PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

1792

August 4, Saturday: Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at Field Place, Warnham, near Horsham, West Sussex, the eldest child of Elizabeth Pilfold Shelley and a Member of Parliament for New Shoreham, Sir Timothy Shelley,1 and the eldest grandchild of a man with extensive holdings in land, (Percy) Bysshe Shelley.

This firstborn son of privilege would be educated at Eton and Oxford University and it would be presumed during his growth years that when he would reach the age of maturity, 21, he would inherit his father’s seat in Parliament. As a stripling he would be taken to the House of Commons and would meet Sir Francis Burdett, the Radical M.P. for Westminster. At Eton he would develop a consuming distaste for tyranny, and in the midst of all this adolescent rebelliousness would be greatly influenced by Burdett — in 1810 he would dedicate one of his earliest poems to him. While at Oxford, Shelley would be consuming the thoughts of radical political writers such as Tom Paine and William Godwin. He would author articles in defense of Daniel Isaac Eaton, a bookseller who was being condemned because he offered for sale works by Tom Paine and Richard Carlile.

1. Sir Timothy Shelley had sat for a seat under the control of the Duke of Norfolk, and always endorsed his patron’s policies of electoral reform and Catholic Emancipation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1797

June: A treaty with the Bey of Tripoli that had been negotiated by the administration of President George Washington was finally signed and ratified by the federal senate at this point during the administration of President John Adams. Article 11 of the English-language version of this treaty, curiously, declares that “the United States is in no sense based on the Christian religion.” (This English version inclusive of the curious declaration would have been what was signed by our President and duly ratified by our Senate. There is a mystery about this, since no such article appears in the Arabic version! Refer to Bevans’s Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776-1989, Volume 11, and to David Humphreys’s Miscellaneous Works of 1804.) The agreement cost us $56,000, a sum which was not to be considered to be “tribute.” Our vessels would henceforth be granted most-favored-nation status, the same as if they were English or French. In London, Charles Lamb was becoming an intimate in a group of young writers who believed in political reform, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Hazlitt, and (eventually) Leigh Hunt. He and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge went for a short summer holiday at Nether Stowey, where they had an opportunity to get to know William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Lamb contributed additional blank verse for a 2d edition of POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS. Within the next year Coleridge would be authoring “Kubla Khan,” Part I of “Christabel,” “Frost at Midnight,” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

1798

Percy Bysshe Shelley was studying with a local Welsh clergyman, the Reverend Evan (“Taffy”) Edwards, who was running a small day school in his vicarage.

1802

Percy Bysshe Shelley began boarding school at Syon House Academy, Isleworth, on the Great Western Road in Thames Valley.

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1804

September: George Gordon, Lord Byron was at Harrow School in north-west London again.

Percy Bysshe Shelley began his studies at Eton College near Windsor to the west of London (his sinecure at this welfare institution for the extraordinarily well situated would continue through Spring 1810).

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1806

Earliest possible year for any of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poems in THE ESDAILE NOTEBOOK (latest written 1813).

Thomas De Quincey journeyed a 2d time to the Lake District of England, in his attempt to actually meet his famous pen-pal William Wordsworth, only to again suffer a failure of nerve and turn back. Wordsworth’s Poems, in Chronological Sequence • November 1806 • Address to a Child, during a boisterous winter Evening, by my Sister • Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

March 3, Monday: The dominions of Lucca were extended over all of Tuscany.

Bysshe Shelley was created Sir Bysshe Shelley, 1st baronet of Castle Goring, Sussex.

1808

Percy Bysshe Shelley, a schoolboy in the home of Dr. Bethel at Eton, played a practical joke. By connecting a Voltaic pile to the doorknob, he electrified the doctor.2 Also during this year Percy began corresponding with his Wiltshire cousin Harriet Grove (their “engagement” would end in 1810).

2. During that same period, he was also trying to conjure up the devil, and he was using his chemistry set to make explosives. All this was by way of preamble, for later he would be expelled from University College for his atheism and for noisy, smelly, and dangerous chemical experiments conducted in his rooms. 4 Copyright 2012 AAustin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1809

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Friend was being published, and he was making frequent stopovers at the home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth in Dove Cottage at Grasmere in the beautiful Lake District of England, where Sara Hutchinson was residing.

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote five or six poems into The Esdaile Notebook.

Thomas De Quincey rented Dove Cottage because it had been Wordsworth’s home. He would reside there for a decade.

In this year he supervised the printing of Wordsworth’s pamphlet on “The Convention of Cintra,” and contributed a lengthy “Postscript on Sir John Moore’s Letters.”

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1810

Spring: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s gothic novel ZASTROZZI.

July 30, Monday: Percy Bysshe Shelley concludes his studies at Eaton.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 30 of 7 Mo// I believe the mind has not been employed to much if any proffit today, & I doubt whether my body has also. — ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

September: George Gordon, Lord Byron made a 2d trip to Morea. He was sick with a fever at Patras.

Percy Bysshe Shelley and his sister Elizabeth Shelley’s ORIGINAL POETRY BY “VICTOR” AND “CAZIRE” was published (in the following month is would be withdrawn).

October: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Elizabeth Shelley’s ORIGINAL POETRY BY “VICTOR” AND “CAZIRE,” published during the previous month, was withdrawn.

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY October 10, Wednesday: Percy Bysshe Shelley began studies at University College, Oxford, where he would soon be meeting Thomas Jefferson Hogg.

Cassius M. Clay was born.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 10th M 1810// The mind in a dull lifeless state, poor & destitute of every living thing. Oh! when shall I be raised, when shall Life be more raised into dominion in my tabernacle of clay - Brother David called in the eveng — ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

November: At the storming of Port Louis, Mauritius, Midshipman Hugh Clapperton was 1st in the breach, and was seen to seize and haul down the French flag.

Publication of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s POSTHUMOUS FRAGMENTS OF MARGARET NICHOLSON.

December: George Gordon, Lord Byron made a trip to Sunium.

Publication of ST. IRVYNE, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 2d Gothic novel.

1811

January: Percy Bysshe Shelley met Harriet Westbrook.

George Gordon, Lord Byron was back at the Capuchin Monastery in Athens.

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February 11, Monday: On or about this day, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Thomas Jefferson Hogg wrote on THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM.

For the 3d time in 4 years, President Madison prohibited trade with Britain.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 11 of 2 Mo// Our neighbors Sam Towle & wife & Daughter took tea with us & set the evening. Brother David also set the evening. — —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

March 25, Monday: Percy Bysshe Shelley had just written A POETICAL ESSAY on war according to which it was the “cold advisers of yet colder kings” who had “the power to breathe / O’er all the world the infectious blast of death”: Millions to fight compell’d, to fight or die In mangled heaps on War’s red altar lie .. . When legal murders swell the lists of pride; When glory’s views the titled idiot guide.... Man must assert his native rights, must say We take from Monarchs’ hand the granted sway; Oppressive law no more shall power retain, Peace, love, and concord, once shall rule again, And heal the anguish of a suffering world; Then, then shall things which now confusedly hurled, Seem Chaos, be resolved to order’s sway, And error’s night be turned to virtue’s day –

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He and Thomas Jefferson Hogg were expelled from University College for refusing to answer questions about the authorship of THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM.

That evening in Viviers, France, Honoré Flaugergues noticed without a telescope a comet (C/1811 F1) in the area of the sky covered by a “constellation” that we no longer use for such purposes, one then termed Argo Navis. SKY EVENT

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 25 of 3 Mo// Nothing material thro’ the day except that my H spent the Afternoon at my fathers —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

August 25, Sunday: Percy Bysshe Shelley and 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, daughter of the keeper of a coffee-house, eloped to Scotland. What a scandalous thing for a firstborn son of privilege to do! His well- positioned father would never forgive him!

In Scotland, this scion would be making revolutionary speeches about religion and politics, and authoring a political pamphlet “A Declaration of Rights, on the subject of the French Revolution,” that would be considered to be too radical for distribution in Britain.

August 29: The elopees Percy Bysshe Shelley and Harriet Westbrook were wed in Edinburgh.

October: A sister of John Edleston informed George Gordon, Lord Byron that her brother had died.

The Shelleys arrived at York, where Thomas Jefferson Hogg promptly attempted to seduce Harriet.

November: The Shelleys moved to Keswick and were befriended by Southey.

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1812

Percy Bysshe Shelley was launching little silk hot-air balloons across the Bristol Channel into north Wales, bearing messages having to do with political rights and scientific progress.

BALLOONING Early February: The Shelleys traveled to Dublin. In Ireland, Percy Bysshe Shelley would be publishing two pamphlets, ADDRESS TO THE IRISH PEOPLE and PROPOSALS FOR AN ASSOCIATION OF ... PHILANTHROPISTS.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was in the Lake District of England for his final time, until a point during March.

April 6: After British and Portuguese troops captured, from a combined garrison of French, Spanish, and Hessians, the fortress and city of Badajoz in Extremadura, what followed was a plunder, rape, and murder of local citizens.

The Shelleys returned from Ireland to Wales.

June: The Shelleys moved to Lynmouth in Devon, and Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote to Lord Ellenborough.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge reissued a somewhat altered The Friend.

September: The Shelleys traveled with Elizabeth Hitchener –who had joined them during July– to Tremadoc in North Wales.

September 29, 1812: Sometime after this date, the Shelleys went with Elizabeth Hitchener to London.

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October 4: In London a spendthrift 19-year-old heir to a baronetcy, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was just getting his bride Harriet Westbrook Shelley pregnant, met William Godwin, a liberally oriented man whose defenseless daughter Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft had just turned 15. Hot damn!

WILLIAM GODWIN’S LIFE

US forces defeated British forces at Ogdensburgh, New York after a British raid out of Prescott, Ontario had failed and their two gunboats had been forced to return.

November 15: John Clarke Allen was born to Mary Morrill Allen and the Reverend Wilkes Allen in Chelmsford, Massachusetts.

At about the midpoint of November the Shelleys returned from London, without Elizabeth Hitchener, to Tremadoc.

1813

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A VINDICATION OF NATURAL DIET.

February 27: The Shelleys fled from Tremadoc, going first to Ireland to recover from a printer there the manuscript of THE ESDAILE NOTEBOOK.

“The Trustees of the Congregational Ministerial Fund in Concord” came into existence as a legal entity. The initial board of trustees was Deacon John White, Deacon Francis Jarvis, and John L. Tuttle of Concord.

FINANCES.— In the early ages of the town, several lots of land were reserved for the “public good,” and donations were made by individuals for the same purpose. Most of them, however, were disposed of without producing much permanent benefit, or accomplishing the wishes of the donor. Captain Timothy Wheeler,3 in 1687, bequeathed to the Rev. Edward Bulkeley and the Rev. 3. Captain TIMOTHY WHEELER died July 10, 1687 aged 86. He came to Concord in 1638, and, as tradition says, from Wales. Besides holding, at different times, most of the important trusts in various town affairs, he was captain of a military company, and represented the town eighteen years in the General Court, between 1653 and 1672. In all stations he appears to have conducted himself with great propriety. At his death he was possessed of a very respectable estate. His will, which is recorded in the Suffolk Probate Records, was dated the 1st of March next before his death. His second wife was Mary, daughter of Captain Thomas Brooks. They had no male issue. One of his daughters, Elizabeth, married Ebenezer Prout, some time clerk of the House of Representatives; and another, Rebecca, married James Minott, Esq., and was the ancestor of many distinguished individuals. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 11 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY Joseph Estabrook, who were then the ministers of the town, 20s. apiece; and to the town about three acres of land, with a house standing on the same, to be improved, all but half an acre (which was “laid out to the training place” at the northwesterly end of the public common), “for the furtherance of learning and the support of a school in the said town.” This lot was that on which the grammar school-house now [1835] stands, and then embraced nearly all which would be included in a line drawn from the north side of the house recently built by Ephraim Merriam, to the brook and by the brook round to the Middlesex Hotel and the common. These premises were several years leased and the rents applied according to the wishes of the donor; but piece after piece was unfortunately sold, till the school-house lot was contracted to its present [1835] highly inconvenient dimensions. Captain Wheeler also bequeathed to the town 40 acres of woodland, “to be improved from time to time for the use and benefit of the ministers of the said town.” This was the present [1835] ministerial lot; and the people were long accustomed to hold a bee, when a sufficient quantity of wood for the minister’s annual consumption was drawn from this lot to his door. The town directed, April 1, 1811, that the wood on this lot, and on one in Carlisle, should be cut off and sold; and that pews should be erected on some vacant floor in the meeting-house, and also sold; and that the proceeds should be vested in the hands of trustees, as a ministerial fund. Their first report was made November 7, 1814, and shows the following results. Proceeds of sales of wood on the ministerial wood-lot $2,566.13 Proceeds of sales of wood on a lot in Carlisle 364.27 Proceeds of sales of pews in the meeting house 1,365.55 ———————— Total on interest from January 1st, 1814 $4,295.95 The first trustees were John White, Francis Jarvis, and John L. Tuttle; and they and their successors were incorporated by an act passed February 27, 1813, as “The Trustees of the Congregational Ministerial Fund in Concord.” This fund has since been accumulating; and it received the additional legacy of Humphrey Barrett,4 in 1829, of $500. No appropriations were made from it till 1830; and on the first of January, 1831, it amounted to $11,431.45. In 1732, a committee was appointed, consisting of the Rev. Mr. Whiting, James Minott, Jr., John Fox, and Samuel Heywood, to make sale of the common and ministerial land in the town, and vest the proceeds in other real estate. A “ministerial pasture and plow land,” was accordingly bought west of the almshouse and some time used as a “perquisite” lot. During the Rev. Mr. Emerson’s ministry, it was sold for £75, or $250, and the annual interest, $15, applied for the benefit of the minister. In consequence of losses sustained during the revolution, it became reduced to $100 nearly. In 1819, the town voted that the minister should receive $15, the original perquisite; and the balance $9, has been annually raised by a tax.5

4. HUMPHREY BARRETT was the son of Lieutenant Humphrey Barrett, and died without issue, March 13, 1827, aged 75. Abel B. Heywood inherited, and lives on [1835], his real estate. 5. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston MA: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy, 1835 (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry David Thoreau would indicate a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study. On July 16, 1859 he would correct a date mistake buried in the body of the text.)

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April 5: The Shelleys returned to London.

May: QUEEN MAB; A PHILOSOPHICAL POEM: WITH NOTES. BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, a long poem celebrating the merits of republicanism, atheism, vegetarianism, and free love (according to E.P. Thompson, it was the notes to this poem that communicated the early philosophical anarchism of Godwin to the Chartists).

June 23: Harriet Westbrook Shelley gave birth to Ianthe Shelley.

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July: The Shelleys were at Bracknell, with the Newton-Boinville circle.

1814

January-February: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A REFUTATION OF DEISM.

