4. Shelley's Radicalism: The Poet as Economist

¹The epigraph is taken from Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx Aveling, Shelley's Socialism (1888; rpt. London: Journeyman, 1975), p. 16. There is some debate over the authenticity of this quotation; see Paul Foot, Red Shelley (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1980), pp. 227–28. After surveying the evidence, Foot concludes: “Eleanor Marx, however, is unlikely to have put her name to a quotation from her father which she knew to be invented” (p. 228).

²George Watson, The Lost Literature of Socialism (Cambridge, U.K.: Lutterworth, 1998), pp. 62–63, moves the date back but still places it five years after Shelley's death; he claims that “socialism was first used as a term by Robert Owen in the Cooperative Magazine in 1827.”

³This development was reflected in the history of the Shelley Society, founded in England in 1886, which was divided, broadly speaking, between those who championed the poet for literary reasons and those who championed him for ideological reasons. The dispute centered on the status of Shelley's early poem, Queen Mab, which the first faction thought “should be relegated to Shelley's juvenilia,” while the socialists in the society revered “Queen Mab as the bible of the new order” (Robert Metcalf Smith, The Shelley Legend [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1945], p. 268). The dispute culminated in a speech by A.G. Ross, in which he chastised the socialist members of the society, charging that “the blatant and cruel socialism of the street” was trying to “use the lofty and sublime socialism of the study for its own base purposes.” Coming to the defense of the socialist view of Shelley, George Bernard Shaw called this speech “the most astonishing one he had heard” (Smith, Shelley Legend, p. 271). But note that even Ross makes the concession that Shelley is in some sense a socialist. Michael Henry Scrivener, in his Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 67, writes that “Queen Mab became a part of socialist culture” in Victorian England. For a detailed discussion of Shelley's posthumous reputation among British and other socialists, see Foot, Red Shelley, pp. 227–73.

⁴For a serious attempt to present Shelley as a forerunner of Marx, see Terence Allan Hoagwood, Skepticism & Ideology: Shelley's Political Prose and Its Philosophical Context from Bacon to Marx (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988), especially pp. 79–138. For other discussions of Shelley as a socialist, see Aveling and Marx, Shelley's Socialism and Kenneth Neill Cameron, “Shelley and Marx,” The Wordsworth Circle 10 (1979): 234–39. In his Red Shelley, Foot presents the poet as a left-wing radical, with many affinities to Marx, but ultimately concludes: “Shelley was not a socialist. Shelley was a leveller” (p. 96). Similarly, Scrivener argues that Shelley “anticipates... a number of radical tendencies, including the socialism of Marx,” but he also sees a strong “libertarian” element in Shelley (Radical Shelley, p. 318), which ultimately leads him to conclude that the poet is best understood as a “philosophical anarchist.” In his The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), P.M.S. Dawson also places Shelley in the tradition of philosophical anarchism. Shelley's personal and philosophical links to William Godwin lend credence to these attempts to place him in the anarchist camp.

⁵I quote A Philosophical View of Reform from the Julian edition, Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, eds., The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Ernest Benn, 1930), vol. 7. For the history of and problems with the text of the work, see vol. 7, pp. 332–33.

⁶On this point, see Gerald McNiece, Shelley and the Revolutionary Idea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 84.

⁷As we shall see, Shelley was by no means alone in this opinion. For an insightful and comprehensive treatment of the tradition in which Shelley was operating, see Patrick Brantlinger, Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), especially the chapter on eighteenth-century critics of the emergence of the Whig financial system, pp. 48–87, and the chapter on Shelley's contemporaries, pp. 88–135, which includes a section on Shelley himself (pp. 114–18). Many of the traditional critics of modern money and banking systems Brantlinger discusses anticipate Austrian views on the subject. Brantlinger seems to be embarrassed to find himself in agreement with Friedrich Hayek at one point, but he makes sure to distance himself from the Austrian by labeling him as “ultraconservative” (p. 25), even though his position on government oppression turns out to be identical to that of the ultraradical Shelley.

⁸Philosophical View, pp. 25–26.

⁹Ibid., p. 26.

¹⁰Ibid., p. 25.

¹¹One of Shelley's chief sources for his economic information, William Cobbett, does an excellent job of explaining this phenomenon, namely, how banknotes get into circulation. See Cobbett, Paper Against Gold (London: Cobbett, 1817), pp. 84–85. For the influence of Cobbett on Shelley's essay, see Kenneth Neill Cameron, “Shelley, Cobbett, and the National Debt,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 42 (1943): 197–209, McNiece, Shelley, pp. 84–87, and Brantlinger, Fictions of State, pp. 114–16. Shelley mentions Cobbett in his 1819 poem The Mask of Anarchy (line 153) and refers his readers to Paper Against Gold in a bracketed passage in the manuscript of A Philosophical View of Reform, which Ingpen and Peck print in their notes (The Complete Works, vol. 7, p. 338). Dawson (Unacknowledged Legislator, pp. 47–48) questions Shelley's knowledge of economics: “He lacked however the conceptual equipment to analyse the economic structure of his society, and his distaste for the study of political economy condemned his utterances on the subject to remain on the level of a callow moralism.” Dawson blames Shelley's ignorance of economics specifically on his reliance on Cobbett: “The writer on whom Shelley drew most deeply for his economic views was, unfortunately, William Cobbett. Cobbett's no-nonsense analysis of the economic structure of English society was clearly far more congenial to Shelley than the complexities of the political economists” (p. 49). Dawson evidently prefers “nonsense” economics to “no-nonsense” economics. The “political economists” he refers to were the apologists for the Bank of England, many of them in fact Directors of the Bank. In fact, Cobbett had no less a political economist than David Ricardo on his side of the argument, and events soon vindicated his understanding of the British banking system. Although Cobbett expressed his views with journalistic verve, they were in fact quite cogent and insightful economically, and Paper Against Gold can be profitably read to this day.

¹²For brief but good summaries of the development of banking and finance in eighteenth-century England, see Elie Halévy, A History of the English People in 1815 (1924; rpt. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), pp. 296–323 and T.S. Ashton, An Economic History of England: The 18th Century (London: Methuen, 1955), pp. 167–200.

¹³Philosophical View, p. 26.

¹⁴Ibid., p. 27.

¹⁵See Brantlinger, Fictions of State, pp. 3, 22.

¹⁶Quoted from the text in the Julian edition, vol. 3, p. 327 (Act I, lines 107–10).

¹⁷Philosophical View, p. 40.

¹⁸Ibid., p. 51.

¹⁹In his Classical Economics: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1995), vol. 2, p. 182, Murray Rothbard points out that one of Shelley's contemporaries, Lord King, referred to the depreciation of currency as “an indirect tax... imposed upon the community.”

²⁰For this point, Shelley relied heavily on Cobbett; see Paper Against Gold, pp. 324–25, 331–32, especially p. 331: “Yes: we talk about dearness; we talk of high prices; we talk of things rising in value; but, the fact is, that the change has been in the money and not in the articles bought and sold; the articles remain the same in value, but the money, from its abundance, has fallen in value” (Cobbett's italics). For historical support for this claim, see Halévy, History of the English People, p. 306 and T.S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution 1760–1830 (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 103.

²¹Philosophical View, p. 26.

²²For discussions of this important episode in British economic history, which led to the so-called bullionist controversy, see Friedrich Hayek, The Trend of Economic Thinking: Essays on Political Economists and Economic History, vol. 3 of his Collected Works (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 177–215; John F. Chown, A History of Money: From AD 800 (London: Rout-ledge, 1994), pp. 232–45, and Rothbard, Classical Economics, vol. 2, pp. 157–224. For an attempt to relate this economic episode to literary developments, see Kevin Barry, “Paper Money and English Romanticism: Literary side-effects of the last invasion of Britain,” Times Literary Supplement, Feb. 21, 1997, pp. 13–16.

²³Philosophical View, p. 26.

