Richard Carlile
From Philosopedia
Carlile, Richard (9 December 1790 - 10 February 1843)
Freethinker and tireless free speech champion Carlile was born in Ashburton, Devon, England. His father, a shoemaker, abandoned the family in 1794, leaving his mother to support three children. At the age of six he received free education at the local Church of England school, leaving at 12 for a 7-year apprenticeship to a tinsmith in Plymouth. Marrying Jane Carlile in 1813, the couple had five children, three of whom survived.
Carlile was jailed for selling political satires in 1817. A freethinking deist, he then published an inexpensive version of The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, and the Deist, a pioneering and popular freethinking weekly. Among his crimes were publishing the suppressed works of William Hone and his own Political Litany (1817). He supported birth control, universal suffrage, and freedom to publish including material on phrenology and mesmerism.
In 1819, he was prosecuted for blasphemy and seditious libel by the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Although he became a cause celebré during two trials in the Guildhall where he defended himself, he was convicted and sentenced to pay £1500 pounds and spend three years in prison. His prison stay was doubled after he refused to pay the fine, so he spent 1819-1825 at Dorcester prison, where he published freethought tracts with wide circulation and influence, including reprints of freethinkers such as Voltaire, Shelley, Byron, and Bentham.
He took over publication of the weekly Republican, a major freethought periodical with a circulation of 4,000 to 5,000, in 1822, also from prison. Carlile's wife, Jane, his sister, and many supporters were imprisoned for disseminating Carlile's tracts. A campaign, called the "war of the shopmen," continued until Carlile, his workers, and vendors were released.
He then opened up a shop to print and promote freethought literature, teaming up with "Rev." Robert Taylor in the late 1820s for freethought speaking tours. Together, they opened the Rotunda in London, a hub of dissent. Both were arrested and convicted of various blasphemies in 1831. Carlile continued organizing and writing from prison, with the help of Eliza Sharples, known as "Isis," who became his common law wife (or "moral mistress") after he separated from his first wife.
Carlile spent a great part of his life in prison. Carlile's gallant fight was "the greatest fight ever waged for a free press and free speech," according to freethought biographer Joseph McCabe, lessening future prosecutions. His influence and cachet with other reformers gradually diminished and his final years were spent in great poverty. He is remembered for his pioneering support for birth control, women's suffrage and rights (which he called for in the 1820s), against child labor, for parliamentary reform, and his one-man fight to free speech.
Although J. M. 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. David 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 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.
In his campaign against child labor, Carlile in 1827 was given a copy of material by America's radical journalist, John Brown, about a former parish apprentice called Robert Blincoe - Carlile published the "Robert Blincoe's Memoir" in The Lion, printing it in five weekly episodes.
In 1830 he was back in prison for having supported agricultural laborers who were campaigning against wage cuts. When he left prison 2 1/2 years later, he was deeply in debt and he had no financial resources to publish newspapers. For the next few years he lived in extreme poverty.
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 G. W. 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; FFRF; FO; FUK; HAB; JM; JMR; RAT; RE; RSR; VI; TRI; TYD}
