Richard Carlile

In October 1819 a London bookseller of twenty-eight stood before the Lord Chief Justice and a special jury in the Guildhall, charged with publishing Thomas Paine's Age of Reason. The Attorney-General, Sir Robert Gifford, put the case in a sentence that would be quoted against freethinkers for the rest of the century: "Christianity is part and parcel of the law."¹² The bookseller had no counsel. He defended himself, and over the days of the trial he read the whole of the Age of Reason into the record of the court.¹ "My only reason for publishing the works of Mr. Paine," he told the jury, "has been an anxious and sincere desire to promote the cause of truth and free discussion."³

He was convicted, fined £1,500 and sentenced to three years, and because he would not or could not pay the fines he served three more.⁴⁵ His name was Richard Carlile, and he had been a tinman's apprentice. As a boy he had helped burn Paine in effigy; in prison he became an avowed atheist; and fourteen years after the trial he wrote to the Bishop of London that he was "altogether a Christian." This chapter asks how one man travelled that road, and whether, as he insisted at the end, he had really stood still.

Ashburton

He was born at Ashburton in Devon on 8 December 1790. His father had been a shoemaker, an exciseman and a schoolmaster before he enlisted as a soldier, and he died at thirty-four, when Richard was about four.⁶ The boy learned his letters from a dame, went to the Ashburton free schools, and from nine to twelve learned some Latin at a chapel school in Lawrence Lane.⁷ Every fifth of November, he remembered in a letter written the year before he died, he went out "to gather a faggot wherewith to burn the effigy of 'old Tom Paine', my now venerated political father."⁸⁹

He was, by his own account, a believer. "I was in my youthful days taught to read the Bible," he wrote in 1819, "and I continued to read and reverence it more than twenty years; and was as tenacious of it and the Christian religion as any one could be."¹⁰¹¹

At twelve he spent four months with a chemist in Exeter, and then he was apprenticed to a tinman there for seven years, working fifteen or sixteen hours a day.¹² In Exeter he met some young bookbinders who were Deists and admirers of Paine, but, his daughter wrote, he "received no impression" from them.¹³ He married a woman of thirty after a courtship of two months at Gosport; the marriage did not last, and a separation was agreed in 1819.¹⁴

Into the front of the battle

What changed him first was not religion but hunger. The year 1816 brought hard times and short work, and the half-employed tinman began to read the radical papers and to write letters to them. The only notice he ever got, he said, was a line in the answers to correspondents: "A Half-employed Mechanic is too violent."¹⁵ Accounts differ on when he first read Paine, whether in Exeter in 1810 or in London in 1816.¹⁶ What is certain is the step he took in the spring of 1817, when the government suspended Habeas Corpus and the radical publishers of London lost their nerve. He began selling Wooler's Black Dwarf in March and in April took over William Sherwin's shop at 183 Fleet Street. "I then resolved," he wrote, "to get into the front of the battle and to set the best possible example."¹⁷¹⁸¹⁹

That summer William Hone was prosecuted for blasphemy for three parodies of the Prayer Book. Carlile reprinted them, was arrested in August 1817, and spent eighteen weeks in the King's Bench prison, until Hone was acquitted in December.²⁰ The charge shocked him more than the prison did. "I felt disgusted to see the charge of blasphemy brought against such simple, such ridiculous publications," he wrote later, "and I soon resolved to put the question to an issue."²¹²² Somewhere in these months, too, his religion gave way. "Priestcraft," he wrote in 1819, "had carefully provided a sufficiently powerful enemy to defeat the efforts of the divine light of nature, until I had the courage to read The Deist and Paine's Age of Reason."¹⁰²³

Paine, Peterloo and the Guildhall

On 16 December 1818 he published Paine's Theological Works, the Age of Reason among them, at half a guinea. The first thousand copies sold and he printed three thousand more.²⁴ In January 1819 the Society for the Suppression of Vice had a bill of indictment found against him; the Attorney-General filed an information of his own, and in February Carlile was arrested again.²⁵

