Shelley’s fantastic prank
Times Online July 12, 2006
H. R. Woudhuysen
In 1809 the controversial naval officer Sir Home Popham invited Peter Finnerty, a radical Irish journalist and supporter of the United Irishmen, to join him on the British expedition to the Scheldt: its object was to attack Antwerp, then held by the French. Although Flushing fell, a large number of troops succumbed to a form of malaria on the island of Walcheren and the expedition ended in disaster with the deaths of around 4,000 men. Finnerty’s reports on these events in the Morning Chronicle led to his arrest and transportation back to England. In January 1810 he accused his “ancient enemy” Lord Castlereagh of trying to silence him and compounded the offence by repeating accusations against the politician about the abuse of United Irish prisoners in 1798. Finnerty was tried for libel in February 1811 and sentenced to eighteen months in Lincoln Gaol. It was not the first time he had gone to prison as a result of clashing with Castlereagh: he had previously spent two years in prison in Dublin for printing a seditious libel and had been made to stand in the pillory. This second libel case was reported in great detail and Finnerty’s plight attracted widespread support, prompting a debate during the summer in the House of Commons and a public subscription, initiated by Sir Francis Burdett, which reached £2,000 on his release. Among those who contributed to a fund to maintain the journalist while he was still in prison was Percy Bysshe Shelley, then an undergraduate at Oxford in his second term at University College. His name appears in a list of four subscribers, each pledging a guinea, printed in the Oxford University and City Herald on March 2, 1811. A week later the journal carried an advertisement for a Poetical Essay, “Just published, Price Two Shillings”; it was described as “On the Existing State of Things . . . for Assisting to Maintain in Prison Mr. Peter Finnerty, Imprisoned for a Libel” and was “by a Gentleman of the University of Oxford”. Similar advertisements for the book appeared in the national press, in The Morning Chronicle (on March 15 and 21) and in The Times (on April 10 and 11).
Shelley’s authorship of this poem was known to his contemporaries at Oxford and the existence of the pamphlet was recorded by the Oxford bibliographer and book collector Philip Bliss. Those who knew Shelley might have associated this publication with An Address to the Irish People (Dublin, 1812), the first work to appear with his full name on its title page (rather than a pseudonym or his initials), and in which he refers to Finnerty’s fate (“He was imprisoned for persisting in the truth”). The designation “by a Gentleman of the University of Oxford” gave little away in itself, but sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that this was also the formula used on the title page of the anonymous gothic novel, St Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance, which Shelley published in 1811 in London with the Pall Mall bookseller J. J. Stockdale. His third anonymous publication of the year was The Necessity of Atheism (Worthing: printed by C. & W. Phillips) in which he collaborated with his fellow undergraduate T. J. Hogg. It was that pamphlet which led to Shelley and Hogg being sent down from University College on March 25, “for contumaciously refusing to answer questions proposed to them and for also repeatedly declining to disavow a publication entitled ‘The Necessity of Atheism’”. It seems likely that the Poetical Essay, whose authorship was probably known to the authorities, contributed to the poet’s expulsion, the episode that his cousin Thomas Medwin rather mildly called “Shelley’s mishap at Oxford”.
The Poetical Essay was no doubt one of what another contemporary at University College, C. J. Ridley, described as “Shelley’s strange and fantastic pranks”. Although it was advertised as for sale by the London publisher B. Crosby & Co. (“and all other Booksellers”), it was actually printed by the Oxford firm of Munday and Slatter. Two months before it was published, on January 11, Shelley had written to Hogg saying: “I have a Poem, with Mr Lundi which I shall certainly publish. There is some of Eliza’s in it: I will write tomorrow I have something to add to it & if Lundi has any idea (when he speaks to you of publishing it wth my name[)] will you tell him to leave it alone till I come”. “Mr Lundi” must be John Munday and the letter might be taken to suggest that Shelley and his sister Elizabeth had been working on the poem together and that the “something to add to it” might relate to the imprisonment of Finnerty. The brother and sister had previously collaborated in the production of the poet’s first book, Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (Worthing, 1810), which had to be withdrawn when the publisher, Stockdale, realized that one of the poems in the collection of lyrics and gothic narratives had been lifted entirely from a piece by M. G. Lewis.
Original Poetry sank from view and was forgotten about until 1859; an actual copy of the collection was only discovered in 1897, when it was reprinted in facsimile by Richard Garnett. The Poetical Essay, however, has completely eluded Shelley scholars for nearly two centuries. Its title page – whose contents, including the epigraph concerning the ravages of famine from Southey’s recently published The Curse of Kehama (1810), were reproduced in the press advertisements – made it clear that it had some direct link with the case of Peter Finnerty, but the nature of “the State of Things” (Stephen C. Behrendt has detected an allusion to Things as They Are, the proper title of William Godwin’s Caleb Williams) remained obscure. What Kenneth Neill Cameron described as “One of the unsolved mysteries of Shelley bibliography” can now be solved, for a copy of the pamphlet has been discovered and is in the possession of the booksellers Bernard Quaritch.
