Eighteenth Century Fiction

This important book provides a vivid, readable, and nuanced account of the Dissenting genealogy of Romanticism. While detailing the tremendous variety and popularity of late-eighteenth-century religious nonconformity, Daniel E. White shows how literary creation and political expression were inextricable from religious discourse and practice in this period. At the heart of his book is the argument that the redefinition of Christianity that dominated cultural and political life in the late eighteenth century led to an unprecedented interpenetration [End Page 140] of religious, political, and artistic life. This interpenetration has, to date, been little understood in its full complexity. The introduction lays out clearly the aims of the project, as well as its plan for enhancing our understanding of eighteenth-century nonconformity. Essentially, the impact of Dissent on the period’s publicly oriented literary and political programs is to be traced through a series of figures: Anna Barbauld and her family (the Aikins), William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey. All these writers were either born into Dissenting denominations or participated in Dissenting life during periods of lapsed Anglicanism. In selecting these particular authors White addresses what he describes as “the all-important middle ground ... of religious Dissenting life” (4). In reviewing recent studies of Romantic religion, he makes it clear that he is not concerned with the influence of religious ideas on early Romantic writing; instead, his aim is to illustrate these writers’ engagement with and participation in public religious communities, institutions, discourses, and practices. In his emphasis on “public religion,” together with his venturing beyond the canonical Romantics and back into the mid- to late-eighteenth-century period, White defines a new methodology for studies of Romantic religion. He also undertakes to provide a “greater degree of specificity” than is commonly found in literary-historical accounts of eighteenth-century religion (4).

The book falls into two halves. The first examines how an extensive network of nonconformist writers, educators, reviewers, and publishers evolved a new language of opposition, “a dissident middle-class language that suggests an influential and distinct fragment of the bourgeois public sphere” (11). The collaborative literary and religious conversations of Anna Barbauld and the Aikin family circle are central here, as are other Dissenters, such as Joseph Priestley, all figures associated with the Warrington Academy. Focussing on the new culture of sensibility and Barbauld’s emphasis on the familial, the affective, the personal, and the local, White shows how the Dissenting public sphere shaped the new aesthetic, political, and religious features of early Romantic culture. The second half of the book re-evaluates the writings of Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Coleridge, and Southey in relation to religious heterodoxy and nonconformity in general and to the Dissenting public sphere in particular. White sketches the dissipation of the Dissenting public sphere from the early 1790s onward. This decline in vigour and coherence is particularly striking during the mid to late 1790s, the period often referred to as the “English Terror,” when new forms of communication and association arose, such as the radical and secular working-class societies, whose message exploded into print in the shape of thousands of cheap pamphlets (89). Of particular importance here is White’s challenge to those who would dismiss the later thinking of his targeted writers as proto-reactionary or quietist. Instead, he shows [End Page 141] how a sometimes testy and strained engagement with the conversational, collaborative, and rational-critical modes of Dissenting publicity led all four writers to articulate different forms of subjectivity and models of creativity, resulting in a modification of earlier radicalism into oppositionist aesthetic programs. The case of Godwin, whose career is commonly seen to veer from that of radical philosopher to an apostate “Lover of Order,” is particularly interesting in this regard. White shows how Godwin’s preferred form of communication as involving “both private judgment as well as individuated conversation” clashed with the radicals’ collective conviviality of mass meetings and cheap pamphlets (101). Espousing “Liberty without Licentiousness,” Godwin attempted to...