EARLY INFLUENCES

The intensity of one’s radicalism depends on the extent to which the institutions of a country cause one suffering and disappointment. Shelley says in Julian and Maddalo:

Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong,
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

A description of Shelley’s radicalism then must take account of all the circumstances that tended to make him dissatisfied with existing institutions. Some of these circumstances may seem trifling, but then it must be remembered that events which appear insignificant sometimes have far-reaching effects. Pascal remarked once that the whole aspect of the world would be different if Cleopatra’s nose had been a little shorter. The history of Shelley’s life is a series of incidents which tended to make him radical. He never had a chance to be anything else. No sooner would he be brought in contact with conservative influences than something would happen to push him again on the high road of revolt. Even were he temperamentally conservative (and Hogg says that “his feelings and behavior were in many respects highly aristocratical”), the experiences that he underwent were of such a nature as to inevitably lead him into radicalism.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at Field Place, in the county of Sussex, on Saturday, the 4th of August, 1792. His family was an ancient and honorable one whose history extends back to the days of the Crusades. His grandfather, Bysshe Shelley, born in America, accumulated a large fortune, married two heiresses, and in 1806 received a baronetcy. In his old age he became whimsical, greedy, and sullen. He was a skeptic hoping for nothing better than annihilation at the end of life.[8] With regard to the poet’s father, it is very difficult to form a just estimate. There is no doubt that Shelley enthusiasts decried the father too much in their efforts to canonize the son. It would indeed be strange to find any father at that time who would be capable of giving our poet that guidance and training which his nature demanded. It was a time when might was right, when the rod held a large place in the formation of a boy’s character. We must not be too severe then on the father if he was unacquainted with the proper way of dealing with his erratic son. No one who has read Jeafferson’s life of the poet will say that Bysshe treated his son too harshly. It was his judgment rather than his heart that was at fault. Medwin remarks that all he brought back from Europe was a smattering of French and a bad picture of an eruption of Vesuvius.

It is to his mother that Shelley owes his beauty and his good nature. He said that she was mild and tolerant, but narrow-minded. Very few references to the home of his boyhood are made in his poetry; and this leads us to believe that neither his father nor his mother had much influence over him.

In his childhood he seems to have had the day dreams and reveries that Wordsworth had. “Let us recollect our sensations as children,” Shelley writes, in the Essay on Life, “What a distinct and intense apprehension had we of the world and of ourselves!... We less habitually distinguished all that we saw and felt from ourselves. They seemed, as it were, to constitute one mass. There are some persons who in this respect are always children. Those who are subject to the state called reverie feel as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being.” In Book II of the Prelude Wordsworth gives expression to a similar experience:

Oft in these moments such a holy calm
Would overspread my soul that bodily eyes
Were utterly forgotten, and what I saw
Appeared like something in myself—a dream
A prospect in the mind.

Shelley from the very beginning delighted in giving free scope to his imagination. In the garret of the house at Field Place he imagined there was an alchemist old and grey pondering over magic tomes. The “Great Old Snake” and the “Great Tortoise” were other wondrous creatures of his imagination that lived out of doors. He used to entertain his sisters with weird stories about hobgoblins and ghosts; and even got them to dress themselves so as to represent fiends and spirits. In the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty he writes:

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts and sped
Thro’ many a listening chamber, cave and ruin
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing,
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

He was attached to the occult sciences and sometimes watched whole nights for ghosts. Once he described minutely a visit which he said he had paid to some neighbors, and it was discovered soon afterwards that the whole story was a fabrication.

At ten years of age he was sent to Sion House Academy, Isleworth, where he met his cousin and future biographer, Thomas Medwin. The other boys, Medwin tells us, considered him strange and unsocial. It was at this school that Shelley first became acquainted with the romantic novels of Anne Radcliffe and the other novelists of the School of Terror. Here too he became greatly interested in chemistry and astronomy. The idea of a plurality of worlds, through which we “should make the grand tour,” enchanted him. Thus we see that he began very early to live in the unreal and the wonderful.

In 1804 he went to Eton, and there he was known as “Mad Shelley” and “Shelley the Atheist.” The word “atheist” here does not mean one who denies the existence of God. According to Hogg, it was a term given to those who distinguished themselves for their opposition to the authorities of the school. The title must have fallen into disuse shortly after Shelley’s time, as Professor Dowdon failed to find at Eton any trace of this peculiar usage of the word. Here he became interested in physical experiments and carried them on at unseasonable hours. For this he was frequently reprimanded by his superiors, but he proved to be very untractable.

