Shelley in a Revolutionary World

Ciarán O’Rourke

The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley welcomes back Ciarán O’Rourke. He last wrote for the site in late January about Paul O’Brien’s new edition of Redwords collection of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s verse and prose from the year 1819: Shelley’s Revolutionary Year. The collection was introduced (and I assume curated) by the great crusading journalist and Shelley devotee, Paul Foot. You can read his brilliant speech about Shelley to the London Marxism Conference of 1981 here.

Ciarán is a thrilling young poet and Marxist from Ireland. He is the founder and editor of the online archive Island's Edge Poetry which features interviews with contemporary Irish poets about their work and craft. His first collection, The Buried Breath, is available from Irish Pages Press. He is based in Dublin, Ireland (www.ragpickerpoetry.net/). I can personally attest to the vibrancy and beauty of his poetry. After sampling some verse on line, I immediately ordered The Buried Breath.

"Ciarán was born in 1991 and took a degree English and History at Trinity College, Dublin. He received a Masters in English and American Studies from Oxford in 2014, and completed his PhD on William Carlos Williams at his alma mater in Dublin in 2019. A winner of the Lena Maguire/Cúirt New Irish Writing Award, the Westport Poetry Prize, and the Fish Poetry Prize, he is a widely published poet. His first collection, The Buried Breath, is available from Irish Pages Press

Ciarán’s prose is as crisp and insightful as his poetry. And I love the way that a new generation of revolutionary-minded writers are embracing Percy Shelley. Much like the battlers of previous generations, for example Paul Foot, Eleanor Marx and Pauline Newman, the writers I have featured embrace the revolutionary spirit of PBS and appreciate the full extent of his modern relevance. Writers like like Ciarán; Paul Bond (read his excellent article, “The Peterloo Massacre and Percy Shelley”); Arielle Cottingham (read my article about her poetry, “Let Liberty Lead Us”); and Mark Summer (read “Revolutionary Politics and the Poet”).

Another real world example of how Shelley’s rhetoric and revolutionary sentiment has been harnessed by members of the public is the recent viral thread on Twitter authored by @AshaRangappa. Asha is a Senior Lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and a former Associate Dean at Yale Law School. Prior to her current position, Asha served as a Special Agent in the New York Division of the FBI, specializing in counterintelligence investigations. Asha has been a contributor on numerous television and radio outlets, and is now a legal and national security analyst for CNN. Her thread, which you can find unspooled here, began in this way:

It is important to take note and be prepared for the unprecedented actions Trump says he intends to take after the election. But it is also important not to allow his *wishful* reality to *become the reality.

But things got really interesting for we Shelleyans when she reached her 10th tweet. She wrote,

To close, some stanzas from Percy Bysshe Shelley's "The Masque of Anarchy," which you should read in its entirety, whenever you need to refocus.

Asha then proceeded to quote 10 full stanzas from the poem. Fabulous. There were tens of thousands of retweets and comments, many of them referring specifically to Shelley’s poem, many making references to Ozymandias. It is easy to underestimate the burst of Shelleyan-awareness among the general public that this caused. This is Shelley in action; Shelley at the barricades; Shelley redux.

Paul Foot certainly knew exactly why Shelley could be so easily recruited to a new generation’s fight for liberty and equality:

“Of all the things about Shelley that really inspired people…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.”

Ciarán succinctly sums it up in his own way rather poetically:

“There’s something in the Romanticism of Percy Shelley that seems always on the verge of breaking down the gate-posts of history and gusting into our world….His work is subversive, and multiplicitous: often notable not so much for its resemblance to that of his immediate fellows and forebears, than for its ease of access to revolutionary fervours, past and future. Shelley prefigured radicals, and listened to the crowd.”

Precisely. In our quest to interest a new generation of readers in a poet such as Shelley, it is best to listen to exactly how he is being perceived. How are his words, his beliefs being put into action. In fact, I think we would be better off if we reclassified Shelley as a radical philosopher who happened to write some of his ideas down in poetry. He was probably the most coherent and sophisticated English philosopher of his times. If we want to save departments of English, and to ensure that professors are hired to teach romanticism, let’s ask what it is from that era that speaks to our world now. It is not esoterics…it is revolutionary fervour, as Ciarán puts it - and Shelley has that in buckets. So does, Ciarán O’Rourke.

Ciarán’s article is filled with surprising and delightful revelations about James Connolly (strongly influenced by Shelley), Rosa Luxemberg. and Thomas Kinsella. Perhaps most astonishing was his discussion of the Industrial Workers of the World, which, in the words of Pluto Press,

was a union unlike any other. Founded in 1905 in Chicago, it rapidly gained members across the world thanks to its revolutionary, internationalist outlook. By using powerful organising methods including direct-action and direct-democracy, it put power in the hands of workers. This philosophy is labeled as ‘revolutionary industrial unionism’ and the members called, affectionately, ‘Wobblies’.

If Ciarán whets your appetite to learn more about the Wobblies (as he did mine!), check out “Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW”, edited by Peter Cole, David Struthers, Kenyon Zimmer.

Ciarán also offers one the the best explanations I have ever read of what Shelley meant when he wrote, “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

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Percy Shelley in a Revolutionary World

by Ciarán O’Rourke.

