Work for all. Salvation Arm social campaign. Lithographically-printed illustration, on sheet (428 x 277 mm) folded and tipped-in, facing title page of: General [William] Booth, In darkest England and the way out (1890, London: International Headquarters of the Salvation Army). Illustration printed by The Salvation Army, Litho, 98 & 100 Clerkenwell Road
The Reverend William Booth founded the East London Christian Mission in 1865, changing its name to the Salvation Army in 1878 to reflect both its evangelism and its semi-military organization. In darkest England and the way out, his best-selling book (200,000 sold in its first year) on ‘the Social Question’ – how to deal with the poor, destitute, and unemployed – was ghost-written by William Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. It came out in 1890, following the publication earlier that year of Henry Morton Stanley’s In darkest Africa. Booth-Stead wrote: ‘As there is a darkest Africa is there not also a darkest England? Civilisation, which can breed its own barbarians, does it not also breed its own pygmies? May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stone’s throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest?’
We show the illustration (‘chart’) which opens the book in order to enlarge the notion of ‘information’: not here ‘facts’ or ‘data’ but rhetorical support to readers. The book’s argument is here summarized, if not at a glance – too complex for that – then on one page. Nineteenth-century book publishers could be pretty good at giving readers advance notice of what they would be getting, by means of such things as expanded contents lists with chapter summaries, digests, synoptic overviews – a battery of editorial devices which offered signals and guides to readers, what today might be called navigational and access aids. Here, the story is given in one picture and its accompanying iconographic guide.
The 312-word caption (‘Key to the chart’) explains that the chart is ‘intended to give a birdseye-view of the Scheme described in this book, and the results expected from its realization.’ Together they offer a prospectus of the book’s argument: ‘A population sodden with drink, steeped in vice, eaten up by every social and physical malady, these are the denizens of Darkest England amidst whom my life has been spent, and to whose rescue I would now summon all that is best in the manhood and womanhood of our land.’ The general cited the work of his namesake Charles Booth – the ‘one book there is, and so far at present, only one, which even attempts to enumerate the destitute’ – whose Descriptive map of East End poverty had appeared the year before in the first volume of Life and labour of the people. Volume 1: East London (London: Macmillan, 1889). Relying on Charles Booth’s statistics – selections from which are displayed on the piers of the arch – General Booth reckoned that at least three million people, one tenth of Britain’s population, lived in destitution. His solution was a scheme to extract the pauperized and unemployed from their squalor, and to place them in urban workshop ‘colonies’ from which they would later graduate to farm colonies, before finally being exported to colonies overseas. In the early 20th century the Salvation Army attempted to realize Booth’s scheme through a programme of assisted emigration from Britain to all corners of its empire.
This document recalls a tradition of apocalyptic vision in painting, from Hieronymus Bosch to John Martin’s ‘judgement paintings’ of 1851–4. In the general’s chart, presumably made under his guidance by an anonymous commercial artist, its lower depths of poverty, vice and despair contain just one named person: Jack the Ripper, to the right and below the lighthouse of salvation.
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