For the past three years, GW Foote & Co. Ltd have been working on a project to digitise the complete run of print versions of the Freethinker from 1881 to 2014. This project has now been completed and everyone can access this extraordinary back catalogue free of charge here.

In the first instalment of this series, I explained my own interest in freethought literature and my continuing career as a part-time bookseller for over 40 years. I have had the privilege of handling thousands of freethought books, pamphlets, journals, and other ephemera. However, the occasions when I have come across past issues of the Freethinker have been remarkably few. I have handled early bound volumes just twice and even later examples are rare, with dealers often demanding prices best described as speculative. I have asked myself why this is and guess that the attitude to newspapers is generally that you read them and then throw them away.

What is more, the printed Freethinker was always published in a relatively large format—the first copies were foolscap size (approximately 34 x 20 cm). This lasted for many years and made them difficult to store. The copies I have come across have almost always been bound volumes sold at the end of the calendar year. There were two types of these, one leather bound and one bound in sturdy green cloth. The former did not age well, with the leather cracking and the boards detaching, but the latter stood the test of time. I am delighted to say that one of the two sets I have handled still adorns my bookshelves and continues to provide me with hours of instruction, distraction, and entertainment.

If you agree that the Freethinker has been the dominant voice of British secularism and freethought for 143 years, and that secularism and freethought are central to a free and democratic society, then the Freethinker is precious, and it is troubling that up to now the archive has been so difficult to access. For most, it has meant an arduous physical visit to a copyright library. This is why the conclusion of the GW Foote & Co. digitisation project is cause for cheers and celebration.

As a tentative pointer to what readers might enjoy about the archive, I offer the following comments on the Freethinker’s history and an indication of what I have discovered over the years in my own printed collection.

In a previous article, I wrote of George Willam Foote’s (1850-1915) early life, his founding of the Freethinker in 1881, and his year-long imprisonment for blasphemy. An additional matter that deserves recognition is that Foote’s actions involved a large element of self-sacrifice. He was a cultivated, bookish man, a librarian with refined literary tastes who wrote beautifully. For him, the abrasive, satirical, and outrageous style of the new journal was initially alien. However, he was so incensed by the treatment of the President of the National Secular Society (NSS), Charles Bradlaugh, and the deprivation of Bradlaugh’s right to sit as an MP for Northampton, that he determined to take the fight to the ‘bigots’.

He was also influenced by the established tone of freethought publications, epitomised by George Jacob Holyoake’s (1817-1906) writings which were thoughtful, worthy, totally lacking in humour, and, for many, rather boring. Foote reasoned that humour was a devastating weapon when employed against pompous authority figures in the established church and against religion in general. He reasoned that nobody takes seriously an individual or idea that has been laughed at and he also noted the satirical power of cartoons, which he was to employ with great effect and which led to his conviction for blasphemy. Some things never change; cartoons have not lost their power to provoke in the modern world.

Foote’s years as editor were not only characterised by his pungent attacks on the religious and religion. After his accession to the NSS Presidency in 1890, the Freethinker emerged as the NSS’s ‘in-house’ journal, acting as a type of noticeboard providing details of lectures, meetings, and publications. I particularly enjoy Joseph Mazzini Wheeler’s tightly written historical and biographical articles. Here was a man who grasped the significance of the intellectual and historical traditions of freethought. It is a great pity that his poor health and early death scuppered his plans to write a history of those traditions.

By the beginning of the First World War, Foote was ailing. Although he nominally remained editor, he had relocated to Westcliff-on-Sea for the sea air and occasionally commuted into London. Much of the actual editorial work and writing was being carried on by his sub-editor and loyal deputy, Chapman Cohen (1868-1954). Cohen formally took over the editor’s position and became President of the NSS when Foote died in 1915. He was known to a generation as CC, remaining editor until 1951. The Freethinker had had just two editors in its first 70 years. 

Like Foote, Cohen came to dominate the journal and make it his own, but there were differences in approach, substance, and style.  By the time of Cohen’s accession, the days when freethought was associated with radical political campaigns and working-class activism were long past. CC had little or no contact with politicians and always resisted political interventions in his many public meetings. His writings were characterised by a relatively sober critique of the illogicality, contradictions, and self-serving nature of religion and the religious. His arguments were rooted in philosophy, natural and social science, and literature. Foote’s biting satire was no more, and the cartoons long forgotten.

