Mark Canuel. Religion, Toleration and British Writing 1790–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN: 0-521-81577-0. Price: £45 (US$75).

“All national institutions of churches—whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish—appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit.” Thomas Paine’s uncompromisingly anti-clerical “profession of faith” in the Age of Reason (1794) constituted one of the most immoderate—and accessible—challenges to Christian belief, and the authority of the national Church, of the late Enlightenment. Revived and popularized by a second generation of radical infidels, the creed of Painite freethought appeared to many more orthodox observers to represent an urgent threat to political and moral order, and drew down upon its defenders harassment, prosecution, and imprisonment. Yet in response even to such provocative and extreme examples of religious heterodoxy, legal persecution provided strategic opportunities for infidel expression. The radical journalist Richard Carlile not only succeeded in reprinting the classic texts of eighteenth-century freethought before his imprisonment for blasphemous libel; he continued to run his publishing business from his cell, and insisted upon reciting the Age of Reason at his trial in order to facilitate the text’s republication in newspaper legal reports. The enforcement of orthodoxy opened a precarious space for the articulation of dissent. Mark Canuel’s Religion, Toleration and British Writing is precisely concerned with the shifting, ill-defined relation between religious toleration, conformity, and dissent in the early nineteenth century. Such a study is particularly welcome since, along with the recent work of Jon Mee, Martin Priestman, and Robert Ryan, it seeks to challenge the traditional focus of Romantic studies upon the internalized, imaginative sublimation of religious identity, and insists instead upon considering that identity within an institutional and political context. To assert, as Paine did in the 1790s, that “My own mind is my own church” was to articulate a claim with public, political implications, not simply to make a statement of private belief. Canuel’s study is an ambitious, if also in some respects unsatisfactory, attempt to trace the consequences of this fact for our understanding of Romantic literary culture. The broad historical framework for the book rests upon the argument that a significant measure of religious freedom had been achieved in Britain by the early nineteenth century, and that this development coincided, in an allegedly non-arbitrary fashion, with the extension of governmental agency in the fields of poor relief, prison reform, national education, and policing. The rise of “secular government” is asserted, but not explored in any depth; instead, Canuel seeks to substantiate his larger case by reconstructing an eighteenth-century “discourse of toleration” in which the demand for freedom of conscience is linked to the formation of the modern political subject. This introductory section of the book is sustained principally by discussions of Bentham and Locke. Thus Bentham’s hostility to religious establishment is explored in relation to his writings on secular education, while Locke’s Letter concerning Toleration is aligned with the Two Treatises and the responsibility of government as a guarantor of the security and property of the individual. As an explanatory account of the growth of religious freedom in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain this is, of necessity, a partial and schematic argument. Indeed, its presentation requires Canuel to overlook significant differences not only between Bentham and Locke, but also between theoretical arguments for toleration, and the complicated and contingent circumstances in which the cause of religious freedom was fitfully advanced after 1689. (The Toleration Act itself is conflated with Comprehension and misdescribed as “an attempt to unite Dissenters within the Church of England” (25), an elision with some consequence for the larger argument.) It is certainly true that Lockean thought played a significant role in eighteenth-century dissenting discourse. Yet …