rest of the world. The flood-gates of culture were thrown down, and theological debate was swept into the background. The "world, the flesh, and the Devil" were no longer considered synonymous; the emotions came into their own. The grey clouds of Puritanism, chill and forbidding, were pierced and warmed by the sun of Pagan beauty. And as the clouds rolled back and the horizon broadened, American literature blossomed in the sunlight. Yale University. LITERATURE AND THE LAW OF LIBEL: BY NEWMAN I. WHITE When Lord Eldon ruled that Percy Bysshe Shelley, atheist and libertine, was not a fit person to rear his own children, it was not the last time that Shelley's radical opinions were to elicit an adverse verdict from an English court. A posthumous trial occurred. nineteen years after the poet's death, on June 23, 1841, before Lord Denman and a special jury, in the Court of Queen's Bench. This trial has passed practically unnoticed by the numerous writers on Shelley. One of the objects of this paper is to furnish an account of this trial, with some incidental effects of a purely Shelleyan significance. One cannot deal at length with the materials involved, however, without realizing that Shelley is not the central figure of the story; neither is Thomas Noon Talfourd (author of Ion), who defended Shelley's indicted publisher. The dominating figure is that of Henry Hetherington, a London printer and bookseller almost unknown to literary annals, and yet a man whose practical influence on literature, though indirect, was probably greater than that of either Shelley or Talfourd. The trial of Edward Moxon, Shelley's publisher, is simply an incident in a campaign waged with considerable resourcefulness by Hetherington and his radical friends, partly for the protection of radicals from 1 Although J. P. Anderson's bibliography appended to Sharp's Life of Shelley lists Talfourd's contemporary pamphlet on the trial, the attention given the episode by writers on Shelley is apparently limited to two or three casual and mistaken lines in Roger Ingpen's Shelley in England (ii: 62) and in H. B. Forman's privately printed The Vicissitudes of Queen Mab (p. 21). For my knowledge of the reference in Mr. Forman's rare pamphlet I am indebted to Mr. T. J. Wise, former secretary of the Shelley Society, whose well-known courtesy to investigators led him in this instance to re-read the pamphlet and inform me of its bearing on the Moxon trial. Mr. Wise informs me that Forman's silence on the subject when writing The Shelley Library was due to the fact that the matter seemed to him to belong to the biographer rather than the bibliographer. I am also indebted to Mr. Wise for the information that Volume V of his Catalogue of the Ashley Library now with the binders contains letters to Moxon from Mary Shelley and E. J. Trelawney on the subject of the trial. discriminatory treatment under the law of libel and partly to widen the limits of free speech under English law. Having pointed out in advance that Shelley in this instance is merely a pawn of the radicals, we may waive strict chronological sequence and proceed at once to the trial of Moxon, returning thereafter to a consideration of the chain of trials in which it was a link. In 1839, Mrs. Shelley brought out, through the publisher Edward Moxon, the first authorized collected edition of Shelley's poems, in four volumes. True to her steady purpose of ingratiating Shelley as far as possible with the safe-and-sane reader, she presented Queen Mab in this volume with so many excisions as to make it both harmless and meaningless. Reviewers protested, particularly the Athenaeum reviewer,2 and later in the year a one-volume edition of the poems appeared in which Queen Mab was printed entire, with Shelley's notes. It was for publishing this volume that Edward Moxon was tried on June 23, 1841, for blasphemous libel. At the time of the trial the British public was so excited over the Corn Law elections that the case was practically ignored. This circumstance, together with the fact that it involved the relations of literature to the law of libel, seemed to Thomas Noon (Sergeant) Talfourd, counsel for the defense, sufficient justification for publishing his speech for the defendant. Along with Nos. 600, 633, 635. 3 Speech for the Defendant in the Prosecution of the Queen versus Moxon, for the Publication of Shelley's Works. Delivered at the Court of Queen's Bench, June 23, 1841, and Revised. London, 1841. It was reprinted in Critical and Miscellaneous Writings of Thomas Noon Talfourd, 3rd American edition, Boston and New York, 1854. The case is not mentioned in the Queen's Bench Reports for 1841, Perry and Davison's Reports for 1841, Gale and Davison's Reports for 1841, The Digest of English Case Law, The Jurist, nor under Trials in the Catalogue of the Harvard Law School Library. It is included in State Trials, New Series, IV: 693-722 and in Modern State Trials, by W. C. Townsend, London, 1850, ii: 356-393, but Townsend's account is in large part a literal repetition of Talfourd's pamphlet, without acknowledgment. The trial is mentioned, briefly, in the Encyc. Brit. and