There’s something in the Romanticism of Percy Shelley that seems always on the verge of breaking down the gate-posts of history and gusting into our world. The archival shackles in which the academic humanities prefer to keep their spectral versifiers and yawping hobgoblins enclosed seem especially frangible and ill-suited to the reluctant baronet’s “sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.” Shelley is present in our efforts to meet and counteract the predicaments of our moment (from the mendacious mis-rule of government elites to the devastation of natural habitats for profit) in a way that Wordsworth, scrummily in awe of Nature and his own perception of it, is not – or at least, not so fluently.

Shelley’s writings are world-spanning in their scope of interest, and yet also vividly individual – expressing an apparently instinctive disdain for established mores alongside a faith (shared by few of his contemporaries with equal intensity) in the power of downtrodden communities to shape a common future. “Sow seed—but let no tyrant reap”, he urged, “Find wealth—let no imposter heap: / Weave robes—let not the idle wear: / Forge arms—in your defence to bear.” His work is subversive, and multiplicitous: often notable not so much for its resemblance to that of his immediate fellows and forebears, than for its ease of access to revolutionary fervours, past and future. Shelley prefigured radicals, and listened to the crowd.

Rosa Luxemberg

Relentless, clear-eyed, valuably capable of both rebel joy and analytical despair, Rosa Luxemburg’s life shares something of this same quality, flashing across our human skies like a burning comet-trail of light and fire. Her incisive political praxis – with its insistence on mass, proletarian democracy over the self-sustaining party committee as the necessary engine of social change – was grounded in what can be described, without piety or exaggeration, as a dynamic sense of oneness with the world about her. In late 1917, incarcerated for her agitation and opposition to the First World War, she wrote to Sonia Liebknecht of the activity in the prison yard, including the arrival of a cart-load of supplies, dragged by a team of buffaloes. “They are black, and have large, soft eyes”, she told her friend, in a passage worth quoting at length:

[They] are war trophies from Romania [....] Unsparingly exploited, yoked to heavy loads, they are soon worked to death. The other day a lorry came laden with sacks, so overladen indeed that the buffaloes were unable to drag it across the threshold of the gate. The soldier-driver, a brute of a fellow, belaboured the poor beasts so savagely with the butt end of his whip [….] At length the buffaloes succeeded in drawing the load over the obstacle, but one of them was bleeding. You know their hide is proverbial for its thickness and toughness, but it had been torn. While the lorry was being unloaded, the beasts, which were utterly exhausted, stood perfectly still. The one that was bleeding had an expression on its black face and in its soft black eyes like that of a weeping child – one that has been severely thrashed and does not know why, nor how to escape from the torment of ill-treatment. I stood in front of the team; the beast looked at me: the tears welled from my own eyes [....] Far distant, lost for ever, were the green, lush meadows of Romania. How different there the light of the sun, the breath of the wind; how different there the song of the birds and the melodious call of the herdsman. Instead, the hideous street, the foetid stable, the rank hay mingled with mouldy straw, the strange and terrible men – blow upon blow, and blood running from gaping wounds. Poor wretch, I am as powerless, as dumb, as yourself; I am at one with you in my pain, my weakness, and my longing.

There’s arguably more poetry in this single letter by Red Rosa than many writers manage in an entire lifetime (of course, Shelley himself believed that the “distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error”). The passage also sheds light on her socialism, so feared and demonised by the state that eventually killed her, as one expression of what was evidently a passionate, deep-rooted love for life and the living, akin, perhaps, to that force described so memorably by Shelley: “a powerful attraction towards all we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when [we] seek to awaken in all things [a] community with what we experience within ourselves.” You can read an engaging account of Red Rosa’s life in Kate Evans graphic biography: Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg.

Certainly, the Shelleyan spirit (or perhaps, that quickening world-spirit to which Shelley proved himself so attuned) was pulsingly alive in Red Rosa’s time. Across the United States, troubadours and labour organisers associated with the Industrial Workers of the World – founded in 1905 by such agitational luminaries as “Big Bill” (William) Haywood and “Mother” (Mary Harris) Jones – shook the foundations of American capitalism with their militant, often carnivalesque strikes and free-speech campaigns, earning them and others vicious reprisals in the form of state-sanctioned murders, beatings, and deportations. “There is but one bargain that the IWW will make with the employing class”, said one member, “complete surrender of all control of industry to the organized workers.” The world over, from Mexico to Russia, peasant and industrial populations mounted daring, sometimes epoch-changing attempts to seize control of the means of subsistence and production, in incendiary movements sparked and fuelled, in many cases, by the self-activity of women.

James Connolly, later executed for his role in Dublin’s “Easter Rising” against British imperialism in 1916, expressed the revolutionary promise of these disparate global insurgencies concisely, in his rebuttal to placid reformists and capitalist overlords alike:

Some men, faint-hearted, ever seek

Our programme to retouch,

And will insist, whene’er they speak

That we demand too much.

’Tis passing strange, yet I declare

Such statements give me mirth,

For our demands most moderate are,

We only want the earth.

