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Queen Mab (poem)

Title page of the limited first edition printed by Shelley

Title page of the limited first edition printed by Shelley
himself, 1813.

Original leaf from Shelley's copy of Queen Mab, 1813,

in the Ashley Library.[1]

Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem; With

Notes, published in 1813 in nine cantos
with seventeen notes, is the first large
poetic work written by Percy Bysshe
Shelley (1792–1822), the English
Romantic poet.[2]

After substantial reworking, a revised

edition of a portion of the text was
published in 1816 under the title The
Daemon of the World.[3]

History
This poem was written early in Shelley's
career and serves as a foundation to his
theory of revolution. It is his first major
poem. In this work, he depicts a two-
pronged revolt involving necessary
changes, brought on by both nature and
the virtuousness of humans.

Shelley took William Godwin's idea of

"necessity" and combined it with his own
idea of ever-changing nature, to establish
the theory that contemporary societal evils
would dissolve naturally in time. This was
to be coupled with the creation of a
virtuous mentality in people who could
envision the ideal goal of a perfect society.
The ideal was to be reached incrementally,
because Shelley (as a result of Napoleon's
actions in the French Revolution), believed
that the perfect society could not be
obtained immediately through violent
revolution. Instead it was to be achieved
through nature's evolution and ever-greater
numbers of people becoming virtuous and
imagining a better society.

He set the press and ran 250 copies of this

radical and revolutionary tract. Queen Mab
is infused with scientific language and
naturalising moral prescriptions for an
oppressed humanity in an industrialising
world. He intended the poem to be private
and distributed it among his close friends
and acquaintances. About 70 sets of the
signatures were bound and distributed
personally by Shelley, and the rest were
stored at William Clark's bookshop in
London. A year before his death, in 1821,
one of the shopkeepers caught sight of
the remaining signatures. The shopkeeper
bound the remaining signatures, printed an
expurgated edition, and distributed the
pirated editions through the black market.
The copies were–in the words of Richard
Carlisle– "pounced upon," by the Society
for the Prevention of Vice. Shelley was
dismayed upon discovering the piracy of
what he considered to be not just a
juvenile production but a work that could
potentially "injure rather than serve the
cause of freedom." He sought an
injunction against the shopkeeper, but
since the poem was considered illegal, he
was not entitled to the copyright. William
Clark was imprisoned for 4 months for
publishing and distributing Queen Mab.

The British bookseller Richard Carlile

issued a new edition of the poem in the
1820s. In spite of prosecution from the
Vice Society, Carlile was encouraged by
the popularity Shelley's poem enjoyed with
the working classes, progressives, and
reformers into producing four separate
editions of Queen Mab during the 1820s.
Between 1821 and the 1830s over a dozen
pirated editions of Queen Mab were
produced and distributed among and by
the labouring classes fuelling, and
becoming a "bible" for Chartism.[4]

When Shelley's widow, Mary Shelley,

published her husband's Poetical Works in
1839, the dedication and several atheistic
passages of the poem were omitted, but
were restored in a second edition less than
a year later. As a response to his own
pending trial in 1840 for blasphemous
libel, the first such case in 17 years, the
Chartist Henry Hetherington brought
similar blasphemous libel charges against
Edward Moxon, the publisher, over the
restored passages.[5] The resulting trial, in
which the prosecuting counsel "eulogized
the genius of Shelley; and fairly admitted
the respectability of the defendant,"[6]:362
and Moxon was defended by Serjeant
Talfourd, resulted in a guilty verdict, but the
prosecution chose not to pursue any
punishment beyond a payment of costs,
and "there were no further attempts to
impede the circulation of Queen
Mab".[5]:333[7]

Synopsis
The poem is written in the form of a fairy
tale that presents a future vision of a
utopia on earth, consisting of nine cantos
and seventeen notes. Queen Mab, a fairy,
descends in a chariot to a dwelling where
Ianthe is sleeping on a couch. Queen Mab
detaches Ianthe's spirit or soul from her
sleeping body and transports it on a
celestial tour to Queen Mab's palace at the
edge of the universe.

Queen Mab interprets, analyses, and

explains Ianthe's dreams. She shows her
visions of the past, present, and the future.
The past and present are characterised by
oppression, injustice, misery, and suffering
caused by monarchies, commerce, and
religion. In the future, however, the
condition of man will be improved and a
utopia will emerge. Two key points are
emphasised: 1) death is not to be feared;
and, 2) the future offers the possibility of
perfectibility. Humanity and nature can be
reconciled and work in unison and
harmony, not against each other.

Queen Mab returns Ianthe's spirit or soul

to her body. Ianthe then awakens with a
"gentle start".

Of the seventeen notes, six deal with the

issues of atheism, vegetarianism, free
love, the role of necessity in the physical
and spiritual realm, and the relationship of
Christ and the precepts of Christianity.
The theme of the work is the perfectibility
of man by moral means.

