Shelley: The Pursuit (89 page)

[10]
He had good reason for this fear. 1817 saw twenty-six prosecutions for seditious and blasphemous libel, among which were the trials of William Hone, Tom Wooler and Richard Carlile.
Queen Mab
was peculiarly open to the kind of disguised political prosecution which the government mounted during this period. Shelley realized that further involvement with the courts on
civil
charges might well bring with it a
criminal
‘information’ with the threat of crippling fines and perhaps even imprisonment. In 1821
Queen Mab
was indeed successfully prosecuted and its publisher heavily fined. See Chapter 27.

[11]
The night of 9 June 1817 saw disturbances in Derbyshire which became known as the Pentridge Revolution. Shelley later wrote his most brilliant political pamphlet in defence of the men involved in this most successful of Lord Sidmouth’s political exercises with
agents provocateurs
.

[12]
In the Silsbee-Harvard MS Notebook, Claire’s copy of the poem contains an indicative notation in pencil which she later added: ‘written at Marlow 1817 — wd. not let Mary see it — sent it to Oxford Gazette or some Oxford or county paper without his name’. The version printed by the
Oxford University and City Herald
in its issue of 31 January 1818 was first recovered and republished by Judith Chernaik,
The Lyrics of Shelley
, Case Western Reserve University Press 1972, pp. 195-7. It contains a number of minor textual variants and is signed ‘Pleyel’. Pleyel is the rationalist and lover of Clara Wieland in Charles Brockden Brown’s romance,
Wieland
.

Illustrations: Section II

15. Mary Shelley, sketch by an unknown artist, about 1814

16. Claire Clairmont in 1819 by Aemilia Curran

17. Byron in 1818 by James Holmes

18. Château Chillon and Lac Leman from an early nineteenth-century engraving

19. Leigh Hunt by Samuel Lawrence

20. John Keats by C. A. Brown

21. William Hazlitt by William Bewick

22. Ramasses II (
photograph by Adrian Holmes
)

23. Garden at Casa Bertini, Bagni di Lucca where Shelley translated Plato’s Symposium

24. Beatrice Cenci, by Guido Reni

25. ‘Massacre at St Peter’s’. cartoon by F. Fogg, 1819