The Story of The Mask of Anarchy, from Shelley to the Triangle Factory Fire

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I have a treat in store for members of the Shelley Nation: Michael Demson’s graphic novel (or radical comic - your choice of terminology), “Masks of Anarchy: The History of a Radical Poem, From Percy Shelley to the Triangle Factory Fire”.

In it, Demson tells the story of two political radicals and the poem that brought them together:  Percy Shelley and the early 20th Century union organizer he inspired, Pauline Newman.  Demson, in collaboration with illustrator Summer McClinton, accomplishes this through an unusual medium: a radical political graphic novel! This gets my RPBS "Stamp of Champ, You Must Read This" recommendation!

Let’s dig in. Pauline Newman came to America in 1901 as a child, the daughter of immigrant Lithuanian Jews. She spoke no English, lived in appalling poverty and was subjected to brutal labour conditions. According to Annelise Orleck (writing for the Jewish Women’s Archive) as a child worker Newman began working among other children “in the ‘kindergarten’ at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, the most infamous of early twentieth-century garment shops” - she would work there for 7 years, leaving just before the infamous fire which killed 146 people. Yet, incredibly, at the age of around 16, Newman started fighting for change. Orleck:

In 1907, with New York City in the grip of a depression and thousands facing eviction, the sixteen-year-old Newman took a group of “self-supporting women” to camp for the summer on the Palisades above the Hudson River. There they planned an assault on the high cost of living. That winter, Newman and her band led a rent strike involving ten thousand families in lower Manhattan. It was the largest rent strike New York City had ever seen, and it catalyzed decades of tenant activism, which eventually led to the establishment of rent control.

At age 15 Newman joined the Socialist Reading Society. There, according to Orleck (“Common Sense and a Little Fire”, 40), she was introduced to the writings of Shakespeare, George Eliot and Thomas Hood and actually met Jack London. Inspired by this she would invite other young girls from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory to join her in her room where they would read poetry aloud to better educate themselves. Eventually she came to Shelley of which she said, “he appealed to us because it was a time when we were ready to rise.” (Orleck, 40) Later on she peppered her speeches with references to Shelley.

As Michael Demson suggests here, a poem like “The Mask of Anarchy” not only offered common people a language for understanding their problems, but also helped workers to build a sense of community from culture and shared political goals.

Newman went on to be a driving force in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (henceforth, “ILGWU”).  According to Orleck,

Pauline Newman was a labor pioneer and a die-hard union loyalist once described by a colleague as “capable of smoking a cigar with the best of them.” The first woman ever appointed general organizer by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), Newman continued to work for the ILGWU for more than seventy years—first as an organizer, then as a labor journalist, a health educator, and a liaison between the union and government officials. Newman played an essential role in galvanizing the early twentieth-century tenant, labor, socialist, and working-class suffrage movements. She also left an important legacy through her writings, as one of the few working-class women of her generation who chronicled the struggles of immigrant working women.

Demson tells us that “Newman was aware that Shelley had two audiences in America in the early twentieth century.” She traveled widely at the behest of the ILGWU in order to win sympathy from upper-class women's groups in New York and across the country. In her letters, Newman recounts two stories which specifically mention Shelley. In upstate New York she recounts that the women’s group,

“…began asking questions – not only about the strike [of 1909], but about me personally – did I like to read? Shelley? How nice! However, like all good things the afternoon came to an end – an afternoon which once again pointed to the comfort and plenty of some and the poverty with all its resulting misery of/for others…”

In Indianapolis, Newman was asked by the secretary of the Woman's Poetry Club:

“…whether I liked poetry and who my favorite poet was…I need not tell you that I had no difficulty in telling them that I did like poetry, very much indeed, and that I regard Shelley and Keats as my favorite poets although there were others whom I like, too. My reply was my passport to enter the inner sanctum of the Women's Poetry Club of Indianapolis!”

In 1923, Newman was appointed as the educational director for the ILGWU Union Health Center - a position she would keep for 60 years. According to Orleck, she used her position “to promote worker health care, adult education, and greater visibility for women in the union.” She died in 1986 at approximately 99 years of age. And she most decidedly had changed the world in which she lived.

Shelley himself had set out to change the world - through poetry. And, across the centuries, a poem that was not even published in his lifetime, did just that: “The Mask of Anarchy”.

