This volume owes its origins to an invitation to give the Stanton Lectures in the Philosophy of Religion for 2006–7, eight of which were delivered in the Michaelmas term 2006 under the title ‘The Crisis of the Word in English Romantic Literature’. I am particularly grateful to the Faculty of Divinity in the University of Cambridge for this opportunity, which provided a basis for most of the chapters gathered here. A small amount of work in the book has been published previously: Chapter 4 is similar to my contribution to the volume 1800: The New Lyrical Ballads, edited by Nicola Trott and Seamus Perry (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), while a section of Chapter 10 (not among the lectures given in Cambridge) was offered for the Gaskell Centenary conference at Canterbury in July 2007, subsequently to be published in the Gaskell Society Journal.

I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Tom Mayberry, whose lecture on Coleridge in Somerset at an early Coleridge Summer Conference first drew my attention to the diary of William Holland and its significance.

The discussions of shifts in British culture during the relevant periods could profitably be complemented by reading recent work on social studies, notably E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (London: V. Gollancz, 1963).