Charles Bradlaugh

Politician

• Born: September 26, 1833
• Birthplace: Bacchus Walk, Hoxton, London, England
• Died: January 30, 1891
• Place of death: London, England

Biography

Charles Bradlaugh was born in Hoxton in London on September 26, 1833, the eldest of the seven children of his namesake father, a solicitor’s clerk. His formal education was scanty; he began work as an errand boy in the same company as his father but left home after quarreling with his father over religious matters. He worked briefly as a coal merchant before joining the Seventh Dragoon Guards in 1850, serving as a trooper in Dublin, Ireland. After buying his discharge, he returned to London in 1853, working as a builder’s foreman and a solicitor’s clerk. He remained in the latter position for most of his life, becoming a skilled lawyer but making little progress in the profession. His employers kept letting him go, alarmed by his political activism. He was often desperately short of money.

Bradlaugh became a committed freethinker as well as a political reformer, but he was doggedly antisocialist. He made a name for himself as an orator and pamphleteer, signing himself “Iconoclast.” In 1855, he married Susannah Lamb Hooper, with whom he had three children. After a periodical of his own failed, he helped Joseph Barker establish the National Reformer in 1860, becoming its proprietor in 1862 after an argument regarding Bradlaugh’s promotion of George Drysdale’s Elements of Social Science. In 1866, he helped establish the National Secular Society. In 1870, he separated from his wife—who had become a alcoholic after taking up with the poet James Thomson—and met Annie Besant, whose articles for the National Reformer soon established her as an important feminist.

In 1871, Bradlaugh delivered the lectures that became his most famous and controversial pamphlets, The Land, the People, and the Coming Struggle and The Impeachment of the House of Brunswick. He became president of the London Republican Club, which became the base of the National Republican League in 1873. In 1877, Bradlaugh and Besant republished Charles Knowlton’s pamphlet advocating birth control, The Fruits of Philosophy, following the successful prosecution of Charles Watts—the founder of the Rationalist Press Association—for issuing its first edition. This led to a conviction for “obscene libel,” quashed on appeal.

In 1880, Bradlaugh was elected as member of parliament for Northampton, after several failed attempts, but the House of Commons refused to admit him when he asked to affirm allegiance rather than take the required oath. The Whigs’ leader, William Gladstone, supported him, but he was arrested when he attempted to take his seat and imprisoned in the Clock Tower. He made repeated attempts to take his seat until he finally succeeded, after several reelections, in 1886. His reputation as an orator was enhanced by his performances in the House, supporting Irish home rule, arguing for republicanism, and strongly opposing imperialist foreign policy.

Bradlaugh died on January 30, 1891, of complications related to hereditary Bright’s disease; three thousand mourners attended his interment in unconsecrated ground. Had he lived, he would probably have become secretary for India, where Annie Besant settled after becoming involved with Theosophy—of which Bradlaugh, a diehard atheist, would not have approved. He remains a highly significant pioneer of free thought and its reasoned application to political and social policy; his younger daughter, Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, wrote his biography in collaboration with the historian John Mackinnon Robertson.