BYSSHE

"The fascination with fire-arms was one of many elements in Shelley's character which Hogg, a very down-to-earth personality despite all his masterly sarcasms, could never really account for. Another was Shelley's almost maniac disregard, on certain occasions, for the commonplace decencies of public normal public behaviour, as the time when he seized a baby out of its mother's arms while crossing Magdalen Bridge and began earnestly to question it about the nature of its Platonic pre-existence so that he might prove a point in an argument he was having with Hogg concerning metempsychosis."

February22012

“From here Shelley distributed revolutionary propaganda, putting messages in bottles and floating them out to sea, or sending them up in miniature hot-air balloons. This led the Home Office to step up their surveillance of him.”

- Romanticism, 3rd Edition, Blackwell

(Image from Hark! A Vagrant, the best webcomic.)

I’m sure your messages were wonderful Percy but somehow I doubt that the random launching of miniature hot-air balloons is the most effective format for the distribution of political pamphlets regarding the oppression of Ireland.

Though I’m sure your other tactics of handing them out to prostitutes or angrily throwing them through the windows of passing carriages may prove to be effective political techniques.

shelley

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