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- LIFE AND CHARACTER OF RICHARD CARLILE
-
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost
-no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
-under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
-eBook or online at http://www.gutenberg.org/license.
-
-
-Title: Life and Character of Richard Carlile
-
-Author: George Jacob Holyoake
-
-Release Date: March 10, 2012 [EBook #39123]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE AND CHARACTER OF RICHARD
-CARLILE ***
-
-
-
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 39123 ***
Produced by David Widger.
@@ -1604,372 +1580,4 @@ religion. _The Lancet,_ No. 1,016, p. 774, February 18, 1843.
————
-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE AND CHARACTER OF RICHARD
-CARLILE ***
-
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+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 39123 ***
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- LIFE AND CHARACTER OF RICHARD CARLILE
-
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost
-no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
-under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
-eBook or online at http://www.gutenberg.org/license.
-
-
-Title: Life and Character of Richard Carlile
-
-Author: George Jacob Holyoake
-
-Release Date: March 10, 2012 [EBook #39123]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
-
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE AND CHARACTER OF RICHARD
-CARLILE ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by David Widger.
-
-
-
-
- *LIFE AND CHARACTER OF RICHARD CARLILE*
-
-
- _By_
-
- *George Jacob Holyoake*
-
-
- _London_
-
- _1849_
-
-
-
-
-CONTENTS
-
-
- PREFACE
- LIFE AND CHARACTER OF RICHARD CARLILE
- CHAPTER I. HIS PARENTAGE, APPRENTICESHIP, AND MARRIAGE
- CHAPTER II. THE PUBLISHER AND THE PRISONER
- CHAPTER III. THE EDITOR AND THE ATHEIST
- CHAPTER IV. HIS DEATH AND CHARACTER
- ST. THOMAS'S HOSPITAL
-
-
-
-
-PREFACE
-
-
-When I first entered London, one Saturday evening in 1842, I was not
-known personally to half a dozen persons in it. On reaching the office
-of the Oracle of Reason, I found an invitation (it was the first I
-received in the metropolis) from Richard Carlile to take tea with him on
-the next afternoon at the Hall of Science. There was no name known to me
-in London from whom an invitation could have come which I should have
-thought a greater honour. The conversation at table was directed to
-advising me as to my defence at my coming trial. He requested me to hear
-his evening lecture, which he devoted to the policy of sceptical defence
-which he thought most effectual. At the conclusion, he called upon me
-for my coincidence or dissent. I stated some objections which I
-entertained to his scientifico-religious views with diffidence but
-distinctness. The compliments which he paid me were the first words of
-praise which I remember to have trusted. Coming from a master in our
-Israel, they inspired me with a confidence new to me. I did not conceal
-my ambition to merit his approval. On my trial at Gloucester, he watched
-by my side fourteen hours, and handed me notes for my guidance. After my
-conviction, he brought me my first provisions with his own hand. He
-honoured me with a public letter during my imprisonment, and uttered
-generous words in my vindication, when those in whose ranks I had fought
-and fallen were silent. It was my destiny, on my liberation, to be able
-to pour my gratitude only over his grave. In his Life and Character,
-here attempted, I am proud to confess that 1 have written with affection
-for his memory, but I have also, written with impartiality--for he who
-encouraged me to maintain the truth at my own expense, would be quite
-willing, if need be, that I maintain it at his.
-
- G. J. H.
-
-
-
-LIFE AND CHARACTER OF RICHARD CARLILE
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER I. HIS PARENTAGE, APPRENTICESHIP, AND MARRIAGE
-
-
-I have accomplished the liberty of the press in England, and oral
-discussion is now free. Nothing remains to be reformed but the ignorance
-and vices of the people, whose ignorance cannot be removed, while their
-bodies are starved and their church remains a theatre of idolatry and
-superstition.' These were the proud and wise words uttered in the last
-periodical edited by Richard Carlile. They are the history of his
-life--the eulogy of his career--and the witnesses or his political and
-religious penetration.
-
-Of Carlile's family, I can gather little beyond this, that his father
-had some reputation as an arithmetician. He published a collection of
-arithmetical, mathematical, and algebraical questions. His talent was
-individual though mediocre. He put his questions into verse and
-intermixed them with paradox. His career was various and brief: first a
-shoemaker, he aspired to be and became an exciseman. Like Burns, his
-habits suffered by his profession, and he often fell into intoxication.
-Of his own accord he retired from the Excise, became successively
-schoolmaster and soldier, and died at the age of 34, no person's enemy
-but his own.(1) Carlile's mother was now left a widow, with three infant
-children. For several years she was in a flourishing business, but it
-began to decay with the pressure of the times, about 1800, and she was
-afflicted alternately with sickness and poverty. Thence to the time of
-her death, she was assisted by Carlile, who was her only son. As a woman
-she was virtuous, as a mother kind and indulgent. She died at the age of
-60. It is an evidence of Carlile's honourable notions of duty, that out
-of thirty shillings per week, which he earned as a journeyman, he
-supported his wife and several children, and spared an offering for the
-support of his mother and sisters; and it deserves to be mentioned in
-his behalf, that the first dissatisfaction he experienced in married
-life arose from the opposition which he received in the discharge of
-these generous duties.
-
- 1. Carlile to Lord Brougham, Gauntlet, No. 8, p. 113. 1833.
-
-Richard Carlile was born in Ashburton, Devonshire, December 8, 1790. He
-was but four years of age at the death of his father. He early felt his
-father's ambition. Before he was twelve years of age, he determined to
-be something in the world, and afterwards his unexpressed ideas were
-ever at work and accumulating. His dreams by night, and his thoughts by
-day, all worked one way, and vaguely contemplated some sort of
-purification of the church.(1) But how far he was from understanding the
-part he was to play is clear from the circumstance, that on the 5th of
-November, he used to gather faggots to burn 'Old Tom Paine,' instead of
-Guy Fawkes; and it was not till 1810, when he was twenty years old, that
-he first saw in the hands of an old man in Exeter, a copy of the Rights
-of Man.(2)
-
-Carlile received all the education that village free schools could
-afford. The educational routine where his own Gifford had before been a
-scholar, was confined to writing, arithmetic, and sufficient Latin to
-read a physician's prescription. His first place seems to have been with
-Mr. Lee, chemist and druggist, in Exeter, but, being set to do things
-which he deemed derogatory to one who was able to read a physician's
-prescription, he left the shop after four months' service. Being too
-much of a man to go to school again, he lived idly three months, amusing
-himself with colouring pictures to sell in his mother's shop. His
-mother's principal wholesale customers were the firm of Gifford and Co.,
-which consisted of the brothers of that Attorney-General who had such
-extensive dealings with the son afterwards, in a different line. At the
-pressing wish of Carlile's mother, he was apprenticed to a business
-which he never liked, that of tinplate working, and, like Bunyan, he
-became a tinman. He served seven years and three months to a Mr.
-Cummings, whom he has described as a hard master, as one who considered
-five or six hours for sleep all the recreation necessary for his youths.
-Carlile had no knowledge then of the 'Rights of Man,' but he betrayed
-some knowledge of the rights of apprentices,(3) and his impatience under
-injustice was then manifested, as his term of service was one series of
-conspiracies, rebellions, and battles. On being relieved from this worse
-than seven years' imprisonment, he resolved to follow that business no
-longer than he should be compelled. His ambition then was to get his
-living by his pen.
-
- 1. Gauntlet, No. 8, p. 113.
- 2. Repub. vol. 5, p. 134.
- 3. Republican, vol. ii. pp. 226-7.
-
-The office of an exciseman, which was offered him, he refused,
-remembering the fate of his father, and continued to follow his
-business, as journeyman tinman, in various parts of the country, and in
-London, where he first arrived in February, 1811. He returned to Exeter
-the same year. In 1813, we find him in London again, working at Benham
-and Sons, Blackfriars Road. A short sojourn in Gosport, in the previous
-year 1812, led to his acquaintance with the person who became, after two
-months' courtship, Mrs. Carlile. He was at that time twenty-three, and
-she thirty years of age. Mrs. Carlile was not without accomplishments as
-to personal appearance; and temper excepted, was not without most of the
-qualifications necessary to a good tradesman's wife.(1)
-
-Mrs. Carlile had talents for business, which were of the greatest value
-to her husband in the course of his career. He, bent on propagandism,
-never paid that attention to the details of trade which was necessary to
-keep a business together. But their difference in education, in age, in
-intellectual aspiration and their opponency in disposition, early
-converted their union into an intimacy tolerated rather than prized, and
-entire separation ensued twenty years after. Peculiar conduct on the
-part of relatives was alleged as promotive of these results, but this
-conduct I do not particularise as the explanation of the parties
-concerned is not before me, and cannot now be obtained. Of personal
-causes, temper seems to have been a chief one. Writing to Mr. Hunt, in
-1822, Carlile said, 'Knowing Mrs. C. to possess a _warm_ temper, as I
-do, I wonder,' etc.(2) In 1819, the separation of Mr. and Mrs. Carlile
-was arranged to take place, so soon as he had the means of making a
-sufficient settlement for her comfort: it was not, however, till 1832,
-when the annuity of 50, bequeathed him by Mr. Morrison, of Chelsea,
-cleared itself of legacy duty, that he was able to provide for her. Then
-it was that they parted, she taking all the household furniture and 100
-worth of books.
-
- 1. A Scourge, p. 18. 1834.
- 2. Rep. vol. vi. p. 15.
-
-His elder sister remained a violent Methodist, and was never reconciled
-to his anti-religious labours. Mrs. Carlile, as well as his younger
-sister, who both incurred imprisonment on his account, did it rather
-from natural resentment at the injustice practised for his destruction,
-than from any sympathy with his opinions. But, in this respect, they
-behaved with a bravery worthy of their name; they resolutely refused to
-compromise--the sister the brother, or the wife the husband, at all
-risks to themselves. None of his family, save a first cousin,
-countenanced his proceeding; he stood alone on his own hearth, as he
-stood often alone in the world.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER II. THE PUBLISHER AND THE PRISONER
-
-
-It was in 1816, while employed as a tinplate worker, by the firm of
-Matthews and Masterman, of Union Court, Holbom Hill, that he first
-essayed public life. He was then twenty-six years of age. Before this
-time he had read no work of Paine's; but the distress of that year
-excited him to inquiry. Knowledge speedily prompted nim to action. He
-wrote scraps for the newspapers, (principally the _Independent Whig_ and
-the _Newt_) which scraps were all condemned: 'A half-employed Mechanic
-is too violent;' this was the notice in answer to correspondents. He
-annoyed Mr. Cobbett by a foolish acrostic, on the name of Hunt. He wrote
-to Hunt himself, and paraded one night, two hours in front of his hotel,
-in Covent Garden, before he could muster courage sufficient to ask the
-waiter to take his effusion up. At this time he burned to see himself in
-print; although, as he afterwards confessed, he was not able to write a
-single sentence fit to meet the public eye.(2)
-
- 1. Repub. vol. xi. p. 101.
- 2. Repub. vol. xii. p. 2.
-
-In 1817 _The Black Dwarf_ made its appearance, which was much more to
-Carlile's taste than _Cobbett's Register_, but as the Habeas Corpus Act
-was suspended, and Sidmouth had sent forth his Circular, there was a
-damp among the newsvendors, and few would sell. This excited Carlile
-with a desire to become a bookseller. The story of Lackington beginning
-with a stall encouraged him. He resolved to set a good example in the
-trade of political pamphlets. Finding the sale of the _Black Dwarf_ very
-low, he borrowed 1 from his employer, and invested it in one hundred
-_Dwarfs_, and on the 9th of March, 1817, he sallied forth from the
-manufactory, with his stock in his handkerchief, to commence the trade
-of bookselling. He traversed the metropolis in every direction to get
-newsvendors to sell the _Dwarf_, and called every day to see how they
-sold. He inquired also after _Cobbett's Register_, and Sherwin's
-_Republican_, but finding that they did not want pushing, he took none
-of those round. Indeed, he refused to avail himself of the profit he
-could have made by taking _Cobbett's Register_ because it did not go far
-enough.(1) He carried the _Dwarf_ round several weeks, walking thirty
-miles a day, for a profit of fifteen and eighteen pence. At length an
-information was lodged against the publisher, and Mr. Steill was
-arrested. Carlile at once offered to take his place.
-
- 1. Repub, vol. xi. p. 102.
-
-Mr. Wooler, however, arranged the matter, and Carlile's offer was
-declined Mr. Sherwin, then a young man, (formerly keeper of South-well
-Bridewell, Nottinghamshire,) editing the _Republican_, perceived
-Carlile's value, and offered him the publishing of his paper, which he
-accepted. Carlile guaranteed Mr. Sherwin against arrest, which left him
-free to be bold without danger. The shop on which he now entered was
-183, Fleet Street, which Mr. Cobbett afterwards occupied. Carlile's
-first ideas of politics were, that neither writers, printers, nor
-publishers were bold enough; and he now commenced to set the example he
-thought wanted. 'I did not then see,' he said, in the decline of his
-life, 'what my experience has since taught me that the greatest
-despotism ruling the press is the popular ignorance. I made the
-calculation, which has been an error embittering my whole public life,
-that the entire people would assist and applaud an attempt, however
-humble, to set the press free. I have found myself like our
-parliamentary reformers idolizing a virtue of the imagination not yet
-brought into existence. I correctly made the calculation of having to
-pass through five or six years' imprisonment, to appease the angered
-authorities of having defied their will; but I had not calculated that,
-after having conquered the authorities, by self-sacrifice, the greater
-difficulty would remain, of having to conquer the ignorance and vice of
-the people, by still more painful sacrifices.'
-
-His first step was a resistance to the attempt of the poet laureat,
-Southey, to suppress the sale of his early Poem, 'Wat Tyler.' He sold
-twenty-five thousand of that poem in 1817.
-
-The second was a prosecution, defence, and imperfect verdict gained
-against Thomas Jonathan Wooller.
-
-The third was the reprint of the political works of Thomas Paine, by
-himself and Mr. Sherwin.
-
-The fourth was the trials and acquittals of William Hone, which Carlile
-forced on, by reprinting those suppressed political squibs called 'The
-Parodies on the Book of Common Prayer.'
-
-The Parodies cost him eighteen weeks' imprisonment in the King's Bench
-Prison, from which he was liberated with out trial, on the acquittals of
-William Hone.
-
-By the end of the year 1818 he had published the Theological Works of
-Thomas Paine. The prosecutions instituted induced him to go on printing
-other similar works, such as the 'Doubts of Infidels,' 'Watson Refuted,'
-'Palmer's Principles of Nature,' 'The God of the Jews,' &c. &c. By the
-month of October, 1819, he had at least six indictments pending against
-him. Two of the indictments were tried from the 12th to the 16th of
-October, and verdicts obtained against him. He was committed to the
-King's Bench Prison, and on the 16th of November sentenced to fifteen
-hundred pounds fine, and three years imprisonment in Dorchester Goal. In
-the middle of the night he was handcuffed, and driven off between two
-armed officers to Dorchester, a distance of one hundred and twenty
-miles.
-
-The first thing he did, at the close of his trial, was to print the 'Age
-of Reason,' in twopenny sheets, as part of the report of the trial,
-having taken care to read the whole in defence. Of these he sold more in
-a month than of the volumes in a-year. For this publication, a
-prosecution was instituted against Mrs. Carlile, but was dropped on her
-declining the sale. She was not however long unmolested.
-
-Under pretence of seizing for Mr. Carlile's fines, the sheriff, with a
-writ of _levari facias_, from the Court of King's Bench, took possession
-of his house, furniture, stock in trade, and closed the shop. It was
-thus held, from the 16th of November to the 24th of December. Rent
-became due and it was then emptied.
-
-Under Mr. C.'s desire Mrs. Carlile renewed a business, in January 1820,
-with what could be scraped together from the unseized wreck of their
-property. In February she was arrested; but the first indictment failed
-through a flaw in the verdict. She was immediately proceeded against by
-the Attorney-General, and became her husband's fellow-prisoner in
-Dorchester Gaol in February 1821, after having done good service in the
-shop for a-year.
-
-Carlile's sister Mary Ann succeeded Mrs. Carlile in the management of
-the business, but was also immediately prosecuted. The first indictment
-failed in this case, by the honesty of one of the jurymen. In the second
-the judge (Best) suppressed the defence. By the month of November, 1821,
-his sister was also a prisoner in Dorchester Gaol, and under a fine of
-five hundred pounds.
-
-In the course of the year, 1821, a new association had been formed,
-called the "Constitutional Association." It asked for subscription to
-pay the expenses of prosecuting the assistants of his business. Six
-thousand pounds were subscribed, and the Duke of Wellington saw fit to
-put his name with his money, at the head of the list. Carlile's sister's
-trial was the first check the Association received. The unsuccessful
-prosecution of Thomas Dolby, the second. Then came a troop of assistants
-to the encounter: to wit, Susanna Wright, George Beer, John Barkley,
-Humphrey Boyle, Joseph Rhodes, William Holmes, and John Jones. All
-these, save Jones, sustained terms of imprisonment, from six months to
-two years; but they succeeded in breaking down the "Constitutional
-Association."
-
-Then came James Watson and William Tunbridge, both meeting imprisonment.
-
-In the month of February, 1822, Mrs. Wright being then in possession of
-the house, the very week that Mr. Peel had taken possession of the Home
-Office, a second seizure was made of the house and stock of 55, Fleet
-Street, and the house finally wrested from Carlile. This was done on the
-pretence of satisfying the fines; but neither from this nor the former
-seizure was a farthing allowed in the abatement of the fines, and
-Carlile was detained in Dorchester Gaol to the end of the sixth year,
-three years' imprisonment having been taken in lieu of the fines.
-
-Joseph Trust was the only person prosecuted in 1823, and the Lord Chief
-Justice Abbott intimated that enough had been done; but in May, 1824,
-there came a new rage for prosecutions from the government, when Charles
-Sanderson, Thomas Jefferies, William Haley, William Campion, Richard
-Hassell. Michael O'Connor, William Cochrane, John Clarke, John
-Christopher, and Thomas Riley Perry, were severally arrested, and the
-last nine imprisoned, through various periods, from six months to three
-years.
-
-Two years Mrs. Carlile was kept in Dorchester Gaol: so was his sister,
-a-year having been taken for her 500 fine. After this it was reported,
-that the Cabinet, had, in council acknowledged Carlile invincible in the
-course of moral resistance which he had taken, and no more persons were
-arrested from his shop, while no one of his publications had been
-suppressed.
-
-His imprisonment in Dorchester Gaol was in some respects, severe. The
-first magisterial order was that he should be led into the open air only
-as a caged animal, to be exhibited to the gaze of the passing curious,
-half an hour each day, or an hour every other day, or as the gaoler
-might be pleased. This, and similar orders caused him to pass two years
-and a-half in his chamber, without going into the open air.
-
-When he came to trial in 1819, he had no clear understanding of the
-subject of his defence, it was compiled from the pleadings of others for
-toleration and free discussion. In this mental state he entered
-Dorchester Gaol. He had taken the impression from the hint of an aged
-political friend, that all the evils of mankind rooted in the
-superstition and the consequent priestcraft practised upon them, that he
-resolved to devote the solitude of his imprisonment to the study of
-religious mysteries, and fearlessly and faithfully to make the
-revelation for the common good of man. His defence, on his first three
-days' trial, alarmed the Emperor Alexander of Russia, who issued an
-Ukase, forbidding any printed report of it from being brought into his
-territory. His first defence was much interrupted; his second was
-entirely suppressed.
-
-When he was liberated from Dorchester Gaol, in 1826, the freedom of the
-press was complete, as far as government or aristocratical societies
-were concerned. His shopmen were detained to complete their sentences of
-three years' imprisonment, not much to the political merit of Sir Robert
-Peel, who gave up not a day in either case, save that of a bad young
-man, who had unprincipledly intruded himself among them. To honest
-opposition he yielded nothing, but was, in every sense of the character,
-an inveterate persecutor.
-
-Though the freedom of the press was accomplished in 1829, something more
-remained to be accomplished, which was the freedom of public oral
-discussion; and on this object Carlile set his thoughts.
-
-When Mr. Taylor was prosecuted and imprisoned, in 1828, Carlile was
-called into action in his new character. He immediately converted a
-large room in his house, 62, Fleet Street, into a Sunday School of Free
-Discussion, and introduced a public debate on all useful political
-subjects on the Sabbath Day. This had not been done before by any one
-anywhere. By a subscription he got Mr. Taylor well supported in prison,
-and on his liberation accompanied him to Cambridge, as an infidel
-Missionary, to challenge the University to public discussion. They
-passed from Cambridge to Liverpool, presenting a printed circular of
-public challenge to every priest on the road. One only accepted it, the
-Rev. David Thom, of Liverpool, who quailed at the very onset, and
-withdrew. This was done in 1829.
-
-In 1830 he sought a larger sphere of action for public meetings than his
-own dwelling-house, and engaged a series of buildings and theatres
-called the Rotunda, in Blackfriars Road. Soon after he gained possession
-of this building, the second French Revolution broke out, which gave a
-new impetus to political feeling in London. Giving to every man liberty
-of speech in his theatres, the Rotunda was attended bv all the public
-men of note out of parliament; and the public meetings there became so
-frequent and so large, that the government took alarm, and the prophecy
-of the day was, that the Rotunda would cause a Revolution in England.
-While the Tories remained in office, they did not molest him, but the
-Whigs no sooner took office, than they very foully made war on him, and
-caused him thirty-two months imprisonment in the Compter of the City of
-London.
-
-The Rev. Robert Taylor was also prosecuted under the Whig
-Administration, and filled out two years in Horse-monger Lane Gaol, for
-his preaching in the Rotunda.
-
-In 1834 and 1835, Carlile passed ten weeks in the same Compter, for
-resistance to the payment of Church Rates; making his total of
-imprisonment nine years and four months.
-
-These church-rates were assessed upon his house, 62, Fleet Street. When
-his goods were seized, he retaliated by taking out the two front windows
-and placing therein two effigies--one of a bishop, and the other of a
-distraining officer. After a time, he added a devil, who was linked
-arm-in-arm with his Grace. Such crowds were attracted, that public
-business was impeded. Eventually, Mr. Carole was indicted for a
-nuisance. The court was less virulent than before: it was externally
-courteous. He defended himself in a speech of coherency and good sense,
-but was found guilty, and ultimately sentenced to pay a fine of 40s. to
-the King, and give sureties in 200 (himself in 100, and two others in
-50 each), for good behaviour for three years. The spirit in which he
-met this award was characteristic of the veteran martyr.
-
-'They have sentenced me' said he, 'to three years' imprisonment. So much
-for their leniency! It is a mockery to say that I may, if I please,
-purchase my liberty. I cannot do it. I shall have more liberty in prison
-than in walking the streets at the discretion of one set of men, and at
-the hazard of 100 penalty to two others. It is a case in which I will
-not interfere to abate one hour of the imprisonment. When the gates are
-open to me I will walk out, but I will not pay or do anything to procure
-release.'(1) And he wrote to Mr. Cope, keeper of Newgate, to desire that
-he would get him removed to the Compter, and he quietly announced next
-week that he had been removed to his old room.'
-
- 1. _A Scourge_, No. 12, pp. 89, 90.
-
-Before sentence he made a deposition in court. As this was his last
-imprisonment, I quote the concluding words of this deposition. They show
-the temper in which the dying lion shook his mane.
-
-'And deponent further saith, that in case the court should think a
-penalty necessary, this deponent has no other property from which he can
-pay a fine than printed books; and from the political business in which
-this deponent is involved, he cannot reasonably ask any other person to
-become his sureties, that his future proceedings may not be construed
-into political offence; not but that this deponent is anxious to live in
-peace and amity with all men, _but that there do exist many political
-and moral evils which this deponent will, through life, labour to
-abate.'_
-
-This was the tone of his entire career. When in 1819, a law was proposed
-by Castlereagh, to inflict banishment upon him for a second offence, he
-wrote:--'In some cases, this power of banishment might amount to a
-deprivation of life; but for my own part, I think nothing of it, and
-hope to show, that it will not have the least tendency to change my
-course.'(2) 'Indictments and warrants have never affected me--they have
-been the life of my business.' He was present at the 'Manchester
-massacre,' and escaped narrowly falling a victim, first to the soldiers,
-and afterwards to the police, who let him pass, not knowing his name.
-The danger he ran on all hands was imminent. On the morning when the
-government chose to reveal the Thistlewood plot of their own concoction,
-they arranged that their agents of the vice society should arrest Mrs.
-Carlile,(3) to associate, as far as possible, his family in that
-proceeding. Not only were parties inculpated without fault, but tried
-without defence. The humble advocate was bullied into the abandonment of
-his political client, and the powerful one was bribed. Mr. Cooper was
-frowned into silence and threatened. Mr. Cross obtained a silk gown for
-his _defence_ of Brandreth and Mr. Justice Best won the same distinction
-by his _defence_ of Despard. So virulent were the rulers of that day
-that Peel refused to liberate Mrs. Carlile after thirteen months
-detention, though in daily expectation of accouchment which might occur
-at an hour when assistance could not be had.(4) In addressing Mrs.
-Gaunt, of Manchester, Mrs. Carlile observed in reference to the position
-in which she was placed, 'My spirits and strength are good, or I should
-have everything to dread in childbirth in such a place as this
-[Dorchester Gaol], where humanity is a marketable commodity, and where,
-what is still worse, I am one of those excluded from the market at any
-price.(5)
-
- 1. A Scourge, No. 12, p. 90.
- 2. Republican, vol. ii. p. 5. Idem. p. 60.
- 3. Republican, vol. ii. p 254.
- 4. Republican, vol. v. p. 301.
- 5. Republican, vol. v. p. 608.
-
-Of the risks Carlile ran from espionage, he has detailed many instances.
-I quote one passage in his own words. He is speaking of Paine:--'I
-revere,' says he, 'the name of Thomas Paine; the image of his honest
-countenance is constantly before me. I have him in bust [now in
-possession of Mr. Watson], in whole length figure; for which I may thank
-the late government of Liverpool, Castlereagh, and Sidmouth, who
-appointed Edwards the spy to this task, he, who when he failed to get me
-hanged, caused the death of Thistlewood, and others. Edwards occupied
-_six months_ of 1819, in excuse of making this statute to keep at my
-heels. He followed me closely until I was in Dorchester Gaol. There I
-escaped him; and then, immediately, he was put on other game with which
-he succeeded. The very men that he hanged, he brought about me in the
-King's Bench Prison, offering me their lives, if I would use them for
-any purpose. I had then, a clear sighted purpose of my own, which these
-men did not understand. At that age I should have had no objection to a
-little physical force fighting; but I was sober enough to see its
-impracticability, and thus I frustrated the acquaintance, which
-Liverpool, Castlereagh, Sidmouth, and their spy Edwards, wished to bring
-me into with Jack Ketch. I found Edwards a tradesman in Fleet Street, as
-an artist, before I got there, and I so became his next door neighbour.
-He succeeded, in occupation, the shop which William Hone had, and where
-he published his famous Parodies. When I came to No. 55, in January,
-1819, Edwards had been two years at No. 56, so I had little ground to
-suspect his spyship.
-
-I had known him as a customer through that time. He pleaded that his
-father had been an old politician: nor was my suspicion excited by his
-having a brother in the Hatton Garden Police. When I entered upon No.
-55, he pleaded what a great convenience it would be to him in business,
-if I would allow him to lodge in my house, as he had a shop next door
-without a dwelling-house. I had almost yielded; but the shrewd
-suspicions of Mrs. Carlile, re-acting upon his villainous countenance,
-put it aside. He was then placed in an upper story lodging of the
-opposite house, (where was born my statue of Paine) in the under part of
-which was placed a man of the name of John Carlisle, a bookseller, to
-oppose me, in conflict with another class of publications. This was the
-work of the government, superintended by their agent, John Reeve.
-Edwards did not scruple to talk to me about meeting the Archbishop of
-Canterbury in Windsor Castle; but left me to infer, that it was about
-his art as a modeller, not as a spy. I can now see, that he was placed
-in Hone's old shop, to keep out a political publisher; and I have since
-divined a deep history of the spy system of that time, which I never
-feared, because I had nothing morally to fear in what I purposed to do.
-One, I have marked, as an old acquaintance, a man connected with the
-Stamp Office, very regularly at my lectures for years. From, or in the
-house of John Carlisle, by Edwards, was concocted the plot called the
-Cato Street Conspiracy. In beginning, middle, and end, that was wholly
-the work of Lords Castlereagh and Sidmouth, with Edwards as an agent.
-After the finish of that political tragedy, Edwards was provided for in
-one of the colonies, it has been said, the Cape of Good Hope. John
-Carlisle dwindled into great poverty in Fleet Street, was made permanent
-constable, and at last very strangely got his house burned down, just
-after I came triumphantly from six years' imprisonment in Dorchester
-Gaol, and established myself _ruinously_ in splendid No. 62.'(1)
-
-Yet it was in such times and amid such dangers that Carlile formed the
-resolution, and adhered to it to the day of his death, never to cease
-any publication so long as any prosecution or intimidation menaced it.
-
-Placing himself always where danger was to be braved, his position was
-from the first prominent, and attracted to him many leading political
-characters, who saw in him a vicarious sacrifice for that freedom they
-were willing to enjoy, if it could be done without paying so troublesome
-a price as the ministers of that day charged for it. But, as the danger
-grew imminent, they began to pull him back and condemn his open
-conduct.(2) Cobbett at first said, 'You have done your duty bravely, Mr.
-Carlile; if every one had done like you, it would have been all very
-well.'(3) But afterwards he censured him without measure. Wooler, whom
-Carlile offered to save, said that the publication of Paine's works
-would put a stop to all the political writings of the day. But whatever
-ground there appeared for these fears, a wise publicist should have
-given Carlile all possible support, since he _ought to have_ triumphed
-in his course. Major Cartwright deprecated the republication of Paine's
-works as mischievous, to flying in the face of Juries; that when a jury
-had once declared these works to be libels, the very _errors_ of that
-jury ought to be respected. Yet against this dictum of the influential
-veteran, Reformer, Carlile contended. He encountered greater obstacles
-among such friends than among his enemies. It requires more courage to
-fight against friends than against foes. Carlile illustrated the remark
-of Mr. Miall, that 'martyrdom in the past tense is madness in the
-present.' Then the Reformers Degan to call themselves 'Christian
-Reformers,' 'Religious Reformers,' and by other safe conventional names
-to distinguish themselves from 'Carlile and his party.'(4) No man should
-lightly compromise his party by a dangerous step. Carlile is not
-amenable to blame on this account. He took a necessary step for general
-progress, and his triumph justified his penetration. A weaker man than
-Carlile would not have been justified in the course which he took, as a
-weaker man would have failed. But Carlile was a Buonarotti.
