Salem Chapel

Arthur Vincent is young, clever, and quietly sure of his own gifts when he arrives in the market town of Carlingford to take up the pulpit of Salem Chapel. He imagines a brilliant ministry and an influence reaching up into the best society of the town. What he finds is a congregation of greengrocers, buttermen, and dressmakers who regard their minister as, in effect, their property — to be fed at their tea-parties, judged on his sermons, and kept properly grateful.

Chief among them is the good-hearted, comically self-important deacon Tozer, whose daughter has designs on the new pastor. Vincent chafes against the whole proprietary world of the chapel, and his head is soon turned by the genteel Anglican society he longs to enter — above all by the beautiful young widow Lady Western. But ambition and a fashionable infatuation are about to cost him dearly.

For among Salem's irregular hearers is the mysterious Mrs Hilyard, a gentlewoman living in poverty and hiding from a husband she fears — the charming, predatory Colonel Mildmay, who, under a false name, has been courting Vincent's own sister Susan. When Susan and Mrs Hilyard's child are lured away together, social comedy gives way to abduction, a near-fatal shooting, and the threat of a murder charge, and Vincent must decide at last what he owes to the humble congregation he has scorned.

An early and celebrated entry in Oliphant's Chronicles of Carlingford, Salem Chapel braids shrewd, affectionate social comedy of Nonconformist chapel life with the suspense of a Victorian sensation plot. With an unillusioned eye for class and the slow, devastating power of congregational opinion, it is a study of pride and humility, of ambition and the price of gentility, and of who, in the end, holds power over a man's life and conscience.