Review

In dialogue especially with Jon Mee's Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation (2003), Lake Methodism participates in a growing body of interdisciplinary work focused on literature and religion in what literary critics are accustomed to think of as the Romantic period (here 1780–1830), while remaining nonetheless invigorated by an alleged secularism in constructions of the ‘Romantic’. Cragwall notes that mainstream anthologies of Romantic literature continue to omit religious texts, while historicist criticism persists in eliding religious belief by assuming that discourses of faith merely perform superficial resolution of more fundamental ideological conflicts. As a result, well-established hallmarks of Romantic writing, most notably notions of inspiration and prophecy, remain disjoined for most readers from the eighteenth-century religious landscape in which they were being formulated and contested. Designed as a contribution primarily to literary scholarship, this book therefore boldly reveals Methodism and its clash with the Established Church as an essential context for ‘Romanticism’, promising fresh approaches to canonical works by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Mary Shelley.Lake Methodism is not only, however, an act of historical recuperation. Cragwall's ‘Lake’, he confesses, ‘spills beyond Lakers’ while his Methodism moves ‘beyond Methodists’ (226). Indebted in this respect to the revisionary energy of Robert Miles's Romantic Misfits (2008), ‘Lake Methodism’ comes to function as shorthand for the dialectic that most interests Cragwall: the volatile boundary between ‘polite’ and ‘popular’ culture. In his depiction, the Anglican Church, alongside a literary coterie disdainful of plebeian associations, anxiously police their cultural authority, while ‘Methodism’—when it is not a phenomenon of ‘semantic vagrancy’ (6), rendered amorphous by the competing definitions of its castigators and proponents—is above all a dynamic of cultural revolt, an ‘affective and spiritual mode’ (6) that, like the bestselling prophetic writings of Joanna Southcott, empowered the illiterate, giving credence and voice to their claims of inspiration and exploiting mass print culture to furnish them with affordable ‘literature’. It is this ‘low-cultural company’ (5), this ‘counter-romanticism’ (156), that in collusion with their ‘polite’ forebears, Cragwall tells us, critics of Romantic literature have conspired to repress.It can be difficult to combine historical specificity with politicized revisionism, and it will be for historians to judge Cragwall's portrait of Methodism as ‘a massive reorganisation of the logic, purpose and demographics of culture’ (39) that ‘let loose the imagination of the gaping multitude’ (39), ‘trained illiterate men and women to read their subjectivities’ (66), and so ‘signified a double-threat against the joint establishments of the Church of England and English culture’ (35). However for literary scholars, Cragwall's method certainly opens up some arresting readings of familiar texts. It is, for example, a commonplace of Romantic poetics that Wordsworth should utter a ‘prophecy’ to the open fields at the start of The Prelude while extolling his singling out for ‘holy services’, but it is entirely new to argue that a specifically Methodist language of self-consecration and itinerancy underpins this articulation of ‘the poet's irregular authority’ (108), and Cragwall goes further in suggesting we read Wordsworth's self-fashioning alongside Southey's Life of Wesley or in terms of the many Methodist lives that engaged a growing reading public with gripping accounts of spiritual calling. Because he is so attuned to the political stakes of these conjunctions, Cragwall sensitively spots Wordsworth's awkward tendency to hedge his terms, and deftly traces the textual revisions through which he erased the ‘popular’ Methodist tenor his critics were beginning explicitly to condemn. More provocatively, Cragwall's final chapter invites us to read Shelley's Frankenstein as a novel with a ‘cultural pre-history more Wesleyan than Newtonian’ (187). Cragwall's Victor is not, or not only, a mad materialist, but a too zealous enthusiast, whose reanimation of dead body parts echoes the Methodist conceit of ‘new birth’. Just as Victor's creature awakens to life amidst monstrous physical swellings and gnashing of teeth, so too, Cragwall notes, did many a Methodist, as accounts of their conversions amply indicate. Cragwall subtly reads these resonances as part of Shelley's scrutiny, through Victor, of her husband's creativity, uncovering its excitable rootedness not in nineteenth-century science but the popular and enduring religious enthusiasms of the eighteenth century.It is hard to do justice to such a very dense and nuanced book in this short space and Cragwall's cross-disciplinary ambitions clearly invite evaluation from many different angles. Still, whether or not he fairly conceives Methodism as a mass culture that fascinated and repelled ‘polite’ writers in equal measure, bringing a nervous oscillation into formulations of the Romantic aesthetic, his essential claim that Methodism's forms—the magazines, lives, and journals that Southey could claim in 1810 out-circulated all other works, as well as the sneering journalistic accounts that came to constitute a ‘fictive history’—merit a serious place in discussion of Romantic literature has surely to be important and exciting for literary and Methodist studies alike.

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