Although pessimism has little place in Shelley's early enthusiasm, the philosophical framework that was to produce it is sliding into place. Shelley's presumption in setting off at the age of 19 to Dublin in order to address the Irish people on how to resist their persecution sounds unattractively precocious. The audience he envisaged for his pamphlet An Address to the Irish People (Clark, 39–60) was the ‘poor Catholics’; from the start, the invitation to talk down to or patronize them looks irresistible. However, Shelley's youthful polemic becomes a more sophisticated exercise, one already expressive of his problematic idealism. He appears to have written the pamphlet prior to any empirical research into the true condition of the Irish. His ‘Postscript ’ damagingly concedes that only now, after writing it, has he ‘endeavoured to make [himself] more accurately acquainted with the state of the public mind on those great topics of grievances which induced [him] to select Ireland as a theatre, the widest and fairest, for the operations of the determined friend of religious and political freedom’ (Clark, 59). Did he only bother travelling to Dublin to tell the Irish of their usefulness in offering his radical opinions more dramatic support? This appearance of unpleasant opportunism is modified by Shelley's actual argument. His idealistic adoption of the Irish to bear ‘the standard of liberty … a flag of fire – a beacon at which the world shall light the torch of Freedom!’ is bound up with his attack on their religious sectarianism and propensity to violent rebellion (Clark, 43). The details of their plight are precisely what he wants them to transcend in the interests of generally desirable political principles. His cavalier attitude towards their circumstances is to encourage them to enlarge their aspirations beyond confrontational struggle between fixed identities and nationalities. Far from being condescending, Shelley urges on them that escape from restricting oppositions to be exemplified by his most exalted poetic heroes and heroines.

Shelley's abstraction, then, has a practical purpose. His pragmatism is evident first in his silencing of his own atheism to sue instead for Catholic Emancipation. Secondly, he muffles his hatred of aristocracy to lament, like Maria Edgeworth and others, the passing of a responsible Irish aristocracy with the Act of Union of 1802.