Eleanor Marx Battles the Shelley Society!

Eleanor Marx Battles the Shelley Society!

Eleanor Marx

In 1886, at the height of the Victorian era, a group of admirers of Percy Bysshe Shelley came together to form the Shelley Society. Among the founders were some of the intellectual giants of the age. For example, the list of distinguished names includes Edward Dowden, Buxton Forman, William Michael Rossetti, Arthur Napier (the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford), Dr. Richard Garnett, George Bernard Shaw, Henry Salt, William Bell Scott (whose gorgeous painting of Shelley’s grave hangs in the Ashmolean Museum), Algernon Charles Swinburne, Francis Thompson, the Rev. Stopford Brooke, Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx - to name only a few. At inception there were just over 100 but this number soon swelled to over 400 members. In addition, members of the general public were allowed to attend the meetings. As a result, while the inaugural lecture had an audience of over 500 - only a small proportion of whom were actual paid members. As it grew, the Society came to have chapters around the world. One thing that to me stands out from the list of eminent names, is what amounts to an ideological left/right fault-line which is at the heart of our story. And it actually speaks to Shelley’s protean character that he would find passionate adherents on both ends of the political spectrum.

A useful history of the literary societies of the 1880s (Shelley’s was not the only one) can be found in Angela Dunstan’s article, ‘The Newest Culte’: Victorian Poetry and the Literary Societies of the 1880s (In Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s, edited by Penny Fielding and Andrew Taylor and published in 2019 by Cambridge). Dunstan points out that

“Though many in the Society were eminent literary scholars or critics the Notebooks make a concerted effort to legitimate opinions and close readings of rank and file members, demonstrating the capacity of vernacular poetry to be seriously studied by professional scholars and amateur enthusiasts alike.”

Also apparent to anyone reading through the Society proceedings is the presence of female voices. Dunstan writes,

Women were active in the Shelley society; notices of their involvement were regularly printed in “Ladies’ Columns:” in the press and reprinted in the Notebooks, and female members certainly attended the Society’s activities that contributed to debates. The Notebooks evidence debates over close readings of Alastor, for example, where ordinary female speakers confidently take on George Bernard Shaw or William Michael Rossetti over interpretation, and it is this democratic nature of literary societies’ debates which many outside of the societies and particularly in the universities found threatening.

“A stuffy Victorian, bourgeois morality suffuses the written record of the Society’s meetings.”

— Graham Henderson

The Society published notes of its meeting, undertook research, hosted speeches, spawned local affiliates, republished important articles and poems (some for the first time!) and even produced Shelley’s The Cenci for the stage — all before it fell apart four years later. The goal was to make the scholarly study of Shelley more accessible to the general public - to in effect popularize Shelley and “democratise” literary criticism - and the meetings gained a reputation for an interest in critical rather than mere biographical exercises. Though largely forgotten by history, the proceedings of the Shelley Society constituted a momentous episode in the history of Shelley’s reception by the reading public; though one that is not without controversy.

Some, notably the socialist Paul Foot, were of the view that the Society had a deleterious effect on his reputation as a political radical. That said, Professor Alan Weinberg has noted that

We are reminded that prominent members of the Shelley Society present at the inaugural lecture were not averse to the poet's politics. If anything they tended to advance them. Succeeding lectures were devoted to Queen Mab (Forman), Prometheus Unbound(Rossetti), The Triumph of Life (Todhunter), The Mask of Anarchy (Forman), The Hermit of Marlow and Reform (Forman), Shelley and Disraeli's politics (Garnett) -all of which point positively or constructively to Shelley's radical sentiments.

The Rev. Stopford Brooke, 1885

The first speech at the inaugural meeting of the Society was delivered by the Reverend Stopford Augustus Brooke. Brooke was a prominent member of the Church of England who had risen to the post of “chaplain in ordinary” to Queen Victoria in 1875. He was a patron of the arts and was the leading figure in raising the money to acquire Dove Cottage (now administered by the Wordsworth Trust). In 1880, Brooke took the unusual step of seceding from the church because he no longer subscribed to its principal dogmas. In that same year Brooke also published a collection of Shelley’s poetry, Poems from Shelley, selected and arranged by Stopford A. Brooke (London: Macmillan & Co., 1880). In the speech, Brooke principally responds to the attacks on Shelley’s character that had been famously leveled by Mathew Arnold - opinions which have poisoned Shelley’s reception to the present day. The Society, said Brooke, desired to

“connect together all that would throw light on the poet’s personality and his work, to ascertain the truth about him, to issue reprints and above all to do something to further the objects of Shelley’s life and works, and to better understand and love a genius which was ignored and abused in his own time, but which had risen from the grave into which the critics had trampled it to live in the hearts of men.”

Matthew Arnold

Brooke also devoted considerable attention to rebutting the opinions of perhaps Shelley’s most effective critic, Matthew Arnold. Arnold’s judgement on Shelley was, Brooke thought, “victimized by his personal antipathy to Shelley’s idealism”, and Brooke found his views “petulant” and “prejudiced”. While others had attacked Shelley, none of them had the gravitas and influence of Mathew Arnold; Arnold who had characterized Shelley as a “beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain”. Arnold’s critique of Shelley appeared in a pair of essays written on Byron and Shelley and which were published together in his Essays in Criticism, Second Series (1888). You can find a beautifully written, approachable essay on the subject written by Professor Alan Weinberg here. Arnold’s encapsulation of Shelley’s character went on to have enormous influence. Weinberg:

On close examination (as will be shown), his [Arnold’s] argument is grossly superficial and unreliable. What has tended to carry weight is the authority of Arnold's position as eminent critic of his age (while this had currency) and the persuasiveness of his dictum which has connected with an ongoing antipathy or ambivalence towards Shelley. In the course of time, the dictum has become disentangled from the original argument and has acquired a life of its own.

Despite Professor Weinberg’s opinion expressed above, it is my view that Shelley’s radical politics were at best tolerated by Society members. It seems to me that from inception, there was a not so hidden agenda which came to dominate the Society’s proceedings. In seeking the “truth about Shelley”, Brooke for example proposed a distinctly religious and spiritual approach saying that Shelley’s “method was the method of Jesus Christ, reliance on spiritual force only…” Brooke saw Shelley’s life as “full of natural piety” and “noble ideals” while at the same times characterising his “aspirations” as “often unreal and visionary.” He saw Shelley as a man “not content with the world the way as it is” (fair enough) but as a “prophetic singer of the advancing kingdom of faith and hope and love.” (more problematic). A stuffy Victorian bourgeois morality suffuses the written record of the Society’s meetings. That morality even appears to have influenced membership applications. Henry Salt records that when Edward Aveling (a socialist living out of wedlock with the daughter of Karl Marx) attempted to join the Society, his application was turned down by a majority of members - “his marriage relations being similar to Shelley’s”. It was only through the “determined efforts” of William Michael Rossetti that the decision was over-turned (Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx, p 450).

Frederick James Furnivall. William Rothenstein (attributed), Trinity Hall

Frederick James Furnivall, a prominent “Christian Socialist” who founded the London Working Men’s College and was a tireless promoter of English literature, lauded Brooke’s impassioned remarks by declaring that the Shelley Society would devote itself to responding to what he characterized as “Philistine” attacks on Shelley’s character and poetry. The chief “Philistine” referenced here was Cordy Jeaffreson who had recently authored a highly critical biography of Shelley: (The Real Shelley: New Views of the Poet's Life, 2 vols. 1885). What we see playing out here was a curious contest between rival camps to stake out exactly who the “real” Shelley was and just importantly, what he believed.

The Society’s goal, then, was not only to rebut attacks of Shelley, but also to find the “real Percy Bysshe Shelley”. Now, this is a mission which frankly resonates with me! However, at the hands of the Society, a very unusual, apolitical, quasi-religious Shelley would emerge as “real” Shelley. For his part, this would probably have come as an enormous surprise to Shelley himself - the self-declared atheist, humanist and republican who once wrote, "I tell of great matters, and I shall go on to free men's minds from the crippling bonds of superstition.” This battle for the soul of the “real” Percy Bysshe Shelley has never really gone away and it had real world consequences for me - something I wrote about in My Father’s Shelley - a Tale of Two Shelleys.

“I tell of great matters, and I shall go on to free men’s minds from the crippling bonds of superstition.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

However, the Society didn’t just want a new, more religiously-minded Shelley, whose “rotten ethics” (see below) had been explained away as youthful folly. Notwithstanding the fact that Society members had a somewhat permissive or indulgent attitude toward Shelley’s radicalism (Weinberg, above), there was nonetheless a distinct tendency to in effect depoliticise Shelley. For example, in a lecture to the Society on 14 April 1886, Buxton Forman complained that,

“Shelley is far more widely known as the author of Queen Mab than as the author of Prometheus Unbound. As the latter really strengthens the spirit while the former does not, we, who reverence Shelley for his spiritual enthusiasm, desire to see all that changed. And the change is advancing.“

The battle lines were clearly drawn. This fight was going to be about more than poetry; it was going to be about politics and it was going to be about class. A major stumbling block for the bourgeois members of the Society was clearly Shelley’s professed atheism. But there were ways to deal with this. Francis Thompson, for example, devoted a significant portion of his famous 1889 essay, Shelley, opining that Shelley could not really have been an atheist - because he was “struggling - blindly, weakly, stumblingly, but still struggling - toward higher things.” He had just died before he got there. While we might question the robustness of this evidence, his final argument was air-tight: “We do not believe that a truly corrupted spirit can write consistently ethereal poetry…The devil can do many things. But the devil cannot write poetry.”

Sara Coleridge daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and an arch, bourgeois Victorian, reflected a widespread view when she wrote to a friend,

Sara Coleridge

"You are more displeased with Shelley's wrong religion than with Keats' no religion. Surely Shelley was as superior to Keats as a moral being, as he was above him in birth and breeding. Compare the letters of the two . . . see how much more spiritual is Shelley's expression, how much more of goodness, of Christian kindness, does his intercourse with his friends evince.”

One might well think that with friends like this, who needs enemies? I am not sure what is worse: the cringe-worthy dismissal of Keats, or the complete misappropriation of Shelley. And indeed, on another occasion one of the attendees said almost exactly that. Having listened to a speech about Shelley by Edward Silsbee that struck her as more of a “homily” than literary criticism, a Mrs. Simpson remarked that had Shelley heard the speech, he might well have said, “Save me from my friends.” Silsbee was reminded by another listener that between Dante and Shelley there was in fact another poet by the name of Shakespeare. Hagiography was very much the order of the day it would appear.

By the time the bourgeois members of the Shelley Society had finished with Shelley, poems like Queen Mab had been successfully relegated to the back pages of collected editions under the heading “Juvenilia“ - a designation suggested by Forman himself. Thus a cordon sanitaire had been established - Shelley’s radicalism was “ring-fenced”. He had in effect been reclaimed by proper society.

“The battle lines were clearly drawn. This fight was going to be about more than poetry; it was going to be about politics and it was going to be about class. ”

— Graham Henderson

Why was this happening? Well, Shelley an important poet. But he had two very distinct and mutually antagonistic audiences - both loved him and for very different reasons. On the one hand was the working class and its socialist champions. On the other? The upper class who valued above all Shelley’s “spiritualism”, his love poetry and his lyricism. The two could have probably co-existed but for the annoying fact that Shelley himself was ill-fitted to the bourgeois camp. That and the fact Shelley was actually a revolutionary who had set himself implacably against them - most of his output was intensely political and revolutionary.

Karl Marx and his daughters with Engels.

Bourgeois Victorian literary society in the main objected Shelley’s radical heritage. They wanted to shift focus from this unwelcome aspect of his poetry and in this regard, his prose was for the most part ignored. Though perhaps presciently, it was Arnold who observed that Shelley’s letters and essays might better resist the “wear and tear of time” and “finally come to stand higher that his poetry”. Instead the focus was to shift to Shelley’s “mysticism”, his “spiritual enthusiasm” and above all his “lyricism”. Shelley’s political poetry was considered to be almost an aberration and a defect of character and grist for the “street socialists.”

