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William Godwin's Influence upon John Thelwall

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

B. Sprague Allen
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Extract

At two periods in the eighteenth century, literature was more closely and more frequently associated than is its wont, with immediately contemporary events, and instead of being a disinterested interpretation of life it was enlisted in the service of propaganda. At the outset of the century party-politics, the bickering of Whig and Tory, more than once roused Defoe, Arbuthnot, Addison, and Swift to seize a polemic pen, and from the tumult of controversy emerged works like The Campaign amd The History of John Bull, inspired as much by anticipated rewards as by agitated feelings. Again, at the close of the century, in the presence of such a social upheaval as the French Revolution, it was impossible for thinking men to remain neutral. Problems, born of the intellectual ferment of the age and concerned with the fundamental issues of religion, morals, and government, stirred men to a white heat of partisanship and set them writing passionately, according to their sympathies, in behalf of liberty, equality, the state of nature and civilization, Christianity and atheism, and traditional ethics and individualistic morality. Losing contact with beauty, imaginative literature indeed at this time too often staggers under a weight of social philosophy.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , December 1922 , pp. 662 - 682
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1922

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References

1 A Letter to a Noble Lord.

2 The Anti-Jacobin—April 9, 1798.

3 Pursuits of Literature. First American, from Seventh London edition, revised. Philadelphia 1800, p. 116, pp. 99, 297.

4 John Thelwall,—Charles Cestre. London and New York, 1906. After comparing The Peripatetec and The Excursion Cestre concludes that the resemblance is “more than a fortuitous coincidence,” (p. 29). A contemporary opinion which he has overlooked, confirms his inference. After a visit to Thelwall, Crabb Robinson states in his Diary (February 12, 1815) “He talked of The Excursion as containing finer verses than there are in Milton, and as being in versification most admirable; but then Wordsworth borrows without acknowledgment from Thelwall himself!!”

5 The Tribune, A Periodical Publication, consisting chiefly of the Political Lectures of J. Thelwall, 3 vols. London; 1795-1796, Preface VIII, Vol. II. See also marginal comment in Thelwall's own hand on p. 7 of the British Museum copy of Democracy Vindicated. An Essay on the Constitution and Government of the Roman State; from the Posthumous works of Walter Moyle; with a preface and notes, by John Thelwall, Lecturer on Classical History, Norwich; 1796.

6 State Trials for High Treason—Part Third Containing the Trial of Mr. John Thelwall; Reported by a student of the Temple, London (1795).

7 A Letter to Francis Jeffray (sic), Edinburgh, 1804.

8 The Rights of Nature, against the Usurpations of Establishments. A series of letters to the People of Britain, occasioned by the recent effusions of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, London, 1796, Letter II.

9 Lecture: ‘On the Nature and Calamities of War.‘ The Tribune, I, 61 (seq.)—cf. p. 149. Compare Godwin's statement: “But, by conforming ourselves to the principles of our constitution, in this respect (i.e. ”to employ our understandings and increase our discernment“), we most effectually exclude all following, or implicit assent… . We must bring everything to the standard of reason. Nothing must be admitted either as principle or precept, that will not support this trial.” Political Justice, Third Ed., London, 1798, Book I, Ch. V.

10 The Tribune I, 149.

11 Early Recollections, chiefly relating to the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Joseph Cottle, 2 vols. London 1837, I. 254.

12 Lecture on the system of terror and persecution adopted by the present ministry. The Tribune, I, 261.

13 Sober Reflections on the Seditious and Inflammatory Letter of the Right Honorable E. Burke to a Noble Lord. London, 1796.

14 Considerations on Lord Grenville's and Mr. Pitt's Bills concerning Treasonable and Seditious Practices and Unlawful Assemblies, by a Lover of Order, London.

15 Political Justice—Vol. I, Bk. IV, Ch. VIII.

16 Ibid., Vol. II, Bk. VII, Ch. 1.

17 The Tribune I, 54. cf. On the Moral Tendency of a System of Spies and Informers. London 1794. For Shelley on necessity see Queen Mob. Canto VI.

18 The Tribune I, 54.

19 The Tribune I, 151. Compare this statement from Godwin's Caleb Williams (Vol. II, Ch. VI) when reference is made to the murderer Falkland. “If he have been criminal, that is owing to circumstances; the same qualities under other circumstances would have been, or rather were sublimely beneficient.”

20 Cestre, John Thelwall, Appendix.

21 For letter to Gerrald see Kegan Paul, William Godwin and his Contemporaries, I, 125.

22 The material for this part of the discussion is based on the lectures “On the Moral and Political Influence of the Prospective Principle of Virture.” The Tribune, I, 147, 222.

23 A Letter to Francis Jeffray.

24 The Rights of Nature, Letter III.

25 The Daughter Of Adoption. A Tale of Modern Times by John Beaufort L.L.D. 4 vols. London 1801. The identity of the authorship is established by the Prefatory Memoir in Poems Chiefly Written in Retirement by John Thelwall, Hereford, 1802.

26 See the present writer's article, “The Reaction against William Godwin,” Mod. Philol., Sept., 1918.

27 See the present writer's article, “William Godwin as a Sentimentalist,” P. M. L. A., XXXIII, 1.

28 On the Moral Tendency of a System of Spies and Informers.