As the UK prepares to elect a new government on 4 July, this seems a good moment to reflect on Charles Bradlaugh’s heroic stand for democracy against the religious reactionaries of his day. Bradlaugh, the founder of the National Secular Society (NSS) and an open atheist, was prevented by bigots from taking the parliamentary seat he was elected to represent and was subsequently imprisoned for insisting on his democratic right to do so. Emma Park, in the New Humanist, tells the story:

‘At the time, MPs were required to swear an oath of allegiance to the monarch on the Bible. Quakers were allowed to affirm, but they were the exception. Bradlaugh asked to affirm on the grounds of his atheism. A select committee decided, by one vote, that he was ineligible. He then tried to take the oath, but before doing so, wrote an over-confident letter to The Times in which he declared that the oath included “to me . . . words of idle and meaningless character”. As Bradlaugh’s biographer, Bryan Niblett, has shown, this merely encouraged those who disliked his atheism to argue that the oath would not be “binding on his conscience”. Others feared that, as a republican, he would not be loyal to the Crown.

In June 1880, Bradlaugh was told by the Speaker of the Commons that he was allowed neither to affirm nor to take the oath. Bradlaugh, in his own words, “respectfully” refused to withdraw, on the grounds that it was “against the law” for Parliament to prevent a properly elected MP from taking his seat. After a dramatic vote, in which only seven MPs supported him, he was arrested by the Serjeant-at-Arms and spent the night in custody in the Clock Tower beneath Big Ben – the last MP ever to do so.

Between 1881 and 1884, Bradlaugh was elected three more times in Northampton. It was not until the fifth attempt that he was finally allowed to take the oath, in January 1886. By this time, the stress of the campaigns, combined with legal and financial worries, was affecting his health. He would only live for another five years before dying of kidney disease and heart failure at the age of 57.

His story is a blot on Parliament’s record: a clear case of the abuse of political power fuelled by prejudice. It demonstrates the importance of having a constitution in which everyone’s right to “speculative opinions” is respected, and in which, equally, there is no stigma attached to the free criticism of others’ ideas.’

Though the struggle shortened Bradlaugh’s life, he triumphed in the end with the success of his campaign to enact the Oaths Act in 1888, which gave MPs the option to make a secular affirmation rather than swearing to God when taking their parliamentary seats. The lithograph above tells Bradlaugh’s dramatic story in two parts: from prisoner of conscience to victorious champion of democracy. Today, indeed, a bust of Charles Bradlaugh stands proudly in the halls of Parliament itself.

As the 2024 election looms, it would be well to bear in mind the central lesson of Bradlaugh’s struggle: freedom is never granted, it is always fought for. And that fight is far from over, even in an advanced democracy like the UK’s. After all, we still have an established church and a hereditary head of state (both of which were also opposed by Bradlaugh). The story of the struggle for democracy in Britain, which goes back as far as the 17th-century Levellers if not much further, and which takes in Thomas Paine, the Chartists, the suffragettes, and numerous others—well, that story is very far from over.

Further reading

Bradlaugh’s struggle to enter Parliament, by Bob Forder, NSS website

Charles Bradlaugh and George Jacob Holyoake: their contrasting reputations as Secularists and Radicals, by Edward Royle

Image of the week: Charles Bradlaugh’s study after his death, by Walter Sickert, by Bob Forder

Review of ‘A Dirty, Filthy Book’ by Michael Meyer, by Bob Forder

‘I do not think you are going to get a secular state without getting rid of the monarchy’: interview with Graham Smith, by Daniel James Sharp

Is all publicity good publicity? How the first editor of the Freethinker attracted the public’s attention, by Clare Stainthorp

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

On trial for blasphemy: the Freethinker’s first editor and offensive cartoons, by Bob Forder

From the archive: imprisoned for blasphemy, by Emma Park

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

What secularists want from the next UK Government, by Stephen Evans

Islamic identity politics is a threat to British democracy, by Khadija Khan

‘This is not rocket science’: the Disestablishment of the Church of England Bill 2023, interview with Paul Scriven by Emma Park

The case for secularism (or, the church’s new clothes), by Neil Barber

Blasphemy and bishops: how secularists are navigating the culture wars, by Emma Park

The post Image of the week: Charles Bradlaugh’s struggle and triumph appeared first on The Freethinker.

The first article in this series focused on Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason (three parts, 1794, 1795, and 1807), the last of what Eoin Carter in this magazine recently called Paine’s three ‘era-defining texts’. But I don’t think I should leave Paine without acknowledging the huge significance of his Rights of Man (two parts, 1791-2) to freethinkers—and, in fact, to anybody on what might be loosely described as the progressive side of politics.

In Rights of Man, Paine makes the case that individuals have rights intrinsic to their humanity, independent of the whims or ambitions of political leaders. Individuals are citizens, not subjects, and citizens exercise rights independently of the supposedly God-given authority of aristocrats and monarchs. Here is the case for human rights as a secularist issue (and the reason that this writer regards republicanism and secularism as closely intertwined). For Paine, government must surely be based on the consent of the governed.

Rights of Man was a direct response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), an attack on the French Revolution and the British radicals who admired it, and who in some cases regarded it as a blueprint for Britain. The tract tore into monarchy, traditional social institutions, and the hereditary principle in favour of a thorough-going liberal democracy.

