Once a working man could read, who could control what he read?

epub or mobi

One Saturday shortly before Christmas 1866, the Rev. Septimus Lee Warner encountered something that convinced him his life was in danger. There, on public display in a shop window on the High Street, he was confronted by an eye-catching montage, full of revolving lights and twinkling mirrors, the centre-piece of which was his own photograph, pasted provocatively onto an upright coffin-lid. For many parishioners the church in their midst was a potent political symbol. Grieving parents who, for want of access to medical intervention or decent sanitation, found themselves burying their dead children in the churchyard in the shadow of a building that had cost £2000 to restore. Tiny coffins were borne to the grave, accompanied by funeral hymns played on an organ that had cost £250, all of it donated by the Rev. Lee Warner and his family and friends. Worse, this was at a time when Lee Warner was widely suspected of using duplicitous means to get his hands on the parish charities, and of mismanaging them in such a way that the poor were now deprived of their full benefits. Small wonder that Lee Warner genuinely feared for his life when he saw the executed effigy of himself in a High Street window, just a few weeks after his church had been blown up. There were people in the village with serious grievances against him, and he knew they meant business.