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
12 - The Conceptual Underpinnings of John Thelwall's Elocutionary Practices
- 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
At the turn of the nineteenth century, after being harassed for his radical political ideas and after failing to make a financial go of it as a farmer, lecturer and writer, John Thelwall began to establish himself as an elocutionist. Between the years 1802 and 1826 he lectured often on the ‘science and practice of elocution’. During these years he also wrote three lengthy works on his theories and practices as well thirty or so smaller pieces, including articles in newspapers and unpublished tracts. Finally, it was during this period that Thelwall opened his first institute in London, where he lived, housed and taught his pupils, gave public lectures and oratory performances and provided a venue for his students to publicly display their elocutionary skills.
His 1806 announcement of the opening of this Institute published in the Medical and Physical Journal reads as follows:
Mr. Thelwall has opened a Seminary, No. 40 Bedford Place, Russell Square, for the cultivation of the Science and Practice of Elocution, and the Cure of Impediments of Speech; and is delivering a Course of Lectures on the Elementary Principles of his Art. The lectures are illustrated by graphic and mechanical demonstrations of the essential propositions; and are occasionally relieved by popular readings and recitations, and specimens of spontaneous oratory. Mr. T. also proposes to receive into his house a limited number of pupils who have impediments of utterance, of whatever description, the deaf alone excepted; and to give lessons, at stated hours, to individuals and to select classes, to whom domestication might not be convenient; and who may either labour under the like imperfections, or be desirous of improvement in the accomplishments of reading and recitation, conversational fluency, public oratory, and the principles of criticism and composition.
This essay focuses on the therapeutic aspects of Thelwall's elocutionary practices. I will try to show that his contributions to elocution are worthy of study on their own terms and deserve to be treated as more than a forced or unfortunate departure from his political and literary work.
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- Information
- John ThelwallRadical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, pp. 139 - 146Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014