Blasphemy and Politics in Romantic

Literature: Creativity in the Writing of

Percy Bysshe Shelley 1st ed. Edition
Paul Whickman
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Blasphemy
and Politics in
Romantic Literature
Creativity in the Writing of
Percy Bysshe Shelley
pau l w h ic k m a n
 Blasphemy and Politics in Romantic Literature

“Paul Whickman’s valuable study opens up insightful new ways of considering

the slippery relationship between blasphemy and politics in the Romantic period.
Focusing on Percy Bysshe Shelley, Whickman reveals the value of situating him
within a broader context and how Shelley’s poetry responded to the intersection
of political and religious power.”
—Madeleine Callaghan, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Sheffield, UK
 Paul Whickman

Blasphemy
and Politics
in Romantic Literature
Creativity in the Writing of Percy Bysshe Shelley
Paul Whickman
University of Derby
Derby, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-46569-8 ISBN 978-3-030-46570-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46570-4

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 Acknowledgments

This book has benefitted from the generous support and insights of a
huge number of individuals and organisations to whom I remain eter-
nally grateful. My Ph.D. supervisors at the University of Nottingham,
Lynda Pratt and Matthew Green, helped me steer a course through the
difficult early stages of this project and my career ever since, while the
insights of Nicholas Roe and Brean Hammond have helped me shape
this into the book it has become. Nick’s leading role in The Wordsworth
Conference Foundation should also be acknowledged; the regular
Summer Conference in Rydal and, previously, Grasmere, have been won-
derful collegial events. Not only have I shared nascent ideas that have
informed the direction of this book, I have more importantly made
many good friends and colleagues. Among these was Richard Gravil, the
founder of the Wordsworth Conference Foundation, who was kind and
supportive to me as a young academic; his death in 2019 was keenly felt.
The University of Derby has graciously supported me in bringing this
book to completion, providing funding and teaching relief where neces-
sary. Paul Elliott, Erin Lafford, Ruth Larsen, Tom Neuhaus and Robin
Sims all aided me in this way, while Ian Whitehead guided me in my
early days as a lecturer and has been a good, and very silly, friend ever
since. Indeed, regular Derby ‘lodge meetings’ with Robin and Ian have
certainly formed a valuable part of my ‘intellectual’ and ‘cultural’
development. Most importantly, I am privileged to teach students at
Derby who inspire me with their intuition, erudition and enthusiasm,
consistently reminding me why I do what I do.

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My editorial team at Palgrave, formerly Ben Doyle and latterly Rachel

Jacobe and Allie Troyanos, have been patient and enthusiastic about the
project, while the insightful and diligent anonymous reader comments
have most certainly helped to polish the finished product. Giuseppe
Albano and the rest of the staff of the Keats-Shelley House, Rome, not
only gave me essential access to their collections but were wonderful
hosts on the occasions I visited. Thanks also to the British Library as
well as Hallward Library, Nottingham, whose holdings and staff exper-
tise have proven invaluable. Gratitude is also duly paid to the pubs, cafes
and bars of the cities of Nottingham and Derby where I both wrote, and
escaped from, various passages of this book.
By far the most important people are the friends and family who have
supported me in both my career and personal life and have been the
encouragement I needed to finally get this written. Ed Downey’s beer
and burger evenings remain an excellent source of both intellectual and
distinctly unintellectual conversation. Ed’s excellent humour is matched
by his acumen, and he really should not have to be reminded of this.
Dave Peplow remains one of the few academics with whom I can simul-
taneously discuss the torment of supporting a struggling Premier League
football team, dreadful ‘80s and ‘90s pop culture and the merits of liter-
ary fiction. My brother, Mark Whickman, keeps me grounded with his
preposterous humour but also because, more prosaically, he will simply
always be cleverer than me. My mother, Elaine Whickman, gave me a
wonderful childhood and instilled in me a love of reading and educa-
tion that has shaped my career. She has continued to support all my deci-
sions as an adult and remains one of my most enthusiastic cheerleaders
in everything I do. My wife, Rachel Whickman, makes me happier than
any human deserves to be; her joie de vivre is infectious, but her intelli-
gence and her ability to succeed at whatever she puts her mind to make
me deeply proud. I thank her for her encouragement, belief and patience
as I lost evenings and weekends to this book, listening to my many com-
plaints. Most of all, though, I am thankful that I have her in my life.
This book is dedicated to my loving grandmother, Hilda Steel, who
passed away as the manuscript neared completion. You are sorely missed.
 Note on Texts and Abbreviations

There are currently two different on-going scholarly editions of Shelley’s

poetry that are not yet complete. As a result, I have referred to various
editions where appropriate.
For most of the poetry I have consulted

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1989—. The Poems of Shelley. 5 volumes (currently 4

available). Ed. Matthews, Geoffrey; Everest, Kelvin; Donovan, Jack; Duffy,
Cian and Rossington, Michael. London & New York: Longman.—(when
necessary, cited as Poems, and volume number, in parenthesis)

For poetry not yet available in the above edition, and for some of
Shelley’s prose, I have referred to

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 2002. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Reiman,
Donald H. and Fraistat, Neil. London & New York: W. W. Norton &
Company.—(when necessary, cited as Poetry & Prose in parenthesis)

In addition, I have made use of the following incomplete edition of

Shelley’s prose

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1993—. The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
1 volume. Ed. Murray, E. B. Oxford: Clarendon Press.—(cited as Prose in
parenthesis)

vii
viii NOTE ON TEXTS AND ABBREVIATIONS

and the following complete, albeit older, edition

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1954. Shelley’s Prose Or, The Trumpet of a Prophecy.
Ed. Clark, David Lee. Albuquerque, N.M: The University of New Mexico
Press.—(cited as Prose, Clark, in parenthesis)

For Shelley’s letters, I have used

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1963–1964. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 2 vol-
umes. Ed. Jones, Frederick L. Oxford: Clarendon Press.—(cited as Letters,
and volume number, in parenthesis)

All biblical references are to the following King James Version

2008. The Bible: Authorized King James Version. Ed. Carroll, Robert and
Prickett, Stephen. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
1.1 Blasphemy: History and Definition 4
1.2 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Blasphemy and Creativity 7
1.3 Shelley and Romantic Religion 11

2 Blasphemy and Copyright in the Long Eighteenth

Century, 1695–1823 17
2.1 Licensing of the Press and Religious Tolerance,
1698–1710 19
2.2 Copyright, Censorship and Class: The Statute of Anne
and ‘Bad Language’, 1710–1745 25
2.3 Blasphemy, Obscenity or Sedition: John Wilkes to William
Hone, 1745–1817 35
2.4 Chancery and the Dissemination of ‘Injurious’ Texts,
1817–1823 43

3 Blasphemy and the Shelley Canon: Queen Mab and Laon

and Cythna 61
3.1 Queen Mab: Readership, Reputation and ‘Respectability’
in the 1820s 64
3.2 Censoring Queen Mab in the (Il)legitimate Press:
William Clark, Richard Carlile, Mary Shelley 72

ix
x CONTENTS

3.3 From ‘God’ to ‘Power’ : Laon and Cythna to the Revolt

of Islam 82
3.4 Conclusion: The Contemporary Shelley Canon 91

4 Vulgar Anthropomorphisms: Blasphemy, Power

and the Philosophy of Language 97
4.1 Anthropomorphising the Abstract: Lockean Scepticism
of Language in Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna 99
4.2 The Vitality and Epistemology of Language: ‘Ode to the
West Wind’ and ‘Mont Blanc’ 110

5 The Promethean Conqueror, the Galilean Serpent

and the Jacobin Jesus: Shelley’s Interpretation(s)
of Jesus Christ 137
5.1 Secularising and Demystifying Jesus 139
5.2 A Jesus in History: Jesus as Reformer, Jacobin
and Blasphemer 149
5.3 Prometheus Unbound: Suffering, Faith
and Atonement in the Gospel According
to Percy Bysshe Shelley 157

6 Conclusion 181
6.1 From Infidel to Canonisation: Shelley’s Posthumous
Reputation 185

Works Cited and Further Reading 191

Index 207
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

On 25 March 1811, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his future
biographer, Thomas Hogg, were expelled from University College,
Oxford. While history commonly records that the two undergraduates
were excluded for atheism, the precise reason was ‘for contumaciously
refusing to answer questions proposed to them, and for also repeatedly
declining to disavow’ a pamphlet for which both had been responsible.1
The pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism (1811), was far less provocative
than its title suggested; to have apparently advocated atheism, however,
was enough to risk criminal charges for violating common and statute
law against blasphemy. The opportunity to ‘disavow’ the work had been
granted as a possible way both undergraduates might have ameliorated
any future criminal proceedings. Prosecution for The Necessity of Atheism
never materialised for either men, but the Oxford episode remains an
important touchstone in Shelley’s biography and criticism. Indeed, it
is an event that, along with the disparaging reactionary accounts of
Shelley’s death in 1822, are commonly taken as bookending Shelley’s
‘atheistical’ adult life and career.
The nature of Shelley’s (ir)religion remains a matter of some debate,
but the ‘atheist’ tag has nevertheless persisted in popular perceptions of
this major member of the ‘Big 6’ Romantic poets. It is therefore easy
to see how ‘the issue of “atheism”’, as Martin Priestman has argued,
remains central to the history of canonical Romanticism.2 In sharing
Priestman’s position, my present study is concerned with the broader
and more amorphous term ‘blasphemy’. While the charge of blasphemy

© The Author(s) 2020 1

P. Whickman, Blasphemy and Politics in Romantic Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46570-4_1
2 P. WHICKMAN

encompasses atheism in the period, my reason for this wider focus is

fourfold. Firstly, Priestman has already offered a thorough examination
of more specific atheistic tendencies within Romantic poetry.3 Secondly,
to investigate blasphemy is to offer a more comprehensive account of
heterodox religious opinions that may not necessarily come from a posi-
tion of unbelief.4 Thirdly, the broader irreverence that the term implies
suggests important creative possibilities for a writer. Finally, the very lack
of specificity of the word ‘blasphemy’ is itself worthy of comment, as it
enabled authorities to define it as they saw fit in moments of political
exigence. While ‘atheism’ was among the charges levelled at political
enemies, this was only one amid the multitude of religiously inflected
allegations under the umbrella of a purposefully ill-defined ‘blasphemy’.
My approach, therefore, is one that not only recognises the
intersection of (ir)religion and politics, but also between c­ensorship,
print history and creativity. To blaspheme in a text, or at least to
be perceived as blaspheming in it, determines its materiality and
dissemination in the period as much as it explains its aesthetic or the-
matic content. To appreciate this necessitates a methodology that simul-
taneously considers historical context—political, legal and material for
example—as well as formal attention to the text(s) in question. For
instance, while the intersecting philosophical and political themes of a
poem such as Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813) may in itself lead a critic to
identify the connection between its politics and its supposed blasphemy,
the fact that it was frequently sold in the 1820s alongside texts of a more
obviously political or obscene nature similarly affirms an association. In
1823, Richard Carlile even complained how the ‘enemies of Reform’
would connect him to ‘immorality’ by highlighting that his shops sold
blasphemous and obscene texts alongside his more overtly political
ones.5 Although Carlile denied this to be the case with the shops he was
personally responsible for, he claims to ‘have been informed that copies
of […] amatory publications from Mr. Benbow’s Press […] have been
sold at the shop in Giltspur Street under my name’ (p. 35). It is impor-
tant, then, to recognise the socio-historical realities of print while consid-
ering the formal manifestation of blasphemy within literary works.
Richard Cronin describes his approach in The Politics of Romantic
Poetry (2000) as one that attempts to reconcile New Historicist with
‘New’ Formalist approaches to Romanticism. He writes
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

The urgent task for the critic of Romantic poetry is not, it seems to me, to
choose between these two apparently antithetical approaches [i.e. between
Historicist and Formalist approaches], for both remain too valuable to be
rejected. The need is rather to find a critical manner through which the
two may be reconciled […] a criticism of Romantic poets is possible that
does not choose between attention to the language of a poem or attention
to its historical context, but seeks rather to show that it is through their
language that poems most fully engage with their historical moment.6

