John Thelwall Research Articles

John Thelwall: selected poetry and poetics

1. Introduction: 'Poets and Poesy I sing' 2. Poems Pastoral and Peripatetic 3. Comic Ballads, Satires, and Seditious Allegories 4. Sonnets 5. Odes I: Public and Pindaric 6. Odes II: Conversations and Effusions 7. Songs of Love 8. Epic: The Hope of Albion 9. Autobiographies

The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture by Mary Fairclough

Mary Fairclough. The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. 294. $105. Edmund Burke was not alone in fearing a quick transit from the demotic to the demonic. Across the revolutionary age, when democracy seemed to many a synonym for mobocracy, the cumulative force that results when people gather was hardly a less pressing issue than the fate of the European monarchies. But what exactly happens when people come together? Or perhaps: what exactly happens to people when they come together? It was in part against the pathologization of crowd behavior by Le Bon and Freud that a half-century ago George Rude, E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and others sought to render the crowd as something more (or less) than the primeval sublime. Their work fostered a subgenre in eighteenth- and nineteenth century studies, with significant contributions by Mark Harrison (1988), Nicholas Rogers (1998), John Plotz (2000) and others. Moving this line of inquiry in a productive new direction, Mary Fairclough's new work (shortlisted for the BARS first book prize) asks what the concept of sympathy might have to tell us about Romantic-era understandings (and misunderstandings) of group behavior. The Romantic Crowd opens with a survey of sympathy according to the Scottish Enlightenment. Tracking David Hume's growing unease with the unruly potential of sympathy from A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) to Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Fairclough observes that the conception of sympathy in the Treatise as a universal, dynamic medium of proves extremely difficult to sustain, so that by the time of the Enquiry it has become a phenomenon that requires control (27). This wariness is further registered in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which reveals a sharpened sense of sympathy's disruptive potential. Well before 1789, in other words, we find a recognition that sympathy as a medium of sociality could enable social unrest no less than charitable concern. It was with the fires across the Channel that this recognition grew into urgent admonitions. We might not be surprised that Burke smelled the smoke. But Fairclough's second chapter also makes the case that Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and John Thelwall were variously attuned to and wary of sympathy's wild power. Sympathy was just fine when it prompted middle class regard for individuated victims of industrial capitalism and colonial slavery, but reformers quailed when the objects of sympathy became participants in collectivities. Wollstonecraft and Godwin occupied a particularly fraught middle ground between hope and fear, eager to welcome democratic energy but not chary of articulating fears about potential to overawe individual reason. Fairclough makes a welcome turn to the understudied Historical and MoraI View of the French Revolution (1794) to demonstrate Wollstonecraft's apprehension about sympathy's coercive threat, but it is Thelwall who anchors this chapter, and who is singled out as something of a hero in The Romantic Crowd (the book's cover, a detail from Gillray's Copenhagen House [1795], shows a caricatured Thelwall virtually ranting Fairclough's title as though it were a speech bubble). Thelwall matters for Fairclough because she is interested in the contemporary use of physiological figures to think about sympathy: it spreads like a contagion through the public body, even as it models the internal working of the human body itself (when organs fall out of sympathy, according to contemporary medical writers, systemic disorder results). With at least one eye on the scientific vanguard, Thelwall offers a rare example of an approach to sympathetic communication that addresses its physiological properties and their potential political effects without reducing them to pathology (107). Thelwall's work provides Fairclough with a helpful instance of sympathy conceived neutrally as both a social and a somatic process, but his readiness to accept in materialist terms was not representative of his moment. …

The Excursion: An Unparalleled "variety of musical effect"

