THE TIMES INTO WHICH
OUR HERO WAS BORN

FROM a study of the Nottingham Date Book it would seem that the unchronicled occurrence of William Booth’s birth in 1829 was preceded and accompanied by events almost as horrible and alarming as any that ever intimidated the decent inhabitants of a civilized English town.

Nature at that time showed her most ferocious face to the midland capital; and man, who is said to begin where nature ends, seems to have had no difficulty in exceeding these excesses of environment.

It was a period of tremendous storms and of horrible brutality: of thunder, lightning, and devastating rains: of hideous crimes and outrageous destitution. Nine months before the birth of William Booth the town was swept and flooded by the most angry tempest within living memory; three days after his birth immense masses of rock gave way both in the centre of the city and in the then neighbouring hamlet of Sneinton, plunging down in many hundreds of tons upon the houses beneath.

A more or less formal revival in the religious life of the city which marked the year of the great rivivalist’s birth may have been due in no small part to these alarming occurrences. Many churches and chapels in 1829 were restored, repaired, or reopened for public worship, the local dignitaries taking a ceremonial part in some of the celebrations which marked these efforts either to appease the heavens or to Christianize the people.

Two years before, the town had been deeply shocked by the discovery of a gang of resurrection men in its midst who went about at night “despoiling the sanctuaries of the dead.” So sharply did this disclosure agitate and excite the minds of Nottingham people that, when the murders committed by Burke and Hare in Edinburgh became known in 1829, the whole town was thrown into a condition of panic which necessitated action by the magistrates.

Burke and Hare were “connected with the murder by suffocation of thirty or forty persons, for the sake of the money arising from the sale of their bodies for the purposes of dissection”; and so alarmed were the inhabitants of Nottingham by these dreadful disclosures that “timid people dared not to venture out after dark, and all sorts of alarming reports were in circulation.”

Little was talked of, we are told, “but rumours of pitch-plasters being placed on people’s mouths, and of others being missing and burked” The magistrates of Nottingham were obliged, so general was the panic, to issue a notice declaring that there was no foundation for the alarm.

Murders, highway robberies, mysterious stabbings of women in the streets at night, crimes of every kind, public executions and a public whipping witnessed by enormous crowds of people, escapes from the county gaol in Narrow Marsh, riots and insurrections of a most demoniacal character, devastating fires, destructive floods, and thunderstorms fatal to man and beast -- these dire and dreadful things continued to agitate the life of Nottingham throughout the boyhood of William Booth.

We may allow ourselves the conjecture that the child was influenced in no small measure by the continual excitement provoked by these events, particularly when we remember the isolation of provincial cities at that time and the general narrowness of the outlook upon life.

He would have heard on every side of him breathless tales of murder and garottings, descriptions of surging drunken crowds watching the hanging of criminals; he would have seen the maddened rioters when they tore down the iron railings in front of his father’s house to use them as weapons against the soldiers and special constables; he did see, and on many occasions, bodies of men and women charging through the streets to sack bakers’ shops, returning with their arms full of loaves; he was the witness again and again of such misery and destitution, such haggard want and infuriating deprivation, as filled the streets with angry mobs shouting for food, compelled tile authorities to read the Riot Act, and drove thousands of people to seek the relief of the rates.

Children in the poor streets of great cities hear nothing of political events; they are uninfluenced by the philosophy of the period. But their minds, in that region which psychologists name the unconscious, are influenced, and powerfully influenced, by all the sights and all the sounds of their environment. They take a passive part in the life of their own immediate world, but their minds are unconsciously active, and their characters are permanently affected by the most transitory excitement of their time.

It is doubtful whether William Booth heard any discussions touching Catholic Emancipation, the Reform Bill, Newman’s work at Oxford, Negro Emancipation, and the stubborn conservatism of that “unmanageable naval officer,” his sovereign lord, King William the Fourth.

