WILLIAM BOOTH
IN DARKEST ENGLAND (1890)
The revivalist British minister William Booth (1829‑1912) dedicated
himself to preaching salvation and social reform. In 1878, he founded the Salvation Army, which he modeled
organizationally on the British Army with himself as its first general. Although harassed vigorously during their
early years, Booth and the Salvation Army came to be respected for their
efforts to aid the outcasts of society.
In 1890, Booth published In Darkest England, in which he proposes a series of remedies
for poverty and vice that gained wide public support and received considerable
financial backing. In the excerpt
below, Booth begins the work by justifying the need for aid to the British poor,
comparing their lot to that of the peoples of Africa.
This summer the attention of the civilized world has
been arrested by the story which Mr. Stanley [1] has told of “Darkest Africa”
and his journeyings across the heart of the Lost Continent. In all that spirited narrative of heroic
endeavor, nothing has so much impressed the imagination, as his description of
the immense forest, which offered an almost impenetrable barrier to his
advance. The intrepid explorer, in his
own phrase, “marched, tore, ploughed, and cut his way for one hundred and sixty
days through this inner womb of the true tropical forest.” The mind of man with
difficulty endeavors to realize this immensity of wooded wilderness, covering a
territory half as large again as the whole of France, where the rays of the sun
never penetrate, where in the dark, dank air, filled with the steam of the
heated morass, human beings dwarfed into pygmies and brutalized into cannibals
lurk and live and die....
It is a terrible picture, and one that has engraved
itself deep on the heart of civilization.
But while brooding over the awful presentation of life as it exists in
the vast African forest, it seemed to me only too vivid a picture of many parts
of our own land. As there is a darkest
Africa is there not also a darkest England?
Civilization, 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?
...
The Equatorial Forest traversed by Stanley resembles
that Darkest England of which I have to speak, alike in its vast extent..., its
monotonous darkness, its malaria and its gloom, its dwarfish de-humanized
inhabitants, the slavery to which they are subjected, their privations and
their misery. That which sickens the
stoutest heart, and causes many of our bravest and best to fold their hands in
despair.... It is the great Slough of
Despond [2] of our time.
And what a slough it is no man can gauge who has not
waded therein, as some of us have done, up to the very neck for long
years. Talk about Dante's Hell, and all
the horrors and cruelties of the torture-chamber of the lost! The man who walks
with open eyes and with bleeding heart through the shambles of our civilization
needs no such fantastic images of the poet to teach him horror. Often and often, when I have seen the young
and the poor and the helpless go down before my eyes into the morass, trampled
underfoot by beasts of prey in human shape that haunt these regions, it seemed
as if God were no longer in His world, but that in His stead reigned a fiend,
merciless as Hell, ruthless as the grave.
Hard it is, no doubt, to read in Stanley's pages of the slave-traders
coldly arranging for the surprise of a village, the capture of the inhabitants,
the massacre of those who resist, and the violation of all the women; but the
stony streets of London, if they could but speak, would tell of tragedies as
awful, of ruin as complete, of ravishments as horrible, as if we were in
Central Africa; only the ghastly devastation is covered, corpse-like, with the
artificialities and hypocrisies of modern civilization.
The lot of a negress in the Equatorial Forest is
not, perhaps, a very happy one, but is it so very much worse than that of many
a pretty orphan girl in our Christian capital?
We talk about the brutalities of the dark ages, and we profess to
shudder as we read in books of the shameful exaction of the rights of feudal
superior. [3] And yet here, beneath our
very eyes, in our theatres, in our restaurants, and in many other places,
unspeakable though it be but to name it, the same hideous abuse flourishes
unchecked. A young penniless girl, if
she be pretty, is often hunted from pillar to post by her employers, confronted
always by the alternative‑Starve or Sin.
And when once the poor girl has consented to buy the right to earn her
living by the sacrifice of her virtue, then she is treated as a slave and an
outcast by the very men who have ruined her.
Her word becomes unbelievable, her life an ignominy, and she is swept
downward ever downward, into the bottomless perdition of prostitution....
The blood boils with impotent rage at the sight of
these enormities, callously inflicted; and silently borne by these miserable
victims. Nor is it only women who are
the victims, although their fate is the most tragic. Those firms which reduce sweating to a fine art, who
systematically and deliberately defraud the workman of his pay, who grind the
faces of the poor, and who rob the widow and the orphan, and who for a pretence
make great professions of public-spirit and philanthropy, these men nowadays
are sent to Parliament to make laws for the people. The old prophets sent them to Hell‑but we have changed all
that....
Darkest England, like Darkest Africa, reeks with
malaria. The foul and fetid breath of
our slums is almost as poisonous as that of the African swamp. Fever is almost as chronic there as on the
Equator. Every year thousands of
children are killed off by what is called defects of our sanitary system. They are in reality starved and poisoned,
and all that can be said is that, in many cases, it is better for them that
they were taken away from the trouble to come.
Just as in Darkest Africa it is only a part of the
evil and misery that comes from the superior race who invade the forest to
enslave and massacre its miserable inhabitants, so with us, much of the misery
of those whose lot we are considering arises from their own habits. Drunkenness and all manner of uncleanness,
moral and physical, abound. Have you
ever watched by the bedside of a man in delirium tremens? Multiply the sufferings of that one drunkard
by the hundred thousand, and you have some idea of what scenes are being
witnessed in all our great cities at this moment. As in Africa streams intersect the forest in every direction, so
the gin-shop stands at every corner with its River of the Water of Death
flowing seventeen hours out of the twenty-four for the destruction of the
people. 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.
NOTES
1. Henry
Stanley (1841-1904), a
British American explorer whose successful effort to locate Dr. David Livingstone in Africa captivated
European imaginations in the early 1870s.
2. Quoted
from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678), referring to a deep bog
that is so difficult to cross that it causes one to lose hope.
3. Legendary European feudal right of lords to
sleep with any vassal's bride on her wedding night.
QUESTIONS FOR
DISCUSSION
1.
What comparisons does Booth draw
between “darkest Africa” and “darkest England”? Of what significance is the metaphor of darkness?
2. How does Booth assess blame for problems in
England and in Africa?
3. How does Booth emphasize the way oppressive
conditions in the lives of Africans and in the lives of the poor in Britain
affect the human body? What role does
gender play in his text?
4. How do Booth's descriptions of Africa
compare to the images of Africans held by members of the Society of the Friends
of Blacks? To those implicit in
Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation?