The Clapham Sect was a group of evangelical Christians, prominent in England from about 1790 to 1830, who campaigned for the abolition of slavery and promoted missionary work at home and abroad. The group centred on the church of John Venn, rector of Clapham in south London. Its members included William Wilberforce, Henry Thornton, James Stephen, Zachary Macaulay and others. Stephen Tomkins tells the fascinating story of the group as one of a web of family relations - father and son, aunt and nephew, husband and wife, daughter and father, cousins, etc. Within the story of the people are the stories of their famous campaigns against the slave trade, then slavery, the Sierra Leone colony, Indian mission, home mission, charity and politics. The book ends by assessing the long term influence of the Clapham Sect on Victorian Britain and the Empire.

Casts a fresh light on the abolitionist William Wilberforce and his friends in the Clapham sect by looking at their private lives as revealed in their family correspondence. Stott explores themes of the family, women and gender, childhood and education, sexuality, and intimacy.

This book gives a picture of an important religious reform group in action during the period of the French Revolution, Napoleon, and the Industrial Revolution. In this period of injustice and misery the British ruling classes, frightened by the excesses of the French Revolution, determined, at a time when economic life was changing at a rate unequalled for centuries, that existing laws and institutions should not change. And yet from this time came the moral, philanthropic, and religious ideas which transformed later England and resulted in the abolition of the slave trade, educational reforms in India, emancipation of Negroes in the British possessions, popular education and the growth of Sunday schools in England, reform of the whole penal and judicial system, industrial and parliamentary reform, and a new spirit of religious tolerance and philanthropy. The moving force in human progress at this epoch was a "brotherhood of Christian politicians" lampooned in Parliament, during their lifetime, as "the Saints" and remembered in history as "The Clapham Sect," led by Wilberforce. Dr. Howse brings together for the first time in this book material on all the activities of the Sect. He gives us sketches of members of the Set, their life as a group at home, and in the midst of their campaigns, where novel methods and ceaseless labour brought results out of all proportion to the size of the group.

The biography of one of the leaders of the Evangelical Movement at the beginning of the nineteenth century. As the son of Henry Venn of Huddersfield and friend of Charles Simeon, William Wilberforce, Henry Thornton, and Hannah More, John Venn tends only to be remembered because of his relationship to them, but his avoidance of the limelight should not lead to an underestimation of his influence. As Rector of Clapham, Venn was the prototypically effective nineteenth-century town parson, but through his role as first Chairman of the Church Missionary Society and as Chaplain to the Clapham Sect his influence was felt on the wider Church. Full use has been made of the Venn Family Papers and other original sources, including letters and diaries.

This wide-ranging study demonstrates that Woolf, despite her agnostic upbringing, was profoundly interested in, and knowledgeable about, Christianity as a faith and a socio-political movement. Jane de Gay provides a strongly contextual approach, first revealing the extent of the Christian influences on Woolf's upbringing, including an analysis of the far-reaching influence of the Clapham Sect, and then drawing attention to the importance of Christianity among Woolf's friends and associates. It shows that Woolf's awareness of the ongoing influence of Christian ideas and institutions informed her feminist critique of society in Three Guineas. The book sheds new light on works including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves by revealing her fascination with the clergy, the Madonna, churches and cathedrals; her interest in the Bible as artefact and literary text; and her wrestling with questions about salvation and the nature of God.

This is the first substantial biography of More for 50 years and the first to make extensive use of her unpublished correspondence.

Like many gentlemen of his time, Charles Darwin married his first cousin. In fact, marriages between close relatives were commonplace in nineteenth-century England, and Adam Kuper argues that they played a crucial role in the rise of the bourgeoisie. Incest and Influence shows us just how the political networks of the eighteenth-century aristocracy were succeeded by hundreds of in-married bourgeois clans—in finance and industry, in local and national politics, in the church, and in intellectual life. In a richly detailed narrative, Kuper deploys his expertise as an anthropologist to analyze kin marriages among the Darwins and Wedgwoods, in Quaker and Jewish banking families, and in the Clapham Sect and their descendants over four generations, ending with a revealing account of the Bloomsbury Group, the most eccentric product of English bourgeois endogamy. These marriage strategies were the staple of novels, and contemporaries were obsessed with them. But there were concerns. Ideas about incest were in flux as theological doctrines were challenged. For forty years Victorian parliaments debated whether a man could marry his deceased wife’s sister. Cousin marriage troubled scientists, including Charles Darwin and his cousin Francis Galton, provoking revolutionary ideas about breeding and heredity. This groundbreaking study brings out the connection between private lives, public fortunes, and the history of imperial Britain.