Part 1 was originally to be published by Joseph Johnson, but Johnson withdrew from the project following several visits from government agents, correctly sensing that the book would attract bitter controversy. Paine reacted quickly and transferred the work to J.S. Jordan, who was made of sterner stuff, and the book appeared on 16 March 1791. It became an instant bestseller, with around 50,000 copies in circulation by May, albeit at the relatively high price of three shillings. Numerous editions followed and cheaper ones boosted the book’s circulation, leading Paine to boast that it had outsold anything published in recent years, if not ever.

Jordan published Part 2 the following February with a circulation exceeding even that of Part 1. Close to a million and a half copies were sold in Britain during Paine’s lifetime. By now the furore Paine had provoked was reaching fever pitch, with the flames further fanned by a vicious campaign of slander headed by the Prime Minister, William Pitt. While the consequences for Paine were unpleasant, it seems that the attention Pitt and others drew to Paine’s work only boosted sales. In fear for his life, Paine fled the country in 1792 and headed to France, where he received a hero’s welcome. Back in England, his effigies burned brightly and he was convicted, in absentia, of seditious libel against the Crown.

Shortly before leaving, Paine had penned the obscurely titled Letter Addressed to the Addressers on the Late Proclamation, which has been described as ‘practically a third part of Rights of Man’. This brief tract dealt with the issue of how the principles of Rights of Man could be implemented. Paine argued for the establishment of a national convention since a corrupt House of Commons and a hereditary House of Lords and monarchy could hardly be trusted to reform themselves. In some ways, this tract was the most inflammatory and radical of all.

Unfortunately, Jordan’s courage was exhausted and he withdrew from publishing Paine’s works following threats of a sedition charge. At first, Paine took over publication himself under the imprint ‘the printers and booksellers of London’, but when he fled England, he placed it in the hands of H.D. Symonds, who not only published the two parts of Rights of Man but did so in cheap editions at sixpence each. Symonds, in concert with Thomas Clio Rickman, then went on to publish the Letter at the low price of fourpence.  Both Symonds and Rickman were persecuted for their trouble, with Rickman following Paine by fleeing to France and Symonds being gaoled for two years.

Paine’s work circulated in huge numbers among the population despite the government’s best efforts to suppress it and it remains in print to this day. I have heard it said that Paine is largely forgotten, and it is certainly true that many, particularly the very religious, would prefer that this were the case. But even if the man is forgotten, his ideas live on and still influence the character of political discourse. It is extraordinary how salient Paine remains.  Over more than two centuries, different individuals have alighted on different aspects of Paine’s work which support their own opinions and/or campaigns. Over the years, Paine’s work has been published in various editions by various people. I have several of these in my collection, and their preliminary remarks demonstrate the many uses to which Paine’s work has been put over the years.

Richard Carlile wrote a preface to his 1820 edition of Paine’s Political and Miscellaneous Works from Dorchester Gaol, where he was serving a sentence for blasphemy and seditious libel. He alights on Paine’s ‘[exploding of] the idea of hereditary right in priests, nobles, and princes, and hereditary wrong in the people.’ To Carlile goes a large share of the credit for keeping Paine’s writings alive during the first thirty years of the nineteenth century—a period of severe government repression in the wake of the French Revolution and the fear that the radical contagion could spread across the Channel.

I also have an edition of The Political Works of Thomas Paine ‘published by T.M. Wheeler, at the Office of the Chartist Co-operative Land Society’ (c. 1843), in which a copy of the People’s Charter of 1838 is also bound. The preface presents Paine as an antidote to ignorance which, according to the author, holds millions in subservience and poverty. Paine inspired the Chartists in their struggle for constitutional reform.

In my collection, there is also an 1883 Freethought Publishing Company edition of Paine’s work with an introductory note by Charles Bradlaugh, the leading secularist, republican, and freethinker of his age, and the founder of the National Secular Society (NSS). He suggests that this edition would be useful for young politicians, who would find Paine’s ‘simple Saxon style’ containing ‘vigour and backbone’ worth imitating. (How very Bradlaugh those words are!) For many years the NSS celebrated Paine’s birthday on 29 January—a sort of freethinkers’ Christmas. (For more on the Freethought Publishing Company and its premises at 28 Stonecutter Street, London, see my previous article on the subject.)

In 1891, the Freethinker founder G.W. Foote’s Progressive Publishing Company published a centenary edition of Rights of Man. This edition contained an introduction by J.M. Wheeler, a close friend of Foote’s, sub-editor of the Freethinker, and a keen student of freethought, whose illness and early death cut short his ambition of writing a history of the subject. Wheeler characterises Paine as ‘the plague of princes’ and describes him as the ‘best-abused man of a century ago’. He gives him credit for his influence on ‘the popular mind’ and for expressing the widespread desire for freedom of thought and expression.

Watts and Co. republished Rights of Man in a Thinker’s Library edition in 1937 for the Rationalist Press Association. In his introduction, the socialist G.D.H. Cole latched upon Paine as a champion of the poor and approved of his belief ‘in using the State as a practical instrument for the promotion of the welfare of its citizens’, dependent on ‘complete democratic equality’ and ‘democratic representation’.