My approach in this book is similar to Cronin’s, although I consider

these different approaches to be not only valuable but necessary in fully
understanding the manifestation of blasphemy in Romantic-period lit-
erature. While Cronin is critical of Jerome McGann’s monumental
Romantic Ideology (1983), McGann’s reminder that ‘poems are social
and historical products’ informs my approach here, without overshadow-
ing the centrality of close, textual analysis.7 McGann’s notion of ‘biblio-
graphical codes’, first coined in his later The Textual Condition (1991),
is similarly useful in illustrating how ‘producing editions is one of the
ways we produce literary meanings’ and that it is ‘as complex as all the
others’.8 This is important in appreciating that perceptions of blasphemy
and other forms of transgression both shaped, and were shaped by, the
reality of the physical printed text and the resulting influence on the
Romantic-period reading public.
While a study of literary blasphemy is necessarily multifaceted, my
main argument is that Romantic-period blasphemy is primarily a political
crime or transgression; the fact that it was frequently prosecuted both
on the grounds of potential audience and the manner—rather than the
matter—of its expression attests to its close interrelationship with both
class and aesthetics. Like many ‘subversive’ cultural forms such as por-
nography, blasphemy has a curious relationship with the mainstream lit-
erary canon, existing outside and yet profoundly shaping and responding
to it. This is evident in blasphemy’s association with the development of
intellectual property and copyright in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, with copyright acting first as a form of proxy censorship before
counterintuitive Chancery rulings such as Southey v. Sherwood (1817)
ultimately aided the proliferation of blasphemous, obscene and seditious
texts. This impacted the size and nature of the Romantic-reading public
and, I argue, the nature of the Romantic canon.
4 P. WHICKMAN

1.1  Blasphemy: History and Definition

Blasphemy is, on the one hand, easy to define; the OED’s definition
reads that it is ‘[p]rofane speaking of God or sacred things; impious
irreverence’, clearly determining it to be something subversive that is
expressed rather than merely thought.9 Yet this classification allows for
a rather broad range of possibilities. It does not, for instance, estab-
lish what an act of blasphemy would actually entail, reliant instead on
abstract conceptions of ‘reverence’ and ‘the sacred’ that such an act is
said to subvert. Alain Cabantous is right then to note the difficulty for
researchers in the broad disciplines of the human sciences who ‘are aware
more than most how semantically tricky blasphemy proves to be, how
slippery as anthropological objects go’.10 One of the issues is that what
is deemed ‘sacred’ or to be paid due reverence is arbitrary, meaning, in
both senses of the word, something determined by mere chance and also
by autocratic ‘arbiters’. The ‘sacred’, for instance, may be established by
cultural factors, religious denomination or socio-historical context but
also by legal and political authorities.
When considering the historical legal definitions of blasphemy
between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, it is apparent that
often what is understood by ‘blasphemy’ should be more appropriately
termed ‘heresy’. As the OED defines it, heresy is

Theological or religious opinion or doctrine maintained in opposition, or

held to be contrary, to the ‘catholic’ or orthodox doctrine of the Christian
Church, or, by extension, to that of any church, creed, or religious system,
considered as orthodox.11

Despite its significant difference from ‘blasphemy’, ‘heresy’ is commonly

considered as its synonym in this period. This semantic blurring serves a
useful political purpose; while ‘heresy’ suggests a hierarchically imposed
orthodoxy, evoking connotations of the religious persecutions of the
early Christian church, ‘blasphemy’ appears less partisan. What is deemed
blasphemous is not a matter of simple doctrinal disagreement but the
profaning of something indisputably sacred; a matter of common sense
and ‘good taste’. Preferring the term ‘blasphemy’ over ‘heresy’ therefore
gives the illusion of maintaining a pretence of religious toleration while,
in fact, working to delineate the limits of politically endorsed orthodoxy.
The 1648 ‘Ordinance for the punishing of Blasphemies and Heresies’
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

passed during the Interregnum is at least open with its targeting of per-
ceived heresy, but its doctrinal specificity is nevertheless remarkable. Not
only does it list every book of the canonical Bible in turn, arguing that
it is blasphemy to deny that these are the Word of God, it painstakingly
details that blasphemers are also those who question the perfect omnipo-
tence of God, the doctrine of the Resurrection, the divinity of Christ and
the doctrine of the Trinity.12
Despite this doctrinal precision, the policing of religious belief was
historically more socio-political than it was theological. An act passed
in 1650 called ‘An Act against several Atheistical, Blasphemous and
Execrable Opinions, derogatory to the honor of God, and destructive to
humane Society’ was a development of the 1648 act, moving to addition-
ally criminalise those individuals who bestowed fallible human attributes
onto the deity. Examples of this include declaring one’s self or another
‘meer Creature’ to be either equal to God, or God himself, or that ‘acts
of Uncleanness, Prophane Swearing, Drunkenness, and the like Filthiness
and Brutishness, are not unholy and forbidden in the Word of God’.13
The legislation’s common appellation as ‘the Act against Ranters’ reveals
its target; the Ranters were an extreme Antinomian sect who rejected
the concept of sin because they believed man to have been redeemed by
Christ. Ranters were perceived as a threat to ‘humane Society’ because
not only were many of them libertines, frequently engaged in pub-
lic nudity and other lewd acts, but because of their disdain for author-
ity. Other Christian sects such as Quakers were similarly criminalised due
to their ‘levelling’ politics rather than their theological predilections.
Quakers refused to use the formal ‘you’ in addressing a social superior, to
swear oaths and often to recognise any earthly authority at all.
While these laws were declared null and void following the
Restoration (1660), new legislation emerged that simply reasserted
pre-Civil War Anglican hegemony. For instance, 1662 saw the passing of
both the so-called ‘Quaker Act’ and the ‘Act of Uniformity’. The for-
mer effectively denied Quakers freedom of worship and criminalised their
refusal to swear oaths, while the latter required all churches to have a
copy of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, to perform Anglican Rites,
and clergy were expected to publicly declare their ‘unfeigned assent &
consent to the use of all things in the said Booke contained and pre-
scribed in these words and no other’.14 Risking oversimplification, the
motivation was more to ensure political rather than religious obedience
following the re-establishment of the Church of England. The King’s
6 P. WHICKMAN

authority, as head of the Church, ensured, and was ensured by, the
Church of England’s primacy among all Christian denominations. ‘The
Conventicles Act’ of 1664, for instance, that outlawed all non-Anglican
religious assemblies, was explicitly political, framed to enable ‘speedy
Remedyes against the growing and dangerous Practises of Seditious
Sectaryes and other disloyall [sic] persons (my emphases)’.15 What was
clear, as Leonard Levy contends, was that ‘[a]nyone not a member of
the Church of England was a potential subversive’.16 The years after the
Restoration, therefore, re-laid the groundwork for the tight conflation
between the religion of the state and the state itself.
This is particularly evident in a case of 1676 known as Rex v. Taylor.
For Elliot Visconsi, this was ‘to become one of the most influential
pieces of common-law jurisprudence to emerge from the later Stuart
period’.17 Indeed, its impact was profound and long-lasting, and was still
so regularly cited in blasphemy trials as late as the nineteenth century
that an article in The London Magazine in 1827 poked fun at it, suggest-
ing that it had become clichéd.18 The case concerned John Taylor, a yeo-
man from Surrey, who was successfully prosecuted for blasphemy. The
presiding judge, Lord Chief Justice Hale, declared that Taylor’s ‘wicked
blasphemous words were not only an offence to God and religion, but a
crime against the laws’ as, crucially, ‘Christianity is parcel of the laws of
England; and therefore to reproach the Christian religion is to speak in
subversion of the law’.19 Hale’s judgement set the precedent that explic-
itly determined the legal relationship between Church and State in mat-
ters of blasphemous expression. A glaring issue with the ruling is noted
by The London Magazine. Referring to the trial of another Mr. Taylor
in 1827 that had cited Hale, the author remarks that Lord Tenterden,
who presided over the recent case, ‘spoke not then of any of the many
sects into which opinions had divided [Christianity]’.20 The precedent’s
ambiguity often proved politically useful, even if what it deemed to be
‘Christianity’ was at times narrowly interpreted.
Hale’s ruling in Rex v. Taylor should of course be understood within
the immediate context of a newly assertive, post-Restoration Anglicanism.
At the same time, its conflation of Church and State was hardly histori-
cally unique, a phenomenon pre-dating Henry VIII’s establishment of the
Church of England in 1534. In the Old Testament book of Numbers, for
instance, Korah’s rebellion against Moses and Aaron is presented both as
seditious and blasphemous, with each implying the other. After Moses sep-
arates the rebels from the rest of the people of Israel, the earth swallows
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

them up. This proves the legitimacy of Moses’s and Aaron’s rule since
the rebellion had ‘provoked the LORD’ (16:30). To question Moses’s
authority then is to blaspheme and, conversely, to blaspheme against God
is to oppose his earthly, political representatives. In March 1717, an anti-
Nonconformist article appearing in the conservative Pro-Anglican period-
ical The Scourge interprets the story of Korah as one of the preservation of
state power and of the dangers of religious schism:

when Korah and his Accomplices made a Disturbance in the Congregation;

the Design of the Mutiny was pretended only against the Pontifical Dignity
and the Episcopal Preheminence [sic] of Aaron; but the Prophet perceiv’d
that they aim’d at the Civil Power […] he dealt with them as State-Rebels,
foreseeing what began in Schism, would end in Rebellion.21

The author takes Korah’s rebellion to be political from its outset, with
any apparent theological dispute simply concealing the rebels’ true objec-
tives. Nevertheless, the article reveals a common eighteenth-century per-
ception that the interdependence of religious and state power was both
necessary and to be expected, exemplified through the Hale ruling of
1676. In short, if God is taken to be infallible, his supposed earthly repre-
sentatives can argue the same for their political authority.

1.2  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Blasphemy and Creativity

What The Scourge’s defence of the prevailing religious authority of the
age does not account for is the historical influence ‘blasphemers’ have
had on the political and religious culture of Europe. Plato, for instance,
records that the Athenian authorities accused Socrates of asebeia, or
‘impiety’; one of a number of charges that led to Socrates’s suicide. Most
importantly, Jesus Christ’s crucifixion was the result of his conviction for
blasphemy, instigated by the prevailing religious and political authorities
of his time. It is to this contradiction, of persecuting religious outsid-
ers in the name of those who were themselves similarly persecuted, that
Percy Bysshe Shelley consistently drew attention. His pamphlet A Letter
to Lord Ellenborough (1812), written in response to the prosecution and
punishment of the radical activist, author and publisher Daniel Isaac
Eaton for blasphemous libel, is an early example of this. Shelley compares
Eaton’s trial to that faced by Christ in first-century Judea. His intention
is not to paint Eaton as a Christ-like figure, but to divest ‘blasphemy’
8 P. WHICKMAN

of any meaning beyond a subjective, context-specific application. Noting

the disjunction between a once persecuted blasphemer becoming recog-
nised as the Messiah in nineteenth-century Christianity, he writes ‘Time
rolled on, time changed the situations, and with them, the opinions of
men’ (Prose, Clark, p. 77).22 Shelley also heavily implies that the perse-
cution of Eaton reveals the government of his age to be like the corrupt
and tyrannical authorities of Christ’s.
Shelley’s consistent recognition of the interrelationship of political
and religious hegemony in his works makes him an appropriate writer
for a study of this kind. Indeed, I would argue that it is in fact central to
his philosophy. In 1816, Shelley wrote in the registers of three hotels in
the Vale of Chamonix that his occupation was ‘Democrat, Philanthropist
and Atheist’ and that his destination was ‘Hell’. As Timothy Webb has
put it, ‘[i]n Shelley’s mind the three characters – lover of mankind, dem-
ocrat and atheist – were logically connected, each one implying the other
two’.23 While for Shelley to be a religious subversive is to be a politi-
cal subversive and vice versa, it is more complex than simple cause and
effect. In a contemporary response to Shelley’s entries, appearing in
The Commercial Chronicle and The London Chronicle in 1819, the word
‘atheist’ is the only one of Shelley’s ‘occupations’ that is mentioned:

Mr Shelley is understood to be the person who, after gazing on Mont

Blanc, registered himself in the Album as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Atheist;
which gross and cheap bravado he, with the natural tact of the new school,
took for a display of philosophic courage; and his obscure muse has been
since constantly spreading all her foulness of those doctrines which a
decent infidel would treat with respect, and in which the wise and honour-
able have in all ages found the perfection of wisdom and virtue.24

