Salem Chapel is the fourth of seven works set in the delightful country town of Carlingford. Originally published in 1862. Young Arthur Vincent is a Dissenting minister beginning his ministry at Salem Chapel in Carlingford. He is intellectual and idealistic - not prepared for a middle class congregation whose social level is that of shopkeepers and tradespeople. He starts out fairly well but goes off track as he becomes enamoured of the beautiful Lady Western, and also involved in the affairs of a mysterious poor gentlewoman. Finally a crisis involving a kidnapping and his sister's disappearance takes him to the breaking point. Margaret Oliphant was a Scottish novelist and historical writer, who usually wrote as Mrs. Oliphant. During her career she wrote more than 120 works, including novels travelogues, histories and volumes of literary criticism. Two of her better-known fictional works are Miss Marjoribanks (1866) and Phoebe Junior (1876). Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, with a new introductory biography.

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".