“England in 1819” and Other Poems
“England in 1819” and Other Poems
THE LITERARY WORKS
Three poems set in England during the 1810s; all three were written in 1819; “The Mask of Anarchy” was published in 1832; “England in 1819” and “Song to the Men of England” were published in 1839.
SYNOPSIS
Triggered by the Manchester Massacre in 1819, the poems protest government in the Regency era and call for revolution. The first poem describes the corrupt monarchy; the remaining two call upon England’s oppressed workers to rise up against employers.
Events in History at the Time of the Poems
Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792 at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, into a conservative landowning aristocratic family, but most of his writing was devoted to spreading his vision of a free-thinking, universal brotherhood. He attended Oxford University but was expelled for publishing The Necessity of Atheism. In 1811 he married Harriet Westbrook, with whom he had two children. He published his first long Radical poem, Queen Mab, in 1813. Involved in Radical political activities in Ireland and then Wales, he fled Wales for London in 1813. Here he met the well-known, liberal social philosopher William Godwin, and also Godwin’s daughter, Mary, whose mother was the famed feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (see Vindication of the Rights of Woman , also in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times). Mary Godwin and Shelley became a couple, going off to continental Europe, where they lived near the Romantic poet Lord Byron. In 1816 Harriet Shelley drowned herself and Percy Shelley married Mary Godwin. The next year the British courts denied him custody of his two children by Harriet; the bitterness of this experience prompted him to leave England for good and settle in Italy. He died here in 1822 at the age of 30, victim of a drowning accident.
Although Shelley never completed his formal education, he voraciously read classical Greek and Western literature, philosophy, history, and contemporary sciences. Also, he eagerly followed the social and political events that were unfolding in England at the time, penning political poems such as Queen Mab, The Revolt of Islam, and the three poems featured in this entry, which comment on the social revolution taking place in England during this era.
Events in History at the Time of the Poems
The Napoleonic Wars and the British monarchy
The stage of the French Revolution known as the “Reign of Terror”—when thousands of counterrevolutionaries were guillotined along with the French royal family—provoked consternation among England’s aristocracy. It seemed very likely that the Revolution might cross the British Channel, and that the British monarchy might meet the same fate as that of the French royal family, who had been executed publicly. In 1793 France declared war on Britain, and the Napoleonic Wars began. Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799 and established a military dictatorship in France; he then began his series of conquests of neighboring states—Switzerland, Italy, Holland, Germany. As the war progressed, the British enacted increasingly conservative, restrictive laws in order to control any possible sedition at home. Lasting for over a decade, the Napoleonic Wars finally ended in 1815, with Napoleon’s decisive defeat at the Battle of Waterloo.
During the Napoleonic Wars, the British monarchy itself fragmented and changed shape, and Shelley’s sonnet, “England in 1819,” caustically draws upon the details of this change. King George III had the first of several attacks of madness in 1788, and was declared insane in 1811; his son George, the Prince of Wales, ruled as Regent until 1820 (hence the term “Regency England”). In that year George III died and the Prince of Wales took the throne as George IV.
George III may have been high-handed and stubbornly authoritative (which cost England its American colonies), as well as fat, moralistic, and dull, but he had strengths that the Prince Regent definitely lacked. George III was also squarely middle class in his emphasis on thrift and domestic virtue, and he remained happily married to Queen Charlotte, who bore him 15 children. His three eldest sons were all profligate and corrupt, each with a long line of royal mistresses. The third, George, who became Prince Regent, was the most extravagant of all. In 1798, George reluctantly married his cousin, Princess Caroline, to settle his debts of thousands of pounds. Nine months later, after the birth of a daughter, Charlotte, he formally separated from Caroline, and from then on he openly carried on a series of royal affairs. He loved to eat, and his increasing girth showed it; he also loved to give wildly expensive parties for the London aristocracy (one banquet in 1817 featured more than 100 gourmet dishes).
The working-class experience in Regency England
At the other end of the social scale, the laborers, artisans, and the poor grew increasingly desperate as their wages dropped or they were forced out of work altogether by the Industrial Revolution (a series of technological and social changes that transformed England from a primarily agricultural nation into an urban manufacturing power; these changes quickened between 1750 and 1850). Shelley’s companion poems, “Song to the Men of England” and “The Mask of Anarchy,” are full of the particulars of the contemporary working-class experience during this period.
