ABSTRACT
T 0 most of the contemporaries of Henry Thornton his authorship of the book which is now reprinted after one hundred and thirty-six years would by no means have been regarded as his major title to fame. To them the fact that he was a successful banker and a great expert on finance probably appeared as the indispensable but comparatively uninteresting background which put him in the position to be a great philanthropist and the effective advocate of every good cause; certainly it enabled him to provide at his comfortable Clapham home the meeting place for the active and influential group of Evangelicals, who, quite apart from the great role they played in their own time, were probably one of the most profound influences which fashioned the outlook and character that was typical of the English upper middle class of the nineteenth century.* It would be an interesting and instructive task to attempt a full-length Life of Henry Thornton, and, considering how many minor figures of the circle of which he and William Wilberforce were the centre have been honoured with biographies,t it is surprising that it has never been accomplished.:j: But the men who became the historians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were on the whole not too sympathetic towards that austere view of life, which in many instances must have overshadowed their own youth, and which perhaps found its most perfect embodiment in the person of Henry Thornton. It may well
* The influence of the Clapham Sect in this respect is well brought out in E. Halevy's History of the English People in rSrs.
