Abstract
Thelwall’s earliest literary attempt at sparking a new consciousness in the body politic was his 1793 work The Peripatetic; or, Sketches of the Heart, of Nature and Society; in a Series of Politico-Sentimental Journals, in Verse and Prose of the Eccentric Excursions of Sylvanus Theophrastus, Supposed to be Written by Himself. Following the pedestrian excursions of the poet-philosopher Sylvanus Theophrastus and various companions, the work gives us a running (or walking) commentary on the sociopolitical and cultural state of England in the early 1790s. A striking feature of this condition-of-England fiction avant la lettre is its ‘politico-sentimental’ mingling of genres, styles and voices in a series of more than 100 brief sections. In the preface Thelwall describes it as ‘uniting the different advantages of the novel, the sentimental journal, and the miscellaneous collection of essays and poetical effusions’.2 He might also have mentioned the travelogue, epic poem, gothic tale, political lecture, autobiography and character-sketch. These disparate elements are held together by the sentimental subplot of Belmour and Sophia, young lovers kept apart by the dictates of paternal tyranny. Thelwall claimed to have introduced this narrative thread and the character of the narrator to boost The Peripatetic’s, circulation at the suggestion of a ‘literary friend’ — probably Thomas Holcroft, a strong proponent of ‘[u]nity of design’ in the novel.3
Reason is not the sole Arbiter in the human mind. Imagination has also a considerable share in the enjoyment and perturbations of the soul: nor will her vivid impressions always submit to the cool and regular deductions of Philosophy.1
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Notes
Thelwall, Peripatetic, p. 255. Judith Thompson draws attention to The Peripatetic’s attempt to ‘dismantle discursive structures and replace them with an ideal of intergeneric conversation’, in ‘John Thelwall and the Politics of Genre 1793/1993’, Wordsworth Circle 25, no. 1 (1994), 22;
and Thompson (ed.), The Peripatetic, by John Thelwall (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2001), pp. 40–1; and she has more recently highlighted the work’s contribution to the ‘autobiographical conversation’ of Thelwall and Wordsworth, in Silenced Partner, pp. 189–201, 189. Michael Scrivener discusses The Peripatetics literal and figurative performance of ‘eccentricity’, or divergence from a centre, in relation chiefly to Wordsworth, in Seditious Allegories, pp. 210–19. Gary Kelly sees The Peripatetic as an example of the Romantic ‘quasi-novel’, which appropriated the factual discourses of history, travel writing, antiquarianism and autobiography to redeem the novel from its status as an effeminate, commercialized and sub-literary genre; see ‘The Limits of Genre and the Institution of Literature: Romanticism between Fact and Fiction’, in Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 167.
According to Henry Crabb Robinson, Wordsworth borrowed from Thelwall ‘without acknowledgment’. Diary Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Thomas Sadler, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London: Macmillan, 1869), vol. I, p. 473. On this influence see also Thompson, Silenced Partner, pp. 187–218;
Kenneth R. Johnston, Wordsworth and The Recluse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 11–14; and Judson Stanley Lyon, The Excursion: A Study (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950), pp. 35–7.
Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 266.
Such theories are discussed in J. R. Poynter, Society and Pauperism: English Ideas on Poor Relief, 1795–1834 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 1–44.
Claeys (ed.), PEJ, p. lii. Claeys discusses Thelwall’s ‘new vision of egalitarian commercial republicanism’ as it laid a foundation for the development of both socialist and liberal thought in the nineteenth century in ‘Rights of Labour’, 263–74. Other insightful accounts of Thelwall’s economic and political theory include Geoffrey Gallop, ‘Ideology and the English Jacobins: The Case of John Thelwall’, Enlightenment and Dissent 5 (1986), 3–20;
Iain Hampsher-Monk, ‘John Thelwall and the Eighteenth-Century Radical Response to Political Economy’, Historical Journal 34 (1991), 1–20;
Robert Lamb, ‘Labour, Contingency, Utility: Thelwall’s Theory of Property’, in John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, ed. Steve Poole, The Enlightenment World 11 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), pp. 51–60;
and Richard Sheldon ‘“A Loud, a Fervid, and Resolute Remonstrance with our Rulers”: John Thelwall, the People and Political Economy’, in John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, ed. Steve Poole, The Enlightenment World 11 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), pp. 61–70.
John Armstrong, The Art of Preserving Health, Book IV, lines 40–6 and 84–5, repr. in Thelwall, Selections for the Illustration of a Course of Instructions on the Rhythmus and Utterance of the English Language (London, 1812), pp. 117–20.
Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, 1. 50, in Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green, The Cornell Wordsworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 117. I have in mind also Marjorie Levinson’s critique of Wordsworth’s ‘transcendentalizing impulse’ in this poem, which leads him to ‘exclude from his field [of vision] certain conflictual sights and meanings — roughly, the life of things’, as noted in Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Tour Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 25.
Robinson, The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), p. 52.
Thelwall, Peripatetic, p. 71; Sterne, A Sentimental Journey and Other Writings, ed. lan Jack and Tim Parnell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; repr. 2008), p. 4.
Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 5–12.
J. W. Smeed, The Theophrastan ‘Character’: The History of a Literary Genre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 64–5.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1985), p. 88.
Anne D. Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origin and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 93–4.
Lamb, ‘Language and Hartleian Associationism in A Sentimental Journey’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 13, no. 3 (Spring 1980), 304. The gypsies cluster, like the haymaker episode, also instantiates what Alan Richardson describes as the ‘shuttling among memory, imagination, mind reading, reverie, and even navigation’ that occurs in a wide range of Romantic-era fiction and poetry, and which he compares with the age-old practice of ‘wayflnding’, finding one’s way by repeatedly taking stock of one’s past, present and future locations. ‘Reimagining’, 393–4. For Michael Scrivener’s reading of the gypsies cluster as it educates the reader in ‘the art of making analogies’, see Seditious Allegories, p. 212.
Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 15–16, which does not discuss The Peripatetic;
Miriam L. Wallace, Revolutionary Subjects in the English ‘Jacobin’ Novel, 1790–1805, Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2009), p. 31.
Rothstein, ‘“Ideal Presence” and the “Non Finito” in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 9, no. 3 (1976), 323.
Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; repr. 2005), p. 121.
McCann, Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 87–9.
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© 2014 Yasmin Solomonescu
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Solomonescu, Y. (2014). Errant Sympathies. 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_3
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