John Thelwall

Selected Poetry and Poetics

J. Thompson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137344823
• eBook ISBN: 9781137344830
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Drawing on newly-discovered manuscripts, this collection is the first modern edition of poetry by John Thelwall, the famed radical Romantic and champion of the working class. Eight key essays and 125 fully-annotated poems introduce his work in correspondence with historical traditions and current critical paradigms.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: “POETS AND POESY I SING”

John Thelwall: Selected Poetry and Poetics is the first modern collection of the remarkably wide-ranging and original poetry and criticism of a Romantic-era radical better known for his political activism than his literary art. It draws from new manuscript material to offer a representative selection that complements recent editions of Thelwall’s political writing, plays, and novels,¹ and contributes to an accelerating project of archival rediscovery and critical revival.

Orator and journalist, poet and pedagogue, autodidact and polymath, John Thelwall stood at the forefront of a “lost generation” of Unusual Suspects whose voices were gagged, prospects blighted, and reputations blackened in the “Reign of Alarm” with which the British government responded to the French revolutionary Reign of Terror (Johnston). Only in the late twentieth century did he begin to emerge from that shadow, as a generation of scholars led by E. P. Thompson argued for his significance as a “maker of the English working class,” an astute theorist and fearless champion of popular rights. Although facsimile reprints of some of his poetry appeared at that time, the first wave of scholarship concentrated more on his political than his literary significance. However, pioneering work in the 1990s by Nicholas Roe, Michael Scrivener, and myself developed contexts, formulated methodologies, and offered preliminary readings that laid a foundation for the fuller understanding of his poetry that emerged in two landmark studies at the turn of the century. In Seditious Allegories (2001), Scrivener demonstrated the range and sophistication of Thelwall’s literary techniques in the context of Jacobin writing, while in Presences that Disturb (2002), Damian Walford Davies presented Thelwall as a model of Romantic identity, offering nuanced intercontextual analysis of his poetic dialogue with Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the decade that followed, a growing number of scholars have explored Thelwall’s poetry within traditions of gothic romance (O’Boyle), prosody (Gravil, Fairer), prison writing (Mee, Bugg), and materialism (Solomonescu).

At the same time, the Thelwall revival has been hampered by archival obstacles, notably the absence of a proper biography, and the disappearance of his manuscripts. This began to change, however, with the discovery, in Derby in 2004, of a previously unknown, 1,000-page manuscript of original poems, written in Thelwall’s hand, covering his entire career, extensively revised, and with his instructions for posthumous publication jotted in the margins. As I pointed out in a 2009 article announcing the find (“Citizen Juan”), this keystone of the missing Thelwall archive reveals that he wanted to be taken seriously as a poet and a critic, and it gives us the means at last to do so: to pull scattered pieces together, to recognize characteristic tropes and themes, to trace patterns of development, and to appreciate an originality that is both dazzling and demanding. The first study to make substantial use of the manuscript, my 2012 John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle: The Silenced Partner, revealed that the poetic conversation between Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Thelwall was far deeper and more extensive than anyone had realized. John Thelwall: Selected Poetry and Poetics complements that monograph but also widens its scope. By making a representative selection from the full range of Thelwall’s verse, based on his own instructions, it restores poetry to its integral place in his long and diverse career, understanding its relation both to his pioneering theories and practice in other fields, and to the work of his precursors and contemporaries. It opens a unique perspective upon the public sphere to which it was addressed and delivered, and within which it was widely known, and a new approach to reading Romantic poetry.

While inspired by and drawing from manuscript material, this selection also focuses renewed attention on Thelwall’s publications, many of them still little known. Five books of his original poetry appeared over 35 years at the heart of the Romantic century: the two-volume Poems on Various Subjects (1787), Poems, Written in Close Confinement in the Tower and Newgate (1795), Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement (1801), The Vestibule of Eloquence (1810), and Poetical Recreations of the Champion (1822). Faircopy of another two-volume collection of Poems, Chiefly Suggested by the Scenery of Nature, dating from around 1805 but never published, forms the core of the Derby manuscript. During the same period he owned and/or edited five periodicals in which substantial selections of his poetry appeared, along with his literary and theater reviews and essays: The Biographical and Imperial Magazine (1789–91), The Tribune (1795–6), The Champion (1819–21), The Monthly Magazine (1825), and The Panoramic Miscellany (1826). More poems were published in his eccentric miscellany The Peripatetic (1793) and the anthologies of elocutionary Selections (1802–12) that accompanied his lectures, where his own work appears next to (and in some cases rewrites) that of other poets to represent theories of elocution that are also poetic theories.

