exploited Miltonic imagery to characterize supporters of the government as good and reformers as evil. The line, “Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now,” which emphasizes the distance between the reviewer and Keats, is adapted from a passage in Paradise Lost applying to Satan. This image of Satanic defiance had appeared in Shelley’s letter to William Gifford protesting about the Quarterly’s attack on Keats; the image is used to underline Shelley’s own invulnerability to attack.40 The letter claims that “in respect to the writer” of the Quarterly’s review of The Revolt of Islam, “ ‘I am there sitting where he durst not soar—’ ” (L, 2:251). The Eternal is absolutely opposed to the reviewer and the tyranny he represents, yet at this point the text itself (like Shelley’s letter to Gifford) continues to rely on Satanic or individualist rhetoric.41 The dependence is underscored by a verbal echo: Adonais is said to be free “From the contagion of the world’s slow stain” (l. 356), but the very metaphor used begs the question, especially since the speaker later claims that “Life . . . Stains the white radiance of Eternity” (ll. 462–63, emphasis added).42 Nevertheless, the stanza quoted above complicates its distinction between the reviewer’s insistence on the autonomy of the self and the speaker’s allegiance to the all-encompassing “Eternal.” The “Eternal” incorporates the self rather than being defined against it. Here Keats “wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead” (l. 336, emphasis added). “Wakes or sleeps” may imply that it does not matter which, or it may indicate uncertainty as to whether Keats has preserved an identity of his own upon joining the One. Moreover, the One is elsewhere the origin and destination of all “Earth’s shadows” (l. 461), but in this stanza it is paradoxically selective as to whom it lets back in: “the pure spirit shall flow / Back to the burning fountain whence it came” (ll. 338–39), while the murderer of Adonais is clearly excluded. In addition, although Keats’s treatment by the “carrion kites” is the stanza’s starting point, the posthumous reception of his poetry is elided. “He” becomes

166


“it,” which allows the speaker to evade the question of whether Keats’s poetry survives in conjunction with his “pure spirit.” These discrepancies reflect the seepage within Adonais between individual earthly fame and transcendent immortality. That is to say, in vacillating on the question of whether or not mere earthly fame is necessary for survival beyond death, Adonais accomplishes a sleight-of-hand whereby individual poetic fame— which lasts only as long as there are readers—is conflated with transcendent poetic immortality (an apparent oxymoron), and the consolation promised by one is transferred to the other.43 Similar to the way in which the poem succeeds in moving beyond its dependence on the reviewers, Hunt’s article in part bypasses their denunciatory and individualist rhetoric. When Hunt turns to a discussion of the distinction between the personal and the generic, he shows a different sense of what Shelley called “self.” Recognizing that Shelley’s decision to write a pastoral elegy might be seen as eccentric, Hunt preemptively defends Shelley’s choice of genre: “Nor is the elegy to be considered less sincere, because it is full of poetical abstractions” (H, 298). Quoting Samuel Johnson’s well-known attack on Lycidas, “Where there is leisure for fiction, there is little grief ” (H, 299), Hunt denies the incompatibility of genuine emotion and poetic artifice. He thus anticipates a central concern of twentieth-century discussions of pastoral elegy: the relationship between the spontaneous and the conventional. However, whereas later critics argue that artifice itself can be seen as sincere in that elegies make personal statements through their very use of shared forms,44 Hunt refuses to grant the artificiality of artifice, asserting that “A poet’s world is as real to him as the more palpable one to people in general” (H, 299). According to Hunt, “a truly poetical habit of mind” takes pastoral conventions “literally” (H, 299). A poet, that is to say, rather than making real things fictional, takes fictions “literally,” living them as if they were “real.” On these grounds, Hunt justifies the traditional elegiac exploitation of the pathetic fallacy, since according to him, to the pastoral elegist, flowers really do “hang their heads” (H, 299). By emphasizing the power of the “real” over the fictional, Hunt actually suggests the poet’s absorption in his own fiction. After claiming that poetic devices are literal to a poet’s imagination, Hunt gives his argument another twist: “Milton perhaps overdid the matter a little when he personified the poetical enjoyments of his friend and himself under the character of actual shepherds. Mr. Shelley is the more natural in this respect, inasmuch as he is entirely abstract and imaginative, and


167

recalls his lamented acquaintance to mind in no other shape than one strictly poetical” (H, 299). In personifying himself and Edward King, the ostensible subject of Lycidas, as “actual shepherds,” Milton goes too far: the intrusion of reality—or, rather, the poetic fiction of a reality—interferes with the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief. Shelley, by contrast, is paradoxically “more natural” in being “entirely abstract and imaginative”; Keats is not represented as real, but in a “shape . . . strictly poetical.” The statement seems to be another attempt to defend Shelley from charges that his work suffers from a lack of human interest, but it also more intriguingly contends that Shelley, instead of transforming nature into poetry, makes a purely poetic realm “natural.” Shelley’s revision of the genre, in other words, naturally makes it more natural by making it more artificial. The ability of true poets to “live” in a higher “sphere” is, to Hunt, “a principle in nature.” The “etherial beauty” of Shelley’s “genius” of course belongs in that sphere. In recognizing the formal qualities of Adonais—its reworking of an ancient genre—and simultaneously drawing on his own experience as a mutual friend of Shelley and Keats, Hunt insists on distinguishing between the generic and the biographical while at the same time offering a reading that is both generic and biographical. Hunt’s configuration of the relationship between Shelley and Keats—it was “poetical” rather than “personal”—implies an acceptance of the way in which Shelley rewrites Keats in his own “abstract and imaginative” image. Hunt even provides information of his own to validate Shelley’s apparent absence of interest in Keats as a person, claiming that “it happens, singularly enough, that the few hours which he [Keats] and Mr. Shelley passed together were almost entirely of a poetical character” (H, 299). That is to say, he provides a historical explanation for what could be seen as a formal maneuver, reinterpreting the elegiac in the light of the biographical. Nevertheless, when, in his discussion of Adonais, Hunt turns to Shelley’s self-portrait, he develops his argument about the blurring of the real and the fictional: like his claims concerning poetic artifice, Hunt’s response to the self-portrait suggests an understanding of how literary language works that is somewhat different from that held by his fellow reviewers. At the same time, in himself performing the elegiac movement from loss to consolation, Hunt is the first reader to detect in Adonais an unconscious premonition of doom. Unlike later commentators, who, with the benefit of hindsight, would focus on what they perceive to be the ominousness of the final stanzas of the poem, Hunt reads some lines in Shelley’s self-portrait as

168


a potentially self-fulfilling prophecy of his own death. Hunt initially takes the self-portrait as evidence that the “use of the Pagan mythology” can be “natural” (H, 301), though it may be only Hunt’s personal knowledge of Shelley that enables him to read the self-portrait this way. Instead of using the passage to bear out his earlier claim about the “strictly poetical” character of Adonais, Hunt asserts that the poet’s self-portrait is “strikingly calculated to excite a mixture of sympathy and admiration” (H, 301). It is not clear whether the sympathy comes from a “calculated” poetic strategy or whether it comes from Hunt’s own warm feelings towards the writer. Hunt’s readiness to admire what can be seen as an impersonal description reflects the paradox in the conception of Shelley as an “etherial” writer: an ethereal person is someone who is barely present, and so is not really a person at all, while an ethereal style—one that is strictly poetical—contains the presence of a calculating obtrusive self even when it seems most abstract. Hunt’s response to the self-portrait is very much at odds with those of twentieth-century critics, many of whom have been repelled or discomfited by this passage.45 Such reactions imply that, despite making Adonais what he called a “highly wrought piece of art ” (L, 2:294), Shelley in his portrait is carried away by his sense of persecution, which climaxes in the selfaggrandizing description of “his branded and ensanguined brow, / Which was like Cain’s or Christ’s—Oh! that it should be so!” (ll. 305–6). Implicitly accepting the sentimentality of the self-portrait, some recent critics in contrast have emphasized how abstract and stylized it is, as if to distance themselves from its self-indulgence. These critics stress that not only does Shelley present himself as a “companionless” phantom, a “frail Form,” and as a follower of Dionysus, he transforms himself into a series of personifications. They also point out that the image of the poet as one “Who in another’s fate now wept his own” follows elegiac convention; the genre thematizes the elegist’s self-pity.46 By the same token, the selfportrait itself forms part of the elegy’s traditional procession of mourners. In seeing the portrait as an idealized depiction of the persecuted poet, critics downplay the expression of Shelley’s own personal paranoia, but the two alternative readings are not necessarily incompatible. As Hunt’s earlier remarks suggest, the personal may generate the impersonal and vice versa. Autobiography involves distancing from the self, while that distancing in turn allows for self-indulgence. Readers cannot automatically dissociate themselves from the self-portrait’s self-pity by privileging generic over biographical determination. Hence the “sympathy” of Hunt, and


169

the embarrassment of Shelley’s later critics. I would like to connect this observation to the possibility that the self-portrait, like Hunt’s comments on the relationship between the real and the poetic, marks a distance from the Satanic rhetoric of individualism encountered elsewhere in the poem. A recognition of the self-portrait’s mingling of the personal and the impersonal may underlie Hunt’s invitation to his readers to “see” the following quotation as “natural” (H, 301): He, as I guess, Had gazed on Nature’s naked loveliness, Actaeon-like, and now he fled astray With feeble steps o’er the world’s wilderness, And his own thoughts, along that rugged way, Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey. (ll. 274–79)

These lines suggest Shelley’s identification with the “frail Form” that is their subject, but identification, though promised, is never fully achieved. The tentative “as I guess,” which looks like an attempt by the speaker to distance himself from the Form, actually has the reverse effect, since this single moment of hesitation sympathizes with the Form’s diffidence, while the vigor of the Form’s self-inflicted punishment aligns itself with the speaker’s authoritativeness. Whereas to identify completely with “Nature’s naked loveliness” could be said to involve the collapse of the distinction between self and other, the poet-figure lives on in this stanza as a selftormentor, “father” and “prey” of his own thoughts, his obtrusive selfabsorption at odds with the impulse to admire what is outside the self.47 Yet the relationship between the act of gazing and the self-pursuit is not necessarily polarized: the sentence quoted merely holds three separate main clauses together with “and.” The cumulative syntax enacts the figure’s resilience: even self-destruction is not a resting point. The circularity of the image of self-pursuit brings the description to an apparent standstill, but the “raging hounds” of the mourner’s thoughts forcibly cancel the debility of his “feeble steps.” Inner violence counteracts outward weakness in an apparent triumph of psychology over stylization, but closure is denied: there seems to be nothing more to add, nowhere else to go, but the portrait continues. The next stanza of the self-portrait—also approvingly quoted by Hunt— vacillates between self-distancing and self-identification in a way that continues the blurring of the personal and the impersonal. This stanza

170


has been taken to exemplify Shelley’s allegorical style—his rhetoric of temporality—but it can also be seen to limit the vagaries of that style and thus to check the breaking down of the boundaries around the self: A pardlike Spirit, beautiful and swift— A Love in desolation masked;—a Power Girt round with weakness;—it can scarce uplift The weight of the superincumbent hour; It is a dying lamp, a falling shower, A breaking billow;—even whilst we speak Is it not broken? On the withering flower The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break. (ll. 280–88)

Critics uncomfortable with the portrait’s self-indulgence have complained about its extravagant length: Shelley devotes four stanzas to himself, whereas his allusions to his fellow mourners, or “mountain shepherds” (l. 262) together occupy only two stanzas.48 Critics taking an ostensibly more objective approach have pointed out the portrait’s fluctuation between strength and weakness.49 The two observations are related, since it is Shelley’s characteristically self-extending syntax that generates a hint of survival out of multiple references to dissolution. One critic has described the syntax of the self-portrait as changing from relatively strong in the first stanza to very weak in this stanza, but this stanza contains only an extreme version of the paratactic syntax of the previous one. The discrepancies between its various metaphors—held together only by apposition—enact on a small scale the potential discontinuities in narrative created by the use of the Spenserian stanza.50 On one level these fragmentary images are simply juxtaposed; no logic unites them. They may seem to realize Shelley’s notion of proliferating veils, in floating free of meaning through an arbitrary series of figures. Yet the metaphors are connected if only by the impulse to dissipate the vitality of the “pard-like spirit beautiful and swift,” which fades away in a succession of participles, “dying,” “falling,” and “breaking,” which serve only to hold that individual “Spirit” in a state of suspension prior to extinction. When these various images of feebleness give way to slightly more positive ones, the impression given is not of randomness but of extreme weakness tipping over into renewed “life.”


171

The question that emerges from the various metaphors of weakness is the pivot of the stanza and of the portrait as a whole, and it is one that steps back from the self-admiration of the beautiful “Spirit” to equate the stance of the elegist with that of the reader: “even whilst we speak / Is it not broken?” (emphasis added). Somewhat unexpectedly, the implicit answer is negative, since the image of the sun killing and smiling at the same time is an image of the deceptiveness of death, not of death itself, while the final image of the stanza, that of a cheek blushing while the heart breaks, goes further in asserting the possibility of survival despite despair. That is to say, the last two and a half lines of the stanza contradict rather than reinforce what has gone before. The shift from multiple images of debility to ones of residual vitality participates in the larger strategy of the elegist, which is to emphasize death in order to establish immortality. It offers an inconspicuous version of the larger swerve from loss to consolation in the poem. But whereas, in making this transition, the passage containing the curse on the reviewer relies mainly on the elegiac convention of a sudden transition, this stanza accomplishes the same swerve through its distinctive imagery. That imagery, in pulling apart the figure of the Shelleyan “Spirit,” shows that Shelley’s language can find ways of decentering individual agency, as we also saw in my discussion of the desolation song and choruses of spirits in Prometheus Unbound. A deconstructive reading would take such language to illustrate metaphor’s vulnerability to metonymy.51 But as we just saw, the ending of the stanza slides from fragmenting the self to checking its final dissolution: “on a cheek / The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.” This is not to claim that the statements in these lines resist deconstruction but to point out once again that the poem affirms, insofar as it does so, by conflating the beauty of an individual “Spirit” with a more deindividualized “Power,” personal and impersonal transcendence. Hunt’s discussion of the poet’s relationship with his genre and his subject matter, however fanciful, and his reaction to the selfportrait, however sentimental, seem to intuit this strategy of the poem. Hunt’s reading, rather surprisingly, however, emphasizes gloom, not recovery, perhaps because he is not yet in a position to acknowledge explicitly the need for a narrative of consolation. After his quotation from the self-portrait he adds, “Ah! te meae si partem animae rapit / Maturior vis!” (H, 301; “Ah! If a more timely force snatches you, a part of myself, away”).52 Hunt, anticipating his reminiscences of the dead Shelley, identifies with Shelley in the very act of imagining separation

172


from him, at once echoing and reversing the stance of the elegist, in that his loss is still in the future. Yet in line with an elegiac stance, Hunt’s review establishes ways of imagining consolation for the soon-to-be-dead Shelley. After his Latin quotation, Hunt remarks, “But the poet is here, I trust, as little of a prophet, as affection and a beautiful climate, and the extraordinary and most vital energy of his spirit, can make him” (H, 301). In supplying several external reasons for why the writer of the self-portrait should not be seen as a prophet, Hunt contradicts his previous denial of the distinction between the real and the fictional. He emphasizes the discrepancy between, on the one hand, what looks like prophecy (fiction) and, on the other hand, the combination of the (real) powers of “affection” (presumably that of Shelley’s friends), the “beautiful climate” of Italy, and the “vital energy” of Shelley himself. We will see that as soon as Shelley is dead, that discrepancy disappears: his capacity for inspiring affection, the beautiful surroundings in which he lived, and his own energy are all taken to validate his prophetic ability, an ability that in turn is taken to confirm any earthly signs of individual survival in another world. Meanwhile, Hunt’s brief reading of Shelley in terms of external circumstances (such as climate) shares the tendency of his comments on genre to de-emphasize the poet as an individual. Hunt’s both manipulative and admiring characterization of Shelley initiates the establishment of the effete angel; at the same time, Hunt’s own topics of discussion and choice of quotations help to destabilize the assumptions underlying other reviewers’ moralistic and polarizing rhetoric, assumptions that Adonais to some extent shares but also questions. The maneuver whereby the boundaries around Shelley’s self are weakened at the same time as his identity is asserted replicates the incomplete dispersal of individual agency that we saw in the self-portrait and, on a larger level, the poem’s contradictory treatment of immortality. The complementary yet also competing images of Shelley as a “prophet” and the trappings such as the “beautiful climate” with which he becomes associated will reappear frequently in the posthumous reception of Adonais.

III. The Circle of Mourners Almost immediately after Shelley’s death, which took place the day after the publication of Hunt’s review, Hunt and the poet’s other friends began, or rather continued, their efforts to retrieve his reputation. I will now analyze


173

the various published texts in which the members of the Shelley circle connect Adonais and Shelley’s death; by way of contrast, I will also briefly examine some reactions to the conjunction of poem and biographical event by a few commentators personally unacquainted with the poet. All these responses are elegiac in the sense of attempting to compensate for loss through an appreciation of enduring beauty, but, as mentioned earlier, most of them are defined, like much of Hunt’s article, by the terms of prior attacks by reviewers. More than in Hunt’s review, the text that they admire is not a poem but the dead poet, transfigured in the light of the beautiful Keats/Shelley of Adonais as well as in a reaction (similar to Hunt’s) against the stylistic complaints of Shelley’s reviewers. At the same time, the circumstances of Shelley’s death lead these commentators— including Hunt—into reflections that go further than Hunt’s formal review of Adonais in searching for consolation. In a letter from Pisa to Shelley’s friend Horace Smith, which was quoted by several British periodicals, and which contributed to the inevitably partisan debate over Shelley’s merits, Hunt wrote, “God bless him! I cannot help thinking of him as if he were alive as much as ever, so unearthly he always appeared to me, and so seraphical a thing of the elements” (H, 322). This statement stresses both the identity of the mourned (his own power to survive) and the subjectivity of the mourner (the poet survives in Hunt’s thoughts). Blurring the line between life and death, Shelley’s unearthliness when alive is taken as a sign of his living on in his friend’s imagination, while the occasion of his death is an opportunity to think of him as alive, both because of and despite his seraphical rather than human appearance. The adjectives “unearthly” and “seraphical” constitute a stylistic description of what Mary Shelley later categorized as Shelley’s “purely imaginative” (PW, xxii) poetry (exemplified by Adonais). The description, like Hunt’s review of Adonais, turns what some contemporary readers of Shelley called unintelligibility and vagueness into a more appealing quality, unearthliness, which is transferred from the poetry onto the poet. In doing this Hunt implicitly defends Shelley’s political stance, just as he did in opposing a genius of “etherial beauty” to the demon conjured up by the reviews. One establishment periodical predictably reacted with disgust to Hunt’s letter, pointing out the inappropriateness of calling the author of Queen Mab “unearthly” and “seraphical.”53 This reaction illustrates how the Shelley circle’s diction—involving a use of adjectives that are derived not so much from the style of Shelley’s poetry (a style partially at odds with the reviewers’

174


rhetoric) as from the reviewers’ own reactions to that style—itself gets pulled back into the reviewers’ terms.54 In Hunt’s letter, the defense of Shelley as a political writer is bound up with Hunt’s impulse to claim his friend’s survival after death and simultaneously, in typical elegiac fashion, to gain the benefit of association with immortality. Other responses to the poet’s death by members of the Shelley circle similarly make standard elegiac moves of self-promotion and self-effacement. In her preface to Shelley’s Posthumous Poems, Mary Shelley at first denies that consolation is possible: “To his friends his loss is irremediable” (PW, xxv). The claim of inconsolability is a conventional elegiac gesture, expressed in Adonais by the words, “Ah woe is me! Winter is come and gone, / But grief returns with the revolving year” (ll. 154–55). In an equally conventional fashion, Mary Shelley no sooner mentions loss than she contemplates solace. She immediately asserts that Shelley lives on in his friends’ minds: “He is to them as a bright vision, whose radiant track, left behind in the memory, is worth all the realities that society can afford” (PW, xxv). In this formulation, Shelley’s survival is contingent upon the recollections of his friends. However, towards the end of the preface Mary Shelley identifies another source of consolation, proclaiming that “his unearthly and elevated nature is a pledge of the continuation of his being, although in an altered form” (PW, xxvi). Again, a judgment about the style of Shelley’s poetry—“unearthly and elevated”—is transferred onto the poet himself and identified as a proof of Shelley’s “continuation,” not necessarily in another world, and in an “altered form,” but not altered enough presumably to lose his essential “nature.” Mary Shelley here collaborates on the creation of the beautiful angel, and in doing so she follows Hunt’s letter in inverting the procedures of biographical criticism: instead of the man’s life being seen to influence his work, his life or rather his afterlife is read in terms of a favorable characterization of his style. In contrast with Hunt’s earlier review, the upholding of Shelley’s “self ” and the self-assertion of his mourners here remains entirely within the dynamics of the Satanic scenario: the unearthly angel is the product of earthly partisanship. In the August 1822 Paris Monthly Review, an obituary by Shelley’s friend Horace Smith55 expanded upon the characterization of Shelley in Hunt’s letter to Smith (which it quotes in full) and laid the ground for Mary Shelley’s tribute, while also shifting the ground somewhat with its embellishment of the dead Shelley. Smith played up the literary associations of the poet’s death by quoting the following lines from Lycidas:


175

Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhime; He must not float upon his watery bier Unwept, and welter in the parching wind Without the meed of some melodious tear. (ll. 10–14)

The article does not explicitly make a case for the continuation of Shelley’s being, but in drawing attention to the similarity between Shelley’s death and that of Edward King, the young man on whom Milton’s poem is based, this quotation implies that the article itself will provide “some melodious tear” through its tribute to Shelley. Smith next claims, “Never did the remorseless deep engulph so gentle, so angelic, so melodious a Lycidas, as Percy Bysshe Shelley; and yet never was there a name associated with more black, poisonous, and bitter calumny than his” (H, 327). This reference to the persecution of Shelley by the reviewers, the “assassins, spies, and informers, who act as purveyors to this literary conspiracy” (H, 327), underlines the political rationale behind the attempt to turn Shelley into an angel. Like Hunt and Mary Shelley, Smith tries to defend both the personal character and the poetic style of Shelley, in terms that collapse into those of his opponents. He goes on to declare that Shelley’s poetry possesses “an air of abstraction, mystery, and allegory” (H, 328). These words echo the strictures of a number of reviewers, who had connected the poetry’s theoretical speculations with—to quote the London Magazine’s comment on Prometheus Unbound —its “gaudy, flimsy, allegorical pictures on gauze” (H, 272). Again, not only the personal attacks on Shelley by the reviewers but also their objections to his style are allowed to dictate the terms of the writer’s defense. But the Shelley of this article is not quite a mere mirror image of the reviewers’ Shelley. Smith revives and relinquishes Shelley by picturing him as he was in the weeks preceding his death and emphasizing the impossibility of his return. At the same time he introduces a somewhat different strategy of consolation, which resembles the reference to external circumstances such as climate in Hunt’s review of Adonais, displacing Shelley’s identity onto his idyllic surroundings in Italy: Could the reader, who has perhaps seen him held up in the pages of the Quarterly Review as a demon, have transported himself to

176


the beautiful Bay of Lerici in the Gulf of Spezzia [sic ], and beheld a fragile youth moving upon the earth like a gentle spirit, imagining incessant plans for promoting the welfare of the great circle of mankind, while he formed the happiness of the little one in which he moved, and recreating himself with music, literature, and poetic reveries while he floated in his “fatal and perfidious bark” upon the blue waves of the Mediterranean—how little would he dream that he was gazing upon the traduced and calumniated Percy Bysshe Shelley!—and how keenly would he regret that such a being, not having yet consummated his thirtieth year, should be “sunk beneath the watery floor,” ere the maturing of his great and undoubted genius had enabled him to perfect some imperishable record of his fame. (H, 328–29)

This passage first points to the impetus behind the attempt to etherealize Shelley: he has been “held up in the pages of the Quarterly Review as a demon.” In this account the angelic Shelley is opposed to the demonic Shelley of the Quarterly, but his setting in the earthly yet otherworldly “beautiful Bay of Lerici” provides the opportunity for a more extended evocation of his “genius.” Smith does not mention Adonais, but his preoccupation with Lycidas displays a self-awareness concerning the genre of elegy that facilitates his removal of Shelley to another, better, fictionalized world.56 The first of the two allusions to Lycidas in this passage is like a presentiment of the poet’s end: Shelley’s boat, or rather “bark,” is “fatal and perfidious” even before it sinks, so that the sentence slides almost inexorably towards an image of the dead Shelley, still in the conditional as if the reader is being made to participate in the hypothetical disappearance of the elusive “being” conjured up by the writer. The second allusion to Lycidas, “sunk beneath the watery floor,” implies that Shelley’s death had a certain poetic appropriateness; this impression is strengthened by the claim that the poet has left no “imperishable record of his fame.”57 This assertion makes Shelley into a Lycidas or an Adonais, a young poet who has died before fulfilling his early potential; since it does not appear from the obituary that the poet’s works will provide an enduring monument, it is implied that Shelley will only be memorialized by the shared and suitably distanced “regret” of Smith and his audience. Yet these lines also commemorate Shelley by inviting readers to make an imaginative projection: thinking of Shelley dead involves thinking of him alive, but the poet is sketched in terms that rely on the hindsight provided by his death, and thus make Shelley seem on the verge of death even when living.


177

Shelley is pictured in the place where he lived right before his death and where he also died; the figure that the reader is asked to contemplate is already shadowed by death. He is a “fragile youth” (the implication is that he does not have long to live anyway) who “moved about upon the earth” (as if he does not really belong there—perhaps water or the air would be more congenial elements) like a “gentle spirit” (one who is presumably too good for this world). The love of that spirit for the “circle of mankind” and the “happiness” of what Smith later calls the “circle of his associates” (H, 329) are made precious by his loss—seemingly only appreciated now that they have ceased to exist, just as he himself can only now be truly valued for the first time. These implicit claims certainly feed into the creation of the effete angel, but they also begin to establish a space in which the aesthetic—“music, literature, and poetic reveries”—can be depoliticized. Shelley’s friends were not the only early readers of Adonais to react elegiacally to Shelley’s death, although not all those who did so rewrote the dead poet so elaborately. Literalizing the perpetuation of the genre, the flurry of published comments immediately following Shelley’s death included two so-called elegies, both by strangers to the poet.58 The more sympathetic of the two, an Elegy on the Death of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1822) by Arthur Brooke (John Chalk Claris) does not share the impulse of Leigh Hunt and Mary Shelley to imagine Shelley’s survival in an altered form: the elegy itself—less ambitious than Adonais or even than the quasi-elegiac tributes of Shelley’s friends—merely tries to act as a memorial.59 Although this poem, adopting Leigh Hunt’s adjective, demands, “But is he lost? and can it be that death / Has quench’d that spirit’s most ethereal beam?” (H, 349), and although it contains echoes of Adonais, it finds consolation more in figuratively “deck[ing]” Shelley’s “cenotaph”—on which it predicts that “richer flowers shall soon be fitly strewn”—than in envisaging for him any kind of immortality (H, 352). That is to say, the poem employs the elegiac convention of adorning the dead poet’s hearse, but it does not proffer images of resurrection.60 A review of Brooke’s poem in the Monthly Magazine echoed (unconsciously or not) the terms of Smith’s obituary notice in the Paris Monthly Review and at the same time picked up on Brooke’s suggestion of “richer flowers”61 by proclaiming Shelley’s friends responsible for his future immortality:

178


It is an affecting consideration, that the generous poet, who so lately gave “the meed of his melodious tear”62 to the grave of the young and unfortunate Keats, to whom he was personally unknown, should so soon claim the same melancholy offices, and receive them, as in this instance, from stranger hands. It is not fit that he should “float upon his watery bier unwept,” who has “built the lofty rhyme” so often and so well, and from whom, in the maturity of his extraordinary powers, so much more might have been expected. Nor will the effusion under our notice . . . supersede the exertion of the high and acknowledged genius of some of Mr. Shelley’s personal friends, on whom the task of raising an honourable and lasting monument to his fame seems naturally to devolve. (H, 338)

Amidst the familiar allusions to Lycidas, Shelley, in fact an acquaintance if not a friend of Keats, is made “personally unknown” to the younger poet for the sake of symmetry. The melodious tear of a stranger may have been enough for the obscure Keats, but is “not fit” for Shelley, even though he too died before reaching “maturity.” Shelley, like Keats in Adonais, is again accommodated to the myth of the young poet “blighted in the bud.” Shelley’s “personal friends”—more talented, it is hinted, than Shelley himself (the writer presumably has Lord Byron in mind, but may also be referring to Hunt)—must create a “lasting monument to his fame” in the form, one assumes, of an elegy.63 More ambivalently, a posthumous review of Adonais itself rather than of Brooke’s Elegy took a sympathetic stance—apparently against the reviewer’s own better judgment or rather against his conservative political views— but made no attempt to seek or offer consolation, despite stressing a motif that becomes central in the responses of Shelley’s friends—the idea of foreshadowing. Reviewing Adonais two months after its author’s death, the Literary Register recalled “the inferior imitation of Adonais lately noticed by us from the pen of a Mr. Brook [sic ]” (RR,C, 551). Although he labels Brooke’s poem an “imitation,” the reviewer himself has only recently become aware of an original: “Since our notice of an elegy on the untimely death of Percy B. Shelley, our attention has been directed to another elegy written by the last mentioned gentleman on the death of the author of Endymion. There is something very melancholy and touching in this remarkable coincidence” (RR,C, 551). As Donald Reiman points out, this reviewer “seems to be unacquainted with the tradition of pastoral elegy” (RR,C, 550). The reviewer finds the production of two elegies to be just as much a “coincidence” as the proximity of


179

the two deaths. But he also vacillates over whether Shelley’s death was a coincidence or something more. This writer goes on to relate how, after composing his elegy on Keats, Shelley “himself met even a more sudden death”: “We presume it is now well known, that Mr. Shelley was drowned in the Mediterranean. The following lines which nearly conclude Adonais, cannot be read without an awful association of ideas. It would almost seem that the Disposer of events had listened and attended to the poet’s mournful wish” (RR,C, 551). The reviewer then quotes the lines “Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart? / Thy hopes are gone before” (ll. 469–70), implying that Shelley’s anticipation of his own death may have been an answered prayer (RR,C, 551). Significance is here imposed from two directions: first, from the reader’s “awful association of ideas” and, second, from the poet himself, who is imagined to have power over his fate but only negatively. Despite or perhaps because of the reviewer’s acknowledged “feelings,” he seems inclined—like many of Shelley’s twentieth-century critics—to take what looks like a sort of Shelleyan death instinct as a suicidal impulse rather than inscribing it within a narrative of redemption. Other more overtly hostile posthumous accounts of Shelley pick up on the impulse to transform the poet into an angel and then turn it back against Shelley’s friends, thus remaining squarely within the terms of the Satanic scenario. Later in 1824 a brief portrait of Shelley appeared in a so-called Narrative of Lord Byron’s Voyage to Corsica and Sardinia. At one point on the voyage, according to the anonymous author, the prospect of shipwreck terrified “Percy S——-,” the professed atheist: he “appeared to have lost all energy and the horrors of approaching death made him weep like a child. Those names which he never before pronounced but in ridicule, he now called upon in moving accents of serious prayer.”64 Once the danger was past, however, the infidel “recovered from his fits of fear, and came from his cabin like a spectre from the tomb. . . . A glass of rum and water, warm, raised his drooping spirits, and in twentyfour hours he was the same free-thinking, thankless dog as ever” (30–31). In response to this behavior, adds the writer, Lord Byron “threatened to compose an elegy on the death and resurrection of P—– S——-” (32). At a later stage in the narrative, Percy S— has a presentiment that he will drown and refuses to continue on the voyage. A footnote informs readers that this presentiment remarkably enough proved accurate two years later (68). The coincidence is far from startling, of course, since

