John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination

Yasmin Solomonescu

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137426130
• eBook ISBN: 9781137426147
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination reassesses Thelwall's eclectic body of work from the perspective of his heterodox materialist arguments about the imagination, political reform, and the principle of life itself, and his contributions to Romantic-era science.

1

Vital Principles

From the Animal Body to the Body Politic

But what is this something – this vivifying principle?¹

John Thelwall wanted to give his heart to medical science. He and the surgeon Astley Cooper had an agreement whereby, if Thelwall died first, Cooper would receive his heart for medical study. It was apparently remarkable for its pathology, as well as for its radical sensibility. According to his second wife and biographer, Henrietta Cecil, Thelwall suffered from a strange condition that sometimes caused his heart to beat so loudly that it was audible from several yards away. On one occasion it startled a passer-by in the street; on another it awoke Cecil in the middle of the night, when she mistook its beating for someone knocking at the door. Cooper joked that his friend had ‘an exceedingly good head – but an excessively bad heart!’.² Although that defective organ eventually caused Thelwall’s death in 1834 when he suffered ‘some affection’ of it, probably a heart attack, while on an elocutionary lecture-stop in Bath, it seems doubtful that Cooper ever sought fulfilment of their agreement.³ He knew, in any case, that Thelwall had already given his heart to medical science four decades earlier, when he attended lectures at Guy’s and St. Thomas’s hospitals in London and immersed himself in the debates about vitality and cognition that were to pulse through his life’s work. Thelwall’s early engagement with medical science was a vital context for his pursuits across disciplines and decades, yet it has long lain buried beneath his profile as a radical agitator and one-time friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge. If we are adequately to reassess his body of work, we must first recover the ideas about the human mind and body that were at its very heart.

Since Michel Foucault’s pioneering study of the eighteenth-century transformation of medicine into ‘a science of the individual’ and Roy Porter’s and George Rousseau’s investigations of contemporaneous understandings of the relationship between the body and the self, the intersections of Romantic-era literary and scientific cultures have become prominent areas of analysis.⁴ With few exceptions, however, scholars have tended to give only cursory attention to Thelwall’s place in what Alan Richardson describes as ‘one of the most daring intellectual ventures of [… the] era – the reinvention, along naturalistic, physiological, and ecological lines, of the study of human nature’.⁵ This chapter demonstrates how, in the crucible of early 1790s’ political debate, Thelwall’s medical training became compounded with his radical politics and developing theories of language and the imagination to provide a model and a lexicon for his vision of reform. The first section examines the idiosyncrasies of his belief that the properties and processes of living nature could be explained with reference to certain immutable laws of matter, situating his theory in relation to those of his better-known contemporaries, including Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, John Hunter and William Lawrence. The second section shows how Thelwall’s heterodox speculations about animal life provided a model for ‘quickening’ a reformist consciousness in the body politic through the medium of language, while the third explores the bridge between his scientific and political theories: his materialist conception of the mind. Although the paper in which Thelwall set forth his ideas about cognition was lost amid the controversy surrounding its presentation in 1793 before the leading surgeons and anatomists of the day, we can infer its contents from a range of other documents, in which he endorses a doctrine of mental association as propounded by the philosopher David Hartley, while following his mentor William Godwin in attempting to keep open a place for individual agency. Responding to critics who fault Thelwall for failing to develop an equivalent to Thomas Paine’s ‘intellectual vernacular’, the chapter ends with a look ahead to an essay of 1826 in which he articulates his faith in the ‘ambiguous magic’ of literary language – the capacity to spark associative trains of thought that made it a powerful instrument of reform.⁶ By recovering these theoretical underpinnings of Thelwall’s career, the chapter lays a foundation for the ensuing readings of his literary and elocutionary works not merely as alternatives to his political activism, but as the principal means by which he sought to elicit the sympathetic imagination in the cause of reform. A brief excursus into Thelwall’s early years will help contextualize his interest in medical science.

Living, in a material world

Born 27 July 1764 in Covent Garden to a downwardly mobile family of Saxon descent, Thelwall showed polymathic interests from a young age. Following the death of his father, he was pulled from school at age nine to work behind the counter of the family silk shop and suffered routine beatings by his mother and epileptic older brother. He found comfort in voracious reading – ‘plays, poetry, and history, moral philosophy, metaphysics, and even divinity’⁷ – and made unsuccessful attempts to become a historical painter and actor-dramatist, before leaving home at 16 to become apprenticed first to a west-end tailor, and then to an attorney. He kept up his self-education, even carrying a candle in his pocket so that he could read as he walked home at night.⁸ But he soon came to detest the career of ‘venal pleading’ as much as the ‘disgusting trade’ of the tailor shop.⁹ In 1786, just a year before his qualification for the bar, Thelwall abruptly cancelled his articles of indenture and ‘launch[ed] into the world as a literary adventurer’.¹⁰ The following year he published the two-volume sentimental collection Poems on Various Subjects as well as Orlando and Almeyda: A Legendary Tale, in the Manner of Dr. Goldsmith, and around the same time he became editor of the Biographical and Imperial Magazine, composing much of its miscellaneous content himself.¹¹ Financial self-sufficiency enabled him in July 1791 to marry Susan Vellum, whom he had met on a visit to Rutland two years earlier, when she was only ‘a simple, innocent, unsophisticated little maiden’ of 15.¹²

