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As the industrial revolution transformed England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a number of important writers re-evaluated the precapitalist institution of chivalry. In A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Mary Wollstonecraft scorns Edmund Burke's expressions of "gallantry" and "knightly fealty" (24) in the part of Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) in which he deplores the treatment of Marie Antoinette by the revolutionaries. She speculates that "probably the spirit of romance and chivalry is in the wane; and reason will gain by its extinction" (29) . Lord Byron is even more critical of chivalry in his addition to the preface of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II ( 1812) . Responding to objections that his "`vagrant Childe' . . . is very unknightly, "he points out that
the good old times... were the most profligate of all possible centuries.... The vows of chivalry were no better kept than any other vows whatsoever. . Burke need not have regretted that its days are over, though Maria Antoinette was quite as chaste as most of those in whose honours lances were shivered, and knights unhorsed. (20-21)
In An Essay on Chivalry (1818), Sir Walter Scott praises "the exalted, enthusiastic, and almost sanctimonious, ideas connected with [the] duties" of chivalry for counterbalancing "the evils of the rude ages in which it arose" (5-6) . But he also writes that "the devotion of the knights of Chivalry degenerated into superstition, [and] the Platonic refinements and subtleties of amorous passion which they professed, were sometimes compatible with very coarse and gross debauchery" (39-40). Percy Bysshe Shelley presents a more positive view of knight-errantry's influence on gender relations in A Defence of Poetry (composed 1821 ) . He declares that "if the error which confounded diversity with inequality of the powers of the two sexes has become partially recognized in the opinions and institutions of modern Europe, we owe this great benefit to the worship of which Chivalry was the law, and poets the prophets" (497-98).'
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley had close personal relationships with three of these four writers: she read and reread her mother's works (see The Journals of Mary Shelley 684); she admired Byron's poetry and made fair-copies of many of his...