Politico-Sentimentality: John Thelwall, Literary Production and the Critique of Capital in the 1790s

Abstract

In E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, John Thelwall embodies the pathos of thwarted heroism that typifies the radical milieu of the 1790s in the imaginings of the British left. ‘Thelwall took Jacobinism to the borders of Socialism; he also took it to the borders of revolutionism’, writes Thompson eulogistically.¹ As one of the London Corresponding Society members prosecuted for treason in 1794, and as the orator who addressed an estimated crowd of one hundred and fifty thousand in Copenhagen Fields in 1795, Thelwall has at least a consistent profile in histories of the labour movement and in materialist social histories of the 1790s. Besides political philosophy and public activism, however, Thelwall also published several collections of poetry, though as a figure in the development of Romantic literary forms and as an inheritor of the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility, he is marginal at best, typically warranting a dismissive footnote, or at most figuring in the background of studies on Coleridge, Wordsworth or early Romanticism more generally.