Charles Bradlaugh

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Title:     Charles Bradlaugh
Author: Augustine Birrell [More Titles by Birrell]

[Footnote A: Charles Bradlaugh: A Record of His Life and Work. By his daughter, Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner. Two vols. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894.]

Mr. Bradlaugh was a noticeable man, and his life, even though it appears in the unwelcome but familiar shape of two octavo volumes, is a noticeable book. It is useless to argue with biographers; they, at all events, are neither utilitarians nor opportunists, but idealists pure and simple. What is the good of reminding them, being so majestical, of Guizot's pertinent remark, 'that if a book is unreadable it will not be read,' or of the older saying, 'A great book is a great evil'? for all such observations they simply put on one side as being, perhaps, true for others, but not for them. Had Mr. Bradlaugh's Life been just half the size it would have had, at least, twice as many readers.

The pity is all the greater because Mrs. Bonner has really performed a difficult task after a noble fashion and in a truly pious spirit. Her father's life was a melancholy one, and it became her duty as his biographer to break a silence on painful subjects about which he had preferred to say nothing. His reticence was a manly reticence; though a highly sensitive mortal, he preferred to put up with calumny rather than lay bare family sorrows and shame. His daughter, though compelled to break this silence, has done so in a manner full of dignity and feeling. The ruffians who in times past slandered the moral character of Bradlaugh will not probably read his life, nor, if they did, would they repent of their baseness. The willingness to believe everything evil of an adversary is incurable, springing as it does from a habit of mind. It was well said by Mr. Mill: 'I have learned from experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in the least altering the habits of mind of which false opinions are the result.' Now that Mr. Bradlaugh is dead, no purpose is served by repeating false accusations as to his treatment of his wife, or of his pious brother, or as to his disregard of family ties; but the next atheist who crops up must not expect any more generous treatment than Bradlaugh received from that particularly odious class of persons of whom it has been wittily said that so great is their zeal for religion, they have never time to say their prayers.

Mr. Bradlaugh will, I suppose, be hereafter described in the dictionaries of biography as 'Freethinker and Politician.' Of the politician there is here no need to speak. He was a Radical of the old-fashioned type. When he first stood for Northampton in 1868, his election address was made up of tempting dishes, which afterwards composed Mr. Chamberlain's famous but unauthorized programme of 1885, with minority representation thrown in. Unpopular thinkers who have been pelted with stones by Christians, slightly the worse for liquor, are apt to think well of minorities. Mr. Bradlaugh's Radicalism had an individualistic flavour. He thought well of thrift, thereby incurring censure. Mr. Bradlaugh's politics are familiar enough. What about his freethinking? English freethinkers may be divided into two classes--those who have been educated and those who have had to educate themselves. The former class might apply to their own case the language once employed by Dr. Newman to describe himself and his brethren of the Oratory:

'We have been nourished for the greater part of our lives in the bosom of the great schools and universities of Protestant England; we have been the foster foster-sons of the Edwards and Henries, the Wykehams and Wolseys, of whom Englishmen are wont to make so much; we have grown up amid hundreds of contemporaries, scattered at present all over the country in those special ranks of society which are the very walk of a member of the legislature.'

These first-class free-thinkers have an excellent time of it, and, to use a fashionable phrase, 'do themselves very well indeed.' They move freely in society; their books lie on every table; they hob-a-nob with Bishops; and when they come to die, their orthodox relations gather round them, and lay them in the earth 'in the sure and certain hope'--so, at least, priestly lips are found willing to assert--'of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ.' And yet there was not a dogma of the Christian faith in which they were in a position to profess their belief.

The free-thinkers of the second class, poor fellows! have hitherto led very different lives. Their foster-parents have been poverty and hardship; their school education has usually terminated at eleven; all their lives they have been desperately poor; alone, unaided, they have been left to fight the battle of a Free Press.

