Poems Written in Close Confinement in the Tower and Newgate, Under a Charge of High Treason. By John Thelwall

by John Thelwall

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Delve into what it was like to live during the eighteenth century by reading the first-hand accounts of everyday people, including city dwellers and farmers, businessmen and bankers, artisans and merchants, artists and their patrons, politicians and their constituents. Original texts make the American, French, and Industrial revolutions vividly contemporary.
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British Library

T116790

With a final errata leaf.

London : printed for the author, and sold by J. Ridgway; H. D. Symonds; and D. I. Eaton, 1795. [2],iii,[1],32,[2]p. ; 4°

42 pages, Hardcover

First published May 25, 2000

Reviews

[Danielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting work. The poems deal quite explicitly with ideological considerations. The author was supposedly of the political school of English "Jacobinism", so the poems do not have wonderful things to say about Great Britain in the age of revolution. The war with France, the overlordship over India, and political repression domestically, all invoke Thelwall's ire. Using a literary convention of the time, he compares contemporary evils unfavorably with a mythic libertarian rule over England-- recalling, for instance, Runnymede, the site of Magna Carta. The work though, is not especially didactic in its approach to the social questions of the day, such as they were. Indeed its chief interest is in the personal nature of the appeal to justice, both historically-- given that Thelwall was imprisoned for his outspoken views during the work's genesis-- and in regard to the content of the work, whereas Thelwall articulates the re-establishment of freedom in England-- movingly, albeit rather stoically-- in terms of his own right and duty to selfless action, whatever the cost to himself. In this respect the work is self-consciously opposed to certain libertarian currents in the romantic poetry of the time, with Thelwall saying as much in the preface. Whether Thelwall in fact is as solitary in this stance as he supposes himself is debatable, though certainly he seems quite alone when raised against the scholarly legacy of English romanticist poetry, whose meaningfully revolutionary aspects have been rather forgotten.