To my mind, Cohen’s greatest attribute was his ability to make the logical case for freethought in terms accessible to general readers. He never talked down, he just wrote logically and clearly in elegant, plain English that all could understand. Forty years ago, when I started book dealing, there were a few older customers who knew him. More than once I heard him described as ‘my greatest teacher’. To this, I would add that there was not a freethinking argument advanced by Bertrand Russell that CC had not made before. This is not to belittle Russell; rather, it is to recognise Cohen. For those who want to understand the case for atheism and the dangers of religion, just go to the Cohen years in the archive.

Before moving on, I must recognise CC’s sheer hard work. Each week through the 1920s and 30s he edited 12 or 16 foolscap pages, some of which he wrote. He corresponded with readers, provided the NSS with leadership, and spent his weekends speaking publicly. In the summer, that meant ‘outdoors’, in parks and public spaces. From September to April, he was ‘indoors’, travelling the country giving lectures (sometimes three in a single weekend). For example, during the 1919-1920 indoor season he spoke at no less than 34 venues on more than 50 occasions. This was a pattern and level of activity that he maintained throughout the interwar years.

One contributor whose writings will be enjoyed by those with an interest in freethought and radical history is Herbert Cutner (1881-1969), although he did not restrict himself to historical subjects. He began his contributions in 1920 and by 1959 had had his 1,000^th article published.

Since Cohen’s resignation the turnover of editors has been more rapid, at times too rapid, although an important exception was Barry Duke’s 24-year tenure beginning in 1998. One editor who had a particular impact on me was Bill McIlroy (1928-2013), who served three separate terms totalling more than 14 years. As well as commissioning some important historical essays, and networking with individuals such as politicians Tony Benn and Michael Foot and academics Edward Royle and David Berman, Bill had a talent for punchy, witty headlines. Here are some examples to whet the appetite. ‘Pious Indoctrinators Tighten Grip on Classroom Captives’ (July 1988); ‘Embryology Bill: “Pro-Life” Dirty Tricks Campaign Aborted’ (May 1990); ‘Patten Links Crime Rate with Decline in Fear of Fire and Brimstone’ (May 1992).

Another relatively recent contributor who should be mentioned is Jim Herrick (1943-2023), a stalwart of the freethought and secularist movement in general, editor of the Freethinker from 1977 to 1981, and contributor on a diverse range of subjects over many years. I have particularly enjoyed Jim’s theatre reviews and historical articles. An invaluable contribution is his centenary history of the journal, Vision and Realism: A Hundred Years of the Freethinker, published in 1982.

So, the Freethinker lives on as a contemporary digital magazine rooted in its historical archive. Not everything published in its pages over the past 143 years has been impressive, although much of it is. But for me, it is a kind of intellectual treasure trove hidden away for too long and unavailable to even its most fervent supporters. There is nothing quite like it, with its alternative and critical take on religious belief, contemporary events, and social developments. It is also a testament to those who have gone before and who have on occasion sacrificed their own interests rather than surrender their intellectual freedom. The digital archive will be invaluable in keeping this intellectual tradition, once termed ‘the best of causes’, alive for a long time to come.

Editor: The Freethinker digital archive is a great achievement, the work of many hands. Though it, like the Freethinker today, is free to read, many resources were put into it and donations from readers are much appreciated. Anyone who donates over £500 will not only have our immense gratitude but will be publicly recognised, with their name proudly displayed in the archive itself (if they so desire). For technical reasons, please get in touch with us if you wish to donate £500 or more rather than using our usual donation form. Meanwhile, enjoy the archive.

The post Books from Bob’s Library #4: The ‘Freethinker’—over a century of issues now available as a digital archive appeared first on The Freethinker.

James Gillray’s (1765-1815) hand-coloured etching was originally published by Hannah Humphrey (1745-1818) in 1798. It would have been displayed in the window of Humphrey’s shop at 27 St James’s Street, London—and it would undoubtedly have attracted crowds.

