One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Is human history progressive, tending to ever-greater peace, prosperity, and harmony among human communities, or is it cyclical, characterized by repeated patterns of rise and fall, growth and decline? How can the theory of evolution, whether as a literal scientific theory or as a metaphor, help us understand the history of a nation? What happens when a major scholar sets out, thesis in place, to write one book, only to realize that the treasure trove in the archives of two continents impels him to write another?

These are the questions to which Howard Weinbrot’s Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture, 1660–1780 offers both explicit and implicit answers. It argues that the British eighteenth century was an era of progress in the religious sphere. Britons evolved, fitfully but steadily, from the blood-letting of the Civil War and the bitter sectarian rhetoric of the dynastically uncertain reigns of William III and Anne, to a Hanoverian society marked by tolerance and ecumenism. In his most persuasive chapters, Weinbrot presents detailed case studies that show this meliorist historical process at work. He shows, for instance, how the rhetoric of 30th of January sermons, honoring the date of Charles I’s execution, cooled over the course of the long eighteenth century from militant royalist martyrology into theologically tinctured treatises on Lockean political theory. An extended reading of Humphry Clinker illustrates how mainstream rhetoric towards Methodists develops in the middle decades of the century from fear and mistrust to grudging acceptance. Throughout this study, the reader harvests the fruits of diligent, detailed work in the archival record of eighteenth-century controversial pamphlets, sermons, and other under-analyzed print genres. Nor is Weinbrot a desk jockey encountering the Sacheverell trial or the Gordon Riots through keyword searches of a digital ECCO chamber: his discussion of Defoe’s Shortest Way With Dissenters, for instance, is richer for his careful examination of annotated copies of the pamphlet in the Houghton and the British Library. Weinbrot mock-warns the reader that Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture is “a heavily annotated text,” and his footnotes furnish rich veins of ore for further scholarly work on the topic of religious controversy in the period (16).

Unfortunately, this study’s archival discoveries and historical insights are undermined by a range of organizational and stylistic flaws. First and most importantly, this book is a palimpsest, with the skull of a very different book distractingly visible beneath the skin of the finished volume. As Weinbrot confesses in his introduction, he originally set out to write a study entitled “Hearts of Darkness: Swift, Johnson, Burke, and Confrontations with Evil in the Eighteenth Century” (13). This book, in which Swift and Burke were to be identified with Conrad’s Kurtz and Johnson with Marlow, each responding in his own way to the “horror” at the heart of human experience, would have argued that “things changed but stayed the same”—the opposite, more or less, of the book’s eventual thesis (14). The argument and assumptions of this ur-book linger on in the background. While Weinbrot is ostensibly arguing for a progressive narrative of historical change, he repeatedly juxtaposes his eighteenth-century sources with quotations from earlier figures, such as the church father Ammianus Marcellinus or the Elizabethan author Roger Ascham, as well as later figures such as Conrad, and uses jarringly modern locutions like “final solution” (48) and “chattering classes” (261). While the book’s thesis privileges historical change, in other words, its rhetoric creates a flattening effect in which peccant human nature reveals itself as semper idem across time and space. Indeed, several sections of the book seem to have been repurposed from the earlier version with only superficial revision. Thus, Weinbrot argues that one sign of the integration of Methodists into wider British culture is that they “received the characteristic British right to be branded as fools, traitors, villains, tyrants, Jesuits, hypocrites, Jacobites, absolutists, and various other kind of monsters” (207). If that is...