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“Fighting and Hoping”, James Connolly

Connolly in fact drew on Shelley’s work repeatedly for inspiration in the ferment of radical politics into which he plunged his time and energy. “The freedom of the worker is freedom to sell himself into slavery to the class which controls his supply of food”, he wrote in one essay, “he is free as the wayside traveller is free of clothes after highwaymen have robbed and stripped him”, amplifying the thunderous music of this perception with a quote from the forerunning English agitator:

What is Freedom? Ye can tell

That which slavery is too well,

For its very name has grown

To an echo of your own.

’Tis to work, and have such pay,

As just keeps life, from day to day,

In your limbs as in a cell

For the tyrants’ use to dwell.

One of Connolly’s most powerful legacies today is his belief in the necessity of a world free of landlordism, bossery, and royalty; his dream of a nation ruled and embodied by a risen people. Addressing himself to “tenant farmers”, “wage workers”, and “to every one of the toiling millions upon whose misery the outwardly-splendid fabric of our modern civilisation is reared”, Connolly declared himself on the side of the Irish masses, with an eloquence that still resounds:

[The] Republic I would wish our fellow-countrymen to set before them as their ideal should be of such a character that the mere mention of its name would at all times serve as a beacon-light to the oppressed of every land, at all times holding forth promise of freedom and plenteousness as the reward of their efforts on its behalf… a rallying point for the disaffected, a haven for the oppressed, a point of departure for the Socialist, enthusiastic in the cause of human freedom.

If Connolly had a gift for synthesising the various strains of domestic disquiet and worldly revolt, casting distinctively Irish hopes in the language of propulsive, proletarian internationalism, he also wrote and spoke with poetic fire, carrying a Shelleyan rhetoric of visionary illumination and material change into the modern day. After all, for Shelley, likewise, Ireland had stood as“the isle on whose green shores I have desired to see the standard of liberty erected, a flag of fire, a beacon at which the world shall light the torch of Freedom!”

Importantly, and as is true of his work in general, Shelley was not concocting a mysticism of social betterment here: his political utopianism stemmed from a full-blooded apprehension of very real, if temporarily buried, revolutionary currents in his time. When he wrote these lines, he was conscious of the Irish insurrections against colonial hegemony that had been crushed in 1798 and 1803, among other global rebellions, having in fact befriended more than a few former members of the underground organisations, the United Irish Men and Women, on his sojourn to Dublin after being expelled from Oxford in 1811. If Shelley conceived of poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, a great part and purpose of this role lay, for him, in the capacity to perceive and express the radical aspirations of the toiling “many” (in Ireland and farther afield).

“The Mask of Anarchy”, of course, (the source of that ringing recognition, “ye are many – they are few”) has itself been riffed and iterated, adopted and embraced, at innumerable moments in the human story: by the garment workers striking for better pay in New York in 1909, for example, as well as the so-called Corbynistas, who briefly swept Britain’s electoral sphere with a message of social democratic empowerment in 2017. In a clear affirmation of Shelley’s astuteness of political portraiture (of “Murder” with “a mask like Castlereagh”) and perennially lucid understanding of power and its abuse in the modern world, the poem also served as a kind of originary prototype for Thomas Kinsella’s visceral accusation of empire, “Butcher’s Dozen”.

The latter was composed in the aftermath of the British army’s killing of fourteen Northern Irish civil rights marchers in Derry in 1972, an atrocity that echoed in chilling detail the act of violent class warfare against peaceful demonstrators denounced by Shelley in 1819, the Peterloo Massacre. “I went with Anger at my heel / Through Bogside of the bitter zeal”, Thomas Kinsella writes, “a murder smell that stung and stained” still lingering in the streets. Echoing the rhythm of Shelley’s verse, the poem unfurls with a slow burn of fury, as the imagined ghosts of victims speak:

The thing is rapidly arranged:

Where's the law that can't be changed?

The news is out. The troops were kind.

Impartial justice has to find

We'd be alive and well today

If we had let them have their way.

Yet England, even as you lie,

You give the facts that you deny.

Spread the lie with all your power

– All that's left; it's turning sour.

Friend and stranger, bride and brother,

Son and sister, father, mother,

All not blinded by your smoke,

Photographers who caught your stroke,

The priests that blessed our bodies, spoke

And wagged our blood in the world's face.

The truth will out, to your disgrace….

Revisiting Kinsella’s pained, compulsive lines today, almost fifty years after the bloodshed of their occasion, is in many ways a sobering experience. Since then, populations from Fallujah to Gaza have suffered the arrogance and brutality of imperialist violence on an even larger scale, while in Derry, as the veteran campaigner, Eamonn McCann, has noted, the Saville report (into the events known as “Bloody Sunday”) “cleared the dead and wounded” of wrongdoing, “and this was rightly welcomed,” but “stopped short of admitting the truth about the role of the most senior soldiers” in the butchery, including General M. Jackson, since knighted for his services to the Crown. As is partly true of “The Masque of Anarchy”, Kinsella’s political elegy aches and quivers with the burden of its own music:

I stood like a ghost. My fingers strayed

Along the fatal barricade.

The gentle rainfall drifting down

Over Colmcille's town

Could not refresh, only distil

In silent grief from hill to hill.