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Through the medium of a radical comic, Demson tells the story of the creation of Shelley's poem and the incredible real world influence it had a century later and on the other side of the world.  Regular visitors to this site will know that my goal is to introduce Shelley to a new generation of readers in an accessible, approachable manner. Thus, when I stumble on something like “Masks of Anarchy “I get very excited: it is something I can recommend to the burgeoning Shelley Nation without reserve. I know this will fire your interest in Shelley and inflame your passion for him. “Masks of Anarchy” is thrilling to read. I found myself emotionally overwhelmed at several points - most particularly as I read the story of Pauline Newman’s activism.

Poetry, writes Demson in his introduction, "is our most fundamental weapon against alienation, isolation, automation, apathy and despair." Coupled with skepticism, that ancient philosophy that Shelley so admired, the liberal arts and the humanities may be the only trump card we have to play in the face of a wave of 21st century intolerance, hypocrisy, xenophobia and cyber-libertarianism.

Paul Buhle, self portrait from Verso Press

Demson’s technique is to interweave the two narratives, a chapter on Shelley followed by a chapter on Newman and then a flashback to Shelley, and so on.  In his forward, Paul Buhle, places this work in the context of the history of comic art and notes that “Masks of Anarchy” is “one of the most remarkable works of comic art to date.” Buhle should know, he is a formerly a senior lecturer at Brown University who now produces radical comics full time. He founded the SDS Journal Radical America and the archive Oral History of the American Left and, with Mari Jo Buhle, is coeditor of the “Encyclopedia of the American Left”. Buhle believes “Masks of Anarchy” will “cast its influence widely over future non-fiction graphic works, especially as regards the uses of poetry and meanings of social, labour and women’s history.”

If I have a quibble about “Masks of Anarchy”, it is that some of the details about Shelley’s life have been somewhat distorted. The reason for this is not obvious to me.  Demson has Claire Clairmont meeting Byron for the first time in Geneva and getting pregnant by him there. We know this is incorrect. He also has Shelley, Mary and Claire leaving Geneva in 1816 to go straight to Italy, when it is well known that they returned to England so Claire’s child could be born there. While somewhat troubling, these flaws are no reason to turn away.

But what of the poem Demson celebrates? “The Mask of Anarchy” was written by Shelley as a response to the massacre of unarmed protestors (including children) in Manchester on 16 August 1819. Shelley was in Italy at the time, hence the famous opening lines of the poem, “As I lay asleep in Italy / There came a voice from over the Sea.”  Shelley had been cut off from the politics of England for some years, so he does not mean he was literally asleep, he means this figuratively. As Paul Foot has pointed out, the people of England had endured the worst government in their history for Shelley's entire adult life (1810-1822); Shelley called it the "ghastly masquerade." (Foot, 19) Living in Italy, Shelley felt cut off and impotent for years. He was outraged by what he heard and it motivated him to drop everything else he was doing and focus on a response. Now he wanted to get plugged back in. You can read an excellent summary of what happened at Peterloo - and Shelley’s reaction to it - in Paul Bond’s superb article The Peterloo Massacre and Shelley (originally published by the World Socialist Web Site). Or, why not try the young Irish Marxist and Poet Ciaran O’Rourke’s review of Paul O’Brien’s “Shelley’s Revolutionary Year.”

“The Mask of Anarchy” was the first of a stream of highly charged political poems and essays including:

(i) his letter in support of the radical journalist Richard Carlile (one of the words great defenses of free speech),

(ii) “Peter Bell the Third” (a scathing attack on Wordsworth's callow, shameless black-sliding into conservatism),

(iii) “A Philosophical View of Reform” (a brilliant set of philosophical proposals that anticipated socialism by decades) and

(iv) “The Mask of Anarchy”. 