²⁴On this point, see Cobbett, Paper Against Gold, pp. 5–8. Shelley's passionate defense of the gold standard as the foundation of a sound monetary system is probably the aspect of his economic thinking that would seem most peculiar to those who try to categorize him as a socialist. The gold standard is supposed to be the obsession of capitalists. And in his early poetry, Shelley does seem to view gold negatively, as in this passage from Queen Mab: “Commerce has set the mark of selfishness,/ The signet of its all-enslaving power/ Upon a shining ore, and called it gold” (quoted from the text in Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers, eds., Shelley's Poetry and Prose [New York: W.W. Norton, 1977], p. 40 [section V, lines 53–55]). But Shelley is using the word gold poetically in this passage—as a metonym for the mad pursuit of wealth and the greed that inspires it. Queen Mab is filled with hostile statements about “commerce” and even a sarcastic reference to Adam Smith's concept of “the wealth of nations” (Act 5, l. 80). One has to bear in mind that Queen Mab is one of Shelley's earliest poems (written 1812–13) and his reading of Cobbett's Paper Against Gold evidently changed his mind about the precious metal as the basis for a currency. Contemporary scholars may find it hard to believe that Cobbett was a populist and yet championed the gold standard against paper currency. With the Free Silver movement in mind, and William Jennings Bryan's famous “Cross of Gold” speech, modern Americans tend to think of opposition to the gold standard as the populist position. But as Cobbett's treatise reminds us, there was a time when the gold standard was defended precisely as a way of protecting common people against the currency manipulations of a financial elite. In A Philosophical View of Reform, Shelley champions the gold standard because he is championing the common people. For a member of Shelley's circle who continued his polemic against paper money and in favor of gold, see Thomas Love Peacock's Paper Money Lyrics (written 1825–26). The spirit of these humorous poems is captured in the opening lines of the first poem:

The Country banks are breaking:
The London banks are shaking:
Suspicion is awaking:
E'en quakers now are quaking:
Experience seems to settle,
That paper is not metal,
And promises of payment
Are neither food nor raiment.

Quoted from The Works of Thomas Love Peacock (London: Richard Bentley, 1875), vol. 3, p. 222. On Peacock's attack on paper money, see Brantlinger, Fictions of State, pp. 118–23. This section also includes four examples of James Gilray's marvelous cartoons satirizing the reign of paper money in Britain.

²⁵Notice that Shelley regards a defense of sound money, the gold standard, and government financial retrenchment as “ultra-radical.” We see here in fact what the word radical meant to Shelley.

²⁶Julian edition, vol. 2, pp. 329–30 (Act I, lines 198–207).

²⁷Philosophical View, p. 27.

²⁸Shelley may have known about this point from reading David Hume's essay “Of Money” in Essays: Moral, Political and Literary (1741–42; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 291–92. For Shelley's knowledge of Hume's Essays, see Cameron, “Shelley, Cobbett,” p. 200. For more on the understanding in Shelley's day of the uneven effects of inflation, see Rothbard, Classical Economics, vol. 2, pp. 182, 210.

²⁹Peter Bell the Third, lines 166–71 (Reiman and Powers, Shelley's Poetry, p. 331).

³⁰Philosophical View, p. 27.

³¹Ibid., p. 30. Foot (Red Shelley, p. 91) cites this passage as an illustration of the Marxist theory of wage exploitation, as if Shelley were talking about workers who perform fourteen hours of labor but are paid for only seven, rather than workers who find that the depreciation of the currency means that the wage for fourteen hours of labor now has the purchasing power that the wage for seven used to have. Foot tries to attribute to capitalist exploiters the harmful effects that Shelley in fact attributes to government engineered inflation.

³²The Mark of Anarchy, lines 176–183 (Reiman and Powers, Shelley's Poetry, p. 306).

³³Scrivener, Radical Shelley, p. 136, argues that Shelley's fixation on the national debt was merely an example of “rhetorical duplicity,” adopted from Cobbett. Scrivener would rather blame the misery Shelley discusses on the “industrial revolution” (p. 215). Although Shelley was perfectly capable of disguising his views, it is difficult to see how following “Cobbett's tactic of concentrating the public wrath on the fundholders” (Scrivener, p. 136) against his better judgment would have aided Shelley's cause. If anything, attacking the public funding system got him in trouble; see McNiece, Shelley, p. 8: “Apparently his doctrines were alarming his friends in Italy with money invested in the funds.”

