Deep Time: Queen Mab

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines Percy Bysshe Shelley's understanding and representation of Romantic–age conceptions of planetary temporalities on the scale of what we would today refer to as “deep time,” or the prehuman history of the Earth. I explore Shelley's response in Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem: with Notes (1813) to James Hutton's geological theories of planetary temporalities and show that Shelley's depiction of eternalism in this poem must be recontextualized in light of Hutton's geological critique. Few scholars have sought to explore the deep time dimensions of the poem's intense temporal rescaling and Shelley's voluminous prose notes on the topic. As I show, Shelley's conception and representation of temporal scale in Queen Mab is likely informed by Hutton's research leading to the publication of his Theory of the Earth, with Proofs and Illustrations (1795) and the afterlife of that work in his friend and popularizer John Playfair's Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802). If we are going to unpack and comprehend Shelley's depiction of eternity in Queen Mab, we must return to the geological notion of eternalism defining Huttonian theory.