But it is quite certain that he heard a number of stories of the dreadful murder that was followed by the last execution on Gallows Hill;

• of the funeral by night, without religious ceremony, of a young butcher who had committed suicide in so deliberate a fashion that the jury was forced to bring in a verdict of felo de Se:
• of the great riot which led among other things to the gutting of Nottingham Castle by incendiaries; of the public execution of some of the rioters;
• of the frightful desolation wrought in the town by Asiatic cholera: of the fight between two young men on Mapperley Plains for the love of a girl who had promised to marry the winner, one of the men being killed in the contest;
• of more than one execution of men for atrocious offences committed against young women;
• of people transported for life on trivial charges; of the last public flogging to take place in Nottingham;
• of many a disastrous fire that swept through the city; and of the crashing down of rock in Sneinton Hermitage, close to his own home, with a noise that seemed like the thunders of Judgment Day.

Gossip of this kind must have been general in the town, particularly among children, and we know that it made a dark impression on the mind of William Booth.

“When but a mere child,” he says in his preface to In Darkest England, published in 1890, “the degradation and helpless misery of the poor stockingers of my native town, wandering gaunt and hunger-stricken through the streets, droning out their melancholy ditties, crowding the union or toiling like galley slaves on relief works for a bare subsistence, kindled in my heart yearnings to help the poor which have continued to this day, and which have had a powerful influence on my whole life.”

He spoke on one occasion of his troubled childhood, saying with some bitterness, which the reader will readily understand, “From the earliest days I was thrown into close association with poverty in its lowest depths.” His mind, before it was penetrated by religious illumination, must have been depressed by the gossip of Nottingham back-streets and by the sights of misery and want which confronted him at every turn.

In 1837, the year which witnessed Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne, there was distress in Nottingham of a most grievous and heartbreaking description. William Booth, though only eight years of age, was powerfully impressed by the horrors of that year.

A public meeting was held in the Exchange at which five thousand pounds was subscribed for “the relief of the widely-spread distress amongst the operative classes, arising from an utter prostration of the manufacturing interest.” The number of persons thrown for subsistence upon the poor rates was greater than ever before known. “The enumeration was as follows :

— Within the walls of the house, 971. Two hundred men on the roads, with families of four on an average, 1,000. Fed twice a day in a temporary erection on Back Commons, 258. Children fed and educated, 200. Aged, infirm, sick, etc., receiving outdoor relief, 1,200. Total relieved from the rates weekly, 3,629; or about one in fourteen of the entire population of the union.”

An entry in the Nottingham Date Book shows that the local wages, although shamefully inadequate, were higher than those of the stockingers (4s. 6d. a week) mentioned in the Life of Thomas Cooper.

The year 1838 was famous for a severe winter and the freezing of the river Trent. The first stone of the new church at Sneinton, where William Booth had been baptized, was laid by Lord Manvers. Grace Darling’s heroic exertions to save the lives of people on board the wrecked Forfarsbire thrilled the whole country, and in Nottingham, because a Mr. Churchill of the town was among those who had perished, made a deep impression; a monument was set up in the General Cemetery.

In 1839 the new church at Sneinton was opened by the Bishop of Lincoln, and we may take it as fully certain that William Booth was present at this elaborate ceremonial. Worse distress than ever occurred among the operatives, lasting from that autumn to the spring of 1840. Three thousand four hundred and eighty-one people received relief. A riot was anticipated, and the troops in the town were kept under arms.

In 1842 there was an attempt “to promote a general strike, or cessation from labour, until the document known as the People’s Charter became the law of the land.” I believe this is the first mention of a general strike, and it seems as if Nottingham gave birth to the idea. Now and again William Booth hung on the outskirts of the large crowds that gathered to hear the Chartist orators.

In 1844 the whole town was staggered by a calamity which could not fail to leave an impression on the mind of young Booth. A labourer named William Saville, aged 29, who had been married at Sneinton Church, murdered his wife and three children. He was executed on August 8, and an immense crowd gathered to witness the spectacle.