³⁴See the data in Norman J. Silberling, “British Prices and Business Cycles, 1779–1850,” The Review of Economic Statistics 5 (1923): 223–47, especially the graphs on pp. 230, 234, and 235. Rothbard, Classical Economics, vol. 2, p. 160 points out that during the same period the money supply in England also roughly doubled. As economists like David Ricardo argued at the time, the rise in prices was directly linked to the suspension of the convertibility of banknotes to gold. Brantlinger makes the odd claim: “Even during the paper money era of 1797–1821, the bank note issues of the Bank of England remained relatively stable and uninflationary” (Fictions of State, p. 140). Even by modern standards, a doubling of the money supply and the price level in roughly 20 years is inflationary.

³⁵Philosophical View, p. 31.

³⁶Ibid., p. 45.

³⁷Shelley does consider the possibility of a one-time tax on capital to liquidate the national debt; the fact that David Ricardo advocated the same policy suggests that this is not a particularly “socialist” position. For the relation between Shelley and Ricardo on this issue, see Cameron, “Shelley, Cobbett,” pp. 207–9 and McNiece, Shelley, pp. 88–89.

³⁸Modern literary critics keep imputing their own economic opinions to Shelley. Cameron feels a need to supplement Shelley's analysis of the economic misery of his day: “For another important reason for the increased hardships on the poor in these years and one which Shelley doubtless had in mind, we must turn to the financial history of the time. This was the abolition of the income tax in 1816” (“Shelley, Cobbett,” p. 205). Writing in the wake of the New Deal, Cameron could not understand how any intelligent person could fail to be in favor of progressive income taxation, but in fact Shelley never once complains about the abolition of the income tax; for the reasons why, see Halévy, History of the English People, pp. 326–28, who concludes: “the income tax was in universal disfavour” (p. 327). As we have seen, far from lamenting the abolition of the income tax, Shelley was calling in 1820 for a further tax revolt. Shelley's thinking on taxation resembles the position of some modern economists. In Swellfoot the Tyrant, Shelley even anticipates the famous Laffer Curve in his criticism of the British tax system: “till at length, by glorious steps,/ All the land's produce will be merged in taxes,/ And the revenue will amount to—nothing!” (Julian edition, vol. 2, p. 337, II.i.15–17)

³⁹Philosophical View, p. 34.

⁴⁰Ibid., p. 22.

⁴¹On the monopoly status of the Bank of England, see Halévy, History of the English People, p. 302; Ashton, Economic History, pp. 178–79, 183; Chown, History of Money, p. 234; and Rothbard, Classical Economics, vol. 2, pp. 159, 183.

⁴²The best analysis I know of the nature of this regime is Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., “Party Government and the Settlement of 1688,” The American Political Science Review 58 (1964): 933–46, which does an excellent job of relating the financial policies of the Whigs to their fundamental political program.

⁴³Philosophical View, p. 25.

⁴⁴Ibid., p. 34. See Cobbett, Paper Against Gold, p. 424. For a general his torical account of the connection between British war policy and the development of deficit financing, see John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688–1783 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).

⁴⁵Hume makes this point in his important essay “Of Public Credit” (Essays, pp. 359–60). Brantlinger shows that Jonathan Swift argued similarly earlier in the eighteenth century (Fictions of State, p. 39).

⁴⁶Philosophical View, pp. 35–36.

⁴⁷Shelley learned the need for such demystification from Cobbett; see Paper Against Gold, pp. 8–9, and especially p. 421:

One would really suppose, that the general creed was, that the Bank Directors were the Gods of the country, that they were our Sustainers if not actually our Makers, that from them we derived the breath in our nostrils, that in and through them we lived, moved, and had our being.

On the issue of public credit and mystification, see Brantlinger, Fictions of State, pp. 88–89.

