Shelley and Vitality

Shelley and Vitality Sharon Ruston Shelley and Vitality This page intentionally left blank Shelley and Vitality S...

Author: Sharon Ruston

53 downloads 1633 Views 731KB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Shelley and Vitality

Sharon Ruston

Shelley and Vitality

This page intentionally left blank

Shelley and Vitality Sharon Ruston

in association with

© Sharon Ruston 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–1824–4 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ruston, Sharon. Shelley and vitality / Sharon Ruston. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-4039-1824-4 1. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792–1822–Knowledge–Science. 2. Literature and science–Great Britain–History–19th century. 3. Biology in literature. 4. Vitality. I. Title. PR5442.S3R87 2005 821′.7–dc22

10 14

9 13

8 12

7 11

2004056539

6 10

5 09

4 08

3 07

2 06

1 05

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For George, Bernadette and Gavin Ruston

v

This page intentionally left blank

Contents Acknowledgements

ix

List of Abbreviations and Manuscripts Cited

xi

Introduction: A New Dawn What is life? The vitality debate Materialism and atheism

1 2 10 15

1

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 Vitality and radical scientists Humphry Davy: Romantic scientist Abernethy and Lawrence After 1819

24 24 34 38 63

2

Shelley’s Knowledge of the ‘Science of Life’ 1811 Shelley and Bart’s Lawrence and the Bracknell Circle Shelley’s notes on Davy

74 74 81 86 95

3

The Political Body: Prometheus Unbound The furies and animal life Electricity as life Earth as a living being Utopian new life

102 102 110 117 125

4

‘The Painted Veil’: Deﬁning Life Sensibility and the ﬁgure of the poet Mutability The painted veil Materialism

132 132 138 145 151

5

‘The Poetry of Life’ Life cycles Vitally metaphorical Posthumous life Beginnings and endings

157 157 163 168 174

vii

viii Contents

Conclusion

181

Notes Bibliography Index

186 209 222

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following libraries and their staff: the British Library, the Huntington Library and the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. Particular thanks are owed to Marion Rae, Samantha Searle and Sally Thompson at St Bartholomew’s Hospital Archives, Tina Craig at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, Bruce Barker-Benﬁeld at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, and Frank James and Ivone Turnbull at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. The Humphry Davy manuscripts are published here by Courtesy of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. William Godwin’s diaries and letters are quoted with the permission of Lord Abinger granted through the Bodleian Library. This project has been funded by grants from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the University of Wales, Bangor. The following academics have been incredibly generous with their time, support and advice. Thanks to Simon Bainbridge, Andrew Bennett, Helen Berry, Ben Colbert, Nick Davis, Cian Duffy, Paul Hamilton, Maurice Hindle, Chris Jones, Nicholas A. Joukovsky, Angela Keane, Peter Kitson, David Knight, Clark Lawlor, Timothy Morton, Mark Philp, Martin Priestman, Daniel Roberts and David Worrall. Particular thanks are due to Kelvin Everest, my PhD supervisor, and to Nicholas Roe for examining my PhD and helping me to rework this project into its new form. I am grateful to Tim Fulford for his comments on manuscript. Linda Jones did an expert job helping me to prepare the manuscript for the press. Thanks also to Emily Rosser and Paula Kennedy at Palgrave Macmillan. A version of Chapter 2 appeared in Romanticism issue 9. 1 (2003) and is reproduced here by permission of the editors. This book is dedicated to my loving parents George and Bernadette Ruston and brother Gavin Ruston. I would also like to thank my friends for lots of fun and frolics: Victoria Ball, Richard Ball, Liz Barry, Sue Chaplin, Beth Green, James Kidd, Matthew Gerry, Emma Mason, Julie Shepherd, Sean McKenzie, Andrew Moor, Mel, Alex and Kiva Sinclair, Sarah Veysey and Dale Watson. Lucy Hill and Donna Murphy have been the most brilliant, caring and true friends. Thanks to Michelle ix

x Acknowledgements

Harrison and Muriel Evans for keeping my spirits up. Jerome de Groot has inspired me always; he is excitable and energetic, encouraging and supportive, and can always make me laugh. SHARON RUSTON

List of Abbreviations and Manuscripts Cited BSM

Enquiry

Hunterian Oration

Introduction

Lectures

Letters

MS Journals

P&P

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, ed. D.H. Reiman, 23 vols (New York and London: 1986–2002). John Abernethy, An Enquiry into the Probability and Rationality of Mr. Hunter’s Theory of Life: being the subject of the ﬁrst two anatomical lectures delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons, of London (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1814) and Part of the Introductory Lecture for the Year 1815, Exhibiting some of Mr. Hunter’s Opinions Respecting Diseases delivered before the Royal College of Surgeons, in London (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1815) [bound together]. John Abernethy, The Hunterian Oration for the Year 1819, delivered before the Royal College of Surgeons, in London (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1819). William Lawrence, An Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology; being the Two Introductory Lectures, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons, on the 21st and 25th of March, 1816 (London: J. Callow, 1816). William Lawrence, Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and The Natural History of Man, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons (London: J. Callow, 1819). Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. F.L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). Mary Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley: 1814–1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1995). Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd edn, xi

xii List of Abbreviations and Manuscripts Cited

Poetical Works

Physiological Lectures

Poems

Prose Works

SC

Shelley’s Prose

Norton Critical Edition (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2002). Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, corr. G.M. Matthews (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). John Abernethy, Physiological Lectures, Exhibiting a General View of Mr Hunter’s Physiology, and of his Researches in Comparative Anatomy, delivered before the Royal College of Surgeons, in the year 1817 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1817). Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Poems of Shelley, ed. Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews, 3 vols (London and New York: Longman, 1989–). Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. E.B. Murray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Percy Bysshe Shelley et al., Shelley and his Circle, 1773–1822, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron and D.H. Reiman, 10 vols (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1961–2002). Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Prose: or the Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque: University of Mexico Press, 1954).

Manuscripts Royal Institution RI MS HD 13f Davy’s Personal Notebook. RI MS HD 13h Davy’s Personal Notebook. British Library BL Add. 40120 ff. 170 Lawrence to Hone. BL Add. 40120 f. 171 Lawrence to Hone. BL Adds. 22897–8 Cavallo to Lind. Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine MSS. 815–16 Lectures on Anatomy. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford Bod. Dep.e.212–19 William Godwin Diaries. Bod. Dep.e.214/3 William Godwin Correspondence. Bod. MS Eng lett c200 MSS. and Family Papers of Thomas Forster.

List of Abbreviations and Manuscripts Cited xiii

Royal College of Surgeons MS Add. 194 Lawrence to R.G. Glynn Bart. St Bartholomew’s Hospital Archives MS BHA X 54/1 Journal of Ludford Harvey. MS BHA HA 1/16 Governors’ Minutes. MSS BHA SA 1/1 Medical and Physical Society Minute Book. MSS BHA SA 1/2 Medical and Physical Society Minute Book. The form ‘p.’ or ‘pp.’ is not used when a volume number for a work is given, nor is it used to reference poetry, where line numbers or stanza numbers are given instead.

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction: A New Dawn

Life, and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of its transient modiﬁcations; but it is itself the great miracle. What are changes of empires, the wreck of dynasties with the opinions which supported them; what is the birth and the extinction of religions and of political systems to life? What are the revolutions of the globe which we inhabit, and the operations of the elements of which it is composed, compared with life? What is the universe of stars and suns [of] which this inhabited earth is one and their motions and their destiny compared with life? (‘On Life’, P&P, p. 505) Writing ‘on Life’ P.B. Shelley expresses his astonishment at the ‘wonder of our being’. This is not the Shelley we thought we knew, the poet whose central, canonical works we are accustomed to reading for his views on politics, religion and science. In this essay, he demotes those subjects in favour of the mystery of our physical life, a greater miracle to him than the creation of the universe, or past and present political systems and religious beliefs. The nature of ‘vitality’ was being debated during the Romantic period by scientists and surgeons. Placing Shelley’s work in the context of contemporary theories of the workings of the living body removes the ‘mist of familiarity’ from him and emphasizes the importance of his materialist thinking.

1

2 Shelley and Vitality

What is life? After a particularly bad attack of opthalmia and pain caused by a kidney stone, Shelley wrote to Claire Clairmont: ‘I can do you no other good than in keeping up the unnatural connexion [sic] between this feeble mass of diseases & inﬁrmities and the vapid & weary spirit doomed to drag it through the world’ (Letters, II, 257, 16 January 1821). Shelley’s description of his living body is not the irrational complaint of a patient but a contemporary medical deﬁnition of human life. From the 1790s onwards the body had come to be seen among scientists as a mass of diseases, heading steadily towards death, while the ‘unnatural connexion’ which held the body together in life was acknowledged to be the greatest mystery.1 The study of vitality had become, by the time of Shelley’s letter, one of the most intensely argued and notorious subjects in science and Shelley’s knowledge of this scientiﬁc debate informs his poetry and prose. The nature of vitality became a site of contention during the revolutionary upheavals of the late eighteenth century and provided a metaphor for reﬂecting on these political events. In the conservative backlash that followed in Britain during the early nineteenth century, metaphors of vitality were used to serve different ends, both to reinforce and to radically question a fear of political change. Conservative thinkers such as Malthus speculated that the potential of revolution to animate might also be a potential to destroy and consume: ‘the French Revolution … like a blazing comet, seems destined either to inspire with fresh life and vigour, or to scorch up and destroy the shrinking inhabitants of the earth’.2 The ‘dawn’ that William Wordsworth sensed was expressed in the vitalist language of scientists. The revolution was recognized by its supporters as a galvanizing force, which woke and roused the ‘inert’; it was new life infused into an otherwise dead body.3 Poetry had this potential to animate: Milton’s voice, had he lived in these times, would have been a vital force to revive an England that Wordsworth described as ‘a fen / Of stagnant waters’.4 Romantic texts proliferate vitalist language and metaphor; as Nicholas Roe has written, ‘the vitality debate surged from science into literature, and for a brief period in the 1790s it seemed that science, the poet’s imagination, and political and religious liberty were mutually cooperative and progressive’.5 The physiological debate in England over the nature of vitality offered poets and political commentators alike a metaphor for expressing their fears and hopes. The question asked at the end of Shelley’s last poem, ‘The Triumph of Life’, ‘then, what is life’ was asked during the Romantic period by

Introduction: A New Dawn 3

poets and scientists alike. By the year 1800 a new concept of life had emerged, likening animals to human and even plant life. For the ﬁrst time, life was considered a universal state, and the political ramiﬁcations of this idea are seen clearly in the literature of the period. Romanticism can be typiﬁed as a literature that explores a man’s new sense of his position within the universe.6 Marilyn Gaull has argued that science simultaneously shifted from the ‘chain of being’ model favoured during the eighteenth century to a new levelling idea of a ‘chain of life’ (1988, p. 352). Therefore, the pantheism of the young Wordsworth and Coleridge has the same political origins as the scientiﬁc reappraisal of life. Shelley uses ‘life’ as a concept in numerous senses and often with conﬂicting deﬁnitions, from the demonic triumph of ‘Life’ in the poem of that name, to the femme fatale ‘Life’ in Una Favola, to the ‘veil which those who live / Call Life’ in the sonnet ‘Lift not the painted veil’. At times he uses physiological detail to describe the life of plants, animals, and all living things; at other times, he uses the same knowledge to make philosophical comment on a much grander scale: Shelley’s ‘Power’ or ‘Necessity’ can be likened to the principle of life which some contemporary scientists believed animated all living beings. The word had particular resonance during the second decade of the nineteenth century, when surgeons John Abernethy and William Lawrence, both of whom Shelley knew and read, publicly debated the nature of life. When Shelley uses the word ‘life’ he uses it knowingly, exploiting the contemporary meanings attached. The different theories for vitality provided Shelley with metaphors to describe the distance he felt from his contemporary world as well as the excitement he felt at the prospect of change. They supplied him with a means to imagine revolution and utopia. Different versions of life in this period had distinct political motivations and associations, and the vitality debate offered a versatile and intricate set of ideas for his poetry and prose. The questions raised by the search for a principle of life involved characteristically Shelleyan concerns: the possibility that there is a principle of life at all problematizes the idea of a self, from which Shelley was continually trying to escape. The radical implications of certain theories of life offered Shelley a means by which to voice his own scepticism and atheism. The search for a principle of vitality was motivated, on all sides, by the new deﬁnition of life that had emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. Trying to understand what the principle of life could be, scientists of the Romantic period asked two key questions: how

4 Shelley and Vitality

could life exist in so many bodies organized so completely differently, from an oyster to man? What was the fundamental distinction between living and dead beings? So much depended on the answers to these questions. Life could be, and was, held to be the work of an immaterial spirit or of the material body; the blood, brain, and nerves were all put forward as potential candidates for the principle of life. The answer to the question ‘what is life?’ was used to support opposing political and theological opinions. Among the many answers to this question was the idea that the life which animated humans was the same as that in all other living beings, and that God’s hand was nowhere in evidence in the creation or sustenance of life; alternatively the body was believed to be subject to an external and independent source of vitality, likened to the soul. These theories were held to prove equally diverse and extreme political ends, from the notion that French revolutionaries had a different and lesser life than the British, to the idea that externally governing bodies were needed to control the will of the individual. Vitality metaphors appear throughout texts of the Romantic period, from popular journals and literary reviews, to the speeches of politicians and the sentiments of the poets themselves. Before the nineteenth century, life had been considered the body’s natural condition, and death the mysterious and unaccountable Other. This changed as Romantic scientists recognized that the state all matter tended towards was that of death and dissolution, and life became the subject of scientiﬁc speculation. However, life was a tricky subject to study; it was not constant, could not be artiﬁcially created or reproduced, and was so precarious as to be endangered by attempts to study it. The animal-rights movement evolved during this period in response to such experiments as those alluded to in Anna Barbauld’s poem ‘A Mouse’s Petition’ and painted by Joseph Wright of Derby.7 Joseph Priestley, among others, attempted to isolate a single element that gave life: he found that without oxygen mice and birds in air pumps collapsed, while the reintroduction of oxygen revived them. Later, Giovanni Aldini’s electric-shock treatment on recently-hanged murderers attempted to prove that electricity was the principle of life. In this book I argue that scientiﬁc experiments of the period were uniﬁed in their intentions to a degree not hitherto acknowledged; the search for a principle of life can be seen as a motive for much of the scientiﬁc work of the period. Romantic writers also became interested in vitality: as Roe has written, using John Thelwall’s speculations as an example, ‘this vital principle was already wired to dissenting and radical politics’

Introduction: A New Dawn 5

(Roe, 2001, p. 4). Chapter 1 considers the origins of the vitality debate in the work of scientists such as Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Priestley, and how even scientists known primarily for their work in ﬁelds other than biology can be seen to be working on the vitalist project. The case study of Humphry Davy is used to show the politics of this science: Davy’s early materialism, fostered in the radical circle of Thomas Beddoes and the Pneumatic Institution at Bristol, was supplanted by a conservative vitalism as Davy moved into the ranks of the establishment in the Royal Institution. This book rejects the idea of a strict division between science and literature, C.P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’, in the way that it conceives both its subject and its methodology.8 Ian Wylie has considered Coleridge in this light, not looking solely for references to science, or for what Coleridge ‘believed’ in scientiﬁc matters, but arguing that his poetry was ‘informed, crucially and deeply’ by his studies in science in the 1790s.9 Coming at the same issue from a different perspective, the historian of science, Patricia Fara, has also warned that we should ‘avoid imposing today’s categories on past activities’.10 In her discussion of the period’s fascination with magnetism, she considers the arts and the sciences to have been ‘mutually fashioned by each other’ (Fara, 1996, p. 5). Another important aim for her book is to contextualize accounts of magnetism, whether by writers or practitioners, within ‘the massive transformations of eighteenth-century English life’ (ibid., p. 6). As Jan Golinski writes: ‘Science, like music, literature, or fashion is a cultural form, to be understood historically in relation to social forces such as emulation and consumerism’.11 Authors such as Alan Bewell, Marilyn Gaull, Noah Heringman, David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill, and Jenny Uglow, have also considered texts of the period in this crossdisciplinary light, as shaped by each other and the culture in which they were produced.12 In this book I return the search for a principle of life to its rightful place at the centre of Romantic concerns. Public scientiﬁc lectures, widespread coverage in contemporary journals, the passing of laws to allow surgeons to dissect the corpses of paupers and murderers, in a culture in which the arts and sciences were seen to collaborate rather than conﬂict, all disseminated information about theories of vitality and ﬁndings on the nature of life to a broad audience. The effects of such dissemination can be seen in the general public’s hysterical fears of premature burial, grave robbing and the religious implications of dissection and resurrection after death, and the popular belief that resurrection after death was entirely possible. As this suggests I consider

6 Shelley and Vitality

science to be part of the cultural movement of Romanticism. My emphasis throughout is historical and political. The vitality debate between surgeons at this time was not contained within the medical world, since it was thought to comment on such matters as the dual nature of mind and body, to prove or disprove the existence of the soul and even to reﬂect a person’s patriotism. John Abernethy had been apprenticed to the St Bartholomew’s surgeon, Charles Blicke; although primarily trained by Blicke, he also went to lectures given by other eminent men in the profession, including Percivall Pott, William Blizzard and John Hunter.13 He became a full surgeon at Bart’s in 1815. Abernethy’s conservative vitalism was in many ways the voice of the status quo, representing the establishment and its concerns with national security in a time of crisis. Abernethy’s particular brand of vitalism can be viewed as the dominant ideology of the Romantic period, with Lawrence as the dissident voice, challenging and questioning this. Lawrence’s lectures were considered to be blasphemous and seditious by the Chancellor Lord Eldon. He clearly was seen as a threat to the stability of the country and he is linked throughout with others who questioned cultural orthodoxies. Science was used by vitalists to sustain a particular model of power and by materialists to question and disrupt that model. Shelley clearly recognized the political implications of the scientiﬁc theories proposed and exploited them as comments upon contemporary society. Marilyn Butler places a Quarterly review article attacking Lawrence within the context of its ‘consistent, orchestrated campaign against cultural subversion’, identifying ‘its most visible target’ as Byron.14 In this book I show how Shelley and Lawrence were regarded as part of this subversive circle and how they used the science of life to attack the conservative and reactionary order that journals such as the Quarterly were attempting to protect. Butler has written that ‘Percy Shelley’s intellectual association with Lawrence is in fact better hidden than his wife’s’ (M. Shelley, 1993, p. xlix). Her edition of Frankenstein as a dramatic reworking of the issues raised in the vitality debate has done much to bring the debate and its literary repercussions to the attention of Romantic critics. Others have looked at the inﬂuence of contemporary issues of vitality on Romantic writers: Trevor Levere and Wylie on Coleridge, Nicholas Roe on Thelwall, Hermione de Almeida and Denise Gigante on Keats.15 Shelley’s interest in science is well-documented, yet no critic has looked in depth at his interest in the science of life. Shelley possessed an air pump among his chemical apparatus and his letters are ﬁlled with questions and theories concerning the nature of vitality. He had

Introduction: A New Dawn 7

read Abernethy’s work and attended his lectures, and he became Lawrence’s friend and patient. Shelley eventually moved to Italy on Lawrence’s advice. Chapter 2 extends knowledge of Shelley’s association with these two surgeons, using new information regarding Shelley’s attempts to become a surgeon in 1811, and evidence of Lawrence’s involvement with the Bracknell circle Shelley spent time with in 1813–14. Read in the light of the science of life, canonical, familiar poems such as ‘Ode to the West Wind’ are transformed.16 One of Shelley’s favourite images, that of the seed containing the plant, or of the acorn containing the oak, is repeatedly employed in theories of life put forward during this period. Shelley’s interest in the acorn or seed is that it carries revolutionary potential, although this potential may or may not be realized. Speaking to a future generation because contemporary readers did not value his writings, he hopes that a more enlightened audience might appreciate and revive the ‘withered leaves’ of his ‘Dead thoughts’ (64, 63). The ‘dead leaves’ are the leaves of the pages on which his poem is printed and so, what was once dead has the capacity to live again, or at least to provide for life. His words will feed the new generations beyond his death and the cycle of life goes on as Lucretius believed, ‘nothing dies, everything changes’. Literally, the leaves of the pages were once also alive and are now dead; a different kind of life is possible for them in the minds and hearts of future readers. In his note to the poem, Shelley writes: ‘This poem was conceived and chieﬂy written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence … on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating’ (P&P, p. 297). The animating effects of the wind have produced this poem. A recurring analogy between radical poetry and the principle of vitality is explored in the following chapters of the book. Shelley’s poetry can live, not only in the sense that new audiences read and interpret it, but in the sense that it can have a real and tangible effect on a society. The poem becomes substituted for the vital principle itself. If successfully resurrected from obscurity, it can enliven the lives of others. It was precisely the changes between life and death that taxed the greatest scientiﬁc minds of Shelley’s day: how did life begin? What was the crucial difference between living and dead matter? The ‘winged seeds’ blown by the west wind are to lie like corpses until Spring comes when they sprout and ﬂower. This process begged another question: how do we designate a being as living when there are some that seem to be dead for long periods of time? The naturalist, William Smellie,

8 Shelley and Vitality

for example, spent some time examining the apparently inanimate polyp, examples of which ‘afford instances of every appearance of sensation, or even of irritability, being suspended, not for months, but for several years, and yet the life of these animals is not extinguished’.17 He concludes with, ‘It is possible, therefore, that life may exist in many bodies which are commonly thought to be as inanimate as stones’ (1790, I, 14). Shelley’s scepticism and uncertainty at the end of ‘Ode to the West Wind’, the question which remains crucially unanswered and sounds a plea from poet to both contemporary and future readers, also perplexed Romantic scientists. Life seemed capricious and mysterious; the leaves may not ‘quicken a new birth’, the Earth may remain ‘unawakened’ (64, 68). Knowledge of the science of life offers a new vocabulary with which to analyse Shelley’s poetry, one which he knowingly used. As can be seen in this instance, the metaphor was extremely versatile; in Chapter 3 of this book I examine its utility as a political tool, in Chapters 4 and 5 I consider its use in philosophical and aesthetic discussion. Andrew Bennett’s work on the Romantic impulse to write primarily for posterity examines the ‘textual afterlife’ imagined in poems such as ‘Ode to the West Wind’; in Chapter 5 this concept is put into the wider context of the vitality debate.18 Shelley knew how life was perceived to work according to William Lawrence, who became part of Shelley’s circle in London in the early 1810s. It is possible to trace the inﬂuence that Lawrence had on Shelley in the theories of life Shelley states in his letters and his writings. In one early letter Shelley explains the way in which an acorn fulﬁls its potential for life: We put an acorn in the ground, in process of time it modiﬁes the particles of earth air & water by inﬁnitesima[l] division so as to produce an oak; that power which makes it to be this oak, we may call it’s [sic] vegetative principle, symbolising with the animal principle, or soul of animated existence. (Letters, I, 110, 20 June 1811) Shelley’s idea of life here is not an instantaneous infusion of life, such as is achieved by Victor Frankenstein. Instead the ‘animal principle’ is like the ‘vegetative principle’, a transmuting force, which changes nonliving matter into living matter. Particles of earth, air and water, are gradually modiﬁed to create a living oak tree. The anonymous author of one Edinburgh Review article on Abernethy’s and Lawrence’s debate gives a similar deﬁnition of life. Denying that there is much difference

Introduction: A New Dawn 9

between the organization of a living being and of a being which was once living but is now dead, the reviewer argues that life is: that sort of appropriation of foreign matter which we observe in the human body, when it converts its food into bone, and muscle, and nerve, &c.; or in a plant, when it changes portions of the elements in which it is placed, into bark, and wood, and leaves, and so forth. Those bodies alone are entitled to the appellation of living, in which, some such addition and conversion of surrounding substances as this, is actually taking place:—all others are denominated Dead.19 Matter is not regarded as inert, but as capable of transforming other materials to its purpose. The ability to convert matter of one kind into another is the sign of a living body. According to the review, one clear example of this process in the human body is the circulation of blood: in the physiology of the period this operation included the conversion of blood into other vital substances, and the conversion of air and food into blood (Anon., 1814, p. 386). An analogy can be made here with intertextuality, which Shelley regarded as integral to the creative process. Poetry ‘creates by combination and representation’, a kind of transmutive process in which the words of other writers are grafted onto his own (Poems, II, 474). Shelley’s example of the acorn and the oak is drawn on to express his concerns about identity and selfhood. Just as life transmutes other elements to itself, so living bodies must constantly shed parts of themselves in order to continue to live. In Shelley’s A Refutation of Deism, Eusebes expresses a further consequence of this world in which nothing perishes but everything changes: ‘no organized being can exist without a constant separation of that substance which is incessantly exhausted, nor can this separation take place otherwise than by the invariable laws which result from the relations of matter’ (Shelley’s Prose, p. 133). Life is therefore, as Lawrence pointed out, inherently and essentially mutable: ‘we see a continued change, so that the body cannot be called the same in any two successive instants’ (Introduction, p. 139). This was the main reason for Lawrence’s belief that empiricism was the only means by which life could be analysed, not by Abernethy’s method of proceeding by analogy. It was also one reason why the question ‘what is life’ could not, ultimately, be answered; since, to ask the question at all presupposed that life was a noun, a thing, and denied the perpetual ﬂux and mutability of life. After a

10 Shelley and Vitality

hundred years the oak becomes earth again, as Shelley continues in his letter; at this stage he questions whether it ceases to exist: the ‘identity’ of the subject has changed irrevocably. He concludes that despite this inevitable metamorphosis, the tree continues to exist though in a different form to that which it had previously embodied. These scientiﬁc theories of life are richly suggestive for Shelley; another of his favourite tropes, the use of successive images each fading into and replacing the last, can also be seen to have its counterpart in the scientiﬁc writings on vitality. Paul Hamilton has noted ‘Shelley’s symptomatic imagining of revolutionary achievement as a kind of personal death’ and this death is a bodily, material death.20 Hamilton reasserts Shelley’s materialism, not just as a philosophy discarded in his youth but as a conviction which persisted to the end. This book similarly argues for Shelley as a materialist thinker; his poetry uses scientiﬁc knowledge of the human body and of other animate beings to imagine and embody historical change and revolution. To return to ‘Ode to the West Wind’, poetry, for Shelley, is truly a vital force: envisioned in its most strict scientiﬁc sense, poetry as life is able to ‘quicken’ dead matter, to revive, to transmute, to mutate. Still, Shelley recognized in this poem that only sympathetic readers could provide the spark needed to revive the dead leaves of his words. Writing of the ‘modern literature of England’, Shelley also highlights the importance of external conditions to life: ‘The mass of capabilities remains at every period materially the same; the circumstances which awaken it to action perpetually change’ (Preface to Prometheus Unbound, Poems, II, 474).

The vitality debate The vitality question was explored by such ﬁgures as Thomas Beddoes, Erasmus Darwin, Humphry Davy, John Hunter, Joseph Priestley and Smellie. It was not until the second decade of the nineteenth century, however, that the search for the principle of life triggered the public debate between surgeons John Abernethy and William Lawrence. Abernethy was a respected teacher and surgeon at St Bartholomew’s Hospital who expounded a conservative vitalism, based, he claimed, on the writings and conversation of his teacher, the celebrated John Hunter, to whom he had been apprenticed. In published lectures to the Royal College of Surgeons, Abernethy believed that life did not depend on the organization of the body but existed as a material substance ‘superadded’ to the body. His opponent, Lawrence, had once been

Introduction: A New Dawn 11

his talented protégé, and had risen through the ranks of the medical profession with great speed. He was supremely different in character and intellectual ability to his mentor; in contrast he was well-read, eloquent, handsome and polite (Abernethy cultivated a rude and disinterested bedside manner). Inﬂuenced by the French materialists to a degree considered dangerous by Abernethy and the conservative element of his colleagues, Lawrence proceeded to demolish and ridicule with great style and inventiveness his old master’s arguments in lectures to the same body, the Royal College of Surgeons, which he also then published. Organization was the buzz word of the day, and Lawrence claimed that a notion of life as an independent matter superadded to the body was outmoded. He perceived life as simply the working operation of all the body’s functions, the sum of its parts. Their debate became increasingly vitriolic and personal. The respective positions taken by Abernethy and Lawrence and between which the entire London medical community became entrenched exposed current political and theological differences. For a time the physiological disagreement about the nature of life was a hotly discussed topic; Lawrence’s lectures were in the words of a Quarterly Review article ‘criticized, answered, written about and talked about’.21 Not everyone agreed that the topic warranted such attention. Abernethy’s lectures were attacked anonymously in the Edinburgh Review; where the premise of the science of life itself was ridiculed: Those who are not much conversant in physiological studies, will probably be surprised to learn, that physiologists are not yet agreed as to the precise grounds even of that most familiar of all classiﬁcations—the arrangement of Bodies into Living and Dead; and that, in the whole science of vital economy, (if so we may venture to call it), there is not, at this moment, a term which is used with greater ambiguity, than the term Life. We confess that this diversity of opinion is a little surprising to ourselves; for although we are perfectly aware that a very simple question may be made abstruse enough by the manner of treating it, yet this is one of these plain points, which we should have thought it difﬁcult either for dullness or subtlety to render obscure. (Anon., 1814, pp. 384–5) It was easy to make fun of the surgeon’s idea that life, that most familiar of all classiﬁcations, was unfamiliar. In the reviewer’s eyes Abernethy and his fellow surgeons are creating a problem where none really exists.

12 Shelley and Vitality

In Shelley’s essay ‘On Life’ he couches the problem in similar terms, but argues that it is precisely this familiarity with life which gets in the way of our exploring it. Shelley recognizes that life is a concept so central to our being that it is difﬁcult to appreciate that it is a phenomenon we know nothing about. Shelley calls for his readers to rethink their preconceptions about life and to consider it in a new way, as a mystery that might be analysed and possibly even explained, just as the revolutions of the earth have been. His efforts are part of a Romantic objective: the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and Shelley’s Defence of Poetry both claim the importance of making the familiar unfamiliar.22 Shelley’s interest in the various answers proposed to the question can be seen in his attending Abernethy’s lectures, reading his work, in conversations he had with Lawrence and others during the period of the surgeons’ debate, in references made in letters, poetry and prose to the science of life, and in his reading of other scientiﬁc matter, from the books of his early mentor the Priestleyan Adam Walker to the detailed notes Shelley made of Humphry Davy’s Elements of Chemistry. Abernethy argued that since living and dead bodies usually had the same ‘organization’, life could not be dependent upon organization. Hunter, in A Treatise on the Blood, Inﬂammation, and Gun-shot Wounds, had also claimed that there is a ‘living principle’ which does not depend on organization.23 Abernethy developed and interpreted Hunter’s theory of life by making an analogy with electricity, which he believed operated in the same way as Hunter thought life did. Abernethy refers to the work of Galvani in his discussion of the way that a frog’s limbs can be reanimated by electricity; the fact that this reanimation is less effective with each subsequent application of electricity demonstrates to him that irritability ‘is not exhausted but fatigued’ with the onset of death (Enquiry, pp. 29–30). Life is viewed as a gradual diminishing of power: except in cases of accidental death where vitality is ‘suddenly dissipated’, life is ‘lost by degrees, without any apparent change taking place in the structure’ (Enquiry, p. 42). Abernethy clearly sets himself up in opposition to the materialist view of life: ‘The matter of animals and vegetables is … an aggregate mass; it is as we express it, common matter, it is inert; so that the necessity of supposing the superaddition of some subtile and mobile substance is apparent’ (Enquiry, p. 41). In Abernethy’s formulation, then, the frame or structure of the body is essentially inert; life is given to the body in the form of a ‘supperadded’ element, without which the body would remain dead. Butler’s reading of Frankenstein notes the Abernethian inﬂuence on Victor, who ﬁrst creates a body and then infuses it in some unspeciﬁed way with vitality.

Introduction: A New Dawn 13

Lawrence’s 1816 lectures introduced surgical students to the same subjects as those broached by Abernethy’s lectures, but offered a completely different and contradictory view of life. Lawrence opened by deﬁning ‘organization’, ‘vital properties’ and ‘functions’, all of which combined created life. He contradicts Abernethy’s and Hunter’s claim that vitality does not depend on organization: Organization means the peculiar composition, which distinguishes living bodies; in this point of view they are contrasted with inorganic, inert, or dead bodies. Vital properties, such as sensibility and irritability, are the means by which organization is capable of executing its purposes … Functions are the purposes, which any organ or system of organs executes in the animal frame … Life is the assemblage of all the functions, and the general result of their exercise. Thus organization, vital properties, functions, and life are expressions related to each other; in which organization is the instrument, vital properties the acting power, function the mode of action, and life the result. (Introduction, pp. 120–1) Whereas Abernethy represents the principle of life as the cause of living phenomena, Lawrence sees it as the result of the working operation of the living body. Critics assessing the debate, have pointed out that Lawrence was just as much a vitalist as Abernethy.24 His concept of ‘vital properties’ as ‘the acting power’, is neither mechanical nor materialist; yet it was viewed by many contemporaries as materialist dogma. Lawrence’s use of the phrase ‘vital properties’ alluded deliberately to the French physiologist Xavier Bichat, and it was partly Lawrence’s free use of and unproblematized reference to the French materialists that contributed to his being labelled one of their camp. He openly expressed his admiration of French physiologists Cuvier and Bichat and aligned himself with them in promoting the concept of organization. Bichat famously deﬁned life as ‘the sum of the functions, by which death is resisted’.25 The analogy of Hunter’s ‘Theory of Life’ with electricity was Abernethy’s personal contribution to the vitality debate. He believed that vitality and electricity acted in a similar fashion, and had the same relationship to the subject they acted upon (Enquiry, p. 42). It was crucial to his argument that the reader agree that electricity ‘seems to pervade every thing, and appears to be the life of the world’ (ibid., p. 51). In order to back up his argument he turned to another

14 Shelley and Vitality

well-known and acknowledged expert in his ﬁeld, and claimed that Humphry Davy had proved this of electricity. Davy in 1814 was a successful and prominent chemist in the Royal Institution and his most important discoveries had involved using electricity in chemical experiments. In 1806 he identiﬁed an intimate relationship between chemical afﬁnity and electrical energy, and speculated that they were in fact ‘identical’, and even ‘an essential property of matter’. 26 Nonetheless, Abernethy’s interpretation of these ﬁndings must have surprised Davy; he was praised for successfully proving that electricity performed a vital operation in both dead and living matter. Abernethy describes Davy’s achievement: That electricity is something, I could never doubt, and therefore it follows as a consequence in my opinion, that it must be everywhere connected with those atoms of matter, which form the masses that are cognizable to our senses; and that it enters into the composition of every thing, inanimate or animate. If then it be electricity that produces all the chemical changes, we so constantly observe, in surrounding animate objects, analogy induces us to believe that it is electricity which also performs all the chemical operations in living bodies. (Enquiry, p. 49) The proof that electricity is ‘something’ is key to Abernethy’s idea of the relationship between electricity and life. The term identiﬁes electricity as a substance, a thing, which exists independently of the body it enters. This independence was essential to his religious and moral convictions, which were supported by his physiological beliefs – Abernethy believed it was crucial that the mind and the soul be considered separate entities to the body. Lawrence was a well-read and eloquent speaker, delighting his audience with inventive comic representations of Abernethy that displayed his literary knowledge. Through these means Abernethy becomes a ﬁgure of fun, consigned ‘to the vault of all the Capulets’, while his theory of life is ridiculed. Taking the part of Hamlet to Abernethy’s Polonius, Lawrence writes: ‘this vital principle is compared to magnetism, to electricity, and to galvanism; or it is roundly stated to be oxygen: ‘Tis like a camel, or like a whale, or like what you please’ (Introduction, pp. 167, 169). Concentrating on the theory that life was like electricity, which could be instantly recognized as Abernethy’s personal view, Lawrence casts doubt on the way that electricity is

Introduction: A New Dawn 15

perceived as one of these ‘extremely ﬁne and invisible ﬂuids, superadded to the matters in which they are exhibited’ (ibid., p. 169). He ﬁnally states unequivocally that ‘The truth is, there is no resemblance, no analogy between electricity and life … Electricity illustrates life no more than life illustrates electricity’ (ibid., pp. 170–1). There were a number of points on which the debate turned. It can be seen as promoting the tenets of Romanticism against outmoded eighteenth-century ideals. Lawrence argued for empiricism against Abernethy’s analogy; Lawrence asserted his scepticism and distrust of ﬁrst causes, a philosophical position held by Abernethy as tantamount to atheism; Lawrence insisted that life was not a thing but a process. Unfortunately, Lawrence was to ﬁnd that his ideas were too avant garde for his time.

Materialism and atheism While Lawrence claimed that his theory of life had nothing to do with political or religious opinion, Abernethy was quite clear that he was arguing from a moral standpoint. By 1819 commentators on the surgeons’ debate and the debate itself had become obsessed with the religious implications of the surgeons’ respective opinions. Abernethy stated explicitly that there was a moral purpose to his theory of life: it was most important that he prove that the mind and, by analogy, the soul were separate entities. If this were the case, he could argue that ‘the distinct and independent nature of mind, incites us to act rightly from principle’ (Physiological Lectures, p. 50). Appealing for his theory of life to be considered only on scientiﬁc merit, Lawrence emphasized that the existence of the soul was an independent issue, which he did not intend to discuss: ‘the theological doctrine of the soul, and its separate existence, has nothing to do with this physiological question’ (Lectures, p. 8). This was in many ways a test case for the emerging notion of scientiﬁc objectivity. Of course, he was not permitted this and critics of his lectures argued that his real object was to prove that the soul did not exist; the lectures were considered particularly pernicious because of the ‘scientiﬁc mode’ in which he treated the matter (Anon., 1822a, pp. 130–1). Lawrence overstepped the mark when he aligned Abernethy with primitive men who had used the notion of a deity to explain otherwise mysterious natural phenomena. To illustrate his point he cited Pope’s Essay on Man and compared Abernethy to the ‘Poor Indian, whose untutor’d

16 Shelley and Vitality

mind, / Sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind’.27 He ridiculed the idea of a superadded principle, describing it as superstitious nonsense: It seems to me that this hypothesis or ﬁction of a subtle invisible matter, animating the visible textures of animal bodies, and directing their motions, is only an example of that propensity in the human mind, which has led men at all times to account for those phenomena, of which the causes are not obvious, by the mysterious aid of higher and imaginary beings. (Introduction, p. 174) Peter G. Mudford views the vitality debate in the same context as the disapproval aroused by James Hutton’s and Erasmus Darwin’s work, which ‘marked the end of the alliance between science and religion … and revealed the fear that existed among the educated section of the English nation of a repetition in England of the events of 1789’.28 It was not until after the publication of Origin of Species that the ‘right of scientist and physician to think in his own terms, without reference to religion’ was won (Mudford, 1968, p. 434). How could a surgeon discover the soul, Lawrence asked: ‘An immaterial and spiritual being could not have been discovered amid the blood and ﬁlth of the dissecting room’ (Lectures, p. 8). Despite his protestations for objectivity, Lawrence was very aware of the philosophical conclusions that would be drawn from his physiological arguments. Abernethy claimed to have warned him of the consequences of such public avowal of materialist sentiment. In a letter to a friend, Abernethy wrote: ‘He has found what I told him, that he never could broach certain Doctrines without exciting the Suspicion & Resentment of a large part of Society’.29 Abernethy, in contrast, could afford to be explicit. He told his audience at the Royal College that ‘The contemplation of this subject at large, is ﬁtter for meditation in the closet than for discussion in the lecture room’ (Enquiry, pp. 87–8). The nature of vitality was, he believed, a matter for the conscience to decide rather than a subject for objective scientiﬁc investigation. Abernethy was not unaware of the philosophy his interpretation of vitality supported, typiﬁed as it was by a system of hierarchies and controlling external powers. If his theory of life was accepted, Thus even would psychological researches enforce the belief which I may say is natural to man; that in addition to his bodily frame, he possesses a sensitive, intelligent, and independent mind: an opinion

Introduction: A New Dawn 17

which tends in an eminent degree to produce virtuous, honourable, and useful actions. (Enquiry, p. 95) The existence of an independent mind is used to argue that man needs an entity of this nature in order to be virtuous. If physiological studies can prove that it is ‘natural’ for humans to be controlled and regulated by a superadded principle, the legitimacy of externally governing bodies is justiﬁed. Abernethy provides evidence for Edmund Burke’s treatise that individuals need to have their inclination, will and passions controlled ‘by a power out of themselves’, condoning the conservative establishment’s oppressive political, religious and moral actions in the guise of a physiological debate.30 As is clear from these excerpts, the ‘physiological researches’ of both Abernethy and Lawrence were used to ‘enforce’ political and religious beliefs. Shelley recognized this and exploited it to full advantage in such texts as Prometheus Unbound, where eventually man is allowed to be ‘king / Over himself’, rather than the victim of oppressive institutions (III. 4. 196–7). Lawrence compared Abernethy’s superadded vital principle with ‘Bow Street’ or the ‘Old Bailey’ (Lectures, p. 12). Commenting on injustice within contemporary society, Lawrence describes the situation that afﬂicts both Prometheus and man in Shelley’s poetic drama: Among the misfortunes which afﬂict our species, one of the most painful is the situation of a man of courage withheld by a superior power from resisting oppression; and the poetic ﬁctions best calculated to excite compassion, are those which represent sentient beings inclosed [sic] within immoveable beings.31 Lawrence argued that virtue is encouraged and regulated by volitional means, without need of or recourse to an external God or a future state. In contrast, dualists such as Abernethy continued to insist that man would act morally only if authority (both divine and civic) and a system of reward and punishment were enforced from outside the self. Not mentioning Lawrence by name, Abernethy coined a damning term for the ‘party’ Lawrence was held to represent, calling them the ‘Modern Sceptics’ (Physiological Lectures, p. 37). Abernethy describes the modern sceptics’ position: ‘I discover that they wish me to consider life to be nothing; which I take to be the plain English of the Physiology contained in some late French publications relating to this subject’ (p. 38). His interpretation of Lawrence’s idea of life as

18 Shelley and Vitality

‘nothing’ contrasts with his own idea of life as ‘something’; Abernethy believed that the French thought in this way because of the speciﬁc political events that had shaped their national identity. He urged that the British reception of the French physiologists’ ideas be censored: in France, in a nation where the writings both of its philosophers and wits have greatly tended to demoralize the people, I do not therefore wonder that those of their anatomists and physiologists should represent the subject of their studies in a manner conformable to what is esteemed most philosophical or clever. But that in England, the chief excellence of whose inhabitants is, that they are a thinking people, who consider the probable ends of conduct from its beginning; that in this country, particularly after so arduous an examination, and so rational an explanation of the vital phenomena have been presented to us by Mr. Hunter, the mere opinions of some French anatomists, with respect to the nature of life, should be extracted from their general writings, translated, and extolled, cannot, I think, but excite the surprize and indignation of any one fully apprized of their pernicious tendency. (Physiological Lectures, p. 52) Lawrence’s open declaration of the inﬂuence of French writers on his work was interpreted by Abernethy’s supporters as both a political and intellectual betrayal. He was denounced as a materialist and an atheist. A number of outraged medical and non-medical critics attacked Lawrence’s lectures. The surgeons Charles Bell and John Barclay, the writer Lady Shepherd, the Christian advocate for the University of Cambridge and personal friend to Lord Eldon, Thomas Rennell, a Minister in Bath, Edward William Grinﬁeld, wrote full length attacks on Lawrence.32 He countered their charge, of having perverted the honourable ofﬁce, intrusted to me by this Court, to the very unworthy design of propagating opinions detrimental to society, and of endeavouring to enforce them for the purpose of loosening those restraints, on which the welfare of mankind depends. (Lectures, p. 1) This accusation had appeared in many of the conservative journals that reviewed the controversy: the Quarterly charged Lawrence with ‘converting the lecture-room of the College into a school of materialism’.33 Lawrence’s opinions were felt to be particularly dangerous because of his

Introduction: A New Dawn 19

position in society and the inﬂuence he had on a group that already showed a tendency towards scepticism. Lawrence made fun of Abernethy’s shock-tactics, which he portrayed as mere scare-mongering: ‘It is alleged that there is a party of modern sceptics, co-operating in the diffusion of these noxious opinions with a no less terrible band of French physiologists, for the purpose of demoralizing mankind!’ (Lectures, p. 4). Happily appropriating the label of ‘a modern sceptic’, Lawrence turned Abernethy’s attempts to discredit him to his own advantage: A sceptic is one who doubts;—and if this party includes those, who doubt,—or rather who do not doubt at all,—about the electro-chemical doctrine of life, I can have no objection to belong to so numerous and respectable a body. The assent of the mind to any proposition cannot be forced;—it must depend on the weight of evidence and argument. I cannot adopt this hypothesis until some proof of reasoning of a very different nature from any hitherto produced shall be brought forwards. (Lectures, p. 6) In the strictest sense a sceptic, Lawrence professed ‘an entire ignorance of the nature of the vital properties, except in so far as they are disclosed by experience’ (Lectures, 14). He persisted to call for the empirical proof of Abernethy’s assertions, rather than his hypothetical speculation. Lawrence cheekily punned on the word ‘sense’ when he enlarged on the difference between his and Abernethy’s approaches, writing in a footnote: ‘He [Abernethy] “conﬁdes more in the eye of reason than in that of sense”’.34 In 1819 Lawrence published his most radical book, Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and The Natural History of Man, and the issue became a matter of national concern. He was presented as inculcating the young susceptible minds of trainee British surgeons with precisely the same ideals that had led to the French revolution. This was, of course, the year of the Peterloo Massacre, followed by the so-called ‘gagging acts’ and other repressive measures taken by a ruthless government. Lawrence fell victim to this zealousness and 1819 saw the publication of a number of pamphlets, books and journal articles calling for his resignation. Such a hysterical response was unsurprising, considering the current political climate. In April 1819 the governors of Bridewell and Bethlem hospitals held their annual elections and ruled to suspend Lawrence from his position as surgeon. Despite his protestations never to be silenced, Lawrence was persuaded to write a letter to the governors retracting his ‘inﬁdel opinions’ and promising

20 Shelley and Vitality

to ‘suppress and prevent the circulation of his book’.35 Lectures was withdrawn less than a month after having been published, and after receiving his letter the governors reinstated Lawrence. The matter did not end there. After an 1823 pirate edition of the Lectures was published Lawrence applied for copyright for his book. Lord Eldon refused it on the grounds that the material the book contained was blasphemous, seditious and immoral. Eldon’s part in the silencing of Lawrence linked him with the radical writers and poets who had suffered similarly at the hands of the Lord Chancellor, including Byron, Southey and Shelley himself. One book published in the aftermath of Lawrence’s 1819 Lectures was titled The Radical Triumvirate, or the Inﬁdel Paine, Lord Byron, and Surgeon Lawrence.36 The Monthly Magazine supported Lawrence through these trials and published his letter of recantation, dated 16 April 1822, in parallel columns alongside ‘the never-to-be-forgotten abjurations of Galileo’ (Monthly Magazine, 1822, p. 542). The message is clear; Lawrence is regarded as the injured victim of conservative repression, whilst the analogy also implies that his theory of life will prove to be the true one. Richard Carlile published Lawrence’s Lectures and the 1816 Introduction together, with the following inscription: ‘to John, Earl of Eldon, Lord High Chancellor of England, as the result of his injustice in refusing to establish the author’s right of property in them. By the publisher’.37 The Lectures continued to be published until the ninth edition in 1848. While Lawrence made fun of Abernethy’s notion of a ‘party’ of ‘modern sceptics’ there was public acknowledgement of a group of radical thinkers to which Lawrence belonged. The people who had written book-length defences of Lawrence’s theory of life included the surgeon Sir Thomas Charles Morgan, husband of the poet and novelist Sydney Owenson, and Thomas Love Peacock’s friend and correspondent, the naturalist Thomas Forster. There clearly was something in the public conception of Lawrence as politically radical and the government’s perception of him as a danger to national security: in a private letter to William Hone, Lawrence makes it clear that the book’s suppression was a matter of expediency and expressed his admiration for Hone’s ‘much greater courage in these matters’.38 Forster is a ﬁgure who has received little attention to date, though the publication of his correspondence with Peacock should alter this position.39 He has links with Lawrence, Shelley and Peacock, and wrote an anonymously published book ridiculing Abernethy’s vitalism and defending his friend Lawrence. Like Shelley, Forster had originally approved of Abernethy’s emphasis on constitutional health and on the importance of the

Introduction: A New Dawn 21

stomach in disease, and had published on the adverse effects of alcohol on the body. He was introduced to Abernethy by the doctor William Lambe and shared not only this friend with Shelley but also a lifelong belief in vegetarianism and animal rights. Chapter 2 offers new information on the circle that Shelley was part of in London and Bracknell during 1813–14. Forster, Lawrence, Lambe and the vegetarian John Newton are among those Shelley spent time with at this point, discussing medical and political issues. Butler points out that ‘almost all Lawrence’s own publications in the vitalist and evolutionary ﬁeld fall into the years of the conceiving and writing of Frankenstein’ (M. Shelley, 1993, p. xviii). Although, as Butler rightly points out, the period of the Royal College debate was at its most intense during the gestation and composition period of such texts as Frankenstein and Alastor, it was not until 1819 that a wider public interest fully evolved (ibid., p. xvii). The period of 1818–22 witnessed Shelley’s most explicit contributions to the debate, the most obvious being the essay ‘On Life’, ‘The Sensitive Plant’, ‘Lift not the painted veil’, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, and ‘The Triumph of Life’. Shelley may well have felt himself implicated within the attack on the party of ‘Modern Sceptics’ whom Abernethy accused of demoralizing the nation. Shelley suggests the phrase in his essay ‘On the Punishment of Death’, but subverts Abernethy’s derogatory intent, referring to ‘the accurate philosophy of what I may be permitted to term the modern Academy by shewing [sic] the prodigious depth & extent of our ignorance respecting the causes & nature of sensation’ (BSM, VI, adds. e.8, 25). Shelley’s phrase ‘modern Academy’ incorporates the philosophical scepticism linked with Lawrence, whilst speciﬁcally echoing William Drummond’s Academical Questions, which itself alludes to Plato’s Academy.40 Just as Shelley’s friend Thomas Forster regarded Abernethy’s charges as a personal insult, Shelley must have been aware that Abernethy’s attack was not just on Lawrence but took in a wider circle of contemporary radical thinkers apparently threatening the nation. Shelley’s perception of the contemporary political atmosphere in Britain as it is reﬂected in the pre-revolutionary world of Prometheus Unbound was shaped by the tyranny and oppression under which Lawrence, along with ﬁgures such as Priestley, Paine, Hone, Carlile, Byron and Shelley himself, had suffered. Shelley uses the vitality debate to provide a language and images with which to represent the unhappy existence of humans before the fall of Jupiter and the changed, free and healthy existence which mortals enjoy after this event. In his early discussions of vitality Shelley states that ‘intelligence & bodily animation …

22 Shelley and Vitality

are in their nature conjoined, and as we suppose, as we observe, inseparable’ (Letters, I, 100–1, 11 June 1811). He is aligning himself here with the monist Lawrence, who refused to see existence as determined by material and immaterial elements. Empiricism had led Lawrence to believe that there was only matter, that the body and the mind or spirit were inseparable. Hamilton imagines Shelley asking ‘What happens to an idea of authority inseparable from the natural processes of mutability and decay to which all are subject?’ (2000, p. 4). The prospect is unthinkable for Shelley and, thus, materialism offers him optimism. Shelley alludes to Lawrence’s theory of life as organization: ‘Some Philosophers – and those to whom we are indebted for the most stupendous discoveries in physical scence [sic] – suppose … that spirit intelligence & life is the mere result of certain combinations of among the particles of its objects’ (BSM, XV, 153 rev). The phrase ‘& life’ has been crossed out by Shelley though it is still clearly legible. It is clear from Shelley’s late essay ‘On the Punishment of Death’ that he believed the body and the mind to be inseparable; he believed that mental illness should be treated differently because the body’s disorders affect mental powers. Shelley writes that we should not omit to calculate how ‘the accidents of disease & temperament [and] organization & circumstance … affect the mind opinions & the conduct … & the happiness of individuals’ (BSM, VI, 26). Shelley follows Lawrence, and Godwin, when he links the mind with the body: ‘In old age the mind gradually withers, & as it grew & was strengthened with the body, so does it together with the body fall does it sink into decrepitude’ (‘Essay on a Future State’, BSM, XV, 142–1 rev, crossings out are Shelley’s own). The mind depends upon the material body. This book will begin with the science of life and move on to consider Shelley’s use of this material in his writings. The ﬁrst chapter offers a context for the scientiﬁc study of life, considering the link between radical politics and the search for a vital principle in the work of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century scientists Beddoes, Darwin, Davy and Priestley. This provides the background for a full exposition of the debate between Abernethy and Lawrence from 1814–19. The second chapter explores the new evidence of Shelley’s interest in surgery, from his own attempts to become a surgeon to new links made between him and St Bartholomew’s Hospital and its surgeons. In particular, Shelley’s cousin, John Grove, Godwin, and Peacock’s friend, Thomas Forster, provide previously undetected connections to Lawrence, making the case for his being part of Shelley’s circle in London during the poet’s residence there. Chapter 2 also

Introduction: A New Dawn 23

analyses Shelley’s extensive notes of Davy’s Elements of Chemistry, and places these for the ﬁrst time in the context of Shelley’s interest in organic chemistry. The remaining chapters read a number of Shelley’s poems in this new historical and scientiﬁc context. Chapter 3 concentrates on Prometheus Unbound, composed in 1819 when the vitality debate was at its most public. In many ways this text can be seen as a response to attacks such as the Quarterly’s on both Shelley and Lawrence’s lectures. Various aspects of Prometheus are considered, the furies’ understanding of physiology and vitality in Act One, the afﬁnity between electricity and life in the character of Asia and in the mesmeric encounter of Panthea and Prometheus, and Shelley’s use of vitality in the utopian ‘new life’ visualized in Act Four. The fourth chapter considers Shelley’s appropriation of terms that were associated with contemporary deﬁnitions of life: sensibility, irritability and mutability. Shelley explores these medical concepts in poems such as ‘The Sensitive Plant’, ‘Lift not the painted veil which those who live / Call life’, ‘Mutability’ and ‘The Cloud’ to exploit their political, philosophical and aesthetic possibilities. The case for Shelley’s materialism is given here, as I examine the scepticism and empiricism proposed by Shelley’s comments on vitality. The ﬁnal chapter reads Adonais and The Defence of Poetry in this new light, exploring the way in which the vocabulary of vitality is used in Shelley’s metaphorical language to explore cycles of history and of life, concepts of genius and origins and endings. Contemporary thinking on the nature of life galvanized Shelley’s writing. The medical study of vitality inspired his poetry with a new language and a potential afﬁnity between the physical, mental and societal. Retrieving this language and these theories gives us an insight into his reading and knowledge as well as into the ways in which these are used. In the poems considered in this study, theories of life are both the subject of Shelley’s discussion and the means by which his political, historical, aesthetic and material convictions are expressed.

