ABSTRACT
This sonnet, roughly drafted in pencil and revised in ink on p. 178 of Nbk 11, is copied fair on p. 182 (see illustration facing title-page). It appears that it was then transcribed into Harvard Nbk 1; this is probable though not certain: the first forty pages of the nbk have been removed, and a poem entitled E xxxxx d is listed by Mary in the Contents as occupying page 38. Accepting the inference that this missing poem was indeed England in 1819, the allusion to Peterloo (see headnote to MA, no. 231) in l. 7 means that it must have been written in the period from 9 September, when S. set about composing a number of political poems prompted by the events in Manchester on 16 August (L ii 119), to 23 December when he wrote to Leigh Hunt: ‘I send you a Sonnet. I do not expect you to publish it, but you may show it to whom you please’ (L ii 167). The Sonnet has generally been identified as England in 1819, and on good grounds: both the contents of the second paragraph of S.’s letter, beginning ‘What a state England is in!’, and his conviction that the poem is too dangerous for Hunt to publish would be appropriate to the uncompromising indictment of the monarch, the princes, the Church and the unreformed Parliament that it contains at a moment when Parliament was passing the infamous Six Acts to control the press and public gatherings. The apparent influence on line 11 of the attack on S.’s character in the Quarterly Review for April 1819, which he read in mid-October (L ii 126–7), would further narrow the period of composition to c. 15 October–23 December; see the note to that line. The position of both draft and fair copy in Nbk 11 is consistent with this range of dates (.BSM xviii pp. xvii–xxi).
