Shelley’s Mask

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Abstract
On the 16th August 1819, a crowd of around sixty thousand gathered outside Manchester to listen to the renowned radical Henry Hunt. When the crowd appeared to grow restless the authorities ordered in a regiment of Hussars. Eleven were killed, hundreds injured. The radical presses swiftly condemned the “Peterloo massacre.” So, away in Italy, did the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The consequence of Shelley’s anger was one of the greatest poems of political protest in the English language. It was entitled The Mask of Anarchy. This article is about this poem. It asks why Shelley wrote it, what he wanted to say, and how he chose to say it.

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