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From Citation to Recitation: Shelley’s “Men of England”

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Remaking Romanticism

Abstract

Chapter 5 argues that the radical repurposing of texts influenced the operations of nineteenth-century poetry more broadly, with an added attention to the effects of recitation. Shelley’s “Song: To the Men of England,” with its ringing call for action and its marching rhythm, was regularly put to use by Chartists and Socialists alike. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the poem was so regularly recited by radical speakers that by the late nineteenth century the poem’s most famous stanza was appearing in quotation anthologies, grammar books, and elocution manuals. This powerful poem about working-class exploitation entered the canon because of its fame in radical circles.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See my Chapter 3, for Gilmartin’s claim that “Radical weeklies were saturated with speeches and debates” (Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 30) and Robert Southey’s contemporary worry that radical papers were “read aloud in tap-rooms and pot-houses to believing auditors” (“Essay IV,” 1:120). David Worrall’s “Mab and Mob: The Radical Press Community in Regency England” (in Romanticism, Radicalism, and the Press. Ed. Stephen Behrendt [Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997], 137–156) examines the reports of British government spies in the 18teens, recording the rampant reading aloud of radical texts.

  2. 2.

    I discuss these songbooks in detail below; my thanks to Chris Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 107–111, for alerting me to the presence of Shelley’s poems in these collections. Socialist songbooks were many, from Edward Carpenter’s oft-reprinted Chants of Labor to collections published by small, local socialist organizations. “These songbooks,” according to Waters, “shared the goal of fashioning a general literary and musical culture for the socialist movement” (107).

  3. 3.

    English Lyrics (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1885). Hathi Trust Digital Library. Web. July 11, 2016, 249–251; J. K. Hoyt (ed.), Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations: English, Latin, and Modern Foreign Languages (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1896), 152; Samuel Silas Curry, Lessons in Vocal Expression (Boston: The Expression Company, 1895), 91.

  4. 4.

    Catherine Robson, Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

  5. 5.

    This poem appeared under a number of slightly different titles. Reiman and Fraistat use “To a Sky-Lark” in their Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New York: Norton, 2002, 304–307). Various titles used throughout the century include “To a Skylark,” “The Skylark,” “Ode to a Skylark,” etc. I have tried to use the version of the title employed by the edition I am discussing at the time.

  6. 6.

    Virginia Woolf, “‘Not one of us’ [Review of Shelley: His Life and Work].” 1927. In The Death of the Moth and other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1942), 119–120.

  7. 7.

    Elizabeth Miller, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 151.

  8. 8.

    Miller, Slow Print, 150.

  9. 9.

    Qtd. in Miller, Slow Print, 156.

  10. 10.

    Miller, Slow Print,156.

  11. 11.

    Matthew Arnold, “Byron.” In The Works of Matthew Arnold in Fifteen Volumes. Vol. IV (London: Macmillan & Co, 1903), 150.

  12. 12.

    Mary Favret, “Mary Shelley’s Sympathy and Irony: The Editor and her Corpus.” In The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein. Ed. Audrey Fisch, Anne Mellor, and Esther Schor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 17–38.

  13. 13.

    Neil Fraistat, “Illegitimate Shelley: Radical Piracy and the Textual Condition as Cultural Performance.” PMLA 109.3 (1994): 410. Fraistat treats in great detail Mary Shelley’s 1824 edition, as well as the 1826 pirated version of that edition.

  14. 14.

    Favret, “Mary Shelley’s Sympathy and Irony,” 29.

  15. 15.

    Mark Kipperman, “Absorbing a Revolution: Shelley Becomes a Romantic, 1889–1903,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 47.2 (September 1992): 190.

  16. 16.

    Kipperman, “Absorbing a Revolution,” 190.

  17. 17.

    Stephen C. Behrendt, Shelley and his Audiences (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).

  18. 18.

    William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 319–320. The question of copyright was brought to trial as part of a custody case regarding Shelley’s children with his first wife.

  19. 19.

    St Clair, Reading Nation, 320.

  20. 20.

    Other politically minded poems from this period include the now famous “England in 1819” and “A New National Anthem.”

  21. 21.

    Letter to Leigh Hunt, May 1, 1820. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Vol. 2. Ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 191.

  22. 22.

