author
Charles Southwell
1814–1860
A fiery 19th-century journalist and freethinker, he helped launch Britain's first openly atheistic periodical and later carried his combative style to colonial New Zealand. His life was short, turbulent, and deeply tied to the radical debates of his time.
2 Audiobooks
Superstition unveiled
by Charles Southwell
About the author
Born in London in 1814, Charles Southwell grew up in a poor, unusually large family and left school young to work in the piano trade. Even so, accounts describe him as intelligent and widely read, with a gift for languages and a taste for Shakespeare that stayed with him throughout his life.
Southwell is best remembered as a radical journalist and freethinker. In 1841 he co-founded The Oracle of Reason, widely described as Britain's first openly atheistic periodical. Its blunt attacks on Christianity made him notorious, and an article he wrote in Bristol led to a blasphemy prosecution, a prison sentence, and a fine. That mix of polemic, controversy, and public speaking made him one of the best-known freethought figures of the period.
Later, he spent time in Australia and then settled in New Zealand, where he founded the Auckland Examiner and remained an outspoken public voice. He died in Auckland on 7 August 1860, apparently from tuberculosis, at just 46. Today he is remembered less as a polished man of letters than as a bold, unruly campaigner who pushed disbelief and anti-clerical politics into public view.