Shelley and the Marriage Question

Shelley and the Marriage Question is an essay or short critical work by John Todhunter, the Anglo Irish poet, playwright, and critic who lived from 1839 to 1916. Todhunter was a friend of W B Yeats and a substantial figure in the Irish Literary Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although he is now less remembered than the major Revival figures.

The essay engages with one of the most controversial aspects of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s life and thought, his radical views on marriage and his complicated personal history involving his first wife Harriet Westbrook and his second wife Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley. Shelley had been associated with the political and philosophical radicals of the early nineteenth century who had questioned the conventional Christian institution of marriage on various philosophical and ethical grounds, and his personal life had given his philosophical positions a particular force and a particular notoriety.

Todhunter approaches the subject as a sympathetic Victorian admirer of Shelley trying to make sense of Shelley’s marriage philosophy and his marriage practice for an audience of late nineteenth century readers. The essay works through the various positions Shelley had taken in his writings on marriage, with attention to the influence of William Godwin and other earlier radical thinkers. It also addresses the personal history with reasonable honesty, neither minimizing the difficult episodes nor sensationalizing them.

The wider Victorian debate about marriage was active during the period when Todhunter was writing, with figures like Grant Allen, George Bernard Shaw, and various others taking positions that ranged from cautious reform to outright rejection of conventional marriage. Todhunter’s essay belongs to this broader debate and uses the Shelley case as a vehicle for considering the larger questions about the relationship between philosophical conviction and actual personal conduct in matters of love and marriage.

The essay is short and is mostly of interest now to readers of late Victorian literary criticism and to students of the long English language debate about Shelley’s life and reputation. It pairs naturally with the other Victorian biographical and critical literature on Shelley.