⁴⁸Philosophical View, pp. 36–37.

⁴⁹Most people think that the idea of class conflict originates with Marx, and are unaware that he developed his views on the subject in response to the work of prior thinkers, particularly among the French, who categorized classes and class conflict differently. On this important subject, see Ralph Raico, “Classical Liberal Roots of the Marxist Doctrine of Classes,” in Yuri N. Maltsev, ed., Requiem for Marx (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1993), pp. 188–220, and especially pp. 202–04 for an analysis of the class interest of government clients similar to Shelley's. See also Rothbard, Classical Economics, vol. 2, pp. 385–91 and Watson, Lost Literature, pp. 8, 19–28, and especially p. 22, where he quotes Marx himself saying in a letter to Georg Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852:

No credit is due me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of the class struggle, and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes.

⁵⁰On the status of the new species of financial professionals, especially the stockbrokers, see Halévy, History of the English People, pp. 314–16; Halévy himself refers to them as “aristocrats” (pp. 299, 314).

⁵¹Cameron, “Shelley, Cobbett,” pp. 201–02, claims that Shelley derived the idea of the two aristocracies from Cobbett, but, as Cameron himself admits (p. 209), Shelley's analysis of the situation is considerably more complex and subtle than Cobbett's.

⁵²Hume offers a similar analysis of the ignobility of the new class of financial professionals in his “Of Public Credit,” Essays, p. 363.

⁵³Philosophical View, pp. 28–29.

⁵⁴The one seemingly “Marxist” aspect of Shelley's essay is his tendency to explain people's opinions in terms of their underlying economic interests. Yet ultimately Shelley is not a Marxist because he does not apply this principle mechanically. In another passage Ingpen and Peck relegate to their notes (p. 336), Shelley explicitly denies the Marxist principle that economic interests strictly determine political opinions: “It is not alledged that every person whose interest is directly or indirectly in the maintaining things as they are, is therefore necessarily interested. There are individuals who can be just judges even against themselves, and by study and self-examination have established a severe tribunal within themselves to which these principles which demand the advantage of the greater number are admitted to appeal.” Hoagwood (Skepticism & Ideology, pp. 85–86) unaccountably offers this passage as an example of Shelley's Marxist thinking, as if Marxism allowed individuals within a class to be exempt from class consciousness.

⁵⁵Philosophical View, p. 29.

⁵⁶Attempts to portray Shelley as a socialist ultimately reduce to a syllogism like this: (1) Shelley was concerned with social justice and helping the poor. (2) The only way to achieve social justice and help the poor is through socialism. (3) Therefore, Shelley must have been a socialist. This logic is most clearly at work in Aveling and Marx, Shelley's Socialism, especially pp. 36–38. What essays like this fail to show is that Shelley ever called for identifiably socialist policies to remedy the economic evils he identified in Britain. Critics with socialist leanings themselves cannot imagine that anyone could believe that allowing the market to operate freely could help the poor. And yet that is just what Shelley argues in A Philosophical View of Reform.

⁵⁷Philosophical View, pp. 42–43.

⁵⁸On this point, see McNiece, Shelley, pp. 93–94, 265.

⁵⁹Generally regarded as one of the most radical thinkers of his day, Cobbett, Paper Against Gold, p. 34, takes, if anything, a more generous view of the right of the middle and upper classes to property:

Physicians, Parsons, Lawyers, and others of the higher callings in life, do, in fact, labour; and it is right that there should be persons of great estate, and without any profession at all; but then, you will find, that these persons do not live upon the earnings of others: they all of them give something in return for what they receive. Those of the learned profession give the use of their talents and skill; and the landlord gives the use of his land or his houses. (Cobbett's italics)

⁶⁰Philosophical View, p. 37.

⁶¹Ibid.

