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
Introduction: The character and reputation of an ‘acquitted felon’
- 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
This tragical plot has turn'd out a mere farce,
And th'alarmists we fairly outwitted;
‘If we are’, cries the amanuensis of Mars,
‘Still your friends are but felons acquitted’.
‘Epigram on the “Acquitted Felons”’, Cabinet of Curiosities (London, 1795), p. 62.Reintroducing himself to public life during a boisterous election meeting for Westminster in 1819, John Thelwall offered his audience a quick word of explanation for his twenty-year absence from the reform struggle. Weary of government-inspired attempts to ‘hunt him down like a wild beast’, and doubtful about his own effectiveness in the cause of reform, he had withdrawn into the arms of his family. Yet, now, here he stood once again, unchanged, uncorrupted and re-energized. How would he have them remember him? Simply, he said. And when he died, a memorial stone might record his contribution for posterity: ‘Here lies John Thelwall, whose moral and political character was never impeached’.
As ill-luck would have it however, Thelwall died quietly on a lecture tour at Bath in 1834. His funeral was not noticed in either the national or local press, and for seven months no memorial marked his last resting place. His widow and a few friends in London tried unsuccessfully to raise a subscription for a ‘handsome mural monument’, but finally settled for a ‘temporary’ marker of local stone. Its inscription is a good deal less simple than the one Thelwall had in mind in 1819, but no less evasive in its commemoration of a man who had been, in E. P. Thompson's judgement, Britain's most important, ‘courageous and judicious’ radical theorist of the French Revolutionary years, a man who had once addressed crowds of 500–600, twice weekly in his London lecture rooms, and who had stood trial on a charge of High Treason for it:
He brought to its highest perfection the science which distinguishes mankind from the brute. In his utterances Englishmen experienced the full beauty and energy of their native speech.
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- John ThelwallRadical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, pp. 1 - 12Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014