In 1812, the English poet Percy Shelley, who was 20 at the time, was in Dublin distributing his ‘Address to the Irish People’, a pamphlet demanding equal treatment for Catholics in Ireland. Such was his fervour that he is reported to have thrown his pamphlets into carriages, through open windows and into the hands of passing strangers.1 Almost a decade after his Irish campaign, Shelley published his lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820) whilst living in Italy. In Greek mythology, Prometheus, a primordial god, steals fire from Zeus, the king of the gods, and gifts it to humanity, an act for which he is bound to a rock as punishment. For Shelley, Prometheus is Satan, yet someone who is ‘impelled by the purest and the truest motives’,2 helping to bring about freedom and secular knowledge. On the other hand, Jupiter (the Roman equivalent of Zeus) is presented as God, yet one who uses his absolute power for evil.Although many reviewers praised the poetic imagery, they found Shelley’s subversion of Christian doctrine problematic. In the November 1820 edition of Lonsdale Magazine, one critic accused Shelley of having ‘drunk deep of the two poisonous and kindred streams — infidelity and sedition’.3 ‘Sedition’ probably refers to Shelley’s political activism, whereas ‘infidelity’ mocks his views on love and marriage.Shelley believed that the very institution of marriage was immoral, a view also held by his father-in-law, the political writer William Godwin. A married woman at the time had few rights, and her property and earnings (including any future earnings) became her husband’s upon marriage. Shelley believed that ‘a system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage,’4 and his later actions suggest that he may well have wished instead to be a part of a commune, raising children together and loving one another freely.5Shelley and Godwin’s daughter Mary began an adulterous affair (despite Godwin’s disapproval) and had two children together while Shelley was still married to his first wife. Although Percy Shelley and Mary eventually married in 1816, this was only to improve his chances of gaining custody in the wake of his first wife’s death.In 1822, Shelley moved his family to a shared house in Lerici, Italy, near to where his friends the writers Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt lodged. The three planned to start a new journal called ‘The Liberal’ to feature the work of like-minded, radical authors. Tragically, Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia, aged 29, before its first publication.Many of Shelley’s works were deemed too radical for publication during his lifetime, including ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ (1819) for which he is now well known. The poem was penned in response to the Peterloo Massacre of the same year, in which some 60,000 people who had gathered to demand political reform were charged upon by the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry cavalry, resulting in some civilian deaths. Leigh Hunt, who had been sent the poem for his Journal, initially feared that the public would perceive Shelley as an aggressive revolutionary, on account of lines such as ‘Rise like lions after slumber/ In vanquishable number’,6 but eventually published this work in 1832.The Mask of Anarchy comes closest to our understanding of Shelley the radical, for his stand against authority, and the desire to speak out against the injustices he perceived in society.