180


the Narrative is entirely spurious: no such voyage took place. Shelley’s fate, it is implied, as in several of the hostile accounts of his death, is a deserved punishment.65 The powerful demon of earlier attacks on Shelley has here metamorphosed into a feeble, specterlike coward—a shift that illustrates the near-automatic consequence of the angelic image: once that impression is in place, the charge of ineffectuality is practically inevitable.66 This outcome, an emphatic emptying out of political content in what itself is a partisan gesture, confirms that the tendency for images to take on an independent life is not necessarily positive, contrary to Shelley’s suggestions in the Defence of Poetry.67 Nevertheless, in “co-operating”—to borrow a term from the Defence (493)—on the shared fiction of what will become a depoliticized angel, Shelley’s friends collectively turn that fiction in a particular direction. According to them Shelley survives because he foretold his own fate or because his fate was fitting. Although both claims separately reinforce Shelley’s new angelic image, in combination they recall the more radical consolatory claims of Adonais. Both the foreshadowing of death and the notion of a fitting death are generic—and the latter idea at first sight merely counters the claims of certain reviewers who would say by contrast that Shelley’s death was morally or theologically just. Yet the conventional elegiac power dynamic between mourner and mourned is subsumed by the slippage between the idea of the survival of the individual poet (whose agency is emphasized by his prophetic ability) and a dispersal of Shelley’s identity through elaboration on the circumstances of his death. Examining further comments on his death by Shelley’s friends, we can see the way in which their multiple-authored elegy becomes more and more invested in the motifs of prophecy and suitableness. In his letter to Smith, Hunt remarked, “Our dear friend was passionately fond of the sea, and has been heard to say that he should like it to be his death-bed” (H, 322). This merely apt circumstance hardens into a prediction, in Medwin’s 1824 account of Shelley, with the help of some research into Shelley’s poetry: “The sea had ever been his great delight; and in the following lines, written as early as 1814, he seems to have anticipated that it would prove his grave.”68 Medwin’s quotation from Queen Mab (which was actually written by 1813) is then fancifully elaborated upon: “Well might his disconsolate widow, and the friends by whom he was adored, as he was by all who knew him, add in the words of Lycidas:


181

‘It was that fatal and perfidious bark, Built in the eclipse, and rigg’d with curses dark, That struck so low that sacred head of thine.’ (ll. 100–102, as quoted by Medwin, 250)

Lycidas is here exploited again in order to continue the process of deifying Shelley: the appropriateness of the image of drowning allows Shelley by the power of association to have a “sacred head.” Medwin goes on to inform his readers, “The remains of one who had little repose here, now sleep with those of his friend Keats, in the burial ground near Caius Cestus’s tomb [sic ];—‘a spot so beautiful,’ said he, ‘that it would almost reconcile me to death, to lie there!’ ” (250). By misquoting the preface to Adonais, which echoes Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” (“I have been half in love with easeful Death” [l. 52])69 in welcoming death (“It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place” [p. 4]), Medwin implies that the link with the burial place of Keats is coincidental rather than engineered by Mary Shelley and Trelawny, who had arranged for Shelley’s ashes to be buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome precisely because he had described it in the preface and in stanzas 49–51 of Adonais, and because Shelley’s son William—alluded to in stanza 51 of Adonais—had been buried there in 1819.70 Although Medwin refers in the same paragraph to Shelley’s “wish of being buried in Rome,” he gives the impression that Shelley’s act of naming his own burial spot carries the weight of a prognostication. In another 1824 account, the idea of a fit between Shelley’s poem and his fate blends with an occurrence that makes his fate more fitting. As Hunt had informed Smith in his letter announcing Shelley’s death, “in S.’s pocket . . . a copy of Keats’s last volume which he had borrowed of me to read on his passage, was found open and doubled back” (H, 322). Hunt mentions this detail only to support his “hope” that the “passage from life to death” was “short” (H, 322). Two years later, however, it was being used to shore up the idealization of Keats in Adonais and to elegize Shelley in turn. Hazlitt does not actually mention Adonais in his ambivalent article on Shelley’s Posthumous Poems in the Edinburgh Review, but that makes this statement all the more striking: Mr Shelly [sic ] died, it seems, with a volume of Mr Keats’s poetry grasped with one hand in his bosom! These are two out of four poets, patriots and friends, who have visited Italy within a few years, both

182


of whom have been soon hurried to a more distant shore. Keats died young; and “yet his infelicity had years too many.” A canker had blighted the tender bloom that o’erspread a face in which youth and genius strove with beauty. The shaft was sped—venal, vulgar, venomous, that drove him from his country, with sickness and penury for companions, and followed him to his grave. And yet there are those who could trample on the faded flower—men to whom breaking hearts are a subject of merriment—who laugh loud over the silent urn of Genius, and play out their game of venality and infamy with the crumbling bones of their victims! (RR,C, 402)

This passage first embellishes the detail concerning the book, which is now dramatically grasped in Shelley’s “bosom” instead of simply found open in his pocket.71 (Since, according to Trelawny, the drowned poet’s hands had been eaten away by fish by the time his body was washed up on shore, the image is improbable.) Hazlitt then goes on to echo the vocabulary of Adonais: the “more distant shore” recalls the phrase “Far from the shore” (l. 489) in Shelley’s last stanza, while the image of the blighting canker takes its cue from the sentence in Shelley’s preface that I quoted earlier: “The genius of the lamented person to whose memory I have dedicated these unworthy verses, was not less delicate and fragile than it was beautiful; and where cankerworms abound, what wonder, if it’s [sic ] young flower was blighted in the bud?” As we have seen, this sentence had clearly inspired readers who knew Shelley far better than Hazlitt did; unlike them, Hazlitt does not explicitly transfer the description from Keats to Shelley, but in mixing its metaphor, so that the bloom of the “young flower” in Shelley’s account moves from Keats’s genius to his beautiful face, he allows imagery to spread metonymically from one poet to the other. The reference to the venal shaft, which takes for granted Shelley’s claim in both preface and poem that the reviewers had caused Keats’s death, picks up on both the “shaft which flies / In darkness” (ll. 11–12)—a metaphor for the reviewers’ murder weapon—and the vibrating “rude shaft” (l. 292) of the “light spear” (l. 291) carried by the follower of Dionysus who is equated with Shelley himself in one stanza of his self-portrait. The intertwining of Keats with the Shelley of the self-portrait is continued by the allusion to Keats having only “sickness and penury for companions,” which recalls the frail Form’s companionlessness among his fellow mourners. Likewise, the “faded flower” and “breaking hearts” sanction Shelley’s apparently self-pitying identification with Keats by recalling the


183

“withering flower” (l. 286) and the “heart” that “may break” (l. 288) of the self-portrait. Hazlitt collaborates with the move whereby Shelley, in turning Keats into an extension of his own self-image, distances himself from him.72 Shelley can be seen as silencing Keats in the poem as a whole: Adonais is “mute” (l. 27), like the voiceless Leigh Hunt in the procession of mourners (“The silence of that heart’s accepted sacrifice” [l. 315]). (As mentioned before, such “consumption” of the mourned by the mourner is in keeping with the genre.) Hazlitt adopts this same strategy by referring to the “silent urn of Genius,” which revises the expressive Grecian urn of Keats’s ode, one of the poems in the volume that Shelley allegedly clutched to his bosom as he died. Finally, the almost macabre reference to “crumbling bones” puts the scraps and fragments of the poet’s body back together only so that it can fall apart again.73 In Hazlitt’s account, the notion of Shelley as a persecuted angel is reinforced by the circumstances of his death, as if Shelley’s story of Keats being killed by the reviewers has somehow been exemplified by Shelley’s own fate, despite a death by drowning having nothing to do with the venal shaft of the reviewers.74 Again the two poets are metonymically connected. Hazlitt also offers an alternative reading of Shelley’s fate in twisting the terms of Shelley’s self-description to explain his premature death: “Mr Shelley was a remarkable man. His person was a type and shadow of his genius. His complexion, fair, golden, freckled, seemed transparent with an inward light, and his spirit within him —‘so divinely wrought, That you might almost say his body thought.’

He reminded those who saw him of some of Ovid’s fables. His form, graceful and slender, drooped like a flower in the breeze. But he was crushed beneath the weight of thought which he aspired to bear, and was withered in the lightning-glare of a ruthless philosophy!” (RR,C, 400).75 Hazlitt here insists in conventional fashion on the similarity between Shelley’s outward appearance and his inner poetic “genius.” This quintessentially etherealizing description of Shelley seems to empty out his “body,” substituting pure “spirit.” The account of Shelley’s death in this passage also writes Shelley into his own fiction in a way that was anticipated in Hunt’s review of Adonais. The allusion to the “withering flower” of the self-portrait and to stanza 53 of Adonais, “what still is dear / Attracts to crush, repels to

184


make thee wither” (ll. 473–74), implies that the weakness of Shelley’s “form” was enough to kill him, while the ruthlessness of Keats’s murderer is transferred to “a ruthless philosophy“—presumably Shelley’s own. The poet, attenuated to the level of a beautiful youth in an Ovidian “fable,” has to be powerfully wiped out, “crushed,” as well as “withered”; again, his actual death by drowning is elided, as Hazlitt’s fictive embellishment of Shelley’s demise takes over, leaving the allegedly “remarkable man” behind. When Shelley’s friends invoke Adonais in accounts of his death, we have seen that they turn a story of loss into one of consolation by exploiting two overlapping maneuvers: one, they identify prophecies and foreshadowings of Shelley’s death; two, they emphasize ways in which Shelley’s death can be seen as fitting, in the sense of artistically appropriate. Adonais alone offers almost too many foreshadowings of Shelley’s death. First, Shelley describes himself as on the verge of death (“a dying lamp”) in his self-portrait. Second, the poetic speaker asks himself, “Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?” as if urging himself to join Adonais in death.76 Third, the poem ends with a reference, which may or may not be suicidal, to a small boat “Far from the shore” (l. 489), the apparent culmination of various images in Shelley’s poetry suggesting drowning. Despite the image of the “bark” (l. 488) giving its sails to the tempest, and Shelley’s granted wish that the sea would be his deathbed, in Adonais he contradictorily expresses a desire (which was also fulfilled) to be buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, like Keats (and like Shelley’s son William, who is alluded to in the poem). Yet, although Shelley anticipates his death in a number of ways, not one of them by itself nor all of them together are sufficient to account for that death, which remains a chance event. The foreshadowings and the fact of the death are simply brought together to construct a consoling narrative. The supposed ability to foretell the manner of his own death (not to mention the place of his burial) confirms Shelley’s otherworldliness, which in turn confirms the authenticity of the prophecy. This circular logic underpins the process whereby Shelley’s friends enumerate the various reasons why he should be dead and then go on to proclaim his immortality. This process corresponds to the way in which Adonais itself kills off Keats all over again, and in several different ways, in order to resurrect him. Shelley’s friends insinuate that since Shelley was able to predict the circumstances of his own death, then he had power over his destiny in life, and is therefore somehow more likely to be living on in another world. This claim purports to be poet-centered, putting Shelley in control of his fate, but like the


185

friends’ other main consolatory move it is actually reader-centered, relying on the hindsight of the survivors. Ostensibly confirming the deceased poet’s ongoing existence as an individual (one with the power to script his own end), the mourners assert their control over his angelic identity. Their second train of logic implicitly locates Shelley’s survival in the ability of his audience to identify his death as fitting. Multiple factors feed into the fitting death. Most obviously, Shelley’s identification with Keats in Adonais is made real for his mourners by the fact that he seems to have been reading Keats’s 1820 Poems just before he died. Further, the generic link between Adonais and Lycidas, written to commemorate a poet who drowned, makes it appealingly appropriate (to some) that Shelley himself drowned. More speculatively, the case for a fitting death argues that the surroundings in which Shelley spent his last days are consonant with his genius and therefore help make his loss bearable. This claim also rests on problematic reasoning in the sense that the scenery is seen as beautiful because Shelley is seen as beautiful (thus reading Shelley himself in terms of a particular view of his own poetic style), instead of the beauty of Shelley’s style being perceived to reflect his experience. As we saw, the treatment of Shelley in his friends’ comments thus disperses his individuality by blurring the distinction not only between Shelley and his self-portrait and Shelley and Keats but between Shelley and Lycidas, and Shelley and a particular conception of his poetic style partly originated by his reviewers and partly sanctioned by the language of Adonais. The elusiveness of Shelley is confirmed and completed by the way he disappears into the landscape of Italy in the process of being “hurried to a more distant shore.” A politicized reformulation of taste generates and gives way to depoliticized aesthetic contemplation, a process that can be identified in Adonais itself. The consolatory strategy whereby Shelley is rewritten in terms of his poetry, while the place where he spent his last days is rewritten in terms of the poet, was extended by some members of the Shelley circle in their accounts of the unforeseen event that came between his drowning in the Mediterranean and the burial of his ashes at Rome: the cremation of the poet’s body on the beach near Viareggio five weeks after his death.77 The accounts of the cremation by Trelawny, Hunt, and Medwin each perform maneuvers similar to those we have seen in the other comments on Shelley’s death: they continue to turn Shelley into an angel and commemorate him, finding consolation in the fact that the poet’s body was burned in a suitably scenic setting; Shelley meanwhile disappears from their accounts as his

186


body literally disappeared in the flames.78 Trelawny’s celebrated account in his Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858) contains a typical remark: “The lonely and grand scenery that surrounded us so exactly harmonized with Shelley’s genius, that I could imagine his spirit soaring over us. . . . Not a human dwelling was in sight. As I thought of the delight Shelley felt in such scenes of loneliness and grandeur while living, I felt we were no better than a herd of wolves or a pack of wild dogs, in tearing out his battered and naked body from the pure yellow sand that lay so lightly over it, to drag him back to the light of day” (135–36). Here, the fit between the surroundings of the cremation and Shelley’s “genius” allows for the “soaring” of his spirit, while Trelawny objectifies his friend’s body. The body is metonymically associated with “the pure yellow sand that lay so lightly over it,” even while Shelley’s former companions are reduced to a voracious “herd of wolves or a pack of wild dogs,” an analogy that echoes Shelley’s reference in Adonais to the reviewers as “herded wolves” (l. 244) and therefore confirms the continuity between the reviewers and the Shelley circle, even though Romantic-era reviewers in 1858 had been long forgotten. By the time Trelawny published his account, the installation of the angelic image was complete, no longer carrying the traces of the immediate context of reception in which it originated. Mary Shelley’s earlier comments on Adonais and Shelley’s death will therefore provide a more fitting ending to my story. In her notes on Shelley’s poems, published in her 1839 edition of Shelley’s Works, Mary Shelley goes further than any of Shelley’s other friends and readers in seeing Adonais as “a prophecy on [Shelley’s] own destiny” (PW, 663) and in seeing his death as an instance of “sublime fitness” (PW, 679).79 She also makes a more calculated effort than other members of the Shelley circle to pull in her own readers as if to lengthen the poet’s funeral procession. In her final note, the note on Shelley’s poems of 1822, Mary Shelley not only reads Shelley in terms of the landscape where he spent his last summer, as in the obituary notice written by Horace Smith; she displaces Shelley’s supposed ability to foretell his own death back onto those same surroundings in the form of various vague prognostications. Also as in the Paris Monthly Review obituary, the beauty of the landscape has the effect of making Shelley’s death seem appropriate, even if not pleasingly so; in fact, the scenery itself is made to match what Mary Shelley calls Shelley’s preference for the “mystical” (PW, 676). Describing the landscape in detail, Mary Shelley asserts, “the scene was indeed of unimaginable


187

beauty” (PW, 676–77). She claims that the scenery of Lerici “formed a picture such as one sees in Salvator Rosa’s landscapes only” (PW, 677), as if it might not actually have existed. The proximity of the Shelleys’ house to the sea is stressed: “we almost fancied ourselves on board ship” (PW, 677); as in Smith’s obituary, Shelley is shadowed by death while unconsciously on its brink. The threat of death here is dispersed onto his companions.80 Premonitions of Shelley’s death build up throughout the passage. Shelley’s new boat is described as “fatal” (PW, 677), and after quoting his friend Edward Williams’s comment, “we have now a perfect plaything for the summer,” Mary Shelley adds with a note of melodrama, “It was thus that short-sighted mortals welcomed Death, he having disguised his grim form in a pleasing mask!” (PW, 677). (The personified Death’s “pleasing mask” inverts the “Love in desolation masked” of Shelley’s self-portrait.) Again, the threat of death spreads, as the recklessness of Shelley and Williams is transferred to the party as a whole: “It was agreed that Shelley and Williams should go to Leghorn in the boat. Strange that no fear of danger crossed our minds! Living on the sea-shore, the ocean became as a plaything: as a child may sport with a lighted stick, till a spark inflames a forest, and spreads destruction over all, so did we fearlessly and blindly tamper with danger, and make a game of the terrors of the ocean” (PW, 678). Now it is not just the fatal boat that is a plaything, but the ocean. The obliviousness of Shelley and his friends to their destiny is used here to heighten suspense; however, as Shelley’s death approaches, a “vague expectation of evil” on Mary Shelley’s part is substituted for fearlessness. The carefree attitude gives way abruptly to multiple foreshadowings: On the 1st of July they left us. If ever shadow of future ill darkened the present hour, such was over my mind when they went. During the whole of our stay at Lerici, an intense presentiment of coming evil brooded over my mind, and covered this beautiful place and genial summer with the shadow of coming misery. . . . Not long before, talking of presentiment, [Shelley] had said the only one that he ever found infallible was the certain advent of some evil fortune when he felt peculiarly joyous. Yet, if ever fate whispered of coming disaster, such inaudible but not unfelt prognostics hovered around us. The beauty of the place seemed unearthly in its excess: the distance we were at from all signs of civilization, the sea at our feet, its murmurs or its roaring for ever in our ears, all these things led the mind to brood over strange thoughts, and, lifting it from everyday life, caused it to be familiar with the unreal. A sort of spell surrounded us. (PW, 678)

188


This passage elaborates upon a claim in the preface to Shelley’s Posthumous Poems: “Our seclusion, the savage nature of the inhabitants of the surrounding villages, and our immediate vicinity to the troubled sea, combined to imbue with strange horror our days of uncertainty” (PW, xxvi). Mary Shelley’s unhappiness during the summer at Lerici is transformed, through a process of revisionary history, to “the shadow of coming misery,” while Shelley’s enjoyment of his last summer is made into a “presentiment” of evil, the infallibility of which is only slightly undercut by the hesitation of Mary Shelley’s “Yet.” The “unearthly” beauty of the scenery takes the adjective by now applied almost routinely to Shelley,81 and reads it back on to the surroundings he had just left, while the wildness of the place and its nearness to the sea come together to create contact with the supernatural. Excessive beauty tips over into quasi-Gothic “strange thoughts,” as if Mary Shelley and her companion in misery, Jane Williams (unnamed in this account), are put in touch with the afterlife of their loved ones even before their deaths.82 In contrast with the line taken in her 1824 preface, Mary Shelley explicitly rules out any hope of consolation, referring—seventeen years after the event—to “the certainty of the death that eclipsed all happiness for the survivors for evermore” (PW, 678). Yet the multiplying of prognostications throughout the passage—the viewing of the scenery as itself a form of presentiment—seems to reflect a search for consolation, as if Shelley’s ability to foretell his own death (stressed later in this narrative) is displaced onto the landscape, a displacement made aesthetically appropriate by the equation between the unearthly beauty of his poetry and that landscape. As in the pastoral elegy, nature joins in mourning the lost poet. After discussing the disposal of Shelley’s body (“The concluding stanzas of the Adonais pointed out where the remains ought to be deposited” [PW, 679]), Mary Shelley switches to a consideration of the possibility of consolation: Could sorrow for the lost, and shuddering anguish at the vacancy left behind, be soothed by poetic imaginations, there was something in Shelley’s fate to mitigate pangs which yet, alas! could not be so mitigated; for hard reality brings too miserably home to the mourner all that is lost of happiness, all of lonely unsolaced struggle that remains. Still, though dreams and hues of poetry cannot blunt grief, it invests his fate with a sublime fitness, which those less nearly allied may regard with complacency. A year before he had poured into verse all such ideas about death as give it a glory of its own. He had, as it


189

now seems, almost anticipated his own destiny; and, when the mind figures his skiff wrapped from sight by the thunder-storm, as it was last seen upon the purple sea, and then, as the cloud of the tempest passed away, no sign remained of where it had been—who but will regard as a prophecy the last stanza of the Adonais? (PW, 679)

Mary Shelley here entertains the thought of the consoling value of “poetic imaginations” only to discard them as inefficacious for the “mourner”: the “struggle that remains” is, she claims, “unsolaced.” As in her preface to Shelley’s Posthumous Poems, Mary Shelley makes the standard elegiac claim of inconsolability. This bleak conclusion does not prevent her from appreciating the effect of the “sublime fitness” of Shelley’s death on those outside Shelley’s circle (“less nearly allied”), however: these nonmourners are invited to take pleasure rather than pain in the “fitness.” This fitness is apparently the product of many factors, but the chief is Shelley’s ability to make death poetic, to “give” death “a glory of its own,” thus making his own death yet again somehow artistically appropriate. The conjunction of Adonais and its writer’s death itself constitutes consolation for the loss of Shelley. Shelley, as in Hunt’s review of Adonais, has lived his own fiction. The poet’s anticipation of “his own destiny” requires an accompanying imaginative projection from the “mind” of the reader. This mind “figures” two seemingly incompatible images: Shelley’s boat at once “wrapped from sight” and “last seen”; it puts itself in the place of a real observer (a footnote summarizes an eyewitness account) and at the same time “figures” what that observer could not see. The structure of the sentence reinforces this contrast, by shifting from hearsay evidence (“as it was last seen”) to an authoritative account (“and then . . .”). The reader’s mind has to restage Shelley’s death in order to regard the ending of Adonais as a “prophecy,” and the use of imagination to supplement Shelley’s text paradoxically results in the death itself seeming as much an imaginative creation as the poem, especially since Mary Shelley puts herself in the position of a viewer from a distance rather than identifying with the drowning man. In this account it is difficult to believe that “hard reality” is ever really brought “home.” In emphasizing the role of the reader, Mary Shelley is careful not to claim that Shelley really foretold his own death: the anticipation and the prophecy are in the minds of the readers of Adonais instead of in the intention of the poet, even though the engagement with the “glory” of Shelley’s own death would seem to require a transfer of imagination from the poet to the reader.

190


The passage therefore at once denies and insists on the power of poetry to effect consolation; it draws a sharp line between the feelings of Shelley’s inner circle and those of outsiders. For this reason Mary Shelley’s note may appear to stand apart from other efforts by members of the Shelley circle to find consolation through contemplating the connection between Adonais and Shelley’s death or between the style of Shelley’s poetry (especially that style as supposedly defined by Adonais) and the circumstances of his death. Mary Shelley insists that her own loss cannot be compensated for. Yet in rewriting the “scene” in terms of Shelley and his death, and in dwelling on the consolation that is at least hypothetically afforded by Adonais, Mary Shelley implicitly does gain consolation from her own account through the act of memorialization. She also—unlike those (including herself ) writing in the 1820s, but like later critics of Shelley—has the poet’s earthly fame to console her: she makes this clear in her 1839 note on the poems of 1821, announcing, “There is much in the Adonais which seems now more applicable to Shelley himself than to the young and gifted poet whom he mourned. The poetic view he takes of death, and the lofty scorn he displays towards his calumniators, are as a prophecy on his own destiny when received among immortal names, and the poisonous breath of critics has vanished into emptiness before the fame he inherits” (PW, 663). “The poetic view he takes of death” presumably refers to the elegiac translation of death into a cause for celebration, although as in Mary Shelley’s notes to the poems of 1822 the implication is that it is Shelley’s own death that is poetic. The contrast between approval for Shelley’s attitude of “lofty scorn” towards his “calumniators,” and the declaration that “the poisonous breath of critics has vanished” echoes Shelley’s own treatment of the reviewers. In claiming that Shelley has been received “among immortal names,” Mary Shelley blurs the distinction between mortal and immortal fame, insinuating that Shelley has earned the very type of fame that he evoked in Adonais.83 In implicit answer to her own rhetorical question (“who but will regard as a prophecy . . . ?”), Mary Shelley ends her note on the poems of 1822, and thus her account of Shelley, by quoting the last stanza of Adonais: The breath whose might I have invoked in song Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven, Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng Whose sails were never to the tempest given; The massy earth and spherèd skies are riven!


191

I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar; Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are. (ll. 487–95)

The placement of this quotation gives the misleading impression that it was the last thing Shelley wrote, even though he composed Adonais over a year before his death.84 The point is of course that if these were not actually Shelley’s last words, they should have been. The force of Mary Shelley’s claims relies on the collaboration of her readers, whose response it is supposed will go beyond assent to surface statements and into the realm of aesthetic pleasure or “complacency.” Readers are expected to enjoy the idea that Shelley imaged in advance the wreck of his sailboat in a storm; the notion of prophecy turns the individual from a victim of chance into one who has control over his destiny. Mary Shelley’s decision to end by quoting this last stanza assumes that her readers, in joining the circle of Shelley’s mourners, will participate in the aesthetic appreciation of Shelley and his death, and in doing so will confirm that he has achieved eternal fame, even though a closer look at the last stanza will show how its language, like that of many others in the poem, destabilizes the elegiac speaker’s transcendentalizing claims. The stanza, which forms part of the conventional return to the mourner (although as previously mentioned, unlike Lycidas, Adonais does not end with the revival of the mourner), explicitly insists on and at the same time questions the poem’s emphasis on the consoling power of transcendence. Continuing past the rhetorical climax of the poem (“The One remains”), it asserts the immortality of Adonais while setting up a hint of doubt whether such a state can be reached by an earthbound mortal afloat in a “bark.” In the stanza in which he celebrates the One, the speaker invites himself and perhaps a hypothetical fellow mourner to “Die, / If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!” (ll. 464–65). In the next stanza he hesitates: “Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?” only to return to a series of essentialized abstractions in the penultimate stanza: “Light . . . Beauty . . . Benediction . . . Love” (ll. 478–81), images of transcendence that are, however, grounded and actualized, “through the web of being blindly wove / By man and beast and earth and air and sea” (ll. 482– 83). In the final stanza the speaker is “driven,” not triumphantly, but

192


“fearfully” towards Adonais and apparently towards death. The suggestion of suicide has been taken to problematize the consolation offered by the poem. The implicit desire of the speaker (in contrast with the “trembling throng”) to give his “sails” to the “tempest” creates the impression that he is willingly drawn into an apocalyptic storm: “The massy earth and spherèd skies are riven!” The speaker’s grandiosity can be inferred from the way his particular “tempest” is equated with the end of the world. To some readers, in line with this impression of self-aggrandizement, the speaker can be seen to embrace death, taking self-renunciation to an extreme by identifying completely with the dead, thus removing the need for consolation.85 But the idea that in Adonais Shelley figures the “dead end” of “rhetorical suicide” risks underestimating the tendency of elegy to make death inviting.86 Moreover, in conflict with suicidal readings, this last stanza may suggest that—in line with the impression that the poem has gone past its logical stopping point, the One—the speaker’s death is to be indefinitely deferred: he is “borne” passively along by the breath or the tempest but not necessarily towards the beaconing Adonais, who may be issuing either a welcome or a warning. The speaker could, with his return to “I,” be celebrating the prospect of individual immortality as the poem ends on a note of quiet assurance.87 Conversely, he might be lamenting his inability to join Adonais, who is up with the “Eternal” while the speaker remains down on the water: the speaker himself may fear the annihilation that would be produced by union with Adonais, even though he remains in darkness, while Adonais shines “like a star.” According to this reading, the poem ends by marking distance rather than identification. Those critics who see Adonais as self-consciously about itself, who see consolation as depending on the survival of poetry, find the distance unproblematic because if immortal fame is just a poetic image of earthly fame, the speaker’s resistance is resistance to annihilation.88 In accordance with the suggestion that the “soul of Adonais” survives after death, the One, as mentioned earlier, can be read as an image for a recognizable collectivity—earthly fame, the result of admiration by multiple readers. With this kind of fame, the poet endures only as long as the words endure in which his poems are written, and only as long as there exist human beings capable of reading those words. Such fame is temporal, not eternal. However, the One cannot only be equated with earthly fame: insofar as it comprises not only individual survival but “those whose names on earth are dark” (including, for all Shelley knew,


193

Keats), it is at once an image for poetic immortality and a referent for the transcendent and unearthly. Whether the poem is seen as holding out against or capitulating to death, and thus to self-obliteration, this last stanza tries to insist on the existence of something outside mere poetic fame: the “inmost veil of Heaven” may resemble the essentialized “inmost naked beauty” mentioned in the Defence. On the other hand, the phrase “burning through,” referring to “the soul of Adonais,” may imply that the soul is still on its way to the inmost veil—which may cast doubt on the existence of the veil—or that the soul has broken past that veil, in which case there must be something else beyond. The “inmost veil,” that is, can be relativized by the notion of endless layers implied by the Defence ’s image of stripping off “veil after veil.” If metaphor (which in this poem rests on an essentialized beauty) prevailed over metonymy (which de-essentializes beauty) in the self-portrait, here in the last stanza the opposite would seem to be the case. The poem apparently ends by rejecting idealism in favor of allegory. What then happens to the poem’s central symbol of transcendent beauty, the One? It is not negated by the vulnerability of the language that celebrates it. Although the poem’s vision of immortality would be more consoling (less precariously consoling, perhaps) if it referred uncomplicatedly to what William Ulmer calls “actual ontological transcendence,”89 I would not attempt to argue that Shelley’s expressions of idealism can in and of themselves resist the demystifying pressures of deconstruction on the one hand or historicist ideology critique on the other. As I have suggested all along, however, the circumstances of reception provide one means of holding onto Shelley’s idealism—generally in the case of Prometheus Unbound, specifically and uniquely in the case of Adonais. Whereas Ulmer, in Shelleyan Eros, sees metaphor as “lapsing” into metonymy in Shelley’s later poetry (including Adonais [170]), I find an ongoing tension in the dialogue between Adonais and its reception, a tension that holds metaphor (Shelley is an angel) in solution with metonymy (which fragments the dead poet), and which can therefore be seen to reproduce the tensions within Shelley’s own idealism. Shelley’s friends cannot of course literally put into practice the problematic form of aesthetic appreciation celebrated in Adonais. As we have seen, the intertwining accounts of Adonais and Shelley’s death by members of the Shelley circle at face value seem remote from a Shelleyan act of selfeffacement, since Shelley’s friends tell us more about themselves than about the poet. On one level, their shared rewriting of Shelley is a simple act of

194


exploitation: their substitution of an angel for a devil is an example of the elegiac convention whereby mourners destroy the mourned all over again in the course of lamenting their loss. In disembodying and emasculating their friend, the members of the Shelley circle do to Shelley what he does to Keats, advancing their own agenda at his expense, an agenda with which Shelley’s own self-representations collaborated. This process, following the conventional strategies of the elegist, merely inverts and therefore replicates the maneuvers of paranoid rhetoric. Although it is a “going out of [their] nature” in the sense that it is an unwitting collaboration, the Shelley circle’s admiring reaction to their friend incorporates the unflattering, partisan descriptions of his poetry by hostile reviewers. Like the poem’s own reaction to Keats, it therefore seems tainted by Satanic rhetoric. In labeling the poet an angel, Shelley’s friends at once aggrandize the individual poet (granting him the power of foresight) and self-servingly deprive him of agency. The more the poet’s friends compensate for the loss of an individual by investing in the figure of the author, the more they draw attention to their own shared act of reshaping taste. They thus repeat the standard elegiac interplay between self-renunciation and self-promotion. Unlike in the dialogue between Prometheus Unbound and its reviewers, the “Satanic” reading of Adonais and its reception persists within what might be called a transcendent reading and thus threatens to confine that reading within the parameters of the Satanic scenario. At the same time, though, the Shelley circle’s collective response to Shelley and Adonais circumvents as well as perpetuates the dynamics of paranoid politics. Shelley’s friends sidestep absolute terms of good and evil by implying that the beauty of the poetry at once confirms the beautiful and angelic character and appearance of the poet, and is in turn confirmed by it. This response relies on the following spiraling train of presuppositions, connected more by feeling (sympathy for Shelley) than logic: if one finds Adonais beautiful then one can appreciate the sublime fitness of Shelley’s death and vice versa; that sense of fitness blurs with the impression that the ending of Adonais is a prophecy, each reinforcing the other; if one grants the validity of the prophecy one will be consoled for Shelley’s death by the conviction that somehow he lives on, not so much in the sense that his works survive him as in the sense, presumably, of his continuing existence among the “Eternal.” (The survival of Shelley’s works tends to be incidental in these accounts, presumably because of the standard elegiac fiction that the poet was cut off before his prime.) In making this implicit argument,


195

the friends exchange what others see as unintelligibility and vagueness for beauty; they transfer that beauty from the poetry onto the man, making him unearthly and seraphical, and they transfer the unearthly beauty of the man onto his death, from his death onto the landscape or even (in accounts of his funeral) onto the sand in which his body was buried, and from those surroundings back onto the poetry. This circular metonymic slippage cannot finally reveal Shelley’s “inmost naked beauty,” just as the poem cannot finally reveal that of Adonais; it remains an approximation, an act of aesthetic appreciation filtered through an attempted reformulation of taste. Historically successful in persuading readers, it makes the never fully explicit yet thoroughly generic argument that the circumstances of Shelley’s death somehow compensate for his loss. Since no amount of beauty can presumably really compensate for the death of a human being—the two are incommensurable—this argument is made through a blurring of terms, a blurring equivalent to the conflation within Adonais itself of earthly fame and immortal fame, individual fame and collective fame. The reception of the poem therefore reproduces the sleight-of-hand by which Shelley mingles the individual and the transcendent. It also reproduces Shelley’s treatment of Keats in the poem as a whole and thus his implicit treatment of himself, as well as his more explicit treatment of himself in the self-portrait. In each case the distinction between individual selves is broken down: attributes shift metonymically from one poet to the other, from poem to poet, and from the poet onto other sources, proliferating allegorically. This self-reinforcing reaction is not generalizable: it is created by, and itself helps to create, a particular nexus consisting of Shelley, his death, and Adonais. The chance juxtaposition of Shelley’s death and his elegy for Keats leads Shelley’s friends, in themselves constituting a procession of mourners commemorating a dead poet, to realize a version of the elegy’s own complex revision of Shelley’s idealized identification with the beautiful. As such, this particular conjunction of events—unlike the dialogue between Prometheus Unbound and its reviewers—does not necessarily suggest that the study of reception may offer further opportunities for defending Romantic idealism against either deconstruction or an equally skeptical historicism. The elegiac reception of Adonais comprises nothing more nor less than a culturally specific instance of the enactment of idealism.


