In recent years, the reputation of John Thelwall as a political thinker and writer has steadily risen on a gathering tide of revisionary scholarship. The current revival is curiously one-sided, however, for over half of Thelwall's career is still virtually unknown; little sustained attention has yet been paid to his poetry, and even less to elocutionary theory, therapy and pedagogy. One might almost be forgiven for assuming that Thelwall died with the ‘radical decade’ with which he is so closely associated, sinking below the horizon of history like his namesake, the title character of Wordsworth's unfinished epic The Recluse. But that assumption, like Wordsworth himself, does Thelwall an injustice. For although he did retreat under the anti-Jacobin onslaught, Thelwall emerged from his Welsh exile reinvigorated and reinvented, to greet a new century with a new profession, and a linchpin volume of Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement.

While the romantic lyrics at the centre of the Retirement volume are receiving increasing critical attention, the ambitious historical poems that frame them deserve closer conjoined critical reading than they have yet received. The volume opens with ‘The Fairy of the Lake,’ an Arthurian ‘dramatic romance’ based on Welsh myth and concludes with specimens of ‘The Hope of Albion,’ a Miltonic epic set in seventh-century Northumbria. Closely connected in plot, aims and origin, these poems take a longer view of Thelwall's troubled times, returning to ancient British history to dramatize a man and a nation poised between past and future, in a ‘dark age’ of repression and civil conflict indeed, but also a liberating moment of transformation. Following the ‘universal principle of action and re-action’ that governs and unites Thelwall's political, literary and elocutionary theory and practice, Thelwall here uses the past as a springboard for personal and national renewal. In similar fashion, these poems may bring about a long-deferred rebound in Thelwall's reputation as a poet.

The liminal position of these history poems in the emergent Thelwall canon, and of Thelwall himself in the established literary canon, follows from and speaks to the radical fragmentation of the Thelwall archive, which The Hope of Albion exemplifies.