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: Poet and Revolutionary by Jacqueline Mulhallen

For those of you with a desire to connect to the radical and revolutionary politics of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jacqueline Mulhallen’s slim but trenchant volume Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Revolutionary is the answer. First published in 2015 by Pluto Press Mulhallen’s book is in the grand tradition of those biographers who were primarily concerned with and inspired by Shelley’s reformist, even revolutionary ideas. Biographers such as Kenneth Neill Cameron (The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical. Paul Foot (The Red Shelley), Michael Scrivener (Radical Shelley: the Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley) and PMS Dawson (The Unacknowledged Legislator). Indeed, Shelley has of late been attracting increased attention from the writers and thinkers on the left and so her book is very much of its time. Just recently Paul Bond, writing on the World Socialist Web Site (published by the International Committee of the Fourth International which was founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938) published a thrilling account of the left’s reception of Shelley’s reaction to the Peterloo Massacre. I republished this article here with introductory comments.

Before we get to Mulhallen’s volume, let’s talk about the four books mentioned above. First, while there have been many books on the question of Shelley's radicalism, perhaps the most important is Kenneth Neill Cameron's The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical. 

One of the greatest Shelley scholars of all time, Neil Fraistat, recently told me that it was his favourite book on Shelley and that he was "in awe of it."  It is deserving of that accolade because it manages to put all of Shelley's youthful poetry and prose (often condemned as juvenile and not worth reading) into context and restores it to a place of respect and honour. But alas,The Young Shelley is out of print and almost impossible to get. 

The second is Paul Foot's extraordinary 1980 book, Red Shelley. Foot's style is polemical, uncompromising and intoxicating.  But this book too is out of print and hard to find.  I recently published for the first time the transcript of a speech Paul delivered to the London Marxism Conference in 1981.  The speech, Paul Foot Speaks!! The Revolutionary Percy Bysshe Shelley, was based on the book and is a must read; find it here.

PMS Dawson's book, The Unacknowledged Legislator, also published 1980, is another favourite. Unlike Foot, Dawson's style is dry and academic - but also shrewd and perceptive. And unlike a staggering number of academic texts from the post 1980 era, Dawson is immensely readable and approachable. He and Foot are two sides of the same stylistic coin and young members of the academy would do well to pay close attention to the ability of these writers to convey complex intellectual ideas in straightforward English that one does not require a thesaurus to understand.

Then there is Michael Scrivener’s book Radical Shelley: the Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley - also published in 1980 - making 1980 a sort of annus mirabilis for Shelley’s radicalism. Written in a vein similar to that of Dawson (although guilty of rather too much academic jargon) Scrivener seeks to place Shelley in a sort of “utopian-anarchist” tradition; whereas Dawson sought to rather "tone down" Shelley's radicalism and place him within the orbit of Whig reformers.

Now, if there is ONE thing I think Shelley is not, it is a utopian. And for this reason Scrivener got under my skin - much the same way as do writers who attempt to read a pure form of "idealism" into Shelley's thinking.  For me, Shelley was a life long skeptic in the tradition of Drummond, Hume and Cicero. In an article published in the Edinburgh Press (The Modern Disciple of the Academy: Hume, Shelley, and Sir William Drummond), Thomas Holdon demonstrated Drummond’s “decisive influence on Shelley’s philosophical development”. You can read it here.

For an excellent summary of these three books, Red Shelley, The Unacknowledged Legislator and Radical Shelley, look no further than the great Willian Keach's article Rise Like Lions: Shelley and the Revolutionary Left, which may be found here.

It is worth quoting Keach's typically trenchant summary in full:

The task of reclaiming Shelley’s poetry for the revolutionary left, most notably undertaken by Paul Foot in his book Red Shelley, inevitably raises difficulties and complications which I would like to address. I worried about some of these difficulties and complications several years ago in a 1985 review essay that considered Foot’s Red Shelley together with Michael Scrivener’s Radical Shelley and Paul Dawson’s The Unacknowledged Legislator. My judgement then was that, while Foot’s desire to claim Shelley for the real socialist left was deeply important, his book did not address some of the difficult questions of Shelley’s political writing as convincingly as Scrivener’s and Dawson’s had done. My perspective today has shifted substantially from what it was in 1985, when I had just finished an avowedly formalist study of Shelley’s style and was still a member of a social democratic group called the Democratic Socialists of America. I have come to have a much stronger commitment to the political tradition from which Foot’s work on Shelley springs, and I see strengths in Red Shelley that I had not seen or had not been able fully to realise before. However, I still think that the questions posed by Scrivener in his case for an anarchist and utopian Shelley, and by Dawson in his case for a reformist Shelley, need to be confronted.

