Abstract
On 27 October 1795, the day after John Thelwall had addressed a mass meeting of the ‘Friends of Parliamentary Reform’ at Copenhagen Fields, Islington, the anti-Jacobin periodical the Tomahawk published the following squib ‘On Mister Surgeon Thelwall’:
Poor Mister Thelwall has exhausted
All his little stock of wit, The fellow merits — to be hoisted;
So high he soars — to pick a bit.
He dealt with resurrection-men,
To make the Quick rise now he’s at; But sure we cannot wonder, when
The fellow is a Democrat!
If he would eat in peace his bread,
Why let him follow ancient thriving; Go pick the BONES then of the dead
And not the POCKETS of the living!1
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Notes
Britton, The Auto-Biography of John Britton (London, 1849), vol. I, p. 146. Thelwall’s widow Henrietta Cecil, having devoted the first volume of her Life of John Thelwall to his achievements in politics, planned a second that would encompass his literary and scientific (specifically elocutionary) pursuits, but that second volume never appeared. Mrs. Thelwall, Life, p. xii.
Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963; repr. London: Penguin, 1991).
The earliest book about Thelwall was Charles Cestre’s John Thelwall: A Pioneer of Democracy and Social Reform in England during the Trench Revolution (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1906), which was based partly on six volumes of Thelwall’s letters, notes and outlines of intended books and lectures that Cestre purchased at Sotheby’s in June 1904 and are now lost.
Nicholas Roe reconstructs the volumes’ likely contents in ‘The Lives of John Thelwall: Another View of the “Jacobin Fox”’, in John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, ed. Steve Poole, The Enlightenment World 11 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), pp. 17–19. Another loss to the Thelwall archive was the seizure, on his arrest in 1794, of many of his early manuscripts — ‘all the unpublished material of ten years’ -including poems, plays, novels and essays. Mrs. Thelwall, Life, p. 163.
E. P Thompson, ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’, Past and Present 142 (1994), 94–140;
Claeys (ed.), The Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995);
Claeys, ‘The Origins of the Rights of Labour: Republicanism, Commerce, and the Construction of Modern Social Theory in Britain, 1796–1805’, Journal of Modern History 66 (1994), 249–90;
Barreli, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 104–8, 391–401.
Scrivener, Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001);
Thompson, John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle: The Silenced Partner, Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
A catalyst of Thelwall’s literary recovery was Nicholas Roe’s discussion of his relationship with the canonical poets in Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
See, for instance, Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 47 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
Nicholas Roe (ed.), Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001);
Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee and Peter J. Kitson, Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 60 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall (eds), Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780–1830 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008);
and Noel Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 73 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Thelwall, Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement (Hereford, 1801; repr. Oxford: Woodstock, 1989), pp. xxii–xxiii.
Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; repr. 2009), p. 701.
Donald Reiman (ed.), Ode to Science, John Gilpin’s Ghost, Poems, The Trident of Albion, by John Thelwall (New York: Garland, 1978), p. x.
I allude to the original title of William Godwin’s 1794 novel Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)
and to Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) and the scholarship inspired by it.
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1973; repr. New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 145.
Simon Blackburn offers a comparable definition in The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), s.v. ‘vitalism’.
Cf. also George Rousseau’s definition of vitalism as the belief in the existence of ‘a mysterious force running through all matter in the universe’, in ‘The Perpetual Crises of Modernism and the Traditions of Enlightenment Vitalism: with a Note on Mikhail Bakhtin’, in The Crisis of Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, ed. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 24.
Vickers, Coleridge and the Doctors, 1795–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004);
Gigante, Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
A landmark study of the organic and vitalistic qualities of the Romantic imagination remains M. H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953; repr. New York: Norton, 1958).
McGann, Romantic Ideology, Richardson, Science of the Mind, p. 36. See also Richardson, The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010);
Sha, ‘Romantic Physiology and the Work of Romantic Imagination: Hypothesis and Speculation in Science and Coleridge’, European Romantic Review 24, no. 4 (2013), 403–19;
Sha, ‘Toward a Physiology of the Romantic Imagination’, Configurations 17 (2009), 206–9;
Sha, ‘Imagination as Inter-Science’, European Romantic Review 20, no. 5 (Dec. 2009), 661–9;
Levinson, ‘A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza’, Studies in Romanticism 46 (Winter 2007), 367–408;
and Ruston, Shelley and Vitality (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; repr. 2012).
Richardson, ‘Reimagining the Romantic Imagination’, European Romantic Review 24, no. 4 (2013), 385.
Hartman, ‘Wordsworth and Metapsychology’, in Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience, ed. Alexander Regier and Stefan H. Uhlig (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 195.
Ruston, Shelley and Vitality; Levinson, ‘A Motion and a Spirit’; ss Jackson, Science and Sensation; Gilmore, Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
Roe, The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries, 2nd edn (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), especially pp. 87–119, where Roe reprints the Animal Vitality essay and provides illuminating commentary.
Packham, Eighteenth-Century Vitalism: Bodies, Culture, Politics, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 122–43.
Thelwall’s materialist speculations about ‘animal vitality’ are also discussed in James Robert Allard, Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body, The Nineteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 66–70;
and Mary Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 97 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 107–21. I engage their readings in the ensuing chapters.
Macherey, ‘In a Materialist Way’, in Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Monteflore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 142.
See, for instance, the essays collected in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 197, where he notes that the use of ‘materialism’ to designate ‘an overriding or primary concern with the production and acquisition of things and money’ has ‘no necessary philosophical and scientific connection’ to the first two definitions.
Coleridge, ‘Irregular Sonnet: To John Thelwall’, in Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C Mays, 3 vols, Bollingen Series 75 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2001), vol. I, pp. 264–5; and The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956–71), vol. I, p. 137.
Thelwall, Marginalia on Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, repr. in Burton R. Pollin and Redmond Burke, ‘John Thelwall’s Marginalia in a Copy of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library 74 (1970), 82.
OED Online, s.v. ‘nervous, adj.’ George Rousseau notes that the eighteenth-century rise of a ‘nervous style’ was tied to an empiricist-sensationalist aesthetics of perception based on the functions of the brain and nervous system, in Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 40–6.
On the political contests over language use and theory in the period, see, notably, James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963; repr. Westport: Greenwood, 1975);
and Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
See Nicholas Roe’s remarks about this ‘positive’ mode of historical reading in Politics of Nature, p. 9, and Damian Walford Davies’s comparable remarks about his attention to ‘the modalities of presence’ in Presences that Disturb: Models of Romantic Identity in the Literature and Culture of the 1790s (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), p. 3.
Magnuson, Reading Public Romanticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
The phrase ‘literal archaeology’ is borrowed from Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. ix.
See, notably, E. P. Thompson, ‘Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon’, in The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age (New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 33–74.
Philp, ‘The Fragmented Ideology of Reform’, in The Trench Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. Mark Philp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 72–3.
Klancher, ‘Godwin and the Republican Romance: Genre, Politics, and Contingency in Cultural History’, Modern Language Quarterly 56, no. 2 (June 1995), 145–65.
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© 2014 Yasmin Solomonescu
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Solomonescu, Y. (2014). Introduction. In: John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426147_1
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