The pamphlet is a quarto, consisting of twenty pages with a final leaf of notes on the recto and errata on the verso; printed on paper with a watermark date of 1807, it is stitched and uncut, still very much in the same state as it was when it was issued. The poem is dedicated “TO HARRIET W–B–K”, that is Harriet Westbrook with whom Shelley eloped in August 1811: this constitutes the first printed reference to the poet’s wife. The dedication is followed by a “Preface”, a short essay touching on politics and religion, calling for “a total reform in the licentiousness, luxury, depravity, prejudice, which involve society”, not by warfare, which he vigorously denounces, but by “gradual, yet decided intellectual exertions”. The poem which follows consists of 172 lines of rhyming couplets.
It ranges over the devastations of war, the fearless voice of Sir Francis Burdett, the iniquities of Castlereagh, the tyranny of Napoleon and the oppressions of colonial India. Rather than remaining focused on Finnerty and Ireland, Shelley is concerned with England and the war:
Millions to fight compell’d, to fight or die
In mangled heaps on War’s red altar lie . . .
When legal murders swell the lists of pride;
When glory’s views the titled idiot guide.
It is the “cold advisers of yet colder kings” who have “the power to breathe / O’er all the world the infectious blast of death”.
Burdett is the hero of the poem and Castlereagh, with his “Vices as glaring as the noon-day sun”, its principal but unnamed target. As former President of the Board of Control and Colonial Secretary, Castlereagh stands for the iniquities of British rule in India (“The fainting Indian, on his native plains, / Writhes to superior power’s unnumbered pains”), while in Europe, Napoleon is like an “evil spirit brooding over gore”. Shelley’s concluding vision is of the virtuous reign which the overthrow of monarchy will bring:
Man must assert his native rights, must say
We take from Monarchs’ hand the granted sway;
Oppressive law no more shall power retain,
Peace, love, and concord, once shall rule again,
And heal the anguish of a suffering world;
Then, then shall things which now
confusedly hurled,
Seem Chaos, be resolved to order’s sway,
And error’s night be turned to virtue’s day –
While some of the language in the poem, for example the use of abstract terms, is reminiscent of Shelley’s other work, the regularity of the couplets is uncharacteristic. A possible explanation for this could be the fact that the poem was some sort of collaboration between Shelley and his sister Elizabeth. The fate of the pamphlet has been a mystery. The switch from local advertising in Oxford to its appearance in national newspapers coincided with Shelley’s move to London after being sent down from Oxford. It is known that although Munday refused to publish The Necessity of Atheism, Shelley put copies of it in the windows and on the counter of the bookseller’s High Street shop. They were spotted by a Fellow of New College there and all but one of the shop’s stock of them was burnt in its back kitchen. Munday and Slatter may have disposed of their copies of the Poetical Essay in the same way. In April, however, it was said to be available from Benjamin Crosby & Co of Ludgate Hill in London. These press advertisements and the Quaritch copy of the pamphlet suggest that previous theories that Shelley withdrew it, or that the Oxford printers refused to produce it until they were paid by the aristocratic but hard-up undergraduate, cannot be sustained.
Whatever the explanation for the disappearance of the pamphlet, some of the early history of this copy can be recovered. Immediately after being sent down, Shelley went to London. His arrival is recorded in a famous passage in Thomas Medwin’s Life of him:
I remember, as if it occurred yesterday, his knocking at my door in Garden Court, in the Temple, at four o’clock in the morning, the second day after his expulsion. I think I hear his cracked voice, with his well-known pipe, – “Medwin, let me in, I am expelled;” here followed a sort of loud half-hysteric laugh, and a repetition of the words – “I am expelled,” with the addition of, “for Atheism.”
Shelley was, as ever, in financial trouble and after a time in London he spent some of May and June 1811 with his father at Field Place, trying to mend their difficult relationship. When he eloped with Harriet Westbrook he sought money and legal advice from Medwin’s father, a solicitor who lived near to the Shelley home at Horsham in Sussex. It seems likely that it was around this time that he gave the sole surviving copy of the Poetical Essay to Thomas Medwin’s younger brother Pilfold (The unusual first name was a family one: Shelley’s mother was Elizabeth Pilfold), who was then about seventeen years old. He signed this copy at the top right of the title page. The signature can be compared with that on documents relating to Shelley in the Horsham Museum.
It is not unusual for manuscripts which are thought to have been lost to reappear by their very nature they can be hard to read, hard to identify and may easily be passed over but it is extremely rare for printed books of any period to be rediscovered after an absence of 200 years. The Quaritch copy of the Poetical Essay is all the more remarkable for its unexpected emergence and for the insights a full study of it will give into Shelleys development as a poet and political thinker.