Traditionally, artisan trades such as spinning and weaving had been “cottage industries,” with whole families laboring at home. But during the first few decades of the nineteenth century, the machines of the factory mills relentlessly replaced the handwork of the artisans, producing more goods at a more rapid rate. So in a market flooded with cheaper goods, fewer workers were needed to produce them, and unemployment increased exponentially. As more and more workers became available, the masters (employers) reduced the wages of those who did work. Often the workers were paid in scrip to be used only in the factory stores (which featured inflated prices) rather than in coin. The most depressed trade was that of weaving, as the artisan weavers were rapidly replaced by the power looms of the cotton mills.
Factory masters also required laborers to work longer hours in shifts at the factories: the average length of a working day was 14 hours. Child labor was essential to the mills, and it was not until 1819 that an act was passed limiting the time that children could spend working in the cotton mills to 12 hours a day. This was the first, though inadequate, parliamentary reform of the laborers’ working conditions. The factory shifts destroyed the workers’ family lives in other ways: whereas parents and children had formerly worked together at home to craft their goods, now they worked at the mills on different shifts.
Ever since the coming of the Industrial Revolution, workers in different trades had attempted to organize into unions, although unionists could be prosecuted for conspiracy. The Combination Acts, first passed in 1799 and 1800, sentenced unionists to prison terms. By 1817 it had become alarmingly clear to authorities that the organizing of trade unions was spreading. It was also clear that the union movement was coming into contact with radicals who called for universal suffrage, or the right of all Englishmen to vote for parliamentary representatives.
There was an increasing number of demonstrations, and sometimes strikes, by workers in different English manufacturing cities. In Manchester the spinners went on strike in 1818, followed by the bricksetters, dyers, and carpenters in 1819. In that same year the miners marched in Dewsbury, and the framework-knitters demonstrated in Nottingham. As a result, the Combination Acts were more rigorously enforced. Shelley’s “Song to the Men of England” is addressed to the workers who are afraid to organize into trade unions.
Other earlier government measures had increased the workers’ misery. In the late eighteenth century, the rural landowners sped up the “enclosing” of areas on their estates that had traditionally been held in common by the rural poor; this common land henceforth became a private part of the landowner’s estate. The government passed enclosure laws to enforce this action; Parliament was in favor of it because higher taxes could thus be levied on the landowners. The enclosed lands had been areas where the poor could plant small gardens for food, or keep some chickens and a cow to supply eggs and milk. Now, the poor either starved, or worked for low wages in the cotton mills or mines.
The plight of the poor was made even more desperate during the Napoleonic Wars; grain could not be imported, which kept the cost of bread high. In 1815, when the wars ended, the government passed the Corn Laws (not repealed until 1846), which kept the cost of grain artificially high by raising the tariff on imported grain to protect English farmers, or landowners, from foreign competition. Since bread was made from grain, this only drove the cost of the staple food of the poor upward. At one point, it was cheaper to buy a pint of gin than a loaf of bread. During 1815 there were riots to prevent the exportation of grain and also to protest the high cost of grain; riots by the unemployed to destroy factory machinery; and still more riots by weavers, miners, and other workers in reaction to the reduction of their wages. In 1816 the first of a series of food riots took place, as 1,500 farm laborers, carrying spiked sticks and flags with the slogan “Bread or Blood,” set the barns of their landlords on fire. The government responded with predictable military force, set up a Special Commission to investigate, and hanged several of the rioters. Then in 1817 habeas corpus (the law that prevented imprisonment without a charge and guaranteed a speedy trial) was suspended for the first time in centuries.
