21 Facts About Richard Carlile

Richard Carlile was an English radical publisher and writer.

Richard Carlile was an important agitator for the establishment of universal suffrage and freedom of the press in the United Kingdom.

Richard Carlile was the second of three children of William Carlile and Elizabeth.

William Carlile published a book on mathematics but later became a drunkard, deserted the family a few years after his son's birth, and died shortly thereafter.

Richard Carlile's mother ran a shop in Lawrence Lane, Ashburton, and was a devout Anglican, providing her children with a strict Christian upbringing.

Richard Carlile published pamphlets, including unauthorised copies of William Hone's parody of parts of the Book of Common Prayer, for which Hone had already been arrested.

Richard Carlile remained there for four months until he was released, following Hone's acquittal.

Richard Carlile immersed himself in the literature of religious freethought and wrote his first pamphlet, The Order for the Administration of the Loaves and Fishes, a parody of the Anglican Communion Service.

Richard Carlile began to reprint the political essays of Thomas Paine, including Common Sense and The Rights of Man.

Richard Carlile published the trades union newspaper, Gorgon, edited by John Wade, Francis Place and John Gast, and assisted Henry Hunt's unsuccessful campaign to be elected to Parliament.

Richard Carlile continued his project to republish all of Paine's works.

In 1819, following his publication of Paine's long-banned The Age of Reason, Richard Carlile was faced by a series of law suits from both the Attorney General and the Society for the Suppression of Vice.

Richard Carlile was one of the scheduled main speakers at the reform meeting on 16 August 1819 at St Peter's Fields in Manchester.

Richard Carlile escaped and was hidden by radical friends before he caught the mail coach to London and published his eyewitness account, giving the first full report of what had happened, in Sherwin's Weekly Political Register of 18 August 1819.

Richard Carlile was prosecuted for blasphemy, blasphemous libel and sedition for publishing material that might encourage people to hate the government in his newspaper, and for publishing Tom Paine's Common Sense, The Rights of Man and the Age of Reason.

Richard Carlile then published further journals, The Lion which campaigned against child labour and The Promptor.

Richard Carlile debated Unitarian minister John Relly Beard in The Republican, 1826.

Richard Carlile joined up with the radical and sceptical clergyman Robert Taylor and set out on an "infidel home missionary tour" which reached Cambridge on Thursday 21 May 1829 and caused a considerable upset to the University of Cambridge where a young Charles Darwin was a second-year student.

At their meeting in Bolton, Lancashire, Richard Carlile met Eliza Sharples, who was to become his long term mistress.

Richard Carlile then opened a ramshackle building on the south bank of the River Thames, the Blackfriars Rotunda, and in widespread public unrest in July 1830 this became a gathering place for republicans and atheists.

Richard Carlile left prison deeply in debt, and government fines had taken from him the finances needed to publish newspapers.