Various shades of radicals, liberals, reformers, and democratic socialists have alighted on rather different aspects of Rights of Man—and Paine’s work more generally—over the years, but it seems to me that for those who strive for a better, more democratic, and fairer world, this old but strangely current book remains a touchstone, whether the man who wrote it is recognised or not. As G.W. Foote often remarked, it is ideas that change the world rather than votes.

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

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

From the archive: imprisoned for blasphemy, by Emma Park

Charles Bradlaugh and George Jacob Holyoake: their contrasting reputations as Secularists and Radicals, by Edward Royle

Is all publicity good publicity? How the first editor of the Freethinker attracted the public’s attention, by Clare Stainthorp

On trial for blasphemy: the Freethinker’s first editor and offensive cartoons, by Bob Forder

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

Review of ‘A Dirty, Filthy Book’ by Michael Meyer, by Bob Forder

Britain’s blasphemy heritage, by David Nash

The post Books from Bob’s Library #2: Thomas Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

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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The post Charles Bradlaugh and George Jacob Holyoake: their contrasting reputations as Secularists and Radicals appeared first on The Freethinker.

The people and places really responsible for fundamental political and social change often go unrecognised, particularly when they are associated with unbelief. The case of 28 Stonecutter Street from 1877 to 1900 perfectly illustrates this phenomenon.

By the 1870s, the leading personality among militant British freethinkers was Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891), who founded the National Secular Society (NSS) in 1866.  Two of his closest associates were Annie Besant (1847-1933), an NSS vice-president, and Charles Watts (1836-1906), the first general secretary. They were Neo-Malthusians – in favour of birth control, or family planning, as we would call it today. In particular, they were advocates of a booklet entitled Fruits of Philosophy, which gave advice on contraceptive techniques. This was written by an American doctor, Charles Knowlton, and was first published in the US in 1832 and in England in 1834.

In 1876, a Bristol bookseller, Henry Cook, was sentenced to two years’ hard labour for selling the pamphlet, because it contained ‘obscene’ illustrations. How obscene we do not know, because no copies have survived, but it seems that the illustrations were Cook’s own and were inserted by him. Despite the fact that Knowlton’s pamphlet had been published for some 44 years, the authorities, their appetites whetted from their success in Bristol, decided to press on and prosecute Charles Watts, who had published it. 

To the horror, disgust and fury of Bradlaugh and Besant, Watts pleaded guilty to publishing an obscene book, and thus escaped with a suspended sentence. Watts parted ways with his former colleagues amidst great acrimony. The rift was so great that Watts helped found a rival organisation to the NSS, the British Secular Union, before emigrating to Canada, where he lived until after Bradlaugh’s death. Watts had been a freethought publisher of significance; his departure left something of a void, which Bradlaugh and Besant were soon to fill.

Bradlaugh and Besant determined to test the law. They formed the Freethought Publishing Company and took out a lease on a property at 28 Stonecutter Street. In her biography of Annie Besant, Gertrude Williams describes it thus:

‘…a tumble-down building…a hundred yards up Shoe Lane from Fleet Street, past Wine Office Court and Gunpowder Alley.  The narrow lanes hummed with the clank of presses and the air was heavy with the sweetish smell of paper and printer’s ink.’ [1]

It was from these premises that Fruits of Philosophy was republished in a new edition, with medical notes by Dr George Drysdale and a publisher’s preface by Bradlaugh and Besant.  Bradlaugh delivered the first copy to the Chief Clerk at the Guildhall, and notified the police that at a specified time he and Annie would attend to sell the booklet in person. There were crowds in the street when the shop opened; the customers included some plain-clothes policemen, whom Bradlaugh identified from their boots.

For over 40 years, Fruits had been selling around 700 copies per year. In contrast, in its first three months on sale, the Stonecutter Street edition sold around 125,000 copies.

Bradlaugh and Besant had invited prosecution, and the authorities duly obliged. In June 1877, the trial began. The Solicitor General, Sir Hardinge Giffard, appeared for the prosecution – a clear sign of the importance attached to the case. Bradlaugh and Besant defended themselves. They used several arguments, ranging from freedom of the press to the value of contraception as an antidote to prostitution and infanticide, and as an essential way of relieving poverty and improving the lot of women.

The Solicitor General summed up as follows:

‘I say this is a dirty, filthy book, and the test of it is that …no decently educated English husband would allow even his wife to have it…The object of it is to enable persons to have sexual intercourse, and not to have that which in the order of Providence is the natural result.’ [2]

Despite a sympathetic summing-up by the Lord Chief Justice, presiding, the jury convicted. However, the decision was overturned on appeal on a technicality. Although this did not end prosecutions designed to prevent the dissemination of Neo-Malthusian literature, it did stem the tide as far as Fruits was concerned.

Bradlaugh and Besant had always had ambitions for their publishing venture that went well beyond the republication of Fruits. In Bradlaugh’s journal, The National Reformer, they announced their intention to make available ‘all works extant in the English language on the side of Freethought in Religion, Morals and Culture’. [3] 

The business, initially managed by W.J. Ramsey, was a success and soon expanded beyond the capacity of No. 28. In 1882, Bradlaugh and Besant took out a further lease on premises at 63 Fleet Street, which, it is interesting to note, stood on the opposite corner of Bouverie Street to No. 62 Fleet Street. Half a century earlier, No. 62 had served as Richard Carlile’s ‘Temple of Reason’ and the shop from which he sold freethought works, including his Every Woman’s Book, the first book in English to advocate and explain contraceptive techniques.

