Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (review)

In this assured first book, Daniel White makes a compelling case not only for the importance of the Dissenting public sphere for variant strands of early Romantic literary production, but also for the careful examination of sociability, performance, and affect in this period of intense social and cultural change. This book offers an extraordinarily clear and cogent historical account of the issues and debates surrounding devotional and sectarian practice in the period. With admirable attention to extant scholarship and startling new research, each chapter places its primary authors – Anna Letitia Barbauld, the Aikin circle, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey – within intersecting networks of religious sociability and debate. Taken together, these historical contextualizations provide the reader with a map of a sub-public, defined by White as the Dissenting public sphere, which has the potential to alter much of our received knowledge of print culture and radical politics. Because the book is so aware of the ongoing engagement with Habermas in Romantic studies, White’s detailed attention to the flows of print culture is exemplary. But his most important theoretical innovation lies in an implicit merger between recent work on print publics and Bourdieu’s writings on the interaction of the habitus and the field of cultural production. In order to pursue this merger, White necessarily has to enter into the consideration of the dynamics of sociability, the often transient effects of performance, and the representation of affect. This means that much of the book’s evidentiary procedures involve an expansion of conventional literary criticism into social history, and it is through these three issues that one can offer a brief summary of the book’s achievement.

The book opens by examining the Dissenting social circles associated with the Warrington Academy and with the Aikin family circle. The first three chapters of the book enact a genealogy of religious and social dispositions whose impact is most clearly felt in the writings of Anna Letitia Barbauld. The practice of everyday life is examined, not to provide a thematic coherence to Barbauld’s writings, but rather to trace the emergence of styles of utterance whose import is formal and conceptual. For example, in chapter 2, after carefully untangling the debates surrounding the political and devotional implications of styles of pulpit oratory, White unravels key discursive strategies in Barbauld’s verse that are too easily overlooked or misread in another context. Throughout these opening chapters, the habitus of Dissenting households and congregations is characterized through scenes of performance, and one salutary effect of the analysis is to re-invigorate our understanding of the political valences of enthusiastic utterance and of the discursive implications of Dissenting subjects’ attention to questions of particularity and affective experience. These latter issues, in White’s hands, become fundamental determinants of the stylistic innovations that open onto Romanticism itself.

With this heightened sense of the politics of affect and of social performance, the final three chapters provide innovative readings of key developments in the 1790s. The vicissitudes of Godwin’s political writings are read in light of his early Sandemanianism. Godwin’s discomfort with forms of radical print culture and his changing relation to matters of affect and sensibility in his Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft are directly related to shifts in his comprehension of the social dynamics of devotional culture. Similarly, chapter 5 approaches Coleridge’s conversation poems in light of the strange amalgam of performance styles in his sermons. The class implications of these readings are connected to the practicalities of Coleridge’s complex engagement with Unitarian society. Chapter 6 follows Southey’s divagations from the establishment church in order to comprehend the political ramifications of the proto-Quakerian aspects of Islam in Thalaba. The analysis of the sectarian struggles waged within the competing discourses of Orientalism is in itself an important contribution to the study of imperial culture. In each case, White has managed to combine subtle readings of the texts with a very clear evocation of the passage of an underappreciated...