-
- 1. Christian Warrior, pp. 27-28.
- 2. Repub. vol. ii. p. 257.
- 3. Repub. v. pp 283-4
- 4. Christian Warrior, p. 10
-
-Such was the difficulty of obtaining the forbidden books, in which he
-set the example of dealing, that twelve guineas were offered for twelve
-copies of the Age of Reason,(1) and 5 for five suppressed twopenny
-Tracts.(2) In order to destroy a trade which they could not intimidate,
-the Government arrested his shopmen with a rapidity intended to exhaust
-them. To defeat this intention, books were sold through an aperture; so
-that the buyer was unable to identify the seller.(3) Afterwards they
-were sold by clockwork.(4) On a dial was written the name of every
-publication for sale. The purchaser entered, and turned the hand of the
-dial to the book he wanted, which, on depositing his money, dropped down
-before him without the necessity of any one speaking. The Vice and
-Constitutional Associations we both defied and defeated; notwithstanding
-that the honoured name of Wilberforce was found on the list of the
-members of one of the societies, and that of the Duke of Wellington
-headed the other. The circulation of Carlile's books were quadrupled,
-and a cheering crowd around his shop windows perpetually testified their
-approval of his courage, and at public dinners in the provinces, the
-health was drank of 'Carlile's invisible shopman.' Martyrdom, he said,
-was contagious, and could he keep it up, he should glory in a perpetual
-sessions at the Old Bailey. The result of his course he expresses with
-honourable exultation. 'In this country the Age of Reason was spellbound
-for twenty years, with the exception of a few copies put forth by Daniel
-Isaac Eaton. From December, 1818, to December, 1822, I had sent into
-circulation near 20,000 copies. Let corruption rub out that if she can,
-as Mr. Cobbett said his 40,000 Registers.' By the month of June, 1824,
-in the fifth year of his imprisonment, his calculation was verified; the
-press was freed, and the Government, who had beaten Napoleon in a
-physical conflict, was beaten by Carlile in a moral struggle--so
-impotent is power to overcome the right, when brave men champion the
-right.
-
- 1. Repub. vol. ii. p. 183.
- 2. Christian Warrior, p. 29.
- 3. Repub. vol. v. p. 56.
- 4. Repub. vol. v. p. 264.
-
-Carlile was liberally supported, and found powerful friends. The third
-and fourth years of his imprisonment produced subscriptions to the
-amount of 500 per year, and for a long period his profits over the
-counter were 50 per week. An idea of his occasional business may be
-formed from the circumstance that once when a trial was pending, Mrs.
-Carlile took 600 in the shop in one week. When he came from Dorchester
-Gaol one friend lent him 1,000 to extend his business. But he got out
-of money as fast as it came, and his ambition leading him to give the
-greatest possible effect to his advocacy, he contracted liabilities at
-62, Fleet Street, which embarrassed him. Indeed, continually torn from
-his home by government prosecutions, he had ill opportunities of
-maintaining business habits. The latter part of his life was passed in
-the vicissitudes and anxieties of fallen fortunes.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER III. THE EDITOR AND THE ATHEIST
-
-
-During Carlile's imprisonment in Dorchester Gaol, he edited the
-_Republican_, a Weekly Journal, which he conducted through fourteen
-volumes. Its circulation reached at one time as high as 15,000. He saw
-that a work had to be done, and he prepared to do it; if he could not do
-it so well as he could wish, he resolved to do it as well as he was
-able. He offered his ardour in the public cause as an apology for the
-want of a grammatical education. Drawn into authorship by the force of
-events, he hardly knew in what grammatical accuracy consisted, till he
-felt his own deficiency through the criticisms of his correspondents,
-some of whom did not hesitate to tell him, that he was unfit for a
-public writer. This state of things continued till the fourth volume of
-the _Republican_, where he wisely resolved to put his prison hours to
-educational uses.(1) But his editorial duties were his best education,
-and this he admitted; 'I give,' said he, in 1825, 'a receipt to the
-criticism of my friends upon my writings for the better part of the
-knowledge that I now possess.'(2) Some of Carlile's correspondents were
-men from whom it was an honour to receive direction. From Francis Place
-he gleaned all his ideas of Political Economy, and what Carlile called
-the 'all-surpassing question of the regulation of the numbers of the
-people.' It was from Jeremy Bentham, through Mr. Place, that he was
-instructed not to attempt the building of any system of his own, but to
-go on pulling down existing errors, every item of success in which, was
-in fact, so much good building.(3) In Carlile's last days he spoke of
-Francis Place as 'his old tutor who had a hard task to beat all the
-superstition out of him.'
-
- 1. See Repub. vol. iv. p. 191.
- 2. Lion, vol. i. p. 373.
-
- 4. Christian Warrior, p. 13.
-
-While others were calling Carlile 'Atheist and Infidel,' Place was
-calling him 'the most, obstinately superstitious fellow alive;' but
-always paid him the compliment of admitting that he was worth the
-trouble, and that if he could be set right he would keep right.(1)
-
-When Carlile's days of thinking began, he began with himself. He knew
-himself well, and this was the source of his strength. Like Cobbett he
-could write always well of himself. His first study was to form a mind
-of his own on the basis of the best known principles.(2) Carlile began
-to write a man. Nature made him for an agitator. He had an iron will and
-limitless self-reliance. I have been told by one who advised him
-frequently, that no man could control him. His first papers in the
-_Republican_, are thoughtful, manly, self-possessed, nervous, and
-resolute. Sherwin preceded Carlile in the publication of a work, called
-the _Republican_, but, after the fourth number, it was changed into
-'_Sherwin's Weekly Political Register_,' on the ground that people were
-afraid of its name. But Carlile resumed its title, and selected those
-articles only which had the real names and addresses of the author
-appended. He called upon the friends of his opinions to avow themselves,
-and declared himself ambitious of incurring martyrdom, if martyrdom was
-necessary to the cause of liberty.(3)
-
-Carlile's political and religious prototype was Paine. Carlile always
-wrote with manifest purpose, and seems to have emulated the plain vigour
-of Cobbett and the invective of Junius.
-
-Carlile's habits were marked by great abstemiousnesss. Seldom taking
-animal food,(4) he refused wine(5) when offered a dozen at Dorchester
-Gaol, preferring good milk. He was morally as well as physically
-particular. In the rules of the Deistical Society, he provided that only
-persons of good character should be eligible.(6) 'It is important to
-you, Republicans,' wrote he, from Dorchester Gaol, 'that however humble
-the advocates of your principles may be, they should exhibit a clear
-moral character to the world.'(7) He never sold a copy of any work which
-he would hesitate to read to his children.(8) He expressed a hope, when
-fairs were popular, that fairs would be put down all over the country.
-He was one of the first thus to oppose what the pious then approved.
-
- 1. Christian Warrior, p. 26.
- 2. Gauntlet, No. 8, p. 113.
- 3. Repub. No. 1, vol. i.
- 4. Repub. vol. ii. p. 148.
- 5. Repub. vol. ii. p. 234.
- 6. Repub. vol. v. ft. 31.
- 7. Repub. vol. vi. p. 3.
- 8. Repub. vol. vii. p. 36.
-
-There was no intolerance in Carlile's habits. 'I have no wish,' these
-were his words, 'to force my opinions on any man--if he wishes to have
-them, he must either buy them or challenge me to defend them; and, in
-this last instance, it must be some one whom I consider worth contending
-with, before I would open my mouth.'(1) He was of a retiring turn, and
-utterly incapable of obtruding himself, where there was the possibility
-of his not being desired. It was a sense of duty alone that made him
-brave, his moral courage was great, but it was the courage of
-conviction. Carlile was an illustration of Bulwer's remark, that courage
-in one thing, is not to be mistaken for courage in everything. He who
-opposed himself without fear to the spies of Sidmouth, and the edicts of
-Castlereagh, who singly withstood public opinion on the questions of
-Marriage and Religion, when that opinion knew no reason and no mercy, he
-felt, through his whole life, a want of fair confidence in himself, when
-addressing a public audience. Large numbers, called together by his
-name, produced in him a sense of disturbing responsibility and
-embarrassment.(2) When liberated from imprisonment in Dorchester
-Gaol--an ill discipline certainly for oratory--he trembled at committing
-his reputation to the lapses of an inexperienced tongue. His friends
-thought he would never make a speaker, but his perseverance prevailed.
-Still his efforts were irregular; sometimes he was as eloquent as the
-best, at others timidly hesitating. Probably his stolid nature wanted
-passion to excite it--some nature's, like deep waters, are only to put
-in motion by a storm. A paralytic stroke, in March 1841, affected the
-muscles of the mouth and tongue, and diminished his acquired power.
-
-Hume has said that Christian sects manifest intolerance, which increases
-in intensity the nearer their valuing creeds coincide. This has been
-true of some classes of infidels, but Carlile wisely regarded with
-favour the approximation of sects to reason. He encouraged the Rev.
-Robert Taylor's Deistical friends, because, like the Unitarians, they
-would break up some part of the superstition of other sects. His
-impression was that, 'Though not themselves free from superstition, they
-would lessen the sum total among all the sects, and, in so doing, do a
-certain amount of good.'(3)
-
- 1. Repub. vol. iv. p. 33.
- 2. Gauntlet, No. 30 p. 385.
- 3. Repub. vol. xvi. p. 130.
-
-Carlile's writings abound in instances of great political penetration:
-thus he placed on the title page of the second volume of the
-_Republican_ these words--'Liberty is the property of man: a Republic
-only can protect it.' The same volume contained his qualification ot
-equality. 'Equality,' says he, 'means not an equality of riches, but of
-rights merely.'(1) Yet the contrary is asserted to this hour.
-'Timidity,' wrote he in 1828, 'maybe seen sitting on the countenance of
-almost every Politician. He speaks and speculates with a trembling which
-generates a prejudice in others. As it is the slave who makes the
-tyrant, so it is timidity in the Politician which creates the prejudice
-of the persecutor.'(2) In words to this effect, he pourtrayed that
-conventional caution of the newspaper press, which is to this hour the
-bane of popular progress. He had a distincter conception of the part to
-be played by education in public reform, than any other agitator of his
-rank at that time. 'I have before advised your majesty,' said he, in
-dedicating vol. 12 of the _Republican_ to George IV., 'to patronise
-Mechanics' Institutions, and you will become a greater monarch than
-Buonaparte. Kings must come to this, and he will be the wisest who does
-it first and voluntarily.' Republicanism was not with Carlile, as with
-so many--politics in rags; he never divested it of efficiency and
-dignity. To one who said that his exacting 100 shares for his Book
-Company was aristocratic, he answered, 'Call it what you please, that is
-republican which is done well.'(3) Carlile took a view of the rationale
-and initiation of revolution in England as manly as it was sagacious.
-'In the beginning of my political career,' he writes, 'I had those
-common notions which the enthusiasm of youth and inexperience produces,
-that all reforms must be the work of physical force. The heat of my
-imagination shewed me everything about to be done at once. I am now
-enthusiastic, but it is in _working_ where I can work _practically_
-rather than theoretically; and though I would be the last to oppose a
-well-applied physical force, in the bringing about reforms or
-revolutions, I would be the last in advising others to rush into useless
-dangers that _I would shun, or where I would not lead_. I have long
-formed the idea that an insurrection against grievances in this country
-must, to be successful, be spontaneous and not plotted, and that all
-political conspiracies may be local and even individual evils. I
-challenge the omniscience of the Home Office to say whether I ever
-countenanced anything of the kind in word or deed. I will do nothing in
-a political point of view which cannot be done openly.'(4) There is a
-strong vein of political wisdom in all this, not yet appreciated by
-popular politicians, and this has the merit of having been written at a
-time, when (as indeed now) the maxim of English popular progressive
-politics is not to find how much can be done _within the law_, but how
-much can be done _without it_ and _against it_: a policy which dooms
-Democracy to ceaseless antagonisms in the attainment of its claims, and
-will, if persisted in, fetter it with impotence when the victory is won.
-
- 1. Repub. vol. xiv. p. 105.
- 2. Lion, vol. i. p. 3.
- 3. Repub. vol. xii. p. 3.
- 4. Repub. vol. xiv. pp. 5, 6.
-
-The progress of Carlile's convictions respecting religion is evident and
-honourable to his thoughtfulness. He was twenty-seven years old before
-he conceived any error in the article religion. His attention was first
-drawn to the fact by finding that the suppressed writings of his day
-chiefly related to religion. When the Attorney General first called him
-profane, for publishing Hone's Parodies, he was a very different man.
-Through several volumes of the _Republican_ he was a Deist only. But
-reflection led him onwards step by step. A first indication is in these
-words--'Paine, in his lifetime, appears to have been the advocate of a
-Deistical church, but such an attempt shall ever find my reprobation, as
-unnecessary and mischievous.'(1) The reason he assigned was, that
-science alone could lead to true devotion, and lectures on science were,
-therefore, the proper worship. In his first controversy with Cobbett, he
-avowed himself, as Mr. Owen always has, a believer in a great
-controlling power of Nature. But at this point, Carlile's belief had
-grown practical in its negation, as he wrote, 'I advocate the abolition
-of all religions, without setting up anything new of the kind.'(2) By
-this time he had become a confirmed materialist, and soon after, defined
-mind as a portion of the organization of the human body, acted upon by
-the atmosphere and the body jointly, and dependent upon a peculiarity in
-the organization, in the same manner as voice and life itself.(3) The
-definitions he gave, in 1822, of Religion and Morality were essentially
-the same as those since rendered more elegantly by Emerson. Carlile
-defined Morality as a rule of conduct relating to man and man--Religion
-as a rule of conduct, relating not to man, but to something which he
-fancies to be his Maker.(4) Next he observed, 'I may have said that the
-changes observed in phenomenon argue the existence of an active power in
-the universe, but I have again and again renounced the notion of that
-power being intelligent or designing.(5) 'It is not till since my
-imprisonment that I have avowed myself Atheist.'(6)
-
- 1. Repub. vol. iv. p. 220.
- 2. Repub. vol. v. p. 201.
- 3. Repub. vol. vi.
- 4. Repub. vol. vi. p. 249.
- 5. Repub. vol. vii. p. 26.
- 6. Repub. vol. vii. p. 397.
-
-He reached the climax of his Atheism on the title page to his tenth
-volume of the _Republican_, where he declared 'There is no such a God in
-existence as any man has preached; nor any kind of God and this
-declaration was so far carried out in detail, as to exclude from the
-_Republican_ _God, nature, mind, soul_, and _spirit_, as words without
-proto types.(1)
-
-The two extremes of Carlile's career exhibit a coincidence of terms, but
-betray to the initiated observer a radical progress and distinction of
-opinion. In his first work, he wrote, 'Science is the Antichrist;'(2) in
-his last, 'Science is the Christ.'(3) When he wrote the first he was a
-Deist, when he wrote the last he was an Atheist.
-
-We commonly find that extreme political enthusiasts in youth, pass, in
-old age, like Sir Francis Burdett, into extreme Conservatism: but it is
-a phenomenon in intellect, that Carlile, whose convictions, not his
-passions, led him to hold positive materialism, should lapse into a more
-than Swedenborgian mysticism. 'I have discovered,' said he, 'that the
-names of the Old Testament, either apparently of persons or places, are
-not such names as the religious mistakes have constructed, but names of
-states of mind manifested in the human race, and, in this sense, the
-Bible may be scientifically read as a treatise on spirit, soul, or mind,
-and not as a history of time, people, and place.'(4) To insist on the
-utility of such a theory, except as a mere theory of theological
-explanation (useful as explaining it away altogether), was very strange
-in Carlile. It seems like the artifice of a beaten man to conciliate an
-implacable enemy. But Carlile was no beaten man. A few months only
-before his death, he wrote to Sir Robert Peel, in reference to the
-imprisonment of Mr. Southwell and myself, avowing his determination to
-renew martyrdom, if Sir Robert persisted in reviving persecution. But
-Carlile did make the capital error of proposing to explain science under
-Christian terms, which was giving to science, which is universal, a
-sectarian character. Hence, he was found using the words God, soul,
-Christ, etc., with all the pertinacity of a divine, and scandalising his
-friends by taking out his diploma as a preacher. In this, he manifested
-his old courage. He was still true to himself, and was still an Atheist,
-but veiling his materialism under a Swedenborgian nomenclature.
-
- 1. Repub. vol. xiv. p, 770.
- 2. Preface, p. 14. to vol. i. of Repub.
- 3. Christian Warrior.
- 4. Christian Warrior, p. 30.
-
-But the adoption of Swedenborgian terminology was a virtual recantation,
-and Carlile lost caste by it as did Lawrence. Lawrence gained no
-practice, and Carlile no influence. Indeed, I never knew any of these
-virtual recantations to be believed, or even respected by the world, who
-forced them on. A real recantation I never knew beyond this, that
-Atheists have acceded to Pantheism, or perhaps, relapsed into
-Unitarianism. But they have always remained Rationalists. None that 1
-have known and watched--not even the weakest, have fallen into
-Evangelism. Carlile, by his new course, exposed himself to be distrusted
-by his less observing but warm friends, and he conciliated no foe among
-the Christians. Carlile, however, was no hypocrite, nor did he take this
-new course for venal ends. He was as in all things else conscientious.
-Still his course was one of choice, not of necessity. He was free as
-ever to expound science, as science, or to expound it in the language of
-religion. He adopted the mystic course. This was his error of judgment,
-not an alteration of conviction. If I may explain the paradox of his
-conduct in a paradox of terms, this is the expression of it:--From being
-a Material Atheist, he became a Christian Atheist. His definition of a
-Christian at this stage, was 'a man purged from error.'(1) That this
-course was no more than a mode of inculcation of his favourite Atheism
-is evident, intrinsically, and also from the fact that he was so much a
-realist, as to still avow his detestation of fiction; and so coherently
-did he keep to this text, that he never ceased to make war on poetry,
-theatres, and romance, from the commencement of his career down to the
-last number of the _Christian Warrior_.
-
-But the condemnation I pass upon the philosophy of his latter days shall
-not be exparte. I subjoin that passage in which he has most powerfully
-stated his own case.
-
-'The first problem in human or social reform is _through what medium
-must it be made_. In what is called a religious state of society, that
-is, a state of idolatry and superstition, can reform be carried out
-through any other medium than its religion! My experience, added to the
-best advice I could find, is, that, with a religious people, religion is
-the only medium of reform. If I were opposed in that problem, I could
-successfully defend my side of it. The Charter shall change the
-constituency of the House of Commons, without improving the House.
-Socialism may create 20 Tytherlies, but it has still done nothing for
-the nation. But 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.
-It is the substitution of the known for the unknown, the real for the
-unreal, the certain for the uncertain. Religion is the erroneous mind's
-chief direction. It must be corrected by and through the medium which it
-most respects. It rejects all other opposing conditions, and increases
-its tenacity for its errors. To reform religion by science, is to
-regenerate fallen man, and to save a sinking country.
-
- 1. Cheltenham Free Press, Any. 1842.
- 2. Christian Warrior, p. 31,
-
-There is great wisdom in this language. The question is, _how_ shall the
-problem be solved? In this Carlile erred, as he did with the theory of
-personalities, which he conceived with equal ability. I conceive that
-Science is independent of Theology in its essence and its terms.
-Religion may be brought to science by adroit interpretations, and
-improved in character and significance; but Science can never be brought
-to Religion without being 'paltered in a double sense,' and lowered in
-dignity and intelligibility.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER IV. HIS DEATH AND CHARACTER
-
-
-Carlile's death took place on this wise. He had come up from Enfield to
-Bouvene Street, Fleet Street, to live on the old field of war, and edit
-the _Christian Warrior._ While a van of goods were unpacking at the
-door, one of his boys strayed out and went away. Carlile was fond of his
-children, and he set out anxiously to seek his child. The excitement
-ended in death. On Carlile's return he was seized with a fatal illness.
-Bronchitus, which he was told by his medical advisers would soon destroy
-him, if he came to live in the city, set in, and the power of speech
-soon left him. Mr. Lawrence, the author of the famous 'Lectures on Man,'
-whom Carlile always preferred in his illnesses, was sent for. He
-promptly arrived, but pronounced recovery hopeless; and Richard Carlile
-expired February 10,1843, in his fifty-third year.
-
-Wishing to be useful in death as in life, Carlile devoted his body to
-dissection. Always above superstition, in practice as well as in theory,
-his wish had long been--that his body, if he died first, should be given
-to Mr. Lawrence. At that time the prejudice against dissection was
-almost universal, and only superior persons rose above it. His wish was
-complied with by his family, and the post mortem examination was
-published in the _Lancet_ of that year.
-
-Carlile's burial took place at Kensal Green Cemetry. He was laid in the
-consecrated part of the ground--nearly opposite the Mausoleum of the
-Ducrow family. At the interment, a clergyman appeared, and with the
-usual want of feeling and of delicacy, persisted in reading the Church
-service over him. His eldest son Richard, who represented his sentiments
-as well as his name, very properly protested against the proceeding, as
-an outrage upon the principles of his father and the wishes of the
-family. Of course the remonstrance was disregarded, and Richard, his
-brothers, and their friends left the ground. The clergyman then
-proceeded to call Carlile 'his dear departed brother,' and to declare
-that he 'had died in the sure and certain hope of a glorious
-resurrection.'
-
-Carlile left six children--Richard, Alfred, and Thomas Paine, by his
-wife Mrs. Jane Carlile; and Julian, Theophila, and Hypatia, by 'Isis,'
-the lady to whom he united himself after his separation from his wife.
-
-Mrs. Carlile survived him only four months. She died in the same house,
-No. 1, Bouverie Street, and was buried in the same grave. It is hoped
-that a suitable monument will soon mark the resting place of England's
-stoutest champion of free discussion, political and religious.
-
-All stories about the recantation of Carlile, to which the pious have
-given currency, are necessarily false, as he was never able to recant.
-He lost his power of speaking long before death approached so near as to
-suggest recanting to him. But death had no power to make his strong
-spirit quail at ideal terror or to shake the firm convictions of his
-understanding. His dying words, therefore, are the last which he
-addressed to the public in his _Christian Warrior_, and they were
-these--'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 on
-covenant. They must be uprooted for public and individual safety_.'(1)
-
- 1. Christian Warrior, No. 4 p. 83.
-
-These words which he published thirteen days only before his death, are
-those which he, doubtless, would have pronounced in his last hour, had
-consciousness and strength remained with him.
-
-In the early portion of my imprisonment in Gloucester Gaol, the Rev.
-Samuel Jones, in order to move me by fear to the retraction of my
-convictions, told me before a class of prisoners that 'the notorious
-Richard Carlile was dead, and had died horribly; but he had made what
-amends he could by recanting his dreadful principles on his
-death-bed--had denounced his infidel colleagues, and implored mercy of
-God. You see, therefore,' added the Rev. libeller to me, 'what you have
-to look forward to.' Great, however, was the Rev. Mr. Jones'
-astonishment and confusion, when a short time after, Mr. Carlile himself
-walked into my cell, alive and well, to offer me his generous sympathy
-and advice to enable me the better to combat the old enemies of free
-thought and free speech. The usual stories told of infidel recantations
-are about as well founded as was this fabrication concerning Carlile, by
-the Rev. Samuel Jones, visiting magistrate of Gloucester Gaol.
-
-But _why_ should Carlile recant! Why should the unbeliever fear to die!
-There are four things on which Christians hang the terrors which usually
-haunt their death-beds. Let us examine them.
-
- 1. The story of the Fall.
- 2. The rejection of the offer of salvation.
- 3. The sin of unbelief.
- 4. The vengeance of God.
-
-1. If man fell in the garden of Eden--who placed him there! God! Who
-placed the temptation there? God! Who gave him an imperfect nature--a
-nature of which it was foreknown it would fall! God! To what does this
-amount!
-
-If a parent placed his poor child near a fire at which he knew it would
-be burnt to death, or near a well into which he knew it would fall and
-be drowned, would any power of custom prevent our giving speech to the
-indignation of the heart, and pronouncing such a parent a miscreant! And
-can we pretend to believe God has so acted, and at the same time be able
-_to trust_ him! If God has so acted, he may so act again. This creed can
-afford no consolation in death. If he who disbelieves this dogma fears
-to die, he who believes it should fear death more.
-
-2. Salvation, it is said, is offered to the fallen. But man is not
-fallen, except on the revolting hypothesis just discussed. And before
-man can be accepted by God, he must, according to Christians, own
-himself a degraded sinner. Is salvation worth this humiliation! But man
-is not degraded. No man can be degraded by the act of another. Dishonour
-can come only by his own hands: and depravity has not come thus. Man,
-therefore, needs not this salvation. And, if he needed it, he could not
-accept it. Debarred from purchasing it himself, he must accept it as an
-act of grace. But it is not well to go even to heaven on sufferance. We
-despise the poet who is not above a patron; we despise the citizen who
-crawls before the throne; and shall God be said to have less love of
-self-respect than man! He who will consent to be saved after this
-fashion hath most need to fear that he shall perish, for he deserves it.
-
-3. Then, in what way can there be a _sin_ of unbelief? Is not the
-understanding the subject of evidence? A man, with evidence before him,
-can no more help seeing it or feeling its weight, than a man with his
-eyes or ears open can help seeing the house or tree before him, or
-hearing the sounds made around him. If a man disbelieve, it is because
-his conviction is true to his understanding. If I disbelieve a
-proposition, it is through lack of evidence; and the act is as virtuous
-(so far as virtue can belong to that which is inevitable), as the belief
-of it, when the evidence is perfect. If it is meant that a man is to
-believe, whether he sees evidence or not, it means that he is to believe
-certain things, whether true or false; in fine, that he may qualify
-himself for heaven by hypocrisy and lies. It is of no use that the
-unbeliever is told that he will be damned if he does not believe; what
-human frailty may do is another thing; but the judgment is clear, that a
-man _ought_ not to believe, nor profess to believe, what seems to him to
-be false, although he should be damned. The believer, who seeks to
-propitiate heaven by this deceit, ought to fear its wrath, not the
-unbeliever who rejects the dishonourable terms and throws himself on its
-justice.
-
-4. There is the _vengeance_ of God. But is not the savage idea destroyed
-as soon as you name it? Can God have that which man ought not to
-have--_vengeance_. The jurisprudence of earth has reformed itself--we no
-longer _punish_ absolutely; we seek the _reformation_ of the offender.
-We leave retaliation to savages; and shall we cherish in heaven an idea
-we have chased from earth? But _what_ has to be punished? Can the sins
-of man disturb the peace of God? If so, as men exist in myriads and
-action is incessant, then is God, as Jonathan Edwards has shown, the
-most miserable of beings and the _victim_ of his meanest creatures. We,
-see, therefore, that sin against God is _impossible_. All sin is finite
-and relative--all sin is sin against man. Will God punish this, which
-punishes itself? If man errs, the bitter consequences are ever with him.
-Why should he err! Does he choose the ignorance, incapacity, passion,
-and blindness, through which he errs? Why is he precipitated,
-imperfectly natured into a chaos of crime! Is not his destiny made for
-him; and shall God punish that sin which is his misfortune rather than
-his fault? shall man be condemned to misery in eternity _because_ he has
-been made wretched, and weak, and erring, in time.
-
-But if man _has_ fallen at his conscious peril--_has_ thoughtlessly
-spurned salvation--_has_ offended God--will God therefore take
-vengeance? Is God without dignity or magnanimity? If I do wrong to him,
-who does wrong to me, I come down (has not the ancient sage warned me)
-to the level of my enemy? Will God thus descend to the level of
-vindictive man! Who has not thrilled at the lofty question of Volumnia
-to Coriolanus:--
-
- 'Think'st thou it honourable for a noble man
-
- Still to remember wrongs.'
-
-Shall God be less honourable and remember the wrong done against him,
-not by his equals, but by his own frail creatures! To be unable to trust
-God is to degrade him. Those passages in the New Testament which give
-the narratives most interest and dignity, are the parables in which a
-servant is told to forgive a debt to one who had forgiven him; in which
-a brother is to be forgiven until seventy times seven (that is
-unlimitedly); and the prayer where men claim forgiveness as they have
-themselves forgiven others their trespasses. What was this but erecting
-a high moral argument against the relentlessness of future punishment of
-erring man? If, therefore, man is to forgive, shall God do less? Shall
-man be more just than God? Is there anything so grand in the life of
-Christ as his forgiving his enemies, as he expired on the cross? Was it
-God the Sufferer behaving more nobly than will God the Judge? Was this
-the magnificent teaching of fraternity to vengeful man, or is it to be
-regarded but as a sublime libel on the hereafter judgments of heaven?
-The Infidel is Infidel to error, but he believes in truth and humanity,
-and when he believes in God, he will prefer to believe that which is
-noble of him. He will be able to trust him. Holding by no conscious
-error, doing no dishonour in thought and offering, his homage to love
-and truth, why should the unbeliever fear to die! Carlile saw not less
-clearly than this, nor felt less strongly, and he knew that only those
-fear death who have never thought about it at all, or thought about it
-wrongly.
-
-Carlile's early career gave evidence of that iron hauteur which
-characterised him. In dedicating from Dorchester Gaol, his second volume
-of the _Republican_, to Sir Robert Gifford, the Attorney General of that
-day, (1820) he wrote, 'Gratitude being one of the noblest traits in the
-character of animals, both rational and irrational, _to which ever you
-may deem me allied_, I feel that I owe it to you.' Carlile taunted the
-Society for the Suppression of Vice, or as he most correctly styled it
-the Vice Society, saying that, 'next to their secretary, Pritchard, the
-lawyer, he had gained most by their existence,(1) and had sold more
-Deistical volumes in one year through their exertions than he should in
-seven, in the ordinary course of business.'(2) Carlile's cheerful
-disposition resisted the sombre influence of the dungeon, and he
-declared when Wedderbum arrived at Dorchester Gaol that he would
-'endeavour to get him chaplain, as the officiating one was so extremely
-fat that he could hardly get up to the pulpit, and when there, he was so
-long in recovering from the exertion, that he could not read the prayers
-with sufficient solemnity.(3)
-
- 1. Repub. vol. ii. p. 183.
- 2. Repub. vol. ii. p. 185.
- 3. Repub. vol. iii. p. 112.
-
-The fourth volume of the _Republican_ Carlile also dedicated to Gifford,
-the Attorney General, beginning, 'My constant and learned friend,
-between you and the Vice Society I am at loss how to pay my courtesies,
-so as to avoid jealousy. You acted nobly with my first volume. My second
-you neglected; and I had resolved to stop when I heard of your renewed
-prosecutions. I am sorry we did not understand each other better
-before.' A paragraph in the Dedication of his sixth volume to George IV.
