John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon

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JOHN THELWALL: RADICAL ROMANTIC AND ACQUITTED FELON

The Enlightenment World: Political and Intellectual History of the Long Eighteenth Century Series Editor: Series Co-Editors:

Advisory Editor:

Michael T. Davis Jack Fruchtman, Jr Iain McCalman Paul Pickering Hideo Tanaka

Titles In This Series 1 Harlequin Empire: Race, Ethnicity and the Drama of the Popular Enlightenment David Worrall 2 The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1776–1832 Michael Scrivener 3 Writing the Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic Colonialism Carol Bolton 4 Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle (eds) 5 Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism Jacqueline Labbe (ed.) 6 The Scottish People and the French Revolution Bob Harris 7 The English Deists: Studies in Further Enlightenment Wayne Hudson 8 Adam Ferguson: Philosophy, Politics and Society Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle (eds) 9 Rhyming Reason: The Poetry of Romantic-Era Psychologists Michelle Faubert

10 Liberating Medicine, 1720–1835 Tristanne Connolly and Steve Clark (eds) Forthcoming Titles The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century Jonathan Lamb William Wickham, Master Spy: The Secret War against the French Revolution Michael Durey

www.pickeringchatto.com/enlightenmentworld

JOHN THELWALL: RADICAL ROMANTIC AND ACQUITTED FELON

Edited by Steve Poole

london PICKERING & CHATTO 2009

Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH 2252 Ridge Road, Brookfield, Vermont 05036-9704, USA www.pickeringchatto.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the publisher. © Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Ltd 2009 © Steve Poole 2009 british library cataloguing in publication data John Thelwall : radical romantic and acquitted felon. – (The Enlightenment world) 1. Thelwall, John, 1764–1834 – Criticism and interpretation 2. Thelwall, John, 1764–1834 – Political and social views 3. Romanticism – Great Britain 4. Great Britain – Intellectual life – 18th century I. Poole, Steve, 1957– 828.7’09 ISBN-13: 9781851969739 e: 978 1 85196 698 5

∞

This publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Printed in the UK by the MPG Books Group

CONTENTS

List of Contributors Preface

ix xiii

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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Notes Works Cited Index

175 207 221

13 25 39 51 61 71 83 95 107 117 125 139 147

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

John Barrell (University of York) Co-founder of the York Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies and author of numerous books and essays on eighteenth-century literature and politics, including The Dark Side of the Landscape: the Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2000); and Exhibition Extraordinary!! Radical Broadsides of the Mid 1790s (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2001). With Jon Mee, he is editor of the eight-volume collection, Trials for Treason and Sedition, 1792–1794 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007). Sir Geoffrey Bindman Visiting professor in Law at University College, London and London Southbank University, Sir Geoffrey is a founder of Bindmans LLP solicitors and a lawyer specializing in civil liberties, libel and human rights issues. He has won awards for a lifetime’s achievement in human rights from Liberty (December 1999) and the Law Society’s Gazette (October 2003), and was knighted in 2007. He is a regular writer and broadcaster in the specialist and national media on human rights, media law, anti-discrimination law, and the legal profession. Judith Felson Duchan (State University of New York at Buffalo) A specialist on the history and practice of speech pathology and therapy, Judith’s publications in the field include ‘Progressing Toward Life Goals: A Person-Centered Approach to Evaluating Therapy’ in Topics in Language Disorders, 22:1 (2001) and ‘How Conceptual Frameworks Influence Clinical Practice: Evidence from the Writings of John Thelwall, a Nineteenth Century Speech Therapist’, in the International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 41:6 (2006). She is also the author of a website on the History of Speech Pathology, which includes a major section on Thelwall’s elocutionary theory and practice (http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~duchan/new_history/overview.html).

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Tara-Lynn Fleming (University of British Columbia) Following recent completion of her thesis on ‘The Lecture as Cultural Forum in the Works of John Thelwall’, Tara continues to examine the elocutionary profession within the context of a nineteenth-century British adult education movement. Her current work in progress, provisionally titled ‘Romantic-era Print Culture: Reading the Sociable Voice, (Re)reading Romanticism, and ‘Surveying the Landscape: Introducing a British Lyceum Culture’, seeks to refine and revise understandings of Britain’s literary marketplace in the Romantic Age. Georgina Green (Hertford College, Oxford) Georgina Green is currently completing a D.Phil, provisionally entitled: ‘Representing the People: The Practice of Radical Prose in the 1790s’, which explores the means by which the representation of ‘the people’ in a democracy is negotiated in the practice of writing radical prose. Her research interests are focused on radical 1790s writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine and John Thelwall. Kenneth R. Johnston (Indiana University, Bloomington) Ruth N. Halls professor of English at Indiana and author of numerous essays on political and literary culture in the Romantic period, among the most recent of which is ‘The First and Last British Convention’, Romanticism, 13:2 (2007). He is an editor of Romantic Revolutions; Criticism and Theory (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990); and author of The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York and London: Norton, 1998). Robert Lamb (University of Exeter) Lecturer in British radical political thought and author of several essays on the political works of William Godwin, including ‘Was William Godwin a Utilitarian?’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 70:1 (2009), Robert has forthcoming publications on Thomas Paine and has recently co-edited (with Corinna Wagner) a four-volume set of the Selected Political Writings of John Thelwall (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008). Jon Mee (University of Warwick) Author of numerous articles and book chapters on the Romantic literary and political culture of the 1790s and the monographs Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). He is also co-editor of The Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and (with John Barrell) of the

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eight-volume collection, Trials for Treason and Sedition, 1792–1794 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006–7). Steve Poole (University of the West of England, Bristol) Director of the Regional History Centre at UWE, and organizer of the conference from which these papers are dawn, Oratory, Poetry and Popular Politics: The Many Lives of John Thelwall, 1764–1834. Author of various essays on popular politics in the long eighteenth century, including ‘Pitt’s Terror Reconsidered: Jacobinism and the Law in Two South Western Counties’, Southern History, 17 (1995), and ‘Til Our Liberties be Secure: Popular Sovereignty and Public Space in Bristol, 1780–1850’, Urban History, 26:1 (1999), as well as the monograph The Politics of Regicide in England, 1760–1850: Troublesome Subjects (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Nicholas Roe (St Andrews University) Editor of the scholarly journal, Romanticism, and author of Wordsworth & Coleridge: the Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988); The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and some Contemporaries (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992 and 2002); John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997); and numerous other books and essays on Romantic literature and culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His ‘Coleridge and John Thelwall: the Road to Nether Stowey’, has been recently republished in R. Gravil and M. Lefebure (eds), The Coleridge Connection (Humanities-EBooks LLP, second edition, 2007). Michael Scrivener (Wayne State University, Michigan) Author of the monograph Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing, (Pennsylvania, PA: Penn State University Press, 2001) and, with Frank Felsenstein, ‘Incle and Yarico’ and ‘The Incas’: Two Plays by John Thelwall (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007). Michael Scrivener has also published a number of essays on Thelwall, including ‘John Thelwall and the Revolution of 1649’, in T. Morton and N. Smith (eds), Radicalism in British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and ‘John Thelwall’s Political Ambivalence: Reform and Revolution’ in M. T. Davis (ed.), Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775–1848 (Basingtoke: Macmillan, 2000). Richard Sheldon (University of Bristol) Co-author of four chapters on popular crowd disturbances in A. J. Randall and A. Charlesworth (eds) Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996), and a contributor to An Atlas of Industrial Protest in Britain 1750–1990 (London: Longman, 1996); Richard is currently completing a monograph on the Politics of Bread in Eighteenth Century England.

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Yasmin Solomonescu (Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax) Yasmin Solomonescu completed her doctoral thesis, ‘The Correspondent Flame: John Thelwall’s Radical Poetics’ at the University of Cambridge in 2007, and her earlier M.Phil. dissertation explored Thelwall’s The Peripatetic. She was a research assistant to Paul Keen for The Popular Radical Press in Britain, 1817– 1821 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003). She is now teaching at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Canada. Judith Thompson (Dalhousie University, Halifax) Editor of a new critical edition of John Thelwall’s The Peripatetic (Wayne State, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2001) as well as numerous essays on Romantic literature and politics, several of which focus on Thelwall including, ‘An Autumnal Blast, A Killing Frost: Coleridge’s Poetic Conversation with John Thelwall,’ Studies in Romanticism, 36:1997, ‘A Voice in the Representation: John Thelwall and the enfranchisement of literature’, in, T. Rajan and J. Wright (eds) Romanticism, History and the Possibilities of Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and, most recently, ‘Overlooking History: The Case of John Thelwall,’ Romanticism, History, Historicism: Essays on an Orthodoxy (New York: Routledge, 2008). Corinna Wagner (University of Exeter) Author of a forthcoming monograph on the relationship between medical discourse, politics and private life, Corinna has also jointly edited (with Robert Lamb) a four-volume set of Selected Political Writings of John Thelwall (Pickering & Chatto, 2008). Other recent publications include ‘Hypocritical Monster: Loyalist Propaganda and the Scandalous Life of Tom Paine’, British Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, 28 (2005) and ‘Press Scandal and the Struggle for Cultural Authority in the 1790s’, Nineteenth Century Studies (Autumn 2008).

PREFACE

There were many facets to the life and character of John Thelwall: poet, dramatist, politician, scientist, teacher and orator. They will be explored in this book. The main focus of my own career as a lawyer has been the defence of civil liberties. Not surprisingly therefore my interest in Thelwall has been concentrated on that aspect of his life and on his political activism. Three events in particular encapsulate his attraction for me. The first occurred in his youth. His uncle encouraged him to take up a legal career.1 He arranged for him to be articled to a solicitor in the Temple. One day he was sent to serve a writ in South London. He knocked at the door and was hospitably welcomed by the householder’s wife who believed him to be a friend of her husband. He was so embarrassed and ashamed of the hardship the writ would cause the family that he returned to the office without serving it. His delicacy did not endear him to his employer. His legal career ended before it had properly begun. But for an honourable reason: he put his concern for human suffering ahead of his economic prospects. This early experience doubtless helped to form his lifelong aversion to lawyers, whom he described as ‘a race of man who have spread more devastation through the moral world than the Goths and Vandals who overthrew the Roman Empire’2 (I often feel the same way myself.) That, however, did not end his involvement with the law. Although he did not follow it as a profession, his radicalism brought him into a prolonged entanglement with the legal system. His leading public role in promoting reform embarrassed and annoyed the government, provoking it to devise legal stratagems to silence him. Among these was another major event, and undoubtedly a turning point in Thelwall’s life: his trial for treason in 1794. As the trial was about to begin at the Old Bailey, the great advocate Thomas Erskine appeared to represent him, having just secured the acquittal of Thelwall’s fellow luminaries of the London Corresponding Society, Thomas Hardy and Horne Tooke. Thelwall sent Erskine a note: ‘I’ll be hanged if I don’t plead my own cause’. Erskine replied, ‘you’ll be hanged if you do.’3 Thelwall allowed Erskine to continue but later took a very active part in the trial, cross-examining several of the prosecution witnesses. It is

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not recorded whether this was a compromise agreed with Erskine or a series of spontaneous interruptions by the irrepressible orator. That the government proceeded with the trial after the acquittal of Hardy and Tooke is surprising. They could hardly have hoped that the same jurymen would convict Thelwall when the basis of the prosecution was virtually the same, though there were two additional complaints against Thelwall. The indictment alleged that he had compared King George to a gamecock and the spy Groves gave evidence that he heard Thelwall say, while blowing the head off a glass of porter: ‘this is the way I would have all kings served.’ The government could not have believed these trivial absurdities would sway the jury. Furthermore, just before the trial started the Attorney-General announced that he was abandoning similar cases against Bonney, Joyce and Kidd – three other co-defendants accused of the same offences. Serjeant Adair, prosecuting Thelwall, admitted at the outset that he had to explain why he was still pursuing him when all the others had been cleared. His only argument was that Thelwall had been mildly supportive of the French Revolution. The real reason could only have been that the government feared his powers of leadership and persuasion. They saw him as their most dangerous enemy. Thelwall certainly struck some effective blows in his cross-examination of prosecution witnesses but Erskine was probably right in forecasting a fatal outcome had his own services been dispensed with. Erskine’s speech was a model of forensic skill which must have made a powerful impact on the jury. A third event in Thelwall’s life which stands out for me is a speech at a public meeting outside Copenhagen House in North London in October 1795.4 After the treason trial had ended he had naturally resumed his campaigning activities. These continued until he was stopped in his tracks by Draconian new legislation introduced by a frightened government. The ‘two Acts’ – the Gagging Acts – at the end of 1795, were aimed very directly at him. They effectively blocked public protest. The significance of the Copenhagen House meeting for me is not in the speech itself but in the depiction of the event by Gillray. In Gillray’s cartoon, Thelwall is shown at the rostrum in the full flow of his fearless rhetoric, his head thrust forward, the crowd evidently mesmerized by his passionate eloquence. No wonder the authorities were nervous. Gillray appends a quotation: ‘I tell you, citizens, we mean to new-dress the Constitution and turn it, and set a new Nap upon it.’ It would be wrong to see Thelwall only as an architect of law reform. His courageous pursuit of political liberty in the face of government repression inspired resistance in others, not least the members of the juries who declined to do the government’s bidding by punishing him and his fellow radicals. On trial for his life he was acquitted by a jury composed mainly of the relatively prosperous,

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including a brewer, a farmer and a biscuit maker. It was an early example of a jury asserting its independence and displaying the confidence to defy the bias of a judge who summed up the evidence strongly in favour of the prosecution. Although not in a position to make particular improvements in the legal process, Thelwall in his lectures and elsewhere demonstrated considerable knowledge of constitutional history and was an effective exponent of those features of the law which affected its ability to secure political freedom. In the second of his Political Lectures5, which the government unsuccessfully tried to suppress, he gives a powerful sketch of the history of prosecutions for political opinion ‘with strictures on the late proceedings of the Court of Judiciary in Scotland’. Here he refers to the prosecution for sedition of delegates from the London Corresponding Society and others, which resulted in their transportation to Australia. These were the ’Scottish Martyrs’. Thelwall concluded his lecture, The names of Gerrald and Margarot, of Skirving, Muir and Palmer shall resound continually in our ears; and fired by their illustrious example, we will press forward till our brows are crowned with the wreaths of victory: and our memory shall be embalmed with theirs, by the gratitude and admiration of mankind.

It could have been this peroration which prompted not only Thelwall’s own prosecution shortly afterwards, but the very special anger towards him which drove forward what had become a hopeless effort to convict him. There are obvious parallels between Thelwall’s time and our own. The panic brought about among the governing classes in Britain by the French Revolution is echoed by the response of the present government to the threat of terrorism. That response, as in the 1790s, includes the suppression of dissent and the gagging of those individuals perceived as supporting the cause of the enemy. Politicians then and now have been willing, even eager, to take disproportionately punitive action against such people, abandoning long-cherished principles to allay irrational fears. In such times the wrong people are targeted and the safeguards they need to defend themselves are whittled away. That is why the right of public protest is so important and why we will always need men and women with the courage and determination of John Thelwall to maintain our liberties. Hence my respect and admiration for John Thelwall, inspired by his commitment to justice and the rule of law, exemplified by his courageous and energetic participation in the campaigns of the London Corresponding Society and his readiness to risk his life for the democratic cause in which he believed. His feats of oratory at public meetings and his eloquent efforts to promote his ideas through public lectures were tragically brought to a premature end by the Gagging Acts in 1795, when his activities were subjected to the full force of the law.

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It is hard to appreciate that he was then only thirty-one years old. More than half his life was yet to come. Thelwall’s life thereafter took a very different course though he did not change his political views and continued to write prolifically. The great orator became a teacher of oratory and achieved lasting fame as the first theorist, if not indeed the inventor, of the art of science of elocution. The vagaries of his progress through the first decades of the nineteenth century are less well documented than his early political life but his ambition and his intellectual stamina did not fail him. The work of the scholars represented in this book has done much to give John Thelwall the credit and the place in the history of his period which he deserves and which until now has been denied him. It also promises much enjoyment for those to whom he is introduced for the first time.

Notes 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

H. C. Thelwall, The Life of John Thelwall, 2 vols (London, 1837), vol.1, pp. 24-6 From ‘The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons’, reproduced in G. Claeys (ed.), The Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), p. 22. C. Cestre, John Thelwall: a Pioneer of Democracy and Social Reform in England during the French Revolution (London: Swan Sonenschein, 1908), p. 112. Thelwall’s speeches at the meetings of the London Corresponding Society at Copenhagen House on 26 October and 12 November 1795 were transcribed by W Ramsey and published by Thelwall himself soon after they were delivered. As published by Thelwall in 1794.

INTRODUCTION: THE CHARACTER AND REPUTATION OF AN ‘ACQUITTED FELON’ Steve Poole

This tragical plot has turn’d out a mere farce, And th’alarmists we fairly outwitted; ‘If we are’, cries the amanuensis of Mars, ‘Still your friends are but felons acquitted’. ‘Epigram on the “Acquitted Felons”’, Cabinet of Curiosities (London, 1795), p. 62.

Reintroducing himself to public life during a boisterous election meeting for Westminster in 1819, John Thelwall offered his audience a quick word of explanation for his twenty-year absence from the reform struggle. Weary of government-inspired attempts to ‘hunt him down like a wild beast’, and doubtful about his own effectiveness in the cause of reform, he had withdrawn into the arms of his family. Yet, now, here he stood once again, unchanged, uncorrupted and re-energized. How would he have them remember him? Simply, he said. And when he died, a memorial stone might record his contribution for posterity: ‘Here lies John Thelwall, whose moral and political character was never impeached’.1 As ill-luck would have it however, Thelwall died quietly on a lecture tour at Bath in 1834. His funeral was not noticed in either the national or local press, and for seven months no memorial marked his last resting place. His widow and a few friends in London tried unsuccessfully to raise a subscription for a ‘handsome mural monument’, but finally settled for a ‘temporary’ marker of local stone. Its inscription is a good deal less simple than the one Thelwall had in mind in 1819, but no less evasive in its commemoration of a man who had been, in E. P. Thompson’s judgement, Britain’s most important, ‘courageous and judicious’ radical theorist of the French Revolutionary years, a man who had once addressed crowds of 500–600, twice weekly in his London lecture rooms, and who had stood trial on a charge of High Treason for it: –1–

2

John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon He brought to its highest perfection the science which distinguishes mankind from the brute. In his utterances Englishmen experienced the full beauty and energy of their native speech. His oratorical powers were only surpassed by his devoted zeal and unflinching efforts to promote the best liberties of his fellow men’.2

Appropriately enough, this collection of essays originated in two conferences organized to mark the conservation of that very gravestone in 2006,3 clear indicators of a recent upsurge of scholarly interest in Thelwall and evidence of a long-overdue assessment of the many facets of his life and legacy.4 Identifying exactly who Thelwall was or how best to appraise his historical significance is not straightforward, for he was a Romantic and enlightenment polymath. On the one hand, he was the best-known lecturer and theorist in the London Corresponding Society (LCS) and the recipient of the disdainful soubriquet ‘acquitted felon’ following the collapse of the Pitt administration’s case against him in 1794. On the other hand, he was also a painter, a poet, a novelist, a journalist and a playwright, a collaborator and confidante of Wordsworth and Coleridge during the year of Lyrical Ballads, a Romantic ruralist, a travel writer and pedestrian and an idealistic subsistence farmer in the Wye Valley. Then again, during the nineteenth century he became a pioneering elocutionist, curing young men from stammers and theorizing about phonetics at his own very successful London Institute. Although the separate strands of Thelwall’s life and work have been considered at various times by scholars of all these disciplines, no volume has yet sought to bring them together or make sense of them as a whole; to understand, for example, the Thelwallian association between speech therapy, Romanticism, Jacobin polemic and practice, free speech, political economy and English constitutional history. In the absence of any modern biography of Thelwall then, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection address his historical significance more fully than ever before. Nicholas Roe’s opening essay tackles the problem of Thelwall’s identity head-on. The difficulty facing the modern biographer, he suggests, is not just one of coherently assembling the parts of a multifaceted career, but of pulling together sufficient source materials. The Thelwall manuscripts used by Charles Cestre in 1906 have gone missing without trace while many other sources remain scattered and fragmentary. As both Roe and Judith Thompson argue here, the weight of scholarly attention already devoted to Thelwall as the disreputable ‘Jacobin Fox’ of the 1790s has deflected interest from Thelwall the respectable elocutionist and lecturer on oratory who flourished a quarter of a century later. Roe’s essay arranges the bones of a biographical skeleton and offers some timely suggestions by which we might flesh them out. We should start here, perhaps, with some discussion of Thelwall’s reputation as a Jacobin and ‘acquitted felon’. The readiness of both E. P. Thompson and Iain Hampsher-Monk to apply, thirty years apart, the notoriously imprecise term ‘Jacobin’ to Thelwall, and indeed his own ironic acceptance of the term (‘because

Introduction

3

it is fixed upon us, as a stigma, by our enemies’) raises important questions about his identity, some of which have been discussed in detail elsewhere by Nicholas Roe.5 Gregory Claeys has accepted him as a literal ‘Jacobin’ insofar as he held a ‘burning “sans culotte” desire for social equality’, but the common association of Jacobinism with the acceptance, not only of republicanism but of revolutionary violence, effectively places Thelwall broadly beyond its reach. The problem, however, is that most British radicals understood insurrection (or resistance) within a historical and constitutionalist framework that relates very imperfectly to the French experience of Jacobinism during revolution.6 As James Epstein and David Karr have recently suggested, literal terms of reference may be of less use here than ‘performative’ ones, for English radicals of the 1790s sometimes adopted Jacobin performance as counterculture, by the adoption of ‘Citizen’ as a form of address, through toasts to the French Republic, or in the donning of French clothing styles.7 If Thelwall’s capture, interrogation and trial can themselves usefully be seen as arenas for performance, so too can his acquittal. When William Windham announced in the House of Commons that he wished Thelwall, Hardy and Horne Tooke ‘all the joy of innocence of an acquitted felon’, he provoked a storm of protest, chiefly from their co-defendant Thomas Holcroft who committed his indignance to print in pamphlet form, but also from Opposition MPs who demanded a retraction. As John Barrell has shown, Windham prevaricated awkwardly over the niceties of what he had actually meant,8 but the phrase remained a memorable one, leaving them, as Thelwall noted, ‘certain terrible fellows since known by the name of acquitted felons’.9 The pernicious nature of the phrase lay in the fact that since Windham had been obliged to deny ever having actually called anyone an acquitted felon by name, its currency made it a suitable vehicle for stronger insults which pushed the boundaries of libel. Some might be content to talk of ‘acquitted felons’, declared the arch-loyalist William Atkinson, yet others might consider ‘the rankest traitors’ a more accurate term.10 As John Barrell shows in his essay here, Thelwall and his fellow accused had plenty to feel outraged about, for the Crown’s case against them, by which High Treason was more or less rendered ‘figurative or virtual’, had been engineered only by means of the most tortuous logic and ‘crazily ramifying arguments’. Barrell’s substantive point is that only Thelwall, and perhaps Erskine, seemed fully aware of the awful consequences for civil liberties should the prosecution get away with it. Thelwall’s unused but subsequently published trial defence lays bare what he called the ‘labyrinth of constructions’ behind a Crown brief that might, if successful, have turned any attempt at extra-parliamentary lobbying into an act of constructive treason. But, just as Thomas Spence had defused the power of Edmund Burke’s pejorative epithet, ‘the swinish multitude’, by inverting it for ironic radical use as Pigs Meat, supporters of the LCS were soon drinking toasts to ‘the innocence

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John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon

of acquitted felons’, and Thelwall expressed his pride in accepting (once again) the ‘honourable stigma’ of the phrase. Coleridge invoked the ‘eight triumphant acquitted felons’ in his opposition to the Two Acts, Horne Tooke used his candidature in the following general election to campaign against an entire ministry of ‘un-acquitted felons’, and Thomas Erskine considered the words ‘characteristic of the conduct and disposition of the present ministry’. Radical responses varied from triumphalism to ribald mockery: ‘The Great Windhamite shall revile them … and call them innocent culprits and acquitted felons, and thy people shall laugh thereat and be exceeding merry’, chortled one. From this inglorious height, the phrase slipped inexorably and broadly into a political discourse that recognized none of the boundaries originally intended for its use, prompting a complaint that, Protector and Abhorrer, Round-head and Cavalier, Whig and Tory, are the terms by which our ancestors distinguished parties; but we, more ingenious, no longer confine ourselves to generals, when we get a watchword such as swinish multitude, perish commerce, acquitted felon etc., its meaning is instantly perverted and it is bandied about from one end of the island to the other.11

Most commentaries on Thelwall, whether contemporary or modern, are concerned with his ‘Jacobin’ reputation as a lecturer. This was why satirists had been referring to him as ‘Telwell’ as early as 1794, and why, indeed, he became identifiable in satirical prints as a slight figure clutching a scroll emblazoned with the word, ‘Lectures’.12 Whether motivated by admiration or disgust, few accounts disagree that Thelwall was an animated and impassioned public performer. The Godwinian Thomas Amyot might have enjoyed Thelwall’s relatively calm published critiques of Burke, but his appreciation of them was cast rudely aside as soon as he heard him lecturing. He ‘raves like a mad Methodist Parson; the most ranting actor in the most ranting character never made so much noise as Citizen Thelwall; his voice, tho’ sufficiently loud, is coarse and unpleasant and his action seems to have been learned at the School of Mendoza and Co. If it had not been for the feebleness of his person, I should almost have been led to suspect he was going to beat his audience out of doors.13

Thelwall’s intemperate oratory has been discussed in terms of its relationship to religious enthusiasm by Jon Mee, and to the performative turn by Epstein and Karr, through which its extravagance becomes an expression of ‘deep play’ in radical practice, a process by which ‘radicals understood the risks they were taking and their knowingness was matched by the excessiveness of their behaviour. Radicals did not merely play their roles: they overplayed them’.14 Thelwall ‘the ranter’ was soon personified in Isaac D’Israeli’s burlesque satire, Vaurien, as Citizen Rant himself, an immoderate agitator who boasts, ‘My lungs, my arms,

Introduction

5

my feet, this cadaverous face, and these ferocious locks, flying like the serpent hair of furies, perform miracles among apprentices…’15 But once removed from the Jacobin milieu and re-scripted as a professional lecturer on the politer provincial circuit of the post-war period, Thelwall’s histrionic gifts found a more appreciative audience. A reporter for the Manchester Times in 1820 was clearly impressed: As an extemporaneous speaker, his powers are extremely remarkable. His words are happily chosen and happily placed. They express his precise meaning, neither more nor less, and his figurative illustrations, in which he frequently indulges, seem to be inspired by genius, as they are regulated by the most discriminating taste … he seems to have deeply studied what he professes to teach, not to have contented himself with the easier practice, too generally prevalent, of adopting the observations of others … he takes full possession of the minds of his audience. Their smiles or tears are at his command. He can ‘enchant their ears’.

His penchant for ‘extravagance’ had not disappeared, but it seemed under tighter control, so that ‘what would be wrong in another man is right in him. By his look and gesture, he anticipates each sentiment he is about to utter’.16 Thelwall’s honing of his own oratorical voice during his nineteenth-century career as a public lecturer directly informed his parallel practice as a speech therapist and phonetic theorist. Two essays in this volume explore these interrelated concerns. Tara-Lynn Fleming focuses her attention upon the socially inclusive proto-democratic culture of the early lyceum movement with which Thelwall’s speaking tours may be associated, and with the textual embodiment of that culture in the accompanying published volumes, the Selections. The recitation techniques around which Thelwall’s elocutionary theories were organized may be seen as weapons against ‘verbal and social repression rooted in speech’, and a ‘politically subversive engine of reform’ in their own right. Both she and Judith Duchan are struck by Thelwall’s performative interest in ‘rhythmus’, both in the flow of spoken language and the movement of the body when speaking. Duchan’s essay here identifies the various elements in the conceptual methodology of Thelwall’s elocutionary practice, and considers the particular role of speech in the performance of citizenship. Thelwall’s elocutionary career demonstrates not only his significance as a founding theorist of that discipline, but a deep conviction too that public virtue was attainable only through the ‘creative faculty of discourse’. In a brief obituary published in the sympathetic Bath Guardian in 1834, Thelwall’s contribution to written and spoken forms was succinctly summarized, and with a qualification that would become familiar. ‘His talents as a speaker were of a very high order’, it conceded, but ‘as a writer he was unsuccessful’.17 Thelwall’s words, then, became persuasive through animation, or through their staging in performance, but lacked substance on the printed page; a triumph, perhaps, of

6

John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon

form over content. Hostile critics, anxious about the influence of demagoguery upon the pliant and irrational minds of the swinish multitude, certainly thought this the case. ‘I have printed in every class of literature; but whatever is most energetic from my tribune makes no impression in print’, declares Citizen Rant, ‘My works are like the acidity of lemon squeezed on salts of wormwood; if the instant froth is not caught, ’tis vapidness!’ Rant acknowledges that his words are without substance on the printed page, ‘but approach my tribune, hear my screams of indignation, my whispers of discovery, the foaming vengeance of my mouth, the thundering resolution of my arm and the audible contempt of my foot. I assure you, citizens, a living line of animation runs along the room…’18 Loyalist writers were under no illusions about the danger posed by Thelwall’s excitable lecturing style. Robert Bisset considered him the new John Ball, fusing them together in an historical essay ostensibly about the Peasants Revolt, but where ‘John made many converts among the most ignorant of the populace. Had the government been sufficiently vigilant to stop John’s lectures when their rebellious tendency first appeared’ the consequent ‘riot and insurrection’, no less than the murder of ‘the primate, the chancellor, the high treasurer and all other persons of rank and distinction who fell in their way’, might have been avoided. 19 To Thelwall’s disappointment of course, critics of his intemperance were not all arch-loyalists like Bisset. On the contrary, they included Coleridge (‘You talk loudly and rapidly; but powers of vociferation do not constitute a PATRIOT’)20 and William Godwin. In other respects a close political ally, and a fellow traveller whose Political Justice Thelwall had done much to popularize, Godwin preferred ‘writing quarto volumes and convening with a few speculative philosophers by the fire side’ to risking unregulated dissemination in a plebeian public sphere. The tension between the quiet philosophical radicalism of Godwin and the more active proselytizing of Thelwall has been amply discussed in recent years as an exemplar of radical debates over strategy. Yet, as Kenneth Johnston argues in his essay here, strategy scarcely mattered, given the determination of Pitt’s ministry to crush the movement in whatever clothes it made an appearance. Thelwall’s performative intemperance, it is shown, in a careful analysis of the provocative republication of his lectures in The Tribune, ‘was necessary to his rhetoric, as a response to the intemperateness of the government’s actions and reactions’. But in any case, Thelwall’s abandonment of platform politics in 1797 did nothing to save him from attack; rather it disabled him. The whole tenor of his performance to this point had been to provoke and test repressive legislation. This he could resist, in court once again if necessary, but resisting the unofficial barracking of extra-judicial intimidation was an entirely different proposition.21 The question of strategy, and the tension between Thelwall’s use of literary forms on the one hand and mass platform lecturing on the other for political ends, is also addressed in Yasmin Solomonescu’s essay here. In a close reading, not of

Introduction

7

the Tribune but of the earlier Peripatetic, a work she regards as Thelwall’s ‘earliest literary experiment in political consciouness-raising’, Solomonescu unravels some of the difficulties and doubts Thelwall himself expressed about both forms of approach. Rather than give in to the difficulties of creating a shared political consciousness through the individualized responses engendered by readers of literature, Thelwall strove to develop a ‘theory and practice of writing’ in which the distinction (between collective and individual forms of address) breaks down. The common dismissal of Thelwall’s contribution to political thought as rhetorically spectacular but theoretically insubstantial was not confined to his contemporaries. In Philip Brown’s estimation, Thelwall ‘was not a profound thinker but he had the qualities which matter; he was genuine, sturdy and sound’. Brown, one senses, would have chosen the dependable Thelwall for the school football team before securing him a place in the senior debating society. Even Charles Cestre, for whom Thelwall’s ‘honesty, sincerity and single-minded devotedness’ were unquestionable, believed him ‘not one of those highly gifted men who stand prominently at the head of their age’ and conceded that his ‘social doctrine’ had become ‘out of touch with the newer, more precise claims of factory workers’ by the early years of the nineteenth century. Albert Goodwin, the first historian to consider the agitations of the LCS in any detail, was not exactly hostile to Thelwall, but believed his revolutionary influence misjudged by his critics; touched by bravura but moderate at heart, and found him ‘neither an original nor a subversive thinker’. E. P. Thompson’s admiration for Thelwall as a radical icon during the heroic 1794–6 period is evident enough, but it never got in the way of his post-1797 retrospective summary: that ‘he posed as the Patriot and then as the Recluse and failed in both roles’.22 Thelwall has even been pulled up for having insufficiently advanced gender politics. In The Rights of Nature, he critiqued Burke’s attempt to restrict those who ‘in any political view are to be called “the People”’ to a leisured, educated and privileged 400,000, for example, on grounds that by Burke’s own admission, the figure included ‘twenty thousand petticoat allies – ladies of the court and ladies of the town!’, an indiscretion seized upon by Anna Clark as evidence that ‘Thelwall expressed hostility to the idea that women could be included in public opinion’. While it would be ridiculous to claim him as a feminist, and Clark is right to note that ‘few male radicals considered the possibility of female citizenship’, her position is not strengthened by Thelwall’s careful accommodation of women at his lectures. Far from excluding women from public opinion, Thelwall moved his lectures from New Compton Street in 1794 because at the former venue, ‘numerous citizens of both sexes who wished to attend were disappointed from the want of room’, and at Beaufort Buildings, ‘ladies’ were not only made welcome but ‘advised to attend early, as it may otherwise be difficult to procure convenient seats’. Godwin’s criticism of Thelwall’s populism was based at least

8

John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon

in part upon what he called the lectures’ ‘mixed’ audience. At the ill-fated Yarmouth lecture in 1796 moreover, women figured among the injured when the meeting was attacked by a loyalist mob.23 As the unresolved question of Thelwall’s gender politics demonstrates, debates over the nature of the Jacobin and plebeian public sphere remain cogent. Georgina Green’s essay in the present volume is a contribution to this field. Green’s interest is in the formulation of Thelwall’s ‘public’, and the theoretical underpinnings of his insistence on agitation led by the ‘physical’ and ‘living body’ of public opinion, his emphasis upon politics as a communal experience, and the ‘promiscuous’ conception of audience that Godwin found so distasteful. She skilfully exposes contemporary loyalist fears of an embodied LCS, glimpsed as a ‘coup d’œil’ at Copenhagen House, and assuming a ‘presence or visibility that critiques their invisibility in virtual representation’. Investigations into the nature of ‘public’ discourse during the 1790s have, unsurprisingly, drawn upon the conceptual ‘public sphere’ of Jürgen Habermas. Corinna Wagner’s contribution to this book takes as its starting point tensions between transparency and concealment in Habermas’s public sphere and further develops recent work by John Brewer and John Barrell on the shifting boundaries of public and private life in the 1790s. Thelwall is unique, she argues, ‘less in his republicanism or his delineation of civic virtue, than in the way he sets about using his private life to pragmatically demonstrate abstract principles’. In a range of published works, she finds him remarkably candid about his own domestic autobiography, demonstrating an important theoretical association between personal and public openness and the secretive, corrupt behaviour of the Pitt regime, its spies and its informants. But, as he found in the course of an acrimonious exchange with the editor of the Edinburgh Review in 1804, living one’s life in public was not without its costs. Thelwall is beginning, slowly, to attract greater attention as a serious political thinker. Substantive modern discussions of radical ideology have, until recently, followed Goodwin’s accusation of intellectual unoriginality. Despite E. P. Thompson’s early suggestion in The Making that Thelwall was the movement’s ‘most important’ theorist for instance, H. T. Dickinson’s influential analysis of eighteenth-century political thought found little of note beyond the radical redefinition, in The Rights of Nature (1796), of property as, essentially, labour itself. ‘Unfortunately’, he concluded, Thelwall failed to ‘develop this insight into a coherent theory of labour’, and so far as unequal distribution of income was concerned, ‘failed to offer any economic solution to the problem’. Thelwall’s more recent restoration as a serious theorist owes much to the important work of Iain Hampsher-Monk and Gregory Claeys, for whom he was not only ‘the chief orator, strategist and theoretician’ of the LCS but ‘the leading republican writer in Britain’ after Paine’s departure in 1792. Claeys has picked up Thomp-

Introduction

9

son’s assertion and explored it thoroughly in a number of influential essays and the first edited collection of Thelwall’s political writings. His most recent work finds Thelwall fully incorporated into ‘the origins of modern politics’ alongside (and given comparable weight with) Burke, Paine, Wollstonecraft and Godwin, principally for the part he played in moving radicalism beyond a moral distaste for wealth and luxury and heralding ‘that idea of co-operative partnership between labour and capital which some socialists found an attractive alternative to both capitalism and communism in the following century’, or as HampsherMonk put it, ‘the process by which nostalgic radicalism became progressive and forward looking’.24 Two essays in this book explore these issues in depth. Robert Lamb’s contribution shifts the debate over The Rights of Nature away from its ‘proto-socialist analysis of exploited workers and the corresponding case for a redistribution of resources’, to consider for the first time Thelwall’s theoretical account of private property rights themselves. In the process he establishes a clear case against Dickinson’s dismissal of Thelwall’s coherence, and shows how Thelwall modified Locke to produce a theory of labour that justified the right to private property in land while at the same time demanding its extension to individual workers. Lamb’s essay uniquely considers Thelwall’s conception of rights within a framework informed by both utilitarianism and the conflicting historical theories of economic development associated with the Scottish Enlightenment, and proposes a utilitarian basis for Thelwall’s theory of property. Richard Sheldon’s essay takes a different tack. Sheldon is unconvinced by the argument that Thelwall produced a labour theory of value and questions the association between his attitude to political economy and early socialism. Thelwall, he maintains, was an opponent of both moral economy and the restrictive economic policies of the French Jacobins. Concentrating on Thelwall’s writings on dearth, the grain trade and agricultural monopoly in 1795, Sheldon finds him more a progenitor of the Anti Corn Law League and J. S. Mill than of socialism or radical Chartism, closer in his attitude to subsistence rights to Condorcet and Smith than to the radical anti-capitalism of Thomas Spence. Beyond the flexible labels of lecturer and theorist, or Jacobin and ‘acquitted felon’, the diversity of Thelwall’s career has made him difficult for academics to pigeon-hole, and a source, variously, of admiration, confusion and disappointment for many of those that have tried. This is particularly evident in responses to areas of Thelwall’s life that have traditionally been seen as peripheral to politics and the concerns of serious history. Reviewing Thelwall’s 1797 walking tour from London to Somerset, for example, E. P. Thompson found it ‘unremarkable, being largely devoted to conventional rehearsals of the “romantic and picturesque”’, his sporadic ‘attempts to discover the views of the labouring classes’ as he went, doomed to failure by the inability of his class to make easy conversa-

10

John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon

tion with uncultivated rustics. Thompson’s disappointment, rooted partly in an underlying suspicion of radical figures who ‘had always been ambitious to cut a figure in the world of letters’, betrays an irritation with fair-weather Jacobins in ‘retreat’ from politics. Literary scholars, on the other hand, have read the Tour in rather a different light. For Robin Jarvis, Thelwall’s ‘intellectual mobility’ as a pedestrian is laudable, indicating not a loss of direction but ‘the subjectivity of a man honest enough not to dissimulate his educated high-cultural tastes beneath a bogusly uniform demagoguery’. Michael Scrivener, a contributor to this volume, finds the pedestrian tour ‘a remarkable if also flawed document, one of the finest achievements of British Jacobin prose, at least as energetic and intellectually rigorous as anything Cobbett wrote later’. Unlike Thompson, whose concerns were rather different, Scrivener has allowed himself the time to deconstruct some of Thelwall’s picturesque reveries to reveal its inherently democratic form, a framework through which the pedestrian ‘suggests that receptivity to beauty is not an aristocratic privilege’.25 Another contributor, Judith Thompson, has also done much to reposition pedestrianism as a serious component of Thelwall’s democratic thought. ‘Walking along public roads’, she reminds us, ‘engaging in the Socratic dialogue of the peripateio with the people he met, was not only a ruling passion but a way of life’.26 E. P. Thompson was no more impressed by Thelwall’s penchant for writing ‘mediocre’ poetry, ‘a crime which, though it is committed around us every day, historians and critics cannot forgive’. Yet again, Scrivener is less impatient, conscious that both Coleridge and Wordsworth, ‘not known for flattering other people’s poetry insincerely’, praised it on a number of occasions; indeed Judith Thompson has recognized its important influence on Wordsworth’s political sonnets, the Lyrical Ballads, and Shelley’s Prometheus ‘as well as a later generation of Chartist poets’.27 Three essays in this volume, by Jon Mee, Judith Thompson and Michael Scrivener subject Thelwall’s poems and plays to contextual analysis as expressions of political, rather than simply literary, practice. Jon Mee’s focus is on Thelwall’s Poems Written in the Tower, conceived as he awaited trial and published after his acquittal in 1795, and their impact on his relationship with Coleridge. Through consideration of the intertextuality of Thelwall’s verse and Coleridge’s ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’, Mee reveals the common concern of both poets in the material and metaphorical nature of incarceration, social exclusion and confinement. Coleridge, of course, whose imaginative imprisonment was entirely figurative, had little to complain about beyond the self-denying privations of voluntary rural retirement, but for Thelwall, imagination became the key to displacement from the material circumstances of his cell’s ‘damp foul floor’ and ‘noxious gloom’. As Mee points out, Thelwall wrote with one eye on his own projection to posterity as an historical martyr to Liberty, but he makes no claims about the quality of the poetry. In her own contribution to this book,

Introduction

11

Judith Thompson is equally concerned with Thelwall’s historical interests. Her essay gathers the fragments of Thelwall’s epic but unfinished Saxon poem, The Hope of Albion, a work previously somewhat neglected by literary scholars, and through which Thelwall emerges as ‘not only an ambitious but a surprisingly good poet’. As its title suggests, this important poem is a political allegory, its timeless Albion, ‘a nation silenced and morally paralysed by and in its political rivalries and class divisions, whose masters and masses are equally trapped and tormented by the tyranny they practice and the slavery they have blindly accepted’. As she has suggested elsewhere, allegorical themes like these demand critical attention, not only in the later poems but in Thelwall’s long out of print novel, The Daughter of Adoption (1801), a work passed over rather quickly by E. P. Thompson as a ‘conventional money-spinner’. As Judith Thompson has said, the novel willingly tackles ‘the politics of gender, race and class, and the complex interrelations between domestic and colonial affairs’,28 themes in Thelwall’s published output which echo many of those underpinning his equally overlooked work as a dramatist. The drafts of two previously unpublished plays, Incle and Yarico and The Incas, neither of which were ever performed in Thelwall’s lifetime, have been recently rescued from oblivion and published in a critical edition by Michael Scrivener and Frank Felsenstein.29 In his essay for this volume, Scrivener reveals the importance of both these works in the making of Thelwall’s political ideology, for they reflect his developing concern with issues of empire, the slave trade and the representation of race. Thelwall’s internationalism and commitment to the cause of abolition, acknowledged but never subjected to analysis by previous scholars, emerge as key themes in these early works, and Scrivener identifies them both not only as anti-imperialist allegories but as a vigorous defence of the humanitarian principles of the French Revolution. Taken as a whole then, these essays explore both familiar and less familiar avenues in Thelwall’s complex and significant career. While the concern of the book is to emphasize Thelwall the polymath, it is also to recognize the underlying coherence of his seemingly diverse interests, and the vitality of the political framework upon which he hung them. Most importantly perhaps, we seek to demonstrate that in his temporary withdrawal at the close of the 1790s, the ‘political fox’ was not quite so dead as we have been led to believe.30

1 THE LIVES OF JOHN THELWALL: ANOTHER VIEW OF THE ‘JACOBIN FOX’ Nicholas Roe

‘Thelwall is suddenly an O.K. subject’, E. P. Thompson said in a letter to me in 1993. He was reflecting on the resurgence of interest in John Thelwall at the bicentenary of the French Revolution, and thinking as well of the revival of history in Romantic studies that was then current. His own classic study of Thelwall, ‘Disenchantment or Default?’ dated from 1968 – the year of the Paris riot.1 Thirty years later, Thompson’s essay was republished in The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age (1993), one of the great historicist studies of the English Romantic poets alongside Paul Foot’s Red Shelley (1980). If these books capture the essence of contemporary protest, modern Romantic biography does so too – notably in the interweaving of circumstance and spirit in Richard Holmes’s lives of Shelley and Coleridge; Holmes was living at Paris in May 1968, and writes powerfully about his experiences in his book Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985).2 Remembered now principally as an English Jacobin of the 1790s, as for example in Greg Claeys’s authoritative edition of the Political Writings of John Thelwall (1995) and the same author’s The French Revolution Debate in Britain (2007), John Thelwall actually lived for nearly seventy years, 1764–1834. His long life connects Romantic and nineteenth-century English culture, the revolutionary 1790s and the Chartist 1830s. He moved between the underworld of London’s artisans and the educated sphere of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and in 1793 appeared at the Physical Society in Guy’s Hospital alongside medical men like Astley Cooper who later taught John Keats. In this essay I want to offer a more complete portrait of Thelwall, or, at least, a first sketch towards that. One angle of approach will try to explain why we have no modern biography of Thelwall – as we do of many of his political and literary acquaintances – and in the course of that I hope to draw attention to some aspects of his life and work that lie beyond the revolutionary decade. Thelwall was born on Friday 27 July 1764 at Chandos Street, Covent Garden, the son of Joseph Thelwall a silk merchant. As a child he was sickly, – 13 –

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John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon

asthmatic and stammering. Removed from school to work in the family firm, ‘behind the shop counter’, he was self-taught and cast around to find a direction for his life: he tried to become a painter, then made a fruitless attempt to ‘get upon the stage’. He was apprenticed to a master tailor, but abandoned the trade in another attempt to study as a painter. For three years he studied for the bar then gave up on a legal career and ‘launched into the world as a literary adventurer’.3 He published in journals during the early 1780s, and in 1787 his Poems on Various Subjects appeared to praise from the Critical Review. He became editor and principal contributor to the Biographical and Imperial Magazine, and authored at least two plays, Incle and Yarico (1787) and The Incas (1792). With other journalism, and some private tuition, he contrived to support himself and his mother (the silk business had by now failed). The 1790s saw Thelwall emerge as a leader of the London Corresponding Society, and a challenging, speculative scientific thinker in his Guy’s Hospital lecture on ‘Animal Vitality’. His trial on a charge of treason, in December 1794, was arguably the consequence of his scientific ideas as much as his ‘seditious’ politics.4 By 1797 he had made contact with Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the meditative blank verse of ‘Lines Written at Bridgewater’ from Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement (1801) stands comparison with both ‘Tintern Abbey’ and ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’. Immediately after the turn of the century, Thelwall reinvented himself once again and embarked on a prosperous career as a speech therapist, styling himself ‘Scientific benefactor to the Intellect of the nation’, although he would return to the political fray following the Peterloo Massacre of August 1819 as editor of the Champion newspaper. With the Reform Bill of 1832, Thelwall, Thomas Hardy and other survivors of the 1790s were fêted as heroes.5 Enough here, one would think, for a compelling life narrative that captures Thelwall’s rootless early years, the rough-and-tumble of revolutionary politics, scientific daring and literary adventures. So why, many years after Thelwall became an ‘O.K. subject’, does he languish without a full biography, his significance and achievement seemingly restricted to the 1790s? While we know about hunting the ‘Jacobin Fox’, it is difficult to catch Thelwall complete across all of his sixty-nine years. His life has two major phases, like his fellow radical Leigh Hunt’s. For both men a ‘first life’ of strenuous political activity and involvement is separated from the later years by a period of rustic exile in a farmhouse. Jacobin Thelwall settled in Wales at Llyswen, on the banks of the River Wye, from 1799 until 1802; as the ‘new Recluse’, he had determined that Thelwall the politician must be forgotten, so that he could return to the public as a poet. After the death of Shelley in 1822, Hunt lived for three years in a farmhouse at the hamlet of Maiano, Tuscany, between Florence and Fiesole. He had arrived in Italy as a leading journalist and poet and, wishfully, prospective editor of the Liberal. He returned to England in 1825 to become a man of letters

The Lives of John Thelwall

15

willing to put his pen to any topic that might turn a penny. His first moneyspinner was the controversial memoir Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries (1828). In each life there are separations between early and late, and in both lives there are significant consistencies: Thelwall’s political activities continued during the Napoleonic era, at the Peterloo crisis, and with the Reform Bill in 1832; Hunt’s pacifism was a constant from the early Examiners to the protest poetry of ‘Captain Sword and Captain Pen’ (1835). As a political lecturer in the 1790s, Thelwall was the voice of the inarticulate; in later years his speech therapy helped the tongue-tied to speak for themselves. The popular orator of the Corresponding Society had lisped and stammered; in 1808 the speech therapist lectured on ‘Bonaparte and the Spanish Patriots’ at the Angel Inn, Tiverton.6 Like his grandfather, Thelwall embraced circumstances and ‘cur[ed] the wounds of his enemies as well as of his friends’.7 Hunt found it more difficult to adapt to changing times. We can see readily enough how one Life of John Thelwall might be shaped, with the focus of attention on the first life up to 1801 and several chapters reserved for the remaining years – exactly the shape, incidentally, of Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography of 1850. The ‘Prefatory Memoir’ to Thelwall’s Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement shows that he had already planned what he called ‘an unsophisticated detail’ of his own life, and his several attempts to fulfil this project have survived.8 The Peripatetic of 1793 was mostly based on his own experiences, as were some of the lyrics in Poems on Various Subjects (1787), Poems Written in Close Confinement (1795), and Poems Written in Retirement. We have Thelwall’s self-portrait in Richard Phillips’s Public Characters of 1800–1801 (1801), subsequently revised to produce the ‘Prefatory Memoir’, and the first volume of The Life of John Thelwall by his Widow from 1837. Later accounts of Thelwall’s life appear in Charles Cestre’s John Thelwall: A Pioneer of Democracy (1906); Denyse Rockey’s ‘Thelwall and the Origins of Speech Therapy’ (1979); my Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Radical Years (1988), The Politics of Nature (2002) and ‘Coleridge and John Thelwall: the Road to Nether Stowey’ (1990); E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class (1963) and ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’ (1994); the introductory section, ‘Thelwall’s Life and Times’, in Greg Claeys’s Politics of English Jacobinism (1995); and compact lives of John Thelwall in the DNB, Old and New. Most recently, the life has featured in Judith Thompson’s edition of The Peripatetic (2001) and Michael Scrivener’s Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing (2001). Nearly all of these books, essays and articles glance at Thelwall’s later years, although the principal emphasis is unvaryingly on the 1790s – ironically so, in that the manuscript sources for a full account of those exciting years have long been lost. The period of Thelwall’s career we actually know least about from Thelwall himself has so far received most attention, and this has been at the cost of overlooking the other decades of

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John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon

his long life. In what follows now I want to set out in some detail the difficulties and the possibilities that John Thelwall presents for a biographer. The most obvious barrier to a biography is Thelwall’s missing manuscripts. I want to try to reconstruct these lost volumes, and to speculate on future possibilities for recovering this invaluable archive. It may also be worthwhile identifying some of the other significant gaps in Thelwall’s papers, and to explore Thelwall’s numerous advertisements in the Times from the 1810s for what they can tell us about his life and career. Opening a broader perspective on Thelwall should encourage us to question where the centre of his life and achievement is located, and to reflect upon whether we can see Thelwall in ways other than through the activities of the English Jacobin of the 1790s about whom, as I’ve indicated, we know rather less than we think we do. ‘There is a rumour that you are doing a “biography”’, Thompson wrote to me in April 1993. Was I? I had enquired at more than one hundred libraries for holdings of Thelwall’s correspondence, so I suppose I must have been thinking of something like a biography; ‘The Road to Nether Stowey’ had traced Thelwall’s 1797 encounter with Coleridge and Wordsworth, an episode that might form part of a longer life-narrative. The library hits were few and far-flung, however, and brought home to me the damage that had been done by the loss of the six volumes of Thelwall’s private papers, last sighted in 1904 in the hands of the French scholar Charles Cestre.9 E. P. Thompson had set out the problem of Thelwall’s papers in the appendix to his ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’ essay, and in a letter to the TLS back in 1966: When Charles Cestre wrote his study of John Thelwall [A Pioneer of Democracy] he had in his possession six manuscript volumes of letters, notes, and outlines of lectures which he had obtained at the sale of James Dykes Campbell’s library at Sotheby’s in June, 1904. I wrote to Professor Cestre, whose memory was then failing, some years ago, and he could not recollect what had happened to these manuscripts, but stated that they might have been destroyed, together with many of his books, during the occupation of Paris in the recent war. However, in response to an inquiry at about the same time from an American scholar, he hazarded the reply that he might have sold the manuscripts soon after completing his study – that is, as early as 1906 or 1907. One must hope that the second suggestion was the true one, in which case these manuscripts may still be traced.10

The American scholar to whom Thompson alludes was David Erdman, although these enquiries to Charles Cestre were not the only and by no means the first efforts to locate Thelwall’s lost manuscripts. Forty years before Thompson and Erdman another scholar, Warren Gibbs, had made an identical request to the TLS:

The Lives of John Thelwall

17

Sir – I am trying to locate the six manuscript volumes of John Thelwall which were sold at Sotheby’s in 1904 to Professor Charles Cestre, who used some of the material in his study of Thelwall. Later he disposed of the manuscripts, but no trace of the present owner can be found. Any information in regard to them will be gratefully received.11

Gibbs’s letter suggests that Thompson’s ‘second suggestion’ may be the right one: Cestre had ‘disposed’ of the six volumes some time before the Second World War, in which case there remains a chance that they may yet be traced – and there are currently efforts to do so. In the meantime, at least some of the mystery about the six missing manuscript volumes can be dispelled. Cestre’s book John Thelwall: A Pioneer of Democracy drew extensively on the manuscripts, and from his references to them we can reconstruct at least some of the contents of the missing volumes: Volume 1: • Thelwall’s notes in preparation for his defence in the 1794 treason trial, including quotations from the proceedings of previous State trials and from commentaries on the law of England (Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 112 and n.). • Notes on the Duke of Bedford, suspecting his ‘high and generous magnanimity’ as a Foxite whig overlay the ‘superb feeling’ of the hereditary aristocrat (Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 170 and n.). Volume 2: • Further notes from State Trials in preparation for his defence in the 1794 trial (see volume 1 above and Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 112 and n.). • A letter from William Godwin to Thelwall, 18 September 1794, when Thelwall was in the Tower awaiting trial: ‘It is good to be tried in England, where men are accustomed to some ideas of equity, and law is not entirely what the breath of judges and prosecutors shall make it’ (Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 133 and n., 135 and n.; the full letter is reproduced in Cestre, John Thelwall, pp. 201–3). • An affectionate letter from Thomas Holcroft to Thelwall in the Tower (Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 131 and n.). • An address to Thelwall after his acquittal (December 1794): ‘We admire your advocacy of the great Cause wherein you are so indefatigably employed: the Destruction of Tyranny, and the promotion of the Happiness of Man’ (Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 179). • Copies of Thelwall’s letters to ‘the Lords of His Majesty’s most honourable Privy Council’ requesting return of the books and manuscripts confiscated at his arrest in May 1794 (Cestre, John Thelwall, pp. 89–90 and n.).

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John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon

• A letter from John Richter ‘testifying how brutally and confusedly’ his own house was searched by the authorities when he was arrested in May 1794 (Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 90 and n). Volume 3: • Thelwall’s ‘Notes of Pedestrian Excursion, [and] Documents of Employment of Time in Wales’ with reflections on what he saw; the state of the rural poor; industry, wealth, and the distribution of property (Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 185–6). This is probably the ‘M.S. Diary’ that also included Thelwall’s pedestrian tour through Western England in 1797 and his visit to Coleridge and the Wordsworths at Nether Stowey in July of that year. Thelwall noted that their conversations had turned upon the ‘“moral character of Democrats, of Aristocrats”’, and of ‘“pursuits proper for literary men – unfit for management of pecuniary affairs – Rousseau, Bacon, Arthur Young!”’ (21 July 1797).12 The ‘Diary’ also contained ‘a large number of names of artisans, shopkeepers, dissenting ministers, schoolmasters, by whom he was entertained during his tour through the provinces, in whose company he treated philosophical and political topics, and who subscribed for his books’ (Cestre, John Thelwall, pp. 35 and n., 62, 163–6, 195n.) • Two letters from William Godwin to Thelwall, 28 and 29 November 1795. The two men had quarrelled over Godwin’s pamphlet ‘Considerations on Lord Greenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills’ of 1794 (Cestre, John Thelwall, pp. 133 n., 137–8; the letters are reproduced in Cestre, John Thelwall, pp. 203–4). • Amelia Alderson’s invitation of 1796 encouraging Thelwall to come to Norwich to deliver his Roman History lectures (Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 128 and n.). • A rough copy of Thelwall’s letter of protest to ‘The Right Worshipful the Mayor of Great Yarmouth’, 22 August 1796, following the riots there (Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 129 and n.). • Copy of Thelwall’s letter requesting the mayor of Lynn Regis, Norfolk, to assist in preventing riots (Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 129 and n.). • Letter from the reformist and political writer William Belsham to the publisher Richard Phillips, 25 November 1806, on Thelwall’s character: ‘highly meritorious … his literary productions prove him to be such in point of intellectual endowments as to place him far above the need for praise … I shall be happy to declare in the most explicit terms the respect and esteem I entertain for him’ (Cestre, John Thelwall, 191n.). • Thelwall’s notes on ‘the leading thought of a dissertation or lecture’ intended ‘as an answer to Burke’: ‘Man has, from his very faculties, a phys-

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ical and moral power and aptitude for research. It is his right and duty to apply this power to objects important to human happiness. Government is of primary importance to the happiness, morals, and very existence of man’ (Cestre, John Thelwall, pp. 51–2). • The reformer Joseph Gerrald’s farewell letter to Thelwall, written from the convict-ship, the Sovereign, bound for Botany Bay, 6 May 1795 (Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 131n.). Volume 4: • Outline notes, dating from early 1796, for a series of lectures on Roman History in which (among other things) Thelwall reflects on how to achieve social improvement through ‘a rational scheme of mutual intercourse between men’: ‘First Romans, dissolute refuse of society (banditti, runaway slaves). Chose a good government: virtue the consequence. Institutions and circumstances of society produce virtue or vices. Liberty and good laws make good men’. Thelwall admires the early Romans’ ‘love of liberty’, ‘contempt of death’, and ‘respect for virtuous poverty’ (Cestre, John Thelwall, pp. 51–2, 57–8, 60, 126–7 and n.). Volumes 5 and 6: • Outlines of lectures, many of which were not published’ (Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 117 n.). Additional items, not located by volume, included the various ‘travelling journals’ Thelwall kept on summer pedestrian excursions (e.g. to the Isle of Wight in 1795; (Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 46). It’s worth noting that the three manuscript books containing fair copies of Thelwall’s poems, currently archived in Derby, were not among the missing volumes. Evidently the contents of the six volumes dated from 1794 to 1797–8: Thelwall’s preparations for his trial; letters; lectures in East Anglia amid rioting and tumult; the pedestrian tour of 1797; the meeting at Nether Stowey with Coleridge and Wordsworth; and the exile of the ‘new Recluse’ at Llyswen Farm. However, the loss of these Thelwall papers was only the latest of several misfortunes that have robbed posterity. The first setback was the confiscation of Thelwall’s books, papers, manuscripts, and engravings at his arrest in May 1794. He tells us that following his acquittal, all that he recovered were bundles of letters and ‘a parcel of useless fragments of the foul and imperfect copies of several different works’. Such were the remnants of his early literary and political career: he had lost ‘materials, upon a variety of subjects, both in prose and verse; and, among the rest, two poems, of considerable length’.13 The manuscripts of his two Guy’s Hospital lectures on ‘Animal Vitality’ and ‘Sensation’ may also have been lost in this haul. The National Archive catalogue reveals a few of the items that were retained by the

20

John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon

Treasury Solicitor, including a third volume of the Peripatetic among ‘Miscellaneous Papers on Sedition Cases’.14 But this calamity was only the first. Twenty-six years later, on 25 March 1820, the Times announced a grand sale at Thelwall’s ‘Institution for the Cure of Impediments’, Lincoln’s Inn Fields: MR. THELWALL being about to retire from his Public Institution, announces, that, early in May, his very extensive and valuable LIBRARY will be SOLD by AUCTION at his residence, on the west side of Lincoln’s-Inn-fields, consisting of upward of 6, 000 volumes, selected at great expense and trouble, during a long literary life: at the same time will be sold the Household Furniture, together with the valuable Lease of the House (unless previously disposed of by private contract), well calculated for the residence of a large respectable family: the mansion consists of an entrance-hall, spacious library, dining-room, breakfast-parlour, &c., on the ground floor; on the first floor, 2 large drawing-rooms, boudoir, and water-closet; 4 best bed rooms on the second floor; and 4 excellent attics; the basement is extensive, and replete with every domestic convenience; detached, at the end of the garden, is an excellent 6-stall stable, and double coach-house, with servants’ apartments. Further particulars will be given by the auctioneer in a few days.15

And in April 1820, again from The Times: The excellent Household Furniture, Pier and Chimney Glasses, large mirror, an 8-day spring clock, capital grand piano-forte, paintings, prints, and effects, of John Thelwall, esq., consisting of handsome four-post and field bedsteads, prime goose-feather beds, and corresponding bedding, excellent mahogany articles, in chests of drawers, wardrobes, pedestal sideboard, set of dining-tables, Pembroke and other tables, drawing-room suit of curtains, chairs, and sofas, elegant rosewood card, sofa, and loo tables, large Turkey, Brussels, and other carpets, kitchen articles and various other effects. At one o’clock precisely will be sold the desirable Lease of the Premises, comprising every accommodation for a large family, with detached six-stall stable, two double coach-houses, and rooms over.