Gillray is generally regarded as the ‘father of the political cartoon’ and this etching is a fine example. He first satirised the King, George III. However, during and after the French Revolution, he took a conservative stand against it and its supporters, the most important of whom was Thomas Paine. This is well-illustrated here. Charles Fox, Whig politician, supporter of the principles of the American and French revolutions, and champion of religious toleration and liberty, is portrayed as the Devil trying unsuccessfully to tempt John Bull. Fox’s ‘Tree of Liberty’ is barren and leafless and its fruit is rotten. The title of two of Thomas Paine’s works, The Age of Reason and Rights of Man, adorn the tree along with the red cap of liberty. ‘Atheism’, ‘deism’,‘blasphemy’, and ‘democracy’ are just some of the dangerous and rotten ideas produced by the tree.

Behind Fox and his tree, by contrast, is a sturdy green English oak, rooted in the ’Commons’, ‘Lords’, and ‘King’ with an upright trunk of ‘justice’, branches of ‘law’ and ‘religion’, and fruits which include ‘freedom’ and ‘happiness’. Then as now, progress is derided as corrupt and defiling, while the status quo is seen to ensure stability and ‘true’ freedom.

Related reading

Books From Bob’s Library #1: Introduction and Thomas Paine’s ‘The Age of Reason’, by Bob Forder

Books from Bob’s Library #2: Thomas Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’, by Bob Forder

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

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

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

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

The post Image of the week: ‘The Tree of Liberty – with the Devil tempting John Bull’ by James Gillray (1798) appeared first on The Freethinker.

Of all the items in my library, one of those I prize most is a bound volume of the first twenty issues of Richard Carlile’s The Republican, a radical journal which appeared weekly from 27 August 1819. It thrills me that I can peruse the original leaves of a journal edited and largely written by one of the bravest and most steadfast freethought heroes in British history. At a time of ferocious oppression in the wake of the Peterloo massacre, Richard Carlile dared to challenge the authorities and their arbitrary power in the most outspoken terms—all while he was being tried for blasphemous libel for publishing Thomas Paine’s works, including Rights of Man and The Age of Reason (the subjects of the first two articles in this series).

Richard Carlile was born the son of a shoemaker on 8 December 1790 in Ashburton, Devon. From the age of twelve, he served an apprenticeship as a tinsmith. By 1813, Carlile was in Gosport and probably worked in the nearby Portsmouth Dockyard. On 8 December of that year, he married Jane Cousins. At this time, he was attending David Bogue’s academy and was in training to be a missionary (Bogue was a Congregationalist and from his academy sprang the London Missionary Society). Of course, Carlile was to change his mind about the virtues of Christianity, but his theological training was to stand him in good stead.

Soon after their marriage, the Carliles moved to London and, after struggling to make a living as a tinsmith, Carlile began to sell pamphlets on the streets, including those of Thomas Paine. By 1817 he was reprinting cheap editions of Paine’s works, including The Age of Reason, which had not been sold legally in Britain since 1797.

Peterloo

On 16 August 1819, the then-biggest-ever meeting of working-class people was held in Manchester. Carlile travelled with the main speaker, Henry Hunt, to St Peter’s Field and was on the platform when the yeomanry charged, killing eighteen and wounding many others. Carlile avoided arrest and returned to London to publish one of the first accounts of what he termed the ‘Manchester Massacre’ in the journal he edited, Sherwin’s Political Register. The following week the journal’s title was changed to The Republican, thus upping the stakes. Carlile did not mince his words: in the first issue of the retitled journal, in an article entitled ‘The Crisis – No. 1’ (clearly, he was mimicking his hero Thomas Paine), he wrote:

‘The massacre of the unoffending inhabitants of Manchester, on the 16^th August, by the Yeomanry Cavalry, and Police, at the instigation of the Magistrates, should be the daily theme of the press, until the MURDERERS are brought to justice by the Law Officers of the Crown, under the instruction of the executive, or in default thereof, until the People have obtained their proper rank and station in the legislature…’

To Dorchester Gaol

This was all too much for the authorities, and Carlile was soon on trial for blasphemous libel, as well as for publishing two classic deist texts: Paine’s The Age of Reason and Elihu Palmer’s Principles of Nature (1801). He referred to this as a ‘mock trial’ because he refused to accept that the law could suppress free discussion and because the judge refused to allow him to call the Archbishop of Canterbury and Chief Rabbi as witnesses. He did, however, grasp the opportunity of reading the whole of The Age of Reason to the court so that it was published as part of the record.   

