William and Catherine: The love story of the
founders of The Salvation Army, told through their
letters
Cathy Le Feuvre
Monarch £9.99
(978-0-85721-312-9)
Church Times Bookshop £9 (Use code CT261
)
TODAY, General William Booth
is revered as the grand old man of the Salvation Army, seen with
long white beard, posing stiffly in his uniform for a monochrome
photograph.
Cathy Le Feuvre's book William and Catherine, provides
a contrasting picture of William as young man, husband, father, and
radical Christian, through that very Victorian medium of
hand-written letters. She relates the early years of the Salvation
Army through the personal and intimate correspondence between
William and his wife.
Writing to Catherine,
William shared his vision of ministry, his moments of self-doubt,
and his domestic anxieties, with the one person in whom he could
completely confide.
"My dearest love," he writes
just before Christmas in 1852. "The meeting went off to middling
last night. . . They called mine the speech of the night, and a
wretched thing it was, I know. . . I shall endeavour my dearest, to
manage money matters some way without troubling you. My washing is
to be done for 12/- per quarter. . . Cheap, is it not?"
Thirty years later, the
struggling evangelist was celebrated internationally. Catherine,
too, was in demand as a preacher, and the two spent much time
apart. In 1886, when William was in the United States, Catherine
wrote: "I got home from my last tour and saw your clothes hanging
up, I felt awful. . . I long for you daily."
In a letter home, the same
year, William recalled their early days together. "I came rushing
up the Brixton Road to hold you in my arms and embrace you with my
young love."
The letters provide new
insights into significant events in the Army's early years,
including a notorious court case, which, thanks to the courage of
Bramwell, their son, exposed the hidden evil of Victorian child
prostitution. It was Catherine who took the more radical stand over
the issue, William advising caution.
William was a driven man,
who found in Catherine an ideal and, in church matters, equal
partner. But, as a 19th-century woman, she carried the burden of
family life. "The children have been extremely trying today; both
Willie and Ballington are poorly and very fretful," she writes,
stressed, to her absent husband.
Ted Harrison is a former BBC religious-affairs
correspondent.