This book began from a dissatisfaction with two types of attitude to ‘Romantic’ religious unorthodoxy. By some, such unorthodoxy seems to be too easily taken for granted – either as a guarantee of congenial writers' general up-to-dateness or as part of a conspectus so broad as to merge them harmlessly into a ‘philosophical’ narrative removed from the hurly-burly of the religious and political pressures they actually lived through. It is to avoid this latter well-worn path that I have – except briefly in relation to Coleridge – utterly failed to engage with the German philosophy which has so dominated readings of the age. Instead, I have tried to recontextualize the issue within the debates taking place in Britain at the time, with the idea of ‘philosophy’ linked chiefly to the infidelism of the philosophes. The other attitude I have set out to query sees the Romantic period as largely irrelevant to a grand narrative in which the occasional scepticism of the eighteenth century remained only ironically hinted until Tennyson gave grudging house-room to ‘honest doubt’ and Charles Darwin shattered creationist assumptions by single-handedly discovering evolution.

To read only a small selection of the writings presented in this book is enough to become aware that these great Victorian turning-points were only the mildest restatements of views and ideas furiously circulated and debated between the 1780s and 1820s. The major Romantic writers were fully involved in these debates, and seen to be so by their contemporaries.