Eliza Sharples

Eliza Sharples (1803—1852) was the first female freethought lecturer in England.

Eliza Sharples was born in 1803 in Bolton, Lancashire into a prosperous middle-class manufacturing family. She was educated at a ladies college until the relatively late age of twenty. Both her home and school life instilled a strong commitment to Christian principles.

Shortly after the death of her father, to whom she was very close, in December 1831, Sharples came across "The Republican" magazine. As a result, she lost her faith and started a correspondence with its editor, Richard Carlile.

Sharples was the second (common-law) wife of Richard Carlile.

When the fifteen-year-old Charles Bradlaugh needed somewhere to stay, after being accused of atheism by his pastor, Sharples provided accommodation for him.

In 1832, she edited Isis, a London publication.

Sharples wrote The Glossary of the Bible, Chiefly Designed for Children (c. 1830).

Sharples saw Frances Wright as a role model.

Sharples first met Richard Carlile and Robert Taylor in Bolton during the Lancashire leg of their 1829 Infidel Mission. Her daughter’s memoirs provide some insight into how a respectable middle-class woman with a staunch Evangelical upbringing came to cross paths with the most notorious infidels of the day. Theophila Carlile Campbell, one of the four children to be born of the eventual union between Sharples and Carlile, suggests that her mother first became aware of her father in the years before 1829 when he dined at the home of a Liverpool banker, the father of a school friend of Sharples. Although Sharples claims not to have met Carlile on that occasion, it nevertheless sparked her interest, which was soon further heightened when she encountered a relative reading one of his early publications. Offered the use of her cousin’s library, which contained some of Carlile’s works, she thereafter sought more publications through a free-thought bookseller in Bolton, known only as Mr Hardie. Carlile’s philosophies, Sharples later wrote, prompted a deep transformation. She described herself as a ‘brand snatched from the fire’; she experienced a ‘new birth…unto righteousness’—an intense emotional conversion not unlike that felt by William Knight from his seat in the audience at the Blackfriars Rotunda.

Carlile died intestate in 1843, leaving his family destitute. Sharples ran a freethinking coffee house in Hackney, where she met the 15-year-old Charles Bradlaugh and invited him to stay with her and her children. Sharples did not succeed as a businesswoman, and died in 1852, after 20 years of living in poverty.

• A glossary for the Bible: chiefly designed for children by Eliza Sharples Carlile, 1832