"Bodily compassion": Values and identity formation in the Salvation Army, 1880-1900.

By the end of the nineteenth century, The Salvation Army, an offshoot of British Methodism, had become a respected feature on the Victorian cultural landscape. The fierce opposition the Army faced in its earliest days, for the manner in which it adapted forms of working class popular culture as a means of religious expression, and for its controversial use of women as preachers or "Hallelujah lasses," had been replaced by popular admiration for its philanthropic work among the poor and the socially marginalized. This thesis analyzes the course of this transition. Much of the rehabilitation of reputation can be attributed to the work of a second wave of women recruits who assumed less socially transgressive ministry roles as rescue workers or nurses in the Army's expanding network of social services. Informed by a "heroic" spirituality which emphasized social duty, self-sacrifice and moral influence, these "Social Officers" dramatically embodied an idealized late nineteenth-century behavioural ethos and won the movement admirers if not adherents. The Salvation Army's concerted commitment to a "principle of noncontroversy" broadened its cultural acceptability and invited some unusual alliances. This can be particularly demonstrated in the denomination's interaction with a range of Victorian health reform movements: hydropathy, homoeopathy and vegetarianism