Denying Death

An Interdisciplinary Approach to Terror Management Theory

Lindsey A. Harvell, Gwendelyn S. Nisbett, Lindsey A. Harvell, Gwendelyn S. Nisbett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317279877
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Sozialpsychologie

This volume is the first to showcase the interdisciplinary nature of Terror Management Theory, providing a detailed overview of how rich and diverse the field has become since the late 1980s, and where it is going in the future. It offers perspectives from psychology, political science, communication, health, sociology, business, marketing and cultural studies, among others, and in the process reveals how our existential ponderings permeate our behavior in almost every area of our lives. It will interest a wide range of upper-level students and researchers who want an overview of past and current TMT research and how it may be applied to their own research interests.

1 THE LIVES OF JOHN THELWALL: ANOTHER VIEW OF THE ‘JACOBIN FOX’

DOI: 10.4324/9781315641393-2

Nicholas Roe

‘Thelwall is suddenly an O.K. subject’, E. P. Thompson said in a letter to me in 1993. He was reflecting on the resurgence of interest in John Thelwall at the bicentenary of the French Revolution, and thinking as well of the revival of history in Romantic studies that was then current. His own classic study of Thelwall, ‘Disenchantment or Default?’ dated from 1968 – the year of the Paris riot.¹ Thirty years later, Thompson's essay was republished in The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age (1993), one of the great historicist studies of the English Romantic poets alongside Paul Foot's Red Shelley (1980). If these books capture the essence of contemporary protest, modern Romantic biography does so too – notably in the interweaving of circumstance and spirit in Richard Holmes's lives of Shelley and Coleridge; Holmes was living at Paris in May 1968, and writes powerfully about his experiences in his bookFootsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985).²

Remembered now principally as an English Jacobin of the 1790s, as for example in Greg Claeys's authoritative edition of the Political Writings of John Thelwall (1995) and the same author's The French Revolution Debate in Britain (2007), John Thelwall actually lived for nearly seventy years, 1764–1834. His long life connects Romantic and nineteenth-century English culture, the revolutionary 1790s and the Chartist 1830s. He moved between the underworld of London's artisans and the educated sphere of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and in 1793 appeared at the Physical Society in Guy's Hospital alongside medical men like Astley Cooper who later taught John Keats.

In this essay I want to offer a more complete portrait of Thelwall, or, at least, a first sketch towards that. One angle of approach will try to explain why we have no modern biography of Thelwall – as we do of many of his political and literary acquaintances – and in the course of that I hope to draw attention to some aspects of his life and work that lie beyond the revolutionary decade.

Thelwall was born on Friday 27 July 1764 at Chandos Street, Covent Garden, the son of Joseph Thelwall a silk merchant. As a child he was sickly, asthmatic and stammering. Removed from school to work in the family firm, ‘behind the shop counter’, he was self-taught and cast around to find a direction for his life: he tried to become a painter, then made a fruitless attempt to ‘get upon the stage’. He was apprenticed to a master tailor, but abandoned the trade in another attempt to study as a painter. For three years he studied for the bar then gave up on a legal career and ‘launched into the world as a literary adventurer’.³ He published in journals during the early 1780s, and in 1787 his Poems on Various Subjects appeared to praise from the Critical Review. He became editor and principal contributor to theBiographical and Imperial Magazine, and authored at least two plays, Incle and Yarico (1787) and The Incas (1792). With other journalism, and some private tuition, he contrived to support himself and his mother (the silk business had by now failed). The 1790s saw Thelwall emerge as a leader of the London Corresponding Society, and a challenging, speculative scientific thinker in his Guy's Hospital lecture on ‘Animal Vitality’. His trial on a charge of treason, in December 1794, was arguably the consequence of his scientific ideas as much as his ‘seditious’ politics.⁴ By 1797 he had made contact with Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the meditative blank verse of ‘Lines Written at Bridgewater’ from Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement (1801) stands comparison with both ‘Tintern Abbey’ and ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’. Immediately after the turn of the century, Thelwall reinvented himself once again and embarked on a prosperous career as a speech therapist, styling himself ‘Scientific benefactor to the Intellect of the nation’, although he would return to the political fray following the Peterloo Massacre of August 1819 as editor of the Champion newspaper. With the Reform Bill of 1832, Thelwall, Thomas Hardy and other survivors of the 1790s were fêted as heroes.⁵ Enough here, one would think, for a compelling life narrative that captures Thelwall's rootless early years, the rough-and-tumble of revolutionary politics, scientific daring and literary adventures. So why, many years after Thelwall became an ‘O.K. subject’, does he languish without a full biography, his significance and achievement seemingly restricted to the 1790s?

