Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:45:08.114Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

John Thelwall and the Eighteenth-Century Radical Response to Political Economy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Iain Hampsher-Monk
Iain Hampsher-Monk
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

John Thelwall was born in 1764 in Covent Garden, London. The son of a silk mercer, he was unsuccessfully apprenticed to his father after leaving school at 13, and then successively, an apprenticed tailor, and an articled legal clerk; but he failed to impress at any of these, apparently reading during working hours. Turning to his pen, he published two volumes of poems and became literary editor of the Biographical and Imperial Magazine. Speaking at the Coachmakers' Hall, he caught the attention of John Home Tooke, who offered to send him to university. But by this time he was already enthusing about the revolution in France and had joined both the whiggish Society of the Friends of the People, and the more down-market London Corresponding Society. In the midst of all of this, and getting married, he attended some courses on anatomy and medicine at one of the London medical colleges.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , March 1991 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 There is a good entry on Thelwall in the Dictionary of national biography. Further details of his life are in the biography written by his widow: MrsThelwall, , The life of John Thelwall (London, 1837)Google Scholar. There is a rather whiggish study by Cestre, Charles, John Thelwall: a pioneer of democracy in England (London and New York, 1906)Google Scholar, and an article by Gallop, Geoffry, ‘Ideology and the English jacobins: the case of John Thelwall’, Enlightenment and Dissent, V (1986)Google Scholar. Inasmuch as the latter concentrates on Thelwall's programme of reform as outlined in his periodical The Tribune rather than on his analysis of society it is complementary to the present article. The best general accounts of the period are those of Veitch, G. S., The genesis of parliamentary reform (London, 1914Google Scholar, reprinted 1965), and Goodwin's, A. more recent, The friends of the people (London, 1979)Google Scholar which includes an excellent bibliography.

2 On the Society of the Friends of the People see Hampsher-Monk, I., ‘Civic humanism and parliamentary reform: the case of the Society of the Friends of the People’, The Journal of British Studies, XVIII (1979)Google Scholar; and on the London Corresponding Society, Collins, H., ‘The London Corresponding Society’, in Saville, J. (ed.), Democracy and the labour movement (London, 1954)Google Scholar, and Thale, Mary, intr. and ed., Selections from the papers of the London Corresponding Society 1792–1799 (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar.

3 State trials, XXIV; the ‘Two Acts’ are 36 Geo. III.c.7 & 8. The first rendered the spoken and written word liable to charges of treason, the second forbade unlicensed discussion of political grievances at meetings of more than 50 persons.

4 The British Library has Thelwall's copy of Moyle with his manuscript comments. As well as adding the tendentious title Democracy vindicated, Thelwall misconstrued Moyle's original title as An essay on the constitution and government of the Roman state. Needless to say Thelwall was not concerned with the faithful presentation of the historical Moyle, often criticizing him for failing to emphasise the strengths of the democratic part of the Roman constitution. Thelwall used the lectures as a pretext for more discoursive comments on politics, criminalised under the new legislation. Thelwall's lecture notes are in the P.R.O., TS 11957/3502 (1).

5 Robinson, Henry Crabb, Diary selected and ed. Sadler, Thos. (New York, 1872), 2 vols., II, 265Google Scholar. Interest in speech, elocution and, less surprisingly, oratory was very prevalent amongst radicals at this time. Most obviously one thinks of Cobbett (whose radicalism to be sure dates from a little later) but there is also Home Tooke's Diversions of Purley and Thomas Spence's project for a new phonetic spelling as well as transliterations of his other works in ‘Crusonian’ as he called it. See Real reading-made-easy: or, a foreigner's and grown persons pleasing introduction to reading English (Newcastle, 1782)Google Scholar, and his TH'I HI'STIRE ov KRUZONEA or R'O'INS'IN KROZO'Z IL'IND down to thi prezint Tim (Nuk'as'il, 1782)Google Scholar.

6 Allen, B. S., ‘Godwin's influence on Thelwall’, PMLA, XXXVII (1922), 622Google Scholar.

7 On Godwin's ‘circle’ see the innovative treatment by Philp, Mark, Godwin's political justice (Ithaca and London, 1986)Google Scholar, especially appendices.

8 Thelwall, John, Peacefull discussion, not tumultuary violence the means of redressing national grievance (London, 1795), p. 2Google Scholar, (Thelwall's emphasis); the title has a distinctly Godwinian ring to it.

