Queen Mab (poem)
Queen Mab is infused with scientific language and naturalising moral prescriptions for an oppressed humanity in an industrialising world.
About 70 sets of the signatures were bound and distributed personally by Shelley, and the rest were stored at William Clark's bookshop in London.
Shelley was dismayed upon discovering the piracy of what he considered to be not just a juvenile production but a work that could potentially "injure rather than serve the cause of freedom."
In spite of prosecution from the Vice Society, Carlile was encouraged by the popularity Shelley's poem enjoyed with the working classes, progressives, and reformers into producing four separate editions of Queen Mab during the 1820s.
Between 1821 and the 1830s over a dozen pirated editions of Queen Mab were produced and distributed among and by the labouring classes fuelling, and becoming a "bible" for Chartism.
[5] The resulting trial, in which the prosecuting counsel "eulogized the genius of Shelley; and fairly admitted the respectability of the defendant,"[6]: 362 and Moxon was defended by Serjeant Talfourd, resulted in a guilty verdict, but the prosecution chose not to pursue any punishment beyond a payment of costs, and "there were no further attempts to impede the circulation of Queen Mab".
[5]: 333 [7] The poem is written in the form of a fairy tale that presents a future vision of a utopia on earth, consisting of nine cantos and seventeen notes.
Of the seventeen notes, six deal with the issues of atheism, vegetarianism, free love, the role of necessity in the physical and spiritual realm, and the relationship of Christ and the precepts of Christianity.
He desired to induce every rich man to despoil himself of superfluity, and to create a brotherhood of property and service, and was ready to be the first to lay down the advantages of his birth.
He saw, in a fervent call on his fellow-creatures to share alike the blessings of the creation, to love and serve each other, the noblest work that life and time permitted him.
