Afternoon Poems Special: 200th Anniversary of Peterloo
16 August 2019, 2-4pm
Keats House, Hampstead
‘Massacre at St. Peter’s or “Britons strike home”!!!’ by George Cruikshank (British Museum)
Join the Keats House Poetry Ambassadors for a reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem The Mask of Anarchy. This revolutionary work was written in response to the Peterloo massacre which occurred in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, on 16 August 1819.
Professor Ian Haywood – of the University of Roehampton and President of BARS – will also be present to discuss Peterloo itself and then the poem’s historic context.
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number –
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.