John Thelwall Research Articles

‘Operations and cooperations’: John Thelwall, George Birkbeck, and the Movement for Public Education in Britain

Drawn from new research towards the first full biography of the radical Romantic polymath John Thelwall, this article explores his ‘operations and cooperations’ with his friend George Birkbeck, leading up to the founding of the London Mechanics’ Institution, Birkbeck College, and the University of London. Manifesting his lifelong preoccupation with democratic education, Thelwall’s heretofore unknown contribution is rooted in the extensive, transnational lectures and educational institutions, both political and elocutionary, that he delivered and operated for mechanics (defined in relation to social class, science, language, and the body politic). They in turn were founded in eighteenth-century debating societies, and the long-neglected ‘universal academy’ of ‘Orator Henley’. The article concludes that Thelwall too, so far ahead of his time and so long forgotten, still has much to teach us.

L.E.L. in and out of the Birkbeck Album: Poetics and Politics

Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s contributions to Anna Birkbeck’s album may seem out of place among entries by radicals and reformers associated with the London Mechanics’ Institution, among them John Bowring, William Hone, Robert Owen, and John Thelwall. Yet contrasting sentimental poetics with radical politics fails to capture the radical aesthetics of the 1820s. Thelwall, for instance, placed Landon, whom he called ‘Sappho’, among ‘Poets and Poetry of the Age’. The album authors include editors of journals that shaped Landon’s career: William Jerdan, editor of the Literary Gazette, where Landon made her reputation in the 1820s; and Samuel Carter Hall, the editor of The Amulet and the New Monthly Magazine, which were important venues for her later poems. This article analyses the Landon poems entered into the Birkbeck album after being published in the Literary Gazette, together with later poems published in Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book (1832) and the New Monthly Magazine (1836), teasing out the poetics and politics of her poetry in challenging an egotistical, Wordsworthian strand of Romantic writing, and arguing instead for ‘the public circulation of affect and the necessity of dreaming as a social need’.

“Embronzed with the African Tint”: Racial Color-coding and Intergenerational Inheritance in Jamaica, St. Domingo and England in the Age of Abolition

ABSTRACT In eighteenth-century fiction and drama, race appears as a mutable characteristic, with skin color conditioned by culture and environment. Increasingly, and especially in the Romantic period, race came to be regarded as an inherent facet of a person’s identity in certain contexts. Racialized color-charts emerged for the express purpose of generating a taxonomy of mixed-race peoples; a symptom of the vogue for classification in the natural sciences. These charts encoded a vocabulary of gradation, hybridity, and racial inheritance. Such vocabulary was mapped on charts such as those that appear in Edward Long’s The History of Jamaica (1774), where racial inheritances are depicted as neatly linear. Other historians of the Caribbean islands, such as J. B. Moreton in his West India Customs and Manners (1793), betray an underlying instability. The instability of such categories only increases within late eighteenth-century literary sources and especially in the lexicon imported back into England and appropriated by novelists, many of whom held abolitionist sympathies. This paper investigates the influence of West Indian color-chart vocabulary on the representation and construction of race in John Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption; A Tale of Modern Times (1801) and the anonymously published Woman of Colour; A Tale (1808).

The Georgians: The Deeds and Misdeeds of Eighteenth-Century Britain

The Georgians: The Deeds and Misdeeds of Eighteenth-Century Britain

Anakreontyki zaangażowane. Rozpoznania wstępne na dwóch przykładach

In a common reflection, Rococo is associated with the salon and courtly taste and lifestyle of the elite who liked to adorn themselves — as Stanisław Pietraszko wrote — with ‘the jewelery of literature’. The Rococo aesthetics was related to the sweetness of life of the ancien regime. Poems of this style presented moral extravagances of the aristocracy and rich bourgeoisie of the 18th century in different European countries. However, in the course of historical development, Rococo forms and motifs revealed their activist potential. This tendency was gaining momentum at the end of the 18th century and in the first decades of the 19th century. This article, attempts to show the forms of social and political engagement of Rococo literature using the example of three anacreontic poems. The verses by John Thelwall (Anacreontic, 1794) and Adam Mickiewicz (Pieśń Filaretów, 1820) are taken into consideration In each of these texts, the Rococo topoi take on new meanings and testify to the political dimension of the ‘toys in verse’. Symposiastic poetry enters into close relations with Romantic aesthetics. Anacreontics became an attractive genre of ideological expression of poets with democratic and pro-revolutionary inclinations.