Carlile was convicted in October 1819, sentenced to a total of three years in prison, and fined £1,500 but, as he refused to pay the fine, he was not released until November 1825.  He was sent to Dorchester Gaol, well away from his radical colleagues and sympathisers in London, and placed in solitary confinement for fear he would contaminate other inmates. He was supposed to be taken from his cell for half an hour each day for exercise, but he objected because this would have meant his being paraded before the other inmates. As a result, he didn’t leave his cell for three years.

On the other hand, his cell was light and airy and he had his own sofa, sink, water closet, and bath. There was also a writing desk from which he continued to contribute to and edit The Republican, now published by his wife Jane. This writing desk is currently in the Conway Hall Library. In those days, prisoners could pay for better food and accommodation and Carlile had some well-heeled supporters, including Julian Hibbert, a wealthy Caribbean sugar plantation owner. One thing that the authorities seem to have missed was that the Dorchester to London stagecoach passed both Dorchester Gaol and the Carliles’ premises at 55 Fleet Street, thus providing a convenient service which Carlile used to deliver copy to London. The Republican sold well due to the notoriety of its editor and he produced twelve volumes while in prison. It was during this period that he pronounced himself an atheist (rather than a deist), the first person in England to do so during his own lifetime.

In 1820 it was Jane’s turn to be tried. She stood in the dock with her baby, Thomas Paine Carlile, in her arms. She was sentenced to two years and shared her husband’s cell. When in prison, Jane gave birth to a daughter whom she named Hypatia, after the pagan philosopher who was torn to pieces and burnt by a Christian mob in the fifth century CE. Jane’s place in Fleet Street was taken by Richard’s sister, Mary, who in turn received a sentence of six months and joined Richard and Jane in the same cell in Dorchester. Meanwhile, more than 150 men and women, Carlile’s ‘shopmen’, were sent to Newgate Prison for selling The Republican.

Despite all this, Carlile’s freethought books continued to sell. To make the authorities’ task more difficult, they were sold from behind a screen. On the customer’s side was a clock face bearing the names of the items on offer with a hand that could be pointed at the relevant title, whereupon a hidden shop assistant pushed the book through a hole in the screen, thus avoiding identification. Carlile called it ‘selling books by clockwork’.

By 1825 it had dawned on the authorities that their actions were merely promoting the Carliles’ publications. Carlile was suddenly and unconditionally released. He returned to London, took out a lease on larger premises at 62 Fleet Street, and expanded his business.  These premises are still standing today—although fast food, rather than books, is now sold from them.

Every Woman’s Book

In 1826 Carlile wrote and published Every Woman’s Book, the first book to advocate birth control, provide contraceptive advice, and advocate free love in Britain (it had been preceded by an article in The Republican entitled ‘What is Love?’). For Carlile, contraception served two purposes: it helped prevent conception and facilitated…pleasure!

‘See, what a mass of evil arises from bastard children, from child-murder, from deserted children, from diseased children, and even where the parents are most industrious and most virtuous, from a half-starved, naked, and badly housed family, from families crowded into one room, for whose health a house and garden is essential. All these matters are a tax upon love, a perpetual tax upon human pleasure, upon health, a tax that turns beauty into shrivelled ugliness, defaces the noble attitude of mankind, and makes its condition worse than that of the cattle of the field.’

Carlile was appalled by the practices of abortion and infanticide, both common at the time. He suggested that no married couple need have more children than desired and maintained that no unhealthy woman need endanger her life through childbirth. He believed that there need be no illegitimate children and that sexual intercourse could be independent of the dread of conception.

Carlile’s feminist views were rooted in his experience at Peterloo, where many peaceful women were present, and in witnessing the sacrifices made by his female shop workers, particularly Jane and Mary. Now he went a step further, arguing that Christian sexual morality was a constraint on female emancipation and reduced women to subservience. He accused Christian marriage of causing men to treat their wives ‘with as much vulgarity as he treats any other chamber utensil’ and for placing women under a form of ‘legalised slavery’.

To hammer his point home, Carlile included a frontispiece illustration to his book showing Adam and Eve without the usual fig leaves. He was making the point that, in his opinion, aspects of the Bible were obscene—far more obscene than his endeavours to improve people’s lives.

For Carlile, lovemaking was physically and mentally healthy, and he challenged still more taboos by claiming that women found sex as pleasurable and satisfying as men. His favoured contraceptive method was the sponge, although he also mentions ‘the glove’ (or condom) and withdrawal.

