The political and the personal: the radicalism of sophia chichester and georgiana fletcher welch

Abstract

Abstract This account of two previously unknown, wealthy, upper-class women explores their patronage of religious and political radicals in the 1830s and 1840s. Strongly committed to reform of the marriage laws, they lived on their Gloucestershire country estate while supporting with letters and money men who tried to reform society through a personal theosophy or political and social ultra-radicalism. Of those they patronised, Richard Carlile, who fought for free thought, birth control and the unstamped press, was the most important, and for a time they maintained a close friendship with him. Since Sophia Chichester and her sister were born into an upper-class family with many aristocratic connections, their radicalism took a very different form from that of women like Emma Martin or Eliza Sharples Carlile. Unable to share their political or religious views with their family, and distanced by background from those whose aims they shared, they are unique as upperclass women radicals in early Victorian England.