Sex and the Single Girl and Boy: Eliza Sharples, Richard Carlile, and Radical Reproduction 1831–1833

Abstract

This case study examines the reproductive choices of republican couple Eliza Sharples (1803–1852) and Richard Carlile (1790–1843) and the conflicted political and personal trajectories of those choices. This includes examination of his initial public writings supporting birth control methods set next to his retrogressive attitudes about women’s roles and his increasingly conservative and patriarchal attitudes about sexuality while using Sharples’s pregnancy out of wedlock to make his case for “moral marriage.” It sets his ideas next to Sharples’s proto-feminist uses of her pregnancy (confinement) vis-à-vis his confinement in jail as she seeks to show how her “confinement” does “labor” for republican and feminist causes. The paper highlights a crisis when the jail rescinded Sharples’s right to visit Carlile and studies the rhetoric used in the heated, desperate, triangulated exchanges between the jailors, Carlile and Sharples.

Sometime between January and August 1832, Eliza Sharples became sexually involved with freethinking republican Richard Carlile while he was imprisoned at the Compter jail in London for seditious libel. Many of the letters concerning this paper’s topic are dated as ©1832. After reading the RC files, it appears that at least eight of these letters were written between February and May 1833, not 1832, as they are designated in the collection. They include RC 29, 46–47, 50–51, 53–55. I base this conjecture on internal evidence, including, language about sexual encounters, calculations about the baby’s due date, and the couple’s disputes regarding the baby.

A well-known free speech, freethinking republican, he fought the Six Acts laws passed after the Peterloo Massacre in 1819 and was in and out of jail during the first decades of the century for his “seditious” publications. Like Robert Owen, whom he knew and respected, Carlile also focused on making marriage less repressive in his assertions that marriage, divorce, and sex should be guided by a couple’s “moral” fitness rather than by the oppressive long-standing legal formulas fulfilling the interests of church and state. Accordingly, by the spring of 1832 Sharples and Carlile had committed to a “moral marriage” and by the fall of that same year, she was pregnant. In a letter during this time she reminds him of his moral duty: “Remember, my love, that now I have a double claim … to your assistance, to your kind protection.”1 She may have been concerned that Carlile was still married to his first wife, Jane, whom he wed in 1813, probably because she had gotten pregnant. Though their relationship was unhappy, Carlile and Jane had three children in five years.2 Sharples gave birth to their son, Richard Sharples Carlile, on 10 April 1833. Carlile ended up having seven children that we know of (three with Jane and four with Sharples) and the couple continued in a “moral marriage” until he died in 1843.

So much sex and so many children, this, despite the fact that, as Joel H. Weiner points out, Carlile is known for the “most specific endorsement of birth control to be published up to that time” in Britain, thereby making “birth control part of the vocabulary of working-class dissent” and constituting the “first radical popular critique of orthodox sexual values to emerge in nineteenth century England.”3 The text Weiner refers to is “What is Love?” published by Carlile on 6 May 1825 in The Republican XI.4 In it he recommended coitus interruptus and douching, along with the sheath, partial withdrawal, and diaphragms.5 “What is Love?” was so popular, and scandalous, Carlile then published it in tract form under the title Every Woman’s Book.6

Pointing to the financial prudence of planned pregnancies, the tract advocated for the use of birth control by both married and single men and women so they could enjoy sex without fear of bringing unwanted children into the world. Quoting Rochefoucauld, Carlile asserted that “Love is the most delightful of all our passions,” and, that only tyrants would “forbid the pleasures of youth.”7 Espousing a married or single woman’s right to sexual desire, he noted that “Every healthy woman, after the age of puberty, feels the passion of love,” which is as natural as “hunger or thirst.”8 Likewise, asking, “Why should not the female state her passion to the male, as well as the male to the female?” he derided the “hypocrisy” of barring women from “mak[ing] advances” and encouraged them to “be more bold” and “plead your passion when you feel it.”9

Advocating “Equality between the sexes,” Carlile supported the concept of “moral marriage,” whereby “You shall have me to yourself, just as long as you treat me well and can really love me: when that feeling ceases, we had better part and seek new matches.”10 Revising Christian notions of chastity, he argued that true chastity was not just “constrained abstinence,” but, “in a philosophical and moral sense,” the “power of mind” that rejects “degrading commerce,” which naturally led to unhappy marriages.11 He also claimed that moral marriage would obviate insidious governmentally sanctioned practices, including prostitution and adultery by turning marital choices into private contracts between individuals.12 Thus Carlile participated in ongoing debates in Britain about birth control during the nineteenth-century. These famous voices included Thomas Malthus, Francis Place, William Cobbett, Robert Owen, and Charles Knowlton.

