Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  Whatever Shelley wrote to Mary or Byron of his sickness and depression, he was deeply excited about the forthcoming publication of his poem, which Ollier now agreed should appear around Christmas time. The domineering self-confident attitudes in company that he had manifested at Hunt’s in the spring, were again in evidence. When Henry Crabb Robinson dined at Godwin’s on 6 November, he found Shelley very much at home. ‘I went to Godwin’s,’ he recorded in his diary that evening, ‘Mr Shelley was there. I had never seen him before. His youth, and a resemblance to Southey, particularly in his voice, raised a pleasing impression, which was not altogether destroyed by his conversation, though it was vehement, and arrogant, and intolerant. He was very abusive towards Southey, who he spoke of as having sold himself to the Court. And this he maintained with the usual party slang . . . . Shelley spoke of Wordsworth with less bitterness, but with an insinuation of his insincerity, etc.’40

  As the author of Laon and Cythna, Shelley had committed himself to a public political statement, and ‘party slang’ and radical politics occupied much of his talk and thought throughout November, and was the occasion of his second Hermit of Marlow pamphlet. This was the best political pamphlet he ever wrote.

  The idea was triggered off in an unexpected way. At the Crabb Robinson dinner Shelley heard that Princess Charlotte, the much-loved only daughter of the much-hated Prince Regent, had died suddenly in childbirth that morning. Public mourning was officially declared. This event ironically coincided with the trial of the Pentridge Revolution leaders, and their conviction and execution at Derby on 8 November.

  Shelley had been following the trial closely in the Examiner and other more radical journals. The case was notorious both in liberal and working-class circles. The jury had been picked, the prosecution were assigned ten lawyers and the defence only two, and all the prisoners were held for weeks previously on a bread and water diet with no visitors permitted. Most disturbing of all, though the man’s name appears nowhere in the transcripts of the trial, it was widely known that one of the ring-leaders and anchor-men of the insurrection was the government spy Oliver.41 Jeremiah Brandreth was convicted of high treason, and with two other insurrectionists, Isaac Ludlam and William Turner, they were publicly hanged and quartered on 8 November. Contrary to popular belief, these men were not ‘half-starved, illiterate, and unemployed’ labourers.42 Brandreth was a stern, self-educated Baptist, who had probably served as a Luddite captain in 1812. Turner was a 47-year-old stonemason, a man of steady and independent character who had served during the war in Egypt. Ludlam was a Methodist preacher, and part-owner of a local stone quarry. They were all examples of the new wave of self-educated and politically conscious working class from whom Cobbett, Carlile and Samuel Bamford had also sprung.[6]

  Shelley was immediately struck by the grim discordance between the official reception given to the two pieces of news; the death of the three Pentridge conspirators, and the death of Princess Charlotte. Turning the matter over in his mind, he had already begun to think in terms of a pamphlet, when on the evening of the 11th he and Mary walked along the Marylebone fields from Mabledon Place to take tea with Hunt in Lisson Grove. Godwin and Charles Ollier also dropped in on Hunt, and in the political discussion that followed Shelley’s plan was well received. He began his pamphlet, An Address to the People on the Death of Princess Charlotte the same evening and writing with intense concentration continued it the following day. By midday on the 12th he had most of it finished, and hurried off the manuscript to Ollier. ‘I enclose you what I have written of a pamphlet on the subject of our conversation the other evening. I wish it to be sent to press without an hours delay . . . the printer can go on with this & send me a proof & the rest of the manuscript shall be sent before evening.’ Shelley thought the subject ‘tho treated boldly is treated delicately’, and hoped Ollier would have no objections.43 He wrote on during the afternoon, and walked over with Mary and the completed manuscript as he had promised in the evening. He had given it a subtitle, a famous revolutionary jibe from Tom Paine: We Pity the Plumage, but Forget the Dying Bird. Paine had been attacking Burke’s sentimental eulogy on the execution of Marie Antoinette in 1793, when the Revolution was in danger. Shelley was attacking the attention given to the Princess’s death, when political liberty itself was dying.

