California Streaming
SMP chair David Hide reports on our connection with a Shelley Society in the USA.
Zooming across the miles
On most Fridays, by nine o’clock in the evening you might ordinarily expect to be meeting up with friends for a few drinks or relaxing in front of the telly after a long week, but Friday 22nd May was no ordinary day for the SMP.
We were, for the second year running, zooming into Oak Park High School, California, as guests of their Shelley Society, following an invitation from their teacher, Kathy Schultheis to join them on the final day of term.
This year we started by talking about Shelley's early life in Horsham, his time at Eton and then Oxford and the formative moment which would point to the direction his life would take when he was expelled from University College Oxford for 'contumaciously refusing to answer questions proposed to [him], and for also repeatedly declining to disavow a publication entitled The Necessity of Atheism'.’
The college records at the time suggest that, the College thought it had washed its hands of a troublesome student; it only realised later that it had expelled one of England’s greatest romantic poets.
We completed our presentation by reading extracts from some of Shelley's most famous poems, including Ode to the West Wind, Ozymandias, To a Skylark and The Mask of Anarchy.
Then followed a fascinating discussion on a range of topics with questions and comments going back and forth across the internet as two communities, separated by thousands of miles, set about exploring the life, work and influence of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
One student observed that Karl Marx references Shelley as an influence, yet Marx supported violent revolution, while Shelley proposed non-violent resistance.
Students from the Shelley Society at Oak Park High School, California
Other pertinent questions included:
What were the conditions like in England for the workers during the early 1800s?
Why were so many workers so poor, and why was nothing being done about it?
What was Shelley's take on Methodism, and what part did the Methodists play in the radical movement and most especially at the time of the Peterloo Massacre?
We are seeing in the media that there is a lot of unrest in the UK at the moment and dissatisfaction with the government. Would Shelley have joined the protesters?
It was another extraordinary night and one we will remember for a very long time.
This is what the OPHS Shelley Society said about the zoom meeting on their Instagram account:
Thank you Shelley Memorial Project for honouring us with a marvellous presentation about Percy Bysshe Shelley! This is the second year we have done our international exchanges via Zoom, and it is truly amazing to communicate across oceans and continents to exchange knowledge about this great Romantic poet. David, thank you for taking the time to prepare such an intricate presentation for us here in Oak Park! Carol, we appreciate your dedication to the Memorial Project and providing us with knowledge about British history! We are beyond grateful of you two taking your Friday nights to relay upon our society your vast knowledge of Shelley and answer our questions. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you from the Oak Park Shelley Society.
The SMP also had a great night out, and we would also like to thank the Society for holding a fundraiser on our behalf. It is an astonishing experience to connect with young people from across the globe who are demonstrating such interest and thirst for knowledge
If you would be interested in learning more about the Shelley Memorial Project and would like to book a speaker from our group, please get in touch.