Freethought
London Radicals
09/22/2011 10:21
I’ve been looking over a lot of information I’ve accumulated over the last couple of years, about British radical Charles Bradlaugh. When CB was thrown out of his house onto the streets of East London at age 16, for admitting he was an atheist, he found shelter for a while with the Eliza Sharples Carlile, the widow of radical freethinker Richard Carlile, and her three children.
The Carliles are really an
interesting family, when you think about it. I’ll probably have more to say about them later -- in the meantime, here are a couple of portraits from the Bradlaugh papers. The first is Richard Carlile, the second is his daughter Hypatia.
Yes, CB kept a portrait of Hypatia, and it survived his death 50 years after he was in love with her on Warner Street in East London. So yeah, maybe there’s more to that story than his daughter (whom he named Hypatia and who wrote a 2-volume biography of CB) wanted to tell…
Yes, CB kept a portrait of Hypatia, and it survived his death 50 years after he was in love with her on Warner Street in East London. So yeah, maybe there’s more to that story than his daughter (whom he named Hypatia and who wrote a 2-volume biography of CB) wanted to tell…
The Knowltons and the Kneelands
06/14/2009 10:39
Like Knowlton, Abner Kneeland was a member of a respected central Massachusetts family. Abner was a grandson of Timothy Kneeland, the third resident of Gardner. The Kneeland family remained prominent in Gardner, where Charles’ brothers Emery and Augustus settled and became chair manufacturers. Gardner is five miles from Templeton, where Charles grew up. Kneeland was 26 years older than Knowlton, and was employed as a schoolteacher about the time Knowlton was born. Two years later, he published his first book (the American Definition Spelling Book), and by the time Charles was five, Abner was in Langdon, NH, being ordained as a Baptist minister.
It might be interesting to trace the lives of these two men, since they came from similar backgrounds and ultimately found each other in the freethought movement, where they were both imprisoned for unpopular beliefs (where was Kneeland incarcerated? Cambridge, like Knowlton?). Since a very small minority of people with their backgrounds developed these views (as far as we currently know), and since Kneeland wrote about the beginnings of the labor movement (and Knowlton’s brothers were small-scale capitalists, probably employing a couple of dozen workers in their chair factory), this connection might lead in interesting directions.
Hall of Science
04/21/2009 13:15
