Carlile, RICHARD, a much-prosecuted Radical, was born at Ashburton, in Devonshire, 8th December 1790. After some education at the village free school, where Gifford had been a scholar, he served in a chemist's shop, and afterwards as apprentice to a tinman, whose undue severity kept alive the rebellious spirit of the boy. Paine's Rights of Man converted him into a Radical propagandist, and in 1817 he began to vend a London weekly, Black Dwarf, next sold thousands of Southey's Wat Tyler, reprinted Hone's Parodies, and wrote a series of imitations of these, for which he was rewarded with eighteen weeks in the King's Bench. For reprinting Paine's works and some similar books, he was sentenced, after a three days' trial, in November 1819 to a fine of £1500 and three years' imprisonment in Dorchester gaol. Here he at once began to issue his periodical, The Republican, of which the first 12 vols. are dated from his prison. His wife, for continuing to publish, was sentenced in 1821 to two years' imprisonment. But the indomitable Radical continued still to publish spite of a public subscription, for the prosecution of his assistants, of £6000, headed by the Duke of Wellington; of repeated seizures of his stock; of a three years' extension of his own confinement in lieu of the fines; the imprisonment of his sister for a year besides a fine of £500; and the imprisonment of nine of his shopmen in terms of from six months to three years. After his release Carlile continued his activity, editing The Gorgon, and holding free discussions in the London Rotunda.
Three more years' imprisonment he suffered for refusing to give sureties for his good behaviour after a prosecution that grew out of his refusal to pay church-rates; and a second period of ten weeks, in 1834-35, for resisting the same payment, brought up the total of the imprisonment of this much-enduring man to nine years and four months. He died 10th February 1843. This martyr at least was as ready to suffer as to bluster, and may safely be said to have done as much as any Englishman for the freedom of the press. See Holyoake's Life and Character of R. Carlile (1848).