  On the Death of Princess Charlotte is the last political pamphlet Shelley ever wrote in England. It bears the distinctive mark of a single, rapid, informed and passionate reaction to a public issue of moment. It goes straight to its mark, without philosophical extenuations, and is brilliantly readable. Shelley’s real target was, as before, the urgent need for sweeping political reform; but now he added to this the need for economic reform as well. Like the preface to Laon and Cythna, it shows for the first time Shelley’s attitudes reaching their mature formulation. It is outstanding in his political writing for its flexibility and directness of style. Shelley used the lurid data of the popular press with immense effect. Thus he makes his main, and of course seditious, political point:

  On the 7th November, Brandreth, Turner and Ludlam ascended the scaffold. We feel for Brandreth the less, because it seems he killed a man. But recollect who instigated him to the proceedings which led to murder. On the word of a dying man, Brandreth tells us, that ‘OLIVER brought him to this’ — that ‘but for OLIVER, he would not have been there.’ See, too, Ludlam and Turner, with their sons and brothers and sisters, how they kneel together in a dreadful agony of prayer. Hell is before their eyes, and they shudder and feel sick with fear lest some unrepented or some wilful sin should seal their doom in everlasting fire. With that dreadful penalty before their eyes — with that tremendous sanction for the truth of all he spoke, Turner exclaimed loudly and distinctly while the executioner was putting the rope round his neck, ‘THIS IS ALL OLIVER AND THE GOVERNMENT’.44

  Shelley’s indictment of the Liverpool ministry’s role in the whole affair is no less forthright and trenchant. It is in many ways surprising that Ollier was prepared to let the pamphlet go out under his imprint unaltered at such a time. The risk of a prosecution for seditious libel must have been very considerable.

  The Government had a desperate game to play. In the manufacturing districts of England discontent and disaffection had prevailed for many years; this was the consequence of that system of double aristocracy produced by the causes before mentioned. The manufacturers, the helots of luxury, are left by this system famished, without affections, without health, without leisure or opportunity . . . . Here was a ready field for any adventurer who should wish for whatever purpose to incite a few ignorant men to acts of illegal outrage. So soon as it was plainly seen that the demands of the people for a free representation must be conceded, if some intimidation and prejudice were not conjured up, a conspiracy of the most horrible atrocity was laid in train. It is impossible to know how far the higher members of the government are involved in the guilt of their infernal agents . . . . But thus much is known that so soon as the whole nation lifted up its voice for parliamentary reform, spies were sent forth . . . . It was their business to find victims, no matter whether right or wrong. It was their business to produce upon the public an impression that, if any attempt to attain national freedom, or to diminish the burdens of debt and taxation under which we groan, were successful the starving multitude would rush in and confound all orders and distinctions, and institutions and laws in common ruin.45

  This was clear, forceful argument and it showed once again the benefit of Shelley’s long summer of sustained composition.

  The pamphlet also contains effective though simplified passages of economic analysis, in which Shelley locates the root cause of political oppression in the economic exploitation of labourers and factory hands (‘manufacturers’). The prime factors in this exploitation he suggests were the national debt which had grown phenomenally in the previous twenty-five years; and the ‘second aristocracy’ of capitalists, businessmen and bureaucrats. These were men who had taken advantag
e of the growing system of stocks and loans, ‘petty piddling slaves who have gained a right to the title of public creditors, either by gambling in the funds, or by subservience to government, or some other villainous trade’. This is one of the earliest pieces of recognizably ‘pre-Marxist’ analysis to be found in English. Shelley drew the political lesson that democratic revolution was required in bold and vivid terms:

  The effect of this system is that the day-laborer gains no more now by working sixteen hours a day than he gained before by working eight. I put the thing in its simplest and most intelligible shape. The laborer, he that tills the ground and manufactures cloth, is the man who has to provide out of what he would bring home to his wife and children, for the luxuries and comforts of those whose claims are represented by an annuity of forty-four millions a year levied upon the English nation . . . the public voice loudly demanded a free representation of the people. It began to be felt that no other constituted body of men could meet the difficulties which impend.46

  His steady move away from the conspiratorial Illuminist beliefs, towards a more open and aggressive confidence in democratic and extra-Parliamentary mass movements perfectly reflects the movement of the times.