Carlile must have been disappointed by the reaction to his book. Many of his female followers turned against him and William Cobbett branded him ‘the grand pornographer and pimp’who planned to lure into prostitution the maidenhood of England. Nevertheless, the book sold steadily.

Lecture tours

When Carlile was released from gaol he went on four lecture tours, two in 1827 (totalling eight months), one in 1828 (six months), and another in 1829 (also six months). Although these had mixed success, they did help to establish a national network of reformers. He was always particularly well-received in Portsmouth and Manchester, although he had substantial support in many other industrial towns. He was not a particularly forceful speaker, and his most successful tour was the 1829 one, when he teamed up with Robert Taylor, the ‘Devil’s Chaplain’, and launched an ‘infidel…missionary tour’.¹ Taylor was a Cambridge-educated former Anglican Minister who had served a prison sentence for blasphemy. His oratorical skill greatly exceeded Carlile’s.

Eliza Sharples

Sadly, Richard and Jane were now falling out of love, and Richard took up with Eliza Sharples in 1832. Sharples became, in his words, his ‘moral wife’. She was a formidable character and campaigner in her own right, an effective platform speaker who edited her own feminist journal, The Isis. Years later, after Carlile’s death, a young Charles Bradlaugh was to briefly find a home with Sharples when his relationship with his father broke down.

The Rotunda

In 1830, Carlile opened the Blackfriars Rotunda on the banks of the Thames, near Blackfriars Bridge. This was a substantial building with two lecture theatres, one of which could accommodate up to 1,500. The Rotunda became infamous as the centre of reformers’ activities at a time of mounting discontent.

In 1831, Carlile was incarcerated again, this time in London, for defending the ‘Swing Riots’, uprisings by agricultural workers demanding better working conditions. Now it was Sharples who visited him in prison. During one of her visits, they conceived a child, the first of four.  While he was imprisoned, Sharples took over management of the Rotunda. 

Final years

After this second imprisonment, Carlile’s career declined. Financially bereft thanks to government fines, he had also lost a lot of support due to his abandonment of Jane, though he had granted her an annuity of £50 per year. He also made himself unpopular with many former supporters by adopting the title Reverend. His atheism was unwavering, but he thought Christianity provided a sound moral code.

Carlile’s end was probably hastened by his belief (shared by others) that swallowing a small amount of mercury each day improved health. He died on 10 February 1843 and his body was taken to St Thomas’s Hospital where, in accordance with his wishes, his brain was dissected for research. He was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery.

The Republican provided a foundation on which Richard Carlile built his reputation and following. His punchy, colourful, sometimes outrageous writing reflects his audacious and extraordinarily courageous war against arbitrary authority in the cause of liberal, democratic, and Enlightenment ideals. Can you blame me for gently handling my bound volume with awe—and a misty look in my eye?

Main sources

Joel H. Wiener, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain.  The Life of Richard Carlile.  Greenwood Press, 1983.

Michael L. Bush, The Friends and Following of Richard Carlile.  A Study of Infidel Republicanism in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain. Twopenny Press, 2016.

Michael L. Bush, What is Love? Richard Carlile’s Philosophy of Sex. Verso, 1998.

1. Editor: I can’t resist adding a little more about Taylor’s nickname. One of Carlile and Taylor’s stops on the infidel tour was Cambridge, where a young Charles Darwin witnessed the controversy stirred up by the two infidels. Perhaps this was what made him fearful, years later, of stirring up controversy by publishing his theory of evolution by natural selection. He certainly remembered Taylor’s nickname, writing in 1856 ‘What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of Nature!’. In 2003, a latter-day missionary of Moloch, Richard Dawkins, was inspired by Darwin to entitle an essay collection A Devil’s Chaplain (albeit erroneously crediting Darwin with coining the term—which, in fact, goes as far back as Chaucer). ~ Daniel James Sharp ︎

Related reading

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

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

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

Britain’s blasphemy heritage, by David Nash

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

How three media revolutions transformed the history of atheism, by Nathan Alexander

Secularism is a feminist issue, by Megan Manson

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

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

What should schools teach young people about sex? by Peter Tatchell

The post Books from Bob’s Library #3: Richard Carlile’s ‘The Republican’ and ‘Every Woman’s Book’ 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

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.