Spring: The spendthrift 21-year-old heir to a baronetcy, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was feeling needful of some female other than his own wife Harriet Westbrook Shelley (who just at this period was becoming again pregnant by him) or his own infant daughter Ianthe Shelley, someone with nice tits who would understand his deep spirit, someone “who can feel poetry and understand philosophy” who would be so pleasant as to ring his chimes for him. He hit on a real babe, the vulnerable motherless 16-year-old daughter of his liberally oriented friend William Godwin, Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft. Bingo!

WILLIAM GODWIN’S LIFE

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July 28: Percy Bysshe Shelley escaped the annoyance of his pregnant wife Harriet Westbrook Shelley and his infant daughter Ianthe Shelley by running away with a teenager,

Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft, to Bourbon France. They took along with them another 16-year-old adventuress, Percy’s step-sister Mary Jane Clairmont, and this ménage would be moving quickly through war- ravaged France into Switzerland.

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August: On a romantic trip down the Rhine River, inspecting medieval castle ruins in the moonlight, Percy Bysshe Shelley got Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft good and (to deploy an Americanism) knocked up.

(This primapara of an adolescing female would be severely premature and would be a SIDS death during the night.) One of the places at which the ménage stopped was at Mannheim, near the ruins of a Herr Frankenstein’s castle. Although it is not known whether she was exposed to the ruin at that time or only later became aware of its legend through Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s FAUST, Mary of course would come to utilize that name, Frankenstein.6

There were at this point about 3,000 American sailors being held in the dour granite prison complex near the mist-enshrouded village of Princeton on the stark Devonshire moor about a day’s march from the port town of CRIMPING Plymouth, England.

6. The name “Frankenstein” had begun neither as the name of the “Mad Scientist” nor as the name of his horrid Lon Cheney monster, but as, literally, the stone of the Franks (a Teuton tribe). Around 500CE the Franks took control of a northern part of the Roman empire including Gaul. Within this territory was a Roman quarry near what is now Darmstadt, Germany. The earliest person known to have been using “Frankenstein,” Stone of the Franks, as a family surname, was the knight Arbogast von Frankenstein. In the 13th Century, near the site of this quarry, a castle was erected for a Baron von Frankenstein and his knights. One of the knights of the 16th Century, Sir George Frankenstein, is reputed to have sacrificed his life in combat to save beautiful Annemarie, “Rose of the Valley.” (Hmmm!) Carvings in his crypt near the ruin depict him slaying a dragon, with the dragon’s tail piercing his armor. Another figure was Johann Konrad Dippel born in the castle in 1673, who studied Philippus Paracelsus and claimed an ability to create life, who sometimes signed himself “Frankensteina.” Whatever secret this wandering scholar and alchemist, who also claimed to have in his possession the philosopher’s stone, had for the control of life, it evidently died with him in 1734. The brothers Grimm would write a tale about a dragonslayer from the Frankenstein district. Goethe, who would spend much of his life producing an epic poem about the quest for self-knowledge, had spent part of his youth near the ruin and later read his Faust manuscript in progress to a circle of friends from Darmstadt, under some linden trees near the ruin. In the manuscript, Faust sells his soul to the devil in seeking the philosopher’s stone and the secret of life and its creation. 16 Copyright 2012 AAustin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September 13, Tuesday: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft returned to England.

British Foreign Secretary Viscount Castlereagh, his wife, and her sister arrived in Vienna to attend the Congress.

British forces took Machias, Maine, giving them control of a significant portion of the coast of Maine. Many locals welcomed them because this means renewed commerce with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

After the battle on Lake Champlain, the most severely wounded of the English prisoners who were still alive were paroled and transported to the hospital on Isle aux Noix. To the surface of the waters rose parts of the body of a son of General T.E. Stansbury who had mysteriously disappeared from the Ticonderoga during the action — it was discovered that this lieutenant had been “cut in two with a round shot.”

It had been quite a night in the harbor of Baltimore, Maryland, for the British had fired 1,800 shells at Fort McHenry. A proslavery lawyer, Francis Scott Key, was watching this bombardment from an offshore boat, and scribbled a commemorative poem which he titled “The Defense of Fort McHenry” on a scrap of paper, and passed this scrap of paper along. In this depiction of action figures from the War of 1812, we can see that the manufacturers have thoughtfully included a tiny action figure of a lawyer:

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY When it appeared that his poem was to be printed as a broadside, he suggested that it be sung to that tune John Smith had whistled up in 1776 as a theme song for the English drinking club, The Anacreon Society, the well- known “To Anacreon in Heaven.”

When Benjamin Carr ran off several hundred folded sheets containing the Francis Scott Key lyrics together with the To-Anacreon-in-Heaven melody, he gave the effort a less topical title, “Johns vs Jonathans et al” — no, the title he gave it was “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In time this popular song would become the standard musical expression of US national belligerence which would be sung before each and every sports contest — and in the 1990s would give Roseanne her opportunity to make her famous scratching-her-crotch gesture. At this writing, ten of those folded sheets run through the press by Carr are still in existence. Now, don’t forget that, class, this is important information: those ten pieces of history paper are worth mucho dinero, and they belong to ten rich people just like those slaves used to belong to rich people and thus these ten rich people have rendered themselves two-ways-blessed rather than merely one-way-blessed by making a contribution to our nation’s heritage. –And no, I don’t want to hear any lawyer jokes. If you’re going to live in America, you need to learn what America is all about.

November 30:Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1st son, Charles Shelley, was born to Harriet Westbrook Shelley.

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1815

January-April: During this period Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft, Clare Clairmont, and Thomas Jefferson Hogg were engaging in an experiment in free love.

January: Percy Bysshe Shelley was involved with George Cannon and the Theological Inquirer.

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY January 5, Thursday: Sir Bysshe Shelley died. During the subsequent 18 months, Percy Bysshe Shelley was involved in negotiations with his father over the settlement of the will, ultimately receiving money to pay his debts (some cash he diverts to Godwin), as well as an annual income of 1,000 pounds (200 earmarked for Harriet; later 120 for her children).

La gioventù di Enrico quinto, an opéra comique by Louis Joseph Ferdinand Hérold to his own words and Landriani’s after Pineux-Duval, was performed for the initial time, in the Teatro del Fondo of Naples. Hérold’s first work for the stage was warmly received.

When the final report of the Hartford Convention was disclosed, the American public learned that the delegates had stopped well short of advocating that New England secede from the federal union. Seven amendments to the United States Constitution had instead been agreed upon (all seven would be stillborn).

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 5 of 1st M 1815 / Our Meeting was silent & to me allmost Blank, but I believe some others Experienced a season of favor for I thought divine help & goodness was near but the enjoyment was to be held from me. — This evening my mind has been favord with the quickenings of life — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

April 5: In Indonesia, 13,000-foot Mount Tambora (Gunung) on the north coast of Sumbawa Island blew 4,000 feet of its peak into the air, causing a tidal wave and a rain of rock fragments that killed 12,000 people on nearby islands. Before the explosion the mountain had been some 13,000 feet high, more or less, and afterward it has been measured at 9, 350 feet. Some 40 cubic miles of tephra material had been blown into the skies of this planet.7 This eventually caused a drop in temperature as the dust spread through the upper atmosphere of the planet, amounting to some 7 degrees in New England in the year 1816. The result would be crop-destroying frosts, and ice floes on the Thames River as it passed through London.8 Because of the explosion of this Mount Tambora, of which they were unaware, Americans would come to refer to their year 1816 as “eighteen hundred and froze to death.”9

“Beware the lo heres, and the lo theres.”

VOLCANIC EXPLOSIVITY INDEX (Logarithmic)

Timing Volcanic Event Logarithmic Explosivity Index

73,000 years ago, Toba, Sumatra during Pleistocene (the largest caldera in the world) VEI8

Pleistocene Yellowstone, Wyoming Apparently not that much of an explosion

April 1815 Tambora, Indonesia VEI7

7. The explosion of Krakatoa in Indonesia in 1883, by way of contrast, would put 18 cubic miles of tephra material into the atmosphere, and would thus result in a lesser global weather excursion, although because of the topography of the lowlands of Sumatra and Java nearby some 36,000 people would be drowned as its tsunamis reached the other side of the narrow strait. 8. In 2004 scientists would uncover the remains of a native village under some 10 feet of ash, and the bodies of two adults. A remarkable similarity would be noted between the Tambora remains and those associated with the 79CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius. 9. This isn’t Krakatoa, the volcano you’ve probably heard about. Krakatoa exploded in 1883. 22 Copyright 2012 AAustin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Timing Volcanic Event Logarithmic Explosivity Index

1835 Cosigüía, Nicaragua Apparently not that much of an explosion

1883 Krakatau VEI??

1888 Bandaisan, Japan Apparently not that much of an explosion

1902 Mt. Pelée, Martinique Apparently not that much of an explosion

1911 Taal, Philippines Apparently not that much of an explosion

1912 Novarupta (near Mt. Katmai), Alaska Apparently not that much of an explosion

1919 Kelud, Java Apparently not that much of an explosion

1932 Quizapú, Chile Apparently not that much of an explosion

1947-1948 Hekla, Iceland Apparently not that much of an explosion

1956 Bezmianny, Kamchatka Apparently not that much of an explosion

DATE Pinatubo, Philippines VEI6

DATE Mount Saint Helens, USA VEI5

VEI5 = Event of a size to be expected about once per decade VEI6 = Event of a size to be expected about once per century VEI7 = Event of a size to be expected every other millennium or so VEI8 = Event of a size to be expected every 10,000 years or so

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April 30: Commodore Joshua Barney’s Chesapeake Bay flotilla was being disbanded.

At about this point in time Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft was again becoming preggers (either by Percy Bysshe Shelley or by the other male of this swinging set, Thomas Jefferson Hogg — none of those participating seemed to much care).

August: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft settled near Bishopsgate.

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September: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft traveled by boat up the Thames River with Peacock and Charles Clairmont.

Fall/Winter: Percy Bysshe Shelley was writing ALASTOR.

1816

February: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ALASTOR ... AND OTHER POEMS.

May 2, Thursday: At Carlton House, Princess Charlotte Augusta Hanover of Wales, daughter of Prince Regent George of Great Britain and Caroline Amelia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, Princess of Wales, heir presumptive to the throne of Great Britain, got married with Prince Leopold George Christian Frederick of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, afterwards King of the Belgians. They would reside at Claremont, a wedding gift from the nation (their wedded bliss would be temporary).

Persuaded by Clare Clairmont that George Gordon, Lord Byron would be delighted to have their company, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft, and Claire went toward Dover to leave England to visit Byron in Geneva (they would arrive in mid-May and would remain near him till August 29th).

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 2 of 5 M Meeting rather small - A short testimony from C R. — My Mother, Cousins Patty & Mary Ann Gardiner & Josiah Lawton & Wife set the Afternoon with us. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

June: Percy Bysshe Shelley toured Lake Leman near Geneva with George Gordon, Lord Byron and wrote a “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.”

June 16, Sunday: Celebrations took place in Vienna honoring the 50th anniversary of Antonio Salieri’s arrival in the city. He received a gold medal from the Lord Chamberlain in the name of the Emperor. During a celebration of the High Mass Salieri conducted his own music. In the evening, a concert by his pupils took place in his Vienna home, wherein Beitrag zur fünfzigjährigen Jubelfeier des Herrn Salieri D.441 for solo voices and piano by Franz Schubert was performed for the initial time.

That night Percy Bysshe Shelley and his 18-year-old bride Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft were holed up at the Villa Diodati near Geneva, with Dr. John Polidori and George Gordon, Lord Byron, because during this particularly violent storm of that strangely rainy summer, they simply would not have been able to make their way back comfortably to where they had been staying at Chapuis. Evidently due to the bad weather the group was unable to get a good cable connection for their TV (or something), and so they decided to amuse themselves by reading aloud a collection of German ghost stories, THE FANTASMAGORIANA, in one of which a group of travelers were trying to amuse one another with their respective supernatural experiences. Byron proposed the agenda that they were each to invent a story such as found in this volume, for one another’s entertainment. Shelley wrote a piece which was entirely forgettable, Byron dashed off a fragment, and Polidori began what would become the “The Vampyre,” the first modern vampire tale, the main character of which, Lord Ruthven, could well have been based upon Byron (for some time it would be presumed that Byron “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 25 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY himself had invented the story). Mary herself did not at this point put anything on paper.

In every month during this year there was a severe frost. January and February were comparatively mild, though there were a few cold days. The greater part of March was as might be expected, cold and boisterous. April opened warm, again, as might be expected, but then grew colder, ending in snow and ice and wintry cold. In May ice formed half an inch thick. Opening buds and flowers were killed and the corn froze. Frost, ice, and snow occurred throughout June. On Inauguration Day, in June, there was four inches of snow on the level ground in Warner, New Hampshire, while across the border in Maine there was ten inches. Almost every green thing was killed. There would be no fruit this year. Then there was frost and ice even in July. On July 5th, ice covered the ponds of New England and New York state like window glass. In August this ice thickened to half an inch. The wind was from the north, and cold, nearly all summer. About all that could be done with the corn this year was cut it and dry it for fodder. Farmers would be obliged to pay $4 and even $5 a bushel for corn from the 1815 harvest, in order to get seed for the next spring’s planting. Then the first two weeks of September were mild but the remainder of the month was cold, with frost, and ice again formed, a quarter of an inch thick. October was more than usually cold, with frost and ice. November was cold and blustering, with snow enough for good sleighing, but then December proved to be quite mild and comfortable.

Cold weather was persisting through the summer in much of the world’s temperate zones. Crops were being killed by frost and snow would be occurring in June and July in the United States. The weather this summer was so dreadful for farming, that during the following traveling season, the summer of 1817, a number of

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY families would pack up and leave for points west. (This population migration phenomenon caused by the cold summer of 1816 would come to be known as “Ohio fever.”)

Why was this summer of 1816 in the Northern Hemisphere exhibiting such strange weather? Well, it wasn’t just the sunspots, which were extraordinarily prominent and which people were observing through smoked glass during that May and June, and also, it wasn’t just the “ice king” Frederic Tudor of Boston who was cooling off the hot spots of this planet! For in fact dust, circling the earth from the explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, in this season was reaching the northern latitudes.10 Crop-damaging summer frosts SUNSPOTS caused some of the hard-won farmlands of New England to be abandoned — fields upon which cultivation has not since been attempted. Indiana experienced an unprecedented surge of some 42,000 settlers in this year, many of them fleeing the cold weather back in New England. The drop in mean temperature was amounting to some 7 degrees in New England11 and the price of hay was rocketing from like $30.00 per ton to like $180.00 per ton. People were praying “God, please do not inflict on us another year without a summer.” Of course, in Switzerland that summer, Mary was huddling indoors to stay out of the cold and damp, and her story FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, if you go back and look into it, or the last half of it, is a story with what would have appeared to be a wholly gratuitous amount of guess what, snow and ice and coldness. Because of this explosion of which they were unaware, Americans would come to refer to their year 1816 as “eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death.”