-was in these words, 'You are not only the head of the State but of the
-Church too, and as I am an intermeddler with the matters of both, I,
-your Banishment Act notwithstanding, dedicate my volume to both heads at
-once, with the most profound hope and prayer that neither of them may
-ache after reading it.' When Carlile took notice of Mease, he thus
-addressed him--'To Mr. Thomas Mease, grocer, draper, and methodist.' The
-letter to Mease, was dated 'Dorchester Gaol, December 18, year 1822; of
-the God that was born of a woman, who was his own father, and who was
-killed to please himself. The _immortal_ god that died.' The letter
-commenced thus,--'Sir Saint and Savage.' To Mr. Dronsfield he wrote--'I
-am not humble; civility to all; servility to none is the becoming
-characteristic of manhood.'(1) Alluding to the extensive sale of Wat
-Tyler, which had such an influence on his early fortunes, Carlile
-exclaimed, 'Glory to thee, O Southey! Happy mayst thou be in singing
-hexameters to thy old Royal Master, when thou hast passed the _reality_
-as well as the _vision_ of judgment! Yes, my patron! to that best of thy
-productions, "Wat Tyler," do I owe the encouragement I first found to
-persevere.(2)
-
-Of his own Every Woman's Book, Carlile said, 'It had sustained Mr.
-Cobbett's malignity--one of the most powerful venoms which the animal
-world had produced.'(3) Carlile characterised the weak point in his own
-character with severe felicity, when speaking of others. 'Conceit,' said
-he, 'is a malady of humanity, of which some people die.'(4) These words
-might stand as the epitaph of his own public influence. The following
-passage occurred in that letter to me, alluded to in the preface. 'You,
-Southwell and others,' said he, 'are now where I once was, resting upon
-the mere flippant vulgarisms of what you and the world consent to call
-Atheistic infidelity, regulating your amount of wisdom by a critical
-contrast with other people's folly.(5) I hope we were never amenable to
-the censure with which this sentence opens: the concluding words are
-shrewd and instructive, which I repeat for the sake of those young
-gentlemen who take up infidelity as a pastime, instead as a principle.
-
- 1. Repub. vol. vii. p. 868.
- 2. Repub. vol. vii. p. 674.
- 3. Lion, vol. ii. p. 450.
- 4. Oracle of Reason, vol. i. p. 366.
- 5. Oracle of Reason, vol. i. p. 366.
-
-It is due to Carlile to observe that the annoyance he marshalled against
-authority was chiefly retaliative. He disowned a placard put in his
-window, which said, 'This is the Mart for Sedition and Blasphemy,' as he
-deemed it an admission that he did vend something of the kind. 'I sell,'
-said he, 'only truth and right reason.'(1) (In parenthesis it maybe
-observed, that he denied that any human tribunal was competent to
-declare what was blasphemy.) How much farther Carlile was impartial than
-are Christians, is evidenced by the fact that he published Bishop
-Watson's Apology for the Bible, in conjunction with Paine's Age of
-Reason.(2) In another respect he behaved as Christians never behave, he
-never questioned the youths he employed, nor any of his dependents as to
-their opinions, nor did he use any means to induce them to comprehend or
-adopt his.(3) He held his opinions too proudly to intrigue or supplicate
-others to accept them.
-
-In candour, in independency of judgment, in perfect moral fearlessness
-of character, I believe Carlile cannot be paralleled among the public
-men of his time. Lovel writes:
-
- He is a slave who dare not be,
-
- In the right with two or three.
-
-Carlile was no slave. He was able to stand in the right by himself
-against the world. One forgives his errors, his vanity, and his egotism,
-for the bravery of his bearing and his speech. Though Paine was his
-great prototype, he was prompt, both in his early enthusiasm and in his
-latter days, to acknowledge Paine's defects as a theologian. 'About
-"God" Paine,' said he, 'was not altogether wise, but less unwise than
-the world at large.(4) In his earliest attachments, Carlile
-discriminated, 'I neither look,' wrote he 'on Mr. Gibbon nor Mr. Hume,
-as standards of infidelity to the Christian religion.'(5) He hesitated
-at Shelley's views of marriage, deeming them crude.(6) Carlile was able
-to take anything up or put anything down at the bidding of his judgment.
-He said to Mr. Searlett, 'At present I am not a tinman, but I should
-never feel ashamed to return to it to earn an honest livelihood, if
-circumstances should render it necessary in this or any other
-country,'(7)
-
- 1. Repub. vol. v.r. 12.
- 2. Repub. vol. v. p. 89
- 3. Repub. vi. p. 778.
- 4. Scourge, p. 110.
- 5. Repub. vol. ii. p. 168.
- 6. Repub. vol. v. p. 148.
- 7. Repub. vol. ii. p. 403.
-
-He began a periodical or ended it at will. No taunt deterred him, no
-threat intimidated him, no smile seduced him. Carlile was perfectly able
-to stand alone. He avowed himself an Atheist when no one else did. When
-he understood that arbitrary checks to population were necessary he said
-so and distinguishing the particular kinds of checks, disguisedly hinted
-at by Political Economists, or anonymously broached in handbills, he
-specified them and added these words, 'I think these plans tor the
-prevention of conception good, and publicly say it.'(1) Although that
-saying involved his own reputation and that of his cause. If Carlile had
-the querulousness, which condemned others, he had also the rarer courage
-which condemned himself. If he called others fools he called himself
-one, when his judgment convinced him that he had been in error. To those
-whom he found he had wronged, he made no dubious acknowledgment.
-Disdaining deceit always he openly made the amplest apology frank words
-could express. 'I ask Mr. Cobbett's pardon, and make the due apology,'
-said he, on finding that he had made an erroneous attribution to him.(2)
-To Dr. Olinthus Gregory he was more emphatic still.(3) Carlile
-proclaimed the excellence of Cobbett's Grammar, and the superiority of
-Hunt's Roasted Corn,(4) at the same time that he roasted the authors of
-both. Major Cartwright's 'English Constitution Produced and
-Illustrated,' he praised in some parts, while he mercilessly assailed it
-in others.(5) He acknowledged the kindness of his prosecutors, where
-they were kind, with the same fullness with which he execrated them when
-brutal.(6) To his bitterest enemy he was constantly thus just, and his
-own faults he confessed with as little reserve as he pointed out those
-or his enemies. His intellect was rude, but most robust. He had a
-passion for truth and did not care whether it went against him or for
-him; he told it with equal zest. He not only as many do, professed to
-love free speaking; he could _bear it_ of himself. He held, as a public
-man should do, his reputation in his hand, and he would toss it up as
-one would a ball.
-
- 1. Repub. No. 18, vol. ii. pp. 566-6. 1825.
- 2. Repub. vol. xii. p. 29.
- 3. Repub. vol. xii. p. 727.
- 4. Repub. vol. vi. p. 12.
- 5. Repub. vol. viii. p. 18.
- 6. Repub. vol. x. pp. 63-4.
-
-Carlile had a just notion of the relation of personalities to
-principles. 'Human nature,' said he, 'through whatever improved
-modifications it may pass, will still have its frailties, and those
-frailties have no relation to the social principles that may be
-advocated, nor do they emanate from newly advocated social principles,
-but from the frailty of that nature,... and any exhibition of such
-frailty belongs to the individual, and not to the principles
-constituting the public cause.'... But it is one thing to perceive the
-tenor of personalties, and another and very different thing to be able
-to conduct them. Mr. Carlile was utterly unable to conduct them
-usefully. They must be entered upon, not on personal, but upon public
-grounds; or they lose all moral effect. If undertaken from spleen, or
-vanity, they belong to the class of 'quarrels,' and damage both the
-writer and nis cause. If entered upon to preserve the integrity of a
-public question, such intention must be made very evident and the
-_improvement_ alone, and not the mortification of the party criticised,
-must be steadily kept in view. This Mr. Carlile never understood: he
-wounded, he disparaged, he recriminated. He did not weigh character
-through its entire extent. He mistook a part for the whole. It was in
-this erroneous way, that he condemned Cobbett and Hunt, was querulous to
-his friends in Parliament, and most unjust to his most important and
-devoted allies. Ricardo, Hume, Brougham, Burdett, who presented
-petitions for him, seem to me to have treated him much better than he
-treated them.
-
-Richard Carlile's reputation was founded on the joint profession of
-Republicanism, and ultimately of Deism and Atheism. He owed much to the
-_time_ when he made these professions, and not a little to the talent
-with which he maintained them. But did his services rest exclusively on
-the conditions under which they were rendered, their value would still
-stand high in the opinion of those capable of estimating the steps of
-public progress. He had to incur an obnoxious singularity, and brave
-imminent danger in order to purchase a field of action for others. This
-is a work which the world does not applaud like the manifestation of
-genius and talent, but it is a work which requires a courage and a
-sentiment of self-sacrifice, which the world's favourites rarely
-display. The work of the pioneer of thought is a work done for men of
-genius and talent; a work they are seldom able to do for themselves--for
-talent is prudent, and genius is timid; it is a work, however, which
-must be done by some one, or freedom languishes, invention is dumb,
-talent is misdirected, and philosophy creeps stealthily along starting
-at the sound of its own footsteps.
-
- 1. Sherwin*s Republican, No. 2, p. 21.
-
-No adequate estimate or the merits of Carlile, and no tolerant judgment
-of his faults can be formed without taking into account the aspects of
-the times when he struggled, and the unscrupulous and powerful enemies
-against which he contended. _Then_ the most hateful types of Toryism and
-Christianity were rampant--_Then_ Castlereagh declared in Parliament
-that it was necessary that 'the last spark of the spirit of the French
-Revolution should be extinguished.'(1) Malignant and servile
-Attorney-Generals and vindictive Judges left no man's liberty or life
-safe if he professed liberal opinions. The press was intimidated, and
-public meetings, who complained, butchered. It was under these
-formidable circumstances that Carlile undertook to free the press, and
-to make the famous works of the 'rebellious needleman' household books
-in England, and to oppose himself singly to crown and mitre, ana brave
-whatever political and priestly vengeance could inflict, when political
-and priestly power were unchecked by public opinion.
-
- 1. The apparent offensiveness of some of his addresses was
- created by Christians themselves, an Instance occurs in his
- letter to 'Old William Wilberforce,' to whom he said 'sinner,'
- instead of 'sir,' but this was because Wilberforce was a
- self-styled sinner.--Repub. vol. ii. p. 388
-
-It is in reference to the same public circumstances that Carlile's
-faults are to be judged.
-
-Those who in these days shall peruse the pages of Carlile's periodicals
-will be startled at the fierce invective and measureless denunciation
-which abound there. But let those who affect to pass over his name on
-this account, call to recollection the deadly arena of antagonism in
-which he had to fight the battle of freedom. The course he took is
-indeed not to be imitated now. We exist in better times, when the
-conflict of reason has succeeded to the strife of passion. We have
-better arts, because we have a fairer field, and we owe that fairer
-field to such men as Carlile. Let us not impose our modes of warfare on
-men who fought with savages, and demand of the actors of other times
-that virtue which belongs exclusively to our opportunities. Men who are
-patriotic in easy chairs and by the fire-side only, who never incur
-damped feet in the public cause, and essay the reform of society in kid
-gloves and white waistcoats, know nothing, and can allow nothing for
-that strife of spirit in which men live, who take up the dice box of
-oppression to play for liberty, and whose stakes are their lives. Let
-the Christian whose altar is protected by law, whose arrogance over
-infidels is part and parcel of the statutes, and is applauded by public
-opinion; let the sleek and unruffled saint beware how he judges one on
-whose head was every day poured out the phials of holy malignity, whom
-the highest authorities stooped to defame, whose name was sacked at the
-instigation of every miserable deacon or venal informer, whose household
-gods were strewn in the streets by policemen selected for their
-ferocity--whose wife was consigned to a gaol, and himself doomed to
-spend nine years and a half in the endurance of the unceasing indignity
-of vindictive imprisonment. Where the Christian in ermine has been
-brutal, vituperative, and malignant, let him not exact a perennial
-delicacy of sentiment from his victim, writhing under his provocations.
-Taking these circumstances into account he is little acquainted with
-human nature, who will wonder that Carlile, in the sixth year of an
-imprisonment caused by Lords Castlereagh, Liverpool, Sidmouth, and
-Eldon, should from Dorchester Gaol, dedicate the volume of the Trials of
-his Wife, Sister, and Shopmen in these words--'To the Memory of Robert
-Stewart, Marquis of Londonderry, Viscount Castlereagh, etc., who
-eventually did that for himself which millions wished some noble mind
-would do for him--_Cut his throat_.'
-
-The strait-laced moralist of this generation may turn to the volumes of
-the Carlile's Trials, and find that Mrs. Carlile was indicted for
-publishing a paragraph justifying assassination of tyrants. I have no
-sympathy with this doctrine. I deem it far nobler and more useful to
-society, to submit to be the victim than to victimize others. But
-Carlile acted on a resolute sense of self-defence. He was a believer in
-Brutus and Colonel Titus, and he lived in darker times when the policy
-of moral resistance was less clear and less practicable than now.
-
-The Society for the Suppression of Vice distinguished him in 1820, as
-'that most audacious offender, Carlile.'(1) The _Age_ called him 'a
-miscreant tinker.'(2) The _Sunday Times_ described him as 'a wretched
-man in the very kennel of contempt, from whom his proselytes fled as if
-he were emerged from a pest-house, and advised that he should rot in
-oblivion.'? And in this way papers and pulpits rang fascinating changes
-on such adjectives as fiend, monster, wretch, execrable, hideous,
-obscene, abandoned, infamous, etc., etc., till when he took a tour
-through the country in 1828, the idea of Carlile current among the pious
-was that of a black griffin with red glaring eyes--a tail with forked
-end, talons instead of fingers, and hoofs instead of toes.'(3)
-
- 1. Repub. vol. ii. p. 182.
- 2. Repub. vol. xii. p. 121
- 3. Repub. vol. xii. p. 151.
-
-Yet this man whom the Government, the Pulpit, and the Press co-operated
-thus to describe, was human, and not devoid of generous filial
-affection. When in Dorchester Gaol, in 1820, a letter came sealed with
-black wax, which, Carlile suspecting to announce the death of his
-mother, he threw it aside for four hours--not finding resolution to open
-it. 'I had hoped,' said he, 'that her life would have been extended a
-few years, that she might have witnessed the result of my present
-career. But it affords me pleasure to think that she sunk calmly to
-sleep, neither tortured by priests nor superstitious notions. It affords
-me pleasure,' cried he, exultingly, 'that in spite of the efforts of the
-Society for the Suppression of vice, the Priests, and the
-Attorney-General of a wicked administration, I have still retained a
-roof to shelter her, and under which she died.'(1) The department of
-progress in which Carlile worked has not yet received recognition by
-society. Society only remembers the genius which is creative, not that
-which is practical--though it profits in its ulterior stages more by the
-practical than the creative. The world has been rich in theory ages ago,
-and would have realised universal happiness by this time had it
-encouraged those who reduce its theories to practice. When a great truth
-is proclaimed, it produces no fruit till society is ploughed and sown
-with it. The pioneer, the orator, and the journalist, are they who
-practicalise truth: and he who re-asserts it, who insists upon it, and
-re-echoes it by all the arts of repetition--he it is who really advances
-society. He is the worker; yet society accords him no distinction, no
-posthumous memory. Hence it requires more generosity of sentiment to be
-useful than to be great. He who seeks distinction may advance society as
-he achieves distinction: but the advancement of society is secondary
-with him--the advancement of himself is the primary consideration, and
-he is often careless whether society advances or retrogrades provided he
-lays hold of its renown and keeps it. Hence he who seeks fame is
-selfish--he who seeks utility is generous, because he is certain that
-society will neglect him, as it pays its honours to those who serve it
-least. The theorist provides for the future, but it is the worker who
-makes the future by realising the fulness of the present. It was in this
-department that Carlile laboured. He left no distinct book, he
-bequeathed no invention, he is the author of no famous theory; but his
-life was a poem of heroic and voluntary sacrifice, by which new freedom
-was won and secured to posterity; and men are now benefited through his
-exertions who remember him not, who know him not, and who would disown
-him or revile him if they did. Attorney-Generals delight to prate about
-the danger to society of dissemminating new opinions--the danger is to
-him alone who undertakes the task. Let him who thinks that mankind are
-to be set on change too rapidly, read the Life of Carlile. The deadly
-opposition by which he was assailed is the answer to their fears.
-Society loves its opinions, and clings to them, whether they be error or
-truth. It hates him who teaches it to alter its course, however the
-change may be for its benefit. It is the destiny of the Reformer to
-serve mankind, and to be cursed by them for his pains. He who is not
-prepared for this has no business to be a Reformer. Then has he no
-reward? His proud reward is the satisfaction of contemplating the
-benefit he confers upon men who are not to be conciliated by good
-intentions, nor penetrated by favours bestowed. To give happiness to a
-friend is but a common place delight, but the pride of conferring
-pleasure upon an enemy is a noble passion, of which only exalted natures
-are susceptible. This is the passion of the true Reformer, and this is
-his reward.
-
- 1. Repub vol. ii. pp. 376-7.
-
-Of Carlile's errors it may be said that they were fostered, if not
-developed by the position in which he was placed. In the autumn of his
-career, he grew to think better of himself than of other men, but it was
-in a great measure because he had done more and dared more. He was
-impatient of a rival, because his rivals as political or anti-religious
-leaders wanted the proper qualification. Carlile had suffered so much,
-and so long, that he not unnaturally became convinced that suffering was
-the sole qualification of a public teacher. He confounded endurance with
-ability, and doubted the integrity or the courage of those who had dared
-nothing. He was tolerant of rivals in proportion as they had suffered
-any thing. His great imprisonments were so many wounds which he had
-received in the service of freedom, and he was proud of them as a
-Spartan hero of scars. He graduated, as _a patriot_, in dungeons, and he
-suspected the qualifications of every man who had not taken out a
-diploma from the Attorney-General. Carlile was one of those men who are
-tattooed by the enemy into whose hands they fall, and who are dyed by
-the influences against which they struggle. He was like a man who fights
-all day in the front rank; who is discoloured by the powder expended in
-the battle, and never after wears the hue of peace. Cobbett and
-O'Connell manifested the same peculiarity. They outlived their day. They
-were living memorials of themselves and of the times which _they_ had
-changed. He who judges any of these men impartially, will recognize
-their virtues as arising in the greatness of their natures and their
-faults, but as the accidents of their local positions. So posterity will
-judge Richard Carlile.
-
-
-
-
-ST. THOMAS'S HOSPITAL
-
-
-Examination of the body of Mr. Richard Carlile.
-
-The well-known Mr. Richard Carlile, bookseller, late of Fleet Street,
-bequeathed his body for the purpose of anatomical dissection. By
-permission of the governors of St. Thomas's Hospital, his remains were
-removed from his residence in Bouverie Street, Fleet Street, to that
-Institution; and, on Tuesday last, there was a numerous assemblage of
-the friends of the deceased and members of the medical profession, to
-witness his post mortem examination. The chest and abdomen only were
-opened, and the necessity that existed for the knowledge of anatomy, not
-only to the surgeon, but to the physician, was shown. Mr. Grainger
-delivered a short address on the occasion, thinking that the object of
-the deceased would be obtained by this proceeding in public, and by a
-statement of the motives which, had actuated him in giving his remains
-for dissection.
-
-The illustrious Bentham, actuated by the same benevolent feeling, had at
-the close of the last century, left his body for dissection, and that at
-a time when the prejudice against anatomical examinations was so great
-that bodies were procured with the utmost difficulty. That prejudice was
-perhaps less at the present time, but still sufficiently strong to
-interfere very materially with that due supply of subjects, so essential
-to the proper education of the medical student, and of such vital
-importance to the community at large. Such difficulties existed that no
-lecturer in this country had ever yet been able to complete a course of
-operative surgery, properly so called. Mr. Carlile deserved the
-approbation of all the friends of humanity for attempting to remove this
-prejudice by leaving his remains for anatomical purposes.
-
-Mr. Grainger vindicated medical men from the charge of irreligion, and
-contended that medical and anatomical studies, if _properly_ pursued,
-served to demonstrate the truth, not only of natural, but of revealed
-religion. _The Lancet,_ No. 1,016, p. 774, February 18, 1843.
-
- J. Watson, Printer, 3, Queen's Head Passage, Paternoster Row.
-
- ----
-
-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE AND CHARACTER OF RICHARD
-CARLILE ***
-
-
-
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<div class="document" id="life-and-character-of-richard-carlile">
<h1 class="document-title level-1 pfirst title">LIFE AND CHARACTER OF RICHARD CARLILE</h1>
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<p class="noindent pfirst" id="pg-produced-by"><span>Produced by David Widger.</span></p>
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-.. -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-
-
-.. meta::
- :PG.Id: 39123
- :PG.Title: Life and Character of Richard Carlile
- :PG.Released: 2012-03-10
- :PG.Rights: Public Domain
- :PG.Producer: David Widger
- :DC.Creator: George Jacob Holyoake
- :DC.Title: Life and Character of Richard Carlile
- :DC.Language: en
- :DC.Created: 1849
-
-
-
-.. role:: smallit
- :class: small italics
-
-.. role:: xlarge-bold
- :class: x-large bold
-
-.. role:: small-caps
- :class: small-caps
-
-
-
-
-
-=====================================
-LIFE AND CHARACTER OF RICHARD CARLILE
-=====================================
-
-.. pgheader::
-
-
-.. clearpage::
-
-.. class:: center
-
- | :xlarge-bold:`LIFE AND CHARACTER OF RICHARD CARLILE`
- |
- |
- | `By`
- |
- | :xlarge-bold:`George Jacob Holyoake`
- |
- |
- | :smallit:`London`
- |
- | :small-caps:`1849`
-
-
-.. clearpage::
-
-
-
-
-.. contents:: CONTENTS
- :depth: 1
- :backlinks: entry
-
-
-
-
-.. clearpage::
-
-
-
-
-PREFACE
-=======
-
-.. dropcap:: W When
-
-
-When I first entered London, one Saturday evening in 1842, I was not
-known personally to half a dozen persons in it. On reaching the office
-of the Oracle of Reason, I found an invitation (it was the first I
-received in the metropolis) from Richard Carlile to take tea with him on
-the next afternoon at the Hall of Science. There was no name known to
-me in London from whom an invitation could have come which I should
-have thought a greater honour. The conversation at table was directed to
-advising me as to my defence at my coming trial. He requested me to hear
-his evening lecture, which he devoted to the policy of sceptical defence
-which he thought most effectual. At the conclusion, he called upon
-me for my coincidence or dissent. I stated some objections which I
-entertained to his scientifico-religious views with diffidence but
-distinctness. The compliments which he paid me were the first words of
-praise which I remember to have trusted. Coming from a master in our
-Israel, they inspired me with a confidence new to me. I did not conceal
-my ambition to merit his approval. On my trial at Gloucester, he watched
-by my side fourteen hours, and handed me notes for my guidance. After
-my conviction, he brought me my first provisions with his own hand. He
-honoured me with a public letter during my imprisonment, and uttered
-generous words in my vindication, when those in whose ranks I had fought
-and fallen were silent. It was my destiny, on my liberation, to be able
-to pour my gratitude only over his grave. In his Life and Character,
-here attempted, I am proud to confess that 1 have written with affection
-for his memory, but I have also, written with impartiality—for he who
-encouraged me to maintain the truth at my own expense, would be quite
-willing, if need be, that I maintain it at his.
-
-G. J. H.
-
-
-
-LIFE AND CHARACTER OF RICHARD CARLILE
-=====================================
-
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER I. HIS PARENTAGE, APPRENTICESHIP, AND MARRIAGE
-======================================================
-
-.. dropcap:: I I have
-
-
-I have accomplished the liberty of the press in England, and oral
-discussion is now free. Nothing remains to be reformed but the ignorance
-and vices of the people, whose ignorance cannot be removed, while their
-bodies are starved and their church remains a theatre of idolatry and
-superstition.’ These were the proud and wise words uttered in the
-last periodical edited by Richard Carlile. They are the history of his
-life—the eulogy of his career—and the witnesses or his political and
-religious penetration.
-
-Of Carlile’s family, I can gather little beyond this, that his father
-had some reputation as an arithmetician. He published a collection of
-arithmetical, mathematical, and algebraical questions. His talent
-was individual though mediocre. He put his questions into verse and
-intermixed them with paradox. His career was various and brief: first
-a shoemaker, he aspired to be and became an exciseman. Like Burns, his
-habits suffered by his profession, and he often fell into intoxication.
-Of his own accord he retired from the Excise, became successively
-schoolmaster and soldier, and died at the age of 34, no person’s enemy
-but his own.(1) Carlile’s mother was now left a widow, with three
-infant children. For several years she was in a flourishing business,
-but it began to decay with the pressure of the times, about 1800, and
-she was afflicted alternately with sickness and poverty. Thence to the
-time of her death, she was assisted by Carlile, who was her only son.
-As a woman she was virtuous, as a mother kind and indulgent. She died
-at the age of 60. It is an evidence of Carlile’s honourable notions
-of duty, that out of thirty shillings per week, which he earned as a
-journeyman, he supported his wife and several children, and spared an
-offering for the support of his mother and sisters; and it deserves
-to be mentioned in his behalf, that the first dissatisfaction he
-experienced in married life arose from the opposition which he received
-in the discharge of these generous duties.
-
- 1. Carlile to Lord Brougham, Gauntlet, No. 8, p. 113. 1833.
-
-Richard Carlile was born in Ashburton, Devonshire, December 8, 1790. He
-was but four years of age at the death of his father. He early felt his
-father’s ambition. Before he was twelve years of age, he determined
-to be something in the world, and afterwards his unexpressed ideas were
-ever at work and accumulating. His dreams by night, and his thoughts
-by day, all worked one way, and vaguely contemplated some sort of
-purification of the church.(1) But how far he was from understanding the
-part he was to play is clear from the circumstance, that on the 5th of
-November, he used to gather faggots to burn ‘Old Tom Paine,’ instead
-of Guy Fawkes; and it was not till 1810, when he was twenty years old,
-that he first saw in the hands of an old man in Exeter, a copy of the
-Rights of Man.(2)
-
-Carlile received all the education that village free schools could
-afford. The educational routine where his own Gifford had before been
-a scholar, was confined to writing, arithmetic, and sufficient Latin to
-read a physician’s prescription. His first place seems to have been
-with Mr. Lee, chemist and druggist, in Exeter, but, being set to
-do things which he deemed derogatory to one who was able to read a
-physician’s prescription, he left the shop after four months’
-service. Being too much of a man to go to school again, he lived idly
-three months, amusing himself with colouring pictures to sell in his
-mother’s shop. His mother’s principal wholesale customers were
-the firm of Gifford and Co., which consisted of the brothers of
-that Attorney-General who had such extensive dealings with the son
-afterwards, in a different line. At the pressing wish of Carlile’s
-mother, he was apprenticed to a business which he never liked, that of
-tinplate working, and, like Bunyan, he became a tinman. He served seven
-years and three months to a Mr. Cummings, whom he has described as a
-hard master, as one who considered five or six hours for sleep all the
-recreation necessary for his youths. Carlile had no knowledge then of
-the ‘Rights of Man,’ but he betrayed some knowledge of the rights of
-apprentices,(3) and his impatience under injustice was then manifested,
-as his term of service was one series of conspiracies, rebellions,
-and battles. On being relieved from this worse than seven years’
-imprisonment, he resolved to follow that business no longer than he
-should be compelled. His ambition then was to get his living by his pen.
-
- 1. Gauntlet, No. 8, p. 113.
-
- 2. Repub. vol. 5, p. 134.
-
- 3. Republican, vol. ii. pp. 226-7.
-
-The office of an exciseman, which was offered him, he refused,
-remembering the fate of his father, and continued to follow his
-business, as journeyman tinman, in various parts of the country, and in
-London, where he first arrived in February, 1811. He returned to Exeter
-the same year. In 1813, we find him in London again, working at Benham
-and Sons, Blackfriars Road. A short sojourn in Gosport, in the previous
-year 1812, led to his acquaintance with the person who became, after two
-months’ courtship, Mrs. Carlile. He was at that time twenty-three, and
-she thirty years of age. Mrs. Carlile was not without accomplishments as
-to personal appearance; and temper excepted, was not without most of the
-qualifications necessary to a good tradesman’s wife.(1)
-
-Mrs. Carlile had talents for business, which were of the greatest value
-to her husband in the course of his career. He, bent on propagandism,
-never paid that attention to the details of trade which was necessary to
-keep a business together. But their difference in education, in age,
-in intellectual aspiration and their opponency in disposition, early
-converted their union into an intimacy tolerated rather than prized,
-and entire separation ensued twenty years after. Peculiar conduct on the
-part of relatives was alleged as promotive of these results, but
-this conduct I do not particularise as the explanation of the parties
-concerned is not before me, and cannot now be obtained. Of personal
-causes, temper seems to have been a chief one. Writing to Mr. Hunt, in
-1822, Carlile said, ‘Knowing Mrs. C. to possess a *warm* temper, as I
-do, I wonder,’ etc.(2) In 1819, the separation of Mr. and Mrs. Carlile
-was arranged to take place, so soon as he had the means of making a
-sufficient settlement for her comfort: it was not, however, till 1832,
-when the annuity of £50, bequeathed him by Mr. Morrison, of Chelsea,
-cleared itself of legacy duty, that he was able to provide for her.
-Then it was that they parted, she taking all the household furniture and
-£100 worth of books.
-
- 1. A Scourge, p. 18. 1834.
-
- 2. Rep. vol. vi. p. 15.
-
-His elder sister remained a violent Methodist, and was never reconciled
-to his anti-religious labours. Mrs. Carlile, as well as his younger
-sister, who both incurred imprisonment on his account, did it rather
-from natural resentment at the injustice practised for his destruction,
-than from any sympathy with his opinions. But, in this respect, they
-behaved with a bravery worthy of their name; they resolutely refused
-to compromise—the sister the brother, or the wife the husband, at
-all risks to themselves. None of his family, save a first cousin,
-countenanced his proceeding; he stood alone on his own hearth, as he
-stood often alone in the world.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER II. THE PUBLISHER AND THE PRISONER
-==========================================
-
-.. dropcap:: I It
-
-
-It was in 1816, while employed as a tinplate worker, by the firm of
-Matthews and Masterman, of Union Court, Holbom Hill, that he first
-essayed public life. He was then twenty-six years of age. Before this
-time he had read no work of Paine’s; but the distress of that year
-excited him to inquiry. Knowledge speedily prompted nim to action. He
-wrote scraps for the newspapers, (principally the *Independent Whig* and
-the *Newt*) which scraps were all condemned: ‘A half-employed Mechanic
-is too violent;’ this was the notice in answer to correspondents. He
-annoyed Mr. Cobbett by a foolish acrostic, on the name of Hunt. He wrote
-to Hunt himself, and paraded one night, two hours in front of his hotel,
-in Covent Garden, before he could muster courage sufficient to ask the
-waiter to take his effusion up. At this time he burned to see himself in
-print; although, as he afterwards confessed, he was not able to write a
-single sentence fit to meet the public eye.(2)
-
- 1. Repub. vol. xi. p. 101.
