Shelley: The Pursuit (23 page)

Shelley now began to think of taking a house in Sussex again, but not near any ‘populous manufacturing dissipated town’ or near any barracks. In travelling between Edinburgh, York and Keswick he had already gained new experience of the poverty and exploitation which existed in the great cities of the North and Midlands, and had observed the ubiquity of soldiers wherever social conditions were worst.

At this time the occupation army stationed at trouble spots in England exceeded in number the whole of Wellington’s force fighting on the Spanish peninsula.
³⁶
The war itself was increasingly unpopular, and the country was in the throes of a severe economic crisis, brought on partly by the Continental blockade, and partly by the internal disruption of trade and the soaring of wartime prices. Harvests were bad, and the cost of basic foods rose sharply. Petitions for minimum wages were drawn up by thousands of weavers in Scotland, Manchester and Bolton.
³⁷
Discontent boiled over in local disturbances, food riots and outbreaks of frame-breaking, especially in Lancashire. All this came together in the phenomenon of Luddism, which shook the country in the spring and summer of 1812. The symptoms were not merely temporary economic ones: they arose from deep-seated social grievances, the appalling lack of
proper housing, savage working hours and factory conditions, and the complete absence of educational or medical facilities among the manufacturing populations. Class antagonisms were sharpened by the indiscriminate use of troops to ‘keep the peace’ for the local employers and property-owners.

These extreme economic conditions were helping to give birth to a quite new kind of radicalism, not the old radicalism of the Foxite Whigs and men like the Duke of Norfolk, but a working-class radicalism, concerned fundamentally with economic and social grievances rather than party political ones, and without as yet any kind of parliamentary representation. In the country as a whole, and especially in the parts of it through which Shelley had been travelling as an outcast from his family and from his class of southern Whig aristocrats, a new political awareness was growing. Class identities were solidified as they came into opposition and finally into open and violent conflict with the forces of local justice and property ownership, and ultimately with the forces of government.
[4]

In the December of 1811, a steady politicizing of Shelley’s views was going on at Keswick, reflecting the developments in the nation at large. To begin with he was concerned primarily with the settling of his own little community in such a remote and beautiful region. ‘Oh! how you will delight in this scenery. The mountains are now capped with snow. The lake as I see it hence is glassy and calm. Snow vapours tinted by the loveliest refractions pass far below the summit of these gigantic rocks. The scene even in winer is inexpressibly lovely. The clouds assume shapes which seem peculiar to these regions; what will it be in summer, what when
you
are here. Oh! give me a little cottage in
that
scene, let all live in peaceful little houses, let temples and palaces rot with their perishing masters.’
³⁸
Yet even in this pastoral Rousseauesque dream, the note of political discontent crept in. Shelley was planning a poem, a long one, which would be ‘by anticipation a picture of the manners simplicity and delights of a perfect state of society: tho still earthly’.
³⁹
He realized, half laughingly, that at such a time, even so poetical a plan might be regarded as subversive. ‘What think you of my undertaking. Shall I not get into Prison. Harriet is sadly afraid that his Majesty will provide me a lodging in consideration of the zeal which I evince for the bettering of his subjects.’
⁴⁰

The works of Godwin now began to fill more and more of Shelley’s vision of the struggle for reform and the ideal society. He listed to Miss Hitchener what he considered were Godwin’s most valuable contributions in the following order of
importance:
The Enquirer, St Leon, Political Justice
and
Caleb Williams
. It was characteristic of Shelley’s temperament that as his thinking became politically active he should immediately be attracted to the work of an extreme anarchist idealist, who had once been trained for the Presbyterian ministry at Hoxton Academy, and always retained the passionate puritan logic of the dedicated religious missionary. Shelley’s championship of atheism was now almost lackadaisical: ‘I annihilate God; you destroy the Devil and then we make a Heaven entirely to our own mind — It must be owned that we are tolerably independent . . . .’ But it began to take its place in a wider pattern of intellectual rejection and social criticism, that grew in self-confidence and anger.

On Christmas Day 1811, Shelley wrote to Miss Hitchener, now the perfect sounding-board for his ideas, what was really a classic statement of the new emergent radicalism. Coming from Shelley, at this early stage, it inevitably lacked any definite objectives in reform terms; yet the depth, the fury and the social disillusionment of the criticism is unmistakably cast in the language of the Luddite period.

I have been led into reasonings which make me
hate
more and more the existing establishment of every kind. I gasp when I think of plate & balls & tables & kings. — I have beheld scenes of misery. — The manufacturers are reduced to starvation. My friend, the military are gone to Nottingham — Curses light on them for their motives if they destroy
one
of its famine wasted inhabitants. — But if I were a friend to the destroyed myself about to perish, I fancy that I could bless them for saving my friend the bitter mockery of a trial. — Southey thinks that a revolution is inevitable; this is one of his reasons for supporting things as they are. — But let
us
not belie our principles. — They may feed & may riot & may sin to the last moment. — The groans of the wretched may pass unheeded till the latest moment of this infamous revelry, till the storm burst upon them and the oppressed take furious vengeance on the oppressors.
⁴¹

Shelley now saw a lifetime’s task opening up before him. The awareness that he showed in this Christmas Day letter of 1811, though as yet naïve and to some extent melodramatic, was to lie behind his work and thinking for the rest of his career. One must also remember its formulation: ‘I have been led into reasonings which make me
hate
. . . .’ This hate remained steadily behind the main thrust and energy of much of his most powerful and characteristic work.

