John Thelwall And The Materialist Imagination

Drawing on a range of new archival materials, John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination reassesses Thelwall's diverse body of work - literary, political, and elocutionary - from the vantage of his heterodox contributions to Romantic-era science. This book argues that Thelwall's scientific materialism merged with his reformist politics and literary imagination in previously unexplored ways to anchor his career over four decades, as he attempted in speech and writing to catalyse democratic reform in the body politic.

Through the prism of Thelwall's works, the book demonstrates that materialism was not merely a relic of Enlightenment empiricism and the utopian optimism of the 1790s, but a formative element of British culture well into the nineteenth century - one that was intertwined with idealist modes of thought to make up the double-helix DNA of Romanticism.

Review: John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination covers the range of Thelwall's writing, including the novel Daughter of Adoption and the manuscript of poetry recently discovered in Derby. It includes an impressive account of the import of Thelwall's elocutionary writings to his other work. The presentation of John Thelwall as the 'Champion of Materialism' for his period is the key contribution of this monograph.

Not only does it develop recent interest in Thelwall in his own right, but it provides a new perspective on the understanding of his role in the period's materialist thinking. In this regard, Solomonescu's work will speak to medical historians and historians of science as well as scholars of the Romantic period. - Jon Mee, University of York, UK