There is a grim knowledge, powerfully affirmed, in Kinsella’s stance: that wherever the state and rule of law are most bloodthirsty in their assertion, refusing all redress, the people they would suppress from view nevertheless continue on, their words, their pain, their struggle living still, with a continuity through history (a “silent grief” moving “from hill to hill”), which the poet can honour, but not heal.

There is also Shelleyan permanence to the rage of “Butcher’s Dozen”, a justice gleaming in its memorial process that is all the more compelling for its absence outside of the verse itself (a justice reached for, and only imperfectly held, within it). If nothing else, indeed, reading the poem throws into sharp relief Shelley’s will to witness and transform “the else unfelt oppressions of the earth”: the frequent cost and urgent necessity of this project. The “rushing light of clouds and splendour” and “sense awakening, yet tender” that Shelley envisioned as lifting humankind to a radical equality in class and nature are far from guaranteed, as Kinsella sees, and easily quenched. But beneath the silence of grief and seemingly irreparable dispossessions of our time, the music of the masses can be heard, stirring: for justice, for peace, for the earth reclaimed and won. We live entangled in the dialectic. “Ye are many – they are few.”

The Peterloo Memorial in Manchester.

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 Ciarán is founder and editor of the online archive, Island's Edge Poetry, which features interviews with contemporary Irish poets about their work and craft. His first collection, The Buried Breath, is available from Irish Pages Press. He is based in Dublin, Ireland (www.ragpickerpoetry.net/).

The Peterloo Massacre and Percy Shelley by Paul Bond

In the early autumn, my online “Shelley Alert” trip wire came alive with a link to an article published by Paul Bond on the World Socialist Web Site (“WSWS”) under the auspices of the International Committee of the Fourth International (“ICFI”). Paul, it turns out, is an active member of the Trotskyist movement and has been writing for the WSWS since its launch in 1998. It also turns out he is an ardent admirer of Percy Shelley. That someone like Paul would be interested in Shelley and that the ICFI would publish his article about Shelley did not surprise me in the least. Though I suspect it might arouse the curiosity of a goodly portion of Shelley’s current fan base.

Before we delve further into this, let’s find out exactly what the WSWS is? Understanding this may explain a lot:

The World Socialist Web Site is published by the International Committee of the Fourth International, the leadership of the world socialist movement, the Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.

The WSWS aims to meet the need, felt widely today, for an intelligent appraisal of the problems of contemporary society. It addresses itself to the masses of people who are dissatisfied with the present state of social life, as well as its cynical and reactionary treatment by the establishment media.

Our web site provides a source of political perspective to those troubled by the monstrous level of social inequality, which has produced an ever-widening chasm between the wealthy few and the mass of the world's people. As great events, from financial crises to eruptions of militarism and war, break up the present state of class relations, the WSWS will provide a political orientation for the growing ranks of working people thrown into struggle.

We anticipate enormous battles in every country against unemployment, low wages, austerity policies and violations of democratic rights. The World Socialist Web Site insists, however, that the success of these struggles is inseparable from the growth in the influence of a socialist political movement guided by a Marxist world outlook.

The standpoint of this web site is one of revolutionary opposition to the capitalist market system. Its aim is the establishment of world socialism. It maintains that the vehicle for this transformation is the international working class, and that in the twenty-first century the fate of working people, and ultimately mankind as a whole, depends upon the success of the socialist revolution.

You can learn more about them here.

For those of you familiar with the radical Percy Shelley, this will, of course, make sense. Shelley has been an inspiration to those on the left from the early 1800s. I have written extensively about this in my articles “My Father’s Shelley: A Tale of Two Shelleys”, “Percy Bysshe Shelley in Our Time” and “Jeremy Corbin is Right: Poetry Can Change the World”.

I think the fact that the WSWS has published an extensive article exploring Shelley’s radicalism is an important and salutary moment. It should help to reconnect Shelley to a new generation of radicals. The principal reason that Shelley remains relevant today is almost exclusively connected to his radicalism. His love poetry is exquisite and reminds us that PB was a three dimensional person. But there is an enormous amount of brilliant love poetry out there; and precious little radical poetry - having said that a great deal of Shelley’s love poetry is in fact a very radical variant of love poetry.

But it is Shelley’s radicalism that makes him stand out as a giant among his contemporaries. Little wonder then that Eleanor Marx proudly declaimed in a famous speech in 1888: “We claim his as a socialist.” Shelley’s radicalism inspired generations of activists and radicals; radicals who, explicitly inspired by Shelley, went on to change the world for the better. Is there a better example of this than the effect Shelley had on Pauline Newman, one of the founders of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union? You can read more about this in my article “The Story of the Mask of Anarchy: From Shelley to the Triangle Factory Fire”. And please read Michael Demson’s brilliant graphic novel of the same name. Links to buy it are in my article.

Two of the best biographies of Shelley were written by life-long members of the left. The first, Kenneth Neill Cameron (an avowed Marxist), penned The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical. The other, Paul Foot (the greatest crusading journalist of his generation), authored The Red Shelley. You can read Paul Foot’s spellbinding address to the 1981 International Marxism Conference in London here. It took me over two hundred hours to transcribe and properly footnote his speech!

