The most obvious and important contribution of George Southcombe's study of dissenting polemic and identity formation is his close attention to the lives and printed works of a set of individual nonconformists who have received inadequate scholarly attention. Each of four chapters of The Culture of Dissent in Restoration England is a largely stand-alone study of a particular figure or duo. Southcombe begins with the Presbyterian minister and poet Robert Wild; this study takes up over a quarter of the entire the book, including the introduction, conclusion, and notes. He continues with chapter-length treatments of the General Baptist minister Thomas Grantham and the Quaker John Whitehead, and concludes with a final chapter on the Welsh fifth monarchist Vavasor Powell and the Particular Baptist minister Benjamin Keach. In this way, Southcombe captures some of the variety of experience and thought within what is too often considered a monolithic Restoration nonconformity and defined less on its own terms and its supposed opposition to the established church than in terms of internal divisions. Throughout, Southcombe offers straightforward, historical readings of the texts produced by these figures. His readings of poetry will be particularly useful to other historians. He also places these readings within a granular and chronologically precise understanding of the period.

It is worth highlighting a few more specific aspects of these case studies in order to clarify their broader historiographical importance. Southcombe does make a few explicit, general historiographical arguments, but more particular aspects of his book prove to be more valuable. The broad observation reiterated throughout is that there is a recent tendency among scholars to emphasize the thorough mutability of religious identities in this period. Southcombe asserts that this claim should be dialed back considerably, but he does not document this trend in the field or describe its contours with precision. He appears to associate it with the work of Peter Lake. This is a confusing point of departure for many reasons, not least because Lake works almost exclusively on periods prior to the English Revolution, the religio-political landscapes of which are dramatically different from those with which Southcombe is concerned. More importantly, the position on mutability implicitly attributed to Lake here, and by extension to the field of post-Reformation studies, is unlikely to be familiar to readers of Lake's or most others’ work.

Readers will be better served by scrutinizing a few of the most interesting observations that emerge in Southcombe's biographical sketches and setting these alongside the existing historiography of dissent in the Restoration era. None of these observations is entirely novel within the existing secondary literature, but, taken together, they do complement some of the most important developing strands within that literature. The chapter on the comic poet Robert Wild introduces a central theme of the book. It explores the tensions, ambivalence, and ambiguity inherent in maintaining a “Presbyterian royalist” position in the 1660s and 1670s, in the context of anti-Presbyterian polemic, changes in regime policy, and the effects of Presbyterian print itself. Instead of accepting the traditional division of Restoration Presbyterians into “dons” and “ducklings”—those focused on comprehension and a younger generation more resigned to separation—Southcombe shows how a figure like Wild oscillated in his orientation and outlook as a result of the contexts identified above while moving, overall, toward the development of a separate, denominational identity.

The same theme is developed to some extent in the other chapters. Thomas Grantham is an interesting case. While he mounted virulent attacks on the bishops and the established church during his imprisonments, at other moments his attitude to the Anglican establishment softened considerably, even approaching, Southcombe contends, a genuine irenicism, as he considered the threats posed by Catholicism and Quakerism and developed a friendship and a spirited, private theological exchange with a local conforming minister. While Southcombe probably goes too far in taking irenic gestures on both sides at face value, this case again exposes the dilemmas and oscillation inherent in dissenters’ structural position over the course of the Restoration era. One can see commonalities across the dissenting spectrum while appreciating that the structural position of certain groups changed over time, and that the structural dimension also exhibited important variation across groups. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the example of Grantham is how it suggests that the basic soteriological affinities of General Baptists with Arminian Anglicans, affinities not shared by many other nonconformists, made the structural position of General Baptists in this period peculiar.

The chapter on John Whitehead and the Quakers emphasizes that Quaker political engagement remained fierce after the Restoration. It was for Southcombe hardly dulled, at least in some cases, by the “experience of defeat” so commonly emphasized as a turning point in widely read previous work on the topic. This chapter also offers a more critical analysis of irenic gestures by dissenters, one that might be usefully turned back on the Grantham material in order to enable a more realistic portrayal of the way in which irenic rhetoric itself served as a polemical strategy unlikely (and probably unintended) to result in confessional concord. Perhaps the most useful aspect of the final chapter on Powell and Keach is its emphasis on how the character of political and religious engagement in print by dissenting ministers is so often best understood not as formal theological debate but rather in terms of the prosecution of a pastoral mission under trying conditions. As a slew of recent work demonstrates, pastorally driven visions of the proper conduct of the Christian community and the relative primacy placed upon different aspects of worship and doctrine—as opposed to formal, clear-cut conflicts between theological systems—were clearly at the bottom of many of the most important tensions and conflicts within Restoration English Christianity, both between emerging denominational groupings and within them.