1 The Vitality Debate, 1814–19

Vitality and radical scientists From around 1800 there existed a new general concept of ‘life’.1 In 1819, William Lawrence was the ﬁrst to introduce the word ‘biology’ into the English language and deﬁned it as ‘biology, or the science of life’.2 The more usual term was physiology, which, as William Coleman has discussed, was virtually synonymous with our present understanding of ‘biology’ as ‘the study of living creatures, including the description and explanation of their structure, vital processes, and manner of production’.3 In Romantic science vitality was an issue that ‘occupied a central place in English physiological and medical thought from approximately 1780 until 1830’.4 Coleman writes that ‘With few but signiﬁcant exceptions little attention prior to about 1780 was accorded the vital processes of plants and animals for their sake alone’ (1977, p. 3). This new way of thinking of life is bound up with a distinct shift in the politics, literature and attitude which constitutes that loose web of ties we call Romanticism. Mechanistic ideas of the body and of the laws of animation were replaced with a new sense of an all-inclusive constantly ﬂuctuating sea of life. Concentrating on those scientists whose work Shelley knew, it is possible to consider their research and the major discoveries of the period as contributing to the wider debate concerning the vital properties and functions of the living body. The writers in this chapter offer a variety of perspectives on the debate. Priestley, Darwin and Walker have their own opinions on what the principle of life is, but all are committed to a radical political and unorthodox religious agenda. Each of these scientists was considered part of a revolutionary Midlands society constituting a threat to contemporary ‘Church and 24

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 25

King’ supporters. In contrast, Davy can be seen to reject and deny his youthful materialist theories of life and to take a place within the conservative establishment, whose full power eventually falls on William Lawrence. This chapter explores the context for the vitality debate between Abernethy and Lawrence, considering, in particular, those scientists Shelley knew and read. Links between radical politics and vitalism were ever present in the study of life. M.H. Abrams has discussed how the move at the end of the eighteenth century to consider life as something other than, and transcendent of, the mechanical body represents a shift towards the concerns at the heart of Romanticism.5 Coleridge’s theory of organicism was inﬂuenced by his scientiﬁc reading and knowledge, with particular debts to the radicals Joseph Priestley and Thomas Beddoes. The radical origins of vitalism were subsumed within the vitalism used in the second decade of the nineteenth century to support a conservative political agenda. The shift in Coleridge’s personal political beliefs mirrors this movement. In the 1790s he was inﬂuenced by David Hartley; by 1810 he ridicules this theory of life and instead argues for a far more conservative notion of a soul, an immaterial mind and the design of an omnipotent God.6 By the time that the second generation Romantics, Byron, Shelley and Mary Shelley, are discussing vitality in Villa Dodati in Geneva, any divergence from this establishment line is considered materialist and atheist. Chemistry’s contribution to the ‘science of life’ was an important one. During the Romantic period, chemists set to work analysing the living and dead matter of animals and vegetables. Previously, the greatest progress had been made in inorganic chemistry, studying minerals and other non-living matter.7 The major discoveries of organic chemistry had not yet been made: living matter could not be reproduced in laboratories and the uniqueness of living animal and vegetable substances seemed indisputable. Death was seen as the great chemist. Mysteriously, living matter resisted the operations of the chemical decomposition to which all inanimate bodies were subject, but with death and the onset of putrefaction, vegetable and animal matter became like inanimate matter: they could be broken down into elements which chemists could analyse, and be combined with similar elements in the earth. Romantic-period chemistry promised greater knowledge of the relationships and differences between the animate and inanimate, the living and dead, the vegetable and animal. The ﬁndings of chemists were used to prove and disprove various theories about the characteristics which distinguished ‘life’ from other states of

26 Shelley and Vitality

being, and chemists themselves were quick to speculate on the implications of their discoveries for the contemporary debate on the nature and principles of vitality. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the debate on which other elements were vital for the survival of living beings was still unresolved, although botany did much to improve knowledge of what was necessary for plant life. Stephen Hales, early in the eighteenth century, had found that plants contained large quantities of air. He was the ﬁrst to draw an analogy between animal lungs and the leaves of a plant and recognized their identical respiratory functions. Similarities continued to be discovered between plants and animals; the necessity of food, water, air, light and heat to life was examined. Priestley inadvertently discovered photosynthesis during his experiments on plant life, although he did not immediately recognize the importance of light in the process.8 Beyond these analogies, there was a growing awareness that animals and plants needed each other to survive. The experiments with air showed that animals needed oxygen but exhaled carbon, while plants needed carbon and gave out oxygen. Joseph Priestley’s pneumatic experiments established the fact that the vital element in the air we breathe is oxygen, also known as ‘vital air’ or ‘vital gas’ in the chemistry textbooks of the period.9 He never called this gas oxygen: it was Lavoisier who named the gas after its acidity principle. In the account of his discovery in Philosophical Transactions Priestley measures the new air in terms of its ‘goodness’, the term used to describe its ability to be respired.10 He also established that vegetables produced oxygen and was awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society in 1773 for his ground-breaking work. In his address to the Society, the President, Sir John Pringle, spoke of Priestley’s achievement as a revelation of Nature’s mysterious workings: From these discoveries we are assured, that no vegetable grows in vain, but that from the oak of the forest to the grass of the ﬁeld, every individual plant is serviceable to mankind; if not always distinguished by some private virtue, yet making a part of the whole which cleanses and puriﬁes our atmosphere. In this the fragrant rose and deadly nightshade co-operate.11 Pringle imagines a natural world that works in harmony to sustain the human race. The empirical fact that air ‘vitiated’ by either combustion or respiration could be ‘restored’ by vegetation implied an ordained economy in the world (Golinski, 1992, pp. 77–8). Priestley proved that

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 27

contaminated air could be restored by the introduction of living plants (Orange, 1974, p. 775). The quantity of air necessary for our existence was being constantly restored and puriﬁed naturally. In Pringle’s world no element had been created without purpose; each had its mutually beneﬁcial role. For Priestley, the fact that air could be made wholesome again proved, in Ian Wylie’s words, ‘that the benevolent Creator sustained the very breath of man’ (Wylie, 1989, p. 71). John Thelwall’s discussion of ‘life’, presented to the Physical Society at Guy’s Hospital in 1793 and published as An Essay Towards a Deﬁnition of Animal Vitality, shows how by this point air had been rejected in Britain as a candidate for the ‘vivifying principle’, but still seemed to offer an analogy with it: But what is this something—this vivifying principle?—Is it atmospheric air itself?—Certainly not. The coats of the arteries, and the membranous linings of the cells of the lungs, forbid the access of such an element; besides, it has been proved by experiment, that in the arteries of the living body there is no air. Something, however, it must be, that is contained in the atmosphere, and something of a powerful and exquisitely subtile nature.12 By the 1790s, air had been ruled out as the single principle of life. Yet vitalists still felt that knowledge of respiration might illustrate how the vital principle operated. Nicholas Roe, writing on Thelwall, describes this lecture as fusing ‘advanced science’ with ‘revolutionary politics’ (Roe, 2001, p. 1). Water was another substance essential to life: Lavoisier had found the presence of both ‘pure air’ (oxygen) and ‘inﬂammable air’ (hydrogen) in water. In an impressive experiment, Lavoisier separated water into hydrogen and oxygen and then recombined them to create water again (Golinski, 1992, p. 133). Priestley, ever suspicious of Lavoisier, did not believe that this had been achieved. He continued to believe that water was an imponderable, like heat. For Priestley, politics was never far from science; he saw his discoveries as weapons against the forces of ‘Church and King’, and when the mob retaliated in Birmingham in 1791 they did so by destroying his laboratory, manuscripts and library. Priestley’s materialism, which, as Wylie has observed, had such an inﬂuence on Coleridge’s poetry of the 1790s, redeﬁned matter as active rather than inert (Wylie, 1989). In his Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777), Priestley argued that there was no reason to think

28 Shelley and Vitality

that there ‘are two distinct kinds of substance in human nature’, which ‘have been distinguished by the terms matter and spirit, or mind’.13 In fact, he argued that neither matter nor spirit, in other words, the body and the soul, existed in the way that they were commonly thought. He believed that matter was capable of certain powers, the possession of which denominated it as active: ‘matter is not that inert substance that it has been supposed to be … powers of attraction or repulsion are necessary to its very being’ (Priestley, 1771, p. xxxviii). As for the soul, there was no reason to assume that it was so different from the body: It is, likewise maintained in this treatise that the notion of two substances that have no common property, and yet are capable of intimate connection and mutual action is both absurd and modern; a substance without extension or relation to place being unknown both in the scriptures, and to all antiquity; the human mind for example, having till lately been thought to have a proper presence in the body, and a proper motion together with it; and the Divine Mind having always been represented as being, truly and properly, omnipresent. (Priestley, 1771, pp. xxxviii–xxxix). Priestley argued that thought depended upon the brain, and proof of this came when a person’s brain was injured or destroyed (1771, p. 27). Priestley’s science was intimately connected with his religious beliefs; he believed God to be the source of these active powers, which could not exist otherwise. Indeed God himself was ‘far from being immaterial’.14 Priestley featured among the ‘elect band’, of whom Coleridge wrote in his poem Religious Musings, and inﬂuenced Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s ‘one life’ theories of the 1790s in poetry that Shelley greatly admired. In all his scientiﬁc discoveries Priestley emphasized the radical and dissenting agenda to his work; he hoped to bring about the end of superstition, prejudice and intolerance: The rapid process of knowledge, which like the progress of a wave of the sea, or of light from the sun, extends itself not in this way or that way only, but in all directions, will, I doubt not, be the means, under God, of extirpating all error and prejudice, and of putting an end to all undue and usurped authority in the business of religion as well as of science; and all the efforts of the interested friends of corrupt establishments of all kinds, will be ineffectual for their support in this enlightened age … the English hierarchy (if there be

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 29

anything unsound in its constitution) has equal reason to tremble even at an air pump, or an electrical machine.15 Shelley shared the belief that scientiﬁc knowledge could destroy superstition and prejudice. Priestley’s enthusiasm for the French Revolution made him the target of satire and conservative suspicion. Burke, in Reﬂections on the Revolution in France, referred to Priestley and what he considered rash enthusiasm for the Revolution with an analogy from pneumatic science: The wild gas, the ﬁxed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgment [sic] until the ﬁrst effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface. (Burke, 1790, p. 8) Shelley associated those who ‘burnt the House of Priestley’ with the ‘swinish multitude … the undiscriminating million’ he is ﬁghting against himself (Letters, I, 294, 7 May 1812). One of the Midlands Lunar Society members, Erasmus Darwin, was read and much admired by Shelley, who read The Botanic Garden (1791), Zoonomia (1794–6) and The Temple of Nature (1803).16 Desmond KingHele has explored the many ways in which Shelley’s poetry was inﬂuenced by the ideas he read.17 The ‘sensorial power’ or ‘spirit of animation’ was a central character in Darwin’s Zoonomia; The Botanic Garden mythologized the creation of the world and all living forms, and The Temple of Nature is thoroughly indebted to Lucretius, arguing that matter is indestructible and immortal.18 Darwin was a vitalist in the sense that he believed that neither the laws of mechanics nor chemistry were entirely sufﬁcient to explain the phenomena of life. However, Alan Richardson has shown how the ‘spirit of animation’ in his Zoonomia is made of matter (2001, p. 13). In his lifetime, he was widely regarded as a radical and an atheist, though, as Martin Priestman has discussed, Darwin did in fact believe that a ﬁrst cause had created life although he did not see further evidence of God’s involvement in the world.19 Vitality is a central issue in all of Darwin’s works. He speaks with conﬁdence of the ‘spirit of animation’, identiﬁed as a power of excitability which needs to be constantly replenished by nutrition, breathing and warmth, but which eventually diminishes and fails, causing the feebleness of old age and our eventual death.20 Indeed, it literally wears itself out. During life, however, the vital principle was

30 Shelley and Vitality

renewable: ‘The perpetual necessity of breathing shews, that the material thus acquired is perpetually consuming or escaping, and on that account requires perpetual renovation’.21 He thought of the living principle as a kind of matter, which ‘resides in the brain and nerves, and is liable to general or partial diminution or accumulation’ (Darwin, 1803, I, Section 4). He calls the vital principle an ‘ethereal ﬂuid’, which causes the body’s ﬁbres to contract, an ability which characterizes organized living matter and distinguishes it from inanimate forms (Darwin, 1973, I, 245n). The Temple of Nature tracks the development of individual man from birth to death, and of human life from its creation to the ﬁnal catastrophe. He speaks of a ‘living line’ and a ‘living web’; such tropes describe the traditional eighteenth-century notion of a hierarchical order from beast to man, but also his certainty that all matter, whether ‘a Monarch or a mushroom’, will after death merge and live again in another form (Darwin, 1973, I, 253, 259, IV, 383).22 He believes that minerals were once alive: mountains and all types of rock originally ‘Rose from the wrecks of animal or herb’ (Darwin, 1973, IV, 442). Darwin’s earth is teeming with life, from the microscopic ‘ens’ to the mountains. Life is a powerful agent that temporarily, and only brieﬂy, stops ever-mutating forms changing: ‘Contractile earths in sentient forms arrange, / And Life triumphant stays their chemic change’ (Darwin, 1973, I, 419–20). It becomes clear that the natural condition for matter is one of change, decay and new composition: ‘Organic matter, unreclaim’d by Life, / Reverts to elements by chemic strife’ (Darwin, 1973, II, 7–8). Life only momentarily reclaims organic matter for its purposes. Chemistry has the original and the ultimate claim upon matter. Living bodies are also distinguished by their ‘appetencies’, a desire to unite with other bodies. Darwin imbues living matter with the desire to join with other living matter (Darwin, 1973, II, 39n). After death, the chemical powers of attraction and repulsion succeed appetencies. Though Darwin allowed for two types of element in the world, material and immaterial, he clearly did not think that the immaterial one was the proper subject of science: By the words spirit of animation or sensoral power, I mean only that animal life which mankind possesses in common with brutes, and in some degree even with vegetables, and leave the consideration of the immortal part of us, which is the object of religion, to those who treat of revelation. (Darwin, 1803, I, 80)

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 31

The material effects of the living principle could be evinced in the motions of the blood, animal ﬁbres and muscles: the living principle ‘resides throughout the body, without being cognizable to our senses, except by its effects’ (Darwin, 1803, I, 5). Darwin thinks it ridiculous to believe that the principle of life can move and effect matter without being, in some part, matter itself: ‘This immaterial agent [the spirit of animation] is supposed to act in or with matter, but to be quite distinct from it, and to be equally capable of existence, after the matter, which now possesses it, is decomposed’ (ibid., 79). As matter dies so does life. The Temple of Nature published a year after Darwin’s death was not well-received. Clearly inﬂuenced by Lucretius, and despite Darwin’s un-Lucretian belief in the ‘First Great Cause’, or the ‘Ens Entium’, the poem was regarded as outrageously atheistic (1973, IV, 453n). The consoling message throughout The Temple of Nature, is that there is no real death: all things ‘Live but to die, and die but to revive!’ (1973, II, 42). Adam Walker, Shelley’s early scientiﬁc mentor, was an advocate of a particular brand of Enlightenment science, typiﬁed by Priestley. He was one of three educationalists linked with Priestley, whose role was an important part of Priestley’s objective to make science accessible to all. Walker ﬁrst lectured at Birmingham, and then moved to London where he lectured each winter in Hanover Square (he was still lecturing there in 1807), and at schools, including those Shelley attended, Syon House and Eton. His audiences in London are described as ‘large and genteel’ and Walker himself is described as a ‘midwife’ to contemporary scientiﬁc discoveries.23 Rather than being thought of as the amateurish entertainer that Shelley critics often represent him as, Walker is often given the epithet ‘celebrated’ before his name.24 He corresponded with many leading scientists, remained the personal friend of Priestley, and held a long list of patents for mechanical inventions. His lectures were republished throughout his lifetime.25 Walker had ﬁrst made the acquaintance of Priestley after Walker wrote to him enquiring about one of his discoveries. He soon met the other members of the Lunar Society, and this letter from Boulton to Watt shows the reputation he had before they had even met him: The Philosopher Walker is come to Town & begins a Course of Lectures on Monday. I expect from ye Sylibus [sic] he will set people a talking about Engines. I have Subscribed but cant [sic] attend. He dines with me Tomorrow. I think it better to make him a friend than an Enemy.26

32 Shelley and Vitality

The dinner took place with Walker, his wife, and William Withering at Boulton’s house. As Roderick Tweedy has written, the world in which Walker taught was one of societies and philosophical associations, which conservative authorities did their best to prohibit in the 1790s.27 Where Walker has been seen as a ﬁgure on the peripheries of science by Shelley critics, it is clear that he was actually a key and solicited member of the scientiﬁc community. The Chapter Coffee House in London is mentioned a number of times in connection with Walker. Josiah Wedgwood’s Commonplace Book records a meeting with Walker in London: ‘Society at the Chapter Coffee House now held at Mr. Walkers [sic] Lecture room’. Those present included ‘Dr. Keir, Mr. Wedgwood, Dr. Priestley, Mr. Boulton, Mr. Whitehurst’ (Schoﬁeld, 1963, p. 234). In 1781 ‘Professor John Playfair was introduced … “to a chemical society”’ which met at the Chapter Coffee House, and which included ‘Mr. Whitehurst … Dr. Keir, Dr. Crauford [sic] and several others’.28 Walker believed that all forms of electricity, light and heat were modiﬁcations of the same single principle, which he preferred to call ‘ﬁre’. Despite the substantial changes that he made to the last corrected 1804 edition of his Analysis, he retained the word ‘ﬁre’ throughout this and subsequent editions. In Walker’s model, ﬁre in its ‘elementary state’ is electricity and the sun is the source of electricity (Walker, 1802, I, 142). For Walker, ﬁre is a simple substance, pure and indivisible. The ﬁre that we know in our everyday lives is an impure, contaminated product, having joined with other gross ‘terrestrial matter’. All bodies have latent ﬁre within them and their ability to catch alight easily depends upon their being able to receive and contain ﬁre. Fire has many ‘various appearances’ and ‘transforms into that thin ﬂuid we call our atmosphere’. It is a chameleon substance, ‘deriving its various character from the substances with which it is combined’ (ibid.). In Analysis, Walker writes that ﬁre is the only truly ﬂuid substance, and that if air did not contain ﬁre it would be solid. The operations of ﬁre are unknowable to the human senses; because its particles are ‘inﬁnitely small’ it can enter into all bodies, easily penetrating even the most solid (Walker, 1766, p. 41). It unites itself with blood, via air, goes into the lungs and is carried around every part of the body. Indeed, air is composed of three elements according to Walker: vital air, azotic air and ﬁre (Walker, 1802, I, 34). Presumably because it contains ﬁre, air is characterized as another extremely ‘subtle’ element, that ‘pervades the pores of all bodies’ (Walker, 1766, p. 23). The atmosphere is made up

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 33

of any number of elements in gaseous state, including the perspiration of living beings and the putrid vapours given off by the dead (Walker, 1802, I, 254). The body in Walker’s System is not much more than a vehicle through which light and air ﬂow; these elements come from the atmosphere and will eventually return to it. In the preface to System, Walker refers to his ‘ﬁre’ hypothesis as the book’s most original element. His ‘leading problems’ are to establish the veracity of this theory and to prove that ﬁre, light and heat are the ‘grand agents in the order of nature’ (Walker, 1802, II, xi). Walker’s is a Priestleyan world-view; he prefers the term ‘equilibrium’ to express his notion of a self-generating earth, which sustains and restores itself to a constant condition. On a microcosmic scale, ﬁre rushes out to make external bodies the same temperature as itself and thereby achieve an equilibrium (ibid., 75). The gesture performs in miniature the action of the world, where lightning restores the equilibrium of the earth and the vegetable world restores the contamination caused by the animal world: From this smoke, putrid efﬂuvia, calcination of metals, and breathing of animals, the air must be continually contaminating and unﬁtting for respiration. Providence has wisely made the vegetable kingdom the cure for this evil; for plants imbibe nutrition from putrid and azotic air at their leaves, as may be seen by the superior vigour in plants growing near large cities; by their growing on walls without earth, and by green plants put in noxious air, which imbibe nourishment, and cure the air at the same time. (Walker, 1807, p. 42) He added this passage to the last changed edition, concluding ‘the plant becomes nourished by the same process by which the air is cured; thus do the animal and vegetable kingdoms mutually work for each other’ (ibid., p. 32). Walker rarely distinguishes between animals and vegetables when he speaks of nature and of life; he thinks that they have equivalent vital systems. His distinction between the animate and the inanimate, in contrast, is complete: The death of plants is similar to the death of animals; the functions of both seem to depend on irritability, or the vital principle. When the vital principle ceases to operate, they are no longer subject to vital afﬁnity, but to chemical afﬁnity; by which, having lost their vital

34 Shelley and Vitality

principle, they do not perish, but only lose their organic structure; and soon germinate again into other organised bodies. (Walker, 1802, I, 203) The living, whether animals or plants, are subject to their own mysterious laws and not to the laws that govern the rest of the universe. As soon as they die chemistry can take its usual course and the matter that once made up a living body, now divided into its constituent elements, continues to unite and combine with other atoms outside the body. Walker imagines a kind of internal force that holds the living body together and believes it is impervious to the action of external powers.

Humphry Davy: Romantic scientist In the generation after Darwin and Priestley, Humphry Davy also speculated on the chemical composition of life, though with a very different political agenda. Without doubt the most famous chemist of his time, Humphry Davy’s career spanned a paradigmatic shift in chemistry as a discipline, and a shift away from the materialism of his early circle, which originally included such ﬁgures as Coleridge, Southey, Roget and a number of prominent radical scientists. Davy’s early materialism was replaced by a conservative vitalism, which reﬂected his personal move away from provincial, socially-motivated science to institutionalized science, in the context of the national government’s swing from pro-French enthusiasm to oppressive measures at home and abroad. His career began with scientists associated with Priestley and Darwin, but ended with him playing a role in silencing that same circle. Davy’s importance to this book is not simply in the fact that Shelley read his Elements of Chemistry (1812) and read and carefully took notes from Davy’s Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (1813); Davy’s case demonstrates the changing attitudes to the theories of life put forward by scientists of the period.29 For this reason I concentrate here on Davy’s early and late career, while the next chapter examines those works Shelley knew. Davy’s early mentor was Thomas Beddoes, who had taken up the challenge posed by Priestley’s ﬁndings on the therapeutic beneﬁts of ‘airs’ or gases.30 Using the theories of John Mayow, whose writings he edited and published, Beddoes set up the Pneumatic Institute at Clifton, Bristol, to treat consumption, one of the period’s biggest killers, with these medical preparations. He was friendly with most of

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 35

the Lunar Society’s members, was Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s son-inlaw, and corresponded and collaborated with Darwin, Watt and Withering (Schoﬁeld, 1963, p. 5). In 1792 he was forced to resign from the readership he had held at Oxford for two years because of the reaction to his open support of the French revolution and criticism of the British government (Levere, 1981, pp. 10–11). When he died in 1808 The Gentleman’s Magazine was blunt in its condemnation: ‘that his philosophical speculations had a direct tendency to Atheism is well known … In short he was a disciple of Darwin’s whose “Temple of Nature” is more glaringly Atheistical than even the poem of Lucretius de rerum natura.’31 Beddoes was a prominent political ﬁgure, who obtained support for his scientiﬁc endeavours from his political allies. Thomas Wedgwood funded the Clifton project and James Watt built the apparatus used there.32 The treatment given at the Pneumatic Institute was inﬂuenced by John Brown’s vitalist theory of ‘excitability’. The theory was more inﬂuential in Italy and Germany than in Britain, but, signiﬁcantly, Beddoes, Darwin and Coleridge were among its converts.33 Beddoes publicized Brown’s work and he wrote an introduction for a new edition of The Elements of Medicine in 1795.34 Beddoes reduced Brown’s theory of life to a number of principles: ‘I. That every animated being is allotted a certain portion only of the quality or principle, on which the phenomena of life depend. This principle is denominated EXCITABILITY’ (Brown, 1795, I, cxxvii). Brown divided diseases into those caused by an excess of excitement, the sthenic, and those caused by an insufﬁcient degree of excitement, the asthenic, and advised that they be treated accordingly. While Davy was employed as Beddoes’s superintendent he was closer in thought and politics to his mentor than he later liked to admit. Exceeding even his former friends, Southey and Coleridge, in his swing from radical to conservative, Davy’s time in Bristol came to be an embarrassment to his later social and professional ambitions. His early materialism is apparent in the unpublished notebooks and letters from the period before and during his time in Bristol. Writing in 1797, 19-year-old Davy puts forward the materialist case that ‘The Thinking Powers depend on Organisation.’35 These notebooks are a maze of crossings out, pages cut out and additional supportive or angry, conﬂicting comments; Davy clearly read them again later in life when his views were very different. Despite what he later claimed, it is apparent that at this point in his life, during his time at Bristol, Davy was a materialist. He believed that the mind

36 Shelley and Vitality

depended on the brain, and proved this by citing cases where patients were mentally deranged by physical disorders. His vitriolic denunciation of Christian dogmatism is particularly revealing. Tracing the idea of a soul back to ancient Egypt, Davy accuses ‘Crafty Priests’ of inventing the concept so ‘that they might make men more subservient to their ends’ (RI MS HD 13f, p. 21). The following reads like the words of a radical materialist and atheist: Prejudice shoud [sic] never lead us to believe theories which are absurd & contrary to common sense. The body is a ﬁne tuned Machine. The nerves are those parts which convey sensation to the brain … The Passions depend on the tune of the nervous System. Those whose nerves are ﬁnely formed & harmoniously disposed have ﬁne feelings & Passions. This is what we call susceptibility which is often supposed to be an attribute of the Soul. A Man in a Lethargy loses this susceptibility when the Generality of the nerves are primarily affected. (RI MS HD 13f, pp. 16–17) His debt to the materialist Julien Offray de La Mettrie is obvious here.36 In another notebook Davy states that it is probable ‘that the phaenomena of life are capable of chemical solution’, and Davy continued to believe for some years during his investigations into nitrous oxide and his early galvanic experiments that vitality could be distilled into a chemical preparation, the exact balance of which would ultimately determine how to control happiness as well as health and longevity.37 The young Davy is a republican, advocating this as ‘The Most Perfect form of Government’, and he portrays the state of Britain in recent years as ‘a mighty Nation groaning under the Chains of Tyranny & sustaining the pang of Oppression’ (RI MS HD 13f, p. 23). These sentiments continue in notebooks kept into the 1800s. His published works of this period also demonstrate his materialist ideas. In 1799, before Davy became superintendent at the Pneumatic Institute, Thomas Beddoes had published an essay written by him in Contributions to Physical and Medical Knowledge. Davy’s contribution includes ‘observations on the chemistry of life’.38 In this, Davy argued that Lavoisier’s analysis of oxygen was incorrect on two counts: in the belief that caloric was matter, and in ignoring the signiﬁcant presence of light in all chemical processes (Davy, 1799, p. 60). Oxygen, in Davy’s mind, should properly be called ‘phosoxygen’, recognizing the presence of light. Respiration, then, becomes the chemical combination of light,

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 37

oxygen and blood, rather than the decomposition of air in the lungs. In this operation, light has an essential role to life and is as vital as oxygen for the operation of the body’s nervous and muscular systems. Light is an ‘etherial principle’, which connects the nerves to the brain: ‘Light enters into the composition of living bodies. To understand these combinations is of inﬁnite importance to man. On the existence of this principle in organic compounds, perception, thought, and happiness, appear to depend’ (Davy, 1799, p. 127). After this was published, the young Davy was denounced as a hotblooded materialist. The British Critic, reviewing the collection, declared that ‘the hypothetical conjectures on light and heat, considered as the product of a young man are ingenious, though not solid; but as leading to materialism, they are evidently highly objectionable’.39 Davy blamed Beddoes for publishing his speculations prematurely. The Bristol circle at this time was bound by political as well as scientiﬁc ties. Southey had come to Bristol to be nearer to Beddoes, his doctor.40 Coleridge joined him and probably ﬁrst met Beddoes in 1795 at public demonstrations against the Pitt-Grenville government’s ‘Gagging Bills’ (Levere, 1981, p. 11). Davy and Coleridge became particularly close in Bristol. Coleridge introduced Davy to Godwin with great success, recording that Godwin ‘talks every where of him as the most extraordinary human Being, he had ever met with.’41 In Bristol, Davy’s radical circle ‘seditionized’ and tried nitrous oxide, ﬁnding a connection between the two; the results of their experiments made Davy’s career and led him away from his friends and their politics.42 Davy proof-read the Lyrical Ballads at Wordsworth’s request, and Southey’s Thalaba (Southey, 1965, I, 234).43 There are hints in letters and other writings from this time that Davy’s real objective was to discover the seat and nature of life. In his essay in Contributions, Davy saw ‘phosoxygen’ as ‘the pabulum vitæ of organic beings’, and nitrogen interested him because of its ‘important part in the phoenomena [sic] of life’ (Davy, 1799, pp. 83, 95). When Davy began work on the Voltaic pile, he told Coleridge that he had made some important discoveries ‘which seem to lead to the door of the temple of the mysterious god of Life’.44 After his move to the Royal Institution in 1800, Davy made deliberate efforts not to follow, or be seen to endorse, the same agenda as his early mentors Priestley and Beddoes. Davy had seen their expressed aims of using chemistry to aid social reform damage their personal and professional reputations, and he disassociated himself from either the politics or the science of the Bristol circle after his move to London.45 He never veered from the broadly conservative in his public roles in

38 Shelley and Vitality

the Royal Institution and, later, as President of the Royal Society; indeed, he became part of the scientiﬁc establishment that Beddoes and Priestley had battled against throughout their careers. Davy was active in developing an animal chemistry society that was made up of establishment ﬁgures whose experiments put forward a uniﬁed vitalist theory of life.46 Founder members included the chemists Davy, Charles Hatchett, William Thomas Brande, and possibly Henry Cavendish (he died soon after it began), the physician William Babington, and two surgeons, Everard Home and Benjamin Brodie. The Society met regularly from 1808 until 1825, their main objective being to prove a vitalist theory of life. Speaking directly of the work being done by Club members Home and Brande, Davy makes it clear that the club’s efforts proved a vitalist rather than a materialist view of life: The laws of living and dead nature appear to be perfectly distinct: material powers are made subservient to the purposes of life, and the elements of matter are newly arranged in living organs; but they are merely the instruments of a superior principle.47 There was a transparent political agenda to the concerted effort made by the scientists in the Animal Chemistry Club to prove that life was a vitalist principle. By this point, any alternative view of life was associated with French revolutionaries and radical politics, and the eminent members of this Club refused even to allow speculation on the issue. Since he left the Bristol circle Davy maintained an uncompromising anti-materialist stance; somewhat rewriting his life, he reﬂected in his last days: ‘The doctrine of the materialists was always, even in my youth, a cold, heavy, dull and insupportable doctrine to me, and necessarily tending to atheism.’48 Byron’s letters and journals show that he knew Davy and Lady Davy well; while he lived in England he regularly visited them, and in 1820 Davy visited him at Ravenna. On this occasion Byron described Davy as ‘the Man of Chemistry’.49 Davy admired Byron’s poetry, though by this point in Davy’s life they clearly held very different opinions.50 By a strange quirk of fate, Teresa Guiccioli, Byron’s former mistress, became Davy’s companion in his last illness and taught him Italian (Knight, 1992, p. 169).

Abernethy and Lawrence John Abernethy was apprenticed, in 1779, aged ﬁfteen, to one of the three St Bartholomew’s surgeons, Charles Blicke, and after this seven-year

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 39

apprenticeship had been a dresser for Percival Pott, but he felt that John Hunter had been the greatest inﬂuence among his teachers (Thornton, 1953, pp. 20, 23). He was elected assistant surgeon at Bart’s in 1787, but had to wait until 1815 to be made full surgeon because the current practising surgeons were relatively young and did not retire when they reached 60. The position of assistant surgeon carried no salary but Abernethy built up a successful and lucrative practice. While an assistant surgeon at Bart’s, he was appointed surgeon at Christ’s Hospital and Hunterian Professor of Anatomy and Surgery to the Royal College of Surgeons. After ﬁnally becoming full surgeon at Bart’s, he continued there until 1829. His major contribution to surgery was the successful extension of Hunter’s operation for aneurysm, but as he got older he avoided operating wherever possible, advocating rest for patients rather than amputation in the cases of fractures.51 Abernethy was remembered for his rudeness to patients and indifference to their class or rank.52 He believed that the lifestyles of the rich were responsible for their illnesses and recommended abstemious eating and drinking habits as the answer to all diseases. After his death Abernethy was described as a plain-speaking, political and religious conservative who frequently appealed to the ‘moral bearings of any subject under discussion’.53 Lawrence was born in 1783, and aged 16 became apprenticed to Abernethy. His early career was ﬁlled with honours and publications. Only three years after his apprenticeship began he was promoted to the position of demonstrator for Abernethy’s anatomy lectures, a post he held until 1812. Lawrence lived in Abernethy’s house for ﬁve years of his apprenticeship. In 1801 he translated from the Latin Adolphus Murray’s Description of the Arteries of the Human Body. In 1805 he was awarded his diploma from the Royal College of Surgeons and in 1806 won the College’s Jacksonian Prize for his work on ruptures. This work became A Treatise on Ruptures: it went through ﬁve editions, and in 1868 was still regarded as the ‘standard work on the subject’.54 In 1807 he published his translation of Blumenbach’s Short System of Comparative Anatomy.55 In 1813 he was elected assistant surgeon at Bart’s and became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was made surgeon at the London Inﬁrmary for Diseases of the Eye (today called Moorﬁeld’s Eye Hospital) in 1814, and in 1815 was given the sinecure ofﬁce of surgeon to the Royal Hospitals of Bridewell and Bethlem (Williams, 1994, p. 15). Also, in 1815 he became a Professor of Anatomy and Surgery to the Royal College of Surgeons, a position Abernethy held contemporaneously. In this role he gave introductory lectures to students taking courses in surgery and anatomy.

40 Shelley and Vitality

When John Hunter died in 1793, he left a number of manuscripts ﬁlled with speculations and ideas. As his ﬁrst lecture to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1814, Abernethy chose as his subject Hunter’s ‘Theory of Life’, which even he confessed he had to put together himself from the messy and difﬁcult to decipher papers Hunter had left. Most of the theories Abernethy ascribed to Hunter were neither fully thought out, nor published, by Hunter himself. Abernethy claimed to know Hunter’s thoughts on the vitality question partly through the private conversations he had had with him, which, as Abernethy’s critics soon pointed out, could not be substantiated. Hunter was one of the most famous surgeons of the Romantic period. He had assisted his brother, William, in the dissecting room at his Windmill Street School while studying at Chelsea and Bart’s hospitals. In 1756 he became a house surgeon there and in 1768 was appointed full surgeon at St George’s. He had been a staff surgeon in the army and served in expeditions during the early 1760s to Belleisle and Portugal. The Hunterian museum, still housed within the Royal College of Surgeons, originated as his private collection. Hunter’s most pertinent contribution to the vitality debate is his 1794 A Treatise on the Blood, Inﬂammation and Gunshot Wounds, in which he claims that blood is a living substance: from many circumstances attending this ﬂuid, [blood] would seem to be the most simple body we know of, endowed with the principle of life. That the blood has life, is an opinion I have started [sic] for above thirty years, and have taught it, for near twenty of that time, in my lectures. (Hunter, 1794, p. 53)56 Hunter openly expressed his belief that there is a ‘living principle’, which does not depend on organization (1794, p. 78). He had come to this conclusion after his studies in comparative anatomy seemed to show that animal substances ‘devoid of apparent organization’ were also living (ibid.). In the Treatise, he intended to demonstrate ‘that organization, and life, do not depend in the least upon each other; that organization may arise out of living parts and produce action, but that life can never rise out of, or depend on organization’ (ibid.). Though he was clear on this point, other ideas given in his unpublished notebooks were obscure and never clearly expressed; Abernethy presented Hunter’s ideas to the public in a dogmatic form the original versions did not possess, accompanied by such claims as ‘I am sure that he meant more than he expressed’ (Enquiry, p. 122).

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 41

Abernethy published his ﬁrst lecture to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1814 as An Enquiry into the Probability and Rationality of Mr. Hunter’s Theory of Life. Describing himself as a mere ‘expositor’ of Hunter’s ‘theory’, Abernethy repeated Hunter’s idea that life does not depend on the organization of the living body (Enquiry, p. 128). Abernethy’s idea of the living world is one based on hierarchies and divisions, though he sees links between man and the lowest on the chain of being: In surveying the great chain of living beings, we ﬁnd life connected with a vast variety of organization, yet exercising the same functions in each; a circumstance from which we may I think naturally conclude, that life does not depend upon organization. Mr. Hunter, who so patiently and accurately examined the different links of this great chain, which seems to connect even man with the common matter of the universe, was of this opinion. (Enquiry, pp. 16–17) Using the eighteenth-century term ‘chain of being’, Abernethy describes how life is found in numerous bodies that have a vast range of physical arrangement. He goes on in the lecture to claim that life cannot be dependent on the nerves, the muscles, or the brain, since some living forms do not possess these and yet are still denominated living. Man is connected with even the lowest living form by virtue of his body, the inert matter from which he is formed, and which Abernethy marvels at for its simplicity and design (Enquiry, p. 14). The greatest mystery to him is the way that the living state is achieved: ‘we become lost in astonishment that such important ends can be effected by apparently simple means’ (ibid., p. 15). If life does not depend on organization, for Abernethy, neither does it depend on chemical or mechanical processes. Seeking to prove that life is nothing to do with a body’s physical arrangement, Abernethy considers the differences between a living and a dead body, where anatomy is the same in both: In speaking of the properties of life, [Hunter] says, it is something that prevents the chemical decomposition, to which vegetable matter is so prone; that regulates the temperature of the bodies it inhabits, and is the cause of the actions we observe in them. All these circumstances, though deduced from an extensive contemplation of the subject, may, however, be legitimately drawn from observations made on the egg. A living egg does not putrefy under circumstances that would

42 Shelley and Vitality

rapidly cause that change in a dead one. The former resists a degree of cold that would freeze the latter. And when subjected to the genial warmth of incubation, the matter of it begins to move or be moved so as to build up the curious structure of the young animal. (Enquiry, pp. 17–18) Throughout the lectures, Abernethy builds up a catalogue of ways in which the living state of a being differs from its dead state. For example, a living human’s biceps can lift weight that would tear the same muscle in a dead body (Enquiry, p. 27). Abernethy concludes that there is something ‘superadded’ to the body, which ensures it resists the usual chemical operations that work on all other matter. It is clear from the quote above that Abernethy believes that the dead state of a body is its natural one. Life is alien to the body, and stops it decomposing and decaying as it would if left alone. Abernethy describes the living human body as composed of three separate but linked entities: physical organization (including muscles, ﬁbres, nerves, organs), the ‘superadded’ substance ‘life’, and also separate, perception and intelligence, or mind: in the human body there exists an assemblage of organs, formed of common inert matter, such as we see after death, a principle of life and action, and a sentient and rational faculty, all intimately connected, yet each apparently distinct from the other. (Enquiry, pp. 77–8) Despite their distinct nature from each other, they are also intimately connected. So much so that others have mistaken them as the same: The body springs and bounds as though its inert fabric were alive; yet have we good reasons for believing that life is distinct from organization. The mind and the actions of life affect each other. Failure or disturbance of the actions of life prevent or disturb our feelings, and enfeeble, perplex, or distract our intellectual operation. The mind equally affects the actions of life, and thus inﬂuences the whole body. Terror seems to palsy all its parts, whilst contrary emotions cause the limbs to struggle, and become contracted from energy. Now though these facts may countenance the idea of the identity of mind and life, yet have we good reason for believing that they are perfectly distinct. (Enquiry, pp. 78–9)

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 43

There is a hierarchy explicit in Abernethy’s language: unsurprisingly, the inert physical matter of the body is at the bottom of this hierarchy, but it is also important not to confuse the rational or intellectual part of us with ‘mere’ vitality. While he acknowledges that the organs seem to be alive or that vitality seems to be sensible, this is not actually the case. Vitality is separate from both these, although it can affect and inﬂuence them. This idea of inﬂuence is yet another idea Abernethy claims to have drawn directly from Hunter, otherwise called ‘sympathy’. Abernethy speaks of Hunter’s notion of a ‘universal sympathy’, or ‘that sympathy which the whole system seems to have with its several parts’ (Enquiry, pp. 99–100). The stomach, he argues, is the ‘center [sic] of sympathies’ (ibid., p. 103). The stomach can inﬂuence and affect the head and the remotest organs of the body. He believes that perceptions and intelligence are faculties connected with the nervous system. This would explain the difference between man, animals and vegetables. Clearly the principle of life cannot depend on the nerves since some animals have only a limited nervous system, and some vegetables no trace of a nervous system whatsoever. Abernethy’s pinning down of the rational faculty begs the question of what, then, is life? Having spent much time telling his audience what life is not, he offers speculative theories of what it is. He posited that vitality was a substance, a something. It was not, however, capable of being discerned by the senses, and this offers him the opportunity to regret the limitation of the senses and encourage trust in reason rather than empiricism (Enquiry, p. 23). He describes vitality, throughout, as a ‘subtile, mobile, invisible substance, superadded to the evident structure of muscles, or other forms of vegetable and animal matter, as magnetism is to iron, and as electricity is to various substances with which it may be connected (ibid., p. 38). It is too ‘subtile’ for human perception: it is a substance superadded to the body’s physical organization. In Abernethy’s model, it occupies some middle ground between the thoroughly material, and therefore inert, body, and the thoroughly immaterial mind and soul. The one substance that he found to be similar to this intermediary state was electricity and this led him to speculate that, in fact, life was electricity. He was careful, though, to claim that the theory that life is electricity came from the mouth of another famous and well-respected scientist, rather than his own: The experiments of Sir Humphrey [sic] Davy seem to me to form an important link in the connexion of our knowledge of dead and living matter. He has solved the great and long hidden mystery of

44 Shelley and Vitality

chemical attraction, by shewing that it depends upon the electric properties which the atoms of different species of matter possess … Sir Humphrey Davy’s experiments also lead us to believe, that it is electricity, extricated and accumulated in ways not clearly understood, which causes those sudden and powerful motions in masses of inert matter, which we occasionally witness with wonder and dismay; that it is electricity which causes the whirlwind, and the water spout, and which ‘with its sharp and sulphurous bolt splits the unwedgeable and gnarled oak,’ and destroys our most stabile ediﬁces; that it is electricity which by its consequences makes the ﬁrm earth tremble, and throws up subterraneous matter from volcanos [sic]. When therefore we perceive in the universe at large, a cause of rapid and powerful motions of masses of inert matter, may we not naturally conclude that the inert molecules or vegetable and animal matter, may be made to move in a similar manner, by a similar cause? (Enquiry, pp. 48–51) Davy would no doubt have been shocked to hear how his experiments had been interpreted by Abernethy. Reviewers of Abernethy’s 1814 lectures accused him of misrepresenting Davy’s work and ideas in the same way as he did Hunter’s. Davy does not appear to have made a public reply to Abernethy, but the Edinburgh Review exerted itself in his defence: If there be any man who believes, that Sir Humphry Davy has really done all this, or who has suffered himself to be so bourne away by these ‘whirlwinds’ and ‘water-spouts’ of Mr. Abernethy, as to look upon his body as a Leyden phial, we fear that we should exhaust our vital principle in endeavouring to dispel the illusion. (Anon., 1814, p. 397) Abernethy’s argument was that if electricity had been proved to do all these things, to be capable of moving inert matter in such impressive and violent ways, it might also be responsible for life itself. With false modesty he claimed not to be ‘hardy’ enough to assert that electricity and vitality were one and the same (Enquiry, p. 51). He catalogued other ways in which electricity acted like life, the way in which it became fatigued with repeated exertion but able to reinvigorate after a period of rest, for example (ibid., p. 29). Also, importantly, electricity had, he believed, been proved to prevent putrefaction, one of the distinguishing characteristics of life itself (ibid., p. 88).

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 45

Characteristically, Abernethy believed that a person’s opinion on this subject directly paralleled their conduct in life. Opinions generally, in Abernethy’s mind, were the ‘cause of conduct’, potentially leading to beneﬁcial or disastrous actions (ibid., p. 92). In his mind, the need to believe that vitality was an ‘intervening substance’ between his ‘bodily frame’ and his ‘independent mind’ was of the utmost importance because such an opinion ‘tends in an eminent degree to produce virtuous, honourable, and useful actions’ (ibid., p. 94). He appears in these lectures to be aware that there would be opposition to what he said, but even he could not have been prepared for what happened after they were published. There was an extremely hostile, anonymous review of his lectures in the Edinburgh Review the same year that they were published. In the reviewer’s words, the book was ‘any thing but a defence of Mr. Hunter’s theory. It is the development of a speculation altogether peculiar to [Abernethy]’ (Anon., 1814, p. 396). The review placed Abernethy ﬁrmly within a history of vitalist thinking, stating that physiology should have progressed beyond these outmoded ideas. The idea of life as a ‘something or Principle’ was represented as an unsophisticated attempt to ﬁnd any explanation for the ‘unaccountable in living bodies’ (ibid., p. 387). A more important, sustained and hurtful attack on Abernethy came from his Bart’s colleague, and former pupil, William Lawrence. In his 1816 Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology, lectures also given to the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS), Lawrence confronted Abernethy’s theory of life and expounded his own radically different theory. Years later Abernethy remarked that their disagreements had been going on for some time before these public lectures: ‘from a very early period of his professional studies, [Lawrence] was accustomed to decry and scoff at what I taught as the opinions of Mr. Hunter respecting life and its functions’ (Hunterian Oration, p. 59). In the same passage, Abernethy alludes to a group of surgeons who disagreed with his theories: ‘I continued to teach them in the midst of the controversy and derision of those students who had become his proselytes’ (ibid.). The personal nature of their debate, which became increasingly vitriolic, ensured much public interest. Abernethy’s supporters were horriﬁed at Lawrence’s presumption in attacking the man who had taught him, and even housed him for ﬁve years of his indenture. In the ﬁrst lecture he gave to the RCS, Lawrence referred to Abernethy’s kindness; after praising Abernethy’s skills as a surgeon and teacher, Lawrence gives a personal view of the man: Having had the good fortune to be initiated in the profession by Mr. Abernethy, and to have lived for many years under his roof,

46 Shelley and Vitality

I can assure you, with the greatest sincerity, that however highly the public may estimate the surgeon and the philosopher, I have reason to speak still more highly of the Man and the Friend; of the invariable kindness, which directed my early studies and pursuits, of the disinterested friendship, which has assisted every step of my progress in life. (Introduction, p. 3) Despite this introduction, Lawrence was accused of immediately ‘Forgetting the encomiums which he had just passed on to his benefactor and instructor’ and indulging ‘in taunts and sarcasms, not of the most modest, or mild description’ against Abernethy ([D’Oyly], 1819, p. 3). Throughout the next few years, while Abernethy and Lawrence attacked and counter-attacked each other, they continued to work together in Bart’s, Abernethy as full surgeon and Lawrence as assistant surgeon. There is little extant evidence to show how this debate affected their daily interactions, but what little does exist portrays a deep running wound that had continually to be put aside to ensure domestic harmony.57 To begin with, Lawrence’s lectures did not seem to deviate so much from his mentor’s. Indeed, Lawrence’s perception of vitality was still a vitalist one; he still believed in the ‘essential’ difference between living and dead or inorganic matter, and speaks in the same vague way of ‘living powers with which [animal bodies] are endowed’, and of the peculiar powers of life to resist chemical decomposition (Introduction, pp. 9, 116). This was not the way that contemporaries viewed these lectures, however; Lawrence was viliﬁed as a dangerous materialist, his lectures accused of containing blasphemy and sedition. From the outset of his Introduction, there is a reliance upon comparative anatomy. Lawrence argues that the ﬁrst step in the quest to discover the principle of life is to consider the body’s organs, or the ‘material instruments’ of life (Introduction, p. 9). Directly opposing Abernethy’s claim that life has nothing to do with organization, Lawrence argues that ‘life is the result of the organization’ (ibid., p. 115, my emphasis). It is essential, Lawrence writes, that we study not only the human form but all animal forms, because life exists in all (ibid., p. 11). This is the fundamental way in which Lawrence perceives comparative anatomy to have changed over the past century; rather than studying animals simply in order to compare them to man, who exists as an ideal standard, the term ‘is now used in a more extensive sense, and means the anatomy of all living beings compared to each other’ (ibid., p. 8).

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 47

Acknowledging the ‘great chain of beings’, Lawrence thinks we need to extend our view over the entire chain, ‘over the whole animated creation’, if we want to discover what life is (ibid., pp. 10, 11). Lawrence’s perception of how the living body worked was a complex system of properties, vitality and functions, that distinguished living from dead matter: The matter that surrounds us is divided into two great classes, living and dead; the latter is governed by physical laws, such as attraction, gravitation, chemical afﬁnity: and it exhibits physical properties, such as cohesion, elasticity, divisibility, &c. Living matter also exhibits these properties, and is subject in great measure to physical laws. But living bodies are endowed moreover with a set of properties altogether different from these, and contrasting with them very remarkably. These are the vital properties or forces, which animate living matter, so long as it continues alive, are the source of the various phenomena, which constitute the functions of the living animal body, and distinguish its history from that of dead matter. (Introduction, pp. 121–2) In Lawrence’s model, vital properties are the means by which organization manages to perform the functions we witness, and there are no comparable properties in inorganic matter (ibid., p. 120). These functions include digestion, respiration, secretion, generation and inﬂammation. The vital properties are sensibility and irritability, and it is such sentiments as these that make it clear that Lawrence was not a true materialist. He refused to apply to living bodies the same laws that work on non-living ones, instead believing that life has its own unique set of properties and laws. There are a number of ways in which a living body can be distinguished from a dead one, and Lawrence’s aim throughout the lectures is an attempt to ‘ﬁx’ or pin down the unstable signiﬁer of the word ‘life’ (Introduction, p. 123). He determined to do this by showing his audience what life is not, and how it can be differentiated from other signs. The power that a living body has to renew itself is one of these ways in which it is distinguished: ‘The power of reproduction – of restoring or renewing parts, that have been mutilated or entirely lost, is one of the most striking characters of organized bodies’ (ibid., p. 14); man’s ability to renew parts of himself is limited compared to the abilities of other animals, lower in the hierarchical chain of being

48 Shelley and Vitality

(ibid., p. 15). Indeed, it is man’s sensibility that makes his hold on life more precarious: What a contrast is there between the precarious tenure of life in man and the higher orders of animals, where the various organs are connected by numerous sympathies, and where the whole system is inﬂuenced by the affections of each part, so that disorders and destruction are constantly impending; and the simple but powerful vitality of the hair-worm (gordius), or the wheel animal (vorticella rotatoria), which after remaining for years in a dried state resume life and motion on being moistened. (Introduction, pp. 13–14) The ‘sympathy’ that Abernethy identiﬁed also exists between the parts of the living being described by Lawrence. More simple animals, in Lawrence’s scheme, however, do not possess the same complex arrangement of links and connections and in consequence possess a more unbridled, ‘powerful vitality’. For these reasons, sensibility is detrimental to the longevity of humans and their ability to recover from accidents. Life, in Lawrence’s lectures, is a constantly mutating and changing state of being. It is never the same in two successive moments, and is differently experienced by different people (ibid., p. 139). Injuries and diseases affect and alter a body’s vitality. ‘It is not the same in the child, the adult, and the old man; in the male and in the female; in a quiet state of the mind, and in the agitation of the passions’ (ibid., p. 160). The living body is constantly rotating the materials it uses and discards, composing and decomposing itself. Its power to transform foreign matter to its own is another of its distinctive properties (ibid., pp. 146–7). He describes the process as ‘a kind of circulation …, in which the old and useless elements are thrown out, and their place is supplied by new materials’ (ibid., p. 139). While the particles of an inorganic body are made up of the same matter throughout, the living body only achieves its identity by its whole mass: Thus a simple grain of marble has the same characters as an entire mountain. A living body, on the contrary, derives its character from the whole mass, from the assemblage of all the parts. This character, which is more simple or complicated according to the place which the body occupies in the scale of being, is altogether different from that of its component particles. (Introduction, p. 124)

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 49

The heterogeneous nature of living bodies had led the French materialist Xavier Bichat to deﬁne life as ‘the sum of the functions, by which death is resisted’ (Bichat 1816, p. 21). Lawrence acknowledged the inﬂuence of Bichat in his Lectures, and it was this inﬂuence that alerted British reviewers to Lawrence’s ‘materialist’ tendencies.58 In Bichat’s model, organic and inorganic matter are subject to, and controlled by, the same invariable physical laws, and the fundamental difference between these types of matter is found in the internal functions of the living body. An animal ‘transforms into its proper substance the particles of other bodies, and afterwards rejects them when they are become heterogeneous to its nature’ (ibid., p. 23). Bichat encouraged research that began from the empirical observation of living phenomena, rather than working from ‘abstract considerations’ (ibid., p. 21), and he emphasized the continually changing aspect of life; chemical analysis of once living substance was ultimately worthless because ‘the state of the vital powers in the organs … changes at every moment’ (ibid., 1816, p. 81). Lawrence not only declared himself, in his association with Bichat and Cuvier, a supporter of the ‘French school’, but also announced that he was a sceptic. While it is natural to wonder about the origin of life, ‘and to inquire how it is communicated to the beings in which we ﬁnd it’, these are questions that he believes it is impossible to answer fully (Introduction, p. 140). There are those, and it is clear to whom he refers, who pretend to have answers to the question ‘what is life?’ (ibid., p. 166). All who pretend to such knowledge have put forward equally misleading theories: ‘Most of them indeed have long lain in cold obstruction amongst the rubbish of past ages; and the more modern ones are hastening after their predecessors to the vault of all the Capulets’ (ibid., p. 167). Quoting Lucretius, further proof for contemporaries of his materialism and atheism, he comments on the lack of success which efforts to deﬁne and analyse life have found (ibid., pp. 178–9). 59 Lawrence ﬂirted with danger on many fronts in his Introduction. He criticized the British ruler for putting more money into ‘schemes of war and conquest’ than investing in science, as the French government had done (ibid., pp. 92, 86), while at other times his words hint at blasphemy. Claiming that thought is a function of the brain, or that the ‘medullary substance is capable of sensation and of thought’, he implies that there is nothing beyond the material, no transcendent, immaterial bodies, in other words, no soul (ibid., p. 144). 60 Science’s task, for Lawrence, is to dispel myth, and to dissipate ‘absurd fables’ (ibid.,

50 Shelley and Vitality

p. 83). For Lawrence, belief in a ‘a subtle invisible matter, animating the visible textures of animal bodies, and directing their motions’ suggests a naïve and uncivilized view of the world (ibid., p. 174). Though he never mentions Abernethy by name, he responds to his lectures in detail and refers to his theory as the most recent incarnation of an ancient misapprehension. His dismissal of Abernethy’s theory of life becomes increasingly sarcastic and vitriolic; Lawrence looks forward to a time when a theory will be put forward which does not ‘disgrace the name of Hunter’ (ibid., p. 165). Figured as Polonius to Lawrence’s Hamlet, the analogy connoting their real-life relationship as mentor to apprentice, father to son, Lawrence represents Abernethy’s theory as ludicrous and old-fashioned: To make the matter more intelligible, this vital principle is compared to magnetism, to electricity, and to galvanism; or it is roundly stated to be oxygen. ‘Tis like a camel, or like a whale, or like what you please. You have only to grant that the phenomena of the sciences just alluded to depend on extremely ﬁne and invisible ﬂuids, superadded to the matters in which they are exhibited; and to allow further that life and magnetic, galvanic and electric phenomena, correspond perfectly: the existence of a subtle matter of life will then be a very probable inference. On this illustration you will naturally remark, that the existence of the magnetic, electric and galvanic ﬂuids, which is offered as a proof of the existence of a vital ﬂuid, is as much a matter of doubt, as that of the vital ﬂuid itself. It is singular also that the vital principle should be like both magnetism and electricity, when these two are not like each other. (Introduction, pp. 169–70) The conclusions that ‘You have only to grant’ are clearly beyond that which could or should be granted. Abernethy is asking too much of his audience: the very existence of such ﬂuids is doubted by Lawrence. Not only this, after allowing that such substances may exist the scientist has then to imagine that electricity and magnetism are exactly these kinds of substances. After permitting these as probabilities, it is a simple matter to concur with Abernethy’s idea of life. Instead, Lawrence decisively refutes Abernethy’s understanding of these matters: ‘The truth is, there is no resemblance, no analogy between electricity and life: the two orders of phenomena are completely distinct; they are incommensurable. Electricity illustrates life no more than life illustrates electricity’ (ibid., pp. 170–1).

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 51

Clearly Abernethy could not simply ignore Lawrence’s offensive. The next year he gave another lecture to the Royal College of Surgeons, published as Physiological Lectures, Exhibiting a General View of Mr Hunter’s Physiology, and of his Researches in Comparative Anatomy. His intention was to counter those who had described his lectures as ‘unintelligible or inadmissable’ and he complained of having been wilfully ‘misunderstood or misrepresented’ (Physiological Lectures, pp. 4, 26). He never mentioned Lawrence by name and his only reference to his ‘brother professor’ was complimentary (ibid., p. 14), yet it was clear throughout that he was responding primarily to Lawrence’s comments in his 1816 lectures. It was obvious by this point that Lawrence was not just speaking for himself; the division between those supporting Abernethy’s principle of vitality and Lawrence’s theory of organization and functionality had divided broadly into a generational split. Adrian Desmond links ‘regency radical’ Lawrence, with Thomas Southwood Smith and the Lancet editor and friend of Cobbett and Hone, Thomas Wakley.61 These ﬁgures were ﬁghting a war against the nepotism and corruption, the old-fashioned, dogmatic science and the Tory politics of such established surgeons as Abernethy, Anthony Carlisle, Charles Bell, Joseph Henry Green and Astley Cooper.62 Many of these surgeons treated and were the friends of Coleridge, Charles Lamb and Robert Southey. Their opponents, the ‘Lawrencians’ as Coleridge called them, were trying to democratize the RCS and introduce a new objectivity into scientiﬁc work (Coleridge, 1956, V, 49, 25 May 1820). They wanted to distance anatomy, surgery and medicine from theological concerns, such as revealed religion and the existence of the soul, and their efforts should be placed within the context of the political radicalism of Hone, Cobbett and Carlile with whom they had a number of connections. For Carlile, at least, science was the means by which superstition could be exploded. Indeed, Abernethy alleged in his 1817 Physiological Lectures that he was defending himself against a ‘party’, whom he labelled the ‘Modern Sceptics’ (p. 35). He portrays them as a scourge of society, a national threat and a disgrace to their profession. Some of his favourite metaphors are drawn from war; he imagines himself wielding the spear of Truth against the ‘fortress of scepticism’ (ibid., pp. 54, 41). Claiming that his opponents are allied to ‘the French school’ in their science and their politics, Abernethy is continually evoking the British spirit, law and gentleman in his defence against these enemies. They are a ‘formidable party’: Formidable, because some of them possess extensive information, are subtle disputants, have words at will to make the worse appear

52 Shelley and Vitality

the better argument, and are writers even by profession. Yet I feared them not, because I knew, that words do not make, but merely adorn arguments. Nevertheless I thought it prudent to entrench my subject behind a little fortiﬁcation made of the most approved rules of reasoning; and neither this outwork, nor the subject itself, has even been assailed. (Physiological Lectures, pp. 36–7) It is clear from this that Abernethy does not think that he is just up against his fellow surgeons; Marilyn Butler has argued that this debate and its repercussions, the way that Lawrence was treated by the Tory government, should be thought of as part of a wider cultural movement to clamp down on radicalism, and she points out that the enemies of the state included writers as well as surgeons; Byron and Shelley experienced similar treatment to Lawrence from Liverpool’s government (M. Shelley, 1993, p. 228). Abernethy had his own writers in support, Coleridge was a patient and friend, and took a great interest in seeing that the kind of vitality proposed by Abernethy triumphed over Lawrence’s supposed materialism, atheism and republicanism.63 In fact, Coleridge claims in The Friend that the Physiological Lectures were ‘dictated solely by the writer’s [Coleridge’s] wishes’ (Coleridge, 1956, V, 49).64 In some respects, Abernethy’s Physiological Lectures were merely repeating the theories given in the lectures of 1814 and 1815. His aim was to elucidate further his central point: ‘We feel a strong conviction, that a more subtile and mobile substance, or a more attenuated species of matter pervades, acts upon, and is the cause of motion in that which is more gross and inert’ (Physiological Lectures, p. 328). Even while deigning to participate in ‘so disgraceful and mischievous a contest’, Abernethy continued to argue for ‘Hunter’s theory of life’ (ibid., p. 338). He ﬁnds more evidence that the discoveries of Davy conﬁrmed Hunter’s views and proved that life was as he proposed (ibid., pp. 25, 30, 39–40, 246). In these lectures, however, Abernethy was much more candid about the real motives behind these beliefs. To believe as he does in a superadded principle of life is to believe in law and order, the British constitution, and, to be morally good and honourable: I know that the opinions I allude to are productive of nothing but good to humanity, individually and collectively. I admit, that the belief that man is a machine, does not tend to alter his natural and established motions, and consequently, that there have been many

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 53

good and moral sceptics. But I also know, that the good dispositions will want that excitement and energy which the opposite sentiments produce, whilst the bad will be left without control. It is equally apparent that the belief of the distinct and independent nature of mind, incites us to act rightly from principle; to relieve distress, to repel aggression, and defend those who are incapable of protecting themselves; to practise and extol whatever is virtuous, excellent, and honourable; to shun and condemn whatever is vicious and base; regardless also of our own personal feelings and interests, when put in competition with our duty. (Physiological Lectures, pp. 49–50) It is of supreme importance for Abernethy and other Tory vitalists that the principle of life has a superior power over the body, and is typiﬁed by its ability to control and regulate the body (ibid., p. 35). He implies that control is needed to enforce moral rectitude. He concedes that a person can be naturally good; he supported the phrenology of Gall and Spurzheim for example, but if they are, they will still not possess the ‘energy and excitement’ that would be produced by a belief in a separate and independent life, mind and soul. Those with natural tendencies in the other direction will not have anything to check those tendencies. As Lawrence was to point out, Abernethy’s supperadded principle of life was akin to those symbols of oppression that were designed to keep people on a virtuous path, Bow Street and the Old Bailey (Lectures, p. 12). Abernethy’s response to contemporary calls for law and order in a time when reform was being demanded was to portray life as a system of hierarchical substances, controlling the gross and inert matter of the body. By making virtue something that was imposed and regulated from outside the self, he gave a physiological support for the notion of running a society by legal organizations that enforced good behaviour, such as the prisons, the law courts, the government. Therefore, virtue was not a product of a Rousseaean inner quality but imposed from outside, just as Burke believed (Burke, 1790, p. 89). The gross inert matter of the body was held to represent the people, and the supperadded, ruling elements as the governing forces. In turn, Lawrence’s theory is a republican one, levelling all matter and denying that a ‘monarch’ was needed at the head of the state. Invoking ‘British liberty’ and ‘the British law’, Abernethy contrasts his ‘useful and dignifying’ theory against the ‘pernicious and derogatory’ theory of Lawrence (Physiological Lectures, pp. 334, 335). He repeats

54 Shelley and Vitality

his belief in an upper-case ‘Life’ as a ‘principle’, and contrasts this with Lawrence’s opinion: If, however, those professed sceptics, whom I have incorporated under the title of Moderns, really suppose that they have no opinion on certain subjects, they deceive themselves; for by repeatedly thinking that there may be nothing which is not an object of sense, they at last bring themselves to believe that there is nothing, which is a positive opinion, and also a creed found to have various conveniences. (ibid., pp. 29, 42) In contrast to his own understanding of life as something, Abernethy ﬁnds that the ‘Modern Sceptics’ wish him ‘to consider life to be nothing’ (ibid., p. 38). Because ‘nothing can exert no force’ the only possible alternatives are that atoms are sentient, a ridiculous notion since their inherent properties are ‘unassigned or unsupported by intelligence’, or, that there is a superadded vital principle at work on matter (ibid., pp. 44, 330). Abernethy portrayed his own opinions in a way that made it not only irreligious but also unpatriotic to believe otherwise. The physiological opinions of Lawrence et al. originated chieﬂy, Abernethy argued, from the ‘French school’ (ibid., p. 327); it was the French who proposed that life was nothing, and it was their ‘demoralized’ lives that persuaded them of this fact (ibid., pp. 38, 52). In England, however, the constitution and liberty that Englishmen enjoyed meant that they had the correct notion of life. He fully believed that ‘Nation should vie with nation in promoting human knowledge and happiness’, and warned against the ‘pernicious tendency’ of the French anatomists (ibid., pp. 17, 52). In contrast to the French, the English ‘consider the probable ends of conduct from its beginning’, or, in other words, they consider the consequences on society of putting forward theories of life (ibid., p. 52). According to Abernethy, the surgeon’s role held a position of responsibility to society: The education and course of life of medical men tend to make them sober-minded, moral, and benevolent; and their professional avocations equally require, that they should possess such characters and dispositions. On no other terms can they be admitted with conﬁdence into the bosoms of those families which may require their

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 55

medical aid. Whoever therefore inculcates opinions tending to subvert morality, benevolence, and the social interests of mankind, deserves the severest reprobation from every member of our profession, because his conduct must bring it into distrust with the public. (Ibid., pp. 52–3) In the clearest terms Abernethy is demanding the punishment of Lawrence for his ideas. He is endangering the good name and reputation of their profession, whose remit includes promoting moral good by supporting the Tory government in its endeavours. This means recognizing the French as the enemy, despite the peace which currently existed between the two countries, and encouraging the people to believe in a system of rigorous punishment and authority, both in this life and after death. This last point, he argues, is the real motive behind their opinions: Wherefore do they tell us, that we know not why a muscle acts, or a nerve feels, and that both are properties of organization? Is it not because they wish to persuade others, as perhaps they may have brought themselves to believe, ‘that when the brains are out, the man is dead’. (Ibid., p. 47) By implication, if the principle of vitality is a myth then so is the soul. Abernethy charged his former apprentice with sedition, blasphemy, materialism and atheism; he is being treasonous to his country, constitution and profession. Quoting Hamlet back at Lawrence, but putting himself in Hamlet’s role, Abernethy makes it obvious that by only allowing for the existence of those material objects that can be perceived by the senses, Lawrence is denying the soul and even God: he reminds his audience that there are ‘“more things in heaven and earth, than they in their philosophy dreamt of”’ (Physiological Lectures, p. 46). He ﬁrmly believes ‘that there may be, and are things, of the nature of which we can never entertain the least idea, from their having no correspondence to the objects of our senses’ (ibid., p. 277). It should be most obvious to anatomists, he argues, that the sense of sight is limited and fallible, since they know more about its workings (ibid., p. 205). He portrays his opponents as wilful and lascivious creatures, whose ‘true philosophy … consists in gratifying their senses’ (ibid., p. 47). Using vitality as a metaphor he hints at their immoral and debauched lives, asking why they have so

56 Shelley and Vitality

suddenly been roused from their usual state of torpor: ‘whence arises the irritability they have displayed? The nature of this kind of irritability is, indeed, well known to Physiologists, it is but the common consequence of debility when excited’ (ibid., p. 46). He refers here to a common medical complaint, ‘their professions and conduct form a curious example of a vis inertiæ’, an excessive or unnatural irritability, which was commonly held to be produced by dissolute lifestyles (ibid., p. 338). Lawrence and his supporters were thus represented as morally dissolute, their emphasis on empiricism redeﬁned as sensuality and their physiological opinions seen as merely the justiﬁcation for their disregard of living in an honourable and just manner. Refuting the existence of the soul and other immaterial beings, Lawrence was seen as laying the path for a life devoid of moral consequence or punishment in this world or the next. Countering Lawrence’s argument, that every organ has a function and therefore that there must be an organ which generates life, Abernethy is keen to emphasize evidence of design in the creation of the living body. By this point in comparative anatomy teaching, it had become obligatory to point to anatomy as evidence of God’s hand in the creation of the body. Desmond quotes Thomas Wakley’s mimicry of such oldschool lecturers as Cooper, Carlisle, Abernethy and Bell who never let such an opportunity go by: Bell ‘never touches a phalanx and its ﬂexor tendon, without exclaiming, with uplifted eye, and most reverentiallycontracted mouth, “Gintilmin, behold the winderful eevidence of desin!”’ (1989, p. 112). In his Physiological Lectures, Abernethy challenged Lawrence with: ‘he must be a dull, inconsiderate, or perverse character, who can contemplate the organs and structures which compose it, without a feeling of admiration’ (p. 70). He asks his audience to judge, implying that their response will be necessarily the same as his own: ‘what shall we say of the anatomist who observes the structure and functions of those beings, who examines their extreme variety, and regular gradation and connexion, without any feeling or perception that Intelligence has operated in ordaining the laws of nature?’ (ibid., p. 331). It was precisely this revelation, that there must have been a divine intelligence to create man, which Abernethy alleges cured Galen of his youthful scepticism (p. 152). Lawrence retaliated to Abernethy’s 1817 lectures with deﬁance: GENTLEMEN! I CANNOT presume to address you again in the character of Professor to this College, without ﬁrst publicly clearing myself from

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 57

a charge publicly made in this theatre;—the charge of having perverted the honourable ofﬁce, intrusted to me by this Court, to the very unworthy design of propagating opinions detrimental to society, and of endeavouring to enforce them for the purpose of loosening those restraints, on which the welfare of mankind depends. (Lectures, p. 1) The charges were no less than treason, blasphemy, conspiracy and sedition, made at a time when the government was actively repressing all radical activity. Lawrence’s Lectures were given at the RCS in 1817 and 1818 but were published in 1819, while a violent and suppressive, hysterical and overreacting government was in power. The fate of this publication demonstrates that it was impossible to discuss matters of science objectively; everything was bound up with, and was impossible to extricate from, religion, nationalism and politics. The year 1817 had witnessed the suspension of Habeus Corpus and the Seditious Meetings Act; while the temporary nature of these directives should warn against overreading the government’s emergency measures during this period, it is clear that there was a mood of political unrest, encouraged by the economic hardships caused by the recently ended war and the activities of ﬁgures such as Henry Hunt and William Cobbett. Though prosperity and an accompanying ease of government control was in evidence through 1818, the events of 1819 put Britain back on a state of national alert. Peterloo, the passing of the six acts, including the so-called ‘gagging act’ or the Blasphemous and Seditious Libels Act, were part of the reaction of Liverpool’s government to the possibility of popular uprising and organized radical opposition. Since the Treasonable and Seditious Practices act of 1795, words such as ‘treason’, ‘conspiracy’ and ‘sedition’ were not to be bandied about lightly. The new libel act of 1819 gave the government powers to search for seditious or blasphemous material and on being found guilty of a second offence the punishment was transportation. Despite this, throughout his 1819 lectures Lawrence maintains his deﬁance. He exclaims that he will not be bowed down, that this debate has become an issue of freedom, both of speech and of thought, and that he will ﬁght to the end: my opinions are published:—they were not brought forward secretly; they have never shunned the light, and they never shall be concealed or compromised. Without this freedom of inquiry and speech, the duty of your professors would be irksome and humiliating: they would be dishonoured in their own eyes, and in the estimation of

58 Shelley and Vitality

the public. These privileges, GENTLEMEN! shall never be surrendered by me: I will not be set down nor cried down by any person, in any place, or under any pretext. However ﬂattering it may be to my vanity to wear this gown, if it involves any sacriﬁce of independence, the smallest dereliction of the right to examine freely the subjects on which I address you, and to express fearlessly the result of my investigations, I would strip it off instantly. (Lectures, pp. 3–4) His enemies did defeat him, and Lawrence did sacriﬁce his independence and freedom of expression when his job was on the line, but at this point it is clear that he felt his case to be part of the wider political struggle faced by such as Carlile, Cobbett, Hunt and Hone. In the 1820s these lectures were to take a central position in the debates surrounding publications deemed to be either seditious or blasphemous, but even at this juncture, in 1819, the year in which Carlile was ﬁned and imprisoned for publishing Paine’s Age of Reason and Elihu Palmer’s Principles of Nature, there was a serious threat of legal action.65 Lawrence uses the rhetoric of a trial: defending himself from Abernethy’s charges, he pleads ‘not guilty’ and puts his faith in the ‘candour and impartiality of the tribunal’ (Lectures, p. 5). Unfortunately for him, his real tribunal was not made up of the RCS students and fellow radical surgeons listening to his lectures but the senior ﬁgures in the London hospitals, the hospital governors and, ultimately, Lord Eldon, the conservative and dogmatic Chancellor. Lawrence clearly identiﬁed the real threat his lectures posed: Abernethy, he argues, is not really attacking the scientiﬁc basis of his lectures, but has enlisted ‘religion and morality on the side of self-love’ (Lectures, p. 5). Abernethy is not just speaking about anatomy or physiology; the content of his 1817 lectures is described as including matter that is ‘ethical, controversial, abusive’ (ibid., p. 2n). The real argument has been ‘abandoned, and its place supplied by an inquiry into motives, designs, and tendencies’ (ibid., p. 4). These motives are among the worst that could be alleged in 1819: As to the charge itself, of bringing forward doctrines with any design hostile to the principles or opinions, on which the welfare of society depends; or with any other intention, except that of displaying to you the impartial result of my own reﬂections and researches;—I reply in one word;—that it is false. (Ibid., p. 14)