Samuel Griswold Goodrich, the children’s author, would write the best-known contemporary account of this strange year. The season appears to have been a repeat of the growing season of the year 1454 in the Northern Hemisphere, when the Chinese wheat crop was destroyed by frosts after a winter in which the Yellow Sea had frozen, along the coast, to as much as a dozen miles out from the shoreline.

To bring this home to Concord, Massachusetts, please note that per John Hanson Mitchell: Departures are not necessarily well documented, but there is good evidence that 1816 might have broken the back of Estabrook [Thoreau’s “Easterbrooks Country”]. In 1815 the great volcano Tambora in Indonesia blew its top, and ... here in New England the effects were especially troublesome, since the soils were wearing out and the hardscrabble hilltop farms and marginal areas such as Estabrook were already hard-pressed.... The Estabrooks, the Kibbes, the Clarks, the Browns, and other “outlivers,” as they were called, who inhabited the poor farms in the tract that would come to be known as Estabrook Woods, were not immune to this pattern of settlement, and one by one, for varying reasons, the families pulled up stakes and went west ... and by Thoreau’s time Estabrook was a haunted land, the farms deserted, the families departed, and only a wind blowing.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day / Our afternoon meeting was not quite as large as usual but proved a quiet favor’d opportunity - James Greene opened the meeting in a rather short testimony which savor’d well to me Then Gerrard F Hopkins in a large & excellent testimony, wherein the power of Truth was remarkably conspicuous - Margaret Judge concluded in a living prayer 10. Soufrière on St. Vincent had blown in 1812, Mayon in the Philippines had blown in 1814, but these became almost as pop-tarts popping up in a toaster when Tambora in Indonesia blew, as this was by far the most powerful volcanic blast of the past 10,000 years. All but 26 of the 12,000 Sumbawa islanders had lost their lives. We would have a mild taste of this volcano weather, in our own lives, in the series of cool summers after 1991 when Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines blew its top. 11. What happened in New England, what happened for instance to the denizens of Thoreau’s “Easterbrooks Country,” of course doesn’t compare at all with what was happening on the islands immediately around this Indonesian volcano, for some 80,000 people were starving to death in huts staring out at the barren, buried fields that had been their entire livelihood. (That’s them and we’re us, I suppose.) “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 27 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY In the Afternoon James Greene again, & as usual when present opened the Service then David Harkness, then Calvin Straight, then Christopher Healy & then Calvin Straight a second time — all the appearances, I thought were in the life - & The meeting as quiet as so large & mixed a gathering could be - in addition to our lodgers, we have tonight Isaac Thorne & wife of Nine Partners & Robert Pary & wife of Pennsylvania — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

June 17, Monday night: George Gordon, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft and Dr. John Polidori continued their evening activities at the Villa Diodadi and Lord Byron wrote “A Fragment of a Novel (1816).” At midnight he recited Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel” and, becoming overwrought and declaring Mary to be the villainess of this poem, Percy Bysshe ran from the room. Apparently his behavior got the group rather worried — especially Mary. What the hell was going on in the mind of this high-strung hubby?

READ “CHRISTABEL” Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day / Our meeting this morning opened under solemn covering -Jas Green opened then Hugh Judge, then C Rodman, then Isaac Thorn in solemn Supplication - at the instance of D Buffum seconded by E Thornton the meeting proceeded to business. The usual Service of this forenoon was persued, & some lively sensations excited by Several Epistles particularly the London & Virginia, pertinent remarks made several times by Hugh Judge. — In the Afternoon we enterd into the State of Societys, 28 Copyright 2012 AAustin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY Some deficiencies appeared, but I thought on the whole thngs were as comfortable as at any time. (that is) in the general — Many remarks were with much feeling, weight & life. Hugh Judge tho’ deaf, sought out the cause which he knew not speaking very pertinently to divers cases while the Answers were under consideration tho’ he could not hear a single voice - Isaac Thorn Christopher Healy, James Hallack, G F Hopkins, D Harness, C Straight labord abundantly for our good, & many remarks were added by several of our own members —. The meeting concluded under a remarkably solom covering & adjourned to the 3rd hour tomorrow Afternoon — In the eveng we had a large company of pleasant & interesting friends. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY June 22, Saturday: Britain ended its 13-year occupation of St. Pierre and Miquelon as these islands reverted to being a colony of France.

That night, George Gordon, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley having plans for a boat trip around Lake Geneva on the next day, they abandoned their efforts to compete in the story contest, but Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft, after her late start, was persisting. The friends discussed a subject from Madame de Staël’s DE L’ALLEMAGNE: “whether the principle of life could be discovered and whether scientists could galvanize a corpse of manufactured humanoid.”12

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 7th day Early this morning Several friends went to fort Walcot & procured liberty to meet with the Soldiers at 11 OClock, they went in the Custom House boat kindly accomodated by John Stevens. The company from abroad were James Halleck, John Hull - - - -Robert Parry, Sally Parry, Dorothy Holding, Alice Abbot of our own towns folks was father Rodman, Jonathon Dennis, John Slocum, Benja Hadwen Hannah Dennis, Ruth & Eliza Rodman. They first went to Fort Walcot where they had good service & truth

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY was maintained, then to fort Adams where Truth also bore the Palm, & the good cause preserved -This meeting was of great weight on my Spirits & since I find it succeeded well, I feel rejoiced with those who went having travailed with them as deeply as my capasity would admit. - I was fully persuaded it was best for me not to go, but to stay & promote the meeting appointed for people of colour at 5 OC this afternoon -While our aforementioned friends were on the fort Hugh Judge, Gerrard T Hopkins & company were called to go on Board the Packet for NYork 0- which rendered my presence necessary to pay their passages as one of the committee for that purpose Robert & Sally Parry & Sister Ruth dined with us. — The black meeting this Afternoon was not largely attended, but succeeded pretty well John Hallock, Dorothy Golding twice, James Halleck twice were concerned in testimony — Robert & Sally lodged at Jonathon Dennis’s to night & expect to be at Portsmouth tomorrow from thence to Providence homeward bound. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

July: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft visited Mont Blanc and Percy wrote “Mont Blanc.”

12. The term “scientist” in this translation is of course an anachronism, as this term would not begin to be used until 1830. In regard to the scientific currency of Mary Shelley’s galvanic mechanism for bringing life to Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s monster: In 1809 in ELEMENTS OF PHYSIOPHILOSOPHY, no less a credited figure than Lorenz Oken had declared that “Galvanism is the principle of life. There is no other vital force than the galvanic polarity.”

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July 27, Thursday: On their boat tour around Lake Geneva, George Gordon, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley visited Ouchy, where Byron wrote “The Prisoner of Chillon.” He finished Canto III of “Childe Harold” and wrote “The Dream,” “Stanzas to Augusta,” and other poems.

A heated cannonball fired from the gunboats of the white attacking force blew up the powder magazine of Fort Barrancas at Pensacola, Florida, causing the instant death of 270 of its defenders. After the recognizable leaders among the few survivors had been summarily executed there remained 64 black persons to “return” per the orders of Andrew Jackson “to their former owners,” which is to say, 64 burned and maimed persons to be transported to Georgia and there shared out among the owners of various plantations for whatever remaining usefulness could be extracted from such survivors as field slaves.13 WHITE ON RED, RED ON WHITE “OLD COMERS”

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 27th of 6th M 1816 / Our Moy [Monthly] Meeting is this days held at Portsmouth & I dont know as I feel much amiss in not going there is one subject that impresses my mind alittle [sic], but I dont see that it does with sufficient weight to move in it, was I there — The situtation of friends on the Island of Connanicut, & indeed of the inhabitants generally has a place in my feelings, but what is to be done for them I do not see at present, there is something very unpleasant, in a whole Town’s being without any meeting for Public Worship, which now the case, they have a convenient meeting house & might have a meeting occasionally & pretty Steady. There are two Men members & four Women One of which is a minister & one an Elder but being somewhat Advanced in life are unable to get out constantly, the other two women one is feeble & the other a young Woman with children - If any thing could be done to encourage these to keep a meeting on acct of the inhabitance generally it seems to me that I should be willing to unite in it occasionally — There are Some there who seem very friendly & pretty steadily go to meeting on first Day These considerations have occupied my feelings for some time, but the state of things is so low among us, that, as respects myself I feel but little resolution to move the subject — Those of our friends who went to Portsmouth to attend Moy [Monthly] Meeting hove returned, they Say the first meeting was nearly silent - & in the last the buisness went on pretty well — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

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August: Percy Bysshe Shelley launched a silk hot-air balloon across the Lake of Geneva into the city of John Calvin, bearing a message intended to set the burgers to thinking.14

August 29, Thursday: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft, and Clare Clairmont left Geneva to return to England.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 29th of 8th M / Rode to Portsmouth with Sister Mary & John in the Chaise & attended the Moy [Monthly] Meeting, - stoped on the way thither at Uncle Thurstons — At Meeting D Buffum preached very lively - & a pretty good meeting to me — In the last we had considerable buisness some of which labor’d & occasioned some pretty smart remarks, particularly a communication from So Kingston Moy [Monthly] Meeting respecting a matter between R Hazard & T R Williams —- Daniel Gould was restored to membership & I hope he may prove more useful to society than he has hither to been We dined at Anne Anthonys after which we rode to the new Cotton factory in Motts Gulley after taking a View of it we return’d to tea & then rode home by a little after sun set — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

September 8: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft reached Portsmouth, after which they settled at Bath.

October 9: Suicide of Fanny Godwin (Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft’s half-sister), in Wales.

December 7: On or about this date, Harriet Westbrook Shelley threw herself into the Serpentine River.

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December 10: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s abandoned wife’s drowned body was discovered floating in the Serpentine River. Harriet Westbrook Shelley had evidently committed suicide earlier in the month, probably about December 7th.

What to do about unfortunate 3-year-old Ianthe Shelley? What to do about unfortunate 2-year-old Charles Shelley?

Daniel Foster was born at Hanover, New Hampshire, the 4th of the eight sons of Richard Foster and Irene Burroughs Foster.

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December 30: Some three weeks after Percy Bysshe Shelley’s abandoned wife’s drowned body had been discovered in the Serpentine, he as the absconding father of two legitimate orphaned children and his mistress Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft felt constrained to wed — presumably to enhance Percy’s chances at his pending 1 hearing to obtain custody of his children by Harriet Westbrook Shelley, Ianthe Shelley (age 3 /2) and Charles Shelley (age 2).

WILLIAM GODWIN’S LIFE

1817

February 5: Percy Bysshe Shelley met John Keats and John Hamilton Reynolds at supper with Leigh Hunt.

France introduced a new electoral law limiting franchise and increasing the power of the middle class.

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February 23: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Shelley, and Claire Clairmont traveled to Marlow.

March: It was probably during this month that Percy Bysshe Shelley began writing LAON AND CYTHNA; OR, THE REVOLUTION OF THE GOLDEN CITY: A VISION OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. IN THE STANZA OF SPENSER. This would be completed sometime during the month of September.

In this month, or perhaps in April, Samuel Taylor Coleridge published his 2d “Lay Sermon.”

March 14: At about this date, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s PROPOSAL FOR PUTTING REFORM TO THE VOTE appeared.

At some point during this year Shelley wrote, in a letter to a friend: It is impossible to know how far the higher members of the Government are involved in the guilt of their infernal agents. But this much is known, that so soon as the whole nation lifted up its voice for parliamentary reform, spies went forth. These were selected from the most worthless and infamous of mankind, and dispersed among the multitude of famished and illiterate labourers. It was their business to find victims, no matter whether right or wrong.

March 27: Chancery Court denied to Percy Bysshe Shelley custody of his children by Harriet Westbrook 1 Shelley, Ianthe Shelley (age 3 /2) and Charles Shelley (age 2).

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 27 of 3 M / Monthly Meeting in Town. - In the first meeting we had two testimonys Viz D B & C R — it was a Season of labor to me —In the last we had no buisness of much importance - No one came home to Dine with us tho’ I asked an unusual number, all previously engaged RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

March 28: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley spent their first night in Albion House, their permanent home while at Marlow.

September: Percy Bysshe Shelley completed a poem that he had been writing away at since March, LAON AND CYTHNA; OR, THE REVOLUTION OF THE GOLDEN CITY: A VISION OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. IN THE STANZA OF SPENSER. It was presumably sometime during this month that he began to draft his “Essay on Christianity,” which would be completed in December.

September: Percy Bysshe Shelley completed a poem that he had been writing away at since March, LAON AND CYTHNA; OR, THE REVOLUTION OF THE GOLDEN CITY: A VISION OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. IN THE STANZA OF SPENSER. It was presumably sometime during this month that he began to draft his “Essay on Christianity,” which would be completed in December.

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October and November: In this timeframe Percy Bysshe Shelley’s LAON AND CYTHNA; OR, THE REVOLUTION OF THE GOLDEN CITY: A VISION OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. IN THE STANZA OF SPENSER was going through the presses.

November/December: Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley’s HISTORY OF A SIX WEEKS’ TOUR recounted the continental tour she and Percy Bysshe Shelley had taken in 1814 following their elopement, and recounted their summer near Geneva in 1816.

November 6, Thursday: Milosh Obrenovic became Prince of Serbia, replacing George Petrovic who had died on July 25th.

Princess Charlotte Augusta Hanover of Wales, the daughter of Prince Regent George who had been destined since her birth to become eventually the Queen of Great Britain, instead died at the age of 21 at Claremont House, Esher, in Surrey, of post-partum hemorrhage and shock early in the morning, after having been delivered the previous day of a stillborn male infant. This funeral would of course be promoted as a national tragedy or media event — even the undertakers would get drunk. The mother Caroline was not duly informed of her daughter’s death, nor invited to the funeral. When she would find out about it courtesy of a traveler, she would faint. The proto-queen’s body would be interred in St. George’s Chapel of Windsor with her stillborn male infant at her feet. Percy Bysshe Shelley immediately began “Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte” somewhat in the manner in which Elton John would in this century celebrate the untimely death of the Princess Diana in a Paris auto accident, adding of course a few rough touches in the mode of Diana’s brother’s funeral declarations about the social context of her demise: We cannot truly grieve for every one who dies beyond the circle of those especially dear to us; yet in the extinction of the objects of public love and admiration, and gratitude, there is something, if we enjoy a liberal mind, which has departed from within that circle.... But this appeal to the feelings of men should not be made lightly, or in a any manner that tends to waste, on inadequate objects, those fertilizing streams of sympathy, which a public mourning should be the occasion of pouring forth. This solemnity should be used only to express a wide and intelligible calamity, and one which is felt to be such by those who feel for their country and for mankind; its character ought to be universal, not particular.

