SOURCE: “The Book of Mormon in the English Literary Context of 1837,” Brigham Young University Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1, Winter, 1987, pp. 37-45.

In the following essay, Thomas suggests possible reasons why the English literary world did not enthusiastically embrace the Book of Mormon upon its introduction into England in the late 1830s.

“Do you know anything of a wretched set of religionists in your country, superstitionists I ought rather to say, called Mormonites, or Latter-Day Saints?” So wrote the great English poet William Wordsworth to his American editor Henry Reed early in 1846. This is the only reference to Mormonism in Wordsworth's surviving letters or other writings, and it may come as a shock to modern Latter-day Saints to find such anger and hostility towards us in a poet of whom we so often think as our poet, one who believed much of what we believe, knew what we know, and...