The Trial of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh

Abstract

Book Reviews ROGER MANVELL, The trial ofAnnie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, London, Elek, 1976, 8vo, pp. xi, 182, £5.95. One of the celebrated nineteenth-century trials was The Queen v. Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant in 1876. As free-thinkers they had re-published a forty-year-old pamphlet advocating contraception within marriage and were indicted the following year for having issued an "obscene libel".Much has been written on this episode and the main participants, but Mr. Manvell, a professional biographer, concentrates on the verbatim transcript of the trial (pp. 61-156), which was published in 1877. He uses the episode as a barometer of Victorian opinion regarding contraception and other matters of sex, and accurately sets the scene leading up to it and the aftermath. The moral conventions and susceptibilities of the time are well portrayed, and, as the author suggests, the whole event is reminiscent of the 1960 hearing of the prosecution of the publishers of Lady Chatterley's lover. In each case the legal proceedings helped to unfetter the British press. This book is a useful addition to the elucidation of a facet of Victorian society, as well as a further consideration of a fascinating reformer, Annie Besant (1847Besant ( -1933.

Women Philosophers in Nineteenth-Century Britain

“…The real capacities of the negro race have never been thoroughly tested; and until they are placed in a position to be influenced by the civilizing influences which surround freedom, it is really unjust to apply to them the same test, or to expect them to attain the same standard of excellence, as if a fair opportunity had been given to develop their faculties. ([1862] 1942: 218) Remond was drawing on the republican tradition in political thought, specifically the idea that relations of domination and their 'dreadful and despotic influence' ³⁴ Besant spoke in her own defence: see Manvell (1976) and, for a more critical discussion, Janssen (2017).…”

Bandwidth lost: family planners and post-war television

“…The NPO birth control sectorwhich is the focus of this paper -began with the Malthusian League. This was set up to promote an abstract concept of family limitation in the 1870s (Fryer, 1967;Ledbetter, 1976;Manvell, 1976). Following the opening of the first dedicated contraceptive clinic by Dr Aletta Jacobs in Amsterdam in 1882 (Drucker, 2020), Malthusian campaigners such as C.V. Drysdale agitated for similar clinics in Britain.…”

“…Pressure group activity has a long alliance with birth control dating back to the sensational trial of Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891) and Annie Besant (1847Besant ( -1933, who were tried for obscenity in 1876 after disseminating Charles Knowlton's Fruits of Philosophy, a pamphlet on birth control. Their conviction (six months imprisonment and heavy fines) was overturned on appeal, apparently giving public advocacy of birth control the green light: The Malthusian League, the original British birth control advocacy group, was set up expressly for this purpose (Manvell, 1976). Pressure group activityand, we might say, related activities such as PR -went hand-in-hand with the birth control movement (Dowse and Peel, 1965).…”

Virilizing and Valorizing Homoeroticism: Eugen Sandow’s Queering of Body Cultures Before and After the Wilde Trials

“…54 Aligning the objectives of his physical culture with the mission of National Besant and Charles Bradlaugh in the very year that Leighton embarked upon this sculpture. 65 While it led to the manufacture from 1880 of anti-masturbation metallic armour to safeguard the human penis and scrotum from 'animal instincts', this struggle was meant to be overcome by athletics and Sandow's physical culture. 66 That Leighton's sculpture may also be decoded autobiographically as his own struggle with autoeroticism and masturbatory impulses is suggested by Keren Hammerschlag.…”