At Eton Shelley became acquainted with Dr. Lind, whom he immortalized as a hermit in The Revolt of Islam and as Zonoras in Prince Athanase. It was Dr. Lind, according to Hogg, who gave Shelley his first lessons in French philosophism. Jeafferson says that he taught Shelley to curse his superiors and to write letters to unsuspecting persons to trip them up with catch questions and then laugh at them.[9]

An event occurred in the summer of 1810 which had considerable influence in developing the radicalism of Shelley. He had known and loved his cousin. Harriet Grove, from childhood, and during the vacation of this year asked her to be his wife. Harriet’s family, however, became alarmed at his atheistical tendencies and made her give up all communications with him. This angered him very much, and made him declaim against what he considered to be bigotry and intolerance. In a letter to Hogg, December 20, 1810, he writes: “O! I burn with impatience for the moment of the dissolution of intolerance; it has injured me. I swear on the altar of perjured love to revenge myself, on the hated cause of the effect; which even now I can scarcely help deploring.... Adieu! Down with bigotry! Down with intolerance! In this endeavour your most sincere friend will join his every power, his every feeble resource. Adieu!” And in a letter of January 3, 1811: “She is no longer mine! She abhors me as a skeptic as what she was before! Oh, bigotry! When I pardon this last, this severest of thy persecutions, may Heaven (if there be wrath in Heaven) blast me!” These ravings show Shelley to have been nervous, hysterical, and supersensitive.

The breaking of this engagement with Harriet made such an impression on him as to convince him that he should combat all those influences which caused the rupture. The story of Shelley’s life might have been an entirely different one had he been allowed to marry Harriet Grove. Man is a stubborn animal. Once he takes up a certain side, opposition merely serves to strengthen his convictions and make him fight all the harder. If Shelley’s willfulness had been ignored instead of opposed, I have no doubt that he would have seen things in their proper light and would never have been the rabid radical that he became. An Etonian called once on Shelley in Oxford and asked him if he meant to be an atheist there too. “No!” he answered, “certainly not. There is no motive for it; they are very civil to us here; it is not like Eton.”[10] It is Medwin’s conviction that Shelley never completely overcame his love for Harriet. Hogg notes that as late as 1813 Shelley loved to play a simple air that Harriet taught him. In the Epipsychidion he refers to her thus: “And one was true—Oh! why not true to me?” Love was to Shelley what religion is to the ascetic. He could not understand why one should put obstacles in the way of anyone in love, and so he thinks himself in duty bound to fight everything that supports this hated intolerance. This led him to wage war against religion itself.

Shelley entered University College, Oxford, in the Michaelmas term of 1810. It was unfortunate for him that conditions at the university were as deplorable as they were. He did not find there the intellectual food that his mind needed, and no doubt his sensitive soul was scandalized by what it felt. Intellectual life there was dull. Mark Pattison[11] says Oxford was nothing more than a grammar school, the college tutors were a little inferior to public school directors, and they obtained their positions through favoritism and not through merit. Copleston, a defender of the university against the attacks of the Edinburgh Review, admitted that only extreme incapacity or flagrant idleness would prevent a student from obtaining his degree at the end of his course. Fynes Clinton, in his Autobiography, tells us that Greek studies at Christ Church were very much neglected. During his seven years of residence grammar, syntax, prosody were never mentioned. Students rarely attended lectures. Much of their time was passed in hunting, drinking, and every kind of debauchery. “At boarding schools of every description,” writes Mrs. Wollstonecraft, “the relaxation of the junior boys is mischief; and of the senior, vice. Besides, in great schools, what can be more prejudicial to the moral character than the system of tyranny and abject slavery which is established among the boys, to say nothing of the slavery to forms, which makes religion worse than a farce? For what good can be expected from the youth who receives the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, to avoid forfeiting half-a-guinea, which he probably afterwards spends in some sensual manner?”[12] Such was the atmosphere in which Shelley was placed, and it is little wonder that it hastened the growth of the seeds of discontent and revolt which had been already implanted in his soul.

Misfortune still pursued Shelley. Had he formed friendships at Oxford with men of sober intellect, the whole course of his life might have been changed. Unfortunately he soon found a kindred spirit in the cynic Hogg.

This friend of Shelley gives us minute details of the poet’s life there. He thinks that Shelley took up skeptical philosophy because of the advantage it gave him in argument. Hume’s Essays was a favorite book with Shelley, and he was always ready to put forward in argument its doctrines. It may seem strange that this cold skeptical philosophy appealed to such an imaginative poet as Shelley; but destruction, as Hogg remarks, so that it be on a grand scale, may sometimes prove hardly less inspiring than creation. “The feat of the magician who, by the touch of his wand, could cause the great pyramid to dissolve into the air would be as surprising as the achievement of him who by the same rod could instantly raise a similar mass in any chosen spot.”

On September 18, 1810, Stockdale offered for sale a volume of poetry by Shelley entitled “Original Poetry: by Victor and Cazire.” The book was not out long when it was discovered that many of the poems were stolen property—a fraud on the public and an infringement of at least one writer’s copyright. The book was at once withdrawn and suppressed. Some doubt exists as to the name of the person who cooperated with Shelley in producing this book. Shelley enthusiasts say that Shelley was the unsuspicious victim of an unworthy coadjutor. Jeafferson is of the opinion that Shelley was fully conscious of the fraud that was being done. This biographer maintains that Shelley was an inveterate liar.