For both Engels and Marx, Shelley was an inspiration:

Engels:

"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”

Marx:

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.

Eleanor Marx supplied the principle reason for these assessments of Shelley. She wrote,

More than anything else that makes us claim Shelley as a Socialist 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.

This grim portrayal of the tyranny faced by the citizens of Shelley’s and Marx’s eras has an equally grim, modern resonance. One need to look no further than Marxist-inspired writers such as Astra Taylor (The People’s Platform) and Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism) to come to grips with the fact that the situation has, if anything, got worse. Our modern “possessing class” of digital overlords threaten not simply to strip the people of their labour, but to turn our very lives into the raw materials that feed the rapacious, insatiable demands their modern “surveillance capitalism”.

However, let me turn the floor over to Paul Bond whose essay is something of a tour de force that encapsulates Shelley’s reception by the radicals of his era down to those of today. His article is wonderfully approachable, sparkles with erudition and introduces the reader to almost the entire radical dramatis personae of the 19th Century. I think it is vitally important for students of PBS to understand this radical legacy. And who better to hear this from than someone with impeccable socialist credentials: Paul Bond. You can follow Paul on Twitter @paulbondwsws and the World Socialist Web Site @WSWS_Updates.

The caption photo at top is of Eleanor Marx (middle) with her two sisters - Jenny Longuet, Laura Marx, father Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Eleanor was a champion of PBS.

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The Peterloo Massacre and Shelley

by Paul Bond

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This year marks the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre, a critical event in British history. On August 16, 1819, a crowd of 60,000 to 100,000 protestors gathered peacefully on Manchester’s St. Peter’s Field. They came to appeal for adult suffrage and the reform of parliamentary representation.The disenfranchised working class—cotton workers, many of them women, with a large contingent of Irish workers—who made up the crowd were struggling with the increasingly dire economic conditions following the end of the Napoleonic Wars four years earlier.

Shortly after the meeting began, local magistrates called on the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry to arrest the speakers and sent cavalry of Yeomanry and a regular army regiment to attack the crowd. They charged with sabres drawn. Eighteen people were killed and up to 700 injured.

On August 16 of this year the WSWS published an appraisal of the massacre.

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The Peterloo Massacre elicited an immediate and furious response from the working class and sections of middle-class radicals.

The escalation of repression by the ruling class that followed, resulting in a greater suppression of civil liberties, was met with meetings of thousands and the widespread circulation of accounts of the massacre. There was a determination to learn from the massacre and not allow it to be forgotten or misrepresented. Poetic responses played an important part in memorialising Peterloo.

Violent class conflict erupted across north western England. Yeomen and hussars continued attacks on workers across Manchester, and the ruling class launched an intensive campaign of disinformation and retribution.

At the trial of Rochdale workers charged with rioting on the night after Peterloo, Attorney General Sir Robert Gifford made clear that the ruling class would stop at nothing to crush the development of radical and revolutionary sentiment in the masses. He declared: “Men deluded themselves if they thought their condition would be bettered by such kind of Reform as Universal Suffrage, Annual Parliaments, and Vote by Ballot; or that it was just that the property of the country ought to be equally divided among its inhabitants, or that such a daring innovation would ever take place.”

Samuel Bamford (1788–1872), 'The Radical', Silk Weaver of Middleton by Charles Potter

Samuel Bamford, a reformer and weaver who led a contingent of several thousand marchers to Manchester from the town of Middleton, said he spent the evening of the massacre “brooding over a spirit of vengeance towards the authors of our humiliation.” Bamford told the judge at his trial for sedition that he would not recommend non-violent protest again.

Workers took a more direct response, even as the military were being deployed widely against the population. Despite the military presence, and press claims that the city had been subdued, riots continued across Manchester.

Two women were shot by hussars on August 20. A fortnight after Peterloo, the most affected area, Manchester’s New Cross district, was described in the London press as a by-word for trouble and a risky area for the wealthy to pass through. Soldiers were shooting in the area to disperse rioters. On August 18, a special constable fired a loaded pistol in the New Cross streets and was attacked by an angry crowd, who beat him to death with a poker and stoned him.

There was a similar response elsewhere locally, with riots in Oldham and Rochdale and what has been described by one historian as “a pitched battle” in Macclesfield on the night of August 17.

Crowds in their thousands welcomed the coach carrying Henry Hunt and the other arrested Peterloo speakers to court in Salford, the city across the River Irwell from Manchester. Salford’s magistrates reportedly feared a “tendency to tumult,” while in Bolton the Hussars had trouble keeping the public from other prisoners. The crowd shouted, “Down with the tyrants!”

While the courts meted out sharper punishment to the arrested rioters, mass meetings and protests continued across Britain. Meetings to condemn the massacre took place in Wakefield, Glasgow, Sheffield, Huddersfield and Nottingham. In Leeds, the crowd was asked if they would support physical force to achieve radical reform. They unanimously raised their hands.

These were meetings attended by tens of thousands and they did not end despite the escalating repression. The Twitter account Peterloo 1819 News (@Live1819) is providing a useful daily update on historical responses until the end of this year.

