Abstract
On account of his political lectures and speeches at the open-air meetings of the London Corresponding Society in the 1790s, Thelwall was widely regarded as one of the most powerful public speakers of the age. Wordsworth thought that he had ‘extraordinary talent’ and Coleridge regarded him as ‘the voice of tens of thousands’.2 William Hazlitt described him more ambiguously as ‘[t]he most dashing orator I ever heard’, ‘the model of a flashy, powerful demagogue — a madman blessed with a fit audience’ and ‘a volcano vomiting out lava’? In James Gillray’s iconic depiction of a mass meeting of reformers at Copenhagen Fields in the fall of 1795, Thelwall towers over the crowd from a podium in the foreground, fist pumping the air, lips parted mid-sentence — a posture that recalls his invitation to audiences for his weekly lectures in the Strand to ‘take my lungs for a pair of bellows to blow an alchymist’s fire withal’.4 (Figure 5.1) Thelwall prided himself on such spontaneous overflows of powerful feeling. Rather than compose lectures in tranquillity he spoke from notes and outlines, asserting that ‘the clothing and embellishments ought to be left to the time of delivery: for that language will always be most emphatic, which the warmth of the moment supplies’.5
I know of no such distinction as a verse mouth and a prose mouth: I want only a distinct, a sonorous, an articulative mouth — a mouth that ‘is a parcel of the mind’.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Thelwall, Selections for the Illustration of a Course of Instructions on the Rhythmus and Utterance of the English Language (London, 1812), p. xvi. Thelwall also refers to this work as Illustrations of English Rhythmus.
Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest De Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940–49), vol. I, p. 363; Coleridge, Lectures 1795, p. 297.
Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–34), vol. XII, p. 264. Cf. Godwin, Political Writings, II, pp. 131–2.
Thomas Amyot, letter to Henry Crabb Robinson, 8 June 1796, repr. in Youth and Revolution in the 1790s: Letters of William Pattison, Thomas Amyot and Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Penelope J. Corfield and Chris Evans (Stroud: Sutton, 1996), p. 138.
See George Walker’s The Vagabond (1799) and Robert Bisset’s Douglas; or, The Highlander (1800) respectively. Thelwall also appears as an aged elocutionist who demonstrates his skills to ludicrous effect in George Borrow’s Lavengro: The Scholar-The Gypsy-The Priest, 3 vols (London, 1851), vol. II, pp. 124–34, as noted in A. Boyle, ‘Portraiture in Lavengro VI: The Teacher of Oratory-John Thelwall’, Notes and Queries, 197 (1952), 38–9.
Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day, vol. III (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. 157. Andrew McCann argues that by training students for careers in parliament, the law and the church Thelwall was helping to ‘assimilate’ them into the institutions of bourgeois public life and consolidating its values; ‘Romantic Self-Fashioning: John Thelwall and the Science of Elocution’, Studies in Romanticism 40 (2001), 215–32. Steve Poole likewise contends that in the early nineteenth century Thelwall did not so much redirect his earlier energies as dissipate them in uncontroversial professional channels; ‘Gillray Cruikshank and Thelwall: Visual Satire, Physiognomy and the Jacobin Body’, in John Thelwall: Critical Reassessments, ed. Yasmin Solomonescu, Romantic Circles, Sept. 2011, http://romantic.arhu.umd.edu/praxis/thelwall/HTML/praxis.2011.poole. html (accessed 12 June 2012), para. 18.
Judith Thompson, ‘Re-Sounding Romanticism: John Thelwall and the Science and Practice of Elocution’, in Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture, ed. Angela Esterhammer and Alexander Dick (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. 21–45,
borrowing the terms ‘logo-paedic’ from Denyse Rockey ‘The Logopaedic Thought of John Thelwall, 1764–1834: First British Speech Therapist’, British Journal of Disorders of Communication 12 (1977), 83–95.
Frederick W. Haberman, ‘John Thelwall: His Life, His School, and His Theory of Elocution’, in Historical Studies of Rhetoric and Rhetoricians, ed. Raymond F. Howes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961), p. 191;
Judith Thompson, ‘From Forum to Repository: A Case Study in Romantic Cultural Geography’, European Romantic Review 15, no. 2 (2004), 187; ‘Mr. Thelwall’, Gentleman’s Magazine ns 2 (1834), 549–50.
Robin Thelwall, ‘The Phonetic Theory of John Thelwall (1764–1834)’, in Towards a History of Phonetics: Essays Contributed in Honour of David Abercrombie, ed. R. E. Asher and Eugénie J. A. Henderson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), p. 188;
Rockey ‘John Thelwall and the Origins of British Speech Therapy’, Medical History 23 (1979), 156.
Paul Fussell, Jr., Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England (1954; Hamden, CT: Archon, 1966), pp. 141–42.
The recitation of Comus is recorded in Robinson, Diary, vol. I, p. 492. On Thelwall’s ‘metronomic’ elocution see Haberman, ‘John Thelwall’, p. 196; on his ‘lèse-prosodie’ see Saintsbury English Prosody, p. 158; on his insensitiv-ity to the effects of metre and rhythm compared notably with Wordsworth, see Brennan O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1995), pp. 31–2;
and Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 67 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 10–11.
Wordsworth, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1805, ed. Ernest De Selincourt, rev. Chester L. Shaver, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 432. The square bracket insertions are the editor’s.
Wilbur Samuel Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 152–9.
See, for instance, Michael Shortland, ‘Moving Speeches: Language and Elocution in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, History of European Ideas 8 (1987), 684;
and Murray Cohen, Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England, 1640–1785 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 114.
Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 355–60.
Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 2; Michaelson, Speaking Volumes, pp. 44–8.
Baillie quoted in Alan Richardson, ‘Joanna Baillie’s “Plays on the Passions”’, in Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist, ed. Thomas C. Crochunis (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 134.
Thelwall, Derby manuscript, vol. II, p. 463, repr. in Poetical Recreations, pp. 219–21. The addressee of ‘To Miss Bannatine’ may have been a relation of George Bannatine, the cousin of Hugh Blair, or of Blair’s wife Katherine Bannatine (d. 1795). Richard B. Sher, ‘Blair, Hugh (1718–1800)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online edn, ed. Lawrence Goldman, Oct. 2009, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2563 (accessed 29 Oct. 2012).
Richard Gravii, ‘Mr. Thelwalľs Ear; or, Hearing The Excursion’, in Grasmere, 2011: Selected Papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference, comp. Richard Gravii (Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2011), pp. 188–9; Richardson, Science of the Mind, p. 70.
Henry Cockburn, Life of Lord Jeffrey: With a Selection from His Correspondence, vol. I (Edinburgh, 1852), p. 150. Cockburn notes that Thelwall and Jeffrey met amicably several years later.
See Thelwall, marginalia on Coleridge, 92, where he refers to ‘Knitch’ [sic], ‘Who published a work on the Kantean philosophy while he was in England Which I have in my library, & attempted to establish a Kantean school or society here, of which I was a member, & in which I held several disputations with him on the principles of that professor’. Nitsch was the author of A General and Introductory View of Professor Kant’s Principles concerning Man, the World and the Deity (1796). See also Manfred Kuehn, ‘Hamilton’s Reading of Kant: A Chapter in the Early Scottish Development of Kant’s Thought’, in Kant and His Influence, ed. George Macdonald Ross and Tony McWalter (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 318.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Yasmin Solomonescu
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Solomonescu, Y. (2014). The Language of Nature. 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_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426147_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49071-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-42614-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)