John Thelwall and William Godwin provide two of the clearest and most significant examples of the ways in which innocent lives in the 1790s were drastically altered by their encounters with the British state's domestic security apparatus, which critical commentators then and some historians today refer to as Pitt's ‘Reign of Terror’. They also provide a paradigmatic representation of the ways in which the victims of this state-sponsored system of intimidation can be divided into two groups, which I call ‘usual’ and ‘unusual’ suspects. Thelwall represents the former group: active reformers (organizers, lecturers, writers, publishers) against whom the state acted directly by arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, trial and, most of the time, conviction and punishment. Godwin represents the ‘unusual’ suspects: not activists (on principle, in his case), but writers whose work (treatises, novels, plays, poems) expressed optimistic views of, at first, the events or ideals of the French Revolution and, after 1793, of the practice or theory of parliamentary reform in Britain which had revived in response to it. These ‘unusual’ suspects were not, for the most part, arrested or otherwise acted upon officially. Instead, their lives and especially their careers suffered significantly from the hegemonic (informal, vigilante) ‘overflow’ of state-sponsored intimidation: innuendo, threat, rumour, gossip, false reports and the like, which resulted in a wide range of largely irreversible negative effects: fellowships lost, promotions denied, promised church livings withheld, inheritances unforthcoming, contracts and engagements broken, and so on and on.

In both groupings, however, the result was the same: an effective silencing of dissent, dramatically reduced career possibilities, and an ‘after’ or ‘second’ life markedly different than the promising ones members of both groups had begun to envision for themselves. Like Thelwall and Godwin, most people in both groups recovered to a degree (though less so in the case of the former), but their lives and careers were never the same again.