Introduction

In common with other members of my family, I love books. Not just their contents (which are, of course, very important) but their appearance, smell, and feel—the older, the better. Their associations with events and people never cease to fascinate me.

My family’s book addiction goes back to my great grandfather, Robert Joseph Forder, who was secretary of the National Secular Society (NSS) throughout most of the heroic Bradlaugh years (1866-90; for more information on Charles Bradlaugh and the history of the NSS, see my video lecture series) and who then became a publisher of freethought literature until he died in 1901. His premises were at 28 Stonecutter Street, which was also the headquarters of the NSS and the birthplace of the Freethinker. In those days, being a freethought publisher carried a high status, following as it did in the heroic footsteps of Daniel Isaac Eaton, Richard Carlile, Henry Hetherington, and James Watson, to name but a few (more on Eaton and Carlile below). I think Robert Joseph’s importance as a publisher of birth control literature is often underrated or ignored.

Robert Joseph’s son, Robert William, became a bookseller and ran bookshops on Charing Cross Road in the interwar years, sometimes aided by his son (and my father), Robert Edwin. After the war, Robert Edwin became a teacher but spent most of his Saturdays at jumble sale book stalls or in second-hand bookshops. He was rarely seen without a book in one hand, and he built up a small but interesting collection of freethought publications. I inherited these when he died, far too young, in 1973.

I became a teacher and, following a chance school staffroom encounter in 1983, I made the acquaintance of Kit Mouat. Kit was a feisty woman, a one-time Freethinker editor and author who was ill and knew she was dying. She had issued freethought book catalogues and persuaded me to take over, selling me her stock. Over the next few years, and until the advent of online bookselling, I issued fifteen catalogues, each with around 400-500 items, and sold thousands of items all over the world. The US was always the largest market. I occasionally look back at the catalogues and blanch when I see the asking price of what are now regarded as antiquarian rarities. It is an unfortunate characteristic of the bibliophile bookseller that each sale brings regret.

My part-time career brought me into contact with many of the leading freethinkers and freethought institutions in the English-speaking world. The most memorable conversations were with Madalyn Murray O’Hair, founder of American Atheists. Madalyn and I had lively telephone exchanges laced with foul language (on her part). At the time she was endeavouring to build up a library and archive in Austin, Texas and was on the hunt for material of the type I was selling. She thought I should offer everything to her first, ahead of other customers. In 1995 I issued a catalogue but heard nothing from Texas. Only later did it transpire that Madalyn with her son and granddaughter had been murdered and their bodies dismembered and hidden. It wasn’t until 2001 that their remains were recovered, with Madalyn being identified by the serial number on her hip prosthesis.

Other memorable acquaintances included Dr Gordon Stein, editor of The American Rationalist and a bibliophile and author, who compiled some important freethought bibliographies along with other works. Gordon had a huge library, now in the hands of the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York, which includes many books I sourced. He once visited our home and told me that he had collected every edition of Thomas Paine’s freethinking classic The Age of Reason he could get his hands on, as this was the surest way of identifying every publisher sympathetic to freethought.

Other customers and acquaintances included Jim Herrick, David Tribe, Nigel Sinnott and Bill McIlroy (all former Freethinker editors). I have fond memories of them all.

On the purchasing front, I once made a journey to Yorkshire on the strength of a phone call from a vendor of what were once euphemistically called ‘top-shelf magazines’ who had somehow come into possession of some titles containing the word ‘freethought’. He also mentioned some familiar authors’ names to me. It turned out that he had purchased a huge pile of freethought journals, pamphlets, and books, which he had had trouble disposing of—until he contacted me. I will never be entirely clear on how he got hold of the collection, but there was mention of clearing a loft in Stretford, Manchester. We negotiated a price and loaded everything into my Lada Estate (I anxiously watched on as the suspension flattened).  There was a complete run of the Freethinker from the first copy in May 1881 until the 1930s, together with a mountain of pamphlets. From some pencil notes and names on the items it became apparent that I had bought the library of the Manchester branch of the NSS.

I found it impossible to part with everything I handled, hence my large and ever-growing freethought library (not good business practice, I grant). In truth, when I started, I did not really understand the significance of many items. Who would have guessed, for example, that The Fruits of Philosophy and The Elements of Social Science are titles of Victorian birth control pamphlets? However, book dealing is a much better educator than it is a wealth generator, which brings me to the purpose of this introduction. 

Knowledge of freethought literature is not common, even among booksellers, and over the next few months, I shall endeavour to share my observations on some of the books, pamphlets, and journals in my collection. Some description of what they contain will be essential, but it will also be my aim to explain each publication’s historical significance and the events it was associated with, as well as the importance of the author and sometimes also the publisher.

There is only one place to start: with the freethinking hero Thomas Paine (1737-1809).

The Age of Reason

In a recent Freethinker essay, Eoin Carter credits Thomas Paine with writing three ‘era-defining texts’. The first two were Common Sense (1776) and Rights of Man (two parts, 1791-2). The third was The Age of Reason (three parts, 1794, 1795, and 1807), which dealt with his views on religion. Although these views may have been implicit in earlier works, now they were overt and unambiguously stated, with serious implications for the way posterity was to regard its author. The first part was written under the shadow of the Jacobin Reign of Terror while Paine was living in France, having been driven out of England after the publication of Rights of Man. The Age of Reason represents a shift in his revolutionary focus from the hereditary privilege enjoyed by monarchy and aristocracy to what he saw as the related nonsense and tyranny of revealed religion.

My copy of the first part is dated 1794 and acknowledges the printer as Barrois of Paris, with the seller as D.I. Eaton of the Cock and Swine, 74 Newgate Street, London. Considerable mystery surrounds the first 1793 French edition, of which only one incomplete copy survives. The Joel Barlow edition of February 1794 probably also predates the Eaton version. Further confusion stems from Paine’s frequent early textual revisions, but it was the Eaton edition that sold in large numbers and attracted attention. And what attention it got.

Daniel Isaac Eaton (1753-1814) was one of an extraordinary band of radical, freethinking publishers whose courage still astounds. By the end of 1794 the authorities had already unsuccessfully tried to prosecute him for sedition twice. His premises in Newgate Street (now adjacent to St Paul’s Underground station and in the shadow of the Cathedral) were called the Cock and Swine. This was a provocation in itself: the cock represented French republicanism and the swine was an ironic reference to Edmund Burke’s use of the term ‘swinish multitude’ as a descriptor of the general population in his anti-revolutionary Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Eaton also issued halfpenny tokens decorated with images of a cock and swine to be used as currency (see an example here).

Although Eaton avoided imprisonment to begin with, in 1796 he had to flee to America to remain a free man. He returned to England three years later only to have his person and property seized and to be imprisoned for fifteen months. In 1812, he was again imprisoned, this time in Newgate Gaol, which effectively became a university of radicalism with inmates discussing, reading, and even publishing radical works. Part of Eaton’s sentence included his standing in the pillory for an hour a day. This is how his fellow radical William Cobbett described the scene:

‘An immense crowd of people cheered him during the whole hour: some held out biscuits…others held him out glasses of wine, and others little flags of triumph and bunches of flowers. While the executioner and officers of Justice were hooted!’

Cobbett went on to suggest that this backfire led to the end of pillory punishment in London.

Of all Paine’s works, it was The Age of Reason which provoked the most enduring hostility, reaching its apotheosis when Theodore Roosevelt referred to Paine as a ‘filthy little atheist’, all three words of which are inaccurate. As he makes clear at the outset of The Age of Reason, Paine was a deist, not an atheist: ‘I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.’ Nevertheless, his evisceration of organised religion is absolute. He argued that it was ‘set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.’

And then there is the famous short paragraph which, to my mind, says it all, and gets right to the heart of what freethinking means:

‘I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.’ (Emphasis added.)

It is not surprising that The Age of Reason became one of the most prosecuted, if not simply the most prosecuted, works of all time. This repression was successful for a while, and it doubtless reduced the number of copies in circulation. But due to the heroism of a small band of radical publishers, of whom Richard Carlile (1790-1843) is possibly the finest example, it was to become the most famous, or infamous, freethought book ever published. We will hear more about Richard Carlile throughout this series.

There was nothing particularly new about Paine’s criticism of religion. The likes of David Hume and Edward Gibbon had already made their scepticism clear. But they used mannerly language to express themselves and their ideas were politely discussed in fashionable coffeehouses. Paine was groundbreaking in his polemical, militant, witty, and plebian style.  Such a lack of deference and respect shook the aristocratic and religious establishment to its core.

For all the reasons mentioned above, The Age of Reason achieved the status of a seminal work in freethought circles. As Chapman Cohen (1868-1954), second editor of the Freethinker, often remarked, the various editions would fill a good-sized room. The Bradlaughite secularists of the late nineteenth century celebrated Paine’s birthday on 29 January each year at the Old Street Hall of Science in what was a kind of freethinkers’ Christmas. Finally, although he never used the term ‘secularism’, the coining of which awaited George Jacob Holyoake (1817-1906), Paine’s conviction that the separation of church and state is a necessary condition for true freedom lies at the very heart of liberal democracy.

Further reading

Image of the week: ‘The world is my country, to do good my religion!’ by Bob Forder

Introducing ‘Paine: A Fantastical Visual Biography’, by Polyp, by Paul Fitzgerald

Freethought and birth control: the untold story of a Victorian book depot, by Bob Forder

Christopher Hitchens and the long afterlife of Thomas Paine, by Daniel James Sharp

‘There is nothing easy or empty about humanity and reason’: in memoriam Jim Herrick (1944–2023), by Bob Forder

From the archive: ‘A House Divided’, by Nigel Sinnott

Image of the week: ‘Wha wants me’, a caricature of Thomas Paine by Isaac Cruikshank (1792), by Daniel James Sharp

The rhythm of Tom Paine’s bones, by Eoin Carter

The post Books From Bob’s Library #1: Introduction and Thomas Paine’s ‘The Age of Reason’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

Life

Readers of this journal, particularly the older generation, will be saddened to learn of the death of Jim Herrick in Cambridge at the age of 78.

Herrick read history and English at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then worked for several years as a schoolteacher before emerging as a stalwart of the freethought, secularist and humanist movement and an important personality in all its organisations. He contributed as speaker, as manager, organiser and campaigner and, most of all, as writer and editor.

Over 30 years, Herrick wrote numerous pieces for the Freethinker and New Humanist, including book, theatre and cinema reviews. He also published five books: Aspiring to the Truth: Two Hundred Years of the South Place Ethical Society (2016); Humanism: An Introduction (2003); Humanist Anthology: From Confucius to David Attenborough (1995); Against the Faith: Some Deists, Skeptics and Atheists (1985); and Vision and Realism: A Hundred Years of The Freethinker (1982).

Against the Faith reveals the depth of Herrick’s understanding of the freethinking intellectual tradition and its roots. In his introduction, he noted the wide range of backgrounds of those who have contributed to freethought, ranging from fiery activists and politicians, like Paine and Bradlaugh, through poets, historians, scientists and philosophers (including Shelley, Gibbon, TH Huxley, and JS Mill), to polymaths like Bertrand Russell. In his review, Harold Blackham (Freethinker, June 1985) wrote:

‘Jim Herrick shows himself learned and acquainted with the ideas of his selected representatives, and is direct in expression… His temper throughout is cool and fair, and his material is controlled by judicious and perceptive comment.’

After leaving the teaching profession, Herrick’s first employment was as Assistant General Secretary of the BHA. In June 1977, he became General Secretary of the NSS, serving until August 1979. 

Herrick was assistant editor of the Freethinker from October 1975 until he took over as editor in January 1977, a post he held until to August 1981. In 1982, he published Vision and Realism, his centenary history of the magazine. In 1984, he became editor of New Humanist, and then, in 2002, literary editor, until his retirement in 2005; he also served as editor of International Humanist News.

Herrick’s association with the NSS, begun in the 1970s, continued until 2009, when he stepped down from the Council of Management.  He also served as one of the society’s vice-presidents. He was a long-term member of the Board of Secular Society and GW Foote & Co. (publishers of the Freethinker) and served as Chair of both; he was also a trustee of the Rationalist Association, which publishes New Humanist. In 1996 he received the Distinguished Humanist Service Award from the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), and in 2022 he was the recipient of the International Rationalist Award. Herrick was a founder member of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association as well as acting as its Chair.

Herrick and the Freethinker 

According to the authors of The Humanist Movement in Modern Britain (2023, p. 239), a book recently published with the support of Humanists UK (HUK), Herrick told the research assistant Jessica Douthwaite in a 2018 interview that he left the Freethinker because he was ‘tired of all the anti-religious stuff…bashing the church’. In the concluding pages of Vision and Realism, published the year after he left the Freethinker, he recorded some of the ‘ill-feeling’ and verbal slights that had passed between some members of the National Secular Society (NSS) and the Freethinker on the one hand, and of the British Humanist Association (BHA, now HUK) on the other. The secularists spoke bitterly of ‘narcissistically Intellectual Humanists … disinclined to fraternise with working-class people.’ The humanists responded with pointed remarks about the ‘essential sterility of secularism’.

Yet in the same book Herrick also emphasised the ‘diversity’ within both the BHA and the NSS, and the fact that ‘there was overlap of membership and activists’. He characterised the purpose of secularism as ‘criticising religion and propounding social reform’. In the May 1981 issue of the Freethinker, he seemed more positive about the role of secularism, freethought and even the magazine itself than his later comments in The Humanist Movement might suggest. As he put it:

‘The major issues of our time such as disarmament, race relations, unemployment and equable sharing of the world’s resources of food and energy, do not allow us to look to the future with easy optimism. Freethought – the “best of causes” – will continue to clear the ground by exposing religions where they obscure issues and cloud thought. The secular humanist outlook… will continue to provide an essential ingredient of civilisation. Long may the Freethinker flourish.’