Given Carlile’s advocacy of birth control, free love, and moral marriage, it is surprising to find that in neither of his marriages did the couple seem to use the methods espoused in Every Woman’s Book. Why had they not used the sheath, douching, or the sponge, since both couples experienced dire financial straits, which, as he had argued, having fewer children would have alleviated? The answer may be found, in part, in Sharples’s desire to claim her sexual desire and publicly and proudly parade the pregnancy that had resulted from moral marriage. As to Carlile, Weiner explains that “publicly brave on so many issues,” he “would not accede” to Sharples’s demand to make her pregnancy public.13 But why get pregnant at all, rather than having four children in five years (Richard 1833,14 Julian 1834, Hypatia 1836, and Theophilia in 183715) and thus ensuring a life of profound poverty?

As early as 27 January 1825, when preparing to publish “What is Love?” Carlile described the sponge to William Vamplew Holmes:

In France, sexual intercourse is much more free, than in this country, and better regulated. It is well known, that almost every milliner in Paris has her intrigues and her lovers, and it is common with persons of this kind, and those who wish not to have children to wear a piece or two of sponge tied on to their waist or inner dress, so as always to be at hand.16

He then asks his friend not to “give out this as any scheme of mine; for it is not, I have been bored into the mention of it. I am altogether a prude and a modest young man.” He concludes that, “I have told Mrs. C [Jane] that she may send for the waist coat piece” if “she likes.”17 Certainly a peculiar letter, on one hand, Carlile is embarrassed about displaying sexual knowledge, but he is also proud of being magnanimous to his wife regarding her reproductive choices. Nevertheless, he retrogressively puts the responsibility for contraception on the woman.18

His cavalier attitude to sex is also illustrated in a letter from 5 May 1836 to his acolyte Thomas Turton, where Carlile jokes that he has “committed the last of my follies in adding a daughter to my family. I am now almost to end my days in wisdom.”19 Here, Carlile acts as though he had never considered using birth control, and, indeed, this was not his last “folly,” for the couple had another child a year later.20 Another anecdote is revelatory for we see Carlile’s opinions all over the map as from October 1841 to April 1842 he advised Turton about his daughter Jane, who had gotten pregnant out of wedlock. Persistently urging Turton to send her to Carlile because he felt he would supervise her better than Turton could, he noted that Jane “ought not to have been a mother” and had become “a great trouble” to Turton. He also points out that Sharples, who had been in the same situation, was very empathetic. Likewise, he himself says, “I rather pity” Jane “than blame her.”21 On 27 December 1841, Carlile remarks to Turton: “I would certainly not consent or recommend a marriage while pregnant from another source.” Yet in a letter dated 16 October 1842, he tells Turton that he was “glad to hear” Jane had “gotten married” after having gotten pregnant.22 It is unclear if she married “another source” or married the father of the child.

By this time Carlile’s sexual attitudes appear increasingly conservative. For example, in a letter dated 4 March 1842, he wrote to Turton that:

I shall soon hope to hear that $\sout{\mathrm{Jane}}$ [name lined out] is over one part of her trouble. No man is more sensible than I am, how much the youthful public want instruction on the relations of the sexes; but I detest all mere exciting publications as vicious in as high degree of criminality. As a juryman, I would condemn to punishment everything of the kind.23

In the same letter, he grouses that a son from his first marriage “has entered upon a class of low amatory publications, which I have denounced and have called upon him to give them up.”24 Whether his son was distributing pornography or birth control advice is unclear, but in either case, Carlile was perturbed. Indeed, Weiner points up a telling remark Carlile made to Sharples and Jane Carlile when he urged them not to use “the sponge because it was insufficiently respectable.”25

In another betrayal of professions made in Every Woman’s Book, in letters written late in Sharples’s first pregnancy, Carlile shows irritation with her expressions of passion toward him. As their argumentative letters reveal, his priority was rationality (“Philosophy”) while hers was passionate “Love” for him. In fact, the letters depict a couple sexually, emotionally, and philosophically off-kilter with each other. One might conjecture that Sharples’s overwrought descriptions of her erotic feelings were a direct result of having read Every Woman’s Book’s advice, for her letters during the early part of their relationship proudly describe their passionate sex life. Extolling the “delightful sensation, that love produces,” she revels in having “drank deep” “draughts from the fountain of Love.”26 At one point wondering if she should have stayed in her comfortable middle-class home, she concludes that if she had, “my life would have passed on without the engagement of extreme pleasure. … I cannot help, loving, and adoring you.”27