Bradlaugh and Besant’s Company also published catalogues. The catalogue for December 1882 was divided into two parts, the first comprising exclusively Company publications, of which there were 45 books and 176 pamphlets, as well as, for the enthusiast, three different photographic portraits of Bradlaugh and Besant. The second part comprised some 200 remainders on the radical or freethought themes of the day, including political reform, the emancipation of women, Neo-Malthusianism, republicanism, biblical criticism and theology. 

There were also reports of debates with clergy and other religious figures who were game and confident enough to take on the likes of Bradlaugh. These must have been great spectacles, as well as useful fundraisers: the debating halls were generally packed over several nights, and the audience paid for admission.

Stonecutter Street was also the British publisher of the writings of Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899). He was generally known as Colonel ‘Bob’ Ingersoll, having acquired his military title in the American Civil War. He was also Bradlaugh’s contemporary; some nicknamed him ‘America’s Bradlaugh’. He was certainly America’s leading infidel lecturer, and his writings sold in huge numbers. At the time he had a great influence on radicals on both sides of the Atlantic, including many involved in the foundation of the Labour Party; today he is almost entirely forgotten.

Finally, there were 26 publications associated with the scientific lecture courses held at Bradlaugh’s Hall of Science on Old Street. Books could be purchased at the shop or by post.                           

By the end of the 1880s, Bradlaugh was exhausted and ailing, and Besant’s interests had moved onto socialism and then, more strangely, theosophy. In 1890 they dissolved their partnership, the lease on 62 Fleet Street lapsed, and the publishing business and the lease on 28 Stonecutter Street transferred to my great-grandfather, another Robert Forder. Robert had replaced Charles Watts as NSS secretary in 1877 and first managed the publishing business in 1883, at a time when William Ramsey was imprisoned for blasphemy, along with G.W. Foote, for publishing the Freethinker. 

28 Stonecutter Street is significant for other reasons. It was the birthplace of the Freethinker, founded by G.W. Foote, in 1881, and for a time it was the address of his ‘Progressive Publishing Company’. It was also the initial headquarters of the Malthusian League, whose first secretary was Annie Besant. The League was later to evolve into the Family Planning Association, which was founded in 1930 by Charles Vickery Drysdale.

However, most significantly, 28 Stonecutter Street was the place from which hundreds of thousands of birth control pamphlets were disseminated throughout the land during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Although it is not easy to calculate the numbers, some estimate is made possible by the publisher’s practice of including print numbers on individual pamphlets. Between 1887 and 1900, at least half a million 6d pamphlets were sold, and it may be closer to a million. Copies were also translated into several languages and widely sold in North America and Australasia.

There were three main pamphlets. First there was Knowlton’s Fruits, of which around 125,000 copies were sold in the three months after republication in 1877, and more after that. Fruits was replaced by Annie Besant’s Law of Population, which she wrote to provide readers with updated advice; this was published in late 1877, first in the National Reformer and then, in an expanded form, as a pamphlet. Around 200,000 of the pamphlets were sold before Besant withdrew the title upon leaving the freethought movement. Her book was in turn superseded by Dr Henry Allbutt’s Wife’s Handbook, which remained in print from 1886 until the 1920s. The Wife’s Handbook was undoubtedly the best publication, featuring illustrated advertisements as informative as the text: around 500,000 copies were sold from Stonecutter Street. Unfortunately for Allbutt, it led to his being struck off the register. He remains an unsung hero of the family planning movement, of public health and women’s emancipation. Marie Stopes, a great self-publicist, eugenicist and Christian, receives far too much credit. The hard yards came before her.

The 28 Stonecutter Street story came to an end in 1900. Robert Forder’s wife died in 1898, and his health was failing. Foote, by then President of the NSS, endeavoured to resurrect things, first with a new Freethought Publishing Company Ltd, and then the Pioneer Press. Both were worthy, but never rivalled the range and quantity of publications of their predecessor. In the early twentieth century, the mass market came to be catered for by the Rationalist Press Association, with series such as its ‘Cheap Reprints’ and ‘Thinker’s Library’. 

Today, the remains of 28 Stonecutter Street lie under the glitzy London headquarters of Goldman Sachs. Every couple of years I contact them, offering to write a few lines about 28 Stonecutter Street. I have in mind a plaque, booklet, or something like, that but I have never received a reply. I cannot help thinking this is something of a metaphor for what happens to the history of freethought in general. They bury us and ignore us. Or am I being unfair?

[1] Williams, G. (undated) The Passionate Pilgrim.  A Life of Annie Besant, John Hamilton Ltd., pp. 84-85.

[2] (1877) In the High Court of Justice, Queen’s Bench Division, June 18, 1877.  The Queen v.  Charles  Bradlaugh and Annie Besant, Freethought Publishing Company, p. 251.

[3] Besant, A. (1885) ‘Autobiographical Sketches’, Freethought Publishing Company, p. 119.

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What motivated you to make this film?

