Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  He took advertising space in the Dublin Evening Post, and a summary of the Address appeared on 25 and 29 February, and again on 3 March. It mentioned Catholic Emancipation, Repeal of the Union with England, and the setting up of ‘associations’ to press for these and other measures. Most important, and most controversially, it stressed the attempt to reach the lowest levels of society: ‘The lowest possible price is set on this publication, because it is the intention of the Author to awaken in the minds of the Irish poor a knowledge of their real state, and suggesting rational means of remedy.’7

  In the first three days after publication, Shelley succeeded in distributing 400 copies. No reaction seemed forthcoming from Curran or Rowan, but he was promptly invited by the Catholic Committee, a powerful liberal pressure group, to address one of their open Aggregate Meetings the following evening, 28 February, at Fishamble Street. This was to prove the most striking success of the expedition, and Shelley wrote to Miss Hitchener, ‘The persons with whom I have got acquainted, approve of my principles, & think the truths of the equality of man, the necessity of a reform and the probability of a revolution undeniable.’8

  Yet his pamphlet An Address to the Irish People was far too long to have any impact on its intended popular readership. Ideologically it shifted uneasily between the sobriety of the Catholic Committee’s gradualism, and the hectic rhetoric of bloody popular revolution. This ambiguity reflected a deep split in Shelley’s own political thinking.

  Ostensibly, the Address proclaimed a mild policy of peaceful self-education, and sober political thinking which would remove from the men’s minds the prejudice of religious division and sectarian hatred. The targets to be striven for, by peaceful means, were repeal of the Union, Catholic Emancipation and political self-education. Change by violent means was repeatedly repudiated. ‘I do not wish to see things changed now, because it cannot be done without violence, and we may assure ourselves that none of us are fit for any change, however good, if we condescend to employ force in a cause we think right.’9 The real method of change must be slower and more severe. ‘Temperance, sobriety, charity, and independence will give you virtue; and reading, talking, thinking and searching will give you wisdom; when you have those things you may defy the tyrant.’10 All this, though Godwinian in flavour, was thoroughly amenable to the Catholic Committee’s strategy.

  But the pamphlet was not quite as innocent as it looked, for it had two messages, an overt one and a secret one. The secret one was in effect revolutionary. While preparing it in Keswick, Shelley had explained that the pamphlet ‘is intended to familiarize to uneducated apprehensions ideas of liberty, benevolence, peace and toleration. It is secretly intended also as a preliminary to other pamphlets to shake Catholicism at its basis, and to induce Quakerish and Socinian principles of politics without objecting to the Christian Religion, which would do no good to the vulgar just now, and cast an odium over the other principles which are advanced.’11 Socinus’s politics, like those of the Quakers, were stoutly democratic, independent and egalitarian, with a strong puritan drive.[4] To think in these terms, and to plan to ‘shake Catholicism at its basis’ in an Irish context, could only be regarded as courting violence and revolution. The ‘secret’ intentions were concealed in the body of the pamphlet.

  Shelley explicitly opposed the government’s legislation on meetings, and followed with an outright call to resistance.

  Although I deprecate violence, and the cause which depends for its influence on force, yet I can by no means think that assembling together merely to talk of how things go on, I can by no means think that societies formed for talking on any subject, however Government may dislike them, come in any way under the head of force or violence . . . . Are you slaves, or are you men? If slaves, then crouch to the rod and lick the feet of your oppressors; glory in your shame; it will become you, if brutes, to act according to your nature. But you are men; a real man is free, so far as circumstances will permit him . . . . The discussion of any subject is a right that you have brought into the world with your heart and tongue. Resign your heart’s blood before you part with this inestimable privilege of man.12

  Shelley attacked aristocrats and legislators, irrespective of their religion or nationality, and condemned the political system wholesale as oppressive, corrupt and unrepresentative.

  It is horrible that the lower classes must waste their lives and liberty to furnish means for their oppressors to oppress them yet more terribly. It is horrible that the poor must give in taxes what would save them and their families from hunger and cold; it is still more horrible that they should do this to furnish further means of their own abjectness and misery.13

  This was no longer the language of the Catholic Committee; nor the language of Godwinism. This was the language of the nineties once more — Godwin recognized it instantly — the language of the French Revolutionary Convention, of Painites, of Wolfe Tone, of radical republicans. When Godwin received his copy of the pamphlet in early March, he read passages like this with open horror. ‘You talk of awakening them,’ he wrote, ‘they will rise up like Cadmus’ seed of dragon’s teeth, and their first act will be to destroy each other.’14

  Godwin’s own position, which was reflected by many of the old guard radicals like Curran and Rowan, was that in the present conditions of society, reform could only be propagated safely through individual discussion and ‘congenial intercourse’ at ‘each other’s fireside’. It was in effect armchair radicalism, and the thing it most feared was mob violence among the lower orders. There was some good reason for this, since the experience of the French Revolution had taught them that revolutionary mobs do not in the end bring liberty, but civil war followed by some form of tyranny. Having digested his pamphlet, Godwin made this point to Shelley with some acidity: ‘. . . Your views and mine as to the improvement of mankind are decisively at issue. You profess the immediate object of your efforts to be “the organisation of a society, whose institution shall serve as a bond to its members”. If I may be allowed to understand my book on Political Justice, its pervading principle is, that association is a most ill-chosen and ill-qualified mode of endeavouring to promote the political happiness of mankind.’

