Politics, Petitions, and Violence in Shelley’s Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson

ABSTRACT This essay examines Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1810 work Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson. By returning to the political moment of the work’s composition and publication, I establish a new and formative context for the work (which is often considered juvenilia and consequently less closely read than it could be): the political turmoil surrounding petitions in 1810. As I demonstrate, the poem, from its choice of Nicholson as a subject to its thematic and formal gestures, dramatizes the political dead-end of the liberal faith in petitions and, ultimately, offers a radical critique of the ideology from which they derive and their consequent violence. Indeed, what emerges in the Posthumous Fragments is a typology of violence linking the structural violence of monarchy with forms of empirical violence such as war and suffering. And finally, to show the sustained relevance of this dynamic in Shelley’s political imagination, I conclude by briefly discussing the role of petitions in The Cenci.