Anne Stott's book is a deeply researched consideration of how family and friends shape purposeful lives. Taking as her subject the domestic history of the Clapham sect, Stott explores the intertwining of the public and the private in the families of William Wilberforce, his cousin the member of Parliament and banker Henry Thornton, and Zachary Macaulay. While these men's careers are significant to Stott's account, she also examines the lives of Claphamite women and children, and aims to show how the group's “distinctive evangelical piety” affected “their patterns of courtships and marriage, their philosophy of child-rearing, and their strategies in coping with death and bereavement” (4). The Wilberforces are at the book's center, but as a whole, the book presents a portrait of a wider circle in which Stott finds much to admire.

Stott's book is divided into four sections, which roughly track the stages of William Wilberforce's life. The first traces Wiliberforce's youth, entrance into public life, evangelical conversion, and the early years of the Clapham sect. From his birth in 1759, Wilberforce was small and frail, and Stott is attentive to how his lifelong health problems weighed on him. After the death of his father in 1768, William became strongly attached to a doting aunt and uncle who were strong Calvinistic Methodists. The pair showered him with attention, and he imbibed their religious convictions. When his mother learned that William was being drawn into Methodism, she cut contact between her son and the couple. While his mother kept William within the Church of England, these experiences helped prepare the way for his subsequent evangelical conversion and probably contributed to the “voracious need for love and affection” (66) he felt in later life.

The book's second section traces the efforts of Wilberforce, Thornton, and Macaulay to find suitable spouses while leading busy public lives. In the work's most compelling passages, Stott examines Wilberforce's transition from bachelorhood to married life at age thirty-seven, a period fraught with angst. In the 1790s, while immersed in abolitionism and parliamentary business, he was awkwardly attempting to find a spouse who shared his religious views and could make him happy in other ways. To the bafflement of several women whom he courted, Wilberforce ran hot and cold on a succession of prospective partners and came close to a suit for breach of promise. Stott argues that Wilberforce's “religious journal” and diary “show a man in his mid-thirties going through a personal crisis in which he demonstrates an extreme emotional immaturity” (66). There were, she says, “three Wilberforces at this period: the persistent abolitionist, the kind and unselfish friend . . . and the emotional wreck whose life was descending into black comedy” (71).

Wilberforce's marriage to Barbara Spooner in 1797 marked an abrupt end to this crisis. It was seen by many of his friends as a precipitous and odd match—Barbara was uninterested in politics or abolitionism—but Stott argues that she was “able to give her husband the unstinting love that he had craved ever since he had been parted from his aunt and uncle” (106). For the Claphamites, marriage served “as a spiritual partnership in which husbands and wives aided each other on the road to heaven” (61). William Wilberforce, Henry Thornton, and Zachary Macaulay all put their evangelical faith into action through politics. Their spouses, though, had more varied attitudes toward their duties as Christians, and Stott sensitively explores their lesser-known lives. While Barbara Wilberforce often sought to shield her husband from the demands of his public life, Marianne (Sykes) Thornton was deeply engaged in political matters and campaigned for her husband in parliamentary elections. Selina (Mills) Macaulay had kept a school with her sisters, but once married, she “revelled in solitude and domesticity” (141–42) and largely kept aloof from her husband's Clapham friends.

What these women shared was responsibility for expanding families. When Marianne and Henry Thornton died within ten months of each other in 1815, they left behind nine children under age nineteen. The Wilberforces had six children; the Macaulays had ten. In the third part of the book, Stott looks at the Claphamites' family lives when the group was its most cohesive. Some of the book's most eloquent passages recount how they helped each other celebrate births, nurse the sick, and mourn the dead. Claphamite parents took a warm interest in their children's development, and Stott presents a largely favorable picture of childhood in these evangelical households. While parents fretted continuously about the state of their children's souls, they “took considerable care to make their lives enjoyable” (152). Stott also argues that the Claphamites' devotion to domesticity had a wider impact. “Wilberforce's experience of family life,” she notes, “its pains and pleasures, and its awesome responsibilities, coloured his politics and his religion, intensifying his compassion for the slaves and reinforcing his attitudes to death and the afterlife” (193).

In the book's final section, Stott focuses on the Wilberforces as Barbara and William aged and their children moved into adulthood. For the younger generation, evangelicalism proved a complicated legacy. As Elizabeth Wilberforce noted in a letter to a brother, thinking of “what religious advantages we have had—I tremble” (225). William, the eldest son, proved a financially draining disappointment because he failed to find a productive career. His brothers—Samuel, Robert, and Henry—took Anglican orders, but they all drifted away from evangelicalism. Samuel became a rather conventionally high-church bishop. Robert and Henry were drawn to Tractarianism and ultimately became Roman Catholics. Probably happily for Wilberforce, these conversions happened after his death; he lived just long enough to see the slave emancipation bill pass its third reading in the House of Commons in July 1833. His death, Stott writes, marked “the passing not only of a great Christian humanitarian but also of a way of life” (273). This evocative book reminds us that even for such a public figure, much of the stuff of life consisted of family, friends, and home.