D. N. B. sketches of both Moxon and Talfourd and in the D. N. B. sketch of Henry Hetherington; also in J. A. Brain's A Lecture Entitled an Evening with Thomas Noon Talfourd, Reading, 1889. It is given some attention in the memoirs of radical agitators of the period: viz., W. J. Linton's James Watson; A Memoir and George Jacob Holy several other booksellers from whom the witness had purchased copies of Shelley's Poetical Works, Moxon stood indicted of blasphemous libel in that he "did falsely and maliciously publish a scandalous, impious, profane and malicious libel of and concerning the Holy Scriptures, and of and concerning Almighty God." Four passages from Queen Mab were specified and quoted in the indictment: IV, 208-221; VII, 84-97; VII, 100-115; and a part of Shelley's second note, which speaks, as Talfourd admits, "in very disrespectful terms of the statements of Christian history." By Moxon's request, his own case was the first tried. The prosecuting attorney, Thomas, opened the case by establishing the proposition that a work tending to bring religion into contempt and odium was an offense against the common law, citing the recent case of Henry Hetherington among others. He then read the indicted passages and several others, all from Queen Mab. He showed that the case was without personal animus by fairly admitting the respectability of the defendant and eloquently eulogizing the genius of Shelley, and concluded with stating his satisfaction if this trial should establish the principle "that no publications on religion should be subject for prosecution in the future." 5 The sole witness, Thomas Holt, then testified to purchasing the indicted book at the defendant's shop at the desire of Henry Hetherington, and Talfourd began his speech for the defense. Talfourd's argument for the defense is based "on Christian grounds." He contends that the whole book cannot be indicted on the basis of several excerpts "torn violently from their context"; that they form part of the intellectual history of a genius and do not exist independently for the purpose of creating doubt, that the work is not dangerous to the class of readers for whom it was intended; that Queen Mab, from which the indicted passages are taken, was deprecated by Shelley himself in a letter published by Moxon with the poem, that Shelley is not an atheist; that if Moxon oake's Sixty Years of An Agitator's Life; but the radicals were interested in it only as an outgrowth of Hetherington's trial for libel. Thus it is not mentioned in The Life and Struggles of William Lovett, which devotes 14 pages to Hetherington, in Wallas's Life of Francis Place or G. J. Holyoake's Bygones Worth Remembering. Taken from the indictment as copied in State Trials. Talfourd does not specify all the indicted passages. Talfourd, op. cit., Preface. is found guilty the publishers of Fielding, Richardson, Milton, Gibbon, Byron, the Elizabethan dramatists, French and German literature, the ancient classics and even the Bible would lie open to irresponsible indictment; and that the volume itself, by its inspired genius, is the greatest possible proof of Divine existencethat the law, in a word, should regard Moxon's publication of Shelley as in an entirely different category from Hetherington's selling copies of Haslam's Letters to the Clergy of All Denominations, at a penny each. Much of Talfourd's argument, however, was outside the law, as Chief Justice Denman himself intimated in summing up. The significant element in Talfourd's speech is not so much his argument as his eloquence. Since a large part of this eloquence was in appreciation of Shelley's genius, his speech becomes of some significance in the growth of Shelley's reputation. Talfourd's attitude toward Shelley throughout is one of confident admiration. Though Queen Mab is obscure, Shelley even at that early period is "a youth endowed with that sensibility to the beautiful and the grand which peoples his minutes with the perception of yearswho, with a spirit of self-sacrifice which the eldest Christianity might exult in if found in one of its martyrs, is ready to lay down that intellectual being-to be lost in loss itself-if by annihilation he could multiply the enjoyments and hasten the progress of his species and yet with strange wilfulness, rejecting that religion in form to which in essence he is imperishably allied." In its exaltatation this passage is fairly typical of the whole speech. Enough is here given to show that as early as 1841 an eminent lawyer of some reputation in literature and criticism could write of Shelley with the full flavor of the late Stopford Brooke in his most mellifluous moments. Talfourd's account of the trial, which we have followed hitherto, says practically nothing of the summing up, the verdict, and the conclusion of the trial, the details of which must be supplied from other sources." In his summary Lord Denman complimented Talfourd's eloquent speech, read the indicted passages, reviewed the arguments, State Trials, New Series, IV: 693-722; Townsend's Modern State Trials, II: 356-393; and W. J. Linton: James Watson-A Memoir, 49-53. |