Unfortunately, the sale also disposed of Thelwall’s ‘Extensive Library of Books’ as well as ‘Maps in cases, Busts and Globes, Astronomical Instruments, Medals and Coins, in Silver and Copper, Minerals and Shells, &c.’: MR. THELWALL’S Genuine Library of Books, consisting of upwards of 6, 000 vols., containing many scarce and valuable works, original editions, entire sets, and connected series, not frequently to be met with, complete: upwards of 600 of which, connected with English history, antiquities, and constitutional law; an almost entire collection of English classical poetry, of the elder poets in particular; several in black letter, many of them in folio, and large quarto; the entire works of Shakespeare, Dryden, Milton, Pope &c.; with MS annotations on the rhythmatics, pauses, emphases, and musical quantities &c.; old plays and other curious works; fine editions of Greek and Latin classics, mathematics, science, elocution, &c.; French and Italian

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books, including Voltaire complete; the French theatre, &c.; a large collection of Voyages and Travels, and others too numerous to mention.16

Given the three clearouts of Thelwall’s books and manuscripts, in 1794, in 1820 and then at some point in the twentieth century, it is surprising that any such sources have survived. In the absence of a Thelwall archive, incidental references and associations can be helpful in recovering the life. The Times sale advertisements from 1820 offer us exactly this kind of assistance. In Thelwall’s library, we can see the range of his reading and some of the intellectual backgrounds to his diverse lives and publications. Perhaps we glimpse a connoisseur of eighteenth-century mould (antiquities, black letter editions) transforming into a more omnivorous collector of books, maps, busts, globes, astronomical instruments, medals, coins, minerals, shells. Intellectually and temperamentally Thelwall was always a materialist, and he had an appropriately robust physical presence appearing in 1797 as ‘a little Stout Man with dark cropt Hair’.17 By 1820 his activities as a lecturer and elocutionist had brought him considerable wealth and a comfortable middle-class way of life: in a good year, he earned around £3,000 – more than enough for the former ‘Jacobin Fox’ to rest his limbs in a handsome, four-post, goose-feathered bed. But what Thelwall had not acquired was sufficient financial security to withstand the economic depression of the post-war years. He had reopened his Institute in October 1819 for the ‘usual courses of instruction … for domestic and private pupils’. 18 Just six months later, he was selling up and about to part with the possessions of a lifetime. What we see here is the economic vulnerability of the early nineteenth-century middle classes, and a resurgence of the volatility that had marked Thelwall’s early life: he had only settled down as an elocutionist after many years of diverse ‘pursuits of life’, including his political involvements of the mid-1790s. While we are familiar with Thelwall the poet, orator, lecturer, leader of popular societies, speculative scientist and elocutionist, we know the leaseholder of the finely furnished London mansion rather less well. Thelwall was also a published dramatist, pamphleteer, autobiographer, novelist, diarist, political agent, songwriter, journalist, editor, pedestrian, naturalist, farmer and collector. To these we can add the false starts of his early years as a shop-minder in his father’s silk business; as an apprentice to a master-tailor; epic poet; trainee lawyer; aspirant actor, and would-be historical painter. He liked to style himself variously as a ‘private citizen’; as ‘Citizen Thelwall’ of the Corresponding Society; as ‘Brother Thelwall’ of the Philomathian Society; as Sylvanus Theophrastus; as John Beaufort the novelist; and as ‘the new Recluse’ of Llyswen Farm. Others tagged him ‘Citizen John’; ‘Citizen Jack’; ‘the famous Thelwall’; and ‘the lisping orator’. Thomas Matthias recruited a ‘pallid Thelwall’ in The Pursuits of Literature; Wordsworth

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seems to have installed him as the Solitary of the Excursion. It is possible to map a comparable diversity in other areas of Thelwall’s life – for example his many homes and his various travels and tours. Given all of these activities, publications, commitments and identities, a number of questions arise: • Was Thelwall’s life merely a kind of protracted miscellany, a Peripatetic in sixty-nine annual volumes? And if it was not, what common thread runs through those seemingly diverse performances? • Are we sure that Thelwall’s principal significance was as a leader of popular societies in the 1790s? He spent as many years projecting himself as a poet, with some success, and much longer practising as an elocutionist. Should Denyse Rockey’s originator of speech therapy count for more than Thompson’s ‘Jacobin Fox’? • Have Thelwall’s three volumes of lectures in The Tribune and his political pamphlets distracted us from his achievements in other writings? The Peripatetic, the poems, the plays and the journalism in the Panoramic Miscellany, Monthly Magazine and the Champion all have persuasive claims for attention. • Is Thelwall’s outstanding work in the revolutionary decade actually the scientific treatise based on his Guy’s Hospital lecture, ‘An Essay, Towards a Definition of Animal Vitality’ from 1793? Thelwall’s claims as a ‘pioneer of democracy’ and as a ‘candidate for poetical reputation’ are arguably overshadowed by the ‘Member of the Physical Society’, whose daring theories of life startled Guy’s Hospital and reverberated in medical circles, in Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s poems, and in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.19 • Should we attend more closely to the emotional and psychological landmarks of Thelwall’s life? We need to know more about his ancestors, marriages and children; about his clergyman tutor, Harvey, who ‘sowed the seeds of [his] literary ambition’; about the traumatic, evidently sexual ‘attack made upon his innocence’; about the death of his daughter Maria, and his ‘aggravated’ exile at Llyswen; and about Thelwall’s health, his ‘feeble and defective lungs’, his stammer and the heart condition that, late in life, he mistook for asthma.20 Finally, to draw all of this together, should we see Thelwall as a representative of his times, caught up by a great cause in the French Revolution that left him – as it left many - with a dislocated life that mirrored the conflicts of the age? In the ‘Prefatory Memoir’ Thelwall recalled that he had been ‘without a profession, without fortune, almost without friends; and … without the advantages of a regular education’.21 In this account Thelwall fitted the profile of the discon-

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tented ‘masterless men’ who rallied to the cause of Jacobinism. Equally, however, Thelwall appears as a typically middle-class figure – coming from nowhere, resourceful, self-made and ultimately, at least for a time, prosperous. Thelwall was both an English Jacobin and a middle-class gentleman, and much more than either of those two typecast categories. After his imprisonment, trial and acquittal, repression propelled him towards poetic introspection and the role of the ‘new Recluse’.22 One outcome was the ‘Prefatory Memoir’ in which Thelwall urges his readers to ‘forget’ the politician and then proceeds, at length, not to allow them do so (a reluctance that may be significant for later profiles of his life). He aimed to establish himself in the public mind as a poet, and what the ‘Memoir’ shows most compellingly is the considerable effort required to do so. The curious post-scripted ‘Omission’ at the end of the ‘Memoir’ is effectively a second conclusion, spliced into the narrative so as to offer us two different images of the author: • the retrospect on a ‘bad politician’ who has ruined himself and his family and who has a claim ‘a priori in favour of his poetical talent’. and • the ‘Farmer and the Poet’ whose ‘ill-starred experiment’ has failed, and who now portrays himself as a poet ‘alone’.23 This identity crisis passed, and another role appeared. Within the year Thelwall wrote to his old friend Thomas Hardy ‘in civic & cordial fraternity’, to let him know that he had ‘forsworn politics’ and now did not ‘care two-pence what anybody thinks of any thing relating to me but my Elocution’.24 With this revealing letter to Hardy, I think we come close to a consistent trait in Thelwall that might offer a shaping dynamic for the life as a whole, and I’ll try to explain this by way of concluding the essay. ‘[M]y Elocution’, Thelwall writes, as if hugging himself in his new clothes. As we watch the persecuted Jacobin assuming another identity as an elocutionist, what we’re aware of most strongly is his wily and tenacious foxiness. Again and again Thelwall moves between successive careers, commitments and identities like an actor adopting yet another bravura role; the instinct for the stage, for performance, that was there from the first never left Thelwall, even when he appeared to be ‘resting’ in the remoteness of the Wye Valley. And his phrase ‘my Elocution’ is uncannily close to echoing the words of another foxy one, Ben Jonson’s Volpone, as he withdraws to his handsome feather bed and gathers himself for a fresh performance: ‘Fetch me my gown / My furs and night-caps’: Now, now, my clients Begin their visitation! Vulture, kite, Raven and gor-crow, all my birds of prey,

24

John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon That think me turning carcass, now they come. I am not for ’em yet …25

In October 1802 Thelwall was living on his foxy wits; before very long his clients would be bringing him at least something like Volpone’s riches, and setting him on the road to the mansion at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. And Thelwall kept on at it. On 25 January 1834 he reported to his ‘dear Children’ that his ‘successful career’ in lecturing on ‘Oratorical and Elocutionary Accomplishments’ at Bristol Institution had encouraged him to continue at Bath. ‘[M]y elocution has created a great sensation’, he announced – the lecture theatre was ‘completely full’ – and while ‘[the] game at Bath is not quite so sure … there is little hazard, & some chance of great results’.26 Written just three weeks before his death, this letter was the cue for the last of John Thelwall’s performances. the Bristol Mercury takes up the story: During the foregoing week he had been delivering lectures in [Bath], similar to those he lately delivered here. The day preceding (Sunday), he attended St. Margaret’s Chapel, in the afternoon, and heard the Rev. Mr. Hutchins deliver an admirable sermon; he went home with the Rev. preacher, and dined at his house, where he also slept – alas! for the last time. At four o’clock in the morning, an alarm being given, Mr. T. was found sinking under an attack of spasm from disease of the heart, to which he had been subject; immediate assistance was procured but without effect. Those of our readers who were delighted and instructed with the able lectures he so recently delivered in this city will not condemn us for giving the following brief memoir of him. As a public man, who suffered for his opinions, something more is due than the bare record of his decease.27

Something more is due. That might be the best spirit in which to begin a life of John Thelwall.

2 USUAL AND UNUSUAL SUSPECTS: JOHN THELWALL, WILLIAM GODWIN AND PITT’S REIGN OF TERROR Kenneth R. Johnston

John Thelwall and William Godwin provide two of the clearest and most significant examples of the ways in which innocent lives in the 1790s were drastically altered by their encounters with the British state’s domestic security apparatus, which critical commentators then and some historians today refer to as Pitt’s ‘Reign of Terror’. They also provide a paradigmatic representation of the ways in which the victims of this state-sponsored system of intimidation can be divided into two groups, which I call ‘usual’ and ‘unusual’ suspects. Thelwall represents the former group: active reformers (organizers, lecturers, writers, publishers) against whom the state acted directly by arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, trial and, most of the time, conviction and punishment. Godwin represents the ‘unusual’ suspects: not activists (on principle, in his case), but writers whose work (treatises, novels, plays, poems) expressed optimistic views of, at first, the events or ideals of the French Revolution and, after 1793, of the practice or theory of parliamentary reform in Britain which had revived in response to it. These ‘unusual’ suspects were not, for the most part, arrested or otherwise acted upon officially. Instead, their lives and especially their careers suffered significantly from the hegemonic (informal, vigilante) ‘overflow’ of state-sponsored intimidation: innuendo, threat, rumour, gossip, false reports and the like, which resulted in a wide range of largely irreversible negative effects: fellowships lost, promotions denied, promised church livings withheld, inheritances unforthcoming, contracts and engagements broken, and so on and on. In both groupings, however, the result was the same: an effective silencing of dissent, dramatically reduced career possibilities, and an ‘after’ or ‘second’ life markedly different than the promising ones members of both groups had begun to envision for themselves. Like Thelwall and Godwin, most people in both groups recovered to a degree (though less so in the case of the former), but their lives and careers were never the same again. To trace the diminishing arc of – 25 –

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John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon

Thelwall’s and Godwin’s careers, from 1794 to 1800, is thus to chart the loss of some significant might-have-beens in British culture and politics, even though the traditional triumphalist view of this period (the defeat of Napoleon, the rise of Romanticism) regards them, if at all, as ‘collateral damage,’ the kinds of sacrifices or unfortunate accidents necessary to gain the glorious prize at Waterloo or, in another register, to become a famous poet. The present essay will concentrate on Thelwall, appropriately for this volume, though Godwin’s intellectual stature would merit fuller consideration in an extended comparison between the two. But it is not my intention to compare or rank their achievements. Rather, I see them as prime instances of the twin fates shared by any opponents to the political status quo in Britain in the 1790s. Neither activism nor ‘passivism’ (so to speak) stood a chance against Pitt’s determination to crush his domestic opponents. More particularly, I want to show how Thelwall moved, between 1794 and the end of the decade, from being a usual suspect to becoming an unusual one, and continued to suffer the same ill-effects in the hegemonic sphere that he had in the official sphere. That is to say: Thelwall tried to get out of politics, but found that he couldn’t, thus enforcing the point that in times of national political stress (however defined: la patrie en danger!) the distinction between the political and the personal is erased, and any kind of critical action beyond the quietest quietism may be subjected to severe recriminations. Most of all, I want to show how Thelwall, for reasons difficult to understand but fascinating to try to fathom, helped to provoke the continuing extra-legal attacks on himself, by the increasingly strident, taunting tone and ferocious rhetorical argumentation of his personal challenges to Pitt, in the pages of his Tribune lectures of 1795 and, even more so, in his careful editing and rearranging of them in the three-volume set he issued in 1796, just before setting out on his final, disastrous lecture tours to the provinces. The conservative satirist T. J. Mathias sent him on his way: ‘Thelwall for the season quits the Strand, / To organize revolt by sea and land.’1 And George Canning, Pitt’s literary hitman for the mop-up of the reformers, mockingly bade farewell to Thelwall in the last issue of the government’s hegemonic attack-organ, The Anti-Jacobin, after it was all over, in his satirical poem, ‘New Morality,’ of August, 1798, illustrated by James Gillray’s brilliant cartoon of the same name, sending off the entire line-up of 1790s suspects, usual and unusual, and celebrating the success of the government’s tactics: And ye five other wandering Bards that move In sweet accord of harmony and love, C___DGE and S__TH_Y, L___D and L__B and Co. … TH_LW__L, and ye that lecture as ye go, And for your pains get Pelted, praise LE PAUX!2

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Thelwall and Godwin were the best-known names standing for liberal reform in the 1790s, or its most notorious radicals, depending on your political point of view. Tom Paine was a bigger name, of course, but he had absconded to France in late 1792, never to return (nor was he expected to, having been convicted of treason and condemned to death in absentia). But neither of them are well known now. The British Romantic poets, famous now, were of course not so at the outset of their careers. In the 1790s, their run-ins with the state’s apparatus of repression – for they all had them – were comparatively minor, police-blotter affairs. Coleridge’s farcical ‘Spy Nozy’ version of the Home Office agent James Walsh’s 1797 visit to Somerset, published in Biographia Literaria (1817), helped to insure that posterity’s recollections of the great poets’ radical youth could be dismissed as hilarious official blunders or, at most, reminders that they, too, had made their youthful mistakes (‘juvenile errors,’ as Wordsworth called them in his posthumously published Prelude) and grown up to be pillars of the conservative establishment. But they, along with Southey and Lamb, had known very well, in their time, the two principal victims of Pitt’s reign of terror, Thelwall and Godwin, in its two principal modes of operation. What is particularly illuminating about Thelwall’s and Godwin’s experiences of Pitt’s repressive regime in the 1790s is the dramatic way in which it divided their lives into a Before and an After. Thelwall tried to draw a line under his political career and reinvent himself, changing from a nationally recognized radical orator to an obscure yet innovative elocutionist and speech therapist. Godwin went from being a bestselling philosopher and novelist to a pseudonymous author of children’s books. He disappeared more completely than Thelwall, for a while, hiding under the name ‘Edward Baldwin’ (among other pen-names), writing in the back room of his second wife’s bookshop, under a cloud of public disapproval so darkly louring that he dared not write or publish in his own name. Thus they can be taken to represent two poles of radical behavior in the 1790s, the literary active and the literary passive. Their very different personalities are clearly displayed, or exposed, in their falling-out in 1795: Godwin’s cool, smug, egotistical rectitude versus Thelwall’s unbuttoned, irascible, histrionic egotism. But it is really beside the point, in every sense, to make much of their all-too-human weaknesses. The main point for my purposes here is that it didn’t make any difference: both got slapped down, though each in his own way, by the institutional and hegemonic forces at Pitt’s disposal. Hence I find it both ironic and poignant that they should have fallen out with each other, in their reactions to the aftermath of the 1794 Treason Trials, and in their assessments of what the reform movement should do in the face of such government actions, as if oppositional strategy made any difference anymore. Nor was their falling-out merely personal. Their break represented a serious and definitive one, ‘between radical

28

John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon

imaginative theory and radical business-like agitation, the exponents of both of which were soon to be driven from public life by the old order’.3 Thelwall and Godwin had known of each other in London from the 1780s, both moving along the ragged edges of the publishing business, writing reviews and floating occasional book projects that failed to provide them with any steady income. In 1787, for example, we find them holding similar positions on two similar journals: Godwin as British and foreign editor of The New Annual Register, Thelwall as editor and principal contributor to the Biographical and Imperial Magazine.4 They were brought closer together in late 1793 by their mutual friend Joseph Gerrald, the most popular (in London) of the five defendants in the ‘Scottish Martyrs’ trials in Edinburgh.5 By then, each had achieved the success which, as it turned out, would represent the pinnacle of their fame, to which they would never return. Thelwall was introduced by Gerrald into the newest and largest of the reform societies, the London Corresponding Society, in October, 1793. He was so successful there that he, almost alone among the many lecturers popular at this time, was soon able to maintain his own lecture hall, with paid attendance, first in Compton Street and later at the Beaufort Buildings in the Strand. But soon, as Wordsworth said, speaking of France at about the same time, ‘the soil of common life’ became, ‘too hot to tread upon.’ (Prelude, IX.166–7) In May of 1794, the government made what it planned to be its decisive move against the reformers, in a series of raids and arrests, beginning with Thomas Hardy, secretary of the LCS, on 12 May. Thelwall was nabbed the next day, an indication of the importance the government attached to his influence. Some thirty suspects were rounded up, from which twelve ‘conspirators’ were selected to be put on trial in the autumn. Thelwall spent the next six months in jail, first in the Tower and then, from October, in what he called the ‘Common Charnel House’ of Newgate. Godwin came to the rescue of his new friend. As soon as the details of the government’s case became known, he published his Cursory Strictures on the Charge Delivered by the Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury, which thoroughly scouted the legal grounds on which the government based its charge of treason against the London Twelve. This extra-mural effort was widely credited with embarrassing the government publicly, thus supplementing the brilliant trial work of Thomas Erskine for the defence in court. With the acquittals in the Treason Trials in November, the reform movement breathed a sigh of relief and started to regain its momentum. It was, for example, in 1795 that Wordsworth and his friend Francis Wrangham wrote the first drafts of their (never published) imitation of Juvenal’s eighth satire (on un-noble nobility), directed against the powerful lords of the North, the dukes of Portland (soon to be Home Secretary), Manchester and Northumberland. In 1795

Usual and Unusual Suspects

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also, Wordsworth and his friend William Mathews tried to realize their plans for a radical journal, to be called the Philanthropist, which seems to have been the seed or prototype of the journal of the same name brought out throughout 1795 by the indefatigable radical publisher, Daniel Isaac Eaton.6 Thelwall redoubled his lecturing and publishing efforts: speaking on nearly a weekly basis at his lecture hall and immediately publishing each speech in his new journal, the Tribune. Since my argument makes much of the performative or ‘speech-act’ aspect of Thelwall’s writing and editing of the Tribune, it is important to note the special care he expended in turning his live performances into print, reflecting the lessons he had learned from being on trial, and hearing his actual or reported words, both oral and printed, read into the court record as ‘constructive’ evidence of his treason. He employed a shorthand writer to sit with him at the podium, scrupulously recording and later transcribing his every word, including interruptions from the audience, and his own ad lib responses to them. The Tribune lectures in their periodical form run from March 1795, through April 1796. Their subtitle is their effective working title: ‘the Political Lectures of J. Thelwall’. But the main title is also functionally important, since Thelwall is self-consciously assuming a republican office, that of a Roman tribune, specifically the tribune to the people or plebeians. But the government had learned lessons from its defeat in the trials as well. Its legal officers went back to the drawing boards to devise a new definition of treason, which ultimately bore fruit in the passage of the two Gagging Acts in December of 1795, laws so airtight that no prosecutions were ever brought under them. At the same time, Home Office records show that the domestic secret service was revamped: immediately after the trials ended, in January of 1795, it was set up on a new, more modern footing, mostly having to do with matters of accountability and payroll, so as to produce information (that is, reports from informers) that would stand up better in court, unlike the freelance methods that had been used heretofore.7 Thelwall’s audiences were even larger now, benefiting from the favourable publicity of his release. They were also proportionately more middle class, though membership in the London Corresponding Society also swelled, in the new but fleeting atmosphere of relief. He had no trouble drawing 500 spectators to his chambers in the Strand on any given night.8 Though some reformers, notably John Horne Tooke, were wisely beginning to reconsider their public stance, in light of the trials, Thelwall was not about to give up.9 Au contraire. Michael Scrivener says these popular, twice-weekly lectures ‘provoked the government’s passage of the Two Acts.’10 This may well be, though it is hard to separate provocation and response at times like these. It’s a sort of chicken-or-egg dilemma: as Thelwall’s lectures provoked government reactions,

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so too government actions provoked further lectures of protest. Scrivener also makes a point that I will develop further here; namely, that Thelwall’s ‘intemperance’ was necessary to his rhetoric, as a response to the intemperateness of the government’s actions and reactions.11 Gradually, Thelwall’s Tribune lectures began to show his awareness of a gathering new storm, which broke with the passage of the Two Acts in December, ending the liberals’ year of living comfortably. As they appear throughout 1795 and then reappear in 1796, they anticipate those fundamentally radical political discourses whose immediate urgency is encapsulated in their simple active-voice titles. Such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done? (1865), or Lenin’s later reprise of it, with the same title, in 1902. Or Alexander Herzen’s Who is to Blame? (1841–6), or Henry David Thoreau’s On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849). Or the common ancestor of them all, Paine’s The Crisis (1776). In Thelwall’s case, a title we could paraphrase from for the 1795 periodical form of his Tribune lecture-essays might be, ‘What’s Going to Happen’ – not posed as a question, but as a declarative prediction. And for his 1796 republication and rearrangement of them, their controlling question/title could become, ‘What Has Happened’, or indeed, his prolepsis of Chernyshevsky: ‘What is to Be Done?’ Godwin re-enters Thelwall’s life and public struggles in late 1795, but in a very different way from 1794. After the attack on the king’s coach on 29 October gave the government the opportunity it wanted (and may well have provoked), to introduce the Two Acts for quick passage in Parliament, massive protests against them broke out in London and elsewhere in the country. Godwin protested them too, in his Considerations of Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills, but his considerations were far too considerate to satisfy Thelwall and most of the other reformist leaders. If Godwin’s Cursory Strictures helped to sink the government’s case in 1794, his Considerations of 1795 gave ammunition to those who argued in parliament in favour of the Two Acts, by suggesting that the radical leaders had much to answer for in bringing about the crisis they faced: the chicken–egg dialectic again. He called their ‘leader’ (unnamed, but very likely Thelwall was intended) ‘a traitor to Justice and Reason’ – a rather high-sounding or ‘Godwinian’ definition of treason, to anyone who had stood in the dock accused of the capital crime of treason against the state. Thelwall was furious. He felt betrayed by his former champion and muchadmired ‘philosophical father’: ‘the bitterest of my enemies has never used me so ill as this friend has done’.12 ‘It is with difficulty that I can believe that William Godwin is the man who has taken advantage of the alarm and fury of the moment to join the war-hoops [sic] of slanderous misrepresentation against an individual whom every engine of Tyranny and Falsehood is at work to destroy.’13 The two men’s very different opinions on political organization and agitation

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here played directly into their lives and personalities. Godwin’s language was especially unfortunate in its comparisons of the LCS to the Jacobins of Paris. He accused lecturers like Thelwall of stirring up people’s passions and putting them ‘in training for scenes of riot and lynchings … more or less similar to those of the Jacobin Society of Paris.’14 So too with his facetious but ill-considered supposition to Thelwall personally, that he would want to ‘consign me to the lamp-post.’15 Indeed, there were those ‘who wondered aloud whether he had been won over by the usual method of an official salary.’16 But it is after the passage of the Two Acts that we can see most clearly the extent of Thelwall’s brilliance and bravery. For he published his Tribune essays again in the spring of 1796, collecting and rearranging them in three volumes. If in their 1795 form they helped provoke the government’s repressive reaction, though that could hardly have been his intention, then in their 1796 collected form, he presented them in such a way as, indeed, to provoke further government action, to expose the injustice of the Two Acts, offering himself as a test case. They go over the same ground, but retrospectively, spelling out and drawing out the consequences of the new legal situation. Thelwall rearranged his lectures to frame and, as it were, to anticipate and define his own experience of repression as he may have foreseen it, when he set out on his two provincial lecturing tours, in the spring of 1796 and 1797. They are consecutively numbered, 1–50, through the three volumes, but they are not presented in the chronological order of their original oral delivery or first publication. For example, number 47 is from 6 November 1795, but number 49 is from 15 April 1795. They are also topically rearranged: volume I is the most ‘occasional’, volume II contains mostly reprints of Thelwall’s other works, and volume III mounts his climactic, escalating challenges to the government. They are not much rewritten, but Thelwall occasionally adds language which shows him adjusting the point of his 1795 pieces, bringing them to bear more saliently on the new realities of 1796.17 In volume I, Thelwall is at his ‘occasional’ best, reflecting on passing events of the times. For example, its first essay, on the distresses of the poor, picks up on the coincidence that it was delivered on one of the national Fast Days that George III had reinstituted from former times, as propagandistic occasions to keep up the national will behind the shaky war effort. But Thelwall turns the official, monarchical occasion to his own account, usurping it, as it were, in the name of the people’s tribune. ‘However absurd the idea of averting national catastrophes by superstitious observances [i.e., high masses] … may be, the situation of the country is much too serious to be made the subject of an idle pastime.’ (1:1) Far from supporting the war efforts (celebrating victories, praying for the boys abroad), he tries to take the occasion away from the King, observing that the King suffers his own peasantry to be ‘annihilated … in a ridiculous … crusade

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to restore the fallen despotism of France.’ It is not only the material misery of the poor that outrages him. ‘The personal liberty of English men is [also] invaded, with impunity, by … lawless violence.’ The only ‘consolation’ in all this, to ‘relieve the philanthropic mind’ is that ‘the project [i.e., the war] is not likely to succeed.’ And it didn’t. For most intents and purposes, England lost its ‘coalition’ wars against republican France, 1793–9. But the government’s campaign against its domestic opponents was very successful. Towards the end of volume I, Thelwall’s occasional voice becomes more pointed, in a long comparison of the characters of Pitt and Robespierre (in favour of the latter), that leads to an analysis of ‘The Present System of Terror’ – that is, Pitt’s reign of terror. Thelwall knows whereof he speaks, and makes sure his audience knows it too. ‘I know well, citizens, what dangerous ground I tread upon: I know very well that though treason once meant compassing and imagining the death of the King, it now [since the preceding December] means telling truth to the shame and confusion of Ministers.’ (1:254) Here is one of several key points at which Thelwall adds words to his 1795 lecture/essay to give it a sharper point for 1796. It would be hard to improve upon this sentence, for succinctly putting the difference between the old and the new treason statutes. But he is not just analysing ‘The Present System of Terror’. Like Marx, Thelwall thinks philosophical analysis should eventuate in action. If the government has offered a new definition of treason, Thelwall will offer one too. It consists of either ‘betraying the trust reposed in the individual by the country, or betraying that country to the injury and destruction from which it is the duty of the individual to preserve it’ (1:282). It is time for individuals to try to rescue the country. He makes a simple pun to define the crime from which enlightened individuals must rescue the country: ‘They have called this crime of Treason Patricide! – or murdering the Country.’ (1:283) In the face of such provocations, something must be done, and volume III proposes a (legal) plan of action. But it is less a calling of others to general or future action, than, so far as speech and writing can legitimately be considered forms of action, a kind of ‘speech-in-action’ by itself. The dedication to volume III, written in April of 1796, just as the strictly periodical publication of his lectures had ceased, announces the activist thrust that Thelwall wants to put upon his collected edition of them. He now dedicates them, ironically, to the principal political and law lords of the land, Pitt, Dundas, Windham, Grenville, Scott and Mitford, ‘and those majorities in both Houses who voted in favor of Acts to suppress such lectures’ – that is, such lectures as he has already given, but which would now be illegal if he tried to keep on giving them. He admits he has not had much practice writing grateful dedications to generous patrons, the people being his usual patrons, and his new patrons have done their damnedest to make

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the present work not possible. But if they will try to stop him, he will try to stop them. Thelwall takes the plunge, daring these men to attack him if they must attack anyone, even offering himself as the sacrificial victim for the cause of reform, and for the failed ‘cause’ of the war which is being used as the excuse to dismantle it. If I am guilty, let me alone be punished! Take from my country the unconstitutional shackles with which you have restricted her hitherto undisputed liberties, and let the vial of your vengeance be poured, alone, on this devoted [i.e., fond or foolish] head. (3:v)

Yet he is also singling out someone else. He has heard of countries being punished for their king’s crimes, and of kings being punished for their peoples’ sins, but never of a whole people being punished for the crimes of a single individual. If the English people are being punished, in the state’s attack on their liberties, who is to blame? John Thelwall? Or is it another individual, namely William Pitt, whose misguided war policies and abandoned reform principles, and whose iron determination not to change course on either, are the single personal source, in so far as there is one, of almost all of the ills being visited upon the country? Thelwall is using the same tactic he did in volume I when he ‘usurped’ the feast day observances from George III, here taking the initiative of the Two Acts away from Pitt and trying to use it against him. The likelihood that Thelwall is here indicting Pitt, rhetorically, is strengthened at the end of volume III, which is dated contemporaneously with its dedication, since both were written last. He says he had planned to end the Tribune when the Two Acts put an end of his ‘Lectures on the Laws, Constitution, and Government and Policy of these Kingdoms.’ This, we should note, was not the title he had given his political lectures in 1795 (‘The Political Lectures of J. Thelwall’), though it describes their content accurately enough. Rather, this is exactly the wording of the new Act against seditious speech and publication. That is, ‘lectures on the laws, constitution, government and policy of these kingdoms’ are precisely what, in the new statute, are now forbidden by law. He says that his passion arises from the fact that they were delivered ‘on the spur of an awful and momentous crisis’ (think of Paine), which could be equally the disastrous war, the destruction of the reform movement, the passage of the Two Acts, or, now, John Thelwall’s own freedom, life and well-being. Now, the general crisis is upon him, personally – that is, he draws it upon himself. He now applies another classical name to his lectures, calling them his Philippics (3:322). Like ‘tribune,’ this is another carefully chosen classical allusion, summoning up the highly personal attacks of Demosthenes on Philip of Macedon and, half a millennium later, of Cicero upon Mark Antony. These are the big leagues of political oratory, chosen by Thelwall to put himself in their

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company, and to indicate that he, too, has a large personal target in the sights of his political arguments, Pitt himself.18 This is not merely a rhetorical attack, since Thelwall and Pitt had faced off in person in the Privy Council’s preliminary examination of Thelwall, which Thelwall reproduces in the Tribune in dialogue form, a hilarious little piece of political farce.19 But he does something additional, that trumps Demosthenes and Cicero: he offers himself as the alternative target for his attacks: if not Pitt, then me. If his lectures are so inflammatory, what about the lecturer? ‘What must be his audacity – nay, his folly – his madness, not only in taking such precautions [i.e., to print accurately every word he’s said] . . . but in bringing all these proofs to the bar of the public, and challenging investigation, in the very teeth of power?’ (3:323). Speaking truth to power, as we would say. But he is not done yet. If his lectures are treasonous, so be it: let him be duly prosecuted. But if they are not, ‘what must the public [then] conclude with respect to those ministers’ to whom he has dedicated them? And what will not only the public, but posterity and the entire present generation, ‘say to the men who thus slandered an innocent individual … that through his sides, they might stab the constitutional liberty of their country … ?’ We might feel Thelwall goes too far here, in offering himself up in the image of the crucified Christ, bearing, as it were, the Holy Spirit of constitutional liberty within him. Certainly the image confirms what I, following Michael Scrivener, have suggested: that Thelwall is casting himself in the role of surrogate or sacrifice for his cause. Yet it is hard to accuse him of being histrionic with, as E. P. Thompson well said, ‘the whole of established culture and established power … bearing down … on him’.20 And we remember that the other stridently exclusionary phrases uttered under the pressure of the possibilities of these glorious times also gained force from their implied fear of losing the opportunity to speak. ‘Give me liberty or give me death!’ (Patrick Henry) Henry would certainly have been executed, along with Washington and all the other leading American rebels, had they lost their war. So would Thelwall, had he been convicted in 1794.21 Who are the real traitors? Thelwall as provocative Jesus? Or Pitt and his cabinet as – if we follow out the terms of the rhetorical figure – the commanders of the soldiers who stabbed Jesus to make sure he was dead? Thelwall presses on in this vein; one senses that rhetorical possibilities occur to him as he writes; they increase exponentially. He cheekily announces the title of his new course of classical lectures as, ‘Lectures in strict Conformity with Mr. Pitt’s Convention Act.’22 As if to say, ‘Catch me if you can’. Some authorities take it on faith that these are lectures on classical Roman history, with obvious parallels to the contemporary 1790s situation. But that’s only if you read their main titles. A list of their subtitles shows how provocative Thelwall’s supposedly ‘strict conformity’ is.

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• ‘Digressions on the republican governments of America and France’. • ‘Parallels to the revolutions in France and Holland’. • ‘Reflections on revolutions that have overthrown monarchic governments in the ancient and modern world’. (My emphasis) • ‘The folly and wickedness of a confederation of kings to try to overthrow the . . . Roman republic’. • ‘Commotions caused by tyrannical governments’. • ‘Considerations of the differences between the Roman and the French revolutions’. • ‘Reflections on the effects of suppression of popular discussion’. • ‘Differences between ancient and modern democracies, with a particular reply to Burke’s calumnies against the French Revolution’. And finally, ‘Animadversions on corruption and priestcraft that led to Rome’s fall, with instances from the histories of all nations, except THESE KINGDOMS – upon which (and which alone) it is now unlawful to lecture’. (My emphasis) He is really asking for it. Not only does he push the ancient/modern parallels well past the spirit of the Two Acts, he brings it all back home in a final spin on the putative illegality of the very course of lectures he is delivering. To say this is provocative rhetoric is to say too little, and too blandly. But if we think he should be more careful, he will have none of it. Although our freedoms may have been narrowly circumscribed, we still have the duty to exercise as fully as we can those that are left to us, and not to compromise with Oppression. For that would only enslave us further, making us into ‘ENTIRELY THE THING YOU WISH US’. This is the positive corollary to Thoreau’s insistence on the duty of civil disobedience. It shows Thelwall’s splendid ability to imagine and incorporate what his likely audiences’ reactions will be to what he is saying. He is a speech-act in motion, a moving, speaking, taunting target, one that shoots back. He really puts himself out on a limb. He agrees with his critics in The Times and the True Briton, two of the staunchest (and most well subsidized) government papers: ‘If these Lectures are suffered to go on, [then] the late Act is a mere dead letter’. Opposition is incorporated into his sedition. Either they are seditious or they are not. And if they are not, who then are the traitors? If not me, then who? He even puts a use-by date on himself and his lectures, a legal action-clause, a timed rhetorical fuse. He has suspended his lecturing for six months, because six months is the statutory time in which prosecutions for offences under the Two Acts must be filed. If he hasn’t been arrested within that time, then they are not seditious. And, in the fundamental corollary of the dialectics of speech and action on which his ‘Dedication’ and ‘Farewell’ are based, if he hasn’t been

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seditious, then somebody else must be guilty of violating the natural and constitutional rights of Britons. But Thelwall was not to get his (second) day in court. Instead, six months later, he was wholly on the run, with ‘independent officers’ or off-duty policemen or ‘civilian’ magistrates in pursuit, not bailiffs of the court carrying out their stated legal duties. Indeed, we can regard Thelwall’s lecture tours of 1796 and 1797 as marking the very progress of his transition from being a usual suspect – the most usual of all, in the government’s eyes between 1793 and 1795 – to becoming an unusual one, one the government no longer had to pay much attention to, since the hegemonic, extra-legal operations of its repressive machinery was working so well. Thelwall could still command crowds of up to 5,000 people, even in the provinces, but these peaceable and interested folk were easily dispersed by smaller groups of armed men. At first, the army and the navy were both involved. In Ashby de la Zouch, he was ‘escorted’ out of town by a detachment of the Inniskilling dragoons. In Yarmouth, in August 1796, the worst instance, a detachment of sailors from the ship L’Espiegle in the harbour came on shore under the leadership of one of their officers and smashed into the hall Thelwall was using, driving the audience away and forcing Thelwall to defend himself with a pistol.23 When magistrates were appealed to by members of the audience to do their duty of keeping the peace, they replied with officialdom’s own version of the chicken–egg dilemma. Thelwall had brought it all upon himself: if he didn’t speak on such volatile subjects, why then, such violent actions would never have resulted. And in other places – Lynn, Norwich, Derby, Stockport – ‘concerned citizens’ were able to carry out the necessary dirty work by themselves, causing disturbances, cat-calling, pushing and provoking, and finally smashing and threatening worse. By the summer of 1797, we see Thelwall still on the road, but in a very different guise: that of a pedestrian tourist, like the hero of his great Menippean satire of 1793, The Peripatetic. He published some of these observations in the Monthly Review. In both his route and his writing, he was headed in what he thought was the new right direction, to Nether Stowey, where his new correspondent, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, erstwhile leading radical orator of Bristol, the equal of Thelwall in London, had ‘snapped his baby trumpet of sedition’ and where they could talk, famously, of having transcended – or at least having escaped – the need to ‘talk treason.’ But Coleridge warned Thelwall off in words that must have hurt as much as the sticks and stones of the provocateurs he had endured over the course of the previous year. What should we make of Thelwall’s proactive rhetorical performance? Brave? Brilliant? Foolhardy? He underestimated not the government’s malevolence toward him but its determination, its ruthlessness. Above all, its lawlessness; its

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willingness and its ability to go outside the law. He had been tried and acquitted under the old definition of treason, and he was willing to be tried again under the new one. Trials, legality and illegality were foremost in his mind. His tropes and rhetoric are drawn from the legal arena, the law and the courtroom. He was willing to have his innocence tried. It did not occur to him, or did not occur to him soon or forcefully enough, that the government had gone beyond trying his guilt or innocence. It was out to get him, any way it could. For surely the assault and battery at Yarmouth was little less than an assassination attempt, or a threatening demonstration of its easy possibility.24 But this government’s preferred method of judicial murder was transportation to ‘the fatal shore’ of Australia, as Thelwall knew, from his now-dead friend Gerrald’s experience. But, if he was safe from Botany Bay – which was, after all, a prison colony, part of the state penitentiary system –there were other places he could be sent, and literally dropped off the map. We would say ‘Siberia’, but in his day it was Kamchatka that he feared, the Vladivostok peninsula. This was not just a writerly fantasy, a figment of Thelwall’s understandably heated imagination. He had written enough about the widespread abuses of crimping and pressing to know that the destination was unimportant, that it was almost literally Nowhere. Once on board a British warship, he knew would be effectively gone. Instead, very much like the eponymous protagonist of Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Thelwall would find out that there was no place in Britain (England, Wales and Scotland) where he could act, speak, as he wanted. He could hardly be himself. He had to change his identity by changing both his modus vivendi and his modus operandus. Michael Scrivener has brilliantly analysed the ins and outs and the strengths and weaknesses of Thelwall’s defensive attempt to transform himself. He was willing to be a usual suspect, a defendant. He did not foresee becoming an unusual one, beyond not only the force of the law but also of it protections, such as they were. Instead, he was cast out onto the freely ‘voluntary’ mercy or malevolence of people who could act against him, or not, as they saw fit. These were the hegemonic ‘police’ that, led by the parish priest, hounded him off of his retreat at Llyswen farm in Wales two years later. These were the smartalecky young critics and lawyers, including Francis Jeffrey and other friends of the young Walter Scott, who harassed him when he showed up, an innocent elocutionary lecturer, in Edinburgh two years after that. By disruptive behaviour in the hall and misleading reports in the press, they soon sent him packing on his way, not coincidentally insuring his financial losses as well. Against such ‘policing’ he could only, and now wholly ineffectually, having no law to use or to combat, publish futile remonstrances and clarifications, to which no one paid any attention except to laugh at his plight.25 It was the same strategy that George Canning and Pitt’s other bright young men had honed to perfection in The AntiJacobin of 1797–8.

3 THELWALL IN HIS OWN DEFENCE: THE NATURAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT OF BRITONS John Barrell

I In May 1794 John Thelwall was arrested on suspicion of high treason, imprisoned until December and put on trial at the Old Bailey. The chief crime alleged against him was that, together with other members of the London Corresponding Society and Society for Constitutional Information who were also arrested, he had participated in the meetings of a committee aiming to organize a convention intended to achieve a reform in parliament – by universal manhood suffrage, annual parliaments, and (so the prosecution claimed, on the flimsiest of evidence) the abolition of the House of Lords. According to the law officers of the crown, who conducted the prosecution, the committee was to have claimed to be a convention of delegates of the whole people, and far more representative therefore than the corruptly elected House of Commons. On the basis of this claim it would either have announced that it had superseded parliament, or, by its strength of numbers, would have sought to ‘overawe’ parliament into agreeing to a reform. The leaders of the reform societies themselves gave a different and altogether more plausible account of what they were trying to do. Under interrogation they could be vague about it, no doubt aware that to specify the convention as having any particular aim would lay themselves open to a charge of some sort. Thus Thomas Hardy, secretary of the LCS, told the Privy Council that the aim of the convention was ‘to inform the Nation of the necessity of a Parliamentary Reform, and then the business will do itself; though I do not exactly know how’.1 In other examinations by the council, and in various publications of the society, its members explained that they planned to call a convention of delegates not of the whole nation, but of reform societies from around Britain, in order to confer on the possibility of summoning a further convention which could truly claim to represent the people at large and not just the societies themselves.2 If this sec– 39 –

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ond convention could be organized, and if it voted in favour of the societies’ programme of reform, they believed that parliament would have no choice but to accede to its wishes. By the time of the arrests, however, the joint committee of the societies had made no progress, and the scheme for a convention was being edged towards the back burner. Like the others arrested and tried, Thelwall was acquitted, and shortly after his release he published a pamphlet, The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons, which he had written in prison and originally intended as his courtroom defence; – though in the end he wisely submitted to be represented by Thomas Erskine and Vicary Gibbs, who before Thelwall’s trial had already secured the acquittal of Thomas Hardy, the Secretary of the LCS and John Horne Tooke, the guiding spirit of the SCI. The pamphlet is one of Thelwall’s most brilliant pieces of writing. It is at once an explanation of what the reform societies were attempting to achieve, designed to confute the wilder imaginings of the prosecution; a witheringly accurate account of the legal arguments of the law officers and the trial judge, who had been forced to bend the law of treason almost beyond recognition in order to fit the societies’ activities into what they claimed was a new variety of the crime; and an argument to show that Thelwall and the others had been put on trial for attempting to exercise their constitutional rights – indeed, for attempting to perform what was their constitutional duty. The Natural and Constitutional Right is probably the most concise and is certainly the clearest contemporary summary of what the notorious treason trials of 1794 were about, and I offer this account of it partly as a help to understanding what was the most vital moment in Thelwall’s career, and partly because I believe its account of constitutional rights and duties, though deeply embedded in the oligarchic Britain of the eighteenth century and the arguments of one strand of eighteenth-century Whiggery, may still inspire us in the attempt to reclaim what has been lost from democracy in Britain. The law of treason, as set out in statute law, the precedent cases, the commentaries of authorities such as Sir Matthew Hale and Sir Michael Foster, is not a complex body of doctrine. The main difficulty in understanding the treason trials of 1794 lies in the arguments by which, in those trials, the crown lawyers were departing from that body of doctrine in order to represent the various activities of the reformers as a distinctive modern version of high treason. Indeed, as I read the trials, the crown lawyers were careful to avoid spelling out the full implications of their arguments, as if to do so would have risked outraging the juries and even embarrassing the judges into repudiating them, whereas, left murky as they were, the judges could endorse them, and did so with little comment or explication. Of the defence lawyers, only Thomas Erskine, in his defence especially of Tooke, and Robert Cullen, who had defended David Downie in a treason trial in Edinburgh a few months before those in London, appeared to grasp just what it

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was that the crown lawyers were trying to argue. But for whatever reason – and faced with the enormous piles of evidence collected by the prosecution, Erskine at least had enough to do – they too did not spell it out very fully. What the lawyers leave in the dark, Thelwall illuminates.

II The government was determined to use the law of treason to break the popular reform movement, not just because high treason was the most serious crime on the statute book and punished with exemplary cruelty, but because a charge of treason would enable the crown lawyers to produce evidence that would not have been admissible on the only plausible alternative charge of seditious libel. It was not easy to see, however, how Hardy, Tooke and Thelwall, by merely planning to summon a convention of delegates from the parliamentary reform societies in England and Scotland, had laid themselves open to such a prosecution for treason. In Scotland at the beginning of 1794 William Skirving, Maurice Margarot and Joseph Gerrald had been charged only with sedition for actually organizing and attending the British convention, which, notoriously, had adopted the forms and procedures of the National Convention of the new republic of France. The law of treason was the same in Scotland and England; but the crown lawyers in Scotland had repeatedly stated that, heinous though the crimes of the British conventionists had been, they did not – quite – amount to treason.3 In England, therefore, the law officers were faced with the problem of arguing that what it had been no more than sedition to do late in 1793, it was now high treason merely to plan to do in 1794; and this obliged them to invent some novel legal arguments. The crime of high treason was defined by an act of 1351, and among the various treasons it listed, two were referred to in the indictments of Thelwall and the others. It is treason, said the act, to ‘compass and imagine’ the death of the king, and it is treason to ‘levy war’ against the king. The words ‘compass’ and ‘imagine’, as they are used in this statute, are both understood to mean ‘intend’: the law against compassing and imagining the king’s death is most unusual in that the crime it defines is not an action but merely an intention. You cannot be charged in English law with killing the king, only with intending to kill him, and if you do actually kill him, that act is regarded in law simply as evidence of your prior criminal intention. To prove an intention to kill the king, it was necessary to prove that a defendant had committed some palpable action, some ‘overt act’ in which that intention was manifested. Exactly what constituted an overt act of treason was a complicated question, however, and almost all arguments about the meaning of the statute of treasons, including those in the trials of 1794, turned on this question.

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All major commentators on the law of treason agreed that conspiracies to depose or imprison the king, as well as to assassinate him, were overt acts that could be laid as evidence of compassing and imagining his death. The king’s life would inevitably be put at risk by such conspiracies, and the conspirators should obviously be regarded as intending the probable or the foreseeable consequences of their actions. Since the early seventeenth century, however, legal commentators had progressively extended the notion of what could constitute an overt act. In the late seventeenth century Sir Matthew Hale described an overt act of compassing and imagining as any act that ‘must induce’ the death of the king. Early in the following century, William Hawkins defined overt acts more capaciously, as any that ‘shew a Design as cannot be executed without … apparent Peril’ to the king’s life. By the mid century, Sir Michael Foster was willing to go still further: overt acts of treason, he declared, included ‘every thing Wilfully and Deliberately done or attempted, whereby his [the king’s] life may be endangered’.4 It had been perfectly reasonable to regard overt acts as disclosing an intention to put the king to death if that was their probable and foreseeable consequence; but in Foster’s definition the locus of the treasonable intention had shifted, so that overt acts now appeared to include intentional actions whose indirect, unintended and not so easily foreseeable results may have included putting the king in danger. Perhaps the most significant development, however, concerning the doctrine of overt acts, had involved the clause in the statute which made it high treason to levy war against the king. By the late seventeenth century lawyers distinguished two kinds of levying war. On the one hand was ‘direct’ levying, armed rebellions and insurrections with the aim of coming into the king’s actual presence and killing, deposing or imprisoning him; on the other was ‘constructive’ levying, aimed not against the king himself but his government, his ‘majesty’, and intended to achieve some reformation in the law, or to ‘reform’ or ‘new-model’ the government. Both these kinds of levying war were high treason, and the difference between them was important only when a conspiracy to levy war was discovered before it could launch an actual armed rebellion. An unfulfilled conspiracy to levy war was not in itself high treason; and though most authorities agreed that a conspiracy to levy direct war against the king’s own person could be laid as an overt act of imagining his death, since it clearly risked endangering the king’s life, a conspiracy to levy ‘constructive’ war, against his ‘government’, or his ‘majesty’, could not, and for the obvious reason that ‘the King of Constructive Treason’, as one lawyer put it, was immortal. ‘Treason itself cannot kill him’,5 for the government and majesty of the Crown do not die when the king dies but pass immediately to his successor. During the summer and autumn of 1794, a campaign in the loyalist press had represented the case against the reformers as overwhelming. To the government and the law officers, however, it must have been evident that it would not

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be straightforward for the prosecution to argue that the reform societies had deliberately intended the king’s death, or even his deposition or imprisonment. There was not the slightest evidence of any such intention. In his charge to the grand jury when the defendants were indicted, Lord Chief Justice Eyre, who presided over the treason trials, repeated an argument that had been advanced by loyalist politicians and writers prior to the trials and would be repeated endlessly after them; that the societies might have committed a distinctively ‘modern’, or ‘French’ treason. In previous cases of high treason, the argument went, the defendants had been seeking to remove one dynasty from the throne to replace it with another; but ‘modern’ treason – the attempt to establish manhood universal suffrage by ‘overawing’ the sovereign power – aimed at overthrowing the whole constitution, in which the king was included.6 The direct intention may not have been to remove the king, but the effects either of universal suffrage itself, or of the methods adopted to achieve it, might well include that result. Modern, French, treason, it seemed, was different from and worse than old-fashioned English treason; but perhaps for that very reason ‘modern’ treason did not come easily within the scope of the act of Edward III. In the event, the crown lawyers conducting the prosecutions of Hardy, Tooke and Thelwall decided to base the indictment on the charge that the societies had been engaged in a conspiracy to levy war against the king; that they intended to subvert the constitution, to depose the King, and put him to death; and for that purpose, and ‘with Force and Arms’, they conspired to excite insurrection and rebellion.7 There were, however, several difficulties in the way of substantiating this charge. The societies would claim that the evidence of their proceedings would clearly show they had not aimed to subvert the constitution at all and had never so much as contemplated endangering the king’s life; indeed, that their scheme of parliamentary reform went no further than the plan put forward in 1780 by the Duke of Richmond (now a convinced anti-reformer and member of William Pitt’s cabinet), and that their plan for a convention of delegates was borrowed from a similar plan advanced by Pitt himself.8 There was no serious evidence that the radicals had been contemplating an armed insurrection, and even if the juries could be persuaded that the societies had intended such a thing, it might be hard to persuade them that it was aimed directly, rather than constructively against the king, and so could be laid as an overt act of imagining the king’s death. The task of the crown lawyers was to find a way of arguing that the defendants’ plan to summon a peaceful, unarmed convention, with the intention of changing the basis on which the House of Commons was elected, amounted to nothing less than a conspiracy to levy war directly against the king himself, which would have led to his deposition and his death. The arguments they invented to demonstrate this were thoroughly ingenious. The notion that the societies had

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‘imagined’ in the sense of ‘intended’ the king’s death came to depend more than it had for any of the legal authorities on the indirect consequences of the overt acts set out in the indictment. The formula used by Eyre, in his charge to the Grand Jury, was that if the defendants had planned to summon a convention, who could say where it would have stopped?9 This might have been followed by that, which might be well have been followed by this other, which might well perhaps been followed by that other, and so on, and the king might have died. Overt acts were now not just actions that ‘must’ or ‘may’ endanger the king, but, as Sir John Mitford the Solicitor-General said in the trial of Hardy, that possibly ‘might’ endanger him. Hardy was guilty, he told the jury, if there had been ‘a conspiracy to take measures in consequence of which the King’s life might be put in hazard’.10 At the same time a particularly intriguing argument was advanced to show how what ‘might’ put the king’s life at risk would in fact be certain to do so, an argument indeed so bizarre that it alone justified Thelwall’s denunciation of the proceedings as an ‘absurdity’. It went like this. By the Coronation Oath Act, the king was obliged to swear to govern ‘according to the statutes in parliament agreed on, and the laws and customs of the same’. This act had always been understood as setting limits to the powers of the king; it was fundamental to the constitutional monarchy that distinguished Britain from the absolute monarchies of Europe. According to the law officers, however, the point of this act was to oblige the king to defend the laws and the constitution, to resist any attempt to put pressure on him and his parliament, by force (or, as we shall see, by ‘implied’ force), even at the hazard of his life. Thus anyone who conspired to levy war for such purposes must be regarded as imagining the king’s death, for he must foresee that the king will be bound by his oath to oppose him, and that in the ensuing struggle the king’s life must be put at risk.11 The aim of this argument was to argue away the distinction, which had been reaffirmed as recently as 1780 by the greatest of eighteenth-century judges, Lord Mansfield, between conspiracies to levy direct, treasonable war against the real king, and conspiracies to levy constructive war against his ‘majesty’ or government which were not treasonable at all.12 Once the law officers had discovered this argument, which they first tried out before some compliant judges in the trials of Robert Watt and David Downie in Edinburgh, they were at liberty to acknowledge just how constructive, how indirect, the reform societies’ conspiracy to levy war really was. They could deal with the fact that there was no evidence of an intention to depose the king by arguing that, if the proposed convention had been successful in overawing king and parliament into granting a reform against their will, they would have ‘virtually’ restrained the king from acting according to his own will, and so would ‘virtually’ have deposed him for as long as it took him to give his assent to a

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reform bill.13 They dealt with the fact that the societies were supposed to have conspired to levy war without the ‘force of arms’ necessary to do so by an argument equally novel. The crown lawyers were willing, at least in theory, to concede the people’s right to meet and to frame petitions, provided that, by the humility of their address, they made it clear that they were making no claim to popular sovereignty, and provided they met in numbers too small to be able to enforce their wishes, should parliament refuse them. But, they pointed out, the reform societies had expressly repudiated attempting to secure their aims by petitioning, believing that universal suffrage was a natural right and that, if a majority of people agreed with them, they had a right not to beg but to demand it. To plan to demand universal suffrage therefore, even by an unarmed convention, was still to conspire to overawe the king and parliament, and was still a conspiracy to levy war, because the whole aim of the project was to show that a majority of the people wanted a reform, and to demand universal suffrage with the backing of most of the population was to bring to bear an ‘implied’ force on the government which would then be acting under an implied duress.14 In short, the prosecution were sometimes prepared to go so far as to concede that the societies were levying a merely virtual war with a merely virtual force and were imagining only a virtual deposition and death of the king of constructive treason; for they could still insist that, by the terms of the Coronation Oath, all this amounted to a compassing and imagining of the real death of the real king. The defence dealt with these arguments partly by relying on the precedents that the prosecution were trying to argue away, partly by claiming that the effect of the prosecution case was to turn high treason into a kind of figurative, or virtual crime, and partly by insisting that the defendants should be tried against the simple, unelaborated, unambiguous letter of the law, which made it high treason to intend the real death of the real king.

III That it is possible to isolate and spell out these prosecution arguments with some degree of clarity is in large measure due to Thelwall, who, in The Natural and Constitutional Right, offered the clearest clue to what he described as the ‘labyrinth of Constructions’, the crazily ramifying arguments by which modern treason was invented. Thelwall too uttered the clearest warnings of the danger they threatened to the constitution and to liberty of the subject. He picked up on the implications of Mitford’s alteration of the ‘must’ and the ‘may’ of the commentators into ‘might’. The argument of the prosecution, writes Thelwall, at base came down to this: A Convention in France ... overthrew the Constitution and brought the King to the scaffold; therefore a Convention might possibly overthrow the constitution of this

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Even sticking with Hale’s ‘may’, as the crown lawyers at their less fanciful had done, the implication of the prosecution’s argument was that ‘to seek to alter or ameliorate the laws and constitution … is high treason, because the people may possibly become unreasonable in their demands, and the government may possibly oppose their wishes, and a contest may possibly ensue, in which the King may possibly be deposed or slain …’15 Indeed, even if the government did not oppose their wishes, Thelwall pointed out, to seek legal or constitutional change by means of meetings and petitions might still end in treason – indeed, by the other novelties in the prosecution case, it would certainly do so. He painstakingly examined the notion of virtual restraint, which since the Edinburgh treason trials had been made the foundation of the doctrine of virtual deposition, and by which, as he put it, an alledged conspiracy for the purpose not of deposing the King; – not of imprisoning the King – not of putting bodily restraint or coercion upon him – but for the purpose of overawing parliament (as it is ambiguously called) and so, by assumed consequence, laying the mind of the King under bias or restraint, is offered … as an overt act of compassing or imagining the King’s death.16

The prosecution, by what Thelwall suggested was no more than a play on words, represented the opinion of a convention ‘of 50 or 60 individuals’ as a ‘Power’ as a ‘Force’, in order to support the claim that to levy war against the king it was not necessary to have arms, but simply to wield an ‘implied force’. He repudiated the doctrine of ‘the unity and indivisibility of the King and Parliament’, enunciated by Eyre and confirmed in every attempt by the prosecution to dissolve the distinction between the person and authority of the king, pointing out that in numerous occasions the interests of king and parliament were ‘in diametrical opposition’. He argued that the Coronation Oath argument rested on two ‘palpable fallacies’; that the oath, by pledging the king to govern according to established laws and customs, thereby bound him to ‘resist all alterations of existing laws’; and that the king was bound to resist by force of arms peaceful attempts to change the laws.17 ‘You cannot but foresee’, he told his imaginary jury, the ruin and dissolution that must inevitably follow if Ministers and Crown Lawyers are suffered to alter the law of treason at their pleasure, by newfangled constructions and circuitous inferences. ... How effectually will all the barriers erected by our ancestors for the security of our lives and liberties be thrown down? and how absolutely

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will it be in the power of ministers to destroy every virtuous individual who shall be obnoxious to their caprice ...?18

In short, what Thelwall understood more clearly and more urgently even than Erskine was that the doctrines on which the case for the prosecution was based were an attempt to lock up power in the corrupt and unrepresentative parliament of 1794, and to do so in a way that would repudiate, and was actually intended to repudiate, the allegedly representative character of the Commons – the notion that the legitimacy of the House of Commons lay in the fact that it represented those who had no vote as well as those who had. The strongest argument for the reality of this ‘virtual representation’ lay in the right to petition, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, which necessarily implied the right to meet in large numbers to frame and vote petitions. The Whig doctrine on the power of petitioning had been memorably set out by Earl Camden in his famous Lords protest of February 1780, which had been signed by various peers who at the time of the trials were members of Pitt’s cabinet. Among these were the Duke of Richmond, once a proponent of universal manhood suffrage who had warned reformers that parliament would never reform itself, and the job would have to be done, as he put it, by ‘THE PEOPLE AT LARGE’,19 and the Duke of Portland, now Home Secretary and the man who had made the final decision to prosecute Thelwall and the others on a charge of treason for attempting to collect the opinions of ‘the people at large’. In those prosecutions the crown lawyers were arguing that any large meeting of the people in pursuit of some political aim was an attempt to overawe parliament, therefore to restrain the king in the exercise of his powers, therefore in effect to depose him, and therefore in effect to kill him. Camden, whose protest was read to the court in Hardy’s trial, had on the contrary insisted that if the people had a right to petition in numbers, then a fortiori they had a right to meet peaceably in numbers to frame their petitions; and when he came to consider what would happen if parliament refused to grant a petition which could claim to represent ‘a great or notorious majority of the people’, he gave the answer that such a case could not be supposed. For ‘it cannot be presumed’, he said, that the Commons would act in defiance of the will of the great majority of those it represented.20 In short, it was the constitutional duty of the Commons to permit itself to be overawed; it was the right of constituents, and especially of those without the vote, who had no other way of influencing parliament, to overawe their representatives, and if their representatives refused to be overawed they ceased to be representatives.

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IV This belief, that those without votes as well as those with them had a right to dictate to the Commons if they could speak with a sufficient degree of unanimity, was thus vital to the claim that the unreformed House of Commons was indeed a house of representatives. It was a belief it cost the Whig elite little to adopt, for it appeared to grant the unenfranchised a merely symbolic power which they would never be organized enough to make real, for they would never be able to show that a sufficient number of them were of one mind. The trials of Thelwall and the rest were all about the attempt of the reform societies to realize their symbolic position in the constitution by associating in a nationwide political movement. In justification of this, Thelwall took Camden’s argument a stage further. The reform societies had a right to attempt to show parliament that the majority of the people wanted a reform; and supposing they could manage to show that, parliament would be obliged to grant the reform they sought; if it did not, the societies had the right of ‘concentrating the public opinion, till it was no longer decent for the legislature to resist the wishes of the people’. But under a system of ‘virtual representation’, he argued, by which ‘the right of the people to a voice in the government’ was denied, the right to associate and to address the government and legislature became more than a right; it was a constitutional duty.21 For since the people’s ‘virtual’ representatives could not know their needs and grievances as well as the people did themselves, the people must have both a right and a duty to inform, advise, remonstrate with parliament and even to instruct it. Indeed, the right of the people to meet, by delegates in convention or in any other peaceable way they chose, in order to instruct the legislature, became not just a right, not merely a duty, but a necessity.22 Government could not be properly carried on unless the virtually represented were free to advise and instruct their virtual representatives; and the leaders of the reform societies had been put on trial for doing exactly what the constitution required that the people should do ‘How infamously’ the people ‘have been plundered of their rights by the pretended champions of their Constitution’, exclaimed Thelwall. For ‘if it is high treason,’ he wrote, ‘to seek for political amelioration by impressing the legislature with an aweful sense of the collective wishes of the people, in what but in name consists the difference between the free-born Briton and the Asiatick slave?’ ‘If this be a crime, Representation is itself High Treason; and to talk of the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled, is mockery and absurdity.’ 23 It was no doubt partly because he saw himself as a much more than virtual representative of those without votes that Thelwall understood so clearly that the devious arguments of the prosecution in the 1794 trials were intended to concentrate power forever in a corrupt and in every sense unrepresentative parliament, and

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that led him to defend so strenuously the right to associate. So strongly indeed was the right of the people to come together in political meetings asserted and vindicated in the trials and in the literature they gave rise to, most notably in Thelwall’s pamphlet, that the right had to be formally legislated away by Seditious Meeting Act, passed amidst huge protests a year after Thelwall’s acquittal.

V Reflecting on the situation of the unenfranchised in Britain in the 1790s, Thelwall asked, Why has commerce, by which the opulence, the pleasures, the luxuries of the higher orders are so eminently increased, sunk the industrious poor into still more abject misery? Why is the labourer taken from his plough, or the manufacturer from his loom to bleed in foreign contests? while those who riot in luxurious indolence enjoy the glory of his scars at home? Why? – Because only the opulent and powerful are represented in Parliament; and therefore the opulent and powerful alone are they whose interests the representatives find it necessary to consult. If once in every year the poor man’s vote were as important as his employer’s, the poor could not be forgotten.24

Thelwall and his colleagues in the LCS imagined that universal manhood suffrage and annual parliaments would bring an end, not to economic inequality, but to a system in which Britain could be governed by a ruling class which took little or no thought for the condition of the poor. They did not believe that universal suffrage in itself would secure this change, for under the system of septennial parliaments that prevailed through most of the eighteenth century it would still give the governors plenty of time to enrich themselves at the expense of the public before they had to face the electorate again. They did not doubt, though, that the poorest members of society, if once they were admitted to the franchise, would find their lives forever changed for the better under a system of universal suffrage. They could not have imagined the situation that British democracy finds itself in now, in which the gap between rich and poor steadily increases with the encouragement of both main political parties, which at each change of government simply swap scripts, and compete only in offering the best deal to the few thousand self-interested floating voters in marginal seats by whom elections are now decided. It hardly needs saying that no one would argue now for the benefits of annual parliaments. Only a thoroughgoing change in the system of representation could rescue us from what the human rights lawyer Michael Mansfield has described as ‘a non-participative democracy in which the ballot-box is rendered almost powerless’.25 With ever fewer of the electorate believing that it is worth the trouble to vote, Thelwall’s insistence not only on the right but the duty, still more the

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necessity, of extra-parliamentary organization, of associating to attempt to influence, persuade and overawe parliament, may be thought of as having a new kind of urgency and relevance. The overawing of the government currently serves the rich very well: while I have been writing and revising this essay there have been successful campaigns, accompanied by threats of various kinds, against a series of government proposals to make marginal increases in taxes that mostly affect the rich and the comfortably-off, while protests at an increase in the income tax paid by the childless poor have been brushed aside. With both government and opposition intensely relaxed at the prospect of the poor getting relatively poorer, it may be only that a return to extra-parliamentary association can enable those who have been disenfranchised by the new politics to exert greater pressure on their rulers.