  Shelley brought together his two central themes of the death of Princess Charlotte, and the death of the Derbyshire men tricked in their struggle for political liberty, in a masterly closing elegy. The passage is especially important in that for the first time Shelley specifically addresses himself to a mass and working-class audience, ‘People of England’. Its processional imagery, and the phoenix trope of the ‘glorious Phantom’ Liberty, were to re-occur in the great political ballads and poems of 1819.

  Mourn then, People of England. Clothe yourselves in solemn black. Let the bells be tolled. Think of mortality and change. Shroud yourselves in solitude and the gloom of sacred sorrow. Spare no symbol of universal grief. Weep — mourn — lament. Fill the great City — fill the boundless fields with lamentation and the echo of groans. A beautiful Princess is dead: she who should have been the Queen of her beloved nation and whose posterity should have ruled it forever . . . . She was amiable and would have become wise, but she was young, and in the flower of youth the despoiler came. LIBERTY is dead.

  If One has died who was like her that should have ruled over this land, like Liberty, young, innocent, and lovely, know that the power through which that one perished was God, and that it was a private grief. But man has murdered Liberty . . . . Let us follow the corpse of British Liberty slowly and reverentially to its tomb; and if some glorious Phantom should appear and make its throne of broken swords and sceptres and royal crowns trampled in the dust, let us say that the Spirit of Liberty has arisen from its grave and left all that was gross and mortal there, and kneel down and worship it as our Queen.47

  Shelley’s pamphlet, printed in sixteen quarto pages, appeared on Saturday morning, 15 November, and was eagerly read by Mary, as she records in her journal, and by members of the Hunt circle. But there is a mystery about its wider distribution. Unlike the Proposals, there is no record of a mailing list, or of how many copies were run off, and no copy of the original edition remains extant. The modern text is from a ‘facsimile reprint’ published in the 1840s. It seems likely that Ollier did finally baulk at having a large edition printed for extensive circulation. Unlike Queen Mab, the pamphlet did not have the good but dangerous fortune of falling into the hands of Richard Carlile or other members of the working-class radical press.[7]

  Back at Marlow, Mary wrote to her old friend Isabel Baxter encouraging her to visit Shelley and Claire, and they subsequently met at Godwin’s on 23 November. Isabel’s father, William Baxter, who admired Shelley, was there; and also Isabel’s husband, David Booth, an elderly Scottish brewer with strong Presbyterian views, who did not. The evening provided the opportunity for another piece of direct action. Shelley agreed with Baxter that he should purchase on his behalf twenty thick ex-army blankets, together with material for sheets, and send them down to Marlow in time for Shelley to present them as Christmas presents to the poor of the district. They were embroidered with his name, presumably so that they could not be sold off: ‘PBS Esq., Marlow, Bucks’. The Bill, which he did honour, came to £17 2s. 9d.48 Baxter highly approved of this apparently Christian act, but later he was advised by David Booth that he should not allow his family to take up socially with the Shelleys at Marlow. Baxter wrote tactfully to Shelley: ‘[Your] independence of fortune, too, has given you a freedom of thought and action entirely inconsistent with the customs, manners, and prejudices of European society with which I have been at pains to imbue their minds and which I wish not to see eradicated.’49

  Shelley instantly sensed a social rebuff and wrote back a touchy letter: ‘Though I have not a spark of pride or resentment in this matter, I disdain to say a word that should tend to persuade you to change your decision.’50

  The connection between the Baxters and the Shelleys was broken, and Shelley thought gloomily of how relentlessly he was prevented from forming social connections outside the small Godwinian circle of writers and Hunt’s set of liberals.