Michael Meyer has produced this splendidly researched and written account of the 1877 trial of Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant for republishing the American doctor Charles Knowlton’s infamous birth control pamphlet The Fruits of Philosophy (1832).

This pamphlet was the most influential nineteenth-century tract of its type. It provided cheap but useful advice on how to prevent conception. Within months, a British edition appeared, published by a succession of freethought publishers. By 1876, the plates were in the hands of Charles Watts, then secretary of the National Secular Society (NSS) and a close ally of the NSS’s President, Charles Bradlaugh, and one of its Vice-Presidents, Annie Besant. The pamphlet had been selling steadily but in small numbers, perhaps 700 per annum. In 1876, a Bristol bookseller, Henry Cook, was sentenced to two years’ hard labour for selling the pamphlet adorned with ‘obscene’ illustrations. We can only guess how ‘obscene’ these were, as no illustrated copies survive. Now, with their appetites whetted, the authorities decided to press on and prosecute the publisher, Charles Watts. To the extreme disgust and fury of Bradlaugh and Besant, Watts pled guilty to publishing an obscene book and was let off with a suspended sentence.

Meyer argues that it was Besant who showed the greater resolve and persuaded Bradlaugh that the booklet was defensible. Others have argued that Bradlaugh needed no such persuasion. In any event, the pair broke all connection with Watts and determined to republish the tract, with new medical notes, themselves. For this purpose, they founded the Freethought Publishing Company, taking out a lease on a small shop close to Fleet Street.

On the day the pamphlet went on sale, there were crowds in the street when the shop opened.  Bradlaugh and Besant were both there and 500 copies exchanged hands in the first twenty minutes, with 125,000 sold in the first three months. Bradlaugh and Besant made no secret of their activities and were duly prosecuted. The importance of the case was underlined by the appearance of the Solicitor General, Hardinge Giffard, as chief counsel for the prosecution.  Bradlaugh and Besant defended themselves with skill and passion. Regarding Besant, it was virtually unheard of for a woman, and a young woman at that, to represent herself, but Besant did so without hesitation. The arguments used by the pair were wide-ranging, but a common theme was that they were representatives of a morality superior to that of their persecutors. This was not to deter their opponent Giffard, who uttered the following words in his summing up:

‘I say this is a dirty, filthy book, and the test of it is that no human being would allow that book to lie on his table; no decently educated English husband would allow even his wife to have it…’

Despite the judge, Sir Alexander Cockburn, summing up in terms favourable to the defendants, the jury returned an ambiguous verdict, concluding that although the book was calculated to deprave public morals, they could not find that the defendants had corrupt motives.  A perplexed Cockburn interpreted this as a guilty verdict but the defendants appealed and succeeded in having their conviction overturned on technical grounds.

Although the trial is Meyer’s main focus, he also goes much deeper. He explains the backgrounds of both Bradlaugh and Besant and shows how they came to hold their opinions. He also explores the consequences of their actions for themselves. For example, and tragically, Annie Besant was to lose custody of her daughter, Mabel, in 1878, having been deemed an unfit mother. Custody passed to her husband the Reverend Frank Besant, from whom she was estranged and whom she loathed. The consequences for Bradlaugh were not quite so drastic, but Meyer describes his subsequent struggle to be elected an MP and then take his seat. He was prevented from doing so by religious opponents incensed by his atheism and what they saw as his associated low morality. Such contextualisation is further provided by periodic references to events in wider society relevant to public and establishment attitudes to birth control.

For Meyer, the life and career of the extraordinary Annie Besant is central to his narrative. Her vitality, courage, energy, and sparkling intelligence are nothing if not inspirational and he is astonished that she is not better known and celebrated. Of this, I am unconvinced. There have been several biographies, the best of which is Arthur H. Nethercot’s superb two-volume account, although this dates from the early 1960s. She also often takes a place of honour within the many books charting the history of the birth control movement. Annie was associated with other vitally important events and ideas in radical and working-class history, including her pioneering feminist writings and her support of the Bryant & May matchgirls’ strike of 1888.  However, by the late 1880s, she was moving away from organised freethought and from Bradlaugh, embracing first socialism and then theosophy. For the first, she could be forgiven and accommodated, but not for the second.