    The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Mary Shelley (London: Moxon, 1839), 3: 207.

  23. 23.

    Richard Holmes, in Shelley: The Pursuit (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co, 1975), provides a list of eight poems he suspects would have formed the collection, including, of course, “Song to the Men of England” (593). “The Mask of Anarchy” was published earlier than the rest, by Moxon, in 1832.

  24. 24.

    The Poetical Works, 3: 207.The political poems appear in Volume 3, where they (along with the other poems) are categorized according to chronology, sectioned off year by year. “Poems from 1819” includes “Song: To the Men of England,” “The Masque of Anarchy,” “England in 1819,” etc. M. Shelley followed this edition (published by Edward Moxon) with a single volume version in the same year.

  25. 25.

    The Masque of Anarchy, to which is added Queen Liberty; Song—to the Men of England (London, J. Watson, 1842). I have been unable to determine the price of this pamphlet, but intended – as it seems to have been – for radical readers, it’s likely that it was priced quite affordably. Another notable, more affordable, edition is Moxon’s 1846 The Minor Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, which offers many poems, including “Song to the Men of England,” all in tiny font (London: Moxon, 1846).

  26. 26.

    For an analysis of the importance of the Peterloo Massacre to the Chartist press, see Ian Haywood, “Encountering Time: Memory and Tradition in the Radical Victorian Press.” In Encounters in the Victorian Press: Editors, Authors, Readers. Ed. Laurel Brake and Julie F. Codell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 69–87.

  27. 27.

    Bouthaina Shaaban, “Shelley and the Chartists.” In Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World. Ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 125. Shaaban traces the many appearances of Shelley’s poems in the Chartist press.

  28. 28.

    See Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century British Working-Class Literature (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1974), 96, and Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 135–6.

  29. 29.

    Michael Scrivener, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 199–210; Behrendt, Shelley and his Audiences, 191.

  30. 30.

    According to James Epstein, “By the end of 1838, the Star had established itself as the most widely circulating provincial paper in Britain” (The Lion of Freedom: Feargus O’Connor and the Chartist Movement, 1832–1842 [London: Croom Helm, 1982], 68). The circulation numbers of the Northern Star rose and fell depending on shifting levels of Chartist activity. The paper ran from 1837 until 1852, with its highest circulation numbers between 1838 and 1842, ranging from 11,000 to 36,000 papers a week (Epstein, Lion of Freedom, 86 fn. 40).

  31. 31.

    The Poetical Works. Ed. Mary Shelley, 3: 186–187; and The Masque of Anarchy, to which is added Queen Liberty; Song—to the Men of England, 24. Watson’s version has additional commas in the first line of the last stanza (“With plough, and spade, and hoe, and loom,”) as well as a somewhat inexplicable comma between “Sow” and “seed” in the first line of the sixth stanza.

  32. 32.

    Scrivener notes Shelley’s ambivalence about even non-violent resistance, however: “The idea of massive nonviolent resistance, in the context of a general strike and an egalitarian assembly [in The Mask of Anarchy], is a way for Shelley to express his revolutionary vision while at the same time relieving some of the anxiety this vision produced in him” (Radical Shelley, 210).

  33. 33.

    Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences, 194.

  34. 34.

    Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences, 194.

  35. 35.

    Northern Star, and National Trades’ Journal 9.428 (January 1846): 3; Northern Star, and National Trades’ Journal 10.510 (July 1847): 3; Northern Star, and National Trades’ Journal 11.560 (July 1848): 2. The poem is usually entitled “Song to the Men of England,” and Shelley is cited as the author each time.

  36. 36.

    “The seed ye sow, another reaps; / The wealth ye find, another keeps; / The robes ye weave, another wears; / The arms ye forge, another bears” became the most oft-quoted stanza.

  37. 37.

    “[Epigraph to Thomas Wheeler’s Sunshine and Shadow],” Northern Star, and National Trades’ Journal 12.623 (September 29, 1849): 3.

  38. 38.

    In Mary Shelley’s, and other published versions, “keeps” rather than “heaps.”

  39. 39.

    “Justice for England and Ireland. The People’s Charter: Important Public Meeting,” Northern Star, and National Trades’ Journal 11.529 (December 1847): 1.

  40. 40.

    “A Defence of Poetry,” 516.

