John Thelwall’s Political Ambivalence: Reform and Revolution

Abstract

The parliamentary reform movement in Britain would seem to be an obvious antithesis to revolution, but in fact, as Malcolm Thomis and Peter Holt observed in their study of Threats of Revolution in Britain 1789–1848, this movement’s intentions were ‘invariably open to misinterpretation, unintentional or deliberate’.1 There were times when reform seemed to mean revolution, not just to overly anxious governments but to the reformers themselves. Thomis and Holt nicely capture the nature of revolution in Britain as not primarily a movement but rather as ‘an idea … [that is] elusive in its location in time and space, elusive above all in its shape and form’.2 If we have difficulty keeping discrete the conceptual boundaries between revolution and reform as we try to understand the early democratic movements in Britain, that is in part due to the ambiguity, unintentional or deliberate, which the early democrats themselves realized in their political rhetoric. John Thelwall is a good example of someone from the parliamentary reform movement who made equivocal use of the terms and ideas of revolution and reform. Indeed, Thelwall’s ambivalence towards both concepts was not idiosyncratic but typical of the democratic movement from the French Revolution to the Reform Act of 1832.