Knowlton Biography Chapter 47

Forty-seven: But Not the End

The work is calculated, in my opinion, to be productive of a vast deal more human happiness than misery, and is, consequently, a good thing.

Charles Knowlton’s legacy goes beyond the comfortable estate he left for his family and the lives he saved and health he preserved in Western Massachusetts.  Providing for his family and improving the lives of his neighbors would certainly have been enough for Charles, of course.  From Knowlton’s utilitarian perspective, these two accomplishments had certainly added to the happiness and decreased the misery of the human condition.  By his own moral standards, Charles’s life had been a good thing.

But Knowlton’s legacy went beyond his family or his neighborhood.  Early in his life, Charles had hoped to “astonish the world” with his materialist philosophy, and make a name for himself that would place him in the company of philosopher John Locke.  Ironically, it was the “little book,” and not Modern Materialism, that made Knowlton famous.  Fruits of Philosophy was a practical book.  It answered the question Knowlton’s philosophy had raised: if you’re a materialist doctor, and you believe the good is measured by results in this life, then what should you do?  Charles’s birth control book was the action demanded by the idea—the fruits of his philosophy.  And it added Charles Knowlton’s name to a list that, although it didn’t include Locke, was headed by Thomas Paine. 

Thirty-eight years after Knowlton’s death, two British freethinkers were prosecuted for blasphemy at the Queen’s Bench in London.  Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant were notorious atheists and co-editors of The National Reformer.  Much like The Boston Investigator a generation earlier, their paper advocated social reform, secularism, and birth control.  Bradlaugh and Besant’s crime: republishing Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy.

Decades after its first publication and Charles’s prosecutions in Massachusetts, Knowlton’s book was still one of only a handful of family planning books written by a physician.  Fruits of Philosophy arrived in Britain in 1834, and had been continuously in print since that time.  Freethought publishers sold a few thousand copies a year, as they had in Charles’s day.  That all changed in 1878.

Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant not only ran Britain’s most popular weekly freethought paper, they published books and pamphlets.  Books by Thomas Paine, Richard Carlile, Frances Wright, and Robert Dale Owen shared shelf space in their shop with Bradlaugh’s own volumes and Fruits of Philosophy.  When Bradlaugh and Besant were given a chance to avoid a trial by taking Knowlton’s book out of circulation, they refused.  Knowlton and Kneeland had gone to jail for their principles in the United States, and Richard Carlile had done the same—convicted of blasphemy for reprinting Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason—in Britain.  Charles Bradlaugh had lived briefly with Carlile’s family during his youth.  He was not about to back down from this fight.

The trial was sensational, and birth control was splashed over the headlines of papers throughout the British Empire.  Bradlaugh and Besant spoke in their own defense.  Their speeches were reprinted in papers that would never normally have carried the ideas of radical freethinkers.  Suddenly, a topic that had once been spoken of only in hushed voices or by unwholesome radicals was being discussed in the morning news and at the breakfast tables of regular people.  Bradlaugh and Besant won their case, and in the months after the 1878 blasphemy prosecution, Fruits of Philosophy sold over two hundred thousand copies.  Knowlton’s book would probably have sold hundreds of thousands more.  But Annie Besant wrote her own book, called Law of Population, in 1879. 

The British birthrate was at its all-time high in the late 1870s.  Historians trace the beginning of a decline that halved Britain’s birthrate in a single generation, to the Bradlaugh-Besant Fruits of Philosophy trial.  In America, large families on the western frontier and immigration masked the effect of family planning on population growth.  But both urban and rural people in the crowded eastern states gained control over the sizes of their families they would not have had without Fruits of Philosophy.  Freethinkers such as Robert Ingersoll, in the second half of the nineteenth century, continued to focus on family planning and social change, in spite of the silence of most physicians.  Conservative leaders of the medical profession continued to believe the less said about the subject the better, and birth control wasn’t discussed at most medical schools for two more generations.  But by the early twentieth century, a new generation of activists, including freethinker Margaret Sanger, had taken up the fight Charles Knowlton began, to bring useful medical information and choice to regular people.