The author’s distaste for Shelley’s declared atheism is obvious but it is

also important to note that Shelley’s supposed philosophical superficial-
ity is connected to his aesthetic judgement; to remain an atheist despite
‘gazing on Mont Blanc’ is to imply a failure to ascribe the sublime to the
hand of the Creator.
Not only, then, does religious subversion imply political subversion
and vice versa, but it is also commonly tied to questions of creativity and
aesthetics. David Nash is right to urge caution in too readily identifying
blasphemers ‘as trail-blazers whose confrontation with a slower moving
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

moral climate makes them “ahead of their time”’, but there is neverthe-
less the possibility that literary ‘blasphemy’ has the potential to stimulate
a new aesthetic.25 While writing in an innovative way to perhaps ‘avoid
the censor’ is one example of potential ingenuity, the irreverence engen-
dered in literary blasphemy implies a scepticism of accepted or existing
standards of ‘correctness’. Lord Byron’s famous attack on the ‘cant’ of
his age for instance is not only a simple indictment of hypocritical mor-
alising. In describing it as ‘verbal decorum’, Byron implies that exposing
cant is an act of indecorus linguistic demystification. He writes

The truth is, that in these days the grand “primum mobile” of England is
Cant—Cant political—Cant poetical—Cant religious—Cant moral—but
always Cant—multiplied through all the varieties of life—It is the fashion—&
while it lasts—will be too powerful for those who can only exist by taking
the tone of the parts—I say Cant because it is a thing of words—without the
smallest influence upon human actions—the English being no wiser—no bet-
ter—and much poorer—and more divided amongst themselves—as well as far
less moral—than they were before the prevalence of this verbal decorum.26

Exposing prevailing codes of moral authority as ‘Cant’ is to reveal these

systems to be mere empty words. Such exposure may well begin as a
simple act of irreverence—think of Byron’s later comments to Douglas
Kinnaird that ‘the Cant is so much stronger than Cunt’—but it also
encourages a new aesthetic, to consider whether always ‘saying the right
thing’ ever has any tangible politically progressive implications.27 In this
light, one might, at least analogously, reflect on how describing a writer
as ‘revolutionary’ has several connotations; such a writer could either be
one that writes on politically revolutionary themes—a potential ­political
subversive—or a writer that is aesthetically revolutionary, in that they
write in a new or exciting way. Conversely, the aesthetic is perhaps inex-
tricable from the political, in that in order to challenge an existing status
quo necessitates a new artistic approach.
This explains the nature and purpose of Shelley’s irreverence towards
the Christian God in his works. In The Necessity of Atheism and the notes
to Queen Mab, for instance, Shelley determines ‘God’ to simply be a
word or metaphor, and argues that seeing it as otherwise has dangerous
political implications. For a poet who later authored A Defence of Poetry
(1821), identifying ‘God’ as a mere metaphor is akin to preparing for
10 P. WHICKMAN

the poet’s task of necessarily creating ‘afresh the [linguistic] associations

which have been thus disorganized’ (Poetry & Prose, p. 512) In short,
a political or religious problem becomes one of artistic representation.
Such ‘blasphemy’ then allows for the possibility of new expression and
the revitalisation of the language that shapes humanity’s political and
religious life, concerns of such works as ‘Mont Blanc’ (1817), Laon and
Cythna (1817) and Prometheus Unbound (1820).
At the same time, it is nevertheless important to recognise that in
cases of blasphemy, obscenity and sedition in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries focusing on the manner of expression frequently offers a
useful way by which defenders of prevailing religious, moral and political
positions can easily dismiss such works without engaging with their ideas.
It becomes possible, for instance, to declare that it is acceptable to dis-
cuss the divinity of Christ while labelling works that do so as ‘impolite’.
This was a common conservative tactic employed during the so-called
Woolstonian Controversy of the 1730s for instance. If partly analo-
gously, this also explains the later discussion of the aesthetic merits of the
‘Cockney school’ of second-generation Romantic writers. Indeed, Jeffrey
Cox’s summary of the conservative attacks on authors such as Leigh
Hunt, John Keats and William Hazlitt shows how their literary style was
taken as ‘a sign for both aesthetic and political inadequacy’.28 While this
recognises the association of linguistic style with political persuasion,
Olivia Smith’s work has similarly helped to show the class-bound nature
of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century approaches to language.
She describes the period’s perception that ‘to speak the vulgar language
demonstrated that one belonged to the vulgar class; that is, that one
was morally and intellectually unfit to participate in the culture’.29 It
is in these ways that social class, and conceptions of ‘vulgarity’, play an
important role in the perception of blasphemy; blasphemy is both ‘vul-
gar’ in the manner of its expression but also because of the perceived
‘vulgarity’ of those who read or produced it. Indeed, a supposedly ‘blas-
phemous’ work written in a manner deemed likely to attract a popular,
working-class readership or, alternatively, made available in a cheaper
edition, was far more likely to attract the attention of the authori-
ties. That Shelley’s textual but nevertheless ‘highbrow’ blasphemy was
deemed more of a threat when his readership began to include those
from a more ‘vulgar’ background should therefore be borne in mind.
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

1.3  Shelley and Romantic Religion

Religion and religious politics in Romantic-period writing is now
well-trodden ground in literary criticism, with much contemporary
scholarship benefitting from the earlier insights of M. H. Abrams and his
Natural Supernaturalism (1972). Abrams’ work highlights how appar-
ently secular Romanticism frequently appropriates a more distinctly ‘reli-
gious’ register. One of the implications of this has been a tendency to
imagine an amorphous and homogenous ‘Romanticism’ that is not dis-
similar to T. E. Hulme’s much earlier characterisation of Romantic ‘spilt
religion’. That is, the ‘concepts that are right and proper in their own
sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines
of human experiences’; essentially, religion is both everything and noth-
ing.30 While positing Romanticism as a secularised religion is neverthe-
less useful in helping to distinguish between expressions akin to religious
sentiments and genuine religious belief in Romantic-period literature,
this has not been without its problems. Critics have not, for instance,
always taken on board that citing, echoing or alluding to scripture
does not imply belief, a point made by Martin Priestman in Romantic
Atheism: Poetry and Freethought (1999).31 Indeed, Bryan Shelley’s Shelley
and Scripture: The Interpreting Angel (1994) opens with an important
intervention on Biblical echoes, asserting that ‘the new context [of an
allusion] determines its significance’ noting that, in the case of Shelley,
‘the Romantic poet intentionally deviates from the orthodox understand-
ing of the text’.32 As Shakespeare’s Antonio remarks in The Merchant of
Venice, ‘The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose’.33 To count a poet’s
allusions to religious texts then is of limited use in arguing for a poet’s
religious predilections. At the same time, to argue for allusions to scrip-
ture or broader religiosity in an author’s work as always being insincere,
parodic, subversive or otherwise ‘not literal’ is similarly unconvincing. In
his The Romantic Reformation (1997), Robert Ryan describes the above
inclination in Shelley criticism as dividing ‘into those who take his asser-
tions of atheism as the deepest truth about him and those who find a
contrary tendency to religious affirmation present in the poetry from the
start’.34
Indeed, despite literary criticism’s reputation for respecting nuance
and difficulty, Shelley scholarship has occasionally become preoccupied
with definitively determining whether Shelley was an atheist or not.
12 P. WHICKMAN

Aside from the impossibility of discerning, at least from their work, an

author’s personal (un)belief, I argue that such essentialism does not tell
us much about the literature itself; the evidence for or against Shelley’s
‘atheism’ can be read out of the work and then reflexively read back in to
it, with the life and literature essentially working to ‘prove’ the other. In
this book, then, I am less interested in definitively categorising Shelley as
a ‘blasphemer’ than I am by the fact he was perceived to be one. Instead,
this book’s focus is on investigating not only why occurrences of per-
ceived blasphemy were read in the way that they were but also why they
were of interest to Shelley, particularly how they relate to his broader
philosophy, politics and poetics. At the same time, while Shelley remains
the focus of my study, situating him within a broader context enables
an appraisal of literary blasphemy within the Romantic period and the
‘Long Eighteenth Century’ more generally. In my second chapter, for
instance, I trace the active statute law against blasphemy in the Romantic
period back to its origins in the late seventeenth century; doing this
helps to reveal the consistent interrelationship of the law of copyright
with censorship. While this had a significant influence on the dissemi-
nation of eighteenth-century texts, I also show that this continues well
into the nineteenth century. The fact that, following Southey v. Sherwood
(1817), texts of an ‘injurious’ nature no longer benefitted from the pro-
tection of copyright meant that such works were commonly cheaper, and
far more widely distributed, than more ‘legitimate’ publications. Not
only did this shape the nature of the Romantic canon, it also determined
Romantic-period readership, with such works essentially enfranchising
readers from a broader range of social classes.
Chapter 3 explores this in relation to the dissemination and readership
of the work of Shelley in particular, focusing primarily on Queen Mab
and Laon and Cythna. The ‘blasphemy’ and ‘atheism’ of Queen Mab
cost it its copyright protection, and it became Shelley’s most widely read
work as a result. This, I suggest, profoundly influenced Shelley’s late and
posthumous reputation, with Queen Mab’s primary distribution through
the illegitimate press affecting more legitimate publications both of the
poem and Shelley’s work more broadly. I focus, too, on early pirated ver-
sions of the poem exploring both the publication decisions made dur-
ing their production and, most importantly, the nature of passages that
were commonly censored. This reveals much about the perceived sensi-
bilities of readers and early nineteenth-century legal authorities, deemed
more likely to react strongly to blasphemous than other transgressive
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

sentiments. In a similar fashion, the chapter ends with a reading of the

authorised revisions made to Laon and Cythna towards it becoming
The Revolt of Islam. My argument is that, while these are partly prag-
matic instances of self-censorship, they also serve as a further example of
Shelley’s increasing recognition of the intersection of political and reli-
gious power and as signalling a reformulation of his poetic approach.
In Chapter 4, I argue that Shelley’s irreverence towards religious and
political power is manifested aesthetically in his poetry. In other words, a
philosophical problem becomes a poetical one; to ascribe both the prob-
lem of causality and the nature of the sublime to a deity for Shelley is
not only philosophically and aesthetically inadequate, but also has sig-
nificant political implications. Shelley’s aesthetic resistance to the ‘fixity’
offered by the word ‘God’ is central to his philosophical scepticism and
shows how blasphemous irreverence can engender new creativity. In fact,
Shelley’s aim to revitalise language in his poetry necessitates revisiting
seemingly sacrosanct terms, positing irreverence to be at the heart of his
poetic project. Mont Blanc is where I suggest this is most evident, but
Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna both offer a poetic ‘diagnosis’ or blue-
print that is reworked in other poems.
My final chapter continues to argue for the importance of Shelley’s
resistance to fixity, although the focus is on his representation of Jesus
Christ. Shelley’s admiration for Jesus is at odds with his antipathy
towards the religion that bears his name. The literary portrayal of Christ
was a significant factor in blasphemy prosecutions throughout the Long
Eighteenth Century, and the fact that Jesus was, in Shelley’s eyes, himself
crucified for blasphemy means that an appraisal of Shelley’s treatment of
the figure is necessary for this study. I argue that Shelley’s Jesus was indeed
a ‘blasphemer’ in the sense that he opposed the prevailing religious and
political authorities of his age. While Christ’s teachings are valuable how-
ever, he is best understood as a political reformer rather than the Messiah
of Christian tradition. Shelley’s position is that it is this very deification
of Christ that has led to the development of a corrupted Christianity;
the very faith system Jesus himself sought to abolish. Jesus becomes an
important influence on Shelley’s idealised political and spiritual revolution
against tyranny in Prometheus Unbound (1820). Prometheus’s resistance
necessitates he learn not only Christ-like forgiveness but also the risks of
good deeds becoming corrupted into dogmatic faith systems. His suc-
cess in the drama is achieved by not embodying—or ‘fixing’—the power
of the defeated Jupiter within himself. That Prometheus’s non-violent
14 P. WHICKMAN

defiance is posited as being against ‘Power, which seems omnipotent’

(IV. l. 572), determines it to be an act of religious and political irrever-
ence. This reaffirms my thesis that blasphemy is both political and religious
for Shelley, and that such irreverence is a necessary aspect of his ‘revolu-
tionary’ poetics.