Herrick and humanism

Denis Cobell, NSS President from 1997 to 2006, knew Herrick for over 40 years, and regarded him as a friend. In his words:

‘Jim was not a self-publicist and was quietly spoken at meetings when matters of dispute arose. He displayed patience, kindness and objectivity. He was committed to what was once known as “the best of causes” and always went well beyond his duty.’

Herrick’s own view of humanism was poignantly encapsulated in a letter to the Guardian (24 August 2002), in response to claims by the indefatigable Giles Fraser that ‘the humanist agenda is almost entirely parasitic upon religious belief itself’. Not true, said Herrick:

‘The “unspeakable” may be experienced by humanists listening to a string quartet, or touching the depths of love, or acknowledging the puniness of self in the face of the vastness of the universe. There is nothing easy or empty about humanity and reason’.

Further obituaries of Jim Herrick: Humanists UK

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The post ‘There is nothing easy or empty about humanity and reason’: in memoriam Jim Herrick (1944–2023) appeared first on The Freethinker.

Sarah Bakewell is what you might call a non-organised humanist. That is not to say she is disorganised (far from it), but that she has developed her conception of humanism individually, over many years and to a large extent independently of the official humanist ‘movement’. Her previous books include a biography of Montaigne, a narrative study of Sartre and the existentialists, and two ‘true stories’ of eighteenth and nineteenth-century adventurers.

Bakewell’s latest book, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope, published by Chatto & Windus in March, represents her attempt to synthesise at least three distinct ‘humanist’ trends of thought that emerged, primarily in Europe, between the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries: the literary culture of Petrarch and the Renaissance umanisti; the philosophical humanism of Voltaire and the Enlightenment; and the expressly non-religious, scientifically inclined humanism of figures like TH Huxley and those involved in early organised humanism.

Humanly Possible has already attracted attention. Bakewell has been profiled by the New York Times; her book has been reviewed by the philosopher Julian Baggini and Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and featured on BBC Radio 4. She also gave this year’s Rosalind Franklin lecture, held annually by Humanists UK, on the topic of humanist women.

I interviewed Sarah Bakewell in the British Library. Over a cup of tea, we explored some of her ideas in depth – from the relationship between humanistic and scientific humanisms to how to find meaning without religion.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Freethinker: How does Humanly Possible relate to your previous books, as well as to your own intellectual development?

Sarah Bakewell: It definitely grew out of the previous two books. The spark was thinking about Montaigne as a humanist, and what role the humanist tradition played in his education and his attitude, but also how he rebelled against and reinvented it, and was much less reverent towards it compared to other people of his father’s generation. And humanism was connected with existentialism: Jean Paul Sartre famously gave a lecture after the end of the Second World War, saying that ‘existentialism is a humanism’ – then he kept changing his mind about it.

I also wanted to understand more about the connections between the different forms of humanism and their development in different eras and contexts. Thirdly, it was about what humanism meant to me. I have always been a humanist, although for years I did not use the label.

Are there any translations in the pipeline?

Yes. There are a dozen or so on their way, including German, Italian, French, and two Chinese editions – one for Taiwan and one for China.

Will the one for China be censored?

One publisher, who I did not go with in the end, said that any mention of religion would need to be cut, which is strange in a book about humanism. It was different compared to the last book, where none of this came up. I think there has been a shift in how much publishers feel they have to self-censor. But there were certain compromises that I would not and did not make.

Was religion a part of your life growing up?

No. My background was absolutely atheist. My parents were non-religious. My father was brought up as a Baptist and he rebelled against that when he was a teenager, and had the whole church praying for his soul as a result. My mother was never a believer. So I was lucky in that I did not have to go through that painful, challenging process of rejecting what you have been brought up with. My grandmother, the Baptist one, did hope that she might be able to get me interested in religion. She sent me a children’s pictorial Bible, which I loved because it had great stories, like fairy tales, with beautiful illustrations. But I never took it literally.

Would you now consider yourself agnostic, atheist or something else?

Theoretically, I am inclined to say agnostic, simply because you cannot prove a negative. But I am more of an atheist by personal conviction. There are parts of what institutional religion does that appal me. But there are parts that I respect, because religious activity is a form of human activity and artistic creation. I enjoy going into churches, and even reading religious books sometimes. I love the beauty that can be found in religious traditions.

But for me, the real beauty comes from contemplating the universe, what we know about it and what we might still discover, the scale of what we see in the night sky and how it might all work. The desire to find out more about the universe inspires me much more than religious traditions.

When did you first start using the label ‘humanist’ for yourself?

About 15 years ago. Definitely before I started writing this book. I have never been much of a joiner of organisations, but I did join Humanists UK when I started writing it. Labels are not something I usually feel very drawn to using. I think that might be true of many humanists, who by disposition want something subtler and more individual.

How much of your research was in the UK and how much elsewhere?

A lot of it was in the British Library, where we are now sitting, as well as the Warburg Institute, the London Library and the Bishopsgate Institute. I spend a lot of time in Italy anyway [Bakewell’s wife, Simonetta Ficai-Veltroni, is Italian]. I did not do much research in Italian libraries, but I did try to find out more about the places where the humanists of the early modern era lived. Padua stands out, because it was important for university life and education, particularly in the history of medicine. Chapter 4 of the book is about medicine and humanism. In the medical university at Padua you can stand in the Anatomical Theatre [built in 1595] and imagine what it would have been like to be a medical student, seeing the anatomising of a body – a process which is of course so important for good medical education, and thus for better medicine, and thus for better human welfare.

Petrarch, who is the main character of Chapter 1, lived close to Padua towards the end of his life, and was involved with the university and the local community. I also visited Avignon, where Petrarch grew up, and Paris. I spent a few days in Chartres. The cathedral there has got nothing to do with humanism in the non-religious sense, but it had everything to do with the flowering of education and a proto-scholarly humanism that started there and in other French centres before it started in Italy. It gives you such a different perspective when you are in a place. I visited Basel, which was the closest Erasmus came came to having a home – in fact, he spent most of his time travelling around and said that ‘My home is wherever I keep my library.’ Which sums him up, really.

Your focus is primarily from fourteenth to late twentieth-century Europe. Why did you choose this period, and those specific starting and finishing points?

Petrarch marks the beginning of the self-consciously modern revival of classical learning in Europe. He saw himself as bringing the light back from the classical world and starting a moral as well as an intellectual revival. In that sense, he is often called the first humanist, so it seemed a sensible place to start. The story tends to focus mainly on Europe, with some reaching in other directions, particularly to America. That was deliberate, because I needed to impose some kind of structure, limit and coherence. The people involved were influenced by each other, read each other, and responded to each other’s work.

I thought about ending with a more substantial survey of where humanism is now. But this has already been written about by others, and it is still very much a live story, changing and developing. I did not think I could do it justice unless I had a large section on it. And I am more of a historian by temperament.

You read philosophy at university. It seems to me that you are a little ruthless with Plato and Aristotle, writing that they ‘were (in most respects) not very humanistic’, and preferring Democritus, a fragmentary Presocratic, and the obscure sophist Protagoras. What made you take this approach?

From the fragments that we have of Protagoras, he and Democritus were in many respects proto-humanists, in the tradition of materialist philosophy. There is one fragment of Protagoras which says, ‘as to the gods, I know nothing about them’. This and other Presocratic sources suggest that, because we cannot know anything about the gods, it is not worth spending time worrying about them. There is a similar tradition of materialism in ancient India.

Your book talks about Cicero’s idea of humane studies, including in his speech in defence of Archias, where he identifies a ‘common bond’ between the ‘arts that concern humanity’. How far are these ideas a starting point for Renaissance humanism?

The Ciceronian idea of the ‘human and literary studies’ is really at the foundation of Renaissance humanism. This interest in Cicero was kick-started by Petrarch, who really admired Cicero, although he did criticise him as well. But others came along after him who thought Cicero was an almost godlike figure and could not be questioned, and that his style in Latin should be imitated absolutely. There was a tension between the kind of humanists who were obsessed with classical models and the ones that were more questioning and critical.

You point out that Renaissance humanists like Petrarch were concerned about literary style even when writing in an emotional state or about distressing topics. Is this an idea that would be worth considering for modern humanists?

We still recognise the importance of speaking and writing in an articulate way, though it does not go under the name of eloquence any more. But sometimes we are suspicious of the veneer of polished speaking. There is the idea, which started with the Romantics, that beautiful words mean nothing, and just cover up authentic feelings. This idea was alien to the Renaissance humanists, who would have said that deep feeling should be communicated as powerfully as possible. They also took from classical literature the idea that real eloquence must always be allied to virtue, or goodness.

We seem to have a double standard. On the one hand, we – at least I – do not trust the likes of Boris Johnson, who uses Latin quotations elegantly and is educated in the tradition of eloquence and classical reference, without that necessarily being a reflection of goodness or honesty. On the other hand, we can also be judgemental about people who do not express themselves very fluently.

Among the people you mention in your ‘Acknowledgements’ is Andrew Copson, the CEO of Humanists UK. To what extent did you consult with him or any humanist organisations during your research and writing?

I talked to Andrew, who was very helpful, and to one or two other humanists. Almost as a matter of principle, though, I mainly worked with my own idea of what I wanted to write. I did not not want to feel that I was presenting a view of humanism that was officially sanctioned by humanist organisations. Although I did include Humanist International’s Declaration of Modern Humanism (2022) as an appendix.

Is there anything in the 2022 Declaration (the latest version of the Amsterdam Declaration of 1952) that you would disagree with or want to modify?

No. One change I agree with is the emphasis on the need for humanism to involve respect and concern for the rest of the natural world and for other species, not only for human beings. There is a misconception out there that humanism is the same thing as anthropocentrism and that it implies not caring about other species.

Why should humanists care about other species?

On the simplest level, because we cannot survive without them. We are of this planet, and woven into the biodiversity around us. The general humanist approach also involves a sense of responsibility for the impact we can have on the planet. We have considerable powers technologically and by sheer force of numbers; I think we need to own up to that responsibility.

You identify ‘freethinking, enquiry and hope’ as consistent aspects of humanism throughout your period of study. Why these three?

These three points apply to all the widely divergent forms of humanism that I discuss in the book – not just modern humanism of the secular or non-religious sort, but also the scholarly and literary humanism of the Renaissance and the philosophical interest in human well-being and dignity of the Enlightenment.

To what extent can we really talk about a single humanism running through all these different threads?

I tackle that in the opening pages of the book. It is there in the word: they are all practices or ways of thinking which have the human realm as the centre of their concern – whether culture, literature and the studies of the humanities, or human nature and well-being. And modern humanism involves a sense of morality and meaning that comes from human relationships and human concerns.

I mean ‘freethinking’ in the broadest sense of not taking anything on authority alone – whether that be the authority of religious institutions or political ones. ‘Enquiry’ is linked to that, but it involves asking questions and undertaking intellectual investigations in a more active sense – something many of the humanists did with gusto.

‘Hope’ is a little different. We cannot just be naïvely optimistic, but a humanist does have some sense that we can use our faculties and talents and our abilities to improve the well-being of other people and of other living things, to achieve a better politics, to solve our problems to as large an extent as we can. It was well summed up by Bertrand Russell, who features towards the end of the book precisely for what he said about the need to have hope in ourselves. Today, many people are in despair over the state of the world. But I think that losing hope is an abdication of responsibility and also risks being a self-fulfilling prophecy. We have to have some sense that we are capable of using our best abilities constructively.

Your book focuses primarily on individuals who were humanist in different ways. Was your choice of characters a personal one, or were you influenced by other accounts of humanism?

I was influenced by who I was interested in and who had something new to contribute. I tried to ensure that everybody that features in the book advances the story in some way, or stands for a wider process. I did not want to write a reference book merely listing lots of names, but something that was fun to read.

You use photographs to illustrate some of your main characters. Where did you find them, and why did you decide to add this pictorial element?

I took many of them from picture libraries. I wanted to have images to make it easier on the eye, but I did not want it to be just portraits. I tried to choose images that were a bit different or unexpected. In a few cases, there are contemporary political cartoons of people, rather than portraits, and in other cases, pictures of title pages or manuscripts that illuminate the text in some way.

Did you make any surprising discoveries during the course of your research?

There were a lot of things that were surprising to me, because when I write books, I find out a lot as I go along. I think that is more fun for the reader too, because we are going along together. Some of the characters were more interesting than I expected them to be – for example, Matthew Arnold, who wrote Culture and Anarchy, which I had had on my shelves for years but never read because I thought it would be boring. He is conservative and Victorian sometimes, but his writing is interesting, and he is endearing and enjoyable from a humanist point of view – I warmed to him. Wilhelm von Humboldt is another character who was full of surprises, not least his kinky fantasy life.

Your book discusses the debate Matthew Arnold had with TH Huxley about the relative importance of the humanities and literary studies versus the sciences. In 1959, CP Snow revived this debate with his Rede lecture on the ‘two cultures’. These days, it seems, if anything, too easy for scientists to take pot shots at the humanities for their irrelevance, lack of rigour or stagnation in the morass of literary theory. How far can the literary and scientific approaches to life, or more specifically literary and scientific humanism, be reconciled?

The clue to it is, again, in that idea of human studies. The universe is physical; we are physical beings. Some people would see that as invalidating all of the ‘human studies’ or humanities, as if they are somehow irrelevant because they do not correspond to how the universe is. But human studies are not irrelevant to us, because we are human beings. We are social and cultural by our nature, and so the human realm is enormously interesting to us. It is the sea in which we swim all the time – it is language, culture, communication, society, politics. The two cultures are connected, I think, not contradictory.

You say you like contemplating the universe. This reminds me of Kant’s idea of sublimity: ‘the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’. Is there an argument that the scientific perspective is fundamentally inhuman because its focus is on the very big and the very small, on the objective and not the subjective human experience? Isn’t the human, from the scientific point of view, just a collection of processes or cells or atoms?