A protest meeting at London’s Smithfield on August 25 drew crowds estimated at 15,000-40,000. At least 20,000 demonstrated in Newcastle on October 11. The mayor wrote dishonestly to the home secretary, Lord Sidmouth, of this teetotal and entirely orderly peaceful demonstration that 700 of the participants “were prepared with arms (concealed) to resist the civil power.”

The response was felt across the whole of the British Isles. In Belfast, the Irishman newspaper wrote, “The spirit of Reform rises from the blood of the Manchester Martyrs with a giant strength!”

A meeting of 10,000 was held in Dundee in November that collected funds “for obtaining justice for the Manchester sufferers.” That same month saw a meeting of 10,000 in Leicester and one of 12,000 near Burnley. In Wigan, just a few miles north of the site of Peterloo, around 20,000 assembled to discuss “parliamentary reform and the massacre at Manchester.” The yeomanry were standing ready at many of these meetings.

The state was determined to suppress criticism. Commenting on the events, it published false statements about the massacre and individual deaths. Radical MP Sir Francis Burdett was fined £2,000 and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for “seditious libel” in response to his denunciation of the Peterloo massacre. On September 2, he addressed 30,000 at a meeting in London’s Palace Yard, demanding the prosecution of the Manchester magistrates.

Richard Carlile

Radical publisher Richard Carlile, who had been at Peterloo, was arrested late in August. He was told that proceedings against him would be dropped if he stopped circulating his accounts of the massacre. He did not and was subsequently tried and convicted of seditious libel and blasphemy.

The main indictment against him was his publication of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man. Like Bamford, Carlile also concluded that armed defence was now necessary: He wrote, “Every man in Manchester who avows his opinions on the necessity of reform should never go unarmed—retaliation has become a duty, and revenge an act of justice.”

In Chudleigh, Devon, John Jenkins was arrested for owning a crude but accurate print of the yeomanry charging the Peterloo crowd when Henry Hunt was arrested. A local vicar, a magistrate, informed on Jenkins, whose major “crime” was that he was sharing information about Peterloo. Jenkins was showing the print to people, using a magnifying glass in a viewing box. The charge against Jenkins argued that the print was “intended to inflame the minds of His Majesty’s Subjects and to bring His Majesty’s Soldiery into hatred and contempt.”

Against this attempt to suppress the historical record there was a wide range of efforts to preserve the memory of Peterloo. Verses, poems and songs appeared widely. In October, a banner in Halifax bore the lines:

With heartfelt grief we mourn for thoseWho fell a victim to our causeWhile we with indignation viewThe bloody field of Peterloo.

Anonymous verses were published on cheap broadsides, while others were credited to local radical workers. Many recounted the day’s events, often with a subversive undercurrent. The broadside ballad, “A New Song on the Peterloo Meeting,” for example, was written to the tune “Parker’s Widow,” a song about the widow of 1797 naval mutineer Richard Parker.

Weaver poet John Stafford, who regularly sang at radical meetings, wrote a longer, more detailed account of the day’s events in a song titled “Peterloo.”

The shoemaker poet Allen Davenport satirised in song the Reverend Charles Wicksteed Ethelston of Cheetham Hill—a magistrate who had organised spies against the radical movement and, as the leader of the Manchester magistrates who authorised the massacre, claimed to have read the Riot Act at Peterloo.

Ethelston played a vital role in the repression by the authorities after Peterloo. At a September hearing of two men who were accused of military drilling on a moor in the north of Manchester the day before Peterloo, he told one of them, James Kaye, “I believe that you are a downright blackguard reformer. Some of you reformers ought to be hanged; and some of you are sure to be hanged—the rope is already round your necks; the law has been a great deal too lenient with you.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Clint (after Amelia Curran) c. 1829

Ethelston was also attacked in verse by Bamford, who called him “the Plotting Parson.” Davenport’s “St. Ethelstone’s Day” portrays Peterloo as Ethelston‘s attempt at self-sanctification. Its content is pointed— “In every direction they slaughtered away, Drunken with blood on St. Ethelstone’s Day”—but Davenport sharpens the satire even further by specifying the tune “Gee Ho Dobbin,” the prince regent’s favourite. (These songs are included on the recent Road to Peterloo album by three singers and musicians from North West England—Pete Coe, Brian Peters and Laura Smyth.)

The poetic response was not confined to social reformers and radical workers. The most astonishing outpouring of work came from isolated radical bourgeois elements in exile.

On September 5, news of the massacre reached the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) in Italy. He recognised its significance and responded immediately. Shelley’s reaction to Peterloo, what one biographer has called “the most intensely creative eight weeks of his whole life,” embodies and elevates what is greatest about his work. It underscores his importance to us now.

