Part of Series
Salem Chapel tells the story of Arthur Vincent, recent graduate of Homerton College, Cambridge, who has been called to pastor Salem Chapel upon the retirement of its previous minister, Mr Tufton. Salem belongs to the Dissenters of Carlingford, to whom Oliphant attributes varying degrees of kindness, hospitality, generosity, commercial acumen, stubbornness, and complacency. Chapel life is naturally rooted in Carlingford's mercantile center, and the cheerful bustle of tea-meetings, singing classes, charitable and missionary activities echoes the hum of commerce. At the center of this "brisk succession of 'Chapel business'", stands the minister. He is, Oliphant declares, "everything in his little world. That respectable connection would not have hung together half so closely but for this perpetual subject of discussion, criticism, and patronage".
Author
Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant (née Margaret Oliphant Wilson) was a Scottish novelist and historical writer, who usually wrote as Mrs. Oliphant. Her fictional works encompass "domestic realism, the historical novel and tales of the supernatural". Margaret Oliphant was born at Wallyford, near Musselburgh, East Lothian, and spent her childhood at Lasswade (near Dalkeith), Glasgow and Liverpool. As a girl, she constantly experimented with writing. In 1849 she had her first novel published: Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland which dealt with the Scottish Free Church movement. It was followed by Caleb Field in 1851, the year in which she met the publisher William Blackwood in Edinburgh and was invited to contribute to the famous Blackwood's Magazine. The connection was to last for her whole lifetime, during which she contributed well over 100 articles, including, a critique of the character of Arthur Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.
