Blood and Mud in Shelley’s “England in 1819.”

Abstract

Shelley’s sonnet “England in 1819” reads like a pathology report on a terminally ill patient. The patient in question is England in the year 1819. George III, the country’s erstwhile monarch, is “old, mad, blind” and moribund; the Prince Regent, a gluttonous libertine, attests to the progressive vitiation (“mud from a muddy spring”) of the royal gene pool; the vital organs of state are dysfunctional; the body politic is “fainting” from starvation; and the episode that has brought England’s endemic disease to light is the wryly dubbed Peterloo Massacre – the moment when liberty met its Waterloo. On 16th August, 1819, rural and royal cavalry units charged into St Peter’s Field, Manchester, where the charismatic radical orator Henry Hunt was addressing a vast (16–20,000 people) but peaceful public meeting. The fatal combination of Hunt on the hustings agitating for parliamentary reform and the saber-slashing, hoof-crushing cavalry down below left eighteen dead and almost 700 seriously wounded.1 What the Manchester massacre laid bare was the moral bankruptcy of a government that refused to acknowledge or allay the plight of the impoverished working classes in the industrial north of England. It is this dereliction of duty that Shelley catalogues in his sonnet and crystallizes through the poem’s pivotal blood conceit. The first intimation of blood is given in the second and third lines of the sonnet: “Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow/Through public scorn – mud from a muddy spring.” The word “dregs” is a clear reference to the debauched Prince Regent, epitomizing the dullness – a rich pun denoting a lack of sensibility, efficacy, and sharpness of https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2227373