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Blasphemy and Politics in Romantic Literature: Creativity in the Writing of Percy Bysshe Shelley 1st ed. Edition Paul Whickman full chapter instant download
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Blasphemy
and Politics in
Romantic Literature
Creativity in the Writing of
Percy Bysshe Shelley
pau l w h ic k m a n
Blasphemy and Politics in Romantic Literature
Blasphemy
and Politics
in Romantic Literature
Creativity in the Writing of Percy Bysshe Shelley
Paul Whickman
University of Derby
Derby, UK
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied,
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgments
This book has benefitted from the generous support and insights of a
huge number of individuals and organisations to whom I remain eter-
nally grateful. My Ph.D. supervisors at the University of Nottingham,
Lynda Pratt and Matthew Green, helped me steer a course through the
difficult early stages of this project and my career ever since, while the
insights of Nicholas Roe and Brean Hammond have helped me shape
this into the book it has become. Nick’s leading role in The Wordsworth
Conference Foundation should also be acknowledged; the regular
Summer Conference in Rydal and, previously, Grasmere, have been won-
derful collegial events. Not only have I shared nascent ideas that have
informed the direction of this book, I have more importantly made
many good friends and colleagues. Among these was Richard Gravil, the
founder of the Wordsworth Conference Foundation, who was kind and
supportive to me as a young academic; his death in 2019 was keenly felt.
The University of Derby has graciously supported me in bringing this
book to completion, providing funding and teaching relief where neces-
sary. Paul Elliott, Erin Lafford, Ruth Larsen, Tom Neuhaus and Robin
Sims all aided me in this way, while Ian Whitehead guided me in my
early days as a lecturer and has been a good, and very silly, friend ever
since. Indeed, regular Derby ‘lodge meetings’ with Robin and Ian have
certainly formed a valuable part of my ‘intellectual’ and ‘cultural’
development. Most importantly, I am privileged to teach students at
Derby who inspire me with their intuition, erudition and enthusiasm,
consistently reminding me why I do what I do.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For poetry not yet available in the above edition, and for some of
Shelley’s prose, I have referred to
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 2002. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Reiman,
Donald H. and Fraistat, Neil. London & New York: W. W. Norton &
Company.—(when necessary, cited as Poetry & Prose in parenthesis)
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1993—. The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
1 volume. Ed. Murray, E. B. Oxford: Clarendon Press.—(cited as Prose in
parenthesis)
vii
viii NOTE ON TEXTS AND ABBREVIATIONS
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1954. Shelley’s Prose Or, The Trumpet of a Prophecy.
Ed. Clark, David Lee. Albuquerque, N.M: The University of New Mexico
Press.—(cited as Prose, Clark, in parenthesis)
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1963–1964. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 2 vol-
umes. Ed. Jones, Frederick L. Oxford: Clarendon Press.—(cited as Letters,
and volume number, in parenthesis)
2008. The Bible: Authorized King James Version. Ed. Carroll, Robert and
Prickett, Stephen. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Blasphemy: History and Definition 4
1.2 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Blasphemy and Creativity 7
1.3 Shelley and Romantic Religion 11
ix
x CONTENTS
6 Conclusion 181
6.1 From Infidel to Canonisation: Shelley’s Posthumous
Reputation 185
Index 207
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
On 25 March 1811, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his future
biographer, Thomas Hogg, were expelled from University College,
Oxford. While history commonly records that the two undergraduates
were excluded for atheism, the precise reason was ‘for contumaciously
refusing to answer questions proposed to them, and for also repeatedly
declining to disavow’ a pamphlet for which both had been responsible.1
The pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism (1811), was far less provocative
than its title suggested; to have apparently advocated atheism, however,
was enough to risk criminal charges for violating common and statute
law against blasphemy. The opportunity to ‘disavow’ the work had been
granted as a possible way both undergraduates might have ameliorated
any future criminal proceedings. Prosecution for The Necessity of Atheism
never materialised for either men, but the Oxford episode remains an
important touchstone in Shelley’s biography and criticism. Indeed, it
is an event that, along with the disparaging reactionary accounts of
Shelley’s death in 1822, are commonly taken as bookending Shelley’s
‘atheistical’ adult life and career.
