One winter evening in Somerset, in the early months of 1798, Dorothy Wordsworth observes ‘the moon and two planets; sharp and frosty … The sea very black, and making a loud noise as we came through the wood, loud as if disturbed, and the wind was silent’ (DWJ 147). In between these descriptions of natural phenomena she records, as if in parentheses: ‘Met a razor-grinder with a soldier’s jacket on, a Knapsack upon his back, and a boy to drag his wheel’ (DWJ 147). Unlike the lyrically suggestive accounts of sea, wind and sky, this human encounter is pared to a sequence of bare facts and, while we may deduce that the man is an army veteran now making a living as an itinerant laborer, no attempt is made to derive any further significance from the incident. In the Alfoxden Journal this entry marks the only meeting with a stranger encountered on the roads. By contrast, in the 1800–1803 Grasmere Journal Dorothy records numerous meetings with men, women and children on the public highway and, more often than not, these meetings yield insights into the consequences for the rural poor of the British involvement in the war against revolutionary France, and of the Pitt government’s relentless pursuit of socio-economic ‘improvements’ to support this involvement. Many of these meetings were subsequently developed in poems written by Wordsworth. But, whether written as poetry or in prose, the stories of these outcast and denuded figures, striking in their mundanity, were to cast a searching light on the iniquities of the times.

This chapter introduces the major philosophical concepts, historical interpretations, and political, legal, and economic issues concerning the First Amendment, church-state relations, and religious liberty in the United States. It will address philosophical concepts such as natural religion, the nature of religious exercise, and the special status of religious liberty in the philosophy of law. It will then present historical developments from colonial America to modern Supreme Court cases concerning church establishments, religious toleration, religious dissent and minorities, religious tests, and the historical and jurisprudential meanings of “free exercise” and “establishment.” It will conclude with reflections on natural rights and religious liberty exemptions, originalist constitutional interpretations, corporate religious liberty, the economic origins of religious liberty, the separation of church and state, and contemporary challenges to religious liberty.

This chapter focuses on James Humphreys, the publisher of the 1802 Philadelphia edition of Lyrical Ballads, and examines many aspects of the text itself, such as the book’s material form, price, date and place of issue. It considers how Humphreys’ involvement in the American Revolution affected the political charge of the poems and how he used the Ballads and other works published by his press to critique and alter the course of the new nation. Humphreys was as concerned with people being disenfranchised during Jefferson’s tenure as president as Wordsworth and Coleridge were with people being disenfranchised during George III’s reign as king.

Founders of the earliest American colonies considered religious piety an essential civic virtue and therefore continued the tradition of religious establishment found in Britain and other Protestant countries. New sects and denominations (especially Quakers and Baptists) contended against Congregationalist and Anglican establishments throughout the colonies. Though prominent dissenters Roger Williams and William Penn founded colonies respecting religious liberty, the decline of religious establishment elsewhere was owed primarily to changes in British law, commercial and political expediencies necessary for increasingly diverse immigrant populations, and, in the case of Anglican establishments, the difficulty of securing ordination and a self-sustaining parish. Though Roman Catholics enjoyed some degree of toleration, enthusiastic Protestant identity on both sides of the Atlantic further reduced Catholic rights and liberties. Jews enjoyed some limited degree of toleration, but only in a handful of colonies.

Debates over the original meaning of the establishment clause have usually revolved around the question of which broad church-state principle is represented by the clause. Strict separationists advocating a “wall of separation” highlight different historical evidence than do non-preferentialists who argue that the clause allows evenhanded government support for religion. A third group asserts that the clause was instead a federalism provision designed to reserve church-state decisions to the states. This chapter assesses these conflicting interpretations and concludes that the framers and the public understood the clause only as banning the establishment of a national church. That understanding did not necessarily represent an anti-establishment principle, however, and it assumed that church-state issues would continue to be resolved by the states. In light of the Supreme Court’s adoption of the incorporation doctrine, the combination of the federalism interpretation and the no-national-religion prohibition best encompasses the original constitutional decision.

