Capital Crimes: John Thelwall, ‘Gallucide’ and Psychobiography

Abstract

It is no longer an outlandishly jacobin critical move to cite Wordsworth and Coleridge as a context for a reading of John Thelwall. For too long a political caricature and mere anecdote in the narrative of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s youthful radicalism, Thelwall is now recognised not only as one of the most impressive thinkers and voices of the 1790s reform movement and as a pioneering speech therapist in his ‘second life’, but also as a paradigmatic Romantic author whose enfranchising experimentation with a variety of genres forged a new kind of literary-political discourse. The probing collection of essays on this ‘radical Romantic and acquitted felon’ edited by Steve Poole (2009), the issue of this journal (16, 2; July 2010) devoted to Thelwall, and the founding of The John Thelwall Society on 4 January 2012 at an international gathering in Oxford are only the most recent interventions in a dynamic, burgeoning field. Critics have been drawn in particular to Thelwall’s jacobin allegories, satires and fables of the 1790s, the most politically eventful time of his career. These allegories, whose strategies of indirection mark the pressures of anti-jacobin regulation, have appealed to Romanticists owing to what Michael Scrivener calls their ‘characteristically allusive and semantically elusive’ methods. As sites of ‘print-culture incursion into popular oral culture’, Thelwall’s fables became ‘object[s] of contestation over legally permissible political expression’.