Anne Stott's latest book is an excellent example of the ways in which the religious, as well as the broader intellectual and political, currents of an age can be illuminated through the exploration of family connections. One thinks immediately of the humanitarian endeavour revealed by studies of the Gurney-Fry families and, most recently, the social and educational ideas of the Aikin-Barbauld kindred as examined in the important collection of essays edited by Ian Inkster and Felicity James, published in 2012. The James and Inkster volume is designed to elucidate the cultural nuances of Rational Dissent and its evolution into early nineteenth-century Unitarianism. Stott's purpose, by contrast, is the illustration by means of a focus on its domesticity and its public and private fortunes and misfortunes of the Evangelical religion of what subsequently became known as the Clapham Sect. The dominance of the historiography of this influential and much studied group by its male members, argues Stott, means that the roles of the Clapham wives, sisters and daughters, have suffered relative neglect. Hence, the main thesis of her book is that the public sphere in which the principal male figures pursued their Evangelical causes – anti-slavery, philanthropy, education and reformation of manners – cannot be understood fully without an appreciation of the domestic context which was central to their whole existence. One reason for the male domination has been the non-survival of several key female primary sources, such as the letters of William Wilberforce's sister Sarah and many of those from his wife Barbara. Fortunately, Stott has made effective use of surviving but under-researched documentary collections, notably the correspondence of Marianne Thornton (née Sykes) and those of her unmarried daughter of the same name. The result is a highly readable account of the lives of some of the most significant individuals of the period, in which the public and parliamentary spheres on the one hand, and the private lives on the other, are deftly and almost seamlessly interwoven. A particularly telling example of the interconnection was the possibility in 1827 of the marriage between Wilberforce's only surviving daughter Elizabeth and the Bristol merchant Charles Pinney – an alliance only called off when the full extent of Pinney's involvement in Caribbean slave-holding became (belatedly) known to the prospective father-in-law.

Accordingly, the book proceeds with a broadly chronological survey of the vicissitudes of the inter-related Wilberforce, Thornton and Macaulay families, from the 1760s to the 1840s, with various members of the Stephen, Sargent and Bird families as supporting characters. Three helpful genealogical tables set out the relevant matrimonial details. The ‘heart’ of the Clapham Sect was Battersea Rise, purchased by Henry Thornton in 1792, which served as the shared home of Thornton and William Wilberforce until their marriages, respectively, in 1796 and 1797. Home life is indeed the central theme, and the book's sixteen chapters focus upon sociability, courtship and marriage, financial problems, childbirth and its perils, children, health, and, all too frequently, deathbed scenes. The contrast between the well-organised Thornton household and the perilously chaotic saga of that of Wilberforce is entertainingly drawn. Evangelical attitudes towards children receive much attention and there are some particularly interesting comments on the education and spiritual progress of the female younger generation. Curiously, amid the playfulness, the children's literature, the seaside holidays, the private tutors and the generous allocation of parental quality time – all of which enable the author to refute some of the more extreme accusations of Evangelical ‘repressiveness’ – there is virtually no mention of domestic animals. Were the Clapham children, one wonders, introduced to cats, dogs, rabbits and caged birds in order to learn – in accordance with the mores of their religion and their social milieu – that cruelty to animals was sinful?

Hannah More, of whom Stott published a distinguished biography in 2003, is a key witness to the activities of Wilberforce and his friends. Although off-stage in Bristol, the detailed epistolary communication which she received from Clapham amounts to an important primary source; she was also godmother to several Clapham infants. Some of the Clapham wives and daughters acted with vigour upon her famous injunction that ‘Charity is the calling of a lady. The care of the poor is her profession.’ Marianne Thornton undertook the education of a group of African children and organised ‘feast days’ for the poor of Lambeth, while Elizabeth Wilberforce devoted the last years of her short life to the succour of the cottagers in her husband's Yorkshire parish. Barbara Wilberforce, by contrast, married the man, not the abolitionist cause for which he was so widely celebrated. Similarly, Selina Macaulay took no part in her husband Zachary's lifelong efforts on behalf of Sierra Leone and the African Institute. Significantly, however, electoral canvassing was off-limits even for the most active of the Clapham ladies, even when their husbands were seeking election or re-election; Henry Thornton faced a particularly difficult campaign in Southwark in 1802. As Stott points out, canvassing on behalf of their male relatives was deemed both natural and appropriate for aristocratic women; indeed, as Elaine Chalus has shown, many of those female aristocrats exercised political influence far beyond the polls, through patronage networks, public entertainments and sometimes as organisers. To Evangelicals within the Church of England, however, female activism in politics, as distinct from philanthropy, was a serious breach of religious as well as social convention, just as engagement in popular (and especially itinerant) preaching incurred the dread charge of Methodism.

The book concludes on a rather elegiac note on the decline of the Clapham sect. Wilberforce's four sons departed from the tradition and two of them converted to Catholicism; the family connections gradually loosened; and, in 1852, the last member of the Thornton family to live at Battersea Rise was obliged to abandon it. And Stott draws a regretful (and perhaps exaggerated) distinction between the warm, cheerful, sociable ethos of the Claphamites and what she sees as a more narrow-minded, exclusive and often anti-Catholic Evangelicalism of the middle and later years of the nineteenth century. None the less, this is a well-researched, broadly based and sympathetic analysis of an under-explored dimension of an influential religious grouping. One small detail: ‘Making Decent’ (1822), the caricature of Wilberforce placing a fig-leaf with strategic prudishness upon Westmacott's statue of Achilles is ascribed to Isaac Cruickshank (p. 272, and in the list of illustrations) and to George Cruickshank (p. 271); the latter is correct (Isaac died in 1811).