“Eight was the hour of execution, but every available space was occupied long before it arrived. Occasionally, there came a cry from the surging mass that some one was fainting or being crushed to death, and if the sufferer were fortunate enough not to be entirely bereft of strength. he or she was lifted up, and permitted to walk to the extremity of the crowd on tile shoulders of the people. Saville was led forth, and at three minutes past eight, the drop descended. Almost immediately after the mighty crowd broke, as it were, in the middle. The anxiety, deep and general, to witness the spectacle, was succeeded by an equally general and still deeper desire to get away from the overpowering and suffocating pressure.

The result was positively awful. The greater portion of the house doors along the Pavement were closed, and those who were crushed against the walls by the terrific, resistless tide had no means of escape. Twelve persons were killed, and more than a hundred received serious injuries; and of the latter, the deaths of five, after lingering illnesses, were clearly traceable to the same catastrophe.”

William Booth had already started his life as a preacher when in 1847 the curate of his old church at Sneinton committed suicide in the grounds of Nottingham Castle, shooting himself on the refusal of a vicar in the town to accept him as the lover of his daughter, a girl of seventeen years of age.

These few events, however briefly related, will afford some idea to the reader, not only of certain local influences surrounding the childhood of William Booth, but of the spirit of the age in which he was born. How different was that period from our own may perhaps be better seen in one single occurrence, half grotesque and half scandalous, which is recorded in the Nottingham Date Book as late as 1852:

April 28.— About twelve o’clock, a female about 38 years of age, accompanied by her husband and two of his companions stood in the Market Place, near the sheep pens. The female was the wife of Edward Stevenson, rag merchant, Millstone Lane, and he had come to the determination, with her consent, to dispose of her by auction. A new rope, value sixpence, was round her neck. Stevenson, with his wife unabashed by his side, held the rope, and exclaimed, Here is my wife for sale: I shall put her up for two shillings and sixpence.”

A man named John Burrows, apparently a navvy, proffered a shilling for the lot, and after some haggling she was knocked off at that price, and they all went to The Spread Eagle to sign articles of agreement, the lady being the only party able to sign her name.

One cannot now imagine such an occurrence as this in any civilized town, and the remembrance of it, kept in mind during that part of our narrative which deals with the childhood and youth of William Booth, will enable the reader to enter more closely into the thoughts and feelings of the young evangelist. He was not only born in Nottingham at the beginning of the nineteenth century, he was shaped by the Nottingham of that period.

And if he breathed the excited spirit of reform which filled the air of the town at that time, as certainly did he take into his soul the dark and squalid colour of his environment. He not only saw suffering, he experienced it. He not only witnessed the destructive force of sin, he was aware in himself of its power.

From his earliest years he was thrown into close association with poverty in its lowest depths; and on the mountains he remembered the pit from which he was digged. In few instances of great and remarkable men is it more possible to trace throughout the years of their lives, up to the very last, so clear and deep a mark of the earliest influences upon their character.

That there was some effort to reach the people of Nottingham with a more pressing sense of the claims of religion than was offered at that time by the established churches and chapels, may be gathered from the fact that an evangelist from Yorkshire visited the town, and preached the gospel of conversion with a fair measure of success. No mention is made of this John Smith in the Nottingham Date Book, but it is quite clear from other sources that his visit was memorable in the religious history of the town.

Nottingham was dear to the heart of Wesley, and that great man has left behind him an affectionate tribute to the honesty and kindness of its generous people. He visited the town on several occasions. His preaching brought about numerous conversions and led to the establishment of a strong and enduring Methodism.

But the zeal of the founder, the fire and passion which inspired his teaching as an evangelist, was cooling, and towards the middle of the nineteenth century, Methodism in Nottingham, as well as elsewhere throughout England, was becoming a somewhat formal school of religion. It was beginning to forget the poor.

