There are already several studies of W.T. Stead (1849–1912), English Congregationalist newspaper editor, Christian moral campaigner and spiritualist, but Stewart Brown brings a distinctive focus on the development of Stead's eclectic religious beliefs. For this new biography appears in the Oxford University Press series Spiritual Lives which takes a broad view of faith, against the tendency in some secularisation theory to see this disappearing in the twentieth century. Subjects will run from the sixteenth century to the present, mixing mainstream religious believers with atheists and socialists. Current figures include Woodrow Wilson, Christina Rossetti, John Stewart Mill and Leonard Wolf, with Margaret Mead and others in the pipeline. Stead is an excellent fit, since he began his career as a provincial exponent of the ‘Nonconformist conscience’, before branching out to embrace all manner of religious and political life.

What makes Stead historically important is his central, high-profile role in the sensationalist ‘new journalism’ of an emerging mass society. For him, the popular newspaper was a modern pulpit with much wider reach, in which he cast himself as a preacher or prophet, making news and shaping moral campaigns. The son of a Congregational minister, Stead's career began as editor of the Northern Echo based in Darlington and an admirer of Oliver Cromwell. Soon he developed a strong alliance with Josephine Butler against the Contagious Diseases Acts, remaining a strong supporter of women's rights throughout his life. His next cause was the 1875 ‘Bulgarian Atrocities’ against Orthodox Christians under the Ottoman empire, which drew him close to Gladstone and closer still to Madame Olga Novikoff, a Russian aristocrat based in London. In 1880 he moved to the Pall Mall Gazette in London, initially under John Morley. Before long he was egging on General Gordon into Sudan. As editor, he developed a relationship with the Booths and the Salvation Army, Cardinal Manning and several leading Anglo-Catholics. Concerned with urban destitution, his most notorious ‘Maiden Tribute’ campaign against child prostitution landed him in prison. Next came Irish Home Rule, land reform agitation and a friendship with Annie Besant.

Once Stead's campaigns reached beyond Nonconformity, his religious view became more diffuse as he underwent successive ‘conversions’. He developed a respect for the Orthodox Church and gained audiences with the tsar. The universal ambitions of the Roman Catholic Church appealed to him, while he also ran with socially conscious secularists and atheists. He rationalised all this by developing a strong ecumenical emphasis that stretched beyond Christianity, underpinned by the ideal ‘to be a Christ’ and later the notion of a ‘Civic Church’, which sought to bring together all people who wanted to create a Kingdom of God on earth. By 1890 he had established a new weekly, The Review of Reviews, to pursue these goals and he took this brand of Social Gospel to the USA, where it received an enthusiastic reception. Rather like John Trevor's Labour Church movement, he tried to find institutional forms for his big religious idea, in local congregations or alliances, but after great publicity flourishes these failed.

The final decades of Stead's life moved in two parallel streams. First, he embraced Christian Spiritualism to provide scientific evidence of the afterlife and underpin his life-long spiritual mission against materialism, leading to a new quarterly, Borderland. Predictably, he came into contact with Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society. But this also opened him to the 1904–5 Welsh Evangelical Revival, which anticipated the twentieth-century rise of Pentecostalism. His Julia's bureau orchestrated spiritualist experiences of the other world. But Stead was not done with popular religious politics, as in a second stream he fulminated against the growing early twentieth-century threat of war between the great powers, organising international peace conferences. The 1899 Boer War gave this campaign a sharper focus and challenged Stead's earlier assumptions about the civilising role of the English-speaking peoples.

Even Stead's death is associated with a major public event, as he went down with the Titanic in 1912. Like a celebrity Forrest Gump, he turned up at a series of famous moments of late Victorian and Edwardian England, to stand beside or challenge major public figures, from Gladstone and Cardinal Manning to Tolstoy and Cecil Rhodes to Annie Besant and Helena Blavatsky. But how do we assess this life? Certainly, he is not everyone's cup of tea, then or now. There is no doubting that his moral campaigns brought to public attention serious issues and helped to spur social reform, notably by raising the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen. Today, we tend to associate the tabloid or ‘gutter’ press with greed and cynicism. It is surprising to find a Christian moralist using similar methods, as if the end always justifies the means. Few today would buy a child from a poor family to prove a point, as Stead did to expose child prostitution. Many more would still pursue a Parnell or Dilke over adultery to ruin their political career; in Stead's case despite his own earlier, adulterous affair.

Stead conducted serious social investigation into the condition of the working classes, including If Christ came to Chicago (1894), one of thirteen books. Yet even here there seemed to be a fascination with lurid extremes, while there's little evidence of contact with the mundane but important, mainstream labour movement, often led by Nonconformist skilled men. John Burns became critical of Stead's imperialist demagoguery. As Brown (p. 20) astutely observes: ‘He reduced the complexities of the public health measures aimed at curbing venereal disease to a matter of simple right and wrong.’ His successors, the next generation of Christian Socialists, would often reach for state-socialist panacea; big fixes by the central state in the mould of Sidney and Beatrice Webb – surely secular candidates for another volume in this valuable series. But Stead remained in politics a radical Liberal who looked for associational and local government solutions, albeit under paternalist middle-class leadership.

The great strength of Stewart Brown's biography is that he lets you make up your own mind. His account is lucid and fair-minded throughout, laying the facts on the table. Access to Stead's private journal allows him to illuminate the personal ideas and emotions that lie behind the manifold campaigns. As Brown points out, Stead managed without much formal education or theological training. None of his ideas were original, but they did win much popular acclaim in his time. Thus, this excellent, concise religious life provides a window into the chattering classes of the time, from the Nonconformist Social Gospel to Anglo- and Roman Catholicism to Spiritualism and Theosophy and back again. That leaves the interesting question of reception: who read Stead's papers and books and how far did they reach into the emerging worlds of labour?