Not one of these works of genius were published in his life time.  He wrote with increasing desperation to his friend Leigh Hunt, but to no avail.  The letters are tinged with a deeply moving, plaintive desperation:

You do not tell me whether you have received my lines on the Manchester affair. - Florence, 14 November 1819

I don't remember if I acknowledged the receipt of "Robin hood" - no more than you did of "Peter Bell". - Pisa, 5 April 1820

I wish to ask you if you know of any bookseller who would like to publish a little volume of popular songs, wholly political. Pisa, 1 May 1820

One thing I want to ask you - do you know any bookseller who wd publish for me an octavo volume entitled "a Philosophical View of Reform? It is boldly by temperately written - and I think readable - ... will you ask and think for me? Pisa, 26 May 1820

All of the works were either ignored or actively repressed until very recently.  Even modern collections of Shelley's poetry routinely omit “The Mask of Anarchy”; a work Richard Holmes has called "the greatest poem of political protest every written in English". It is time to restore this poem to its rightful place in the history of protest - and not a moment too soon considering the election of Donald Trump in America. If ever there was a poet speaking to our times, it is Percy Bysshe Shelley. So let's learn more about the events that inspired him to write his great poem.

What happened in Manchester in 1819 was an outrage, an outrage that has been perpetuated by a failure by English authorities to honestly and respectfully recognize the tragedy.  You can find out more about this here. I almost never recommend Wikipedia as a source for reliable information on the internet, however, here you will find an unusually well written and researched document with appropriate sources.  Demson pictures Shelley’s reaction when he heard of the massacre thusly:

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On the morning of 16 August, a peaceful assembly of some sixty thousand English men, women and children began to gather in what is now St. Peter’s Square in Manchester (hence the name the massacre was popularly given: Peterloo). They did so quietly and with discipline. The protest was organized by the Manchester Patriotic Union and was to feature the famed orator Henry Hunt. Hunt was to speak from a simple platform in front of what is now the Gmex Center. The crowd brought homemade banners that proclaimed REFORM, UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE, EQUAL REPRESENTATION and (touchingly) LOVE. But before the speeches could begin, local magistrates ordered the local militia (known as ‘yeomanry”) to break up the meeting.  This was done with extraordinary violence.  As many as 12 protestors died and over 500 were wounded.

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In the aftermath, journalists attempting to cover the massacre were arrested and news of the event suppressed. The businessman John Edwards Taylor was so shocked by what had happened that he went on to help set up the Guardian newspaper to ensure that the people would have a voice. For years, the event was commemorated in Manchester only by a blue plaque which described the massacre as a “dispersal”:

“The site of St Peters Fields where on 16th August 1819 Henry Hunt, radical orator addressed an assembly of about 60,000 people. Their subsequent dispersal by the military is remembered as “Peterloo”.

That the term “dispersal” is used to describe what was a massacre is an unconscionable euphemism.  It was only in 2007 that it was replaced by a more appropriate red plaque:

Finally, in 2019, on the 200th Anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre, the local authorities bowed to a fierce advocacy campaign mounted by the Peterloo Memorial Campaign, and created a permanent memorial to the event and the people who participated in (and some of who died during) the protest.

Photograph from the Peterloo Memorial Campaign website

In a partnership with the Age of Revolution, The University of Kent and the authors and publishers of the full graphic novel “Peterloo: Witnesses to a Massacre” (Polyp, Schlunke, and Poole) created a twenty-page schools’ version of the innovative graphic novel specially adapted for teachers wishing to explore the events of 16 August 1819 in the classroom. You can download the student version at the Age of Revolution website here or buy the full version from the publisher’s Ethicalshop here.

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Excerpt from the graphic novel Peterloo: Witnesses to a Massacre. The cover on the right.

According to Michael Scrivener, “the response of the radical leadership to Peterloo was surprisingly timid…the leaders must have been more alarmed than inspired by the revolutionary situation”. (Scrivener, 207) Hunt, for example, called for passive resistance in a variety of forms (such as tax resistance) and others sought a Parliamentary investigation. Only Richard Carlile (a radical journalist championed by Shelley and who later did much to keep Shelley’s reputation alive) proposed a meaningful response: he and a few others proposed a general strike – which never materialized. Shelley as we shall see went much further. Scrivener notes: ‘the key to understanding the uniqueness of Shelley’s poem is his proposal for massive non-violent resistance.”  (Scrivener, 208)

Shelley's poem opens with a poetic, allegorical vision of the true nature of social reality a reality which must be "unmasked' - hence the title of our poem. We are shown a parade (Shelley calls it the "ghastly masquerade") of political figures; exposed for what they really represent.  Shelley sets out to expose the manner in which Murder, Fraud, Hypocrisy and Anarchy operate in society: they can only come to life through the actions of people. The individuals he names, leading members of government, can be thought of as having completely given up their humanity as they take on their roles: Castlereagh as Murder, Eldon as Fraud, and Sidmouth as Hypocrisy.  Daringly, the skeletal Anarchy represents the entire social order and is described in such a way as to invite a connection to the Prince Regent. These monsters are shown trampling the people of England, aided and abetted by lawyers and priests. Shelley therefore daring executes one of the ironic inversions for which he is justly famous. Anarchy is not to be seen in it’s traditional sense; anarchy is what happens when society is perverted by the ruling classes.

