A graphic book on Shelley’s Masks of Anarchy fails to affirm the radical lives of the poet and his circle, and is marred by too many inaccuracies, argues Jacqueline Mulhallen

Masks of Anarchy: The history of a radical poem, from Percy Shelley to the Triangle Factory Fire is a graphic book. When I saw the title, I thought it would be a history of all the occasions on which the famous poem, The Mask of Anarchy by Percy Bysshe Shelley had inspired a fight-back against oppression. It is not. It is two stories. One is the story of the poet Shelley and the other the story of Pauline Newman who was involved in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) in America in the early twentieth century and who was inspired by the poem. They are interwoven.

Although it was not the book I anticipated, it should still have been exciting to show the life of the revolutionary poet and link it with those whom his poetry inspired one hundred years later. It should still have been valuable because there are many right-wingers who dislike Shelley’s poetry for political reasons and there are many even on the left who believe that poetry achieves nothing. However, the portrait of Shelley in this book is not accurate, and it does not show him as the political thinker and activist he was.

Pauline Newman is quoted in Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States (pp.318-19) as saying that the garment workers knew The Mask of Anarchy. But, although Newman appears to have been active in these strikes, the garment workers’ greatest victory, the ‘rising of the 20,000’ in 1909 which lasted for two months and won better wages and shorter hours for the workers, is not mentioned at all in Masks of Anarchy. Neither is the 1910 strike, general throughout the garment industry when over 45,000 men and women were out on strike! The women workers in the garment industry are given the credit for campaigning for the end of child labour and the eight-hour day, but more space is given to the Triangle factory fire (March 1911) than to their trade-union activity. This appears to me to undermine the militancy of the young women and make it appear that their campaigning only started after the fire.

The story of Shelley begins in 1812, when he was twenty, with his arrival in Lynmouth from Ireland where he had been distributing pamphlets for political reform and speaking at meetings. It is narrated by Mary Shelley, Shelley’s second wife. In the text, she says, ‘Shelley never had the patience for practical concerns… In 1812, all of his concentration was focused on poetry, while Harriet [Shelley’s first wife] and an Irish boy, Daniel, handled daily matters’ (p.9). To show this, Shelley is portrayed as never even speaking like an ordinary person. His speech bubbles contain part of a poem or a paraphrase of a poem or a discourse about poetry. He airily gives orders like: ‘Dan, can you find us a cottage’, or, ‘Post these broadsheets’ (pp.9, 12), while Harriet is shown ordering supper or lighting a fire.

The implication is that Shelley was unable or unwilling to attend to these things. This is fiction and belongs to a view of Shelley which has long been discredited. Shelley was perfectly capable of practical activity, and there is no evidence that Harriet was any more ‘practical’ than Shelley. The Shelleys travelled with Harriet’s sister, Eliza, who kept an eye on the money and who is not mentioned in this story, but there is no evidence to show that she or Harriet rather than Shelley arranged accommodation or transport, still less that Dan did so.

Daniel Healey was arrested in Lynmouth when he had Shelley’s poem The Devil’s Walk on him, and he was imprisoned for six months, after which he joined the Shelleys in Wales. Shelley was also distributing his ‘Bill of Rights’, which he had had printed in Ireland. In Demson’s version of the story, Daniel was tortured to reveal that Shelley wrote the poem (the Bill of Rights is not mentioned) and then released, but he is left behind when the Shelleys go to London (not Wales) and do not have enough money to pay his fare (pp.13, 28, 33). Actually, Shelley gave him money when he was in prison and presumably paid for him to come to Wales.

The book also suggests that Shelley claims that his father (described as Lord Shelley on p.13) represents a ‘rotten borough’ (p.29), i.e. one in which the population was so small that one or a few powerful men could control the electorate, and effectively choose who was to be the MP. In real life, Sir Timothy Shelley (not Lord) represented Horsham, in Sussex, which was not a rotten borough at all. Shelley is also shown writing: ‘Are the trade unions strong enough to force the issue of reform?’ (p.46). Well, hardly. They were illegal at the time.

