Introducing The Liberal

In a Letter of 16 August 1821 to Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that his "great content" would be in isolation from society, retiring with her and their child "to a solitary island in the sea"; whereas the "other side of the alternative’ could be "to form for ourselves a society of our own class, as much as possible, in intellect or in feelings: & to connect ourselves with the interests of that society. – Our roots were never struck so deeply as at Pisa & the transplanted tree flourishes not". This was one of the earliest signs announcing the formation of what has become known as the Pisan group or Pisan circle in British Romanticism.

This group gathered gradually between 1820 and 1822, and eventually comprised Mary and Percy Shelley, his cousin Thomas Medwin, the Irish expatriate John Taaffe, Professor Francesco Pacchiani who taught at the local University (1801-21), Lord Byron’s friends Count Gamba and his son Pietro Gamba, Byron’s mistress Countess Teresa Gamba Guiccioli, Byron himself, Shelley’s friend Edward John Trelawny, Leigh Hunt, his wife Marianne (and their children), and a host of other figures including the Greek prince Alexandros Mavrokordatos.

Shelley, who possibly had the original idea for a periodical, insisted on inviting Hunt to Pisa as editor-in-chief and contributor, while Hunt’s brother John, in London, would unertake its publication. Shelley, Byron and Hunt would be its main contributors and animators. In other words, The Liberal issued from the multifaceted context of the Pisan group, its sociable climate and intellectual exchanges, as well as from its ‘excentric’ geographical, political and cultural position in relation to Britain. It was the expression of a community of exiles and expats - controversial figures propounding radical ideas and envisaging literature as an instrument for political and social interventions, and as a vehicle for cosmopolitan, transnational principles.

During its short life the periodical had no Italian contributors. Yet, it was deeply imbued with Italian history, culture, and literature: the context of Pisa, Tuscany and Italy bore upon it in countless ways, and it promoted a decidedly Southern viewpoint as an expression of ‘Anglo-Italian radicalism’ (as proclaimed in its subtitle) in contrast to Britain’s rampantly conservative climate in the 1820s.

The Liberal  was beset by difficulties from the outset. Setting it up meant confronting the lively but ruthless world of 1820s periodicals and trying to make a place for it in a conflictive and politically and ideologically conditioned milieu. Its four issues were assembled in Pisa first, and then, after the ‘colony’ broke up, in Genoa. Its day-to-day running was always a bumpy affair, fraught with interpersonal tensions, and complicated by distance from London. Its end was also accelerated by Shelley’s untimely death, in July 1822, before the publication of the first issue.

These complex dynamics enrich, rather than diminish, the significance of The Liberal , its uniqueness as a groundbreaking, transcultural publication seeking to instigate a sea-change in literature and politics – indeed, a change in politics ‘through’ literature. It was an unprecedented laboratory of new ideas and principles, only seemingly disorganized, but actually informed by an underlying rationale. For, even though the contents of its four miscellaneous issues appear disorderly and discontinuous, they are crisscrossed by countless interconnecting lines.

The four issues contained both pieces expressly written for the periodical, and manuscripts already available for publication. These consisted of a variety of prose pieces, the majority written by Leigh Hunt, such as his “Letters from Abroad” (one for every issue); the historical narratives “The Florentine Lovers” and “The Giuli Tre” also by Hunt; Mary Shelley’s historical essay “Giovanni Villani” and the short story “A Tale of the Passions”; and William Hazlitt’s biographical “My First Acquaintance with Poets”; sketches such as “The Scotch Character” or “Portrait of Alfieri”, and a piece on the Suliotes of the Balkans; and literary criticism such as an article on Shakespeare’s fools by Charles Armitage Brown. It also contained long compositions in verse, especially by Byron (The Vision of Judgment, The Blues, Heaven and Earth) and Hunt (The Dogs). There were also translations from Italian and other languages, among which Byron’s version of the first canto of Luigi Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore; a section from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso; and Shelley’s translation of parts of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust. Each issue also featured shorter poems such as epigrams, lyrics and ‘minor pieces’ in verse - both original and translated.

What made The Liberal so unique was that it originated from collaborative creativity; its Italian location and links with Italian literature as the privileged focus of many of its articles; and its interlacing of literature and politics, highlighted also by its subtitle “Verse and Prose from the South”. In many ways, this radical, contentious periodical could not have been conceived in England: instead, its geographical dislocation allowed for new experimentations that resulted in a publication that was exceptional in its conception and output. Significantly, The Liberal proved controversial both for the conservative press, which saw it as dangerously subversive, and for the radical press, which downplayed its significance and impact by treating mainly it as a literary periodical.

As this overview makes clear, however limited its circulation and problematic its history, The Liberal is a unique cultural landmark – one whose relevance relates to the history of liberalism in politics and culture, Anglo-Italian intercultural contacts, and the literary history of several major Romantic-period works. On more specific levels, The Liberal throws light on a constellation of questions, issues, and phenomena including the changing semantics of ‘liberal/ism’; cosmopolitanism and transnationalism; the world of 1820s periodicals; Romantic-era coteries and groups (the London Cockney group around Leigh Hunt; the Pisan group); geo-cultural politics (the Romantics’ ‘Cult of the South’; the development of Anglo-Italian identities); the cultural and political contexts of Italy, and Tuscany particularly, in the early 1820s; and a wide range of literary questions such as translation, appropriation, the transformations of literary genres and the canon.

To date, these aspects have been only intermittently explored, re-assessed and valorized. A full reappraisal of The Liberal - both in terms of scholarship and public engagement – is what our project sets out to achieve, in the first place by making available the periodical’s first transcribed and annotated version, complete with critical commentary.