The Counterrevolution Is Not Over: Commemorating Legh Richmond

Abstract

Recent critical interest in romantic-period evangelical literature has been shadowed by another recovery project outside the university, as American evangelical publishers have brought out devotional editions of the religious works of Hannah More and Legh Richmond written in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While it is easy to dismiss this as cultural nostalgia, contemporary Christian publishers are alert to the enterprising and activist character of early evangelical tract literature. If there is a lapse of historicism about their recovery project, there is also another way of thinking about history and human agency.