First rocketing to fame when he 'purchased' a 13-yearold girl as part of a campaign against child prostitution, W. T. Stead was the pioneer of investigative reporting. As criminal convict, Puritan, sex-fanatic, occultist, social reformer and stuntman, Stead's notoriety escalated throughout his life until his tragic death in the Titanic disaster. This book traces the rise and fall of W. T. Stead, from his childhood as the son of a strict Nonconformist minister in Newcastle, to his rapid and Machiavellian career as an influential investigative journalist, and his last years when he was ridiculed as a madman for his devotion to the occult. Stead's campaigns - all conducted with his trademark invincible zeal - are vividly described, ranging from the reform of London slums to denouncing an ex-slave trader who claimed to be the Messiah. A hundred years after his death, author Will Robinson presents new material about Stead's life taken from his personal papers, previously suppressed by his wife, giving us a fuller portrait than ever before of the sensational father of journalistic campaigning.

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.