The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability by Emily B. Stanback

Reviewed by: The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability by Emily B. Stanback Jared S. Richman (bio) Emily B. Stanback. The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. v + 337. $84.99 hardcover. Disability studies scholars have for decades challenged the stability and efficacy of normalcy as a cultural and biological category. Now, the first full monograph with specific critical focus on Romanticism and disability, [End Page 116] Emily B. Stanback's The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability, makes its remarkable debut. Her study locates disability as a crucial conceptual framework for subjective experience through Romantic writers' meditations on their own disabilities and those of others. The book centers on the Wordsworth-Coleridge coterie: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb, but also John Thelwall, Thomas Beddoes, Humphry Davy, and Thomas Wedgewood with attention given to Robert Southey, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Lamb, Thomas Poole, William Godwin, Erasmus Darwin, and Sara Coleridge. The study embraces a valuable interdisciplinary approach by ranging across genre and form to engage short fiction, letters, journals, poetry, medical treatises, print satire, and memoir. Stanback convincingly demonstrates how aesthetic concerns related to and shaped by disability make their way into a wide range of cultural productions both public and private. Ultimately the book shows how works by writers like Wordsworth and Coleridge revealed a consciousness of disability that was culturally constructed during an era of rapid social change. The book's introduction operates in part as a cultural history of Romantic medicine, tracing its professionalization between 1790 and 1810 alongside the simultaneous growth of Romantic writing. Throughout, Stanback's delineation of disability demonstrates how norms related to health and illness had yet to be established at the turn of the nineteenth century. Deeply interested in the conditions of literary production, Stanback shows us how encounters with non-normative embodiment demanded, generated, and shaped new forms of expression, thus revealing the essential aesthetic value of disability within Romantic discourse. "The story I wish to tell," she explains, "is one of the productively diverse field of Romantic medicine and its relation to a correspondingly broad range of cultural attitudes towards those thought to be under the purview of medical authority—those who, by virtue of their non-normative bodies and minds, we might now call 'disabled'" (2). Stanback takes "disability" to be a sociocultural category with a foundation in medical structures, but one grounded in subjective experience. Aesthetic questions take center stage here and put Stanback's work in dialogue with important disability theorists such as Ato Quayson and Tobin Siebers. Moreover, she convincingly demonstrates how "Romantic disability aesthetics" is an essentially interdisciplinary mode, a claim borne out by an impressively detailed and rigorous textual analysis that testifies to the porousness and multimodality of Romantic discourse (3). Moving from humoral theory to Enlightenment conceptions of deformity through the early years of Georgian medicine, Stanback shows how the practice "for naming, describing, and studying diseases … [participated] in the cultural project of establishing embodied norms, and specifically to help [End Page 117] construct ideals of 'health'" (14–15). She ably negotiates a variety of social and political categories here, from gender construction to race theory to ethnography, from colonialism and empire to pathology and physiognomy. One of the great strengths of Stanback's approach is her emphasis on mental and psychological difference alongside the physical and the sensual. Such attention to the mind and brain allow her to explore senses of wonder, the sublime, and even disgust as Romantic writers encounter and experience the non-normative. Yet even while foregrounding "affective response," Stanback does so in order to "emphasize the role of corporeality in Romantic aesthetics" (45). The second chapter begins with the poet and elocutionist John Thelwall, whose background in medicine shaped his exposition on vocal disability, the Letter to Henry Cline (1810). Stanback identifies Thelwall's elocutionary practice as deeply democratic, and in her reading of his self-help ethos, she connects him to the physician Thomas Beddoes, whose novella, The History of Isaac Jenkins (1792), delineates principles of preventative care and frames the legacy of popular medicine, amateurism, and the rise of the medical professional. Here...

Radical Birdcalls: Avian Voices and the Politics of the Involuntary

This essay investigates Romantic-era treatments of bird calls as “unpremeditated”, spontaneous, and involuntary. Looking at parrots, starlings, mockingbirds, gamecocks, and skylarks in the work of writers including John Thelwall, Percy Shelley, Thomas Beddoes, and Helen Maria Williams, I explore the way in which talking and singing birds are often understood through reference to materialist philosophy and the associationism of David Hartley. Taking Thelwall’s King Chaunticlere and John Gilpin’s Ghost, and Shelley’s ‘To a Sky-Lark’ and A Defence of Poetry as my main focus, I argue that these writers use materialist metaphors of unconscious avian utterance to make nuanced claims about the seemingly ambiguous role of the will in political speech.

“Transcripts of the Heart”: John Thelwall and Romantic-era Shorthand Writing

ABSTRACT This essay explores Romantic-era engagements with shorthand transcription as a way of representing the speaking body in text, especially in relation to the poet, radical orator, and teacher of elocution John Thelwall. With reference to projects in phonetic writing undertaken during the period by Benjamin Franklin, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas and Joseph Gurney, and others, I investigate the extent to which Thelwall characterized shorthand as a way of documenting an authentic and affective body and consider how the mediating role of the shorthand writer and their body complicates his claims for transcription as a direct record of spoken utterance.