Notes

Introduction 1. Lawrence Zillman, ed., Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound”: A Variorum Edition, 126. In general, quotations from Shelley’s poetry are as given by his contemporary reviewers. Otherwise, Shelley’s poems are cited from the first editions published during his lifetime, in this case the 1820 text of Prometheus Unbound provided by Zillman. Except where noted, other references to Shelley’s works are from SPP. Any emphasis in a quotation reproduces that of the author being quoted. 2. In addition, for Hofstadter, users of the paranoid style take for granted “the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character” (14). The notion of an extended international network of secret societies only very occasionally surfaces in the reviews that I will be analyzing. Although during the Napoleonic era British periodical writers sometimes mention the insidious influence of French or American ideas, after Waterloo they usually focus on the threat of conspiracy at home. But they are certainly preoccupied with the imminence of revolution, and they habitually take what Hofstadter calls a “curious leap in imagination” (37) when describing the effects of reformist texts on their readers and even on nonreaders. Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” and Other Essays. 3. Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style, 41. C. S. Lewis, in A Preface to “Paradise Lost,” gives a brilliant account of the impotence of Milton’s Satan, which he presents as a corrective to the Romantic Satanism of Blake and Shelley, but Lewis’s reading of “the Satanic predicament” (100) is anticipated by William Godwin’s depiction of the relationship between Caleb and Falkland in Caleb Williams (1794) and by Mary Shelley’s even more Miltonic recasting of that relationship in Frankenstein (1818), as well as by Shelley’s Julian and Maddalo 197

198

N o t e s t o P a g e s 3–5

(1818–1819, published 1824) and Lord Byron’s The Vision of Judgment (1822). 4. Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism, 37. 5. Freud’s Dr. Schreber is the classic example of the paranoid megalomaniac who imagines that he is being persecuted. See Sigmund Freud, “Psychoanalytical Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia.” In contrast with my emphasis on the multiple causes of the Romantic era’s version of cultural paranoia, the classic Freudian account of psychological paranoia identifies a single cause for the paranoiac’s megalomania, defensiveness, and persecution complex: homosexuality. While I follow Hofstadter in stressing that the practitioners of the paranoid style are precisely not psychotic, I will show in passing that one of the ways in which cultural and psychological paranoia resemble each other is in sometimes expressing what looks like homosexual panic. 6. Similarly, Theresa Kelley, in “Poetics and the Politics of Reception: Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci,’ ” reads “La Belle Dame” as a response to the unfavorable reception of Keats’s Poems (1817) and Endymion (1818). She sees Keats taking an at once antagonistic and placating stance towards the reviewers, as evidenced in both his choice of literary sources and his revisions of “La Belle Dame,” which, according to Kelley, simultaneously flaunt and de-emphasize Keats’s “Cockney” stylistic idiosyncrasies. 7. On Shelley’s debt to Godwin’s anticoercive stance, see Steven E. Jones, Shelley’s Satire: Violence, Exhortation, and Authority, 91–91. 8. Cf. Paul de Man, who, in “Shelley Disfigured,” claims that any reading is inevitably a “monumentalization” (123), which (countering the deconstructive impulse to go “beyond good and evil” [122]) attempts to assign “value” (122)—positive or negative—to a text. William A. Ulmer, in Shelleyan Eros: The Rhetoric of Romantic Love, asserts that “Granting his readers an equal role in the construction of intersubjective meanings, Shelley realized, meant granting them the capability to disfigure the most beautiful idealisms in the very process of assimilating them—as the public reception of his work amply demonstrated” (21). My argument shows by contrast that while disfiguration in de Man’s sense (going “beyond good and evil”) may threaten “beautiful idealisms,” if one acknowledges, as de Man does, the irresistibility of assigning “value,” then the public reception of Shelley’s poetry may be seen as reshaping Shelley’s “idealisms” as well as misshaping them. That the effects of a text’s interaction with its public reception are necessarily beyond its author’s control sorts well both with Shelley’s refusal to dictate the shape that change should take and the value he places on breaking down the boundaries around the individual self.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 6–7

199

9. The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, 9:237. 10. Tilottama Rajan, in The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice, stresses the multiple “voices” of the Defence: “the idealistic and the deconstructive, the ontological and the pragmatic, the essentialist and the historicist” (296). See also Richard Cronin, Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts, 33–35. I agree with these critics that although its competing voices should make one wary of using statements from the Defence to gloss Shelley’s theoretical positions, those statements do not necessarily cancel each other out. 11. Cf. Donald Reiman, “Shelley and the Human Condition.” Reiman sees the definition of love in “On Love” as less self-effacing than the definition given in the Defence (10). 12. William A. Ulmer, “Adonais and the Death of Poetry,” 429. 13. See, for example, Jerrold Hogle, Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works. Despite its occasional historicizing gestures, in this book Shelley’s works exist in a formalist space rather than a cultural one. See also John A. Hodgson, Coleridge, Shelley, and Transcendental Inquiry. 14. See, for example, Kenneth Neill Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years; and Michael Scrivener, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley. The critics who focus on Shelley’s political involvements (Cameron, Scrivener, and others) tend to restrict their analyses to what I see as Shelley’s participation in the Satanic scenario. 15. The problem of how to hold on to Shelley’s idealism in the wake of deconstruction is most explicitly confronted by Tilottama Rajan in Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism and again in Supplement of Reading. Rajan ingeniously finds resistance to deconstruction within the poems themselves. Another recent critic who argues that Shelley’s idealism is not canceled out by his skepticism is Ulmer, in Shelleyan Eros. Despite his concern to recuperate Shelley’s idealism in formalist terms, Ulmer goes on to maintain that Shelley grants “the priority of the allegorical” (in a de Manian sense—see note 16 below) in his later poetry, including Adonais (79), a contention elaborated upon in Ulmer’s essay, “Adonais and the Death of Poetry.” In Shelley’s Process, Hogle attempts to combine a deconstruction of Shelleyan idealism with a commitment to the ethical imperative driving Shelley’s poetry, an imperative that would seem to require a ground other than what Hogle calls “transference,” the “rootless passage between different formations” (15). For a materialist critique of Shelley’s idealism, see Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation, 121.

200

N o t e s t o P a g e s 8–1 5

16. I thus extend de Man’s notion of allegory to include the interaction between a text and its audiences; see Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” De Man’s essay identifies Romantic poetry with a conception of allegory as groundless and “temporal”: “Whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification, allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference” (191). 17. Compare Martin Aske, who, in “Critical Disfiguring: The ‘Jealous Leer Malign’ in Romantic Criticism,” analyzes “a very specific language of envy and resentment” (53) that is cultural rather than personal, a language that locks opponents like Leigh Hunt and William Gifford into mutual fascination. 18. Stephen C. Behrendt, in Shelley and His Audiences, explores Shelley’s own rhetorical manipulations but without emphasizing the effects of these maneuvers on actual readers. 19. The Edinburgh Review did not discuss Shelley until after his death, when it finally reviewed his Posthumous Poems (1824) in an article by Hazlitt (discussed briefly in Chapter 4). Nevertheless, I include essays from the Edinburgh in my first chapter as representative of the establishment rhetoric with which Shelley’s poetry engages. Chapter 1 1. [John Gibson Lockhart], “Remarks on the Periodical Criticism of England—in a Letter to a Friend,” BM 2 (March 1818): 670–79. 2. “Mr Jeffray [sic ] . . . has as yet done nothing which will ever induce a man of research, in the next century, to turn over the volumes of his Review” (BM 2:676). 3. Von Lauerwinkel mentions a circulation of “fifteen thousand” (BM 2:674), but a footnote in his own article questions this figure. According to Richard Altick, in The English Common Reader, the circulation of the Edinburgh Review in 1818 was 12,000 (392). 4. John Gibson Lockhart praised his own “Remarks” in his anonymous Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk: “It was the first regular attack made with any striking degree of power of thought, or even with any display of nervous and manly language, against all the chief sins of the Edinburgh Review” (2:215). Lockhart’s praise of his own essay reinforces the sense of a selfsustaining system in which the judgments of the reading public are only tangentially relevant.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 7–1 8

201

5. As earlier mentioned, the Edinburgh did not review Shelley during his lifetime, but as we will see, its essays on politics feed into the public discourse of paranoia. Newman Ivey White suggests a reason for the Edinburgh’s neglect of Shelley: “Shelley may have been pointedly ignored because to notice him favorably would seem to be endorsing atheism and so furnish the Tories with ammunition against The Edinburgh” (H, 5). 6. A later, more serious analysis of the two periodicals by the liberal Westminster Review, like Lockhart, overstates the influence of the Edinburgh but in order to deplore its conservatism rather than its subversiveness. See [James Mill], “Periodical Literature: 1. The Edinburgh Review, Vol. 1, 2, &c,” WR 1 (January 1824): 206–49; [John Stuart Mill], “Periodical Literature: The Edinburgh Review,” WR 1 (April 1824): 505–41; and [James Mill], “Periodical Literature: The Quarterly Review,” WR 2 (Oct. 1824): 463–503. The last article is an exposure of the Quarterly’s rhetorical strategies. Throughout history, according to the Westminster, the “weapons” of those in power are what it calls “Assumption, and Abuse” (WR 2:465). The Quarterly “maintains its position,” that is to say, “by begging questions, and venting calumny” (WR 2:468). “Contradictions,” adds the Westminster, “though they are contrary to the rules of ordinary logic, are by no means contrary to the logic of power” (WR 2:470– 71). One might add that the Westminster ’s own analysis shows that this generalization is also true of the opponents of power, and that the Edinburgh is also guilty of assumption—meaning preaching to the converted— and abuse. 7. John Clive, in Scotch Reviewers: The “Edinburgh Review,” 1802–1815, summarizes the political twists and turns taken by the Edinburgh up to 1815 (86–123). 8. Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and his Friends, 1:100. The Quarterly Review was supposedly set up in response to an article by Francis Jeffrey and Henry Brougham, “Don Pedro Cevallos on the French Usurpation of Spain,” ER 13 (October 1808): 215–34, which argued that “Reforms in the administration of our affairs must be adopted, to prevent more violent changes” (ER 13:222). The call for reform represents the Edinburgh Review at its most left-wing; however, confirming my point about the extravagance of the periodicals’ rhetoric, Tory reactions to this article were far more extreme than its content would seem to warrant. Clive, in Scotch Reviewers, 111, lists some reactions, including a pamphlet called Remarks on the Jacobinical Tendency of the Edinburgh Review (1809). 9. Walter Graham, English Literary Periodicals, 243.

202

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 8–1 9

10. Cf. Robert Southey’s remark to his brother on the founding of the Quarterly: “In plain English, the Ministers set it up. But they wish it not to wear a party appearance” (quoted by Stanley Jones, Hazlitt: A Life, 248). 11. Smiles, Publisher and his Friends, 1:101. For the quotation from Murray, see Smiles, 1:152–53. 12. Both Gifford and Jeffrey revised other reviewers’ contributions to make them “harmonize” with the overall style of the periodical. See Hill Shine and Helen Chadwick Shine, The “Quarterly Review” under Gifford: Identification of Contributors, 1809–1824, xvi; see also Clive, Scotch Reviewers, 57–59. The Shines add that “the Quarterly articles were considered entirely the property of the periodical; and that periodical—the periodical alone, rather than any individual reviewer—was responsible for whatever appeared in its pages” (xviii). 13. Klancher, in The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832, classifies the audiences that he claims begin to emerge in this period, including “a newly self-conscious middle class . . . and an insurgent radical readership” (15). 14. [Robert Southey], “Inquiry into the Poor Laws,” QR 8 (December 1812): 319–56. The main argument of the essay is that the poor have declined morally due to the increase in manufacturing. Southey quotes his own Letters from England (1807)—pretending not to know whether “this writer be Spaniard or Englishman”—on the inevitability of revolution as a result of discontentment caused by manufacturing, and ironically applauds his own “foresight” (QR 8:341). Southey also, like Cobbett in his “Address” (see below), attacks Malthus, whose theory of population growth comes under fire from both the right and the left. 15. Quoted in Shine and Shine, “Quarterly Review” under Gifford, 34. The juxtaposition and the use of the plural are both means by which the supposed threat posed by two very different writers is routinely inflated. The phrase “the Hunts” misleadingly conflates the middle-class Leigh Hunt and his brother John with the more populist Henry “Orator” Hunt. See also an article, probably written by Lockhart, “Cockney Poetry and Cockney Politics: Bristol Hunt and Hampstead Hunt” in BM 5 (September 1819): 639–42, which facetiously plays on Leigh Hunt’s and Henry Hunt’s shared name. Richard Cronin, in “Peter Bell, Peterloo, and the Politics of Cockney Poetry,” points out that the Cockney School of Poetry, represented by Leigh Hunt and his circle and the Examiner, was more middle class than the Cockney School of Politics, represented by Henry Hunt, Cobbett, and their followers (67). But the reviewers’ rhetoric tends to ignore the

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 9–2 1

203

differences between their political opponents, a move that makes them seem at once more threatening and more containable. 16. [Francis Jeffrey], “Cobbett’s Political Register,” ER 10 (July 1807): 386–421. The essay emphasizes the “great influence” (ER 10:421) of Cobbett’s “poison” (ER 10:399). Clive, in Scotch Reviewers, does however point out that the content of this essay was unusually conservative for the Edinburgh (104–9). 17. Twenty-two hundred in 1808, by Hunt’s own account (Altick, The English Common Reader, 392); “almost” treble that figure in 1811, according to Jeremy Bentham (see Herschel Baker, William Hazlitt, 197). 18. Coleridge, in a letter to Southey of May 12, 1812, had encouraged him to write this article on the “theme” of “the sinking down of Jacobinism below the middle & tolerably educated Classes into the Readers & all-swallowing Auditors in Tap-rooms &c, of the Statesman, Examiner, Cobbet [sic ], &c” (Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 3:410). 19. Southey himself may well fall into the first of these categories, since apparently he literally feared for the safety of himself and his family. Jones, in Hazlitt, quotes Benjamin Haydon on Southey: “he feared in case of a revolution he should be the very first man hung by the Radicals” (244). Southey’s own personal paranoia feeds into the larger cultural phenomenon that I am describing, but it certainly cannot wholly account for that phenomenon. 20. Until March 1817, when Habeas Corpus was suspended and Cobbett fled to America, he evaded the stamp duty by publishing the leading article only as a Weekly Political Pamphlet. See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 620. Kevin Gilmartin, in “The Press on Trial: Form and Imagination in Early Nineteenth-Century Radical Culture,” points out that Cobbett threatened to realize the Tory nightmare of a nation saturated by print protest (145). Cobbett’s cheap Register may have been a literalization of Tory fears (as Gilmartin claims), but the specter of proliferating seditious material was always more potent than the reality. 21. Kevin Gilmartin, in Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England, observes that “Even the nickname ‘TwoPenny Trash’ was an epithet first applied by his enemies, which Cobbett then appropriated as a badge of honor” (75). Thompson, in Making, 90, hints at the limitations of the radicals’ use of pig imagery, while Olivia Smith, in The Politics of Language, 1791–1819, discusses at more length the ambivalence of this strategy (79–85). Andrew M. Cooper, in “Blake and Madness: The World Turned Inside Out,” claims that the reformers in the 1790s were disabled rather than empowered by their adoption of Burke’s

204

N o t e s t o P a g e s 2 2–2 3

terms (594). Cf. Klancher, in The Making of English Reading Audiences: “By declaring themselves dominated, English radical writers and readers also helped produce a self-consciously dominant culture” (99). 22. Here I disagree with Leonora Nattrass, who, in William Cobbett: The Politics of Style, claims that Cobbett’s tendency to work within the terms of his establishment opponents rather than seeking “an alternative, untainted discourse” (30) is effective rather than the reverse. Cobbett and many of his fellow reformers share the assumptions underlying paranoid rhetoric, in that a central tenet of early-nineteenth-century radicalism is that the sinecurists, placeholders, and pensioners of a corrupt government conspire to deprive the lower orders of political representation. Individuals, that is to say, are to blame for the state of public affairs. Cobbett and other radical leaders also take for granted the automatic efficacy of reformist texts—an at once empowering and limiting assumption. 23. Selections from Cobbett’s Political Works, 5:1–17 (8). Further references to the “Address” in parentheses. 24. Raymond Williams, Cobbett, 17. In the “Address,” Cobbett claims to be against universal suffrage because “mere menial servants, vagrants, pickpockets and scamps of all sorts might . . . come to poll” (11). Thompson, in Making, points out that Cobbett later changed his mind and by February 1817 came to support universal male suffrage (637). 25. This statement expresses a revisionary constitutionalist stance. See Nattrass, William Cobbett, 112–18, on constitutionalism and the “Address.” Nattrass sees the “Address” as more rhetorically effective than I do, but she adds suggestively that “to an important degree the achievement of the text itself is a symbolic one tied up with its low price and wide availability” (110). 26. Thompson, in Making, attributes this ambivalence to Cobbett’s peculiar “blend of Radicalism and Traditionalism” (756), but as Thompson himself suggests, Cobbett was not alone in his “ambiguity” (625) over the desirability of revolution. Citing Thomas Wooler’s Black Dwarf and a speech by Henry Hunt at the first Spa Fields demonstration in November 1816, Thompson condemns “the vices attendant upon such a style” (625). 27. Cobbett distrusted what Thompson, in Making, calls “those organisations through which public opinion must be mediated to become effective” (638), dismissing them as “secret Cabals” (quoted in Thompson, 639). In Print Politics, Gilmartin points out that political activism itself consisted of the publication of radical newspapers: he asserts that “The survival of a [radical] paper through constant mutation became in every sense its plot” (82). (William Pitt’s government had successfully suppressed

No t e s t o Pa g e 2 3

205

radical discourse in 1796, and the Tory government of the postwar years tried to do the same through repressive legislation.) One can distinguish between the Quarterly Review and the Tory government (although a government minister, George Canning, helped to establish the Quarterly), but in an important sense in this period, radical activity is journalism. Even Thompson, who draws attention to alternative forms of political activity such as reform meetings and petitions, stresses the central role of the radical press (Making, 717–29). 28. Kevin Gilmartin’s “ ‘Victims of Argument, Slaves of Fact’: Hunt, Hazlitt, Cobbett, and the Literature of Opposition,” analyzes what he calls “the contradictory logic of independent opposition” (90). Each of the three writers named in his title employ a rhetoric of “detachment” (91) intertwined with an emphasis on “self-authorization” (93) that remains within the terms of the “closed system” (92) of political tyranny. Gilmartin takes Cobbett as his strongest example: “As the extreme instance of egotism, Cobbett provides the best evidence that a personal opposition reproduces the structures and activities it sets out to undermine” (93). Although Gilmartin argues that Hunt, Hazlitt, and Cobbett all escape from their dependence on “the enemy” (93) by envisioning “a utopian social order” (93), his conclusion confirms the sense of the near-impossibility of sidestepping the “system” in that he sees the utopianism as “self-consuming”: “It is unclear what political language the reformed communities that lie beyond opposition might speak” (95). Again, Cobbett “provides the most complete instance of the utopian dissolution of oppositional language” (95). Gilmartin expands upon this argument in Print Politics. 29. Gilmartin quotes Cobbett himself on the “effect” of the “Address” (“ ‘This Is Very Material’: William Cobbett and the Rhetoric of Radical Opposition,” 89). More general claims about the widespread dissemination of radical opinions also tend to rely on the alarmist reactions of leading Tories. Altick, in The English Common Reader, for example, as evidence for the often repeated claim that radical newspapers were widely read aloud in provincial taverns (321; see also 322–23), cites Arthur Aspinall, who, in Politics and the Press, 1780–1850, himself quotes an 1817 letter from Southey to Lord Liverpool as evidence for this notion (29). Aspinall also quotes Southey’s “Parliamentary Reform” essay (discussed below) as evidence for the proliferation of radical propaganda (43). 30. He encouraged purchasers to share copies so as to reach the maximum possible number of readers (Political Register, November 16, 1816, cited by William H. Wickwar, The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press, 1819–1832, 54). Ironically, as late as August 29, 1807, Cobbett himself

206

N o t e s t o P a g e s 2 3–2 7

in the Political Register had called newspapers “vehicles of falsehood and of bad principles” (quoted by Aspinall, Politics and the Press, 10). 31. Confirming the sense of the mutual dependence of Tories and reformers, Aspinall, in Politics and the Press, says, “The Government and its supporters, indeed, paid Cobbett the compliment of imitating his methods. He was to be ‘written down’ ” (29) by pro-government publications. Strangely enough, Aspinall’s supporting evidence for this claim is also taken from Cobbett’s Political Register (of August 2, 1817, published five months after Cobbett had fled to the United States), though he comments that “Cobbett’s figures are hardly credible” (29 n. 6). In escalating claims concerning circulation figures, we see the way in which paranoia builds on itself. Cf. David Worrall, who, in “Mab and Mob: The Radical Press Community in Regency England,” mentions actual readers and live audience participation (144). 32. [Robert Southey], “Parliamentary Reform,” QR 16 (October 1816): 225–78. 33. Demonstrating the point that a paranoid stance bears no necessary relationship to the actual political opinions expressed by a writer, Hazlitt wrote in his essay “Mr Southey” in The Spirit of the Age that despite the “virulence” of Southey’s articles, “The spirit of humanity (thanks to Mr. Southey) is not quite expelled from the Quarterly Review” (Works, 11:83). 34. On the way in which the English national character was defined against the French, see Seamus Deane, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789–1832, 1–3, 27–42. Cf. Cooper, “Blake and Madness,” 595, on the way in which the French/English dichotomy was recast onto English politics after 1815. 35. The Tory government’s engineering of the Cato Street conspiracy, for example, seems like an attempt to create paranoia. 36. The Whigs have the same anxiety. An Edinburgh Review article that outlines the history of parliamentary reform with a Whig bias refers to the Jacobites as having attacked the government established at the Glorious Revolution in “republican disguise” ([James Mackintosh], “Universal Suffrage,” ER 31 [December 1818]: 165–203 [169]). 37. See Shine and Shine, “Quarterly Review” under Gifford, 53. 38. See, for example, William Hazlitt, “Wat Tyler and the Quarterly Review” in the Examiner, March 9, 1817, and Leigh Hunt, “Extraordinary Case of the Late Mr. Southey,” Examiner, May 11, 1817 (quoted in Lionel Madden, ed., Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage, 233–35 and 246–53). 39. A Letter to William Smith, Esq., M.P. from Robert Southey, Esq., 32. In the Letter, Southey refused to admit that he had written the

N o t e s t o P a g e s 2 7–3 1

207

“Parliamentary Reform” essay; he was attacked on this ground among others by Francis Jeffrey in “Wat Tyler and Mr Southey,” ER 28 (March 1817): 151–74: “The truth is, that the writers of one half of the articles in a review are impatient to be known, and take effectual measures to be so. This we take to be the case with Mr Southey” (158). Unsuccessfully defending Southey in a series of articles in the Courier (March–April, 1817), Coleridge stressed the possible dangerous effects of Wat Tyler on the lower orders. 40. The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, 2:419. Further references in parentheses. 41. See Marilyn Butler, who, in Peacock Displayed: A Satirist in His Context, remarks that Melincourt “reacts . . . in kind” to Southey’s essay (94). Butler sees Melincourt as “a political failure” (97), because it was published in March 1817, the same month that Habeas Corpus was suspended. 42. [Robert Southey], “The Rise and Progress of Popular Disaffection,” QR 16 (January 1817 [published April 1817]): 511–52. 43. He admits that, despite being fired at, the Lord Mayor himself has denied that there is a “plot or conspiracy . . . against the government” (QR 16:513), but he cites as evidence of an underlying design the separate discovery of “a fellow bearing the tricolour flag in the Royal Exchange!” (QR 16:514). 44. Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 3. Smith’s argument about the epistemological basis of this artificial hegemonic distinction helps to explain why political reform took so long to occur in early-nineteenthcentury England. 45. Ironically Southey’s attitude to party resembles what Gilmartin calls the radicals’ “rejection of party” (Print Politics, 11). 46. Kenneth Neill Cameron, “Shelley versus Southey: New Light on an Old Quarrel.” 47. Southey calls the “pernicious” Junius (QR 16:530) “the founder of that school of writers, who, setting truth at defiance, impose the most audacious misrepresentations upon a credulous public, and seasoning sophistry with slander, carry into literary and political disquisition a spirit of personal malevolence” (QR 16:531). 48. Southey also contemptuously quotes the radical claim that “his Majesty’s ministers are engaged in plots and conspiracies themselves” (QR 16:546), drawing attention to it rather than refuting it. 49. Cf. [David Robinson and William Gifford], “The Opposition,” QR 28 (October 1822): 197–219. This article blames “LIBELLOUS

208

N o t e s t o P a g e s 3 1–3 3

PUBLICATIONS” (QR 28:200) for the “turbulent and seditious spirit” (QR 28:199) of postwar Britain, arguing that radical newspapers thrive because Whig newspapers are so similar, they enable them to be legally protected. 50. See also the attack on the Quarterly in the Westminster Review 2 (October 1824): 463–503, which emphasizes the contradictoriness of the Quarterly’s rhetoric: “[The Quarterly reviewer] could not make [his opponents] appear so odious as he wished, without making them appear formidable. He could not make them appear so contemptible as he wished, without making them appear to be not formidable” (WR 2:471). 51. [Robert Southey], “On the Poor Laws,” QR 18 (January 1818): 259–308, and “On the Means of Improving the People,” QR 19 (April 1818): 79–118. 52. Marilyn Butler, in “Romantic Manichaeism: Shelley’s ‘On the Devil, and Devils’ and Byron’s Mythological Dramas,” argues that “A ‘Satanic’ school of infidel poets, deliberately challenging Christians by using the figure of Satan as a bridge to other mythologies—solar, dualistic, pantheistic—really did exist by 1818, and was not seriously misrepresented by paranoid Anglican critics” (19). Butler points out, however, that her main example of a Satanic work by Shelley, his essay “On the Devil, and Devils” (probably written in 1819, but not published until 1880), was “unpublishable” (23) at the time. 53. Southey’s Poetical Works, 769. Further references are in parentheses. 54. Southey has cantos 1 and 2 of Don Juan in mind, but he may also be alluding to Shelley’s work, though the publication of the preface preceded the pirate publication of Shelley’s most explicitly atheistic poem, Queen Mab. Stuart Curran, in “The Siege of Hateful Contraries: Shelley, Mary Shelley, Byron, and Paradise Lost,” claims that Southey virtually invents Romantic Satanism in this preface (210–11). 55. This ambiguity corresponds to a contemporary confusion over whether contagious diseases are transmitted from person to person, or whether contagion can occur without human mediation. For a discussion of the “contagionist” controversy in early-nineteenth-century England, see my second chapter. 56. [William Jacob], “Bristed—Statistical View of America,” QR 21 (January 1819): 1–25 (8). I analyze these reviews in my essay, “ ‘Radical Trash’: American Emigrants in the Quarterly Review,” which stresses the Quarterly’s containment of the radical “threat” in that I show how the reviewers exploit their allegedly dangerous political opponents for their entertainment value.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 3 4–3 5

209

57. [Francis Jeffrey], “Mounier, De L’Influence des Philosophes,” ER 1 (October 1802): 1–18. 58. “The idea, in short, of a conspiracy, regularly concerted, and successfully carried on by men calling themselves philosophers, for the establishment of a republic, appears to us to be most visionary and extravagant. Such a supposition has, no doubt, a fine dramatic effect, and gives an air of theatrical interest to the history; but, in the great tragedy of real life, there are no such fantastic plots, or simple catastrophes” (ER 1:13). Jerome Christensen, in “The Detection of the Romantic Conspiracy in Britain,” points out that this stance is contradicted within the first issue of the Edinburgh Review by the paranoia of Jeffrey’s attack on the Lake Poets (608–610). 59. He also disagrees with the opinion of Mounier, whose De L’Influence des Philosophes is the book under review, that “there is no natural connexion between irreligion and democracy” (ER 1:11). 60. [Francis Jeffrey], “Short Remarks on the State of Parties at the Close of the Year 1809,” ER 15 (January 1810): 504–21. 61. Clive quotes this statement in Scotch Reviewers, 118. 62. See Thompson, Making, 639. 63. [Henry Brougham] “Present State of Public Affairs,” ER 27 (August 1817): 516–43 (529). 64. [James Mackintosh], “Universal Suffrage,” ER 31 (December 1818): 165–203 (189; 172). 65. Whig and Tory conspiracy theories, though different, involve a similar attitude of fear and contempt towards the lower classes. This writer describes “the multitude” as spontaneous, violent, and, most importantly, fickle: “Their acclamations are often as loud around the scaffold of the demagogue, as around his triumphal car” (ER 31:189). Cf. the 1817 essay “Present State of Public Affairs,” which refers to the “wicked designs . . . of the lowest rabble” (ER 27:543). 66. [Henry Brougham], “Spy System at Lyons—1817,” ER 30 (June 1818): 172–81. 67. See Thompson, Making, 649–69, for a description of this quickly suppressed rebellion. Thompson recounts how, when the conspirators went on trial, the defense blamed the influence, not of Oliver, but of the “artful and insidious publications” of Cobbett and other radicals, alluding to Cobbett’s “Address to the Journeymen and Labourers” as “one of the most malignant and diabolical publications ever issued from the English press” (quoted by Thompson, 664). See the Examiner, November 9, 1817, for an account of the execution of the supposed traitors. In his

