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 Roberts

2000-07-01 A surprisingly Interesting Book for a non Salvationist

I was prompted to read this book due to the fact that I have several unconnected friends who are members of the Salvation Army. I see the total committment and the sparkle in their eye when they talk of Jesus Christ and the work that the Army does in His name, not only in evangelising but in the broader social aspect of their work. I suppose hitherto it had been easy to dismiss the Salvation Army as interfering do gooders.

Roy Hattersley has written an excellent book which reads very well and unlike other books on, perhaps, this kind of subject sustains an interest throughout. I personally had no conception of the amount of difficulties that the Salvation Army faced in its work in the 19th century and it is testimony to the early members that they continue today, albeit in the more difficult circumstances of materialism and denial Of God.

This book has an appeal beyond members of the Army who will be sure to read it. The only thing I would say and it must be difficult , depending on the sources used, and that is I feel that I haven't got to know William Booth himself, apart from the obvious facts that he was totally dedicated to God's work and had the support of a supremely brave wife and colleagues in fulfilling the mission that they believed was given to them. Perhaps I would have liked to see a more personal William, but this may be my failing in trying to read quickly as the book is most absorbing.

However, I am surprised, or maybe I shouldn't be , that this appears to be one of the first reviews of this book. Maybe members of the Army are to modest to review it. They shouldn't be. This is a timely biography/history that will bring the trials and tribulations of William Booth a little closer to a modern audience who hitherto have failed to grasp the full significance of William and Catherine Booth's work.