CLASS SUFFRAGE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
One of the main causes of social unrest during the Romantic period was the fact that suffrage, or the right to vote for parliamentary representatives, was restricted to aristocratic landowners until the first Reform Bill was passed in 1832. The early decades of the nineteenth century saw a continuing shift in the population from the rural areas to the large manufacturing cities; yet these urban English citizens had no parliamentary representation, whether middle-class factory owners or workers. As urban conditions grew increasingly desperate, the conservative landowning members of Parliament stiffened their resistance to any kind of labor reform. The first Reform Bill of 1832 extended franchise to middle-class property owners. But aristocratic landowners and middle-class property owners all shrank from allowing unpropertied workers to vote for parliamentary representatives, who could then make laws affecting those with property. Radical workers joined the Chartist movement in the mid 1830s; in 1836 they drew up a “Charter” with a petition to parliament calling for “universal suffrage” that would extend the vote to all Englishmen, In 1838 the Charter was formally adopted by unionists. The government responded by jailing many Chartists, and others fled the country. In 1840 Chartism organized into the National Charter Association, and continued to agitate for parliamentary consideration of their petition. The House of Commons rejected their petition in 1848. Suffrage was not extended to the working classes until the second Reform Bill in 1867.
Radical culture in Regency England
The Radicals opposed the conservative, harsh repression of the monarchy and the parliament. The Radicals were to be found among the English working-class artisans and laborers, as well as among the intellectuals and writers—both middle class or, in the cases of Byron and Shelley, aristocratic.
The movement for parliamentary reform in England extended back to the 1770s. In the 1790s, the movement grew stronger among the London artisans and the rural working-class societies that studied the works of the Radical Thomas Paine (including Rights of Man [1791] and Age oj Reason[1793]). Later, rural working-class Radicals would read religious tracts, histories, and Radical periodicals; or the illiterate workers would meet weekly in a pub where William Cobbett’s Radical pamphlet, Political Register, would be read to them.
Working-class Radical leaders began agitating to extend the vote to all men, whether propertied or not; and the Hampden Clubs were formed in 1812 to bring the reform movement out into the open. These clubs sprang up in large towns all over England, and continued until 1820; their working-class members resolved to achieve reform by securing suffrage, rather than by rioting. To the aristocratic, propertied English citizens who did have the vote, the idea of extending suffrage to all classes (of men) was appalling, even terrifying.
There was also an active Radical press that supported working-class protest. Some pamphlets and weekly periodicals, like Cobbett’s Political Register, were designed to reach a working class audience; others were aimed at a middle-class and aristocratic audience, most notably Leigh Hunt’s The Examiner. Founded in 1808, this weekly became widely read for its literary reviews, incisive political articles, and contributions by major Radical writers such as William Hazlitt, Byron, and Shelley.
Radical publishers always ran the risk of imprisonment for political libel; so many of them received prison terms that it became a badge of honor. Both Cobbett and Hunt spent time in prison under this charge—Hunt for his article attacking George III, with an irreverent aside on his weight. When habeas corpus was suspended in 1817, Radical leaders fled, and Cobbett left England.
The Manchester Massacre: Peterloo
“On August 16, 1819, about 100,000 millworkers and their families gathered in St. Peter’s Field outside a cotton mill in Manchester, both to demonstrate for higher wages and to hear the Radical orator Henry Hunt (no relation to Leigh Hunt) speaking for universal suffrage. The demonstration was to be peaceful, so the workers were unarmed and whole families attended with their children. Local authorities sent a saber-armed militia on horseback to arrest Hunt. After he had been carried off, they turned on the tightly packed crowd to cut down the people who were frantically stampeding to escape. One witness described the scene ten minutes later:
Over the whole field, were strewed caps, bonnets, hats, shawls, and shoes, and other parts of male and female dress; trampled, torn, and bloody. The yeomanry had dismounted—some were easing their horses’ girth, others adjusting their accoutrements; and some were wiping their sabers. Several mounds of human beings still remained where they had fallen, crushed down and smothered. Some of these were still groaning—others with staring eyes, were gasping for breath, and others would never breathe more. (Bamford in Hollis, pp. 100-101)
Records show that 11 workers were killed; 571 were injured on the field, and of these, 161 cases came from saber wounds and the rest were due to trampling by either the panicked crowd or the horses’ hooves of the militia. More than 100 of the injured were women or girls. Probably there were scores more who did not report their injuries for fear of later retaliation (Thompson, p. 687).
