By: Bob Forder

Bob Forder — Sun, 01 May 2022 11:14:08 +0000

The history of freethought publishing is a story that has been inadequately told and is closely linked to the publication of birth control literature. I am pleased that this interesting article goes some way to addressing the issue, although there is plenty of scope for further research. It was Richard Carlile who wrote and published ‘Every Woman’s Book’, the first book in English advocating birth control and explaining birth control techniques. 28 Stonecutter Street, effectively the bookselling and publishing headquarters of the National Secular Society and the secularist movement in the United Kingdom from 1877 to 1900, was also the address from which the first mass circulation birth control pamphlets appeared.
George Eliot gets too much credit for translating Strauss’s ‘Life of Jesus’. The first English edition was published by Henry Hetherington and Joseph Taylor in four volumes between 1842 and 1844. It was anonymously translated from the third German edition and is one of the most important books of the nineteenth century; a milestone in the growth of sceptical thought which has continued to this day. The Chapman Bros., 1846 edition (which was translated by George Eliot) is often incorrectly claimed as the first English edition.

Comments on: How three media revolutions transformed the history of atheism

By: Bob Forder