Shelley would compare and contrast this express “private grief” to the lack of affect being displayed by the

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY public and by the press in regard to the hangings, drawings, and quarterings being carried out at virtually the same time of three laborers, Jeremiah Brandreth, Isaac Ludlam, and William Turner, who had been detected in Luddite activities (that is, had been incited to lead the Pentrich Rising): Let us follow the corpse of British Liberty slowly and reverently to its tomb: and if some glorious Phantom should appear, and make its throne of broken swords and sceptres and royal crowns trampled in the dust, let us say that the Spirit of Liberty has arisen from its grave and left all that was dross and mortal there, and kneel down and worship it as our Queen. The Princess Charlotte’s obstetrician, Sir Richard Croft, who had correctly diagnosed a transverse lie of the baby during labour but had somehow failed to resort to forceps as would have been the standard procedure during that era, would three months later commit suicide. For the details as to Princess Charlotte Augusta in the early 19th Century, refer to Stephen C. Behrendt’s ROYAL MOURNING AND REGENCY CULTURE, Macmilla / St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Public exercises in mourning were great and widespread, a huge number of poems, sermons, and other literary and quasi-literary texts appeared almost immediately, commemorative ceramic objects, textiles, coins, sculptures, and music followed. That princess had been widely regarded as an attractive domestic alternative to the Prince Regent, her widely unpopular father, as well as to his largely disgraced estranged wife Caroline of Brunswick, and this untimely death was therefore a most grievous blow to those who had invested this princess with the symbolic significance of “England’s Hope.” Much as Elton John has reinvented Diana as “England’s Rose,” Charlotte would be apostrophized in that period as “Albion’s Rose.” Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s COLLECTED WORKS published in 1825 would have a poem for Princess Charlotte which is very much in the mode of sensibility and emphasizes the universal mourning the death occasioned except in the case of the mad George III who no longer has the capacity for grief. Charlotte’s funeral resembled Diana’s laying in state in Westminster Abbey. The parallels are rich because Charlotte was fashioned in the

public mind as a sort of precursor to the “domestic virtues” we later associate with the Victorian era — and indeed, it was her death, at the stillbirth of her only child, that would ensure that, 20 years later, a princess named Victoria would ascend the throne of England.

ON THE DEATH OF THE PRINCESS CHARLOTTE.

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—— Yes, Britain mourns, as with electric touch, For youth, for love, for happiness destroyed, Her universal population melts In grief spontaneous, and hard hearts are moved, And rough unpolished natures learn to feel For those they envied, leveled in the dust By Fate’s impartial stroke ; and pulpits sound With vanity and woe to earthly goods, And urge and dry the tear. — Yet one there is Who midst this general burst of grief remains In strange tranquillity ; whom not the stir And long-drawn murmurs of the gathering crowd, That by his very windows trail the pomp Of hearse, and blazoned arms, and long array Of sad funereal rites, nor the loud groans And deep-felt anguish of a husband’s heart, Can move to mingle with this flood one tear : In careless apathy, perhaps in mirth, He wears the day. Yet is he near in blood, The very stem on which this blossom grew, And at his knees she fondled in the charm And grace spontaneous which along belongs To untaught infancy : — Yet O forbear ! Nor deem him hard of heart ; for awful, struck By Heaven’s severest visitation, sad, Like a scathed oak amidst the forest trees, Lonely he stands ; — leaves bud, and shoot, and fall ; He holds no sympathy with living nature Or time’s incessant change. Then in this hour, While pensive thought is busy with the woes And restless change of poor humanity, Think then, O think of him, and breathe one prayer, Form the full tide of sorrow spare one tear, For him who does not weep !

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 6th of 11 M / Silent Meeting. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

November 7: The drawing, hanging, and quartering for treason of three laborers, Jeremiah Brandreth, Isaac Ludlam, and William Turner, who had been detected in Luddite activities (that is, had been incited to lead the Pentrich Rising). In “An Address to the People on The Death of the Princess Charlotte,” Percy Bysshe Shelley would proclaim this to be a greater tragedy for the nation than the unexpected death of Princess Charlotte Augusta Hanover of Wales on the previous day.

November 9, Sunday: Percy Bysshe Shelley in The Examiner: On the 7th November, Brandreth, Turner and Ludlam ascended the scaffold. We feel for Brandreth the less, because it seems he killed a man. But recollect who instigated him to the proceedings which led to murder. On the word of a dying man, Brandreth tells us, that “Oliver brought him to this” - that, “but for Oliver, he would not have been there.” See, too, Ludlam and Turner, with their sons and brothers, and sisters, how

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY they kneel together in this dreadful agony of prayer. With that dreadful penalty before their eyes - with that tremendous sanction for the truth of all he spoke, Turner exclaimed loudly and distinctly, while the executioner was putting the rope round his neck, “This is all Oliver and the government.” What more he might have said we know not, because the chaplain prevented any further observations. Troops of horse, with keen and glittering swords, hemmed in the multitudes collected to witness this abominable exhibition. “When the stroke of the axe was heard, there was a burst of horror from the crowd. The instant the head was exhibited, there was a tremendous shriek set up, and the multitude ran violently in all directions, as if under the impulse of sudden frenzy. Those who resumed their stations, groaned and hooted.”

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 9 of 11 M / Our meeting was pretty full & tho’ to me it was a season of much dryness Yet I trust there were those present who were more favor’d - Father Rodman concerned in a short testimony - Sister Eliza dined with us & has just come in & wanted to know if I was writing in my journal & wished to see it but I declined as there is nothing here worth seeing. She concluded she should see it when I am gone, but as I chiefly write for my own satisfaction it is probable that should she survive me but a small portion of what I have written will be found but that is a subject I leave as we know what may happen - This Afternoon Meeting was Silent RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

November 11: In the Teatro San Carlo of Naples, Armida, a dramma by Gioachino Rossini to words of Schmidt after Tasso, was performed for the initial time, and neither its audience nor the critics liked it at all.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was writing (and perhaps would soon afterward publish) AN ADDRESS TO THE PEOPLE ON THE DEATH OF THE PRINCESS CHARLOTTE (she had died during childbirth on November 6th).

December: Percy Bysshe Shelley completed his “Essay on Christianity,” which he had been working on since September. A revised version of LAON AND CYTHNA was published as THE REVOLT OF ISLAM (dated 1818). David Booth and W.T. Baxter broke with the Shelleys.

1818

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s REVOLT OF ISLAM.

William Godwin’s FURTHER LETTERS OF ADVICE TO JOSEPH BEAVAN (Analectic Magazine, Philadelphia).

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Z’s articles on the “Cockney School of Poetry” appeared in Blackwood Magazine, attacking Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, John Keats, and eventually Percy Bysshe Shelley.

A scathing review of Keats’s ENDYMION appeared in the Quarterly.

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote to Thomas Love Peacock about Lake Como: We have been to Como, looking for a house. This lake exceeds anything I ever beheld in beauty, with the exception of the arbutus islands of Killarney. It is long and narrow, and has the appearance of a mighty river winding among the mountains and the forests. We sailed from the town of Como to a tract of country called the Tremezina, and saw the various aspects presented by that part of the lake. The mountains between Como and that village, or rather cluster of villages, are covered on high with chestnut forests (the eating chestnuts, on which the inhabitants of the country subsist in time of scarcity), which sometimes descend to the very verge of the lake, overhanging it with their hoary branches. But usually the immediate border of this shore is composed of laurel-trees, and bay, and myrtle, and wild fig- trees, and olives which grow in the crevices of the rocks, and overhang the caverns, and shadow the deep glens, which are filled with the flashing light of the waterfalls. Other flowering shrubs, which I can not name, grow there also. On high, the towers of village churches are seen white among the dark forests. Beyond, on the opposite shore, which faces the south, the mountains descend less precipitously to the lake, and altho they are much higher, and some covered with perpetual snow, there intervenes between them and the lake a range of lower hills, which have glens and rifts opening to the other, such as I should fancy the abysses of Ida or Parnassus. Here are plantations of olive, and orange, and lemon trees, which are now so loaded with fruit, that there is more fruit than leaves — and vineyards. This shore of the lake is one continued village, and the Milanese nobility have their villas here. The union of culture and the untameable profusion and loveliness of nature is here so close, that the line where they are divided can hardly be discovered.

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But the finest scenery is that of the Villa Pliniana; so called from a fountain which ebbs and flows every three hours, described by the younger Pliny, which is in the courtyard. This house, which was once a magnificent palace, and is now half in ruins, we are endeavoring to procure. It is built upon terraces raised from the bottom of the lake, together with its garden, at the foot of a semicircular precipice, overshadowed by profound forests of chestnut. The scene from the colonnade is the most extraordinary, at once, and the most lovely that eye ever beheld. On one side is the mountain, and immediately over you are clusters of cypress-trees, of an astonishing height, which seem to pierce the sky. Above you, from among the clouds, as it were, descends a waterfall of immense size, broken by the woody rocks into a thousand channels to the lake. On the other side is seen the blue extent of the lake and the mountains, speckled with sails and spires. The apartments of the Pliniana are immensely large, but ill-furnished and antique. The terraces, which overlook the lake, and conduct under the shade of such immense laurel-trees as deserve the epithet of Pythian, are most delightful.

January: Percy Bysshe Shelley began writing ROSALIND AND HELEN, A MODERN ECLOGUE.

January 11, Sunday: Publication, in The Examiner, of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”: I met a Traveler from an antique land, Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read, Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.” Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair! No thing beside remains. Round the decay Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.

(This had been inspired by Book I, Chapter 47 of Diodorus Siculus Διόδωρος Σικελιώτης’s BIBLIOTHECA HISTORICA, dealing with the history and culture of ancient Egypt. He and his friend Horace Smith, who was helping him manage his finances, had agreed to stage a friendly poetry competition, and Smith’s submission, decidedly reminiscent of the final scene in the movie “Planet of the Apes,” would appear in a subsequent edition of the magazine.)

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 11 of 1 M / Our forenoon Meeting was Silent - In the Afternoon father Rodman delivered a short sympathetic testimony with a tried state which he apprehended present — Set the evening at home chiefly — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY February 1, Sunday: Horace Smith, a friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley, was helping him manage his finances. The two had decided to stage a friendly poetry competition, to appear in the pages of The Examiner. Their competing sonnets were stipulated to be based somehow upon a reading of Book I, Chapter 47, of Diodorus Siculus Διόδωρος Σικελιώτης’s BIBLIOTHECA HISTORICA, dealing with the history and culture of ancient Egypt. Shelly’s “Ozymandias” had already been printed. On this day Smith’s submission was printed (later it would feature in his volume AMARYNTHUS under the title “On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below”). In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone, Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws The only shadow that the Desart knows:— “I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone, “The King of Kings; this mighty City shows “The wonders of my hand.”— The City’s gone,— Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose The site of this forgotten Babylon. We wonder, —and some Hunter may express Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace, He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess What powerful but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 1st of 2 M 1818 / Our Meetings were both silent, & to me Seasons of barraness as I have no doubt they were to most present. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

March: From this month into May, Percy Bysshe Shelley would be drafting Acts II-III of PROMETHEUS UNBOUND: A LYRICAL DRAMA.

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY March 11, Wednesday: Sarah Elizabeth Shattuck was born in Concord, 2d child of Daniel Shattuck and Betsey Miles Shattuck.

Official date of publication15 of the story by Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley about the birth of a monster out of dead bodies with the help of Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s electricity, FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, with a preface ostensibly authored by the author but, for some reason, actually written for her by her spouse Percy Bysshe Shelley: “The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment.”

This husbandly evaluation was accurate. You should notice that there is simply no “antiscientism” to be found in this romance which might have given a 19th-Century person such as Henry Thoreau pause.

The antiscientism with which we are so familiar actually is all stuff which Hollywood has imported into the tale during the 20th Century! The 1931 originary movie would begin with an anonymous authoritative lecturer setting the scene by informing us that we are to learn of “a man of science who sought to create a man after his own image without reckoning upon God.” This movie’s 1935 sequel “Bride of Frankenstein” would be even more explicit, in presenting an actress portraying the author engaged in conversation with Mr. 15. Actually, copies of her book had begun selling in December of the previous year. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 45 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron, going: “My purpose was to write a moral lesson of the punishment that befell a mortal man who dared to emulate God.”

But where had the real Mary Shelley ever expressed such an attitude? In fact she had placed in Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s mouth, as his dying words, the hope that although he had failed in his scientific objective to “renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption,” there was still room for hope as “another may succeed.”

March 12, Thursday: Overture in the Italian Style for two pianos, eight hands by Franz Schubert was performed for the initial time, in the Gasthof “zum römischen Kaiser” of Vienna.

After having spent some time in London, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley departed for the Continent accompanied by Claire Clairmont, three children, and two servants — Amelia (Milly) Shields and Louise (Elise) Duvillard.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 12th of 3rd M 1818 / Our meeting was small & silent & to me a very comfortable Season - a considerable many of our members were absent to attend the funeral of our friend Ruth Sherman which was at 2 OClock at the Meeting house, which I understood was a favord time Ruth Davis appeared in supplication & H Dennis & Obadiah Davis in Testimony & Obadiah was also engaged in a few words at the grave She is the last of the old Standards that used to set on the high Seat when I was a boy She died last second day evening at her house in Portsmouth Aged about 77 Years. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

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April 10, Friday: The head and torso of the Egyptian statue known then as “younger Memnon” arrived at the British customs office and was declared free from import duties.

The “Endymion: A Poetic Romance” of the beautiful young 5-foot poet John Keats –written in April through November of the previous year apparently while in a rural retirement, possibly waiting out the visible stages of VD– found a publisher and provided the British reader with a newer, happier ending for the old story of Circe, Scylla, and Glaucus. A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

In this 4,000-line-plus novelty, Circe somehow only appeared to have converted Scylla into a horrible monster, and instead actually the lovely maid Scylla, instead of having lost her beauty, had merely drowned. Glaucus consented to Circe’s blandishments until he became aware of her treachery and her cruelty, and of her transactions with her beasts, and then in disgust attempted to escape. His punishment was that for one millennium, in decrepitude and pain, he would collect all bodies of drowned lovers. Returning to the seashore, the first body he discovered was that of his drowned sweetheart Scylla. At the end of this millennium, Endymion beloved of Selene the moon goddess (or Diana or Cynthia, as Keats has it) appeared to restore life to Scylla and all the other drowned lovers, and to restore to Glaucus his youth.

