The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane

The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane is an 1887 novel by Mark Rutherford, the pen name of William Hale White (1831-1913), and the book many critics judge his masterpiece. The novel falls in two parts: the London of 1814-21, where the artisan Zachariah Coleman is drawn into the radical politics of the post-Waterloo years, the Cato Street shadow, and the strains of his loveless marriage; and a generation later, the provincial town of Cowfold, where the chapel politics of Tanner’s Lane work out the inheritance of that radical Dissenting tradition in smaller lives. White joins political history, religious psychology, and provincial comedy with the dry truthfulness that made Lawrence call him incomparably honest. The novel is a major document of English radical Dissent. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.