The Wilberforce Diaries Project is preparing a scholarly edition of the diaries of William Wilberforce. Wilberforce was a Member of Parliament for forty-five years (1780-1825). From 1789 onwards, he was internationally renowned as the parliamentary spokesman for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. He was active in numerous other causes – political, philanthropic and religious – including the reformation of manners, penal law reform, the Sierra Leone colony, missionary and Bible societies, and animal welfare. 

Wilberforce’s extant diaries are held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and Wilberforce House Museum, Hull. Written over half a century, from 1779 to the year of his death in 1833, the diaries and religious journals amount to almost a million words and form a remarkable record of the later Hanoverian age by one of its most celebrated figures. In their official Life of William Wilberforce, 5 vols (1838), his sons reproduced over 100,000 words from the diaries, but eighty-five per cent of the text has never been published. 

The project received seedcorn funding in 2014-15 from the College of Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities at the University of Leicester, and from the John Fell Fund at Oxford University. The speed of its progress accelerated thanks to generous donations via the University of Leicester’s Development and Alumni Relations Office: https://le.ac.uk/giving. Most recently, the project has been supported by a substantial grant from the Marc Fitch Fund. Together, these have funded the work of postdoctoral research assistants, enabling the team to complete the transcription and collation phase of the project, before moving onto its current major phase: annotation of the diaries (identifying persons, places, texts, and events). The final phase will be preparing the edition (including introductions, appendices and indexes) for publication by Oxford University Press. We welcome queries about the project via email: wilberforcediaries@gmail.com.

Editorial Team

John Coffey is the director of the Wilberforce Diaries Project and the general editor. As Professor of History at the University of Leicester, he has published extensively on the relationship between religion, politics and ideas in early modern and nineteenth-century Britain and America. His books include Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558-1689 (2000), and Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King Jr. (2014). Most recently, he has edited The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, c. 1559-1689 (2020), and was part of the team that produced a major new edition of Richard Baxter’s seventeenth-century memoir, Reliquiae Baxterianae, 5 vols (OUP, 2020). 

Anna Harrington is a full-time research associate and editor on the Wilberforce Diaries Project. She recently completed a PhD at the University of Leicester, titled ‘”The Grand Object of my Parliamentary Existence”: William Wilberforce and the British Abolition Campaigns, 1783-1833’ (2020).

Gareth Atkins is an editor on the Project and Official Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Queens’ College, Cambridge. He has published widely on evangelicalism, including his first monograph, Converting Britannia: Evangelicals and British Public Life, 1770-1840 (2019). He has an interest in religious ideas, culture and technologies, having edited Making and Remaking Saints in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2016) and co-edited Reframing Stained Glass in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Culture, Aesthetics, Contexts and Chosen Peoples: the Bible, Race and Empire (both 2020). He is also General Editor of the Church of England Record Society series.

Michael D. McMullen is an editor on the Project and Professor of Church History at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, MO. He is the editor of William Wilberforce: His Unpublished Spiritual Journals (Christian Focus, 2023). He has edited manuscript sermons of Jonathan Edwards and Robert Murray M’Cheyne and was co-editor of The Diary of Andrew Fuller (2016). He is the Editor of the Midwestern Journal of Theology, and was an Associate Editor on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Mark Smith is an editor on the Project and University Lecturer and Director of Studies in Local and Social History at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Religion in Industrial Society: Oldham and Saddleworth 1740-1865 (1994), and has edited or co-edited a variety of historical texts: Doing the Duty of the Parish: Surveys of the Church in Hampshire 1810 (2004); Evangelicalism in the Church of England c.1790- c.1900 (2004); and The Parish in Wartime: Bishop Gore’s Visitations of Oxfordshire, 1914 and 1918 (2019).

John Wolffe is an editor on the Project and Professor of Religious History at the Open University. He wrote the articles on William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and is the author of The Expansion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers and Finney (2006). His other books include God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland, 1843-1945 (1994), Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (2000), and Sacred and Secular Martyrdom in Britain since 1914 (2019). He is a past president of the Ecclesiastical History Society and the editor of Yorkshire Returns of the 1851 Census of Religious Worship (2005).