The allegorical figure of Hope however intervenes and overthrows Anarchy; that is to say the existing social order.  It is unclear how Anarchy’s downfall is accomplished and exactly who kills it. One gets the sense that tyranny self-destructs in the face of massive non-violent protest. The most famous stanza of the poem, and the only one which is repeated, is this:

'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.'

lines 151-54 and 369-72

Scrivener notes that “What is foremost here is struggle, unity and revolutionary consciousness: this is not moral argument, but political exhortation, and appeal to physical superiority.” (Scrivener, 209).

“The Mask of Anarchy” is neatly divided into two sections: the first is the visionary dream just described, and the second (which PMS Dawson considers “the main substance of the poem”) is Shelley’s address to the people of England in which he outlines the nature of the political problem and proposes a solution. Shelley’s economic analysis has been widely praised for its sophistication and for anticipating socialism. Dawson wrote that Shelley addressed himself “responsibly, and with a realism that does not shun the banal, to directing the efforts of those who seek to redeem [the plight of the people of England]". (Dawson, 207)

Following his economic analysis, Shelley issues his call not to arms, but to peaceful assembly:

'Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free -'

It is this assembly (made up of people from every walk of society and without class distinction) upon which Shelley imagines liberty will be founded. His description of that liberty is celebrated:

What are thou Freedom? O! could slaves
Answer from their living graves
This demand - tyrants would flee
Like a dream's dim imagery:'

Thou art not, as imposters say,
A shadow soon to pass away,
A superstition, and a name
Echoing from the cave of Fame.'

'For the labourer thou art bread,
And a comely table spread
From his daily labour come
In a neat and happy home.'

Thou art clothes, and fire, and food
For the trampled multitude -

Lines 209-222

For an engrossing look at the events at Peterloo as well as Shelley’s reaction to the massacre through a Marxist lens, you can read Paul Bond’s essay, “The Peterloo Massacre and Shelley”.

Even reading this poem at a distance of 200 years, it is impossible not to be inspired. And very clearly it inspired Newman. She incorporated a lot of Shelley’s poetry into her speeches and Demson and McClinton beautifully capture this in their book. The final chapter brings Shelley and Newman, graphically, face to face.  This has a quite electrifying effect as we are presented with situations in Newman’s life that caused her to draw directly from Shelley’s poetry for inspiration.

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Very clearly, Shelley’s calls for unity, struggle and revolutionary consciousness, for a great assembly and general strikes, had a profound effect on Newman and therefore on the development of one of the most powerful and effective unions of the 20th Century. It also led to the creation of the Worker's University, where course on the radical poets of the French Revolution were taught.

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I had to laugh at poke at George Gordon (Lord Byron).

Well done Percy.  And well done Pauline. We will need a lot more of your help in the 21st Century. Thanks to Michael Demson and his illustrator Summer McClinton you both feel closer than ever.

If you want to read more about Pauline Newman, try this: “Common Sense and a Little Fire” by Annelise Orlek.

Michael Demson's wonderful graphic novel can be purchased directly from Verso.  Verso is a terrific imprint of New Left Books. Demson is currently professor of English at Sam Houston State University in Texas.

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References

Dawson, P.M.S.  The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Print.

Demson, Michael. “‘Let a Great Assembly Be’: Percy Shelley’s ‘The Mask of Anarchy,’” published in The European Romantic Review, Volume 22, Number 5, p. 641-665

Foot, Paul. Red Shelley, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1980. Print.

Orleck, Annelise, Common Sense and a Little Fire: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Digital Edition.

Scrivner, Michael. Radical Shelley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Print.

