Introduction

The work by Shelley which is here printed for the first time is contained in about 200 pages of a small vellum-covered note-book, which includes also a few jottings for poems, and casual scribblings. It was in the possession of Lady Shelley, the poet’s daughter-in-law. By her it was presented to her friend the Rev. Stopford A. Brooke, on whose death, in March 1916, it came to his daughter, the wife of the present writer, with the wish that I should examine it, and if it seemed desirable give it to the world. This was a labour of love, but also, owing to the character of the MS., one of considerable difficulty, and it could not be thought of until the claims of work in connexion with the war were at an end. The present edition is the answer to the question which I had to decide, and I trust I shall be held justified in believing that so important a work of Shelley’s prime should no longer be left unpublished.

Besides its literary contents, the little volume has an interesting feature in the shape of a drawing made by Shelley on the cover. This is the most elaborate and careful drawing which we have from his hand, and I think it may be said to prove that Shelley had Edition: current; Page: [iv] remarkable natural talent as an artist. His great contemporary, Goethe, at a certain time of his life, longed to be a painter, and strove with all his might to qualify himself for that calling rather than for literature, but he has left nothing which in mastery or poetic vision can compare with this. Unfortunately the drawing has been a good deal defaced and has suffered from a dint or scrape made by some heavy and sharp object. The size and shape of the little book suggest that it was meant to be carried in the pocket, and it probably accompanied its owner in many roamings by sea and land. A facsimile of the drawing is prefixed to the present volume.

The work which, just a hundred years ago, was committed to these pages, is unfinished and in the condition of a first draft. In places the difficulty of transcription has been great. Shelley’s handwriting when he wrote his final copy for the printer was both beautiful and clear, but his first drafts were blotted, scrawled, and interlined to a degree which once made Trelawney—or so he tells us—mistake a famous lyric of Shelley’s for a sketch of a duck-pond. There is nothing quite so bad as this in the present MS., and some of it is as clear as one could wish, but there are many passages which it took much time and pains to decipher with certainty.

The MS. presented other difficulties too. Sometimes Shelley would remodel the latter part of a sentence and substitute a different form of expression without making the consequential changes in the grammar of the first part. In these cases I have silently made such grammatical changes as are called for. I have also corrected a few errors in spelling (where these are not a form of the period, like ‘antient’) and have inserted words obviously omitted in the writer’s haste. Such additions are printed in italics. In some cases Shelley has enclosed a passage in square brackets, indicating apparently that he had not quite made up his mind whether it should appear in that particular place or elsewhere. These brackets have been retained in the printed text. The division of chapters is Shelley’s own, but the marginal guides to various subsections of the work have been added by me.

The first mention which we have of this Essay is contained in a letter of Shelley to Leigh Hunt, dated May 26th, 1820:

‘Do you know’, he writes, ‘any publisher or bookseller who would publish for me an octavo volume, entitled ‘‘A Philosophical View of Reform’’? It is boldly but temperately written, and, I think, readable. It is intended for a kind of standard book for the philosophical reformers, politically considered like Jeremy Bentham’s, something, and perhaps more systematic. I will send it sheet by sheet. Will you ask and think for me?’

Nothing further seems to have come of this proposal.

The MS. opens with a scheme of four heads under which the subject of political reform was to be treated:

This was repeated at the close of the introductory chapter, but in a slightly different form, the first head being expanded into two. The work as we actually have it consists of an introductory chapter of the nature of a rapid historical review, not mentioned in the scheme—and of two further chapters corresponding respectively to the first and the fourth heads of the scheme. The second and third heads are not treated in this draft.

