Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing by Michael Scrivener (review)

Abstract

972 Reviews impressive, and the argument cogently expressed. This is by farthe longest chapter of the book and redeems to a large extent the excesses apparent in the previous chapters. University of Northumbria David Walker Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing. By Michael Scrivener. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press. 2001. xii + 305 pp. $55. ISBN 0-271-02109-8. In this fine study, Michael Scrivener makes a series of related arguments: that a Ja? cobin public sphere was created in the 1790s which successfully mediated between Enlightenment culture and popular culture; that this public sphere was forcibly repressed by state action; that it produced 'writers' and not Romantic 'authors'; and that after 1801 and the successful anti-Jacobin repression this public sphere was fragmented into heavily policed separate middle-class and popular fragments. Further: partly as a result of the ever-present threat of state action, a characteristic mode of writing and reading of this Jacobin public sphere was allegory, partly 'Aesopian' but pervasive also in all forms of writing which could be read, and are certainly so read by Scrivener, as making multiple allusions to the social and political world that produced them. These large contentionsare all explored via the central figureof John Thelwall, who in this account emerges as a sympathetic and admirable figure: one who never recanted his Jacobin commitments; who successfully mediated between literary and popular culture in the 1790s; who was forced by repressive state action into a career as public lecturer on elocution; yet who re-emerged in the late 1810s as an unrepentant participant in the next phase of radical protest. Scrivener contrasts Thelwall with a series of figures, Jacobin and Romantic, who negotiated their way through these dramatic times in differentways: with Godwin, whose social formation was in some respects similar, but who differed with Thelwall on the matter of oratory and the popular audience to be sought for Jacobin ideas; with Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose political trajectory was obviously to be very different;and at the other end of the political and social scale, with Spence and Wedderburn, much more thoroughly wedded to popular cultural forms, and closer to insurrectionary politics. This is an attractive and well-argued case, rightly restoring Thelwall to a central position in the cultural politics, indeed the politics tout court, ofthe 1790s. Its schol? arship is impressive; furthermore,the ideological commitments which are driving the book are abundantly clear, and lend its contentions an appealing seriousness. These commitments are clearest in the book's sustained engagement with E. P. Thompson, whose extraordinary transformation of the historical and literary field, fortyyears afterthe publication of The Making of theEnglish WorkingClass, is still working itself out. If there is a difficultywith the book, it is concerned with the reading practices that it appears to license. Once grant the necessity of Aesopian writing, then alle? gory can be detected everywhere: not just in the 'Chaunticlere' seditious allegory for which Thelwall's publisher was prosecuted (a kingly gamecock has to be beheaded to preserve the farmyard from ruin), but in all Thelwall's writings, his pre-1789 verse as much as in his later novels and autobiographical writings. Scrivener's interpretations are mostly persuasive, but in the nature of things?as indeed Thelwall's prosecutors discovered?allegory's existence in the eye of the beholder makes it impossible to establish with complete confidence. Finally, the book once again demonstrates the absolute importance of the 1790s as a period of intellectual and literary experiment, which, despite the deliberate and sustained repression at the end of the decade, persisted in all sorts of underground ways to fructifymany ofthe radical movements of the nineteenth century: Chartism, MLRy 98.4, 2003 973 feminism, anti-Slavery, land reform, and socialism are among those which this book suggests. Thelwall emerges as one of the most visible and indeed heroic carriers of these often underground continuities, and this book, while in no way an attempt at a biography, manages both to historicize him and to present him as an undefeated agent in that dramatic history. University of Gloucestershire Simon Dentith 'Wonders Divine': The Development ofBlake's Kabbalistic Myth. By Sheila A. Spec? tor. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University...