The Religious Rebellion of a Clergyman’s Daughter

Abstract

In the 1880s, a struggle between a teenage girl and her father attracted public attention. Maud Charlesworth, a daughter of an Anglican clergyman, became involved in the Salvation Army against her father’s wish, and eventually married a son of ‘General’ William Booth. It was one of those subtle, day‐to‐day resistances which occur within a family, at the same time being a battle between the two ‘religious family enterprises’. The contest was over ideas on gender, class, age, and the way to salvation, all of which the Rev. Charlesworth, as a clergyman as well as a father, had imparted to Maud. In this sense, a Victorian parsonage might be considered an excellent example of the gender/power structures that shaped middle‐class relationships. This article analyses the various discourses that Maud, her father, her mother, her sisters, the Salvation Army, and the Church of England utilised, in order to explore the complexity of family dynamics and the interface between gender, class and religion in the negotiation of family roles and identities. From the forms of rhetoric that she used, it will also reconsider the issue of ‘separate spheres’.