CARLILE

See his entry in the Oxford DNB. The Church Army, still active today, was founded in 1882 as a Church of England equivalent to the Methodists’ Salvation Army. From the papers of the recipient Wilfred Seymour De Winton of Haverfordwest. 3pp, 12mo. On a bifolium of grey paper. In good condition, lightly aged. Signed ‘W Carlile / Hon. Chief Sec.’ To the left of the signature, in the bottom-left of the recto of the second leaf, is a purple ink stamp of the following: ‘WRITTEN BY ONE OF OUR POOR STRUGGLING LABOUR HOME BROTHERS’.

A nice artefact, a number of Carlile's celebrated radical journal 'The Republican' (espousing not only republicanism but also atheism, abolitionism and birth control) as it appeared from the press. For information on Carlile - described by E. P. Thompson as a 'Showman of Free Thought' - and his 'moral wife' the suffragist Eliza Sharples, see their entries in the Oxford DNB. For publishing various 'blasphemous' works by Thomas Paine, Carlile was fined £1500 and sentenced to three years in Dorchester Gaol.

For information on Carlile - described by E. P. Thompson as a 'Showman of Free Thought' - and his 'moral wife' the suffragist Eliza Sharples, see their entries in the Oxford DNB. At the time of writing Carlile was in prison for refusal to pay the church rates. The proofs Carlile asks to be allowed to receive in the first letter are presumably those of his journal 'The Gauntlet'. The phrenologist 'Mr. Hohn' referred to in the second of the letters - the 'Mr. Holme' of the accompanying slip - is the German-born physician and phrenologist John Diederick Holm (d.1856).