Shelley: The Pursuit (83 page)

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.
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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 advantage 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.’
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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 — ’
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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’
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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.’
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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.
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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.’

Shelley’s further argument was that only an author, and not a publisher, could be held responsible for a book: but legally this was unsound. He added, with more relevance, that Thomas Moore had already read and commented favourably on a copy of the poem which Shelley had sent him, and that it now lay in Ollier’s hands to ‘blast’ his reputation and literary character.
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‘I do hope you will have too much regard to the well chosen motto of your seal to permit the murmurs of a few bigots to outweigh the serious and permanent considerations presented in this letter.’ The Ollier seal was, ‘In omnibus libertas’.

Ollier’s reply arrived two days later. Shelley was surprised to discover that the publisher’s only objections apparently lay in the specific statements of the blood relation between the two lovers, Laon and Cythna, and the implicit defence of
incest in the preface. It was merely a question of a few individual lines and phrases, and Ollier did not mention politics. Shelley replied that his explanation ‘certainly alters the question’ and hastened to invite Ollier down to Marlow to help with the alterations on the spot. Ollier came at once, on 14 December, to find ‘a friendly welcome and a warm fire’ at the end of his journey, and the corrected manuscript was completed in two days, when Ollier returned with it to London.
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