History is replete with times overshadowed by a preceding era, and this has become the subject of a number of studies, notably Brian Young's The Victorian Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2007) and Jonathan Clark's Our Shadowed Present: Modernism, Postmodernism and History (Stanford, CA, 2003). In this fascinating book, John Seed tackles a time perhaps more overshadowed by its past than most: the eighteenth century. The particular slice he takes is how Protestant Dissenters viewed their past. The English Civil Wars, the execution of Charles I, the ejection of Puritans from the Church of England in 1662, and the Glorious Revolution all cast extraordinarily long shadows. Few groups lived further in the depths of these shadows (perhaps with the exception of Catholics) than Protestant Dissenters. In the eighteenth century, the limited toleration they enjoyed made them feel that little had changed since the 1640s or 1670s. Dissenters wove for themselves an identity that consciously claimed a link between their contemporary constraints and the sufferings and privations of their forebears. This heritage was a potent influence for Dissenters. Recitation of a collective memory of adversity (what Seed calls their “narrative identity”) fueled Dissenters’ responses to Anglicans and to the state and established an agenda for religious and political liberty that achieved extraordinary longevity. What Seed presents is a convincing account of the competing histories of the seventeenth century. In the early eighteenth century, Edmund Calamy, Daniel Neal, and John Walker wrote histories in which Dissenters had been reviled by the Church and thus argued for a legitimate separation from it. Calamy's work was easily the most influential, engaging Benjamin Hoadly in the years 1703–5 and establishing a powerful pedigree of pious martyrdom. It was a narrative, argues Seed, that was continued by less significant writers, such as William Harris, Macaijah Towgood, and James Peirce. These accounts emphasized the right to a separate existence from the Church—and confounded the hopes of reunion of Hoadly and Samuel Clarke. But the Dissenters did not have it all their own way. Seed argues that David Hume's influential History of England contested the Dissenters’ narrative and defended the establishment in Church and State. Seed argues that “in the calls of ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ Hume heard the rantings of seventeenth century Puritans” (95). Certainly Dr. Johnson noted that John Wilkes was supported by a “rabble” of Dissenters. Hume and Harris attacked each other's interpretations, but, for Seed, this did not obscure the existence of a strand of stubbornly radical Dissent that linked the Old Commonwealthmen of the seventeenth century with the agenda of the Wilkesites of the 1760s and 1770s. Seed also argues that the same historical shadow was cast over Burke's use of Hume's narrative as the basis for rejection of Dissenting demands for reform in the 1790s.

Seed's book is a fascinating analysis of how history is written and contested and how it influenced the lives and identities of subsequent generations. As Seed also shows, history is constructed out of present-centered concerns. Seed recognizes the complexities of the disconnected and multifaceted strands of Dissent, Presbyterian, Baptist, Unitarian, and Independent and their individual views of the past. But his work shows how such groups could be reradicalized, and how radicalism could be sustained, by the recitation of a collective memory. Such a book, with a tight and concentrated focus, does not attempt to range widely across the history of Dissent. But it is in some of the questions that are stimulated by Seed's book that its value is found. For example, by presenting one of the mechanisms that sustained Dissenting radicalism, Seed's book points the way for future scholars to consider others. These include the role of Dissenting academies, which trained Dissenting ministers.

If there is a general criticism of Seed's book, and in a way it is a compliment, it is that it does not range widely enough. For example, Seed is largely silent on the reception of the histories he discusses. Outside the controversialists, it would be useful to know how they were received, who read them, and how their ideas were disseminated among dissenting congregations. Also one wonders how Dissenters, such as Calamy and Neal, responded to the repeal of penal constraints upon them in 1718, and how later Dissenters reacted to the relaxation of penal laws in the years after 1779. An important gap in this work is consideration of the ways in which Dissenters’ histories influenced their relations with the Latitudinarians, who were most sympathetic to them in the Church of England. At the same time that Latitudinarians were trying to broaden the Church to comprehend Dissenters within it, some Dissenters were emphasizing their distance from the Church. Perhaps this is why Bishop Gilbert Burnet of Salisbury (not, as Seed says on page 25, Thomas Burnet) greeted John Walker's The Sufferings of the Clergy of 1714 with angry looks and rough words. Dissenters’ relationships with Latitudinarians were complex and an important element in events such as the Bangorian controversy and Walpole's attempt to straddle the electoral interests of Church and Dissent. Finally, it would be fascinating to know how the strong Dissenting identity that Seed describes faltered in the lives of some key individuals. Samuel Wesley, Isaac Maddox, Joseph Butler, Thomas Secker, and John Potter were educated in the Dissenting tradition, but they conformed to the Church. Yet Seed is silent on how such leading figures could abandon the narrative of martyrdom and turn to the Church who oppressed them. Nevertheless, this is an important book, one that says much about eighteenth-century radicalism.