4 LABOUR, CONTINGENCY, UTILITY: THELWALL’S THEORY OF PROPERTY Robert Lamb

Introduction Though one of the most important and influential British pamphleteers of the 1790s, John Thelwall never composed a systematic political theory. The closest he came was probably his The Rights of Nature Against the Usurpations of Establishments, a work that has received increasing attention from historians of political and economic thought in recent years.1 Published in 1796, at a time when Britain had experienced almost famine conditions, the third of the four letters that comprise The Rights of Nature offers an impassioned, often indignant account of the economic oppression suffered by a labouring poor at the mercy of the tyranny of their employers and the state. But more than this, it – mainly through a neat twist on Locke’s labour theory of value – makes an impressive and innovative case for the moral entitlement of individual workers to the fruits of their labour and thus for a significant redistribution of material resources. Indeed, as several scholars have noted, Thelwall’s account would seem to have anticipated (if that is not too terribly Whiggish a term to use) the conceptualisation of worker exploitation later developed by socialist thinkers. Thelwall’s critical account of the distribution of material resources is thus regarded by historians as a crucial bridge from the eclipse of the eighteenth-century republican tradition by its radical liberal and socialist successors. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it is the redistributive aspect of Thelwall’s argument – the proto-socialist analysis of exploited workers and the corresponding case for the redistribution of resources – that has occupied the attention of most historians and political theorists. There has been far less interest in the theoretical case that Thelwall marshals for private property rights themselves: in other words, how he is able to argue that the right to private property ownership is an inviolable moral right in the first place; what his justification for that right is. This chapter explores this issue in order to raise an interpretive issue that concerns how historians of ideas can (or perhaps even should) understand Thelwall’s political – 51 –

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writing. The focus of my analysis is his simultaneous appeal to three political traditions that are not merely different from, but seem also to stand in tension with, each another: natural rights, the historicized economic sociology of the Scottish Enlightenment and utilitarianism. The significance of this interpretive issue is twofold. First, it concerns how we are to understand the identity of Thelwall’s thought: the nature of his intellectual development and the extent to which his political, moral and economic thought seems to have become, by 1796, an interesting fusion of the three different traditions identified. His endorsement of these three rival traditions is notably at the expense of any concern with civic virtue; in The Rights of Nature he does not seem to entertain the possibility of, let alone defend, any notion of ‘virtuous’ poverty.2 Second, and arguably more importantly, it concerns Thelwall’s intellectual legacy and the extent to which we can legitimately read him as positing a coherent political theory. While there is no doubt that the British reform movement in the 1790s was united by nothing more than, as Mark Philp puts it, a ‘fragmented ideology’3, there is no reason to consider the distinct political arguments advanced by individual reformers as similarly fragmented. As I later argue, it seems legitimate – indeed perhaps necessary – to present Thelwall’s drawing together of disparate philosophical traditions as a unified theoretical account of individual rights as the alternative seems to point to a denial of agency.

Labour and Radicalized Lockean Natural Rights The political tradition that Thelwall appeals to most directly in The Rights of Nature is, as its title suggests, that of natural rights. Claims about natural rights and their political entailments were commonplace in British political discourse in the 1790s, particularly in service of the reform movement, where Thomas Paine invoked them most comprehensively.4 As with Paine’s Agrarian Justice, Thelwall’s The Rights of Nature uses a commitment to inviolable individual rights to offer a radical refashioning of the justification of private property ownership most famously associated with John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. These works written by Paine and Thelwall (each without knowledge of the other’s) both endorsed some of the foundational principles of Locke’s account yet sought also to reveal its radical entailments. For Locke, as for earlier natural law thinkers like Grotius and Pufendorf, private property rights emerge historically from a situation of original communism, in which natural resources can only be exclusively held if they serve the purpose of subsistence. In their accounts, although the world is bequeathed to all individuals, communally by God, individuals can come to acquire rights of private ownership over particular resources under certain circumstances or in lieu of certain activities and provided certain provisos are met. What makes

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Locke unique in the natural law tradition is the way in which he explains and justifies the emergence of legitimate private property rights from this situation of original communism. For him it is the application of a person’s labour upon (or ‘mixing with’5 as he memorably puts it) a particular resource that generates almost inviolable rights to it for the labourer in question; rights that include the power to transfer the holding in question or bequeath it to one’s children.6 The reason that labour as an activity is able to generate such exclusive claim rights is because it is an activity that individuals have been commanded to engage in by God; this is because the effect of labour is the improvement of the natural world, something that ensures that we fulfil our paramount moral obligation to preserve our lives.7 An important component of Locke’s argument – the component that explains why he has remained such an important figure within modern libertarian politics – is the fact that it is only the initial act of labour that generates ownership rights rather than the continuing engagement in labour as an activity. Thus, on the Lockean account it does not matter how much one labours when assessing the legitimacy of a property holding, but only that the holder in question was the first to labour on a particular resource at a time when it had no owner. Property rights are not distributed according to quantity of labour but simply by initial acts of labour. Crucially, as it is only the initial act of labour that is necessary to establish inviolable rights of ownership, property owners are able to utilize the labours of others without surrendering the holdings they have legitimately acquired. So, Locke is able to confidently assert that ‘the Turfs my Servant has cut … become my Property, without the assignation or consent of any body’.8 Because the initial act of labour has generated a private ownership right for the master, the servant might be entitled to an agreed wage, but this wage need not bear any relation to the amount of labour that is actually exerted. Indeed, the worker in question has no rights to remuneration for labour beyond the contingencies of any agreed contract with an employer, something that is of course likewise contingent on bargaining power. In The Rights of Nature Thelwall – like Paine in Agrarian Justice – invokes this Lockean account of property, but provides a crucial alteration, one that radically transforms its political meaning. Indeed, what Thelwall does is offer a labour theory of legitimate acquisition that performs a dual role: on the one hand, it justifies the existence of legitimate private property over land; and on the other, it demands the extension of that right to individual workers by virtue of their labour. He begins from the same situation of original communism commonplace in natural law arguments and, like Locke, claims that this situation was legitimately disrupted by the labour of individuals: when an act of labour takes place, the individual in question gains an entitlement to the relevant resource. Thelwall claims that the rights generated by such exertions of labour means that

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‘we must bid a sad farewell’ to the initial circumstance of ‘equality of landed possession’.9 He further suggests an analogous relationship between the right a savage acquires over the game that he successfully hunts and the cultivator who claims ‘the produce of the land he has cultivated’.10 ‘The basis of property’, Thelwall declares, is ‘the right of the individual to the advantages resulting from his own industry and faculties, employed upon the common elements of nature’.11 So far, so Lockean. But what Thelwall then does is to radicalize this Lockean approach by insisting that the entitlement acquired through one’s industry and faculties actually extends beyond land ownership and into the commercial economy and thus to the labours of a waged worker. Unlike Locke, who insisted that ‘the turfs that one’s servant’ cut belonged not to the servant but to the master, Thelwall argues that labourers have fundamental rights that extend beyond what their individual masters decide to offer them. Individual labourers have rights that go beyond the content of particular contracts. In fact, for Thelwall ‘the labourer has a right to a share of the produce, not merely equal to his support, but, proportionate to the profits of the employer’.12 The entailment is that the property holdings of a worker increase in proportion to her labour since the assumption is that the profits accrued by an employer will increase in line with the quantity of labour exerted. Workers also retain their right to subsistence provisions: they each have ‘a right to the gratification of the common appetites of Man; and to the enjoyment of [their] rational faculties’, which no individual can ever consent to giving up’.13 As Gregory Claeys notes, such a ‘generalized account of wage labor … went well beyond the theories of any of [Thelwall’s] predecessors’.14 For Thelwall, then, property ownership appears to have a clearly Lockean basis; albeit one that contains a redistributive rather than libertarian logic.

Historical Contingency Yet one of the most remarkable aspects of Thelwall’s natural rights argument is that it is embedded within the ‘four-stage’ historical account of economic development associated with the Scottish Enlightenment. The reason that this is remarkable is that the theoretical statuses of the foundational claims that define the two traditions would seem to be in conflict. Whereas the four-stage account of history historicized morality as a practice within its sociological account of human life, natural rights claims relied explicitly on a foundational commitment to a universal and thus explicitly ahistorical moral standard. The significance of this tension can be shown through examination of the status of history and its contingency in Thelwall’s account. For natural law thinkers such as Locke or Pufendorf, the emergence of property ownership as a political institution based on moral right is in some

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sense historically inevitable. The reason for this is that God has commanded us to establish the conditions necessary for its existence.15 However, within the historicized account of economic development that Thelwall embraces, the emergence of property ownership is actually a contingent occurrence and not the result of any moral imperative and definitely not a sanction from God. It is the case that Thelwall occasionally appears to suggest that the existence of property is inevitable; at one point, for example, he describes the pastoral stage of human history as ‘little calculated for permanent establishment’.16 He also provides a quite dramatic account of how miserable human life is in order to explain why the phenomenon of private ownership emerges in the first place: without it subsistence ‘is scanty and precarious; the social passions are languid and joyless; the faculties are sluggish; the intellect slumbers…;and all the nobler and finer feelings of our nature, lie benumbed in the oblivious bog of indolence: the endearing intercourses of friendship are scarcely known; the reciprocations of relationship are but a sad chain of domestic tyranny and servitude’.17

Such a description – in pointing to how it has improved human existence – arguably points to the unavoidable nature of property as a social institution. Nevertheless, although the factors he lists all seem to reveal sound reasons for human societies to desire the institution of private property, Thelwall is insistent that its emergence is not actually inevitable and is in fact entirely contingent. He is adamant that property ownership need not exist. He makes it very clear at the start of the third letter of The Rights of Nature that property is ‘neither coeval with man, nor an immediate or inevitable consequence of political Society’.18 This claim about the sheer contingency of the emergence of property as an institution is mirrored in the account provided by Paine in Agrarian Justice, who declared that ‘it is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural, uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be [were it not for cultivation], the common property of the human race’.19 The appeal to these two alternative types of political argument – natural rights and stadial history – leaves both Thelwall and Paine with a very important question to answer: what justifies the right to own private property? Why can individuals come to acquire exclusive claim rights over resources beyond what they immediately need to subsist? The answer, as the previous section suggested, is that the individual has laboured upon that natural resource. But this merely begs a further, pointed question, one asked of Locke’s theory by American philosopher Robert Nozick: ‘why isn’t mixing what I own with what I don’t own a way of losing what I own rather than a way of gaining what I don’t?’.20 In other words, what is so special, morally speaking, about an individual’s labour and why does it justify inviolable ownership rights over things? Locke is of course able to

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offer an unequivocal answer to such questions because of the deep theological underpinnings of his political thought: labour is important because it is something God has commanded us to do, to improve the natural world in order to sustain our lives. But Thelwall and Paine both resist recourse to such a divine command. Paine does claim that God gave the natural world to us equally, but at no point does he suggest that the Creator told us to own exclusive property rights; in fact he explicitly rejects such a claim.21 Nor does he invoke any Lockean moral obligation for human beings to preserve their lives.22 Thelwall’s account goes even further by offering a defence of individual rights that appears to leave God out of the picture altogether: he claims not to ‘argue upon any theological or philosophical hypothesis of creation’23 in his discussion of property. But by doing that, he simply underlines the importance of giving some reason why labour as an activity is morally important enough to generate inviolable claim rights.

Utility The effect of Thelwall’s combination of natural rights claims with an account of the contingent nature of human economic development is the raising of what might be described as a justificatory difficulty about what exactly grounds an agent’s right to private ownership. One potential solution to this difficulty lies in what seems to be his invocation of a third tradition: utilitarianism. This appears when he declares that ‘the foundation of what is called Landed Property’ (as distinct from property rights over subsistence resources) is not ‘physical or abstract right’ but ‘moral and political expediency’.24 The suggestion here, then, is that although the moral basis of property ownership over resources we use (including, for Thelwall, animals) is grounded in our labour or industry, the moral basis for ownership of land is actually expediency and therefore consequentialist. The justification for an individual’s exclusive entitlement over land is that such entitlements have positive consequences for our existence, not that we have a natural moral right to it. While this might fit with his views on the contingent nature of historical development, it would completely undermine his commitment to natural rights, the value of which could thus only be understood instrumentally, as a means to an end. The positive consequences that Thelwall cites show a markedly utilitarian concern for human welfare rather than an interest in any other sort of end. He does not appeal to any teleological or perfectionist understanding of what is good for human beings, but rather only to their happiness. The conditions that Thelwall wishes to ameliorate are those of ‘misery’, of ‘degradation’ and of ‘suffering’.25 The reason, he claims, why we cannot return to the natural, rude state of equality of landed possession is not that it would violate individual natural rights

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to property, but rather that any attempt to do so would ‘plunge the world into yet unheard-of horrors’.26 When Thelwall passionately bemoans the emergence of the ‘unhappy distinction’ between proprietor and labourer and the difficulties that have resulted from their relationship, he again displays a seemingly utilitarian view.27 His argument is that the contractual relationship between the two could have initially been ‘comparatively fair, and grounded in mutual advantage’, but then traces its degradation. Then, crucially, the question he poses is not ‘does the relationship violate individual rights?’ but rather ‘Is the condition of the multitude improved?’ by its existence.28 If individuals have natural rights to the produce of their labour, then any improvement of their condition would seem, though obviously welcome, ultimately of secondary importance. Also, in the Second Letter of The Rights of Nature, when Thelwall discusses the foundations of rights arguments, he states that ‘the rights of man … are determined by his wants, and his faculties; and the means presented by the general system of nature … for the gratification of the former, and the improvement of the latter’.29 The idea that rights exist because individuals have wants to satisfy, would seem to give those wants some kind of normative priority, which might be further evidence for a utilitarian interpretation of Thelwall’s justification for property rights. There are admittedly some potential problems with any utilitarian interpretation. For one thing, Thelwall doesn’t actually deploy the term ‘utility’ in his account of just property rights. The absence of this term might seem at first to derail the account I have just sketched. In the years between its use to describe and vaguely assess morality by Hume and Smith and its precise systematisation as a hedonistic political principle by Bentham, ‘utility’ was deployed both loosely and narrowly, but above all frequently, in late eighteenth-century thought.30 Its absence in this case is, however, not a huge problem as provided there is sufficient relevant evidence, we can ascribe utilitarian beliefs to Thelwall regardless of his specific use of certain linguistic terms.31 So although in this instance he eschews the term ‘utility’32, he clearly does not eschew the concept it refers to. We know this because he expresses the belief that happiness is the measure of moral and political right: instead of ‘utility’ he talks of ‘advantages’, ‘welfare’, ‘general good’ ‘improvement’ of the multitude and ‘expediency’.33 Another potential problem might be the possibility of mistaking certain rhetorical conventions for any philosophical commitment to utilitarianism. Thelwall’s appeal to consequences and expediency might be thought unsurprising given his purpose: after all, few political writers can hope to achieve success with a popular audience without claiming that the proposals they suggest will make individual people happier. In this case, he is certainly unlikely to argue that the consequence of respecting labourers’ rights will be to make society more miserable. But this worry can also be assuaged fairly easily. Distinguishing between

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the expression of sincere beliefs of political thinkers and the rhetoric they use to get their arguments across to the public is rarely a completely straightforward interpretive task. What is usually required to make such a distinction is further evidence, and in this case there are plenty of reasons to accept Thelwall’s sincere commitment to some form of utilitarianism. Thelwall’s other writing clearly indicates he adheres to a utilitarian definition of right, both when it is addressed to particular political issues and more abstract moral matters. Thus, when offering arguments against Britain’s war with France, he suggests that ‘no war can be just that is not politic; and by politic I mean productive of the happiness of the people; for how can that be good which does not secure the general happiness of mankind’34 and when addressing the role of political authorities, he argues that ‘the duty of government [is] to promote the general happiness and welfare of the human race’.35 When concerned with more abstract issues, Thelwall defines virtue as ‘the happiness and welfare of the human race’36 and conceives the nature of moral obligation as entailing ‘that all our endeavours should be directed only to promote the happiness and welfare of the human species: that welfare and that happiness which ought to be the dearest object of every man’s pursuit’.37 Thelwall’s apparently utilitarian commitment to the promotion of human happiness is perhaps traceable to his close intellectual relationship with William Godwin, whose Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, first published in 1793, had a huge influence on him. Though definitely not a Godwinian in every respect – most obviously in his strikingly different view of the utility of political associations – Thelwall did embrace most of the ideas defended in that work, by the person he subsequently referred to as his ‘philosophical father’.38 Even when criticizing Godwin’s Political Justice, he described it as a ‘singular work’, one that advocated ‘the most extensive plan of freedom and innovation ever discussed by any writer in the English language’.39 By the second edition of that text (revised and published in 1795), Godwin’s utilitarianism was unambiguous: for him, ‘pleasure and pain, happiness and misery, constitute the whole ultimate subject of moral enquiry. There is nothing desirable but the obtaining of the one and the avoiding of the other’.40 As shown, there is much evidence to suggest that Thelwall shared this belief.

How to Make Sense of This (and Why Bother) I suggested earlier that Thelwall’s account of property contains a justificatory ambiguity, because it appears to ground rights of ownership simultaneously in firstly the natural rights that individuals have to the produce of their labour and secondly an explanation of the history of economic development that seems to reveal the sheer contingency of such rights. By further revealing his commit-

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ment to a third philosophical tradition, utilitarianism, it might appear that his account of property looks even more problematic, perhaps completely incoherent. What are we to make of this? How is it possible to make sense of Thelwall’s claim that property ‘rests upon the joint foundations of general expediency, and of individual right’?41 The most convincing way of ironing out his ambiguous account of property rights is by giving normative priority to utility; thus placing weight on his declaration that it is not abstract notions of ‘rights’ but rather ‘expediency’ that justifies the existence of private ownership of land. It cannot be done the other way around: we cannot prioritize rights over utility because while a utilitarian account can explain the value of rights instrumentally, a rights-based account cannot explain the value of utility in a non-circular manner. So, we can present Thelwall’s theory of property as comprised of three key propositions: (A) Ownership rights are morally justified by instances of labour (both prior to and within commercial society). (B) Property ownership as a historical event is contingent and not a necessary outcome of human development. (C) Landed Property rights are justified on the basis of a calculation of their expediency for the multitude and contribution to human happiness. Entitlements over items of property that can be considered as subsistence resources are justified with reference solely to natural rights and entitlements over land are justified with the utility guaranteed by the observance of those entitlements. Thelwall’s theory of property rights, at least as far as land is concerned, has a utilitarian basis. This analysis of Thelwall’s writings on property rights touches on an important interpretive problem often faced by historians of political thought: the extent to which a selection of a thinker’s works or individual arguments within a single work can and should be rendered theoretically coherent. Another related interpretive problem concerns the extent to which the writings of past political thinkers can or should be read at the most abstract level of philosophical argument or as contributions to irreducibly localized, particular debates. These two problems are often conflated, in part because worries about the first are often parasitic on worries about the second: if the arguments advanced by an individual writer are mired in a dispute over issues that are highly specific to a particular historical circumstance, they are presumably less likely to comprise a coherent theory. Two initially influential but now rather old-fashioned approaches to the history of ideas that conflate these problems offer misguided solutions to them and flawed interpretive prescriptions. One approach, associated with the work of Arthur Lovejoy, assumes the history of ideas to be characterized by debates over timeless, eternal issues or ‘unit-ideas’ and therefore concluded that each text

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could be plausibly read as essentially a contribution to such debates.42 Individual thinkers are thus assumed to be offering coherent theories. Such an assumption seems indefensible in its reliance on unsustainably essentialist assumptions about the nature of history. Another equally dubious approach, associated with the work of Quentin Skinner, assumes that the history of thought is characterized only by localized, particularistic debates with individual thinkers incapable of advancing abstract philosophical arguments that can be understood beyond their immediate context.43 Individual thinkers are assumed to be offering only localised speech-acts and thus historians should reject any ‘myth of coherence’.44 Such an assumption seems indefensible in its ignorance of the possibility that individuals do frequently seek to offer coherent theories. The correct way to approach the writing of past thinkers is surely not to assume either way but rather to presume a minimal standard of coherence in the ideas they seek to communicate and beliefs they intend to express.45 But even if this is so, the question remains: why should we ascribe such coherence to Thelwall? Is there sufficient evidence to do so? This remains something of an open question and the interpretation I have offered could still be rejected. It could be argued that Thelwall’s discussion of property merely represents the pulling together of various rival discourses into a conceptually confused argument designed to make the case for the redistribution of resources. It could be suggested that he is better understood as pamphleteer than political philosopher. But this alternative reading would effectively reduce his writing to the status of ideology rather than theory, an unjustified, yet quite common move when considering political thinkers of the 1790s. Consider the following analysis from H. T. Dickinson: Thelwall and William Godwin recognized the important role of labour in the production of wealth, but they did not develop this insight into a coherent theory of labour, which might have enabled them to argue more effectively for a fairer redistribution of wealth. Thelwall also dimly perceived that the working conditions of the poor, which brought them together for a large part of the day, might provide them with a greater awareness of their grievances and a better opportunity to combine their numerical strength. This idea did not, however, lead Thelwall to suggest that the workers might be the means of their own salvation if they put their numerical strength and economic value to good use.46

For Dickinson – whose analysis manages to sound both Whiggish and Marxist at the same time – Thelwall’s role, as ideologue rather than theorist, is clear. He grasps the importance of labour but failed to offer a ‘coherent theory’ of it and only ‘dimly perceived’ the possibilities for revolutionary action uncovered by later socialist thinkers. Such a view is the obvious alternative to approaching Thelwall’s writing as if they contain coherent theories of various moral and political phenomena and its effect would be to rob him of any substantial theoretical legacy.

5 ‘A LOUD, A FERVID, AND RESOLUTE REMONSTRANCE WITH OUR RULERS’: JOHN THELWALL, THE PEOPLE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY Richard Sheldon

Thelwall’s best-known public oration was staged on 26 October 1795 at the giant open-air meeting at Copenhagen Fields to protest against war, the high price of bread and the absence of effective political representation. Three days later came the attack on George III’s coach at the opening of parliament by crowds clamouring for peace and a reduction in the price of bread, threatening ‘a king without a head’, if their demands were not met. These events marked only the crescendo of an argument that commenced earlier in the year as food prices inexorably rose and as riot and popular agitation spilled onto the streets. For Thelwall the deep cause of the crisis lay in the absence of political representation, and the solution was to be sought in ‘a loud, a fervid, and resolute remonstrance with our rulers’.1 ‘Remonstrance’ of course is a gesture towards the long shadow cast by the political contests of the seventeenth century, suggesting to the historicallyminded the precedence of the Great Remonstrance presented to Charles I at the Long Parliament, which had complained amongst other things about the burden of maintaining long and costly wars.2 But Thelwall’s pronouncements in this year, delivered as lectures, then published in The Tribune, have been freighted with extra significance, suggesting indeed a watershed in political thought: the moment at which the powerful modern sociology of political economy was first set out in defence of the labouring poor. This essay explores the nature of Thelwall’s contribution to what might be termed the political economy of English Jacobinism. Interest in Thelwall as an English Jacobin theorist has grown in recent years; he has also come to occupy a crucial position in the historiography of British radicalism, so much so that a careful review of precisely what he said, together with its context, is required in order both to move away from some inaccurate portrayals of his politics and to recapture the true sources of his originality. Unlike – 61 –

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thinkers such as Major Cartwright, who said little about economic problems and practically ignored the contemporary experience of dearth, Thelwall explicitly considered the question both in his lectures and in The Rights of Nature. Reformers and reactionaries alike knew well the potential dangers of subsistence crises; the French revolution had been presaged by serious rioting in Paris. Thus for Collins, in his pioneer account of the London Corresponding Society, Thelwall was, of all that society’s members, the ‘most alive to economic distress and to the relation between such distress and political action.’3 For Thompson the interest in economic thought was of momentous significance: Thelwall ‘took Jacobinism to the borders of socialism’, and ‘revolutionism’; his ideas would enter ‘into the stream of nineteenth-century working class politics’.4 The 1790s gave birth to the most remarkable political contests of the modern period. Whilst the revolution debate spurred by Burke and Paine has been discussed in every generation, economic issues have been comparatively neglected, despite their obvious interest as possible precursors to the emergence of socialist thought in the early nineteenth century. It was in this decade that the tension between the revolutionary goal of liberty and the conditions of equality first appeared with any kind of clarity, as the rights of private property and the rights of economic freedom came into conflict with the rights of the poor. The decade as a whole is marked by the shift from an optimistic liberalism identified with Adam Smith, to a pessimistic mood associated more with Malthus. A particular reading of the stringent sections of The Wealth of Nations dealing with the grain trade hardened opinion on the question of the economic rights of the poor and the nature of political economy and thus a more pessimistic and less benign Smith also emerged. Textual support for both Smithian positions can be deployed and the debate as to the real identity of Smith continues to this day. With all this came a marked change in the image of political economy. Whilst in the aftermath of 1789, The Wealth of Nations could be praised or blamed as a cause of the French revolution, by the early nineteenth century it was denounced by early socialists such as Fourier, and by romantic poets including Wordsworth, who now perceived the ‘false philosophy’ and, ‘The utter hollowness of that we name “The “Wealth of Nations”’.5 Whilst there has been an inclination amongst radical scholars to see economic problems and popular political agitation converging in the 1790s, detailed scholarship has not always borne this relation out. Arguably some strenuous interpretations over-egg the ‘proto-socialist’ nature of Thelwall’s writings, as well as the cogency of his economic diagnosis of his times (Thompson’s claims above have been described as ‘sheer fantasy’).6 Ironically, some of the more voluntaristic readings bear some resemblance to the paranoid fears of authorities in the revolutionary decade when Portland despatched Aaron Graham the Hatton

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garden magistrate to find evidence of his connections with the Naval Mutineers of 1797. The economic crisis and near-famine of the mid-1790s and its impact on radicalism have been downplayed in the most recent British history writing. The subsistence crises were not in any case subjected to thorough examination until the publication of Roger Wells’s Insurrection, and Wretched Faces in the 1980s. These argued that the years 1795–6, marked by high food prices, riot and widespread political disaffection were also a seminal period of class conscious labour and trade union activity.7 Whilst Wells’s work has drawn plaudits for its thoroughness, it did not set out to examine the question of political ideology in relation to dearth. The cultural and linguistic turns in history then drew the attention of scholars away from the analysis of ‘material’ concerns and political economy questions. Günther Lottes’s work on the enlightenment and the ‘plebeian public sphere’ in England had again focused upon the importance of Thelwall as a conduit between radical intellectuals and popular movements, but the absence of an English translation has limited its influence.8 David Jones shows that Thelwall was still maintaining radical connections during his welsh ‘retirement’ and that he was even present in the market place of Merthyr at the onset of food riots staged by local industrial workers.9 Gwyn Williams made much of these connections and speculatively projected a link between Thelwall and the later secret mountain reading groups in Voltaire and Paine which ‘supplied the first phase leadership of local Chartism.’ 10 Although Thelwall’s influence on Thomas Hodgskin, author of the influential work of popular political economy, Labour defended against the claims of capital (1825), can be detected, much more work remains to be done in order to prove continuity from the 1790s to the 1830s.11 A maximalist interpretation of Thelwall has emerged, then, which argues that he was a proto-socialist, armed with a labour theory of value, and an advanced conception of the relationship between the party, intellectuals and the masses in his advocacy of Jacobinism. The recent attention of intellectual historians, however, allows some precisions. Has been seen by Gregory Claeys as one of the most important ‘pro-commercial republican’ thinkers of the 1790s and the author of work which laid the foundations for Owenite and other forms of socialism.12 1795 was the year in which the economic crisis came to loom large in radical argument. Thelwall’s first lecture of the year on the subject of bread, ‘On the proper means of averting national calamities’, was delivered on 25 February, the day officially appointed for a solemn fast. He looked forward to a prospect of ‘famine, or little short of famine’ and promised ‘political remedies which might remove this grievance’.13 Thelwall scathingly likened the fast to the Catholic practice of processing with the remains of Saints in order to ward off natural disasters. Although dealing with many disparate factors involved in the creation of famine circumstances, he avowed to work upon ‘broad and universal principles;

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to consider universal justice and humanity, the deep root and solid trunk from which my arguments are to sprout and my conclusions grow’.14 His concern was how to ‘preserve a just proportion between the price of their wages and the price of the necessaries of life’.15 He began by stating the evident nature of the problem and by declaiming any intent to inflame passions leading to possible disorder. As well as blaming aristocratic corruption, luxury, the corn laws, trade embargoes, tithes, the decline of hospitality and other factors, Thelwall saw the war against France which had plunged the whole of Europe into conflict with a corresponding neglect of agriculture and commerce as the major cause (he specified 75 per cent) of the price increase, but without giving us his workings.16 Although Pitt was an admirer of Adam Smith and generally in favour of free trade, his government had disappointed liberals, first by refusing the export of flour requested by France to quell Parisian riots on the eve of revolution, then later engaging in pragmatic acts of market management. Further, his administration acted on the declaration of war in 1793 by adopting policies of aggressive mercantilism, seizing foreign neutral ships with cargoes of grain and bringing them to London, later destroying grain supplies on the continent which may have been appropriated by France. Thelwall argued that the disappearance of small farms had a profound economic effect in allowing giant landowners to treat farms as speculative enterprises, and a deep moral impact in removing the virtuous figure of the yeoman from the countryside (an eighteenth-century commonplace) and was not at all averse to quoting from Goldsmith in his lectures.17 He believed that larger, capitalized, farmers had more scope to monopolize and speculate on rising provision prices. Here he did depart somewhat from classic laissez-faire and from Adam Smith who had, dogmatically and controversially, denied the possibility of monopoly in the grain trade – arguing that the trade was too diverse to be monopolized and that the nature of the trade meant speculation was too risky a venture to succeed for any length of time. The critique of the monopolizing of farms was linked to an argument about sympathy. Thelwall rejected most models of equality as being impractical under current conditions of human development, and his substitute for the Golden age was a social model based on ‘imperceptible gradations of rank’ so that ‘the whole society, connected together by inseparable interests indulges that fellow feeling between man and man, from which … the real fruits of humanity and justice can be expected’. From this principle he builds a theory about social distance and our dispositions to act with humanity and justice. The calamities of the classes just below us can well be understood and sympathized with. If we see calamity or its threat in the rank closest to us then we will readily perceive its threat and will be naturally disposed to offer assistance. ‘But’ Thelwall argues, ‘he who has been nursed in pomp and luxury, looks down upon the poor drudge, by whom he is

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supported, as a beast of burden, created for his ease and advantage; and feels no more for his calamities.’ 18 Thelwall was notably tentative in suggesting that farms should be limited in size to no more than 200 acres each, but drew far short of calling for an agrarian law along such lines. 19 Although he defended the rights of the commoners, conceding that there had been calamitous consequences of enclosure, he still supported their extension under ‘fair and honest’ principles.20 Thelwall was an early opponent of the Corn Laws. He saw them as the result of combination among the ruling classes to keep up food prices and rents that would have been punished as a felony had it occurred among unrepresented mechanics or artisans.21 He asserted that ‘while the ports of nations are open, scarcity can never exist to any alarming degree. Every country, if not prevented by political impediments, will send its surplus productions to the best market.’ He continued, ‘The best market is always the country which is in most want, and therefore, those who have most of any particular commodity will carry it to the port where its scarcity is most notorious: so that the effects of that scarcity will hardly be perceptible to the community at large.’22 Such a benign view of free trade places Thelwall more in line with the Anti Corn Law league than with socialism or radical Chartism. Although prepared to accept the possibility of monopoly, he portrayed this more as a consequence of political corruption than the inefficiency or immorality of commerce. Later socialist thinkers, notably Charles Fourier, took a very different line on the rights of commerce to be left alone. Commercial freedom, allowing hoarding and speculation, amounted to a robbery of the social body rather than a set of actions that would, through the mechanism of the invisible hand, assist the common good. Discussing Adam Smith and referring to the practices of grain speculation in the period of the revolutionary wars, Fourier shifted nineteenth-century socialism onto an anticommercial plane where by and large it would remain.23 One of the great divides between pro-commercial republicans and anti-capitalist radicals, before and after the advent of socialism, is their position on the entitlements of the poor in times of scarcity. The ‘right to live’, the assertion that persons could legitimately claim necessary subsistence ‘was deeply rooted in western political culture by the late eighteenth century’.24 But it is far from clear that Thelwall endorsed this claim. Best known of the anti-commercial radicals, and a sometime associate of Thelwall, was Thomas Spence who spoke of enclosures and capitalist farming as denying men ‘the right to Live’ and who called for price controls and public granaries in the food crises of the 1790s.25 Thelwall’s position on this question, by contrast, is very closely allied to, and almost certainly derived from, that worked out by Turgot, Condorcet and (especially) Smith that unrestricted commerce and technological advancement pointed the way out of poverty and scarcity; a position that would be held by British liberal radicals

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until John Stuart Mill. The classical genealogy of the rise of socialist ideas follows the notorious egalitarian conspiracy of Babeuf, a revolutionary plot to do away with class distinctions hatched in the very same years of Thelwall’s interest in economic questions.26 There are good reasons to look at intellectual currents apart from classical narratives, and our understanding of the rise of socialism in the nineteenth century has been enriched by a shift in focus towards more plural sources. But if Thelwall faces the same problems in the same years and stands closer to Adam Smith than to Babeuf, then we may judge pro-commercial radicalism to be at some distance from socialism. Thelwall’s ideas also have a particular resonance in terms of what social historians have termed, following E. P. Thompson, ‘the moral economy of the poor.’27 Moral economy has been seen as a popular critique of economic liberalism, as well as a progenitor of cooperative socialism. It is difficult however to segue from Thelwall to the sentiments of the moral economy as he several times makes explicit criticisms of the actions and beliefs of rioters. Thelwall claimed to have remonstrated with workers on the ‘impropriety of tumult and violence’ and that their actions were in some ways playing into the hands of authorities who were happy to see ‘a few millers, bakers and butchers persecuted’ as these things drew attention away from calm investigation of the real causes of dearth and also gave them a pretext for strengthening the repressive agencies of the state. The people needed to learn that tradesmen in provisions were ‘as much oppressed as themselves; and that they must look higher [and] … think more deeply, if they would learn the means by which that oppression is to be removed.’28 He had little time for ‘the frantic proceedings of those, who have seized upon the shambles, the mills, and the bakers’ shops; and thus have endeavoured, by their arbitrary proceedings, to reduce the price of provisions. Thus far they think the interference of the people right: But as to political enquiry, to this they are too many of them dead.’29 Their victims were innocent victims of misdirected passions on the part of the crowd. Further, Thelwall associated the loyalist inspired anti-radical riots of the early 1790s with the food riots of 1795 in Birmingham: ‘Having wreaked their vengeance on those who refused to think upon religious and political topics as they dictated, they have no thought that they might do the same on those that did not choose to sell provisions at the price they demanded them.’30 The only permissible use of violence was as self defence in the final resort. Most radicals identified popular direct action with the disorder of the Gordon riots, or the more recent ‘Church and King’ mobs as well as the loyalist orchestrated ‘Paine burnings’ (in effigy), when they imagined crowds, rather less regulated in nature than the spontaneous cohesion, restraint and discipline of E.P. Thompson’s moral economy riots. Thelwall’s imprecations against violence are made too frequently to be dismissed as saving clauses thrown out with an eye on the government spy. Indignation could and should be shown, but this should only take

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the Godwinian form of ‘that benevolent feeling which disdains to see the miseries of our fellow creatures without attempting to obtain redress … I hope I have a heart that really shudders at the idea of civil discord as much as the aristocratic hypocrites and cowardly alarmists of the day pretend’. Violence was only possible as a last resort under immediate physical threat. The ‘manly exertions’ Thelwall demanded from his audience were to be solely ‘benevolent and peaceable’. 31 At the heart of Thelwall’s political economy lay a critique of the war-making, tax-gathering state. Taxes, unfairly levied upon the industrious, were required to maintain the national debt, enabling a fiscal-military state which managed to keep soldiers and sailors engaged in active battle for roughly half the eighteenth century.32 A basic political fundamentalism underlay most of Thelwall’s analysis, linking backwards social and economic ills to the root cause of corruption. Taxes supported armies of placemen and pensioners, wars prevented the peoples of the world from engaging in peaceful commerce and communication and thus realizing their shared interests against national states and aristocracies. All the miscellaneous long and short term causes of high prices could be traced back to aristocratic corruption and misgovernment. He drew upon and extended the arguments of the author of Political Progress, and of Tom Paine, in linking ‘the system of war’ with overseas plunder, especially the despoliation of Bengal in the 1760s and 1770s, and connected this to the rise of an Indian interest of ‘nabobs’ in the British elite.33 He believed that the war waged against revolutionary France was particularly unjust, its conduct criminal, and its cost fatal to the British economy, having added some seventy million pounds to the national debt by 1795.34 It was a mainstream enlightenment idea that a natural harmony of interests would, if left alone, regulate conduct between individuals peacefully; only the vested interests of the aristocracy in their dying days conspired against this.35 Thelwall upheld ‘the fair, the just, and rational system of commerce’ against ‘the system of mad havock and extermination’ that was Pitt’s war policy. His definition of commerce was inside the liberal mainstream: ‘whatever one country produces more than necessary for the consumption of that country, it sends to another country that is in want of that article, in order that it may bring back some other article of necessity, or luxury, of which it stands in need’.36 He seems to have supposed that grain would naturally find its way to the regions most in need, were it freed up from vexatious legislation and control. Thelwall was happy enough to accept the label of Jacobin ascribed to him by Burke and others and remained a solid supporter of the French Revolution. Despite its excesses, including the massacres of the Terror, it was still ‘a great and glorious effort for the emancipation and moral improvement of the human race’.37 In his comparison of the characters of Pitt and Robespierre, Thelwall made a telling contrast between the Frenchman who punished combinations amongst the rich and the British prime minister who punished only the poor labourers

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who attempted to combine. Thelwall, however, notably drew short of endorsing Jacobin emergency economic policies such as the law of Maximum or the use of the revolutionary armies on mission in the countryside requisitioning grain for the urban masses. But there is no paradox here; by and large Jacobinism too was a pro-commercial movement. It was broadly in favour of private property and economic liberty. They were convinced that a free trade in grain served best the general interest. Controls such as the law of Maximum were largely pragmatic concessions to pressure from below.38 Thelwall followed Adam Smith in deploring the fact that workers’ combinations were illegal, whilst no law regulated the rights of masters and merchants to combine and rig markets to their best advantage, but the next step of advocating freedom of association and combination for workers is rarely taken by eighteenth-century radicals, including Thelwall. In his examination of the high prices of food, Thelwall noted that some London ‘trades, among whom combination is easy, have by a sort of insurrection and violence, extorted’ higher wages, but declined to comment on the correctness or otherwise of their actions.39 The individualism of eighteenth-century radicalism is by and large quite incompatible with the notion of solidarity underlying the principles of unionism. Some other English Jacobins had discussed the claims of labour. Thelwall drew upon the researches of George Dyer, a follower of Paine and Godwin, who had argued that the price of labour was undervalued and that it ought to be fixed in some proportionate ratio to the profits of masters. He tended, however, to view strike action as an unfortunate consequence of an unfair system rather than as an appropriate strategy for labour, preferring instead to advocate the right of assembly in order to petition and remonstrate.40 However critical radicals were of employer combinations, they tended to disapprove of the moral and, often, physical coercion prevalent in the early trades union movement. The relation of French Revolutionary theory and of Jacobinism in particular, towards trades unions was unequivocal: they were unnatural and unlawful combinations in restraint of trade and as such were to be proscribed. The Loi Le Chapelier of 1791 was in advance of British anti-union legislation by some eight years and was markedly more stringent.41 Thelwall has sometimes been described as employing a labour theory of value in his writings of the 1790s. It is important, however, to distinguish between a theory proper and a set of assertions about the creation of value. Labour theories of value, have their roots in the writings of Sir William Petty, John Locke, Benjamin Franklin and Adam Smith and were formalized by the classical economists. Thelwall’s ‘labour theory of value’ sometimes has a physiocratic tinge, as in his celebration of the moral qualities of ‘the peasanty’ against the growth of luxury consumption: ‘the productive energies of man, or the baubles of distinction!’ Similarly in his assertion that: ‘the real sources of all revenue and, indeed,

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all the enjoyments and necessaries of life, are the labours of those classes of society whom we treated with so much contempt’. 42 Thelwall saw a large class who had grown dependent upon wage labour apportioned by the ups and downs of market demand and who would thus suffer deprivation in times of depressed trade, yet his analysis consistently focussed upon political corruption as the prime cause of depressed trade. He crystallized his inquiry in 1795 to the simple question: ‘By what right, by what authority do I wallow in luxury, while those who have produced that luxury are writhing in the gripe of famine, or at best pining in hopeless penury?’43 Some of the work by intellectual historians on the idea of luxury, present it as a signal of naive rusticity. The high enlightenment debate on luxury showed once and for all that terms like ‘luxury’ and ‘necessity’ were relative and historical, forever subject to change, with one era’s luxury becoming a future generation’s absolute necessity. Luxury production would in any case provide employment for the poor. Goodman and Claeys have both argued that 1795 marked a shift in Thelwall’s attitude towards luxury along these lines.44 Certainly there is a refinement of his arguments, but it is wrong to assume that the concept lost all of its conceptual and moral charge for the radical critique, Thelwall’s included. The critique of luxury returned in a different, but probably more powerful form later in the eighteenth century as a means of criticising the increasing disparities of wealth and the immiseration of sections of the urban and rural poor in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Luxury is an economic category as much as an element of political morality in the old republican tradition. The critique of luxury merged into a more modern notion of class exploitation, the contrast between luxury and necessity being one of the most compelling markers of inequality, class difference and antagonistically opposed interests. Thelwall believed the current economic system was warped in favour of the rich: ‘Let us consider the real utility of commerce: not that it may swell, as at present, the opulence of a few individuals; give the luxuries of the globe to the great man’s table, and thus inflate his pride with the imagination, that he is a being of superior species to those by whose toil his appetites are pampered. No: the real advantage of commerce is, that the surplus resources of one nation exchanged for the surplus resources of another, may prevent excessive want and scarcity from being felt by any individual portion of the universe’.45 Thelwall argued that the labourer should expect to receive a comfortable subsistence for himself and his family including some comforts and leisure in return for his labour. If Thelwall choose not to assert the right to live, this was in part because his vision went beyond the mere protection of bare existence and included a wider range of enjoyments, perhaps comparable to the sans-culottes conception of l’égalité des jouissances. Here he draws upon and inverts the historical anthropology of the stadial theory of social development used by Locke, Adam Smith and others, giv-

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ing it a bitter twist, pointing out that a contrast of the living standards between commercial societies and those of hunter-gatherers would not stand up very well in the era of the Rev. David Davies’s and Sir F. M. Eden’s detailed social inquires amongst the English rural poor. It was a commonplace of enlightenment economics to contrast the ‘naked savages’ of Africa or America as contemporary examples of man in the first stage of development with the artisan or labourer of Europe and to point out that although inequalities were smaller inside savage societies than commercial, the labourer and even the peasant of Europe enjoyed living standards which far exceeded ‘that of many an African King, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.’46 For Thelwall the contrast was reversed: ‘The Naked savage of America!!! – I declare in the very bitterness of sympathy, that to me, the condition of the naked savage appears, by far, more tolerable than that of a large portion, at least, of the laborious classes in this happy, flourishing, cultivated island’ Mankind departed from the state of ‘savage independence’ for a common advantage. They did so to improve the ‘comforts and abundance of all, not the luxury and wantonness of a faction.’ The poor Briton who starved amongst ‘luxury, splendour, and refinement, rears his half-naked children in savage ignorance.’47 It is far from clear that Thelwall had a consistent and fully worked out economics, but in some regards he is all the more interesting for this. His position lies somewhere between an orthodox enlightenment defence of capitalism as doux commerce in the sense championed by Montesquieu, and a reinvigorated republican critique of luxury and corruption.48 Thelwall’s solution to the problem of dearth lay in reform, a fuller and fairer system of representation in the House of Commons; not in popular actions or in government economic intervention. A strong causal connection existed between the system of corruption invented by Walpole and perfected by Pitt and his allies and the increasing miseries of the poor towards the end of the eighteenth century. Twentieth-century leftists tended to view the political sociology of ‘Old Corruption’ and its lack of an analysis of classes and capital as a somewhat naive or inadequate precursor to later proper socialisms. But such ideas do not seem evidently redundant to an early twenty-first-century generation schooled in the politics of the Gulf Wars, ‘dodgy dossiers’ and crony capitalism. If Thelwall’s political economy remained, by and large, inside the liberal enlightenment’s benign optimism about the work of markets, his vision of the economic rights of man was nevertheless richer than that of his contemporaries. His insistence on the political dimension of exploitation and inequality is still a fruitful approach: for these reasons alone his writings continue to demand our attention.

6 JOHN THELWALL’S RADICAL VISION OF DEMOCRACY 1 Georgina Green

Lift up your voices …– Let not only the nocturnal phantom, but the living body of your complaints appear before your oppressors. John Thelwall, The Rights of Nature (1796).2

At a time of concentrated government suppression of popular assembly, when it was a newly formulated treason to attempt to ‘overawe’ parliament, John Thelwall calls for resistance to what he sees as the spectralization of popular opinion.3 Similarly, in 1792 Major Cartwright had complained that ‘the people’s share and influence’ in the House of Commons was ‘rendered a mere phantom’ by the corruption of parliament.4 At his trial for sedition following his involvement in the alleged ‘anti-parliament’ of the 1793 British Convention, Joseph Gerrald also spoke of overcoming the spectral nature of political representation, asking for ‘a fair, full, and complete representation – not a delusive vision, an empty phantom, an unreal mockery’.5 Like the early nineteenth-century reform movement described by Kevin Gilmartin, the 1790s agitation for reform can be considered ‘a calculated intervention in the political history of these phantoms, as radical theorists proposed electoral mechanisms and discursive practices that would replace the deceptive shadow-play of “virtual representation”’.6 However, the normative assumptions which allow us to describe virtual representation as a ‘shadow-play’ or an ‘unreal mockery’ are the very assumptions which were being closely contested in the 1790s. For some, the assemblies of the people gathered at Thelwall’s lectures or at LCS demonstrations were more fantastical and unreal than a virtual representation of the nation. For its proponents, only virtual representation ‘could offer a representation that was “real”, probably even more real than that provided by “actual” representation’, as Brian Seitz notes.7 For them, the appearance of popular opinion would always already be a super- or subpolitical spectre rather than a truly political body; a ‘new raised phantom, which calls itself THE PEOPLE’.8 I hope to convey a sense of this contested territory, in order to show what it means for Thelwall to demand that popular opinion be – 71 –

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a ‘living body’ in a political realm whose metaphysical laws denied the very possibility of such an appearance.

I To appease this opinion, to lay this wandering ghost* of popular discontent, the simulator, Pitt, has drawn once more around him the magic circle of delusion, with charms and spells of pretended negociation, and backward mutters of arrogance and recantation. But lift up your voices, ye artificers, ye mechanics, ye manufacturers of the land, ye genuine props and pillars of the nation! … - let not only the nocturnal phantom, but the living body of your complaints appear before your oppressors. * The body is reported to have been buried, at the beginning of December last, in St. Stephen’s Chapel, with this inscription –‘Pitt and Grenville’s Acts;’ –and underneath, ‘in a state of internal tranquility’. Thus much by authority. To which is added, by an unknown hand, ‘but in hopes of a joyful resurrection’. 9

After a spate of bills designed to limit popular association Thelwall insists that popular opinion yet has a ghostly influence. Here, he satirizes government efforts to repress association or ‘lay the wandering ghost’ and imagines a triumphant return of the repressed. But, even as he delights in the ghostly power to torment the living, he ultimately rejects such compensations and demands a more substantial mode of existence. As such, this passage is paradigmatic of Thelwall’s aim to give the people a political presence based on a collective articulation of their aggregate opinion. Thelwall’s critique and defiance of political oppression is captured in the footnote, whose content is peculiarly appropriate to its supplementary, liminal status on the page. It notes that popular opinion is dead and buried at St Stephen’s Chapel, the then site of the House of Commons. 10 The people are suppressed by the very institution claiming to represent them. Pitt’s ‘magic circle of delusion’ and ‘recantation’ dupes the population and aims to lose them ‘not only “in the oblivious pool,” but “In bottomless perdition; there to dwell / In adamantine chains”’.11 And yet their grave, so conclusively engraved with the language of state coercion, ‘Pitt and Grenville’s acts’, is nevertheless supplemented ‘in hopes of a joyful resurrection’. This anonymous, unauthorized addition implies an uncannily persistent resistance. Indeed, the afterlife of popular opinion haunts William Pitt. Engaging something akin to the visual idiom which James Gillray employed in prints such as ‘Tom Paine’s nightly pest’, Thelwall depicts ‘The wandering ghost of popular discontent’ troubling a nightdressed Pitt despite the exertions of his ghost-busting legislation:12

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it has its influence … on the pillow of the minister, where it requires no second-sight to perceive, that it haunts his imagination, and disturbs his slumbers. There, in prophetic visions, it foretels the sad catastrophe of his ambition.13

‘The wandering ghost of popular opinion’ haunts the minister as an ethical imperative -despite the legal exclusion of popular opinion from the political realm, this ‘other’ demands attention in its very status as neither absent nor present. Moreover, as a disturbance of Pitt’s ‘vision’, the phantom undermines the very master-trope used by the elite to justify their authority in the political realm. But despite the defiance imagined in these satirical images, these pages of The Rights of Nature ultimately reject the liminal status of popular opinion which they visualize. The paradoxical incorporation of popular opinion in the wandering ghost and the grave at St Stephen’s Chapel is rejected as part of an oppressive ideology which actually justifies the few in trampling on the liberties of the many. These spectres are inadequate substitutions for the ‘living body of your complaints’. Though the allegory can be indulged for its potential to humiliate Pitt, ultimately it does not condone such a mystificatory mode of representing the people and imagines a more fully incorporated existence. Whilst the passage celebrates the spectral invincibility of popular opinion, it also demands and reasserts the presence of an economically crucial and morally capable class: ‘lift up your voices, ye artificers, ye mechanics, ye manufacturers of the land, ye genuine props and pillars of the nation! … let not only the nocturnal phantom, but the living body of your complaints appear before your oppressors’. This apostrophe interrupts the spectral logic of the discourse, interpellating the living, materialist subjects which such logic denies, and offering a ‘vision’ of democracy which is, despite the ocularcentric metaphor of my title, perhaps more accurately understood as an aural, or even a bodily phenomenon. Similarly, the apostrophe implies the merely supplementary status of the text itself, in its ultimate aim ‘to goad and urge [the people] to the manly energies of reason, and the decided tone of authoritative complaint’.14 The overriding mode of address in The Rights of Nature is imperative – imperative verbs such as ‘awake’ and ‘think’ convey an effort of almost physical intensity to have the complaint of the text embodied by the people, to have them form ‘the living body of [their] complaints’.15 According to Thelwall, such a living body could not be achieved without actual interaction amongst the multitude that composes the people. He understands the print sphere as part of a strategy which deployed print media only in tandem with literally oratorical and embodied practices. Thelwall articulates this theory of the potential agency of assembly in his response to the untimely criticisms of his friend and philosophical mentor, William Godwin.

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In his Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills (1795), Godwin criticized ‘the political lecturer in Beaufort Buildings’ (i.e. Thelwall) for talking of politics to a ‘mixed and crowded audience’.16 Godwin argues that the situation of the orator amongst or before a crowd is not conducive to understanding the subtle points of politics, for either participant: quiet disquisition ‘does not suit the tone of collected multitudes. Sober inquiry may pass well enough with a man in his closet, or in the domestic tranquillity of his own fire-side: but it will not suffice in theatres and halls of assembly’.17 Reform, he agrees, is necessary, but it must be carried on by slow, almost insensible steps, and by just degrees. The public mind must first be enlightened; the public sentiment must next become unequivocal; there must be a grand and magnificent harmony, expanding itself through the whole community. There must be a consent of wills, that no minister and no monopolist would be frantic enough to withstand.18

In The Tribune, Thelwall rebukes: I was not frantic enough though the ‘Lover of Order’ is, to suppose that this consent of wills -this ‘magnificent harmony, expanding itself through the whole community’, was to be produced by writing quarto volumes, and convening with a few speculative philosophers by the fire side.19

For Thelwall, Godwin’s thought is ‘remarkable’ in that ‘it should at once recommend the most extensive plan of freedom and innovation ever discussed by any writer in the English language, and reprobate every measure from which even the most moderate reform can rationally be expected’.20 The philosopher’s faith in mere thought to change the world is ‘frantic’ (or fanatical), whilst the orator believes that the unwithstandable ‘consent of wills’ will not appear without practical activism. An alternative type of intellectual is needed. Such an intellectual is imagined in Thelwall’s critique of the French literati. Like Godwin, the French literati were ‘not deficient’ in ‘acuteness, subtility, penetration, and even profundity’, but, like Godwin: [T]hey wanted that boldness – that active energy – that collected, unembarrassed, firmness and presence of mind, which nothing but the actual enjoyment of liberty, and an unrestrained intercourse with a bold, resolute, bustling and disputatious race of men can possibly confer. This energy of mind, without which it is impossible, in any useful and important sense of the word, to be a man of business, must be sought among ‘thronged and promiscuous audiences’, ‘in theatres and halls of assembly’; for there only is it to be found.21

Thelwall places communal experience and interaction at the affective heart of the radical strategy for reform:

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it is in ‘mixed and crowded audiences’ – ‘in theatres and halls of assembly,’ that the real lover of his species must principally expect to instil that generous sympathy – that social ardor, without which a nation is but a populous wilderness, and the philosopher himself only a walking index of obsolete laws and dead-lettered institutes.22

Thelwall again distinguishes between the living and the dead, but here we gain insight into the ‘science of life’ which grounds Thelwall’s commitment to bringing people together, to dialectical discursive practices, and to realising his own texts in a collective articulation of popular opinion.23 Andrew McCann describes the importance of assembly to Thelwall’s hopes that the people will collectively articulate themselves: This is a very different economy of cultural production and reception from that implied by the practices of private consumption. It constructs communal identity, and accordingly deploys socially situated knowledge, in a way that privatized reading practices alone could not.24

In this way the assembly demonstrates the ‘possibility of collectively articulating the common experience of political disenfranchisement’, or forming a ‘living body of your complaints’.

II Thelwall’s demand for a ‘living body of your complaints’ in The Rights of Nature is a response to Edmund Burke’s Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace (1796), which denied the validity or relevance to politics of such articulations of popular opinion. As this section will argue, the challenge of Thelwall and the London Corresponding Society was almost a metaphysical affront for some reactionary commentators. According to such figures, ‘the people at large’ or ‘popular opinion’ simply could not exist in the political realm. In his Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace Burke ‘endeavoured to class those who, in any political view, are to be called the people’. 25 He proceeded to argue that ‘there is such a thing as a natural representative of the people’ and classified that representative thus: In England and Scotland, I compute that those of adult age, not declining in life, of tolerable leisure for such discussions, and of some means of information, more or less, and who are above menial dependence, (or what virtually is such) may amount to about four hundred thousand.26

Whilst Burke tells us that he is setting out to define ‘the people’, he in fact defines their ‘natural representative’, which remains logically distinct from the people. This deferral results in a void – in place of a definition of ‘the people’, Burke defines those who represent them. As he continues to say, these are the ‘natural

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representatives of the people’, the ‘British publick’, as opposed to ‘the people’ which he originally set out to define. It seems that in ‘the political view’ ‘the people’ can only be known through this ‘natural representative’. ‘The people’ in any other sense, are below the political’s threshold of vision. As Burke puts it, ‘without doing something of this sort we must proceed absurdly’. To attempt an unmediated or uncircumscribed vision of the people as the people (rather than as their interests) would be to invite the absurd to disturb the rational vision of the politician. For Burke the ‘political view’ is the privilege of an elite group of ‘disinterested gentlemen’, collectively capable of virtually representing the nation by virtue of the privileged view of society which they possess. As John Barrell and others have argued, their vision of society is imagined as a prospect view whose survey extends through both time and space.27 Large assemblies of the populace such as those organized by the LCS in 1795 were, however, irrelevant to such an ‘equal, wide survey’. In 1796 Joseph Cawthorne (who had been a government pension-holder from the secret service fund in the 1780’s) defended virtual representation in similar terms and stated the political invisibility of the people still more clearly: ‘I maintain, that the collective body of this free state have no political existence whatever’.28 Objecting specifically to the Duke of Bedford’s presentation of the LCS’s Copenhagen Fields petition to the House of Lords, Cawthorne states that whilst the constitutional authority Lord Thurlow might state the right of the people to petition the government, ‘the learned Lord is too well acquainted with our Government to say [‘the people’] means the Populace or the Nation at large, whose rights are wisely absorbed by a comprehension into a smaller compass’.29 Similarly to Burke’s insistence that without defining the people as the 400,000 ‘we must proceed absurdly’, for Cawthorne the idea of the people acting without mediation, even in the form of a petition, is a departure from the rational: ‘To talk of the rights of the people in general to assemble and petition the Legislature for supposed grievances, is talking like a madman’.30 Advocates of virtual representation or representation by a natural aristocracy make it impossible to speak of ‘the people’ in any pre-representative sense. They insist that the political lexicon simply does not have a word for this group. ‘The people’ when used in any political sense refers to a body that is always already a representation. Hannah Arendt warns that such rational ‘comprehension’ or reduction of multiplicity will result in ‘the abolition of the public realm itself ’ and the ‘arbitrary domination of all others’ or ‘in the exchange of the real world for an imaginary one where these others would simply not exist’ – such a world seems to be coexistent with the political realm when virtual representation loses what Burke admittedly acknowledges as a necessary ‘substratum in the actual’.31

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III If the people are not permitted to associate and knit themselves together for the vindication of their rights, how shall they frustrate attempts which will inevitably be made against their liberties? The scattered million, however unanimous in feeling, is but chaff in the whirlwind. It must be pressed together to have any weight. Deny them the right of association, and a handful of powerful individuals, united by the common ties of interest, and grasping the wealth of the Nation, may easily persevere in projects hostile to the wishes, and ruinous to the interests of mankind; and in the very midst of this execrated career, exult in apparent popularity.32

Thelwall resists such an ‘exchange of the real world for an imaginary one’ where the people ‘would simply not exist’, confronting the invisibility of the aggregate people in the political sphere. He asks ‘By what right, by what omnipotent power, by what uncreating, and recreating authority, does this base renegade [Burke] doom to political annihilation nine-tenths of the adult inhabitants of a nation? Where are the fate-commanding locks of this painted Jupiter, that thus he thinks to nod away the existence of millions?’33 In the speech which Thelwall was dissuaded from delivering at his trial, but which he afterwards published, he argues that the people must be allowed to ‘associate and knit themselves together’ to form a sufficient counterbalance to both the Royal and the aristocratic bodies, which are ‘intimately encorporated’: ‘The scattered million, however unanimous in feeling, is but chaff in the whirlwind. It must be pressed together to have any weight’. ‘Encorporation’ with its etymological roots in the body or ‘corpus’, conveys a sense, not only of combination into a whole, but of incarnation or tangibility. The people are ‘incorporated into tangibility and reality’, to use Carlyle’s phrase, by bringing them together to consider their rights.34 Thereby, they resist the solipsistic ‘uncreating and re-creating’ powers of the political elite. In contrast to the Burkean understanding of representation, Thelwall emphasizes the link between representation and popular opinion, first arguing that the right to universal representation is already a part of the constitution, and then that ‘the right of popular representation includes the right of popular opinion, and popular opinion can only be collected by popular assemblies’.35 Moreover, this right is not circumscribed as Burke and Cawthorne insist it must be: ‘to meet in such assemblies’ is ‘an absolute right of the people, and every part of the people of this country – the constitutional right of non-electors as well as constituents – of those who have no particular representatives as well as those who have’.36 On two dates in late 1795 the LCS practised this right to meet in assemblies, reasserting the presence and visibility of this pre-representative people, to ‘render ourselves so conspicuous’.37 The fields surrounding the Copenhagen House tavern in Islington, on the margins of the city, were crowded with thousands of people attending the LCS meetings.

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This attempt to effect a ‘return of the visible’ was contested by reactionary critics. Their protests reveal the extent to which, for one dominant conception of politics, such visions of the populace were mere fantasy. Their responses make that physical presence less real than the representation of the people by the House of Commons. Cawthorne’s memorable statement to the effect that the collective people have no existence whatsoever was part of a response to these assemblies at Copenhagen House. The General Evening Post also associates the Copenhagen assembly’s aspirations to political visibility with lunacy or ‘poetic’ vision, satirizing an MP, ‘Mr. Jenwel’, who ‘By a poetic flight of fancy, his ‘Eye in a fine phrenzy rolling,’ had rambled to Copenhagen House, for the purpose of drawing a comparison between the Meeting of that place, and the British House of Commons’.38 Such a comparison, is, for the Post, tantamount to the vision of ‘The lunatic, the lover, and the poet’ –as the allusion to Theseus’s speech from A Midsummer Nights Dream implies.39 Turning to The Senator’s record of parliamentary sessions, it becomes clear that this attack on ‘Mr. Jenwel’ is part of a paradigmatic contest over the nature of the visionary and the real. ‘Mr. Jenwel’ is in fact Mr. Joseph Jekyll (1754–1837) MP for the borough of Calne, Wiltshire.40 The subversion of the record performed by the Post goes deeper than this, for the journalist has in fact appropriated the words of Mr Jekyll and turned them against him. Mr Powys had spoken before Jekyll, arguing that the meeting at Copenhagen House was an attempt to usurp the authority of parliament, and was directly connected to the notorious attack upon the King. Jekyll responded by accusing Powys of lunacy via Shakespearean allusion: The Honourable Gentleman connected the meetings at Copenhagen House with the attack on His Majesty. His eye, in a fine phrenzy rolling from Islington to Westminster, saw the destruction of the English Senate at Copenhagen House; yet he would ask whether they had anything but the imagination of the Honourable Gentleman to connect the Parliament at Westminster Hall with the meeting at Copenhagen House, or to establish intentions were there entertained of a criminal nature.41

For Jekyll, government alarmists have overactive imaginations. Yet in the Post redaction ‘Jenwel’ is the fantasist, nonsensically judging the House of Commons by comparison to the LCS meeting. The Post’s satire reveals in a startling manner how the visible and the visionary, even the ‘real’, is being contested in politics at this juncture. Indeed, when the ‘two bills’ were discussed in parliament, these sessions were prefaced by the presentation of petitions by members of parliament, whose representative validity was then disputed at length. Especially when these petitions were in favour of the bills, their presentation had a potentially ironic relationship to the bills themselves, which arguably curtailed the right to petition. The suspension of parliamentary discussion by these presentations is,

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perhaps, a sign of the failure of theories of virtual representation to produce an uncontested boundary between the true and the untrue, the real and the fictional, the sane and the insane.