For a glimpse into what they were reacting against, here is the view from the left (seemingly directly in response to the activities of the Shelley Society), courtesy of Friedrich Engels:

"Shelley, the genius, the prophet, finds most of [his] readers in the proletariat; the bourgeoisie own the castrated editions, the family editions cut down in accordance with the hypocritical morality of today.”

According to Eleanor Marx, her father,

“who understood the poets as well as he understood the philosophers and economists, was wont to say: “The real difference between Byron and Shelley is this: those who understand them and love them rejoice that Byron died at thirty-six, because if he had lived he would have become a reactionary bourgeois; they grieve that Shelley died at twenty-nine, because he was essentially a revolutionist, and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism.”

Our story begins in earnest during the spring of 1887 when in a speech to the Society on 13 April one of the members, Alexander G. Ross delivered a bitter, class-based attack not upon Shelley himself, but upon Shelley’s socialist proponents. According to Paul Foot, Ross had been “enraged to discover that workers and even socialists were quoting a well-known English poet to their advantage”. Worse, of course, was the fact that Ross believed that Shelley’s “ethics were rotten.” As did many of his bourgeois colleagues.

“...they grieve that Shelley died at twenty-nine, because he was essentially a revolutionist, and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism.””

— Karl Marx

Ross approached the issue by arguing that while,

“…no one can contest the right of anyone even though he may be a mere sans culotte who runs about with red rag, to quote Shelley when or where he pleases; but when the blatant and cruel socialism of the street endeavours to use the lofty and sublime socialism of the study for its own base purpose it is time that with no uncertain sound all real lovers of the latter should disembowel any sympathy with the former….It will be clearly understood that I strongly protest against any Imaginative writer being cited as an authority in favour of any political or social action…”

Edward Aveling

The distinction between “parlour socialism” and socialism actually put into action (“street socialism”) is quite something. Poetry was to be for poetry’s sake - and to hell with the politics. Now, in fairness, it is to be pointed out that both Rossetti and Furnivall both objected to elements of Ross’s address. Rossetti noted that a “great poet should put morals into his writings”, while carefully reinterpreting the Revolt of Islam’s message as “do good to your enemies; an annunciation of a universal reign of love.” The Revolt of Islam he concluded was “certainly not a didactic poem”. Furnivall complained that Ross seemed to treat poetry as a “toy”, and averred that “poets were men who felt certain truths more deeply than other men, and it was their work to put forth those thoughts.” Three of the avowed socialists in the room, Henry Salt, Aveling and George Bernard Shaw objected more specifically to the attacks on socialism.

Aveling, for his part, maintained that “the socialism of the study and the street was one and the same thing – and that constituted the beauty of modern socialism.” Shaw was highly critical as well, arguing that “a poem ought to be didactic, and ought to be in the nature of a political treatise - for poetry was the most artistic way of teaching those things a poet ought to teach.” One of the oddities of the debate turns on the argument about whether Shelley’s poetry was “didactic” or not. It will help modern readers if we unpack the coded language here. Opponents of Shelley’s didacticism were really reacting to his politics; or to be more accurate, the fact that socialists were championing him and as Paul Foot suggested, doing so to their advantage - in other words advancing the cause of socialism.

Annie Besant

Ross’s contentious address prompted Aveling and Marx to request an opportunity to present the case for an alternative version of the “Real Shelley”; a case for the “Socialist Shelley”. To them, what was happening in the 1880s was, plainly, a battle for the legacy of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Viewed from the left, the stakes would have been remarkably high. Marx and Aveling saw Shelley as someone who saw more clearly than anyone else “that the epic of the nineteenth century was to be the contest between the possessing and the producing classes.” This insight removed him “from the category of Utopian socialists and [made] him as far as was possible in his time, a socialist of modern days.” To see Shelley “castrated” (in the words of Friedrich Engels) and co-opted by the bourgeoisie was a call to arms. Aveling delivered the paper in April of 1888 though was careful to point out that “although I am the reader, it must be understood that I am reading the work of my wife as well as, no, more than, myself.”

Eleanor Marx was an extraordinary person who deserves far more attention from our modern society. According to Harrison Fluss and Sam Miller writing in Jacobin, Marx was

born on January 16, 1855, Eleanor Marx was Karl and Jenny Marx’s youngest daughter. She would become the forerunner of socialist feminism and one of the most prominent political leaders and union organizers in Britain. Eleanor pursued her activism fearlessly, captivated crowds with her speeches, stayed loyal to comrades and family, and grew into a brilliant political theorist. Not only that, she was a fierce advocate for children, a famous translator of European literature, a lifelong student of Shakespeare and a passionate actress.

To which we can add that she was also devotee of and influenced by Percy Shelley. Both Eleanor and Aveling were immersed in culture - much like Karl Marx himself. This was not Aveling’s first foray into the subject matter. In 1879 he had given a speech about Shelley to the Secular Society - described by Annie Besant as a “simple, loving, and personal account of the life and poetry of the hero of the free thinkers..” (Kapp, p. 451) This assessment, by the way, is yet another indication of the high regard accorded to Shelley by the socialist community. According to her Wikipedia entry, Besant was was a

“British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer, orator, educationist, and philanthropist. Regarded as a champion of human freedom, she was an ardent supporter of both Irish and Indian self-rule. She was a prolific author with over three hundred books and pamphlets to her credit.”

That she considered Shelley to be the “hero of freethinkers” is telling and a further reminder of the influence Shelley had on 19th century socialists. Kapp perceptively points out that:

“There can be no doubt that this lecture, though delivered by Aveling, was it to collaboration between two people who had long and devotedly studied the poet with equal enthusiasm, Aveling primarily as an atheist, Eleanor as a revolutionary…”

Eleanor Marx at 18

Marx and Aveling were at pains to point out that “the question to be considered…is not whether socialism is right or wrong, but whether Shelley was or was not a socialist.” Thus they first described a set of six distinguishing hallmarks of socialism and pointed out, “…If he enunciated views such as these, or even approximating to these, it is clear that we must admit that Shelley was a teacher as well as a poet.” The authors then set out their course of study:

(1) A note or two on Shelley himself and his own personality, as bearing on his relations to Socialism;

(2) On those, who, in this connection had most influence upon his thinking;

(3) His attacks on tyranny, and his singing for liberty, in the abstract;

(4) His attacks on tyranny in the concrete;

(5) His clear perception of the class struggle; and

(6) His insight into the real meaning of such words as “freedom,'’ “justice,” “crime,” “labour,” and “property”.

Of Shelley’s personality, Marx and Aveling seem principally interested in adducing (with copious citations from The Cenci, Prince Athanese, Queen Mab, Laon and Cythna and Triumph of Life) Shelley’s connection to the politics of his era, noting his advanced thinking on issues such as Napoleon and evolution:

“Of the two great principles affecting the development of the individual end of the race, those of heredity and adaptation, he had clear perception, although day as yet we are neither accurately defined nor even named. He understood that men and peoples were the result of their ancestry and their environment.”

As for Shelley’s influences, the authors begin by contrasting Shelley with Byron.

In Byron they suggest,

“…we have the vague, generous and genuine aspirations in the abstract, which found their final expression in the bourgeois-democratic movement of 1848. In Shelley, there was more than the vague striving after freedom in the abstract, and therefore his ideas are finding expression in the social-democratic movement of our own day….He saw more clearly than Byron, who seems scarcely to have seen it at all, that the epic of the nineteenth century was to be the contest between the possessing and the producing classes. And it is just this that removes him from the category of Utopian socialists, and makes him so far as it was possible in his time, a socialist of modern days.

They then enumerate those whom they consider his prime influences: François-Noël Baboeuf, Rousseau, the French philosophes, the Encyclopaedists, Baron d’Holbach, and Denis Diderot. The addition of Diderot to this list is interesting. We now know that as early as 1812, Shelley had ordered copies of Diderot’s works - but this was not widely known in the 19th Century. I certainly feel that the spirit of Diderot suffuses Shelley’s philosophy and writings. Interestingly, Aveling and Marx thought very highly of Diderot as well, averring that Diderot “was the intellectual ghost of everybody of his time” - an assessment described to me as a “penetrating insight” by Andrew Curran the author of the excellent Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely.

“We simply can not underestimate the influence Shelley had on the socialists of this period.”

— Graham Henderson

Godwin was also singled out, hardly surprisingly - though as Marx and Aveling ruefully note, “Dowden’s Life has made us all so thoroughly acquainted with the ill-side of Godwin that just now there may be a not unnatural tendency to forget the best of him.” But of real interest is the time spent adducing the under-appreciated influence of “the two Marys” (Wollstonecraft and Godwin), and the perspective is instructive. “In a word,” Marx and Aveling suggest,

the world in general has treated the relative influences of Godwin on the one hand and of the two women on the other, pretty much has might have been expected with men for historians. Probably the fact that he saw so much through the eyes of these two women quickened Shelley's perception of woman's real position in society and the real cause of that position….this understanding…is in a large measure due to the two Marys.

Shelley’s espousal of what we would now call feminist causes was extremely unusual for his time. Clearly it resonated with Marx and Aveling who comment that “it was one of Shelley's "delusions that are not delusions" that man and women should be equal and united. And Paul Foot seizes on and develops this theme in his speech to the 1981 Marxism Conference in London.

“It’s not just that he saw that women were oppressed in the society, that the women were oppressed in the home; it’s not just that he saw the monstrosity of that. It’s not even just that he saw that there was no prospect whatever of any kind for revolutionary upsurge if men left women behind. Like, for example, in the 1848 rebellions in Paris where he men deliberately locked the women up and told them they couldn’t come out to the demonstrations that took place there because in some way or other that would demean the nature of the revolution. It wasn’t just that he saw the absurdity of situations like that. It was that he saw what happened when women did activate themselves, and did start to take control of their lives, and did start to hit back against repression. Shelley saw that what happened then was that again and again, women seized the leadership of the forces that were in revolution! All through Shelley’s poetry, all his great revolutionary poems, the main agitators, the people that do most of the revolutionary work and who he gives most of the revolutionary speeches, are women. Queen Mab herself, Asia in Prometheus Unbound, Iona in Swellfoot the Tyrant, and most important of all, Cythna in The Revolt of Islam. All these women, throughout his poetry, were the leaders of the revolution and the main agitators.”

I have written myself at length on the fact that much of Shelley’s radicalism concentrates on what he would have considered twinned targets: the monarchy and religion (religion being for Shelley the “hand-maiden of tyranny”). So it is not surprising that when Marx and Aveling came to the third part of their presentation, they pointed out that at the root of Shelley’s antagonism to the tyranny of church and state was the belief that the ultimate problem was

“the superstitious in the capitalistic system in the empire of class…. And always, every word that he has written against religious superstition and the despotism of individual rulers may be read as against economic superstition and the despotism of class.”

They also pointed out the extent to which Shelley’s concern with tyranny was more than just abstract, he is lauded not just for his attention to Mexico, Spain, Ireland and England, but also for his attacks on individuals: Castlereagh, Sidmouth, Eldon and Napoleon. “He is forever,” they wrote, “denouncing priest and king and statesman.”

Of most interest to me is the fourth section in which Marx and Aveling turn to Shelley’s understanding of “class struggle.” What makes Shelley a socialist more than anything else,

“is his singular understanding of the facts that today tyranny resolves itself into the tyranny of the possessing class over the producing, and that to this tyranny in the ultimate analysis is traceable almost all evil and misery. He saw that the soul-called middle class is the real tyrant, the real danger at the present day.”

Shelley by George Clint after Amelia Curran

To support this position, a veritable arsenal of quotations is deployed. From what they call the Philosophic View of Reform, from Godwin, from letters to Hookham and Hitchens, and from Swellfoot the Tyrant, Peter Bell the Third and Charles the I. The effect is spectacular. For example, this from Swellfoot: “Those who consume these fruits through thee [the goddess of famine] grow fat. / Those who produce these fruits through the grow lean". The cumulative effect is to place Shelley in a tradition that leads directly to Marx, Engels and modern socialism. And, indeed, the resonance and reverberation of the language is uncanny.

