John Thelwall (27 July 1764 – 17 February 1834), was a radical British orator, writer, and elocutionist.
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Thelwall was born in Covent Garden, London, but was descended from a Welsh family which had its seat at Plas y Ward, Denbighshire. He was the son of a silk merchant.
He published a volume of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, in 1787, and The Peripatetic; or, Sketches of the Heart, of Nature and Society; in a Series of Politico-Sentimental Journals in 1793. From 1795 to 1796, he published The Tribune, a periodical that mostly consisted of his own political lectures. He helped form the London Corresponding Society in 1792. In 1794, he was tried for treason along with fellow radicals John Horne Tooke and Thomas Hardy, although all three men were acquitted. Government officials who considered him to be the most dangerous man in Britain continued to hound him even after his acquittal. Many of his plays and other works were consequently banned.[1]
Among his other views, Thelwall was known for his denunciation of all wars except those of self-defence.
A restoration project on Thelwall's grave was launched in 2006 by the Regional History Centre at University of the West of England (UWE).
In October 2009, the Dalhousie University Theatre Department produced the first ever staging of Thelwall's 1801 melodrama The Fairy of the Lake, as a complement to the John Thelwall conference being hosted at the time by the University's English Department.[2]
Thelwall's eldest son was the clergyman and scholar Algernon Sydney Thelwall; his lesser-known younger son was called John Hampden Thelwall or Hampden Thelwall, they were named after 17th century republicans.[3]