Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: The character and reputation of an ‘acquitted felon’
- 1 The Lives of John Thelwall: Another View of the ‘Jacobin Fox’
- 2 Usual and Unusual Suspects: John Thelwall, William Godwin and Pitt's Reign of Terror
- 3 Thelwall in his own Defence: The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons
- 4 Labour, Contingency, Utility: Thelwall's Theory of Property
- 5 ‘A Loud, a Fervid, and Resolute Remonstrance with our Rulers’: John Thelwall, the People and Political Economy
- 6 John Thelwall's Radical Vision of Democracy
- 7 Articulations of Community in The Peripatetic
- 8 Domestic Invasions: John Thelwall and the Exploitation of Privacy
- 9 ‘The Dungeon and the Cell’: The Prison Verse of Coleridge and Thelwall
- 10 Thelwall's Two Plays Against Empire: Incle and Yarico (1787) and The Incas (1792)
- 11 A ‘Double Visag'd Fate’: John Thelwall and the Hapless Hope of Albion
- 12 The Conceptual Underpinnings of John Thelwall's Elocutionary Practices
- 13 Tracing the Textual Reverberation: The Role of Thelwall's Elocutionary Selections in the British Lyceum
- 14 ‘Not Precedents to be Followed but Examples to be Weighed’: John Thelwall and the Jacobin Sense of the Past
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
9 - ‘The Dungeon and the Cell’: The Prison Verse of Coleridge and Thelwall
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: The character and reputation of an ‘acquitted felon’
- 1 The Lives of John Thelwall: Another View of the ‘Jacobin Fox’
- 2 Usual and Unusual Suspects: John Thelwall, William Godwin and Pitt's Reign of Terror
- 3 Thelwall in his own Defence: The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons
- 4 Labour, Contingency, Utility: Thelwall's Theory of Property
- 5 ‘A Loud, a Fervid, and Resolute Remonstrance with our Rulers’: John Thelwall, the People and Political Economy
- 6 John Thelwall's Radical Vision of Democracy
- 7 Articulations of Community in The Peripatetic
- 8 Domestic Invasions: John Thelwall and the Exploitation of Privacy
- 9 ‘The Dungeon and the Cell’: The Prison Verse of Coleridge and Thelwall
- 10 Thelwall's Two Plays Against Empire: Incle and Yarico (1787) and The Incas (1792)
- 11 A ‘Double Visag'd Fate’: John Thelwall and the Hapless Hope of Albion
- 12 The Conceptual Underpinnings of John Thelwall's Elocutionary Practices
- 13 Tracing the Textual Reverberation: The Role of Thelwall's Elocutionary Selections in the British Lyceum
- 14 ‘Not Precedents to be Followed but Examples to be Weighed’: John Thelwall and the Jacobin Sense of the Past
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
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’. 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.
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.
But he unaw'd by guilty fears,
(To Freedom and his Country true)
Who o'er a race of well-spent years
Can cast the retrospective view,
Looks inward to his heart, and sees
The objects that must ever please.
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- John ThelwallRadical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, pp. 107 - 116Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014