But who was this Endymion, the rescuer, of whom we have uncovered a reclining Parian marble in the ruins of Hadrian’s villa?16 He had allegedly been a noble shepherd on the Latmos range, inland from the coastal Greek colony of Miletos in Caria in Asia Minor, and at night while he slept his pulchritude or his Calvin Kleins or something had enticed Selene to come down and sneak a kissypoo or fifty kissypoos.17 (The Latmus  range of mountains, and Caria,18 the land around the Mæander River,19 are not on the map of Turkey anymore under such names, but Miletos  is a name that is still present although everybody now lives at Palatia or Akköy. –For this had been famous as the hometown of the great western “first natural 16. The villa of the Emperor Hadrian was at Tivoli on the River Tiber some 15 miles upstream from Rome. 17. Some of the Greek fables have Selene bearing a series of 50 children engendered by her sleeping Prince Charming, thus adding an extra-archaic authenticity to the cute phrase “kiss and swell.” 18. The site of one of the accredited “seven wonders” of the ancient world, the structure within which King Mausoleus was able to begin in pomp and ceremony to sleep his long sleep, in 353 BCE, quite as permanently secure from nocturnal emissions as from any nocturnal incursions of the moon goddess — the long vanished structure from which all the “mausoleums” of Sleepy Hollow derive their name. 19. From the oxbows of which, incidentally, the “meanders” of such lazy streams as the Sudbury River and the Concord River derive their name. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 47 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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philosopher” Thales  circa 624?-546? BCE.) This kissypooing, or something, was said to have reduced this goddess’s boy-toy to a charmed dormitive state in which he dreamed along pleasantly and indefinitely while his flocks, watched over by the gods, prospered: We see in Endymion the young poet, his fancy and his heart seeking in vain for that which can satisfy them, finding his favourite hour in the quiet moonlight, and nursing there beneath the beams of the bright and silent witness the melancholy and the ardour which consume him. The story suggests aspiring and poetic love, a life spent more in dreams than in reality, and an early and welcome death. Well, so ’tis said. But I’ll have to add, it sounds more like a ’60s druggie story to me.20 Thus we get the “Faithful Shepherdess” of Fletcher telling: How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove, First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes She took eternal fire that never dies; How she conveyed him softly in a sleep, His temples bound with poppy, to the steep Head of old Latmos, where she stoops each night, Gilding the mountain with her brother’s light, To kiss her sweetest. 20. In his essay on “Behavior” published as part of CONDUCT OF LIFE in 1860, Waldo Emerson would evidently be making reference to another tradition about this Endymion figure, for his drowsy shepherd would be not pulchritudinous and supremely kissable but, mysteriously, “much deceived”: Too weak to win, too fond to shun The tyrants of his doom, The much deceived Endymion Slips behind a tomb. –Which is of course in distinct opposition to the comment Henry Thoreau makes about dreaming in “Wednesday” of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS: GOD IN CONCORD by Jane Langton © 1992 Penguin Books USA Inc. 40 . . . in dreams we never deceive ourselves, nor are deceived. . . . Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers “Wednesday” Viking Penguin

Homer Kelly would have put it differently, but he might have come to a similar conclusion. Looking out at the shining ISBN 0-670-84260-5 — PS3562.A515G58

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Whether this is more the young 19th-Century poetical type or more the young 19th-Century dormitive-virtue type, “His temples bound with poppy,” evidently such a belonged effort of a poem was not well received, for in 1821 when Percy Bysshe Shelley issued his “Adonais, An Elegy on the Death of John Keats,” he would allude to the current myth of the delicacy of genius in this wise:21 “The genius of [Keats] was not less delicate and fragile than it was beautiful. … The savage criticism on his Endymion, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgments from more candid critics of the true greatness of his powers were ineffectual to heal the wound wantonly inflicted.”22 In fact, this tale of Keats’s vulnerability to criticism would spread so far, perhaps through Lord Byron’s jibes as much as through the anecdotes of James Henry Leigh Hunt, as to find a place in Part I of Louisa May Alcott’s LITTLE WOMEN, OR, MEG, JO, BETH AND AMY in 1868:

Her family and friends administered comfort and commendation liberally. Yet it was a hard time for sensitive, high-spirited Jo, who meant so well and had apparently done so ill. But it did her good, for those whose opinion had real value gave her the criticism which is an author’s best education, and when the first soreness was over, she could laugh at her poor little book, yet believe in it still, and feel herself the wiser and stronger for the buffeting she had received. “Not being a genius, like Keats, it won’t kill me,” she said stoutly, “and I’ve got the joke on my side, after all, for the parts that were taken straight out of real life are denounced as impossible and absurd, and the scenes that I made up out of my own silly head are pronounced ‘charmingly natural, tender, and true.’ So I’ll comfort myself with that, and when I’m ready, I’ll up again and take another.”

In “Sunday” of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, of course, Henry Thoreau would incidentally mention this figure as “representative of all promising youths who have died a premature death,

21. The poem was savaged not only in the Quarterly Review but also in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and in the British Critic, and it was clear that his critics supposed that this young poet was a doper since they were encouraging him to return to the apothecary shop from which he had derived inspiration: … so back to the shop, Mr. John. 22. Keats’s hemorrhage would occur on February 3, 1820 and his death, in Italy, on February 23, 1821 The “rapid consumption” mentioned here by Percy Bysshe Shelley was the last stages of phthisis, the 19th-Century term for TB, the disease John had caught from his brother Tom. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 49 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and whose memory is melodiously prolonged to the latest morning,”

A WEEK: We read that Aristeus “obtained of Jupiter and Neptune, that the pestilential heat of the dog-days, wherein was great mortality, should be mitigated with wind.” This is one of those dateless benefits conferred on man, which have no record in our vulgar day, though we still find some similitude to them in our dreams, in which we have a more liberal and juster apprehension of things, unconstrained by habit, which is then in some measure put off, and divested of memory, which we call history. According to fable, when the island of Ægina was depopulated by sickness, at the instance of Æacus, Jupiter turned the ants into men, that is, as some think, he made men of the inhabitants who lived meanly like ants. This is perhaps the fullest history of those early days extant. The fable which is naturally and truly composed, so as to satisfy the imagination, ere it addresses the understanding, beautiful though strange as a wild-flower, is to the wise man an apothegm, and admits of his most generous interpretation. When we read that Bacchus made the Tyrrhenian mariners mad, so that they leapt into the sea, mistaking it for a meadow full of flowers, and so became dolphins, we are not concerned about the historical truth of this, but rather a higher poetical truth. We seem to hear the music of a thought, and care not if the understanding be not gratified. For their beauty, consider the fables of Narcissus, of Endymion, of Memnon son of Morning, the representative of all promising youths who have died a premature death, and whose memory is melodiously prolonged to the latest morning; the beautiful stories of Phaeton, and of the Sirens whose isle shone afar off white with the bones of unburied men; and the pregnant ones of Pan, Prometheus, and the Sphinx; and that long list of names which have already become part of the universal language of civilized men, and from proper are becoming common names or nouns, — the Sibyls, the Eumenides, the Parcae, the Graces, the Muses, Nemesis, &c. It is interesting to observe with what singular unanimity the farthest sundered nations and generations consent to give completeness and roundness to an ancient fable, of which they indistinctly appreciate the beauty or the truth. By a faint and dream-like effort, though it be only by the vote of a scientific body, the dullest posterity slowly add some trait to the mythus.

ENDYMION

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and we don’t quite know here whether Thoreau is referring to Endymion’s long sleep, or to Keats’s early demise due to tuberculosis, or maybe to both Endymion’s long dream and Keats’s early death. At any rate, this first mention by Thoreau is utterly conventional. One might expect Thoreau to have seized upon such a figure from ancient mythology, later in his literary production, to counterpoise as the antithesis to all his WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS tropes about morning work, waking, alertness, etc.23 –That will not, however, be a use to which Thoreau will ever put this figure, and instead we will see him developing the figure, in his journal for 1851, first in the direction of day sleep to make up for the weariness that “comes of obeying his Genius” while burning the midnight oil, and then in the direction of the poser about whether Zhuang Zi was a human being who had dreamed of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that he had become a human being:24

September 12, Friday, 1851: … After I have spent the greater part of a night abroad in the moonlight I am obliged to sleep enough more the next night to make up for it–Endymionis somnum dormire–to sleep an Endymion sleep as the ancients expressed it. And there is something gained still by thus turning the day into night. Edymion is said to have obtained of Jupiter the privelege of sleeping as much as he would. Let no man be afraid of sleep–if his weariness comes of obeying his Genius. He who has spent the night with the gods sleeps more innocently by day than the sluggard who has spent the day with the satyrss sleeps by night. He who has travelled to fairy-land in the night–sleeps by day more innocently than he who is fatigued by the merely trivial labors of the day sleeps by night. That kind of life which sleeping we dream that we live awake–in our walks by night, we, waking, dream that we live, while our daily life appears as a dream. — and then in his journal for 1852 Henry Thoreau will develop this figure in the direction of his work on “Moonlight,” much of it still unpublished:25

July 15, Thursday, 1852: … Morton quotes Wafer as saying of some albinoes among the Indians of Darien that “They are quite white, but their whiteness is like that of a horse, quite different from the fair or pale European, as they have not the least tincture of a blush or sanguine complexion. They seldom go abroad in the day time, the sun being disagreeable to them, and causing their eyes, which are weak & poring, to water, especially if it shines towards them; yet they see very well by moon light, from which we call them moon-eyed’. In Drakes Col. of voyages”. Neither in our thoughts in these moonlight walks methinks is there “the least tincture of a blush or sanguine complexion” –but we are perchance intellectually & morally albinoes –children of Endymion whose parents have walked much by moonlight. Walking much by moonlight –conversing with the moon –makes us then Albinoes. Methinks we should rather represent Endymion in colorless marble –or in the whiteness of marble –than painted of the ruddy color of ordinary youth.… This reference to Endymion as a blanched statue would of course be a reference to “The Sleeping Endymion,” the ancient Parian26 marble presently in the Swedish National Museum in Stockholm.

April 4, Saturday: In the federal House of Representatives, Mr. Livermore proposed amending the US Constitution to do away forever with the peculiar institution of human enslavement. The House of course voted to entertain no such notion. “No person shall be held to service or labour as a slave, nor 23. Reminding us of Thoreau’s narcolepsy, inherited from the Jones side of his family tree, “I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?” from Chapter 2 of WALDEN and “Only one in a hundred millions is awake to a poetic or divine life.” –A Buddha-movement toward the usage proposed by the young Simone Weil, “Sin is sleep.” 24. Here is a pre-1855 verse fragment of Walt Whitman’s, for a similar comparison with Zhuang Zi’s butterfly dream:

I cannot be awake, for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.

I would recommend Burton Watson’s “Qiwulun or A Treatise on Equalizing (with) All Things,” which you can find in his THE BASIC WRITINGS OF CHUANG TZU, New York: Columbia University Press, 1965, page 45. 25. It is interesting, is it not, that each time Thoreau mentions this Endymion figure, over an extended period of time, he makes no reference to his previous manner of use but instead uses it in a quite different way from before? 26. The island of Páros, or Paroikía, in the Aegean Sea, is composed largely of this white stone. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 51 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY shall slavery be tolerated in any state hereafter admitted into the Union, or made one of the United States of America.” Read, and on the question, “Will the House consider the same?” it was determined in the negative. HOUSE JOURNAL, 15th Congress, 1st session, pages 420-1; ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 15th Congress, 1st session, pages 1675-6. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE SLAVERY

Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley reached Milan, where they would visit the Italian lakes.

April 22, Wednesday: Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote again to George Gordon, Lord Byron, urging in the strongest possible moral terms that he involve himself again with the mother, Claire Clairmont, of his illegitimate daughter. Taking Allegra away from her mother was simply wrong, wicked, evil. Byron remained entirely unmoved: he wanted his daughter but would have nothing further to do with its mother. She’d been an OK fuck, and that was about it.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 22nd of 4 M 1818 / This morning Aunt Stanton sailed for N York — Yesterday we had the news of the sudden departure from time of our cousin Dorcas Gardiner & this morning soon after Aunt Stanton left us - Word was brought over from Narragansett that Peleg Gardiner father of Dorcas Died twelve hours after her -this is an afflicting stroke to the family, to have two corpses laying in one house at one time is no common circumstance. & from the near friendship which existed between My mother & cousin Peleg I see nothing but that I must go over to Narragansett to the funeral, tho’ much against my interest, being behind hand in my buisness already On mature consideration this Afternoon of Aunt Molly Wantons situation &c I concluded not to go to Narragansett RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

April 28, Tuesday: Launching of the steamboat Walk-in-the-Water.

George Gordon, Lord Byron’s illegitimate daughter Allegra by Claire Clairmont was forwarded to her father by her mother in the charge of a servant, Louise (Elise) Duvillard.

May: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley visited Pisa and Livorno (Leghorn), and met the Gisbornes.

June: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley moved to Bagni di (Baths of) Lucca, where Shelley would translate Plato’s SYMPOSIUM, write “On Love,” and complete ROSALIND AND HELEN.

August: Percy Bysshe Shelley settled at Este and began piecing together the parts of PROMETHEUS UNBOUND: A LYRICAL DRAMA.

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY August 17, Monday: Percy Bysshe Shelley departed for Venice with Claire Clairmont. They were in the expectation that they would be able to persuade George Gordon, Lord Byron to allow her to see her illegitimate daughter by him, Allegra Byron.

August 27, Thursday: The day after arriving in Venice, Percy Bysshe Shelley visited George Gordon, Lord Byron and sent off a letter summoning Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley and the children (with Milly and a new servant named Paolo Foggi).

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 27th of 8the M / Rode with my H & John to Portsmouth to attended the Moy [Monthly] Meeting - went out by the way of Green End & took the lower rode & came out by Elams & Isaac Chases — This is a part of the Island which Hannah had never before seen, we stoped at Uncle S Thurstons. At meeting (which was silent) my mind was favord with quiet — In the last we had an exercising case some pleasant ones, & on the whole a pretty good meeting - we dined at Uncle Thurstons & took tea at Uncle Richd Mitchells. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

September: From sometime during the month of September until October 11th, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s depression was reflected in his “Euganean Hills” and in the beginning of “Julian and Maddalo.”

September 24, Thursday: Clara Shelley, a little more than a year old, died. MARY GODWIN WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 24th of 9th M / Our first meeting was rather a low time to me but Hannah Dennis & Anne Greene were favor’d in lively testimonys In the last, life, (I believe) was rather as a low ebb with most present, but the few concerns that came before us were pretty well conducted - Asa Sherman & Adam Anthony dined with us. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

October: During this month and the following one, Percy Bysshe Shelley would be writing “West Wind” and “Peter Bell the Third.”

October 12-31: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley visited Venice.

November: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley traveled to Rome and Naples, making excursions to Vesuvius, Paestum, etc.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge revised his periodical The Friend and issued it in book form.

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY December: Percy Bysshe Shelley drafted “A Philosophical View of Reform.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge began a series of lectures on Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Spenser, and Cervantes, that would persist into March of the following year.

December 1, Tuesday: Joshua Barney died near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley settled down in Naples while Percy was finishing PROMETHEUS UNBOUND: A LYRICAL DRAMA (which would be published during August 1820).

