Base and Aristocratic Artificers of Ruin: Plebeian Blasphemy and the Satanic School

Abstract

In December 1821, the publication of Cain: A Mystery provoked an uproar: readers called for the suppression of Byron’s play when they found that it contained a violent assault on the authority of the Bible. Reviewers took the dramatic character Lucifer, the first murderer’s mentor, to be the author’s iconoclastic mouthpiece. This response to Byron’s supremely notorious performance as a Satanist is revealing, because it ties the diabolical elements of the play to the ‘blasphemy crisis,’ the surge of plebeian anti-Christian writing in the late Regency and the broad effort to suppress it.^l Involving state trials of offending publishers and booksellers and new, repressive legislation, the crusade required the reinforcement of opinion through partisan writing. In the Quarterly Review the methods and motives of blasphemous writers and publishers — attacking religion in order to undermine political authority — were demonized. Here the mythic brand was applied to ‘men, who, like the Malignant Principle himself, can knowingly take advantage of the distresses of mankind, to blast their virtues, — base artificers of ruin, who drive the trade of destruction.’² To many of the first readers of Cain, it appeared that an aristocrat had made common cause with these diabolical vulgarians.