On account of his political lectures and speeches at the open-air meetings of the London Corresponding Society in the 1790s, Thelwall was widely regarded as one of the most powerful public speakers of the age. Wordsworth thought that he had ‘extraordinary talent’ and Coleridge regarded him as ‘the voice of tens of thousands’.2 William Hazlitt described him more ambiguously as ‘[t]he most dashing orator I ever heard’, ‘the model of a flashy, powerful demagogue — a madman blessed with a fit audience’ and ‘a volcano vomiting out lava’? In James Gillray’s iconic depiction of a mass meeting of reformers at Copenhagen Fields in the fall of 1795, Thelwall towers over the crowd from a podium in the foreground, fist pumping the air, lips parted mid-sentence — a posture that recalls his invitation to audiences for his weekly lectures in the Strand to ‘take my lungs for a pair of bellows to blow an alchymist’s fire withal’.4 (Figure 5.1) Thelwall prided himself on such spontaneous overflows of powerful feeling. Rather than compose lectures in tranquillity he spoke from notes and outlines, asserting that ‘the clothing and embellishments ought to be left to the time of delivery: for that language will always be most emphatic, which the warmth of the moment supplies’.5