How Soapy was Sam? A Study of Samuel Wilberforce
Despite being denounced by Huxley as a man who used high gifts to discredit humble seekers after truth, David Newsome writes of how this Victorian prelate has also been acclaimed as the greatest bishop of his age.
On a hot summer evening in mid-July 1873 the Bishop of Winchester was thrown from his horse while riding with Lord Granville. He had just been commenting on the beauty of the trees and the excellence of his mount; a moment later he was dead. Thus Samuel Wilberforce’s career was cut short while he was still at the height of his powers, and—in the words of R. W. Church (whose judgments posterity has tended to endorse)— the Church of England lost her “greatest bishop... for a century and a half.”1
Dean Church’s words are startling if only because so little of Wilberforce’s life and work has survived in popular memory. We recall a name (“Soapy Sam”) and a faux pas involving T. H. Huxley, but very little else: a pathetic residuum of an active life, the details of which rarely escaped public notice. Indeed, the eyes of the world had been fastened upon all the Wilberforce children since their infancy.
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