9 Godwin has long been held to be an extreme, indeed, the extreme, example of an actutilitarian. Amongst the best of these interpretations is Monro's, D. H.Godwin's moral philosophy (Oxford, 1953)Google Scholar, see also Clarke, J. P., The philosophical anarchism of William Godwin (Princeton, 1977)Google Scholar, and Marshall, Peter H., William Godwin (New Haven, 1984)Google Scholar. This view has recently been challenged in a close reading of the various revisions Godwin made of Political justice, which argues that Godwin's position is a species of ‘perfectionism’. See Philp, Godwin's political justice. Despite his persuasive arguments I remain attached to the older view.

10 Thelwall, John, The natural and constitutional rights of Britons to annual parliaments, universal suffrage, and the freedom of popular association (London, 1795), (hereafter Rights of Britons), p. ivGoogle Scholar.

11 Thelwall, , Rights of Britons, p. 50Google Scholar.

12 Thelwall, , Rights of Britons, pp. 88–9Google Scholar; see also Report of the subcommittee of the Westminster association (London, 1780)Google Scholar.

13 Thelwall, , Rights of Britons, p. 90Google Scholar.

14 Thelwall, , Rights of Britons, p. 46Google Scholar.

15 I can find no ‘eighteenth-century commonwealthsman’ before Major John Cartwright, arguing the kind of principled case for manhood suffrage found amongst civil-war radicals. Extension of the franchise, where advocated, is seen as instrumental to an independent Commons and the restoration of virtue. For the general background to this see Robbins, Caroline, The eighteenth-century commonwealthsman (Cambridge, Mass., 1959)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Pocock, J. G. A., The machiavellian moment (Princeton, 1975)Google Scholar, chs. XII–XIV.

16 Thelwall, , Rights of Britons, pp. 42–3Google Scholar.

17 Thelwall, , Rights of Britons, p. 54Google Scholar.

18 Thelwall, , Rights of Britons, p. 49Google Scholar and see ff

19 Thelwall, , Rights of Britons, pp. 58–9Google Scholar.

20 Thelwall, , Rights of Britons, pp. 55–6Google Scholar.

21 Thelwall, , The rights of nature against the usurpations of establishments in a series of letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London, 1796) (Letters II-IV pagination continuous), III, 50Google Scholar.

22 Thelwall, , Rights of Britons, p. 43Google Scholar.

23 Thelwall, , Rights of Britons, p. 44Google Scholar.

24 Thelwall, , Rights of Britons, pp. 82–3Google Scholar.

25 Thelwall, , Rights of Britons, p. 46Google Scholar.

26 Private letter, 17 Dec., cited in Cestre, , John Thelwall, p. 143Google Scholar.

27 See on this Hont, Istvan and Ignatieff, M. (eds.), Wealth and virtue: the shaping of political economy in the Scottish enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in particular the contributions of John Dunn and J. G. A. Pocock. There is a good discussion of the issues raised by this and another important collection – Campbell, R. H. and Skinner, Andrew S. (ed.), The origins and nature of the Scottish enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1982)Google Scholar – by Berry, Chris: ‘The nature of wealth and the origins of virtue: recent essays on the Scottish enlightenment’, History of European Ideas, VII I, (1986), 85–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 The discussion which clearly brings out the issues is John Dunn, ‘From applied theology to social analysis’, in Hont & Ignatieff, Wealth and virtue.

29 Locke, John, Two treatises of government, ed. Laslett, Peter, (Cambridge, 1960), p. 304Google Scholar. Filmer's challenge was to argue that defenders of property rights against the king had either to accept communal ownership of all property, or demonstrate that a unanimous agreement to partition what had been given to all in common had taken place. See SirFilmer, Robert, Patriarcha and other political works, ed. Laslett, Peter (Oxford, 1949), pp. 63–6Google Scholar.

30 Burke, following Selden and Hobbes, argued that natural rights were given up on entry to society, and thereon ceased to be relevant (see reference in the following note). Rousseau of course argued that rights are transformed in the course of social development, and Locke's argument was widely taken to mean that natural property rights were transformed into positive property rights. That he may not have meant this, as is argued by Tully, J., A Discourse on property, John Locke and his adversaries (Cambridge, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar – an intepretation re-enforced by the much more radical context that has been provided for reading Locke by Ashcraft, Richard, Revolutionary politics and Locke's ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Princeton, 1986)Google Scholar – is strictly irrelevant to how he was read by orthodox readers in the 1790s.

The argument is far better known in the civic than in the natural rights tradition. Fletcher of Saltoun, of all the neo-harringtonians most preoccupied with large scale historical developments, ‘exposed the most difficult of the many problems to perplex eighteenth-century social thought: the apparent incompatibility of liberty and virtue with culture,…Virtue, in its paradigmatic social form, was now located in a past; but the era of freedom was also the era of barbarism and superstition,…’ Pocock, , Machiavellian moment, p. 431Google Scholar.

