John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination

239 Pages·2014·1.595 MB·English

by  Yasmin Solomonescu (auth.)

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JOHN THELWALL AND THE MATERIALIST IMAGINATION
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John Thelwall and the
Materialist Imagination
Yasmin Solomonescu
Assistant Professor, University of Notre Dame, USA
© Yasmin Solomonescu 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-42613-0
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Contents
List of Illustrations viii
Acknowledgements ix
List of Abbreviations xii
Introduction: ‘Mister Surgeon Thelwall’ 1
1 Vital Principles: From the Animal Body to the Body Politic 13
2 Errant Sympathies: The Peripatetic 34
3 From Self to Sentient Nature: Poems Written in Close
Confinement and Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement 50
4 Between Hope and Necessity: The Fairy of the Lake,
The Hope of Albion and The Daughter of Adoption 73
5 The Language of Nature: Elocutionary Writings and
Poems, Chiefly Suggested by the Scenery of Nature 95
6 The Materialist Imagination: Late Poetry and Criticism 120
Appendices
1 Peter Crompton, Letter to John Thelwall, 11 Sept. 1800 143
2 Thelwall, ‘To Dr. Peter Crompton’, Poems, Chiefly Written
in Retirement (1801) 145
3 Thelwall, ‘The Star that Shone When Other Stars Were Dim:
A Night-Walk in the Vicinity of Whitehall’, Monthly
Magazine 59 Supplement (1825), 661–3 147
Notes 151
Bibliography 199
Index 219
vii
List of Illustrations
5.1 James Gillray, Copenhagen House (1795) 96
5.2 John Thelwall, ‘Ode from the Land of Mountains’, in The
Vestibule of Eloquence: Original Articles, Oratorical and Poetical,
Intended as Exercises in Recitation, at the Institution, Bedford
Place, Russell Square (London, 1810), pp. 160–1 115
5.3 John Thelwall, ‘Sonnet to Stella (in the Style of Ossian)’, in
Poems, Chiefly Suggested by the Scenery of Nature; to Which are
Added Odes &c. Amatory and Congratulatory, Translations, and
Attempts at Humour, 3 vols, manuscript, Derby Local Studies
Library, England, vol. II, p. 727 116
viii
Acknowledgements
Many people and organizations have helped make the writing of this
book at once possible and pleasurable. For their generous support of my
research, I wish to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada (SSHRC), Doctoral and Postdoctoral Fellowship
Programs; Trinity Hall, Cambridge; the Cambridge Commonwealth
Trust; the Canadian Centennial Scholarship Fund; the Gordon Sinclair
Foundation; and the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts,
University of Notre Dame.
The publishers and I are grateful to the following for permission
to reproduce archival or copyright material: the Derby Local Studies
Library for permission to quote from Thelwall’s three faircopy volumes
entitled Poems, Chiefly Suggested by the Scenery of Nature and for permis-
sion to reproduce part of a page from that collection; the National
Library of Scotland for permission to quote from Thelwall’s letters to
Robert Anderson of 9 Feb. and 12 March 1804; John F. Delaney Letters,
Department of Special Collections, Hesburgh Libraries of Notre Dame,
for permission to quote from Thelwall’s letters to Thomas Hardy of 24
Aug. 1796, 19 May 1797 and 12 Dec. 1805; the HCL Widener Library for
permission to reproduce Thelwall’s ‘Ode from the Land of Mountains’
from The Vestibule of Eloquence; the British Museum for permission
to reproduce James Gillray’s Copenhagen House; and the Fitzwilliam
Museum for permission to reproduce on the cover William Blake’s
‘I want! I want!’ Plate 9 in For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise. This book
benefitted from the expert assistance of librarians, curators and man-
agers at all of those institutions, as well as at the British Library; the
Cambridge University Library; the King’s College London Library; the
Jerwood Centre, Grasmere; the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert
Museum; and the Morgan Library and Museum.
Earlier versions of material in Chapters 2 and 3 appeared as
‘Articulations of Community in The Peripatetic’, in John Thelwall: Radical
Romantic and Acquitted Felon, ed. Steve Poole, The Enlightenment World
11 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), pp. 83–93, and ‘Mute Records
and Blank Legends: John Thelwall’s “Paternal Tears”’, Romanticism 16,
no. 2 (2010), 152–63, respectively. The publishers and I are grateful to
Pickering and Chatto and Edinburgh University Press for permission to
reproduce that material here.
ix