The massacre outraged the working class and much of the middle class, and it served to mobilize Radical organization. It came to be known as “Peterloo” in a sardonic reference to the Battle of Waterloo that defeated Napoleon, the military victory of which England was so proud. Shelley was in Italy at the time, but his response to the event was the same as that of the Radicals in England.
The Poems in Focus
Contents summary
“England in 1819.” This poem may follow the general form of the sonnet, being 14 lines of iambic pentameter with a concluding couplet, but its rhyme pattern is neither Shakespearean, Spenserian, nor Petrarchan; it is instead ababab cdcdcc ee. It is an unconventional sonnet grammatically too, for the first 12 lines list the nouns that constitute the subject of “are” in line 13.
LEIGH HUNT ON THE EXAMINER IN 1837
“It was the Robin Hood of its cause, plunder excepted; and by the gaiety of its daring, its love of the green places of poetry, and its sympathy with all who needed sympathy, produced many a brother champion that beat it at its own weapons. Hazlitt, in its pages, first made the public sensible of his great powers. There Keats and Shelley were first made known to the lovers of the beautiful. There Charles Lamb occasionally put forth a piece of criticism, worth twenty of the editor’s, though a value was found in those also; and there we had the pleasure of reading the other day one of the earliest addresses to the public of a great man, who, with a hand mighty with justice, has succeeded in lifting a nation into the equal atmosphere, which all have a right to breathe,—Daniel O’Connell [O’Connell was an Irish orator and statesman, and liberator of the Irish Roman Catholics.] Let no friend, who ever mentions our having suffered for a “libel” (a word we hate) on the Prince Regent, forget to add, that it was occasioned by the warmth of our sympathy with that nation, and our anger at seeing the Prince break his promises with it.”
(Hunt in Houtchens, pp. 376-377)
England in 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn-mud from muddy
spring;
Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a
blow;
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled
field;
An army which liberticide and prey
Makes as two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and
slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A Senate—Time’s worst statute unrepealed,
Are graves from which glorious Phantom
may
Burst to illumine our tempestuous day.
All the nouns in lines 1 through 12 are the “graves” of line 13. These nouns describe the monarchy and the workers of England in 1819; all are dying, affected by the decaying Regency monarchy—the insane, dying George III and his scandal-ridden sons, with their expensive, tax-supported extravagances (they “leech-like to their fainting country cling” [“England in 1819,” line 5]). Nineteenth-century physicians used leeches on patients to draw off the poisonous blood that was supposed to cause illness; Shelley visualizes the fat princes as leeches who have gorged themselves on blood and then fallen off the patient. The “blood” is not only the exorbitant taxes that the government has drawn from the people during the war years but, more immediately, the blood of those who have just been “stabbed” in the Manchester Massacre (“England in 1819,” lines 6-7). The millworkers there were demonstrating for higher wages because they were “starving,” and they did so in St. Peter’s Field, which was “untilled” because the factory had taken over productive farmland (“England in 1819,” line 7).
To a reader at the time, the poem from lines 8-14, which predicts a revolutionary backlash, would have recalled the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, in which James II was deposed. The “army” that advanced on horseback with sabers to kill the peacefully demonstrating workers was “a two-edged sword,” for it would provoke English workers into a reprisal (“England in 1819,” lines 8-9). Nor was there any justice available in the Parliament, whose members accepted bribes (“golden laws”), and where, by law, Catholics were forbidden to hold office (“Time’s worst statute unrepealed”) (“England in 1819,” lines 10, 12).
The first 12 lines portray Shelley’s present-day England, and the concluding couplet predicts its future. The king, the Prince Regent, the workers who died at Peterloo, the Manchester militia, the parliamentary laws forbidding suffrage to workers and Catholics—all of these are “graves” (“England in 1819,” line 13). But out of these graves may “burst” a spirit, or “glorious Phantom” to guide England in 1819 (“England in 1819,” lines 14, 13). The word glorious alludes to the Glorious Revolution. The image of the spirit rising from the grave is a millennial one. Shelley is predicting an imminent, apocalyptic war between the English people and their rulers.
“Song to the Men of England.”