IV So grand and extraordinary a coup d’œil was perhaps never seen, as was the continual progress of the people pouring in from every quarter like a torrent –the various streams of which all directed their course to the same central point.’42

The tropes of vision which the LCS use to describe their assemblies at Copenhagen Fields give an insight into their challenge to the ‘political view’ of commentators like Burke and Cawthorne. Such a challenge was irresistible to Thelwall, who had distanced himself from the LCS after the treason trials. The sheer scope and innovation of these events enticed him back. In the pamphlet sold by the radical bookseller Richard ‘citizen’ Lee after the October meeting the event is described as a ‘coup d’œil ’, meaning ‘a glance taking in a general view’ or ‘a view or scene as it strikes the eye at a glance’.43 The phrase appears in picturesque tours and books on military engineering. The best officers possess the coup d’œil – the gift of a glance that takes in the general view (of a battlefield) at once, almost as if by instinct, overcoming confusion and distraction in a ‘penetrating and synthesizing’ glance. In this sense it is literally a ‘commanding vantage’.44 Perhaps the most interesting connection forged by this phrase is to Robert Barker’s panoramas. The first permanent panorama had opened earlier that year on Leicester Square, and the original patent of 1787, before the coinage of ‘panorama’ described an apparatus called ‘La Nature à Coup d’ Oeil’.45 In describing the assembly of people at Copenhagen Fields as a ‘coup d’œil’, the pamphlet constructs the event as an almost technological achievement akin to Barker’s panoramas – the bringing into one glance that which seems beyond the scope of the mere glance – rendering ‘the people’ visible. For the writer of the pamphlet, the technological achievement of this assembly is evidence ‘that when the people are called together for the discussion and consideration of their essential and inalienable rights and privileges, they not only can but will, however immense their numbers, demean themselves in such a peaceable and orderly manner’.46 But despite this orderliness, the mass assembly, like the Panorama, does not leave the Burkean scopic regime (founded in locodescriptive painting and extended to the realm of politics) entirely intact. As William Galperin argues, the panoramic view tended to overwhelm or contest ‘a subject-position, wherein the privilege to behold was simultaneously the privilege to command or to control’.47 The pamphlet repeats this effect, perhaps primarily through its anonymity, but also in the way that the text firmly locates this gathering at the margins of the city in relationship to that sprawling, diverse and distracting metropolis; ‘the fields

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about White Conduit House – and the different paths leading from Gray’s-innlane, and other outlets from various parts of the town, began to be crowded with Citizens, both male and female’, ‘pouring in from every quarter like a torrent’.48 In addition, the principle of organization in this ‘landscape’ is not a product of the understanding of the spectator. Though the pamphlet writer perceives a guiding principle uniting this variety, that principle is of a terrifyingly self-organizing landscape: ‘the various streams [of the people] all directed their course to the same central point’. Galperin’s panorama is useful in understanding the double and seemingly contradictory function of gathering large numbers of people: the gathering forms a prospect view – it literally makes the disenfranchised visible to the bodily eye where they were invisible to politics. At the same time, that visibility is not of the same order as the gentleman’s metaphorical prospect view: just like Galperin’s panorama, the gathering of the people has a tendency towards spectacle which, ‘thanks chiefly to its composition from the “physical order of things” or from the “real” world’, disturbs the distance between spectator and spectated which preserves the commanding subject-position.49 The crowd may transform the people into a coup d’œil, giving the people a ‘presence’ or visibility that critiques their invisibility in virtual representation. However, the crowd also deconstructs virtual representation more radically, perturbing an entire regime of truth through the challenge it poses to the individual subjectivity upon which the idea of a disinterested observer depends.50 The multitudinous, mobile bodies of the crowd –‘like a torrent’ or like Wordsworth’s ‘endless stream’ – threaten to overwhelm any sense of individual subjectivity. But the potentially mob-like implications of this vision of the crowd are interrupted at the moment at which the scheduled ‘meeting’ begins – at which point the pamphlet shifts from describing a spectacle and records the verbal ‘business of the day’, conducted and recorded according to the conventions of a formal meeting. The LCS’s quasi-technological achievement was to integrate the sheer embodiedness of this crowd with an account of their involvement in the production of formal, arguably constitutional, documents of protest. This might explain why Thelwall found these events so irresistible. They exemplify the creation of what he later formulated as the ‘living body’ of popular opinion. Thelwall’s ‘vision of democracy’ similarly displaces the visual as the sense which metaphorically determines the political as a ‘view’ to be constructed by an elite spectator. Thelwall’s desire to be present at Copenhagen Fields does not stem from his attraction to such a spectacle. Rather, he experiences Copenhagen Fields as a meeting –a site of embodied communication. Speaking to thousands, he says ‘it can rarely happen that I should have an opportunity of meeting so large a number of my fellow Citizens, and I am anxious that I should not meet them now in vain’.51 To return to our beginning, the phrase ‘let … the living body of your complaints appear’ – in which an inherently diachronic

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phenomenon – ‘complaints’ – is asked to conform to an inherently synchronic mode of ‘appearance’ – now seems to indicate the straining and challenging of a model of politics based upon the privileged, generalizing vision of the elite. Such an ‘object’ as a ‘living body of your complaints’ challenges the claims of this elite to combine such an extent of time and space into the ‘visual synchrony’ of a metaphorical landscape.52 As such, it challenges not only their representative authority but the source of this authority in the idea that there exist privileged perspectives from which to view and understand the nation. Such a body does not passively ‘appear’ as a simple object, but actively challenges the would-be stable subject and his structures of cognition. No longer the solipsistic creation of the elite, the ‘appearance’ of a living body of popular opinion in the political realm would, in order to ‘appear’, have had to transform the political into an open and democratic realm of communication, speech and participation. In other words, in order for this body to be judged ‘true’ rather than fictional, ‘real’ rather than spectral, it will have had to institute an alternative regime of truth. As the diverse essays in this volume might suggest, the foundations of this alternative regime could be found in the many areas which Thelwall turned to: from the philosophy of natural rights to constitutionalist discourse; from the theatre to the sonnet; and from the domestic realm to the mass assembly.

7 ARTICULATIONS OF COMMUNITY IN THE PERIPATETIC Yasmin Solomonescu

One of twenty-four quotations from Thelwall appearing in the OED exemplifies the use of ‘participated’ as an adjective meaning ‘shared’. The source is Thelwall’s 1793 work in verse and prose, The Peripatetic; or, Sketches of the Heart, of Nature and Society; in a Series of Politico-Sentimental Journals, in Verse and Prose of the Eccentric Excursions of Sylvanus Theophrastus, Supposed to be Written by Himself. More specifically, the source is the satirical poem ‘Philautiaccha; or the Voluptuary: A Rhapsody’, which pays tribute to an imagined patron-deity of pleasure, Philautiaccha, who is the illegitimate daughter of Bacchus and ‘the sordid dame Misanthropy’.1 The latter is described in the lines quoted by the OED as A louring, selfish, sullen wight, Who scowling flies from human sight. Nor ever heav’d the social sigh, Nor knew participated joy.2

In this instance, ‘participated’ not only fills out the metre of the line, but also makes explicit a guiding literary and philosophical principle of The Peripatetic. It is worth recalling that in the late eighteenth century ‘participation’ still carried the meaning of sharing something in common.3 With this definition in mind, I propose to read The Peripatetic as Thelwall’s earliest literary experiment in political consciousness-raising and what we might think of, following the contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, as the writing of community, or what he calls ‘being in common’. Drawing on Nancy in conjunction with Aristotle, whose ethical theories inform The Peripatetic, I will present this heterogeneous work as a participatory conversation among ideas, voices and genres that gives shape to what Nancy describes as ‘a community of articulation’ even as it casts into doubt its own ability, as a literary work, to catalyze immediate political change. The placement of the rhapsodic ‘Philautiaccha’ in the middle of a prose anecdote (‘An Equestrian Digression’) is typical of The Peripatetic, which alter– 83 –

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nates verse and prose in a series of thematically diverse clusters that span three volumes. These clusters are inspired by the pedestrian excursions of the work’s narrator, Sylvanus Theophrastus, in the vicinity of London, as he attempts to dispel his ‘valetudinarian langour [sic]’.4 Sylvanus’s intermittent companions are his friend Ambulator, whose name evokes a contemporary guide to London and the surrounding counties, and the melancholic Belmour, whose tale of thwarted love gives the work a loose narrative continuity.5 In the course of two main excursions to Rochester and Saint Albans, the characters offer a running (or walking) commentary on the economic, political and cultural state of England in the early 1790s. The narrative comes to a close with the comical reunion of Belmour and his estranged beloved, and the celebration of two marriages. But the real story culminates a few scenes earlier in a sort of round-table discussion about the meaning of generosity – an issue that gives the work its effective, albeit non-narrative, impetus throughout. Judith Thompson provides a comprehensive introduction to The Peripatetic in her 2001 edition of the work, which marked its first republication since the facsimile reprint of 1978.6 In that introduction and an earlier article, Thompson calls attention to The Peripatetic’s unusual mingling of genres and styles, including effusion and invective, character-sketch and confession, treatise and travelogue. (Thelwall himself described the work as a compound of ‘the novel, the sentimental journal, and the miscellaneous collection of essays and poetical effusions’.7) Thelwall’s purpose, Thompson argues, is literally to reform literary convention in accordance with his democratic principles: ‘to dismantle discursive structures and replace them with an ideal of intergeneric conversation ... ’.8 In what follows I will take the notion of ‘intergeneric conversation’ a step farther, into the realm of community and ‘literary communism’.

‘Freedom of conversation’ In his 1986 work La Communauté désoeuvrée, published in English as The Inoperative Community (1991), Jean-Luc Nancy takes issue with the Western philosophical tradition of defining community as a project of fusion or communion. Community is not, he argues, ‘a single thing’, the incorporation of the many into ‘an All or an Individual’.9 It is, rather, a sharing. ‘[O]ne cannot make a world with simple atoms’, Nancy declares. ‘There has to be a clinamen. There has to be an inclination or an inclining from one toward the other, of one by the other, or from one to the other’.10 This inclination or ‘sharing’ takes place between what Nancy calls ‘singularities’, which he defines as ‘our multiple, dispersed, mortally fragmented existences, which nonetheless only make sense by existing in common’.11 A community formed of these shared singularities is therefore a community of others, not egos. It is, as Nancy puts it, a ‘being-in-common’

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or a ‘being-the-one-with-the-other’, as opposed to a ‘being of togetherness’. For Nancy, the latter is associated with the Gemeinschaft conception of community that was central to Nazi ideology.12 The Inoperative Community is, in part, a critique of the very discourses that Thelwall drew on to express his ideas about community, particularly the notion of community as a family or confraternity of rational individuals. Nancy points out that the model of community as fraternité – as the French revolutionary motto had it – has been thought of in various terms and paradigms, including ‘the natural family, the Athenian city, the Roman Republic, the first Christian community, corporations, communes, or brotherhoods …’.13 But for him the fact remains that this ideal community has never existed, and any nostalgia for a ‘lost’ community therefore only confuses modern thought.14 It might seem paradoxical to read Thelwall alongside Nancy given Thelwall’s frequent recourse to the metaphor of the ‘body politic’. In his political rhetoric, corporal metaphors serve to emphasize the responsibility of each member of society for the well-being of the whole. ‘I am not a solitary individual’, Thelwall declared in 1795 at the conclusion of a lecture on virtue. ‘I am but a part – a little, little member of the great animal of human society – a palpilliary [sic] nerve upon one of the extremities! and I must do that duty to the whole, for which by my structure and organization I am adapted’.15 In The Peripatetic, doing one’s duty to the whole means showing generosity, which is the subject of a discussion among the work’s main characters towards the end of the narrative. Each one attempts to define generosity anecdotally and ends up illustrating some other quality – wastefulness, extravagance or meanness – until at last Sylvanus succeeds with his description of Ambulator: ‘real distress flies immediately to his heart, and his purse is sure to sympathize with its expansion’.16 We see an instance of this genuine generosity earlier in the narrative when Belmour gives a coin to some needy cottage children. Remembering the occasion, Sylvanus exclaims, ‘[t]he generous act itself is Paradise! – the sordid soul is hell!’17 For Nancy, by contrast, such ‘effusion[s]’ have nothing to do with the spirit of community, which does not arise from any bonding between individuals, but testifies to its impossibility.18 Community, he explains, ‘is not a communion, nor the appropriation of an object, nor a self-recognition, nor even a communication as this is understood to exist between subjects’; on the contrary, it is a sharing that consists in ‘“communicating” by not “communing”’, and the places where this takes place are ‘no longer places of fusion, even though in them one passes from one to the other …’.19 Rather, they are places of ‘dislocation,’ or what Nancy describes elsewhere as ‘distanced proximity’.20 Given the apparent contradiction between Thelwall’s faith in the power of sympathy (and sympathetic acts of charity) to create affective bonds between individuals, thereby ‘melt[ing] and organiz[ing]’ them into ‘one harmonious

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mass’,21 and Nancy’s rejection of such bonding and the idea of community as something to be produced by work – whether the work of sympathy, charity or some other process – it might seem odd to find an instance of communication in The Peripatetic that is not a communion. But let us consider Sylvanus’s encounter with an old disbanded sailor near the beginning of his first excursion. Declaring it to be one of his maxims that ‘there is no human being with whom it is not worth while to spend a quarter of an hour’, Sylvanus welcomes the old man’s ‘overtures ... of conversation’; nonetheless, he avoids answering questions about his profession lest any ‘false estimate’ of his importance prevent ‘that freedom of conversation from which alone the human heart can be revealed…’.22 Sylvanus finds the old sailor to be a lively and inquisitive conversationalist but regrets that ‘professional prejudice’ has left ‘a blot on his philanthropy’, causing him to complain of the long duration of peace for having brought a decline in trade. Rather than argue with the man, Sylvanus asks about his past and learns that he has spent almost his entire life ‘between the dock-yard and the man of war’.23 This insularity apparently makes the man’s biases understandable, and Sylvanus chooses to leave them intact. What this section dramatizes is decidedly not a communion or a conversion, but an encounter between singular beings who, during and after the encounter, remain unbridgeably distant, dislocated or ‘other’. The encounter nonetheless celebrates ‘freedom of conversation’, suggesting that the major philosophical influence here is not, as elsewhere in The Peripatetic, Rousseau, but Aristotle, the founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy.24 This classical legacy is also apparent in the narrator’s surname: Theophrastus was the Greek philosopher who headed the Peripatetic school after Aristotle’s death. Of particular relevance is the Nicomachean Ethics, in which Aristotle observes that to ‘live together and share conversation and thought’ with a friend is to ‘perceive … [that] friend’s being’ together with one’s own.25 In its passionate conviction that there can be no ‘living together’ without communication, even when there is no agreement, The Peripatetic turns out to have a closer philosophical affinity with Nancy than at first it seemed. For Nancy, although community does not have organic totality, it may be said to have ‘the totality of a dialogue’.26 However, such a dialogue is not intersubjective: it is not about the exchange of particular messages, but about the sharing of voices, ‘the articulated being (being articulated) of speech itself (or its written being/being written)’27 Nancy’s discussion of literature as just such a dialogue opens up a new perspective on the multiple genres and voices that compose The Peripatetic.

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‘A Work of Digressions and Conversations’ Long before ‘conversation’ acquired its current meaning of ‘familiar discourse or talk’, it denoted ‘[t]he action of living or having one’s being in a place or among persons’ and also a ‘[m]anner of conducting oneself in the world or in society’. Etymologically, ‘conversation’ derives from the French converser meaning ‘to pass one’s life, live, dwell in or with’ – a connotation that still survives in the expression ‘to have converse with’.28 Nancy draws out this meaning in his observation that ‘[s]aying “to speak with” is like saying ... “to live with” ’: both articulate common being as ‘communication and thinking’.29 If we consider this remark along with Aristotle’s observation that to ‘live together and share conversation and thought’ with a friend is to ‘perceive ... [that] friend’s being’ together with one’s own, we can begin to see why it is significant that The Peripatetic is not only ‘intergeneric’ but specifically conversational: ‘a work of digressions and conversations’, as the narrator puts it.30 It is by virtue of their ‘friendly Converse’ that Sylvanus and his fellow travellers constitute a community, ‘an eccentric little knot, attracted by congenial taste, and bound together by the ties of friendship…’31 The ideal reader of The Peripatetic also participates in this community and its conversations. He – or indeed she – is assumed not to be one of the ‘fine ladies’ or ‘petit maitres’ on account of whose squeamishness Sylvanus considers affixing a smelling bottle to his description of several anatomically correct sculptures of human skulls.32 Nor is he one of ‘the Lettered Sages of Paternoster Row’ who is sure to wonder what Sylvanus finds interesting about ‘vulgar objects’ such as gypsies.33 Still less is the reader one of those worldly voluptuaries who, like the goddess Philautiaccha, scorns the ‘participated joy’ of social intercourse. Against these alternatives, the reader is constructed as a humanist, a critic and a ‘lover of rural scenery, who ... takes the trouble to deviate from the road’34 – in short, as a fellow peripatetic who is given an active share in the work’s ethical deliberations and discoveries. This participatory ethos is classically Peripatetic, as the narrator’s surname reminds us. Theophrastus is chiefly remembered as the author of Characters, a collection of thirty short prose sketches describing the vices and follies of Athenians in the fourth century bc.35 We are clued into the significance of this lineage in volume 3, when Sylvanus pauses on the verge of recounting an improbable tale to assert its veracity: a descendant of the Philosopher Theophrastus should ... [sketch] his characters with the bold pencil of truth, ... [and] reveal the extravagances of human nature as they present themselves before him, without attending to any other circumstances than the accuracy of his draughts, and the truth of his colouring.36

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This seemingly extraneous remark suggests that however ‘truthfully’ delineated The Peripatetic’s own characters may be, they should not to be read as realistic portraits, but as fictional devices representing ‘extravagances’ of thought and conduct.37 Sylvanus in particular is not a perfect spokesman for the author, but a dramatic narrator prone to inconsistencies in the practice of his numerous ‘maxims’.38 Thus, as a schematic representation of human thought and character, the Theophrastan character is well suited to the participatory nature of The Peripatetic, which does not vest authority in any one character, but leaves key issues open to conversation and debate. This participatory quality is also manifest in the work’s episodic structure and signalled by the titles of its various sections. Instead of a continuous narrative we are presented with ‘Indications of Commerce’, ‘Symptoms of Loquacity’, ‘Hints for the Stoics’, ‘Scraps of Criticism’ and ‘Traits of Singularity’ (my emphases). It is up to the reader to find patterns in this succession of fragments and make a complete picture out of these numerous ‘sketches of the heart, of nature and society’. Sylvanus suggests as much when he describes his friend Wentworth’s habit of ‘uniting ... the broken thread of our discourse’ during the conversation about generosity,39 or when he submits his anecdotes ‘to the animadversion of the reader’40 in much the same way that Thelwall submitted his political lectures to the analysis of his listeners, urging them to be as wary of a pope in Beaufort Buildings – the venue for his lectures in the mid-1790s – as of a pope in Rome.41 Sylvanus also leaves it up to the reader to pursue the questions raised by The Peripatetic beyond the limits of the text, observing that ‘the condition of the labouring poor in this country ... [is a] subject so copious, and the abuses and oppressions so numerous, that our journey was completed before our enquiry ... ’42

Transient Influences At the same time, The Peripatetic begs the question of whether fictional works, even those composed on the principles of conversation and participation, can have a reforming effect on readers at all. In ‘A Digression for Parents and Preceptors’, Sylvanus recalls having once told a ‘pretty story’ about a giant who traps humans to teach a young girl why she was wrong to trap a ladybird. The girl promptly frees her captive, and Sylvanus flatters himself that his ‘harmless fiction’ has helped make her ‘a better member of society’.43 But almost in the same breath, he acknowledges that ‘the unfeeling mass of mankind’ will be deaf to such stories.44 Sylvanus expands on this point in the section entitled ‘Effervescences of Political Enthusiasm’, in which he attempts a poetic reductio ad absurdum of Belmour’s lovelorn solipsism. Mingling the sources of Belmour’s discontent with his own – the ‘raging tyrants [who], with malignant pride / Display their talents

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in the public scene’, and the ‘senseless crowds, assembled at their nod’ – Sylvanus concludes that it is ... better far, forgetting and forgot, Sequester’d, to the peaceful grave to glide, From Fortune’s wheel withdraw our anxious lot, And crimes we can’t prevent, at least avoid.45

This ‘rhapsody’ has an immediate effect: ‘[Belmour’s] mien assumed its wonted dignity, his eyes began to sparkle with indignation …’.46 But these ‘effervescences’ subside before Sylvanus can bring them to a boil: ‘the fervour was of short duration; as is generally the case with that enthusiasm, which is the effect only of appeals to the imagination, rather than of principles resulting from actual feeling and present experience’.47 In a sort of postscript to the episode, Sylvanus remarks that ‘modern sophists’ are mistaken when they ‘pretend that reason is to be deluded by declamations on fancied grievances, or even that the most animated remonstrances against real oppression can excite a serious discontent in the popular mind, till the enormity of the evil has brought home the consequent suffering to every man’s business and bosom’.48 As long as ‘the real causes of complaint’ remain hidden, he adds, there is little chance that reformers’ rants will have a lasting effect: Remove but the real causes of complaint; nay, keep them but at such a distance, that they may not goad the bosoms of those who have the capacity to act, and whatever may be the transient influence of poets and orators on the heated fancies of a few, every one will quickly find, like Belmour, some personal feeling, some individual interest to overpower the sympathies of imagination, and restore the momentary wanderer to himself !49

This is a key moment in The Peripatetic and in Thelwall’s writing more generally. Andrew McCann reads this passage as an acknowledgement of the limitations of sentimental appeals in eliciting a shared oppositional consciousness. Such appeals, he claims, can have only a fleeting and gratifying effect on the reader when they are articulated through the medium of literature, and they inevitably consolidate the structures that they are meant to undermine, namely private culture-consumption and the reproduction of capital. In McCann’s view, Thelwall was confronted with the potential neutralization of his own political aims by the circulation of his text through the marketplace, and the ensuing creation of a public of readers who are in fact merely individualized, serialized subjects experiencing their collectivity – their humanity – in the assumed ubiquity of their responses to the affect of the tableau.50

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McCann concludes that Thelwall’s awareness of this potential neutralization led him to refocus his efforts on the medium of political oratory.51 While I agree with McCann about the importance of the previously quoted passage as evidence that Thelwall recognized the fraught potential of ‘politicosentimental’ appeals, I do not see it as invalidating the literary aspects of his project. On the contrary, if we consider that The Peripatetic’s appeal is not only sentimental, but also premised on the demystifying juxtaposition of established genres and styles, including the oratorical mode that McCann sets apart, the passage begins to look less like an acknowledgement of the futility of literary reformism and more like a recognition of the challenges inherent in any medium, genre or style to the project of ‘bringing home’ to each man’s bosom the consequences of another’s suffering. Indeed, Sylvanus’s remarks apply just as much to ‘orators’ as to ‘poets’. For me, the interest of this moment lies in its concern with the efficacy of radical language – whether literary or political, oral or written – and the question of how to spark enthusiasm in the service of reform. Sylvanus is careful to distinguish between the rational, benevolent enthusiasm he wishes to elicit and the ‘deluded’ enthusiasm that ‘modern sophists’ like Edmund Burke attributed to the influence of radical agitators. Elsewhere in the work, he tells us that although Ambulator advocates the principles of liberty and equality, ‘he is no enthusiast – (He abhors the sanguinary crew ... )’.52 A few pages earlier, he presents a contrary definition of ‘enthusiasm’ in a description of himself as a boy standing near the edge of a precipice and listening to the ebbing tide ‘in sweet enthusiasm’.53 In the increasingly paranoid political climate of the 1790s, and especially after Thelwall’s trial for high treason in 1794, the distinction between a rational, benevolent enthusiasm and a fanatical one – between exciting what Thelwall called ‘a correspondent flame in the cause of liberty’54 and inciting to violence – became a central preoccupation of his radical practice. In The Peripatetic, however, the concern is not that the reader or listener might be carried too far, but that he might not be carried far enough: that, as with Belmour, ‘personal feeling’ and ‘individual interest’ might overpower the sympathetic imagination and ‘restore the momentary wanderer to himself’. As Jon Mee points out, Thelwall does not attempt to contain the types of enthusiasm represented in The Peripatetic by marking off the literary sphere from the real world: he ‘disregards the kind of regulation that separated polite sensibility, which aims to “restore the momentary wanderer to himself ”, from a more expansive movement out of the self and towards the multitude associated with enthusiasm’.55 He is more preoccupied with questioning the power of radical writers and orators to bring about lasting changes. What are we to make of such a questioning with respect to The Peripatetic, and how can we explain similar moments in Thelwall’s writing – frequent enough

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to merit attention – when discussion and debate seem inadequate to changing people’s minds, much less their behaviour? Andrew McCann suggests that Thelwall’s doubts about the effectiveness of literary reformism strengthened his commitment to political lecturing,56 while others, taking their cue from Thelwall himself, claim that the apparent defeat of the radical movement in the late 1790s hastened his retirement to a remote farm in Wales, where he rededicated himself poetry and novel-writing.57 But perhaps these moments of radical doubt do not suggest any such discontinuity between Thelwall’s literary and political pursuits, and point instead to a theory and a practice of writing in which that distinction – literature or politics – breaks down or becomes irrelevant. If so, then Thelwall’s works bear reading within a new theoretical frame.

The Articulated Community Thelwall’s inclusive conception of the public and his faith in rational-critical debate make him a good candidate for interpretation in terms of Jürgen Habermas’s well-known concept of the ‘public sphere’ or its later ‘counter-public’ variants.58 But Habermas’s thinking has moved on from that initial concept. In recent years, his aim has been to rescue what remains of the rational-critical spirit of the Enlightenment in advanced capitalist societies. Thus, in The Theory of Communicative Action (German 1981, English 1984) and other recent works, Habermas turns his attention from the public sphere as an ideal foundation for democratic politics to the rules of communication on which such a politics now rests. ‘Reaching understanding’, he says, ‘is the inherent telos of human speech’.59 As a modern counterpart to the late eighteenth-century faith in the truthdisclosing potential of rational debate, or what William Godwin called the ‘collision of mind with mind’,60 the theory of communicative action seems to provide a fitting framework for interpreting Thelwall. But from a literary-critical perspective, one problem with the theory is its reliance on a rigid distinction between ‘communicative’ and ‘strategic’ forms of action. Communicative action aims to achieve consensus and depends on other people’s acceptance of the validity claims inherent in a given speech act, while strategic action seeks to influence or coerce others to produce a particular result.61 Although Habermas allows that strategic-action elements may appear in communicative-action contexts and vice versa, what matters to him is the overall orientation of the action, which must be either strategic or communicative.62 Literary language occupies an ambiguous position in this typology. Habermas places it under the heading of communicative action: it apparently falls into the subcategory of ‘dramaturgical action’, which encompasses all forms of ‘aesthetic practical knowledge’, including all fictive, allusive, poetical and expressive means of representing the world.

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(Intriguingly, the category also covers self-deceptions of the sort that ‘can be dissolved in therapeutic dialogue by argumentative means’.63) However, as Jonathan Culler points out, further demarcations within the category of communicative action call the status of literary language into question.64 Drawing on the speech act theory of J. L. Austin and John Searle, Habermas distinguishes between the normal, serious uses of language, as in everyday communication, and its abnormal or ‘parasitic’ uses, as in fiction.65 In the same spirit he distinguishes rhetoric from logic and literature from philosophy, and takes issue with Jacques Derrida for ‘levelling’ these distinctions. In his view, there exists a ‘tension-filled polarity between the poetic-world-disclosive function of language and its prosaic, innerworldly functions …’, which he also calls its ‘problem-solving’ functions.66 One critic, Lasse Thomassen, glosses this as a distinction between ‘solving questions of what is true and right, and opening up new horizons of meaning thereby making us see things differently’.67 Thus, although Habermas ranks literary discourse as part of communicative action, he denies it any serious role in public discourse. I have tried to show that the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy might provide a useful complement – or corrective – to a Habermasian reading of Thelwall. Indeed, despite the apparent conflict between Thelwall and Nancy over the idea of community as an organic body or extended family, there is a striking correspondence between their ways of thinking about communication. For Nancy, the ‘totality’ of community is, as I have mentioned, ‘the totality of a dialogue’, and that dialogue is not about the exchange of particular messages, but about the sharing of voices, ‘the articulated being ... of speech itself ’.68 We are a long way from Habermas’s privileging of communicative acts geared towards consensus – forms of communion that The Peripatetic calls into question, as in the ‘Old Sailor’ episode – and a great deal closer to the performative, participatory and sometimes playful dimensions of Thelwall’s writing, which combines literary styles, genres and voices in a manner that evokes Nancy’s definition of the ‘community of articulation’ as ‘the play of a juncture: what takes place where different pieces touch each other without fusing together, where they slide, pivot, or tumble over one another, one at the limit of the other – exactly at its limit ... ’.69 Perhaps, then, one way of understanding Thelwall’s literary works is as instances of what Nancy – being deliberately provocative – calls ‘literary communism’. By this expression he designates ‘the sharing of community in and by its writing, its literature’.70 More specifically, he means writing that suspends its own exemplarity as work71 – be it the work of sympathy, generosity, consciousnessraising or community-building. ‘Literary communism’ is writing that articulates ‘the absence of communion … through which we communicate to each other not the meaning of community, but an infinite reserve of common and singular meanings’.72 Seen from this perspective, The Peripatetic, like the larger corpus

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to which it belongs, takes on significance outside the range of Enlightenment philosophy that inspired it. This is not to establish Thelwall as a forerunner of post-Enlightenment thought, but to find evidence in his writing that pragmatism and poetics, or rationality and rhetoric, or reason and imagination are not mutually exclusive, but coexist along a continuum,73 and that despite the ongoing compartmentalization of such forms of knowledge, a role for the literary activist as an acknowledged legislator of the world may yet be forged.

8 DOMESTIC INVASIONS: JOHN THELWALL AND THE EXPLOITATION OF PRIVACY Corinna Wagner

Throughout his life John Thelwall was very much concerned with the question of what sort of access governments, political groups and individuals should have to spaces traditionally considered private. In his writings he often expounded what seemed to be unequivocal views on government intrusion. Yet an unresolved tension surfaces between his efforts to safeguard personal privacy and his advocacy of the principle – to use a fitting if somewhat anachronistic phrase – that ‘the personal is political.’ Throughout various careers in the public eye, as political debater, orator, lecturer and elocutionist, he attempted to resolve the contradictions that emerged between his fears about incursions into the most intimate areas of human relations; his self-publicizing practices (which included disclosures about his domestic life); and the growing emphasis on the contiguity between the public and private spheres (an emphasis which he endorsed). I would argue that Thelwall’s contradictory and rather remarkable experiences with fame and infamy reveal much about political culture, past and present. Thelwall’s experiences are emblematic of a transitional moment in modern British political history, for in contrast to their early eighteenth-century counterparts, politicians in the post-French Revolution period found it much more difficult to shield their private lives from the prying eyes of the public. As a consequence, political figures – whether reformers, radicals, reactionaries, Whigs, Tories or members of the royal family – became progressively more conscious of the impact their personal lives had on the reception of their ideas and opinions. Importantly, Thelwall’s writing and his experiences raise wider, more perennial questions about the issue of privacy, particularly as it pertains to public trust in government. Privacy is central to our assessment of the possibilities and risks associated with identity politics and to our understanding of the formation of public opinion. My goal here is twofold: first, using Thelwall as my exemplar, I will show how in the 1790s and after, the personalization of the political gave rise to extraordinary violations of privacy. When these incursions were carried out explicitly by government, they were seen as violations, but when remarkably – 95 –

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similar incursions were performed by fellow citizens or by the press they were often viewed as standard practice. Secondly, I aim to open a window here onto the nature of modern privacy and to interrogate how, since the late eighteenth century, private life has become established as a heuristic by which political ability and trustworthiness is measured.

I The idea that an individual’s private character and domestic life are the best indicators of political trustworthiness has become a foundational principle in our understanding of modern political culture. This, and indeed any discussion of the emergence of the modern public sphere obviously owes much to Jürgen Habermas’s account of the public as consisting of independent, rationally-minded individuals whose political activities take place in the space between official government and the private sphere.1 Whilst there is not the space here to engage with many of the fruitful debates generated by this conceptualization of the public sphere, I want to focus on one important aspect of this debate. Among the gaps or oversights scholars have identified in the Habermasian model is a lack of attention to a dichotomy that surfaces between transparency and concealment in political culture; as Agnes Ku puts it, Habermas ‘undertheorizes the conceptual pair of publicness (openness) versus secrecy.’2 An attention to this undertheorized dichotomy greatly informs my exploration of the relationship between private life, public opinion and the right to privacy in the modern public sphere. I am specifically concerned with how the struggle between openness and secrecy in public life is bound up with self-publicity, personal disclosure and the cultivation of a public-as-audience-oriented subjectivity. This essay also builds on the work of scholars who have usefully identified the ways that previously private spaces became politicized and publicly accessible in the revolutionary era. In his study of the proliferation of autobiographical writing in the eighteenth century, John Brewer has outlined a Habermasian-inflected model of how ‘the private realm’ became ‘coextensive with civil society.’3 Importantly, he addresses that gap identified above by showing how the ‘the invention of intimacy’ paradoxically provided the means for ‘a seamless and transparent publicness.’4 As well, John Barrell has identified how politics entered areas – the dressing room, the cottage, the coffeehouse and other places of conviviality and free exchange – that according to an earlier paradigm of privacy, were seen as consummately private.5 Still others have shown how, in the prevailing atmosphere of moral panic that followed revolution, such ‘biographical’ genres as anti-monarchical scandal and scurrilous memoirs of radicals resulted from, and contributed to, the prising open of private space.6 What these studies share is a close attention to the ways that changes in political culture paralleled and were

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influenced by changes in the language of politics. At the same time that the state and private life became more intimately connected, affective, domestic language featured increasingly in political discourse. Along with Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, Thelwall had condemned the ‘madness’ of Edmund Burke’s ‘cumbustible’ discourse: such emotive language was thought an inappropriate medium for the discussion of serious political issues, largely because its affective power was seen as antithetical to rational debate.7 Yet he begrudgingly admired the powerful response such affective, personalized language could elicit. This type of language provided access to his private life – something Thelwall welcomed and promoted. Such an access reflected an eighteenth-century refiguring of a classical republican tradition that established civic virtue as a prerequisite of citizenship. Thelwall’s politics are deeply rooted in the republican characterization of a legitimate political community as one comprised of virtuous public citizens, but with a definitional adjustment. For Thelwall, the body politic must be composed, too, of privately virtuous citizens. He expresses this philosophy plainly in his Tribune lectures where he states that ‘the same principle that makes a man virtuous in public life, would, if applied to private affairs, make him virtuous there also.’8 Thelwall’s politics merged this republican view of civic virtue with a Godwinian rationality: virtue, he continually emphasized, relied heavily on self-regulation and required constant critical vigilance. The same disinterested eye that appraised the conduct of strangers should be turned on one’s closest relations and also upon the self. As he expressed some years later – ironically, in a pamphlet written in response to published details about his domestic life – the individual ‘who is truly virtuous, will deplore, and restrain, the errors even of a father; in the same token, one’s ‘own private conduct should be searched with critical severity.’9 Thelwall pinpoints self-analysis and the scrutiny of others as not only the means of attaining ‘virtue, wisdom and utility’ but as the very reason for living ‘in an age of civilization.’10 He may be indulging a recognizably Thelwallian penchant for rhetorical flourish here, but the point remains: the public sphere is a space where private individuals evaluate, assess and make alterations. This dual emphasis on openness and self-regulation is more than political rhetoric; in fact, the uniqueness of Thelwall’s politics arguably lies less in his republicanism or his delineation of civic virtue, than in the way he sets about using his private life to pragmatically demonstrate these abstract principles in practice. There is something very exceptional about Thelwall’s sharing of private information: very few radicals or reformers were so willing to share information about their private lives and the lives of their families.11 Politics, literature and autobiography are melded together in such early work as The Peripatetic (1793) and his Poems Written in Close Confinement (1795). In these texts, autobiographical writing becomes a technology of the patriot citizen, a figure who,

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in the case of the former, takes his audience on a literal journey of democratic reconstruction.12 The scenes and people he encounters on his travels provide the material for a project of personal and national rebuilding in line with his definition of civic virtue. In the case of the Poems, Thelwall the patriot citizen embarks on a project of self-definition which casts himself and other jailed reformers as affectionate husbands and fathers whose domestic affections inspired them ‘to deeds of manly Virtue’, thus effectively guaranteeing their political integrity.13 In his 1801 Prefatory Memoir to his Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, he shares, in a highly sentimentalized, personalized and specific language, personal information about the death of his mother in 1794, the death of his beloved sixyear-old daughter Maria in 1799 and the vicissitudes of marriage and domestic life.14 Crucially, Thelwall took many opportunities to submit his private life to the type of overt public examination he describes in theoretical terms. He placed a steadily consistent faith in the public as a rational and just adjudicative body. Throughout his life, he continually appealed to the ‘tribunal of public opinion’ – a tribunal more ‘accessible,’ as he put it, than courts and governments.15 On one occasion he asked his lecture audience and his readers to identify any ‘improper motive’ he exhibited and to ‘let it be known, that its impropriety may be detected; and that I may be benefited by the animadversions of my fellow citizens.’16 In another case, he exposed himself to the public in a markedly uninhibited and candid way. Using a discourse heavily inflected with a Godwinian emphasis on impartial judgment, he requests that his audience ‘investigate with the most scrupulous exactness every opinion and sentiment’ that he had uttered.17 In these ways, Thelwall used his own behaviour to demonstrate unambiguously how personal virtue – the basis for political membership – requires on the one hand, openness, sincerity, transparency, and on the other, correction and self-discipline.

II But why was Thelwall so willing to use his own life as political capital? Why did he encourage public scrutiny of the very areas of life generally afforded protection from such intrusion? At least part of the answer must be that he intended to send a particularly bold challenge to government. The transparency of his own life throws into sharp relief the opacity surrounding the workings of William Pitt’s government and justifies a demand for greater parliamentary and juridical transparency. The type of self-presentation that readers encounter in Poems Written in Confinement, which casts him and his affiliates as models of persecuted republican virtue, provides a foil against which the murkiness of government activities surrounding their arrests and the subsequent trial proceedings appears

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as a glaring contrast. In his undelivered trial speech, published as The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons (1795) Thelwall argues that the government had used the treason trials to create a smokescreen: their foremost purpose was not to defend the state, safeguard the king or even to protect the status quo. Rather the trials conveniently created an elaborate diversion which would prevent Britons from properly ‘scrutiniz[ing] the conduct of their public servants and representatives.’18 In fact, the very charge of treason was oxymoronic, for it was an accusation of secrecy, of harbouring some sort of diabolical ‘secret intention’, or as the prosecutors had stated, of having ‘a purpose hidden under the veil’.19 In this light, Thelwall’s biographical transparency fulfils an overtly political purpose: as a platform from which to criticize government, his private life becomes part of an attempt to agitate for increased transparency in government and to establish openness as the basis of political legitimacy. It seems to me that there is also a rather less overtly political purpose to Thelwall’s self-publicization. His ability to create a political identity that is both distinct from and yet akin to that of the general public is surely a strategic move in the public opinion stakes. The publicity surrounding his private life establishes him as a political martyr whose sufferings could neither bow him nor prevent him from baring his most private emotions openly, honestly, publicly; yet, his ‘effusions of social and relative affection,’ as he was to describe them, were not the product of the political martyr or the politician, but rather of the man, the son, the father and the husband.20 Thelwall’s discourse reveals an acute awareness that the most efficient – if not the only – means of gaining, regaining and maintaining public confidence was to establish a sense of cultural coherence between himself and an audience that increasingly placed political stock in the display of domestic virtue and moral probity. The cultivation of a familiar identity fulfils a distinctly pragmatic purpose in that it enables a political actor to establish a sense of collectivity with his or her audience – a requirement for the establishment of political membership and the first step to cooperative action. Thelwall’s highly personalized and affective language would appeal to listeners who identify their own familial configurations and domestic challenges in his experiences. The autobiographical disclosures encourage readers to classify the individual, the personal, the singular (and thus the otherwise ineffable) as political.

III Up to now, I have considered how Thelwall willingly publicized his own life, but he also clearly defines those areas of human life that should be protected from the prying eyes of government. In a letter to the Lord Mayor of London, reprinted in his 1795 lecture on On the Moral Tendency of a System of Spies and

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Informers, he condemned the Pitt ministry for authorizing emissaries to storm privately-owned and privately-rented lecture rooms. In this text, he defines the attendance of such spies, who would most often disturb proceedings with catcalls but who would also threaten kidnapping and violence, as a clear ‘violation of public and private right’.21 Thelwall’s characterization of the lecture room as both a public and private space shares something with Habermas’s categorization of coffeehouses as part of the private realm because ‘their public was recruited from private people.’22 Since for Habermas – as for Thelwall – these assembled persons are not state officials but rather independent private individuals, and given that, as political philosopher Nancy Fraser points out, the ‘deliberative practice’ of such gatherings ‘consists exclusively in opinion formation and does not also encompass decision making’, then the lecture hall can be characterized as an autonomous, independent space.23 As such, there is an expectation that the lecture hall be both protected from criminal intrusion and from government interference (as any other private space would be entitled to), as long as it abides within recognized law. ‘I understand it to be an established principle of British jurisprudence, that the magistracy is bound to protect the citizens in the exercise of every function which the legislature has not prohibited’, Thelwall writes, and yet the violent disruptions of his lectures by government hirelings and churchand-king mobs demonstrates that ‘anarchy is sanctioned by magistracy itself ’ so that ‘our houses are no sanctuaries’ and ‘our persons have no security.’24 In terms of individual privacy, Thelwall is even more adamant about the need to protect spaces of interpersonal communication and correspondence. In The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons he rails against the ‘rummaging’ of his ‘closet for unfinished letters’ and the invasions of the homes of his ‘nearest relations’. In the current climate of suspicion, he declares, every tavern and coffee-house has been haunted … My hours of conviviality have been attended by spies and sycophants, my doors beset with evedroppers, my private chambers haunted by the familiar spirits of an infernal Inquisition, and my confidential friends stretched on the rack of interrogatory, on order to extort from them the conversation which in the unsuspecting hours of social hilarity may have been uttered at my own table. 25

It is hard to imagine anyone not protesting against these types of encroachments into spaces of hospitality, domesticity and familiarity. That Thelwall uses the word ‘haunted’ to describe government penetration into these spaces is, I think, telling. The word gives an impression of how we tend to view these spaces as sacrosanct; we conceive of the violation of them as not only deeply disturbing but a contravention of individual rights. Implicit in the word ‘haunt’, is also another meaning. There is a sense of a ‘return’ here: to publicize one’s private life is to relinquish control over that shared part of the self that can then be appropri-

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ated by others, only to return as damaging evidence against ourself. In Thelwall’s case, his self-publicity may have been politically expedient – even obligatory – at certain times in his career but as we will see in a later section, the personal information he shared returned to vex him for the rest of his life. Rather surprisingly, within the very same text that he condemns those who had invaded his domestic and convivial space, Thelwall invites even further personal scrutiny. Rather than protest the legality or efficacy of courtroom attacks on his character, he instead demands deeper forays into his private life. If I am ‘the dangerous traitor’ or ‘the Anarchist’ that ‘the unprincipled agents of my prosecutors’ have accused, he insists, ‘why were not more of my personal acts … brought forward?’26 He presents his life as evidence of his innocence, urging his readers to consider the respectability of acquaintances who were called as character witnesses on his behalf. Since as he says, the government ‘broke into the most secret recesses’ of his life and made sure that ‘every thing that might appear injurious’ to his character was publicized, he is forced to respond to the unwarranted smearing of his reputation.27 Thelwall’s statements indicate how compelled he is to do battle on the same ground that he has been attacked; still, there is something very problematic about such a public appeal. He places a very large burden of proof on personal character. A serious tension emerges here between his protests against government intrusion and his readiness to use personal character as the burden of proof in political and legal battle. It seems to me that Thelwall gets caught in a paradox of his own making: the very sphere of life he aims to protect from government interference is the sphere he places squarely before the inquiring eyes of the public. This same paradox emerges even more clearly when Thelwall’s public struggles are not with the government or his opponents but with two famous political allies, John Horne Tooke and William Godwin. In his posthumously-published biography, he uses a language that plainly shifts the ambit of political debate into the realm of the private. In an account of his disagreement with his political mentor and fellow treason trial defendant, Horne Tooke, Thelwall insists ‘“that the world has nothing to do with private differences between man and man”’ and asserts that a patriot would never let personal resentment ‘“diminish the admiration due to public virtue”,’ but then he goes on to inform readers that Horne Tooke had once suggested that he could ‘“have done better”’ than to make an imprudent marriage to his beloved Stella.28 Private communications between two private men – the very thing Thelwall is so keen to protect – is here presented for public consumption. He goes further: ‘“however excellent”’ were Horne Tooke’s ‘“political dogmas”’, they were not ‘sufficient to atone for all deficiencies of heart and morals. I still, indeed, respect the politician, but I abhor the man. … the being who even in his attachments and social intercourse is merely a politician, is without feeling.’29

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Thelwall may seem to take care here to divide the political from the private, but the effort reads rather noticeably as a rhetorical gesture. In the canon of his writing and in nineteenth-century political culture, private virtues were plainly indivisible from public ones; thus, his statements to the contrary fall somewhat flat. The more famous public spat occurred when William Godwin characterized Thelwall’s lectures as rabble-rousing and disruptive in his 1795 Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills. There have been conflicting readings of Godwin’s intentions and the details of the subsequent exchanges between the two men, but my intention is not to rehearse these or to weigh into the debate here.30 Rather, I want to focus on the highly personalized language of Thelwall’s public response, published in the preface to the second volume of the Tribune. In this public forum, Thelwall chose to blatantly target Godwin’s bachelorhood and his alleged social reclusiveness. Godwin’s pamphlet had demonstrated clearly, he declares, how ‘dangerous’ was ‘the life of domestic solitude,’ for it rendered him selfish, unsympathetic and incapable of ‘every feeling of private, and sometimes of public justice’. As he had done in his published trial speech, Thelwall again turns to the tribunal of the public to judge his actions and his character. ‘Let any man compare together,’ he asks, ‘the terms of friendship and reciprocal esteem’ that existed between him and Godwin, ‘and the time, circumstances, and complexion of this attack, and then judge’ who was ‘guilty of illiberality.’31 Such a strategy, in both these cases, seems incompatible with his insistence, made elsewhere in the same years, that philosophy rather than personality must ultimately decide political questions. In his 1796 Address to the Inhabitants of Yarmouth, for instance, he expresses great relief ‘at being compelled to abandon personality for principle, local prejudices for universal philanthropy’.32 In his Appeal to Popular Opinion, written the same year, Thelwall criticizes politicians for whom ‘men, not measures’ was of uppermost concern.33 In a Tribune lecture contrasting England’s Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution, he privileges the latter for being based on principles rather than on leaders. This was ‘not the revolution of Marat or Robespierre ... but the revolution of the people’.34 Such political analysis parallels much more personal attempts to separate his own feelings from his sense of public duty. In fact, during the 1796 lecture season, he must have been thinking at least partly of Godwin when he turned introspective, speaking frankly and regretfully of the way private disagreements had clouded his political purpose. In a poem in the second volume of the Tribune, he resolves to prevent ‘private wrongs’ and ‘private feelings’ from swaying him from his political purpose. He articulates his determination to remain unswayed by ‘the furious hiss / Of undeserv’d Suspicion’ and vows that his ‘sole revenge on those whose sland’rous tongue’ had tainted his ‘fair fame’ would be his fortitude.35

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A similar subject had figured in the previous season, following his withdrawal from the London Corresponding Society. In his farewell address to his lecture audience, recorded in the Tribune, he responds to or anticipates personalized interpretations of his departure. His address is an acknowledgement that ‘the mind is sometimes apt to become inflamed, to lose sight of principles, and dwell too much upon personalities’. The tinge of disappointment is palpable here as he humbly promises his audience that self-correction will follow his self-reflections. He pledges to avoid ‘being carried by the title of popularity’ and hopes that any improper ‘conduct this season, will be corrected in retirement’ so that in the ensuing seasons, he would be sure to show less personal prejudice and resentment.36 A question that surfaces here is: how should such personally-extended invitations to scrutinize personal character be reconciled with attempts to shift public attention from personality to focus on political issues? As we have seen, Thelwall takes many opportunities to publicize the personal. But at times, his publicization techniques appear to collide with his anxieties about the possible negative effects of politicizing the personal. Providing public access to his private life was meant to buttress his arguments about transparency in government, but it could be argued that such access also resulted in compromising his political objectivity and infringing upon his domestic space.

IV The public became a tribunal in ways that Thelwall could not have foreseen; in fact, arguably, the most disturbing invasions of his privacy were performed not by the state but by the general public. He had become a recognized figure, known for his powerful oratorical performances at debating clubs, London Corresponding Society meetings, large outdoor gatherings at Copenhagen Fields and St George’s Fields, at public lectures in London and on provincial tour. Public recognition, however innocuous or positive it may seem, is always pregnant with dangerous possibility. A mass may become a mob; order may unexpectedly descend into anarchy; a once docile or impartial public may be convinced to identify political threat where previously it had seen none. That same public may also be convinced that part of their civic duty was to eject that threat from their midst. The free exchange of ideas Thelwall envisioned became impossible in the environment of surveillance that settled over Britain in the mid-1790s. Much of his post-1795 writing gives a sense of how pervasive had become such abuses of his privacy and how numerous the abusers: the government may have created what he referred to as ‘a complete system Espionage’, but it was a system that had evolved so far out of their hands that ‘in every class and situation of society’

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were found ‘daring banditti’.37 The agents, he writes, who ‘probed with the most scrutinizing observation’ his every move were not paid spies or loyal associators, but the regular inhabitants of far-flung provincial towns.38 Even when an increasingly inhospitable atmosphere forced him to retire from London politics to domestic solitude in the Welsh countryside in 1798, he and his family were scrutinized with suspicion by neighbouring farmers – a set of people far removed from London politics. Rather ironically, Thelwall addressed the damaging effects of the loss of his privacy most comprehensively in his 1801 Prefatory Memoir, a text in which he bares his most private history. The language he adopts is worth noting here: he informs readers that ‘the politician should be forgotten’ and that only his ‘poetical and moral reputation’ be considered.39 Although he remained ‘unchanged in his opinions’, he insists that out of consideration for himself, ‘his unoffending family’ and for the general state ‘of the public mind’, he would no longer address political issues.40 His claims to have traded politics for domestic bliss – whether fully sincere or not – must be intended to cast himself as a ‘reformed’ man. The private Thelwall was a man of probity, a family man, a feeling man; therefore he might still find a reading public by writing on purely domestic subjects. Of course his claims must also be interpreted, at least in part as a rhetorical strategy, intended as protection against persecution. Providing public access to his politics was no longer a safe thing to do, and yet he seemed to suppose that facilitating even greater access to his private life was a safe activity. Thelwall’s ostensible withdrawal from active politics and his self-refashioning into a rural poet-farmer did not offer the protection he may have imagined. Just as Godwin’s candid retelling of Mary Wollstonecraft’s sexual history in his Memoirs of her had proven a public relations disaster some seven years earlier, so did Thelwall’s confessions invite further public pillaging. Most notably, his revelations about his rootless youth and familial hardships became the focus of a very public and rather protracted battle with Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review. The affair started with a rather brief (four-page) review of Thelwall’s Poems Written in Retirement, which appeared in the April 1803 edition of the Review.41 Although Thelwall’s domestic life, much more conventional than Wollstonecraft’s or Godwin’s, meant that sexual morality was a non-issue, the reviewer found other aspects of Thelwall’s life to attack: Ploughboys and carpenters are first drawn into the shops of mercers and perfumers, and into the service of esquires, baronets, and peers; the runaway apprentice next goes upon the stage; hairdressers and valets write amatory verses; coffeehouse waiters publish political pamphlets; and shoemakers and tailors astonish the world with plans for reforming the constitution, and with effusions of relative and social feeling.42

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Thelwall’s ambitions and his relatively humble economic background are targeted here, as is the personalized language he had used in his ‘effusions of relative and social feeling’. The reviewer willingly exploits, but expresses an ostensible discomfort with, the sharing of highly personal details and emotions: private sorrows do not become the subject of public discussion if they are not offered up as such. In response to this review, Thelwall published an intensely passionate and inflammatory 131-page pamphlet. His reaction in A Letter to Francis Jeffray [sic] On Certain Calumnies and Misrepresentations in the Edinburgh Review sounds remarkably similar to his earlier protest against government intrusion. The same outrage is there in his demand to know ‘why, resolute in unprovoked hostility, they still pursue me, from the Study to the Rostrum?’43 Yet never does Thelwall express regret for publicizing his private life nor does he lose faith in the tribunal of the public (a phrase he consistently uses). Confident in his trust that wronged victims can obtain ‘consolation and redress’ he challenges Jeffrey: If you have attacked my character through the medium of the press, through the medium of the press I have a right to seek my remedy. If you have abused the public with falshoods and forgeries … to the bar of that public I have a right to call you; that those falshoods may be detected, and those insults atoned.44

Calling Jeffrey to the public bar only stirred up greater public hostility and steered the debate into more personal territory. An anonymous author – supposedly a Jeffrey supporter – defended the reviewers and placed the blame for the ensuing public scandal at Thelwall’s feet. He contended that ‘If Mr Thelwall had not, with a rare mixture of vanity and bad taste, obtruded on the world a bombastic account of his professions and disgraces, the Reviewers most certainly would never have dragged them into notice’.45 And surely, he continues in a conspicuously wry tone, the reviewers had not laughed at Thelwall’s ‘paternal sorrows’ as he had alleged nor had they made his ‘family afflictions … a subject of derision’.46 As these comments indicate, the domesticity, personal virtue and moral probity that Thelwall demonstrated in his life would not protect him – even after death – from that part of the public who were determined to judge him politically and personally unworthy.

V It is, of course, impossible to pinpoint with any certainty the exact ramifications of Thelwall’s self-publicizing. Throughout his adult life, he emphasized civility, openness, transparency and the inseparability of personal virtue and political worth. There is no question that an identifying feature of modernity, which emerges so strongly in his writing and his experiences, is the contiguity of the

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political and the private. Personal experience is connected in a multitude of ways to national identity, patriotism and political legislation. Personal relationships greatly influence political decision-making and public policy. There is no doubt that personal lives have political significance. What also seems clear, however, is that the access he provided to his life at least encouraged unforeseen infringements on his personal liberty and that of his family. Renunciations of the right to privacy resulted in the type of spectacular tactics that were employed against him. Public intrusion – whether legal or illegal, individual or collective – is at least partially a consequence of endowing the private sphere with tremendous political significance and with making the life of the politician part of the political platform. We commonly assume that it is the individual’s prerogative to freely decide how much of, and what aspects of his or her life to share with the public. Regardless of how much an individual reveals about his or her life, we expect that he or she should be entitled to at least some type of protection from public intrusion in a democratic, liberal society. But one thinks here of Isaiah Berlin’s argument that liberty requires that ‘a frontier … be drawn between the area of private life and that of public authority.’47 Thelwall’s negotiations over the issue of access provide an early glimpse into what have become two disturbing trends in modern political life. There is, first of all, a tendency to give too little publicity to many government activities, thus jeopardizing democratic values. That the personal lives of political actors have at times eclipsed important political issues in the last 200 years has surely contributed to this phenomenon. At the same time, there is a tendency (and again, Thelwall’s case is an early example of this) to either disregard individual privacy or to refuse to recognize privacy as a right or a privilege. Certainly, there have been any number of politicians whose careers have been sacrificed to scandal, whose politics have been stamped with ‘the broad seal of infamy,’ to borrow Thelwall’s phrase.48 Deemed to have fallen short of established norms, these individuals have then become used to enforce prescriptive moral categories. Most often, the ‘truth’ about whether an individual’s life conforms to prevailing cultural standards matters little, since the public condemnation or celebration he or she receives has limited ‘factual’ basis anyway. The ‘truth,’ as we know, is most often obscured by savvy public relations maneuvering – an inevitable circumstance in a society that uses private life as the yardstick by which to measure political or moral worthiness. In our own time, infringements of privacy have resulted in the type of ‘sexual McCarthyism’, to borrow legal expert Alan Dershowitz’s phrase, we witnessed in the flaying of Bill Clinton’s private affairs in court and media. There is resonance between this case and that of Thelwall’s: both provide compelling evidence of the hazards of identity politics.

9 THE DUNGEON AND THE CELL: THE PRISON VERSE OF COLERIDGE AND THELWALL Jon Mee

While in prison in 1794 awaiting trial for High Treason, John Thelwall wrote. He wrote to occupy ‘those solitary hours which might have been irksome, but for some such source of amusement’.1 Thelwall prepared a course of lectures and also wrote the defence he was ultimately dissuaded from giving in court, published the following year as The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons (1795). He also wrote poetry. Some of Thelwall’s prison poetry was published almost immediately in the newspapers, most later collected as Poems written while in Close Confinement (1795). Although he claimed to write for amusement, Thelwall wrote with posterity in mind and, not necessarily the same thing, with a sense of himself as part of a long and ongoing struggle for liberty. Such self-consciousness was typical of Thelwall, but his literary ambition was closely wrapped up with his political commitment. When the poems were published in 1795, for example, they were brought out by a conger of popular radical publishers, Daniel Isaac Eaton, James Ridgway, and Henry Delaney Symonds, rather than booksellers more readily associated with polite letters or even the poetry of meditative inwardness associated with an emergent literary romanticism.2 Among the poems Thelwall included was ‘The Cell’, written, apparently, on 24 October 1794, while in Newgate, originally published the day after in the Morning Post: WITHIN the Dungeon’s noxious gloom The Patriot still, with dauntless breast, The cheerful aspect can assume – And smile – in conscious Virtue blest! The damp foul floor, the ragged wall, And shattered window, grated high, The trembling Ruffian may appal, Whose thoughts no sweet resource supply. – 107 –

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The poem’s emphasis on patriot virtue finds parallels, as Nicholas Roe has pointed out, in the ‘Ode to Liberty’ John Augustus Bonney wrote while he was in the Tower: Great Russell’s worth, and Sydney’s patriot zeal, Here fell beneath a Tyrant’s murd’ring steel. Nor, charged with guilt, when Pitt’s uneasy mind Saw plots in air, and Treason in each wind, Could virtuous patriotism, and learning’s lore, Against Tooke’s entrance, bar this fatal door.4

Where they may differ is in the greater emphasis Thelwall gives to his material circumstances in prison and his relationship to the radical movement outside the walls, including the shoemaker Thomas Hardy.5 The details of the ‘noxious gloom’ and ‘damp foul floor’ in Thelwall’s poem (and repeated in several others) are commonplaces of the campaign against conditions in Newgate that had started as early as 1793 with the death of Lord George Gordon.6 At the arraignment of the prisoners – the day after ‘The Cell’ was written – Thelwall, Bonney and the other prisoners had complained that conditions there were ‘deplorable beyond anything that ever before entered my imagination’.7 Further details were given in the Tribune, after Thelwall’s acquittal: ‘At my first entrance into this place, I was struck at once with disgust and surprise. I had heard of cells and dungeons, and had pictured them to my imagination: but a place so vile, so filthy, and so abhorrent to all the feelings and senses of man, I never had beheld or conceived’. The description emphasises the dark and dampness of this ‘common receptacle for the putrid carcases of felons’.8 Looking beyond the details of the damp and noxious prison, the theme of the freedom of the mind in the incarcerated body sketched out in the final stanza of ‘The Cell’ had been a recurrent one in poetry sympathetic to reform for decades. The epigraph for Thelwall’s poems was a familiar quotation from Milton’s Comus: FOOL, DO NOT BOAST THOU CAN’ST NOT TOUCH THE FREEDOM OF MY MIND, -------- ALTHO’ THIS CORPORAL RIND, THOU HAST IMMANACLED.9

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Despite the epigraph from Milton, perhaps (to modern ‘literary’ readers, at least) the most obvious seventeenth-century precedent for ‘The Cell’ may be the Cavalier Richard Lovelace’s ‘To Althea from Prison’, and its famous couplet: Stone walls doe not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage;

Lovelace’s poem concludes: If I have freedome in my love, And in my soule am free; Angels alone, that sore above, Injoy such libertie.10

Lovelace’s Cavalier ‘libertie’, however, has different resonances than the invocations of patriot virtue that recur throughout Thelwall (and, indeed, Bonney’s) prison poetry. Bonney’s diary records an inscription taken from the wall of the governor’s apartments made in the 1660s: By torture strong my truth was try’d And of my liberty deny’d Wherefore Reason hath me persuaded That therefore patience must be imbraced Tho hard time chained me with smart Still virtue shall possess my heart.11

‘Virtue’ here, perhaps unlike Lovelace’s ‘libertie’, seems a conscious appeal to the values of classical republicanism that are invoked by Thelwall’s use of the lines from Milton as his epigraph. In Thelwall’s prison poetry, liberty remains a political possibility, rather than a transcendence of the realm of politics as such, although its classical republican aspects are powerfully tinctured by the eighteenth-century culture of sentiment.12 The idea of the power of the imagination to recreate the experience of freedom even in prison was given a further twist in Thelwall’s ‘Stanzas, Written on the Morning of Trial, and Presented to the Four Prisoners Liberated on the Same Day’. Here the freedom of the individual mind transcends its own limitations to imagine the benefits of ‘social joy’ felt by his liberated compatriots: For sweeter, from the lonely cell At length to life restor’d, Shall every soft emotion swell Around the social board.

