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
2 - Usual and Unusual Suspects: John Thelwall, William Godwin and Pitt's Reign of Terror
- 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
John Thelwall and William Godwin provide two of the clearest and most significant examples of the ways in which innocent lives in the 1790s were drastically altered by their encounters with the British state's domestic security apparatus, which critical commentators then and some historians today refer to as Pitt's ‘Reign of Terror’. They also provide a paradigmatic representation of the ways in which the victims of this state-sponsored system of intimidation can be divided into two groups, which I call ‘usual’ and ‘unusual’ suspects. Thelwall represents the former group: active reformers (organizers, lecturers, writers, publishers) against whom the state acted directly by arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, trial and, most of the time, conviction and punishment. Godwin represents the ‘unusual’ suspects: not activists (on principle, in his case), but writers whose work (treatises, novels, plays, poems) expressed optimistic views of, at first, the events or ideals of the French Revolution and, after 1793, of the practice or theory of parliamentary reform in Britain which had revived in response to it. These ‘unusual’ suspects were not, for the most part, arrested or otherwise acted upon officially. Instead, their lives and especially their careers suffered significantly from the hegemonic (informal, vigilante) ‘overflow’ of state-sponsored intimidation: innuendo, threat, rumour, gossip, false reports and the like, which resulted in a wide range of largely irreversible negative effects: fellowships lost, promotions denied, promised church livings withheld, inheritances unforthcoming, contracts and engagements broken, and so on and on.
In both groupings, however, the result was the same: an effective silencing of dissent, dramatically reduced career possibilities, and an ‘after’ or ‘second’ life markedly different than the promising ones members of both groups had begun to envision for themselves. Like Thelwall and Godwin, most people in both groups recovered to a degree (though less so in the case of the former), but their lives and careers were never the same again.
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- John ThelwallRadical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, pp. 25 - 38Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014