Notes
1. Cited in Sedley, Stephen. 2019. ‘Dumb Insolence’. In Letters 41.2. 24
January. London Review of Books. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/
v41/n02/letters. Accessed 29 December 2019.
2. Priestman, Martin. 1999. Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought,
1780–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 2.
3. James Bryant Reeves’ book, forthcoming at time of writing, promises
to offer a similarly thorough account of literary atheism in the earlier
eighteenth century. See Reeves, James Bryant. 2020. Godless Fictions
in the Eighteenth Century: A Literary History of Atheism. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
4. It is important to note that, alongside atheism, Priestman’s book does
consider what he calls ‘softer versions of unorthodoxy’; see Romantic
Atheism, p. 3.
5. Carlile, Richard. 1823. ‘Sedition and Blasphemy Have No Connection
with Obscenity’. The Republican, 7:2. 10 January, p. 33.
6. Cronin, Richard. 2000. The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the
Pure Commonwealth. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, pp. 13–14.
7. McGann, Jerome. 1983. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation.
Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, p. 3.
8. McGann, Jerome. 1991. The Textual Condition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, p. 33.
9. Oxford English Dictionary Online. http://www.oed.com/view/
Entry/19934?rskey=SWfk2a&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid. Accessed
29 December 2019.
10. Cabantous, Alain and Rauth, Eric (trans.). 2002. Blasphemy: Impious
Speech in the West from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century. New
York: Columbia University Press, p. 1.
11. Oxford English Dictionary Online. http://www.oed.com/view/
Entry/86195?redirectedFrom=heresy#eid. Accessed 29 December 2019.
12. Firth, C. H. and Rait, R. S. 1911. ‘May 1648: An Ordinance for the
Punishing of Blasphemies and Heresies, with the Several Penalties
Therein Expressed…’. In Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–
1660. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.
aspx?compid=56264. Accessed 29 December 2019.
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

13. Firth, C. H. and Rait, R. S. 1911. ‘August 1650: An Act against Several

Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrable Opinions, Derogatory to the
Honor of God, and Destructive to Humane Society…’. In Acts and
Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660. British History Online.
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=56410. Accessed
29 December 2019.
14. Raithby, John. 1819. ‘Charles II, 1662: An Act for the Uniformity of
Publique Prayers and Administrac[i]on of Sacraments & Other Rites &
Ceremonies and for Establishing the Form of Making Ordaining and
Consecrating Bishops Preists and Deacons in the Church of England…’.
In Statutes of the Realm: Volume 5: 1628–80. British History Online.
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=47307. Accessed
29 December 2019.
15. Raithby, John. 1819. ‘Charles II, 1664: An Act to Prevent and Suppresse
Seditious Conventicles’. In Statutes of the Realm: Volume 5: 1628–80.
British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx-
?compid=47357. Accessed 29 December 2019.
16. Levy, Leonard. 1993. Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, from
Moses to Salman Rushdie. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 206.
17. Visconsi, Elliot. 2008. ‘The Invention of Criminal Blasphemy: Rex v.
Taylor (1676)’. Representations 103, p. 31.
18. Anonymous. 1827. ‘The Law of Blasphemy’. The London Magazine.
November, p. 360.
19. Cited in Visconsi, Elliot. 2008. ‘The Invention of Criminal Blasphemy:
Rex v. Taylor (1676)’. Representations 103, p. 31.
20. Ibid., p. 361.
21. Anonymous. 1717. The Scourge, Designed as a Modest Vindication of the
Church of England. 11 March, p. 2.
22. The deployment of Christ as an example of an individual persecuted for blas-
phemy forms an essential part of Chapter 5. This comment is also a pro-
vocative echo of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man; provocative since Eaton’s
prosecution was for publishing Paine’s The Age of Reason: ‘circumstances of
the world are continually changing, and the opinions of men change also.’
See Paine, Thomas. 1998. Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other Political
Writings. Ed. Philp, Mark. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 95.
23. Webb, Timothy. 1977. Shelley: A Voice Not Understood. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, p. 140.
24. Anonymous. 1819. ‘Review of New Publications’. Commercial Chronicle.
3 June, p. 626.
25. Nash, David. 1999. Blasphemy in Modern Britain: 1789 to the Present.
Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, p. 6.
16 P. WHICKMAN

26. Byron, Lord George Gordon. 1991. The Complete Miscellaneous Prose. Ed.
Nicholson, Andrew. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 128.
27. Byron, Lord George Gordon. 1976. Letters and Journals, volume 6. Ed.
Marchand, Leslie. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 232.
28. Cox, Jeffrey. 1999. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley,
Hunt and Their Circle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 27.
29. Smith, Olivia. 1984. The Politics of Language, 1791–1819. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, p. 2.
30. Hulme, T. E. 1975. ‘Romanticism and Classicism’. In Romanticism:
Points of View. Ed. Gleckner, Robert F. and Enscoe, Gerald E. Detroit,
MI: Wayne Street University Press, p. 58.
31. Priestman, Martin. 1999. Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought,
1780–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 5.
32. Shelley, Bryan. 1994. Shelley and Scripture: The Interpreting Angel.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. viii.
33. I. iii. l. 96.
34. R yan, Robert. 1997. The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in
English Literature, 1789–1824. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
p. 193.
 CHAPTER 2

Blasphemy and Copyright in the Long

Eighteenth Century, 1695–1823

The active statute against blasphemy in the Romantic period was an act
passed almost 100 years before. The context of the so-called ‘Blasphemy
Act’ of 1698 or, to give it its full name, ‘An Act for the more effectual
suppressing of Blasphemy and Profaneness’, both illustrates the peculiar
nature of long eighteenth-century legislative responses to ‘blasphemy’
and also signals a transition towards the crime being considered primar-
ily as one of print. Aside from the centrality of blasphemy to concerns
regarding press freedom, the emergence of copyright law in the eight-
eenth century profoundly influenced, and was influenced by, the nature of
‘blasphemous’ publications in the period. Indeed, the authorities’ increas-
ing focus primarily on the dissemination of not only blasphemous but
seditious and obscene material meant that such texts were tested under a
nascent culture of intellectual property as much as they were in the crim-
inal courts. My argument here then takes its cue in part from Foucault’s
position in ‘What is an Author?’ (1969), that a text’s ‘status as property
is historically secondary to the penal code controlling its appropriation’.1
Indeed, in his analysis of the ‘author’ as a ‘function of discourse’ Foucault
establishes the historical relationship between the question of property in
a text and its potentially transgressive nature. He writes

Speeches and books were assigned real authors […] only when the author
became subject to punishment and to the extent that his discourse was
considered transgressive. In our culture – undoubtedly in others as well
– discourse was not originally a thing, a product, or a possession, but an

© The Author(s) 2020 17

P. Whickman, Blasphemy and Politics in Romantic Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46570-4_2
18 P. WHICKMAN

action situated in a bipolar field of sacred and profane, lawful and unlawful,
religious and blasphemous. It was a gesture charged with risks long before
it became a possession caught in a circuit of property values. But it was at
the moment when a system of ownership and strict copyright rules were
established […] that the transgressive properties always intrinsic to the act
of writing became the forceful imperative of literature. It is as if the author,
at the moment he was accepted into the social order of property which
governs our culture, was compensating for his new status by reviving the
older bipolar field of discourse in a systematic practice of transgression and
by restoring the danger of writing which, on another side, had been con-
ferred the benefits of property. (pp. 305–306)

Whether one fully accepts Foucault’s argument for transgression as

‘intrinsic’ to the very notion of ‘authorship’, by tracing the nascent
development of copyright in the eighteenth century we can nevertheless
observe its consistent intersection with censorious impulses. This obvi-
ously had a significant influence on dissemination albeit in strikingly
different ways; the case of Burnet v. Chetwood (1721), for instance, ulti-
mately restrained publication of the text in question, while the seemingly
counterintuitive ruling in the much later Southey v. Sherwood (1817) had
the opposite effect. What is important is that neither case was heard in
a criminal court and neither were the transgressive or criminal nature of
the texts involved reason for the cases being brought in the first place.
The professionalisation of authorship due to the invention of copy-
right may have helped to democratise a broader publishing and reading
public but this presented dangers. Not only were there anxieties con-
cerning the potentially harmful material being disseminated more widely
than ever before, but there were concerns, too, regarding the perceived
degradation of literature. Alongside the question of intellectual proper-
ty’s relationship to transgressive material, then, is the issue of distinction
between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. That blasphemous or criminal material
was deemed more of a threat if consumed by the masses rather than a
few discerning readers is important, but I argue that this is inextricable
from aesthetics; the manner of expression is frequently more important
than the matter under discussion. This is certainly class inflected, and
the concern for ‘expression’ is a commonly employed red herring to dis-
guise genuine intolerance of opposing opinions. My point, though, is to
emphasise the intersection of aesthetics and the more practical questions
of readership in contemplating the perception of ‘blasphemous’ mate-
rial. My reading of the prosecutions of figures such as Thomas Woolston,
 2 BLASPHEMY AND COPYRIGHT IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY … 19

John Wilkes and William Hone help to make this clear. At the same time,
these cases also reveal how blasphemy was consciously invoked to dis-
credit specifically political, rather than religious, opponents. Blasphemy,
then, is commonly the prosecutor’s trumped-up crime of choice when
wishing to censor expression, even when such speech could be described
more accurately as seditious or obscene.

2.1  Licensing of the Press and Religious

Tolerance, 1698–1710
Following the restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, the new govern-
ment wasted little time in passing the ‘Licensing of the Press Act’ in
1662. This was essentially a replacement for the earlier ‘Licensing Order’
(1643) that had been introduced following the abolition of the crown’s
Star Chamber—whose remit included censorship—in 1641. Both acts
legislated for pre-publication censorship on all written works, but where
the 1662 act differed from its predecessor was its explicit reference to,
and concern for, blasphemy. As detailed in its lengthy preamble:

[M]any evil disposed persons have been encouraged to print and sell
heretical schismatical blasphemous seditious and treasonable Bookes
Pamphlets and Papers and still doe continue such theire unlawfull and
exorbitant practice to the high dishonour of Almighty God the endanger-
ing the peace of these Kingdomes and raising a disaffection to His most
Excellent Majesty and His Government.2

The act notes that not only texts containing ‘blasphemy’ of an inade-
quately defined nature were to be censored, but also those that express
opinions ‘contrary to Christian faith or the Doctrine of the Church of
England’.3 It therefore insisted upon the orthodoxy of written expres-
sion on matters of religion; note, for instance, the conflation of ‘blasphe-
mous’ not only with ‘seditious’ and ‘treasonable’ but with ‘heretical’ and
‘schismatical’.
Nevertheless, an increasing interest in issues regarding freedom of
speech following the passing of the ‘Bill of Rights’ in 1689, which ruled,
among other things, that no member of Parliament could be impeached
for remarks made in parliamentary proceedings, led to Parliament’s
refusal to renew the ‘Licensing Order’ in 1695 and thus to its expira-
tion. This effectively ended pre-publication censorship, resulting in a
20 P. WHICKMAN

vast increase in publications and to what Ronan Deazley describes as ‘an

emerging and increasingly unruly press’.4 John Feather notes how even
‘the messenger of the press, Robert Stephens, could not keep track of all
publications, especially when the multiplication of newspapers increased
the flow to a flood’.5 Despite the end of this censorship regime—ended
both for practical and ideological reasons—there still ‘remained a strong
perceived need for opinion to be controlled by the state’.6 To this end,
after the expiration of the act and most especially towards the end of the
eighteenth century, the law of libel became the chief means for the state
to exert its control of public opinion. Deazley notes that ‘In May 1695,
barely a month after the 1662 Act had lapsed, the Lord Justices declared
that the offences of criminal and seditious libel were, when detected, still
punishable at common law’ (p. 5). Material deemed to be ‘blasphemous’
risked prosecution in a similar fashion.
It is within the context of the end of pre-publication censorship that
the 1698 Blasphemy Act emerged. There were no fewer than twelve
attempted bills in the ten years after 1695 that would have re-introduced
some form of statutory regulation of the press (Deazley, p. 2). Of these,
only the Blasphemy Act became law, indicating parliament’s singular
appetite for combatting blasphemous expression in particular. The act in
fact declares itself to be a response to those who ‘have of late Years openly
avowed and published many blasphemous and impious Opinions contrary
to the Doctrines’, suggesting it to be a response to a specific perceived
threat.7 This is the view of critics such as Alain Cabantous and others,
who cite works such as John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious (1696),
known as ‘the Deist’s bible’, as those most obviously targeted by it.8
Nevertheless, this threat was still one that manifested in print, with the
act explicitly focused on written expression. A blasphemer is defined as

[A]ny Person or Persons having been educated in or at any time having

made Profession of the Christian Religion within this Realm shal [sic] by
writing printing teaching or advised speaking deny any one of the Persons
in the Holy Trinity to be God or shal [sic] assert or maintain there are more
Gods than One or shal [sic] deny the Christian Religion to be true or the
Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be of Divine Authority.9

