Looking Back

Abstract

Shelley’s death did not pass entirely unnoticed. The upholders of the status quo, who attacked him while he was alive with a venom which now seems almost comic, seized their chance to have a final fling. Typical of the obituary notices in the Tory papers was the Courier’s: ‘Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned; now he knows whether there is a God or no’.¹ The Gentleman’s Magazine belied its name by referring to ‘this tyro of the Juan school, that pre-eminent academy of Infidels, Blasphemers, Seducers and Wantons’.² In contrast, the Examiner printed a panegyric:

while Freedom still retains Amid the waters of Corruption’s flood, An Ararat whereon to rest her foot, — Thy spirit still will be revered on earth, And commune with the minds of unborn men.¹

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

Hippocrates Aphorisms