John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon (The Enlightenment World)

John Thelwall was a Romantic and Enlightenment polymath. During the 1790s, he achieved national recognition as an orator, republican, Jacobin theorist and leading member of the proto-democratic London Corresponding Society. In 1794 he was tried and acquitted of high treason, earning himself the disdainful soubriquet 'acquitted felon' from Secretary of State for War, William Windham. Later, Thelwall's interests turned to poetry and plays. He was a collaborator and confidant of Wordsworth and Coleridge during the gestation of Lyrical Ballads, a Romantic ruralist, travel-writer and pedestrian, and an idealistic farmer in the Wye Valley. During the nineteenth century he pioneered elocutionism, curing young men from stammers and theorizing about phonetics at his own London Institute. Although the separate strands of Thelwall's life and work have been considered at various times by scholars of both English literature and of eighteenth-century history, no volume has yet sought to bring them together or make sense of them as a whole; to understand, for example, the association Thelwall made between speech therapy and radical politics. This edited collection draws together a range of essays from leading eighteenth-century and Romantic scholars. Thelwall's manifold activities are considered in relation to each other, and contextualized within wider Romantic culture and politics. Contents ......Page 8 List of Contributors......Page 10 Preface......Page 14 Introduction......Page 18 1. The Lives of Joh Thelwall......Page 30 2. Usual and Unusual Suspects......Page 42 3. Thelwall in His Own Defence......Page 56 4. Labour, Contingency, utility......Page 68 5. 'A Loud, A Fervid, and Resolute Remonstrance with Our Rulers'......Page 78 6. Joh Thelwall's Radical Version of Democracy......Page 88 7. Articulations on Community in The Peripatetic......Page 100 8. Domestic Invasions......Page 112 9. The Dungeon and the Cell......Page 124 10. Thelwall's Two Plays Against Empire, Incle and Yarico (1787) and The Incas (1792)......Page 134 11. A 'Double-Visag'd Fate'......Page 142 12. The Conceptual Underpinnings of John Thelwall's Elocutionary Practices......Page 156 13. Tracing the Textual Reverberation......Page 164 14. 'Not Precendents to be Followed but Examples to be Weighed'......Page 178 Notes......Page 192 Works Cited......Page 224 Index......Page 238 John Thelwall was a Romantic and Enlightenment polymath. In 1794 he was tried and acquitted of high treason, earning himself the disdainful soubriquet'acquitted felon'from Secretary of State for War, William Windham. Later, Thelwall's interests turned to poetry and plays, and was a collaborator and confidant of Wordsworth and Coleridge. John Thelwall was a Romantic and Enlightenment polymath. During the 1790s, he achieved national recognition as an orator, republican, Jacobin theorist and leading member of the proto-democratic London Corresponding Society. This collection draws together a range of essays from leading 18th-century and Romantic scholars Fourteen essays on the Romantic period radical and polymath, John Thelwall.