Autograph letter signed about the 'Brandy King' from Francis William Newman 1884

[BRANDY KING]; NEWMAN, Francis William (1805-1897). Autograph letter to the Editor of the Alliance News concerning the "Brandy King" and temperance propaganda, Weston-super-Mare, 5 May 1884.
 
Autograph letter signed, one page, approximately 175 x 115 mm, written from Weston-super-Mare, 5 May 1884. Marked "Private" at head. Some moderate foxing and light handling wear, otherwise good.
 
A sharply worded letter from the scholar and radical Francis William Newman, younger brother of Cardinal John Henry Newman, reprimanding the editor of the temperance newspaper the Alliance News for repeating as fact a story from the Pall Mall Gazette concerning the Swedish industrialist and spirits magnate Lars Olsson Smith, popularly known as the "Brandy King".
 
Newman questions a series of claims in the account, including Smith's financial figures, the Stockholm licence and the extraordinary assertion that 90,000 people had been carried free on his steamers. He asks whether the article had correctly described the Gothenburg system and concludes by deploring "the principle which justifies the propagation of false narratives beyond the power of contradiction". The Alliance News was the newspaper of the United Kingdom Alliance, one of Britain's leading temperance organisations.