‘A voice from over the Sea’: Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy, Peterloo, and the English Radical Press

Abstract

Abstract Shelley’s poetic response to the Peterloo massacre, The Mask of Anarchy, was crucially informed by printed news sources relating to the momentous events in Manchester of 16 August 1819. Hitherto our knowledge of those sources has been confined to Leigh Hunt’s Examiner newspaper. This article re-examines the available evidence and argues that Shelley may well also have drawn on the accounts of Peterloo written by the radical journalist and freethinker, Richard Carlile. It traces the connections between Carlile and the Shelley circle in London during 1819 (including Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock, William Godwin, and Thomas Jefferson Hogg), and identifies a number of suggestive verbal parallels between Shelley’s Mask and Carlile’s prose. But there were also important political differences between the two men; an appreciation of those differences throws new light on the Mask’s ambivalent attitude to the prospect of revolution, and Shelley’s strident advocacy of non-violent resistance to state-sponsored oppression.