The nature of Shelley’s (ir)religion remains a matter of some debate,
but the ‘atheist’ tag has nevertheless persisted in popular perceptions of
this major member of the ‘Big 6’ Romantic poets. It is therefore easy
to see how ‘the issue of “atheism”’, as Martin Priestman has argued,
remains central to the history of canonical Romanticism.2 In sharing
Priestman’s position, my present study is concerned with the broader
and more amorphous term ‘blasphemy’. While the charge of blasphemy
The urgent task for the critic of Romantic poetry is not, it seems to me, to
choose between these two apparently antithetical approaches [i.e. between
Historicist and Formalist approaches], for both remain too valuable to be
rejected. The need is rather to find a critical manner through which the
two may be reconciled […] a criticism of Romantic poets is possible that
does not choose between attention to the language of a poem or attention
to its historical context, but seeks rather to show that it is through their
language that poems most fully engage with their historical moment.6
passed during the Interregnum is at least open with its targeting of per-
ceived heresy, but its doctrinal specificity is nevertheless remarkable. Not
only does it list every book of the canonical Bible in turn, arguing that
it is blasphemy to deny that these are the Word of God, it painstakingly
details that blasphemers are also those who question the perfect omnipo-
tence of God, the doctrine of the Resurrection, the divinity of Christ and
the doctrine of the Trinity.12
Despite this doctrinal precision, the policing of religious belief was
historically more socio-political than it was theological. An act passed
in 1650 called ‘An Act against several Atheistical, Blasphemous and
Execrable Opinions, derogatory to the honor of God, and destructive to
humane Society’ was a development of the 1648 act, moving to addition-
ally criminalise those individuals who bestowed fallible human attributes
onto the deity. Examples of this include declaring one’s self or another
‘meer Creature’ to be either equal to God, or God himself, or that ‘acts
of Uncleanness, Prophane Swearing, Drunkenness, and the like Filthiness
and Brutishness, are not unholy and forbidden in the Word of God’.13
The legislation’s common appellation as ‘the Act against Ranters’ reveals
its target; the Ranters were an extreme Antinomian sect who rejected
the concept of sin because they believed man to have been redeemed by
Christ. Ranters were perceived as a threat to ‘humane Society’ because
not only were many of them libertines, frequently engaged in pub-
lic nudity and other lewd acts, but because of their disdain for author-
ity. Other Christian sects such as Quakers were similarly criminalised due
to their ‘levelling’ politics rather than their theological predilections.
Quakers refused to use the formal ‘you’ in addressing a social superior, to
swear oaths and often to recognise any earthly authority at all.
While these laws were declared null and void following the
Restoration (1660), new legislation emerged that simply reasserted
pre-Civil War Anglican hegemony. For instance, 1662 saw the passing of
both the so-called ‘Quaker Act’ and the ‘Act of Uniformity’. The for-
mer effectively denied Quakers freedom of worship and criminalised their
refusal to swear oaths, while the latter required all churches to have a
copy of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, to perform Anglican Rites,
and clergy were expected to publicly declare their ‘unfeigned assent &
consent to the use of all things in the said Booke contained and pre-
scribed in these words and no other’.14 Risking oversimplification, the
motivation was more to ensure political rather than religious obedience
following the re-establishment of the Church of England. The King’s
6 P. WHICKMAN
authority, as head of the Church, ensured, and was ensured by, the
Church of England’s primacy among all Christian denominations. ‘The
Conventicles Act’ of 1664, for instance, that outlawed all non-Anglican
religious assemblies, was explicitly political, framed to enable ‘speedy
Remedyes against the growing and dangerous Practises of Seditious
Sectaryes and other disloyall [sic] persons (my emphases)’.15 What was
clear, as Leonard Levy contends, was that ‘[a]nyone not a member of
the Church of England was a potential subversive’.16 The years after the
Restoration, therefore, re-laid the groundwork for the tight conflation
between the religion of the state and the state itself.
This is particularly evident in a case of 1676 known as Rex v. Taylor.
