Charles Bradlaugh and the English Republican Movement, 1868–1878

Abstract

The English republican movement of the late 1860s and early 1870s has received meagre notice in standard historical accounts of the Victorian period. If viewed as no more than a notorious episode of the time English republicanism perhaps deserved no better; but, if considered as a persistent element of the radical tradition dating from the 1790s, coming to climax and then anti-climax in the 1870s, it merited more than mere passing attention. It has never been the subject of a single substantial historical work, and given that it was so inextricably bound up with other elements of nineteenth-century radicalism, perhaps it never will. Nevertheless, it has been accorded more than passing reference in the work of Royle, Gossman, Hardie and Harrison.