Copenhagen House

This image depicts a public meeting of more than 100,000 people at Copenhagen Fields, Islington, called by the London Corresponding Society on 12 November 1795. The figure on the right, brandishing a clenched fist, is John Thelwall, the political reformer, who had been imprisoned in the Tower of London for treason the previous year.

Radical Birdcalls: Avian Voices and the Politics of the Involuntary

This essay investigates Romantic-era treatments of bird calls as “unpremeditated”, spontaneous, and involuntary. Looking at parrots, starlings, mockingbirds, gamecocks, and skylarks in the work of writers including John Thelwall, Percy Shelley, Thomas Beddoes, and Helen Maria Williams, I explore the way in which talking and singing birds are often understood through reference to materialist philosophy and the associationism of David Hartley. Taking Thelwall’s King Chaunticlere and John Gilpin’s Ghost, and Shelley’s ‘To a Sky-Lark’ and A Defence of Poetry as my main focus, I argue that these writers use materialist metaphors of unconscious avian utterance to make nuanced claims about the seemingly ambiguous role of the will in political speech.

‘More than mortal fervour’: Patriotism and Democracy in John Thelwall's Epic The Hope of Albion

John Thelwall published extracts from his epic fragment The Hope of Albion (1801) during an unprecedented revival of epic poetry in Britain. The revival saw writers from across the political spectrum promoting various ideas of national identity and examining Britain's developing role as an imperial power. This article positions Thelwall's fragment alongside poems of his contemporaries, including epics by Joseph Cottle and Henry James Pye (both titled Alfred and published in 1800 and 1801). Examining how Thelwall differently revises tropes from classical and Miltonic poems, I argue that he uses the epic genre to explore how the nation could be transformed as an answer to tyranny and oppression. At the same time, formal tensions in the poem suggest the limitations of the very hope that comprises Thelwall's subject.