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: