ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to provide an insight into the 'condition of Britain' in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. As several of the sections in the anthology suggest, the political implications of the multifaceted debate about modernity and civilization in the early decades of the nineteenth century were complex. The fate of the anti-religious strain of 1790s radicalism is the subject of the anthology. Though positive uses of the word 'atheism' were as rare in the early decades of the nineteenth century as they were in the 1790s, these decades saw a rising challenge not only to established faiths but to the deistic 'natural religion' of writers such as Tom Paine. The years 1798-1832 encompass significant phases not only of nationalist political activity and organization but of theoretical concern with nationhood.