“About this time,” says Stockdale, “not merely slight hints but constant allusions, personally and by letters, ... rendered me extremely uneasy respecting Mr. Shelley’s religious, or indeed irreligious, sentiments.” Shelley’s father too was worrying at this time about his son’s loss of faith. He may have received the first intimation of his son’s speculations from a criticism in The Critical Review of another work of Shelley’s, Zastrozzi, in which the unknown author was condemned as an offender against morality and a corrupter of youth. The irate father wrote to his son and severely reprimanded him for his conduct.

In a letter to Hogg, Shelley says: “My father wrote to me, and I am now surrounded, environed by dangers, to which compared the devils who besieged St. Anthony were all inefficient. They attack me for my detestable principles. I am reckoned an outcast, yet I defy them, and laugh at their ineffectual efforts, etc.” And in another letter: “My mother imagines me to be on the highroad to Pandemonium; she fancies I want to make a deistical coterie of my little sisters. How laughable!” Shelley imagines the whole world is against him. He feels very keenly his isolation. He says his “soul was bursting.” There is a relief though. “I slept with a loaded pistol and some poison last night, but did not die.”

Shelley thought he was called upon to come to the aid of all those in distress. We find him at this time aiding aspiring authors, and defending traitorous politicians. An Irish journalist, Peter Finnerty, was condemned for libel and sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment in Lincoln jail. Shelley contributed to a subscription list in aid of Finnerty and also wrote a poem entitled A Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things to help on the cause. Leigh and John Hunt, who defended Finnerty in The Examiner, were tried for seditious libel and acquitted. Shelley rejoiced over their triumph, and wrote the following letter to Leigh Hunt congratulating him and proposing a scheme for the mutual defense of all friends of “rational liberty.”

One of the books read by Shelley at this time was the AbbÉ Barruel’s Memoires pour servir a l’histoire du Jacobinisme, which contains an account of the Society of Illuminists. The remarkable success of this society in propagating free thought and revolutionary principles evidently inspired Shelley to attempt the formation of a similar society in England. His proposals, though, fell on deaf ears, and it is probable that Leigh Hunt did not even acknowledge the receipt of Shelley’s letter.

In February, 1811, a small pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, which was written by Shelley, was published anonymously. According to Hogg, Shelley had a custom of writing to divines and engaging them in controversy on the existence of God. The Necessity of Atheism is merely an elaboration of the arguments of these letters. The masters and some of the fellows of Oxford sent for Shelley and asked him if he were the author of the work. He replied that they should produce their evidence, if they could prove he wrote it, and not question him because it was neither just nor lawful to interrogate him in such a case and for such a purpose. Shelley refused to answer their questions and was given one day in which to leave the college. His friend Hogg shared the same fate for the same reason. Shelley never received any admonition nor hint that his speculations were improper. Hogg says “there can be no reasonable doubt that he would at once have acceded to whatever had been proposed to him by authority.”[13] Every kind of disorder was tolerated at the university, and Shelley and Hogg had no suspicion that their metaphysical speculations were considered so much worse than drunkenness and immorality. If the sentence was not unjust, it was at least needlessly harsh. Shelley felt the sting of this disgrace very keenly, and it did much to embitter him against all kinds of authority.

Shelley and Hogg proceeded to London after their expulsion and obtained rooms in Poland Street. The name reminded Shelley of Kosciusko and Freedom. Timothy Shelley wrote to his son, commanding him to abstain from all communication with Hogg and place himself “under the care and society of such gentlemen as he should appoint” under pain of being deprived of all pecuniary aid. Shelley refused to comply with these proposals. Toward the middle of April Hogg left London to settle down to his legal training in York.

It was about this time that Shelley became acquainted with Harriet Westbrook. She wrote him from London that she was wretchedly unhappy, that she was about to be forced to go to school, and wanted to know if it would be wrong to put an end to her miserable life. Another letter from her soon followed, in which she threw herself upon his protection and proposed to fly with him. Shelley hastened to London, and after the delay of a few weeks eloped with Harriet to Edinburgh, where they were married on August 28, 1811. Shelley agreed to go through the ceremony of matrimony to save his wife from the social disgrace that would otherwise fall upon her.

Writing to Miss Hitchener on March 14, 1812, Harriet says: “I thought if I married anyone it should be a clergyman. Strange idea this, was it not? But being brought up in the Christian religion, ’twas this first gave rise to it. You may conceive with what horror I first heard that Percy was an atheist; at least so it was given out at Clapham. At first I did not comprehend the meaning of the word; therefore when it was explained I was truly petrified.... I little thought of the rectitude of these principles and when I wrote to him I used to try to shake them—making sure he was in the wrong, and that myself was right.... Now, however, this is entirely done away with, and my soul is no longer shackled with such idle fears.” This would indicate that he spent more time proselytizing Harriet than in making love to her.

