“The Great God Pan is Alive Again”: Peacock and Shelley in Marlow

Abstract

This chapter examines two particularly productive years in the life of a literary circle and demonstrates the extent to which an emphasis on community—exemplified by Hunt’s writing contests, correspondence, and the establishment of salons—makes this a fertile time for the pagan imagery that recurs in all of these connected authors. Barnett challenges the conventional reading of the relationship between Thomas Love Peacock and Percy Shelley as one of affectionate satire in favor of a more nuanced relationship characterized by influence and collaboration, exemplified by their shared classical studies and the interplays of many of their works (Peacock’s Genius of the Thames and Shelley’s Esdaile Notebook; Peacock’s Ahrimanes and Shelley’s Laon and Cythna; Peacock’s Calidore and Rhododaphne and Shelley’s Alastor and Prometheus Unbound).

I hope you paid your devotions as usual to the Religio Loci, and hung up an evergreen. If you all go on so, there will be a hope some day that old Vansittart & others will be struck with a Panic Terror, and that a voice will be heard along the water saying “The great God Pan is alive again,”—upon which the villagers will leave off starving, and singing profane hymns, and fall to dancing again.

—Leigh Hunt letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg , 22 January 1818 ¹

I often revisit Marlow in thought. The curse of this life is, that whatever is once known, can never be unknown. You inhabit a spot, which before you inhabit it, is as indifferent to you as any other spot upon earth, and when, persuaded by some necessity, you think to leave it, you leave it not; it clings to you—and with memories of things, which, in your experience of them, gave no such promise, revenges your desertion. Time flows on, places are changed; friends who were with us, are no longer with us; yet what has been seems yet to be, but barren and stripped of life.

—Percy Shelley letter to Thomas Love Peacock, 4 April 1818 ²