There’s Some Spirit Left Yet
On December 8, 1876, Bristol police arrested the bookseller Henry Cook for selling the American birth control booklet Fruits of Philosophy. (Victorian readers knew the latter noun was a byword for “science.”) The edition’s title page bore the name of the National Reformer publisher Charles Watts, who had purchased the plates years before and printed it alongside dozens of National Secular Society pamphlets.
Unbeknownst to the London-based Watts, Henry Cook had previously served two years in prison for selling pornography from under his shop’s counter. Between the Fruit’s pages of plain text, Cook had inserted images from his old trade that illustrated explanations of human anatomy and recommendations for safely preventing pregnancy.
On December 14, Annie Besant — the National Secular Society’s second-in-command, a 29-year-old single mother who had defiantly left her sexually abusive Anglican vicar husband in an era of strict coverture laws — arrived at the National Reformer’s smart new Fleet Street office to find a nervous Charles Watts. Upon hearing of the Bristol arrest, he had telegraphed to Cook, “Fear not, nothing can come of it.” But until now, Watts had never actually read the pages that he printed.
Handing a copy of Fruits of Philosophy to Besant, he asked her opinion. She read it on the train en route to a lecture on the emancipation of women. The pamphlet advocated parental responsibility, and the restriction of family size within the means of its existence. While the 1830s American medical English lacked her flair—George Bernard Shaw had recently proclaimed her among Britain’s best orators — Annie concluded that she would have been proud to author such a work.
Unlike the Victorian Dr. Acton — then instructing England that masturbation led to blindness — in his Fruits the American Dr. Charles Knowlton wrote about sex as a natural enterprise, and nothing to be ashamed of. Nor should it be limited to the purpose of procreation. “A temperate gratification,” Knowlton wrote, “promotes the secretions, and the appetite for food; calms the restless passions; induces pleasant sleep; awakens social feeling, and adds a zest to life which makes one conscious that life is worth preserving.”
From the train station, Annie telegraphed Watts, “Book defensible as medical work.”
Her confidant Charles Bradlaugh, on the other hand, felt it was indictable. The National Secular Society president, a disciple of Richard Carlile and John Stuart Mill who for the past decade had attacked the Church and Crown over its hold on free speech, knew that open discussion of sex remained taboo. Previously he had urged Watts to pull the title from the press. Now that the horses had bolted, Bradlaugh instructed his long-serving coworker to appear in Bristol and admit to the magistrates that he was the pamphlet’s publisher. The hearing did not go well. Charles Watts gave the court 13 copies of the book. Embarrassed when select passages were read aloud, he denounced the pamphlet’s “vile purpose,” and withdrew his support for the arrested bookseller. After Boxing Day, Henry Cook would be sentenced to two years of hard labor. Before returning to London, Watts promised a judge that he would cease to print Fruits of Philosophy. The matter seemed closed. The incident barely made a ripple in the great paper ocean of Victorian newspapers.
Meanwhile, news of the publisher Charles Watts’ impunity made its way back to London. On January 8, 1877, police arrested him without warning in Fleet Street. He was arraigned at Guildhall for publishing an obscene book, released on bail and committed for a February trial at the Old Bailey.
Understandably, Watts panicked. Charles Bradlaugh promised to hire a skilled lawyer, with the aim of convincing a grand jury to return a “no bill,” or recommendation to drop the indictment. “The case is looking rather serious,” Bradlaugh admitted to Watts, “but we must face it. I would the prosecution had been against any other book, for this one places me in a very awkward position.”
Annie Besant argued with both men that the case absolutely must go to trial, as the publicity would shine a needed light on a woman’s right to sex education and the power to make decisions about her own body and health. Knowlton’s Fruits might be bruised, but it was all they had. At length, both men finally agreed with her, even if they remained unenthused. “I have the right and the duty,” Bradlaugh said, “to refuse to associate my name with a submission which is utterly repugnant to my nature and inconsistent with my whole career.” However, “The struggle for a free press has been one of the marks of the Freethought party throughout its history, and as long as the Party permits me to hold its flag, I will never voluntarily lower it.”