Marx and Aveling conclude the section by quoting Mary to great effect (from her notes to her collected edition): “He believed the clash between the two classes of society was inevitable, and he eagerly ranged himself on the peoples side.” They clearly see Shelley as a direct precursor to Marx and Engels and it is hard to disagree with them. In an unusual turn of phrase considering their undoubted atheism, they had earlier referred to Shelley as a philosopher and a prophet - a term you will have seen Engels use as well in the quotation cited above. Elsewhere, Marx and Aveling refer to him as the “poet-leader”. In a truly remarkable passage they seem to treat Shelley’s writing, his value system, almost as a “sacred text”:

This extraordinary power of seeing things clearly and of seeing them in their right relations one to another, shown not alone in the artistic side of his nature, but in the scientific, the historical, the social, is a comfort and strength to us that hold in the main the beliefs, made more sacred to us in that they were his, and must give every lover of Shelley pause when he finds himself departing from the master on any fundamental question of economics, a faith, of human life.”

It was not uncommon for atheists, including Shelley, to use the words of religion when attempting to convey passionately held beliefs. And passages and expressions such as these mean that we simply can not underestimate the influence Shelley had on the socialists of this period.

“[What makes Shelley a socialist] is his singular understanding of the facts that today tyranny resolves itself into the tyranny of the possessing class over the producing class.”

— Eleanor Marx

In their final section, Marx and Aveling consider Shelley’s use of language, focusing on the words, “anarchy, freedom, custom, crime and property” as well as the concept of the “governing class”. Perceptively and shrewdly, they note that for Shelley the accepted meaning of certain phrases does not align with reality. Thus they touch on what came to be understood as Shelley’s famous capacity for ironic inversion. For example his deployment of the term “anarchy” to describe the then current social system and “rule of law”. For Shelley, they say, anarchy, was “God and King and Law…and let us add…Capitalism.”

On the question of “property”, Marx and Aveling reach their denouement. They begin by quoting a passage from A Philosophical View of Reform that directly anticipates Marx:

Labor, industry, economy, skill, genius, or any similar powers honourably or innocently exerted, are the foundations of one description of property. All true political institutions ought to defend every man in the exercise of his discretion with respect to property so acquired… But there is another species of property which has its foundation in usurpation, or imposture, or violence, without which, by the nature of things, immense aggregations of property could never have been accumulated.

They then paraphrase this in the language of what they call scientific socialism:

“A man has a right to anything his own labour has produced, and that he does not intend to employ for the purpose of injuring his fellows. But no man can himself acquire a considerable aggregation of property except at the expense of his fellows. He must either cheat a certain number out of the value of it, or take it by force.”

With citations from Song to the Men of England, Fragment: To the People of England, Queen Mab and a letter to Hitchener, Marx and Aveling make the case that Shelley understood,

the real economic value of private property in the means of production and distribution, whether it was in machinery, land, funds, what not. He saw that this value lay in the command, absolute, merciless, unjust, over human labour. The socialist believes that these means of production and distribution should be the property of the community. For the man or company that owns them has practically irresponsible control over the class that does not possess them.

And this, they conclude, are the “teachings of Shelley.” And as they are also the teachings of socialism, the two are one and the same thing. Thus Marx and Aveling end with the ringing words, “We claim him as a socialist.”

““We claim him as a socialist.””

— Eleanor Marx

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According to Marx’s biographer Yvonne Kapp, Shelley’s Socialism was first published by To-day: The Journal of Scientific Socialism in 1888 (Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx, p. 450). It also appeared as a pamphlet in an edition of only twenty-five copies published (presumably by the Shelley Society) for private circulation under the title Shelley and Socialism. In 1947, Leslie Preger (a young Manchester socialist who had fought in the Spanish Civil War) arranged to have it published, with an introduction by the Labour politician Frank Allaun through CWS Printing Work. The Preger edition can be found online through used book services such as AbeBooks. The version published by Preger and that which appeared in To-Day are somewhat different. The version which appears in To-Day appears to have been lightly edited and omits several selections from Shelley’s poetry that appear in the Preger edition. My assumption is that Preger reproduced the pamphlet version released by the Shelley Society. The version I have made available (see link below) is based on Preger and thus is the only complete and “authoritative” version of the speech (as delivered) available on line. You may read it online in it entirety for the first time.

In their speech, Marx and Aveling refer to a second part which they intended to deliver upon some future occasion. Either the second installment has been either lost or perhaps it was never delivered. However, Kapp tantalizingly points out that Engels in fact translated the second part into German for publication in Germany by Die Neue Zeit (Kapp p. 450). No trace of it appears to exist - a loss for us all given the intended subject matter discussed in the speech.

Frank Allaun, author of the preface to the Preger edition, offered this encapsulation of the speech: “A Marxist evaluation of the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley.” He concludes his preface with this sage assessment:

“Shelley, who died when his sailing boat sinking a storm in 1822, lived when the Industrial Revolution was only beginning. The owning class had not yet "dug their own graves" by driving the handloom weavers and other domestic workers from their kitchens and plots of land into the "dark satanic mills" alongside thousands of other operatives. Conditions were not ripe for the modern trade union and socialist movement. Had they been so Shelley would have been their man.”

Of the authors, George Bernard Shaw said "he (Aveling) was quite a pleasant fellow who would've gone to the stake for socialism or atheism, but with absolutely no conscience in his private life. He said seduced every woman he met and borrowed from every man. Eleanor committed suicide. Eleanor's tragedy made him infamous in Germany". Shaw added, "While Shelley needs no preface that agreeable rascal Aveling does not deserve one.”

You can read a wonderful encapsulation of Eleanor Marx and her legacy in the Jacobion, here. And you can buy Kapp’s biography of Marx here, though I strongly suggest you instead order it through your local bookseller.

Click the button to go to the speech.

The footnotes in all of the sources are antiquated and refer to out of date editions of Shelley’s poetry and prose - I will in due course provide references to more modern, available texts. Interestingly, there is no mention of the speech in any of the major Shelley biographies. Not even Kenneth Neill Cameron, a Marxist, alludes to it.  Nor does Paul Foot reference it in Red Shelley. Thus, it would appear that Aveling’s and Marx’s effort to “claim Shelley as a socialist” had little effect either of the Society or upon public opinion in general. Perhaps this was predictable given the tenor of the times. As Foot observed:

Paul Foot

“In the 1840s as Engels noted, Shelley had been almost exclusively the property of the working class the Chartists had read him for what he was, a tough agitator and revolutionary. The effect of the Shelley-worship of the 1880s and 1890s was too weaken that image; to present for mass consumption a new, wet, angelic Shelley and to promote this new Shelley with all the influence and wealth of respectable academics and publishers.”

Paul Foot offers a disquieting account of the struggle during these years in chapter 7 of Red Shelley. It was a struggle which was largely won by the right and lost by the left. And it would be decades before Kenneth Neil Cameron emerged in the early 1950s to begin the lengthy and arduous process of salvaging Shelley’s left wing credentials. For generations, the Shelley that was embraced by Chartists, by Marx and Engels, would be subsumed by a tidal wave of mawkish Shelleyan “sentimentality’. Gone would be his revolutionary political ardour and in its place appeared a carefully curated selection of poetry designed to showcase only Shelley’s lyrical capabilities - his love poems.

Interestingly, to call Shelley a “love poet” can be intensely misleading. Many modern readers encountering the term “love poet” will think immediately of romantic or sexual love - and there is no doubt that Shelley wrote many poem that were almost purely romantic. However, when Shelley speaks of love, you have to look carefully at what he is saying, and what he is almost always talking about is empathy, that is the ability to imagine and understand the thoughts, perspective, and emotions of another person; to put yourself in their shoes, as it were. Shelley should therefore be thought of as the “poet of empathy” and of revolutionary love.

“Shelley should be thought of as the poet of empathy and, if anything, of revolutionary love.”

— Graham Henderson

Isabel Quigley’s selection of Shelley’s Poetry: “No poet better repays cutting.”

For example, in the first part of the 20th century, Gresham Press offered a highly popular selection of poems by English poets. In the introduction to the Shelley volume, the poet and editor Alice Meynell (also a vice president of the Women Writers' Suffrage League) cheerfully announced that “ This volume leaves out all Shelley’s contentious poems.”

As recently as 1973, Kathleen Raine, in Penguin’s Poet to Poet series, omitted important poems such as Laon and Cythna - as well as most of the rest of his overtly political output. And she did so with considerable gusto, stating explicitly that she did so “without regret”. In a widely available edition of his poetry, the editor, Isabel Quigly, cheerfully notes, “No poet better repays cutting; no great poet was ever less worth reading in his entirety".

Fortunately Shelleyan scholarship has now long since passed through this dark period in his reception. The annus mirabilis in this regard was 1980, the year in which PMS Dawson published his book, Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics, Paul Foot published Red Shelley, and Michael Scrivener published Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley. All three owe an enormous debt to perhaps the greatest of Shelley’s politically minded biographers, the Marxist Kenneth Neill Cameron whose magisterial volume The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical appeared in 1958. This is a book of which one can truly be in awe.

Shelleyan Top Ten Moments - 2017

Welcome to my inaugural, year end "Shelleyan Top Ten" list. The eligibility criteria for an appearance on this list is pretty straight forward (and subjective!) First the event or occurrence must have contributed to raising the awareness of Percy Bysshe Shelley among the general public. Second, it also needs to have come to my attention - which is not omniscient (this means my list is not necessarily definitive!). Finally, I also have ranked on the basis of whether the moment was unusual or unexpectedly brilliant.

In any event, these sorts of lists are supposed to be fun and are designed to provoke debate and conversation.  So let the discussion begin.

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The 10 Best Shelley Moments of 2017

10.        Entering the list at number ten is the Penn-Shelley Seminar series that is overseen by Eric Alan Weinstein. The seminar brings scholarship from around the world together to examine the life and work of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Over the past three years, more than a dozen Penn faculty members spanning five separate departments have contributed as have almost forty visiting scholars -including me!  You can watch my most recent presentation by clicking the link to "The Radical Shelley in His Time and Ours". Together Eric and his team have produced nearly 100 hours of unique digital scholarly content, all of which is being made freely available. An associated MOOC became of of the world's favourites in 2016. Say what you will about MOOCs, hundreds of people participated in Eric's course as did I. It is fair to say that my entire Shelley project was inspired by that course. Like Shelley, Eric wants to change the world; Shelley can help us to do this. I look forward to the relaunch of the Shelley MOOC in 2018!!! You can learn more about Eric's initiatives here.

9.         At number 9, we have Paul R Stephens (follow him on Twitter here) who launched a series of “On This Day" Tweets that focus on memorable excerpts from the letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Featuring over 300 selections so far, the series also matched the prose with very carefully chosen works of art. Paul is a Shelley scholar working on his PhD at Oxford. With Paul’s permission, I began republishing his selections on The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley Facebook page in November with the addition of a couple of paragraphs of my own commentary.  These posts have proved to be a huge hit, drawing hundreds of reactions and scores of comments and shares. What makes Paul’s selections so clever is the manner in which they draw attention to different aspects of Shelley’s multifaceted character.  So, well done Paul, don’t stop now!!!!

8.         In the summer of 2017, the Keats-Shelley Association of America (full disclosure: I am a Board Member) announced an ambitious online communications strategy which involves revamping its website and launching Twitter and Facebook feeds. The organization has hired Shelley scholar Anna Mercer as the official coordinator. She currently oversees four communication fellows. I have been advocating for this since I joined the Board as I believe social media (despite all of its drawbacks) is an essential tool to build communities. I look forward to great things from this initiative in 2018.