1819

January 26, Tuesday: Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote to Thomas Love Peacock after an initial visit to Pompeii (he would visit again, several times, during February): We have been to see Pompeii, and are waiting now for the return of spring weather, to visit, first, Paestum, and then the islands; after which we shall return to Rome. I was astonished at the remains of this city; I had no conception of anything so perfect yet remaining. My idea of the mode of its destruction was this: First, an earthquake shattered it, and unroofed almost all its temples, and split its columns; then a rain of light small pumice-stones fell; then torrents of boiling water, mixed with ashes, filled up all its crevices. A wide, flat hill, from which the city was excavated, is now covered by thick woods, and you see the tombs and the theaters, the temples and the houses, surrounded by the uninhabited wilderness. We entered the town from the side toward the sea, and first saw two theaters; one more magnificent than the other, strewn with the ruins of the white marble which formed their seats and cornices, wrought with deep, bold sculpture. In the front, between the stage and the seats, is the circular space, occasionally occupied by the chorus. The stage is very narrow, but long, and divided from this space by a narrow enclosure parallel to it, I suppose for the orchestra. On each side are the consuls' boxes, and below, in the theater at Herculaneum, were found two equestrian statues of admirable workmanship, occupying the same place as the great bronze lamps did at Drury Lane. The smallest of the theaters is said to have been comic, tho I should doubt. From both you see, as you sit on the seats, a prospect of the most wonderful beauty. You then pass through the ancient streets; they are very narrow, and the houses rather small, but all constructed on an admirable plan, especially for this climate. The rooms are built round a court, or sometimes two, according to the extent of the house. In the midst is a fountain, sometimes surrounded with a portico, supported on fluted columns of white stucco; the floor is paved with mosaic, sometimes wrought in imitation of vine leaves, sometimes in quaint figures, and more or less beautiful, according to the rank of the inhabitant. There were paintings on all, but most of them have been removed to decorate the royal museums. Little winged figures, and small ornaments of exquisite

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY elegance, yet remain. There is an ideal life in the forms of these paintings of an incomparable loveliness, tho most are evidently the work of very inferior artists. It seems as if, from the atmosphere of mental beauty which surrounded them, every human being caught a splendor not his own. In one house you see how the bed-rooms were managed; a small sofa was built up, where the cushions were placed; two pictures, one representing Diana and Endymion, the other Venus and Mars, decorate the chamber; and a little niche, which contains the statue of a domestic god. The floor is composed of a rich mosaic of the rarest marbles, agate, jasper, and porphyry; it looks to the marble fountain and the snow-white columns, whose entablatures strew the floor of the portico they supported. The houses have only one story, and the apartments, tho not large, are very lofty. A great advantage results from this, wholly unknown in our cities. The public buildings, whose ruins are now forests, as it were, of white fluted columns, and which then supported entablatures, loaded with sculptures, were seen on all sides over the roofs of the houses. This was the excellence of the ancients. Their private expenses were comparatively moderate; the dwelling of one of the chief senators of Pompeii is elegant indeed, and adorned with most beautiful specimens of art, but small. But their public buildings are everywhere marked by the bold and grand designs of an unsparing magnificence. In the little town of Pompeii (it contained about twenty thousand inhabitants), it is wonderful to see the number and the grandeur of their public buildings. Another advantage, too, is that, in the present case, the glorious scenery around is not shut out, and that, unlike the inhabitants of the Cimmerian ravines of modern cities, the ancient Pompeiians could contemplate the clouds and the lamps of heaven; could see the moon rise high behind Vesuvius, and the sun set in the sea, tremulous with an atmosphere of golden vapor, between Inarime and Misenum. We next saw the temples. Of the temples of Æsculapius little remains but an altar of black stone, adorned with a cornice imitating the scales of a serpent. His statue, in terra-cotta, was found in the cell. The temple of Isis is more perfect. It is surrounded by a portico of fluted columns, and in the area around it are two altars, and many ceppi for statues; and a little chapel of white stucco, as hard as stone, of the most exquisite proportion; its panels are adorned with figures in bas-relief, slightly indicated, but of a workmanship the most delicate and perfect that can be conceived. They are Egyptian subjects, executed by a Greek artist, who has harmonized all the unnatural extravagances of the original conception into the supernatural loveliness of his country's genius. They scarcely touch the ground with their feet, and their wind-uplifted robes seem in the place of wings. The temple in the midst raised on a high platform, and approached by steps, was decorated with exquisite paintings, some of which we saw in the museum at Portici. It is small, of the same materials as the chapel, with a pavement of mosaic, and fluted Ionic columns of white stucco, so white that it dazzles you to look at it. Thence through the other porticos and labyrinths of walls and columns (for I can not hope to detail everything to you), we came to the Forum. This is a large square, surrounded by lofty porticos of fluted columns, some broken, some entire, their “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 55 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY entablatures strewed under them. The temple of Jupiter, of Venus, and another temple, the Tribunal, and the Hall of Public Justice, with their forest of lofty columns, surround the Forum. Two pedestals or altars of an enormous size (for, whether they supported equestrian statues, or were the altars of the temple of Venus, before which they stand, the guide could not tell), occupy the lower end of the Forum. At the upper end, supported on an elevated platform, stands the temple of Jupiter. Under the colonnade of its portico we sat and pulled out our oranges, and figs, and bread, and medlars (sorry fare, you will say), and rested to eat. Here was a magnificent spectacle. Above and between the multitudinous shafts of the sun-shining columns was seen the sea, reflecting the purple heaven of noon above it, and supporting, as it were, on its line the dark lofty mountains of Sorrento, of a blue inexpressibly deep, and tinged toward their summits with streaks of new-fallen snow. Between was one small green island. To the right was Capreae, Inarime, Prochyta, and Misenum. Behind was the single summit of Vesuvius, rolling forth volumes of thick white smoke, whose foam-like column was sometimes darted into the clear dark sky, and fell in little streaks along the wind. Between Vesuvius and the nearer mountains, as through a chasm, was seen the main line of the loftiest Apennines, to the east. The day was radiant and warm. Every now and then we heard the subterranean thunder of Vesuvius; its distant deep peals seemed to shake the very air and light of day, which interpenetrated our frames with the sullen and tremendous sound. This sound was what the Greeks beheld (Pompeii, you know, was a Greek city). They lived in harmony with nature; and the interstices of their incomparable columns were portals, as it were, to admit the spirit of beauty which animates this glorious universe to visit those whom it inspired. If such is Pompeii, what was Athens? What scene was exhibited from the Acropolis, the Parthenon, and the temples of Hercules, and Theseus, and the Winds? The island and the Ægean sea, the mountains of Argolis, and the peaks of Pindus and Olympus, and the darkness of the Boeotian forests interspersed? From the Forum we went to another public place; a triangular portico, half enclosing the ruins of an enormous temple. It is built on the edge of the hill overlooking the sea. That black point is the temple. In the apex of the triangle stands an altar and a fountain, and before the altar once stood the statue of the builder of the portico. Returning hence, and following the consular road, we came to the eastern gate of the city. The walls are of an enormous strength, and enclose a space of three miles. On each side of the road beyond the gate are built the tombs. How unlike ours! They seem not so much hiding-places for that which must decay, as voluptuous chambers for immortal spirits. They are of marble, radiantly white; and two, especially beautiful, are loaded with exquisite bas-reliefs. On the stucco- wall that encloses them are little emblematic figures, of a relief exceedingly low, of dead and dying animals, and little winged genii, and female forms bending in groups in some funereal office. The high reliefs represent, one a nautical subject, and the other a Bacchanalian one. Within the cell stand the cinerary urns, sometimes one, sometimes more. It is said that paintings were found within,

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY which are now, as has been everything movable in Pompeii, removed, and scattered about in royal museums. These tombs were the most impressive things of all. The wild woods surround them on either side; and along the broad stones of the paved road which divides them, you hear the late leaves of autumn shiver and rustle in the stream of the inconstant wind, as it were, like the step of ghosts. The radiance and magnificence of these dwellings of the dead, the white freshness of the scarcely- finished marble, the impassioned or imaginative life of the figures which adorn them, contrast strangely with the simplicity of the houses of those who were living when Vesuvius overwhelmed them. I have forgotten the amphitheater, which is of great magnitude, tho much inferior to the Coliseum. I now understand why the Greeks were such great poets; and, above all, I can account, it seems to me, for the harmony, the unity, the perfection, the uniform excellence, of all their works of art. They lived in a perpetual commerce with external nature, and nourished themselves upon the spirit of its forms. Their theaters were all open to the mountains and the sky. Their columns, the ideal types of a sacred forest, with its roof of interwoven tracery, admitted the light and wind; the odor and the freshness of the country penetrated the cities. Their temples were mostly upaithric; and the flying clouds, the stars, or the deep sky, were seen above.

Thomas De Quincey got canned as editor of The Westmorland Gazette. He, John Wilson, and J.G. Lockhart prepared a review of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s THE REVOLT OF ISLAM for Blackwood’s Magazine.

During this year and the following three years, Samuel Taylor Coleridge would be making occasional contributions to Blackwood’s Magazine.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s THE CENCI.

In THE CALL TO FREEDOM Shelley ended his argument for non-violent mass political protest with: From the workhouse and the prison Where pale as corpses newly risen, Women, children, young and old Groan for pain, and weep for cold — From the haunts of daily life Where is waged the daily strife With common wants and common cares Which sows the human heart with tares — Lastly from the palaces Where the murmur of distress Echoes, like the distant sound Of a wind alive around Those prison halls of wealth and fashion Where some few feel such compassion For those who groan, and toil, and wail As must make their brethren pale — Ye who suffer woes untold, Or to feel, or to be behold Your lost country bought and sold With a price of blood and gold — Let a vast assembly be, And with great solemnity Declare with measured words that ye Are, as God has made ye, free —

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY And these words shall then become Like Oppression's thunder doom Ringing through each heart and brain, Heard again — again — again Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number — Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you — Ye are many — they are few.

The Quarterly published a scathing review of Shelley’s THE REVOLT OF ISLAM, and made a vicious attack on his character.

February 28, Sunday: Former President Thomas Jefferson presided over the foundation of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. (He had designed the first buildings of the campus. The first classes would not begin until 1825.)

Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley left Naples.

At Vienna’s Redoutensaal, Die Huldigung, a cantata by Johann Baptist Schenk to words of Hölty, was performed for the initial time.

Schäfers Klagelied D.121 to words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the first of Franz Schubert’s lieder to be presented in public, was performed for the initial time, in the Gasthof “zum römischen Kaiser.”

A total of 66 students were registered at the Yearly Meeting School of the Religious Society of Friends in Providence, Rhode Island.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 28th of 2nd M 1819 / Our morning Meeting was silent & rather smaller than usual owing to a number of friends & attenders of our meeting having gone to Portsmouth to attend the funeral of Mary Mott daughter of our late friend Jacob Mott who departed this life the 26th inst at the old Mansion house, her remains were carried to friends Meeting house & after Meeting interd In the Afternoon father Rodman deliverd a few words very appropriate & to me savory. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

March 5, Friday: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley reached Rome, where at about the middle of the month Mary would become pregnant.

June 7, Monday: Death of William Shelley at the age of 3½; Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley, in a depression, began writing an incest novella, MATHILDA (which would see publication during May 1820).

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 7th of 6 M / I have been engaged much of today, as well as sixth & seventh days in tending on Carpenters at work in the Meeting House Yard, at puting the fence in order & fixing the Meeting House for Yearly Meeting, this is buisness which many of the brethren have had to do, whose Mortal remains are in the 58 Copyright 2012 AAustin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY adj burying ground & thier spirits I trust in Heven, where I do mine nisty[?] be in the Lords time. — Set a little while this evening at Br John Rodmans very pleasantly. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

June 10, Thursday: The Shelleys fled to Livorno, where Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley would remain in depression during the summer while Percy Bysshe Shelley was writing THE CENCI (printed in Italy, this would be sent to England for publication in 1820).

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 10th of 6th M 1819 / Our meeting was silent, & in the last, which was Preparative, we had no buisness, but to appoint representatives. — I have remarked that the 5th day meeting previous to yearly Meeting is generally a dull time. Friends are generally so occupied in preparing for the latter that their minds is too unsettled to experience the arisings of life as at some other times. Were we all as good as we ought to be a little more incumberance at times than common would not so obstruct the circulation of the Sap of life in the heart This Afternoon Wm Rickman of England & Sam Wood of N York arrived & took quarters for the yearly Meeting at Aunt Nancy Carpenters.- Wm was here about 46 years ago companion to Saml Emlen & the year before that to [blank] Oxley he was then about 27 & is now 73 Years of Age RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

July: James Henry Leigh Hunt moved to Pisa to join George Gordon, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley in publishing The Liberal.

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY September: News of the deaths in the “Peterloo Massacre” at St. Peter’s Fields in Manchester, England arrived in Italy and provoked Percy Bysshe Shelley to perpetrate a poem that blamed Lord Castlereagh, Lord Sidmouth, and Lord Eldon, a poem which would of necessity be withheld from publication until the enactment of a Reform Bill in 1832: The Mask of Anarchy As I lay asleep in Italy, There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me To walk in the visions of Poesy. I met Murder on the way — He had a mask like Castlereagh — Very smooth he looked, yet grim; Seven blood-hounds followed him; All were fat; and well they might Be in admirable plight, For one by one, and two by two, He tossed them human hearts to chew Which from his wide cloak he drew. Next came Fraud, and he had on, Like Eldon, an ermined gown; His big tears, for he wept well, Turned to millstones as they fell. And the little children, who Round his feet played to and fro, Thinking every tear a gem, Had their brains knocked out by them. Clothed with the Bible, as with light, And the shadows of the night, Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy On a crocodile rode by. And many more Destructions played In this ghastly masquerade, All disguised, even to the eyes, Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, and spies. Last came Anarchy: he rode On a white horse, splashed with blood; He was pale even to the lips, Like Death in the Apocalypse. And he wore a kingly crown: And in his grasp a sceptre shone; On his brow this mark I saw —

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY “I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!”

September 2, Thursday: Surgeon John Stokoe of HMS Conqueror, having treated Napoléon Bonaparte three times, had formed the opinion that the prisoner was suffering from “liver disease.” Napoléon’s jailer Sir Hudson Lowe had been offering a different diagnosis, so he had ordered a court-martial by a council of war on board the Admiral’s ship. After four sessions at which the surgeon attempted to represent himself since he was denied counsel (his defense being to confess that he must have been to some degree insubordinate or impolitic but despite this had not allowed himself to become any sort of accomplice to the enemy), the panel unanimously declared him guilty of insubordination and condemned him to be dismissed but –in consideration of his former services– with a recommendation for half-pay.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 2nd of 9 M / Sampson Shermans funeral went to meeting which occasioned a pretty large gathering. Hannah & Jonathon Dennis were engaged in testimony & our friend D Buffum was very lively & pertinent. Abigail Sherman also Said a few words —After meeting the Corpse was decently interd in the upper burying Ground in the Medow field. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY October 2, Saturday: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley moved to Firenze.