From these social considerations, he moves on to imagine the power of his own sufferings ‘To benefit mankind’. The sympathetic powers of Thelwall’s incarcer-

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ated mind move out to imagine the social joys of his friends and then to the larger benefits for mankind of his political commitments, just as Coleridge imagined ‘Philanthropy’ to be ‘a thing of Concretion – Some home-born Feeling is the center of the Ball, that, rolling on thro’ Life collects and assimilates every congenial Affection’.13 Yet, as we shall see, this doctrine of concretion played out in rather different ways in the poetry of Thelwall, pointing towards Anne Janowitz’s claim that the prison poems represent ‘excellent examples of the political poetry of sensibility, which articulate the bonds between an inward and an external set of constitutive goods’.14 Over 1795, Thelwall widely publicized what had happened to him in prison, both in poetry and various prose pamphlets. Withdrawing from the LCS after his acquittal, he went through a period of retirement, before recommencing his career as a lecturer and orator at reform meetings in the new season in September 1795. Nicholas Roe has suggested that Coleridge and Thelwall kept a close watch on each other over 1795. Presumably Coleridge would have been aware of Thelwall’s increasingly important role in the radical movement from even earlier. He almost certainly followed the fate of those arrested for treason from mid-1794 closely, and may well have read ‘The Cell’ in the Morning Post.15 Indeed, in a letter to Thelwall of 19 November 1796, Coleridge claims ‘of your works I have now all, except your essay on animal vitality which I never had, & your poems [probably the 1787 collection] which I bought on their first publication, & lost them’. He even claims ‘from those poems I should have supposed our poetical tastes more nearly alike, than I find, they are’ (Letters, i.258), a comment on their disagreements over Coleridge’s ‘Religious Musings’, but affiliation followed by intimations of difference, as we shall see, were not untypical of Coleridge’s relationship with Thelwall. Coleridge first discussed Thelwall explicitly in print in The Plot Discovered, his protest against the Two Acts published at Bristol, early in December 1795, describing him as ‘the voice of tens of thousands’.16 Thelwall mentions Coleridge’s pamphlet in his own attack on the new legislation as early as the 9 December issue of The Tribune.17 Opposition to the Two Acts could unite people of very different political persuasions. Some of the differences between Thelwall and Coleridge became apparent when the latter attacked ‘Modern Patriotism’ in his Watchman essay of March 1796: Good Citizen -------? why do you call yourself a PATRIOT? You talk loudly and rapidly; but powers of vociferation do not constitute a PATRIOT. You wish to be distinguished from the herd; you like victory in an argument; you are the tongue-major of every company: therefore you love a Tavern better than your own fire-side. Alas! You hate power in others, because you love power yourself ! You are not a PATRIOT! you have studied Mr. Godwin’s Essay on Political Justice; but to think filial affection folly, gratitude a crime, marriage injustice, and the promiscuous intercourse of the

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sexes right and wise, may class you among the despisers of vulgar prejudices, but cannot increase the probability that you are a PATRIOT18

The key difference between them, destined to remain a thorny issue throughout their correspondence, was religion. Coleridge’s basic position throughout his many vicissitudes of the 1790s was that benevolence without Christianity must sink into sensuality, because otherwise it could ultimately find no external foundation beyond the self-interestedness of the passions and affections. He ended the ‘Modern Patriotism’ essay by insisting: You must give up your sensuality and your philosophy, the pimp of your sensuality; you must condescend to believe in a God, and in the existence of a Future State!19

Thelwall’s displeasure at the attack in ‘Modern Patriotism’ seems to have been reported back to Coleridge somehow, for he wrote a placatory letter towards the end of April urging that ‘pursuing the same end by the same means we ought not to be strangers to each other’ (Letters, i. 204). Thelwall’s reply seems to have been positive, but fierce in its rebuttal of Coleridge’s religious principles, judging, at least, by the quotations from it in Coleridge’s reply. There followed an intense correspondence between the two men that lasted over the next year or so, culminating in Thelwall’s visit to Nether Stowey in July 1797. Coleridge’s first letter to Thelwall was accompanied by a copy of his own Poems (1796), which seems to have had inscribed on its fly leaf a sonnet to Thelwall.20 The sonnet champions Thelwall’s ‘patriot zeal’ against those – like Godwin – who ‘Closet their valour’. From this point on in their correspondence, Coleridge spent a lot of energy trying to split Thelwall from Godwin.21 For Coleridge the essential issue was the repugnance he felt for Godwin’s atheistic emphasis on private judgment as the right road to virtue and justice: Godwin, whose very heart is cankered by the love of singularity & who feels no disinclination to wound by abrupt harshness, pleads for absolute Sincerity, because such a system gives him a frequent opportunity of indulging his misanthropy (Letters, i.214).

Coleridge goes on to give various examples of Godwin’s lack of Christian charity towards the feelings of others, culminating in a reference to the attack on Thelwall himself in Godwin’s Considerations on Lord Greville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills (1795): ‘His base, & anonymous attack on you is enough for me’ (Letters, i.214). Despite Thelwall’s suspicion of Coleridge’s religious opinions (‘the furious prejudices of the conventicle’), he was perhaps more amenable to his overtures because of the attack he had suffered at Godwin’s hands. Even so, in his next letter, Thelwall – wise perhaps to what was going on – accused Coleridge of having ‘industriously collected anecdotes unfavourable to the characters of great men’.22

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In the sonnet, Coleridge had figured himself as someone who hopes to tear off the ‘Myrtle crown inwove with cypress boughs’ and instead imitate Thelwall’s ‘stern simplicity & vigorous song’. Apart from the question of religion (and the affiliation with Godwin, which was its corollary in terms of personalities), the issue of retirement and political activism was to be a recurrent one in their correspondence. Initially the emphasis was on Thelwall encouraging Coleridge to make London his ‘proper sphere’ in a letter of 10 May 1796, but increasingly – as the political horizon darkened in the aftermath of the Two Acts – it was Coleridge’s retirement in Somerset which looked the more attractive option.23 Possibly Coleridge knew that Thelwall himself had struggled with issues of retirement and commitment immediately after his acquittal. In his closing address for the lecturing season, on 12 June 1795, Thelwall had announced: ‘I am going awhile into privacy and retirement … long lost pleasures of the rural scene’, although he was very clear that the aim was to return to the political fray reinvigorated, as he did for the start of the new season in September 1795.24 No doubt the discussions between them on the relative merits of retirement and activism, as various critics have suggested, ought to be understood as part of the defining context of Coleridge’s great conversation poems, especially ‘Frost at Midnight’.25 For Judith Thompson, they extend on into a ‘conversation’ or ‘debate’ between Coleridge’s poems and those gathered together in Thelwall’s later collection Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement (1801). She maintains that ‘Coleridge’s vision developed and expressed itself dialectically; that his romantic idealism was hard-won by means of, rather than in an evasion of debate; and that this debate was public and political in its awareness and implications, even if it was often private and personal in its immediate expression.26 Here I want to think, instead, about the prior relationship between Thelwall’s Newgate poetry and what we might mischievously call Coleridge’s prison poetry, particularly ‘This Lime Tree Bower my Prison’, and a poetic relationship that seems less one of debate than Coleridgean displacement or, more negatively, even denial. My primary concern is with ‘This Lime Tree Bower,’ but I will say a little first about ‘The Dungeon’, probably written slightly later, and extracted from the play Osorio for inclusion in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798).27 ‘The Dungeon’ is made up of two simple stanzas. The first complaining at the idea of imprisonment as any kind of ‘cure’ for the criminal, the second appealing to the ministrations of nature. Unlike ‘This Lime Tree Bower’, ‘The Dungeon’ is explicitly about imprisonment, although displaced on to a hymn to nature in its second stanza. Reprinted in several newspapers in 1800, only The Albion saw a need to unpack its topical potential with a subtitle ‘RECOMMENDED TO THE PERUSAL OF THE DEFENDERS OF BASTILES IN EVERY COUNTRY’.28 If ‘The Dungeon’ itself is coy about such an application, then ‘This Lime Tree Bower my Prison,’ written earlier, but not published until anonymously in

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the Annual Anthology of 1800, is, one might say, not really about imprisonment at all.29 On the face of it, the poem is a private and domestic one, which, according to Coleridge, had its origins in an incident in mid July 1797, when Charles and Mary Lamb were visiting him. Coleridge’s wife had accidentally scalded his foot, rendering him unable to join his friends on a walk. Annotating the poem, J. C. C. Mays, editor of the recent weighty variorum edition of Coleridge’s poetry, acknowledges that Thelwall’s ‘The Cell’ – a poem Mays (rather insensitively) describes as ‘celebrating Newgate’ – can be ‘considered another of C[oleridge]’s backgrounds’.30 Coleridge had, in fact, briefly commented on the poem when giving his assessment of the Newgate collection on 6 February 1797. He preferred the odes in the collection, but allowed: ‘Several of the sonnets are pleasing – & whenever I was pleased, I paused, & imagined you in my mind in your captivity’ (Letters, i.307). Whether he is castigating himself for making an experience of pleasure out of Thelwall’s confinement here is unclear, although such an expression of guilt would be characteristic of Coleridge, but the mention of the power of the imagination to call into the mind those from whom one is separated by imprisonment is arresting in the context of the ‘plot’ of ‘This Lime Tree Bower’. For Mays, Thelwall’s ‘The Cell’ takes its place among ‘the web of personal allusion, shared experience, and private hopes’ that form ‘the substance of what is communicated’.31 The early part of ‘This Lime Tree Bower’, imagining the experiences of the friends from which Coleridge is excluded by his imprisonment, in the ‘roaring dell, o’erwooded, narrow, deep, / And only speckled by the mid-day Sun’ does seem to contain some verbal echoes of ‘The Cell’ and Thelwall’s other prison poems. The ‘dripping edge / Of the dim [‘blue’ only after 1800] claystone’ and their situation ‘Unsunned and damp’ has something in common with Thelwall’s several descriptions in prose and verse over 1795 of the dark, wet stone walls of Newgate, but the more basic comparison – with both the final stanza of ‘The Cell’ and most of ‘Lines Written on the Morning of Trial’ – is the general situation where a prisoner has to supply from the power of his imagination the experiences of ‘social joy’ (to use the phrase from Thelwall’s ‘Stanzas, written on the Morning of Trial’ discussed earlier) from which he is barred: Well, they are gone, and here must I remain, This Lime-Tree Bower, my Prison! I have lost Beauties and Feelings, such as would have been Most sweet to my remembrance.

Indeed this intertextuality may help explain Coleridge’s strange sixth line where he writes of ‘Friends, whom I never more may meet again’. Unless he thought he was going to die of a scalded foot, the idea seems much more appropriate to Thelwall’s situation in 1794 than his own in 1797.

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If Thelwall’s prison poetry is in Coleridge’s mind in these opening lines, then it can only have been reinforced by the fact that he was visited by the radical orator in Stowey the week after the Lambs left, possibly while the poem was still in process. Thelwall’s visit was the first overture in the soap opera of whether or not he would move to Nether Stowey from London. Coleridge encouraged him in the idea of a rural exile, but also showed a marked ambivalence about having such a notorious radical so close to hand, finding him a cottage through the good offices of his neighbour John Chubb, and then advising him not to take it because of the disruption it would cause to the life of another friend, Thomas Poole.32 Perhaps betraying an awkward self-consciousness about a debt to Thelwall’s poetry, Coleridge actually quoted from a version of ‘This Lime Tree Bower’ in a letter to Thelwall of 14 October 1797 (where he – jokingly, but not without betraying some anxiety about their differences – calls Thelwall ‘an atheist reprobate,’ Letters, i.349): Silent with swimming sense; and gazing round On the wide Landscape gaze till all doth seem Less gross than bodily, a living Thing Which acts upon the mind, & with such Hues As cloath th’Almighty Spirit, when he makes Spirits perceive his presence! (Letters, 350)

The context of the letter is a discussion of Coleridge’s ache for ‘something one & indivisible’ beyond the ‘heap of little things’ (Letters, i.349). Mays suggests that the letter’s complex and confused glossing of the quotation shows some ‘unease at the pantheistic implications’.33 No doubt Coleridge was anxious not to have them read as confirming the materialism that underpinned Thelwall’s own faith in a freedom of the mind that could perceive ‘objects that ever please’ and ‘social joy’ beyond the conditions of the incarcerated body. Indeed one of the untitled odes in Thelwall’s Newgate collection ends with the affirmation ‘what are dungeons? – what the gloom / Of solitude, to him who thus can turn / From Self to Sentient Nature’.34 Materialistic ideas of a ‘Sentient Nature’ were a constant of Thelwall’s writing from the Peripatetic and Essay on Animal Vitality (both 1793) right through to his work on elocution. The latter, indeed, was predicated on an idea of the power of sympathetic communication: Hence, from the central throb of individual impulse, the feeling expands to the immediate circle of relative connections; – from relatives, to friends and intimate associates; from intimate association, to the neighbourhood where we reside – to the country for which we would bleed! – from the patriot community to civilized society – to the human race – to posterity – to the sentient universe: and wherever the throb of sensation can exist, the Virtuous find a motive for the regulation of their actions. Such are the expanding undulations of virtuous sympathy.35

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Although such ideas can seem very similar to Coleridge’s ideas on the concretions of sympathy, Coleridge’s sense of sentient nature was always underpinned by a theism at odds with Thelwall’s materialism, hence the disagreements on religion throughout their relationship. Discussing Coleridge’s 1796 sonnet to Thelwall, Judith Thompson suggests Thelwall’s activism ‘clearly heightened Coleridge’s feelings of guilt and unease about his own passive tendencies and metaphysical flights’.36 Reflecting in his Lecture on a System of Spies and Informers (1794) on the imprisonment of Gerrald, Margarot and the other Edinburgh Martyrs, before his own arrest, Thelwall had insisted on the possibilities of ‘benevolent assertion’ even from prison: Not that I mean to insinuate that even in a dungeon a philosophical and enlightened patriot need be entirely useless to society. Mind! mind! – that almost omnipresent faculty of man! superior to the malice of persecution – defies the chains and dungeons of the oppressor; and while the body still languishes in confinement, makes to itself wings, and, scaling the walls and barriers that vainly endeavour [sic] to enslave it, scatters its emanations far and wide.37

Coleridge’s guilt about his own lack of purpose in this respect may even cloud the decision to quote to Thelwall from ‘This Lime Tree Bower’. Guilt often operates, of course, by obsessive return to its source. Like a criminal returning to the scene of his crime, Coleridge quotes to Thelwall from a poem that seems to rewrite and displace his prison poetry of 1794. Of course, the context of the discussion in the letter is not imprisonment or even politics, but rather their theological differences. Coleridge’s tells Thelwall he can ‘at times feel strongly the beauties, you describe, in themselves, & for themselves’, but still aches for something ‘one & indivisible’ (Letters, i.349). Coleridge’s letter displays its anxiety about their different understandings of sentient nature, but in the process represses the displacement of the political context of Thelwall’s prison poetry in ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’. By quoting from ‘This Lime Tree Bower’ in his letter to Thelwall, Coleridge does not confess the guilty deed of his denial of Thelwall’s prison poetry as such, but he does seem to want to give himself away by returning to the scene of the crime. To return to the poem itself, any displacement of Thelwall’s prison poetry in ‘This Lime Tree Bower’ might seem a classic instance of Alan Liu’s claim that in the development of Romantic ideology ‘the theory of denial is Imagination’.38 For Liu, among others, the theory of the imagination that emerges out of the collaborations of Coleridge and Wordsworth represses ‘History’, representing ‘a sustained effort to deny history by asserting nature as the separating mark constitutive of the egotistical self ’.39 The application to Coleridge’s echoing of ‘The Cell’ in ‘This Lime Tree Bower’ is a tempting one, but critics such as Kelvin Everest and Morton D. Paley, among others, have read the domestic world of

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Coleridge’s conversation poems as keeping open a utopian possibility whereby the small social circle is a link in the chain of the larger social bond.40 Read within the context of the debate over retirement and activism in which Thelwall participated, the story certainly seems more tangled than any summary version of Liu’s position would allow. Assertions of the transformative power of the imagination as ‘the freedom of the mind’ were not necessarily part of a binary pitting the Imagination against History as totalized concepts. They do not necessarily abstract ‘mind’ as a principle above and beyond the socio-political. In Thelwall’s prison poetry, for instance, the imagination is what sustains politics within history while the body is incarcerated. The ‘throb’ of animated nature does not mark a separation from history, but is constitutive of a link between the feeling individual and political posterity. ‘This Lime Tree Bower’ may seem to describe a similar arc to Thelwall’s prison poetry. The imagination recovers a virtual ‘social joy’ and, in Judith Thompson’s words, ‘holds the key to release the soul from a self-created prison’.41 Yet for Coleridge this represents a flight to something ‘one & indivisible’ that transcends the material world of Thelwall’s undulations of sentiment. Here it seems fitting to return to Liu’s discussion of displacement and denial in The Prelude. Explaining his preference for the stronger term ‘denial’ over the emphasis on ‘displacement’ used by some New Historicist criticism, Liu comments that ‘displacement suggests a little too much glissade for my purposes – a little too much of arbitrarily free indirection and not enough of stubbornly determined and over determined opposition’. He regards ‘denial’ as a two-part process made up of ‘historical bind and substitutive release’.42 It certainly seems a more accurate description of the relation of ‘This Lime Tree Bower’ to Thelwall’s prison poetry than any idea of debate or conversation. ‘This Lime Tree Bower’ may covertly bind itself to Thelwall’s experiences in prison, but only to seek release by substituting the sufficiency of the imaginative transformation of the self in nature. The condition of the body itself has become the cell, nature the only trial, and the imagination keeps for itself the power of acquittal. Thus Coleridge seeks to transcend the legal system that has imprisoned Thelwall, but he also threatens to leave behind his political aspirations in the process.

10 THELWALL’S TWO PLAYS AGAINST EMPIRE, INCLE AND YARICO (1787) AND THE INCAS (1792)1 Michael Scrivener

John Thelwall’s two plays, written at an early stage of his career, deconstruct cultural myths upholding slavery and empire. An operatic farce, Incle and Yarico comically treats the well-known eighteenth-century story of Inkle and Yarico, in which an English merchant betrays and sells into slavery his Indian lover, represented as a ‘Noble Savage’. The play translates the intertextual narrative into a forthrightly abolitionist satire in its depiction of the slave trade, and wittily represents English middle-class status anxieties and crude materialism, deploying urban middle-class speech and malapropisms. A historical opera, The Incas – a full-length drama designed as a theatrical main piece – translates Spanish Conquest narratives into an anti-imperialistic play, justifying the native rebellions against the Spanish in South America and allegorizing the French Revolution and the English suppression of political dissent. Drawing upon and extending some of the central precepts of the radical Enlightenment, Thelwall undermines the justifications for European empire. The play’s hero, known first as Faulkland and then as the historically evocative Sidney, fights with the Incas against the Spanish and becomes embroiled in a complicated but typically operatic love triangle. At the heart of the play is his betrayal and near execution by the Incas for whom he fought, a plot sequence evoking the contemporary revolutionary politics of Paris and London. The play expresses an encounter with the New World mediated by Enlightenment texts that in some sense Thelwall translates. Marmontel’s Les Incas (1777) was Thelwall’s chief source, but other likely sources include Las Casas (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552)), Abbé Raynal (A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies (1774)), Helen Maria Williams (Peru (1784)), and William Robertson (The History of America (1788)). The fictionality of Thelwall’s New World natives does not mean they are arbitrary, for his knowledge came by way of an intellectual engagement with slavery – 117 –

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and empire. His participation in the debating clubs of 1787 during the first wave of the anti-slavery agitation resulted in his losing his Toryism and gaining an abolitionist stance. Reading these two plays as translations highlights the issue of mediation and language. Textually mediated events – the Spanish conquest of Peru, the Tupac Amaru revolt of the 1780s, the transatlantic slave trade, the abolitionist movement in England, slave rebellions, the French Revolution, the London reform movement and its loyalist opposition and government repression – all contribute to the construction of meaning in these two plays. How Thelwall turns these diverse meanings into coherent plays is roughly analogous to the task of the translator. Applying the translation model to Thelwall’s two plays, one can say that his Incle and Yarico translates the intertextual fable to bring out its abolitionism through two different kinds of English, the London demotic speech and the African stage dialect. Thelwall’s Incas translates the Spanish conquest narrative to affirm the justice of native rebellion and resistance, as well as making allegorical connections with European revolution. That less radical and more overtly nationalistic treatments of Thelwall’s topics became popular on the London stage – Colman’s Inkle and Yarico (1787) and Morton’s Columbus (1792) – indicates that the London theatre did not easily accommodate the abolitionist and anti-imperialist intentions produced by Thelwall’s aggressive translation of conventional texts about the New World. The 1787 farce, designed as a two-act afterpiece for the London theatre, revises one of the most well known eighteenth-century fables about Englishmen and slavery, the Inkle and Yarico story popularized by Richard Steele’s narrative appearing in the Spectator (11 and 13 March 1711). Based on the supposedly true account by Richard Ligon, Steele’s tale, situated within a dialogue between a male narrator and a female interlocutor on the theme of woman’s inconstancy, is presented as an anti-misogynistic counter to the Petronius story about the faithless Ephesian matron. Arietta, the female interlocutor, brings to the surface the politics of literary representation with a fable about a lion and a man. The man taunts the lion with man’s superiority by pointing to a painted sign showing a man killing a lion. The lion replies: ‘We Lions are none of us Painters, else we could show a hundred Men killed by Lions, for one Lion killed by a Man.’ Arietta draws out the moral as it applies to sexual politics: ‘You Men are Writers, and can represent us Women as Unbecoming as you please in your Works, while we are unable to return the injury’. Arietta’s story of Inkle and Yarico, hardly a morally neutral account, then, is intended to injure men who harm women.2 That Thomas Inkle, young English merchant, harms Yarico is beyond dispute. When the English ship, nearing Barbados, desperately needs supplies, it stops at an inlet where Indians attack but Inkle escapes and is then protected by Yarico, an Indian woman who hides him and provides food and shelter. During

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their two-month idyll of love ‘they had learn’d a Language of their own’ in which Inkle promises to bring Yarico to London. After an English ship brings the two of them to Barbados, Inkle views his idyll with Yarico as wasteful – ‘a loss of Time’, and he starts to calculate ways to recoup his losses – ‘to weigh with himself how many Days Interest of his Mony he had lost during his stay with Yarico’.3 He starts back on the road to prudence by selling his lover into slavery, and when she protests that she is pregnant with his child, he happily notes she will bring a higher price. The popularity of the Inkle and Yarico story at the very same time that West Indian slavery and the transatlantic slave trade flourished suggests the strength and ideological usefulness of the urban myth of the Noble Savage.4 In Thelwall’s comic treatment of the story the two-month becomes a twoyear idyll of love between Incle and Yarico, long enough for Incle to become restless and homesick but Yarico is as devoted to Incle as she ever was. A Thelwall invention is the improbable happenstance of Incle’s parents and uncle, on a slave-trading expedition from London, becoming stranded in the same area of Central America as Incle himself. Discovering his parents and uncle in the first scene of the second act, Incle is torn between his sense of obligation to Yarico who saved his life and his desire for self-advancement that would be gratified by selling into slavery both his lover and her friend, another Thelwall addition, Yahamona. Among the sailors who were on the Incles’ ship is a character named Williams, who sides with the Indians against the English and who pairs up with Yahamona. The Indians, who intervene before the British kidnap Yarico and Yahamona into slavery, establish the terms by which the farce is finally resolved: at first they plan to enslave the British as agricultural labourers, but after Yarico’s discussion with her father, the Indian leader, the British are permitted to live among the Indians but not allowed to return to their country to ‘do you wicked designs some oder time’.5 By the play’s end a penitent Incle is back together with a disappointed Yarico, another Thelwall innovation. A principal technique in Thelwall’s farce is reversal, comically illustrated in act one, scene one where the servant Timothy finds himself with an Indian woman who desires him; because her friend Yarico has a white lover, she too wants one. Faced with the frankly sexual Yahamona, Timothy adopts the role of coy maiden, explaining himself thus: ‘I supposes now she’ll think nothing of me if I’m won too easy, for I thinks they say we’re in the Auntoy Podes, and so every thing’s reversed’.6 According to Frank Felsenstein, Yahamona’s ‘predatory’ sexuality comically inverts the conventional designation of the desirable woman as the ‘trophy’ to be won.7 In Thelwall’s play the cultural stereotypes are reversed. The civilized English are crudely materialistic, even animalistic, for Incle’s uncle is named ‘Turtle’, suggesting a complete identity between himself and his appetite for turtle meat and the name of Incle’s father, ‘Traffic’, evokes the phrase ‘traffic in human beings’ referring to the slave trade. In contrast the Indians are

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altruistic, self-sacrificing, noble, idealistic and generous. Countering the pathos of Yarico’s betrayal by Incle is the betrayal of Timothy by Yahamona, the Indian woman who leaves him for the sailor Williams, a more affectionate lover who is the moral centre of the play. Countering the mercenary Incle is the plain-speaking democrat Williams who articulates the play’s most explicitly political ideas. The most dramatic reversal is Williams’s decision to side with the triumphant Indians against the English who have lost all moral authority. When the supposedly cannibalistic American natives have the opportunity to dispose of the morally worthless English in any manner they choose, they practise the ‘forgiveness’ associated with Christian morality and end up granting them freedom – but not freedom to continue slave trading.8 By having the Indian characters speak the black African stage dialect, Thelwall blurs the distinction between African and American slaves, not unlike some visual representations of Yarico with African features.9 Thelwall deconstructs the racial binary in the play, white and coloured, through numerous reversals. The sexuality of Yarico and Yahamona derives from the Enlightenment’s assumption of a free, natural sexuality enjoyed by those uncontaminated by sexually repressive Christianity and especially the commercial corruption of sexuality. Thelwall deploys the Indians’ sexuality satirically against what he sees as the hypocritically puritanical middle class, something he does as well in his later novel about the slave rebellion in San Domingo, The Daughter of Adoption (1801). There are two contrasting visions of Englishness, one of which is the ruthless pursuit of self-interest, an economic liberty to compete for wealth and power without the distractions of pity and morality. When Uncle Turtle tries to persuade the reluctant Incle to put his lover on the slave market, he tells his nephew not to worry about his conscience. ‘Conscience! Ha! Ha! Tom. I’ll tell you this, my boy: if your conscience is not as elastic as an alderman’s stomach (take my word for ’t), you’ll never add another plum to the one your father has accumulated’.10 Williams’s version of Englishness rejects slavery because of the Golden Rule – ‘Split my mainmast if I don’t think it bloody cruel not to do as we would wish to be done by’; moreover, he conceives of national liberty reflexively – ‘What then did we only fight for our own freedom that we might rob others of theirs?’11 Incle, who is an unappealing character, to be sure – he is bored with Yarico and is homesick for London after two years in a tropical paradise – has parents and an uncle even more morally repulsive than he is. His mother, a former servant who inherited £2000 after the death of her bachelor master, married Incle’s mercenary father who did not think twice about abandoning the woman with whom he already had a relationship for someone with more money. His parents, who loathe each other, bicker constantly, as the mother cares only about social status and the father only about money. The second scene of the first act sati-

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rizes commercialized sexuality in a comic song about ‘boarding school misses’ who are trained to attract men, who in turn purchase the girls. ‘Thus completely accomplish’d, at fifteen years old, / To some rake fortune-hunter young madam is sold’.12 The sexuality of the Indian women, although stereotypically ‘free’ and ‘natural’, acts principally to contrast the artificial construction of women’s sexuality tied to commercial and status advancement. Anticipating Blake’s analysis of sexuality, Thelwall shows that slavery is a logical expression of a morally degraded commercial culture fuelled by a commodified sexuality. When Incle’s father and uncle urge him to sell his lover and her friend into slavery, they dismiss as unreal the authority of moral claims such as ‘gratitude’ and ‘conscience’, and legalistically dismiss any obligations he might have to his child by Yarico. Such moral concepts are fine for ‘poets’ and impoverished writers who live in garrets but not applicable to those who want the pleasures that money can buy in a commercial society.13 Slavery and empire in Thelwall’s play depend less on race than on greed and a corrupted sexuality. The version of Englishness depicted in the later play, The Incas, strongly parallels that articulated by Williams, as the play’s hero, Faulkland, who occupies a higher social position than the sailor in Thelwall’s farce, also sides with the Amerindians against the Europeans. The drama’s setting is sixteenth-century Peru within the early years of the Spanish conquest. The action of the play revolves around Faulkland, an English soldier who at first battled with the Spanish, and then – under a new republican name, Sidney – fought against the Spanish with the Peruvian natives. The Spanish having been defeated and Faulkland having bonded with the Inca and his son, the marriage between Faulkland and the Inca’s daughter has two impediments: first, out of gratitude and not love he was engaged to marry Elvira, the daughter of the Spanish leader to whom he was obligated; second, Masseru, an envious Peruvian general who wants to marry Myrrha and who resents the prominence of a foreigner, frames Faulkland with the accusation that he blasphemed the Sun, a capital crime in Peru. The opera concludes with Faulkland’s vindication, as Masseru’s treachery and the collaboration of Elvira and Myrrha are finally made public. That Elvira attempted to have Faulkland killed frees him from his obligation to marry Elvira, so he is finally free to marry the woman he loves, Myrrha.14 The most remarkable thing about Thelwall’s translation of the Spanish conquest is that the Peruvians in his opera are victorious and the Spanish completely vanquished. It is as though the Amerindian uprisings of 1780–1 in the Andes had succeeded rather than resulting in the torture and mutilation of the rebel leaders and the slaughter of over 100,000 native Americans.15 Thelwall presents a range of native characters, each with moral agency, from the progressive enlightener Rocca, the Inca’s son, to Masseru, distrustful of the European and his ways. Myrrha is the Noble Savage reminiscent of Yarico; indeed, the Faulk-

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land–Myrrha relationship parallels the one between Inkle and Yarico because Faulkland betrays his American lover out of ‘duty’ rather than greed but the betrayal is just as real. Faulkland has a prior commitment, just as Colman’s Inkle does in the person of Narcissa, daughter of the Barbados governor.16 Thelwall’s Myrrha, when she learns about Faulkland’s prior commitment to Elvira, blithely suggests that he marry both women, as the custom in Inca culture allows men to have more than one wife. Faulkland replies: ‘Your Father’s laws sanction such custom – mine forbid it’. While he justifies monogamy as benefiting both the husband and wife, who get one another’s ‘undivided affection’, she suggests a compromise that he rejects impatiently; ‘you have yet no idea of the duties of us Europeans’.17 Although Faulkland is clearly the hero of the opera, his rigidity absolutizes the moral value of monogamy while he refuses to make any equitable adjustment that would grant legitimacy to the cultural norms in her society. Thelwall here is evoking the New World ethnography that represented a much freer sexuality than that practised by the puritanical Faulkland, who is being gently mocked.18 The play satirizes the exemplary nature of his fidelity to ‘duty’ because, for one thing, his fiancée Elvira vows revenge for his having killed her brother. Elvira, even before she hears about the romance between Faulkland and Myrrah, knows that the promise to marry her was given only out of gratitude and duty, not the love that she really wants.19 She has no intention of marrying the murderer of her brother anyway, as she is far more intent on revenge. At one point expressing a wistful regret that she might have been happy with him, she is somewhat ambivalent in her retribution.20 A good operatic actress could make Elvira a complicated, interesting character and, although she is European, her situation as a captive, an abandoned woman, someone belonging to a defeated nation makes her a figure of colonial subjection. The Inca’s son Rocca illustrates the themes of enlightenment and political reform, for he is the one who intervenes several times to save Faulkland’s life, first when he and Pedrillo are shipwrecked and second when he is about to become a human sacrifice. According to Pedrillo, Rocca persuaded his fellow warriors to spare the Europeans because he ‘discerned our merits’ and supervised their gradual acculturation.21 Defending Faulkland from the charge of blaspheming the Sun, Rocca reminds his people that the Englishman had ‘instructed us successfully to oppose those tyrants to whom we had previously paid such slavish and unavailing adoration’.22 The anti-imperialistic message passes from ‘Sidney’ to Rocca to the American natives. The debate between Vilacuma and Rocca pivots on the moral nature of the culture, whether the essence of God is Vilacuma’s ‘revenge’ or Rocca’s ‘forgiveness’.23 Although the play gives voice to both the traditionalist and the modernist, it vindicates the modernist who intervenes in the final scene to save the hero from execution.

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The name change from Faulkland, as he is known to the Spanish, to Sidney, as he is known to the Americans, is an intriguing detail that is only partially and inconsistently realized in the manuscript of the play. The playwright, who named his eldest son Algernon Sidney Thelwall (1795–1863), also named his second son John Hampden Thelwall (1797–c. 1876), thus inscribing his political ideals on his sons by giving them the names of two famous seventeenth-century republican heroes, Algernon Sidney (1623–83) and John Hampden (1595–1643). The character Faulkland probably takes after the same seventeenth-century moderate, highly cultured royalist, Viscount Falkland 1610–43), that Godwin used as the name for his aristocratic character Falkland, tormentor of Caleb Williams in the 1794 novel. Politically motivated name changes were not unknown during the period of the French Revolution: the new name of Baron de Clootz (1755–94), ‘Anacharsis’, corresponded with the renunciation of his aristocratic privileges and his advocacy of a revolutionary world federation. Faulkland becoming Sidney reflects a similar transition from being affiliated with the Spanish colonizers to leading an anti-colonial struggle with native Americans. Sidney, then, is a figure like Anacharsis Clootz or Tom Paine, a republican citizen of the world fighting for revolutionary ideals that transcend nationalistic ideology. One might ask why Thelwall did not make the European revolutionary who sides with the native Americans a Spaniard as Marmontel does in his novel Les Incas with the character Alonzo.24 A Faulkland/Sidney appeals to specifically English political history and republican ideals in ways that Alonzo – or some other Spanish character – does not. If Alonzo were the opera’s hero, the play could not gesture as effectively as it does in expressing solidarity with the native American rebellions against the Spanish colonists. Moreover, Faulkland/Sidney does not act on behalf of the British government or British society or even Europe but universal political ideals (compromised, it has to be admitted, by inevitable Eurocentrism). Rocca gives Faulkland an opportunity to play the aggressive colonizer role, something Faulkland consistently declines to do: he refrains from criticizing a religion in which he does not believe, does not resist his imminent execution undertaken according to traditional Incan laws and does not use his position as military leader to impose European ideas on the culture. Overall Faulkland/Sidney’s actions as an anti-colonial organizer encourage the enlighteners like Rocca that already exist in the Incan society but also respect the native traditions. Married to Myrrha, leader of the military, closest advisor to the future Inca himself, ‘Sidney’ brings with himself and carries into the American culture European values and practices, but he does so with restraint and respect for the already existing American society. Given the level of political conflict and violence in 1792, the struggle between revenge and forgiveness and the tension between duty and desire have allegorical resonance. The defenders of monarchy and aristocracy employed a rhetoric of

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settling of scores; notably the Duke of Brunswick’s ‘manifesto’ of May 1792 bristled with threats of violent retribution, echoing the tone assumed in Burke’s 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France, especially the call to defend the honour of Marie Antoinette. The English anti-Jacobin reaction was well under way by 1792 with the public burning of effigies of Paine and loyalist societies organizing the suppression of reformist political speech. Until the Reign of Terror (1793–4) the revolutionaries were not identified with revenge and never with revenge in the name of traditional values, as both Elvira and Vilacuma advocate. The quarrel between desire and duty was a clash within the logic of republicanism, as the more romantic and sentimental dimensions of Enlightenment culture bolstered the legitimacy of desire, exemplified in a text like Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1794), and as the more Stoic and Roman emphases idealized dedication to duty, epitomized in the famous illustration of utilitarian morality in Godwin’s Political Justice (1793) – if only one person could be saved from a deadly fire, the more socially valuable philosopher was to be chosen over one’s own family members.25 The desire–duty opposition was played out in the writing of Rousseau who sided unpredictably with one or the other. The Incas seems uncertain about which one gets priority because Faulkland’s fidelity to duty, perhaps endorsed by how the plot finally works out, is balanced by the clear exploitation of duty’s authority in the case of carrying out the punishment for blaspheming the Sun (a locution that evokes blasphemy against the Son as well). For Walter Benjamin, translation at its most authentic brings out things that are new but that also existed as potentiality, as something inhering within both languages, something called pure language, an ‘intentio’ occupying the interrelationship of the languages rather than author or translator. Thelwall’s treatment of the New World in these two plays, precisely because of their conventionality and intertextuality, is similar to Benjaminian translation. Arietta’s complaint about the politics of representation in Steele’s Spectator narrative, Yarico’s sentimental protest to Inkle and the tragic triumph of the Spanish over the Inca civilization are translated into something new, in part because of a new social creativity in the abolitionist movement and in the French Revolution. The social forces of 1787 provide what we might call the ‘translatability’ by which Thelwall’s play makes universalist moral claims about slavery and counters the possessive individualist national identity with an enlightened republican national identity. Similarly, The Incas rewrites the defeat of the Peruvian natives in both the sixteenth and eighteenth century as a current cosmopolitan victory on the strength of the world-historical events in France, which had recently abolished slavery in its empire. Thelwall’s translation had the freedom sufficient to bring out the immanent and potential meanings that might otherwise have been silent.

11 A ‘DOUBLE-VISAG’D FATE’: JOHN THELWALL AND THE HAPLESS HOPE OF ALBION Judith Thompson

In recent years, the reputation of John Thelwall as a political thinker and writer has steadily risen on a gathering tide of revisionary scholarship.1 The current revival is curiously one-sided, however, for over half of Thelwall’s career is still virtually unknown; little sustained attention has yet been paid to his poetry, and even less to elocutionary theory, therapy and pedagogy. One might almost be forgiven for assuming that Thelwall died with the ‘radical decade’ with which he is so closely associated, sinking below the horizon of history like his namesake, the title character of Wordsworth’s unfinished epic The Recluse. But that assumption, like Wordsworth himself, does Thelwall an injustice. For although he did retreat under the anti-Jacobin onslaught, Thelwall emerged from his Welsh exile reinvigorated and reinvented, to greet a new century with a new profession, and a linchpin volume of Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement. While the romantic lyrics at the centre of the Retirement volume are receiving increasing critical attention, the ambitious historical poems that frame them deserve closer conjoined critical reading than they have yet received.2 The volume opens with ‘The Fairy of the Lake,’ an Arthurian ‘dramatic romance’ based on Welsh myth and concludes with specimens of ‘The Hope of Albion,’ a Miltonic epic set in seventh-century Northumbria. Closely connected in plot, aims and origin, these poems take a longer view of Thelwall’s troubled times, returning to ancient British history to dramatize a man and a nation poised between past and future, in a ‘dark age’ of repression and civil conflict indeed, but also a liberating moment of transformation. Following the ‘universal principle of action and re-action’3 that governs and unites Thelwall’s political, literary and elocutionary theory and practice, Thelwall here uses the past as a springboard for personal and national renewal. In similar fashion, these poems may bring about a longdeferred rebound in Thelwall’s reputation as a poet.4 The liminal position of these history poems in the emergent Thelwall canon, and of Thelwall himself in the established literary canon, follows from and speaks to the radical fragmentation of the Thelwall archive, which The Hope – 125 –

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of Albion exemplifies. A ‘National and … Constitutional epic’ whose ‘action is the establishment of the English Constitution on the broad bases of civil and religious Liberty,’5 its imminent publication was repeatedly announced, but it was never published in its entirety. By his own account Thelwall composed ‘four or five thousand verses (constituting the matter of the first six books)’6 before putting aside his epic under the demands of his new elocutionary profession. Yet, like Wordsworth with his perpetually provisional The Recluse, he kept returning to his magnum opus, repeatedly revising it and publishing epic fragments and introductory notices among his periodical and elocutionary selections and essays. He probably intended it for posthumous publication, but may never have completed it. In the absence of loyal and resourceful descendants or devotees to posthumously preserve and edit his lifelong Hope, it no doubt shared the fate of other manuscripts lost in the mysterious dispersal of his papers at the turn of the twentieth century.7 The recent discovery of a massive part of that missing archive, while encouraging, has unfortunately thrown little light upon Thelwall’s epic.8 Even if a complete faircopy is never found, however, much more of Thelwall’s Hope was published than justifies its neglect. Careful collation of Thelwall’s prolific periodical and elocutionary publications between 1800 and 1834 has turned up over 2,000 lines from at least five books of The Hope of Albion. These nuggets of discontinuous but relatively coherent and dramatic blank-verse narrative give a clear picture of Thelwall’s poetic ambitions and principles, testifying to the continuity of his pre- and post-1800 vision and voice, and offering insight into a crucial transition in British literature and culture. This is especially true if Thelwall’s long-deferred and fragmentary Hope is read in conjunction with other texts that share its point of origin, especially The Fairy of the Lake, which Thelwall himself conceived as part of his ‘long-meditated epopee’.9 In fact, Thelwall’s epic is best understood as a composite work, like Wordsworth’s The Recluse (though more a vestibule of eloquence than a gothic cathedral). Shining through its gaps, it proves that Thelwall was not only an ambitious poet, but a surprisingly good one, worth reading as much for his brilliant wit and prosodic innovations as for the acuity and depth of his political and psychological insight. The Hope of Albion justifies comparison with Wordsworth’s The Recluse in so far as it shares both its ambitions and its point of origin, springing from the animated discussions among the ‘literary-political triumvirate’ whose reciprocal meetings framed the famous ‘annus mirabilis’ of romantic literary collaboration.10 The aims of these discussions are succinctly summed up in Coleridge’s 1799 letter to Wordsworth: ‘I wish you would write a poem … addressed to those who, in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution, have thrown up all hopes of the amelioration of mankind, and are sinking into an almost epicurean selfishness.’11 This plea sent Wordsworth off on his well-documented journey into the Mind of Man; Thelwall’s heretofore undocumented epic voy-

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age took him in a different but equally revisionary direction. He responded to Coleridge with a narrative not of personal but of political consciousness, turning to the origins not of imagination but of democracy, which he, like many of his contemporaries, located in the Saxon prehistory of Britain – a time of nascent empire and internecine conflict; protodemocratic promise and protofeudal prejudice – a time, in short, like his own.12 Although Coleridge’s influence is evident throughout, Thelwall’s composite epic originates in his own early work, especially The Peripatetic, which engages a contemporary debate about ‘the character best calculated for the hero of a national epic poem’.13 Thelwall (through his alter ego Sylvanus) argues that while Alfred has ‘real dignity of character’, ‘the exploits … of King Arthur against the Saxon invaders’ provide ‘as noble a theme,’ as well as latitude for ‘imaginative exertion as daring and fabulous as the age itself ’.14 Countering the argument that Arthur is not a true hero because he lacks ‘the grand requisite of ultimate success’, Sylvanus asserts that ‘the final issue of the struggle between the Saxons and Britons’ does not ‘throw the least shade upon [Arthur’s] triumphs’.15 Here we can see the germ of both The Hope of Albion (whose hero, Edwin, like Alfred, is one of ‘the earliest of our Saxon princes celebrated for the establishment of laws and the effective and impartial administration of justice’)16 and the Fairy of the Lake (which fulfills Sylvanus’s promise and tests his claim about the relative importance of the hero’s success). The Peripatetic also anticipates the profound ambivalence about romantic heroism so characteristic of the later poems. For Sylvanus’s ‘Epic Poem’ is actually a mock-epic satire whose hero is neither Alfred nor Arthur, but Alphabeta, a titan who loses his battle to liberate the English tongue from political repression and rhetorical inflation. Like Alphabeta, Thelwall’s later epic champions are titanic failures, dramatized not in their moments of triumph but in the desperate ‘probationary hour[s]’17 of limbo, exile and reactionary retrenchment that precede them. In Arthur, the melancholy idealist-avenger spellbound by self-doubt and mystical enchantments, and Edwin, the storm-tossed orator-prince beset by fratricidal enemies and apostate friends, Thelwall reproduces the psychological, socio-political, and rhetorical conflicts and complexities of his own position at the turn of the new century: an enlightened citizen-of-the-world in a benighted backwater, a Saxon among the Welsh, a champion in exile, an orator without an audience, a friend betrayed, an atheist martyr to romantic metaphysics. A self divided in a nation torn apart, Thelwall identifies himself with both victor and victim figures, invaders and defenders, redeemers and betrayers, splitting off and dramatizing conflicting aspects of his own divided allegiances and experiences in both the heroes and the villains of his morally ambiguous psychodramas. As Hope opens in the early seventh century , the throne of Deiria (Northumbria) has been usurped by a neighbouring chieftain, Adelfrith, ‘powerful in

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wrongs, and terrible in arms’, who has established a kingdom where ‘Tyranny tower’d to prescriptive right; as tho secure in tacit confirmation’.18 The true heir to the throne, Edwin, ‘Freedom’s first prototype’19 and ‘the champion still’ of innocence and virtue20 has grown up in ‘disastrous exile’,21 wandering from court to court seeking refuge, and in constant danger of betrayal. Shipwrecked within sight of his native land, he escapes to find perilous protection in the court of King Redowald of East Anglia, who comes under increasingly heavy pressure to hand him over to Adelfrith’s emissaries. There he is befriended by Redowald’s son Reynier, who advises him once more to flee; Edwin vacillates but ultimately resolves to ‘take my stand [and] … turn upon my foes’22 in the dramatic climax of the epic, a rousing oratorical battle that has barely begun when the extant fragments break off, leaving the reader uncertain as to its resolution. The Fairy of the Lake opens with Edwin’s fifth-century counterpart, the similarly indecisive Arthur, in similarly perilous circumstances, wandering bewildered and abandoned through a land in which virtue and justice have been laid asleep. Although he has just won a victory over the mercenary Saxon invaders, his true love Guenever, the soul of Albion, remains in the incestuous grip of her lustful father, the Welsh traitor Vortigern, while Arthur’s men have been enchanted by Vortigern’s deceitful wife, the Saxon sorceress Rowenna, who, having conceived a desperate passion for ‘the British Champion,’ now casts ‘Runic spell[s]’ to seduce him to her side.23 Arthur temporarily succumbs to her ‘magic numbers’24 but revives to spurn enchantment and lay siege to Vortigern’s castle; significantly, however, he is unable to free Guenever himself, but must wait for the ‘good witch’ Fairy of the Lake to bring about the resolution of the drama (ambiguously assisted by Arthur’s comical sidekick, the drunken Tristram). The most striking feature of The Fairy of the Lake is the pathetic weakness of its putative hero, Arthur, compared to its powerful and curiously compelling villain, Rowenna. A byword in British history for ruthless ambition and cunning treachery, Rowenna embodies the spirit of the age as Thelwall saw it – an age in which the iron fist of tyranny puts on a velvet glove of ‘sweet content’ and ‘soft consent’25 to render the spirit of freedom inert and impotent. A different aspect of the same antipathy appears in The Hope of Albion, where Rowenna’s counterpart is the minor character, Meribah, or Discord, one of the Miltonic fallen ‘angel hosts apostate’ who ‘urge presumptuous war’ and ‘brood strife and contention’ within and between Northumbria and its neighbours, stirring up ‘panics, and rage, and wrongs; obdurate pride / and Jaundice’d jealousies; suspicions dire, / And fears, and hates’.26 Both demons of tyranny operate through lowly human agents: in the Fairy, Rowenna summons an Incubus to freeze the voices of opposition, while in the Hope the spirit of Discord takes human form in Adelfrith’s emissaries Hermanric and Ossa, who scheme to turn East Anglia against Edwin.

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Through the dramatic interactions between these Machiavellian tyrants, their nefarious secret agents and a vulnerable credulous populace, Thelwall offers a vivid and astute analysis of the turncoat psyche of turn-of-the-century Britain, in psychodramatic allegories that sound less like Wordsworth than Blake, Shelley or Byron. The Albion of these poems is a nation silenced and morally paralysed by and in its political rivalries and class divisions, whose masters and masses are equally trapped and tormented by the tyranny they practise and the slavery they have blindly accepted. Like Blake’s Urizen, Thelwall’s Rowenna is deluded by her own rationalizations, caught in the machinations of desire and fear that she sets in motion and affects to govern; like Shelley’s Jupiter, she misinterprets the oracular clues of the Demogorgonish ‘double-visaged Fate’27 whose cave she visits, and thereby brings about her own downfall. ‘Baffled by an apostate heart’,28 she is only as strong as the equally double-faced agents who perform her divided will. Chief among these agents is the Incubus, whose comical ambiguity takes us to the heart of Thelwall’s position within, and attitude towards, his ‘double-visaged’ age and nation. A boastful, incompetent coward, Incubus is a caricature of the spies and loyalists who targeted Thelwall, and became his targets in turn. In particular he seems to be modelled after James Walsh, whose surveillance of Thelwall led to the infamous ‘Spy Nozy’ incident at Alfoxden, for his portrait richly echoes the icy eavesdropping of Thelwall’s poetic conversation with Coleridge in the wake of that incident.29 Incubus is introduced as a ‘son of Frost’30 who has been ‘hung up for an icicle’ ‘freezing and dangling on the eaves’ of the palace of Fear31 until the year of his regeneration ‘when the twelvemonth’s contention of Cent’ries is done, /Whether eighteen be ended, and nineteen begun’.32 Later, ‘the frost in [his] joints is converted into so horrible a hot-ache’33 in a precise echo of the terms in which Coleridge had taken the temperature of the times in his Thelwallian political lectures: We have breathed so long the atmosphere of Imposture and Panic, that many honest minds have caught an aguish disorder; in their cold fits they shiver at Freedom, in their hot fits they turn savage against its advocates…34

Incubus’s farcical good nature is another striking sign of Thelwall’s epic ambivalence. Where one might expect paranoid rage or tragic despair, Thelwall instead treats his nemesis with jovial affection as a comic relief, a miles gloriosus who sings a rollicking ditty of ice-cream and new-age sexual liberation. Reluctantly relishing his recreant powers, this ‘journeyman devil’ represents an aspect of the popular audience to whom Thelwall appealed and with whom he identified, even after they had turned against him. Like Thelwall, the people of Albion have been bullied, silenced and left hanging, frozen by their own eavesdroppings; but they retain an irrepressible vitality, thumbing their noses at the ‘fisticuff Divinities’35 whose tools they have become. Thelwall’s sympathy for them explains

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the apparent metamorphosis of the ‘bad-guy’ Incubus, who early in the play is sent by Rowenna to ‘scout the country round’36 into the ‘good-guy’ Scout, who appears at Tristram’s side immediately after he has been frozen by Incubus, and assists him in a little secret agency of his own. What Incubus represents, then, is both the turncoat animus and the liberating animation of the popular, within Thelwall and the nation. A more insidious version of the spy figure is found in the agents who shadow Edwin in The Hope of Albion. Classic courtiers, with no personalities of their own, Hermanric and Ossa mould themselves to their masters, and their malleable listeners, in exactly the manner Thelwall had diagnosed in his famous lecture ‘On Spies and Informers’.37 They put on a ‘specious shew of patriotic care’38 with King Redowald and his advisors, affecting the reasonable discourse of national pride and ancient alliance, while exploiting rooted prejudices to demonize Edwin as a vagrant in league with the enemy. Meanwhile, just as the system of spies and informers fanned the fears of the public in the radical decade, so Hermanric and Ossa effectively work upon the ‘popular mind’, ‘rais[ing] / Ideal terrors, phantoms of alarm, / And baseless apprehension’,39 and rousing The sullen passions – scorn, and deadly hate Of alien tribes, and national pride that steels The obdurate heart, presumptuous, and confounds Reason and right; moulding the infatuate herd (Their own worst foes!) to the pernicious views Of crafty politicians.40

Eventually even Edwin’s loyal friends and principled supporters begin to turn against him as, in another poignant echo of Coleridge’s betrayal, young prince Reynier urges Edwin to flee in the name of friendship, god, hope and love. Like his political lectures, Thelwall’s poetic diagnosis of the mind of the nation in an age of repression and suspicion is notable for both its psychological and its rhetorical self-reflexiveness. In his epic soliloquys and dramatic dialogues, Thelwall analyses the ills of the nation as ills of language. His villains are sophists and poets; their victims, the people, are as easily manipulated into rage as spellbound into silence. Skilled ventriloquists, Ossa and Hermanric veil and match their tone and terminology to the situation and the audience, from the false frankness of the council chamber to the hotheaded hate speech of the meadhall: Now, in lowliest weeds, they mix Among the lowest, and, with sordid speech, Quaint idiom, and obscener mirth, disguise Insidious malice; now, in martial strain, Boast their exploits, and shew the mimic fear,

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Feigned from Icenian shafts. Anon, they seem Sages, or Priests, that of impending ills Bode, reas’ning, or, from divination, feign Woes darkly shadow’d.41

Their rhetoric of fear is infectious, as with ‘reverberate shout … swift, from man to man, contagious wrath / Spreads, direful to repeat and denounce’.42 Thelwall’s experience in the raucous echo-chamber of 1790s public discourse is dramatized even more effectively in the shipwreck scene of The Hope of Albion, which alone of all the major published excerpts of the epic is not identified by book number, but seems to float homeless like Edwin (and Thelwall) himself. Able to see but not reach ‘the long wish’d port’43 of his aspirations, Edwin is ‘driven devious’ by ‘frantic winds’ amid ‘thunder’s roar’44 in the infinitely recursive waking nightmare of an endlessly amplified echo of his own powerful voice. If the public court scenes in The Hope of Albion allegorize Thelwall’s political lectures, and the floating shipwreck scene the neverending disaster of their aftermath, then the pastoral mysticism of The Fairy of the Lake dramatizes the poetic crisis of the Llyswen years. For Rowenna is a romantic poet, her chief weapon an art of ‘runic spell[s]’ and ‘magic numbers’45 whose aim is to numb the minds and enthral the soul of Albion, until every voice is either silenced or rendered ‘obedient to [her] wishes’.46 The effect of Rowennian romanticism on the land is immediate and widespread: the ‘narcotic influence’47 of her wand not only lays the people asleep, and disarms the warrior of his weapons, but subordinates to her will both nature and culture, from the Wordsworthian ‘deep bosom’d waters’ to the Blakean bards in Braga’s hall.48 Combining aspects of Ossianic antiquarianism, Burkean metaphorical excess, Coleridge’s mystifying metaphysics and the sentimental histrionics of the Della Cruscans, Rowenna’s verse showcases Thelwall’s equal arts of parody and prosody in a siren song of slavery that continues the critique begun in The Peripatetic. Yet Rowenna registers not only Thelwall’s critique of Romanticism, but his deep attraction to it. His strangely attractive villain dominates the action: Arthur doesn’t enter until Act 2 and the entire first act is a psychodrama in which, like Byron’s Manfred, Rowenna summons spirits, reads and challenges omens, demands her doom, commands the forces of nature and struggles in vain to control her own desperate passions. A muse of power rather than popularity, she embodies the struggle between ‘conquering sword’ and ‘magic art’ as both ‘[a]re baffled by the apostate heart’.49 Thelwall’s susceptibility to the temptations of ‘epicurean selfishness’ into which so many of his contemporaries had fallen is most evident in the sonorous beauty of the poetry he gives her: Doughty hero! Lay aside Sullen looks and martial pride:

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John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon Love and Pleasure wait you here. Love and Pleasure, Without measure, Ope their treasure: Melting Love, and Joy sincere! … Can your heart coldly beating, From Rapture retreating, Disdaining! Refraining From passions alarms, An Empire relinquish, and fly from these arms? Then my magic shall aid, and my verse shall record All the deathless exploits of your lance, and your sword; And the glory that heroes have struggled to gain I offer secure. – Shall I offer in vain? No; heart to heart beating, and clasp’d in these arms Love, Glory and Empire shall mingle their charms.50

The sheer variety of her musical measures surpasses the much-vaunted metre of Coleridge’s ‘Christabel,’ a poem with which Thelwall’s ‘goblin … rhodomontade’51 enters directly into conversation.52 It also anticipates Shelley’s ‘Prometheus Unbound,’ which resonates so fully with the Fairy that one suspects direct influence, even if it cannot be verified.53 Edwin, too, feels the temptations of romanticism, and here again they are dramatized in dialogue with a thinly-veiled Coleridge. The title of Book Four of the Hope (‘The Friendship of Reynier and the Suppression of the Sedition’) alludes directly to Thelwall’s visit to Nether Stowey, and its content echoes the great theme of their correspondence, the conflict between radical activism and romantic retirement. This conflict is focused symbolically in the tension between the ‘martial’ and the ‘tracing spear’.54 As the book opens, Edwin is literally tracing on the wall, with his spear, an imaginary map of his ‘expected and rightful kingdom’: o’er the pictur’d towers, firm monument Of his predestin’d fame! With fix’d regard, Musing high thoughts, abstract, the hero hung, … The son of Aella paus’d: but not withdrew, The tracing spear, that, o’er the unfinished work Still lingering, speaks the mind to other thoughts Reluctant55

As Reynier repeatedly counsels his ‘disastrous prince’ to ‘fly,’ Edwin, after another brief pause of ‘conflicting passions,’ rouses himself and striking ‘upon the ground … his martial spear’, commences one of the rousing wish-fulfilment speeches that constitute the battleground of Thelwall’s epic of eloquence:

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‘And where, Sternly, he asks, ‘shall vagrant Edwin fly?– ‘In what vile den, forest, or bog obscene ‘Next hide his recreant head, dishonour’d? No: ‘My Reynier, no: I thank thy friendly zeal– ‘Thy virtue love, and high heroic pride, ‘Worthy the race of Uffa: but no more, ‘Chac’d, like a timid leveret from his lair, ‘Shall Edwin fly, bewildering; in each breeze ‘List’ning the hunter’s cry – a trembling thing! ‘No: stag-like, rather, here I take my stand, ‘My warrior antlers trusting.’56

The contrast between tracing and martial spear is a contrast between two kinds of poetry: one Coleridgean, philosophical and visionary, that has come to define romanticism; the other Thelwallian, rhetorical and performative, that romanticism has traditionally devalued. It is a contrast, too, between writing and speech: the tracing spear is an obvious symbol of the pen, while the martial spear is linked by Thelwall to public eloquence that alone, in his theory, extends beyond and has the power to transform written vision into meaningful social action, as through speech alone the one and the many are linked: We’ll try, at least, what Energy can do, By Justice nerv’d. Nor are we now to learn That one can make the many, easier far Than many make the one. … Believe me, friend! That Virtue oftner fails Missing example than desire; and Vice Thrives in its boldness, only when the good Want equal daring.57

Achieving an intensity of cadence and insight that recalls Shakespeare and anticipates Yeats, Thelwall here announces a new kind of poet-hero, who raises Wordworth’s ‘man speaking to men’ to a Miltonic pitch. This romantic hero is neither a lover nor a warrior but a friend and an exemplar. Bold and daring in rhetorical battle, he stands for the people, inspiring them to equal action and virtue through his ‘infectious’ example. The democratic reciprocity at the heart of this revisionary Thelwallian epic is dramatized in Reynier’s response. ‘Flushing with hope unwonted’, and ‘kindling with heroic rage’ he pledges his ‘faithful friendship’ with ‘commutual grasp’ and ‘demand[s his] share’ of ‘noble daring’.58 Even the syntax is reciprocal, as Edwin defines hope as that ‘which oft creates / what it forebodes’ and vows to ‘confront these demons; on themselves, / Turn their vile arts’.59

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The crucial democratic interdependence between one and many, the body of the people and their representative voice, is confirmed in Book 5, in which, in a display of non-violent resistance that anticipates Shelley’s ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, Edwin courts martyrdom, confident that as long as he dies as he speaks, openly, out loud, in public, the news will be the incitement the nation requires to ‘arise, and crush’ his vile oppressors. ‘Punctur[ing] their guilty hearts’60 with both his ‘voice that peal’d / Like Heaven’s own thunder’61 and the body language of his ‘keen searching’ glance,62 Edwin is rewarded with ‘peeling plaudit[s]’63 and the commutual compact between the people and their orator-champion is seemingly sealed. But his triumph is only temporary, and therein lies the flaw in Thelwall’s oratorical, activist and democratic challenge to the romantic imaginary. For if hope creates what it forebodes, then Edwin’s very eloquence creates the conditions for its defeat, as by the end of Book 5 more voices enter the fray: while both ‘fervid Reynier’ and ‘hoary Alwin’64 speak in support of Edwin, Hermanric and Ossa also recover their voices, and the book disintegrates into a cacophony of competing rhetorics. As the play upon the words ‘plausive’ and ‘plaudit’ makes clear, Edwin’s very strength – his voice, and the sympathetic popularity it enables – is also his weakness, as his rhetorical strategies are almost indistinguishable from those of his enemies, to whom the ‘fickle throng: enflam’d by plausive speech’ are just as likely to turn ‘like the gay pennant, on some gusty day, / When veers the unstable wind’.65 It is exactly here that the extant excerpts of the Hope break off, with an ultimatum from ‘imperious Hermanric’ demanding a ‘final answer / Or thundering war shall claim it in these walls’.66 The reader is left hanging like Incubus on the eaves of Thelwall’s unfinished epic, uncertain how the poet will accomplish Edwin’s historical triumph. Will ‘Freedom’s first prototype’67 prevail through the power of his thundering oratory? Or, as the trajectory of the published excerpts of the Hope suggests, will the solitary give way to the collective ‘Gemot’s voice: / The soveran voice of congregate East Anglia’68 to which Reynier and Alwin appeal in Book 5? Or does history teach that words alone will not suffice, and ‘thundering war’ must always ‘chase your factious Gemots’?69 The double-bind climax of The Hope of Albion is mirrored in the shadowboxing design of the showdown ‘seduction/betrayal’ scene in Act 2 of The Fairy of the Lake. Rowenna, at once the master and the victim of her own will-topower, has the vitality that Arthur lacks, but is unable to realize it because of her irresistible desire for her enemy. Arthur, isolated and impotent in his very integrity and resistance, is Rowenna’s ineluctable foe but also, ironically, her mirror image, as he echoes the obsessive language of her lovelorn laments in his own apostrophes to Guenever. Together they illustrate an almost Blakean drama of revolutionary contraries and the psychology of power, as tyrant and redeemer, passion and reason, evil and good, self-love and love of others, are bound in a

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wheel of irresistible attraction and repulsion. Like fragments of Thelwall’s own divided psyche, like the radicals and loyalists of the 1790s, each has what the other lacks and desires, and they are locked in a fruitless and destructive impasse of opposition, until the Fairy of the Lake intervenes to bring about the resolution of the drama. It is this turncoat, turn-of-the-century impasse of frustration and failure, suspicion and self-absorption, that the conjoined arms of Thelwall’s double-visag’d epic so vividly capture. In their very inconsistencies and fragmentation, their radical ironies and rhetorical excesses, The Fairy of the Lake and The Hope of Albion dramatize one of the essential themes of romanticism, in surprisingly complex, dynamic and musical verse, and this alone should merit Thelwall a place among titans like Wordsworth, whose diffuse and sometimes dissonant Prelude is constructed around this same impasse. Yet Thelwall has never been recognized as anything but a failure as a poet; ‘tame and trite and tedious’,70 unable to complete his great Hope, unable to make the romantic breakthrough achieved by his friends and rivals. In order to challenge that assumption, and resolve the question of Thelwall’s poetic reputation, then, it is necessary to reconsider the question of his epic’s resolutions. Though The Fairy of the Lake achieves a conventionally romantic closure, its resolution remains ambivalent. For one thing, it is completely arbitrary. Having destroyed his enemy, but in so doing doomed his beloved to death, Arthur’s victory is capriciously snatched from the flames of defeat; for as Guenever sinks with the burning tower to which she has retreated, ‘the space becomes filled by a pool of water’71 out of which she reappears in a chariot driven by the Fairy of the Lake. The Fairy is a deus ex machina whose sudden interventions draw attention to the masque-like allegory of Thelwall’s drama. An emblem of Hope’s capacity to ‘create from its own wreck the thing it contemplates’ (the words of Shelley, foreboded in Thelwall), 72 the Fairy is a providential spirit of Shelleyan cyclical liberation and ‘never-ceasing spring’, representing Thelwall’s continuing faith in nature and romantic ideals. That faith is represented in the symbol of water, the ‘tribute spring’ that runs ‘thro secret veins, to feed [the] broader lake’73 in which the Fairy’s power resides. As its refreshment sounds ‘murmuring – tinkling, / Bubbling – sprinkling’74 in the shimmering music of her final songs (as prosodically accomplished as anything before Tennyson), the poem recalls with affection Thelwall’s shared brookside quest with Coleridge and Wordsworth for the springs of hope in which their epic rivalry originated. Yet while the Fairy resolves her drama in a satisfying (or at least familiar) romantic manner, a very different resolution is achieved by another character who collaborates in the coup de grace. That is Arthur’s doughty and drunken friend Tristram, who, after being drugged and dragged off in Act 2, enters Act 3 with his Incubus Scout to carry the action of the drama. While Arthur and the

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rest of his knights ride off with heroic futility to lay siege to the castle, Tristram and Scout secretly infiltrate it to rescue Guenever. Through Tristram, Thelwall both redeems and undermines his own gothic structure and romantic resolution. In him, we hear a delightfully Falstaffian, disreputable, pragmatist countervoice to the romantic imaginary,75 a voice that refuses to be silenced but will use whatever weapons are at hand not only to survive but to triumph against the odds. Tristram’s weapons are intoxication and secrecy, each linked to a mode of language or text. He enters the play carrying a cask of cwrw (the Welsh word for ale), which becomes a symbol for the power of language itself as a weapon. Neither the high-flown political oratory of Edwin of Northumbria nor the angst-laden romantic poetry of Arthur or Rowenna, the language of the cask is the language of play, the oppositional discourse of parody and satire, for which Thelwall is justly famous. Tristram’s drunken improvisations upon the meaning and utility of cwrw, both the empty cask and the unpronounceable Welsh word, provide a sustained parodic counterpoint to both the metaphysical meanderings of Arthur, whose every word of heartfelt lament or desperate hope is turned inside out, and to the romantic charms and songs of Rowenna. Much of this farcically philological wordplay calls to mind Coleridge, whose metaphysical apostasy is parodied mercilessly. Like Thelwall arriving at Coleridge’s cottage in 1797, Tristram first knocks on the cask, only to find it ‘Hollow! Hollow! – Hollow as a false friend, who preaches and moralizes when Necessity is at the door: and then he rings, just like this – all his swelling words being nothing but emptiness’.76 In a blatant allusion to the epic rivalry of the Alfoxden summer, Tristram then boasts that with ‘one draught of this genuine water of the muses’, he will ‘eclipse all the Knights of the Round Table, and bear away the prize, in the bardic circles’.77 Just as he bends to drink, however, Tristram, like Thelwall, is caught and frozen by the Incubus, who has been hiding in the cask all along : ‘now I shall be famous,’ he says as he drinks, ‘or the devil is in it’ – and, of course, the devil IS in it – a groaning pun which doubles as a brilliant materialist critique of Coleridge’s symbolist language theory.78 Yet, although the empty cask of ale does become the instrument of Tristram’s (and Thelwall’s) imprisonment, cwrw and the power of satire it symbolizes is also the instrument of their liberation, since it is by means of both drink and wit that Tristram infiltrates the castle, baffling and entertaining the seneschal with a series of brilliantly parodic holy trinities that take arms against any and all ‘fisticuff Divinities’. Ultimately, it is Tristram’s secret agency (and Scout’s double agency) of language that carry the day, enabling him not completely to liberate Guenever but to preserve her from flames of war until the Fairy of the Lake intervenes. Tristram is rewarded with a place in the chariot that rises out of the pool, in an ironic doubling of the rising of the cask. Seated just behind Guenever in the romantic vehicle, his survival provides a satisfying resolution for not

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only The Fairy of the Lake, but Thelwall’s poetic reputation. Formally and prosodically innovative, psychologically and politically astute, and as entertaining as anything before Byron, Thelwall’s Fairy surely merits him a place among the great romantic poets. But what about the hapless Hope of Albion, a thing of shreds and patches forever hung out to freeze-dry in the ‘contention of Cent’ries’?79 In the absence of another breakthrough discovery of missing Thelwall manuscripts, the only way to resolve that question is to return to its break-off point: the call for a Witenagemot in Book 5. This protodemocratic Saxon council, one of the ‘institutions’ which Thelwall ‘regarded as the peculiar advantages of the English Constitution’ was a frequent touchstone of his political and elocutionary lectures, and the students at his Institute were encouraged to enquire into and debate upon it in their Historical and Oratorical Society (itself a microcosmic replica of the idealized ‘gemot’s voice’).80 It is in such Societies and Institutes and the elocutionary pedagogy that Thelwall developed in them that we must look for the resolution of his epic poem. For The Hope of Albion is quite literally framed by them: its final extant books were published in The Vestibule of Eloquence, a volume of Thelwall’s poetry printed in 1810 ‘expressly for the purpose of recitation among my pupils’ in order to preserve ‘some fragments … of a work so long meditated … in some form that may give them a degree of permanency and diffusion’ by ‘transferring [them] … from the silence of my port-folio, to the memory of those, whose voices, hereafter, may give them an expression’.81 It appears, then, that The Hope of Albion may not be as incomplete as it first appears. For according to the criteria outlined in his epic and even more fully in the essays and headnotes prefaced to his elocutionary publications, the Art and Act of eloquence (of which poetry is the highest form) is not complete until it is received and renewed in the reader/listener. 82 As The Vestibule of Eloquence testifies, Thelwall’s epic achieved just this form of completion: his elocutionary selections regularly included the speeches of Edwin, Reynier and Alwin, as well as other excerpts from his epic and other poems, and they circulated widely not only to the pupils of his London speech Institute, and audiences of the regular public lectures and performances he and his students delivered there, but to the countless provincial audiences who attended his peripatetic performances and purchased his cheap print Selections at the door. His words, received and renewed in the mouths and minds of his listeners and readers, prepared the next generation to become active participants in public debate and government.83 Thus while the written text of Thelwall’s great epic poem may never have been completed, his Hope of Albion surely was. Its heroic resolution occurs not inside but outside the text, not in silent portfolio of aesthetic representation but in the verbal battleground of realized action. Thelwall’s move from politics to poetry and elocution was not a diversion from but the completion of his princi-

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ples, and thus a careful reading of his poetry in its elocutionary context promises to complete our understanding of his profoundly ‘double-visag’d’ career. Thelwall’s hapless but promising Hope will live as long as there are voices in which his call for freedom can be heard.