Blasphemy is clearly a crime of language both written and spoken: ‘writ-

ing printing teaching or advised speaking’. Like the previous acts of
1648 and 1650, this latest one determined blasphemers to be those who
 2 BLASPHEMY AND COPYRIGHT IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY … 21

disbelieved in the doctrine of the Trinity, the Divinity of Christ and the
divine origins of scripture. One new addition, however, was the act’s
explicit reference to ‘unbelief’, a broader remit that now included deists
and atheists.
Despite this, the act was largely inadequate; prosecutions required a
witness reporting the ‘blasphemy’ within four days of it occurring and
it did not explicitly specify whether, for instance, private thoughts writ-
ten in a journal were as criminal as those intended for broader dissem-
ination. Nevertheless, it signalled a move towards treating blasphemy
as an abuse of press and speech freedom rather than targeting belief
or practice. The conflation of press freedom with questions concern-
ing religious toleration is made particularly apparent in the response
to the attempted ‘Bill to Restrain the Licentiousness of the Press’, first
presented to the Commons on 13 January 1704. The bill ultimately
failed after two readings on 13 and 18 January, but it is clear that the
intention was to re-introduce a measure of pre-publication censorship,
less than ten years after it had ended.10 The proposed bill’s opponents
included John Locke, Daniel Defoe and, intriguingly, Quakers. A group
of Quakers even proceeded to publish a single page pamphlet enti-
tled Some Considerations Humbly Offered By the People Called Quakers,
Relating to the Bill for the Restraining the Licentiousness of the Press. This
pamphlet suggests that a curtailment of press freedom and the re-intro-
duction of pre-publication censorship would result in a specific targeting
of those individuals whose religious difference would single them out for
persecution. It argues on the one hand that

To Prevent the Printing and Publishing of Seditious or Treasonable Books

against the Government, and Scandalous Pamphlets tending to Vice and
Immorality, is the Wisdom of all Good Governments, and must be the
Desire of all Good Men.11

Simultaneously, however, the pamphlet argues against pre-publication

licensing of religious texts:

[T]o Limit Religious Books to a License, where the Tolerated Perswasions

[sic] are many, they Conceive, seems altogether Unsafe to all, but that
whose Opinion the Licenser is of, who by this Bill hath Power to Allow
what he shall judge Sound and Orthodox, or Reject what he shall construe
to be either Heretical, Seditious or Offensive. (p. 1)
22 P. WHICKMAN

Not only does the passage deem this period ‘the Age of Toleration’ it
also emphasises the many religious differences existing among individuals
within the Kingdom. The problem with re-introducing pre-publication
licensing of religious texts, the pamphleteers argue, is that any licenser
possesses the power to dismiss religious books solely on the grounds of
their own religious beliefs or prejudices. Thus, the licenser has the power
to declare what is blasphemous and what is not. As summarised in the
final paragraph, the pamphlet suggests that, should the said bill succeed,
it would damage the fragile tolerance enjoyed by those from a religious
minority, and that they ‘humbly hope, that nothing may be Enacted that
will lessen the Toleration, which they thankfully enjoy under the Favour
of this, as well as the late Government’ (p. 1). The freedom of the press
is therefore seen as closely tied to the freedom of religious expression.
Daniel Defoe’s ironic, satirical essay The Shortest Way With Dissenters;
Or Proposals for the Establishment of the Church (1702), allied to Defoe’s
own Presbyterian dissenter upbringing, would perhaps suggest that his
response to the proposed Licentiousness Bill would largely follow the pat-
tern set by the Quakers. Nevertheless, his An Essay on the Regulation of
the Press (1704) takes a rather different view; in fact, Defoe is concerned
about the dangers of religious subversion in the press most particularly.
While the Quaker pamphleteers emphasise religious difference as a key
argument against the return of the Licenser, Defoe instead highlights
political difference in much the same way:

[S]uppose this or that Licenser, a Party-Man, that is, One put in, and
upheld by a Party; suppose him of any Party, which you please, and a
Man of the opposite Kidney, brings him a Book, he views the Character
of the Man, O, says he, I know the Author, he is a damn’d Whig, or a rank
Jacobite, I’ll license none of his Writings.12

Texts are hypothetically refused a licence due to the differing political

persuasions of the licenser and the licensee. Despite their differences,
both pamphlets help in summarising a common concern that a return to
pre-publication licensing represents a threat to the post-licensing act age
of improved press freedoms and political and religious tolerance.
The main concern of Defoe’s essay is how to ‘Restrain the Licentious
Extravagance of Authors’ without putting ‘a general stop to publick
[sic] Printing [which] would be a check to Learning, a Prohibition of
Knowledge, and make Instruction Contraband’ (p. 2). A return to the
 2 BLASPHEMY AND COPYRIGHT IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY … 23

pre-publication censorship of the Licensing Order era as suggested by

the proposed bill is too great a restraint on liberty for Defoe, who writes

To Cure the ill Use of Liberty, with a Deprivation of Liberty, is like cutting
off the Leg to cure the Gout in the Toe, like expelling Poison with too
Rank a Poison, where both may struggle which Poison shall prevail, but
which soever prevails, the Patient suffers. (p. 8)

To this end, rather than preventing publications guilty of an ‘ill use of

liberty’, which Defoe likens to a person being punished for a crime
before it has been committed, ‘’tis enough to make Laws to punish
Crimes when they are committed’ (p. 7). Defoe’s solution, therefore, is
that the ‘Legislative Authority’ should

make an Act that no Man shall, by Writing or by Printing, Argue, Dispute,

Reflect upon, or pretend to vindicate such and such Points, Persons,
Bodies, Members, &c. Of the State of the Church, or of any other
Matter or Thing as the Law shall mention, and they will be such as the
Law-makers see proper to insert […]
[and]
That if any shall presume to [break this law] they shall be punish’d in such
or such a manner. (p. 14)

This is an accurate summary of the way in which the Government and

law courts did indeed work to restrain the ‘extravagant’ freedom of the
press, through prosecutions for libel after publication and distribution of
the ‘libellous’ material had already occurred. Defoe’s essay is revealing in
the emphasis he places on the need to regulate blasphemous expressions
in particular, declaring ‘the prodigious looseness of the Pen, in broaching
new Opinions in Religion, as well as in Politicks [sic], are real Scandals
to the Nation, and well deserve a Regulation’ (p. 3). The syntax of this
sentence implies that the regulation of more explicitly politically seditious
material is an afterthought to the greater threat posed by religious sub-
version. Even if this is considered simply a matter of style, it is neverthe-
less important that Defoe then chooses to illustrate his point, expressing
his shame that Britain should disproportionately produce such texts
compared with other nations, by only giving examples of a blasphemous,
rather than of a solely political, nature:
24 P. WHICKMAN

No Nation in the Christian World, but ours, would have suffered such
Books as Asgill upon Death; Coward against the Immortality of the Soul;
____ on Poligamy; ____ against the Trinity; B____t’s Theory; and abun-
dance more tending to Atheism, Heresie, and Irreligion, without a pub-
lick Censure, nor should the Authors have gone without Censure and
Punishment, in any place in Europe, but here. (p. 4)

Among others, Defoe refers to William Coward who, in 1702, had

published Second Thoughts Concerning the Human Soul. This disputed
the idea that humans possessed a separate soul and that, upon the
Resurrection, the whole human, body and soul, would be resurrected
as one. Condemned as blasphemous by a specially appointed commit-
tee within the House of Commons, Coward’s works were ordered to be
publicly burned by the hangman in March 1704.13 Otherwise, however,
Coward remained unpunished and even proceeded to publish the second
edition of his book.
Defoe’s answer to the problem of press regulation is to introduce a
system of copyright. This stems partly from Defoe’s call for the require-
ment that all published texts should contain the name of the author
and, if not, the authorship should be assigned to the final seller of the
book. Doing this, Defoe argues, makes it easier to track down and
prosecute authors of controversial material without the need for the
re-introduction of pre-publication censorship. Assigning responsibil-
ity to the booksellers, he argues, should aid in preventing the dissem-
ination of anonymously authored subversive material since booksellers
would be unwilling to sell such works knowing that they could be held
accountable for the book’s contents. Furthermore, Defoe writes

This Law would also put a Stop to a certain sort of Thieving which is now
in full practice in England, and which no Law extends to punish, viz. Some
Printers and Booksellers printing Copies none of their own. (p. 19)

The failure to regulate press piracy leads to not only what is tantamount
to theft, but also ‘robs Men of the due Reward of Industry, the Prize of
Learning, and the Benefit of their Studies’ since pirated texts are often
‘imperfect’ containing ‘innumerable Errors, by which the Design of
the Author is often inverted, conceal’d, or destroy’d’ (p. 19). Thus, for
Defoe, the issue of press piracy is not solely an issue concerning an indi-
vidual’s property in books, but one of what could be regarded as a sort
 2 BLASPHEMY AND COPYRIGHT IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY … 25

of ‘quality control’. Defoe’s point is that eliminating piracy ensures that

published material is indeed attributable to the author, in both sense and
design, and that what is presented has not been abridged to the detri-
ment of the subject or to knowledge. Defoe’s argument regarding the
introduction of a right to copy in books is in fact fairly typical. As Deazley
puts it: ‘In the early part of the eighteenth century, the booksellers
presented the author as public benefactor and private beneficiary’ (p. 94).
Defoe’s call for copyright protection is prescient. In 1710 a new act
was passed that finally established copyright in printed material largely
along the lines that Defoe presented in his essay.14 The world’s first-ever
full copyright statute, commonly known as the ‘Statute of Anne’ or, ‘An
Act for the Encouragement of Learning by vesting the Copies of printed
Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times
therein mentioned’, became law on 5 April 1710.15 For the first time,
‘the author of any book or books already printed’ or those ‘persons who
hath or have purchased or acquired the copy or copies of any book or
books’, such as booksellers and printers, had ‘the sole right and lib-
erty of printing such book and books for the term of [21] years’.16 The
authors or copyright holders of books printed in the future also had the
same right for fourteen years following initial publication. Those indi-
viduals who proceeded to print texts without the permission of the cop-
yright holder faced a punitive fine of ‘one penny for every sheet which
shall be found in his, her or their custody, either printed or printing,
published or exposed to sale’. In order to benefit from the protection
of copyright, the publication and the proprietor’s name must be entered
into the Register Book of the Company of Stationers, and upon deliv-
ery of ‘nine copies of each book or books, upon the best paper’ to the
‘Warehouse-Keeper of the said Company of Stationers’ for the use of var-
ious libraries.17

2.2  Copyright, Censorship and Class: The Statute

of Anne and ‘Bad Language’, 1710–1745

The theory that underpinned the ‘Statute of Anne’ had two essen-
tial elements. Firstly, as seen by the act’s full title, the act worked to
encourage learning through the distribution of nine copies of a newly
published work to various libraries. Secondly, it rewarded writers with
the sole right to copy due to their own private labour and because they
26 P. WHICKMAN

had contributed to public knowledge. The Statute of Anne, at this

stage, worked in theory to protect all writers and publishers regardless
of content. That copyright was awarded to writers, however, has a cru-
cial bearing on future copyright cases concerning seditious and blasphe-
mous material since the ‘reward’ of copyright could essentially be seen to
legitimise subversion.
The case of Burnet v. Chetwood of 10 October 1721, the first copy-
right case following the Statute of Anne not involving a work protected
by letters patent, happened to concern a text proffering controver-
sial religious positions.18 In 1692 Thomas Burnet published, in Latin,
Archaeologiae Philosophicae sive Doctrina de Rerum Originibus or, in
English, The Ancient Doctrine Concerning the Origin of Things.19 In
1721, Burnet’s surviving brother and executor secured an injunction
that prevented William Chetwood and Richard Franklin from re-­printing
the work in translation. The case was granted to the plaintiff, as was a
second action regarding another of Burnet’s works. Two ­ important
issues emerge from this. Firstly, the question of copyright for trans-
lated works, determining whether a translation is a second and therefore
different piece of work from the original. Secondly, the case draws an
explicit connection between ‘blasphemous’ material and the law of copy-
right. A factor behind Burnet’s success was that translating his brother’s
works into English would expose ‘unlearned’ men to ‘strange notions’.
Indeed, Burnet’s work, among other things, had questioned the Biblical
fall of man as a literal, historical event. As a result, Lord Chancellor
Macclesfield, who presided over the case, is reported to have observed
that his ruling was beyond a simple question of property:

