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
13 - Tracing the Textual Reverberation: The Role of Thelwall's Elocutionary Selections in the British Lyceum
- 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
Toy with your books; and as the various fits
Of humour seize you from philosophy
To fable shift, from serious Antonine
To Rabelai's ravings, and from prose to song.
While reading pleases, but not longer, read;
And read aloud, resounding Homer's
strain And wield the thunder of Demosthenes.
(John Armstrong, ‘Management of the Mind’, Selections BL-B 34–40)This oratorical call to action, drawn from John Thelwall's edited version of John Armstrong's ‘Management of the Mind’, presents a striking ideological revision of our concept of Britain's traditional reading practices. Calling for a shift in genre from serious philosophy to playful fable, an exchange in voice from a demure Antonine to a verbally explosive Rabelais, a reconfiguration of register from silent prose to oral song and, in turn, a redefinition of reading itself from passive absorption to active performance, Anderson's passage proposes a reading practice informed by the performative values of oratory. Featured in Thelwall's elocutionary textbook, Selections, Armstrong's ‘Management of the Mind’ conceptualizes Thelwall's poetics of speech and serves as a paradigm of his orally-inflected program of self-improvement. As one of several excerpts in the Selections which reflect the tenets of Thelwall's learner-centred approach to elocutionary development, Armstrong's passage demonstrates the connections between Thelwall's speech-based theory of education and Britain's nascent learning culture. More specifically, this command to ‘read aloud, resounding Homer's strain’ speaks to a unique historical moment in the early years of the nineteenth century, when the emergence of what Jürgen Habermas refers to as the ‘public sphere’, coupled with innovations in the structure and accessibility of popular print forms, were met with powerful reforms in the nation's education system.
In the early years of the nineteenth century, a climate of what Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite refer to as ‘Romantic sociability’ began to emerge, ‘engendered by the commercialization of culture in venues such as the coffee-house, the inn, tavern, alehouse, the proliferation of forms of voluntary association … and so on’.
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- Information
- John ThelwallRadical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, pp. 147 - 160Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014