This chapter examines how poet, orator, and early speech therapist John Thelwall engages with embodied materialist models of involuntary, yet autonomous, utterance to support his lifelong belief in the necessity of free and active speech. It investigates how Thelwall’s work presents both politicised notions of the speaking body and a physiological and sometimes pathologised understanding of political silencing and argues that Thelwall’s later elocutionary work develops a concern with embodied speech already fundamental to his more overtly political writing, resulting in a theory of speech production and impediment which remains suggestive of a radical politics in its materialist conception of the human body’s operation and agency. Drawing on his unpublished ‘Derby Manuscript’, the chapter considers how Thelwall’s cross-disciplinary theory of ‘rhythmus’, which positions the elements of elocution as fundamental physical laws, rather than practical or cultural rules, gives credence to the notion of speech as a materially potent force.

Taking the notion of the ‘mechanic’ as its starting point, this chapter outlines how an interest in the mechanic and scientific aspects of speech production is a pervasive feature of Romantic-era treatments of spoken utterance. The chapter investigates the numerous contemporary senses of the term ‘mechanic’, to highlight these senses’ common concern with physical movement, whether of the human hands, a constructed machine, or the material world. It examines how Romantic innovations in the theory of speech production which present utterance as a form of motion – of bodies, of machines, and of matter itself – combine, engage with, and react to traditions of materialist philosophy and elocution teaching and explores how such studies of speech rely on blending knowledge-based fields of study with traditionally non-theoretical practices including medicine and elocution.

This essay explores the intersection of religion and literature in sermons and lectures during the British Romantic period. The essay traces the advance of elocutionary advice in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and demonstrates how interest in orality proliferated the printing of both sermons and lectures on religious themes. In addition to noted figures such as S. T. Coleridge, William Hazlitt, and Edward Irving, women’s voices emerged during the time, as women in dissenting religious circles set the stage for the first public lectures by women in Britain.

This essay explores the particular forms that Jonsonian politics took across the period from the 1790s to the 1830s through two detailed case studies. The first explores the uses of Jonson made by the radical lecturer and political reformer, John Thelwall, from 1794–6. Thelwall offers a reading of a public Jonson whose presence in the lecture room and in political pamphlets is vitally connected with the discourses of political possibility made available by and in this post-Revolutionary moment in English history. The second case study explores contrastingly private uses of Jonson made by Charles Lamb, a writer who for a long time was sweetened by his posthumous reception into a far less political, engaged and awkward writer than he should now seem. Lamb’s annotated copy of the Jonson third folio is for the first time available to study after its purchase by Princeton University Library. The essay suggests that these annotations have their origin in the moment of mid-1790s protest to which Thelwall’s Jonson had belonged, and in which Lamb, too, played a part. Over the course of his many returns to reading Jonson, Lamb inscribes a Romantic politics in Jonson’s margins, a politics that today may have renewed relevance.