210

N o t e s t o P a g e s 3 6–4 1

pamphlet An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte (1817), Shelley attacks the government for engineering this conspiracy. According to Thompson, “The exposure in the Leeds Mercury of Oliver’s role as an agent provocateur literally astounded public opinion” (662). He claims, “Although throughout 1817 many reformers remained imprisoned under the suspension of Habeas Corpus, the clamour grew throughout the country against the ‘continental spy system’ ” (662–63). Thompson takes this development to account for the acquittal of William Hone on charges of blasphemous and seditious libel in December 1817 (662). 68. This reviewer relates how the local government officials at Lyons created “clouds of misrepresentation” and “detailed a multitude of particular facts, scarcely possible to resist, in support of their accounts; openly accusing of sinister views the only one of their number who differed from them” (ER 30:175). Cf. Hofstadter’s description of the paranoid style as “scholarly” in that it has an “elaborate concern with demonstration” (“Paranoid Style,” 37, 35). 69. [Henry Brougham], “State of Parties,” ER 30 (June 1818): 181– 206. This essay also claims that if the government goes on “encroaching on the people’s rights,” it may be subverted by a “popular commotion” (ER 30:197). 70. [Francis Jeffrey], “State of the Country,” ER 32 (October 1819): 293–309 (301). 71. Cf. [Francis Jeffrey], “Cobbett’s Political Register,” ER 10 (July 1807): 386–421, on Cobbett’s hints concerning revolution: “To these alarms, artfully excited and kept up, the country owes almost the whole of her present difficulties; for, had it not been for the fear men entertained of the overthrow of all order, law, and religion, Pitt never could have held so long that power, by the exercise of which he entailed such a train of curses on us” (ER 10:393). 72. See, for example, [John Miller], “State of the Laws of Great Britain,” QR 21 (April 1819): 398–430. 73. [Robert Southey], “Inquiry into the Copyright Act,” QR 21 (January 1819): 196–213 (207). 74. [John Allen], “Hallam’s Middle Ages,” ER 30 (June 1818): 140–72, and [Andrew Rutherford], “Burgh Reform,” ER 30 (September 1818): 503–24. 75. One example of the ostensible separation between the political and the aesthetic lies in the distinction between Leigh Hunt’s two publications, his weekly newspaper, the Examiner (begun in 1808), and the more belletristic Indicator (1819–1821). Kelley, in “Poetics and the Politics of

N o t e s t o P a g e s 4 1–4 2

211

Reception,” points out that the Indicator could not really be apolitical, given its association with the Cockney School (349–50). See also Hunt’s own rather ambiguous claim in the preface to the first number of the Liberal: “The object of our work is not political, except inasmuch as all writing now-a-days must involve something to that effect” (Liberal 1 [October 1822]: vii). 76. Clive, in Scotch Reviewers, attributes the “acidulous tone” (52) of the Edinburgh Review both to Francis Jeffrey’s mental makeup and to the “connection between vituperation and good business” (53). 77. See, for example, [Francis Jeffrey], “Southey’s Thalaba,” ER 1 (October 1802): 63–83, reprinted in RR,A, 415–25. Jeffrey sees the Lake poets as constituting a “conspiracy . . . against sound judgment in matters poetical” (RR,A, 416). 78. Clive, in Scotch Reviewers, seeking to explain Jeffrey’s attacks on Wordsworth, examines six different schools of thought, one of which espouses this hypothesis, which Clive labels the “persecution thesis” (158). The thesis is propounded by Robert Daniel, in “Jeffrey and Wordsworth: The Shape of Persecution” (204). As Clive points out, the notion of persecution for its own sake—or in this case persecution for the sake of political influence—implies a complete discrepancy between private opinions and public assertions. Daniel himself allows for mixed motives in suggesting both that Jeffrey was “carried away by his vivacious style” and that “he was compelled to write in such haste that his decisions were often ill-considered and opportunistic” (212). Cf. Butler, who, in “Culture’s Medium,” claims that Jeffrey’s first attack on the Lake poets was to gain publicity (133). 79. Levinson, in Keats’s Life of Allegory, sees class anxieties as underlying the notorious hostile attitude of contemporary reviewers to John Keats. Other recent critics who have analyzed the unstable rhetoric of the reviewers in connection with specific poets have both extended and complicated a class-based explanatory framework. These critics, while directing their attention away from class per se, continue to assume that some kind of anxiety underlies the reviewers’ unstable language. Karen Swann, for example, in her essay on the reception of Coleridge’s Christabel, “Literary Gentlemen and Lovely Ladies: The Debate on the Character of Christabel,” argues that the reviewers articulate and make safe anxieties concerning the distinction between high culture and mass culture by displacing a question of genre (Christabel threatens the high/low distinction) onto a concern with blurred gender boundaries. I would stress that extremist language need not be the result of some hidden (or

212

N o t e s t o P a g e s 4 2–4 4

not-so-hidden) anxiety: It may invent a threat rather than—or as well as—respond to one. 80. A facetious essay on “The Leg of Mutton School of Poetry,” BM 9 (June 1821): 345–50, claimed that “To separate the faults and merits of a book, and administer to each a well proportioned dose of praise and censure, is of all tasks the most dull.” Misquoting Pope’s Essay on Man, the anonymous writer (possibly John Gibson Lockhart) adds, “ ‘To praise where we may, be candid where we can,’ is a recipe from which an amusing article was never concocted” (BM 9:345). Michael Allen, in Poe and the British Magazine Tradition, sees the attacks of Blackwood’s as a matter of genre, rather than what appear to be signs of psychic disturbance on the part of the reviewers; he comments that “journalists of the period recognised a specific and conscious convention of conflict” (41). I would suggest that the “convention of conflict” only gradually became “conscious.” 81. See also Peacock’s Melincourt, which, in caricaturing Gifford as “Mr. Vamp,” calls him “naturally very testy and waspish” (The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, 2:399). 82. In “On Criticism” in Table Talk (Works, 8:214–26), Hazlitt recommends reprisals as an antidote to “the venom of the most rancorous bigotry” (220). Hazlitt responded to the brief personal attacks on him (“pimpled Hazlitt”) in the essays on the Cockney School of Poetry in Blackwood’s Magazine by writing the undignified “A Reply to ‘Z,’ ” which was not published until 1923. On a more practical level, Hazlitt started legal proceedings against William Blackwood and was awarded an outof-court settlement of one hundred pounds. See Baker, William Hazlitt, 373–76. Baker remarks that Hazlitt “had helped to set the pattern” of brutal reviewing (365). See also Butler, in Peacock Displayed, on the limitations of Hazlitt’s “invective” (61). 83. The “Letter” calls the Quarterly Review “a receptacle for the scum and sediment of all the prejudice, bigotry, ill-will, ignorance, and rancour, afloat in the kingdom” (Works, 9:14). Hazlitt’s stance of independence, “I think what I please, and say what I think” (Works, 9:31), is also undermined by his minute rebuttals of the Quarterly’s various attacks on his writings. Hazlitt continues his personal attack on the editor of the Quarterly in “Mr. Gifford” in The Spirit of the Age (Works, 11:114–26). 84. Jerome Christensen, in Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society, accepts this hypothesis of Coleridge’s: “A criticism that lacks disciplinary autonomy (a systematic, philosophically informed poetics; institutional independence) cannot be lawful or integrative and will inevitably fall back on the violent, ritualized language it has claimed

N o t e s t o P a g e s 4 4–4 5

213

to transcend” (28). Apropos of the claim to transcend violence Christensen calls the Edinburgh Review “the most important vehicle for the promulgation and application of the principles of political economy,” and other “strategies of enlightenment” (xv) such as utilitarianism. Yet as he seems to concede and as I have already shown, both the Edinburgh and the Quarterly exploit a similarly “violent, ritualized language.” 85. In contrast with Coleridge, Hazlitt perhaps self-servingly defends the Edinburgh Review by claiming that “At all times, whether it was praise or blame that was bestowed, ample reasons were given with it” (“Mr. Jeffrey’s Resignation,” Works, 20:245). 86. Graham, for example, in English Literary Periodicals, gives this account of Jeffrey: “With a dogmatism and an obstinacy worthy of a better cause, he valiantly defended his pseudo-classical citadel, long after the battalions of romantics had conquered the field” (235). J. H. Alexander, in Two Studies in Romantic Reviewing, discusses literary reviewing terminology at the turn of the century, emphasizing the Edinburgh’s reliance on the eighteenth-century reviewing tradition (1:125). See also a review of Shelley’s Hellas (1821) in the General Weekly Register: “Whether the revolution which poetry has undergone be for the better, it is not for us to determine, but as admirers of the old school we cannot but lament the change. If harmony, if beauty of expression, if loftiness of idea, and terseness of thought be the constituents of true poetry, where can we find them so brilliantly displayed as in Dryden, Pope, Goldsmith, Milton, and the writers of the last century?” (RR,C, 457). 87. Irene Elizabeth Mannion, in “Criticism ‘Con Amore’: A Study of Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817–1834,” takes issue with critics such as Reiman and J. H. Alexander, who see Blackwood’s as progressive. Reiman claims that the Blackwood’s reviewers were “among the first group of critics who had been fully infected with the Romantic doctrine that poetry was essentially as important to human life as theology, or political economy, or historical study” (RR,C, 48). See also J. H. Alexander, “Blackwood’s: Magazine as Romantic Form.” In “Learning from Europe: Continental Literature in the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine, 1802–1825,” Alexander declares of Blackwood’s: “Romantic reviewing has arrived” (120). Mannion argues by contrast that the literary criticism of Blackwood’s oscillates between innovative impressionistic responses and the conservative standards of taste of the Quarterly and Edinburgh Reviews. 88. [John Taylor Coleridge?], “ ‘Foliage,’ by Leigh Hunt,” QR 18 (January 1818): 324–35, reprinted in RR,C, 758–63. The author of this review is thought to be John Taylor Coleridge because he refers in a footnote

214

N o t e s t o P a g e s 4 5–4 7

to having known Shelley at Eton (RR,C, 758). In the same footnote, the reviewer refers to a poem that he does not name but which is evidently Laon and Cythna (1817). J. T. Coleridge reviewed this poem in the Quarterly Review for April 1819 (see below), though at this point wonders “whether it would be morally right to lend it notoriety by any comments” (RR,C, 327). He also claims to “know the author’s disgraceful and flagitious history well” (RR,C, 327). 89. Reiman points out that these remarks are “directed at Shelley more than at Hunt” (RR,C, 758). 90. Referring to Southey in November 1818, Byron complained that “The Son of a Bitch on his return from Switzerland two years ago—said that Shelley and I ‘had formed a League of Incest’ ” (BLJ, 6:76). 91. J. T. Coleridge is not the only critic who, discussing Hunt’s Foliage in a flippant tone, becomes suddenly serious when considering Shelley. A reviewer for the British Critic in July 1818 writes, “Mr. Percy Byshe Shelley [sic ]—but we will not trust ourselves with this person; Tacitus has taught us, that there are some offences so flagitious in their nature, that it is necessary, for the benefit of public morals, to conceal their punishment; we leave them, therefore, to the silent vengeance which vice sooner or later must wreak upon itself ” (RR,C, 215). Presumably this writer has in mind the offenses mentioned in the Quarterly Review. We will see how the reviewers use Shelley, the poet of dissolving boundaries, to divide the acceptable from the unacceptable. 92. This allusion convinced Shelley that Southey was the author of the Quarterly’s attacks on him. See Cameron, “Shelley versus Southey.” 93. A classic celebration is Coleridge’s “Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni” (1802). Compare Frances Ferguson’s reading of “Mont Blanc” (1816) in “Shelley’s Mont Blanc: What the Mountain Said.” Ferguson claims that Shelley “does not destroy the mountain’s symbolic value but merely inverts it” (203), given that “the sublime [is] the aesthetic operation through which one makes an implicit argument for the transcendent existence of man” (213). 94. Timothy Webb, “ ‘The Avalanche of Ages’: Shelley’s Defence of Atheism and Prometheus Unbound.” Webb discusses Shelley’s deliberately provocative use of the term brfpt ( and reluctantly finds Shelley guilty of inconsistency, since he had no right to complain about the word being cited by unsympathetic reviewers (27). 95. [John Taylor Coleridge], “Shelley’s Revolt of Islam,” QR 21 (April 1819): 460–71, reprinted in RR,C, 770–76. The article is headed by the titles of both Shelley’s Revolt of Islam (published in January 1818) and

N o t e s t o P a g e s 4 7–4 9

215

Laon and Cythna, the earlier version of the poem that had been withdrawn immediately after publication. Again, the review was written by John Taylor Coleridge, although Shelley became obsessed with the idea that its author was Southey. See below for a brief discussion of the exchange of letters on the subject between Shelley and Southey. Shelley latched onto the idea of Southey even though J. T. Coleridge refers to having known him in boyhood and ridicules the assumption of Shelley’s poem that a revolution can be achieved by “eloquence” (RR,C, 774). Southey surely thought a revolution could be achieved by much less. In my third chapter I discuss the last five paragraphs of the preface of Prometheus Unbound as Shelley’s public response to this second attack in the Quarterly Review. 96. Byron wrote of the Foliage review, “It has sold an edition of the Revolt of Islam” (BLJ, 6:83). 97. A familiar, containing claim. Compare Hazlitt on the counterproductiveness of Shelley’s “extravagance” in his review of Shelley’s Posthumous Poems, in ER 40 (July 1824): 494–514 (497), reprinted in RR,C, 399–409 (RR,C, 401). 98. “Mr. Shelley is his own Laon” (RR,C, 774). John Donovan points this out in “Incest in Laon and Cythna: Nature, Custom, Desire” (70). 99. Shelley wrote to Charles Ollier: “There is one very droll thing in the Quarterly. They say that ‘my chariot-wheels are broken.’ Heaven forbid! My chariot, you may tell them, was built by one of the best makers in Bond Street, and it has gone several thousand miles in perfect security. What a comical thing it would be to make the following advertisement!—‘A report having prevailed, in consequence of some insinuations in the Quarterly Review, that Mr. Shelley’s chariot-wheels are broken, Mr. Charters, of Bond Street, begs to assure the public that they, after having carried him through Italy, France, and Switzerland, still continue in excellent repair’ ” (L, 2:163). 100. The word “am” in “am drowned” is missing from the manuscript of this letter as transcribed in SC, 6:926–27. 101. [William Sidney Walker], “Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound,” QR 26 (October 1821): 168–80, reprinted in RR,C, 780–86. 102. Hunt’s reactions to the Quarterly Review’s attacks on Shelley indicate that he shared the assumptions of the Tory critics. In his review of The Revolt of Islam in the Examiner (February 1, February 22, and March 1, 1818) he had made the familiar reformist claim about the efficacy of that “modern engine,” the press (RR,C, 437). He predicts that instead of causing a revolution, as the Tories fear, it will crush superstition “as a steamengine would a great serpent” (RR,C, 437). Hunt’s defense of Shelley in the Examiner (September 26, October 3, and October 10, 1819) following

216

N o t e s t o P a g e s 5 0–5 5

the Quarterly Review’s attack also unintentionally serves the purpose of reinforcing the Quarterly’s point of view. Describing the review of The Revolt of Islam as “Heavy, and swelling, and soft with venom . . . like a skulking toad” (RR,C, 444), he rebukes the Quarterly for publicizing the existence of the suppressed Laon and Cythna. But his own article confirms Shelley’s notoriety because it does not attempt to find a separate ground from which to attack the Quarterly Review. Defending Shelley’s knowledge of the Bible (which the Quarterly had patronizingly advised Shelley to read), Hunt argues that Shelley’s philosophy is closer than theirs is to the spirit of Christianity. Hunt’s major objection is to the Quarterly’s insinuations about Shelley’s private life. He says that he wishes to “respect the silence hitherto observed publicly by Mr. Shelley respecting such matters,” but that he “cannot resist” defending his friend against the charge of dissolute conduct (RR,C, 447). He goes on to describe Shelley’s scholarly and ascetic lifestyle, actually detailing the poet’s daily routine, thus implicitly granting the validity of a judgment about a writer’s personal life. 103. Making the standard accusation that Tory reviewers make attacks for financial gain, Shelley added, “The wretch who wrote it has doubtless the additional reward of a consciousness of his motives, besides the 30 guineas a sheet or whatever it is that you pay him” (L, 2:251). 104. Jones, in Shelley’s Satire, connects the two writers’ correspondence to Shelley’s fragment, “A Satire upon Satire,” which mentions Southey (77– 87). According to Jones, the letters and the fragment alike show Shelley’s ambivalence towards “paper warfare” (L, 2:204). 105. Kim Wheatley, “The Blackwood’s Attacks on Leigh Hunt.” The larger-than-life fictionalization of Hunt intersects with the Blackwood’s habit of extemporizing to produce a narrative of pursuit, which ultimately aggrandizes Hunt as much as it diminishes him. This last section of the chapter develops the brief remarks that I made in that essay on Lockhart’s reviews of Shelley. 106. Knight’s Quarterly Magazine makes the same point about Shelley in 1824, saying that the “worst parts” of his poems are those in which he presents his political ideas (RR,C, 494). 107. See, for example, Alan Strout, “Maga, Champion of Shelley,” written when it was believed that John Wilson wrote these reviews of Shelley, and the same author’s “Lockhart, Champion of Shelley.” 108. The Honeycomb, August 1820, quoted in James E. Barcus, ed., Shelley: The Critical Heritage, 272. 109. Charles E. Robinson, in “Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Ollier, and William Blackwood: The Contexts of Early Nineteenth-Century

N o t e s t o P a g e s 5 9–6 1

217

Publishing,” has developed the “friend behind the scenes” theory, arguing that the connection between William Blackwood and Shelley’s publisher Charles Ollier accounts for the kind treatment of Shelley by Blackwood’s. But the connection cannot have been very influential before late 1819: The fact that Ollier published the second and third editions of Rimini in 1817 and 1819 did not soften Z’s attitude to Hunt. 110. Shelley signs himself “Miching Mallecho” (325) in Peter Bell the Third (1819, first published 1839), the poem that he called a “party squib” (L, 2:135) and a “joke” (L, 2:164). Chapter 2 1. H. Buxton Forman, The Vicissitudes of Queen Mab: A Chapter in the History of Reform, 10; Forman’s emphasis. 2. Where possible, all quotations from Queen Mab are as given by the relevant reviewers. Otherwise, all quotations from the poem and its notes are from the first edition of 1813. Since the first edition does not provide line numbers, the line numbers given refer to the version of the poem in SPP. 3. Margaret Pelling, in “Contagion/Germ Theory/Specificity,” comments that in the case of contagion, medical terminology has been greatly influenced by other areas of thought: “Ideas of contagion are inseparable from notions of individual morality, social responsibility, and collective action” (310). 4. [John Thomson], “Dr. Haygarth on Infectious Fevers,” ER 1 (October 1802): 245–52. In 1819 the government concluded that contagion did exist, but in response to the agitation of anticontagionists, it relaxed quarantine restrictions after a second inquiry in 1824. 5. As Pelling comments in “Contagion/Germ Theory/Specificity,” “Confusion arises from failure to distinguish between the material or influence (living or non-living) which is transmitted between persons and environments, and the process of transmission or affection, direct or indirect” (314). She also remarks that “in historical terms contagion and miasma have been more readily seen by theorists as alternative or complementary, rather than contradictory, factors in disease” (312). The articles discussed here all touch on questions summarized by Pelling: “Why did diseases prevail in some places and not others? Why did epidemics—or pandemics—rise and then decline, and affect the world at some times and not at others? Does disease consist of stimuli affecting the body, or the body’s reaction to those stimuli?” (311).

218

N o t e s t o P a g e s 6 1–6 2

6. [Robert Gooch], “Contagion and Quarantine,” QR 27 (July 1822): 524–53. Gooch asserts that “we have opinions of our own, and . . . they do not exactly coincide with those of any writer in the controversy” (QR 27:526). For a useful summary of the contagionist controversy, see Charles F. Mullett, The Bubonic Plague and England: An Essay in the History of Preventive Medicine, 335–62. As Mullett mentions (357), to refute contagionism Napoleon Bonaparte touched the pestilential sores of plague-infected soldiers in Egypt, but as Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby points out in “Rumor, Contagion, and Colonization in Gros’s PlagueStricken of Jaffa (1804),” this action is equivocal: “Unlike the monarchs who touched in order to heal as a form of divine intercession, Napoleon, as a mortal man, touches the bubo in order to prove that the disease cannot be transmitted between men. If, however, we accept the notion that both contagion and death resulted solely from fear and imagination, as Napoleon maintains, it is difficult to sustain the idea that the touch was also heroic” (9). 7. The Quarterly itself took a moderate stance on this occasion, implicitly agreeing with those who deny contagion any “abstract power and independent essence” (QR 27:526). This particular reviewer denies that “new distempers” can be created (QR 27:529), yet he claims that diseases over time are subject to “modifications beyond the admission of the contagionist” (QR 27:528) and he concedes, quoting Hancock, that the “virus” of the plague is “capable of spontaneous origin” (QR 27:538). 8. One objection to contagionism concerns how a contagious disease preexists individuals with the disease. Critics of strict contagionism also object that if contagion were a physical entity capable of existing independently of human beings, then it would be inexorable, whereas in fact contagion becomes exhausted. If contagion is real, then how can it be magically eliminated? Yet at the other end of the spectrum believers in environmentalism could find it equally difficult to explain why epidemics wear themselves out and attack their victims selectively. The Quarterly quoted Hancock: “The first class [contagionists] have left us in ignorance by what laws the contagion ceased after its sources were so incalculably multiplied; and the last [anticontagionists] have not explained how a wide spreading evil like the vitiated air still left millions untouched” (QR 27:540). 9. [Unidentified author], “On the Causes, Cure, and Prevention of Contagious Fever,” ER 31 (March 1819): 413–40. The reviewer takes a middle-of-the road stance. Just as the question of the plague’s transmission foregrounds the issue of how to separate human from environmental influence, the topic of how to avoid or treat contagious diseases raises

N o t e s t o P a g e s 6 2–6 3

219

questions concerning the limits and power of individual agency and responsibility. 10. Maclean also reinstates conspiracy by claiming that the belief in contagion is part of an economic conspiracy by the government against traders in imported goods. The anticontagionist position, which downplays human agency, therefore itself incorporates conspiracy theory. Maclean called the quarantine laws “the most gigantic, extraordinary, and mischievous superstructure” ever raised “upon a purely imaginary foundation” (quoted by Mullett, Bubonic Plague, 352). See also Charles F. Mullett, “Politics, Economics, and Medicine: Charles Maclean and Anticontagion in England.” 11. The idea that contagion could be assisted or even actually transmitted, as it were, by the imagination is commonplace in these accounts. The Edinburgh Review, for example, calls fear “a passion that predisposes wonderfully to the reception of all contagious diseases” (ER 31:433), and the Westminster Review refers to “The fear of contagion—that fear, the physical and the moral operation of which is productive of such incalculable mischief ” (WR 3:522). 12. The Edinburgh Review even reverses the standard assumption about who is the most susceptible in claiming that “in the present sickness [a typhus epidemic in Britain], fever has been proportionately more fatal among the rich than the poor” (ER 31:418). 13. He then affirms that “the distinction set up between contagious and pestilential disorders does not, in truth, obtain to any thing like the extent commonly supposed” (QR 27:531): his substitution of the term “pestilential” for infectious muddies the issue. 14. The 1819 Edinburgh essay, like the one in the Quarterly, uses the terms “poison” and “contagion” (ER 31:418) interchangeably; it also argues explicitly that “what physicians call ‘exciting causes’ ” are “partly of a physical and partly of a moral nature” (ER 31:419). The reviewer notes, “We are aware that many able authors hold, that concomitant circumstances alone, such as foul air, filth, putrid animal effluvia, cold, wet, fatigue, and bad diet, will generate contagion, even though none previously existed” (ER 31:417). 15. Grigsby’s analysis in “Rumor, Contagion, and Colonization” brings out the way in which plague and poisoning are both models of “systemic contaminations, without known origins, without visibility as agents” (31), while the juxtaposition of the two (Napoleon was rumored to have poisoned the troops he left behind in Egypt) presupposes agents in control: “Epidemic catastrophe engenders conspiratorial theories. Recourse to the idea of poison represents a search for origins, a quest for causality” (32).

220

N o t e s t o P a g e s 6 3–6 5

For another linkage of epidemic disease and mass poisoning, see François Delaporte, Disease and Civilization: The Cholera in Paris, 1832. The 1819 Edinburgh Review essay mentions lower-class people’s fear of hospitalization on account of “a very general, though most erroneous impression, that in public hospitals medical ‘experiments are tried’ upon the patients” (ER 31:437). 16. [Robert Gooch], “Plague, a Contagious Disease,” QR 33 (December 1825): 218–57. 17. [Thomas Southwood Smith], “Contagion and Sanitary Laws,” WR 3 (January 1825): 134–67. The article concludes, following Maclean, that neither the yellow fever nor the plague is contagious. The sequel to this article, “Plague—Typhus Fever—Quarantine,” WR 3 (April 1825): 499– 530, reiterates this conclusion in proposing an equation between the plague and typhus fever. 18. As Gilmartin points out in Print Politics, “corruption had become the master-trope of the age” (63). See also Gilmartin on the “redefinition of corruption” in the early nineteenth century—a redefinition that “still held government ministers responsible for the abuse of power, but argued that their influence now spread outward through an increasingly complex social and political structure” (14). In his chapter on Cobbett, Gilmartin adds, however, that “Cobbett ultimately insisted on holding individuals, and above all politicians, to account” (167). 19. In this article, “Plague—Typhus Fever—Quarantine,” Smith mocks the “reasoning” and “logic” (WR 3:511) of the contagionists, and takes exception to one writer’s choice of “metaphor”: “A specific virus cannot enjoy ‘a temporary interval of calm’; an animal poison cannot ‘slumber’; so long as it exists and continues in contact with an animal body, it must work its work of destruction without sleeping night or day” (WR 3:512). In assigning malicious intent (“work its work of destruction”) to an “animal poison,” Smith seems to retain the anthropomorphizing imagery that he objects to. 20. [Robert Gooch], “The Quarterly Review of Dr. Macmichael on Contagion and the Plague,” BM 19 (January 1826): 130–31. This article is as much an attack on the Westminster ’s April 1825 article as on the Quarterly’s December 1825 article. (The anonymity of the reviews enables Gooch to critique his own essay.) Cf. a point in the Edinburgh’s 1819 article, which seems to anticipate the Westminster ’s distinction: “This poison, as soon as the disease is fairly begun, continues unintermittingly to exhale from every pore, until convalescence is nearly completed. Not only the surface of the skin, but also the inner surface of the lungs, mouth, intestines,

N o t e s t o P a g e s 6 5–6 6

221

and bladder, continue to pour out the contagious vapour; consequently the very secretions and excretions are highly impregnated with it. In truth, the patient is surrounded, for two or three feet, by an atmosphere of his own, very deleterious to all persons susceptible of the disease who may happen to be exposed to it” (ER 31:431). The idea of a person generating “an atmosphere of his own” pulls together the notions of human and environmental influence, while again the use of terms such as “impregnated” and “poison” seems to reinstate human agency. The Edinburgh Review also claims that contagion “has never become wholly extinct; but has lurked as a fatal spark among the neglected embers of society, ready to burst forth into a blaze at every favourable opportunity” (ER 31:416). This diction strikingly echoes the commonplace early-nineteenth-century image of revolution as a spreading fire. 21. Maclean described contagion as “a ghost walking in darkness” (quoted by Mullett, Bubonic Plague, 338). 22. Pelling, in “Contagion/Germ Theory/Specificity,” gives a list of “homely analogies” (313) most of which feature in early-nineteenthcentury discussions of contagion: “decay . . . putrefaction . . . fermentation . . . the spread of odours . . . vapours . . . animal breath . . . the effect of dyes in water . . . poisons . . . generation” (314). 23. Cf. Nicholas Roe’s account of the Blackwood’s attack on Keats in John Keats and the Culture of Dissent, 20. Roe emphasizes that the disease imagery carries a political resonance. 24. David Duff, in Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre, has pointed out that Queen Mab’s “blend . . . of abstract and figurative language . . . bears unmistakable traces of the French revolutionary style” of the 1790s (65). (Duff denies, however, that Queen Mab contains any “paranoia” [65], even though one could object that paranoia is the defining feature of such a style.) Duff also claims, “Queen Mab . . . in general seeks to close ambiguities, to permit one meaning at a time and maintain a tight control of the process of signification” (113). Similarly, Ronald Tetreault states, in The Poetry of Life: Shelley and Literary Form, that Mab’s “language always indicates some determinate signified that admits of no interpretation” (33). But note Gilmartin’s claim that “Effective political opposition might prefer a rhetoric of transparent description, but it could not avoid a riot of figures (disease, decay, parasitism, atmosphere, monstrosity) when it actually described the enemy” (Print Politics, 63). 25. After seven cantos denouncing past and present “corruption” (3.108), the poem’s portrayal of a utopian future in its last two cantos appears as if from nowhere. The surface argument of Queen Mab (good

222

N o t e s t o P a g e s 6 7–6 8

triumphs over evil) is destabilized by an incommensurability between its images of virtue and vice. 26. Thomas Jefferson Hogg, in his Life of Shelley, called the Memoires a “favourite book” of Shelley’s. “He used to read aloud to me with rapturous enthusiasm the wondrous tales of German Illuminati; and he was disappointed, sometimes even displeased, when I expressed doubt or disbelief ” (1:376). 27. On Shelley’s reading of Barruel, see James Rieger, The Mutiny Within: The Heresies of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 63–68, and Gerald McNiece, Shelley and the Revolutionary Idea, 22–23. 28. In the Proposals for an Association, Shelley scornfully dismisses Barruel’s conservatism—“The names of Paine and Lafayette will outlive the poetic aristocracy of an expatriated Jesuit” (Prose, 51)—but the pamphlet tends to reverse the implications of Barruel’s lurid scenarios, without questioning his premises. Shelley envisages one liberal association generating others, until their influence becomes universal—his version of Barruel’s worldwide network of secret societies. Shelley states that his own principles originate “from the discoveries in the sciences of politics and morals, which preceded and occasioned the revolutions of America and France” (Prose, 50); he thus implicitly accepts Barruel’s view that the French Revolution was brought about by subversive writings. 29. Godwin does not explain how this happens; he merely takes for granted that “The conviviality of a feast may lead to the depredations of a riot” (PJ, 1:208). 30. Depending on one’s view of Shelley, one can read the Proposals for an Association as either for or against revolution. On the one hand, Shelley explicitly dismisses Godwinian passivity, claiming that “Benevolent feeling . . . will not be kept alive by each citizen sitting quietly by his own fire-side” (Prose, 44), and he explains that his association scheme ultimately aims at “a subversion of all factitious distinctions” (Prose, 45). He also writes ambiguously that the sort of association that he is proposing “would be obnoxious to the government, though nothing would be farther from the views of associated philanthropists than attempting to subvert establishments forcibly, or even hastily” (Prose, 45). On the other hand, Shelley tries to preempt charges that his associations will lead to bloodshed, insistently disavowing the use of secrecy as well as violence (Prose, 47). 31. The allusion to Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) shows that Godwin’s paranoia is a manifestation of a long-standing cultural concern over the dangers of publication. 32. Scrivener points this out in Radical Shelley, 63. See L, 1:258 and 261.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 6 9–7 1

223

33. Shelley informed Godwin that he had “withdrawn from circulation the publications wherein I erred” (L, 1:276), adding that “Had I like you been witness to the French revolution it is probable that my caution would have been greater” (L, 1:277). 34. William Godwin, “Of Choice in Reading,” in The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature, 140. As P. M. S. Dawson points out in The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics, Godwin’s terms suggest “a contagious disease” (218). The main argument of Godwin’s essay seems at odds with his posture of alarm in his letters to Shelley, since it stresses the difficulty of specifying “the moral of a story, or the genuine tendency of a book” (133). 35. In another image refiguring contagion, Godwin had recommended Shelley to “put off self, and to contribute by a quiet, but incessant activity, like a rill of water, to irrigate and fertilize the intellectual soil” (L, 1:270). 36. Behrendt, in Shelley and His Audiences, comments, “Why would the anti-Christian sentiment be ‘unnoticed’ in a note? Because no one reads notes?” (88). Behrendt points out that in the 1813 edition, the notes “occupy nearly half the volume” (88). 37. Donald Reiman, in his review of the first volume of Neville Rogers’s Oxford edition of Shelley, in Journal of English and Germanic Philology 73 (1974): 250–60, mentions that the character of Queen Mab features in eighteenth-century children’s literature (258). 38. See the review of his own early novel, Zastrozzi (1810), that appeared in the Critical Review. The reviewer asks, “Does the author, whoever he may be, think his gross and wanton pages fit to meet the eye of a modest young woman? Is this the instruction to be instilled under the title of a romance? Such trash, indeed, as this work contains, is fit only for the inmates of a brothel. It is by such means of corruption as this that the tastes of our youth of both sexes become vitiated, their imaginations heated, and a foundation laid for their future misery and dishonour. When a taste for this kind of writing is imbibed, they may bid farewell to innocence, farewell to purity of thought, and all that makes youth and virtue lovely!” (RR,C, 298). 39. Quoted by Newman Ivey White, Shelley, 1:338. The quotations in the next sentences are from the same page. 40. Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 204–5. Further references in parentheses. 41. See White, Shelley, 1:437. As White remarks, Medwin’s report of Shelley’s “conversation with the disciple” is “novelistic” (Life of Shelley, 1:709 n. 80).

