British social reformer
Richard Carlile
|
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Born
| (
1790-12-08
)
8 December 1790
Ashburton
,
Devon
, England
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Died
| 10 February 1843
(1843-02-10)
(aged 52)
London
, England
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Occupation
| Publisher
, agitator, activist
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Richard Carlile
(8 December 1790 ? 10 February 1843) was an important agitator for the establishment of
universal suffrage
and
freedom of the press
in the United Kingdom.
[1]
Early life
[
edit
]
Born in
Ashburton, Devon
, he was the son of a shoemaker who died in 1794; leaving Richard's mother struggling to support her three children on the income from running a small shop. At the age of six he went for free education to the local
Church of England
school, then at the age of twelve he left school for a seven-year apprenticeship to a
tinsmith
in
Plymouth
.
Personal life
[
edit
]
In 1813, he married, and shortly afterwards the couple moved to
Holborn
Hill in London where he found work as a tinsmith. His wife,
Jane
, gave birth to five children, three of whom survived.
[2]
In 1832, having separated from his wife, Carlile commenced a relationship with
Eliza Sharples
, with whom he had four children.
[3]
Politics and publishing
[
edit
]
His interest in politics was kindled first by economic conditions in the winter of 1816 when Carlile was put on short-time work by his employer creating serious problems for the family: "I shared the general distress of 1816 and it was this that opened my eyes." He began attending political meetings where speakers like
Henry Hunt
complained that only three men in a hundred had the vote, and was also influenced by the publications of
William Cobbett
.
As a way of making a living he sold the writings of parliamentary reformers such as
Tom Paine
on the streets of London, often walking "thirty miles for a profit of eighteen pence".
In April 1817, he formed a publishing business with the printer William Sherwin and rented a shop in
Fleet Street
. To make political texts such as Paine's books
The Rights of Man
and the
Principles of Government
available to the poor he split them into sections which he sold as small pamphlets, similarly publishing
The Age of Reason
and
Principles of Nature
. He issued unauthorized copies of Southey's
Wat Tyler
and after the radical
William Hone
's arrest in May, he reissued the parody of parts of the
Book of Common Prayer
for which Hone was to be tried, then was himself arrested in August and held without charge until Hone was acquitted in December.
He took on distributing the banned
Radical
weekly
The Black Dwarf
at a time when the government was prosecuting publishers: "The Habeas Corpus Act being suspended ... all was terror and alarm, but I take credit to myself in defeating the effect of these two Acts upon the Press... Of imprisonment I made sure, but I felt inclined to court it than to shrink from it".
Carlile then brought out a radical journal,
Sherwin's Political Register
, which reported political meetings and included extracts from books and poems by supporters of the reform movement such as
Percy Bysshe Shelley
and
Lord Byron
. The popularity of this helped to soon bring his profit from his publishing venture to £50 a week.
Peterloo and
The Republican
[
edit
]
Carlile was one of the scheduled main speakers at the reform meeting on 16 August 1819 at St. Peter's Fields in
Manchester
. Just as
Henry Hunt
was about to speak, the crowd was attacked by the yeomanry in what became known as the
Peterloo massacre
. Carlile escaped and was hidden by radical friends before he caught the mail coach to London and published his eyewitness account, giving the first full report of what had happened, in
Sherwin's Weekly Political Register
of 18 August 1819. His placards proclaimed "Horrid Massacres at Manchester".
The government responded by closing
Sherwin's Political Register
, confiscating the stock of newspapers and pamphlets. Carlile changed the name to
The Republican
and in its issue of 27 August 1819 demanded that
"The massacre... should be the daily theme of the Press until the murderers are brought to justice.... Every man in Manchester who avows his opinions on the necessity of reform, should never go unarmed ? retaliation has become a duty, and revenge an act of justice."
Carlile was prosecuted for
blasphemy
,
blasphemous libel
and
sedition
for publishing material that might encourage people to hate the government in his newspaper, and for publishing
Tom Paine
's
Common Sense
,
The Rights of Man
and the
Age of Reason
(which criticised the
Church of England
).
