Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. The Groundwork of Change -- Eighteenth-Century Evolutionary Theory -- Practical Awareness -- The Chapters and a Definition -- A Note on Notes -- PART I. THREATS TO THE SPECIES: Madness, Discontent, and the Danger of Dissolution -- Chapter 1. Causation and Contexts of Hatred: Savage Beasts Mortal and Deadly -- Conjuring Up Reasons: Original Sin, Fragile Connections, Church and State -- Aristocratic Historiography: Advocacy and Resistance -- Metaphorical Enhancements: Floods, Propagation, Legions, and Dutch Treats -- Chapter 2. Madness, Extirpation, and Defoe's Shortest Way with the Dissenters -- Madness -- Root and Branch -- Defoe's Shortest Way, Sacheverell's Political Union, and Religious Conflict -- The Shortest Way: The Bible and Other Clues beyond the Obvious -- Response and Judgment -- Defoe as a Character of His Own Creation -- PART II. TAKING THE CURE AND IMPROVING THE SPECIES: Sermons, Compulsion, and Methodists -- Chapter 3. The Thirtieth of January Sermon: From Extermination to Inclusion -- The Thirtieth of January Sermon and Royalist Law -- The High Church Response and the Beginning of Change -- Higher Church and Moderate Responses to the High Church Response -- Raising the Decibels in a Lowered Church -- State, Not Church -- God's Hand, William's Hand, and the Divine Right of Government -- Retrospective -- Chapter 4. "Compel Them to Come In," Luke 14:23: From Persecution to Persuasion -- Against Augustinian Compulsion -- Revocation of the Edict of Nantes: Response and Rage -- Contexts Changed and Augustine Charged -- Happy Had His Works Not Been Preserved -- Persuade Them to Come In -- Adopt Men From All the Nations of the Earth: Equiano's Conversion -- Chapter 5. Methodism: From Antagonist to Relation -- The Spreading Fog -- Reforming the Reformation? Reforming Reform?.

Grudging Acceptance -- Humphry Clinker: Joining the Family -- PART III. EVOLUTIONARY REVERSION: The Gordon Riots, Return to Rage, and Reinventing a Cure -- Chapter 6. Déjà Vu All Over Again? The Gordon Riots -- Bedlam Revisited, Restoration of Order, and a Trial on Trial -- Repeal, No Popery, and the Gordon Riots: Destruction and the Puritan Redivivus -- Renovating the Language of Cultural Regress -- Church, State, and Political Causation -- Strategies of Defense and Alternative Responses -- "What Is to Depose the Sword?": The Return to Order -- Debate, Arrest, Trial, and Consequences -- The Trial of Lord George Gordon for Treason, 1781 -- Chapter 7. A Very Near Thing: State Terrorism, the Fury of the Aggrieved, and Incompatibility with the Safety of Millions -- A River Too Far -- The Trials of Lord George Gordon, 1786-1787, and Excommunication -- The Trials of Lord George Gordon, 1786-1787: Libeling France and Britain -- Aftermath: Flight, Conversion, and Sentence -- True Colors: Robert Watson's Life of Lord George Gordon -- Chapter 8. Coping, Repairing, and Dickens' Barnaby Rudge -- How to Cope? The World after the Gordon Riots -- Dickens' Barnaby Rudge: To Point a Moral but Not Adorn a Tale -- The Victorian Retrospective and Punishment by Neglect -- Conclusion, Summary, Implications -- A Brief Summary of a Long Book -- Illustrating Evolution -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y.