W. T. Stead: Nonconformist and Newspaper Prophet (Spiritual Lives)

Description

W. T. Stead (1849-1912) was a newspaper editor, author, social reformer, advocate for women rights, peace campaigner, spiritualist, and one of the best-known public figures in the late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. W. T. Stead: Nonconformist and Newspaper Prophet provides a compelling religious biography of Stead, offering particular attention to his conception of journalism--in an age of growing mass literacy--as a means to communicate religious truth and morality, and his view of the editor's desk as a modern pulpit. Leading scholar, Stewart J. Brown explores how his Nonconformist Conscience and sense of divine calling infused Stead's newspaper crusades-most famously his 'Maiden Tribute' campaign against child prostitution. The biography also examines Stead's growing interest in spiritualism and the occult, as he searched for the evidence of an afterlife that might draw people in a more secular age back to faith. It discusses his imperialism and his belief in the English-speaking peoples of the British Empire and American Republic as God's new chosen people for the spread of civilisation; and it highlights how his growing understanding of other faiths and cultures--but more especially his moral revulsion over the South African War of 1899-1902--brought him to question those beliefs. Finally, it assesses the influence of religious faith on his campaigns for world peace and the arbitration of international disputes. Cover W. T. Stead: Nonconformist and Newspaper Prophet Copyright Dedication Preface Contents Abbreviations 1: A Voice of the Nonconformist Conscience, 1849–80 A Remarkable Nonconformist Family His ‘First Conversion’ His ‘Second Conversion’ Appointment as Editor of the Northern Echo The Northern Echo and the Nonconformist Conscience Josephine Butler and the Contagious Diseases Acts Stead and the ‘Bulgarian Atrocities’ Madame Olga Novikoff Notes 2: To Be a Christ: Striving for Righteousness at the Pall Mall Gazette, 1880–8 John Morley’s Apprentice The Salvation Army The Bitter Cry of Outcast London Gordon for the Sudan ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ His ‘Third Conversion’ ‘Government by Journalism’ Ireland, Evictions, and the Catholic Church The Law and Liberty League Annie Besant Notes 3: The City of God and the Civic Church, 1888–94 The Truth about Russia The Pope and the New Era The Review of Reviews Stead’s Nonconformist Conscience, Dilke, and the Fall of Parnell The Salvation Army in ‘Darkest England’ The Civic Church If Christ Came to Chicago! If Christ Came to the British City Notes 4: Spiritualism and the Other World, 1880–1912 The Fin de Siècle and the ‘Other World’ Automatic Writing and Julia Ames Borderland The Revival of 1904–5 ‘Julia’s Bureau’ Notes 5: The Great Pacifist, 1894–1912 Stead in the Later 1890s and Early 1900s Arbitration and Armenian Massacres The Peace Campaign of 1894–9 War against War in South Africa Methods of Barbarism New Perspectives on Imperialism and Race The Hague Conference of 1907 and ‘The Coming Parliament of Man’ The ‘Martyrdom of Man’ Notes Select Bibliography Index