J. Furnivall marked yet another stage in the process of legitimization. The society, which counted George Bernard Shaw among its members as well as several of the great Victorian Shelley specialists, arranged monthly lectures, supported reprints of rare Shelley texts and encouraged serious study of the poet’s ideas and literary techniques. Its most celebrated undertaking was sponsoring the well-publicized first performance of The Cenci in 1886. Ostensibly a ‘private’ occasion – the Lord Chamberlain, exercising the office of censor, had refused to license a public production – the performance was attended by an audience of some 2,400. The society’s achievement in mounting The Cenci was to situate Shelley’s tragedy on the moral fringe of the lively Victorian theatrical world and test its suitability for the stage. The performance was extensively reviewed as a notable dramatic occasion – Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw were among the reviewers – attracting considered, and mixed, opinions on the tragedy itself, the production and the acting, rather than the outraged condemnation the play had attracted when first published.31 Out of the Shelley Society’s activities also emerged the committed political interpretations Shelley’s Socialism (1888), by Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, and the social reformer and vegetarian Henry Salt’s A Shelley Primer (1887), a tradition continued, and revised, for the twentieth century in Paul Foot’s Red Shelley (1980).

III

In a letter of October 1819 to his publisher, Charles Ollier, Shelley evokes the example of the leading poets of the day, for him Wordsworth and Byron, who have drawn upon ‘the new springs of thought and feeling, which the great events of our age have exposed to view’.32 Born in 1792, three years after the outbreak of the French Revolution, Shelley lived in a time of ‘great events’ such as had never been experienced in the modern history of Europe. Pre-eminent among these was the grand narrative of the French Revolution. Its ideals and accomplishments, failings and atrocities, its experiment in republicanism, the emergence of Napoleon – the empire that rapidly succeeded, followed by the final collapse of the Napoleonic regime and the restoration of monarchy – constituted an overarching influence on Shelley’s writing in verse and prose, as it did on the minds and expectations of his contemporaries. And if the French revolutionary and imperial experiments are viewed as encompassing not only an astonishing sequence of political initiatives and military actions but also the intellectual influences that underlay them – the philosophical and literary responses to them across Europe and in the wider world, the debates occasioned, the sense of possibility opened up and the impetus given to both reform and reaction – then we can appreciate the force of Shelley’s remarks to Byron in letters of September 1816 on the Revolution as ‘the master theme of the epoch in which we live’ and its suitability for a literary work ‘involving all that is best qualified to interest and to instruct mankind’.33 The recent history of France inevitably recalled the establishment of the young American Republic, which itself had been achieved through a ‘just and successful Revolt’ (as Shelley puts it in A Philosophical View of Reform: here) inspired by democratic ideals and with French assistance.34 An associated conflict, the British–American War of 1812, continued from the middle of that year until the end of 1814.

The war with France, which lasted with brief interruptions from 1793 to 1815, occasioned significant hardship in Britain. Increased taxation and the scarcity of resources required by the war effort were felt most acutely by those of low or modest income, the continuing heavy impositions necessary to repay the increase in the national debt being a particular source of privation and resentment. The outdated and unequal system of parliamentary representation in Britain had long been the cause of popular discontent, and led to a post-war revival of organized agitation for electoral reform, which was harshly repressed by government. Following the first defeat of Napoleon, the European settlement agreed by the victorious powers at the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) represented a cruel disappointment for British liberals, who condemned it as reactionary; while the ‘Holy Alliance’ of September 1815 entered into by Austria, Russia and Prussia (but not Britain), which sought to lend religious sanction to the renewed order of absolutist governance and forestall any fresh revolutionary movements, appeared to European liberal opinion as no more than a cover of pious hypocrisy for the continued exercise of arbitrary political authority. Both at home and abroad the ideals of the Revolution seemed clearly to have given way to reaction.

As an intellectual heir of the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Shelley viewed the momentous happenings and public debates of his time within an established tradition of critical thought. The leading ideas that shaped his outlook, evident in both his published works and his private correspondence, are rationalist, secular, progressive and egalitarian. He regularly evokes, to take important examples, the Roman poet Lucretius (98–c.55 BC), materialist critic of religious superstition; the scientific reformer Francis Bacon (1561–1626); the philosophical anarchist William Godwin (1756–1836), who would become his father-in-law in 1816; and the empirical philosopher and sceptic Sir William Drummond (?1770–1828). A summary definition of the modern liberal perspective, together with a history in outline of the major thinkers who have contributed to form it, is set out in the initial section of A Philosophical View of Reform, which concludes:

The result of the labours of the political philosophers has been the establishment of the principle of Utility [or ‘general advantage’] as the substance, and liberty and equality as the forms, according to which the concerns of human life ought to be administered.

Shelley was persuaded that these ideals, conspicuously recalling the Revolutionary Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, would inevitably be realized by a gradual dissemination of knowledge. Human well-being and lasting social improvement could be achieved only if they were preceded and directed by the necessary mental and moral enlightenment. This moderate gradualism he shared with many upper- and middle-class intellectuals of his time. In common with them, he struggled with the practical dilemma of how best to promote the durable reform of inequitable and oppressive political regimes in an age when established power had become deeply resistant to reform. In a postscript to his pamphlet An Address to the Irish People (1812), Shelley urges the need for a comprehensive moral and political regeneration of society which avoids equally ‘the rapidity and danger of revolution’ and the minor concessions and half measures that amount to no more than the ‘time servingness of temporizing reform’.35

Religion, too, Shelley regarded from a rational and sceptical point of view. Although he maintained a deep admiration for the character and social teachings of Christ, he considered that the grand biblical scheme of Creation, Fall, Redemption and Last Judgement could not command belief in an enlightened age. He especially deplored what he considered the historical exploitation of the fictional narratives and prophecies of the Bible by the collusion of the Christian Church with dynastic and absolutist political systems in order that the ‘cunning and selfish few’ might consolidate their power over the fearful and ignorant many.36 Nor could he accept the conclusions on the origin and governance of the universe arrived at solely by reasoning on the phenomena and operations of nature, the traditional ground of ‘natural religion’ or ‘deism’, subscribing instead to the sceptical conclusions of empirical philosophers such as David Hume, who held that certainty was unattainable in such matters. Nonetheless, in various contexts Shelley formulated his intuitive persuasion of the existence of a universal presiding and directing power that is immanent in nature. ‘The interfused and overruling Spirit of all the energy and wisdom included within the circle of existing things’ is how he puts it in ‘On Christianity’ (here), where he explores the idea most fully. This Spirit he conceived of not as remote from human experience but as closely implicated with it. In his commentary on the beatitude ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’ (Matthew 5:8) Shelley makes it clear that, for him, so far from being transcendent and impenetrable, the divine is experienced by the exercise of virtue at the highest reach of our human nature (here).

IV

In the resonant concluding paragraph of A Defence of Poetry (here), Shelley memorably articulates the relation between contemporary writers and what he calls ‘the spirit of the age’ which animates them. An epoch of great intellectual and artistic achievement is one in which revolutionary events, ideas and imagination energize each other. Such was the case in the England of the Renaissance, and so it is at the present moment:

we live among such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last national struggle for civil and religious liberty … At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature.

Within this atmosphere of creative interchange, the art of great poets such as Dante exhibits a vital relation to contemporary ‘knowledge, and sentiment, and religion, and political condition’, so shaping an indispensable representation of the epoch to itself and transmitting it to succeeding ages (here). This high and serious office Shelley began to define in the Preface to Laon and Cythna and pursued in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound, where artists are said to be ‘in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age’ (here).