The Churches and reform

Between 1750 and 1900, trade and industry made Britain rich and strong. She became the 'workshop of the world', she gained a great empire, and her navy ruled the seas. But there was a dark side to all this success. This was the suffering of the black slaves and the children in the mills. It was the women in the mines and the crowded families in the filthy slums.

Evangelicals, such as William Wilberforce, tried to put right these wrongs. Wilberforce spent his life fighting for the rights of slaves. In 1807, he and his friends got Parliament to ban the trade in slaves. But it was not until 1833, the year of his death, that all the slaves in the British Empire were freed.

Lord Shaftesbury was troubled by the 'slaves' in the mills and mines. He was the leader of the 'Ten Hours Movement'. This was a group of evangelicals in Parliament, who wanted to shorten the working day to no more than ten hours. They had some success - Factory Acts passed in the 1830s and 1840s cut children's hours of work and banned women from the mines. In the end, they led to shorter hours for men as well.

After 1870, reformers turned to housing for the poor. Cardinal Manning, the leading Catholic, tried to improve the state of London's slums. Some charities put up new blocks of flats. But the best work in this field was done by George Cadbury, a Quaker, and the head of a chocolate firm. At Bournville, near Birmingham, he housed his workers in a brand new town.

Walter Robson: Britain 1750 – 1900; Oxford University Press, 1993/2002, page 93 f.