Alfred Hawkins got married with a Martha Peterson or Patterson at the Anglican Cathedral of Québec. The gazette for October 13th would report: “Married, at Québec on Saturday evening 2nd instant, by the Rev. G.J. Mountain, Mr. Alfred Hawkins, wine merchant, to Miss Patterson, daughter of Mr. James Patterson, of the same place.”

The nation was learning that Commodore Oliver Hazard “We Have Met The Enemy And They Are Ours” Perry, hero of the War of 1812, had in Venezuela succumbed to the yellow fever:

OLIVER HAZARD PERRY

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 7th day 2nd of 10 M 1819 / This Afternoon Attended the funeral of My Cousin Ruth Marsh, she departed this life last evening about a quarter past 8 OClock. I returned to the House & took tea with the family she being the last of her generation, & to

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY take my leave of a house where I took much pleasure & derived much benefit in my youth from the proffitable conversation of her Sister Mary & Brother Jonathon. The estate will be divided into so many divisions that it is Probable it will now soon go out of the name & the house so old that it must be Pulled down. — from the best information I can obtain the Marsh House on the east side of Thames Street was built by Walter Clarke & given to one of his daughters who married a Gould & their daughter Mary Married Jonathon Marsh the father of Ruth aforementioned & has been regularly inhabited by Friends to the present day & she is the last of our society that will probably have any claim to it. —- The fashon & all things in this World change. - while sitting in the Room at the funeral my mind was lead into a very serious train of reflection, on the many changes I had seen in that House & now it seemed as if the final change had come to it. — May I proffit by the feelings which I experienced while commemorating the past hours spent with the past inhabitants of that house, & I am Sure I felt much more that I have here conveyed. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

November 12, Friday: Monier Williams was born in Bombay, a son of Colonel Monier Williams, surveyor- general in the Bombay presidency. INDIA

As an example of the distress being caused by the Panic of 1819, on this day J. Joseph Henry II wrote to William Henry III and mentioned that “I have not sold one Rifle for each these nine months.”

Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley gave birth to Percy Florence Shelley.

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY November 23, Tuesday: Percy Bysshe Shelley sent a sonnet to James Henry Leigh Hunt of The Examiner, noting that he didn’t expect that it could be published (this poem would eventually see the light of day in Mrs. Shelley’s edition of 1839): England in 1819 An old, mad, blind, despis’d, and dying king,27 Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn—mud from a muddy spring,28 Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know, But leech-like to their fainting country cling, Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, A people starv’d and stabb’d in the untill’d field, An army, which liberticide and prey Makes as a two-edg’d sword to all who wield, Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay,29 Religion Christless, Godless—a book seal’d, A Senate—Time’s worst statute unrepeal’d, Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

From the diary of Adlard Welby: A beautiful day: breakfasted near the small town of Darby, and shortly after once again entered Philadelphia, after an absence of four months, and a journey of above two thousand five hundred miles performed in good health and with much interest throughout. I now take leave of the Western country of the United States; and although the reader may perhaps be enabled to gather from the foregoing observations sufficient where-on to judge for himself, yet it may be proper to sum up that which I have to say upon it; and it may be done in a few words: -- First addressing all those who are possessed of capital, I will state, that if they are content to undergo for their own lives many difficulties, and to make a certain sacrifice of many of the little comforts they can possess and have been used to enjoy at a moderate cost in England, they may then for a trifling sum establish their posterity upon a good estate in America, which hereafter may place them in affluence; and this may be accomplished at a distance far short of the Prairies of Illinois; — but let them be again reminded that it must be done at some risk, much trouble, and a certain sacrifice of many of their own comforts: so much for those who look forward. ...finding a cool reception, and work not immediately offered on his arrival at the Eastern ports; — he must push forward westward without idly stopping to spend his money and waste his time; work his way if money runs short (he may at all places get food at least for his services,) until he arrives at a place where hands are wanted and good wages are offered for them; he has then a fair and near prospect of comfort, taking care only to be industrious, frugal, and especially to avoid habits of drinking, a vice the most difficult to withstand where the spirits of the country are to be obtained for half a crown the gallon. There are people with us in England who object to giving the poor man any facility of emigration, and who are disposed to 27. King George III would die at the age of 81 in the following year. His madness had been permanent since November 1810 and had necessitated the Regency Act of February 1811 by which his eldest son had become Prince Regent. 28. The Prince Regent, an “an aesthete decayed into grossness by habitual self-indulgence,” “a corpulent Adonis of fifty.” 29. Shelley complained specifically against current agricultural policy, against the misuse of the army against the people as witness the Peterloo Massacre of August 19, 1819, and probably against government use of agents provocateurs such as the notorious Oliver. 64 Copyright 2012 AAustin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

condemn prospects held out to him of improving his present condition by a change of country; I shall not stop to argue with such narrow policy and truly anti-christian reasoners more than to say, that I will leave them to point out, for I cannot, even in a political point of view, any loss to a country arising from the emigration of a redundant population.

December 22, Wednesday: Olimpie, a tragédie lyrique by Gaspare Spontini to words of Dieulafoy and Brifaut after Voltaire, was performed for the initial time, at the Paris Opéra.

James Henry Leigh Hunt’s The Indicator published Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Love’s Philosophy”: I. The Fountains mingle with the river And the rivers with the ocean, The winds of heaven mix for ever With a sweet emotion; Nothing in the world is single, All things by a law devine In one another's being mingle— Why not I with thine?

II. See the mountains kiss high heaven And the waves clasp one another; No sister-flower would be forgiven If it disdain'd its brother: And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea— What are all these kissings worth, If thou kiss not me?

1820

Felicia Dorothea Hemans’s “Stanzas to the Memory of the Late King,” and her THE SKEPTIC attacking George Gordon, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

January 26, Wednesday: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley moved to Pisa.

New York’s J.W. Taylor proposed a amendment to the Maine statehood bill, prohibiting slavery in Missouri.

In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 26th of 1 M / Have been much engaged this week in taking the Inventory of Gilbert Chases personal effects, & in consequence of the illness of Benjamin Hadwen I am under the necessity of receiving the Town & State Tax for him which occupies my time & my mind - but I hope to receive no hurt. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

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March: Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote “Sensitive Plant,” “Ode to Liberty,” and “Sky-lark.”

June-August: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley spent time in England and then went to live in the house of the Gisbornes at Livorno.

After June 16, Friday: Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote “Letter to Maria Gisborne.”

August-October: At Bagni di San Giuliano (Bagni di Pisa), Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote “Witch of Atlas,” “Ode to Naples,” and “Swellfoot the Tyrant” (the last published and suppressed in November or December).

August: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s PROMETHEUS UNBOUND was published.

End of October: A flood forced Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley (with Medwin) to return from Livorno to Pisa.

November: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley met Teresa (“Emilia”) Viviani.

December 2, Saturday: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley met Mavrocordato.

1821

January/February: Percy Bysshe Shelley visited Teresa Viviani and wrote “Epipsychidion.”

January 13, Saturday: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley met Edward and Jane Williams, who have recently arrived in Pisa.

February/March: Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote “A Defence of Poetry.”

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY March: Four-year-old Allegra having come to be more bother than she was worth, she was packed off to be cared for at the convent of Bagnacavallo.

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

April 11, Wednesday: A letter from London informed Percy Bysshe Shelley of John Keats’s death in Rome.

Early May: EPIPSYCHIDION was published anonymously.

Edward and Jane Williams moved to Pugnano while Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley moved to Bagni di San Giuliano (both being places on the River Serchio).

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May/June: Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a poem30 “Adonais, An Elegy on the Death of John Keats” in the preface to which he alluded to the current myth of the delicacy of genius: “The genius of [Keats] was not less delicate and fragile than it was beautiful. … The savage criticism on his Endymion, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgments from more candid critics of the true greatness of his powers were ineffectual to heal the wound wantonly inflicted.”31

In fact, this tale of Keats’s vulnerability to criticism would spread so far, perhaps through Lord Byron’s jibes as much as through the anecdotes of James Henry Leigh Hunt, as to find a place in Part I of Louisa May Alcott’s LITTLE WOMEN, OR, MEG, JO, BETH AND AMY in 1868:

Her family and friends administered comfort and commendation liberally. Yet it was a hard time for sensitive, high-spirited Jo, who meant so well and had apparently done so ill. But it did her good, for those whose opinion had real value gave her the criticism which is an author’s best education, and when the first soreness was over, she could laugh at her poor little book, yet believe in it still, and feel herself the wiser and stronger for the buffeting she had received. “Not being a genius, like Keats, it won’t kill me,” she said stoutly, “and I’ve got the joke on my side, after all, for the parts that were taken straight out of real life are denounced as impossible and absurd, and the scenes that I made up out of my own silly head are pronounced ‘charmingly natural, tender, and true.’ So I’ll comfort myself with that, and when I’m ready, I’ll up again and take another.”

In “Sunday” of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, of course, Henry Thoreau would initially go along with this reading by incidentally mentioning this figure as “representative of all promising youths

30. It would be printed in July. 31.Keats’s hemorrhage would occur on February 3, 1820 and his death, in Italy, on February 23, 1821. The “rapid consumption” mentioned here by Shelley was the last stage of phthisis, the 19th-Century term for TB, the disease Keats had caught from his brother Tom. 68 Copyright 2012 AAustin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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who have died a premature death, and whose memory is melodiously prolonged to the latest morning,” We seem to hear the music of a thought, and care not if the understanding be not gratified. For their beauty, consider the fables of Narcissus, of Endymion, of Memnon son of Morning, the ENDYMION representative of all promising youths who have died a premature death, and whose memory is melodiously prolonged to the latest morning; the beautiful stories of Phaeton, and of the Sirens whose isle shone afar off white with the bones of unburied men; and the pregnant ones of Pan, Prometheus, and the Sphinx; and that long list of names which have already become part of the universal language of civilized men, and from proper are becoming common names or nouns, — the Sibyls, the Eumenides, the Parcae, the Graces, the Muses, Nemesis, &c. It is interesting to observe with what singular unanimity the farthest sundered nations and generations consent to give completeness and roundness to an ancient fable, of which they indistinctly appreciate the beauty or the truth. By a faint and dream-like effort, though it be only by the vote of a scientific body, the dullest posterity slowly add some trait to the mythus. and we don’t quite know here whether Thoreau is referring to Endymion’s long sleep, or to Keats’s early demise due to TB, or maybe to both Endymion’s long dream and Keats’s early death. At any rate, this first mention by Thoreau is utterly conventional.

August: John Williams of Gloucester was lost at sea.

Upon publication of George Gordon, Lord Byron’s “Don Juan” III-V, Murray’s premises in London were mobbed by Booksellers’ messengers.

Percy Bysshe Shelley visited Lord Byron at Ravenna and urged him and the Gambas to move to Pisa.

Shelley, at age 19, to Elizabeth Hitchener: “Adequacy of motive is sufficient ... potence will become omnipotence.”

October/November: Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote “Hellas.”

November: George Gordon, Lord Byron and the Shelleys joined in Pisa, forming the “Pisan circle.” There Lord Byron began writing “The Deformed Transformed.”32

32. Was this the winter spoken of by Kay Redfield Jamison in TOUCHED WITH FIRE (The Free Press, 1993)? The winter before Byron sailed for Greece, an English physician observed the poet’s melancholy and reported that Byron had asked him, “Which is the best and quickest poison?” His sudden and ungovernable rages, which had been part of his emotional makeup since childhood, and which had been especially pronounced during his year with Lady Byron, became more frequent and more furiously irrational. Moore noted that one of the grounds for the charges of insanity brought by Lady Byron against her husband, in addition to fears for her own safety, was the fact that Byron had taken an old watch that he loved and had had for years, and in “a fit of vexation and rage... furiously dashed this watch upon the hearth, and ground it to pieces among the ashes with the poker.” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 69 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1822

The Bowles Controversy: George Gordon, Lord Byron’s “A Letter to [John Murray] on the Rev. W.C. Bowles’s Strictures on ... Pope.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley went to Italy where he, James Henry Leigh Hunt, and Lord Byron would publish the journal The Liberal (by publishing it in Italy the three men were able to remain free from prosecution by the British authorities). The 1st edition of The Liberal would sell 4,000 copies but soon after its publication Shelley would be lost at sea while sailing to meet Hunt.

January: George Gordon, Lord Byron began Cantos XV-XVI of DON JUAN, “The Deformed Transformed.” ENGLISH EVENTS OF 1822

The “Pisan Circle” centering on Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley planned theatricals.

In this timeframe Shelley was working on “Charles the First.”

January 14, Monday: 1st Lieutenant, Corps of Artillery James Duncan Graham was assigned to topographical duties.

Louis Spohr arrived in Kassel to take up his position as Hofkapellmeister.

Edward John Trelawny arrived in Pisa.

February: George Gordon, Lord Byron wrote Cantos VI, VII, and VIII of DON JUAN. Robert Southey attacked Lord Byron in The Courier. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Hellas was published.

April 30, Tuesday: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Edward and Jane Williams, moved to San Terenzo on the Bay of Lerici.

Johann Nepomuk Hummel gave another concert in Konigsberg, improvising on the organ of the Burgkirche (thus ended his only tour of Russia).

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 3rd day 30th of 4th M 1822 / This Morning sent John out to Uncle Stantons to stay during Election Week - And at 9 OClock with my wife & other Friends, went on board the Greenwich Packet to attend the Quarterly Meeting — we arrived in Greenwich a little past Noon & went up to Updikes Tavern & dined. - Then called a little while at cousin Wanton Caseys where we left our things & walked out to Daniel Howlands & took tea where we met several of our friends, soon after we got there David Buffum & several others came, which made them too full of lodgers, & D Buffum

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY & my H & myself with John Greene went over to Thos Howlands, & lodged RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

May 12, Sunday: “My manner was not such as to satisfy myself.” The Reverend Convers Francis of Watertown, Massachusetts exchanged pulpits for the day with the Reverend Ezra Ripley of Concord. His prooftext for the Concord morning service was John 14:6 and his topic was “The Way, the truth, and the Life.” His prooftext for the afternoon service was Romans 14:12 and his topic was “On the Accountability of God.”

Waldo Emerson to his journal (a crossed out entry):

I have a nasty appetite which I will not gratify.

(We may wonder for how many minutes he was able to hold out.)

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s boat, the Don Juan, arrived.

Gaetano Donizetti’s dramma La zingara to words of Tottola was performed for the initial time, in the Teatro Nuovo, Naples. The composer would remark “the public was certainly not stingy with compliments.”