Yes, but the paradox is that the science that we do, the ability to visualise and study the very large or the very small, is a human activity. There is no getting away from the human, for us. One of the things that is fascinating about science as a human activity is that it does try to set aside human preconceptions, perspectives, prejudices, and to work from the evidence – and that is a truly impressive thing to do. But even that – working out scientific methods, testing hypotheses, looking for falsifications and evidence – is still a human activity.

At the end of the book, you briefly mention posthumanism and transhumanism. How might the development of technologies like artificial intelligence affect humanism, and what it means to be a human, in the future?

This is a difficult question, because we do not know where we are going and things are moving very fast. We are already closely integrated with our technology, and are likely to be ever more so. Is there a line that we would one day cross, when we would no longer be the same? Have we crossed it already? I do not know the answer to that because it is all developing under our noses. I am wary of simplistic answers as to whether there will always be some human ‘essence’. I really do not know.

Your book was published in March this year, and you have said elsewhere that you spent about six years writing it. Those years were also a very eventful period in Britain. Did the turbulent political atmosphere have an effect on your book?

It was quite dramatic because I started working on it in early 2016, and then Brexit happened, and Trump. Since then, there have been all sorts of further blows to our sense of confidence in human common sense, if you like. I tried to keep reminding myself of what Bertrand Russell and others have said, that the greater the challenge to our sense of hope in ourselves, the more we actually need that hope – and the more we need a sense of faith in ourselves and in our processes, in our better political institutions, legal protections, free press, and the ability to talk openly about issues and to establish effective media of communication between countries. Altogether, we need more of our good qualities rather than just giving up on them.

Bertrand Russell [1872-1970] also experienced growing up in a hopeful time and then having to realise that things would not always simply get better and better. That is not how human history has ever gone. There will always be complications, steps backwards, obstacles and wrong moves, but it is wiser to expect that and not to be naïvely optimistic. And, as always, it is up to us. If things are going to be even a bit better in this world, we are going to have to do it.

Does the humanist have a natural political stance? Or should humanists today subscribe to any particular political views about anything?

No. I do not think there is any inevitable connection with any particular political viewpoint. In the nineteenth century, Humboldt and Mill were classical liberals, but Matthew Arnold, whose views about culture and education had much in common with theirs, was a small ‘c’ conservative. I am more interested in how the humanist dimension works with various political positions.

Where would you put yourself on the political spectrum?

I would say I am a humanist liberal.

Does the humanist today have a moral obligation to be involved in any sort of political campaigning or activism, or can they live a quiet life?

Personally, I live a fairly quiet life – I am not a political activist. That is just me. So I have to say that it is not necessary to be politically active in order to be a humanist! But looking through history, a lot of humanists were politically active, or became so. Bertrand Russell, for example, started as a scholarly logician, mathematician and philosopher, but was politicised by the First World War and decided from then on to write political material as well, and campaign for political causes. Renaissance humanists were often engaged with the politics of their city and their environment. Humanists are often drawn to political activity because it goes with the idea that it is up to us to make the world that we want to have.

You emphasise the importance of freethinking and enquiry to humanism – which leads naturally to the question of how important you think free speech is today, and where you would draw the line. How far should free enquiry go?

I am drawn to the free speech end of that continuum: I think things should be talked about. If we are ever going to say that something should not be talked about, we had better give a very good reason why not. There are certain things that disturb me when I hear them said, but I am not sure that the best method of stopping people from saying them is just to silence them. I would want to ask why people might be saying those things, what that implies about us as a society, and where we should go from there.

Your book is full of references to happiness, human fulfilment, and the need for connections between people. Is writing a way in which you make connections?

There is a relationship with the reader. But part of the nature of writing is that you do not know what everybody who reads it thinks or wants to say back to you. I think that is as it should be. It is nice to hear back from readers, but that is not the primary reason why I write. It is a way of discovering things for myself as I go along, and taking other readers with me. It is like walking along a path together, but without knowing who the readers are – that is part of the appeal. I like the idea that people could make something out of the book that I would never dream of.

A recurring motif in the book is the idea that humanists can, in a sense, live on in their writings after they are dead. Is this also a motivation for you?

No. Most of the things that any individual does gradually fade away out of view after they are dead. Even those we think of as timeless classics – Plato and Aristotle and Protagoras – it is too early to say whether they are all going to endure. They became fragments. There would be an egocentric arrogance in thinking that somehow your words are going to live on. But I do spend a lot of time pottering around in second-hand bookshops and libraries and picking up obscure and forgotten books from a hundred years ago or more. I love the idea of reading something that has not survived in more than a few copies, and yet finding the voice of the author still talking to you.

You talk about hope as an ingredient of humanism. In the very long term, of course, the earth will probably be swallowed by the sun, and the human race may well have died out long before then. Where can humanists find hope, given that, on a cosmic scale, we are, by all appearances, so fundamentally meaningless?

On that scale, I do think we are completely meaningless and forgettable, as is everything to do with this planet and the very fact that we have existed at all. But we have got much more immediate things to worry about, and we could find ourselves disappearing a lot sooner than that. We are still a very young species – dinosaurs were around for an enormously longer time than we have been. Also I do not believe in God, so even if I wanted to find meaning there, that is not an option. Would I be happier if I had this great sense of meaning? No, because to me it would not be a genuine source of meaning. Actually, I find it exhilarating to think about the size of the universe. The fact that we are tiny does not bother me.

Final question: what is your next project?

I have not got one yet. I am having a little interlude to see what might arise next. And even if I did have one, like most writers, I probably would not want to talk about it.

Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope, by Sarah Bakewell, was published on 30 March 2023 by Chatto & Windus.

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Humanists contributed immeasurably to ethical debates in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. Relatively small in number, yet often vocal and articulate, the humanists made their voices heard in a land where moral politics remained dominated by Christianity. There is much to be said about the rise and fall and rise again of one of the movement’s major organisations, Humanists UK, which emerged from the soup of 19^th century counterculture to be constituted as the Union of Ethical Societies in 1898.

But the focus here is upon some of the thinkers and activists whose humanist views informed and contributed to progressive political campaigning in Britain from the 1940s to the 1960s. Most of these people were familiar figures in British humanist and secularist organisations, but some spent most of their time in campaigning for their particular ethical causes. A brief introduction to the activities and concerns of a selection of these people can serve to illustrate the reach of humanist ideas, as well as how these ideas were able with varying degrees of success to influence social policy, moral sensibilities, and even international law.

Sexualities  

A concern with the politics of sexual morality has been a staple of the humanist movement since the 19^th century, with humanists and rationalists frequently locked in combat with religious conservatives. Humanists contributed immeasurably to the struggle to reform laws and attitudes surrounding sex in the 1950s and 1960s, making the medical and legal case for liberalism in sexual culture and in the process providing a younger generation with ammunition to craft social change.

Humanist intellectuals were vocal in support of gay law reform from its earliest beginnings. They provided some of the least equivocal evidence to the Wolfenden Committee in 1954, generally favouring decriminalisation over the age of eighteen and the social acceptance of gay men. Humanists including the philosopher A.J Ayer, the author E.M Forster, the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes (wife of playwright J.B. Priestley) and the sociologist Barbara Wootton, were vocal in their support of the Homosexual Law Reform Society upon its foundation in 1958. By contrast, only a handful of liberal clergy joined and they often expressed reservations.

One of the most intriguing personalities in the liberal intellectual vanguard of the fifties was the Ulster Unionist MP, Harford Montgomery Hyde, who repeatedly spoke in favour of reform in the House of Commons, and for his efforts was deselected by his local party. Hyde, whose political career in an establishment political party with a socially conservative electorate required him to remain discreet about his religious views, described himself in his autobiography as having been both a humanist and a rationalist since the 1920s. Although himself heterosexual, Hyde was a staunch ally to the gay movement and in 1968 published one of the first histories of homosexuality written from a sympathetic perspective.

Humanists were active, too, in early sorties against the oppressive moral codes which surrounded heterosexuality prior to the liberalisations of the later 1960s. Eustace Chesser was a humanist and progressive as well as a psychiatrist and researcher who penned a stream of popular advice manuals on aspects of sexualities from the 1940s onwards, along with works on medical sociology. In 1959, Getting Married, a booklet which Chesser published witn the British Medical Association, resulted in a wave of reactionary opposition. The pamphlet, which suggested that pre- and non-marital sex should be the result of individual choices, was withdrawn and a television appearance by Chesser blocked. Undeterred, Chesser then penned a polemical defence of his arguments which aimed to demolish the ‘outmoded’ theological prohibition of sex before marriage.

Nuclear disarmament

One of the most strenuous contributions of humanist intellectuals to the politics of morality in post-war Britain was, unfortunately, the least successful. The case for unilateral nuclear disarmament was, in my view, morally unanswerable, yet advancing it relied on attempts to influence transnational politics which would in turn prove futile in the face of the Cold War. A network of elite scientists, including the humanist Jacob Bronowski (who had been one of those dispatched by the British government to assess the impact of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and the nuclear scientist Joseph Rotblat, mobilised in the mid-1950s to oppose nuclear weapons. The majority of signatories of the 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto – which opposed nuclear weapons – were humanists. Humanists were well-represented too amongst the membership of the founding executive committee of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in 1957. The CND is perhaps most closely associated with the philosopher Bertrand Russell, a luminary who was widely admired by the public for his unshakable moral convictions and whose bestselling 1927 exposition, Why I am not a Christian, remains in print today.

Barbara Smoker, the campaigner, author and former president of the National Secular Society, formed a link between CND and the leadership of humanist and secularist organisations. She had joined Russell’s short-lived ‘Committee of 100’, a non-violent group campaigning against nuclear weapons, which deployed direct action tactics such as mass demonstrations at locations including American air bases. The idea of the ‘Committee’ was that there would be safety in numbers, as the government would be unwilling to convict so many people at once. Russell’s scheme failed, observed Smoker, when the authorities simply arrested random people, demonstrating that the government was less concerned with justice than he had imagined. When Russell was convicted for his protest activities and obliged to spend two weeks behind bars at the age of ninety, Smoker was amongst his supporters in court. She was also closely involved in the clandestine ‘Spies for Peace’ movement, which worked to reveal and publicise egregious plans by the British state to shelter their elites in secret bunkers while the rest of the population were to be abandoned to perish in the nuclear holocaust.

Human rights

Another committed humanist was H.G Wells, who in 1931 inspired the foundation of the Progressive League, an organisation which aimed to bring together campaigners and thinkers dedicated to social and ethical reform. Motivated by the catastrophic failure of the League of Nations, by the early 1940s, Wells was very concerned with the development of the concept of universal human rights, with their implicit shift from the rights of nations to those of individuals. His efforts stimulated the formation of the Sankey Commission, chaired by the lawyer John Sankey. This resulted in the Sankey Declaration of the Rights of Man (1940), which was issued for a wide readership in paperback and serialised in the Daily Herald by the journalist and humanist campaigner, Peter Richie Calder, under the succinct title: ‘What are We Fighting For?’

Wells’s and Sankey’s endeavours in turn influenced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) – particularly in terms of vocabulary. Wells appears to have been the originator of the phrase ‘freedom of thought, conscience and religion’ which was inherited by the 1950 European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), which carried the underlying idea of the plurality of secular and religious ideologies, the freedom of worship, and the freedom to change and not to have a religion. Noteworthy, too, was the absence in these documents of the notion of enforcing a state religion and the absence of mention of god or gods. The latter was a source of controversy, and religious interests at the 1948 Congress of Europe insisted on the addition of a reference to ‘common heritage of Christian and other spiritual and cultural values.’

The Sankey Commission’s eleven clauses created paradigms for the thirty articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the eighteen articles of the European Convention, and thence to the development of further international agreements. The contribution of humanists to the creation of the human rights movement requires further research, but it seems clear that the chain of innovation can be traced back to the visionary thinking of H.G Wells, who, as bombs rained down on Britain in the early 1940s, foresaw that the concept of the equality of rights for every human being might be the foundation upon which international co-operation between nations could rest.

These individuals were but a few of the leading figures in Britain who campaigned for real-life change to the ethical basis of national and international laws in the mid-twentieth century, leading the charge for progressive reform. Our book explores their efforts and shared humanist outlook.

The Humanist Movement in Modern Britain: A History of Ethicists, Rationalists and Humanists, by Callum Brown, David Nash and Charlie Lynch (2023), is published by Bloomsbury.

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Among the freethinkers of the long nineteenth century, the name of Thomas Paine stands as one of the earliest and most prominent. Although he was in fact a deist, he was reviled as an atheist for the critique of religion in his three-part The Age of Reason (1794, 1795, and 1807). Since then, he has continued to inspire freethinkers into the twenty-first century. Most notably, Christopher Hitchens, one of the ‘Four Horsemen of New Atheism’, described himself as a political ‘Paine-ite’. Hitchens drew on Paine in his atheist bestseller God Is Not Great (2007) and wrote a book about him in 2006 (Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: A Biography), where he devoted a chapter to Paine’s views on religion. In God Is Not Great, Hitchens wrote that The Age of Reason ‘marks almost the first time that frank contempt for organised religion was openly expressed.’

As the journalist George Packer once recounted of Hitchens:

‘[F]or all his radicalism, he was old-fashioned. He once said to me, “I’m a Paine-ite,” meaning Thomas Paine. That sounded right. Christopher was born a couple of centuries too late. He was a figure of the Enlightenment, a coffee-house pamphleteer, a ready duellist, an unreasonable fighter for reason, an émigré from England come to the New World to tell us what the universal words of our Declaration meant, and hold us to them.’

Hitchens, however, differed from Paine in one essential aspect: he did not believe in any kind of god. In his book on Paine, perhaps echoing Richard Dawkins’s view that the case for atheism was incomplete before Darwin, Hitchens wrote that ‘The Age of Reason belongs to the prehistory of the argument, as indeed does deism.’