Intense and idealistic about her feelings for him, Sharples writes that “the love I bear you” is not “merely human, but it is such as angels feel, as heavenly spirits feel, … I am sure it will never change. I intend to manage it I am able to do so.”28 Neither is she shy when she tells her lover, “As a weary traveller pants, and thirsteth after water so my heart longs for your letter,” and, using a double entendre, she refers him to the 63rd Psalm, particularly the verse “I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the night.”29 Elsewhere she exclaims, “I have a thousand endearing expressions, almost thrusting themselves, upon my paper.”30 Disappointed by his increasing coolness to her avowals, she proclaims that “Love sincere and true” cannot be constrained, and that it “must be free has31 the air we breathe. It will not be told, that it must love thus far and no farther.”32

As noted above, by the time Eliza was pregnant, Carlile’s letters exhibit more rationality and little to no lovemaking, but this only increased her dedication to free love and her intent on proving the morality of her “fierce” feelings. “My love,” she says, is based on “the principles … of Integrity and Truth,” and she remonstrates that Carlile “know[s] very little of” her “heart, and affection” when he says “‘such love is not lasting.’”33 She is not afraid either to call his hypocrisy to account, reminding him that he does not “practise what you preach,” for he had brought “my affection to … a pitch of love” when he did not want a romantic relationship. And, in another double entendre, she points out that he had “endeavoured” to “implant the seed of love, in my bosom, and now when you see the fruit [pregnancy], you are alarmed!”34

Despite the risks of having unprotected sex, in these letters she does not seem concerned about the consequences. But Sharples soon came to understand that, at the very least, liberated sexuality presented fewer risks to the man. By late in the pregnancy she realized that Carlile was hardly the romantic sort, what with his repeated lectures that she must calm down on that front. Ultimately indicating that there was a significant disjunct in their feelings for each other, Sharples idealistically stresses that she is willing to be a single parent if necessary in order to live up to her beliefs in moral marriage, even though “she was not within a few days of being a Mother.”35 She even avers that “Should an alteration in your sentiments take place, should you ever transfer your love to another woman,” she “could even bear” a breakup and “remember with pleasure, the happy, moments that we had spent together.”36

A compelling snub illustrates the humiliation and misogyny she faced daily after becoming pregnant. Sharples describes an encounter she had with two of Carlile’s followers, the Misses Laws, whom she suspected were romantically interested in him.37 When taking her new-born infant for a stroll, Eliza crossed their paths and was excited to show the baby to them. But to Sharples’s dismay, they “pass[ed]” her, “as if we had never met.” Angrily noting “What a change has taken place, in their behaviour towards me!” Sharples perhaps naively expected the sisters, who “profes[sed]” republican principles, to accept her just as they continued to support Carlile during this time.38 Hera Cook notes that the couple were often heckled in public after announcing their moral marriage, Sharples for being “no better than a prostitute” and a “moral mistress.”39 Such sexism seems to have been common in radical circles. For example, in 1842 Carlile gossips about famous fellow republican Emma Martin, saying that she “has become impregnated, and that for that and other reasons, the Socialists have discarded and renounced her. She complained of them, when she came to me.”40

Still, without the protections of marital coverture, Sharples was deeply committed to the idea of modeling a moral marriage. As she explained to Carlile, she wanted to “sacrafice [sic], and suffer, every thing [sic], in the vindication of the ‘Rights of women.’”41 This extraordinary statement suggests a knowledge of Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings, but it is unclear if she was familiar with her feminist forebear or implying knowledge of her writings. In any case, throughout this pregnancy Sharples pointed up her labors and “sacrafices” [sic] as a woman. Indeed, her choices can be read through Cook’s argument that “the processes of menstruation, pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding” are “labour, which is performed by the woman’s body.” Thus, for women, sex always carries the whiff of labor.42 Sharples intuited this when she wrote to Carlile after her first baby was born, saying that her moral husband “ought to share in nursing him, really my back and arms ache, to such a degree I can scarcely bear.”43 Understanding that the pregnant body was politicized, as will be seen Sharples pressed Carlile and government officials to mind the gap between their patriarchal approaches and the material and theoretical reality of her condition.