224

N o t e s t o P a g e s 7 2–7 4

42. “F” has been identified as Robert Charles Fair. See Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840, 81. Louise Schutz Boas, in “ ‘Erasmus Perkins’ and Shelley,” argues that although Shelley “certainly connived” with George Cannon, the editor of the periodical (413), he was “not wholly pleased by the inclusion of Queen Mab” (409). See also William St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 514. 43. The “beautiful personification of NECESSITY” was presented in the August issue (Theological Inquirer 1:446). The letter appeared in the June issue (Theological Inquirer 1:242–47). McCalman, in Radical Underworld, identifies “Mary Ann” as Mary Ann Coates (née Thompson) (81). 44. The May issue, however, contains a letter signed “EUNOMUS WILKINS” (Theological Inquirer 1:165) quoting the lines on the death of an atheist from Queen Mab (7.1–14), including the line, “There is no God!” (7.13). 45. Jane Austen had exploited these connotations a year previously in Mansfield Park (1814), which emphasizes the moral laxity of Elizabeth Inchbald’s Lover’s Vows (1798), a play based on a work by August von Kotzebue. 46. Shelley certainly had an interest in promoting freedom of speech, as his Letter to Lord Ellenborough (1812) shows, but the reviewer seems to place that concern above the alternative ideological messages of Queen Mab itself. Thompson makes a similar point in his account of the limitations of Richard Carlile’s thought: “the freedom of the press was no longer a means but, in itself, an end” (Making, 766). 47. This is not ultimately because he separates political content from poetic form but because he sees “the usual poetical imagery” and the “machinery” (RR,C, 850) of the poem as transparent vehicles for Shelley’s radical message. If present-day critics are divided over whether Queen Mab in any sense anticipates Shelley’s nondidactic political poetry, F implicitly agrees with a reading of Mab that would see its political content as paraphrasable and independent of poetic form. See Kyle Grimes, who, in “Queen Mab, the Law of Libel, and the Forms of Shelley’s Politics,” claims that the poem is “by no means formally subversive” (7). For a conflicting view see Monika H. Lee, who, in “ ‘Nature’s Silent Eloquence’: Disembodied Organic Language in Shelley’s Queen Mab,” argues that the combination of “affective and rational discourse” in Queen Mab aims to promote “reform without the institution of new dogma,” making the poem “not as greatly different from Shelley’s later poetic works as past critics have suggested” (171).

N o t e s t o P a g e s 7 4–7 6

225

48. Quoted by Lewis M. Schwartz from the Aurora Borealis, in “Two New Contemporary Reviews of Shelley’s Queen Mab,” 80, as is the quotation in the next sentence. 49. See also the claim in the Literary Chronicle review that “Mr. Shelley furnishes one of the most striking and melancholy instances of the perversion, or rather prostitution of genius, that we ever met with” (RR,C, 508). 50. Kenneth Neill Cameron, in The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical, has claimed that Queen Mab’s initial impression of literary derivativeness, like Shelley’s choice of an innocuous-sounding title for his poem, was designed to appeal to innocent readers who would then become an unsuspecting audience for its “radical propaganda” (271). But the extent of the discrepancy between the hostile reviewers’ comments on the style of Queen Mab and their reactions to its content shows that the poem’s formal conventionality did not predispose them to treat it kindly. Instead, although the reviewers themselves were not unsuspectingly drawn in by the poem’s apparent innocuousness, they wanted (like Cameron and like Shelley himself in 1813) to imagine that others could be. This possibility supports both hostile reviewers’ claims that the poem was capable of corrupting its readers, and the mere inverse of those claims in the comments of sympathetic reviewers: the implication that the poem has the power to inspire its readers to bring about reform. Compare this reaction of mock horror: “Being deceived by the title, I was seduced to read it through. Good heavens! who would conceive that a title adapted to a work of fancy and imagination, should thus be made the vehicle for the Bedlamite ravings of Atheism and Democracy” (quoted by Boas in “ ‘Erasmus Perkins’ and Shelley,” 411, from a pamphlet by Robert Wedderburn, High Heel’d Shoes for Dwarfs in Holiness [probably 1821]; Boas claims that the “pretence of disparagement” [410] served as protection against prosecution). Despite his tongue-in-cheek tone, this writer apparently wants to imagine the possibility of an unsuspecting reader who would be “seduced to read it through.” 51. Duff, in Romance and Revolution, contends that Shelley “was consciously reclaiming” the revolutionary politics of the “Thalaba style” (76), but if that is the case, none of Shelley’s contemporary reviewers registered this act of reclamation (in fact, the Monthly Magazine’s hostility to the “Thalaba style” may well reflect a partisan disdain for the conservative, not the Jacobin Southey)—and if they had, it could not have heightened their sense of his subversiveness, empty though that subversiveness might be. 52. Pointing out that the central figures in Queen Mab are allegorical, Carlos Baker, in Shelley’s Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision, has

226

No t e s t o Pa g e 7 6

stressed Queen Mab’s indebtedness to eighteenth-century imitations of Spenser (24). Baker calls Queen Mab “a somewhat belated example” (23) of a poetic genre in which a human protagonist, like the hero of a medieval dream poem, typically experiences an enlightening vision in one of various “palaces, castles, temples, and houses of Fame, Pleasure, Indolence, Nature, Disease, and Superstition” and then “returns to earth” though sometimes he or she is left “up in the air” (25). Baker concludes that “Nearly every creaking cog in the machinery of Shelley’s poem was borrowed from the stock-pile of the moral allegories of the eighteenth century” (24–25). 53. In quoting this phrase F approvingly cites one of the passages that hold those in power to be responsible for social ills. Just as the kings and priests are directly blamed for the woes of the past and present, so the virtuous elite are implicitly given credit for the redeemed future. But it is unclear whether the fairy Mab is demonstrating what must inevitably take place, with or without conscious human agency, or, whether, instead, she is encouraging Ianthe (and the reader) to take immediate action to help renovate society. The extent to which critics stress Queen Mab’s indebtedness to Godwin depends on whether they see Shelley as a paranoid believer in revolutionary conspiracy or a relatively sane advocate of moderate political reform. The alternatives are not mutually exclusive (Godwinian and antiGodwinian attitudes to revolution disagree over the desirability of violent change, while both assume that a group of men can easily be provoked into revolutionary violence), but different critics tend to emphasize one at the expense of the other. See, for example, Richard Holmes, in Shelley: The Pursuit, who claims that “The influence of Godwin is local, rather than, as usually stated, dominant” (202), and “Queen Mab is essentially subversive in intent . . . and revolutionary in content and implication” (201). At the other extreme, Dawson, in Unacknowledged Legislator, downplays any revolutionary tendencies in Shelley’s thought. For a Shelley less moderate than Dawson’s but equally consistent, equally individualistic, and equally committed to Godwinian philosophical anarchism throughout his career, see Scrivener, Radical Shelley. 54. Joseph Barrell, in Shelley and the Thought of His Time: A Study in the History of Ideas, 72, and Frank B. Evans, in “Shelley, Godwin, Hume, and the Doctrine of Necessity,” point out that Godwin spiritualizes the notion of Necessity that he takes from Hume, making it incompatible with his commitment to materialism in Political Justice. Shelley, who quotes from both Godwin and Hume in his notes to Queen Mab, takes over the idea of Necessity as Spirit.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 7 6–8 3

227

55. On the limitations of Shelley’s treatment of Necessity, see, for example, Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 37–38. 56. See Carlos Baker, “Spenser, the Eighteenth Century, and Shelley’s Queen Mab,” 86. 57. In a letter written on February 14, 1812, Shelley refers to “the fixed and virtuous will ” (L, 1:251) alluding to “Fixt Fate, Free will” (PL 2:560)—items from the catalog of philosophical subjects discussed by the fallen angels in Milton’s hell. On the next page of his review F notes enthusiastically, “Satan’s passage through Chaos, in Milton, sublime as it is, sinks into comparative insignificance, when considered with the description of the fairy and the spirit’s course through the immensity of the universe” (RR,C, 852). This comparison puts both Mab and Ianthe in the position of Satan. F presumably sees this position as empowering rather than the reverse, implicitly imagining virtue only in terms of Satanic willfulness and self-aggrandizement. 58. Duff, in Romance and Revolution, has claimed that the poem, while Godwinian, is “revolutionary” (58), partly because of the nature of its attack on commerce (66–69). Yet, as Duff admits (69) and as Gilmartin points out in Print Politics, commerce was a conventional target of radical attack (182). Also, Duff concedes that “The question of human agency remains. . . . Shelley keeps silent on the issue of what the virtuous man must do in order to assist or initiate the regeneration of society” (110). 59. Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge, 2. 60. On the “close-knit community” of radicals, see Worrall, “Mab and Mob,” 145. 61. “The Daemon of the World” is at first sight a far less radical poem than Queen Mab, although Kenneth Neill Cameron, in “The Queen of the Universe: Shelley’s Revised Queen Mab,” SC, 4:487–514, has denied that the “Daemon” is more conservative than Queen Mab, on the grounds first that the former includes a new passage, and second that Shelley included “Superstition” in the Alastor volume. All of Shelley’s original denunciation of the past and present is condensed into the enigmatic new passage (see PW, 6–7, ll. 256–84). This passage confounds literal and figurative agency to show how human delusions can take on real existence, like various personifications in Queen Mab. Mary A. Quinn, in “The Daemon of the World: Shelley’s Antidote to the Skepticism of Alastor,” sees the “Daemon” as cautious rather than conservative. She discusses the new passage on pp. 769–71. 62. To support their claim that Shelley was an irresponsible parent, the Westbrooks provided the court with not only a copy of Queen Mab

228

N o t e s t o P a g e s 8 3–8 5

but also a copy of the Letter to Lord Ellenborough and some of Shelley’s letters to Harriet. See White, Shelley, 1:489–90. Although Queen Mab was therefore not solely used to discredit Shelley, Shelley’s biographers have pointed out that the poet latched onto Queen Mab as if it was the only piece of evidence against him—see White, Shelley, 1:491; and Holmes, Shelley, 356–57—even though his alleged desertion of Harriet also came up in court. In a letter to Mary Shelley (L, 1:526–29), in another letter to Lord Byron (L, 1:529–30), and in his “Declaration in Chancery” (the draft of a document used in court), Shelley misreads the Chancery suit as a trial of his principles rather than a test of the connection between those principles and his private conduct. Murray, in Prose, points out that “Much of the draft of the Declaration is concerned with generalizing his case on political rather than on strictly domestic grounds” (311). See Medwin, Life of Shelley, 463–86, for other papers relating to the Chancery trial. 63. Medwin, Life of Shelley, 464. 64. The brief for Shelley’s defense gives more detail than the report in the Examiner. Among other things, it raises the question of what constitutes publication: “and as to the Publication of [Queen Mab], it was merely distributed to some few of his personal Friends; not 20 ever got abroad. The Copy which is referred to by Miss Westbrooke appears to be one which Mr Shelley confidentially gave to his late wife” (quoted by White, Shelley, 2:515). Is distributing fewer than twenty copies of a book to one’s personal friends the same as publishing it? This statement implies that it is not, and that in order for the book to do harm to society, its circulation would have to have been wider. Shelley’s counsel seemed to think that if they could establish the fact that Queen Mab was not published, then that would mean that it could not cause corruption. But again, the point at issue was potential one-on-one contamination—of the children by their father—rather than actual wider corruption. 65. Shelley begins his “Declaration” by stating that “I understand the opinions which I hold on religious matters to be abandoned as a ground of depriving me of the guardianship of my children” (Prose, 166). 66. Quoted by White, Shelley, 2:516. 67. White, Shelley, 1:495. See also Medwin, Life of Shelley, 184. Twelve years later the Quarterly Review commented that this legal “precedent” was not to be “regarded with apprehension by any except the professed atheist and the practical profligate united in the same parent”; it called Shelley “a black combination of systematic infidelity, satanic wickedness of principle, and open profligacy of life” (QR 39: 210).

N o t e s t o P a g e s 8 5–8 6

229

68. A plan for the education of Shelley’s children, which was finally drawn up by his solicitor after he was refused their guardianship, assumed that the purity of girls in particular is easily contaminated by their reading material, for it recommended that Ianthe Shelley be “shielded from the reading of most novels, of all books that might shake her faith in the Church of England, and even of Pope and Shakespeare except in expurgated editions” (summarized by White, Shelley, 1:496). See Medwin, Life of Shelley, 483–84, for full details. 69. St. Clair, Godwins and the Shelleys, 512–18, gives the most up-to-date account of the pirated editions. William Benbow published an “American” edition in 1821, which, according to St. Clair, may have predated Clark’s edition (514–15). Later, Carlile rebuked Clark for tamely withdrawing Queen Mab and announced in the Republican in February 1822 that he was offering a new piracy (RR,C, 787). 70. In support of the first view see, for example, Stuart Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse: The Narrative and Dramatic Poetry, 2; for the second, see H, 328 and 331. For Shelley’s comments on the piracy of Queen Mab, see L, 2:298, 300–302, 304–5, 350. They are summarized by White, Shelley, 2:304. Some of his comments show that he could not remember the poem very well: “I have not seen it for some years, but inasmuch as I recollect it is villainous trash” (L, 2:298); “I really hardly know what this poem is about. I am afraid it is rather rough” (L, 2:350). Given these remarks, it is ironic that reviewers in 1821 took Queen Mab to be a statement of his present political and religious opinions. Whether or not Shelley had modified his views since writing the poem, his later works reflect far more than Queen Mab does his statement in a January 1813 letter to Hookham that “A poem very didactic is I think very stupid” (L, 1:350). 71. Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences, 84–85. Behrendt, who points out that “Shelley’s letter satisfies the letter of the law in repudiating Queen Mab even as it advertises the poem to the curious reader” (82), analyzes the letter at some length, seeing it as “evidence” of a “subtle and sophisticated campaign of audience manipulation” (86). 72. See also Hazlitt’s objections to Shelley in his review of Posthumous Poems (RR,C, 401). Behrendt adds, “The conclusion of Shelley’s letter implies that he and Clarke are being martyred by a crumbling power structure and that readers who find themselves oppressed by this same power structure are members of a persecuted sect whose day may yet arrive” (Shelley and His Audiences, 85)—a gesture that would seem to replicate the defiant stance of Queen Mab.

230

N o t e s t o P a g e s 8 7–9 0

73. Schwartz, in “Two New Contemporary Reviews,” calls this journal “liberal” (80) on the grounds that it praises Queen Mab. 74. Carlile added, “Lord Byron calls it a poem of great strength and wonderful powers of imagination; and, with his Lordship, we differ from some of the Author’s metaphysical opinions” (RR,C, 788). (The piracy of Queen Mab coincided with the appropriation of Byron by the radical cause.) Carlile had one major disagreement with Shelley: “We hesitate before we give assent to the Author’s views of marriage, particularly, as he strikes at the contract without modifications, and seems desirous of destroying it without defining a better system” (RR,C, 788–89). That is to say, unlike Lord Eldon, Carlile finds Shelley’s views impractical, though they both find them potentially influential. 75. This firm distinction might suggest that the London Magazine is transcending partisanship, as it had done momentarily in two previous articles on Prometheus Unbound (which I discuss in Chapter 3), but the reviewer of Queen Mab concludes by deprecating the “affectations of that school with which the author has been classed” (RR,C, 640). In doing so Gold’s London Magazine reverts to the attitude taken by its earlier review of The Cenci (1820), in approaching Shelley as a member of the Cockney School, a school defined by both stylistic idiosyncrasies and political ideology. 76. According to Murray, in Prose, the original Reply misspelled “Bysshe” as “Byssche” in its title, and was published by W. Clarke with an “e” (567). On William Clark or Clarke, see Worrall, “Mab and Mob,” 148. 77. Reiman explains that this reviewer fears that the Tories would point to Shelley “as a typical example of the practicing liberal” (RR,C, 668). 78. See Wickwar, Struggle for the Freedom of the Press, 55. 79. The author of the Reply to . . . Queen Mab draws attention to Queen Mab’s reification of contagion. As the author of the Reply points out, the poem goes on to imagine the transformation of the natural world as well as utopian social progress (H, 65). By implication, physical as well as moral “contagion” (7.188) disappears: “Even where the milder zone afforded man / A seeming shelter, yet contagion there, / Blighting his being with unnumbered ills, / Spread like a quenchless fire” (8.187–90). In the same canto Mab states that in the new world, “the nightshade’s tempting bane / Poisons no more the pleasure it bestows” (8.129–30). Moreover, in a passage quoted by the Literary Gazette, Mab declares that due to the abolition of marriage, sexually transmitted diseases will disappear: “No longer prostitution’s venomed bane / Poisoned the springs of happiness and life” (9.87–88).

N o t e s t o P a g e s 9 1–9 6

231

80. The statement has been seized on by critics eager to see Shelley as identifying with a poetic elite of “revolutionary heroes.” See, for example, McNiece, Shelley and the Revolutionary Idea, 112. See also Scrivener, Radical Shelley, 72 and 74. Such heroes, I would claim, are inevitably restricted to the Satanic position in the Satanic scenario. Compare the attack on commerce cited earlier that describes everyone getting tainted by commerce but then also imagines a “virtuous man” (5.168) with a Satanic “resolute and unchanging will” (5.171) supposedly standing outside its all-corrupting power. 81. Knapp, in Personification and the Sublime, points out the tendency of personifications to call into question the “reality” of other fictional agents. Analyzing the eighteenth-century debate over the aesthetic value of Milton’s allegory of Sin and Death, Knapp claims that those critics who found it absurdly unrealistic were responding to the threat of “reversibility. Once the boundaries between literal and figurative agency were erased, it seemed that nothing would prevent the imagination from metaphorizing literal agents as easily as it literalized metaphors” (2). Conversely, critics who found the personifications sublime were recognizing their “combination of fanatic self-absorption and overt fictionality,” which “perfectly matches the dual criteria of the sublime, its conflicting requirements of identification and distance” (4). Similarly, the reviewer’s self-dramatizing impressionistic responses—“So strongly has this impression dwelt upon our minds,” “our souls revolt with tenfold horror”—at once acknowledge the persuasive power of Queen Mab and set it at a distance with the help of hyperbole and the sustained use of the first person plural. The moments of labored humor in this passage—“we absolutely asked a friend,” “We were almost disappointed to learn”—also seem to ironize the reviewer’s apparent emotional overinvestment in the idea of Shelley as a fiend. 82. Duff includes in Romance and Revolution (facing p. 115) a fascinating engraving by Isaac Cruikshank, “The Revolutionary Association” (1821), in which the title of Queen Mab appears on one of the placards advertising “seditious publications” that are brandished by a mob of radicals being egged on by the devil (complete with pitchfork), whose voice balloon reads, “Go it my dear Boys, do all the mischief you can and I will give you a warm place in my Dominions.” The engraving certainly conjures up an impression of gleeful demonic energy, but one can see that energy as at once perpetuated (or even created) and contained by the engraving just as the rhetoric of the reviewer ascribes to Shelley a demonic power and also limits that power. See my jacket illustration for a detail.

232

N o t e s t o P a g e s 9 8–1 0 7

83. Shelley, however, thought that the more recent rumor that he had fathered a child (Elena Adelaide Shelley) by Claire Clairmont was “evidently the source of the violent denunciations of the Literary Gazette” (L, 2:320). 84. Reviewers justified their personal attacks on the familiar grounds that the distinction between private life and public life was inappropriate where Shelley was concerned, because with the blasphemy of Queen Mab he had “almost put himself out of the pale of human laws” (RR,C, 508). One reviewer merely stated that “the private life of Mr. Shelley is said to be in unison with his principles” (RR,C, 509), while others reiterated the details mentioned in the Literary Gazette, or refused to do so: “As to the private scandal from which some critics have borrowed pungency and attraction for their disquisitions, we utterly disclaim it” (RR,C, 639). Other comments in the reviews insist on identifying the author with his text: one writer of an obituary notice on Shelley claimed inaccurately that his first two children were called Henry and Ianthe, the names of the lovers in Queen Mab (H, 332). Another review implied that Shelley had been expelled from Oxford because of Queen Mab (RR,C, 639), while another also confused the poem with The Necessity of Atheism (1811) and stated that the notes to Queen Mab were a joint effort by Shelley and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg, while refuting the rumor that the notes to the poem were by Byron (H, 100–102). 85. They are sublime because they fulfill the paradoxical “desire for simultaneous identification with and dissociation from an image of ‘fanatical’ power” (Knapp, Personification and the Sublime, 98). We saw the way in which the Literary Gazette reviewer alternately identified with and distanced himself from the images of Shelley that he conjured up. He vacillated between making Shelley threatening and acknowledging the metaphoricity of the threat. Knapp adds that “in eighteenth-century poetic practice, the antithetical structure of the sublime experience is sometimes divided between two agents: a personified abstraction, frozen in a posture of fanatic reflexiveness; and an urbanely skeptical speaker” (4). This is not the case with the speaker of Queen Mab, who instead shares what Knapp calls the “fanaticism” (87) of the personifications she—Mab— addresses. 86. Knapp, Personification and the Sublime, 86. 87. White, Shelley, 1:294. 88. See Newman Ivey White, “Literature and the Law of Libel: Shelley and the Radicals of 1840–42,” and “Shelley and the Active Radicals of the Early Nineteenth Century.”

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 0 7–1 1

233

89. See White, Shelley, 2:405–7 for the “afterlife” of Queen Mab. See also Bouthaina Shaaban, “Shelley in the Chartist Press,” and “Shelley and the Chartists,” for summaries of references to Shelley in Chartist newspapers. Duff, in Romance and Revolution, points to Queen Mab’s later popularity among radicals, including Owenites and Chartists, as evidence that “history has judged Queen Mab to have been a remarkable success” (70). Duff seems to accept the radicals’ own equation between a wide circulation and “success.” 90. White, writing in 1940, claimed that “Only a few years ago a group of Communists in a Milwaukee jail were reported to have attempted to convert fellow prisoners by reading Queen Mab aloud” (Shelley, 2:417). 91. The Beauties of Percy Bysshe Shelley, London: Stephen Hunt, 1830. 92. Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds, 1:258–59. Chapter 3 1. The reviewer acknowledges the class connotations of “taste” by distinguishing those who have it from those who do not: “That may be deemed energetic or sublime, which is in fact unnatural or bombastic; and yet there may be much difficulty in making the difference sensible to those who do not preserve an habitual and exclusive intimacy with the best models of composition” (RR,C, 780). On the immutability of standards of taste, see, for example, Francis Jeffrey’s review of Southey’s Thalaba in the Edinburgh Review 1 (October 1802): 63–83. 2. The passage continues, “it belongs only to the judgment to determine whether certain passages convey any signification or none; and . . . if we are in error ourselves, at least we can mislead nobody else, since the very quotations which we must adduce as examples of nonsense, will, if our charges be not well founded, prove the futility of our accusation at the very time that it is made” (RR,C, 780–81). 3. Despite earlier setting aside the criterion of taste, the reviewer refers to Shelley’s “sins against sense and taste” (RR,C, 784), and demands, “Is there no respect due to common sense, to sound taste, to morality, to religion?” (RR,C, 785). 4. See, for example, Scrivener, Radical Shelley, 179. Critics of Shelley now take this for granted. See also Ellen Brown Herson, “Oxymoron and Dante’s Gates of Hell in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound,” 374. In this respect Prometheus Unbound contrasts strikingly with Queen Mab, the antityrannical stance of which imitates the absolutism that it ostensibly denies. See Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 195.

234

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 1 1–1 4

5. See, for example, V. A. De Luca, “The Style of Millennial Announcement in Prometheus Unbound,” and Neil Fraistat, The Poem and the Book: Interpreting Collections of Romantic Poetry, 145. See also Marlon B. Ross, “Shelley’s Wayward Dream-Poem: The Apprehending Reader in Prometheus Unbound.” Other critics shift responsibility for change onto future readers of Prometheus Unbound, announcing, for example, “Whether we enact and perpetuate a Promethean revolution depends on us” (Timothy Webb, “The Unascended Heaven: Negatives in Prometheus Unbound,” 58). See also Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 201. 6. See, for example, Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading, 258– 61, and Lloyd Abbey, Destroyer and Preserver: Shelley’s Poetic Skepticism, 53–56. 7. Wasserman, Shelley, 319. 8. Critics interpret this problem in various ways—philosophical and linguistic as well as political. Stuart M. Sperry, in “Necessity and the Role of the Hero in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound,” argues that Shelley dramatizes the conflict between free will and Necessity; Rajan, in Supplement of Reading, points to what she calls the drama’s “ungrammaticalities” (305); and Ulmer, in Shelleyan Eros, claims that “Demogorgon’s repression of Jupiter acts as the organizing matrix of the poem’s political ironies” (103). 9. See, for example, John Rieder, “The ‘One’ in Prometheus Unbound.” Hogle, in Shelley’s Process, says Shelley is almost undone by his use of negatives (195). Webb, however, in “Unascended Heaven,” sees the use of negatives in a more optimistic light. Compare the way in which Queen Mab reinforces the power of the institutions it attacks by its reliance on denunciation. 10. The Quarterly’s second attack on him certainly provoked him to expand his original preface and may have influenced his decision to add Prometheus Unbound ’s fourth act. See Zillman, Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound.” 11. Of the Spirit of the Hour’s speech, McGann, in Romantic Ideology, says, “Time does not treat such verse very kindly” (121). See also Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, who, in Shelley’s Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity, objects to act 4: “Imagining the earth and moon joyously and harmoniously aspin presents nothing like the difficulty involved in imagining a world of harmonious, just, and equable human beings” (263). 12. The Lonsdale Magazine, for instance, quoted the phrase “THRONES WERE KINGLESS” (3.3.131) from the Spirit of the Hour’s speech (RR,C, 653). See also Blackwood’s (RR,C, 140), and the Dublin

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 1 5–1 6

235

Magazine (RR,C, 315). Similarly, three of the reviewers were antagonized by lines in the “Ode to Liberty,” published in the Prometheus Unbound volume. See the Quarterly Review (RR,C, 785), Blackwood’s (RR,C, 146), and the Lonsdale Magazine (RR,C, 654). In his defense of Shelley in the Examiner, Leigh Hunt protested against the Quarterly’s treatment of the “Ode.” See H, 310. See also the way in which both the Monthly and the Quarterly Reviews predictably latched onto the speech in which Prometheus asserts that the “name” of Christ has “become a curse” (1.603– 4), the former commenting that the passage “must be most offensive, as it too evidently seems to have been intended to be, to every sect of Christians” (RR,C, 724). 13. The periodicals that reviewed Prometheus Unbound showed the same ambivalence over the question of literary efficacy that we saw in the reviews of the pirated edition of Queen Mab. The Dublin Magazine accused Shelley of selling “poison” (RR,C, 316) but refused to give evidence for this claim, because of the advertising potential of quotation: “We are afraid to pursue our remarks further, as we cannot, of course, consent to make our pages instrumental in the circulation of the passages which justify these remarks” (RR,C, 316). The Literary Gazette announced its “bounden duty” to “stem” the “tide of literary . . . corruption” (RR,C, 524), and the Lonsdale Magazine congratulated itself on the efficacy of its review: “The beast requires only to be dragged into public light, to meet its merited contempt” (RR,C, 654). 14. He had hoped to do the latter with the innocuous title and “fine paper” of Queen Mab. See my second chapter. See also Cameron, Shelley, 484, and Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences, 166. These critics tend to posit a hypothetical contemporary audience without examining actual reactions to the preface. 15. Horace Smith in a letter to Shelley commented on the “want” of “human interest” in Prometheus Unbound (quoted by Zillman, Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound,” 41). See also an anonymous article “Percy Bysshe Shelley” in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 4 (1832–1833): “The Prometheus is dramatic in form only; there is little or no human interest in it” (338). Later in this chapter I develop the implications of such complaints. Disagreements among critics over when what they see as the drama’s one moment of action takes place are summarized by Rieder, “The ‘One’ in Prometheus Unbound,” 777. 16. See, for example, C. S. Lewis, Preface to “Paradise Lost.” Rejecting Shelley’s reading of Satan, Lewis argues, “[Satan] thought himself impaired because Messiah had been pronounced Head of the Angels. These are