All three of these incredibly important books are out of print and difficult to obtain.  So what is one to do?!  Obviously, we must turn to Jacqueline Mulhallen’s book, Shelley: Poet and Revolutionary. Mulhallen is very much in the tradition of Cameron, Foot, Dawson and Scrivener and her book has the advantage of being available! Here are just a few of the well-earned accolades:

A compelling and eye-opening study. Reminds us of Shelley's robust socio-political vision, that remains as relevant and vital for our own volatile times. (Stephen C. Behrendt; George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English, University of Nebraska)

Highly readable, this is an absorbing study of Shelley’s life, thought, and writing. Jacqueline Mulhallen has written a valuable book. (Michael O’Neill, Professor of English, Durham University)

A fresh and impassioned account of the significance of Shelley's radical life and writings. A fine and highly readable achievement. (Michael Rossington, Professor of Romantic Literature, Newcastle University)

[Mulhallen's book is] Fresh, clear and compelling, this is the best compact account of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s revolutionary life currently available. (Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews)

And when these professors say it is readable, they mean it is readable by the general public - a rare distinction in the modern era. Mulhallen, for this reason alone, would have earned my "Stamp of a Champ - Must Read" recommendation. But in addition to being readable it is an also an accurate and concise portrayal of the real Shelley: Shelley the revolutionary, the atheist, the skeptic, the leveler.  Mulhallen gives us a clear-eyed modern image of the Shelley the great Victorian Henry Salt described as follows:

"...there can be no mistake whatever about the attitude Shelley took up...in the whole body of his writing toward the established system of society, which, as he avowed in one of his later letters, he wished to see, "overthrown from the foundations with all of its superstructure, maxims and forms." His principles are utterly subversive of all that orthodoxy holds most sacred, whether in ethics or in religion..." (Salt, Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Pioneer, 4)

As I cast my eye back over the chaotic political events of the past year I can see that Shelley's programmes of reform and resistance have enormous relevance.  Take for example two separate events: the election of Donald Trump and the near-election of Jeremy Corbyn. In the case of the former, Shelley's brand of revolutionary, non-violent resistance to authoritarianism provides important sign posts as to how best to oppose Trump.  You can find my take on this here: What Should We Do to Resist Trump" by Sandy Grant and here: Percy Bysshe Shelley in Our Time.

In the case of the latter, it is very clear to me that a general election was fought out in Britain in part on territory staked out by Shelley 200 years ago, as evidenced by the Labour Party's slogan: For the Many. Not the Few (a direct, intentional, lift from Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy).  And by the way, we know for a fact that Corbyn reads Mulhallen’s book prior to the 2017 election. You can read about this here: Jeremy Corbyn is Right: Poetry can Change the World.

Of all Shelley's poems that I think we might turn our attention to at this point, I am increasingly wondering if it should not be Queen Mab. Every single one of the authors I have just written about place Queen Mab at or near to the heart of his radicalism. It is the poem that was most influential on the radical reformists of the 19th century and those people are the ones largely responsible for preserving his radicalism.  Roland Duerksen said of Queen Mab,

"...so far as overt, discernible effects are concerned, [Queen Mab] appears historically to have had as great effect on society as any of his other works. It touched an inspired the Chartists of the mid-nineteenth century in a kinetic way and to an effect whose importance no amount of aesthetic condemnation of this work has been able to diminish" The source of this effect must lie in the genuineness of feeling and the correlation of the poem's successful artistic devices with the human condition of its nineteenth century readers....they responded enthusiastically to what their experience told them was true an genuine in the poem". (Duerksen, Shelley's Poetry of Involvement, 68)

In other words, ignore the critics and read with your heart.  Kenneth Neill Cameron also offers a valuable comment on the appeal of Queen Mab:

If at times the language, in its revolutionary bluntness, short-circuits finer aesthetic transmutations, its cascading sincerity gives it a rugged intensity of power unique in English poetry. In spite of the higher harmonies and soaring visionariness of Prometheus Unbound, Queen Mab, dealing with the same theme cannot simple be regarded as a juvenile precursor. It is a great poem in its own right. (Cameron, Young Shelley, 254)

Shelley's themes revolved around the correct response to authoritarians and tyrants, political and religious repression, massive concentration of wealth, and exploitation of the working class and the environment.  Reading Shelley today engenders a very disturbing feeling of deja vu; his concerns appear to be eerily familiar to us.  How much have things changed?  Are they in fact worse? Certainly Paul Foot seemed to think so in 1981 when he gave his famous speech, The Revolutionary Percy Bysshe Shelley. Read it all here. He shrewdly perceived the importance of Shelley to the modern world, saying,

Of all the things about Shelley that really inspired people [in the] a hundred and sixty 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] 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.

