The 1819 Manchester Massacre and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Masque of Anarc

The 1819 Manchester Massacre and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy Sometimes a person is beyond all reach of society. Percy Bysshe Shelley was in Italy on August 16, 1819, during an event which shook his native England. The next month, word reached Italy, and upon receiving word of the protest gone awry, he immediately started work on a poem, and finished it before the end of the month (White 105). It became â€Å"The Masque of Anarchy.† Written in light of the 1819 Manchester Massacre, it demonstrates Shelley’s political stance, in that he detested the British government yet was terrified of the chaos and violence of a revolution.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The Manchester Massacre, also called the Peterloo Massacre due to the name of the specific location--St. Peter’s Field--as well as its temporal proximity to the battle of Waterloo, took place on the field in the city, and featured such noted speakers of the day as Richard Carlile, John Cartwright, and Henry Hunt, all known for their contrarian views of the government (Bloy). The people there had gathered--fifty to sixty thousand outside of the city of only two hundred thousand, a fourth of the normal population--to protest, among other things, misrepresentation in Parliament (Manchester and other new industrial cities didn’t have any parliamentary representation, but much, much smaller townships did). However, such a large gathering, peaceful or not, would and did arouse the suspicions of the government, especially a bloated and corrupt government like England’s in the early nineteenth century. The English government, fearful of a violent uprising, took the first strike and sent more than sixteen hundred troops: cavalry, infantry, artillery, and even dispatched the local yeomanry and co... ... but also refreshes and soothes the mind from its radical feelings. Sources Cited: Bloy, Marjie. â€Å"The Peterloo Massacre, 16 August 1819.† A Web of English History. 18 Aug. 2001. 9 May 2002 . Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Shelley: The Golden Years. Cambridge: Harvard, 1974. â€Å"Map of Peterloo.† Peterloo. 29 Dec. 2000. 9 May 2002 . â€Å"Peterloo Massacre.† Peterloo. 29 Dec. 2000. 9 May 2002 . Noyes, Russell. â€Å"Percy Bysshe Shelley.† English Romantic Poetry and Prose. New York: Oxford, 1967. 954-965. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. â€Å"The Mask of Anarchy.† English Romantic Poetry and Prose. Ed. Russell Noyes. New York: Oxford, 1967. 1052-1057. White, Newman Ivey. Shelley. Vol. 2. New York: Octagon, 1972.