Harriet and Shelley reached London late on the evening of Monday, 5 April, and drove straight to Westbrook’s at Chapel Street. Shelley fired off a quick greeting to Hogg, and the two friends were united early the next morning.
With Harriet’s baby due in June, Shelley’s majority in August and Queen Mab to be put through the press, Shelley decided to take up strategic but neutral ground in central London where Harriet could be comfortable and he could quietly write letters, correct proofs and compose his ‘Notes’. They took a suite of rooms at Cook’s Hotel in Albemarle Street, and settled in. They were eventually joined by Dan and a disgruntled Eliza. Little record remains of these months, except ‘the bustle of the city’ and Harriet’s slightly irritable complaints about the noise made by the two waiters who came to set and serve dinner in their rooms.5 Hogg, Hookham and probably Peacock were regular visitors. But they did not bother to write to Lawless (who had since been committed to prison) or their other friends in Dublin; and strangest of all it appears from Godwin’s Diary that he and Shelley did not meet until 8 June when Godwin found him at John Newton’s taking tea and discussing vegetarianism. During this period they had all, according to Harriet, ‘taken to the vegetable regimen again’.
The next few weeks Shelley spent editing and correcting Queen Mab, and drafting the ‘Notes’. Two hundred and fifty copies were run off, probably towards the end of May, ‘Printed by P.B. Shelley, 23 Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square, 1813.’ Hookham had, in the end, concluded that it was too dangerous to carry such a work under his own imprint. The full title page was given: ‘Queen Mab; a Philosophical Poem; with Notes. By Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ecrasez l’Infame!, Correspondance de Voltaire.’ The ‘infame’ of Voltaire was the Church in general; but the same phrase had also been adopted by the Illuminists as its motto referring specifically to Christ. The title was complete with a Latin tag from Lucretius, and Archimedes’s famous aphorism in Greek: ‘Only give me a place on which to stand, and I shall move the whole world.’ The idea of the search for a place, from which he could launch his ideas of changing society, was to become increasingly important for Shelley. It meant both the search for a philosophical standpoint, and the search for a literal geographical location where he could live and write unmolested. Queen Mab was being distributed by July.
The whole work was dedicated to Harriet with a typically Shelleyan flourish of generosity:
. . . thou wert my purer mind;
Thou wert the inspiration of my song;
Thine are these early wilding flowers,
Though garlanded by me.
On 21 May she broke her silence to Dublin, writing to Catherine Nugent from Cook’s Hotel: ‘Mr Shelley continues perfectly well, and his Poem of “Queen Mab” is begun [to be printed], tho it must not be published under pain of death, because it is too much against every existing establishment. It is to be privately distributed to his friends, and some copies sent over to America. Do you [know] any one that would wish for so dangerous a gift?’6
This was very much the light in which Shelley himself regarded his first major production. Queen Mab is essentially subversive in intent, vigorously polemic in attack, and revolutionary in content and implication. Its main targets, constantly expressed in abstract categories, are, in order of importance: established religion; political tyranny; the destructive forces of war and commerce; and the perversion of human love caused by such chains and barriers as the marriage institution and prostitution. Secondary themes carry a strong puritan undercurrent, involving temperance and vegetarianism, republican austerity, and righteous moral independence of judgement. For all its irreligion, which is in many places extremely violent, the poem and the ‘Notes’ are fundamentally missionary in their manner of address with many overtones of sectarian tract writing. This is the real substance of Queen Mab, and it is only partly softened and obscured by the introductory machinery of the Fairy Queen, the sparkling cosmological settings, and the eruptions of exotic phrases, imagery and rhythms which are imitated from Southey’s oriental epics. Shelley had commented to Hogg: ‘. . . I have not been able to bring myself to rhyme. The didactic is in blank heroic verse, & the descriptive in blank lyrical measure. If authority is of any weight in support of this singularity, Milton’s Samson Agonistes, the Greek Choruses, & (you will laugh) Southey’s Thalaba may be adduced. . . . I have not abated an iota of the infidelity or cosmopolicy of it.’7
What Shelley was preaching came to be understood by his friends, and by his enemies, as a vision of the good life built on atheism, free love, republicanism and vegetarianism: a combination of the enlightened, the millennial and the cranky.
The poem consists of nine cantos. After the two introductory cantos, Canto III attacks Monarchy; Canto IV attacks warfare and political Tyranny; Canto V attacks economic and commercial exploitation; Cantos VI and VII attack priestcraft and religion in general, and Christianity in particular. The remaining cantos enclose the whole poem in visionary machinery of past and future civilizations.
There are seventeen notes, eleven of which are quite brief, and six of which are fully developed essays. The six essays are on the labour theory of value (Note 7); on the theory and practice of free love (Note 9); on Necessity in the moral and material universe (Note 12); on atheism (Note 13, a reprint of the Oxford pamphlet); on Christ and Christian doctrine (Note 15); and on vegetarianism (Note 17). As parts of these essays, the ‘Notes’ also contain long quotations in the original from Pliny, Lucretius, d’Holbach, Spinoza, Bacon and Plutarch. Altogether the ‘Notes’ are almost equally as long as the poem.
