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.
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Notes
In the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey seized immediately on the play’s links with contemporary anti-Christian writing, its air of ‘argumentative blasphemy’ (see The Romantics Reviewed, ed. Donald H. Reiman, 9 vols, New York: Garland, 1972, Part B, II, 930).
Robert Grant, ‘State of Public Affairs,’ Quarterly Review, 22 (1820), 511.
For their denials see Shelley’s letter to Horace Smith, 11 April 1822 (The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964, II, 412) and Byron’s letter to Thomas Moore, 4 March 1822 (Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973–82, IX, 119); both editions cited parenthetically hereafter (Letters, BLJ).
Letters, I, 361. On Shelley’s epistolary hoaxes, see Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (New York: Penguin, 1974), p. 26.
Steven E. Jones, Shelley’s Satire: Violence, Exhortation, and Authority (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994), pp. 36–7.
See Elie Halevy, The Liberal Awakening 1815–1830, vol. II of A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, trans. E.I. Watkin (London: Ernest Benn, 1926; rev. 1949), pp. 70–2.
The crime of blasphemous libel was construed more as an offense against the state (‘the peace of our Lord the King, his crown and dignity’) than against God; this transference was achieved by arguing from the 1676 precedent of Sir William Hale that Christianity was the law of the land — that it was part and parcel of the common law — and that infidelity therefore represented an attack on the Constitution. See W.H. Wickwar, The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press, 1819–1832 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1928), pp. 20–5.
Joel H. Wiener, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Life of Richard Carlile (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1983), p. 34.
Edward Royle, Radical Politics 1790–1900: Religion and Unbelief (London: Longman, 1971), p. 30; Wickwar, p. 102; Wiener, pp. 457–8.
P.M.S. Dawson and Timothy Webb review the evidence and settle on ‘a date between the last months of late 1819 and the middle of June 1820’ (see Shelley’s ‘Devils’ Notebook: Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e.9, eds P.M.S. Dawson and Timothy Webb, New York: Garland, 1993, Vol. XIV of The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, p. xvii.
Ibid., pp. 7–9.
The crucial paragraphs in the preface to Prometheus Unbound were almost certainly drafted either shortly before or not long before he began The Cenci. See The Prometheus Unbound Notebooks: A Facsimile of Bodleian MSS. Shelley e.1., e.2, and e.3, ed. Neil Fraistat, (New York: Garland, 1991), vol. IX of The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, vol. IX, p. lxxiii.
For a discussion of the self-dramatizing behavior of the characters in The Cenci and their practice of ‘self-anatomy,’ see Michael Scrivener, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 191–6.
Ibid., p. 196; Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), p. 122.
For an account of the early Byronic myth of Satan, see Jerome J. McGann, Don Juan in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 23–34.
Byron said that the accusation, ‘being interpreted, means that I worship the devil’ (The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland E. Prothero, 6 vols, London: John Murray, 1898–1901, V, 563).
See Charles Robinson, Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 192–3.
Donald Thomas, A Long Time Burning: A History of Literary Censorship in England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 207.
See Truman Guy Steffan, Lord Byron’s Cain (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), pp. 13–18.
David Eggenschwiler, ‘Byron’s Cain and the Antimythological Myth,’ Modern Language Quarterly, 37 (1976), 329.
See William D. Brewer, The Shelley-Byron Conversation (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1994), pp. 103–4.
Byron’s principal debt to Bayle is his skeptical demonstration that rationalistic theology cannot reconcile the co-existence of evil with an omnipotent and benevolent God. This problem can only be resolved through faith and revelation; otherwise, Bayle says, the Manichean objection to monotheism is unanswerable. See ‘Paulicians,’ in Dictionary, IV, 512–28. Byron drew upon this argument to ground Lucifer’s refutation of Christian theodicy in the tradition of respectable irreligion extending from Bayle through Voltaire and Gibbon, probably as an alternative to the vulgarian mode of Carlile. See Howard Robinson, Bayle the Skeptic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), pp. 253–65).
These thinkers were willing to extend backward in time and expand into ages the first ‘days’ of Creation, so long as the Creation of man remained a very recent event. Thus men like William Buckland sanitized the implications of Cuvier’s research. See Charles Gillispie, Genesis and Geology (New York: Harper, 1951), pp. 101–15 and Francis C. Haber, The Age of the World: Moses to Darwin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), pp. 191–203.
See Paul Cantor, Creature and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism, pp. 148–55 and Jerome J. McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 255–62.
See Wolf Z. Hirst, ‘Byron’s Revisionary Struggle with the Bible,’ in Byron, the Bible, and Religion, ed. Wolf. Z. Hirst (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991), pp. 89–95.
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© 2003 Peter A. Schock
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Schock, P.A. (2003). Base and Aristocratic Artificers of Ruin: Plebeian Blasphemy and the Satanic School. In: Romantic Satanism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230513303_4
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