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. 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. 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’. 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”’. 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. For them, the appearance of popular opinion would always already be a super- or sub-political spectre rather than a truly political body; a ‘new raised phantom, which calls itself THE PEOPLE’. 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 a ‘living body’ in a political realm whose metaphysical laws denied the very possibility of such an appearance.