Richard Carlile

Journalist

• Born: December 8, 1790
• Birthplace: Ashburton, Devonshire, England
• Died: February 10, 1843
• Place of death: London, England

Biography

Richard Carlile was one of three children born to a Devonshire shoemaker and his wife. Richard Carlile’s father deserted the family in 1794, leaving the children’s mother struggling to care for the children on the income from the small shop she ran. Richard Carlile learned to read and write during his six years of free schooling at the Church of England’s local public school, and a twelve-year-old Carlile was then apprenticed to a tin plater in Plymouth. He married in 1813, and moved to London with his wife Jane, who gave birth to five children in the following years, two of whom did not survive childhood.

Upon arriving in London, Carlile began work as a tinsmith. When his hours were reduced in 1816, creating economic hardships for his family, he began attending political meetings, which introduced him to the ideas and works of Henry Hunt and Thomas Paine. Experiencing an epiphany, Carlile threw himself into political reform. Quickly a regular at meetings, he began selling his contemporaries’ reform writings on the streets of London. In 1817, Carlile set up shop as a publisher and began printing and selling Paine’s works, not as whole books, but as divided pamphlets. From 1819 to 1826, he published the radical newspaper The Republican.

One of Richard Carlile’s first confrontations with the system he was working to reform came when he reprinted a banned work by a fellow radical, and authorities jailed him for eighteen weeks without ever bringing charges against him. His subsequent legal entanglements, however, were more serious. Carlile was a speaker alongside Henry Hunt at an August, 1819, reform meeting of thousands of participants at St. Peter’s Field, Manchester. He witnessed firsthand what would be dubbed the Peterloo Massacre, in which overzealous authorities panicked and attacked, killing eleven people and injuring hundreds. When Carlile published an account of the massacre and then continued to lash out at government officials in his publications, he was arrested for seditious libel and blasphemy, fined severely, and imprisoned for three years. His wife, Jane Carlile, continued to publish The Republican, and she too was imprisoned for two years; the writer’s sister Mary Carlile was the next to be imprisoned, just six months after taking over from Jane Carlile.

The writer returned to activism upon his 1825 release, advocating for women’s rights and against child labor. He argued vehemently for women’s right to vote and for their being allowed to run for parliament. His 1826 Every Woman’s Book: Or, What Is Love? advocated birth control and women’s sexual emancipation. In 1828, the publisher addressed child labor in The Lion, and his support for farmworkers fighting wage cuts landed him in jail again in 1830. When he was released two and a half years later, after repeated jailings and heavy fines, Richard Carlile was financially impoverished and unable to publish with his previous vigor. His 1843 death drew numerous mourners for the tireless reformer.