John Thelwall

In his ‘Sober Reflections on the Seditious and Inflammatory Letter of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke to a Noble Lord’ (1796), the radical lecturer and pamphleteer John Thelwall presents a critique which replicates both the principles and contradictions of the radical rhetoric of clarity. Thelwall, however, is not generally included in accounts of the new rhetoric. Howell, for example, in his compendious history of eighteenth-century British logic and rhetoric, only mentions him once, in an account of the early nineteenth-century elocutionary movement.¹ But Thelwall’s metarhetorical participation in the Reflections controversy and the nature of his quasi-oratorical publications demonstrate the importance of including Thelwall in an account of the radical rhetoric of clarity. He was an influential and a controversial figure even among radical circles, often delivering provocative speeches which indulged in the kind of figurative abuse elsewhere (and, as I have shown, rather hypocritically) derided by radicals who explicitly denounced that form of obscurantist rhetoric. Thus Nicholas Roe notes that Godwin would have argued in relation to Thelwall’s rhetoric ‘that reform, and the wholesale regeneration of mankind, could be achieved without Thelwall’s lectures which aroused the passions of his audience but did not enlighten their minds’.² He lectured passionately for reform in London and elsewhere in England, and was punished and pursued by government authorities for his radical activities, arrested along with Thomas Hardy, Horne Tooke and other radicals during the infamous treason trials of 1794 which followed the suspension of habeus corpus on May 17, and even spending time in a ‘dead-hole’ in Newgate where ‘the corpses of those who had died of gaol fever’ were kept.³

Attacked from various sides for his fiery rhetoric, Thelwall made various metarhetorical, reflexive attempts to constrain the unpredictable effects of fiery persuasion, as he did in the title of a published speech called Peaceful Discussion, and not Tumultuary Violence the Means of Redressing National Grievances.⁴ Many of his numerous radical publications in the early 1790s were based on his public lectures and speeches or other forms of public address, such as a response to Burke with the Paineite title Rights of Nature, which took the form of a series of letters ‘to the people’.⁵ But in spite of his extensive activity, by the end of 1796 Thelwall became one of the primary figures of radical decline, seeking rural shelter from persecution with Coleridge, only to be rejected and forced to find what solace he could elsewhere, as he figuratively does in his 1801 Poems Chiefly Written in Retirement, where his ‘retirement’ contrasts meaningfully with his 1795 Poems Written in Close Confinement in the Tower and Newgate.⁶ As a particularly fiery writer and orator who simultaneously denounced the excesses of fiery rhetorical information, his rhetoric demonstrates the tendency of the radical metarhetoric of clarity to metamorphose into the object of its critique through parody and appropriation. With its invocation of a self-defeating reciprocal figuration of Burkean rhetorical inebriation, ‘Sober Reflections’ offers a particularly apposite example of this problematic element of Thelwall’s rhetoric. And Thelwall himself is an apposite figure to introduce at the end of this chapter, for as Nicholas Roe has remarked, ‘[a]fter the mass meetings of October and December 1795, the winter marked the demise of Thelwall as a radical leader and the beginning of the end of the popular reform movement’.⁷

In his pointedly titled ‘Reflections’, Thelwall uses a sustained metaphor of drunkenness to signify the obfuscating potential of language in the hands of writers like Burke who would take advantage of ‘slippery signifiers’ to conflate distinct principles and manipulate the overwhelmed reader. His critique of Burke, in other words, is typically rhetorical and linguistic. Intemperance is associated with figures of obscurity and contrasted with the healthy light of moderation, standing for cloudy consciousness and unclear thought. In Burke’s excessively figurative and emotional letter, writes Thelwall, ‘every thing [is] left to the misguidance of those ignes fatui of intemperance and revenge, which, in the night of ignorance, a foul and corrupted atmosphere never fails to ingender, in the low, rank, marshy fens of vulgar intellect’.⁸ Considering the sensitive subject he is addressing, Burke’s ‘tricks and arts of eloquence’ and ‘gusts of passion’ are dangerously misapplied, and only exacerbate the intemperance of the revolutionary harpies hatched by forces of oppression in France.⁹ Burke should have proceeded, Thelwall claims, like a philosopher, with temperate caution, ‘lest by pouring acceptable truths too suddenly on the popular eye, instead of salutary light he should produce blindness and frenzy!’¹⁰ Thelwall’s explicit interest in promoting gradual, non-violent reform was figured as under threat by anything calculated to incite violent action, and so when Burke ‘calls in the aid of poetry’ he only contributes to the imbalance which always attends revolutionary excitement.¹¹

Thelwall’s major interest in ‘Sober Reflections’ is in Burke’s misleading conflation of revolution with violence. Because it functions not only as a misrepresentation of the facts, but also as an indiscriminate use of one of the inherent weaknesses of language, Burke’s rhetorical action is doubly worthy of extensive metarhetorical rebuttal. His ‘black cloud of indiscriminate abuse’ is used to obscure the fact that ‘principles, which are the sun of the intellectual universe’, cannot ‘be changed in their nature or their course by the vile actions of a few ruffians’.¹² In order to associate revolution in popular consciousness with a dangerous lack of control, the enemies of reform

endeavour to confound together, by chains of connection slighter than the spider’s web… every intemperate action of the obscurest individual whose mind has become distempered by the calamities of the times, not with the oppressions and the miseries that provoke them, but with the honest and virtuous labours of those true sons of moderation and good order who wish… to spread the solar light of reason, that they may extinguish the grosser fires of vengeance.¹³

Reasoning in a sober fashion is, ostensibly, Thelwall’s remedy to this gross manipulation of the congenital weakness of arbitrary linguistic reference. In this context, Thelwall’s attack on Burke’s loose and figurative language is an extension of a concern for sustaining a clear and rational discourse. Accordingly, he singles out Burke’s figurative description of reason as an example of obfuscation: ‘[w]hy does he thus bewilder our judgment…? Why leave us benighted in these cold fogs of mysticism?’¹⁴ Thelwall then goes on, as a consequence of his attempt to diminish the effect of Burke’s faulty and inconsistent associations, to characterize reason - which is always represented as an enemy of the church, if not necessarily of God - as fully human, with no invocation of divinity: ‘I have ever considered reason as nothing more than the operations of the mind, employed in the research, comparison, and digestion, of knowledge by which efficient understanding can alone be produced’.¹⁵ In Thelwall’s rhetoric of clarity, reason, and the proper investigation of principles, must be clear and sober in order to withstand the malevolent influence of the foggy haze spread by ‘poetry’ and intemperance.

But in the logic of the new rhetoric of clarity, Thelwall’s metarhetorical use of rhetorical devices and highly figurative language, of long breathless sentences and wild declamations, contradicts his explicit concern for clarity and philosophical deliberation. As Michael Scrivener argues, ‘Thelwall condemned political and verbal “intemperance”, but at the same time celebrated political and verbal “energy” that seems indistinguishable from intemperance’.¹⁶ Thelwall’s concern with Burke’s conflation is therefore close to his own inability to maintain a clear distinction between the very terms which Burke is collapsing together, reform and revolution, an inability which ‘was not idiosyncratic but typical of the democratic movement from the French Revolution to the Reform Act of 1832’.¹⁷ This problem, of separating the rhetoric of clarity from a rhetoric of obscurity, may now be seen not only in reference to the need to simultaneously move and inform readers, but also to wider problems of linguistic ambivalence, motivated political speech, and the slippage of signification. The line separating ‘reform’ and ‘revolution’, ‘rhetoric’ and ‘eloquence’, was not merely thin, but ultimately indistinct.