It was doubtless the unfinished condition of the MS., coupled with the feeling that all Shelley’s prose work is of subordinate interest as compared with his poetry, that led to the suppression for a hundred years of a work on which he himself set considerable store. The century has brought us round again to an hour which is singularly opportune for a consideration of his ideas, for, in some particulars, the situation of public affairs at present reproduces very closely that amidst Edition: current; Page: [vii] which, and to act on which, Shelley composed his treatise. England had in 1820 just emerged from a long period of warfare. She had emerged victoriously, but the country was full of distress and unrest. The National Debt had risen to what was then considered an appalling figure. Prices of all the necessaries of life had soared up just as they have done at present. The vast development of mechanical industry, which in the economic sense saved the situation—even if it laid what Shelley calls ‘mines of mischief’ to the endangerment of future civilization—had not yet appeared on the horizon. England was facing a very threatening future under the rule, broadly speaking, of the country gentlemen and the Church of England, with some admixture of what Shelley calls the ‘new aristocracy’, the profiteers and speculators to whom the war had brought much wealth and a growing power. The working-classes on whom the system of taxation weighed with intolerable oppression had practically no voice in the still unreformed Parliament. In a situation like this it needed little argument to establish the necessity for reform of some kind, and it is of interest to see what kind of reform Shelley thought applicable to the case and by what means he hoped to bring it into being. Here I think we shall be struck with the moderation of his views. He certainly Edition: current; Page: [viii] had extreme political opinions. He was still entirely under the dominion of the ideas of the French Revolution—ideas of the natural equality and goodness of man and of the inherent viciousness of power when centred in a few individuals, with its beneficence and virtue, if only it were equally distributed to everybody. But he realized quite clearly that these ideas could not be applied at one stroke to the existing situation in England. The first thing to be done was to gain for the people at large a real share in the Government. In this he was in accord with all the serious political thought of his time, and if he had lived a dozen years longer he would have seen it done. In his views on the question of property he was certainly no Communist. What a man had honestly earned was rightfully his, to hold and to bequeath. But there were dishonest and wrongful ways of procuring or of using property, and for property so acquired or used he had no respect. He believed, however, that these means would not flourish in any State where property and political rights were reasonably well distributed among the whole population.

Of the nature of National Credit and Finance he had no understanding, and he offers a drastic and quite impracticable scheme for dealing with the National Debt, but in most other respects his ideas on the reforms Edition: current; Page: [ix] to be taken in hand were neither impossible, nor unreasonable, nor unjust. Even as regards the National Debt he appears to have modified his views. In writing to ‘C. T.’ on June 29th, 1822, he argues not for repudiation, but for reduction of interest:

‘England appears to be in a desperate condition, Ireland still worse; and no class of those who subsist on the public labour will be persuaded that their claims on it must be diminished. But the government must content itself with less in taxes, the landholder must submit to receive less rent, and the fundholder a diminished interest, or they will all get nothing. I once thought to study these affairs, and write or act in them. I am glad that my good genius said, refrain. I see little public virtue, and I foresee that the contest will be one of blood and gold.’

But Shelley’s impulses, in their violent reaction against wrong and tyranny, sometimes led him into extravagance and self-contradiction. He was writing immediately under the influence of the ‘Peterloo Massacre’, when a large Reform Meeting, assembled, it is true, in defiance of a Government prohibition, but entirely peaceful and well-behaved, was charged without notice by cavalry, and several persons killed. This event, which had deeply Edition: current; Page: [x] stirred English opinion, was in Shelley’s mind when he wrote his wild attack on the soldier’s profession (p. 68). How much this attack was mere passionate impulse and how little it was reasoned opinion is clear from the fact that for Shelley the profession of arms lost all its vice when it was exercised at sea! Sailors were not usually employed to ride down peaceful reformers or to drive starving crowds back to their dens, and therefore he found no difficulty (p. 56) in demanding a well-paid and well-equipped Navy to keep envious Continental Powers from descending on the happy shores of the England of his dreams.

As Professor Dowden has said, in discussing the ‘Philosophical View of Reform’ in his ‘Life of Shelley’, we have no other document which tells us so much of that side of Shelley’s mind which was directed to politics. Every side of the mind of a great poet is worth knowing, and on the side of Shelley’s mind which is revealed to us in these pages, there is nothing that does him dishonour. It is true that the work is unfinished. Not only does it end in the midst of a sentence, but there are passages in it here and there which, if they had been written in their final form, we may be sure would have been Edition: current; Page: [xi] written otherwise. In one case a long passage (pp. 29, 30) actually was rewritten, in order to be incorporated in another work, the ‘Defence of Poetry’; and to compare the two versions is to get an interesting glimpse into the workshop of a master of language. But as we see by the many corrections and cancellations, a great deal of care and thought were certainly spent on the MS. as we have it now; we can trace Shelley’s spirit in every line of it, and for the many things which it alone tells us of his outlook on the world of a hundred years ago, his country to-day may be inclined to welcome this last addition that yet remains to be made to the published work of her greatest lyric poet.