It has been said that Harriet’s sister, Elizabeth, managed the whole affair, and that the marriage was brought about through her successful plotting.[14] After spending five weeks in Edinburgh, Shelley, Harriet, and Hogg went to York. They were joined there by Elizabeth, who henceforth ruled over Shelley’s household with a stern hand. She is partly responsible for the estrangement of Shelley and his wife.

During all this time Shelley was in need of money, and shortly after their arrival at York went south to induce his father to provide them with the means of living. While he was absent Hogg tried to seduce Harriet. Shelley sought an explanation from Hogg, and pardoned him “fully and freely.” Shelley’s account of the affair in a letter to Miss Hitchener savors much of Godwinism. “I desired to know fully the account of this affair. I heard it from him and I believe he was sincere. All I can recollect of that terrible day was that I pardoned him—fully, freely pardoned him; that I would still be a friend to him and hoped soon to convince him how lovely virtue was; that his crime, not himself, was the object of my detestation; that I value a human being not for what it has been but for what it is; that I hoped the time would come when he would regard this horrible error with as much disgust as I did.”[15]

Early in November, Shelley, his wife, and Eliza left York suddenly for Keswick. Shelley’s father and grandfather feared that the poet would parcel out the family estate to soulmates, and so they proposed to allow him £2,000 a year if he would consent to entail the property on his eldest son, and in default of issue, on his brother. The proposition was indignantly rejected. He considered that kinship bore that relation to reason which a band of straw does to fire. “I am led to love a being not because it stands in the physical relation of blood to me but because I discern an intellectual relationship.”

Early in 1812 Shelley started a correspondence with William Godwin, to whom he was then a stranger. In his first letter he writes: “The name of Godwin has been used to excite in me feelings of reverence and admiration. I have been accustomed to consider him a luminary too dazzling for the darkness which surrounds him. From the earliest period of my knowledge of his principles I have ardently desired to share, on the footing of intimacy, that intellect which I have delighted to contemplate in its emanations.”

Godwin’s influence with the revolutionists of this time was great. Coleridge and Southey were his ardent disciples for a time. “Throw aside your books of chemistry,” said Wordsworth to a student, “and read Godwin on necessity.” This philosopher seemed to provide them with a simple, comprehensive code of morality, which gave unlimited freedom to the reason, and justice as complete as possible to the individual.

In February, 1812, the Shelleys went to Dublin to help on the cause of moral and intellectual reform. He published there an “Address to the Irish People” which he had written during his stay at Keswick. Shelley’s mission was moral and educational rather than political. He advocated Catholic Emancipation and the Repeal of the Union; but he thought that he should first of all strive to dispel bigotry and intolerance—“to awaken a noble nation from the lethargy of despair.”[16] What Irishmen needed most of all were knowledge, sobriety, peace, benevolence—in a word, virtue and wisdom. “When you have these things,” he said, “you may defy the tyrant.” It is not surprising that his mission turned out to be a fiasco. Godwin wrote Shelley several letters in which he tried to convince him that his pamphlets and Association would stir up strife and rebellion. “Shelley,” he writes, “you are preparing a scene of blood.” The poet accordingly withdrew his pamphlets from circulation and quitted Ireland.

Shelley then crossed over to Wales, and after a short residence at Nangwillt settled at Lynmouth. Elizabeth Hitchener, “the sister of his soul,”[17] joined them there. The poet first met her at Cuckfield while visiting his uncle, Captain Pilfold. She was a schoolmistress, professing very liberal opinions and possessing “a tongue of energy and an eye of fire.” Everybody that Shelley admired seemed to him perfect, while those whom he disliked were fiends. Their correspondence, which extends over a period of more than a year, gives us a good picture of the workings of Shelley’s mind during this time. They all moved to London in November. It was not to be expected that a combination of even such disinterested, enlightened superior mortals as these could last long. Elizabeth’s influence over Shelley soon began to wane. His dislike for her was equalled only by his former extravagant praise. She was no longer his angel, but was now known as the “Brown Demon.” “She is,” he writes, “an artful, superficial, ugly, hermaphroditical beast of a woman, and my astonishment at my fatuity, inconsistency, and bad taste was never so great as after living four months with her as an inmate. What would hell be were such a woman in heaven?” Miss Hitchener took her leave of the Shelleys and again became a schoolmistress.

Shelley and his family spent some time in Wales and Dublin and then returned again to London in April, 1813.

It was about this time that he finished Queen Mab. On February 19, 1813, Shelley wrote to Hookham, his publisher: “You will receive Queen Mab with the other poems; I think that the whole should form one volume.” Medwin says that he commenced this work in the autumn of 1809. “After his expulsion he reverted to his Queen Mab commenced a year and a half before, and converted what was a mere imaginative poem into a systematic attack on the institutions of society.” What was it that induced him to make the change? There is no doubt but it was his experience of the misery and suffering around him that prompted him to attack society as he did.

