William Booth (1829–1912), founder and first General of the Salvation Army, left an indelible mark on the religious and social life of the late nineteenth century. Born in 1829 in Sneinton, near Nottingham, Booth became a Wesleyan Methodist local preacher in his teens, an evangelist with the Wesleyan Reformers in his early twenties, and then a minister of the Methodist New Connexion for eight years before resigning in 1862 to pursue the calling of a freelance revivalist with his wife and fellow preacher Catherine, née Mumford (1829–90). From 1865 the Booths were based in the East End of London, seeking to reach the unchurched urban masses with a forceful gospel message. Their East London Revival Society evolved by stages into the Salvation Army, launched in 1878, with its flags, its uniforms, its brass bands, and its military terminology—and its deliberate eschewing of ecclesiastical language, structures, and sacraments. Over the next three decades Booth saw the Army become an international movement, with a strong presence in North America and Australasia, as well as Continental Europe. After years of strenuous opposition from local authorities and from the ‘Skeleton Army’ of urban ne'er-do-wells, Booth attained the status of a celebrity, visiting Buckingham Palace, conversing with the Emperor of Japan, leading prayers in the United States Senate, and receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford. His methods were discussed in the Contemporary Review in 1882 by Randall Davidson and Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, and his proposals for social reform, set out in his In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), were debated by public intellectuals like H. M. Hyndman and T. H. Huxley. When he died, Booth lay in state for four days before a funeral service at Olympia attended by an estimated 35,000 people and a procession to Abney Park cemetery headed by thirty-six bands. The General's absolute control over the Salvation Army was demonstrated by his bequest of leadership to his eldest son Bramwell; seventeen years later the Army's High Council removed the ailing Bramwell from office, although members of the Booth family remained in senior leadership for many decades thereafter.Gordon Taylor served for twenty-three years with the Salvation Army's International Heritage Centre, and was senior researcher, archivist, and associate director there. His unrivalled knowledge of the Salvation Army's archives and his indefatigable trawling through nineteenth-century newspapers have produced a monumental study of William Booth's long life, falling only just short of 1,000 pages. As a narrative, the biography is hugely informative, highly readable, and enhanced by well-produced photographs of the Booth family and significant places in the story. As indicated by the title of the second volume, Taylor continues the narrative into the twenty-first century, describing anniversary commemorations and biographies by Harold Begbie, St John Ervine, Roy Hattersley, and David Bennett. Taylor even notes the naming of a peak near Alberta, Canada, Mount William Booth in 1966.In terms of descriptive detail and thoroughness, this biography offers all that the reader might desire and more. This reviewer was intrigued to find the Booths' work endorsed by such Wesleyan luminaries as George Osborn, J. H. Rigg, and T. P. Bunting, as well as Hugh Price Hughes and Henry Lunn. Financial support came from Henry Reed, a lay Wesleyan who made a fortune in Tasmania, and from William Shepherd Allen, member of Parliament and scourge of theological liberalism. There are questions still to be explored: for example, why revivalism polarized opinion in most of the Methodist denominations in the mid- nineteenth century, so that the Wesleyans, the New Connexion, and the Primitive Methodists closed their pulpits to freelance revivalists; why the Salvation Army provoked such ferocious opposition, not only in the East End of London, but also in provincial towns like Basingstoke and Northampton; and to what extent the Army succeeded in its aim of reaching the ‘submerged tenth’ of the urban population. Likewise, the Booths' debt to Methodism, whether to John Wesley or to later iterations of Wesleyan theology and practice, both British and North American, continues to invite investigation. These issues are not discussed in any detail here, but Gordon Taylor has provided a rich and comprehensively annotated biographical resource that will place scholars of Victorian religion in his debt for many years to come.
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Open Access
May 17, 2023
Ziyu Dong 
