Poetic forms containing rampant money

This chapter begins with the South Sea Bubble and the Financial Revolution by bringing to light an anonymous Jacobite Pindaric ode written in response to the consequences of this emblematic boom and bust. Other poems or passages on the Bubble by Anne Finch, Gay, Swift and Pope are drawn upon in an exploration of how poetic form may attempt to manage and counteract the rise of stocks and shares, notes of exchange and paper currency. The repeatedly evoked contrast between metallic coin, especially gold, and these fiduciary symbols of value is identified in such poems as Pope’s ‘Of the Use of Riches’ and then followed into the Romantic period in poems by Keats, Shelley and Byron. This distinction is found to influence Shelley’s ‘Defence of Poetry’ through the association between precious metals and poetic value in the essay by Thomas Love Peacock to which it responds.

The nineteenth-century opium complex: From Thomas Love Peacock to Sherlock Holmes

This introduction to the special issue proposes that two discrete nineteenth-century histories of opium – a literary history, initiated by the drug confessions of De Quincey, and a colonial history, exemplified by the commercial activities of the East India Company (in which Thomas Love Peacock participated) in cultivating opium in Bengal for export to China, leading to the first Opium War – are common elements in a nineteenth-century ‘opium complex’, a set of interlocking practices of individuals and (quasi)state actors, extending across the globe. Sherlock Holmes detective stories are read as compressed registers of tensions that inhere in this complex.

‘A voice from over the Sea’: Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy, Peterloo, and the English Radical Press

Shelley’s poetic response to the Peterloo massacre, The Mask of Anarchy, was crucially informed by printed news sources relating to the momentous events in Manchester of 16 August 1819. Hitherto our knowledge of those sources has been confined to Leigh Hunt’s Examiner newspaper. This article re-examines the available evidence and argues that Shelley may well also have drawn on the accounts of Peterloo written by the radical journalist and freethinker, Richard Carlile. It traces the connections between Carlile and the Shelley circle in London during 1819 (including Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock, William Godwin, and Thomas Jefferson Hogg), and identifies a number of suggestive verbal parallels between Shelley’s Mask and Carlile’s prose. But there were also important political differences between the two men; an appreciation of those differences throws new light on the Mask’s ambivalent attitude to the prospect of revolution, and Shelley’s strident advocacy of non-violent resistance to state-sponsored oppression.