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 59

Lawrence feels he has been accused of designs ‘hostile to the very elements and foundations of civil union’; he demanded to know ‘What are the covert acts to prove this treason against society?’, and, with whom did he conspire? (Lectures, pp. 6, 12). He claims to know of no such ‘party’ as that to which Abernethy says he belongs: ‘which I know no more of, than I do of the man in the moon, and in whose existence I believe just as much’ (p. 5). In calling them the ‘Modern Sceptics’, Abernethy is using a term that in this period virtually connotes atheist.66 Lawrence ﬂung accusations at Abernethy in retaliation for those he perceived to be directed at him personally. Science, he argued, should be objective not partisan, addressed to the intellect and not the prejudices of an audience: You must bring to this physiological question a sincere and earnest love of truth; dismissing from your minds all the prejudices and alarms which have been so industriously connected with it. If you enter on the inquiry in the spirit of the bigot and partisan, suffering a cloud of fears and hopes, desires and aversions, to hang round your understandings, you will never discern objects clearly; their colours, shapes, dimensions, will be confused, distorted, and obscured by intellectual mist. (Ibid., p. 106) On the one hand, Lawrence argues that he is free from wider contextual afﬁliations, that he is not part of an identiﬁable ‘party’ with coherent aims and objectives; on the other, he situates himself ﬁrmly among the martyred victims of political oppression, under pressure to be silent and tow the establishment line. Courting charges of blasphemy, he argues that this ‘abstract physiological question’ of the nature of life should not be opened up to the ‘ugly ﬁend’ and ‘venomous breath’ of the ‘odium theologicum’ (Lectures, pp. 6, 10). Little had changed later in the same century when Charles Darwin’s work appealed for the same kind of scientiﬁc objectivity, and it is not surprising that in 1819 Lawrence did not achieve what he sought: And here I take the opportunity of protesting, in the strongest terms,—in behalf of the interests of science, and of that free discussion, which is essential to its successful cultivation,—against the attempt to stiﬂe impartial inquiry by an outcry of pernicious tendency; and against perverting science and literature, which naturally tend to bring mankind acquainted with each other, to the

60 Shelley and Vitality

antisocial purpose of inﬂaming and prolonging national prejudice and animosity. (Ibid., p. 15)67 Drawing a comparison between science and literature, Lawrence argues that the freedom gained by the republics of ancient Greece and Rome are responsible for their ‘superior’ cultural productions (ibid., p. 487). This thinly veiled reference to contemporary British politics, and calls for parliamentary reform, is accompanied by other more explicit criticisms. Germany, he claims, has produced so much good scientiﬁc work because, unlike Britain, there: ‘literature and science are resuming that activity which had experienced a short interruption from war, – the favourite, but costly and destructive game of princes, and indeed of people’ (p. 28). In Regency England such a comment would be perceived as a direct criticism of recent foreign policy. Lawrence’s agenda is never far from the surface; he even uses his research into comparative anatomy, on the multitude of differences between living beings, to argue that man should be permitted the freedom to think differently from his fellow man. This is the logical extension of the physiological discovery that we are not built alike: ‘varieties of thought are as numerous, and as strongly marked, and as irreducible to one standard as those of bodily form’ (ibid., p. 4). Criticizing the ‘legislators and rulers of the world’, Lawrence argues that minds should not be coerced into the same opinions: I cannot help pointing out to you how strongly the voice of Nature, so clearly expressed in this obvious law, opposes all attempts at making mankind act or think alike. Yet the legislators and rulers of the world have persisted for centuries in endeavouring to reduce the opinions, the beliefs of their subjects, to certain fancied standards of perfection,—to impress on human thoughts that dreary sameness, and dull monotony, which all the discipline and all the rigour of a religious sect have been hardly able to maintain in the outward garb of its followers. The mind, however, cannot be drilled, cannot be made to move at the word of command; it scorns all shackles; and rises with fresh energy from every new attempt to bind it down on this bed of PROCRUSTES. (Ibid., p. 95) Procrustes was an evil mythological ﬁgure who tortured guests by stretching them to ﬁt the bed they lay on. Lawrence uses a military

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 61

language to imagine minds being ‘drilled’ and organized into a disciplined force, identical to each other and all marching under a single command without independent or autonomous thought. Abernethy is situated among those rulers who will not accept difference, only uniformity, among the minds of those he teaches. This passage leads to the expression of Lawrence’s ‘grand purpose’: ‘I mean the complete emancipation of the mind, the destruction of all creeds and articles of faith, and the establishment of full freedom of opinion and belief’ (Lectures, p. 96). Explicitly linking control and tyranny with religion, Lawrence argues that until organized religions are destroyed, the mind will remain fettered and shackled. Vitality is used as a metaphor throughout the lectures of Abernethy and Lawrence and other contemporary writers. In the quoted passage, the mind refuses to be bound down and forced into a shape which suits the tyrant, continually rising ‘with fresh energy’ at each new attempt to control it. In a tribute to America, Lawrence similarly describes the ‘energies of freedom, which vivify this new country’ (ibid., p. 489). There is more at stake here in using these particular metaphors than might at ﬁrst appear. Both surgeons at various points attempt to appropriate vitality for their own ends. In Lawrence’s case, vitality is typiﬁed by its ability to move and transmute; it is constantly changing and attempts to bind and ﬁx it are perceived as fatal. Tory politics and religion are both forces in Lawrence’s model that kill by enforcing identity and uniformity on living beings, which should be allowed to exist in a freer and more varied form. Lawrence repeats this idea of how life works: Living bodies exhibit a constant internal motion, in which we observe an uninterrupted admission and assimilation of new, and a correspondent separation and expulsion of old particles. The form remains the same, the component particles are continually changing. While this motion lasts, the body is said to be alive; when it has irrecoverably ceased, to be dead. The organic structure then yields to the chemical afﬁnities of the surrounding agents, and is speedily destroyed. (Ibid., p. 93) In Chapter 4, I consider Lawrence’s and Shelley’s theories of life as inherently mutable in more detail. Abernethy’s resorting to calling his fellow surgeon an ‘atheist’ is, Lawrence claims, largely ineffective these days: ‘it is now found more noisy than destructive’ (ibid., p. 11). While future events hardly

62 Shelley and Vitality

bore this view out, Lawrence dismisses Abernethy’s name-calling as a dishonourable practice; he clearly did not take the power of his political enemies seriously enough. While he recognized Abernethy’s propensity to promote his principle of vitality as an agency of moral enforcement, he did not recognize that the ‘physico-theologists’ he ridiculed had power enough to shut down the war he was waging (ibid., p. 51). He associated Abernethy and his vital principle with the establishment forces policing the city of London and the country at large: this subtile and mobile vital ﬂuid … is not only designed to shew the nature and operation of the cause, by which the vital phenomena are produced, but to add a new sanction to the great principles of morals and religion, and to eradicate all the selﬁsh and bad passions of our nature. An obscure hypothesis, which few have ever heard of, and fewer can comprehend, is to make us all good and virtuous, to impose a restraint upon vice stronger than Bow Street or Old Bailey can apply; and in all probability to convert the ofﬁces of Mr. Recorder and his assistant Mr. Ketch into sinecures. (Lectures, pp. 11–12) Lawrence drew an analogy between Abernethy’s purpose for his vital principle and the operations of the Magistrate’s Court, Criminal Court, and the city’s magistrate and hangman. Lawrence identiﬁed the real motive for Abernethy’s theory of life as an attempt to prove that we need such symbols in order to be virtuous. He saw Abernethy’s vital principle as a ‘new sanction’, a way of ensuring that the British people act according to the rules laid out by those in power. In his opinion, the vital principle, as Abernethy and other conservative vitalist thinkers conceived it, sanctions or supports the means by which the nation is kept in check and under restraint. According to Abernethy, the French materialists’ theory of life was held to support their morally dissolute government (Physiological Lectures, p. 52). Such motives were simply not the prerogative of medical or scientiﬁc enquiry. Just as Abernethy had argued that these meditations were ‘ﬁtter for meditation in the closet than for discussion in the lecture room’, Lawrence moved discussion of the existence of a soul out of the lecture theatre: ‘divinity and morals, however excellent in their own time and place, do not exactly suit the theatre, audience, or subject of these Lectures’ (Enquiry, pp. 87–8; Lectures, p. 9).68 Lawrence begs to be taken as speaking ‘physiologically’, since, ‘the theological doctrine of the

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 63

soul, and its separate existence, has nothing to do with this physiological question, but rests on a species of proof altogether different’ (Lectures, p. 8). It truly would be a materialist who would expect to ﬁnd an immaterial principle, such as the soul ‘amid the blood and ﬁlth of the dissecting room’ (p. 8).69

After 1819 Lawrence’s Lectures ‘On the Natural History of Man’ have aroused recent critical attention for a different matter: in them Lawrence proposes to consider man as an animal, attempting to build a chain of human beings and show how intellectual and physical characteristics develop through race (Lectures, p. 119). Peter Kitson describes Lawrence’s project as more biological and zoological in scope than his contemporaries. He was concerned with making precise zoological comparisons between men and animals, and between the different human varieties. Although believing in the essential unity of mankind, he nevertheless regarded ‘the highly civilized nations of Europe’ as racially superior to ‘a troop of ﬁlthy Hottentots’ and, indeed, ‘the whole of the more or less barbarous tribes that cover the entire continent of Africa’. His work is deeply racist, closer in tone to the dismissive comments of Kant and Hume than to the praise of Blumenbach for the achievements of black people.70 Lawrence did not use his physiological theories to support slavery, but, as Kitson writes: ‘he was not an advocate for human equality’ (1999, p. xix). The Quarterly Review was an early witness to the potential applications of Lawrence’s work, pointing out: if at any time a slave-driver in the West Indies should feel some qualms of conscience for treating the blacks under his care as a herd of oxen, he would have only to imbibe Mr. Lawrence’s idea respecting their being as inferior to himself in mental faculties as the mastiff is to the greyhound in swiftness, and his mind would at once be set at ease on the subject. ([D’Oyly], 1819, p. 30) Shelley critics who have mentioned Lawrence have characterized him incorrectly as a proto-evolutionist.71 Peter G. Mudford has set the

64 Shelley and Vitality

record straight on the idea that Lawrence was an important predecessor to Darwin in this respect; Lawrence’s 1819 book was directly opposed to the ideas put forward by Monboddo and Rousseau that man was originally of the same species as a monkey.72 Lawrence did not believe that external or environmental factors sufﬁciently accounted for ‘the bodily and mental differences, which characterise the several tribes of mankind’; instead he believed they were determined by the ‘breed or race’ to which groups belonged (Lectures, pp. 502–3). Abernethy responded to Lawrence’s Lectures in his 1819 Hunterian Oration, part of a lecture series established in memory of John Hunter.73 When this lecture was published in the same year he added a ‘Postscript’, which attacked Lawrence by name. Abernethy again defended what he persisted to call ‘Hunter’s theory of life’, while using biographical anecdotes from Hunter’s life to support his request for more bodies for dissection (Hunterian Oration, pp. 38–9). In the postscript Abernethy laments ‘the necessity of adding a few words, and, for the ﬁrst time in my life, of speaking of him, before the Public, in other terms than those of commendation’ (ibid., p. 58). Using the same tactics as Lawrence, Abernethy drew attention to what he regarded as the most ‘absurd’ of Lawrence’s ideas. Milton could not have created Paradise Lost in the manner Lawrence suggests: ‘That he from the glands of his brain / Secreted his Paradise Lost’ (ibid., p. 60n). Abernethy concentrated on Lawrence’s belief ‘that the soft medullary ﬁbres of the brain feel and think’ (ibid.). He was disparaging of Lawrence’s 1819 Lectures, which ‘contains but a repetition of assertions which I have in general objected to, as he continues to harp upon words without attending to thoughts’ (ibid.).74 The only further publications that came directly from Abernethy and Lawrence and which related directly to their debate were the articles they both contributed to Rees’s Cyclopædia, also published in 1819. The preface states that articles on ‘Anatomy and Physiology’ were written by Abernethy and Lawrence, and those on ‘Comparative Anatomy’ by Macartney (another of Abernethy’s former pupils), Lawrence and Clark (Rees, 1819, I, iv–v). It is difﬁcult to assign authors to individual entries because they were written anonymously, but it is generally accepted that Lawrence wrote the entries for ‘Cranium’, ‘Generation’, ‘Life’, ‘Monster’ and ‘Man’, while Abernethy probably wrote that on the ‘Brain’.75 The entry on ‘Life’ is recognizably Lawrence’s work; invoking Bichat and Cuvier, he often quotes from his own 1816 and 1819 lectures. Lawrence also uses the piece to advocate political reform; the vital power inherent within the body can be seen as a symbol of the

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 65

human potential for change within, and of our fundamental ability to resist oppression from external forces. The letters Abernethy wrote to a Scottish surgeon, George Kerr, span the period of controversy from 1814–19. In a letter dated 28 June 1819, Abernethy comments on the dispute with Lawrence: I would not have taken any Notice of Mr. Lawrence’s Nonsense but that I thought some of his Party would have said that I could not answer him. There is no Warfare between us. He has found what I told him, that he never could broach certain Doctrines without exciting the Suspicion & Resentment of a large part of Society; and that he has been in Consequence obliged to call in his Book. (Franklin, 1930–1, p. 240) The book in question was his 1819 Lectures; in April 1819 the governors of Bridewell and Bethlem hospitals held their annual elections and ruled to suspend Lawrence from his position as surgeon. Despite his protestations never to be silenced, Lawrence was persuaded to write a letter to the governors retracting his ‘inﬁdel opinions’ and promising to ‘suppress and prevent the circulation of his book’ (Anon., 1822b, p. 544). Lectures was withdrawn less than a month after having been published and after receiving his letter the governors reinstated Lawrence. The pressure on Lawrence had come not just from Abernethy; a whole host of pamphlets, books and journal articles had called for his resignation during the debate. Lawrence was not an isolated threat to these writers; he was only one of a group of medical sceptics who were politically radical and perceived as a danger to national security. In a letter to William Hone, Lawrence’s true feelings are clear: I beg you to accept the accompanying copy of my lectures, and to assure you that although I thought it expedient to withdraw this work from circulation, no consideration of expediency would ever induce me to shun the appearance of intimacy with one whom I respect so highly for talent & the most important public services as well as for the possession of so much greater courage in these matters than falls to the lot of Yours very faithfully, W. Lawrence. (BL Add. 40120 f. 171) Lawrence was in serious danger of losing his medical practice, as happened to Thomas Charles Morgan, the husband of novelist Sydney Owenson, who published Sketches of the Philosophy of Life in 1818.76

66 Shelley and Vitality

Morgan, a physician, had been impressed with the work he witnessed being done by his French counterparts when he travelled the country, and in Sketches put forward a materialist view of life: ‘it seems highly probable that there is no basis for the theory, which assigns the movements of organized species to a cause different from the general laws of matter’ (Morgan, 1818, pp. 29–30). He also expressed a disbelief in the myth of ‘ﬁrst causes’: ‘The existence of organized matter depending upon function, and function reciprocally requiring organized arrangements, they exhibit a circle unmarked by commencement or termination’ (ibid., p. 35). It is impossible, therefore, to explain the ‘inextricable mystery’ of the origin of life (ibid.). Morgan, Lawrence and Bichat were the object of Thomas Rennell’s Remarks on Scepticism, a book that gives a clear example of the way that the scientiﬁc debate was taken up by contemporary religious authorities. Though he mentions the ‘spirited stand’ of Abernethy, and the ‘animated protest’ of fellow surgeon Charles Bell, the debate is viewed in the much wider context of a contest between materialist and vitalist, also equated in Rennell’s mind with French against British, and devout Christian against atheist (Rennell, 1819, p. 53).77 The Quarterly Review joined in the attack, claiming that Lawrence had made ‘an open avowal’ of the ‘doctrine of materialism’ ([D’Oyly], 1819, p. 1). Abernethy’s notion of a superadded vital principle was regarded as a principle that had been ‘added by the will of Omnipotence’ (ibid., p. 2). In Rennell’s opinion, ‘Materialism and Atheism go hand in hand’ (Rennell, 1819, p. 64). Lawrence was given special attention in Rennell’s survey of the organizational theory of life because of his position of eminence and inﬂuence. As Lawrence’s lectures were given and published with the apparent approval of the Royal College of Surgeons, his theory was seen as being particularly dangerous: it appears ‘as the production of a Professor in the Royal College of Surgeons, recited in their school and sanctioned by their authority’ (Rennell, 1819, p. 64). The Quarterly similarly charged Lawrence with ‘converting the lecture-room of the College into a school of materialism’ ([D’Oyly], 1819, p. 6); they acknowledged that the medical profession was a general cause of alarm because of the prevalence of ‘sceptical opinions’ held among its members (ibid., p. 34). George D’Oyly invoked the name of William Drummond as one of the few people that Lawrence could call to his defence; he is slyly described as being ‘highly deserving of the entire conﬁdence of Mr. Lawrence’ (1819, p. 13). Abernethy is pictured as a last bastion of piety, repeatedly defending his theory against ‘the miserable ribaldry with which it had been assailed, and to guard his

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 67

hearers from the mischief of the sceptical principles promulgated in that lecture-room in the preceding year’ ([D’Oyly], 1819, p. 4). Indeed, Abernethy is seen as having risen above the pettiness of their altercation and preserved dignity; his reproof to Lawrence is described by the Quarterly as ‘expressed … without harshness or severity’ (ibid., p. 5). Lawrence, on the other hand, ‘under the pretence of defending himself … indulges in the most coarse and virulent invective against his former patron’; his ‘taunts and sarcasms’ are considered unbecoming for someone in his professional situation (ibid., pp. 5, 3). Edward William Grinﬁeld, a Minister in Bath, also added his disapproval of Lawrence in 1819.78 Grinﬁeld admitted his ignorance of physiology and anatomy but nonetheless felt that he could perceive in Lawrence’s researches ‘the evils which they portend to society in general, and to the morals of your own profession in particular’ (Grinﬁeld, 1819, p. 4). He regarded Lawrence ‘almost in the light of a dictator’ when he considered the power Lawrence wielded over his audiences, and represented medical students as morally delinquent: From what is generally understood of the morals of too many of those young gentlemen who walk the hospitals, and frequent the medical schools of our capital, the Public will not be inclined to thank you for your ingenious apology for sceptical opinions, nor your reiterated sneers at the government and religion of your country. (Grinﬁeld, 1819, pp. 4, 6–7) Grinﬁeld feels that it is his ‘duty’ to voice his concern and protest against Lawrence’s Lectures and urges students instead to read Paley’s Natural Theology (1819, p. 55). A second edition of Grinﬁeld’s book, published in the same year, carried with it ‘A Congratulatory Address to Mr. Lawrence on the Suppression of his “Lectures”’. The debate continued beyond 1819 and Abernethy privately expressed his gratitude at John Barclay’s book, published in 1822, which placed Abernethy within a eminent tradition of philosophers who held the same theory of life including Aristotle, William Harvey and John Hunter (Barclay, 1822).79 Barclay emphasized the general interest that the science of life had for the public at large: Respecting the grounds of these speculations, it must be obvious that it is not the physiologist alone who is here concerned: all must feel equally interested to know what is the cause of their origin,

68 Shelley and Vitality

what is the nature of their existence, and whether in likelihood it is to be conﬁned to this world, or extended to another. (Barclay, 1822, pp. vii–viii) By this point, the conservative vitalists had won the battle, at least that waged personally against Lawrence. Barclay’s publication is much less hysterical than those of Rennell and Grinﬁeld, written in the knowledge that Lawrence’s opposition could safely be consigned to history. Others had exerted themselves in Lawrence’s defence. Thomas Forster, writing under the name ‘Philostratus’, published Somatopsychonoologia: Showing that the Proofs of Body, Life and Mind, Considered as Distinct Essences, Cannot be Deduced from Physiology in 1823.80 He felt himself to be imputed in Abernethy’s aspersions of ‘the Party’ and was impelled to publish a defence of theories such as Lawrence’s and his own. His contribution to the debate has been seen as a partisan one, arguing that Lawrence’s theory was supported by the Catholic religion.81 Forster has not been connected hitherto with Shelley but it seems that they were friends. A triangle can be formed between Forster, Shelley and Lawrence, which is more closely investigated in the second chapter of this book. One of the anonymous publications reacting to his Lectures attacked Lawrence primarily for his scepticism. It was written by Lady Mary Shepherd and united Lawrence with Hume and Thomas Brown.82 In the book, Shepherd refers to Lawrence’s physiological lectures ‘at present before the public; which have drawn so much of its Notice’ ([Shepherd], 1824, p. 28). She describes Lawrence himself: Also a modern and living author, of great celebrity, Mr. Lawrence, in his late Lectures, has adopted Mr. Hume’s and Dr. Brown’s notions of the relation of cause and effect, as containing a proof of the materiality of the soul;—a doctrine of sufﬁcient importance to justify a further investigation of the argument on which it is supposed to be well founded. ([Shepherd], 1824, p. 6) Shepherd approached the problem of Lawrence’s letters from this angle, the scepticism on which his imputed materialism was based. There were clearly a number of groups to which Lawrence was joined in the public imagination, radical writers and political activists, sceptical philosophers, atheists and republicans.

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 69

After the suppression of the Lectures, Lawrence had applied for and been granted an injunction to forbid piracy of his book. It was surprising that the injunction had been granted since Southey’s attempts to get an injunction against the pirate publications of Wat Tyler had failed.83 Lawrence’s lectures became embroiled in the legal wrangles between a number of radical writers and Lord Eldon. Despite the injunction, two pirate editions of Lawrence’s Lectures were brought out, one by William Benbow, and one by a publisher named James Smith. In March 1822, Lawrence brought a civil action against James Smith, and the case was heard in Chancery Court before the Lord Chancellor. Lawrence may have decided to act against Smith’s edition and not Benbow’s because of his friendships with the radical presses. 84 Eldon dissolved the injunction after hearing the case and, ironically, cleared the way for many other pirate editions, including those brought out by Richard Carlile and J. Grifﬁn.85 When Lawrence speaks of Abernethy’s desire by his theory ‘to impose a restraint upon vice’, he is using a language made familiar by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, set up in 1802 to prosecute blasphemous and obscene publications. The Society issued notices against the publishers of material declared unﬁt for copyright protection by Eldon.86 Both Benbow and Carlile had fallen foul of the new sedition laws and gagging acts. William Benbow had worked with Cobbett on the Political Register and had been imprisoned for seditious libel. He also published Rambler’s Magazine, which printed pornographic material objected to by the Society and in June 1822 was prosecuted by them. He won his case, being found not guilty, pointing out in his defence the questionable morals of some of the Society’s members.87 Lawrence suffered the same judgement as Eldon had pronounced in the cases he had heard of contemporary poets: intellectual property could not be protected where the material in question was considered by Eldon to be blasphemous, seditious or immoral. Eldon was aware of the paradoxical situation his ruling had created; radical publishers were free to continue to disseminate as many cheap and accessible pirated versions of the text in question after he had ruled that it was unsuitable for public reading. Byron lost a case decided by Eldon in February 1822, for Cain. His publisher, John Murray, had successfully brought an injunction against Benbow, who had published Cain, but this injunction was dissolved when the case of this ‘blasphemous poem’ was brought before Eldon (Thomas, 1969, p. 210). Byron also lost the

70 Shelley and Vitality

case against publisher William Dugdale in 1823 for the unauthorized publication of cantos six, seven and eight of Don Juan.88 Lawrence v. Smith was heard before Eldon in March 1822. The trial again linked Lawrence with Romantic poets and radical writers,89 and the counsel for the defence argued that Lawrence had no copyright in the work because ‘it was a publication denying Christianity and Revelation, which was contrary to public policy and morality’.90 He called in his defence the opinions of writers for the Edinburgh Medical Review, the Quarterly Review, Thomas Rennell and Edward Grinﬁeld (Times, 25 March 1822, 3c). Smith’s counsel quoted passages from the Lectures which he believed proved that ‘the object of the publication was to send out to the world the doctrine, that when a man dies, his soul dies with him; denying the immortality of the soul’ (Times, 25 March 1822, 3c). Other blasphemies brought to the Chancellor’s attention were Lawrence’s claim that ‘a man had no more soul than an oyster, or any other ﬁsh or insect’, and his refusal to believe that the world had been created as it is narrated in the scriptures (ibid.). Another spokesman for Smith reminded the court of the ruling that had refused Joseph Priestley damages after the Birmingham riots of 1791, and ‘also referred to the case of Mr. Southey’s book, and the work of Lord Byron’ decided in court just ‘the other day’ (ibid.).91 Lawrence’s counsel rehearsed the same arguments that Lawrence had himself put forward in his reply to Abernethy’s charges, but to no avail; Lord Eldon having read the work in question concluded that ‘entertaining a rational doubt upon some parts of the work, as to their being directed against the truth of Scripture, he would not continue this Injunction’.92 A Quarterly Review article detailing the recent court cases involving Wolcot, Southey, Byron and Lawrence pointed out the ridiculousness of the situation, imagining a ‘literary foreigner’ in Britain: in every obscure bookseller’s shop he would meet with proposals for the publication of Mr. Lawrence’s ‘Lectures’ at a price so low as to exclude all remuneration to the author, or implying a most extensive sale. If he asked for an explanation of all this, we doubt whether his original surprise would be diminished by the answer. He would be told that ‘Wat Tyler,’ and ‘Cain,’ and ‘Lawrence’s Lectures’ were allowed to be circulated without restriction because it was supposed that their tendency might be injurious to the best interests of society. (Anon., 1822a, p. 123)

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 71

Contrary to the best public interest, Lord Eldon’s decision meant that the topic and the book itself were again in the public eye, easily accessible in editions cheap enough for a wide readership. There was a particular fear of the ‘uneducated purchaser’ possessing this dangerous text (ibid.).93 This article claims that Eldon ‘was heard by his counsel’ to say that Lawrence’s lectures: denied Christianity and revelation, and was contrary to public policy and morality, that it was more dangerous from the author’s scholar-like command of language and his scientiﬁc mode of treating the subject; which acting upon undisciplined minds was calculated to bring them under its controul [sic], and thereby work the greater mischief. (Ibid., pp. 130–1) Lawrence is charged with treating his real subject (to deny the existence of an immaterial soul) in a particularly pernicious way, using a ‘scientiﬁc mode’. The absurdity of these events was made even more explicit by the dedication to Eldon in one of the many editions that followed Eldon’s judgment; Richard Carlile published Lawrence’s Lectures and the 1816 Introduction together from Dorchester Gaol, inscribed to Eldon personally. The Lectures continued to be published until the ninth edition in 1848. Carlile exerted himself in defence of Lawrence, in The Republican and in a pamphlet called Address to the Men of Science (1821).94 Their friendship may be measured by the fact that in Carlile’s last illness he asked for Lawrence to see him, and when he died, in a particularly symbolic act, Carlile requested that his body be given to Lawrence to be dissected.95 On 2 April 1822 a governor of Bridewell and Bethlem hospitals accused Lawrence of violating the pledge he had made in 1819 to suppress his book. After having suppressed the book in 1819, and buying up all remaining copies himself, it suddenly ﬂourished again in America and hospital governors accused Lawrence of having ‘imported 400–600 copies of the lectures’.96 He confessed having distributed ‘400–odd’ of the suppressed book to ‘medical readers’ and was suspended again (Anon., 1822b, p. 544). After being dismissed for the second time by the governors of Bridewell and Bethlem hospitals, Lawrence was persuaded to recant his theory of life again. The Monthly Magazine published his letter in parallel columns alongside Galileo’s retraction (Anon., 1822b, p. 542).97 They printed Lawrence’s letter to the hospital governors in full; in it he

72 Shelley and Vitality

effectively promises to refrain from theorizing and concentrate on his medical practice: Further experience and reﬂection have only tended to convince me more strongly that the publication of certain passages in these writings was highly improper, to increase my regret at having sent them forth into the world; to make me satisﬁed with the measure of withdrawing them from public circulation; and consequently ﬁrmly resolved, not only never to reprint them, but also never to publish anything more on similar subjects. (Ibid., p. 543) Although this might seem to recant fully, Lawrence carefully chose his words in order that he might retain something of his earlier convictions. He mentioned the ‘late decision of the Lord Chancellor, which has enabled all who may choose to print and publish my Lectures’ perhaps as a pointed reference to how little it mattered that he had distributed copies himself (ibid.). ‘As to the charge of irreligion’, he wrote: I am fully impressed with the importance of religion and morality to the welfare of mankind—that I am most sensible of the distinguishing excellencies of that pure religion which is unfolded in the New Testament, and most earnestly desirous to see its pure spirit universally diffused and acted upon. (Ibid.) The repetition here of ‘pure’ suggests that the letter and spirit of the New Testament are to be desired as theoretical abstractions of good moral behaviour, but not to be accepted as scientiﬁc proof. On 8 May 1822 the governors carried a resolution that made Lawrence eligible to apply for his job again and when the ‘respectable candidate’ lined up to take the position heard of this he graciously withdrew from the election (ibid., p. 544). Lawrence was elected surgeon on the 9 May, although it was noted that many governors did not turn out to vote (ibid.). Lawrence never published on these matters again. The entire episode is generally seen as victory for the Tories, who had effectively silenced Lawrence and fellow proponents of the ‘organizational’ theory of life. The animosity between Lawrence and Abernethy continued. Lawrence spoke at two public meetings against the nepotism and corruption of the Royal College of Surgeons, with Astley Cooper and Abernethy as his two

The Vitality Debate, 1814–19 73

main targets.98 Further controversy followed the underhand attempts by Abernethy to ensure that Lawrence would not succeed him in his post as one of the three principal surgeons at Bart’s. The students showed their support of Lawrence by holding a rally on his behalf in the hospital. In 1828, in a surprising but shrewd move, Lawrence was elected to the Royal College of Surgeons, the very institution he had spent years railing against. He was also elected to Abernethy’s post following the latter’s eventual retirement in 1829. It was at this point that Lawrence deserted his radical and reformer friends and actively began to work against them. His former friend, the editor of the Lancet, Thomas Wakley, described him as an ‘apostate’.99 In 1834 he was voted onto the ﬁrst Court of Assistants of the RCS, having been nominated by his old enemy Abernethy and seconded by Cooper. In 1837 he was named Surgeon Extraordinaire to the new Queen, Victoria, and later her SergeantSurgeon. He and his wife entertained the Queen and Prince Albert at their home, and in 1867 he was made a baronet. He became President of the Council of the RCS and his reign was noticeable for its lack of reform and anathema to change.

2 Shelley’s Knowledge of the ‘Science of Life’

1811 P.B. Shelley’s decision to become a surgeon after being expelled from Oxford has been seen by many of his biographers as little more than a passing fancy, forgotten as soon as a new interest arose in the shape of Harriet Westbrook. Such an assessment is symptomatic of the way his scientiﬁc pursuits have been regarded in the past. Shelley has been represented as slipshod and undisciplined in his research, and this is held as characteristic of the way he picked up and discarded all manner of philosophies and opinions.1 In this chapter I will explore the friendships and intellectual acquaintances Shelley made among the St Bartholomew’s Hospital medical community during the spring of 1811, and in London and Bracknell in 1813–14, which continued to inﬂuence him and his work throughout his life. The initial steps he took towards becoming a surgeon himself introduced him to John Abernethy and William Lawrence, who were soon to have their public debate, discussed in my ﬁrst chapter, on the nature of vitality. Shelley’s reading of science and his corresponding interest in the controversial issues of his day extends far beyond the teenage years he spent alarming fellow students with dangerous experiments in Oxford.2 In November 1810 Thomas Medwin visited Shelley at Oxford and found he had been ‘making some experiments’: ‘He had not forgotten our Walker’s Lectures, and was deep in the mysteries of chemistry’.3 Thomas Jefferson Hogg describes Shelley’s Oxford rooms as ﬁlled with scientiﬁc equipment: Shelley possessed ‘an electrical machine, an air-pump, the galvanic trough, a solar microscope, and large glass jars and receivers’ with which to create various chemical and medical preparations.4 Hogg’s recollections of Shelley’s aspirations for 74

Shelley’s Knowledge of the ‘Science of Life’ 75

chemistry and electricity betray his own lack of scientiﬁc knowledge whilst revealing Shelley’s awareness of current developments. He uses Shelley’s vision of a galvanic battery of ‘colossal magnitude, a wellarranged system of hundreds of metallic plates’ to ridicule the poet’s enthusiasm and portray him as a dreamer, not in touch with the realities of science (1858, I, 62). In fact, Humphry Davy had only a few years earlier announced it a matter of national concern that the Royal Society should build the biggest electric battery yet produced: the result was a pile of 2,000 plates.5 Other inventive fantasies ridiculed by Hogg are keyed into the beliefs of contemporaries such as Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Priestley. Their work was characterized by an emphasis on the real and practical use of science, an important aspect of Shelley’s own philanthropic interest in chemistry; Hogg quotes him as saying that: Water, like the atmospheric air, is compounded of certain gases: in the progress of scientiﬁc discovery a simple and sure method of manufacturing the useful ﬂuid, in every situation and in any quantity, may be detected; the arid deserts of Africa may then be refreshed by a copious supply, and may be transformed at once into rich meadows, and vast ﬁelds of maize and rice. (Hogg, 1858, I, 60–1) The air pump and receivers which Hogg remembers in Shelley’s room could have been used to replicate many of the experiments made by contemporary chemists and communicated by their publications and articles in the Philosophical Transactions. In November 1811, Shelley describes in a letter how he demonstrated to Harriet Shelley and her sister, Eliza, ‘the nature of the atmosphere, and to illustrate my theory I made some experiments on hydrogen gas, and on its constituent parts’. The vivid ﬂame was seen at some distance and as a consequence they were asked to leave the house they were renting (Letters, I, 193–4, 24 November 1811). It was crucial for Priestley, as part of his egalitarian view of science, that his experiments could be reproduced with simple equipment and little expense. Tea-dishes and beer glasses were among the equipment both he and Shelley used.6 Geoffrey Matthews, in his essay ‘A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley’, demonstrates that ‘it is unnecessary to assume that Shelley relied very heavily on recondite works of science. Much of his scientiﬁc information … could have been drawn from the major reviews, the Gentleman’s Magazine, and the Annual Register.’7 Marilyn Butler’s survey of the science in Frankenstein lays a

76 Shelley and Vitality

similar emphasis on contemporary popular journals, especially the Quarterly Review and the Edinburgh Review, noting the amount of scientiﬁc information that could be gained from these sources (M. Shelley, 1993, p. xxix). As the previous chapter showed, the debate between Abernethy and Lawrence was covered by most of the popular journals we know Shelley to have read. Though I initially concentrate on the period in 1811 when Shelley made a concerted effort to become a surgeon, his interest in medicine did not wane throughout his life. As Nora Crook and Derek Guiton have pointed out, this is partly the result of Shelley’s own illnesses and the health problems and deaths of many of his immediate family. Matthews was the ﬁrst to point out the importance of including Shelley’s ‘medical record’ within the entire range of knowledge that should be brought to bear on any study of Shelley’s ideas (1957, p. 192). Crook and Guiton regard Shelley as a ‘wounded surgeon’, arguing that his interest in medicine is motivated primarily by a concern for his own health (1986, p. ix). They carefully develop the idea ﬁrst expressed by Thornton Hunt that Shelley’s ill health throughout his life was the result of syphilis contracted, or that Shelley believed he had contracted, when he was young. With reference to the period between Shelley’s expulsion from Oxford and his elopement with Harriet, Kenneth Neill Cameron declares: ‘As to Shelley’s interest in science, there is not much to record’.8 Crook and Guiton have gone some way to correcting this view, pointing out that this is ‘an episode in Shelley’s life which is seldom commented upon’ (1986, p. 1). Timothy Morton’s book, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste, looks particularly at the period 1813–14, and considers Shelley’s interest in vegetarianism from a medical perspective, paying particular attention to the inﬂuence John Frank Newton and Dr William Lambe had on Shelley.9 In this chapter I will ﬁrst consider the people Shelley came into contact with while his cousin, Charles Grove, was a student at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and the knowledge he gained from lectures he attended himself. The inﬂuence of Lawrence on Mary Shelley has been examined carefully by Butler in her introduction to the Oxford World Classic’s edition of the 1818 Frankenstein, but she concedes ‘Percy Shelley’s intellectual association with Lawrence is in fact better hidden than his wife’s’ (p. xlix). While this chapter shows the opportunities Shelley had to meet and converse with Lawrence and others on the subject of vitality, later chapters examine the ways in which the problem of deﬁning life inspired and intrigued Shelley.

Shelley’s Knowledge of the ‘Science of Life’ 77

After being expelled from Oxford, Shelley was faced with the reality of having to support himself, and his cousin Medwin records that Shelley decided to become a surgeon: Under the prospect of being forced to support himself by a profession, he applied his talents to medicine, which he often told me he should have preferred to all others, as affording great opportunities of alleviating the sufferings of humanity. (Medwin, 1913, p. 136) Shelley’s friend Hogg also had the importance of starting a career impressed upon him and soon left London to begin his training as a lawyer.10 On their ﬁrst night in London, on 26 March 1811, Shelley and Hogg had visited Shelley’s cousins, John and Charles Grove, in John’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.11 After Hogg left, Shelley moved in with his cousins.12 John was already a qualiﬁed surgeon and his younger brother, Charles, had come to live with him while he too began medical training at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. The Grove family had well-established links with Bart’s: their great-uncle, William Long, had been one of the principal surgeons there and was now one of the hospital governors. Even the position of their house was of signiﬁcance: the Royal College of Surgeons’ building occupied numbers 41 and 42 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the eminent surgeon Henry Cline lived in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, as did a number of London-based surgeons including their great-uncle. Shelley had visited Long’s house when visiting London with his ﬁrst love, John’s and Charles’s sister, Harriet Grove, in 1810. John Grove’s house also had been used as a London base by Shelley’s family throughout his childhood and early adulthood. During the period of Shelley’s stay in London in 1811 his friendships with John and Charles were strengthened.13 When Shelley arrived in London after being expelled, John undertook to reconcile Shelley and his father, achieving much early success in his mediations between the poet, his father and the family’s solicitor.14 On one occasion Shelley unexpectedly bumped into his father in the hall of the Lincoln’s Inn Field house (Letters, I, 67, 24 April 1811). Shelley’s determination to become a surgeon is expressed in his letters from this period. In July 1811, even after he had eloped with Harriet, he wrote deﬁantly to a friend: ‘I still remain ﬁrm in my resolve to study surgery – you will see that I shall’ (Letters, i, 121, [?] July 1811). In October the same year he seems less certain, writing to Elizabeth Hitchener, ‘when last I saw you [I] was about to enter into the profession

78 Shelley and Vitality

of physic’. He is clearly aware of the consequences of such a decision: ‘I told you so, I represented my views as unembarrassed, myself at liberty to experiment upon morality, uninﬂuenced by the possibility of giving pain to others’ (Letters, I, 144, 8 October 1811). Shelley is here acknowledging the reality of choosing at this time to enter into the medical profession. We know from Keats’s experiences as a medical student that this was not a decision to be taken lightly.15 Shelley’s perception is very different to Medwin’s representation of his motives in choosing surgery as a profession; the idealistic notion that he would be ‘alleviating the sufferings of humanity’ is far from Shelley’s own mind because he had spent a summer with the medical student Charles Grove: Bysshe and his friend then came to London … I was then in town, attending Mr. Abernethy’s anatomical lectures. The thought of anatomy, especially after a few conversations with my brother, became quite delightful to Bysshe, and he attended a course with me, and sometimes went also to St Bartholomew’s Hospital. At that time Bysshe and his friend took a lodging in Poland Street, where they continued for some time; I think, a great part of the spring, and I spent a part of every day with them. No particular incident occurred at the time; at least I do not recollect any. They both, but especially Bysshe, were occupied all the mornings in writing; and after the anatomical lecture, we used sometimes to walk in St. James’s Park. (Hogg, 1858, II, 552–3) Signiﬁcantly, the three months Shelley spent in Charles’s company were those designated for summer medical courses. Previous to the Apothecaries Act of 1815, membership to the Royal College of Surgeons, the medical qualiﬁcation needed to practise as a surgeon, could be granted after an apprenticeship to a surgeon, attendance at one session of anatomy and one session of surgery. St Bartholomew’s Hospital was one of the oldest London hospitals and, during this period, one of the most prestigious. Although there had been teaching at Bart’s before, during John Abernethy’s era the hospital became an important medical school. Abernethy worked hard to get this reputation for the hospital and large numbers of students were drawn to Bart’s lectures largely because of his reputation as a teacher. In 1811 William Lawrence was Abernethy’s demonstrator for his anatomy lectures. Surgical students followed surgeons around hospital wards and watched them diagnose and treat patients, perform operations and

Shelley’s Knowledge of the ‘Science of Life’ 79

post-mortems.16 Often the experience was dissatisfying: as many as 17 students might be gathered round a surgeon and pupils frequently complained that they could not see or hear anything.17 Shelley clearly felt that he had gained sufﬁcient knowledge from his time at Bart’s to advise others on their health. Leigh Hunt’s son, Thornton, recalled that Shelley, in Marlow in the summer of 1817, ‘played the Lord Bountiful among his humbler neighbours, not only helping them with money or money’s-worth, but also advising them in sickness; for he had made some study of medicine, in part, I suspect, to be the more useful’.18 There is a striking difference between the way that Shelley expresses his ideas on ‘life’ at the beginning of 1811 and later that same year, after he has attended Abernethy’s lectures and read his work, become the friend of Lawrence, and walked the wards of St Bartholomew’s with his cousin Charles. In this letter from the beginning of January, before he has been expelled from Oxford, Shelley writes to Hogg: I entertain no doubt of the fact, altho it possesses no capabilities of variation; if the principle of life, (that of reason put out of the question as in the cases of dogs, horses & oysters) be soul, then Gravitation is as much the Soul of a Clock, as animation is that of an oyster. I think we may not inaptly deﬁne Soul as the most supreme superior and distinguished abstract appendage to the Nature of any thing. (Letters, I, 39, 6 January 1811) Shelley here makes a distinction between the ‘soul’ as the principle of life in humans and ‘animation’, the equivalent principle in an oyster. He clearly still believes in a hierarchical Chain of Being, where man’s existence is radically different from that of other living creatures. What we see in this letter is precisely the kind of reasoning Abernethy used in his theory of life. The soul is deﬁned as an ‘appendage’ to the human body. If the soul is the principle of life in humans, then Shelley is regarding life as something appended to the material body. In the same way, Frankenstein gives vitality to the otherwise inert body of the Creature he creates. The oyster signiﬁes one of the lowest forms of life, and the fact that life existed in bodies organized so completely differently, from an oyster to man, was used as evidence to demonstrate that life must be a superadded principle, since there could be no similarity in the organization of oysters or men. In the Chancery Court case for Lawrence’s 1819 Lectures, the counsel for James Smith contended that this was one of

80 Shelley and Vitality

Lawrence’s most horrifying suggestions: ‘for what was the doctrine of the plaintiff? – that a man had no more soul than an oyster, or any other ﬁsh or insect’ (Times, ‘Law Report’, 23 March 1822, 3c). During the spring of 1811 Shelley became acquainted with Abernethy’s and Lawrence’s ideas through a number of means. Hugh J. Luke Jnr speculated in his 1965 article that Shelley probably ﬁrst met Lawrence in 1811, though he had no evidence to conﬁrm this (Luke, 1965, p. 143). One of the three principal surgeons in Bart’s at this time, Ludford Harvey (1759–1829), kept a diary throughout his career at the hospital.19 In it he recorded the names of students at the hospital and information about them. Charles Grove is listed as the sixty-third student enrolled since Harvey’s promotion to full surgeon in 1807. Other information in his entry tells us that Charles was a ‘Walker’, or student, to Harvey, and that he signed up and paid on 6 March 1811 for six months at six pounds and sixpence (St Bartholomew’s Hospital Archives, BHA X 54/1, p. 315). In the ﬁnal column of the entry Harvey noted that Charles was ‘nephew to Mr. Long’. This family connection with the hospital might account for the record, in a separate section of Harvey’s journal, that Charles Grove had been chosen as Harvey’s personal ‘Box-Carrier’ (ibid., p. 316). A box carrier was singled out from the many walkers and paid to work for a surgeon.20 The job would have been coveted by other students, because it brought you to the attention of the surgeon and carried certain responsibilities and privileges: duties included preparing dressings, splints and bandages, as well as attending ‘in case of accidents frequently occurring both day and night’.21 A ﬁrst-hand account of box carriers describes how they ‘each took duty for their respective surgeon’s admission week, and at night they had to decide, in conjunction with the night-nurse, in accident cases whether to summon the dresser on duty’.22 Examining Harvey’s journal it is clear that Shelley would have had a privileged perspective of the cases at Bart’s because of his cousin’s position there, since Charles would have visited patients without the surgeon being present. The journal also reveals the cases Harvey attended at the hospital during the period of Shelley’s stay in London. At this time, all operations were performed without anaesthetic and had a high mortality rate. The one major operation Harvey’s journal mentions in the summer of 1811 may have been recorded precisely because of its success. The wound was a punctured ‘brachial artery’ in the arm, which is described as ‘very much distended with blood’; Harvey operated and it had successfully healed by 6 June 1811. Most of the operations he performed were amputations, and during 1811 Harvey removed diseased ﬁngers, hands and breasts from hospital

Shelley’s Knowledge of the ‘Science of Life’ 81

patients (BHA X 54/1, pp. 242–3). If Medwin is to be believed, Shelley’s recollections of the hospital are of appalled sensitivity: ‘a lazar house, it was’ (Medwin, 1913, p. 136).23 Shelley’s ‘Essay on the Vegetable System of Diet’ refers to his experiences: ‘Hospitals are ﬁlled with a thousand screaming victims; the palaces of luxury and the hovels of indigence resound alike with the bitter wailings of disease, idiotism and madness grin and rave amongst us’ (Prose Works, p. 150).

Shelley and Bart’s John Grove was more established at Bart’s than his younger brother. He had been registered as an apprentice for six years to his great-uncle William Long, paying £315, from 4 June 1802.24 This would have placed him in a good position to obtain a post at the hospital. John qualiﬁed as a surgeon in 1808: he was examined on 1 July 1808 and gained his Diploma of Membership, the MRCS. Hospital positions became available very rarely and it was not until 1813 that he applied for the position of assistant surgeon at Bart’s. Elections involved only a few candidates, all of a high calibre; usually the candidates had served as apprentices to hospital surgeons and had held the role of house surgeon before applying for the position of assistant surgeon. Hospital elections were notoriously nepotistic and corrupt; candidates were expected to pay the fees for their supporters to become governors. The position was coveted, despite not carrying with it a hospital income, because promotion to full surgeon was pretty much automatic. Candidates canvassed existing governors and exploited any possible connection with the hospital. Charlotte Grove’s diary for 19 February 1813 hints at this, and at other connections that the Grove family had with the hospital: ‘John wrote us word that there is a vacancy in St Bartholomew’s – I hope he will get it. I wrote to my friend Mr. Snow for his interest’.25 On 10 March she wrote: ‘John made a speech before the Governors of St Bartholomew’s & was applauded’: this was presumably his election petition (Hawkins, 1995, p. 121). The election John Grove entered was won by William Lawrence. They were almost the same age but Lawrence had been Abernethy’s apprentice, had qualiﬁed before John, gaining his MRCS in 1805, was published, and had stood down in the last election in 1807, conceding to a more senior candidate.26 In the election Grove entered, after reading their election petitions, Grove and the other candidates stood down so that the position became Lawrence’s with their consent (BHA HA 1/16, p. 495). For unknown reasons, John Grove did not enter the 1815

82 Shelley and Vitality

election or the one after that in 1816.27 Instead he was elected Physician to Salisbury Hospital in 1817, remaining there till 1845 when he inherited the Grove family estate.28 John’s participation in the 1813 election suggests that he had a high proﬁle at Bart’s: he had worked there since the beginning of his apprenticeship in 1802 and was a member of the hospital’s Medical and Philosophical Society. No doubt John told Shelley about the election when he saw him in London a few months later (Letters, I, 367, 18 May 1813). His decision not to take the contest further than reading his election petition, and not to call in the votes he had secured, indicates an agreement between him and Lawrence. Certainly they must have known each other, and not only as rivals. Links between Shelley, the Groves and Lawrence can be discerned within the intellectual culture of the hospital, evidence of which is found in the Medical and Philosophical Society in Bart’s, which John Abernethy founded in 1795. In 1800 it formed a library, and for a while the Society ﬂourished. Looking at the Minute Books covering meetings during the years 1799 to 1815, and between 1805 and 1809, there are repeated references to the attendance of ‘Mr Grove’ as well as to Lawrence.29 The chair of society meetings regularly changed; Mr Grove was ‘President’ of a few meetings.30 At each meeting (sometimes they met as often as fortnightly) one person would read a paper or begin discussion on a case they had come across in the hospital. Lawrence gave a paper on 1 December 1801 ‘on varieties of human species’, which could have been an original version of his Lectures (BHA SA 1/1). Lawrence was the treasurer and librarian of the society and, aided by two other council members, decided which books should be bought. On 26 February 1805 the Minute Book records: ‘Grove presented Cavallo, Philosophy, 4 vols, 8vo to the Society for which the thanks of the Society were voted to him’ (ibid.).31 In 1807, when Mr Grove was one of the library’s consultants, James Lind’s book ‘on diseases of persons in hot climates’ was bought: this is Lind’s An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates, ﬁrst published in 1768 (BHA SA 1/1, 11 April 1807). Both Tiberius Cavallo and Lind can be linked to Shelley. James Lind (1716–94) was the cousin of Dr James Lind (1736–1812), Shelley’s teacher at Eton, who directed his scientiﬁc reading. Shelley would also have encountered Cavallo through Lind, who corresponded with him and published the results of experiments they performed together.32 Shelley’s circle in London in 1811, before he eloped with Harriet, centred around the medical men of Bart’s and Shelley con-

Shelley’s Knowledge of the ‘Science of Life’ 83

tinued to write to Charles and see John, until at least 1813. Shelley had written to Charles from York on 29 October 1811, with the postscript ‘tell John I am happy to ﬁnd that we are as good friends as ever’, perhaps having anticipated some diminution of their friendship since his elopement (Letters, I, 164). Probably the last time that Charles saw Shelley was in the spring of 1812: ‘The following spring I saw Bysshe and Mrs. Shelley in London’ (Hogg, 1858, II, 555). But it seems that Shelley continued to see John Grove after this date. He wrote to his father on 18 May 1813, ‘I was happy to hear from John Grove who din’d with us yesterday that you continue in good Health’ (Letters, I , 367). This may have been a vegetarian dinner, since, as Timothy Morton points out, Shelley and Harriet were conﬁrmed vegetarians on 21 May 1813 (Letters, I , 367n.; Morton, 1994, p. 68). As I discuss in detail later in this chapter, Shelley spent a great part of his time in 1813–14 in the company of John Frank Newton, Lawrence, and other vegetarian friends. There are possibly greater connections between John Grove and this circle, which I have been unable to discover, but Grove’s acquaintance with Lawrence and his profession would have suited Shelley’s circle at this time. John Grove and Newton were given as credit references for the carriage Shelley bought in the summer of 1813 from Charters (SC, III , 157). John Grove also owned a copy of Shelley’s A Vindication of a Natural Diet. 33 When asked by Hogg to provide his recollections of Shelley, John wrote that he had lost all contact with his cousin after his elopement with Mary. John Grove, however, is listed with other people Shelley meant to write to in a notebook dated 1817.34 John Abernethy was one of the most popular doctors of his time, despite the fact that he did not physically examine patients and preferred instead to send them away to read ‘My Book’, the name by which he referred to his Constitutional Origin of Local Diseases. 35 He referred to it so often in lectures and consultations that he became known as ‘My Book Abernethy’. 36 This work was founded on the general principle that ‘the stomach and bowels are disordered by injuries and diseases of parts of the body’ (Abernethy, 1820, p. 5). Consequently, in his teachings and practice he targeted bad diet and the unhealthy lifestyles of the rich as the reason behind most ailments. Abernethy’s insistence upon the importance of diet was clearly inﬂuential on Shelley’s belief in the importance of vegetarian diet, not only to individual health but to the progression of an entire society.37 Shelley refers to this theory in a note (indicated by a

84 Shelley and Vitality

footnote reference) to his ‘Essay on the Vegetable System of Diet’, with the words ‘see Abernethy’: The remotest parts of the body sympathise [with] the stomach; groundless terrors, vertigo and delirium are frequently consequent upon a disease of the digestive organs; tremours [sic] and spasmodic affections remote both in their nature1 and position from disorders of the stomach are yet in many cases to be traced to its derangement; and those whose digestive powers are strongly and regularly exerted are particularly exempt from illness.38 Shelley is here alluding to Abernethy’s favourite theory. The surgeon ﬁrmly believed that all illnesses could and should be treated through attention to the stomach, which is the basis for Abernethy’s idea of ‘inﬂuence’ or ‘sympathy’ used in his theory of life.39 Abernethy not only recommended not eating more than the stomach can digest, he speciﬁcally singled out the dangers of eating too much meat: ‘being in a warm and moist place, the undigested food will undergo those chemical changes natural to dead vegetable and animal matter: the vegetable food will ferment and become acid, the animal food will grow rancid and putrid’ (Abernethy, 1820, p. 74). The ability of the stomach to act in this way but not to consume that ﬂesh the stomach is made of was one of the mysteries that led Hunter to the formulation of his vitalist principle. Why, Hunter asked, does the stomach’s acid juices not attempt to digest the material it is composed of? Sometimes after death this process could be witnessed and the ﬂuids of the stomach attacked the stomach itself. This clearly indicated a principle at work during life that protected the body from usual chemical operations, like digestion; as David Knight writes, ‘for Hunter and his disciples this showed that dead and living matter are subject to different laws’.40 The course of anatomical lectures given by John Abernethy at St Bartholomew’s Hospital that Shelley attended offers one source of information about Shelley’s medical knowledge. The audiences of these lectures were medical students from hospitals throughout London. Abernethy’s pupils remember him speaking slowly and distinctly, explaining difﬁcult subjects carefully and limiting the amount of information given in a single lecture to a manageable quantity.41 His lectures were punctuated by anecdotes that illustrated how the theories students learned in these lectures should be applied to the practice of surgery. He was always attentive to the practical applications of the information he gave, assuming that everyone in his audience was a

Shelley’s Knowledge of the ‘Science of Life’ 85

serious student, preparing for life as a medical practitioner. The information Shelley would have received in the 1811 lectures he attended can be found in the extant manuscript lecture notes of Frederick Grainger (1791–1864), a student in London at this time, who later became a general practitioner in Devon.42 The lectures were divided into sections on each part of the body. Each section followed a basic pattern whereby, for example, Abernethy gives the names of the muscles that exist in the neck, describes what they do and then describes a case-study involving these muscles. The information given is detailed and technical and assumes that the student has a degree of knowledge at the start of the course. There are constant references to Abernethy’s trademark theory: that local problems can be eased by treating the entire frame. For example, in a discussion on the inﬂamed and diseased joints, Abernethy tell his audience that ‘many joints become diseased by the general health being disordered, in these cases local applications will be of little use, our chief care then should be to amend the constitution, and having done this we cure the disease’ (Wellcome, MSS. 815–16, I, 5). During the spring of 1811 Shelley clearly became familiar with the opinions behind this debate and his opinion of how life worked changed. A letter written after spending time at Bart’s and in the company of these men refutes the ideas of the letter of 6 January 1811, thus demonstrating how differently Shelley now thought on the matter. Lawrence’s ideas appear to have permeated Shelley’s thoughts and the nature of life is newly deﬁned as Lawrence rather than Abernethy conceived of it: When we speak of the soul of man, we mean that unknown cause which produces the observable effect evinced by his intelligence & bodily animation which are in their nature conjoined, and as we suppose, as we observe, inseparable. The word God then, in the sense which you take it analogises with the universe, as the soul of man to his body, as the vegetative power to vegetables, the stony power to stones. Yet were each of these adjuncts taken away what would be the remainder—what is man without his soul? he is not man. What are vegetables without their vegetative power? stones without their stony? Each of these, as much as constitute the essence of men, stones &c, as much as make it to be what it is, as your God does the universe. In this sense I acknowledge a God, but merely as a synonyime [sic] for the existing power of existence. I do not in this, nor can you do I think recognise a Being which has

86 Shelley and Vitality

created that to which it is confessedly annexed as an essence, as that without which the universe wd. not be what it is, it is therefore the essence of the universe, the universe is the essence of it—it is another word for the essence of the universe. (Letters, I, 100–1, 11 June 1811) Intelligence and animation are here inseparable, just as Lawrence believed intelligence relied on the material brain; otherwise, as he put it, the brain was ‘left almost without an ofﬁce’ (Lectures, p. 105). Shelley begins by arguing the vitalists’ case, that there is a principle of vitality that causes animation in the body. This principle he links, as his contemporaries did, to the idea of a soul. The effect, animation, can be observed but the cause, the soul, is ‘unknown’. Yet, Shelley argues, this is a false dualism, the power which animates matter is inseparable from matter. It is clear from this letter that Shelley can conceive of nothing which is independent of matter; there is no inert body to which animation is attached as an appendage: animation itself is material. There is no universal principle of life, which animates all beings whether animal, vegetable or mineral, but a type-speciﬁc ‘power’ reminiscent of Lawrence’s theory of life as organization. Shelley’s circle in London and Bracknell during the early 1810s introduced him to ideas that he would continue to exploit in the poetry he wrote throughout the rest of his life. His knowledge of human anatomy and physiology, gained from Abernethy’s lectures and his medical friends, provides many of the images and vocabulary he uses to describe his sense of what poetry is able to achieve. Not only this, but Shelley, with his radical politics and openly atheist views is perceived by the conservative establishment ﬁgures represented by Abernethy to be one of the party of ‘Modern Sceptics’ they were threatened by. Shelley was linked publicly and intellectually with this band of men who questioned the existence of a soul, the need for an external, controlling principle to regulate the natural impulses of the body and the nature of life itself.