Franz Mehring, circa 1900

Even among the radical Romantics, Shelley is distinctive. He has long been championed by Marxists for that very reason. Franz Mehring famously noted: “Referring to Byron and Shelley, however, [Karl Marx] declared that those who loved and understood these two poets must consider it fortunate that Byron died at the age of 36, for had he lived out his full span he would undoubtedly have become a reactionary bourgeois, whilst regretting on the other hand that Shelley died at the age of 29, for Shelley was a thorough revolutionary and would have remained in the van of socialism all his life.” (Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, Harvester Press, New Jersey, 1966, p.504)

Shelley came from an affluent landowning family, his father a Whig MP. Byron’s continued pride in his title and his recognition of the distance separating himself, a peer of the realm, from his friend, a son of the landed gentry, brings home the pressures against Shelley and the fact that he was able to transcend his background.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s childhood and education were typical of his class. But bullied and unhappy at Eton, he was already developing an independence of thought and the germs of egalitarian feeling. Opposed to the school’s fagging system (making younger pupils beholden as servants to older boys), he was also enthusiastically pursuing science experiments.

He was expelled from Oxford in 1811 for publishing a tract titled “The Necessity of Atheism.” That year he also published anonymously an anti-war “Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things.” This was a fundraiser for Irish journalist Peter Finnerty, imprisoned for libel after accusing Viscount Castlereagh of mistreating United Irish prisoners. Long thought lost, a copy was found in 2006 and made available by the Bodleian Library in 2015.

Ireland was a pressing concern. Shelley visited Ireland between February and April 1812, and his “Address to the Irish People” from that year called for Catholic emancipation and a repeal of the 1800 Union Act passed after the 1798 rebellions. Shelley called the act “the most successful engine that England ever wielded over the misery of fallen Ireland.”

Shelley’s formative radicalism was informed by the French Revolution. That bourgeois revolution raised the prospect of future socialist revolutionary struggles, the material basis for which—the growth of the industrial working class—was only just emerging.

Many older Romantic poets who had, even ambivalently, welcomed the French Revolution as progressive reacted to its limitations by rejecting further strivings for liberty. Shelley denounced this, writing of William Wordsworth in 1816:

In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, —
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.

In 1811, Shelley visited the reactionary future poet laureate Robert Southey. He had admired Southey’s poetry, but not his politics, writing, “[H]e to whom Bigotry, Tyranny, Law was hateful, has become the votary of those idols in a form most disgusting.” Southey furnished Shelley with his introduction to William Godwin, whose daughter Mary would become Shelley’s wife.

Mary Shelley, 1849, Richard Rothwell

Godwin’s anarchism reflects the utopianism of a period before the emergence of a mass working class, although his novel Caleb Williams (1794) remains powerful. Shelley learned from Godwin, but was also attuned to social, political and technological developments.

Shelley’s 1813 philosophical poem Queen Mab, incorporating the atheism pamphlet in its notes, sought to synthesise Godwin’s conception of political necessity with his own thinking about continuing changes in nature. Where some had abandoned ideas of revolutionary change because of the emergence of Napoleon after the French Revolution, Shelley strove to formulate a gradual transformation of society that would still be total.

He summarised his views on the progress of the French Revolution in 1816, addressing the “fallen tyrant” Napoleon:

I did groan
To think that a most unambitious slave,
Like thou, shouldst dance and revel on the grave
Of Liberty.

He concluded:

That Virtue owns a more eternal foe
Than Force or Fraud: old Custom, legal Crime.
And bloody Faith the foulest birth of Time.

This was a statement of continued commitment to radical change and an overhaul of society. Queen Mab’s radicalism was recognised and feared. In George Cruikshank’s 1821 cartoon, “The Revolutionary Association,” one placard reads “Queen Mab or Killing no Murder.”

Eleanor Marx (middle) with her two sisters - Jenny Longuet, Laura Marx, father Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

What marks Shelley as revolutionary is his ongoing assessment of political and social developments. He was neither politically demoralised by the trajectory of the French Revolution nor tied to outmoded ways of thinking about it. He was able to some extent to carry the utopian revolutionary optimism forward into a period that saw the material emergence of the social force capable of realising the envisaged change, the working class.

His commitment to revolutionary change was “more than the vague striving after freedom in the abstract,” as Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling wrote in 1888. It was a concrete striving that had to find direct political expression.

This is what makes Shelley’s response to Peterloo significant. Hearing the “terrible and important news” he wrote, “These are, as it were, the distant thunders of the terrible storm which is approaching. The tyrants here, as in the French Revolution, have first shed blood. May their execrable lessons not be learnt with equal docility!”

He began work immediately on a series of poems and essays, which he intended to be published together. In The Masque of Anarchy: Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester, he identified Murder with “a mask like Castlereagh,” (Lord Castlereagh, the leader of the House of Commons, responsible for defending government policy), Fraud as Lord Eldon, the lord chancellor, and Hypocrisy (“Clothed with the Bible, as with light, / And the shadows of the night”) as Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth. The poem’s Anarchy is “God, and King, and Law!” Shelley’s “Anarchy we are all so afraid of is very present with us,” wrote Marx and Aveling, “[A]nd let us add is Capitalism.”

Its 91 stanzas are a devastating indictment of Regency Britain and the poem’s ringing final words—regularly trotted out by Labour leaders, with current party leader Jeremy Corbyn adapting its last line as his main slogan—still reads magnificently despite all such attempts at neutering:

And that slaughter to the Nation
Shall steam up like inspiration,
Eloquent, oracular;
A volcano heard afar.
And these words shall then become
Like Oppression’s thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again—again—again—
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.