Galvanized, Annie organized a defense fund, collecting over £8 at a talk that weekend in Plymouth. Concurrently, Charles Watts had a change of heart. He was switching his plea to Guilty, and planned to throw himself at the mercy of the Central Criminal Court.
Bradlaugh called him a coward, and, after 15 years of working and campaigning together, fired him from the National Reformer. The two would engage in an exchange of public recriminations that forced freethinkers to choose a side. Annie learned of this turn of events upon her return to London. She had been prepared, she wrote, to stand by her colleague Watts in battle, “but not in surrender.” She returned the donations to her Plymouth brethren, read Fruits of Philosophy once again, and planned on a course of action that no British woman had ever undertaken before.
Sharing the same roof as the notorious Newgate Prison, the stone blockhouse of the Old Bailey squatted stolidly in the center of the City of London. The courthouse was a five-minute walk from the National Reformer office, via Limeburner Lane. In the February 5, 1877, volume of its proceedings, under the heading Sexual Offences, a clerk’s hand recorded:
CHARLES WATTS (41), PLEADED GUILTY to unlawfully printing and publishing thirteen indecent and obscene books – To appear and receive judgment when called upon.
In the end, his admission brought the leniency he hoped for. No jail time, and a steep £25 fine, for costs.
Annie Besant proposed that she and Bradlaugh form their own publishing company, taking the National Reformer pamphlet plates away from the pigeon-hearted printer Charles Watts. That they had no experience in business did not deter Annie, who held that “all things are possible to those who are resolute.” The pair cobbled together funds to rent a dilapidated shop on Stonecutter Street, a passage linking Shoe Lane to Farringdon Street. The shop was even closer to the Old Bailey than their old one. If her scheme went as planned, she would have a shorter walk to her trial.
By the end of February, the partners had opened the Freethought Publishing Company. As he sniped at and attempted to scoop Charles Watts’ new rival publication, the Secular Review, she directed her partner to a more important fight: printing an updated edition of the prosecuted Fruits of Philosophy and challenging Britain’s obscenity law.
With his eye on standing a fourth time for Parliament, Bradlaugh did not share Besant’s enthusiasm for martyrdom. He did not even like the book. With the Church and Crown arrayed against them, he doubted they could win. They could be sentenced to prison. Mrs. Besant said she would publish the pamphlet herself.
Readers of March’s final edition of the National Reformer found the announcement, topping the page of advertisements for tailored trousers and Bordeaux burgundies, of a new edition of Fruits of Philosophy: “The Pamphlet will be republished on Saturday, March 24, with some additional Medical Notes by a London Doctor of Medicine. It will be on sale at 28 Stonecutter Street after 4 pm until close of shop. Mr. Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant will be in attendance from that hour, and will sell personally the first hundred copies.”
On the day of the actual printing, Bradlaugh was in Scotland to give a talk. His daughter Hypatia described Annie’s fear of a police raid and seizure of the stock before the sale. With her sister Alice’s help, the women “hid parcels of the pamphlet in every conceivable place. We buried some by night in [Annie’s] garden, concealed some under the floor, and others behind the cistern. When my father came home again the process began of finding as quickly as possible these well-hidden treasures — some indeed so well hidden that they were not found till some time afterwards.”
On the Saturday, Besant and Bradlaugh found a crowd waiting outside their printshop. In twenty minutes the first print run of 500 copies sold out. Despite her hand delivery of the National Reformer to magistrates’ postboxes in Guildhall, the police never showed.
The following day, a Sunday, Besant and Bradlaugh hand-sold 800 copies of Knowlton and mailed parcels of the pamphlet to fulfil orders across England and Scotland. Letters of support flowed in. The feminist journalist Florence Fenwick Miller admired Annie’s noble stand against “this attempt to keep the people in enforced ignorance upon the most important of subjects.” Miller included a donation for the defense fund she promised they would be needing. She wished she had “fifty times as much to give.”