In August he went to Manchester, and on 16 August he was on the hustings with Henry Hunt at St Peter's Field when the yeomanry charged the crowd. He got away under the platform and came back to London without his hat.²⁶²⁷ Within days he was in print with an open letter on "the atrocious Murders committed by the Yeomanry Cavalry, at the instigation of the Magistrates of Manchester, on the bodies of the inhabitants of that town, assembled in a legal and peaceable meeting."²⁸²⁹ His daughter later argued that it was these letters, more than Paine, that made the government press the prosecution.²⁸ Sherwin gave up his paper after Peterloo, and Carlile renamed it The Republican.³⁰

At the trial in October he was still a Deist; a sympathiser wrote to him that month of "a poor plain, upright Deist" hunted by the newspapers, and he did not object to the description.³¹ Hone helped him prepare his defence, and he sold the daily reports of what he called his "Mock Trials" in twopenny sheets.³² He told the jury that Paine's works "tend to exalt our notions of the Deity."³

Not every Christian thought he should be in the dock. That same month the Unitarian minister W. J. Fox preached a sermon on what Christians owed to Deists: "If Deists will listen to you, persuade them; if they will reason, argue with them; if they write and publish, reply to them; if they misrepresent, expose them; but in the name of Christ, do not persecute them."³³³⁴ The court took the other view. Passing sentence on 16 November, Mr Justice Bayley said that the courts could not interfere with doctrines a man kept to himself or discussed "with calmness and reason; but he could not be permitted rashly to unsettle the faith of others."³⁵ That night Carlile was handcuffed and taken to Dorchester gaol, and his shop was seized.⁴

Six years in Dorchester

His mother died in March 1820, and he wrote from prison that she "fell calmly asleep, untortured by priests."³⁶ He kept to his room for two and a half years rather than be shown to the visitors who came to look at him.³⁶ He went on editing the Republican from his cell, fourteen volumes of it in all, and he spent the years studying religion.³⁷

The Vice Society advertised for funds against "that most audacious offender, Carlile, who, notwithstanding repeated indictments found against him, still persisted in selling works of the foulest sedition and the most horrible blasphemy that ever disgraced a free press."³⁸ He answered them in an open letter: "It is your province to war with obscenity, mine with idolatry."³⁹ The prosecutions reached his family. His wife Jane was sentenced in January 1821 to two years in Dorchester, and his sister Mary-Anne followed her there after a trial brought by the new Constitutional Association, a society whose subscription list Wellington's name headed.⁴⁰⁴¹⁴² One after another, more than twenty shop assistants who kept the Fleet Street counter open went to prison, for terms of six months to three years.⁴³

In March 1823 Joseph Hume presented Mary-Anne's petition to the House of Commons. Sir Thomas Acland read out Carlile's own lines about his boyhood Bible and called it "dreadful to think of this man, who thus artfully referred back to the time when he worshipped his God as a child in simplicity of heart."⁴⁴⁴⁵ William Wilberforce, who would not have chosen Carlile's company, nonetheless said that he "would rely on the Christian religion triumphing over all its opponents, without any thing like persecution."⁴⁴⁴⁶

It was in Dorchester that the Deist became an atheist. His friend and biographer George Jacob Holyoake wrote that "through several volumes of the Republican he was a Deist only."⁴⁷ In 1821, in An Address to Men of Science, Carlile took up the word his enemies used and defined it: it had "no other meaning than a seceder from all mythologies, although the ignorant and interested make so much ridiculous clamour and fuss about it."⁴⁸⁴⁹ By July 1823 he was explaining that "atheism expresses nothing more than a doubt or disbelief of the existence of such a God, as those preach, who confess that they do preach what they know nothing at all about," and that December he wrote of himself, in a footnote, "I confess myself an Atheist."⁵⁰⁵¹⁵²

The next year he put his conclusion on the title page of the Republican and dedicated the volume to the Vice Society: "I can now maintain against all the learning that Oxford or Cambridge has produced, that there is no such a God in existence as any man has preached, and, consequently, that all religion, without an exception, is idolatry. This is the result of my five years' study in this Gaol."⁵³⁵⁴ In the same dedication he claimed to have shown "that no such person as Jesus Christ existed."⁵⁵