It was a personal journey. I was a reckless, irrational individual mainly because I was brought up in an orthodox religious family. I was groomed in a system where everything is holy and a religious significance was attributed to the mundane events of everyday life. My ‘Damascene conversion’ was not from atheism to belief, but the other way round and more slowly. Through constant questioning of my childhood beliefs, seeking answers and analysing empirically, I started feeling liberated from the worldview with which I grew up. I would say that this intellectual enlightenment is what motivated me to make this film. I started viewing the world in the light of rationalism and realised there are so many people, especially in India, who are chained to religious dogma and its associated stigmas. They too need liberation. Film is the most popular form of art. As a filmmaker, I considered it was my responsibility to share my experiences and spread the importance of rationalism in today’s political context.

How long has it been in the making, and what was it like to direct?

We started the production of Vivesini in 2019 November, and had planned to complete it by April 2020 – but then the pandemic hit. We ultimately finished production in 2021 and completed the film in 2022. It was an enjoyable experience to direct Vivesini. I also had the responsibility of ensuring that the film did not come across as propaganda. I believe in art and not in propaganda, because I see art as something that welcomes everyone with open arms, regardless of their beliefs and associations. I think I have done justice to the central idea, which is the importance of rationalism, without disregarding the requirements of mainstream cinema.

Can you tell us a bit about the actors and why you chose them?

There are five main characters in the film, including the protagonist, Shakthi. All the other four characters act as a catalyst to her. For Jayaraman, I originally had two actors in mind. In the end, I was delighted to recruit the actor Nasser, who is based in Chennai, and already had a similar outlook on life to Jayaraman. Nasser has been the focal point of Vivesini ever since.

For the character of Clara, I had few figures in mind, all of whom were activists. In particular, I wanted a tall, dark personality who could resonate with the ideas of Clara Zetkin. I met Mekha Rajan and briefed her about this character. We had already worked together on another project before, so I knew her strengths. Mekha was known for her sweet on-screen demeanour and was very popular among television viewers, thanks to the many adverts in which she was cast either as a doting mother or a devout wife. This was the main reason why I chose her – because Clara is exactly the opposite.

Kavya, who plays Shakthi, had no major experience of working in a film before. But her confidence and the audition she gave for Shakthi were tremendous. I was looking for a pair of eyes that were constantly searching for answers and a sense of exhaustion in her expression from that constant searching. We were able to capture that mood throughout. Kavya really identified with Shakthi’s journey, and this is reflected on screen. 

Vanessa Stevenson played the cameo role of Alice Walker. I had worked with Vanessa during my postgraduate days in Kent. The main challenge I faced while writing Alice’s part was the number of stunt sequences involved. So I needed an actor who could trust me when she was required to hang thirty feet off the ground from an industrial crane. Vanessa, an experienced actor from London, did just that. And she is so convincing as Alice Walker.

For Charles Aniefuna, we had initially shortlisted an actor from Hollywood. But due to a last-minute date clash he withdrew, and we had to look for an African American actor with considerable experience. When Gary Cordice sent in his reel I was thrilled, because he was exactly the figure I had in mind. However, he was British, with a strong British accent. We worked on his American accent for three months and finally took him on board. Charles Aniefuna’s ancestors are from Africa and his great-grandfather was a tribal leader of a clan. Charles carries the same passion and spirit about nature that his ancestors had. I saw all of this in Gary.

How did you come up with the plot?

I come from a place where writers, journalists, academics and intellectuals who express rationalist views are threatened and even killed by religious mobs in the name of protecting their religious beliefs. To take but one among so many instances, when my state’s elected representative, M. Karunanidhi, once remarked that a deity was a fictional mythological character, the right-wing politician Ram Vilas Vedanti suggested that it would be praiseworthy to behead him and cut out his tongue. Other extremist religious organisations endorsed this view.

The far-right political narrative has been on the rise across the world in the last few years; it especially seems to have started targeting science, free speech, free thought, and radical and secular ideas. Look at the recent attack on Salman Rushdie, or several recent attacks on Indian rationalists. When these irrationalist forces seep into power structures like the legislature, judiciary and constitutional framework, then they can push human civilisation back by several centuries, and have a particularly negative effect on women and, in India, people from the lower castes.

To answer your question on how I came up with the plot, I see the plot in terms, as it were, of a fall from a cliff. And I am standing on the edge of the cliff called ‘society’, and these social issues keep bombarding me one after the other, pushing me off the cliff, and I eventually landed on this plot. This plot is my destination. My journey as an individual seeking answers has made me land here.

What are the key things you would like your viewers to take away from it?

Above all, I want them to be persuaded of the importance of rational thinking and free thought, the value of standing against oppression in any form, and the importance of welcoming progressive ideas that can liberate humanity from the restrictions of narrow religious worldviews. But there are also other themes that I hope the viewers will be able to absorb – in particular, the way in which anthropology can help us understand human development over thousands of years, and the need to liberate ourselves from the religious beliefs, rituals and customs that arose at an early stage of humanity’s development.

Where does the title come from, and what is the connection with the Freethinker?

