The Nottinghamshire Baptists and Social Conditions

Abstract

"Victorian chapel-going business men are not infrequendy portrayed as hard-fisted, self-centred hypocrites, ostentatiously religious, exhibiting an excessive care for the souls of the poor but· with little concern for their bodies. They may have shed fervent tears for the benighted African, but beneath their benevolent exterior lurked the hearts of true business tycoons. This is, of course, a caricature, but does this caricature contain important elements of truth? Were these men knowingly blind to the poverty and social evils around them, and were they unWilling to allow the fundamental changes in the industrial system which were necessary if these evils were to be remedied? The men to be described were of this class."