Lyrical Ballads is well established as a work of literary collaboration, co-conceived, co-authored and ‘rooted in friendship’.1 Jack Stillinger calls it ‘the most famous co-authored book in English literature’.2 The ‘most famous’ literary collaborators are of course Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, ‘twins almost in genius and mind’ as Wordsworth phrases it in his Prelude.3 However, the volume’s various, complex print histories point to the role of multiple collaborators in creating the texts we know as Lyrical Ballads. This chapter begins with a re-examination of the original project of creating an anonymous, collaborative poetry collection, taking into account the 1798 print variants, and moves towards a wider examination of what collaboration may mean in the production of the 1798 and 1800 editions. In so doing, it reconsiders the role of literary friendships and influences, as well as the domestic processes of poetic production. More importantly, this chapter re-centres Dorothy Wordsworth as a key collaborator, drawing on Elizabeth Fay’s conception of Wordsworth the poet as ‘William and Dorothy Wordsworth combined’.4 Nicola Healey calls Lyrical Ballads ‘a symbol of their collaborative textual union’.5 However, even in the introduction to the authoritative Cornell edition of Lyrical Ballads, Dorothy appears only as a companion, a copyist, and as a commentator on the publication prospects of the male poets’ work. This chapter therefore follows on from the work of Fay and Healey in repositioning Dorothy as a principal creative partner, as ‘part of William’s writing self’, as well as considering the importance of the presence of John Wordsworth at Dove Cottage during the production of the 1800 edition (Healey, 167).

Although recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions respecting corporate religious liberty have been heavily criticized, this chapter argues that corporate religious freedom is not the novel or radical development that critics decry. What is new, rather, is an increasingly intense opposition to any special legal accommodation of religious commitments. Indeed, upon close examination, the familiar criticisms do not for the most part actually turn on anything peculiar to the corporate form. They are better understood as manifestations of an emerging, deep-seated opposition to the traditional American commitment to religious freedom as a distinctive legal right. And this opposition is itself part of a broader effort to repudiate the vestiges of an older religious or biblical conception of American community, as described in Robert Bellah’s influential scholarship on American “civil religion,” in favor of a different conception that we might describe as “secular” or “progressive.”

This chapter follows the principles outlined in the introduction by responding to the three early editions (1798, 1800, 1802) of Lyrical Ballads as a combined totality: three parts that make up one whole. It uses the historicity provided by the reception of the ‘Preface’ in each of the three parts to pull out defining features of response to the volume in its own time. John E. Jordan states of Lyrical Ballads, ‘For so long now we have thought of the work as a literary landmark, forgetting that many of the characteristics of that monument are the accumulation of age or the effects of perspective’.2 By looking at what the volume was assumed to be without (before) the ‘Preface,’ as well as once this prose essay is added, we can begin to understand its intended and actual impact within its own time. Approaching the volume in this way allows us to see how the work itself accumulates over time and in conjunction with its reception, as well as drawing out for us the core principles it was understood to embody.

It is no exaggeration to say that sympathy is the founding principle of the poems collected in both the first and second editions of the Lyrical Ballads. Together with the associated and overlapping affective impulses of compassion, pity, identification, and what we tend now to call ‘empathy’, sympathy, or its absence, is a central organising impulse of almost every poem in the collection. Sympathy – a feeling for or feeling with – is expressed and explored in various ways and with, or towards, different kinds of individuals or objects (including animals and inanimate objects), but is consistently the focus of poem after poem. As Wordsworth comments in the final poem in the 1800, two-volume edition of Lyrical Ballads, the ‘power / Of Nature’ has led him to ‘feel / For passions that were not my own’ and thereby to think ‘On man, the heart of man, and human life’ (LB ‘Michael’, 28–31).

In recent years a new approach to the study of British Romantic literature has fundamentally altered the kinds of questions posed by literary criticism. This new approach, known as ecocriticism, first emerged into prominence during the 1990s, a period of increasing environmental concern throughout the industrialised world. Jonathan Bate’s influential study Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition was among the first to examine the ecological elements of British Romanticism, arguing that Wordsworth articulated a powerful and enduring vision of human integration with nature.1 Ecological critics have pondered fundamental questions about the purpose of literary criticism, and of imaginative literature itself, in a time of ever-increasing environmental crisis. In an era of impending threats to the global environment, the emerging discipline of ecocriticism is engaged in a vital re-vision of the fundamental task of poetry. Greg Garrard explains: ‘Environmental problems require analysis in cultural as well as scientific terms, because they are the outcome of an interaction between ecological knowledge of nature and its cultural inflection’.2 Because it often seeks to address perennial questions concerning the relationship between humankind and the natural world, British Romantic poetry has become one of the most important terrains for the development of ecocriticism. Moreover, the canon of British Romantic literature has been broadened and reshaped by the consideration of what constitutes an environmental text.3