POSTHUMOUS FRAGMENTS OF MARGARET MCHOLSON. by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Written when Shelley was just eighteen and still at Oxford, this pamphlet claims to be the lost poems of Margaret Nicholson, a real woman who attempted to stab King George III in 1786 and ended up spending her life in Bethlem Royal Hospital. Shelley uses her as a disguise to express intense, revolutionary anger against kings, war, and tyranny. It serves as a young rebel's first major provocation, cleverly presented as a literary hoax.

Defiant, sardonic, and dramatically outraged. Shelley approaches the entire piece with a sense of gleeful provocation — there’s genuine anger beneath the surface, but it’s cloaked in the flair of a teenager who has just realized he can provoke reactions with his words. The mock-scholarly framing adds a dry, deadpan quality that sharpens the radicalism even further.

In 1786, a woman named Margaret Nicholson approached King George III outside St James's Palace and tried to stab him with a dessert knife. She was quickly subdued, declared insane, and sent to Bethlem Royal Hospital — known as 'Bedlam' — where she passed away in 1828. She never faced trial. Percy Bysshe Shelley, born six years later, was inspired by her story during his time at University College, Oxford. He and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg published a pamphlet about her in November 1810, just months before Shelley was expelled from Oxford for a different pamphlet, *The Necessity of Atheism*. This piece fits within a tradition of radical Romantic writing that used historical or fictional figures to criticize monarchy and war. It's one of Shelley's earliest surviving works and already reflects the political passion that would characterize his later poetry.