Shelley Among the Chartists

Abstract

SHELLEY AMONG THE CHARTISTS R O N A L D T E T R E A U L T D a lh ou sie U n iv ersity W hen Shelley began The Mask of Anarchy by invoking the “great power” of the voice that speaks in the poem, he was prophetic in more ways than one. His trope figures not merely inspiration but consequence, for the verbal power of Shelley’s verse electrified his readers, not always in ways he could anticipate. Published too late to have any impact on events leading up to the Reform Bill of 1832, the poem nevertheless was to play an influential role in subsequent agitations for social change. Along with other works of Shelley, the poem was highly popular among the Chartists; indeed, it appears that the politics of The Mask of Anarchy found greater compatibility with the revolutionary tendencies in Chartism than they did with the liberal spirit of Whiggish reform with which Shelley is usually associated. Leigh Hunt thought it was safe to publish the poem in 1832, for as he read the poem, “it advises what has since taken place” (Shelley 3: 227). But he could not of course foresee the purposes the poem might serve in the climate of intense class warfare in the years to come. That the poem could be read less innocently is a sign that the poem’s language is not transparent but figurally prolific, and that the “great power” of its discourse conveys a surplus of meaning that can be interpreted differently by readers with differing ideologies. Though Hunt in his 1832 Preface deliberately linked The Mask of An­ archy with Shelley’s more rational proposals for reform, the justification he gives for withholding it from publication in 1819 hints at his fear of an irrational element in the poem. As soon as he heard about the charge of the Manchester cavalry on a large but peaceable reform meeting (an event commonly known as the Peterloo massacre), Shelley wrote a letter to Hunt expressing the depth of his emotion: “the torrent of my indignation has not yet done boiling in my veins. I wait anxiously to hear how the Country will express its sense of this bloody murderous oppression” (6 September 1819). Although the process of putting that anger into words is a way of achieving power over it, there is a power in the words themselves of Shelley’s poem that is beyond the control of the poet. Hunt seems to sense this possibility even as he balances it against what he sees as Shelley’s artistic intentions: His charity [Hunt writes] was avowedly more than proportionate to his indignation; yet I thought that even the suffering part of the people, English Studies in Ca n a d a , x v i, 3, September 1990 judging, not unnaturally, from their own feelings, and from the exaspera­ tion which suffering produces before it produces knowledge, would believe a hundred-fold in his anger, to what they would in his good intention. (Shelley 3: 225) If some Chartists, when they were agitating for further reforms after 1832, responded more to Shelley’s indignation than to the charity and forbear­ ance in his poetry, they can be dismissed as simply misunderstanding his meaning. However, the extent of Shelley’s popularity among the Chartists suggests that their response to him was a complex phenomenon, and that some of his angriest readers were able to connect with the emotional po­ tential of his text, however thickly shrouded it might be within the veils of putative “good intention.” George Bernard Shaw helped promote the notion that Shelley, in the words of his 1892 review, “inspired a good deal of that huge but badly managed popular effort called the Chartist movement” (29: 257). Though Chartism was often rooted in local and temporary grievances, it gained its impetus from the widespread feeling that the Reform Bill of 1832 had not gone far enough. Further extension of the franchise and greater participa­ tion in political institutions were the principles on which Chartism based its six-point program calling for universal manhood suffrage, vote by secret ballot, equal electoral districts, annual parliaments, abolition...