Bradlaugh v. The Queen
"Bradlaugh v. The Queen" is a significant legal case from 1877, involving Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant, two prominent advocates for secularism and birth control in Victorian Britain. The case stemmed from the arrest of Bradlaugh and Besant for selling "The Fruits of Philosophy," a book by Charles Knowlton that addressed contraception. British detectives, under the Obscene Publications Act of 1850, targeted the bookshop where they operated, citing the book as indecent and harmful to public morals. During the trial, which garnered substantial public attention and support, the defendants argued against the vague charges and maintained that the book was a serious medical work. The jury acknowledged the book's potential moral implications but cleared Bradlaugh and Besant of any corrupt intentions. Ultimately, they successfully appealed the flawed indictment in the Court of Error, leading to a significant increase in the book's sales and heightening public discourse on contraception. This case illustrates the tensions between societal norms, legal standards, and the push for reproductive rights during a time of strict moral regulation.
Bradlaugh v. The Queen
Court: Court of Queen’s Bench, Great Britain
Decided: June 18-22, 1877
Significance: Great Britain’s last serious legal challenge to birth control publications, this case had the effect of increasing public interest in contraception, thereby contributing to a decline in the birth rate
In 1877 plainclothes British detectives entered a London bookshop and purchased a copy of The Fruits of Philosophy (1832), a sober book on birth control by American physician Charles Knowlton. They then arrested the shop’s proprietors, Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant, well-known radical secular atheists. Bradlaugh and Besant welcomed the opportunity to test the rights of a free press in light of the Obscene Publications Act of 1850.
For two decades before this incident occurred, Knowlton’s book had sold about a thousand copies a year in Britain without incident. Meanwhile, Henry Cook, who operated a free-thought bookshop in Bristol, had altered the book by adding two illustrations considered shocking to Victorian sensibilities. Partly because of these illustrations, the criminal indictment against Bradlaugh and Besant charged them with “unlawfully and wickedly devising, contriving, and intending” to corrupt the morals of youth, as well as inciting and encouraging people “to indecent, obscene, unnatural, and immoral practices.” The indictment described Knowlton’s book as “indecent, lewd, filthy, bawdy, and obscene” and alluded to obscene language that it contained. The party who brought the complaint to the criminal court was never identified.
The case was assigned to the Queen’s Bench, with Lord Chief Justice Alexander Cockburn presiding and the Crown’s solicitor general, Sir Hardinge Gifford, serving as prosecutor. While Bradlaugh and Besant defended themselves during the five-day trial, as many as twenty thousand people supported them from the streets outside the Westminster Hall courtroom. The defendants argued that offensive language cited in the indictment was not identified and that the book in question was a serious work on medicine and political economy. Justice Cockburn noted that the offending language was not explained, but said that it would be an issue for the Court of Error to decide. A jury then returned a puzzling verdict: “We are unanimously of opinion that the book in question is calculated to deprave public morals, but at the same time we entirely exonerate the defendants from any corrupt motives in publishing it.”
Bradlaugh and Besant then took their case to the Court of Error, where they won their appeal. Their original indictment was found to be defective, and the court noted that their appeal was being decided on “a dry point of law, which has nothing to do with the actual merits of the case.” The defendants used speeches, articles in Bradlaugh’s secularist weekly, The National Reformer, and demonstrations to keep their cause before the public.
Over the next three years The Fruits of Philosophy sold more than 200,000 copies in Britain, precipitating a decline in the English birth rate. Burdened with a flawed case, the Crown’s litigation ironically served to disseminate contraceptive information and awareness even more widely in the populace, demonstrating the risks of challenging the public’s perceived needs and interests.