Deep Time: Queen Mab

ABSTRACT

This essay examines Percy Bysshe Shelley's understanding and representation of Romantic–age conceptions of planetary temporalities on the scale of what we would today refer to as “deep time,” or the prehuman history of the Earth. I explore Shelley's response in Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem: with Notes (1813) to James Hutton's geological theories of planetary temporalities and show that Shelley's depiction of eternalism in this poem must be recontextualized in light of Hutton's geological critique. Few scholars have sought to explore the deep time dimensions of the poem's intense temporal rescaling and Shelley's voluminous prose notes on the topic. As I show, Shelley's conception and representation of temporal scale in Queen Mab is likely informed by Hutton's research leading to the publication of his Theory of the Earth, with Proofs and Illustrations (1795) and the afterlife of that work in his friend and popularizer John Playfair's Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802). If we are going to unpack and comprehend Shelley's depiction of eternity in Queen Mab, we must return to the geological notion of eternalism defining Huttonian theory.

Notes

1 Shelley first refers to this “magic car” voyage in canto 1 (line 207). Shelley’s poetry (including the prose notes) are quoted from The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and are cited by canto and line or page number(s), as applicable.

2 See Weinberg (92). Reiman and Fraistat gloss Shelley’s reference to “the crinities or nebulæ of Herschel” in his note 13 (268) as potentially deriving from Darwin’s description of Herschel’s work in The Botanic Garden (627–28). Aside from Weinberg’s reading, scarce critical attention has focused explicitly on the treatment of time in this text, with a notable exception being Duffy’s article, which makes reference to the role of time in Queen Mab (“‘Time is flying’” 41, 42) but focuses primarily on Shelley’s later writings.

3 Weinberg likewise notes this gap in criticism while also making the following stipulation: “Notwithstanding ground-breaking studies of Queen Mab, such as the comprehensive readings of Cameron and Duff, and the specialized reading of Morton, the visionary scope of the work remains largely neglected” (90, 91). In addition to Cameron, Duff, and Morton, also see Mitchell.

4 Weinberg makes no reference to Hutton in his work on Queen Mab. Furthermore, critics who do invoke Hutton, temporality, and Queen Mab do so only briefly in order to move on to his later poetry. While Leask investigates Mont Blanc and Geric studies Prometheus Unbound, Duffy largely takes up “The Triumph of Life” (“‘Time is flying’”).

5 Butler was among the earliest critics to identify Hutton’s “ambitious uniformitarian description of the history of the earth” (15) with gradualist and other features of Shelley’s writings (12–13, 17, 22) and with the works of other Romantic-age intellectuals. Critics as recent as Leask and Geric have continued that association and tradition. Such critical claims stand in stark contrast to the work of scholars such as Lloyd N. Jeffrey and Christine Kenyon Jones, who have argued for an antithetical connection between Shelley’s work and the catastrophism espoused in the geological writings of Jean-Léopold-Nicholas-Frédéric (Georges), Baron Cuvier. For reasons of space, this essay is unable to delve into Cuvierian geology, which despite being antithetical to Huttonian eternalism and uniformitarianism in several ways, did indeed likewise expand the concept of planetary timescale far beyond biblical accounts during the period, as documented by Rudwick, who has demonstrated how, for Cuvier, “the deep past was truly ‘other’ than the present” (Bursting 364).

6 I have silently modernized the long “s” in all citations from Hutton and Playfair in this essay.

7 For a helpful (revisionist) account of the “priority claims” concerning the discovery and articulation of deep time, see Heringman (6–7).

8 Frederick L. Jones notes that “[t]here is evidence that Shelley read [Darwin’s] The Botanic Garden” with care (1.129). Shelley mentions his immersion in Darwin’s writings roughly four months before he first conceived Queen Mab, as announced in his letter to Elizabeth Hitchener in early December 1811 (1: 201).

9 For two recent readings of these topics, see Duff (54–114) and Duffy’s “From Religion to Revolution.”