Abstract
John Thelwall wanted to give his heart to medical science. He and the surgeon Astley Cooper had an agreement whereby, if Thelwall died first, Cooper would receive his heart for medical study. It was apparently remarkable for its pathology, as well as for its radical sensibility. According to his second wife and biographer, Henrietta Cecil, Thelwall suffered from a strange condition that sometimes caused his heart to beat so loudly that it was audible from several yards away. On one occasion it startled a passer-by in the street; on another it awoke Cecil in the middle of the night, when she mistook its beating for someone knocking at the door. Cooper joked that his friend had ‘an exceedingly good head — but an excessively bad heart!’.2 Although that defective organ eventually caused Thelwall’s death in 1834 when he suffered ‘some affection’ of it, probably a heart attack, while on an elocutionary lecture-stop in Bath, it seems doubtful that Cooper ever sought fulfilment of their agreement.3 He knew, in any case, that Thelwall had already given his heart to medical science four decades earlier, when he attended lectures at Guy’s and St. Thomas’s hospitals in London and immersed himself in the debates about vitality and cognition that were to pulse through his life’s work. Thelwall’s early engagement with medical science was a vital context for his pursuits across disciplines and decades, yet it has long lain buried beneath his profile as a radical agitator and one-time friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge.
But what is this something — this vivifying principle?1
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Notes
Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, p. 197; Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason: How the Enlightenment Transformed the Way We See Our Bodies and Souls (London: Allen Lane, 2003; repr. London: Penguin, 2004);
Porter, ‘Medical Science and Human Science in the Enlightenment’, in Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains, ed. Christopher Fox, Roy Porter and Robert Wokler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 53–87;
Rousseau, Nervous Acts; and Rousseau, ‘Science and the Discovery of the Imagination in Enlightened England’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1969), 108–35.
Thelwall, Retirement, p. vii. The ‘Prefatory Memoir’ in the Retirement collection and the posthumous Life of John Thelwall by Henrietta Cecil Thelwall are the two chief sources of information about his life. See also Nicholas Roe, ‘Thelwall, John (1764–1834)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, online edn, ed. Lawrence Goldman, Sept. 2012, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27167 (accessed 16 Nov. 2012); and Judith Thompson (ed.), ‘John Thelwall in Time and Text’, Romantic Circles, Aug. 2012, http://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/thelwall_chronology/index.html (accessed 27 Oct. 2012).
Drain Burch, Digging up the Dead: The Life and Times of Astley Cooper, an Extraordinary Surgeon (London: Vintage, 2008), pp. 98–9.
Parkinson, a member of the Society for Constitutional Information and London Corresponding Society, published several radical pamphlets. Walker went to Paris, became acquainted with many radicals and translated the manifesto of the Theophilanthropists, an atheistic society. See Michael Bevan, ‘Parkinson, James (1755–1824)’ and Deborah Brunton, ‘Walker, John (1759–1830)’, both in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, ed. Lawrence Goldman, Oct. 2009, http://www.oxforddnb.com (accessed 16 Oct. 2012 and 22 June 2011).
Carolyn D. Williams, ‘Hawes, William (1736–1808)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, ed. Lawrence Goldman, Oct. 2009, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12648 (accessed 11 June 2012).
L. S. Jacyna, ‘Immanence or Transcendence: Theories of Life and Organization in Britain, 1790–1835’, Isis 74, no. 3 (1983), 311–29;
and George S. Erving, ‘The Politics of Matter: Newtonian Science and Priestleyan Metaphysics in Coleridge’s “Preternatural Agency”’, European Romantic Review 19, no. 3 (2008), 221.
Pantheism can be defined simply as the doctrine that identifies God with the universe, while hylozoism is the ancient doctrine that all matter has life. Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, s.v. ‘pantheism’ and ‘hylozoism’. For fuller treatments of Romantic-era pantheism, see Ian Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 122–42;
and Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).
I also draw here on Robert R. Schofleld, The Enlightened Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1773 to 1804 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), pp. 59–76;
Schofleld, Mechanism and Materialism: British Natural Philosophy in an Age of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), especially pp. 263–7;
and John W. Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 107–26. Thelwall’s substitution of ‘vacuum’ for ‘spirit’ in the Animal Vitality essay recalls Priestley’s famous experiments with air pumps and other kinds of apparatus to manipulate gases.
Patricia Fara, An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment, Revolutions in Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 51–61;
and Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Tuture, 1730–1810 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), pp. 12–14.
See, for instance, Paola Bertucci, ‘Therapeutic Attractions: Early Applications of Electricity to the Art of Healing’, in Brain, Mind and Medicine: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Neuroscience, ed. Harry Whitaker, C. U. M. Smith and Stanley Finger (New York: Springer, 2007), pp. 271–83.
See, for instance, Ruston, Shelley and Vitality; Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Tenor of Science (London: Harper, 2008), pp. 305–36;
and Miranda Seymour, Mary Shelley (New York: Grove, 2000), pp. 3–20.
Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 9.
Stephen M. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 81, 102, referring to Milton’s views from the late 1650s onwards.
