John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle: The Silenced Partner. Judith Thompson.

Abstract

Judith Thompson, John Thelwall in Wordsworth Circle: The Silenced Partner (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) xvi + 313 $90.00 Judith Thompson's John Thelwall in Romantic Circle sometimes comes close to replicating standard satirical representation of academic rhetoric, claim that the continuing neglect of X by serious scholars is nothing less than scandalous. But sometimes this is true, as I am persuaded that it is in case of John Thelwall. Thelwall has not been comprehensively ignored, but good work that has been done on his life and works (by E.P. Thompson, Michael Scrivener, Gregory Claeys and Nicholas Roe, among others) has yet to result in a widespread recognition of his significance to big picture of British Romanticism. With this book, one hopes that balance may at last be tipped. Its claims can sometimes seem obsessive, but Thelwall deserves an obsession on someone's part if we are to reckon seriously with his place as something other than a silenced partner in a canonized conversation. For Wordsworth and Coleridge, there are in hand well-funded multi-volume standard editions; most of Thelwall's writings have not been reprinted at all and there is almost nothing that has been standardized. Working from 1000page Derby manuscipt of Thelwall's complete poems, among other sources, Thompson argues that his influence on Wordsworth circle was both profound and extended, going beyond early 1790s and well into 19th century. Thelwall, she proposes, haunted imaginations of these major poets as they matured away from their radical years into a more complicated and conflicted staging of relations between politics and aesthetics. It is to Thompson's credit that she avoids predictable calling-to-account that would render sidelining of Thelwall an index of incremental apostasies of Wordsworth and Coleridge; on contrary, she finds that his haunting of their creative imaginations is a constructive one, making them better writers (9) rather than mere establishment sell-outs. Not for first or only time, doubt and even bad faith make for good poetry. Thelwall, it is suggested, provided a benchmark for political certitude against which his better-known contemporaries could measure themselves. His conviction that ills preying upon land could be attributed to capitalism, industrialization, and monopolization of land and wealth (118) was explicit and consistent, a powerful position open to being both refined and sidestepped by his fellow writers. Coleridge, as Thompson reads him, distanced himself further from Thelwall than did Wordsworth, and two seem to have competed more or less openly for lecture audiences in 1811-12 and again in 1818 (89). Unfortunately no one (as far as is known) took trouble (or risk) of transcribing Thelwall's deliveries, but Thompson deduces from ancillary texts that they were emphatic about social role of theater at just those points where Coleridge was playing up his metaphysical method. What were Thelwall's most important and largely unacknowledged contributions to spirit of age and interpersonal dynamic with two of its most famous authors? Thompson here specifies a technique of circumspection ( 20) developed under pressure of government censorship, a mode of indirect direction that would appear refurbished as Wordsworthian ambiguity or irony; a full embrace of public rather than private address, involving a crucial focus on spoken word and on importance of elocution in conception and delivery of poetry, which thus becomes a literal and explicit instance of a man speaking to men; and a career-long dialogue in print with Wordsworth and Coleridge, many of whose most famous works function as overt or covert addresses and responses to Thelwall. …