While we know about hunting the ‘Jacobin Fox’, it is difficult to catch Thelwall complete across all of his sixty-nine years. His life has two major phases, like his fellow radical Leigh Hunt's. For both men a ‘first life’ of strenuous political activity and involvement is separated from the later years by a period of rustic exile in a farmhouse. Jacobin Thelwall settled in Wales at Llyswen, on the banks of the River Wye, from 1799 until 1802; as the ‘new Recluse’, he had determined that Thelwall the politician must be forgotten, so that he could return to the public as a poet. After the death of Shelley in 1822, Hunt lived for three years in a farmhouse at the hamlet of Maiano, Tuscany, between Florence and Fiesole. He had arrived in Italy as a leading journalist and poet and, wishfully, prospective editor of the Liberal. He returned to England in 1825 to become a man of letters willing to put his pen to any topic that might turn a penny. His first moneyspinner was the controversial memoir Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries (1828). In each life there are separations between early and late, and in both lives there are significant consistencies: Thelwall's political activities continued during the Napoleonic era, at the Peterloo crisis, and with the Reform Bill in 1832; Hunt's pacifism was a constant from the early Examiners to the protest poetry of ‘Captain Sword and Captain Pen’ (1835). As a political lecturer in the 1790s, Thelwall was the voice of the inarticulate; in later years his speech therapy helped the tongue-tied to speak for themselves. The popular orator of the Corresponding Society had lisped and stammered; in 1808 the speech therapist lectured on ‘Bonaparte and the Spanish Patriots’ at the Angel Inn, Tiverton.⁶ Like his grandfather, Thelwall embraced circumstances and ‘cur[ed] the wounds of his enemies as well as of his friends’.⁷ Hunt found it more difficult to adapt to changing times.

We can see readily enough how one Life of John Thelwall might be shaped, with the focus of attention on the first life up to 1801 and several chapters reserved for the remaining years – exactly the shape, incidentally, of Leigh Hunt's Autobiography of 1850. The ‘Prefatory Memoir’ to Thelwall's Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement shows that he had already planned what he called ‘an unsophisticated detail’ of his own life, and his several attempts to fulfil this project have survived.⁸The Peripatetic of 1793 was mostly based on his own experiences, as were some of the lyrics in Poems on Various Subjects (1787), Poems Written in Close Confinement (1795), and Poems Written in Retirement. We have Thelwall's self-portrait in Richard Phillips'sPublic Characters of 1800–1801 (1801), subsequently revised to produce the ‘Prefatory Memoir’, and the first volume of The Life of John Thelwall by his Widow from 1837. Later accounts of Thelwall's life appear in Charles Cestre's John Thelwall: A Pioneer of Democracy (1906); Denyse Rockey's ‘Thelwall and the Origins of Speech Therapy’ (1979); my Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Radical Years (1988), The Politics of Nature (2002) and ‘Coleridge and John Thelwall: the Road to Nether Stowey’ (1990); E. P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class (1963) and ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’ (1994); the introductory section, ‘Thelwall's Life and Times’, in Greg Claeys's Politics of English Jacobinism (1995); and compact lives of John Thelwall in the DNB, Old and New. Most recently, the life has featured in Judith Thompson's edition of The Peripatetic (2001) and Michael Scrivener's Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing (2001). Nearly all of these books, essays and articles glance at Thelwall's later years, although the principal emphasis is unvaryingly on the 1790s – ironically so, in that the manuscript sources for a full account of those exciting years have long been lost. The period of Thelwall's career we actually know least about from Thelwall himself has so far received most attention, and this has been at the cost of overlooking the other decades of his long life. In what follows now I want to set out in some detail the difficulties and the possibilities that John Thelwall presents for a biographer.

The most obvious barrier to a biography is Thelwall's missing manuscripts. I want to try to reconstruct these lost volumes, and to speculate on future possibilities for recovering this invaluable archive. It may also be worthwhile identifying some of the other significant gaps in Thelwall's papers, and to explore Thelwall's numerous advertisements in the Times from the 1810s for what they can tell us about his life and career. Opening a broader perspective on Thelwall should encourage us to question where the centre of his life and achievement is located, and to reflect upon whether we can see Thelwall in ways other than through the activities of the English Jacobin of the 1790s about whom, as I’ve indicated, we know rather less than we think we do.