 7.        In March of 2017, English fashion designer John Alexander Skelton deployed Shelley's Mask of Anarchy in his spring runway show. This is an example of members of the general public engaging with Shelley and the radical past and unusual ways. You can read my article, "Shelley Storms the Fashion World" by clicking the button below. Skelton has to be one of the first clothing designers in history whose clothing line was inspired by a bloody massacre.  This might strike many as unusual, but I think it is actually quite an important example of art interfacing with politics and political protest – in a manner Shelley would have whole-heartedly approved.

6.         Frankenreads is another initiative of the Keats-Shelley Association of America. It enters my list at number 6.  An ambitious project it is designed to get people around the world thinking about and reading Frankenstein, the concept is built around a massive, world-wide reading project slated for Halloween of 2018.  While this project is virtually entirely focused on Mary, it can nonetheless function as a gateway through which we can interest Mary Shelley enthusiasts in Percy - after all, he was an active and not insubstantial collaborator on the novel. You can learn more about this brilliant KSAA project here.

5.         Flying in under the radar at number five is Tess Martin's brilliant animation short based on Shelley’s fragmentary poem, The Dirge. You can read the poem here. There is speculation that the poem was based on a true story about Ginevra degli Almieri, who was thought dead of a plague that swept the city of Florence in the year 1400, and was put in a vault to be buried the next day. But she then awakens and is mistaken for a ghost by both her husband and her parents. Martins gorgeous, ghostly interpretation of the poem is exquisite. It is one of the years great Shelley events. Thanks to Tess Martin and Max Rothman the good folks at Monticello Park Productions. I have an upcoming article on this magnificent project.

4.         Shelley took an unexpected star turn in the summer blockbuster, Alien Covenant. This is deserving of fourth place on the list!!  After the movie was released, I was very excited to hear that Shelley's poem Ozymandias features prominently.  The poem's theme is woven carefully into the plot of the movie, with David (played again by Michael Fassbender) quoting the famous line, "Look on my works ye mighty and despair." David, as followers of the movies will know, is a "synthetic humanoid" - one in a long line of such creatures, one of the most famous being Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation. That David quotes the poem without a trace of irony is central to the question of whether or not these creatures are fully human or not. For David, not to see that Shelley is employing one of his trademark ironic inversions, suggests that something is not quite right with him. That he mistakenly attributes the poem to Byron is another twist altogether. Enjoy Zac Farini's terrific review, "David or the Modern Frankenstein" by clicking the button below.

3.         During the summer of 2017, I published in three installments, for the first time, the text of a speech given by Shelley devotee and crusading journalist Paul Foot. It was an epic one-and-a-half-hour extemporaneous speech delivered to the London Marxism Conference of 1981.  I have estimated that the project took over two hundred hours – involving laborious transcription, research and editing. The entire speech was ultimately collected together and published on my website in the fall of 2015 by my research and editorial associate, Jonathan Kerr. You Paul epic speech "The Radical Percy Bysshe Shelley" by clicking the button below. Here is a link to the only audio we have, so you can listen along!! Here's to one of the greatest of all Shelleyans, Paul Foot. We will never forget you Paul, you left us too soon.

2.         Sitting in the number 2 position is the Shelley Conference 2017. The project was the brain child of Shelley scholars Anna Mercer and Harrie Neal, who were motivated by their frustration with the fact that, in Anna's words, there is no "regular event, academic or otherwise, dedicated solely to the study of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s works. Neither is there such an event for Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.” Given the outsize influence these two writers have had on our modern world, this fact is astonishing.  The Conference was a wonder and featured keynotes by three of the world’s leading Shelleyans: Nora Crook, Kelvin Everest and Michael O’Neill.  You can watch these here, here and here.  Slowly, I am also releasing panel presentations – but the process is somewhat time consuming.  My hope is that this conference will be followed by many more. Anna? Harrie? Percy and Mary owe you big time -- so do we all. Read Anna's article "Why the Shelley Conference" by clicking the button below

The Best Moment of 2017

1.         Pride of place this year goes to Jeremy Corbyn who adopted Shelley's poetry from The Mask of Anarchy as the foundation of his election campaign. The election slogan itself, “For the Many. Not the Few”, had a catalytic effect on the electorate and we can only guess at how many voters it mobilized. Corbyn then went on to quote Mask of Anarchy on several occasions.  The most memorable were at his campaign-concluding rally, and then after the election at Glastonbury. Both occasions were electrifying. Corbyn’s harnessing of Shelley earns pride of place in my year end list because it awoke tens of thousands of people to Shelley’s existence. Opportunities like this tend to be generational – and we just experienced one. His use was also a perfect illustration of why Paul Foot thought Shelley was so important. Shelley doesn’t just supply ideas (though there are plenty of those), he furnishes us with inspirational rhetoric and enthusiasm. Paul wrote, “Of all the things about Shelley that really inspired people in the years since his death, the thing that matters above all is his enthusiasm for the idea that the world can be changed”. Well, thanks to Jeremy Corbyn, we just witnessed such change first hand. Read my article "Jeremy Corbyn is Right: Poetry Can Change the World" by clicking the button below.  Watch the speech below (Shelley is quoted at 2:40). Thank you Mr, Corbyn, your job now is to bring some of Shelley's egalitarian dreams alive. Don't stop with the slogan; Shelley can be your best friend. Don't let us all down.

If you have some moment I have missed, write to me here: graham@grahamhenderson.ca.  2017 was also a terrific year for my website and the associated Facebook and Twitter accounts.  You can read about my progress in building a modern Shelley community here: "The Year in Review - 2017" .  I have big plans for 2018. Happy New Year to everyone. Here's to a magnificent, Shelley-packed 201811

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The Worst Moment of 2017

Now, most folks also offer a reflection on the worst moments of the previous year.  I am no different. For me, hands down, the worst moment of 2017 for Shelley was the release of Haifaa al Mansour’s atrocious re-invention of the lives of Mary and Percy.  It is a hot mess. What facts she doesn't distort to suit her fictional story line, she simply invents.  A fact checker could spend weeks correcting her mistakes. Here it is in a nutshell: the film makers want you to believe that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in a single night based entirely on personal experiences of abandonment and bereavement. No collaboration. No apparent research. Yeah, it is THAT bad. In trying to put Mary on a pedestal it actually completely trashes her reputation for meticulous research, collaboration and hard, hard work. Oh, and after having been abandoned by Shelley in her hour of need (portrayed as a heavy drinker who directly causes the death of her first child) - a man who has stolen credit for her novel - she takes him back at the end of the movie with no questions asked. Because, ya know, that's how it happens in teenland, right?  It also trashes the reputation of almost everyone around her. Despite my hopes it would not find general release, it has. So Shelleyans can look forward to an invented story of Frankenstein’s creation which is jam packed with misrepresentations, false claims, fabrications and innuendo. You can read more about in my article, "The Truth Matters".  This publicity photo pretty much sums up the movie. This is what you will get - a ridiculous, fatuous teen drama. Avoid it if you can. Shame on those who made this film.

The Revolutionary Percy Shelley in His Time and Ours

Today I am pleased to release the recording of my presentation "The Revolutionary Shelley in His Time and Ours".  This was delivered on November 15th 2016 as part of the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Shelley Seminar; run under the auspices of The Unbinding Prometheus Project and Penn Libraries. I hope you enjoy it.  You will find some introductory notes below.

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"I am a lover of mankind, a democrat and an atheist."

When Shelley wrote these words in the hotel register at Chamonix, he was, as PMS Dawson has suggested deliberately, intentionally and provocatively “nailing his colours to the mast”. The thumbnail above is a portion of the actual hotel register page. Shelley's handwriting can be seen in the top line. Here it is in full:

He knew full well people would see these words and that they would inflame passions. The words, however may require some context and explanation.  Many people have sought to diminish the importance of these words and the circumstances under which they were written.  Some modern scholars have even ridiculed him.  I think his choice of words was very deliberate and central to how he defined himself and how wanted the world to think of him.  They may well have been the words he was most famous (or infamous) for in his lifetime.

Shelley’s atheism and his political philosophy were at the heart of his poetry and his revolutionary agenda (yes, he had one).  Our understanding of Shelley is impoverished to the extent we ignore or diminish its importance.

Shelley visited the Chamonix Valley at the base of Mont Blanc in July of 1816. Mont Blanc was a routine stop on the so-called “Grand Tour.”  In fact, so many people visited it, that you will find Shelley in his letters bemoaning the fact that the area was "overrun by tourists." With the Napoleonic wars only just at an end, English tourists were again flooding the continent.  While in Chamonix, many would have stayed at the famous Hotel de Villes de Londres, as did Shelley.  As today, the lodges and guest houses of those days maintained a “visitor’s register”; unlike today those registers would have contained the names of a virtual who’s who of upper class society.  Ryan Air was not flying English punters in for day visits. What you wrote in such a register was guaranteed to be read by literate, well connected aristocrats - even if you penned your entry in Greek – as Shelley did. 

The words Shelley wrote in the register of the Hotel de Villes de Londres (under the heading "Observations") were (as translated by PMS Dawson): “philanthropist, an utter democrat, and an atheist”.  The words were, as I say, written in Greek.  The Greek word he used for philanthropist was "philanthropos tropos." The origin of the word and its connection to Shelley is very interesting.  Its first use appears in Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound” the Greek play which Shelley was “answering” with his masterpiece, Prometheus Unbound.  Aeschylus used his newly coined word “philanthropos tropos” (humanity loving) to describe Prometheus. The word was picked up by Plato and came to be much commented upon, including by Bacon, one of Shelley’s favourite authors.  Bacon considered philanthropy to be synonymous with "goodness", which he connected with Aristotle’s idea of “virtue”.

What do the words Shelley chose mean and why is it important? Because here is exactly what I think he was saying: I am against god. I am against the king. I am the modern Prometheus, and I will steal fire from the gods and I will bring down kingdoms and I will give power to the people. This is an incredibly revolutionary statement for the time.  No wonder he scared people. But not only did he say these things, he was developing, as we will see, a system to deliver on this promise. Part of his system was based on his innate skepticism, of which he was a surprising sophisticated practitioner.  And like all skeptics since the dawn of history, he used it to undermine authority and attack truth claims. "Implicit faith," he wrote, "and fearless inquiry have in all ages been irreconcilable enemies. Unrestrained philosophy in every age opposed itself to the reveries of credulity and fanaticism."

My presentation will discuss his revolutionary programme and its application to our modern era.  Enjoy.

The Truth Matters - a Review of Haifaa al-Mansour's Movie, Mary Shelley

THE TRUTH MATTERS

Haifaa al-Mansour’s new movie Mary Shelley premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 9 September 2017. For those anticipating a nuanced, balanced and careful study of the relationship between two of the world’s authentic literary geniuses, Mary and Percy Shelley, I am sorry, you will be disappointed. For all of its pretensions, this movie seems to be little more than a sort of thinking person’s Twilight or maybe Beauty and the Beast: two hot, beautiful young people with perfect skin and hair are thrust together by chance, torn apart by circumstance only to be at last happily reunited. It is riddled with factual errors and the plot involves an almost complete rewrite of history. Percy and Mary, as depicted in Mary Shelley, are essentially props whose lives have been casually rearranged to allow al-Mansour and her screenwriter to concoct a myth about the creation of Frankenstein. Were the movie to carry a warning, “based on a true story”, it would not go far enough. Mary and Percy have been done a disservice. The true story of Mary, Percy and Frankenstein deserves to be told – but it will await yet another day.

The real-life relationship between Mary and Percy offers us one of the very few examples of a male/female creative partnership between co-equals that was characterized by mutual respect and collaborative cooperation.  Yet for 200 years they have largely been subjected to binary analyses in which one or other of the two has been cast in an invidious role to exalt the other. We have only just now reached the point where they are being seen, as Anna Mercer recently remarked, for what they were: “two incredibly talented authors, who dedicated their lives to the study and writing of radical and innovative literature.”

