The title of George Southcombe's The Culture of Dissent in Restoration England promises somewhat more than this slim volume delivers. This is really a book about print culture. Specifically, this book imagines Restoration print culture as the preeminent arena for the formation and articulation of English nonconformist identity in the period after the 1662 Act of Uniformity. Southcombe elaborates this claim through a series of five largely standalone case studies of the lives and careers of some lesser known nonconformist literary figures from the later Stuart era. And what insights it offers about the theology and politics of late seventeenth-century English Dissent are gleaned expressly through sustained readings of their pamphlets and other printed material. Even the not inconsiderable manuscript material consulted here is mostly deployed to further contextualize the published output of these five figures and their interlocutors.

The authors examined over the course of the four central chapters are the scabrous Presbyterian poet and satirist Robert Wild; the Baptist minister Thomas Grantham; the Quaker polemicist John Whitehead; the Welsh millenarian Vavasor Powell; and the Particular Baptist Benjamin Keach. Beneath these writers spreads out a dimly visible network of sympathetic nonconformist printers operating, often at considerable personal risk, in the interstices of the resurrected licensing regime. Indeed, the Crown's implacable and long-serving Surveyor of the Press Roger L'Estrange looms particularly large throughout the first half of Southcombe's study. And more than a few of the literary works under consideration here were penned from prison.

Southcombe's study is modest in its broader claims about the culture of English nonconformity. Most forthrightly, the book seeks to problematize the “experience of defeat” (as Christopher Hill put it) as the prevailing framework through which to interpret the religion and politics of English nonconformity after the restoration of church and crown. By focusing on polemical, publicly engaged, and sometimes mordantly funny literary output, Southcombe hopes to challenge (or at least balance out) the notion of a turn toward inwardness and quietism as the signal features of dissenting cultural politics in this period.

To this end, the author is shrewd to focus the bulk of the study on the rather uproarious figure of the satirical poet clergyman Robert Wild. Beginning with his early 1660 celebration of General Monck, Wild used his poetry to articulate a popular loyalist Presbyterianism keen to recover the political and ecclesiastical gains of the Long Parliament from the excesses of regicide and radicalism. Southcombe details the ways in which such an identity buckled under the reactionary pressures of the Restoration, embodied most palpably in the ferocious anti-Puritan polemic of Roger L'Estrange. One could be a Presbyterian or a loyalist, it appeared, but one could not be both. Turned out from his Stafforshire living on Black Bartholomew, Wild turned his poetic, and often mildly scandalous, wit against the newly consolidating regime in both church and state. Wild is credited with bestowing upon L'Estrange the scatological nickname by which he would be identified in Restoration polemic: “crack-fart” (45). Southcombe reads Wild's brazen satirical performances as part of what he calls survival strategies, which helped mediate the Presbyterian transition from would-be national establishment to persecuted religious minority. More interestingly, Southcombe shows how, even after the poet's death in 1679, the jesting figure of Robert Wild became a fixture of Whig polemic throughout the remainder of the century. Indeed, the sober denominational historians of the early eighteenth century, who sought to construct a nonconformist heritage rooted in Christian notions of resignation and suffering, had a difficult time reconciling the figure of the “fat, jolly Man” Robert Wild with their coalescing confessional identity (74).

The subsequent chapters are never quite as illuminating nor quite as much fun as Southcombe's engagement with Wild. For instance, the chapter on the General Baptist minister Thomas Grantham seeks to use a local instance of defamation (a false accusation against Grantham of sheep-stealing in Lincolnshire) as the backdrop for both sectarian dispute with his nonconformist accusers and irenical outreach to his Anglican defenders. A common anti-Calvinism underlying both Grantham's theology and that of the local Anglican rector formed the basis of ecumenical exchanges between them. But these tactics appear to reveal more about the exigency of neighborliness than about the contingency of religious identity. Another chapter uses the fiery anti-authoritarian declamations of the frequently imprisoned John Whitehead to question the historiographical commonplace of the political quietism and theological respectability of Restoration Quakerism. But, as Southcombe freely admits, this conceit has already been tottering for some time now. Still, evidence of enduring radicalism among Quaker polemicists, like the garrulous Presbyterian or the Anglican-friendly Baptist, forces us to think seriously about some of the incongruities of religious identity in the Restoration period.

The Culture of Dissent in Restoration England is, for the most part, convincing in its claim that these incongruities developed in the cut and thrust of literary participation in the public sphere. And Southcombe's work offers a compelling picture of the formal and generic diversity of this participation, where scurrilous verse, pastoral admonition, and apocalyptic prophecy alike bridged the distance between theological systematization and popular politics. The book's few glimpses past the coming of formal toleration in 1689 suggest that it was the work of the post-Revolution generations to reconcile some of these discordances.