Richard Carlile
Richard Carlile | |
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Born | Ashburton, Devon, England | 8 December 1790
Died | 10 February 1843 London, England | (aged 52)
Occupation | Publisher, agitator, activist |
Richard Carlile (8 December 1790 – 10 February 1843) was an important agitator for the establishment of universal suffrage and freedom of the press in the United Kingdom.[1]
Early life
Born in Ashburton, Devon, he was the son of a shoemaker who died in 1794; leaving Richard's mother struggling to support her three children on the income from running a small shop. At the age of six he went for free education to the local Church of England school, then at the age of twelve he left school for a seven-year apprenticeship to a tinsmith in Plymouth.
Personal life
In 1813, he married, and shortly afterwards the couple moved to Holborn Hill in London where he found work as a tinsmith. His wife, Jane, gave birth to five children, three of whom survived.[2]
In 1832, having separated from his wife, Carlile commenced a relationship with Eliza Sharples, with whom he had four children.[3]
Politics and publishing
His interest in politics was kindled first by economic conditions in the winter of 1816 when Carlile was put on short-time work by his employer creating serious problems for the family: "I shared the general distress of 1816 and it was this that opened my eyes." He began attending political meetings where speakers like Henry Hunt complained that only three men in a hundred had the vote, and was also influenced by the publications of William Cobbett.
As a way of making a living he sold the writings of parliamentary reformers such as
In April 1817, he formed a publishing business with the printer William Sherwin and rented a shop in
He took on distributing the banned
Carlile then brought out a radical journal, Sherwin's Political Register, which reported political meetings and included extracts from books and poems by supporters of the reform movement such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. The popularity of this helped to soon bring his profit from his publishing venture to £50 a week.
Peterloo and The Republican
This section needs additional citations for verification. (July 2023) |
Carlile was one of the scheduled main speakers at the reform meeting on 16 August 1819 at St. Peter's Fields in
The government responded by closing Sherwin's Political Register, confiscating the stock of newspapers and pamphlets. Carlile changed the name to The Republican and in its issue of 27 August 1819 demanded that "The massacre... should be the daily theme of the Press until the murderers are brought to justice.... Every man in Manchester who avows his opinions on the necessity of reform, should never go unarmed – retaliation has become a duty, and revenge an act of justice."
Carlile was prosecuted for
In October 1819, he was found guilty of
To curb newspapers the government had raised the ½d tax on newspapers, first imposed in 1712, to 3½d in 1797, then 4d in 1815. From December 1819 it set a minimum price of 7d, with further restrictions. At a time when workers earned less than 10 shillings (120d.) a week this made it hard for them to afford radical newspapers, and publishers tried various strategies to evade the tax. Groups would pool their resources in reading societies and subscription societies to purchase a book or journal in common, and frequently read it aloud to one another as was the case with James Wilson.
By 1821, Carlile was a declared
Carlile's sentence ended in 1823 but he was immediately arrested and returned to prison for not paying his £1,500 fine, so the process continued until he was eventually released on 25 November 1825. In the next edition of The Republican he expressed the hope that his long confinement would result in the freedom to publish radical political ideas. An example of the support he received from around the country is the £1.5.1 sent to him in Dorchester jail by forty working men in the West Yorkshire village of Hunslet, accompanied by a noble letter on behalf of those "few Friends to Truth and Justice".[6]
He then published further journals, The Lion which campaigned against child labour and The Promptor. He argued that "equality between the sexes" should be the objective of all reformers, and in 1826 published Every Woman's Book advocating birth control and the sexual emancipation of women. Cobbett denounced this book as "so filthy, so disgusting, so beastly, as to shock even the lewdest men and women".[7]
Carlile was an advocate of the Christ myth theory. He did not believe that Jesus existed. He debated Unitarian minister John Relly Beard in The Republican, 1826.[8][9]
The Devil's Chaplain
He joined up with the radical and sceptical clergyman Robert Taylor and set out on an "infidel home missionary tour" which reached Cambridge on Thursday 21 May 1829 and caused a considerable upset to the University of Cambridge where a young Charles Darwin was a second-year student.