And then again, here is Hitchens in a 2008 debate with his conservative Christian brother, Peter:

‘You may wish to be a deist, as my heroes Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine were, and you may not wish to abandon the idea that there must be some sort of first or proximate cause or prime mover…but even if you can get yourself to that position…all your work is still ahead of you. To go from being a deist to a theist, in other words, someone who says god cares about you, knows who you are, minds what you do, answers your prayers, cares which bits of your penis or clitoris you saw away or have sawn away for you, minds who you go to bed with and in what way, minds what holy days you observe, minds what you eat, minds what positions you use for pleasure—all your work is still ahead of you, and lots of luck.’

Here, he expresses his debt to deist heroes of the past, while almost seeming to claim deism on the atheist side. Deism is one thing, he seems to say, but theism is an entirely different, and much more ludicrous, proposition.

This article will look more deeply into some of these connections between two of the most renowned freethinkers of their time. I hope to show that, while the deist/atheist difference is a significant one, the similarities between the two men, ideologically and stylistically, are much more important and interesting.

First, some context. In Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (2014), Matthew Stewart argues that the U.S. was built by radical, godless (or nearly godless) men and that its founding ideals were inspired by ‘ancient, pagan, and continental ideas’ more than anything else.

In Stewart’s view,

‘[ D]eism is in fact functionally indistinguishable from what we would now call ‘pantheism’; and pantheism is really just a pretty word for atheism. While deism could often be associated with moderation in politics, it served principally to advance a system of thought that was revolutionary in its essence and effects. This essentially atheistic and revolutionary aspect of deism…is central to any credible explanation of the revolutionary dimension of the American Revolution. In a word, America’s founders were philosophical radicals.’

This provocative view explains my contention that the difference between deism and atheism is relatively unimportant when comparing Hitchens and Paine. It also explains why Hitchens could seemingly dismiss Paine’s deism as belonging to ‘the prehistory of the argument’ while frequently citing him as a freethinking hero.

With this context in mind, I shall now consider the most interesting affinities between the writing and thinking of Hitchens and Paine.

First, at the deepest level, both men saw religion and politics as intertwined. For Hitchens, god was not just a failed hypothesis, but the very essence of the totalitarian. This is why he often called himself an ‘anti-theist’ rather than an atheist. As he wrote in Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001), ‘I am not even so much an atheist as an antitheist…[I do not wish] to live…under a cradle-to-grave divine supervision.’ He almost seems to abandon the title of ‘atheist’ entirely to differentiate himself from those non-believers who wished there was a god.

Or, as he put it in the debate with his brother:

‘[Religion] is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who can…subject you to a total surveillance around the clock, every waking and sleeping minute of your life. I say “of your life”—before you’re born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you’re dead. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate? … But at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea!’

Paine also believed in the existence of a connection between the political and the religious. In a letter to the mayor of Philadelphia in 1806, he wrote that his political project had been ‘to rescue man from tyranny and false systems and false principles of government, and enable him to be free.’ In his works on religion, he wrote, he had always desired ‘to impress on [people] the great principles of divine morality, justice, mercy, and a benevolent disposition to all men and to all creatures; and to excite in him a spirit of trust, confidence, and consolation in his creator, unshackled by the fable and fiction of books, by whatever invented name they may be called.’

Paine’s interest in religion was thus as earthly as his interest in politics: in both spheres, he wanted to see tyranny overthrown and reason, justice, and freedom established. As he put it in Rights of Man (1791), his defence of the French Revolution and revolution in general, ‘my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.’ For both Paine and Hitchens, freedom in religion and freedom in politics are aspects of the same principle.

Second, Paine and Hitchens gloried in the wonders of science. In a (more or less) godless universe, they believed that the beauty of scientific discovery was far superior to anything to be found in primitive mythology. Out with the Bible and in with Hubble, you might say. Indeed, Hitchens did pretty much say this, in a debate with Pastor Douglas Wilson. This little speech was once put to epic music and intercut with pictures by an enthusiastic YouTuber:

‘If you want to be awe-inspired, ladies and gentlemen, let me say, let me just tell you, that those of us who do not believe that we are divinely created, let alone divinely supervised, are not immune to the idea of awe and beauty and the transcendent. Let me invite you to look for a moment at the pictures taken by the Hubble telescope, some of you may have done it… if you haven’t done it now…do it soon. The extraordinary revelations of swirling yet somehow beautiful new galaxies in colour and depth and majesty, like nothing I think the human eye has ever seen. Turn away from that if you wish and gaze at a burning bush in an illiterate desert part of the Middle East and say that’s where revelation comes from. I don’t believe you’d be able to do it.’

In The Age of Reason, Paine wrote that

‘natural philosophy, mathematical and mechanical science, are a continual source of tranquil pleasure, and in spite of the gloomy dogmas of priests and of superstition, the study of these things is the true theology; it teaches man to know and admire the Creator, for the principles of science are in the creation, and are unchangeable and of divine origin.’

Admittedly, Paine invokes the divine principle. Nevertheless, the high rhetoric and the evocation of the exaltedness of science, especially as set against the dogmas of organised religion, are quite striking in their similarity to Hitchens’s tone in the previous extract.

Third, both Paine and Hitchens use a similar method in their anti-religion works: close reading. Several chapters in God Is Not Great are given over to close analysis of religious texts. In that book, Hitchens even argues, citing Paine, that close reading was one of the ways in which, before Darwin and Einstein and all the other discoveries of modern science, ordinary people could see through the lies of religion:

‘Long before modern inquiry and painstaking translation and excavation had helped enlighten us, it was well within the compass of a thinking person to see that the “revelation” at Sinai and the rest of the Pentateuch was an ill-carpentered fiction, bolted into place well after the non-events that it fails to describe convincingly or even plausibly. Intelligent schoolchildren have been upsetting their teachers with innocent but unanswerable questions ever since Bible study was instituted. The self-taught Thomas Paine has never been refuted since he wrote, while suffering dire persecution by French Jacobin anti-religionists, “…to show that these books are spurious, and that Moses is not the author of them; and still further, that they were not written in the time of Moses, nor till several hundred years afterwards, that they are an attempted history of the life of Moses, and of the times in which he is said to have lived; and also of the times prior thereto, written by some very ignorant and stupid pretenders several hundred years after the death of Moses; as men now write histories of things that happened, or are supposed to have happened, several hundred or several thousand years ago.”’

Indeed, The Age of Reason employs close reading extensively, for instance when Paine scrutinises the Book of Joshua to conclude that it was written by later authors, not Joshua himself. Is it too much to speculate that Paine’s close readings of the Old and New Testaments one after the other in The Age of Reason are the direct ancestors of Hitchens’ similar structure in God Is Not Great? This could be so even though Hitchens’ aim is much wider: he goes on to critique Islam, Mormonism, and Buddhism.

There is also a similarity in the language employed by Hitchens and Paine on religion – and on everything else. They were both plain-spoken, fearlessly rude men of considerable rhetorical prowess. References to the true deity and revulsion at atheism aside, this passage from The Age of Reason sounds positively Hitchensian:

‘Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid, or produces only atheists and fanatics.’

The reference to Christianity producing atheists is an interesting aspect of Paine’s theology: he sought to defend what he saw as the true faith from anti-religious radicals. Indeed, The Age of Reason was written in part against what he saw as the depraved violence and persecution of the secular Jacobins. Still, and in line with Matthew Stewart, I would place Paine closer to atheism than he would have been comfortable with. Both he and Hitchens were, in any case, viscerally opposed to what they saw as the pernicious political, social and moral effects of organised religion. Perhaps we can follow Hitchens and dispense with the deism-atheism taxonomy by focusing on anti-theism instead; I think Paine could certainly be counted under this heading.

Finally, it is worth noting that both Hitchens and Paine adored America. For Hitchens, as he wrote in his biography of Thomas Jefferson, the American Revolution was the only one that could still inspire. In the introduction to his last collection of essays, Arguably (2011), he wrote that the American example of ‘the secular republic with the separation of powers is still the approximate model, whether acknowledged or not, of several democratic revolutions that are in progress or impending.’ Similarly, in his famous pamphlet calling for revolution against the British, Paine wrote that ‘the cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.’

For Paine, the founding of the US represented a world-historical shift away from theocratic tyranny toward secular democracy. Hitchens believed this too. Indeed, this is one of the central reasons he supported the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars: he saw them as instances of America’s exporting radical, secular revolutionary democracy around the world, echoing Paine’s desire for the emergence of a revolutionary axis to overthrow the ancien régime in all nations in the 18th century.

Incidentally, or not so incidentally, Hitchens dedicated his book on Paine to Jalal Talabani, ‘first elected president of the Republic of Iraq; sworn foe of fascism and theocracy; leader of a national revolution and a people’s army. In the hope that his long struggle will be successful, and will inspire emulation.’ This may be a nod to Paine’s dedication of Part One of Rights of Man to George Washington:

‘I present you a small treatise in defence of those principles of freedom which your exemplary virtue hath so eminently contributed to establish. That the Rights of Man may become as universal as your benevolence can wish, and that you may enjoy the happiness of seeing the New World regenerate the Old…’

The above survey is only an introduction to the many resemblances between Paine and Hitchens. However, it raises some further questions.

First, is Hitchens’ dismissal of Paine-ite deism to ‘the prehistory of the argument’ fair? Is it even consistent with many of his own anti-religion arguments? To what extent is New Atheism prefigured in the pro-science, anti-religion arguments of Paine? Does the deism/atheism divide matter more than I have suggested, both in general and regarding Hitchens and Paine in particular? Is this style of anti-religion popular in 2022? To go even further: if Paineite anti-religion is a founding idea of modernity, is atheism redundant?

These questions deserve further consideration. One thing, however, is clear: while Paine is certainly not, and indeed is very far from, the only influence on contemporary non-believers in general and Hitchens in particular, his life and work stand as a singularly powerful testament to freethinking. Paine is very much a living symbol of secular resistance to religion.

As Paine’s political enemy John Adams, the second US President, proposed – not meaning it kindly – the era of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment revolutions could appropriately be labelled ‘the Age of Paine.’ Like the French Revolution, perhaps it is ‘too early to say’ what the consequences of the Age of Paine will be. This is certainly true, at least, when it comes to contemporary unbelief – and who knows what influence Hitchens himself will go on to exert?

The post Christopher Hitchens and the long afterlife of Thomas Paine appeared first on The Freethinker.

I was recently interviewed by Christoph De Spiegeleer via Zoom about the history of freethought and open enquiry and their future, both in Britain and around the world. De Spiegeleer is a Research Fellow at Liberas, a heritage and research centre for the history of the liberal movement and the freedom ideal in Ghent, Belgium.

The full audio recording of the interview (in English), with a written introduction (in Dutch), is available on Liberas’ website; it can also be accessed on YouTube. Below is an edited and abridged version.

We discuss the relationship between freethought, secularism and humanism, and their namesake organisations in the UK; why secularist issues like disestablishment still matter; how the religious mentality can recur in many guises; and why satire and irreverence are vital to the open society.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Christoph De Spiegeleer:   How does one become the editor of the Freethinker today?

Emma Park:      There are two main magazines of freethought in Britain. One is the Freethinker and the other is the New Humanist. The NH was founded not long after us (in 1885). The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by G. W. Foote, who would go on to be the second president of the National Secular Society. From that perspective, it has long been closely associated with the NSS. But it has always been technically independent because it is published and mainly funded by an independent company, Secular Society Limited. It went online in 2014, and that was simply because it was too expensive to stay in print.

I am now trying to find ways of making the Freethinker relevant in the third decade of the 21st century. It is important for the magazine to be independent, both of the National Secular Society and Humanists UK, but also to be a voice for secularists, humanists and those of a liberal, non-religious disposition in general. It is necessary to rethink what freethought means, why it matters, and what the challenges are. Even in the 19th century, religion was only one issue among many of relevance to freethinkers; today that is still true.

De Spiegeleer:     How do you see the relationship between the Freethinker today and explicit atheism and republicanism?

Park:    The Freethinker is a freethought magazine. We are more or less atheist and republican. ‘Freethought’ means the stance whereby you question everything. You start from a position of no knowledge and you use the tools you have, of reason, observation, logic, reflection, critical enquiry and the scientific method, where appropriate. The freethinking attitude is naturally to question religious superstition and authority, as well as all other forms of dogma and authoritarianism.

The Freethinker is atheist or strongly agnostic in that its starting point is that there is no evidence for any god. Is it republican? Certainly as a matter of principle. It questions the authority of the ancient, hierarchical system of the monarchy, which seems totally irrelevant to today’s world and out of keeping with the idea that all people are equal.

On the other hand, the question of what to do about the monarchy touches on the distinction between cultural liberalism and political liberalism.

You can have the culture and the principle that having a monarchy is a bad idea, but then the question is how to actually abolish it. When is the right time to do so? What system should it be replaced by? That is a political issue. As a magazine, we do not take a stance on the specific practicalities of how this should be done, because it is an incredibly complicated question – but we would certainly urge contributors to debate it. We have also published a cartoon satirising the current state of Britain’s monarchy.

De Spiegeleer:     From the beginning, G.W. Foote used satire and cartoons to ridicule Christian beliefs. He actively courted outrage. Is this still an important legacy for the Freethinker today? Do you still find it important to use cartoons and satire to criticise religious beliefs?

Park:    Satire and and cartoons are still important. Irreverence matters, because in order to have truly free thought and speech, you have to be able to laugh. To laugh at authority is a way of questioning it. If you cannot laugh at authority, it means you accept it.

What form that satire and those cartoons should take changes with the times. Foote conceived the Freethinker from the perspective of the working class man who was criticising the hierarchy of state religion, which was imposed from the top down on people like him. For instance, there is one, called ‘Moses Getting a Back View’, which is a sketch of Moses looking at the seat of God’s trousers. Today the humour in this cartoon would probably seem crude, especially since these cartoons of Old Testament characters often seem to have an antisemitic edge in the way they depict Jewish people, or at least could be interpreted that way.

Nevertheless, I think there is still a place for satirical cartoons. The magazine that has arguably done the most to demonstrate this in Europe is Charlie Hebdo. It has an important role to play in the broader European culture of satire and the criticism of religion.

