Shelley's Steamship

This article centers on Percy Shelley's attempt to build a steamship with the engineer Henry Reveley in 1819–20. I argue that Shelley analogized the construction of a steamship with that of crafting poetry. Shelley allied poetry with engineering as he attempted to transmit his radical political poetry to audiences who were living within developing political moments that seemed to promise revolution. There are clues in Shelley's poetry and letters that allow identification of the class and capabilities of his steamboat. I furthermore argue that Shelley's writings, and particularly his repeated references to Archimedes, coincide with mathematical equations on work, force, and distance that were standardized in the period. Like a small weight on a long lever, Shelley's poems would travel on the steamship to carry out work at a distance. For Shelley, poetry is an active force that can transfer mental energy between people to create political activity; in Miranda Burgess's words, the steamship would enable a "flow of nervous stimulation" (249). Shelley's A Defence of Poetry begins, in the first sentence, with "mental action." He then argues that "poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause" (SPP 517). Poems can do mental and physical work, Shelley believes, transmitting a force that can be converted into kinetic energy through reading, thus enabling transformative political action.