John Thelwall was a Romantic and Enlightenment polymath. In 1794 he was tried and acquitted of high treason, earning himself the disdainful soubriquet 'acquitted felon' from Secretary of State for War, William Windham. Later, Thelwall's interests turned to poetry and plays, and was a collaborator and confidant of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

John Thelwall was a Romantic and Enlightenment polymath. In 1794 he was tried and acquitted of high treason, earning himself the disdainful soubriquet 'acquitted felon' from Secretary of State for War, William Windham. Later, Thelwall's interests turned to poetry and plays, and was a collaborator and confidant of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination reassesses Thelwall's eclectic body of work from the perspective of his heterodox materialist arguments about the imagination, political reform, and the principle of life itself, and his contributions to Romantic-era science.

John Thelwall was London Corresponding Society's most prominent orators and was tried for high treason along with Thomas Hardy and John Horne Tooke in 1794. This edition brings together Thelwall's most important political writing ranging from scientific pamphlets and writings on the art of elocution, to political philosophy and journalism.

This volume offers a reappraisal of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's radical careers before their emergence as major poets. Updated, revised, and with new manuscript material, this expanded new edition responds to the most significant critical work on Wordsworth's and Coleridge's radical careers in the three decades since the book first appeared. Fresh material is drawn from newspapers and printed sources; the poetry of 1798 is given more detailed attention, and the critical debate surrounding new historicism is freshly appraised. A new introduction reflects on how the book was originally researched, offers new insights into the notorious Léonard Bourdon killings of 1793, and revisits John Thelwall's predicament in 1798. University politics, radical dissent, and first-hand experiences of Revolutionary France form the substance of the opening chapters. Wordsworth's and Coleridge's relations with William Godwin and John Thelwall are tracked in detail, and both poets are shown to have been closely connected with the London Corresponding Society. Godwin's diaries, now accessible in electronic form, have been drawn upon extensively to supplement the narrative of his intellectual influence. Offering a comparative perspective on the poets and their contemporaries, the book investigates the ways in which 1790s radicals coped with personal crisis, arrests, trumped-up charges, and prosecutions. Some fled the country, becoming refugees; others went underground, hiding away as inner émigrés. Against that backdrop, Wordsworth and Coleridge opted for a different revolution: they wrote poems that would change the way people thought.

This book explores the hopes, desires, and imagined futures that characterized British radicalism in the 1790s, and the resurfacing of this sense of possibility in the following decades. The articulation of “Jacobin” sentiments reflected the emotional investments of men and women inspired by the French Revolution and committed to political transformation. The authors emphasize the performative aspects of political culture, and the spaces in which mobilization and expression occurred – including the club room, tavern, coffeehouse, street, outdoor meeting, theater, chapel, courtroom, prison, and convict ship. America, imagined as a site of republican citizenship, and New South Wales, experienced as a space of political exile, widened the scope of radical dreaming. Part 1 focuses on the political culture forged under the shifting influence of the French Revolution. Part 2 explores the afterlives of British Jacobinism in the year 1817, in early Chartist memorialization of the Scottish “martyrs” of 1794, and in the writings of E. P. Thompson. The relationship between popular radicals and the Romantics is a theme pursued in several chapters; a dialogue is sustained across the disciplinary boundaries of British history and literary studies. The volume captures the revolutionary decade’s effervescent yearning, and its unruly persistence in later years.

John Thelwall was London Corresponding Society's most prominent orators and was tried for high treason along with Thomas Hardy and John Horne Tooke in 1794. This edition brings together Thelwall's most important political writing ranging from scientific pamphlets and writings on the art of elocution, to political philosophy and journalism.

Reveals the development of the idea of 'the people' through print and publicity in 1790s London. This title is also available as Open Access.

This collection explores how location shaped sociability in the Romantic period.

This is the first full-scale study of the political radicalism of Iolo Morganwg, the renowned Welsh romantic whose colourful life as a Glamorgan stonemason, poet, writer, political activist and humanitarian made him one of the founders of modern Wales. This path-breaking volume offers a vivid portrait of a natural contrarian who tilted against the forces of the establishment for the whole of his adult life. Known as the ‘Bard of Liberty’ or the ’little republican bard’, he moved in highly-politicized circles, embraced republicanism, founded the Gorsedd of the Bards of the Isle of Britain, threw in his lot with Unitarians, promoted a sense of cultural nationalism, and supported the anti-slave trade campaign and the anti-war movement during years of war, oppression and cruelty.