Richard Carlile is a paradoxical figure. He was a radical journalist who split with most of the radicals of his day. He was a freethinker, a self-professed infidel, who embraced a mystical, personal form of Christianity and even published a short-lived periodical titled Carlile's Railroad to Heaven (1838). He was a moral reformer who left his wife and proclaimed a "moral marriage" to Eliza Sharples. He was an indifferent orator who spoke to crowds numbering in the thousands. In life, he had hundreds of loyal followers who supported him morally and monetarily while he served numerous prison sentences for attacking the government. At his funeral his mourners could be counted on the fingers of one hand. He was, however, at the very center of the battle for press and religious freedom in the early nineteenth century, and even his detractors admit that his actions and his example advanced those...