Indeed, a major conference founded on this concept took place in London on 15 and 16 September 2017. As conference co-organizer and Shelley expert Anna Mercer wrote recently:

Our speakers will pay attention to biographical details in order to gauge how their shared lives (and also their shared travels) influence their texts, as opposed to the texts revealing truths about their lives. Can we remove the damaging opinion that the Shelleys’ relationship was something defined by scandal, infidelity, gossip, and anti-establishment teenage pursuits? They certainly would have wished we could do so. Let us return to their writings, and not the many, many biographical speculations created by scholars and other writers, some with good intentions, some without.

The proof is in the marketing...

al-Mansour tacks in exactly the opposite direction, creating a host of new biographical speculations designed to suit her theory that Frankenstein is almost completely autobiographical - reinforcing, as Anna Mercer recently pointed out to me, a lamentable sexist stereotype in wide circulation regarding female authors.

To make her point, al-Mansour offers up a veritable orgy of speculation that focuses on just the sort of “scandal, infidelity, gossip and anti-establishment teenage pursuits” which Mercer cautions us to avoid. I am increasingly of the view that acts of historical vandalism such as this are a variant on cultural appropriation. al-Mansour, apparently with full knowledge that she was rewriting history, created a narrative which she offered to the public with absolutely no warning about the veracity of the story. The story appears to be true; it looks and feels real. Clearly this is irresponsible and misleading; but I think it is worse. Mary and Percy had real lives - lives about which we know a LOT.  To warp and twist those stories to present a narrative about the creation of Frankenstein which suits the director's idea of how great works are created is a misappropriation of their lives; put bluntly, it is a fraud on history - a lie.

The characters, with the possible exception of Mary (but more on that later) are dismayingly two-dimensional: Percy is presented as an “irresponsible narcissist”; Byron is a “blood-sucking devourer of souls”; William Godwin (author of one of the most important philosophical works of his century: Political Justice) is a pottering, befuddled shopkeeper; Claire Clairmont is a gold-digger in search of a “poet of her own”. There is even an evil step-mother thrown in for good measure: Claire’s mother, Mary Jane, whom Godwin married after the death of Mary's mother (and, yes, I am aware the real Jane Clairmont was very difficult). There are some elliptical visual clues about who these people actually were. We see a flash of the title page of Political Justice; there is a glimpse of Shelley's poem, Queen Mab in a gorgeous bound gilt edition that of course never existed); and we see Byron swanning around a theater like a rock star. But these flash by and despite them, unless you know the historical background of these people, you would have no idea that some of these people were the intellectual titans of their age.

This is a movie that abandons virtually all pretense to historical accuracy in the opening five minutes. We all have come to expect this from the silver screen.  But it is one thing for directors in search of sensationalism and a “good story” to veer far from the truth (how often do we see the words “based on a true story”), but it is entirely another when the director in question has explicitly set out to tell the truth.  al-Mansour is unequivocal in this regard. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter director spoke of "finding inspiration in how Shelley defied what was expected of her." She said, “I think a lot of people know Frankenstein and, of course, the green monster, everybody knows that. But they don’t know her.” al-Mansour purports to set the record straight, to tell the world who the real Mary Shelley was. You can not do this by manipulating the truth.

It occurred to me that it might be valuable to approach Mary Shelley (the movie) simply as a fairy tale – a movie with made up characters and a moral. al-Mansour’s herself described the movie as a “coming of age story” about a “strong woman.” Does it stand up? Does the story-line make sense? Do the characters feel real? Is Movie Mary the “strong woman” al-Mansour purports her to be?

Well, here are our two protagonists as the film presents them:

Douglas Booth as Shelley. As an aside, Shelley was famous for wearing his shirts open at the neck. The movie could not even get this right.

Percy Bysshe Shelley. This character is a poet and is presented early on as a revolutionary. He is impossibly handsome and clearly aware of his charms – a ladies’ man!

What he is rebelling against is uncertain, though he clearly does not like religion (that much was true). To make this point, there is a scene in which Percy takes Mary into an empty church, steals the sacramental wine and drinks it from the chalice while lounging on the altar – he such a bad boy. Here are some of the “anti-establishment teenage pursuits” to which Mercer points. Percy clearly has a gift for words – we hear a few snatches of some romantic poetry - but he is also something of an extroverted showman. He is explicitly characterized as an “irresponsible narcissist”. Percy is also dismissive of others – ridiculing or humiliating those who disagree with him – including Mary.

As for his relationship with Mary, in the course of approximately one year, he repeatedly lies to her, sleeps with her half-sister Claire, maybe sleeps with Byron (whose very public kiss on the lips Percy does not refuse), is psychologically and verbally abusive to Mary and demonstrates an alarming facility for "mansplaining". Unlike the real Percy who remained with Mary until his death, Movie Percy abandons her for months in her hour of need after stealing the credit for her book. Yikes. This Percy spends much of his time drunk - swigging directly from the bottle (the real one was a vegetarian teetotaler). He plays an abject fanboy to Byron's rock star, which is such a disappointment given the deep, complex and abiding relationship these two towering intellects developed in real life. Oh, and according to the movie he literally causes the death of their first child. He’s quite a catch, isn’t he!?

But maybe he is smart? Well, while we occasionally see Percy scribbling on scraps of paper, there is very little evidence that he has produced anything of significance whatsoever. There are suggestions that he is famous. For example, two star-struck young women encounter him in a park and implausibly identify him as “the poet Shelley” and ask for an “autograph” (he complies with what actually appears to be a ball point pen!). The real Shelley was of course almost completely unknown and how anyone could have identified him in an age before photography and celebrity magazines is difficult to ascertain. So, it would appear then that Movie Percy is “airport famous”. But wait! alMansour also treats to scenes in which we see him angry, sullen and despondent as his poetry is repeatedly rejected by publishers.  So which is he? Airport famous or rejected-poet-in-the-garret? Movie Percy also never discusses with Movie Mary any of the sophisticated philosophical theories for which his real counterpart was famous. Despite what appears to be a fetish for books, we never see him actually reading one - either alone or with Mary. This is something for which the real couple are well known; their book lists are legendary. Late in the movie, after he has read Mary’s novel, he bursts in upon her with empty praise for its brilliance and then offers one of the most astoundingly stupid, mansplained editorial suggestions in the history of literature.  There are many more examples of this. The movie version of Percy is a drunk, a dullard and a dupe.

The characters in Bloomsbury where the Shelleys never lived.

But does he have money? He certainly appears to: swaggering into Mary’s home and promising to lavish money on the Godwin family. After eloping, he and Mary move into a fashionable address in Bloomsbury. While the two very briefly lived in Bloomsbury, clearly alMansour never bothered to find out exactly how they lived.

In our movie, they live in opulent luxury - an opportunity to dress up they actors in period costume. This is false. While Shelley's father was wealthy, Shelley had great difficulty accessing any of this wealth as he and his father had dramatically fallen out over his atheism. To this point we know nothing about this and Percy is presented as an independently wealthy young aristocrat.  It is therefore a shock to Mary when the creditors arrive in the middle of the night to seize everything. Movie Percy even lied about his wealth, it would seem.

Do I have any takers for this cretin?  al-Mansour has one: Mary Shelley. The question is why? Those familiar with the biography of the real Percy can readily understand why a precocious young genius like Mary would chose to be with him. She sought out an equal – just as he did. For all his faults, the real Shelley was nothing like the dim-witted, pretty-boy showcased in Mary Shelley. But what would be the motivation for Movie Mary to pick Movie Percy?

Elle Fanning as Mary Shelley, shown here having her hair carefully arranged, because, well, you know, people's hair in 1816 was perfect.

Mary Shelley. This character is a preternaturally brilliant and drop dead gorgeous teenage girl with aspirations to write.

She overcomes a tyrannical step-mother who opposes her interest in books and writing. She has a befuddled father who owns a book shop and seems to live with his head in the clouds but who offers her perhaps the crucial piece of advice in the film: that she, must “find her own voice” and ignore what other people have to say.  Movie Mary is presented as a character with a strong moral compass who reveres her dead mother and cares for everyone around her. She is driven, passionate, self-assured and inspiring. She is not cowed in the presence of Lord Byron, instead stands up to him at a critical point, getting, as they say, “right up in his grill”.  She forces Byron (played in a preposterously over the top manner by Tom Sturridge) to take responsibility for the daughter he fathered with Claire – in real life it was Percy who undertook this tricky and distasteful task.

It is widely believed that Frankenstein was written in response to Lord Byron’s challenge that his guests at the Villa Diodati (Percy, Mary, Claire and Dr John Polidori) compose a “ghost story”. In our movie, only Mary and Polidori rise to the occasion – Percy and Lord Byron being too piss-drunk to do much more than fall about the room – at one point Byron actually leaps on a divan and imitates a baboon replete with monkey noises. Embarrassing. But Mary overcomes all of this! Back in London, and with zero support from her hopeless boyfriend, and with her father’s voice literally ringing in her ears (“do it yourself baby!”), she writes all 60,000 words of Frankenstein in the course of a single night – pausing only for a midnight snack. I am not making this up. She triumphantly slaps it down on a bewildered Percy’s writing desk first thing the next morning. “Take that, you deadbeat” one can imagine her saying before she turns on her heel and storms out of the room.  Mary also, entirely on her own, arranges to have her book published, having faced down a blizzard of rejection notices (the world of early 19th century publishing being imagined as identical to our modern version – it was not). In real life it was Percy who found a publisher for the novel.

Boom!  What a superwoman.  Which begs the question: what does this superwoman want with that super-loser. The movie provides absolutely no satisfactory answers.  But boy, does this gal want her man.

Note the credit.

Mary Shelley, is, however, more than a movie about “boy meets girl” – or at least it pretends to be. It is about the creative process itself.  How the heck did one of the most famous novels of all time actually get written? Alas, al-Mansour seems to have replaced the “great man” theory of history with the “great woman” theory. Mary works entirely in isolation. In contrast with the real Mary Shelley who was an extraordinarily voracious reader, the movie Mary appears to read nothing. She relies instead on her own sources of inspiration. And here they are: the ghost stories of her childhood, the death of her mother and her daughter Clara, the abuse and abandonment she suffers at the hand of Percy, a demonstration of galvanism, an article on galvanism supplied by Polidori, and a dream in which a corpse is brought to life.  This raw material is sufficient to allow her to produce a complex 60,000 word novel in a single night. This is nonsense.

One of the grievous sins of this movie is that it utterly removes Mary from her intellectual milieu. She is presented as the archetypal lonely genius. Anyone who has an even remote familiarity with Mary, Percy and their circle will know that they had a thriving network of brilliant friends all of whom fed off one another. This portrait brilliantly emerges from the pages of Daisy Hay's wonderful book, Young Romantics. For example, we know for a fact that Shelley played a large role in influencing the Wordsworthian character of Childe Harolde, Canto III. This famous Canto was written while the group was at the Villa Diodati during the summer of 1816. In the movie, Mary and Percy do visit Byron, but the entire episode is presented like a sort of weekend bacchanal during which Percy and Byron are far too drunk to discuss poetry let alone write a single word. Mary was an active participant in this circle. In reviewing Hay's book, Michael Holroyd noted:

“The originality of this engrossing narrative comes from Daisy Hay's unusual focus on the passionate allegiances and literary influences between her characters. With great skill she weaves in and out of the lives of these poets, novelists, and philosophers, their husbands, wives, lovers, and children, exploring the dual nature of the creative impulse, its individuality, and the stimulus of kindred spirits. It is a most impressive achievement.”

These are facts.  And they are not unknown facts.  For someone like al-Mansour, who proudly notes that she was a literature major, to have ignored them is irresponsible.

The real Mary actively collaborated with the real Percy - and she was inspired by the writing of many famous people, including her mother and father and classical Greeks such as Aeschylus; whose plays she was familiar with through Percy.  Aeschylus' play Prometheus Bound played a large role in the novel Frankenstein which was, after all, subtitled, The Modern Prometheus. Percy Bysshe Shelley himself actually contributed around 5,000 words to Frankenstein and made editorial suggestions - this is a small but significant role. This is not speculation and al-Mansour simply could not have missed this fact - an entire book was written on the subject by a distinguished professor of literature, Charles Robinson.