  41. 41.

    We might imagine this gap as one of class, but also as one of geography, as Shelley was far from England when he wrote this poem.

  42. 42.

    Letter to Leigh Hunt, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2: 191.

  43. 43.

    Commas separate the first and second half of each line in Mary Shelley’s published version, but not in the versions printed by the Northern Star, including the one that appears in Harney’s speech.

  44. 44.

    “[T]he texts that were most frequently assigned tended to be those written in closed forms, those that manifested regular rhythmic patterns and consistent rhyme schemes” (Robson, Heart Beats, 115).

  45. 45.

    George Seldes, Tell the Truth and Run (New York: Greenberg, 1953), xxiii.

  46. 46.

    “Address of the Salford Radical Association,” Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser 3.132 (May 1840): 8. This use of the poem predates the cheaper 1842 edition, demonstrating that even Mary Shelley’s expensive 1839 edition of Shelley’s poem was circulating among radicals. “Song to the Men of England” appeared, complete, in Henry Vincent’s Western Vindicator in 1839, offering another example of how quickly the poem moved through these radical circles. The Western Vindicator 2 (December 1839): 6 (from a new, cheaper, second series of the Vindicator, which only ran for two numbers in December 1839). Vincent Collection, Labour History Archive.

  47. 47.

    “Address of the Salford Radical Association,” Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, 8.

  48. 48.

    “Address of the Salford Radical Association,” Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, 8.

  49. 49.

    Patrick Dollan, a former miner, remembers in his autobiography the fondness for Shelley on the part of miners at the century’s end, noting that the poet was often quoted at Independent Labour Party meetings. Patrick Dollan, “Autobiography.” Unpublished TS, 193. Mitchell Library, Glasgow. I was directed to this source by Jonathan Rose (The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001], 119–120).

  50. 50.

    London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1888. The collection would be reissued six times, over the next thirty years (Chris Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884–1914 [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990], 107).

  51. 51.

    Edward Carpenter, Chants of Labor: A Songbook of the People, with Music (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1888), 47.

  52. 52.

    An exception is Revolutionary Rhymes and Songs for Socialists (London: T. Binning, 1886) which precedes Carpenter’s collection. There, Shelley’s poem is included in its entirety, complete with the final two stanzas (12–13).

  53. 53.

    J. Bruce Glasier, Socialist Songs (Glasgow: Labour Literature Society, 1895); The Fabian Society, Songs for Socialists (London: A. C. Fifield, 1912); Rowland Barrett, The Rockvale Collection of Twenty Socialist Songs (Dartmouth: Rowland Barrett 1932); A Songbook for Socialists (London: Reeves, n.d.). These books are all to be found in Salford’s Working Class Movement Library, with the exception of the Fabian Society’s version, which is available at the British Library. The Fabian Society’s edition does not include Carpenter’s chorus, although it does leave out the final two stanzas of Shelley’s original. In his own survey of nine socialist songbooks from that period, Chris Waters found no less than six appearances of “Song: To the Men of England” (Waters, British Socialists, 109–111).

  54. 54.

    Carpenter, Chants of Labour, vi.

  55. 55.

    “Preface,” Songs for Socialists, n.p.

  56. 56.

    National Council of British Socialist Sunday School Unions, The Socialist Sunday School Tune Book (Manchester: William Morris Press, 1912); [Untitled Hymn Book] (National Council of British Socialist Sunday School Unions, 1910); The Labour Church Hymn Book (Manchester: The National Labour Press, 1915). Socialist Sunday School Collection, Labour History Archive.

  57. 57.

    I owe many of the following references to Ian Michael’s The Teaching of English: From the 16th Century to 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) which provides a particularly useful survey of nineteenth-century textbooks and their contents.

  58. 58.

    The Moral and Intellectual Schoolbook; containing instructions for reading and speaking, lessons on religion, morality, science, and philosophy, rhetoric and oratory, with Copious Extracts from the Modern Poets, and remarks on their genius and writings (London: Darton and Clark, [1838], 257–260).

  59. 59.

    Anne Bowman, “Preface,” Poetry: selected for the Use of Schools and Families from the Most Approved Authors, Ancient and Modern (London: G. Routledge and Co., 1856), iv.

  60. 60.