As a result of globalisation, the world has grown smaller. Technology, infrastructure, culture, recipes, fashion, and so forth reaches the other side of the world almost instantly – whether for better or worse. Almost 140 years ago, a progressive, radical freethought movement travelled thousands of miles from London to British Madras (now Chennai) in less than a year, without the internet. In 1881, G.W. Foote founded the Freethinker. In 1882, the magazine inspired a group of people in British-ruled Madras to start a progressive journal called The Thinker in English and Tattuva Vivesni in Tamil. ‘Athipakkam’ Venkatachalam (a rationalist who took the name of his village as his first name) was the leading contributor to Tattuva Vivesini. This journal was published from 1882 to 1888, after which it disappeared for lack of patronage.

In 2019, I made Vivesini, which talks about the resurgence of rationalism in Chennai, and in which a fictional character, ‘Jayaraman’ was presented as Athipakkam Venkatachalam’s great grandson. Alice Walker, a fictional character whose great-grandmother (in the film) worked with Charles Bradlaugh, revives the spirit of enlightenment in Shakthi. In July 2022, the very first private screening of Vivesini was held in Conway Hall, in the presence of members of the National Secular Society, of which Bradlaugh was the first president, and the editor of the Freethinker. I am delighted to witness the reconnection of the Freethinker magazine and Tattuva Vivesini through the art of cinema. For me, this symbolises the resurgence of enlightenment in Chennai.

How prevalent is superstition in southern India today?

Superstition is part and parcel of any average Indian’s outlook. For instance, numerous events, from taking the oath in the legislative assembly, to launching rockets or even writing the code for a new piece of software, are required to be done on an ‘auspicious’ date and even at an ‘auspicious’ time of day. We make the most important and crucial life decisions based on superstitious beliefs. We look to auspicious dates, days and times even for things like medical procedures. But in recent years there has been a movement to reinterpret these superstitions and irrational beliefs as ‘science’ – a sort of ‘science’ that is thousands of years old and was in use by our ancestors. Any scientific explanation or objection to these practices is considered blasphemous, and critics are likely to face retribution from religious leaders.

For you, how is freethought connected to political activism?

Vivesini considers some of the ways in which free thought can lead to political activism. Shakthi is brought up by a rationalist father who advocates freethought. But it is not until she is grown up and starts to ask questions that she frees herself of illusions about what happened to her parents in the past, and ends up as an activist, as they were.

Thinking freely, rationally and without being constrained by religious superstition can lead to political secularism. Historically, the freethought, rationalist and secularist movements have fought for the separation of church and state, paved the way for industrialisation and been criticised by religious leaders for questioning the established order. In our era, political activism plays an important role in creating consciousness about environmentalism, the decentralisation of power, sustainable energy, gender equality and so on. And where there is freethought there is political activism. 

What is the future of secularism in south India?

The British rule of India was marked by many shadows. However, I see introduction of freethought and progressive, reformist ideas as the silver lining during this period. The rationalist movement started by the Madras Secular Society gained further momentum during the Dravidian movement. Just as the work of Satyajit Ray (1921-1992), a progressive filmmaker from Bengal, reflected the years of social reform in Bengal, the Dravidian school of reformism gave birth to Dravidian cinema, which started propagating secularist and rationalist ideas through films.

Southern India, especially Tamil Nadu, has always been receptive to progressive ideas, and it continues to do so. Here in Tamil Nadu, the representatives of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), a rational political party, still consciously follow Charles Bradlaugh’s example of refusing to take a religious oath when assuming office. Four Chief Ministers who hail from the Dravidian movement, C.N. Annadurai, M. Karunanidhi, M.G. Ramachandran and M.K. Stalin, have followed this secular method of taking the oath.

What’s next after Vivesini – do you have plans for a sequel?

I am first planning to screen Vivesini at certain universities and educational institutions in the UK and US, and then release it commercially in India. I have no plans for a sequel, but am looking at producing films that can break the current trend in the Indian film industry, which, although technically and aesthetically advanced, is presenting increasingly regressive ideas that go back to pre-modern times. This reflects the current mood in national politics, in which people in power are reintroducing ancient religious beliefs and adapting them to present circumstances. Anything that was preached or followed or propagated centuries ago is not automatically holy. We tend to associate ideas that are thousands of years old with sanctity. But I would argue that such ideas were formed when humankind was in its childhood stage; we are now, as it were, in humanity’s middle age and fighting the trauma we had during our childhood. But the point is that these beliefs are primitive and should not be venerated merely because they are very old. To break this pattern, I am looking at injecting progressive thoughts into people’s minds through my films.

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The post The resurgence of enlightenment in southern India: interview with Bhavan Rajagopalan appeared first on The Freethinker.

Readers of the Freethinker are cordially invited to a closed private screening of Vivesini, a new rationalist film by Laburnum Productions, a film company based in Chennai, south India.

The event will start at 18:00 on Thursday 21st July at Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4RL. It will begin with a welcome drink, followed by the screening at 18:15. The running time will be approximately 2 hours 30 minutes. There will then be a short Q&A with the writer and director, Bhavan Rajagopalan, chaired by Freethinker editor, Emma Park.

If you would like to attend, please email laburnumproductions@gmail.com.

For the trailer, please click here.

Update, 14 November 2022: video about the making of the film and its reception (with participation by Emma Park and Bob Forder) now available here.

Further information below:

‘Vivesini’ is Tamil for ‘thinker’ or ‘enquirer’. The screening at Conway Hall, a historic seat of secularist, rationalist, ethical and humanist reform since 1929, is a tribute to the principles of the secularists, and more specifically to Charles Bradlaugh, first president of the National Secular Society. The film will feature an appearance by NSS historian, Bob Forder.

