The Salvation Army: Caring for the Soul through the Body

The Salvation Army provided Booth with a unique key to the needs, realities and culture of the working classes. The instruments of attracting attention and drawing the working classes near as well as the straightforward, easy-to-grasp religious doctrines used by the Army allowed Booth unrivalled access to the inhabitants of the poor urban neighbourhoods and the industrial mining districts.

Salvationist theology and religious practice held an emotional appeal unparalleled by established denominations. By contrast to Stewart Headlam, Booth failed to construct grand theological systems, but emphasised individual doctrines which served him and his followers as signposts towards a sanctified life. From his Wesleyan background, Booth retained a faith in the universal love of God and the possibility of salvation for all. From evangelicalism, he borrowed the emphasis on the individual soul. He was also drawn to the highly emotive approaches of holiness theology and revivalism which had been re-imported into England in the first half of the nineteenth century by American evangelists²⁹⁸.

The historian of Salvationism Roy Hattersley has argued that holiness theology provided an ideal vehicle for converting semi-educated working men and women. It did away with long periods of study, theological arguments and private contemplation²⁹⁹. For clerics of the above persuasion, sanctification was a gift from God bestowed instantaneously upon the truly repentant sinner. It only required the individual’s willingness to lay “body, soul and spirit with all their redeemable powers upon Thine altar to be forever Thine”³⁰⁰. In a second step, the newly saved could then achieve personal holiness or “entire sanctification” by acquiring the power to resist all future temptation.

Ultimately, holiness theologians preached, conversion and sanctification would free men and women from sinful and ruinous bodily cravings such as drink, tobacco, physical aggressiveness and licentiousness and would teach them the virtue of cleanliness, which in many Victorian eyes was the outer manifestation of godliness.

Impromptu public preaching and open air services brought the revivalist message to the streets.

Humour was deemed essential during services, heckling and spontaneous comments from the

298 In his book Blood and fire: the story of William and Catherine Booth and their Salvation Army, the historian Roy Hattersley names the American revival preachers James Caughey (1810-91), Charles Finney (1792-1875) and Phoebe Palmer (1807-74) as formative influences on William Booth's style of preaching. See Hattersley, Roy, Blood and fire: the story of William and Catherine Booth and their Salvation Army, 1999, p.104ff

299 Hattersley, Roy, Blood and fire: the story of William and Catherine Booth and their Salvation Army, 1999, p.104ff

300 Phoebe Palmer as quoted in Hattersley, Roy, Blood and fire: the story of William and Catherine Booth and their Salvation Army, 1999, p. 105

audience were encouraged. During their prayer meetings, preachers went from pew to pew praying with individuals, asking them to come forward to relate their personal experiences. Booth used revivalist practices in his work at Whitechapel turning Salvationism into a true “neighbourhood religion”³⁰¹ designed to convert entire streets and districts.

But it was not only the religious message he preached which moved Booth nearer to the working classes than were most other religious agencies in Victorian England. Unlike many other urban mission stations and travelling preachers, Booth and the Salvation Army did not in their evangelising work try to force middle-class values and understandings of respectability and propriety onto the masses. Conversions among working men and women, Salvationists believed, were best effected by ”people of their own class, who would go after them in their own resorts, who would speak to them in a language they understood, and reach them by means suited to their own tastes”³⁰². Booth summed up the Army's unusual proximity to the poor: “We are among the people, of the people, and are therefore able to judge the people.”³⁰³

Booth and his associates plundered working-class culture in pursuit of catchy and inviting vehicles for their religious message. They rented music halls, theatres and pubs for their services such as the Eastern Alhambra at the Army's Limehouse station³⁰⁴. In their posters and publications, they borrowed the sensationalist style and idiom of penny gaffs and circuses. Brass bands accompanied services and processions. Booth and his colleagues snatched popular music hall tunes and equipped them with religious words to be sung at the Army’s numerous services and meetings. The Salvation Army was also among the very first religious communities to make use of the new medium of film.

By 1906, a hurriedly established Salvationist cinematograph department had produced seventy-four promotional films and had purchased three hundred and twenty one commercial ones covering topics as diverse as the Army’s work, an outing to the London Zoo, the coronation of Edward II. or the making of a motor car³⁰⁵. Their use of film proved particularly effective in drawing crowds of adolescents to Salvationist services.

Booth gained his unique insights into the culture and living conditions of the British working classes through his practice of using converts in his evangelising work³⁰⁶. The Army sent off the recently saved into their old environments to publicly relate their experiences. The practice enabled Booth and his Christian Mission to make inroads into the urban working-class neighbourhoods to

301 Walker, Pamela J., Pulling the devil's kingdom down: the Salvation Army in Victorian Britain, 2001, p.56

302 McLaughlin, Joseph, Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot, 2000, p.91

303 Booth, William, Emigration and the Salvation Army, 1906, p.18

304 Murdoch, Norman H., Origins of the Salvation Army, 1995, p.55

305 Rapp, Dean, The British Salvation Army, The Early Film Industry and Urban Working Class Adolescents, 1897-1918, 1996, p.161

306 Murdoch, Norman H., Origins of the Salvation Army, 1995, p.148ff.

an extent which none of the other religious establishments could achieve. Salvationists penetrated the closely knit network of relations with family members, neighbours and colleagues which formed a working man’s or woman’s environment. In this respect, women evangelists proved a particular asset to the Army. Mothers and housewives welcomed them into their living quarters more easily than men and were more open with them about a family’s particular problems. The knowledge of working class culture which Booth and the Salvationists gathered in the course of their work formed the nucleus and background to the social scheme advanced in In Darkest England and the Way Out.

