freethinker
Freethinker summary
03/17/2009 19:14
Inscription: “To my friend WE Adams” (From Memoirs of a Social Atom, W. E. Adams 1903, volume 2, facing page 407)
This was a summary/pitch for Freethinker, which I envisioned as a young-adult biography:
Charles Bradlaugh’s parents threw him out of their house when he was sixteen for admitting his doubts about their religion. Bradlaugh survived on the streets of East London, and met radicals fighting for reform. He watched poor families starve as an occupying soldier in Ireland, and returned home to London determined to change the world.
Victorian London is America. Bradlaugh was the most notorious radical in the world’s first modern city. Readers of Freethinker get a glimpse of Victorian society from an unusual angle. Freethinker provides a view from below, but from Bradlaugh’s intelligent, energetic, constructive point of view. This distinguishes it from other stories that tap into the fascinating energy of the London streets but focus on crime, vice, and moral decay (Alan Moore’s graphic novel series From Hell, dealing with the Whitechapel murders, is a good, edgy example).
There is no recent biography of Charles Bradlaugh. The most current work on him is nearly four decades old, and the best biography went out of print a century ago. Bradlaugh is a compelling subject not only because he was an iconoclast, but because he was a reformer rather than a revolutionary. Bradlaugh’s story illustrates the complexity of fighting for change from within. This is a valuable addition to school and library shelves filled with stories about revolutionaries, who destroy and replace the systems they oppose.
Freethinker provides a new historical perspective, the point of view of an engaged partisan rather than a neutral historian. Bradlaugh’s eventful life and Freethinker’s narrative nonfiction approach enable his biography to read like an adventure novel. The reader participates in Bradlaugh’s reaction to his world, and gains a sense of what it would feel like to fight for change.