31 Burke, Edmund, Works of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke (6 vols., London, Bohn's Standard Library Edition, 1880), II, 332Google Scholar.

32 Historically, we have tended to regard Lockean natural rights as the paradigm; in fact, as Richard Tuck has most recently shown, Locke is distinctly anomalous. Prior to him, and with the exception of the Levellers, natural right theory was used to explain how government gained its authority, not how citizens might retain some. See Tuck, Richard, Natural rights theories (Cambridge, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Burke is in this tradition following Selden (whom he cites), and Hobbes (with whom he expresses familiarity – ‘old Hobbes’) in arguing that natural rights are given up on entering society, and are thereafter irrelevant.

33 Burke, , An appeal from the new to the old whigs, in Works, III, 95, 82Google Scholar.

34 See the discussion of this problem in the thought of Paine in Nursery-Bray, P. F., ‘Thomas Paine and the concept of alienation’, Political Studies, XVI (1969)Google Scholar.

35 Henry Redhead Yorke invoked Locke in a famous revolutionary speech in Sheffield to a crowd claimed to number 10,000 on 7 April 1794, Goodwin, , Friends of the people, p. 325Google Scholar. Thomas Spence, the famous Tyneside radical was supposedly influenced in his communitarian views by his Glassite background; but he is reputed to have replied to a charge of having stolen nuts from (wild) trees in the duke of Newcastle's estate, with an enquiry as to whether his Grace had laboured on the trees! On Spence see Rudkin, Olive, Thomas Spence and his connections (London, 1927)Google Scholar and Ashraf, P. M., The Life and times of Thomas Spence (Newcastle, 1983)Google Scholar. Radical periodicals such as Spence's Pig's meat, and Daniel Isaac Eaton's Hog's wash commonly excerpted suitably radical tags from Locke, and other thinkers.

36 See Dunn, John, The political thought of John Locke: an historical account of the Two treatises of government (Cambridge, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, passim, and on the limits of rebellion Hampsher-Monk, Iain, ‘Dr Anglim's Locke’, Political Studies, XXVI, 1 (1978)Google Scholar.

37 The situation is perhaps not quite as simple as this. Locke does indicate that the invention of money alters intrinsic values and leads to an increase in the effective desires of men, and the likelihood of conflict, thus rendering government more necessary. (Locke, , Two treatises, II, v, paras. 37, 45Google Scholar). In these remarks Locke displays an admittedly limited interest in the kind of historical moral sociology that so preoccupied the political economists. There may thus be room for drawing Locke back into that now dominant stream of eighteenth-century thought from which he has recently been excluded.

38 Paine, Thomas, The rights of man, Part I, in Foner, Philip S., (ed.), The complete writings of Thomas Paine (2 vols., New York, 1969), I, 257Google Scholar.

39 Dickinson, H. T., Liberty and property (London, 1977), p. 257Google Scholar. Since this article was accepted for publication my attention has been drawn to Professor Günther Lottes' work, Politische Aujklärung and plebejisches Publicum: zur Theorie und Praxis des englischen Radicalisms im späten 18. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1979)Google Scholar. This has been an extended discussion of the natural rights theory of Paine and Thelwall, pp. 284–99.

40 Thelwall, , Rights of Britons, p. 43Google Scholar.

41 Later Roman law recognized a specific category of res communes, such as the air, running water, the sea, and the tidal seashore. These could not be privatized. But from the earliest times property could be encumbered with ‘servitudes’, obligations to second parties with respect of certain ‘natural’ rights to pass through, conduit water across, or enjoy the light from, another's property. See Buckland, W. W., A textbook of Roman law (3rd edn revised, Cambridge, 1963), pp. 182–3, and 259–64Google Scholar. In English law all real property was residually the crown's, but property owners could acquire rights to the natural attributes deriving from properties not their own, such as easements of light.

42 Thelwall, , Rights of nature, II, 33–4Google Scholar.

43 Thelwall, , Rights of nature, II, 37–8Google Scholar.

44 Thelwall, , Rights of nature, III, 54Google Scholar.

45 Thelwall, , Rights of nature, III, 55Google Scholar.

46 Thelwall, , Rights of nature, III, 52Google Scholar: ‘The simplest condition…out of which every other state has arisen, by a series of progressive innovations, is the Savage State’ and ff.

