Shelley's Ghost

Shelley published this sixteen-page pamphlet in March 1817, as by ‘The Hermit of Marlow’ (Marlow, a town on the Thames, was his current address). It called for a meeting to be held at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in London to plan a referendum on parliamentary reform. The tone is moderate. Shelley argues not for a revolution that would bring, all at once, universal male suffrage and the abolition of the monarchy and aristocracy, but for ‘many gradations of improvement’.

These are the proof sheets of the pamphlet, containing Shelley’s manuscript corrections, additions, and, on the title page, sketches of trees. It was once owned by Leigh Hunt, who described it in the preface to his edition of The Masque of Anarchy (1832):

The title-page of the proof is scrawled over with sketches of trees and foliage, which was a habit of his in the intervals of thinking, whenever he had pen or pencil in hand. He would indulge in it while waiting for you at an inn, or in a door-way, scratching his elms and oak-trees on the walls … But it is worth observing how agreeably this habit of sketching trees and bowers evinced the gentleness of my friend’s nature, the longing he had for rest, and the smallness of his personal desires.