John Thelwall is usually seen through the eyes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Thomas De Quincey as a figure of demonic Jacobin proportions and of middling poetic talents; however, he can be seen as a writer whose poetry and prose straddles the world of Wordsworth and Coleridge and the world of urban Jacobin political agitation in the 1790s. Thelwall's poetry is seldom studied, but his political writing and lectures have received recent historical and literary-critical attention.

Thelwall was born in London, the son of a silk mercer. When he was nine, he lost his father, Joseph Thelwall. He was brought up by his mother, whose entire energies were devoted to carrying on her husband's business. Thelwall received a rudimentary education at a school in Highgate, but was taken from school at fourteen and put to work behind the counter at his family's business. At sixteen he was apprenticed...