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rom that to the later and more daring step of buying a
halfpenny copy of the People's Charter.

CHAPTER II.

BOYHOOD.

Now came the time when the little Charles Bradlaugh should put aside
his childhood and make a beginning in the struggle for existence. His
earnings were required to help in supplying the needs of the growing
family; and at twelve years old he was made office boy with a salary
of five shillings a week at Messrs Lepard's, where his father was
confidential clerk. In later years, in driving through London with
him, he has many a time pointed out to me the distances he used to run
to save the omnibus fare allowed him, and how if he had to cross the
water he would run round by London Bridge to save the toll. The money
thus saved he would spend in books bought at second-hand bookstalls,
outside of which he might generally be found reading at any odd moments
of leisure. One red-letter day his firm sent him on an errand to the
company of which Mr Mark E. Marsden was the secretary. Mr Marsden,
whose name will be remembered and honoured by many for his unceasing
efforts for political and social progress, chatted with the lad,
asking him many questions, and finished up by giving him a bun and
half-a-crown. As both of these were luxuries which rarely came in the
office boy's way, they made a great impression on him. He never forgot
the incident, although it quite passed out of Mr Marsden's mind, and he
was unable to recall it when the two became friends in after years.

The errand-running came to an end when my father was fourteen, at
which age he was considered of sufficient dignity to be promoted to
the office of wharf clerk and cashier to Messrs Green, Son, & Jones,
coal merchants at Brittania Fields, City Road, at a salary of eleven
shillings a week. About this time, too, partly impelled by curiosity
and swayed by the fervour of the political movement then going on
around him, but also undoubtedly with a mind prepared for the
good seed by the early talks with old Mr Brand, he went to several
week-evening meetings then being held in Bonner's Fields and elsewhere.
It was in 1847 that he first saw William Lovett, at a Chartist meeting
which he attended. His Sundays were devoted to religion; from having
been an eager and exemplary Sunday school scholar he had now become
a most promising Sunday school teacher; so that although discussions
were held at Bonner's Fields almost continually through the day every
Sunday, they were not for him: _he_ was fully occupied with his duties
at the Church of St Peter's, in Hackney Road.

At this time the Rev. John Graham Packer was incumbent at St Peter's;
and when it was announced that the Bishop of London intended to hold
a confirmation at Bethnal Green, Mr Packer naturally desired to make
a good figure before his clerical superior. He therefore selected
the best lads in his class for confirmation, and bade them prepare
themselves for the important occasion. To this end Charles Bradlaugh
carefully studied and compared the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church
of England and the four Gospels, and it was not long before he found,
to his dismay, that they did not agree, and that he was totally
unable to reconcile them. "Thorough" in this as in all else, he was
anxious to understand the discrepancies he found and to be put right.
He therefore, he tells us, "ventured to write Mr Packer a respectful
letter, asking him for his aid and explanation." Instead of help there
came a bolt from the blue. Mr Packer had the consummate folly to write
Mr Bradlaugh senior, denouncing his son's inquiries as Atheistical,
and followed up his letter by suspending his promising pupil for three
months from his duties of Sunday-school teacher.

This three months of suspension was pregnant with influence for him;
for one thing it gave him opportunities which he had heretofore
lacked, and thus brought him into contact with persons of whom up till
then he had scarcely heard. The lad, horrified at being called an
Atheist, and forbidden his Sunday school, naturally shrank from going
to church. It may well be imagined also that under the ban of his
parents' disapproval home was no pleasant place, and it is little to be
wondered at that he wandered off to Bonner's Fields. Bonner's Fields
was in those days a great place for open-air meetings. Discussions on
every possible subject were held; on the week evenings the topics
were mostly political, but on Sundays theological or anti-theological
discourses were as much to the fore as politics. In consequence of my
father's own theological difficulties, he was naturally attracted to
a particular group where such points were discussed with great energy
Sunday after Sunday. After listening a little, he was roused to the
defence of his Bible and his Church, and, finding his tongue, joined in
the debate on behalf of orthodox Christianity.

The little group of Freethinkers to which Mr Bradlaugh was thus drawn
were energetic and enthusiastic disciples of Richard Carlile. Their
out-door meetings were mostly held at Bonner's Fields or Victoria Park,
and the in-door meetings at a place known as Eree's Coffee House. In
the year 1848 it was agreed that they should subscribe together and
have a Temperance Hall of their own for their meetings. To this end
three of them, Messrs Barralet, Harvey, and Harris, became securities
for the lease of No. 1 Warner Place, then a large old-fashioned
dwelling-house; and a Hall was built out at the back. As the promoters
were anxious to be of service to Mrs Sharples Carlile, who after the
death of Richard Carlile was left with her three children in very poor
circumstances, they invited her to undertake the superintendence of the
coffee room, and to reside at Warner Place with her daughters Hypatia
and Theophila and her son Julian.

When my father first met her, Mrs Sharples Carlile, then about
forty-five years of age, was a woman of considerable attainments.
She belonged to a very respectable and strictly religious family at
Bolton; was educated in the Church with her two sisters under the Rev.
Mr Thistlethwaite; and, to use an expression of her own, was "quite an
evangelical being, sang spiritual songs, and prayed myself into the
grave almost." Her mind, however, was not quite of the common order,
and perhaps the excess of ardour with which she had thrown herself into
her religious pursuits made the recoil more easy and more decided.
Be this as it may, it is nevertheless remarkable that, surrounded
entirely by religious people, reading no anti-theological literature,
she unaided thought herself out of "the doctrines of the Church." After
some two-and-a-half-years of this painful evolution, accident made her
acquainted with a Mr Hardie, a follower of Carlile's. He seems to have
lent her what was at that time called "infidel literature," and so
inspired her with the most ardent enthusiasm for Richard Carlile, and
in a less degree for the Rev. Robert Taylor. On the 11th January 1832,
whilst Carlile w

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