^ is the freedom ^ of the Universe (Excursion IX: 16) When a friend of Catherine Clarkson complained of the verse of The Excursion, Wordsworth replied with magnificent condescension, and some asperity: Unitarian hymns must by their dispassionate monotony have deprived your Friend's of all compass, which implies of all discrimination. To you I will whisper that the Excursion has one merit, if has no other, a versification to which for variety of musical effect no Poem in the language furnishes a parallel. Tell Patty Smith ... to study with her until she has learned to confess it (ME2: 187). (1) It is not impossible that Wordsworth was mistaken in this immodest claim, at which even so loyal an admirer as Henry Crabb Robinson might have raised an eyebrow: Robinson confided to his diary that the poem included passages which run heavily, tales which are prolix, and reasonings which are spun (Diary 1: 241). But the advice raises numerous issues which, as far as I can tell, have not been discussed in the two hundred years since the Clarksons pondered Wordsworth's letter over their toast and marmalade. Most of all, if received assumptions about Wordsworth's adherence to the norms of accentual-syllabic verse are correct, Patty Smith's fingers could have told her little or nothing. His boast suggests, prima facie, that an capable of any discrimination at all will discover an exceptional variety of fundamental rhythms, at least on a par with other blank verse renegades. Because Wordsworth is usually silent on the detail of his craft, one can only interpret his boast by appealing to his practice. Almost all that is known of his metrical theory, apart from some unhelpfully minimal comments in two prefaces, comes from a cordial letter to John Thelwall, in January, 1804, which has been much discussed and mostly misconstrued. I suspect that Wordsworth's practice is more sympathetic to Thelwall's radical ideas than is generally supposed, and the fact that Thelwall was The Excursion's most assiduous reader and one of its greatest enthusiasts, and that Wordsworth praised both Thelwall's blank verse and his good ear (ME 2: 361), may support that hypothesis. The key passage in Wordsworth's letter: [Y]our general rule is just that the art of verse should not compell you to read in [tone? some?] emphasis etc that violates the nature of Prose. But this rule should be taken with limitations for not to speak of other reasons as long as verse shall have the marked termination that rhyme gives it, and as long as blank verse shall be printed in lines, will be Physically impossible to pronounce the last words or syllables of the lines with the same indifference, as the others, i.e. not to give them an intonation of one kind or an other, or to follow them with a pause, not called out for by the passion of the subject, but by the passion of metre merely. This might be demonstrated. As to my own system of metre is very simple, 1st and 2nd syllables long or short indifferently except where the Passion of the sense cries out for one in preference 3d 5th 7th 9th short etc according to the regular laws of the Iambic. This the general rule. But I can scarcely say that I admit any limits to the dislocation of the verse, that is I know none that may not be justified by some passion or other. I speak in general terms. The most I know in my writing, is this in the Cumberland Beggar. 'Impressed on the white road in the same line' which taken by itself has not the sound of a verse ... The words to which the passion is att[ached?] are white road same and the verse dislocates [for the] sake of these. This will please or displ[case by th]e quantity of feeling excited by the image, to those in whom excites [such? much?] feeling, as in one will be musical to others not. Adieu. (EY 434-5) The dislocated line in context, with its beats italicised (one can't scan a single in a Wordsworthian cadence) (2): He plies his weary journey, ^ seeing still, ^ And never knowing that he sees, ^ some straw, ^ Some scatter'd leaf, ^ or marks which, ^ in one track, ^ The nails of cart or chariot wheel ^ have left / Im press'd|^ on the |white road, ^ |in the | same line, ^ At distance still the same. …

‘There was One Man at Llyswen that could Conjure’: John Thelwall – Cunning Man

John Thelwall has emerged in recent years as a protean figure central to our conception of Romanticism as a literary and cultural phenomenon. Recent work by Judith Thompson, Yasmin Solomonescu and Steve Poole, among others, has built on crucial interventions by such critics as Nicholas Roe and Michael Scrivener to extend the narrative of Thelwall’s life beyond the fraught political theatres of the 1790s, revealing links between his multiple personae: reformer, ‘acquitted felon’, political theorist, demagogue, poet of sensibility and protest, novelist, historian, dramatist, political antiquary, professor of elocution and speech theorist. Moreover, critics have succeeded in revealing the nuances of Thelwall’s representations and reinflections of his ‘public’ and ‘private’ selves. As Damian Walford Davies remarks: ‘we’re dealing here not with a simple and (over-)familiar narrative of defeat and opportunistic bourgeois resurrection, but with acts of thoughtful and principled re-fashioning’. I suggest that we can meaningfully locate a ‘bridge’ between two distinct (if vitally interconnected) stages of Thelwall’s life and career in the three-year period (1797–1800) he spent in the Breconshire village of Llyswen: a fascinating transitionary ‘timespace’ that was so much more than a ‘parenthesis’ between two periods of political-intellectual activity. The foundations for a mapping of Thelwall-in-Wales were established by E. P. Thompson, and extended by J. Corfield and Chris Evans, Scrivener, Walford Davies and Thompson. My aim is to contribute to this project by examining Thelwall’s occult, and occulted, ‘Welsh’ identities and the ways in which the transition from metropolitan and English provincial culture to rural Wales manifested itself in a range of complex literary (self-)representations in his 1801 collection Poems Chiefly Written in Retirement. Here, Thelwall flirts with a variety of genres and forms, testing their applications and limits. The portal to the poetry is a ‘Prefatory Memoir’ –written, suggestively, in the third person. Here, Thelwall showcases his many identities: those of the past, those that were serviceable at Llyswen, and those that equip him for a return to provincial and metropolitan engagement. Dramatised (and advertised) are the poet, the husband, the father, the wronged radical, the philosopher and –most importantly for my purpose – the conjuror. Published at a time of political watchfulness, Poems was Thelwall’s attempt to re-enter the public arena – not in a depoliticised role, but at a