Still, it is true that she was ultimately seen as having betrayed her secularist comrades, who would undoubtedly have relished celebrating her achievements more had she stayed within the fold. She would also almost certainly have succeeded Bradlaugh as NSS president upon his untimely death in 1891. Her former friends watched her go with sadness rather than rancour, but sadness is not the positive emotion that provides a good basis for celebration. Perhaps it is strange that the Labour Party has not had more to say about her, particularly as she passed through a Fabian and socialist stage. But the Labour Party has never shown great affection for freethinkers, generally favouring its non-conformist and Christian socialist roots. Besant spent the second half of her long life in India, where she is better remembered for her championing of Indian nationalism.

By focusing on Annie Besant, Meyer may be responsible for failing to fully recognise the role and significance of her mentor, colleague, and confidant, Charles Bradlaugh. For example, although Besant’s role in the Knowlton trial was spectacular, it was Bradlaugh’s extraordinary self-taught legal knowledge that guided them and made their defence possible. And, though the consequences were dire for Besant, Bradlaugh had to suffer the anguish of a six-year struggle to take his rightful seat as an MP, facing deliberate efforts to bankrupt him through prosecutions designed to result in huge financial penalties. His daughter and disciple, Hypatia, always argued that it was this struggle that contributed to his early death in 1891. Unlike Besant, Bradlaugh remained steadfast and consistent in his opinions, and it is symbolic that Bradlaugh’s grave and monument at Brookwood is surrounded by those of his fellow birth control pioneers and freethinkers while Annie was cremated on a different continent.

The Knowlton case was significant for other reasons too. Central were the issues of freedom of speech and bodily autonomy; the trial’s outcome represented a significant victory on both counts. This battle goes on, is never won, and remains central to the freethinking, secularist tradition. As for the birth control movement, it would be nice to assume that prosecutions ceased, but they did not. Booksellers continued to serve prison sentences and have stock seized. The year after the Knowlton trial, Edward Truelove, the veteran freethinking publisher, was imprisoned for four months in London’s grim Coldbath Gaol for publishing Robert Dale Owen’s Moral Physiology, a work generally regarded as milder than Knowlton’s. But perhaps these prosecutions were final, futile attempts to resist change. I am sure Meyer is correct when he writes of the case as a ‘quantum leap’ which ‘[legitimised] contraception as worthy of public discussion, and [as something that was] morally permissible to practise at home.’ That was some achievement.

A Dirty, Filthy Book is a superbly written model for those who aspire to write significant but accessible history. Perhaps this is only to be expected from such an experienced journalist and author whose main academic post is as a Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. The book fizzes along and deserves a bumper sale. It also partly provides something desperately lacking— a highly readable history of the National Secular Society, founded in 1866, the UK’s oldest extant radical campaigning pressure group. 

Of course, it only deals with what might be termed the ‘heroic’ phase from 1866 until Bradlaugh’s death in 1891, but it is welcome for all that, leaving just 134 years to cover for some other enterprising writer. The individualistic, intellectual tradition represented by organised freethought and secularism has been deficient when it comes to recording its own history and substantial achievements—a marked contrast with the churches, who wallow in their perceived past glories. Most of what has been written about secularism is to be found in academic treatises, worthy in their way, but unappealing to the general reader. Michael Meyer’s book is a sparkling exception and I, for one, am grateful for this.

A Dirty, Filthy Book can be purchased here. Note that, when you use this link to purchase the book, we earn from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate.

Further reading

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

The post Review of ‘A Dirty, Filthy Book’ by Michael Meyer 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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Chapman Cohen’s name is rarely heard today, yet for 34 years he was president of the National Secular Society (1915 -1949) and for 36 years served as editor of this magazine (1915 – 1951). Nobody has ever written more about freethought than ‘CC’.  He was arguably a real philosopher whose talents included the ability to explain abstract ideas in a language ordinary people could understand. It may be worth adding that he never received any recognition in academic circles. At the time, his working-class origins made that hard enough to attain; his association with an organisation like the NSS, which some regarded as disreputable, and with the editorship of the infidel Freethinker, made it impossible.

Despite holding the office of NSS president longer than anybody else ever has, Cohen rarely used the terms ‘secular’, ‘secularist’ or ‘secularism’, preferring ‘freethought’ and ‘freethinker’.  This may well have reflected his philosopher’s perspective, but also have indicated a preference for such a positive and relatively perspicuous term.  Contrast that with ‘secularism’, whose meaning is often seen as obscure or ambiguous.