Social endeavours were not new to William Booth when he wrote In Darkest England in 1890.

Already the Christian Mission, predecessor of the Salvation Army, had run soup kitchens, mothers’

meetings and friendly societies on a neighbourhood scale, and so did the Army. One of the Army’s first formalised social endeavour, the Cellar, Gutter and Garret Brigade³⁰⁷, was a semi-professional team of women Salvationists who visited the poor and helped with cleaning work and nursing wherever fellow-missionaries detected need. Army-run food and shelter depots, homes for fallen girls, drunkards and ex-prisoners opened in response to the misery and privation witnessed by Salvationist evangelists.

Initially, William Booth looked upon such initiatives with some contempt as useful tools for drawing in the masses; his aim was – and remained - the conversion of the working classes and the saving of souls. By 1890, however, the reports of his evangelists on their experiences in the poorest districts of the towns had brought Booth to consider the very existence of slum neighbourhoods to be a “satire upon our Christianity”³⁰⁸ and a “great discredit to our boasted civilisation”³⁰⁹. He had come to realise that material conditions and physical suffering may stand in the way of spiritual salvation. “[It] is primarily and mainly for the sake of saving the soul that I seek the salvation of the body”³¹⁰, he asserted in the first part of In Darkest England. What, after all, he asked, was the use of preaching the gospel to one who could not think of anything other than where to find food for the day’s meal and shelter for the night: he or she could not hear you anymore than a person whose head was under water³¹¹. “I am quite satisfied”, Booth wrote, “that those multitudes will not be saved in their present circumstances.”³¹²

Booth began to consider it a “Christian duty” to work against the misery and squalor of so large a section of the English population and to help alleviate some of the suffering. He condemned the apparatus of temples and meeting houses set up by the established denominations “to save men

307 Walker, Pamela J., Pulling the devil's kingdom down: the Salvation Army in Victorian Britain, 2001, p.114

308 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.16

309 Booth, William, Emigration and the Salvation Army, 1906, p.4

310 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.45

311 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.45

312 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.257

from perdition in a world which is to come while never a helping hand is stretched out to save them from the inferno of their present life”³¹³. In response to the abject poverty among much of its clientèle, in 1890, the Salvation Army opened its Social Reform Wing, aiming henceforth at

“Salvation for Both Worlds”³¹⁴.

Yet, it is important to bear in mind that relief work should always take second place to the saving of souls in Booth's mind. He remained uncertain about the time and energy put into social work and at times wondered whether they would not be better spent on evangelising. As he wrote to his son Bramwell in 1903: “As to whether we get as much real benefit out of the time and labour and ability bestowed upon feeding the poor as we should do if spent in purely spiritual work is a very difficult question to answer.”³¹⁵ Ultimately it was his belief in his divine calling and in God's assistance from which he drew his courage to tackle the immense problem of poverty and physical destitution in Britain: “[In] the faith that He has made in His image all the children of men we face even this hideous wreckage of humanity with a cheerful confidence that if we are but faithful to our own high calling He will not fail to open up a way of deliverance.”³¹⁶

There has been some debate about the authorship of In Darkest England and the Way Out. The journalist and social critic W. T. Stead claimed to have made a significant contribution; shortly after the book’s publication he pronounced that one could “recognise my fine Roman hand in most chapters”. The end of the first chapter was indeed adopted almost word for word from an article by Stead in the Pall Mall Gazette from October 1883. In addition, recent historical research has established the co-authorship of Frank Smith, a prominent Salvationist and member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Smith became first head of the Army’s Social Reform Wing;

Norman Murdoch, historian of Salvationism, credits him with the original ideas for the colony scheme described in In Darkest England.³¹⁷ Considering Booth’s autocratic position within his organisation and given the fact that the text was published under his name, one can nonetheless assume that the views expressed in the book and the remedies suggested represent Booth’s own opinion on the subject of poverty and unemployment. In fact, Stead gave Booth full credit as the master mind behind the scheme: “The sole responsibility and the dominating mind was his and his alone.”³¹⁸ I shall thus continue to cite Booth as the author of the piece.

313 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.16

314 Booth, „Salvation for Both Worlds“, in All the World, Vol.V, No. 1, January 1889, as quoted in Woodall, Ann M., What price the poor?, 2005, p.164

315 As quoted in Woodall, Ann M., What price the poor?, 2005, p.165

316 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.35

317 Smith eventually left the Army to dedicate himself to political work and ILP socialism. See Murdoch, Norman H., Origins of the Salvation Army; 1995

318 Murdoch, Norman H., Origins of the Salvation Army, 1995, p.161