Selected Poems and Prose
Page 89
Our text is taken from MWS’s fair copy with corrections by PBS which was sent to Leigh Hunt on 23 September 1819 and which is now in the Library of Congress (MMC 1399): there is a facsimile in MYR (Shelley) II.
The extensive commentary on MA includes: Stephen C. Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 196–204; Richard Cronin, Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 39–55, and The Politics of Romantic Poetry (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 173–80; Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1975), pp. 185–93; Steven E. Jones, Shelley’s Satire: Violence, Exhortation, and Authority (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994), pp. 94–123; Michael Henry Scrivener, Radical Shelley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 199–210; and Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 195–204.
6 Castlereagh: See headnote to ‘To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh]’.
8 Seven bloodhounds: Various references have been detected in the phrase: to the recurring number seven in Revelation, e.g. the beast with seven heads in 17:3; to the seven other European nations that joined Great Britain to postpone indefinitely the abolition of the slave trade in 1815; and to the pro-war party in Pitt’s administration (1783–1801), who were known as ‘bloodhounds’.
15 Eldon: The Lord Chancellor, John Scott, 1st Earl of Eldon (1751–1838), an uncompromising defender of the established order in Church and State, had in the Court of Chancery in March 1817 delivered the verdict that deprived PBS of the custody of his children by his first wife, Harriet.
ermined gown: The mark of a peer of the realm and a judge.
16 tears: Eldon was known for weeping in court.
17 mill-stones: Cp. Matthew 18:6: ‘But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.’ See also Richard of Gloucester addressing the murderers he has commissioned in Richard III I.iii.351: ‘Your eyes drop millstones when fools’ eyes fall tears.’
24 Sidmouth: See headnote to ‘To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh]’. The pious Sidmouth supported the building of new churches to serve the growing population of industrial towns.
25 crocodile: In popular lore, the crocodile shed tears while devouring its victim. See ‘To —– [the Lord Chancellor]’, ll. 47–8.
26 Destructions: Destroyers.
30–33 Anarchy is modelled upon the apparition in Revelation 6:8: ‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death.’ See the Dedication before Laon and Cythna, l. 86, and The Triumph of Life, ll. 285–6.
34–7 The lines borrow details from Revelation 19:11–16.
48–9 Alluding to the drunken ‘Mother of Harlots’ in Revelation 17:1–6 and to reports that the yeomanry who attacked the crowd at Manchester had been drinking or were drunk.
57 triumph: See note to ‘To —–’ (‘Corpses are cold in the tomb’), l. 19.
59 blood and flame: Recalling the red coats of the British army.
77 ten millions: The large allowances from the public purse granted to the seven sons of George III caused widespread offence. See ‘England in 1819’, ll. 2–3.
80 globe: ‘A golden orb, emblem of sovereignty’ (OED).
83 Bank and Tower: The Bank of England and the Tower of London, the latter both a fortress and an arsenal.
85 pensioned: In receipt of a stipend from government and so biased to support its policies and prerogatives.
115 A planet, like the Morning’s: Venus as the morning star, emblem of love, one of the principal symbols in PBS’s verse.
145 accent: Utterance.
151 The line adopts a traditional simile, as in Numbers 23:24: ‘Behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion.’
169 pine and peak: Waste away.
176–83 The radical reformer William Cobbett (1763–1835), whom PBS cautiously admired, was persuaded that the necessity of paying the interest on the large national debt had led to two measures which weighed disproportionately on the poor: the issue of paper currency unbacked by gold, which depreciated in value; and the introduction of regressive commodity taxes. Together, these deprived of their just reward those whose labour was the ultimate source of wealth. See ‘From A Philosophical View of Reform’ and Peter Bell the Third, ll. 152–6.
205–8 Recalling Matthew 8:20: ‘And Jesus saith unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.’
220 Fame: Rumour, gossip. In Ovid, Metamorphoses XII.39 ff., Rumour (Latin fama) lives in a house of echoing brass.
233 The flag of the American Minutemen militia in the Revolutionary War pictured a coiled rattlesnake and the words ‘Don’t tread on me’. See K. N. Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Havard University Press, 1974), p. 623.
238–41 PBS deplored the threat of eternal punishment by institutional religion as a means of enforcing political submission. In his letter protesting against the conviction of the bookseller Richard Carlile for ‘blasphemous libel’ for publishing Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason (1793, 1796), PBS defended freedom of opinion on religious matters and castigated its misuse for political advantage: ‘the prosecutors care little for religion, or care for it only as it is the mask & the garment by which they are invested with the symbols of worldly power’ (Letters II, p. 143).
245 In 1793 Britain joined other European powers in a coalition against revolutionary France (Gaul).
250–53 The stanza draws upon Luke’s Gospel, on which PBS made notes in late 1819: the episode of the woman who washed and kissed Jesus’s feet and is forgiven her sins in 7:36–50; of Christ’s advice to the rich man in 18:18–22; and of the charity of Zacchaeus the Publican in 19:1–10.