236

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 1 6–1 9

the ‘wrongs’ which Shelley described as ‘beyond measure’ ” (94). As I suggested in a note to my introduction, Lewis arguably uses the appreciative Romantic reading of Satan as a straw man. William Empson, in Milton’s God, claims, “Shelley is not a Satanist,” but adds, “To take for granted that ‘the interest’ of Paradise Lost can only be resistance to tyranny is charmingly cool” (18). Others discuss this passage to show that Shelley was not of the devil’s party, but their repeated denials are significant. See, for instance, Joseph Anthony Wittreich Jr., “The ‘Satanism’ of Blake and Shelley Reconsidered.” 17. For an account of how Shelley’s comments on Satan in the preface to Prometheus Unbound and in A Defence of Poetry critique a “selfperpetuating system of tyranny,” see Kenneth Gross, “Satan and the Romantic Satan: A Notebook,” 324. Cf. Lucy Newlyn’s discussion of the preface in “Paradise Lost” and the Romantic Reader, 145–46. 18. Cf. the way in which both the Literary Gazette and the Monthly Review alluded with irritation to Shelley’s statement in the preface that he would prefer to be “damned with Plato and Lord Bacon, than go to Heaven with Paley and Malthus” (126). The word “damned” is Shelley’s shorthand way of signaling that on one level, he is willingly entering the Satanic scenario. 19. See also Shelley to Medwin, July 20, 1820: “ ‘Prometheus Unbound’ is in the merest spirit of ideal Poetry, and not, as the name would indicate, a mere imitation of the Greek drama, or indeed if I have been successful, is it an imitation of anything” (L, 2:219). 20. These remarks anticipate the passage in A Philosophical View of Reform (also written in the fall of 1819) on the “spirit of the age,” later reworked as the ending of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, in which he calls poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the World” (SPP, 508). 21. The essay in Gold’s London Magazine, “On the Philosophy and Poetry of Shelley”—mainly on Prometheus Unbound —in quoting the “unimagined change” and “collected lightning” passage from the preface (which it equates with the return of “true religion” [H, 261]), enthusiastically associated Shelley and other “glorious spirits” with the “progress of intellect” (H, 262). See also Baldwin’s London Magazine, which quoted the same passage in its first brief notice of Prometheus Unbound and announced, “This poem is more completely the child of the Time than almost any other modern production. . . . Like the Time, its parent, too, it is unsettled, irregular, but magnificent” (H, 217). The latter sentiments assent to Shelley’s overt argument in the preface concerning the dynamic relationship between choice spirits and the spirit of the age.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 2 1–2 3

237

22. The use of the plural (“idealisms”) presumably discouraged the reviewers from taking the phrase to refer to idealism in the following more philosophical senses: Berkeleyean idealism, what Shelley calls the “intellectual system,” the doctrine that “nothing exists but as it is perceived” (SPP, 476); Platonic idealism; or, alternatively, a quasi-Kantian transcendentalism. Shelley’s conflation of aesthetic and moral judgements is both anti-Platonic and anti-Kantian. Wasserman, in Shelley, reads Prometheus Unbound in terms of the Berkeleyean “intellectual philosophy,” with Prometheus representing the “one mind” that Shelley refers to in his essay “On Life” (SPP, 478). Charles E. Robinson’s attempt, in Shelley and Byron: The Snake and the Eagle Wreathed in Flight, 118–24, to correct Wasserman’s reading by seeing Prometheus as representing human perfection, risks substituting one form of extremism for another. Prometheus fluctuates between the individual and the collective, the quasi-human and the divine. 23. Hence, in the sentence mentioning the beautiful idealisms, the ambiguity of “hitherto,” which could include Prometheus Unbound but which has been taken to refer only to Shelley’s earlier poems. See, for example, Cameron, Shelley, 483. See also Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros: Shelley “envisions a reader who changes by becoming like the poet, yet who can do so only to the extent that he is already like the poet” (20). Ulmer goes on to argue that “Shelley feared conceding an audience so much power [the power to disfigure beautiful idealisms], and continued to privilege authorial consciousness as the locus of truth” (21), but any such privileging remains merely hypothetical, since poetry inevitably enters into dialogue with its readers. 24. Prometheus Unbound relies upon the impulse to posit causes and effects even while challenging it. That is why readers are able to see a possible causal connection between Prometheus’s revocation of his curse and the subsequent revolution, and another one between Asia’s encounter with Demogorgon and the arrival of the fatal “car” (2.4.153) that will liberate Prometheus. See some comments by the Literary Gazette: the reviewer makes it clear that he objects both to the concept of a purposeful meteorological event and to the unsettling of cause and effect when he quotes “it tingles thro’ the frame / As lightning tingles, hovering ere it strike” (1:133–34), and remarks, “Common bards would have thought the tingling was felt when it struck, and not before,—when it was hovering too, of all things for lightening [sic ] to be guilty of!” (RR,C, 524). He also quotes the phrase “speech created thought” (2.4.72) and draws attention to what he finds to be an inversion of logical sense: “exactly, in our opinion,

238

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 2 3–2 4

the cart creating the horse; the sign creating the inn; the effect creating the cause” (RR,C, 525). 25. Hence the hesitation in Shelley’s prose over whether the great writers of the present are “companions,” which would imply that he thinks the great writers are indeed the creators and products of their current revolutionary age, or “forerunners,” which would acknowledge that while the age is in fact reactionary, he has faith that change is about to occur. The point made by Neil Fraistat, ed., in The “Prometheus Unbound” Notebooks: A Facsimile of Bodleian MSS . . . , that “the composition of Prometheus Unbound was a much more fluid, continuous, and revisionary process” than previous critics have realized (lxxiii) implies that the competing models of change in the poem cannot easily be separated. In this connection, Rajan, in Supplement of Reading, makes some interesting speculations about a notebook draft of the poem (319–20). 26. My procedure also takes its cue from some of the reviewers, who depart from their usual strategy of outlining the work under consideration episode-by-episode, while offering long extracts with minimal comment. Instead, they pull together passages from different parts of the poem in order to illustrate and develop their claims. See, for example, the reviews in the Literary Gazette and the Quarterly. The Literary Gazette reviewer explains the organization of his article by announcing, “We shall not follow the long accounts of the hero’s tortures, nor the longer rhapsodies about the blissful effects of his restoration; but produce a few of the brilliant emanations of the mind modified on the study of extraordinary intellects” (RR,C, 524). Cf. the more conventional structure of the Literary Gazette’s later review of Queen Mab (discussed in my second chapter). The tendency to dispense with chronological summary in favor of ranging more freely over the work under discussion in order to draw attention to its stylistic peculiarities is even more marked in the case of reviews of the later Adonais. See RR,C, 147, 531, and 550. 27. See Webb, “ ‘Avalanche of Ages.’ ” Webb reads the passage as an “image of intellectual defiance” (31). 28. The Norton editors, invoking this part of the sentence from the preface, call this simile “one of the best examples” of Shelley’s “reversal of imagery” (SPP, 169 n), though Shelley himself does not use the term “reversal.” William Keach, in Shelley’s Style, takes the second part of the sentence to refer to “traditional ways of relating the mental to the physical” (44). 29. Many critics see Shelley as dramatizing a revolution in mental states or levels of perception. See, for example, Cronin, Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts, 166–68.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 2 4–2 6

239

30. Cf. Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” in which the mountain is represented as dependent on the “human mind’s imaginings” (l. 143), according to most commentators. See, for example, Wasserman, Shelley, 237; Timothy Webb, Shelley: A Voice Not Understood, 138; and Ferguson, “Shelley’s Mont Blanc,” 211–14. In my terms, this would mean that Shelley was still writing from inside the Satanic scenario when he wrote “Mont Blanc,” even though (or especially because?) the dualism of mind and mountain in that poem is triangulated by the “secret strength of things” (l. 139). Hogle, in Shelley’s Process, dissenting from the critics named above, claims that the poem’s final question “affirms” the existence of a “sheerly relational activity” (transference) prior to minds and “other forms” (86). I would suggest that if Mont Blanc “affirms,” it has not evaded the Manicheism of Satanic rhetoric. Asia’s speech is more radical in neither celebrating nor regretting the dependence of the “minds” on the avalanche, though, as I go on to say, this moral neutrality is itself problematic. 31. See Keach, Shelley’s Style: “ ‘As do the mountains now’ can be read as a second simile folded within the first, representing as figurative vehicle an echo of the original tenor” (77). 32. See Webb, “ ‘Avalanche of Ages,’ ” 34, on the ambivalence of the avalanche image. 33. When Asia’s image of the avalanche is read as a reply to the Quarterly Review, her encounter with Demogorgon, in which Asia’s questions dictate the terms of Demogorgon’s replies, can be seen as not merely an exposure of an oppressor-oppressed dialectic but more specifically a critique of the self-perpetuating structure of the Satanic scenario. For a discussion of this scene as an exposure of “master-slave logic,” see Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 188–90. 34. Twentieth-century critics have examined the poem’s attempt to cleanse language of its inherited associations through a variety of experimental stylistic techniques, including the revision of expectations concerning genre. Critics are divided over the extent to which this cleansing process is successful. See, for example, Daniel J. Hughes, who, in “Potentiality in Prometheus Unbound,” argues that Shelley turns, “through a series of verbal strategies, the actual back upon itself ” (108); and Susan Hawk Brisman, who, in “ ‘Unsaying His High Language’: The Problem of Voice in Prometheus Unbound,” sees Prometheus Unbound as a critique of Satanic thinking, which substitutes a “Promethean” language of fiat for a “Hermetic” language of reference. According to Brisman, “Act IV brings word and world into being in a single presence and shows how a poetry of voice can belie its medium of script” (86). By contrast, Ulmer,

240

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 2 7–3 2

in Shelleyan Eros, citing the redefinition of “King” in act 4, claims that “Shelley’s adversarial rhetoric limits itself to recontextualizing maneuvers” (22–23). 35. White comments on this discrepancy in Shelley, 2:131. Cf. the Quarterly’s statement: “We fear that his notions of poetry are fundamentally erroneous” (RR,C, 784). 36. This quotation is actually from a review (in the Scots Magazine) of Shelley’s Posthumous Poems, but it echoes the kind of complaint that is made about the “cold allegories” of Prometheus Unbound (H, 269). 37. Cf. Jerome Christensen, “ ‘Thoughts That Do Often Lie Too Deep for Tears’: Toward a Romantic Concept of Lyrical Drama”: “If the characters of lyrical drama will not pose as beautiful idealisms, they cannot be antithetically consigned to the inert state of mere things either” (61). The characters of the drama have too much will to be reduced to poetic images, but not enough vitality to give them human interest. See also Tilottama Rajan, “Romanticism and the Death of Lyric Consciousness.” Rajan claims that Prometheus Unbound is “not so much an interiorizing of the dramatic form as an exteriorizing of the lyrical” (202). She also claims that the lyric element in Prometheus Unbound “testifies to an understanding of the self that is not quite that of poststructuralism” (207). 38. These charges were echoed by Victorian critics, one of whom commented, with approval rather than disapproval, that the characters are “shining incarnations of principles and essences in the semblance of bodies” (quoted by Zillman, Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound,” 41). 39. See Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros, 97, and Dana Polan, “The Ruin of a Poetics: The Political Practice of Prometheus Unbound,” 35. 40. Table Talk No. 9: “On People of Sense,” London Magazine 3 (April, 1821): 368–74 (370). 41. See Webb, “Unascended Heaven,” 39. 42. Shelley’s final extant manuscript of Prometheus Unbound reads “lulling footstep” instead of “silent footstep,” which appeared in the first edition. See Fraistat, “Prometheus Unbound” Notebooks, 242, and Zillman, Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound,” 177. The review misprints “footstep” as “footsteps.” 43. See Leigh Hunt on Shelley in Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, 206: “If he will have a good deal of will, he must occasionally have an excess of it.” Hunt embodies the coincidence between a hypothetical “elect” reading and the reviewers’ collective reading, since Hunt was no doubt one of the “5 or 6 persons” for whom Prometheus Unbound was “intended,” yet his remarks on the poem in the Examiner,

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 3 2–3 4

241

like his defense of The Revolt of Islam, share the terms of his fellow reviewers. 44. The phrase that ends the stanza, which is not quoted by the Literary Gazette reviewer, “as he whom now we greet,” referring to Prometheus, has an effect similar to that of Asia’s “as do the mountains now.” Instead of returning the reader to the reality of the drama’s action, it could be seen as an image inside an image, making Prometheus himself a figure of speech as shadowy as Pain. The rhyme, “feet”/”greet,” also confirms the subordinate status of this final phrase, making it point inward rather than outward. 45. See Olwen Ward Campbell’s dismissive attitude to the desolation song in Shelley and the Unromantics: “We must console ourselves as best we can for this, noticing that [Shelley] is remembering—though perverting— a passage in Plato’s Symposium, and pass on” (213). The desolation passage alludes to Agathon’s speech on love in the Symposium. Campbell presumably finds it to be a perversion because, after praising the “delicacy” of Love, Agathon says that “he neither inflicts nor endures injury” (Shelley’s translation, quoted by James Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley: A Study of Platonism and the Poetic Mind, 435). The allusion can be seen as deepening the ambiguity of the passage, because it adds to the positive connotations that attach to desolation. 46. See de Man, who, in “Shelley Disfigured,” connects the trampling feet of the “shape all light” in The Triumph of Life with the poem’s meter (113). 47. Scrivener, Radical Shelley, 167. See Carl Grabo, Prometheus Unbound: An Interpretation, 45. 48. Cameron, Shelley, 500. See Zillman, Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound,” 410–11, for a summary of interpretations up to the 1950s. These include a biographical reading that sees the “unreal and deceptive” monster as a reference to Shelley’s own “disillusionments” (411). 49. See, for example, Milton Wilson, Shelley’s Later Poetry, 100. 50. Daniel J. Hughes comments on this aspect of Shelley’s imagery in “Coherence and Collapse in Shelley, with Particular Reference to Epipsychidion”; Hogle, in Shelley’s Process, elevates Shelley’s desire to avoid any resting point into a principle. 51. See, for example, F. R. Leavis, Revaluation, on Shelley, and de Man’s reading of The Triumph of Life in “Shelley Disfigured.” Most of the contemporary reviewers’ complaints about Shelley reappear in Leavis’s attack on the poet. Like the Quarterly Review, Leavis sees Shelley’s “corruption” of the language as calling for “moral comment” (216). His stylistic objections to Shelley’s poetry strikingly echo those of his forerunners. The Quarterly,

242

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 3 5–3 6

claiming that Shelley “never describes the thing directly” (RR,C, 783), pointed to the confusion of tenor and vehicle: “his poetry is in general a mere jumble of words and heterogeneous ideas, connected by slight and accidental associations, among which it is impossible to distinguish the principal object from the accessory” (RR,C, 782). Here the Quarterly echoes Samuel Johnson’s attack in his “Life of Cowley” on the yoking together of “heterogeneous ideas” by the metaphysical poets. Similarly, Leavis, defining what he says is not a “fashionably limited taste,” finds Shelley “almost unreadable” (204) because of his self-generating metaphors and nonreferential use of language, his “weak grasp upon the actual” (206). On the resemblance between reviews of Prometheus Unbound and later New Critical strictures, see Barcus, Shelley, 29–30. 52. Shelley’s fair-copy manuscript reads “progeny immortal” and capitalizes “Painting Sculpture & rapt [not wrapt] Poesy.” See Fraistat, “Prometheus Unbound” Notebooks, 416–17. The punctuation of Reiman and Powers’s version is less ambiguous. 53. His association of “ambiguity” with “nonsense” leads him later to object as follows to the highly oxymoronic description of the sphere inhabited by the Spirit of the Earth in act 4: “We have neither leisure nor room to develope all the absurdities here accumulated, in defiance of common sense, and even of grammar; whirlwind harmony, a solid sphere which is as many thousand spheres, and contains ten thousand orbs or spheres, with inter-transpicuous spaces between them, whirling over each other on a thousand sightless (alias invisible) axles; self-destroying swiftness; intelligible words and wild music, kindled by the said sphere, which also grinds a bright brook into an azure mist of elemental subtlety; odour, music, and light, kneaded into one aërial mass, and the sense drowned by it!” (RR,C, 781–82). Despite his reluctance to “develope” the passage’s “absurdities,” the reviewer takes the trouble to list many of its images, and in doing so brings out the power of its synaesthesia. The Literary Gazette reviewer dismissed the same passage as “insane” (RR,C, 525). 54. Keach, in Shelley’s Style, points out that the “uncertainty about whether to take ‘as’ in a comparative or temporal sense” (evident in Asia’s avalanche passage) applies here as well (77). Although most of the speech has been paratactic, an accumulation of images with no apparent focus or purpose beyond a description of life in the cave, this final “And” may signal either an arbitrary occurrence or, instead, participation in a process of mutual improvement. 55. Shelley’s passage also refers to forms in the sense of different art forms or genres. The passage thus evokes another statement in the preface

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 3 7–3 9

243

to Prometheus Unbound, the discussion of the interplay of spirits and forms. Forms in the sense of literary forms involve a mutually constitutive relationship between examples of a genre and the history of that genre, and thus connect individual minds and the collective mind, while forms in the sense of personifications mediate between individual persons and abstract qualities. 56. The Quarterly’s review of Prometheus influenced at least one contemporary reader. Henry Crabb Robinson wrote on December 28, 1821: “I began Shelley’s Prometheus, which I could not get on with. I was quickened in my purpose of throwing it aside by the Quarterly Review, which exposes the want of meaning in his poems with considerable effect. It is good to be now and then withheld from reading bad books” (Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, 1:279). 57. Romantic-era collections include Sidney Melmoth, ed., Beauties of British Poetry (Huddersfield: Brook and Lancashire, 1801), and John Wolcot, ed., The Beauties of English Poetry: Selected from the most esteemed authors (London: C. Spilsbury for J. Walker, 1804). In its review of Prometheus Unbound, the Quarterly says Shelley’s images are fit for “a cabinet of poetical monstrosities” (RR,C, 782), that is, an anthology of nonsense. 58. For example, the Quarterly attacked part of Prometheus’s description of his cave (as we have seen), Asia’s lyric, “My soul is an enchanted boat,” and two of the poems that accompany Prometheus Unbound, “The Cloud,” and “A Vision of the Sea.” By contrast, Gold’s London Magazine praised the description of the cave, the “enchanted boat” passage, and the same two shorter poems. (“A Vision of the Sea” was also admired by Blackwood’s and the otherwise hostile Lonsdale Magazine.) Also, while the Literary Gazette made fun of parts of Prometheus’s opening speech, the same speech was enthusiastically quoted by both the London Magazine and Blackwood’s. Fraistat, in Poem and the Book, stresses the importance of considering the Prometheus Unbound volume as a whole, arguing that the accompanying shorter poems modify the optimism of Prometheus Unbound itself, but he does not consider the effect of the shorter poems on the reception of the volume. For the reviewers, the shorter poems work two ways: they either reinforce the subversiveness of Prometheus Unbound (“Ode to Liberty”), or they balance it with innocuous aestheticism (“The Cloud,” “To a Skylark”). 59. Charles Robinson, in “Shelley, Ollier, and Blackwood,” makes the case for a financial motive for the praise of Shelley in Blackwood’s in that William Blackwood was announced as a joint publisher of Prometheus

244

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 3 9–4 2

Unbound in some advertisements. This circumstance literalizes the breaking down of the appearance of rigid political partisanship that I see occurring in dialogue with Prometheus Unbound. 60. The same point is made in the Quarterly’s review of Prometheus Unbound: “Christianity is the great prop of the social order of the civilized world; this social order is the object of Mr Shelley’s hatred; and, therefore, the pillar must be demolished, that the building may tumble down” (RR,C, 179). 61. Thomas Noon Talfourd wrote a favorable review of Prometheus Unbound: perhaps one of these was that review; if not, his was never published. See his letter to James Ollier of September 9, 1820, in T. J. Wise, A Shelley Library, 101–2. In this letter Talfourd regretted that Henry Colburn, founder of the conservative New Monthly Magazine and the Literary Gazette, had rejected his review of Prometheus Unbound on the grounds that “the work was full of Jacobinism and blasphemy, and the eulogy on it consequently inadmissible in a work devoted to Church and King” (101). 62. The straightforwardness of the London Magazine’s conception of didacticism is suggested by its later essay, which claims that Shelley’s poetry “enkindles in the breast of the reader a corresponding enthusiasm of benevolence” (H, 262). This assertion echoes Shelley’s statement in the preface to The Revolt of Islam that he hopes his poem will possess “the power of awakening in others sensations like those which animate my own bosom” (PW, 35). The notion of a transfer of feeling from author to reader is a simpler understanding of poetic efficacy than the more dialectical one expressed in the preface to Prometheus Unbound or even elsewhere in the preface to The Revolt of Islam. 63. In contrast with those for whom the isolated beauties of Prometheus Unbound make Shelley more dangerous, this reviewer assimilates “beauties” to his domesticating reading of the poem when he regrets that “he should ever attempt to adorn cold and dangerous paradoxes with the beauties which could only have been produced by a mind instinctively pious and reverential” (RR,C, 638). 64. Reiman claims that this reference to “ ‘the shadow of things unseen’ (part of the definition of faith in the Epistle to the Hebrews)” and the same reviewer’s “allusion to ‘Light which never was by sea or land,’ referring to Wordsworth’s ‘Stanzas . . . on Peele Castle’ ” demonstrate the “triumph of Romantic critical theory,” since they “praise poetic qualities that would have been considered blemishes . . . twenty years earlier” (RR,C, 627). One might add that most of Shelley’s poetic qualities were generally still being

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 4 2–4 9

245

considered “blemishes” in 1820. Reiman’s claim basically confirms my point about Shelley’s redefinition of his readers’ taste: Reiman’s reference to “poetic qualities” seems to allude to Shelley’s use of nebulous images to represent a state of transcendence. These certainly constitute part of what the reviewers, with their demand for clarity, call nonsense. Insofar as such images are beginning to be appreciated, the reviewers are being converted to the enjoyment of a poetic style that we would now call Romantic. 65. This reviewer also admires the opposite tendency in Shelley, the impulse to embody rather than the impulse to disembody, when in a discussion of the shorter poems published with Prometheus Unbound he refers to Shelley’s ability to “doff in an instant the cumbersome garments of metaphysical speculation, and throw itself naked as it were into the arms of nature and humanity” (RR,C, 627). In this comment, the ideal is a “cumbersome” covering for the real rather than an etherealizing of the real, showing how positive and negative connotations can switch back and forth between the two sides of the dichotomy. 66. The twentieth-century critical history shows that Prometheus Unbound has been admired chiefly because of what Rieder, in “The ‘One’ in Prometheus Unbound,” calls the individualist misreading but which Ulmer, in Shelleyan Eros, claims is present in the text as a possibility alongside the decentering of individual agency (96). 67. Some later critics have read the speech this way, too. See, for example, Holmes, Shelley, 507, and Ulmer, who, in Shelleyan Eros, not only claims that “Prometheus’ sanctuary, viewed in historical perspective and human terms, is a prison” (108), but that “Shelley’s deepest emotional sympathies inhabit the cave” (97). Abbey, in Destroyer and Preserver, deplores Prometheus’s “womb-cave of passive aestheticism” (113). 68. One early-twentieth-century critic found this scene “charming” but “dramatically very irrelevant” (Olwen Campbell, quoted by Zillman, Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound,” 433). 69. See Sperry, who, in Shelley’s Major Verse, points out that this passage pulls together improbability and “inevitability” (98). Sperry’s reading of this passage provided a starting point for my own. 70. For a summary, see Zillman, Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound,” 436–38. 71. Also, the “fatal mountain” is a reminder of Demogorgon’s future overthrow of Jupiter. 72. Cf. White, Shelley, 2:116, who sees “Demogorgon’s mighty law” as a symbol for Spring (itself a symbol of progression), instead of Necessity.

246

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 5 3–5 5

Chapter 4 1. Andrew Bennett, in Keats, Narrative, and Audience, stresses the importance of writing for posterity in Romantic poetry, but focuses on the tension between a notion of reading as a posthumous Derridean “supplement” and the Romantic nostalgia for “an impossible coincidence of reading with the event of inscription” (10), rather than the idea of writing for eternity in a transcendent sense. 2. Except when taken directly from the relevant reviews, quotations are from the 1821 Pisa edition of Adonais. Since the first edition does not provide line numbers, the line numbers given refer to the version of the poem in SPP. 3. See Donald Reiman, “Keats and Shelley: Personal and Literary Relations,” in SC, 5:399–427 (424). 4. Horace Smith read the poem in this light when he noted, in a letter to Shelley, “You must expect a fresh stab from Southey” (quoted in L, 2:348), implying that the poem was another round in a cycle of mutual recrimination. See also Peter Cochran, who, in “Adonais and The Vision of Judgement,” claims that Adonais “echoes Southey’s own intolerance” (203). 5. Ironically, given Shelley’s tendency to problematize the issue of literary efficacy, both the preface and the poem actualize the performative power of texts, through the effectiveness of their claim that the Quarterly Review’s “savage criticism” (preface, p. 4) of Endymion had caused Keats’s early death. James A. W. Heffernan, in “Adonais: Shelley’s Consumption of Keats,” shows that this claim gained temporary acceptance. 6. In 1821 the Pisa edition of Adonais had been shipped to Ollier, and Shelley had also sent some copies to England with his friends the Gisbornes, but the poem’s initial circulation was limited. Only a few reviews of Adonais were published during Shelley’s lifetime. 7. Shelley had been advised by his friend John Taaffe to omit certain references before publication, but he refused, saying, “I am afraid that I must allow the obnoxious expressions if such they are, to which you so kindly advert, . . . to stand as they are.” Shelley added disingenuously, “The introduction of the name of Christ as an antithesis to Cain is surely any thing but irreverence or sarcasm” (L, 2:306). 8. The Literary Gazette ascribed Keats’s death instead to his leaving off his neckcloth, while Blackwood’s complained that the subject matter of Adonais exemplifies the “triviality” of the “New School” (RR,C, 147). 9. In fact the Literary Gazette dismissed the task of summary as impossible: “We give a verse at random, premising that there is no story

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 5 5–5 7

247

in the elegy, and that it consists of fifty-five stanzas, which are, to our seeming, altogether unconnected, interjectional, and nonsensical” (RR,C, 531). There is a similar shift from scene-by-scene summary to stylistic analysis in the reviews of Prometheus Unbound. 10. Similarly, the Literary Gazette reviewer objected to personifications such as “Splendours, and Glooms” (RR,C, 532), which Shelley “classifies under names, the greater number as new we believe to poetry as strange to common sense” (RR,C, 532). See also a later article on Adonais in The European Magazine and London Review 87 (April 1825): 345–47, which, despite enthusiastically praising the poem, criticized its “exuberance in metaphor, and allegorical personification” (345). 11. The Literary Gazette asked, “what honourable inscription can be placed over the dead by the hands of notorious libellers, exiled adulterers, and avowed atheists” (RR,C, 531). 12. Hodgson, for example, in Coleridge, Shelley, and Transcendental Inquiry, stresses Shelley’s skepticism in his reading of the Defence (51– 65), and goes further in identifying an “implicit, pessimistic thesis (poetry is corruptive)” (62). 13. McGann, in Romantic Ideology, reminds his readers apropos of Adonais that “Shelley’s ideology is time and place specific” (123). Nevertheless McGann praises Shelley’s poetry for drawing attention to its own “emotional contradictions” (123). 14. Tetreault points out, in Poetry of Life, 226, that a sudden reversal of mood is generic. The turn to consolation in Lycidas: “Weep no more, woful Shepherds weep no more” (l. 165), and “Henceforth thou art the Genius of the Shore” (l. 184), can be seen as a matter of poetic fiat, as Peter Sacks mentions in The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats, 115. Except where noted, line references to Lycidas are from the text in C. A. Patrides, ed., Milton’s Lycidas: The Tradition and the Poem. Cronin identifies a similar moment in Edmund Spenser’s Astrophel (Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts, 170). 15. Critics generally follow Wasserman’s Shelley in dividing the poem into three parts, the first of which describes universal mourning for Adonais; the second of which contrasts the revival of the natural world with the dead Adonais; and the third of which finds consolation in the discovery that Adonais is one of the “enduring dead” (l. 336). 16. Adonais piles up multiple references to the murder of Keats: the preface refers to the “violent effect” of the attack on Endymion “on his susceptible mind” (p. 4); and the poem describes Adonais as being “pierced” (ll. 11 and 152) and poisoned (l. 316).