This “song” is addressed to the English workers, whether farm laborers, miners, or factory hands. Shelley asks them why they work so hard for such low wages when their masters and ruling monarchy do no work themselves. The metaphor underlying the first three stanzas is that of the bee colony, where the worker bees busy themselves creating the honey for the colony and building the hive, while the male drones’ only work is to fertilize the Queen bee. It is a particularly telling metaphor for the monarchy, alluding to the well-known sexual excesses of the Prince Regent and his two eldest royal brothers, and more specifically to Queen Caroline’s well-known love affairs.
The workers, the “Bees of England,” make weapons and chains for their rulers to use against them, weave the robes for the aristocracy to wear, toil in the mines for coal and tin, and plant the crops that the wealthy landowners eat (“Song to the Men of England,” line 9). The workers, counsels Shelley, should continue laboring, but should keep their products for themselves, and they should use the arms they forge in self-defense. But, afraid to do this, they return to their hovels while the wealthy live in “halls” (“Song,” line 26). When the workers do demonstrate, the “steel” of the militia slashes them (“Song,” line 28). And so, out of fear, the workers stop resisting; they build their own “tomb,” and weave their own “winding-sheet” (the burial cloth for the dead) because of their refusal to rebel (“Song,” lines 30, 31). They literally work themselves to death, while England becomes their “sepulchre” or burial vault (“Song,” line 32).
“The Mask of Anarchy.”
The poet is “asleep in Italy,” when he has a dream-vision about England, a dream that the rest of the poem relates (“The Mask of Anarchy,” line 1). He sees a line of figures, all abstractions. (The word mask in the title is a pun, for it could mean a facial covering that hides one’s true identity, or it could refer to the seventeenth-century aristocratic theatrical performances known as “masques” that had a procession of allegorical figures.) The first three figures take the shape of the people from contemporary English government most closely connected with governmental repression. First there is “Murder,” who looks like Lord Castlereagh, the conservative Foreign Secretary from 1812-1822 who brutally suppressed the United Irish Rebellion (“Mask,” lines 5, 6). He is followed by “seven blood-hounds” who are fed by the “human hearts” that he throws to them (“Mask,” lines 8, 12). The next is “Fraud,” in the form of Lord Eldon, weeping huge tears that become “millstones,” which crush the “little children” playing around his feet (“Mask,” lines 13, 14, 16, 17). Eldon was Lord Chancellor (or presiding officer of the House of Lords), famous for weeping in court; he was also the judge who deprived Shelley of the custody of his children. The third figure is “Hypocrisy,” which appears as Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary whose cruel policies against labor unrest—supported by Castlereagh—helped to spark Peterloo (“Mask,” line 24).
Bishops, lawyers, and peers (or noblemen) are next in the procession. The last figure to appear is “Anarchy,” who rides “a white horse” and looks like “Death in the Apocalypse” (“Mask,” lines 30-31, 34). Anarchy wears a crown and holds a scepter, and his brow is marked, “I am God, and King, and Law” (“Mask,” line 36). By “King,” Shelley does not literally mean the monarch, but rather that Anarchy rules the country, for the Peterloo Massacre shows that the country has no form of moral authority or control. Peterloo violated the longstanding English constitutional rights of peaceful assembly and free speech. The skeleton-like figure of Anarchy rides over England (“Mask,” lines 35-39). Anarchy is surrounded by “a mighty troop” of soldiers who are trampling the multitude, waving swords, and riding through England drunkenly until they come to London (“Mask,” lines 40-41, 44, 47-48). There these “hired murderers” address Anarchy as their “God, and Law, and King,” and ask for further work and for money (“Mask,” lines 60-61). The implication is that these royal forces are really mercenaries, professional soldiers who hire themselves out to foreign armies, and are not really English soldiers. Lawyers and priests (these would be priests of the established Church of England, not Catholic priests) also bow to Anarchy as their God and king.
Anarchy advances through London past “his” Palace, and is about to meet the Parliament when a maiden, Hope, rushes past him (“Mask,” line 79). She lies down in the street in front of Anarchy’s horse and expects to be trampled and killed, but instead the figure of Freedom arises. Small at first, it grows larger and more powerful, clothed in armor. It passes over the multitude, and in its wake Anarchy lies dead and the “murderers” whom Anarchy employed also are trampled to dust (“Mask,” line 134). The “sons of England” revive in the new light, and listen to the words spoken by Hope (“Mask,” line 140).