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A page of Frankenstein on display at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Percy's handwriting is the dark ink, Mary's in a lighter ink.

The actual manuscripts for Frankenstein may be found in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. You can see the marginal suggestions Percy made and the contrasting handwriting.  But nope! Not Movie Mary, she does it alone.  Oh, and she does it exclusively in pencil when every single version we have of the manuscripts is in ink.

The concept of great art as something created in a vacuum is an idea that has been dying a slow yet richly deserved death. In the case of Mary and Percy, we know for a fact that the two of them collaborated on Frankenstein.  This doesn’t weaken Mary’s claim to authorship – it enriches it.  Two brilliant people worked together; each respectful of the other’s genius.  What a story that would be! Except that is not the story al-Mansour tells. She had an opportunity to celebrate one of the more unusual creative partnerships in history. Instead, in order to uplift Mary, she felt it necessary smash Percy to atoms and deny his collaborative role in the creation of Frankenstein. Worse, it distorts Mary's actual creative process. We have her journals! We know that she laboured over the manuscript for months even years: polishing, honing, researching and rewriting. What agenda does it serve to lead people (particularly the young people to whom this movie seems to be pitched given the casting of heart-throbs) to believe that writing a 60,000 word masterpiece is something that happens overnight? Leonard Cohen famously took 6 or more years to write Hallelujah.

al-Mansour has effectively stolen Mary's world from her and replaced it with something almost sterile and antiseptic - despite all of the Hollywood melodrama. How much richer and more exciting was Mary's real life.

This sums it all up. Elle Fanning with her perfect hair and ever present pencil working in isolation seeking inspiration only from her own experiences.

How bad does this get? At the end of the movie, Mary’s father brings together a group of people at his bookshop – ostensibly to celebrate the publication of Frankenstein but actually to allow for a staged confession by Percy.  Like so many of the scenes in the film, this never happened.  But who cares, this is Hollywood, right?

SPOILER ALERT

Settle in, boys and girls, here is how our fairy tale ends.  Mary, tipped off to the meeting by her father, sneaks into the gathering unobserved and hides in a corner.  Godwin thanks the assembled throng of aged, whiskered, white males for coming. He notes that the novel was published anonymously. It is further alleged that Percy capitalized on this by writing a signed introduction which he knew would invite the world to conclude he had written the novel. To underline this point, al-Mansour manufactures a meeting that NEVER happened.  She imagines Mary and Polidori coming together to console one another: Percy is point blank accused of stealing the credit for Frankenstein and Byron for stealing the credit for Polidori's book, The Vampyre.

Godwin then offers a precis of the novel which incredibly casts Percy in the role of Victor Frankenstein and Mary in the role of the monster. He says it is a novel about:

“…the absolute necessity for human connection. From the moment Dr. Frankenstein’s creature opens its eyes it seeks the touch of its creator, but he recoils in terror leaving the creature to the first of its many experiences of neglect and isolation. And if only Frankenstein had been able to bestow upon his creation a compassionate touch, a kind word, what a tragedy might have been avoided.”

Wow. Just wow. At this point Percy slips into the room to applause. He pauses for dramatic effect, makes eye contact with Mary and begins:

“I know many of you wonder who could have written this horrific tale and why it was published anonymously. I see some of you suggest the work belongs to me. Indeed, you could say the work would not exist without my contribution. But to my shame, the only claim I remotely have to this work is inspiring the desperate loneliness that defines Frankenstein’s creature.  The author [voice breaking] of Frankenstein is of course, Mary Wollestonecraft Godwin. It is a work of singular genius and she is indebted to no one in its creation.”

This we know, as a matter of public record, is a lie. But as a movie-land mea culpa, it is a tour de force and Movie Percy executes it with every ounce of his formidable masculine charm. We are now at the moment of truth, are we not? How does this powerful, vindicated woman respond to her abuser? Slap him and leave the room? Throw a drink in his face? Sue him? Surely if we are all honest with ourselves we are rooting for her to give him the heave ho. But no. In this perverse fairy tale, the abused must take back her abuser. Because, what?  That’s true love!?!?! Whoa.

Percy’s confession produces the desired cinematic result. Here are the last words spoken in the movie:

MWG:        Percy?

PBS:           Mary?

MWG:        I really thought you’d left for good.

PBS:           I never promised you a life without misery. But I underestimated the depths of despair that I regret you had to endure.

MWG:        I lost everything to be with you Percy. We set out to create something wonderful. Something beautiful. But something volatile seethed within us. Behold, the monster, galvanized. [referring to herself]. But if I had not learned to fight through the anguish, I would not have found this voice again. My choices made me who I am and I regret nothing.

Kiss and fade to black.

ARE. YOU. KIDDING. ME. This? This is the moral of our fairy tale? Is this a role model for young women? If you are going to create a fairy tale which pays scant attention to the truth, why would you have your protagonist absolve her abuser in such an abject manner and take him back. This is not empowering. Surely a 21st Century happy-ending would see Movie Mary smack Movie Percy upside the head and walk out on him (or at least read the rat-bastard the riot act). That ending would at least have been consistent with the lies the movie is founded upon. That ending would have had me on my feet.  As it stands, the movie utterly fails to provide any motivation for Mary to take Percy back. That, ladies and gentlemen, is one helluva plot failure.

In addition to the wholesale rewriting and manipulation of history, errors abound, some of them egregious and some benign.  For example, one of the end title cards notes that Byron’s daughter died at the age of ten – this is not true, she died in 1822 at age 5.  For a mistake like this to have slipped by the people involved with the movie speaks volumes about their concern for the truth. The cavalier rearrangement of the truth to suit the movie’s plot line is characteristic of the movie.  It feels at times like the lives of Mary and Percy are reduced to the status of stage props to suit a theory held by the creative team of Mary Shelley. 

What makes this a truly bad movie is that is aspired to be so much more and fell so dramatically short.  Unlike a superficial and trite film like Ken Russell’s atrocious Gothic, Mary Shelley aspires to be taken very, very seriously.  And, sadly it will be taken seriously. I have read almost all of the reviews (almost all of them are tepid).  None of them dig below the surface. Mary Shelley has the potential to corrupt the way people think about Mary and Percy for a generation. And this is unfortunate because the movie has appropriated and distorted one of the most important and nuanced creative relationships that we know of, and renders it in a flat monochrome. The protagonists of this film should be role models for no one. This is not how Frankenstein was written; this is not how their lives were lived.

Had al-Mansour confined herself to recounting the actual facts surrounding the creation of Frankenstein, her movie would have been so much more compelling and satisfying, because the story would ring true. Mary Shelley could have offered a much better insight into the creative process involved in the writing of Frankenstein and two of the greatest literary talents in the English language. It could have told the truth, and the truth matters.

Good lord.  What did we expect? Explain to me why Booth, who is not the star, is seated in the center.  Oh wait...never mind.

The Shelley Conference - London, 15-16 September 2017

On Friday and Saturday the 15th and 16th of September, in London, the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at University of York, is presenting a two day conference that celebrates the writings of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The event is organized by two brilliant young young Romantics scholars: Anna Mercer and Harrie Neal.

I will be speaking at this conference.

Keynote speakers include some of the very top people in this field: Professor Nora Crook, Michael Neill and Kelvin Everest.  But there are also a host of panel discussions that look excellent.  I strongly recommend this conference to anyone who can make it.  The price is right and many of the topics are mouthwatering.

Some of the names that will be familiar to my readers include: Mark Summers who will talk about "Reclaiming Shelley's Radical Republicanism";  Anna Mercer on the extent to which Percy and Mary collaborated; Jacqueline Mulhallen on "1817 - a Philosophical Year for Shelley"; and Lynn Shepherd on "Fictionalizing the Shelleys". 

As for me, my topic will be the subject of "Romantic Resistance."  Shelley's writing affords modern political activists a veritable treasure trove of ideas and, as one of my readers put it, "Words of Power".  As we contemplate a world in which wealth is concentrated in ever fewer hands, a world in which superstition and religion are increasing their pernicious influence, a world in which tyrants are proliferating, we must see that our world is very much Shelley's. We have need of his guidance.  He was one of the greatest political thinkers of any age.

The event takes place at the Institute for English Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London Greater London WC1E 7HU (near to the British Museum).

Paul Foot understood this.  He persistently and passionately promoted Shelley's ideas to a generation of leftists whom he believed had lost their intellectual vigor as well as their connection to the problems of everyday people. 

Paul Foot

He offered this reason for restoring Shelley to prominence: modern activists need, he said in his famous speech to the 1981 London Marxism Conference,

"...a language which has some bite and zest and enthusiasm. That’s what we have to do and that’s why I think reading great revolutionary poets like Shelley is fundamentally important. It is filled with all kinds of images, all kinds of similes and metaphors - ways of saying things, different ways of saying things. The great masters of language really understood language and could use it like great musicians use the piano. These are things we need to soak up. Particularly when those great masters of language are in line with our politics."

But I think there is more, much more, than just language.  Timothy Webb once said of Shelley that “politics was probably the dominating concern of his life.” My presentation will demonstrate how Shelley’s politics, his philosophical skepticism and his theory of the imagination combine to offer some potent solutions for the troubles of the early 21st Century.  Given recent events, it is time that we cast a fresh eye on romantic, specifically Shelleyan, theories of resistance.

When Shelley declared in Chamonix that he was a “lover of humanity, a democrat and an atheist” he did so knowing his words would be widely read.  The “Chamonix Declaration”, as I refer to it, was a more revolutionary statement than has commonly been assumed.  I will offer a new interpretation of what Shelley meant by these words and the radical programme he proposed to upend the political and religious status quo.

Mont Blanc

To do this I will reopen the question of Shelley’s philosophical skepticism and the role it played in his theory of revolution.  For Shelley skepticismwas a critically important tool to undermine authority and attack truth claims. In an age of “alternative facts” and “fake news” the value of skepticism as a discipline and approach to tyranny is all too evident. Mere skepticism was not and still is not, enough, however, to effect permanent political change.

I will argue that Shelley therefore evolved a theory of the imagination, at a time almost exactly contemporaneous to the Chamonix Declaration, to provide a mechanism for permanent revolutionary change; the type of change that would avoid the backsliding into chaos and tyranny he witnessed in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

Shelley has answers that remain as relevant today as they were in his time; just how we communicate those answers to the general public will also be discussed. Shelley famously wrote, "Mont Blanc yet gleams on high: the power is there," he did not mean for us to think the power lay outside us.  It is actually within us all.  We have the power to change the world.  But we have to act.  Paul Foot understood this well when he said:

Of all the things about Shelley that really inspired people since his death, the thing that matters above all is his enthusiasm for the idea that the world can be changed. It shapes all his poetry. And when you come to read Ode to the West Wind where he writes about the “pestilence stricken multitudes” and the leaves being blown by the wind; then you understand that he sees the leaves as multitudes of people stricken by a pestilence. You begin to see his ideas, his enthusiasm and his love of life. He believed in life and he really felt that life is what mattered.  That life could and should be better than it is. Could be better and should be better. Could and should be changed. That was the thing he believed in most of all.

Please join me and others in London on September 14-15 for a wonderful excursion into the brilliant minds of Percy and Mary Shelley.

Shelley Square in Viareggio, Italy.

Pecksie and the Elf. What's in a Pet Name?

This is me with the Elf on my left and Pecksie on my right at the Bodmer Foundation in Geneva

Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, like almost everyone else on the planet, had pet names for one another. She was "Pecksie" and he was "Elf".  PB's use of the name "pecksie" has actually attracted controversy. To find out why, I dug into the circumstances in which these names were used and the fascinating origin of "pecksie". Buckle up!

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Many years ago, while reading Anne Mellor's biography of Mary Shelley, I encountered her opinion of Percy’s use of a pet name for Mary. The name was “pecksie”.  In Mellor’s opinion, this demonstrated “that he did not regard his wife altogether seriously as an author”.  Cue my head exploding.