Lawrence and the Bracknell Circle When Shelley met Godwin after their initial period of correspondence, on 4 October 1812, he was also introduced to a number of Godwin’s friends. For a time, until his elopement with Mary on 28 June 1814, he became particularly close friends with a group of these, known here as the ‘Bracknell circle’.43 They were connected by their vegetarianism,

Shelley’s Knowledge of the ‘Science of Life’ 87

which was motivated by their interest in radical politics and medicine. Godwin had met Harriet de Boinville, the wife of a French émigré, by 8 August 1809; he knew her and her sister Cornelia through their father (SC, III, 276). Cornelia Collins married John Frank Newton, author of the vegetarian tract Return to Nature, and thus Godwin met Newton. Newton, in turn, had been inﬂuenced by the vegetarian doctor, William Lambe, another of their circle.44 Godwin’s friend Thomas Turner, whom he had known since 1803, married the daughter of Harriet de Boinville, another Cornelia, who become Cornelia Turner in 1812. Cornelia Newton was attended in her last illness by Lambe; she died in 1816. In 1818, Alfred de Boinville, Harriet’s son, married William Lambe’s daughter. Godwin introduced Shelley to this circle in November 1812, which also included the surgeon William Lawrence, who, it seems, was a good friend of the Newtons. Godwin takes a surprisingly central role during these years in the medical circle surrounding Shelley, attending Abernethy’s lectures himself and independently visiting Lawrence. In Godwin’s diaries, now held in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, there are a number of references to Lawrence. Godwin saw the de Boinvilles and Newtons fairly regularly from 1810 onwards. For 1 June 1812 there is a speciﬁc reference to William Lawrence in Godwin’s diary: ‘tea Newton’s, w. Lawrence, surgeon, MJ, M & J’.45 As indicated here, also present were Godwin’s wife, Mary-Jane Godwin, her daughter, Jane (Clair) Clairmont, and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. This was only a few days before Mary went to stay with the Baxters in Dundee from 7 June 1812 till 10 Nov 1812. This speciﬁc reference to Lawrence the surgeon, leads me to believe that Godwin refers to William Lawrence, and may well mean that references made simply to ‘Lawrence’ are not to the same man.46 There are a number of references that specify ‘Lawrence, surgeon’, which suggest Godwin’s need to distinguish this Lawrence from others. From the entries that do distinguish Lawrence the surgeon it becomes clear that he was close friends to the Newtons and is often to be found at their house or with them. It is also the case, though, that Godwin began to visit or receive Lawrence on his own. When Shelley and Godwin meet, their conversations range those topics that may well have been discussed at the Newtons, with Lawrence present; for example, on their walk on 6 November 1812, Godwin records that he and Shelley discussed ‘matter & spirit; atheism’ (Bod. Dep. e. 212). Indeed, Godwin’s role in Shelley’s scientiﬁc and medical reading has not perhaps been given the attention it deserves. Godwin himself

88 Shelley and Vitality

knew a number of surgeons, including Anthony Carlisle, who treated Coleridge, Lamb, Southey, Godwin’s family, and perhaps Godwin himself.47 Carlisle was surgeon-extraordinaire to the Prince-Regent and certainly not one of Lawrence’s radical circle.48 Carlisle published An Essay in the Disorders of Old Age, and on the Means of Prolonging Human Life in 1817, in which he stresses the importance of diet and constitution to health, but advocates a speciﬁc diet of meat rather than vegetables.49 Godwin’s diary entry for 24 June 1812 records him reading ‘Trotter’, which could be Thomas Trotter’s 1804 Essay on Drunkenness or his 1806 View of the Nervous Temperament (Bod. Dep. e. 212). 50 Trotter is one of the authors Shelley requests Thomas Hookham to send, in a list that clearly shows the inﬂuence of Godwin’s conversations and letters (Letters, I , 345, 24 December 1812). Godwin also dined with Davy on 14 Dec 1810 and continued to write to him through 1812 (Bod. Dep. e. 211, e. 212). Godwin met and knew a number of doctors, as the period of Mary Wollstonecraft’s death attested.51 His diaries often record his own illnesses and it seems that Mary Shelley was ill as a child; she was treated by Henry Cline when she was 14 (SC, III, 101). By 1 June 1812 when Godwin went to the Newtons’ with his family for tea and saw Lawrence there, Lawrence was Abernethy’s demonstrator, and had not yet been appointed assistant-surgeon at Bart’s. On 7 November 1812 Godwin recorded: ‘PBS to Newton’s’ (Bod. Dep. e. 212). Shelley’s visit to the Newtons’ may have a bearing on a letter, dated 6 (for 7) November 1812, in which Shelley asked his mother to send his galvanic machine and solar microscope: ‘The latter instrument being essential to a branch of philosophy which I am now pursuing’ (Letters, I, 328). On 11 November 1812 Godwin notes that ‘Shelleys & E Westbrook dine; adv. Lawrence, surgeon’ (Bod. Dep. e. 212).52 Then, on 14 January 1813 Godwin attended one of John Abernethy’s lectures, presumably inﬂuenced by Lawrence and John Frank Newton: ‘Lecture, Abernethy, w. Parkman’ (ibid.). This lecture would have been one of Abernethy’s anatomy lectures given at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and probably was not hugely different from the course Shelley had attended in 1811. Godwin’s attendance alerts us to his personal involvement with medical ﬁgures and science, as well as encouraging us to consider him as more a part of Shelley’s vegetarian circle. There is a gap in Godwin’s diaries where no references are made to the de Boinvilles, Newtons, or William Lawrence speciﬁcally. This was

Shelley’s Knowledge of the ‘Science of Life’ 89

the period when Shelley moved to Bracknell, probably on 27 July (SC, III, 208–10). Shelley had lived in London since April 1813, ﬁrst at Cooke’s Hotel in Albermarle Street, though he also took lodgings at Half-Moon Street. Clearly Shelley was seeing a lot of John Frank Newton and his family at this point: in a letter postmarked 9 July 1813 he writes to Hogg, ‘Last night your short note arrived … and the Ns had already taken me with them. This night the N.’s [sic] have a party to Vauxhall’ (Letters, I, 374–5). The Newtons lived in Chester Street, in Belgravia, near Vauxhall Bridge Road and Pimlico. In Hogg’s Life, he writes that Shelley also took lodgings in Pimlico: I sometimes met [Shelley] at the house of our common friend, and several times in particular at the adjacent lodgings of the lady friend, for whose sake he had emigrated to Pimlico. She was an amiable and accomplished old lady, and tolerably agreeable, but too much of the French school to be quite so, and the greater part of her associates were odious. I generally found there to be two or three sentimental young butchers, an eminently philosophical tinker, and several very unsophisticated medical practitioners, or medical students, all of low origin, and vulgar and offensive manners. They sighed, turned up their eyes, retailed philosophy, such as it was, and swore by William Godwin and Political Justice. (1858, II, 462–3) The ‘common friend’ was John Frank Newton, and presumably the woman in the ‘adjacent lodgings’ was his sister-in-law Harriet de Boinville. Shelley was quite taken with Harriet and her daughter Cornelia and decided to remove his family to Bracknell at the end of July to live in de Boinville’s house at High Elms. The Newtons came to visit him when he was there. In a later letter to Thomas Love Peacock, Shelley speaks of his affection for ‘Mrs. B’, ‘the most admirable specimen of human being I had ever seen’. He also remembers particularly ‘the amiable circle once assembled round her’ (Letters, I, 92, 6 April 1819). Shelley introduced Peacock to the Newtons at Bracknell and they had already met Hogg, who was to continue his friendship with the Newtons for many years after Shelley left England. Cornelia Newton told Hogg of meeting the ‘cold Scholar’ Peacock and in the same letter, written on 21 October 1813, she wrote: ‘We all look with pleasure to your return not omitting Mr Lawrence who always speaks of you as you deserve’ (SC, III, 253). Whether Lawrence was one of the medical men Hogg describes so disparagingly is unclear, but since he

90 Shelley and Vitality

had clearly met Lawrence by the date of Cornelia Newton’s letter, this seems quite possible: Consequently, I saw something at that period of medical society; I cannot say that, upon the whole, it was agreeable. Some of the therapeutics were tolerably good company, but not one of them, so far as I remember, was particularly pleasant. For the most part, they were mere prigs, living glossaries of hard words, conceited, intolerant, and dogmatical, to a ludicrous excess, on points which, at best, were extremely doubtful … Jealous, envious, illiberal, and quarrelsome; detracting from and backbiting each other; and too frequently epicureans, obtruding and thrusting in men’s faces a low, offensive, and shallow materialism. (1858, II, 429–30) The ‘backbiting’ Hogg describes perhaps alludes to the general split between the surgeons of London, which would soon erupt with the public debate between Abernethy and Lawrence. Godwin saw Shelley again at the end of 1813 when he brieﬂy returned from Bracknell. On 19 December 1813 his diary records: ‘dine at Newton’s, w. Shelley, Hog [sic], Lawrence & Hookham’ (Bod. Dep. e. 213). Again on 27 December 1813 Godwin writes ‘Call on [Francis] Place & Shelley, St James’s Hotel; adv Newtons & Lawrence’ (ibid.). Around this period, Lawrence is generally to be found with or at the Newtons when Godwin sees them. Despite Lawrence’s later denunciations of the vegetarian diet, at this juncture he was clearly one of the ‘Holy’, as Cornelia Turner put it (SC, III, 253).53 Hogg had been invited to Christmas dinner in 1813 at the Newtons, though there was less certainty over whether he would ‘continue one of the Holy or not’ (ibid.). A friend of Peacock’s, the naturalist Thomas Forster, who knew Lambe, Newton, Lawrence and Shelley, repeatedly claims that Lawrence was a committed vegetarian. In Philozia (1839), for example, Forster writes: Mr. Lawrence, whose eminence as a surgeon is well known; lived for many years on vegetable diet; Byron the poet did the same, as did likewise Percy Bysshe Shelley and many other distinguished literati whom I could name. Dr. Lambe and Mr. Frank Newton have published very able books in defence of a diet of herbs, and have condemned the use of ﬂesh as tending to undermine the constitution by a sort of slow poisoning.54

Shelley’s Knowledge of the ‘Science of Life’ 91

Forster’s recollections of this circle help to piece together their motivations and interests. Like Lawrence, he was a student of Abernethy’s and was much inﬂuenced by his theory of ‘sympathy’ between the stomach and other parts of the body. In the event of the vitality debate, however, he wrote a book defending Lawrence (Philostratus, 1823). It seems likely that Godwin also met Forster, in Edinburgh, when they were both visiting the city. Godwin’s diary records seeing ‘Forster (clouds)’ on 13 April 1816, and that Forster was among those he dined with the next day (Bod. Dep. e. 214). Forster was in Edinburgh around this time because he gave a paper at the Wernerian Society, in March 1816, and the Bodleian Library has an extant letter from Dr Johann Caspar Spurzheim, the phrenologist, to Forster, addressed to him at Edinburgh and dated 17 April 1816 (Forster, 1839, p. 77).55 The identiﬁcation of ‘(clouds)’ also tells us that this is Thomas Forster, since Godwin is probably referring to Forster’s Researches about Atmospheric Phenomena, published in 1813.56 Even after Shelley had eloped with Mary, and when the Newtons moved from London to Hampshire (both events occurring in 1814), Godwin continued to see Lawrence occasionally.57 There are diary entries recording that Godwin called on ‘Lawrence, surgeon’ on 18 March 1815 and on 4 May 1818 (Bod. Dep. e. 214, e. 216). It is clear from this that Godwin was in contact with Lawrence throughout the period of the Royal College of Surgeon’s lectures, as was Shelley. Shelley consulted Lawrence about his health in August 1815; he wrote to Hogg: ‘My health has been considerably improved und[er] Lawrence’s care, and I am so much more free from the continual irritation under which I lived, as [to] devote myself with more effect and consistency to study’ (Letters, I, 429, [?] August 1815). The year 1815 had not been a good one for Shelley in this respect; after consulting ‘an eminent physician’ Mary Shelley recalls that Shelley was diagnosed to be ‘dying rapidly of a consumption’ (Poetical Works, p. 30).58 This physician has been identiﬁed by Crook and Guiton as Dr Christopher Pemberton, although Matthews and Everest believe it is Lawrence.59 Again in 1817 there are direct references to Lawrence: in September, Shelley went to London to see him, and Mary wrote from Marlow, ‘write my love, a long account of what Lawrence says’.60 Another letter written by Mary to Shelley, while he remained in London, has been interpreted as a reply to a now lost letter in which he informed her that Lawrence had advised him to stop writing poetry because of the nervous excitement it caused (M. Shelley, 1980–88, I, 43). The poem referred to is Laon and Cythna, ﬁnished in September 1817 (BSM, XI, xxviii). It seems that it was Lawrence who told Shelley that he

92 Shelley and Vitality

should leave England for Italy; writing to Byron on 24 September 1817, Shelley informs him ‘My health is in a miserable state, so that some care will be required to prevent it speedily terminating in death … They recommend Italy as a certain remedy for my disease’ (Letters, I, 556, 24 September 1817). The collection of material Crook and Guiton have gathered together on this disease, and the doctors Shelley consulted during his illness-ridden lifetime, leave little work to be done on this aspect of his connection with medicine.61 Crook and Guiton have identiﬁed periods of intense pain and illness, speciﬁcally liver, lung, kidney and eye disorders, diagnosed by various doctors on different occasions as consumption, hepatitis, nephritis and opthalmia. They point out that Lawrence was an eye specialist and the ideal doctor for Shelley to see in 1817 when he was suffering from opthalmia (1986, 109). It is likely that Shelley saw Lawrence more often than extant information can prove but, in any case, their speciﬁcally mentioned meetings in 1815 and 1817 occur during the intense period of the vitality debate. Thomas Forster was a friend of Peacock. They had certainly met by 12 October 1809, and probably through their mutual friends the de St Croix family.62 In a letter written in 1859 to Peacock, Forster writes: ‘You will recollect that in or about 1814 Shelley, Byron[,] Lawrence & myself began the Cibo di latti et del frutto [‘Diet of milk and fruit’]’.63 While Forster must be incorrect in placing Byron in this circle, in his writings he repeatedly connects the radical politics and vegetarianism of a circle which included himself, Shelley, and the surgeon Lawrence. The development of Forster’s ideas, initially inﬂuenced by Abernethy’s and Lambe’s emphasis on the importance of the stomach to health, but ultimately supporting Lawrence in his battle against Abernethy, demonstrates how the ideas of Godwin, Shelley and the Bracknell circle were similarly connected to these two surgeons. Like Shelley’s cousins, John and Charles Grove, Forster had been enrolled as a student physician in Bart’s, though this might not have been until 1817 after he graduated from Cambridge.64 Forster also attended Abernethy’s lectures on anatomy (Forster, 1829, p. 44). By 1814, though, Forster had met and become friends with Abernethy’s erstwhile apprentice, William Lawrence.65 In 1829 Forster dedicated his Illustrations of the Atmospherical Origin of Epidemic Disorders of Health: To William Laurence [sic] … out of respect for the great public services which he has rendered to the profession, and for the distinguished talent and assiduity which have justly placed him at the head of it; as well as in testimony of personal esteem, the result of

Shelley’s Knowledge of the ‘Science of Life’ 93

many years of uninterrupted intimacy, this volume is inscribed, by his friend, the author.66 Importantly, though, it was Abernethy who ﬁrst inﬂuenced Forster’s ideas and publications, just as he had inﬂuenced Shelley’s own ‘Essay on the Vegetable System of Diet’. Forster recalls in his memoirs that he had ﬁrst met Abernethy through William Lambe: En 1811 je publiai mes réﬂections sur l’opertio des liqueurs fortes sur l’estomac de l’homme. Cet ouvrage a produit des controverses parmi les médecins; il est la cause de mon introduction á Mr. le docteur Lambe et á Mr. Abernethy fameux chirugien de Londres. Dans cette brochure j’avais donné mon opinion que l’homme n’était pas carnivore; et cité mon propre exemple á prouver que la santé est, plus forte et l’intellect plus éclairé quand on ne mange que des substances vegetales. J’avais, en fait vecu, pendant bien des années, comme Guarini en Pasto Fido, sopra il cibo di lalle [latte?] et del frutto; une expérience que j’avais fait aprés avoir lu l’histoire des Hindus avec certains traités sur l’inhumanité envers les animaux, la philosophie de Pythagore, que j’amais beaucoup et surtout le fameux discours qu’Ovid a mit dans la bouche de philosophe dans la quinziéme livre de ses Métamorphoses. (Forster, 1835, p. 8) The publication he describes here is his Physiological Reﬂections on the Destructive Operation of Spiritous and Fermented Liquors on the Animal System.67 The vegetarianism of Forster and the Bracknell circle was explicitly inﬂuenced by the medical theories of Lambe and Abernethy, both of whom urged patients to look to the quantity and nature of their diet. Lambe had published A Medical and Experimental Enquiry into the Origin, Symptoms, and Cure of Constitutional Diseases in 1805.68 Lambe’s biographer and great-grandson, H. Saxe Wyndham, alleges that Lambe’s book inﬂuenced Abernethy, and indeed calls the latter a ‘convert’ to Lambe’s views on diet.69 In any case, Lambe’s text is remarkably similar (even in its title) to Abernethy’s Constitutional Origin, ﬁrst published in 1807. Shelley met Lambe a number of times and remembered him fondly.70 Both Lambe and Abernethy argued for the importance of diet on health, and treated patients by urging them to change their diet. According to Wyndham, Lambe became acquainted with Abernethy while the latter was writing his 1804 Surgical Observations, Containing a Classiﬁcation of Tumours and agreed to put one of his cancer patients

94 Shelley and Vitality

under Lambe’s care (Wyndham, 1940, p. 19). Lambe felt that cancer, in particular, could be treated by a regimen of vegetables and distilled water; he believed that water from the Thames contained an arseniclike compound responsible for chronic diseases.71 Hogg recalls an ‘arsenic hunt’ with Lambe and Shelley (Hogg, 1858, II, 424). While there was a degree of consensus between them, Abernethy and Lambe disagreed on some fundamental points. Abernethy believed that the quantity of food as well as the periods of taking it was important (Abernethy, 1820, p. 74), and would prescribe a much restricted diet of ‘twelve ounces of meat and stale bread daily, with a glass or two of wine’ (Wyndham, 1940, p. 23).Whereas Lambe did not believe it mattered how much, or when, food was eaten, only that food consisted solely of vegetables, and that distilled water was the only liquid drunk. Lambe seems to have harboured some irritation at the way he was treated by Abernethy. Writing to Forster, in 1824, he blames his lack of evidence on the failure of Abernethy and Lawrence in the early 1810s to procure him the patients he needed to test his treatments.72 In his memoirs, Forster writes that his 1812 book caused quite a stir among medical circles, receiving the approbation of Abernethy and Lambe. Indeed, he writes that: Cette année je ﬁs la connaissance trés intime de Mr. Abernethy, une connaissance qui s’est ﬁnie par une forte attaque que j’ai fait sur lui en défence de mon ami Mr. Lawrence dans une brochure intitulée: Somatopsychoologia or Body Life and Mind. London 1823. (Forster, 1835, p. 9) The friendship and mutual understanding of Forster and Abernethy ended abruptly when Forster felt implicated in Abernethy’s aspersions against Lawrence and ‘The Party … The author considering himself as included in the sweeping but ambiguous charge, by having emerged originally from the same school of anatomy, and having pursued physiology to similar conclusions’ (Philostratus, 1823, p. iii). Somatopsychonoologia (a word created from the Greek words meaning body, life and mind) was published under the pseudonym ‘Philostratus’, a mythological ﬁgure whom Joseph Ritson had discussed in his own vegetarian tract from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ‘Because he hated tyrants’.73 Forster holds similar beliefs to those of Shelley and the Bracknell circle and these informed his life-long vegetarianism. Shelley’s feelings about animal cruelty are well documented and his vegetarianism is closely linked with his radical politics: ‘the use of animal ﬂesh and fermented

Shelley’s Knowledge of the ‘Science of Life’ 95

liquors, directly militates with this equality of the rights of man’ (note to Queen Mab, Poems, I, 419). Comparative anatomy had its part to play in this belief too: ‘Comparative anatomy teaches us that man resembles frugivorous animals in everything, and carnivorous in nothing’ (ibid., 411). Lawrence’s theory of life, with its levelling emphasis on similarity rather than difference, became a powerful tool for those arguing for and against vegetarian diets. The degree to which animals and humans shared living characteristics easily translated into a language of rights, whether these were for slaves, lower-class men, women, dissenters, or animals.

Shelley’s notes on Davy One neglected source of information about Shelley’s knowledge of science, speciﬁcally of the scientiﬁc ideas involved in the debate regarding vitality, are Shelley’s detailed and lengthy notes taken from Davy’s Elements of Agricultural Chemistry.74 Shelley wrote 18 pages of notes; Carlene Adamson, the editor of these manuscript notes, dates them sometime around 8–13 April 1820, when both Shelley and Claire Clairmont make references elsewhere to agriculture (BSM, V, xlvi).75 She believes that George William Tighe was the ‘person responsible for introducing Shelley to “Agriculture”’ (ibid.). Shelley was already interested in Davy’s work and had read Elements of Chemical Philosophy (Letters, I, 319). As Adamson writes, the notes have yet to be incorporated into any study of Shelley, whether of his life or ideas (BSM, V, xlvi). At the time of Grabo’s study of Shelley’s science, with its special emphasis on Davy, the existence of the notes was not known. Davy’s Agricultural Chemistry was an enormous success and became the standard textbook on the subject until the mid-1830s.76 The book was published for a speciﬁc audience, the landed gentlemen who belonged to the Royal Institution. With their needs in mind, Davy’s book was regarded as offering practical information that could help ‘raise better crops in a time of prolonged war and blockade, and the food shortages that went with them’ (Knight, 1992, p. 43). In Britain, the ‘plain’ and ‘accessible’ language of the lectures was ‘calculated to make gentlemen of an intellectual turn of mind keen to apply science on their own estates’ (ibid., p. 48). The publication of Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) had instigated a search for the means to produce enough food to cope with his predicted geometric rise in population. Shelley was interested in Davy’s book for a number of reasons, not least because Malthus’s theory was a direct criticism of Rousseau and Godwin. The existence of potato yield calculations in the same notebook as

96 Shelley and Vitality

Shelley’s notes on Davy’s book indicates this as a likely inﬂuence (BSM, V, 2–7). Shelley may have been considering developing land in Italy, or perhaps was thinking about his future inheritance of an estate.77 Davy’s work would have appealed to the chemist in Shelley, with its particular attention to the powers and nature of matter and detailed analyses of living organizations. Davy entered into the contemporary agricultural debate, about which was the best formula for manure and when it should be applied, with a philosophical eye to the importance of dead and decaying matter on the life of vegetation. These notes offer clear evidence of Shelley’s extensive knowledge of chemistry and general science, indicated by his deviations from Davy’s texts; Shelley often uses his own words to gloss Davy’s description, or conﬁdently makes a summary of a long and detailed passage in Davy’s text. Shelley’s scientiﬁc acumen is also demonstrated by his use of abbreviation: he uses nomenclature abbreviations which seem to be developed by him personally and differ from Davy’s preferred system in Agricultural Chemistry. Shelley uses medical and scientiﬁc language comfortably, often without the need for Davy’s explicating deﬁnitions. On the ﬁrst page of notes, Shelley uses quotation marks presumably to distinguish Davy’s phrase from his own, ‘“heat light & air”’ (BSM, V, 172 rev). This indicates that he has copied Davy’s original text and is not, as is the case generally, paraphrasing Davy’s words. This is the only occasion on which quotation marks are used and Shelley’s text increasingly moves away from Davy’s as the notes continue. Davy writes that his book might have a more extensive readership than those intending to practise agriculture: ‘Even considered merely as a philosophical science, this department of knowledge is highly worthy of cultivation. For what can be more delightful than to trace the forms of living beings and their adaptations and peculiar purposes’ (Davy, 1814, p. 29). Since organic chemistry was in its infancy at this time, agriculture offered a rare insight into the composition of organic bodies. The desire to know more about life and the living world is a legitimate reason for reading Davy’s book and the ‘ultimate and highest destination’ of such knowledge is its agricultural application (ibid.). Davy goes on to claim that such an understanding will eventually beneﬁt the entire human race. Through the better understanding of agriculture man will be able to modify the earth, accelerate or slow down the decomposition of animal and vegetable substances, and possess ‘the means of producing the greatest effects from the materials employed’ (p. 17). Davy’s book contained chemical analyses of vegetable and plant life but also compared vegetable organizations to animal bodies and

Shelley’s Knowledge of the ‘Science of Life’ 97

discussed the nature of their dependence upon each other. For example, decomposed animal matter, or manure, is useful to vegetable life, which in turn is essential to living animals. Davy is clear though on the uniqueness of living matter, which differs from inorganic and dead substances. He repeatedly states his vitalist conviction that organic life cannot be examined in the same way and with the same degree of success as lower forms of life, particularly vegetable life, or dead matter. It is possible to gain ‘just views respecting the composition of plants, and the economy of the vegetable kingdom; but the same accuracy of weight and measure, the same statical [sic] results which depend upon the uniformity of the laws that govern dead matter, cannot be expected in operations where the powers of life are concerned’ (ibid.). This is due to the ‘diversity of organs and of functions’ that exist in animated nature: Life gives a peculiar character to all its productions; the power of attraction and repulsion, combination and decomposition, are subservient to it; a few elements, by the diversity of their arrangement, are made to form the most different substances; and similar substances are produced from compounds, which, when superﬁcially examined, appear entirely different. (Ibid.) Another passage, not noted by Shelley, states the differences between the life of vegetables and animal life; the former exhibit ‘no signs of perception, or of voluntary motion; and their organs are either organs of nourishment or of reproduction; organs for the preservation and increase of the individual, or the multiplication of the species’ (ibid. , p. 55). Although Davy perceives of a general ‘life’ which has universally shared characteristics, he believes that there are fundamental differences between the ‘living structures’ of animals and vegetables. He ﬁrmly places the vital principle of a body apart from its organization. Shelley is clearly interested in the idea of the reciprocal beneﬁts gained by the animal and vegetable world. My next chapter considers how the utopian world of Act Four of Prometheus Unbound utilizes the contemporary idea of mutually supportive systems of living beings. Shelley notes Davy’s explication of the process by which animals and vegetables provide the means by which each can live: The earth is the laboratory in which the nutriment of vegetables is prepared. Manure is useful & may be converted into organized bodies. Plants decompose the carbonic acid gas of the atmosphere

98 Shelley and Vitality

absorb & convert the carbon, & in the same proportion give forth o<x>ygen <.> carbonic acid gass produced by fermentation [&] combustion & respiration can only be consumed by plants which e[xude] in the same proportion oxygen. From the progress or the waste of animal life a principle necessary to the existence of vegetables is produced, & from the functions of vegetable existence, desire a supply of th[eir]e substance indispensible to their life. An exchange is made between carbonic acid gass & oxygene gas; the former the result of the destruction of the principle of life & the latter the fuel by which it is nourished. (BSM, V, 171–0 rev)78 The manuscript is marked with crossings out and misspellings and the lack of punctuation makes it difﬁcult to read, but it is clear that Shelley understood the concepts Davy was explaining. This passage is particularly pertinent to the contemporary debate concerning life. Shelley’s notes also provide a good example of how he treats and interprets Davy’s original text, which reads: The soil is the laboratory in which the food is prepared. No manure can be taken up by the roots of plants unless water is present; and water or its elements exist in all the products of vegetation. The germination of seeds does not take place without the presence of air of oxygene [sic] gas; and in the sunshine vegetables decompose the carbonic acid gas of the atmosphere, the carbon of which is absorbed, and becomes a part of their organized matter, and the oxygene gas, the other constituent, is given off; and in consequence of a variety of agencies, the economy of vegetation is made subservient to the general order of the system of nature. It is shewn [sic] by various researches, that the constitution of the atmosphere has been always the same since the time that it was ﬁrst accurately analysed; and this must in a great measure depend upon the powers of plants to absorb or decompose the putrifying or decaying remains of animals and vegetables, and the gaseous efﬂuvia which they are constantly emitting. Carbonic acid gas is formed in a variety of processes of fermentation and combustion, and in the respiration of animals, and as yet no other process is known in nature by which it can be consumed, except vegetation. Animals produce a substance which appears to be a necessary food of vegetables; vegetables evolve a principle necessary to the existence of animals; and these different classes

Shelley’s Knowledge of the ‘Science of Life’ 99

of beings seem to be thus connected together in the exercise of their living functions, and to a certain extent made to depend upon each other for their existence. (Davy, 1814, pp. 15–16) From the ﬁrst line Shelley’s version is similar to Davy’s text but is tellingly altered: ‘soil’ in Davy becomes ‘earth’ in Shelley, a far more encompassing term and one that recalls the character of ‘Earth’ in Prometheus Unbound, whose role includes feeding and sustaining all who live on her surface. Shelley prefers the word ‘nutriment’ to Davy’s more plain ‘food’, but nutriment also implies a quality of nourishment and goodness. Shelley’s much more brief comment on manure may indicate his lack of interest in the subject and, perhaps, that the practice of agriculture might not be his immediate aim in taking notes from the book. Where Davy notes the necessity of manure in the operation of feeding plants, Shelley notes that manure is ‘useful’ and that it can be ‘converted into organized bodies’. His terminology indicates that for him ‘organized bodies’ includes vegetables as well as animals, and he expresses an interest here in the idea that matter can be ‘converted’ into other types of matter. Even soil, which is usually regarded as inorganic, can be transformed into organic, living matter. What follows this in Shelley’s account is a concise and succinct version of Davy’s text. The word ‘convert’ is original to Shelley’s text, and reveals his belief in matter’s potential for metamorphosis. Davy instead uses the phrase ‘becomes a part of’, which suggests that carbon is contained within rather than transformed into vegetable matter. Shelley’s idea that oxygen is given off in the same ‘proportion’ as carbon is also original to his notes, but may be indebted to Davy’s belief in the ‘system of nature’, with its implication of proportion and order. Shelley interprets Davy’s statement that the content of the atmosphere has been constant ‘since the time that it was ﬁrst accurately analysed’ as further evidence that vegetables produce exactly the correct amount of oxygen that animals need, and vice versa. Animals depend upon ‘the powers of the plants’ to perform this process, since Davy believes carbon can only be consumed by vegetables, and Shelley appears to concur. Shelley sums up Davy’s message with the words: ‘from the progress or waste of animal life a principle necessary to the existence of vegetables is produced’, thus incorporating the carbonproducing process of the living being, respiration, and the process undergone by the decaying body after death, fermentation. Assessing the ‘exchange’ that takes place between animal and plant, Shelley

100 Shelley and Vitality

concludes using words not taken from Davy, and describes carbonic acid gas as ‘the result of the destruction of the principle of life’ and oxygen as ‘the fuel by which it is nourished’. The principle of life therefore becomes an engine which burns oxygen, in a process analogous with combustion, and when destroyed produces gas of a different nature. This principle of life can be both produced and consumed. There are other examples of Shelley’s interest in Davy’s discussion of vitality. Various phrases appear repeatedly in Shelley’s notes, ‘vegetable life’, for example. Shelley observes: ‘Light necessary to the health of plants’ and deﬁnes oxygen by its vital function: ‘Oxygene (the principle of animal life)’, where the corresponding description of oxygen given by Davy does not include the deﬁnition that Shelley gives in parentheses (BSM, V, 167 rev, 166 rev; Davy, 1814, p. 44). Shelley shows an interest in the composition and organization of plants and trees, and describes them using analogies with animal life. For example, he notes ‘The alburnum is the great vascular system of the plant’ (BSM, V, 164 rev).79 Shelley’s knowledge of human anatomy is clear; he does not need to deﬁne such terms as ‘vascular’, ‘epidermis’, ‘ﬁbrous’ or ‘cellular membranes’ (BSM, V, 165 rev, 164 rev). He is interested in the vital elements of plants, and makes a point of noting of ‘The pith’ that is ‘Not necessary to life’ (BSM, V, 163–2 rev). This note is a much briefer version of Davy’s passage, which includes an account of different scientiﬁc opinions on the importance of the pith in a plant. Davy considers the theories of Stephen Hales, who believed that the pith was instrumental in the plant’s growth and also discusses how Linnaeus, whose lively imagination was continually employed in endeavours to discover analogies between the animal and vegetable systems, conceived ‘that the pith performed for the plant the same functions as the brain and nerves in animated beings.’ He considered it as the organ of irritability, and the seat of life. (Davy, 1814, p. 62) Davy’s tone is patronizing and quotation marks distinguish his from Linnaeus’s opinions. He dismisses Linnaeus’s speculation and cites someone else’s experiments in which the pith was successfully removed from several plants that continued to live regardless. Davy proceeds to name the pith ‘an organ of secondary importance’, but Shelley formulates this in his own words when he writes that it is ‘Not necessary to life’ (Davy, 1814, p. 62; BSM, V, 161 rev). Shelley notes of the pistil of a plant: ‘Congeries of spherical forms are contained in it,

Shelley’s Knowledge of the ‘Science of Life’ 101

the base of future seeds –’ (BSM, V, 161 rev). This is already a favourite image used by Shelley, to symbolize the revolutionary potential of new birth hidden within a decaying form. It features in ‘Ode to the West Wind’, which is also in this notebook. Davy’s belief in dynamic corpuscular powers prompted Shelley to note ‘The laws by which substances unite with various degrees of force, chemical afﬁnity act upon vegetable life’ (BSM, V, 167 rev). He notes that the shapes of plants are formed by this afﬁnity and that it contributes to the ‘absorption of food of vegetables’ (ibid.). Reﬂecting his interest in geology, Shelley notes the page on which Davy discusses ‘The progress & the changes produced upon the face of the Earth by decomposition & vegetation’ (ibid., 156 rev). Indeed, Shelley consistently notes references that Davy makes to the changes that the earth undergoes as matter transforms between animate and inanimate states. Shelley’s interest in astronomy, alcohol and poisons can be seen elsewhere in the notes. From the ﬁrst pages of his notes, Shelley uses a system of abbreviation. It is striking that in one of the few instances when Shelley abbreviates a word, which is not the name of an element, he refers to ‘V. & A. M’, for vegetable and animal matter. By the end of the notes, Shelley also begins to use a shorthand form of reference to the atomic weights, which Davy persists in calling ‘proportions’ (ibid., 158 rev). He adds the potato to Davy’s list of vegetables which contain sugar even though Davy does not mention sugar in the properties of the potato (BSM, V, 160 rev; Davy, 1814, pp. 139–40). Only later in the book does Davy mention that potatoes become sweet after a change occurs in their state (Davy, 1814, pp. 233–4). Shelley also notes this: ‘To preserve Potatoes from becoming sweet in thawing after frost, thaw them under water that has been boiled’ (BSM, V, 155 rev). This is one of the instances in which Shelley shows an interest in husbandry, and in the economical ways of providing food, but information about how to produce sugar from readily available vegetables was also of political signiﬁcance at this time. Mr Forester, the caricature of Shelley in Peacock’s Melincourt, wants to abstain from buying sugar, because it is a product of the slave-trade.80 Shelley’s notes from Davy represent him as informed and knowledgeable on chemistry’s methods and discoveries. These notes, though taken from a book ﬁrst published in 1813, were not written until 1820 and the intervening period saw the issues that Davy raised being brought to the foreground of public and scientiﬁc attention, in the form of the debate between Abernethy and Lawrence. The next three chapters trace the inﬂuence of this debate on Shelley’s poetry and prose.

3 The Political Body: Prometheus Unbound

The furies and animal life Critics generally agree that it was in Prometheus Unbound that P.B. Shelley made most reference to scientiﬁc matters, though they disagree as to the extent and sources of this material. There are references to a wide range of disciplines in Prometheus: astronomy, geology, chemistry and biology are among the sciences to which Shelley alludes. The only other poem to approach it in terms of the quantity and range of such allusions is Queen Mab, to which Shelley appended a series of elucidating and extending notes (in the style of Erasmus Darwin’s poems), which revealed the extent of his reading at that time. Mary Shelley states in her edition of the poetic drama that Shelley meant to write similar accompanying notes for Prometheus Unbound, ‘which would have served to explain much of what is obscure in his poetry’ (Poetical Works, p. 272). The question of why Shelley waited until Prometheus Unbound, ‘written’, Peter Butter argues, ‘long after he had stopped reading much science or doing experiments’, to demonstrate most clearly his scientiﬁc awareness is no longer problematic when we consider it within the context of the vitality debate (Butter, 1954, p. 139). In the past, critics have generally agreed with Desmond King-Hele’s assessment that ‘from 1814 till 1819, if we judge from [Shelley’s] poems alone, science was buried beneath a humanistic landslide’ (King-Hele, 1971, p. 155). These dates are precisely those which witnessed the vitality debate between John Abernethy and William Lawrence, and the previous chapter explored Shelley’s ongoing association with Lawrence and Abernethy and their ideas within this period. Despite the poem’s particularly complex composition history, it seems that Shelley began Prometheus Unbound in at least August 1818, with the fourth act added 102

The Political Body: Prometheus Unbound 103

by the end of 1819.1 It is possible to place Shelley’s poem within the context of pamphlets written in response to the surgeons’ debate, and to read certain scientiﬁc aspects of it as informed by, and responding to, the questions that the debate had provoked. The project of recuperating scientiﬁc sources for the material in Prometheus Unbound is not simply one of supplying footnotes; as Geoffrey Matthews’s and Kelvin Everest’s edition of Prometheus shows, scientiﬁc material is ‘imaginatively fused with an extensive network of allusion to classical lore and literature of volcanic and related material’ (Poems, II, 469). Many footnotes in this edition conjecture a source for scientiﬁc allusions, but they also gesture towards a reading of the poem which is complicated by these allusions. Carl Grabo believed that considering Shelley’s scientiﬁc reading ‘has made clear large parts of the poem previously unintelligible’, but he was also trying to demonstrate ‘the pervasive character of Shelley’s scientiﬁc thought in Prometheus’ (Grabo, 1930, p. 194). King-Hele called the fourth act of Prometheus ‘lyricized science’, subverting the usual privileging of poetry above its scientiﬁc content (King-Hele, 1971, p. 155). By restoring the neglected context of the vitality debate, I hope similarly to prove that Shelley does not simply allude to theories of life, but that he employs the vocabulary and ideas of this new science to express social, political and poetic questions and ideals. While Shelley would have aligned himself with Lawrence politically, it seems that the subject of vitality was highly suggestive to him and often, rather than come down ﬁrmly on one side or the other, he is alive to the imaginative potential of both Lawrence’s and Abernethy’s theories of life. In Prometheus, as in other of his major works, Shelley shows that he understands the ideological agenda of contemporary theories of vitality and exploits them for his own poetic purposes. In this chapter I ﬁrst examine the way that Shelley uses the political ramiﬁcations of theories of vitality to imagine the volitional and internal change that enables resistance to tyranny, looking in particular at the furies in Act One, who put forward a misguided representation of ‘animal life’, which can be identiﬁed as Abernethy’s (I. 484).2 In the next section, the character of Asia is explored as a symbol of the life principle itself. Here, electricity is considered to be the principle of life, just as Abernethy believed. This chapter also considers the poem’s references to mesmerism, particularly in Panthea’s dream of Act Two. There is some attempt in the poem to distinguish between different kinds of life, animal, vegetable and mineral, and the similarities and differences between living bodies

104 Shelley and Vitality

offer insight into Shelley’s understanding of these classiﬁcations. This necessarily involves determining which elements are vital for such beings to live, and often Shelley alludes to the work of scientists discussed in the ﬁrst chapter and their contributions to the vitality issue. I analyse the anatomical and physiological accounts of Earth as representative of Shelley’s knowledge of these sciences. She is imagined metaphorically as a living human being and descriptions of her serve to demonstrate Shelley’s concept of the body, its diseases and treatments. The ‘breathing Earth’ has characteristics which correspond with contemporary accounts of speciﬁcally human anatomy and physiology (II. 2. 52). Shelley wrote the last ﬁve paragraphs of his Preface to Prometheus Unbound after reading a particularly virulent attack on Laon and Cythna that the Quarterly Review had published in 1819.3 The anonymous reviewer, now identiﬁed as J.T. Coleridge, explicitly identiﬁed Shelley as one of a ‘party’, just as Abernethy had warned against a party of ‘Modern Sceptics’: ‘Of all his brethren Mr. Shelley carries to the greatest length the doctrines of the sect’ (Physiological Lectures, p. 37; [Coleridge], 1819, p. 460). Shelley defended himself against charges of plagiarism and against the imputation that his poetry was motivated exclusively by his politics. His defence also incorporates contemporary science: ‘it is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any degree as containing a reasoned system on the theory of human life’ (Poems, II, 475). While Shelley could mean that he is not simply offering a sociopolitical account of the moral behaviour of humans, his words have to be read in their 1819 context of the increased public interest in, and awareness of, theories of life.4 Matthews and Everest date the ﬁrst four paragraphs of the preface as completed by late September 1819 and think the last ﬁve were added by late December of that year (ibid., 460). An article surveying the entire debate and reviewing no less than eight of the publications involved was printed in the Quarterly Review for November 1819 ([D’Oyly], 1819). The Quarterly’s animosity further connects Shelley with Lawrence. Both the article on Shelley and on the vitality debate should be recognized as part of what Marilyn Butler has called a ‘consistent, orchestrated campaign against cultural subversion’ (M. Shelley, 1993, p. 228). There are also a number of ways in which the complicated textual and publication history of Shelley’s writings are linked with Lawrence; for example, William Benbow, who had published editions of Lawrence’s Lectures and Byron’s Cain, also published two pirate editions of Prometheus Unbound after Shelley’s death (Poems, II,

The Political Body: Prometheus Unbound 105

463); J. Callow, the medical publisher, published Lawrence’s work and Shelley’s Vindication of a Natural Diet; in 1822 Richard Carlile published pirate editions of both Lawrence’s Lectures and Shelley’s Queen Mab (Poems, I, 268). Despite Shelley’s disclaimer, Prometheus must be regarded as motivated by political reform, although this may not be Shelley’s sole intention in writing it. Matthews writes ‘it must be inferred from Shelley’s words that the poem is at least partly so dedicated’ (Matthews, 1957, p. 227). Similarly, whilst Shelley’s poem is not to be understood as containing a ‘reasoned system on the theory of human life’, it is clear that the ‘science of life’ is discussed. Shelley’s words are a disclaimer against all that a ‘reasoned system’ implies of scientiﬁc and methodological dogmatism. Elsewhere Everest has warned against all critical approaches that are founded ‘on the most profoundly debatable premiss that Shelley had any such “System” to articulate’.5 Immediately after the above statement Shelley invokes Darwin, whose didactic poetry offers a prime example of how not to approach the subject: ‘Didactic poetry is my abhorrence; nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse’ (Poems, II, 475). Shelley’s purpose in Prometheus, therefore, is not simply that of scientiﬁc exposition, which would be best ‘expressed in prose’; instead he intends a creative use of science, which is more suited to the medium of poetry. That Shelley’s poem does touch on the question of life, albeit without a ‘reasoned’ theoretical and methodological basis, is clear from this preface. He uses the terms and ideas of the ongoing medical debate when he describes a poet as ‘the combined product of such internal powers as modify the nature of others; and of such external inﬂuences as excite and sustain these powers; he is not one, but both’ (Poems, II, 474). The vocabulary used here, ‘powers’, ‘inﬂuences’, ‘modify’, ‘excite’ and ‘sustain’, is evocative of the vitality debate. Physiological life is used as a metaphor for the poet’s special status. Shelley’s description of ‘internal powers’, which have the ability to ‘modify’ other natures, are precisely those used in the vitality debate to distinguish living matter. Shelley had deﬁned the term ‘power’ in A Refutation of Deism: If Power1 be an attribute of existing substance, substance could not have derived its origin from power. One thing cannot be at the same time the cause and effect of another.—The word power expresses the capability of any thing to be or act. (Prose Works, p. 121)

106 Shelley and Vitality

The footnote reference next to the word ‘Power’ directs the reader to the following note: ‘For a very profound disquisition on this subject, see Sir William Drummond’s Academical Questions, Chap. I, p. i’ (Prose Works, I, 121). Shelley’s discussion bears on the question of life, also considered as a ‘power’. While Abernethy held life to be the cause of animation, Lawrence thought it the result (Lectures, p. 93). In any case, though, Lawrence is aware of the contradiction inherent in Abernethy’s terminology. Lawrence quotes the Scottish enlightenment philosopher Thomas Brown’s Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect, which he describes as ‘a most instructive work’ (ibid., p. 78n). Brown was to be associated with Lawrence’s Lectures in Mary Shepherd’s An Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect controverting the Doctrine of Mr. Hume, concerning the nature of that relation; with Observations upon the Opinions of Dr. Brown and Mr. Lawrence, connected with the same subject ([Shepherd], 1824). Lawrence quotes Brown on the term ‘power’: The powers, properties, or qualities of a substance, are not to be regarded, then, as any thing superadded to the substance, or distinct from it. They are only the substance itself, considered in relation to various changes, that take place, when it exists in peculiar circumstances. (Lectures, pp. 80–1n) I consider Shelley’s scepticism in more detail in the next chapter. Here, it is sufﬁcient to point out that the terms Shelley uses are at the centre of the vitality debate. Shelley’s reference to William Drummond further connects the vitality question with philosophical scepticism.6 In his Academical Questions, Drummond uses physiology to show the ridiculousness of asserting that the soul is both actuated by and the effect of this ‘power’: Little respect would be shown for the physiologist, who attempted to explain the animal œconomy of man, by saying, he digests by his power of digestion; is nourished by his capacity for nutrition; and breathes by the act of respiration. (1805, p. 4) According to Lawrence, Abernethy argues that we live by the power of life. Though Drummond’s discussion concerns the soul rather than physiological life, contemporary criticism was clear about the links

The Political Body: Prometheus Unbound 107

between the subject of his book and Lawrence’s Lectures ([D’Oyly], 1819, p. 13). Life is repeatedly deﬁned by its ability to transform different substances into living matter: according to both John Hunter and Adam Walker, blood, as the living principle, was perceived to transmute oxygen, heat and light into its own nature. By describing such powers as internal in his preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley aligns himself with Lawrence and his supporters, rather than with Abernethy who attributes this property to an independent, superadded source. A poet is not only the product of this action but also of ‘such external inﬂuences as excite and sustain these powers’: in the vehicle of this metaphor, these ‘inﬂuences’ (rather than powers) are the chemical and physical laws to which a living body is subject. They are not portrayed here as potentially destructive to life, but as part of the animating process, exciting and sustaining that life. They can be likened to the external stimuli used to decide whether a body is living: a plant’s ability to respond and react to such external inﬂuences as heat, water and light, for many scientists in this period, determines its status as a living being. The furies that torture Prometheus in Act One hunt ‘all things that weep, and bleed, and live’ (I. 456). They give a good indication of what they perceive life to be, tracking by means of smell, ‘I scent life!’ (I. 338). Jupiter feeds the furies with ‘groans and blood’ in order to keep them as his instruments, and, for Prometheus, they are objects of pity (I. 332). The furies are the creations of Jupiter’s ‘all-miscreative brain’ (I. 448).7 They taunt Prometheus by imagining the kinds of torture he might be expecting; such torture is offered as an inferior example of what they are able to accomplish. They mock him with, ‘Thou thinkest we will rend thee bone from bone, / And nerve from nerve, working like ﬁre within?’ (I. 475–6). Destroyed from inside, the body will be taken apart in the same way, and with the same deliberation, as it could have been put together. This is a dreadful inversion of the life process; organization is unpacked piece by piece, or ‘anatomized’, in the language of the period. The ‘ﬁre within’ may refer to the vital principle itself: the furies will use the same means by which life is created but they will reverse the usual effect and deconstruct the body. Of the horrible punishments with which they threaten Prometheus, one is to act like ‘animal life’: Thou think’st we will live through thee, one by one, Like animal life, and though we can obscure not

108 Shelley and Vitality

The soul which burns within, that we will dwell Beside it, like a vain loud multitude Vexing the self-content of wisest men: That we will be dread thought beneath thy brain, And foul desire round thine astonished heart, And blood within thy labyrinthine veins Crawling like agony? (I. 483–91) They are proposing to enter his body, and imitate ‘animal life’ within it.8 They will each take turns and this succession, ‘one by one’, suggests the successive generations of mortal animal life. The reference to a speciﬁc kind of life, ‘animal life’, implies that it is an alien principle to Prometheus; the furies are not suggesting that they will imitate the life he has but another, different kind of life. Presumably, as an immortal, he does not possess this kind of vitality. This episode offers the opportunity to see how animal life is perceived to operate. The furies mean to crawl within his veins just as blood does in an animal; the veins are seen as ‘labyrinthine’. They impose a distinction between thought and the brain, just as Abernethy did. The threat recognizes the potential of physical disorder to vex ‘the selfcontent’ of even the ‘wisest’ of men, challenging Stoic ideas that the wise man cannot suffer wrong. There is a horrifying sense of excess. Prometheus’s body will be inhabited by both his own vital principle and a series of others; this impression is mirrored in the number of syllables in the blank verse line beginning ‘Like animal life’. The stresses spill over; the iambic pentameter is disrupted: the effect is of a disturbance beneath the surface and the verse enacts the process that the furies threaten. In his essay ‘On the Devil and Devils’, Shelley humorously alludes to this vitalist theory: ‘how devils inhabit the body is not explained. It cannot be that they animate them like what is called the soul or vital principle because that is supposed to be already preoccupied’ (BSM, XIV, 87). In the fury’s description, vitality exists in an animal body but is separate from the soul. By imitating this life, they will be thought, desire and blood, beneath, around and within his brain, heart and veins.9 This animal life will be superadded to the body’s own organization. This is a revealing description of life, seeming to work against the self rather than with it. There is a battle going on beneath the surface of the skin and animal life is regarded as a hostile presence rather than the natural state of the body.

The Political Body: Prometheus Unbound 109

Shelley represents the furies as having a misguided sense of ‘animal life’; their theory of life can be identiﬁed as that of Abernethy and by this comparison Abernethy is portrayed as an outmoded vitalist. The furies’ misconception of life as a superadded principle is the means by which Prometheus can repeal their threats. He fends them off by claiming that they already perform this role but that he continues to exercise control over ‘the torturing and conﬂicting throngs within’ (I. 493). In other words, he remains in possession of his life. This operation is not effected by a superadded external body but internally: man is his own master. The distinction can be read in the same light as the politicized opinions of Abernethy and Lawrence. If Prometheus were to submit to the furies’ concept of ‘animal life’ and acknowledge its truth, he would be accepting Abernethy’s and Burke’s belief that humans need such external institutions as kings, prisons and law courts in order to be ‘virtuous’ and ‘useful’ (Enquiry, p. 95). One of Prometheus’s achievements, as listed by Asia, is that ‘He taught to rule, as life directs the limbs’ (II. 4. 92). Through Prometheus’s teachings, life needs to be redeﬁned; dependence upon external powers should be replaced by a reliance upon the internal powers of the self. In the utopian world of act four of Prometheus Unbound this is effected; post-revolutionary man is described as ‘King / Over himself’ (III. 4. 196–7). The new life experienced by humans in Act Four enacts Shelley’s maxim in his ‘Sonnet: To the Republic of Benevento’: ‘Man who man would be, / Must rule the empire of himself’ (10–11, P&P, p. 327). A person cannot be forced to become a good and honourable citizen, with a responsible sense of their civic duty by the pressure of external forces, by a Burkean sublime justice imposed from outside the self. Importantly, Prometheus recognizes that change is only possible from within; his repentance and forgiveness of his torturer is volitional rather than evolutionary. His former hatred is ‘dead within’ and instead he summons a fortitude and selﬂessness from his inner resources (I. 71). Lawrence, describing Abernethy’s theory of life, succinctly also manages to describe the political message of Prometheus Unbound, where ‘a man of courage’ is ‘withheld by a superior power from resisting oppression’ (Rees, 1819, XX, ‘Life’). Shelley’s lyrical drama is one of those poetic ﬁctions described by Lawrence as ‘best calculated to excite compassion’, and in doing so instruct its reader as to ‘the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature’ (Rees, 1819, XX, ‘Life’; ‘Preface’ to Prometheus Unbound, Poems, II, 473). Reﬂecting Shelley’s desire to believe in human perfectibility, in Prometheus Unbound life does change for humans, although the time-scale for this change is unknown at this stage in the dramatic action. Prometheus’s reiterated line ‘Ah me, alas, pain, pain ever forever!’ is

110 Shelley and Vitality

repeated, after the visit from the furies, but punctuated with a question mark rather than an exclamation mark (I. 23, 30, 635). The end is perhaps within sight, or is at least recognized as possible. After Prometheus is released, humans have a different existence, both morally and physiologically, and like Prometheus are able to exercise this kind of control over themselves. Man will never be free from mutability, the energy which constantly changes life, but he will be able to rule it as a master (III. 4. 200–1). Walker used a similarly politicized language when he described vitality as a tyrant that exercises control over matter: life is its ‘dominion’, and only when it ‘abandons its empire’ does it cease to govern (Walker, 1802, i, 204). In portraying man as capable of ruling ‘the empire of himself’, Shelley offers, as Lawrence did, physiological evidence for republicanism (Sonnet: To the Republic of Benevento, 11, P&P, p. 327).

Electricity as life In the second act of Prometheus, Panthea describes a dream she has had at length to Asia, in which the damaged physical body of Prometheus falls from him and he appears in ‘that form / Which lives unchanged within’ (II. 1. 64–5). Without his ‘pale, wound-worn limbs’, Prometheus exists as he did originally, with ‘soft, ﬂowing limbs’, before he knew physical pain and suffering under Jupiter’s punishment (II. 1. 62, 73). This reversion to his former self, and the sexual nature of the encounter between Prometheus and Panthea suggests that the dream is still a prerevolutionary vision, which preﬁgures Prometheus’s ﬁnal transformation. In relating her dream, Panthea borrows from the language of the vitality debate and uses, metaphorically, the idea of a vital principle. The scene is paralleled in the lyric poem ‘To Constantia’, in which the poet ﬁgure is deeply moved by the experience of listening to a woman singing. Both texts refer to life in physiological terms; in ‘To Constantia’ it is ‘The blood and life within thy snowy ﬁngers’ that produces the wonderful sound of the instrument (3, Poems, II, 336).10 The poet ﬁgure responds physically to Constantia’s song: My brain is wild, my breath comes quick, The blood is listening in my frame, And thronging shadows fast and thick Fall on my overﬂowing eyes, As morning dew, that in the sunbeam dies, I am dissolved in these consuming ecstasies. (5–11, Poems, II, 336)

The Political Body: Prometheus Unbound 111

This reaction involves a number of symptoms I will discuss in this section: the sexual encounter is described as something that consumes, and the self is ‘dissolved’ in the experience. In the next stanza, the poet ﬁgure claims: ‘I have no life, Constantia, but in thee’ (12, Poems, II, 336). The idea of love or sex as an exchange of life-force is made possible through the notion of a vital principle. In Prometheus, the vitalist language that proliferates in the poem enables Shelley to imagine both pre- and postrevolutionary relationships. This poem is strikingly similar to Panthea’s experience in her dream, in which there seems to be a kind of life-transplant enacted.11 Nigel Leask sees this episode as ‘Panthea’s account of her “magnetization” by Prometheus’.12 Mesmerism was ﬁrst practised by Anton Mesmer late in the eighteenth century; Hermione de Almeida describes his claims for the treatment: His ﬂuid universale was believed to be an invisible, miraculous vis vitae that was at once the principle of animation and a power that could be transmitted from one organic body to another less vital body as a healing and vitalizing agent. (1991, pp. 71–2) Mesmerism can be seen as a practical application of Abernethy’s theory that vitality is analogous to electricity, using Galvani’s discovery that the body has innate electricity. 13 In Leask’s words, mesmerists believed that ‘when the regulating nerves are vitiated and unable to perform their function, they can be “artiﬁcially” supplemented by the nervous vitality of others’ (1992, p. 66). Diseases are seen as a deﬁciency in vitality and treatment is offered by means of a transfer from the practitioner to the patient. Mesmerism depends upon a vitalist theory of life since this means that life can be introduced to the body from outside it. The mesmerist would move their hands over the body of the patient, hovering without touching the skin, to transmit electricity, or life, into the body of the patient. Mesmerism conceives of a transferable life-force that can be channelled and manipulated. The sexual aspect of mesmeric treatment posed the greatest concern among mainstream medical practice, particularly because the patient was often female and the practitioner male. 14 Shelley writes of this sexually-charged experience in the poem ‘The Magnetic Lady to her Patient’: ‘from my ﬁngers ﬂow / The powers of life’ (5–6, Poetical Works, p. 667). Shelley received mesmeric treatment in 1820 from Thomas Medwin,

112 Shelley and Vitality

Jane Williams and Mary, but both Paul Dawson and Leask believe that he was aware of mesmerism long before this date (Leask, 1992, p. 55).15 In her dream, Prometheus appears to Panthea as pure spirit and the night is illuminated by his radiance (II. 1. 63–4). Panthea is in a state like that which often precedes a trance. The dramatic action ensues after Panthea complies with Prometheus’s order, ‘lift thine eyes on me!’: I lifted them: the overpowering light Of that immortal shape was shadowed o’er By love; which, from his soft and ﬂowing limbs, And passion-parted lips, and keen, faint eyes, Steamed forth like vaporous ﬁre; an atmosphere Which wrapped me in its all-dissolving power, As the warm ether of the morning sun Wraps ere it drinks some cloud of wandering dew. I saw not, heard not, moved not, only felt His presence ﬂow and mingle through my blood Till it became his life, and his grew mine, And I was thus absorbed—until it passed, And like the vapours when the sun sinks down, Gathering again in drops upon the pines, And tremulous as they, in the deep night My being was condensed. (II. 1. 71–86)16 The ‘overpowering light’ of Prometheus, which might otherwise invite comparison with the ‘Insufferable might’ of Jupiter when he raped Thetis, is made bearable by the softer inﬂuence of love (III. 1. 37). There are, though, other striking similarities between Jupiter’s report of Thetis’s words and Panthea’s; for example, during the rape, Thetis is reported to have cried out ‘all my being … is dissolved’. She felt unable to ‘sustain’ the ‘quick ﬂames, / The penetrating presence’ of Jupiter (III. 1. 38–41). This sexual encounter is expressed in a similar way to Panthea’s dream as the imposition of one principle of vitality on another. In Panthea’s dream, however, love is a ‘vaporous ﬁre’ emitted from Prometheus’s limbs, lips and eyes; the atmosphere he creates wraps Panthea within its power. Shelley uses his scientiﬁc knowledge of the natural world to metaphorically describe what is happening. Panthea describes the experience as like the sun’s action on a cloud when it absorbs the water that the cloud

The Political Body: Prometheus Unbound 113

carries. In effect, she loses her own individual identity and becomes part of him: she is ﬁrst enveloped by his ‘all-dissolving power’ and then consumed, as a cloud is absorbed.17 King-Hele glosses this passage: ‘Panthea in her dream felt as if she were a drop of dew vaporizing under the warmth of Prometheus’ sun-like beams’ (1971, p. 177). Shelley is alluding to one of the most signiﬁcant operations of all matter, the ability to change from one form into another, used to demonstrate the Lucretian maxim that nothing is annihilated only metamorphosed. This ability is peculiarly a characteristic of life; living matter was seen as being able to actively convert other matter to its own nature. The climax comes when she feels ‘His presence ﬂow and mingle through my blood / Till it became his life, and his grew mine’ (II. 1. 79–80). This suggests an equal transference of vitality, until the gendered pronouns she uses are examined further: employed repeatedly, the word ‘his’ emphasizes Prometheus’s governing role in this act. She felt ‘his presence’ enter her blood, until the completion of this process, when ‘it’, her blood, had become his life and his life was hers. The word ‘grew’, however, may mean that Prometheus loses nothing of himself during this act; if we take the verb to mean ‘increased’ or ‘was added to’, rather than ‘became’, her life can be seen as being grafted onto his. Throughout this scene, Prometheus speaks in a gendered language of control and mastery, which, as I have already noted, echoes Jupiter’s rape of Thetis. This can be accounted for by what Matthews and Everest call ‘the dark epoch of pre-revolutionary oppression’ in which this scene takes place, and in which Panthea’s ‘sexual love’ is predominate (Poems, II, 467). Though we have only Panthea’s perspective here, it seems that she is ‘absorbed’ into him; the atmosphere which wraps and dissolves her comes from him.18 The imposition of his vital force on hers, would, however, ﬁt a reading of this scene as mesmerism. When she is again reconstituted, Panthea regains her sense of self and her independent life force. Her senses are regained as she is condensed and her thoughts are again ‘gathered’. While Panthea is dreaming she appears to have physically enacted the events of the dream with Ione. Panthea sleeps with her head on Ione’s ‘life-breathing bosom’, which description posits Ione as a source of vitality, while it locates vitality within the breast or lungs (II. 1. 49). During Panthea’s dream, Ione feels robbed of the air and blood which are vital to her: it is thy sport, false sister! Thou hast discovered some enchantment old,

114 Shelley and Vitality

Whose spells have stolen my spirit as I slept And mingled it with thine;—for when just now We kissed, I felt within thy parted lips The sweet air that sustained me, and the warmth Of the life-blood, for loss of which I faint, Quivered between our intertwining arms. (II. 1. 99–106) Panthea is vampiric, just as Prometheus was in her dream. In the phrase ‘life-blood’, Shelley may be alluding to Hunter’s theory that blood was life, or he may be referring speciﬁcally to arterial blood, considered a more vital component than other kinds of blood. In many ways Ione is reacting to this encounter as the victim of a vampire would. The erotic subtext of the scene ﬁts this model, and Ione is weak and faint from the loss of blood. Panthea steals life from Ione where she had freely offered it to Prometheus in her dream. Ione feels that Panthea mingled her ‘spirit’ with her own; she feels the air she needs ‘within’ Panthea’s lips and the memory, or warmth, of the blood she has lost is ‘between’ their arms. Asia embodies the principle of life itself. In Matthews’s and Everest’s words: Shelley ‘identiﬁes Asia with love, electricity, and the lifesupporting energy of the sun’ (Poems, II, 540n.).19 Panthea, talking to Prometheus, explains how Asia’s presence has transformed the bleak Indian vale to which she was exiled: The scene of her sad exile—rugged once And desolate and frozen like this ravine; But now invested with fair ﬂowers and herbs, And haunted by sweet airs and sounds, which ﬂow Among the woods and waters, from the ether Of her transforming presence—which would fade If it were mingled not with thine. (I. 827–33) The transforming power of Asia can be seen in the once barren vale that her presence has made lush and verdant. She can be seen as symbolizing the animating principle, identiﬁed as pure electricity, light, and love.20 Shelley had clearly noted Humphry Davy’s belief in the role of electricity in animating vegetation.21 Asia is only able to exercise a lessened version of her vital role during Prometheus’s imprisonment,

The Political Body: Prometheus Unbound 115

partly because she needs his presence to fully realize her powers; it is not until he is about to be released that she begins to return to her full potential. In the scenes considered here the word ‘mingled’, which, as Matthews and Everest note, is ‘One of S[helley]’s habitual terms for sexual intercourse’, does not necessarily imply an equal blending of two persons (Poems, II, 531n.). Asia’s ‘transforming presence’ needs to be mingled with Prometheus’s, so that it does not lose the ability to transform death to life (I. 833). Here, the word ‘presence’ does retain some sense of the spatial, bodily presence of Asia inhabiting the once rugged vale she has metamorphosed. The word ‘presence’ is used again in Panthea’s dream, and again, it has some connotation of the bodily; she can feel it ﬂow through her blood (II.1. 71–80). In both instances, it is ‘presence’ that is or can be ‘mingled’. At this point, her blood becomes ‘his life’ and it is unclear whether the word ‘presence’ is a synonym for ‘life’ or some kind of necessary condition for an exchange of life. In Ione’s description of her sexual encounter with Panthea, she prefers the term ‘spirit’ to either ‘presence’ or ‘life’ (ibid., 99–101). Whereas the idea that Asia’s presence needs to be ‘mingled’ with Prometheus’s so that it does not fade implies a degree of equality in the mingling, other instances suggest that there is an unequal and even selﬁsh superaddition of one life onto another.22 The science of life is used in Prometheus to imagine relationships, whether constructive, as in the case of Prometheus and Asia, or tyrannical, as with the rape of Thetis by Jupiter or the vampiric sexual encounter between Panthea and Ione. The idea of a vital principle allows Shelley to describe the gendered, political connotations of relationships, including the ideal relationship, ﬁgured as a transformative love that creates life from death. By using metaphors obtained from scientiﬁc theories of life as electricity, Shelley can describe and complicate his notion of love in the pre-revolutionary world in which he lives, as well as realize an ideal and utopian love possible after the end of tyranny. Asia’s identity as life is partly a dramaturgical role; her power is required to counterpoint the ‘miscreative’ Jupiter and to reinvigorate the deadened Prometheus, changed by the hatred expressed in his curse. Timothy Webb compares Jupiter’s world to that described in Paradise Lost, ‘Where all life dies, death lives’.23 Asia tells us that it was only during Jupiter’s reign that ‘ghastly death’ appeared and the Earth records how he attempted to crush every natural element to a ‘life-less mire’ (II. 4. 51; IV. 349). Just as living beings in contemporary accounts change other matter to their own, Jupiter mirrors but inverts this process: as Prometheus tells us, ‘Evil minds / Change good to their own

116 Shelley and Vitality

nature’ (I. 380–1). The furies, for example, are shapeless unless formed by the ‘destined agony’ of their victim (I. 470–2). Jupiter is the antithesis of creativity, or the principle of life, capable of transforming from life to death; even Prometheus is in danger of this: ‘Methinks I grow like what I contemplate’ (I. 450). Prometheus needs Asia, and their reunion is integral to the lyrical drama’s resolution. Asia’s eyes are the source of her peculiar vital capacity: Prometheus recalls ‘drinking life from her loved eyes’ (I. 122).24 She is seen as the source of his vitality and without her he is unable to obtain the life he needs. Asia, both literally and symbolically, represents new life, a genuine break from the past. The terms in which Prometheus expresses his relationship with Asia carry both a sexual and a vital signiﬁcance: Asia! who, when my being overﬂowed, Wert like a golden chalice to bright wine Which else had sunk into thirsty dust. (I. 809–11)25 In one of its incarnations in Prometheus, love is described as ‘Scattering the joy of life’ (I. 765). It has ‘lightning-braided pinions’ and paves ‘the world with light’, explicitly associating it with electricity (I. 765, 767). Later in the poem, ‘love, which is as ﬁre’, acts like a Leyden jar: the torch-bearer ‘kindled’ his lamp ‘anew’ by gazing on Asia’s loved eyes (III. 3. 150–1). After Asia’s transformation, love ceases to be contained within her and replaces Jupiter’s miscreative power: And from beneath, around, within, above, Filling thy void annihilation, Love Bursts in like light on caves cloven by the thunder-ball. (IV. 353–5) With Asia’s character, Shelley demonstrates his understanding of the life principle. After her meeting with Demogorgon, when Prometheus is about to be released, she begins to transform into her unmediated self. This is a direct result of the auspicious conditions of this time: as Panthea notes, Some good change Is working in the elements, which suffer Thy presence thus unveiled. (II. 5. 18–20)

The Political Body: Prometheus Unbound 117

The day on which Jupiter is overthrown is covered by an unnatural darkness; the sun does not rise until noon, but Asia is envisaged as a powerful light source which ﬁlls this void. Panthea can no longer look at Asia directly and can ‘scarce endure’ to feel ‘the radiance of [her] beauty’ (II. 5. 17–18). In Asia, Shelley synthesizes light, electricity and love and these are analogous with vitality; she is the embodiment of life itself. Panthea describes how when Asia was born: love, like the atmosphere Of the sun’s ﬁre ﬁlling the living world, Burst from thee, and illumined Earth and Heaven. (II. 5. 26–8) Asia is a source of love and this love is imagined as electricity and light and the means by which beings live. This synthesis can be identiﬁed as originating in Walker’s idea that light, heat and electricity were all modiﬁcations of the single pure element ‘ﬁre’; he thought that electricity was one form of this element and that it came from the sun (1802, I, 142). Shelley’s choice of the phrase ‘sun’s ﬁre’ could allude to Walker’s theory; Walker believed that the atmosphere was a ‘thin ﬂuid’ version of the pure element of ﬁre, and that both air and blood contain this same element (1802, I, 142). Similarly, in ‘To Constantia’, the source of Constantia’s ability, ‘a power like light’, is located in her eyes and is likened to ‘ﬁre’ (37, 42, Poems, II, 337–8). As she transforms, Asia is called ‘Life of life’, ‘Child of Light’ and ‘Lamp of Earth’ (II. 5. 48, 54, 66).26 As the ‘Life of life’, she is characterized by her ability to ‘enkindle’, which is often used as a synonym for ‘animate’ or ‘enliven’, and performs vital functions in producing heat and light (II. 5. 48) Love is heat-producing and able to transform the ‘cold air’ into its own nature, which is ‘ﬁre’ (II. 5. 51).27 Shelley’s knowledge of contemporary scientiﬁc and medical notions enable him to imagine and describe an ideal love, which can transform into its own nature. Shelley borrows from vitalist ideas and language in order to ﬁgure Asia’s abilities in a post-revolutionary, utopian world.

