ABSTRACT
The ongoing re-radicalization of Shelley in literary studies has undoubtedly offset and so corrected the post-Victorian conception that typed him as impractical and otherworldly, an angelic Icarus-figure ‘beating in the void his luminous wings in vain’. Shelley’s dual emphasis finds precedent in a line of dissident English writers going back at least to Bacon and the anti-clericalism of the Commonwealth period and more specifically, in his own time, to Paine, Godwin and the revolutionary left in general. In describing an epoch originating several centuries earlier, Shelley, from the very outset of his essay, expertly distinguishes between genuine reform which, in the instance of Jesus Christ, is meant to be universally enabling and its sham appropriation to serve the interests of a privileged ruling class or clique. The full Shelleyan counter-strategy is to read the resistance to revolutionary change as an axiom, true for all governments, whose primary concern is, by whatever fraudulent means, to entrench existing powers and privileges.