Radicalism, as has already been shown, springs from discontent. The worse existing conditions are, the more pronounced will be the radicalism that usually arises. Conditions—moral, political and social—during the latter half of the eighteenth century were very bad indeed. In his inimitable sketches of the four Georges, Thackeray asserts that the dissoluteness of the nation was awful. He depicts the lives of its princes, courtiers, men of rank and fashion as idle, profligate, and criminal. “Around a young king himself of the most exemplary life and undoubted piety lived a court society as dissolute as our country ever knew.” Education was sadly neglected. In Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, published 1753, Charlotte gives an account of her two lovers. One of them is an ideal specimen of the young nobility and is represented as spelling pretty well for a lord. In Ireland, the colonies, and even in England itself, oppression was well-nigh intolerable. Byron’s Age of Bronze contains a good description of the way in which the landlords treated their tenants. The changes that followed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution caused untold suffering. The spread of machinery destroyed the old domestic industries of spinning and weaving, and many were consequently deprived of their most important source of subsistence. Children took up the places of the master craftsmen; and the amount of misery that this substitution entailed to both children and craftsmen is almost incredible.[18] Politics was rotten to the core. Even the great commoner, William Pitt, has been convicted by Macaulay, of sacrificing his principles without any scruple whatever. The political corruption started by Walpole was organized into a system. Every man had his price. “Politicians are mere jobbers; officers are gamblers and bullies; the clergy are contemned and are contemptible; low spirits and nervous disorders have notoriously increased, until the people are no longer capable of self-defense.”[19] In their struggle with the Stuarts the people were completely victorious; but it soon became apparent that they had simply substituted one evil for another. The despotism exercised by the Stuarts was now practiced by the Dodingtons and the Winningtons. Burke observes: “The distempers of monarchy were the great subjects of apprehension and redress in the last century. In this the distempers of Parliament.”The House of Commons was not responsible to anybody; and its members showed very little consideration for their constituents. Persons who were not acceptable to the ruling party were often fined and imprisoned without due process of law. It is little wonder then that Godwin, Shelley, and others declaimed against all forms of government. They were acquainted only with the Parliament of the Georges and the oligarchy of the Stuarts, and the one was as bad as the other.

The national debt was trebled in the space of twenty years, thus imposing heavy sacrifices on all. There was an income-tax of two shillings on a pound sterling; but the taxes which caused the most suffering to the poor were the indirect taxes on wheat, shoes, salt, etc. In 1815 a law was passed prohibiting the importation of wheat for less than eighty shillings the quarter.[20] No doubt the wealth of the country became very great through the development of new resources, but it was distributed among the few and gave no relief to the common people.

The poor laws were working astounding evils. With wheat at a given price, the minimum on which a man with wife and one child could subsist was settled; and whenever the family earnings fell below the estimated minimum, the deficiency was to be made up from the rates. In this way the path to pauperism was made so easy and agreeable that a large portion of the laboring classes drifted along it. This system set a premium on improvidence if not on vice. The inevitable effect was that wages fell as doles increased, that paupers so pensioned were preferred by the farmers to independent laborers, because their labor was cheaper, and that independent laborers, failing to get work except at wages forced down to a minimum, were constantly falling into the ranks of pauperism. It was not until 1834 that “a new poor law” was enacted which eliminated these evils.[21]

From one end of the kingdom to the other the prisons were a standing disgrace to civilization. Imprisonment from whatever cause it might be imposed meant consignment to a living tomb. Jails were pesthouses, in which a disease, akin to our modern typhus, flourished often in epidemic form. They were mostly private institutions leased out to ruthless, rapacious keepers who used every menace and extortion to wring money out of the wretched beings committed to their care. Prisons were dark because their managers objected to pay the window tax. Pauper prisoners were nearly starved, for there was no regular allowance of food. Howard’s crusade against prison mismanagement produced tangible results, but after his death the cause of prison reform soon dropped, the old evils revived, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century were everywhere visible.[22]

The Church of England, it appears, had become an object of contempt. No doubt Selwyn’s Dr. Warner is a distorted picture of the clergymen of the time; yet there is reason to believe that Anglican parsons were not very much concerned with the salvation of souls. “The Church had become a vast machine for the promotion of her own officers. How admirable an investment is Religion! Such is the burden of their pleading!”

Some of the conventionalities of the age were so absurd as to engender sooner or later a spirit of revolt. Servants said “your honor” and “your worship” at every moment: tradesmen stood hat in hand as the gentlemen passed by: chaplains said grace and retired before the pudding. “In the days when there were fine gentlemen, Mr. Secretary Pitt’s under-secretaries did not dare to sit down before him; but Mr. Pitt, in his turn, went down on his gouty knees to George II; and when George III spoke a few kind words to him, Lord Chatham burst into tears of reverential joy and gratitude; so awful was the idea of the monarch, and so great the distinction of rank.”[23] Not to use hair powder was an unpardonable offence. Southey and Savage Landor were among the first to appear with their hair in statu naturali and this action of theirs produced an extraordinary sensation.

