The period from the end of the eighteenth century to the mid nineteenth century has been referred to variously as an age of revolution, of reform, and of improvement, but more recendy, and perhaps more aptly, as an age of atonement. The language of atonement pervaded politics and literature, as well as religion, in a way which it never did in the eighteenth century. As the debate on the abolition of slavery went on, it was seen in the first instance as an act of atonement for national sins. Whilst some evangelicals regarded the Irish famine of 1845 a s God's judgement on ‘an indolent and un self-reliant people’, Gladstone wrote to his wife that unless England atoned for its neglect of the Irish it must expect ‘a fearful retribution’. A National Fast day was proclaimed for this and other occasions of war and famine. The eighteenth century had also had its days of National Fasting, but the importance of religious guilt as a social and political factor is unquestionably higher in this period.