Reading Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Mask of Anarchy”

A recording of the reading (viewable by clicking “Watch on Youtube“).

On 16 August 2022, the anniversary of the Peterloo massacre at Manchester (1819), some fifty scholars of British Romanticism gathered to read Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem “The Mask of Anarchy” (composed 1819) in a virtual event hosted by John Bugg (Fordham) and Susan Wolfson (Princeton).

Subtitled “Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester”, the poem was—against the poet’s original wish for its inclusion in the Hunts’ radical Examiner—published posthumously in 1832 in light of a tightening of political constraints meant to quell the calls for reform following the massacre.

The entirety of the poem can be read on this website, and parts of the manuscript can be viewed on the British Library website here.

“Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number --

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you --

Ye are many -- they are few.”