286 tares: Noxious weeds, alluding to the parable in Matthew 13:24–40.
305 targes: Light shields.
319 scimitars: Short curved swords used especially in the Near East and associated with proverbial Oriental brutality and despotism.
320 sphereless stars: Stars that have left their proper sphere in the heavens (as understood in older astronomy) and appear as meteors.
330 phalanx: Compact battle array; more generally, a body of people drawn closely together for a common purpose.
331–4 Cp. PBS’s A Declaration of Rights (1812): ‘No man has a right to disturb the public peace, by personally resisting the execution of a law however bad. He ought to acquiesce, using at the same time the utmost powers of his reason, to promote its repeal’ (Prose Works I, p. 57).
335 old laws of England: Reformers appealed to such legal milestones as Magna Carta (1215) and the Bill of Rights (1689) as well as to the rule of law generally, as forming a native English tradition.
341 sacred heralds in their state: In the exercise of their duties as representatives of the sovereign, the safety of heralds was to be scrupulously respected.
344–67 PBS argued for passive resistance in A Philosophical View of Reform: ‘not because active resistance is not justifiable when all other means shall have failed, but because in this instance temperance and courage would produce greater advantages than the most decisive victory’ (Prose, p. 257).
360 bold, true warriors: Reports in The Examiner for 22 and 29 August contrasted the restrained conduct of the regular troops at Peterloo with the undisciplined force used by the yeomanry cavalry.
364–7 Volcanic vapours were thought to inspire those who delivered the prophecies of the ancient oracles. Volcanoes regularly figure in PBS’s poetry as emblems of revolutionary change. See Prometheus Unbound II.iii.1–10 and Hellas, ll.587–90.
PETER BELL THE THIRD
Wordsworth’s Peter Bell recounts, in a ballad-like stanza, a number of incidents in the life of the character of the title, an itinerant seller of earthenware pots. The last of these, his overhearing of a Methodist preacher urging repentance, has the effect of completing his conversion from a cruel, selfish and brutal life to be ‘a good and honest man’ (l. 1135). Peter Bell the Third (in the Prologue, Reynolds’s is the first Peter, Wordsworth’s only the second) counters this fable of conversion with another, in which his Peter mimics the display of orthodox religious convictions in Wordsworth’s recent verse as well as his change from a reforming to a conservative political outlook. PBS learned in a letter of July 1818 that in the parliamentary elections for Westmorland Wordsworth had supported the successful candidates, the two sons of his patron the Earl of Lowther, against the liberal Whig Henry Brougham, prompting a disgusted reply: ‘What a beastly and pitiful wretch that Wordsworth! That such a man should be such a poet!’ (Letters II, p. 26). The barter of political integrity for personal advantage is in PB III the cardinal sin for a poet, and Peter reaps its inevitable reward of dullness.
This narrative provides PBS with a satirical perspective on what he regarded as deadening features of contemporary literary culture: a narrow religious outlook, sexual prudery, political patronage and partisan reviewing. From all of these he felt he had himself suffered, no more so than in the review of his Laon and Cythna/The Revolt of Islam (1817–18) in the Quarterly Review for April 1819 (it reached him in mid October), which combined a vituperative personal attack with the charge that he had imitated, and perverted, Wordsworth. The central figure of the metropolitan literary scene in which Peter is corrupted is his patron the Devil, who is no goat-like demon but ‘what we are’ (l. 81) – of this world and able to embody himself in any convenient human form. In PB III, PBS imagines this Devil for a rational age (see the extract from ‘On the Devil, and Devils’) as a member of the ‘new aristocracy’ that he recognizes in the essay A Philosophical View of Reform (p. 644), one of the nouveaux riches whose wealth allows them to patronize learning and taste without title to either.
PB III’s ballad-like stanza of five lines of three or four stresses rhyming abaab is a variant of both Wordsworth’s and Reynolds’s, which rhyme abccb. Two satirical influences are of particular note. With Pope’s Dunciad (1743) PB III shares the conviction that bad writing and debased civilization go hand in hand. The apocalyptic triumph of dullness bringing the return of ancient chaos and darkness at the end of The Dunciad provides the model for the conclusion to PBS’s poem. T. L. Peacock’s burlesque Sir Proteus: A Satirical Ballad (1814) combines the mock-heroic narrative of a comic character based on the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, with an attack on the political apostasy of the Lake Poets.
Critical comment includes: Poems III, pp. 70–81; Carlo M. Bajetta, Peter Bell: The 1819 Texts, rev. edn (Milan: Mursia, 2005); James Chandler, England in 1819 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 484–90, 515–24; Richard Cronin, ‘Peter Bell, Peterloo, and the Politics of Cockney Poetry’, Essays and Studies (1992), pp. 63–87, and The Politics of Romantic Poetry (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 147–55; Steven E. Jones, Shelley’s Satire: Violence, Exhortation, and Authority (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994), pp. 38–69; and Michael Henry Scrivener, Radical Shelley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 218–24.