‘There is a rumour that you are doing a “biography”’, Thompson wrote to me in April 1993. Was I? I had enquired at more than one hundred libraries for holdings of Thelwall's correspondence, so I suppose I must have been thinking of something like a biography; ‘The Road to Nether Stowey’ had traced Thelwall's 1797 encounter with Coleridge and Wordsworth, an episode that might form part of a longer life-narrative. The library hits were few and far-flung, however, and brought home to me the damage that had been done by the loss of the six volumes of Thelwall's private papers, last sighted in 1904 in the hands of the French scholar Charles Cestre.⁹

E. P. Thompson had set out the problem of Thelwall's papers in the appendix to his ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’ essay, and in a letter to the TLS back in 1966:

When Charles Cestre wrote his study of John Thelwall [A Pioneer of Democracy] he had in his possession six manuscript volumes of letters, notes, and outlines of lectures which he had obtained at the sale of James Dykes Campbell's library at Sotheby's in June, 1904. I wrote to Professor Cestre, whose memory was then failing, some years ago, and he could not recollect what had happened to these manuscripts, but stated that they might have been destroyed, together with many of his books, during the occupation of Paris in the recent war. However, in response to an inquiry at about the same time from an American scholar, he hazarded the reply that he might have sold the manuscripts soon after completing his study – that is, as early as 1906 or 1907. One must hope that the second suggestion was the true one, in which case these manuscripts may still be traced.¹⁰

The American scholar to whom Thompson alludes was David Erdman, although these enquiries to Charles Cestre were not the only and by no means the first efforts to locate Thelwall's lost manuscripts. Forty years before Thompson and Erdman another scholar, Warren Gibbs, had made an identical request to theTLS:

Sir – I am trying to locate the six manuscript volumes of John Thelwall which were sold at Sotheby's in 1904 to Professor Charles Cestre, who used some of the material in his study of Thelwall. Later he disposed of the manuscripts, but no trace of the present owner can be found. Any information in regard to them will be gratefully received.¹¹

Gibbs's letter suggests that Thompson's ‘second suggestion’ may be the right one: Cestre had ‘disposed’ of the six volumes some time before the Second World War, in which case there remains a chance that they may yet be traced – and there are currently efforts to do so.

In the meantime, at least some of the mystery about the six missing manuscript volumes can be dispelled. Cestre's book John Thelwall: A Pioneer of Democracy drew extensively on the manuscripts, and from his references to them we can reconstruct at least some of the contents of the missing volumes:

Volume 1:

• Thelwall's notes in preparation for his defence in the 1794 treason trial, including quotations from the proceedings of previous State trials and from commentaries on the law of England (Cestre,John Thelwall, p. 112 and n.).
• Notes on the Duke of Bedford, suspecting his ‘high and generous magnanimity’ as a Foxite whig overlay the ‘superb feeling’ of the hereditary aristocrat (Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 170 and n.).

Volume 2:

• Further notes from State Trials in preparation for his defence in the 1794 trial (see volume 1 above and Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 112 and n.).
• A letter from William Godwin to Thelwall, 18 September 1794, when Thelwall was in the Tower awaiting trial: ‘It is good to be tried in England, where men are accustomed to some ideas of equity, and law is not entirely what the breath of judges and prosecutors shall make it’ (Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 133 and n., 135 and n.; the full letter is reproduced in Cestre, John Thelwall, pp. 201–3).
• An affectionate letter from Thomas Holcroft to Thelwall in the Tower (Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 131 and n.).
• An address to Thelwall after his acquittal (December 1794): ‘We admire your advocacy of the great Cause wherein you are so indefatigably employed: the Destruction of Tyranny, and the promotion of the Happiness of Man’ (Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 179).
• Copies of Thelwall's letters to ‘the Lords of His Majesty's most honourable Privy Council’ requesting return of the books and manuscripts confiscated at his arrest in May 1794 (Cestre,John Thelwall, pp. 89–90 and n.).
• A letter from John Richter ‘testifying how brutally and confusedly’ his own house was searched by the authorities when he was arrested in May 1794 (Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 90 and n).

Volume 3:

• Thelwall's ‘Notes of Pedestrian Excursion, [and] Documents of Employment of Time in Wales’ with reflections on what he saw; the state of the rural poor; industry, wealth, and the distribution of property (Cestre, John Thelwall, p. 185–6). This is probably the ‘M.S. Diary’ that also included Thelwall's pedestrian tour through Western England in 1797 and his visit to Coleridge and the Wordsworths at Nether Stowey in July of that year. Thelwall noted that their conversations had turned upon the ‘“moral character of Democrats, of Aristocrats”’, and of ‘“pursuits proper for literary men – unfit for management of p...