The pet name had appeared twice in the margins of a manuscript copy of Frankenstein that PB and MW had been jointly working on.  Nora Crook, one of the foremost Shelley scholars alive today, supplies the details here:

“On the manuscript of Frankenstein are two comments by P. B. Shelley which have become infamous. Writing quickly, Mary Shelley had left off the first syllable of 'enigmatic' and ended up with 'igmmatic' (she was prone to double the letter 'm' while her husband had an ie/ei problem with words like 'viel' and 'thier'). Later she confused Roger Bacon with Francis Bacon. He scribbled 'o you pretty Pecksie' beside the first and 'no sweet Pecksie—twas friar Bacon the discoverer of gunpowder.'”

Most scholars, but not all, looked upon these pet names and comments as benign, even endearing. But remarks such as Mellor's were enough to fuel a controversy that persists to this day.

At this point I think we need to pause and give our heads a collective shake.  Are we really having this conversation?  Hopefully not.  Nora Crook had, I think, a similar reaction and produced a brilliant, accessible, and sensitive essay on PB and MW's relationship, using the pet names as a jumping off point. She begins:

“Whether, however, a young woman who at nineteen could read Tacitus in the original would have felt intimidated by this may be doubted, especially one who called her spouse her 'Sweet Elf'.  Between Pecksie and Elf, in terms of diminution, there is, prima facie, little to choose, any more than there is between the protagonists in the Valentine's Day newspaper advertisements where Snuggle Bum pledges love to Fluffkins. Intimate pet-names are almost invariably embarrassing to read. We do not know enough about the contexts in which these arose, whether they pleased or annoyed at the time, whether 'Pecksie' and 'Elf' were pleasant banterings or counters in underground hostilities. It would seem wise to suspend judgement and use them as evidence neither of an unproblematically equal relationship nor of one in which Mary Shelley was subordinated.”

I might also add here that the “young woman” in question was the daughter of no less a personage that Mary Wollstonecraft (the author of Vindication of the Rights of Women) and William Godwin (the author of Political Justice).  Intellectually, she was a match for PB. 

Even more interesting is the fact that, as Anna Mercer demonstrates, in the Shelley household, the term “pecksie” was applied by each partner to the other!  For example, in a letter from 1815, Mary asked Percy to return one of her possessions, if he fails to do so, Mary tells him fondly, "I shall think it un-Pecksie of you".

This suggests that “pecksie” might have been more than just a pet name and rather a term that represented a constellated set of attributes. We might therefore be interested in what exactly it means to be “pecksie”; what behaviours or patterns of conduct fall into the category of “pecksian”? I think I am now in the position to shed some light on this!

So, let’s look at the origin of the term "pecksie". We begin again with Nora Crook suggests that it is "the name of the industrious bird in Mrs. Sherwood's The History of the Robins".  Mary Martha Sherwood was an incredibly influential, best selling writer of children's literature in 18th and 19th century England.  She was also an inveterate christian evangelist and proselytizer – which makes her books unlikely source material for the atheistical PB Shelley.  But is Sherwood the source of the nickname? No.

In this, Crooks is unfortunately mistaken.  The author of The History of Robins is not Sherwood, it was in fact Sarah Trimmer as Judith Barbour has pointed out.

And the correct spelling of the little robin’s name is in fact “Pecksy” and not "pecksie".  Trimmer was in her own right an extremely famous children's author. Originally titled Fabulous Histories, Trimmers' book was continuously in print and a favourite of parents and children alike until after the First World War. After 1820, the book came to be known as The History of Robins or more simply, The Robins.

Born in 1741, Sarah Trimmer’s first book did not appear until 1780.  Fabulous Histories, the book which established her reputation, was published in 1786. Today she is perhaps most famous for her periodical that systematically categorized and reviewed children’s literature: The Guardian of Education.  The Hockcliffe Project is a remarkable cache of early children's literature which has recently been digitized.  According to the uncredited author of the introductory essay on Sarah Trimmer:

“Trimmer's purpose in her Fabulous Histories was to teach children to behave with Christian benevolence towards all animals. Most of the book is spent inveighing against children and adults who torment animals, and also those who fall into the 'contrary fault of immoderate tenderness to them'. Both were common themes in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century children's (and adult's) literature. So too was the more overarching purpose of teaching the reader his or her place in the grand hierarchy of the universe. The reader learns that humans are at the head of creation, with power over all other living beings. Though this gives them the right to kill other animals and plants for food and to protect themselves, they may not without reason kill or hurt any creature without transgressing against the 'divine principle of UNIVERSAL BENEVOLENCE'.”

Trimmer aimed to teach these lessons by presenting the reader with two families, one of humans and one of robins. Both families, individually and through their interaction, are a microcosm of society. The reader is meant vicariously to learn the proprieties of family life and of behaviour to other parts of God's creation through the education by their respective parents of the two human children, Harriet and Frederick, and the four robin nestlings, Robin, Dicky, Flapsy and Pecksy. The human family, the Bensons, is fairly typical of the usual inhabitants of moral tales. They are affluent and landed. There is a largely absent father, and a loving if somewhat stern and pontificating mother. And there is one obedient and thoughtful child, Harriet, and another, younger sibling, more imprudent and thoughtless, but good at heart and responsive to a painstaking education. Though the family of robins was constructed on similar lines, with doting but stern parents and a brood which ranged from the docile and considerate Pecksy to the rash and conceited Robin, is was surely their presence which secured the book's lasting popularity.

Which brings us to the question of what it might mean in the Shelley household to be “pecksian”.  I do not want to over play this hand, but if it is true that both PB and MW aspired to behave in a manner consistent with a set of "pecksian traits" and reproved one another when they failed to, it is worth while trying to understand what those traits were.  It could tell us a surprising amount about the two of them.

Nora Crook would have us believe such behavior would be characterized as “industriousness”.  However, having read a fair portion of Fabulous Histories, I think Pecksy’s personality is typified by a very different set of personality traits: she is obedient, amiable, self-effacing, considerate of others, self-sacrificing and a peacemaker.

The four nestlings from Fabulous Histories: Dicky, Pecksy, Flapsy, and Robin.

While the other three baby robins are continually in trouble, Pecksy distinguishes herself by her serene and sweet behavior. She is almost something of a “goody two shoes” who “wished to comply with every desire of her dear parents”.  Perhaps not surprisingly, this makes Pecksy somewhat unpopular with her siblings, who grow quite jealous of her and are often reproved for this by their mother. For example:

“A few days after a fresh disturbance took place, all the little robins except Pecksy, in turn committed some fault or other for which they were occasionally punished; but she was of so amiable a disposition that it was her constant study to act with propriety, and avoid giving offence; on which account she was justly treated by her parents with distinguished kindness. This excited the envy of the others, and they joined together to treat her ill, giving her the title of the “pet”, saying that they made no doubt their father and mother would reserve the nicest morsels for their darling.”

Somewhat later we find this exchange between Pecksy and her mother after an incident which led to her being tormented by her siblings:

“‘I have been unhappy my dear mother’, said she, ‘but not so much as you suppose; and I am ready to believe that my dear brothers and sister were not in earnest in the severe things they said of me -- perhaps they only meant to try my affection. I now entreat them to believe, that I would willingly resign the greatest pleasure in life, could I by that means increase their happiness; and so far from wishing for the nicest morsel, I would content myself with the humblest fare rather than any of them should be disappointed.’ This tender speech had its desired effect it recalled those sentiments of love which envy and jealousy had for a time banished; all the nestlings acknowledged their faults, their mother forgave them and a perfect reconciliation took place to the great joy of Pecksy, and indeed of all parties”.

Later, Pecksy brings her mother a spider to eat. Her mother approvingly remarks, “How happy would families be if everyone like you, my dear, Pecksy consulted the welfare of the rest instead of turning their whole attention to their own interest”.

The day eventually arrives when the nestlings must learn how to fly.  Several misadventures occur, notably to the headstrong Robin, but not to the observant Pecksy:

"Pecksy was fully prepared for her flight, for she had attentively observed the instruction given to the others and also their errors; she therefore kept the happy medium betwixt self-conceit and timidity indulging that moderated emulation which ought to possess every young heart; and resolving that neither her inferiors nor equals should soar above her she sprang from the ground and with a steadiness and agility wonderful for her first essay, followed her mother to the nest who instead of stopping to rest herself there flew to a neighbouring tree, that she might be at hand to assist Robin should he repent of his folly;…”

Readers familiar with the values both PB and MW came to cherish and extol in their poetry and prose will not be surprised, I think, to see in the character of the little robin called Pecsky an intimation of what was to come.  That they themselves strove to behave in a “pecksian” manner and reproved one another when they failed (“I shall think it un-Pecksie of you.”) also tells us something about the value system operating in their home.

And can we go so far as to say PB's closing lines to Prometheus Unbound are pecksian?

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
   To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
   Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

Prometheus Unbound, Act IV, ll 570-578

Too far??  Okay....maybe a wee bit! But you smiled...I know you did.

And there is another value system at operation here: the humane treatment of animals.  Trimmer's book was subtitled "The Instruction of Children Respecting Their Treatment of Animals".  While Trimmer was no vegetarian (she approved of the killing of animals as long as it was done "not without reason") she nonetheless sought to inculcate in children a benevolence toward animals.  Fabulous Histories is an excoriating morality tale in which those who torment animals are harshly punished. For me it is easy to trace a developmental arc for a sensitive child such as PB: from values such as these encountered in childhood, to the full blown vegetarianism of his adulthood.

To me, investigations like this are an eternal delight.  We start with an uncharitable aspersion cast at our poet by a critic – all because he used a pet name for his lover. We are led to a delightful essay by a leading Shelley scholar and from thence first to the wrong book, but then to the right one.  Along the way, we discover two largely forgotten giants of early children’s literature - Mary Sherwood and Sarah Trimmer. We finally arrive at a little robin – a nestling who embodied a set of character traits that came to be valued and extolled by two of the great writers of the 19th Century.  Not a bad excursion. Tell me that wasn't fun!! All aboard for the next one?

1816: The Message of Diodati

Percy and Mary Shelley joined Byron in Geneva for part of the summer of 1816.  They spent much of their time at Byron's residence: the Villa Diodati. It was there that some of the most important ideas of the Romantic era were conceived. Can we distill one of the core principles? I think we can. Join me for the first installment of my exploration the life and times of the extraordinary Percy Bysshe Shelley.  Episode One - 1816: The Message Of Diodati

Note to viewers.  This episode of The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley is a "pilot". It may be a little rough around the edges, but based on what I learned from its production, I can guarantee better production values going forward.  Please subscribe to my channel and leave me your comments.  If you have an idea for an episode, I would love to hear it.  Thank you and enjoy!

My Father's Shelley; a Tale of Two Shelleys

When I was very little, my father, dissatisfied with the state of my education, decided that he would offer Sunday evening lectures in his library.  And so each Sunday, at exactly the time Bonanza was on, my brother and I would be herded into the library, moaning and complaining.  A chalk board was produced.  And the entire history of the Greek and Roman world played out, slowly, labouriously, on that chalk board over the ensuing years...or at least it seemed like years. 

In addition to ancient history, recent poetry was assigned for memorization. When I say recent, I mean poetry from the 18th and 19th centuries.  To this day, I have a little volume of around 20 poems that he gave to me – all specially selected.  It was quite a cross-section.

We would actually be QUIZZED on poetry and history!!  As if school wasn't bad enough. There were, however, incentives.  I think we got 50 cents for every poem we could successfully recite.  I recently found a little postcard that he sent home from one of his travels.  It ended with a gentle admonition to make sure I had something new memorized for him upon his return.  I discovered one of the quizzes years after his death.  Have a look...how well would a 10-12 year old do today? -- how well would a university student do?!

