The Peripatetic

by John Thelwall

Book by Thelwall, John

447 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2000

Reviews

[Tony Gualtieri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book requires the patience and ability to inhabit the mind of someone writing over 200 years ago. If those requirements are met, it's immensely rewarding. John Thelwall was a radical and proto-Romantic whose liberal outlook is a refreshing change from the stolid Toryism of Samuel Johnson and his imitators. He champions the equality of all people and rails against the unfairness of contemporary social distinctions. Like Wordsworth, he appreciated the charms of rural life and the natural world. Telling examples of Thelwall's politics are the pleasure he takes in the conversion of royal sites into "useful" farms and cottages, and the diatribes against cruelty to animals.

The Peripatetic is framed by walking journeys to Richmond and St. Albans. The travelogue is broken by digressions on the Rights of Man and poems ranging from a satirical "Battle of the Books" between belles-lettres and the popular press to a beautiful ode inspired by the White Cliffs of Dover. There are character sketches and even a love story which weaves its way through the narrative. The prose is heavy, twenty words serve where one would do, and some of the poems simply don't work, but the uniqueness of this eccentric work more than compensates.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's really hard to categorize this because it's not my normal kind of reading and it was, at times, hard to get through because it seemingly rambled on. However, Thelwall was an endlessly fascinating man and writer and it was easy to get lost in his head for long periods of time.

[Lydia Hughes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for my university course. Generically complex and vastly different from my usual reading, I thoroughly enjoyed this bold text’s exploration of rights, politics, class, race, and patriotism, via the vector of a travelogue. We accompany the speaker on an insightful political and literal journey in our reading experience. The prose may be clunky and slow in places, however the uniqueness of the text compensates for such shortcomings. Moreover, I appreciated the typically-Romantic appreciation of the natural world (in the spirit of my favourite, Wordsworth).