The synthesis of much of Cohen’s writings is found in his wonderful 18 Pamphlets for the People.  Number 7, entitled ‘What is Freethought?’, was written shortly before the Second World War. Like the others, it occupied 16 tightly written pages of plain English. To summarise Cohen’s summary, freethought has no creed and is anathema to dogma. It stands not for the sanctity of opinion, but the right to express opinion: ‘Its essence lies in the denial of authority in the sphere of opinion.’  It follows that whatever opinion a person holds should be their own, otherwise they are a mere echo. 

As such, freethought may be regarded as virtuous, but it is also essential. Humanity’s progress depends on a variation in ideas, a sort of philosophical evolution, as new theories and ideas replace older redundant or obsolescent forms. Cohen tells us that true revolutionaries are not those who hurl bombs, but those who pioneer new ideas. He argues that real improvement in society depends on the creation of an environment hospitable to new ideas. From this perspective, Galileo, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin were the true revolutionaries. ‘Free speech’ was a term employed less frequently in Cohen’s era, but it is clear from what he says that free speech is intrinsic to freethought. The two are inseparable, and equally important to human progress.

One of the NSS’s most eminent associates was the philosopher Bertrand Russell, whose connection to the organisation stretched over many years. It was on an NSS platform in 1927 that Russell gave a lecture which became the text of one of his most famous, or notorious, essays, ‘Why I am Not a Christian’.  He was also on the NSS’s Distinguished Members’ Panel, and prominent in supporting campaigns like those for secular education and abortion law reform.

In his 1944 work, The Value of Free Thought. How to Become a Truth Seeker and Break the Chains of Mental Slavery, Russell echoed Cohen’s arguments. ‘What makes a freethinker is not his beliefs but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not, he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought he finds a balance of evidence in their favour, then his thought is free.’

In the same essay Russell argues that the search for truth and the conquest of fear are at the heart of freethought. To him the creed of freethought is optimistic; its adherents strive for a better world.

Cohen’s belief in freethought also explains his contempt for organised or ‘revealed’ religion.  For him, the very purpose of a priesthood was to exercise authority over others’ beliefs, repress freethought and thus arrest human progress. It should be stressed that freethought is not synonymous with atheism, which is generally taken to mean the denial of a deity’s existence. Thomas Paine, for example, was a freethinker and strong critic of the established church or ‘priesthood’, despite being a deist who believed in God. Like Cohen, he valued intellectual independence, proclaiming in The Age of Reason, ‘My own mind, is my own church.’ An advantage of ‘freethought’ is that it is more positive than ‘atheism’, and does not have the negative connotations that have always dogged the latter.

As for the relationship between freethought and secularism, as I mentioned above, the word ‘secularism’ is ambiguous and has been defined in different ways in different eras. G.J. Holyoake is generally given credit for coining the term, but his conception was far broader than that generally accepted today. For example, in an 1853 debate Holyoake outlined three secularist principles. First, that secularism gives precedence to the duties of this life rather than those that might pertain to ‘another world’.  Second, that science is superior to ‘spiritual dependency’. Third, that morality has social origins rather than ‘spiritual authority’. One might go so far as to suggest that ‘humanism’ closely resembles Holyoake’s conception of secularism. 

The NSS has defined secularism more narrowly to mean something which ‘works for the separation of religion and state and equal respect for everyone’s human rights so that no one is either advantaged or disadvantaged on account of their beliefs.’ Cohen’s ‘right to express opinion’ seems to sit comfortably with the idea that ‘no one is either advantaged or disadvantaged on account of their beliefs.’ The NSS tells us that secularism requires the separation of Church and state in the interests of fairness and equality. Secularism might well seem attractive to freethinkers, although freethought itself has a philosophical dimension absent from secularism, which, at least as the NSS defines it, is a purely political concept. Another way of putting it is that secularism is a political idea rooted in the philosophical concept of freethought. It is time for secularists to acknowledge and celebrate this intellectual heritage.

On the career of Chapman Cohen and his conception of freethought, see further this YouTube video made using a 1932 78 rpm recording of Cohen talking about ‘The Meaning and Value of Freethought’.

The post Freethought and secularism 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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