Fifteen Eighty Four

When the idea of setting up a Modern Languages school (which was intended to include the study of English) was being debated at the University of Oxford in the late 1880s, E.A. Freeman, Regius Professor of Modern History, witheringly dismissed the study of literature as ‘mere chatter about Shelley’. Freeman was impressed with his coinage, repeating it in an article the following year. In the end, Freeman and his allies lost, and both Modern Languages and English did become subjects of study, with their own departments, at universities throughout Britain and the world.

Percy Shelley in Context, aimed at an audience more or less new to the work of this once-divisive figure in the history of English literature, is very far from being ‘mere chatter about Shelley’. Freeman’s singling out of Shelley was obviously meant to sway a conservative, late Victorian audience: the revolutionary, vegetarian, adulterer Shelley, whose poetry displayed a whole host of unsavoury fascinations, had died in self-imposed exile in Italy, far from the England whose institutions, ruling class, and laws he had come to hate. For a figure such as Freeman (someone, let’s say, hardly without prejudice), Shelley’s work was clearly not the kind of thing our gentlemen should be studying – and the idea that they might, were English literature to become its own discipline, was a significant mark against such a proposal. As it happens, Shelley’s work has been peculiarly entangled with the fate of English studies ever since. He clearly bothered one kind of late Victorian as much as he enthused other kinds – such as aesthetes and decadents like Walter Pater and Algernon Charles Swinburne. His stock then fell dramatically thanks to the largely negative view of his work espoused by T.S. Eliot and other Modernist figures, a position entrenched in academic circles by F.R. Leavis. A significant recovery from the critical and scholarly doldrums came later in the twentieth century, in part thanks to the post-structuralist focus on the evasions and infidelities of language, something Shelley’s poetry was taken to exemplify in the work, for instance, of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Barbara Johnson, and Carol Jacobs – all of whom wrote seminal essays on Shelley. More recent turns to consider the importance to the literary production of the early nineteenth century of questions of race, gender and sexuality, and empire have likewise seen in Shelley an essential body of work and a frequently troubling biographical record. And added to Shelley’s complex entwinement with the history of literary criticism is the long-running saga of the editing of his works, which, in the forms of the now-complete Longman edition and nearly complete Johns Hopkins edition, has also brought him into close contact with the evolution of textual scholarship.

Far from ‘mere chatter’ as it is (I can make this bold assertion: I am the ‘mere’ editor of this collection of 41 chapters by contributors from seven different countries), Freeman still wouldn’t have liked Percy Shelley in Context very much. Organised into four parts – on Shelley’s life and death, his intellectual, cultural, and political contexts, his writings, and his afterlives – it offers a large number of perspectives for thinking about Shelley’s life, work, and legacy. It ranges along with Shelley through the many places he lived and visited in his not quite 30 years – England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Switzerland, Italy – and the many more he imagined – the Atlas Mountains, the Asian steppe, India, America. Shelley also emerges from the volume’s consideration of his afterlives as a writer with an abiding influence on poets, musicians, artists of all sorts, politicians, and revolutionaries down to the present day and, indeed, around the world. It offers new insights into his sometimes-vexed relations with poetic forebears and rivals, as well as his almost always vexed relations with family, partners, lovers, and children. Shelley emerges from those chapters that consider his writings more directly as a writer of extraordinary breadth – not just a poet who mastered several genres (including the seemingly unromantic genres of drama and satire) but as a writer of fiction, translator from several languages, and remarkable correspondent as well.

As I intimate above, a writer of such breadth and influence required an exceptional team of contributors to cover the many dimensions of his work for a series such as ‘Literature in Context’. I was fortunate to be able to assemble such a team. Borrowing a term from Freeman’s lofty dismissal of Shelley, I also described myself above as the ‘mere’ editor of this volume. That’s no false modesty: it really is the work of the different contributors I gathered and coordinated – a job they made mercifully easy. Chapters for ‘Literature in Context’ volumes are short (and it was another thing to be thankful for that all of the contributions I received were pretty much the right length at the first time of asking) and have to be aimed at a reader who doesn’t necessarily have any prior knowledge of the subject matter. In addition to the preface, I wrote the chapter on Shelley’s reading of English literature written up to his birth in 1792 – a huge terrain to squeeze into 3000 words. Actually, I found the assignment liberating, making for a bolder, slightly more assertive and direct form of writing than is perhaps usual in academic criticism (in my academic criticism, at least). Shelley sometimes put his own writings into tight spaces that paradoxically enabled their dissemination over great distances and to unknown readers – bottles set sail on the sea, balloons launched in the air – something which we may likewise hope for Percy Shelley in Context.