The Salvation Army

Danny Wells will speak at the TPHS April meeting. Catherine Booth was fortified with the spirit and convictions of early 19th-century rural Methodism in the Midlands. Having met a kindred spirit in William Booth of Nottingham, they were to take their pre-industrial Methodist creed into the religious and political fulcrum of the East End of London in the second half of the century.

The Booths’ response to the poverty, hunger, squalor, and ‘sin’ that they observed all around them was to create the Salvation Army as a ‘Way out of Darkest England’. It became the fastest-growing religious movement of late Victorian Britain and is still a religious and social service agency of international importance to this day.