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The visit of John Smith wrought a change, and it is fair to regard him as a precursor of David Greenbury, James Caughey, and William Booth: although he is not to be reckoned one of the immortals among revivalists. He had neither the scholarly sweetness of Wesley, nor the deep humanity of William Booth; he believed in conversion, but people had to come to his chapel to experience it; he desired the salvation of sinners, but he did not seek them where they were to be found; whether he felt for the wrongs of the people we do not know, but he is certainly not conspicuous as a champion of their rights.

John Smith, we are told, “was exceedingly wild and wicked as a youth, but, getting converted in a revival at his native village in 1812, he became a local preacher.” One who knew him tells me that he had the habit of praying at public meetings with his eyes tight squeezed, his arms outspread, his hands wide open, and with his fingers working rapidly -- a fashion which was imitated by others. One of his phrases was, “God will stand to His engagements; His work must go on.” Typical of his method is a “remarkable incident” which occurred at a love feast over which Mr. Smith presided in the Halifax Place Chapel:

A local preacher rose and said that “he had once enjoyed the blessing of entire sanctification, but through unwatchfulness had in this respect suffered loss.” With much feeling he added that he was now earnestly longing and waiting for the restoration of this great privilege. Mr. Smith instantly started from his seat in the pulpit, and cried, “The all-cleansing power is on you now!” For a moment he hesitated, it was but a moment, and he then exclaimed, while the whole of his body quivered with emotion, “It is; I feel it in my heart!”

The congregation then united in thanksgiving and prayer; in a short time the windows of heaven were opened, and there was a rush of holy influence, such as by the majority of that vast assembly was never before experienced. It seemed like a stream of lightning passing through every spirit. At one time, twenty persons obtained the blessing of perfect love, and rose up rapidly one after another, in an ecstasy of praise, to declare that God had then cleansed their heart from all sin.

David Greenbury, who exercised no small influence on William Booth, also came to Nottingham from Yorkshire. He seems to have been a different type from John Smith in many respects. He is described as looking like a country squire — a tall, bearded man, not unlike the General Booth of later life. One of his favourite hymns, it is remembered, contained the lines:

Though in the flesh I feel the thorn,
I bless the day that I was born.

He rejoiced in life, and found a deep pleasure in his work. It is said that he was the first man to encourage William Booth to continue his public speaking. One of his converts became the talk of Nottingham, and the story must have given an impulse to the spirit of young Booth — perhaps the first impulse of that kind.

A notorious rascal called “Besom Jack,” whose wife and children starved while he went from tavern to tavern — a lady is still living in Nottingham who remembers how his wife would come to her mother’s back door begging for old tea-leaves — was converted at one of David Greenbury’s meetings and became a sensible, good, honest man, a glad and cheerful Christian, who testified wherever he went to the blessings and the miracle of conversion.

But the greatest influence upon William Booth was exercised, beyond all question, by the American evangelist James Caughey, a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church. This man attracted enormous crowds to Wesley Chapel, and brought about an undoubted revival of religion in the town. He was a tall, thin, smooth-shaven, cadaverous person with dark hair.

One who often saw him and well remembers him tells me that he wore a voluminous black cloak folded about him in a Byronic manner; his voice was subdued, he gave no sign of an excitable disposition, his preaching warmed slowly into heat and passion which communicated themselves with magnetic instantaneousness to his audiences.

It will give the reader a faithful idea of this preacher and his method, and also a general idea of the prevalent religious feeling, if I quote at this point a rather striking description of one of his religious meetings which I was fortunate enough to discover in an ancient Nottingham newspaper. The reporter, it would seem, was unlucky in being born before the advent of the sensational press:

The preaching of Mr. Caughey creates a very great sensation in the town; the chapel is crowded even in the aisles during every service, and at its conclusion numbers of penitents make their way to the communion-rails, near the pulpit, to seek, under the terrors of guilty consciences, benefit there.

It was announced on Wednesday evening, that two hundred persons had given in their names as having received conversion under Mr. Caughey’s ministry since he came to Nottingham, and we believe his visit will not soon be forgotten. There is nothing in the manner in which the reverend gentleman commences the service to lead the reader to expect what is to follow.

