Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend Jefferson Hogg wrote this collection when they were students at Oxford University. The subject of the poem, Margaret Nicholson, seems to have suffered from some kind of personality disorder involving delusions that she related to royalty. In 1786 she sent the privy council a rambling petition about usurpers and royal pretenders, and on 2 August that year made a half-hearted attempt on the king's life with a table-knife. The king was unharmed and seeing that she was in more danger from the crowd than he was from her, he said, 'the poor creature is mad; do not hurt her, she has not hurt me.' The fragments in Shelley and Hogg's book claim to be some of the fragments of petition about usurpers and royal pretenders , and are pastiches in which the young writers put forward their views on war, society and the nature of government.