Shelley's objective was to show that

reform and improvement in the lot of
mankind were possible. In her notes to the
work, Mary Shelley explains the author's
goals:

He was animated to greater zeal

by compassion for his fellow-
creatures. His sympathy was
excited by the misery with which
the world is bursting. He
witnessed the sufferings of the
poor, and was aware of the evils
of ignorance. He desired to
induce every rich man to despoil
himself of superfluity, and to
create a brotherhood of
property and service, and was
ready to be the first to lay down
the advantages of his birth. He
was of too uncompromising a
disposition to join any party. He
did not in his youth look
forward to gradual
improvement: nay, in those days
of intolerance, now almost
forgotten, it seemed as easy to
look forward to the sort of
millennium of freedom and
brotherhood, which he thought
the proper state of mankind, as
to the present reign of
moderation and improvement.
Ill health made him believe that
his race would soon be run; that
a year or two was all he had of
life. He desired that these years
 should be useful and illustrious.
He saw, in a fervent call on his
fellow-creatures to share alike
the blessings of the creation, to
love and serve each other, the
noblest work that life and time
permitted him. In this spirit he
composed Queen Mab.

Ahasuerus
Ahasuerus the "Wandering Jew" appears
in Queen Mab as a phantom, but as a
hermit healer in Shelley's last major work,
the verse drama Hellas.[8]

References
1. "The Ashley Library" . The Times. 11
September 1937. p. 14.
2. Mark Sandy, University of Durham.
"Queen Mab." The Literary
Encyclopedia. 20 Sep. 2002. The
Literary Dictionary Company.
Accessed 30 November 2007.
3. The Complete Poetical Works of
Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas
 Hutchinson ed., Oxford University
Press, London. 1961. p.762
4. Richard Holmes, "The Pursuit," New
York Review of Books, 1974, pp. 208;
the term "bible of Chartism" was first
used in: George Bernard Shaw,
„Shaming the Devil about Shelley“, Pen
Portraits and Reviews by Bernard
Shaw (London: Constable, 1949), pp.
236–246.
5. Thomas, Donald (1 December 1978).
"The Prosecution of Moxon's Shelley".
The Library. 5/33 (4): 329–334.
doi:10.1093/library/s5-XXXIII.4.329 .
 6. Townsend, William Charles (1850).
Modern State Trials . pp. 356–391.
7. Seymour, Miranda. Mary . London:
John Murray, 2000. 467–468.
8. Tamara Tinker, The Impiety of
Ahasuerus: Percy Shelley's Wandering
Jew, revised edition 2010.

Sources
Baker, Carlos. (1941). "Spenser, The
Eighteenth Century, and Shelley's Queen
Mab." Modern Language Quarterly, 2(1):81–
98.
Morton, Timothy. “Queen Mab as Topological
Repertoire,” in Neil Fraistat, ed., Early Shelley:
Vulgarisms, Politics and Fractals. Romantic
Praxis, 1997.
Forman, H. Buxton. The Vicissitudes of
Shelley's Queen Mab; A Chapter in the History
of Reform. London: Clay and Sons, 1887.
Grimes, Kelly. (1995). "'Queen Mab', the Law
of Libel and the Forms of Shelley's Politics."
The Journal of English and Germanic
Philology.
Duffy, Cian. Shelley and the Revolutionary
Sublime. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Fraistat, Neil. (2002). "The Material Shelley:
Who Gets the Finger in Queen Mab?"
Wordsworth Circle, Vol. 33.
Burling, W. J. (1984). "Virginia Woolf's
'Lighthouse': An Allusion to Shelley's Queen
Mab?" English Language Notes, 22, 2, pp. 62–
65.
Hecht, Jennifer Michael. Doubt: A History:
The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of
Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to
Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson. NY:
HarperCollins, 2004.
Morton, Timothy. (2006). "Joseph Ritson,
Percy Shelley and the Making of Romantic
Vegetarianism." Romanticism, 12.1, pp. 52–
61.
Morton, Timothy. Shelley and the Revolution in
Taste: The Body and the Natural World. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Curtin, John. (1918). "Shelley, the
Revolutionist." Westralian Worker.
Raisor, Philip. "'Palmyra's Ruined Palaces!':
The Influence of Shelley's 'Queen Mab' on
Browning's 'Love Among The Ruins'."
Victorian Poetry, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Summer,
1976), pp. 142–149.
Schwartz, Lewis M. "Two New Contemporary
Reviews of Shelley's 'Queen Mab'." Keats-
Shelley Journal, Vol. 19, (1970), pp. 77–85.
Scrivener, Michael Henry. Radical Shelley: The
Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought
of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1982.
Sloan, Gary. (July/August 2003). "Shelley:
Angelic Atheist." Eclectica Magazine, 7, 3.
Smith, Jessica. "Tyrannical Monuments and
Discursive Ruins: The Dialogic Landscape of
Shelley's Queen Mab." Keats-Shelley Journal,
Vol. 47, (1998), pp. 108–141.
Welsh, Dennis M. "Queen Mab and An Essay
on Man: Scientific Prophecy versus
Theodicy." College Language Association
Journal, 29.4 (1986): 462–82.
External links

Wikisource has original text related to

this article:
Queen Mab

Wikisource has original text related to

this article:
The Daemon of the World

Audiorecording of extracts from Queen

Mab by the BBC.
Queen Mab at Archive.org
Complete text of the poem
 "Poet of Revolution," Time Magazine,
December 16, 1940.

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