ABSTRACT

John Thelwall's writing and his experiences raise wider, more perennial questions about the issue of privacy, particularly as it pertains to public trust in government. In terms of individual privacy, Thelwall is even more adamant about the need to protect spaces of interpersonal communication and correspondence. Thelwall addressed the damaging effects of the loss of his privacy most comprehensively in his 1801 Prefatory Memoir, a text in which he bares his most private history. The private Thelwall was a man of probity, a family man, a feeling man; therefore he might still find a reading public by writing on purely domestic subjects. Thelwall's highly personalized and affective language would appeal to listeners who identify their own familial configurations and domestic challenges in his experiences. Thelwall's ambitions and his relatively humble economic background are targeted, as is the personalized language he had used in his 'effusions of relative and social feeling'.