A History of Britain, Volume 3 by Simon Schama Read Free Book Online

infants given the virtual death sentence of being dispatched to one of the London wet nurses in the slums of St Giles’s or St Clement Danes; African children torn from their families and villages, and herded on to the slave ships; or the ‘climbing boys’ sent up filthy, soot-caked chimneys to contract cancer of the scrotum and respiratory diseases before being got rid of at 12 or 14 as too big to do the job.
    Common to all these crusades was their intense religious fervour. Most of the evangelists who burned to correct the evils of their age believed that the established Church had become too rich, too complacent, too aristocratic, to fulfil its Christian pastoral mission, and was part of the problem rather than an instrument for solving it. In response, the 1770s and 1780s saw the most extraordinary spiritual rebirth in Britain since the 17th century; a great flowering of dissenting faiths and Churches in which the Bible was read (as it had been by the radical sects of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth) as a proclamation of the doctrine of common humanity, and the gospel of compassion for the poor and downtrodden.
    Not all of those Nonconformist Churches were necessarily radical. After all, true evangelicals, with their emphasis on mystical revelation, required surrender to its power. And John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, detested Unitarians and their rejection of the divinity of Christ, calling it ‘poison’. But the intensity of his tirades was a backhanded compliment to the attraction of what could for the first time be called, without uttering an oxymoron, ‘rational Christianity’. It was, in fact, hard to find a Unitarian preacher in the 1770s and 1780s who was
not
also a sharp critic of the social and political status quo. For men such as Joseph Priestley (better known to posterity as a scientist, one of the discoverers of oxygen) and the Welsh Dr Richard Price, Jesus was no longer to be thought of as the son of God but as the first of the reformers, an all round good egg and socially concerned citizen who, more than any other, had preached the indissoluble bonds of obligation tying the more fortunate to those less so.
    ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’ read the inscription on the famous anti-slavery ceramic medallion produced by Josiah Wedgwood’s factory at Etruria in Staffordshire. And the new Churches of brotherhood under Christ preached their spiritualized civics using every means at their command: hymns; anthems; charismatic meetings at which the spirit of righteousness burst from their lungs; series of lectures; pamphlets and petitions to parliament; and, not least, the powerful medium of images, designed by artists who included William Blake and printed on every available surface – drinking goblets as well as paper. Each cause had its own particular story of infamy, repeated over and over as a rallying cry. The scandal of the slave ship
Zong
, when over 100 sick Africans were thrown overboard so that the master could collect on insurance, was used time and again to mobilize indignation against the so-called triangular trade – cheap manufactured goods from Britain to West Africa, that cargo then exchanged for slaves to the West Indies, in turn replaced by sugar and rum for the third leg back to Britain. The fresh converts thus recruited came from almost every class of society: reform-minded aristocrats as well as preachers, country gentlemen, lawyers, physicians and tradesmen – the same kind of broad church of the righteous, in fact, that had made the revolution of the 1640s. But this time it also conspicuously included men from the world of science and industry; very often they were the second generation of famous names, like Thomas Wedgwood, who felt they had to earn or even atone for their good fortune, and who wanted to distinguish it from money made from the trade in black humans. And among the congregations of the indignant were now counted completely new constituencies: well-read