The firm that did bring out most of his published volumes, C. and J. Ollier, was a small, impecunious and inexperienced operation lacking the resources to promote a little-known author. Shelley came to regret his connection with the Olliers, whose dealings with him and his poetry were certainly less than assiduous and largely ineffective.2

Partisan literary politics also played its part. Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813) and Laon and Cythna (1817), revised and reissued as The Revolt of Islam (1818), made outright attacks on monarchy and institutional religion as principal sources of the injustice and oppression which had continued to blight the world since first kings and priests leagued together in mutual interest. Both poems also frankly denied the existence of God and (in the unrevised Laon and Cythna) celebrated the incestuous love of a brother and sister as liberation from arbitrary moral proscription. Polemical and openly belligerent, these substantial works attracted the animosity, and on occasion the malevolence, of the conservative press, instances of which are considered below. Shelley’s association with the liberal weekly The Examiner and its editor, the poet and man of letters Leigh Hunt (1784–1859), gave rise to further contention. Hunt had introduced Shelley in his newspaper as a rising talent, published some of his poems and defended his literary gifts and personal integrity. To some, Shelley was tarnished by association with what Blackwood’s Magazine lampooned as an impudent and subversive coterie gathered round Hunt, the ‘Cockney School’, which included John Keats and William Hazlitt.3 And, as if all this were not enough to nourish suspicion and provoke censure, a few notorious events in Shelley’s personal life served as a basis on which to construct a sensational history of impiety and moral depravity.

In March 1811 Shelley had been expelled from University College, Oxford, for diffusing, and then refusing to deny his joint authorship (with his fellow undergraduate Thomas Jefferson Hogg) of, the rationalist pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism.4 For this, together with the two long poems mentioned above, he was in orthodox quarters caricatured as impious, not to say demonic. Additional opprobrium (as well as prurient interest) was attracted by the tangled involvements of his private life. In July 1814 he had eloped with the then Mary Godwin, abandoning Harriet, his wife of three years, and their two children – an act which acquired a tragic dimension when Harriet committed suicide in autumn 1816. Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, had accompanied her and Shelley to France and Switzerland in summer 1814 and lived with them for long periods thereafter. Claire (then pregnant by Byron) again made one of their party in summer 1816 in Switzerland, giving rise to rumours of a ‘league of incest’ involving herself, Mary, Byron and Shelley.5 From early 1817 the presence of Claire’s child Alba (later ‘Allegra’) in the Shelley household inspired further rumours of promiscuity. The imputations of sexual licence combined with his reputation for atheism to prepossess opinion against Shelley as both irreligious and dissolute, the latter condition seeming to follow as a matter of course from the former. As if in official validation of these charges, in March 1817 the Court of Chancery denied him custody of his two children by his first wife, in order, the court ruled, to prevent the principles that governed his behaviour being communicated to his offspring.

And then many of Shelley’s major poems, among them several on which he himself set great store, are (in the words of his friend Edward Williams) ‘far above the level of common apprehension’.6 Ambitious in scope, sophisticated in their procedures, they ask for close and sustained attention from readers as well as an alert receptiveness to literary experiment. Shelley himself repeatedly acknowledged that such poetry could only ever be of limited appeal, qualifying the audience he addressed as ‘enlightened and refined’ (Laon and Cythna) or (in Greek) ‘the discerning’ (Epipsychidion) or consisting of no ‘more than 5 or 6 persons’ (Prometheus Unbound).7 The figures gathered by William St Clair confirm the truth of the publisher Charles Ollier’s remark in 1823, that ‘the sale, in every instance, of Mr Shelley’s works has been very confined’.8

