Lost Shelley letters turn up: the German connection?

It’s not every day that Percy Bysshe Shelley makes the news. Here he is, though.

http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=4663403

Four letters written by the young Shelley turned up in a trunk. Apparently they were saved at the last moment from going into a car boot sale. In a way I’m sorry about that: I’d like to think that you can find new Shelley writing, or maybe an unknown Bach aria (http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1501487,00.html ), in your local flea market.

The Scotsman only gives an extract from one letter in which Shelley argued that: "Christ never existed... the fall of man, the whole fabric indeed of superstition which it supports can no longer obtain the credit of philosophers."

The BBC report and the Scotsman report say the letters are interesting for showing that Shelley had arguments concerning religion on his mind at the time he was preparing to write The Necessity of Atheism. Which would suggest they’re both relying on a hand-out from the auctioneers, Christie’s. That isn’t really the interesting thing: we knew that.

What strikes me as interesting about the quoted fragment is the line that “Christ never existed”. In one of the notes to Queen Mab, written a little later, Shelley mentioned evidence that the historical Jesus may have been the leader of a political revolt, not a peaceful figure, nor unambitious. These two theories (taking “Christ never existed” as shorthand for the idea that the biblical Christ was – like King Arthur or Robin Hood – a figure entirely or almost entirely created by the accretion of myths) were both current in the most recent German-language biblical scholarship, work that was not available in English.

Which suggests that Shelley wasn’t just using his German to read horror novels, as has commonly been assumed. He seems to have been reading recent, German-language academic texts. That leads to another possibility. Shelley wasn’t just interested in theological and biblical issues, at this time, he was also strongly interested in linguistic philosophy, reading philologists and philosophers of language like Monboddo and Horne Took, among others. (Shelley’s interest in philosophy of language is a strong and consistent theme in his poetry, though it's usually implicit. When Paul de Mann claimed Shelley as a precursor of the post-structuralists, he was being opportunist, of course, but there’s a grain of truth to it. Though you could just as easily claim Shelley as a positivist. I'd claim him for the eclectic sceptics, myself, but then I would.)

Anyway, it seems reasonably likely, then, that if you looked for evidence of influence from then-current German philologists and linguistic philosophers in Shelley, you’d find some new things, and some of those things would shed interesting new light on the intellectual framework of the later poems.

I’m writing too much serious stuff at the moment. Next up: Faust in a hat-box.