Maps, Lists, Views: How the Picturesque Wye transformed Topography

John Thelwall’s 1801 collection, Poems Chiefly Written in Retirement, comprises three sections, as proclaimed on the title page: ‘THE FAIRY OF THE LAKE, A Dramatic Romance; Effusions of Relative and Social Feeling; and Specimens of THE HOPE OF ALBION; or, Edwin of Northumbria, an Epic Poem’. These generically distinct sections (drama, lyric effusion, and epic) are set off from each other typographically: the romance in all caps, the effusions in italic script, and the epic introduced by the phrase ‘specimens of’ in gothic blackletter (see Figure 1). Font signals the collection’s heterogeneous mixture—something of a Thelwall trademark after the ‘genre salad’ of The Peripatetic—and content specifies the relation between the clearly demarcated sections: the romance turns on the resistance of early Britons to Saxon invasion; the effusions find Thelwall mourning the loss of his daughter Maria on the banks of the Wye; and the epic extends the history begun in the drama while substituting a Saxon for the Briton as hero. The combination of picturesque scenery and lyric subjectivity familiar from William Lisle Bowles’ sonnets and Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads mediates between and is hemmed in by the ‘obscurity’ and ‘barrenness’ (as David Hume put it) of antiquarian research into the Saxon conquest of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. Thelwall’s volume may seem to inelegantly splice together incommensurate forms and topics, but I’d like to argue here that his generic parsing marks a specific historical moment in the development of topography as a subfield of the modern disciplines of physical and cultural geography. In the eighteenth century, topography was a field defined by compilation of sources—it was fundamentally bibliographic and could include texts from almost any genre. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the term and the field it designated had both narrowed and deepened. As J. Hillis Miller suggests, rather than an inventory of writing about a place, topography became a technical term associated with a specific kind of graphic delineation, the topographic map. As early as 1808, Benjamin Pitts Capper’s Topographical Dictionary of the United Kingdom legitimated the accuracy of its ‘geographical, topographical and statistical accounts of every district, object and place in England, Wales, Scotland, [and] Ireland’ with ‘forty-six maps, drawn purposefully for this work’ that ‘bear a direct relation to the population of the different places they describe’—a feature, he claimed, new to topographical publications (see Figure 2). In Britain, this shift away from source compilation to statistical and cartographic

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

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. …

Capital Crimes: John Thelwall, ‘Gallucide’ and Psychobiography

It is no longer an outlandishly jacobin critical move to cite Wordsworth and Coleridge as a context for a reading of John Thelwall. For too long a political caricature and mere anecdote in the narrative of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s youthful radicalism, Thelwall is now recognised not only as one of the most impressive thinkers and voices of the 1790s reform movement and as a pioneering speech therapist in his ‘second life’, but also as a paradigmatic Romantic author whose enfranchising experimentation with a variety of genres forged a new kind of literary-political discourse. The probing collection of essays on this ‘radical Romantic and acquitted felon’ edited by Steve Poole (2009), the issue of this journal (16, 2; July 2010) devoted to Thelwall, and the founding of The John Thelwall Society on 4 January 2012 at an international gathering in Oxford are only the most recent interventions in a dynamic, burgeoning field. Critics have been drawn in particular to Thelwall’s jacobin allegories, satires and fables of the 1790s, the most politically eventful time of his career. These allegories, whose strategies of indirection mark the pressures of anti-jacobin regulation, have appealed to Romanticists owing to what Michael Scrivener calls their ‘characteristically allusive and semantically elusive’ methods. As sites of ‘print-culture incursion into popular oral culture’, Thelwall’s fables became ‘object[s] of contestation over legally permissible political expression’.