In Chapter 5 of this graphic novel, we are introduced to Mary Godwin (later Shelley), her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and her father, William Godwin. We are also told that Mary Wollstonecraft ‘ran off at a young age with an American businessman named Gilbert Imlay. He abandoned her while they were travelling abroad … upon learning she was pregnant with his child’ (p.47). Mary Wollstonecraft was not that young (33) when she met Imlay in Paris, where she had gone to witness the French Revolution, and he did not ‘abandon’ her that quickly. In this version, Mary writes her famous treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ‘out of her depression’, as a result of Imlay’s departure and being unable to find a job (p.47). But Mary had worked as a governess and professional writer before she met Imlay, and A Vindication was completed in January 1792, nearly a year before her departure for Paris.

There is a sequence of pictures in which Mary and Shelley consummate their relationship on Wollstonecraft’s tomb (p.52), which derives from a piece of nineteenth-century gossip. There is also confusion around the suicide of Harriet Shelley who drowned herself in the Serpentine two years after Shelley eloped with Mary. She did not attempt to drown herself by jumping off Putney Bridge with her pockets weighted with stones as shown in the pictures (pp.55, 56); it was Mary Wollstonecraft who did this after Imlay left her, and she was rescued.

Shelley and Mary returned from Switzerland in 1816, before Harriet’s suicide, and did not leave to live in Italy until 1818. In Demson’s version, they leave for Switzerland after Harriet’s death when Shelley loses custody of the children, and he has them going on from Switzerland to Italy, and straight to their last residence (1822) at Lerici ‘before winter came’ (pp.56, 60). Leigh Hunt is said to have ‘rented a cottage nearby’ in 1822 when Shelley ‘set out to sail up the coast’ (p.96). Shelley sailed to Livorno actually to meet Hunt rather than as a pleasure trip. Hunt had just arrived in Italy and was to have apartments in Byron’s palace rather than renting a cottage. Shelley was on the return trip when the storm blew up in which he drowned. However, to explain that Shelley had actually arranged for Hunt and his family to come to Italy and edit a journal with himself and Byron would rather undermine the view that he was totally impractical and only thought about his poetry. To describe Shelley in this way gives the impression that Shelley’s political views, too, are impractical.

The drawings are in some places very good and dramatic but they are sometimes quite bizarrely anachronistic. The post office in 1812 Lynmouth looks rather like a 1950s village shop, with the shopkeeper in a jacket, shirt and tie and a 1950s style pipe in his mouth (pp.29, 30). Mary Wollstonecraft on board a ship is wearing clothes that are more appropriate to a suffragette in the 1900s (p.47). Sometimes the portraits of characters, Leigh Hunt for example, are successfully based on well-known portraits, but others such as William Godwin look nothing like.

As a playwright who has adapted biography for the stage, I am well aware that there must be a certain amount of condensing when writing in another medium, and that omissions must be made. Nonetheless, the selection and ordering of material presents a view of a character and the times in which that character lived. In Masks of Anarchy, at least insofar as Shelley and Wollstonecraft are concerned, the characters presented are weakened by the misrepresentation of their actions. They do not have the tremendous political courage, conviction and dynamism they had in real life. It is not just that there are inaccuracies and omissions, there are distortions. It is likely that Mary Wollstonecraft suffered from depression, but nevertheless she was a strong, independent woman and a great writer. In Demson’s version she is a victim. Shelley was a great poet and political thinker, but in this version he is selfish and thoughtless, and there is no indication from where his political ideas came.

These portrayals are popular among the right-wing and their promotion undermines the work that these writers did. It is strange to find them, therefore, in a book published by Verso, which is presumably intended to popularise the ideas of Shelley and Wollstonecraft among a new generation, since the graphic-book style was chosen. Similarly, in a book which claims to show how Shelley’s poem inspired the garment workers, to have so little attention paid to their victorious strikes suggests that actually it did not inspire them! Masks of Anarchy is described as a ‘history’, not a novel, and therefore should have paid greater attention to accuracy. I would not recommend it.

Jacqueline Mulhallen is the author of The Theatre of Shelley (Cambridge: Openbooks, 2010).