Toleration, Persecution, and the Novel

Toleration has long been hailed by critics of the Enlightenment as emblematic of the liberalizing progress of Whig history. As a legal and religious doctrine, however, toleration confronted eighteenth century writers with a difficult social irony. A tolerant society ought to be at ease with the richness of its own plurality. Yet toleration, as defined in the 1689 Act of Toleration, functioned primarily to exclude any religious group seen as a threat to social stability, thereby maintaining religious belief as a legal standard for exclusion throughout the eighteenth century. Focusing on novels published in the aftermath of the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite rebellions, my dissertation argues that the novelistic preoccupation with character and community gave voice to both the continuing struggle for religious equality and the fear of some writers, such as Henry Fielding and Robert Paltock, that religious difference would ultimately lead to the downfall of the nation. Moreover, I maintain that reading persecution through the lens of toleration offers new insights into the development of Enlightenment thought and literature. After the inscription of toleration into English law, persecution changed from outright acts of torture and murder, like those detailed in Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1563), to less grotesque, if equally insidious, acts of legal and social oppression. In response to this social change, the nature of the dissenting character gained ever increasing complexity. Through her mere existence as a political and religious outsider, for instance, Jane Barker's Galesia disrupts Whig social norms. No longer defined exclusively by religious enthusiasm, these characters' willingness to take ethical stands against the accepted views of their fellow citizens, friends, and even families, preserved Britain's bloody history of civil war and rebellion, setting the groundwork for cosmopolitanism. For authors like Samuel Richardson sympathy comes to embody a radically inclusive alternative to toleration that avoids the trappings of identity politics, opening the door for recognition of the shared humanity of all peoples.