Pollock, Wilberforce

John Pollock, Wilberforce. London: Constable, 1979.

Another long biography of Wilberforce! Some surprise is surely excusable. It is, after all, only four years since Robin Furneaux combed thoroughly the unpublished papers for the first time since the standard Victorian 'Life', and only three years since Roger Anstey's very full history of Abolition, which naturally dealt extensively with its key figure. In drawing on more that 100 manuscript sources (though not, inexplicably, the Wrangham MSS, which include the invaluable Private Journal) Pollock is to be congratulated more for his industry than for the increased illumination he supplies. He corrects Furneaux on a few small points (eg Wilberforce's opium eating) but on the whole his book is more for the scholar who wants to see the contemporary records squeezed dry than for the interested layman.

Wilberforce's career has the neat shape of a morality play. The cherished son of a rich Hull merchant, he idled his way through Cambridge and then chose politics as a suitable occupation for a gentleman given to dilletantism. A seat in the Commons was no problem: he had 'an unlimited command of money' and the prevailing bribe was only two guineas per vote. An outlay of a few thousands did the trick and Bewilderforce, as the caricaturists speedily dubbed him, settled down to introducing such bills as the one to rescue the bodies of hanged traitresses from the judicial flames for the purpose of anatomical dissection. Then Evangelism struck him with all the force of a Pauline conversion. By 1787 God's intentions towards him had been made manifest: 'the suppression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of Manners'. Thenceforth he was a man possessed. His first goal took 20 years to gain.

Not unreasonably, given earlier extensive treatments, Pollock spends little time on the trade itself, though the effect of this selectivity rather gives the impression of his subject tilting against an invisible target. He clings to the view of abolition as a personal crusade and a personal triumph, even though it was, as he says himself, a matter where the public's attitude counted for little. The issue was decided in the unreformed House of Commons; and when that body of hard men voted for abolition we may be sure they were persuaded by factors more tangible than Wilberforce's silver tongue. Yet of the strong economic influences - and one might instance the suggestion that slaves at last grew more expensive than new technology plus day-labourers - there is scarcely a hint.

The Reformer of Manners, by contrast, gets full and sympathetic treatment. Here there is a difficulty. That Wilberforce was incorruptible, generous and a hater of hypocrisy is beyond question, but it remains true that his virtue was not of a kind to recommend itself much to modern tastes. The perfect paternal liberal, he was for change, but change dispensed and regulated from above. Like his friend Hannah More, Wilberforce was far more willing to supply recipes for cooking sheep's head than ones for fundamental reform. Subordination, discipline, patience, gratitude: these were in turn required of the poor.

His equating social and Christian virtue could make him quite ruthless: he spoke against Robert Owen's factory reforms on the ground of Owen's atheism; he tried to ban Sunday newspapers; he helped crush a hapless printer for selling Tom Paine's work; he introduced a bill which led to the hateful Combination Act, banning trade unions.

Pollock tells us that Wilberforce 'did not regard this as repressing the workers', but the radicals Place, Carlile and especially Cobbett tell a different story. The latter eulogised his exile in America: 'and, then, to see a free country for once ... No Wilberforces. Think of that! No Wilberforces!' It is hard to resist the Hammonds' view (which Pollock misrepresents throughout) that Wilberforce did indeed throw the cloak of the moral guardian over every kind of oppression. There is a nice symbolism in a scene of 1820, when at a reception the year-old Princess Victoria played about the feet of the aged reformer, the man pledged to make goodness fashionable.

A biography which, like this one, has a soft-edge love for its subject rarely reveals as much as one which displays a sharp distaste. Pollock is too bland: by the end one wishes that Lytton Strachey had turned his acid pen to a series of Eminent Georgians. A dismemberment of Wilberforce might have made more of the concealed egotism and power hunger beneath the smooth philanthropic facade.