At 12:30 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 15, Professor of English Susan Wolfson and English graduate student Piper Winkler will discuss how a copy of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism (1811) came to Princeton University, and their related research.

Registration for the discussion, as an All-Access Book Discussion Group event, is handled through Princeton Public Library.

The book group, meeting every six weeks, is a collaboration with the public library by Firestone Library Reference and Outreach Specialist Emma Sarconi and the special collections staff, one of several library initiatives this fall for getting to know special collections.

The copy of Shelley’s pamphlet in Princeton University Library’s Rare Books and special collections is one of only six copies known to survive. The pamphlet’s surreptitious publication resulted in Shelley’s expulsion from Oxford University and the pamphlet’s near complete suppression.

Wolfson and Winkler, becoming interested in how the copy came to Princeton — it arrived wrapped in an 1810 bookstore advertisement for The Family Bible — traced its course of owners from Shelley to the bibliophile who delivered it, library benefactor Robert H. Taylor, a 1930 Princeton graduate.

Along the way, they “thickened their adventure,” Wolfson writes, with research on the five other copies, and the “white hot controversy” that surrounded the only other copy in the Western Hemisphere, at the University of Texas, where the state legislature, “on getting wind of the use of public funds for this purchase,” opened an investigation. 

An article that Winkler and Wolfson published this fall, “Covering The Necessity of Atheism,” in Essays in Criticism, details their research and the controversies of suppression and acquisition around the pamphlet. A companion article on Taylor’s acquiring a copy — “hotly competed for,” Wolfson writes — for Princeton is forthcoming in the Princeton University Library Bulletin.

The Nov. 15  presentation will also involve related texts from the Romantic era in England, such as Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813), a visionary political epic with endnotes that recovered much of the suppressed pamphlet; The Mask of Anarchy, about a violent military suppression by the government (sardonically dubbed “Peterloo” in 1819, Wolfson notes) or Byron’s “Fugitive Pieces,” which Wolfson notes is “replete with what one bemused Victorian critic (and sometime pornographer) called ‘naughty’ poems.”

The book discussion group events are presented with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Susan Wolfson and Cliff Robinson, Princeton Public Library contributed to this article.