Throughout his life John Thelwall was very much concerned with the question of what sort of access governments, political groups and individuals should have to spaces traditionally considered private. In his writings he often expounded what seemed to be unequivocal views on government intrusion. Yet an unresolved tension surfaces between his efforts to safeguard personal privacy and his advocacy of the principle – to use a fitting if somewhat anachronistic phrase – that ‘the personal is political.’ Throughout various careers in the public eye, as political debater, orator, lecturer and elocutionist, he attempted to resolve the contradictions that emerged between his fears about incursions into the most intimate areas of human relations; his self-publicizing practices (which included disclosures about his domestic life); and the growing emphasis on the contiguity between the public and private spheres (an emphasis which he endorsed). I would argue that Thelwall's contradictory and rather remarkable experiences with fame and infamy reveal much about political culture, past and present. Thelwall's experiences are emblematic of a transitional moment in modern British political history, for in contrast to their early eighteenth-century counterparts, politicians in the post-French Revolution period found it much more difficult to shield their private lives from the prying eyes of the public. As a consequence, political figures – whether reformers, radicals, reactionaries, Whigs, Tories or members of the royal family – became progressively more conscious of the impact their personal lives had on the reception of their ideas and opinions.

Importantly, Thelwall's writing and his experiences raise wider, more perennial questions about the issue of privacy, particularly as it pertains to public trust in government. Privacy is central to our assessment of the possibilities and risks associated with identity politics and to our understanding of the formation of public opinion. My goal here is twofold: first, using Thelwall as my exemplar, I will show how in the 1790s and after, the personalization of the political gave rise to extraordinary violations of privacy.