We cannot do what Charlie Hebdo does because we do not have the resources. Our approach is also a little gentler and less caustic. However, as far as circumstances allow, we do commission satirical and irreverent cartoons. Our main cartoonist at present is Paul Fitzgerald, aka Polyp, who describes himself as a ‘radical cartoonist’. He has drawn cartoons for us about religion, Rushdie, the culture wars and more. We also recently commissioned the Jesus and Mo cartoonist to create a special edition of his cartoon strip on the theme of civil liberties.

Again, it is a question of taste, and of putting the cartoon into a context which is relevant. I would  not want to use cartoons to gratuitously attack religions or to perpetuate stereotypes or generalisations, but rather to make a specific point. 

De Spiegeleer:     Is the disestablishment of the Church of England still a major issue for the secularist movement in the UK? And what is the role and the position of the Freethinker in this regard?

Park:    Yes, disestablishment is still very important.

Historically, the term ‘freethinker’ comes into the English language in about the late 17th or early 18th century (see the Wikipedia entry for an overview). At that time it was used for people who were not necessarily atheists – because that was still very much a term of abuse and incrimination – but people who questioned the established church. There is also a long tradition of independent artisans in parts of the UK, for instance in Northampton (later Bradlaugh’s constituency), who valued self-reliance above state interference.

In the English Civil War of the 1640s, all sorts of radical sects arose who were not necessarily atheists, but who questioned the authority of the Anglican church – the Ranters, the Diggers, the Levellers, and so on. You can see a rebellious, even iconoclastic criticism of religion developing during this period, all the way up to someone like Thomas Paine in the late 18th and early 19th century, whose Age of Reason attacked what he called ‘priestcraft’. Paine was a deist, not an atheist, but he certainly opposed established religion.

Resistance to established religion is a resistance to a religious and political hierarchy. It is resistance to being told what to think. It is part of the idea of liberty, which has a very strong tradition in Britain. One of the key things the Freethinker aims to do is to champion liberty, because I think we in Britain have lost sight of its importance in the last six or seven years. ‘Liberty’ has become a dirty word, contaminated on the political left and right by all the things that have happened. But I think it really, really matters.

To return to disestablishment, as long as you have an established church, you have the state saying that religion is not only a part of the national identity, it is a part of the constitution. The monarch is the head of the Church as well as the head of state. It is very strange to imply that God is somehow involved in the monarchy – or that bishops should be in the House of Lords. The only other country in the world that has clerics in its legislature is Iran.

Disestablishment is essential to secularism, to freethought, to having a society in which people really are able to think and act for themselves without being pushed in a certain direction, as tends to happen when religious organisations are given political power.

According to the 2021 census, less than half the population are Christian, and 37.2 per cent have no religion. Yet religion is part of the fabric of public life in Britain in a way which clashes with the lack of religion in the lives of many of its inhabitants.

De Spiegeleer:     I am wondering whether there is a difference between an organisation like the National Secular Society and Humanists UK when approaching the role of religion in British public life. Do you see a difference between, say, a humanist, a secularist and a freethinker when they approach this important issue or not?

Park:    Yes, there is a difference. I should say, in the interests of transparency, that I am at the moment a member of the National Secular Society, but not of Humanists UK. And having done podcasts for the NSS, I know a little more about it than HUK. But I should stress that I cannot speak for either organisation – the Freethinker is independent of both. That is deliberate, because we say things that neither the NSS nor HUK would necessarily want to say or would agree with.

The NSS is a political campaign group that aims to challenge religious privilege. Its aims are narrow, and it is much smaller than HUK. But their histories are intertwined.

HUK was founded in 1896, not long after the NSS (1866), as the Union of Ethical Societies. HUK today covers a lot of the same ground as the NSS, even if they view secularism as a sub-category of humanism. I recently interviewed Andrew Copson, who is the president of Humanists International and the Chief Executive of Humanists UK. From what I gather, they are trying to define humanism, to foster it as a cultural and political organisation, and to provide the services I referred to (as a substitute for religious services of a similar kind). They are a charity, unlike the NSS, because they have broader aims, and they publish books about humanism as well. They also provide the secretariat to the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group.

I know many people who are supporters both of HUK and the NSS. The organisations have had their differences, which is why they do not cooperate, unfortunately, as much as they ought to on these issues.

I would probably consider myself a secular humanist if I knew what humanism was. Humanism is a difficult term and it means different things to different people. HUK have put together a Humanist Heritage website in which they include many people from the past who would not necessarily have described themselves as humanist. In this sense, ‘humanist’ is used as a heuristic label. But HUK also uses ‘humanist’ of their own organisation, which has very specific political and campaign ends, as well as a distinctive ethical approach. I question whether these different uses of ‘humanist’ are always consistent.

The appeal of freethought is that it is not a philosophy, but just a starting point. Questions of how to live, how to behave, what to think, what one’s culture should be, are difficult and complicated, and, I would argue, cannot easily be answered by one ethical system.

Freethought is a critical stance. It is individualist, not collectivist: it treats the individual as an end, not a means. In many religious and political ideologies, the individual is treated to some extent as a means to a greater end – communism is an extreme example. In my view, the ability to experience life, culture and the world, and to flourish, is something that can only be done at the level of the individual human being. This approach draws on a humanistic tradition which goes back to the classical world via the Renaissance.

The Freethinker aims to encourage a culture in which people can talk rationally about difficult issues. Speaking and thinking freely are acquired skills, like speaking a language – use it or lose it. Today, the Freethinker aims to step back from the political-cultural polarisation of the ‘culture wars’ and to criticise everything. As a result, we have ended up exploring controversial political topics from perspectives which would doubtless be unpopular to one side or other, or both. But we are trying to foster a liberal culture, in which people can discuss controversial issues rationally and without fear, anger or prejudice.

De Spiegeleer:     What are the guidelines that everybody should respect in order to have a civilised culture of free speech in the Freethinker?

Park:    This question is fundamentally about deciding what you as a magazine mean by free speech: what you want your culture to be, what you would and would not permit. The approach we adopt is to permit more or less everything to be discussed that can be discussed within the limits of English law and within the spirit of the Freethinker. We allow the offensive, but draw the line at the grossly offensive – which is a matter of judgement and taste in the circumstances. But this is something that we have to keep thinking about because things can change so rapidly. With the aid of the Secular Society board, I have put together Community Guidelines for comments: these also apply to our contributors.

Speech is not just about what you say, but how you say it. The Freethinker encourages clarity, objectivity, logic and, as far as possible, intellectual honesty. In our guidelines for contributors, we also discourage punditry, pontification and rants.

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Introduction

Bradlaugh and Holyoake were the two men under whose leadership the Secularist movement was created and shaped. But their reputations, in their lifetimes and since, have suffered mixed fortunes. In this article I shall reassess their historical importance more generally as radicals and as freethinkers. I shall first compare them as leaders of the Secularist movement, and then examine how changing historical perspectives have shaped their posthumous reputations.

Contrasting reputations

Holyoake was the older of the two men, born in 1817. He also lived longer, dying in 1906 – and this is important. Bradlaugh was half a generation younger, born in 1833 and dying at the relatively young age of 57 in 1891. Bradlaugh died when the achievements of his prime years were still fresh in the memory of friends and foes alike. Holyoake died when many of his achievements were half-forgotten, having achieved ‘grand old man’ status. Kind things might be said about him, but he had outlived his usefulness.

When I first studied these men in the 1960s, Bradlaugh was the better-known of the two, largely on account of his struggle to take the Oath of Allegiance when elected to the House of Commons in 1880, which had recently been given scholarly treatment by Walter Arnstein in The Bradlaugh Case (1965). Bradlaugh was also respected and revered as the founding President of the National Secular Society, the centenary of which in 1966 was celebrated by the then-President, David Tribe, in his 100 Years of Freethought (1967), to be followed by his adulatory biography, President Charles Bradlaugh MP (1971). It seemed like heresy within the freethought movement to question the greatness of this undoubtedly great man.

Holyoake, by contrast, was recalled – if at all – through his association with the Co-operative movement, as its much-published historian. The headquarters of the Co-operative Union in Manchester were in Holyoake House; I recall, as a child, that my junior school near the local co-op store was next to a street called Holyoake Terrace. What was known of his freethought past came through footnote references to his first two-volume autobiography, Sixty Years of an Agitator’s Life (1892), followed by his second, even more self-justifying account, Bygones Worth Remembering (1905), many of which were not.

Both men left daughters to defend their reputations; both men left copious archives which I have catalogued; and both men were given friendly biographies within a few years of their deaths – both of which were to some extent written to defend their subject against the actions and views of the other. As an ‘outsider’ to the movement, little did I realise that, when I set out to rediscover ‘George Jacob Holyoake and the Origins of the Secularist Movement’ in 1965, I was entering a polemical minefield as well as a fascinating field of historical study, little-known in the wider world of historical scholarship. Over the next few years I was to receive nothing but kindness and generous help from Bill McIlroy, then secretary of the National Secular Society, and from Nicolas Walter of the Rationalist Press Association, as I proceeded to study first Holyoake and then Bradlaugh.

George Jacob Holyoake (1817-1906)

I. The young Owenite lecturer and educator

Holyoake was born in Birmingham, the son of a skilled workman, and (apart from Sunday School) was educated as a young man at the Birmingham Mechanics’ Institute, where he experienced strong Unitarian influences. He also encountered the ideas of Robert Owen and became a lecturer for the Owenite Association of All Classes of All Nations. The typically sweeping title of this Owenite organisation was also its manifesto. Owenism introduced the young Holyoake to a new moral world of co-operation beyond the narrowing confines of class. Birmingham in the 1830s was a centre of radical political activity, but under the leadership of men like Thomas Attwood and Joseph Sturge it was a radicalism that sought to be a movement of all classes, bridging the gap between working-class and middle-class reformers.

Moderation and a belief that the path to social and political advancement lay through reason and education was at the heart of Holyoake’s early experiences. He was an educator. Three of his early publications in the 1840s can be seen as embodying the trivium of the classical curriculum: Grammar (The Handbook of Grammar), Logic (A Logic of Facts) and Rhetoric (Rudiments of Public Speaking and Debate). He also published Mathematics no mystery; or the Beauties of Euclid. His preference for the title of his later autobiography was Sixty Years of an Educator’s Life, but his publisher (T. Fisher Unwin) thought ‘agitator’ would make the book more saleable.

II. The path to atheism

Little of this moderation was immediately apparent. An attack on the Owenite lecturing structure in 1841, orchestrated by the Bishop of Exeter in the House of Lords, led to the ‘social missionary’ (i.e. Owenite lecturer) in Bristol, Charles Southwell, being prosecuted and imprisoned for blasphemy on account of an attack on the Bible (which he called the ‘Jew Book’) in his unofficial weekly periodical, the Oracle of Reason. Holyoake stepped forward to edit the paper, as much to champion freedom of speech as to maintain Southwell’s extreme views.

Holyoake’s Owenite rejection of Christian theology became embittered by events over the next few years. He was himself prosecuted for blasphemy following a flippant reply to a question about the place of religion in an Owenite community, in which he said the people were too poor to have a God, and he declared himself to be without any religion at all. While he was in gaol for this comment, his elder daughter died.

His rejection of religion was partly intellectual, but it was enhanced by Christian bigotry, hypocrisy and what he described as ‘persecution’. Holyoake was a stubborn man and never wavered from his rejection of religion. Over the years, however, his range of acquaintances and experiences widened; and while the memory of his early treatment at the hands of Christians never faded, some of the bitterness did, and the ‘all classes of all nations’ side to his outlook reasserted itself. Holyoake was a born moderate, yet however accommodating he became in later life towards those with whom he disagreed, and however keen he might have seemed to compromise with the world, he never renounced his atheism. The world eventually had to accept him on his own terms. That he was eventually accepted was as much a sign of the changing times as of the changing Holyoake: he was on the right side of progress.

III. The leader of freethought

Following his imprisonment he enjoyed his reputation, lecturing as a ‘martyr’ to the cause of freethought, but it rapidly became apparent that his forte was writing and organisation. He was not a good public speaker. Having a weak high-pitched voice, he was no orator. His words were stilettos not broadswords, and his witty pinpricks, aimed sometimes as much at rival freethinkers as at the enemies of freethought, irritated many.

His first achievement as an organiser was to gather up the remnants of Owenite branches and bring them together in an organisation to promote freedom of expression and the philosophy of Rationalism, by which he meant Owenism shorn of its discredited communitarian ideas. Out of this grew his two major contributions to radical organisation: the promotion of freethought as an intellectual and civil rights movement, renamed ‘Secularism’, in 1851; and the encouragement of economic co-operation among both producers and consumers, which led to his increasing identification with the ‘Rochdale Pioneers’ (whose history, Self Help by the People, he published in 1858) and the nascent co-operative movement.

IV. Secularism and the Reasoner

This activity was maintained through publication, chiefly a weekly periodical entitled the Reasoner, which he edited from 1846 until 1861. The manifesto issued in the very first number of this octavo periodical remained at its core throughout: ‘Communistic in Social Economy – Utilitarian in Morals – Republican in Politics – and Anti-theological in Religion’. By ‘Communistic’ he meant Owenite Socialism, but with co-operation in the community rather than co-operation in communities; by ‘Utilitarian’, he meant the moral philosophy of Jeremy Bentham as developed by John Stuart Mill, taking the promotion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number as the measure of an ethical life; by ‘Republican’ he meant democratic government of the people, for the people, by the people; and by ‘Anti-theological’ he meant an intellectual rejection of all supernatural explanations of the natural world.

V. Radical politics

Although much of his work in both Secularism and Co-operation grew from his Owenite roots, Holyoake was also active in the wider radical political movement: Chartism at home and republicanism abroad. His emphasis varied according to circumstances, with politics occupying much of his time around 1848 and again in the later 1850s.

