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Show Page 78 For the first time Orson Pratt found himself on the soil of the Old World. His impressions have gone unrecorded; however, it is possible to reconstruct the conditions he encountered upon his arrival in Great Britain. Three years into Queen Victoria's reign, the kingdom was afflicted with the mass unemployment and destitution which would characterize the entire decade of the "Hungry Forties." In many parts of the industrial Midlands, where the Twelve began their mission, the world-wide depression of 1837 seemed hardly to have begun. Starvation and begging were so common that the appalled elders gave all their spare change to the derelicts that crowded the streets. Socialism was a rising force, and such powerful voices as Charles Dickens and Karl Marx were finding their angry pitch with the top-heavy capitalism that had thrown working-class Britain into disaster. Heber C. Kimball, when he saw a royal procession in London: "You would be astonished to see the stur thare is made over a little queen at the same time thousands starving 7 to deth fore-a little bread." Along with those who sought secular reform were the "seekers" for the millennium - there was no shortage of American revivalists on the streets of England. Many of the working class yearned for a more democratic church, a simpler, more accessible religion than that offered by the Church of England, and many were the reformist religious societies that grew up among the common people. Indeed, the secular and spiritual reform movements were noticeably intertwined, with the clash between the supporters of the "People's Charter" and those of the Oxford Movement, mostly aristocrats who favored imposing Anglo-Catholicism on all. Little wonder so many Britons were attracted by Mormonism, which taught both temporal and spiritual salvation in a new Zion across the sea, far from English breadlines and debtors' prisons. |