In its range and quality, Thelwall’s published work alone is comparable to that of many contemporaries. But the printed word was not his chief poetic medium. As both the Tribune and the Selections volumes testify, he recited his poetry at all his lectures—political, historical, elocutionary, and literary—which he delivered at least three times a week, over at least 30 weeks a year, for the better part of 25 years—not only in London, but through England, Ireland, Scotland, and even France. That is quite an impact, hard as it may be now to measure. In addition to this, he frequently extemporized occasional verse and delivered verse prologues and addresses for and in the theater. These, together with lyrical dramas and dramatic fragments, both published and unpublished, show the essentially performative nature of his poetry. This is another reason for the eclipse of his poetic reputation, given the ephemerality of the spoken word, as well as widespread distrust of both theater and oratory in an age and by a posterity that, like Hazlitt, valued the art of writing over the act of speaking (Thompson, “Romantic Oratory”). Thelwall turned that authority on its head. Voice was to him what vision was to his fellow Romantics: integral to his poetic language, form, themes, and critical public purpose. His devotion to freedom of speech, to the vox populi as idea, as audience, and as body to be healed, underlies and unites his literary, political, and elocutionary endeavors, crossing disciplinary boundaries that have also impeded appreciation of his accomplishment.

Surveying the varied media, forms, and contexts in which Thelwall worked confirms that he was, as he put it in his 1822 “Auto-Biography,” “steep’d o’er and o’er/In poesy’s lore” (p. 271). He was as accomplished, prolific, and well read as his contemporaries, in many ways more original, and connected more directly to his wide audiences. He deserves to be returned to the poetic conversations and critical debates that he often initiated, and to which he richly contributed; he demands to be given the intellectual respect so long denied him; he repays the kind of careful attention devoted to other Romantic poets; and he teaches a new method of close reading, based on the spoken rather than the written word. This volume takes the first step in a long-deferred reassessment not simply to right a historical wrong but to bridge a gap between “art” and “act” that continues to challenge humanists, and to revitalize a genre that has always been intended (as the Churchillian epigraph to Thelwall’s first volume of poetry asserts), “to amuse, instruct and to reform mankind.”²

“THE DAWN AND PROGRESS OF A POETIC MIND”

The fundamental importance of poetry in Thelwall’s life is reflected in numerous autobiographies, in verse and prose, he wrote over more than 40 years. In them, he constructs an allegory of his poetic genesis and development as an endless series of “ups and downs” on the wheel of fortune (“Auto-Biography,” p. 265), exemplifying the “universal principle of action and re-action, which forms the paramount law of all reiterated or progressive motion” (Letter to Cline 15) that underlies his political, poetical and elocutionary theory and practice.

This principle of “erratical” progress first manifested itself in Thelwall’s London childhood: in the family silk business in Covent Garden, whose theatrical neighborhood stimulated his voice even as its shopboard servitude stifled it; in his father’s “freehold cottage” in Lambeth (Life 15), where he overcame physiological restraint (weak lungs) through peripatetic excursions; and at a school in Highgate whose authoritarian abuse was mitigated by a “colloquial” Tutor who laid the foundations of Socratic friendship and conversational pedagogy (Peripatetic 300). The fruit of this upbringing was his earliest publication, the two-volume Poems on Various Subjects of 1787, which also contains his first autobiography in a series of pastoral elegies recounting the struggle of an energetic but “hapless youth” (“Elegy VI: The Lark”) to realize his poetic ambitions in the face of “arts unfriendly” that “supprest” his “aspiring flame” (“Elegy VIII: The Execration”). The imagery, versification, and subject matter of these “rural poems,” legendary tales, and sentimental sonnets are conventional enough, but the exchanges between sportive zephyrs and amorous flowers (“The Nosegay,” p. 27), lovesick swains and witty maidens (“The Theft,” p. 38) are lively and dramatic. The social conscience and polymathic pursuits of Thelwall’s later career are prefigured in Spenserian romances whose sentimental seduction plots are interwoven with calls to reform attitudes toward prostitution, or “Facts recorded in the Reports of the Humane Society” (“A Dramatic Poem”).³ The arcadian eroticism, moralized antiquarianism, and pragmatic materialism that characterized these early volumes recurred in his later work, and these poems became a source from which he drew repeatedly.