During the 1840s he was a Chartist, supporting the democratic movement for the extension of the franchise to all men, but the mainstream National Charter Association led by Feargus O’Connor was not to his taste. O’Connor’s demagoguery and readiness to use the threat of violence were incompatible with Holyoake’s rational and intellectual approach, which favoured building bridges with moderate reformers rather than alienating them. Was this an unprincipled urge to compromise, or strategically sensible? His opponents within the radical and freethought movements thought the former, and detected in Holyoake too great a readiness to be flattered by the company of reformers of a higher social class. One might suggest that he thought himself the better of his equals and the equal of his betters.

VI. Moderating influences

This became clear as Chartism declined after the failure of the Third Petition in 1848. In association with three of the six authors of the original Charter in 1838 (James Watson, Henry Hetherington and Richard Moore) Holyoake was a founder-member of the People’s Charter Union and co-editor with the Mazzinian republican, William James Linton, of a short-lived Chartist newspaper, the Cause of the People. This development was metropolitan in origin and nature, and opposed to the O’Connorite National Charter Association and Northern Star, which drew on nationwide support, especially in the manufacturing districts of the North.

Holyoake undertook provincial lecture tours, mainly at the invitation of former Owenites whom he was organising into what became Secularism after 1851. However, by 1850 he had in fact become a London-based publisher and journalist, with increasing connections to the metropolitan intellectual radicalism of William Henry Ashurst, Robert Owen’s solicitor, whose home at Muswell Hill was a centre of Mazzinian activity; and of W. J. Fox of the Unitarian and Rationalist South Place Chapel. It was here that the radical intelligentsia worshipped – including John Stuart Mill and Professor Frank Newman, brother of the later Cardinal. Collet Dobson Collet, a leading member of the People’s Charter Union, was choirmaster at South Place.

These people and their connections had an undoubted influence on Holyoake; they also helped fund his activities and supplied material for his weekly Reasoner. He in turn wrote for the Leader, a weekly middle-class periodical which ran throughout the 1850s, edited by Thornton Hunt, son of the radical poet, Leigh Hunt.

As Holyoake faced up to the failures of the politics of the 1830s and 1840s and the decline of Owenism and Chartism, he became more compromising and expedient in his strategy, whilst never abandoning his ultimate ideals. But many fellow Chartists and increasing numbers of freethinkers criticised his approach, which they saw as weak and ineffective.

Holyoake collaborated with middle-class and parliamentary radicals, including Richard Cobden and John Bright, in the continuing movement to extend the franchise, repeal the newspaper stamp and advertisement duties – the so-called ‘taxes on knowledge’ – and achieve public secular elementary education. This experience convinced him that this was the way to achieve progress. In addition, through the emerging co-operative movement he learnt he could even work with Christian Socialists. So the philosophy of Secularism evolved, taking its name from the Secular Education movement. As the Reasoner proclaimed at the beginning of 1853: ‘Secularism is the province of the real, the known, the useful, and the affirmative. It is the practical side of scepticism.’ He continued to believe that religious doctrines and theologies were in error, but saw no reason for them to be a bar to his working with people of all faiths and none to achieve practical, secular reforms.

VII. The growth of Secularism in the 1850s

This new approach was not without its critics. However, it began well when attacks by Christian lecturers gave Secularism publicity and brought in wider audiences. For six nights in January and February 1853, Holyoake debated in London with a Congregationalist lecturer, Brewin Grant, the question, ‘What advantages would accrue to mankind generally, and the working classes in particular, by the removal of Christianity, and the substitution of Secularism in its place?’ The event was so successful that it was repeated in Glasgow in February 1854. There the question was, ‘Is Secularism inconsistent with reason and the moral sense, and condemned by experience?’ The circulation of the Reasoner doubled, peaking at around 5,000. The word ‘Secularist’ in Holyoake’s sense entered the English language, and was used in the official Report of the 1851 Census of Religious Worship, published in 1853. In this Report, the masses of non-church-goers were described as ‘unconscious Secularists’, a phrase which Holyoake dismissed as an oxymoron: for him, Secularism was a conscious intellectual choice.

VIII. Faltering leadership

But as fickle public attention switched to other matters, notably the Crimean War, which divided radical opinion, the wider interest in Secularism began to fade and numbers fell. Furthermore, Holyoake was caught up with other concerns, such as the continental struggle for freedom following the defeat of the European Revolutions of 1848-9. These matters consumed an increasing amount of his time, until by 1860 he was almost wholly occupied as acting secretary for the Garibaldi Committee, which organised a volunteer legion to fight with Garibaldi in the liberation of Italy from Austrian rule. As Holyoake’s leadership of Secularism faltered, so his critics became more vocal. The movement to revive the former Owenite branches, which he had started, had grown in areas of former Owenite strength in the textile areas of Lancashire, Cheshire, Yorkshire and the East Midlands. There were over thirty localities reporting societies, and lectures taking place in as many more again, but Holyoake’s leadership was lacking in vigour and popular appeal. He was operating a pressure group for reform; they wanted to fight a campaign.

Enter Charles Bradlaugh

Meanwhile, in the East End of London, an unknown youth was beginning to attract attention. A hostile Christian paper described him in 1850 as:

‘an overgrown boy of seventeen, with such an uninformed mind, that it is really amusing to see him sometimes stammering and spluttering on in his own ignorant eloquence, making the most ludicrous mistakes, making all history to suit his private convenience, and often calling yea nay and nay yea, when it will suit his purpose.’

At the end of the decade, following an erudite lecture on ‘Has man a soul?’ at Sheffield, the local Secular Society secretary reported of this same youth:

‘he stands 6 feet 1, is about 25 years of age & has done terrible execution with both the Bible & the Saints. Ministers of religion … have been so many play things in his hands, he takes no notes & the Sledge Hammer falls heavily sharpened with wit & tempered with eloquence.’

This was Charles Bradlaugh.

Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891)

I. Early years

Bradlaugh was born in East London in 1833 to lower-middle class parents. He had little formal education and learnt his freethought on the street corners of London. When he left home, he went to lodge with the freethinker Eliza Sharples, relict of the freethought republican publisher and prisoner, Richard Carlile, and their daughters, Hypatia and Theophila. After army service in Ireland, he worked as a solicitor’s clerk. Though never articled, over the years, through extensive reading, he acquired a considerable knowledge of the law. This, when allied to his debating powers, made him a formidable figure in the law courts.

Bradlaugh rapidly became a leader in the Secularist movement, giving new strength to those who found Holyoake weak and ineffective. In 1861 Sheffield invited him to become junior editor of a new paper, the National Reformer. After an interlude of three years from 1863, during which time the editor was John Watts of Bristol, Bradlaugh assumed full control of the paper in 1866, transforming it into a high-class 16-page 2d. review and doubling its circulation in five years to around 6,000.

II. The National Secular Society

In 1866, Bradlaugh also made himself the indispensable founder-president of the National Secular Society. Holyoake had spent years trying to build up the movement nationally as a federation of independent local societies, but failed to establish any stable national organisation. Bradlaugh and Charles Watts cut the Gordian knot in 1866, announcing the formation of a new society, the National Secular Society, with themselves as temporary president and secretary respectively, and promising to call a Conference as soon as 1000 members had been enrolled. Local Societies were subsequently allowed to form branches and enrol their members at a reduced fee.

A few local societies remained wholly independent, but most simply became branches of the NSS. The two most notable exceptions were Leicester and Huddersfield, both societies with strong Owenite roots and a continuing loyalty to Holyoake. For the most part Holyoake was sidelined, confined to sniping from the wings when the occasion presented itself. There were three reasons for this. First, the temperamental differences between the two men; second, intellectual differences over the nature of Secularism and Holyoake’s dismay at seeing his creation bent to the new man’s will; and third, I suspect, Holyoake’s outright jealousy at Bradlaugh’s success.

Bradlaugh and Holyoake compared

The two men were very different. In stature, Bradlaugh was a giant of a man; Holyoake merely average in height and of slight build. Bradlaugh had the loud voice necessary for controlling a large crowd, especially out of doors; Holyoake’s weak voice was not suited to such oratory. Bradlaugh was confident in his opinions, believing himself (usually correctly) to be right; Holyoake appeared more considered, temporising, even evasive, and willing to trim according to changing circumstances over time. Bradlaugh could be ruthless; Holyoake could be irritating.

III. Early setbacks

In the early 1870s, Bradlaugh’s movement was in danger of slipping backwards. He was increasingly involved in politics, and also had personal and financial problems. In 1871 he declined to be nominated as NSS president, and Watts similarly withdrew as secretary.  Bradlaugh’s successor, the aristocratic radical Arthur Trevelyan, was no substitute. The NSS became practically defunct, with Bradlaugh and Watts keeping the movement going through their lectures and the National Reformer.

IV. Enter Annie Besant (1847-1933)

A revival began when Watts and Bradlaugh resumed office in 1874, with the latter now totally in control. The opportunity to demonstrate this came in 1876 when a publication advocating birth control by the American, Dr Charles Knowlton, of which Watts was nominally the publisher, was prosecuted. Watts’s wife Kate, the daughter of a Nottingham freethinker, was the ‘leading lady’ in the NSS at that time (Bradlaugh was already separated from his alcoholic wife, who died in 1877). Watts pleaded guilty and both he and Kate were driven out of the movement by Bradlaugh, and a relative newcomer to Freethought, Mrs Annie Besant, took Kate’s place. Annie was the young estranged wife of a clergyman, with a will and energy to match those of Bradlaugh himself. Kate Watts was not the only woman to feel pushed out: the same was true of Bradlaugh’s daughters, Alice and Hypatia, who were then emerging into adulthood as worthy followers and supporters of their father. For the next decade, Annie Besant was to be Charles Bradlaugh’s rock and staff and shield.

V. Bradlaugh and Parliament

Bradlaugh needed this. He had been contemplating a parliamentary career since 1868. Having finally been elected for Northampton in 1880, he suddenly found that the Speaker of the House of Commons would not permit him, as one who had declared his unbelief in God and who therefore thought the oath meaningless, to swear the oath of allegiance and so take his seat. The story of the next six years is well known and not my direct concern here.

During these years of struggle, Bradlaugh exhibited extraordinary legal skill, physical courage and stubborn determination. Again and again, he went back to his constituents to be re-elected, and again and again, he defied the parliamentary authorities to exclude him. The principal opposition came from a minority of Conservative members, who were determined to use the Bradlaugh case to disrupt the legislative programme of Gladstone’s Liberal government. When there was a Conservative government and a new Speaker in 1886, Bradlaugh was permitted to take the oath without question, and was to be a hard-working MP for the next five years.

Not all Secularists were pleased by Bradlaugh’s stand. Holyoake thought an atheist republican should not be fighting for the right to swear a religious oath to the Crown but should have stood on principle for the right of the electors to send whomsoever they wished to the Commons. There was an ironic symmetry here, with the expedient Holyoake standing on principle against the principled Bradlaugh’s expediency.

But the general effect of this parliamentary struggle was to enhance Bradlaugh’s radical credentials. It also raised the profile and membership of the NSS, as well as the circulation of the National Reformer.

VI. Enter George William Foote (1850-1915)

This success was augmented by the decision of a future leader of the next generation, George William Foote, to throw aside his moderate literary approach to freethought and start a new 1d. weekly, the Freethinker, which reverted to the older style of an anti-religious blend of humour and propaganda.

VII. Birth control

In her support for birth control information, Annie Besant was principally interested in the neo-Malthusian control of the population as an answer to the problem of poverty. Bradlaugh agreed, but wished to challenge the prosecution of the Knowlton pamphlet in 1876 on the grounds of freedom of publication. At the same time, he had also long been committed to the publication of guides to sexual knowledge and contraception. As early as 1861 he was championing George Drysdale’s publication, Elements of Social Science, which is more accurately described by its original title of 1854, Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion.

This support for such literature, and more widely for neo-Malthusian economics, separated Bradlaugh both from socialists, who blamed capitalism, not population growth, for poverty, and from Holyoake and his supporters in the Secularist movement, who viewed with horror the undermining of their argument that being without God did not mean being without morals. As usual, by dint of an iron will to make his point – coupled with skilful legal ruses – Bradlaugh succeeded in 1877, rallying the Secularist movement around him and Besant, before going on to further victory in his parliamentary struggle.

All this came at a price. In what should have been his prime of life, Bradlaugh was prematurely aged. He died of kidney disease on 30 January 1891, the same day, appropriately, on which another Charles had met his death in 1649.

Contrasting legacies

These, then, were the two men who created the Secularist movement: George Jacob Holyoake, the originator of the movement; and Charles Bradlaugh, the man who developed it and founded the National Secular Society. Their legacies are as contrasting as their lives.

Holyoake is largely remembered through his own writings for his lifetime of radical agitation, and as the man who encouraged and publicised the spread of consumers’ co-operation throughout Britain and across the world. If his contribution to freethought is acknowledged, it is embodied in the Rationalist Press Association, founded in 1899 by Charles Watts’s son, Charles Albert Watts, with Holyoake as first Chairman. This organisation represented through its publications the educational and rational wing of freethought, closest to Holyoake’s own temperament and outlook.

Bradlaugh is chiefly remembered for his parliamentary struggle, although his legacy organisation, the NSS, still survives. The NSS represents the more campaigning side of freethought, though in the modern humanist movement the two aspects are merging into one. With the decline of Christianity as the dominant cultural force in British society, the need for Bradlaugh’s style of militant atheism has declined. In today’s secular world the attractions of Holyoake’s positive philosophy of Secularism have again become more relevant to a reinterpretation of our current condition, confused as it is by the many cross-currents of a multi-cultural and multi-religious society. In a world of religious contests and conflicts, the secular can hold the common central ground.

