Abstract
On 27 June 1777, Dr William Dodd — society preacher, ‘Macaroni’ and one-time chaplain of the Magdalen Hospital for reformed prostitutes — was executed for a forgery committed in a fraudulent attempt to borrow money on behalf of his ex-pupil Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield. Until his final moments, Dodd had hoped for a pardon from the king to whom an appeal, written in his name by Samuel Johnson, had been sent, but despite numerous petitions and newspaper campaigns, no last-minute leniency materialised. Indeed, the vociferous appeals on behalf of Dodd may have had the opposite effect, in deciding Lord Chief Justice Lord Mansfield against setting a dangerous precedent in allowing public opinion to influence the operation of justice. A speech (also penned by Johnson) to be declaimed by Dodd from the gallows went undelivered, and the clergyman was hanged for about an hour before his body was taken down and carried away.
one would have thought that the existence of theological and political institutions had depended upon the agitation of a question in physics
John Thelwall, Prefatory Memoir, Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement (1801), p. xxiii
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Notes
Aberdeen Journal (1794), quoted in Jessie Dobson, ‘John Hunter and the Unfortunate Doctor Dodd’, Journal of the History of Medicine, 10 (1955), 369–78 (pp. 373–4).
See Wendy Moore, The Knife Man: Blood, Body-Snatching and the Birth of Modern Surgery (London: Bantam, 2005), pp. 240–2.
William Hunter, Two Introductory Lectures, Delivered by Dr. William Hunter, to his Last Course of Anatomical Lectures, at his Theatre in Windmill Street (London, 1784), pp. 81, 96.
John Hunter, Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gunshot Wounds (London, 1794), p. 78.
John Hunter, ‘Proposals for the Recovery of People Apparently Drowned’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 66 (1776), 412–25.
Carolyn Williams discusses the Humane Society as a context for Frankenstein in ‘“Inhumanly brought back to life and misery”: Mary Wollstonecraft, Frankenstein and the Royal Humane Society’, Women’s Writing, 8:2 (2001), 213–34.
On the Magdalen Hospital and sentiment, see Mary Peace, ‘The Magdalen Hospital and the Fortunes of Whiggish Sentimentality in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain’, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 48:2 (2007), 125–48. Thelwall praises the Magdalen Hospital in a later poem in his volume, comparing its charitable impulses with those of the Humane Society. See John Thelwall, Poems on Various Subjects (London, 1787), p. 78.
Samuel Horsley, On the Principle of Vitality in Man, as Described in the Holy Scriptures, and the Difference between True and Apparent Death (London, 1789), pp. 2, 7.
John Hunter, Lectures on the Principles of Surgery, in The Works of John Hunter, ed. James F. Palmer, 4 vols (London, 1837), vol. 1, p. 213.
The Anti-Jacobin Magazine and Review, London 1799, p. 1. Edmund Burke, First Letter on a Regicide Peace, 1796, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), vol. 9, ed. R. B. McDowell, p. 199.
See John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death (Oxford University Press, 2000) and John Whale, Imagination Under Pressure 1789–1832 (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
See, for instance, John Thelwall’s Political Lectures 1 (London, 1794), p. 26, John Thelwall, Sober Reflections on the Seditious and Inflammatory Letter of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke to a Noble Lord (London, 1796), pp. 3, 68.
See John Thelwall, The Rights of Nature, against the Usurpations of Establishments (London, 1796), p. 1, Thelwall, Sober Reflections, pp. 12, 56, 58.
John Thelwall, ‘An Essay Towards a Definition of Animal Vitality’, repr. in Nicholas Roe, The Politics of Nature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 118.
Philip F. Rehbock, ‘Transcendental Anatomy’, in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 156.
Thelwall, ‘Animal Vitality’, p. 100; Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Judith Thompson (Michigan: Wayne State University Press), p. 147.
See Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation (Oxford University Press, 2003), Paul Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Andrew McCann, Cultural Politics in the 1790s (London: Macmillan, 1999). James Allard’s ‘John Thelwall and the Politics of Medicine’, European Romantic Review, 15:1 (2004), 73–87 is rare in exploring the inflection of Thelwall’s physiological learning on his politics. The distinction between Thelwall’s speech and writings is of course a porous one, given that much of Thelwall’s published work was previously delivered in lecture-form. Given that we only have access to his lectures in their published form, they will be discussed under the term ‘writings’ for the remainder of the chapter.
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963), p. 157.
Gregory Claeys, The Politics of English Jacobinism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).
Burke, First Letter on a Regicide Peace, p. 224, and Second Letter on a Regicide Peace, p. 292. Energy, activity and communication are regarded with deep suspicion in both texts. Ritson is quoted in Mark Philp, ‘The Fragmented Ideology of Reform’, in The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. Philp (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 50–77 (p. 52).
John Thelwall, ‘King Chaunticlere, or, The Fate of Tyranny’, Politics for the People, 8 (1794), 102–7 (p. 103).
Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, pp. 104–8 (p. 106). Michael Scrivener discusses allegory as a primary feature of Jacobin writing in Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). For other discussions of Chaunticlere, see Philp, ‘Fragmented Ideology’, pp. 70–2, and Marcus Wood, ‘William Cobbett, John Thelwall, Radicalism, Racism and Slavery’, Romanticism on the Net, 15 (1999).
Thelwall, Political Lectures I, p. 37; John Thelwall, The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons to Annual Parliaments, Universal Suffrage, and the Freedom of Popular Association (London, 1795), p. 24.
Burke, First Letter on a Regicide Peace, 1796; ‘On the Overtures of Peace’, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 9, ed. R. B. McDowell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 192, 197, 223.
See Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, also Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 37–8.
John Thelwall, Poems Written in Close Confinement (London, 1795). See especially Ode II.
Quoted in Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 172.
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© 2012 Catherine Packham
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Packham, C. (2012). Enlightenment Legacies and Cultural Radicalism: Physiology and Politics in the 1790s. In: Eighteenth-Century Vitalism. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230368392_5
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