[…] this being a book which to his knowledge, (having read it in his
study,) contained strange notions intended by the author to be concealed
from the vulgar in the Latin language, in which language it could not
do much hurt, the learned being better able to judge of it, he thought it
proper to grant an Injunction to the printing and publishing it in English.20

Moreover, Macclesfield declared the case to have set a precedent in

which Chancery now ‘had a superintendency over all books, and might
in a summary way restrain the printing or publishing any that contained
reflections on religion or morality’ (Merivale, v. 2, p. 334). This had an
important effect on broadening the remit of future Chancery rulings.
 2 BLASPHEMY AND COPYRIGHT IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY … 27

The refusal to grant Chetwood and Franklin the rights to translate

and publish the text for a non-Latin speaking audience was essentially an
act of censorship. Not only did Burnet v. Chetwood show that the content
of a work could influence decisions to deny publication through injunc-
tions, but that the nature or class of those who might have read it had a
similar effect. More educated individuals, such as those who could read
Latin, were seen as less likely to be corrupted by a subjectively ‘morally
questionable’ text than those from less educated backgrounds. Thus, if
a text were targeted at less educated individuals, it became regarded as a
greater threat with writers and publishers punished accordingly. Factors
such as a book’s price and its presentation or ‘bibliographical codes’
came to be seen as indicative of its targeted audience. At the same time,
a work’s aesthetic or linguistic style could similarly imply a wider mass
readership and thus be deemed more of a threat.
Crimes such as obscenity and blasphemy were essentially crimes of
‘bad language’. While such a phrase indicates vulgar language or blas-
phemous swearing, it also evokes connotations of quality or content of
expression. As a writer, to be accused of using ‘bad language’ is sug-
gestive not only of offensiveness but of style. As a result, obscenity and
blasphemy intersects with subjective conceptions of literary aesthet-
ics, between different understandings of ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature and,
therefore, of social class. At the same time, it is important to emphasise
that attacking a writer’s style became a convenient critical red herring
that concealed a commentator’s often conservative moral or religious
position so as not to be seen to object to the discussion of controversial
ideas in themselves. This is in part analogous to the phenomenon iden-
tified by Olivia Smith where, towards the end of the eighteenth century,
‘vulgarity’ became sufficient grounds in itself for a government to resist
reform. She argues, for instance, that ‘[t]rials for sedition, discussions in
Parliament, comments in newspapers, and responses to petitions relied
on the notion of vulgarity to argue against the concept of extended or
universal male suffrage’.21
The intersection of aesthetics, class and criminality is easily ­discerned
from the situation concerning the notorious publisher Edmund Curll.
Curll’s 1727 prosecution in Rex v. Curl [sic] led to the creation of
‘obscene libel’ as an offence. Curll is now most widely remembered as
one of the ‘dunces’ so ruthlessly satirised in Alexander Pope’s ­mock-epic
poem The Dunciad (1728–1743). There was intense personal bad feel-
ing between Pope and Curll. The two men had clashed over Curll’s
28 P. WHICKMAN

illegitimate publication of Court Poems (1716) resulting in Pope s­piking

his rival’s drink with an emetic. They also had a long-running copyright
dispute over the publication of Pope’s private correspondence.22 Yet,
Pope not only disliked Curll personally but took particular exception
to what he represented. Born into poverty, he was one of a new breed
of self-made professional publishers and was a particularly unscrupulous
one. Curll not only continually violated copyright law, or sailed rather
close to the wind, he became known for his willingness to publish any
text—regardless of content—as long as he was convinced it would sell.
Alongside often illegitimate works of the foremost writers of his day,
Curll sold pornographic and other ‘immoral’ texts. He became so asso-
ciated with this perceived literary immorality that Defoe coined the term
‘Curlicism’ to refer to any act of literary licentiousness. In a piece enti-
tled ‘Against Printing Indecent Books’ (1719), Defoe blasts the corrupt
nature of the books of his day determining Curll to be the individual
most responsible for their dissemination:

Hast thou ever heard among the Roll of Sodom, crimes of the Sin of
CURLICISM? Know then, this is the Sodomy of the Pen; ‘tis writing
beastly Stories, and then propagating them by Print and filling the Families
and the Studies of our Youth, with Books which no Christian Government
that I have read of, ever permitted […]
There is indeed but one Bookseller eminent among us for this
Abomination; and from him, the Crime takes the just Denomination of
Curlicism: The Fellow is a contemptible Wretch a thousand Ways; he is
odious in his Person, scandalous in his Fame, he is mark’d by Nature, for
he has a bawdy Countenance, and a debauch’d Mein [sic], his Tongue is
an Echo of all the beastly Language his Shop is fill’d with, and Filthiness
drivels in the very Tone of his Voice.23

Defoe’s personal attack on Curll is arguably classist. This is evident in

the connection drawn between Curll’s own language to ‘the beastly
Language’ of the immoral books he stocks in his shop, with Curll’s
‘Tone of […] Voice’ resembling the written style of the books he sells.
Such a class-inflected depiction of Curll is similarly apparent in his
treatment by Pope, the poet through whom he is most well known.
For Paul Baines and Pat Rogers, the concerns of the literary culture of
the age are typified by the dispute between the two men, which they
see as a
 2 BLASPHEMY AND COPYRIGHT IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY … 29

clash between Pope, the uncrowned laureate of his age, representative of

high classical culture and urbane values, and Curll, a self-made bookseller
with a reputation for piracy, deviousness, and obscenity. Curll became the
most visible and unrepentant exponent of a new art of publicity in the
early eighteenth century, which for Pope and his circle represented the
absence of civilized discrimination between high and low culture, an intru-
sive interest in the private lives of the famous, and a mechanization of the
art of writing.24

For Brean Hammond, this very ‘discrimination between high and low
culture’ was largely down to Pope himself, as instituted and dramatised
in satiric poems such as The Dunciad:

It was Pope as much as anyone else who established the distinction

between ‘classic’ and ‘popular’ writers and writing […] what is ‘good’
and ‘bad’ literature, what is ‘classic’ and what ‘popular’ is not given in
the nature of things […] The Dunciad is a potent vehicle for promoting a
value-system under which certain literary forms and practices appeared as
praiseworthy and others as corrupt.25

Pope’s literary opponents in The Dunciad—of whom Curll was one—

are dismissed as ‘dunces’ due to them being inferior writers or as other-
wise corrupting the literary and cultural landscape. For Hammond, Pope
makes this distinction seem one of natural good taste: ‘What gives him
the right to treat the dunces as he does? In the text itself (as opposed to
the introductory paraphernalia), Pope would like the reader to think that
the matter is a straightforward, aesthetic one’ (p. 127).
Curll appears in The Dunciad Book II, at a games held in honour of
‘head dunce’ Colley Cibber, where he proceeds to race with the rival
publisher Barnaby Bernard Lintot (Lintot was a much more scrupulous
publisher of ‘high’ literature than Curll). Curll’s race ends abruptly, as he
slips in something rather unpleasant:

Full in the middle way there stood a lake,

Which Curl’s Corinna chanc’d that morn to make:
(Such was her wont, at early drawn to drop
Her evening cates before his neighbour’s shop,)
Here fortun’d Curl to slide; loud shout the band,
And Bernard! Bernard! Rings thro’ all the Strand.
Obscene with filth the miscreant lies bewray’d,
Fal’n in the plash his wickedness had laid.26 (II. ll. 69–76)
30 P. WHICKMAN

Amidst the crowd cheering his rival Lintot, Curll falls in a puddle of
urine that had earlier been deposited by his ‘Corinna’. Corinna, a
name commonly used in Classical love poetry, is likely an ironic refer-
ence to the female protagonists in Curll’s pornographic or ‘amatory’
publications. Falling in the ‘lake’ of urine is just deserts for the ‘mis-
creant’ Curll’s ‘wickedness’ and obscenity, essentially reaping what
he has sown. Indeed, the poet ironically refers to ‘Curl’s chaste press’
(I. l. 40) in Book I of the poem. Not only does Pope establish Corinna’s
vulgarity in urinating in the street, however, the very fact he men-
tions that it is in front of a shop draws attention to Curll’s position as
a commercial, bourgeois bookseller rather than an ‘aristocratic’, ama-
teur writer like Pope himself.27 The reference to Curll’s lower social
status is further emphasised in the notes to this part of the poem in
which, in apologising for the ‘low and base’ scenario depicted, the poet
refers to the ‘meaner degree of Booksellers’ and how ‘the politest men
are sometimes obliged to swear, when they happen to have to do with
porters and oyster-wenches’ (pp. 500–501 n). Issues of morality and
questions of taste in literary practice are conflated with class discourse,
with ‘Swearing’ or ‘bad language’ posited as the language of the ‘lower
orders’.
Curll’s ‘wickedness’ and ‘[un]chaste press’ soon caught up with him
and led to his imprisonment. In 1724, he published a translation of Jean
Barrin’s Venus in the Cloister; or, The Nun in Her Smock.28 Venus in the
Cloister was a series of erotic fictionalised dialogues between two nuns
in which the elder of the two, Angelica, attempts to sexually initiate the
younger Agnes through discussions of both heterosexual and homosex-
ual encounters. Curll’s case led to the creation of ‘obscene libel’ as an
offence which, as David Saunders points out, is odd since Venus in the
Cloister libelled no individuals (p. 436). This much is made apparent
in a 1755 published account of the legal debates surrounding the case.
Venus in the Cloister is thought by one Judge to not be a libel as the text
did not speak ill ‘against the publick or some private person’ and Curll is
thus not punishable in a ‘temporal’ court.29
As well as being the first case of obscene libel, Rex v. Curl was the
first prosecution ‘which found the act of publication of a book to be
criminally obscene’ setting a number of important precedents (Saunders,
p. 436).30 In fact, it was not so much the content of Venus in the Cloister
that led to Curll’s prosecution but its physical reality as a book: ‘’tis
libellus from it’s [sic] being a book, and not from the matter of it’s [sic]
 2 BLASPHEMY AND COPYRIGHT IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY … 31

contents’ (Strange, p. 789). As Saunders illustrates, for ‘Curll’s publica-

tion of Venus in the Cloister to be a crime and not a sin, there had to be
a public offence, not merely a private immoral act’ (p. 437). Saunders
defines Curll’s ‘public offence’ as follows:

What made Curll’s action criminal in the view of the judges was a contin-
gent technological circumstance: the publication was a printed work, and
as such it was capable of widespread public distribution. The court found
that, as a printed book, Curll’s publication ‘goes all over the kingdom,’
threatening ‘morality in general,’ as the Attorney General claimed in pros-
ecuting, because it ‘does, or may, affect all the King’s subjects’. (p. 437)

In the account of the case itself, not only does the Attorney General
emphasise the corrupting and injurious impact of Venus in the Cloister on
wider society, but also significantly establishes the particular themes that
would be seen as similarly injurious in future libel cases:

this is an offense at common law, as it tends to corrupt the morals of the

King’s subjects, and is against the peace of the King. Peace includes good
order and government, and that peace may be broken in many instances
without an actual force. 1. If it be an act against the constitution or
civil government; 2. If it be against religion: and, 3. If against morality.
(Strange, p. 790)

Essentially the three types of libel mentioned are sedition, blasphemy

and immorality (or obscenity); all three, in written form, are associated
as equally dangerous to society despite their lack of ‘actual force’. Not
unlike Burnet v. Chetwood, the most significant issue at stake in Rex v.
Curl was one of distribution and audience. The two cases of Burnet v.
Chetwood and Rex v. Curl in the 1720s had a significant theoretical
impact on the later publication of subversive, blasphemous or obscene
material. The Burnet case in particular set the precedent that copyright
could be refused on the grounds of a text’s moral content, in the belief
that to award copyright would legitimise the writer’s subversive work,
rewarding the author with the right to copy in the process, and there-
fore, in fact, aiding in its distribution. This was an important develop-
ment since the refusal to grant copyright to controversial material could
in fact lead to increased distribution through piracy, since pirates knew
that they could not be sued for breach of copy. This becomes most
apparent with the case of Southey v. Sherwood (1817). Essentially, the
32 P. WHICKMAN

two cases of Burnet and Curll changed the concept of copyright law
as determined by the ‘Statute of Anne’ that had granted copyright to
texts regardless of content or quality. From the end of the 1720s, how-
ever, copyright became conditional upon subjective interpretations of
conventional morality. Saunders neatly summarises this issue:

