At the young age of twenty-four Robert Edwards Holloway, a British schoolmaster, became principal of the Wesleyan Academy in St John's. During his thirty-year tenure he dramatically changed the direction of the school that later became the Methodist College. Ruby Gough's biography of Holloway and the Holloway Era is set against the growing social consciousness of the late nineteenth century and the major crises that shook St John's - the diphtheria epidemic of the late 1880s and the Great Fire of 1892 and its aftermath.