Abstract
In a brief but fascinating essay of 1820 ‘On Human Automatonism’, inspired by a 20-year struggle to complete his epic poem The Hope of Albion, Thelwall admitted the possibility that his faith in individual rational agency was misguided:
Say what we choose on the self-satisfying subject of free-will, there are phenomena enough in almost every life to justify an occasional suspicion that we are nothing but mere machines — speaking automatons, whose very words are breathed thro’ us, as thro’ an organ-pipe, inflated by some exterior agency, and stopped or played upon by the finger of a capricious destiny. We reason, it is true, or appear to do so; but how seldom is the practical result a consistent part of the syllogism? We resolve, or persuade ourselves that we have done so; but how frequently our actions gainsay our pretended resolutions: -nay, fly in the very teeth of them, and shew that we know nothing of ourselves.2
[T]here are phenomena enough in almost every life to justify an occasional suspicion that we are nothing but mere machines — speaking automatons[.]1
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Notes
Thelwall, The Daughter of Adoption; A Tale of Modern Times, ed. Michael Scrivener, Yasmin Solomonescu and Judith Thompson (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2013), p. 270.
Godwin, Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit, The Pickering Masters (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), pp. 298–9.
Williams, Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays, Radical Thinkers (London: Verso, 1980; repr. 2005), pp. 108–9.
Scrivener, Seditious Allegories, pp. 250–1; Thompson, ‘A “Double-Visag’d Fate”: John Thelwall and the Hapless Hope of Albion’, in John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, ed. Steve Poole, The Enlightenment World 11 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), pp. 128–9. By contrast, Alan Lupack’s assessment of The Fairy as a critique of the hero’s ‘destructive vengeance’ does not fit with Arthur’s primarily self-destructive tendencies.
Lupack (ed.), Arthurian Drama: An Anthology (New York: Garland, 1991), pp. xvi–xvii.
Thelwall, Retirement, p. 16; Thompson, ‘Double-Visag’d’, p. 129. On Walsh and Thelwall, see Nicholas Roe, ‘Who Was Spy Nozy?’ Wordsworth Circle 15, no. 2 (1984), 46–50;
and A. J. Eagleston, ‘Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Spy’, in Coleridge: Studies by Several Hands on the Hundredth Anniversary of His Death, ed. Edmund Blunden and Earl Leslie Griggs (London: Constable, 1934), pp. 73–87.
Patty O’Boyle suggests instead that Incubus might be modelled on Coleridge in ‘Coleridge, Wordsworth and Thelwall’s Fairy of the Lake’, Coleridge Bulletin ns 28 (2006), 66–7.
Thelwall, Poetical Recreations, p. 236; Hume, The History of England, 6 vols (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1983), vol. I, p. 36, The Online Library of Liberty, http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/1868 (accessed 7 Nov. 2012).
As noted by Steve Poole in ‘“Not Precedents to Be Followed but Examples to Be Weighed”: John Thelwall and the Jacobin Sense of the Past’, in John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, ed. Steve Poole, The Enlightenment World 11 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), p. 163.
The page count refers to the four-volume London edition published in 1801 by Richard Phillips; the same year’s two-volume Dublin edition was published by Nicholas Kelly. Textual variants are discussed in Michael Scrivener, Yasmin Solomonescu and Judith Thompson (eds), The Daughter of Adoption; A Tale of Modern Times (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2013), pp. 41–2.
As Robert Southey explained to a friend in November 1801: ‘The novel you mention is by John Thelwall, and in the assumed name of Beaufort you may trace the Lecturer in Beaufort Buildings’; New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry, 2 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), vol. I, p. 256.
Srinivas Aravamudan (ed.), Fiction (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), p. xviii, vol. VI of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, ed. Peter J. Kitson and Deborah Lee, 8 vols.
Thelwall, Incle and Yarico and The Incas: Two Plays by John Thelwall, ed. Michael Scrivener and Frank Felsenstein (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006).
Baron de Wimpffen, A Voyage to Saint Domingo, in the Years 1788, 1789, and 1790, trans. J. Wright (London, 1797);
Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies, vol. Ill (London, 1798).
The classic modern account of the rebellion is C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Dial, 1938; repr. London: Allison and Busby, 1980).
Although the Amis prided themselves on representing the national interest, they were sometimes accused of being English agents sent to weaken the French hold on the Antilles. See Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 169–77.
Kitson, ‘“Bales of Living Anguish”: Representations of Race and the Slave in Romantic Writing’, ELH 67 (2000), 529–32.
On the novel’s representation of race see also Kitson, ‘John Thelwall in Saint Domingue: Race, Slavery, and Revolution in The Daughter of Adoption: A Tale of Modern Times (1801)’, Romanticism 16, no. 2 (2010), 126–9;
Arnold A. Markley Conversion and Reform in the British Novel in the 1790s: A Revolution of Opinions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 106–14; and Scrivener, Solomonescu and Thompson (eds), Daughter, pp. 20–6.
Thelwall, Daughter, p. 217; Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 266.
L. T. Topsfield, Troubadours and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 42–69. Coleridge addresses Thelwall in a letter of February 1797 as ‘amorous Jeffery Ruddell’, a designation that Thelwall probably used self-referentially in a prior letter. Collected Letters, vol. I, p. 308.
This is Paul Hamilton’s reading of Godwin in ‘Coleridge and Godwin in the 1790s’, in The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas McFarland, ed. Richard Gravii and Molly Lefebure (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), p. 55.
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Solomonescu, Y. (2014). Between Hope and Necessity. 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_5
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