Shelley's work was not widely read in his lifetime outside a small circle of friends, poets and critics. Most of his poetry, drama and fiction was published in editions of 250 copies which generally sold poorly. Only The Cenci went to an authorised second edition while Shelley was alive[172] – in contrast, Byron's The Corsair (1814) sold out its first edition of 10,000 copies in one day.[3]
The initial reception of Shelley's work in mainstream periodicals (with the exception of the liberal Examiner) was generally unfavourable. Reviewers often launched personal attacks on Shelley's private life and political, social and religious views, even when conceding that his poetry contained beautiful imagery and poetic expression.[173] There was also criticism of Shelley's intelligibility and style, Hazlitt describing it as "a passionate dream, a straining after impossibilities, a record of fond conjectures, a confused embodying of vague abstraction".[174]
Shelley's poetry soon gained a wider audience in radical and reformist circles. Queen Mab became popular with Owenists and Chartists, and Revolt of Islam influenced poets sympathetic to the workers' movement such as Thomas Hood, Thomas Cooper and William Morris.[9][175]
However, Shelley's mainstream following did not develop until a generation after his death. Bieri argues that editions of Shelley's poems published in 1824 and 1839 were edited by Mary Shelley to highlight her late husband's lyrical gifts and downplay his radical ideas.[176] Matthew Arnold famously described Shelley as a "beautiful and ineffectual angel".[7]
Shelley was a major influence on a number of important poets in the following decades, including Robert Browning, Algernon Swinburne, Thomas Hardy and William Butler Yeats.[5] Shelley-like characters frequently appeared in nineteenth-century literature; they include Scythrop in Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey,[177] Ladislaw in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Angel Clare in Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles.[178]
Twentieth-century critics such as Eliot, Leavis, Allen Tate and Auden variously criticised Shelley's poetry for deficiencies in style, "repellent" ideas, and immaturity of intellect and sensibility.[5][179][180] However, Shelley's critical reputation began to rise in the 1960s as a new generation of critics highlighted Shelley's debt to Spenser and Milton, his mastery of genres and verse forms, and the complex interplay of sceptical, idealist, and materialist ideas in his work.[180] American literary critic Harold Bloom describes him as "a superb craftsman, a lyric poet without rival, and surely one of the most advanced sceptical intellects ever to write a poem".[5] According to Donald H. Reiman, "Shelley belongs to the great tradition of Western writers that includes Dante, Shakespeare and Milton".[181][182]
