Pulling the Devil's Kingdom Down: The Salvation Army in Victorian Britain (review)

Students of plebian culture, gender, and religion are all well served in this throughly researched book by Pamela Walker. Her new history of the Salvation Army demonstrates scholarly rigor and interdisciplinary elan, and provides a sympathetic scrutiny of the mental states and worldviews of first-generation participants in the Army. Walker's scope is wide and her goals ambitious. She sets out to make us understand how the Army transgressed gender conventions, and why working-class religion developed as it did in Victorian Britain. It is a book that will be useful for both academics and their students; Walker writes clearly and comprehensibly even when dealing with difficult subjects, such as the theological thinking underlining the Army's understanding of conversion and sacramentalism.

Walker begins her story by tracing the intellectual and religious roots of the Salvation Army in Victorian Methodism; more than this, she makes it plain why Methodist culture and religiosity was an essential factor in the birth of the Army. Her brief biographical sketches of the Booths do not add anything to the massive hagiographies already available, but they are concise and useful. Walker is at her strongest when introducing the reader to the intellectual forces that shaped Salvationist theology, and when discussing the tensions between gender, class, and culture in the Army's early years. She is obviously fascinated by the fact that Army women administered communion, and mentions it repeatedly. As interesting and radical as this appears, more is made of this issue than it merits, since the Salvation Army abandoned the sacraments in 1883—very early in its career, and while it was still formulating its identity, as Walker herself admits.

She is particularly good at teasing out the conflicts that arose when working- class women were put in charge of local Army corps. Their male contemporaries often found it extremely difficult to accept the authority of females in religious matters, and Walker's discussion of the fraught relationship between oppression, subordination, and authority is excellent. Building on her previous work, Walker makes a convincing case for the role of the "Hallelujah Lasses" in the disruption of late Victorian gender relations. Linked to this discussion is her claim that the Army transformed, at least for its adherents, concepts of working-class masculinity, threatening masculine culture with its rejection of drink and sports as suitable manly activities and replacing the beershop with open-air preaching.

Less persuasively, Walker repeatedly claims that the Salvation Army was a "neighborhood religion." By this she seems to mean that it was firmly rooted in working-class communities, and displayed a public, bustling face, similar to that associated with music hall, circuses, pubs, and street vendors. This romanticized, nostalgic view of the vitality of working-class neighborhoods needs to be set against recent urban historians' evocation of the silence and dreariness of real working-class neighborhoods in this period. It is generally conceded that the normative working-class neighbourhood of the late Victorian period consisted of dull miles of mean little houses on barren streets, so much more typical of the real life of poor Londoners than the colorful, noisy disorder of Whitechapel High Street. The Army may have brought drama and emotional release into the lives of some of the inhabitants of these neighborhoods, but it did not borrow much from their physical and cultural environments other than their emphasis on uniformity and conformity.

There is little new material in the chapter on the opposition to the Salvation Army: the Skeleton Army has been covered well by earlier historians of the Army. But these criticisms do not overshadow the real achievement of this book, which will become the standard introduction to the subject. In it, Walker attempts, and to a great extent succeeds, in reinstalling the Salvation Army in its rightful place in our conception of...