Out of the Darkness
was inspired by the true story of a nineteenth-century child coal miner who rose out of the ashes of poverty and tragedy to reach for his dreams.
At age seven, Tom Wright follows in the footsteps of his father and grandfather before him into England’s mid-nineteenth-century Yorkshire coal mines. He struggles with childhood fears, working twelve-hour days, six days a week, in the darkest depths of a dangerous coal mine. That is until disaster strikes, taking the lives of his boyhood friends in one of England’s most tragic accidents in its long coal mining history. Devastated, Tom is determined to change his fate laid out for him by the tyrannical system of industrial slavery.
This is the fast-moving story of a young boy overcoming the iron-fisted rule of the massively wealthy lord of the land, who not only owns and rules much of South Yorkshire, its coal mines, and the villages the mining families live in, but the mortgage on their very lives. With the help of his brilliant, passionate, self-educated mother, Tom rises above his beginnings despite the tyranny of his lordship’s brutal psychopathic enforcer and a society fostering the oppression of the working class.
We follow Tom into adulthood, on his path to a brilliant career, through the tragedy of yet another of the largest industrial disasters in England’s history, in his fight against child labor, and his love affairs with two strong-willed, determined women. And finally, we see his family’s escape to America to pursue their dreams in book two of The Courageous Series. Theirs has become a vast family legacy, including their seven-year-old great, great, great, great grandson Cole, pictured on the front cover of this book.