Date Published:

Abstract:

The poetry in British freethought periodicals in the second half of the 19^th century illuminates how members of this radical secularist movement agitated for change, expressed their ideas, and self-fashioned their collective identity as a community of thought and action. This article examines the role of poetry in the National Reformer, Freethinker, Secular Review/Agnostic Journal, and Secular Chronicle. Their editors published lyrical and reflective poetry alongside poems of protest, expressing freethinkers’ social and political struggles across poetic forms and bringing an often-divided secularist movement together. The article concludes by considering what cuttings in an edition of J. M. Wheeler’s Freethought Readings and Secular Songs (1892) tells us about the value of poetry for secularists.

September 2024: Clare Stainthorp is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. She primarily works on the nineteenth-century freethought movement and their periodicals but has a wider interest in literary responses to esoteric spiritualities and intellectual history. Her book, Constance Naden: Scientist, Philosopher, Poet, was published by Peter Lang in 2019. She co-edited the Routledge volume Nineteenth-Century Religion, Literature and Society: Disbelief and New Beliefs with Naomi Hetherington (2020). Her articles have appeared in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Periodicals Review, Media History, and elsewhere.