Our text is taken from MWS’s press copy of the poem with additions and corrections by PBS, now in the Bodleian Library (MS Shelley adds. c. 5, ff. 50–99: see BSM I).
Title Miching Mallecho: Sneaking mischief. See second epigraph.
First epigraph The scene is a nocturnal fantasy of the terrified Peter Bell in Wordsworth’s poem. The stanza was omitted in editions after 1819 to avoid offending ‘the pious’ (Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years 1821–1853, ed. E. de Selincourt, rev. Alan G. Hill, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978–88), I, p. 312).
Second epigraph From Shakespeare, Hamlet III.ii.130–31. Hamlet explains to Ophelia the meaning of the dumb show he has arranged to uncover the hidden guilt of Claudius the king.
DEDICATION
p. 369 To Thomas Brown Esqr., the younger, H. F. &c. &c.: A comic parody of Wordsworth’s dedication of his Peter Bell to ‘Robert Southey, Esq. P. L.’ (i.e. Poet Laureate). ‘Thomas Brown, the Younger’ was the name adopted by the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779–1852) for two popular verse satires, The Twopenny Post-Bag (1813) and The Fudge Family in Paris (1818). ‘H. F.’ has been decoded as ‘Historian of Fudges’ or as Hiberniae Filius (Latin for ‘Son of Ireland’) or as Hiberniae Fidicen (‘Harpist of Ireland’).
Fudges: A fictional Irish family who go on a fashionable tour to Paris after the restoration of the Bourbons in Thomas Moore’s verse satire (see previous note), which mocks their opinions and behaviour. The father of the family, Phil Fudge, a radical in the 1790s, now serves the foreign secretary, Castlereagh (for whom see headnote to ‘To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh]’), as spy and informer.
the Rat and the Apostate: The targets intended are not entirely evident. In the early nineteenth century, a ‘rat’ was political slang for a turncoat; an ‘apostate’ is one who abandons his religion or principles or allegiances. Reynolds’s and Wordsworth’s ‘Peter Bells’ might qualify, the first as appearing in the disguise of another, the second as having undergone a conversion (the potter Peter Bell) and changed political loyalty for personal advantage (Wordsworth himself).
p. 370 Mr. Examiner Hunt: Leigh Hunt edited the liberal weekly The Examiner from 1808 to 1821.
the Quarterly: The Quarterly Review was edited by William Gifford (1756–1826) from an upper room at the establishment of its publisher, John Murray. The conservative Gifford and the liberal Leigh Hunt were bitter critical and political opponents.
eleutherophobia: A coinage from the Greek, ‘fear of freedom’.
borrow colours: Find pretexts.
venerable canon … grandmother: The Book of Common Prayer included as the first entry in its table of the degrees of kinship and affinity within which marriage was forbidden: ‘A man may not marry his grandmother.’
Proteus: A sea god who could change shape at will.
ultra-legitimate dullness: The phrase conjoins Wordsworth’s shift to conservative opinions and the – in PBS’s view – degeneration of his verse. ‘Legitimacy’, or the incontestable right of hereditary monarchy, was imposed by the victorious powers as the basis of the post-revolutionary settlement in Europe.
White Obi: Obi was a system of magic and sorcery of West African origin current among the transported slaves of the British West Indies. ‘White Obi’ evidently means Obi as practised by whites, i.e. Christianity. See l. 552.
p. 371 the world … or not at all: A slight misquotation of the final three lines of Wordsworth’s poem ‘French Revolution, As It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement’ (1809), republished in Poems (1815).
six or seven days … literature of my country: Mocking Wordsworth’s statement in the Preface to Peter Bell that he had been revising the poem since 1798 with a view ‘to fit it for filling permanently a station, however humble, in the Literature of my Country’.
cyclic poems: Heroic narrative poems based on a cycle of legends or myths.
bitterns: Large marshland birds.
Waterloo bridge: Originally, Strand Bridge, renamed and reopened on 18 June 1817, the anniversary of the victory at Waterloo.
Prologue
3 antenatal: Reynolds’s Peter Bell, which appeared before Wordsworth’s poem.
4 weeds: Clothes.
7–12 The passage combines logical and theological language to construct a mock argument on the relations that bind the three Peter Bells to each other. Wordsworth’s poem is likened to the ‘mean’ or middle term of a syllogism: that is, an argument in three propositions, of which the first and last are the ‘extremes’. To be valid these two must be properly linked by the mean. This prevents a ‘schism’, or break in the argument, because it is correctly ordered (‘orthodoxal’), and also a doctrinal split because the mysterious threefold nature of Peter Bell is affirmed on an analogy with the orthodox Christian belief in the Holy Trinity – for which see the third paragraph of the Dedication.
10 Aldric’s: The reference is to Henry Aldrich (1647–1710), whose Artis Compendium Logicae (1691) was used as a textbook for teaching logic at Oxford.