The rest of the poem gives Hope’s long address to the “sons of England.” First she advises them to join together to “shake [off] your chains” (“Mask,” line 153). Then she tells them that if they do not yet know what Freedom is, they certainly know “slavery” (“Mask,” line 157), which is seen in the daily experience of workers in the different trades. They labor for low wages in the mills, or on farms, or in the mines (“Mask,” line 165). They see their families starve while the aristocracy feasts at banquets (“Mask,” lines 172-73). They are forced to accept scrip or paper money for their wages (“Mask,” lines 176-80). And when they do hold peaceful demonstrations, they are murdered as they were at Peterloo (“Mask,” lines 188-92).
However, Hope will describe Freedom for these workers, since they have never known it. Freedom is “bread” for the laborer who can now come from work to a united family in a “happy home” (“Mask,” line 220). Freedom is Justice, where money and rank have no effect; Freedom is Wisdom, under which all religions are allowed; Freedom is Peace, which would never brook the expense and human cost of the Napoleonic wars; Freedom is Love, which makes the rich give their goods to the poor. (“Mask,” lines 230-32; 234-35; 239-41).
Hope then calls for another unarmed demonstration in St. Peter’s Field outside Manchester,
JUDICIAL CORRUPTION AND RELIGIOUS REPRESSION
It was clear by the end of the Regency period in 1820 that reform was urgently needed at all levels: in parliamentary representation, in labor conditions, in the court system and penal code, and in the Church (Murray, p. 266). Seats in the House of Commons were openly bought and sold, and bribery was an assumed part of the proceedings. Parliamentary seats were even advertised (Murray, pp. 267-68). The penal code included public floggings for petty thefts, and public executions, with about 150 kinds of felony warranting capital punishment. Prisoners’ situations while serving their sentences differed drastically according to their means. Those with wealth and/or position were allowed private rooms, visitors, and special meals (Murray, p. 276). At that time, neither dissenters, Catholics, nor Quakers could hold parliamentary seats. In 1828, Dissenters from the Church of England were put on an equal basis with members of the Church; in 1829, the Catholic Emancipation Bill was passed; and during the early 1830s Quakers were admitted to Parliament.
but this time she calls on all the English poor—working or unemployed—to gather, not just the millworkers. They will come from prisons and workhouses, as well as the factories and mines, to assemble and declare that God made them free (“Mask,” line 275). The “tyrants,” “troops,” and “charged artillery” may attack them again (“Mask,” lines 303-07). This time, however, the poor will not flee but will stand and face the horsemen in passive resistance, for they will be supported by the “old laws of England” that guarantee the rights of free speech and of peaceful assembly (“Mask,” line 331).
The “tyrants” may again slash and stab them, but their resistance should be the passive one of the martyr. This time, the “tyrants” afterward will meet the scorn from “every woman in the land” and from the genuine soldiers who have fought for England in the recent wars (“Mask,” lines 356-57). Their slaughter of the poor will cause such universal contempt in the Nation that Hope’s concluding words to the workers will become the hymn for all who are oppressed. These concluding words command the poor to join together “like Lions” (“Mask,” line 368). This refers not only to the ferocity of the beast, but to the fact that the lion is emblematic of England, and thus suggests that these impoverished citizens are the truest Englishmen.
Inciting action
The intended audience of the three poems examined in this entry was different from that of Shelley’s other poems. His other works are dense with allusions to philosophy, especially idealistic skepticism, as well as contemporary discoveries in the empirical sciences of physics, optics, astronomy, anatomy, and botany. Metrically complex, these other poems are startlingly original in the freshness of their images and the music of their alliteration. Their audience is Shelley’s peers, similarly educated and skilled in reading difficult poetry. But the poems under consideration here were written to be read by the middle class and, particularly, the working-class Radicals who were agitating for trade unions and for parliamentary reform. More than that, these poems were not written to describe utopian social change in the future but to cause social reform in the present. The verse urges the workers to “forge arms—in your defence to bear” (“Song,” line 24).
