RICHARD

See also:

• RICHARD CARLILE (1790-1843)

CARLILE (1790-1843)  , English freethinker, was born on the 8th of December 1790, at Ashburton, Devonshire, the son of a shoemaker . Educated in the village school, he was apprenticed to a tinman against whose harsh treatment he frequently rebelled . Having finished his apprenticeship, he obtained occupation in London as a journeyman tinman . Influenced by reading Paine's Rights of Man, he became an uncompromising radical, and in 1817 started pushing the sale of the Black Dwarf, a new weekly paper, edited by Jonathan Wooler, all over London, and in his zeal to secure the dissemination of its doctrines frequently walked 30 m. a day . In the same year he also printed and sold 25,000 copies of Southey's Wat Tyler, reprinted the suppressed Parodies of Hone, and wrote himself, in imitation of them, the Political Litany . This work cost him eighteen weeks imprisonment . In 1818 he published Paine's works, for which and for other publications of a like character he was fined £1500, and sentenced to three years' imprisonment in Dorchester gaol . Here he published the first twelve volumes of his periodical the Republican . The publication was continued by his wife, who was accordingly sentenced to two years' imprisonment in 1821 . A public subscription, headed by the duke of Wellington, was now raised to prosecute Carlile's assistants . At the same time Carlile's furniture and stock-in-trade in London were seized, three years were added to his imprisonment in lieu of payment of his fine, his sister was fined 500 and imprisoned for a year for publishing an address by him, and nine of his shopmen received terms of imprisonment varying from six months to three years . In 1825 the government decided to discontinue the prosecutions .

After his

release in that year Carlile edited the Gorgon, a weekly paper, and conducted free discussions in the London Rotunda . For refusing to give sureties for good behaviour after a prosecution arising out of a refusal to pay church rates, he was again imprisoned for three years, and a similar resistance cost him ten weeks' more imprisonment in 1834–1835 . He died on the loth of February 1843, after having spent in all nine years and four months in prison .