I think readers of this blog share Shelley's enthusiasm. Foot believed that our job as activists, as people who care about our world, was to "unlock the enthusiasm, the excitement that exists in every human being." He and I believe that Shelley can provide us with an inspiration and a vocabulary to help us do this. Mulhallen is a kindred spirit:

The Universe,

In nature's silent eloquence, declares

That all fulfil the works of love and joy -

All but the outcast man. He fabricates

The sword which stabs his peace; he cherisheth

The snakes that gnaw his heart; he raiseth up

The tyrant, whose delight is his woe,

Whose sport is his agony.

Shelley, Queen Mab, 3. 196-203

I hate to end with a quibble, but I know Mulhallen shares my concern. The one thing I find troubling about this book is the selection of the cover image. This child-like, effeminate image is a misrepresentation; it bears no relation to what he must have looked like. It is not a portrait. This plays directly into the stubbornly resistant narrative of the "ineffectual angel" created over a century ago by Matthew Arnold. People are surprisingly influenced by visual images; therefore this is the wrong one to have chosen. Apparently this was a choice made by the publisher and NOT the author.

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Jacqueline Mulhallen wrote and performed in the plays Sylvia and Rebels and Friends. She is the author of The Theatre of Shelley (Open Book Publishers, 2010) and contributed a chapter on Shelley to The Oxford Handbook to Georgian Theatre (OUP, 2014), which was shortlisted for the Theatre Book Prize 2015. Click the button above and order her wonderful book, Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Revolutionary. You will thank me. You can visit her website here.

Shelley's Musical Muse

Jessica Quillin’s magical book, Shelley and the Musico-Poetics of Romanticism, was originally published in hardcover by Ashgate in 2012 and almost immediately thereafter became almost inaccessible. There is good news for the Shelley Nation, or at least those with an appetite and stomach for a deeper dive: her book was recently issued in paperback at a reasonable price.  You can order it here. All references in this review are to her hardback version.

Shelley and the Musico-Poetics of Romanticism explores Shelley’s near lifelong fascination with music and the role it played in the creation of his poetry and his theory of the imagination. It thus fills a significant gap in the critical literature. So far as I am aware hers is the only book length treatment of the subject.  Jessica radically extends and amplifies the pioneering work of Ronald Tetrault who wrote briefly on the subject in the early 1980s. Quillin's book is thoroughly researched and tackles a difficult subject.  As an independent scholar anxious to bring Shelley to the attention of a larger audience, books such as this are an important tool because they can connect Shelley to people who come from very divergent walks of life.

Anyone who has read Shelley (or has heard it properly read, which sadly is almost never) has almost certainly been impressed with its musicality.  Burton Pollin’s view was that “No English poet…has paid more attention than has Shelley to the loveliness of music….” During the 1800s, Shelley’s poetry was set to music on hundreds occasions; it is a pity that this habit died out. Jessica however is quick to point out that it is not just musicality that invests Shelley’s poetry, it is a musical aesthetic. What I mean by this is that Shelley carefully selects the musical imagery which infuses many of his poems. She writes:

“Shelley’s exposure to a diversity of musical experiences and ideas of music affected not only the way in which he perceived music, but came to shape both his skills as a poet and his general view of poetry and the poet’s role.” (Quillin, 7)

One musical form with which he was particularly enamored was opera. Shelley's taste for opera developed very early and was complimented by the affection both his friend Thomas Love Peacock and Mary had for it. Peacock introduced him to Don Giovanni in 1817, and after that, he was a regular attendee.  Mozart was his favourite and he saw many performances at La Scala as well as in Turin, Naples and Pisa. I feel that we can say with confidence that his love of opera came to dictate the actual form of "Prometheus Unbound" which Shelley referred to as a “Lyric Drama”.  Tetrault notes that even his choice of this term

“inevitably associated [Prometheus Unbound] with the operatic stage. ‘Drame lyrique’ was the term applied in 1809 to the French production of Don Giovanni…”

Jessica also argues that the “organization of discourse and the specific dramatic arrangement…of Prometheus Unbound have strong affinities with the Italian opera of his day.”  (Tetrault, 149)

Tetrault believed that we can better understand "Prometheus Unbound" if we see it unfolding according to the conventions of opera in which

“not action, but the quality of an action, the intensity of the moment is elaborated musically. Music abstracts and internalizes the social realism of drama, allows the characters to express their motives and passions in song, and shifts the attention of the audience from narrative to essential emotion and thought. Shelley's drama occupies its own imaginative space, beyond the bounds of realism, according to the conventions of a vast psycho-drama that gives expression to desire and hope.” (Tetrault, 152)

In a brilliant appendix to her book, Quillin outlines a possible “Operatic Organization for Prometheus Unbound” part of which you can see below.

