Shelley’s Path to Marx and Engels

Shelley’s Path to Marx and Engels

Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned off the coast of Italy in July 1822, his small boat overwhelmed in a sudden squall in the Gulf of La Spezia. He was twenty-nine. Karl Marx was four years old; Friedrich Engels was not yet two. The poet and the founders of scientific socialism never met, never could have met, and the channel through which Shelley reached them was not direct literary inheritance but something stranger and more interesting — a process of suppression, piracy, and working-class adoption that turned a Romantic poet, posthumously, into something he had never quite been in life: the unofficial laureate of the British revolutionary tradition.

The story begins with suppression. Queen Mab , Shelley’s long philosophical poem of 1813, was the book that effectively ended his life as a respectable Englishman. Its attacks on monarchy, organized religion, marriage, and meat-eating were comprehensive and unsubtle, and when Shelley used it as evidence of his sincere convictions, the Court of Chancery used the same evidence to strip him of custody of his children by his first wife, Harriet Westbrook. Shelley had printed only about two hundred and fifty copies of Queen Mab privately, intending it for a select audience of sympathetic radicals. He could not have anticipated what would happen to it after his death.

In 1821, a London publisher named William Clark issued a pirated edition of Queen Mab with a false American imprint — “New York: Printed and Sold by J. Baldwin, Corner of Chatham Street, 1821” — printed in fact in London. The false imprint was a legal dodge. Queen Mab was, by the standards of the British state, a blasphemous and seditious libel, and publishing it openly invited prosecution. Clark was eventually convicted and imprisoned anyway, but his edition got out, and it kept getting out. Subsequent piracies followed through the 1820s and 1830s, each cheaper and more widely circulated than the last. Queen Mab became, in the phrase that contemporaries actually used, “the Chartists’ Bible.” This was not metaphor. Working men’s reading rooms kept copies. Chartist orators quoted from it. The Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge issued counter-pamphlets specifically rebutting it. By the 1840s, the radical Shelley was a fixture of British working-class political culture — and crucially, that culture was the one Engels walked into when he came to Manchester.

Other Shelley works followed similar paths. William Benbow, another radical London publisher with a long history of trouble with the authorities, issued a pirated Miscellaneous Poems in 1826 — the first selected edition of Shelley’s verse, predating Mary Shelley’s authorized edition by thirteen years. Benbow operated outside the respectable trade, publishing radical pamphlets and obscene literature with equal enthusiasm, and his Shelley edition was aimed squarely at the working-class radical reader. The Mask of Anarchy , Shelley’s great poem on the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, was suppressed even by Leigh Hunt, who thought the public was not ready for it; it was finally published in 1832 by Hunt himself, and then reissued in cheaper form by James Watson, a Chartist publisher, in 1842 and again in 1852. By the time Watson’s reprints circulated, the poem’s closing stanza — “Rise, like lions after slumber / In unvanquishable number — / Shake your chains to earth, like dew / Which in sleep had fallen on you — / Ye are many — they are few” — had become a kind of secular hymn of British radicalism.

This is the Shelley that Friedrich Engels encountered when he arrived in Manchester in late 1842 to work in his father’s textile firm. Engels was twenty-two and already a committed radical; he had been engaging seriously with Shelley for several years, working on translations and adaptations of Queen Mab and other poems while still in Bremen. His teenage letters refer to Shelley with the ardor of a young man who has found a poet who fuses lyric intensity with revolutionary politics in a way the German Romantic tradition mostly did not. Goethe was Olympian, Schiller idealistic, Heine ironic — but none of them offered what Shelley offered, which was a poetry that combined philosophical materialism, atheist polemic, and visionary hope in a single voice. For a young German radical reading his way out of Hegelianism toward something more concrete, Shelley was a discovery.