-
- 2. Repub. vol. xii. p. 2.
-
-In 1817 *The Black Dwarf* made its appearance, which was much more to
-Carlile’s taste than *Cobbett’s Register*, but as the Habeas Corpus
-Act was suspended, and Sidmouth had sent forth his Circular, there was
-a damp among the newsvendors, and few would sell. This excited Carlile
-with a desire to become a bookseller. The story of Lackington beginning
-with a stall encouraged him. He resolved to set a good example in the
-trade of political pamphlets. Finding the sale of the *Black Dwarf* very
-low, he borrowed £1 from his employer, and invested it in one hundred
-*Dwarfs*, and on the 9th of March, 1817, he sallied forth from the
-manufactory, with his stock in his handkerchief, to commence the trade
-of bookselling. He traversed the metropolis in every direction to get
-newsvendors to sell the *Dwarf*, and called every day to see how they
-sold. He inquired also after *Cobbett’s Register*, and Sherwin’s
-*Republican*, but finding that they did not want pushing, he took none
-of those round. Indeed, he refused to avail himself of the profit he
-could have made by taking *Cobbett’s Register* because it did not
-go far enough.(1) He carried the *Dwarf* round several weeks, walking
-thirty miles a day, for a profit of fifteen and eighteen pence. At
-length an information was lodged against the publisher, and Mr. Steill
-was arrested. Carlile at once offered to take his place.
-
- 1. Repub, vol. xi. p. 102.
-
-Mr. Wooler, however, arranged the matter, and Carlile’s offer was
-declined Mr. Sherwin, then a young man, (formerly keeper of South-well
-Bridewell, Nottinghamshire,) editing the *Republican*, perceived
-Carlile’s value, and offered him the publishing of his paper, which he
-accepted. Carlile guaranteed Mr. Sherwin against arrest, which left him
-free to be bold without danger. The shop on which he now entered was
-183, Fleet Street, which Mr. Cobbett afterwards occupied. Carlile’s
-first ideas of politics were, that neither writers, printers, nor
-publishers were bold enough; and he now commenced to set the example he
-thought wanted. ‘I did not then see,’ he said, in the decline of
-his life, ‘what my experience has since taught me that the greatest
-despotism ruling the press is the popular ignorance. I made the
-calculation, which has been an error embittering my whole public life,
-that the entire people would assist and applaud an attempt,
-however humble, to set the press free. I have found myself like our
-parliamentary reformers idolizing a virtue of the imagination not yet
-brought into existence. I correctly made the calculation of having to
-pass through five or six years’ imprisonment, to appease the angered
-authorities of having defied their will; but I had not calculated that,
-after having conquered the authorities, by self-sacrifice, the greater
-difficulty would remain, of having to conquer the ignorance and vice of
-the people, by still more painful sacrifices.’
-
-His first step was a resistance to the attempt of the poet laureat,
-Southey, to suppress the sale of his early Poem, ‘Wat Tyler.’ He
-sold twenty-five thousand of that poem in 1817.
-
-The second was a prosecution, defence, and imperfect verdict gained
-against Thomas Jonathan Wooller.
-
-The third was the reprint of the political works of Thomas Paine, by
-himself and Mr. Sherwin.
-
-The fourth was the trials and acquittals of William Hone, which Carlile
-forced on, by reprinting those suppressed political squibs called ‘The
-Parodies on the Book of Common Prayer.’
-
-The Parodies cost him eighteen weeks’ imprisonment in the King’s
-Bench Prison, from which he was liberated with out trial, on the
-acquittals of William Hone.
-
-By the end of the year 1818 he had published the Theological Works of
-Thomas Paine. The prosecutions instituted induced him to go on printing
-other similar works, such as the ‘Doubts of Infidels,’ ‘Watson
-Refuted,’ ‘Palmer’s Principles of Nature,’ ‘The God of the
-Jews,’ &c. &c. By the month of October, 1819, he had at least six
-indictments pending against him. Two of the indictments were tried from
-the 12th to the 16th of October, and verdicts obtained against him. He
-was committed to the King’s Bench Prison, and on the 16th of November
-sentenced to fifteen hundred pounds fine, and three years imprisonment
-in Dorchester Goal. In the middle of the night he was handcuffed, and
-driven off between two armed officers to Dorchester, a distance of one
-hundred and twenty miles.
-
-The first thing he did, at the close of his trial, was to print the
-‘Age of Reason,’ in twopenny sheets, as part of the report of the
-trial, having taken care to read the whole in defence. Of these he sold
-more in a month than of the volumes in a-year. For this publication, a
-prosecution was instituted against Mrs. Carlile, but was dropped on her
-declining the sale. She was not however long unmolested.
-
-Under pretence of seizing for Mr. Carlile’s fines, the sheriff, with
-a writ of *levari facias*, from the Court of King’s Bench, took
-possession of his house, furniture, stock in trade, and closed the shop.
-It was thus held, from the 16th of November to the 24th of December.
-Rent became due and it was then emptied.
-
-Under Mr. C.’s desire Mrs. Carlile renewed a business, in January
-1820, with what could be scraped together from the unseized wreck of
-their property. In February she was arrested; but the first indictment
-failed through a flaw in the verdict. She was immediately proceeded
-against by the Attorney-General, and became her husband’s
-fellow-prisoner in Dorchester Gaol in February 1821, after having done
-good service in the shop for a-year.
-
-Carlile’s sister Mary Ann succeeded Mrs. Carlile in the management of
-the business, but was also immediately prosecuted. The first indictment
-failed in this case, by the honesty of one of the jurymen. In the second
-the judge (Best) suppressed the defence. By the month of November, 1821,
-his sister was also a prisoner in Dorchester Gaol, and under a fine of
-five hundred pounds.
-
-In the course of the year, 1821, a new association had been formed,
-called the “Constitutional Association.” It asked for subscription
-to pay the expenses of prosecuting the assistants of his business. Six
-thousand pounds were subscribed, and the Duke of Wellington saw fit
-to put his name with his money, at the head of the list. Carlile’s
-sister’s trial was the first check the Association received. The
-unsuccessful prosecution of Thomas Dolby, the second. Then came a troop
-of assistants to the encounter: to wit, Susanna Wright, George Beer,
-John Barkley, Humphrey Boyle, Joseph Rhodes, William Holmes, and John
-Jones. All these, save Jones, sustained terms of imprisonment, from
-six months to two years; but they succeeded in breaking down the
-“Constitutional Association.”
-
-Then came James Watson and William Tunbridge, both meeting imprisonment.
-
-In the month of February, 1822, Mrs. Wright being then in possession of
-the house, the very week that Mr. Peel had taken possession of the Home
-Office, a second seizure was made of the house and stock of 55, Fleet
-Street, and the house finally wrested from Carlile. This was done on the
-pretence of satisfying the fines; but neither from this nor the former
-seizure was a farthing allowed in the abatement of the fines, and
-Carlile was detained in Dorchester Gaol to the end of the sixth year,
-three years’ imprisonment having been taken in lieu of the fines.
-
-Joseph Trust was the only person prosecuted in 1823, and the Lord Chief
-Justice Abbott intimated that enough had been done; but in May, 1824,
-there came a new rage for prosecutions from the government, when Charles
-Sanderson, Thomas Jefferies, William Haley, William Campion, Richard
-Hassell. Michael O’Connor, William Cochrane, John Clarke, John
-Christopher, and Thomas Riley Perry, were severally arrested, and the
-last nine imprisoned, through various periods, from six months to three
-years.
-
-Two years Mrs. Carlile was kept in Dorchester Gaol: so was his sister,
-a-year having been taken for her £500 fine. After this it was reported,
-that the Cabinet, had, in council acknowledged Carlile invincible in the
-course of moral resistance which he had taken, and no more persons
-were arrested from his shop, while no one of his publications had been
-suppressed.
-
-His imprisonment in Dorchester Gaol was in some respects, severe. The
-first magisterial order was that he should be led into the open air only
-as a caged animal, to be exhibited to the gaze of the passing curious,
-half an hour each day, or an hour every other day, or as the gaoler
-might be pleased. This, and similar orders caused him to pass two years
-and a-half in his chamber, without going into the open air.
-
-When he came to trial in 1819, he had no clear understanding of the
-subject of his defence, it was compiled from the pleadings of others
-for toleration and free discussion. In this mental state he entered
-Dorchester Gaol. He had taken the impression from the hint of an
-aged political friend, that all the evils of mankind rooted in the
-superstition and the consequent priestcraft practised upon them, that
-he resolved to devote the solitude of his imprisonment to the study
-of religious mysteries, and fearlessly and faithfully to make the
-revelation for the common good of man. His defence, on his first three
-days’ trial, alarmed the Emperor Alexander of Russia, who issued an
-Ukase, forbidding any printed report of it from being brought into
-his territory. His first defence was much interrupted; his second was
-entirely suppressed.
-
-When he was liberated from Dorchester Gaol, in 1826, the freedom of
-the press was complete, as far as government or aristocratical societies
-were concerned. His shopmen were detained to complete their sentences
-of three years’ imprisonment, not much to the political merit of Sir
-Robert Peel, who gave up not a day in either case, save that of a bad
-young man, who had unprincipledly intruded himself among them. To honest
-opposition he yielded nothing, but was, in every sense of the character,
-an inveterate persecutor.
-
-Though the freedom of the press was accomplished in 1829, something
-more remained to be accomplished, which was the freedom of public oral
-discussion; and on this object Carlile set his thoughts.
-
-When Mr. Taylor was prosecuted and imprisoned, in 1828, Carlile was
-called into action in his new character. He immediately converted a
-large room in his house, 62, Fleet Street, into a Sunday School of
-Free Discussion, and introduced a public debate on all useful political
-subjects on the Sabbath Day. This had not been done before by any one
-anywhere. By a subscription he got Mr. Taylor well supported in prison,
-and on his liberation accompanied him to Cambridge, as an infidel
-Missionary, to challenge the University to public discussion. They
-passed from Cambridge to Liverpool, presenting a printed circular of
-public challenge to every priest on the road. One only accepted it,
-the Rev. David Thom, of Liverpool, who quailed at the very onset, and
-withdrew. This was done in 1829.
-
-In 1830 he sought a larger sphere of action for public meetings than
-his own dwelling-house, and engaged a series of buildings and theatres
-called the Rotunda, in Blackfriars Road. Soon after he gained possession
-of this building, the second French Revolution broke out, which gave a
-new impetus to political feeling in London. Giving to every man liberty
-of speech in his theatres, the Rotunda was attended bv all the public
-men of note out of parliament; and the public meetings there became so
-frequent and so large, that the government took alarm, and the prophecy
-of the day was, that the Rotunda would cause a Revolution in England.
-While the Tories remained in office, they did not molest him, but the
-Whigs no sooner took office, than they very foully made war on him, and
-caused him thirty-two months imprisonment in the Compter of the City of
-London.
-
-The Rev. Robert Taylor was also prosecuted under the Whig
-Administration, and filled out two years in Horse-monger Lane Gaol, for
-his preaching in the Rotunda.
-
-In 1834 and 1835, Carlile passed ten weeks in the same Compter,
-for resistance to the payment of Church Rates; making his total of
-imprisonment nine years and four months.
-
-These church-rates were assessed upon his house, 62, Fleet Street. When
-his goods were seized, he retaliated by taking out the two front windows
-and placing therein two effigies—one of a bishop, and the other of
-a distraining officer. After a time, he added a devil, who was linked
-arm-in-arm with his Grace. Such crowds were attracted, that public
-business was impeded. Eventually, Mr. Carole was indicted for a
-nuisance. The court was less virulent than before: it was externally
-courteous. He defended himself in a speech of coherency and good sense,
-but was found guilty, and ultimately sentenced to pay a fine of 40s. to
-the King, and give sureties in £200 (himself in £100, and two others
-in £50 each), for good behaviour for three years. The spirit in which
-he met this award was characteristic of the veteran martyr.
-
-‘They have sentenced me’ said he, ‘to three years’ imprisonment.
-So much for their leniency! It is a mockery to say that I may, if I
-please, purchase my liberty. I cannot do it. I shall have more liberty
-in prison than in walking the streets at the discretion of one set of
-men, and at the hazard of £100 penalty to two others. It is a case in
-which I will not interfere to abate one hour of the imprisonment. When
-the gates are open to me I will walk out, but I will not pay or do
-anything to procure release.’(1) And he wrote to Mr. Cope, keeper of
-Newgate, to desire that he would get him removed to the Compter, and he
-quietly announced next week that he had been removed to his old room.’
-
- 1. *A Scourge*, No. 12, pp. 89, 90.
-
-Before sentence he made a deposition in court. As this was his last
-imprisonment, I quote the concluding words of this deposition. They show
-the temper in which the dying lion shook his mane.
-
-‘And deponent further saith, that in case the court should think a
-penalty necessary, this deponent has no other property from which he can
-pay a fine than printed books; and from the political business in which
-this deponent is involved, he cannot reasonably ask any other person to
-become his sureties, that his future proceedings may not be construed
-into political offence; not but that this deponent is anxious to live
-in peace and amity with all men, *but that there do exist many political
-and moral evils which this deponent will, through life, labour to
-abate.’*
-
-This was the tone of his entire career. When in 1819, a law was proposed
-by Castlereagh, to inflict banishment upon him for a second offence, he
-wrote:—‘In some cases, this power of banishment might amount to a
-deprivation of life; but for my own part, I think nothing of it, and
-hope to show, that it will not have the least tendency to change my
-course.’(2) ‘Indictments and warrants have never affected
-me—they have been the life of my business.’ He was present at the
-‘Manchester massacre,’ and escaped narrowly falling a victim, first
-to the soldiers, and afterwards to the police, who let him pass, not
-knowing his name. The danger he ran on all hands was imminent. On the
-morning when the government chose to reveal the Thistlewood plot of
-their own concoction, they arranged that their agents of the vice
-society should arrest Mrs. Carlile,(3) to associate, as far as possible,
-his family in that proceeding. Not only were parties inculpated without
-fault, but tried without defence. The humble advocate was bullied
-into the abandonment of his political client, and the powerful one was
-bribed. Mr. Cooper was frowned into silence and threatened. Mr. Cross
-obtained a silk gown for his *defence* of Brandreth and Mr. Justice Best
-won the same distinction by his *defence* of Despard. So virulent were
-the rulers of that day that Peel refused to liberate Mrs. Carlile after
-thirteen months detention, though in daily expectation of accouchment
-which might occur at an hour when assistance could not be had.(4) In
-addressing Mrs. Gaunt, of Manchester, Mrs. Carlile observed in reference
-to the position in which she was placed, ‘My spirits and strength are
-good, or I should have everything to dread in childbirth in such a place
-as this [Dorchester Gaol], where humanity is a marketable commodity, and
-where, what is still worse, I am one of those excluded from the market
-at any price.(5)
-
- 1. A Scourge, No. 12, p. 90.
-
- 2. Republican, vol. ii. p. 5. Idem. p. 60.
-
- 3. Republican, vol. ii. p 254.
-
- 4. Republican, vol. v. p. 301.
-
- 5. Republican, vol. v. p. 608.
-
-Of the risks Carlile ran from espionage, he has detailed many instances.
-I quote one passage in his own words. He is speaking of Paine:—‘I
-revere,’ says he, ‘the name of Thomas Paine; the image of his
-honest countenance is constantly before me. I have him in bust [now in
-possession of Mr. Watson], in whole length figure; for which I may
-thank the late government of Liverpool, Castlereagh, and Sidmouth, who
-appointed Edwards the spy to this task, he, who when he failed to get
-me hanged, caused the death of Thistlewood, and others. Edwards occupied
-*six months* of 1819, in excuse of making this statute to keep at my
-heels. He followed me closely until I was in Dorchester Gaol. There I
-escaped him; and then, immediately, he was put on other game with which
-he succeeded. The very men that he hanged, he brought about me in the
-King’s Bench Prison, offering me their lives, if I would use them for
-any purpose. I had then, a clear sighted purpose of my own, which these
-men did not understand. At that age I should have had no objection to
-a little physical force fighting; but I was sober enough to see
-its impracticability, and thus I frustrated the acquaintance, which
-Liverpool, Castlereagh, Sidmouth, and their spy Edwards, wished to bring
-me into with Jack Ketch. I found Edwards a tradesman in Fleet Street, as
-an artist, before I got there, and I so became his next door neighbour.
-He succeeded, in occupation, the shop which William Hone had, and where
-he published his famous Parodies. When I came to No. 55, in January,
-1819, Edwards had been two years at No. 56, so I had little ground to
-suspect his spyship.
-
-I had known him as a customer through that time. He pleaded that his
-father had been an old politician: nor was my suspicion excited by his
-having a brother in the Hatton Garden Police. When I entered upon No.
-55, he pleaded what a great convenience it would be to him in business,
-if I would allow him to lodge in my house, as he had a shop next
-door without a dwelling-house. I had almost yielded; but the shrewd
-suspicions of Mrs. Carlile, re-acting upon his villainous countenance,
-put it aside. He was then placed in an upper story lodging of the
-opposite house, (where was born my statue of Paine) in the under part
-of which was placed a man of the name of John Carlisle, a bookseller, to
-oppose me, in conflict with another class of publications. This was
-the work of the government, superintended by their agent, John Reeve.
-Edwards did not scruple to talk to me about meeting the Archbishop of
-Canterbury in Windsor Castle; but left me to infer, that it was about
-his art as a modeller, not as a spy. I can now see, that he was placed
-in Hone’s old shop, to keep out a political publisher; and I have
-since divined a deep history of the spy system of that time, which I
-never feared, because I had nothing morally to fear in what I purposed
-to do. One, I have marked, as an old acquaintance, a man connected with
-the Stamp Office, very regularly at my lectures for years. From, or in
-the house of John Carlisle, by Edwards, was concocted the plot called
-the Cato Street Conspiracy. In beginning, middle, and end, that was
-wholly the work of Lords Castlereagh and Sidmouth, with Edwards as an
-agent. After the finish of that political tragedy, Edwards was provided
-for in one of the colonies, it has been said, the Cape of Good Hope.
-John Carlisle dwindled into great poverty in Fleet Street, was made
-permanent constable, and at last very strangely got his house burned
-down, just after I came triumphantly from six years’ imprisonment
-in Dorchester Gaol, and established myself *ruinously* in splendid No.
-62.’(1)
-
-Yet it was in such times and amid such dangers that Carlile formed the
-resolution, and adhered to it to the day of his death, never to cease
-any publication so long as any prosecution or intimidation menaced it.
-
-Placing himself always where danger was to be braved, his position was
-from the first prominent, and attracted to him many leading political
-characters, who saw in him a vicarious sacrifice for that freedom they
-were willing to enjoy, if it could be done without paying so troublesome
-a price as the ministers of that day charged for it. But, as the
-danger grew imminent, they began to pull him back and condemn his open
-conduct.(2) Cobbett at first said, ‘You have done your duty bravely,
-Mr. Carlile; if every one had done like you, it would have been all very
-well.’(3) But afterwards he censured him without measure. Wooler, whom
-Carlile offered to save, said that the publication of Paine’s works
-would put a stop to all the political writings of the day. But whatever
-ground there appeared for these fears, a wise publicist should have
-given Carlile all possible support, since he *ought to have* triumphed
-in his course. Major Cartwright deprecated the republication of
-Paine’s works as mischievous, to flying in the face of Juries;
-that when a jury had once declared these works to be libels, the very
-*errors* of that jury ought to be respected. Yet against this dictum
-of the influential veteran, Reformer, Carlile contended. He encountered
-greater obstacles among such friends than among his enemies. It requires
-more courage to fight against friends than against foes. Carlile
-illustrated the remark of Mr. Miall, that ‘martyrdom in the past
-tense is madness in the present.’ Then the Reformers Degan to call
-themselves ‘Christian Reformers,’ ‘Religious Reformers,’ and by
-other safe conventional names to distinguish themselves from ‘Carlile
-and his party.’(4) No man should lightly compromise his party by a
-dangerous step. Carlile is not amenable to blame on this account. He
-took a necessary step for general progress, and his triumph justified
-his penetration. A weaker man than Carlile would not have been justified
-in the course which he took, as a weaker man would have failed. But
-Carlile was a Buonarotti.
-
- 1. Christian Warrior, pp. 27-28.
-
- 2. Repub. vol. ii. p. 257.
-
- 3. Repub. v. pp 283-4
-
- 4. Christian Warrior, p. 10
-
-Such was the difficulty of obtaining the forbidden books, in which he
-set the example of dealing, that twelve guineas were offered for twelve
-copies of the Age of Reason,(1) and £5 for five suppressed twopenny
-Tracts.(2) In order to destroy a trade which they could not intimidate,
-the Government arrested his shopmen with a rapidity intended to exhaust
-them. To defeat this intention, books were sold through an aperture;
-so that the buyer was unable to identify the seller.(3) Afterwards
-they were sold by clockwork.(4) On a dial was written the name of every
-publication for sale. The purchaser entered, and turned the hand of the
-dial to the book he wanted, which, on depositing his money, dropped
-down before him without the necessity of any one speaking. The Vice and
-Constitutional Associations we both defied and defeated; notwithstanding
-that the honoured name of Wilberforce was found on the list of the
-members of one of the societies, and that of the Duke of Wellington
-headed the other. The circulation of Carlile’s books were quadrupled,
-and a cheering crowd around his shop windows perpetually testified their
-approval of his courage, and at public dinners in the provinces, the
-health was drank of ‘Carlile’s invisible shopman.’ Martyrdom,
-he said, was contagious, and could he keep it up, he should glory in
-a perpetual sessions at the Old Bailey. The result of his course he
-expresses with honourable exultation. ‘In this country the Age of
-Reason was spellbound for twenty years, with the exception of a
-few copies put forth by Daniel Isaac Eaton. From December, 1818, to
-December, 1822, I had sent into circulation near 20,000 copies. Let
-corruption rub out that if she can, as Mr. Cobbett said his 40,000
-Registers.’ By the month of June, 1824, in the fifth year of his
-imprisonment, his calculation was verified; the press was freed, and the
-Government, who had beaten Napoleon in a physical conflict, was beaten
-by Carlile in a moral struggle—so impotent is power to overcome the
-right, when brave men champion the right.
-
- 1. Repub. vol. ii. p. 183.
-
- 2. Christian Warrior, p. 29.
-
- 3. Repub. vol. v. p. 56.
-
- 4. Repub. vol. v. p. 264.
-
-Carlile was liberally supported, and found powerful friends. The third
-and fourth years of his imprisonment produced subscriptions to the
-amount of £500 per year, and for a long period his profits over the
-counter were £50 per week. An idea of his occasional business may be
-formed from the circumstance that once when a trial was pending, Mrs.
-Carlile took £600 in the shop in one week. When he came from Dorchester
-Gaol one friend lent him £1,000 to extend his business. But he got out
-of money as fast as it came, and his ambition leading him to give the
-greatest possible effect to his advocacy, he contracted liabilities at
-62, Fleet Street, which embarrassed him. Indeed, continually torn
-from his home by government prosecutions, he had ill opportunities of
-maintaining business habits. The latter part of his life was passed in
-the vicissitudes and anxieties of fallen fortunes.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER III. THE EDITOR AND THE ATHEIST
-=======================================
-
-.. dropcap:: D During
-
-
-During Carlile’s imprisonment in Dorchester Gaol, he edited the
-*Republican*, a Weekly Journal, which he conducted through fourteen
-volumes. Its circulation reached at one time as high as 15,000. He saw
-that a work had to be done, and he prepared to do it; if he could not
-do it so well as he could wish, he resolved to do it as well as he was
-able. He offered his ardour in the public cause as an apology for the
-want of a grammatical education. Drawn into authorship by the force of
-events, he hardly knew in what grammatical accuracy consisted, till he
-felt his own deficiency through the criticisms of his correspondents,
-some of whom did not hesitate to tell him, that he was unfit for a
-public writer. This state of things continued till the fourth volume of
-the *Republican*, where he wisely resolved to put his prison hours to
-educational uses.(1) But his editorial duties were his best education,
-and this he admitted; ‘I give,’ said he, in 1825, ‘a receipt to
-the criticism of my friends upon my writings for the better part of the
-knowledge that I now possess.’(2) Some of Carlile’s correspondents
-were men from whom it was an honour to receive direction. From Francis
-Place he gleaned all his ideas of Political Economy, and what Carlile
-called the ‘all-surpassing question of the regulation of the numbers
-of the people.’ It was from Jeremy Bentham, through Mr. Place, that he
-was instructed not to attempt the building of any system of his own, but
-to go on pulling down existing errors, every item of success in which,
-was in fact, so much good building.(3) In Carlile’s last days he spoke
-of Francis Place as ‘his old tutor who had a hard task to beat all the
-superstition out of him.’
-
- 1. See Repub. vol. iv. p. 191.
-
- 2. Lion, vol. i. p. 373.
-
- 4. Christian Warrior, p. 13.
-
-While others were calling Carlile ‘Atheist and Infidel,’ Place was
-calling him ‘the most, obstinately superstitious fellow alive;’
-but always paid him the compliment of admitting that he was worth the
-trouble, and that if he could be set right he would keep right.(1)
-
-When Carlile’s days of thinking began, he began with himself. He knew
-himself well, and this was the source of his strength. Like Cobbett he
-could write always well of himself. His first study was to form a mind
-of his own on the basis of the best known principles.(2) Carlile began
-to write a man. Nature made him for an agitator. He had an iron will
-and limitless self-reliance. I have been told by one who advised him
-frequently, that no man could control him. His first papers in the
-*Republican*, are thoughtful, manly, self-possessed, nervous, and
-resolute. Sherwin preceded Carlile in the publication of a work, called
-the *Republican*, but, after the fourth number, it was changed into
-‘*Sherwin’s Weekly Political Register*,’ on the ground that people
-were afraid of its name. But Carlile resumed its title, and selected
-those articles only which had the real names and addresses of the author
-appended. He called upon the friends of his opinions to avow themselves,
-and declared himself ambitious of incurring martyrdom, if martyrdom was
-necessary to the cause of liberty.(3)
-
-Carlile’s political and religious prototype was Paine. Carlile always
-wrote with manifest purpose, and seems to have emulated the plain vigour
-of Cobbett and the invective of Junius.
-
-Carlile’s habits were marked by great abstemiousnesss. Seldom taking
-animal food,(4) he refused wine(5) when offered a dozen at Dorchester
-Gaol, preferring good milk. He was morally as well as physically
-particular. In the rules of the Deistical Society, he provided that only
-persons of good character should be eligible.(6) ‘It is important to
-you, Republicans,’ wrote he, from Dorchester Gaol, ‘that however
-humble the advocates of your principles may be, they should exhibit a
-clear moral character to the world.’(7) He never sold a copy of any
-work which he would hesitate to read to his children.(8) He expressed a
-hope, when fairs were popular, that fairs would be put down all over
-the country. He was one of the first thus to oppose what the pious then
-approved.
-
- 1. Christian Warrior, p. 26.
-
- 2. Gauntlet, No. 8, p. 113.
-
- 3. Repub. No. 1, vol. i.
-
- 4. Repub. vol. ii. p. 148.
-
- 5. Repub. vol. ii. p. 234.
-
- 6. Repub. vol. v. ft. 31.
-
- 7. Repub. vol. vi. p. 3.
-
- 8. Repub. vol. vii. p. 36.
-
-There was no intolerance in Carlile’s habits. ‘I have no wish,’
-these were his words, ‘to force my opinions on any man—if he wishes
-to have them, he must either buy them or challenge me to defend them;
-and, in this last instance, it must be some one whom I consider worth
-contending with, before I would open my mouth.’(1) He was of a
-retiring turn, and utterly incapable of obtruding himself, where there
-was the possibility of his not being desired. It was a sense of duty
-alone that made him brave, his moral courage was great, but it was the
-courage of conviction. Carlile was an illustration of Bulwer’s
-remark, that courage in one thing, is not to be mistaken for courage
-in everything. He who opposed himself without fear to the spies of
-Sidmouth, and the edicts of Castlereagh, who singly withstood public
-opinion on the questions of Marriage and Religion, when that opinion
-knew no reason and no mercy, he felt, through his whole life, a want
-of fair confidence in himself, when addressing a public audience.
-Large numbers, called together by his name, produced in him a sense
-of disturbing responsibility and embarrassment.(2) When liberated
-from imprisonment in Dorchester Gaol—an ill discipline certainly for
-oratory—he trembled at committing his reputation to the lapses of an
-inexperienced tongue. His friends thought he would never make a speaker,
-but his perseverance prevailed. Still his efforts were irregular;
-sometimes he was as eloquent as the best, at others timidly hesitating.
-Probably his stolid nature wanted passion to excite it—some
-nature’s, like deep waters, are only to put in motion by a storm. A
-paralytic stroke, in March 1841, affected the muscles of the mouth and
-tongue, and diminished his acquired power.
-
-Hume has said that Christian sects manifest intolerance, which increases
-in intensity the nearer their valuing creeds coincide. This has been
-true of some classes of infidels, but Carlile wisely regarded with
-favour the approximation of sects to reason. He encouraged the Rev.
-Robert Taylor’s Deistical friends, because, like the Unitarians,
-they would break up some part of the superstition of other sects. His
-impression was that, ‘Though not themselves free from superstition,
-they would lessen the sum total among all the sects, and, in so doing,
-do a certain amount of good.’(3)
-
- 1. Repub. vol. iv. p. 33.
-
- 2. Gauntlet, No. 30 p. 385.
-
- 3. Repub. vol. xvi. p. 130.
