timeline
Prehistory
03/17/2009 19:25
Prehistory
1807: James Bradlaugh, a younger son of a blacksmith in Brandeston, Suffolk [thanks, Clive!], arrives in London with his family. He settles and opens a gunsmith shop at 4 Parson’s Ct., Bride Lane, off Fleet Street. (David Tribe, President Charles Bradlaugh, MP, London: Elek, 1971, p. 13)
1811: Charles Bradlaugh (Sr.) born in London. Father James Bradlaugh dies of Tuberculosis less than six months later.
In addition to Tribe (above), the best source for the general story of Bradlaugh’s life is his daughter’s book: Charles Bradlaugh, A Record of His Life and Work by His Daughter Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895.
1-18-1818: Francis Place writes to George Ensor about neo-Malthusianism, the idea that people should deliberately limit the size of their families to a number of children they can reasonably support. This doctrine was to become a taboo subject in Victorian England, The arguments against artificial birth control were first, that it was against the “law of God,” and second, that it would encourage vice. Although James Mill had adopted Malthusian ideas first, Place was becoming the leader. The idea of simply encouraging later marriages made no sense, he argued. His early marriage (at 19, to a 16 year old girl) had, in his opinion, saved his life. But neither was “moral restraint” the answer. He and his wife had 15 children (five died), and he wrote to Ensor that between himself, Ensor, James Mill (who had 9), and Wakefield, they had “no less I believe than 36 children—rare fellows to teach moral restraint.” (James A. Field, “The Early Propagandist Movement in English Population Theory,” The Bulletin of the American Economic Association, Vol. 1, No. 2, Princeton: American Economic Association, 1911. p. 221)
1-4-1822 Richard Carlile writes his new year issue of The Republican In the Dorchester Gaol, where he is imprisoned for publishing Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason in an inexpensive edition that poor people could afford to buy and read. The issue contains summaries of the trial of his wife, Jane Carlile, imprisoned for carrying on his business and publishing the report of his trial, and his sister, Mary Ann Carlile, who was also imprisoned for continuing to keep the shop open.
1823: Francis Place begins Neo-Malthusian movement. One of his earliest recruits is his student John Stuart Mill. “The talented son of a talented father, a public character universally known and esteemed, throughout civilized Europe, but whose name I withold because its publication might injure the man without benefiting the cause—bought up many hundred copies of Carlile’s pamphlet [Every Woman’s Book or possibly “What Is Love?”], and, aided by a young friend, distributed them gratuitously in the most crowded part of London. Their doing so attracted the attention of the police, and they were brought before a magistrate. He inquired of them their names, which they gave to his surprise; asked them what could induce them to circulate such a pamphlet, and upon their replying, calmly, but firmly, ‘that they had been actuated solely by a desire to assist and instruct those who stood most in need of assistance and instruction,’ they were quietly dismissed by the perplexed magistrate, who would not approve, and yet knew not how to condemn their proceedings; and who feared the effect, to moral as to religious orthodoxy, of publicly associating names of such high standing with principles so heterodox.” (Robert Dale Owen, son of social reformer Robert Owen, Indiana Congressman, and author of Moral Physiology, 1830, quoted in John Cunningham Wood, John Stuart Mill: Critical Assessments, London: Routledge, 1991, p. 41-2) Note that by this time, they’re talking about “every woman,” not every married woman. Mill and his friend were throwing the pamphlets into the cellars of well-to-do houses where the servants lived, in 1823 or 1824. This event, although it didn’t end in official sanctions against Mill, seems to have scared him straight. He never again went so far out on a limb, and for the rest of his life he very rarely made public statements about his private opinions. Mill even withheld the publishing of his autobiography until after his death in 1873.
1-2-1829: Richard Carlile begins his New Year edition of his new paper, The Lion, with an open letter to the Duke of Wellington on “The Vice of Oath-Taking.” He says “the keeping of a man out of an office by a testing oath, and swearing a man into an office, are acts alike unwise, unnecessary, and vicious.” (4) He continues, when “a man is kept from an office by his dislike of an oath: and here the first principle indicated is, that very honesty and energy which is so very desirable in a public officer.”
1832: The church, alarmed at the popularity of speakers like the Carliles and the interest shown by the working people, began publishing defenses of “Inspiration, the Canon, and Revealed Truth.” In their view, “By modern infidelity... we are simply to understand those new forms, and that new energy which skepticism has put on, in modern times, and more particularly since the era of the French revolution; by which it has mightily diffused itself among all ranks of society, and has produced a class of writers capable of making their appeal to each separate branch of the community.” (John Morison, D.D., A Portraiture of Modern Scepticism or A Caveat Against Infidelity, London: Frederick Westley and A. H. Davis, 1832. pp. 7-8)
1831-2: Charles Bradlaugh (Sr.), who had been apprenticed to a law stationer since the age of ten or eleven, is “loaned” to one of the stationer’s clients, Lepard & Company, solicitors at 6 Cloak Lane. They like the young man’s work, and buy his indenture from the stationer. Charles Sr. becomes a clerk, and later a confidential clerk and office manager for Lepard & Co. He works for them for the rest of his life, eventually earning two guineas (42 shillings) a week. Bradlaugh marries Elizabeth Trimby, a domestic servant. They move to 31 Bacchus Walk, Hoxton, where their first son, Charles, is born September 26 1833.
1833: William Ewart Gladstone enters the House of Commons at age 23. Gladstone is a younger son of a father who turned a modest inheritance into huge wealth by investing in West Indian sugar and slavery. Educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, “hothouses for the governing classes,” William Gladstone had planned to become an Anglican priest, until he became impassioned by the 1832 reform movement. He shouted himself hoarse at rallies, OPPOSING the increase in the franchise. In the election following the 1832 Act, the Duke of Newcastle (whose son, Lord Lincoln, was a school chum of Gladstone’s) offered Gladstone his “pocket” borough or Newark. Gladstone entered the Commons convinced he was going into politics to save England from the unwashed masses. In his first session he opposed reform to working conditions, the poor law, local government, and the Church of England. “His maiden speech was a defense of West Indian plantation owners, of which his father was one, against government attempts to abolish slavery.” (Richard Aldous, The Lion & the Unicorn: Gladstone V. Disraeli, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007. Pp. 12-14)
