Shelley's ‘cancelled cycles’: Huttonian Geomorphology and Catastrophe in Prometheus Unbound (1820)

Abstract

In an important recent study of the theories of the eighteenth-century Scottish geologist James Hutton, Tom Furniss has read Hutton’s 1788 text as ‘Romantic science’, arguing that Hutton’s depiction of the earth as a ‘self-sustaining. . . organism whose design bears witness to the wisdom and goodness of nature itself’ offers a model of nature that finds parallels in Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s Romantic theory. Demonstrating how Hutton’s text participates in the formation of Romantic culture, Furniss explores the continuities between Hutton’s ostensibly Enlightenment science and Romantic sensibilities. Building on Furniss’s argument, this paper reads Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) as a text that responds to both the empirical and Romantic character of Huttonian earth science, and crucially, as a text that uses the mechanisms of geological change Hutton posits in order to figure a characteristically Shelleyan revolution. It is a commonplace to read Shelley’s ideal model of socio/political reform as a gradual, non-violent and ideological revolution in which the values of the intellectual elite are filtered down and assimilated into the social body over generations. However, with regards to Prometheus Unbound, the structural mechanism through which Shelley figures this transformation has not been fully identified. I argue that a more coherent picture of the Shelleyan revolution emerges once the drama’s Huttonian deep structure is brought into relief, and that the geology of Shelley’s text, which has been read in terms of Georges Cuvier’s descriptions of the effects of serial geological catastrophe, can only be fully understood once the drama as a whole is framed within the wider cycles of Huttonian geological theory. Shelley’s depiction of sequential tyrannies – of ‘cancelled cycles’ and the ‘wrecks . . . of many a city vast’ (4.289, 296) – evokes Constantin Francois Volney’s The Ruins: or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires (1791), a text that Shelley knew well and that resonates in much of his politically charged poetry, and one that offered a powerful indictment of a world denied moral and intellectual maturity. That The Ruins made a ‘deep . . . impression upon Shelley’, and that ‘echoes of it are to be found in Prometheus Unbound’, has long been recognised. Also well known is Shelley’s adherence to the Godwinian view that political reform should ‘take place in a mild and gradual, though incessant advance, not by violent leaps’. In A Philosophical View