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William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890) “aroused more public interest than any other book since Henry George’s Progress and Poverty,” according to social historian Victor Bailey. Booth set out to end unemployment in Britain by moving the unemployed from city workshops to farm colonies, and then to overseas colonies. His scheme provides the foundation for Salvation Army social services today.

Before the mid 1880s, Booth had little interest in social reform. He was an evangelist who saw soul-salvation as the only hope for society’s redemption. Social services only diverted from revivalist endeavors. For example, Booth had quarreled with social programs proposed by Andrew Mearns’s Bitter Cry of Outcast London. Booth argued that only soul-salvation will “clothe the naked” and “change their miserable hearts and make them happy.”

Early Salvationists had, of course, begun urban home mission practices of temporary, hand-out charity. But the Darkest England scheme attempted to change the very nature of the urban environment. Why did Booth change his mind?

First, certain Salvationists interested in social reform pushed him in new directions. Social reform was in the air when Salvationist slum sisters living in London established refuges for unfortunate women in Soho and Picadilly areas. When the Salvationists discovered that slum dwellers, mostly Irish and southern and eastern European immigrants, opposed their Wesleyan/holiness salvation message as foreign to their culture, they opened homes for “fallen women” and orphaned “waifs and strays,” hunted down drunkards, and met released prisoners in “Red Mariahs” at prison gates. The example of these women led the Booths to join the 1885 “Maiden Tribute” crusade of W. T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. Their efforts brought to world attention the need for legislation to save girls under sixteen from white slavery in London and Paris brothels.

In short, “social” Salvationists began to change the mind of William Booth. These Salvationists have not gained credit for their role because Booth’s authoritarian rule required that he be the originator of Army programs. But had these Salvationists gained credit for their ideas, the Army might have split into separate spiritual and social organizations. Divisions between Salvationist revivalists and those involved in social reform activities were only tenuously patched over by Booth’s charisma.

(Indeed, some “social” Salvationists left “the work.” Frank Smith, who brought social reform ideas to William Booth, later embraced socialist politics as a better way to bring about society’s reform. He started a Labour Army and published a Worker’s Cry. Suzie Swift, who assisted Booth in writing Darkest England, left the Army to join a Catholic order in the United States in 1896.)

A second element that led Booth to change his mind about social reform was The Salvation Army’s struggle to win the “heathen masses” in urban slums. In January 1888 a British Weekly survey indicated that London corps (local Salvation Army mission halls) attracted only .7 percent of London’s population to religious services. By comparison, an 1881 survey had shown that the Army had attracted 11.1 percent in provincial Scarborough, 7.4 percent in Hull, 6.8 percent in Barnsley, and 5.3 percent in Bristol. While the Army grew in working-class neighborhoods, it declined in the poorest slums.

The decline was particularly noticeable in London, Booth’s headquarters. In Whitechapel and Bethnal Green districts of the East End, surveyors could scarcely find a Salvationist. They found the Army’s main hall at Clapton situated “among artisans and clerks,” a class other Nonconformist groups were reaching. On April 13, 1889, District Officer Adjutant Morgan disclosed that total East End corps’ membership was 1,000 soldiers, the same as it had been fifteen years earlier at only four mission halls. The obvious conclusion was that the Army was not converting the “heathen masses” to the gospel. Frustration over failure with populations they felt called by God to save led to new practices.

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