During the British Romantic era, civil liberties were granted to a very limited group of people. For example, the right to vote was only given to male property holders, solidifying the classism that had been deeply rooted in British culture for past millennia. The Chartist movement was formed as a protest against this striking lack of representation and frank dehumanization that these limitations begot. It began – or at least gained traction – around 1832 when the Reform Act failed to extend the right to vote to those who did not own land.

The Chartist movement headed up a charter with that focused on the following demands according to the website parliament.uk: “all men to have the vote (universal manhood suffrage), voting should take place by secret ballot, Parliamentary elections every year, not once every five years, constituencies should be of equal size, members of Parliament should be paid, the property qualification for becoming a member of Parliament should be abolished”. Further rejection of these demands throughout the decades prompted further unrest and protests that came to a head in the Peterloo Massacre. That being said, the persistence of the movement did breed some success and most of their demands had been met by 1918.

In their book surrounding this subject, Bouthaina Shaaban exclaims, “literature, especially poetry, became the chief medium not just to convey political issues but also to enhance their value and magnify their effect, so much so that the Chartist Movement came to be known as 'the Minor Poets' Movement'” (Shaaban viii). Shaaban then spends much of their writings highlighting the influence that the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley had on this movement. One of those influences that Shelley had over this political and literary era is that his focus was “centered chiefly on the task of educating the people, revealing for them the nature of their circumstance and the necessity of its reform” (Shaaban 8). Though part of the upper class (though, certainly on the lower end of it), Percy Shelley was deeply invested in revealing the class divides and the tyranny of the ruling classes.

To lay out exactly what it is about Shelley that appealed to members of the Chartist movement, Shaaban explains,

“First, the Chartists believed that Shelley was more fundamentally radical than any of his compeers and than those who were known to have molded his views. Second, Shelley's stance on the inheritance of his father's seat in Parliament and of the family estate and his views on Ireland, religion and various other social and political issues were greatly appreciated and admired by the Chartists. Third, Shelley was a poet whose theories on reform, on the one hand, and the fusion he managed between poetry and politics, on the other, corresponded to the relation they envisaged between poetry and politics” (Bouthania, 1-2).

Thus we see that, Shelley was not only a defender of the people of lower classes but also a rejector of the power and prestige that could have been and legally was his. Additionally, he was very open and even loud in these radical ideas that led him to support the lower classes most affected by tyranny of the ruling classes.

Shelley’s poetry was a shining example of his strong vocal support of the ideals that fueled the Chartist movement. For example, in the poem “England 1819” he describes the monarchy as “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king, - /Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow” as “mud from a muddy spring” (Shelley 1-3). He openly mocked their claim to religious favor, calling them “Christless” and “Godless” (11). He then blamed them (as he should) for the blood shed during the Peterloo Massacre, painting a picture of “A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field” (7), accusing the army, the great emblem of Empirical force, of liberticide. Percy Shelley’s eloquent opposition to the tyrannical hold that the upper class had on the people was suppressed even by friends and fellow activists that were deeply involved in the movement such as Leigh Hunt and could not be published until after his death.