ABSTRACT
This chapter contextualises Polwhele’s combative religious writing in terms of both debates in late-eighteenth-century Anglican theology and the specific confessional context of South West Cornwall. Methodists, Evangelicals, the National Schools movement, and an Anglican clergy lacking engagement with the laity all come in for abuse. It establishes Polwhele’s most challenging work within its most pressing intellectual context and identifies the ways in which his anti-Jacobin and reactionary religious paranoia is articulated via the literary forms of modernity. As such it questions both the neat binary of radical and reactionary and the predominance of whiggish, secularising narratives in literary history.
