Beilby Porteus - Legacy

Legacy

Beilby Porteus was one of the most significant, albeit underrated church figures of the eighteenth century. His sermons continued to be read by many, and his legacy as a foremost abolitionist was such that his name was almost as well known in the early nineteenth century as those of Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson – but a hundred years later he had become one of the ‘forgotten abolitionists’, and today his role has largely been ignored and his name has been consigned to the footnotes of history. His primary claim to fame in the twenty-first century is for his poem on Death and, possibly unfairly, as the supposed prototype for the pompous Mr Collins in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

But it is ironic that Porteus' most lasting contribution was one for which he is little-known, the Sunday Observance Act of 1781 (a response to what he saw as the moral decay of England), which legislated the ways in which the public were allowed to spend their recreation time at weekends for the following two hundred years, until the passage of the Sunday Trading Act of 1994.

His legacy lives on, though, in the fact that the campaign which he helped to set in motion eventually led to the transformation of the Church of England into an international movement with mission and social justice at its heart, appointing African, Indian and Afro-Caribbean bishops and archbishops and others from many diverse ethnic groups as its leaders.