Search results for ""Author Alan Argent""

Edition of young men's magazines from just before the First World War, presenting a vivid and touching picture of life at the time. The Angels' Voice was the title given to a magazine which circulated among a group of some 40 or so young men in Brixton between 1910 and 1913, all members of the Young Men's Bible Class of Trinity Congregational Church there. In its pages they teased each other, their sisters and girlfriends in poetry, drawings and witty, innocent articles. We see them playing football, going on country rambles, roller-skating, cycling, smoking (a lot), arguing about politics and women's rights, taking day trips to France and holidays in the Channel Islands, Belgium and Italy, and even working in Switzerland, India and the Canary Islands. This magazine offers an unique insight into life in London in general, and the lives and attitudes of lower middle-class young men in one suburb in particular, on the eve of the outbreak of the First World War, during which many of them were to serve and several of them were to die; its pages depict the world lost in the trenches of France and Flanders. The magazines are presented here with an introduction and full notes, with an appendix providing biographical information on many of those connected with them. ALAN ARGENT grew up in south London. He is minister of Trinity Congregational Church, Brixton, and Research Fellow at Dr Williams's Library, London. He has written a biography of Elsie Chamberlain, and a history of Congregationalism in the twentieth century.

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This first complete history of Dr Williams's Trust and Library, deriving from the will of the nonconformist minister Daniel Williams (c.1643-1716) reveals rare examples of private philanthropy and dissenting enterprise. The library contains the fullest collection of material relating to English Protestant Dissent. Opening in the City of London in 1730, it moved to Bloomsbury in the 1860s. Williams and his first trustees had a vision for Protestant Dissent which included maintaining connections with Protestants overseas. The charities espoused by the trust extended that vision by funding an Irish preacher, founding schools in Wales, sending missionaries to native Americans, and giving support to Harvard College. By the mid-eighteenth century, the trustees had embraced unitarian beliefs and had established several charities and enlarged the unique collection of books, manuscripts and portraits known as Dr Williams's Library. The manuscript and rare book collection offers material from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, with strengths in the early modern period, including the papers of Richard Baxter, Roger Morrice, and Owen Stockton. The eighteenth-century archive includes the correspondence of the scientist and theologian Joseph Priestley. The library also holds several collections of importance for women's history and English literature. The story of the trust and library reveals a rare example of private philanthropy over more than three centuries, and a case study in dissenting enterprise. Alan Argent illuminates key themes in the history of nonconformity; the changing status of non-established religions; the voluntary principle; philanthropy; and a lively concern for society as a whole.

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