Richard Carlile, as honourable a man as most, and between whose religious opinions and (let us say) Lord Palmerston's there was probably no difference worth mentioning, spent nine out of the fifty-two years of his life in prison. Attorney-Generals, and, indeed, every degree of prosecuting counsel have abused this kind of free-thinker, not merely with professional impunity, but amidst popular applause. Judges, speaking with emotion, have exhibited the utmost horror of atheistical opinions, and have railed in good set terms at the wretch who has been dragged before them, and have then, at the rising of the court, proceeded to their club and played cards till dinner-time with a first-class free-thinker for partner.

This is natural and easily accounted for, but we need not be surprised if, in the biographies of second-class freethinkers, bitterness is occasionally exhibited towards the well-to-do brethren who decline what Dr. Bentley, in his Boyle Lectures, called 'the public odium and resentment of the magistrate.'

Mr. Bradlaugh was a freethinker of the second class. His father was a solicitor's clerk on a salary which never exceeded L2 2s. a week; his mother had been a nursery-maid; and he himself was born in 1833 in Bacchus Walk, Hoxton. At seven he went to a national school, but at eleven his school education ended, and he became an office-boy. At fourteen he was a wharf-clerk and cashier to a coal-merchant. His parents were not much addicted to church-going, but Charles was from the first a serious boy, and became at a somewhat early age a Sunday-school teacher at St. Peter's, Hackney Road. The incumbent, in order to prepare him for Confirmation, set him to work to extract the Thirty-nine Articles out of the four Gospels. Unhappy task, worthy to be described by the pen of the biographer of John Sterling. The youthful wharfinger could not find the Articles in the Gospels, and informed the Rev. J.G. Packer of the fact. His letter conveying this intelligence is not forthcoming, and probably enough contained offensive matter, for Mr. Packer seems at once to have denounced young Bradlaugh as one engaged in atheistical inquiries, to have suspended him from the Sunday-school, to have made it very disagreeable for him at home and with his employer, and to have wound up by giving him three days to change his views or to lose his place.

Mr. Packer has been well abused, but it has never been the fashion to treat youthful atheists with much respect. When Coleridge confided to the Rev. James Boyer that he (S.T. Coleridge) was inclined to atheism, the reverend gentleman had him stripped and flogged. Mr. Packer, however, does seem to have been too hasty, for Bradlaugh did not formally abandon his beliefs until some months after his suspension. He retired for a short season, and studied Hebrew under Mr. James Savage, of Circus Street, Marylebone. He emerged an unbeliever, aged sixteen. Expelled from his wharf, he sold coal on commission, but his principal, if not his only customer, the wife of a baker, discovering that he was an infidel, gave him no more orders, being afraid, so she said, that her bread would smell of brimstone.

In 1850 Bradlaugh published his first pamphlet, A Few Words on the Christian Creed, and dedicated it to the unhappy Mr. Packer. But starvation stared him in the face, and in the same year he enlisted in the 7th Dragoon Guards, and spent the next three years in Ireland, where he earned a good character, and on more occasions than one showed that adroitness for which he was afterwards remarkable.

In October, 1853, his mother and sister with great difficulty raised the L30 necessary to buy his discharge, and Bradlaugh returned to London, not only full grown, but well fed. Had he not taken the Queen's shilling he never would have lived to fight the battle he did.

He became a solicitor's clerk on a miserably small pay, and took to lecturing as 'Iconoclast.' In 1855 he was married at St. Philip's Church, Stepney. His lectures and discussions began to assume great proportions, and covered more than twenty years of his life. Terribly hard work they were. Profits there were none, or next to none. Few men have endured greater hardships.

In 1860 the National Reformer was started, and his warfare in the courts began. In 1868 he first stood for Northampton, which he unsuccessfully contested three times. In April, 1880, he was returned to Parliament, and then began the famous struggle with which the constitutional historian will have to deal. After this date the facts are well known. Bradlaugh died on January 30, 1891.

His life was a hard one from beginning to end. He had no advantages. Nobody really helped him or influenced him or mollified him. He had never either money or repose; he had no time to travel, except as a propagandist, no time to acquire knowledge for its own sake; he was often abused but seldom criticised. In a single sentence, he was never taught the extent of his own ignorance.

