Close confinement: John Thelwall and the Romantic prison

Abstract

The prison was the central institutional means for silencing dissent in 1790s Britain. While attention to prisons was called for by John Howard in the 1770s, prison conditions commanded broad attention by the 1790s, when dozens of writers, editors, journalists, and booksellers lived through or were threatened with imprisonment. The 1790s saw the first systematic imprisonment of British literati, resulting in a flurry of poems, essays, broadsheets, drawings, and newspaper reports that introduced a wide range of readers to life inside a jail cell. The birth of “prison literature” is twin to the birth of British Romanticism: the prison plays an important role in the work of Thelwall, Coleridge, More, Wordsworth, Hays, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft, and of lesser‐known figures such as James Montgomery, John Augustus Bonney, and Charles Piggot. This essay examines the writing of prison poets such as Thelwall, Montgomery, and Bonney, arguing that the experience of confinement drew these writers to shape their poetry in ways that would anticipate and influence the conventions of Romantic verse. In inaugurating the formal complex that M.H. Abrams called the “greater Romantic lyric,” 1790s prison poetry is an unrecognized but important space for our understanding of the history of poetic form.