The extraordinary discovery has excited scholars who have been searching in vain for it for nearly two centuries. Professor Henry R Woudhuysen, Professor of English at UCL, reveals the full story in the July 14 issue of The Times Literary Supplement

Shelley was a young undergraduate at Oxford University when he produced his Poetical Essay. With a preface on politics and religion, it featured a poem that ranges from the devastations of war to the oppressions of colonial India.

The poem was Shelley's his direct response to the arrest and imprisonment of a radical Irish journalist who had dared to report the horrors of war in the national press.
Although Shelley published the pamphlet under the anonymous pseudonym of “a Gentleman of the University of Oxford”, his contemporaries at the university knew his identity, and his actions are thought to have precipitated his expulsion from Oxford.

Professor Woudhuysen spoke of the excitement of reading something which no-one has read for nearly two centuries.

He said: “It is extremely rare for printed books of any period to be rediscovered after an absence of 200 years. (It) is all the more remarkable for its unexpected emergence and for the insights a full study of it will give into Shelley’s development as a poet and political thinker.”

The pamphlet is being sold by Quaritch, antiquarian booksellers.

“It is one of the most exciting literary discoveries that I can remember," Ted Hofmann, the director of Quaritch, told The Times. "It was written about by Shelley scholars, but it was all a matter of conjecture. It’s certainly a very important poem.”

The pamphlet’s fate has been a mystery. No-one knows how many copies were produced, whether Shelley sold any and whether the university authorities destroyed some of them.

Shelley was responding to the imprisonment of Peter Finnerty, a journalist who was invited in 1809 to join the British expedition to the Scheldt to attack Antwerp, then held by the French.

The expedition ended in disaster. Large numbers of troops fell victim to a form of malaria, and some 4,000 men lost their lives.

Finnerty’s reports in the Morning Chronicle led to his arrest. Undaunted, a year later, he accused Lord Castlereagh of trying to silence him. Tried for libel, he was sentenced to 18 months in Lincoln Goal. The case sparked widespread interest, a debate in the House of Commons and a fund-raising campaign to maintain the journalist in prison.

Contributors to the Finnerty fund included Shelley, then in his second term at University College. He pledged a guinea towards the cause and charged “two shillings” for the Poetical Essay, judging by his advertisement in The Times. Readers were told that it was “to Maintain in Prison Mr.Peter Finnerty, Imprisoned for a Libel”.

In a line in the poem that reads, “vices as glaring as the noon-day sun”, Shelley is thought to have been referring to Castlereagh.

Professor Woudhuysen said: “As former President of the Board of Control and Colonial Secretary, Castlereagh stands for the iniquities of British rule in India.”

The pamphlet may have been among “Shelley’s strange and fantastic pranks” to which one contemporary referred. Mr Hofmann believes it, as well as his inflammatory pamphlet in support of atheism, contributed to the poet’s expulsion from the university: “It was another nail in the coffin.” Shelley never resumed his studies.

The poem is dedicated to Harriet Westbrook, with whom Shelley eloped in 1811. As such, it marks the poet’s first printed reference to his wife.
The preface is a short essay on politics and religion. In it, he called for “a total reform in the licentiousness, luxury, depravity, prejudice, which involve society”.

Professor Woudhuysen says that, while some of the language in the poem is reminiscent of Shelley’s other work, the regularity of the couplets is uncharacteristic. That, he suggests, may be explained by the fact that the pamphlet was “some sort of collaboration” between Shelley and his sister, Elizabeth.

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