ROBERT PARKER'S 'LETTERS ON ATHEISM': AN EARLY RESPONSE TO SHELLEY'S "THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM"

This article presents texts of a hitherto unknown series of letters to Percy Bysshe Shelley from his uncle Robert Parker (1754—1837), a lawyer and banker at Maidstone and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. Although the original letters have disappeared, full copies of six of them are preserved, with a brief summary of a seventh, in Parker's commonplace book, now at the East Sussex Record Office at Lewes. Written over a period of four months from late February to mid-June 1811, Parker's 'Letters on Atheism' constitute the most intelligent and most sustained contemporary reply to Shelley's pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism (1811), for which he and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg were expelled from University College, Oxford. Based largely on William Wollaston's The Religion of Nature Delineated (1724), Sir Richard Blackmore's Natural Theology (1728), and other eighteenth-century works, Parker's rather dated arguments for the existence of a creative Deity did not convince Shelley, but they may have changed his attitude toward natural religion and prompted him to supplement The Necessity of Atheism with A Refutation of Deism (1814).