    Bowman, Poetry, 24–25, 87, 139.

  61. 61.

    Bowman, Poetry, 33.

  62. 62.

    Thomas Shorter, A Book of English Poetry for the School, the Fireside, and the Country Ramble (London: T. J. Allman, 1861), 72.

  63. 63.

    William Osborn, A Selection of Poetry, for the Use of Schools (York: Thomas Brady, 1861).

  64. 64.

    Richard Trench, A Household Book of English Poetry. 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 1870 [first edn. 1868]), ix.

  65. 65.

    Poetry for Recitation (London: Moffatt and Paige, 1885). Both “The Cloud” and “To a Sky-Lark” appear in Part 4, designed for Standards V, VI, and VII.

  66. 66.

    In The Social Content of Education, 1808–1870: A Study of the Working Class School Reader in England and Ireland (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1972), J. M. Goldstrom provides a detailed overview of the shift from religious to secular education, especially in regards to textbooks (162–175).

  67. 67.

    See Robson, Heart Beats, 57–73, especially, for details on the role of recitation in changing educational requirements.

  68. 68.

    See Rose, Intellectual Life, for both a historical overview, and a collection of responses by working-class people to late nineteenth-century education, 146–156.

  69. 69.

    Robson, Heart Beats, Appendix 1, 235–236.

  70. 70.

    See Jonathan Rose: “Reading rooms and adult schools were organized largely as an alternative to the mechanics’ institutes, founded and governed by paternalistic middle-class reformers, where religious and political controversy was usually barred and the premises could be uncomfortably genteel. In 1843 workingmen petitioned a Croydon institute to form a discussion class and to drop the rule barring controversial political and religious works from the library” (Intellectual Life, 65). See also E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966) on the ways in which middle-class supporters came to control mechanics’ institutes. Thompson notes, however, the variability in such institutions; some were controlled by radical artisans (743–745).

  71. 71.

    Qtd. in Rose, Intellectual Life, 65.

  72. 72.

    Margaret Mathieson, from The Preachers of Culture: A Study of English and its Teachers (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1975). Qtd. in Kipperman, “Absorbing a Revolution,” 195.

  73. 73.

    Kipperman, “Absorbing a Revolution,” 194–195.

  74. 74.

    Frederick Dennison Maurice, Has the Church, or the State, the Power to Educate the Nation? A Course of Lectures (London, J. G. and F. Rivington, 1839), 220.

  75. 75.

    Kipperman examines “the actual institutional and ideological forces at work on the teachers themselves, who struggled to admit Shelley’s appeal and to interpret his relevance for vast numbers of new readers, the working and middle classes of the nineteenth century” (“Absorbing a Revolution,” 188).

  76. 76.

    “Two Kinds of Poetry,” Monthly Repository (October 1833); rpt. in The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory. Ed. Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999), 1224.

  77. 77.

    See Janowitz, Lyric and Labour, for discussions of John Stuart Mill’s role in this history. On the history of lyricization, and the force of lyric reading in the American academy, see Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

  78. 78.

    Stopford Brooke, “Preface.” In Poems from Shelley (London: Macmillan & Co., 1880), xxv.

  79. 79.

    The Poetical Works, ed. Mary Shelley, 207.

  80. 80.

    Brooke, “Preface,” xxv–xxvi.

  81. 81.

    “To a Sky-Lark,” l. 6.

  82. 82.

    Virginia Jackson, “Who Reads Poetry?” PMLA 123.1 (2008): 183.

  83. 83.

    English Lyrics (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1885). Hathi Trust Digital Library. July 11, 2016.

  84. 84.

    “Introduction,” English Lyrics, xv–xvi, xviii.

  85. 85.

    “Song” appears on pp. 249–251. Also included is Shelley’s “National Anthem,” a rewriting of “God Save the Queen” with “Liberty” as the Queen. Other less political poems by Shelley include ““Stanzas, April 1814,” “Stanzas written in Dejection, near Naples,” and several sets of untitled “Lines.” “To a Skylark,” interestingly, is not included.

  86. 86.

    “Introduction,” English Lyrics, xvii.

  87. 87.