Caleb Williams and the Philomaths

This essay offers a reassessment of William Godwin's political engagement in the mid to late 1790s and the implications of this activity for his participation in the public sphere in the nineteenth century. It considers his membership of the Philomaths, a debating society that he joined in the 1790s, and suggests that his participation in the deliberative and rational exchange of the society influenced Caleb Williams (1794). The formation, activities, and membership of the Philomaths are discussed, with John Thelwall's involvement and his dispute with Godwin receiving particular attention. Godwin's engagement with and subsequent withdrawal from the Philomaths allows us to read his intellectual trajectory in a more positive fashion than has previously been the case, as he moves toward a more inclusive conception of the Habermasian public sphere. Such a move is consistent with the broader sociability that can now be mapped in his diary and the shift in emphasis in his writing activities, for example, his engagement with the theater.

Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture by Alexander Dick, Angela Esterhammer

612 BOOK REVIEWS Alexander Dick and Angela Esterhammer, eds. Spheres ofAction: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Pp. 306. $65. This lively and varied collection of essays sets itself the task of “liberating the tongue of Romanticism,” a project that seeks to drive another stake through the heart of the so-called “Romantic ideology” that privileges mind over matter, thought over action, and the private over the public realm. In fact, as the volume’s subtitle indicates, the interests of the con­ tributors range much more widely than the recovery of the spoken voice, opening onto a broader field of performance that encompasses theatrical, parliamentary, legal, and sporting contexts. Studying performance in any of these arenas at the remove of two hundred years clearly poses formidable methodological problems, which some ofthe contributors make a main fo­ cus oftheir essays. All are interested in the potential offered by the category of the performative to reassert the importance ofsubjectivity and moral re­ sponsibility, and to rebalance the material and the abstract, in Romantic studies: individual bodies perform consequential acts in real situations, after all, but they do so within limits and constraints, whether those take the form ofphysical spaces, institutional codes, or ideological pressures. In their various efforts to grasp or probe the limits of human action, Dick and Esterhammer argue in their introduction, the Romantics anticipated the distinctly postmodern preoccupation with “the tension between the sover­ eign subject’s fantasy of agency and the power diffused within social dis­ course.” To some extent, therefore, the editors share the desire implicit in several recent studies to emphasize not so much the historical difference of Romantic culture, as its uncanny similarity to the way we live, think, and communicate now. The essays in Spheres ofAction are divided into two sections, on “Public Speaking” and “Body Language,” an unstable binary, as the editors admit, and one that gives only a loose idea of the actual content of the individual pieces. The volume begins strongly with Judith Thompson’s essay on “John Thelwall and the Science and Practice of Elocution.” I am not sure that I wholly agree with Thompson’s view ofthe “bias against speech” that she attributes to both Romantic writers and their modern critics: Words­ worth, after all, characterized the poet as a “man speaking to men,” and Shelley defined poetry as harmonious sounds echoing an eternal music, and critics have not been backward in dissecting this poetics of orality/aurality. Nevertheless, Thompson sheds fascinating light on the interplay between Thelwall’s thirty years’ work as an elocutionist and speech therapist and his literary and political activities. In the absence of transcripts ofhis elocution­ ary lectures, she focuses on his 1794 lecture on spies and informers (aspects SiR, 51 (Winter 2012) BOOK REVIEWS 613 of the delivery ofwhich are signified in transcription by different fonts and so forth), which she interprets not as flashy demagoguery but as a sophisti­ cated performance aimed at persuading his audience to see themselves as more than a passive rabble. Just as Thelwall’s physiological understanding of speech and speech defects emphasized the importance of sympathetic cooperation between different parts of the body, so his oratorical technique encouraged listeners to “recognize different parts or movements of their own characters (indignation and steadiness, invective and reason) and to balance them,” thus becoming fitter democratic subjects than their rulingclass oppressors. Whereas Thompson concentrates on delivery, Sarah M. Zimmerman, in “Coleridge the Lecturer, A Disappearing Act,” is more interested in the physical spaces in which Coleridge made his name as a public lecturer. In­ spired by Humphry Davy’s success in shaking offhis early associations with provincial radicalism and establishing himself in London as a professor of chemistry and celebrity speaker, Coleridge too sought to put his radical years in Bristol behind him and reinvent himselfwith his lectures on litera­ ture at the Royal Institution, where the arts were valued alongside science and technology because they helped to attract well-to-do patrons. Cole­ ridge found the beautiful semicircular lecture theater the ideal setting for his new role, his only concern being the possible association of lectures with popular entertainment, an anxiety compounded by...

