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Few would deny William Booth the title “The Prophet of the Poor.” He is best known today as founder and first general of The Salvation Army, an organization that exists to bring a better life to the poor through both social and spiritual salvation.

Yet Booth did not come to this high appellation by a direct route; he was not to the manor born. Rather he was born in relative poverty, in Sneinton, a Nottingham, England suburb, on April 10, 1829. One biographer described William’s father, Samuel, as “an illiterate speculative builder.” His mother, Mary Moss Booth, was Samuel’s second wife. The Booths were at best laboring class, with little education. His father, “a Grab, a Get,” by William’s definition, died when William was just 14. By that time William was helping to earn the family income by working as a pawnbroker’s apprentice. Mrs. Booth ran a small shop in a poor Nottingham district where she sold household wares.

After his father’s death, a Wesleyan couple invited William to attend chapel. William’s family had not been religious, although they had had William baptized at the Sneinton parish church (Anglican) two days after his birth. William’s conversion at age 15 cannot be fixed in time or place. Various biographers describe it as coming in the streets of Nottingham, in the Broad Street Wesleyan Chapel where evangelist Isaac Marsden was leading a revival, or in a small prayer meeting. William did recall a long siege of conviction after he had made a profit in a transaction with a friend. He remembered the relief he felt when his guilt was removed.

Soon after his conversion William had another life-changing experience: hearing American revivalist James Caughey, who led “a remarkable religious awakening” at Nottingham’s Wesleyan Chapel. The rush of souls to hear the gospel led Booth to see that “soul-saving results may be calculated upon when proper means are used for their accomplishment.” Booth went on to make a lifelong commitment to the scientific revivalism methods of Charles G. Finney.

With Caughey’s example fresh in mind, Booth and a group of friends set out to evangelize the poor of Meadow Platts. They held nightly open-air addresses, after which they invited people to meetings in cottages. Their use of lively songs, short exhortations calling for a decision for Christ, visitation of the sick and of converts (whose names and addresses they recorded) all anticipated methods Booth would write into Salvation Army Orders and Regulations thirty years later.

During his adolescent lay evangelism among Nottingham’s poor, Booth grew frustrated by the local clergy’s faint devotion to revivalism. Then his pastor proposed that William himself prepare for ordained ministry. William accepted official recognition by Wesleyanism.

However, Booth fell ill, and his chapel’s lack of concern for his welfare left him feeling scorned. In 1850, through a misunderstanding, Wesleyan Methodists labeled him a “reformer” and took away his class ticket (membership). Booth then became pastor to Reform Methodists in Spaulding, though their disorganized ways repelled him.

In this period of despondency, William met Catherine Mumford. Beginning with their second meeting on Good Friday, April 9, 1852, William and Catherine entered one of the most remarkable man-woman relationships in religious history. They married in a South London Congregational chapel on June 16, 1855.

When Catherine began preaching five years later, they became an evangelistic partnership of true equality. In the 1870s they began requiring all couples involved in the Christian Mission—an East London mission, their first enterprise—to recognize the dual nature of husband-wife ministry. Their commitment to female ministry ultimately caused the Salvation Army to discontinue, in 1883, its practice of the sacraments; laypersons refused to accept them as practiced by women officers.

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