Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce

Mr Brown has written an assessment of the Evangelical revival in the Church of England at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He makes a number of important points about the Evangelicals: who they were, what they tried to do, how they tried to do it, and what success they had. He establishes how much they made the later Victorian age what it was and also suggest how the movement came to lose its hold on the foremost minds if the age in the third generation. This is a most extraordinary and brilliant introduction to the change of mind between two ages, and it is as interesting to the student of literature and the general reader as to the historian. What real part was played by Wilberforce and the Clapham sect? How is it that the time of Jane Austen is noticeably more refined than that of Fielding, and the age of George Eliot even more so? All these questions are answered in Mr Brown's book; a dazzling performance, and an enlightening one.