"On 16 August 1819, a crowd of more than 50,000 gathered at St Peter's Fields outside Manchester to support parliamentary reform. The radical orator Henry Hunt was to speak in favour of widening the franchise and reforming Britain's notoriously corrupt system of political representation. Magistrates ordered the Manchester Yeomanry to disperse the demonstration. The cavalry charged the crowd, sabres drawn, and at least 15 people, including a woman and a child, were killed.
The businessman John Taylor, who had witnessed the aftermath, went on to set up the Manchester Guardian in response. It was via newspapers, almost a month later, that Percy Bysshe Shelley, living in Italy, found out about what became known as the Peterloo massacre. "The torrent of my indignation," as he put it, flowed into The Masque of Anarchy, a poem devised to be accessible to a wide readership but doomed not to reach it. Though he sent it back to Britain, his friend Leigh Hunt felt it could not be safely published, the perpetrators of the massacre having been exonerated. It remained unpublished until the 1830s. This weekend, Maxine Peake will deliver a new interpretation of the work, mere steps from the site of the massacre itself.
Running to 91 stanzas, the poem is a prophetic dream, an apocalyptic vision of Regency Britain and the shaky legitimacy of its ruling class...
...Running to 91 stanzas, the poem [
Shelly's The Masque of Anarchy,see below] is a prophetic dream, an apocalyptic vision of Regency Britain and the shaky legitimacy of its ruling class. In the first part, the nation's leading politicians parade like monsters, leading the figure of Anarchy around on a white horse to trample the multitudes. In this vision, the true anarchists are Britain's rulers, who delight in fear and disorder. Anarchy's followers, who include lawyers and priests, take possession of palace and parliament. They are challenged only by a "maniac maid" called Hope, though "she looked more like Despair"..."
The entire article with the first nine stanzas annotated...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2013/jul/08/anarchy-in-peterloo-shelleys-poem-unmasked
The whole poem...
http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/13321/Ignorance is bliss, bliss is happiness, I am happy...to draw your attention to the possible connectivity in the foregoing.