Earth as a living being This section concentrates on Prometheus Unbound’s representation of the elements that Shelley perceived to be vital, or, the characteristics that the ‘living’ in the poem display. Prometheus Unbound offers a consistent set of criteria necessary for the generation and

118 Shelley and Vitality

promulgation of life. Air, for example, is one of the necessities of living beings and its quality is represented as crucial to the health of those who breathe it: it is twice called ‘all-sustaining air’ and Ione describes it as the ‘sweet air that sustained me’ ( I . 755; II . 5. 42; II . 1. 104). Shelley is responding here to the work of scientists such as Thomas Beddoes, Tiberius Cavallo, Davy, Joseph Priestley and Walker with their research into vital air and the other component gases of the environment, and he shows his knowledge of their experiments when he chooses to purify the atmosphere of post-revolutionary life. Air is recognized for its ability to ‘sustain’ life. At times Shelley suggests that if air is not the principle of life itself this principle might exist within the atmosphere we breathe; there were contemporary speculations of this nature sufﬁcient to warrant the epithet of ‘life-breathing’ (II. 1. 49). Blood, too, is called ‘life-blood’, as though in agreement with Hunter’s theory of the blood as the vital principle ( II . 1. 99–106). Heat, light and water are other forces identiﬁed as vital; the warmth of the sun is described as ‘lifekindling’, and again later, the ‘sun’s heaven’ gives ‘radiance and life’ ( III . 3. 118; IV . 385–7). 28 Ultimately, Shelley does not seem to privilege any one vital element above others but he does make it clear that life could not exist without any of them. As the fauns’ discussion in Act Two makes clear living beings take many forms: when one faun expresses his surprise and asks ‘If such live thus, have others other lives’; the second faun answers ‘Ay, many more, which we may well divine’ (II.2. 83, 88). The question of deciding which beings should be designated as ‘living’ is tackled in Prometheus Unbound, and a complex chain of beings with different degrees of existence is developed. There are ‘two worlds of life and death’ and two languages (I. 195). In the opening lines of the poem, Prometheus compares his and Jupiter’s state of sleeplessness; they alone of ‘living things’ behold these worlds with ‘sleepless eyes’ (I. 3–4). While they are ‘living’ their life is not to be considered the same as human life, and a number of distinctions are drawn throughout the poem to clearly demarcate the difference. The most obvious difference between them and humans is their inability to die. According to Asia’s history of the earth, life existed under Saturn’s rule but death did not appear until Jupiter’s reign, accompanied by the seasons and disease (II. 5. 50–2). Prometheus was unable to rid the humans of death, though he hid its shape and made its presence bearable (II. 5. 63). Death is incomprehensible to Asia: she asks the Earth what death is like but is told that she will not be able to understand

The Political Body: Prometheus Unbound 119

death because she is immortal. Not only this, but death can only be spoken of in the language of the dead. The Earth says: It would avail not to reply: Thou art immortal, and this tongue is known But to the uncommunicating dead. (III. 3. 110–12) The existence of these different languages complicates the relationship between the various strata of living beings. In Act One, when Prometheus calls on the Mountains, Springs, Air and Whirlwinds to repeat his original curse back to him, he cannot understand their reply. Prometheus responds: ‘I hear a sound of voices: not the voice / Which I gave forth’ (I. 112–13). He becomes angry at what he perceives as the natural world’s disdain, and reminds the elements of everything that they owe to him: ‘Why answer ye not, still? Brethren!’ (I. 130). He asks: ‘Why scorns the spirit which informs ye, now / To commune with me?’ (I. 125–6). While he can hear a sound, he is unable to understand the meaning of what is said.29 At this point the Earth, speaking for the elements, explains why they have not repeated his curse: ‘They dare not’ (I. 130). The Earth responds to Prometheus’s repeated question by asking a rhetorical question: ‘How canst thou hear, / Who knowest not the language of the dead’ (I. 137–8). Prometheus replies: ‘Thou art a living spirit; speak as they’ (I. 139). The Earth is identiﬁed here as ‘living’ despite her ‘inorganic voice’. Though she is able to speak as the living speak she does not dare to, because Jupiter uses this language and will be able to understand what she says (I. 140–3). She tries again to communicate with Prometheus in this ‘language of the dead’, because ‘the Gods / Hear not this voice’ (I. 143–4). She makes a renewed effort because she feels that Prometheus might be exempt from this rule, since he is ‘more than God / Being wise and kind’, but in the event he still cannot understand her words (I. 144–5). She ﬁnally gives up, concluding No, thou canst not hear: Thou art immortal, and this tongue is known Only to those who die. (I. 149–51) Clearly there are strict principles governing characters and their relationships. Their separate languages reveal that there is a species to which

120 Shelley and Vitality

Prometheus and the other immortals do not belong: the immortals speak ‘like life’ whereas the elements speak in the ‘language of the dead’. In order to overcome the problems caused by the language difﬁculties, the Earth reveals to Prometheus the structure which underpins these divisions: For know there are two worlds of life and death: One that which thou beholdest; but the other Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit The shadows of all forms that think and live Till death unite them and they part no more. (I. 195–9) This world underneath the Earth’s surface is ﬁlled with the phantasm of every form that lives. Even the immortals, who will never die and therefore never join their shadows, have identical forms within this world of the dead. The phantasms of Prometheus and Jupiter, as well as ‘heroes, men and beasts’, all exist there; they can be commanded by the living (‘Ask, and they must reply’) but are described as ‘vacant’ (I. 215, 216). The division between the two languages seems to be conﬁrmed by the arrival of the phantasm of Jupiter, who ﬁnally repeats Prometheus’s curse without understanding the meaning of the words he speaks: Why have the secret powers of this strange world Driven me, a frail and empty phantom, hither On direst storms? What unaccustomed sounds Are hovering on my lips, unlike the voice With which our pallid race hold ghastly talk In darkness? (I. 240–5) Finally speaking in the language that Prometheus can understand, the phantasm can be seen as performing Prometheus for the duration of the curse’s repetition and he assumes his facial expression and gestures (I. 258–61). This is not the language normally used by the phantom, and he wonders at his ability to communicate in this new ‘voice’. He does not comprehend the meaning of what he says: Prometheus asks him to recall the words of the curse, ‘Although no thought inform thy empty voice’ (I. 249). Clearly the world of Prometheus Unbound

The Political Body: Prometheus Unbound 121

imagines distinct boundaries between the living and the dead, the organic and the inorganic, the immortal and the mortal. The world and its natural elements are ﬁgured as animate beings in Prometheus Unbound and their characteristics offer the reader the opportunity to see what Shelley thought was required for a being to be classed as living. The Earth, for example, is imagined as a living being and compared metaphorically with the human body. She evinces human physical characteristics such as veins, ﬁbres, and blood, within a frame. Her ‘stony veins’ operate in the same way as the human circulatory system (I. 153).30 These veins extend in a network through her being to ‘the last ﬁbre of the loftiest tree’, and thus the plants which grow on the Earth become the furthest reaches of a single body (I. 154). The image is of a monarchical body politic, with the heart as the most important organ feeding and sustaining the outermost limbs. Shelley is not arguing for this within human society, but in the relation between Earth and plant life he may be putting forward a speciﬁc notion of ‘vegetable life’ as it differs from ‘animal life’. Shelley’s poem can be placed among the many contemporary attempts to give a more speciﬁc deﬁnition to the word ‘life’: Xavier Bichat, for example, divided living beings into two types, ‘organic life’ and ‘animal life’. Lawrence cited Bichat in his article on ‘Life’ in Rees’s Cyclopædia, and gave his own gloss on this ‘division’: One is common to vegetables and animals, the other peculiar to the latter. Compare together two individuals, one taken from each of these kingdoms: one exists only within itself, has no other relations to surrounding objects than those of nutrition, is born, grows, and perishes, attached to the soil, which received its germ: the other joins to this internal life, which it possesses in still higher degree, an external life, which establishes numerous relations between it and the neighbouring objects, unites its existence to that of other beings, and draws it near to or removes it from them according to its wants or fears. (Rees, 1819, XX, ‘Life’) Both Bichat and Lawrence were unhappy about the indiscriminate term ‘life’ being used to deﬁne a speciﬁc physiological state, and these new categories were part of their efforts to determine meaning for the word. In Prometheus Unbound, vegetable life is part of the Earth’s body, while ‘animal’ life retains a degree of independence, even though Shelley acknowledges that all life forms need certain natural elements

122 Shelley and Vitality

to sustain them. Earth makes reference to the vegetable life, which ‘is born, grows, and perishes, attached to the soil’, when she describes how ‘death shall be the last embrace of her / Who takes the life she gave’ (III. 3. 105–6). Animal life on the other hand is expressed by Bichat in the terms used by Shelley in his preface: ‘the combined product of such internal powers as modify others; and of such external inﬂuences as excite and sustain these powers; he is not one, but both’ (Poems, II, 474). Shelley uses the term ‘animal life’ in Prometheus and there is an attempt to deﬁne it as distinct from other kinds of life (I. 484). Matthews and Everest believe James Burnett Monboddo to be the source of this distinction, which Shelley refers to in other poems: they deﬁne animal life as ‘Nervous or sensitive vitality, as distinct from “Brute life” (which informed inanimate Nature), “Vegetable life” (which moved vegetables), and “Intellectual life” (imagination)’ (Poems, I, 275). In Queen Mab Shelley used the term with some precision: Upon the couch the body lay Wrapped in the depth of slumber: Its features were ﬁxed and meaningless, Yet animal life was there, And every organ yet performed its natural functions. (I. 139–43) This describes a body in what we would now call a coma, still displaying all the life signs. It may seem to be less distinct from vegetable life in this condition. Animal life is therefore simply the physical workings of the human body; the ‘ﬁxed’ features suggest irritability without sensibility. This extract can be read to mean that animal life was present because ‘every organ yet performed its natural functions’, a deﬁnition with which Lawrence would agree. An alternative reading which would support Abernethy’s theory of life can be suggested if the ‘And’ is emphasized; thus animal life is separate from and superadded to the working of the organs. Such passages in Shelley’s poetry address the difﬁculty felt among contemporaries of providing a theory of life that could apply to the range of beings deﬁned as living; in Prometheus Shelley describes even grass and air as ‘living’ (IV. 227). He is often keen not to divide or categorize living forms into animal and vegetable but to emphasize that all have life: ‘all plants, / And creeping forms, and insects rainbow-winged, / And birds, and beasts, and ﬁsh, and human shapes’ (III. 3. 91–3).

The Political Body: Prometheus Unbound 123

When Earth gave birth to Prometheus ‘Joy ran, as blood within a living frame’; the vital process of blood ﬂowing through the body is used to describe her happiness at this event. There are other later examples of this when ‘Love’ begins in the post-revolutionary world of Prometheus Unbound to act in the same way as vital elements.31 The image of the Earth as the heart of a body that extends to the furthest leaf on a tree means that all living beings dependent on the Earth for subsistence beneﬁt or suffer from her emotional state. When Prometheus was born this meant that all living creatures experienced joy; when, however, she grieved for Prometheus’s treatment at the hands of Jupiter, the opposite effect occurred and she became a malignant force. This acknowledges the sympathy existing between mental and physical conditions; Shelley gained this knowledge from Abernethy, and Godwin, inﬂuenced by Benjamin Franklin, also believed it. Earth calls her ‘frame’ living; where Hunter would have regarded blood to be the life principle, Shelley imagines it as the carrier of either good health or disease to the rest of the body. The frame can be seen as the bones or skeleton, and is regarded by Abernethy and fellow vitalists as the inanimate part of the body, which is enlivened by the life principle. After Jupiter had chained Prometheus to the precipice a number of events took place on a global scale. In keeping with Shelley’s belief that other planets were inhabited, the Earth describes how these peoples saw her ‘light wane in wide heaven’. The sea was affected by the altered light on the moon and new volcanoes erupted (I. 163–8). Besides these disorders and other ‘strange’, or unnatural, events, other occurrences endangered life on earth (I. 166, 168). A number of punishments visited the planet and all living beings were subject to an unhealthy environment that bred disease and illness, for example ﬂooding and the growth of health-threatening plants. Coupled with the diseases that Jupiter sent to destroy mortal life, the Earth contributed a pestilence made more deadly because it was emitted from the core of natural life: Plague had fallen on man and beast and worm, And in the corn, and vines, and meadow-grass, Teemed ineradicable poisonous weeds Draining their growth, for my wan breast was dry With grief; and the thin air, my breath, was stained With the contagion of a mother’s hate Breathed on her child’s destroyer. (I. 172–9)

124 Shelley and Vitality

Again, living beings are divided into certain categories which infer a kind of subdivision within the category of ‘living’: ‘man and beast and worm’ are all equally affected by the plague. The plague is caused by the political conditions of the world. These creatures also suffer from famine, while a corresponding ‘black blight’ speciﬁcally attacks ‘herb and tree’. Other plants are unable to grow because poisonous weeds, for which there is no antidote, ‘Drained’ them; water is needed for plants to live and grow. The reason given for the existence of these weeds is that the Earth’s ‘wan breast was dry / With grief’. She further sustains the comparison with human life by making explicit the analogy, ‘the thin air, my breath’. The atmosphere which the living breathe is ﬁgured as the breath of Earth and thus is inﬂuenced by her mood. As a consequence of the curse she breathed on Jupiter, the hate she is polluted by is transmitted into the atmosphere and proves contagious to those respiring this air. Here, Shelley incorporates contemporary ideas of the importance of clean air as well as discussing the other important elements to health. Mary Shelley writes that Lawrence had advised Shelley to ‘live as much as possible in the open air’ in the summer of 1815 (Poetical Works, p. 528). Besides Davy’s, Beddoes’s and Cavallo’s work on the potential medical beneﬁt of gases Shelley would also have known of Walker’s ideas on this subject; Walker published a pamphlet explaining his theories, A Philosophical Estimate of the Causes, Effects and Cure of Unwholesome Air in Large Cities (1777). Thomas Forster also published Researches About Atmospheric Phænomena (1813) during the period when he and Shelley were in London. 32 Elsewhere in Prometheus Unbound the furies show Prometheus how ‘Many a million-peopled city / Vomits smoke in the bright air’ (I. 551–2).33 The metaphor of a body of which all living beings are a part suggests that the source of disease is internal, and emphasizes the dependence of animal life on nature. Shelley imagines disease as an external superadded ‘other’ rather than a product of the body’s natural workings, though he also highlights the importance of constitutional health. He was clearly inﬂuenced by Abernethy in this. The Earth’s ability to counter infection and administer treatment is impaired by her feelings; she is actually perceived to be responsible for the disease itself. The hatred that she feels affects her usual functions, and the air which should nourish now infects her dependants. There is a sympathy between the emotional and the physical in the body of the Earth.

The Political Body: Prometheus Unbound 125

Utopian new life Shelley’s scientiﬁc and political aims in Prometheus are truly interdisciplinary. He was convinced of the possibility of man’s amelioration and in the poem envisages an ideal existence after the fall of Jupiter; this depends, however, upon a physical as well as a moral revolution. The vitality debate provides Shelley with a vocabulary with which to express this change. The improvement of man, expressed in ideologically-loaded scientiﬁc terminology, is also inﬂuenced by Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis, who similarly argued for, as Israel James Kapstein puts it, ‘the important relation between man’s physical well-being and his intellectual and moral health’.34 Though unaware of Cabanis’s inﬂuence on Shelley, Grabo also recognized Shelley’s belief that ‘man’s physical perfection was to be coincident with his moral regeneration’ (1930, p. 195). In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley imagines the change that occurs when Prometheus is released and Jupiter overthrown as both a physical and a moral process. All conditions under which living beings exist on earth are altered by these events. Furthermore, it is speciﬁcally the life of man that changes, and Shelley’s knowledge of issues raised in the vitality debate offered the scientiﬁc and medical information to represent human physical conditions in his present day and to imagine how they could be improved. The concept that most clearly signiﬁes Shelley’s belief in the interdependence of the physical and moral is his concept of ‘Love’, a force that is lacking in the pre-revolutionary world but which begins to grow and dominate in the utopian existence after Jupiter’s fall. Love is not realized as simply a moral or an emotional force, it also has a physical identity. Love ﬁlls the gap that Jupiter has left and is imagined as, in Walker’s words, the one principle which has many modiﬁcations; in Walker’s deﬁnition of ﬁre these are expressly light, heat and electricity. The inﬂuence of Love on the physical world creates the necessary environment in which life can ﬂourish and regenerate itself. At the end of Prometheus, Demogorgon reveals that ‘Love, Thought, and Breath’ are the ‘powers that quell Death’; in other words, they are necessary for life (IV. 151–2). After Jupiter is overthrown, the spirits of human thought are also changed: they travel with ‘sandals of lightning’ and their ‘eyes are as Love which is veilèd not’ (IV. 90–1). In other words they assume an identity that is closer to electricity and the air is atmospherically charged. When Ocean and Apollo recount the fall of Jupiter, they describe how the world will change ‘Henceforth’ (III. 2. 18). The emphasis is on

126 Shelley and Vitality

a genuine break from the past and the Earth will no longer threaten humans but will be beneﬁcent. Grabo believes this is fundamental to Shelley’s belief that natural elements can be both harmful and good for life: ‘Shelley … could not but be struck by the close association in nature of powers which work to man’s beneﬁt and to his destruction’ (1930, p. 188). Grabo uses nitrous oxide and electricity as examples of natural forces which had the potential to both harm and beneﬁt in contemporary science (ibid.). In many instances the same chemical could in its different forms both kill and cure. In chapter ﬁve, I examine further the way in which such evidence was used in the vitality debate. In Prometheus, the natural world exists in both the pre- and post-revolutionary earth, but the environment that once polluted now revives human life. After the release of Prometheus, and the reunion of Prometheus and Asia, the Earth is transformed, and once again she becomes a pure source of vitality for those she feeds. When Prometheus kisses the ground, the Earth exclaims: I hear, I feel; Thy lips are on me, and their touch runs down Even to the adamantine central gloom Along these marble nerves; ’tis life, ’tis joy, And through my withered, old, and icy frame The warmth of an immortal youth shoots down Circling. Henceforth the many children fair Folded in my sustaining arms—all plants, And creeping forms, and insects rainbow-winged, And birds, and beasts, and ﬁsh, and human shapes, Which drew disease and pain from my wan bosom, Draining the poison of despair—shall take And interchange sweet nutriment; to me Shall they become like sister-antelopes By one fair dam, snow-white and swift as wind, Nursed among lilies near a brimming stream. (III. 3. 84–99) The kiss of Prometheus, the ‘immortal youth’, transmits a warmth to the Earth that acts as blood circulating the body; she is renewed and revived. Shelley plays on the phrase ‘immortal youth’, which both is Prometheus’s immortality and the youthfulness he transmits. Earth identiﬁes the warmth as ‘life’; it runs ‘Along’ her nerves and ‘through’

The Political Body: Prometheus Unbound 127

her frame till it reaches the ‘adamantine central gloom’, which presumably corresponds to a human heart. The image is of a prematurely withered body rejuvenated by a new vitality, which is transmitted by another, eternally young source. We can see the way in which Shelley perceived vitality to work through the body. The ‘wan breath’ described in the ﬁrst act is referred to here as a ‘wan bosom’, encouraging the image of Earth as mother of all living things. Now she holds them in her ‘sustaining arms’ and nurses them. In the poem, plants, birds, animals and insects as well as humans are considered as living beings. All are involved in the new currency of exchange: living creatures will henceforth ‘take / And interchange’ the nutriment they receive from the Earth. Shelley uses the word ‘exchange’ when discussing this process in his notes taken from Davy’s Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (BSM, V, 171–0 rev). It is suggestive of the process whereby plants provide the oxygen humans breathe and humans provide the carbon that plants need, a mutually beneﬁcial cycle of giving and receiving. In Prometheus, all living creatures shall henceforth be regarded as of the same species, ‘like sister-antelopes’, nursed by their mother, thus recognizing their similar rather than different life and origin. They are all living and therefore all belong to the same species, rather than being deﬁned as different types of living beings. The Earth describes how the world will change now that Prometheus has been freed. Although seasons will continue to rotate, they will be milder, thus allowing ‘ever-living leaves, and fruits, and ﬂowers’ to exist; plant life will survive all year round even in the usually barren areas (III. 3. 121–3). The breath with which Earth had polluted minds becomes a benign nitrous oxide gas, identiﬁable as such by its colour and source: Which breath now rises, as among tall weeds A violet’s exhalation, and it ﬁlls With a serener light and crimson air Intense, yet soft, the rocks and woods around; It feeds the quick growth of the serpent vine, And the dark linkèd ivy tangling wild, And budding, blown, or odour-faded blooms. (III. 3. 131–7)35 Shelley is aware that the nitrous oxide compounds with which Davy famously (and almost fatally) experimented could be harmful and he imagines a world in which the curative effects of the gas could be

128 Shelley and Vitality

realized. The potentially harmful inﬂuences of the ‘crimson foam’ of Act Two have become purely beneﬁcent to plant growth, thus realizing Davy’s and Beddoes’s attempts to persuade the scientiﬁc world of the good of which oxides of nitrogen were capable (II. 3. 44).36 He conceives of this good in the same way as they did, imagining that it could help living beings to grow and develop. The crimson gas, which rises in the same manner as the carbon dioxide given off by plants, ‘feeds’ through their veinèd leaves and amber stems The ﬂowers whose purple and translucid bowls Stand ever mantling with aërial dew, The drink of spirits. (III. 3. 141–4) This passage draws on an explanation of how ﬂowers imbibe the air they need to sustain them. As Shelley notes from Davy’s Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, ‘Capillary attraction & att¯n [attraction?] of cohesion preserves the form & contributes to the absorption of food of vegetables’ (BSM, V, 167 reV). The reference to the capillaries of a plant is rephrased in Prometheus Unbound as the ‘veinèd leaves’ of the ﬂower. An extended note on plants illustrates further the process by which plants feed: ‘The sap in plants becomes dense as it ascends & deposits the solid matter which is modiﬁed by “heat light & air” in the leaves’ (172 rev). The spirit of the earth describes in act three how the ‘green world’ has changed following the sound of the shell that signalled emancipation (III. 4. 39). From a ‘green waste wilderness’, the earth has transformed into a loving and mutually beneﬁcial world, where even kingﬁshers have become vegetarians (III. 4. 14, 80–2). While the spirit of the earth describes how the earth’s inhabitants have altered, the spirit of the hour describes the change in the physical elements which sustain life on the planet: the impalpable thin air And the all-circling sunlight were transformed, As if the sense of love, dissolved in them, Had folded itself round the spheréd world. (III. 4. 100–3) Love, identiﬁed in the poem as electricity and light, or Walker’s ‘one principle’, has transformed the air and sunlight. A few lines later the

The Political Body: Prometheus Unbound 129

air is called ‘lightsome’, and the sky is described as ‘bright and liquid’ (III. 4. 107, 118). This combination of ﬁre and air is identiﬁed as the vital element in air, or oxygen; Schelling also called oxygen ‘ﬁre-air’.37 The greater proportion of ﬁre in air the greater its ability to support life because oxygen is needed to create the kind of blood which is best suited to life. In Walker’s model, after having travelled from the heart to the furthest arteries in the body, the blood returns to the heart via the lungs where it receives oxygen (Walker, 1807, p. 32). Before it receives this oxygen, blood is ‘thick and dark-coloured’; at the lungs ‘it receives vital air, and becomes thin and ﬂorid by it; returning into the circulation ﬁt to ﬂow through the ﬁnest ramiﬁcations!’ (ibid.). When bodies do not receive this fresh oxygen, the blood retains this thick quality ‘and ﬁlling the ﬁner vessels, forms such pressure upon the neighbouring nerves, as soon produces spasms, convulsions and death’ (ibid.). Another product of the release of the atmosphere’s ‘latent ﬁre’ is the production of ‘animal heat’, which is also crucial for survival (Analysis, 1807, p. 32). Shelley is using this model for his concept of the transformation of air and sunlight; infused with love, the parallel element in the moral world to Walker’s ‘ﬁre’, the atmosphere becomes, in Matthews’s and Everest’s words, ‘cleansed to transparency’ (note to III. 4. 100–5, Poems, II, 603).38 Despite the fact that previously the air is recognized as ‘impalpably thin’, with love dissolved into it, it will become an even thinner ﬂuid and more beneﬁcial to those who breathe it. The physiological beneﬁts of respiring such air are clearly set out in Walker’s Analysis.39 Fire is the vital element in any lifesupporting system. The horses which conveyed the spirit of the hour ‘henceforth will live exempt from toil, / Pasturing ﬂowers of vegetable ﬁre’ (III. 4. 109–10). These are the ﬂowers that live on the sun, recognized here and elsewhere as a planet able to support life. The phrase ‘vegetable ﬁre’ is synonymous with the vital principle or ‘vegetative power’, which makes vegetables live (Letters, I, 100, 11 June 1811). On many different levels then, life has been transformed for humans, and in all cases moral changes are accompanied by changes in the material universe. The ‘painted veil’, which was life, has been removed and man can live free from pain (III. 4. 190). This new mortal existence is described in much the same terms as Prometheus’s life was at the beginning of the lyrical drama; man will be ‘king / Over himself’ and will rule rather than be subject to those forces which formerly had oppressed him, including a tyrannical and superadded life principle controlling his body (III. 4. 195–6, 200). A change occurs in the planet’s water, also recognized as a vital element; the spirits in act four describe how they

130 Shelley and Vitality

lead ‘clouds that are heavy with Love’s sweet rain’, or electricity (IV. 179). This is a new rain, which, when released, will affect natural life in a different manner. As Walker testiﬁed, electricity was generally recognized to have a positive effect on life: it is seen to ‘help vegetation, germination, evaporation, motion of the blood, the growth of the foetus, and the hatching of eggs’ (1802, I, 22). As the fauns’ discussion in Act Two makes clear, living beings take many forms: this passage serves not only to show how Shelley understood and utilized contemporary scientiﬁc ideas of the hydrogen cycle, but also how he used this knowledge to consider questions raised within the context of the vitality debate. Grabo was the ﬁrst to identify this scientiﬁc allusion, though he attributed it to Darwin; Peter Butter has since persuasively argued that Walker was Shelley’s source.40 The following passage in Walker’s System is very similar to the faun’s description of the lives of the invisible spirits of which they speak: The air which swells the bodies of dead animals is a compound of inﬂammable [hydrogen] and ﬁxt [carbon] air, which, when discharged, each returns to its proper function; ﬁxt air to the earth, and the roots of plants, whilst the inﬂammable part ascends to the upper regions, often forming meteors, falling stars; and sometimes, in the very act of discharge from rotten animal and vegetable substances, ignites in the character of Will-o’-th’-Wisp. In muddy ponds, near great towns, inﬂammable air may be procured in great abundance. (1802, I, 260) Walker proceeds to describe an experiment whereby hydrogen gas can be collected from the pond rising from it in bubbles; when exposed to a candle ﬂame this gas will ignite, or ‘take ﬁre, and often explode’ (1802, I, 260).41 The spirits the faun describes breathe hydrogen and live within the bubbles which exist at the bottom of lakes and pools.42 When the noon sun heats, or ‘kindles’ these waters, the bubbles burst, and the ‘thin ﬁery air’ they breathed ‘Ascends to ﬂow like meteors through the night’ (II. 2. 76–9). They ride on this gas but can direct its course in order to return to their home beneath ‘the waters of the Earth again’ (II. 2. 80–2). Critics who have noted the similarity between Walker’s words and those of the faun have not commented on the fact that throughout Walker’s discussion of hydrogen he is at pains to make it clear that hydrogen is produced by decomposing natural matter, whether animal, vegetable or mineral. Cavallo also makes this point.43 This has a bearing on the faun’s description because it is another example of the recycling

The Political Body: Prometheus Unbound 131

of once living forms into other matter. Shelley was aware of this source of hydrogen as is clear from his letter to Elizabeth Hitchener: Yet are we, are these souls which measure in their circumscribed domain the distances of yon orbs, are we but bubbles which arise from the ﬁlth of a stagnant pool, merely to be again reabsorbed into the mass of its corruption? (Letters, i, 201, [?]10 December 1811)44 Shelley discusses the prospect of eternity with Hitchener and the hydrogen cycle offers an analogy. He recognizes the pool as stagnant, identifying it as once having been living and moving but now dead. The knowledge that hydrogen comes from dead matter makes the prospect of our habitation on earth seem like an unhealthy existence and our brief lives the temporary release from an eternal ‘mass of corruption’. It is another reading of the body as part of the matter that exists in a ﬁxed quantity on earth. We are made up of once dead matter, revived from its natural condition for a brief respite, but after death we again join the ‘life-less mire’ (Prometheus Unbound, IV. 349). If the body has a natural tendency towards death and dissolution, then life is an aberration in this endless cycle of dead matter. The faun describes the earth as full of life, even in the most microscopic forms, which we may not be able to perceive by our sensors but can instead ‘divine’ their existence. Life exists: Under pink blossoms or within the bells Of meadow ﬂowers, or folded violets deep, Or on their dying odours, when they die, Or in the sunlight of the spheréd dew? (II. 2. 83–7) Life can come from the death of other living beings; other forms live as ﬂowers die, just as hydrogen is formed when living matter dies. Shelley knew the importance of hydrogen for life on earth, that it was a component in the atmosphere that we breathed and the water that we needed to live. Here, as elsewhere, life gives way to other life as part of the natural world, just as ‘night-folded ﬂowers / Shall suck unwithering hues in their repose’ (III. 3. 101–2). The next two chapters consider other ways in which Shelley used the vocabulary and ideas of the vitality debate to describe and contend political and poetic ideas.

4 ‘The Painted Veil’: Deﬁning Life

Sensibility and the ﬁgure of the poet Poets are, for P.B. Shelley, beings of a peculiarly ‘reﬁned’ or ‘delicate’ sensibility and it is his own sensibility, his ability to ‘apprehend minute & remote distinctions of feeling whether relative to external nature, or the living beings which surround us’, that qualiﬁes him to write (Letters, I, 577).1 In this ability, Shelley is aware of his being ‘not in common with the herd of mankind’ (ibid.). Indeed, the very skill of being peculiarly sensible to one’s own and the feelings of those around you, and the ability to ‘communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or the material universe as a whole’, ironically sets the poet apart from those he can particularly understand and speak to. Timothy Clark’s work on Shelley and sensibility has lead to a greater understanding of the political nature of such sentiments; Clark has established that for Shelley, as for Godwin, self-analysis was a ‘potent political weapon’ (1989, p. 3). Clark has also recognized the importance of the medical deﬁnition of sensibility, and regards it as primary to Shelley’s understanding of the term (ibid., p. 44). As Karl M. Figlio has written of the period’s science, ‘Concepts, such as organization, irritability and sensibility, were not only terms for the animate properties; they were also invested with ideological (philosophical, religious, moral and nationalistic) overtones.’2 In this chapter, I want to emphasize the central role that sensibility had within the life debate, and to show how this bears on Shelley’s own foregrounding of the concept. Irritability and sensibility were considered generally to be the two distinguishing characteristics of living beings. As Shelley demonstrates in his positing of a more highly evolved being, the Romantics believed that 132

‘The Painted Veil’: Deﬁning Life 133

there were degrees of perceptiveness. Discussions of sensibility, therefore, played a role in the central problem of how to deﬁne life. One generally agreed characteristic of all living beings was ‘irritability’, deﬁned in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as the ‘capacity of being excited to vital action by the application of a external stimulus’. Sensibility, as it was used in the life debate, denoted the degree to which a living being responded to external stimulI. It was a further degree of irritability: ‘the (greater or less) readiness of an organ of tissue to respond to sensory stimuli’ (OED). These terms appear repeatedly in contemporary scientiﬁc texts, used as indexes to a hierarchy of living beings. William Smellie’s The Philosophy of Natural History, which Claire Clairmont read when she lived with the Shelleys in 1814, was an attempt not only to ‘distinguish’ between animals, plants and minerals, but also to consider the ‘analogies between the plant and animal’ (Smellie, 1790, I, 1).3 This can be viewed as part of the early Romantic project in science, which decentred man to consider him as one among many living beings. Smellie wrote of the ‘extreme difﬁculty of ﬁxing the boundaries which separate the animal from the vegetable kind’ (ibid., 21). He found repeated instances of animals that displayed as little animation as minerals, and plants that were as sensitive as humans. His examination of the apparently inanimate polyp showed that animals could survive despite showing neither sensibility nor irritability ‘for several years’ (ibid., 13). He concluded: These and similar facts show, that we are entirely ignorant of the essence and properties of life. What life really is, seems too subtle for our understanding to conceive, or our senses to discern. If we have no other criterions to distinguish life, than motion, sensation, and irritability, the animals just mentioned continue for years in a state which every man would pronounce to have been perfectly dead. It is possible, therefore, that life may exist in many bodies which are commonly thought to be as inanimate as stones. (Smellie, 1790, I, 14) In this context Thomas Jefferson Hogg’s account of Shelley’s disappointment at his Oxford lecturer’s inability to see beyond the physical descriptions of stones might suggest that Shelley, too, was aware of the potentially blurred boundaries between denominating a thing animate or inanimate (Hogg, 1858, I, 58).4 As with many of Hogg’s descriptions of Shelley’s science, knowledge of the scientiﬁc theories of the time make Shelley seem less ridiculous and Hogg more ignorant.

134 Shelley and Vitality

As early as 1788 James Smith wrote of the ‘irritability of vegetables’, urging his readers not to confuse this irritability with ‘mechanical’ movements of inanimate beings.5 Plants were beginning to seem more like animals, with identical systems of digestion, respiration and reproduction. Erasmus Darwin argued that plants were capable not only of irritability but also sensibility: ‘The approach of the anthers in many ﬂowers to the stigmas, and of the pistils of some ﬂowers to the anthers, must be ascribed to the passions of love, and hence belongs to sensation, not to irritation’ (1803, I, 75). Smellie, in his scientiﬁc treatise, personiﬁes the plants he discusses: ‘But, though plants should escape the numberless diseases which daily threaten them, they have no defence against the ﬂower approaches of old age, and its unavoidable consequence, death’ (1790, I, 66). Adam Walker, Shelley’s teacher, exclaimed: ‘animals are but vegetables, attached to their mother by the umbilical cord’ (1802, I, 50). He ﬁnds evidence of both irritability and sensibility in vegetables and describes how, in an anthropomorphic natural world, plants ‘shut up their leaves and sleep in the night’, while a ‘wounded tree’ can ‘bleed freely’ (1802, I, 199). Shelley refers to a type of ﬂower that he encounters in Italy in the same terms: ‘There are also curious ﬂeshly ﬂowers, & one that has blood & that the peasants say is alive’ (Letters, II, 361, 22 October 1821). The mimosa, or sensitive plant, was of particular interest to comparative anatomists considering the analogies of plant and animal life during this period. It was so called because its leaves recoiled spontaneously from touch. Vegetables were generally agreed to exhibit only a lesser degree of life, irritability rather than sensibility, and yet this plant imitated animal reactions. In one scale depicting the ‘chain of being’ these plants are entered under the category ‘insects’.6 It is within this context that Shelley’s poem ‘The Sensitive Plant’ should be read. Sensibility offers Shelley a discourse in which to frame his political belief in equality: the poem’s plants and humans partake of the same life, to different degrees. The world is imagined as full of life and even inanimate beings seem through the use of metaphor to be alive. Often in Shelley’s poetry plants and micro-organisms are as much alive as humans. Shelley conﬁdently expresses this claim in Queen Mab: I tell thee that those living things, To whom the fragile blade of grass, That springeth in the morn And perisheth ere noon, Is an unbounded world;

‘The Painted Veil’: Deﬁning Life 135

I tell thee that those viewless beings, Whose mansion is the smallest particle Of the impassive atmosphere, Think, feel and live like man. (II, 226–34, Poems, I, 288–9) This is a lesson to proud men, who do not recognize their presumption in claiming to be the only living beings. In fact, the same laws, ‘ﬁxed and indispensable’, rule micro-biological life as rule our lives and the life of the planets (II. 241; Poems, I, 289). In one sweeping all-encompassing gesture Shelley moves from the minute to the ‘rolling orbs’ of the universe (II. 243, Poems, I, 289). In such statements Shelley had many predecessors; Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin Everest point to Bernard de Fontenelle, Joseph Addison and Thomas Paine in their notes to this passage (Poems, I, 288–9n). Thomas Forster made similar comparisons between human and microscopic societies: ‘Nature people’s [sic] every leaf /And waterdrop with nations as important.’7 Sensibility did not of course have solely positive connotations. Too much sensibility was as bad for a person as too little, and the poet’s heightened sensibility, as it is described by Shelley, is a painful burden. Peter Melville Logan, using an author Shelley read, Thomas Trotter, has examined in detail the relationship between ‘nervous bodies’ and the social, political and historical conditions that produce this disease.8 Shelley’s own health has been regarded by a number of his critics as important to understanding his poetry, whether this be Nora Crook’s and Derek Guiton’s reading of Shelley as a ‘wounded surgeon’ or Richard Holmes’s more hostile reading of Shelley as a ‘hypochondriac’ (Crook and Guiton, 1986, p. ix; Holmes, 1987, p. 143n). Holmes’s diagnosis of Shelley’s illness undervalues the validity of Shelley’s health complaints, resigning symptoms to ‘a shadowy, psychosomatic area’, and he concludes that ‘As a young man, [Shelley] … undoubtedly cultivated the pose of ill-health for the beneﬁt of such as Godwin’ (1987, p. 143n). Holmes’s use of such terms as ‘hysterical and nervous attacks’ and ‘hypochondria’ need to be considered within an understanding of medical science at this time, with particular reference to the speciﬁc illness known as excessive sensibility. John Mullan has discussed how, in the cases of Hume, Richardson and Sterne, such illnesses were the result of experiencing and communicating social feelings and sentiment.9 William Hazlitt in his essay on Shelley, ‘On Paradox and the Commonplace’, describes

136 Shelley and Vitality

Shelley in terms of his body, the consequences of which are his radical political beliefs: ‘He strives to overturn all established creeds and systems: but this is in him an effect of constitution’.10 Shelley’s poem ‘The Sensitive Plant’ was published in the Prometheus Unbound volume in 1820. Among other Shelley critics, Earl Wasserman has drawn attention to the mimosa’s importance as a link between animal and vegetable life (1971, p. 157). Many elements of the way the sensitive plant is personiﬁed in the poem have their precedent in the scientiﬁc texts Shelley read, particularly those of Darwin, Walker and Smellie. It is no mere poeticism to describe the plant opening its leaves at dawn and closing them to sleep; the analogies made between this plant particularly and humans but also between plants generally and humans were being made by contemporary scientists. Shelley’s sensitive plant has been held up as a symbol for the poet, whom, as Shelley writes in A Defence of Poetry, has ‘the most reﬁned organization’ and is ‘more delicately organized than other men, and sensible to pain and pleasure, both his own and that of others, in a degree unknown to them’, (P&P, pp. 532, 534). The word ‘unknown’ here refers not only to the poet’s special capacity for sensibility that is not experienced by others, and which makes the poet and the sensitive plant ‘Companionless’, but also to the fact that the society in which they live does not know that they suffer in this way (‘The Sensitive Plant’, I. 12).11 The plant’s excessive sensitivity is clear from the beginning: it ‘trembled and panted with bliss’ to a degree not experienced by the other plants in the garden (I. 9). It is physically weak, just as Shelley’s ﬁgure of the poet often is, ‘The feeblest’ of the plants (I. 113). Using a metaphor of one plant’s actions for different kinds of plant, the mimosa ‘could give small fruit / Of the love which it felt from the leaf to the root’ (I. 70–1). In this incapacity it is again contrasted with its fellow ﬂowers, whose passionate and sexual natures indicate their abilities to reproduce; by contrast the sensitive plant is ‘hermaphroditic’ as Donald Reiman puts it (P&P, p. 286). The assonance and alliteration of the second line of this stanza produces a culminating effect through the sounds of ‘Of’ in ‘love’, the transformed ‘felt’ (with the echo of ‘fruit’ in the previous line) becoming ‘leaf’, and the ﬁnal ‘to’ in ‘root’. In one sense at least this is the ‘fruit’ of the poet’s sensibility, the ability to feel and to communicate this feeling through words. The use of an analogy of a plant for a plant, where usually a metaphor describes like by difference, is part of a larger quality of this poem. The plant and ﬂowers are described anthropomorphically; they are often attributed human characteristics, motivations and emotion.

‘The Painted Veil’: Deﬁning Life 137

While this is common in poetry generally, such ﬁgures and tropes have a speciﬁc contemporary resonance in the science of life. Shelley’s choice of metaphor often reveals a belief in a world in which there is analogy to be made between the inanimate and animate, as well as between the different kinds of living beings. This poem describes a world where wind can die (III. 57), the night ‘kisses’ (I. 4) and stars gaze (I. 36), where ﬂowers breathe (I. 15) and die (I. 20). He uses the Greek myths of humans metamorphosed into ﬂowers to further make the point that the vegetable world is as much alive as we are. At ﬁrst glance, the lady introduced in the second part of the poem might fulﬁl the function of a principle of vitality; she is described as a ‘Power’ (II. 1). In her comparison with the sensitive plant, she too is companionless, has similarly passionate dreams and ‘tremulous breath’, and a telling comparison is made between her role in the garden and God’s role in the universe (II. 13, 14, 4). Her form is likened, in the way it has been shaped by her mind, with ‘a sea-ﬂower’, further confusing the boundaries between human and plant (II. 8). In contrast to the question posed by the poem’s sceptical conclusion, of whether the sensitive plant ‘felt’ the change as it died and decayed, and the linked question of whether the lady’s mind continued after death, there are some sentiments of certainty: I doubt not the ﬂowers of that garden sweet Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle feet; I doubt not they felt the spirit that came From her glowing ﬁngers through all their frame. (II. 29–32) As with other poems alluding to mesmerism, ‘To Constantia’ and ‘The Magnetic Lady to her Patient’ in particular, Shelley seems to imagine here a life force that can be felt and communicated from one body to another. Here, ﬂowers can feel the effects of animal electricity upon them. There is a ‘mutual atmosphere’ enjoyed by all the living beings of the garden, and it is not only plants and humans that live here, the winds too are described as living, as is the rivulet, and the earth itself (I. 69). The effect is of a living world, and this life is imagined as love. When the garden is at its zenith, being cared for by the lady, music, light and odours ‘interpenetrate’, in Shelley’s words, to form this atmosphere. Each have a cycle from dawn to nightfall, until, by that time, ‘the Air was all love’ (I. 99). There are clear comparisons to be drawn between

138 Shelley and Vitality

this poem and its companion, Prometheus Unbound, which imagines, as Alan Bewell puts it, ‘a total conquest and transformation of the world’s diseased environments, a global ecological revolution made possible by science and love’, though in the case of ‘The Sensitive Plant’ this paradise will not survive (1999, p. 211). After the death of the lady, the plant ‘Felt’ the sounds, sights and even smells of the funeral (III. 6). The treatment of death in Shelley’s poems, a subject I shall return to in next chapter’s discussion of Adonais, never shies away from the most disgusting of corporeal images. It is in this regard again, that Shelley is a physical poet, with, as Matthews has put it, a ‘grasp upon the actual’.12 The plant even smells the corpse of the dead woman, through the ‘pores’ of the cofﬁn’s wooden plank, a term that might be regarded as metaphorical (III. 11–12). In a sense the wood was once alive, as is ‘living grass’, but it is now inanimate matter, likened in this instance to the operations of an animate body (I. 85). The ‘verse feels loath’ to utter the ugly names of the venomous plants that begin to grow in the garden and yet even this is a conceit on Shelley’s part, immediately following as it does a line containing some clever word play and rhyme with ‘dock’, ‘henblane’, a mix of these two in ‘hemlock’, and a ﬁnal transformed ‘dank’ (III. 55). The beautiful and sylph-like form of the lady as she is described in Part Two, with an almost weightless body and a footprint so light that her hair erases its trace, does not in any way prepare us for the description of the decay and ruin of the garden, which itself is a symbol of her decaying corpse (II. 25–7). Repeatedly the decaying plants are likened to their human equivalent, just as in a stanza Reiman includes but some editors have omitted, the ‘loose ﬂesh’ of fungi is likened to a gibbet (III. 68). The garden is described as being ‘Like the corpse of her who had been its soul’ (III. 18). The sights, smells and lack of sound rival in their complete envelopment the previous atmosphere of love. The ‘running rivulet’ ceases to run, and instead is ‘Made … thick and dumb’; this is in direct contrast to its earlier mutability, the multi-coloured effects on its ‘inconstant bosom’ of the reﬂections of ‘embowering blossom’ from above (III. 70–1; I. 41–2). Where the earlier image expresses mutability through polygamy, the ﬁckleness and inﬁdelity of the river encountering the sexualized embraces of the ﬂowers, the later image of the river is static and dead. The next section discusses Shelley’s use of mutability as a deﬁning characteristic of life.

Mutability Life for William Lawrence and for Shelley was recognizable through its ability to transform and mutate. Lawrence described the living body as con-

‘The Painted Veil’: Deﬁning Life 139

stantly rotating the materials it used and discarded, continually composing and decomposing itself (Introduction, p. 146). In his Lectures he claims: ‘variation and ﬂuctuation are essential characters of all vital processes’ (p. 72). Life’s power to transform foreign matter to its own nature is another of its most distinctive and unique properties (Introduction, p. 147). This process is described in Shelley’s ‘The Witch of Atlas’: The plant grew strong and green—the snowy ﬂower Fell, and the long and gourd-like fruit began To turn the light and dew by inward power To its own substance. (305–8, P&P, pp. 376–7) Indeed, this was a central problem for those attempting to study life: as Lawrence wrote, ‘we see a continued change, so that the body cannot be called the same in any two successive instants’ (Introduction, p. 139). Life is so fragile and sensitive that it can be endangered by attempts to analyse it and experiments with air-pumps on birds, mice and larger animals often ended in the death of the subject. In this section I want to consider mutability as a deﬁning characteristic of the living beings in Shelley’s poetry, and to consider the poetic and political ramiﬁcations of his investment in mutability. In Prometheus Unbound, man’s mutability is evinced in the constantly changing state to which living matter is subject. Were man ever to be exempt from change, he would not be ‘man’; mutability deﬁnes him. Even after Prometheus’s release, when man is exempt from all previous evils, he retains this state (III. 4. 201). Prometheus rhetorically asks ‘What can hide man from mutability?’, pointing out that the immortals will forever remain ‘unchanged’ (III. 3. 25, 24). Demogorgon asks the dead whether they are ﬁxed and immutable, the sum of their lives on earth, but the dead suggest an alternative existence, that they exist in the same way as they did while living: in other words, they continue to be mutable and able to transform into other states of matter. Shelley’s scepticism leaves this issue unanswered: Demogorgon Ye happy Dead, whom beams of brightest verse Are clouds to hide, not colours to portray, Whether your nature is that universe Which once you saw and suffered—

140 Shelley and Vitality

A Voice from Beneath Or as they Whom we have left, we change and pass away. (IV. 534–8) Verse, according to Demogorgon, should not offer us answers to such questions, but should shroud them in mystery. It was clear to scientists that one way to deﬁne life was to deﬁne its opposite, death, but it was also clear that once-living matter became fundamentally altered by death, when it assumed an inorganic form. Ultimately, Prometheus Unbound does not envisage a future in which ‘man’ will ever be free from death; he will continue to strive for perfectibility with accepted limits built into his condition. Shelley’s belief in the constantly mutating nature of living matter comes in part from the inﬂuence of Lucretius’s motto, ‘everything changes, nothing dies’. We can see this in the compost heap that the garden in ‘The Sensitive Plant’ becomes: ‘Leaf after leaf, day by day / Were massed into the common clay’ (III. 32–3). The garden is not barren after the death of its protector but gives birth to a ‘monstrous undergrowth’: ‘All loathliest weeds began to grow’ (III. 59, 51). The evil atmosphere in the garden is imagined as stagnancy and stillness (III. 70–7). Bewell has commented on this: ‘for [Shelley] the “unmoving” state of the atmosphere or swamp … is a symptom of social stagnancy, not its cause’ (1999, pp. 214–15). As this reveals, there are political reasons for constant mutability. One reason for Shelley’s interest in Godwinian theories of perfectibility was that, as Paul Dawson writes, ‘perfectibility does not offer any ﬁnal goals, for it insists on continual change, and distrusts ﬁxed goals as attempts to limit progress’.13 Godwin’s distrust of the effects of institutions, laws and contracts, their ability to check progress and ﬁx meaning, inﬂuenced Shelley’s own conception of the political importance of mutability. For Godwin, government is the enemy of change because it ‘gives substance and permanence to our errors’.14 One problem for the scientists who believed life to be a constantly transforming state was the issue of selfhood. How could we still be the same person when our bodies were continually losing parts of themselves, whilst simultaneously gaining new matter from elsewhere? Sir Thomas Charles Morgan, in his contribution to the vitality debate, Sketches of the Philosophy of Life, discussed one contemporary estimate that every 40 days, there is a ‘complete revolution of the whole man’ (1818, p. 50). This was one of John

‘The Painted Veil’: Deﬁning Life 141

Abernethy’s main difﬁculties with Lawrence’s theory. He refused to believe that consciousness, or a sense of our personal identity, could be the result of the organization of the body (Physiological Lectures, p. 277). As we have already seen in the quote from Queen Mab, Shelley could imagine matter as sensible rather than insensible; in A Refutation of Deism, written around the time that Shelley was dining regularly with the de Boinvilles and Lawrence, Eusebes argues: ‘Matter, such as we behold it, is not inert. It is inﬁnitely active and subtile’ (Prose Works, p. 116).15 Writing in Lawrence’s defence, Forster was happy to accept that ‘every vital action, as well as every propensity, every intellectual and reﬂective faculty, and every sentiment of the mind, is the necessary consequence of the active state of an appropriate material organ’ (Philostratus, 1823, p. viii). But he admitted that the fact of ‘single consciousness’, or our perception of ourselves as a single, individual self did not seem to accord with this: I have always believed, and do still believe, that I am something distinct from the circumexistent matter of the universe, of which my body forms a part, and that I am likewise distinct from the moving principle of the surrounding universe, of which my vitality may be a modiﬁcation. This consciousness of being is, however, no deduction from physiology; it is an intuitive feeling, and resolves itself, after all the vain attempts of philosophers to explain it, into a conditional principle of existence. I believe that this very consciousness of a distinct being is itself dependent on the activity of some material and cerebral instrument; perhaps it is connected with the common centre of sensation. (Philostratus, 1823, pp. viii–ix) Forster deﬁnes life as motion, and so the vitality of the individual is part of the ‘moving principle’ animating the world. Shelley’s idea of the ‘one mind’, deﬁned by Clark as ‘a transindividual consciousness in which each individual only participates’, operates in a similar way to Forster’s concept of ‘vitality’, where individual vitality for Forster is a ‘modiﬁcation’ of the ‘moving principle of the universe’ (Clark, 1989, p. 39). Shelley, in his essay ‘On Life’, considers the ‘delusion’ of believing in ‘distinct individual minds’: The words, I, you, they are not signs of any actual difference subsisting between the assemblages of thoughts thus indicated, but are

142 Shelley and Vitality

merely marks employed to denote the different modiﬁcations of the one mind. (P&P, p. 508) Similarly, the body is made up of the same matter as the universe. For Forster, the self’s ability to perceive both the matter of the body and the motion that animates it, suggests that the self is outside both of these, a third function, able to perceive and comment upon them: ‘But we are further conscious that matter and motion are perceived by ourselves … neither of these two principles seems adequate to account for that consciousness of that identical and indivisible being – our own self’ (Philostratus, 1823, p. 103). In Adonais, this perceiving self is tentatively set apart as ‘that alone which knows’, when Shelley questions the consolation offered by knowledge of the life Adonais has rejoined by his death (177, P&P, p. 416). Despite his doubts, since there is no empirical evidence that there is anything other than matter, Forster is, ultimately, content to consider consciousness as dependent on the brain. Shelley believed that selfhood had potentially damaging inﬂuence, and instead promoted in his poetry a politically-inﬂected notion of selﬂessness. In Paul Hamilton’s words, Shelley’s ‘self-effacing’ efforts are part of his attempt to rewrite ‘individual as collective interests’ (2000, p. 3). Hamilton sums up the message of the poem ‘Mutability’ with: ‘“Mutability” stresses the hopelessness of clinging to the idea of a unique self persisting unchanged through time’ (2000, p. 26). In the poem, it is not simply the clouds’ transience that makes them like humans, it is also their restlessness, their constancy in change. The lyres, which are also compared to humans, serve to illustrate our inability to move back in time or to return to a former mood. The physicality of the lyres, their ‘frail frame’, which experiences emotion as a ‘modulation’, reminds us of our own sensibility (7, 8).16 They respond to external stimuli in the form of the ‘varying blast’ of the wind (6). Importantly, though, the lyres do not experience the same emotion twice; their ‘various response’ is equally as varied as each ‘varying blast’ that motivates it. The third stanza, directly describing human life, speaks of our having an internal ‘power’ to both ‘poison’ and ‘pollute’ our equilibrium; we are not permitted the static condition described ironically in short, deliberate sentences: ‘We rest. … We rise.’ (9–10). It is impossible for us to maintain for any length of time any single mood; alteration and change are certain. The irony, then, in the ﬁnal stanza, ‘It is the same!’, when the whole poem has been denying

‘The Painted Veil’: Deﬁning Life 143

that sameness could exist, is the central paradox of Lucretius’s maxim (13). The only thing that is the same in the sense of unchanging is the principle of change. The only constancy is the constancy of change, or, in Shelley’s words, the only certainty is that ‘Nought may endure but Mutability’ (16). The mutability that was lamented in ‘We are as clouds’ is celebrated in ‘The Cloud’: ‘I pass through the pores, of the oceans and shores; / I change, but I cannot die’ (75–6).17 The cloud speaking in the poem constructs and deconstructs, builds and ‘unbuilds’, a ‘Destroyer and Preserver’ like the West Wind (80, 84). The cloud is constantly moving, a characteristic that is reﬂected by the number of verbs in the poem: the cloud is chameleon-like, continually transforming itself and the landscape it acts upon. The alternate lines of internal rhymes combined with end-rhyming lines gives the verse a rolling effect, similar to the effect of terza rima utilized in such poems as ‘Ode to the West Wind’. As we have seen in Panthea’s dream in Prometheus Unbound, processes such as condensation were highly suggestive to Shelley and he refers to processes similar to those described in ‘The Cloud’ a number of times in his poetry. Judith Chernaik writes that ‘The imagery of dissolution and consumption’ serves ‘as physical evidence of unity in multiplicity, of eternity in change’ (1972, pp. 56–7). Richard Carlile in his 1821 Address to the Men of Science writes that such processes, where matter changes state, prove ‘that matter is imperishable and indestructible’.18 He confesses his own astonishment when he ﬁrst learned in 1819, only two years before the publication of Address and the year of Lawrence’s Lectures, that after being burned, solids ‘are dispersed in their gaseous state, and again ready for the operations of nature, to amalgamate with some new living and growing substance, to which their qualities can be assimilated’ (Carlile, 1821, p. 6). These processes of assimilation and elimination in living bodies might also be described as the means by which the body mutates and transforms. In Shelley’s poetry, though, assimilation, or the ability of a living being to transform external matter into its own living matter, can be achieved negatively as well as positively. As already shown, in Prometheus Unbound, for example, ‘Evil minds / Change good to their own nature’ (I. 380–1). The idea that a powerful nature can assimilate something outside itself into its own form occurs frequently in this poem, and it does not always have positive implications. See, for example, Prometheus’s fear in his encounter with the Furies that he ‘might grow

144 Shelley and Vitality

like what I contemplate, / And laugh and stare in loathsome sympathy’ (I. 450–1). Coleridge, clearly in agreement with Abernethy’s idea of the division between the internal and external world, had used vitality as a metaphor for the secondary imagination, which dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially ﬁxed and dead.19 M.H. Abrams notes how Coleridge’s use of the word ‘assimilate’, refers to his reading and knowledge of contemporary physiology. The imagination is for Coleridge an ‘assimilating power’; he refers here to the process whereby ‘an organism converts food into its own substance’, or its transformative power (Abrams, 1953, p. 169). The next chapter considers in more detail how poetry, for Shelley, was a similarly vital force, deﬁned as vital by this speciﬁc power to transmute other matter to its own, and for its own internal powers of mutability: ‘It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes’ (Defence of Poetry, P&P, p. 533). The political potential is clear. Poetry can transmute in a number of signiﬁcant ways; according to Shelley’s lifelong belief in the power of poetry to change people’s minds and beliefs, it can awaken a public conscientiousness, generate new ways of thinking and destroy error and tyranny. One of the most important ways to achieve such ends was to convince contemporaries that, as Shelley wrote in his essay ‘On Life’, those institutions that seem to be permanent are actually merely ‘transient modiﬁcations’ of the great mystery that is life (P&P, p. 505). Shelley lists as those ‘transient modiﬁcations’ such seemingly generalized universals as empires, dynasties, religions, and political systems (ibid.). The poem ‘Ozymandias’ demonstrates the irony of such mistaken beliefs, showing the transience and decay of kings and their mighty works. There is however the possibility, which would have worried Shelley even while he denied its truth, that there will always be tyranny in some form or other. The rule of George III and his ministers in Britain during Shelley’s lifetime could demonstrate that evil had the potential to mutate and in so doing achieve permanence, tyranny might continue to exist though taking a variety of forms.

‘The Painted Veil’: Deﬁning Life 145

The painted veil In response to Asia’s question about death in Prometheus Unbound, the Earth offers a deﬁnition of life: ‘Death is the veil which those who live call life: / They sleep and it is lifted’ (III. 3. 113–14). The image of a veil occurs frequently in Shelley’s poetry and it is often associated with life, though this is life in an ontological rather than physiological sense. As I showed in the previous chapter, however, these senses are often connected in Shelley’s imagination. Examining Shelley’s use of the veil as a metaphor for life gives an idea of how he perceived life to operate, how he visualized the wrongs of living in his times and how he imagined a future, better existence might be. In scientiﬁc texts of the Romantic period, particularly those discussed in previous chapters, the metaphor of a veil is also commonly used. It often appears as a symbol of scientiﬁc revelation: the veil of ignorance and superstition is removed by new scientiﬁc discovery. As Ludmilla Jordanova has pointed out, the veil is a pertinent metaphor in science because ‘veiling has to do with knowledge and truth and … it implies a link between such knowledge and the capacity for unimpeded vision’.20 Recent critics, exploring the relationship between gender and science, have highlighted the veil as indicative of attempts by masculine science to dominate and control a nature personiﬁed as feminine. Prometheus Unbound, in particular, employs many of the devices witnessed in contemporary scientiﬁc language, while remaining attentive to the implications of this discourse. The Marquis de Laplace, in The System of the World, which Shelley read carefully, emphasizes how the new science destroys superstition: Seduced by the illusion of the senses, and of self-love, man considered himself, for a long time, as the centre about which the celestial bodies revolved, and his pride was justly punished by the vain terrors they inspired. The labour of many ages has at length withdrawn the veil which covered the system. And man now appears, upon a small planet, almost imperceptible in the vast extent of the solar system, itself only an insensible point in the immensity of space.21 The veil of ignorance has at last been withdrawn, and the ‘system’ that regulates the world is uncovered. Shelley similarly believed that religion was a primitive means to explain natural phenomena, and that science was the means to dispel such false and pernicious myths.

146 Shelley and Vitality

Primarily in Shelley’s poetry, removing a veil is a negative action, which involves identifying an illusion and recognizing its falseness. As with Plato’s cave, even the task of identifying a veil is difﬁcult, if everyone is under the impression that it is the truth. In his article on ‘Life’ in Rees’s Cyclopaedia, Lawrence repeats his sceptical position in the same terms as he used elsewhere; he paraphrases Bichat: ‘so narrow are the limits of the human understanding, that the knowledge of ﬁrst causes seem placed forever beyond our reach. The thick veil that covers them, envelops in its innumerable folds whoever attempts to break through it’ (Rees, 1819, XX, ‘Life’). The demonstration of ‘ﬁrst causes’ was equally distant for Shelley. His use of the word ‘life’, loaded with the contemporary scientiﬁc and medical deﬁnitions given to it, is often expressed with the image of a covering veil, which is all we can see and know. Baron D’Holbach, whose work inﬂuenced both Shelley and Lawrence, writes: let [man] consent to be ignorant of causes hid from him under the most impenetrable veil—let him submit himself without murmuring to the decrees of an universal necessity, which can never be brought within his comprehension, or which can never emancipate him from those rules his essence has imposed upon him.22 The metaphor was clearly a common trope used to express the sceptical acknowledgement of human limitations. In Peter Bell the Third Shelley mocks Wordsworth with a masculine ribaldry, implying both his sexual inadequacy and his lack of perception: But from the ﬁrst ’twas Peter’s drift To be a kind of moral eunuch He touched the hem of Nature’s shift, Felt faint — and never dared uplift The closest, all-concealing tunic. (313–17, P&P, p. 351) Shelley issues a challenge, daring the poet to be bold enough to remove the dress that covers nature. In many instances of the veil in Shelley’s poetry, he is referring speciﬁcally to an item of suggestively thin clothing and the allusion is erotically charged. In the prose extract Una Favola, the poet-ﬁgure is surrounded by a troop of veiled ﬁgures who refuse despite his protestations to unveil themselves. Only ‘Life’ consents to unveil herself, ﬁgured as a woman with Death as her sister.

‘The Painted Veil’: Deﬁning Life 147

The youth soon realizes that Life is the most false of those present and that the veils had concealed the most ‘hideous and terrible’ forms (Shelley’s Prose, pp. 359–61). The veil is one of the concepts highlighted by Geoffrey Matthews as ‘overdetermined’: ‘a veil is now of ugliness concealing beauty, now of beauty concealing ugliness’ (1957, p. 164). Jerome McGann identiﬁes three types of veil in Shelley’s poetry: ‘the veil of old and worn out ideas which cover the true beauty of life’, ‘that which nature lays over the world as a garment of beautiful appearances’ and ‘that which poetry itself lays upon the visionary institutions of the poet’.23 Shelley allowed that ‘Life’s familiar veil’, as he described it in Genevra, made the subject an extremely difﬁcult one to explore objectively (122, Poetical Works, p. 651). In his essay ‘On Life’ he implores the reader to consider life as it really is, the greatest wonder shrouded in a ‘mist of familiarity’ (P&P, p. 505). In A Defence of Poetry the role of stripping the ‘veil of familiarity from the world’ to lay ‘bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms’ is given to poetry (P&P, p. 533). Poetry, Shelley writes, whether it ‘spreads its own ﬁgured curtain, or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things … equally creates for us a being within our being’ (P&P, p. 533). In the many instances in which the metaphor of the veil occurs it is often used in relation to life. In The Revolt of Islam, for example, the mighty veil Which doth divide the living and the dead Was almost rent. (xII. 4581–4; Poems, II, 251) Again in ‘Mont Blanc’, ‘The veil of life and death’ refers to the boundary between these two states (55, Poems, I, 539). In Prometheus Unbound the veil that operates as a simulacrum of life needs to be lifted before man can be free. Mortals have been living a death rather than a life: ‘Death is the veil which those who live call life’ (III. 3.113). It is language and ‘naming’ that traps according to Shelley’s sceptical position; what we ‘call life’ is not actually life but death. In the sonnet ‘Lift not the painted veil’, Shelley again makes the point that ‘those who live’ call this veil ‘Life’ (1–2, Poems, II, 414). At the end of Prometheus Unbound the voice of the abyss is able to shout ‘Heaven hast thou secrets? Man unveils me, I have none’ (IV. 423). In the post-revolutionary state of Act Four, nature can be

148 Shelley and Vitality

unveiled without any sense of impropriety. Man’s different existence is ﬁgured by the removal of the veil, which he had mistaken for life during Jupiter’s reign; the veil is torn but the mask simply falls, effected by the release of Prometheus: The painted veil, by those who were, called life, Which mimicked, as with colours idly spread, All men believed, and hoped, is torn aside— The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed—but man. (III. 4. 190–4) Man has been operating within a simulacrum; the veil imitated every aspect of life and was mistaken for reality. He has been labouring under a false perception and his release is imagined in terms of a pretence removed to reveal what man is essentially. Shelley’s essay ‘On Life’ is organized by the central question ‘What is Life?’ In his 1818 essay ‘On Love’, Shelley recognizes the question as taxing: ‘What is Love? – Ask him who lives what is life’, not least because we are simultaneously doing the thing we are trying to analyse. We are living while we attempt to study life. Hamilton has shown how in such poems as ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and ‘Mont Blanc’, Shelley attempts to carve out what Hamilton calls a ‘hyper reality’, a virtual space from which to view the subject and the world that has ideologically produced that subject (2000, p. 28). Examining theories of life can be seen as a similarly tricky situation: indeed, Shelley states that ‘It is well that we are so shielded by the familiarity of what is at once so certain and so unfathomable, from an astonishment which would otherwise absorb and overawe the functions of that which is [its] object’ (P&P, p. 505). Shelley examines the distinction between the act of living and the process of naming and analysing life. He draws our attention to the signiﬁer ‘Life’ and to that which it signiﬁes. In ‘On Life’, Shelley urges us to remove the ‘mist of familiarity’ from our eyes; by defamiliarizing the familiar we can better appreciate it: Life, and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of its transient modiﬁcations; but it is itself the great miracle. What are changes of empires, the wreck of dynasties with the opinions which

‘The Painted Veil’: Deﬁning Life 149

supported them; what is the birth and the extinction of religions and of political systems to life? What are the revolutions of the globe which we inhabit, and the operations of the elements of which it is composed, compared with life? What is the universe of stars and suns [of] which this inhabited earth is one and their motions and their destiny compared with life? (‘On Life’, P&P, p. 505) Life is compared with the ‘transient modiﬁcations’ of civilization, which are passed off as ﬁxed and dogmatic: empires, dynasties, religions and ‘political systems’ are all offered to us as immutable, permanent solutions to our anxieties, but, describing them as such is part of an ideological project. It is, as Shelley writes elsewhere, ‘merely an affair of words’ (Shelley’s Prose, p. 186). Throughout the essay ‘On Life’ Shelley continues to point out the inadequacies of language. All it can do is to express our proper scepticism: ‘How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being. Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance to ourselves, and this is much’ (P&P, p. 506). The problems Shelley recognizes in identifying life, mistaking it for something else that we call life, are paralleled in the science of the period. This was a time in which the words ‘life’ and ‘death’ simply could not be pinned down: the French Encyclopédie deﬁned two kinds of death, ‘incomplete’ and ‘absolute’, claiming that the ﬁrst kind could be ‘cured’.24 The Encyclopédie continued: ‘That there is no remedy for death is an axiom widely admitted; we, however, are willing to afﬁrm that death can be cured’ (Arasse, 1989, p. 37). The work of the Humane Society in Britain during the Romantic period publicized treatments to ‘resurrect’ persons drowned. The word life in particular became an extremely slippery concept as the language of vitality was exploited to further the political agendas of both radicals and conservatives. Abernethy believed that ‘something’ was superadded to the body to make it move and live. His and Lawrence’s arguments revolved around the nature of life, whether it had substance and materiality, whether such a ‘thing’ existed at all. Abernethy described the modern sceptics’ position with: ‘I discover that they wish me to consider life to be nothing’ (Physiological Lectures, p. 38, my emphasis). Lawrence repeatedly acknowledges in his study of life the inexactitude of the term ‘life’ itself: it is too vague, deployed in a general way to describe our state of existence, and often used to denote something so familiar that it is impossible to distance ourselves from it and see it with proper scientiﬁc objectivity and detachment. At this point he

150 Shelley and Vitality

reveals not only his frustration with the inadequacy of language, but also his Humean suspicion of causality: It is justly observed by Cuvier that the idea of life is one of those general and obscure notions produced in us by observing a certain series of phenomena, possessing mutual relations, and succeeding each other in a constant order. We know not the nature of the link, that unites these phenomena, though we are sensible that a connexion [sic] must exist; and this conviction is sufﬁcient to induce us to give it a name, which the vulgar regard as a sign of a particular principle, though in fact that name can only indicate the assemblage of the phenomena, which have occasioned its formation. Thus, as the bodies of animals appear to resist, during a certain time, the laws which govern inanimate bodies, and even to act on all around them in a manner entirely contrary to those laws, we employ the term life to designate what is at least an apparent exception to general laws. It is by determining exactly, in what the exceptions consist, that we shall ﬁx the meaning of the term. For this purpose it is necessary to consider living bodies in their various relations with the rest of nature; and to contrast them carefully with inert substances; as it is only from the result of such a comparison that we can expect to derive a clear notion of life. (Introduction, pp. 122–3) The single word ‘life’ is all we have to describe what is actually a process, or a number of simultaneous operations. Lawrence’s objections to the use of a noun, or a word that describes a thing, is supported by Darwin’s deﬁnitions of a verb: ‘The verb, or the word, has been so called from its being the most expressive term in all languages; as it suggests the ideas of existence, action or suffering, and of time’ (Darwin, 1973, iv, 294n). Because ‘life’ operates and is used as a noun it seems to imply naturally that it is a principle or something. The signiﬁer should not, Lawrence argues, be taken for the sign. Lawrence determines instead to ‘ﬁx’ the meaning of life by deciding how it differs from other signs; life is to be deﬁned by death and the inanimate. Morgan, speaking of Thomas Rennell in his Sketches of the Philosophy of Morals, also declared the importance of language in this debate on the nature of life: The reverend author of the ‘Remarks on Scepticism’ … has come to the discussion so unprepared with a knowledge of his subject, and

‘The Painted Veil’: Deﬁning Life 151

of the views of his opponents, that he has mistaken the deﬁnition given by them, of the sense in which they use the word life, for an attempted explanation of the thing; though the manifest scope of this part of their works is to deny our acquaintance with any principle corresponding with the word, in this its more usual and ordinary signiﬁcation. The deﬁnition expressly states, that the term is employed as a general representative of vital effects; and yet the critic believes, or affects to believe, that, in giving it, such writers as Bichat and Mr. Lawrence could have imagined themselves occupied with the consideration of vital causes.25 Here Morgan accuses Rennell of confusing signiﬁer, the word life, with the signiﬁed, ‘the thing’, although as he then points out there is no ‘principle’ or ‘thing’ actually signiﬁed by the word life. He goes on to point out that Lawrence is not concerned with what causes life, as Abernethy is, but simply what the effects are of life. In his essay ‘On Life’, Shelley argued that ‘almost all familiar objects are signs, standing not for themselves but for others’ (P&P, p. 507). He draws attention to the process of signiﬁcation, and to the unreliability of signs. For these reasons, he argues: ‘Our whole life is thus an education of error’ (ibid.). Just as in the sonnet ‘Lift not the painted veil which those who live / Call Life’, Shelley points to a distinction between that which we call life and life itself. Shelley’s characteristic distrust of language can be linked in this speciﬁc instance to Lawrence’s objections to the word ‘life’. Lawrence’s much-vaunted scepticism, which Abernethy regarded as a positive theory of life as ‘nothing’, should perhaps be seen as one of the vacancies produced by efforts of William Drummond’s ‘intellectual system’ to destroy error (‘On Life’, P&P, p. 507). As Hamilton has written of ‘Mont Blanc’, ‘Silence, solitude and/or vacancy’, must become positive terms if we are to imagine a thoroughgoing liberation from prejudice and vested interest’ (2000, p. 33).