Mrs. Thelwall, Life, pp. 44, 58–9, which also notes that Thelwall’s ‘first political publication’ was his ‘Ode on the Destruction of the Bastille’, which appeared in Biographical and Imperial Magazine 2 (1790), 312–15. See also Christopher Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’, in Democracy and the Labour Movement: Essays in Honour of Dona Torr, ed. John Saville (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1954), pp. 11–66.
Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the Trench Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 318; and Claeys (ed.), PEJ, p. xix.
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in Trance, in The Trench Revolution, 1790–1794, ed. L. G. Mitchell, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 111.
Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp, The Pickering Masters (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), p. 15.
Many Scottish philosophers of the mid-to late eighteenth century likewise discussed economic and social life in physiological terms, as Christopher Lawrence has shown in ‘The Nervous System and Society in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture, ed. Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin, Sage Focus Editions 6 (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1979), pp. 19–40.
Eyre’s charge is reprinted in Godwin, Political Writings II, ed. Mark Philp, The Pickering Masters (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), p. 73.
Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace, in The Revolutionary War, 1794–1797, and Ireland, ed. R. B. McDowell, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 224; and Thelwall quoting Burke in Rights of Nature, repr. in PEJ, p. 409.
Bransby Blake Cooper, The Life of Sir Astley Cooper, 2 vols (London, 1843), vol. I, p. 237; and [Jeffrey], Observations, pp. 249–50.
Topics of discussion at the Philomathian Society included religion, politics, the law, the theatres, property, free will and marriage, according to William St. Clair in The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (New York: Norton, 1989; repr. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 92–3.
Thelwall was a member of the Philomathians by 1791, when he delivered his ‘Ode to Science’ to mark its anniversary. Godwin joined the Philomathians in 1793, as did Thomas Holcroft (St. Clair, Godwins and Shelleys, p. 93). However, ss Godwin’s diary records that he first met Thelwall at John Horne Tooke’s house on 18 Aug. 1793, as noted by Pamela Clemit (ed.), The Letters of William Godwin, vol. I: 1778–1797 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 104. Godwin’s Political Justice was among the books seized from Thelwall’s home on his arrest (Mrs. Thelwall, Life, p. 164).
Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice: Variants, ed. Mark Philp, The Pickering Masters (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), p. 45.
Richardson, Science of the Mind, pp. 9–10. My discussion of eighteenth-century associationism is also informed by Cairns Craig, Associationism and the Literary Imagination: From the Phantasmal Chaos (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007);
Walter Jackson Bate, From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), pp. 93–128;
Martin Kallich, The Association of Ideas and Critical Theory in Eighteenth-Century England (The Hague: Mouton, 1970);
and Graham Richards, Mental Machinery: The Origins and Consequences of Psychological Ideas. Part I: 1600–1850 (London: Athlone, 1992).
Wayne A. Davis notes in Meaning, Expression, and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 461–80, that although most of association’s theoretical claims are false, it remains an important psychological phenomenon and a necessary complement to the focus on belief and desire in contemporary cognitive science.
Godwin, Political Justice, p. 178. On Godwin’s reconciliation of necessity and individual rationality, see Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 92–3.
Kramnick, ‘Eighteenth-Century Science and Radical Social Theory: The Case of Joseph Priestley’s Scientific Liberalism’, Journal of British Studies 25, no. 1 Gan. 1986), 15.
Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Judith Thompson (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2001), p. 339.
On the ‘allusive and elusive’ character of radical writing, see Jon Mee, ‘“Examples of Safe Printing”: Censorship and Popular Radical Literature in the 1790s’, in Literature and Censorship, ed. Nigel Smith, Essays and Studies ns 46 (Cambridge: Brewer, 1993), p. 86.
Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London: Routledge, 1993).
According to Mrs. Thelwall, Life, p. 110, Daniel Isaac Eaton published ‘King Chaunticlere’ in his newspaper Politics for the People ‘after dressing it up in certainly very strong terms, which Thelwall would never have used’, and was charged with libel as a result. The anecdote has been variously interpreted as an allegory of regicide, a parody of Burkean alarmism and a narrative of the death of Thelwall’s early church-and-king conservatism. For the first perspective, see Philp, ‘Fragmented Ideology’, 70–2; Barreli, Imagining, pp. 106–7; and Michael Scrivener, ‘John Thelwall and Popular Jacobin Allegory, 1793–95’, ELH 67 (2000), 956. For the second perspective, see Marcus Wood, ‘William Cobbett, John Thelwall, Radicalism, Racism and Slavery: A Study in Burkean Parodics’, Romanticism on the Net 15 (Aug. 1999), http://www.eradit.Org/revue/ron/1999/v/nl5/005873ar.html (accessed 23 May 2007);
and for the third, Damian Walford Davies, ‘Capital Crimes: John Thelwall, “Gallucide” and Psychobiography’, Romanticism 18, no. 1 (2012), 62.
Introducing excerpts from Thelwall’s political writings of the 1790s, Marilyn Butler claims that he ‘made little use of Tooke’s hostile analysis of upper-class language, or implied preference for a plain Anglo-Saxon discourse as a vehicle for ideas’; Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 207. Similarly, Olivia Smith observes of The Peripatetic that, ‘[t]he emotive heart and the political mind which Thelwall hoped to unite in his writings are kept apart by two styles of language, one for sentiment and another for thought’; Politics of Language, p. 87.
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Solomonescu, Y. (2014). Vital Principles. 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_2
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