In June 1825 Henry Brougham presented his petition to Parliament and called the sentence "unexampled." Brougham was no unbeliever; he said he would look on an atheist, "if there were any such, with pity, not with blame."⁵⁶⁵⁷ Carlile was released in late 1825, after six years, and his friends held a dinner for him on Paine's birthday.⁵

The trade of freethought

Out of prison, he made unbelief a business and a public meeting. In 1826 he published Every Woman's Book, a frank tract on preventing conception that he had learned to think necessary from Francis Place; "it is better to prevent than to cure," it argued, "and here, prevention is most simply practicable, a means within the reach of all." By the 1828 edition, the preface said, ten thousand copies had been sold.⁵⁸⁵⁹

In 1828 he started a new weekly, The Lion, while the Reverend Robert Taylor, a clergyman who had preached himself out of the Church, was in prison at Oakham. When Taylor came out the two men toured the country in 1829 as "Infidel Missionaries," Taylor to deal with the origins of Christianity and Carlile with the idea of God.⁶⁰⁶¹ "We have truth on our side," Carlile wrote in The Lion, "and that is what the Catholic never had."⁶² On 30 May 1830 he opened the Rotunda on Blackfriars Road as a hall for freethought, where Taylor gave the astronomical sermons that were printed as The Devil's Pulpit.⁶³

In November 1830 he began The Prompter, and within two months he was convicted of seditious libel for two of its articles, one of them addressed to the agricultural labourers.⁶⁴⁶⁵ Accounts of the sentence differ, from two years to thirty-two months to three.⁶⁵ He served it in the Giltspur Street Compter, turned his cell into a shop and a library, and sold books through a hole in the wall by a dial that hid the seller from the buyer.⁶⁶ "In the course of our great political struggle I like a gaol," he wrote in 1831, "and am more happy here than I can possibly be anywhere else."⁶⁷ When release came with conditions attached he refused it, three times, and he walked out in 1833 "without yielding a single point."⁶⁸

While he was there, in December 1831, a young woman from Bolton wrote to him. Eliza Sharples had been an evangelical who "prayed myself into the grave, almost," and she was now, she said, "convinced that all religion is vice."⁶⁹ Carlile answered before he had met her: "I swear eternal fealty to her before I see her."⁷⁰ She came to London in January 1832, lectured at the Rotunda as "the Lady of the Rotunda," and edited a weekly of her own, Isis.⁷¹ They lived as husband and wife, "unlicensed by the priest," and had several children.⁷²⁷³

Altogether a Christian

In November 1833, a few months out of the Compter, the atheist wrote to the Bishop of London. "I am one of your Lordship's scattered sheep," he began, "wishing for the fold of a good shepherd," and he went on: "I am altogether a Christian; save the mark at which superstition has been planted upon Christianity."⁷⁴⁷⁵⁷⁶ He did not mean that he had come to believe the creed. In a second letter he explained that he rejected the literal reading of the Bible: "it claims to be local and temporal history, and is not." He read both Testaments "as political and moral instruction veiled in allegory," its persons as personifications of principles, and he proposed "that the Church, in short, be made a school for the people."^77787980 He printed the correspondence two years later with a letter to Sir Robert Peel on church reform.⁷⁷

Where the turn came from is not clear. Guy Aldred, an admirer writing in 1923, traced a taste for mysticism back to 1825, to the long years in prison, to Carlile's studies of Freemasonry, and to Taylor's way of reading the Bible as astronomy.⁸¹ But by September 1833 Carlile was writing that Taylor's interpretation "leaves no room for discussion, and he does not like discussion," and the next year he said that the two had quarrelled.⁸²⁸³ Nothing in the surviving letters ties the change to Eliza Sharples, who had come to him as the woman who thought all religion a vice.⁶⁹

