Shelley: The Pursuit (45 page)

12. Assailant’s target-view diagonally across drawing-room, from the east window to the south

13. Copy of a drawing Shelley supposedly made of his Tan-y-rallt assailant. First published in
(Century Magazine)
1905 — a myth in the making

14. William Godwin by James Northcote

9. A Poem and a Wife: Queen Mab 1813

Shelley’s reveries were suddenly interrupted towards the end of March by the arrival of a note from Hogg, who had come to Dublin, and was impatiently awaiting them at Lawless’s. His old friend Hogg, and the lights of the metropolis, suddenly looked infinitely attractive. Leaving Eliza with Dan to follow at a more normal pace, Shelley and Harriet seized a chaise and horses and set out on the evening of the 28th. Without Eliza’s matronly presence it was quite like a second elopement. Driving through the night, they reached Cork at 1 a.m. on the 29th,
¹
and without pausing for sleep took their seats on the Dublin mail that Tuesday morning. By 3 o’clock on Wednesday afternoon they had reached the city, only to find that Hogg had himself departed for London the previous day. Shelley roundly blamed ‘the inconceivable blindness and matter of fact stupidity of Lawless’ — ‘had you stayed one day longer, you would have heard the words of sincerity and friendship from my own lips’.
²
It appears that in his anxiety to cover his tracks, Shelley asked Lawless to keep his Killarney address secret from all inquiries — and had forgotten or omitted to except Hogg. Shelley was not in the mood to be obstructed by minor considerations of time and distance. He borrowed ‘a small sum of money’, arranged a sea-passage for Harriet and himself, and sailed out of Dublin on Friday morning, 2 April. Eliza, Dan, books and luggage were all forgotten, left to make there own journey to England by the Freight Route from Cork to Bristol.
³
Ahead of him raced a message: ‘. . . Tomorrow evening we embark for Holyhead. . . . Of course you will not write to us here. Above all do not send, or dream of procuring for us any money; we will do these matters very well. The property of friends at least is in common. On Monday evening we shall be in London. . . . My dear friend, all happiness attend you.’
⁴

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 eccentric, 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: