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[This is the second part of a continuing history of the works that followed in the wake of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis and lead to the emergence of the scientific romance in the late nineteenth century. The first part, covering Bacon and his immediate successors, appeared in NYRSF #305.—the eds.]
When John Dryden and Abraham Cowley, poets who became early members of the Royal Society in the late seventeenth century, employed their art to celebrate the ambitions of the institution and of scientific research in general, they both looked back to Francis Bacon for inspiration. It took some time for the Society to produce a new fount of inspiration from within its own ranks, but when it did in the form of Isaac Newton, poets both within and without the Society’s ranks were not slow to celebrate and dramatize that triumph, helping in the process to formularize and cement the myth of his genius.
Newton became the primary symbol of the New Science among littérateurs. When he died, Allan Ramsay wrote an “Ode” in his memory, and Alexander Pope wrote an epitaph for him: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;/God said, Let Newton be! and all was light!” William Wordsworth subsequently characterized him in “The Prelude” (1805) as “Newton with his prism and silent face,/The marble index of a mind for ever/Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.” James Thomson—who also wrote “A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton” (1727)—described him in “The Seasons” (1726–30; rev. 1744) as “Newton, pure intelligence, whom God/To mortals lent to trace his boundless works.” Other tributes included Richard Glover’s “A Poem on Newton,” which was printed in Henry Pemberton’s A View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy (1728).
A more profound philosophical influence of Newton’s achievements can been seen in several long poems using his ideas as the foundation of a new epic mythology. Richard Blackmore’s Creation: A Philosophical Poem Demonstrating the Existence and Providence of God (1712) presents the theory of gravity as a striking and conclusive manifestation of divine omnipotence. Henry Baker’s “The Universe” (1734), which includes a detailed account of the solar system, including comets and recently discovered minor planets and also an elaborate account of “animalcules” discovered by microscopy, similarly takes it for granted that Newton’s discovery of physical laws necessarily implies a divine lawmaker.
Obviously influenced by both precedents but more adventurous in its method, Henry Brooke’s “Universal Beauty” (1735) is similar to Baker’s poem in its scope but begins with an invocation of “Tritonia! Goddess of the new born skies” and “Venus Urania.” The poem also seems to borrow some inspiration from Francis Bacon’s The Wisdom of the Ancients, including a series of footnotes to explain the symbolism of such classical allusions with reference to modern scientific ideas. Annotating poetry was not a popular strategy, but when poets grappled with such complex themes as Newtonian cosmology, they accepted a burden of explanation that had to be dealt with somehow, and long expository passages of verse could often be seen as detrimental to the poetic value of the work. It is no coincidence that the classic anthology of bad poetry The Stuffed Owl (1930), edited by D. B. Wyndham-Lewis and Charles Lee, begins its catalogue of horrid exemplars with the Royal Society poets Dryden and Cowley and includes many more samples of poetry attempting to deal with the wonders of science and technology.
The difficulty is further illustrated by Mark Akenside’s long didactic poem The Pleasures of Imagination, which was originally published in 1744 and thoroughly revised for a new version, bearing the subtly different title The Pleasures of the Imagination, in 1757. Both versions begin with analytical prefaces which separate the pleasures in question into various categories, corresponding to the various sections of the poem. The fourth section is perhaps the most interesting in that it considers pleasures more limited in their attainment because they require greater intelligence and a more philosophical turn of mind—to wit, the pleasures of the scientific imagination. Akenside insists the role of imagination in the apprehension of various kinds of beauty is “not alike to every mortal eye” and people possessed of different slants of imagination perceive different kinds of beauty in the natural world.
In Akenside’s view, imagination is no mere inventive fancy but a kind of mental penetration that ideally seeks and grasps the “vast, the stable, [and] the sublime” within “the transient and minute.” While it can see things in terms of the vocabulary of mythology, it is, or at least ought to be, aware of the symbolic quality of such contrivance. Because the poem makes elaborate use of classical imagery, it routinely stresses that such imaginative artifice is a means to an end, since “the various charms of life and sense adjoined” are “pledges of a state entire/Where native order reigns,” and beauty is the “lovely ministress of truth and good/In this dark world. For truth and good are one./And beauty dwells in them, and they in her.”
The identity of truth with beauty had been asserted many times since Plato asserted their equivalence, not least by Henry Brooke, and it was repeated yet again, more famously, by John Keats. What Keats and many of his predecessors meant to assert by that alleged equivalence is that the beautiful is always in some sense “true,” while Akenside belonged to the group approaching from the other direction, convinced that the truth is the ultimate source and vindication of beauty and that a privileged understanding of the natural world—science—is not merely one of the pleasures of the imagination but the key to them all.
That view is expressed more explicitly in Akenside’s “Hymn to Science,” which summons Science to “bless my labouring mind,” and in which the poet asks to be taken “Where reason points the way” to “learn each secret cause” in mathematics and motion and then to approach the human mind in the same way. As in Brooke’s “Universal Beauty,” there is no enmity in Akenside’s work between the imagination’s use of mythological imagery and its search for truth by scientific methods and means—quite the reverse; they can function as aspects of the same endeavor, provided that they cast off the burdens and idols of authority in order to open the mind.
The poetic interest in science—especially revolutionary science—assisted by the poets of the Royal Society and others fascinated by the Newtonian revolution inevitably fed into the Romantic Movement. Imported to Britain from Germany in the late eighteenth century, it seemed, both to some of its most vocal adherents and some of its most vocal adversaries to have a scientific as well as a poetic aspect. To some extent, the association of scientists with Romanticism was a coincidence of political ideals; many of the leading Romantic poets were supporters of the French Revolution and lent succor to English agitators, and their friends in the scientific community tended to have been drawn into alliance by similar sympathies. There was, however, more to the sympathy than mere coincidence, just as it was more than mere coincidence that had made Francis Bacon the philosopher of science into both the utopian author of New Atlantis and the mythological reinterpreter of The Wisdom of the Ancients. Science did, indeed, seem inherently democratic, scientific truth being exactly the same for everyone, while antidemocratic institutions and prejudices seemed to be reflected in and endorsed by the Church, in spite of the Christian teachings the Church claimed to embody.
The paragon of Romantic science in Britain as the eighteenth century drew to a close in terms of his status as a figurehead if not his actual achievements, was Erasmus Darwin. Erasmus Darwin is nowadays primarily remembered as the grandfather of the more famous Charles, but he played a key role of his own in the development of British perceptions of science. His detractors could and still can claim with some justification that his discoveries were slight, his inventions trivial, and his commentaries open to ridicule, but—partly because of the last-cited circumstance—he attracted enormous attention.
Darwin was the host and leading figure of the Lunar Society, a talking shop for scientists and technologists that seemed something of an absurdity itself in being based in Lichfield and in selecting its name not because of any particular interest in lunar astronomy but because of its suggestion of lunacy. Nevertheless, it was a cabinet of authentic celebrities. In himself Darwin seemed larger than life, not merely because of his successful publications and awesome physical bulk but because of his many offspring, estimated at fourteen in all, including three known illegitimate children. Whatever he was reckoned to be, he was certainly not mediocre.
Darwin was born in 1731 in Nottinghamshire and educated at Chesterfield Grammar School, St. John’s College Cambridge, and the University of Edinburgh Medical School, although there does not seem to be any record of his ever having obtained an M.D. He moved to Lichfield after failing to set himself up in Nottingham and maintained a practice there for fifty years, which won him a considerable reputation. It is unclear to what extent that success was based on treatments derived from the unorthodox theory of disease set out in his treatise Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794), which we now know to be incorrect. Like some other incorrect theories employed as bases for medical treatment in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, Darwin’s would have had the benefit of avoiding chemical treatments that did more harm than good—the only possible way in the golden age of quackery to become a reasonably successful physician. He gained enough of a reputation to be invited to serve as a Royal Physician alongside Mark Akenside, but he declined, not wanting to leave peaceful Lichfield for the hurly-burly of London.
The members of Darwin’s Lunar Society included James Watt, whose crucial improvements to Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine gave such machines the ability to transform the worlds of labor and transportation; Watt’s business partner Matthew Boulton; the chemist and clergyman Joseph Priestley; the potter Josiah Wedgwood, who was to become Charles Darwin’s other grandfather; and Samuel Galton, later, along with Erasmus Darwin, the other grandfather of Francis Galton, the pioneer of eugenic theory. Meetings of the Society also entertained such famous occasional guests as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Samuel Johnson.
