Revolutionary Shelley

Abstract

Shelley, born three years after the storming of the Bastille, witnessed both the spread and the suppression of the ideals of the French Revolution. Liberty and equality remained catchwords, waiting to be turned into forbidden action. Having arrived on the scene too late to take an active part, Shelley hoped for belated acknowledgment as a radical. Indeed, his life as an outcast and his subversive ideas appealed to his red readers so much that they styled the poet of “Song to the Men of England” as a revolutionary spokesman of the masses. Especially among the Chartists, he achieved more posthumous fame than Byron. Lectures on Shelley were popular, journalists frequently quoted him, and his poetry was recited at meetings. As many of the Chartist leaders were poets themselves, they felt inspired by Shelley’s radical ideas, expressed in his infl uential poem Queen Mab, which was distributed widely through a large number of cheap pirated editions