The purpose of my research was to understand the role that the novel played in the development of religious toleration in eighteenth-century Britain. In my first chapter, I draw on an archive of polemical texts, legal documents, correspondence, sermons, and novels to reconstruct the historical and ideological transformations that occurred between the English Civil War (1642) and Catholic Emancipation (1829). I demonstrate the centrality of anti-Catholicism to the construction of British identity and arguments for the toleration of Protestant Dissenters. Throughout my dissertation, I argue that the novel served as a site for the articulation of new concepts and identities, and functioned as a mechanism for transforming readers’ subjectivities. One of the most important transformations to which the novel contributed was the elaboration of the concept of tolerance as a supplement to toleration. As an individual, private affect, tolerance depoliticizes religious difference, shifting emphasis away from the existential threat that toleration could potentially pose to the state and established church. The most surprising finding of my research was the extent to which novelists drew on a contemporary theological discourse of charity in developing this idea. My readings demonstrate the need for an understanding of secularization that would see it not only as a separation out of church and state, but also as a set of corresponding changes within religion, and a process whereby religious ideas are brought into what we normally think of as secular political ideas, like tolerance.
Daniel Defoe plays a pivotal role in my dissertation, as both a prolific polemicist and one of the first novelists. My second chapter explores his polemical arguments for toleration, before moving on to examine how the political philosophy he develops in them informs the Robinson Crusoe novels (1719-1720). I argue that the liberty of conscience that Crusoe offers is tenuous and fragile in the first novel because of contradictions in Defoe’s political thought. In The Farther Adventures (1720), he is able to offer a more robust vision of toleration, by placing the relationship of charity between the Protestant Crusoe and a French priest at the center of his novel. In chapter three I shift my focus to the formal features of the Crusoe novels, arguing that the first novel urges its readers to undergo a series of identifications that lead them toward the charitable tolerance that the second novel thematizes. The second novel disperses the narrative function between characters, highlighting the role of perspective in religious knowledge. My fourth chapter argues that in Sir Charles Grandison (1753), Samuel Richardson demonstrates that tolerance can function as a bulwark, rather than a threat, to British identity. Richardson simultaneously offers a positive representation of Catholic characters and shows how tolerance in the face of intolerance can found a new identity secured by a dynamic of moral and epistemological condescension. My final chapter turns to an exploration of how the Gothic novel could mediate changes in the political and ideological context at the end of the eighteenth century, as toleration was first being extended to Catholics in Britain. I argue that Lusignan (1801) represents Catholic monasticism in a way that makes it not only newly tolerable, but also newly desirable for British readers. At the same time, the novel demonstrates more forcibly than any of the preceding texts, the secularizing negotiations that not only Catholicism, but religion itself, underwent during the increasing modernization and liberalization of Britain through the eighteenth century.