English copyright law has treated literary masterpieces and their authors
indifferently from railway timetables, football pools coupons, com-
puter software, and exhaust-pipe specifications and their producers.
However, this principle is contradicted by the civil obscenity doctrine
which makes protection dependent upon a quality in the work (absence of
“immorality”). (p. 435)

Moreover, Rex v. Curl illustrated that, despite the removal of

pre-publication licensing, the publication of controversial material could
result in prosecution. Saunders makes the point that in ‘1710 writers
acquired the capacity to occupy the status of owner of a copyable com-
modity; in 1727, they acquired the capacity to be held criminally respon-
sible for the publication of an obscene matter’ (p. 437). While Saunders
is right to highlight that Rex v. Curl led to issues concerning criminal
responsibility for printed material, his focus on the writer rather than
publisher is misleading. In Rex v. Curl, it was Edmund Curll the pub-
lisher and not Robert Samber the translator who was punished for Venus
in the Cloister. This case was by no means unique in this regard, and suc-
cessive trials throughout the eighteenth century similarly targeted pub-
lishers rather than writers. Since the verdicts in both Rex v. Curl and
Burnet v. Chetwood suggest a legal system more concerned with limiting
distribution of subversive material rather than its composition per se, it
appears logical to focus on publishers since it is they, and not authors,
who are responsible for dissemination.
An example of a writer, rather than a publisher, who was prosecuted
for blasphemy in the same decade as the Burnet and Curll cases was
Thomas Woolston in 1729, a former member of the clergy and former
Fellow of Sidney College, Cambridge. Though Woolston had written
texts expressing similar notions before, leading to his dismissal from
the clergy, it was his The Moderator Between an Infidel and an Apostate
(1725) that was the major spark behind the controversy. Woolston
argued that parts of scripture should be interpreted allegorically rather
than literally and disputed the argument for Jesus’ divinity as proven by
 2 BLASPHEMY AND COPYRIGHT IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY … 33

miracles. Citing the Epistles of Paul, Woolston argues that ‘such citations
out of St. Paul are a sufficient Vindication or Apology for the allegori-
cal Interpretation of the Law and the Prophets’.31 Most controversially,
although at great pains to illustrate that he himself did not disbelieve
it, Woolston challenged the notion that the doctrine of the Virgin Birth
should be considered to be indisputably true:

I do believe the Virginity of the Mother of our Lord, and will by no

Means be induced to write against it: But it is ridiculous, very ridiculous
and absurd to imagine, that God should give forth a Prophecy of the
Conception of a Virgin, which is subject to Counterfeit, and in its com-
pletion liable to unanswerable Exceptions against it. Who can prove the
Mother of Jesus to have been a Virgin, otherwise than upon her own word,
and the good Opinion her Relations had upon her? (p. 66)

Though Woolston is careful to not express his disbelief in the

Virgin Birth, he argues that it can be proven to be false and is thus inad-
equate proof of the truth of the divinity of God; the Resurrection is chal-
lenged in a similar fashion. In spite of his caution, however, Woolston’s
statements were taken to be blasphemous. Woolston’s book, as well as
his later Six Discourses on the Miracles of Our Saviour (1727–1729), was
interpreted as having effectively denied the divinity of Christ and the
divinity of scripture, key terms of the 1698 Blasphemy Act. In 1729,
Woolston was charged and successfully prosecuted for blasphemous libel,
remaining in prison until his death in 1733.
The response to Woolston’s writings and his prosecution, which
became known as the ‘Woolstonian Controversy’, was ferocious, with
some historians putting the number of books and pamphlets written on
the issue at over sixty. Indeed, ‘A catalogue of all the books that have
been wrote, pro and con, in the Woolstonian Controversy’, appeared
prefixed to the second edition of a work entitled Free Thoughts on
Mr Woolston and His Writings in 1730, lists just under sixty pamphlets
and volumes immediately contemporary to Woolston’s prosecution.32
While some of the participants in the ‘Woolstonian Controversy’ were
supportive of Woolston—even some of those who disagreed with him
did not condone his punishment—it is Woolston’s opponents that are of
particular interest. A letter appearing under the pseudonym Philo-Libert
in The Grub Street Journal on 18 June 1730, for instance, argued that
Woolston’s work
34 P. WHICKMAN

did not proceed from an honest and sincere desire of removing error, and
re-establishing truth: for then he would have written with good nature,
modesty and decency. But since his Pieces are full of malicious reflections,
arrogant boasts, and scurrilous banters; since he has treated not only his
Adversaries, but his Subject, the most sacred Person, and the most sacred
Things with a most audacious and blasphemous ridicule; it is evident the
true motive of his undertaking was only to gratify the irregular passions of
his own depraved heart.33

Not only is Woolston accused of being blasphemous in ridiculing the

‘most sacred Person’ and the ‘most sacred Things’, but also of treat-
ing his opponents with contempt. Essentially, the author is clos-
ing down the suggestion that his dismissal of Woolston is based on a
denial of free inquiry into religion. Note, for instance, that he does
not attack Woolston for having undertaken his work in the first place;
rather he attacks him for being motivated by ‘the passions of his own
depraved heart’. Woolston’s failing, the author alleges, is on the grounds
of poor literary manners, having not written ‘with good nature, mod-
esty and decency’. A criminally libellous production is therefore seen
to be written in subjectively stylistically ‘bad language’. Not only that,
Woolston also makes an appearance in Book III of The Dunciad. In a
footnote, the poet glosses Thomas Woolston as ‘an impious madman,
who wrote in a most insolent style against the miracles of the Gospel’
(III. l. 212 n).34 Again, Woolston is attacked as much for his ‘insolent’
writing ‘style’ as he is for his impiety. On the one hand, Woolston’s
opponents may have had a point; describing the notion of the virgin
birth as having been pre-ordained as ‘ridiculous, very ridiculous and
absurd’, is hardly measured in tone.
It goes without saying that had Woolston written abrasively in defence
of the ‘indisputable’ virgin birth no prosecution would have ever been
brought. Woolston’s style, then, became a useful way for opponents to
dismiss him without appearing to be against free enquiry into religion.
The Grub Street Journal article, for instance, though not ruling out pros-
ecution for speaking against core doctrinal beliefs, suggests that to only
prosecute without properly answering the blasphemous text serves to
turn the ‘blasphemer’ into a martyr for his cause:
 2 BLASPHEMY AND COPYRIGHT IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY … 35

Such prosecutions seem to carry in them an intimation, which is always

propagated as much as possible by the sufferers, that there is something
extraordinary in what he has advanced, which cannot be answered by argu-
ment, and therefore this coercive method is pursued. And thus a Person is
often rendered very considerable in the eyes of the world, who was either
altogether obscure, or even contemptible before; and his writings and
notions are much farther diffused by those very means which intended to
suppress them. (p. 1)

Instead, the first step in opposing such ‘blasphemers’ as Woolston is to

‘publish a proper answer to them’ (p. 1). To prosecute a writer without
addressing his contentious work in print is seen to strengthen and legit-
imise the work by implying that the writer’s arguments are so convinc-
ing that they cannot be answered. Prosecution, therefore, is interpreted
perversely as a sign of weakness if used in isolation. Furthermore, the
increased publicity that prosecution brings, of both the work in question
and its author, serves to disseminate the controversial material to a wider
audience when previously such writers could be dismissed as insignifi-
cant. To this end, any response to a blasphemous text should not come
from ‘a person who is in a much higher station in the world’ than the
writer of the original, since this ‘raises an obscure adversary to a kind of
equality with his opponent’ (p. 1). Moreover, while the author appears
to express at least a modicum of sympathy elsewhere in the article for
Woolston’s punishment, his main aim is to consider how ‘to prevent
the mischief which would probably arise from suffering [blasphemous
works] to be spread abroad among the people with impunity’ (p. 1). The
author fears that government efforts to stamp out blasphemy through
prosecutions may instead lead to greater dissemination of it.

2.3  Blasphemy, Obscenity or Sedition: John Wilkes

to William Hone, 1745–1817

If blasphemy is to speak ‘profane[ly]…of God or Sacred things’, and to

speak profanity is also to speak in a ‘ribald, coarse [and] indecent’ fash-
ion, then blasphemy, by its very definition, is inextricably linked to issues
of obscenity.35 Furthermore, if coarseness of expression is akin to pro-
fanity, then the ‘insolent’ writing style of Thomas Woolston infers the
connection of form and content in considering issues of blasphemous
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Title: The men return

Author: Jack Vance

Illustrator: Robert Engle

Release date: September 4, 2023 [eBook #71565]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Royal Publications, Inc, 1957

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

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RETURN ***
 THE MEN RETURN

By JACK VANCE

Illustrated by ENGLE

Alpha caught a handful of air, a globe of

blue liquid, a rock, kneaded them together....

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Infinity July 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Only rarely will the Infinity-plus

symbol—INFINITY's award of unusual
merit—appear on an individual story.
(For a typical example of the way it
will be used, see "Tales of Tomorrow"
elsewhere in this issue.) The Men
Return is an exception by virtue of
being one of the most unusual stories
ever written. We do not guarantee that
you will like it, but we are sure that
you will either like it tremendously or
hate it violently. And we're very
anxious to learn your reactions!
The Relict came furtively down the crag, a shambling gaunt creature
with tortured eyes. He moved in a series of quick dashes, using
panels of dark air for concealment, running behind each passing
shadow, at times crawling on all fours, head low to the ground.
Arriving at the final low outcrop of rock, he halted and peered across
the plain.
Far away rose low hills, blurring into the sky, which was mottled and
sallow like poor milk-glass. The intervening plain spread like rotten
velvet, black-green and wrinkled, streaked with ocher and rust. A
fountain of liquid rock jetted high in the air, branched out into black
coral. In the middle distance a family of gray objects evolved with a
sense of purposeful destiny: spheres melted into pyramids, became
domes, tufts of white spires, sky-piercing poles; then, as a final tour
de force, tesseracts.
The Relict cared nothing for this; he needed food and out on the
plain were plants. They would suffice in lieu of anything better. They
grew in the ground, or sometimes on a floating lump of water, or
surrounding a core of hard black gas. There were dank black flaps of
leaf, clumps of haggard thorn, pale green bulbs, stalks with leaves
and contorted flowers. There were no recognizable species, and the
Relict had no means of knowing if the leaves and tendrils he had
eaten yesterday would poison him today.
He tested the surface of the plain with his foot. The glassy surface
(though it likewise seemed a construction of red and gray-green
pyramids) accepted his weight, then suddenly sucked at his leg. In a
frenzy he tore himself free, jumped back, squatted on the temporarily
solid rock.
Hunger rasped at his stomach. He must eat. He contemplated the
plain. Not too far away a pair of Organisms played—sliding, diving,
dancing, striking flamboyant poses. Should they approach he would
try to kill one of them. They resembled men, and so should make a
good meal.
He waited. A long time? A short time? It might have been either;
duration had neither quantitative nor qualitative reality. The sun had
vanished, and there was no standard cycle or recurrence. Time was
a word blank of meaning.

Matters had not always been so. The Relict retained a few tattered
recollections of the old days, before system and logic had been
rendered obsolete. Man had dominated Earth by virtue of a single
assumption: that an effect could be traced to a cause, itself the effect
of a previous cause.
Manipulation of this basic law yielded rich results; there seemed no
need for any other tool or instrumentality. Man congratulated himself
on his generalized structure. He could live on desert, on plain or ice,
in forest or in city; Nature had not shaped him to a special
environment.
He was unaware of his vulnerability. Logic was the special
environment; the brain was the special tool.
Then came the terrible hour when Earth swam into a pocket of non-
causality, and all the ordered tensions of cause-effect dissolved. The
special tool was useless; it had no purchase on reality. From the two
billions of men, only a few survived—the mad. They were now the
Organisms, lords of the era, their discords so exactly equivalent to
the vagaries of the land as to constitute a peculiar wild wisdom. Or
perhaps the disorganized matter of the world, loose from the old
organization, was peculiarly sensitive to psycho-kinesis.
A handful of others, the Relicts, managed to exist, but only through a
delicate set of circumstances. They were the ones most strongly
charged with the old causal dynamic. It persisted sufficiently to
control the metabolism of their bodies, but could extend no further.
They were fast dying out, for sanity provided no leverage against the
environment. Sometimes their own minds sputtered and jangled, and
they would go raving and leaping out across the plain.
The Organisms observed with neither surprise nor curiosity; how
could surprise exist? The mad Relict might pause by an Organism,
and try to duplicate the creature's existence. The Organism ate a
mouthful of plant; so did the Relict. The Organism rubbed his feet
with crushed water; so did the Relict. Presently the Relict would die
of poison or rent bowels or skin lesions, while the Organism relaxed
in the dank black grass. Or the Organism might seek to eat the
Relict; and the Relict would run off in terror, unable to abide any part
of the world—running, bounding, breasting the thick air; eyes wide,
mouth open, calling and gasping until finally he floundered in a pool
of black iron or blundered into a vacuum pocket, to bat around like a
fly in a bottle.
The Relicts now numbered very few. Finn, he who crouched on the
rock overlooking the plain, lived with four others. Two of these were
old men and soon would die. Finn likewise would die unless he
found food.