-
-Carlile’s writings abound in instances of great political penetration:
-thus he placed on the title page of the second volume of the
-*Republican* these words—‘Liberty is the property of man: a Republic
-only can protect it.’ The same volume contained his qualification ot
-equality. ‘Equality,’ says he, ‘means not an equality of riches,
-but of rights merely.’(1) Yet the contrary is asserted to this
-hour. ‘Timidity,’ wrote he in 1828, ‘maybe seen sitting on the
-countenance of almost every Politician. He speaks and speculates with a
-trembling which generates a prejudice in others. As it is the slave who
-makes the tyrant, so it is timidity in the Politician which creates
-the prejudice of the persecutor.’(2) In words to this effect, he
-pourtrayed that conventional caution of the newspaper press, which is to
-this hour the bane of popular progress. He had a distincter conception
-of the part to be played by education in public reform, than any
-other agitator of his rank at that time. ‘I have before advised your
-majesty,’ said he, in dedicating vol. 12 of the *Republican* to George
-IV., ‘to patronise Mechanics’ Institutions, and you will become a
-greater monarch than Buonaparte. Kings must come to this, and he will be
-the wisest who does it first and voluntarily.’ Republicanism was not
-with Carlile, as with so many—politics in rags; he never divested
-it of efficiency and dignity. To one who said that his exacting £100
-shares for his Book Company was aristocratic, he answered, ‘Call it
-what you please, that is republican which is done well.’(3) Carlile
-took a view of the rationale and initiation of revolution in England
-as manly as it was sagacious. ‘In the beginning of my political
-career,’ he writes, ‘I had those common notions which the enthusiasm
-of youth and inexperience produces, that all reforms must be the work of
-physical force. The heat of my imagination shewed me everything about to
-be done at once. I am now enthusiastic, but it is in *working* where I
-can work *practically* rather than theoretically; and though I would be
-the last to oppose a well-applied physical force, in the bringing about
-reforms or revolutions, I would be the last in advising others to rush
-into useless dangers that *I would shun, or where I would not lead*. I
-have long formed the idea that an insurrection against grievances in this
-country must, to be successful, be spontaneous and not plotted, and that
-all political conspiracies may be local and even individual evils.
-I challenge the omniscience of the Home Office to say whether I ever
-countenanced anything of the kind in word or deed. I will do nothing in
-a political point of view which cannot be done openly.’(4) There is
-a strong vein of political wisdom in all this, not yet appreciated by
-popular politicians, and this has the merit of having been written at
-a time, when (as indeed now) the maxim of English popular progressive
-politics is not to find how much can be done *within the law*, but how
-much can be done *without it* and *against it*: a policy which dooms
-Democracy to ceaseless antagonisms in the attainment of its claims, and
-will, if persisted in, fetter it with impotence when the victory is won.
-
- 1. Repub. vol. xiv. p. 105.
-
- 2. Lion, vol. i. p. 3.
-
- 3. Repub. vol. xii. p. 3.
-
- 4. Repub. vol. xiv. pp. 5, 6.
-
-The progress of Carlile’s convictions respecting religion is evident
-and honourable to his thoughtfulness. He was twenty-seven years old
-before he conceived any error in the article religion. His attention was
-first drawn to the fact by finding that the suppressed writings of his
-day chiefly related to religion. When the Attorney General first called
-him profane, for publishing Hone’s Parodies, he was a very different
-man. Through several volumes of the *Republican* he was a Deist only.
-But reflection led him onwards step by step. A first indication is
-in these words—‘Paine, in his lifetime, appears to have been the
-advocate of a Deistical church, but such an attempt shall ever find
-my reprobation, as unnecessary and mischievous.’(1) The reason he
-assigned was, that science alone could lead to true devotion, and
-lectures on science were, therefore, the proper worship. In his first
-controversy with Cobbett, he avowed himself, as Mr. Owen always has,
-a believer in a great controlling power of Nature. But at this point,
-Carlile’s belief had grown practical in its negation, as he wrote,
-‘I advocate the abolition of all religions, without setting up
-anything new of the kind.’(2) By this time he had become a confirmed
-materialist, and soon after, defined mind as a portion of the
-organization of the human body, acted upon by the atmosphere and the
-body jointly, and dependent upon a peculiarity in the organization, in
-the same manner as voice and life itself.(3) The definitions he gave, in
-1822, of Religion and Morality were essentially the same as those since
-rendered more elegantly by Emerson. Carlile defined Morality as a rule
-of conduct relating to man and man—Religion as a rule of conduct,
-relating not to man, but to something which he fancies to be his
-Maker.(4) Next he observed, ‘I may have said that the changes observed
-in phenomenon argue the existence of an active power in the universe,
-but I have again and again renounced the notion of that power being
-intelligent or designing.(5) ‘It is not till since my imprisonment
-that I have avowed myself Atheist.’(6)
-
- 1. Repub. vol. iv. p. 220.
-
- 2. Repub. vol. v. p. 201.
-
- 3. Repub. vol. vi.
-
- 4. Repub. vol. vi. p. 249.
-
- 5. Repub. vol. vii. p. 26.
-
- 6. Repub. vol. vii. p. 397.
-
-He reached the climax of his Atheism on the title page to his tenth
-volume of the *Republican*, where he declared ‘There is no such a
-God in existence as any man has preached; nor any kind of God and this
-declaration was so far carried out in detail, as to exclude from the
-*Republican* *God, nature, mind, soul*, and *spirit*, as words without
-proto types.(1)
-
-The two extremes of Carlile’s career exhibit a coincidence of terms,
-but betray to the initiated observer a radical progress and
-distinction of opinion. In his first work, he wrote, ‘Science is the
-Antichrist;’(2) in his last, ‘Science is the Christ.’(3) When
-he wrote the first he was a Deist, when he wrote the last he was an
-Atheist.
-
-We commonly find that extreme political enthusiasts in youth, pass, in
-old age, like Sir Francis Burdett, into extreme Conservatism: but it
-is a phenomenon in intellect, that Carlile, whose convictions, not his
-passions, led him to hold positive materialism, should lapse into a more
-than Swedenborgian mysticism. ‘I have discovered,’ said he, ‘that
-the names of the Old Testament, either apparently of persons or places,
-are not such names as the religious mistakes have constructed, but names
-of states of mind manifested in the human race, and, in this sense, the
-Bible may be scientifically read as a treatise on spirit, soul, or mind,
-and not as a history of time, people, and place.’(4) To insist on
-the utility of such a theory, except as a mere theory of theological
-explanation (useful as explaining it away altogether), was very strange
-in Carlile. It seems like the artifice of a beaten man to conciliate
-an implacable enemy. But Carlile was no beaten man. A few months only
-before his death, he wrote to Sir Robert Peel, in reference to the
-imprisonment of Mr. Southwell and myself, avowing his determination to
-renew martyrdom, if Sir Robert persisted in reviving persecution. But
-Carlile did make the capital error of proposing to explain science under
-Christian terms, which was giving to science, which is universal, a
-sectarian character. Hence, he was found using the words God, soul,
-Christ, etc., with all the pertinacity of a divine, and scandalising his
-friends by taking out his diploma as a preacher. In this, he manifested
-his old courage. He was still true to himself, and was still an Atheist,
-but veiling his materialism under a Swedenborgian nomenclature.
-
- 1. Repub. vol. xiv. p, 770.
-
- 2. Preface, p. 14. to vol. i. of Repub.
-
- 3. Christian Warrior.
-
- 4. Christian Warrior, p. 30.
-
-But the adoption of Swedenborgian terminology was a virtual recantation,
-and Carlile lost caste by it as did Lawrence. Lawrence gained no
-practice, and Carlile no influence. Indeed, I never knew any of these
-virtual recantations to be believed, or even respected by the world,
-who forced them on. A real recantation I never knew beyond this,
-that Atheists have acceded to Pantheism, or perhaps, relapsed into
-Unitarianism. But they have always remained Rationalists. None that
-1 have known and watched—not even the weakest, have fallen into
-Evangelism. Carlile, by his new course, exposed himself to be distrusted
-by his less observing but warm friends, and he conciliated no foe among
-the Christians. Carlile, however, was no hypocrite, nor did he take this
-new course for venal ends. He was as in all things else conscientious.
-Still his course was one of choice, not of necessity. He was free as
-ever to expound science, as science, or to expound it in the language of
-religion. He adopted the mystic course. This was his error of judgment,
-not an alteration of conviction. If I may explain the paradox of his
-conduct in a paradox of terms, this is the expression of it:—From
-being a Material Atheist, he became a Christian Atheist. His definition
-of a Christian at this stage, was ‘a man purged from error.’(1)
-That this course was no more than a mode of inculcation of his favourite
-Atheism is evident, intrinsically, and also from the fact that he was
-so much a realist, as to still avow his detestation of fiction; and so
-coherently did he keep to this text, that he never ceased to make war on
-poetry, theatres, and romance, from the commencement of his career down
-to the last number of the *Christian Warrior*.
-
-But the condemnation I pass upon the philosophy of his latter days shall
-not be exparte. I subjoin that passage in which he has most powerfully
-stated his own case.
-
-‘The first problem in human or social reform is *through what medium
-must it be made*. In what is called a religious state of society, that
-is, a state of idolatry and superstition, can reform be carried out
-through any other medium than its religion! My experience, added to the
-best advice I could find, is, that, with a religious people, religion
-is the only medium of reform. If I were opposed in that problem, I
-could successfully defend my side of it. The Charter shall change the
-constituency of the House of Commons, without improving the House.
-Socialism may create 20 Tytherlies, but it has still done nothing for
-the nation. But 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.
-It is the substitution of the known for the unknown, the real for
-the unreal, the certain for the uncertain. Religion is the erroneous
-mind’s chief direction. It must be corrected by and through the medium
-which it most respects. It rejects all other opposing conditions, and
-increases its tenacity for its errors. To reform religion by science, is
-to regenerate fallen man, and to save a sinking country.
-
- 1. Cheltenham Free Press, Any. 1842.
-
- 2. Christian Warrior, p. 31,
-
-There is great wisdom in this language. The question is, *how* shall the
-problem be solved? In this Carlile erred, as he did with the theory of
-personalities, which he conceived with equal ability. I conceive
-that Science is independent of Theology in its essence and its terms.
-Religion may be brought to science by adroit interpretations, and
-improved in character and significance; but Science can never be brought
-to Religion without being ‘paltered in a double sense,’ and lowered
-in dignity and intelligibility.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER IV. HIS DEATH AND CHARACTER
-===================================
-
-.. dropcap:: C Carlile’s
-
-
-Carlile’s death took place on this wise. He had come up from Enfield
-to Bouvene Street, Fleet Street, to live on the old field of war, and
-edit the *Christian Warrior.* While a van of goods were unpacking at the
-door, one of his boys strayed out and went away. Carlile was fond of
-his children, and he set out anxiously to seek his child. The excitement
-ended in death. On Carlile’s return he was seized with a fatal illness.
-Bronchitus, which he was told by his medical advisers would soon destroy
-him, if he came to live in the city, set in, and the power of speech
-soon left him. Mr. Lawrence, the author of the famous ‘Lectures on
-Man,’ whom Carlile always preferred in his illnesses, was sent for. He
-promptly arrived, but pronounced recovery hopeless; and Richard Carlile
-expired February 10,1843, in his fifty-third year.
-
-Wishing to be useful in death as in life, Carlile devoted his body to
-dissection. Always above superstition, in practice as well as in theory,
-his wish had long been—that his body, if he died first, should be
-given to Mr. Lawrence. At that time the prejudice against dissection was
-almost universal, and only superior persons rose above it. His wish
-was complied with by his family, and the post mortem examination was
-published in the *Lancet* of that year.
-
-Carlile’s burial took place at Kensal Green Cemetry. He was laid in
-the consecrated part of the ground—nearly opposite the Mausoleum of
-the Ducrow family. At the interment, a clergyman appeared, and with the
-usual want of feeling and of delicacy, persisted in reading the Church
-service over him. His eldest son Richard, who represented his sentiments
-as well as his name, very properly protested against the proceeding,
-as an outrage upon the principles of his father and the wishes of the
-family. Of course the remonstrance was disregarded, and Richard,
-his brothers, and their friends left the ground. The clergyman then
-proceeded to call Carlile ‘his dear departed brother,’ and to
-declare that he ‘had died in the sure and certain hope of a glorious
-resurrection.’
-
-Carlile left six children—Richard, Alfred, and Thomas Paine, by
-his wife Mrs. Jane Carlile; and Julian, Theophila, and Hypatia, by
-‘Isis,’ the lady to whom he united himself after his separation from
-his wife.
-
-Mrs. Carlile survived him only four months. She died in the same house,
-No. 1, Bouverie Street, and was buried in the same grave. It is hoped
-that a suitable monument will soon mark the resting place of England’s
-stoutest champion of free discussion, political and religious.
-
-All stories about the recantation of Carlile, to which the pious have
-given currency, are necessarily false, as he was never able to recant.
-He lost his power of speaking long before death approached so near as
-to suggest recanting to him. But death had no power to make his strong
-spirit quail at ideal terror or to shake the firm convictions of
-his understanding. His dying words, therefore, are the last which
-he addressed to the public in his *Christian Warrior*, and they were
-these—‘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 on covenant. They must be uprooted for public and individual
-safety*.’(1)
-
- 1. Christian Warrior, No. 4 p. 83.
-
-These words which he published thirteen days only before his death, are
-those which he, doubtless, would have pronounced in his last hour, had
-consciousness and strength remained with him.
-
-In the early portion of my imprisonment in Gloucester Gaol, the Rev.
-Samuel Jones, in order to move me by fear to the retraction of my
-convictions, told me before a class of prisoners that ‘the notorious
-Richard Carlile was dead, and had died horribly; but he had made
-what amends he could by recanting his dreadful principles on his
-death-bed—had denounced his infidel colleagues, and implored mercy of
-God. You see, therefore,’ added the Rev. libeller to me, ‘what you
-have to look forward to.’ Great, however, was the Rev. Mr. Jones’
-astonishment and confusion, when a short time after, Mr. Carlile himself
-walked into my cell, alive and well, to offer me his generous sympathy
-and advice to enable me the better to combat the old enemies of free
-thought and free speech. The usual stories told of infidel recantations
-are about as well founded as was this fabrication concerning Carlile, by
-the Rev. Samuel Jones, visiting magistrate of Gloucester Gaol.
-
-But *why* should Carlile recant! Why should the unbeliever fear to die!
-There are four things on which Christians hang the terrors which usually
-haunt their death-beds. Let us examine them.
-
-1. The story of the Fall.
-
-2. The rejection of the offer of salvation.
-
-3. The sin of unbelief.
-
-4. The vengeance of God.
-
-
-1. If man fell in the garden of Eden—who placed him there! God! Who
-placed the temptation there? God! Who gave him an imperfect nature—a
-nature of which it was foreknown it would fall! God! To what does this
-amount!
-
-If a parent placed his poor child near a fire at which he knew it would
-be burnt to death, or near a well into which he knew it would fall and
-be drowned, would any power of custom prevent our giving speech to the
-indignation of the heart, and pronouncing such a parent a miscreant! And
-can we pretend to believe God has so acted, and at the same time be able
-*to trust* him! If God has so acted, he may so act again. This creed can
-afford no consolation in death. If he who disbelieves this dogma fears
-to die, he who believes it should fear death more.
-
-2. Salvation, it is said, is offered to the fallen. But man is not
-fallen, except on the revolting hypothesis just discussed. And before
-man can be accepted by God, he must, according to Christians, own
-himself a degraded sinner. Is salvation worth this humiliation! But man
-is not degraded. No man can be degraded by the act of another. Dishonour
-can come only by his own hands: and depravity has not come thus. Man,
-therefore, needs not this salvation. And, if he needed it, he could not
-accept it. Debarred from purchasing it himself, he must accept it as an
-act of grace. But it is not well to go even to heaven on sufferance. We
-despise the poet who is not above a patron; we despise the citizen who
-crawls before the throne; and shall God be said to have less love
-of self-respect than man! He who will consent to be saved after this
-fashion hath most need to fear that he shall perish, for he deserves it.
-
-3. Then, in what way can there be a *sin* of unbelief? Is not the
-understanding the subject of evidence? A man, with evidence before him,
-can no more help seeing it or feeling its weight, than a man with his
-eyes or ears open can help seeing the house or tree before him, or
-hearing the sounds made around him. If a man disbelieve, it is
-because his conviction is true to his understanding. If I disbelieve a
-proposition, it is through lack of evidence; and the act is as virtuous
-(so far as virtue can belong to that which is inevitable), as the belief
-of it, when the evidence is perfect. If it is meant that a man is to
-believe, whether he sees evidence or not, it means that he is to believe
-certain things, whether true or false; in fine, that he may qualify
-himself for heaven by hypocrisy and lies. It is of no use that the
-unbeliever is told that he will be damned if he does not believe; what
-human frailty may do is another thing; but the judgment is clear, that a
-man *ought* not to believe, nor profess to believe, what seems to him
-to be false, although he should be damned. The believer, who seeks
-to propitiate heaven by this deceit, ought to fear its wrath, not the
-unbeliever who rejects the dishonourable terms and throws himself on its
-justice.
-
-4. There is the *vengeance* of God. But is not the savage idea destroyed
-as soon as you name it? Can God have that which man ought not to
-have—*vengeance*. The jurisprudence of earth has reformed itself—we
-no longer *punish* absolutely; we seek the *reformation* of the
-offender. We leave retaliation to savages; and shall we cherish in
-heaven an idea we have chased from earth? But *what* has to be punished?
-Can the sins of man disturb the peace of God? If so, as men exist in
-myriads and action is incessant, then is God, as Jonathan Edwards has
-shown, the most miserable of beings and the *victim* of his meanest
-creatures. We, see, therefore, that sin against God is *impossible*. All
-sin is finite and relative—all sin is sin against man. Will God punish
-this, which punishes itself? If man errs, the bitter consequences
-are ever with him. Why should he err! Does he choose the ignorance,
-incapacity, passion, and blindness, through which he errs? Why is he
-precipitated, imperfectly natured into a chaos of crime! Is not his
-destiny made for him; and shall God punish that sin which is his
-misfortune rather than his fault? shall man be condemned to misery in
-eternity *because* he has been made wretched, and weak, and erring, in
-time.
-
-But if man *has* fallen at his conscious peril—*has* thoughtlessly
-spurned salvation—*has* offended God—will God therefore take
-vengeance? Is God without dignity or magnanimity? If I do wrong to him,
-who does wrong to me, I come down (has not the ancient sage warned
-me) to the level of my enemy? Will God thus descend to the level of
-vindictive man! Who has not thrilled at the lofty question of Volumnia
-to Coriolanus:—
-
- ‘Think’st thou it honourable for a noble man
-
- Still to remember wrongs.’
-
-Shall God be less honourable and remember the wrong done against him,
-not by his equals, but by his own frail creatures! To be unable to trust
-God is to degrade him. Those passages in the New Testament which give
-the narratives most interest and dignity, are the parables in which a
-servant is told to forgive a debt to one who had forgiven him; in
-which a brother is to be forgiven until seventy times seven (that is
-unlimitedly); and the prayer where men claim forgiveness as they have
-themselves forgiven others their trespasses. What was this but erecting
-a high moral argument against the relentlessness of future punishment of
-erring man? If, therefore, man is to forgive, shall God do less? Shall
-man be more just than God? Is there anything so grand in the life of
-Christ as his forgiving his enemies, as he expired on the cross? Was it
-God the Sufferer behaving more nobly than will God the Judge? Was this
-the magnificent teaching of fraternity to vengeful man, or is it to be
-regarded but as a sublime libel on the hereafter judgments of heaven?
-The Infidel is Infidel to error, but he believes in truth and humanity,
-and when he believes in God, he will prefer to believe that which is
-noble of him. He will be able to trust him. Holding by no conscious
-error, doing no dishonour in thought and offering, his homage to love
-and truth, why should the unbeliever fear to die! Carlile saw not less
-clearly than this, nor felt less strongly, and he knew that only those
-fear death who have never thought about it at all, or thought about it
-wrongly.
-
-Carlile’s early career gave evidence of that iron hauteur which
-characterised him. In dedicating from Dorchester Gaol, his second volume
-of the *Republican*, to Sir Robert Gifford, the Attorney General of that
-day, (1820) he wrote, ‘Gratitude being one of the noblest traits in
-the character of animals, both rational and irrational, *to which ever
-you may deem me allied*, I feel that I owe it to you.’ Carlile taunted
-the Society for the Suppression of Vice, or as he most correctly styled
-it the Vice Society, saying that, ‘next to their secretary, Pritchard,
-the lawyer, he had gained most by their existence,(1) and had sold more
-Deistical volumes in one year through their exertions than he should
-in seven, in the ordinary course of business.’(2) Carlile’s cheerful
-disposition resisted the sombre influence of the dungeon, and he
-declared when Wedderbum arrived at Dorchester Gaol that he would
-‘endeavour to get him chaplain, as the officiating one was so
-extremely fat that he could hardly get up to the pulpit, and when there,
-he was so long in recovering from the exertion, that he could not read
-the prayers with sufficient solemnity.(3)
-
- 1. Repub. vol. ii. p. 183.
-
- 2. Repub. vol. ii. p. 185.
-
- 3. Repub. vol. iii. p. 112.
-
-The fourth volume of the *Republican* Carlile also dedicated to Gifford,
-the Attorney General, beginning, ‘My constant and learned friend,
-between you and the Vice Society I am at loss how to pay my courtesies,
-so as to avoid jealousy. You acted nobly with my first volume. My second
-you neglected; and I had resolved to stop when I heard of your renewed
-prosecutions. I am sorry we did not understand each other better
-before.’ A paragraph in the Dedication of his sixth volume to George
-IV. was in these words, ‘You are not only the head of the State but of
-the Church too, and as I am an intermeddler with the matters of both, I,
-your Banishment Act notwithstanding, dedicate my volume to both heads
-at once, with the most profound hope and prayer that neither of them
-may ache after reading it.’ When Carlile took notice of Mease, he
-thus addressed him—‘To Mr. Thomas Mease, grocer, draper, and
-methodist.’ The letter to Mease, was dated ‘Dorchester Gaol,
-December 18, year 1822; of the God that was born of a woman, who was
-his own father, and who was killed to please himself. The *immortal* god
-that died.’ The letter commenced thus,—‘Sir Saint and Savage.’
-To Mr. Dronsfield he wrote—‘I am not humble; civility to all;
-servility to none is the becoming characteristic of manhood.’(1)
-Alluding to the extensive sale of Wat Tyler, which had such an influence
-on his early fortunes, Carlile exclaimed, ‘Glory to thee, O Southey!
-Happy mayst thou be in singing hexameters to thy old Royal Master, when
-thou hast passed the *reality* as well as the *vision* of judgment! Yes,
-my patron! to that best of thy productions, “Wat Tyler,” do I owe
-the encouragement I first found to persevere.(2)
-
-Of his own Every Woman’s Book, Carlile said, ‘It had sustained Mr.
-Cobbett’s malignity—one of the most powerful venoms which the animal
-world had produced.’(3) Carlile characterised the weak point in
-his own character with severe felicity, when speaking of others.
-‘Conceit,’ said he, ‘is a malady of humanity, of which some people
-die.’(4) These words might stand as the epitaph of his own public
-influence. The following passage occurred in that letter to me, alluded
-to in the preface. ‘You, Southwell and others,’ said he, ‘are now
-where I once was, resting upon the mere flippant vulgarisms of what you
-and the world consent to call Atheistic infidelity, regulating your
-amount of wisdom by a critical contrast with other people’s folly.(5)
-I hope we were never amenable to the censure with which this sentence
-opens: the concluding words are shrewd and instructive, which I repeat
-for the sake of those young gentlemen who take up infidelity as a
-pastime, instead as a principle.
-
- 1. Repub. vol. vii. p. 868.
-
- 2. Repub. vol. vii. p. 674.
-
- 3. Lion, vol. ii. p. 450.
-
- 4. Oracle of Reason, vol. i. p. 366.
-
- 5. Oracle of Reason, vol. i. p. 366.
-
-It is due to Carlile to observe that the annoyance he marshalled against
-authority was chiefly retaliative. He disowned a placard put in his
-window, which said, ‘This is the Mart for Sedition and Blasphemy,’
-as he deemed it an admission that he did vend something of the kind.
-‘I sell,’ said he, ‘only truth and right reason.’(1) (In
-parenthesis it maybe observed, that he denied that any human tribunal
-was competent to declare what was blasphemy.) How much farther Carlile
-was impartial than are Christians, is evidenced by the fact that he
-published Bishop Watson’s Apology for the Bible, in conjunction with
-Paine’s Age of Reason.(2) In another respect he behaved as Christians
-never behave, he never questioned the youths he employed, nor any of his
-dependents as to their opinions, nor did he use any means to induce
-them to comprehend or adopt his.(3) He held his opinions too proudly to
-intrigue or supplicate others to accept them.
-
-In candour, in independency of judgment, in perfect moral fearlessness
-of character, I believe Carlile cannot be paralleled among the public
-men of his time. Lovel writes:
-
- He is a slave who dare not be,
-
- In the right with two or three.
-
-Carlile was no slave. He was able to stand in the right by himself
-against the world. One forgives his errors, his vanity, and his egotism,
-for the bravery of his bearing and his speech. Though Paine was his
-great prototype, he was prompt, both in his early enthusiasm and in his
-latter days, to acknowledge Paine’s defects as a theologian. ‘About
-“God” Paine,’ said he, ‘was not altogether wise, but less
-unwise than the world at large.(4) In his earliest attachments, Carlile
-discriminated, ‘I neither look,’ wrote he ‘on Mr. Gibbon nor Mr.
-Hume, as standards of infidelity to the Christian religion.‘(5) He
-hesitated at Shelley’s views of marriage, deeming them crude.(6)
-Carlile was able to take anything up or put anything down at the bidding
-of his judgment. He said to Mr. Searlett, ‘At present I am not a
-tinman, but I should never feel ashamed to return to it to earn an
-honest livelihood, if circumstances should render it necessary in this
-or any other country,’(7)
-
- 1. Repub. vol. v.r. 12.
-
- 2. Repub. vol. v. p. 89
-
- 3. Repub. vi. p. 778.
-
- 4. Scourge, p. 110.
-
- 5. Repub. vol. ii. p. 168.
-
- 6. Repub. vol. v. p. 148.
-
- 7. Repub. vol. ii. p. 403.
-
-He began a periodical or ended it at will. No taunt deterred him, no
-threat intimidated him, no smile seduced him. Carlile was perfectly able
-to stand alone. He avowed himself an Atheist when no one else did. When
-he understood that arbitrary checks to population were necessary he said
-so and distinguishing the particular kinds of checks, disguisedly hinted
-at by Political Economists, or anonymously broached in handbills, he
-specified them and added these words, ‘I think these plans tor the
-prevention of conception good, and publicly say it.’(1) Although that
-saying involved his own reputation and that of his cause. If Carlile had
-the querulousness, which condemned others, he had also the rarer courage
-which condemned himself. If he called others fools he called himself
-one, when his judgment convinced him that he had been in error. To
-those whom he found he had wronged, he made no dubious acknowledgment.
-Disdaining deceit always he openly made the amplest apology frank
-words could express. ‘I ask Mr. Cobbett’s pardon, and make the
-due apology,’ said he, on finding that he had made an erroneous
-attribution to him.(2) To Dr. Olinthus Gregory he was more emphatic
-still.(3) Carlile proclaimed the excellence of Cobbett’s Grammar, and
-the superiority of Hunt’s Roasted Corn,(4) at the same time that
-he roasted the authors of both. Major Cartwright’s ‘English
-Constitution Produced and Illustrated,’ he praised in some parts,
-while he mercilessly assailed it in others.(5) He acknowledged the
-kindness of his prosecutors, where they were kind, with the same
-fullness with which he execrated them when brutal.(6) To his bitterest
-enemy he was constantly thus just, and his own faults he confessed with
-as little reserve as he pointed out those or his enemies. His intellect
-was rude, but most robust. He had a passion for truth and did not care
-whether it went against him or for him; he told it with equal zest. He
-not only as many do, professed to love free speaking; he could *bear it*
-of himself. He held, as a public man should do, his reputation in his
-hand, and he would toss it up as one would a ball.
-
- 1. Repub. No. 18, vol. ii. pp. 566-6. 1825.
-
- 2. Repub. vol. xii. p. 29.
-
- 3. Repub. vol. xii. p. 727.
-
- 4. Repub. vol. vi. p. 12.
-
- 5. Repub. vol. viii. p. 18.
-
- 6. Repub. vol. x. pp. 63-4.
-
-Carlile had a just notion of the relation of personalities to
-principles. ‘Human nature,’ said he, ‘through whatever improved
-modifications it may pass, will still have its frailties, and those
-frailties have no relation to the social principles that may be
-advocated, nor do they emanate from newly advocated social principles,
-but from the frailty of that nature,... and any exhibition of
-such frailty belongs to the individual, and not to the principles
-constituting the public cause.’... But it is one thing to perceive the
-tenor of personalties, and another and very different thing to be
-able to conduct them. Mr. Carlile was utterly unable to conduct them
-usefully. They must be entered upon, not on personal, but upon public
-grounds; or they lose all moral effect. If undertaken from spleen, or
-vanity, they belong to the class of ‘quarrels,’ and damage both the
-writer and nis cause. If entered upon to preserve the integrity of
-a public question, such intention must be made very evident and the
-*improvement* alone, and not the mortification of the party criticised,
-must be steadily kept in view. This Mr. Carlile never understood: he
-wounded, he disparaged, he recriminated. He did not weigh character
-through its entire extent. He mistook a part for the whole. It was in
-this erroneous way, that he condemned Cobbett and Hunt, was querulous
-to his friends in Parliament, and most unjust to his most important
-and devoted allies. Ricardo, Hume, Brougham, Burdett, who presented
-petitions for him, seem to me to have treated him much better than he
-treated them.
-
-Richard Carlile’s reputation was founded on the joint profession of
-Republicanism, and ultimately of Deism and Atheism. He owed much to the
-*time* when he made these professions, and not a little to the talent
-with which he maintained them. But did his services rest exclusively on
-the conditions under which they were rendered, their value would still
-stand high in the opinion of those capable of estimating the steps of
-public progress. He had to incur an obnoxious singularity, and brave
-imminent danger in order to purchase a field of action for others. This
-is a work which the world does not applaud like the manifestation of
-genius and talent, but it is a work which requires a courage and a
-sentiment of self-sacrifice, which the world’s favourites rarely
-display. The work of the pioneer of thought is a work done for men
-of genius and talent; a work they are seldom able to do for
-themselves—for talent is prudent, and genius is timid; it is a
-work, however, which must be done by some one, or freedom languishes,
-invention is dumb, talent is misdirected, and philosophy creeps
-stealthily along starting at the sound of its own footsteps.
-
- 1. Sherwin*s Republican, No. 2, p. 21.
