Shelley at Oxford
By Colin Silver
8 July 2022
In the year 1810, England was in the midst of a protracted war with France and the government’s fear of all things politically radical extended to the suppression of free speech. Many newspaper editors were jailed for expressing their views about the government’s conduct during the war, or condemning the social conditions of the working people. There were Luddite riots in Nottingham and Yorkshire.
At this time, Oxford University was a theological institution run by churchmen which meant it was a bastion of conservative values and royalist tradition. The conditions in the university at the time are well documented; the classics were taught in a haphazard way, wine was consumed in vast quantities, parties, gambling and hunting were traditional.
One day in October, 1810, a new student arrived at University College. He was called Percy Bysshe Shelley, the son of a Whig MP from Sussex. A fellow student called Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who was to become an important character in Shelley’s life, visited Shelley in his rooms and described what he saw:
‘Books, boots, papers, shoes, philosophical instruments, clothes, pistols, linen, crockery, ammunition....An electrical machine, an air pump, the galvanic trough, a solar microscope, and large glass jars and receivers were conspicuous amid the mass of matter.’
Shelley’s interest in matters scientific had some bizarre manifestations. One day he was found standing on a table while connected to his ‘electrical machine’; his long flowing hair was standing on end. He would read for sixteen hours a day and then curl up in front of the fire for a few hours’ sleep. Shelley had already published a novel and some poetry and his father had taken him to the booksellers Slatter and Munday at Carfax, to whom he said that his son had a literary turn, and asked that they ‘do pray indulge him in his printing freaks’.
The university authorities were aroused from their wine and port-induced slumbers by the arrival of this tall, soft-spoken, elegant, long-haired and somewhat effeminate student. Apart from his eccentric behaviour, he read the French philosophers - Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot - and published a semi-erotic poem which became quite notorious (an epithalamium in what Shelley dubbed The posthumous Poems of Margaret Nicholson, a woman who had been locked up in Bedlam after attempting to assassinate King George III in 1786). This was enough to alarm even the most liberal of the governing academics, and one of them, an MA of Christ Church College, wrote to his patron:
‘...we have lately had a literary sun shine forth upon us here - a Mr Shelley of University College, who lives upon arsenic, aquafortis, half-an-hours sleep in the night and is desperately in love with the memory of Margaret Nicholson. He hath published what he terms her Posthumous Poems...which...though stuffed full of treason, is extremely dull; but the author is a great genius, and if he be not clapped up in Bedlam or hanged, will certainly prove one of the sweetest swans on the tuneful margin of the Cherwell’.
Shelley and Hogg were the most unlikely of friends. Hogg was the son of a lawyer in Durham, and destined for the law. He was a short, stocky, solid intellectual without any of Shelley’s imaginative flair or physical grace. What he did share was Shelley’s radicalism, his refusal to conform, to be subdued by what he saw as the bigoted and narrow-minded authorities of the university. The two young men would roam the Oxfordshire countryside, sailing ‘fire boats’ on ponds near Shotover Hill and, armed with Shelley’s pistols, indulge in target practice, shooting tickets pinned to trees. But most of all they talked, argued and debated religion and philosophy, and published their poetry and pamphlets through Slatter and Munday’s.
Among the dons and gentlemen of his college, of all the accusations levelled against Shelley, by far the most dangerous was that he was an atheist. Shelley did indeed question the existence of God and rage against Christianity in his discussions with Hogg and in his private letters. For example, a letter of his survives, written on Sunday 11th November, 1810, to Joseph Stockdale, a bookseller in London, wherein Shelley asks for ‘an Hebrew essay, demonstrating that the Christian religion is false....’ This obscure and esoteric work was published in 1642 by Isaac Ben Abraham, a Hebrew scholar and a powerful opponent of Christianity, and demonstrates the seriousness of Shelley’s attempt to challenge the religious doctrines of the authorities at Oxford. He was to pay a heavy price, as we shall see. But Shelley had much wider concerns and interests. In his short lifetime he was to publish voluminous quantities of some of the most beautiful lyric poetry in the English language (Ode to the West Wind; To a Skylark), while his dozens of brilliant and often profound essays have such titles as Essay on Love, A Treatise on Morals, A Philosophical View of Reform and an essay called A Defence of Poetry in which he famously describes poets as ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. All this was in the future.