At their meeting in Bolton, Lancashire, Carlile met Eliza Sharples, who was to become his long term mistress.[10]
Carlile then opened a ramshackle building on the south bank of the
Jailed again
In 1831, he was jailed, under the charge of seditious libel, given two and a half years for writing an article in support of agricultural labourers campaigning against wage cuts and advising the strikers to regard themselves as being at war with the government.[11][12]
He left prison deeply in debt, and government fines had taken from him the finances needed to publish newspapers.
His political and social opinions never altered, but his philosophy underwent a change in the 1830s. In 1837 H. Robinson published the results of his later thinking in the book Extraordinary Conversion and Public Declaration of Richard Carlile of London to Christianity.
In 1834, he was tried for creating a public nuisance, when he displayed two effigies in the windows of his shop at 62 Fleet Street, one in blue representing a broker titled "Temporal broker" and another dressed as a bishop titled "Spiritual broker". A large group of people were often gathered there, impeding traffic and causing quarrels. He was found guilty, but judgment was respited.[13]
After living for some years in extreme poverty in
Writings
- The Deist; or, Moral Philosopher: Being an Impartial Inquiry After Moral and Theological Truths (1819)
- A Letter to the Society for the Suppression of Vice: On Their Malignant Efforts to Prevent a Free Enquiry After Truth and Reason (1819)
- An Address to Men of Science: Calling Upon Them to Stand Forward and Vindicate the Truth from the Foul Grasp and Persecution of Superstition (1821)
- Life of Thomas Paine: Written Purposely to Bind With His Writings (1822)
- The Character of the Jew Books: Being a Defence of the Natural Innocence of Man, against Kings and Priests, or Tyrants and Impostors (1822)
- Every Woman's Book or What is Love? (1826)
Notes
- doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/4685. (Subscription or UK public library membershiprequired.)
- doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/4685. (Subscription or UK public library membershiprequired.)
- doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/38370. (Subscription or UK public library membershiprequired.)
- ^ E.P. Thompson (1968). The Making of the English Working Class. Penguin. p. 796.
- ISBN 9781921862014.
- ^ The Republican, volume 8, page 107
- ISBN 0861932293.
- ^ Beard, J. R. (1825). To Mr. Richard Carlile, London. The Republican 12 (26): 803-828.
- ^ Carlile, Richard. (1826). To Mr. J. R. Beard, Unitarian Preacher, Manchester. The Republican 13 (3): 65-72.
- ISBN 9781921862007. Retrieved 27 November 2013.
- ^ State Trials (New Series), II, 459: "The King against Richard Carlile, 1831
- ^ Old Bailey Proceedings Online (accessed 29 January 2019), Trial of RICHARD CARLILE. (t18310106-117, 6 January 1831).
- ^ Old Bailey Proceedings Online (accessed 29 January 2019), Trial of RICHARD CARLILE. (t18341124-155, 24 November 1834).
References
- Aldred, Guy A (1941). Richard Carlile Agitator. Glasgow: Strickland Press.
- ISBN 0-7181-3430-3
- Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 5 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
- Holyoake, George Jacob (1887). Stephen, Leslie (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 9. London: Smith, Elder & Co. . In
- Michael Laccohee Bush, The Friends and Following of Richard Carlile: a Study of Infidel Republicanism in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain, Twopenny Press, 2016
External links
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- Richard Carlile (Parliamentary reform)
- Richard Carlile – Reformer
- Richard Carlile – Famous Quotations
- Newspapers and publishers at dawn of 19th century Archived 7 July 2015 at the Wayback Machine
- The Republican
- The campaign for a free press
- Manual of Freemasonry
- Works by Richard Carlile at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Richard Carlile at Internet Archive