The Ghost of Gold: Forgery Trials and the Standard of Value in Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy

I read the famous lines on paper money and forgery in Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy as one of a number of responses to the government and the Bank of England's disastrous campaign of forgery prosecutions in the wake of the suspension of cash payments. Many economic writers claimed that the value of money could not be secured by law but only through the operations of the free market, at the center of which was the gold standard, passed into law in Britain for the first time in 1816, but not put into practice until 1821. Radical journalists like Cobbett and Wooler, by contrast, argued that the real standard of value lay with sincere understanding and fellow feeling: any government imposed standard was tantamount to fraud. Shelley agreed in principle with both of these recommendations. But he did not recommend either a gold standard or a moral standard but rather a literary standard. The market should be regulated not by economic forces but by a collective consciousness of natural rights enshrined in the productions of imaginative geniuses.