Improvement and Repair: Architecture, Romance and the Politics of Gothic, 1790-1817

This article seeks to provide a politically nuanced reading of the treatment of acts of architectural modification in a selection of late 18th- and early 19th-century Gothic fictions. Reading scenes of Gothic architectural restoration as they are figured in Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791); T. J. Horsley Curties’Ancient Records, Or, The Abbey of Saint Oswythe (1801); and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) alongside contemporary architectural debates, the argument pays particular attention to the extended cultural interchange between architect James Wyatt and Antiquarian John Carter, published in the Gentlemen’s Magazine between the years 1797 and 1817, concerning the architectural and political ‘improvement’ of the legacy of the English nation’s ancient Gothic past. Having considered the metaphors of architectural improvement, repair, restoration and demolition as they are appropriated in the political writings of Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Thelwall and Hannah More during the 1790s, the article seeks to assess, via a reading of their architectural concerns, the various attitudes towards the Gothic past staged and negotiated in Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House (1793) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).

The Romantic Kinship of Medical Science, Sensory Experience, and Literary Aesthetics

The Romantic Kinship of Medical Science, Sensory Experience, and Literary AestheticsNoel Jackson's Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, 2008) is a study of the uses to which British Romantics put the science of aisthesis or sensory experience. While this book is not an easy read, it is a useful contribution to the growing body of work relating the Romantics to the sciences. Jackson argues that William Wordsworth and other Romantics called upon the discourses of the emerging human sciences of the brain, nerves, sensation, and perception to create a vocabulary of embodied aesthetic that they used to define and defend the political work of aesthetic culture (1). A uniquely social logic existed in the Romantics' inward-turning (1), which he believes derived from the historical and cultural kinship of medical science and literary (4) and the degree to which Romantic poets were attentive to emerging discourses about the brain and physical sensation. Understood in this way, Jackson asserts, Romantic literary products and their inferiority (especially Wordsworth's of the sense) articulate a practical relationship between the mind and the world. This relationship, amounts to an alternative form of political action and thereby demonstrates the usefulness of aesthetic experience (13).By his own admission, Jackson does not attempt a broad accounting of the Romantic poets' engagement with the sciences of sensation, though he offers a useful index of contemporary scholars who have contributed to such work. Instead, he selects sites in Romantic literature where the literary and scientific domains converge. These include the concept of mental suggestion, the practice of scientific self-experimentation, the notion of the poet as physician or healer of society, and the theory of the divided nerve, which he believes is John Keats's model for the divided nature of poetic form. The book's three sections cover the historicity of poetic sensibility, the subjectivity of the Romantic lyric and its relation to society, and the legacies of early Romantic aesthetics in the work of Walter Pater and Wilkie Collins. Offering two chapters in each section, Jackson's method serves, in part, as a sketch of recent critical discussions, including what the Romantics contributed to understandings of human community and whether their endeavors made or escaped history. Portions of the book are devoted to William Blake, S. T. Coleridge, Keats, Pater, and Collins, but its primary focus is upon Wordsworth's early poetry and his aesthetic legacy.The first chapter, Powers of Suggestion: Sensation, Revolution, and Romantic Aesthetics, begins with a useful rehearsal of classic criticism of Wordsworth - from Irving Babbitt and W.J. Bate to M.H. Abrams and Marjorie Levinson - and a select history of the uses of the word suggestion - from William Shakespeare and John Milton, to the Common Sense philosophers, Erasmus Darwin, Wordsworth, and Keats. The high point of this chapter is Jackson's astute and wide-ranging march through Romantic-era texts to collect examples supporting his thesis that the language of the sense, while seemingly private, is actually public and political. He highlights specific uses of the word suggestion that are scientized, selected from an impressively varied range of texts, including The Prelude (1805), The Watchman (1796), Keats's letters (1816-1820), Humphry Davy's notebooks (1839), Mary Hays's Jacobin novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), Anna Laetitia Barbauld's Inventory of the Furniture in Dr. Priestley's Study (1825) and John Thelwall's Hope of Albion (1801). Jackson contends that this scientized sensual language would have been understood as a stimulus or incitation (55) to readers' minds, creating awareness that would almost necessarily lead to public action. While the textual work here is impressive, I longed for more evidence firmly establishing that the writers Jackson quotes were either schooled in the science implied in their language or that they fully and specifically anticipated that their readers' response would be significant public action. …