248

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 5 7–5 9

17. Hogle, in Shelley’s Process, points out that Heffernan, in arguing in his “Adonais” that Shelley “consumes” Keats, “fails to note the permission that Shelley gains from the elegy tradition” (391 n. 59). 18. It has been argued, however, that even Milton exposes the fictionality of the genre’s compensatory gestures. See Sacks, English Elegy, 116. 19. Cf. Harold Bloom, who claims in The Anxiety of Influence, that since Adonais is “beyond ambition,” the consolation it offers is “oblivion” (151). 20. Wasserman has been accused by other critics of contradicting himself, since throughout his book he emphasizes the consistency of Shelley’s skeptical thought, but he then ends his argument on an affirmative note, with the Shelley of Adonais believing in a transcendental absolute. Jean Hall, in The Transforming Image: A Study of Shelley’s Major Poetry, explains this discrepancy by seeing Wasserman’s reading of Adonais as an aesthetic response. She claims that for Wasserman’s Shelley, “Truth finally becomes Beauty” (149). 21. Hogle, for example, finds all absolutes in Shelley, including the “One,” to be undermined by “transference,” a circumstance that he sees as a cause for celebration. Hogle ingeniously de-essentializes the “One” of Adonais by arguing that—in his wishful formulation—“Instead of the One drawing him away from transference, . . . the poet draws the One back toward transference” (Shelley’s Process, 266). Ulmer, in “Adonais and the Death of Poetry,” sees Adonais as idealistically embracing a paradoxically “universalist historicism” (437), which is undermined by Shelley’s “figural reflexivity” (444). 22. Scrivener, Radical Shelley, 273; see also Dawson, Unacknowledged Legislator, 250 and 253. To this argument one might object that language is always figurative and that as Prometheus Unbound dramatizes, even useful fictions develop a life of their own, independent of their users. Contrary to Shelley’s (idealist) assumption in his Defence of Poetry, fictions can be expected to behave randomly rather than benignly. 23. Hogle identifies those readings that locate transcendence within the human mind rather than beyond it, readings that stress “the creative mind’s power to turn dissolutions into resurrections by its own capacity to imagine desire fulfilled in metaphoric constructs” (Shelley’s Process, 390 n. 49). (Among these are John W. Wright’s, in Shelley’s Myth of Metaphor.) By contrast, Hogle himself claims that Adonais points to “a dynamism prior to the personal imagination” (393 n. 74). 24. Ulmer, in “Adonais and the Death of Poetry,” finds the equation in Adonais of immortality with poetic fame to be unproblematic, even though he agrees with Cronin, in Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts (193–98), that

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 5 9–6 3

249

the poem offers a “superabundance of immortalities” (Ulmer, 429). For example, Adonais is “made one with Nature” (l. 370), but the ending of the poem asserts that he has transcended nature. 25. One commentator who stresses this is Edward E. Bostetter, in The Romantic Ventriloquists, 225. 26. Shelley wrote to Ollier, “I am especially curious to hear the fate of Adonais—I confess I should be surprised if that Poem were born to an immortality of oblivion” (L, 2:365). 27. In the following account, I include the reactions of Horace Smith and Hazlitt, one a friend and one an acquaintance of Shelley’s, but neither of whom saw Shelley after he went to Italy in 1818. As for other friends, Hogg and Peacock (who also did not see Shelley after he went to Italy in 1818) did not publish their biographical accounts of the poet until the 1850s. The narrative I construct begins in 1822 and could probably continue to the present day, but I have chosen to end it with the early Victorian institutionalization of Shelley, as marked by Mary Shelley’s 1839 edition of his Poetical Works. 28. Edward John Trelawny, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, 154. 29. Sylva Norman gives a lively account of this phenomenon in her study of the early development of Shelley’s reputation, Flight of the Skylark. 30. Karsten Klejs Engelberg, in The Making of the Shelley Myth, states that Shelley’s self-portrait and the poem’s ending were used by nineteenthcentury commentators to promote “a sentimental view of Shelley” (65). 31. Cf. Francis Claiborne Mason, A Study in Shelley Criticism, 103. Mason contends that while Mary Shelley uses biography to interpret Shelley, Edward Trelawny uses biography to evaluate Shelley; I would claim that all Shelley’s friends do the latter. 32. Heffernan makes this point in “Adonais” (305). 33. Hunt first announces that “The author has had before him his recollections of Lycidas, of Moschus and Bion, and of the doctrines of Plato” (H, 298). Hunt here recognizes his friend’s debt to Milton’s Lycidas, as well as to two classical examples of the genre. The reference to the “doctrines of Plato” is the sole allusion by a contemporary reader to the controversial transcendentalizing rhetoric that has preoccupied twentieth-century critics of Adonais. In including Plato, Hunt could just be referring to the poem’s first epigraph, which is wrongly attributed to Plato by Shelley, but Hunt’s mention of Plato’s “doctrines” would seem to allude to the ending of Adonais. 34. Susan J. Wolfson, in “Keats Enters History: Autopsy, Adonais, and the Fame of Keats,” emphasizes how Shelley’s descriptions effeminize Keats

250

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 6 3–6 4

(26), but she does not specifically discuss the reception of Keats/Shelley as elegiac. Neil Fraistat, in “ ‘Illegitimate Shelley’: Radical Piracy and the Textual Edition as Cultural Performance,” emphasizes the class connotations of the vocabulary of refinement and disembodiment applied to Shelley by both his circle and others beyond it, such as the Cambridge Apostles. 35. Similarly, the image of Byron silencing the “herded wolves” (l. 244) with “one arrow” (l. 250)—English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809)— literalizes a fantasy of single-handedly overcoming the “contagion” (l. 248) of the reviewers. 36. Milton’s speaker’s diatribe against the “foul contagion” (l. 127) of the clergy has been seen as expressing the desire for revenge—a displaced desire given that no one can logically be blamed for Edward King’s death by drowning. See Sacks, English Elegy, 93 and 110. The speaker of Lycidas also blames the “bark” (l. 100) in which King met his untimely end. On cursing, see Sacks, English Elegy, 21. 37. A draft of the preface to Adonais, in comparing Keats’s fate with Shelley’s own “persecution” by the reviewers, provides evidence for personal motivation. See Anthony D. Knerr, ed., Shelley’s “Adonais”: A Critical Edition, 194–200 (199). See also Donald H. Reiman, “Shelley’s Manuscripts and the Web of Circumstance.” Reiman discusses drafts of the preface (233–37) and suggests identities for three figures sketched by Shelley in the notebook that contains the drafts: “the smaller figure with the spear represents the young Keats, . . . encountering the headless giant, representing the anonymous critic of the Quarterly Review, who urinates on him. The figure of the devil who seems to be skulking away may, if related to the other two figures, represent Robert Southey” (233). Presumably, of course, the “nude male” (233) with the spear could represent Shelley as well as Keats, and the devil-figure could be Shelley as well as Southey. Sacks, throughout English Elegy, suggests ways in which the psychological behavior of the bereaved intersects with the conventions of the elegy. 38. See Heffernan, “Adonais,” on how Shelley deliberately fabricated the story (295–301). 39. One could say that the curse frees itself from the reviewers’ terms in that it does not depend on violence: It merely tells the reviewer to “Live!” and since, in accordance with generic convention, the poem is redefining death as desirable, life becomes the worst possible fate. In addition, the line “But be thyself, and know thyself to be!” suggests that given the poem’s transvaluation of the individual, to be imprisoned within the individual self is the worst possible torture. Then again, the very acceptance of

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 6 5–6 9

251

an oppositional relationship between poet and reviewer would seem to perpetuate their mutual powerlessness. 40. Cf. Reiman and Powers on how Shelley “inverts the implications” of the image (SPP, 401 n. 5). Shelley also refers to this line in the Defence (506). As mentioned in my first chapter, since his letter to Gifford (L, 2:251– 53) was not sent, Shelley presumably recognized the weakness of his own stance. Yet the same image is reinvoked in a later stanza of Adonais declaring Keats’s freedom from the insults to which he has been subjected: “He has outsoared the shadow of our night” (l. 352). To invert the implications of such an image, I would suggest, is not enough. 41. For some critics, this apparent inability to avoid partisanship is commendable in that it shows that Shelley’s poem remains tethered to the real world. See, for example, Vincent Newey, “Shelley and the Poets: Alastor, ‘Julian and Maddalo,’ Adonais,” 268. 42. One could make an argument similar to those made by some critics about act 4 of Prometheus Unbound, that the language here is cleansed of its previous associations—but as with that text one could also object that the act of cleansing is problematized by a prior resort to violence. 43. Cf. Wilson, in Shelley’s Later Poetry: “What Shelley has in fact given Adonais is an immortality of fame presented in terms of mortal memory and identity” (247). 44. See, for example, Paul Alpers, “Lycidas and Modern Criticism.” 45. Wasserman, for example, describes the self-portrait as seeming at first sight “sadly marred by extravagant self-pity and unmanliness” (Shelley, 499). Another critic initially finds the self-pity, “for which,” he says, “no justification is given,” to be “gross and nauseating” (Eric Smith, By Mourning Tongues: Studies in English Elegy, 68). 46. See Stuart Curran, “Adonais in Context,” 166. Curran suggests that Shelley “abstracts himself ” into a Keatsian oxymoron (175). Angela Leighton, in Shelley and the Sublime, claims that the passage is “not a self-portrait, but a dramatisation of an aesthetic process” (142). Jeffrey N. Cox, in “Keats, Shelley, and the Wealth of the Imagination,” stresses “the identification between Shelley and Keats” in the self-portrait, reading the passage as an attack on the “weakness” of what Cox claims Shelley sees as both poets’ self-centeredness. According to this interpretation, the self-portrait is partly self-critique. 47. The passage can also be read as a reflection on the stance of the elegist. The Actaeon image dramatizes the poet’s encounter with the beautiful, or “Nature’s naked loveliness,” even while that encounter is rendered hypothetical by the “as I guess.” “Nature’s naked loveliness” recalls the “inmost

252

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 7 0–7 4

naked beauty” of poetry in the Defence, which is inaccessible, whether it actually exists or whether its realization is deferred forever. The act of gazing on it, or on the body of Diana with which it corresponds, is analogous to the mourner’s identification with the mourned, an identification that is counteracted and confirmed by his consignment of the mourned to an otherworldly “loveliness” (l. 379). 48. For complaints about this, see, for example, Cameron, in Shelley, 436. Knerr, in Shelley’s “Adonais,” shows that the portrait was even longer in draft (83 and 172). 49. See, for example, Judith Chernaik, The Lyrics of Shelley, 16–17. 50. Cronin, in Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts, 191–92, comments on the shifting syntax of the passage and discusses the Spenserian stanza as containing conflicting impulses towards narrative progression and stasis. 51. Ulmer, in “Adonais and the Death of Poetry,” argues that Shelley’s metaphorical identification with Keats breaks down when allegory (aligned with metonymy over against metaphor) wins out in Shelley’s self-portrait. Ulmer claims that the self-portrait embodies a “self-cancelling evanescence” (442) at odds with what he calls Shelley’s “metaphorical idealism” (444). I am indebted to Ulmer’s insistence on the distinction between metaphor and metonymy in Shelley’s poetry. 52. This translation is quoted from Barcus, Shelley, 314. Appropriately, given Hunt’s parasitic financial relationship to Shelley, Hunt quotes from an ode of Horace (Odes 2.17:5–6) in which Horace expresses the hope that his patron, Maecenas, will not die before him. James Baron identified the quotation. By taking the end of the stanza just quoted, which may connote survival, to refer to incipient death, Hunt gives himself the opportunity to dramatize his own emotional response to his friend’s imagined death, yet he does this not in his own words but in those of another poet, Horace. He can therefore be seen to reproduce the conflicting tendencies in elegy towards an emphasis on the biographical or autobiographical and an emphasis on the formal, tendencies nowhere more evident than in the self-portrait that Hunt quotes so admiringly. 53. Hunt’s description of Shelley, which appeared in the Morning Chronicle on August 12, 1822, was quoted very disapprovingly by the Tory John Bull. See H, 322–23. 54. Susan J. Wolfson, in “Editorial Privilege: Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley’s Audiences,” points out that Mary Shelley’s 1839 notes misleadingly imply that attacks by reviewers forced Shelley into “abstruse and exclusivist idioms” (46).

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 7 4–7 8

253

55. Stuart Curran, in “Horace Smith’s Obituary Panegyric on Shelley,” says that the first three paragraphs (preceding the quotation from Lycidas) are by Thomas Colley Grattan, the rest by Horace Smith. 56. Horace Smith had read Adonais, having received a copy from Shelley and having praised it in a letter of August 30, 1821 (L, 2:348 n. 1). 57. See also Mary Shelley in her preface to Posthumous Poems: “Hereafter men will lament that his transcendent powers of intellect were extinguished before they had bestowed on them their choicest treasures” (reprinted in PW, xxv). 58. Some of these comments were sympathetic towards him, some not. I have already discussed the hostile reception of Shelley’s death by establishment reviewers, at the end of my chapter on Queen Mab. As we saw, several Tory reviewers exulted over Shelley’s death, taking the extremist tone typical of paranoid rhetoric (“we ought as justly to regret the decease of the Devil” [H, 338]). Along slightly more charitable lines, an “Elegy on the Death of Shelley” signed “F” imagined Shelley repenting of his atheism just before he drowned. Several other poems were published on the occasion of Shelley’s death, some at least lamenting rather than celebrating the event. A poem by “B” published in the Examiner —perhaps by Leigh Hunt’s sister-in-law Bessy Kent—refers at length to Adonais and stresses the poet’s achievement of immortality through his works. See H, 345–47. 59. White reprints Brooke’s Elegy on the Death of Percy Bysshe Shelley in H, 348–52. Reacting against Brooke’s defense of Shelley’s reformism, Bernard Barton’s “Verses on the Death of Percy Bysshe Shelley” expressed regret that Shelley’s mourners might share his lack of Christian faith. See H, 352–57. A review of Brooke’s and Barton’s poems in the Literary Chronicle, siding with Barton, found Shelley’s friends guilty of ascribing to him too many virtues (H, 336). 60. Sacks describes how the casting of flowers and the distancing that such rituals involves are connected with the “crucial self-privileging of the survivors” (English Elegy, 19). 61. Norman, in Flight of the Skylark, points this out (23). 62. White prints “need.” 63. See also a September 1822 article on Shelley from The Rambler’s Magazine, probably by William Benbow, which commented, “His elegy on the death of Mr. Keats, showed . . . that he would not permit such a spirit to descend to the tomb silently and unrevenged. May some kindred genius now defend his name from the slurs of envy and disappointed malice!” (quoted by Hugh J. Luke, “An Overlooked Obituary Notice of Shelley,” 43). This plea is clearly motivated by political partisanship.

254

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 7 9–8 3

64. Narrative of Lord Byron’s Voyage to Corsica and Sardinia, during the summer and autumn of the year 1821. Compiled from minutes made during the voyage by the passengers, and extracts from the journal of his lordship’s yacht, The Mazeppa, kept by Captain Benson, R.N., Commander, 26. Further references in parentheses. 65. See also two poems on the death of Shelley, which imagined him repenting of his sins while drowning (H, 347–48 and 357–58). 66. Clement Dunbar, in A Bibliography of Shelley Studies, 1823–1950, points out the logic whereby the beautiful angel invented by Hunt, Mary Shelley, et al., turned almost automatically into the beautiful and ineffectual angel of Matthew Arnold (xl). 67. Cf. Fraistat’s claim in “ ‘Illegitimate Shelley’ ” that “Once put into social circulation by Posthumous Poems, the lyrics of the volume took on a cultural life of their own and were reproduced in articles, anthologies, musical settings,” and so on (412). In this case the “life” predictably perpetuates the image of Shelley as an angelic and primarily lyric poet. 68. Quoted from Ernest J. Lovell Jr., ed., Medwin’s “Conversations of Lord Byron,” 250. Further references in parentheses. 69. Quoted from John Keats, Complete Poems, 281. 70. See MSWL, 1:312. Medwin also quotes part of the curse on the reviewer from Adonais, and two stanzas from the self-portrait, claiming, “I cannot give a fairer specimen of his style and manner, or a better portrait of Shelley, than the one he drew of himself in this poem, and afterwards expunged from it” (249). The stanzas he quotes were not of course “expunged,” though some later admirers of Shelley seem to wish they had been. 71. Showing that such claims can still be read in partisan, anti-Cockney terms, a facetious attack on Hazlitt’s article, published in Blackwood’s, responded as follows: “But what a rash man Shelley was, to put to sea in a frail boat with Jack’s poetry on board! Why, man, it would sink a trireme. In the preface to Mr. Shelley’s poems we are told that ‘his vessel bore out of sight with a favourable wind;’ but what is that to the purpose? It had Endymion on board, and there was an end.” See [William Maginn], “Letters of Mr. Mullion to the Leading Poets of the Age. No. 1: To Bryan W. Proctor, Esq., alias Barry Cornwall,” BM 16 (September 1824): 285– 89 (288). 72. Shelley himself wrote in a letter to John Gisborne, “As to real flesh and blood, you know that I do not deal in those articles,—you might as well go to a gin-shop for a leg of mutton as expect anything human or earthly from me” (L, 2:363).

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 8 3–8 7

255

73. The allusion to a game of dice echoes (though presumably not consciously) a letter that Charles Lamb wrote to Bernard Barton (author of the hostile “Verses on the Death of Percy Bysshe Shelley”) parodying the lines from The Tempest that were to be used (unbeknownst to Lamb) as part of Shelley’s epitaph: “Full fathom five the Atheist lies / Of his bones are hell dice made” (quoted in H, 352). (Trelawny’s choice of quotation from The Tempest is part of the process whereby the dead Shelley is etherealized.) 74. Leigh Hunt’s account of Shelley in Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries also rewrites Shelley’s death as a murder rather than an accident. Hunt compares Shelley with a “spirit” (177) and pictures “its wings stiffened, its warm heart cold; the relics of a misunderstood nature, slain by the ungenial elements” (178). 75. Blackwood’s compared the beginning of this description to “a scooped turnip upon a pole, with a candle in it,” and reacted to the rest of the passage with what looks like homosexual panic: “Is there not something sickening and Italianized in thus beslavering a man’s personal appearance? What need MEN care about his freckled phiz and his hang-a-bone stoop?” (BM 16:287). 76. The Literary Register reviewer is the only commentator who actually draws attention to this. 77. Medwin, in Life of Shelley, claims that in Epipsychidion Shelley foresaw even the nature of his funeral: “A radiant death—a fiery sepulchre” (403). 78. See my article, “ ‘Attracted by the Body’: Accounts of Shelley’s Cremation,” forthcoming in the Keats-Shelley Journal, in which I show that these accounts foreground a tension between the angelic Shelley and bodily decay, a tension that increases rather than lessens the intrigue of the cremation. 79. Wolfson, in “Editorial Privilege,” focuses on Mary Shelley’s role in the “recuperation” (53) of Shelley, analyzing the way in which, in her 1839 edition of the poet’s works, Mary Shelley figures herself as subordinate to Shelley yet also asserts her “privileged status as the poet’s truest audience” (59)—a point that supports my claim concerning the elegiac treatment of Shelley, since this dual move can be seen as generic. 80. Reinforcing the impression of a place removed from real life, Mary Shelley emphasizes the wildness of the “natives”: “Our near neighbours . . . were . . . like savages” (PW, 677). Mary Favret, in “Mary Shelley’s Sympathy and Irony: The Editor and Her Corpus,” emphasizing that the “real” Shelley who is reshaped by his survivors is just as fictional as the beautiful and ineffectual angel, offers a fascinating analysis of Mary Shelley’s note to

256

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 8 8–9 0

the poems of 1822 in terms of Gothic romance. Favret argues that Mary Shelley’s 1839 notes set “in motion a profound reevaluation of gender and genre” (19) by elevating her own chosen genre—prose fiction (a genre associated with female writers and readers)—over the traditionally male genre of poetry. Favret’s reading of the notes as competitive ties in with my points about the power dynamics of elegy. 81. See, for example, the description of Marmion Herbert, the Shelleyfigure in Benjamin Disraeli’s Venetia (1837): “His countenance was very pallid, so colourless indeed that its aspect was almost unearthly; but his large blue eyes, that were deeply set in his majestic brow, still glittered with fire, and their expression alone gave life to a visage, which, though singularly beautiful in its outline, from its faded and attenuated character seemed rather the countenance of a corpse than of a breathing being” (349). 82. Favret, in “Mary Shelley’s Sympathy and Irony,” comments, “We know her premonitions will result in Percy’s drowning, not just because history has already scripted his death, but also because gothic conventions allow forebodings of evil to materialize” (33). 83. Her other probable source of consolation is not mentioned in this note, but possibly because she takes it for granted: the possibility of a Christian afterlife for Shelley. In her preface to the 1839 Works, Mary Shelley claims, “It is our best consolation to know that such a pure-minded and exalted being was once among us, and now exists where we hope one day to join him” (PW, xxiii). In the years immediately succeeding Shelley’s death, when Hunt imagined him continuing to exist as a “thing of the elements” and Mary Shelley herself simply envisaged the “continuation” of his being in an “altered form,” Shelley’s friends seemed to be doing him the justice to avoid invoking Christianity in the course of their attempts to recuperate his reputation. In her preface to the 1824 Posthumous Poems Mary Shelley had claimed that “My only consolation was in the praise and earnest love that each voice bestowed and each countenance demonstrated for him we had lost” (PW, xxvi). But of course the notion of Shelley’s angelic nature presupposes a Christian framework: Mary Shelley’s notes on Shelley participate in a process of Christianization that culminates in the Victorian sculpture by Henry Weekes depicting Mary Shelley as a Madonna-like figure supporting the drowned and Christ-like Shelley. The monument is discussed by Bette London in “Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity.” Both London and Norman (Flight of the Skylark, 214) mention the derivation of the image from Michelangelo’s Pietà. The base of the monument quotes the stanza from Adonais beginning “He has outsoared the shadow of our night” (l. 352) as if it refers not to Keats

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 9 1–9 2

257

but to Shelley. Ironically this still defines Shelley against the terms of the reviewers, because “outsoared” refers to Paradise Lost, like the line “Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now,” discussed earlier. The stanza quoted on the monument also alludes to “a head grown grey in vain” (l. 358), an allusion to Southey. The Christianized version of Shelley may be the logical outcome of the Shelley circle’s collaboration, but it is only implicit in the elegiac moves of Hunt and others; these narratives are precisely not Christianized elegy but instead seek other forms of consolation. 84. Similarly, Wasserman ends his book by quoting the final lines of Adonais. Both thus give the illusion that Adonais was Shelley’s last word, ignoring Hellas, “Charles the First” (1822), The Triumph of Life, and various shorter poems and fragments. Wolfson, in “Editorial Privilege,” comments that “His yearning after Adonais becomes, in the context of [Mary Shelley’s] narrative, her yearning after him; she speaks his voice and performs his role, and so, in the rhetoric of her edition, becomes one with him” (60). I would add that what Wolfson calls this “assimilation” (60) is another example of the way in which members of the Shelley circle reproduce the poet’s elegiac stance. Mary Shelley at once effaces herself for Shelley’s benefit and takes control of him. In an analysis of comments from Mary Shelley’s journals and letters, Wolfson shows how her “rhetoric of vulnerable private dependence modulates into one of privileged, authorizing audience” (57). Mary Shelley tells herself, “I shall write his life, and thus occupy myself in the only manner from which I can derive consolation” (Mary Shelley’s Journal, quoted by Wolfson, 57). 85. Some critics claim that the extent of Shelley’s identification with Keats complicates the elegiac speaker’s conventionally egotistical attempt to gain fame for himself as well as for the poet whom he takes care to render more dead than before. According to Judith Page in “Teaching Adonais as Pastoral Elegy,” “what was only a metaphoric identification for earlier poets becomes radical and literal for Shelley: he becomes Keats” (102). Other critics transfer Shelley’s apparently suicidal impulse onto his treatment of the elegy, suggesting that Shelley has driven the genre to—or past—its logical conclusion. Sacks claims that in Adonais Shelley “somehow burst[s] beyond the elegy as a genre” (English Elegy, 163). According to this line of reasoning, Shelley brings a genre that had almost been exhausted before the seventeenth century back to life only to kill it off. Like Milton, Shelley revives the elegy only to close it down equally if not even more decisively. However, the idea that a genre can be killed off gives too much agency to the poet and not enough to the genre itself. Conversely, the notion that Shelley is encouraged to embrace a transcendental absolute by his choice of

258

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 9 2–9 3

genre gives too much power to the genre. Wilson makes the latter argument in Shelley’s Later Poetry, 236. 86. The quotation is from Hodgson, Coleridge, Shelley, and Transcendental Inquiry, 104. Cf. Laura Claridge, Romantic Potency: The Paradox of Desire, 170–77. In this account, which takes no notice of genre, the supposedly suicidal tone of the poem or the suicidal impulse potential in the genre become transferred onto Shelley. Ulmer, in “Adonais and the Death of Poetry,” despite paying some attention to elegiac convention, sees the poem’s turn to death to be rhetorically motivated rather than genre-inflected. 87. At least one critic has taken the poem’s last word, “are” (l. 495), to affirm a faith in personal immortality. See, for example, Heffernan, “Adonais”: “Shelley now sees that only by envisioning the survival of Keats’s identity can he foresee the survival of his own” (314). 88. Curran, for example, reads the reference to the “breath” that “Descends” on the speaker as an allusion to the fact that the power of poetry is a force stronger and larger than the poet himself (Curran, “Adonais in Context,” 176). By contrast, Cronin takes these lines to acknowledge that the poet has overreached himself in trying to imagine transcendence outside the poem: He is now forced reluctantly to admit the inability of poetry to reach the state of perfection that it has figured (Cronin, Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts, 198). The inadequacy of language has recoiled back upon the speaker, as it does at the end of Epipsychidion. Sacks takes the reference to the speaker’s “bark” being “driven” from the shore to imply that the poet himself is being gathered up into his own fiction, as if he refuses to draw a boundary between imagination and reality (Sacks, English Elegy, 165). In other words, this final stanza refuses to admit the limitations of language. 89. Ulmer, “Adonais and the Death of Poetry,” 429.

Works Cited

Abbey, Lloyd. Destroyer and Preserver: Shelley’s Poetic Skepticism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. Alexander, J. H. “Blackwood’s: Magazine as Romantic Form.” Wordsworth Circle 15 (1984): 57–68. . “Learning from Europe: Continental Literature in the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine, 1802–1825.” Wordsworth Circle 21 (1990): 118–23. . Two Studies in Romantic Reviewing. 2 vols. Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1976. Allen, Michael. Poe and the British Magazine Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. Alpers, Paul. “Lycidas and Modern Criticism.” ELH 49 (1982): 468–96. Altick, Richard. The English Common Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957. Arnold, Matthew. The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. Ed. R. H. Super. 11 vols. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960– 1977. Aske, Martin. “Critical Disfiguring: The ‘Jealous Leer Malign’ in Romantic Criticism.” In Questioning Romanticism, ed. John Beer, 49–70. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Aspinall, Arthur. Politics and the Press, 1780–1850. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1973 (first published 1949). Baker, Carlos. Shelley’s Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision. New York: Russell and Russell, 1961 (first published 1948). . “Spenser, the Eighteenth Century, and Shelley’s Queen Mab.” MLQ 2 (1941): 81–98. Baker, Herschel. William Hazlitt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962. 259

260

Wo r k s C i t e d

Barcus, James E., ed. Shelley: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. Barrell, Joseph. Shelley and the Thought of His Time: A Study in the History of Ideas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947. Behrendt, Stephen C. Shelley and His Audiences. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Behrendt, Stephen C., ed. Romanticism, Radicalism, and the Press. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Bennett, Andrew. Keats, Narrative, and Audience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Bennett, Betty T., and Stuart Curran. Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Blackwood’s Magazine. Edinburgh: William Blackwood; London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1817–1826. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Boas, Louise Schutz. “ ‘Erasmus Perkins’ and Shelley.” MLN 70 (1955): 408–13. Bostetter, Edward E. The Romantic Ventriloquists. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963. Brisman, Susan Hawk. “ ‘Unsaying His High Language’: The Problem of Voice in Prometheus Unbound.” Studies in Romanticism 16 (1977): 51–86. Butler, Marilyn. “Culture’s Medium: The Role of the Review.” In The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran, 120–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. . Peacock Displayed: A Satirist in His Context. London: Routledge, 1979. . “Romantic Manichaeism: Shelley’s ‘On the Devil, and Devils’ and Byron’s Mythological Dramas.” In The Sun Is God: Painting, Literature, and Mythology in the Nineteenth Century, ed. J. B. Bullen, 13–37. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Byron, George Gordon, Lord. Byron’s Letters and Journals. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. 12 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1973–1982. Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Shelley: The Golden Years. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974.

Wo r k s C i t e d

261

. “Shelley versus Southey: New Light on an Old Quarrel.” PMLA 57 (1942): 489–512. . The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical. New York: Collier Books, 1962 (first published 1950). Cameron, Kenneth Neill, and Donald H. Reiman, eds. Shelley and His Circle, 1773–1822. 8 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961–1986. Campbell, Olwen Ward. Shelley and the Unromantics. London: Methuen, 1924. Chernaik, Judith. The Lyrics of Shelley. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972. Christensen, Jerome. “The Detection of the Romantic Conspiracy in Britain.” South Atlantic Quarterly 95 (1996): 603–27. . Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. . “ ‘Thoughts That Do Often Lie Too Deep for Tears’: Toward a Romantic Concept of Lyrical Drama.” Wordsworth Circle 12 (1981): 52–64. Claridge, Laura. Romantic Potency: The Paradox of Desire. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Clive, John. Scotch Reviewers: The “Edinburgh Review,” 1802–1815. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957. Cobbett, John M., and James P. Cobbett, eds. Selections from Cobbett’s Political Works. 6 vols. London: Anne Cobbett, n.d. Cochran, Peter. “Adonais and The Vision of Judgement.” Romanticism 1 (1995): 193–205. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. . Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–1971. Cooper, Andrew M. “Blake and Madness: The World Turned Inside Out.” ELH 57 (1990): 585–642. Cox, Jeffrey N. “Keats, Shelley, and the Wealth of the Imagination.” Studies in Romanticism 34 (1995): 365–400. Cronin, Richard. “Peter Bell, Peterloo, and the Politics of Cockney Poetry.” Essays and Studies 45 (1992): 63–87. . Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts. New York: St. Martin’s, 1981.

262

Wo r k s C i t e d

Curran, Stuart. “Adonais in Context.” In Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference, ed. Kelvin Everest, 165–82. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1983. . “Horace Smith’s Obituary Panegyric on Shelley.” Keats-Shelley Journal 37 (1988): 27–34. . “The Siege of Hateful Contraries: Shelley, Mary Shelley, Byron, and Paradise Lost.” In Milton and the Line of Vision, ed. Joseph Anthony Wittreich, 209–30. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975. Daniel, Robert. “Jeffrey and Wordsworth: The Shape of Persecution.” Sewanee Review 50 (1942): 195–213. Dawson, P. M. S. The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Deane, Seamus. The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789–1832. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Delaporte, François. Disease and Civilization: The Cholera in Paris, 1832. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986. De Luca, V. A. “The Style of Millennial Announcement in Prometheus Unbound.” Keats-Shelley Journal 28 (1979): 78–101. De Man, Paul. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” In Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S. Singleton, 173–209. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969. . “Shelley Disfigured.” In The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 93–123. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Disraeli, Benjamin [Earl of Beaconsfield]. Venetia. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1881. Donovan, John. “Incest in Laon and Cythna: Nature, Custom, Desire.” Keats-Shelley Review 2 (1987): 49–90. Duff, David. Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Dunbar, Clement. A Bibliography of Shelley Studies, 1823–1950. New York: Garland, 1976. Eagleton, Terry. The Function of Criticism. London: Verso, 1984. Edinburgh Review. Edinburgh: A. Constable, 1802–1824. Empson, William. Milton’s God. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1961. Engelberg, Karsten Klejs. The Making of the Shelley Myth. London: Mansell, 1988.

Wo r k s C i t e d

263

Evans, Frank B. “Shelley, Godwin, Hume, and the Doctrine of Necessity.” Studies in Philology 37 (1940): 632–40. Everest, Kelvin, ed. Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1983. Favret, Mary. “Mary Shelley’s Sympathy and Irony: The Editor and Her Corpus.” In The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, ed. Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor, 17–38. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Ferguson, Frances. “Shelley’s Mont Blanc: What the Mountain Said.” In Romanticism and Language, ed. Arden Reed, 202–14. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Forman, H. Buxton. The Vicissitudes of Queen Mab: A Chapter in the History of Reform. London: printed for private circulation, 1887. Fraistat, Neil. “ ‘Illegitimate Shelley’: Radical Piracy and the Textual Edition as Cultural Performance.” PMLA 109 (1994): 409–23. . The Poem and the Book: Interpreting Collections of Romantic Poetry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Fraistat, Neil, ed. The “Prometheus Unbound” Notebooks: A Facsimile of Bodleian MSS. Shelley e.1, e.2, and e.3. New York: Garland Publishing, 1991. Freud, Sigmund. “Psychoanalytical Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia.” In Standard Edition, 12:9–82. London: Hogarth Press, 1958. Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth. Shelley’s Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Gilmartin, Kevin. “The Press on Trial: Form and Imagination in Early Nineteenth-Century Radical Culture.” Wordsworth Circle 24 (1993): 144–47. . Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early NineteenthCentury England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. . “ ‘This Is Very Material’: William Cobbett and the Rhetoric of Radical Opposition.” Studies in Romanticism 34 (1995): 81–101. . “ ‘Victims of Argument, Slaves of Fact’: Hunt, Hazlitt, Cobbett, and the Literature of Opposition.” Wordsworth Circle 21 (1990): 90– 96. Godwin, William. The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature. London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1797.

264

Wo r k s C i t e d

. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness. 2 vols. London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1793. Grabo, Carl. “Prometheus Unbound”: An Interpretation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935. Graham, Walter. English Literary Periodicals. New York: Octagon Books, 1966 (first published 1930). Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. “Rumor, Contagion, and Colonization in Gros’s Plague-Stricken of Jaffa (1804).” Representations 51 (1995): 1–46. Grimes, Kyle. “Queen Mab, the Law of Libel, and the Forms of Shelley’s Politics.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 94 (1995): 1–18. Gross, Kenneth. “Satan and the Romantic Satan: A Notebook.” In Remembering Milton, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson, 318–41. New York: Methuen, 1988. Hall, Jean. The Transforming Image: A Study of Shelley’s Major Poetry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980. Hazlitt, William. Works. Ed. P. P. Howe. 21 vols. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930–1934. Heffernan, James A. W. “Adonais: Shelley’s Consumption of Keats.” Studies in Romanticism 23 (1984): 295–315. Herson, Ellen Brown. “Oxymoron and Dante’s Gates of Hell in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.” Studies in Romanticism 29 (1990): 371–93. Hodgson, John A. Coleridge, Shelley, and Transcendental Inquiry. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Hofstadter, Richard. “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” and Other Essays. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965. Hogg, Thomas Jefferson. The Life of Shelley. Ed. H. Wolfe. 2 vols. London: Dent, 1933. Hogle, Jerrold E. Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Holmes, Richard. Shelley: The Pursuit. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975. Hughes, Daniel J. “Coherence and Collapse in Shelley, with Particular Reference to Epipsychidion.” ELH 28 (1961): 260–83. . “Potentiality in Prometheus Unbound.” Studies in Romanticism 2 (1963): 107–26. Hunt, Leigh. Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries. London: Henry Colburn, 1828. Reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1966. Jones, Stanley. Hazlitt: A Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

Wo r k s C i t e d

265

Jones, Steven. Shelley’s Satire: Violence, Exhortation, and Authority. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994. Keach, William. Shelley’s Style. New York: Methuen, 1984. Keats, John. Complete Poems. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1982. Kelley, Theresa. “Poetics and the Politics of Reception: Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci.’ ” ELH 54 (1987): 333–62. Klancher, Jon. The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Knapp, Steven. Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. Knerr, Anthony D., ed. Shelley’s “Adonais”: A Critical Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Leavis, F. R. Revaluation. New York: G. W. Stewart, 1947. Lee, Monika H. “ ‘Nature’s Silent Eloquence’: Disembodied Organic Language in Shelley’s Queen Mab.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 48 (1993): 169–93. Leighton, Angela. Shelley and the Sublime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Levinson, Marjorie. Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Lewis, C. S. A Preface to “Paradise Lost.” London: Oxford University Press, 1942. The Liberal: Verse and Prose from the South. London: John Hunt, 1822– 1823. [Lockhart, John Gibson.] Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk. 3 vols. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1819. London, Bette. “Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity.” PMLA 108 (March 1993): 253–67. The London Magazine. London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1820–1824. Lovell, Ernest J., Jr., ed. Medwin’s “Conversations of Lord Byron.” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966. Luke, Hugh J. “An Overlooked Obituary Notice of Shelley.” Papers on Language and Literature 2 (1966): 38–46. Madden, Lionel, ed. Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. Mannion, Irene Elizabeth. “Criticism ‘Con Amore’ : A Study of Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817–1834.” Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1984.

