Chapter 16 - Politics

Summary

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.