Extract

PREVIEW

THIS IS NOT AN ESSAY ABOUT the social and political history of atheism, work so amply developed that even a recent bibliography would take pages. It is a material history of one item, The Necessity of Atheism, published by Percy Bysshe Shelley when briefly a student at Oxford University, a career that its publication (as is well known) ended. Our story blends textual and bibliographical scholarship, presenting fresh, even surprising, information to update and consolidate the fate of this notorious pamphlet, published in 1811 and suppressed within hours, with only a few copies surviving a mandated conflagration. If a detailing of the record of the physical survivors seems to bode a rather dry report, our story shows otherwise.

COVER-UP

In 1832, political reformist Leigh Hunt finally felt it was safe to publish Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy: Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester (1819), under a title strategically shortened and fancified to The Masque of Anarchy. A Poem, with legal care to mask two words in this stanza on the parade of state powers:

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