Materialism In Shelley’s own history of his philosophical thought, given in the essay ‘On Life’, he tells us how: ‘The shocking absurdities of the popular philosophy of mind and matter, and its fatal consequences in morals, their violent dogmatism concerning the source of all things, had early conducted me to materialism’ (P&P, p. 506). Such ‘violent dogmatism’ is witnessed in Abernethy’s and Lord Eldon’s belief in a

152 Shelley and Vitality

dualistic system. Those who believe in the distinction between mind and matter have answered the question ‘What is the cause of life?’ with ‘Religion’ (‘On Life’, P&P, p. 508). For all his subsequent denial of the ‘false’ and ‘pernicious’ philosophy of the materialists, Shelley throughout his poetry and prose shows a preoccupation with the bodily, the physical and the material (Letters, II, 412, 11 April 1822). As has been suggested earlier, this no doubt is partly due to his own and his family’s ill-health, but it is also linked to Shelley’s political beliefs and to his insistence on the importance of the here and now of contemporary political conditions. Abstract ideas are often expressed using a physical language: in ‘The Sensitive Plant’, for example, death is not idealized; even the smell of the corpse is noted. Hamilton’s study argues that Shelley had an acute ‘sense of being bodily determined’ throughout his poetic career (2000, p. 4). Hamilton’s work has represented the mature Shelley as a materialist, inﬂuenced, in one particular case, by the French materialist physiologist Julien Offray de La Mettrie.26 Evidence of Shelley’s engagement with the vitality debate further substantiates Hamilton’s materialist Shelley, who collapses the ideological and the physical in his refusal to acknowledge the dichotomy between mind and body. Abernethy’s case rests on this distinction and the corporeality of mind was one of the issues most discussed during his altercation with Lawrence.27 Just as for Lawrence the mind was embodied in the brain, so for Shelley historical, political, aesthetic and religious movements were often importantly typiﬁed by the transient and mutable character of matter. For Shelley, a preoccupation with the physical and material is linked to a political determination to counter the general ‘temptation’ to ‘escape’ these ‘conditions of life’ (Hamilton, 2000, p. 6). Hamilton asks, as ‘Ozymandias’ does: ‘What happens to an idea of authority inseparable from the natural processes of mutability and decay to which all are subject?’ (p. 4). Shelley repeatedly uses natural, physical elements as metaphors for abstract ideological notions, and he fully exploits the conﬂating deﬁnitions of such words as ‘corruption’ for example. ‘England in 1819’ describes the monarchy as clinging ‘leechlike to their fainting country’, imagining it bleeding the people through such means as high taxation and inﬂated Corn Prices, until they are too weak to ﬁght back (5, P&P, p. 326). Lawrence was denounced as a materialist by such texts as the anonymous Thought Not a Function of the Brain.28 Lawrence, in turn, describes his opponents as ‘immaterialists’ (Lectures, p. 110). He writes that the term ‘Life … denotes what is apparent to our senses; and cannot be

‘The Painted Veil’: Deﬁning Life 153

applied to the offspring of metaphysical subtlety, or immaterial abstractions, without a complete departure from its original acceptation’ (Lectures, p. 60). All that Lawrence could prove he took from his studies into comparative anatomy. He sees the animal functions as inseparable from the organs that perform those functions and asks what could possibly be the use of the ‘immaterial being’ Abernethy alluded to, other than to afford ‘occupation to the organs of ideality and mysticism’ (ibid., p. 11). In the same mischievous tone, he asks at what point precisely the ‘spiritual guest’ or immaterial mind ‘arrives in his corporeal dwelling’ (ibid., p. 107)? Any reference to the problem of believing in an immaterial mind was interpreted by contemporaries as a lack of belief in any immaterial being, including the soul. Lawrence claimed that his most controversial argument, that the mind was a function of the brain, was proved by the evidence of anatomical research. As the body gets older, mental powers grow weaker: ‘with the decline of organisation the mind decays: it becomes decrepit with the body; and both are at the same extinguished by death’ (ibid., p. 108). If, instead, ‘thought is not an act of the brain, but of an immaterial substance, residing in or connected with it’, then this ‘large and curious structure’, the brain, which receives a ﬁfth of the body’s blood, is ‘left almost entirely without an ofﬁce’ (ibid., p. 105). Calling upon the conservative notion that every organ demonstrates the work of God in its design, Lawrence demands to know what could be the point of such an organ if you deny it the one operation it is associated with. While, as Michael Scrivener has written, it is important to recognize that Shelley’s prose differs from the optimism expressed in his poetry, it is also the case that ‘One can scan the entire corpus of Shelley’s prose for his statements concerning death and immortality without ﬁnding a single dogmatic sentence afﬁrming immortality’.29 The question of immortality was an important one for the vitality debate and Shelley’s customary scepticism links him with Lawrence’s comments on the subject. In his ‘Essay on a Future State’, dated by Paul Dawson as late 1818, and thus a more mature consideration of the topics broached in A Refutation of Deism, Shelley examines the arguments for and against the idea of an ‘animating power’, which ‘survives the body which it has animated’ (Dawson, 1980, p. 283; Shelley’s Prose, p. 176). Shelley’s essay offers the same arguments that Lawrence used in his altercation with Abernethy. Shelley resolves in his essay to ‘bring the question to the test of experience and fact’, thus aligning himself with the empirical methodology of Lawrence rather than the analogical reasoning of Abernethy (ibid.).

154 Shelley and Vitality

Countering the materialist argument that the body when ‘resolved into its elements’ is incapable of ‘the smallest diminution’, the immaterialists have argued that the spirit, or ‘sensibility and thought’, is ‘even less susceptible of division and decay’ (Shelley’s Prose, p. 175). Godwinian Necessity is ﬁgured as a vital ‘principle’, which all animating principles originate from and return to, regulating ‘the proceedings of the universe’, without either intelligence or sensitivity (ibid., p. 176). Death is deﬁned by Shelley as encompassing both the physical functions and the condition of selfhood or identity: it is ‘that apparent termination of all the functions of sensitive and intellectual existence’, and ‘the condition in which natures resembling ourselves apparently cease to be that which they were’ (ibid., pp. 175, 176). While Shelley is sceptical in his thought, he is ﬁrm on the notion that life or thought depends upon the material body: ‘We know no more than that those external organs and all that ﬁne texture of material frame, without which we have no experience that life or thought can subsist are dissolved and scattered abroad’ (ibid., p. 176). The ‘intellectual operations’ are regarded as ‘dependent’ upon ‘the organs of sense’: ‘How can a corpse see or feel? Its eyes are eaten out, and its heart is black and without motion’ (ibid.). Shelley then discusses the conviction of the scientist that there is no future state: The natural philosopher … believes that he sees with more certainty that [death] is attended with the annihilation of sentiment and thought. He observes the mental powers increase and fade with those of the body and even accommodate themselves to the most transitory changes of our physical nature. Sleep suspends many of the faculties of the vital and intellectual principles; drunkenness and disease will either temporarily or permanently derange them. Madness or idiocy may utterly extinguish the most excellent and delicate of those powers … Assuredly these are convincing evidences that so soon as the organs of the body are subjected to the laws of inanimate matter, sensation, and perception are at an end. (Shelley’s Prose, p. 177) He goes on to state the case that life depends upon organization: It is probable that what we call thought is not an actual being, but no more than the relation between certain parts of that inﬁnitely varied mass of which the rest of the universe is composed and

‘The Painted Veil’: Deﬁning Life 155

which ceases to exist so soon as those parts change their position with regard to each other. (Ibid.) Even if, as Abernethy had argued, life is to be seen as ‘some peculiar substance which permeates and is the cause of the animation of living beings’, then why would it be ‘something essentially distinct’ from other substances and ‘exempt from subjection to those laws from which no other substance is exempt’ (ibid.)? Directly confronting Abernethy’s favoured opinion, that life was electricity, Shelley pointed out that electricity was as subject to the laws of matter as any other substance, that it too was ‘subject to change and to decay and to conversion into other forms’ (ibid.). Indeed this law of change is that which in living beings is ‘a power which converts the substances by which it is surrounded into a substance homogenous with itself’ (ibid.). Throughout, Shelley emphasizes that what we ‘see and know’ should be the only evidence brought to bear on the subject. It is unlikely, he implies, that there would be a ‘vital principle’, or, in other words, ‘a certain substance which escapes the observation of the chemist and anatomist’ (ibid., pp. 177–8). Lawrence’s scepticism, which seems, like Shelley’s, to have been inﬂuenced by Drummond, questions whether the relation posited between cause and effect is anything more than custom and habit. As Shelley writes in ‘On Life’: ‘cause is only a word expressing a certain state of the human mind with regard to the manner in which two thoughts [things] are apprehended to be related to each other’ (P&P, p. 508). A common mistake was made in searching for a cause of life, when all we could know was the effect of life. The functions of life, respiration, circulation, digestion, were all that could be experienced. As Morgan wrote: ‘Life is known exclusively by function’ (1818, p. 52). Lawrence wrote: To talk of life as independent of an animal body,—to speak of a function without reference to an appropriate organ,—is physiologically absurd. It is in opposition to the evidence of our senses and rational faculties: it is looking for an effect without a cause. (Lectures, p. 61) It seems from his ‘Essay on a Future State’ and other writings that Shelley similarly believed that it was absurd to discuss anything beyond what our experience revealed to us (ibid., p. 508). Ultimately, life is a ‘great miracle’ and, the best we could do was to ‘make evident

156 Shelley and Vitality

our ignorance to ourselves’ (‘On Life’, P&P, pp. 505, 506).30 Likewise Lawrence distinguishes himself from those who ‘penetrate to their ﬁrst causes; to shew [sic], independently of the phenomena, what is life, and how irritability and sensibility execute these purposes, which so justly excite our admiration (Introduction, pp. 165–6). The next chapter further considers the ways in which the material conditions of life are exploited for Shelley’s poetical and political purposes.

5 ‘The Poetry of Life’

Life cycles This chapter examines the way in which Shelley used the theories and vocabulary of the vitality debate as a metaphor for poetic, aesthetic and historical ideas. Adonais’s use of fertility myth and its language of growth and renovation have been commented on before. Erasmus Darwin in The Temple of Nature writes of Adonis: ‘the ﬁgure of Adonis was probably designed to represent the more abstracted idea of life or animation’ (1973, I, 372n). Shelley’s poem reﬂects upon materialist ideas of the cycles of life, where dead matter feeds living matter, and as Lucretius maintained, nothing dies but everything changes. The poem has also been examined for its appeal to future generations of readers, for its questions regarding the fate of poetry after the death of the poet and the transmission of texts through time, most recently in the work of Andrew Bennett on Romantic ‘posthumous writing’ (Bennett, 1999). Shelley’s Adonais addresses the potential for poetry to perpetuate the existence of a poet, by exploiting the vocabulary and ideas of contemporary medical notions of vitality, yet no critic has yet considered the medical language in which these ideas are discussed or their relation to contemporary notions of vitality. On one level this poem is literally about the death of Keats, and Shelley does not shy away from graphic descriptions of the changes a decomposing corpse goes through. On the other hand, however, this poem is, as Shelley described it himself, ‘a highly wrought piece of art’, and its adherence to the stylized genre of elegy cannot be ignored (Letters, II, 294, 5 (?) June 1821). While the poem twists and turns through conventional elegiac patterns, it explores philosophical issues in a serious manner. The language of disease and death is present 157

158 Shelley and Vitality

throughout, in words such as ‘contagion’, ‘infection’, ‘stain’, ‘corruption’, ‘convulse’, ‘decay’, ‘consume’ and ‘deface’. This discourse competes with a language, which, though cloaked in Shelley’s customary scepticism, encourages us to think of life rather than death: the word ‘sustain’, for example, appears a number of times, as do verbs similarly associated with life, such as ‘kindle’, ‘restore’, ‘renew’, ‘survive’. A number of words and ideas are used in the poem in both their positive and negative senses. Shelley’s study of science had alerted him to the number of elements that had the potential to both kill and cure; oxygen for example is one element needed to sustain life but which is also instrumental in decomposing a corpse. The ability for a single chemical substance or process to operate in radically different ways on living and dead bodies was one of the mysteries which preoccupied scientists that studied vitality, and which led them to believe that living beings had unique properties. How could the living body vitally need certain elements, such as oxygen, when this same substance has a destructive effect on a corpse?1 In a paper published in Philosophical Transactions in 1772, ‘On the Digestion of the Stomach after Death’, Hunter argued that the fact that living animals did not digest the material of their own stomach, while after death this process did take place, showed that there must be a principle at work during life that protected the body from usual chemical operations such as digestion. As Ian Wylie puts it, Hunter believed: ‘that some force or power, superior to chemical forces, protected and maintained living matter from the material processes of digestion. Only on the death of the individual, after the vital principle had ceased, was the body subject to ordinary chemical laws’ (1989, p. 127). In Adonais, air can be both benign and malign; compare, for example, Shelley’s phrase ‘vital air’ with the infectious airs which vultures bring (26, 246–8).2 A number of properties occupy opposing and conﬂicting deﬁnitions within the poem: white, for example, can be used to describe decay, as in ‘white Death’ (66) and ‘white death-bed’ (309), or perfection and purity, the ‘white radiance of Eternity’ (463). Heat, likewise, can describe a hectic and fevered ﬂush, the ‘burning brain’ (228), or be used to demonstrate the difference between life, the ‘burning bed’ of Urania’s tears (21), and the ‘cold heart’ (80) of the dead Adonais. The different meanings of these words and images is relative to their position in the elegy’s narrative. The poem is divided into sections of 17, 21 and 17 stanzas, which demarcate the change in ideas. The narrative develops as the narrator proposes and then rejects ways of

‘The Poetry of Life’ 159

understanding and dealing with the death of Adonais, though this rejection is never fully complete; there is a partial truth in the earlier position that provides the way forward to the next. The narrative, in this respect, has a kind of looping pattern, which beﬁts the poem’s discussion of nature’s and life’s cycles. In the ﬁrst section of the poem (stanzas 1–17), the narrator is full of despair for Adonais, who is repeatedly described as absent. The transition between living body and insensible corpse was one which taxed scientists of Shelley’s day. As Mr Clare in Caleb Williams commented: How curious is the line that separates life and death to mortal men! To be at one moment active, gay, penetrating, with [immense] stores of knowledge at one’s command, capable of delighting, instructing and animating mankind, and the next, lifeless and loathsome, an incumbrance [sic] upon the face of the earth.3 The search for a principle of vitality was motivated, on all sides, by a new deﬁnition of life. John Abernethy had cited John Hunter as the authority on the deﬁnition of ‘life’: ‘it is something that prevents the chemical decomposition, to which dead animal and vegetable matter is so prone’ (Enquiry, p. 17). The natural condition for the body then is death and decay, and life, instead, is a strange and mysterious phenomenon. ‘Life is a forced state’ wrote John Brown; according to Bichat, life is the totality of functions which resist death (Brown, 1795, I, cxxvii; Bichat, 1816, p. 21). The ﬁrst section of Adonais offers us the chance to see which are the elements Shelley considers vital to life: in contemporary science, air, blood and nerves were seen as either the vehicle of, or even the principle of life itself. In Adonais, Shelley writes of heat (21–2), the ‘vital air’ (26), breathing (100–4), and water (49) as the elements that sustain life. Adonais’s ‘cold heart’ (80) and ‘frozen cheek’ (99) signify death. Just as heat is used to describe both the healthy and diseased state of a body, so too is water; death is described as ‘damp’ (104) where, later, water signiﬁes life and dried leaves signify death (138). The living in this poem are described as such by virtue of their beating hearts (22, 294), their body’s heat, tears, and the life that ‘can burn in blood’ (288). Often, the vital signs are to be drawn from metaphors used: Adonais is compared to a ﬂower a number of times and this paralleling of human, animal and plant life conﬁrms Shelley’s conviction that all living beings shared certain needs. Dew for plants is the equivalent of water for humans, for example.

160 Shelley and Vitality

In stanza three the narrator commands an absent Urania to ‘dream not that the amorous Deep / Will yet restore him to the vital air’ (25–6). The corpse of the recently dead Adonais is seen as intact and as though he were only sleeping, but there is a recognition that the ‘law / Of change’, irrevocable as it is, will soon transform him from this state (71–2). The potential for resurrection is denied. There is, however, a moment when a personiﬁed Death’s hold on Adonais is momentarily loosened and life begins to return: In the death chamber for a moment Death Shamed by the presence of that living Might Blushed to annihilation, and the breath Revisited those lips, and life’s pale light Flashed through those limbs. (217–21) This would suggest that death is the alien condition for the body and that life is its natural state. The momentary release from Death’s hold almost returns Adonais to life. There are other later episodes, however, where the opposite is true. The poem’s ﬁnal inversion, that death is life and life is death, is accompanied by a realization of a physiological nature: We decay Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief Convulse us and consume us day by day And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay. (348–51) The scientiﬁc notion that our lives are a brief respite from the body’s more natural condition of death could be extended to mean that disease is not an invasion of a healthy frame but a symptom of the body’s natural tendency. This physiological knowledge offers Shelley a metaphor for the corruption he witnessed in his contemporary society: Adonais is distinguished in the poem from the living-dead who consider themselves alive, but whose hearts grow cold even while they live (358). As in the sonnet ‘Lift not the painted veil which those who live / Call life’, what we believe is life is actually death. The idea that we ‘miscall’ death life appears throughout Shelley’s work. 4 In Adonais the ‘dead live’ while life dies (395). 5

‘The Poetry of Life’ 161

Bennett also comments on this aspect: ‘the poem … seeks to disrupt the distinction between life and death in order to suggest that “We decay”, we readers, decay’ (1999, p. 177). In keeping with the demands of the genre, Shelley’s poem has a cyclical movement: it begins by lamenting the ﬁnality of human mortality, compares it to the immortality of nature, and then ﬁnds something of this immortality even in the death of the individual. Throughout, individual human life is contrasted with the cycles of nature, where, for example, day follows each night and spring each winter. The poem is suffused with images of renewal and rebirth, which are used to contrast with the impossibility of renewing the life of Adonais. This is a conventional feature of elegy, and the cycle of the seasons or days are common tropes for the depiction of life. In Adonais, nature’s ability to transform, to mutate and re-form, is recognized in verbs such as ‘renew’, ‘revolve’, ‘reappear’ (155–7). ‘A quickening life from the Earth’s heart has burst / As it has ever done, with change and motion’: this life has the ability to ‘quicken’ other lives, and this takes place through transformation and movement (164–5). There is a luxurious sensuality involved as ‘All baser things … Diffuse themselves’ and ‘spend’ their time and themselves in sexual intercourse (169–70). This dissolution of the self is no matter for regret, since they instead celebrate in the ‘renewed might’ of their combined selves (171). Each of the statements made concerning nature build up to create a picture of a self-renewing, ever-living earth: ‘Nought we know, dies’ (177). This provides for the contrast: the only thing that seems to die is our immaterial mind, our capacity for knowledge, the very capacity that sets us apart from animals and ‘All baser things’: ‘Shall that alone which knows / Be as a sword consumed before the sheath’ (177–8)? As ever in Shelleyan formulations of this kind, this is left as a question rather than a stated fact. The beginning of the poem laments the silencing of Adonais, or the ‘mute voice’ of the poet (27). The music of the mourner’s weeping is quite literally the elegy itself and it is through music and voice that the poem attempts to restore Adonais. It is the grief and the expression of this grief through poetry that keeps Adonais alive. Later in this chapter I explore the idea that only poetry can offer a future state for Shelley, but here even this grief is subject to conditions and is tied to metaphors of the material: Alas! that all we loved of him should be, But for our grief, as if it had not been,

162 Shelley and Vitality

And grief itself be mortal! Woe is me! Whence are we, and why are we? Of what scene The actors or spectators? Great and mean Meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow As long as skies are blue, and ﬁelds are green, Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow. (181–9) The rhyme scheme here and elsewhere in the poem mirrors the cyclic nature of the poem, returning to pick up rhyming sounds while moving on to new ones. This stanza also discusses particularly crucial points for the study of life, or the study of ‘Whence are we, and why are we?’ Shelley’s partial assonance in ‘Great and mean’ becomes full assonance in the repeated ‘e’ sound of ‘mean’ and ‘Meet’; through the alliteration of the ‘m’ sound, these become ‘massed’, literally and ﬁguratively, in the ﬁnal word ‘death’, which both contains, compounds and offers a new sound to those given before. The matter of life becomes massed in death, and yet, death transforms that which had existed before. Shelley’s poetry enacts the process he describes. In keeping with the poem’s notion that life is simply a temporary respite from the body’s natural condition of death, here death merely ‘lends’ life what it needs with the understanding that what is borrowed will have to be returned. The relentless cycle of the days, months and seasons are here seen as tied to sorrow, which is unable to escape and thereby also subject to the same relentless movement. In using such a metaphor, in its association with the material, grief achieves permanence. Even at the end of the poem, where Adonais’s existence is recognized as eternal, more real than the ‘dream’ we ‘miscall’ life, it is still one that can be empirically experienced: ‘He is a presence to be felt and known / In darkness and in light, from herb and stone’ (373–4). The ‘Power’ of which he has become a part ‘Sustains’ and ‘kindles’ the world, both verbs associated with life-giving powers. Stanza 43 identiﬁes this ‘Spirit’ by its ‘plastic stress’, its ability to ‘compel’ and ‘torture’ ‘All new successions to the forms they wear’ (381–5). The material of the world is recognized as ‘dross’ and ‘dense’ until it is transformed by this power (384, 382). Shelley uses a vitalist metaphor here to imagine a way in which life can be regarded as eternal; the ‘Spirit’ is a kind of principle of life, which has the power to animate all beings.

‘The Poetry of Life’ 163

Vitally metaphorical In his Defence of Poetry, Shelley describes poetry as ‘vitally metaphorical’ (P&P, p. 512).6 The adverb ‘vitally’ in this phrase is usually taken to refer to the degree of importance Shelley gives to metaphor in poetry. In other words, it is vital that poetry marks the before unapprehended relations of things, and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become through time signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse. (P&P, p. 512) In this section I would like to consider the senses in which this aspect of poetry is ‘vital’. Shelley does not describe the metaphorical nature of poetry as vital solely to indicate how important the poet’s ability to create is; the word also indicates the way that Shelley saw this creation taking place. It is common enough to say that poetry and the imagination are creative faculties, which Shelley does throughout his Defence, but, as I hope I have shown throughout this book, vitality had speciﬁc and detailed deﬁnitions in this period. Shelley utilizes these in his description of poetry’s function: the process of metaphor, in other words, is, speciﬁcally, a vital process. In the quote from the Defence, Shelley deﬁnes what he means by metaphor and explains why he considers this to be a ‘vital’ process. Without the application of abstract ideas to new historical and political contexts, without seeing and expressing new similarity or relation between things, language would be ‘dead’. Using verbs that appear repeatedly in the Defence, Shelley describes metaphor as ‘perpetuating’ signs or things, and then becoming new signs themselves; in this way, metaphor transforms. Imagination, as opposed to reason, is ‘the principle of synthesis’ and ‘similitude’, just as life transforms by assimilating matter (Defence, P&P, p. 510). In Shelley’s mind, poetry, as ‘“the expression of the imagination”’ was inherently vital (Defence, P&P, p. 511). Shelley’s own poetry lived up to this ideal. F.R. Leavis’s well-known criticism of Shelley’s images, which, he wrote, have ‘a general tendency … to forget the status of the metaphor or simile that introduced them and to assume

164 Shelley and Vitality

an autonomy and a right to propagate’, describes precisely the vital or living aspect of Shelley’s metaphors, which transform as they describe and create new and newly creative images in their refusal to ﬁx and settle (Leavis, 1936, p. 206). Shelley often describes poetry using physiological metaphors, many of which have been seen in the medical writings of surgeons involved in the vitality debate: Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. (Defence, P&P, p. 517) This power to ‘assimilate’ to their own nature, is one that had been characterized as vital. S.T. Coleridge had similarly called the imagination ‘essentially vital’, for this same reason (1817, I , 296). In Shelley’s Defence a perhaps unlikely analogy is drawn between the imagination and digestion. ‘Fresh food’ is needed to sustain and nourish thoughts. By eating, external objects are assimilated to our needs and become part of us. Creation is not sufﬁcient alone; ideas have also to be sustained in the minds, thoughts and poetry of others: ‘all language, institution and form, require not only to be produced but to be sustained’ (P&P, p. 521). This is imagined in Adonais, where the dead poet’s thoughts ‘Wander no more, from kindling brain to brain / But droop there, whence they sprung’ (77–8). Throughout the Defence a number of physiological and anatomical metaphors are used to describe and deﬁne poetry and the imagination. Digestion is referred to again when Shelley explains that we ‘have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how to reduce into practise’, and lack the poetry to express this: We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. (P&P, p. 530)

‘The Poetry of Life’ 165

Here he argues that it is not enough simply to have this knowledge, instead we need to be able to ‘imagine that which we know’, and to ‘act that which we imagine’. The ‘poetry of life’, it seems, is one that can assimilate and transform knowledge into expression and, eventually into political action. The same analogy is used in a later section of the Defence: The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selﬁsh and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it. (P&P, p. 531) Here speaking of selﬁshness, which overproduces and hoards more than is necessary for life, Shelley imagines a body unable to cope with the process of assimilation. Both tropes suggest the medical writings of such as William Lambe and Abernethy, who both treated patients by prescribing dietary restrictions. Abernethy was more concerned than Lambe about the quantities of food eaten, writing: ‘There can be no advantage in putting more food into the stomach than it is competent to digest, for the surplus can never afford nourishment to the body; on the contrary, it will be productive of various ills’ (1820, p. 65). Indeed, in Abernethy’s text, the excess food begins to ‘putrefy’ and decay rather than to help with the business of life (ibid., p. 67). Using a formulation like that used in his essay ‘On Life’, Shelley asks what would be the point of ideals if poetry did not bring ‘light and ﬁre’ to animate them: What were Virtue, Love, Patriotism, Friendship &c.—what were the scenery of this beautiful Universe which we inhabit—what were our consolations on this side of the grave—and what were our aspirations beyond it—if Poetry did not ascend to bring light and ﬁre from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? (P&P, p. 521) Where he found all the wonders of our lives wanting when compared to the mystery that is life in ‘On Life’, here he ﬁnds that none of this would matter if poetry did not ‘bring’ something else to this life. The

166 Shelley and Vitality

‘eternal regions’ he speaks of do not seem to be beyond the grave, but are a source of imaginative and creative thoughts. Repeatedly in the Defence he refers to ‘the eternal’ in which the poet participates (P&P, p. 513). This is also described using a metaphor of vitality: The sacred links of that chain have never been entirely disjoined, which descending through the minds of many men is attached to those great minds, whence as from a magnet the invisible efﬂuence is sent forth, which at once connects, animates and sustains the life of all. (Defence, P&P, p. 522) Using an analogy that draws on the ‘chain of life’, Shelley imagines that all minds are connected, that we are all connected to ‘those great minds’ that he discusses in the Defence. These minds act like a magnet, emitting a force that attracts all other minds. In Adonais, Shelley describes such poets as those ‘whose transmitted efﬂuence cannot die’ (407). The OED describes ‘efﬂuence’ as a kind of ‘ﬂowing out’, usually of electricity or magnetism. In the Defence, this efﬂuence is imagined as both creating life and sustaining it. Lightning has a similar function to that which Shelley here imagines for magnetism; the ‘light and ﬁre’, which poetry brings to man seems to elide such principles as light, heat, electricity and magnetism, as Adam Walker had, and similarly emphasizes their vital function. In the Defence, the revolutionary potential of lightning is clear; speaking of Dante, Shelley writes: His very words are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth, and pregnant with a lightning which has yet found no conductor. All high poetry is inﬁnite; it is as the ﬁrst acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. (P&P, p. 528) Shelley imagines his own words as ‘Ashes and sparks’ in ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (67). Here we see the potential of life; though thought is ‘inextinguishable’, it yet lies ‘covered with ashes’. Similarly, the capacity of these thoughts to change or revolutionize opinions is imagined as ‘lightning’, which has not yet found a conductor, or a means by which to fulﬁl its potential. In the Preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley writes of his age, that ‘The cloud of mind is discharging its

‘The Poetry of Life’ 167

collected lightning, and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring, or is about to be restored’ (Poems, II, 474). Walker also thought that lightning was a means by which to restore equilibrium. In the Defence, lightning is also imagined as a weapon by which to ﬁght oppressive institutions with radical political opinion: ‘Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it’ (P&P, p. 520). The trope of an acorn containing an oak, or of a seed containing a plant or ﬂower, is used repeatedly through Shelley’s Defence.7 This process was discussed at length by scientists in the study of life. Some contemporary scientists believed that, in the same way, human life was contained in miniature in the womb. By virtue of this metaphor, ‘the future is contained within the present as the plant within the seed’ (Defence, P&P, p. 511). Within this present, then, is the potential for change. The poet’s thoughts are ‘the germs of the ﬂower and the fruit of latest time’ (ibid., p. 513). Shelley considers poets as the product of their times, and, in Britain, they are ‘the fruit’ of their nation’s ‘struggle for civil and religious liberty’ (ibid., p. 533). They are also, though, the germs that can produce ﬂowers. The importance of the seed in creation is emphasized in the metaphor Shelley uses to describe the ‘vanity of translation’: ‘The plant must spring again from its seed or it will bear no ﬂower’ (ibid., p. 514). The message of the Defence, refusing the pessimism of Peacock’s Four Ages of Poetry, is that the literature being produced in Britain during his lifetime seems to bring a new birth: ‘It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words’ (ibid., p. 533). In his essay ‘On Life’, Shelley described how it was impossible for us to see the true wonder of life because it is something we were so familiar with (P&P, p. 505). In the Defence, he writes that poetry is the means by which to remove this familiarity and reveal the life beneath: Poetry turns all things it touches to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed: it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes; its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which ﬂow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the

168 Shelley and Vitality

world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms. (P&P, p. 533) Here again poetry’s ability to transmute is emphasized. It changes, and transforms for the better, all it comes into contact with. This image is like that of the magnet’s efﬂuence, where poetry has a kind of force ﬁeld radiating from it, which attracts forms moving within this sphere. Electrical attraction can be likened to the theories of ‘sympathy’ expressed by medical writers such as Abernethy, and in Shelley’s Defence, other forms are assimilated into the nature of poetry because of their sympathy with it. They are changed by sympathy to become new applications, or incarnations, of the eternal truths poetry utters. Elsewhere in the Defence, Shelley offers an interpretation of love that is strikingly like a medical deﬁnition of sympathy: ‘A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own’ (P&P, p. 517).

Posthumous life The language of vitality was also appropriated in the period to describe concepts of genius and by Shelley to imagine a kind of textual afterlife. Humphry Davy is again an interesting case in point; he used scientiﬁc ideas to posit privately-held philosophies regarding genius and reputation. In questions of genius, vitality is not used simply as a metaphor, but is held to account for the differing degree of ability witnessed in human endeavour. Davy believed, and was not alone in believing, that individuals had a ﬁnite amount of vitality apportioned to them, and that life expectancy depended on the rate at which this was used up. He wrote to his wife: ‘I cannot help thinking that a certain quantity of nervous or vital power is given to man, which, when consumed, cannot be replaced, and which limits the period of activity and experience’ (Knight, 1992, p. 161). This strange kind of fatalism means that those whose lives have been full of activity and who have burned energy, or vitality, quicker than others by virtue of their dynamic lives, will die young. Davy spoke in these terms of his own life and of Byron’s, whose life he compared to a ‘great comet’ that raced through the universe accumulating light and imitating its speed and brightness.8 Richard Carlile used different imagery, though still drawn from natural phenomena, to suggest that those who possess genius will not

‘The Poetry of Life’ 169

live long: ‘We come and pass like a cloud – like a shower – those of us who possess a brilliancy superior to others, are but as the rainbow, the objects of a momentary admiration, and a momentary recollection’ (1821, p. 7). Davy described the symptoms of his last illness in a vitalist language: ‘I feel my vital powers … are not restoring … My mind, however, I hope, has all its vigour, and too much discriminating sensibility’ (Knight, 1992, p. 171). Davy was convinced that vitality continued in the body for some time after death. Consequently, he had a phobia of being buried alive and left instructions that ten days should elapse before he was buried, by which time his death would be incontrovertible (Knight, 1992, p. 168). This fear was not unusual during the Romantic period; as resuscitation skills improved, so too did fears of premature burial. If the dead could be restored to life by the much publicized practices of organizations such as the Humane Society, set up in London in 1774 to promote resuscitation techniques for the revival of drowned persons, the separation between life and death might be less absolute than had been thought previously. For these reasons Davy refused to allow an autopsy on his body after death. His brother described how: He had a dread of a post mortem examination, founded on an idea which occurred to his active mind, that it was possible for sensation to remain in the animal ﬁbre after the loss of irritability and the power of giving proof to others of its existence.9 Daniel Arasse has discussed experiments by French scientists during the French Revolution, which included holding up decapitated heads and shouting in their ears to see whether they could still hear (Arasse, 1989, p. 37). The evidence of electrically-induced muscular contractions after death in the experiments of Giovanni Aldini and others perpetuated the belief that vitality survived in the body after death, and accounts for prolonged efforts to revive a person when a successful outcome was unlikely. The irritability that was perceived to remain within the body was thought to be retained for a longer time in victims of suffocation or drowning. The experiments carried out by Aldini on malefactors hung for their crimes seemed to give evidence of this: with the application of electric shocks their eyes rolled, they sat up, clenched their ﬁsts and even seemed to be attempting to stand.10 These experiments fed into the contemporary notions that the ‘vital principle’ was closely related to, if not

170 Shelley and Vitality

synonymous with, electricity and that it was demonstrably evident in the dead body for hours after death. 11 Abernethy refers to the work of Galvani in his discussion of the way that a frog’s limbs can be re-animated by electricity; the fact that this re-animation is less effective with each subsequent application of electricity demonstrates to him that irritability ‘is not exhausted but fatigued’ with the onset of death (Enquiry, pp. 29–30). Life is viewed as a gradual diminishing of power: except in cases of accidental death where vitality is ‘suddenly dissipated’, life is ‘lost by degrees, without any apparent change taking place in the structure’ (ibid., p. 42). As Ludmilla Jordanova has noted, the eighteenth-century public had a ‘sustained interest in suspended animation [and] techniques for reviving the drowned and the hanged’; these were the deaths where vitality, in the words of Abernethy ‘suddenly dissipated’ and where resuscitation might be more likely. 12 The word ‘reanimation’ was used in the period rather than resuscitation, identifying the process as bringing a person back to life. Shelley, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, demonstrates his belief that death is reversible: describing the efforts of Dr John Bell attending his son, William, during his last illness, he writes, ‘By the skill of the physician he was once reanimated after the process of death had actually commenced, and he lived four days after that time’ (Letters, II, 104, 25 July 1819).13 Shelley refers to the work of the Humane Society in his notes to Queen Mab, contrasting their reanimation of dead bodies with the miracles performed by Christ: But even supposing that a man should raise a dead body to life before our eyes, and on this fact rest his claim to being considered the son of God; — the Humane Society restores drowned persons, and because it makes no mystery of the method it employs, its members are not mistaken for the sons of God. (Poems, I, 401) For the remainder of this section, I want to consider how Shelley metaphorically attempted to restore or reanimate Keats in his poem Adonais; the vocabulary of Davy, Aldini and other contemporary surgeons and scientists was appropriated in the poem to discuss the ways in which poets continue beyond their lifetime and the way that poetry lives. We use this language metaphorically when we speak of the textual ‘afterlife’, and such formulations as Roland Barthes’s ‘death of the author’ and ‘birth of the reader’. But I want to suggest that in

‘The Poetry of Life’ 171

Shelley’s case, this language was informed by his knowledge of current investigations into the nature of life and death. Throughout the poem, but clustered especially in its ﬁnal section, scientiﬁc theories of the nature of life are used to address issues of how poetry can continue to exist, how a poet’s reputation can be secured, and in the light of the unfavourable criticism received by both Shelley and Keats, whether a future audience will understand and appreciate them. The words ‘sustain’ and ‘kindle’, used in a different sense earlier in the poem are now appropriated to consider how to sustain the life of a text after its creator is dead. Similarly, Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ uses as a metaphor scientiﬁc knowledge of the methods by which seeds are transported from dead plants to fertile ground in order to create new life. In the preface to Adonais, Shelley expresses his hopes that the spirit of Keats will ‘animate the creations of [Joseph Severn’s] pencil and plead against Oblivion for his name!’ (P&P, p. 411). Despite the narrator’s denial that Adonais can be restored (26), the ‘mute and uncomplaining’ voice of the dead poet is taken up by the loud and complaining voice of his champion (23). Bennett has written that ‘the most explicit and powerful ﬁguration of the death of the reader occurs in Keats’s poem “This living hand” – a poem that, arguably suggests that the poet’s hand lives because the reader has given it blood and is dead’; in the same way, ‘Adonais again presents the poet-as-reader dying into Keats’s poetry’. 14 Bennett’s metaphor of a kind of blood transfusion is in keeping with Shelley’s own tropes. The narrator describes the ‘passion-winged Ministers of thought’ who visit Adonais, the creations of his poetic mind (74). These once ‘fed’ near the ‘living streams / Of his young spirit’ (75–6). He is imagined as having sustained them, as having given them ‘strength’; since Adonais’s death they ‘Wander no more, from kindling brain to brain’, but droop round the ‘cold heart’ of the dead Adonais (77–80). If these splendours are regarded as poetic creation, remembering here that Shelley quoted approvingly Tasso’s statement ‘None deserves the name of Creator except God and the Poet’, they are imagined as the physical product of the poet; he created and sustained them (‘On Life’, P&P, p. 506n). In order to survive they need to continue to travel between the kindling minds of others. Similarly, the Power which Adonais is recognized as part of by the end of the poem, ‘Sustains [the world] from beneath, and kindles it from above’ (378). Poetry, as was discussed in the previous section, has this ability to be sustained through its being kindled in the

172 Shelley and Vitality

receptive minds of a sympathetic audience. Keats is one of those poets: whose names on Earth are dark But whose transmitted efﬂuence cannot die So long as ﬁre outlives the parent spark. (406–8) Others, such as the critic who has destroyed Adonais, are described as ‘sparkless’, and this is a symptom of their living death, when the ‘spirit’s self has ceased to burn’ (360, 359). As discussed, the poem features a number of cycles of life. With reference to Lucretius’s materialism, and the way that after death matter continues to live in other forms, the seasons metaphorically mark a return to life from death. If, as Shelley suggests, poetry ‘creates by combination and representation’, the words of poets can generate new meaning in other’s poems (Poems, II, 474). The cycle of matter where death feeds life and is transmuted into living matter again, can be used metaphorically to describe cycles of inﬂuence in poetry. Poetry again is seen as being essentially vital, since it is capable of using and transforming other matter to its purpose. It is sustained by being read and understood by others after the death of the poet, generating new thoughts and actions. In another sense, poetry can be seen to perform an animating function; as Kelvin Everest puts it, ‘the poem tries to bring about, by imagining, events which have never yet happened’.15 Such a task becomes increasingly important when events described are of a political and even revolutionary nature. Poems such as Prometheus Unbound attempt by imagining revolution to bring such an event closer to being realized. Critical reviews of Shelley’s Adonais used ‘posthumous’ terminology: the Metropolitan Magazine (1835) said that Shelley had ‘given life’ to Keats with this poem.16 Modern critics too appropriate such metaphors: Once the poem passes entirely beyond the purposive control of the author, it leaves the pole of its origin and establishes the ﬁrst phase of its later dialectical life (what we call its critical history) … The moving pole of its receptive life … dates from the ﬁrst responses and reviews it receives.17 In Jerome McGann’s formulation, the text has a ‘life’ beyond the life of the author. A standard trope in early twentieth-century New Criticism

‘The Poetry of Life’ 173

was the idea that the father-author gave a text life in writing it: ‘The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it)’.18 Aurora Leigh, in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s autobiographical poem of the same name, measures her success as a poet by the degree to which she has given her poem life and independence from herself: I ripped my verses up, And found no blood on the rapier’s point; The heart in them was just an embryo’s heart, Which never yet had beat, that it should die. (III. 245–8)19 In all of these very different theoretical perspectives the language of vitality is used, though in each it serves different ends. The peculiar situation in which a work of art outlives its maker seems to suggest the metaphor that the work takes on a life of its own. Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ is a text that has been seen as interrogating the notion of this ‘life’ of art. Everest has written an extended discussion of how the ‘Text in Time’ continues to exist.20 ‘Ozymandias’ sets up a situation whereby the vaunt of the self-invested ‘King of Kings’ becomes simultaneously empty and meaningful. The (itself dictatorial) command, ‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’, reveals to other rulers the fact that their rule will not survive the sands of time (11).21 Their power is, as with everything else, historically contingent and the decayed and dilapidated condition of the statue of Ozymandias serves to illustrate this point. Art is self-reﬂexively considered in the poem by means of this discussion of the material life of tyranny, and the work of art, the statue, and by inference, the poem itself, are recognized as being capable of such ravages. Everest uses the history of this speciﬁc poem’s transmission to illustrate this point. In his words, texts have a material life, they mutate and decay ‘inevitably, in the ordinary processes by which they are transmitted through time’ (Everest, 1992a, p. 24). ‘Ozymandias’, in particular, ‘has, so to speak, been corrupted as a “text” in the processes of its transmission through time’ (ibid., p. 31). But, the poem’s double irony reveals that in fact there is a kind of life imaginable that is eternal and is not historically contingent. While it is true that Ozymandias’s power has waned and the index of his

174 Shelley and Vitality

control, his statue, lies in pieces, it is also true that the scene has a powerful impact and carries a meaningful message. This is partly due to the ability of the sculptor/poet who created the statue/ poem, but it is also partly due to the fact that tyranny still exists, whether the year is 1819 or any other. This suggests, then, that while there may be local (in space and time) incarnations of art, ‘“Ozymandias”, the poem, offers an instance … of a human activity which is genuinely able to transcend time, to outlast the conditions and occasions of its making, and in living beyond them to establish the higher kind of existence enjoyed by art as against life’ (Everest, 1992a, pp. 32–3). This kind of existence could be a manifestation of life as described by Shelley in his essay ‘On Life’: ‘there is a spirit within [man] at enmity with change and extinction [nothingness and dissolution]. This is the character of all life and being’ (P&P, p. 506). Perhaps the study of life shows a way that poetry can be seen to continue to exist, outliving the individual self and made permanent through its ability to transmute others to itself and generate new forms. As Jerrold Hogle writes, the poet’s ‘nurslings of immortality’ are ‘kept immortal by reinterpretations of them’ (Prometheus Unbound, I. 749; Hogle, 1988, p. 179). The associations to be made between poetry and life are highly suggestive. For example, neither art nor life can be experienced except in some form or another; as Everest puts it: this begs a central question: do verbal works of art exist in a mode which is not subject to the depredations of time? If, as we have already observed, even a poem must have some means of material transmission through time, then a poem must become corrupted, that is, the physical form in which it exists must alter and degrade. (Everest, 1992a, p. 33) A poem’s dependence upon its physical manifestation can be seen as a useful metaphor for the way in which, for scientists such as Lawrence, life depends upon the body.

Beginnings and endings James Hutton in his Theory of the Earth wrote ‘we ﬁnd no vestige of a beginning – no prospect of an end’.22 Despite this, in their study of life contemporary scientists considered the beginnings and endings of life: the birth and death of the individual, as well as the origin and extinction of a species. Shelley wrote in his Defence of Poetry that: ‘poetry is

‘The Poetry of Life’ 175

connate with the origin of man’ (P&P, p. 511). Astronomers in the period considered the origins of the world and the universe, while geologists looked to the origins of life: where we had begun, what we had come from, and how we had changed.23 The questions Shelley asks in his essay ‘On Life’, and which are repeated in ‘The Triumph of Life’, demonstrate this desire to ﬁnd out what we were, are and will become: ‘For what are we? Whence do we come, and whither do we go? Is birth the commencement, is death the conclusion of our being? What is birth and death?’ (P&P, p. 506). Act Four of Prometheus Unbound discusses a number of aspects involved in the creation of life: Shelley alludes, for example, to the evolutionary theories of Darwin (IV. 86–7). The question of how life on earth has evolved suggests various creation theories. When Asia and Panthea go through the caverns to reach Demogorgon’s cave, the geological event caused by Prometheus’s imprisonment is described. They journey: Through the many-folded mountains, To the rents, and gulfs, and chasms, Where the Earth reposed from spasms. (II. 1. 201–3) The Earth’s spasms or convulsions are another symptom of the sickness that is caused by Prometheus’s treatment at the hands of Jupiter. By these means Shelley gives a mythological explanation of geological phenomena as he understands it. He is clearly endorsing contemporary theories that regarded rock strata, realized here as the folds of the mountains, as the product of catastrophic convulsions, probably of volcanic or seismic activity.24 The voice from the mountains recalling the moment of Prometheus’s curse in the ﬁrst act speaks of how they stand ‘O’er the Earthquake’s couch’; though they had often trembled ‘as men convulsed with fears’, at this moment they ‘bowed’ their ‘snowy crest’ (I. 75–7, 91–2). During this period geology established itself as an independent scientiﬁc discipline. Hutton speculated about previous life on earth from the evidence he found in layers of rock strata, and his argument that the earth is continually undergoing cyclical change was based on the empirical evidence available. His was a world that was constantly changing, perpetually repeating the cycle that he describes in Theory of the Earth: the land on which we dwell has been elevated from a lower situation by the same agent which had been employed in consolidating

176 Shelley and Vitality

the strata, in giving them stability, and preparing them for the purpose of the living world. This agent is matter actuated by extreme heat, and expanded with extreme force. (Hutton, 1795, I, 129–30) Such extreme heat would be caused by the volcanic action of Prometheus Unbound, as Matthews has discussed (Matthews, 1957, pp. 197–8). Hutton’s ‘Plutonism’ countered the theory of scientists grouped together under the label ‘Neptunists’, whose theories were reconciled with the biblical account of the earth’s history: they believed the sea which had once covered the earth was responsible for all the minerals identiﬁed on the earth now. The Neptunists could appeal to evidence which proved that living forms postdated the rocks in the order that the book of Genesis claimed for them, ﬁsh, mammals and humans.25 Hutton’s model offered no such comfort and was incompatible with any biblical accounts of creation: ‘there is no occasion for having recourse to any unnatural supposition of evil, to any destructive accident in nature, or to the agency of any preternatural cause, in explaining that which actually appears’ (1795, I, 165). George Cuvier tried to reconcile his own theory that the earth had witnessed a series of catastrophes with the biblical account of creation.26 Noah’s ﬂood could be seen as the only one of these catastrophes to have been recorded; it offered an example in which there had been destruction followed by divine recreation. Hutton was accused of ‘atheism’ and ‘impiety’: his research argued that the earth was far older than the 6,000 years assumed by the bible.27 His supporter, John Playfair, compared Hutton with Copernicus, arguing that geological theories which tried to reconcile their scientiﬁc research with the bible were ‘forced and unsatisfactory’ (Playfair, 1802, p. 127). In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley imagines the Earth’s past and the possible life which inhabited it as it is evidenced by fossilized remains: The wrecks beside of many a city vast, Whose population which the Earth grew over Was mortal, but not human; see, they lie, Their monstrous works and uncouth skeletons, Their statues, homes, and fanes; prodigious shapes Huddled in grey annihilation, split, Jammed in the hard, black deep; and over these The anatomies of unknown wingèd things, And ﬁshes which were the isles of living scale,

‘The Poetry of Life’ 177

And serpents, bony chains, twisted around The iron crags, or within heaps of dust To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs Had crushed the iron crags;—and over these The jagged alligator, and the might Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once Were monarch beasts, and on the shiny shores And weed-overgrown continents of Earth Increased and multiplied like summer worms On an abandoned corpse, till the blue globe Wrapped deluge round it like a cloak, and they Yelled, gasped, and were abolished; or some God Whose throne was in a comet, passed, and cried ‘Be not!’—and like my words they were no more. (IV. 296–318)28 Shelley approaches the subject of the origins of life with his customary scepticism; though he imagines possible scenarios, he does not commit to any single theory. This passage recalls both Keats’s Endymion and Richard III; Matthews and Everest also ﬁnd the inﬂuence of Hutton, Cuvier and Buffon (Poems, II, 632n).29 There is also a clear reference to the theories of James Parkinson in Organic Remains of a Former World, which Shelley ordered in 1811.30 The ‘cancelled cycles’ refers not only to Shelley’s cyclical view of history and tyranny, which is broken by the events of Prometheus Unbound, but also to the theory that cycles of catastrophic events explain the extinction of species that once lived on earth.31 The ‘secrets’ which the beams from the spirits reveal within the ‘Earth’s deep heart’ include evidence of the past civilizations that have inhabited the planet (IV. 279). They have become monuments to their existence and illustrate how life has evolved and transformed over the millions of years since its creation: ‘sepulchred emblems / Of dead destruction’ (IV. 294–5). Shelley describes how populations died out and the earth ‘grew over’ them; once living beings thus become transformed into inorganic matter. He recognizes that they are preserved ‘Jammed, in the hard, black deep’; fossilized in the depths of the mountains, they become petriﬁed, unable to grow and change. This passage examines a cross-section of this rock and sees bands of past civilizations as fossils. The behemoth once reigned on the earth because conditions promoted this species; the ‘slimy shores’ and ‘weedovergrown continents’ were particularly suitable and therefore they

178 Shelley and Vitality

multiplied. The reasons for their extinction are speculated upon but no single possibility is privileged. The movement from present to past allows for questions regarding the origin of life itself. Shelley recognizes that species have existed on the earth which are now no longer present. They are extinct and there is no comparable kind of being now living. The Marquis de Laplace used the fossil discoveries of geologist, Cuvier, to discuss the extinction of whole species and to prove that the one constant principle of ‘life’ is change: do not all those species of animals which are extinct, but whose existence Cuvier has ascertained with such singular sagacity, and also the organization in the numerous fossil bones which he has described, indicate a tendency to change in things, which are apparently the most permanent in their nature? The magnitude and importance of the solar system ought not to except it from this general law; for they are relative to our smallness, and this system, extensive as it appears to be, is but an insensisble [sic] point in the universe. (Laplace, 1830, II, 332–3)32 Cuvier had discovered the fossil remains of beings that were unlike any that now existed on earth. The realization that these species had ‘become entirely extinct’ led a contemporary reviewer of Cuvier’s work to speculate on the world in which they had lived: ‘Indeed, they probably belong to a period when man’s dominion over the earth was weak and partial; when the human race, perhaps, was conﬁned to some favourite spot in the valley of the Nile’.33 The earth itself had changed beyond all recognition. As Parkinson put it, fossils demonstrated that: ‘matter is in constant motion; being impelled, in regular progression, through various forms, and modes of existence’ (1804, p. 9). It was this principle of constant and relentless change which was behind Laplace’s so-called ‘nebular hypothesis’. For him, the changes on the earth are microcosmic reﬂections of events happening elsewhere in the solar system. The animation of the moon in Act Four of Prometheus Unbound clearly demonstrates Shelley’s understanding of the means by which the moon would be inhabitable. The spirit of the earth emits a beam ‘Which penetrates [the moon’s] frozen frame, / And passes with the warmth of ﬂame’ (IV. 328–9). Light and heat are acknowledged as the vital components needed to revive the frozen moon. The importance of water to life is also recognized, as the snow on the moon’s ‘lifeless mountains / Is loosened into living fountains’ (IV. 356–7). The ‘solid

‘The Poetry of Life’ 179

oceans’ on the moon begin to ﬂow, thus making the moon more like the ‘green and azure’ earth and similarly able to support life (IV. 358, 339, 459). The scene relies upon a physiological knowledge of the human body and echoes the treatment of the Earth in earlier acts: once the conditions for life are present, a spirit bursts outwards from the ‘heart’ of the moon (IV. 359). This spirit is reﬂected, as light is, from the earth to the moon. It is recognized as love and animates the moon, moving to the outermost reaches of the newly verdant moon’s surface and into the atmosphere. The source for this light, or electricity, is the eyes; the moon experiences this transformation as she gazes on the earth (IV. 363). The generation of plants and other unnamed ‘living shapes’ proceed from this electrical inﬂux: ‘Green stalks burst forth, and bright ﬂowers grow’ (IV. 365, 364). The atmosphere of the moon is changed with full clouds bearing the rain which ‘new buds’ need (IV. 366–8). At the end of Prometheus Unbound, then, new life does not solely exist on the earth; the moon also becomes an inhabited planet. Spirits describe how they will travel beyond the earth ‘into the hoar deep to colonize’ and create a world based on the post-revolutionary, Promethean ‘new world of man’ (IV. 143, 156).34 Even to the point of his death Shelley continued to ask ‘what is life’. Key questions are repeated in Shelley’s ﬁnal poem, ‘The Triumph of Life’: the narrator is struck by the multitude who cannot tell where they have come from or where they are going: ‘none seemed to know / Whither he went, or whence he came’ (47–8); he asks Rousseau his guide: ‘Whence camest thou and wither goest thou?’ (296); in turn, Rousseau, when he recalls his ‘awakening’, asks the spirit he sees ‘Shew whence I came’ (398).35 In the poem, life is the ‘afﬂiction of vain breath’; it is a mundane, daily existence that seems more like death than life (61). Life triumphs in the way that Petrarch’s ‘Triumphs’ had, conquering in the manner of ‘Imperial Rome’ (113). In the poem’s ﬁnal lines, the question ‘Then, what is Life?’ is asked again, showing that Shelley remained preoccupied with this question almost to the last words he wrote (544). The poem’s form makes it particularly susceptible to problems of beginning and ending: terza rima has the effect of a rolling movement which has no sense of an origin but rather seems to pick up and release an ongoing rhythm. The repetition of the rhymes, which are retrieved in the next tercet, means that even at the poem’s ﬁrst line there is an impression of something having gone before. John Freccero, writing on Dante’s use of the verse form, notes that ‘the rules for closure are not inherent in the form: the terzina as a metrical pattern could go on

180 Shelley and Vitality

forever and must be arbitrarily ended’.36 Other Shelley poems which use the scheme, such as ‘Merenghi’, ‘The Woodman and the Nightingale’ and ‘Prince Athanase’, are similarly unﬁnished (Freccero, 1986, p. 261).37 The way that the poem develops, by unfolding itself from within, is also ﬁtting: the narrator describes his vision, he then meets Rousseau who describes his own individual experiences, going back into his past to his ﬁrst memory and then, ﬁnally, reaches a time identiﬁable as the narrator’s original vision. This is all within the frame of the ‘real’ time of the narrator’s morning which the poem opens with. The poem moves through a succession of images as each new image supersedes the old. The narrator’s world is replaced by the vision; the Sun is replaced by the light of the Car of Life; the narrator’s vision is replaced by Rousseau’s; in which, the natural light of the sun is obscured by a ‘shape all light’; this shape, in turn, is overwhelmed by the light of the Car of Life (352). Importantly, though, as Ralph Pite has written: ‘the next in a series of visions either erases what came before or makes it gradually fade … In either case, something survives.’38 ‘The Triumph of Life’ is Shelley’s most sustained account of a life that is a death. The metaphors used for the existence of those caught up in the ‘maniac dance’ of life, is material in the darkest and most reductive sense: they are described as ‘Mixed in one mighty torrent’, ‘a great stream / Of people’, and as a ‘living sea’ (110, 53, 44–5, 113). The effect of the poem’s form, its rhyme scheme and the way its narrative unfolds, is mitigated by such images where individuality has been subsumed within a senseless moving mass of life. The repeated tropes used, which likened life to water, emphasize the indiscriminate nature of people’s existence. They are described as a ‘perpetual ﬂow of people’, which ‘Poured’ on the ground in the same way as a river in which single drops of water are impossible to distinguish (298, 57). When the Car of Life drives over them, they return ‘to the dust whence they arose’, but this action does not appear to herald a new beginning, or a transformation to a new form (173). There is a degree of optimism though in Rousseau’s claim that even though he has been degraded and corrupted personally, ‘yet there rise / A thousand beacons from the spark I bore’ (206–7). Despite describing his words as ‘seeds of misery’, Rousseau acknowledges: ‘I / Am one of those who have created, even / If it be but a world of agony’ (293–5). It seems that even in this dark and pessimistic poem, where the materialist imagery used serves only to portray the world as a one of death, vitality is possible through poetry.

Conclusion

Shelley’s knowledge of the issues key to the vitality debate is clear, as are his connections with the ﬁgures involved in it. He uses the vocabulary and ideas of the debate to address his own concerns, asserting the importance of mutability, transience and decay to issues of selfhood, identity, history and politics. Awareness of the ideological motivations and consequences of theories of life enabled Shelley to exploit them to the full, and such theories provided him with a means to explore issues of gender and political hierarchies in poems such as Prometheus Unbound. I hope that I have persuaded the reader of the importance of this context, its inﬂuence on the language, ideas and images Shelley uses in his poetry and prose. The newly-conceived life Shelley came across was constantly changing, assimilating other forms and, in the process, transforming them and itself: this life can be seen as a model for the poetry Shelley wished to create, which ‘transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes’ (Defence of Poetry, P&P, p. 533). The recent edition of Shelley’s Poems, edited by Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin Everest, testiﬁes to the range and extent of Shelley’s reading in the sciences. When Carl Grabo wrote his important 1930 book, ﬁrst claiming the importance of science to the understanding of Shelley’s poetry, he did not have the invaluable assistance of the Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, which revealed evidence such as Shelley’s 18 pages of notes on Humphry Davy’s Agricultural Chemistry (Grabo, 1930). Desmond King-Hele and Peter Butter continued and reﬁned Grabo’s work, demonstrating the full extent of Shelley’s debt to such scientists as Erasmus Darwin and Davy (King-Hele, 1971; Butter, 1954). Critics who have considered Shelley’s science before 181

182 Shelley and Vitality

have been occupied for the main part with source-hunting. Grabo, for example, writes that Shelley ‘clothes in poetic imagery’ the ‘simple phenomena’ to which his scientiﬁc knowledge leads him (Grabo, 1930, p. 121). I hope in this book, though, not only to have added to the knowledge we have of Shelley’s interest in science and medicine but also to have shown how these interests are central to his thought. This work began by addressing the word ‘life’ in Shelley’s poetry as an instance of what Matthews called an ‘overdetermined concept’, one that was used in a number of ways and with a variety of motivations and which required a more in-depth study, a concept which ‘may serve as a collecting-point for several of the writer’s political, scientiﬁc, or philosophical perceptions of reality’ (Matthews, 1957, p. 192) Within its study of Shelley’s science, my work contributes generally to the historicizing of Shelley, taking its lead from the work of, among others, Timothy Clark (1989), P.M.S. Dawson (1980) and Timothy Morton (1994). The Shelley portrayed here is interested in the ‘here and now’ of the political world of his time, and I hope to have shown that this political world incorporates and is reﬂected in the science of life. I also hope that this book will contribute to the growing number of studies that consider, through examining a single, scientiﬁc case study, the ways in which science and literature intersect, and the ways in which they are mutually shaped by the historical and political events of their time. Writers such as June Goodﬁeld-Toulmin (1969), L.S. Jacyna (1983) and Owsei Temkin (1977) have looked at the debate between Abernethy and Lawrence in this context, and I hope to have added some new evidence to their studies. This study also shows how culturally pervasive the topics raised in the debate between Lawrence and Abernethy were, and, further, how they spoke particularly to a poet of the period. The ‘two cultures’ model of science and literature simply did not exist: both Shelley and Priestley would have considered themselves simply as searching for truth. The science and poetry of the period emerged from the same political events and played a role in promoting a speciﬁc political standpoint. Theories of life, whether expressed in lectures to the Royal College of Surgeons or in poetry, played a part in justifying or rejecting ideas that were used to legitimize nationalism, racism, patriotism, cruelty to animals, vegetarian diet, issues of morality and freedom of speech. Both Shelley and Lawrence found themselves at the mercy of Tory critics, labelled as atheists. All of this and more could be made to depend upon the nature of our life.

