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John Thelwall's diverse achievements in the fields of literature, science and politics have been read as the reason for his omission from the Romantic literary canon. But Thelwall's scientific research arms him with a unique understanding of the connections between these disciplines, which upset the very notion of canonicity. Thelwall's model of sympathy, developed in his Essay Towards a Definition of Animal Vitality (1791) offers a physiological understanding of the term which he applies to radical effect in his literary and political works. For Thelwall, sympathy is the physical force through which one organ of the body is inextricably connected with the rest. This physical model radicalises the sentimental tropes Thelwall employs in The Peripatetic (1793), where benevolence is figured as an instinctive impulse. In Thelwall's political lectures, sympathy is an index of solidarity, but its rational, material basis offers a riposte to charges that Thelwall seeks to exploit the unruly energies of his audience. Thelwall figures sympathy instead as the medium for his political ideal, the diffusion of information and ideas.

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Coleridge's account of the imagination in Biographia Literaria as a phenomenon that functions to 'idealize and to unify' is still highly influential. But Coleridge's contemporaries explored alternative accounts of the phenomenon. For Thomas Beddoes the imagination was a vital stimulus of scientific enquiry and political activism. Beddoes's work demonstrates the extent to which the Romantic literary imagination was informed by investigations in other fields. This essay analyses Beddoes's exploration of the imagination in his scientific, political and medical practice. Beddoes's writings emphasise the importance of imaginative enquiry across all his works, and challenge the regulative effects of disciplinary distinctions.

This essay explores how the new technology of the optical telegraph provoked discussion of the possibilities of globalized communication in the 1790s. It focuses on the Telegraph, an anti-ministerial London newspaper. the Telegraph exploits its metaphorical connections with telegraphic technology, boasting of the speed and accuracy of its transmission of news. the Telegraph’s reception from its rival publications perpetuates this metaphorical connection: the ministerial press criticizes the speed of the paper’s transmission of news, as much as the principles it transmits. This essay analyzes the Telegraph’s connections with the London Corresponding Society, and explores the limitations of utopian models of telegraphic communication through the case of reformers exiled to Australia. Despite the practical limitations of telegraphic transmission, the Telegraph demonstrates the potentially transformative political effects of communicative media.