William Wilberforce and England’s forgotten saints

On 25 March 1807, Parliament passed an act to abolish the British slave trade. The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade had been formed twenty years before, and this was the culmination of their combined efforts. It was a momentous occasion.

Centre stage stood William Wilberforce, the MP who dedicated the best part of his adult life to the cause. He made his first speech in favour of abolition on 12 May 1789, right before turning thirty, and died but a week after the practice of slavery itself was abolished throughout the British Empire, on 29 July 1833. It is for this that Wilberforce is now best remembered.

And yet, abolition was only one of the two goals to which Wilberforce committed himself. He wrote in his diary in 1787, the same year the abolition committee first came into being, that “God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of Manners”. By “manners”, he didn’t mean politeness, as we often do now, but rather one’s behaviour as informed by religious principles. While the suffering of slaves in the British colonies concerned him greatly, he saw it as symptomatic of a malady that began at home: English society — the upper classes in primis — remained Christian in name, but not in practice.

Ten years later, in 1797, Wilberforce went on to publish what he would later term his “manifesto”, the rather clunkily titled A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. His friends — Wilberforce biographer Stephen Tomkins explains — “warned against it” (William Wilberforce: A Biography, 2007), and the printer only risked 500 copies in the initial run. Against all odds, the book sold out in five days. In the latter part of the 18th century, religious “enthusiasts” in England had been viewed with suspicion. But here was, Tomkins tells us, “a condemnation of the religious status quo from a prominent member of the establishment … offering a calm, compelling case for the evangelical faith popularly associated with firebrands and fanatics”. This kind of composed religious fervour found an audience. A Practical View  went on to sell a further 7500 copies in the first six months. It was the book Edmund Burke spent his last two days on earth reading.

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