Not long after the publication of his first Poems, Thelwall became editor of (and chief contributor to) the Biographical and Imperial Magazine, which enabled him to marry his poetic “Stella,” Susanna Vellam, a Rutlandshire farmgirl whom the outgoing cockney met on one of the many eccentric excursions that would take narrative form in The Peripatetic. Both these miscellanies follow a format that would become Thelwall’s trademark, in which poems are interspersed among prose sketches in the politico- sentimental conversation that manifested his principle of correspondence at an early date. Many of the personae who later reappeared as characters and/or pennames (Wentworth, Sylvanus) originated here, as did the peripatetic technique of prospective retrospection by which he grew and gained inspiration from retracing and rewriting the routes and roots of his poetic identity. At the same time, Thelwall’s verse repertoire widened, under the pressure of prose, as the medium of both rational enquiry and political critique, and history, as both subject and contemporary event. In lyric and philosophical reflections, public odes, and mock-epic satires, the pastoral motifs and characters of his earlier work are enlisted in the service of abolitionism, property reform, and universal suffrage, while his moralizing speakers set Beauties against Rights of Nature, and anatomize the body (politic) in a manner that reflects Thelwall’s medical studies at Guy’s Hospital, and his membership in its Physical Society, to which he delivered an important lecture on animal vitality, shortly before The Peripatetic was published.

In the same year, and on the same theme, but to another debating society, Thelwall delivered the seditious allegory of Chaunticlere with which he would ever after be identified, and which moved him to the forefront of British radical politics. Thelwall’s political activism did not supersede his poetic ambitions, however, merely redirected them. While he honed his vox populi on satirical songs, he continued to write other poems that show the formal and tonal range characteristic of Jacobin writing (Scrivener). In fact, the format of The Tribune (the weekly vehicle for Thelwall’s political lectures) is not unlike that of The Peripatetic; though the content is primarily prose, lectures are interspersed with, and speak to, poems, many of which are recycled from The Peripatetic. Some of these are short, topical ballads but most are longer, philosophical odes, both historical (“The Battle of Barnet”; “Ode on the Bastille,” p. 112) and sentimental (“The Hamlet”; “A Patriot’s Feeling,” p. 144).

The same correspondence of politics and sentiment in poetry and/as rhetoric lies at the heart of Thelwall’s 1795 volume Poems, Written in Close Confinement which, like The Tribune, circulated widely at the peak of his political career. Deprived of the sustenance of living interchange during his nine months in the Tower and the charnel house of Newgate Prison, Thelwall used his poems to construct and interact with an alternative community of the living and dead; deprived for a time even of pen and paper, he had time to weigh every syllable, resound every word, and compress every thought and feeling into the most powerful forms. These songs, sonnets, and odes resonated with his contemporaries as much for their passion as their principles. In them he radicalized and revived English poetic tradition (of the sonnet in particular) by casting off its fetters in a virtuosic exercise in prosodic, psychological, and political action and reaction.

Among those impressed by the mix of pathos and power in the Confinement poems was Coleridge, whose conversation with Thelwall, beginning in early 1796, catalyzed a new phase in the poetic careers of both men, and changed the course of English literature. Through their intense oppositional friendship (Taussig 177–213), they developed the fraternal ideals of the London Corresponding Society in poetic form, revolutionizing the ode as Thelwall had the sonnet, and using its reciprocal structure to navigate the psychological and political turns and counterturns of a transitional moment in their own, and the nation’s, history. Their conversation deepened upon their first meeting in the summer of 1797, which also brought Wordsworth into a “literary and political triumvirate” that “passed sentence on the productions and characters of the age—burst forth in poetical flights of enthusiasm—& philosophized our minds into a state of tranquility” (Letters 296). Although Thelwall’s desire to join this pantisocratic fraternity in Somerset was frustrated, their ten days together shook the world of letters, setting in motion an annus mirabilis in which Thelwall participated from his cottage on the Wye River in Llyswen, Wales. Cut off from their physical presence, his three-year “retirement” was in some ways as bitter and isolating as his prison experience, shadowed by continuing persecution, and shattered by grief after the sudden death of his beloved six-year-old daughter Maria, his hope for the future, at the very turn of the new century. Yet as always, adversity was immensely inspiring: in one three-month period, in the spring of 1798, Thelwall wrote some 5,000 lines of his national epic The Hope of Albion (p. 211), together with its romance doppelganger The Fairy of the Lake; and by the end of that year he had begun his novel The Daughter of Adoption, drafted a series of “New Peripatetic” excursions and memoirs, and laid the foundation of elocutionary theory and practice that would lead him out of exile in 1801.

The year 1801 also saw the publication of Poems, Chiefly Written i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Introduction: “Poets and Poesy I Sing”
• 2 Poems Pastoral and Peripatetic
• 3 Comic Ballads, Satires, and Seditious Allegories
• 4 Sonnets
• 5 Odes I: Public and Pindaric
• 6 Odes II: Conversations and Effusions
• 7 Songs of Love
• 8 Epic: The Hope of Albion
• 9 Autobiographies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index