A week passed, the Freethought press kept printing, and the Fruits kept spilling out the door. “The Vice Society has plenty of spies and informers on its books,” Besant wrote. “One wise sentence only will I recommend to that sapient body; it is from the cookery book of Mrs. Glasse, dealing with the cooking of hares — Men and brethren, ‘first, catch your hare.’”
Annie decided to help them. To the police she offered to be at Stonecutter Street daily from 10 to 11 am. At last, on April’s first Thursday, she and Bradlaugh arrived to find “three gentlemen regarding us affectionately.” They looked to her then “as the unsubstantial shadow of a dream.”
The trio followed them into the shop. Detective Sergeant Robert Outram produced a search warrant. Bradlaugh said he could look around all he wanted; the last of the first print run of 5,000 copies had been sold the previous day. Outram nonetheless played his part as planned, placed the pair under arrest, and marched them down to Bridewell for booking.
If Annie Besant had any illusions that she would be treated differently than those arrested for street crimes, they were shattered when she was told to empty her pockets and hand over her purse, and was led by a matron into a cell to be searched.
“The woman was as civil as she could be,” she wrote, but “it is extremely unpleasant to be handled, and on such a charge as that against myself a search was an absurdity.”
To Annie’s surprise, she and Bradlaugh were led to the Guildhall basement. For two and a half hours (“very dull,” she wrote, “and very cold”) she simmered as, in a neighboring cell, “Mr. Bradlaugh paced up and down his limited kingdom.” Together they listened to the names of prisoners being summoned, until theirs were the day’s last names called to “go up higher.” Annie entered the dock, and measured up the magistrate. He appeared to her “a nice, kindly old gentleman, robed in marvellous, but not uncomely garments of black velvet, purple, and dark fur.” As the proceedings began, clerks handed her a succession of little tan envelopes holding telegrams from admirers, pledging their support.
A detective constable testified that on March 24 he had purchased a copy of Fruits of Philosophy from Annie Besant, who took his one shilling and returned sixpence change. “Bradlaugh saw her take the money,” William Simmonds added matter-of-factly. “I believe that a large amount of books,” the policeman concluded, “are now kept upon those premises for the purpose of sale.”
That suspicion was what compelled Detective Sergeant Robert Outram’s visit to the shop on the day when the pamphlet’s print run had already sold out. In the courtroom DS Outram, too, had seemed kind, as she watched him find seats for Bradlaugh’s daughters. Still, “It amused me,” Annie wrote, “to see the broad grin which ran round when the detective was asked whether he had executed the seizure warrant, and he answered sadly that there was ‘nothing to seize.’” Bail was set for the next hearing, “to which adjuration I only replied with a polite little bow.”
Walking into the waning spring sunlight, she was surprised to see a small crowd cheering. One voice called, “Bravo! There’s some of the old English spirit left yet!” The criminals had missed luncheon, and so set off to have a meal. Supporters straggled behind them like the tails of a soaring kite. Dining in the gathering dusk, Annie experienced the intoxicating thrill of reading about herself in the newspaper.
“The evening papers all contained reports of the proceedings,” she wrote with satisfaction, mentioning the Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard, “as did also the papers of the following morning.” They included, she especially noted, the hallowed Times, where her name appeared for the first time. Victoria’s favorite publication, the Pall Mall Gazette, placed news of Annie Besant’s arrest — “on a charge of publishing a book alleged to be immoral” — immediately after the lines detailing Her Majesty’s daily engagements. The queen’s activities necessitated two lines of type. Annie’s warranted 33.
Adapted excerpt reprinted with permission from A Dirty, Filthy Book: Annie Besant’s Fight for Reproductive Rights, by Michael Meyer, now available in paperback from WH Allen. © 2024 by Michael Meyer. All rights reserved.
