The radical, working-class political movements of the nineteenth century found Percy Shelley’s work quite useful. His poetry was quoted, reprinted, and set to song by Chartists in the 1840s and 1850s and by socialists near the century’s close. These activists selected a particular version of Shelley. They memorised, shared, and reprinted the poems – like Queen Mab, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, and ‘Song: To the Men of England’ – that were, on the one hand, most available and affordable, and, on the other hand, most conducive to collective political action. Chartist editors, political orators, and socialist songwriters all strategically excerpted these poems, avoiding Shelley’s profound reservations about revolutionary action and transforming his work to serve their own political purposes. Across the nineteenth century, working-class activists collaboratively constructed a Shelley of their own.

Conservative reviewers berated Percy Shelley for his political radicalism, his opposition to religious orthodoxy, and his alleged personal immorality. The Tory Quarterly Review subjected Shelley to violent personal attacks, to which he responded in Prometheus Unbound and Adonais. In 1821, pirate editions of Queen Mab provoked some of Shelley’s most vituperative and partisan reviews. Nevertheless, even politically antagonistic reviewers acknowledged the aesthetic merits of Shelley’s poetry. Moreover, positive and negative reviews alike registered the originality of his stylistic innovations and experiments with poetic form. Many of the passages quoted by hostile reviewers as evidence of Shelley’s allegedly incomprehensible diction include striking examples of his distinctive figurative language. In perceptive articles by John Gibson Lockhart, the Tory Blackwood’s Magazine defended Shelley’s poetry while condemning his political principles. Meanwhile, Leigh Hunt consistently defended Shelley in the pro-reform Examiner. Eventually, the elegiac reception of Adonais fed into the posthumous mythologising of Shelley.

This chapter examines Shelley’s engagement with early-nineteenth-century science. It explores Shelley’s interest in chemistry at Oxford, his interest in contemporary developments in science (such as galvanism), and his reading of canonical and contemporary writers in science. Humphry Davy, the foremost man of science in Britain in the early nineteenth century, emerges as an important contemporary influence on Shelley; this chapter discusses the influence of Davy’s Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812) and Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (1813) on Shelley’s writing, specifically in Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 6, Queen Mab (1813), and ‘The Cloud’ (1820).