Percy Bysshe Shelley's Dublin: The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley came to Ireland in 1812 when he was 19 and threw himself whole-heartedly into the struggle for Irish freedom and justice. He had put together a collection of poems to celebrate the cause of liberty, and Dublin seemed the obvious place to have them published and to begin his career as a political activist, writes Paul O'Brien
While in Dublin he wrote two pamphlets, An Address to the Irish People and Proposals for an Association, which were an attempt to radicalise the campaign for Catholic emancipation and repeal of the Union. As a result of this agitation he was invited to speak to the Catholic Association and shared a platform with Daniel O'Connell in the historic Fishamble Street Theatre, which took its name from the old market, the Fish- Shamble, and was the venue for the première of Handel's Messiah in 1742.
The Shelleys took rooms on the first floor of a house belonging to Mr Dunne, a woollen-draper, at 7 Lower Sackville Street (now O'Connell Street). Standing on his balcony, Shelley could see an unbroken vista from the Rotunda in the north to the former houses of parliament over the river Liffey to the south.
His first task was to find a printer for his pamphlets and poems and he engaged John Stockdale of 71 Abbey Street, probably because of Stockdale's former association with the United Irishmen. Stockdale had been imprisoned in 1797 and 1803 for printing seditious literature, but Shelley was not to know that, in 1805, Stockdale, broken by jail, had become a government informer.
Shortly after his arrival, Shelley made the acquaintance of Catherine Nugent, and this relationship is one of the great untold stories in Shelley's life. Born in 1771, Nugent was a valued member of the United Irishmen; her involvement in the rebellion of 1798 was such that if she had been a man she would certainly have been executed. Their friendship was based on mutual respect and admiration and it was on her account that the Shelleys moved to rooms at 17 Grafton Street, opposite the house where she lived. Unlike any of Shelley's other acquaintances, she was working-class; she sewed furs for the rich in the shop of John Newman at 101 Grafton Street. In Nugent he encountered, for the first time, a working-class woman not as a victim of society, but as an individual fighting for what she believed to be her right. From her, Shelley derived a detailed understanding of the situation in Ireland and also, I suspect, of the reality of working-class life.
Shelley was an admirer of Robert Emmet. Like many of the Romantic poets, he was drawn in guilty fascination to Emmet's tragic life. Shelley made a pilgrimage to St Michan's Church, where tradition has it that Emmet was buried in an unmarked grave, covered by a grey stone. Shelley was inspired by Emmet's sacrifice, as is clear from his poem, On Robert Emmet's Tomb.
Irish freedom was not a passing fad for the young poet - he retained an interest in Irish politics and literature until his unfortunate death in 1822. Denis MacCarthy, writing in the Nation newspaper in 1842, claimed Shelley as a friend of the Irish people and invited them to raise up "a monument within their hearts, more endurable than marble or brass to the memory of that man".
Paul O'Brien's book, Shelley and Revolutionary Ireland, was published last month by Redwords, €30hdbk, €16.50pbk