He gives out the hymn in a calm, easy, unappreciating style, and in a tone so conversational, that persons sitting in a distant part of the chapel find it impossible to gather the purport of his words. It is more with the air and tone of a man reading a paragraph from a newspaper to a select party than that of a preacher proclaiming an important message to a large congregation.

In his prayer, too, very few indications are given of the astonishing power he possesses over the mind; though it is not without its peculiarities. He lifts his hands towards heaven, and keeps them in that posture during the whole of his supplication, like Moses, when Israel fought in Rephidim; and once or twice, perhaps, at some point of deeper feeling clasps his palms together, and then re-elevates them into the same poetic attitude.

But, generally speaking, his prayers have rather the tone of calm disquisition than address to the Deity; and nothing at all in them expressive of power, except when a gush of deep affectionate feeling makes its way through the mild tranquillity, or at rarer intervals flashes out for an instant the lightning which has been so calmly folded in its mantle of quiet cloud.

His reading of Scripture betrays even less of power than his prayer; it is not performed without a certain subdued feeling; but there is a peculiar off-hand style with it, and a certain tone of dramatic appreciation, without any great apparent solemnity or reverence in the delivery. It is not till he prepares to name his text, that any extraordinary power is manifested; he generally prefaces it with some observation on what he has felt (during the day, or since he entered the pulpit; or with an appeal to a certain character whom he prophesies to be in the congregation.

Then, indeed, it becomes plain, however the prejudiced visitor may have doubted it before, that the man is in earnest — terribly in earnest; and that every word he says he both feels and believes.

On Tuesday night, when the preliminary parts of the service had been gone through, and the Bible lay open before him, instead of taking his text, as it was natural to expect he would, he startled the congregation by a searching appeal to some backslider, whom he individualized as present among them; and in his manner of doing this showed great knowledge of human nature, and an intimate acquaintance with the subtleties of the mind.

Such a character, if present in the place, unless his heart were triple brass, must have been struck as with a thunderbolt. Of the heart indeed his dissections are masterly; he is evidently well versed in its anatomy. As he represented a certain character, a backslider perhaps, or a defrauder, or a profane person, many eyes seemed fraught with the anxious inquiry, “Is it I?” until at length, as the lineaments of the portrait became clearer and more distinctly defined, the shrinking look and trembling frame declared in unmistakable language, “It is I!”

In his manner of looking at a text there is something original; ingenious and unexpected terms are given to the different parts of it; and as each is illustrated, it tells with surprising power upon the congregation. This effect is heightened by a certain abruptness of delivery, which, scorning all preface and apology, rushes instantly to its point, and takes possession of his hearers by storm.

His eloquence, too, is not an even, uninterrupted flow of words, but his speech is forced out in jerks of great intensity, with an interval between each burst. It must be allowed that his style is highly poetical; not that he indulges in fine, unusual words and strings of epithets; there is no attempt at display of this kind; simple and plain, his style is yet remarkable for its poetic effectiveness; and to this he owes a considerable portion of the influence he exerts over his hearers.

On Tuesday night, the force with which he imaged a fold of sheep, to illustrate the conduct of the newly converted mind, was singular; it was not only quite evident that every word he said he saw visibly before him, but he made his hearers see it too; the swine prowling about the fold and leering at the flock, manifesting no desire to be numbered among the sheep, was forcibly contrasted with the lamb which went bleating around to spy an entrance, and at last, when the door was opened by the shepherd, darted in.

The effect of such passages as these was very much increased by the minister’s appropriate attitudes and gestures; riot his mouth only, but his eyes and hands and his whole person combining to give utterance to his eloquent thought. Every scene he drew was visibly before the eyes of the congregation; where he pointed with his hand, they looked; and the vacant air in front of the pulpit which he chose as the canvas on which to paint his vivid designs, was evidently no longer a vacancy to his hearers, as was quite manifest from the fixed stare with which they gazed into it.