    Charles Noel Douglas (ed.), Forty Thousand Quotations, Prose and Poetical, Choice Extracts on History, Science, Philosophy, Religion, Literature, etc. Selected from the standard authors of ancient and modern times, classified according to subject (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1917), 494; J. K.Hoyt (ed.), Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations: English, Latin, and Modern Foreign Languages (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1896), 152; W. Gurney Benham (ed.), Cassell’s Book of Quotations, Proverbs, and Household Words (London: Cassell & Co., 1907), 332; William Shepard Walsh (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Prose and Poetical Quotations (Philadelphia: J. C. Winston, 1908), 573; Philip Hugh Dalbiac (ed.), Dictionary of Quotations (English) (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1896), 268. Many of these collections were published in multiple editions, and in more than one country at once.

  88. 88.

    Walsh, “How to Use this Book,” International Encyclopedia of Prose and Poetical Quotations, viii.

  89. 89.

    Hoyt, “Guide to the Use of this Book,” Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations, viii.

  90. 90.

    Benham, “Preface,” Cassell’s Book of Quotations, Proverbs, and Household Words, n.p.

  91. 91.

    Hoyt, “Preface,” Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations, v.

  92. 92.

    Walsh, “How to Use this Book,” International Encyclopedia, viii.

  93. 93.

    Douglas, “Introduction,” Forty Thousand Quotations, 7.

  94. 94.

    Douglas, “Introduction,” Forty Thousand Quotations, 7.

  95. 95.

    Hoyt, “Guide to the Use of this Book,” Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations, viii.

  96. 96.

    Hoyt, “Guide to the Use of this Book,” Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations, viii.

  97. 97.

    “Ye,” the plural second-person pronoun in Old English, could also be used, later, as a singular second-person address, to a superior. But this use would certainly not seem applicable here, based on context.

  98. 98.

    Bliss Carman and John R. Howard (eds.), The World’s Best Poetry, in 10 Volumes, Illustrated.Vol 10 (Philadelphia, John D. Morris & Co., 1904), “Preface,” xxviii.

  99. 99.

    World’s Best Poetry, 10: 40.

  100. 100.

    World’s Best Poetry, 10: 492, 494. The quotation by Eliot is originally from Romola (London: Penguin, 1996), 357.

  101. 101.

    World’s Best Poetry, 10: 494.

  102. 102.

    “Song: To the Men of England,” The Poetical Works, ed. Mary Shelley, ll. 30–32.

  103. 103.

    Hoyt, “Preface,” Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations, v.

  104. 104.

    As Gilmartin has argued, early nineteenth-century radicalism was held together largely by the idea of being “oppositional,” and the Chartist movement has been lauded by Marxist historians for its “independent class politics,” a phrase which signals both Chartism’s status as the first truly working-class political movement and Chartism’s separation from mainstream British politics. See A. L. Morton and George Tate, The British Labour Movement, 1770–1920: A History (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1956), 110.

  105. 105.

    Richard Price, “Languages of Revisionism: Historians and Popular Politics in Nineteenth-century Britain,” Journal of Social History 30.1 (August 1996): 239.

  106. 106.

    James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). For other important perspectives on this question (among many), see Eric Hobsbawm’s “The Making of the Working Class, 1870–1914,” in his Workers: Worlds of Labor (New York: Pantheon, 1984), which highlights the importance of the late-century moment for the emergence of “the so-called traditional ‘working class’” (200); and Gareth Stedman Jones’s Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), which points specifically to the working-class culture of the late nineteenth century as evidencing not increasing power, but rather resignation in the face of capitalism.

  107. 107.

    Miller, Slow Print, 6.

  108. 108.

    International Encyclopedia, 573.

  109. 109.

    Letter to Leigh Hunt, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2: 191.

  110. 110.

    Dictionary of Quotations, 268.

  111. 111.

    Kipperman, “Absorbing a Revolution,” 190.

  112. 112.

    G. C. F. Mead and Rupert C. Clift (eds.), English Verse Old and New: An Anthology for Schools. 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923).

  113. 113.

    Mead and Clift, “Preface,” English Verse Old and New, vi.

  114. 114.

    Mead and Clift, “Preface,” English Verse Old and New, v.

  115. 115.

