On 25 March 1811, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his future biographer, Thomas Hogg, were expelled from University College, Oxford. While history commonly records that the two undergraduates were excluded for atheism, the precise reason was âfor contumaciously refusing to answer questions proposed to them, and for also repeatedly declining to disavowâ a pamphlet for which both had been responsible.1 The pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism (1811), was far less provocative than its title suggested; to have apparently advocated atheism, however, was enough to risk criminal charges for violating common and statute law against blasphemy. The opportunity to âdisavowâ the work had been granted as a possible way both undergraduates might have ameliorated any future criminal proceedings. Prosecution for The Necessity of Atheism never materialised for either men, but the Oxford episode remains an important touchstone in Shelleyâs biography and criticism. Indeed, it is an event that, along with the disparaging reactionary accounts of Shelleyâs death in 1822, are commonly taken as bookending Shelleyâs âatheisticalâ adult life and career.
The nature of Shelleyâs (ir)religion remains a matter of some debate, but the âatheist â tag has nevertheless persisted in popular perceptions of this major member of the âBig 6â Romantic poets. It is therefore easy to see how âthe issue of âatheismââ, as Martin Priestman has argued, remains central to the history of canonical Romanticism.2 In sharing Priestmanâs position, my present study is concerned with the broader and more amorphous term âblasphemyâ. While the charge of blasphemy encompasses atheism in the period, my reason for this wider focus is fourfold. Firstly, Priestman has already offered a thorough examination of more specific atheistic tendencies within Romantic poetry.3 Secondly, to investigate blasphemy is to offer a more comprehensive account of heterodox religious opinions that may not necessarily come from a position of unbelief.4 Thirdly, the broader irreverence that the term implies suggests important creative possibilities for a writer. Finally, the very lack of specificity of the word âblasphemyâ is itself worthy of comment, as it enabled authorities to define it as they saw fit in moments of political exigence. While âatheismâ was among the charges levelled at political enemies, this was only one amid the multitude of religiously inflected allegations under the umbrella of a purposefully ill-defined âblasphemyâ.
My approach, therefore, is one that not only recognises the intersection of (ir)religion and politics, but also between censorship, print history and creativity. To blaspheme in a text, or at least to be perceived as blaspheming in it, determines its materiality and dissemination in the period as much as it explains its aesthetic or thematic content. To appreciate this necessitates a methodology that simultaneously considers historical contextâpolitical, legal and material for exampleâas well as formal attention to the text(s) in question. For instance, while the intersecting philosophical and political themes of a poem such as Shelleyâs Queen Mab (1813) may in itself lead a critic to identify the connection between its politics and its supposed blasphemy, the fact that it was frequently sold in the 1820s alongside texts of a more obviously political or obscene nature similarly affirms an association. In 1823, Richard Carlile even complained how the âenemies of Reformâ would connect him to âimmoralityâ by highlighting that his shops sold blasphemous and obscene texts alongside his more overtly political ones.5 Although Carlile denied this to be the case with the shops he was personally responsible for, he claims to âhave been informed that copies of [âŠ] amatory publications from Mr. Benbowâs Press [âŠ] have been sold at the shop in Giltspur Street under my nameâ (p. 35). It is important, then, to recognise the socio-historical realities of print while considering the formal manifestation of blasphemy within literary works.
Richard Cronin describes his approach in The Politics of Romantic Poetry (2000) as one that attempts to reconcile New Historicist with âNewâ Formalist approaches to Romanticism. He writes
The urgent task for the critic of Romantic poetry is not, it seems to me, to choose between these two apparently antithetical approaches [i.e. between Historicist and Formalist approaches], for both remain too valuable to be rejected. The need is rather to find a critical manner through which the two may be reconciled [âŠ] a criticism of Romantic poets is possible that does not choose between attention to the language of a poem or attention to its historical context, but seeks rather to show that it is through their language that poems most fully engage with their historical moment.6
My approach in this book is similar to Croninâs, although I consider these different approaches to be not only valuable but necessary in fully understanding the manifestation of blasphemy in Romantic-period literature. While Cronin is critical of Jerome McGannâs monumental Romantic Ideology (1983), McGannâs reminder that âpoems are social and historical productsâ informs my approach here, without overshadowing the centrality of close, textual analysis.7 McGannâs notion of âbibliographical codes â, first coined in his later The Textual Condition (1991), is similarly useful in illustrating how âproducing editions is one of the ways we produce literary meaningsâ and that it is âas complex as all the othersâ.8 This is important in appreciating that perceptions of blasphemy and other forms of transgression both shaped, and were shaped by, the reality of the physical printed text and the resulting influence on the Romantic-period reading public.