⁶²In this argument, Shelley was following the teaching of his father-inlaw, William Godwin. See Book 8, “Of Property,” in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1798; rpt. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1976), especially chapter 2, pp. 711–19, 755:

we should, at all times, be free to cultivate the individuality, and follow the dictates, of our own judgement. If there be anything in the idea of equality that infringes this principle, the objection ought probably to be conclusive. If the scheme be, as it has often been represented, a scheme of government, constraint and regulation, it is, no doubt, in direct hostility with the principles of this work. But the truth is that a system of equality requires no restrictions or superintendence. There is no need of common labour, meals or magazines.

This clear warning against what have become socialist economic policies is a good indication that, despite the view of many intellectual historians, Godwin, just like his son-in-law, does not belong in the camp of protosocialists. For the contrary view, see Scrivener, Radical Shelley, p. 36: “If Shelley adumbrates Marx, so does Godwin.”

⁶³Philosophical View, p. 38.

⁶⁴Godwin again makes the same argument; see Political Justice, pp. 791–92.

⁶⁵Once again, see Godwin, Political Justice, pp. 719–20.

⁶⁶Philosophical View, pp. 38–39.

⁶⁷Ibid., p. 39. In passages such as this, Shelley seems to subscribe to the labor theory of value. He is even more explicit on the point in the notes to Queen Mab: “There is no real wealth but the labor of man” (David Lee Clark, ed., Shelley's Prose or The Trumpet of a Prophecy [Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954], p. 113). Shelley's belief in the labor theory of value would seem to be strong evidence for regarding him as a proto-Marxist, and it is cited as such in Aveling and Marx, Shelley's Socialism, p. 30 and Cameron, “Shelley and Marx,” p. 237. But contrary to a common misconception, Marx did not invent the labor theory of value. It actually can be traced back to the British classical economists, and was developed by Adam Smith and fully elaborated by David Ricardo—from whom Marx directly derived his notions on the subject. Thus, if believing in the labor theory of value ipso facto makes one a socialist, we are left with the curious claim that the most famous defenders of the free market in Britain, Smith and Ricardo, were socialists. And notice that in A Philosophical View of Reform, Shelley is always careful to offer a much broader definition of “labor” than Marxists usually do—he explicitly includes mental work, such as the efforts of entrepreneurs.

⁶⁸The fact that it should does not of course mean that it will. Foot manages to present Shelley's treatment of the issue of property in A Philosophical View of Reform as an example of his socialist thinking. To do so, Foot must treat Shelley's analysis as “rough-and-ready” and “groping,” implying strongly that the poet is simply confused; in particular, Foot describes Shelley's clear-cut distinction between earned and unearned property this way: “Shelley's line between the two was vague” (Red Shelley, pp. 94–95). Foot's Marxist prejudices repeatedly blind him to the literal meaning of Shelley's prose.

⁶⁹Quoted from the text in the Julian edition, vol. 3, pp. 290–91.

⁷⁰On this subject, see Watson, Lost Literature, pp. 43–52.

⁷¹Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (English edition of 1888) in Lewis S. Feuer, ed., Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), pp. 9, 10, 12.

⁷²This is in fact how Cameron actually tries to make the argument; see “Shelley and Marx,” pp. 238–39.

⁷³Hoagwood calls A Philosophical View of Reform “one of the most advanced and sophisticated documents of political philosophy in the nineteenth century” (Skepticism & Ideology, p. 209). Foot says that “it ranks in style and in content with the most famous radical pamphlets of our history,” including those “of Bentham or Robert Owen or Marx and Engels” (Red Shelley, pp. 10–11). In his Literature & the Marketplace: Romantic Writers and Their Audiences in Great Britain and the United States (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 89, William G. Rowland, Jr. calls the essay “the most sustained and impressive political treatise written by a romantic poet.”

