‘Granny thinking what she is going to write in her book’: religion, politics and the Pontefract by-election of 1872 in Josephine Butler’s Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (1896)

Josephine Butler’s 'Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade' (1896) has long been considered as one of the crucial pieces of evidence for the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts. Yet few scholars have examined this text to consider what Butler’s only explicit autobiographical publication tells us about how she represented and sought to represent her role in the repeal movement. Scholars have instead preferred to explore how Butler revealed the ‘auto/biographical I’ in the biographies of her father, sister and husband, as well as in her hagiographical writings. This article argues that Personal Reminiscences enabled Butler to reinforce a religiously informed identity. It does so by unpacking her account of the Pontefract by-election of 1872. Both biographers and historians have been drawn to her account of the by-election, especially her description of the terrifying events in the hayloft