Percy Bysshe Shelley

On the morning of 25 March 1811, a Monday and Lady Day, an eighteen-year-old undergraduate was called before the Master and Fellows of University College, Oxford. On the table was a pamphlet of seven pages. It had no author's name on it, only a notice asking any reader who disagreed to send proofs, signed "Thro' deficiency of proof, AN ATHEIST."¹ Its title was The Necessity of Atheism. The young man refused to say whether he had written it, and refused to disavow it. The college's record of that day reads: "it was determined that Thomas Jefferson Hogg and Percy Bysshe Shelley, commoners, be publicly expelled for contumaciously refusing to answer questions proposed to them, and for also repeatedly declining to disavow a publication entituled 'The Necessity of Atheism.'"² The next morning the two friends took the eight o'clock coach to London.³

Shelley lived eleven more years and became one of the great poets of the English language. He was never allowed to forget that pamphlet, and six years later a court used his opinions to take his children from him. This chapter is about why a boy of eighteen wrote it, what it cost him, and how the word he chose changed its meaning for him as he grew up.

Field Place and Eton

He was born on 4 August 1792 at Field Place, near Horsham in Sussex, the eldest son of Timothy Shelley, a member of Parliament.⁴ He was baptised at Warnham church, and at six he was sent to learn Latin from the village parson. The family was conventionally Anglican, and nothing in the sources records any particular devotion in the boy; what they record is a child who believed in ghosts and suffered frightful dreams.⁵⁶

At twelve he went to Eton, and Eton made him a rebel. He refused to fag for an older boy, "proclaiming war against the fagging system, which seemed to him an organized tyranny," and the school answered by baiting him; they called him "Mad Shelley."⁷ His widow Mary, writing years later, thought that the cruelty he met "at school and at college led him to dissent in all things from those whose arguments were blows, whose faith appeared to engender blame and execration."⁸ He read what he chose: Lucretius, the Roman poet who argued that the gods had nothing to do with the world, "held him as with a potent spell"; he translated several books of Pliny's Natural History, and was "especially impressed by the chapter 'De Deo,'" in which Pliny mocks gods made in human shape.⁹ He was enchanted by science, by electricity and chemistry and balloons.¹⁰ And he loved an old physician at Windsor, Dr James Lind, of whom he said, "This man is exactly what an old man ought to be."¹¹

These were the first cracks: a boy who hated tyranny, who read a Roman poet who made the gods idle and a Roman encyclopedist who laughed at them, and who loved science. But they were not yet doubt about God. He would later say that he read William Godwin's Political Justice at Eton, and that it made him "a wiser and a better man," though there is evidence he did not get a copy until he was at Oxford.¹²¹³

Oxford

He went up to University College in the autumn of 1810, and at dinner one day at the end of October he sat next to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who became his inseparable friend.¹⁴¹⁵ Together they read Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Hume's essays and made careful analyses of both. Hume's essays were a favourite book of Shelley's, and a cousin remembered that he "thought the sceptical mode of reasoning unanswerable."¹⁶ Locke taught that all knowledge comes through the senses; Hume showed how little the senses can prove about causes and creators. This is where his doubt began in earnest, which is why the belief timeline places it here rather than at Eton. The schoolboy had hated the tyranny of the believers. The undergraduate found an argument.

It was not yet atheism, and his own letters show it. On 3 January 1811, six weeks before the pamphlet was advertised, he wrote to Hogg that the word God "has been, and will continue to be, the source of numberless errors," but also that "the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are, in themselves, arguments more conclusive than any which can be advanced, that some vast intellect animates infinity."¹⁷¹⁸

What pushed him over was people. That December his father, told by a London bookseller of his son's "sceptical principles," attacked him at home. "They attack me for my detestable principles," Shelley wrote; "I am reckoned an outcast; yet I defy them, and laugh at their ineffectual efforts."¹⁹ And his cousin Harriet Grove, to whom he considered himself engaged, ended it. Her brother explained long afterwards that "she became uneasy at the tone of his letters on speculative subjects," and consulted her parents.²⁰ Shelley wrote, "She is no longer mine! she abhors me as a sceptic, as what she was before!"²¹ Three days later: "I will crush Intolerance. I will, at least, attempt it."²² His biographer Edward Dowden thought he came back to Oxford after Christmas "envenomed against what he termed 'intolerance' and 'bigotry,' by the loss of his cousin's love, and of the confidence of his own household."²³

The Necessity of Atheism

The pamphlet was printed at Worthing and advertised in the Oxford Herald on 9 February 1811.²⁴ It opened with a motto from Bacon and set out an argument in a few pages. Belief, it said, is not an act of will but a passion of the mind, compelled by evidence; therefore those who punish disbelief "have attached a degree of criminality to disbelief of which in its nature it is incapable."²⁵ All proof must come from the senses, from reason, or from the testimony of others, and none of the three proves the existence of a God. It ended, like a geometry exercise, "Every reflecting mind must allow that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity. Q.E.D."²⁶

Why did he publish it? Three answers survive, and they point different ways. Hogg said it was a device for starting arguments by post: Shelley had been sending letters of doubt under false names to clergymen and scholars, and the printed "syllabus," he said, "was a small pill, but it worked powerfully" in getting strangers to answer.²⁷²⁸ Dowden linked it to the loss of Harriet and the anger at "intolerance." And Shelley himself, three months after his expulsion, gave the most direct reason, in a letter to a schoolmistress he was trying to talk out of her faith: "My wish to convince you of his non-existence is twofold: first, on the score of truth; secondly, because I conceive it to be the most summary way of eradicating Christianity."²⁹ Accounts differ, and probably all three are part of the truth.