12 THE CONCEPTUAL UNDERPINNINGS OF JOHN THELWALL’S ELOCUTIONARY PRACTICES Judith Felson Duchan

At the turn of the nineteenth century, after being harassed for his radical political ideas and after failing to make a financial go of it as a farmer, lecturer and writer, John Thelwall began to establish himself as an elocutionist. Between the years 1802 and 1826 he lectured often on the ‘science and practice of elocution’. During these years he also wrote three lengthy works on his theories and practices1 as well thirty or so smaller pieces, including articles in newspapers and unpublished tracts.2 Finally, it was during this period that Thelwall opened his first institute in London, where he lived, housed and taught his pupils, gave public lectures and oratory performances and provided a venue for his students to publicly display their elocutionary skills. His 1806 announcement of the opening of this Institute published in the Medical and Physical Journal reads as follows: Mr. Thelwall has opened a Seminary, No. 40 Bedford Place, Russell Square, for the cultivation of the Science and Practice of Elocution, and the Cure of Impediments of Speech; and is delivering a Course of Lectures on the Elementary Principles of his Art. The lectures are illustrated by graphic and mechanical demonstrations of the essential propositions; and are occasionally relieved by popular readings and recitations, and specimens of spontaneous oratory. Mr. T. also proposes to receive into his house a limited number of pupils who have impediments of utterance, of whatever description, the deaf alone excepted; and to give lessons, at stated hours, to individuals and to select classes, to whom domestication might not be convenient; and who may either labour under the like imperfections, or be desirous of improvement in the accomplishments of reading and recitation, conversational fluency, public oratory, and the principles of criticism and composition. 3

This essay focuses on the therapeutic aspects of Thelwall’s elocutionary practices. I will try to show that his contributions to elocution are worthy of study on their own terms and deserve to be treated as more than a forced or unfortunate departure from his political and literary work. I will organize his elocutionary – 139 –

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contributions to speech therapy around four conceptual frameworks that underpin them. Specifically I will talk about the ideas associated • with his mechanical rendering of articulation and speech rhythms in speech production, • with his materialism, used to counter vitalist explanations of life as well as to theorize about the importance of rhythmic harmonies in oral discourse, • with his ideas about the significant role of mental faculties play in causing and remediating speech impediments • and with how he saw and described the moral or emotional effects on elocutionary performance These four organizing frames I will be referring to as his conceptual frameworks of mechanism, materialism, mentalism and moralism. Thelwall’s frameworks yield a puzzle for us, because some appear to be contradictory. That is, mechanism and materialism focus on the tangible aspects of speech production whereas mentalism and moralism involve more abstract renderings of processes involved in speech and elocution. His positions are often seen as antithetical and others who have taken one or the other of them have been cast into opposing camps, such as physiological monists versus idealists, empiricists versus rationalists, behaviourists versus mentalists, and in Thelwall’s time, materialists versus vitalists. Thelwall’s juxtapositions of different and potentially opposing conceptual frames are therefore jarring and in need of explanation. I will first lay out how Thelwall uses each of these organizing frames, then I will forward some possible explanations for why and how he uses seemingly incompatible frameworks in his efforts to construct a science and practice of therapeutic elocution.

Mechanism Thelwall often describes speech as mechanical, focusing on the physical ways speech is produced. He distinguishes two types of mechanical systems involved in speech production, enunciative and vocal.4 The mechanics of what he calls enunciative organs involve the articulation of different speech sounds. Thelwall built his enunciation mechanical system upon the work of others such as the seventeenth-century linguist William Holder,5 and in so doing, classified speech sounds according to their articulatory features. His system of speech sounds included the features of place or where sounds were produced in the mouth such as labial, labiodental and lingual, and features of manner or how the sounds were produced, such as liquid and sibilant.6

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Another mechanical system in Thelwall’s theory of speech production was that produced by the ‘vocal organs’. This includes voice production, rhythm and timing of speech. It was in this area that Thelwall made what he saw as his signature contributions to elocution as a science. He devised a coding system for analysing stress (which he called heavy and light poise) and timing (which he called quantity).7 Thelwall’s depictions of speech rhythms were based in body mechanics. The rhythmic patterns, as he saw them, came from natural rhythmical movements of the body’s speech articulators. He argued further that when people are true to their own ‘rhythmical perception … impediment is impossible’.8 Thus he saw violations of natural rhythms as the source of all speech impediments. From an injudicious application of undisciplined volition to this physical action, I endeavour to account for all the gradations of harsh, ungraceful, and interruptive delivery; and from inconsiderate attempts to violate this primary law, all the customary impediments of speech.9

Thelwall not only used distortions in natural body rhythms as an explanation of speech impediments, he also emphasized rhythmical mechanics when designing therapies to remedy speech impediments. For example, he superimposed his coding system on his practice materials and had his students produce as well as follow his rhythmic notations as they read aloud. He did this so that the students would learn to express rhythms in music-like proportion, in keeping with the natural rhythms expressed in the reading material as well as the natural rhythms emanating from their own bodies as they read. Thelwall described these bodily rhythms in muscular action and reaction as a law of physical necessity. In his own words: … as the pendulum when it has made its full swing in one direction must re-act in the opposite…so when the tongue, lip, or uvula have acted on any given direction for the formation of any given element, it must re-act silently or expressively either upon the primary, or in some new direction, before the same element can be repeated, or any other element requiring a similar line of action can be formed.10

He theorized further that harmonious utterances arise out of fluent physical action and that inharmonious utterances are due to disruptions in the cadences of physical action.

Materialism The second framework used by Thelwall, and one related to the first, was materialism. In 1793, well before his foray into elocution, Thelwall used materialist arguments to counter the idea that a vital or superadded element is needed to distinguish living from dead matter. In his oft-cited lecture at Guy’s Hospital, he

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presented an alternative to vitalism, proposing that a material such as an electrical fluid could replace vitalist explanations of living matter. Thelwall’s electrical fluid theory rests on his materialist idea that matter exists in an ‘organized frame’. He hypothesizes that certain ‘fine particles of matter’ acquire the properties of life when arranged in particular ways – ways that achieve what he called ‘perfect harmony’. Thelwall puts it this way: … previous to the existence of life the body must have attained a specific organization, and that life … is induced by the application of proper stimuli. Thus, then, life in the animal is that state of action (induced by specific stimuli upon matter specifically organized).11

Later, after becoming an elocutionist, Thelwall called again upon this construct, arguing that harmony in organization provides a life force to speech. The harmony he refers to in this instance is between mechanical speech production and one’s perception of musical proportion. In Thelwall’s words: This part of the subject leads me to an investigation of the intimate connection between physiological and harmonic science; the origin of our perceptions of musical proportion, from the primary actions and reactions of the organ of vocal impulse, and the application of these implicated sciences to facility of utterance, to the improvement of the grace and harmony of speech... 12

Mentalism A third framework that informed Thelwall’s writings was mentalism. For example, in his Introductory Discourse he warned against treating elocution as a ‘mere exercise of the organs of speech’,13 a position which contradicts to the strict mechanical, materialist framework that informed his rhythmus work. In his Letter to Henry Cline, the most detailed and most cited of his elocution writings, Thelwall argues that the mental aspects of speech must be attended to if one is to understand and treat people with speech impediments. In his Results of Experience, he also wrote that the act of speaking demonstrates the ‘inward workings of the mind’, and claimed that there are usually mental (and moral) factors that interfere with the proper execution of the mechanistic rhythms; ‘… moral, intellectual, and educational causes have … as absolute and sometimes as extensive an operation on the physical system as physical causes have upon the attributes and phenomena of mind’. Thelwall distinguished physical from mental causes of speech impediments. As he put it, If impediments of speech in general, were not, in reality, mental diseases, the cure would be exceedingly simple: for notwithstanding what is frequently said about nervous, and natural, and hereditary impediments, and the like, nothing is more easy than to demonstrate that while the mind is under the due impression of rhythmical

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perception, and the efforts of enunciation are conducted according to the physiological laws upon which the principles of rhythmus depend, impediment is impossible. Where the impediment, therefore, is merely an habitual imitation: where the perceptions are not blunt, nor the faculties confused; where the mind is neither much enfeebled, nor strongly eccentric; nor the moral temper deeply infected, the remedy is never difficult. But where the mind is embarrassed, lethargic, or incoherent; or the temper perturbed by sullen gloom, excessive irritability, unconquerable levity, morbid vanity, or impatience of correction or control, or any of those blemishes which cloud the reason and intercept volition, the labour increases and the hope diminishes, in proportion to the extent of these mental and moral evils.

Thelwall’s mentalist framework was further used for the design of therapies for ‘correcting and regulating the mental and moral habits of the pupil’.14

Moralism Thelwall and his contemporaries used the term ‘moral’ to signify aspects of personal temperament and motivation as well as social rules of conduct; a concept broadly defined as ‘virtue’.15 He sometimes renders temperament and virtue as two of a kind. Virtue … has its source … in individual feeling … from the central throb of individual impulse the feeling expands to the immediate circle of relative connections … from intimate association to the neighbourhood where we reside to the country for which we would bleed, from the patriot community to civilized society … wherever the throb of sensation can exist the virtuous find a motive for the regulation of their actions.16

Thelwall applies the moral framework to various aspects of his elocutionary work. He sometimes classifies causes, types and therapies associated with speech impediments as moral in kind. For example, Thelwall reports on a child whose speechlessness was due to moral idiocy, in that the girl seemed unwilling to engage in social exchanges.17 Moral causes of speech problems included in Thelwall’s writings are parental neglect or abuse, lack of motivation on the part of the child and temper that may be ‘perturbed’, or subject to such shifts in personality or mood as, ‘sullen gloom, excessive irritability, unconquerable levity, morbid vanity, or impatience of correction of control’.18 Some therapies, Thelwall depicted as moral teachings. For example, he aimed in one case to ‘superinduce a more decorous deportment, to restrain the selfishness of animal passion, and eradicate the habit of systematic falsehood’. Furthermore, ‘No species of imbecility appears to us so hopeless as that which is complicated with vicious habits, and the absence of social sympathy’.19 He emphasized that oral discourse was an effective means for performing moral acts. For example, he held that oral communication is required for carrying out one’s

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responsibility to family, acquaintances and society. People, he argued, are able to attain virtue or morality only through ‘the creative faculty of discourse’.20 In summary, when presenting his case against vitalism in his earliest writings and in favour of an objective science, Thelwall assumed the stance of a strict materialist. He saw the physical – that which he often referred to as ‘physiological’ – as being sufficient to account for higher-level functions. In Thelwall’s time this was called physiological monism. Later, after reinventing himself as an elocutionist, Thelwall still held to his monistic view. In 1805 for example, he argued from his mechanistic law of physical necessity, that all impediments of speech are physically based.21 In other writings, however, he favoured a more dualistic perspective, discussing such mental phenomena as ‘blunt perceptions’ and ‘confused faculties’, as causes of physical impairments in speech production and arguing that, in some cases, speech impediments originate from such ‘moral’ causes as demotivation and irritability. This sense of dualism, in which mental and physical phenomena are separable and capable of affecting one another, clearly stands in contrast to his view of speech production as strictly mechanical and material. So, how might we go about resolving the potential incompatibility between Thelwall’s monistic and dualistic renderings of speech production and speech impairments? One possibility is that Thelwall simply changed his mind about the nature of speech and speech impediments shifting from monism to dualism. Indeed, it is in his earliest writings that he provides the most detailed elaboration of his materialist and mechanistic theorizing, and it is only later in his elocutionary career, especially in the Results of Experience (1814), that he argues strongly for the influence of mental and moral factors on the production of speech and on elocutionary competence and performance. But some of Thelwall’s later works, especially when laying out his theory on rhythmus, promote mechanical and material reasoning. And in his early articles when presenting his theories in terms of physical determinism using mechanistic and materialist frameworks, he also tucks in references to the impact of mental or moral idiocy upon a person’s speech or elocution abilities. A more satisfying explanation for Thelwall’s use of opposing views of elocution is that the conceptual frameworks serve different functions for him in his writings. That is, they are not reflective of a change in perspective, nor are they arbitrarily drawn upon. Rather, his frameworks serve as well-chosen rhetorical devices to allow him to achieve different discursive agendas. One of Thelwall’s earliest agendas was to elevate the status of elocution by portraying it as a branch of ‘natural philosophy’. To this end Thelwall used conceptual frameworks of materialism and mechanism drawn from the work of medical scientists such as William Harvey and Herman Boerhaave. Whereas his predecessors talked about the bodily mechanisms involved in circulation and digestion, Thelwall

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used parallel positivistic and mechanistic thinking to portray the workings of speech production. In the Introductory Discourse, he writes, ‘I shall endeavor to go somewhat deeper into the subject and shall attempt to establish my doctrines upon the settled principles of science, and demonstrate the essential elements of elocution as a branch of natural philosophy’.22 Later, approaching the problem from a different angle, he suggested quite different spheres of influence for medical and elocutionary practitioners. Here, he separated physical therapies that can be performed by physicians (such as surgery or the provision of prosthetic devices), from educational therapies and from mental and moral instruction, which fell strictly within the scope of practice of elocutionists. Throughout his Letter to Henry Cline in 1810 and his Results of Experience in 1814, Thelwall argued that the causes of most speech impediments are mental and moral and that such impediments need, therefore, mental and moral remedies. Even physically based impediments, he argues, are curable as long as mental and moral causes can be overcome. In his words: I reject, altogether, as far as the organization of the mouth is concerned, all distinction of curable and incurable impediments, for I know how far human ingenuity can go in supplying the deficiencies of organic structure. And I know, also, by experience, how far one organ can be trained to supply the deficiencies and perform the functions of another. Even without the application of artificial palates, those who are deficient in that organ may obtain a distinct and intelligible…agreeable utterance. In short, let there be but industry, intellect… and hearing in the pupil; and the professor, who really understands his science, need never despair of superadding the power of fluent speech.

In summary, John Thelwall’s elocutionary writings used a number of conceptual frameworks including those of mechanism, materialism, mentalism and moralism. These frameworks provided him with not only a means for understanding and writing about his elocutionary work, but also served him as a vehicle for promoting his elocution enterprise. When arguing that elocution is based on sound scientific principles, he tended to ground his discourse in mechanistic and materialistic reasoning, furthering the idea that the elocution in general, and his version of it in particular, were grounded in empirical, physiological monism. On the other hand, he used mentalistic and moralistic constructs when arguing for elocution as a separate discipline from medicine. In this way he used dualist notions to justify the need for his newfound work, and in so doing, demonstrated that elocution possesses unique and indispensable qualities beyond those provided by the physical sciences.

13 TRACING THE TEXTUAL REVERBERATION: THE ROLE OF THELWALL’S ELOCUTIONARY SELECTIONS IN THE BRITISH LYCEUM Tara-Lynn Fleming

Toy with your books; and as the various fits Of humour seize you from philosophy To fable shift, from serious Antonine To Rabelai’s ravings, and from prose to song. While reading pleases, but not longer, read; And read aloud, resounding Homer’s strain And wield the thunder of Demosthenes. ( John Armstrong, ‘Management of the Mind’, Selections BL-B 34–40)

This oratorical call to action, drawn from John Thelwall’s edited version of John Armstrong’s ‘Management of the Mind’, presents a striking ideological revision of our concept of Britain’s traditional reading practices. Calling for a shift in genre from serious philosophy to playful fable, an exchange in voice from a demure Antonine to a verbally explosive Rabelais, a reconfiguration of register from silent prose to oral song and, in turn, a redefinition of reading itself from passive absorption to active performance, Anderson’s passage proposes a reading practice informed by the performative values of oratory. Featured in Thelwall’s elocutionary textbook, Selections, Armstrong’s ‘Management of the Mind’ conceptualizes Thelwall’s poetics of speech and serves as a paradigm of his orally-inflected program of self-improvement. As one of several excerpts in the Selections which reflect the tenets of Thelwall’s learner-centred approach to elocutionary development, Armstrong’s passage demonstrates the connections between Thelwall’s speech-based theory of education and Britain’s nascent learning culture. More specifically, this command to ‘read aloud, resounding Homer’s strain’ speaks to a unique historical moment in the early years of the nineteenth century, when the emergence of what Jürgen Habermas refers to as the ‘public sphere’, coupled with innovations in the structure and accessibility of popular print forms, were met with powerful reforms in the nation’s education system. – 147 –

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In the early years of the nineteenth century, a climate of what Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite refer to as ‘Romantic sociability’ began to emerge, ‘engendered by the commercialization of culture in venues such as the coffee-house, the inn, tavern, alehouse, the proliferation of forms of voluntary association … and so on’. Describing the character of this ‘conversational model of culture’, Russell and Tuite include ‘the ideals of unfettered expression and mutual openness and trust expressed through companionability, [as well as] the right of a man to discourse with his friends’.1 Just as these ideals formed the foundations of a socially productive collectivism, so too did they underpin an educational ethic of mutual self-improvement. With the growing intellectualism of public culture and the concurrent revival of the eighteenth-century coffeehouse model of sociability,2 a culture of what I call ‘intellectual sociability’3 began to take root, which blended modes of learning with social interaction to form intellectual sites of sociability. These sociable venues were transformed into such cultural institutions as the coterie-style Literary and Philosophical Societies, the bourgeois Royal Institutions and the working-class Mechanics’ Institutes, among others, which housed lectures, debates and forms of entertainment. These intellectual circles,4 which ranged in formality from small learning clusters to corporate learning institutions, and spanned the social spectrum, together with an intersecting lecture movement, in which itinerant lecturers would circulate, formed the basis of the British Lyceum movement, a nationwide system of adult education which was unified in its mandate to advance a democratic tradition of interdisciplinary education, as a means to verbally, intellectually and politically enfranchise both the individual and the collective voice.5 This focus on self-improvement through the free exchange of knowledge across divisions of class, profession and ability, profoundly echoes the values of democratic education which form the germ of John Thelwall’s political and elocutionary endeavors, and characterize Thelwall’s remarkable forty-year involvement in Britain’s lyceum movement. Adopting a Socratic role within the movement as a democratic leader, an educator, a pedagogical theorist and a mediator between the nation’s lyceum institutions, Thelwall’s professional contributions had four phases: Political, Elocutionary, Theoretical and Posthumous. While critical attention has focused primarily on Thelwall’s 1790s political phase, where he used the political lecture to stimulate and sanction a demand for inclusive adult education, this chapter treats Thelwall’s elocutionary phase, focusing specifically on how he used the elocutionary Selections to respond to this increasing demand for practical knowledge. During the elocutionary phase of his career, Thelwall worked as an independent lecturer and speech therapist, delivering lectures in the same towns, and in some cases, in buildings connected with the Literary and Philosophical Societies, Royal Institutions, and Mechanics’ Institutes.6 From 1802 to 1812, Thelwall

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compiled elocutionary lecture outlines with elocutionary essays and literary excerpts to form the composite Selections handbook. These outlines indicate that during the itinerant portion of his career, Thelwall developed a successful commercial enterprise, delivering elocutionary lectures in the town halls, assembly rooms and taverns of ‘all the principal neighborhoods of an extensive tract of Country, from Worcester and Birmingham to Tweed’,7 to a broad range of learners, including ‘the Mathematician, the professional student, [and] the Classical scholar’8. Notably, no two extant Selections volumes are identical; they differ either in instructional content or in the selection and arrangement of excerpts. Such variations suggest that for each course of lectures he delivered, Thelwall compiled a series of his own pre-existing outlines and recitation excerpts compatible with the proposed lecture agenda. As he traveled from town to town, delivering various courses of lectures on the science and practice of elocution, Thelwall adapted his Selections outlines accordingly, selling the outlines as an auxiliary to his elocutionary instruction. While this may partly account for the ephemeral quality of the volumes’ content, it does not explain the transitory nature of their very existence. On the frontispiece to each volume, Thelwall informs his readers that the outlines were ‘[s]old by all the Booksellers [of the town], and by the Door-keepers, at the Lecture Room’,9 ‘to assist the student, and facilitate the just delivery of the respective passages’10. Individuals would have been able to purchase a volume as an accompaniment to Thelwall’s course of lectures for the cost of one guinea, or separately, as an individual text, for a mere sixpence.11 As such, the Selections may be read as a subsidiary to Thelwall’s elocutionary lectures or as a composite textual collection which was sold, circulated and recited independently of the lecture. The ten (as yet) extant copies of the Selections which I have examined tell us that the volumes were just as itinerant as Thelwall was as a peripatetic lecturer. They circulated in accordance with Thelwall’s lecture circuit but once dispensed they led an excursion of their own.12 As documents which led highly mobile lives,13 these Selections volumes were and continue to be both sites of intellectual sociability and rich repositories of history. It is this interest in the Selections’ itinerancy, or more precisely, in their physical, social, verbal and intergeneric mobility, that this chapter responds to. While research has considered many of Britain’s adult education structures, including the learning circle, the debating club and the lecture forum as productive sites of cultural education, this chapter treats the Selections as such within the context of what Paul Magnuson identifies as ‘the public space of Romanticism’.14 The early nineteenth-century was a period of intense debate over the accepted methods of educating the country’s socially subordinated populations. As a source of knowledge and thus an instrument of power, literature in the hands of the lower classes was considered by many a potential hazard to national stability. In an attempt to maintain a neatly stratified social structure, it was vital

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that society refrain from ‘educating the poor beyond their station’. As a result, literature was ‘a power not to be abused and not to be widely shared’.15 While until the late eighteenth century, books were held in libraries exclusive to affluent members of the aristocratic and bourgeois classes, during the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, this was gradually superseded by widening support for the universal diffusion of knowledge. Thus, in an emergent learning culture where reading was still considered a new privilege to many, the performance of reading as a public act created a powerful, and in some cases, politically contentious, image of social rising. What made reading particularly subversive was the way in which it evoked a resistance to one’s current station. The act of reading indicated a will to better oneself and, in turn, a drive to overcome a condition of verbal, intellectual and/or social repression. For the first time in history, men and women from all classes and professions could be seen in reading circles, taverns, coffeehouses and workshops, taking up works of literature traditionally reserved for the pleasure of the learned upper classes. Not only that, but thanks to Thelwall and others, new learners were publicly proclaiming their newfound literacy through practices of oral recitation. As a result, oral recitation was not only a form of education and sociability; it also served a symbolic and even political function as a public display of one’s intellectual and verbal capacity. Thelwall’s Selections, as an oratorical workbook, promoted the spread of knowledge by encouraging its readers to adopt an oral, performative and corespondent reading practice. By mingling high forms of literature traditionally beyond the grasp of the working classes, with lower forms of print in an inexpensive volume which urges readers of all stations, abilities and tastes to take up the voice of elocution, Thelwall establishes his Selections as a therapeutic and a social tool which challenges the conditions of verbal and social repression rooted in speech. In a challenge to all political, social and literary institutions which seek to socially and verbally silence individuals, Thelwall literally put literature, a symbol of power, into the mouths and minds of the British public. At sixpence a copy, Thelwall’s Selections function like the broadsheet political pamphlets he sold at Beaufort Buildings in the 1790s, which were such an important medium of democratic education among the lower classes. The fact that Thelwall chose such a democratic form to diffuse his elocutionary principles suggests an important connection between Thelwall’s elocutionary and political projects. Even if the lectures themselves were aimed at a bourgeois audience, the Selections volumes were tailored more for those who could not afford the lecture admission, but could use them as print had been used in the 1790s – reading aloud in taverns, debating clubs, coffeehouses and learning circles. In this way, it is likely that the Selections reached the minds of far more people than those who were capable of reading. Thanks to the emergence of social reading practices, in which ‘[y]oung men formed reading and discussion groups, pooled their funds to join

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circulating libraries, read aloud to one another during work hours and in pubs or coffee-houses’, a single copy likely reached the ears and minds of learners from all levels of society.16 Thus, Thelwall forwarded two models of elocution as social reform: the costly lecture contributed to self-advancement among the middling classes and the cheap Selections fostered self-improvement within the working and lower classes. Whether re-sounded in a workshop or tavern by a single reader to a group of listeners, delivered as a performance in a learning coterie, recited in the family reading circle or rehearsed aloud in private, the Selections volumes take the form of a ‘public discourse’ which Magnuson defines as ‘open and available, rather than silent or secluded in the privacy of a library or domestic circle’, 17 and which both founds itself on and fosters an ethos of democratic exchange within and beyond the Selections. With conversation at its centre, Thelwall’s Selections emerges as a pedagogical imperative to adult education, a democratic site of intellectual sociability, and thus, a politically subversive engine of reform. This investigation provokes a series of inquiries: in what ways was Thelwall’s Selections collection an agent in the social and educational reform of the nation? In what ways did the Selections work within Britain’s lyceum culture to enfranchise the aspiring working-class learner, the bourgeois professional and the verbally impaired? In order to address these queries, I will discuss the Selections as a literary and socio-educational tool which takes the form of an elocutionary textbook. The first section will expand upon Thelwall’s oratorical theory of literature to explore the Selections as both a theoretical treatise and a textual manifestation of his speech poetics and practice. Rooted in speech and, more specifically, in the vocal organs, Thelwall’s Selections demands an orally-inflected approach to learning, where poetry becomes oratory, reading becomes oral recitation and the reader becomes the reciter. This is precisely the point where a study of the Selections as a theoretical text slides into a treatment of the Selections as an elocutionary workbook. In fact, whether we refer to textual or verbal transactions, the Selections always positions the learner at the centre of the conversation, making him the active agent in his elocutionary development as he verbally moves through the volume’s lectures, exercises and recitation excerpts. Invoking an orally-inflected mode of reading which will, in effect, lift the voice from the page, I will approach the texts as Thelwall intended them to be read: through the minds and mouths of the British public. Thelwall was, like other elocutionists in his time, revising the way the printed text was being engaged with. The period witnessed a rise in the number of elocutionary texts entering the marketplace, suggesting that some were taking advantage of the influx in pedagogical print forms to respond to a trend in speech education. ‘Gradually, elocution and English began to assert their importance in this new progressive system of instruction, and by 1800, it had become obvious that the period of classical supremacy in education was coming to an

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end’18. Defining elocution in different ways, from a basic practice of ‘reading and speaking’19, to ‘the just and graceful management of the voice, countenance, and gesture, in speaking’20, these texts range in complexity of instruction and pedagogical structure. Working within this elocutionary tradition, Thelwall disseminated his own ideas about reading in the form of a workbook which outlines the principles behind his poetics of speech and applies those principles to a compilation of literary excerpts intended for oral delivery. While a number of his contemporaries21 define elocution as the basic art of speaking, Thelwall speaks to the universality of the application of the general principles of elocution: that from the stem of physiological analysis (to which every part of my system for the treatment of impediments is referred) naturally sprint, not only the blossoms of graceful and harmonious utterance, in conversation and reading, but the matured and invigorating fruits of oratorical energy and impressiveness; nay, that even the arrangements and flow of language (in composition as well as speech) have a connection and dependence on the cultivation of the faculty of oral utterance.22

Establishing a scientific approach to education, Thelwall develops elocution as an applied science, a student-centred programme for elocutionary accomplishment and a therapeutic practice for the speech impaired. With the belief that ‘Impediments however complicated, [are] surmountable’,23 Thelwall includes a speech therapy programme in the form of an empirical system of diagnosis and treatment which targets students suffering from speech impairments. While some elocutionary texts, such as Sheridan’s Course of Lectures on Elocution, are purely theoretical, offering no direct instruction or recitation excerpts, others, such as J. V. Button’s Exercises on Elocution, are strictly anthological, presenting elocutionary excerpts without any theory or instruction. Thelwall draws from both structures, incorporating both theoretical and anthological features, to form an elocutionary text which traverses the lyceum genres of the instructional lecture, the dialogic debate, and the polyvocal performance. In fact, Thelwall’s Selections takes the form of a textual lyceum in its textual structure, pragmatic function and physical mobility. As an elocutionary workbook, Thelwall’s Selections volume comprehends the generic structure of the lyceum, presenting students with didactic lectures which outline the theoretical principles of elocution, engages them in dialogue and debate through recitation exercises and encourages them to deliver recitations, turning works of literature into multi-voiced performances. For example, Thelwall’s Introductory Discourse on the Nature and Objects of Elocutionary Science opens each lesson with a set of metacognitive queries, including ‘What are the Organs of Impulse, Transmission and Modification, which produce the phenomena of human voice?’ Each lesson is then broken down into three segments which introduce, illustrate and

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apply Thelwall’s elocutionary principles. By the time the reader has worked his way through the first didactic section, which outlines the physiological structures of the voice, possible speech impairments and ways to cultivate the vocal organs, he should have a set of elocutionary instruments to apply in the practice section. Adopting Thelwall’s pedagogical process, ‘From Science and theory, we then advance to practice’, 24 the student moves through a series of pronunciation exercises which offer visual instruction, along with opportunities for dialogue, questioning and active rehearsal. The volume’s longest section introduces a collection of literary extracts, framed with Thelwall’s instructional annotations and elocutionary criticism, which offer his student the opportunity to apply his newly-learned skills to the performative recitation of literature. Whether approached as a textbook, a speech therapy resource or an anthology, Thelwall’s Selections is above all a pragmatic work, based on ‘Science and Utility’.25 In other words, whether readers work through the Selections as a lyceum-based textbook, adopting a linear approach as they move from theory to practice, or read the volume as an oratorical anthology, adopting what Barbara Benedict refers to as a ‘dip, sip, and skip’26 approach to reading, they will nevertheless engage in an active, speech-based practice of self-improvement. With the values of utility and speech at the centre of Thelwall’s educational project, the Selections as pedagogical and anthological applications of his speech poetics, helped to shape reading practices and revise our understanding of Romantic culture. While literary thinkers typically identify poetry as the manifestation of the poetic imagination, according to Thelwall, both poetic verse and human utterance originates in the vocal organs. The text’s oral qualities lie in the syllabic rhythms of verse and may only be realized through its verbal re-sounding. The reciter must take the words up and re-sound them in order to physically hear and feel the rhythms of a text. Reading therefore becomes a physiognomic exercise which creates a harmony between the body’s own rhythmic patterns and the cadences drawn forth from the page. As the reciter takes up the words, his body internalizes the work’s rhythms; as he re-sounds the text for an auditor, the rhythmic pattern issues forth from the reciter as both a verbal and a physiognomic act. In the words of Thelwall: When really actuated by any strong and genuine emotion, the tone becomes affected; the physiognomy assumes a sympathetic expression; and bursting thro’ the boundaries of fashion and the chains of unnatural torpor, each limb and muscle seems to swell and struggle with inspiring passion…

Describing the co-respondence between speech and physiognomy, Thelwall illustrates that elocution demands full-body expression. In other words, ‘to produce the effect of eloquence, language alone is not sufficient … every portion of

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the frame must be vital with expressive eloquence’.27 As a result, oral as opposed to silent reading enriches the reader’s experience of the text, drawing both his intellect and his physical body into the processes of interpretation and delivery. Thus, as the reader embodies the rhythms of a work, the reading act becomes an interpretive oral and physical performance. For example, when a reciter takes up Thompson’s ‘Hymn on the Seasons’,28 his body enters into both an oral and a physiognomic dialogue with the lines of verse. As the reader recites the hymn, he literally re-sounds the aural qualities of the hymn, vitalizing the rhythms and phonemes of Thompson’s language. Written in iambic pentameter with a recurrence of caesura and alliteration, the hymn fills its re-sounder’s mouth with flowing lines of verse, making the reading experience corporeal. For instance, as the reader takes up the lines, ‘Such beauty and beneficence combined, / Shade unperceived so softening into shade’, his body and mouth work in unison to perceive and reproduce the verbal undulations of the verse. As the body internalizes and expresses the rhythmic swells, the mouth simultaneously captures the viscous quality of the lines, created by the pairing of phonemes and the alliteration of words. This act of penetrating the silent text in order to literally embody the visceral properties of language allows the reciter to not only bring life to the hymn’s meanings, but also to literally embody them, showing them to be true. As a result, this practice of oral re-voicing fosters a deeper, more embodied form of learning than silent reading because it involves the entire body in sympathetic co-respondence. Thelwall amplifies this concept of co-respondence in his physiological classification of the vocal organs. He identifies the primary, secondary and enunciative organs as a ‘concert of many instruments’ working in universal sympathy.29 The primary organs act on the secondary organs, causing them to vibrate in unison. While vocal expression depends on the strength of the primary larynx muscle, the secondary, receptive organs amplify and shape the sound, thereby re-sounding the primary organs. The power of voice, therefore, is contingent upon these re-sounding instruments which refine and diffuse the sound. This physiological principle of speech translates into a fruitful allegory of the creative force of the reciter. Rather than being a passive receiver of another’s words, as Judith Thompson points out, ‘the reader, in reciting, enters into sympathy with the poet, making the poet’s words his own, even as the poet enters into and reanimates the words and forms of his predecessors’.30 Re-sounding the poet’s words, the reciter functions like the secondary organs, shaping and projecting the reverberations of sound outwards. As each reciter takes up the poetic voice, he carries on the life of the poem through the reverberations of his own speech. As the reciter draws the aural resonances out from beneath the dead weight of the printed word, he plays a co-creative role, highlighting and enriching the text’s semantic complexities which are buried in sound imagery. For instance, Thompson punctuates his

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verse with sound imagery that emanates from nature’s personified elements. As the poem’s speaker addresses the voices of nature, he refers to the different qualities of speech found in nature. He calls upon the ‘voice in dreadful thunder [that] speaks … in hollow-whispering gales’, as well as ‘ye brooks, [to] attune, ye trembling rills;’ and the ‘[s]weetest of birds, sweet Philomena! [to] charm / The listening shades, and teach the night his praise!’. As he sets the voices of thunder, brooks and birds in dialogue with himself, the reciter orally personifies their effusions and elucidates the receptive qualities of nature. As he calls on God to ‘[o]n nature write with every beam his praise’, the speaker urges nature’s elements to be responsive to God’s will, setting them in correspondence with one another and drawing attention to the cyclical progression of nature that is caused by the re-sounding forces of action and re-action. Defining song as action, the speaker calls upon nature to act in what Thelwall calls ‘universal sympathy’ by ‘join[ing] every living soul / Beneath the spacious temple of the sky, / In adoration … to raise / One general song!’ It is this dialogic relationship that creates the ‘infinite progression’ of the seasons. By bringing the voice to life, the reciter draws a parallel between Thelwall’s theory of co-respondence, nature’s sympathetic forces, and his own co-creative relationship with the poet.31 This shift in the centre of poetry from the poet’s imagination to the reciter’s oral expression shifts the creative agency from the writer to the speaker, as the speaker literally vitalizes the content and expands the potential for meaning in the work. One might ask though, how exactly does the act of orally re-voicing a printed text affect the reciter’s own identity? This is precisely the point where Thelwall’s literary vision serves as a material expression of his social vision; that is, in the way Thelwall applies his concept of the active reciter as a powerful force in literature to combat his own conditions of verbal and social repression. As the student-reciter takes up a literary piece, the recitation act gives him the power to redefine himself through his co-respondence with the poetic voice. Through the process of ventriloquism, the reciter is able to transpose qualities of the speaking character upon himself and impart them as his own to the audience. As the reader shifts between works and voices, he takes on these different roles which become an extension of himself. Tracts which work particularly well in fostering the symbolic projection of meaning from the poetic voice to the reader’s voice are those which feature the voices of powerful speakers. Thelwall incorporates many of these in his Selections, including the heroic orators, Alexander and Leonidas, subversive voices of Cassius and Satan, influential figures such as Lord Chatham and Henry V, and men using the art of speech to defend their positions, including Othello and Antony. As the reciter takes up these voices, a transposition of perspective occurs where the symbolic resonances which are attached to the speaker’s voice and to the poetic content become projected onto

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the reciter. As the reader re-sounds these powerful voices, he embodies their authority and gains symbolic capital through his own speech act. This exchange of symbolic agency can be seen by comparing the way Thelwall and a student might approach the same text. As each reciter delivers ‘St. Paul before Agrippa,’ (Acts XXVI) , a speech featuring the biblical story of Saint Paul, a Christian who had been imprisoned by the Jews for spreading Christian ideals, he brings a unique subject position to the work which highlights different resonances within the speech. Saint Paul appears before King Agrippa, appealing to the Roman government to be cleared of unfounded accusations and freed from the Jewish authorities. Although he is imprisoned, he asserts himself verbally, using oratory to present himself as a voice of reason. Paul exclaims, ‘I am not mad, most noble Festus; but speak forth the words of truth and soberness’.32 When different readers take up Paul’s voice, they transform the speech’s symbolic import. For instance, an infamous political orator imprisoned in the Tower of London for committing treason, and repeatedly victimized in the 1790s for spreading politically subversive ideals, Thelwall shared Paul’s experience of physical and social repression. For viewers, Thelwall’s performance of Paul’s speech would trigger memories of Thelwall’s turbulent political history, highlighting the commonalities between the two public figures. Further, Thelwall also relied on oratorical talents to avoid execution and to liberate himself politically and socially. So, as Thelwall brings his own verbal mastery to Paul’s speech, the distinction between the speaker’s voice and the reciter’s voice fades, as Thelwall’s voice becomes the speaker’s voice, reliving the political turmoil of his past through the register of Paul’s voice. As Thelwall blends his voice with Saint Paul’s voice, he projects his public history onto Paul, highlighting the redeeming power of verbal eloquence. Thelwall’s own oratorical excellence focuses the auditor’s attention on the oratorical qualities of Paul’s speech, a connection which registers the speech as a heroic battle of words. As a work in which the speaker must use his verbal mastery in order to overcome physical incarceration, Saint Paul’s speech also carries a significant symbolic function for socially disenfranchised readers. While Thelwall’s performance would highlight Paul’s act of treason and his use of speech to liberate himself, a socially or verbally repressed student might see Saint Paul as a role model and refocus the speech to draw attention to his own condition of silence and to the self-legitimizing power of oracy. For instance, despite being marked as a social outcast, Paul uses his oral talents to validate his actions, admitting to Agrippa, ‘I think myself happy, King Agrippa, because I shall answer for myself this day before thee, touching all the matters whereof I am accused of the Jews’.33 Such a statement suggests Paul had been stripped of his right to speak, only now being given the opportunity to represent himself, in which case he uses oratory to defend himself. As such, when taken up by a working- or lower-class reciter,

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the passage’s symbolic import shifts to suggest that, possibly for the first time, he has been given the opportunity to exercise his voice or to overcome his own incarceration, and thus present himself as an intellectually and verbally capable individual, despite his social standing. Such pieces which not only present readers with the opportunity to try out their voices, but also encourage them to enact this process of working through and overcoming their socially-inscribed conditions, as echoed by the texts’ speakers, foreground the importance of recitation as an active, performative and self-reflexive mode of education. Further, through a symbolic exchange of agency, such speeches sanction the power of elocution itself as an egalitarian art which both enfranchises the elocutionary student’s identity and projects him as a self-advancing member of society. As an act which symbolically shifts agency onto the reciter and actually promotes the learner’s self-betterment, Thelwall’s recitation practice, as a part of the nation’s lyceum project, puts real pressure on Britain’s stratified class system. Just as oral reading induces readers to become verbally mobile, sliding between genres, voices and roles, so too does it stimulate them into becoming socially mobile. Therefore, recitation creates an image which potentially undermines aristocratic values of education. No longer is the author-instructor actively bestowing knowledge upon the passive reader-student, regulating the flow of knowledge. Rather, in recitation the reader is actively seeking out that knowledge, taking control over his own development. As a workbook which introduces recitation to readers of all capacities, professions and classes, as both a path to and a form of social enfranchisement, the Selections forwards the concept of the reciter as an assertive, self-empowering and intelligent member of a growing lyceum community. Thelwall punctuates his collection with a variety of influential voices which induce the reader to reflect inwards upon his own identity and ambition, presenting recitation as a method of actualizing one’s ambitions. In one striking oratorical coupling, Thelwall pairs the self-reflexive voices of Cassius and Satan which together foreground the process of verbal contemplation. Throughout his speech, Cassius compares himself to Caesar, analyzing Caesar’s actions in order to reflect upon his own. Expressing his jealousy of Caesar who ‘is now become a god’, Cassius refers to himself as ‘[a] wretched creature’. This practice of looking outward in order to reflect inward is exemplified as he realizes that Caesar was the source of his own success. Recognizing that ‘[m]en at some time are masters of their fates’, Cassius comes to understand that success is self-determined. In turn, Cassius takes control of his own fate, as well as Caesar’s, by acting on his fatal ambition to usurp Caesar’s omnipotence. While both Cassius’s and Satan’s soliloquies close before they reach the prick of revenge, they both foreground the process of oral deliberation leading up to the fatal act. Reflecting on his history of ‘[w]arring in heav’n against heav’n’s matchless King’, Satan recognizes that he has two options: active leadership ‘on the throne of hell, / With diadem and

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scepter high advanced’ or passive submission to ‘[t]h’ Omnipotent’. Through a period of self-reflection, Satan decides to pursue his ambitions to select evil as his good, and ‘divide[d] [the] empire with heav’n’s King’.34 Both Cassius and Satan come to recognize that they must renounce their respective states of passivity in order actualize their vengeful ambitions, advancing themselves to a point of action through speech. For a working-class labourer or a bourgeois professional to take up these voices, the performance highlights the power of speech as an instrument of self-analysis and of subversive self-advancement. Each reader articulates and enacts a practice of self-examination, learning in the process that he holds the power to control his own fate and to actualize his ambitions. As such, the works motivate the working-class labourer to seize any opportunity to self-improve and the professional to assert his potential. As mouthpieces for his socially-mediated speech theory, the literary works themselves allegorize the elocutionary act as an instrument of self-advancement. Recitation gives the reader the opportunity to try out the organ of speech; that is, the chance to experiment with a concert of voices in a practice leading to the mind’s and the voice’s self-discovery. Through the course of a single Selections volume, the reciter may embody a divine orator, a stammering child, a heroic soldier, a fanatical elocutionist, a powerful senator, an imprisoned man, a poor peasant, an aspiring student of elocution and a sinner wise enough to boil the peas in his shoes before setting out on his pilgrimage. As the reciter works through these tracts, he develops what Thelwall refers to as ‘practical fluency’,35 or the ability to slide through a medley of voices, shaping his own self in relation to these roles. As both a self-reflexive exercise and a co-respondent performance, the recitation act foregrounds the reciter’s public self as a versatile concept which is continually redefined through its conversations with others. The development of this ‘practical fluency’ is precisely what makes recitation such a powerful practice of self and social enfranchisement. The importance of the Selections to Thelwall’s self-improvement project, and to the Lyceum as a whole, is both theoretical and practical. During a period in British history when public culture was undergoing a ‘cultural revolution’,36 new classes of readers were emerging, seeking resources for self-improvement and social self-advancement. It was during this period of educational and social transition that the Selections collection served its most crucial purpose. Not only did Thelwall’s Selections help to fill a void in useful literature, it also helped to shape reading and learning practices which would inform the nation’s educational practices for decades.37 As a theoretical manifestation and a pedagogical application of Thelwall’s speech poetics, the Selections challenge pre-existing modes of thinking about Romantic reading practices. With speech at the heart of the Selections, Thelwall’s project, in the words of Michael Scrivener, ‘performs a fusion of print and oral culture while at the same time turning the act of ‘read-

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ing’ into a social practice primarily oral, social, and popular, rather than visual, individualistic, and private’.38 As such, the Selections transformed learning from a top-down author- and teacher-centred model of instruction to a lateral studentand reader-centred system of education which encourages learners to become creative agents in their own education. By shifting the poetic voice to the reader’s utterance and by transforming literature into recitation, Thelwall presents the recitation act as a liberal, performative and pragmatic form of verbal, intellectual and social education. Even though the Selections’ readers derive from a diverse social spectrum, as a workbook which positions the voice at its center, the Selections becomes an open Thelwallian forum where individuals gather to converse, where social distinctions are celebrated and where individuals are united by their common voice. Developed on the principles of conversation, the Selections volumes, in their various print forms, engage students in activities compatible with the lyceum’s lecture, dialogic debate and polyvocal performance, emerging not only as cultural sites of learning, but as material expressions of the lyceum institution. Textual lyceums which circulated between and amongst the formal lyceum institutions and were disseminated through the mouths of learners, the Selections were, like Thelwall, mobile sites of intellectual sociability which drew the minds and mouths of Britain’s aspiring public together across borders of class, profession and ability, and gave them the opportunity to converse, discover, perform and enfranchise themselves in an egalitarian space.39 Once Thelwall verbally and physically delivered the Selections in his lectures, they spread in much the same way as the vocal organs diffuse sound: through reverberations. Once released, the Selections physically or orally passed through the hands and mouths of learners and travelled through institutions, reading circles, libraries, coffeehouses and homes, spreading themselves across communities and even nations. They paralleled and extended Thelwall’s own itinerant role within Britain’s Lyceum, bridging the bourgeois businessman with the aspiring working-class labourer under a common ethos of sociable self-improvement. While the Selections formed networks of learners, like reverberations of sound, the traces left behind are transitory. Although the routes of these documents are now lost, each volume forms a cultural landmark denoting an untold history of its path. It is difficult at this point to trace the broadly itinerant histories of these volumes, that is, to answer the intriguing question of how some of these Selections volumes made their way across the Atlantic to rest in places such as Canada and the United States. However, the fact that the Selections cover an expansive range of geography proclaims the remarkable spread of Britain’s lyceum culture, both nationally and trans-nationally. More importantly, these extant Selections volumes also proclaim the far-reaching reverberations of Thelwall’s legacy as ‘the organ of all communication between the enlightened and the uninformed’.40

14 ‘NOT PRECEDENTS TO BE FOLLOWED, BUT EXAMPLES TO BE WEIGHED’: JOHN THELWALL AND THE JACOBIN SENSE OF THE PAST Steve Poole

‘The politicians of the present day are not very fond of travelling far backwards. They love not (for very obvious reasons) to expiate much on the Saxon era’. John Thelwall, Champion (16 December 1820).

The debates over constitutional reform that shaped so much of the political discourse of the English 1790s were fundamentally inseparable from arguments over the character and significance of the national past. Between a broad loyalist consensus that constitutional legitimacy was bound by precedent, and a Paineite alternative that located legitimacy only in timeless rational abstractions, John Thelwall set out a stall of his own in 1796. ‘History is to be consulted not for precedents that must be followed, but for examples that should be weighed’, he wrote, ‘not for dogmas to restrain, but for circumstances to illustrate our speculations: and, as far as they extend, for landmarks to direct our course’.1 This interpretative sense of the English past, not as a justification for present and future action, but as a storehouse of exemplary memory with which to warn, inspire and instruct popular agency, was deeply ingrained in Thelwall’s political reasoning; and responsible too, perhaps, for his optimism following Peterloo some thirteen years later that, ‘No man acquainted with English history could suppose that the English spirit was to be put down by the sword or by massacre’.2 Despite teaching himself classics and history as a youth, composing an early and unfinished ‘epic poem on the subject of Caesar’s invasion’, and starting work when still a boy on his own ‘History of England’,3 the mature Thelwall’s historical thought has been given scant attention beyond the role it played in his tactical evasions of government attempts to silence his political lectures through use of the Seditious Meetings Act in 1796. This was certainly the limited view projected by E. P. Thompson’s ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’ in 1994, a narrative of disappointment in which the reclusive Thelwall’s preoccupation ‘with researches – 161 –

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into Nordic, Saxon and Celtic antiquities’ in 1801, are presumed to have been spurred only by the requirements of his ‘mediocre’ and unfinished Saxon epic, The Hope of Albion. Yet he was an avid reader and user of history throughout his life, with a personal library of around 6,000 reference works at his house in Lincolns Inn by 1820, ‘upwards of 600 of which are connected with English History, antiquities and constitutional law’.4 Certainly, Thelwall’s domestic historical interests predate his conversion to radicalism. Aged just twenty-five, he confidently asserted in the Biographical and Imperial Magazine of 1789 that it was only ‘natural’ to inquire after ‘the manners and customs of antiquity, especially such as relate to our own ancestors’, and by 1792 he had introduced a series of didactic historical and political biographies to the journal, in which King Alfred was able to rub shoulders with Thomas Paine and Horne Tooke.5 This was also the year that English history made its first appearance in Thelwall’s lecture programme as a weapon in response to Pitt’s interference with political debating societies. The subsequent 1796 Act, in requiring a magistrate’s license for public meetings of more than forty-nine fee-paying people, and in forbidding political discussion outright, only pushed Thelwall further towards the use of historical metaphor, and not least because debates on ‘divinity, morals, history and science’ still remained legally feasible.6 We will return to these lectures later, but first we must consider the broader context of Jacobin engagements with the national past to which Thelwall was responding between 1792 and 1796. Like many of his circle in the LCS, Thelwall was broadly sympathetic to the venerable libertarian belief that the historical roots of the reform movement lay in ‘usurped’ Anglo-Saxon precedents of universal suffrage, elected chief magistrates and annual parliaments. The dogged defence of this position had become something of an article of faith after the assaults made upon it in David Hume’s hugely influential History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688 (1762). Not only had Hume denied the existence of protodemocratic forms of government in the Anglo-Saxon world; he had also attacked the Whig interpretation of the civil war by placing greater blame at the door of an ambitious parliament than upon the usurpations of the Crown. Hume’s reading of events like these was particularly contentious in the 1760s of course, because it impacted upon contemporary debates over the abuse of the prerogative following the accession of George III, and because his History appeared to have supplanted and corrected Paul de Rapin’s Whiggish History of England, completed in 1731.7 Perhaps the greatest problem presented by Hume to more radical interpretations of the past, like Rapin’s, was his literary approachability. As Oliver Goldsmith would later concede, Hume, together with Smollet and Robertson, had been largely responsible for ‘rescuing history from being a narrative of insipid facts’. Although they had all introduced ‘political prejudices’

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of their own, ‘that of Hume, I think, (was) the most dangerous’.8 Aside from ideological objections that Hume was making nothing but Tory propaganda, his critics in the 1770s also considered the work methodologically flawed for its tendency to relieve individuals of moral responsibility by emphasizing the influence of external political forces. Radical interpretations of the past, infused with enlightenment notions of human perfectibility though reason and virtue, were unsurprisingly antithetical to narratives that downplayed agency and responsibility while amplifying peculiarities of time and place until, as Thomas Jefferson put it, ‘the whig spirit of the country has been completely sapped by it and toryism become the general weed of the nation’.9 The classic re-affirmation of Anglo-Saxon democracy remains Obadiah Hulme’s lengthy Historical Essay on the English Constitution (1771), which traced its origins to ‘about the year four hundred and fifty’, and tracked its degeneration under the Normans down to the reign of George II. Its wise architects took ‘the natural rights of mankind for their guide, and truth and justice their ends in all their establishments’ so that ‘riches, constitutionally considered, gave no power and authority nor any right to power and authority, over the poorest person in the state’ and they ‘made the elective power of the people the first principle of our constitution’.10 A more robust and scholarly challenge to Hume’s History was presented by Catherine Macaulay in her own eight-volume History of England (1763–83), a work which simultaneously set about contesting Tory interpretations of the National story by reclaiming the primacy of individual virtue and responsibility, and shoring up the myth of the ancient constitution with an insistence that it had been based upon universal theories of contractual virtue and natural rights.11 The ground had shifted by the 1790s however, for while the rhetoric of the American Revolutionists of the 1770s had been infused with historical and constitutional justifications, the French Jacobins had no comparable tradition to fall back upon. In a new Europe of abstract possibilities, Thomas Paine’s contention that England had no constitution at all, neither ancient nor modern, had to be negotiated with care by English advocates of his Rights of Man (1791–2).12 The question of whether origins or reason were the best justifications for reform was fudged by many English radicals, partly because they were wary of loyalist arguments that innovations posed unacceptable dangers to gradualist constitutional evolution. In courts of Law moreover, advocacy of unsubstantiated ancient ‘rights’ as a justification for summoning extra-parliamentary ‘conventions’ could get English radicals into a great deal of trouble. Maurice Margarot for instance, tried for treason in Scotland early in 1794, found himself outmanoeuvred by government barristers who expertly exposed his deficient knowledge of constitutional law and dismissed his belief in an Anglo-Saxon golden age as historical fantasy. ‘Let them go back to the History of England’ declared the Lord Advo-

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cate, ‘let them go back to the deepest antiquity; it never did exist. Those people of whom Mr Margarot seems to be the ghostly father, had not heard of the Bill of Rights, nor the claim of rights, and knew not what rights they had lost’.13 As recent research has shown, few LCS men developed an exclusive attachment to either Anglo-Saxon democracy or philosophical abstraction, but tended instead to contextualize natural rights as Macaulay had done, as though the notion was itself not innovative but ancient.14 Thelwall, for all his interest in Paine’s ideas, was neither willing nor able to cast off Romantic attachments to the past, and displayed a deep belief in the authenticity of the ancient constitution throughout his political career. However irrational this Jacobin faith in Saxon liberty may seem to us, its appeal lay partly in offering reformers a historical model of virtue that avoided all mention of ‘levelling’. Loyalist presumptions that, behind the reformist demands of the LCS, lay a more sinister desire for social and economic equality, had made the movement extremely wary of any kind of alignment with the English Leveller tradition of the 1640s. Although he regarded John Lilburne as ‘a virtuous and gallant patriot’, whose deliverance from State tyranny by the intercession of an English jury bore some resemblance to his own, Thelwall, conscious that ‘levelling’ had become a ‘cabalistic word’ in the 1790s, made virtually no references at all to either Lilburne or the Levellers in any of his historical lectures. The ‘levelling doctrine’ of property redistribution he was at pains to refute as ‘totally impracticable’, and only in a light and devil-may-care aside in the Peripatetic did he express indifference to anyone who might call him a leveller for the pleasure he felt in the recent conversion of the once proud Royal palace at Eltham to more virtuous use as a farmer’s barn.15 From his lecture rooms at Beaufort Buildings in 1795, he argued that hereditary monarchy was virtually unknown in practice before 1688, and affirmed the principle of elected monarchs as ‘the practice of our Saxon ancestors, and I defy any historian to contradict the assertion and to bring facts of history to support his contradiction’.16 Fourteen years later, his position remained the same and nowhere was it expressed more clearly than in the single surviving published lecture on the subject, which appeared in the Champion shortly after he became its editor. ‘The Saxon Origin of the English Constitution’, delivered in London in January 1819, followed conventional Norman Yoke theorists in commending the ‘spirit of independence’ carried by Saxon, Jute and Scandinavian settlers to a land that had ‘never been subjected to the pride of despotism’ and meticulously traced its destruction during and after the Norman invasion. These freedom-loving wanderers annually elected their leaders and so became ‘not the masters only but the People of the soil … not the hereditary subjects but the voluntary associates of the chieftains whom they chose to follow’.17 It is equally clear, perhaps, in the ferocity and consistency of his repudiations of Hume, who was unsurprisingly, ‘almost the only authority ever quoted, to their

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eternal disgrace, by our schoolboy senators and venal placemen’. In 1793, he dismissed Hume as ‘an apologist for tyranny’, a poor historian peddling ‘chronicles of suppositious facts’; in 1819 Hume had become a ‘flimsy novelist and sophistical pleader’, a constructor of ‘whimsies’ which ‘amuse’ but ‘cannot instruct’; and as late as 1826, Thelwall was still penning ‘Critical Remarks on Hume’ for the periodical press.18 Hume served two distinct functions in Thelwall’s rhetoric; as an historian to be derided for his prejudice, but (paradoxically) one also to be complimented for his scholarly arrangement of ‘facts’. Hume’s partiality was a useful foil for the radical re-interpretation of past events, a measurement by which Thelwall’s audience might contrast histories written by ‘the avowed champions of corruption and despotism’ with those written by the advocates of ‘reform and liberty’.19 To show that his own interpretation was ‘not the mere invention of Jacobinism’, Thelwall’s lectures often drew upon the authoritative ‘objectivity’ of Rapin, rather than Hume, for historical illustrations,20 but he was also fond of using Hume’s scholarship more mischievously. The chivalry and charity claimed by Hume for the medieval nobility, for example, need not be denied if it could be used instead as a yardstick against which to measure the corrupt and callous behaviour of the present aristocracy. Equally, Hume was a useful source of factual detail for Charles II’s gathering of an international alliance of despots to overthrow the sixteenth-century Dutch republic. For all its presumed faults, Hume’s work remained, ‘pregnant with facts that, if properly known and digested would hurl corruption from its high built seat and restore the reign of liberty and justice’. It was a wonder indeed that when Pitt’s ministry moved to stifle ‘popular enquiry’, it did not also suppress ‘Histories in cheap editions like these’, for the anti-ministerial feelings they might inspire.21 Hume’s public reputation for factual objectivity probably prompted Thelwall’s stated aspiration to be less a ‘professional than a philosophical antiquary’. Never simply an empiricist, he signalled something of his ambition when he returned to historical and political lecturing in 1819 by advertising sweeping digressions on ‘the Philosophy of English History, or The Revolutions, Civil, Military and Political, from the Establishment of the Saxons to the Act of Settlement’. The ‘ignorant and designing misrepresentations of Hume’ towards Anglo-Saxon England were only imperfectly countered by the copious ‘notes and references’ of early nineteenth-century scholars like Campbell, Turner and Heywood, he thought, because their preoccupation with the ‘technical record’ left them insensitive to the destruction and overwriting of Saxon sources by Norman invaders. Although the philosophical antiquary would be both a thoughtful interpreter and a competent archivist then, truth would not emerge by these means alone, but through a complimentary cynicism about the official record. ‘The student who would be master of this important subject has to dig and pioneer for himself and must expect to have much of the soil and dust of

