Freethought
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The Knowltons and the Kneelands

06/14/2009 10:39
AbnerKneeland
Abner Kneeland was a lecturer for Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright’s secular organization, and later was the editor of the Boston Investigator, a freethought newspaper. Kneeland was tried and ultimately convicted of blasphemy, primarily for promoting Charles Knowlton’s birth control book The Fruits of Philosophy. I’ve often wondered how Kneeland and Knowlton met, and how close they were.

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.

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Hall of Science

04/21/2009 13:15
hallofscience
The New York Hall of Science, begun by Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen. Dr. Charles Knowlton spoke here at least twice. The announcements of his lectures suggest that he spoke on medical topics rather than his book on materialism. This suggests that he was already thinking about birth control in 1829 and 1830, and that the Hall of Science lectures were on topics thought beneficial to working people, and not just on the inaccuracy of the Bible or injustice of Christianity. It’s interesting that there was a secular movement in New York, Boston and Philadelphia that shows remarkable parallels to the movement in Britain. Bradlaugh’s main stage in London was at the old Owenite Hall of Science. The communication of ideas (and sometimes even movement of people) back and forth across the Atlantic in the nineteenth century is worth examining further...


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