Brown has done a real service by fleshing out Stead's larger accomplishments as a 'newspaper editor, author, social reformer, women's tights advocate, and spiritualist,' all of which made him 'one of the best-known public figures in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain'.
Stewart J. Brown is Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Edinburgh. He has lectured widely in Europe, China, Australia, India, and the USA, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He served as co-editor of the Scottish Historical Review from 1993 to 1999. His publications include The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement (2017), The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World
1830-1930 (2014), and The National Churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland 1801-46 (2001).