Shelley's Ghost

The pamphlet that got Shelley and Hogg expelled was printed in Sussex, but was soon on sale in Oxford. Shelley personally set out copies of it in the window of the High-Street booksellers Slatter & Munday, at sixpence each. According to the traditional story, a passing don spotted them in the window, and after reading the pamphlet demanded that the stock be burnt at the back of the shop. Surviving copies are now extremely scarce.

Shelley maintains that the necessary proofs for Christianity do not exist. He presents his arguments in an abbreviated and strictly logical fashion which some readers found insufferably arrogant. The final ‘Q.E.D.’ was the last straw.

 Shelley gave this copy of The Necessity of Atheism, ‘the only one I have’, to his publisher friend Thomas Hookham, who bound it together with three other early Shelley pamphlets: A Letter to Lord Ellenborough (1812; one of only two known copies), An Address, to the Irish People (1812), and Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists (1812). Hookham gave the volume to the poet’s son Sir Percy Shelley in 1856.