Holyoake and Bradlaugh in recent historical writings

I. Holyoake the champion of the co-operative commonwealth

What is interesting about this revival in the relevance of Holyoake’s approach is the way in which his recent contribution to the co-operative movement has also been reassessed. The first of three volumes by Stephen Yeo on A Useable Past: a history of association, co-operation and education for un-statist socialism in 19^th and 20^th century Britain, is entitled Victorian Agitator. George Jacob Holyoake (1817-1906): Co-operation as ‘The New Order of Life’. Yeo was Principal of Ruskin College, Oxford (1989-97) and then Chair of the Co-operative College and of the Co-operative Heritage Trust (1999-2015). In his book, published in 2017, Yeo turns to Holyoake for guidance in two major crises of the present day: the crisis of Socialism and the crisis of the Co-operative Movement.

The crisis of Socialism arises firstly from the fact that the Marxism that Yeo once embraced has now been discredited by the collapse of those Communist state powers which annexed it in the first part of the twentieth century. Secondly, the Labour Party in Britain is still searching for an alternative socialist philosophy to the managerial state capitalism of the Fabian founders of Labour.

The crisis of Co-operation comes with the challenge of the big supermarkets (and Amazon) to the ‘Rochdale’ model in a world of consumerist capitalism.

Holyoake’s vision was of a co-operative commonwealth based on secularity, mutual respect and democratic sharing. Yeo finds in this an attractive alternative way forward; his book represents the clearest appreciation of Holyoake’s ethical and philosophical as well as political and economic thinking. The Association of All Classes of All Nations, that Owenite dream mediated by Holyoake, might still be the way forward for a disjointed society and world.

II. Freethought enters the historical mainstream

But if Holyoake the educator is to be taken seriously once more, what of Bradlaugh? Over the past half century since I began work on the Secularist organisations of Holyoake and Bradlaugh, the subject has seen an explosion of scholarly publications, many of them emanating from America. Secularism and Atheism as philosophies, moral systems and personal experiences have been explored and analysed until they have become part of the mainstream of historical and sociological writing.

In Britain we owe a debt to the likes of Callum G. Brown, Professor of Late Modern European History at the University of Glasgow, a social historian specialising in secularisation and Humanism in nineteenth and twentieth century western society. His most recent book is Becoming Atheist: Humanism and the Secular West (2017). We also owe a debt to David Nash, history professor at Oxford Brookes University, who began as my research student and whose first book, based on his PhD thesis, was on the Leicester Secular Society (1992). He has since gone on to publish several works on the history of blasphemy, most recently in 2020, as well as numerous articles.

III. Bradlaugh, the forgotten radical

But there has been no reassessment of Bradlaugh himself. Even the most recent and best biography, Dare to Stand Alone. The story of Charles Bradlaugh, Atheist and Republican by Bryan Niblett (2010), takes the interpretation little further, although it shows a clear understanding and appreciation of Bradlaugh’s legal skills (Niblett is a barrister). What is lacking is a new appreciation among historians who specialise in the wider radical and labour movement of Bradlaugh’s place in their story. An important exception is a book by Matthew Roberts, Political Movements in Urban England, 1832-1915 (2009), where Bradlaugh’s significance in the 1870s and 1880s is acknowledged and integrated into the wider narrative.

Why has Bradlaugh been neglected?

There are good reasons for this general neglect of Bradlaugh as a mainstream radical.

First, Bradlaugh was a Radical in the tradition of Thomas Paine, but he came at the end of that tradition. He was an individualist, suspicious of state power and in favour of low taxation and sound monetary policy. He favoured the world of the small, independent artisan and shopkeeper, who regarded Political Economy as a liberating science – what William Cobbett condemned as ‘Scotch Feelosophy’. As the nature and needs of British society and the economy changed, with the growth of large-scale industrial capitalism, the social problems of urbanisation, and the spread of socialist ideas, this strand of radicalism looked to the past rather than the future. Or if it had a future, it was in the outlook of a Grantham shopkeeper and Margaret Thatcher’s conservatism; or Liz Truss’s path from Liberal Democrat to Conservative. Labour historians did not warm to this style of individualistic radicalism. Bradlaugh did not fit their narrative.

Secondly, historians of the twentieth century, which saw universal suffrage with one person one vote finally accomplished in Britain only in 1948, have been captivated by the study of Chartism, which failed in 1848 but which left a legacy to be picked up by succeeding generations. Bradlaugh was of the next generation, but the narrative told by most mainstream historians has leapt ahead to the rise of political labour and the making of the Labour Party at the start of the twentieth century, with its ideological underpinning of socialism and links with radical Christianity.

On this approach, Bradlaugh lived through an interlude, seen as a time of Liberal hegemony, the era of William Ewart Gladstone. Bradlaugh did not fit this narrative either, except where it bumped into Gladstone’s second ministry between 1880 and 1885. Bradlaugh championed Irish nationalism, but as an atheist did not fit their Catholic narrative; and he championed Indian nationalism, but – unlike Annie Besant – did not live long enough to be part of its rise in the twentieth century. It was a very young Gandhi who attended Bradlaugh’s funeral in 1891.

Thus, whereas Holyoake can now be written back into a narrative of the co-operative commonwealth, Bradlaugh still remains to be interpreted within the broader political history of British radicalism.

Bradlaugh compared with Feargus O’Connor

The great leader of Chartism was Feargus O’Connor. His reputation has grown in recent years as the man who drew together the strands of protest in the anti-poor law and ten-hours movements, and united them with London radicalism to create the most powerful democratic protest movement of the nineteenth century. His tools were a newspaper, the Northern Star, an organisation, the National Charter Association, and a method of popular outreach, the Mass Platform. The latter involved large-scale outdoor meetings addressed by popular orators, who were thereby able to reach those who could neither read newspapers nor afford to join organisations, or could not ordinarily be bothered to do so.

A comparison between O’Connor and Bradlaugh is instructive, but seldom made. O’Connor had the Northern Star as his mouthpiece, with which to publicise himself and his version of Chartism to great effect. The National Reformer was not, after its initial issues, a newspaper at all but a periodical with a far smaller circulation. But on every other count I would argue that Bradlaugh was O’Connor’s superior.

In his maturity he was a better outdoor speaker, powerfully effective without O’Connor’s bluster and demagoguery; he was consequently also able to adapt to be a far better indoor speaker; and he became a master of speaking and operating in the House of Commons, where O’Connor was an abject failure. Bradlaugh’s Parliamentary achievements were considerable. These include his Oaths Act of 1888, which lies at the heart of the parliamentary swearing-in ceremony for a majority of MPs today; and also his hard work on Select Committees and even a Royal Commission.

Bradlaugh, in other words, was a popular orator turned all-round politician. Yet O’Connor – whom Holyoake saw through from the start – is the hero of many historians, while Bradlaugh is almost forgotten. But if I were asked to name the two greatest political platform orators of the nineteenth century, other than William Gladstone and John Bright, I would nominate Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant.

Did the politics of the Mass Platform fade after 1848?

The Mass Platform had been developed by Henry Hunt and sanctified by the blood of martyrs at the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. Historians have associated the failure of Chartism in 1848 with the collapse of the Mass Platform.

True, there were many changes in circumstances in the second half of the nineteenth century. The context for the propagation of radical views was changing: the abolition of the Newspaper Stamp in 1855 gave rise to a new popular press, with several papers vying for the national market that the Northern Star had once dominated – notably Reynolds’s News but also the Daily News and even the Liberal Daily Telegraph. The railway network made lectures out of London easier and more frequent. The country was better policed.

Yet mass meetings did continue into the 1850s and beyond. ‘Is it forgotten how many have met at Blackstone Edge, at Skircoat Moor and at Shipley Glen?’ asked the Yorkshire Tribune, A Monthly Journal of Democracy and Secularism for the People, in 1855. ‘It will be so again when we give the call.’ And so it was, in association with the various campaigns from 1858 onwards in support of parliamentary reform. Secularists played a leading part in organising these mass meetings, modelled on the camp meetings of the Primitive Methodists.

Bradlaugh and radicalism

As well as a favoured speaker on these occasions, Bradlaugh (as well as Holyoake) was on the Council of the Reform League. Bradlaugh was one of those who urged the League in 1867 to call the government’s bluff and hold a prohibited meeting in Hyde Park. This proved effective in securing the passage of the Second Reform Bill through the House of Commons, extending the vote to all male householders in parliamentary boroughs.

In the early 1870s, Bradlaugh again took the lead in the anti-aristocratic movements for land reform and republicanism, with local Secularists and NSS branches setting up Republican Clubs. This was one reason why the NSS faltered in these years, as energies were diverted into politics. Then again, and above all, Bradlaugh’s parliamentary struggle in the early 1880s brought him and his NSS to the forefront, with mass rallies in support of their leader and parliamentary reform more generally, which contributed significantly to the passage of the Third Reform Act in 1884. This, together with the Redistribution Act of 1885, extended the adult male vote to all householders. It enfranchised, for the first time, many Secularists and others who lived in small industrial towns and villages, and who were the backbone of the Secularist radical movement.

So when historians look for the reasons why radicalism appeared weak after Chartism, they are asking the wrong question. They have underestimated both the extent to which Holyoake had successfully rallied former Owenites and Chartists in the 1850s, and the extent to which Bradlaugh then led them to greater heights and influence in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s. Even in the later 1880s, when socialists began to infiltrate and establish clubs in London and elsewhere, their numbers were minute compared with the numbers in London’s radical clubs and Secularist societies in the country.

The Secularists began to lose the initiative only after Bradlaugh’s death. Their strategic mistake was that they had little to offer the trade unions, on whose support socialists were to build a new Labour Party after 1900. By focusing on this alternative labour history, historians have forgotten Bradlaugh.

Conclusion

I would therefore argue that, in their different ways, both Holyoake and Bradlaugh, in addition to their creation and expansion of the Secularist movement, contributed much to the progress of the working class more generally. Their role was central in the co-operative movement and in the promotion of extra-parliamentary radicalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Instead of dwelling on their personal rivalry and the merits of their differing versions of Secularism, we need to recognise the wider significance of both men. Holyoake’s co-operative star may once more be in the ascendant. Perhaps Bradlaugh’s importance to radicalism may also soon be more widely recognised.

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In January 1876, an unprecedented event took place at Milan’s Cimitero Maggiore: Europe’s first modern crematory was put into operation. Within 90 minutes, the new incinerator for human corpses, invented by engineer Celeste Clericetti and professor of chemistry Giovanni Polli, transformed the mortal remains of silk merchant Alberto Keller into ashes. It was the very same Keller who had sponsored the construction of this crematory and who, embalmed and provisionally kept in the non-Catholic part of the cemetery, was the first to be officially cremated in Italy two years after his death.

The cremation was attended by friends and family, state officials, and members of the Milan Cremation Society (established in 1876 thanks to the tireless commitment of physician and freemason Gaetano Pini) as well as scientists, engineers and media representatives. A perhaps unexpected guest was the Protestant pastor Paira, who framed Keller’s funeral with words that stretched the principles of Christian teachings rather far. Paira declared that Christian religion should finally embrace humanism, progress, modernity and hygiene, and abandon what he perceived to be a superstitious tradition centred on a lifeless shell and a vulgar belief in bodily resurrection.

At first glance, the renewed interest in cremation in nineteenth-century Italy may be surprising, as this mode of treating the corpse did not conform to the Catholic burial traditions that had dominated the cultures of the Italian peninsula for most of its history after the rise of Christianity. But this is precisely why, during the Italian process of nation-building, those, like Giuseppe Garibaldi or the aforementioned Pini, who wished to create a civil public sphere free of religious influence, chose cremation as one of their means to oppose Catholicism, which was politically and culturally so influential. Cremation was a way of rejecting Catholic traditions, institutions and experts, which seemed altogether incompatible with the reformers’ visions of science-based progress, reason, rationality, civil morality and a bright Italian future in the European concert of nations. In the second half of the century, the idea of incinerating the dead in Italy became inseparably linked to a culture war between the Catholic Church and an emerging Italian secularist sphere. The latter was partly fostered by the secularisation policies of the liberal state.

Founded in 1861, the young nation-state of Italy actively upheld French revolutionary political traditions. Cremation, which had been introduced briefly during the revolution as an explicitly non-Catholic custom, formed part of this heritage. However, the cremation of the dead was not in itself a ‘secularist’ practice. Rather, it became charged with secularist significance. On the one hand, Italian secularists promoted cremation, considering it antithetical to Christian traditions. On the other hand, the Church’s dogmatisation and anti-modernisation policies in the second half of the nineteenth century included the condemnation of cremation in 1886, which came to be devalued as a Masonic ritual. Eventually, cremation was legalised, and therefore implicitly supported, by the Italian Sanitary Code in 1888.

A closer look sheds light on these competing parties in the Italian confessional-political conflicts of the later nineteenth century. On the one hand, Italian politics was dominated by the Historical Right (Destra Storica) with its liberal, reformist and secular orientation. Politicians such as Massimo d’Azeglio or Camillo Benso, Conte di Cavour, represented this direction. Close to these positions, though less pragmatic and even more oriented towards ‘modernising’ the new state, was the democratic and urban-based Historical Left (Sinistra Storica) with leading figures such as Urbano Rattazzi and Agostino Depretis. Both parties shaped the outlook of the new state. Members of the Historical Left tended to be less tolerant of religion, its institutions, and its influence in society, and here they joined with the efforts of secularist organisations and campaigners. Among them were Italian freemasons like Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, both of whom worked at the forefront of the national cause, as well as freethinkers like Luigi Stefanoni, who edited the influential journal Libero Pensiero (‘Free Thought’), atheists, anarchists and early socialists.

Even though secularism in Italy was heterogeneous and also competitive in its branches, nevertheless, anti-Catholic and anti-clerical secularist publications and organisations openly and unanimously advocated cremation and civil burial to challenge the Church’s prerogative over the dead. But they also offered secularist explanations regarding life and death. Such thinking was inspired by the ideas  of the anti-clericalist and scientific materialist Jacob Moleschott on the cycles of ever-changing matter.

