Masks of Anarchy: The History Of A Radical Poem, from Percy Shelley To the Triangle Factory Fire

By Michael Demson and Summer Mcclinton

Masks of Anarchy tells the extraordinary story of Percy Shelley’s poem “The Masque of Anarchy,” from its conception in Italy and suppression in England to the moment it became a catalyst for protest among New York City workers a century later.

Shelley penned the poem in 1819, after hearing of the Peterloo Massacre, where British cavalry charged peaceful political demonstrators near Manchester. His words would later inspire figures as wide-ranging as Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi—and also Pauline Newman, the woman the New York Times called the “New Joan of Arc” in 1907. Newman was a Jewish immigrant who worked in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, and came to be a leading organizer—and the first female organizer—of one of America’s most powerful unions, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. As she marched with tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers in the streets, Shelley’s poem never ceased to inspire her. “Shake your chains to earth like dew,” it implores. “Ye are many—they are few.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso Books
• Release date: Jul 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781781682296

Michael Demson

Michael Demson is a professor of English at Sam Houston State University in Texas.

Book preview

First published by Verso 2013

Text and preface © Michael Demson 2013

Artwork © Summer McClinton 2013

Foreword © Paul Buhle 2013

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

eBook ISBN: 978-1-78168-229-6

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

v3.1

FOR AUDREY

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

FOREWORD BY PAUL BUHLE

PREFACE

1: THE DEVIL’S WALK

2: HER NAME WAS HOPE

3: AFLOAT, DRIFTING

4: HAIRBRUSHES & CIGARETTES

5: FROM GRAVEYARD TO MOUNTAINTOP

6: LET A VAST ASSEMBLY BE

7: PETERLOO

8: THE FACTORY FIRE

9: THE MASK OF ANARCHY

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD

PAUL BUHLE

COMICS MEET HISTORY, AND POETRY, TOO!

The book before you, reader, is one of the most remarkable works of comic art to date. One can safely predict that Masks of Anarchy will cast its influence widely over future nonfiction graphic work, especially as regards the uses of poetry and the meanings of social, labor and women’s history.

Scholar Michael Demson and artist Summer McClinton have mediated between—and in one or two ways actually merged—the saga of the great English revolutionary poet Percy Shelley and the story of courageous immigrant labor activist Pauline Newman, who stirred working women into action, in part through the use of Shelley’s work and legacy. An amazing true-life tale in itself, the combined version