    “To the Men of England,” English Verse Old and New, 171–172; Clough, “Say not the Struggle Naught availeth,” English Verse Old and New, 172–173. The poem was originally written as “an attempt to console himself and his readers for the failure of the democratic cause in Rome and throughout Europe,” according to Anthony Kenny (Arthur Hugh Clough: A Poet’s Life [London: Continuum, 2005], 185). It was perhaps most famously quoted by Winston Churchill, encouraging American involvement in the Second World War (Kenny, Arthur Hugh Clough, 186–187).

  116. 116.

    Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789–1874 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 120.

  117. 117.

    With this act, often called the “Chace Act,” the United States finally granted copyright protection to foreign authors, with the caveat that in order to receive copyright, their works must be printed in the United States. In order “to conform with both United States and British law,” Simon Nowell-Smith explains, “a book must be published in both countries simultaneously” (International Copyright Law and The Publisher in the Reign of Queen Victoria [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968], 65). Thus for America, Nowell-Smith notes that “By the latter part of the [nineteenth] century copyright and publishing in the empire had become matters not so much of complexity as of chaos” (85). Nowell-Smith provides an overview of the varying situations in the various colonies (85–105).

  118. 118.

    Unfortunately, I do not have the space here to explore the histories and implications of these texts’ appearances in India and Australia. Certainly, Shelley’s poetry was known in both places, and was put to use by Mahatma Ghandi, who quoted from “The Mask of Anarchy.” For more on this fascinating story, see Meena Alexander, “Shelley’s India: Territory and Text, Some Problems of Decolonization.” In Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, ed. Bennett and Curran, 169–178. Alexander offers a telling parallel to the narrative I tell here. Shelley was taught, along with the other Romantics in Indian universities, but it was his lyrics, poems like “To a Skylark,” that appeared, not the political works: “the radical, political poet, whose words would have been too disruptive of an imperial order that sought the careful importation of poetry into the colonies, was cauterized, cut away” (Alexander, “Shelley’s India,” 174).

  119. 119.

    Hoyt, “Preface” Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations, v.

  120. 120.

    Meredith McGill (ed.), The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008).

  121. 121.

    Michael Demson, “‘Let a Great Assembly Be’: Percy Shelley’s ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ and the Organization of Labor in New York City, 1910–1930,” European Romantic Review 22.5 (October 2011): 641–665.

  122. 122.

    Robson, Heart Beats, 7.

  123. 123.

    It is perhaps not surprising that “Song” might be more acceptable in the twentieth-century American schoolroom, where class mobility was itself more acceptable, than in Britain.

  124. 124.

    Samuel Silas Curry, Lessons in Vocal Expression (Boston: The Expression Company, 1895), 3.

  125. 125.

    Curry, Lessons, 10, 22.

  126. 126.

    Curry, Lessons, 90.

  127. 127.

    Curry, Lessons, 91.

  128. 128.

    Letter to Leigh Hunt, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2: 191.

  129. 129.

    “Address of the Salford Radical Association,” Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, 8.

  130. 130.

    Victor A. Fields and James F. Bender, Voice and Diction (New York: Macmillan, 1949), vii.

  131. 131.

    Raymond van Dusen, Training the Voice for Speech (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953), 149–151.

  132. 132.

    van Dusen, Training the Voice, 138–139.

  133. 133.

    Fields and Bender, Voice and Diction, 159–160.

  134. 134.

    George W. Hibbitt and Richard A. Norman, Guide to Speech Training: Voice, Articulation, and Oral Reading (New York: The Ronald Press Co., 1964), 105.

  135. 135.

    George C. Howland, “Preface,” Advanced Lessons in English (Chicago, IL: Colonial Book Company, 1909), [6].

  136. 136.

    Howland, Advanced Lessons, 274. The focus on these particular commas is interesting, as the Northern Star generally left them out.

  137. 137.

    Howland, “Preface,” [6].

  138. 138.

    Seldes, Tell the Truth and Run, xxiii.

  139. 139.

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    In the current college classroom, Shelley’s “Song” is certainly not as canonical as “Skylark,” included in neither Duncan Wu’s compendious Romanticism: An Anthology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), nor in the widely used 2002 Norton collection of Shelley’s poetry and prose, edited by Neil Fraistat and Donald H. Reiman.

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LeGette, C. (2017). From Citation to Recitation: Shelley’s “Men of England”. In: Remaking Romanticism. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46929-4_5

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