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antiquity about him before he can clear his way to the truths he is anxious to demonstrate’.22 Thelwall learned plenty about this when researching his own Sketches of the History of Prosecutions for Political Opinion in 1794. The standard reference work, State Trials, was adequate for the extraction of quantitative data to show the inexorable growth of treason and sedition trails from the Plantagenets to the Hanoverians. But he found ‘the records of earlier times not so well preserved as those that are more recent’, and a number of lower profile cases altogether absent, so that its accounts were ‘incomplete upon comparing them with the page of history and the notes and references I thought it necessary to appeal to’. Prosecutions for sedition had indeed become so numerous during the 1790s that nobody had yet had the ‘leisure and opportunity to collect the necessary materials’ for a proper assessment. Although he found ‘hunting from place to place till I can get the facts I desire’ frustrating, he determined in all his historical writing not to allow conjecture to ‘fill up the vacuum of authentic record’.23 Thelwall allowed himself fullest reign as a ‘philosophical antiquary’ in the pages of The Peripatetic in 1793, a work that may be read as an index to the English landscape as a repository of historical memory.24 Its many signifiers; castles, towns, heaths, graveyards and monuments, are revealed as material sources for both poetic reflection and a proper understanding of the National past, but their truths are revealed only through the intervention of Ambulator, the interpreter, for ‘a thousand interesting circumstances rush upon the mind of the historian as he contemplates (an) eventful scene’. Thanks to Ambulator, the very fabric of Rochester Castle induces moral judgement not only upon the Normans, ‘whose factious barons and brutish succession of usurping tyrants made it the frequent scene of their lawless violence and contentions, from the rapacious Rufus to the stupid John’, but upon the failure of the Stuarts to prevent the Dutch incursion of 1667.25 On Dartford Common, Thelwall’s protagonists are reminded of the Wars of the Roses, the first act of which was performed upon this theatre, ad 1452; when Edward Plantagenet brought into the field an army of ten thousand men whose idle frenzy prompted them to hazard those lives, which ought to have protected and supported their families, in a ridiculous contest for a change of masters. But every part of this kingdom presents so many memorials of the horrible massacres by which the Rights of Kings have been maintained that I shall not at present dwell upon the ungracious subject.26

Dartford ought properly to be remembered not for this but as the birthplace of the Peasants’ Revolt, or ‘Wat Tyler’s insurrection … which, notwithstanding the opprobrious epithets of partial historians, is evidently marked by the modesty and reasonableness of the demands made by the victorious insurgents’.27 In mate-

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rial terms however, Tyler’s insurrection was not at all ‘evidently marked’, either at Dartford or anywhere else, and so on Hadley Green Thelwall was inspired by the sight of a small memorial to the Battle of Barnet to propose similar markers ‘on every spot throughout the kingdom where any memorable transaction had taken place’.28 Despite his enduring fascination with the virtuous Anglo-Saxons and their misfortunes at the hands of the despotic Normans, Thelwall had become ambivalent about foundation myths by 1795, from whatever period they may have sprung. Their real value was limited, he realized, by the degree to which they proved resilient over time to interference from their enemies. The Whigs’ veneration for the ‘libertarian’ Settlement of 1688, for example, was misguided because none of the bold provisions enshrined in the Bill of Rights had prevented a succession of despotic ministries from interfering with free speech, introducing the 1794 treason trials, suspending habeas corpus and passing the Gagging Acts. To study the history of these persecutions, he wrote, when in 1794 he determined to do just that, would lay bare ‘the boasted advantages of the Revolution of 1688; and what provisions, necessary to the enjoyment of a Rational Freedom, were neglected at that memorable period’.29 Similarly, the importance of confirming the authenticity of the ancient constitution was not in establishing its legitimacy through precedent, but in revealing the historical processes by which former liberties had been lost. The extent to which Thelwall’s historical thought was more sophisticated than that of many in the LCS at this time can be shown by contrasting two important publications associated with the Society in 1796, Thelwall’s own Rights of Nature Against the Usurpation of Establishments, and John Baxter’s New and Impartial History of England. Baxter was a London silversmith, a co-defendant with Thelwall in the 1794 trials, and on the militant wing of the LCS. Although both he and Henry Redhead Yorke prepared histories of England in the immediate aftermath of the political crisis of 1795–6, the failure of Yorke’s Britannicus to find a publisher30 left Baxter’s work, adorned with portraits of Thelwall, Hardy, Paine and Horne Tooke, and dedicated to ‘the People at Large and the London Corresponding Society in Particular’, the fullest and most detailed attempt at historical revisionism ever mounted from within the LCS. Baxter’s History heavily plagiarized and truncated Hume’s History, decorated it with ‘correctives’ and added a brief final section on more recent events. The outcome, according to an enthusiastic Thomas Jefferson, was ‘Hume’s history of England abridged and rendered faithful to fact and principle’. Baxter’s attitude to recounting historical narratives was hardly different to Thelwall’s. Accurately presented past events, he proposed, would expose ‘the rapid strides of corruption and despotism through the various periods of our history’ and supplant those other histories that have ‘cast … the rights and liberties of the people into the shade’. Readers might then ‘contrast

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the present with former times, to see where our liberties are invaded or in danger and to learn from example how the evil is to be prevented’.31 Thelwall in 1793 and Baxter in 1796 both agreed, for instance, that Hume’s account of the death of Wat Tyler in 1381 was highly prejudicial and defamatory, and that what it really demonstrated was the danger, not of popular leadership as Hume would have it, but of despotic Kingship (although the lesson Thelwall drew from the incident, ‘that once you have got them in your power you either must lop them off or they will lop off you’, was a good deal more blunt than Baxter’s).32 Despite his militancy, however, and unlike Thelwall, Baxter openly refuted Paine. ‘Those who contend for universal suffrage maintain that it is a right founded in ancient prescription’, he affirmed, and as for Paine, ‘we cannot agree with him that we have no constitution’.33 There are parallels here with another, slimmer historical survey, ordered by the LCS General Committee for the Society’s library in 1793, the anonymously authored Moral and Political Acts of the Kings and Queens of England. Thelwall and Baxter will both have been familiar with this comprehensive catalogue of the historical misdeeds of the Crown, and concurred with its concluding proposition that ‘We have seen the English people, for more than six centuries, oppressed either by their kings or their nobles; their rights have been infringed and their properties invaded’, and as for Kings, ‘we have not seen one whose reign is not defiled with blood’. Like Baxter’s History, the book is littered with critiques of Hume, but takes issue with Paine on the question of precedent and confirms the constitutional legitimacy of the Bill of Rights.34 Thelwall’s Rights of Nature is certainly not a work of history in the same sense as Baxter’s book, but it is deeply ingrained with historical thought and begins in familiar Jacobin style by contesting Edmund Burke over the place of precedent in rational argument. In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke had contended that ‘from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right, it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers … without any reference whatever to any other general or prior right’. English liberties, in other words, had evolved through an hereditary process, defined loosely as a ‘Germanic or Gothic custumary’, peculiar to England, and without any reference to prior or universal values.35 Thelwall was anxious to distance Jacobin claims upon the past from Whiggish thinking of this kind, but wary too of following Macaulay, Hulme, and others into a fruitless debate with Burke over the extent of the damage done to the ancient constitution by the Norman conquest.36 It was not the nature or provenance of the English constitution itself that should form the basis of argument but the social compact to which it owed its origins. He ridiculed Burke’s identification of a Germanic or Gothic custumary as a ‘first principle’ on the grounds that, since all customary activity is social and must therefore be a consequence rather than a cause of civil society, it could not possibly predate

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it. The custumary was really nothing more than a course of events, or precedents, not all of them rational, and not all of them pertaining to Nature in Thelwall’s understanding of the term. Burke’s custumary could only be an historical phenomenon and as such could only have arisen from one of three causes: ‘in chance, in usurpation or in right’.37 Since both chance and usurpation fell outside the Enlightenment’s moral compass, they could scarcely qualify as first principles. The origins of the custumary could only therefore exist in right, in which case it was the origins of right that first required investigation; particularly so indeed, given the unmediated jumble of precedents we had inherited from the custumary, from the investigation of witchcraft by ‘throwing old women into horse ponds’, to the ‘idolatrous foppery and degrading superstition’ of the Catholic Church, and even ‘that barter of groans and tortures and long, long lingering deaths of shrieking anguish, the slave trade’.38 Since right could not be materially invented, its origins must lie in abstract philosophy, in reason, and in ‘Nature’ but, crucially, this placed it beyond the scope of historical research. ‘It is more important to discover what the objects of association ought to be than to be informed what they actually have been’, Thelwall thought. ‘History, obscure with respect to the early transactions of particular States, is, of necessity, silent as to the beginnings of constituted society’.39 In other words, Burke’s Gothic custumary, which seemed to Thelwall to have no basis in Nature at all, or such social phenomena as the rise of private property, were eminently deserving of historical investigation, but Nature, within which Thelwall located the forces that gave rise to the Anglo-Saxon social compact, lay beyond its reach. If, as James Epstein has observed, for many of Paine’s admirers, ‘history and custom were polluting agents: enemies of reason and philosophy’, Thelwall’s determination to rescue the discipline deserves our attention.40 He was one of the few English radicals of the 1790s prepared to assert not only that Magna Charta and the Glorious Revolution were reassertions of older rights, but that Anglo-Saxon law should be viewed in the same light. Thelwall was quite prepared to accept the Paineite views of fellow Jacobins like Yorke for whom, ‘the fear of power and the cry of Precedent prevent men from exerting their reason’, but not to abandon history altogether on account of it.41 In essence, he sought to free history from any pretence that its legitimate concerns might prove the existence of constitutional rights. Historical precedents were often, after all, deeply contradictory, and in practice it would surely fall to the masters of any political regime to assign validity only to those that suited their own interests. Given the social compact of the Anglo-Saxons as a consequence of first principles, history might best be used to identify the forces influencing the relative progress or deterioration of liberty (or our relationship to Nature) from that time to this. The principle held true in both the short duree and the long. ‘Affairs are now at a sad crisis Citizen’, he is supposed to have remarked

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to a friend who told him of Hardy’s arrest in 1794, ‘Let us look back upon the last thirty years and see to what we are brought’.42 And equally, he concluded in Rights of Nature, ‘the History of England, from the Conquest, is little else than a chronicle of usurpations, and revolutions and regicides’, in which there is little from which to draw comfort.43 At the close of 1795, the Seditious Meetings and Treasonable Practices Acts received the Royal Assent. Under the terms of the new law, lectures on the political and constitutional state of Great Britain became illegal without a magistrate’s license, and it is in this context that we should understand Thelwall’s formal retreat from the LCS, the forced closure of the Tribune, and his abandonment of the political lectures upon which he had been dependent for his livelihood, and their replacement by historical ones.44 These lectures should not be seen simply as a reinvention, a retreat, or as E. P. Thompson put it, a circumvention in which ‘disquisitions of “Roman history”’ are produced as a ‘disguise’,45 although this is certainly how they were viewed by hostile contemporaries. Isaac D’Israeli’s thinly disguised ‘Citizen Rant’ owned up to the subterfuge at once: ‘I talk of Constantinople while everyone knows I mean London, of Mahomet when I strike at Jesus, and of a conspiracy of the seven Kings against the liberties of the infant Rome when I clearly describe the allied powers. It is thus I defy all law. Helvetius did the same. Is not this genius in me?’46 This essay has tried to show, on the contrary, that Thelwall’s political vision had been deeply infused with history and historical metaphor for as long as he had been associated with the LCS. It is true that he only now officially described himself a ‘Lecturer in Classical History’, and that he prudently dropped English history lest the ministry’s lawyers should deem any ‘mention of this country, its grievances, its laws, constitution, government and policy’, historical or contemporary, to fall within the meaning of the Act. He understood that the Seditious Meetings Act had been framed at least in part with a view to silencing his voice, and his caution now allowed him to ignore the law despite the best efforts of government spies to find something incriminating in his words. So, explained Thelwall, the conventional constitutional heroes, ‘Locke, Sydney and Harrington are put to silence’ and replaced by ‘Socrates and Plato, Tully and Demosthenes … [for] it is impossible to conceive among nations in any degree enlightened, a despotism so jealous and ferocious as to prohibit the study of general history, or the investigation of the facts and principles connected with the governments of the ancient world’.47 It would be an easy enough matter for audiences to make connections between the ancient world and the modern, with its comparable ‘corruption and tyranny, its spies and informers, its system of organised perjury’. Actually, ‘Tacitus, as well as Dionysius, has had his share in writing the history of Mr Pitt’s administration’, and ‘it would not be difficult to compose a history of the present times made up entirely of quotations from

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ancient historians’. In fact, classical lectures delivered three times a week would sufficiently ‘justify the conduct and sentiments of modern reformers’.48 There were, in reality, some important battles to be fought here over the use and abuse of the historical record. Thelwall’s concern was not only to evade the new Bills, nor to follow the tradition begun by John Cartwright in the preamble to his Give Us Our Rights!, a text which had, a decade earlier, also compared the corruptions of ancient Rome with the abuses of Hanoverian Britain, for there was more at stake. With the Classical lectures, Thelwall entered the lists against such loyalist propagandists as the ‘apostate pedagogue’, Robert Bisset, who sought to use Roman history to illustrate the evils of democracy and, particularly, ‘those sophistical lecturers who earn their bread by gratifying the prejudices of the people and incensing them against dignified characters’. In his Sketch of Democracy for instance, Bisset had fielded Aristotle and Cicero alongside Hume to contest the LCS and its ‘hireling lecturers’ and claim ‘the experience of history and the observation of human nature’ as weapons against reform. In the process, Bisset ‘placed Scipio Nassica at the head of an Association for defending Liberty and Property against Innovators and Levellers’, and cast Roman rebels as a ‘corresponding society’ which ‘formed themselves into a secret committee for arranging the plan of rebellion and bloodshed’. Ultimately, ‘once the suffrage was extended, the majority of the people, stimulated by their demagogues, were not unfavourable to insurrections’.49 Thelwall’s intense irritation with Bisset is recorded in Rights of Nature and should certainly not be underestimated, but, as Gregory Claeys has noted, Thelwall’s attachment to the classical world also owed something to the critique of luxury, hostility to commerce and deep longing for civic virtue underpinning so much of his political thought.50 Whatever its motivation, the new lecture programme was a success. Twenty Lectures on Classical History on such subjects as The Abuses of Kingly Power and Arbitrary Usurpations which Occasioned the Extermination of Royalty, were delivered as planned and, as Thelwall noted, ‘though I never dissembled that my object was to instruct my hearers in the principles of government and the nature of political institution, the Magistrates, the Crown Lawyers and the Government Reporters acquiesced and left me to the uninterrupted pursuit of my plan’. And, should anyone suggest that his ‘arguments would not be felt because built upon the foundations of ancient and foreign history, let it be remembered that principles are eternal’.51 In practice, English history was never abandoned completely. On his East Anglian tour that Summer, Thelwall experimented by offering lectures on English history to private audiences of less than fifty people, but where larger audiences were expected, substituted six of his classical lectures from the London programme. In Thelwall’s view, the violent attacks launched upon these provincial lectures by church-and-king crowds who seized and tore his texts on Roman history ‘into a thousand pieces’, were positive evidence of his success in frustrat-

172

John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon

ing the loyalist recourse to law. As he noted with some satisfaction, ‘The tools of corruption need but half an eye to discover that it is impossible to descant with freedom upon any subject of history or of morals without unveiling the system of fraud and usurpation and, consequently, endangering their trade’.52 As we have seen, Thelwall regarded the commemoration of significant historical events, or ‘memorable transactions’, whether they be the Battle of Barnet or the Glorious Revolution, of vital importance to the education of popular political consciousness. He was not slow to recognize, moreover, that he had himself played a part in this process through his prosecution and acquittal for High Treason in 1794. It had been, thought his widow, ‘one of the most extraordinary periods in English History’, one that ‘ought never to be obliterated from the minds of Englishmen’; and writers of obituaries after his death in 1834 clearly thought it would not, for Thelwall had ‘made himself distinguished on occasions which will form the subject of History’.53 The acquittals of 1794 were commemorated annually in radical circles by large celebratory gatherings at the Golden Lion tavern in Smithfield. In fact these events, which featured speeches on the rights of trial by jury and freedom of expression, and heard regular calls for the repeal of the 1799 Corresponding Societies Act well into the middle of the nineteenth century, outlived not only Thelwall but all of the Treason Trial defendants. Other LCS veterans took their places as guests of honour, principally Alexander Galloway who, at the fiftieth anniversary dinner in 1844 recalled his own ‘forty months imprisonment in the cause’, and attended until at least 1846. In 1843, Galloway was joined by the ninety-seven-year-old William Hodgson, an old LCS republican, jailed for sedition in 1792. By 1850, these events had become, as the Chartist Northern Star put it in when even that movement was in sharp decline, a rallying point for the veteran reformers of the generation that was passing away, and the rising reformers of the generation that was starting into political life and uniting them in oneness of principle and of feeling … There were many to whom that event was a matter of history, who associated it in their minds with events recorded of times gone by, but who were there made to feel the reality of those exciting scenes, the importance of that struggle and the blessed influence of that deliverance.

The last was held on the sixtieth anniversary in 1854, at which point it was noted that the commemoration of the Treason Trials had at least proved more resilient than any events marking Trafalgar, Waterloo, or the passing of William Pitt!54 Thelwall would not have been dissatisfied with such an outcome, but we should also remember his counsel on the dangers of precedent. History, he understood, is a mere repertory of facts, of all descriptions, the good, the bad and the equivocal… He who regards this parent of all useful knowledge in any other light makes her the

‘Not Precedents to be Followed, but Examples to be Weighed’

173

gaoler, not the monitress of man, cradles the human mind in eternal tutelage and rocks it into lethargy with the antiquated lullaby of ‘what has been must be; now, and for ever more.55

The dispersal in 1820 of Thelwall’s personal library of historical texts has prevented a full account of his historical reading, and any scholarly examination of his marginalia. The recovery, for example, of Thelwall’s own copies of Hume, Hulme, Macaulay and Baxter, no less than the now lost manuscript notes he prepared for the Classical lectures of 1796, would no doubt tell us a great deal more about his attitude to ‘the parent of all useful knowledge’. His apparently unshakable faith in the proto-democratic form of Anglo-Saxon society, a belief he adhered to throughout his life, may seem quaintly irrational to our eyes, but it was nevertheless a product of diligent scholarship and, as his own reviews in the Champion of early nineteenth-century histories of the period testify, the result of a consistently serious engagement with the developing literature. One thing remains clear. Nobody associated with the reform movement that grew out of the French Revolutionary era tried harder than Thelwall to secure an informed place for history in political agitation while at the same time unshackling it from the problems of precedent. In essence, Thelwall sought an accommodation between a wholesale Paineite rejection of history on the one hand and popular radical constitutionalism on the other.

NOTES

Introduction 1. 2.

Champion, 17 January 1819. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Pelican: London, 1968), pp. 172–3; Bath Journal, 24 February 1834. 3. ‘Oratory, Poetry and Popular Politics: The Many Lives of John Thelwall’, Conferences held at Regional History Centre, University of the West of England, and Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York, January and March 2006. 4. Apart from the expansive range of recent literature cited below, Thelwall’s political writings have now been comprehensively edited and published in a multi-volume edition: Selected Political Writings of John Thelwall, ed. R. Lamb and C. Wagner, 4 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008). 5. N. Roe, ‘Coleridge and John Thelwall: the Road to Nether Stowey’, in R. Gravil and M. Lefebure (eds), The Coleridge Connection (Humanities-EBooks LLP, second edition, 2007), pp. 63–5; I. Hampsher-Monk, ‘John Thelwall and the Eighteenth Century Radical Response to Political Economy’, The Historical Journal, 34:1 (1991), p. 20. 6. S. Poole, The Politics of Regicide in England 1760–1850: Troublesome Subjects (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 95–114. 7. G. Claeys (ed.), The Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), p. xxxix; J. Epstein and D. Karr, ‘Playing at Revolution: British “Jacobin” Performance’, Journal of Modern History, 79 (2007), pp. 495–530, pp. 515–17. For Thelwall’s acceptance of ‘Jacobin’, see J. Thelwall, Rights of Nature, Part Two (London, 1796), p. 32. 8. T. Holcroft, A Letter to the Right Honourable William Windham MP on the Intemperance and Dangerous Tendency of his Public Conduct (London, 1795); J. Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, p. 43. 9. J. Thelwall, The Tribune, consisting chiefly of the political lectures of J. Thelwall, taken in shorthand by W. Ramsay, and revised by the lecturer, 3 vols (London, 1795–6), vol. 3, 35, p. 52. 10. W. Atkinson, An Oblique View of the Grand Conspiracy Against the Social Order (London, 1798), p. 6. 11. ‘Celebration of the Event of the Late Trials for High Treason held at the Crown and Anchor Tavern, London, February 4 1795’, Cabinet of Curiosities (London, 1795), pp. 58–9; Anti-Jacobin, 4 (December 1797), p. 128; Jordan’s Complete Collection of all the Addresses and Speeches… at the Late Interesting Contest for Westminster (London, 1796), – 175 –

176

12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

Notes to pages 4–9 p. 7; S. T. Coleridge, The Plot Discovered (Bristol, 1795), p. 7; ‘Mustapha’s Adoration of the Sublime Sultan, Pittander the Omnipotent’, Cabinet of Curiosities (London, 1795), p. 50; J. Moser, An Examination of the Pamphlet Entitled Thoughts on the English Government (London, 1796), p. 37 . ‘Telwell’ was first used in The New Times, a prophetic satire on a putative British republic, and published by The Times, 6 September 1794. I am grateful to John Barrell for this reference. Telwell’s next appearance was in ‘Wonderful Exhibition… Signor Gulielmo Pittachio…’, Cabinet of Curiosities (London, 1795). Quoted in P. J. Corfield and C. Evans (eds), Youth and Revolution in the 1790s: Letters of William Pattison, Thomas Amyot and Henry Crabb Robinson (Stroud: Allan Sutton, 1996), p. 138. J. Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford Universitry Press, 2003), pp. 117–28; Epstein and Karr, ‘Playing at Revolution’, p. 520. I. D’Israeli, Vaurien, or Sketches of the Times, 2 vols (London, 1797), vol. 2, p. 256. Manchester Times, 26 December 1828. Bath Guardian, 22 February 1834. D’Israeli, Vaurien, vol. 2, pp. 257–8. R. Bissett, Sketch of Democracy, 2nd edn (Dublin, 1798), pp. 343–4. S. T. Coleridge, ‘The Watchman’, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 2, ed. L. Patton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1970), p. 98. See also Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation, pp. 117–22; N. Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge, The Radical Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 145–98. P. A. Brown, The French Revolution in English History (London: Frank Cass, 1965), p. 138; C. Cestre, John Thelwall: A Pioneer of Democracy and Social Reform in England During the French Revolution (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1906), pp. 190–1; A. Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London: Hutchinson, 1979), p. 321; E. P. Thompson, ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’, Past and Present, 142 (1994), pp. 94–140, p. 121. Thelwall, Rights of Nature, Part One, pp. 14–15, 34. Thelwall’s point was that it was somewhat ironic for Burke to contest the rights of man while apparently accommodating rights for women. For general remarks on gender politics and the LCS see A. Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 142–53; for the comment on Thelwall see A. Clark, ‘Class, Gender and British Elections 1794–1818’ in M. Davis and P. A. Pickering (eds), Unrespectable Radicals? Popular Politics in the Age of Reform (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 107–24, p. 111. For Thelwall’s female audience in London see advertisements in The Morning Chronicle, 30 April 1794, The Morning Post, 7, 9 May 1794; for Yarmouth see J. Thelwall, An Appeal to Popular Opinion Against Kidnapping and Murder (London, 1796). H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth Century Britain (London: Methuen, 1977), pp. 257, 267; Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 172; G. Claeys, ‘The Origins of the Rights of Labour: Republicanism, Commerce and the Construction of Modern Social Theory in Britain, 1796–1805’, Journal of Modern History, 66 (1994), pp. 29–90; Claeys (ed)., Politics of English Jacobinism, p.xiii; G. Claeys, The French Revolution Debate in Britain: The Origins of Modern Politics

Notes to pages 9–21

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

177

(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 138, 142, 144–52; Hampsher-Monk, ‘John Thelwall and the Eighteenth Century Radical Response to Political Economy’, p. 20. Thompson, ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’, pp. 95, 105; R. Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 36–7; M. Scrivener, Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing (Pennsylvania, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 2001), pp. 225–8. John Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. J. Thompson (Wayne State, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2001), p. 12. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p.172; Scrivener, Seditious Allegories. p. 254; Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Thompson, p. 15, 18. Thompson, ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’, pp. 121–2; Thompson, John Thelwall: The Peripatetic, p. 17. M. Scrivener and F. Felsenstein (eds), ‘Incle & Yarico’ and ‘The Incas’: two plays by John Thelwall (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006) Thompson, ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’, p. 128: ‘The political fox was now dead’.

1 Roe, The Lives of John Thelwall: Another View of the ‘Jacobin Fox’ 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

See E. P. Thompson, ‘Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon’, in C. C. O’Brien and W. D. Vanech (eds), Power and Consciousness (New York and London: New York University Press, 1968). R. Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985). See the ‘Prefatory Memoir’ in J. Thelwall, Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement (Hereford: printed by W. H. Parker, 1801), pp. i–xviii. See N. Roe, Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and some Contemporaries, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 91–2. See for example, ‘Anniversary of the Celebration of the Acquittal of Tooke, Hardy, and Thelwall’, The Times 6 November 1832; ‘Borough of Wycombe’, The Morning Chronicle, 12 November 1832. The Taunton Courier 22 September 1808, p. 1. Thelwall, Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, p. iii. Ibid., p. ii. See Cestre, John Thelwall, pp. 15–16. Times Literary Supplement, 5 May 1966, p. 396. Times Literary Supplement, 27 December 1928, p. 1025 J. D. Campbell, Samuel Taylor Coleridge; A Narrative of the Events of his Life (London and New York: Macmillan, 1894), p. 73 n. Thelwall, Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, pp. xvii–xviii. See also Cestre, John Thelwall, pp. 89–90. TS 24/3/18B, The National Archive, London, Treasury Solicitor, ‘Miscellaneous Papers on Sedition Cases’. The Times, 25 March 1820. The Times, 17 April 1820. As the informer Thomas Jones told the spy James Walsh (‘Spy Nozy’), when Thelwall visited Wordsworth at Alfoxden House. See Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge the Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 261. See The Times, 4 October 1819.

178

Notes to pages 22–9

19. Thelwall, Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, p. ii. See the text of ‘An Essay Towards a Definition of Animal Vitality’ in Roe The Politics of Nature, pp. 87–119. 20. Thelwall, Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, pp. vi–vii, xvii–xviii, xli–xlii. 21. Ibid., p. xviii. 22. Ibid., p. xxxviii. 23. Ibid., pp. xliv, xlviii. 24. Thelwall to Hardy, 29 October 1802, John Thelwall MSS, Duke University Library. 25. B. Jonson, Volpone: or The Foxe, I. ii. 84–5, 87–91, in G. A. Wilkes (ed.), The Complete Plays of Ben Jonson, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981–2), iii. p. 9. 26. John Thelwall MSS, Duke University Library; Bristol Mercury, 25 January 1834. 27. Bristol Mercury, 22 February 1834.

2 Johnston, Usual and Unusual Suspects: John Thelwall, William Godwin and Pitt’s Reign of Terror 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

T. J. Matthias, The Pursuits of Literature , Dialogue IV, l. 413 (London, 1797), p. 50. ‘New Morality,’ The Anti-Jacobin Magazine and Review , vol. 2 (London, 1799), p. 636; Louis Marie La Révellière-Lepaux was a member of the Directoire who tried to revive Robespierre’s cult of a Supreme Being in a deistic religion stressing social responsibility, called Theophilanthropy. Other ‘unusual suspects’ making cameo appearances in Gillray’s cartoon procession are William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, Gilbert Wakefield, Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley and David Williams (the ‘Priest of Nature’). Among many others represented by the titles of their works are Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, John Horne Tooke and Charlotte Smith. The ‘Co.’ in Gillray’s caption line is often thought to be William Wordsworth, by a process of elimination among the ‘five other wandering bards’ congregated in Somerset at the time. F. K. Brown, The Life of William Godwin (London: J. M. Dent, 1926), p. 103. For many biographical details, I am indebted to Nick Roe’s entry on Thelwall, and Mark Philp’s on Godwin, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, as well as Gregory Claeys’s splendid introduction to The Politics of English Jacobinism, pp. xiii–lviii. Joseph Gerrald (1763–96) was born on St Kitts, educated in England, practised law in Philadelphia, and authored the reform movement’s best work of political organization, A Convention the Only Means of Saving Us from Ruin (1793). He was convicted of sedition in Edinburgh in March 1794 and transported to Botany Bay in May 1795, where he died of consumption in May 1796. K. R. Johnston, ‘Philanthropy or Treason? Wordsworth as “Active Partisan,”‘ Studies in Romanticism, 25 (1986), pp. 372–409; M. T. Davis, ‘“That Odious Class of Men Called Democrats”: Daniel Isaac Eaton and the Romantics 1794–1795,’ History, 84 (1999), pp. 74–92. Home Office records as cited in K. R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (London: W. W. Norton and Co., 2000); see also Elizabeth Sparrow, Secret Service: British Agents in France, 1792–1815. (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999). Scrivener, Seditious Allegories, p. 182. While awaiting trial, Tooke had written, ‘They want our blood, blood!’ Tooke, a veteran of many political wars, and Thelwall’s first political mentor, was not exaggerating. The government would certainly have executed at least some of the defendants, if it had won

Notes to pages 29–34

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

179

its case. 800 arrest warrants had been prepared in anticipation of convictions, and 300 had already been signed. Scrivener, Seditious Allegories, p. 3. Ibid., p. 177. Claeys (ed.), The Politics of English Jacobinism, p. xxvii, citing B. Sprague Allen, ‘William Godwin’s influence upon John Thelwall,’ PMLA, 37 (1922), pp. 662–82; J. Thelwall, Sober Reflections on the Seditious and Inflammatory Letter of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke to a Noble Lord, 2nd edn (London: H. D. Symonds, 1796), p. 105. Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 137. Locke, A Fantasy of Reason, p. 101; W. Godwin, Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills Concerning Treasonable and Seditious Practices (London, 1796), p. 22. Letter of 28 November 1795, replying to Thelwall’s request that Godwin publicly acknowledge his authorship of the anonymous Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills; quoted in Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 202. Locke, A Fantasy of Reason, p. 335. The Tribune, Consisting Chiefly of the Political Lectures of J. Thelwall, Taken in Shorthand by W. Ramsay, and Revised by the Lecturer, 3 vols (London, 1796). I have not been able to find a complete run of the 1795 Tribune in its original periodical form. Hence my conclusions are based on inference from those issues I have seen, correlated with their more convenient 1796 republication, which most scholars use by default. All page numbers from The Tribune in my text refer to the 1796 edition. Thelwall may have overlooked the fate of his two classical heroes. Demosthenes’s warning was ineffective against the tyrannical rise of Alexander of Macedon, and Cicero’s head and hands were cut off and displayed in the Forum as a warning against such republican outspokenness. Scrivener notes Thelwall’s similar comparison of himself to Socrates: see Scrivener, Seditious Allegories, p. 185. Thelwall, The Tribune, vol. 1, pp. 92–4. Pitt, great orator that he was, could nonetheless be embarrassed and faced down in one-on-one conversations. Tooke handled him so badly in his cross-examination at his trial that Pitt took pains ever after to avoid meeting him. Though Thelwall was not, unlike Tooke, a gentleman, and thus unlikely to meet Pitt socially, his bold behaviour at his Privy Council hearing and his representation of Pitt’s confusion (which I take to be more or less verbatim – Thelwall always conveys an impression of forthright honesty in his reportage) gives added thrust to his pointedly personal challenges to Pitt in the Tribune. Thompson, ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’, pp. 129–30. Claeys (ed.), The Politics of English Jacobinism, p. xxiii. Thelwall is almost alone, so far as I can see, in calling the Two Acts a ‘Convention Act.’ Because he saw clearly what their larger intention was: to prevent combinations, groups, conventions, unity, numbers – any kind of political counter-force. A Convention Act-that is, an anti-convention act – had already been passed in Ireland, just before the arrests and prosecutions began in Edinburgh in 1793. The worst of the government’s ‘alarmist’ nightmares was the idea of a convention uniting the various corresponding societies of the four nations. The ministers remembered what had happened in Philadelphia, and could see what was happening in Paris. There was one weekend, in Edinburgh in 1793, when three of the four British nations’ corresponding societies met together, when three delegates from the United Irishmen joined the four English delegates who had been invited there. Cf. K. R. Johnston, ‘The First and Last British Convention,’ Romanticism, 13:2 (2007), pp. 99–132.

180

Notes to pages 36–45

23. The ship’s name provides occasion for a bit of deconstructive punning. It looks as if it might mean ‘the spy’ (espion), appropriate enough to Thelwall’s circumstances, but it actually means ‘the mischief-maker,’ which is even more fitting. 24. In the twentieth century, formulas for such ‘accidental’ assassinations were perfected: ‘shot while attempting to escape’, ‘committed suicide when guards were not looking’, ‘defenestrated’ and, most recently, ‘disappeared’ used as an intransitive verb, in Spanish: desaparicido (‘disappeared’ persons). 25. J. Thelwall, A Letter to Francis Jeffray [sic], Esq., on Certain Calumnies and Misrepresentations in the Edniburgh Review (London, 1804); J. Thelwall, Mr. Thelwall’s Reply to the Calumnies, Misrepresentations, and Literary Forgeries, Contained in the Anonymous Observations on His Letter to the Editor of the Edinburgh Review (Glasgow, 1804).

3 Barrell, Thelwall in His Own Defence: the Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons 1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

TS11\963\3509, The National Archives, London (hereafter TNA) Treasury Solicitor, and see also the examination of John Ashley, PC1\22\A35\A, TNA, Privy Council, who was similarly vague on the reasons for summoning the convention. Account of the Seizure of Thomas Hardy, Secretary to the London Corresponding Society; with some remarks on the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act (London: LCS, 1794), p. 5; [ J. Parkinson], A Vindication of the London Corresponding Society (London: J. Smith and J. Burks, 1794), p. 7. For more on the LCS’s explanation of why the convention was to be summoned, see J. Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 202. See W. Cobbett and T. B. Howells (eds), A Complete Collection of State Trials, 30 vols (London: Longman et al., 1816–22), vol. 23, cols 512, 623, 626, 693, 764, 773, 811, 858, 865, 866. M. Hale, The History of the Pleas of the Crown, ed. S. Emlyn, 2 vols (London: F. Gyles et al., 1736), vol. 1, p. 109; W. Hawkins, A Treatise of the Pleas of the Crown. Book I (London: J. Walthoe and J. Walthoe, 1716), p. 35; M. Foster, A Report of Some Proceedings ... to which are Added Discourses upon a Few Branches of the Crown Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1762), p. 195. A. Luders, Tracts on Various Subjects in the Law and History of England, 2 vols (Bath: R.Cruttwell, 1810), vol. 1, pp. 15, 71–2. J. Barrell and J. Mee (eds), Trials for Treason and Sedition 1792–1794, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006–7), vol. 2, pp. 11ff. Barrell and Mee (eds), Trials for Treason and Sedition, vol. 2, pp. 21–9. For examples of this claim see Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, p. 202 n. 53. Barrell and Mee (eds), Trials for Treason and Sedition, vol. 2, p. 14. Ibid., vol. 5, p. 195. For a detailed account of the ‘Coronation Oath argument’, see Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, pp. 278–81, 376–9. Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, p. 139. For more on the doctrines of ‘virtual restraint’ and ‘virtual deposition’, see Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, pp. 277–9, 335–7. The phrase ‘implied force’ was originally Erskine’s: see Barrell and Mee Trials for Treason and Sedition, vol. 4, p. 243.

Notes to pages 46–55

181

15. J. Thelwall, The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons to Annual Parliaments, Universal Suffrage, and the Freedom of Popular Association (London: H.D. Symonds et al., 1795), pp. 10–12. 16. Ibid., p. 31. 17. Ibid., pp. 31–3. 18. Ibid., pp. 24–5. 19. C. Lennox, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, A Letter from His Grace the Duke of Richmond to Lieutenant Colonel Sharman (London: J. Johnson, 1792), p. 5. 20. For the full text of Camden’s Protest, see The Parliamentary History of England, 36 vols (London: R. Bagshaw, T. Longman, 1806–20), vol. 20, cols 1318ff. 21. Thelwall, The Natural and Constitutional Right, pp. 67, 46, 33. 22. Ibid., p. 70. 23. Ibid., pp. iv, 11, 37 24. Ibid., pp. 42–3, with Thelwall’s own amendments on the copy in the British Library. 25. Quoted in the Guardian, G2, 8 April 2008, p. 7.

4 Lamb, Labour, Contingency, Utility: Thelwall’s Theory of Property 1.

2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

See I. Hampsher-Monk ‘John Thelwall and the Eighteenth Century Response to Political Economy’; G. Claeys ‘The Origins of the Rights of Labor’, esp. 263–74; Claeys, ‘Introduction’ in The Politics of English Jacobinism; Claeys, The French Revolution Debate in Britain, pp. 138–53. Thelwall did defend such a concept in a poem entitled ‘To Luxury’ (1794). The shift in Thelwall’s position to one more sympathetic to commerce is discussed by Claeys, who suggests that the shift ‘certainly resulted in part from reading the Wealth of Nations’, ‘The Origins of the Rights of Labor’, p. 264. M. Philp, ‘The Fragmented Ideology of Reform’ in M. Philp (ed.) The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Most obviously Rights of Man (London, 1791). ‘Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property’. J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government (London, 1690), II: §27. For Locke, property ownership is subject to (at least) two definite provisos: that the resources once appropriated do not spoil; and, more ambiguously, that the initial act of appropriation leaves ‘enough, and as good’ resources for others. ‘Every one as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his Station wilfully’. Locke, Two Treatises II: §6. Locke, Two Treatises II: §28. J. Thelwall, ‘The Rights of Nature against the Usurpation of Establishments’ in Claeys (ed.), The Politics of English Jacobinism, p. 472. Ibid, p. 468. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid, p. 477. Claeys, ‘The Origins of the Rights of Labor’, p. 268. For Locke, as noted, through labour and, for Pufendorf, through consent. Thelwall, ‘The Rights of Nature’, in Claeys (ed.), The Politics of English Jacobism, p. 466. Ibid.

182

Notes to pages 55–8

18. Ibid, p. 463. 19. T. Paine, ‘Agrarian Justice’ in P. Foner (ed.) Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: Citadel, 1969) Volume 1, p. 611. 20. R. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford, Basil Blackwell), p. 175. 21. ‘Man did not make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it; neither did the Creator of the earth open a land-office, from whence the first title-deeds should issue.’ ‘Agrarian Justice’, p. 611. 22. Paine’s way out of this problem is to draw a distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ property, with only the former being distributed equally. 23. Thelwall, ‘The Rights of Nature’, in Claeys (ed.), The Politics of English Jacobism, p. 455. 24. Ibid, p. 468. 25. Ibid, p. 467. 26. Ibid, p. 472. 27. Ibid, p. 475, emphasis added. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid, p. 457. 30. For one account that emphasizes this promiscuity, see E. Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (London: Macmillan, 1952). See also F. Rosen, Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). 31. For an attempt to defend the plausibility of describing the beliefs held by an individual in linguistic terms they would perhaps not recognise, with particular reference to the ascription of utilitarian theories, see R. Lamb ‘Was William Godwin a Utilitarian?’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 70:1 (2009), pp. 119–41. 32. The term ‘utility’ does appear in the list of contents of the fourth letter (when he is to consider the ‘utility of an idle class’), though at that point in the text he actually refers to the ‘advantages’ of the existence of an idle class, which suggests the two words are interchangeable and denote the same concept. 33. Thelwall, ‘The Rights of Nature’, in Claeys (ed.), The Politics of English Jacobism, p. 458. 34. Thelwall, The Tribune, vol. 1, p. 66. 35. Thelwall, ‘Historical Strictures on Whigs and Tories’, ibid., p. 169. 36. Thelwall, ‘The Address of J. Thelwall to the Audience at Closing his Lectures for the Season’, ibid., p. 333. 37. Ibid, p. 336. 38. Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 131. Godwin directly criticized Thelwall’s role in the London Corresponding Society in his ‘Considerations on Lord Grenville and Mr. Pitt’s Bills’ in late 1795, published anonymously, with the author designating himself solely as a ‘lover of order’. After Godwin confirmed to Thelwall that he was in fact the author, a fallingout between the two friends ensued, albeit a short one. Thelwall responded directly to Godwin’s accusations about the dangers posed by political associations (which he had argued for more abstractly in Political Justice) in the preface to volume 2 of The Tribune (1796) and in an essay entitled ‘Godwin’s Pamphlet’ in volume 3 (1796). 39. Thelwall, ‘Preface’, The Tribune, vol. 2. For a discussion of the intellectual relationship between the two, see Sprague-Allen, ‘William Godwin’s Influence upon John Thelwall’. 40. Godwin, ‘An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice: Variants to Volume I’, in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. M. Philp, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), vol. 4, p. 94. This declaration remained unaltered in the third edition of 1798. In Godwin’s Political Justice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), Mark

Notes to pages 58–64

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

183

Philp raises problems with a utilitarian reading of Godwin. For further discussion, see Lamb, ‘Was William Godwin a Utilitarian?’. Thelwall, ‘The Rights of Nature’, p. 468. A. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (New York: Harvard University Press, 1960). Q. Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory, 8 (1969), pp. 3–53. Ibid., pp. 38–43. This has, in my view, been demonstrated philosophically by Mark Bevir as a logical inference from the grammar of our concepts. See M. Bevir, ‘Mind and Method in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory, 36:2 (1997), pp. 167–89; and M. Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). H. T. Dickinson, British Radicalism and the French Revolution 1789–1815 (Oxford, Blackwell, 1985), p. 23. See also Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).

5 Sheldon, ‘A Loud, a Fervid, and Resolute Remonstrance With Our Rulers’: John Thelwall, the People and Political Economy 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

J. Thelwall, The Tribune, vol. 2, p. 81. For the text see, S. R. Gardiner (ed), The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), pp. 202–32. H. Collins, ‘The London Corresponding Society’, in J. Saville (ed.) Democracy and the Labour Movement (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1954), p. 125. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harrmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), pp. 175, 176, 175. W. Wordsworth, The Prelude, XIII, 79–80, 1805–6 version (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 492. A. D. Harvey, Britain in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: Batsford, 1979), p. 100. R. Wells, Insurrection: The British Experience 1795–1803 (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1983), p. 48. G. Lottes, Politische Aufklärung und Plebejisches Publikum. Zur Theorie und Praxis des Englischen Radikalismus im Späten 18. Jahundert (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1979). On the idea of a plebeian public sphere, see G. Eley, ‘Edward Thompson, Social History and Political Culture: The Making of a Working-class Public, 1780–1850’, in H. J. Kaye and K. McClelland (eds), E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Oxford: Polity Press, 1990). D. Jones, Before Rebecca: Popular Protest in Wales 1793–1835 (London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 208. There does not appear to be any evidence of actual collusion by Thelwall with the rioters. G. A. Williams, Artisans and Sans Culottes: Popular Movements in France and Britain during the French Revolution (London: Libris, 1989), p. 66. D. Stack, Nature and Artifice: The Life and Thought of Thomas Hodgskin, 1787–1869 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), p. 90. Most recently in Claeys, The French Revolution Debate in Britain, ch. 8. Thelwall, The Tribune, vol. 1, p. 9. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 38.

184 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

Notes to pages 64–9 Ibid., p. 318. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 2. The case is more fully developed in vol. 2, pp. 64–6. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 66. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 45. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., p. 67. C. Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements (1808: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 237–45. W. Stafford, Socialism, Radicalism, and Nostalgia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 103. See H. T. Dickinson (ed.), The Political Works of Thomas Spence (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Avero, 1982), pp. 1, 75, and N. Thompson, The Real Rights of Man: Political Economies for the Working Class 1775–1850 (London: Pluto, 1998) ch. 1. See G. Lichtheim, The Origins of Socialism (London: Widenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), pp. 17–25. E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th century’, in E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin, 1991). Thelwall, The Tribune, vol. 2, p. 18. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 307. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 18, 19. For a modern analysis of the fiscal military state, see J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). For contemporary criticism see P. Harling, The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Thelwall, The Tribune, vol. 2, p. 74. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 37. M. Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 20–8. Thelwall, The Tribune, vol. 2, pp. 38–9. The Rights of Nature Agaisnt the Usurpations of Establishments (1796) in G. Claeys (ed.), The Politics of English Jacobinism, p. 412. P. Higonnet, Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins During the French Revolution (Cambridge Mas.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 82–7. Thelwall, The Tribune, vol. 2, p. 6. G. Dyer, The Complaints of the Poor People of England (1793), p. 74. Dyer was a Unitarian radical especially active in reform politics between 1792 and 1795 whose contacts spanned from Cambridge rebels including William Frend, as well as William Godwin, Coleridge and Wordsworth. W. H. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labour from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 88–91, and for the comparison with Britain see J. Rule, ‘Trade Unions, the Government and the French Revolution, 1789–1802’, in Rule and R. Malcolmson (eds), Protest and Survival: Essays for E.P. Thompson (London: The Merlin Press, 1993). Thelwall, The Tribune, vol. 1, p. 2.

Notes to pages 69–74

185

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Ibid., vol. 2, p. 370. Claeys, The French Revolution Debate in Britain, pp. 138–45. Thelwall, The Tribune, vol. 1, p. 13. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 24. Thelwall, ‘The Rights of Nature’, in Claeys (ed.), The Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall, p. 478. 48. On the first, see A. O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); for the second, J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).

6 Green, John Thelwall’s Radical Vision of Democracy 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

This article was written during an AHRC studentship and I gratefully acknowledge the AHRC’s support. J. Thelwall, The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons, p. 29. On the late amendment to the Treasonable Practices Bill of 1795 which made it a treason to attempt to ‘overawe, both houses, or either House of Parliament’ see J. Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, pp. 578–80. J. Cartwright, A Letter to the Duke of Newcastle (London: Printed for J. S. Jordan, 1792), pp. 91–2. J. Gerrald, The Defence of Joseph Gerrald, on a Charge of Sedition, before the High Court of Justiciary, at Edinburgh (London: printed for J. Ridgway, 1794), p. 29. K. Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England, Cambridge studies in Romanticism, vol. 21 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 5. B. Seitz, The Trace of Political Representation (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 40. W. C. Smith, The Patriot; or Political Essays, 2nd edn (Dublin: H. Watts, 1793), p. 109. J. Thelwall, The Rights of Nature, against the Usurpations of Establishments. Letter the First, 2nd edn (London: H. D. Symonds and J. March, 1796), pp. 30–1. In c. 1550 the former St Stephen’s chapel became the site of the House of Commons, until it was destroyed by fire in 1834. Thelwall, The Rights of Nature, p. 89. On Pitt as conjuror in satire of the 1790s see: J. Barrell (ed.), ‘Exhibition Extraordinary!!’: Radical Broadsides of the Mid 1790s (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2001). J. Mee, ‘The Magician No Conjuror: Robert Merry and the Political Alchemy of the 1790s’, in M. T. Davis and P. A. Pickering (eds), Unrespectable Radicals?: Popular Politics in the Age of Reform (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 41–55. D. Fallon, ‘“That Angel Who Rides on the Whirlwind”‘: William Blake’s Oriental Apotheosis of William Pitt’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 31:2 (2007), pp. 1–28, p. 11. J. Gillray, Tom Paine’s Nightly Pest (London: H. Humphrey, 1792). Thelwall, The Rights of Nature, p. 29. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., pp. 91, 89. W. Godwin, Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills, p. 17. Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation, p. 59. Godwin, Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills, pp. 17–18.

186 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

Notes to pages 74–9 J. Thelwall, The Tribune, vol. 2, p. xvii. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. xiv–xv. J. Thelwall, Sober Reflections, p. 93. Thelwall, The Tribune, vol. 2, pp. xiv–xv. On the politics of Thelwall’s science of life see: J. R. Allard, ‘John Thelwall and the Politics of Medicine’, European Romantic Review, 15:1 (2004), pp. 73–87. A. McCann, Cultural Politics in the 1790’s: Literature, Radicalism, and the Public Sphere, Romanticism in Perspective (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 95. E. Burke, Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, in a Series of Letters (London: printed for J. Owen, 1796), pp. 16–17. Ibid., p. 17. As Frans de Bruyn describes it: ‘The vantage point of the [gentleman] viewer permits an extension in time as well as in space: the historical and political associations aroused by the surrounding estate carry the mind’s eye into the past and the future, as though events in time were laid out spatially before the surveyor’. F. De Bruyn, The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke: The Political Uses of Literary Form (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 112. John Barrell explains: ‘The fixed nature of landed property made it arguably analogous to that viewpoint, beyond space and time, from which God surveyed his creation -an analogy that … had long been a crucial element in the claim for the disinterestedness of the man of landed property.’ J. Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730–80: An Equal, Wide Survey, English Literature in History (London: Hutchinson, 1983), p. 72. J. Cawthorne, A Letter to the King, in Justification of a Pamphlet, Entitled, “Thoughts on the English Government:” With an Appendix in Answer to Mr. Fox’s Declaration of the Whig-Club (London: Joseph Cawthorne, 1796), p. 28. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 30. Arendt Qtd. in B. Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 83. E. Burke, A Letter from the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, M.P. In the Kingdom of Great Britain, to Sir Hercules Langrishe, Bart. M.P. On the Subject of Roman Catholics of Ireland (London: printed for J. Debrett, 1792), p. 70. Thelwall, The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons, p. 68. Thelwall, The Rights of Nature, p. 15. T. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus; the Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh (London: Saunders and Otley, 1838), p. 140. Thelwall, The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons, pp. 41, 51. Ibid., p. 50. Account of the Proceedings of a Meeting of the London Corresponding Society, Held in a Field near Copenhagen House, Monday, Oct. 26, 1795 (London: Citizen Lee, 1795), p. 6. ‘Postscript. London. House of Commons,’ The General Evening Post (Saturday 14 November–Tuesday 17 November 1795. W. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Nights Dream, 5.1 7, 11. Stephen M. Lee, ‘Jekyll, Joseph (1754–1837)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/14710, accessed 18 March 2008] The Senator; or, Parliamentary Chronicle (London: Printed for C. Cooke, n.d.), vol. XII, p. 251. Account of the Proceedings Monday, Oct. 26, 1795, p. 4.

Notes to pages 79–84

187

43. Lee’s relationship with the LCS became a legal problem around this time: see J. Mee, ‘The Strange Career of Richard “Citizen” Lee: Poetry, Popular Radicalism and Enthusiasm in the 1790s’, in T. Morton and N. Smith (eds), Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1650–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 151–66, p. 160. ‘coup’, def. 5g, The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989. 44. J. Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment: French Military Engineering from Vauban to the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), p. 219. W. H. Galperin, The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 42. Although the OED have 1839 as the earliest military use of the word for examples of such usage from 1782, see: J. Callander, Military Maxims, Illustrated by Examples (London: T. Cadell, 1782), pp. 21, 22, 23, 29. For its use in the genre of the picturesque tour see: A. Bisani, A Picturesque Tour through Part of Europe, Asia, and Africa (London: J. Davis for R. Faulder, 1793), p. 2. 45. P. Otto, ‘Between the Virtual and the Actual: Robert Barker’s Panorama of London and the Multiplication of the Real in Late Eighteenth Century London,’ Romanticism on the Net.46 (2007): para. 18, 15 April 2008 . 46. Account of the Proceedings Monday, Oct. 26, 1795, p. 3. 47. Galperin, Return of the Visible, p. 42. 48. Account of the Proceedings Monday, Oct. 26, 1795, p. 4. 49. Galperin, Return of the Visible, p. 122. 50. On ‘regimes of truth’ see M. Foucault, Power / Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 131. 51. J. Thelwall, The Speech of John Thelwall, at the General Meeting of the Friends of Parliamentary Reform, Called by the London Corresponding Society, and Held in the Neighbourhood of Copenhagen-House; on Monday, October 26, 1795, 3rd edn (London: J. Thelwall, 1795), p. 12. 52. ‘Visual synchrony’ is a phrase taken from: H. K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 206.

7 Solomonescu, Articulations of Community in The Peripatetic 1.

2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

The name ‘Philautiaccha’ seems to be a compound of the Greek philautia, meaning ‘love of self ’, and iacchos, an alternative name for Bacchus. Thus ‘Philautiaccha’ would mean roughly ‘love (or lover) of self-inebriation’, which is consistent with the subject of the poem. I am grateful to Anna S. Uhlig for elucidating this point. See ‘participate, v.’ in the OED. I have quoted the passage from Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Thompson, p. 201, which reproduces the italics. Since the poems in The Peripatetic are not line-numbered, I cite them by page number instead. See ‘participation, n.’ in the OED. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Thompson, p. 77. See Ambulator: Or, a Pocket Companion in a Tour Round London, within the Circuit of Twenty-Five Miles, Describing Whatever is Most Remarkable for Antiquity, Grandeur, Elegance, or Rural Beauty, 4th edn (London, 1792). See J. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. D. Reiman (New York: Garland, 1978). The work also appears in the microfilm collection The Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge: Research Publications, 1985), reel 923, n. 10. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Thompson, p. 72.

188 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

Notes to pages 84–7 J. Thompson, ‘John Thelwall and the Politics of Genre 1793/1993’, The Wordsworth Circle, 25:1 (1994), pp. 21–5, p. 22. On The Peripatetic as ‘intergeneric conversation’, see also Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Thompson, pp. 37–45, and ‘“A Voice in the Representation”: John Thelwall and the Enfranchisement of Literature’, in T. Rajan and J. M. Wright (eds), Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-Forming Literature 1789–1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 122–48, pp. 131–8. J.-L. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. P. Connor, trans. P. Connor et al. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. xxxix, p. xl. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. xl. Ibid., p. xxxix. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., pp. 10–12. Thelwall, ‘On the Moral and Political Influence of the Prospective Principle of Virtue’, in The Tribune, vol. 1, pp. 147–63, p. 163. ‘Palpilliary’ does not appear in the OED. Thelwall probably meant ‘palpatory’, i.e., relating to touch, rather than ‘papillary’, i.e., of the nature of form of a papilla, ‘[a] small nipple-like protuberance on or in a part or organ of the body, as the kidney, skin, tongue, etc.’. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Thompson, p. 360. Given The Peripatetic’s classical lineage, it is perhaps not surprising that Sylvanus’s definition of generosity coincides with Aristotle’s. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines the generous person as one who ‘avoid[s] giving to just anyone, so that he will have something to give to the right people, at the right time …’. See Nicomachean Ethics, trans. T. Irwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1985), p. 88. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Thompson, p. 219. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 6. Ibid., p. 25. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 25; J.-L. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. R. D. Richardson and A. E. O’Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 98. Thelwall, The Rights of Nature, in Claeys (ed.), The Politics of English Jacobinism, p. 461. Thelwall’s work originally appeared in two separately paginated parts, and part 1 appeared in three editions, the last of which introduced a number of minor stylistic changes. I cite Claeys’s edition for ease of reference. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Thompson, pp. 96–7. Ibid., p. 98. The narrator invokes Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1783) in a reference to his own ‘solitary reveries’ in nature (p. 78). Later reflections on education and parent-child relations (p. 253) echo the tenets of Rousseau’s Émile, whose female protagonist Sophie finds a counterpart in The Peripatetic’s Sophia, the childhood playmate whom Belmour eventually marries. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 261. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 76. Ibid., p. 77. The OED notes that the transference of sense from ‘live with’ to ‘talk with’ is recent and more complete in English than French. See the entries for ‘conversation’ and ‘converse, v.’ Nancy, Being Singular Plural, p. 93. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Thompson, p. 353.

Notes to pages 87–91 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

189

Ibid., p. 116, p. 289. Ibid., p. 145. Ibid., p. 209. Ibid., p. 143. According to J. W. Smeed, the work was translated into English several times from the seventeenth century and gave rise to many native imitations. It had a noticeable influence on English periodicals, beginning with The Tatler and The Spectator in the early eighteenth century. See The Theophrastan ‘Character’: The History of a Literary Genre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 64–5. For George Eliot’s later use of the Theophrastan character, see Impressions of Theophrastus Such, ed. N. Henry (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1994), especially ch. 2, ‘Looking Backward’, a retrospect on the Romantic period. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Thompson, pp. 318–19 The characters’ names seem to confirm this: Sylvanus Theophrastus unites the naturelover and the philosopher, Ambulator embodies peripatetic companionship, Arisor has all the wry humour of the cynic (his name echoes the Latin risibilis, or ‘risible’), and Wentworth is the worthy if naive sentimentalist. Michael Scrivener points out that ‘Wentworth Chatterton’ was a penname under which Thelwall contributed poems to the Biographical and Imperial Magazine. See his ‘John Thelwall and the Press’, in S. C. Behrendt (ed.), Romanticism, Radicalism and the Press (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997), pp. 120–36, p. 135, n. 12. On the autobiographical dimensions of The Peripatetic, see Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Thompson, pp. 21–2. Rebecca Solnit takes the narrator’s pronouncements to be Thelwall’s own: see her mention of The Peripatetic in Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London: Verso, 2002), p. 14. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Thompson, p. 356. Ibid., p. 106. Thelwall, The Tribune, vol. 1, p. 149. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Thompson, p. 350. Ibid., pp. 183–4. Ibid., p. 184. Ibid., pp. 222–3. Ibid., p. 224. Ibid., p. 224. Ibid., p. 225. This passage echoes Adam Smith’s claim that to enter sympathetically into the feelings of another, a spectator must ‘bring home to himself every little circumstance of distress which can possibly occur to the sufferer’. See The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 21. Cf. also Godwin’s remark in the second and third editions of the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice that truth, if ‘brought home to the conviction of the individual’, is all-powerful. See Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, vol. 4, p. 42. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Thompson, p. 225. A. McCann, Cultural Politics in the 1790s, p. 88. Ibid., p. 89. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Thompson, p. 113. Ibid., p. 111. Thelwall, The Tribune, vol. 1, p. 337. Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation, p. 121. McCann, Cultural Politics in the 1790s, pp. 83–106.

190

Notes to pages 91–3

57. For ‘[t]he story of the silencing of Thelwall’, see E. P. Thompson’s essay, ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox,’ Past and Present, 142 (1994), pp. 94–140. Thelwall gives his own account of this silencing in the ‘Prefatory Memoir’ that accompanied his Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement (Oxford: Woodstock, 1989), pp. i-xlviii. 58. In Habermas’s original usage, the public sphere designates ‘the sphere of private people come together as a public’ in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, specifically France, Germany, and Britain. See The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 27. 59. J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. T. J. McCarthy, 2 vols (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), vol. 1, p. 287. 60. Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, vol. 3, p. 15. 61. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, pp. 285–7. Habermas also identifies the category of ‘instrumental’ action, which aims to produce particular results by intervening in ‘a complex of circumstances and events’ rather than by influencing individuals. See The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, p. 285. For my purposes – and for Habermas’s in this section of his argument – instrumental and strategic action are interchangeable. 62. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, p. 331. 63. Ibid., p. 334. 64. J. Culler, ‘Communicative Competence and Normative Force’, New German Critique, 35 (1985), pp. 133–44, rpt. in D. M. Rasmussen and J. Swindal (eds), Jürgen Habermas, 4 vols (London: Sage Publications, 2002), vol. 3, pp. 407–16, pp. 413–14. Another important source for my understanding of Habermas has been M. Scrivener’s ‘Habermas, Romanticism, and Literary Theory,’ Literature Compass, 1 (2004), pp. 1–18. Scrivener points out that the conceptual affinities between Habermasian thought and Romanticism are only just coming to critical attention. 65. See J. Habermas, ‘Leveling the Genre Distinction between Philosophy and Literature,’ in L. Thomassen (ed.), The Derrida-Habermas Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 13–34, which is an excerpt from Habermas’s The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (1987). 66. Habermas, ‘Leveling the Genre Distinction’, p. 28, p. 30. 67. L. Tomassen (ed.), The Derrida-Habermas Reader, p. 13. 68. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, pp. 76–7. 69. Ibid., p. 77, p. 76. 70. Ibid., p. 26. 71. Ibid., p. 79. 72. Ibid., p. 79. 73. This recalls Nancy Fraser’s critique of Richard Rorty’s distinction between the ‘public’-pragmatic philosophy of Habermas and the ‘private’-poetic philosophy of Derrida. This ‘dichotomous picture’, she claims, ‘cuts out the ground for the possibility of democratic radical politics’, which ought to cut across traditional divisions between public and private life, and manifest itself in ‘broad, informally organized, collective formations wherein politics and poetry form an unbroken continuum as struggles for social justice shade into the unleashing of creativity’. See Rorty, ‘Habermas, Derrida, and the Functions of Philosophy’, in D. M. Rasmussen and J. Swindal (eds), Jürgen Habermas, vol. 3, pp. 3–20, and Fraser, ‘Solidarity or Singularity? Richard Rorty between Romanticism and Technocracy’, in J. Arac and B. Johnson (eds), Consequences of Theory: Selected Papers

Notes to pages 93–8

191

from the English Institute, 1987–88 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 39–62, p. 54, p. 55, p. 57.

8 Wagner, Domestic Invasions: John Thelwall and the Exploitation of Privacy 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). A. Ku, ‘Revisiting the Notion of “Public” in Habermas’s Theory – Toward a Theory of Politics of Public Credibility’, Sociological Theory, 18:2 (2000), pp. 216–40, p. 221; 217. J. Brewer, ‘This, that and the other: Public, Social and Private in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’ in Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe (Exeter: Exeter Press, 1995), pp. 1–21, p. 9. Brewer, ‘This, that and the other’, p. 18. J. Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). See for instance, A. Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton University Press, 2004); J. Mee, ‘Libertines and Radicals in the 1790s: The Strange Case of Charles Pigott I’, in P. Cryle and L. O’Connell (eds), Libertine Enlightenment: Sex, Liberty and Licence in the Eighteenth Century (London: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 185–203; C. Wagner, ‘Loyalist Propaganda and the Scandalous Life of Tom Paine: Hypocritical Monster!’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28:1 (Spring 2005), pp. 97–115; C. Wagner, ‘Press Scandal and the Struggle for Cultural Authority in the 1790s’, Nineteenth-Century Studies (2008), forthcoming. Thelwall, The Rights of Nature, in Claeys (ed.) The Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall, pp. 390–437, pp. 396, 395. J. Thelwall, ‘On the Moral and Political Influence of the Prospective Principle of Virtue’ in The Tribune, vol. 1, p.162. Thelwall, A Letter to Francis Jeffray, p. 88. Thelwall, ‘Farewell Address for Closing the Lectures for the Season’ in The Tribune, vol. 1, p. 335. An exception would be William Godwin’s 1798 Memoirs of the Author of “The Rights of Woman.” This point is made by J. Thompson; see ‘Introduction’, in Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Thompson, pp. 11–55, p. 11. J. Thelwall, ‘Ode I: The Universal Duty’, in Poems Written in Close Confinement in the Tower and Newgate, under a Charge of High Treason (London: for the author, 1795), p. 14; see such poems in this collection as ‘The Feelings of a Parent’ and the sonnets on the acquittal of Thomas Hardy and the death of Thomas Muir. J. Thelwall, ‘Prefatory Memoir,’ Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, pp. i–xlviii; on the death of his mother, see also Thelwall, The Tribune, vol. 1, pp. 162–3; for the ongoing public discussion of these aspects of his domestic life see ‘Thelwall’s Poems,’ Edinburgh Review, 2:3 (1803, April), p. 197–202; the reply from Thelwall, A Letter to Francis; a reply from Thelwall’s opposition in Observations of Mr. Thelwall’s Letter to The Editor of the Edinburgh Review (Edinburgh: D. Willison, 1804); and finally, yet another reply from Thelwall, Mr. Thelwall’s Reply to the Calumnies.

