ISBN The Age of Atonement ( The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1795-1865 ) book 428 pages

This book examines the mentality of the upper and middle classes during the first half of the nineteenth century. It was an age obsessed by the idea of catastrophes; by wars famines pestilences revolutions floods volcanoes and - especially - the great commercial upheavals which periodically threatened to topple the world's first capitalist system. Thanks to the dominant evangelical ethos of the day such sufferings seemed to be part of God's plan and governments took a harsh attitude toward social underdogs whether bankrupts or paupers in order not to interfere with the dispensations of providence. Free Trade was adopted not as the agent of growth it was later seen to be but in order to restrain an economy which seemed to be racing out of control. In the 1850s and 1860s however a different attitude to social problems developed along with evolutionary approaches to the physical and animal worlds and a new understanding of God who came to be regarded less as an Arnoldian headmaster and more like Santa Claus. At the centre of this ideology and throwing light upon it was a new way of understanding the Atonement.