8 - The age of atonement

Summary

Thanks be to those who plann'd these silent cells, Where Sorrow's true-born child, Repentance, dwells; Where Justice, sway'd by Mercy, doth employ Her iron rod, to chasten, not destroy; The slave of vice to virtue deigns restore, And bids him, once enfranchised, sin no more.

George Holford, MP

This too I know – and wise it were

If each should know the same –

That every prison that men build

Is built with bricks of shame,

And bound with bars lest Christ should see

How men their brothers maim.

Oscar Wilde, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’

The period from the end of the eighteenth century to the mid nineteenth century has been referred to variously as an age of revolution, of reform, and of improvement, but more recendy, and perhaps more aptly, as an age of atonement. The language of atonement pervaded politics and literature, as well as religion, in a way which it never did in the eighteenth century. As the debate on the abolition of slavery went on, it was seen in the first instance as an act of atonement for national sins. Whilst some evangelicals regarded the Irish famine of 1845 a s God's judgement on ‘an indolent and un self-reliant people’, Gladstone wrote to his wife that unless England atoned for its neglect of the Irish it must expect ‘a fearful retribution’. A National Fast day was proclaimed for this and other occasions of war and famine. The eighteenth century had also had its days of National Fasting, but the importance of religious guilt as a social and political factor is unquestionably higher in this period.