Carlile, Richard

From Philosopedia

Carlile, Richard (1790—1843) An English journalist, reformer, and freethinker born at Ashburton in Devonshire, Carlile spent an entire lifetime advocating freethought and republicanism. He also resisted the blasphemy laws. in order to secure freedom of the press spent over nine years and four months in jail, nearly one-third of his adult life. He had to pay fines amounting to many thousand pounds. Among his crimes were publishing the suppressed works of Thomas Paine, William Hone, and his own Political Litany (1817). He supported birth control, universal suffrage, and freedom to publish including material on phrenology and mesmerism. Although Robertson holds that “Carlile had always been a deist, and, now near his end [he lapsed] into a kind of theistic mysticism,” Berman holds that Carlile was never a deist, that he was first an agnostic, later an atheist. McCabe agrees, stating that from 1821 onward Carlile was an aggressive atheist. In a letter Carlile flatly asserts, “I am an atheist” and “there is no God,” signing the letter, “Your atheistical friend, Richard Carlile.” “The fable of a god or gods visiting the earth did not originate with Christianity,” he declared, further riling the religionists. Carlile is considered to be the first atheistic leader who exerted a wide influence by means of the periodical, mass meetings, and the courtroom. Berman states that Charles Southwell took over the championship of atheism from Carlile, “who had moved away from atheism in the 1830s to a confused form of mystical theism.” He was an editor of such publications as The Republican (1819—1826), The Moralist (1823), Lion (1828—1829), Prompter (1830—1831), and Scourge (1834—1835). Once, when his house was seized because he refused to pay church-rates, he put life-size figures of a devil and a bishop arm-in-arm in his shop window in the center of London. Eventually, he wore out his persecutors, who quit troubling him. The British Dictionary of National Biography wrote that he “did more than any other man for the freedom of the press.” Thirteen days before his death Carlile penned these words: “The enemy with whom I have to grapple is one with whom no peace can be made. Idolatry will not parley; superstition will not treat on covenant. They must be uprooted for public and individual safety.” He was attended in his last illness by Dr. Thomas Lawrence, the author of the once famous “Lectures on Man.” Wishing to be useful in death as in life, Carlile devoted his body to dissection. The family complied with his wish, and the post-mortem examination was recorded in the Lancet. The burial took place at Rensal Green Cemetery, where a clergyman insisted on reading the Church Service over his remains. According to Foote, Carlile’s eldest son Richard, who represented his sentiments as well as his name, “very properly protested against the proceedings as an outrage upon the principles of his father and the wishes of the family. Of course the remonstrance was disregarded, and Richard, his brothers, and their friends left the ground. . . . After their departure, the clergyman called the great hater of priests his “dear departed brother” and declared that the rank Materialist had died “in the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection.” {BDF; EU, Joel H. Wiener; FO; FUK; HAB; JM; JMR; RAT; RE; RSR; VI; TRI; TYD}