W. T. Stead

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. <em>W. T. Stead: Nonconformist and Newspaper Prophet</em> 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. <p/>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.<br>