What Engels found in Manchester confirmed and deepened this attachment. Manchester in 1842 was the world capital of industrial capitalism, the place where the new mode of production had advanced furthest and revealed itself most brutally. It was also a place where Shelley was alive in working-class culture in a way he was not in middle-class culture. Engels noted this with sociological precision in The Condition of the Working Class in England , written in 1844 and published in German in 1845: Shelley and Byron, he observed, were read primarily by the English working class, while the bourgeoisie either ignored them or read sanitized editions. The cheap pirate editions and Chartist reprints — the Clark, the Benbow, the Watson tradition — were the material substrate of this readership. Engels was perhaps the first writer to identify, as a matter of class analysis, what we would now call the political economy of literary reception. He saw that Shelley’s audience was not where the literary establishment thought it was, and that this misrecognition was itself politically significant.

Engels referred to Shelley, in his correspondence, as “the genius, the prophet, Shelley,” and grouped him explicitly with the radical tradition that Marxism understood itself to be inheriting. The point was not merely that Shelley had written some politically congenial poems. It was that Shelley, through the mechanisms of suppression and piracy, had been received as a political poet by the actual working-class movement that Marxism sought to understand and to influence. The poet’s afterlife, in other words, was already part of the history Marx and Engels were trying to theorize. When Engels wrote about the Chartists, he was writing about people who quoted Shelley. When he wrote about working-class education and self-improvement, he was writing about institutions where Queen Mab sat on the shelf next to Tom Paine. The radical Shelley was not an external resource Marxism imported into its analysis of the British proletariat; he was already inside that proletariat’s self-understanding.

This matters for how we read certain passages in early Marx and Engels. The famous closing of The Communist Manifesto — “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!” — is not a Shelleyan quotation, but it lives in the same imaginative atmosphere as The Mask of Anarchy. The image of chains being shaken off, the address to working men as a collective political subject, the rhetoric of universal solidarity against tyrannical few — these are tropes that Shelley had given to the British radical movement two decades earlier, and that Marx and Engels, writing in 1848 partly with a British audience in mind, could deploy without quotation because they had already become part of the common language of the movement. Song to the Men of England , with its blunt question — “Wherefore feed and clothe and save / From the cradle to the grave / Those ungrateful drones who would / Drain your sweat — nay, drink your blood?” — articulated in 1819 the exact relation of expropriation that Capital would anatomize systematically half a century later. Shelley did not have the labor theory of value. He did not need it. He had the moral and imaginative core of the indictment.

Marx’s relationship to Shelley was real but more mediated than Engels’s. He read Shelley, occasionally quoted him, and admired him, but his deepest literary affinities lay elsewhere — with Aeschylus, with Shakespeare, with Goethe, and, among the English Romantics, with Byron more than with Shelley. The famous remark attributed to Marx by his daughter Eleanor — that Shelley was “essentially a revolutionist” who would have remained one, while Byron, had he lived, would have become “a reactionary bourgeois” — captures the family’s view well enough, even if the precise wording is Eleanor’s reconstruction. Marx saw in Shelley a temperament that pointed forward; Byron’s aristocratic radicalism, by contrast, he understood as historically backward-looking, the protest of a class on its way out rather than a class coming in. The distinction is sharper than it looks. Byron’s politics were essentially the politics of the disaffected nobleman who has read his Rousseau and finds modern Europe distasteful. Shelley’s politics, for all his own aristocratic origins, were oriented toward a future that did not yet exist and could only be brought into being by a class that did not yet know itself as a class. This was the Shelley that Marx recognized as a precursor.

The Marx-Shelley connection also runs through philosophical ground that Marx covered in his 1844 Paris Manuscripts and that Shelley had covered, in his way, in the prose notes to Queen Mab and in A Philosophical View of Reform. Both men were materialists who refused to let materialism collapse into mere mechanism. Both saw religion as the displaced expression of real human needs and frustrations rather than as simple error. Shelley’s notes to Queen Mab on Christianity — the system of Jesus understood as a moral code distorted by priestly power into an instrument of social control — anticipates, in compressed and polemical form, the analysis Marx would offer in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right : religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions.” Marx almost certainly did not derive this analysis from Shelley. But the convergence is real, and it reflects the fact that both men were working in a tradition — running through Holbach, Volney, Godwin, the French Revolution — that produced characteristic patterns of thought. Shelley was, in this sense, a fellow-traveler of the intellectual current that would become Marxism, working out parallel conclusions from a shared philosophical inheritance.

