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1 results

  • Chapter 36 - ‘For the Many, Not the Few’

  • from Part IV - Afterlives
  • Edited by Ross Wilson, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Percy Shelley in Context
    Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    24 April 2025, pp 277-283

  • Summary

    The radical, working-class political movements of the nineteenth century found Percy Shelley’s work quite useful. His poetry was quoted, reprinted, and set to song by Chartists in the 1840s and 1850s and by socialists near the century’s close. These activists selected a particular version of Shelley. They memorised, shared, and reprinted the poems – like Queen Mab, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, and ‘Song: To the Men of England’ – that were, on the one hand, most available and affordable, and, on the other hand, most conducive to collective political action. Chartist editors, political orators, and socialist songwriters all strategically excerpted these poems, avoiding Shelley’s profound reservations about revolutionary action and transforming his work to serve their own political purposes. Across the nineteenth century, working-class activists collaboratively constructed a Shelley of their own.