47 Thelwall, , Rights of nature, III, 57Google Scholar.

48 Thelwall endorses the periodized theory of social evolution advanced by the Scottish school, together with some of the political implications those thinkers had drawn from it. E.g. Rights of nature, III, 57: [in pastoral societies] ‘the power of the chieftain expires with the campaign: and all the habits of pastoral life are inimical to the usurpations of authority’. See ibid. pp. 52ff.

49 Thelwall, , Rights of nature, III, 70–1Google Scholar.

50 Thelwall, , Rights of nature, VI, 89Google Scholar.

51 Smith, Adam, An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, ed. Campbell, R. H. and Skinner, A. S. (2 vols., Oxford, 1976)Google Scholar, (in citing this I have given Smith's original book and chapter subheadings, followed by the page number in the Oxford edition) I, viii, 82–3, and see 1, VI, 65–7.

52 Thelwall, , Rights of nature, III, 75, 78Google Scholar.

53 Thelwall, , Rights of nature, III, 76–7Google Scholar: ‘If labour has its adequate reward, I maintain that the permanent possession of land is morally and politically expedient; because it assists production, without preventing distribution; and thereby, benefits the whole human race.’

54 Locke, John, Two treatises of government, II, V, para. 41Google Scholar.

55 Thelwall, , Rights of nature, IV, 92Google Scholar.

56 The notion that one might establish political right on the basis of what kind of contractual alienation of right it would have been morally permissible and prudent for the original contractors to have agreed to is a most important step on this path from natural right. It has been happily designated the ‘principle of interpretive charity’ by Tuck, Richard, Natural rights theories (Cambridge, 1979), ch. VIICrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 A position towards which Paine too was moving in the second part of The rights of man and, more explicitly in Agrarian justice (1796).

58 Thelwall, , Democracy vindicated, p. 20Google Scholar.

59 Thelwall, , Rights of nature, III, 83Google Scholar.

60 Thelwall, , Rights of nature, III, 80Google Scholar.

61 Thelwall, , Rights of nature, III, 90(Thelwall's italics)Google Scholar. Cf. Smith's, Adam remarks about masters being ‘always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate’ – and sometimes ‘to sink the wages of labour even below this rate’, Wealth of nations, I, VIII, 84Google Scholar.

62 Thelwall, , Rights of nature, IV, 89Google Scholar.

63 Ibid.

64 Thelwall, , Rights of nature, IV, 93Google Scholar.

65 Thelwall, , Rights of nature, IV, 99, 97–8Google Scholar. Once again Thelwall may have found Smith suggestive. In Wealth of nations 1, i, 21, Smith notes that in the process of the division of labour, philosophy too ‘becomes, like every other employment, the principal or sole trade and occupation of a particular class of citizens’. And at V, i, f, 782 he notes the enervation and torpor of mind generally prevalent in workers whose lives, on account of the division of labour, are spent performing the same simple task. He ‘generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become…incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation…conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment…of forming any just judgement concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life’.

66 Thelwall, , Democracy vindicated, p. 21Google Scholar.

67 Thelwall, , Democracy vindicated, p. 23Google Scholar.

68 Thelwall, , Rights of nature, 1, 18–19Google Scholar.

69 Burke, Reflections…in Bohn, , Works, II, 351–2Google Scholar. The works of Robertson, and Millar, are, respectively, View of the progress of society in Europe (1769)Google Scholar and Origin of ranks (1771). The identification of Burke's debt to these particular members of the Scottish school is Pocock's, J. G. A., see his ‘The political economy of Burke's analysis of the French revolution’, in his Virtue, commerce, and history (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 197–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the laws of England (4 vols., London, 1809), I, 35Google Scholar (original edn, 35–6).

71 Thelwall, , Rights of nature, III, 84Google Scholar, and see 60 ‘the pastoral tribes of Germany, to which Mr. B. would have us still look for patterns of political and social wisdom’.

72 Thelwall, , Rights of nature, III, 83Google Scholar.

73 Thelwall, , Rights of nature, III, 84Google Scholar.

74 The emphasis on the backward looking qualities of orthodoxy as the century wore on have been luridly portrayed by Clark, J. C. D., English society 1688–1832 (Cambridge, 1985), see esp. pp. 216–35Google Scholar, and more cautiously by Gunn, J. A. W., ‘The Spectre at the Feast’, in Beyond liberty and property (Kingston and Montreal, 1983)Google Scholar.

75 The author must plead guilty to assisting in narrowing this gap. See his ‘Civic humanism and parliamentary reform’. A detailed and pathbreaking account of modernizing nineteenth-century radicalism which acknowledges this problem appeared whilst this paper was in draft see: Claeys, Gregory, Machinery, money and the millennium, from moral economy to socialism, 1815–1860 (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar.