Chapter 1, “Austen and Austin,” presents the details of the book’s central proposition that Jane Austen’s novels are not conduct books sharing preset values but philosophical studies of conduct more in the J.L. Austinian sense. The chapter claims that Austen – in common with the grouping of ordinary language philosophers I engage in this book: Austin, Wittgenstein, and Cavell (most of all) – does not view perception itself as a philosophical problem of major interest. My approach departs from the widespread view that Austen’s fiction reflects the mitigated skepticism of eighteenth-century empiricists and anticipates modernist literary impressionism. In the words of her Victorian critic G.H. Lewes, Austen’s epistemological project includes her cultivation of a prose style not visually hyper-realized, but “content to make us know” through the testing and textures of dialogue and character.

The empiricist legacy of John Locke developed in various directions in the British Romantic period, especially informing the movement known as theological utilitarianism, which taught ethics based on prudence and sought evidences for a benevolent, Christian God as designer of the world. This approach was challenged, however, above all by the idealism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who drew on Platonic and recent German sources. Further, newly translated Hindu texts influenced both metaphysical speculation and practical recommendations of a life of moderation and self-denial, including in the work of several female novelists in the period.

British Romanticism’s engagement with Islam was shaped by an age of conflict, tumult, and intellectual ferment. Following the French Revolution, British Romantic writers gained knowledge of Islam through processes of cultural osmosis. Despite the growing presence of Muslims visiting and even living in Britain, Islam remained the stereotypical “Other.” At the same time, as republican and irreligious, the broader milieu in which these Romantic writers operated manifested its radicalism in the form of the distribution and dissemination of subversive manuscripts, with Islam providing an effective vehicle. While they often subscribed to notions about Britain’s intellectual and moral superiority vis-à-vis the Muslim world, these writers deployed Islam to reinforce a wider cause, in some cases arguing for a radical revision of contemporary orthodoxies, even when a positive depiction risked social approbation and possible punishment in a Britain where prejudice against Islam endured.

This essay explores the established Churches in Britain during the Romantic period, with a focus on England and Scotland. It considers the impact of the churchmanship that was evolving during this period, reveals tensions between the Church and nonconformists, provides examples of everyday belief and practice, and seeks to show why it was believed that a close alliance between Church and state remained necessary.

This chapter explores the relationship between religion and “the novel” by focusing on a cross-section of religious questions having to do with belonging (domestic, national, global) and identity. It begins with a consideration the Evangelical Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809), moves to a cluster of novels that contemplated domestic religious differences in the form of Catholics and Jews, and concludes with a shift outside the geographical boundaries of the United Kingdom and Ireland to examine early novelistic responses to overseas missionary movements, which raised challenging questions about empire, race, and religious community.

The British Romantic period is often characterized as a time of declining interest in religion but religious life permeates the literature through influences from many different religious groups. This essay traces the history of recent scholarship, particularly the waning of the secularization thesis and rise of more than two decades of active study of British Romanticism and religion.

Romanticism and Protestant Dissent are deeply intertwined; this essay reflects on the long history of their cross-connections. In recent decades there has been an upsurge of interest in the inspirational power of Dissenting allegiances to Romantic-era writers, and the rich literary culture of specific religious groups. Individual writers nurtured and encouraged by Dissent are being restored to prominence, and we are beginning to recover the importance of nonconformist discourse in shaping the literature and culture of the long eighteenth-century – such as the influence of Methodist life-writing and different forms of devotional practice. The essay outlines the diversity of nonconformist practice in the period, and argues for the diffuse and far-reaching impact of Protestant Dissent, through the familial and friendship circles of nonconformity, its educational institutions and publishing networks, and its influence on social and political debate. More broadly, it seeks to trace Dissenting affiliations and inspirations in the work of Romantic-era writers, exploring the case study of Anna Letitia Barbauld in detail.

