The Freethinker Christmas Specials (Or, Happy Solstice!)

When George William Foote launched the Freethinker in May 1881, he did so in part out of fury at Charles Bradlaugh’s treatment by Parliament, with Bradlaugh being prevented from taking his seat as an MP due to his atheism. Foote decided the time had come to take the fight to the enemy. But there was another reason too. Foote thought that existing freethought publications, though generally thoughtful, scholarly, and worthy, lacked humour, bite, and, consequently, popular appeal. The Freethinker amply filled this void, with sales growing so quickly that, in August 1881, the monthly became a weekly after just four issues.

Readers could also enjoy additional ‘Christmas Numbers’, of which eight were published between 1881 and 1889; none was published in 1883 when Foote was serving a one-year sentence for blasphemy in Holloway Gaol (on which more below). There were also ‘Summer Numbers’ in 1884, 1885, 1886, and, oddly, 1893, although this was of a different character from the specials of the 1880s. 

These specials differed from the regular issues in several respects. They were larger, generally with sixteen foolscap pages rather than the weekly eight. They were conceived as luxury editions with coloured, illustrated wrappers and were, as Freethinker advertisements put it, ‘beautifully printed on toned paper’. The contents were different too. There was less news and comment in it. Instead, there were many cartoons, lengthier, satirical articles with a lighter touch, and plenty of poems. The pungency typified by Foote’s weekly ‘Acid Drops’ and ‘Sugar Plums’ was largely absent. Whether my vision of a freethinking Victorian family sitting around the fire after Christmas lunch chuckling at Foote’s offerings is justified is anybody’s guess.

One Christmas special stands out. The 1882 issue led to Foote’s first blasphemy trial at the Old Bailey in March 1883 before Lord Justice North. North was characterised as a ‘Catholic bigot’ and undoubtedly let his prejudices influence the twelve-month sentence he imposed on Foote. Features in the 1882 issue included a front-page cartoon entitled ‘A Merry Christmas, Inside and Outside’, which shows a cleric’s table laden with food inside and a poor family outside. There was also the infamous ‘Moses Getting a Back View’ cartoon, a strip cartoon of ‘A New Life of Christ’, and J.M. Wheeler’s ‘Trial for Blasphemy’ in which Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John appear before the ‘Court of Common Sense’.

Apart from the 1893 issue mentioned earlier, the specials disappeared after 1889 along with the cartoons, although the weekly journal had expanded to twelve pages. The tone was changing with the times and whilst the Freethinker retained (and retains) its edge, it was becoming more sober. In 1890, Foote was elected President of the National Secular Society (NSS), succeeding an ailing Charles Bradlaugh. Bradlaugh’s paper, the National Reformer, was to close soon after his death in 1891 and its role as secularism’s journal of record and mouthpiece of the NSS was to pass to the new President’s Freethinker, a role it retained for over a century.

Readers will find the Freethinker specials, alongside many hundreds of other issues, in our digital archive, with the exception of the 1881 Christmas edition which is currently being sourced. Alternatively, you can click on the images below to go straight to each of the extant and available Christmas issues. Meanwhile, the Freethinker wishes all our readers, friends, and enemies a happy solstice. Or, as Thomas Paine once wrote to Thomas Jefferson: ‘I congratulate you on the birth-day of the New Sun, now called christmas day’.