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
Preface
- 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
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. 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’ (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.
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- Information
- John ThelwallRadical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, pp. xiii - xviPublisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014