Literary cold case

English professor Judith Thompson. (Bruce Bottomley Photo)

Who was John Thelwall?

Here’s a hint: Judith Thompson says there ought to be statues of him in any country that calls itself a democracy.

Who’s Judith Thompson?

If you don’t know, you will. Dr. Thompson is the Dalhousie English professor who’s spent the last four years Indiana Jonesing after Thelwall’s ghost—and emerged with buried treasure beyond her wildest dreams.

But who was John Thelwall? A writer? Poet? Playwright and novelist? Doctor or scientist? Thelwall was all of the above—before being blacklisted by the British monarchy for inciting revolution. In fact, John Thelwall was such a hothead that even his closest friends distanced themselves from the perceived troublemaker. That wouldn’t be so unusual, except that Thelwall’s “closest friends” were Romantic figures William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth and Coleridge are usually hailed as rebels in their own right, so if John Thelwall was too hot for them to handle, he was a radical.

“(Thelwall) gave a speech and almost got nabbed by a press gang. He was really a hunted man… he was thrown in jail,” says Dr. Thompson, of Thelwall’s inflammatory public speeches. “The British government was terrified that there was going to be a revolution.”

Authorities during the Romantic period cracked down on dissenters, a move Dr. Thompson compares to America’s midcentury blacklisting of suspected communists. Thelwall was advocating the “Rights of Man,” the vote, and freedom of speech, which made him “public enemy number one in Britain for a while.”

John Thelwall and Llyswen Farm, the house in Wales where he lived.

In later life, Thelwall worked in “elocution.” “He became what we would call a speech therapist,” explains Dr. Thompson. He was also a writer for much of his life but popular disapproval erased Thelwall’s legacy, and the hawk-eyed orator retains the dubious honour of being the poet time forgot.

John Thelwall and Judith Thompson share more than just initials. “I’ve been working on him since when I came to Dal, 21 years ago,” Dr. Thompson states. “I got very frustrated with how little was known about him.” The last biography of Thelwall was written in 1904 by Charles Cestre, with material gleaned from about six boxes of Thelwall’s manuscripts. Unfortunately, after the publication of Cestre’s biography, those six boxes vanished without a trace.

But it’s possible to track Thelwall’s footprints through history—up to a point. “Coleridge invited (Thelwall) to come stay with him,” Dr. Thompson relates. Thelwall spent 10 days with Wordsworth and Coleridge in the countryside, making poetic and political plans during riverside walks, before “Coleridge got cold feet … which was pretty devastating for Thelwall.” Thelwall left, relocating to the village of Llyswen in Wales, and “that’s the point at which the story gets cold.”

Thelwall’s trail remained cold for two centuries, until 2004, when Dr. Thompson made “two amazing discoveries in the spaces of two weeks.” First, she discovered Thelwall’s home in Llyswen—a place called Llyswen Farm.

“I found the farmhouse which he had lived in… nobody knew that that was it. I followed what I called the village grapevine of research assistance.” Dr. Thompson’s quest took her from Llyswen’s local bed-and-breakfast to a friendly vicar, then to a festival at a nearby school. Finally, the husband of a local acquaintance allowed Dr. Thompson to explore the grounds of a local farmhouse.

“On the grounds, I found undeniable evidence. Thelwall had written a letter, a rather charming letter really, about how he had retreated to this place… he built a waterfall, an eight-foot waterfall, and he built a summer house.” She pauses. “I found the waterfall. I found the foundation of the summer house. Details, undeniable evidence.” There was further evidence from Wordsworth in the form of a poem, The Excursion, which Dr. Thompson recognized as making reference to Llyswen Farm.

So how did Dr. Thompson celebrate her monumental discovery in the nooks and crannies of Llyswen? “I went to the pub, and I told the bed-and-breakfast lady,” Dr. Thompson laughs. “They were all really excited.”

After discovering Thelwall’s waterfall, Judith Thompson decided to visit a local library in Derby before heading home. “I only had less than two hours in Derby… I was supposed to have lunch with this distant relation of Thelwall’s.” In the recesses of Derby’s local studies library, Dr. Thompson discovered a box of Thelwall’s “juvenilia.”

As it turned out, the label wasn’t quite accurate. “It wasn’t juvenilia. It was actually 1,000 pages of complete poems, some of them never before known.” The writings in Thelwall’s Pandora box “went right from his earliest days and up to 1827, 1828.” (He died a little later, in 1834.)

As is only appropriate to such a story, there is a whiff of scandal in the contents of Dr. Thompson’s discovery. “In the manuscript, one of the things I noticed was really quite a lot of overheated, overwrought love poetry… (Thelwall) wrote an awful lot of poems to the young women who were in the audience (at his speeches)... I call them fan club poems.” When Thelwall’s wife died, “He remarried very, very quickly—unpleasantly, scandalously quickly. And he married one of his pupils.” Thelwall’s bride was a 17-year-old actress. He was 52.

Not quite as exciting as Thelwall’s November-May romance was the excruciating amount of time Thompson and assistants spent in photocopying every page of Thelwall’s manuscript, microfilmed by the librarian back in Derby.

Now, she plans to publish Thelwall’s new material – verse that has waited 200 years to fall into the right hands. “I’m working on a (book of) collected poems of Thelwall… there’s very little knowledge now of Thelwall as a poet.”

John Thelwall has been Dr. Thompson’s lifelong obsession, and now “editing this stuff and getting it out there has become kind of my full-time job.” She is organizing a conference on Thelwall, to be held at Dalhousie next October, and “before I finish my career, I would like to take a stab at the biography.”

Judith Thompson made an once-in-a-lifetime discovery—twice. But she isn’t finished, at least not if she wants to write a biography to rival Charles Cestre’s. After all, Dr. Thompson reminds me—eyes glinting mischievously—she still hasn’t found those six boxes.