On Tue, 10 Oct 2000 [log in to unmask] wrote:
> --On Tue, 10 Oct 2000 3:33 PM -0400 "David E. Latane"
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > As for Queen Mab, Shelley was a bit ambivalent about the piracies
>
>
> don't forget though, of the original 250 printed, 180 vanished (i think) -
> shelley gave away 70 copies. the radical printers who took it up rescued it
> from 'oblivion' (apart from sections published in journal/s), at least to
> some extent. but, of course, they published it for the notes as much as (or
> more than) for the poetry... and shelley, at least in the spirit of
> composing it, would have been pleased to see it break through the 'class
> barrier'.
true, true. Tho the Shelley who wrote the poem intended it for an
aristocratic audience, and later printers tarted it up for the swells as
well--in an advertisement in the Athenaeum for 1832, _Mab_ with a deluxe
frontispiece is the most expensive of Shelley's works, offered at nine
shillings. Here's Ian jack (Oxford History of English Lit volume):
"A man with a message is a man in search ofan audience, and Shelley
speculated a great deal about who would read his poems. The difficulty was
that a large audience was incompatible with the nature of his views. 'As I
have not abated an iota of the infidelity or cosmopolicy of it', he wrote
of Queen Mab, 'sufficient will remain . . . to make it very unpopular.
Like all egoists, I shall console myself with what I may call, if I
please, the suffrages of the chosen few.' He took it for granted that
these would come from the wealthier classes, ordering only that 250 copies
should be printed--' small, neat quarto, on fine paper, . . . so as to
catch the aristocrats.'"
So there is this wonderful irony that Mab did become genuinely popular
with the working classes,thru the chartists at least.
David Latane
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