‘Thelwall is suddenly an O.K. subject’, E. P. Thompson said in a letter to me in 1993. He was reflecting on the resurgence of interest in John Thelwall at the bicentenary of the French Revolution, and thinking as well of the revival of history in Romantic studies that was then current. His own classic study of Thelwall, ‘Disenchantment or Default?’ dated from 1968 – the year of the Paris riot. Thirty years later, Thompson's essay was republished in The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age (1993), one of the great historicist studies of the English Romantic poets alongside Paul Foot's Red Shelley (1980). If these books capture the essence of contemporary protest, modern Romantic biography does so too – notably in the interweaving of circumstance and spirit in Richard Holmes's lives of Shelley and Coleridge; Holmes was living at Paris in May 1968, and writes powerfully about his experiences in his book Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985).

Remembered now principally as an English Jacobin of the 1790s, as for example in Greg Claeys's authoritative edition of the Political Writings of John Thelwall (1995) and the same author's The French Revolution Debate in Britain (2007), John Thelwall actually lived for nearly seventy years, 1764–1834. His long life connects Romantic and nineteenth-century English culture, the revolutionary 1790s and the Chartist 1830s. He moved between the underworld of London's artisans and the educated sphere of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and in 1793 appeared at the Physical Society in Guy's Hospital alongside medical men like Astley Cooper who later taught John Keats.

In this essay I want to offer a more complete portrait of Thelwall, or, at least, a first sketch towards that. One angle of approach will try to explain why we have no modern biography of Thelwall – as we do of many of his political and literary acquaintances – and in the course of that I hope to draw attention to some aspects of his life and work that lie beyond the revolutionary decade.