He kept fighting the Church in the old way too. When he refused to pay church rates and his goods were seized, he put effigies of a bishop and a devil in his shop window in Fleet Street, was indicted for a nuisance, and went back to the Compter; accounts of that term differ, as they do of the total, which comes to nine and a half years in prison, more or less.⁸⁴ In the later 1830s he lectured in northern towns on the application of science to "the revelation of mystery" and lived with Eliza and the children at Enfield.⁸⁵ To a friend, Thomas Turton, he wrote in 1836: "Many of my friends cannot follow me in the pure mythological description of Christianity; I hope you can; I am sure it is the best point in Infidelity yet reached."⁸⁶ In 1837 he said he treated the scriptures "in reverence, seriousness, and solemnity, without any sacrifice of old materialistic principles," and in 1839 that he pitied "the solidity of the materialists who cannot see my present course to be the most useful and spiritual."^87888990 In October 1840 he put it plainly: "I had not recanted a sentence I ever published, but had only gone on another tack in my warfare with superstition."⁹¹⁹² The same year he gave a sadder reason for the change of tone: "The cessation of prosecution was my political death."⁹¹

His old allies were not persuaded. Francis Place called him "the most obstinately superstitious fellow alive."⁹³⁹⁴ Holyoake, who loved him, judged that "the adoption of Swedenborgian terminology was a virtual recantation, and Carlile lost caste by it." But he thought it "an error of judgment, not an alteration of conviction," and summed it up in a phrase: "From being a Material Atheist, he became a Christian Atheist."⁹⁵⁹⁶ Carlile, for his part, wrote to the young Holyoake in 1842 that the atheists of the day were "now where I once was, resting upon the mere flippant vulgarisms of what you and the world consent to call Atheistic infidelity."⁹⁷

The last tack

A stroke in March 1841 weakened his speech.⁹⁸ His last paper, which Holyoake calls The Christian Warrior, said that "science thrown into the church as a substitute for superstition in the education of the people, begins at once to regenerate the people, the parliament, the institutions, and the throne"; the Dictionary of National Biography gives the title as Christian Mirror, and no copy has been found to settle it.⁹⁹¹⁰⁰ His last printed words, by Holyoake's account, were still a soldier's: "The enemy with whom I have to grapple is one with whom no peace can be made. Idolatry will not parley. Superstition will not treat or covenant."¹⁰¹

He died on 10 February 1843, aged fifty-two, at 1 Bouverie Street, a few steps from Fleet Street, where he had moved back from Enfield. His daughter recorded his last words: "I am the same man I have always been, I have gone neither to the right nor to the left. My aim has been to accomplish one great purpose."¹⁰²¹⁰³ As he had wished, his body was opened at St Thomas's Hospital before friends and medical men, and the report appeared in The Lancet.¹⁰⁴

According to Holyoake, who is the only source for it, a clergyman at the burial in Kensal Green read the Church service over the family's protest, saying that Carlile had died "in the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection," and Carlile's son objected and the family left the grave.¹⁰⁵¹⁰⁶ Stories that Carlile had recanted on his deathbed went round for years; Holyoake answered that he had lost his speech long before, and that a preacher who had told him in Gloucester gaol that Carlile died recanting had been talking of a man still alive.¹⁰⁷

What he left

"He avowed himself an Atheist when no one else did," Holyoake wrote.¹⁰⁸ Carlile's own summary was about the press, not God: "I have accomplished the liberty of the press in England, and oral discussion is now free."¹⁰⁹ Neither was quite true, but both were nearly so. His nine and a half years in prison, and the years his wife, his sister and his shopmen served, made the sale of unbelieving books in London something the government found it could not stop.

The shape of his unbelief changed more than he admitted and less than his enemies hoped. He began as a Deist defending Paine's God against Paine's prosecutors, became in prison an atheist who said there was no God "as any man has preached," and ended a materialist who used the words of Christianity as allegory for science and reform. What did not change was the trade: he printed what he thought, sold it over the counter, and went to prison for it. The boy who burned Paine in effigy in Ashburton lived to be his publisher, and some years after his death Eliza Sharples Carlile took into her home a sixteen-year-old named Charles Bradlaugh and, according to Aldred, helped to make him a freethinker.¹¹⁰ Bradlaugh has his own chapter in this book.