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Now as much as this grated on me when i was young, it did engender in me a love for classical culture and poetry.  It also led to some amusing disagreements over the years.  My father was deeply aggrieved, for example, that I failed to enshrine Pope's translation of the Iliad as the only translation worth having.  On one visit to our home, he stood at my bookshelves gazing with open dismay on my collection of translations of the Iliad - at that time well over a dozen.  He thought this was perverse.  My wife ventured the thought that it must be wonderful to see a seed that he had planted grow to such fruition - but he was having none of it; I had sinned against Pope, the God of the Iliad. Weeks later, the issue was still occupying his thoughts. At a lunch with my brother, agitated, he put down his knife and fork and asked my brother what was wrong with me.  Alexander Pope had been good enough for him (and by extension the entire world), why did I feel the need to venture afield and embrace these other pretenders: "Ross, what is wrong with Alexander Pope?" he lamented in his highly theatrical voice. What indeed?!

Later in life he also came down firmly on the side of the Greeks.  Once, my brother gave him a book on the emperor Diocletian.  Dad promptly returned the book unread, bitterly remarking upon Ross' and my putative adherence to Roman civilization - "The Romans," he remarked dismissively, "were nothing but bully-boys." But I digress.

As I grew up, like most boys, I actively sought out things to like and do that distanced me from my father.  For example, I spent most of my high school years studying maths – a subject matter as alien to my father as any subject on earth.  Then I went to University to be a geologist.  Disaster.  I finally dropped out and worked for a year or so, only to return to University where I ended up studying English Literature.  I am not sure what it was that led me to Shelley.  But something did…. perhaps the awful shadow of some unseen power.  I went deeper and deeper: first an undergraduate thesis and then an MA thesis (undertaken under the supervision of that great Shelley scholar, Milton Wilson).  I even started out on a PhD before I came to my senses. 

Anyway, to the point.  In those days, when one’s thesis was completed, they would bind up a couple of copies for you.  Now by this point in my life, I have to confess, somewhat ruefully, that my father and I were barely on speaking terms.  Nonetheless, like most young men, I still craved his approval.  So, thesis in hand, I traveled to the family homestead to see my parents.  Burning a hole in my briefcase was a copy of my thesis: “Prometheus Unbound and the Problem of Opposites.” (Hopefully soon to be published in this space!)

He was in his library.  After spending sometime in the kitchen with my mum, I screwed up my nerve and knocked on the door. He called me in.  As always, we had to stand at the door waiting for him to finish whatever thought it was that he was in the midst of jotting down.  He was ALWAYS writing, furiously, on a clipboard.  Finally, after what seemed an eternity, he looked up and said hello. 

I explained what I was doing.  I presented him with the thesis.  And then something truly surreal happened; something that seared itself into my memory.  Without really looking at it, he smiled absently, congratulated me and turned to walk toward his library shelves with my thesis.  He casually remarked over his shoulder, “Thank you, Gra, I shall put it with the rest of my Shelleyana.” 

Time slowed to a stop. I remember struggling to understand what that could mean.  But my gaze followed his hands, up, up, up to the higher shelves.  And there it was…sweet mother of god…maybe 10 linear FEET of books on Shelley. 

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Approximately 1/3 of my father's "Shelleyana". Most of these books are first editions.

I did not realize at the time, but this collection also happened to include a first edition of “The Revolt of Islam” and the four volume 1839 Collected Works that Mary put out.  I kid you not. In fact, it turned out that almost everything up there on those shelves was a first edition of some sort. It was like an Aladdin’s cave specially built for Shelley scholars.  People like ME…people like…oh my god…my DAD!! Click on the image to see the slide show:

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Inscription to my brother in Hutchinson's Collected Works of Shelley

Now in retrospect, none of this should have really been a big surprise.  For starters, my brother’s middle name is Shelley (I am not sure he appreciated the choice as a boy).  Dad had given him a copy Hutchinson's "The Complete Poetical Works of Shelley" (a gorgeous single volume, with gilt edged paper and blue calf skin binding) in 1956...AT AGE ONE!!  It bore an inscription to my brother: 'The secret strength of things / Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome / Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!.'

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My markups to Hutchinson's "Poetical Works of Shelley" -- given to my brother at age 1.

I knew this because it was this volume I had used throughout my entire course of Shelley studies.

And then, finally there was that other piece of evidence: there had been a Shelley poem in that little black volume I was given when I was around 10.  As it turned out, Shelley was my father’s favourite poet.  The man I barely spoke to, the man I had spent most of my life distancing myself from, was -- just like me -- devoted to Percy Bysshe Shelley. This was a sobering and disquieting revelation. As I reflect back on this, what I wonder is this: was it THAT poem? Was it Shelley's poem, the one he gave me to memorize, that planted the seed which flowered so many years later?

Well, before we get to that, I am afraid to say that it actually gets weirder.  As I stood there, my jaw working, no sounds coming out of my mouth, he turned back to me and asked me what I meant by the “Problem of Opposites.”  He asked if this was a reference to Jung, by any chance.  By this time I knew where this is going -- there was an inevitability to it; there was an inexorable fate at work.  He then gestured vaguely across the room at another shelf load of books.  Yes, that’s right: The Complete Works of C.G. Jung.  He asked if I would like to borrow any of them if I was continuing my studies on Jung and Shelley.

Because, of COURSE, that is EXACTLY what I had spent the better part of four years doing - applying Jungian theory to the study of Shelley's poetry.

I should point out that my approach to Shelley was so arcane and unique that my thesis supervisor, Milton Wilson, had a hard time drumming up professors to quiz me. It was niche to say the least.  Yet somehow I had stumbled onto a course of study that duplicated two of my father's keenest interests.

Retreating from the library in some bemusement, I walked into the kitchen and my poor mother looked at me in dismay.  “You look awful,” she said, “You look like you just saw a ghost. What happened in there?” Good question.

I can laugh about all of this now.  But then?  Not so much.  I was young and desperate to be different. 

As I sat at the kitchen table trying to sort through my emotions, I thought, “Well, at least, I now have something to talk to him about”.  And so a desultory communication began.  But this too soon turned into almost open warfare.  My father’s Shelley, as I VERY quickly discovered, was very different from mine. He loved the lyric poet.  He loved the Victorian version. He loved Mary’s sanitized version.  In a weird way he bought into Mathew Arnold's caricature of Shelley (“a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating his wings in a luminous void in vain.”) – and loved him the more for it.  He hated the idea that Shelley was a revolutionary.  I have an article coming on the truly remarkable evolution of Shelley's reputation - it is unlike almost another poet in history. Well, my father loved the Victorian version of Shelley, the version which led Engles to remark:

"Shelley, the genius, the prophet, finds most of [his] readers in the proletariat; the bourgeouise own the castrated editions, the family editions cut down in accordance with the hypocritical morality of today”

I once gave him a copy of Foot’s “The Red Shelley”.  This was not well received.  He hated the idea that Shelley was anything but the child-like construct of Francis Thompson:

“Enchanted child, born into a world unchildlike; spoiled darling of Nature, playmate of her elemental daughters; "pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift," laired amidst the burning fastnesses of his own fervid mind; bold foot along the verges of precipitous dream; light leaper from crag to crag of inaccessible fancies; towering Genius, whose soul rose like a ladder between heaven and earth with the angels of song ascending and descending it;--he is shrunken into the little vessel of death, and sealed with the unshatterable seal of doom, and cast down deep below the rolling tides of Time.”

We had heated arguments about this.

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My father's marginalia in Santayana's short monograph on Shelley. "not a communist." Almost every statement Santayana makes on this page is completely incorrect,

As recently as a few months back, I was browsing through his library (he has been dead these past 9 years, but I have kept most of the library together – it is a reflection of his vast and complex mind).  I pulled a slim volume from the Shelley shelves; one I had not looked at before.  It was George Santayana’s short monograph on Shelley,  "Shelley: Or the Poetic Value of Revolutionary Principles".  My father was a fierce marker-up of books – another thing he seems to have bequeathed to me. I like flipping through his books to see what he underlined and what his comments were.  I often get into arguments with his comments, writing my own in beside his.  Anyway, half way through the essay, in one of the margins, were the words , “NOT A COMMUNIST” in a bold, firm, triumphant hand. 

Now, my father was a big time anti-communist; he spent most of his life fighting the cold war and then refighting it after it was over.  One of his great fears was that Shelley was some sort of communist!  And of course, this EXACTLY what the communists thought he was! Marx:

"The real difference between Byron and Shelley is this: those who understand and love them rejoice that Byron died at 36, because if he had lived he would have become a reactionary bourgeois; they grieve that Shelley died at 29, because he was essentially a revolutionist and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism."

But there, for my father, in the calming words of the great George Santayana, was solace and respite: no, Shelley was NOT a communist.  Phew. 

There can never be a resolution between these two visions of Shelley.  My father's Shelley was a Shelley built on false foundations, willful misreadings and wishful thinking. He, and others like him, created a mythical version, so far removed from the historical Shelley that it is scarcely believable. The way in which this awful perversion of history took place is concisely covered in Michael Gamer's article, “Shelley Incinerated.” (The Wordsworth Circle 39.1/2 (2008): 23-26.) I intend to canvas the issues more fully at a future date.

It saddens me that our two Shelleys were separated by an unbridgeable chasm. But I have to always remember that my Shelley could never have come to life had not my father, in a very different time and place, conceived his own Shelley, and fallen in love with him and endeavoured to convey that passion to his children.

But how about that poem? The poem that may have planted the seed of which I was utterly unaware.  What exactly was the Shelley poem in that little binder he had given to me at age 9 or 10? I know it by heart to this very day.  It was this:.

Arethusa arose
From her couch of snows
In the Acroceraunian mountains,--
From cloud and from crag,
With many a jag,
Shepherding her bright fountains.
She leapt down the rocks,
With her rainbow locks
Streaming among the streams;--
Her steps paved with green
The downward ravine
Which slopes to the western gleams;
And gliding and springing
She went, ever singing,
In murmurs as soft as sleep;
The Earth seemed to love her,
And Heaven smiled above her,
As she lingered towards the deep.

II.
Then Alpheus bold,
On his glacier cold,
With his trident the mountains strook;
And opened a chasm
In the rocks—with the spasm
All Erymanthus shook.
And the black south wind
It unsealed behind
The urns of the silent snow,
And earthquake and thunder
Did rend in sunder
The bars of the springs below.
And the beard and the hair
Of the River-god were
Seen through the torrent’s sweep,
As he followed the light
Of the fleet nymph’s flight
To the brink of the Dorian deep.

III.
'Oh, save me! Oh, guide me!
And bid the deep hide me,
For he grasps me now by the hair!'
The loud Ocean heard,
To its blue depth stirred,
And divided at her prayer;
And under the water
The Earth’s white daughter
Fled like a sunny beam;
Behind her descended
Her billows, unblended
With the brackish Dorian stream:—
Like a gloomy stain
On the emerald main
Alpheus rushed behind,--
As an eagle pursuing
A dove to its ruin
Down the streams of the cloudy wind.

IV.
Under the bowers
Where the Ocean Powers
Sit on their pearled thrones;
Through the coral woods
Of the weltering floods,
Over heaps of unvalued stones;
Through the dim beams
Which amid the streams
Weave a network of coloured light;
And under the caves,
Where the shadowy waves
Are as green as the forest’s night:--
Outspeeding the shark,
And the sword-fish dark,
Under the Ocean’s foam,
And up through the rifts
Of the mountain clifts
They passed to their Dorian home.

V.
And now from their fountains
In Enna’s mountains,
Down one vale where the morning basks,
Like friends once parted
Grown single-hearted,
They ply their watery tasks.
At sunrise they leap
From their cradles steep
In the cave of the shelving hill;
At noontide they flow
Through the woods below
And the meadows of asphodel;
And at night they sleep
In the rocking deep
Beneath the Ortygian shore;--
Like spirits that lie
In the azure sky
When they love but live no more.

Well chosen, Dad, well chosen; and thank you for this great gift (thanks also for not giving ME the middle name, Shelley!).