Conclusion 183

In the introduction to a collection of essays entitled Romantic Science, Noah Heringman points out that the reader of Romantic texts was a polymath, interested in science, literature and a range of other subjects (Heringman, 2003, p. 6). The expansion of literacy and publishing enabled both the sciences and the arts to ﬂourish, often alongside each other. Contemporary journals featured articles on these and a variety of other topics in the same issue. In particular, nature, a subject that has long been central to deﬁnitions of Romanticism as an aesthetic and literary movement, crossed discipline boundaries. As Heringman writes: ‘The rapid expansion of print culture beginning in the later eighteenth century fuelled the circulation of writings famously obsessed with nature, from Romantic poems and science tours to theories of the picturesque or the Deluge’ (2003, p. 1). In recent years Romanticism has been redeﬁned as a movement responding to a set of historical and political circumstances, and from this perspective it is clear that there is a corresponding ‘Romantic Science’, which also reﬂected, confronted and reacted to the same events. Ian Wylie has shown that Coleridge understood that the science of such as Thomas Beddoes, Darwin, Davy, Benjamin Franklin and Priestley was a means to effect their radical political objectives (Wylie, 1989). In the 1790s the scientiﬁc discoveries of this ‘elect band’ seemed, to Coleridge, to herald no less than the millennium, a ‘revolution in man’s state’ made possible through new knowledge of the natural world (ibid., p. 69). Coleridge believed that it was possible to ‘transfer the proofs of natural to moral sciences’, and this statement makes it clear that for him science had a crucial role to play in changing the world (ibid., p. 72). The efforts of scientists were motivated by their political and religious beliefs and discoveries they made were used consciously to further bolster these convictions. It seems that Shelley also acknowledged and understood the importance that science could hold; as he states in Prometheus Unbound: ‘Science struck the thrones of Earth and Heaven, / Which shook, but fell not’ (II. 4. 74–5). Shelley believed that England would have a revolution of its own and the actions of the British government in 1819 demonstrates that they felt threatened by the same possibility. Though current life is described as ‘winter’ and the question of spring coming is left a question in ‘Ode to the West Wind’, elsewhere Shelley expressed hope and even conviction that things would change for the better. Throughout his writings Shelley uses metaphors of spring, morning and birth to describe the potential awakening of revolution. Often he borrows from

184 Shelley and Vitality

the vocabulary of the life debate to describe the new beginnings that were possible. Shelley is as sure in 1819 as Wordsworth was in 1798 that the period in which he lived was pregnant with possibilities; or, as Thomas Malthus put it: ‘big with the most important changes, changes that would in some measure be decisive of the future fate of mankind’ (Malthus, 1970, p. 67). In Prometheus volcanoes, lightning and avalanches are symbols for revolution. Demogorgon’s cave is ‘Like veiled lightning asleep, / Like that spark nursed in embers’, or, the potential for new life (II. 3. 83–4). Science is not simply another historical context in which Romantic poetry or even Shelley’s poetry should be read. As Edward Profﬁtt has written, ‘the romantic and the scientiﬁc grow up together and share the same angle of vision’: the Romantic poet no less than the ‘scientist in the laboratory’ ‘seeks to come to terms with natural phenomena through immediate experience’.1 Shelley believed that none merited the name of creator except God and the poet and he recognized poetry’s capacity for realizing nature.2 It is this ability to which Coleridge, discussing Romantic scientists, draws our attention: If in SHAKSPEARE [sic] we ﬁnd nature idealized into poetry, through the creative power of a profound yet observant meditation, so through the meditative observation of a DAVY, a WOOLLASTON, or a HATCHETT; By some connatural force, Powerful at greatest distance to unite With secret amity things of like kind, we ﬁnd poetry, as it were, substantiated and realized in nature.3 Wylie has discussed Coleridge’s agreement with David Hartley that there is a direct chain of knowledge, proceeding from the empirical ‘observation’ of the natural world to the understanding of moral truths. The more detailed and ‘meditative’ the observation, the more successful the moral understanding (Wylie, 1989, pp. 75–6). It is precisely this attention to minute detail in the natural world which characterizes Shelley’s ‘poet’ in Prometheus Unbound: He will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-reﬂected sun illume The yellow bees i’ the ivy-bloom Nor heed nor see what things they be; But from these create he can

Conclusion 185

Forms more real that living man, Nurslings of immortality! (I. 743–9). The poet, according to Shelley’s theory of poetry, performs an animating function; he can create ‘Forms more real than living man’. Shelley’s poet begins by studying the world around him; his meditation is scientiﬁc in its curiosity and thoroughness. As Matthews writes ‘the insects and ﬂowers are identiﬁed; the source and angle of the lighting deﬁned’ (1954, p. 328). From these beginnings the poet can create something more ‘real’ than even the empirical world. This does not mean, as Grabo would have it, that science to Shelley ‘was one strand of human knowledge, to be woven into a synthesis with moral philosophy and metaphysics’ but that for Shelley as for all Romantic poets ‘idealism developed inexorably out of empiricism’ (Grabo, 1930, p. viii; Profﬁtt, 1980, p. 55). The scientiﬁc phenomenon which occupies the poet’s attention ‘from dawn to gloom’ is drawn from the life debate itself; the seemingly constant renewal of life in nature shows the poet how poetry can continue to live.

Notes Introduction 1 I use the term ‘scientist’ anachronistically throughout the book as it was not a term that would have been used during the Romantic period, when ‘natural philosopher’ or ‘man of science’ would have been preferred. The label ‘scientist’ was proposed during a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at which it seems S.T. Coleridge intervened, vetoing the use of the word ‘philosopher’. The Quarterly Review reported that ‘some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist’, Anon., ‘On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. By Mrs. Somerville’, Quarterly Review, 51 (1834), 54–68 (p. 59). 2 Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principles of Population, ed. Anthony Flew (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 67. 3 William Wordsworth, ‘French Revolution, as it appeared to enthusiasts at its commencement’, 17–20, Wordsworth: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 166. 4 Wordsworth, ‘London, 1802’, 2–3, William Wordsworth: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 286. 5 Nicholas Roe, ed., Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Sciences of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 2. 6 See H.W. Piper, The Active Universe: Pantheism and the Concept of Imagination in the English Romantic Poets (London: Athlone Press, 1962). 7 ‘An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump’, Joseph Wright of Derby, 1768 (National Gallery, London). 8 C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientiﬁc Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). 9 Ian Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 9, 10. 10 Patricia Fara, Sympathetic Attractions: Magnetic Practices, Beliefs, and Symbolism in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996). 11 Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 6. 12 Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Marilyn Gaull, English Romanticism: The Human Context (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1988); Noah Heringman, ed., Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003); David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill, eds, Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made The Future (London: Faber, 2002). 186

Notes 187 13 John L. Thornton, John Abernethy: A Biography (London: Printed by the Author, 1953), pp. 20, 23. 14 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text, ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 228. Other recipients of the Quarterly’s attack that Butler singles out are William Cobbett, William Hone, John Bellamy and Richard Carlile, p. 228. 15 Trevor H. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Eighteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Nicholas Roe, ‘“Atmospheric Air Itself”: Medical Science, Politics and Poetry in Thelwall, Coleridge and Wordsworth’, in 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads, ed. Richard Cronin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), pp. 185–202; and ‘Coleridge and John Thelwall; Medical Science, Politics, and Poetry’, Coleridge Bulletin, 3 (1994), pages unnumbered; Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1991); Denise Gigante, ‘The Monster in the Rainbow: Keats and the Science of Life’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 117 (2002), 433–8. 16 ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is quoted from P&P. Line numbers are given after quotes. 17 William Smellie, The Philosophy of Natural History, 2 vols (Dublin: William Porter, 1790), I, 13. 18 Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 19 Anon., ‘An Inquiry into the Probability and Rationality of Mr. Hunter’s Theory of Life; being the subject of the ﬁrst Two Anatomical Lectures delivered before the Royal College of Surgeons, of London. By John Abernethy’, Edinburgh Review, 23 (1814), 384–98 (p. 386). 20 Paul Hamilton, Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Northcote House, 2000), p. 3. 21 Anon., ‘Cases of Wolcot v. Walker; Southey v. Sherwood; Murray v. Benbow, and Lawrence v. Smith’, Quarterly Review, 53 (1822a), 125–34 (p. 130). 22 Cp. ‘The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect’, quoted from the 1850 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W.J.B. Owen and J.W. Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), I, 123. In the Defence of Poetry, Shelley claims that poetry ‘strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms’, P&P, p. 533. 23 John Hunter, A Treatise on the Blood, Inﬂammation, and Gun-shot Wounds (London: George Nicol, 1794), p. 78. 24 ‘Both positions, it is true, were “vitalistic”: they rejected the iatromechanical systems of the mid-eighteenth century, insisting instead upon the unique properties of living beings’, L.S. Jacyna, ‘Immanence or Transcendence: Theories of Life and Organization in Britain, 1790–1835’, Isis, 74 (1983), 311–29 (p. 312). 25 Xavier Bichat, Physiological Researches on Life and Death, trans. F. Gold (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1816), p. 21.

188 Notes 26 Davy’s First Bakerian Lecture (1806), quoted in Harold Hartley, Humphry Davy (London: Nelson, 1966), p. 52. 27 Lawrence, Introduction, p. 177; Essay on Man, ll. 99–100. 28 Peter G. Mudford, ‘William Lawrence and the Natural History of Man’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 29 (1968), 430–6 (p. 435). 29 See Alfred White Franklin, ‘Abernethy’s Letters to George Kerr, 1814–22’, St Bartholomew’s Hospital Journal, 38 (1930–31), 237–41 (p. 240). 30 Edmund Burke, Reﬂections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event (London: J. Dodsley, 1790), p. 89; this passage is quoted by Jacyna, p. 323. 31 William Lawrence, ‘Life’, in Abraham Rees, The Cyclopædia: or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Literature, with the assistance of eminent professional gentlemen, 39 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1819), XX. 32 Charles Bell, An Essay on the Forces Which Circulate the Blood; Being an Examination of the Difference of the Motions of Fluids in Living and Dead Vessels (London: Longman, 1819); John Barclay, An Inquiry into the Opinions, Ancient and Modern, Concerning Life and Organization (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, 1822); [Mary Shepherd], An Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect controverting the Doctrine of Mr. Hume, concerning the nature of that relation; with Observations upon the Opinions of Dr. Brown and Mr. Lawrence, connected with the same subject (London: T. Hookham, 1824); Thomas Rennell, Remarks on Scepticism, especially as it is connected with the subjects of organization and life. Being an answer to the views of M. Bichat, Sir T.C. Morgan and Mr. Lawrence upon these points (London: F.C. & J. Rivington, 1819); Edward Grinﬁeld, Cursory Observations on the ‘Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons by William Lawrence F.R.S. Professor of Anatomy and Surgery to that College, &c. &c. &c.’ In a series of letters addressed to that Gentleman; with a concluding letter to his pupils, 2nd edn (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1819). 33 [George D’Oyly], ‘An Enquiry into the Probability of Mr. Hunter’s Theory of Life …’, Quarterly Review, 43 (1819), 1–34 (p. 6). 34 Lawrence, Lectures, p. 14n; Lawrence is quoting Abernethy’s Physiological Lectures, p. 203. 35 Anon., Monthly Magazine, 53 (1822b), 524–44 (p. 544). 36 Anon., The Radical Triumvirate, or Inﬁdel Paine, Lord Byron, and Surgeon Lawrence, Colleaguing with the Patriotic Radicals to Emancipate Mankind from All Laws Human and Divine. A Letter to John Bull, from an Oxonian Resident in London (London: Francis Wesley, 1820). 37 Lawrence may have been involved with this publication, or at least not frowned upon it since Carlile may have been a friend; see Owsei Temkin, The Double Face of Janus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 355–6. Lawrence visited Carlile in his last illness, Temkin, 1977, p. 357. 38 This letter is held in the British Library, Add. 40120 f. 171, and had accompanied a copy of his Lectures. Hugh J. Luke discovered that both Shelley and Lawrence subscribed to the public fund set up for Hone after he was tried on three occasions in 1817 for blasphemous libel, Hugh J. Luke Jnr, ‘Sir William Lawrence: Physician to Shelley and Mary’, Papers on English Language and Literature, 1 (1965), 141–52 (p. 150).

Notes 189 39 The Letters of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. Nicholas A. Joukovsky, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). 40 William Drummond, Academical Questions (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1805).

1

The Vitality Debate

1 W.R. Albury, ‘Ideas of Life and Death’, in Companion Encyclopaedia of the History of Medicine, ed. Roy Porter and W.F. Bynum, 2 vols (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), I, 249–80 (p. 249). 2 Lawrence was translating a word used by Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, Lectures, p. 60. 3 William Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century: Problems of Form, Function, and Transformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 2, 1. 4 June Goodﬁeld-Toulmin, ‘Some Aspects of English Physiology: 1780–1840’, Journal of the History of Biology, 2 (1969), 283–320 (p. 290). 5 M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953). 6 See Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 10–12. 7 See Maurice Crosland, ‘Chemistry and the Chemical Revolution’, in The Ferment of Knowledge, ed. G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 398–416. 8 A.D. Orange, ‘Oxygen and One God: Joseph Priestley in 1774’, History Today, 24 (1974), 773–81 (p. 775). 9 The term ‘air’ was used during this period to mean any kind of gas. 10 Joseph Priestley, ‘An Account of further discoveries in Air’, Philosophical Transactions, 65 (1775), 384–94 (pp. 388–9). 11 F.W. Gibbs, Joseph Priestley: Adventurer in Science and Champion of Truth (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1965), p. 82. 12 John Thelwall, An Essay towards a Deﬁnition of Animal Vitality; read at the Theatre, Guy’s Hospital, January 26, 1793; in which several of the Opinions of The Celebrated John Hunter are Examined and Controverted (London: T. Rickaby, 1793), pp. 39–40. For a discussion of this passage, see Roe, 1998, p. 187. 13 Joseph Priestley, Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit. To which is added, The History of the Philosophical Doctrine concerning the Origin of the Soul, and the Nature of Matter; with its Inﬂuence on Christianity, especially with Respect to the Doctrine of the Pre-existence of Christ (London: J. Johnson, 1777), p. xxxvii. 14 Priestley quoted in Simon Shaffer, ‘Priestley and the Politics of Spirit’, in Science, Medicine and Dissent: Joseph Priestley (1773–1804), eds. R.G.W. Anderson and Christopher Lawrence (London: Wellcome Trust/ Science Museum, 1987), pp. 39–53 (p. 46). 15 Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (1774), quoted in Golinski, 1992, p. 81. 16 Letters, I, 129 (28 July 1811), 342 (17 December 1812), 345 (24 December 1812). 17 See, for example, Desmond King-Hele, ‘Shelley and Erasmus Darwin’, in Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference, ed. Kelvin Everest (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983), pp. 129–45.

190 Notes 18 Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life, 2 vols (Boston: Thomas & Andrews, 1803), I, 5. 19 Martin Priestman, Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1730–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 20 Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature; or the Origin of Society, 1803 (London: Scholar Press, 1973), Additional Note, VII, ‘Old Age and Death’. 21 Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden; A Poem in Two Parts (London: J. Johnson, 1791), I, 401n. 22 ‘With ﬁner links the vital chain extends, / And the long line of Being never ends’ (Darwin, 1973, II, 19–20). 23 Review of Walker’s lectures, York Chronical, 19 February 1773, quoted in F.W. Gibbs, ‘Itinerant Lecturers in Natural Philosophy’, AmbiX, 8 (1960), 111–17 (p. 111). 24 See, for example, A.M.D. Hughes, The Nascent Mind of Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), pp. 9–10. In contrast, see the obituary of Walker in The European Magazine and London Review, 21 (1792), 411–13. 25 Walker published some of his lectures as Analysis of a Course of Lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy (Kendal: Printed and sold by the Author, 1766). This book went into 14 editions, being last published in London by J. Barﬁeld in 1807. Critics generally use Walker’s A System of Familiar Philosophy: In Twelve Lectures; Being the Course of Lectures Usually Read by Mr. A. Walker, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: G. Kearsley, 1802) in their discussions of his inﬂuence on Shelley although it is quite possible that Shelley read a late edition of Analysis. When quoting from Analysis I identify which edition I am using by giving the year of publication. 26 Quoted in Robert E. Schoﬁeld, The Lunar Society of Birmingham: A Social History of Provincial Science and Industry in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 248 (28 July 1781). 27 Tweedy believes that Walker inﬂuenced Shelley’s belief that such societies were important and necessary despite the political climate suppressing them. Roderick Sebastian Tweedy, ‘The Visionary Mechanic: Shelley’s early philosophy of nature’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 1996). 28 Bryant Lillywhite, London Coffee Houses (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1963), p. 153. 29 Shelley ordered Davy’s Elements of Chemistry before it had even been published in 1812, Letters, I, 319 (29 July 1812). Laura E. Crouch has persuasively argued that Mary Shelley used Davy’s A Discourse, Introductory to A Course of Lectures in Chemistry (1802) in Frankenstein, Laura E. Crouch, ‘Davy’s A Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry: A Possible Scientiﬁc Source of Frankenstein’, Keats–Shelley Journal, 27 (1978), 35–44. In her journal for late October to early November 1816 Mary records that she is reading ‘the Introduction to Sir H. Davy’s Chemistry’, MS Journals, pp. 142–4. 30 On Thomas Beddoes see Trevor H. Levere, ‘Dr Thomas Beddoes (1750–1808): Science and medicine in politics and society’, British Journal for the History of Science, 17 (1984), 187–204 and ‘Dr Thomas Beddoes and the establishment of his Pneumatic Institution: A tale of three presidents’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 32 (1977), 41–9; Dorothy Stansﬁeld, Thomas Beddoes, MD, 1760–1808: Chemist, Physician, Democrat (Holland: D. Reidel, 1984).

Notes 191 31 Anon., ‘Letter from “Amicus” to Mr Urban on Thomas Beddoes’s death’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 79 (1809), 120. 32 Beddoes can be linked to Shelley through his correspondence with James Lind, Shelley’s tutor at Eton, or James Keir, Lind’s cousin, who was also one of the Lunar Society and a friend of the Beddoes family. Nora Crook and Derek Guiton discuss the connections between these ﬁgures in Shelley’s Venomed Melody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 24. Tiberius Cavallo, another scientiﬁc correspondent of Lind, quotes Beddoes in An Essay on the Medicinal Properties of Factitious Airs, with an Appendix on the Nature of Blood (London: C. Dilly, 1798), p. 34. See Crook and Guiton, 1986, p. 21, for Cavallo and Lind, their experiments, and their correspondence (BL MSS. Adds. 22897–98). 33 See W.F. Bynum, ‘Health, Disease and Medical Care’, in The Ferment of Knowledge, ed. G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 211–53 (pp. 221–2). For Coleridge’s preference of Schelling’s modiﬁcation of Brown’s theory over the original, see Levere, 1981, pp. 202–3. 34 John Brown, Elements of Medicine: A New Edition, rev. and corr. Thomas Beddoes, 2 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1795). 35 Davy’s Personal Notebook, RI MS HD 13f, p. 12. 36 La Mettrie was a French philosopher and physician who incorporated his medical knowledge into a materialist doctrine, published as L’Homme Machine (1747). 37 Davy’s Personal Notebook, RI MS HD 13h, p. 17. 38 Humphry Davy, ‘Experimental essays on heat, light, and on the combinations of light, with a new theory of respiration, and observations on the chemistry of life’, in Thomas Beddoes and James Watt, eds, Contributions to Physical and Medical Knowledge, Principally from the West of England (London: Longman & Rees, 1799), 5–147. 39 Anon., The British Critic, 14 (1799), 623–7 (p. 627). 40 Robert Southey, New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry, 2 vols (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1965), I, 206n. 41 Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), I, 559 (2 January 1800). Only a few years later the mere mention of Godwin’s name was enough to alarm Davy; Southey wrote: ‘I have terriﬁed Davy with the news of his coming. He actually perspires at the thought.’ Southey, 1965, I, 277 (10 May 1802). 42 Southey uses the word ‘seditionized’ in relation to a friend of Davy’s: ‘I have at last seen and seditionized with Davys [sic] friend’, Southey, 1965, I, 231 (18 Dec 1800). 43 David Knight, Humphry Davy: Science and Power (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 37–8. Roger Sharrock traces a dialogue between Davy’s Discourse to the Royal Society, and Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, ‘The Chemist and the Poet: Sir Humphry Davy and the Preface to Lyrical Ballads’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 17 (1962), 56–76. For evidence of professional rivalry between Davy and Wordsworth, see Catherine E. Ross, ‘“Twin Labourers and Heirs of the Same Hopes”: The Professional Rivalry of Humphry Davy and William Wordsworth’, in Heringman, 2003, pp. 23–52. 44 Unpublished letter, quoted in Levere, 1981, p. 32.

192 Notes 45 Both Southey and Coleridge complain independently of how Davy changed after his move to London; for example, Southey writes to John Rickman: ‘You never mention Davy, alias the Galvanic Spark, and I never think of the baneful effects of prosperity without remembering him’, Southey, 1965, I, 358 (9 March 1804). 46 See N.G. Coley, ‘The Animal Chemistry Club: Assistant Society to the Royal Society’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 22 (1967), 73–85. 47 Humphry Davy, Elements of Chemical Philosophy, in The Collected Works of Humphry Davy, ed. John Davy, 9 vols (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1839), IV, 127. 48 Consolations in Travel, quoted in Knight, 1992, p. 179. Critics have argued that the concerns of his early life came back to occupy Davy in his last years. See Michael Neve, ‘The Young Humphry Davy: or John Tonkin’s Lament’, in Science and the Sons of Genius: Studies on Humphry Davy, ed. Sophie Forgan (London: Science Reviews, 1980), pp. 1–32 (p. 5), and Christopher Lawrence, ‘The Power and the Glory: Humphry Davy and Romanticism’, in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 213–28. 49 Byron, Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–82), vII, 78. 50 He wrote to his wife after Byron’s death: ‘I often read Lord Byron’s Euthanasia; it is the only case, probably, where my feelings perfectly coincide with what his were’, Knight, 1992, p. 153. 51 The successful operation was performed early in Abernethy’s career, in 1779, and gained him the FRS, David Innes Williams, ‘Portraits of a Confrontation: Abernethy and Lawrence’, Annals of The Royal College of Surgeons of England (Supplement), 76 (1994), 14–17 (p. 15). Abernethy ‘was opposed to vivisection, and was sometimes seen in tears after carrying out a major operation’, John L. Thornton, ‘John Abernethy 1764–1831’, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Journal, 72 (1964), 287–93 (p. 289). 52 In 1816 Abernethy refused a baronetcy, Thornton, 1953, p. 59. 53 George Macilwain, Memoirs of John Abernethy, 3rd edn (London: Hatchard, 1856), p. 190. 54 Anon., ‘Sir William Lawrence, Bart’, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Reports, 4 (1868), 1–18 (p. 2). 55 William Lawrence, A Short System of Comparative Anatomy, translated from the German of J.F. Blumenbach; with numerous additional notes, and an introductory view of the classiﬁcation of animals by the translator (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1807). 56 It was widely remarked that Hunter seemed to have proved the truth of Leviticus, ‘the life of the ﬂesh is in the blood’, 17: 2. 57 See Franklin, 1930–31. For Lawrence’s later reappraisal of their debate, see Thornton, 1953, p. 136. 58 Lawrence was repeatedly accused of quoting Bichat without acknowledgement; see Rennell, p. 64. D’Oyly claimed that Lawrence had copied ‘even the terms in which he has expressed’ ideas from French physiologists, 1819, p. 4. 59 Martin Priestman writes that Lucretius provides the antiquated atheism on which most Romantic atheism is based; see Priestman, 1999, p. 187.

Notes 193 60 See Richardson, 2001. 61 Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 62 It should be pointed out, though, that Coleridge and Green were attempting a new synthesis, ‘restoring the neo-Platonic hypostases, but discovering them from a post-Kantian psychology and physiology. [Green was] attempting to base a theory of mental relations upon his professional skill in physical anatomy, an attempt which offered a new way of reconciling body and soul, object and subject’, Tim Fulford, ‘Coleridge and J.H. Green: The Anatomy of Beauty’, in The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas McFarland, eds Richard Gravil and Molly Lefebure (Hampshire and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), pp. 133–50 (p. 138). 63 See Abernethy’s references to Coleridge and Maria Edgeworth in his Hunterian Oration, pp. 61n, 66. 64 In private, Coleridge wrote disparagingly of Abernethy’s superadded vital principle: ‘(like Abernethie’s Magnetic Fluid which the Conjurer sent into the spring of his Watch)’, Coleridge, 1956, IV, 689 (Letter to James Gillman, 10 Nov 1816). See also Coleridge’s letter to C.A. Talk (12 January 1818), 1956, IV, 809. 65 Shelley wrote an animated defence of Carlile and the unjust nature of such trials and sent it to Leigh Hunt to be published in the Examiner. Hunt did not publish it. Letters, II, 136–48 (3 November 1819). 66 See Priestman, 1999, p. 8. 67 Desmond draws a ﬁnal comparison between Lawrence and Darwin in his afterword: ‘Like Lawrence’s crime in 1819, Darwin’s in 1842 would have been treated as a betrayal of the clerisy’, 1989, p. 413. 68 The invocation of the closet as the appropriate space to read certain subject matter was commonly used in this period when censorship was rife. Shakespeare’s works were considered to be particularly dangerous to women and were consigned to the closet, unless there were suitably expurgated texts available for family consumption. See, for example, Thomas Bowdler in Family Shakespeare (1818), who prefaced Othello with: ‘THIS tragedy is justly considered as one of the noblest efforts of dramatic genius that has appeared in any age or in any language; but the subject is unfortunately little suited to family reading … I would advise the transferring it from the parlour to the cabinet’, quoted in Donald Thomas, A Long time Burning: A History of Censorship in England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 187. 69 La Mettrie believed that the question of whether there was a soul was not for theologians to answer; their ‘obscure studies’ could not help. Instead it was the physicians who would be able to prove the existence of the soul: ‘They alone, calmly contemplating our soul, have caught it a thousand times unawares, in its misery and its grandeur, without either despising it in one state or admiring it in the other’, Machine Man and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Ann Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 4–5. 70 Peter Kitson, ed., ‘Theories of Race’, in Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, ed. Peter Kitson and Debbie Lee, 8 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999), vIII, xix.

194 Notes 71 See, for example, Richard Holmes who identiﬁes Lawrence as ‘the eminent London consultant surgeon and medical author who wrote one of the early essays on modern evolutionary theory’, Shelley: The Pursuit (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 286. 72 See Mudford, 1968, p. 40, and Lectures, p. 123. 73 Abernethy’s Hunterian Oration was instrumental in procuring the 1832 Anatomy Act; see Tim Marshall, Murdering to Dissect: Grave Robbing, Frankenstein and the Anatomy Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 161. 74 Lawrence apparently presented his Lectures to Abernethy: a copy, owned by Abernethy, exists in St Bartholomew’s Hospital Library, inscribed ‘with the Author’s Compliments’, Thornton, 1953, p. 133. 75 See Marilyn Butler on entries written by Lawrence, in M. Shelley, 1993, p. xlii and n.; on Abernethy’s contributions see Thornton, 1953, p. 168, and the bibliography in Arthur Keith, ‘Fresh Light on John Abernethy’, St Bartholomew’s Hospital Journal, 38 (1930–31), 151–63 (p. 162). Shelley referred to Lawrence’s article on ‘Man’ in his notes to Queen Mab, Poems, I, 412. 76 Thomas Charles Morgan, Sketches of the Philosophy of Life (London: Henry Colburn, 1818). 77 Charles Bell dedicated his Essay on the Forces Which Circulate the Blood (1819) to Abernethy. 78 Grinﬁeld’s book was ﬁrst published anonymously in 1819, ‘by one of those People called Christians’. 79 Abernethy wrote to George Kerr on 22 January 1822 that he liked his ‘Codicil’ to the Hunterian Oration ‘better’ since he had read Dr Barclay’s book (Franklin, 1930–31, 241). 80 Philostratus [Thomas Foster], Somatopsychonoologia: Showing that the Proofs of Body, Life and Mind, Considered as Distinct Essences, Cannot be Deduced from Physiology, but Depend upon a Distinct Sort of Evidence; Being an Examination of the Controversy Concerning Life carried on by MM Laurence [sic], Abernethy, Rennell, and others (London: R. Hunter, 1823). 81 Daniel T. Stinson, The Role of Sir William Lawrence in Nineteenth-Century English Surgery (Zurich: Juris Druck & Verlag, 1969), p. 18. 82 Mary Shepherd wrote a number of philosophical treatises, and she became a good friend of Thomas Forster later in life. 83 See Peregrine Simon, ‘Lord Eldon and the Poets’, Keats–Shelley Review, 10 (1996), 243–67. Shelley knew of ‘the precedent of Southey’, Letters, II, 298 (11 June 1821); see also Letters, II, 302, 305. 84 Smith is simply described as ‘a respectable bookseller on the Strand’ in the report of the chancery court case, Lawrence v. Smith, The Times, 25 March 1822, 3c. Lawrence clearly knew William Cobbett personally, since in 1823 Cobbett and Wakley asked Lawrence to write radical political leaders for the Lancet, Desmond, 1989, p. 121. 85 See Carlile on the different editions, The Republican, 26 April 1822. 86 Thomas, 1969, p. 207. They succeeded in prosecuting William Clarke for his pirated version of Queen Mab, a text already declared blasphemous by Eldon during Shelley’s appeal for custody of Harriet’s children. Clarke was sent to prison for four months (Thomas, 1969, pp. 207–9).

Notes 195 87 See Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 88 Byron felt apprehensive of this trial after having witnessed Shelley’s treatment by Eldon, Byron, 1973–82, VI, 252. 89 See, for example, Anon., 1822a. 90 The Times, ‘Law Report’, Lawrence v. Smith, 25 March 1822, 3c. 91 Priestley’s case, overseen by the Lord Chief Justice Eyre, was the precedent that Eldon used to withhold the ﬁrst such injunction applied for by Wolcot, Paul M. Zall, ‘Lord Eldon’s Censorship’, PMLA, 68 (1953), 436–43 (p. 437). 92 The Times, ‘Court of Chancery, Lincoln’s Inn, 26 March. Lawrence’s Physiological and Zoological lectures. Lawrence v. Smith’, 27 March 1822, 4a. 93 The article continues with, ‘A number of the Lectures may be bought for threepence: Mr. Rennell’s answer, and our own critique, remain at their old monopoly price’, Anon., 1822a, p. 134. 94 See The Republican, 14 January 1820, 11–15, 26 April 1822, 538, 19 July 1822, 256, 2 August 1822, 317–19. Carlile advertised his edition of Lawrence’s Lectures in The Republican, 20 December 1822, 959 and asked for further documents on the Chancery Court case in The Republican, 21 Feb 1823, 250. 95 George Jacob Holyoake, The Life and Character of Richard Carlile (London: J. Watson, 1849), p. 27. The dissection of Carlile’s body was reported in the Lancet; Lawrence did not in the event perform the dissection himself. See ‘Examination of the body of Mr Richard Carlile’, Lancet, 1016 (18 February 1843), 774. 96 In Lawrence’s obituary in The Times, this was again conﬁrmed: ‘[Lawrence] kept his word, so far as withdrawing the obnoxious works from circulation in this country, but sold the entire edition to the notorious Carlisle [sic], of Fleet-street, a publisher of seditious and blasphemous works, by whom the books were sent to America’, 10 July 1867, 10f. Lawrence’s son, Trevor Lawrence, defended his father’s innocence in a response to this notice, The Times, 15 July 1867, 10b. The obituary writer then argued that he made the statement ‘on the authority’ of Carlile, who communicated this to him ‘shortly before his death’, The Times, 16 July 1867, 21e. 97 Carlile regarded Lawrence’s letter as a sop to his superiors in the profession: ‘The cowardice of the body of Surgeons in the Metropolis has suffered the spirit of bigotry and idolatrous ignorance to pervade their profession, and to dictate where they shall cease to improve it; they have, with the exception of Mr. Lawrence, basely succumbed to the priestly juggle imposed upon them. And he ﬁnds it impossible to pursue the profession, on which he depends, without throwing a tub to and deceiving this Leviathan of Idolatry that menaces him’, The Republican, 19 July 1822, 256. Lawrence’s original letter is held in the RCS, Lawrence to R.G. Glynn Bart. President of Bridewell and Bethlem, MS Add. 194. Desmond identiﬁed this letter and that it had been dated incorrectly, 1989, p. 121. Years later, Robert Dale Owen republished the Monthly Magazine article, speaking of Lawrence’s being suspended ‘for the heresy of his opinions’, and ‘induced, like the persecuted Galileo, to sign a recantation of the truths he had once so ably propounded’, Galileo and the Inquisition (London: J. Watson, 1841), p. 6.

196 Notes 98 For a history of Lawrence’s life beyond this debate, see Desmond (1989). 99 Lancet 1835, 626 (29 August 1835), 704.

2

Shelley’s Knowledge of the ‘Science of Life’

1 Peter Butter led the movement away from what he regarded as Carl Grabo’s and A.N. Whitehead’s excessive praise of Shelley’s scientiﬁc knowledge, with the expressed aim of ‘readjusting the balance’, Shelley’s Idols of the Cave (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1954), p. 136. Desmond King-Hele, while privileging scientiﬁc inﬂuence, followed Butter’s lead, emphasizing the amateurish nature of Shelley’s practice of chemistry, Shelley: His Thought and His Work, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1971). King-Hele refers to Shelley’s ‘limited and unsystematic’ training and the ‘slapdash’ nature of his experiments, 1971, pp. 158, 162. 2 See Shelley’s Letters, II, appendix 8, for a list of Shelley’s reading. 3 Medwin repeats verbatim Thomas Jefferson Hogg’s assessment of Shelley as a chemist, providing subsequent critics with a portrait of Shelley as inept: ‘it is highly improbable that Shelley was qualiﬁed to succeed in that science, where scrupulous minuteness and a mechanical accuracy are indispensable’, Medwin’s Revised Life of Shelley, ed. H. Buxton Forman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913), p. 69. 4 Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols (London: Edward Moxon, 1858), I, 70. See Crook’s and Guiton’s discussion of the instruments in Shelley’s Oxford rooms, pp. 48–50, and Nora Crook’s account of Hogg’s ‘microscope story’, in ‘Shelley and the Solar Microscope’, Keats–Shelley Review, 1 (1986), 49–59. The apparatus Shelley had may have been bought from Walker; various instruments, amusement chests and portable laboratories were sold to accompany his chemistry books and lectures. 5 Contemporary scientists shared Shelley’s belief that the bigger the electrical machine the more it could achieve, Golinski, 1992, 215–16. 6 See Plate 8 in Gibbs, 1965. Crook and Guiton also note that Shelley’s use of a teacup in experiments, which Hogg sees as testament to Shelley’s amateurism, was common medical practice (1986, p. 49). 7 Geoffrey Matthews, ‘A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley’, English Literary History, 24 (1957), 191–228 (p. 200). 8 Kenneth Neill Cameron, The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical (London: Victor Gollancz, 1951), p. 121. 9 Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 10 Hogg only stayed for three weeks in the house they shared at 15 Poland Street; he left on 16 April 1811, Letters, I, 64. 11 Desmond Hawkins has written extensively on the Grove family and Shelley; see, in particular, Shelley’s First Love: The Love Story of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Archon Books, 1992). 12 On 28 April Shelley wrote to Hogg and addressed the letter from John’s house, informing him ‘I am now at Grove’s’ (Letters, I, 71). 13 During Shelley’s stay in London, John proposed unsuccessfully to Shelley’s sister, Elizabeth. Shelley was against the match, writing to Hogg: ‘his attachment is that of a cool, unimpassioned selector of a

Notes 197

14

15

16

17

18

19 20

21 22 23 24

companion for life’ (Letters, I , 134, 15 August 1811). Hogg records John and Shelley ridiculing Tom Grove’s adulation of the aristocracy: ‘“how many dukes shall we have to-day, Bysshe?” John G – asked’ (Hogg, 1858, I , 302). In these anecdotes they seem to share the same opinions and to enjoy each other’s company. Hogg, on the other hand, seems to have felt left out in their society. Unsurprisingly, considering Hogg’s personal infatuation with Elizabeth, Hogg was not enamoured of John, preferring the younger, more talkative brother Charles (Hogg, 1858, I, 296). Charles became very close to Shelley during this spring and summer; Shelley revealed his plans to elope with Harriet Westbrook to Charles (Hogg, 1858, II, 554). Timothy Shelley had asked John Grove to intercede, Roger Ingpen, Shelley in England (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1917), pp. 230–1. Shelley wrote to Hogg ‘Nemus [Latin for Grove] is ﬂattering like a courtier, & will I conjecture bring him about again’, Letters, I, 74, 29 April 1811. Harriet Shelley’s letter to Catherine Nugent on 21 May 1813 reveals that John continued his attempts to reconcile Shelley with his father: Shelley wrote to Timothy on 18 May 1813 ‘at the earnest solicitation of his cousin’, Letters, I, 367 n. 3. Keats’s apprenticeship to Lucas and the terrible incompetence he witnessed at this surgeon’s hand on the wards of Guy’s Hospital contributed to his decision to give up the idea of surgery. See Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 165–6. ‘Surgeon’s ward-walking pupils, in the hospitals for a year or less, had a little opportunity to do much more than observe the practice there’, Susan C. Lawrence, ‘Science and Medicine at the London Hospitals: The Development of Teaching and Research, 1750–1815’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Toronto, 1985), p. 162. At St Bartholomew’s in 1820 there were only three medical students compared to several hundred surgical students. Charles Newman, ‘The Hospital as a Teaching Centre’, in The Evolution of Hospitals in Britain, ed. F.N.L. Poynter (London: Pitman Medical, 1964), pp. 187–205 (p. 198). Thornton Hunt, ‘Shelley. By One Who Knew Him’, The Atlantic Monthly, 11 (1863), 184–204 (p. 187). My thanks to Nicholas Roe for bringing this quote to my attention. St Bartholomew’s Hospital Archives MS BHA X 54/1 Journal of Ludford Harvey. Elsewhere in Harvey’s journal he records the monthly surgeons’ accounts; in the accounts for March 1811 he enters ‘had for the Box carriers Mr Patchell, Mr Grove & Peacock 11 1/2 guineas’ BHA X 54/1, p. 243. Records of the House Committee of the Hospital, quoted in Thornton, 1953, p. 67. Alfred Willett, ‘The Surgical Side of the Hospital Fifty Years Ago’, St Bartholomew’s Journal, 18 (1910), p. 3. Medwin is here quoting Shelley’s note to Queen Mab, in which Shelley quotes Milton, Poems, I, 408. I am indebted to Tina Craig, Archivist for the Royal College of Surgeons, for this information, which she obtained from the Royal College of Surgeons’ Apprentices Book.

198 Notes 25 Desmond Hawkins, The Grove Diaries: The Rise and Fall of an English Family, 1809–1925 (Dorset: The Dovecote Press, 1995), p. 121. 26 St Bartholomew’s Hospital Archives MS, BHA HA 1/16, Governors’ Minutes, p. 236. 27 John returned with his furniture to the Grove family home on 14 September 1814 (Hawkins, 1992, p. 10). 28 The election John won at Salisbury Hospital is recorded in Charlotte’s diary for 30 August 1817, Hawkins, 1992, p. 13; see also Hawkins, 1986, p. 79. 29 St Bartholomew’s Hospital Archives MSS BHA SA 1/1 and BHA SA 1/2 Medical and Physical Society Minute Book. 30 Grove was President of the meeting held on 20 November 1804 and on 5 February 1805, BHA SA 1/1. 31 The book referred to is Tiberius Cavallo, The Elements of Natural or Experimental Philosophy, 4 vols (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1803). 32 See, for example, Tiberius Cavallo, A Complete Treatise on Electricity, in Theory and Practice, 3rd edn, 3 vols (London: C. Dilly, 1786). 33 Morton noticed this, 1994, p. 68. See P.B. Shelley, The Complete Works, ed. R Ingpen and W.E. Peck, 10 vols (London and New York: Ernest Benn, 1926–30), VI, 347. 34 BSM, xIII, adds. e. 19, p. 76. The list reads vertically ‘Baxter | Godwin | Hunt | Lackington | Groves’. An entry in Charlotte Grove’s diary for 1817 records the arrival on 4 May of ‘Bysshe’s novel of Prometheus’; probably Shelley sent them Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Hawkins, 1995, p. 137. 35 John Abernethy, Surgical Observation on the Constitutional Origin and Treatment of Local Diseases; and on Aneurisms, 5th edn (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1820). 36 D’Arcy Power, ‘Epoch-Making Books in British Surgery’, British Journal of Surgery, 17 (1929–30), 369–72 (p. 369). 37 See Morton, 1994, p. 144. 38 BSM, xxI, adds. c.4, folio 272r. The essay is dated 1814–15 by Murray in Prose Works, p. 151. J. Callow, the medical publisher who published Shelley’s 1813 A Vindication of Natural Diet, also published Lawrence’s Introduction and Lectures. 39 Crook and Guiton discuss Abernethy’s inﬂuence on Shelley’s notion of sympathy, 1986, p. 28. 40 David Knight, ‘Romanticism and the Sciences’, in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 13–24 (p. 19). 41 Norman Moore, The History of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, 2 vols (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1918), II, 656. 42 Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, MSS. 815–16 Lectures on Anatomy. Though the dates of Grainger’s notes refer to the second winter session of lectures Abernethy gave, it is unlikely that they were very different to the earlier session Shelley attended. The manuscript is in two volumes, dated 22 October 1811 and 23 December 1811. 43 See Morton, 1994, on this circle. 44 Newton dedicated his Return to Nature to Lambe and declared his conviction that Lambe’s regimen had cured him of his asthma; John Frank Newton, The Return to Nature, or, A Defence of the Vegetable Regimen; with some account

Notes 199

45 46

47

48 49

50

51 52

53

54

55

of an experiment made during the last three of four years in the author’s family (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1811). Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Bod. Dep. e. 212 William Godwin Diary. There are references to ‘Ch. Lawrence’ on 25 November 1811 (Bod. Dep. e. 211), to ‘Lawrence, ch’ on 22 June 1813 (Bod. Dep. e. 212), and to ‘Cheo [?] Lawrence’ 28 Mar 1815 (Bod. Dep. e. 214). I am indebted to Bruce BarkerBenﬁeld for suggesting that these references may be to a friend of the de Boinvilles, James Lawrence, also known as the Chevalier Lawrence. See William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys (London: Faber & Faber, 1989), p. 263–4. It is possible that a reference, to ‘W & C Lawrence’ at the Newtons on 5 March 1813 (Bod. Dep. e. 212), is to William Lawrence and his brother Charles, who may well have been in London during this time (see DNB). Mark Philp has helpfully noted that Godwin also knew the painter Thomas Lawrence. There is also an extant letter from a different Lawrence, perhaps a bookseller, to Godwin (Bod. Dep. b. 214/3). As Godwin saw William Lawrence more often, it is possible that he stopped putting ‘surgeon’ after Lawrence’s name. For the purposes of this book, though, I shall use only those references that specify that the William Lawrence referred to is a surgeon. There are extant letters from Carlisle to Godwin, which make it clear that Carlisle was called out to see children of the Godwin household in 1804. See, for example, Bod. Dep. e. 214/3. See Desmond, 1989, pp. 111–12. Anthony Carlisle, An Essay in the Disorders of Old Age, and on the Means of Prolonging Human Life, 2nd edn (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1818); see pp. 5, 31, 39 in particular. Thomas Trotter, An Essay, Medical, Philosophical, and Chemical on Drunkenness, and its Effects on the Human Body (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1804) and A View of the Nervous Temperament; being a practical enquiry into the increasing prevalence, prevention, and treatment of those diseases commonly called nervous, billious, stomach and liver complaints; indigestion; low spirits; gout &c. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1807). See Vivien Jones, ‘The Death of Mary Wollstonecraft’, British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 20: 2 (1997), 187–205. Bruce Barker-Benﬁeld alerted me to St Clair’s interpretation of ‘adv.’ as an abbreviation of the Latin ‘advenae’, referring to those guests who had ‘arrived unexpectedly’, St Clair, 1989, p. 56. Mark Philp, however, interprets the abbreviation as from the Latin term for ‘see’, pointing out that not all of the occasions on which it is used refer to visits. Lawrence voices a very different opinion of vegetarianism in his later Lectures, pp. 211–22. His rejection of vegetarianism perhaps foreshadows his move away from radicalism in the 1820s. Philozia: or, moral reﬂections on the actual condition of the animal kingdom, and on the means of improving the same … addressed to Lewis [sic] Gompertz (Brussels: W, Todd, 1839), pp. 42–3. Bod. MS Eng lett c200, MSS and Family Papers of Thomas Forster, pp. 179–80.

200 Notes 56 My thanks to Nicholas A. Joukovsky for informing me that the revised second edition of Forster’s Researches about Atmospheric Phenomena contained aquatint plates illustrating cloud types and cloud formations. 57 A letter from Harriet Shelley also reveals that ‘Mr. Lawrence’ was treating Cornelia Newton (Letters, I, 476n., 5 June 1816). 58 Dr Polidori describes Shelley, on their ﬁrst meeting, as ‘bashful, shy, consumptive’; J.W. Polidori, The Diary of John William Polidori, 1816, ed. W.M. Rossetti (London: Elkin Mathews, 1911), p. 101. 59 Nora Crook and Derek Guiton state that the doctor could not have been Lawrence because he was delivering a paper to the Medico-Chirurgical Society on that day, 1986, p. 103. Cp. Matthews and Everest, Poems, I, 461. 60 The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980–88), I, 41, 24 September 1817. 61 See especially the chapter ‘Pale pain, my shadow 1814–22’, Crook and Guiton, 1986, 102–18. 62 See Nicholas A. Joukovsky, ‘Peacock before Headlong Hall: A New Look at his Early Years’, Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, 36 (1985) 1–40 (p. 21). 63 Peacock, 2001, II, 475, 14 March 1859, translation by Joukovsky. 64 Forster writes that he was ‘entered as physician’s pupil at St Bartholomew’s hospital’, Illustrations of the Atmospherical Origin of Epidemic Disorders of Health … With popular rules for observing fasting and abstinence (London: T. & G. Underwood, 1829), p. v. There is a ‘Mr Forster’ enrolled as a student of Abernethy in a register of students at Bart’s, for the 1817–18 session (commencing 1 October 1817). I am very grateful to Samantha Searle (Archivist for St Bartholomew’s Hospital library) for this information, which was obtained from BHA X 54/1, Ludford Harvey’s Journal. 65 Recueil des Ouvrages et des Pensées d’un Physicien et Metaphysicien (Francfort sur le Mein, 1835), p. 11. 66 Despite this, in a fascinating series of letters from Spurzheim to Forster, which cover the period 1815 to 1817 and which discuss the Abernethy and Lawrence debate, there is some animosity towards Lawrence. Spurzheim, responding to criticism Forster passes on from an unnamed source, believes the criticism to originate with Lawrence: ‘I think of L., Warwick Lane’ (Lawrence lived in Warwick Lane), Bod. MS. Eng lett c200, p. 17 (32 Feb 1815). 67 Physiological Reﬂections on the Destructive Operation of Spiritous and Fermented Liquors on the Animal System (London: Thomas Underwood, 1812). 68 William Lambe, A Medical and Experimental Enquiry into the Origin, Symptoms, and Cure of Constitutional Diseases (London: J. Mawman, 1805). 69 H. Saxe Wyndham, William Lambe, M.D.: A Memoir (London: London Vegetarian Society, 1940), p. 18. 70 Although Shelley fought against William Lambe being appointed guardian of his son, Mary’s journal records Lambe’s daughter Mary visiting them the day before they left England and in a letter of 30 April 1818, to Hogg, Shelley asks ‘Remember me also to the Dr.’ (SC, IV, 618; MS Journal, p. 197; Letters, II, 15). Hogg remained friends with Lambe, despite his ridicule of him in his Life of Shelley. 71 Lambe treated Cornelia Newton until she died in September 1816. Mary Shelley’s Journal entry for 20 November 1814 records: ‘Hogg comes in the

Notes 201

72

73 74

75 76 77 78

79

80

3

evening – gives us a laughable account of … Dr Lambe & Mrs Newton’ (MS Journals, p. 46). Thomas Forster, Epistolarium, or fasciculi of curious letters, together with a few … poems, and some account of the writers as preserved among the MSS. of the Forster family, 2 vols (Brussels: Printed for private circulation, 1845–50), I, 13. Joseph Ritson, An Essay on Abstinence from Animal food, as a Moral Duty (London: Richard Phillips, 1802), p. 171. BSM, V, 155 rev–171 rev. It is clear that Shelley took notes from the second edition of Agricultural Chemistry because the page numbers are substantially different between these two editions and Shelley’s practice of noting the page number corresponds with those of the expanded 1814 edition. All quotes from Davy’s text are therefore from Humphry Davy, Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, 2nd edn (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Browne; Edinburgh: A. Constable, 1814). Shelley wrote to the Gisbournes, ‘I have been thinking & talking & reading Agriculture this last week’, Letters, II, 182, 13 April 1820. Wyndham D. Miles, ‘“Sir Humphrey Davie, The Prince of Agricultural Chemists”’, Chymia, 7 (1961) 126–34. Some of Shelley’s notes are speciﬁcally concerned with the practice of agriculture; for example, he notes ‘Fallowing – a bad practise’ (BSM, V, 168 rev). See BSM, V, for the facsimile of Shelley’s MS. I have not shown crossed out words. I have followed Adamson’s transcript, including her inserts in square brackets, but diamond brackets show letters or punctuation I have inserted into the text. In this instance, Shelley copies Davy’s text but a later section reveals Shelley’s anatomical knowledge. Shelley interprets Davy’s account of the lower surface of leaves: ‘On the lower surface the epidermis is a thin transparent membrane full of cavities, and it is probably altogether by this surface that moisture and the principles or the atmosphere necessary to vegetation are absorbed’ (Davy, 1814, pp. 64–5). Shelley’s corresponding note reads: ‘The upper surface of leaves is resinous siliceous or waxy. The lower vascular’ (BSM, V, 162 rev). The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. H.B.F. Brett-Smith and C.E. Jones, 10 vols (London: Constable, 1924), II, 41–52. The chapter is entitled ‘Sugar’.

The Political Body

1 For detailed discussion of the poem’s composition see Poems, II and BSM, IX. 2 All quotations from Prometheus Unbound are from the second volume of Poems. Act, scene and line numbers are given in the text. 3 [J.T. Coleridge], ‘Laon and Cythna, or the Revolution of the Golden City. A Vision of the Nineteenth Century, in the Stanza of Spencer. By Percy B. Shelley’, Quarterly Review, 42 (1819), 460–70. 4 Shelley himself seems to draw a distinction between this ‘reasoned theory of human life’ and the ‘systematical history of what appear to me to be the genuine elements of human society’. Matthews and Everest think that by the latter he is probably referring to A Philosophical View of Reform, written at about this time, Poems, II, 475n.

202 Notes 5 Kelvin Everest, ‘“Mechanism of a kind yet Unattempted”: The Dramatic Action of Prometheus Unbound’, Durham University Journal, 85 (1993), 237–45 (p. 239). 6 It seems likely that Shelley meant to refer the reader to Drummond’s discussion of ‘power’ on page 5: ‘Power cannot be at once the principle and the attribute of being’ (Drummond, 1805, p. 5). 7 Angela Leighton believes that Prometheus creates the furies himself: ‘The Furies are only helpless externalisations of what Prometheus can “know” (I. 459) and “think” (I. 475) and “imagine” (I. 478)’, Shelley and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 86. 8 Cp. Another frenzy came – there seemed a being Within me – a strange load my heart did bear, As if some living thing had made its lair Even in the fountains of my life. (Laon and Cythna, vII, 16, Poems, II, 186) 9 Isabel Armstrong notes the ambiguity of Shelley’s word ‘through’ elsewhere in the poem; the fury’s use of the word in line 483 also permits this variety of interpretations: ‘burning behind and shining through, burning by means of, burning up, penetrating through’, Language as a Living Form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982), p. 137. 10 Judith Chernaik writes of ‘the invisible principle of life within the visible ﬂesh’, The Lyrics of Shelley (Cleveland and London: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1972), p. 56. 11 Chernaik comments on the links between ‘To Constantia’ and this scene in Prometheus, 1972, pp. 55–7. 12 Nigel Leask, ‘Shelley’s “Magnetic Ladies”: Romantic Mesmerism and the Politics of the Body’, in Beyond Romanticism, ed. Stephen Copley and John Whale (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 53–78 (p. 68). 13 In her 1831 Preface to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley wrote that ‘galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth’ (M. Shelley, 1993, pp. 195–6). 14 For a comprehensive survey of mesmerism and its critics during this period, see Roy Porter, Health for Sale: Quackery in England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). 15 P.M.S. Dawson, ‘“A sort of natural magic”: Shelley and Animal Magnetism’, KSR, 1 (1986), 15–22 (p. 16). 16 Asia reads Panthea’s dream by similarly commanding her to ‘Lift up thine eyes / And let me read thy dream’, and again, ‘lift / Thine eyes that I may read his written soul!’ (II. 1. 55–6; II. 1. 110–11). 17 Andrew Bennett discusses this dissolving of the self in Shelley’s poetry: ‘It is, however, the condition of aesthetic and erotic experience for Shelley, that this burr of the self can be discarded or dissolved’ (1999, p. 176). 18 Chernaik argues, however, that they both are absorbed by some other power, the ‘it’ of the line ‘until it passed’: ‘Both Prometheus and Panthea are subject to the power which infuses and unites them, and bears them on its surge, and which can be known or identiﬁed only through analogy with natural powers – sun, ﬁre, wind’ (1972, p. 56).

Notes 203 19 See Matthews, 1957, on the connection between Asia and the fertility caused by volcanic activity. 20 Earl Wasserman writes ‘Shelley is everywhere inclined to conceive of life (in this ideal sense) and love – and light – as intimately related and nearly synonymous, animation being the luminous energy and joy of love’. He ﬁnds evidence for this connection in a line from The Cenci: ‘light, and life, and love’ (V. 4. 86), Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), p. 276. Matthews and Everest note that Shelley ‘assumes an identity of love with electricity’ (note to I. 122–3). 21 Grabo also recognized this, 1930, pp. 117–19. 22 It could be argued that Prometheus needs Asia just as she needs him: he is described by her as ‘the soul by which I live’ (II. 1. 31). 23 Timothy Webb, ‘The Unascended Heaven: Negatives in Prometheus Unbound’, in Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference, ed. Kelvin Everest (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983), pp. 37–62 (p. 41). Paradise Lost, II, 624. 24 Matthews and Everest note that ‘Asia’s eyes are a source of energy’ (note to I. 122–3). The spirit of the earth ‘before Jove reigned’ used ‘to drink the liquid light / Out of her eyes’ (III. 4. 17–18). Lawrence refers to the eyes as a sign of life, in death: ‘the eyes become dim, the lips and cheeks livid’ (Introduction, p. 128). 25 Elsewhere ‘wine’ refers to blood; see, for example, II. 4. 65. 26 Cp. Shelley’s Defence of Poetry: ‘Poetry ever communicates all the pleasure which men are capable of receiving: it is ever still the light of life; the source of whatever of beautiful, or generous, or true can have place in an evil time’, P&P, p. 522. Asia is also called the ‘light of life’ by Prometheus when they are reunited, III. 3. 6. 27 Cp. Shelley’s essay ‘On Love’: ‘lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart’s best blood’, P&P, p. 504. 28 Cp. ‘The sun’s kind light feeds every living thing / That spreads its blossoms to the breath of spring’, ‘A Tale of Society as it is: From facts, 1811’, 89–90, Poems, I, 197. 29 Angela Leighton writes: ‘Shelley’s reminder here that the voice is “inorganic” raises the old problem of whether the natural landscape can have any voice which is communicable to man’, 1984, p. 80. 30 Cf. ‘One would think that Mont Blanc was a living being & that the frozen blood forever circulated slowly thro’ his stony veins’, Letters, I, 500, 25 July 1816. 31 Cp. The blood in his translucent veins Beat, not like animal life, but love Seemed now its sullen springs to move, When life had failed, and all its pains. (Rosalind and Helen, 824–7, Poems, II, 292) 32 Thomas Forster, Researches About Atmospheric Phænomena (London: Thomas Underwood, 1813). 33 For a discussion of the spread of contagion through atmospheric conditions, see Kim Wheatley, Shelley and His Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1999), especially chapter 2.

204 Notes 34 Israel James Kapstein, ‘Shelley and Cabanis, PMLA, 52 (1937), 238–43 (p. 238). Shelley ordered ‘Ouvres de Cabanis, medicin’ from Thomas Hookham on 17 December 1812, Letters, I, 342. See also Letters, I, 348, n.3. 35 Asia inhales nitrous oxide at the cave of Demogorgon. It is linked in Prometheus Unbound with prophecy; see II. 3. 18, 49–50. Davy represented nitrous oxide as a truth-seeing drug. 36 Grabo also discusses this, 1930, pp. 187–9. 37 Walter D. Wetzels, ‘Aspects of Natural Science in German Romanticism’, Studies in Romanticism, 10 (1971), 44–59 (p. 47). 38 Likewise the mind of man is described in these terms as having once been ‘dusk, and obscene and blind’; it is now like ‘an ocean / Of clear emotion’ (IV. 95–7). The metaphor is of a puriﬁed and cleansed environment, which in turn effects a purer existence. Compare the later description of the new, ‘free’ heaven that now ‘rains fresh light and dew / On the wide earth’, III. 4. 154–5. 39 Walker draws a similar conclusion from his exposition: ‘Hence we see the necessity of breathing this parabulum as pure and open as possible’, 1807, p. 32. 40 Grabo, 1930, pp. 172–4; P.B. Shelley, Shelley: Alastor, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais and Other Poems, ed. Peter Butter (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1970), pp. 284–5. 41 Shelley performed a similar experiment himself, see Letters, I, 193–4, 24 November 1811. 42 Matthews and Everest note that Shelley’s precise phrase ‘clear lakes and pools’ is odd since both Darwin and Priestley stipulate that the gas found in such waters is oxygen and not hydrogen. The extract from Walker’s System describes how hydrogen is to be found in ‘muddy ponds’ 1802, I, 260. 43 ‘HYDROGEN gas is abundantly produced during the dissolution of animal and vegetable bodies; hence it is often found to come out of ponds, burying grounds, and other places that contain animal and vegetable matter in a state of decay’, An Essay on the Medicinal Properties of Factitious Airs, with an Appendix on the Nature of Blood (London: C. Dilly, 1798), p. 13. 44 Matthews and Everest also call attention to this letter in their gloss on Prometheus Unbound, II. 2. 71–82, Poems, II, 545–6.

4

The Painted Veil

1 See his discussions of, for example, Rousseau, Dante, Ariosto and Tasso (Letters, I, 485, II, 112, II, 20). This section is indebted to Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 2 Karl M. Figlio, ‘The Metaphor of Organization: A historiographical perspective on the bio-medical sciences of the early nineteenth century’, History of Science, 14 (1976), 17–53 (p. 31). For the political overtones of sensibility in 1790s literature, see Christopher B. Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). 3 Claire Clairmont read ‘Smellie’s Philosophy [o]f Natural History’ every day from 24–29 September 1814 while she was living with Shelley and Mary, Journals of Claire Clairmont, ed. Marian Kingston Stocking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 46.

Notes 205 4 Kelvin Everest regards this story of Hogg’s as ‘obviously apocryphal’, since Shelley would have ‘known perfectly well what to expect’ from a lecture on mineralogy, ‘Shelley and Science’, Ideas and Productions, 7 (1987), 52–9 (p. 53). 5 James Edward Smith, ‘On the Irritability of Vegetables’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 78 (1788), 158–65. 6 W.D. Rolfe, ‘William and John Hunter: breaking the Great Chain of Being’, in William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World, ed. W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 297–322 (p. 301). For a discussion of the mimosa in Romantic poetry, see Robert M. Maniquis, ‘The Puzzling Mimosa: Sensitivity and Plant Symbols in Romanticism’, Studies in Romanticism, 8 (1969), 129–55. 7 Thomas Forster, Pan, A Pastoral of the First Age, Together With Some Other Poems (Brussels: Belgian Printing and Publishing Society, 1840), p. 22. 8 Peter Melville Logan, Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Prose (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1997), p. 2. 9 John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 16. 10 The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols (London and Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1930–34), vIII, 149. 11 ‘The Sensitive Plant’ is quoted from P&P. Line numbers are given in brackets after quotes. 12 Geoffrey Matthews, ‘Shelley’s Grasp on the Actual’, Essays in Criticism, 45 (1954), 328–31. Matthews was here countering F.R. Leavis’s claim that Shelley had a ‘weak grasp upon the actual’; F.R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1936), p. 206. 13 P.M.S. Dawson, The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 120. 14 William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols (London: William Pickering, 1993), III, 21. 15 A Refutation of Deism was published in 1814. 16 ‘Mutability’ is quoted from Poems, I, 457. Line numbers are given in brackets after quotes. 17 ‘The Cloud’ is quoted from P&P. Line numbers are given. 18 Richard Carlile, Address to the Men of Science … (London: R. Carlile, 1821), p. 6. 19 Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, 2 vols (London: Rest Fenner, 1817), I, 296. 20 Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), p. 90. 21 Marquis de Laplace, The System of the World, trans. Rev. Henry H. Harte, 2 vols (Dublin: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, 1830), II, 342. See Letters, I, 380; II, 458–9. 22 [Baron D’Holbach], The System of Nature; or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World, trans. William Hodgson, 4 vols (London: Printed for the translator, 1795), pp. 18–19.

206 Notes 23 Jerome J. McGann, ‘Shelley’s Veils: A Thousand Images of Loveliness’, in Romantic and Victorian: Studies in Memory of William H. Marshall, ed. W. Paul Elledge and Richard L. Hoffman (New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1971), pp. 198–218 (pp. 200–1). 24 Daniel Arasse, The Guillotine and the Terror, trans. Christopher Miller (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 37. 25 Thomas Charles Morgan, Sketches of the Philosophy of Morals (London: Henry Colburn, 1822), p. x. 26 Paul Hamilton, ‘A French Connection: From Empiricism to Materialism in Writings by the Shelleys’, Colloquium Helveticum, 25 (1997), 171–93. See Edward Reed, From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 49–59, for a discussion of the inﬂuence of Darwin’s ‘ﬂuid materialism’ on the Shelleys. 27 See Richardson, 2001. 28 Anon., Thought Not a Function of the Brain: A Reply to the Arguments for Materialism advanced by Mr. W. Lawrence, in his Lectures on Physiology (London: C. & J. Rivington, 1827). 29 Michael Scrivener, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 272. 30 Thomas Brown’s problem with materialism was that it held the ‘groundless belief, that we are acquainted with the nature of causation’, quoted in Reed, 1997, p. 40.

5

‘The Poetry of Life’

1 See Goodﬁeld-Toulmin, 1969, p. 289. 2 Adonais is quoted from P&P. Line numbers are given in brackets after quotes. 3 William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit, Collected Novels and Memoirs, ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols (London: William Pickering, 1992), III, 31. 4 In Adonais, ‘unrest’ is miscalled ‘delight’ (354). 5 See Webb, 1983, p. 41: ‘Where all life dies, death lives’, Paradise Lost, II, 624. 6 See Jerrold E. Hogle, Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) on Shelley’s use of metaphor as radical transference. 7 This trope is used differently to that noted by Roy Porter: ‘Favoured ways of imagining [the self’s] realization include the metaphor of a seed maturing into a ﬂower, or the growth-process from birth to adulthood, from dependency to self-sufﬁciency’, Flesh in the Age of Reason (London: Allen Lane, 2003). 8 Quoted in Alice Jenkins, ‘Humphry Davy: Poetry, Science and the Love of Light’, in 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads, ed. Richard Cronin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), pp. 133–50 (p. 139). 9 Quoted in Neve, 1980, p. 5. 10 See John Aldini, An Account of the Late Improvements in Galvanism, with a series of curious and interesting experiments performed before the commissioners of the French National Institute, and repeated lately in London (London: Cuthall & Martin, & J. Murray, 1803).