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Other Reviews

“Absorb these words and pictures. Read them carefully. This is your history on the verge of oblivion. An unbroken thread of labor activism through the centuries, across oceans, is skillfully woven together here. Art and activism are the warp and woof of this unforgettable story: allow it to seep deeply into your soul and inspire you.”

         – Eric Drooker, author of Flood! A Novel in Pictures

“With spectacular panache, Demson and McClinton weave together two passionate tales across the ages that come together to transform the world. An inspirational testament to the longevity and power of poetry.”

          – Kennith Goldsmith, author of Uncreative Writing, founder of UbuWeb, and the Museum of Modern Art's 2013 Poet Laureate

“The historical scholarship is impressive”

          – Publishers Weekly

“It’s a fascinating book for all sorts of reasons, not least its portrayal of America’s ongoing antipathy toward immigrants, which, of course, remains very much in the news.”

            – LA Times

“A stunning yet nuanced story… In collaboration with talented illustrator Summer McClinton this short graphic novel reaches deep within one's sense of humanness.”

            – SWANS Commentary

Shelley's Revolutionary Year - a review by Ciarán O'Rourke

In 1990, Redwords published an important collection of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s verse and prose from the year 1819: Shelley’s Revolutionary Year (henceforth“SRY”). 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.

Paul Foot’s introduction to the 1990 edition (now perserved as an “afterword”) opened with these words: “This is the first edition of the book which was proposed for publication 170 years ago by one of England‘s most famous writers.”

In May of 1820, Shelley, who was living in Pisa at the time, wrote two letters to his friend Leigh Hunt. In the letter he asked if Hunt knew of “any bookseller would like to publish a little volume of popular songs, wholly political, and destined to awaken and direct the imagination of reformers.“

Hunt declined to publish the collection - and what a loss it was. 170 years later Paul Foot set out to right the wrong by collecting together those works which he thought Shelley most likely would have included in the collection. 

In this slim volume you will find the Mask of Anarchy, Lines written During the Castlereagh Administration, Song to the Men of England, Sonnet: England 1819, Ode to Liberty and much more. Importantly, Paul elected to include Shelley’s essay, A Philosophical Review of Reform.

It’s been 30 years since this collection was published. And now, timed to co-incide with the 200th anniversary of Peterloo, Redwoods is republishing the collection - with an important difference: this time we are treated to a brand new introduction by the brilliant Shelley scholar Paul O’Brien: Beware the Risen People.

What I love about this collection is that it places some of Shelley’s most radical and trenchant writing all in one handy volume. And thanks to Paul Foot and Paul O’Brien, the reader is given an excellent sense of the importance and context of the poetry and prose. This is a perfect gift for the young (or old) radical in your life. Maybe it is even more important for those among your family and friends who are “radical-curious” or who are searching for political meaning in life. There is a very good reason why Shelley was revered by the Chartists and Owenites and later by luminaries on the left such as Marx and Engels. As Paul Foot said in his address to the London Marxism Conference in 1981:

Of all the things about Shelley that really inspired people in the 160 years 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…you [can] 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.

Echoing these thoughts, Paul O’Brien concludes his engaging introduction with these words:

Shelley has bequeathed us a body of work and an access to language that can inspire and energise people to organize and agitate for a better world…The famous closing lines from The Mask of Anarchy “ye are many - they are few” is more than a slogan or the title of an election programme; it is a call to action.

A few weeks ago, Ciarán O‘Rourke wrote me from Ireland to alert me to the existence of this new version of SYR. He also forwarded me a copy of his own review on the book which appeared in the Irish Marxist Review. I thought it was brilliant. I immediately wanted to republish it because I think it is important for modern fans of Shelley to hear authentic voices from the left speaking about the value of Shelley in the modern political context. With the kind permission of the Reviews editor, John Molyneux, I am pleased to republish (and promote!) Ciarán’s article. Thank you John!

First a few words about Ciarán O’Rourke. Ciarán is a brilliant 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 is currently doing a doctorate on William Carlos Williams at his alma mater in Dublin. A winner of the Lena Maguire/Cúirt New Irish Writing Award, the Westport Poetry Prize, and the Fish Poetry Prize, his poems have appeared in a number of leading publications, including Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review, The Irish Times, The London Magazine, New Welsh Review, The Spectator, and Irish Pages.

