Blood and Fire: William and Catherine Booth and the Salvation Army Book

William Booth's extraordinary life saw him starting out as a pawnbroker's clerk and dying having created one of the most successful and characteristic religious movements of the age. His wife Catherine was, in her way, even more remarkable: chronically ill--"throughout her life she was struck down with disease after disease that would have killed a less hardy and indomitable woman"--she nonetheless raised eight children in 10 years and campaigned powerfully for social amelioration. It was in large part because of her campaign against child prostitution that the age of consent was raised from 13 to 16. Roy Hattersley doesn't shrink from criticising Booth, who was "both arrogant and autocratic in his relations with everyone except his wife" but at the same time he is patently enamoured of the sheer energy Booth brought to his sense of mission. It doesn't surprise us that a socialist such as Hattersley is attracted to this dedication: "In an age when even radicals believed that self-help solved all problems", he says, Booth knew that some people were oppressed "by the circumstances in which they were born and lived", a doctrine that "owed more to Marx than to Methodism". But other aspects of Booth's Army seem more New Labour--the fact that he was, in Hattersley's words, "the greatest publicist of his age" or his affable hob-nobbing with the rich and famous ("he was no class warrior, he never used his sermons to denounce the callous rich"). Hattersley's perspective is more focused on these issues of class and his account of the campaigns for social amelioration is absorbing. The underlying religious questions are less thoroughly interrogated, though; it is difficult, for example, to determine Hattersley's attitudes to what amounts to the religious fundamentalism of the Salvation Army's core beliefs. Contemporaries worried that Booth's methods were too "music hall", "intellectually absurd", "theologically indefensible" and--perhaps worst of all in respectable, middle-class Victorian England--"deeply embarrassing." Like a television Evangelist today, Booth has his problematic side. But Hattersley carries the whole thing off with the expertise we have come to expect of him. --Adam RobertsRead More