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doi:10.1017/S0009640708001868 William Wilberforce: A Biography. By Stephen Tomkins. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2007. 238 pp. $18.00 paper.
The 2007 bicentennial celebrating Britain's anti-slave trade act witnessed a spate of biographies of William Wilberforce (1759-1833), the British politician and philanthropist at the center of the antislavery campaign. Many of these studies have a filiopietistic flavor, as Wilberforce is held up as a model of evangelical spirituality (his True Christianity became a bestseller), social activism, and political engagement. And of course, the recent film, Amazing Grace (2006), did nothing but cast Wilberforce in that light. Unquestionably, there is something heroic about Wilberforce: he was bom to a prosperous family and inherited great wealth, yet he gave himself untiringly to public service and also gave away one-fourth of his annual income to the poor. He wanted, in the word of his day, to live a life of "usefulness." Despite chronic health problems, he served as a member of parliament for forty-five years and engaged in a life-long crusade to reform English "manners" by outlawing hanging, dueling, and bull-bating, and by promoting factory and prison reform, education, home and foreign missionary work, Bible societies, and the prevention of cruelty to animals. Above all, his greatest contribution and the central organizing theme of Stephen Tomkins 's biography was his two-decade campaign to end the British slave trade, the culmination of which, after eleven bills from Wilberforce (and more from...