Shelley’s Steamship

An Interview with John Gardner, Dean of the Doctoral School, Anglia Ruskin University

Percy Bysshe Shelley. Huntington Notebook No. 2, 1819–20, Huntington Digital Library Manuscripts, HM 2177, 16r.

"Shelley pursued making a steamship not only because it could act as a machine to transmit his poetry, but because it was linked to his belief that science and engineering need poetry to do the right kinds of work." —from Gardner’s “Shelley’s Steamship," forthcoming in the Keats-Shelley Journal

John Gardner’s forthcoming article in the Keats-Shelley Journal examines the significance of Percy Shelley’s attempt to build a steamship. In this brief interview, Gardner shares more about his research interests and processes, the impact of the steamship on our reading of Percy Shelley’s poetry, and how this research might offer connections to Mary Shelley’s work as well.

What first interested you in this subject? How does it relate to your larger research interests?

I’ve been interested in Shelley’s poetry since my teenage years when I trained as an engineer–mainly making machinery for ships, submarines, and the power industries. I had no idea then that my two interests could combine. From my earliest encounters with Shelley, I found him to be a poet who was engaged with the world around him, rather than as some lonely, isolated figure. My first academic work examined Shelley’s engagement with radical politics and the pamphleteering culture that corresponds with some of his best-known poems like “England in 1819” and “The Mask of Anarchy”. Close-reading of the poems and letters found many of the connections I wrote about, and it was the same here. I saw the hope that Shelley had in this historical moment when new machinery offered the opportunity to free people from health-ruining labour. This period came before the overriding narrative that machinery oppressed people. Shelley was not alone in believing that engineering and the sciences have to be utilised for freedom rather than slavery. Machines being used to oppress was a concern of Richard Roberts, a Mancunian inventor and engineer, who had been at Peterloo and managed to escape with his life.  On his death, the Journal of the Society of Arts said that Roberts had helped ‘the material progress of England and the world’ to “the tune of millions on million of pounds sterling” through his inventions. Furthermore, Roberts brought a “blessing conferred on humanity, by substituting metallic drudges for living beings”.  The drudge being machines that free workers from soul-crushing tedium. Roberts, like Shelley, worried that engineering could be used against people. Roberts held his self-acting mule back from ‘the mill-owners’ who “wished to have it” to avoid it being used to exploit workers. Roberts’s factory was subsequently the subject of an arson attack, said to be because he “was on the side of the spinners”. I am convinced that the work of the likes of Roberts and Shelley to ensure that machines serve humanity and the animal world is still a notion that is worth fighting for. My larger research interests are in finding the humanity in technical objects.

Can you share more about your research process for this article? Was there an archival component you can elaborate on?

Repeated reading of the poems and letters allowed engineering images to increasingly be glimpsed. I read everything I could about Shelley’s steamship, but too many questions remained. I then read engineering publications of the period that Shelley would have seen by figures such as Abraham Rees and Robert Fulton. I also read the drawings and plans of steam-plants, machines and small steamships that had been created in the period. I soon realised that Shelley’s ship was the same size as the Comet, the first passenger steamship in Britain, but I didn’t know much else. I looked at the Comet’s drawings in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow as well as a cylinder from the ship at the Glasgow Riverside Museum. Seeing the salvaged Comet engine in the Science Museum in London, drawings at the Science Museum Dana Research Centre, and objects in the Science Museum archive in Swindon has also given me more insight.

How does this relationship between Percy Shelley's poetry and his plans to build a steamship impact readings of Shelley's work moving forward? 

Shelley repeatedly has images of mists, shapes and ships for example. I know we are well away from airy Ariel at the moment—although that exists too, but thinking about Shelley as the most technical and exacting of poets chimes with efforts in the period to accurately measure and to find standards in engineering. The notion of poems ‘doing work’ which is a modernist thing to think about—for example William Carlos Williams saying, “A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words” (Introduction to The Wedge [1944])––is already there in Shelley with his repeated use of Archimedes. Shelley’s poems are often designed to do work and he believed that his poems of rebellion such as “Men of England” and  “The Mask of Anarchy” would cause people to effect change after reading them.

Do you have any advice for graduate students or early career scholars working on P.B. Shelley (or the Romantics more broadly)?

When I did my PhD, I took an event- rather than an author-centred approach to open the canon. Despite doing this I still wrote largely on Shelley, Byron and Lamb, but at the same time figures including William Hone, William Benbow and George Cruikshank were necessarily brought in. Since then, I’ve been working with museums and have taken a more object-based approach. Romantic objects like nuts and bolts, and machines are there in the poems that have been repeatedly read in the last two hundred years, but haven’t really been seen. It’s a bit like the way that people didn’t much notice issues of class, sexuality and race. They were always there in the art, but critics often didn’t see it. For me that’s the wonder of literary study. New generations, breathing new air, will find other aspects in the literature that haven’t been seen all that well before. The artists working in that period, and by artists I mean people like Blake, the engineer Henry Maudsley and Shelley were intimately connected with the time and their world and that’s why, without even knowing it themselves or each other, they often incorporated similar ideas in their work. The art remains the same, but we change and notice things that chime with our present age that we feel is new, but there it was 200 years ago, right there in the best-known poems.

You mention in your article that Shelley created airships to carry his poems. Part of what this indicates is how he deemed words to be essential in initiating change and the idea that poems are a sort of machine in themselves, but I also couldn't help but think of Mary Shelley's The Last Man, which seems to complicate (or maybe complement?) this idea. It made me think about both Verney's attempt to write his story, leaving it for whomever might find it, and the sibylline leaves found in the introduction, communicating through fragments (and, of course, the novel's hot air balloons). Do you have any thoughts on how understanding this relationship between Percy Shelley's poetry and machinery (the steamship) might offer new ways to approach similar elements in Mary Shelley's work?

Thank you for this. Other than the balloons I hadn’t really connected this work with The Last Man. That notion of fragments that go on to transmit knowledge is an important one. Fragments, whispers, shapes, abound in Shelley’s work. In the article I talk about poems as transmitters of force––things that work at a distance to move people to action. Shelley really believed that these fragments in bottles and balloons, when read, would cause action to take place. Shelley saw the democratic, easily transmitted aspects of poetry as small, condensed forces that could, like a tiny weight on a long lever, multiply force over distance and move people. In his Defence Shelley writes that “the poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the mythology and institutions of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman Empire” that “outlived the darkness” persisted with an agency that “blended themselves in a new fabric”. Shelley makes the point that small forces transmitted over time continue to persist, writing that “no nation or religion can supersede any other without incorporating into itself a portion of that which it supersedes”. Poetry over a distance of either time or miles continues to have leverage. Mary Shelley has of course been much more closely connected with science than Percy Shelley. There has been excellent work on this recently as things she examines, like plagues, have revisited humanity. Other notions like the steamship of the future that can reach “8 knots at least”––about eight times faster than Shelley’s steamship––were surpassed as the book was written.