Out on the plain one of the Organisms, Alpha, sat down, caught a
handful of air, a globe of blue liquid, a rock, kneaded them together,
pulled the mixture like taffy, gave it a great heave. It uncoiled from
his hand like rope. The Relict crouched low. No telling what devilry
would occur to the creature. He and all the rest of them—
unpredictable! The Relict valued their flesh as food; but they also
would eat him if opportunity offered. In the competition he was at a
great disadvantage. Their random acts baffled him. If, seeking to
escape, he ran, the worst terror would begin. The direction he set his
face was seldom the direction the varying frictions of the ground let
him move. But the Organisms were as random and uncommitted as
the environment, and the double set of vagaries sometimes
compounded, sometimes canceled each other. In the latter case the
Organisms might catch him....
It was inexplicable. But then, what was not? The word "explanation"
had no meaning.
They were moving toward him; had they seen him? He flattened
himself against the sullen yellow rock.
The two Organisms paused not far away. He could hear their
sounds, and crouched, sick from conflicting pangs of hunger and
fear.
Alpha sank to his knees, lay flat on his back, arms and legs flung out
at random, addressing the sky in a series of musical cries, sibilants,
guttural groans. It was a personal language he had only now
improvised, but Beta understood him well.
"A vision," cried Alpha, "I see past the sky. I see knots, spinning
circles. They tighten into hard points; they will never come undone."
Beta perched on a pyramid, glanced over this shoulder at the
mottled sky.
"An intuition," chanted Alpha, "a picture out of the other time. It is
hard, merciless, inflexible."
Beta poised on the pyramid, dove through the glassy surface, swam
under Alpha, emerged, lay flat beside him.
"Observe the Relict on the hillside. In his blood is the whole of the
old race—the narrow men with minds like cracks. He has exuded the
intuition. Clumsy thing—a blunderer," said Alpha.
"They are all dead, all of them," said Beta. "Although three or four
remain." (When past, present and future are no more than ideas left
over from another era, like boats on a dry lake—then the completion
of a process can never be defined.)
Alpha said, "This is the vision. I see the Relicts swarming the Earth;
then whisking off to nowhere, like gnats in the wind. This is behind
us."
The Organisms lay quiet, considering the vision.
A rock, or perhaps a meteor, fell from the sky, struck into the surface
of the pond. It left a circular hole which slowly closed. From another
part of the pool a gout of fluid splashed into the air, floated away.
Alpha spoke: "Again—the intuition comes strong! There will be lights
in the sky."
The fever died in him. He hooked a finger into the air, hoisted himself
to his feet.
Beta lay quiet. Slugs, ants, flies, beetles were crawling on him,
boring, breeding. Alpha knew that Beta could arise, shake off the
insects, stride off. But Beta seemed to prefer passivity. That was well
enough. He could produce another Beta should he choose, or a
dozen of him. Sometimes the world swarmed with Organisms, all
sorts, all colors, tall as steeples, short and squat as flower-pots.
"I feel a lack," said Alpha. "I will eat the Relict." He set forth, and
sheer chance brought him near to the ledge of yellow rock. Finn the
Relict sprang to his feet in panic.

Alpha tried to communicate, so that Finn might pause while Alpha

ate. But Finn had no grasp for the many-valued overtones of Alpha's
voice. He seized a rock, hurled it at Alpha. The rock puffed into a
cloud of dust, blew back into the Relict's face.
Alpha moved closer, extended his long arms. The Relict kicked. His
feet went out from under him, and he slid out on the plain. Alpha
ambled complacently behind him. Finn began to crawl away. Alpha
moved off to the right—one direction was as good as another. He
collided with Beta, and began to eat Beta instead of the Relict. The
Relict hesitated; then approached and, joining Alpha, pushed chunks
of pink flesh into his mouth.
Alpha said to the Relict, "I was about to communicate an intuition to
him whom we dine upon. I will speak to you."
Finn could not understand Alpha's personal language. He ate as
rapidly as possible.
Alpha spoke on. "There will be lights in the sky. The great lights."
Finn rose to his feet and, warily watching Alpha, seized Beta's legs,
began to pull him toward the hill. Alpha watched with quizzical
unconcern.
It was hard work for the spindly Relict. Sometimes Beta floated;
sometimes he wafted off on the air; sometimes he adhered to the
terrain. At last he sank into a knob of granite which froze around him.
Finn tried to jerk Beta loose, and then to pry him up with a stick,
without success.
He ran back and forth in an agony of indecision. Beta began to
collapse, wither, like a jellyfish on hot sand. The Relict abandoned
the hulk. Too late, too late! Food going to waste! The world was a
hideous place of frustration!

Temporarily his belly was full. He started back up the crag, and
presently found the camp, where the four other Relicts waited—two
ancient males, two females. The females, Gisa and Reak, like Finn,
had been out foraging. Gisa had brought in a slab of lichen; Reak a
bit of nameless carrion.
The old men, Boad and Tagart, sat quietly waiting either for food or
for death.
The women greeted Finn sullenly. "Where is the food you went forth
to find?"
"I had a whole carcass," said Finn. "I could not carry it."
Boad had slyly stolen the slab of lichen and was cramming it into his
mouth. It came alive, quivered and exuded a red ichor which was
poison, and the old man died.
"Now there is food," said Finn. "Let us eat."
But the poison created a putrescence; the body seethed with blue
foam, flowed away of its own energy.
The women turned to look at the other old man, who said in a
quavering voice, "Eat me if you must—but why not choose Reak,
who is younger than I?"
Reak, the younger of the women, gnawing on the bit of carrion,
made no reply.
Finn said hollowly, "Why do we worry ourselves? Food is ever more
difficult, and we are the last of all men."
"No, no," spoke Reak. "Not the last. We saw others on the green
mound."
"That was long ago," said Gisa. "Now they are surely dead."
"Perhaps they have found a source of food," suggested Reak.
Finn rose to his feet, looked across the plain. "Who knows? Perhaps
there is a more pleasant land beyond the horizon."
"There is nothing anywhere but waste and evil creatures," snapped
Gisa.
"What could be worse than here?" Finn argued calmly.
No one could find grounds for disagreement.
"Here is what I propose," said Finn. "Notice this tall peak. Notice the
layers of hard air. They bump into the peak, they bounce off, they
float in and out and disappear past the edge of sight. Let us all climb
this peak, and when a sufficiently large bank of air passes, we will
throw ourselves on top, and allow it to carry us to the beautiful
regions which may exist just out of sight."
There was argument. The old man Tagart protested his feebleness;
the women derided the possibility of the bountiful regions Finn
envisioned, but presently, grumbling and arguing, they began to
clamber up the pinnacle.

It took a long time; the obsidian was soft as jelly, and Tagart several
times professed himself at the limit of his endurance. But still they
climbed, and at last reached the pinnacle. There was barely room to
stand. They could see in all directions, far out over the landscape, till
vision was lost in the watery gray.
The women bickered and pointed in various directions, but there was
small sign of happier territory. In one direction blue-green hills
shivered like bladders full of oil. In another direction lay a streak of
black—a gorge or a lake of clay. In another direction were blue-
green hills—the same they had seen in the first direction; somehow
there had been a shift. Below was the plain, gleaming like an
iridescent beetle, here and there pocked with black velvet spots,
overgrown with questionable vegetation.
They saw Organisms, a dozen shapes loitering by ponds, munching
vegetable pods or small rocks or insects. There came Alpha. He
moved slowly, still awed by his vision, ignoring the other Organisms.
Their play went on, but presently they stood quiet, sharing the
oppression.
On the obsidian peak, Finn caught hold of a passing filament of air,
drew it in. "Now—all on, and we sail away to the Land of Plenty."
"No," protested Gisa, "there is no room, and who knows if it will fly in
the right direction?"
"Where is the right direction?" asked Finn. "Does anyone know?"
No one knew, but the women still refused to climb aboard the
filament. Finn turned to Tagart. "Here, old one, show these women
how it is; climb on!"
"No, no," he cried. "I fear the air; this is not for me."
"Climb on, old man, then we follow."
Wheezing and fearful, clenching his hands deep into the spongy
mass, Tagart pulled himself out onto the air, spindly shanks hanging
over into nothing. "Now," spoke Finn, "who next?"
The women still refused. "You go then, yourself," cried Gisa.
"And leave you, my last guarantee against hunger? Aboard now!"
"No. The air is too small; let the old one go and we will follow on a
larger."
"Very well." Finn released his grip. The air floated off over the plain,
Tagart straddling and clutching for dear life.
They watched him curiously. "Observe," said Finn, "how fast and
easily moves the air. Above the Organisms, over all the slime and
uncertainty."
But the air itself was uncertain, and the old man's raft dissolved.
Clutching at the departing wisps, Tagart sought to hold his cushion
together. It fled from under him, and he fell.

On the peak the three watched the spindly shape flap and twist on its
way to earth far below.
"Now," Reak exclaimed vexatiously, "we even have no more meat."
"None," said Gisa, "except the visionary Finn himself."
They surveyed Finn. Together they would more than outmatch him.
"Careful," cried Finn. "I am the last of the Men. You are my women,
subject to my orders."
They ignored him, muttering to each other, looking at him from the
side of their faces. "Careful!" cried Finn. "I will throw you both from
this peak."
"That is what we plan for you," said Gisa.
They advanced with sinister caution.
"Stop! I am the last Man!"
"We are better off without you."
"One moment! Look at the Organisms!"
The women looked. The Organisms stood in a knot, staring at the
sky.
"Look at the sky!"
The women looked; the frosted glass was cracking, breaking, curling
aside.
"The blue! The blue sky of old times!"
A terribly bright light burnt down, seared their eyes. The rays
warmed their naked backs.
"The sun," they said in awed voices. "The sun has come back to
Earth."
The shrouded sky was gone; the sun rode proud and bright in a sea
of blue. The ground below churned, cracked, heaved, solidified.
They felt the obsidian harden under their feet; its color shifted to
glossy black. The Earth, the sun, the galaxy, had departed the region
of freedom; the other time with its restrictions and logic was once
more with them.
"This is Old Earth," cried Finn. "We are Men of Old Earth! The land is
once again ours!"
"And what of the Organisms?"
"If this is the Earth of old, then let the Organisms beware!"
The Organisms stood on a low rise of ground beside a runnel of
water that was rapidly becoming a river flowing out onto the plain.
Alpha cried, "Here is my intuition! It is exactly as I knew. The
freedom is gone; the tightness, the constriction are back!"
"How will we defeat it?" asked another Organism.
"Easily," said a third. "Each must fight a part of the battle. I plan to
hurl myself at the sun, and blot it from existence." And he crouched,
threw himself into the air. He fell on his back and broke his neck.
"The fault," said Alpha, "is in the air; because the air surrounds all
things."
Six Organisms ran off in search of air and, stumbling into the river,
drowned.
"In any event," said Alpha, "I am hungry." He looked around for
suitable food. He seized an insect which stung him. He dropped it.
"My hunger remains."
He spied Finn and the two women descending from the crag. "I will
eat one of the Relicts," he said. "Come, let us all eat."
Three of them started off—as usual in random directions. By chance
Alpha came face to face with Finn. He prepared to eat, but Finn
picked up a rock. The rock remained a rock, hard, sharp, heavy. Finn
swung it down, taking joy in the inertia. Alpha died with a crushed
skull. One of the other Organisms attempted to step across a
crevasse twenty feet wide and disappeared into it; the other sat
down, swallowed rocks to assuage his hunger, and presently went
into convulsions.
Finn pointed here and there around the fresh new land. "In that
quarter, the new city, like that of the legends. Over here the farms,
the cattle."
"We have none of these," protested Gisa.
"No," said Finn. "Not now. But once more the sun rises and sets,
once more rock has weight and air has none. Once more water falls
as rain and flows to the sea." He stepped forward over the fallen
Organism. "Let us make plans."
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