ABSTRACT
By the 1840s people of all political and theological persuasions began to accept that there was a need for social reform. The filth of the industrial towns and cities underlined by the cholera epidemics, the starvation and exploitation of large numbers of the poor and the terrible plight of many children began to affect Anglicans and Dissenters, conservatives, liberals and radicals alike. The activist and interventionist works of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna represented a slow sea-change in evangelical spiritual life. The ideology of the fierce God of the early evangelical revival began to be questioned, particularly as the sheer numbers of unredeemed sinners both at home and abroad continued to grow. Unitarians had always believed in social intervention, albeit by wealthier private individuals rather than government, to achieve a harmonious moral community within the nation. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, Romanticism for progressive women was coming of age, providing a radical and creative underpinning to their social activism.