John Thelwall and the Politics of Sympathy

AbstractJohn Thelwall's diverse achievements in the fields of literature, science and politics have been read as the reason for his omission from the Romantic literary canon. But Thelwall’s scientific research arms him with a unique understanding of the connections between these disciplines, which upset the very notion of canonicity. Thelwall’s model of sympathy, developed in hisEssay Towards a Definition of Animal Vitality(1791) offers a physiological understanding of the term which he applies to radical effect in his literary and political works. For Thelwall, sympathy is the physical force through which one organ of the body is inextricably connected with the rest. This physical model radicalises the sentimental tropes Thelwall employs inThe Peripatetic(1793), where benevolence is figured as an instinctive impulse. In Thelwall’s political lectures, sympathy is an index of solidarity, but its rational, material basis offers a riposte to charges that Thelwall seeks to exploit the unruly energies of his audience. Thelwall figures sympathy instead as the medium for his political ideal, the diffusion of information and ideas.

British Romanticism and Latin America, 2: Atlantic Revolution and British Intervention

The second part of ‘British Romanticism and Latin America’ explores the repercussions of Robertson’s hemispheric heterotopia of the New World in the larger narratives of Atlantic revolution and British intervention that shaped the relationship between Britain and Latin America from the 1790s to the 1820s. The poems and essays that represented insurrection in Latin America drew on the shared histories of Africans and Amerindians in the American hemisphere to negotiate revolutionary sympathies in light of the rebellion of Tupac Amaru in 1781, which, after the Carib War of the 1770s, became the largest movement of indigenous resistance against European power until Toussaint Louverture. The figure of Tupac Amaru haunts the poetry of William Blake and Helen Maria Williams to suggest a returning insurgency and continued struggle for indigenous self-determination, while Ottobah Cugoano’s reinterpretation of the history of Amerindians in Robertson’s America expands the denunciation of European imperialism to include crimes against Africans. Other authors such as Robert Southey, John Thelwall, and George Colman develop the idea of Britain as the ‘noble deliverer’ or liberator of Latin America, an idea that Creole authors such as Francisco Miranda and José Blanco White also promulgated. The narrative of Britain as liberating power facilitated the penetration of British capital and political influence in the region, and resulted in the dissonant portraits of South American independence that informed the work of Maria Graham and British representations of the region in the 1820s.