-
-No adequate estimate or the merits of Carlile, and no tolerant judgment
-of his faults can be formed without taking into account the aspects of
-the times when he struggled, and the unscrupulous and powerful enemies
-against which he contended. *Then* the most hateful types of Toryism and
-Christianity were rampant—*Then* Castlereagh declared in Parliament
-that it was necessary that ‘the last spark of the spirit of the
-French Revolution should be extinguished.’(1) Malignant and servile
-Attorney-Generals and vindictive Judges left no man’s liberty or life
-safe if he professed liberal opinions. The press was intimidated,
-and public meetings, who complained, butchered. It was under these
-formidable circumstances that Carlile undertook to free the press, and
-to make the famous works of the ‘rebellious needleman’ household
-books in England, and to oppose himself singly to crown and mitre, ana
-brave whatever political and priestly vengeance could inflict, when
-political and priestly power were unchecked by public opinion.
-
- 1. The apparent offensiveness of some of his addresses was
- created by Christians themselves, an Instance occurs in his
- letter to ‘Old William Wilberforce,’ to whom he said
- ‘sinner,’ instead of ‘sir,’ but this was because Wilberforce
- was a self-styled sinner.—Repub. vol. ii. p. 388
-
-It is in reference to the same public circumstances that Carlile’s
-faults are to be judged.
-
-Those who in these days shall peruse the pages of Carlile’s
-periodicals will be startled at the fierce invective and measureless
-denunciation which abound there. But let those who affect to pass over
-his name on this account, call to recollection the deadly arena of
-antagonism in which he had to fight the battle of freedom. The course
-he took is indeed not to be imitated now. We exist in better times, when
-the conflict of reason has succeeded to the strife of passion. We have
-better arts, because we have a fairer field, and we owe that fairer
-field to such men as Carlile. Let us not impose our modes of warfare
-on men who fought with savages, and demand of the actors of other times
-that virtue which belongs exclusively to our opportunities. Men who
-are patriotic in easy chairs and by the fire-side only, who never incur
-damped feet in the public cause, and essay the reform of society in kid
-gloves and white waistcoats, know nothing, and can allow nothing for
-that strife of spirit in which men live, who take up the dice box of
-oppression to play for liberty, and whose stakes are their lives. Let
-the Christian whose altar is protected by law, whose arrogance over
-infidels is part and parcel of the statutes, and is applauded by public
-opinion; let the sleek and unruffled saint beware how he judges one on
-whose head was every day poured out the phials of holy malignity, whom
-the highest authorities stooped to defame, whose name was sacked at the
-instigation of every miserable deacon or venal informer, whose household
-gods were strewn in the streets by policemen selected for their
-ferocity—whose wife was consigned to a gaol, and himself doomed to
-spend nine years and a half in the endurance of the unceasing indignity
-of vindictive imprisonment. Where the Christian in ermine has been
-brutal, vituperative, and malignant, let him not exact a perennial
-delicacy of sentiment from his victim, writhing under his provocations.
-Taking these circumstances into account he is little acquainted with
-human nature, who will wonder that Carlile, in the sixth year of an
-imprisonment caused by Lords Castlereagh, Liverpool, Sidmouth, and
-Eldon, should from Dorchester Gaol, dedicate the volume of the Trials
-of his Wife, Sister, and Shopmen in these words—‘To the Memory of
-Robert Stewart, Marquis of Londonderry, Viscount Castlereagh, etc., who
-eventually did that for himself which millions wished some noble mind
-would do for him—*Cut his throat*.’
-
-The strait-laced moralist of this generation may turn to the volumes
-of the Carlile’s Trials, and find that Mrs. Carlile was indicted for
-publishing a paragraph justifying assassination of tyrants. I have no
-sympathy with this doctrine. I deem it far nobler and more useful
-to society, to submit to be the victim than to victimize others. But
-Carlile acted on a resolute sense of self-defence. He was a believer in
-Brutus and Colonel Titus, and he lived in darker times when the policy
-of moral resistance was less clear and less practicable than now.
-
-The Society for the Suppression of Vice distinguished him in 1820, as
-‘that most audacious offender, Carlile.’(1) The *Age* called him
-‘a miscreant tinker.’(2) The *Sunday Times* described him as ‘a
-wretched man in the very kennel of contempt, from whom his proselytes
-fled as if he were emerged from a pest-house, and advised that he should
-rot in oblivion.’? And in this way papers and pulpits rang fascinating
-changes on such adjectives as fiend, monster, wretch, execrable,
-hideous, obscene, abandoned, infamous, etc., etc., till when he took a
-tour through the country in 1828, the idea of Carlile current among the
-pious was that of a black griffin with red glaring eyes—a tail with
-forked end, talons instead of fingers, and hoofs instead of toes.’(3)
-
- 1. Repub. vol. ii. p. 182.
-
- 2. Repub. vol. xii. p. 121
-
- 3. Repub. vol. xii. p. 151.
-
-Yet this man whom the Government, the Pulpit, and the Press co-operated
-thus to describe, was human, and not devoid of generous filial
-affection. When in Dorchester Gaol, in 1820, a letter came sealed
-with black wax, which, Carlile suspecting to announce the death of his
-mother, he threw it aside for four hours—not finding resolution to
-open it. ‘I had hoped,’ said he, ‘that her life would have been
-extended a few years, that she might have witnessed the result of my
-present career. But it affords me pleasure to think that she sunk calmly
-to sleep, neither tortured by priests nor superstitious notions. It
-affords me pleasure,’ cried he, exultingly, ‘that in spite of the
-efforts of the Society for the Suppression of vice, the Priests, and
-the Attorney-General of a wicked administration, I have still retained
-a roof to shelter her, and under which she died.’(1) The department
-of progress in which Carlile worked has not yet received recognition by
-society. Society only remembers the genius which is creative, not that
-which is practical—though it profits in its ulterior stages more by
-the practical than the creative. The world has been rich in theory ages
-ago, and would have realised universal happiness by this time had it
-encouraged those who reduce its theories to practice. When a great truth
-is proclaimed, it produces no fruit till society is ploughed and sown
-with it. The pioneer, the orator, and the journalist, are they who
-practicalise truth: and he who re-asserts it, who insists upon it,
-and re-echoes it by all the arts of repetition—he it is who really
-advances society. He is the worker; yet society accords him no
-distinction, no posthumous memory. Hence it requires more generosity of
-sentiment to be useful than to be great. He who seeks distinction may
-advance society as he achieves distinction: but the advancement of
-society is secondary with him—the advancement of himself is the
-primary consideration, and he is often careless whether society advances
-or retrogrades provided he lays hold of its renown and keeps it. Hence
-he who seeks fame is selfish—he who seeks utility is generous, because
-he is certain that society will neglect him, as it pays its honours to
-those who serve it least. The theorist provides for the future, but
-it is the worker who makes the future by realising the fulness of the
-present. It was in this department that Carlile laboured. He left no
-distinct book, he bequeathed no invention, he is the author of no famous
-theory; but his life was a poem of heroic and voluntary sacrifice, by
-which new freedom was won and secured to posterity; and men are now
-benefited through his exertions who remember him not, who know him not,
-and who would disown him or revile him if they did. Attorney-Generals
-delight to prate about the danger to society of dissemminating new
-opinions—the danger is to him alone who undertakes the task. Let him
-who thinks that mankind are to be set on change too rapidly, read the
-Life of Carlile. The deadly opposition by which he was assailed is the
-answer to their fears. Society loves its opinions, and clings to them,
-whether they be error or truth. It hates him who teaches it to alter its
-course, however the change may be for its benefit. It is the destiny of
-the Reformer to serve mankind, and to be cursed by them for his pains.
-He who is not prepared for this has no business to be a Reformer. Then
-has he no reward? His proud reward is the satisfaction of contemplating
-the benefit he confers upon men who are not to be conciliated by good
-intentions, nor penetrated by favours bestowed. To give happiness to
-a friend is but a common place delight, but the pride of conferring
-pleasure upon an enemy is a noble passion, of which only exalted natures
-are susceptible. This is the passion of the true Reformer, and this is
-his reward.
-
- 1. Repub vol. ii. pp. 376-7.
-
-Of Carlile’s errors it may be said that they were fostered, if not
-developed by the position in which he was placed. In the autumn of his
-career, he grew to think better of himself than of other men, but it
-was in a great measure because he had done more and dared more. He was
-impatient of a rival, because his rivals as political or anti-religious
-leaders wanted the proper qualification. Carlile had suffered so much,
-and so long, that he not unnaturally became convinced that suffering was
-the sole qualification of a public teacher. He confounded endurance with
-ability, and doubted the integrity or the courage of those who had dared
-nothing. He was tolerant of rivals in proportion as they had suffered
-any thing. His great imprisonments were so many wounds which he had
-received in the service of freedom, and he was proud of them as a
-Spartan hero of scars. He graduated, as *a patriot*, in dungeons, and
-he suspected the qualifications of every man who had not taken out a
-diploma from the Attorney-General. Carlile was one of those men who are
-tattooed by the enemy into whose hands they fall, and who are dyed by the
-influences against which they struggle. He was like a man who fights all
-day in the front rank; who is discoloured by the powder expended in the
-battle, and never after wears the hue of peace. Cobbett and O’Connell
-manifested the same peculiarity. They outlived their day. They were
-living memorials of themselves and of the times which *they* had
-changed. He who judges any of these men impartially, will recognize
-their virtues as arising in the greatness of their natures and their
-faults, but as the accidents of their local positions. So posterity will
-judge Richard Carlile.
-
-
-
-
-ST. THOMAS’S HOSPITAL
-=====================
-
-.. dropcap:: E Examination
-
-
-Examination of the body of Mr. Richard Carlile.
-
-The well-known Mr. Richard Carlile, bookseller, late of Fleet Street,
-bequeathed his body for the purpose of anatomical dissection. By
-permission of the governors of St. Thomas’s Hospital, his remains were
-removed from his residence in Bouverie Street, Fleet Street, to that
-Institution; and, on Tuesday last, there was a numerous assemblage of
-the friends of the deceased and members of the medical profession, to
-witness his post mortem examination. The chest and abdomen only were
-opened, and the necessity that existed for the knowledge of anatomy,
-not only to the surgeon, but to the physician, was shown. Mr. Grainger
-delivered a short address on the occasion, thinking that the object of
-the deceased would be obtained by this proceeding in public, and by a
-statement of the motives which, had actuated him in giving his remains
-for dissection.
-
-The illustrious Bentham, actuated by the same benevolent feeling, had at
-the close of the last century, left his body for dissection, and that at
-a time when the prejudice against anatomical examinations was so great
-that bodies were procured with the utmost difficulty. That prejudice
-was perhaps less at the present time, but still sufficiently strong to
-interfere very materially with that due supply of subjects, so essential
-to the proper education of the medical student, and of such vital
-importance to the community at large. Such difficulties existed that no
-lecturer in this country had ever yet been able to complete a course
-of operative surgery, properly so called. Mr. Carlile deserved the
-approbation of all the friends of humanity for attempting to remove this
-prejudice by leaving his remains for anatomical purposes.
-
-Mr. Grainger vindicated medical men from the charge of irreligion, and
-contended that medical and anatomical studies, if *properly* pursued,
-served to demonstrate the truth, not only of natural, but of revealed
-religion. *The Lancet,* No. 1,016, p. 774, February 18, 1843.
-
-
-J. Watson, Printer, 3, Queen’s Head Passage, Paternoster Row.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-----------------------
-
-.. pgfooter::
-
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- LIFE AND CHARACTER OF RICHARD CARLILE
-
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost
-no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
-under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
-eBook or online at http://www.gutenberg.org/license.
-
-
-Title: Life and Character of Richard Carlile
-
-Author: George Jacob Holyoake
-
-Release Date: March 10, 2012 [EBook #39123]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: US-ASCII
-
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE AND CHARACTER OF RICHARD
-CARLILE ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by David Widger.
-
-
-
-
- *LIFE AND CHARACTER OF RICHARD CARLILE*
-
-
- _By_
-
- *George Jacob Holyoake*
-
-
- _London_
-
- _1849_
-
-
-
-
-CONTENTS
-
-
- PREFACE
- LIFE AND CHARACTER OF RICHARD CARLILE
- CHAPTER I. HIS PARENTAGE, APPRENTICESHIP, AND MARRIAGE
- CHAPTER II. THE PUBLISHER AND THE PRISONER
- CHAPTER III. THE EDITOR AND THE ATHEIST
- CHAPTER IV. HIS DEATH AND CHARACTER
- ST. THOMAS'S HOSPITAL
-
-
-
-
-PREFACE
-
-
-When I first entered London, one Saturday evening in 1842, I was not
-known personally to half a dozen persons in it. On reaching the office
-of the Oracle of Reason, I found an invitation (it was the first I
-received in the metropolis) from Richard Carlile to take tea with him on
-the next afternoon at the Hall of Science. There was no name known to me
-in London from whom an invitation could have come which I should have
-thought a greater honour. The conversation at table was directed to
-advising me as to my defence at my coming trial. He requested me to hear
-his evening lecture, which he devoted to the policy of sceptical defence
-which he thought most effectual. At the conclusion, he called upon me
-for my coincidence or dissent. I stated some objections which I
-entertained to his scientifico-religious views with diffidence but
-distinctness. The compliments which he paid me were the first words of
-praise which I remember to have trusted. Coming from a master in our
-Israel, they inspired me with a confidence new to me. I did not conceal
-my ambition to merit his approval. On my trial at Gloucester, he watched
-by my side fourteen hours, and handed me notes for my guidance. After my
-conviction, he brought me my first provisions with his own hand. He
-honoured me with a public letter during my imprisonment, and uttered
-generous words in my vindication, when those in whose ranks I had fought
-and fallen were silent. It was my destiny, on my liberation, to be able
-to pour my gratitude only over his grave. In his Life and Character,
-here attempted, I am proud to confess that 1 have written with affection
-for his memory, but I have also, written with impartiality--for he who
-encouraged me to maintain the truth at my own expense, would be quite
-willing, if need be, that I maintain it at his.
-
- G. J. H.
-
-
-
-LIFE AND CHARACTER OF RICHARD CARLILE
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER I. HIS PARENTAGE, APPRENTICESHIP, AND MARRIAGE
-
-
-I have accomplished the liberty of the press in England, and oral
-discussion is now free. Nothing remains to be reformed but the ignorance
-and vices of the people, whose ignorance cannot be removed, while their
-bodies are starved and their church remains a theatre of idolatry and
-superstition.' These were the proud and wise words uttered in the last
-periodical edited by Richard Carlile. They are the history of his
-life--the eulogy of his career--and the witnesses or his political and
-religious penetration.
-
-Of Carlile's family, I can gather little beyond this, that his father
-had some reputation as an arithmetician. He published a collection of
-arithmetical, mathematical, and algebraical questions. His talent was
-individual though mediocre. He put his questions into verse and
-intermixed them with paradox. His career was various and brief: first a
-shoemaker, he aspired to be and became an exciseman. Like Burns, his
-habits suffered by his profession, and he often fell into intoxication.
-Of his own accord he retired from the Excise, became successively
-schoolmaster and soldier, and died at the age of 34, no person's enemy
-but his own.(1) Carlile's mother was now left a widow, with three infant
-children. For several years she was in a flourishing business, but it
-began to decay with the pressure of the times, about 1800, and she was
-afflicted alternately with sickness and poverty. Thence to the time of
-her death, she was assisted by Carlile, who was her only son. As a woman
-she was virtuous, as a mother kind and indulgent. She died at the age of
-60. It is an evidence of Carlile's honourable notions of duty, that out
-of thirty shillings per week, which he earned as a journeyman, he
-supported his wife and several children, and spared an offering for the
-support of his mother and sisters; and it deserves to be mentioned in
-his behalf, that the first dissatisfaction he experienced in married
-life arose from the opposition which he received in the discharge of
-these generous duties.
-
- 1. Carlile to Lord Brougham, Gauntlet, No. 8, p. 113. 1833.
-
-Richard Carlile was born in Ashburton, Devonshire, December 8, 1790. He
-was but four years of age at the death of his father. He early felt his
-father's ambition. Before he was twelve years of age, he determined to
-be something in the world, and afterwards his unexpressed ideas were
-ever at work and accumulating. His dreams by night, and his thoughts by
-day, all worked one way, and vaguely contemplated some sort of
-purification of the church.(1) But how far he was from understanding the
-part he was to play is clear from the circumstance, that on the 5th of
-November, he used to gather faggots to burn 'Old Tom Paine,' instead of
-Guy Fawkes; and it was not till 1810, when he was twenty years old, that
-he first saw in the hands of an old man in Exeter, a copy of the Rights
-of Man.(2)
-
-Carlile received all the education that village free schools could
-afford. The educational routine where his own Gifford had before been a
-scholar, was confined to writing, arithmetic, and sufficient Latin to
-read a physician's prescription. His first place seems to have been with
-Mr. Lee, chemist and druggist, in Exeter, but, being set to do things
-which he deemed derogatory to one who was able to read a physician's
-prescription, he left the shop after four months' service. Being too
-much of a man to go to school again, he lived idly three months, amusing
-himself with colouring pictures to sell in his mother's shop. His
-mother's principal wholesale customers were the firm of Gifford and Co.,
-which consisted of the brothers of that Attorney-General who had such
-extensive dealings with the son afterwards, in a different line. At the
-pressing wish of Carlile's mother, he was apprenticed to a business
-which he never liked, that of tinplate working, and, like Bunyan, he
-became a tinman. He served seven years and three months to a Mr.
-Cummings, whom he has described as a hard master, as one who considered
-five or six hours for sleep all the recreation necessary for his youths.
-Carlile had no knowledge then of the 'Rights of Man,' but he betrayed
-some knowledge of the rights of apprentices,(3) and his impatience under
-injustice was then manifested, as his term of service was one series of
-conspiracies, rebellions, and battles. On being relieved from this worse
-than seven years' imprisonment, he resolved to follow that business no
-longer than he should be compelled. His ambition then was to get his
-living by his pen.
-
- 1. Gauntlet, No. 8, p. 113.
- 2. Repub. vol. 5, p. 134.
- 3. Republican, vol. ii. pp. 226-7.
-
-The office of an exciseman, which was offered him, he refused,
-remembering the fate of his father, and continued to follow his
-business, as journeyman tinman, in various parts of the country, and in
-London, where he first arrived in February, 1811. He returned to Exeter
-the same year. In 1813, we find him in London again, working at Benham
-and Sons, Blackfriars Road. A short sojourn in Gosport, in the previous
-year 1812, led to his acquaintance with the person who became, after two
-months' courtship, Mrs. Carlile. He was at that time twenty-three, and
-she thirty years of age. Mrs. Carlile was not without accomplishments as
-to personal appearance; and temper excepted, was not without most of the
-qualifications necessary to a good tradesman's wife.(1)
-
-Mrs. Carlile had talents for business, which were of the greatest value
-to her husband in the course of his career. He, bent on propagandism,
-never paid that attention to the details of trade which was necessary to
-keep a business together. But their difference in education, in age, in
-intellectual aspiration and their opponency in disposition, early
-converted their union into an intimacy tolerated rather than prized, and
-entire separation ensued twenty years after. Peculiar conduct on the
-part of relatives was alleged as promotive of these results, but this
-conduct I do not particularise as the explanation of the parties
-concerned is not before me, and cannot now be obtained. Of personal
-causes, temper seems to have been a chief one. Writing to Mr. Hunt, in
-1822, Carlile said, 'Knowing Mrs. C. to possess a _warm_ temper, as I
-do, I wonder,' etc.(2) In 1819, the separation of Mr. and Mrs. Carlile
-was arranged to take place, so soon as he had the means of making a
-sufficient settlement for her comfort: it was not, however, till 1832,
-when the annuity of L50, bequeathed him by Mr. Morrison, of Chelsea,
-cleared itself of legacy duty, that he was able to provide for her. Then
-it was that they parted, she taking all the household furniture and L100
-worth of books.
-
- 1. A Scourge, p. 18. 1834.
- 2. Rep. vol. vi. p. 15.
-
-His elder sister remained a violent Methodist, and was never reconciled
-to his anti-religious labours. Mrs. Carlile, as well as his younger
-sister, who both incurred imprisonment on his account, did it rather
-from natural resentment at the injustice practised for his destruction,
-than from any sympathy with his opinions. But, in this respect, they
-behaved with a bravery worthy of their name; they resolutely refused to
-compromise--the sister the brother, or the wife the husband, at all
-risks to themselves. None of his family, save a first cousin,
-countenanced his proceeding; he stood alone on his own hearth, as he
-stood often alone in the world.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER II. THE PUBLISHER AND THE PRISONER
-
-
-It was in 1816, while employed as a tinplate worker, by the firm of
-Matthews and Masterman, of Union Court, Holbom Hill, that he first
-essayed public life. He was then twenty-six years of age. Before this
-time he had read no work of Paine's; but the distress of that year
-excited him to inquiry. Knowledge speedily prompted nim to action. He
-wrote scraps for the newspapers, (principally the _Independent Whig_ and
-the _Newt_) which scraps were all condemned: 'A half-employed Mechanic
-is too violent;' this was the notice in answer to correspondents. He
-annoyed Mr. Cobbett by a foolish acrostic, on the name of Hunt. He wrote
-to Hunt himself, and paraded one night, two hours in front of his hotel,
-in Covent Garden, before he could muster courage sufficient to ask the
-waiter to take his effusion up. At this time he burned to see himself in
-print; although, as he afterwards confessed, he was not able to write a
-single sentence fit to meet the public eye.(2)
-
- 1. Repub. vol. xi. p. 101.
- 2. Repub. vol. xii. p. 2.
-
-In 1817 _The Black Dwarf_ made its appearance, which was much more to
-Carlile's taste than _Cobbett's Register_, but as the Habeas Corpus Act
-was suspended, and Sidmouth had sent forth his Circular, there was a
-damp among the newsvendors, and few would sell. This excited Carlile
-with a desire to become a bookseller. The story of Lackington beginning
-with a stall encouraged him. He resolved to set a good example in the
-trade of political pamphlets. Finding the sale of the _Black Dwarf_ very
-low, he borrowed L1 from his employer, and invested it in one hundred
-_Dwarfs_, and on the 9th of March, 1817, he sallied forth from the
-manufactory, with his stock in his handkerchief, to commence the trade
-of bookselling. He traversed the metropolis in every direction to get
-newsvendors to sell the _Dwarf_, and called every day to see how they
-sold. He inquired also after _Cobbett's Register_, and Sherwin's
-_Republican_, but finding that they did not want pushing, he took none
-of those round. Indeed, he refused to avail himself of the profit he
-could have made by taking _Cobbett's Register_ because it did not go far
-enough.(1) He carried the _Dwarf_ round several weeks, walking thirty
-miles a day, for a profit of fifteen and eighteen pence. At length an
-information was lodged against the publisher, and Mr. Steill was
-arrested. Carlile at once offered to take his place.
-
- 1. Repub, vol. xi. p. 102.
-
-Mr. Wooler, however, arranged the matter, and Carlile's offer was
-declined Mr. Sherwin, then a young man, (formerly keeper of South-well
-Bridewell, Nottinghamshire,) editing the _Republican_, perceived
-Carlile's value, and offered him the publishing of his paper, which he
-accepted. Carlile guaranteed Mr. Sherwin against arrest, which left him
-free to be bold without danger. The shop on which he now entered was
-183, Fleet Street, which Mr. Cobbett afterwards occupied. Carlile's
-first ideas of politics were, that neither writers, printers, nor
-publishers were bold enough; and he now commenced to set the example he
-thought wanted. 'I did not then see,' he said, in the decline of his
-life, 'what my experience has since taught me that the greatest
-despotism ruling the press is the popular ignorance. I made the
-calculation, which has been an error embittering my whole public life,
-that the entire people would assist and applaud an attempt, however
-humble, to set the press free. I have found myself like our
-parliamentary reformers idolizing a virtue of the imagination not yet
-brought into existence. I correctly made the calculation of having to
-pass through five or six years' imprisonment, to appease the angered
-authorities of having defied their will; but I had not calculated that,
-after having conquered the authorities, by self-sacrifice, the greater
-difficulty would remain, of having to conquer the ignorance and vice of
-the people, by still more painful sacrifices.'
-
-His first step was a resistance to the attempt of the poet laureat,
-Southey, to suppress the sale of his early Poem, 'Wat Tyler.' He sold
-twenty-five thousand of that poem in 1817.
-
-The second was a prosecution, defence, and imperfect verdict gained
-against Thomas Jonathan Wooller.
-
-The third was the reprint of the political works of Thomas Paine, by
-himself and Mr. Sherwin.
-
-The fourth was the trials and acquittals of William Hone, which Carlile
-forced on, by reprinting those suppressed political squibs called 'The
-Parodies on the Book of Common Prayer.'
-
-The Parodies cost him eighteen weeks' imprisonment in the King's Bench
-Prison, from which he was liberated with out trial, on the acquittals of
-William Hone.
-
-By the end of the year 1818 he had published the Theological Works of
-Thomas Paine. The prosecutions instituted induced him to go on printing
-other similar works, such as the 'Doubts of Infidels,' 'Watson Refuted,'
-'Palmer's Principles of Nature,' 'The God of the Jews,' &c. &c. By the
-month of October, 1819, he had at least six indictments pending against
-him. Two of the indictments were tried from the 12th to the 16th of
-October, and verdicts obtained against him. He was committed to the
-King's Bench Prison, and on the 16th of November sentenced to fifteen
-hundred pounds fine, and three years imprisonment in Dorchester Goal. In
-the middle of the night he was handcuffed, and driven off between two
-armed officers to Dorchester, a distance of one hundred and twenty
-miles.
-
-The first thing he did, at the close of his trial, was to print the 'Age
-of Reason,' in twopenny sheets, as part of the report of the trial,
-having taken care to read the whole in defence. Of these he sold more in
-a month than of the volumes in a-year. For this publication, a
-prosecution was instituted against Mrs. Carlile, but was dropped on her
-declining the sale. She was not however long unmolested.
-
-Under pretence of seizing for Mr. Carlile's fines, the sheriff, with a
-writ of _levari facias_, from the Court of King's Bench, took possession
-of his house, furniture, stock in trade, and closed the shop. It was
-thus held, from the 16th of November to the 24th of December. Rent
-became due and it was then emptied.
-
-Under Mr. C.'s desire Mrs. Carlile renewed a business, in January 1820,
-with what could be scraped together from the unseized wreck of their
-property. In February she was arrested; but the first indictment failed
-through a flaw in the verdict. She was immediately proceeded against by
-the Attorney-General, and became her husband's fellow-prisoner in
-Dorchester Gaol in February 1821, after having done good service in the
-shop for a-year.
-
-Carlile's sister Mary Ann succeeded Mrs. Carlile in the management of
-the business, but was also immediately prosecuted. The first indictment
-failed in this case, by the honesty of one of the jurymen. In the second
-the judge (Best) suppressed the defence. By the month of November, 1821,
-his sister was also a prisoner in Dorchester Gaol, and under a fine of
-five hundred pounds.
-
-In the course of the year, 1821, a new association had been formed,
-called the "Constitutional Association." It asked for subscription to
-pay the expenses of prosecuting the assistants of his business. Six
-thousand pounds were subscribed, and the Duke of Wellington saw fit to
-put his name with his money, at the head of the list. Carlile's sister's
-trial was the first check the Association received. The unsuccessful
-prosecution of Thomas Dolby, the second. Then came a troop of assistants
-to the encounter: to wit, Susanna Wright, George Beer, John Barkley,
-Humphrey Boyle, Joseph Rhodes, William Holmes, and John Jones. All
-these, save Jones, sustained terms of imprisonment, from six months to
-two years; but they succeeded in breaking down the "Constitutional
-Association."
-
-Then came James Watson and William Tunbridge, both meeting imprisonment.
-
-In the month of February, 1822, Mrs. Wright being then in possession of
-the house, the very week that Mr. Peel had taken possession of the Home
-Office, a second seizure was made of the house and stock of 55, Fleet
-Street, and the house finally wrested from Carlile. This was done on the
-pretence of satisfying the fines; but neither from this nor the former
-seizure was a farthing allowed in the abatement of the fines, and
-Carlile was detained in Dorchester Gaol to the end of the sixth year,
-three years' imprisonment having been taken in lieu of the fines.
-
-Joseph Trust was the only person prosecuted in 1823, and the Lord Chief
-Justice Abbott intimated that enough had been done; but in May, 1824,
-there came a new rage for prosecutions from the government, when Charles
-Sanderson, Thomas Jefferies, William Haley, William Campion, Richard
-Hassell. Michael O'Connor, William Cochrane, John Clarke, John
-Christopher, and Thomas Riley Perry, were severally arrested, and the
-last nine imprisoned, through various periods, from six months to three
-years.
-
-Two years Mrs. Carlile was kept in Dorchester Gaol: so was his sister,
-a-year having been taken for her L500 fine. After this it was reported,
-that the Cabinet, had, in council acknowledged Carlile invincible in the
-course of moral resistance which he had taken, and no more persons were
-arrested from his shop, while no one of his publications had been
-suppressed.
-
-His imprisonment in Dorchester Gaol was in some respects, severe. The
-first magisterial order was that he should be led into the open air only
-as a caged animal, to be exhibited to the gaze of the passing curious,
-half an hour each day, or an hour every other day, or as the gaoler
-might be pleased. This, and similar orders caused him to pass two years
-and a-half in his chamber, without going into the open air.
-
-When he came to trial in 1819, he had no clear understanding of the
-subject of his defence, it was compiled from the pleadings of others for
-toleration and free discussion. In this mental state he entered
-Dorchester Gaol. He had taken the impression from the hint of an aged
-political friend, that all the evils of mankind rooted in the
-superstition and the consequent priestcraft practised upon them, that he
-resolved to devote the solitude of his imprisonment to the study of
-religious mysteries, and fearlessly and faithfully to make the
-revelation for the common good of man. His defence, on his first three
-days' trial, alarmed the Emperor Alexander of Russia, who issued an
-Ukase, forbidding any printed report of it from being brought into his
-territory. His first defence was much interrupted; his second was
-entirely suppressed.
-
-When he was liberated from Dorchester Gaol, in 1826, the freedom of the
-press was complete, as far as government or aristocratical societies
-were concerned. His shopmen were detained to complete their sentences of
-three years' imprisonment, not much to the political merit of Sir Robert
-Peel, who gave up not a day in either case, save that of a bad young
-man, who had unprincipledly intruded himself among them. To honest
-opposition he yielded nothing, but was, in every sense of the character,
-an inveterate persecutor.
-
-Though the freedom of the press was accomplished in 1829, something more
-remained to be accomplished, which was the freedom of public oral
-discussion; and on this object Carlile set his thoughts.