According to one account, he left copies on the counter of an Oxford bookshop, where they lay on sale for twenty minutes until a Fellow of New College had them burned; Hogg said it was never offered for sale at all.³⁰ Shelley sent copies to bishops and heads of colleges. A don at Oriel showed one to the Master and Fellows of University College, "and I was sent for," Shelley wrote.³¹ What happened in the room is also disputed. Shelley said later that he was told no more would be said if he denied writing it, and that "I refused, and was expelled"; Hogg said that no such offer was made and that Shelley dreamed it.³² A Fellow who was present remembered that Shelley gave no direct reply, and that Hogg came forward unasked to say that he was equally implicated.³³ At the last moment word came that if Shelley asked the Master's permission to stay a little longer it would probably be granted. He was too angry to ask.³

His father was furious and demanded that he go back and apologise to the Master. "No, of course!" Shelley wrote, and his allowance was withdrawn.³⁴

"I, an Atheist"

For a year after Oxford he used the word of himself in private. He argued Elizabeth Hitchener, the schoolmistress, toward it: "Atheism appears a terrific monster at a distance. Dare to examine it, look at its companions, it loses half its terrors."³⁵ When he married Harriet Westbrook at Edinburgh in August 1811, he explained to her "how I, an Atheist, chose to subject myself to the ceremony of marriage": to protect his wife's reputation and his own political rights.³⁶³⁷

In Keswick that winter he met the poet Robert Southey, who had been a young radical himself and saw in Shelley "my own ghost. He is just what I was in 1794."³⁸ Southey told him he was not really an atheist at all, but a pantheist, and Shelley half agreed: "He says I ought not to call myself an atheist, since in reality I believe that the universe is God. I tell him I believe that God is another signification for the Universe."³⁹ In January 1812 he wrote to William Godwin, the author of Political Justice, giving an account of himself: "I became, in the popular sense of the word 'God,' an Atheist. I printed a pamphlet, avowing my opinion, and its occasion."⁴⁰ Godwin replied kindly and sternly, warning him against anger and impatience; Shelley quoted his advice back to him, "Being yet a scholar, I ought to have no intolerable itch to become a teacher," and promised, "I will not again crudely obtrude the question of atheism on the world."⁴¹⁴²

A poem is safe

That promise did not last long, but his method changed. In March 1812 a London bookseller, Daniel Isaac Eaton, was sentenced to eighteen months in prison and an hour in the pillory for publishing Thomas Paine's Age of Reason. Shelley wrote a Letter to Lord Ellenborough, the judge, defending the right to publish; the printer destroyed most of the copies.⁴³ Then he found a safer form. "Indeed, a poem is safe," he wrote to his publisher that August: "the iron-souled Attorney-General would scarcely dare to attack [it]."⁴⁴ The poem became Queen Mab, and the arguments went into its notes: "I shall take that opportunity which I judge to be a safe one, of propagating my principles, which I decline to do syllogistically in poem."⁴⁵

Queen Mab was printed privately in 1813, with Voltaire's motto "Écrasez l'infâme" on the title page.⁴⁶ In it a fairy shows a human soul an atheist being burned at the stake, and says: "There is no God! Nature confirms the faith his death-groan sealed."⁴⁷ But the note on those three words already shows him thinking further. "This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit, co-eternal with the universe, remains unshaken."⁴⁸ The rest of the note reprinted, with improvements, the argument of The Necessity of Atheism. A year later, in a dialogue called A Refutation of Deism, he argued that there was "no alternative between Atheism and Christianity," that a reasoning person could not stop at a God of nature.⁴⁹

In the Alps in the summer of 1816, with Mary Godwin, whom he would soon marry, and Lord Byron, he wrote "Mont Blanc" and the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." The way they speak of God is new: "Power dwells apart in its tranquillity," and "The awful shadow of some unseen Power."⁵⁰ At the inn at Montanvert, above the Mer de Glace, an entry in the visitors' book in Greek, calling him a "philanthropist, democrat, and atheist," is attributed to him, and Byron is said to have scratched it out; Dowden could not say whether it was genuine.⁵¹