⁷⁴The case of Shelley suggests that rethinking the standard view of the economic opinions of the Romantic generation is in order. The Industrial Revolution does not appear to have been as much of an issue for them as critics’ obsession with the “dark Satanic mills” of the Preface to Blake's Milton would suggest (Harold Bloom insists that even these mills “have nothing to do with industrialism”; see his Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument [Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1965], p. 335). Many critics in effect impute Victorian views back into the Romantic era. In the early nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution had not yet broadly transformed the English landscape. It took the development of railroads, beginning in the 1830s, to spread the Industrial Revolution throughout the land. Given the critical focus on Romantic reactions against the Industrial Revolution, it is surprising to discover how seldom the subject actually comes up in Romantic poetry or prose. When the other Romantics criticize economic conditions in early nineteenth-century England, they tend to focus, as Shelley does, on the related issues of high taxes and the government's war policy (see, for example, Wordsworth's The Ruined Cottage). Like Shelley, the other Romantics tend to rail against the actions of the monarch, the aristocrats, and government officials, rather than those of businessmen and industrialists. Brantlinger is clear on the contrast between Romantic and Victorian economic concerns: “The shared concerns expressed in Cobbett's Paper Against Gold and Peacock's Paper Money Lyrics suggest a pre-1832 moment when working- and middle-class politics more or less coincided around taxation and monetary issues. The Reform Bill of 1832 marks a parting of the ways” (Fictions of State, p. 134). In Joseph Bizup's comprehensive study of nineteenth-century attitudes toward industrialization in Britain, he begins his discussion of the critique of industry with Robert Southey's Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, which was not published until 1829—toward the end of the Romantic Era if not after its demise (Manufacturing Culture: Vindications of Early Victorian Industry [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003], p. 1).

⁷⁵Scrivener, Radical Shelley, p. 9, grants the point that in the early nineteenth-century laissez-faire capitalism “was a progressive, antiaristocratic position.” One Marxist critic, Christopher Caudwell (pseudonym of Christopher St. John Sprigg), recognizes clearly that Shelley was a spokesman for the middle class and the new economic freedom it pursued:

He speaks for the bourgeoisie who, at this stage of history, feel themselves the dynamic force of society and therefore voice demands not merely for themselves but for the whole of suffering humanity. It seems to them that if only they could realise themselves, that is, bring into being the conditions necessary for their own freedom, this would of itself ensure the freedom of all.... The bourgeois trammelled by the restraints of the era of mercantilism is Prometheus, bringer of fire, fit symbol of the machine-wielding capitalist. Free him and the world is free.... Shelley is the most revolutionary of the bourgeois poets of this era because Prometheus Unbound is not an excursion into the past, but a revolutionary programme for the present. It tallies with Shelley's own intimate participation in the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary movement of his day. (Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry [New York: International Publishers, 1947], pp. 91–92)

⁷⁶For the classic exposition of the Austrian theory of the business cycle, see Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1949), pp. 535–83.

⁷⁷In another bracketed passage, which Ingpen and Peck place in their notes (p. 338), Shelley writes: “the present miseries of our country are nothing necessarily inherent in the stage of civilization at which we have arrived.” For Shelley the problem is not that England has become capitalist, but that it has not become fully capitalist, that is, elements of the mercantilist system are still in place. As Shelley's analysis reminds us, capitalism is often blamed precisely for the results of anti-capitalist government policies. In particular, literary critics habitually confuse capitalism with mercantilism— the very system it was supposed to replace. For example, Brantlinger twice simply identifies “mercantilism” with “early capitalism” (Fictions of State, pp. 31, 75). For a good example of this kind of obfuscation, see Aveling and Marx, Shelley's Socialism, p. 31, where they offer as evidence of Shelley's hostility to capitalism a passage from his unfinished play Charles the First. Since this play is set in the first half of the seventeenth century, it necessarily portrays the negative effects of mercantilism, not capitalism. This fact is evident in the very passage Aveling and Marx quote (scene I, lines 151–52), in which the Second Citizen talks of “Nobles, and sons of nobles, patentees,/Monopolists, and stewards of this poor farm” (Julian edition, vol. 4, p. 145). Aveling and Marx are evidently attracted by the word monopolists, which they anachronistically interpret in the light of the Marxist theory of monopoly capitalism. But Shelley is obviously dwelling on his familiar theme—the evil of monopolies created by royal patents—exactly the sort of mercantilist practices proponents of capitalism like Adam Smith attacked.

⁷⁸For modern supporters of this view, see Brantlinger, Fictions of State, pp. 236–37.