Queen Mab.

London: Printed and Published by Mrs. Carlile and Sons [reissued by John Brooks],, 1832 [1833]. "The first really cheap version" (St Clair, p. 681) of Queen Mab, a rare survival in the original yellow wrappers, issued by the radical printer Jane Carlile in 1832, with the wrappers showing the re-issue of sheets by John Brooks in 1833 with his imprint. "The small-format 1832 edition became a touchstone text for the Chartist movement" (Behrendt, p. 95). The "edition was an important one: I take it to have been largely consumed by the Owenites, with whom Brooks was connected, and to whom Queen Mab is said to have stood in the position of a gospel. It is a re-arranged edition: Shelley's notes are transferred from their place at the end of the book to the position of foot-notes; and this arrangement of course facilitated the studies both of the special sect of Owenites and of the general body of radicals to whom Queen Mab was now appealing in all seriousness" (Buxton Forman, p. 32). Queen Mab, due to its radical nature, was heavily suppressed from its first publication in 1813. Its publication history, riddled with piracies and surreptitious editions, is marked by various prosecutions of publishers, as late as that of Edward Moxon in 1840. The poem was a favourite of the radicals, often cited as "the Chartist's Bible"; cheap, pocket editions, such as the present version and its successors, brought the poem to a far wider and to a broader working-class readership. The rear wrapper advertises various other radical titles: The Reformer's Catechism, The People's Charter, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man and Common Sense, Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, and several other works by Shelley. Library Hub locates copies in only the British Library and Eton; WorldCat adds a single location, at Harvard. Duodecimo. Original yellow wrappers printed in black. Light wear to spine and chips at wrapper tips, yet still holding firm, some bumping and fraying round page extremities, a very good, well-preserved example. Stephen C. Behrendt, "Shelley and His Publishers", in The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2013; H. Buxton Forman, "The Vicissitudes of Queen Mab", in The Shelley Society's Papers, Part I, 1888; William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, 2004.