From a literary point of view, Unquiet Things is a very strange book. As he explains in his introduction, Colin Jager studies secularism in the romantic era through the works of such writers as Jane Austen, Walter Scott, James Hogg, Horace Walpole, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley (4). Each of these authors is in turn somehow loosely connected to the tiny flapping piece of soot, the “sole unquiet thing” of the title, on the grate of Coleridge's fire in his poem “Frost at Midnight.” Not surprisingly, given the differences between these authors, the argument often seems strained, and endeavoring to find a common symbolic “unquiet” thread that binds such very different works, stemming from very different philosophical and sociological positions, is more a matter of discovering a common mood than anything else. Even then the results seem shaky. Mostly Jager seems concerned with what he sees as a prevailing mood of melancholy resulting from the rise of secularism in romantic English literature. But at one moment “secularism” seems to be equated with the “sublime” (94), at another “state-sponsored violence” (169), or a sense of loss (182). What was, presumably, intended to give a sense of breadth in the choice available actually results in a series of readings sometimes almost willfully against the grain to support Jager's thesis—which, for this reader, remains elusive to the end.

The biggest problem, however, is the idea that any period, least of all the so-called romantic one (usually thought of as from 1780 to, say, 1840), can be described in terms of a prevailing mood. Jenny Uglow's recent book, In These Times (2014), gives a good feeling for the variety of wild public and private emotional swings throughout that peculiarly turbulent period—but melancholy is hardly a common reaction to the French Revolution or the threat of Napoleon. Even more significantly, so far from a rising tide of secularism during this period, what was actually happening was a dramatic rise in religious observance—for the Church of England an increase in attendance from something like 3 percent in 1801 to over 30 percent in 1851. Jager, however, starts well before the romantic period—with Henry VIII and the English Reformation, in fact, where he finds the roots of later secularism. But his selection of works is strangely problematic. Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764), for all its historical significance in inaugurating the craze for Gothick, is for modern readers—and indeed for many then—such an extraordinarily silly book that to put it alongside the subtle realism of Jane Austen's Emma or Coleridge's fantastic “Ancient Mariner” suggests a worrying lack of literary discrimination. Similarly, Hogg's Private Confessions of a Justified Sinner is discussed at some length with almost no reference to the fact that (like much Scottish nineteenth-century literature) it centers on a Doppelgänger—an omission that distorts all the rest of the interpretation.

It is not as if we had not been warned. Jager is an avowed “Foucauldian,” which to many serious modern historians usually means a willfully bad historian. On the grounds that all history serves some prior ideological end, facts can be twisted or suppressed to fit in with whatever political or literary thesis is promoted by the writer. According to Foucault there is, after all, no such thing as “truth” (including, presumably, that assertion itself). Among Jager's stranger historical claims is that “close reading” as used in literary criticism is itself a product of secularity (197–78), inexplicably ignoring centuries of the most detailed medieval biblical exegesis—not to mention the life-and-death disputes of the Reformation itself.

On some occasions, however, what looks like philosophical lacunae or historical inaccuracy may possibly be a more a matter of faulty words than of faulty reasoning. For example, Jager attributes to Shakespeare, Hobbes, and Spinoza a “purely immanent theory of creativity” as part of the secularization process (183). “Immanence,” as usually understood, is surely as much a manifestation of God as transcendence, making this less “secularization” than an apparently alternative theological theory. But this is clearly not what Jager seems to mean in context. This is not the only case of a word used so puzzlingly as to suggest malapropism. Robert Boyle's apparent desire to propagate “prolixity” (130) is equally eccentric, as is the curious comment on the speed and “vicissitude” of government action (156).

Yet, this said, Jager is enormously well read, and Unquiet Things is full of interesting insights and historical detail that make a reading worthwhile. In his account of the English Reformation, for instance, I was particularly struck by the story of Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent (37–40), despite its disturbing outcome (for opposing Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn and proclaiming God's wrath upon them both, she was hanged and then decapitated, with her head displayed on London Bridge). Similarly, Jager is one of the few commentators on Coleridge who has actually read Samuel Purchas, the ostensible source behind “Kubla Khan,” and the links with Locke, who had also read Purchas, are suggestively developed. Perhaps even more interesting is the discussion of philosophical atheism, which was vigorously attacked by theologians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries well before anyone seems to have suggested it—at least in publishable form (228–36). The answer to this puzzle, it appears, is not the existence of a secret world of atheistic samizdats, but a tradition of theoretical intellectual exercises given to theological students. This gives a quite new resonance to Shelley's Necessity of Atheism when it was published deliberately to outrage the torpid sensibilities of the fellows of University College, Oxford.