-
-When Mr. Taylor was prosecuted and imprisoned, in 1828, Carlile was
-called into action in his new character. He immediately converted a
-large room in his house, 62, Fleet Street, into a Sunday School of Free
-Discussion, and introduced a public debate on all useful political
-subjects on the Sabbath Day. This had not been done before by any one
-anywhere. By a subscription he got Mr. Taylor well supported in prison,
-and on his liberation accompanied him to Cambridge, as an infidel
-Missionary, to challenge the University to public discussion. They
-passed from Cambridge to Liverpool, presenting a printed circular of
-public challenge to every priest on the road. One only accepted it, the
-Rev. David Thom, of Liverpool, who quailed at the very onset, and
-withdrew. This was done in 1829.
-
-In 1830 he sought a larger sphere of action for public meetings than his
-own dwelling-house, and engaged a series of buildings and theatres
-called the Rotunda, in Blackfriars Road. Soon after he gained possession
-of this building, the second French Revolution broke out, which gave a
-new impetus to political feeling in London. Giving to every man liberty
-of speech in his theatres, the Rotunda was attended bv all the public
-men of note out of parliament; and the public meetings there became so
-frequent and so large, that the government took alarm, and the prophecy
-of the day was, that the Rotunda would cause a Revolution in England.
-While the Tories remained in office, they did not molest him, but the
-Whigs no sooner took office, than they very foully made war on him, and
-caused him thirty-two months imprisonment in the Compter of the City of
-London.
-
-The Rev. Robert Taylor was also prosecuted under the Whig
-Administration, and filled out two years in Horse-monger Lane Gaol, for
-his preaching in the Rotunda.
-
-In 1834 and 1835, Carlile passed ten weeks in the same Compter, for
-resistance to the payment of Church Rates; making his total of
-imprisonment nine years and four months.
-
-These church-rates were assessed upon his house, 62, Fleet Street. When
-his goods were seized, he retaliated by taking out the two front windows
-and placing therein two effigies--one of a bishop, and the other of a
-distraining officer. After a time, he added a devil, who was linked
-arm-in-arm with his Grace. Such crowds were attracted, that public
-business was impeded. Eventually, Mr. Carole was indicted for a
-nuisance. The court was less virulent than before: it was externally
-courteous. He defended himself in a speech of coherency and good sense,
-but was found guilty, and ultimately sentenced to pay a fine of 40s. to
-the King, and give sureties in L200 (himself in L100, and two others in
-L50 each), for good behaviour for three years. The spirit in which he
-met this award was characteristic of the veteran martyr.
-
-'They have sentenced me' said he, 'to three years' imprisonment. So much
-for their leniency! It is a mockery to say that I may, if I please,
-purchase my liberty. I cannot do it. I shall have more liberty in prison
-than in walking the streets at the discretion of one set of men, and at
-the hazard of L100 penalty to two others. It is a case in which I will
-not interfere to abate one hour of the imprisonment. When the gates are
-open to me I will walk out, but I will not pay or do anything to procure
-release.'(1) And he wrote to Mr. Cope, keeper of Newgate, to desire that
-he would get him removed to the Compter, and he quietly announced next
-week that he had been removed to his old room.'
-
- 1. _A Scourge_, No. 12, pp. 89, 90.
-
-Before sentence he made a deposition in court. As this was his last
-imprisonment, I quote the concluding words of this deposition. They show
-the temper in which the dying lion shook his mane.
-
-'And deponent further saith, that in case the court should think a
-penalty necessary, this deponent has no other property from which he can
-pay a fine than printed books; and from the political business in which
-this deponent is involved, he cannot reasonably ask any other person to
-become his sureties, that his future proceedings may not be construed
-into political offence; not but that this deponent is anxious to live in
-peace and amity with all men, _but that there do exist many political
-and moral evils which this deponent will, through life, labour to
-abate.'_
-
-This was the tone of his entire career. When in 1819, a law was proposed
-by Castlereagh, to inflict banishment upon him for a second offence, he
-wrote:--'In some cases, this power of banishment might amount to a
-deprivation of life; but for my own part, I think nothing of it, and
-hope to show, that it will not have the least tendency to change my
-course.'(2) 'Indictments and warrants have never affected me--they have
-been the life of my business.' He was present at the 'Manchester
-massacre,' and escaped narrowly falling a victim, first to the soldiers,
-and afterwards to the police, who let him pass, not knowing his name.
-The danger he ran on all hands was imminent. On the morning when the
-government chose to reveal the Thistlewood plot of their own concoction,
-they arranged that their agents of the vice society should arrest Mrs.
-Carlile,(3) to associate, as far as possible, his family in that
-proceeding. Not only were parties inculpated without fault, but tried
-without defence. The humble advocate was bullied into the abandonment of
-his political client, and the powerful one was bribed. Mr. Cooper was
-frowned into silence and threatened. Mr. Cross obtained a silk gown for
-his _defence_ of Brandreth and Mr. Justice Best won the same distinction
-by his _defence_ of Despard. So virulent were the rulers of that day
-that Peel refused to liberate Mrs. Carlile after thirteen months
-detention, though in daily expectation of accouchment which might occur
-at an hour when assistance could not be had.(4) In addressing Mrs.
-Gaunt, of Manchester, Mrs. Carlile observed in reference to the position
-in which she was placed, 'My spirits and strength are good, or I should
-have everything to dread in childbirth in such a place as this
-[Dorchester Gaol], where humanity is a marketable commodity, and where,
-what is still worse, I am one of those excluded from the market at any
-price.(5)
-
- 1. A Scourge, No. 12, p. 90.
- 2. Republican, vol. ii. p. 5. Idem. p. 60.
- 3. Republican, vol. ii. p 254.
- 4. Republican, vol. v. p. 301.
- 5. Republican, vol. v. p. 608.
-
-Of the risks Carlile ran from espionage, he has detailed many instances.
-I quote one passage in his own words. He is speaking of Paine:--'I
-revere,' says he, 'the name of Thomas Paine; the image of his honest
-countenance is constantly before me. I have him in bust [now in
-possession of Mr. Watson], in whole length figure; for which I may thank
-the late government of Liverpool, Castlereagh, and Sidmouth, who
-appointed Edwards the spy to this task, he, who when he failed to get me
-hanged, caused the death of Thistlewood, and others. Edwards occupied
-_six months_ of 1819, in excuse of making this statute to keep at my
-heels. He followed me closely until I was in Dorchester Gaol. There I
-escaped him; and then, immediately, he was put on other game with which
-he succeeded. The very men that he hanged, he brought about me in the
-King's Bench Prison, offering me their lives, if I would use them for
-any purpose. I had then, a clear sighted purpose of my own, which these
-men did not understand. At that age I should have had no objection to a
-little physical force fighting; but I was sober enough to see its
-impracticability, and thus I frustrated the acquaintance, which
-Liverpool, Castlereagh, Sidmouth, and their spy Edwards, wished to bring
-me into with Jack Ketch. I found Edwards a tradesman in Fleet Street, as
-an artist, before I got there, and I so became his next door neighbour.
-He succeeded, in occupation, the shop which William Hone had, and where
-he published his famous Parodies. When I came to No. 55, in January,
-1819, Edwards had been two years at No. 56, so I had little ground to
-suspect his spyship.
-
-I had known him as a customer through that time. He pleaded that his
-father had been an old politician: nor was my suspicion excited by his
-having a brother in the Hatton Garden Police. When I entered upon No.
-55, he pleaded what a great convenience it would be to him in business,
-if I would allow him to lodge in my house, as he had a shop next door
-without a dwelling-house. I had almost yielded; but the shrewd
-suspicions of Mrs. Carlile, re-acting upon his villainous countenance,
-put it aside. He was then placed in an upper story lodging of the
-opposite house, (where was born my statue of Paine) in the under part of
-which was placed a man of the name of John Carlisle, a bookseller, to
-oppose me, in conflict with another class of publications. This was the
-work of the government, superintended by their agent, John Reeve.
-Edwards did not scruple to talk to me about meeting the Archbishop of
-Canterbury in Windsor Castle; but left me to infer, that it was about
-his art as a modeller, not as a spy. I can now see, that he was placed
-in Hone's old shop, to keep out a political publisher; and I have since
-divined a deep history of the spy system of that time, which I never
-feared, because I had nothing morally to fear in what I purposed to do.
-One, I have marked, as an old acquaintance, a man connected with the
-Stamp Office, very regularly at my lectures for years. From, or in the
-house of John Carlisle, by Edwards, was concocted the plot called the
-Cato Street Conspiracy. In beginning, middle, and end, that was wholly
-the work of Lords Castlereagh and Sidmouth, with Edwards as an agent.
-After the finish of that political tragedy, Edwards was provided for in
-one of the colonies, it has been said, the Cape of Good Hope. John
-Carlisle dwindled into great poverty in Fleet Street, was made permanent
-constable, and at last very strangely got his house burned down, just
-after I came triumphantly from six years' imprisonment in Dorchester
-Gaol, and established myself _ruinously_ in splendid No. 62.'(1)
-
-Yet it was in such times and amid such dangers that Carlile formed the
-resolution, and adhered to it to the day of his death, never to cease
-any publication so long as any prosecution or intimidation menaced it.
-
-Placing himself always where danger was to be braved, his position was
-from the first prominent, and attracted to him many leading political
-characters, who saw in him a vicarious sacrifice for that freedom they
-were willing to enjoy, if it could be done without paying so troublesome
-a price as the ministers of that day charged for it. But, as the danger
-grew imminent, they began to pull him back and condemn his open
-conduct.(2) Cobbett at first said, 'You have done your duty bravely, Mr.
-Carlile; if every one had done like you, it would have been all very
-well.'(3) But afterwards he censured him without measure. Wooler, whom
-Carlile offered to save, said that the publication of Paine's works
-would put a stop to all the political writings of the day. But whatever
-ground there appeared for these fears, a wise publicist should have
-given Carlile all possible support, since he _ought to have_ triumphed
-in his course. Major Cartwright deprecated the republication of Paine's
-works as mischievous, to flying in the face of Juries; that when a jury
-had once declared these works to be libels, the very _errors_ of that
-jury ought to be respected. Yet against this dictum of the influential
-veteran, Reformer, Carlile contended. He encountered greater obstacles
-among such friends than among his enemies. It requires more courage to
-fight against friends than against foes. Carlile illustrated the remark
-of Mr. Miall, that 'martyrdom in the past tense is madness in the
-present.' Then the Reformers Degan to call themselves 'Christian
-Reformers,' 'Religious Reformers,' and by other safe conventional names
-to distinguish themselves from 'Carlile and his party.'(4) No man should
-lightly compromise his party by a dangerous step. Carlile is not
-amenable to blame on this account. He took a necessary step for general
-progress, and his triumph justified his penetration. A weaker man than
-Carlile would not have been justified in the course which he took, as a
-weaker man would have failed. But Carlile was a Buonarotti.
-
- 1. Christian Warrior, pp. 27-28.
- 2. Repub. vol. ii. p. 257.
- 3. Repub. v. pp 283-4
- 4. Christian Warrior, p. 10
-
-Such was the difficulty of obtaining the forbidden books, in which he
-set the example of dealing, that twelve guineas were offered for twelve
-copies of the Age of Reason,(1) and L5 for five suppressed twopenny
-Tracts.(2) In order to destroy a trade which they could not intimidate,
-the Government arrested his shopmen with a rapidity intended to exhaust
-them. To defeat this intention, books were sold through an aperture; so
-that the buyer was unable to identify the seller.(3) Afterwards they
-were sold by clockwork.(4) On a dial was written the name of every
-publication for sale. The purchaser entered, and turned the hand of the
-dial to the book he wanted, which, on depositing his money, dropped down
-before him without the necessity of any one speaking. The Vice and
-Constitutional Associations we both defied and defeated; notwithstanding
-that the honoured name of Wilberforce was found on the list of the
-members of one of the societies, and that of the Duke of Wellington
-headed the other. The circulation of Carlile's books were quadrupled,
-and a cheering crowd around his shop windows perpetually testified their
-approval of his courage, and at public dinners in the provinces, the
-health was drank of 'Carlile's invisible shopman.' Martyrdom, he said,
-was contagious, and could he keep it up, he should glory in a perpetual
-sessions at the Old Bailey. The result of his course he expresses with
-honourable exultation. 'In this country the Age of Reason was spellbound
-for twenty years, with the exception of a few copies put forth by Daniel
-Isaac Eaton. From December, 1818, to December, 1822, I had sent into
-circulation near 20,000 copies. Let corruption rub out that if she can,
-as Mr. Cobbett said his 40,000 Registers.' By the month of June, 1824,
-in the fifth year of his imprisonment, his calculation was verified; the
-press was freed, and the Government, who had beaten Napoleon in a
-physical conflict, was beaten by Carlile in a moral struggle--so
-impotent is power to overcome the right, when brave men champion the
-right.
-
- 1. Repub. vol. ii. p. 183.
- 2. Christian Warrior, p. 29.
- 3. Repub. vol. v. p. 56.
- 4. Repub. vol. v. p. 264.
-
-Carlile was liberally supported, and found powerful friends. The third
-and fourth years of his imprisonment produced subscriptions to the
-amount of L500 per year, and for a long period his profits over the
-counter were L50 per week. An idea of his occasional business may be
-formed from the circumstance that once when a trial was pending, Mrs.
-Carlile took L600 in the shop in one week. When he came from Dorchester
-Gaol one friend lent him L1,000 to extend his business. But he got out
-of money as fast as it came, and his ambition leading him to give the
-greatest possible effect to his advocacy, he contracted liabilities at
-62, Fleet Street, which embarrassed him. Indeed, continually torn from
-his home by government prosecutions, he had ill opportunities of
-maintaining business habits. The latter part of his life was passed in
-the vicissitudes and anxieties of fallen fortunes.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER III. THE EDITOR AND THE ATHEIST
-
-
-During Carlile's imprisonment in Dorchester Gaol, he edited the
-_Republican_, a Weekly Journal, which he conducted through fourteen
-volumes. Its circulation reached at one time as high as 15,000. He saw
-that a work had to be done, and he prepared to do it; if he could not do
-it so well as he could wish, he resolved to do it as well as he was
-able. He offered his ardour in the public cause as an apology for the
-want of a grammatical education. Drawn into authorship by the force of
-events, he hardly knew in what grammatical accuracy consisted, till he
-felt his own deficiency through the criticisms of his correspondents,
-some of whom did not hesitate to tell him, that he was unfit for a
-public writer. This state of things continued till the fourth volume of
-the _Republican_, where he wisely resolved to put his prison hours to
-educational uses.(1) But his editorial duties were his best education,
-and this he admitted; 'I give,' said he, in 1825, 'a receipt to the
-criticism of my friends upon my writings for the better part of the
-knowledge that I now possess.'(2) Some of Carlile's correspondents were
-men from whom it was an honour to receive direction. From Francis Place
-he gleaned all his ideas of Political Economy, and what Carlile called
-the 'all-surpassing question of the regulation of the numbers of the
-people.' It was from Jeremy Bentham, through Mr. Place, that he was
-instructed not to attempt the building of any system of his own, but to
-go on pulling down existing errors, every item of success in which, was
-in fact, so much good building.(3) In Carlile's last days he spoke of
-Francis Place as 'his old tutor who had a hard task to beat all the
-superstition out of him.'
-
- 1. See Repub. vol. iv. p. 191.
- 2. Lion, vol. i. p. 373.
-
- 4. Christian Warrior, p. 13.
-
-While others were calling Carlile 'Atheist and Infidel,' Place was
-calling him 'the most, obstinately superstitious fellow alive;' but
-always paid him the compliment of admitting that he was worth the
-trouble, and that if he could be set right he would keep right.(1)
-
-When Carlile's days of thinking began, he began with himself. He knew
-himself well, and this was the source of his strength. Like Cobbett he
-could write always well of himself. His first study was to form a mind
-of his own on the basis of the best known principles.(2) Carlile began
-to write a man. Nature made him for an agitator. He had an iron will and
-limitless self-reliance. I have been told by one who advised him
-frequently, that no man could control him. His first papers in the
-_Republican_, are thoughtful, manly, self-possessed, nervous, and
-resolute. Sherwin preceded Carlile in the publication of a work, called
-the _Republican_, but, after the fourth number, it was changed into
-'_Sherwin's Weekly Political Register_,' on the ground that people were
-afraid of its name. But Carlile resumed its title, and selected those
-articles only which had the real names and addresses of the author
-appended. He called upon the friends of his opinions to avow themselves,
-and declared himself ambitious of incurring martyrdom, if martyrdom was
-necessary to the cause of liberty.(3)
-
-Carlile's political and religious prototype was Paine. Carlile always
-wrote with manifest purpose, and seems to have emulated the plain vigour
-of Cobbett and the invective of Junius.
-
-Carlile's habits were marked by great abstemiousnesss. Seldom taking
-animal food,(4) he refused wine(5) when offered a dozen at Dorchester
-Gaol, preferring good milk. He was morally as well as physically
-particular. In the rules of the Deistical Society, he provided that only
-persons of good character should be eligible.(6) 'It is important to
-you, Republicans,' wrote he, from Dorchester Gaol, 'that however humble
-the advocates of your principles may be, they should exhibit a clear
-moral character to the world.'(7) He never sold a copy of any work which
-he would hesitate to read to his children.(8) He expressed a hope, when
-fairs were popular, that fairs would be put down all over the country.
-He was one of the first thus to oppose what the pious then approved.
-
- 1. Christian Warrior, p. 26.
- 2. Gauntlet, No. 8, p. 113.
- 3. Repub. No. 1, vol. i.
- 4. Repub. vol. ii. p. 148.
- 5. Repub. vol. ii. p. 234.
- 6. Repub. vol. v. ft. 31.
- 7. Repub. vol. vi. p. 3.
- 8. Repub. vol. vii. p. 36.
-
-There was no intolerance in Carlile's habits. 'I have no wish,' these
-were his words, 'to force my opinions on any man--if he wishes to have
-them, he must either buy them or challenge me to defend them; and, in
-this last instance, it must be some one whom I consider worth contending
-with, before I would open my mouth.'(1) He was of a retiring turn, and
-utterly incapable of obtruding himself, where there was the possibility
-of his not being desired. It was a sense of duty alone that made him
-brave, his moral courage was great, but it was the courage of
-conviction. Carlile was an illustration of Bulwer's remark, that courage
-in one thing, is not to be mistaken for courage in everything. He who
-opposed himself without fear to the spies of Sidmouth, and the edicts of
-Castlereagh, who singly withstood public opinion on the questions of
-Marriage and Religion, when that opinion knew no reason and no mercy, he
-felt, through his whole life, a want of fair confidence in himself, when
-addressing a public audience. Large numbers, called together by his
-name, produced in him a sense of disturbing responsibility and
-embarrassment.(2) When liberated from imprisonment in Dorchester
-Gaol--an ill discipline certainly for oratory--he trembled at committing
-his reputation to the lapses of an inexperienced tongue. His friends
-thought he would never make a speaker, but his perseverance prevailed.
-Still his efforts were irregular; sometimes he was as eloquent as the
-best, at others timidly hesitating. Probably his stolid nature wanted
-passion to excite it--some nature's, like deep waters, are only to put
-in motion by a storm. A paralytic stroke, in March 1841, affected the
-muscles of the mouth and tongue, and diminished his acquired power.
-
-Hume has said that Christian sects manifest intolerance, which increases
-in intensity the nearer their valuing creeds coincide. This has been
-true of some classes of infidels, but Carlile wisely regarded with
-favour the approximation of sects to reason. He encouraged the Rev.
-Robert Taylor's Deistical friends, because, like the Unitarians, they
-would break up some part of the superstition of other sects. His
-impression was that, 'Though not themselves free from superstition, they
-would lessen the sum total among all the sects, and, in so doing, do a
-certain amount of good.'(3)
-
- 1. Repub. vol. iv. p. 33.
- 2. Gauntlet, No. 30 p. 385.
- 3. Repub. vol. xvi. p. 130.
-
-Carlile's writings abound in instances of great political penetration:
-thus he placed on the title page of the second volume of the
-_Republican_ these words--'Liberty is the property of man: a Republic
-only can protect it.' The same volume contained his qualification ot
-equality. 'Equality,' says he, 'means not an equality of riches, but of
-rights merely.'(1) Yet the contrary is asserted to this hour.
-'Timidity,' wrote he in 1828, 'maybe seen sitting on the countenance of
-almost every Politician. He speaks and speculates with a trembling which
-generates a prejudice in others. As it is the slave who makes the
-tyrant, so it is timidity in the Politician which creates the prejudice
-of the persecutor.'(2) In words to this effect, he pourtrayed that
-conventional caution of the newspaper press, which is to this hour the
-bane of popular progress. He had a distincter conception of the part to
-be played by education in public reform, than any other agitator of his
-rank at that time. 'I have before advised your majesty,' said he, in
-dedicating vol. 12 of the _Republican_ to George IV., 'to patronise
-Mechanics' Institutions, and you will become a greater monarch than
-Buonaparte. Kings must come to this, and he will be the wisest who does
-it first and voluntarily.' Republicanism was not with Carlile, as with
-so many--politics in rags; he never divested it of efficiency and
-dignity. To one who said that his exacting L100 shares for his Book
-Company was aristocratic, he answered, 'Call it what you please, that is
-republican which is done well.'(3) Carlile took a view of the rationale
-and initiation of revolution in England as manly as it was sagacious.
-'In the beginning of my political career,' he writes, 'I had those
-common notions which the enthusiasm of youth and inexperience produces,
-that all reforms must be the work of physical force. The heat of my
-imagination shewed me everything about to be done at once. I am now
-enthusiastic, but it is in _working_ where I can work _practically_
-rather than theoretically; and though I would be the last to oppose a
-well-applied physical force, in the bringing about reforms or
-revolutions, I would be the last in advising others to rush into useless
-dangers that _I would shun, or where I would not lead_. I have long
-formed the idea that an insurrection against grievances in this country
-must, to be successful, be spontaneous and not plotted, and that all
-political conspiracies may be local and even individual evils. I
-challenge the omniscience of the Home Office to say whether I ever
-countenanced anything of the kind in word or deed. I will do nothing in
-a political point of view which cannot be done openly.'(4) There is a
-strong vein of political wisdom in all this, not yet appreciated by
-popular politicians, and this has the merit of having been written at a
-time, when (as indeed now) the maxim of English popular progressive
-politics is not to find how much can be done _within the law_, but how
-much can be done _without it_ and _against it_: a policy which dooms
-Democracy to ceaseless antagonisms in the attainment of its claims, and
-will, if persisted in, fetter it with impotence when the victory is won.
-
- 1. Repub. vol. xiv. p. 105.
- 2. Lion, vol. i. p. 3.
- 3. Repub. vol. xii. p. 3.
- 4. Repub. vol. xiv. pp. 5, 6.
-
-The progress of Carlile's convictions respecting religion is evident and
-honourable to his thoughtfulness. He was twenty-seven years old before
-he conceived any error in the article religion. His attention was first
-drawn to the fact by finding that the suppressed writings of his day
-chiefly related to religion. When the Attorney General first called him
-profane, for publishing Hone's Parodies, he was a very different man.
-Through several volumes of the _Republican_ he was a Deist only. But
-reflection led him onwards step by step. A first indication is in these
-words--'Paine, in his lifetime, appears to have been the advocate of a
-Deistical church, but such an attempt shall ever find my reprobation, as
-unnecessary and mischievous.'(1) The reason he assigned was, that
-science alone could lead to true devotion, and lectures on science were,
-therefore, the proper worship. In his first controversy with Cobbett, he
-avowed himself, as Mr. Owen always has, a believer in a great
-controlling power of Nature. But at this point, Carlile's belief had
-grown practical in its negation, as he wrote, 'I advocate the abolition
-of all religions, without setting up anything new of the kind.'(2) By
-this time he had become a confirmed materialist, and soon after, defined
-mind as a portion of the organization of the human body, acted upon by
-the atmosphere and the body jointly, and dependent upon a peculiarity in
-the organization, in the same manner as voice and life itself.(3) The
-definitions he gave, in 1822, of Religion and Morality were essentially
-the same as those since rendered more elegantly by Emerson. Carlile
-defined Morality as a rule of conduct relating to man and man--Religion
-as a rule of conduct, relating not to man, but to something which he
-fancies to be his Maker.(4) Next he observed, 'I may have said that the
-changes observed in phenomenon argue the existence of an active power in
-the universe, but I have again and again renounced the notion of that
-power being intelligent or designing.(5) 'It is not till since my
-imprisonment that I have avowed myself Atheist.'(6)
-
- 1. Repub. vol. iv. p. 220.
- 2. Repub. vol. v. p. 201.
- 3. Repub. vol. vi.
- 4. Repub. vol. vi. p. 249.
- 5. Repub. vol. vii. p. 26.
- 6. Repub. vol. vii. p. 397.
-
-He reached the climax of his Atheism on the title page to his tenth
-volume of the _Republican_, where he declared 'There is no such a God in
-existence as any man has preached; nor any kind of God and this
-declaration was so far carried out in detail, as to exclude from the
-_Republican_ _God, nature, mind, soul_, and _spirit_, as words without
-proto types.(1)
-
-The two extremes of Carlile's career exhibit a coincidence of terms, but
-betray to the initiated observer a radical progress and distinction of
-opinion. In his first work, he wrote, 'Science is the Antichrist;'(2) in
-his last, 'Science is the Christ.'(3) When he wrote the first he was a
-Deist, when he wrote the last he was an Atheist.
-
-We commonly find that extreme political enthusiasts in youth, pass, in
-old age, like Sir Francis Burdett, into extreme Conservatism: but it is
-a phenomenon in intellect, that Carlile, whose convictions, not his
-passions, led him to hold positive materialism, should lapse into a more
-than Swedenborgian mysticism. 'I have discovered,' said he, 'that the
-names of the Old Testament, either apparently of persons or places, are
-not such names as the religious mistakes have constructed, but names of
-states of mind manifested in the human race, and, in this sense, the
-Bible may be scientifically read as a treatise on spirit, soul, or mind,
-and not as a history of time, people, and place.'(4) To insist on the
-utility of such a theory, except as a mere theory of theological
-explanation (useful as explaining it away altogether), was very strange
-in Carlile. It seems like the artifice of a beaten man to conciliate an
-implacable enemy. But Carlile was no beaten man. A few months only
-before his death, he wrote to Sir Robert Peel, in reference to the
-imprisonment of Mr. Southwell and myself, avowing his determination to
-renew martyrdom, if Sir Robert persisted in reviving persecution. But
-Carlile did make the capital error of proposing to explain science under
-Christian terms, which was giving to science, which is universal, a
-sectarian character. Hence, he was found using the words God, soul,
-Christ, etc., with all the pertinacity of a divine, and scandalising his
-friends by taking out his diploma as a preacher. In this, he manifested
-his old courage. He was still true to himself, and was still an Atheist,
-but veiling his materialism under a Swedenborgian nomenclature.
-
- 1. Repub. vol. xiv. p, 770.
- 2. Preface, p. 14. to vol. i. of Repub.
- 3. Christian Warrior.
- 4. Christian Warrior, p. 30.
-
-But the adoption of Swedenborgian terminology was a virtual recantation,
-and Carlile lost caste by it as did Lawrence. Lawrence gained no
-practice, and Carlile no influence. Indeed, I never knew any of these
-virtual recantations to be believed, or even respected by the world, who
-forced them on. A real recantation I never knew beyond this, that
-Atheists have acceded to Pantheism, or perhaps, relapsed into
-Unitarianism. But they have always remained Rationalists. None that 1
-have known and watched--not even the weakest, have fallen into
-Evangelism. Carlile, by his new course, exposed himself to be distrusted
-by his less observing but warm friends, and he conciliated no foe among
-the Christians. Carlile, however, was no hypocrite, nor did he take this
-new course for venal ends. He was as in all things else conscientious.
-Still his course was one of choice, not of necessity. He was free as
-ever to expound science, as science, or to expound it in the language of
-religion. He adopted the mystic course. This was his error of judgment,
-not an alteration of conviction. If I may explain the paradox of his
-conduct in a paradox of terms, this is the expression of it:--From being
-a Material Atheist, he became a Christian Atheist. His definition of a
-Christian at this stage, was 'a man purged from error.'(1) That this
-course was no more than a mode of inculcation of his favourite Atheism
-is evident, intrinsically, and also from the fact that he was so much a
-realist, as to still avow his detestation of fiction; and so coherently
-did he keep to this text, that he never ceased to make war on poetry,
-theatres, and romance, from the commencement of his career down to the
-last number of the _Christian Warrior_.
-
-But the condemnation I pass upon the philosophy of his latter days shall
-not be exparte. I subjoin that passage in which he has most powerfully
-stated his own case.
-
-'The first problem in human or social reform is _through what medium
-must it be made_. In what is called a religious state of society, that
-is, a state of idolatry and superstition, can reform be carried out
-through any other medium than its religion! My experience, added to the
-best advice I could find, is, that, with a religious people, religion is
-the only medium of reform. If I were opposed in that problem, I could
-successfully defend my side of it. The Charter shall change the
-constituency of the House of Commons, without improving the House.
-Socialism may create 20 Tytherlies, but it has still done nothing for
-the nation. But 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.
-It is the substitution of the known for the unknown, the real for the
-unreal, the certain for the uncertain. Religion is the erroneous mind's
-chief direction. It must be corrected by and through the medium which it
-most respects. It rejects all other opposing conditions, and increases
-its tenacity for its errors. To reform religion by science, is to
-regenerate fallen man, and to save a sinking country.
-
- 1. Cheltenham Free Press, Any. 1842.
- 2. Christian Warrior, p. 31,
-
-There is great wisdom in this language. The question is, _how_ shall the
-problem be solved? In this Carlile erred, as he did with the theory of
-personalities, which he conceived with equal ability. I conceive that
-Science is independent of Theology in its essence and its terms.
-Religion may be brought to science by adroit interpretations, and
-improved in character and significance; but Science can never be brought
-to Religion without being 'paltered in a double sense,' and lowered in
-dignity and intelligibility.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER IV. HIS DEATH AND CHARACTER
-
-
-Carlile's death took place on this wise. He had come up from Enfield to
-Bouvene Street, Fleet Street, to live on the old field of war, and edit
-the _Christian Warrior._ While a van of goods were unpacking at the
-door, one of his boys strayed out and went away. Carlile was fond of his
-children, and he set out anxiously to seek his child. The excitement
-ended in death. On Carlile's return he was seized with a fatal illness.
-Bronchitus, which he was told by his medical advisers would soon destroy
-him, if he came to live in the city, set in, and the power of speech
-soon left him. Mr. Lawrence, the author of the famous 'Lectures on Man,'
-whom Carlile always preferred in his illnesses, was sent for. He
-promptly arrived, but pronounced recovery hopeless; and Richard Carlile
-expired February 10,1843, in his fifty-third year.