“England in 1819” could be read by either class of Radicals, but probably was aimed more at the middle class. It uses the literary form of the sonnet, associated with literary tradition but here subverted into something decidedly non-traditional in its rhyme pattern and its run-on quatrains. Its references to the workers at Peter-loo as “a people” suggest a distance from them (“England in 1819,” line 7). Its allusions to corruptions in the law are more likely to be caught by middle-class Radicals. The poem portrays the contemporary situation of England, but does not call for any action.
This is not the case with the other two poems under discussion here, which seem to have been aimed at the working-class readers who would immediately recognize the truth of Shelley’s portrayal of their daily experiences. Many of them would have participated in some of the earlier labor demonstrations and would especially empathize with Shelley’s graphic allusions to the details of Peterloo. One can imagine such readers in the Hampden Clubs settling down to read “The Mask of Anarchy,” or a unionist chanting “Song to the Men of England” to an enthusiastic crowd at a local tavern. Both poems have the simple phrasing, the straightforward rhymes, and the musical cadences of the anonymous broadside ballads sold on the streets to the working class.
“Song to the Men of England” is directly addressed to “you” workers or “bees of England.” The first five stanzas seem designed to raise resentment at the masters, or capitalists, who do no work themselves but gain all the benefits. The sixth stanza urges a course of action for the workers, and the concluding two stanzas powerfully predict the death that awaits the workers if they do not act.
“The Mask of Anarchy” more closely resembles the Radical literature that was aimed at the literate working-class reader. Shelley is clearly not one of the workers, for he is “in Italy” when he has his “vision” of the Tory politicians and Peterloo. But he is the middle-class or aristocratic Radical sympathizer whose backing gave a sense of moral support to the working-class Radicals. There is a grim kind of humor in the descriptions of Castlereagh hiding human hearts beneath “his wide cloak” to feed his following hounds, Eldon weeping tears that become “millstones” that “knock out” the brains of the children around his feet, and Sidmouth riding along on a crocodile. The final figure of Anarchy in the procession, compared directly to one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, would have at once alerted such a reader to the possibility that these historical figures could be signs of the “Last Days.”
Hope’s long recital (stanzas 40-51) of the details from working-class life that comprise their state of “slavery” seems calculated to make the reader more and more indignant. It is notable that the details are taken from the working-class experience of all the trades, showing that Shelley is appealing to an entire class and not just the factory workers. The final third of the poem is devoted to a replaying of Peterloo for the reader, only this time with a different ending. The workers still are cut down by the sabers and bayonets; the horses still trample them; but this time they stand “with folded arms and looks” (“Mask,” line 321), shaming the attacking militia with their resolute courage. This shame follows the militia as they leave the field, and all Englishmen scorn them for their cowardice in attacking unarmed families who have peacefully assembled.
Working-class Radical leaders were urging the workers to resist passively by seeking parliamentary reform, rather than by violent riots. The conclusion to Shelley’s poem follows this path of moderation.
Sources and literary context
“The Mask of Anarchy” draws upon many of the conventions common to Radical poems, tracts, pamphlets, and cartoons of the time. It is a didactic poem, for it is trying to persuade the workers of the necessity for a resistance to authority that is passive and not violent. Radical literature often dramatized the lessons to be taught, as Shelley does with his narrative of Hope and her closing reenactment of Peterloo. The dream-vision was also a fairly common device. The phrasing and language is simple and almost naive in places, which also characterized much of the Radical literature written to be read by the working class. The figure of Liberty, which Hope sees, often appeared in literature of the Radical culture and in political cartoons, and was considered a Radical emblem. Finally, the idea of passive resistance was much in the style of popular protest then; the Radicals believed that an active political resistance was dangerous because it would serve only as a pretext for government violence.