The Freethinker magazine inspired the founding of The Thinker (Tattuva Vivesini), a Tamil magazine of freethought and secularism, published in British Madras in Tamil and English between 1882 and 1888.

Here is an introduction to the film by Rajagopalan:

Three individuals from Chennai, London, and New York are connected through an encounter with a ‘spirit’ from the enlightenment era. Shakthi, the protagonist, who has been brought up by a rationalist father, treks into a forbidden forest and witnesses a series of inexplicable events that seem to haunt both the forest and her mind. Her quest for an explanation accidentally triggers a social awakening.

The film will be partly in English and partly in Tamil with subtitles.

The post ‘Vivesini’ – a new rationalist film from India appeared first on The Freethinker.

In the late 1880s, Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) was an emerging artist who made money from portrait painting. Ellen Cobden, Sickert’s first wife, was one of the five daughters of Richard Cobden, the great free trade advocate. Through Cobden, Sickert made contact with many leading liberals who knew and admired Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891). In about 1889, he painted a portrait of Bradlaugh in his later years. This was exhibited in and then purchased by the National Liberal Club; it is still on display in their clubhouse on the Embankment. (Bradlaugh was initially rejected by the NLC when he applied for membership in 1882; he eventually joined in 1890.) This painting helped to cement Sickert’s growing reputation.

Bradlaugh greatly impressed Sickert and shared his iconoclasm. When Bradlaugh died in 1891, Sickert was commissioned by an anonymous Manchester freethinker to paint a posthumous portrait of him standing at the Bar of the House of Commons, demanding to take his seat as an MP after his entry had been blocked by opponents hostile to his atheism and republicanism. The largest painting that Sickert ever produced, it was displayed in the headquarters of the Manchester branch of the National Secular Society, and later transferred to the Manchester Art Gallery, where it is still on display.

After Bradlaugh’s death, Sickert offered to paint a picture of his study at his home in St John’s Wood – a rented flat over a piano shop – for his surviving daughter, Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner. In 1890, Sickert had made a cartoon sketch of the same study with Bradlaugh in it; by this stage, he had almost become Bradlaugh’s ‘official portraitist’. The painting of her father’s empty study was presented and dedicated to Hypatia.  

In this painting, the only source of light comes from the sky outside, which falls onto Bradlaugh’s empty chair. The chair appears to have been left pushed out – as if abandoned halfway through a task – and lies just below a blurred bust, like the shadow of the man who has gone. Otherwise, the interior is packed with books in innumerable shades of brown. A green and brass reading lamp suggests relentless effort late into the night, while streaks of white evoke a sheaf of papers and a quill pen, lying on the desk as if about to be used. The view out of the window is of the city where Bradlaugh lived most of his life.

The painting also alludes to Hypatia’s perspective as her father’s former secretary and companion in his struggles. It remained in her possession until her death in 1934; since then, it has been owned by a series of private collectors.

Comparison with a photograph of the study published in the same year (below) shows the reality behind Sickert’s painting, and the ways in which he drew on what was there but also imbued it with his own interpretation of Bradlaugh’s personality and presence.

The post Image of the week: Charles Bradlaugh’s study after his death, by Walter Sickert appeared first on The Freethinker.

The most imposing building in the world to have taken Charles Bradlaugh’s name is in a city he never visited and in a country which did not exist in his lifetime. The construction of Bradlaugh Hall in Lahore began in 1900, nine years after the death of the man after whom it was named. For decades, it was a rallying point for the nationalist movement which brought an end to the British Raj. It is now dilapidated, and squatters have moved in. If nothing is done, it will simply crumble away. But among those who seek to conserve the city’s heritage, there are signs of interest in reclaiming and restoring this huge, architecturally heterodox building which is such an important part of Lahore’s history. A new generation of Pakistani architects is taking the lead.

Hiba Hamid Hashmi is an architect, urban designer and lecturer at the Lahore campus of COMSATS University (‘Commission on Science and Technology for Sustainable Development in the South’). She has given her students the task of devising an ‘adaptive reuse’ of the hall. ‘We are running this as a student project with an intention to revive the Hall as a public gathering space by introducing programmes inviting community activities,’ she says. ‘We also intend to propose a design strategy for the public square outside, as there is a dearth of public spaces in Lahore.’ One of her fourth-year students, Mohammad Moiz Khan, took the photographs which accompany this article.

From a humble household in Hoxton, Charles Bradlaugh quickly rose to become the commanding figure in the Victorian freethought movement. He was a prolific campaigner on the controversial issues of the day: a radical, republican, atheist, supporter of Indian and Irish nationalism, advocate of birth control, propagandist, pamphleteer and orator. He founded the National Secular Society in 1866 and established the National Reformer as one of the most widely read political journals of the day.

In 1880, Bradlaugh was elected MP for Northampton, standing as a Liberal but very much on the party’s radical wing. However, he was only able to take his seat in 1886, after a titanic struggle against opponents in Parliament who insisted that, as an atheist, he could neither affirm nor swear the oath of allegiance to the monarch on the Bible. He was a constitutionalist, a reformer rather than a revolutionary, and relished being in the House of Commons. He became a champion of Indian issues, protesting against the misuse of funds allocated for famine relief and the British authorities’ deposition of the Maharajah of Kashmir; this earned him the informal title of ‘Member for India’. His purpose was not to promote the British Raj but to seek to represent the interests of the Indian people in the imperial Parliament, since Indians themselves, as subjects of the Empire, had no formal representation.