Caleb Williams, written by William Godwin in 1793, is a severe indictment of the customs and institutions of England. “Things as they are,” is the subtitle of the work, and on that account an outline of the work will supplement the review of society already given. “Caleb Williams,” writes Professor Dowden, “is the one novel of the days of revolution embodying the new doctrine of the time which can be said to survive.”[24]

In the first preface to Caleb Williams Godwin says that the story is “a study and delineation of things passing in the moral world. Its object is to show that the spirit and character of the Government intrudes itself into every rank of society.” “Accordingly,” he writes, “it was proposed in the invention of the following work to comprehend, as far as the progressive nature of a single story would allow, a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man.”

Caleb Williams shortly after the death of his father, became secretary of Ferdinand Falkland, a country squire living in a remote county of England. Mr. Falkland’s mode of living was very recluse and solitary. He avoided men and did not seem to have any friends in whom he confided. He scarcely ever smiled, and his manners plainly showed that he was troubled and unhappy. He was considerate to others, but he never showed a disposition to lay aside the stateliness and reserve which he assumed. Sometimes he was hasty, peevish, and tyrannical, and would even lose entirely his self-possession.

Mr. Collins, Falkland’s steward, tells Williams that their master was not always thus, that he was once the gayest of the gay. In response to Caleb’s entreaties, Collins unfolds as much as he knows of their master’s history. He tells him that Mr. Falkland spent several years abroad and distinguished himself wherever he went by deeds of gallantry and virtue. At length he returned to England with the intention of spending the rest of his days on his estate. His nearest neighbor, Barnabas Tyrrel, was insupportably arrogant, tyrannical to his inferiors and insolent to his equals. On account of his wealth, strength, and copiousness of speech he was regarded with admiration by some, but with awe by all. The arrival of Mr. Falkland threatened to deprive Tyrrel of his authority and commanding position in the community. Tyrrel contemplated the progress of his rival with hatred and aversion. The dignity, affability, and kindness of Mr. Falkland were the subject of everybody’s praise, and all this was an insupportable torment to Tyrrel.

Emily Melville, Tyrrel’s cousin, who lived with him, falls in love with Falkland and consequently incurs her patron’s displeasure. He resolved to impose an uncouth, boorish youth on her as a husband. She is imprisoned in her room for refusing, and is saved from a diabolical plot to ruin her through the timely assistance of Falkland. While still delirious and suffering from the ill-treatment of her persecutor. Emily was arrested and cast into prison by Tyrrel for a debt contracted for board and lodging during the last fourteen years. Death liberated her soon afterwards from the persecutions of her cousin.

One of Tyrrel’s tenants, Mr. Hawkins, incurred his master’s displeasure, and he and his family were turned out of house and home. The laws and customs of the country are used to oppress the victims. Tenants must be kept in their places. The presumption is that they are in the wrong, and so the unscrupulous Tyrrel had no difficulty in imprisoning the son. Shelley says: “That in questions of property there is a vague but most effective favoritism in courts of law, and, among lawyers, against the poor to the advantage of the rich—against the tenant in favour of the landlord—against the creditor in favour of the debtor.” (Prose. Vol. II, p. 326.) Falkland remonstrated with Tyrrel for this piece of injustice, but this served only to increase Tyrrel’s hatred of him. At length the crisis came. Tyrrel is driven out of a rural assembly by Falkland. He returned soon afterwards, struck Falkland, felled him to the earth, and kicked him in the presence of all. Falkland was disgraced, and to him disgrace was worse than death. “He was too deeply pervaded with the idle and groundless romances of chivalry ever to forget the situation, humiliating and dishonourable according to his idea, in which he had been placed upon this occasion. To be knocked down, cuffed, kicked, dragged along the floor! Sacred heaven, the memory of such a treatment was not to be endured.” Next morning Mr. Tyrrel was found dead in the street, having been murdered at a short distance from the assembly-house. That day marked the beginning of that melancholy which pursued Falkland in after years. The public disgrace and chastisement that had been imposed upon him were not the whole of the mischief that happened to the unfortunate Falkland. It was rumored that he was the murderer of his antagonist. He was examined by the neighboring magistrates and acquitted. It was absurd to imagine that a man of such integrity should commit such an atrocious crime. Suspicion then fell on the Hawkinses. They were tried, condemned, and afterwards executed. From thenceforward the habits of Falkland became totally different. He now became a rigid recluse. Everybody respected him because of his benevolence, but his stately coldness and reserve made it impossible for those about him to regard him with the familiarity of affection.

