Of all the wide-ranging interests Coleridge showed in his career, religion was the deepest and most long lasting, and Beer demonstrates in this book how none of this work can be fully understood without taking this into account. Beer also reveals how Coleridge was preoccupied by the life of the mind and how closely this subject was intertwined with religion in his thinking.

Revolutionary thinking at the end of the Eighteenth century prompted major English writers to probe the riddle of human consciousness and the ways in which it might differ from 'Being' in a divine or universal sense. In the first of two studies, John Beer traces this question in writings by Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth, and the impact of their ideas on successors such as Keats, De Quincey, Byron and the Shelleys. Relevance to later figures such as the Cambridge Apostles and Tennyson is also discussed.

A full account of Lawrence, ranging from his talent as a young writer to the continuing genius of his later work, and concentrating on his exceptionally acute powers of observation, both human and natural.

In this sequel to his Romantic Consciousness, John Beer discusses further questionings of human consciousness; both the degree to which Dickens's conscious dramatizing differs from the subconscious workings of his psyche and the exploration of subliminal consciousness by nineteenth-century psychical researchers.