Shelley went home for Christmas, to his father’s stately home in Horsham, Sussex, where he continued writing his poetry and firing off his diatribes against religion and contemporary politics. He was an intensely intellectual young man and his search for Truth was relentless, while his poetry, even at this young age, was sophisticated and beautiful. But it also has to be said that he was immature and misguided. He knew that he was alienating himself from his family and friends, and must have known that he was on a collision course with the university authorities. He wrote to Hogg:
‘...My Father called on Stockdale in London, who has converted him to sanctity. He mentioned my name, as a supporter of sceptical principles. My father wrote to me, and I am now surrounded, environed, by dangers, to which compared the devils who besieged St. Anthony were all inefficient. They attack me for my detestable principles; I am reckoned an outcast...’
The outcast returned to Oxford and was reunited with Hogg, a man with a somewhat pedantic turn of mind – he had been studying John Locke’s famous treatise, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Hogg believed that Locke had ‘proved’ that God could not exist and communicated this revelation to Shelley, much to his friend’s delight. In Shelley’s hands, Hogg’s discovery became an eloquent pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism. A flavour of it can be gained from its opening sentence:
‘A close examination of the validity of the proofs adduced to support any proposition has ever been allowed to be the only sure way of attaining truth...’
After putting forward his argument, he ends the pamphlet, ‘Every reflective mind must allow that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity...’
Shelley was effectively inviting debate, but he chose the wrong place and the wrong time. Shelley and Hogg began distributing the pamphlet anonymously to the university and church authorities and they posted several copies in Slatter and Munday’s window, pricing them at sixpence. Just minutes after they had left, in walked the Reverend Jocelyn Walker, a fellow of New College. He was incensed and ordered all copies to be burned at the back of the shop, and in so doing, he sealed Shelley’s fate. The poet was summoned before the university authorities on 25th March, 1811 (his attempt at anonymity having failed) and was asked to acknowledge authorship of the pamphlet. Shelley, the ardent defender of free speech, refused and was sent down. It’s an ironical twist in literary history that Hogg, indignant at his friend’s treatment, rushed to defend him and was himself sent down.
Shelley was now destined to become an exile, both literally and metaphorically. He spent the rest of his short but tumultuous life as a debt-ridden wanderer, disowned by his family, hated by the establishment and ensnared in legal battles over his children and his estate. He was drowned in July 1822 off Viareggio in Italy.
Shelley’s literary legacy was enormous and influential, and in 1894 University College accepted the gift of a memorial to him. It was originally intended to be erected over his grave, near Keats’, in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. Sculpted by Edward Onslow Ford, it depicts the drowned Shelley in marble, supported by bronze winged eagles and the Muse of Poetry. Around it are quotations from Adonais, his eulogy to Keats. But we must go back to the immediate aftermath of his death to get a flavour of the reaction of his critics to it. In August 1822 the Courier reported his death in an article which began:
‘Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry has been drowned; now he knows whether there is a God or no.’
Colin Silver lived for many years near the Lake District. He developed a deep interest in the life and work of the great 19th century art critic John Ruskin whose house overlooked Coniston Water. Following Ruskin, Colin developed a love of the work of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Romantics, particularly Keats and Shelley. When he moved to Oxfordshire, Colin continued his studies and began writing articles on a freelance basis for the Oxford Times’ Limited Edition magazine. His subjects included Keats, Shelley, Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites, Shakespeare and the celebrated 19th century physician Henry Acland. His first book, John Keats and Benjamin Robert Haydon: The Pursuit of Beauty of Truth is now available from Amazon.