  Godwin was also quick to see the ambiguity of Shelley’s position between inoffensive gradualism and dangerous violence. ‘I think of your pamphlet, however commendable and lovely are many of the sentiments it contains, that it will be either ineffective to its immediate object, or that it has no very remote tendency to light again the flames of rebellion and civil war. It is painful for me to differ so much from your views on the subject, but it is my duty to tell you that such is the case.’15 Godwin noted finally that his supposed disciple must have been ‘infected’ by the Irish air, since his last letter had £1 is 8d extra to pay on the postage.

  Shelley responded briskly to Godwin’s criticisms. ‘I am not forgetful or unheeding of what you said of Associations. — But Political Justice was first published in 1793; nearly twenty years have elapsed since the general diffusion of its doctrines. What has followed? Have men ceased to fight, have vice and misery vanished from the earth? — Have the fireside communications which it recommends taken place?. . . I think of the last twenty years with impatient scepticism as to the progress which the human mind has made during this period. I will own that I am eager that something should be done.’16 Nevertheless, the letter afforded him ‘much food for thought’.

  Shelley had arrived in Dublin with little more knowledge of the true state of Irish politics than that which could be gleaned from the Duke of Norfolk’s drawing-room and the library of Robert Southey. With the immediate prospect of addressing the Fishamble Street meeting, and committed to his own scheme for ‘associations’, he made a rapid survey and study of the Irish liberation movement as it had been developing since before the French Revolution. The sectarian rivalry between Protestant and Catholic was abhorrent to him, and attempting to ignore this traditional backbone of reform politics, he anxiously examine
d the various historical phases of the Irish movement in an effort to establish principles and personalities with which he could align himself. It was a painful education in political reality.

  Phase one had been led by Henry Grattan, a member of the Dublin Parliament, and was essentially an aristocratic struggle to bring political power to the Catholic peers and landowners. It commenced in 1778 and ended in 1793 when Grattan’s army of ‘volunteers’ was forcibly dissolved. The episode had little interest for Shelley.

  The second phase, championed by Wolfe Tone, one of the greatest of all Irish revolutionaries, had started in the year of Shelley’s own birth. Tone’s United Irishmen were a product of the French Revolutionary decade, republican in aspiration, schooled on the French philosophers and Tom Paine, middle-class in origin but egalitarian in outlook. The leaders of the United Irishmen were the figures whom Shelley, twenty years after, still worshipped and revered: Tone himself, who committed suicide in a Dublin prison; Hamilton Rowan, a wealthy Whig by background, but an extremist of the cause, who wore his green uniform in public, and was tried for sedition in 1794; John Philpot Curran, the liberal lawyer, who defended Rowan and many others in the courts; Arthur O’Connor, a radical intellectual and freethinker, who was arrested and tried in England, and later married Condorcet’s daughter.

  The United Irishmen were finally provoked into armed rebellion in 1798; support from France failed to materialize, and like many subsequent Irish liberation movements they were savagely crushed by English forces. Pitt pushed through the Act of Union and the Irish MPs and Peers moved to the comforts of Westminster.

  The United Irishmen are important because they link together many of the older figures who feature in Shelley’s life. Curran and Godwin were fast friends from the heady days of the nineties when the radicals of Dublin, Paris and London formed an intimate circle which stretched to include their American brothers from the East Coast. The two main defence witnesses at O’Connor’s trial — he was acquitted — were Charles James Fox and the Duke of Norfolk, precisely those English Whigs to whom Shelley’s family were allied.

  Shelley’s Irish expedition lay within the context of what was, by 1812, almost a venerable tradition of co-operation between Irish freedom fighters, English Whig aristocrats of the liberal wing and radical and revolutionary intellectuals of the nineties with backgrounds as diverse as Godwin, Condorcet, Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft.[5] Shelley was to keep coming across this influential network in later life, in locations as far apart as London, Paris, Pisa and Rome.

  In Dublin Shelley inquired after the scattered members of the illegal organization, and wrote to Arthur O’Connor’s brother. He reported to Miss Hitchener: ‘The remnant of the United Irishmen whose wrongs make them hate England I have more hopes of. — I have met with no determined Republicans, but I have found some who are DEMOCRATIFIABLE.’17

  The Catholic Committee, which Shelley was preparing to address, formed the third and modern phase of the liberation movement and was organized by Daniel O’Connell. It was composed of a powerful and ambitious group of young Dublin barristers, doctors, merchants and other professions of the middle class. They made their two unifying targets repeal of the Union and Catholic Emancipation.[6] This was a new and powerful political force, educated, well-informed, conscious of their own increasing importance and prosperity, businesslike and undoctrinaire. It was neither republican nor revolutionary nor ‘continental’. It wanted parliamentary democracy with both Lords and Commons, and O’Connell even spoke of an Irish king. It was the most politically active opposition in Dublin.