192

Notes to pages 98–102

15. Thelwall, An Appeal to Popular Opinion, p. 7; see also p. 40. 16. Thelwall, ‘Farewell Address for Closing the Lectures for the Season’, The Tribune, vol. 1, p. 333; see note 10 above. 17. Thelwall, ‘Farewell Address’, p. 335. 18. J. Thelwall, The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons, in Claeys (ed.) The Politics of English Jacobinism, pp. 1–63, p. 21. 19. Thelwall, Natural and Constitutional Rights of Britons, in Claeys (ed.) The Politics of English Jacobinism, p. 17. 20. This is the subtitle to Thelwall, Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement. 21. J. Thelwall, Political Lectures (No. I.) On the Moral Tendency of a System of Spies and Informers (London: for the author, 1794), p. ix. 22. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1991), p. 34; for a very helpful discussion of this concept, see J. Barrell, ‘Coffee-House Politicians,’ in J. Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism, pp. 75–102, particularly pp. 79–83. 23. N. Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, in C. Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, pp. 109–42 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 134. 24. Thelwall, Appeal to Popular Opinion, p. 40. In some senses, Thelwall’s argument in this pamphlet anticipates the Habermasian conception of the public sphere as extra-governmental but which has a right to protection. As Agnes Ku notes, following Habermas, ‘it is a structural prerequisite that the public sphere be developed from within a nonstate domain whereby its political autonomy vis-à-vis the state can be safeguarded,’ in A. Ku, ‘Revisiting the Notion of “Public” in Habermas’s Theory - Toward a Theory of Politics of Public Credibility’, p. 219. 25. Thelwall, The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons, in Claeys (ed.) The Politics of English Jacobinism, p. 37, 53. 26. Ibid., p. 37. 27. Ibid., p.13. 28. Thelwall, The Life of John Thelwall (London: J. Macrone, 1837), pp. 351, 352, 353–4. Whilst this biography is ostensibly written by his second wife Cecil, this account bears all the signs of Thelwall’s writing. Moreover, even if parts of the account of his fallout with Horne Tooke were penned by Cecil, she would have been recording his words, as she would not even have been born at the time of the incident (she was thirty years his junior). Much of the material quoted here is, in fact, a direct transcription of Thelwall’s ‘Narrative of the Proceedings of Government’, an unpublished work from 1796. 29. Thelwall, Life of John Thelwall, p. 352. 30. See for instance, Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, pp. 587; E. P. Thompson, The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age (Woodbridge: Merlin Press, 1997), p. 98; M. Philp, ‘Thompson, Godwin, and the French Revolution’, History Workshop Journal, 39 (1995), pp. 89–101, pp. 92–4; C. Cestre, John Thelwall, pp. 203–4; Claeys, introduction to Claeys (ed.), Politics of English Jacobinism, pp. xxix–xxx. 31. Thelwall, ‘Preface’ to The Tribune, vol. 2, p. xv 32. Thelwall, Appeal to Popular Opinion, p. 9. 33. Ibid., p. 14. 34. Thelwall, ‘The Second Lecture on the Unfortunate Restoration of the House of Stuart, with Strictures on the Differences between the English Revolution 1649, and that of France, in 1792’ in The Tribune vol. 3, p. 194. 35. Thelwall, ‘A Patriot’s Feeling; or the Call of Duty’, in The Tribune, vol. 2, p. 300.

Notes to pages 103–8

193

36. Thelwall, ‘The Address of J. Thelwall to the audience at closing his lectures for the Season’ in The Tribune, vol. 1, p. 335; he was about to depart to the Isle of Wight. 37. Thelwall, Appeal to Popular Opinion, p. 5. 38. Ibid., p. 39. 39. J. Thelwall, ‘Prefatory Memoir’, pp. i–xlviii; p.ii. 40. Ibid., pp. xxxiv, xxxv. 41. The reviewer (likely jointly authored by Henry Brougham and Jeffrey) specifically targeted Thelwall’s recounting of how familial and financial circumstances forced him, in his youth, behind a shop counter and into a string of unsatisfying apprenticeships. 42. ‘Thelwall’s Poems,’ Edinburgh Review, 2:3 (1803, April), pp. 197–202: p. 197. 43. Thelwall, Letter to Francis Jeffray, p. 2. 44. Ibid., p.5. 45. Anon., Observations of Mr. Thelwall’s Letter to The Editor of the Edinburgh Review (Edinburgh: D. Willison, 1804), p. 13–14f. 46. Ibid., p. 14 f. 47. I. Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty,’ in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). 48. Thelwall, Natural and Constitutional Rights of Britons, in Claeys (ed.) The Politics of English Jacobinism, p.13.

9 Mee, The Dungeon and the Cell: the Prison Verse of Coleridge and Thelwall 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

‘ADVERTISEMENT’ to Thelwall, Poems Written in Close Confinement, p. i. On the latter and its relationship to more social and political forms of the lyric, including the place of Thelwall’s poetry across his career, see the excellent discussion in A. Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Thelwall, Poems Written in Close Confinement, p. 9. ‘John Augustus Bonney’s Prison notebook,’ MS 46870, British Library, London, f. 18. For Roe’s comments, see his ‘The Prison Diary of John Augustus Boney’ in The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 120–40, p. 123. See Thelwall’s Sonnet X, ‘To Thomas Hardy, On his Conduct on the Day of his Acquittal’, Poems Written in Close Confinement, p. 10. Bonney was active in the Society of Constitutional Information. He had been Tooke’s agent at the Westminster election in 1790. See Roe, ‘Prison Diary,’ pp. 124–5 for further details on Bonney. To a certain extent Thelwall was no less a protégé of Tooke’s than Bonney, indeed he canvassed for Tooke at the election in 1790, but Thelwall had much stronger links with the popular side of the reform movement, including Hardy, being much more active in the LCS. Thelwall’s widow claimed that prior to the treason trials Thelwall had ‘considered Horne Tooke in the light of his intellectual and political father’, see H C. Thelwall, The Life of John Thelwall, 2 vols [only one seems ever to have been published] (London, 1837), vol. 1, p. 76. When called as a witness at Thelwall’s trial, however, Tooke gave an extraordinarily self-indulgent performance. After the acquittal, they broke because, according to Thelwall, he refused Tooke’s advice to withdraw from politics and pursue a line of moderation. See Life of Thelwall, vol. 1, pp. 343–54, although the account in Life does not

194

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Notes to pages 108–11 complain at Tooke’s behaviour in the witness box, and even reproduces some of Tooke’s evidence in an appendix, vol. 1, p. 444. A much less charitable view of Tooke’s conduct was taken in the anonymous LCS pamphlet John Horne Tooke Stripped Naked and Dissected (London, 1795), which argued that ‘if he [Thelwall] had but three words in his vocabulary, he ought to have reprobated you openly, for your sneaking desertion from the standard of a common cause’, p. 7. See M. T. Davis, I. McCalman, C. Parolin, ‘“Patriots in Prison”‘: Newgate Radicalism in the Age of Revolution’ in M. T. Davis et al. (eds), Newgate in Revolution: An Anthology of Radical Prison Literature in the Age of Revolution (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), pp. ix–xxv: p. xviii. Initially the prisoners were held in the Tower, but then on 24 October they were transferred to the much poorer conditions in Newgate prior to their arraignment. Bonney eventually managed to get a writ of habeas corpus to have himself moved back to the Tower. Thelwall then moved to Bonney’s room in Newgate. See Life of Thelwall, vol. 1, p. 229 and Roe, ‘Prison Diary’, p. 126. Thelwall, The Life of John Thelwall, p. 429. Thelwall, The Tribune, vol. 1, pp. 312–13. Thelwall, Poems Written in Close Confinement, title page. Lovelace’s poem was well known in the eighteenth century, and was included in at least two anthologies from the 1790s prior to Thelwall’s poem: V. Knox (ed.), Elegant extracts, 2 vols (London, 1791), vol. 2, p. 375, and J. Ritson (ed.), The English Anthology, 3 vols (London, 1793–4), vol. 1, pp. 72–3. Ritson had helped Thelwall escape prosecution for his lectures in Beaufort Buildings earlier in May 1794: see Life of Thelwall, vol. 1, p. 141. For the reform-minded in the 1790s, Lovelace’s poem may have been reads as being as much about resistance to oppression as anything written from the republican side of the question. Roe, ‘Prison Diary’, p. 129. Following Gregory Claeys, Anne Janowitz suggests that Thelwall’s ‘steeping in the humanitarian poetics of sensibility was instrumental to his politicisation’ See Janowitz, Lyric and Labour, p. 70. For Claeys, see The Politics of English Jacobinism, p. xv. To Robert Southey, 13 July 1794, The Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–71), vol. 1, p. 86. Subsequent references to Coleridge’s letters are given in parentheses in the main text. Janowitz, Labour and Lyric, p. 86. Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge, p. 148. See Coleridge, The Plot Discovered, in The Collected Works, vol. 1, ed. L. Patton and P. Mann, pp. 296–7. Thelwall, Tribune, vol. 3, p. 259. S. T. Coleridge, ‘Modern Patriotism’, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), vol. 2, pp. 98–100, p. 98. Although the portrait is not an exact likeness, Thelwall obviously felt it applied to him. The idea of Thelwall as the product of tavern debating society was not uncommon and – at this stage and despite Godwin’s own attacks on Thelwall’s popular oratory in the anonymous Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills, Concerning Treasonable and Seditious Practices, and Unlawful Assemblies (1795) – Thelwall was a student of Godwin’s works. See Sprague-Allen, ‘William Godwin’s Influence on John Thelwall’, and for Godwin’s attack on Thelwall, Mee, ‘“The Press and Danger of the Crowd”: Godwin, Thelwall, and the Counter-Public Sphere’ in R. Manaquis and V. Myers, The Godwinian Moment (forthcoming Toronto University Press).

Notes to pages 111–15

195

19. Coleridge, ‘Modern Patriotism’, p. 100 20. S. T. Coleridge, ‘Poetical Works I: Poems (Reading Text): Part 1’, The Collected Works, vol. 16, ed. J. C. C. Mays, pp. 264–65. All subsequent quotations from Coleridge’s poetry are from this edition. 21. J. C. C. Mays describes the sonnet to Thelwall as ‘implicitly a rescension of his M Chron sonnet to Godwin’, p. 264. Coleridge had published a sonnet ‘To William Godwin, Author of Political Justice’, in the Morning Chronicle, 10 January 1795. See Coleridge, ‘Poetical Works I’, p. 165–6. 22. These phrases of Thelwall’s are quoted in Coleridge’s replies (Letters, i.212 and 221). Thelwall’s letters themselves have not been found, although his 10 May 1796 reply to the copy of Coleridge’s Poems (1796) inscribed with the sonnet is in the British Library and reproduced in W. E. Gibbs, ‘An Unpublished Letter from John Thelwall to S. T. Coleridge,’ Modern Language Review ( January 1930), pp. 85–90. 23. Gibbs, ‘An Unpublished Letter’, p. 89. 24. Thelwall, Tribune, vol. 1, p. 329. 25. See for instance the accounts given in J. Thompson, ‘An Autumnal Blast, A Killing Frost: Coleridge’s Poetic Conversation with John Thelwall’, Studies in Romanticism, 36 (1997), pp. 427–53, and G. Taussig, Coleridge and the Idea of Friendship, 1789–1804 (London: Associated University Press, 2002), pp.177–213. 26. Thompson, ‘An Autumnal Blast’, p. 452. 27. Coleridge, ‘Poetical Works I’, pp. 333–4. 28. The poem was reprinted in the Courier, 2 September 1800, the Albion, 27 September 1800, and the Cambridge Intelligencer, 27 October 1800. The subtitle only appears in the Albion: see Coleridge, ‘Poetical Works II Poems (Varorium Text): Part 1’, The Collected Works, vol. 16, p. 458. 29. Coleridge, ‘Poetical Works I’, pp. 315–20. 30. Ibid., p. 315 31. Ibid. 32. Coleridge wrote to Thelwall on 19 August 1797 promising to approach Chubb (Letters, i.341). This Coleridge did on 20 August telling Chubb that ‘If the day of darkness & tempest should come, it is most probable, that the influence of T. would be very great on the lower classes – it may therefore prove of no utility to the cause of Truth & Humanity, that he had spent some years in a society, where his natural impetuosity had been disciplined into patience, and salutary scepticism, and the slow energies of a calculating spirit’ (Letters, i.342). The next day Coleridge wrote to Thelwall telling him that Chubb would find him a cottage providing ‘it was thought right, that you should settle here; but this – (i. e. – the whole difficulty – ) he left for T. Poole & me to settle’. Coleridge decides against the move because of the difficulties it would place Poole in given the ‘Very great odium T. Poole incurred by bringing me here’ (Letters, i.343). 33. Coleridge, ‘Poetical Works I’, p. 352n. 34. Poems Written in Close Confinement, p. 22. 35. See Selections and Original Articles, for Mr. Thelwall’s Lectures on the Science and Practice of Elocution: Together with the Introductory Discourse and Outlines (Birmingham, 1806), p. 16. One of the poems published in The Peripatetic similarly speaks of ‘Nature’s finevibrating throb’: see J. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, vol. 3, p. 15. 36. Thompson, ‘An Autumnal Blast’, p. 430. 37. J. Thelwall, Political Lectures (No. 1), p. 37.

196

Notes to pages 115–22

38. Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 5. 39. Ibid., p. 13. 40. See K. Everest, Coleridge’s Secret Ministry: the Context of the Conversation Poems 1795–1798 (Harvester: Brighton, 1979), pp. 86–7, and M. D. Paley, ‘Apocalypse and Millennium in the Poetry of Coleridge’, Wordsworth Circle, 23 (1992), pp. 24–34: p. 26. 41. Thompson, ‘An Autumnal Blast’, p. 449 42. Liu, Wordsworth, p. 529.

10 Scrivener, Thelwall’s Two Plays Against Empire, Incle and Yarico (1787) and The Incas (1792)1 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

For the texts of both plays along with introductory material and commentary, see Scrivener and Felsenstein (eds), Incle and Yarico and the Incas. For additional commentary on The Incas, see Scrivener, Seditious Allegories, pp. 235–40. F. Felsenstein (ed.), English Trader, Indian Maid. Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World. An Inkle and Yarico Reader (Baltimore, MD and London, John Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 82–8. Felsenstein (ed.), English Trader, Indian Maid, p. 88. Felsenstein, ‘Introduction’, in Ibid., p. 7. Felsenstein and Scrivener (eds), Incle and Yarico and The Incas, p. 70. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., p. 34. Felsenstein notes the centrality of cannibalism in representations of the Amerindians; ‘Introduction’, English Trader, Indian Maid, pp. 4–5. Scrivener and Felsenstein (eds), Incle and Yarico and The Incas, p. 15. Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., p. 55. Ibid., p. 64. The recent (May 2005) issue of the online journal Praxis, ‘Opera and Romanticism’, edited by Gillen D’Arcy Wood, points to a new interest in opera in relation to Romantic-era writing. These five excellent essays contain up-to-date source material for research in Romantic opera. www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/opera/index.html On the rebellion of the natives from the South Andes in 1780–1, see O. Cornblitt, Power and Violence in the Colonial City: Oruro from the Mining Renaissance to the Rebellion of Tupac Amaru (1740–1782), trans. E. L. Glick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Felsenstein (ed.), English Trader, Indian Maid, pp. 167–233. Felsenstein and Scrivener (eds), Incle and Yarico and The Incas, pp. 107–8. For the New World ethnography of freer sexuality current in the radical Enlightenment with which Thelwall was no doubt familiar, see Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 57–70. Felsenstein and Scrivener (eds), Incle and Yarico and The Incas, p. 97. Ibid., p. 134. Ibid., p. 106.

Notes to pages 122–6

197

22. Ibid., p. 124. 23. Ibid., pp. 140–1. 24. R. Cole Heinowitz of Bard College asked me this very question at the NASSR convention in August, 2006, after I delivered a paper on Thelwall’s two plays. For an incisive treatment of liberal imperialism in English Romantic writing, see her “The Allure of the Same: Robert Southey’s Welsh Indians and the Rhetoric of Good Colonialism,” in Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic, in Praxis (November, 2006), http://www.rc.umd.edu/ praxis/sullenfires/heinowitz/heinowitz.html. 25. F. E. L. Priestley (ed.), Enquiry Concerning Political Justice by William Godwin, 3 vols (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1946), vol. 1, pp. 126–7.

11 Thompson, A ‘Double-Visag’d Fate’: John Thelwall and the Hapless Hope of Albion 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

Following the groundbreaking work of E. P. Thompson, significant milestones in the resuscitation of Thelwall’s Jacobin identity include Roe’s Wordsworth and Coleridge, Claeys’s The Politics of English Jacobinism and Scrivener’s Seditious Allegories. On Thelwall’s lyrics, see especially D. W. Davies, Presences that Disturb: Models of Romantic Identity in the Literature and Culture of the 1790s (Cardiff : University of Wales Press, 2002) and Thompson, ‘An Autumnal Blast’. Scrivener’s brief but useful remarks on the Fairy and the Hope have recently been supplemented in P. O’Boyle, ‘Coleridge, Wordsworth and Thelwall’s Fairy of the Lake,’ The Coleridge Bulletin, 28 (2006), pp. 63–71 and C. Houswitschka, ‘Alternative Locations of the Reform Movement,’ Alternative Romanticisms ed. W. Huber and M. Egbert (Essen: Blaue Eule, 2003), pp. 67–76. J. Thelwall, A Letter to Henry Cline, Esq on Imperfect Development of the Faculties Mental and Moral as well as Constitutional and Organic and on the Treatment of Impediments of Speech (London: Richard Taylor & Co., 1810), p. 24. On the centrality of this ‘paramount law of all reiterated or progressive motion’ to Thelwall’s elocutionary and political thought, see J. Thompson, ‘Resounding Romanticism: John Thelwall and the Science and Practice of Elocution’, Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture, ed. A. Esterhammer and A. Dick (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2008). In autobiographical passages of the Letter to Cline, Thelwall uses the imagery of ‘rebound’ (p. 14) to narrate the dejection and recovery of his spirits and principles during the Llyswen years. J. Thelwall, The Poetical Recreations of the Champion (London: The Champion Press, 1822), p. 237. Since excerpts from The Hope of Albion appear in miscellaneous collections published by Thelwall over twenty-five years, subsequent in-text citations from the poem will include the abbreviated titles of texts in which they appear, followed by page numbers. The texts in chronological order are Poems Chiefly Written in Retirement (1801); The Vestibule of Eloquence (1810); Poetical Recreations of the Champion; The Panoramic Miscellany (1826). Thelwall, Vestibule of Eloquence, p. 114. On the loss of the Thelwall archive, see Thompson, The Romantics, pp. 218–20; J. Thompson, ‘Overlooking History: The Case of John Thelwall,’ Romanticism, History, Historicism: Essays on an Orthodoxy (New York: Routledge, 2008); and N. Roe’s ‘The Lives of John Thelwall’ in this volume.

198 8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Notes to pages 126–9 Only a few very short epic fragments are included among the 213 or so poems in the Derby Manuscript, which implies that Thelwall kept separate manuscript(s) of The Hope of Albion. For details of the contents and discovery of the Derby Manuscript, see J. Thompson, ‘Citizen Juan: In the Footsteps of a Free-Range Radical,’ forthcoming Studies in Romanticism, 2009. Thelwall, The Poetical Recreations, p. 115. In the ‘Essay on Human Automatonism’ which prefaces excerpts from the Shipwreck scene of The Hope of Albion, Thelwall represents his ‘goblin romance’ as a maliciously self-sabotaging countertext to his ‘long meditated epopee’. The transformative Alfoxden year began with Thelwall’s visit to Coleridge and Wordsworth in July 1797, and ended with their reciprocal visit to Llyswen in July 1798. In a letter to his wife from Alfoxden (published in Davies, Presences that Disturb, p. 296) Thelwall presents the three poets as a ‘literary-political triumvirate’ whose discussions of political and poetic criticism, philosophy and composition are one with the ‘long, artless course’ of the ‘foaming, murmuring, rushing torrent of water’ in which they take place. This literal and metaphorical brook (continued in the stream beside which Thelwall built his Llyswen hermitage, and arguably originating in the springs of Thelwall’s Peripatetic) was the source of their shared epic projects, as suggested by Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge, pp. 251–62, and especially K. R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth, pp. 561–2 and Wordsworth and the Recluse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 10–14. Of course Thelwall would not have read this 1799 letter, as there is no evidence of further contact among the ‘triumvirate’ between mid-1798 and late 1800; nevertheless it is reasonable to suppose that Coleridge’s remarks about the Recluse project in the letter built upon the foundations laid at Alfoxden and Llyswen in 1797–8, and were extended in their subsequent discussions at Keswick in late 1803. On the ‘Norman Yoke’ and Jacobin conceptions of the Saxon origins of democracy, see Scrivener, Seditious Allegories, pp. 245–6, and S. Poole’s essay in this volume. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Thompson, p. 302. On the epic hero debate see 302n and, more fully L. Pratt, ‘Patriot Poetics and the Romantic National Epic,’ Placing and Displacing Romanticism, ed. P. J. Kitson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 88–105. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Thompson, p. 302. Ibid. Thelwall, The Vestibule of Eloquence, p. 115. Ibid., p. 130. J. Thelwall, Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement (Hereford 1801; Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1989), p. 181. Ibid., p. 183. Ibid., 185. Ibid., p. 179. Thelwall, The Vestibule of Eloquence, p. 122. J. Thelwall, ‘The Fairy of the Lake’, in Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement (1989), pp. 2–3. Subsequent citations from this text will include by Act, scene and page numbers. Thelwall, ‘The Fairy of the Lake’ (1989), I.i, p. 3. Ibid., II.iv.p.52. Thelwall, Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement (1989), p. 189. Thelwall, ‘The Fairy of the Lake’ (1989), I.i, p. 3. Ibid., I.i.p.5. On Thelwall’s habit of making fun of Walsh, see Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge, p. 259. On Thelwall’s frosty conversation with Coleridge, see my ‘An Autumnal Blast.’ O’Boyle

Notes to pages 129–34

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

199

marshals further compelling evidence for the identification of Incubus with Coleridge, while also highlighting the allegorically metamorphic complexity of the entire play, which I read as psychodrama. Thelwall, ‘The Fairy of the Lake’ (1989), I.ii, p.15. Ibid., I.ii.p.17. Ibid., I.ii.p.17. Ibid., II.ii.p.34. S. T. Coleridge, Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion, ed. L. Patton and P. Mann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971). Thelwall, ‘The Fairy of the Lake’, I.ii.p.16. Ibid., I.ii.p.14. Thelwall., Political Lectures (No. 1) (London, 1795). Hermanric and Ossa echo characters and passages from Ben Jonson’s Sejanus from which Thelwall quotes liberally in his Spies and Informers lecture. A more detailed reading of the rhetoric of that lecture in relation to Thelwall’s later elocutionary theory is found in my ‘Resounding Romanticism.’ Thelwall, Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, p. 191. Ibid., p. 192. Ibid., p. 195. Ibid., p. 195. Ibid., p. 197. Panoramic Miscellany, p. 377. Thelwall, The Poetical Recreations of the Champion, p. 121. Thelwall, ‘The Fairy of the Lake’, I.i.p. 3. Ibid., I.i, p. 5. Ibid., II.iv, p.49. Ibid., I.i, p. 5. Ibid., I.i, p. 5. Ibid., II.iv, p. 53–5). Thelwall, The Poetical Recreations, p. 115. On the conversation between Thelwall’s ‘Fairy’ and Coleridge’s ‘Christabel,’ see O’Boyle, ‘Coleridge, Wordsworth and Thelwall’s Fairy’, p. 66. Similarities between Thelwall’s and Shelley’s allegorical dramas have been noted by Scrivener, Seditious Allegories, p. 250. Thelwall, The Vestibule of Eloquence, pp. 119, 122. Ibid., pp. 118–19. Ibid., pp. 121–2. Ibid., p.124. Ibid., p. 125–8. Ibid., p. 126–7. Ibid., p. 142. Ibid., p. 137. Ibid., p. 142. Ibid. Ibid., p. 143–4. Ibid., p. 129. Ibid., p. 147–8. Thelwall, Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, p. 183.

200

Notes to pages 134–9

68. Thelwall, The Vestibule of Eloquence, p. 144. 69. Ibid., p. 148. 70. W. Hazlitt, ‘On the Difference between Writing and Speaking,’ The Plain Speaker (London, 1826) in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe, vol. 12 (London: Frank Cass, 1967), pp. 264–5. Hazlitt’s dismissive evaluation of Thelwall’s writing has often been taken out of context and applied without analysis to all aspects of Thelwall’s style. 71. Thelwall, ‘The Fairy of the Lake’ (1989), III.5, p.85. 72. P. B. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound IV.573–4: ‘to hope, till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; / Neither to change nor falter nor repent; / This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be / Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; / This is alone Life; Joy, Empire, and Victory!’ 73. Thelwall, ‘The Fairy of the Lake’ (1989), III.v, p.85. 74. Ibid., III.vi, p. 91. 75. One is tempted to coin the term ‘proto-Pythonesque’ to describe Tristram’s effect upon the Arthurian story. 76. Thelwall, ‘The Fairy of the Lake’ (1989), II.ii.p.36. 77. Ibid., p.41. 78. Ibid., II.ii, p.41. 79. Ibid., I.ii, p.17. 80. Thelwall, A Letter to Henry Cline, pp. 264–5. 81. Thelwall, The Vestibule of Eloquence, pp. 116–17. 82. J. Thelwall, Mr. Thelwall’s Introductory Discourse on the Nature and Objects of Elocutionary Science; and the Studies and Accomplishments Connected with the Cultivation of the Faculty of Oral Expression: with Outlines of a Course of Lectures on the Science and Practice of Elocution (London: Pontefract, 1805), pp. 1–2: ‘Elocution is the Art, or the Act of so delivering our own thoughts and sentiments, or the thoughts and sentiments of others, as not only to convey to those around us (with precision, force and harmony) the full purport and meaning of the words and sentences in which those thoughts are cloathed; but, also, to excite and impress upon their minds—the feelings, the imaginations and the passions by which those thoughts are dictated, or with which they should naturally be accompanied’ (p. 2). 83. See T. L. Fleming, ‘Tracing the Textual Reverberation’ in this collection.

12 Duchan, The Conceptual Underpinnings of John Thelwall’s Elocutionary Practices 1.

J. Thelwall, A Letter to Henry Cline; J. Thelwall, Selections for the Illustration of a Course of Instructions on the Rhythmus and Utterance of the English Language: With an Introductory Essay on the Application of Rhythmical Science to the Treatment of Impediments, And the Improvement of our National Oratory; and an Elementary Analysis of the Science and Practice of Elocution, Composition, Etc. (London: J. McCreery, 1812); J. Thelwall, Results of Experience in the Treatment of Cases of Defective Utterance, from Deficiencies in the Roof of the Mouth, and other Imperfections and Mal-conformations of the Organs of Speech; with Observations on Cases of Amentia, and Tardy and Imperfect Developments of the Faculties. (London, J. M. McCreery, 1814).

Notes to pages 139–48 2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

201

See bibliography in J. Duchan, John Thelwall’s Writings on Elocution (2006) http://www. acsu.buffalo.edu/~duchan/new_history/thelwall/elocution_bibliography_thelwall. html Medical and Physical Journal, 15 (1806), p. 592. J. Thelwall, ‘Mr. Thelwall on the Impediments of Speech’, Medical and Physical Journal, 13 (1805), pp. 450–5; Thelwall, Selections for the Illustration of a Course of Instructions, p. 27. W. Holder, The Elements of Speech, an Essay of Inquiry into the Natural Production of Letters: with an Appendix Concerning Persons Deaf and Dumb. (London: John Martyn, 1669). Thelwall, Selections for the Illustration of a Course of Instructions, p. 36. See also R. Thelwall, ‘The Phonetic Theory of John Thelwall’, in R. E. Asher and E. Henderson (eds), Towards a History of Phonetics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986). pp. 186– 203. Thelwall, Selections for the Illustration of a Course of Instructions, pp. 28–9, 40–58. Thelwall, Results of Experience, p. 73. Medical and Physical Journal, 13 (1805), p. 453. J. Thelwall, ‘Elements in the Science of Elocution’, vol. 12, Part 2 of A. Rees, The New Cyclopaedia. (Philadelphia, PA: Robert Carr and John Conrad, 1809). J. Thelwall, An Essay Towards a Definition of Animal Vitality; Read at the Theatre, Guy’s Hospital, January 26th 1793 (London, 1793), p. 20. Thelwall, A Letter to Henry Cline, p. 181. Thelwall, Mr. Thelwall’s Introductory Discourse, p. 2. Thelwall, Results of Experience, pp. 3, 714. L. S. Jacyna, ‘Medical science and Moral Science: The Cultural Relations of Physiology in Restoration France’, History of Science, 25 (1987), pp. 113–14. Thelwall, Mr. Thelwall’s Introductory Discourse, p. 16. Thelwall, Letter to Henry Cline, pp. 116–22. Thelwall, Results of Experience, p. 74. Ibid., p. 47. Thelwall, Mr. Thelwall’s Introductory Discourse, p. 15. Thelwall, ‘Mr. Thelwall on the Impediments of Speech’. Thelwall, Mr. Thelwall’s Introductory Discourse, p. 1.

13 Fleming, Tracing the Textual Reverberation: the Role of Thelwall’s Elocutionary Selections in the British Lyceum 1. 2.

3. 4.

G. Russell and C. Tuite (eds), Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 7, 17 P. Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963). The term ‘intellectual sociability’ derives from Russell and Tuite’s term, ‘Romantic Sociability’. For a history of adult education institutions, refer to Thomas Kelly’s Adult Education in Liverpool… (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 1960); A History of Adult Education in Great Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1992); George Birkbeck: Pioneer of Adult Education (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1957).

202 5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

Notes to pages 148–52 Carl Bode, in The American Lyceum: Town Meeting of the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956) traces the ‘lyceum’ concept with reference to an American Lyceum movement, but defines it generically as ‘an institution through which lectures, dramatic performances, debates, and the like are presented to a community,’ as well as the ‘building in which such lectures are given’ (Introduction, p. x). The fact that Thelwall moved from London’s center of radicalism to the Northern centers of dissent and spent the first four years of his elocutionary career visiting the same industrial towns which were so important to the rise of lyceum culture was by no means coincidental. A friend of Northern reformers W. Roscoe, B.A. Heywood, and G. Birkbeck, Thelwall shared their reform principles and responded to the corresponding growth in wealth and desire for self-improvement amongst the rising industrialists, manufacturers, and commercial professions. J. Thelwall, Selections, and Original Articles, Read and Recited in Illustration of Mr. Thelwall’s Lectures on the Science and Practice of Elocution (Wakefield, 1802), Glasgow University, Glasgow, frontispiece. J. Thelwall, ‘Letter to E. Daniel, Honorable Secretary of the Royal Institution’, 20 November 1828, RI CL 1/160, Royal Institution Archives, Manchester, p. 160. J. Thelwall, Selections, &c. for Mr. Thelwall’s Lectures on the Science and Practice of Elocution (York, 1802). J. Thelwall, Selections, and Original articles, for Mr. Thelwall’s Lectures on the Science and Practice of Elocution; together with the Introductory Discourse and Outlines (Wakefield, 1802), Robart’s Library, University of Toronto. Frontispiece of J. Thelwall, Mr. Thelwall’s Course of Lectures on the Science and Practice of Elocution: with Readings and Recitations (1803). One of the most intriguing volumes in terms of its itinerant history is the Wakefield 1802 Selections, currently housed in the University of Toronto’s Robarts Library. The Selections are geographically and socially mobile. Their physical mobility stems from Thelwall’s itinerancy insofar as they were produced in different forms in different towns, carried by Thelwall from town to town, and sold to a variety of people, some of whom likely emigrated to North America with the Selections in tow (hence the copies in Canada and the United States). Further, given that reading in this period was increasingly social, taking place in reading circles (not to mention elocution is a social endeavor), the volumes were likely shared with others in personal circles and were less tied to an individual than some books might have been in this and other periods. Thus, the Selections are socially mobile both laterally (across circles) and vertically, insofar as readers purchased them out of a desire for upward mobility. P. Magnuson, Reading Public Romanticism (N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 5. J. Raven, ‘From Promotion to Proscription: Arrangements for Reading and EighteenthCentury Libraries’, in J. Raven et al. (eds.), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 201. A. Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 237. P. Magnuson, Reading Public Romanticism (N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 22. W. Benzie, The Dublin Orator: Thomas Sheridan’s Influence on Eighteenth-Century Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Leeds: The University of Leeds, 1972), p. 70.

Notes to pages 152–9

203

19. J. Walker, A Rhetorical Grammar, or Course of Lessons in Elocution (London: G. Robinson, and T. Cadell, 1785), p. v. 20. T. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution (London, 1796), p. 34. 21. Enfield’s The Speaker, Scott’s Elements of Elocution, and Walker’s A Rhetorical Grammar. 22. Thelwall, A Letter to Henry Cline, p. 254. 23. J. Thelwall, Mr. Thelwall’s Introductory Discourse on the Nature and Objects of Elocutionary Science, p. 26. 24. Thelwall, Mr. Thelwall’s Introductory Discourse on the Nature and Objects of Elocutionary Science, pp. 10, 19. 25. Thelwall, A Letter to Henry Cline, p .9. 26. B. M. Benedict, ‘The Paradox of Anthology: Collecting and Différence in EighteenthCentury Britain’, New Literary History: a Journal of Theory and Interpretation, Spring 34:2 (2003), p. 3. 27. Thelwall, Mr. Thelwall’s Introductory Discourse on the Nature and Objects of Elocutionary Science, pp. 11–13. 28. J. Thelwall, Selections and Original Articles, for Mr. Thelwall’s Lectures on the Science and Practice of Elocution; Together with the Introductory Discourse and Outlines (Birmingham, 1806), pp. 41–4. 29. Thelwall, A Letter to Henry Cline, p. 41 30. J. Thompson, ‘Biographia Logopaedia; or, A Life in Speech: Poetics, Politics and Therapeutics in the work of John Thelwall’ (Unpublished essay, 2000), p. 21. 31. Thelwall, Selections and Original Articles, for Mr. Thelwall’s Lectures on the Science and Practice of Elocution, pp. 11–13, 37–40, 48, 69, 79–80, 116. 32. Thelwall, Selections and Original Articles, for Mr. Thelwall’s Lectures on the Science and Practice of Elocution, pp. 57–9. 33. Thelwall, Selections and Original Articles, for Mr. Thelwall’s Lectures on the Science and Practice of Elocution, p. 57. 34. Thelwall, Selections, &c. for Mr. Thelwall’s Lectures on the Science and Practice of Elocution, 1.2, pp. 41, 86, 89–90, 110–11, 116–17, 139. 35. Cited in J. Thompson, ‘“A Voice in the Representation”: John Thelwall and the Enfranchisement of Literature’, in T. Rajan and J.M. Wright (eds), Romanticism, History and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming Literature 1789–1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 127–8. 36. Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism, p.xiii. 37. Involved in the establishment of The London University, Thelwall supported the transformation of the lyceum’s circles into open universities for the “great purposes of general education” (Panoramic Miscellany, p. 201). Thelwall traces The London University’s history and future, explicitly connecting it to its precursor in the Mechanics’ Institutes. Furthermore, he discusses the emergence of new pedagogical approaches within the university system, including the lecture “to give a general view of a subject” and the tutorial where “the great body of students is divided into smaller masses” (Panoramic Miscellany, p. 205) for more interactive learning. These structures and collaborative approaches to learning continue to build on the collective, Socratic model of Thelwall’s Selections, and Original Articles, Read and Recited in Illustration of Mr. Thelwall’s Lectures on the Science and Practice of Elocution, forming the pedagogical foundations for the modern university system. 38. Scrivener, Seditious Allegories, p. 192.

204

Notes to pages 159–65

39. This is evinced by the discovery of a Selections volume in the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society archives, which suggests that the volume circulated amongst lyceum institutions, making it a public document to be read, rehearsed, performed and discussed during society gatherings or lectures. 40. Thelwall, Selections and Original articles, for Mr. Thelwall’s Lectures on the Science and Practice of Elocution, p. 42.

14 Poole, ‘Not Precedents to be Followed, but Examples to be Weighed’: John Thelwall and the Jacobin Sense of the Past 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Thelwall, The Rights of Nature, pp. 51–2. Extracted from Thelwall’s speech at a public meeting called in Palace Yard, London, to protest the Peterloo Massacre, Exeter Flying Post, 8 September 1819. Thelwall, The Life of John Thelwall, p. 16. Thompson, ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’; The Morning Chronicle, 3 May 1820. Biographical and Imperial Magazine, vol. 2 ( July–December 1789), pp. 291–2; and see also the separate volume, ‘The Beauties of Biography’ (London, 1792). M. Thale, ‘London debating societies of the 1790s’, The Historical Journal, 32:1 (1989), pp. 57–86, p. 75. For Hume’s hostility to Rapin see L. Okie, ‘Ideology and Partiality in David Hume’s History of England’, Hume Studies, 11:1 (1985), pp. 1–32, p. 25. O. Goldsmith, A History of England in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to his Son (Basle, 1800), p. 399. D. L. Wilson, ‘Jefferson vs. Hume’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 46:1 (1989), pp. 49–70, p. 61. O. Hulme, An Historical Essay on the English Constitution, or An Impartial Inquiry into the Elective Power of the People (London, 1771), pp. 2–6. L. E. Withey, ‘Catherine Macaulay and the uses of history: ancient rights, perfectionism and propaganda’, The Journal of British Studies, 16:1 (1976), pp. 59–83, pp. 74–5. For the relationship between the ancient constitution and natural rights in radical thought in the 1770s, see for instance M. Peters, ‘“The Monitor” on the Constitution: New Light on the Ideological Origins of English Radicalism’ English Historical Review, 86 (1971), pp. 706–27 and Withey, ‘Catherine Macaulay and the uses of history’. M. Margarot, The Trial of Maurice Margarot before the High Court of Justiciary at Edinburgh on the 13th and 14th January 1794 (London, 1794), pp. 91, 111, B. Weinstein, ‘Popular constitutionalism and the London Corresponding Society’, Albion, 34:1 (Spring 2002), pp. 27–57. Thelwall, The Tribune, vol. 2, pp. 226, 238–9. Thelwall, The Tribune, vol.2, p. 216; Thelwall, The Rights of Nature, p.70; J. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, vol. 1, p. 187. Champion, 17 January 1819. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, vol. 2, p. 24; Champion, 17 January 1819; Panoramic Miscellany or Monthly Magazine, 3 (1826). Thelwall, The Tribune, vol. 3, p. 18. Thelwall, The Tribune, vol. 1, p. 78 Thelwall, The Tribune, vol. 3, p. 341.

Notes to pages 166–71

205

22. Morning Chronicle, 2 January 1819; Champion, 10–17 January 1819. For Thelwall’s critical review of Heywood’s work see Champion, 7 February 1819. 23. J. Thelwall, Sketches of the History of Prosecutions for Political Opinion (London, 1794), pp. 2–8; See also Thelwall’s lecture on the civil list in The Tribune, vol. 3, XXXIV (1795) and Thelwall, The Rights of Nature, p. 34. 24. For an excellent introduction to Thelwall’s ‘representative aesthetics and topography’ in The Peripatetic, see Thompson (ed.), John Thelwall, The Peripatetic, pp. 33–7. 25. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, vol. 2, p. 220–1. 26. Ibid., p. 37. 27. Ibid., p .24. 28. Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 109–10. 29. Thelwall, Sketches of the History of Prosecutions for Political Opinions, p. 2. Thelwall’s refusal to be drawn into debates between natural rights and historicism was confirmed by his widow. See C. Thelwall, The Life, p. 47. 30. For the Britannicus, see H. R. Yorke, Thoughts on Civil Government: addressed to the disenfranchised citizens of Sheffield (London, 1794). 31. J. Baxter, A New and Impartial History of England, From the Most Early Period of Genuine Historical Evidence to the Present Important and Alarming Crisis (London, 1796), pp. v–xii; Wilson, ‘Jefferson vs. Hume’, p. 65. 32. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, vol. 2, p. 28; Baxter, A New and Imperia History, p. 198 33. Baxter, A New and Imperial History, pp. vii, ix. 34. The Moral and Political Acts of the Kings and Queens of England (London, 1793), pp. 256–7, 260. 35. E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 2nd edn (London, 1790), p. 47. 36. Withey, ‘Catherine Macaulay’, p. 81. 37. Thelwall, The Rights of Nature, Part Two, p. 15. 38. Ibid., p. 7; Part One, p. 31. 39. Thelwall, The Rights of Nature, Part Two, p. 34. 40. J. Epstein, In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 61. 41. H. R. Yorke, Reason Urged Against Precedent, in a Letter to the People of Derby (Derby, 1793). p. 22. 42. Thelwall, Life of Thelwall, p. 153. 43. Thelwall, The Rights of Nature, p. 12. 44. Claeys (ed.), The Politics of English Jacobinism, p. xxvii. 45. Thompson, ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’, p. 95. In Corfield and Evans (eds), Youth and Revolution in the 1790s, p. 36, the lectures are portrayed as a ‘courageous but forlorn effort to circumvent the Acts’. 46. D’Israeli, Vaurien (London, 1797), vol. 2, pp. 256–7. 47. J. Thelwall, Prospectus of a Course of Lectures to be Delivered Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday During the Ensuing Lent in Strict Conformity with Mr Pitt’s Convention Act (London, 1796), pp. 18–21. See also Thelwall, Sober Reflections, p. 110, for very similar remarks. 48. The Moral and Political Magazine of the London Corresponding Society, Vol.1 (London, 1796–7), p. 60. 49. Thelwall, The Rights of Nature, pp.103–4; Bissett, Sketch of Democracy, pp. 20, 127, 307. 50. Claeys, The French Revolution Debate in Britain: The Origins of Modern Politics, p. 140.

206

Notes to pages 171–3

51. Thelwall, The Tribune, L (1796), pp. 325, 330, 331; J. Cartwright, Give Us Our Rights! (London, 1782), p. 3; Thelwall, An Appeal to Popular Opinion, p. 12. Among the texts lost by Thelwall to the mob were ‘Roman Antiquities of Dionysius and Halicarnassus, Plutarch’s Lives and Moyle’s treatise on the Lacedemonian Government’, ibid., p. 25. The lectures were never published. Manuscript notes for them were amongst the Thelwall papers in the possession of Charles Cestre in 1906, but their present whereabouts is unknown. See Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 127. 52. Thelwall, An Appeal to Popular Opinion, p. 18, 25. 53. Thelwall, Life of Thelwall, p. 62; Bath Journal, 18 February 1834. 54. Examiner, 11 November 1843; Morning Chronicle, 6 November 1844; Northern Star, 9 November 1850; Daily News, 7 November 1854. 55. Thelwall, The Rights of Nature, p. 52.

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INDEX

Adair, Serjeant, xiv Albion, The, 112 Alderson, Amelia, 18 Alfoxden, Somerset, 136 American Revolution, 34, 163 Amyot, Thomas, 4 Anglo-Saxon society, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167, 169, 173 Anti Corn Law League, 9, 65 Anti-Jacobin, The, 26, 37 Arendt, Hannah, 76 Aristotle, 83, 86, 87 Nicomachean Ethics, 86 Armstrong, John, 147 Ashby de la Zouch, 36 Atkinson, William, 3 Austin, J. L., 92 Babeuf, François, 66 Bacon, Francis, 18 Barker, Robert, 79 Barrell, John, ix, 3, 8, 76, 96 Bath , 24 Bath Guardian, 5–6 Battle of Barnet, 167, 172 Baxter, John, 167–8 Beaufort Buildings, the Strand, 28, 29, 88, 150, 164 Bedford, Duke of, 76 Belsham, William, 18 Benedict, Barbara, 153 Bengal, 67 Benjamin, Walter, 124 Bentham, Jeremy, 57 Berlin, Isaiah, 106 Bill of Rights, 47, 164, 167, 168

Biographical and Imperial Magazine, 14, 28, 162 biography, 96–101 Birmingham: food riots, 66 Bisset, Robert, 6, 171 Blake, William, 121, 124, 129 Boerhaave, Herman, 144 Bonney, John Augustus, xiv, 108, 109 Botany Bay, 19, 37 Brewer, John, 8, 96 Bristol, 36 Bristol Institution, 24 Bristol Mercury, 24 British Convention, 1793, 71 Brown, Philip, 7 Brunswick, Duke of, 124 Burke, Edmund, 3, 4, 9, 18, 35, 62, 67, 76, 77, 79, 90, 97 Reflections on the Revolution ..., 124, 168–9 Thoughts on the Prospect ..., 75–6 Button, J. V., 152 Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron, 129, 131, 137 Camden, Charles Pratt, Earl, 47, 48 Canning, George, 26, 37 Carlyle, Thomas, 77 Cartwright, John, 62, 71, 171 Catholic Church, 169 Cawthorne, Joseph, 76, 77, 78, 79 Cestre, Charles, 2, 7, 16, 17 John Thelwall ..., 15, 17 Champion, 14, 22, 164, 173 Charles I, King, 61 Charles II, King, 165 – 221 –

222

John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon

Chartism, 10, 13, 63, 65, 172 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 30 Chubb, John, 114 Cicero, 33, 34 Claeys, Gregory, 3, 8–9, 54, 63, 69, 171 Politics of English Jacobinism ..., 15 Clark, Anna, 7 Clinton, Bill, 106 Cobbett, William, 10 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 2, 4, 6, 10, 13, 14, 16, 18, 36, 110–16, 126–7, 129, 130, 133, 135, 136 ‘Christabel’, 132 ‘The Dungeon’, 112 ‘Frost at Midnight’, 112 letters to JT, 110, 111–14 ‘Modern Patriotism’, 110–11 The Plot Discovered, 110 ‘Religious Musings’, 110 ‘Spy Noy’, 27, 129 ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’, 14, 112–16 Collins, H., 62 Colman, George, 118, 122 combination, 64, 67–8 commerce, 49, 64, 65, 67, 69–70 community, 83–93 Condorcet, Marquis de, 65 conversation, 87–8, 112, 116, 148, 151 Cooper, Astley, 13 Copenhagen Fields meetings, 103 1795, 61, 76, 79–81 Copenhagen House, North London, xiv, 8, 77, 78 Corn Laws, 64, 65 Anti Corn Law League, 9, 65 Coronation Oath Act, 44, 45, 46 Corresponding Societies Act, 172 Critical Review, 14 Cullen, Robert, 40 Culler, Jonathan, 92 Dartford Common, 166–7 Davies, David, 70 de Cloot, Baron, 123 democracy, 49, 73, 162, 163, 164 popular opinion, 71–3, 75, 81 Demosthenes, 33, 34, 170

Derrida, Jacques, 92 Dickinson, H. T., 8, 9, 60 D’Israeli, Isaac: Vaurien, 4–5, 170 Downie, David, 40, 44 Duchan, Judith, ix, 5 Dundas, Henry, 32 Dyer, George, 68 Eaton, Daniel Isaac, 29, 107 Eden, Sir F. M., 70 Edinburgh, 37 treason trials, 28, 40, 41, 44, 46, 163–4 Edinburgh Review, 8, 104, 105 education, 147–52, 158–9 see also lyceum movement elocution, 2, 5, 14, 15, 21, 23, 24, 114–15, 137–8, 139–45, 147–52, 157 materialism, 141–2 mechanism, 140–1 mentalism, 142–3 moralism, 143–5 Selections ... for Mr. Thelwall’s Lectures ..., 5, 137, 147, 148, 149, 150–1, 152–3, 155, 157–9 see also recitation empire, 117–18, 121–2 Enlightenment, 70, 91, 117, 124, 169 Scottish, 9, 54 enthusiasm, 89, 90 Epstein, James, 3, 4, 169 Erdman, David, 16 Erskine, Thomas, xiii–xiv, 3, 4, 40, 41, 47 Everest, Kelvin, 115 Examiner, 15 Eyre, Lord Chief Justice, 43, 44, 46 Falkland, Lucius Cary, Viscount, 123 farms, 64–5 Fast Days, 31, 63 Felsenstein, Frank, 11, 119 Fleming, Tara-Lynn, x, 5 food riots, 61, 63, 66 Foot, Paul, 13 Foster, Sir Michael, 40, 42 Fourier, Charles, 62, 65 France literati, 74 National Convention, 41 wars, 1793–9, 31–2, 33, 58, 64, 67

Index Franklin, Benjamin, 68 Fraser, Nancy, 100 French Revolution, xv, 3, 11, 13, 22, 25, 35, 62, 67, 102, 117, 118, 123, 124, 126 Gagging Acts (Two Acts), 1795, xiv, xv, 4, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 110, 112, 167 Galloway, Alexander, 172 Galperin, William, 79–80 gender politics, 7–8 General Evening Post, 78 George III, King, xiv, 30, 31, 33, 61, 162 Gerrald, Joseph, 19, 28, 37, 41, 71, 115 Gibbs, Vicary, 40 Gibbs, Warren, 16–17 Gillray, James: cartoons, xiv, 26, 72 Gilmartin, Kevin, 71 Glorious Revolution, 102, 169, 172 Godwin, William, 6, 7–8, 9, 25–6, 27–8, 30–1, 60, 73–4, 91, 98, 101, 102, 111–12 Caleb Williams, 37, 123 Considerations ..., 30, 74, 102, 111 Cursory Strictures ..., 28, 30 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 58 letters to JT, 17, 18 Memoirs, 104 Political Justice, 6, 124 Golden Lion Tavern, 172 Goldsmith, Oliver, 64, 162 Goodwin, Albert, 7 Graham, Aaron, 62–3 Great Remonstrance, 61 Green, Georgina, x, 8 Grenville, William Wyndham, 1st Baron, 32, 72 Grotius, Hugo, 52 Groves (spy), xiv Guy’s Hospital JT lectures at, 14, 19, 22, 141–2 Physical Society, 13, 22 Habermas, Jürgen, 8, 91–2, 96, 100, 147 Hale, Sir Matthew, 40, 42, 46 Hampden, John, 123 Hampsher-Monk, Iain, 2, 8, 9

223

Hardy, Thomas (of LCS), 14, 108 prosecuted, xiii–xiv, 3, 23, 28, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 47, 170 Harvey, William, 22, 144 Hawkins, William, 42 Henry, Patrick, 34 Heren, Alexander, 30 Historical and Oratorical Society, 137 history, 54–6, 59–60, 63, 115–16, 161–73 contingency, 54–6 four-stage, 54–5 of ideas, 51, 59–60 Hodgskin, Thomas, 63 Hodgson, William, 172 Holcroft, Thomas, 3, 17 Holder, William, 140 Holmes, Richard: Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, 13 Home Office, 29 Hulme, Obadiah, 163, 168 Hume, David, 57, 162–3, 164–5 History of England ..., 162, 167, 168 Hunt, Leigh, 14–15 Autobiography, 15 Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries, 15 imagination, 10, 89, 93, 109, 113, 115–16, 155 Isle of Wight, 19 Jacobinism, 2–3, 4, 9, 10, 15, 16, 23, 62, 67–8, 163, 164, 165, 168 The Anti-Jacobin, 26, 37 Janowit, Anne, 110 Jarvis, Robin, 10 Jefferson, Thomas, 163 Jeffrey, Francis, 37, 104, 105 Jekyll, Joseph, 78 Johnstone, Kenneth, x, 6 Jones, David, 63 Jonson, Ben, 23 Juvenal, 28 Karr, David, 3, 4 Ku, Agnes, 96 labour, 8, 9, 51, 52–4, 56, 60, 63, 68–9 Lamb, Charles, 27, 113

224

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Lamb, Robert, x, 9 language, 97, 98, 104–5, 136 and body expression, 5, 153–4 literary, 91–2 pure, 124 translation, 117–18, 124 see also elocution; oratory; rhetoric; speech Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 117 Lee, Richard, 79 Lenin, 30 Levellers, 164 Liberal, 14 Ligon, Richard, 118 Lilburne, John, 164 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 20, 24, 162 literature, 149–50 Liu, Alan, 115, 116 Llyswen, Wales, 14, 19, 21, 22, 37 Locke, John, 9, 51, 52–6, 68, 69, 170 London Corresponding Society (LCS), 2, 8, 14, 15, 28, 29, 31, 49, 62, 75, 76, 77–8, 79, 80, 162, 164, 167, 168 prosecution of members, xv, 3–4, 23, 28, 39–40, 41, 43, 44, 47, 170 ‘Scottish martyrs’, xv, 28, 115 JT withdraws, 103, 110, 170 London Institute, JT’s, 2, 20, 21, 137, 139 Historical and Oratorical Society, 137 Lotte, Günther, 63 Lovejoy, Arthur, 59 Lovelace, Richard, 109 luxury, 64, 68–9, 70 lyceum movement, 5, 148, 151, 152, 158, 159 Lynn Regis, Norfolk, 18, 36 Macaulay, Catherine, 163, 164 Magnuson, Paul, 149, 151 Malthus, Thomas, 62 Manchester, Duke of, 28 Manchester Times, 5 Mansfield, Sir James, Lord Chief Justice, 44 Mansfield, Michael, 49 Margarot, Maurice, 41, 115, 163–4 Marmontel, Jean François, 117, 123 Marx, Karl, 32 Mathews, William, 29

Matthias, Thomas J., 21, 26 Mays, J. C. C., 113, 114 McCann, Andrew, 75, 89–90, 91 Medical and Physical Journal, 139 Mee, Jon, x–xi, 4, 10, 90 mentalism, 142–3 Mill, J. S., 9, 66 Milton, John, 108–9 Mitford, Sir John, 32, 44, 45 Montesquieu, Baron, 70 Monthly Review, The, 36 Moral and Political Acts of the ..., 168 moral economy, 66 morality and moralism, 54, 58, 143–5 Morning Post, 107, 110 Morton, Thomas, 118 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 83–7, 92 Naval Mutineers, 1797, 63 Nether Stowey, Somerset, 18, 19, 36 New Annual Register, The, 28 New World, 117–24 Newgate prison, 28, 107, 108, 110, 113, 114 Northern Star, 172 Northumberland, Hugh Percy, Duke of, 28 Nozick, Robert, 55 oratory, 4–5, 147, 150–9 Paine, Thomas, 8, 9, 27, 33, 62, 67, 68, 72, 97, 123, 164, 168, 169 effigy burnt, 66, 124 Agrarian Justice, 52, 53, 55, 56 The Crisis, 30 Rights of Man, 163 Paley, Morton D., 115 panoramas, 79–80 parliamentary reform, 25, 27, 28, 33, 39–50, 52, 70, 71–2, 161, 162 Reform Bill, 1832, 14, 15 Paul, St., 156 Peru, 121–4 Peterloo Massacre, 14, 15, 161 Petty, Sir William, 68 Philanthropist, 29 Phillips, Richard, 18 Public Characters of, 1800–1801, 15 Philp, Mark, 52

Index Physical Society, 13, 22 Pitt, William, 25, 26, 27, 32, 33, 34, 37, 43, 64, 67, 70, 72, 73, 98, 100, 162, 165, 170 political economy, 61–70 Poole, Thomas, 114 popular opinion, 71–3, 75, 81 Portland, William Bentinck, 3rd Duke of, 28, 47, 62 prison, 107–16 see also Botany Bay; Newgate; Tower of London private sphere, 8, 95–106 property, 8, 9, 51–60, 62, 164 popular opinion, 8, 71–3, 75, 81 public sphere, 8, 91, 95–106, 147 Pufendorf, Samuel, 52, 54 radicalism, xiii, 3, 6, 8–9, 27–9, 30, 43, 61–3, 65–6, 68–9, 71, 74, 90–1, 96, 110, 125, 162, 163, 169, 172, 173 Rapin, Paul de, 162, 165 Raynal, Abbé, 117 reading, 147–59 recitation, 5, 149–59 reform see parliamentary reform Reform Bill, 1832, 14, 15 Reign of Terror French Revolution, 124 Pitt, 25, 27, 32 republicanism, 8, 29, 51, 97, 109, 123, 124 Richmond, Duke of, 43, 47 Richter, John, 18 Ridgway, James, 107 rights, 9, 51–60, 163, 164 The Rights of Nature, 7, 8, 9, 51–3, 55 , 57, 62, 73, 75, 167, 168, 170, 171 Robertson, William, 117, 162 Robespierre, Maximilien, 32, 67 Rockey, Denyse, 15, 22 Roe, Nicholas, xi, 2, 3, 108, 110 Roman history, 19, 34, 35, 171 Romanticism, 26, 131–2, 149, 153 Romantics, The: England in a Revolutionary Age, 13 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 18, 86, 124 Russell, Gillian, 148

225

satire, 26, 28, 136 savages, 70 Noble, 117, 121–2 Scott, Walter, 32, 37 Scottish Enlightenment, 9, 52, 54 ‘Scottish Martyrs’, xv, 28, 115 see also Edinburgh treason trials Scrivener, Michael, xi, 10, 11, 15, 29–30, 34, 37, 158 Searle, John, 92 Seditious Meetings Act, 49, 161, 162, 170 Seit, Brian, 71 Senator, The, 78 sexuality, 104, 118–22 Shakespeare, William, 133 Sheldon, Richard, xi, 9 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein, 22 Shelley, Percy, 14, 129, 134 Prometheus Unbound, 10, 132, 135 Sheridan, T., 152 Sidney, Algernon, 123, 170 Skinner, Quentin, 60 Skirving, William, 41 slave trade, 117–21, 124 Smith, Adam, 57, 62, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69 Smollet, Tobias, 162 sociability, 148, 149, 159 social development, 69–70 socialism, 51, 62, 63, 65, 66, 70 Society for Constitutional Information (SCI), 39, 40 Solomonescu, Yasmin, xii, 6–7 Somerset, 27 Alfoxden, 136 Nether Stowey, 18, 19, 36 Southey, Robert, 27 speech act, 91–2 and moralism, 143–5 production, 140–1 therapy see elocution see also conversation, oratory; recitation Spence, Thomas, 3, 9, 65 St George’s Fields, 103 State Trials, 166 Steele, Richard, 118, 124 Symonds, Henry Delaney, 107

226

John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon

taxes, 50, 67 Thelwall, Algernon Sidney, 123 Thelwall, John birth, 1, 13 biography, 13–16, 21–4, 27–9, 36–7 library andpapers, 16–21, 126, 162 pseudonyms, 21–2 arrest and trial, 1794–5, xiii–xiv, xv, 3, 14, 17, 19, 29, 39–49, 172 lecture tours, 1796/7, 26, 36 walking tour, 1797, 9–10, 18 in Nether Stowey, 18, 19, 36 death and gravestone, 1–2, 24 Address to the Inhabitants of Yarmouth, 102 The Daughter of Adoption, 11, 120 ‘An Essay Towards ... Animal Vitality’, 14, 19, 22, 141–2 The Fairy of the Lake, 125–8, 131–2, 134–6 The Hope of Albion, 11, 125–35, 137–8, 162 The Incas, 11, 14, 117, 121–4 Incle and Yarico, 11, 14, 117–21 Lecture on a System of Spies and Informers, 115 Lectures on Classical History, 171, 173 A Letter to Francis Jeffray ..., 105 A Letter to Henry Cline, 142, 145 Natural and Constitutional Right ..., 40, 45–7, 99, 100, 107 On the Moral Tendency ..., 99–100 The Peripatetic, 7, 15, 20, 22, 36, 83–93, 97, 127, 131, 164, 166 ‘Philautiaccha’, 83–4 Philippics, 33–4 Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, 14, 112, 125 ‘Prefatory Memoir’, 15, 22–3, 98, 104 Poems on Various Subjects, 14, 15 Poems Written in Close Confinement, 15, 97, 98 Poems Written in Confinement, 98 Poems Written in Retirement, 15, 104 Poems Written in the Tower, 10 Poems written while in Close Confinement, 107–8 ‘The Cell’, 107–9, 110, 113

‘Lines Written on the Morning of Trial’, 113 ‘Stanzas, Written ...’, 109–10, 113 Results of Experience, 142–3, 144, 145 The Rights of Nature, 7, 8, 9, 51–3, 55 , 57, 62, 73, 75, 167, 168, 170, 171 Selections ... for Mr. Thelwall’s Lectures ..., 5, 137, 147, 148, 149, 150–1, 152–3, 155, 157–9 Introductory Discourse on the Nature and Objects ..., 142, 143, 152–3 Sketches of the History ..., 166 The Tribune: Political Lectures, xv, 6, 22, 26, 29, 30, 31–4, 61, 74, 97, 102, 103, 108, 110, 170 Vestibule of Eloquence, 137 Thelwall, John Hampden, 123 Thelwall, Joseph, 13 Thelwall, Maria, 22, 98 Thelwall, Stella, 101 Theophrastus, 87 Thomassen, Lasse, 92 Thompson, E. P., 1–2, 7, 9–10, 11, 34, 66, 170 ‘Disenchantment or Default?’, 13 ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’, 15, 161–2 The Making of the English Working Class, 8, 15 Thompson, Francis: ‘Hymn on the Seasons’, 154–5 Thompson, Judith, xii, 2, 10, 11, 15, 84, 112, 115, 116, 154 Thoreau, Henry David, 30 Thurlow, Edward, 1st Baron, 76 Times: advertisements, 16, 20, 21 Times Literary Supplement (TLS), 16–17 Tooke, John Horne, xiii–xiv, 3, 4, 29, 40, 41, 43, 101, 108 Tower of London, 17, 28, 108, 109, 156 Poems Written in the Tower, 10 translation, 117–18, 124 treason, definition, 29, 32, 37, 40–6, 99 Treason Trials, 1794, xiii–xiv, xv, 3, 14, 17, 27, 28, 29, 39–49, 99 Edinburgh, 28, 40, 41, 44, 46, 163–4 commemoration, 172 Treasonable Practices Act, 170 True Britain, 35

Index Tuite, Clara, 148 Turgot, Anne, 65 Two Acts see Gagging Acts Tyler, Wat, 166–7, 168 unionism, 68 utilitarianism, 56–9 value, 51, 63, 68–9 virtue, 5, 58, 98, 99, 109, 143, 164 Voltaire, 63 Wagner, Corinna, xii, 8 Wales, 18, 91 Llyswen, 14, 19, 21, 22, 37 Walpole, Horace, 70 Walsh, James, 27, 129 war, levying, 42, 43, 44–5 wars vs France, 1793–9, 31–2, 33, 58, 64, 67 Watchman, 110

227

Watt, Robert, 44 Wells, Roger, 63 Williams, Gwyn, 63 Williams, Helen Maria, 117 Windham, William, 3, 32 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 9, 97, 104 Wordsworth, William, 2, 10, 13, 14, 16, 18, 21–2, 28–9, 62, 135 The Excursion, 21–2 The Prelude, 27, 28, 116, 135 The Recluse, 125, 126 satire, 28 Wrangham. Francis, 28 Yarmouth, 8, 18, 36, 37 Address to the Inhabitants of Yarmouth, 102 Yeats, W. B., 133 Yorke, Henry Redhead, 167, 169 Young, Arthur, 18