John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon
Editor: Steve Poole
The Enlightenment World
978 1 85196 973 9: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 85196 698 1
John Thelwall was a Romantic and Enlightenment polymath. During the 1790s, he achieved national recognition as an orator, republican, Jacobin theorist and leading member of the proto-democratic London Corresponding Society. In 1794 he was tried and acquitted of high treason, earning himself the disdainful soubriquet ‘acquitted felon’ from Secretary of State for War, William Windham. Later, Thelwall's interests turned to poetry and plays. He was a collaborator and confidant of Wordsworth and Coleridge during the gestation of Lyrical Ballads, a Romantic ruralist, travel-writer and pedestrian, and an idealistic farmer in the Wye Valley. During the nineteenth century he pioneered elocutionism, curing young men from stammers and theorizing about phonetics at his own London Institute.
Although the separate strands of Thelwall’s life and work have been considered at various times by scholars of both English literature and of eighteenth-century history, no volume has yet sought to bring them together or make sense of them as a whole; to understand, for example, the association Thelwall made between speech therapy and radical politics. This edited collection draws together a range of essays from leading eighteenth-century and Romantic scholars. Thelwall's manifold activities are considered in relation to each other, and contextualized within wider Romantic culture and politics.
Sample pages
Readership
Eighteenth-Century Studies, Romanticism, Political History, History of Radical Thought
Contents
Preface – Sir Geoffrey Bindman
Introduction
1 The Lives of John Thelwall: Another View of the ‘Jacobin Fox’ – Nicholas Roe
2 Usual and Unusual Suspects: John Thelwall, William Godwin and Pitt’s Reign of Terror – Kenneth R. Johnston
3 Thelwall in his own Defence: The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons – John Barrell
4 Labour, Contingency, Utility: Thelwall’s Theory of Property – Robert Lamb
5 ‘A Loud, a Fervid, and Resolute Remonstrance with our Rulers’: John Thelwall, the People and Political Economy – Richard Sheldon
6 John Thelwall’s Radical Vision of Democracy – Georgina Green
7 Articulations of Community in the Peripatetic – Yasmin Solomonescu
8 Domestic Invasions: John Thelwall and the Exploitation of Privacy – Corinna Wagner
9 ‘The Dungeon and the Cell’: The Prison Verse of Coleridge and Thelwall – Jon Mee
10 Thelwall’s Two Plays Against Empire: Incle and Yarico (1787) and The Incas (1792) – Michael Scrivener
11 A ‘Double Visag’d Fate’: John Thelwall and the Hapless Hope of Albion – Judith Thompson
12 The Conceptual Underpinnings of John Thelwall’s Elocutionary Practices – Judith Felson Duchan
13 Tracing the Textual Reverberation: The Role of Thelwall’s Elocutionary Selections in the British Lyceum – Tara-Lynn Fleming
14 ‘Not Precedents to be Followed but Examples to be Weighed’: John Thelwall and the Jacobin Sense of the Past – Steve Poole
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