  It had become the strategy of the Catholic Committee to hold what were termed ‘aggregate meetings’ to circumvent the laws against political societies. They were staged in public theatres, and open to all including the government reporters and police. A list of speakers was informally announced without actually stating that they were guests or officials of the committee. Shelley’s invitation was to one of these semi-legal political gatherings.

  The Fishamble Street meeting of 28 February gave Shelley his first clear indication of the gap between his own aspirations and the practicalities and expediences of reform politics. He went down that evening, with Harriet and Eliza on each arm, to a narrow ill-smelling lane near the Liffey, crowded by beggars and drunkards at the entrance, which was up a rickety wooden verandah. The Fishamble Theatre had once been a church, but later was converted into a music hall with stalls and boxes, where Handel was reputed to have played. Inside, he was surprised to find everything brilliantly illuminated by candlelit chandeliers, the boxes crowded with fashionable ladies, and the stalls packed out with several hundred rumbustious but highly respectable and well-dressed Irishmen from the smarter part of town. The doormen made every effort to keep out the lower orders. Daniel O’Connell himself spoke first, and Shelley — his voice cracking with nervousness and sincerity — third or fourth. He had prepared himself carefully with material from the Address, an outline of his proposed association, and several sharp and well-turned attacks on the English government and the Prince Regent. Startled by his pale, youthful face, his vehement manner, and his sudden felicitous bursts of Oxford rhetoric, the audience listened for more than an hour, though not always with good humour. They cheered loudly when he voiced anti-English sentiment and vague idealisms of brotherhood, but booed and hissed when he discussed political reform, associations or religion. His speech was later reported in three Irish newspapers, and drew a polemical correspondence in the Dublin Journal.

  Among the audience were two English special agents, Michael Farrell and Thomas Manning, who later dispatched an abbreviated report of the meeting to Lord Sidmouth’s Home Office in Whitehall. This was to be the first time that Shelley’s name was officially filed for subversive activity. Manning’s note, now in the State Papers of the Public Records Office, read: ‘On this resolution . . . a young boy, delivered a speech of considerable length and replete with much elegant language; the principle matter it contained of notice was, that he lamented that the Regent should abandon Mr Fox’s principles and join in a shameful coalition, or that he had been so far womanized — here he was interrupted by a question of order.’ Farrell added that Mr Shelley ‘stated himself to be a native of England’, and forwarded with the report a copy of the Dublin Evening Post for the following day. ‘Mr Shelley requested a hearing. He was an Englishman, and when he reflected on the crimes committed by his nation on Ireland, he could not but blush for his countrymen, did he not know that arbitrary power never failed to corrupt the heart of man. (Loud applause for several minutes) . . . He walked through the streets, and he saw the fane of liberty converted into a temple of Mammon. He beheld beggary and famine in the country, and he could lay his hand on his heart and say that the cause of such sights was the union with Great Britain.’ The report was stamped by the Lord Lieutenant and sent on to London.18

  After the initial euphoria of the night, and the dispatch of duplicate newspaper cuttings to Godwin and Miss Hitchener the next day, Shelley’s intelligence began to warn him that the whole affair had been a hollow one. His considered verdict was severe: ‘My speech was misinterpreted . . . the hisses with which they greeted me when I spoke of religion, tho in terms of respect, were mixed with applause when I avowed my mission. The newspapers have only noted that which did not excite disapprobation.’19

  Shelley now began to realize the wild disorganization of the liberal wing, the severity of sectarian divisions and the nervousness of the opposition newspapers which strove to give a false impression of ‘fictitious unanimity’. He also guessed that many of the old radicals had traded in their green coats for government sinecures. Yet he found it difficult to discuss the implications of this with Harriet, and he did not at first like to admit it in correspondence with Miss Hitchener — and certainly not in his philosophic letters to Godwin. For the time being he found it difficult to admit to himself.

  On 2 March, two days after Fishamble Street and nearly three weeks after his arri
val in Dublin, Shelley’s second pamphlet Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists was duly published. Casting all doubts aside, Shelley once again began vigorous distribution. But he had now shifted the field of his attention away from the ordinary man in the street. His plan was now for ‘proselyting (sic) the young men at Dublin College’, and for reaching a generally more educated Dublin readership. He imagined the possibility of founding not merely one, but a whole chain of associations relying wholly on the support of young intellectuals and enlightened members of the middle class. ‘This Philanthropic Association of ours is intended to unite both of these,’ he informed Miss Hitchener. He allowed his thoughts to play for a moment over a wide horizon. ‘Whilst you are with us in Wales, I shall attempt to organize one there, which shall correspond with the Dublin one. Might I not extend them all over England, and quietly revolutionise the country?’20