It is Eleanor Marx, in fact, who is the most important Shelley figure in the Marx household, and the figure through whom the Marx-Shelley connection becomes most explicit. Born in 1855, she grew up in a home where Shakespeare was read aloud and political pamphlets accumulated on every surface. She became a serious literary scholar in her own right — she made the first English translation of Madame Bovary , among other things — and Shelley was one of her enduring preoccupations. In 1888, she and her partner Edward Aveling published a pamphlet titled Shelley’s Socialism , based on lectures they had given to working-class audiences. The pamphlet argued, with considerable textual evidence, that Shelley’s political poems and prose anticipated the major themes of socialist thought: the critique of property, the condemnation of wage labor, the vision of a transformed society organized around collective rather than competitive principles.

The reading was tendentious in places — Shelley was not, in any strict sense, a socialist, because socialism in its modern form did not yet exist in his lifetime — but it was also not unfounded. Queen Mab ‘s notes contain explicit denunciations of commerce as a corrupting force, attacks on the wage relation, and arguments for the abolition of inherited wealth that go well beyond conventional radical politics of the 1810s. A Philosophical View of Reform , written in 1819 but unpublished until 1920, contains an analysis of paper money, public debt, and the relation between the financial system and the immiseration of the laboring poor that is genuinely startling in its anticipation of later left economic critique. The Mask of Anarchy defines freedom not in negative terms but in terms of material sufficiency: “Thou art clothes, and fire, and food / For the trampled multitude.” Eleanor Marx and Aveling were not inventing a red Shelley. They were articulating a Shelley that had already been constructed, over the previous sixty years, by the radical British working class through its reading and its political practice.

Eleanor’s pamphlet matters for another reason. It represents a moment in which the Marx family — by then, after Karl’s death in 1883, embodied largely in Eleanor herself and in Engels, who lived until 1895 — formally claimed Shelley for the socialist tradition. This was a deliberate act of canon-formation. There were other ways the British socialist movement of the 1880s could have understood its literary inheritance. It could have leaned on Carlyle, who was widely read and who offered powerful critiques of industrial society. It could have leaned on Ruskin, whose Unto This Last was the ur-text of Christian socialism. It could have leaned on Dickens, whose social novels reached an enormous audience. The fact that the Marxist current within British socialism oriented itself instead toward Shelley — and through Shelley toward a poetic-prophetic mode of political address — was a choice, and it had consequences. William Morris’s News from Nowhere and A Dream of John Ball , the visionary socialism of the 1880s and 1890s generally, the lyrical strain that runs through twentieth-century left poetry from Auden through Adrian Mitchell — all of this owes something to the decision to make Shelley, rather than Carlyle or Ruskin, the literary ancestor of the British socialist movement.

What is most striking about the Marx-Engels-Shelley connection, viewed in full, is how thoroughly it complicates the standard picture of the relationship between Romantic poetry and modern politics. The standard picture treats Romanticism as a movement of bourgeois interiority, concerned with the self, the imagination, and nature, and it treats Marxism as a science of objective social relations that broke decisively with that earlier sensibility. The Shelley case suggests that the picture is wrong, or at least incomplete. There was a strand of Romanticism — Shelley’s strand — that was already engaged with class, with capital, with the wage relation, with the material conditions of human freedom. And there was a strand of early Marxism — Engels’s strand especially — that recognized this Romantic ancestry and drew on it openly. The line from Queen Mab to The Communist Manifesto runs through Clark’s pirated New York imprint, through Benbow’s cheap reprints, through Watson’s Chartist editions, through Manchester reading rooms in the 1840s, through Engels’s Condition of the Working Class , through Eleanor Marx’s lectures, through Morris’s News from Nowhere , and on into the British labor movement of the twentieth century. It is not a line of direct influence. It is a line of transmission, mediated by class struggle and by the particular history of how radical literature reaches the people who need it.

The poet drowned in 1822. The afterlife began almost immediately, and it carried him into territory he could not have foreseen — into the imagination of two German theorists who would, within a generation of his death, give the British working class a vocabulary for the emancipation Shelley had imagined but could not name.