Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: The character and reputation of an ‘acquitted felon’
- 1 The Lives of John Thelwall: Another View of the ‘Jacobin Fox’
- 2 Usual and Unusual Suspects: John Thelwall, William Godwin and Pitt's Reign of Terror
- 3 Thelwall in his own Defence: The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons
- 4 Labour, Contingency, Utility: Thelwall's Theory of Property
- 5 ‘A Loud, a Fervid, and Resolute Remonstrance with our Rulers’: John Thelwall, the People and Political Economy
- 6 John Thelwall's Radical Vision of Democracy
- 7 Articulations of Community in The Peripatetic
- 8 Domestic Invasions: John Thelwall and the Exploitation of Privacy
- 9 ‘The Dungeon and the Cell’: The Prison Verse of Coleridge and Thelwall
- 10 Thelwall's Two Plays Against Empire: Incle and Yarico (1787) and The Incas (1792)
- 11 A ‘Double Visag'd Fate’: John Thelwall and the Hapless Hope of Albion
- 12 The Conceptual Underpinnings of John Thelwall's Elocutionary Practices
- 13 Tracing the Textual Reverberation: The Role of Thelwall's Elocutionary Selections in the British Lyceum
- 14 ‘Not Precedents to be Followed but Examples to be Weighed’: John Thelwall and the Jacobin Sense of the Past
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
6 - John Thelwall's Radical Vision of Democracy
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: The character and reputation of an ‘acquitted felon’
- 1 The Lives of John Thelwall: Another View of the ‘Jacobin Fox’
- 2 Usual and Unusual Suspects: John Thelwall, William Godwin and Pitt's Reign of Terror
- 3 Thelwall in his own Defence: The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons
- 4 Labour, Contingency, Utility: Thelwall's Theory of Property
- 5 ‘A Loud, a Fervid, and Resolute Remonstrance with our Rulers’: John Thelwall, the People and Political Economy
- 6 John Thelwall's Radical Vision of Democracy
- 7 Articulations of Community in The Peripatetic
- 8 Domestic Invasions: John Thelwall and the Exploitation of Privacy
- 9 ‘The Dungeon and the Cell’: The Prison Verse of Coleridge and Thelwall
- 10 Thelwall's Two Plays Against Empire: Incle and Yarico (1787) and The Incas (1792)
- 11 A ‘Double Visag'd Fate’: John Thelwall and the Hapless Hope of Albion
- 12 The Conceptual Underpinnings of John Thelwall's Elocutionary Practices
- 13 Tracing the Textual Reverberation: The Role of Thelwall's Elocutionary Selections in the British Lyceum
- 14 ‘Not Precedents to be Followed but Examples to be Weighed’: John Thelwall and the Jacobin Sense of the Past
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Lift up your voices …– Let not only the nocturnal phantom, but the living body of your complaints appear before your oppressors.
John Thelwall, The Rights of Nature (1796).At a time of concentrated government suppression of popular assembly, when it was a newly formulated treason to attempt to ‘overawe’ parliament, John Thelwall calls for resistance to what he sees as the spectralization of popular opinion. Similarly, in 1792 Major Cartwright had complained that ‘the people's share and influence’ in the House of Commons was ‘rendered a mere phantom’ by the corruption of parliament. At his trial for sedition following his involvement in the alleged ‘anti-parliament’ of the 1793 British Convention, Joseph Gerrald also spoke of overcoming the spectral nature of political representation, asking for ‘a fair, full, and complete representation – not a delusive vision, an empty phantom, an unreal mockery’. Like the early nineteenth-century reform movement described by Kevin Gilmartin, the 1790s agitation for reform can be considered ‘a calculated intervention in the political history of these phantoms, as radical theorists proposed electoral mechanisms and discursive practices that would replace the deceptive shadow-play of “virtual representation”’. However, the normative assumptions which allow us to describe virtual representation as a ‘shadow-play’ or an ‘unreal mockery’ are the very assumptions which were being closely contested in the 1790s. For some, the assemblies of the people gathered at Thelwall's lectures or at LCS demonstrations were more fantastical and unreal than a virtual representation of the nation. For its proponents, only virtual representation ‘could offer a representation that was “real”, probably even more real than that provided by “actual” representation’, as Brian Seitz notes. For them, the appearance of popular opinion would always already be a super- or sub-political spectre rather than a truly political body; a ‘new raised phantom, which calls itself THE PEOPLE’. I hope to convey a sense of this contested territory, in order to show what it means for Thelwall to demand that popular opinion be a ‘living body’ in a political realm whose metaphysical laws denied the very possibility of such an appearance.
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- John ThelwallRadical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, pp. 71 - 82Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014