David Bruce admits that prior to the research for this project, his knowledge of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton “was minimal, at best” (vii). The same could be said for many other British historians. Buxton, once as well known as William Wilberforce, has largely been forgotten in the general narratives of the nineteenth century, although the areas of his impact—penal reform, aboriginal rights, and abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire—are all standards in the discussion. Bruce's new biography is an attempt to bring one of the more colorful early nineteenth-century public figures to a new generation of readers and researchers.

The structure of Bruce's biography is quite straightforward. It begins with a chapter of historiography that documents the many efforts to tell Buxton's story in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Bruce shows, many of the publications used Buxton's life not only to tell the antislavery story but also to offer an example of Christian public service. From here, the biography proceeds through nine relatively brief chapters. The first two focus on Buxton's upbringing, family connections, entry into his uncles' brewing company (Truman, Hanbury and Buxton after he became a partner), and his early philanthropic efforts. Buxton's efforts to help the poor in Spitalfields led him into public advocacy in 1816, which in turn made him known to many in greater London, including the seasoned evangelical leader Wilberforce.

Before tracing his public career, Bruce includes a chapter on the development of Buxton's religious commitments, which attempts to show how both his Quaker relatives and his evangelical Anglican associations shaped his character and convictions. Separate chapters follow on his prison and criminal-law reform efforts (ca. 1816–18), his entry into Parliament and early career as an MP (1819–22), his turn toward abolition of slavery and movement into public leadership on the issue (1823–29), the success of abolition and some of its consequences (1830–1838), and his promotion of a plan for ending the slave trade in Africa, which culminated with the promising but ultimately tragic Niger Expedition (1839–42). The final biographical chapter, “Buxton in Winter,” discusses the expedition's toll on Buxton's health and public reputation and his death in 1845. A short conclusion offers an assessment of Buxton's life, which centers on the interaction between his faith, ambitions, and public actions.

The chapter on Buxton's family connections and upbringing is among the strongest, and it introduces some new materials, including the wills of Buxton's father and grandfather, to clarify his family's situation within eighteenth-century English society. Much of what follows, while ably organized and engagingly written, builds on earlier published accounts, drawing heavily from The Memoirs of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, published by his son Charles in 1848, but with insightful expansions coming from the privately published papers of Buxton's wife, Memorials of Hannah Lady Buxton (1885), which illuminate parts of Buxton's family life. Bruce also makes frequent use of the Papers of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, 1st Baronet, apparently from the microfilm made by Harvester Press Microform of the manuscripts stored in the Rhodes House Library, Oxford. However, often the precise locations of cited sources are unclear in the endnotes. This may result from the publisher's standards, but it does make further investigation and verification more difficult.

Bruce's study, which is based on his dissertation research, provides a sense of Buxton's sometimes complicated life. The book's strength lies in its relative brevity and highly readable style. But, as Bruce no doubt recognizes, the brevity also obscures much of the complexity. Among Bruce's goals are to see Buxton as “a man of his times” (x), to get beyond the “one-dimensional” tendency in earlier biographies to emphasize Buxton's “accomplishments and personal ethics as the product of his spiritual foundation,” and instead to portray Buxton as “a man driven to succeed by an inherent mix of justice and ambition” (xvii). This study as published does hint at these interconnections but is insufficient to make them clear. The gaps may result from editorial choices and publishing house requirements, but gaps there are.

Often the brevity of chapters leads to quick shifts of focus and misleading impressions. In discussing Buxton's penal reform efforts, for instance, Bruce asserts, “While Buxton failed in his grand appeal, his efforts to revise the use of capital punishments did not go unnoticed” (93). Bruce connects these endeavors to Wilberforce's recruitment of Buxton into the antislavery leadership, but leaves out that Buxton's efforts to press his “grand appeal” only paused because Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel took criminal law reform into government hands in 1823, which suggests that Buxton had very much succeeded in making penal reform a central issue of the day. Bruce's account entirely ignores Buxton's return to penal issues, including his and Sir James Mackintosh's successful amendment to remove the death penalty from Peel's measure to consolidate the forgery laws in 1830. In a later chapter, Bruce notes that Buxton very reluctantly accepted the seven-year apprenticeship for former slaves as a condition of abolition, a compromise that brought him heavy criticism from many in the abolitionist camp, but he says almost nothing about Buxton's parliamentary investigations of the abuses of apprenticeship that brought about its early end in 1838.

While more extensive use of primary sources would have helped clarify much in this study, inclusion of some of the more recent contextual discussions of evangelicalism and of the interaction between Christian missions and colonial expansion, such as those by John Wolffe, Andrew Porter, or Michael Rutz, would also have helped connect Buxton to his times more solidly. Such explorations might also have allowed for fuller discussion of Buxton's theological understanding, which remains underdeveloped. While these limitations mean that David Bruce's biography should not be the last word on Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, it may provide a serviceable introduction for scholars or general readers interested in the generation following Wilberforce and the famous Clapham Sect.