Darwin’s treatise on physiology was by no means his first publication, although he did not make a rapid start on his literary career, being over fifty when he embarked on it. He began work as a translator, taking seven years to render Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae into English in A System of Vegetables (1783–85) and The Families of Plants (1787). That labor inspired him to dramatize the Linnaean system of classification, based on plant reproductive systems, in a long poem, The Loves of the Plants (1789), which was reprinted as Part Two of The Botanic Garden (1791). The first part of the latter book is “The Economy of Vegetation,” which is introduced as a survey of contemporary botanical science although its scope is actually considerably greater.
The Loves of the Plants is elaborately footnoted in order to explain its imagery, and it also includes prose “interludes” framed as dialogues between the author and a bookseller in which the former attempts to justify the method of the poem and explain its esthetics, especially its use of “monsters” and nightmarish imagery. Oddly enough, Darwin does not employ one readily available argument to justify his use of mythological symbolism in describing the reproductive apparatus of plants: that the Linnaean system of classification has no alternative but to borrow many of its generic and specific designations from mythologically associated terms, thus building the language of myth into scientific terminology at the most elementary level. In addition to Greek myth, Darwin also draws upon a fourfold classification of “elemental spirits” that discriminates those of earth (gnomes), air (sylphs), water (nymphs), and fire (salamanders). In his Apology, he calls this the “Rosicrucian doctrine.” That taxonomy provides the main organizing principle of “The Economy of Vegetation.”
“The Economy of Vegetation”—which is even more elaborately footnoted than The Loves of the Plants—begins with an invitation to the Goddess of Botany, who descends from the sky in a “blushing car” with wheels entwined with flowers. The poem then proceeds by way of a general introduction and background to its botanical subject-matter with a discussion of chemical explosions, steam engines, and the “electrical fluid,” enthusiastically celebrating recent discoveries and practical achievements of science. “Immortal Franklin” is hailed as a virtual equal of the mythological figures cited, and Joseph Priestley also takes a leading role. The “additional notes”—which take up considerably more than half of the text—include essays on meteors, comets, primary colors, the steam engine, electricity, and numerous other topics, including various aspects of geology, metallurgy, and meteorology, and an analysis of the imagery of the Portland Vase.
The Botanic Garden is primarily an exercise in the attempted popularization of science, an enterprise in which the Lunar Society had long taken a keen interest. In addition to the scientists and technologists listed above, its members included Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the father of the novelist Maria Edgeworth, who also undertook exercises in the popularization of science, and Thomas Day, the author of the didactic children’s book The History of Sandford and Merton (1783), who made significant efforts in the same cause. Joseph Priestley was also extremely interested in the cause of education—a vocation as important to him as his clerical one, relative to which his scientific researches were a mere hobby. The Lunar Society’s endeavors helped to inspire the production of such works as Conversations in Chemistry (1805) by Maria Edgeworth’s friend Jane Marcet, Samuel Parkes’s Chemical Catechism for the Use of Young People (1806), and Jeremiah Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues (1807).
Because gardening was becoming a popular hobby in England at the time, the title of The Botanic Garden helped the book to sell very well, although some of its readers might have felt that they had been slightly misled and some undoubtedly disagreed strongly with its declarations of support for the French Revolution and calls for the abolition of slavery—inclusions that helped to make it one of the principal identifying texts of the “Jacobin science,” against which the editors of the Anti-Jacobin protested strongly.
The Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner was set up by George Canning, John Hookham Frere, and others as a Tory reprisal against the burgeoning radical press. Founded in 1797, it immediately launched a strident campaign against “Jacobin science” and “Jacobin poets,” often including parodies of their various works. Robert Southey was a favorite target for poetic travesty, and the assault might have assisted his eventual decision to follow Mark Akenside’s example and quit the radical camp for conservatism. The Lunar Society was also an immediate target. The most memorable and most famous of all the periodical’s parodies was a caricature of The Loves of the Plants, “The Loves of the Triangles” (1801). Whether the parody in question caused its target any distress, it is impossible to guess, but it is probable that the publicity it provided merely helped to swell Darwin’s bulk as a figurehead.