When he spoke of angels as hovering over the people, and occupying the ring enclosed by the gallery of the chapel, and invented conversations which he said they might be then holding with respect to certain individuals in the place, the silence that prevailed among the people was profound; they scarcely dared to breathe, and seemed as if they really were hearing the rustling and flapping of the invisible wings.

But as this picture was allowed to fade away, and an appeal to the feelings of the people followed; and when the solicitude of the souls of the departed after the eternal welfare of their friends below was dwelt upon, a universal sob burst from the assembly, and even the faces of the rugged and weather-beaten men were illuminated by the reflection of the lamps in the water upon their cheeks.

At times this emotion assumed a more frantic character, shouts, groans, and all manner of pious ejaculations rising from all parts of the house, until the preacher’s voice became inaudible, and the whole place resounded with the wailings and cries.

The arrangements were extremely well ordered and efficient; during the prayer-meeting which succeeded the service, numbers of persons were observed in all parts of the chapel, who had been appointed to lead up to the communion-rails those who were desirous of being publicly prayed for; and as they obtained assurance of what they sought, led them out orderly at the vestry door.

The Rev. Isaac Page, who was a boy at the time of Caughey’s visit, remembers seeing crowds of people clambering over the iron railings in front of Wesley Chapel an hour or more before the meeting opened. The chapel, which seated eighteen hundred people, was densely thronged in every part, and numbers were unable to enter at the crowded doors.

People remember seeing the tall figure of Caughey standing up to preach in a breathless silence, and being startled by the suddenness with which he thrust out an arm, pointing upwards with a straight accusing finger, and exclaiming, “There is a young man in the gallery who had an awful dream last night; he thought the Day of Judgment had come!”

A hymn introduced by James Caughey was sung all over Nottingham, as seventy or eighty years afterwards the “Glory Song,” introduced by another American evangelist, was sung all over London. Caughey’s hymn contained these verses

O Thou God of my salvation
My Redeemer from all sin,
Moved by Thy divine compassion,
Who hast died my soul to win
Glory! Glory! Glory! Glory!
Glory! Glory! God is Love!
Glory! Glory! Glory! Glory!
Hallelujah! God is Love!

This has set my soul on fire,
Strongly glows the flame of love,
Higher mounts my soul and higher,
Longing for the rest above:
Glory! Glory! Glory! Glory!
Glory! Glory! God is Love!
Glory! Glory! Glory! Glory!
Hallelujah! God is Love!

The Wesleyan Methodist Society, in one of those years, increased, I am told, by 30,000 members.
The visit of this American evangelist, though it did nothing to associate religion with humanitarian idealism, and little to create a social conscience, nevertheless revived the flames of Wesleyan Methodism and breathed some sense of greatness into the sordid air of a much troubled manufacturing town.

It exercised a profound influence upon William Booth’s astonishing career, and in the shout of “Glory! Glory! Glory!” one may trace the dawn of Booth’s great central preaching, that religion is not imposed as a difficult and laborious thing by an exacting God, but given as a blessing and deliverance to poor sorrowful creatures punished and afflicted by their own wrong-doing.

As regards the orthodox religious life of the town, it would seem that Nottingham did not suffer so greatly as other parts of the country from disreputable or sporting clergymen. Parson Wyatt. for instance, the vicar of Sneinton Church, was a Puseyite, and is remembered by many Nonconformists as a good, earnest, and zealous man.

But, on the whole, the churches of the town seem to have been conducted on the principle that those who wanted religion would come and ask for it, arid those who stayed away had deliberately elected for evil. There was no missionary spirit. Men’s minds were taken up with political and industrial questions. Christianity was distinctly in shadow.

It may be said with a fair degree of truth that throughout the length and breadth of the land Anglican clergymen were Tories before everything else, and dissenting ministers, as they were then called, in spite of a subdued interest in revivalism were in large measure concerned with Liberal politics.

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