The price

In December 1816 his first wife, Harriet, from whom he had separated, was found drowned in the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Three weeks later Shelley married Mary Godwin.⁵² Harriet's family went to the Court of Chancery to keep his two children, Ianthe and Charles, from him. "They have filed a bill to say that I published 'Queen Mab,'" he wrote to Mary, "that I avow myself to be an Atheist and a republican, with some other imputations of an infamous nature."⁵³ Harriet's sister swore that he had written and published Queen Mab.⁵⁴

The case was heard in January 1817 before the Lord Chancellor, Lord Eldon. Counsel for the family laid stress on Shelley's religious opinions as set out in the poem; Shelley's own counsel could say only that "little ... can be said in defence of 'Queen Mab,'" except that he had written it as a boy and that hardly any copies had ever got abroad.⁵⁵⁵⁶ Shelley drafted a statement for the court: "If I have attacked religion, it is agreed that I am punishable, but not by the loss of my children."⁵⁷

Lord Eldon gave judgment on 27 March 1817. He did not say that a father must lose his children for his religion. He said that the children could not be left in Shelley's exclusive care, because of "conduct, which I cannot but consider as highly immoral," conduct "established as the effect of those principles."⁵⁸⁵⁹ The principles, he said, were the ones avowed at nineteen, and there was nothing to show they had changed.⁵⁹ Dowden judged that it was not atheism alone that decided the case, nor conduct alone, but "opinions leading to conduct": his views on marriage, and the way he had lived by them. Queen Mab was how those views were proved.⁵⁹ The children were given to guardians who promised to keep the girl from any books that "might tend to shake her faith." Shelley left England for good in March 1818.⁶⁰

Italy

In Italy the word followed him. In April 1819 the Quarterly Review, in an article by a former Eton schoolfellow, attacked The Revolt of Islam and its author's "blasphemous execrations," and said that a young man like Shelley could "cheat himself with the imagined loftiness and independence of his theory."⁶¹⁶² "I am regarded by all who know or hear of me," Shelley wrote from Rome, "except, I think, on the whole five individuals, as a rare prodigy of crime and pollution, whose look even might infect."⁶³ When the radical publisher Richard Carlile was convicted that autumn for printing Paine, Shelley wrote to his friend Leigh Hunt in his defence, setting out the charges and answering each: "For impugning the Divinity of Jesus Christ? I impugn it. For denying that the whole mass of ancient Hebrew literature is of divine authority? I deny it."⁶⁴

In June 1821 a London publisher pirated Queen Mab. Shelley disowned it, but not its cause. "It is villainous trash," he told his own publisher; and to a newspaper he wrote that the poem was "crude and immature," the work of a boy writing "in a sufficiently intemperate spirit," but that he remained "a devoted enemy to religious, political, and domestic oppression."⁶⁵⁶⁶ The poems of these years speak of a power he would not call God. In Adonais, his elegy for Keats, he wrote: "The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly."⁶⁷ In a note to his drama Hellas he wrote of "the sublime human character of Jesus Christ," deformed, he said, by being identified with a power "who tempted, betrayed, and punished the innocent beings who were called into existence by his sole will."⁶⁸

Near the end of his life his friend Edward Trelawny asked him why he called himself an atheist. As Trelawny reported it fifty-five years later, Shelley answered: "It is a good word of abuse to stop discussion, a painted devil to frighten the foolish, a threat to intimidate the wise and good. I used it to express my abhorrence of superstition. I took up the word as a knight takes up a gauntlet in defiance of injustice."⁶⁹ Trelawny is not always reliable, and these words come to us only through him. But they fit what Shelley wrote three weeks before he died, from his last house on the Gulf of Spezia: "Tell me a little of what they say of me besides my being an atheist."⁷⁰ By then it was only a name that other people called him.

On 8 July 1822 he drowned when his small boat, the Ariel, went down off Viareggio, with his friend Edward Williams and a sailor boy.⁷¹ His body was burned on the beach, and his ashes were buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome under the inscription "Cor Cordium," heart of hearts.⁷²

Did his unbelief change shape?

It changed more than once in eleven years, and the word changed with it. At eighteen, reading Hume, he still believed a vast intellect animated the universe; six weeks later he signed himself an atheist "through deficiency of proof." At nineteen he half accepted that he was a pantheist. At twenty he wrote "There is no God!" and in the same book explained that he meant only a creating God, not a spirit pervading everything. In his last years he wrote of the One and of a Power, and of Jesus as a man of sublime character whom the churches had deformed, and he called his own boyish poem crude.

What did not change was the motive. He hated cruelty that called itself faith, at Eton, at Oxford, in Lord Ellenborough's court and in Lord Eldon's. "Atheist," in the end, was the gauntlet he had picked up against that cruelty, and he never put it down, even when he no longer meant by it what the pamphlet meant. His widow, editing his poems in 1839, wrote that he "never doubted the truth or utility of his opinions," though he would have changed many of them.⁷³

The publisher whose prosecution he defended in 1819, Richard Carlile, has his own chapter in this book.