Soon after his marriage Thelwall settled in Southwark, near Guy’s and St. Thomas’s hospitals. This location facilitated his immersion in the world of medical research that was attracting widespread public interest. Possibly inspired by his grandfather, a naval surgeon who was found guilty of high treason for treating his enemies’ wounds during the Spanish War of 1718,¹³ Thelwall began attending lectures on anatomy given by his friend Henry Cline, as well as on chemistry and physiology, and also sat in on operations and dissections. His medical circle soon included Edward Coleman, expert in cases of asphyxia, John Walker, future specialist in vaccination, and James Parkinson, who later identified the disease that bears his name.¹⁴ The latter two would, like Thelwall, become equally well known for their radical politics.¹⁵ Thelwall now also befriended Cline’s pupil Astley Cooper, future surgeon to the king, instructor of John Keats, and prospective recipient of Thelwall’s noisy heart.¹⁶ Along with Cooper, Thelwall became active in the management of the Physical Society, a sort of ‘informal university’ and continuing education programme for the pre-eminent members of the Borough hospitals, who met weekly to discuss medical issues.¹⁷ It was before this society that Thelwall caused a sensation when, on 26 January 1793, he delivered a bold paper on ‘animal vitality’ that was debated for six successive meetings.¹⁸

Vitality was a hot topic at the end of the eighteenth century, when discoveries in chemistry, physiology and other areas of natural philosophy were offering up new grounds of speculation about the principle of life. Thelwall had kept abreast of these developments as editor of the Biographical and Imperial Magazine, publishing reports on Joseph Priestley’s experiments with ‘dephlogisticated air’ (or oxygen), George Fordyce’s Royal Society lecture on muscular motion, Erasmus Darwin’s study of the expansion of air, and Johann Kaspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy, among other scientific items.¹⁹ The magazine also shows Thelwall to have been a keen follower of the Humane Society, founded in 1776 by his friend William Hawes to resuscitate drowning victims and promote research into life-saving techniques.²⁰ In June 1790 two items from the Society’s reports received particular attention in the magazine: the discovery by the Baron de Hupsch that ‘a human body, apparently dead, may be resuscitated by being electrified’, and the invention by a Mr. Roulaud, of the University of Paris, of a machine consisting of a double-bellows for ‘restoring Respiration to Persons drowned, or otherwise suffocated’.²¹

Air, electricity, muscular motion – virtually all subjects of scientific inquiry at the time converged on a single question:

Whether life itself is to be considered as a distinct and positive essence, or, simply, as the result of a particular harmony and correspondence of the whole, or aggregate combination, preserved and acted upon by a particular stimulus?²²

In his 1793 paper before the Physical Society, published later that year as An Essay, Towards a Definition of Animal Vitality, Thelwall undertakes to answer this question ‘upon the simple principles of materialism’.²³ The essay’s epigraph – ‘Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas’ (‘Happy is he who can understand the causes of things’) – comes from a line in Vigil’s Georgics that echoes Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), a foundational text of materialist natural philosophy.²⁴ Thelwall’s attempt to understand the cause of life proceeds by submitting the prevailing theories of the day to a version of the heuristic now known as Occam’s razor: he prefers whichever theory ‘involves the fewest absurdities, or is best supported by analogy, and the correspondence of the general laws of Nature’.²⁵ On this basis Thelwall dismisses the two prevailing theories of the day, starting with the theory that ‘life is to be considered as a distinct and positive essence’ which is ‘superadded’ to organized matter.²⁶ This was a version of vitalism, the ‘belief in the existence of a mysterious force running through all matter in the universe’.²⁷ Sometimes referred to as ‘transcendentalism’ for its distinction between a perishable, material body and an immortal, immaterial soul, the theory was consistent with the Church-sanctioned Newtonian theory of matter as an inert, impenetrable substance consisting of ‘corpuscules’ that were endlessly recombined by divine principles or powers.²⁸ Thelwall traces the transmission of this theory among ancient writers – Aristotle, Plato, Plutarch, Moses and St. Paul – before calling attention to its resurgence in ‘modern philosophy’, notably the works of the country’s foremost surgeon John Hunter (uncle of Matthew and Joanna Baillie).²⁹ Thelwall had regularly attended Hunter’s lectures and was well acquainted with his argument that the principle of life was located in the blood.³⁰ While he agrees that the blood has a role in sustaining the animal organism, he rejects Hunter’s ‘doctrine of the Vitality of the blood’ because it implies that the blood itself is alive, a claim that ‘seems to contradict the known laws and phenomena of nature’, and also contradicts the opinion of ‘some later philosophers’ that the blood is less indispensable to life than the brain.³¹ The latter remark suggests Thelwall’s familiarity with the avant-garde brain science of the 1780s and 1790s, advanced notably by F. J. Gall in Austria and Erasmus Darwin in England.³² By contrast, he compares Hunter’s doctrine with that of

an ancient sect of Atheists, who, to get rid of the necessity of a Deity, insisted upon the original and eternal Vitality of matter, and accounted for the growth and nourishment of living things, by arguing, that the particles that nourished them were themselves possessed of a living prin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: ‘Mister Surgeon Thelwall’
• 1 Vital Principles: From the Animal Body to the Body Politic
• 2 Errant Sympathies: The Peripatetic
• 3 From Self to Sentient Nature: Poems Written in Close Confinement and Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement
• 4 Between Hope and Necessity: The Fairy of the Lake, The Hope of Albion and The Daughter of Adoption
• 5 The Language of Nature: Elocutionary Writings and Poems, Chiefly Suggested by the Scenery of Nature
• 6 The Materialist Imagination: Late Poetry and Criticism
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index