Daniel E. White. Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent

Studies in Romanticism, Spring, 2009 by Michael Tomko

Daniel E. White. Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii 266. $90.00.

Daniel E. White's epigraph from Anna Barbauld's An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (1790), which translates the stubborn fortune of religious dissenters' political marginalization or "opprobrious separation" into an empowering exile, seems to relocate British romanticism to the outskirts of the forest of Arden. Just as the unjustly usurped Duke in As You Like It predicts that "the uses of adversity" will be "sweet" in woods "more free from peril than the envious court" (11.i), Barbauld contrasts the morality of nonconformists' academies, the elegance of their literature, and the productivity of their commercial ventures with the Establishment's corrupt and stagnant counterparts. Accordingly, Britain's true cultural identity and progressive vitality should be sought not in Westminster, but in Warrington, the trading town in Northwest England that was the site of the most famous Dissenting academy. By taking his reader deep into such discourses and contexts, White joins the burgeoning study of religion in the romantic period by figures such as Mark Canuel, Martin Priestman, and Robert Ryan. To this recovery, White adds unprecedented specificity--what he calls the "particularity" of his readings of Barbauld's Arminian-Arian inflected Presbyterianism, William Godwin's roots in ultra-Calvinistic Sandemanianism, S. T. Coleridge's restless Socinianism, and Robert Southey's early attraction to Quakerism (4)--that constitutes the strength of this book and that will refine future considerations of familiar issues such as Coleridge's ambivalent 1790s relationship with Unitarian belief and political action. Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent, however, should not be mistaken for an interesting but ultimately marginal cultural history of theological hair-splitting. Rather, White engages central tropes of Romanticism explored by M. H. Abrams or Rene Wellek--reuniting the "individual with nature," supplementing the "analytical gaps of Enlightenment reason," and expressing the "autonomous mind in the unified work of art" (16)--but insists that they unfolded amid the liturgical, communal, and moral "creeds and practices" (16) of late-eighteenth-century "public religion" (2)--terra incognita for those venerable critics. What insight comes from a reconsideration of the way Dissenting communities not only "energized and molded" but indeed "impelled the genesis of Romanticism" in England? (1) Resisting a nostalgic reading of "pre-apostasy" romanticism as radically revolutionary, White instead sympathetically recaptures a moment when Dissenting culture provided, albeit imperfectly and briefly, a mediating or middle ground of intelligent and ethical expression and debate within the broader republic of letters.

The length itself of Barbauld's epigraph, which tacks back and forth, conveys the complexity of this position. Her initial vaunting of Dissent's outsider status seems to be setting up something similar to a "counter-public" that Kevin Gilmartin and others have used to describe a radical, populist public sphere. Instead, however, the passage ends by appealing to the broader public's "respect" (etymologically a "looking back") and repeatedly emphasizing mutuality in the closing phrase "mutual esteem and mutual reciprocation of good offices." Along the way, Barbauld has made her progressive critique through discourses often labeled conservative--bourgeois commercialist virtues and a nationally defined sense of liberty. This dialectic with British values constitutes, for White, a sub-section of the national public sphere exerting pressure from within. Such careful nuancing is characteristic of an approach that represents the best of historicist criticism. Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent recovers heretofore overlooked contexts with archival and discursive ingenuity and traces reciprocal influence and implications between the realms of literature, religion, politics, and economics. Perhaps most significantly, it does so with an anxiety of overdetermination. White is ever careful neither to reduce writers to their social setting nor to unify or stabilize the historical for the convenience of a scholarly narrative or poetic reading. For instance, White traces the way religion never functioned monolithically in the romantic period as nonconformists at times presented a united front and at other times were embroiled in internal contests within and across denominations. The book's structure embodies this approach with three chapters establishing the institutional and cultural contours of Dissent (with recurring reference to Barbauld), followed by three case studies of Godwin's, Coleridge's, and Southey's conflicted relationships with this subculture. White attends to these writers' habitus, or lived historical and social experience, by highlighting the way the Unitarian sage Joseph Priestley had taken "language itself" as the link to "religion, commerce, and education" (33). This copulative methodology allows the cultural history of British religious and political nonconformity to emerge in vibrant readings of Barbauld's devotional writings, Godwin's memoirs of Wollstonecraft, Coleridge's conversation poems, and Thalaba, Southey's Orientalist epic.