ABSTRACT
S. wrote the bulk of Q Mab between mid-April 1812 and mid-February 1813 (i.e. when aged 19–20), mainly in Wales, in the Elan Valley at Nantgwillt and at Tanyrallt; the notes were mostly written after the poem and were probably complete when printing began (L i 368) three months later. D. L. Clark (‘The Date and Sources of S.’s A Vindication of Natural Diet’, SP xxxvi (January 1939) 70–1) and Cameron (Cameron (1951) 375–7) argue that A Vindication was written before the notes in Q Mab and that, despite its sub-heading ‘being one in a series of notes to Queen Mab (a philosophical poem)’, it was indeed published earlier. The arguments for this are dubious: the internal evidence which suggests revision of A Vindication for Q Mab more plausibly indicates modification and corruption of the Q Mab text in printing A Vindication from it (see notes to S.’s note to viii 211–12). There has been much confusion over the composition dates of the poem, some of it intentional. S. asserted in his letter to the Examiner 22 June 1821, dissociating himself from the recent piracy of the poem (L ii 304), ‘A poem, entitled ‘Queen Mab’, was written by me at the age of eighteen’, and this date, 1810, was accepted by Mary in her Note to the poem (1839 i 96) and by Medwin, who wrote of the period following S.’s expulsion from Oxford (25 March 1811): ‘He reverted to his Queen Mab, commenced a year and a half before, and converted what was a mere imaginative poem into a systematic attack on the institutions of society. He not only 266corrected the versification with great care, but more than doubled its length, and appended to the text the Notes, which were at that time scarcely, if at all begun, even if they were contemplated’ (Medwin (1913) 91–2). Medwin added, however, that ‘Shelley never showed me a line of Queen Mab’ (ibid. 93), which makes his account improbable, unless Dowden’s speculation (Dowden Life i 110–11) is well-founded, that the poem may have originated in the lost ‘Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things’ advertised in the Oxford Herald on 9 March (Mac-Carthy 100) and in the leading journals in May 1811. Early in 1817 S.’s solicitor Longdill prepared ‘Observations’ in defence of his client’s claim to the custody of his children by Harriet S., presumably with S.’s collaboration; these affirm of Q Mab that ‘It was … written and printed by Mr Shelley when he was only 19’ (White ii 515). It was to S.’s advantage to be made to appear as young as possible, but the date could be checked and so is fairly accurate: some of the poem was written when S. was 19, though he was 20 when it was printed. The embryonic notion was first mentioned in a letter of c. 10 December 1811 to Elizabeth Hitchener: ‘I have now my dear friend in contemplation a Poem. I intend it to be by anticipation a picture of the manners, simplicity and delights of a perfect state of society; tho still earthly. -Will you assist me. I only thought of it last night.’ (L i 201). He added: ‘I think I shall also make a selection of my younger Poems for publication’ (ibid. 202). Conversations with Southey, however, had deflected S.’s purpose by 26 December when he told Miss Hitchener: ‘I do not proceed with my poem, the subject is not now to my mind … The minor Poems I mentioned you will see soon. They are about to be sent to the Printers’ (L i 213–14). From Dublin on 14 February 1812 S. sent Miss Hitchener some verse (No. 74) written out as prose, which was later revised and incorporated in Q Mab ix 23–37. By 18 August S. was able to send Hookham part of his MS from Lynmouth: ‘I enclose … by way of specimen all that I have written of a little poem begun since my arrival in England [from Ireland, 6 April 1812, though S. did not settle at Nantgwillt until 14 April]. I conceive I have matter enough for 6 more cantos. You will perceive that I have not attempted to temper my constitutional enthusiasm in that Poem. Indeed a Poem is safe, the iron-souled Attorney general would scarcely dare to attack ‘genus irritabile vatum’ [.] The Past, the Present, & the Future are the grand & comprehensive topics of this Poem. I have not yet half exhausted the second of them’ (L i 324). If the poem was written consecutively, S.’s description would mean that Hookham received approximately four cantos; but the opening at least of Canto iv must have been written during the winter of 1812–13, after S. had received news of Bonaparte’s retreat from Moscow. News of the burning of Moscow in the 19th and 20th Bulletins of the French Grand Army (16–17 September 1812) appears in GM lxxxii (October 1812) 382–3; the evacuation (19 October) and later Russian victories in the snow are retailed from Bulletins 28–9 (11 November and 3 December) in GM lxxxii (Dec 1812) 570–4. The severe weather began early in November. S.’s lines, however, also describe clear, cold weather with snow on the Welsh hills (iv 8–9) and a near-full moon (iv 6, 12). In London snow fell on 17 December after a week of clear, cold weather (GM lxxxii 267(December 1812) 498) and the moon was full the following night. This, then, could be the date of the opening of Canto iv (an alternative is c. 17 January 1813). In the New Year (letter to Hookham, 26 January 1813) S. was approaching the end of his poem: ‘I expect to have Queen Mab, & the other Poems finished by March. Queen Mab will be in ten cantos [it was in fact completed in nine] & contain about 2800 lines. The other poems probably contain as much more. The notes to Q.M. will be long & philosophical. I shall take that opportunity which I judge to be a safe one of propagating my principles, which I decline to do syllogistically in a poem. A poem very didactic is I think very stupid’ (L i 350). On 7 February S. wrote to Hogg: ‘Mab has gone on but slowly altho she is nearly finished. They have teazed me out of all poetry. With some restrictions I have taken your advice, tho I have not been able to bring myself to rhyme. The didactic is in blank heroic verse, & the descriptive in blank lyrical measure. If authority is of any weight in support of this singularity, Miltons Samson Agonistes, the Greek Choruses, & (you will laugh) Southeys Thalaba may be adduced … Since I wrote the above I have finished the rough sketch of my Poem … I mean to subjoin copious philosophical notes’ (L i 352–3). Some ten days later S. told Hookham: ‘Queen Mab is finished and transcribed.