ABSTRACT

John Thelwall and William Godwin provide two of the clearest and most significant examples of the ways in which innocent lives in the 1790s were drastically altered by their encounters with the British state's domestic security apparatus. They also provide a paradigmatic representation of the ways in which the victims of this state-sponsored system of intimidation can be divided into two groups, which the author calls 'usual' and 'unusual' suspects. More particularly, the author shows how Thelwall moved, between 1794 and the end of the eighteenth century, from being a usual suspect to becoming an unusual one, and continued to suffer the same ill-effects in the hegemonic sphere that he had in the official sphere. Towards the end of volume I, Thelwall's occasional voice becomes more pointed, in a long comparison of the characters of Pitt and Robespierre, that leads to an analysis of 'The Present System of Terror' – that is, Pitt's reign of terror.