Jessica also points to Alastor in which Shelley uses two contrasting musical images, both of which are based on the Aeolian Harp.  According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Aeolian Harp derives its name from Aeolus, the Greek god of the winds, and is an instrument

“on which sounds are produced by the movement of wind over its strings. It is made of a wooden sound box about 3 feet by 5 inches by 3 inches that is loosely strung with 10 or 12 gut strings. These strings are all of the same length but vary in thickness and hence in elasticity.”

Massive version of an Aeolian Harp from the castle of Baden-Baden

You can read more about the construction of the Aeolian harp and see lots of examples at Luthier Arthur Robb's excellent page here. 

It was well known in the ancient world, but only really regained popularity during the period of Shelley’s life. Coleridge, for example, wrote two poems about it: "The Eolian Harp" and "Dejection, an Ode" and Shelley mentions it several times: in “Ode to the West Wind”, “Mutability”, “Defence of Poetry” and, of course, “Alastor”.

The type of instrument it is, is obviously very important, for it requires no human intervention in which to produce sound; it is a passive instrument enlivened by the wind. How Shelley elects to present the image is therefore telling.  In the first instance it is presented in its traditional sense: the poet is the harp itself, and the wind (nature) sweeps through him producing music (inspiration) which heightens his understanding of the world around him. But we later find it presented in an entirely different manner: the sound it produces in the second instance is “bewitching, transfiguring, otherworldly” (Quilan, 58).

Now, Quillin believes that Shelley employs these two contrasting images to express what she sees as tension between Shelley’s two philosophical poles at that time: a sort of Godwinian idealism and the skepticism he had imbibed from his readings of David Hume and Sir William Drummond.  Quillin is thus one of the few critics who I believe have attempted to bring a nuanced and sophisticated understanding of skepticism to the study of Shelley’s philosophy, poetry and politics.

Shelley’s recipe for revolution began in effect with the human spirit.  He believed that in order for a successful outward, political revolution to succeed, our imagination, the primary tool with which our minds organize and make sense of the external world, needed to be cultivated and reformed. PMS Dawson wrote that for Shelley, “the world must be transformed in imagination before it can be changed politically…this imaginative recreation of existence is both the subject and the intended effect of Prometheus Unbound.” (emphasis added) Jessica also notes the intensely political aspect of Shelley’s poetry: “For Shelley, the idea of the poetical is so strongly linked with humanistic notions of socio-political reform that on some level ever his minor lyrics have polemical function.” (Quillin, 144)

Shelley believe that true political reform could come only through the aesthetic education of humanity – a fact our policy makers would do well to take note of as they ravage liberal arts programmes around the world. He would have seen opera as an ideal form to achieve his goal.  Opera combines poetry, music and dance and, according to Tetrault, “the ideals it presents are not superhuman and inaccessible but attainable by human skill, discipline, and effort.”  Revolution of the imagination is, thus, eminently achievable. 

Opera was also often intensely political, playing a central role in the unification of Italy by keeping the dream alive during decades of foreign rule. “The Marriage of Figaro” (which Shelley saw at least twice in 1818 according to Mary) was suppressed by Louis the XIV because as he said, “it would be necessary to destroy the Bastille before the presentation of this play would not be a dangerous piece of inconsequence.” He was right.  As Tetrault points out, “Figaro’s mocking aria is the direct expression of the will to revolt.”

The opera, therefore, not only supplied musical inspiration for Shelley, but a revolutionary political platform on which to construct his own vision of the future.

Jessica Quillin’s book is not for the casual reader and will not be everyone’s cup of tea.  However, for those interested in meeting the real Percy Bysshe Shelley, understanding the role music played in his poetry, his philosophy and even his revolutionary politics is important. It is my great hope that Jessica, who is a visitor to this site, will encounter this review and perhaps someday offer the Shelley Nation a simplified approach to the music of Shelley’s world.

References

Ronald Tetrault, “Shelley at the Opera”, ELH, Vol 48, No. 1 (Spring, 1981), pp 144-171)