Other works
Public and private good
Although Wilberforce is most famous for his battle against the slave trade, he was also active in many other social and religious areas.
His book, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes of this Country Contrasted with Real Christianity, was published in 1797 and sold well for many years.
Most of England had become unchurched by the 18th century and Wilberforce was determined to draw people back into the Christian faith.
But he didn't just want people to return to a Christianity limited to church on Sundays; he wanted them to embrace a Christianity that would change the whole fabric of British society.
What he really wanted to do was to reform manners - not social customs, but the way in which people thought of virtue. Nowadays we might call that a project for making goodness fashionable.
God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.William Wilberforce
He worked with friends inside and outside of parliament; Bishops, friends in high places, and influential people throughout British society.
He worked with the poor, he worked to establish educational reform, prison reform, health care reform and to limit the number of hours children were required to work in factories.
Wilberforce believed that he and his supporters should attempt to cure every social ill in the country.
To deal with many of these problems they established organisations that would work to improve or rectify the particular social injustice that they were dealing with.
Wilberforce also used his large income for good causes, donating generously to charity and cutting the rents he charged the tenants on his land.
Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect
Wilberforce was a leading member of the Clapham Sect, a group of evangelical Anglican Christians with a strong bias towards social improvements, who worked for the abolition of the slave trade and promoted missionary work.
The Clapham Sect was very much a 'top-down' movement: they were mostly rich people who believed it was their duty to provide the poor with a better life. The name came from Clapham Parish Church in London, where many of them worshipped.