John Thelwall and the origins of British speech therapy.

THIS ARTICLE outlines the social and intellectual forces which led John Thelwall to remedial elocution and to a therapeutic system based upon a largely idiosyncratic view of English prosody. The first section examines those candidates who might challenge Thelwall's claim to having established a new profession and a new science. In the final three sections, Thelwall emerges as an archetypal figure, harmonizing the many facets of speech correction: medicine, linguistics, drama, education, and, more subtly, psychology. Thelwall first impressed the public mind through politics and, more particularly, oratory, which he intuitively grasped and intellectually understood. This critical interest in the spoken word placed him in the new elocutionary movement which, through its detailed analysis of excellence and its normative prescriptions, throws into contrast abnormal, yet potentially remediable, speech. It is here rather than in deaf education that the orgins of British speech therapy are to be sought. Thelwall was a practitioner, theorist, and writer. He established an Institute capable of housing residential pupils, plus a number of visitors, drawn there by his lectures and the exhibition of patients. For a time Thelwall flourished, but although he resolved to abandon revolutionary activity its lure continued to claim his attention, to the detriment of his practice and his prosodical treatise, which never came to fruition. Thus, though his logopaedic writings were considerable, indeed unrivalled in their day, the key to his system is missing. If the obscurity of his theory be added to the prejudice generated by his politics, it is easy to see why his ideas were not readily adopted. And paradoxically, the working men's institutes which Thelwall so favoured were partly responsible for trivializing elocution and undermining it as an object of intellectual worth. From this situation contemporary British speech therapy is only just recovering.