  Shelley returned to Marlow with Claire at the end of November to prepare for Christmas. He wrote to Ollier demanding a publication date as soon as possible in December, and the immediate advertisement of Laon and Cythna in the public papers. The edition he knew was already completed by the printers, and merely needed binding and distribution. ‘I wish a parcel of twelve to be sent to me as soon as you can get them into boards. If you will send me an account of the expense of the advertisements I will transmit you the money the moment they and it appear — ’51

  Without mentioning Laon and Cythna, he pressed an invitation for Hogg to come down and stay at Marlow: ‘the weather is delightful and so unseasonably fine that yellow and blue flowers are blooming in the hedges, and the primroses are blowing in the garden as if it were spring: a few more days may cover them all with snow’52 Hogg stayed over the whole Christmas break, but based himself at Peacock’s in deference to Mary’s coolness. Mary’s own book was moving smoothly towards publication at Lackington’s who proposed to produce it in January of the New Year. On 3 December Shelley sent them her dedication: it was not to himself. ‘To William Godwin, author of Political Justice, Caleb Williams etc, These volumes are respectfully inscribed by the author.’ They distributed the Christmas blankets in the village, and prepared for festivities. Shelley began to feel ill again.

  Only a fortnight before Christmas, Charles Ollier suddenly became nervous about Laon and Cythna. Yet he was a bit late: Shelley was already urging more advertisements in The Times and the Morning Chronicle; Godwin, the Hunts and the Marlow circle were all reading it, and some bound copies had reached the booksellers. One copy eventually reached the Quarterly Review. But the printer McMillan had begun to make doubtful noises to Ollier. At first Shelley tried to bluster it out. ‘That McMillan is an obstinate old dog as troublesome as he is impudent. ’Tis a mercy as the old women say that I got him through the poem at all — Let him print the errata, & say at top if he likes, that it was all the Author’s fault, & that he is as immaculate as the Lamb of God.’53

  Then he busied himself with an impassioned defence of his own motives for Godwin’s benefit. ‘The Poem was produced by a series of thoughts which filled my mind with an unbounded and sustained enthusiasm. I felt the precariousness of my life, & I engaged in this task resolved to leave some record of myself. Much of what the volume contains was written with the same feeling, as real, though not so prophetic, as the communications of a dying man . . . .’ Godwin had criticized the poem in London, and Shelley wished to outflank such criticism. What he wanted most of all was to impress Godwin with his unassailable sincerity. ‘I felt that it was in many respects a genuine picture of my own mind. I felt that the sentiments were true, not assumed. And in this I have long believed that my power consists: in sympathy & that part of imagination which relates to sentiment & contemplation . . . .’

 
Shelley felt that he had grasped and understood something fundamental about his own writing gift. He continued, ‘I am formed, — if for anything not in common with the herd of mankind — to apprehend remote and minute distinctions of feeling whether relative to external nature, or the living beings which surround us, & to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or the material universe as a whole.’ But Godwin was not over-impressed: he told Shelley that his review of Mandeville, Godwin’s new novel, was a better specimen of his powers than the poem. Shelley was appalled that he could discount the ‘agony & bloody sweat of intellectual travail’ which had produced the poem for a mere scrap of journalism.54

  On the 11th, Ollier wrote to inform Shelley that he was withdrawing the poem from sale, on the pretext that an old customer had walked out of his shop in disgust. He could not consider publishing it in its present form. He had reasons to fear a government prosecution. Shelley responded in a long, coolly-argued, letter in which one can feel the result of thoughtful discussions with Mary, and perhaps Peacock.

  As far as the disgusted customer was concerned, Shelley argued with calm logic: ‘The people who visit your shop, and the wretched bigot who gave his worthless custom to some other bookseller, are not the public. The public respect talent, and a large proportion of them are already undeceived with regard to the prejudices which my book attacks. You would lose some customers, but you would gain others. Your trade would be diverted into channels more consistent with your principles.’