Oh, and one other thing, he is a HUGE fan of Shelley. Here is his article:

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Shelley's Revolutionary Year - a reflection by Ciarán O'Rourke

In the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, in which over seven hundred unarmed civilian demonstrators were injured, eleven killed, by cavalry sent by local magistrates to disperse the crowd, Percy Shelley’s impulse was to mourn the “people starved and stabbed in the untilled field”. Comparing “England” to an “old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king”, Shelley excoriated those actual “Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know, / But leech-like to their fainting country cling” - sucking the blood, like Marx’s later “vampire” capitalists, of the working people whose labour they both demanded and disdained. Later, Shelley addressed the survivors themselves, and in terms that connected the oppression they suffered as a group with the work they performed and the distribution of wealth that resulted:

            Men of England, wherefore plough 

            For the lords who lay ye low?

            Wherefore weave with toil and care 

            The rich robes your tyrants wear?

            Wherefore feed, and clothe, and save, 

            From the cradle to the grave

            Those ungrateful drones who would 

            Drain your sweat - nay, drink your blood?

Peterloo had unleashed the poet into something close to a class analysis of his society, governed increasingly by force under Lord Liverpool’s Tory administration. 

The Peterloo Memorial

 The event stands in history as an emblematic and explosive manifestation of the abhorrence of establishment elites for the democratic rights of a subjugated majority; it was a singular atrocity, but also an omen, in which “the painted veil” of social relations was momentarily lifted, revealing the violence beneath. Indeed, as Paul O’Brien notes, versions of “Peterloo” have “been played out on many occasions in the past two hundred years”, including on “Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972” and in “the battle of Orgreave during the miners’ strike in 1984.” In this respect, the massacre may be understood as holding out to us today that same question which Shelley was clear in answering in 1819: which side are you on? As this selection of the poet’s writings from that year makes plain, the brutality of the Peterloo attack and the pervasiveness of the subsequent cover-up was in fact a catalyst for one of the most productive and incendiary creative periods of his life - and as such serves to foreground the political impetus of a figure too often portrayed as an imaginative if overly earnest dreamer, or the prodigal literary son of the (ultimately reactionary) William Wordsworth. This book serves as a corrective to both of these interpretations. 

Born in 1792 into a minor aristocratic family, expelled from Oxford for publishing a pamphlet on atheism, obsessed with French revolutionary discourse and the relatively recent rebellions in Ireland, Shelley burned bright and died young (in a boating accident in 1822): he is known today, after decades of critical near-invisibility, as one of the most gifted English poets of the nineteenth century. He was also the most radical. 

If Shelley’s instinct in life was to resist all forms of entrenched authority (religious and political), his distinction as a Romantic was to crystallise this rebellion into an often heart-quickening poetry and an incisive style of prose argumentation that together - and despite the occasional limitations of his perspective - sought without fail to kindle and keep alive the revolutionary promise of his times. As Paul Foot helpfully summarises, “Shelley’s enormous talents were used not to butter up the rulers of society”, as has been the case of many other prominent writers, then and now, “but to attack those rulers from every vantage point.” If Shelley sometimes vacillated on questions that later socialists have held dear - questions of universal suffrage, the roles of capital and private property in society, or the validity (and methods) of revolutionary insurrection over political reform - his concern was always to unmask the structures of power that dominated his society. He set out to find in nature, in the upsurge of democratic and nationalist movements across Europe, and in the individuality of his own sensations, the stirrings of a world-transforming change, both spiritual and material. In this sense, the Shelley of mystical visions, celebrated by W. B. Yeats, and the Shelley of inspired insight and radical action, beloved of Karl and Eleanor Marx, among many others, were inseparably the same - as this book valuably reminds us. 

 For all his sweeping intuition as to the spiritual unity of the universe (“The One remains, the Many change and pass”), Shelley was incapable of imagining the world without also recognising the social antagonisms of human society as such. What is slavery, he declares:

            ‘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, 

             So that ye for them are made 

            Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade, 

            With or without your own will bent 

            To their defence and nourishment. 

            ‘Tis to see your children weak, 

            With their mothers pine and peak, 

            When the winter winds are bleak, - 

            They are dying whilst I speak.