Rome only joined the new nation state in 1870, after the city had been captured by Italian troops. This marked the end of the popes’ temporal power. Even before that, the influence of the Church in society had already been reduced by the Italian Civil Code of 1865, as well as by legislative initiatives such as those of Giuseppe Siccardi, which abolished ecclesiastical courts. As a result of its loss of territory and power, the Church reacted harshly to the new state and the secularisation that accompanied it. Its particular bugbear was the radical secularists, with their campaign for cremation, their demands for the emancipation of women, for civil morality, and for an education free of religious influences. Cremation remained forbidden for Catholics until 1963. The leading Catholic journal Civiltà Cattolica spearheaded the polemics against the new practice, which it attacked as ‘a war against the dead’.

Numerous cremation societies were founded in Italy in the nineteenth century, united in an umbrella association led by Malachia de Cristoforis, a senator, professor of medicine and freemason. Crematoria were built in several Italian cities; by 1894 they existed in Milan, Lodi, Cremona, Rome, Brescia, Padua, Udine, Varese, Novara, Florence, Livorno, Pisa, Como, Asti, St. Remo, Turin, Mantua, Verona, Bologna, Modena, Venice, and Perugia. However, few Italians were willing to opt for cremation, given how charged this new way of treating the corpse was. While numbers have risen nowadays, cremation remains a minority practice in Italy whose population continues to be predominantly Catholic (around 75 per cent), followed by agnostics and atheists (approximately 12 per cent), various other Christian denominations, Islam and Buddhism. In 2019, only about 31 per cent of the deceased were cremated; inhumation predominates.

In 1878, two years after the first modern crematory was built in Milan, the second was constructed in Gotha, one of the capitals of the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. In this city, liberal and socialist ideas flourished. The German socialist party (the SPD), for instance, came into being here in 1875. Cremation was advocated by leading German freethinkers such as Ludwig Büchner, well-known monists like Wilhelm Ostwald, and the prominent socialist and later anarchist Johann Most.

Just as in Italy, the new way of dealing with the dead was accompanied by strong anti-clerical and anti-Catholic ideas in Wilhelmine Germany as well, for example by the professor of medicine Karl Reclam in the widely read bourgeois family magazine Die Gartenlaube (1874, 1879). In Protestant Germany, however, the issue of cremation seemed less politically charged. In Catholic-influenced cultures, the practice faced brusque rejection from the church. In Protestant Germany, on the other hand, after initial outright disapproval in 1898 (at the Conference of Eisenach), the Protestant churches, in practice, often adopted a more conciliatory approach. Comparatively early on, German Protestants could opt for cremation. In doing so, they affirmed their liberal and progressive convictions, or dispelled their fear of being buried alive, without giving up on a Christian ceremony. Of course, existing social norms favoured such Christian framing.

Scenarios such as those envisioned by Die Gartenlaube in 1874 were not possible in Protestant Prussia, where throne and altar were closely linked at the time and where, unlike in Italy, state law did not permit cremation until 1911. Nevertheless, the boundaries between secularism and liberal Protestantism in Germany and elsewhere eventually proved less solid than in Catholic cultures. Even so, cremation in the nineteenth century would still have carried an aura of the sensational, the deviant, even in Protestant regions, and would have indicated a turning away from the established religions and beliefs of those who opted for this practice.

After the turn of the century, with the rise of the German labour movement, cremation in Germany took on more socialist features. This was also due to special cremation insurance policies that were set up for workers and their families to provide them with financial security in the event of death. Prominent socialists such as Friedrich Engels and August Bebel chose to be cremated. In a sense, socialist culture disambiguated and politicised the secular and secularist notions of cremation. Later on, this socialist codification of cremation led to high cremation rates in the socialist workers’ and peasants’ state of East Germany. Even today, the number of cremations in the former East German states is considerably higher than, for instance, in Catholic Bavaria.

The history of modern cremation ultimately turns out to be a winding road, laid by political revolutionaries, freethinkers, and freemasons, and paved with anti-clerical and materialist secularism, but also with bourgeois reformist, liberal Protestant attitudes: even in Italy, during the first cremation, a Protestant priest presided over the ceremony. Irreligion or agnosticism are to this day main reasons for choosing cremation; however, today, as in the past, cremation can also be selected for reasons of finance, flexibility and mobility, or on environmental grounds. Matters of belief and modern preferences and values are intertwined.

Today, cremation rates are rising across Europe, but the figures are distributed very unevenly, from countries where it is supported by a quarter of the population or less, such as Greece, Poland or Ireland, to those where it is supported by over 70 per cent, such as Germany, the UK or Sweden. New methods of dealing with the dead body now compete with cremation and burial. These include ‘terramation’, invented in the US, in which the corpse, in special composting chambers, is rapidly transformed into humus to serve as a nutrient for new plants.

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In an early Freethinker editorial, George W. Foote commented that ‘The public now-a-days is in a great hurry, you must attract its attention before you can be heard.’ While some Victorian atheists, agnostics, and secularists sought to attract attention and further their cause by publicly debating with prominent religious figures, standing for Parliament, and emphasising the respectability of their secular ideology, Foote actively courted outrage. This article explores how through the Freethinker he tested the old adage that all publicity is good publicity, and got the press and public talking about these working-class radicals who challenged the religious and political establishment in order to bring about a more equal society.

Freethinkers were mostly republicans, sometimes socialists, and campaigned for the removal of religion from public life alongside causes such as women’s rights, workers’ rights, secular education, and birth control. They occupied a marginal position in Victorian Britain. Membership of the National Secular Society peaked at just a few thousand, while sales of even the most successful weekly journals arising from the movement – the National Reformer and the Freethinker – rarely exceeded 10,000. However, due to the dangers that many believed atheism posed to society, and to the legal cases involving Charles Bradlaugh, Annie Besant and Foote himself, the words and actions of this minority group came to occupy a significant position within the public consciousness.

The weekly Freethinker was established in 1881 as a proactively ‘anti-Christian organ’. Foote’s editorial in the first issue emphasised that its approach ‘must therefore be chiefly aggressive. It will wage relentless war against Superstition … and it will not scruple to employ for the same purpose any weapons of ridicule or sarcasm that may be borrowed from the armoury of common sense’. This provocative strategy amplified minority voices such as Foote’s in the public sphere, enabling freethinkers to play an outsize role in shaping British perceptions of religion as under attack in the second half of the nineteenth century.

In 1882 and 1883 blasphemy charges were levelled at the Freethinker. These legal challenges focused on the ‘Comic Bible’ cartoons that appeared on the front page across the 1880s and the 1882 Christmas number, which because of the subsequent trial became infamous for its irreverent ‘A New Life of Christ’, satirical cartoons, and profane jokes. The historian David Nash describes Foote’s publication of this content as ‘calculated to inflame public opinion’ and ‘activate the creaking and unwieldy machinery of the blasphemy laws’ so that he would be granted a legal platform from which to challenge the powers that be. Foote revelled in being, in his words, ‘on the Devil’s side’, but emphasised that despite charges from opponents that the publication was ‘“foul and filthy” … No filth ever appears in our pages except what is derived from the Bible’. Lord Coleridge ruled in Foote’s trial that ‘if the decencies of controversy are observed, even the fundamentals of religion may be attacked without a person being guilty of blasphemous libel’. The court cases therefore pivoted on the manner in which the Freethinker attacked religion, and the fact that Foote had made such ideas accessible to a working-class audience.

An Observer editorial in 1883 painted this strategy as doomed to fail: ‘we venture to think that Mr. Foote will get very little sympathy from the general public, and as little, or less, from advanced thinkers, who, being men of education, have not cared to state their views in an offensive shape’. In comparison to the sincere beliefs of Quakers, Jews, and Unitarians (the editorial continued), ‘an Atheist of the proselytising school can only make his living by throwing mud; and it becomes a public duty to teach him that throwing mud is a public nuisance, and is not to be tolerated.’ Characterising the Freethinker’s content as trivial and insincere, the editorial rejects the idea that freethought was a legitimate world view on a par with dissenting Christian denominations and Judaism. However, in conflating these two things, the editorial overlooked the point that irreverence can arise from sincerely held beliefs; it therefore misunderstands the Freethinker’s rationale.

The Freethinker was explicit in its aim to ridicule religion and potentially cause offence. Joseph Symes’s front-page article ‘In Praise of Ridicule’ characterised this approach as an inevitable and necessary response to the society in which they lived: ‘there comes a time in every Reform period when truth has been fairly set before the public and error has been argumentatively and logically defeated … Still the millions cling to it as undoubted truth, and the few fatten upon the stupidity of the many, and denounce all who expose their imposture. Just then is the time for wholesale and uncompromising ridicule. And that time is now.’  Symes therefore emphasised the seriousness with which the Freethinker wielded its irreverence and concluded, ‘We don’t play with satire, we fight with it.’

Throughout the 1880s – before, during, and after the legal challenges – regular columns were titled ‘Profane Jokes’, ‘Comic Bible Sketches’, ‘Rib Ticklers’, and ‘Acid Drops’, the latter highlighting bad and hypocritical behaviour from religious people and institutions. The irreligious humour spills out of such columns and pervades other elements of the journal that usually served more prosaic functions too. ‘To Correspondents’ columns were usually a practical way to engage with reader letters, but in the Christmas 1882 issue Foote repurposed them for heretical comic effect: the ‘Holy Ghost’ is advised that he will need to pay child support if proven to be the father of Jesus.

Foote’s desire to capitalise upon his notoriety is clear. From 16 July 1882 until 24 February 1884 (the last issue before his release from Holloway prison), ‘Prosecuted for Blasphemy’ was trumpeted at the top of the front page of every issue of the Freethinker, in font almost as large as the journal’s title. From 18 March 1883, the details of the sentences for editor, printer and proprietor were added to the masthead. But was the publicity generated by the court cases successful in raising the journal’s profile in a way that benefited Foote and other freethinkers?

Foote’s ‘New Year’ column in 1883 celebrated the fact that the Freethinker had doubled its circulation over the preceding year. In a later issue, a correspondent identified as ‘Anxious’ is reassured that the magazine is responding to surges in interest: ‘We printed thousands of extra copies of the Freethinker last week, but not nearly enough for the enormous demand’. The publicity therefore increased circulation, as both the curious and the sympathetic sought out the publication to judge for themselves.

But the publicity also had a more intangible impact. As Foote observed in 1883, ‘The Freethinker is now an institution’. After less than two years of publication, the furore surrounding the Freethinker had given it a sense of legitimacy, purpose, and even permanence, despite the justice system’s best attempts to undermine it. In the same column, Foote also praised ‘the many friends who have helped to give the Freethinker publicity in various ways’. This comment had two quite different meanings.

The first is that, after newsagents and wholesalers became intimidated by the legal challenges, readers responded with gusto to Foote’s call for friends of the Freethinker ‘to push the paper as far as they possibly can’. This led to increased subscriptions, for example ‘An Atheist Blacksmith’ vowed that he and his friends would double their subscription in the event of Foote’s conviction; this was escalated the following week, when another reader promised to take six copies per week. Alternative modes of circulation among acquaintances and social clubs are also documented, while a Scottish bookseller wrote in to say that he was going to buy in copies and post the contents on his shop door. Although we cannot be certain that all reader contributions are genuine, these letters nonetheless praised and therefore encouraged specific reader behaviours that would bring the Freethinker to a wider audience.

Foote’s comment about ‘the many friends who have helped to give the Freethinker publicity in various ways’ can, however, be interpreted as being partly tongue-in-cheek as well. The regular column ‘Sugar Plums’ recorded the gains made by the freethought movement and often excerpted newspaper coverage, which, even when not positive, provided free nationwide publicity. As Foote comments knowingly, ‘The press is beginning to find out that there is a large public interested in Freethought’. This impact was acknowledged by other newspapers, as the Freethinker gleefully recounts: ‘The London Echo points out one of the consolations (to us) of our second prosecution: “If people in future everywhere do not know something of the Freethinker it will not be for want of advertising it in the House of Commons and the law courts.”’ The Echo compared the situation to the way in which sales of The Fruits of Philosophy were boosted during the proceedings against Bradlaugh and Besant in 1877, observing that having been provided with ‘gratuitous national advertisement’, the Freethinker ‘will be more sought after and read than before’.

Foote’s sentencing stimulated further anxieties among the mainstream press. The Spectator was concerned that twelve months’ imprisonment was an attack specifically on working-class freedom of speech, which reflected badly upon British society and might render Foote a martyr: ‘considering the extreme severity of the punishment inflicted for publishing what no one was compelled either to see or read … no one will be able to avoid comparing what Mr. Foote has done, with what more refined assailants of the Christian faith have done without the smallest risk of prosecution’. While Foote was not glorified in the popular press, this concern for the prosecution’s wider implications indicates how publicity had the potential to soften attitudes to the freethought cause.

Within the movement, the reaction to Foote’s combative approach was mixed. While some Victorians were brought into the freethought fold, many of Foote’s fellow freethinkers disagreed with his tactics, advocating instead for moderation and more good faith engagement with their religious contemporaries. Foote was editor from 1881 all the way until his death in 1915. However, the provocative front-page cartoons were dropped in 1889, and the tone of the Freethinker changed quite markedly from 1891 when Foote became president of the National Secular Society upon Bradlaugh’s death. The Freethinker consequently took over from the National Reformer as the principal mouthpiece of the movement, expanding its remit to documenting secularist activities more broadly. However, columns of ‘Profane Jokes’ remained, and Foote continued to pride himself upon publishing a paper that vehemently, and irreverently, challenged religion and its hypocrisies.

Unlike the majority of Victorian freethought journals, the Freethinker remains in publication. The only other UK publication in a non-religious tradition that remains from that era is the New Humanist. While there are many factors that contributed to the longevity of the Freethinker, it is tempting to suggest that its rapid rise to prominence through the courting of notoriety stood it in good stead, giving freethinking voices and actions a heightened public platform from which to direct others towards the freethought cause. Foote knew the strategy would be divisive, but that it nonetheless appealed to a certain minority. As he reflected in 1915, ‘We were not writing to please purchasers but to inspire evangelists.’

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