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This chapter documents the establishment of Elder Dempster Lines Limited, a company under the control of Richard Holt, and follows the fluctuations in West African imports and exports in the 1930s. It examines the successes and failures of Elder Dempster in this period by assessing shipping tonnage and financial results, and comparing the data to the growth of rival lines. The chapter concludes with an introduction of Elder Dempster’s entry into commercial aviation as Elders Colonial Airways Limited, a venture that came to an end in the 1940s due to the outbreak of the Second World War.

This chapter describes how Nathaniel Hawthorne revises the romantic doctrine of feeling, specifically arguing that The House of Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance use philanthropy to rework Adam Smith's and David Hume's notions of sympathetic identification, offering a model of social relations antithetical to the values of romanticism. Henry Giles offers two versions of philanthropy: ‘inspiration’, or the psychology of benevolence, and ‘agency’, or the actions of public charities. The valuations that inform Giles' and Richard Holt Hutton's reactions to Hawthorne's novels reflect the terms of a broader debate regarding the nature and function of moral agency in the mid-nineteenth century, a debate which frequently intersected philanthropy and artistic representation. Miles Coverdale's anxiety over and eventual antagonism towards Hollingsworth invariably focuses on his philanthropy. He establishes the grounds for realism's revision of sentimental sympathy based on the possibility of making the very distinctions that elude Hawthorne's romantic narrator.

William Benjamin Carpenter was a central figure in the Metaphysical Society. Aware of the tensions between the theists and the scientific naturalists in the Society he offered a middle ground. Although his early work in physiology had led him to doubt his own Unitarian faith, his mentor James Martineau had reassured him. However, as his studies in science developed, Carpenter found physiological evidence to underpin his faith. Although Carpenter failed to convince the most extreme among his friends in the Society; namely, Richard Holt Hutton and Thomas Huxley, or his lifelong mentor, Martineau, his ideas were attractive to many others. Henry Edward Manning adopted Carpenter’s ideas in defence of his own theism, for instance, and his ideas were publicized and appreciated in the wider scientific community.

This chapter examines the relationship between the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board and the general public. It considers the factors that led to the public perception of the Board as ‘dedicated to its own interests’ rather than acting in the interest of port users. Jarvis attempts to discern whether or not the public’s perception was just or unreasonable.

This chapter seeks to chart the lively debate about the evolutionary origins and development of morality as it occurred at the Metaphysical Society, a debate that began with the first paper delivered at the Society in 1869 and, after the intervention of several subsequent papers on the topic, came to an end in 1875. Proponents of an evolutionary ethics included the Darwinians John Lubbock and William Kingdon Clifford, while the critics included the journalist and editor Richard Holt Hutton, the classicist Alexander Grant, and the moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick. Much of the debate focused on competing interpretations of the historical record and the nature of historical evidence itself. For the critic of an evolutionary morality, the evidence for the origins and development of morality had to be sought in written records; for the proponent, the evidence needed to be sought much further back in time, in the era known as ‘prehistory’. This important distinction brought to the fore a related area of contention, namely the relationship between civilized European and contemporary aboriginal societies, and what that relationship meant for understanding the deep history of human moral development. The debate largely came to an end when Sidgwick challenged the unjustifiable normative claims that were often embedded in evolutionary descriptions of the origins and development of morality. He showed that a supposedly naturalist account of ethical principles was just as fraught as was the intuitionist account it sought to critique.