—I am now preparing the Notes which shall be long & philosophical.-You will receive it with the other poems. I think that the whole should form one volume, but of that we can speak hereafter. -’ (L i 354). The sequence of S.’s creative activities may thus have been as follows: an Ur-Mab conceived and possibly begun in December 1811 was abandoned when conversations with Southey turned his mind in new directions. Q Mab was begun seriously at Nantgwillt c. 14 April 1812 and carried through at least to the end of Canto iii by mid-August; these cantos were sent to his publisher as a specimen (and possibly not reclaimed before printing: only two notes (to i 242–3, 252–3) are attached to the first three cantos). There was then an intermission caused by the flight from Lynmouth and by S.’s practical duties on the embankment works at Tremadoc. After S.’s return to Tanyrallt from London in mid-November 1812 he first put his minor poems in order (i.e. copied out the Esdaile Notebook; see L i 340); then resumed work on Q Mab Canto iv in mid-December and completed the poem on 7 February 1813. The last-composed poem in Esd that can be dated with certainty (No. 90; Esd No. 10) was written c. 13 November 1812, and the next datable group belongs to summer 1813 and to Esd’s ‘appendix’; it seems, then, that S. gave up writing minor poems for about six months between December 1812 and c. May 1813 in order to finish the long one. S. sent the poem to his publisher early in March 1813, from Dublin, with the comment: ‘The notes are preparing & shall be forwarded before the completion of the printing of the Poem. I have many other Poems which shall also be sent’ (L i 361). He added: ‘Do not let the title page be printed before the body of the Poem. I have a motto to introduce from Shakespeare, & a Preface [neither eventually included; the Shakespeare motto would perhaps have been from Romeo and Juliet I iv 50–3: R. I dreamt a dream tonight. M. And so did I. / R. Well, what was yours? M. That dreamers often lie. / R. In bed asleep while they do dream things true. / M. O then I see Queen 268Mab hath been with you.]. I expect no success.-Let only 250 Copies be printed. A small neat Quarto, on fine paper & so as to catch the aristocrats: They will not read it, but their sons and daughters may’ (L i 361). Printing had begun by 21 May (letter of Harriet S. to Catherine Nugent, L i 367n.), and S. probably received copies about the end of June. The book (subtitled ‘A Philosophical Poem with Notes’ on the title-page) was privately distributed, and not published in the normal way until pirated by William Clark in 1821, by which date 70 of the 250 copies had been disposed of; for its later publication history see H. B. Forman, The Shelley Library (1886) 35–58 and ‘The Vicissitudes of Queen Mab’, Shelley Society Papers, Part I (1888) 19–35. ‘In the twenty-five years from its first printing, [Q Mab] was undoubtedly the most widely read, the most notorious, and the most influential of all Shelley’s works … and established itself as a basic text in the self-taught working-class culture from which the early trade union movement of the 1820s, and the Chartism of the thirties and forties was to spring’ (Holmes 208). Clark’s pirated edition of 1821 coincided with the first American edition (by W. Baldwin & Co., New York 1821), and was followed by a series of very widely circulated editions by Richard Carlile (in 1822, 1823, and 1826) and others (including, after Carlile’s imprisonment, an edition by his wife and sons in 1832), culminating in the ‘Chartist’ edition of Heatherington and Watson in 1839. The much-quoted description of the poem as ‘the Chartists’ Bible’ originates in G. B. Shaw’s essay of 1892, ‘Shaming the Devil about Shelley’. For Q Mab as ‘the gospel of the sect’ of the Owenites, see Medwin (1913) 100. In spite of the predominantly eighteenth-century idiom of its style and egalitarianism, Q Mab places S.’s intellectual and artistic development on an entirely new level. ‘Many features of Queen Mab have a continuous development throughout Shelley’s subsequent work [most notably in L&C and PU]. Human society is always seen in a cosmic setting, and human history as inseparable from the history of stars and insects’ (GM). The influence of Godwin is less pervasive in the thought of the poem than has been argued; the major influences are Painite radicalism in politics and religion, and, above all, the writings of the eighteenth-century French materialists, particularly Holbach (see notes, passim). Many literary sources have been proposed for the poem’s structure of a dream-vision (Cantos i, ii 1–96) in which past (ii 97-end), present (comprehending monarchy, iii; political tyranny, iv; economic corruption, v; religion, vi and vii), and future (viii and ix) are surveyed. Volney’s Ruins is a clear influence, but the temporal survey structure has a number of possible forebears in the English poetic tradition, including Thomson’s Liberty (1735–36) which itself recalls the device in Paradise Lost (see ii 69n.). The machinery of the poem’s opening has been compared with that of Sir William Jones’s ‘The Palace of Fortune’ (2nd edn 1777), but the influence in fact appears slight; a possible alternative is Southey’s Vision of the Maid of Orleans, originally part of Bk ix of Joan of Arc (1795), in which an ‘angel guide’ takes the Maid to the planet Venus to see futurity, when tyrants shall fall and virtue and equality restore Earth as Paradise. S.’s title, designed to camouflage the poem’s atheism and radicalism, probably derives from the numerous children’s stories in the eighteenth century 269which employed the Queen of the Fairies as a character; see for example Marie Catherine La Mothe, Countess D’ Aulnoy, Queen Mab: A Select Collection of the Tales of the Fairies (3rd edn 1782; there was an edition in 1799). For critical accounts of Q Mab, see Hughes 184–92; Baker 21–40; Cameron (1951) 239–74; Holmes 200–11.
