Origins of the Salvation Army

by Norman H. Murdoch

The Salvation Army is today one of the world's best known - and best regarded - religious and charitable movements. In this deeply researched study, Norman Murdoch offers some surprising new insights into the denomination's origins and its growth into an international organization. In particular, he identifies quick accommodation to failure as a persistent theme in the Army's early history. Murdoch follows the lives and work of the Army's founders, William and Catherine Booth, from their beginnings as Wesleyan evangelists in the 1850s to their inauguration of a Utopian social plan in 1890. As teenagers in England's midlands in the 1840s, the Booths were especially influenced by an American-style evangelism that had crossed the Atlantic. Catherine eventually became an advocate of female ministry (and her preaching outshone her husband's) while William went on to found the Christian Mission in the slums of east London. When the East End mission faltered in the mid-1870s, Booth took his p