ABSTRACT
Steadily infiltrating and converting existing members of the Anglican Church to vital religion, a growing number of evangelical converts established and then maintained a vast variety of voluntary charitable societies in the early decades of the century. As a result, by 1850 three quarters of all the voluntary charitable organizations in existence in England were evangelical in character and control. Nevertheless women of all religious persuasions were heavily involved in charitable work as the female activism proselytized by More, Cappe and Trimmer became widespread. Certainly political economy became increasingly popular after 1800 when, in period of revolutionary discontent and war, important economic policy initiatives were carried out. The tenets of political economy thus immediately appeared to her as a series of those immutable laws. Like many of her generation, Martineau simply failed to see that the capitalist system described by political economy was in fact a creation of mankind in response to a particular set of economic and political circumstances.