Judaism in Britain during the Romantic era shaped tradition to suit the requirements of modernity and the challenges of “Englishing” an ancient religion. Jewish novelists, poets, and theologians promoted emancipation and mutual understanding with a Christian-majority society. David Levi, Hyman Hurwitz, and Grace Aguilar made especially important contributions.

Stressing that fully declared atheism was illegal throughout the Romantic period and beyond, the chapter gives a brief survey of some philosophical Enlightenment ‘isms’ which could sometimes be seen as connected to it, such as materialism, pantheism, necessitarianism, idealism, scepticism, and deism. It then moves from such abstractions into the world of active, sometimes dangerous debates about atheism itself, focusing on specific clashes between such figures as Joseph Priestley, Edward Gibbon, Thomas Paine, Richard Carlile, C. F. Volney, Erasmus Darwin, and their critics. The final section looks more closely at ways in which the atheism debate impinged on some of the period’s canonical poets, particularly the anxiously Christian Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the firmly atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley.

While Roman Catholicism has not traditionally figured prominently in Romantic studies, this essay traces the emerging sense of its cultural, historical, and political importance in the period. With William Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us” as a case study, it outlines the political struggle over Catholic Emancipation, transnational contact with Ireland and France, anti-Catholic and philo-Catholic strands of British Romanticism, and contested religious historiographies.

This essay explores the intersection of religion and literature in sermons and lectures during the British Romantic period. The essay traces the advance of elocutionary advice in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and demonstrates how interest in orality proliferated the printing of both sermons and lectures on religious themes. In addition to noted figures such as S. T. Coleridge, William Hazlitt, and Edward Irving, women’s voices emerged during the time, as women in dissenting religious circles set the stage for the first public lectures by women in Britain.

This essay addresses developments in religious life writing in the Romantic period through examination of auto/biographies, journals, and letters in both print and manuscript. Particular interests include the genre of the spiritual conversion narrative, literary uses of confession and conversion, life writing and religious historiography, and women’s auto/biographical practices and place within this tradition.

This chapter explores how the scientific and literary preoccupation with the sources of sensation and sensibility in the Romantic period results in a reassessment of the relationship between matter and spirit. The chemistry of Joseph Priestley and Humphry Davy on matter and respiration is read in the context of devotional practice and the poetry of Anna Letitia Barbauld, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Erasmus Darwin.

This chapter explores politics in the British Romantic period through a close examination of the highly politicized religion of Dissent in the 1790s, tracing in particular its arguments in political tracts and sermons against slavery, the war with France, and the growing inequality between rich and poor. The centrality of religion to an understanding of revolution, rights of man discourse, public worship, and civil liberty is found in the writings of Richard Price, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with reference to Joseph Priestley, Joshua Toulmin, John Edwards, and John Prior Estlin. There is discussion of the chain of influence descending from Price to Barbauld to the young Coleridge, and a conclusion that looks at some of the continuities in Coleridge’s thinking between his earlier radicalism and his later prose works.

The colonial encounter with India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought the British in contact with new ideas, philosophy, and a new religion. This interface between Britain and India and the subsequent interest in, study, and translation of Hindu and Sanskrit texts by British officials and scholars greatly influenced British Romantic poets writing in the nineteenth century. This engagement also shaped Indians writing in the English language. This essay examines this interface and the influence of Hinduism on British Romantic literature.

The history of art in the Romantic period has usually been considered in secularized terms, with a focus on the genres of portraiture and landscape, and the impact of commercialization and public exhibitions. Religious painting was produced in Britain in these decades, including decorations and altarpieces for Anglican churches by Benjamin West, Henry Thomson, and even the landscape painter John Constable. In fact, religious pictures were produced more frequently and with greater ambition in the early nineteenth century than hitherto. Meanwhile, dissenting and esoteric faith commitments influenced the output of several significant artists, most notably William Blake. This essay explores the major changes in British religious art of the period and reflects on the reasons why religious images have been so often overlooked by mainstream art history.