266

Wo r k s C i t e d

Mason, Francis Claiborne. A Study in Shelley Criticism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1929. McCalman, Iain. Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. McGann, Jerome. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. McNiece, Gerald. Shelley and the Revolutionary Idea. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969. Medwin, Thomas. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. H. B. Forman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913. Milton, John. John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. Indianapolis: Odyssey Press, 1957. Mullett, Charles F. The Bubonic Plague and England: An Essay in the History of Preventive Medicine. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1956. . “Politics, Economics, and Medicine: Charles Maclean and Anticontagion in England.” Osiris 10 (1952): 224–51. Narrative of Lord Byron’s Voyage to Corsica and Sardinia, during the summer and autumn of the year 1821. Compiled from minutes made during the voyage by the passengers, and extracts from the journal of his lordship’s yacht, The Mazeppa, kept by Captain Benson, R.N., Commander. London: J. Limbird, 1824. Nattrass, Leonora. William Cobbett: The Politics of Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Newey, Vincent. “Shelley and the Poets: Alastor, ‘Julian and Maddalo,’ Adonais.” Durham University Journal 85 (1993): 257–71. Newlyn, Lucy. “Paradise Lost” and the Romantic Reader. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Norman, Sylva. Flight of the Skylark. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954. Notopoulos, James. The Platonism of Shelley: A Study of Platonism and the Poetic Mind. Durham: Duke University Press, 1949. Page, Judith. “Teaching Adonais as Pastoral Elegy.” In Approaches to Teaching Shelley’s Poetry, ed. Spencer Hall, 100–102. New York: Modern Language Association, 1990. Patrides, C. A., ed. Milton’s “Lycidas”: The Tradition and the Poem. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983.

Wo r k s C i t e d

267

Peacock, Thomas Love. The Works of Thomas Love Peacock. Ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith and C. E. Jones. 10 vols. London: Constable, 1924– 1934. Pelling, Margaret. “Contagion/Germ Theory/Specificity.” In Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, 1:309–34. London: Routledge, 1993. Polan, Dana. “The Ruin of a Poetics: The Political Practice of Prometheus Unbound.” Enclitic 7 (1983): 35–43. Quarterly Review. London: J. Murray, 1809–1829. Quinn, Mary A. “The Daemon of the World: Shelley’s Antidote to the Skepticism of Alastor.” Studies in English Literature 25 (1985): 755–74. Rajan, Tilottama. Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. . “Romanticism and the Death of Lyric Consciousness.” In Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hoˇsek and Patricia Parker, 194–207. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. . The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Reiman, Donald H. The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers. 9 vols. New York: Garland Publishing, 1972. . “Shelley and the Human Condition.” In Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran, 3–13. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. . “Shelley’s Manuscripts and the Web of Circumstance.” In Romantic Revisions, ed. Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley, 227–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Rieder, John. “The ‘One’ in Prometheus Unbound.” Studies in English Literature 25 (1985): 775–800. Rieger, James. The Mutiny Within: The Heresies of Percy Bysshe Shelley. New York: George Braziller, 1967. Robinson, Charles E. “Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Ollier, and William Blackwood: The Contexts of Early Nineteenth-Century Publishing.” In Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference, ed. Kelvin Everest, 183–226. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1983. . Shelley and Byron: The Snake and the Eagle Wreathed in Flight. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Robinson, Henry Crabb. Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers. Ed. Edith J. Morley. 3 vols. London: J. M. Dent, 1938.

268

Wo r k s C i t e d

Roe, Nicholas. John Keats and the Culture of Dissent. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Roe, Nicholas, ed. Keats and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Ross, Marlon B. “Shelley’s Wayward Dream-Poem: The Apprehending Reader in Prometheus Unbound.” Keats-Shelley Journal 36 (1987): 110–33. Sacks, Peter. The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Schwartz, Lewis M. “Two New Contemporary Reviews of Shelley’s Queen Mab.” Keats-Shelley Journal 19 (1970): 77–85. Scrivener, Michael. Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Shaaban, Bouthaina. “Shelley and the Chartists.” In Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran, 114– 25. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. . “Shelley in the Chartist Press.” Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin 34 (1983): 41–60. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Ed. Betty T. Bennett. 3 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980–1988. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Adonais. Pisa: with the types of Didot, 1821. Facsimile reprint. London: Noel Douglas, 1927. . The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Frederick L. Jones. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964. . Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson. Corr. G. M. Matthews. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. . The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. E. B. Murray. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. . Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem: with notes. London: P. B. Shelley, 1813. . Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. New York: Norton, 1977. Shine, Hill, and Helen Chadwick Shine. The “Quarterly Review” under Gifford: Identification of Contributors, 1809–1824. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1949.

Wo r k s C i t e d

269

Smiles, Samuel. A Publisher and his Friends. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1891. Smith, Eric. By Mourning Tongues: Studies in English Elegy. Ipswich: Boydell Press, 1977. Smith, Olivia. The Politics of Language, 1791–1819. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Southey, Robert. A Letter to William Smith, Esq., M.P. from Robert Southey, Esq. London: John Murray, 1817. . Southey’s Poetical Works. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1862. Sperry, Stuart M. “Necessity and the Role of the Hero in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.” PMLA 96 (1981): 242–54. . Shelley’s Major Verse: The Narrative and Dramatic Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. St. Clair, William. The Godwins and the Shelleys. London: Faber and Faber, 1989. Strout, Alan. “Lockhart, Champion of Shelley.” Times Literary Supplement, August 12, 1955, 468. . “Maga, Champion of Shelley.” Studies in Philology 29 (1932): 95–119. Swann, Karen. “Literary Gentlemen and Lovely Ladies: The Debate on the Character of Christabel.” ELH 52 (1985): 394–418. Tetreault, Ronald. The Poetry of Life: Shelley and Literary Form. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Pantheon Books, 1964. Trelawny, Edward John. Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1858. Trollope, Anthony. The Eustace Diamonds. 2 vols. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1928. Ulmer, William A. “Adonais and the Death of Poetry.” Studies in Romanticism 32 (1993): 425–51. . Shelleyan Eros: The Rhetoric of Romantic Love. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Wasserman, Earl R. Shelley: A Critical Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971. Webb, Timothy. “ ‘The Avalanche of Ages’: Shelley’s Defence of Atheism

270

Wo r k s C i t e d

and Prometheus Unbound.” Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin 35 (1984): 1–39. . Shelley: A Voice Not Understood. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977. . “The Unascended Heaven: Negatives in Prometheus Unbound.” In Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference, ed. Kelvin Everest, 37–62. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1983. Westminster Review. London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1824–1826. Wheatley, Kim. “The Blackwood’s Attacks on Leigh Hunt.” NineteenthCentury Literature 47 (June 1992): 1–31. . “ ‘Radical Trash’: American Emigrants in the Quarterly Review.” In Romanticism, Radicalism, and the Press, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt, 170–91. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997. White, Newman Ivey. “Literature and the Law of Libel: Shelley and the Radicals of 1840–42.” Studies in Philology 22 (1925): 34–47. . Shelley. 2 vols. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940. . “Shelley and the Active Radicals of the Early Nineteenth Century.” South Atlantic Quarterly 29 (1930): 248–61. . The Unextinguished Hearth: Shelley and His Contemporary Critics. Durham: Duke University Press, 1938. Wickwar, William H. The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press, 1819–1832. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1972 (first published 1928). Williams, Raymond. Cobbett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Wilson, Milton. Shelley’s Later Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1959. Wise, T. J. A Shelley Library. New York: Haskell House, 1971 (first published 1924). Wittreich, Joseph Anthony, Jr. “The ‘Satanism’ of Blake and Shelley Reconsidered.” Studies in Philology 65 (1968): 816–33. Wolfson, Susan J. “Editorial Privilege: Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley’s Audiences.” In The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, ed. Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor, 39–72. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. . “Keats Enters History: Autopsy, Adonais, and the Fame of Keats.” In Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe, 17–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800. Ed. James Butler and Karen Green. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.

Wo r k s C i t e d

271

Worrall, David. “Mab and Mob: The Radical Press Community in Regency England.” In Romanticism, Radicalism, and the Press, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt, 137–56. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Wright, John W. Shelley’s Myth of Metaphor. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1970. Zillman, Lawrence, ed. Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound”: A Variorum Edition. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1959.


Index

Abbey, Lloyd, 234n6, 245n67 Aeschylus, 139, 140 aesthetic appreciation, 75, 112, 143, 195 aestheticism, 6, 54–57, 140, 149–50 Alexander, J. H., 213nn86,87 allegory, 156, 158, 193, 199n15, 200n16 Allen, Michael, 212n80 Alpers, Paul, 251n44 Altick, Richard, 205n29 anthologies of poetry, 140 Arnold, Matthew, 6 Aske, Martin, 200n17 Aspinall, Arthur, 205n29, 206n31 audiences: shaping of, 18, 115, 202n13 Aurora Borealis, 74, 87 Austen, Jane, 224n45 Baker, Carlos, 225n52 Baker, Herschel, 212n82 Barcus, James, 242n51, 252n52 Baron, James, 252n52 Barrell, Joseph, 226n54 Barrow, John, 33 Barruel, Abbé, 34, 67, 222n28 Barton, Bernard, 255n73 Beacon, 87, 88–89 “beauties,” 11; in Prometheus Unbound, 137–40; in Queen Mab, 74–75 Behrendt, Stephen, 86, 220n18, 235n14 Benbow, William, 89, 229n69, 253n63 Bennett, Andrew, 246n1 Black Dwarf, 23 Blackwood’s Magazine, 11, 88, 213n87; on Adonais, 154–55; on Coleridge, 41; on contagion, 65; editorial policy of, 42; on Keats’s death, 254n71, 255n75; on Prometheus Unbound, 138, 139–41, 142,

234n12, 243n58; on Reviews, 13–15, 18; on Shelley, 40, 49, 51–57 Blake, William, 197n3 Bloom, Harold, 248n19 Boas, Louise Schutz, 224n42, 225n50 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 218n6, 219n15 Bostetter, Edward, 249n25 Brisman, Susan Hawk, 239n34 British Critic, 214n91 Brooke, Arthur: Elegy on the Death of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 177–78 Brougham, Henry, 210n8; “Spy System at Lyons,” 35–36; “State of Parties,” 36–37 Burke, Edmund, 21 Butler, Marilyn, 207n41, 208n52, 211n78 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 88, 98–99, 118, 161, 232n84; in Adonais, 250n35; on review of Hunt’s Foliage, 215n96; on Queen Mab, 230n74; and Satanic school, 32; in spurious Narrative, 179; The Vision of Judgment, 198n3 Cameron, Kenneth Neill, 29, 199n14, 225n50, 235n14, 237n23, 241n48, 252n48 Campbell, Olwen Ward, 241n45, 245n68 Canning, George, 205n27 Canning, Stratford, 18 Carlile, Richard, 2, 19, 30, 38, 224n46; and Queen Mab, 85, 87 censorship, 73–74, 87, 89 Chartists, 107 Chernaik, Judith, 252n49 Christensen, Jerome, 209n58, 213–14n84, 240n37 Clairmont, Claire, 98 Claridge, Laura, 258n86

273

274

Index

Clark, William, 85. See also Reply to . . . Queen Mab Clive, John, 201n7, 203n16 Cobbett, William, 2, 17, 22–23, 30, 37, 205n28, 206n31, 220n18; “Address to the Journeymen and Labourers,” 21–22; and Political Register, 19, 21, 34 Cochran, Peter, 246n4 Cockney school, 41, 52, 141, 202n15, 230n75 Colburn, Henry, 244n61 Coleridge, John Taylor, 213n88, 214–15n95 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 207n39; Biographia Literaria, 42, 44; Christabel, 221n79; “Hymn before Sun-rise,” 214n93; on Reviews, 42–44; and Southey, 203n18 common sense, 109, 112, 138 conspiracy, 2, 11, 20–21, 30, 60 contagion, 2, 11, 17, 20, 30, 32, 38, 60, 91, 92, 230n79 “contagionist” controversy, 61–65, 73, 90, 208n55 Cooper, Andrew, 203n21, 206n34 cost of books, 89, 94 Cox, Jeffrey, 251n46 Critical Review, 223n38 Croly, George, 154 Cronin, Richard, 199n10, 202n15, 238n29, 247n14, 248n24, 252n50, 258n88 Cruikshank, Isaac: “The Revolutionary Association,” 231n82 Curran, Stuart, 208n54, 251n46, 253n55, 258n88 Dalby, John Watson, 105 Dawson, P. M. S., 223n34, 226n53, 248n22 Deane, Seamus, 206n34 deconstruction, 7 Delaporte, François, 220n15 De Luca, V. A., 234n5 de Man, Paul, 198n8, 200n16 Disraeli, Benjamin: Venetia, 256n81 Donovan, John, 215n98 Dublin Magazine, 134, 138, 234n12, 235n13 Duff, David, 221n24, 225n51, 227n58, 233n89 Dunbar, Clement, 254n66 Eagleton, Terry, 3 Edinburgh Review, 3, 10, 13–19, 181, 200n19, 220n20; Coleridge on, 44; on

contagion, 61–63; paranoid rhetoric in, 33–39 elegy, 157–60, 163, 164 Empson, William, 236n16 Engelberg, Karsten Klejs, 249n30 European Magazine and London Review, 247n10 Evans, Frank, 226n54 Examiner, 19, 30, 53, 83, 84, 85, 161, 210n75, 228n64 Fair, Robert Charles (“F”), 72–82; “Ode to the Author of ‘Queen Mab,’ ” 81–82 fame, 153, 159, 160, 166, 192, 195 Favret, Mary, 255n80, 256n82 Ferguson, Frances, 239n30 Forman, H. Buxton, 58–59 Fraistat, Neil, 234n5, 238n25, 240n42, 242n52, 243n58, 250n34, 254n67 Freud, Sigmund, 198n5 Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth, 234n11 Gifford, William, 14, 33, 200n17, 202n12, 207–8n49; and Hazlitt, 42–43; in Melincourt, 27–28; and Shelley, 49–50 Gilmartin, Kevin, 23, 203nn20,21, 207n45, 220n18, 221n24 Gisborne, John, 111, 254n72 Godwin, William: Caleb Williams, 197n3; correspondence with Shelley, 67–69; The Enquirer, 223n34; Political Justice, 67–68, 76 Gooch, Robert, 61–63 Grabo, Carl, 241n47 Graham, Walter, 18 Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo, 218n6, 219n15 Grimes, Kyle, 224n47 Gross, Kenneth, 236n17 Hall, Jean, 248n20 Hazlitt, William, 27, 130, 200n19; “Letter to William Gifford,” 42–43; Political Essays, 17; on Posthumous Poems, 181–84; on Reviews, 42–44; Table Talk, 41, 130 Heffernan, James, 246n5, 248n17, 249n32, 250n38, 258n87 Herson, Ellen Brown, 233n4 Hodgson, John, 199n13, 247n12, 258n86 Hofstadter, Richard, 1, 210n68 Hogg, Thomas Jefferson, 67, 232n84, 248n27

Index Hogle, Jerrold, 158, 199nn13,15, 227n55, 233n4, 234n5, 239nn30,33, 241n50, 248nn17,21,23 Holmes, Richard, 226n53, 245n67 homosexual panic, 198n5, 255n75 Hone, William, 19, 27, 30, 210n67 Honeycomb, The, 54–55, 56, 139 Hookham, Thomas, 69–70 Hughes, Daniel, 239n34, 241n50 Hunt, Henry, 29, 202n15, 204n26 Hunt, Leigh, 17, 27, 66, 110, 160, 200n17, 202n15; on Adonais, 161–72; and Blackwood’s, 41–42, 139; on elegy, 166; Foliage, 123; Indicator, 210n75; on Milton, 166; on Prometheus Unbound, 131–32; and Quarterly Review, 30–31, 37, 45, 161, 164, 235n12; and Shelley, 44, 141, 215n102, 240n43; on Shelley’s death, 173, 255n74. See also Examiner idealism, 8, 195, 237n22; in Adonais, 159, 193; Shelley’s, 5–7, 153, 155–56, 158 incest, 98 Investigator, 87, 106

275

Levinson, Marjorie, 3 Lewis, C. S., 197n3 Liberal, 86, 161, 211n75 Literary Chronicle, 74, 87, 105, 155, 225n49 Literary Gazette, 75, 87; on Adonais, 154–55; attack on Shelley, 94–99; on the language of Prometheus Unbound, 130, 131, 237n24, 242n53, 243n58; on the preface to Prometheus Unbound, 118, 119, 120; on Prometheus Unbound, 127, 129, 235n13, 236n18, 238n26; on Queen Mab, 91–105; Literary Register, 178 Lockhart, John Gibson, 13–15, 41, 51–57, 83, 116, 139–41, 154; Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk, 200n4 London, Bette, 256n83 London Magazine (Baldwin’s): on Prometheus Unbound, 119, 130, 236n21 London Magazine (Gold’s), 87; on preface to Prometheus Unbound, 119, 120–21; on Prometheus Unbound, 115, 129, 138, 141–43, 236n21, 243n58 Lonsdale Magazine, 114, 127, 138, 234–35nn12,13, 243n58

Keach, William, 238n28, 239n31, 242n54 Keats, John, 11, 17, 51, 53, 152, 159, 163, 165; death of, 154, 163–64, 247n16; Endymion, 163, 198n6; Hyperion, 129; “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” 198n6; and Leigh Hunt, 41–42, 44; “Ode to a Nightingale,” 181; Poems, 185, 198n6 Kelley, Theresa, 198n6, 210–11n75 Klancher, Jon, 18, 22 Knapp, Steven, 81, 95 Knerr, Anthony, 250n37, 252n48 Knight’s Quarterly Review, 216n106 Kotzebue, August von, 73

Maclean, Charles, 62, 64, 65 Mannion, Irene, 213n87 Mason, Francis Claiborne, 249n31 McCalman, Iain, 224nn42,43 McGann, Jerome, 8, 52, 234n11, 247n13 McNiece, Gerald, 222n27, 231n80 Medwin, Thomas, 71, 160, 254n70; on Shelley’s death, 180–81 Mill, James, 201n6 Mill, John Stuart, 201n6 Milton, John: Lycidas, 157–58, 159, 163, 166, 167, 175, 176, 180–81, 185, 247n14, 248n18, 249n33, 250n36; Paradise Lost, 3, 17, 77, 116, 165, 231n81. See also “Satanic scenario” Monthly Magazine, 75, 87–88; review of Brooke’s Elegy, 177–78 Monthly Review: on Prometheus Unbound, 127, 138, 235n12, 236n18 Morning Chronicle, 85, 252n53 Moxon, Edward, 107 Mullett, Charles, 218n6, 219n10 Murray, John, 18

Lamb, Charles, 255n73 Leavis, F. R., 241n51 Lee, Monika, 224n47 Leighton, Angela, 251n46

Narrative of Lord Byron’s Voyage, 179–80 Nattrass, Leonora, 204nn22,25 Necessity, 148, 245n72 New Criticism, 52

Jeffrey, Francis, 14, 17, 34, 201n8, 202n12; “Cobbett’s Political Register,” 19, 210n71; on Lake Poets, 41; “Southey’s Thalaba,” 211n77, 233n1; “State of the Country,” 37–38 John Bull, 106, 252n53 John Bull’s British Journal, 87 Johnson, Samuel, 166 Jones, Steven, 198n7, 216n104

276

Index

Newey, Vincent, 251n41 new historicism, 7 Newlyn, Lucy, 236n17 newspapers, 22–23 Norman, Sylva, 249n29 Notopoulos, James, 241n45 Ollier, Charles, 5, 54–56, 111, 118 One, the, 158, 159, 165, 191, 192–93 Owenites, 107 Page, Judith, 257n85 Paine, Thomas: Rights of Man, 23 paranoia, 4, 9–10 “paranoid style,” 4, 21, 33–34, 38–39, 40–41, 59, 67; defined, 1–2, 15–17 Paris Monthly Review, 174 Peacock, Thomas Love, 151, 249n27; Melincourt, 27–28, 212n81 Pelling, Margaret, 217nn3,5, 221n22 personifications: in Adonais, 155; in Queen Mab, 79–81, 100 plague, 61 Polan, Dana, 240n39 publicity, 94 Quarterly Review, 2–3, 10, 176, 228n67; attacks on Keats, 163, 164, 246n5, 247n16; attacks on Shelley, 40, 44–51, 88, 96, 163; on contagion, 61–65; exchange of letters by founders, 18; on the language of Prometheus Unbound, 127, 128, 129, 134–37, 240n35, 242n51; and Leigh Hunt, 123, 161; paranoid rhetoric in, 13–33; on the preface to Prometheus Unbound, 117, 120; on Prometheus Unbound, 109–10, 114, 115, 235n12, 238n26, 243n58, 244n60; on The Revolt of Islam, 117, 165 Quinn, Mary, 227n61 Rajan, Tilottama, 199nn10,15, 234n8, 238n25, 240n37 Rambler’s Magazine, 253n63 Reiman, Donald, 52, 178, 199n11, 223n37, 246n3, 250n37, 251n40 Reply to . . . Queen Mab, 87, 89–90, 93 Rieder, John, 123, 234n9, 235n15, 245n66 Rieger, James, 222n27 Robinson, Charles, 216n109, 237n22, 243n59 Roe, Nicholas, 221n23 Romantic Satanism, 3, 116

Ross, Marlon, 234n5 Sacks, Peter, 247n14, 250n37, 253n60, 257n85, 258n88 “Satanic scenario,” 5, 94, 174, 194, 239nn30,33; defined, 3, 17; and Adonais, 154; and Prometheus Unbound, 112, 115, 116; and Queen Mab, 91 Satanic school, 32, 66, 89 Schwartz, Lewis, 225n48, 230n73 Scots Magazine, 240n36 Scott, Walter, 18, 56 Scrivener, Michael, 199n14, 222n32, 226n53, 231n80, 233n4, 241n47, 248n22 Shaaban, Bouthaina, 233n89 Shelley, Elena Adelaide, 232n83 Shelley, Harriet, 49, 71, 83, 96 Shelley, Ianthe, 70, 229n68 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 47, 56, 71, 85, 160, 181; on Adonais, 152, 188–91; Frankenstein, 59, 107, 197n3; on Shelley, 173–74, 186–91, 252n54, 253n58 Shelley, Percy Bysshe: on Adonais, 153, 246n7, 249n26; Chancery trial, 83–85, 86, 96; and Christianization, 256n83; cremation of, 185; death of, hostile reactions to, 86, 106–7, 173, 179–80; death of, poems on, 253nn58,59; death of, sympathetic reactions to, 173–79; and escapism, 154; and Gifford, 49–50, 165, 251n40; and idealism, 5–7; and Italy, 172, 175, 186–87; and paranoia, 168; persecution, feelings of, 153; and piracy of Queen Mab, 85–86; poetic style of, 127, 129–32, 134–37, 155, 162, 170, 173, 174; on Prometheus Unbound, 117–18; and prophecy, 172, 179, 180, 184, 188; and Quarterly Review, 40; and reviewers, 4–5, 17; on Satan, 236n17; and skepticism, 156; Southey, correspondence with, 29, 50–51 —Adonais, 3, 5, 6, 8, 11, 12, 131; conclusion of, 161, 190–93; curse of, 161, 250n39; deconstructive readings, 158; historicist readings, 158; reviews, early, 154–55; reviews, posthumous, 178–79; as self-portrait, 161, 167–72; Shelley circle on, 151–52, 161–77, 180–95 —Prometheus Unbound, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 46, 49, 60, 103, 109–50, 164; and agency, 157; Asia, 123–26; Demogorgon, 113,

Index 157; genre of, 128; lack of human interest in, 128; and language, 251n42; plot, 113–14; preface of, 115–23; semichorus of spirits, 144–49; Sixth Spirit’s song, 131–33; Spirit of the Hour, 114, 140; and unintelligibility, 127 —Queen Mab, 3, 11, 12, 57, 58–108, 111, 180, 235n13; Ahasuerus, 77–78, 82, 103; on commerce, 79–80, 231n80; derivativeness, 75; initial publication, 69–70; marriage, attack on, 89; mechanization in, 91; Necessity in, 76, 79, 104; notes, 70, 78, 223n36; pirate publication, 85–90, 154; on Religion, 100, 102–4; on Selfishness, 100–102, 103–4 —other works: Address to the Irish People, 67–68; An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte, 210n67; Alastor, 53, 54; The Cenci, 141; “Charles the First,” 257n84; “The Cloud,” 243n58; “The Daemon of the World,” 83; “Declaration in Chancery,” 228nn62,65; A Defence of Poetry, 6, 9, 10, 122, 150, 155–56, 159, 236nn17,20; Epipsychidion, 111, 255n77, 258n88; Hellas, 213n86, 257n84; Julian and Maddalo, 197n3; Laon and Cythna, 45; Letter to Lord Ellenborough, 224n46, 228n62; “A Mask of Anarchy,” 10; “Mont Blanc,” 214n93, 239n30; The Necessity of Atheism, 232n84; “Ode to Liberty,” 115, 235n12, 243n58; “On Love,” 7; “Peter Bell the Third,” 10, 217n110; A Philosophical View of Reform, 10, 236n20; Posthumous Poems, 174, 181, 200n19, 240n36; A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote throughout the United Kingdom, 28; Proposals for an Association, 67–68; A Refutation of Deism, 70, 72; The Revolt of Islam, 47, 49, 52–53, 117, 244n62; Rosalind and Helen, 53; “The Sensitive Plant,” 140; “Superstition,” 83, 100; “To a Skylark,” 243n58; The Triumph of Life, 134, 241n51, 257n84; A Vindication of Natural Diet, 70; Zastrozzi, 223n38 Shelley, William, 181 Shelley circle, the, 160–61 Shine, Hill, and Helen Chadwick Shine, 202n12 Smiles, Samuel, 201n8 Smith, Eric, 251n45

277

Smith, Horace, 173, 186, 235n15, 246n4, 253n56; on Shelley’s death, 174–77 Smith, Olivia, 28, 203n21, 207n44 Smith, Thomas Southwood, 64–65 Society for Prevention of Vice, 85 Southey, Robert, 4, 10, 38, 154, 163, 202n10, 203n19; “Inquiry into the Copyright Act,” 38; “Inquiry into the Poor Laws,” 19–21; Letters from England, 202n14; A Letter to William Smith, 27; “On the Means of Improving the People,” 31–33; “On the Poor Laws,” 31–33; “Parliamentary Reform,” 23–27; “Rise and Progress of Popular Disaffection,” 28–31, 33; Thalaba the Destroyer, 75; A Vision of Judgment, 32; Wat Tyler, 27, 85–86 Spence, Thomas, 20 Spenserian stanza, 170 Sperry, Stuart, 229n70, 234n8, 245n69 St. Clair, William, 224n42, 229n69 Swann, Karen, 211n79 Taaffe, John, 246n7 Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 235n15 Talfourd, Thomas Noon, 244n61 taste, 44, 109–10, 113, 126, 128, 137, 138 Tetreault, Ronald, 221n24, 247n14 Theological Inquirer, 71, 72–82, 87 Thompson, E. P., 22–23, 203nn20, 21, 209n67, 224n46 transcendence, 7, 160, 193, 195 Trelawny, Edward John, 160, 181, 182, 186, 249n31 Trollope, Anthony: The Eustace Diamonds, 108 Ulmer, William, 198n8, 199nn12,15, 234n8, 237n23, 239n34, 240n41, 245nn66,67, 248nn21,24, 252n51, 258nn86,89 Wasserman, Earl, 158, 234n6, 239n30, 247n15, 248n20, 251n45, 257n84 Webb, Timothy, 46, 123, 234nn5,9, 238n27, 239nn30,32, 240n41 Westminster Review, 201n6, 208n50, 219n11; on contagion, 64–65 Wheatley, Kim, 208n56, 216n105 White, Newman Ivey, 87, 201n5, 223n41, 229n70, 233n90, 240n35, 245n72 Wilkes, John, 29 Williams, Edward, 187

278

Index

Williams, Jane, 188 Williams, Raymond, 22 Wilson, Milton, 241n49, 251n43, 258n85 Wittreich, Joseph, 236n16 Wolfson, Susan, 249n34, 252n54, 255n79, 257n84 Wooler’s British Gazette, 87, 90

Wordsworth, William, 17, 42, 118; Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 9, 65 Worrall, David, 206n31, 227n60 Wright, John, 248n23 Zillman, Lawrence, 197n1, 234n10, 240n42, 241n48, 245n70

Shelley and His Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics

Hardy and His Readers

Shelley

The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein

Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power and Politics

Beyond His Control

Beyond His Control

Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics

Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics

shelley-frankenstein

Beyond His Control

Beyond His Control

Shelley and Vitality

Paranoid Park

The Paranoid Style in American Politics: And Other Essays

Keats and Shelley (Cliffs Notes)

Paranoid A Chant

Rewritten Theology: Aquinas After His Readers

Beyond Technocracy: Science, Politics and Citizens

Jesus and the Politics of his Day

A Mary Shelley Chronology

Shelley Munro - Scarlet Woman

A Mary Shelley Encyclopedia

Stephen King - Paranoid - A Chant

The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama

The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama

The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama

Beyond Right and Left: New politics and the culture wars

In Defence Of Harriet Shelley

Beyond Equality and Difference: Citizenship, Feminist Politics and Female Subjectivity

Shelley and His Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics

Hardy and His Readers

Shelley

The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein

Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power and Politics

Beyond His Control

Beyond His Control

Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics

Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics

shelley-frankenstein

Beyond His Control

Beyond His Control

Shelley and Vitality

Paranoid Park

The Paranoid Style in American Politics: And Other Essays

Keats and Shelley (Cliffs Notes)

Paranoid A Chant

Rewritten Theology: Aquinas After His Readers

Beyond Technocracy: Science, Politics and Citizens

Jesus and the Politics of his Day

A Mary Shelley Chronology

Shelley Munro - Scarlet Woman

A Mary Shelley Encyclopedia

Stephen King - Paranoid - A Chant

The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama

The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama

The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama

Beyond Right and Left: New politics and the culture wars

In Defence Of Harriet Shelley

Beyond Equality and Difference: Citizenship, Feminist Politics and Female Subjectivity

Recommend Documents