In October 1819, he was found guilty of
blasphemy
and
seditious libel
and sentenced to three years in
Dorchester
Gaol
with a fine of £1,500. When he refused to pay the fine, his premises in
Fleet Street
were raided and his stock was confiscated. While he was in jail he continued to write articles for
The Republican
which was now published by Carlile's wife, Jane, and thanks to the publicity it now outsold pro-government newspapers such as
The Times
.
To curb newspapers the government had raised the
½d
tax on newspapers, first imposed in 1712, to
3½d
in 1797, then 4d in 1815. From December 1819 it set a minimum price of 7d, with further restrictions. At a time when workers earned less than 10 shillings (120d.) a week this made it hard for them to afford radical newspapers, and publishers tried various strategies to evade the tax. Groups would pool their resources in reading societies and subscription societies to purchase a book or journal in common, and frequently read it aloud to one another as was the case with
James Wilson
.
By 1821, Carlile was a declared
atheist
(having previously been a
Deist
)
[4]
and published his
Address to Men of Science
, in favour of materialism and education. In the same year Jane Carlile was in turn sentenced to two years imprisonment for seditious libel, and her place as publisher was taken by Richard Carlile's sister, Mary. Within six months she was imprisoned for the same offence. The process was repeated with eight of his shop workers, including
Susannah Wright
,
[5]
and over 150 men and women were sent to prison for selling
The Republican
.
Carlile's sentence ended in 1823 but he was immediately arrested and returned to prison for not paying his £1,500 fine, so the process continued until he was eventually released on 25 November 1825. In the next edition of
The Republican
he expressed the hope that his long confinement would result in the freedom to publish radical political ideas. An example of the support he received from around the country is the £1.5.1 sent to him in Dorchester jail by forty working men in the West Yorkshire village of
Hunslet
, accompanied by a noble letter on behalf of those "few Friends to Truth and Justice".
[6]
He then published further journals,
The Lion
which campaigned against child labour and
The Promptor
. He argued that "equality between the sexes" should be the objective of all reformers, and in 1826 published
Every Woman's Book
advocating birth control and the sexual emancipation of women. Cobbett denounced this book as "so filthy, so disgusting, so beastly, as to shock even the lewdest men and women".
[7]
Carlile was an advocate of the
Christ myth theory
. He did not believe that
Jesus
existed. He debated Unitarian minister
John Relly Beard
in
The Republican
, 1826.
[8]
[9]
The Devil's Chaplain
[
edit
]
He joined up with the radical and sceptical clergyman
Robert Taylor
and set out on an "infidel home missionary tour" which reached
Cambridge
on Thursday 21 May 1829 and caused a considerable upset to the
University of Cambridge
where a young
Charles Darwin
was a second-year student.
At their meeting in
Bolton
, Lancashire, Carlile met
Eliza Sharples
, who was to become his long term mistress.
[10]
Carlile then opened a ramshackle building on the south bank of the
River Thames
, the
Blackfriars Rotunda
, and in widespread public unrest in July 1830 this became a gathering place for
republicans
and
atheists
. Taylor staged infidel melodramas, preaching outrageous sermons which got him dubbed "The Devil's Chaplain". Thousands of copies of these sermons were circulated in a seditious publication,
The Devil's Pulpit
.
[
citation needed
]
Jailed again
[
edit
]
In 1831, he was jailed, under the charge of seditious libel, given two and a half years for writing an article in support of agricultural labourers campaigning against wage cuts and advising the strikers to regard themselves as being at war with the government.
[11]
[12]
He left prison deeply in debt, and government fines had taken from him the finances needed to publish newspapers.
His political and social opinions never altered, but his philosophy underwent a change in the 1830s. In 1837 H. Robinson published the results of his later thinking in the book
Extraordinary Conversion and Public Declaration of Richard Carlile of London to Christianity
.
In 1834, he was tried for creating a public nuisance, when he displayed two effigies in the windows of his shop at 62 Fleet Street, one in blue representing a broker titled "Temporal broker" and another dressed as a bishop titled "Spiritual broker". A large group of people were often gathered there, impeding traffic and causing quarrels. He was found guilty, but judgment was respited.
