One of twenty-four quotations from Thelwall appearing in the OED exemplifies the use of ‘participated’ as an adjective meaning ‘shared’. The source is Thelwall's 1793 work in verse and prose, The Peripatetic; or, Sketches of the Heart, of Nature and Society; in a Series of Politico-Sentimental Journals, in Verse and Prose of the Eccentric Excursions of Sylvanus Theophrastus, Supposed to be Written by Himself. More specifically, the source is the satirical poem ‘Philautiaccha; or the Voluptuary: A Rhapsody’, which pays tribute to an imagined patron-deity of pleasure, Philautiaccha, who is the illegitimate daughter of Bacchus and ‘the sordid dame Misanthropy’. The latter is described in the lines quoted by the OED as

In this instance, ‘participated’ not only fills out the metre of the line, but also makes explicit a guiding literary and philosophical principle of The Peripatetic. It is worth recalling that in the late eighteenth century ‘participation’ still carried the meaning of sharing something in common.

With this definition in mind, I propose to read The Peripatetic as Thelwall's earliest literary experiment in political consciousness-raising and what we might think of, following the contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, as the writing of community, or what he calls ‘being in common’. Drawing on Nancy in conjunction with Aristotle, whose ethical theories inform The Peripatetic, I will present this heterogeneous work as a participatory conversation among ideas, voices and genres that gives shape to what Nancy describes as ‘a community of articulation’ even as it casts into doubt its own ability, as a literary work, to catalyze immediate political change.

The placement of the rhapsodic ‘Philautiaccha’ in the middle of a prose anecdote (‘An Equestrian Digression’) is typical of The Peripatetic, which alternates verse and prose in a series of thematically diverse clusters that span three volumes.