The Botanic Garden was represented as a tribute to Joseph Banks who had greatly expanded the scope of the Linnaean classification of plants, having collected many new specimens when he sailed with James Cook’s first exploratory expedition. Banks had promoted the extension of such work when he became president of the Royal Society; he commissioned William Bligh to collect the breadfruit from Tahiti that became one of the bones of contention occasioning the mutiny on the Bounty. His interest was not purely scientific; Banks recognized the importance of plantations in the project of colonization, and he was interested in breadfruit because he thought that it might become a useful staple crop in Caribbean colonial endeavors. When he eventually took charge of the Royal Gardens at Kew, one of Banks’s primary missions was to equip the colonists of Australia with useful crop plants and herbal medicines. Banks had, however, previously been the dedicatee of James Perry’s “Mimosa; or, The Sensitive Plant” (1779), which had taken some inspiration from Linnaeus but far more from the erotic euphemisms of Thomas Stretser’s quasi-pornographic The Natural History of the Frutex Vulvaria, or Flowering Shrub and Arbor Vitae; or, The Natural History of the Tree of Life (both 1732, bylined “Philogynes Clitorides”).
The theme and title of The Loves of the Plants also called attention to the fact that the Linnaean system of classification is based on the characteristics of their sexual organs—a circumstance that had already given rise to some muted accusations of indecency, although the vast majority of scientists did not regard it as a suitable occasion for suggestive nudges. There was, however, more than puerile prurience at stake: the fact that a logical plant taxonomy had to be based on reproductive systems added further evidence to the supposition that the evident relatedness of species must be based on a common heredity and evolutionary sequence.
Whether Erasmus Darwin had been a convinced evolutionist before setting out to translate Linnaeus or not, he was certainly one thereafter—but the hints of that belief set out in The Botanic Garden remained hints, and it was not until 1794, in a single paragraph buried deep in Zoonomia’s chapter on the medical relevance of human reproductive physiology, that Darwin felt able to express it explicitly. The paragraph has since become more famous than the rest of the text, but it did not generate overmuch comment or controversy at the time:
From thus meditating on the great similarity of the structure of the warm-blooded animals and at the same time of the great changes they undergo both before and after their nativity ... would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of years ... that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE endowed with animality ... and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end?
Later, he added: “As the earth and ocean were probably peopled with vegetable productions long before the existence of animals ... shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filament is and has been the cause of all organic life?”
Zoonomia was not nearly as successful commercially as The Botanic Garden, and Darwin’s theory of disease never won enough disciples to become a school or occasion a movement. As summed up in the preface to part three of the text, that thesis is that
all diseases originate in the exuberance, deficiency, or retrograde action of the faculty of the sensorium, as their proximate cause; and consist in the disordered motions of the fibres of the body, as the proximate effects of the exertions of those disordered faculties.
Darwin divided diseases into four classes, consequent on four different ways in which the sensorium has the ability to affect the “fibrous parts” of the body, the four classes in question being diseases of irritation, sensation, volition, and association. Each class of disease, in Darwin’s view, requires a different approach to its cure.
Although we now have a much clearer idea of the causes of diseases, it is hardly fair to blame Darwin for failing to originate (or reinvent) the germ theory forty years in advance of François Raspail, and he doubtless thought that he had obtained some vindication for his theory in his own observations; if his theory was no better than the most orthodox theory then current—that diseases were caused by airborne “miasmas”—it was surely no worse. At least Darwin did not suffer the tragic fate of his fellow “Jacobin scientist,” Humphry Davy, who wondered whether miasmas might be combated by curative gases and inhaled chlorine in order to test its effect. In spite of the primitive nature of Zoonomia’s account of human physiology, its brief summation of comparative anatomy did indeed lead Darwin to a correct conclusion with regard to the “filament” connecting the descendancy of all life on earth.
One significant corollary of the theory of disease elaborated in Zoonomia is the role played by the imagination in both health and disease; among other effects, Darwin suggests that, although early embryos are not formed by parental imagination, they are nevertheless susceptible to them in their development, productive of the resemblances of offspring to parents—thus adding, at least potentially, a whole new dimension to the pleasures and perils of the imagination.
Darwin undoubtedly made more impact on his contemporaries with his ideas on educational reform, which he summarized in A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools (1797), a crucial work in the campaign not merely for the better education of women but for their education in science. In Anti-Jacobin abuse, Darwin was routinely bracketed with the radical propagandist and novelist William Godwin, the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist who had argued cogently in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) that women were not naturally inferior to men and that it was only their lack of education that made them seem so. Erasmus Darwin’s support for her thesis might seem a trifle superfluous today, but it did not seem so in 1797, however unfair it is that his word should have carried so much more apparent weight than hers. Unfortunately, Mary Wollstonecraft died in 1797 giving birth to a daughter, Mary, who was later to elope with Percy Shelley.
Darwin moved on to safer ground with a straightforward championship of hobbyist botany in Phytologia; or, The Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening (1800) but then reverted to work on the epic project begun in The Botanic Garden, the final product of which was the posthumously published The Temple of Nature; or, The Origin of Society (1803), the ultimate summation of his thought and art. Darwin’s evolutionism was reiterated there more elaborately, flamboyantly dressed with the symbolism of mythology and poetic verve, and infused with a relentless and typically Romantic optimism based in faith in the idea of progress.
The poem proceeds by dividing the past into four ages with a fifth having just begun. The first is described in mythological terms, syncretically, taking in, among other motifs, Adam and Eve, the binding of Proteus, the School of Venus, the Eleusinian Mysteries, and Orpheus’ Descent into Hell before proceeding dutifully to God’s function as the First Cause, prompting the origin of earthly life in the sea with the spontaneous production of minute animals. These animalcules then began their evolution from the simple and microscopic toward the complex and ponderous. The mythological imagery does not conclude there, however, being continually reintroduced with various symbolic purposes.
The Temple of Nature is extensively annotated by footnotes explaining its symbolism and elaborating the evolutionary account, with supportive evidence drawn from a variety of sources, including Linnaeus, Lord Monboddo, Edmund Halley, John Locke, Antoine Lavoisier, and—most extensively by far—Darwin’s own earlier works. Reflecting on a passing reference to the cave of Trophonius, Darwin explains the myth and his interpretation of it, very much in the spirit of The Wisdom of the Ancients but decidedly less gloomily than Francis Bacon, concluding that
When we reflect on the perpetual destruction of organic life, we should also recollect that it is perpetually renewed in other forms by the same materials, and thus the sum total of the happiness of the world continues undiminished; and that a philosopher may thus smile again on turning his eyes from the coffins of nature to her cradles.
Another arithmetician might have calculated on the basis of the same data that the sum total of the world’s misery similarly continues undiminished, and a cynic might have disputed Darwin’s fundamental assumption—repeated elsewhere in the poem—of the “happiness of life,” but such quibbles did not bother him if they even occurred to him. In his eyes, the surge and progress of life, reflected in the ambition and adventurism of individual organisms, was intrinsically good, not merely a cause for wonder but for rejoicing.
In describing the crucial emergence of life from water onto land, Darwin’s comments echo those of Benoît de Maillet, although he does not cite that author and probably had not read him. The terms in which he describes the adventure however, could equally well have helped to spark the imagination of the Chevalier de Lamarck or his own grandson:
After islands or continents were raised above the primeval ocean, great numbers of the most simple animals would attempt to seek food at the edges or shores of the new land, and might thence gradually become amphibious.... At the same time new microscopic animalcules would immediately commence wherever there was warmth and moisture, and some organic matter, that might induce putridity. Those situated on dry land, and immersed in dry air, may gradually acquire new powers to preserve their existence; and by innumerable successive reproductions, for some thousands, or perhaps millions of ages, may at length have produced many of the vegetable and animal inhabitants which now people the earth.
There is, as usual, an extensive set of “additional notes” appended to the poem, which more than double the length of the text and constitute a series of essays on its various themes and assumptions: the spontaneous generation of the microscopic animals from which more complex life-forms develop, the faculties of the sensorium, and so on. They include accounts of aging, death, and reproduction, based on the fundamental theses of Zoonomia, and, more adventurously, a chemical theory of electricity and magnetism, based on significant observations made by Humphry Davy, Benjamin Franklin, and Luigi Galvani. The additional text includes in its discussion of the sensorium an essay on the origins of the “sensation” of beauty, heartily endorsing Edmund Burke’s contention that its ultimate basis is love but repeating from Zoonomia the judgment that it “appears to be attached from our cradles to the easy curvature of visible objects, and to have been derived from the form of the female bosom.”
All of this speculative theorizing can now be seen to have been in very large measure, if not completely, incorrect. It reaches too far from inadequate data, and when fuller data became available in the course of the next two centuries, its falsified hypotheses were replaced by better ones. The entire exercise is, therefore, a kind of “scientific romance” even if one sets aside the deliberate romanticization of the poem and its symbolic mythological imagery. Given that, it might seem that Darwin fully deserved the satirization to which his work was subjected, to an even greater extent than Francis Bacon’s depiction of Salomon’s House warranted the parody of Jonathan Swift’s Academy of Lagado.
It does not follow from that argument, however, that Darwin would have done better to stick to the mere accumulation of data and leave romance out, either in the matter of speculative thesis building or in the dramatization of his speculative theses in poetic form. We have now progressed beyond Francis Bacon’s philosophy of science and appreciate the fact that it is not sufficient simply to smash the idols of false belief and then collect observations until the truth falls out by a process of induction. We now appreciate the necessity of constructing hypothetical edifices precisely in order to put them to the proof: to subject them to rigorous trial by ordeal.
Popularization, dramatization, and satirization might be regarded as superfluous to that process, irrelevant if not pernicious from a rigorously scientific viewpoint. But that sets aside the esthetic aspects of scientific endeavor and discovery as well as other aspects of its human significance: the manner in which people conceive of themselves, their situation within and relation to the universe, and what Erasmus Darwin was determined to consider as the never-diminishing sum of “happiness of life.” In that context, both levels of Darwin’s scientific romance—his hypothesizing and his poeticizing—might be considered to have all the justification they need and to represent significant accomplishments even though the hypotheses turned out to be wrong and the poetry, on the whole, not very good.
In spite of—or perhaps because of—the popularity of The Botanic Garden, Erasmus Darwin was never taken entirely seriously in Britain, but the German Romantics thought highly of him, and his influence on English Romanticism might have been greater by the indirect route of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s intense interest in German Romanticism than via his own works. He did, however, have a considerable influence on several significant later works embodying an element of scientific romance and thus added significantly to the narrative component of the genre’s evolution.
The annotated poem that owes a most obvious debt to Erasmus Darwin’s method and precedent is Percy Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813), which begins with Mab’s descent to Earth in a flying car very similar to the one employed by the Goddess of Botany in “The Economy of Vegetation.” Shelley worked very extensively with classical imagery in his poetry, casually embellished with supplementary imagery in a fashion similar to Darwin’s, and the legacy of the scientific component of his education was fused with or subsumed within that imagery, albeit somewhat unobtrusively. The thrust of his most visionary works was revolutionary in both artistic and political terms, and he became the British Romantics’ principal illustration of the dangers of being too explicit in expressing revolutionary zeal.
He first ran into trouble when his essay on “The Necessity of Atheism” had him thrown out of Oxford and branded as a troublemaker. Ostracism by polite society called forth a supportive reaction from sympathizers, but the reputation was not without dangers because of the possibility of prosecution for “blasphemous libel” if he gave full expression to his atheism in print. It did not matter how elaborately he dressed the ideas in question in poetical imagery; having been branded in advance, he had every reason to suppose that there would be readers anxious to penetrate the veil and strike at the face behind.
Shelley’s eventual widow, Mary, the daughter of the radical philosopher William Godwin—with whom he eloped to the continent, running away from an unhappy first marriage, also the result of an impulsive elopement—was later to contend that Shelley’s revolutionary spirit had calmed down somewhat over time. She maintained that he had eventually decided that political upheaval was inapt and insufficient to further the work of moral progress and that what was required was a more gradual but more sweeping evolution of an ideal society appropriate to perfected human beings. That might well have been true, but until he died in 1822, a month before his thirtieth birthday, he retained the reputation of being the most extreme Jacobin among the Jacobin poets and hence the most dangerous. In Queen Mab, the most fervently revolutionary of his early works, the future social transformation he envisaged was far more sweeping than anything envisaged by social reformists like William Godwin, tending more to the apocalyptic than the political.
The publishing history of Queen Mab was troubled by virtue of its insistent, explicit, and flamboyant reiteration of Shelley’s atheism. Although more than two hundred copies were privately printed when it was completed, Shelley only circulated seventy of them to friends and sympathizers, storing the rest in a bookshop. In 1821, the bookseller, William Clark, found the unbound pages, which had by then acquired considerable commercial value as Shelley’s reputation had soared. They were bound and sold without consultation with Shelley, who had left the country for good by then, hoping that the milder climate of the Mediterranean countries might be better for his fragile health than England’s cold and damp. When a copy of the book came into the hands of the Society for the Prevention of Vice, charges were brought and Clark was imprisoned—but other publishers immediately began pirating the work, the commercial value of which had only been increased by the attempted suppression, and was further increased by Shelley’s death.
When Mary Shelley published a collected edition of Percy’s work in 1839, she thought it prudent to remove the passages from Queen Mab that had occasioned the prosecution, and when they were restored in the second edition of 1841, the publisher, Edward Moxon, was immediately prosecuted for blasphemous libel. In the 1847 Moxon edition, Mary rejoiced in her preface that the “obstacles” that had previously prevented her from making a “perfect” edition of Shelley poems available had at last been removed, but she dutifully refrained from printing the whole of Queen Mab, restricting herself to reproducing the opening two cantos, thus eliminating all the contentious material—and it is that truncated version of the poem with which the majority of subsequent readers became acquainted. Opportunities to read the entire poem were rare until the advent of the World Wide Web, which has now made it available to anyone at the click of a mouse.
In the poem, the fairy Queen Mab arrives in a chariot pulled by “celestial coursers” in order to carry away the soul of the sleeping Ianthe. The journey immediately takes them out of the atmosphere and into space in order that the Earth can be placed in its appropriate cosmic context.
This vision involves an evocation of a “Spirit of Nature” very much in keeping with the environment of Erasmus Darwin’s Temple. Having introduced this cosmic perspective, the poem moves on to Mab’s realm and her “Hall of Spells,” where the secrets of the future are to be revealed in the context of a universe moved harmoniously by “Eternal Nature’s law” and in which the “faintest thought” within “one human brain ... becomes a link in the great chain of nature.” In the truncated text, however, the vision only takes in the ruins of the past, insisting that all monuments are doomed to disappear with the result that the final image of the extract preserved in that version leaves the Spirit standing:
High on an isolated pinnacle;
The flood of ages combating below,
The depth of that unbounded universe
Above and all around
Nature’s unchanging harmony.
The full version of the text goes on to take far more detailed lessons from that vision of the past, reading within it a “tale of horror” in which the human sufferings obliterated by the passing of the ages are attributed to the actions of oppression, elaborated in the third canto in a vision of an exemplary king, reveling in luxury and vice. The fourth canto broadens that perspective into a wider indictment, and the fifth expands on the subject of religion’s “twin-sister,” selfishness, as embodied in commerce and economic oppression, although it ends on a brighter note, suggesting that the entire social system in question is “tottering to the grave” and that all its evils are about to be replaced. Even so, the sixth canto reiterates the same lament, mounting a further attack on religion before finding hope again in a vision of the universe entire and “The storm of change, that ceaselessly/Rolls round the eternal universe,” while finding the Spirit of Nature a much kindlier power than “the God of human error,” by virtue of a more complex and elaborate version of the vision revealed in The Temple of Nature. In this prospect, despite the fact that there is no innate “happiness of life” for human beings thanks to the depredations of tyrants, there is always hope in the endless sequence of natural renewals.
In the eighth canto, the poem finally rends “time’s eternal veil” in order to display “hope ... beaming through the mists of fear” over an Earth that is “no longer hell.” Indeed, the future Earth is displayed as a literal paradise in which it is not just human life that is blissful but in which lions can lie down with kids, because “custom’s force” has made their nature lamb-like. Humans are here immortal, free from all the “germs of misery, death, disease, and crime.”
The fairy goes on in canto nine to offer a summary of what has gone before and extract a lesson therefrom before descending to Earth once again to return the soul to Ianthe’s body. Like The Temple of Nature, however, the poem is followed by an elaborate set of notes, including supportive quotations from authors such as Pliny, Francis Bacon, Spinoza, and—very extensively, albeit in the original French—the atheist philosopher Baron d’Holbach’s Système de la nature (1781). The first note explains in great detail what the sun would look like seen from outside the atmosphere and explains the consequences of the finite speed of light. The second emphasizes the immensity of the universe and the plurality of its worlds. Others argue matters of political and economic philosophy and expand at length on the evil consequences of religion in general and Christianity in particular.