Charles Bradlaugh set sail for Bombay (now Mumbai) on his only visit to India in November 1889, arriving there on Christmas Eve. He had been invited to address the recently established Indian National Congress. This later became the party of Nehru and Gandhi, but at the time consisted of an elite alliance of a small number of progressive Britishers in India and of politically assertive Indian lawyers and professionals. It had not yet reached the stage of demanding independence, but instead advocated for a much greater role for Indians in managing their own affairs.

The ‘Member for India’ was fêted. Five days after his arrival, his speech to the annual session of Congress was enthusiastically received. The text was later included in a volume commemorating the centenary of his birth (Champion of Liberty: Charles Bradlaugh, Freethought Press Association, 1933). ‘Friends, fellow-subjects and fellow-citizens,’ Bradlaugh began, to loud cheers, and went on:

‘I have no right to offer advice to you, but if I had, and if I dared, I would say to you men from lands almost as separate, although within your own continent, as England is from you – I would say to you men with race traditions, caste views, and religious differences – that in an empire like ours what we should seek and have is equality before the law for all – (cheers) – equality of opportunity for all, equality of expression for all – penalty on none, favouritism for none. And I believe in this great Congress I see the germs of that which may be as fruitful for good as the most fruitful tree that grows under your sun.’

He commended Congress for including women in its ranks, asserting that ‘great thoughts and great endeavours are not made less because the man goes to the woman for counsel in the hour of need, and makes the woman stronger.’

Bradlaugh made the trip out both to demonstrate his support for Indian nationalism and as a rest cure. He had been seriously ill and a long sea journey was seen as an enforced respite from his punishing, self-imposed workload. ‘My health is coming back very fast,’ he wrote in a voyager’s log which he kept while on board ship. He was deluding himself. While in India, Bradlaugh was not well enough to venture beyond Bombay. In early January he set sail for home. A year after his return to England, he died. M.K. Gandhi, then 21, was among the mourners who attended his funeral.

In 1893, the annual gathering of the Indian National Congress was convened in Lahore, the capital of the province of Punjab in British India. The session was presided over by Dadabhai Naoroji, a wealthy Bombay Parsee who in the previous year had become the first Indian to be elected an MP. His constituency of Central Finsbury adjoined Bradlaugh’s old meeting place at the Hall of Science on Old Street, and Naoroji took on Bradlaugh’s mantle of Member for India. It seems to have been at that session of Congress that plans were developed to build a hall in Lahore which would both honour Charles Bradlaugh and provide a venue for nationalists to assemble without requiring permission from the British authorities.

Fundraising for the hall in Lahore took some time; the foundation stone was only laid in October 1900. Over the decades, Bradlaugh Hall was used as a cultural and theatrical venue. Its political purpose was also amply fulfilled: in the first half of the twentieth century, just about every nationalist leader of note addressed rallies there. One of the most influential nationalists, Lala Lajpat Rai, set up a college within the Hall’s precincts.

In August 1947 the British withdrew from India. The Hall got caught up in the trauma of Partition, since Lahore lay inside Pakistan, though only a few miles from the dividing line. Much of Punjab erupted in violence, and the great majority of Lahore’s Hindu and Sikh communities fled from their home city and eastwards to India. In its way, the Hall, too, was a victim of Partition. In Pakistan, an Evacuee Trust Property Board was set up to administer the public buildings, particularly schools and places of worship, left behind by those who had migrated. It seems the managers of the Hall were among those who left Lahore, so the building became part of the Board’s extensive property portfolio. For a while, it was leased to an educational institute, but little attention was given to its upkeep.

Bradlaugh Hall is wonderfully located, close to the historic heart of Lahore. But it does not directly front a main road, so for many citizens of Lahore, it has long been out of sight and out of mind. Although the building is supposedly sealed shut, two years ago, I managed, with the help of a local historian, to get access to it, by clambering through an unlocked rear door. When I visited, the Hall was an austere, hollowed-out shell. It was evocative to stand where so many nationalist leaders would once have stood and delivered an uncompromising message about the injustice of British rule. There must be scope to reclaim this splendid building, so central to Punjab’s politics.

A campaign to Save Bradlaugh Hall, spearheaded by historians, heritage enthusiasts and civic activists, has been putting pressure on the local authorities to find a new purpose for this historic building. They want to see its renaissance as a cultural venue. Some money is said to have been allocated for basic repairs, but it is still not clear when, or whether, this work will take place. The future of the building is complicated by the mesh of different trusts and authorities whose support and funds are needed for the building to be reborn. Hashmi remains upbeat, encouraged by the enthusiasm of her architecture students. “Maybe when Lahore’s Walled City Authority actually manages to conserve the building, our faculty and students can pitch their ideas,” she says. “We hope for the best!”

Update, 16th May 2022

The Walled City of Lahore Authority (WCLA) and the Evacuee Trust Property Board have agreed on a Memorandum of Understanding to provide funding to restore the Hall. Further information here.

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