The Enlightenment World: John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon (PDF)

John Thelwall was a Romantic and Enlightenment polymath. During the 1790s, he achieved national recognition as an orator, republican, Jacobin theorist and leading member of the proto-democratic London Corresponding Society. In 1794 he was tried and acquitted of high treason, earning himself the disdainful soubriquet 'acquitted felon' from Secretary of State for War, William Windham. Later, Thelwall's interests turned to poetry and plays. He was a collaborator and confidant of Wordsworth and Coleridge during the gestation of Lyrical Ballads, a Romantic ruralist, travel-writer and pedestrian, and an idealistic farmer in the Wye Valley. During the nineteenth century he pioneered elocutionism, curing young men from stammers and theorizing about phonetics at his own London Institute. Although the separate strands of Thelwall's life and work have been considered at various times by scholars of both English literature and of eighteenth-century history, no volume has yet sought to bring them together or make sense of them as a whole; to understand, for example, the association Thelwall made between speech therapy and radical politics. This edited collection draws together a range of essays from leading eighteenth-century and Romantic scholars. Thelwall's manifold activities are considered in relation to each other, and contextualized within wider Romantic culture and politics.