While a study of literary blasphemy is necessarily multifaceted, my main argument is that Romantic-period blasphemy is primarily a political crime or transgression; the fact that it was frequently prosecuted both on the grounds of potential audience and the mannerârather than the matterâof its expression attests to its close interrelationship with both class and aesthetics. Like many âsubversiveâ cultural forms such as pornography, blasphemy has a curious relationship with the mainstream literary canon, existing outside and yet profoundly shaping and responding to it. This is evident in blasphemyâs association with the development of intellectual property and copyright in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with copyright acting first as a form of proxy censorship before counterintuitive Chancery rulings such as Southey v. Sherwood (1817) ultimately aided the proliferation of blasphemous, obscene and seditious texts. This impacted the size and nature of the Romantic-reading public and, I argue, the nature of the Romantic canon.
1.1 Blasphemy: History and Definition
Blasphemy is, on the one hand, easy to define; the OEDâs definition reads that it is â[p]rofane speaking of God or sacred things; impious irreverenceâ, clearly determining it to be something subversive that is expressed rather than merely thought.9 Yet this classification allows for a rather broad range of possibilities. It does not, for instance, establish what an act of blasphemy would actually entail, reliant instead on abstract conceptions of âreverenceâ and âthe sacredâ that such an act is said to subvert. Alain Cabantous is right then to note the difficulty for researchers in the broad disciplines of the human sciences who âare aware more than most how semantically tricky blasphemy proves to be, how slippery as anthropological objects goâ.10 One of the issues is that what is deemed âsacredâ or to be paid due reverence is arbitrary, meaning, in both senses of the word, something determined by mere chance and also by autocratic âarbitersâ. The âsacredâ, for instance, may be established by cultural factors, religious denomination or socio-historical context but also by legal and political authorities.
When considering the historical legal definitions of blasphemy between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, it is apparent that often what is understood by âblasphemyâ should be more appropriately termed âheresyâ. As the OED defines it, heresy is
Theological or religious opinion or doctrine maintained in opposition, or held to be contrary, to the âcatholicâ or orthodox doctrine of the Christian Church, or, by extension, to that of any church, creed, or religious system, considered as orthodox.11
Despite its significant difference from âblasphemyâ, âheresyâ is commonly considered as its synonym in this period. This semantic blurring serves a useful political purpose; while âheresyâ suggests a hierarchically imposed orthodoxy, evoking connotations of the religious persecutions of the early Christian church, âblasphemyâ appears less partisan. What is deemed blasphemous is not a matter of simple doctrinal disagreement but the profaning of something indisputably sacred; a matter of common sense and âgood tasteâ. Preferring the term âblasphemyâ over âheresyâ therefore gives the illusion of maintaining a pretence of religious toleration while, in fact, working to delineate the limits of politically endorsed orthodoxy. The 1648 âOrdinance for the punishing of Blasphemies and Heresies â passed during the Interregnum is at least open with its targeting of perceived heresy, but its doctrinal specificity is nevertheless remarkable. Not only does it list every book of the canonical Bible in turn, arguing that it is blasphemy to deny that these are the Word of God, it painstakingly details that blasphemers are also those who question the perfect omnipotence of God, the doctrine of the Resurrection, the divinity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity .12
Despite this doctrinal precision, the policing of religious belief was historically more socio-political than it was theological. An act passed in 1650 called âAn Act against several Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrable Opinions, derogatory to the honor of God, and destructive to humane Society â was a...