Queen vs. Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, The.
[Birth Control] (Besant, Annie) The Queen v. Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant. In the High Court of Justice, Queen’s Bench Division, June 18, 1877. Specially reported. London: Freethought Publishing Company, 1877.
8vo.; endpapers foxed and offset; pages 7 to 10 detached; hinges tender; brown cloth; stamped in gilt; lower panel wrinkled; lightly rubbed; light wear to extremities.
First edition of Besant and Bradlaugh’s privately printed recapitulation of their infamous trial; with eight pages of advertisements for the Freethought Publishing Company in the rear, and photographs of Besant and Bradlaugh affixed to the first blank and the facing page, above their facsimile signatures.
Besant and Bradlaugh had been tried for reprinting a birth control manual called the Fruits of Philosophy, originally published by Dr. Charles Knowlton forty years earlier. In 1876, bookseller Henry Cook and publisher Charles Watts were prosecuted for the reissue, plead guilty and served a suspended sentence. Besant and Bradlaugh, however, were convicted of demeaning the morals of the public and were sentenced to six months in jail and a thousand dollar fine, which was eventually dismissed on a technicality. As stated in their Preface:
it was for the sake of free discussion that we published the assailed pamphlet when its
former seller yielded to the pressure put on him by the police; it was not so much in
defence of this pamphlet, as to make the way possible for others dealing with the same
topic, that we risked the penalty which has fallen upon us.
The partnership of Besant, a recently divorced woman and newly converted Secularist (who had rejected Christianity for this novel movement based on reason and science), and Bradlaugh, a freethinker and the leader of the Secularist movement, was a potent one. Their trial aroused much public interest, not in small part from the fact that they conducted their own defense. They continue,
Once more a cause has triumphed by the fall of its defenders. Once more a new truth has
been spread everywhere by its persecutors, and has gained a hearing from the dock that it could never have won from the platform.
The Freethought Publishing Company was connected with Secularism and other similar belief systems, like atheism and agnosticism. As indicated by the eight pages of advertisements in the rear, Bradlaugh and Besant were two of its most prolific authors. Among Besant’s other published works are My Path to Atheism, Secular Song and Hymn Book and The Political Status of Women; A Plea for Women’s Rights. Also available was a large photograph of Besant “fit for framing,” indicating that she was a popular figure amongst the Secularists.
Annie Wood Besant was born in London in 1847 to William Wood and Emily Roche Morris. Her father worked in commerce, and supported the family until his death when Annie was five years old. Her mother moved the family to Harrow, where she set up a boardinghouse. Annie was sent to study with Ellen Marryat—the sister of the novelist Frederick Marryat—with whom she developed an interest in religious studies. At age nineteen, against her better judgment, she married Frank Besant, a clergyman. The marriage was doomed from the start: Annie had absolutely no knowledge of sex and considered it repellent; she was independent-minded and proud and her husband expected her to be submissive; Besant was temperamental and would strike Annie when angered. They had two children, Digby and Mabel, over whom a custody battle was fought when their marriage ended in 1873; Digby was sent to live with his father and Mabel with her mother.
Besant began devoting her time to feminist causes after her friendship blossomed with Bradlaugh. She is responsible for organizing the “Match-Girl Strike” of 1888, when she urged women in the Bryant & May match factory to strike for better working conditions. During World War I she became involved in the fight for In
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