Radical Politics and Popular Science in Britain, 1811–43: Richard Carlile and Infidel Materialism

This thesis examines the position of science in the thought and political agitation of the freethought campaigner and radical publisher Richard Carlile (1790–1843). Carlile was one of the most high-profile political prisoners in nineteenth-century Britain, serving over a decade in prison across the 1820s and 30s on charges of blasphemy and sedition. He continued to publish throughout his imprisonment, most notably his weekly journal The Republican (1819–25), with the assistance of a nationwide network of subscribers and volunteers for his London shop. Carlile’s journals represented a new space in British radical politics: an open forum in which his predominantly working-class supporters could ‘meet’ in print from across the country to discuss openly their disdain for ‘kingcraft’ and ‘priestcraft’. This serialised correspondence was marked by rapid political and philosophical advancement across the 1820s, as Carlile and many of his supporters moved from Paineite deistic republicanism to a new form of materialism. While consciously a successor to the Enlightenment thought of philosophes like the Baron d’Holbach, this was also predicated on the belief that modern science was now revealing the true nature of matter directly. The Carlilean materialists developed one of the first recognisable articulations of the ‘conflict thesis’, positing modern science as directly antithetical to religion. This thesis presents the first detailed study of the Carlileans’ wider engagement with science: not just their combative politics of science, but the actual claims about matter and nature upon which it rested. The work traces the development of what Carlile dubbed his ‘gaseous principle’ of matter, inspired by sources ranging from the pneumatic chemistry of Humphrey Davy and neurophysiology of William Lawrence, to the anti-Newtonian physics of Sir Richard Phillips, to the seventeenth-century plenist materialism of Margaret Cavendish. Carlile’s gaseous principle provided continuity at every scale of material existence, from the motions of the planets to the nature of life and thought. The claimed materiality of mind was of particular importance, as it drove the Carlileans in turn to develop a materialist history of the progress of knowledge that reshaped their own political agitation. As an exercise in intellectual history from below, the thesis intervenes in several key nineteenth-century problematics: the relationship between science and religion; the politics of popular science; and the role of new communications technologies in reshaping political participation.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Carter, Eoin

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Secord, James
• Schaffer, SImon
• Margocsy, Daniel

• History of science
• Radicalism
• Nineteenth century
• Social history
• Print history
• History of philosophy
• History of religion

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/cff7fbbc-53e9-4603-a008-a5d10f227e7f/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

Author Identifier

0009-0001-2881-2233

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/381088