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William Paley, Samuel Wilberforce, Charles Darwin and the Natural World: An Anglican Conversation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
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Soapy Sam and the Devil’s Chaplain: even for an age in which public figures were regularly lampooned, the epithets are evocative. To call the recipients of the epithets, Samuel Wilberforce and Charles Darwin respectively, controversial figures of the nineteenth century is the intellectual equivalent of noting that the sky is blue. Without seemingly trying, both men were involved in controversy. Whether it was the Church of England’s response to Essays and Reviews or the creation of a government policy with regard to vivisection, for various reasons both men were regularly in the national spotlight in the mid-Victorian period.
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References
1 See Newsome, David, ‘How Soapy was Sam? A Study of Samuel Wilberforce’, History Today, September 1963, 624–32 Google Scholar, for an assessment of Bishop Wilberforce’s somewhat notorious eponym. For assessments written soon after his death by contemporaries, see Phillimore, Lucy, Bishop Wilberforce: A Sketch for Children (London, 1876)Google Scholar; Pinches, Thomas, Samuel Wilberforce. Faith: Service: Recompense. Three Sermons (London, 1878), 16–76, 157–59 Google Scholar; Burgon, John William, Lives of Twelve Good Men, 2nd edn (London, 1888), 1: viii, 2: xii, 1–70 Google Scholar; Daniell, George W., Bishop Wilberforce (London, 1891)Google Scholar; Baring-Gould, S., The Church Revival: Thoughts thereon and Reminiscences (London, 1914), 174–76 Google Scholar. For a twenty-first-century assessment, see Redfern, Alistair, ‘Oversight and Authority in the Nineteenth-Century Church of England: A Case Study of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Bristol, 2001).Google Scholar
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5 A contemporary report of the meeting is in The Athenaeum, 14 July 1860, 64–65.
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