It is in this long section of the text that Shelley occasionally devotes himself to scientific speculation, supplementing a reference to the pole star with this observation:
It is exceedingly probable, from many considerations, that this obliquity [i.e., of the earth’s axis] will gradually diminish, until the equator coincides with the ecliptic.... There is no great extravagance in presuming that the progress of the perpendicularity of the poles may be as rapid as the progress of intellect; or that there should be a perfect identity between the moral and physical improvement of the human species.
The final and longest note begins with a commentary on the story of Prometheus, which, the author contends, “although universally admitted to be allegorical, has never been satisfactorily explained.” Shelley then offers an interpretation in which the fire stolen by Prometheus is specifically culinary and the vulture sent to devour his entrails is symbolic of disease, crediting that decoding to “Mr. Newton’s Defence of Vegetable Regimen” and including a brief supportive quote.
The latter reference is to John Frank Newton’s The Return to Nature; or A Defence of the Vegetable Regimen, published in 1811. Shelley had met Newton in 1812, having been introduced to him by William Godwin’s son. The version of the story of Prometheus contained in Newton’s book begins with an account of Francis Bacon’s explanation of the myth but then proceeds to offer a variant:
I beg permission of the reader to venture with great humility my own conception of the story of Prometheus, who, it is pretty generally admitted, represents the human race. Making allowance for such transposition of the events of the allegory as time might produce ... the drift of the fable appears to be this: Man at his creation was endowed with the gift of perpetual youth; that is, he was not formed to be a sickly suffering creature as we now see him, but to enjoy health, and to sink by slow degrees into the bosom of the parent earth without disease or pain. Prometheus first taught the use of animal food, and of fire with which to render it more digestible and pleasing to the taste.... Thirst, the necessary concomitant of a flesh diet, ensued ... and man forfeited the inestimable gift of health which he had received from heaven: he became diseased....
By these passages we become acquainted with two particulars not unimportant in the present discussion; first, the sense in which the theft of fire from the sun’s chariot by Prometheus was understood according to the instruction of Pliny’s time; and secondly, that it was the same man, Prometheus, who first preserved it for human uses, and who likewise set an example of slaughtering an ox….
Many ancient writers look with no favorable eye on the great change which Prometheus achieved in the condition of mankind…. Hesiod too acquaints us, that before the time of Prometheus, mankind was exempt from all sufferings....
Newton then goes on to cite the example, also borrowed by Shelley, of the desirability of the Earth’s axis being perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic, except that instead of placing the supposed Age of Plenty associated with that modification in the future where Shelley locates it, he places it in the distant past. Newton recruits far more elaborate support for the thesis than the brief argument that Shelley borrowed, citing observations by Michael Adams in The Philosophical Magazine and also quoting Dryden and Swift.
The long essay Newton then presents, in the attempt to prove that humans are really adapted for a vegetarian diet rather than meat-eating, similarly mingles scientific references with literary and classical ones in a remarkable syncresis. In this account—ultimately derived from the theories of William Lambe, the pioneer of veganism—all disease is explained by carnivorism and all evil is represented as disease. As a general theory of disease, the one proposed by William Lambe is certainly no better than Erasmus Darwin’s but also no worse, and the method of popularization chosen by John Frank Newton and subsequently appropriated by Shelley is very similar to the one adopted by Darwin.
Prometheus, as the symbolic figurehead of carnivorism, becomes a satanic figure in Newton’s decoding. It is perhaps not surprising that Shelley did not want that particular part of Queen Mab reprinted, not merely because it asserts dubious dietary opinions that he probably recanted but because he went on to produce his own highly distinctive reinterpretation of the myth of Prometheus, which similarly makes him “satanic,” but in a much more complimentary fashion. Indeed, Shelley and his wife were to go on to produce two further parts of an entire new Prometheia which produced a reinterpretation of the Titan that still owed something to Francis Bacon and John Frank Newton, but was far more far-reaching and influential and which requires separate consideration in a subsequent article.
The revised and expanded version of Brian Stableford’s history of scientific romance, now entitled New Atlantis: A Narrative History of Scientific Romance, will hopefully appear some time in 2014 from Wildside Press, in four volumes.
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