'The destinies of the world': Shelley's reception and transmission of European news in 1820–21

Abstract

'The destinies of the world':Shelley's reception and transmission of European news in 1820-211 Michael Rossington Between March 1820 and April 1821 Percy Bysshe Shelley, then residing in Tuscany, awakened to the idea that he might assume agency as the mediator of anxious expectation at a time of political crisis in Europe. This essay examines one of his sources of news during this period, Galignani's Messenger, an English-language daily newspaper published in Paris and distributed on the continent. It also considers Shelley's use of the London-based Morning Chronicle as a vehicle for publishinga poem and letter that raised awareness of contemporary political events in Naples and Greece. Finally, it suggests that in early 1821he may have had in mind the publication ofa poem and a prose-piece in Italian in a Florentine newspaper or monthly review to the same end. As well as seeking to avail himself of the fastest possible means of publishing responses to breaking news, daily newspapers enabled him to secure audiences denied bythe poor sales of volumes of his poetry. Furthermore he could circumvent the editors with whom he had placed much of his work since autumn 1816, Leigh Hunt and Charles Ollier, both of whom from autumn 1819 had been hesitant about publishing some of the works he had sent them. Before examining instances of this newspaper-genre of hisoeuvre, an outline is offered of why newswas important to Shelley between March 1820 and April 1821, the channels through which he received it, and some examples of his earlier writings prompted by widely-reported political events. A significant amount of Shelley's poetryand prose was occasioned by news reports and intended for immediate public consumption. The Mask of Anarchy, written in September 1819 in Livorno and sent to Leigh Hunt later that month for publication in his London weekly newspaper, the Examiner but not published until 1832, is only the most celebrated example. This poem and some of the prose pamphlets he published while living in England testify to his ability to identify and re-present events that encapsulated civic division with the aim of instilling debate and shifting public opinion. This opportunistic bent may be seen as evidence of an early political instinct that in a letter of June 1822, one of his last, he both acknowledged but was glad to have kept in abeyance: 'I once thought to study these affairs & write or act in them – I am glad that my good genius said refrain.'2 Earlier cases in point are A Letter to Lord Ellenborough (1812), 'occasioned', its title-page states, by the imprisonment of Daniel Isaac Eaton on a charge of publishing a blasphemous libel attributed to Thomas Paine entitled The Age of Reason: Part the Third, and An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte (1817), prompted by the 'news … nearly at the same time' as the death of the Regent's daughter in [End Page 233] November 1817, of the hanging of three Nottinghamshire men, Jeremiah Brandreth, Isaac Ludlam, and William Turner for high treason. In these instances, widely-circulated national news provided the pretext for Shelley to instruct an already-educated audience philosophically and historically in the extendedly discursive manner appropriate to the pamphlet form. Milton must have been a prominent role-model in this regard along with William Godwin. As recent editors have noted, accounts Shelley read in 'American papers' (Letters, i. 272) – that is, presumably, reports from American sources reproduced in the British press – inspired an early poem, 'To the Republicans of North America' (written in 1812 but not published until 1890), addressed to Mexican rebels against Spanish colonial rule.3 But what of his writings published in newspapers before his removal to Italy in March 1818? On returning from Switzerlandin autumn 1816 he submitted 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty' to Hunt for publication in the Examiner (where it appeared on 19 January 1817), that paper also publishing his review of Godwin's novel Mandeville (28 December 1817) and what has come to be his best-known sonnet 'Ozymandias' (11 January 1818). But such publications owe as much to Hunt's method of patronizing young...