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: [obscured] day 12 of 5 M / A favoured Meeting this morning H Dennis was [obscured] afed in a lively testimony — In the Afternoon rather lean to m RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

May 21, Tuesday: At some point subsequent to the 20th, Percy Bysshe Shelley authored “The Triumph of Life.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe received, courtesy of the composer, a copy of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Meeresstille un gluckliche Fahrt, a cantata composed to Goethe’s words.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day [sic] 21st of 5 M 1822 / Our Meetings were both Silent & to me pretty good seasons in comparrison with some meeting that I have sat in of late. — & my heart was in measure thankful for the favour. —

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY After tea walked with Sister Ruth out to David Buffum Jr to see their little son Benjamin who is very ill with the Quincy or Putrid sore throat — Sister Ruth staid to Watch - with John & his cousin Richard I walked to Tomany Hill & then returned RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

July 1, Monday: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Edward Williams sailed to Leghorn to meet the Hunts.

July 8, Monday: In the “Long Woods” purchase, the Chippewa tribe released a huge tract of land in Ontario to the United Kingdom.

Spanish Royal Guards were defeated in Madrid by troops and militia loyal to the ministry.

In Pisa, George Gordon, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley had renewed their friendship and found they had a common interest in heroic adventures upon the wine-dark sea. Byron was doing well, financially, and was building what he termed a “war-chest” for political adventures in the East Mediterranean. He also had a classy schooner built for himself in Genova, or “Genoa,” a schooner fit for a man who was going to become, somewhere, somehow, a dashing monarch. Not uninterestingly, he had named this new schooner the Bolivar.

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY So Shelley, age 29, to compete, had to have the schooner rigging of his yacht Don Juan, a 24-footer with twin

mainmasts, re-rigged in Livorno, or “Leghorn,” so it would sail “like a witch,” and had to add a false prow and stern so he could plow through larger waves on the Mediterranean. Shelley was falling out of love with Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley, his s2d wife, and into love with the wife of his friend Lieutenant Edward Williams of the East India Company, named Jane, who played the guitar. On the way back to Lerici, some ten miles from shore, he and Williams on board his refitted Don Juan were observed to be near the masts with full sail set in a stiff wind, with one of the two grabbing the other by the arm as if to say “No, damn it, keep going, we’re cruising!” Whereupon, smacking into a wave, the craft disintegrated. When the bodies were fished out of the ocean, Byron threw a romantic Viking funeral for Shelley on the sand of the beach.

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July 18, Thursday: At the Providence, Rhode Island meetinghouse for black people, Brother Asa C. Goldbury, “a man of colour,” was ordained.

It was a hot summer day but there was business to be attended to on the shore at Lericcio near Leghorn. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s corpse had been recovered in an advanced state of decomposition and needed to be disposed of in accordance with Italian sanitary regulations. It was not the custom at the time for the widow to attend such an event and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley was elsewhere. James Henry Leigh Hunt remained in the carriage to keep out of the sun. George Gordon, Lord Byron took to the coolness of the surf and, eventually, swam out to his boat leaving Trelawny to witness the actual burning, which took place in a metal furnace that hired porters had dragged out onto the beach. When nothing was left in the ashes but jaw, skull, and heart, Trelawny raked out that carbonized lump as a souvenir (eventually he would be persuaded to turn it over to the widow and she would retain it wrapped in silk, in her drawer; in 1889 it would be interred with their son Percy Florence Shelley).33

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY August 15, Thursday: After the two drownings on July 8th when the yacht had sunk during a squall off Livorno, the body of Edward Williams had been cremated on the 13th where it had come to the shore near Via Reggio, and the body of Percy Bysshe Shelley had been cremated on the shore at Lericcio near Leghorn. On this day Edward John Trelawny described the occasion: Three white wands had been stuck in the sand to mark the Poet’s grave, but as they were at some distance from each other, we had to cut a trench thirty yards in length, in the line of the sticks, to ascertain the exact spot, and it was nearly an hour before we came upon the grave. Byron could not face this scene, he withdrew to the beach and swam off to the Bolivar. Leigh Hunt remained in the carriage. The fire was so fierce as to produce a white heat on the iron, and to reduce its contents to grey ashes. The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull, but what surprised us all, was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt; and had anyone seen me do the act I should have been put into quarantine. Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley would return to London, where she would reside briefly with her father William Godwin before taking her own lodgings nearby.

The English vessel Orion, Captain William A. Richardson, came to anchor at Yerba Buena in San Francisco Bay.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 15 of 8 M / Our Meeting was a good one & pretty well [— tended] RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS 33. Absolutely nothing in the famous 1889 painting of the cremation by Louis Édouard Fournier is accurate. It had not been a desolate beach. It had not been dusk. The witnesses had not swaddled themselves in heavy coats against the cold. Mary had not knelt in prayer. Hunt and Byron had not struck poses. The corpse, which at that point had neither hands nor a face, was not placed on a pyre of branches.

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1823

Reading QUEEN MAB; A PHILOSOPHICAL POEM: WITH NOTES. BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, a celebration of the merits of republicanism, atheism, vegetarianism, and free love, Richard Henry Horne determined that he also was going to make of himself a poet.

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY July: After her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley’s death Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley returned to England with his heart (she would keep it in her desk drawer) and devoted herself to publicizing his writings and to educating their only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley.

1824

June: Samuel Taylor Coleridge met Thomas Carlyle.

Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley’s edition of her late husband Percy Bysshe Shelley’s POSTHUMOUS POEMS was published by John Hunt.

NEW POETRY OF 1824

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY September: An obituary of John Josias Conybeare, from which I have paraphrased, appeared on page 162 of Annals of Philosophy.

Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley’s edition of her late husband Percy Bysshe Shelley’s POSTHUMOUS POEMS, which had been on sale since June, was suppressed at the insistence of his father Sir Timothy Shelley.

1828

Friend Sarah Helen Power of Providence, Rhode Island married with the wellborn poet and writer John Winslow Whitman, co-editor of the Boston Spectator and Ladies’ Album, and moved to Boston. There she would be introduced to Mrs. Sarah Josepha Buell Hale and the Transcendentalists, and would write essays defending Romantic and Transcendentalist writers including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Waldo Emerson. She became involved in the “causes” of progressive education, woman’s rights, universal manhood suffrage, Fourierism, and Unitarianism. SARAH HELEN POWER WHITMAN

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1831

The 3d edition of FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS by Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley, this time with an introduction actually by the author rather than by her poetic spouse Percy Bysshe Shelley:34 Everything must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean phrase; and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. The Hindus give the world an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise.

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1832

Publication, by Chauncey Goodrich in Burlington, Vermont, of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s THE STATESMAN'S MANUAL; OR, THE BIBLE THE BEST GUIDE TO POLITICAL SKILL AND FORESIGHT: A LAY SERMON. [Followed by] A LAY SERMON, ADDRESSED TO THE HIGHER AND MIDDLE CLASSES, ON THE EXISTING DISTRESSES AND DISCONTENTS. This volume would be in the personal library of Ralph Waldo Emerson and would be commented upon by Henry Thoreau during January 1841. THE STATESMAN’S MANUAL

Publication, in Philadelphia, by the firm of J. Grigg, of THE POETICAL WORKS OF COLERIDGE, SHELLEY, AND KEATS, COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME. STEREOTYPED BY JOHN HOWE. This volume would be in Henry Thoreau’s personal library. COLERIDGE, SHELLEY, KEATS

March 7, Wednesday: In Parliament the Tories were complaining about the political campaign being forwarded by The Times. In the House of Commons, Sir Robert Peel argued that this newspaper was the “principal and most powerful advocate of Reform” in Britain. When the 1832 Reform Act passed, the paper termed this the “greatest event of modern history.”

“The modern man’s daily prayer is reading the daily newspaper.” — G.W.F. Hegel

With the enactment of this reform, it would for the first time be possible to publish the poem that Percy Bysshe Shelley had upon hearing of the “Peterloo Massacre” composed in Italy in 1819: The Mask of Anarchy As I lay asleep in Italy, There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me To walk in the visions of Poesy. I met Murder on the way — He had a mask like Castlereagh — Very smooth he looked, yet grim; Seven blood-hounds followed him; All were fat; and well they might Be in admirable plight, For one by one, and two by two, He tossed them human hearts to chew Which from his wide cloak he drew. Next came Fraud, and he had on, 34. John Locke’s ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING, of course, had, in 1690, in order to get down to fundamentals, attempted to depict human understanding as a “closet wholly shut from light” which had only some small openings to let in ideas, and along the way of explaining this had commented that: This is more or less like the question of the Indian, who, when it is said to him that the world rests on a couple of elephants and the elephants on a huge tortoise, asks in his innocence: “And on what, finally, rests the tortoise?” 80 Copyright 2012 AAustin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Like Eldon, an ermined gown; His big tears, for he wept well, Turned to millstones as they fell. And the little children, who

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY Round his feet played to and fro, Thinking every tear a gem, Had their brains knocked out by them. Clothed with the Bible, as with light, And the shadows of the night, Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy On a crocodile rode by. And many more Destructions played In this ghastly masquerade, All disguised, even to the eyes, Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, and spies. Last came Anarchy: he rode On a white horse, splashed with blood; He was pale even to the lips, Like Death in the Apocalypse. And he wore a kingly crown: And in his grasp a sceptre shone; On his brow this mark I saw — “I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!”

1839

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s CHURCH AND STATE.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s POETICAL WORKS, edited by Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley. Also, his prose works.

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1840

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ESSAYS, LETTERS FROM ABROAD, TRANSLATIONS AND FRAGMENTS, and A DEFENCE OF POETRY.

Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley’s LIVES OF THE MOST EMINENT FRENCH WRITERS ... (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard).35

EMINENT FRENCH WRITERS, I EMINENT FRENCH WRITERS, II

Mary Shelley’s timelines for the lives of these writers:

Montaigne Rabelais Corneille Rochefoucauld Molière La Fontaine 1533-1592 1483-1553 1606-1684 1613-1680 1622-1673 1621-1695

Pascal Madame de Sévigné Boileau Racine Fénélon Volt aire 1623-1662 1626-1696 1636-1711 1639-1699 1651-1715 1694-1778

Rousseau Condorcet Mirabeau Madame Roland Madame De Stael 1766-1817 1712-1778 1744-1794 1749-1791 1754-1793

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY The Kouroo Contexture’s thumbnails for the lives of these writers:

Michel de François Rabelais Pierre Corneille François VI, duc Jean-Baptiste Jean de La Montaigne de la Rochefou- Poquelin Fontaine cauld, prince de (Molière) Marcillac

Blaise Madame de Sévigné Nicolas Boi- Jean Racine François de François- Pascal leau-Despréaux Salignac de la Marie Arouet Mothe-Fénélon (Voltaire)

Jean- Marie-Jean- Honoré Gabriel Marie-Jeanne Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, Jacques Antoine-Nicolas de Riqueti, comte Roland de la baronne de Staël-Holstein Rousseau Caritat, marquis de de Mirabeau Platière (Madame (Madame De Staël) Condorcet Roland)

1845

Prosper Merimee’s novel about CARMEN, a feisty Gypsy girl in an Andalusian cigarette factory.

Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley was invalided by what would eventually be discovered to be a tumor in her brain.

John Quincy Adams wrote to the Reverend Samuel H. Cox: “In my early youth I was addicted to the use of tobacco in two of its mysteries, smoking and chewing. I was warned by a medical friend of the pernicious operation of this habit upon the stomach and the nerves.”

Thomas De Quincey’s “Coleridge and Opium-Eating” and “Suspiria de Profundis” appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine. His “On Wordsworth’s Poetry” and “Notes on Gilfillan’s Gallery of Literary Portraits: Godwin, Foster, Hazlitt, Shelley, Keats” (which would run until 1846) appeared in Tait’s Magazine. SUSPIRA DE PROFUNDIS

Perry Davis’s patent vegetable painkiller consisted of opiates and ethanol and –as is evident in the globe map on its label– originated from that known center of “Joy to the World” sensory satisfaction, Providence, Rhode Island:

35. According to a reading list now stored at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, Thoreau studied this in about 1841. 84 Copyright 2012 AAustin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1888

Henry S. Salt’s LITERARY SKETCHES and PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY: A MONOGRAPH.

LITERARY SKETCHES PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

1931

The originary movie “Frankenstein” began with an anonymous authoritative lecturer informing us that we were to learn of “a man of science who sought to create a man after his own image without reckoning upon God.”36

36.You should notice that there had simply been no such “antiscientism” to be found in the book which began this famous series of movies. The antiscientism with which we are so familiar actually is all stuff which Hollywood has imported into the tale, more or less as a series of prequels to the “Mad Scientist” of the megamovie JURASSIC PARK and his monstrous saurian creations! The 1935 sequel “Bride of Frankenstein” would be even more explicit, in presenting an actress portraying the author engaged in conversation with Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron, going: “My purpose was to write a moral lesson of the punishment that befell a mortal man who dared to emulate God.”

But where had the real Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley ever expressed such an attitude? In fact she had placed in Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s mouth, as his dying words, the hope that although he had failed in his scientific objective to “renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption,” there was still room for hope as “another may succeed.” 86 Copyright 2012 AAustin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1935

The movie “Bride of Frankenstein” was even more explicit in its antiscientism than 1831’s “Frankenstein” had been, in presenting an actress portraying the author engaged in conversation with Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron, going: “My purpose was to write a moral lesson of the punishment that befell a mortal man who dared to emulate God.”

But where had the real Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley ever expressed such an attitude of antagonism toward the stock figure of the “Mad Scientist”? In fact she had placed in Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s mouth, as his dying words, the hope that although he had failed in his scientific objective to “renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption,” there was still room for hope as “another may succeed.”37

37. In the 1818 romance, the problem which was being presented was not that some smartypants among us was trying to play God but that we are all of us shamefully guilty of an uncontrolled aversive reaction to visibly deformed persons. The entire problem of the story originates when Dr. Frankenstein flees in disgust upon catching his first full view of the deformity which he has caused. The creature’s problem is not that he has been created by someone other than God but that due to shameful circumstances entirely beyond his control he had been created “deformed and loathsome,” and that because of shameful attitudes beyond his control all human beings were disowning him: And what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant; but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endowed with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome.... When I looked around, I saw and heard none like me. Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned? Our problem, which created the monster’s monsterness, happens to be one of the deepest predispositions of our biological inheritance, something so entirely amoral as to be indiscriminately immoral, with which Hollywood has yet to learn to cope — our instinctive aversion toward malformity. For an elaborate study of this instinctual aversion, one might consult the work of the ex- Nazi ethologist, Konrad Lorenz, who was fascinated by such things, and far more willing than he ought to have been to accept and embrace them. The fact is that despite the innateness of this response of frisson, it is something which can be unlearned. The unlearning of such responses is awarded a certain honor among us, by being referred to as the learning of compassion. 87 Copyright 2012 AAustin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2012. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: September 10, 2012

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button.

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Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place your requests with . Arrgh.

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