‘More than mortal fervour’: Patriotism and Democracy in John Thelwall's Epic The Hope of Albion

John Thelwall published extracts from his epic fragment The Hope of Albion (1801) during an unprecedented revival of epic poetry in Britain. The revival saw writers from across the political spectrum promoting various ideas of national identity and examining Britain's developing role as an imperial power. This article positions Thelwall's fragment alongside poems of his contemporaries, including epics by Joseph Cottle and Henry James Pye (both titled Alfred and published in 1800 and 1801). Examining how Thelwall differently revises tropes from classical and Miltonic poems, I argue that he uses the epic genre to explore how the nation could be transformed as an answer to tyranny and oppression. At the same time, formal tensions in the poem suggest the limitations of the very hope that comprises Thelwall's subject.

Systems of Life: Biopolitics, Economics, and Literature on the Cusp of Modernity ed. by Richard A. Barney and Warren Montag

Reviewed by: Systems of Life: Biopolitics, Economics, and Literature on the Cusp of Modernity ed. by Richard A. Barney and Warren Montag Robert Mitchell Richard A. Barney and Warren Montag, eds., Systems of Life: Biopolitics, Economics, and Literature on the Cusp of Modernity (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2018). Pp. 280. $35.00 paper. Richard A. Barney's and Warren Montag's Systems of Life: Biopolitics, Economics, and Literature on the Cusp of Modernity consists of a substantive introduction and nine essays, which focus primarily on eighteenth-century European and colonial American texts by well-known authors such as Anna Barbauld, William Blake, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, John Thelwall, and Phillis Wheatley. However, as suggested by the final phrase of its subtitle ("on the cusp of modernity"), this book aims to trace multiple ways in which eighteenth-century "systems of life," and especially the new science of political economy, established assumptions, aspirations, fears, norms, and institutions that continue to structure ways in which life—both individual and collective life, and human and non-human—is "systematized" in our moment. This is an admirable aspiration, even if one that is difficult to achieve, and perhaps especially tricky to pursue by means of an edited volume, which draws together the different, inevitably somewhat divergent, projects of multiple contributors. Yet Systems of Life seems to me largely to succeed in achieving its goal of establishing how eighteenth-century systems of life have set the basic terms for contemporary systems of life. My review aims both to clarify why this is the case, and to put this judgment to work by connecting Barney's and Montag's volume to several recent trends and projects within literary and cultural theory with which the volume is implicitly in conversation. I. SYSTEMS, THEN AND NOW A significant strength of Systems of Life is that its key words—"systems," "life," "biopolitics," "economics," and "literature"—are all carefully chosen, and a majority of the essays take up at least two (and often three or four) of these [End Page 481] terms. The importance of "system" for this volume is underscored by Barney and Montag in their introduction, where they suggest that the concept of 'system' can help specify all the more concretely the ways that the 'bio' was articulated in relation to the 'political' in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century biopolitics, with 'economy' serving as a useful mediating term between them by offering a way to articulate their 'order' as a matter of exchange, valuation, or management. (2) Barney and Montag note that system had come, by the eighteenth century, to denote both the "features of a natural or material phenomenon—for instance, astronomical orbits, climate, or human social behavior," and "the analytic discourse aiming to organize what may otherwise seem to be incongruous elements" (3). That system referred both to something naturally given and its discursive representation encouraged suspicions on the part of some eighteenth-century authors that discursive systems were "invented formulas rather than found artifacts" (4). (It was this sense of system as an illusion, for example, that motivated Edmund Burke's contention that the revolutionary "French system" was serving as "the bank of deposit and the bank of circulation of all the pernicious principles that are forming in every state.")1 Yet, Barney and Montag continue, "it is precisely system's dual conceptualization that ideally qualifies it to serve as the mediating term in the biopolitical imagination, since it promises to bridge the formidable gap between 'natural and 'artificial' registers—between the biological patterns that have been observed and the political gambits that motivate the desire to govern" (4). Before considering the ways in which Systems of Life helps us to understand the productive functions of the semantic ambiguity of the term system, it is worth recalling ways in which earlier literary criticism has refracted contemporary concerns through reflections on the eighteenth-century fortunes of this term. In the 1990s, for example, David Simpson made a compelling case that "theory" was our contemporary synonym for system, and that the theory wars that dominated literary criticism in the 1980s and '90s could be productively understood within a much longer history...

Judith Thompson (ed.), John Thelwall: Selected Poetry and Poetics

<scp>Judith Thompson</scp> (ed.), <i>John Thelwall: Selected Poetry and Poetics</i>

Narrating Resuscitation: Theory, Knowledge, and the Cultural Life of Eighteenth-Century Vitalism.