Shelley was not making holiday speeches. The shaking off of chains is found across the Peterloo poems, and Shelley was grappling with how this might be achieved. In the unfinished essay “A Philosophical View of Reform” he tries to understand the sources of political oppression and the obstacles to its removal. There are indications he was moving away from the gradualism of Queen Mab—“[S]o dear is power that the tyrants themselves neither then, nor now, nor ever, left or leave a path to freedom but through their own blood.”

This is a revolutionary appraisal.

Shelley saw the poet’s role in that process. In the “Philosophical View,” he advanced the position, “Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” He later incorporated this into “A Defence of Poetry” (1820), explaining, “[A]s the plowman prepares the soil for the seed, so does the poet prepare mind and heart for the reception of new ideas, and thus for change.”

The Peterloo poems adopt various popular forms and styles. Addressing a popular audience with his attempt at a revolutionary understanding suggests a sympathetic response to the emergence of the working class as a political force, and the poems are acute on economic relations. As Marx and Aveling said: “…undoubtedly, he knew the real economic value of private property in the means of production and distribution.” In Song to the Men of England( 1819), he asked:

Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
Those rich robes your tyrants wear?

Leigh Hunt; portrait by Benjamin Haydon

Shelley sent the collection to his friend Leigh Hunt’s journal, but Hunt did not publish it. Publication would, of course, have inevitably resulted in prosecution, although other publishers were risking that. When Hunt did finally publish The Mask of Anarchy in 1832, he justified earlier non-publication by arguing that “the public at large had not become sufficiently discerning to do justice to the sincerity and kind-heartedness of the spirit that walked in this flaming robe of verse.”

Advanced sections of the working class, however, understood the poems as they were intended. Shelley’s poetry was read and championed by a different audience than Hunt’s radical middle class.

As Friedrich Engels wrote in 1843 to the Swiss Republican newspaper: “Byron and Shelley are read almost exclusively by the lower classes; no ‘respectable’ person could have the works of the latter on his desk without his coming into the most terrible disrepute. It remains true: blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven and, however long it may take, the kingdom of this earth as well.”

The next major upsurge of the British working class, Chartism, drew explicitly on Shelley’s inspiration and work. The direct connection between the generation of Peterloo and the Chartists, many of whom were socialists, found a shared voice in the works of Shelley.

Manchester Hall of Science, c. 1850 (formerly toe Owenite Hall of Science).



Engels continued:

While the Church of England lived in luxury, the Socialists did an incredible amount to educate the working classes in England. At first one cannot get over one’s surprise on hearing in the [Manchester] Hall of Science the most ordinary workers speaking with a clear understanding on political, religious and social affairs; but when one comes across the remarkable popular pamphlets and hears the lecturers of the Socialists, for example [James] Watts in Manchester, one ceases to be surprised. The workers now have good, cheap editions of translations of the French philosophical works of the last century, chiefly Rousseau’s Contrat social, the Système de la Natureand various works by Voltaire, and in addition the exposition of communist principles in penny and twopenny pamphlets and in the journals. The workers also have in their hands cheap editions of the writings of Thomas Paine and Shelley. Furthermore, there are also the Sunday lectures, which are very diligently attended; thus during my stay in Manchester I saw the Communist Hall, which holds about 3,000 people, crowded every Sunday, and I heard there speeches which have a direct effect, which are made from the special viewpoint of the people, and in which witty remarks against the clergy occur. It happens frequently that Christianity is directly attacked and Christians are called ‘our enemies.’” (ibid.)

Richard Carlile published Queen Mab in the 1820s, and pirated editions produced by workers led to it being called a “bible of Chartism.”

Chartist literary criticism provides the most moving and generous testament to Shelley’s legacy in the working class. The Chartist Circular (October 19, 1839) said Shelley’s “noble and benevolent soul…shone forth in its strength and beauty the foremost advocate of Liberty to the despised people,” seeing this in directly political terms: “He believed that, sooner or later, a clash between the two classes was inevitable, and, without hesitation, he ranged himself on the people’s side.”

Friedrich Engels in his early 20s.

Engels was a contributor to the Chartist Northern Star, which had a peak circulation of 80,000. In 1847, Thomas Frost wrote in its pages of Shelley as “the representative and exponent of the future…the most highly gifted harbinger of the coming brightness.” Where Walter Scott wrote of the past, and Byron of the present, Shelley “directed his whole thoughts and aspirations towards the future.” Shelley had summed up that revolutionary optimism in Ode to the West Wind (1820): “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

Shelley found his champions in the working class, quite rightly, so it is worth concluding with the stanza Frost quoted from Revolt of Islam (1817) as a marker of what should be championed in Shelley’s work, and the continued good reasons for reading him today:

This is the winter of the world;—and here
We die, even as the winds of Autumn fade,
Expiring in the frore and foggy air.—
Behold! Spring comes, though we must pass, who made
The promise of its birth—even as the shade
Which from our death, as from a mountain, flings
The future, a broad sunrise; thus arrayed
As with the plumes of overshadowing wings,
From its dark gulf of chains, Earth like an eagle springs.

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Paul’s article is reproduced with both his and the kind permission of the World Socialist Web Site. You can find the original here and here (in two parts).