The Life of Edward Burrough
The definitive biography of the 'Son of Thunder' — a careful, deeply researched account of the brief, blazing life of Edward Burrough, from his conversion under George Fox to his death in Newgate Prison at twenty-nine.
- Complete biography
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read7.4 hours
- Length106,300 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 7.4 hours
This figure is here so you can compare one book against another. Every title on the site is timed from its own word count at the same reading speed — nothing is adjusted book by book — so if this edition says 7.4 hours and another says half that, the second one really is about half the reading. It is a measure of size, in the way a page count is. Your own pace is your own: at the speeds typical adult readers actually manage, this edition runs anywhere from 5.9 hours to 10.1 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 106,300 words |
|---|---|
| Total | 106,300 words |
Counted from the text of the EPUB you receive. Navigation, the title page, the table of contents and the licence page are excluded — they are packaging, not reading.
The reading rate
238 words per minute, for adult silent reading of non-fiction, applied unchanged to every title on the site. We did not pick the number; it is the pooled result of a published meta-analysis. Nothing is adjusted book by book — that consistency is what makes two of these figures worth comparing.
Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
190 studies, 18,573 participants.
The same paper puts most adult readers between 175 and
300 words per minute, and those two speeds give the
5.9 hours and 10.1 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 7.4 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 304–425 pages.
Words per printed page is a typesetting convention, not a measurement — it moves with trim size, type size and leading. The range above assumes 250–350 words a page. Friends Illuminated publishes no print edition of this book; the figure is here only because pages are a more familiar size than words.
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About This Edition
Charles Evans wrote this biography of Edward Burrough with the thoroughness and affection of a scholar who had spent years inside the Quaker documentary record. The Life of Edward Burrough gives a full account of Burrough’s origins in Westmorland, his encounter with George Fox at the age of seventeen, and his rapid emergence as one of the most powerful preachers and writers the movement produced. Evans draws on Burrough’s own writings, the writings of his contemporaries, and the historical records of the period to reconstruct a life that was remarkable in its intensity and brief in its span.
This companion volume is designed to be read alongside the seven volumes of Burrough’s collected works. It provides the context that Burrough himself rarely supplies — the narrative thread that connects individual tracts and letters to the events that prompted them, the relationships with Fox and other early Friends that shaped his thinking, and the story of his imprisonment and death that gives the whole corpus its tragic gravity. For readers new to Burrough, this biography is an ideal starting point.