This paper considers the relationship between the practice of resuscitation in mid- to late eighteenth-century Britain, and vitalist physiology and medicine. It explores how the mix of mystery and fact presented in the scene of reanimation, and manifested in the resuscitated body as the site of such a compelling conjunction, is negotiated in contemporary vitalist theories of life and theoretical reflections on natural philosophical method. In this, it gives a particular prominence to the Scottish vitalists, especially William Cullen. It considers the attractions of resuscitation for addressing the particular epistemological predicament faced by vitalism: its combination of post-Newtonian empiricism and the inevitable conjecture-or "provisionally inexplicable explicative device"-necessary when faced with the mysteries of life. Finally, the cultural life of vitalism is considered in the work of William Hawes, Humane Society founder, and John Thelwall, radical journalist.

Enlightening the Marginalised: John Thelwall and the Value of Laughter

Among the most influential radical orators of his day (though neglected by critics until recent years), John Thelwall’s lectures reveal a carefully focused wit, one which spoke to artisan and labouring class concerns in the taverns and lecture halls of London. This essay examines Thelwall’s use of humour as a means by which the politically marginalised might be educated and informed, considering the role of his perception of the value of laughter in the construction of his political arguments. The universality of laughter, common to all sections of society rich or poor, made it the perfect tool with which to undermine inequitable political narratives and ideas, allowing those on the peripheries of political debate to make themselves heard. By first examining the roots of Thelwall’s approach to writing humorous material (particularly in his early experiences in the London theatre houses), the essay goes on to investigate the subtle and innovative techniques he used to ridicule the establishment, focusing particularly on the series of political lectures he delivered between 1794 and 1795. Thelwall’s humour, his attempts to provoke laughter from his listeners, provide an invaluable insight into the way in which he sought not only to address the concerns of his audience, but to guide their response to political realities.

Romantic Subjects and Iambic Laws: Episodes in the Early History of Contract Negotiations

The prosodic innovations of free verse, prose poetry, and concrete poetry that overwhelmed poetic practices in the later nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century were grounded in Romantic ideas and practices with vernacular language. While the key agents of change were Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron, John Thelwall’s involvement with the British Elocutionary Movement was equally crucial. What Pound called “the first heave” toward prosodic freedom, “To break the pentameter” (Cantos LXXXI), took place in England between 1790 and 1819.

Romantic Marks and Measures: Wordsworth’s Poetry in Fields of Print. Julia S. Carlson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. xiv+354.

<i>Romantic Marks and Measures: Wordsworth’s Poetry in Fields of Print</i>. Julia S. Carlson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. xiv+354.

Comparing John Thelwall and Thomas Erskine: Radical networks and cultures of reform 1780–1820

Comparing John Thelwall and Thomas Erskine: Radical networks and cultures of reform 1780–1820

John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination. By YasminSolomonescu. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2014. xii + 226 p. $90 (hb). ISBN 978-1-137-42613-0.

Journal for Eighteenth-Century StudiesVolume 40, Issue 3 p. 465-466 Book review John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination. By Yasmin Solomonescu. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2014. xii + 226 p. $90 (hb). ISBN 978-1-137-42613-0. Amy Milka, Amy Milka University of AdelaideSearch for more papers by this author Amy Milka, Amy Milka University of AdelaideSearch for more papers by this author First published: 10 August 2017 https://doi.org/10.1111/1754-0208.12455Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume40, Issue3September 2017Pages 465-466 RelatedInformation

The genre of radical thought and the practices of equality: the trajectories of William Godwin and John Thelwall in the mid-1790s

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I approach the political and philosophical similarities and differences between late eighteenth-century thinkers John Thelwall and William Godwin from the point of view of their respective choices for the genre of political communication. I approach their thought and its expression by weaving an interpretation of what they were saying with a reflection on how and to whom they were speaking. This, I contend, helps us clarify further the thought of each thinker and track the changes in their conception of equality in the framework of political communication. As the 1790s unfolded, both thinkers, I argue, tried to diversify their audience, be generally more inclusive, and re-think the hierarchies of relationship between authors/speakers and their audience in their political communication. Nevertheless, they did so asymmetrically and in different ways: Thelwall quickly started tapping into popular culture, especially oral culture, while Godwin chose the modes of fiction and the conversational essay. By making these choices, both authors enacted a different understanding and practice of political education, and political equality.

Judith Thompson (ed.), John Thelwall: Selected Poetry and Poetics

Judith Thompson (ed.), John Thelwall: Selected Poetry and Poetics

Elizabeth Bohls, Romantic Literature and Postcolonial Studies; John Thelwall, The Daughter of Adoption: A Tale of Modern Times; Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti

E<scp>lizabeth</scp> B<scp>ohls</scp>, <i>Romantic Literature and Postcolonial Studies</i>; J<scp>ohn</scp> T<scp>helwall</scp>, <i>The Daughter of Adoption: A Tale of Modern Times</i>; M<scp>arcus</scp> R<scp>ainsford</scp>, <i>An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti</i>