-
-Wishing to be useful in death as in life, Carlile devoted his body to
-dissection. Always above superstition, in practice as well as in theory,
-his wish had long been--that his body, if he died first, should be given
-to Mr. Lawrence. At that time the prejudice against dissection was
-almost universal, and only superior persons rose above it. His wish was
-complied with by his family, and the post mortem examination was
-published in the _Lancet_ of that year.
-
-Carlile's burial took place at Kensal Green Cemetry. He was laid in the
-consecrated part of the ground--nearly opposite the Mausoleum of the
-Ducrow family. At the interment, a clergyman appeared, and with the
-usual want of feeling and of delicacy, persisted in reading the Church
-service over him. His eldest son Richard, who represented his sentiments
-as well as his name, very properly protested against the proceeding, as
-an outrage upon the principles of his father and the wishes of the
-family. Of course the remonstrance was disregarded, and Richard, his
-brothers, and their friends left the ground. The clergyman then
-proceeded to call Carlile 'his dear departed brother,' and to declare
-that he 'had died in the sure and certain hope of a glorious
-resurrection.'
-
-Carlile left six children--Richard, Alfred, and Thomas Paine, by his
-wife Mrs. Jane Carlile; and Julian, Theophila, and Hypatia, by 'Isis,'
-the lady to whom he united himself after his separation from his wife.
-
-Mrs. Carlile survived him only four months. She died in the same house,
-No. 1, Bouverie Street, and was buried in the same grave. It is hoped
-that a suitable monument will soon mark the resting place of England's
-stoutest champion of free discussion, political and religious.
-
-All stories about the recantation of Carlile, to which the pious have
-given currency, are necessarily false, as he was never able to recant.
-He lost his power of speaking long before death approached so near as to
-suggest recanting to him. But death had no power to make his strong
-spirit quail at ideal terror or to shake the firm convictions of his
-understanding. His dying words, therefore, are the last which he
-addressed to the public in his _Christian Warrior_, and they were
-these--'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 on
-covenant. They must be uprooted for public and individual safety_.'(1)
-
- 1. Christian Warrior, No. 4 p. 83.
-
-These words which he published thirteen days only before his death, are
-those which he, doubtless, would have pronounced in his last hour, had
-consciousness and strength remained with him.
-
-In the early portion of my imprisonment in Gloucester Gaol, the Rev.
-Samuel Jones, in order to move me by fear to the retraction of my
-convictions, told me before a class of prisoners that 'the notorious
-Richard Carlile was dead, and had died horribly; but he had made what
-amends he could by recanting his dreadful principles on his
-death-bed--had denounced his infidel colleagues, and implored mercy of
-God. You see, therefore,' added the Rev. libeller to me, 'what you have
-to look forward to.' Great, however, was the Rev. Mr. Jones'
-astonishment and confusion, when a short time after, Mr. Carlile himself
-walked into my cell, alive and well, to offer me his generous sympathy
-and advice to enable me the better to combat the old enemies of free
-thought and free speech. The usual stories told of infidel recantations
-are about as well founded as was this fabrication concerning Carlile, by
-the Rev. Samuel Jones, visiting magistrate of Gloucester Gaol.
-
-But _why_ should Carlile recant! Why should the unbeliever fear to die!
-There are four things on which Christians hang the terrors which usually
-haunt their death-beds. Let us examine them.
-
- 1. The story of the Fall.
- 2. The rejection of the offer of salvation.
- 3. The sin of unbelief.
- 4. The vengeance of God.
-
-1. If man fell in the garden of Eden--who placed him there! God! Who
-placed the temptation there? God! Who gave him an imperfect nature--a
-nature of which it was foreknown it would fall! God! To what does this
-amount!
-
-If a parent placed his poor child near a fire at which he knew it would
-be burnt to death, or near a well into which he knew it would fall and
-be drowned, would any power of custom prevent our giving speech to the
-indignation of the heart, and pronouncing such a parent a miscreant! And
-can we pretend to believe God has so acted, and at the same time be able
-_to trust_ him! If God has so acted, he may so act again. This creed can
-afford no consolation in death. If he who disbelieves this dogma fears
-to die, he who believes it should fear death more.
-
-2. Salvation, it is said, is offered to the fallen. But man is not
-fallen, except on the revolting hypothesis just discussed. And before
-man can be accepted by God, he must, according to Christians, own
-himself a degraded sinner. Is salvation worth this humiliation! But man
-is not degraded. No man can be degraded by the act of another. Dishonour
-can come only by his own hands: and depravity has not come thus. Man,
-therefore, needs not this salvation. And, if he needed it, he could not
-accept it. Debarred from purchasing it himself, he must accept it as an
-act of grace. But it is not well to go even to heaven on sufferance. We
-despise the poet who is not above a patron; we despise the citizen who
-crawls before the throne; and shall God be said to have less love of
-self-respect than man! He who will consent to be saved after this
-fashion hath most need to fear that he shall perish, for he deserves it.
-
-3. Then, in what way can there be a _sin_ of unbelief? Is not the
-understanding the subject of evidence? A man, with evidence before him,
-can no more help seeing it or feeling its weight, than a man with his
-eyes or ears open can help seeing the house or tree before him, or
-hearing the sounds made around him. If a man disbelieve, it is because
-his conviction is true to his understanding. If I disbelieve a
-proposition, it is through lack of evidence; and the act is as virtuous
-(so far as virtue can belong to that which is inevitable), as the belief
-of it, when the evidence is perfect. If it is meant that a man is to
-believe, whether he sees evidence or not, it means that he is to believe
-certain things, whether true or false; in fine, that he may qualify
-himself for heaven by hypocrisy and lies. It is of no use that the
-unbeliever is told that he will be damned if he does not believe; what
-human frailty may do is another thing; but the judgment is clear, that a
-man _ought_ not to believe, nor profess to believe, what seems to him to
-be false, although he should be damned. The believer, who seeks to
-propitiate heaven by this deceit, ought to fear its wrath, not the
-unbeliever who rejects the dishonourable terms and throws himself on its
-justice.
-
-4. There is the _vengeance_ of God. But is not the savage idea destroyed
-as soon as you name it? Can God have that which man ought not to
-have--_vengeance_. The jurisprudence of earth has reformed itself--we no
-longer _punish_ absolutely; we seek the _reformation_ of the offender.
-We leave retaliation to savages; and shall we cherish in heaven an idea
-we have chased from earth? But _what_ has to be punished? Can the sins
-of man disturb the peace of God? If so, as men exist in myriads and
-action is incessant, then is God, as Jonathan Edwards has shown, the
-most miserable of beings and the _victim_ of his meanest creatures. We,
-see, therefore, that sin against God is _impossible_. All sin is finite
-and relative--all sin is sin against man. Will God punish this, which
-punishes itself? If man errs, the bitter consequences are ever with him.
-Why should he err! Does he choose the ignorance, incapacity, passion,
-and blindness, through which he errs? Why is he precipitated,
-imperfectly natured into a chaos of crime! Is not his destiny made for
-him; and shall God punish that sin which is his misfortune rather than
-his fault? shall man be condemned to misery in eternity _because_ he has
-been made wretched, and weak, and erring, in time.
-
-But if man _has_ fallen at his conscious peril--_has_ thoughtlessly
-spurned salvation--_has_ offended God--will God therefore take
-vengeance? Is God without dignity or magnanimity? If I do wrong to him,
-who does wrong to me, I come down (has not the ancient sage warned me)
-to the level of my enemy? Will God thus descend to the level of
-vindictive man! Who has not thrilled at the lofty question of Volumnia
-to Coriolanus:--
-
- 'Think'st thou it honourable for a noble man
-
- Still to remember wrongs.'
-
-Shall God be less honourable and remember the wrong done against him,
-not by his equals, but by his own frail creatures! To be unable to trust
-God is to degrade him. Those passages in the New Testament which give
-the narratives most interest and dignity, are the parables in which a
-servant is told to forgive a debt to one who had forgiven him; in which
-a brother is to be forgiven until seventy times seven (that is
-unlimitedly); and the prayer where men claim forgiveness as they have
-themselves forgiven others their trespasses. What was this but erecting
-a high moral argument against the relentlessness of future punishment of
-erring man? If, therefore, man is to forgive, shall God do less? Shall
-man be more just than God? Is there anything so grand in the life of
-Christ as his forgiving his enemies, as he expired on the cross? Was it
-God the Sufferer behaving more nobly than will God the Judge? Was this
-the magnificent teaching of fraternity to vengeful man, or is it to be
-regarded but as a sublime libel on the hereafter judgments of heaven?
-The Infidel is Infidel to error, but he believes in truth and humanity,
-and when he believes in God, he will prefer to believe that which is
-noble of him. He will be able to trust him. Holding by no conscious
-error, doing no dishonour in thought and offering, his homage to love
-and truth, why should the unbeliever fear to die! Carlile saw not less
-clearly than this, nor felt less strongly, and he knew that only those
-fear death who have never thought about it at all, or thought about it
-wrongly.
-
-Carlile's early career gave evidence of that iron hauteur which
-characterised him. In dedicating from Dorchester Gaol, his second volume
-of the _Republican_, to Sir Robert Gifford, the Attorney General of that
-day, (1820) he wrote, 'Gratitude being one of the noblest traits in the
-character of animals, both rational and irrational, _to which ever you
-may deem me allied_, I feel that I owe it to you.' Carlile taunted the
-Society for the Suppression of Vice, or as he most correctly styled it
-the Vice Society, saying that, 'next to their secretary, Pritchard, the
-lawyer, he had gained most by their existence,(1) and had sold more
-Deistical volumes in one year through their exertions than he should in
-seven, in the ordinary course of business.'(2) Carlile's cheerful
-disposition resisted the sombre influence of the dungeon, and he
-declared when Wedderbum arrived at Dorchester Gaol that he would
-'endeavour to get him chaplain, as the officiating one was so extremely
-fat that he could hardly get up to the pulpit, and when there, he was so
-long in recovering from the exertion, that he could not read the prayers
-with sufficient solemnity.(3)
-
- 1. Repub. vol. ii. p. 183.
- 2. Repub. vol. ii. p. 185.
- 3. Repub. vol. iii. p. 112.
-
-The fourth volume of the _Republican_ Carlile also dedicated to Gifford,
-the Attorney General, beginning, 'My constant and learned friend,
-between you and the Vice Society I am at loss how to pay my courtesies,
-so as to avoid jealousy. You acted nobly with my first volume. My second
-you neglected; and I had resolved to stop when I heard of your renewed
-prosecutions. I am sorry we did not understand each other better
-before.' A paragraph in the Dedication of his sixth volume to George IV.
-was in these words, 'You are not only the head of the State but of the
-Church too, and as I am an intermeddler with the matters of both, I,
-your Banishment Act notwithstanding, dedicate my volume to both heads at
-once, with the most profound hope and prayer that neither of them may
-ache after reading it.' When Carlile took notice of Mease, he thus
-addressed him--'To Mr. Thomas Mease, grocer, draper, and methodist.' The
-letter to Mease, was dated 'Dorchester Gaol, December 18, year 1822; of
-the God that was born of a woman, who was his own father, and who was
-killed to please himself. The _immortal_ god that died.' The letter
-commenced thus,--'Sir Saint and Savage.' To Mr. Dronsfield he wrote--'I
-am not humble; civility to all; servility to none is the becoming
-characteristic of manhood.'(1) Alluding to the extensive sale of Wat
-Tyler, which had such an influence on his early fortunes, Carlile
-exclaimed, 'Glory to thee, O Southey! Happy mayst thou be in singing
-hexameters to thy old Royal Master, when thou hast passed the _reality_
-as well as the _vision_ of judgment! Yes, my patron! to that best of thy
-productions, "Wat Tyler," do I owe the encouragement I first found to
-persevere.(2)
-
-Of his own Every Woman's Book, Carlile said, 'It had sustained Mr.
-Cobbett's malignity--one of the most powerful venoms which the animal
-world had produced.'(3) Carlile characterised the weak point in his own
-character with severe felicity, when speaking of others. 'Conceit,' said
-he, 'is a malady of humanity, of which some people die.'(4) These words
-might stand as the epitaph of his own public influence. The following
-passage occurred in that letter to me, alluded to in the preface. 'You,
-Southwell and others,' said he, 'are now where I once was, resting upon
-the mere flippant vulgarisms of what you and the world consent to call
-Atheistic infidelity, regulating your amount of wisdom by a critical
-contrast with other people's folly.(5) I hope we were never amenable to
-the censure with which this sentence opens: the concluding words are
-shrewd and instructive, which I repeat for the sake of those young
-gentlemen who take up infidelity as a pastime, instead as a principle.
-
- 1. Repub. vol. vii. p. 868.
- 2. Repub. vol. vii. p. 674.
- 3. Lion, vol. ii. p. 450.
- 4. Oracle of Reason, vol. i. p. 366.
- 5. Oracle of Reason, vol. i. p. 366.
-
-It is due to Carlile to observe that the annoyance he marshalled against
-authority was chiefly retaliative. He disowned a placard put in his
-window, which said, 'This is the Mart for Sedition and Blasphemy,' as he
-deemed it an admission that he did vend something of the kind. 'I sell,'
-said he, 'only truth and right reason.'(1) (In parenthesis it maybe
-observed, that he denied that any human tribunal was competent to
-declare what was blasphemy.) How much farther Carlile was impartial than
-are Christians, is evidenced by the fact that he published Bishop
-Watson's Apology for the Bible, in conjunction with Paine's Age of
-Reason.(2) In another respect he behaved as Christians never behave, he
-never questioned the youths he employed, nor any of his dependents as to
-their opinions, nor did he use any means to induce them to comprehend or
-adopt his.(3) He held his opinions too proudly to intrigue or supplicate
-others to accept them.
-
-In candour, in independency of judgment, in perfect moral fearlessness
-of character, I believe Carlile cannot be paralleled among the public
-men of his time. Lovel writes:
-
- He is a slave who dare not be,
-
- In the right with two or three.
-
-Carlile was no slave. He was able to stand in the right by himself
-against the world. One forgives his errors, his vanity, and his egotism,
-for the bravery of his bearing and his speech. Though Paine was his
-great prototype, he was prompt, both in his early enthusiasm and in his
-latter days, to acknowledge Paine's defects as a theologian. 'About
-"God" Paine,' said he, 'was not altogether wise, but less unwise than
-the world at large.(4) In his earliest attachments, Carlile
-discriminated, 'I neither look,' wrote he 'on Mr. Gibbon nor Mr. Hume,
-as standards of infidelity to the Christian religion.'(5) He hesitated
-at Shelley's views of marriage, deeming them crude.(6) Carlile was able
-to take anything up or put anything down at the bidding of his judgment.
-He said to Mr. Searlett, 'At present I am not a tinman, but I should
-never feel ashamed to return to it to earn an honest livelihood, if
-circumstances should render it necessary in this or any other
-country,'(7)
-
- 1. Repub. vol. v.r. 12.
- 2. Repub. vol. v. p. 89
- 3. Repub. vi. p. 778.
- 4. Scourge, p. 110.
- 5. Repub. vol. ii. p. 168.
- 6. Repub. vol. v. p. 148.
- 7. Repub. vol. ii. p. 403.
-
-He began a periodical or ended it at will. No taunt deterred him, no
-threat intimidated him, no smile seduced him. Carlile was perfectly able
-to stand alone. He avowed himself an Atheist when no one else did. When
-he understood that arbitrary checks to population were necessary he said
-so and distinguishing the particular kinds of checks, disguisedly hinted
-at by Political Economists, or anonymously broached in handbills, he
-specified them and added these words, 'I think these plans tor the
-prevention of conception good, and publicly say it.'(1) Although that
-saying involved his own reputation and that of his cause. If Carlile had
-the querulousness, which condemned others, he had also the rarer courage
-which condemned himself. If he called others fools he called himself
-one, when his judgment convinced him that he had been in error. To those
-whom he found he had wronged, he made no dubious acknowledgment.
-Disdaining deceit always he openly made the amplest apology frank words
-could express. 'I ask Mr. Cobbett's pardon, and make the due apology,'
-said he, on finding that he had made an erroneous attribution to him.(2)
-To Dr. Olinthus Gregory he was more emphatic still.(3) Carlile
-proclaimed the excellence of Cobbett's Grammar, and the superiority of
-Hunt's Roasted Corn,(4) at the same time that he roasted the authors of
-both. Major Cartwright's 'English Constitution Produced and
-Illustrated,' he praised in some parts, while he mercilessly assailed it
-in others.(5) He acknowledged the kindness of his prosecutors, where
-they were kind, with the same fullness with which he execrated them when
-brutal.(6) To his bitterest enemy he was constantly thus just, and his
-own faults he confessed with as little reserve as he pointed out those
-or his enemies. His intellect was rude, but most robust. He had a
-passion for truth and did not care whether it went against him or for
-him; he told it with equal zest. He not only as many do, professed to
-love free speaking; he could _bear it_ of himself. He held, as a public
-man should do, his reputation in his hand, and he would toss it up as
-one would a ball.
-
- 1. Repub. No. 18, vol. ii. pp. 566-6. 1825.
- 2. Repub. vol. xii. p. 29.
- 3. Repub. vol. xii. p. 727.
- 4. Repub. vol. vi. p. 12.
- 5. Repub. vol. viii. p. 18.
- 6. Repub. vol. x. pp. 63-4.
-
-Carlile had a just notion of the relation of personalities to
-principles. 'Human nature,' said he, 'through whatever improved
-modifications it may pass, will still have its frailties, and those
-frailties have no relation to the social principles that may be
-advocated, nor do they emanate from newly advocated social principles,
-but from the frailty of that nature,... and any exhibition of such
-frailty belongs to the individual, and not to the principles
-constituting the public cause.'... But it is one thing to perceive the
-tenor of personalties, and another and very different thing to be able
-to conduct them. Mr. Carlile was utterly unable to conduct them
-usefully. They must be entered upon, not on personal, but upon public
-grounds; or they lose all moral effect. If undertaken from spleen, or
-vanity, they belong to the class of 'quarrels,' and damage both the
-writer and nis cause. If entered upon to preserve the integrity of a
-public question, such intention must be made very evident and the
-_improvement_ alone, and not the mortification of the party criticised,
-must be steadily kept in view. This Mr. Carlile never understood: he
-wounded, he disparaged, he recriminated. He did not weigh character
-through its entire extent. He mistook a part for the whole. It was in
-this erroneous way, that he condemned Cobbett and Hunt, was querulous to
-his friends in Parliament, and most unjust to his most important and
-devoted allies. Ricardo, Hume, Brougham, Burdett, who presented
-petitions for him, seem to me to have treated him much better than he
-treated them.
-
-Richard Carlile's reputation was founded on the joint profession of
-Republicanism, and ultimately of Deism and Atheism. He owed much to the
-_time_ when he made these professions, and not a little to the talent
-with which he maintained them. But did his services rest exclusively on
-the conditions under which they were rendered, their value would still
-stand high in the opinion of those capable of estimating the steps of
-public progress. He had to incur an obnoxious singularity, and brave
-imminent danger in order to purchase a field of action for others. This
-is a work which the world does not applaud like the manifestation of
-genius and talent, but it is a work which requires a courage and a
-sentiment of self-sacrifice, which the world's favourites rarely
-display. The work of the pioneer of thought is a work done for men of
-genius and talent; a work they are seldom able to do for themselves--for
-talent is prudent, and genius is timid; it is a work, however, which
-must be done by some one, or freedom languishes, invention is dumb,
-talent is misdirected, and philosophy creeps stealthily along starting
-at the sound of its own footsteps.
-
- 1. Sherwin*s Republican, No. 2, p. 21.
-
-No adequate estimate or the merits of Carlile, and no tolerant judgment
-of his faults can be formed without taking into account the aspects of
-the times when he struggled, and the unscrupulous and powerful enemies
-against which he contended. _Then_ the most hateful types of Toryism and
-Christianity were rampant--_Then_ Castlereagh declared in Parliament
-that it was necessary that 'the last spark of the spirit of the French
-Revolution should be extinguished.'(1) Malignant and servile
-Attorney-Generals and vindictive Judges left no man's liberty or life
-safe if he professed liberal opinions. The press was intimidated, and
-public meetings, who complained, butchered. It was under these
-formidable circumstances that Carlile undertook to free the press, and
-to make the famous works of the 'rebellious needleman' household books
-in England, and to oppose himself singly to crown and mitre, ana brave
-whatever political and priestly vengeance could inflict, when political
-and priestly power were unchecked by public opinion.
-
- 1. The apparent offensiveness of some of his addresses was
- created by Christians themselves, an Instance occurs in his
- letter to 'Old William Wilberforce,' to whom he said 'sinner,'
- instead of 'sir,' but this was because Wilberforce was a
- self-styled sinner.--Repub. vol. ii. p. 388
-
-It is in reference to the same public circumstances that Carlile's
-faults are to be judged.
-
-Those who in these days shall peruse the pages of Carlile's periodicals
-will be startled at the fierce invective and measureless denunciation
-which abound there. But let those who affect to pass over his name on
-this account, call to recollection the deadly arena of antagonism in
-which he had to fight the battle of freedom. The course he took is
-indeed not to be imitated now. We exist in better times, when the
-conflict of reason has succeeded to the strife of passion. We have
-better arts, because we have a fairer field, and we owe that fairer
-field to such men as Carlile. Let us not impose our modes of warfare on
-men who fought with savages, and demand of the actors of other times
-that virtue which belongs exclusively to our opportunities. Men who are
-patriotic in easy chairs and by the fire-side only, who never incur
-damped feet in the public cause, and essay the reform of society in kid
-gloves and white waistcoats, know nothing, and can allow nothing for
-that strife of spirit in which men live, who take up the dice box of
-oppression to play for liberty, and whose stakes are their lives. Let
-the Christian whose altar is protected by law, whose arrogance over
-infidels is part and parcel of the statutes, and is applauded by public
-opinion; let the sleek and unruffled saint beware how he judges one on
-whose head was every day poured out the phials of holy malignity, whom
-the highest authorities stooped to defame, whose name was sacked at the
-instigation of every miserable deacon or venal informer, whose household
-gods were strewn in the streets by policemen selected for their
-ferocity--whose wife was consigned to a gaol, and himself doomed to
-spend nine years and a half in the endurance of the unceasing indignity
-of vindictive imprisonment. Where the Christian in ermine has been
-brutal, vituperative, and malignant, let him not exact a perennial
-delicacy of sentiment from his victim, writhing under his provocations.
-Taking these circumstances into account he is little acquainted with
-human nature, who will wonder that Carlile, in the sixth year of an
-imprisonment caused by Lords Castlereagh, Liverpool, Sidmouth, and
-Eldon, should from Dorchester Gaol, dedicate the volume of the Trials of
-his Wife, Sister, and Shopmen in these words--'To the Memory of Robert
-Stewart, Marquis of Londonderry, Viscount Castlereagh, etc., who
-eventually did that for himself which millions wished some noble mind
-would do for him--_Cut his throat_.'
-
-The strait-laced moralist of this generation may turn to the volumes of
-the Carlile's Trials, and find that Mrs. Carlile was indicted for
-publishing a paragraph justifying assassination of tyrants. I have no
-sympathy with this doctrine. I deem it far nobler and more useful to
-society, to submit to be the victim than to victimize others. But
-Carlile acted on a resolute sense of self-defence. He was a believer in
-Brutus and Colonel Titus, and he lived in darker times when the policy
-of moral resistance was less clear and less practicable than now.
-
-The Society for the Suppression of Vice distinguished him in 1820, as
-'that most audacious offender, Carlile.'(1) The _Age_ called him 'a
-miscreant tinker.'(2) The _Sunday Times_ described him as 'a wretched
-man in the very kennel of contempt, from whom his proselytes fled as if
-he were emerged from a pest-house, and advised that he should rot in
-oblivion.'? And in this way papers and pulpits rang fascinating changes
-on such adjectives as fiend, monster, wretch, execrable, hideous,
-obscene, abandoned, infamous, etc., etc., till when he took a tour
-through the country in 1828, the idea of Carlile current among the pious
-was that of a black griffin with red glaring eyes--a tail with forked
-end, talons instead of fingers, and hoofs instead of toes.'(3)
-
- 1. Repub. vol. ii. p. 182.
- 2. Repub. vol. xii. p. 121
- 3. Repub. vol. xii. p. 151.
-
-Yet this man whom the Government, the Pulpit, and the Press co-operated
-thus to describe, was human, and not devoid of generous filial
-affection. When in Dorchester Gaol, in 1820, a letter came sealed with
-black wax, which, Carlile suspecting to announce the death of his
-mother, he threw it aside for four hours--not finding resolution to open
-it. 'I had hoped,' said he, 'that her life would have been extended a
-few years, that she might have witnessed the result of my present
-career. But it affords me pleasure to think that she sunk calmly to
-sleep, neither tortured by priests nor superstitious notions. It affords
-me pleasure,' cried he, exultingly, 'that in spite of the efforts of the
-Society for the Suppression of vice, the Priests, and the
-Attorney-General of a wicked administration, I have still retained a
-roof to shelter her, and under which she died.'(1) The department of
-progress in which Carlile worked has not yet received recognition by
-society. Society only remembers the genius which is creative, not that
-which is practical--though it profits in its ulterior stages more by the
-practical than the creative. The world has been rich in theory ages ago,
-and would have realised universal happiness by this time had it
-encouraged those who reduce its theories to practice. When a great truth
-is proclaimed, it produces no fruit till society is ploughed and sown
-with it. The pioneer, the orator, and the journalist, are they who
-practicalise truth: and he who re-asserts it, who insists upon it, and
-re-echoes it by all the arts of repetition--he it is who really advances
-society. He is the worker; yet society accords him no distinction, no
-posthumous memory. Hence it requires more generosity of sentiment to be
-useful than to be great. He who seeks distinction may advance society as
-he achieves distinction: but the advancement of society is secondary
-with him--the advancement of himself is the primary consideration, and
-he is often careless whether society advances or retrogrades provided he
-lays hold of its renown and keeps it. Hence he who seeks fame is
-selfish--he who seeks utility is generous, because he is certain that
-society will neglect him, as it pays its honours to those who serve it
-least. The theorist provides for the future, but it is the worker who
-makes the future by realising the fulness of the present. It was in this
-department that Carlile laboured. He left no distinct book, he
-bequeathed no invention, he is the author of no famous theory; but his
-life was a poem of heroic and voluntary sacrifice, by which new freedom
-was won and secured to posterity; and men are now benefited through his
-exertions who remember him not, who know him not, and who would disown
-him or revile him if they did. Attorney-Generals delight to prate about
-the danger to society of dissemminating new opinions--the danger is to
-him alone who undertakes the task. Let him who thinks that mankind are
-to be set on change too rapidly, read the Life of Carlile. The deadly
-opposition by which he was assailed is the answer to their fears.
-Society loves its opinions, and clings to them, whether they be error or
-truth. It hates him who teaches it to alter its course, however the
-change may be for its benefit. It is the destiny of the Reformer to
-serve mankind, and to be cursed by them for his pains. He who is not
-prepared for this has no business to be a Reformer. Then has he no
-reward? His proud reward is the satisfaction of contemplating the
-benefit he confers upon men who are not to be conciliated by good
-intentions, nor penetrated by favours bestowed. To give happiness to a
-friend is but a common place delight, but the pride of conferring
-pleasure upon an enemy is a noble passion, of which only exalted natures
-are susceptible. This is the passion of the true Reformer, and this is
-his reward.
-
- 1. Repub vol. ii. pp. 376-7.
-
-Of Carlile's errors it may be said that they were fostered, if not
-developed by the position in which he was placed. In the autumn of his
-career, he grew to think better of himself than of other men, but it was
-in a great measure because he had done more and dared more. He was
-impatient of a rival, because his rivals as political or anti-religious
-leaders wanted the proper qualification. Carlile had suffered so much,
-and so long, that he not unnaturally became convinced that suffering was
-the sole qualification of a public teacher. He confounded endurance with
-ability, and doubted the integrity or the courage of those who had dared
-nothing. He was tolerant of rivals in proportion as they had suffered
-any thing. His great imprisonments were so many wounds which he had
-received in the service of freedom, and he was proud of them as a
-Spartan hero of scars. He graduated, as _a patriot_, in dungeons, and he
-suspected the qualifications of every man who had not taken out a
-diploma from the Attorney-General. Carlile was one of those men who are
-tattooed by the enemy into whose hands they fall, and who are dyed by
-the influences against which they struggle. He was like a man who fights
-all day in the front rank; who is discoloured by the powder expended in
-the battle, and never after wears the hue of peace. Cobbett and
-O'Connell manifested the same peculiarity. They outlived their day. They
-were living memorials of themselves and of the times which _they_ had
-changed. He who judges any of these men impartially, will recognize
-their virtues as arising in the greatness of their natures and their
-faults, but as the accidents of their local positions. So posterity will
-judge Richard Carlile.
-
-
-
-
-ST. THOMAS'S HOSPITAL
-
-
-Examination of the body of Mr. Richard Carlile.
-
-The well-known Mr. Richard Carlile, bookseller, late of Fleet Street,
-bequeathed his body for the purpose of anatomical dissection. By
-permission of the governors of St. Thomas's Hospital, his remains were
-removed from his residence in Bouverie Street, Fleet Street, to that
-Institution; and, on Tuesday last, there was a numerous assemblage of
-the friends of the deceased and members of the medical profession, to
-witness his post mortem examination. The chest and abdomen only were
-opened, and the necessity that existed for the knowledge of anatomy, not
-only to the surgeon, but to the physician, was shown. Mr. Grainger
-delivered a short address on the occasion, thinking that the object of
-the deceased would be obtained by this proceeding in public, and by a
-statement of the motives which, had actuated him in giving his remains
-for dissection.
-
-The illustrious Bentham, actuated by the same benevolent feeling, had at
-the close of the last century, left his body for dissection, and that at
-a time when the prejudice against anatomical examinations was so great
-that bodies were procured with the utmost difficulty. That prejudice was
-perhaps less at the present time, but still sufficiently strong to
-interfere very materially with that due supply of subjects, so essential
-to the proper education of the medical student, and of such vital
-importance to the community at large. Such difficulties existed that no
-lecturer in this country had ever yet been able to complete a course of
-operative surgery, properly so called. Mr. Carlile deserved the
-approbation of all the friends of humanity for attempting to remove this
-prejudice by leaving his remains for anatomical purposes.
-
-Mr. Grainger vindicated medical men from the charge of irreligion, and
-contended that medical and anatomical studies, if _properly_ pursued,
-served to demonstrate the truth, not only of natural, but of revealed
-religion. _The Lancet,_ No. 1,016, p. 774, February 18, 1843.
-
- J. Watson, Printer, 3, Queen's Head Passage, Paternoster Row.
-
- ----
-
-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE AND CHARACTER OF RICHARD
-CARLILE ***
-
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