At this point in Keswick, he thought of the methods for circulating ideas which he had learnt from Lind at Eton, and practised at Oxford. He began to consider propaganda and more active forms of political intervention. At once he planned to put out a small collection of poems which would celebrate the cause
of liberty. ‘The minor Poems I mentioned you will see soon. They are about to be sent to the Printers. — I think it wrong to publish anything anonymously. I shall annexe my name, and a preface in which I shall lay open my intentions as the poems are not wholly useless. “I sing, and liberty may love the song.” Can you assist my grave labours. Harriet complains that I hurt my health, and fancies that I shall get into prison.’
⁴²
The accent on prison was partly to impress on Miss Hitchener the seriousness of his intentions, but also to show that he anticipated taking issue with the established authorities of society. The determination to publish under his own name also showed he had changed and learnt from the Oxford days. Shelley was not able to find a publisher in England, and eventually took the collection to Ireland instead, where the manuscript was left with R. and J. Stockdale of Abbey Street, Dublin.
[5]

The idea of visiting Ireland was first vaguely mentioned on 10 December, but it was not until January that it began to form in Shelley’s mind. It seemed the obvious place to get his propaganda poems printed, and to make his first venture into political activism.

Yet it was the meeting and talks with the poet Robert Southey at Greta Hall which supplied the decisive political catalyst. It has usually been thought that the relationship between Southey and Shelley was wholly antagonistic: the young idealist revolutionary set against the middle-aged, soured and hypocritical Tory. Southey remarked in a letter to his friend Grosvenor Bedford that ‘It had surprised him [Shelley] a good deal to meet for the first time in his life with a man who perfectly understands him, and does him full justice. I tell him that all the difference between us is, that he is nineteen, and I am thirty-seven.’
⁴³
This was written on 4 January 1812, at an early stage of their acquaintance. It has sometimes been taken that Southey began by patronizing Shelley; or that, alternatively, as in Hogg’s ridiculous story, Shelley began by offending Southey and falling asleep in the middle of Southey’s talk.
⁴⁴
Yet Shelley, on the contrary, makes it quite clear that at this time he was deeply fascinated and influenced by Southey; they disagreed on many points, but this was precisely the attraction.

The Christmas Day letter, where one first becomes aware of Shelley grappling with contemporary political issues on any extended scale, in fact commences as a discussion of Southey, whom he had just met after ‘contemplating the outisde of his house’ for several days.

I have also been much engaged in talking to Southey. You may conjecture that a man must possess high and estimable qualities, if with the prejudice of such total difference from my sentiments I can regard him great and worthy. —
In fact Southey is an advocate of liberty and equality; he looks forward to a state when all shall be perfected, and matter become subjected to the omnipotence of mind; but he is now an advocate for existing establishments. . . . Southey hates the Irish, he speaks against Catholic Emancipation, & Parliamentary reform. In all these things we differ, & our differences were the subject of a long conversation. . . . But Southey tho’ far from being a man of great reasoning powers is a great Man. He has all that characterizes the poet — great eloquence though obstinacy in opinion which arguments are the last things that can shake. He is a man of virtue, he never will belie what he thinks. His professions are in strict compatibility with his practice.
⁴⁵

Shelley was later to reverse the end part of this appraisal, but not at once, and not before Southey had had a considerable effect upon him.
[6]

Southey was at this time, as he says, a man of 37, living at Greta Hall, originally Coleridge’s house, with his wife, Mrs Coleridge and her three children, and the wife of the poet Robert Lovell. All three ladies were sisters: Edith, Sara and Mary Fricker. Southey supported all these by journalism in the Tory periodicals,
⁴⁶
and by writing voluminous biographies and histories, the most lasting of which has been his
Life of Nelson
. Southey was acutely aware of the serious condition of the social question in England, and wrote at length on issues such as Poor Law relief, unemployment, national education and Luddism. Though his opinions were, as Shelley already knew, quite different from his own, Southey was better informed on these issues than anyone Shelley had met before. The long conversations Shelley had with him gave his own vague ideological loyalties to ‘liberty’ and egalitarianism a new clarity and immediacy. They also led, inevitably, to a break with Southey himself. Poetically though, Southey was to remain an influence on Shelley, and
The Curse of Kehama
(1810), especially, was to be one of the primary sources for the long poem Shelley was beginning to contemplate.

Seven days after the Christmas letter, Shelley was still reporting long, though somewhat one-sided conversations with Southey; one-sided on Shelley’s side. Southey ‘says I ought not to call myself an Atheist, since in reality I believe that the Universe is God. — I tell him I believe that God is another signification for the Universe. — I then explain — ’ Southey was then treated to a description of Shelley’s view of the universe. ‘Southey agrees in my idea of the Deity, the mass
of infinite intelligence. I, you, & he are constituent parts of this immeasurable whole.’
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Shelley was to make this idea — a development of the eighteenth-century ‘Great Chain of Being’ — central to his long poem. It was at this point that Southey tried to put Shelley on to ‘a course of Berkeley’, the great Idealist philosopher.
⁴⁸
This may have caught Shelley’s attention; at any rate he was given the run of Southey’s library.

Southey helped to strengthen the link between Shelley’s religious and social criticism. ‘Southey is no believer in original sin: he thinks that which appears to be a taint of our nature is in effect the result of unnatural political institutions — there we agree — he thinks the prejudices of education and sinister influence of political institutions adequate to account for all Specimens of vice which have fallen within his observation.’
⁴⁹
Thus Shelley was firmly across the bridge travelled by most of the confirmed radicals of the period: they saw atheism or at least ‘Deism’ as the precondition for social reform. Only if human nature was freed from the religious definition of its potential, freed from all concepts of its ‘fallen’ or ‘subjected’ state, did it become genuinely open to political and social improvement. God’s Will could no longer be used to justify the ways of Man to men. Finally, it was Southey who recommended that he write to James Montgomery, the radical poet and editor of the
Sheffield Iris
, about political pamphleteering; and Southey who reminded him — he may not have known before — that William Godwin was still alive, and working in London.