This set of circumstances prevented Shelley’s poetry from reaching any considerable number of readers in his lifetime. The one, modest, exception was the tragedy The Cenci (1819), 250 copies of which he had printed in Italy and sent to London, where a second edition was published in 1821, although this did not itself sell well. For a poet determined to write for his times, as Shelley was, this signal failure to find an audience was deeply dispiriting. His growing persuasion that Byron’s recent poetry, especially Don Juan (1819–24) and Cain (1821), had consolidated his status as the pre-eminent writer of the age added to the disappointment that appears over and again in Shelley’s letters during the last year or so of his life. ‘I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may: and there is no other with whom it is worth contending,’ he wrote to Mary in August 1821. And to his friend the novelist and poet Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) in January 1822: ‘I wish I had something better to do than furnish this jingling food for the hunger of oblivion, called verse.’9

Such a signal absence of contemporary success might seem the inevitable consequence of Shelley’s nature as other-worldly dreamer, an idea of him which has proved remarkably persistent, and which appears to be borne out by some picturesque incidents in his early life. His first wife, Harriet, reported to a friend that she was ‘ready to die of laughter’ when, in Dublin, they threw Shelley’s political pamphlets out of the window, handed them to passers-by in the street, even ‘put one into a woman’s hood of a cloak’.10 The Romantic gestures celebrated in his two sonnets of August 1812, ‘On launching some bottles filled with Knowledge into the Bristol Channel’ and ‘To a balloon, laden with Knowledge’, seem to confirm the portrait of the young Shelley as high-minded but naïve, and feckless at delivering a message he considered of benefit to humanity.11 The truth is quite another matter. From the time of his earliest literary efforts, Shelley displays a practical awareness of the readers he means particularly to address among the various strands of the increasing and increasingly diverse reading public of the early nineteenth century.12 The second of his two Gothic romances, St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian was, he wrote to the publisher in November 1810, ‘a thing which almost mechanically sells to circulating libraries, &c’.13 In March 1813 he advised a prospective publisher to have printed no more than 250 copies of the aggressively radical Queen Mab as a ‘small neat Quarto, on fine paper & so as to catch the aristocrats: They will not read it, but their sons & daughters may’.14 The self-deprecatory Advertisement to his volume Rosalind and Helen (1819) specifies the object of the title-poem, as no more than ‘interesting the affections and amusing the imagination’, thereby signalling the broad popular readership he means to address in this sentimental domestic tale.15 He evokes the ‘highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers’ in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound (1820), having forewarned the publisher Charles Ollier that this ‘lyrical drama’ was unlikely to sell ‘beyond twenty copies’.16 The Cenci (1820), on the other hand, was ‘written for the multitude’, an audience of metropolitan theatre-goers for whom he had taken care to produce ‘the greatest degree of popular effect’ by presenting historical characters as naturally as possible and in unadorned language.17 Following the Peterloo Massacre he tried in spring 1820 to enlist Leigh Hunt’s help in publishing ‘a little volume of popular songs, wholly political, & destined to awaken & direct the imagination of the reformers’, a project which never came to fruition, no doubt owing to Hunt’s prudence; while his long and incomplete prose essay A Philosophical View of Reform he conceived as a kind of textbook for ‘the philosophical [i.e. educated and thoughtful] reformers’, the appeal of which would be ‘from the passions to the reason of men’.18 Another sort of appeal (to those potential supporters acquainted with Greek history and culture) was made in autumn 1821 in favour of a current cause in urgent need of assistance, the incipient Greek revolution against Ottoman rule, which required the ‘immediate publication’ (Shelley wrote to Ollier) of his topical drama Hellas.19

II

Remarkably, for a writer whose works did not enjoy wide circulation, Shelley’s volumes of verse were regularly reviewed in contemporary literary periodicals.20 These notices encompass a more extreme range of opinion than that provoked by any major English poet of the Romantic period. The Shelley that emerges from them is not a single figure but several, usually portrayed in striking colours, not infrequently from the garish quarter of the palette. The most egregious instance of this kind is the vain, sour, querulous, ignorant and vicious individual who is sketched in a review of Laon and Cythna/The Revolt of Islam in the April 1819 number of the Quarterly Review.21 To this image of moral deformity even blacker traits might be added, the reviewer (Shelley’s Eton contemporary J. T. Coleridge, nephew of the poet) assures readers, were he inclined to ‘withdraw the veil of private life’.