Karl Marx with family and Engels - all of them fans of Shelley

Shelley’s hatred for the institutions and privileges of his own class, his insistent recognition of the vicious force with which these last were defended, could also at times shapeshift into a sense of personal isolation and despondency - a feeling all “Me”, as he once wrote, “who am as a nerve o’er which do creep / The else unfelt oppressions of the earth”. More often, however, Shelley presented a vision of the earth in motion, in which the turning seasons and the all-too-palpable pains of social oppression could both be galvanised “to repeal / Large codes of fraud and woe” - a vision in which the “sneer of cold command” of ruling elites was by its very nature vulnerable to these “boundless”, surging forces of transformation the poet discerned. Amid all the destruction of his times - from the bloody final acts of the French Revolution, to the unfettered butchery of the Napoleonic and Peninsular wars, to the savage repression enforced against Irish and domestic populations - Shelley had an uncanny ability to draw the outlines of a new society, urging rebels the world over “To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; / To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates”. As in this passage, there are moments in the sweep and rush of Shelley’s writing that seem the very distillation of revolutionary struggle. 

Of course, in re-claiming the work from a politically anemic and largely conservative literary tradition, there is always the risk of heroising the poet into another kind of myth - of erecting an image of radical purity in place of the much messier reality that was Shelley’s life and personality. Here, for instance, the furious compassion and searing political fire of Ballad of a Starving Mother is praised by the editors (and quite rightly, too), and yet the powerful and even callous solipsism that at times defined Shelley’s own marital relationships, first with Harriet Westbrook and then with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, goes unmentioned. Such qualities were erratic, and were perhaps intensified by Shelley’s youth; and yet it is surely difficult not to perceive Shelley’s sometimes extreme self-absorption at the emotional and physical expense of the women around him as a reflex of his status as a man of many entitlements in an intensely gender-divided society - a society of which, as we have seen, Shelley was an outspoken critic.

Such biographical complexity is lacking from the portrait of the poet we receive in this volume, which seems a loss: partly because socialists deserve a fuller picture of the past and the literary figures whom they are encouraged to quote, and partly because a socialism sanitised of human contradiction will surely fail to live up to its name. This would be a final defeat, for us and for Shelley, the poet who dedicated his work to the winds and “Wild Spirit” of renewal, “Destroyer and preserver” both - and who met, in the “Autumn” of world history in which he lived, the vista of “Pestilence-stricken multitudes” with his own enduring challenge: “Be through my lips to unawakened earth // The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

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Afterword

In response to Ciarán’s important final remarks about the volume’s lack of “biographical complexity” and its failure to address the “callous solipsism that at times defined [Percy] Shelley’s own marital relationships”, I would suggest the reader turn to any of the major biographies, but perhaps in particular to John Worthen’s recent book: The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography or James Bieri’s Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography. Both treat the subject with rigor and candour.

However, Shelley is hardly the misogynistic cartoon-like madman that some recent books (Fiona Sampson’s In Search of Mary Shelley) and movies (Mansour’s Mary Shelley) have sensationally suggested. One thing worth recalling is that Mary stayed married to (and with) Percy until the day he died and then remained devoted to him for decades afterwords - until her own death. Mary was a brilliant and powerful personality - she seems to have made her own judgement. To replace that judgement with arm-chair psychiatric work and casual (almost “click-bait” style calumnies) at a distance of 200 years is a stretch. I reviewed the movie in my essay The Truth Matters. Lesley McDowell, writing in The Herald had this to say about Sampson’s ad hominem jeremiad (in which she attacks everyone around Mary as well - including Claire Clairmont and William Godwin):

“Biography is meant to be an objective art. Stick to the verifiable facts; maintain an authoritative tone; don’t invite conjecture and definitely don’t play armchair psychologist. Fiona Sampson, a prize-winning poet and editor, has eschewed all four rules as she seeks to get inside the head of Mary Shelley, so intent on seeing everything solely from her subject’s perspective that she becomes almost enthusiastic about attributing blame for what happens.”

For a fascinating insight into the depth and strength of Mary and Percy’s relationship you can read Anna Mercer’s article ‘Your sincere admirer’: the Shelleys’ Letters as Indicators of Collaboration in 1821. Since that article was written, Anna has published a book-length study of the subject: The Collaborative Literary Relationship of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. You c an buy it here. Written by expert on the subject matter, Anna’s approach is refreshing, clear-sighted, rational and grounded in fact as opposed to supposition.

