An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King

Percy Bysshe Shelley could not state his radical colours any clearer or insult the King of England more bluntly. Anna Laetitia Barbauld's Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, A Poem is the similar apocalyptic liberal rant from several years earlier, but Barbauld was also nearly 70 when she wrote that poem. The far younger Shelley was by now used to offending people, was widely known as an atheist, and he does not flinch to personally attack kings and politicians (The Mask of Anarchy, like his friend Lord Byron's Don Juan, unleashes on the infamous Tory Castlereagh). Barbauld attacks Britain but Shelley calls his king and royal family ?leechlike.? There is good reason for Shelley?s anger, George III was not only conservative and an enemy of revolution, but he had sat on the throne for 60 years and was by now insane in the eyes of many. The early 1800s were also a trying time for England, with the threat of Napoleon, who was finally defeated at Waterloo (between Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, A Poem and England in 1819). Barbauld?s poem hopes for radical change in England, a chickens coming home to roost, when it is still possible. By 1819, England has began its ascendancy to its zenith of power under Queen Victoria. Culturally, Shelley and Byron and the rise of lower class literacy would make such venom against the monarchy more acceptable, but 1819 was also a peak of conservatism, according to my readings on Don Juan?s reception.