Notes 207 11 Mickey S. Eisenberg, Life in the Balance: Emergency Medicine and the Quest to Reverse Sudden Death (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 16. 12 Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Melancholy Reﬂection: Constructing an Identity for Unveilers of Nature’, in Frankenstein, Creation and Monstrosity, ed. Stephen Bann (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), pp. 60–77 (p. 66). 13 John Bell was the brother of Charles Bell, the vitalist on the side of Abernethy; see Bell, 1819, i–viii. I am very grateful to Ben Colbert for information on John Bell. See E.W. Walls, ‘John Bell, 1763–1820’, Medical History, 8 (1964), 63–9, for an account of Bell’s controversial career in Edinburgh. 14 Andrew Bennett, ‘Shelley in Posterity’, in Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996), pp. 215–31 (pp. 223, 222). 15 Kelvin Everest, ‘Literature and Feeling: New Directions in the Theory of Romanticism’, in Reviewing Romanticism, ed. Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992b), pp. 99–115 (p. 114). 16 Quoted by Susan Woolfson, ‘Keats Enters History: Autopsy, Adonais, and the fame of Keats’, in Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 17–45 (p. 19). 17 Jerome McGann, quoted in Woolfson, 1995, p. 17. 18 ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, in W.K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), p. 5. 19 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, with other Poems, ed. Cora Kaplan (London: The Women’s Press, 1978), p. 122. 20 Kelvin Everest, ‘Ozymandias: The Text in Time’, in Essays and Studies: Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Kelvin Everest (Cambridge: Brewer, 1992a), pp. 24–42. 21 ‘Ozymandias’ is quoted from Poems, I, 310–11. Line numbers are given. 22 James Hutton, Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations, 2 vols (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1795), I, 200. 23 Shelley wrote that: ‘The late invention & improvement in Telescopes has considerably enlarged the notions of men respecting the limits of the Universe’, ‘On the Devil and Devils’, BSM, xIV, 68. 24 See Christine Kenyon-Jones, ‘“When This World Shall be Former”: Catastrophism as Imaginative Theory for the Younger Romantics’, Romanticism on the Net, 24 (November 2001b). 25 Charles Coulston Gillespie, Genesis and Geology: A Study in the Relations of Scientiﬁc Thought, Natural Theology, and Social Opinion in Great Britain, 1790–1850 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), p. 46. 26 Shelley read Cuvier’s Researches sur les Ossemens (1812); see Letters, I, 458–9, 25 April 1822. 27 John Playfair, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (Edinburgh: Cadell & Davis, 1802), p. 119. 28 Shelley showed a personal interest in fossils: ‘We have bought some specimens of minerals & plants & two or three crystal seals at Mont Blanc, to preserve the remembrance of having approached it. – There is a Cabinet d’Histoire Naturelle at Chamouni, just as at Matlock & Keswick & Clifton’, Letters, I, 501, 25 July 1816.

208 Notes 29 Endymion, III. 119–36 and Richard III, I. 4. 21–33. Shelley writes to Peacock, ‘I will not pursue Buffons sublime but gloomy theory’, Letters, I, 499, 24 July 1816. 30 James Parkinson, Organic Remains of a Former World: An Examination of the Mineralized Remains of the Vegetables and Animals of the Antediluvian World; Generally termed Fossils, 3 vols (London: J. Robson et al, 1804). See Letters, I, 214, 255. 31 As Kenyon-Jones has written: ‘Catastrophic destruction and recreation of the whole earth, as envisaged in the geological theories of Baron Cuvier and James Parkinson and invoked in Act IV (296–318) of Prometheus Unbound, may even be required to bring about real change in humanity’s condition’, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001a), p. 120. 32 Shelley read Laplace’s System of the World and Essai Philosophique sur les Probabilitiés, Letters, I, 380; II, 458. 33 Anon., ‘Memoir sur les Eléphans Vivans et Fossiles. – sur le Grand Mastodonte, dont on trouve les Os en divers Endroits des Deux Continens, & surtout sur les Bords de l’Ohio dans l’Amerique Septentrionale. Resumé general de l’Histoire des Ossemens Fossiles des Pachydermes, &c. Par C. Cuvier’, Edinburgh Review, 18 (1811), 214–30 (p. 222). 34 Shelley believed that Herschel had proved that the sun had sufﬁcient conditions to support life. He thought the sun’s ‘internal surface’ was capable of performing ‘the same ofﬁce to the processes of vital & material action on the strike through of the sun [as its external one] does on those of the planets’, ‘On the Devil and Devils’, BSM, xIV, 86–7. 35 ‘The Triumph of Life’ is quoted from P&P. Line numbers are given. 36 John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 261. 37 Everest also makes this point: ‘Like all Shelley’s poems in strict terza rima, Athanase was never completed’, Kelvin Everest, ‘Athanase’, Keats–Shelley Review, 7 (1992c), 62–85 (p. 63). 38 Ralph Pite, ‘Shelley, Dante and the Triumph of Life’, in Evaluating Shelley, ed. Timothy Clark and Jerrold E. Hogle (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), pp. 197–211 (p. 203).

Conclusion 1 Edward Profﬁtt, ‘Science and Romanticism’, The Georgia Review, 34 (1980), 55–80 (p. 56). 2 Shelley does not translate this quote from Tasso: ‘[n]on merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta’, A Defence of Poetry (Poetry and Prose, p. 506). 3 S.T. Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, in The Collected Work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 16 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969–), IV, 1, 471 (1818).

Bibliography Abernethy, John (1814) An Enquiry into the Probability and Rationality of Mr. Hunter’s Theory of Life: being the subject of the ﬁrst two anatomical lectures delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons, of London (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, and (1815) Part of the Introductory Lecture for the Year 1815, Exhibiting some of Mr. Hunter’s Opinions Respecting Diseases delivered before the Royal College of Surgeons, in London (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown) [bound together]. —— (1817) Physiological Lectures, Exhibiting a General View of Mr Hunter’s Physiology, and of his researches in Comparative Anatomy, delivered before the Royal College of Surgeons, in the year 1817 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown). —— (1819) The Hunterian Oration for the Year 1819, delivered before the Royal College of Surgeons, in London (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown). —— (1820) Surgical Observation on the Constitutional Origin and Treatment of Local Diseases; and on Aneurisms, 5th edn (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown). Abrams, M.H. (1953) The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press). Albury, W.R. (1993) ‘Ideas of Life and Death’, in Companion Encyclopaedia of the History of Medicine, ed. Roy Porter and W.F. Bynum, 2 vols (London and New York: Routledge), I, 249–80. Aldini, John (1803) An Account of the Late Improvements in Galvanism, with a series of curious and interesting experiments performed before the commissioners of the French National Institute, and repeated lately in London (London: Cuthall & Martin, & J. Murray). Anon. (1792) Obituary of Adam Walker, The European Magazine and London Review, 21, 411–13. Anon. (1799) The British Critic, 14, 623–7. Anon. (1809) ‘Letter from “Amicus” to Mr Urban on Thomas Beddoes’s death’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 79, 120. Anon. (1811) ‘Memoir sur les Eléphans Vivans et Fossiles. – sur le Grand Mastodonte, dont on trouve les Os en divers Endroits des Deux Continens, & surtout sur les Bords de l’Ohio dans l’Amerique Septentrionale. Resumé general de l’Histoire des Ossemens Fossiles des Pachydermes, &c. Par C. Cuvier’, Edinburgh Review, 18, 214–30. Anon. (1814) ‘An Inquiry into the Probability and Rationality of Mr. Hunter’s Theory of Life; being the subject of the ﬁrst Two Anatomical Lectures delivered before the Royal College of Surgeons, of London. By John Abernethy’, Edinburgh Review, 23, 384–98. Anon. (1820) The Radical Triumvirate, or Inﬁdel Paine, Lord Byron, and Surgeon Lawrence, Colleaguing with the Patriotic Radicals to Emancipate Mankind from All Laws Human and Divine. A Letter to John Bull, from an Oxonian Resident in London (London: Francis Wesley). 209

210 Bibliography Anon. (1822a) ‘Cases of Wolcot v. Walker; Southey v. Sherwood; Murray v. Benbow, and Lawrence v. Smith’, Quarterly Review, 53, 125–34. Anon. (1822b) Monthly Magazine, 53, 524–44. Anon. (1827) Thought Not a Function of the Brain: A Reply to the Arguments for Materialism advanced by Mr. W. Lawrence, in his Lectures on Physiology (London: C. & J. Rivington). Anon. (1834) ‘On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. By Mrs. Somerville’, Quarterly Review, 51, 54–68. Anon. (1868) ‘Sir William Lawrence, Bart’, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Reports, 4, 1–18. Arasse, Daniel (1989) The Guillotine and the Terror, trans. Christopher Miller (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Armstrong, Isabel (1982) Language as a Living Form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Sussex: Harvester Press). Barclay, John (1822) An Inquiry into the Opinions, Ancient and Modern, Concerning Life and Organization (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute). Barrett Browning, Elizabeth (1978) Aurora Leigh, with other Poems, ed. Cora Kaplan (London: The Women’s Press). Bell, Charles (1819) An Essay on the Forces Which Circulate the Blood; Being an Examination of the Difference of the Motions of Fluids in Living and Dead Vessels (London: Longman). Bennett, Andrew (1996) ‘Shelley in Posterity’, in Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press), pp. 215–31. —— (1999) Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Bewell, Alan (1999) Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Bichat, Xavier (1816) Physiological Researches on Life and Death, trans. F. Gold (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown). Brook, Charles W. (1943) Carlile and the Surgeons (Glasgow: Strickland Press). Brown, John (1795) Elements of Medicine: A New Edition, rev. and corr. Thomas Beddoes, 2 vols (London: J. Johnson). Burke, Edmund (1790) Reﬂections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event (London: J. Dodsley). Butter, Peter (1954) Shelley’s Idols of the Cave (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Bynum, W.F. (1980) ‘Health, Disease and Medical Care’, in The Ferment of Knowledge, ed. G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 211–53. Byron (1973–82) Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols (London: John Murray). Cameron, Kenneth Neill (1951) The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical (London: Victor Gollancz). Carlile, Richard (1821) Address to the Men of Science … (London: R. Carlile). Carlisle, Anthony (1818) An Essay in the Disorders of Old Age, and on the Means of Prolonging Human Life, 2nd edn (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown). Cavallo, Tiberius (1786) A Complete Treatise on Electricity, in Theory and Practice, 3rd edn, 3 vols (London: C. Dilly).

Bibliography 211 —— (1798) An Essay on the Medicinal Properties of Factitious Airs, with an Appendix on the Nature of Blood (London: C. Dilly). —— (1803) The Elements of Natural or Experimental Philosophy, 4 vols (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies). Chernaik Judith (1972) The Lyrics of Shelley (Cleveland and London: Case Western Reserve University Press). Clairmont, Claire (1968) Journals of Claire Clairmont, ed. Marian Kingston Stocking (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press). Clark, Timothy (1989) Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Coleman, William (1977) Biology in the Nineteenth Century: Problems of Form, Function, and Transformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Coleridge, J.T. (1819) ‘Laon and Cythna, or the Revolution of the Golden City. A Vision of the Nineteenth Century, in the Stanza of Spencer. By Percy B. Shelley’, Quarterly Review, 42, 460–70. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1817) Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, 2 vols (London: Rest Fenner). —— (1956) Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press). —— (1969–) The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 16 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), IV. Coley, N.G. (1967) ‘The Animal Chemistry Club: Assistant Society to the Royal Society’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 22, 73–85. Crook, Nora (1986) ‘Shelley and the Solar Microscope’, Keats–Shelley Review, 1, 49–59. Crook, Nora and Derek Guiton (1986) Shelley’s Venomed Melody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Crosland, Maurice (1980) ‘Chemistry and the Chemical Revolution’, in The Ferment of Knowledge, ed. G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 398–416. Crouch, Laura E. (1978) ‘Davy’s A Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry: A Possible Scientiﬁc Source of Frankenstein’, Keats–Shelley Journal, 27, 35–44. Darwin, Erasmus (1791) The Botanic Garden; A Poem in Two Parts (London: J. Johnson). —— (1803) Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life, 2 vols (Boston: Thomas and Andrews). —— (1973) The Temple of Nature; or the Origin of Society, 1803 (London: Scholar Press). Davy, Humphry (1799) ‘Experimental essays on heat, light, and on the combinations of light, with a new theory of respiration, and observations on the chemistry of life’, in Contributions to Physical and Medical Knowledge, Principally from the West of England, ed. Thomas Beddoes and James Watt (London: Longman & Rees), 5–147. —— (1814) Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, 2nd edn (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Browne; Edinburgh: A. Constable). —— (1839) The Collected Works of Humphry Davy, ed. John Davy, 9 vols (London: Smith, Elder & Co.).

212 Bibliography Dawson, P.M.S. (1980) The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press). —— (1986) ‘“A sort of natural magic”: Shelley and Animal Magnetism’, Keats–Shelley Review, 1, 15–22. de Almeida, Hermione (1991) Romantic Medicine and John Keats (New York and London: Oxford University Press). Desmond, Adrian (1989) The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). [D’Holbach, Baron] (1795) The System of Nature; or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World, trans. William Hodgson, 4 vols (London: Printed for the translator). [D’Oyly, George] (1819) ‘An Enquiry into the Probability of Mr. Hunter’s Theory of Life …’, Quarterly Review, 43, 1–34. Drummond, William (1805) Academical Questions (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies). Eisenberg, Mickey S. (1997) Life in the Balance: Emergency Medicine and the Quest to Reverse Sudden Death (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press). Everest, Kelvin (1987) ‘Shelley and Science’, Ideas and Productions, 7, 52–9. —— (1992a) ‘Ozymandias: The Text in Time’, in Essays and Studies: Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Kelvin Everest (Cambridge: Brewer), pp. 24–42. —— (1992b) ‘Literature and Feeling: New Directions in the Theory of Romanticism’, in Reviewing Romanticism, ed. Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 99–115. —— (1992c) ‘Athanase’, Keats–Shelley Review, 7, 62–85. —— (1993) ‘“Mechanism of a kind yet Unattempted”: The Dramatic Action of Prometheus Unbound’, Durham University Journal, 85, 237–45. Fara, Patricia (1996) Sympathetic Attractions: Magnetic Practices, Beliefs, and Symbolism in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press). Figlio, Karl M. (1976) ‘The Metaphor of Organization: A historiographical perspective on the bio-medical sciences of the early nineteenth century’, History of Science, 14, 17–53. Forster, Thomas (1812) Physiological Reﬂections on the Destructive Operation of Spiritous and Fermented Liquors on the Animal System (London: Thomas Underwood). —— (1813) Researches About Atmospheric Phænomena (London: Thomas Underwood). —— (1829) Illustrations of the Atmospherical Origin of Epidemic Disorders of Health … With popular rules for observing fasting and abstinence (London: T & G Underwood). —— (1835) Recueil des Ouvrages et des Pensées d’un Physicien et Metaphysicien (Francfort sur le Mein). —— (1839) Philozia: or, moral reﬂections on the actual condition of the animal kingdom, and on the means of improving the same … addressed to Lewis [sic] Gompertz (Brussels: W. Todd). —— (1840) Pan, A Pastoral of the First Age, Together With Some Other Poems (Brussels: Belgian Printing and Publishing Society). —— (1845–50) Epistolarium, or fasciculi of curious letters, together with a few … poems, and some account of the writers as preserved among the MSS. of the Forster family, 2 vols (Brussels: Printed for private circulation). Franklin, Alfred White (1930–31) ‘Abernethy’s Letters to George Kerr, 1814–22’, St Bartholomew’s Hospital Journal, 38, 237–41.

Bibliography 213 Freccero, John (1986) Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), p. 261. Fulford, Tim (1990) ‘Coleridge and J.H. Green: The Anatomy of Beauty’, in The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas McFarland, eds Richard Gravil and Molly Lefebure (Hampshire and London: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 133–50. Gaull, Marilyn (1988) English Romanticism: The Human Context (New York and London: W.W. Norton). Gibbs, F.W. (1960) ‘Itinerant Lecturers in Natural Philosophy’, Ambix, 8, 111–17. —— (1965) Joseph Priestley: Adventurer in Science and Champion of Truth (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons). Gigante, Denise (2002) ‘The Monster in the Rainbow: Keats and the Science of Life’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 117, 433–8. Gillespie, Charles Coulston (1951) Genesis and Geology: A Study in the Relations of Scientiﬁc Thought, Natural Theology and Social Opinion in Great Britain, 1790–1850 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Godwin, William (1992) Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit, Collected Novels and Memoirs, ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols (London: William Pickering), III. —— (1993) An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols (London: William Pickering), III. Golinski, Jan (1992) Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Goodﬁeld-Toulmin, June (1969) ‘Some Aspects of English Physiology: 1780–1840’, Journal of the History of Biology, 2, 283–320. Grabo, Carl (1930) A Newton Among Poets: Shelley’s Use of Science in Prometheus Unbound (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press). Grinﬁeld, Edward (1819) Cursory Observations on the ‘Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons by William Lawrence F.R.S. Professor of Anatomy and Surgery to that College, &c. &c. &c.’ In a series of letters addressed to that Gentleman; with a concluding letter to his pupils, 2nd edn (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies). Hamilton, Paul (1997) ‘A French Connection: From Empiricism to Materialism in Writings by the Shelleys’, Colloquium Helveticum, 25, 171–93. —— (2000) Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Northcote House). Hartley, Harold (1966) Humphry Davy (London: Nelson). Hawkins, Desmond (1986) ‘Shelley’s Cousin: Charles Grove’, Hatcher Review, 3, 78–85. —— (1992) Shelley’s First Love: The Love Story of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Archon Books). —— (1995) The Grove Diaries: The Rise and Fall of an English Family, 1809–1925 (Dorset: The Dovecote Press). Hazlitt, William (1930–4) The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols (London and Toronto: J.M. Dent). Heringman, Noah, ed. (2003) Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: State University of New York Press). Hogg, Thomas Jefferson (1858) The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols (London: Edward Moxon).

214 Bibliography Hogle, Jerrold E. (1988) Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press). Holmes, Richard (1987) Shelley: The Pursuit (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Holyoake, George Jacob (1849) The Life and Character of Richard Carlile (London: J. Watson). Hughes, A.M.D. (1947) The Nascent Mind of Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Hunt, Thornton (1863) ‘Shelley. By One Who Knew Him’, The Atlantic Monthly, 11, 184–204. Hunter, John (1794) A Treatise on the Blood, Inﬂammation, and Gun-shot Wounds … (London: George Nicol). Hutton, James (1795) Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations, 2 vols (Edinburgh: William Creech). Ingpen, Roger (1917) Shelley in England (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench & Trubner). Jacyna, L.S. (1983) ‘Immanence or Transcendence: Theories of Life and Organization in Britain, 1790–1835’, Isis, 74, 311–29. Jenkins, Alice (1998) ‘Humphry Davy: Poetry, Science and the Love of Light’, in 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads, ed. Richard Cronin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 133–50. Jones, Christopher B. (1993) Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London and New York: Routledge). Jones, Vivien (1997) ‘The Death of Mary Wollstonecraft’, British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 20: 2, 187–205. Jordanova, Ludmilla (1989) Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf). —— (1994) ‘Melancholy Reﬂection: Constructing an Identity for Unveilers of Nature’, in Frankenstein, Creation and Monstrosity, ed. Stephen Bann (London: Reaktion Books). Joukovsky, Nicholas A. (1985) ‘Peacock before Headlong Hall: A New Look at his Early Years’, Keats–Shelley Memorial Bulletin, 36, 1–40. Kapstein, Israel James (1937) ‘Shelley and Cabanis’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 52, 238–43. Keith, Arthur (1930–31) ‘Fresh Light on John Abernethy’, St Bartholomew’s Hospital Journal, 38, 151–63. Kenyon-Jones, Christine (2001a) Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate). —— (November 2001b) ‘“When This World Shall be Former”: Catastrophism as Imaginative Theory for the Younger Romantics’, Romanticism on the Net, 24. King-Hele, Desmond (1971) Shelley: His Thought and His Work, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). —— (1983) ‘Shelley and Erasmus Darwin’, in Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference, ed. Kelvin Everest (Leicester: Leicester University Press), pp. 129–45. Kitson, Peter, ed. (1999) ‘Theories of Race’, in Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, ed. Peter Kitson and Debbie Lee, 8 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto), VIII, XX. Knight, David (1990) ‘Romanticism and the Sciences’, in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 13–24.

Bibliography 215 —— (1992) Humphry Davy: Science and Power (Oxford: Blackwell). Lambe, William (1805) A Medical and Experimental Enquiry into the Origin, Symptoms, and Cure of Constitutional Diseases (London: J. Mawman). La Mettrie, Julien Offray de (1996) Machine Man and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Ann Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Laplace, Marquis de (1830) The System of the World, trans. Rev. Henry H. Harte, 2 vols (Dublin: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green). Lawrence, Christopher (1990) ‘The power and the glory: Humphry Davy and Romanticism’, in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 213–28. Lawrence, Susan C. (1985) ‘Science and Medicine at the London Hospitals: The Development of Teaching and Research, 1750–1815’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Toronto). Lawrence, William (1807) A Short System of Comparative Anatomy, translated from the German of J.F. Blumenbach; with numerous additional notes, and an introductory view of the classiﬁcation of animals by the translator (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme). —— (1816) An Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology; being the Two Introductory Lectures, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons, on the 21st and 25th of March, 1816 (London: J. Callow). —— (1819) Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and The Natural History of Man, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons (London: J. Callow). ——, ‘Life’ (1819) in Abraham Rees, The Cyclopædia: or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Literature, with the assistance of eminent professional gentlemen, 39 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown), XX. Leask, Nigel (1992) ‘Shelley’s “Magnetic Ladies”: Romantic Mesmerism and the Politics of the Body’, in Beyond Romanticism, ed. Stephen Copely and John Whale (London: Routledge), pp. 53–78. Leavis, F.R. (1936) Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus). Leighton, Angela (1984) Shelley and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Levere, Trevor H. (1977) ‘Dr Thomas Beddoes and the establishment of his Pneumatic Institution: A Tale of Three Presidents’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 32, 41–9. —— (1981) Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early EighteenthCentury Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). —— (1984) ‘Dr Thomas Beddoes (1750–1808): Science and medicine in politics and society’, British Journal for the History of Science, 17, 187–204. Lillywhite, Bryant (1963) London Coffee Houses (London: George Allen & Unwin). Logan, Peter Melville (1997) Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Prose (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press). Luke, Hugh J., Jnr (1965) ‘Sir William Lawrence: Physician to Shelley and Mary’, Papers on English Language and Literature, 1, 141–52. Macilwain, George (1856) Memoirs of John Abernethy, 3rd edn (London: Hatchard). Malthus, Thomas (1970) Essay on the Principles of Population, ed. Anthony Flew (Harmondsworth: Penguin).

216 Bibliography Maniquis, Robert M. (1969) ‘The Puzzling Mimosa: Sensitivity and Plant Symbols in Romanticism’, Studies in Romanticism, 8, 129–55. Marshall, Tim (1995) Murdering to Dissect: Grave Robbing, Frankenstein and the Anatomy Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Matthews, Geoffrey (1954) ‘Shelley’s Grasp on the Actual’, Essays in Criticism, 45, 328–31. —— (1957) ‘A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley’, English Literary History, 24, 191–228. McCalman, Iain (1988) Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). McGann, Jerome J. (1971) ‘Shelley’s Veils: A Thousand Images of Loveliness’, in Romantic and Victorian: Studies in Memory of William H. Marshall, ed. W. Paul Elledge and Richard L. Hoffman (New Jersey: Associated University Presses), pp. 198–218. Medwin, Thomas (1913) Medwin’s Revised Life of Shelley, ed. H. Buxton Forman (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Miles, Wyndham D. (1961) ‘“Sir Humphrey Davie, The Prince of Agricultural Chemists”’, Chymia, 7, 126–34. Miller, David Philip, and Peter Hanns Reill, eds (1996) Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Moore, Norman (1918) The History of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, 2 vols (London: C. Arthur Pearson). Morgan, Thomas Charles (1818) Sketches of the Philosophy of Life (London: Henry Colburn). —— (1822) Sketches of the Philosophy of Morals (London: Henry Colburn). Morton, Timothy (1994) Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Mudford, Peter G. (1968) ‘William Lawrence and the Natural History of Man’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 29, 430–6. Mullan, John (1988) Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Neve, Michael (1980) ‘The Young Humphry Davy: or John Tonkin’s Lament’, in Science and the Sons of Genius: Studies on Humphry Davy, ed. Sophie Forgan (London: Science Reviews), pp. 1–32. Newman, Charles (1964) ‘The Hospital as a Teaching Centre’, in The Evolution of Hospitals in Britain, ed. F.N.L. Poynter (London: Pitman Medical), pp. 187–205. Newton, John Frank (1811) The Return to Nature, or, A Defence of the Vegetable Regimen; with some account of an experiment made during the last three of four years in the author’s family (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies). Orange, A.D. (1974) ‘Oxygen and One God: Joseph Priestley in 1774’, History Today, 24, 773–81. Owen, Robert Dale (1841) Galileo and the Inquisition (London: J. Watson). Parkinson, James (1804) Organic Remains of a Former World: An Examination of the Mineralized Remains of the Vegetables and Animals of the Antediluvian World; Generally termed Fossils, 3 vols (London: J. Robson et al.). Peacock, Thomas Love (1924) The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. H.B.F. Brett-Smith and C.E. Jones, 10 vols (London: Constable). —— (2001) The Letters of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. Nicholas A. Joukovsky, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

Bibliography 217 Philostratus [Thomas Forster] (1823) Somatopsychonoologia: Showing that the Proofs of Body, Life and Mind, Considered as Distinct Essences, Cannot be Deduced from Physiology, but Depend upon a Distinct Sort of Evidence; Being an Examination of the Controversy Concerning Life carried on by MM Laurence [sic], Abernethy, Rennell, and others (London: R. Hunter). Piper, H.W. (1962) The Active Universe: Pantheism and the Concept of Imagination in the English Romantic Poets (London: The Athlone Press). Pite, Ralph (1996) ‘Shelley, Dante and The Triumph of Life’, in Evaluating Shelley, ed. Timothy Clark and Jerrold E. Hogle (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 197–211. Playfair, John (1802) Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (Edinburgh: Cadell & Davis). Polidori, J.W. (1911) The Diary of John William Polidori, 1816, ed. W.M. Rossetti (London: Elkin Mathews). Porter, Roy (1989) Health for Sale: Quackery in England (Manchester: Manchester University Press). —— (2003) Flesh in the Age of Reason (London: Allen Lane). Power, D’Arcy (1929–30) ‘Epoch-Making Books in British surgery’, British Journal of Surgery, 17, 369–72. Priestley, Joseph (1777) Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit. To which is added, The History of the Philosophical Doctrine concerning the Origin of the Soul, and the Nature of Matter; with its Inﬂuence on Christianity, especially with Respect to the Doctrine of the Pre-existence of Christ (London: J. Johnson). —— (1775) ‘An Account of further discoveries in Air’, Philosophical Transactions, 65, 384–94. Priestman, Martin (1999) Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1730–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Profﬁtt, Edward (1980) ‘Science and Romanticism’, The Georgia Review, 34, 55–80. Reed, Edward (1997) From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). Rees, Abraham (1819) The Cyclopædia: or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Literature, with the assistance of eminent professional gentlemen, 39 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown). Rennell, Thomas (1819) Remarks on Scepticism, especially as it is connected with the subjects of organization and life. Being an answer to the views of M. Bichat, Sir T.C. Morgan and Mr. Lawrence upon these points (London: F.C. & J. Rivington). Richardson, Alan (2001) British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Ritson, Joseph (1802) An Essay on Abstinence from Animal food, as a Moral Duty (London: Richard Phillips). Roe, Nicholas (1994) ‘Coleridge and John Thelwall; Medical Science, Politics, and Poetry’, Coleridge Bulletin, 3, pages unnumbered. —— (1997) John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press). —— (1998) ‘“Atmospheric Air Itself”: Medical Science, Politics and Poetry in Thelwall, Coleridge and Wordsworth’, in 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads, ed. Richard Cronin (Basingstoke: Macmillan), pp. 185–202. ——, ed. (2001) Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Sciences of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

218 Bibliography Rolfe, W.D. (1985) ‘William and John Hunter: breaking the Great Chain of Being’, in William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World, ed. W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 297–322. Ross, Catherine E. (2003) ‘“Twin Labourers and Heirs of the Same Hopes”: The Professional Rivalry of Humphry Davy and William Wordsworth’, in Noah Heringman, ed., Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: State University of New York Press), pp. 23–52. Shaffer, Simon (1987) ‘Priestley and the Politics of Spirit’, in Science, Medicine and Dissent: Joseph Priestley (1773–1804), ed. R.G.W. Anderson and Christopher Lawrence (London: Wellcome Trust/Science Museum), pp. 39–53. Schoﬁeld, Robert E. (1963) The Lunar Society of Birmingham: A Social History of Provincial Science and Industry in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Scrivener, Michael (1982) Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (New Jersey: Princeton University Press). Sharrock, Roger (1962) ‘The Chemist and the Poet: Sir Humphry Davy and the Preface to Lyrical Ballads’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 17, 56–76. Shelley, Mary (1980–8) The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). —— (1993) Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text, ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). —— (1995) The Journals of Mary Shelley: 1814–1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press). Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1926–30) The Complete Works, ed. R. Ingpen and W.E. Peck, 10 vols (London and New York: Ernest Benn). —— (1954) Shelley’s Prose: or the Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque: The University of Mexico Press). ——, et al (1961–2002) Shelley and his Circle, 1773–1822, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron and D.H. Reiman, 10 vols (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press). —— (1964) The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. F.L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press). —— (1970) Shelley: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, corr. G.M. Matthews (Oxford: Clarendon Press). —— (1970) Shelley: Alastor, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais and Other Poems, ed. Peter Butter (London and Glasgow: Collins). —— (1986–2002) Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, ed. D.H. Reiman, 23 vols (New York and London). —— (1986) The Triumph of Life: A Facsimile of Shelley’s Holograph Draft, Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. c. 4, folio 18–58, ed. Donald Reiman, The Bodleian Shelley manuscripts, 23 vols (New York and London: Garland Publishing), I. —— (1987) Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 4, eds P.M.S. Dawson and Timothy Webb, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, 23 vols (New York and London: Garland Publishing), III. —— (1989) Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. d. 7, ed. Irving Massey, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, 23 vols (New York and London: Garland Publishing), II.

Bibliography 219 —— (1989–) The Poems of Shelley, ed. Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews, 3 vols (London and New York: Longman). —— (1990) The Julian and Maddalo Draft Notebook: Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 11, ed. Steven E. Jones, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, 23 vols (New York and London: Garland Publishing), XV. —— (1991) The Prometheus Bound Notebooks: A Facsimile of Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 1, e. 2, e. 3, ed. Neil Fraistat, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, 23 vols (New York and London: Garland Publishing), IX. —— (1992) Shelley’s Pisan Notebook (1820–21): Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 8, ed. Carlene A. Adamson, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, 23 vols (New York and London: Garland), VI. —— (1992) The Geneva Notebook: Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 16 and MS. Shelley adds. c. 4, Folios 63, 65, 71, and 72, ed. Michael Erkelenz, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, 23 vols (New York and London: Garland Publishing), XI. —— (1992) Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 14 and adds e. 19, ed. Tatsuo Tokoo, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, 23 vols (New York and London: Garland Publishing), XIII. —— (1992) Miscellaneous Poetry, Prose and Translations from Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. c.4, Folios 63, 65, 71, and 72, ed. E.B. Murray, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, 23 vols (New York and London: Garland Publishing), XXI. —— (1993) The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. E. B. Murray (Oxford: Clarendon Press). —— (1993) Shelley’s ‘Devils’ Notebook: Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 9, eds P.M.S. Dawson and Timothy Webb, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, 23 vols (New York and London: Garland Publishing), XIV. —— (1997) The Witch of Atlas Notebook: Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 6, ed. Carlene A. Adamson, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, 23 vols (New York and London: Garland Publishing), V. —— (1997) The Faust Translation Notebook: Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 18, eds Nora Crook and Timothy Webb, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, 23 vols (New York and London: Garland Publishing), XIX. —— (1997) Additional Materials in the Hand of Mary W. Shelley: Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. c. 5 and MS Shelley adds d. 6, ed. Alan M. Weinberg, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, 23 vols (New York and London: Garland Publishing), XXII. —— (2002) Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd edn, Norton Critical Edition (New York and London: W.W. Norton). [Shepherd, Mary] (1824) An Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect controverting the Doctrine of Mr. Hume, concerning the nature of that relation; with Observations upon the Opinions of Dr. Brown and Mr. Lawrence, connected with the same subject (London: T. Hookham). Simon, Peregrine (1996) ‘Lord Eldon and the Poets’, Keats–Shelley Review, 10, 243–67. Smellie, William (1790) The Philosophy of Natural History, 2 vols (Dublin: William Porter). Smith, James Edward (1788) ‘On the Irritability of Vegetables’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 78, 158–65. Snow, C.P. (1959) The Two Cultures and the Scientiﬁc Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

220 Bibliography Southey, Robert (1965) New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry, 2 vols (New York and London: Columbia University Press). St Clair, William (1989) The Godwins and the Shelleys (London: Faber & Faber). Stansﬁeld, Dorothy (1984) Thomas Beddoes, MD, 1760–1808: Chemist, Physician, Democrat (Holland: D. Reidel). Stinson, Daniel T. (1969) The Role of Sir William Lawrence in Nineteenth-Century English Surgery (Zurich: Juris Druck and Verlag). Temkin, Owsei (1977) The Double Face of Janus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Thelwall, John (1793) An Essay towards a Deﬁnition of Animal Vitality; read at the Theatre, Guy’s Hospital, January 26, 1793; in which several of the Opinions of The Celebrated John Hunter are Examined and Controverted (London: T. Rickaby). Thomas, Donald (1969) A Long time Burning: A History of Censorship in England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Thornton, John L. (1953) John Abernethy: A Biography (London: Printed by the Author). —— (1964) ‘John Abernethy 1764–1831’, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Journal, 72, 287–93. Trotter, Thomas (1804) An Essay, Medical, Philosophical, and Chemical on Drunkenness, and its Effects on the Human Body (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme). —— (1807) A View of the Nervous Temperament; being a practical enquiry into the increasing prevalence, prevention, and treatment of those diseases commonly called nervous, billious, stomach and liver complaints; indigestion; low spirits; gout &c. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme). Tweedy, Roderick Sebastian (1996) ‘The Visionary Mechanic: Shelley’s early philosophy of nature’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford). Uglow, Jenny (2002) The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made The Future (London: Faber). Walker, Adam (1766) Analysis of a Course of Lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy (Kendal: Printed and Sold by the Author). —— (1802) A System of Familiar Philosophy: In Twelve Lectures; Being the Course of Lectures Usually Read by Mr. A. Walker, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: G. Kearsley). —— (1807) Analysis of a Course of Lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy (London: J. Barﬁeld). Walls, E.W., ‘John Bell, 1763–1820’, Medical History, 8 (1964), 63–9. Wasserman, Earl (1971) Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press). Wheatley, Kim (1999) Shelley and His Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press). Webb, Timothy (1983) ‘The Unascended Heaven: Negatives in Prometheus Unbound’, in Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference, ed. Kelvin Everest (Leicester: Leicester University Press), pp. 37–62. Wetzels, Walter D. (1971) ‘Aspects of Natural Science in German Romanticism’, Studies in Romanticism, 10, 44–59. Whitehead, A.N. (1925) Science and the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Willett, Alfred (1910) ‘The Surgical Side of the Hospital Fifty Years Ago’, St Bartholomew’s Journal, 18, p. 3.

Bibliography 221 Williams, David Innes (1994) ‘Portraits of a Confrontation: Abernethy and Lawrence’, Annals of The Royal College of Surgeons of England (Supplement), 76, 14–17. Wimsatt, W.K. (1954) The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press). Woolfson, Susan (1995) ‘Keats Enters History: Autopsy, Adonais, and the fame of Keats’, in Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 17–45. Wordsworth, William (1969) Wordsworth: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press). —— (1974) The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W.J.B. Owen and J.W. Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press). —— (1984) William Wordsworth: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Wylie, Ian (1989) Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Wyndham, H. Saxe (1940) William Lambe, M.D.: A Memoir (London: London Vegetarian Society). Zall, Paul M. (1953) ‘Lord Eldon’s Censorship’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 68, 436–43.

Index Abernethy, John: idea of sympathy, 43, 48, 84, 90, 123, 168; Enquiry, 41–5, 62, 159; Hunterian Oration, 64, 193n., 194n.; Physiological Lectures, 51–6, 58, 62, 149, 188n.; Surgical Observation on the Constitutional Origin and Treatment of Local Diseases, 83–5, 93, 165 Abrams, M.H., 25, 144 Adamson, Carlene, 95, 201n. Addison, Joseph, 135 Agriculture, 95–101 Albert, Queen’s consort, 73 Alcohol, 21, 93, 101 Aldini, Giovanni, 4, 169–70, 206n. America, 61, 71, 195n. Anatomy Act (1832), 194n. Animal Chemistry Society, 38 Animal cruelty (also animal rights), 4, 94–5, 182; vivisection, 192n. Animal life, see Life Annual Register, The, 75 Apothecaries Act (1815), 78 Arasse, Daniel, 169 Aristotle, 67 Armstrong, Isabel, 202n. Assimilation, 143–4, 163–5, 181 Astronomy, 101, 102, 175 Atheism, 3, 15–23, 25, 29, 31, 35, 36, 49, 52, 55, 58, 61, 66, 68, 84, 87, 176, 182 Babington, William, 38 Barbauld, Anna, 4 Barclay, John, 18, 67–8, 194n. Barker-Benﬁeld, Bruce, 199n. Barrett-Browning, Elizabeth, 173 Barthes, Roland, 170 Beddoes, Thomas, 5, 10, 22, 25, 34–7, 118, 124, 128, 183, 190n., 191n. Bell, Charles, 18, 51, 56, 66, 194n., 207n. Bell, Dr John, 170, 207n. Bellamy, John, 187n. Benbow, William, 69, 104; Rambler’s Magazine, 69

Bennett, Andrew, 8, 157, 160, 171, 202n. Bewell, Alan, 5, 138, 140 Bichat, Xavier, 13, 49, 64, 66, 121–2, 146, 151, 159, 192n. Biology (deﬁnition of), 24 Blasphemous and Seditious Libels Act (1819), 57 Blasphemy, 6, 20, 46, 49, 55, 57, 58, 59, 69–70 Blicke, Charles, 6, 38 Blizzard, William, 6 Blood, 4, 16, 31, 32, 37, 40, 63, 80, 107, 111–30 passim, 159, 171, 173, 203n.; circulation of, 9, 121, 126, 155 Blumenbach, J.F., 39, 63 Botany, 26 Boulton, Matthew, 31–2 Bowdler, Thomas, 193n. Brain, 4, 28, 30, 36, 37, 41, 49, 63, 84, 100, 111, 142, 152–3 Brande, William Thomas, 38 Breath; breathing, see Respiration and Lungs Bridewell and Bethlem Hospitals, 19, 39, 65, 71–2 Bristol, 34–7 British Association for the Advancement of Science, 186n. British constitution, 52–5 British Critic, The, 37 British government (see also Liverpool’s and Pitt–Grenville’s governments), 19, 35, 52, 55, 57, 60, 67, 144, 183 Brodie, Benjamin, 38 Brown, John, 35, 159, 191n. Brown, Thomas, 68, 106, 206n. Burke, Edmund, 17, 29, 53, 109 Butler, Marilyn, 6, 12, 21, 52, 75–6, 104, 187n., 194n. Butter, Peter, 102, 130, 181, 196n. Bynum, W.F., 191n. Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 6, 20, 21, 25, 38, 52, 69–70, 90–2 passim, 104, 168, 192n., 195n.

222

Index 223 Cabanis, Pierre Jean Georges, 125, 204n. Callow, J. (publisher), 104, 198n. Carbon (ﬁxed air), 26, 29, 97–100, 127–8, 130 Caloric, 36 Cameron, Kenneth Neill, 76 Carlile, Richard, 20, 21, 51, 58, 69, 71, 104, 143, 168–9, 187n., 188n., 193n.; The Republican, 71, 194n., 195n.; Address to the Men of Science, 71, 143, 169 Carlisle, Anthony, 51, 56, 88, 199n. Cavallo, Tiberius, 82, 118, 124, 130, 191n., 198n. Cavendish, Henry, 38 Chain of being, 41, 47, 48, 79, 118, 134 Chancery Court, 69, 79, 195n. Chapter Coffee House, 32 Chelsea Hospital, 40 Chemistry (see also Life), 14, 25, 26, 29, 30, 37, 49; organic chemistry, 95–101; chemical apparatus (see also Shelley’s chemical apparatus), 4, 29, 139 Chernaik, Judith, 143, 202n. Christianity, 36, 66–7, 70–2, 176 Christ’s Hospital, 39 Clairmont, Claire, 2, 87, 95, 133, 204n. Clark, Timothy, 132, 141, 182, 204n. Clarke, William, 194n. Cline, Henry, 77, 88 Cobbett, William, 51, 57, 58, 69, 187n. 194n.; Political Register, 69 Coleman, William, 25 Colbert, Ben, 207n. Coleridge, J.T., 104 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 3, 5, 6, 25, 27, 28, 34, 35, 37, 51, 52, 88, 144, 164, 183–4, 186n., 191n., 192n., 193n. Comparative anatomy, 40, 46, 56, 60, 64, 95, 153 Conspiracy, charges of, 57, 58 Consumption, 34, 91–2 Cooper, Astley, 51, 56, 72, 73 Copernicus, 176 Copyright, 69–71 Craig, Tina, 197n. Crauford, Mr (?Adair Crawford), 32 Criminal Court (Old Bailey), 17, 53, 62 Crook, Nora, 76, 91, 92, 135, 191n., 196n., 198n., 200n.

Crosland, Maurice, 189n. Crouch, Laura E., 190n. Cuvier, Georges, 13, 49, 64, 149, 176–8, 207n., 208n. Dante, 166, 179, 204n. Darwin, Charles, 59, 64; Origin of Species, 16 Darwin, Erasmus, 5, 10, 16, 22, 24, 29–31, 34, 35, 75, 102, 105, 130, 134, 136, 150, 157, 175, 181, 183, 193n., 204n., 206n.; Botanic Garden, 29; Temple of Nature, 29, 30, 31, 35, 150, 157, 190n.; Zoonomia, 29, 30, 31 Davy, Humphry, 5, 10, 12, 14, 34–8, 43, 52, 75, 88, 95–101, 114, 118, 124, 127–8, 168–70, 183–4, 191n., 192n., 204n.; Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, 34, 95–101, 127–8, 181, 190n., 201n.; Elements of Chemistry, 12, 23, 34; ‘Experimental essays’, 36–7 Davy, Jane, Lady, 38, 168, 192n. Dawson, Paul, 112, 140, 153, 182 de Almeida, Hermione, 6, 111 de Boinville, Alfred, 87 de Boinville, Harriet, 87–95 passim, 141 de Buffon, George Louis Leclerc, Compte, 177, 208n. de Fontenelle, Bernard, 135 de Laplace, Pierre Simon, Marquis, 145, 178, 208n. Desmond, Adrian, 51, 56, 193n., 195n., 196n. D’Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron, 146 Diet (see also Stomach and Digestion), 39, 83–4, 93–4, 165 Digestion (see also Stomach and Diet), 47, 84, 106, 134, 155, 158, 164 Disease, 22, 35, 48, 80, 84, 104, 111, 123–4, 126, 154, 157, 160 Dissection, 5, 16, 63, 64, 71, 195n. D’Oyly, George (see also Quarterly Review), 46, 66–7, 107, 192n. Drummond, Sir William, 21, 66, 106–7, 151, 155, 202n. Dugdale, William (publisher), 70 Edgeworth, Maria, 193n. Edgeworth, Richard Lovell, 35 Edinburgh Medical Review, 70 Edinburgh Review, 8, 11, 44, 45, 76

224 Index Eldon, Chancellor, 6, 18, 20, 58, 69–72, 151, 194n., 195n. Electrical instruments (also Voltaic pile, Leyden phial, Leyden jar), 29, 37, 44, 74–5, 116, 196n. Electricity (see also Galvanism, Magnetism and Mesmerism), 4, 12, 13–15, 23, 32, 43–4, 50, 103, 110–17, 126, 128, 130, 137, 155, 166–70 passim, 179 Empiricism, 9, 19, 22, 23, 43, 49, 56, 185; as opposed to analogy, 9, 19, 49, 153 Encyclopédie, 149 Eton (see also Shelley at), 31 Everest, Kelvin, 91, 102–5 passim, 113, 114, 122, 129, 135, 172–4, 177, 181, 201n., 203n., 204n., 205n., 208n. Examiner, The, 193n. Excitability, 35 Eygpt, 36 Eyre, Lord Chief Justice, 195n. Fara, Patricia, 5 Figlio, Karl M., 132 Forster, Thomas, 20–1, 22, 68, 90–5, 135, 141–2, 194n.; Illustrations of the Atmospherical Origin of Epidemic Disorders of Health, 92–3, 200n.; Philozia, 90; Philostratus (pseudonym), 94; Physiological Reﬂections on the Destructive Operation of Spiritous and Fermented Liquors on the Animal System, 93, 200n.; Recueil des Ouvrages et des Pensées d’un Physicien et Metaphysicien, 200n.; Researches About Atmospheric Phænomena, 91, 124, 200n.; Somatopsychonoologia, 68, 91, 94, 141–2 Fossils, 176–8, 207n. France (see also Encyclopédie), 34; materialism, 11, 13, 49, 51, 54, 62, 89, 152, 191n.; physiology, 13, 17–19, 66, 191n., 192n.; revolution, 2, 4, 16, 19, 29, 35, 38, 169; government, 49; people, 18, 54–5 Franklin, Benjamin, 123, 183 Freccero, John, 179 Future state (also immortality), 17, 55–6, 68, 70, 153–6, 161, 165, 185; ‘posthumous life’, 168–74

Gagging Acts, 19, 37, 57 Galen, 56 Galileo, 20, 71, 195n. Gall, F.J., 53 Galvani, Luigi,12, 111, 170 Galvanism, 14, 36, 50; galvanic instruments (also trough; machine; galvanic battery; galvanic pile) (see also Chemistry), 37, 74–5, 88, 192n., 202n. Gaull, Marilyn, 3, 5 Generation, see Reproduction Genius, ideas of, 23, 168–9 Gentleman’s Magazine, 35, 75 Geology, 101, 102, 174–8 George III, King of England, 49, 144 George, Prince Regent, 88 Germany, 35, 60 Gigante, Denise, 6 God (also Design), 4, 16, 17, 25, 27, 28, 29, 41, 55, 56, 66, 84, 136, 153, 170, 171, 184 Godwin, Mary-Jane, 87 Godwin, William, 22, 37, 86–92, 95, 123, 132, 135, 140, 154, 191n.; Caleb Williams, 159, 199n. Golinski, Jan, 5 Goodﬁeld-Toulmin, June, 182 Grabo, Carl, 95, 102, 125–6, 130, 181, 185, 196n., 203n., 204n. Grainger, Frederick, 85, 198n. Grave robbing, 5 Greece, 60 Green, Joseph Henry, 51, 193n. Grifﬁn, J. (publisher), 69 Grinﬁeld, Edward William, 18, 67–8, 70, 194n. Grove, Charles, 76–83, 92, 196n., 197n. Grove, Charlotte, 80, 198n. Grove, Harriet, 77 Grove, John, 22, 77–83, 92, 196n., 197n., 198n. Grove, Tom, 197n. Guiccioli, Teresa, 38 Guiton, Derek, 76, 91, 92, 135, 191n., 196n., 198n., 200n. Guy’s Hospital , 27, 197n. Habeas Corpus, suspension of, 57 Hales, Stephen, 26, 100 Hamilton, Paul, 10, 22, 142, 148, 151, 152

Index 225 Hartley, David, 25, 184 Harvey, Ludford, 80–1, 197n., 200n. Harvey, William, 67 Hatchett, Charles, 38 Hawkins, Desmond, 196n., 199n. Hazlitt, William, 135–6 Heart, 121, 123, 127, 129, 159, 173 Heringman, Noah, 5, 183 Herschel, William, 208n. Hitchener, Elizabeth, 77, 131 Hogg, Thomas Jefferson, 74, 77, 79, 83, 89–91 passim, 94, 133, 170, 196n., 197n., 200n., 205n. Hogle, Jerrold, 174, 206n. Holmes, Richard, 135, 194n. Home, Everard, 38 Hone, William, 20, 21, 51, 58, 65, 187n., 188n. Hookham (?Thomas), 90 Hookham, Thomas, 88, 204n. Humane Society, 149, 169–70 Hume, David, 63, 68, 135, 149 Hunt, Henry, 57, 58 Hunt, Leigh, 193n., 198n. Hunt, Thornton, 76, 79 Hunter, John, 6, 10, 12, 13, 18, 39, 40–5, 50, 52, 64, 67, 107, 114, 118, 123, 158–9, 192n. Hunter, William, 40 Hutton, James, 16, 174–7 Hydrogen (inﬂammable air), 27, 75, 130–1, 204n. Illness (see also disease; and Shelley’s illnesses), 39, 88, 123, 152 Inﬂammation, 47 Insects, 70, 80, 122, 126–7, 134 Intelligence, see Mind Irritability, 23, 33, 47, 56, 100, 122, 132–4, 156, 169–70 Italy (see also Shelley in), 35; Rome, 60 Jacyna, L.S., 182 Jones, Christopher B., 204n. Jones, Vivien, 199n. Jordanova, Ludmilla, 145, 170 Joukovsky, Nicholas A., 200n. Kant, Immanuel, 63 Kapstein, Israel James, 125 Keats, John, 6, 78, 157, 170–2, 177, 197n. Keir, Dr (?James), 32

Keir, James, 191n. Kenyon-Jones, Christine, 207n., 208n. Kerr, George, 65, 194n. King-Hele, Desmond, 29, 102–3, 113, 181, 189n., 196n. Kitson, Peter, 63 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 36, 152, 191n., 193n. Lamb, Charles, 51, 88 Lambe, Dr William, 21, 76, 87–95, 165, 198n., 200n. Lancet, 51, 73, 194n., 195n., 196n. Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent, 26, 27, 36 Lawrence, James, Chevalier, 199n. Lawrence, Thomas, 199n. Lawrence, Sir William, translation of A Short System of Comparative Anatomy, 39; A Treatise on Ruptures, 39; translation of Description of the Arteries of the Human Body, 39; Introduction, 13, 20, 45–50, 51, 65, 71, 138–9, 149–50, 156, 198n.; Lectures, 20, 49, 53, 56–72, 82, 104–7, 143, 152–3, 155, 188n., 189n., 194n., 195n., 198n., 199n., 203n., pirated editions of, 69–71, 104–5; article ‘Life’, in Abraham Rees, Cyclopædia, 64–65, 109, 121, 146; article ‘Man’, in Abraham Rees, Cyclopædia, 194n. Leask, Nigel, 112 Leavis, F.R., 163–4, 205n. Leighton, Angela, 202n., 203n. Levere, Trevor, 6, 190n., 191n. Leviticus, 192n. Libel Act (1819), 57 Life (or vitality), ability to resist chemical decomposition or chemical afﬁnity and comparison with vegetables and plants in this respect, 30, 33–4, 41, 46, 47, 61, 84, 101, 107, 158–9; compared with death, 4, 7, 8–9, 11, 13, 41–2, 46, 47, 97, 120; compared with the inorganic, 13, 46, 48, 49, 99; comparisons made between humans, animals, vegetables and plants, 3, 4, 96–7, 100, 103, 107–8, 121–2, 129, 133–4, 136, 137, 159; the animate compared with the inanimate, 25, 33, 101, 136

226 Index Lightning, 33, 166–7, 184 Lind, Dr James (1736–1812), 82, 191n. Lind, James (1716–94), 82 Linnaeus, Carolus, 100 Liverpool’s government, 52, 57 Logan, Peter Melville, 135 London Inﬁrmary for Diseases of the Eye (Moorﬁeld’s Hospital), 39 Long, William, 77, 80, 81 Longevity, 36, 48, 88 Lucretius, 7, 29, 31, 35, 49, 113, 140, 143, 157, 172, 192n. Luke Jnr, Hugh J., 80, 188n. Lunar Society, 24, 29, 31–2, 35, 191n. Lungs (see also Respiration), 26, 27, 32, 37, 92, 113, 129 Magistrate Court (Bow Street), 17, 53, 62 Magnetism (see also Electricity and Galvanism), 5, 14, 43, 50, 166, 168, 193n. Malthus, Thomas, 2, 95, 184 Maniquis, Robert M., 205n. Manure, 96–8 Marshall, Tim, 194n. Matthews, Geoffrey, 75, 91, 102–5 passim, 113, 114, 122, 129, 135, 138, 147, 176, 177, 181–2, 185, 201n., 203n., 204n., 205n. Mayow, John, 34 McCalman, Iain, 194n. McGann, Jerome, 147, 172 Medical and Philosophical Society, see St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medico-Chirurgical Society, 200n. Medwin, Thomas, 74, 77–8, 80, 111, 196n., 197n. Mental illness (also injuries or diseases of the mind or brain), 28, 36, 154 Mesmer, Anton, 111 Mesmerism, 23, 103, 111–14, 137, 202n. Metropolitan Magazine, 172 Miller, David Philip, 5 Milton, John, 2; Paradise Lost, 64, 115, 206n. Mimosa (also sensitive plant; see also Shelley’s poem ‘The Sensitive Plant’), 134, 136, 205n. Mind (also intelligence), 6, 15–17, 22, 25, 28, 42, 43, 45, 53, 60–1, 94, 137

Mineral, 25, 30, 86 Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord, 64, 122 Monthly Magazine, 20, 65, 71, 195n. Morgan, Lady (Sydney Owenson), 20, 65 Morgan, Sir Thomas Charles, 20, 65, 140, 150–1, 155 Morton, Timothy, 76, 182, 198n. Mudford, Peter G., 16, 63, 194n. Mullen, John, 135 Murray, Adolphus, 39 Murray, John, 69 Muscles, 9, 31, 37, 41, 42, 43, 55, 85, 169 Nationalism, 17–18, 54–5, 57, 60, 66, 132, 182 Nerves, 4, 9, 30, 36, 37, 41, 43, 55, 100, 107, 126, 135, 159 Neve, Michael, 192n. New Criticism, 172–3 Newton, Cornelia (née Collins), 87–95 passim, 200n. Newton, John Frank, 21, 76, 83, 87–95 passim, 198n. Nitrous oxide, 36–7, 126–8, 204n. Nugent, Catherine, 197n. Organization, as a theory of life, 10, 11, 12, 13, 35, 40–63, 66, 72, 97, 132, 141, 154 Ovid, 93, 94 Owen, Robert Dale, 195n. Owenson, Sydney, see Morgan, Lady Oxygen (vital or pure air), 4, 26, 27, 32, 36–7, 50, 98–100, 107, 118, 127, 129, 158, 204n. Oyster, 4, 70, 80 Paine, Thomas, 21, 58, 135 Paley, William, 67 Palmer, Elihu, 58 Pantheism, 3 Parkinson, James, 177–8, 208n. Peacock, Thomas Love, 20, 22, 89, 90, 92, 101, 167, 208n. Pemberton, Dr Christopher, 91 Perception, 37, 42, 43, 56, 97, 133, 154 Peterloo, 19, 57 Petrarch, 179 Philosophical Transactions, 26, 158 Philostratus, see Forster, Thomas Philp, Mark, 199n.

Index 227 Phrenology, 53, 91 Pite, Ralph, 180 Pitt–Grenville government, 37 Place, Francis, 90 Plant life, see Life Plato, 21, 146 Playfair, John , 32, 176 Pneumatic Institute (at Clifton, Bristol), 5, 34–7 Polidori, Dr John William, 200n. Polyp, 8, 133 Pope, Alexander, 15 Porter, Roy, 202n., 206n. Potatoes, 95–6, 101 Pott, Percival, 6, 39 Premature burial, fears of, 5, 169 Priestley, Joseph, 4, 5, 10, 12, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26–9, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 70, 75, 118, 182–3, 195n., 204n. Priestman, Martin, 29, 192n. Pringle, Sir John, 26–7 Profﬁtt, Edward, 184 Pythagoras, 93 Quarterly Review (see also D’Oyly; George), 6, 11, 18, 23, 63, 66–7, 70, 76, 104, 186n., 187n., 195n. Radical Triumvirate, The, 20 Reed, Edward, 206n. Reill, Peter Hans, 5 Reiman, Donald, 136, 138 Rennell, Thomas, 18, 66, 68, 70, 150–1, 192n., 195n. Reproduction (generation), 47, 97, 117, 134, 179 Republicanism, 36, 52, 53, 60, 68, 110 Respiration (also breathing and breath; see also Lungs), 26, 30, 36, 47, 98–100, 104, 106, 110, 118, 123–7 passim, 134, 136, 155, 159, 160, 204n. Resurrection (also resuscitation), 5, 160, 169–70 Richardson, Alan, 29, 189n., 192n., 206n. Richardson, Samuel, 135 Rickman, John, 192n. Ritson, Joseph, 94 Roe, Nicholas, 2, 6, 27, 189n., 197n. Roget, P.M., 34 Ross, Catherine E., 191n. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (also Rousseaean), 53, 64, 95, 179–80, 204n.

Royal College of Surgeons, 10, 11, 16, 21, 38–63 passim, 66, 72, 73, 77, 78, 91, 182, 195n. Royal Institution, 5, 14, 37–8, 95 Royal Society, 26, 38, 39, 191n. St Bartholomew’s Hospital, 6, 10, 22, 38–63 passim, 73, 74–86 passim, 197n., 200n.; Medical and Philosophical Society at, 82 St Clair, William, 199n. St George’s Hospital, 40 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Von, 191n. Scrivener, Michael, 153 Searle, Samantha, 200n. Secretion, 47 Sedition, 6, 20, 37, 46, 55, 57, 58, 69, 191n. Seditious Meetings Act (1817), 57 Sensibility, 23, 47, 48, 122, 132–8, 154, 156, 169 Severn, Joseph, 171 Shakespeare, William, 184, 193n.; Hamlet, 14, 49, 50, 55; Othello, 193n.; Richard III, 177 Sharrock, Roger, 191n. Shelley, Elizabeth (Shelley’s sister), 196n., 197n. Shelley, Harriet (née Westbrook), 74–7 passim, 82–3, 197n., 200n. Shelley, Mary, (née Wollstonecraft Godwin), 6, 25, 76, 87–8, 91, 102, 112, 124, 190n., 200n., 204n.; Frankenstein, 6, 8, 12, 21, 75–6, 79, 190n., 198n., 202n. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, scientiﬁc apparatus, 6, 74, 88, 196n; interest in chemistry, 23, 74–6, 96, 102, 196n.; interest in organic chemistry, 95–101; interest in agriculture, 95–101, 201n.; at Eton, 31, 82; at Syon House, 13; at Oxford, 74, 76–7, 196n.; in London, 8, 21, 22, 74–95 passim; Bracknell, 21, 74–96 passim; the ‘Bracknell circle’, 7, 86–95; York, 83; Marlow, 79, 91; Italy, 7, 92, 96, 134; illnesses, 2, 76, 92, 135–6, 152, 200n.; vegetarianism, 76, 86–95, 199n. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, works: A Defence of Poetry, 12, 23, 136, 147, 163–8, 174–5, 181, 187n., 203n., 208n.; A Philosophical View of

228 Index Shelley, Percy Bysshe, works continued: Reform, 201n.; A Refutation of Deism, 9, 105, 141, 153, 205n.; ‘A Tale of Society as it is, From facts, 1811’, 203n.; A Vindication of a Natural Diet, 83, 104, 198n.; Adonais, 21, 23, 138, 142, 157–74 passim, 206n.; Alastor, 21; The Cenci, 203n.; ‘The Cloud’, 23, 143; ‘England in 1819’, 152; ‘Essay on a Future State’ (see also Future state), 22, 153–6; ‘Essay on the Vegetable System of Diet’, 80, 84, 93; Genevra, 147; ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, 148; Laon and Cythna, 91, 104, 147; ‘Lift not the Painted Veil’, 3, 21, 23, 147, 151, 160; ‘The Magnetic Lady to her Patient’, 111, 137; ‘Merenghi’, 180; ‘Mont Blanc’, 147, 148, 151; ‘Mutability’, 23, 142–3; ‘Ode to the West Wind’, 7, 8, 10, 101, 143, 166, 171, 183; ‘On Life’, 1, 12, 21, 141–2, 144, 147, 148–9, 151, 152, 155, 156, 165–7, 175; ‘On Love’, 148, 203n.; ‘On the Devil and Devils’, 108, 207n., 208n.; ‘On the Punishment of Death’, 21, 22; ‘Ozymandias’, 144, 152, 173–4; Peter Bell the Third, 146; ‘Prince Athanase’, 180, 208n.; Prometheus Unbound, 10, 17, 21, 23, 97, 99, 102–31, 138, 139–40, 143–4, 145, 147–8, 166–7, 172, 174–9, 181, 183–5, 201n., 204n., 208n.; Queen Mab, 95, 102, 105, 122, 134–5, 141, 170, 194n., 197n.; Rosalind and Helen; 203n.; ‘The Sensitive Plant’, 21, 23, 134–8, 140, 152; ‘Sonnet, to the Republic of Benevento’, 109–10; ‘To Constantia’, 110–11, 117, 137; ‘The Triumph of Life’, 2, 3, 21, 179–80; Una Favola, 3, 146–7; ‘The Witch of Atlas’, 139; ‘The Woodman and the Nightingale’, 180; Shelley, Timothy (Shelley’s father), 77, 197n. Shepherd, Mary, Lady, 18, 68, 194n. Simon, Peregrine, 194n. Slavery, 63, 95, 101 Smellie, William, 7, 10, 133–4, 136, 204n. Smith, James (publisher), 69–70, 79–80, 194n. Smith, James Edward (naturalist), 134

Smith, Thomas Southwood, 51 Snow, C.P., 5 Society for the Suppression of Vice, 69 Solar microscope (also microscope), 74, 88, 196n Soul (also spirit), 4, 6, 8, 15, 28, 36, 43, 49, 51, 53, 55, 56, 62–3, 68, 70–71, 84–5, 87, 106, 153, 193n. Southey, Robert, 20, 34, 35, 37, 51, 69–70, 88, 191n., 192n., 194n. Spurzheim, J.G., 53, 91, 200n. Sterne, Lawrence, 135 Stomach (see also Diet and Digestion), 21, 43, 84–5, 92, 158 Sugar, 101, 201n. Syon House (see also Shelley at), 31 Tasso, 171, 204n., 208n. Temkin, Owsei, 182, 188n. Thelwall, John, 4, 6, 27 Thornton, John L., 194n. Tighe, George William, 95 Times, The, 70, 195n. Treason, 55, 57 Treasonable and Seditious Practices Act (1795), 57 Treviranus, Gottfried Reinhold, 189n. Trotter, Thomas, 88, 135 Turner, Cornelia (née de Boinville), 87–95 passim Turner, Thomas, 87 Tweedy, Roderick, 32, 190n. Uglow, Jenny, 5 Vegetable life, see Life Vegetarianism (see also Shelley’s vegetarianism), 21, 76, 86–95, 128, 182 Veins (also vascular system), 100, 121, 128, 201n. Victoria, Queen of England, 73 Volcanoes, 44, 102, 123, 175–6, 184, 203n. Wakley, Thomas, 51, 56, 73, 194n. Walker, Adam, 12, 24, 31–4, 74, 107, 110, 117, 118, 124, 125, 128–30, 134, 136, 166–7, 196n, 204n.; Analysis of a Course of Lectures, 32–3, 129, 190n.; A System of Familiar Philosophy, 32–4, 110, 117, 130, 134, 190n. Walls, E.W., 207n.

Index 229 Wasserman, Earl, 136, 203n. Watt, James, 31, 35 Webb, Timothy, 114, 206n. Wedgwood, Josiah, 32 Wedgwood, Mr (?Thomas), 32 Wedgwood, Thomas, 35 Wernerian Society (Edinburgh), 91 West Indies, 63 Westbrook, Eliza, 75, 88 Wheatley, Kim, 203n. Whitehead, A.N., 196n. Whitehurst, Mr (?John), 32

Williams, Jane, 112 Withering, William, 32, 35 Wolcot, John (Peter Pindar), 70, 195n. Wollstonecraft, Mary, 88 Wordsworth, William, 2, 3, 28, 37, 146, 184; Lyrical Ballads, 37; Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 12, 187n., 191n Wright, Joseph (of Derby), 4 Wylie, Ian, 5, 6, 27, 158, 183 Wyndham, H. Saxe, 94