But about the need for socialists (frankly all of us) to get a “fuller picture of the past and the literary figures whom [we] are encouraged to quote”, Ciarán is absolutely right. Because, as he writes, “a socialism sanitised of human contradiction will surely fail to live up to its name.” The full picture is on display in the carefully researched biographies of Shelley by Bieri, Worthen and Richard Holmes. Having done that, let us not then forget what Paul Foot wrote:

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 the 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, wome 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. The person who says, “Can man be free if woman be a slave” is Cythna in The Revolt of Islam! She is taken captive and then she goes to her captors and calls on them to free her and the other prisoners and join with the revolution: “This need not be; ye might arise, and will / That gold should lose its power, and thrones their glory.”

         And that comes from a woman. And he understood, just as we had better understand, and we better understand it fast, because it is a prejudice that goes back deeper than any other prejudice that exists in society today. We’d better understand that point: that when the women start to take control, and it’s not just the question of understanding oppression, paying lip service to the oppression, but the possibility of taking part and sharing in the revolutionary upheaval, actually of leading it. That, I think, is one of the most inspiring parts of Shelley’s poetry.

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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/).

Will Britain Make It? The "Mask of Anarchy" is Timelier than Ever

Last week we drew attention to P. B. Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy as a critical social comment on class politics that is as fresh and timely today as it was when it was written two hundred years ago in 1819—and certainly no less radical. Its timeless message on the corrupt nature of political power extends into Shelley’s later “Ode to the West Wind.” While we put the Mask of Anarchy into dialogue with “Ode to the West Wind” for the latter’s emphasis on the benefits of the cross-cultural influences of globalization as a counter to the current political climate of xenophobia and myopic nationalism, Mask of Anarchy deserves a closer inspection for its critique of the nature of political authority.

Now, as then, Shelley’s poem asks us to look at the nature of order in conjunction with the dynamics of power, particularly as that power figures in political authority. Shelley wrote the poem in response to the Peterloo Massacre, a working-class uprising on 16 August 1819 at St. Peter’s Fields that sought to protest the corn laws and galvanize Parliamentary Reform to expand the voting franchise to those who did not own land. Nearly 400 were wounded and 11 died after cavalry were let loose on them, but they were ordered to do so by the local magistrates not because they were disruptive or violent. In their attempt to change politics by doing politics differently—as Shelley espouses in A Defence of Poetry—their peaceful organization was conceived as a threat. While Shelley was in Italy at the time, his distance from the events did not prevent him from acting in the only way he could—by writing a poem. Not until after 1832—when the Reform Act was passed—was the poem published, its content deemed far too radical for public eyes. The poem’s title is a multileveled metaphor that refers to a masque as a celebration of political authority, locating the poem’s critique of power alongside John Milton’s similar repudiation of the excesses of King James and Charles I’s reigns. But the word “mask” also gestures toward the way in which public figures in Shelley’s time are cloaked as actors in a medieval morality play, layering literary conventions in order to amplify the poem’s ethical message.

Will Britain, in its current state of political turmoil, make it?

Richard Carlile, Peterloo Massacre, aquatint and etching, 1819, National Portrait Gallery

If you are looking for an interesting introduction to what might be seen as one of Shelley's most radical and intensely political poems, look no further than John Mullan’s “The Mask of Anarchy.” This article is produced by the British Library as part of their "Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians" series. Professor Mullan is Professor of English at University College London and is a specialist in 18th-century literature.  In 2012 he published "What Matters in Jane Austen?"  I am happy link to this wonderful series because virtually all of the articles, like this one, are written in an approachable, accessible style. 

From the article’s Introduction: 

Percy Bysshe Shelley was living in Italy when news reached him of the Peterloo Massacre. On 16 August 1819 a crowd of well over 50,000 had gathered at St. Peter’s Fields outside Manchester to support parliamentary reform. The radical orator Henry Hunt was to speak in favour of widening the franchise and reforming Britain’s notoriously corrupt system of political representation, with its ‘pocket’ and ‘rotten’ boroughs. Magistrates ordered the Manchester Yeomanry (recruited from amongst the local middle classes) to disperse the demonstration. The cavalry charged the crowd, sabres drawn. At least 15 demonstrators, including a woman and a child, were killed, and many more wounded.