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Shelley and the Empire of the Nairs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Walter Graham
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Extract

In the year 1793, James Lawrence, an Englishman living on the Continent, contributed to Wieland's Deutsche Merkur an essay on what he called the “Nair system of gallantry and inheritance.” The system was highly Utopian. Its main ideas were so distinctly different from those of even the radical philosophers and theorists, that the essay must have attracted considerable attention. We know from Wieland's footnotes in the Merkur that he was interested.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 40 , Issue 4 , December 1925 , pp. 881 - 891
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1925

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References

1 The essay appeared in the Merkur in June. Godwin's book had been published four months earlier. From it Lawrence may have obtained the idea of free love as an encouragement to companionship and loyalty of the sexes (ii, 497—452). From Mary Wollstonecraft, to whom he alludes several times, he seems to have got little directly, except the idea of educating boys and girls together, so as to make them companions from early youth.

2 Macdonald, The Radicalism of Shelley and Its Sources, 1912.

3 Mod. Lang. Notes, XL, (Apr. 1925), 246-9. For other references, see Shelley Memorials, 1859, p. 49; Prost. Works, 1880, III, 345; Medwin (ed. of 1913) p. 96 n.; and Hogg's Life of Sholley, 1858, II, 314.

4 Shelley wrote: “I need not say how much I admire ‘Love,‘ and little as the British public seems to appreciate its merits ….” Medwin, in his Memoir of Shelley, first published in the Athenaeum, 1832 (p. 502) quoted Shelley as saying, “I abhor seduction as much as I adore love…..” Lawrence, in the Etonian Out of Bounds, 1834, tactfully referred to Med win's garbled version as an “intended original” of the letter, but Forman was probably nearer the truth when he suggested that Medwin trimmed the phrases to suit himself (Prose Works, London, 1880, III, 346, n.).

5 Malabar, the country of the Nairs, was evidently the west coast of British India, often referred to by the author as “Indostan.” Its capital was “Imperial Calicut.” The practice of polyandry among the Nayars of Malabar is well described in Westermarck's History of Human Marriage, N. Y., 1922, iii, 13-141.

6 Macdonald quotes some of these excerpts from Queen Mab, but I have thought it wise to include them together with the others.