Another source for these poems is the biblical book of Revelation, which details the events of the end of the world. Both the sonnet “England in 1819” and the longer poem “The Mask of Anarchy” employ apocalyptic images. The concluding couplet for the sonnet has, as its background, the apocalyptic belief that the righteous will rise from their graves after the Last Judgment. Shelley portrays Anarchy much as John portrays Death in Revelation: “Behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death” (Rev.:6.8). Shelley writes: “Last came Anarchy; he rode / On a white horse splashed with blood / He was pale even to the lips” (“Mask,” lines 30-32). Also “seven blood-hounds” follow Castlereagh, and seven is a number associated with the Last Days before the Apocalypse that runs through Revelation (“Mask,” line 8).
There was a rise in millenarianism among the working class in the 1790s, a surge that persisted well into the nineteenth century. Many believed that they were living in the “last days” before the Apocalypse. Apocalyptic literature has often sprung up among oppressed peoples—the ancient Persians, the Jews, and the early Christians, for example—living in some horrifying period of history when it seems that the righteous are being crushed by the overwhelmingly powerful. It seemed that way to the English working poor, who were experiencing the fragmentation of their families, endless hard labor, starvation, and the terrors of the early years of the Napoleonic Wars. Having been raised on the Bible, a great many working-class readers knew the Revelation of John, which portrays the Apocalypse vividly. In the 1790s the dramatist Thomas Holcroft wrote New Jerusalem, and other millenarian pamphlets appeared (Thompson, pp. 116-17). Millenarianism is central to William Blake’s later minor and major prophetic poems, especially, of course, his major prophecy “Jerusalem,” which concludes with the beginning of the actual Apocalypse.
Publication and reception
Although these three poems were inspired by the events of 1819, none of them was published until more than a decade later. “England in 1819” was sent to Leigh Hunt in 1819 with the note, “I don’t expect you to publish it, but you may show it to whom you please” (Shelley, p. 375). Indeed, Hunt did not publish it. “England in 1819” and “Song to the Men of England” were not published until 1839, when they appeared in Mary Shelley’s first collected edition of her husband’s works. By that time, Queen Victoria had ascended to the throne, Viscount Melbourne had become prime minister, and the liberal Whigs dominated English politics.
Shelley sent “The Mask of Anarchy” to Hunt in 1819 to be published in The Examiner, but it was not published immediately. Hunt had already served a prison term for libel. Publishing Shelley’s poem in 1819 would have guaranteed some kind of government prosecution for the publisher, from heavy fines to prison to possible exile. Hunt waited to publish “The Mask of Anarchy” until 1832, after Shelley had died and in the year that the first Reform Bill was passed.
For literary scholars and readers, “England in 1819” has served as a summation and indictment of this entire decade of class struggle. The two other companion poems have had more of the fate that Shelley would have wished. Both have become cherished songs of protest for the British socialist movement, with “Song to the Men of England” used as one of its anthems. George Bernard Shaw greatly admired Shelley’s works as a precursor to socialism. He recorded that in 1892, the one hundredth anniversary of Shelley’s birth, there was a celebratory meeting in a working-class hall in East London. Shaw wrote: “The President of the National Secular Society recited Shelley’s ‘Men of England,’ which brought the meeting to an end amid thunders of applause;” and that year also, in a meeting of the Aberdeen Trades Council, a speaker “thrilled his audience with a dramatic rendering of some sonorous verses from Shelley’s “Masque of Anarchy” (Shaw in Foote, p. 247).
—Christine Gallant
For More Information
Behrendt, Stephen C. Shelley and His Audiences. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.
Cox, Jeffrey N. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, and Their Circle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Dawson, P. M. S. The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980.
Foote, Paul. Red Shelley. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1980.
Gaull, Marilyn. English Romanticism: The Human Context. New York: Norton, 1988.
Hollis, Patricia, ed. Class and Conflict in Nineteenth-Century England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.
Holmes, Richard. Shelley: The Pursuit. New York: Dutton, 1975.
Houtchens, Lawrence Huston, and Carolyn Washburn Houtchens, eds. Leigh Hunt’s Political and Occasional Essays. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962.
Murray, Venetia. An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England. New York: Viking, 1999.
Rule, John. The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England 1750-1850. London: Longman, 1986.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Poetical Works of Shelley. Cambridge Edition. Ed. Newell F. Ford. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975.
Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Random House, 1964.