His attitude towards the Christian religion and the Bible was a perfectly fair one, and ought not to have brought down upon him any abuse whatever. There are more ways than one of dealing with religion. It may be approached as a mystery or as a series of events supported by testimony. If the evidence is trustworthy, if the witnesses are irreproachable, if they submit successfully to examination and cross-examination, then, however remarkable or out of the way may be the facts to which they depose, they are entitled to be believed. This is a mode of treatment with which we are all familiar, whether as applied to the Bible or to the authority of the Church. Nobody is expected to believe in the authority of the Church until satisfied by the exercise of his reason that the Church in question possesses 'the notes' of a true Church. This was the aspect of the question which engaged Bradlaugh's attention. He was critical, legal. He took objections, insisted on discrepancies, cross-examined as to credibility, and came to the conclusion that the case for the supernatural was not made out. And this he did not after the first-class fashion in the study or in octavo volumes, but in the street. His audiences were not Mr. Mudie's subscribers, but men and women earning weekly wages. The coarseness of his language, the offensiveness of his imagery, have been greatly exaggerated. It is now a good many years since I heard him lecture in a northern town on the Bible to an audience almost wholly composed of artisans. He was bitter and aggressive, but the treatment he was then experiencing accounted for this. As an avowed atheist he received no quarter, and he might fairly say with Wilfred Osbaldistone, 'It's hard I should get raps over the costard, and only pay you back in make-believes.'

It was not what Bradlaugh said, but the people he said it to, that drew down upon him the censure of the magistrate, and (unkindest cut of all) the condemnation of the House of Commons.

Of all the evils from which the lovers of religion do well to pray that their faith may be delivered, the worst is that it should ever come to be discussed across the floor of the House of Commons. The self-elected champions of the Christian faith who then ride into the lists are of a kind well calculated to make Piety hide her head for very shame. Rowdy noblemen, intemperate country gentlemen, sterile lawyers, cynical but wealthy sceptics who maintain religion as another fence round their property, hereditary Nonconformists whose God is respectability and whose goal a baronetcy, contrive, with a score or two of bigots thrown in, to make a carnival of folly, a veritable devil's dance of blasphemy. The debates on Bradlaugh's oath-taking extended over four years, and will make melancholy reading for posterity. Two figures, and two figures only, stand out in solitary grandeur, those of a Quaker and an Anglican--Bright and Gladstone.

The conclusion which an attentive reading of Mr. Bradlaugh's biography forces upon me is that in all probability he was the last freethinker who will be exposed, for many a long day (it would be more than usually rash to write 'ever'), to pains and penalties for uttering his unbelief. It is true the Blasphemy Laws are not yet repealed; it may be true for all I know that Christianity is still part and parcel of the common law; it is possibly an indictable offence to lend Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible to a friend; but, however these things may be, Mr. Bradlaugh's stock-in-trade is now free of the market-place, where just at present, at all events, its price is low. It has become pretty plain that neither the Fortress of Holy Scripture nor the Rock of Church Authority is likely to be taken by storm. The Mystery of Creation, the unsolvable problem of matter, continue to press upon us more heavily than ever. Neither by Paleys nor by Bradlaughs will religion be either bolstered up or pulled down. Sceptics and Sacramentarians must be content to put up with one another's vagaries for some time to come. Indeed, the new socialists, though at present but poor theologians (one hasty reading of Lux Mundi does not make a theologian), are casting favourable eyes upon Sacramentarianism, deeming it to have a distinct flavour of Collectivism. Calvinism, on the other hand, is considered repulsively individualistic, being based upon the notion that it is the duty of each man to secure his own salvation.

But whether Bradlaugh was the last of his race or not, he was a brave man whose life well deserves an honourable place amongst the biographies of those Radicals who have suffered in the cause of Free-thought, and into the fruits of whose labours others have entered.

[The end]
Augustine Birrell's essay: Charles Bradlaugh

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