Neither of the key words in my title is unproblematic. 'Literature' signifies a tension between all kinds of writing and a special literary kind of writing: not until the 1830s is there a conception of literature as normatively belletristic, essentially different from other kinds of more public and instrumental writing. 'Politics' is even more problematic, as the word denotes not only the politics of the crown and parliament but also the politics of the extraparliamentary opposition. Moreover, the Enlightenment public sphere that Jöurgen Habermas describes as emerging in the eighteenth century generated a quasi-political republic of letters that invited all, regardless of social origins, to participate in the literary culture in a career open to all talents. Finally, the sense we now have that everything cultural is also political originates in this period.

From the 1740s to the 1830s, the major political trends included the challenge to aristocratic power by an array of democratic forces; the strengthening of the British Empire; and, especially after the defeat of Jacobitism and the final consolidation of the Protestant claim to the throne, an increase of religious toleration, with anti-semitism and anti-Catholicism declining but hardly disappearing. Many other trends had political implications: agricultural capitalism flourished, with widespread enclosures of common land dispossessing the rural poor; the industrial revolution began in earnest, with the population roughly doubling in the period; literacy grew as the middle classes increased, so that by 1800 about half the women and two-thirds of the men could read.