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 5
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 Wyndham. Later, Thelwall's interests turned to poetry and plays. He was a collaborator and confidante 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 theorising 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 contextualised within wider Romantic culture and politics.
Readership
Eighteenth-Century Studies, Romanticism, Political History, History of Radical Thought
Contents
Sir Geoffrey Bindman, ‘Preface’
Steve Poole, ‘Introduction’
Nicholas Roe, ‘The Lives of John Thelwall: Another View of the “Jacobin Fox”’
John Barrell, ‘Thelwall in his Own Defence: The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons’
Robert Lamb, ‘Natural Right Versus Utility in Thelwall’s Theory of Property’
Richard Sheldon, ‘“A Loud, a Fervid, and Resolute Remonstrance with our Rulers”: John Thelwall, the People and Political Economy’
Georgina Green, ‘John Thelwall’s Vision of Democracy’
Yasmin Solomonescu, ‘Articulations of Community in John Thelwall’s Peripatetic’
Corinna Wagner, ‘Domestic Invasions: John Thelwall and the Exploitation of Privacy’
Jon Mee, ‘“The Dungeon and the Cell”: The Prison Verse of Coleridge and Thelwall’
Kenneth R Johnston, ‘Usual and Unusual Suspects: John Thelwall, William Godwin and Pitt’s Reign of Terror’
Michael Scrivener, ‘Two Plays against Empire by Thelwall’
Judith Thomson, ‘Saviour or Sidekick: John Thelwall and the Hapless Hope of Albion’
Judith Felson Duchan, ‘The Conceptual Underpinnings of John Thelwall’s Elocutionary Practices’
Tara-Lynn Fleming-Espitia, ‘Tracing his Legacy: Discovering John Thelwall’s Role in the British Lyceum’