[13]
After living for some years in extreme poverty in
Enfield
, Carlile returned to Fleet Street in 1842, dying there the following year. He donated his body for medical research. Large numbers of people attended his funeral in
Kensal Green Cemetery
on Sunday 26 February 1843, where his sons protested at the Christian burial rite being administered in the common grave he was being buried in ? citing that their father had "passed his life in opposition to all priestcraft".
[
citation needed
]
Writings
[
edit
]
- The Deist; or, Moral Philosopher: Being an Impartial Inquiry After Moral and Theological Truths
(1819)
- A Letter to the Society for the Suppression of Vice: On Their Malignant Efforts to Prevent a Free Enquiry After Truth and Reason
(1819)
- An Address to Men of Science: Calling Upon Them to Stand Forward and Vindicate the Truth from the Foul Grasp and Persecution of Superstition
(1821)
- Life of Thomas Paine: Written Purposely to Bind With His Writings
(1822)
- The Character of the Jew Books: Being a Defence of the Natural Innocence of Man, against Kings and Priests, or Tyrants and Impostors
(1822)
- Every Woman's Book or What is Love?
(1826)
Notes
[
edit
]
- ^
Philip W. Martin (2004).
"Carlile, Richard"
.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(online ed.). Oxford University Press.
doi
:
10.1093/ref:odnb/4685
.
(Subscription or
UK public library membership
required.)
- ^
Philip W. Martin (2004).
"Carlile, Richard"
.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(online ed.). Oxford University Press.
doi
:
10.1093/ref:odnb/4685
.
(Subscription or
UK public library membership
required.)
- ^
Royal, Edward (2004).
"Carlile, Elizabeth Sharples"
.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(online ed.). Oxford University Press.
doi
:
10.1093/ref:odnb/38370
.
(Subscription or
UK public library membership
required.)
- ^
E.P. Thompson (1968).
The Making of the English Working Class
. Penguin. p. 796.
- ^
Parolin, Christina (2010).
Venues of popular politics in London, 1790?c. 1845
. Canberra: ANU E Press.
ISBN
9781921862014
.
- ^
The Republican
, volume 8, page 107
- ^
Stack, David (1998).
Nature and Artifice
. Boydell Press. p. 30.
ISBN
0861932293
.
- ^
Beard, J. R.
(1825).
To Mr. Richard Carlile, London
.
The Republican
12 (26): 803-828.
- ^
Carlile, Richard. (1826).
To Mr. J. R. Beard, Unitarian Preacher, Manchester
.
The Republican
13 (3): 65-72.
- ^
Parolin, Christina (2010).
'Pythoness of the Temple': Eliza Sharples and the gendered public of the Rotunda
. ANU.
doi
:
10.22459/RS.12.2010
.
ISBN
9781921862007
. Retrieved
27 November
2013
.
- ^
State Trials (New Series), II, 459: "The King against Richard Carlile, 1831
- ^
Old Bailey Proceedings Online
(accessed 29 January 2019),
Trial of RICHARD CARLILE
. (t18310106-117, 6 January 1831).
- ^
Old Bailey Proceedings Online
(accessed 29 January 2019),
Trial of RICHARD CARLILE
. (t18341124-155, 24 November 1834).
References
[
edit
]
- Aldred, Guy A
(1941).
Richard Carlile Agitator
. Glasgow: Strickland Press.
- Adrian Desmond
and
James Moore
,
Darwin
(London: Michael Joseph, the Penguin Group, 1991).
ISBN
0-7181-3430-3
- Chisholm, Hugh
, ed. (1911).
"Carlile, Richard"
.
Encyclopædia Britannica
. Vol. 5 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
- Holyoake, George Jacob (1887).
"Carlile, Richard"
. In
Stephen, Leslie
(ed.).
Dictionary of National Biography
. Vol. 9. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
- Michael Laccohee Bush, The Friends and Following of Richard Carlile: a Study of Infidel Republicanism in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain, Twopenny Press, 2016
External links
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