For Elliot Visconsi, this was ‘to become one of the most influential
pieces of common-law jurisprudence to emerge from the later Stuart
period’.17 Indeed, its impact was profound and long-lasting, and was still
so regularly cited in blasphemy trials as late as the nineteenth century
that an article in The London Magazine in 1827 poked fun at it, suggest-
ing that it had become clichéd.18 The case concerned John Taylor, a yeo-
man from Surrey, who was successfully prosecuted for blasphemy. The
presiding judge, Lord Chief Justice Hale, declared that Taylor’s ‘wicked
blasphemous words were not only an offence to God and religion, but a
crime against the laws’ as, crucially, ‘Christianity is parcel of the laws of
England; and therefore to reproach the Christian religion is to speak in
subversion of the law’.19 Hale’s judgement set the precedent that explic-
itly determined the legal relationship between Church and State in mat-
ters of blasphemous expression. A glaring issue with the ruling is noted
by The London Magazine. Referring to the trial of another Mr. Taylor
in 1827 that had cited Hale, the author remarks that Lord Tenterden,
who presided over the recent case, ‘spoke not then of any of the many
sects into which opinions had divided [Christianity]’.20 The precedent’s
ambiguity often proved politically useful, even if what it deemed to be
‘Christianity’ was at times narrowly interpreted.
Hale’s ruling in Rex v. Taylor should of course be understood within
the immediate context of a newly assertive, post-Restoration Anglicanism.
At the same time, its conflation of Church and State was hardly histori-
cally unique, a phenomenon pre-dating Henry VIII’s establishment of the
Church of England in 1534. In the Old Testament book of Numbers, for
instance, Korah’s rebellion against Moses and Aaron is presented both as
seditious and blasphemous, with each implying the other. After Moses sep-
arates the rebels from the rest of the people of Israel, the earth swallows
1 INTRODUCTION 7
them up. This proves the legitimacy of Moses’s and Aaron’s rule since
the rebellion had ‘provoked the LORD’ (16:30). To question Moses’s
authority then is to blaspheme and, conversely, to blaspheme against God
is to oppose his earthly, political representatives. In March 1717, an anti-
Nonconformist article appearing in the conservative Pro-Anglican period-
ical The Scourge interprets the story of Korah as one of the preservation of
state power and of the dangers of religious schism:
The author takes Korah’s rebellion to be political from its outset, with
any apparent theological dispute simply concealing the rebels’ true objec-
tives. Nevertheless, the article reveals a common eighteenth-century per-
ception that the interdependence of religious and state power was both
necessary and to be expected, exemplified through the Hale ruling of
1676. In short, if God is taken to be infallible, his supposed earthly repre-
sentatives can argue the same for their political authority.
moral climate makes them “ahead of their time”’, but there is neverthe-
less the possibility that literary ‘blasphemy’ has the potential to stimulate
a new aesthetic.25 While writing in an innovative way to perhaps ‘avoid
the censor’ is one example of potential ingenuity, the irreverence engen-
dered in literary blasphemy implies a scepticism of accepted or existing
standards of ‘correctness’. Lord Byron’s famous attack on the ‘cant’ of
his age for instance is not only a simple indictment of hypocritical mor-
alising. In describing it as ‘verbal decorum’, Byron implies that exposing
cant is an act of indecorus linguistic demystification. He writes
The truth is, that in these days the grand “primum mobile” of England is
Cant—Cant political—Cant poetical—Cant religious—Cant moral—but
always Cant—multiplied through all the varieties of life—It is the fashion—&
while it lasts—will be too powerful for those who can only exist by taking
the tone of the parts—I say Cant because it is a thing of words—without the
smallest influence upon human actions—the English being no wiser—no bet-
ter—and much poorer—and more divided amongst themselves—as well as far
less moral—than they were before the prevalence of this verbal decorum.26
Se tulikin!
Hän, pilkattu, jolle jokainen tyttö käänsi selkänsä, hän voi nyt
käsikädessä mennä tanssiin kaunokaisista kauneimman kanssa.
Herra Lorenz Ratolla oli kolme tytärtä, joista vanhin oli Lotta,
"valakaksi" haukuttu, koska hänen hiuksensa, kulmakarvansa ja
silmäripsensä oli vaaleat kuin valkein pellava. Aikaisemmin
haukuttiin häntä "kaniiniksi"; uuden pilkkanimen sai hän vasta siihen
aikaan, jolloin Martti uudessa kasteessa nimitettiin "papurikoksi".
Lotta sai vähemmän pilkkaa kärsiä kuin punatäplä-poskinen
sepänkisälli, kumminkin oli hän murheellisempi kuin Martti, koska
luonto oli hänet erittäin herkällä sydämellä siunannut tai — kironnut.
Hän voi, ensikerran kuultuaan tämän pilkkanimen, itkeä koko päivän.
Hän ei kuvitellut itselleen, että hyvä luontoäiti olisi antanut hänelle
kauneuden lahjoja; kuitenkaan ei se olisi häntä loukannut, jos hänet
olisi jätetty rauhaan. Kun kaikki häntä hylkivät, karttoi hän eläviä ja
pakeni kuolleiden asuntoon, villipensaikon ympyröimään
kirkkotarhaan, missä matalien hautakumpujen välissä kohosivat
akasiapuut, joiden varjossa hänen oli tapana kävellä. Hämärähetkinä
lauleli hän kaihomielisiä lauluja; kun syksy lähestyi, niin sitoi hän
akasian kirjavista kukista seppeleen ja koristi sillä sen haudan
puuristin, jossa hänen äitinsä lepäsi.
"Oi", valitteli hän usein huoaten, "miksi ei ole sydämeni tuon kukan
kaltainen! Kuihdu kuin tämä, sinuahan ei kukaan tarvitse! Ja
kuitenkin — miten voisin minä rakastaa!"
*****
Martti täytti kaksikolmatta vuotta, kun hänen enonsa kuoli; hän peri
pajan ja tuli mestariksi. Vaikkakaan ei vainajan ja hänen sisarensa
pojan välillä vallinnut mikään sydämellinen suhde, suri poika
kuitenkin vilpittömästi miehen kuolemaa, miehen, joka oli ollut hänen
ainoa hyväntekijänsä.
"Etkö mitään! — Toisinaanhan voit puhua niin paljon, ettei siitä tule
loppuakaan."
"Miksi et nyt?"
Papurikko ja valakka.
"Arvaas!"
"En voi arvata."
"Miksi en kuuntelisi?"
"Älä puhu yhä tuota, vaan sitä, mikä todella kuuluu tähän."
"Se on totta!"
"Minä?"
"Sinä!"
"Hahaha!"
"Hahaha!"
"Hukka minut periköön, jos olen puhunut pilaa", sanoi Martti, joka
oli selityksensä aikana noussut ylös ja käveli rauhatonna ympärinsä,
jääden äkkiä seisomaan.
"Mitä?"
*****
Voimakas kuin ruumiinsakin oli myös Martin sielu, tätä sai hän
kiittää siitä, että oli toipunut myrkystä, jota Julia Biro oli vuodattanut
hänen elonsa maljaan. Tosin valtasi hänet ensi päivinä
epäonnistuneen kosinnan jälkeen ollessaan työssä usein ajatus: eikö
olisi parempi, jos raudan sijasta asettaisit pääkallosi alasimelle ja
antaisit lyödä siihen raskaimmalla vasaralla? — Lyönti vaan ja —
kaikki olisi ohi!
"Oletteko jo lopussa?"
"Sen saat kyllä nähdä, tai paremmin sanottu, et saa nähdä, sillä
paiskaan tämän pullon kasvojasi vasten."
"Todellakin!"
"Kyllä!"
"Se ei ollut mikään uni, vaan kauhea todellisuus. — Kuka löi sinut
maahan?"
"Martti!"
"Laputa tiehesi!"
"Älähän toki itke! Eihän ollut tarkoitus niin paha. Enhän tiedä
oikein mitä puhunkaan. Tulehan, ole hyvä, auta minua jaloilleni."
Martti toipui…
"Mutta ethän toki saa tuolla tavoin juosta pois. Vai onko sinullakin
ikävä minun luonani?"
"Eihän toki! — Mutta —"
"Muuten vaan!"
"Miksi?"