Shelley, Urbanization, and Artificial Forms of Society

I

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s earliest surviving response to the Peterloo Massacre reveals his tense anticipation of how the nation would respond to the event and his uncertainty about what that response should be: “I await anxiously [to] hear how the Country will express its sense of this bloody murderous oppression of its destroyers,” Shelley writes to his publisher Charles Ollier; “‘Something must be done … What yet I know not.’”¹ Over the next few weeks Shelley sketched a poetic vision of what might be done in The Mask of Anarchy. For several months he continued to seek the event’s historical roots and to develop a more thorough and explicit statement of the practical changes necessary to avoid civil war while working on the unfinished essay A Philosophical View of Reform. Shelley’s inquiry into the origin of the massacre leads him to consider the origins of the conditions of life in Manchester. In his analysis, the unstable social conditions in Manchester derive from and represent a condensation of a historical process that has been in motion for more than a century. The specifically urban setting of the event strongly correlates this process with the process of urbanization.

In examining how Shelley thinks about urbanization, I aim to contribute to three overlapping critical conversations. First, I seek to add to the thread of scholarship, headlined by James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin’s collection Romantic Metropolis, which has recently recovered the importance of metropolitan life and culture to Romanticism. This valuable work has left largely unremarked both the cultural significance of urbanization as an ongoing social process and the nature of the canonical poets’ relation and response to urban social forms. Shelley, I argue, participates in a radical discourse about urban society and politics also expressed in the popular press. He represents urbanization as a complex social process that entails political, economic, geographic, behavioral, and cultural transformations that realize social power relations in the built environment. For Shelley, urbanization contains at once the evil and the cure: it magnifies the disciplinary power of the ruling orders, but it also facilitates the organization of the unrepresented into a political constituency by concentrating the population within the reach of print culture. He does not oppose urbanization as such; he opposes the historical form it has taken and seeks to reform it. Second, Shelley’s analysis of urbanization emphasizes the power of the social and physical environment to shape the mind. This emphasis calls for a revision of the critical models of Shelley’s theory of the imagination, such as Jerrold Hogle’s transferential process, that derive primarily from analyses of the nature of language. While Shelley’s sense of the systematic and dynamic structuring of space is generally analogous to that of language, it nonetheless encounters different modes of resistance and requires different forms of remaking to be part of the project of reform. The poetic process of continuous reinventions must apply to the urban environment, to urban administration, and to the processes that shape them. And third, I reassert Shelley’s claim for immediate political agency in The Mask of Anarchy. Susan J. Wolfson’s vigorously skeptical reading of the poem checked a particular mode of enthusiastic gushing over the poem’s political commitment, but that Shelley qualifies his call for and imaginative performance of political action does not diminish the urgency of the call. Instead, in The Mask of Anarchy Shelley presents and contests the public’s practical interpretation of the Peterloo Massacre in the hope of redirecting the course of history.

II

In approaching Shelley’s understanding of urbanization, I learn and depart from both recent work on metropolitan Romanticism and Raymond Williams’s classic The Country and the City. In the introduction to Romantic Metropolis, Chandler and Gilmartin gather the various approaches in the collected essays under the umbrella concept of “metropolitanism,” which they define as “a sense of the urban site as at once capital to the provinces and point of contact with the wider world.”² They take the term “metropolitanism” from Williams, who uses it to describe...