The Salvation Army's Call to Change Lives

Sarah Tanner left us a few traces of her life. She was an acquaintance of the writer Arthur Munby. When he first met Sarah in the 1850s she was a maid working for an Oxford shopkeeper. A few years later he ran into her again. His first impression was of how truly well she seemed, hail and hearty. But when they fell into conversation she told him she had raised enough money to employ tutors who were teaching her writing,. In fact to his surprise he found her and I quote, respectable. To his even greater surprise he found she had saved enough money after three years of sex work to open a new business, her own coffee shop. Here's historian Paul Be