The poetry and the prose are closely interwoven in argument, and the reader is constantly aware of a strong pressure of cross-reference which forces him to move back and forth between the two forms, and between the various cantos. The aim of the whole work is argumentative and philosophical rather than poetical. Everywhere the poetry is subordinated to the ideas. The poetry lies not so much in the surface effects of the language, but in the sustained and occasionally brilliant attempt to bring together, relating, comparing and combining, information from enormously varied sources: historical, ethical, astronomical, theological, political and biological. The poetry lies in the energy and fire with which Shelley attempts to weld unity out of diversity. Queen Mab is no less than an attempt to state the basis for an entire philosophy of life, an active and militant view of man confronting his society and his universe.
The attitudes expressed in the work are drawn from many previous writers, and clearly reflect the pattern of Shelley’s reading since spring 1811. But these writers are not in fact those normally accredited with influencing Shelley. In particular the influence of Godwin is local, rather than, as usually stated, dominant. Shelley’s attitude to nature, the material universe and the functioning of natural processes is drawn from Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things and Baron d’Holbach’s Système de la Nature, backed up with detailed information and statistics from the new range of ‘Encyclopedias’. With regard to man’s role in society, its political, ethical and economic aspects, the influences are more diverse, but the most powerful shapers of Shelley’s thinking are the scepticism of Hume and the militant republicanism of Tom Paine. These are supported on specific issues such as free love and labour theory by writers as different as Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Lord Monboddo, Godwin, Lawrence and Trotter (On Nervous Diseases).
The conception of such a total approach to human knowledge was encouraged in Shelley by the reading of Count Volney’s notorious vision of corrupt society, The Ruins of Empire, and Erasmus Darwin’s poems of science and society. Many of these influences are not wholly absorbed or digested, and the ‘Notes’ especially have something of the texture of a private anthology. Nevertheless, there is no poem of the period in England to compare in originality of reach and conception with Queen Mab as a whole, and it entered the small radical repertoire of key books recognized by the next generation along with Volney’s Ruins, Paine’s works and Byron’s Cain.8 It was an eccen
tric, uneven and very immature work; and yet it was unique.
Despite its incidentally poetical ‘beauties’ and exotica, the overwhelming impression is one of anger and accusation. In this the poem reflects much of the personality of the author. At its best this can reach oracular heights of eloquent indignation:
‘Then grave and hoary-headed hypocrites,
Without a hope, a passion, or a love,
Who, through a life of luxury and lies,
Have crept by flattery to the seats of power,
Support the system whence their honours flow . . . .’9
Harnessed to Shelley’s fundamentally egalitarian outlook, this indignation takes on the quality of driving political polemic:
‘Nature rejects the monarch, not the man;
The subject, not the citizen: for kings
And subjects, mutual foes, forever 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 . . . .’10
The sharp sting of Shelley’s puritanism is never very far from the argument, and frequently breaks out with all the rhythms and menaces of religious revivalism. Here, for instance, he addresses the priests and princes of political and commercial power:
‘. . . Are not thy days
Days of unsatisfying listlessness?
Dost thou not cry, ere night’s long rack is o’er,
‘‘When will the morning come?” Is not thy youth
A vain and feverish dream of sensualism?
Thy manhood blighted with unripe disease?
Are not thy views of unregretted death
Drear, comfortless and horrible? Thy mind,
Is it not morbid as thy nerveless frame,
Incapable of judgement, hope, or love?’11
The posture of attack is carried over into the ‘Notes’, where it is often expressed with sardonic scorn. Shelley observed that the sun is 95 million miles from the earth, and that light, which ‘consists either of vibrations propagated through a subtle medium, or of numerous minute particles’ takes a mere eight minutes seven seconds to pass between them. In contrast it takes ‘many years’ for the light to travel from the nearest star, and hence the material universe must surely contain a ‘plurality of worlds’ within ‘indefinite immensity’ (Note 2). Taking into account these modern astronomical considerations, he concludes:
It is impossible to believe that the Spirit that pervades this infinite machine begat a son upon the body of a Jewish woman; or is angered at the consequences of that necessity, which is a synonym of itself. All that miserable tale of the Devil, and Eve, and an Intercessor, with the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews, is irreconcilable with the knowledge of the stars. The works of His fingers have borne witness against Him.12
The theme of free love provides the most successful example of the way in which Shelley managed to interrelate his poetry and his prose. Queen Mab opens in Canto I with the presentation of the sleeping girl, Ianthe, a picture of Harriet, whose dream is to form the substance of the poem. The lover regards her with deep physical tenderness and desire:
Her dewy eyes are closed,
And on their lids, whose texture fine
Scarce hides the dark blue orbs beneath,
The baby Sleep is pillowed:
Her golden tresses shade
The bosom’s stainless pride,
Curling like tendrils of the parasite
Around a marble column.13
This description is echoed at the close of the last canto, when Ianthe awakes from her dream, and the blue eyes open to confront and welcome Henry’s (Shelley’s) ‘looks of speechless love’. The theme of free love is thus argued against the background of a warm and personal realization of a love relationship between two individuals. In the opening four cantos there are many references to the perversion, frustration and incapacitating effect of love caused by tyrannical systems of power and belief, both theological and political. In canto V, the cheapening of sexual love is presented directly as one of the consequences of a corrupt commercial system:
Even love is sold; the solace of all woe
Is turned to deadliest agony, old age
Shivers in selfish beauty’s loathing arms,
And youth’s corrupted impulses prepare
A life of horror from the blighting bane
Of commerce; whilst the pestilence that springs
From unenjoying sensualism, has filled
All human life with hydra-headed woes.14
Shelley’s position here would at first appear to be fairly orthodox; he is attacking prostitution, venereal disease and promiscuity — all three of which were commonplaces of Regency society. But he then appends a note, which opens up the subject in a far more radical way. This is perhaps the greatest short statement on the subject of free love. It begins with a paean:
Love is inevitably consequent upon the perception of loveliness. Love withers under constraint; its very essence is liberty; it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited, where its votaries live in confidence, equality and unreserve.15
From here, Shelley goes on to argue that the ‘sexual connection’ should only last as long as partners love each other. ‘Any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny.’ The marriage institution — let alone the Christian idea of ‘mortifying the flesh for the love of God’ — is just such an intolerable tyranny. Constancy itself has no virtue, and ‘there is nothing immoral in separation’. Shelley summarizes this argument:
Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed: such a vow in both cases excludes us from all enquiry. The language of the votarist [of marriage] is this: the woman I now love may be infinitely inferior to many others; the creed I now profess may be a mass of errors and absurdities; but I exclude myself from all future information as to the amiability of the one and the truth of the other, resolving blindly and in spite of conviction to adhere to them. Is this the language of delicacy and reason? Is the love of such a frigid heart of more worth than its belief?
Considering this belief in its domestic light, Shelley makes shrewd points about the children of unhappy marriages, and the erosive effects of domestic quarrelling. ‘The early education of their children takes its colour from the squabbles of the parents; they are nursed in a systematic school of ill-humour, violence and falsehood.’ Of the relations between husband and wife, he writes with equal perception: ‘The conviction that wedlock is indissoluble holds out the strongest of all temptations to the perverse: they indulge without restraint in acrimony and all the little tyrannies of domestic life, when they know that their victim is without appeal.’
Next Shelley attacks the ‘fanatical idea of chastity’, which he always argued led necessarily to prostitution, ‘destroying thereby all those exquisite and delicate sensibilities whose existence cold hearted worldings have denied; annihilating all genuine passion, and debasing that to a selfish feeling which is the excess of generosity and devotedness’. Of the convention of chastity outside marriage, he writes:
Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half the human race to misery, that some few may monopolize according to law. A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.
What then did Shelley propose to put in its place? Shelley was aware that he would be accused of preachi
ng promiscuity and the destruction of the social network, but he would not be drawn to speculate far on the wider implications of his views.
I conceive that from the abolition of marriage, the fit and natural arrangement of sexual connection would result. I by no means assert that the intercourse would be promiscuous: on the contrary, it appears, from the relation of parent to child, that this union is generally of long duration, and marked above all others with generosity and self-devotion. But this is a subject which it is perhaps premature to discuss. That which will result from the abolition of marriage will be natural and right; because choice and change will be exempted from restraint.
This essay on free love typifies Shelley’s method of drawing on and combining several writers. The emphasis on the psychological and spiritual importance of ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ comes from Godwin; the critique of the destructive effects of the conventional marriage relationship comes from Wollstonecraft and Chevalier Lawrence; the appeal to the ‘natural’ processes of change and constancy reflect Lucretius and Rousseau; the violent cut at the ‘monkish’ and ‘christian’ attitudes to physical love have Gibbon for their historical authority. But the passion and edge in the tone of the argument, the mixture of logic, sarcasm and urgency, is wholly Shelley’s. The essay ends with a memorable, and faintly mischievous image:
How would morality, dressed up in stiff stays and finery, start from her own disgusting image should she look in the mirror of nature!
The theme is now returned to the poem, where it is picked up again in the final Canto IX, in which Shelley is celebrating the vision of a politically and morally revolutionized world, in which ‘the habitable earth is full of bliss’,16 and ‘all things are recreated, and the flame/Of consentaneous love inspires all life’.17 Describing sexual love under this new dispensation, Shelley imagines how the conventionally profane has become naturally sacred:
‘Then, that sweet bondage which is Freedom’s self,
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