Charles Bradlaugh
September 26, 1833-January 30, 1891
Bradlaugh was a Victorian free-thinker who participated in most of the radical movements of his day. He became an atheist at a young age, and it is for his contributions to the cause of secularism that he is principally known today. He went to Italy and Spain in support of their attempts to form republics, he lectured in favor of France in the Franco-Prussian conflict, he sympathized with the Irish, and he lectured on teetotaling. He gained a place in feminist history by publishing a tract with Annie Besant on birth control. With the work (and others) he clashed with Victorian censorship laws. He lost this case, as the text was declared obscene.
He continued to argue cases that dealt with free speech, and also successfully fought to have the oath sworn by plaintiffs made secular. When, after several attempts, he finally made it into Parliament, Bradlaugh refused, as an atheist, to take the Parliamentary oath. He was eventually compelled to do so, under public protest, but was able to use his position to have the offending requirement removed. Bradlaugh continued to be a firebrand, attacking the power of the monarchy and the House of Lords by exposing their misbehaviors via painstaking research.
According to his biographer, David Tribe, "He deserves at least a portion of the credit for obtaining the rubber-stamp House of Lords and monarchy, the freedom of speech and publication, the planned families, the television satire, even the 'permissive society'; ... not only did he make myriads of silent converts and marginally stir the great apathetic masses, he forced the opposition to rethink their basic positions and rephrase their apologetics."
Needless to say, he made himself very unpopular among many - perhaps most - Victorians. However, when it became clear that he was neither a socialist nor a marxist, public opinion softened slightly. Nonetheless, Bradlaugh's reputation remains somewhat checkered to this day, and he tends to be treated as a crackpot, rather than as a man of strong and consistent convictions, whose critical but honest inspection of his society confirmed and even instituted some of the freedoms that are now considered the bedrock of western democracy. One biographer catalogs the fields in Bradlaugh which Bradlaugh exerted beneficial influence as: "equality for women, birth control, republicanism, land reform, labor reform, compulsory education, home rule, [and the] alleviation of poverty."
Information drawn in part from:
Sandy Feinstein, Southwestern College in: Dictionary of Literary
Biography, Volume 57: Victorian Prose Writers After 1867. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by William B. Thesing, University of South Carolina. The Gale Group, 1987. pp. 28-35.