‘In no more danger of impediment than I am’: Two New Letters by John Thelwall

Two previously unpublished letters by John Thelwall offer us a window into the understudied topic of his work in the field of speech pathology, a venture to which he dedicated three decades of his life. In the fall of 1810, and again in the early summer of 1811, Thelwall wrote detailed reports to Dudley Ryder, the 1st Earl of Harrowby (1762–1847) about the progress Ryder’s son was making at Thelwall’s ‘Institution for the Cure of Impediments, the Remedy of Organic Defects, and Preparation of Youth for the Pulpit, Bar, & c’. A Tory and close friend of Thelwall’s nemesis William Pitt, Ryder seems an unlikely Thelwall client, but he was a politically progressive Tory, and even supported electoral reform. Still, the fact that a Pittite Tory would trust his son to Thelwall’s care indicates that the notorious radical found some success in his reinvention at the opening of the nineteenth century: from the infamous ‘Jacobin Fox’ hounded by the Home Office and vilified by the loyalist press, he refashioned himself ‘John Thelwall, Esq., Professor of the Science and Practice of Elocution’. This new Thelwall emerged in the early 1800s, though his interest in science was apparent a decade earlier. A lifelong autodidact, Thelwall dabbled in anatomy in the early 1790s, and was elected a member of the Physical Society of Guy’s Hospital in London, where he gave lectures on ‘animal vitality’ and the ‘origin of mental action’. It was after the Pitt ministry hounded him out of public politics that Thelwall returned to his early interest in science. Driven ‘into temporary retirement’, he recalled, ‘former trains of reflection were gradually renewed; and the treasured remembrances of anatomical and physiological facts, mingling with the impressions that had resulted from the oratorical habits of twelve preceding years’, led to the discovery, Thelwall claimed in a Frankensteinian flourish, of ‘some of the most hidden mysteries of the Science of Human Speech’. Thelwall was one among many contemporary elocutionists, but what distinguished his work, what revealed those hidden mysteries, was his corollary interest in anatomy and physiology. The Romatic-era culture of popular medical study allowed amateurs like Thelwall, operating outside of university settings, to develop novel areas of medical expertise. London, in particular, had a ‘climate of intellectual pluralism’, notes Roy Porter, that ‘allowed new medical specialties to flourish’. It was the new field of speech pathology that emerged from the disciplinary meeting that Thelwall described as his ‘Union of Physiological and Elocutionary Science’. If the energy of amateur scientific endeavor in

John Thelwall in Saint Domingue: Race, Slavery, and Revolution in The Daughter of Adoption: A Tale of Modern Times (1801)

I John Thelwall was a clear opponent of the slave trade and slavery as an institution. Although his political writings have received much scrutiny in recent years, his writings about slavery have received rather scant attention. The most serious current criticism of them is by Marcus Wood who finds that ‘Thelwall was most unusual among radicals in his uncompromising vision of poor white and poor black labour as equally exploited by the nascent forms of capitalism’. Challengingly, Wood argues that British radical hostility to the Evangelical Abolitionist political agenda and its own concern with the domestic poor led to its distancing the movement from abolitionism. Wood claims that, against this trend, Thelwall produces ‘one of the most trenchant pleas for the ideological unification of abolition and reform theory’ and is ‘one who stood out against the Negrophobe orthodoxies of English Radicalism.’ There is some truth in this assertion, although this seriously overestimates Thelwall’s isolation as a reformer from other radical abolitionists, such as William Roscoe, James Currie, and Edward Rushton, a group of Liverpool abolitionists with whom Thelwall was clearly engaged in serious and sustained discussion and committed radical abolitionists, such as Benjamin Flower. Oddly, however, Thelwall’s most powerful engagement with Caribbean slavery and one of his major works is seldom discussed or even noticed. This is the powerful and detailed fictional representation and critique of the Haitian slave revolution (in what was then French Saint Domingue) in his pseudonymously published novel, The Daughter of Adoption: A Tale of Modern Times of 1801. This essay will discuss Thelwall’s engagement with anti-slavery and seek to re-establish the importance, as well as the limitations of this critique by surveying the scope and substance of Thelwall’s only novel.

Disciplining Thelwall: The Art and the Act: John Thelwall in Practice Conference, 16–18 October 2009, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada

Disciplining Thelwall: The Art and the Act: John Thelwall in Practice Conference, 16–18 October 2009, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada

John Thelwall's Elocutionary Practices

John Thelwall's Elocutionary Practices

Mute Records and Blank Legends: John Thelwall's ‘Paternal Tears’

Mute Records and Blank Legends: John Thelwall's ‘Paternal Tears’

John Thelwall's Letters in the British Library

John Thelwall's Letters in the British Library

Thunderer, Recluse or Apostate? Interruptions and Continuities in the life of a Jacobin Fox

An essay in review, critically reconsidering the political writings of John Thelwall (1764-1834), radical democrat, republican, political theorist, pioeer speech therapist and Romantic poet.