Mr. Bradlaugh was a freethinker of the second class.  His father was a solicitor’s clerk on a salary which never exceeded L2 2s. a week; his mother had been a nursery-maid; and he himself was born in 1833 in Bacchus Walk, Hoxton.  At seven he went to a national school, but at eleven his school education ended, and he became an office-boy.  At fourteen he was a wharf-clerk and cashier to a coal-merchant.  His parents were not much addicted to church-going, but Charles was from the first a serious boy, and became at a somewhat early age a Sunday-school teacher at St. Peter’s, Hackney Road.  The incumbent, in order to prepare him for Confirmation, set him to work to extract the Thirty-nine Articles out of the four Gospels.  Unhappy task, worthy to be described by the pen of the biographer of John Sterling.  The youthful wharfinger could not find the Articles in the Gospels, and informed the Rev. J.G.  Packer of the fact.  His letter conveying this intelligence is not forthcoming, and probably enough contained offensive matter, for Mr. Packer seems at once to have denounced young Bradlaugh as one engaged in atheistical inquiries, to have suspended him from the Sunday-school, to have made it very disagreeable for him at home and with his employer, and to have wound up by giving him three days to change his views or to lose his place.

Mr. Packer has been well abused, but it has never been the fashion to treat youthful atheists with much respect.  When Coleridge confided to the Rev. James Boyer that he (S.T.  Coleridge) was inclined to atheism, the reverend gentleman had him stripped and flogged.  Mr. Packer, however, does seem to have been too hasty, for Bradlaugh did not formally abandon his beliefs until some months after his suspension.  He retired for a short season, and studied Hebrew under Mr. James Savage, of Circus Street, Marylebone.  He emerged an unbeliever, aged sixteen.  Expelled from his wharf, he sold coal on commission, but his principal, if not his only customer, the wife of a baker, discovering that he was an infidel, gave him no more orders, being afraid, so she said, that her bread would smell of brimstone.

In 1850 Bradlaugh published his first pamphlet, A Few Words on the Christian Creed, and dedicated it to the unhappy Mr. Packer.  But starvation stared him in the face, and in the same year he enlisted in the 7th Dragoon Guards, and spent the next three years in Ireland, where he earned a good character, and on more occasions than one showed that adroitness for which he was afterwards remarkable.

In October, 1853, his mother and sister with great difficulty raised the L30 necessary to buy his discharge, and Bradlaugh returned to London, not only full grown, but well fed.  Had he not taken the Queen’s shilling he never would have lived to fight the battle he did.

He became a solicitor’s clerk on a miserably small pay, and took to lecturing as ‘Iconoclast.’  In 1855 he was married at St. Philip’s Church, Stepney.  His lectures and discussions began to assume great proportions, and covered more than twenty years of his life.  Terribly hard work they were.  Profits there were none, or next to none.  Few men have endured greater hardships.