ABSTRACT
In late June 2004, I stood on the historic site that gives the village of Llyswen, Wales, its name, overlooking a hairpin bend of the river Wye. 1 Less than a week before, I had presented a conference paper on some long-neglected poems of the Romantic radical John Thelwall, in which I had mourned the disappearance of his name from literary history following his political exile in Wales (1798–1801), and now here I was at the site of that exile, having just found undeniable clues to Thelwall’s hidden afterlife in the ruins of the “rude hermitage” that he built on “the remains of an old sepulchral tumulus.” 2 Barely two weeks later, in a local studies library in Derby, I would stumble upon an even more telling testimonial and an even bigger piece of the lost Thelwall archive: a three-volume, 1,000-page manuscript of his poems, never before known to have existed, covering exactly the period of his life that was missing from the historical record. I would return to the baffling question that had arisen in Llyswen. Why, I wondered, had these relics of one of the most intriguing and dramatic lives in Romantic literary history not been discovered earlier? Why had they, and has he, been overlooked for so long, despite successive waves of “new” historical criticism in the years since his death in 1834? What does the blind spot named Thelwall tell us about our methods of literary history, its lacunae, and the lurking political agendas and antagonisms that threaten still to trip us up amid the ruins of dismantled Romantic ideologies?