Caleb Williams turned all these particulars over and over in his mind and began to suspect that Falkland was the real murderer of Tyrrel. His curiosity became an overpowering passion which was ultimately the cause of all his misfortunes. Falkland realizes that his secretary is convinced of his guilt, so he determines to silence him forever. He calls Williams into his room and confesses his guilt to him. Falkland said that he allowed the innocent Hawkinses to die because he could not sacrifice his fame. He would leave behind him a spotless and illustrious name even should it be at the expense of the death and misery of others. He then told Caleb that if ever an unguarded word escaped from his lips he would pay for it by his death or worse. This secret was a constant source of torment to Williams. Every trifling incident made Falkland suspicious and consequently increased the misery of his secretary. At length Caleb flees, but is taken back, falsely accused of theft, and cast into prison. In all this Falkland contrives to manage things so as to increase his reputation for benevolence. Williams is made to appear an ungrateful wretch. The impotence of the law to secure justice to the weak is only equalled by the wretchedness of the prisons to which they are condemned. “Thank God,” exclaims the Englishman, “we have no Bastile! Thank God with us no man can be punished without a crime!” “Unthinking wretch!” writes Godwin, “Is that a country of liberty, where thousands languish in dungeons and fetters? Go, go, ignorant fool! and visit the scenes of our prisons. Witness their unwholesomeness, their filth, the tyranny of their governors, the misery of their inmates! After that show me the man shameless enough to triumph, and say ‘England has no Bastile!’ Is there any charge so frivolous, upon which men are not consigned to those detested abodes? Is there any villainy that is not practiced by justices and prosecutors, etc.?”

Williams tries to escape from prison and is caught in the attempt. He was then treated more cruelly than ever. He made another attempt to escape and was successful. The rest of the novel is taken up with an account of all that Williams suffered in his endeavors to keep out of the reach of the law. He falls in with a band of outlaws whose rude natural virtues are contrasted with the meanness and corruption of the officers of the law. He is at last caught, but Falkland, to make himself appear magnanimous, does not press the charge against Williams. Instead he persecutes Caleb by poisoning people’s minds against him. Everywhere Caleb goes he is followed by an emissary of Falkland who contrives to convince people that Williams is an ungrateful scoundrel. He can stand the persecution no longer and so determines to accuse Falkland of the murder of Tyrrel. Williams does this in a way to carry conviction to his hearers. Falkland finally breaks down, throws himself into Williams’ arms, saying, “All my prospects are concluded. All that I most ardently desired is forever frustrated. I have spent a life of the basest cruelty to cover one act of momentary vice, and to protect myself against the prejudice of my species.... And now (turning to the magistrates) do with me as you please. If, however, you wish to punish me, you must be speedy in your justice; for, as reputation was the blood that warmed my heart, so I feel that death and infamy must seize me together.” He survived this event but three days. “A nobler spirit than Falkland’s,” Godwin writes, “lived not among the sons of men. Thy intellectual powers were truly sublime, and thy bosom burned with a godlike ambition. But of what use are talents and sentiments in the corrupt wilderness of human society? It is a rank and rotten soil, from which every finer shrub draws poison as it grows. Falkland! thou enteredst upon thy career with the purest and most laudable intentions. But thou imbibest the poison of chivalry with thy earliest youth; and the base and low-minded envy that met thee on thy return to thy native seats, operated with this poison to hurry thee into madness....” All these evils flow from Falkland’s standard of morals—and his is the aristocratic, traditional one. He is the victim of the false ideal of chivalry. The errors of Falkland, Shelley writes, “sprang from a high though perverted conception of human nature, from a powerful sympathy with his species and from a temper, which led him to believe that the very reputation of excellence should walk among mankind unquestioned and unassailed.”

Protests against this condition of affairs were not wanting, it is true, but they did not influence men to any great extent. Cowper, for example, criticizes most severely the luxury and vices of his age.

Rank abundance breeds
In gross and pampered cities, sloth and lust
And wantonness and gluttonous excess.

He deplores the corruption in church and state, and pleads for a return to religion. In the Progress of Error he pictures Occidius as

A cassock’d huntsman and a fiddling priest.
Himself a wanderer from the narrow way,
His silly sheep, what wonder if they stray.

Although he lashes the follies of his time in The Task, Table Talk, and Expostulation, still he does not attack the institutions of his country with the vehemence characteristic of later writers. His poems are a mild expression of the revolutionary spirit that was then gathering strength.

At a very early age Shelley showed signs of hatred for existing institutions. These became more pronounced as he grew older, until they finally blazed forth in Queen Mab in 1813. This poem is considered by some to be merely a declamatory pamphlet in verse. Shelley himself described it at one time as “villainous trash.” Like a true radical he gathers up all the evils of society, its crimes, misery, and oppression, and feels them so keenly that he makes them part of his own being. This collected lightning he discharged in one awful flash in Queen Mab.

The first two parts of this poem bear a striking resemblance to Volney’s Les Ruines.[25] In Queen Mab a fairy descends and takes up Ianthe’s soul to heaven that she may see how to accomplish the great end for which she lives, and that she may taste that peace which in the end all life will share. Ianthe merited this boon because she vanquished earth’s pride and meanness and burst “the icy chains of custom.” Volney’s traveler is likewise disengaged from his body and conveyed to the upper regions by a Genius. Many consolations await him there as a reward for his unselfishness and desires for the happiness of mankind. The earth is plainly visible to both Volney’s traveler and Shelley’s spirit, Ianthe, and its thronging thousands seem like an ant-hill’s citizens. Volney’s traveler sees but a few remains of the hundred cities which once flourished in Syria. All this destruction was caused by cupidity. In the same way the Spirit of Ianthe finds that from England’s fertile fields to the burning plains where Libyan monsters dwell—

Thou canst not find one spot
Whereon no city stood.—Canto II.

Ianthe thanks the fairy for this vision of the past and says that from it she will glean a warning for the future

So that man
May profit by his errors and derive
Experience from his folly.

Volney’s traveler wonders that past experience has not taught mankind a lesson, and that destruction is not a thing of the past. The Spirit, in Queen Mab, is shown the miserable life that kings live. They have no peace of mind; even their “slumbers are but varied agonies.” They are heartless wretches whose ears are deaf to the shrieks of penury. The fairy says that kings and parasites arose—

From vice, black loathsome vice:
From rapine, madness, treachery, and wrong.

This is somewhat stronger than Volney’s dictum that paternal tyranny laid the foundations of political despotism. Canto IV of Queen Mab contains a description of the horrors of war. In Les Ruines there is an account of the war between Russia and Turkey. Both attribute this horrible evil to cupidity, “the daughter and companion of ignorance.” Volney’s traveler is then vouchsafed a glimpse of the “new age” when Equality, Liberty, and Justice will reign supreme. The final chapters of Les Ruines describe a disputation between the doctors of different religions, which ends in convincing the people that all religions are false. The ministers of the various sects contradict and refute one another, opposing revelations to revelations and miracles to miracles, until they render it evident that they are all deceived or deceivers. Man himself is to blame for having been duped. Religion exists because man is superstitious and tolerates the imposition of priests. “Thus, agitated by their own passions, men, whether in their individual capacity, or as collective bodies, always rapacious and improvident passing from tyranny to slavery, from pride to abjectness, from presumption to despair, have been themselves the eternal instruments of their misfortunes.”[26] In the notes to Queen Mab, Shelley says that as ignorance of nature gave birth to gods the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.

But now contempt is mocking thy gray hairs;
Thou art descending to the darksome grave
Unhonored and unpitied, but by those
Whose pride is passing by like thine.
And sheds like thine a glare that fades before the sun
Of Truth, and shines but in the dreadful night
That long has lowered above the ruined world.[27]

The third part of Queen Mab contains a glowing picture of the Golden Age—of the world as it will be, when reason will be the sole guide of men. For this Shelley is indebted mainly to Godwin’s Political Justice.

For his denunciation of the professions Shelley is indebted to the Essay on “Trades and Professions” in Godwin’s Enquirer. With regard to commerce, Godwin says that the introduction of barter and sale into society was followed by vice and misery. “Barter and sale being once introduced, the invention of a circulating medium in the precious metals gave solidity to the evil, and afforded a field upon which for the rapacity and selfishness of man to develop all their refinements.”[28] Shelley says:

Commerce has set the mark of selfishness
The signet of its all-enslaving power
Upon a shining ore, and called it gold.[29]

Godwin expresses his opinion of merchants as follows: “There is no being on the face of the earth with a heart more thoroughly purged from every remnant of the weakness of benevolence and sympathy.”[30]

And Shelley writes:

Commerce! beneath whose poison-breathing shade
No solitary virtue dares to spring.

Shelley says that soldiers—

... are the hired bravos who defend
The tyrant’s throne—the bullies of his fear:
These are the sinks and channels of worst vice,
The refuse of society, the dregs
Of all that is most vile, etc.

His note on this passage was taken bodily from Essay V of Godwin’s Enquirer. With regard to clergymen, Shelley expresses his opinion thus:

Then grave and hoary-headed hypocrites
Without a hope, a passion, or a love
Who, through a life of luxury and lies
Have crept by flattery to the seats of power
Support the system whence their honors flow

Godwin’s verdict is not so severe. “Clergymen,” he says, “are timid in enquiry, prejudiced in opinion, cold, formal, the slave of what other men may think of them, rude, dictatorial, impatient of contradiction, harsh in their censures, and illiberal in their judgments.”

Queen Mab then is a fierce diatribe against existing institutions. It contains very little constructive philosophy. What value has it for mankind? Does it serve any purpose apart from giving pleasure to the aesthetic faculties? It assuredly does. It awakens the social conscience. The first step for the sinner on the road to conversion is to try to realize the sinful state of his soul. The same is true of a nation in need of reform. Unless its shortcomings are vividly brought home to it, reformation will never take place. To do this was and still is the work of Queen Mab. It laid bare the weaknesses of State and Church; it engendered the spirit of compassion and thus paved the way for reform.