A crisis that occurred just weeks before Sharples’s accouchement illustrates the intolerable pressures put on the couple’s personal and political commitments. On 10 March 183344—a month before she gave birth—the jail suddenly barred her from seeing Carlile. Until this time, she was accustomed to visiting him daily. It is likely that she was barred because she was visibly pregnant and not sufficiently ashamed about her unmarried state. In an age when it was a norm for women to die in childbirth, and with it being her first pregnancy, her fears about the coming confinement are understandable. She wanted to see her partner before giving birth and needed him to show some care for her in the dire situation. Sharples also wanted to use the pregnancy to make a highly visible political commitment to republican causes, including her own proto-feminist ideals. Aligning her childbearing “confinement” with Carlile’s political confinement in jail, she was saying they were equals in the sacrifices they made for their beliefs.

For his part, Carlile took umbrage with Sharples’s incessant demand that he confront his jailors on the issue and that he allow her to contend with them on her own behalf. He also resented Sharples’s appeals that he show his love for her during her confinement, almost as though he didn’t recognize her “confinement” as anywhere near as important as his own. Carlile’s vexed machinations around Sharple’s pregnancy figure in highly intense triangulated arguments between himself, Sharples, and his jailors showing that he would have avoided the confrontation if he could have. Further, his letters are as much about the jailors insulting his manhood as they are about their crude treatment of Sharples per se. Indeed, the letters exhibit his hypersensitivity to the ways the authorities slighted his respectability and importance as a well-known radical. The exchanges often bespeak a preening amour propre that had nothing to do with how his jailors humiliated and harassed Sharples. He also makes use of the pregnancy and his jailors’ treatment of Sharples to debate the hypocrisy of government-sanctioned marriage in contrast to “moral marriage.”

As noted, Carlile’s letters to his jailors Teague and Paine, and the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Peter Laurie, illustrate a strange peacockishness that Sharples had become aware of and used in her suggestions for dealing with his jailors. At one point she tutors him45 to say that “for yourself you could bear any thing, and that if Teague thought of making war upon you he was much mistaken” because the “noble” Carlile “had, had, too many powerful Enemies to contend with, to be frightened” of them.46 Drawing on Carlile’s egotism, Sharples contends that he must remind Teague that he has “suffered too much to allow any circumstances” to affect him “individually,” but that it is Sharples’s feelings he is touched by. Even though she knows that her feelings are not his paramount concern, she pursues the approach because she knows he will see that it makes him look respectable, even gentlemanly. Thus, she advises him to inform Teague that the jailor’s “ungentlemanly” actions are “wounding the feelings of” a woman who has “no other, friend.” Ultimately, she encourages him to “Lay all the blame, upon me” as a way of indicating his superior sensibility by saying that “you feel for my distress, and pity my suffering.”47

In keeping with this approach, in the 10 March 1833 letter he provides his own character reference; describing himself as dignified in life’s hardships, he asserts that in the jail he is known by the other prisoners for his “excess of kindness,” “good nature,” and “neighbourly feeling.” He adds that “Difficulties rouse my calm fortitude, put me on my guard, and make me peaceable and circumspect.” But condescending and quick to take umbrage, he notes that he pays people “proper respect” until they “insul[t] me and my friends.” Petulantly, he warns that he takes vengeance for slights to his station.48 In fact, Carlile had schooled Sharples on proper deference to him warning her to

remember, I am not a man to be trifled with, to be jeered, nor to be easily duped. You have seen my promptitude in resenting an insult from Mr. Taylor and my resolution in carrying out the resentment. I shall deal with you precisely the same if you so deal with me.49

Carlile’s insistence on deference could be laughable. At one point, having told Teague that, going forward, he would be “civi[l]” and “studiously avoid your path,” he promises to treat Teague like a “post” by not “run[ning] against” him. Likewise, he warns “that, if ever you attempt again to offer me a personal insult, or to address me” as anything but a “gentleman,” “I will, on the spot, wring your nose for you, even if it be in the presence of your servants and other prisoners.” Though he had begun the letter stating that “You have made yourself my enemy, my persecution” and “insulted and endangered the life of as good and virtuous a woman as ever breathed,” Sharples’s safety, security, and reputation have certainly left the scene by the time Carlile is talking about wringing noses.50

On 11 March 1833, Carlile amplifies his grievances by writing to the Lord Mayor, essentially turning the situation into a matter between gentlemen. Bizarrely he begins with a tirade about how he was treated by his first wife. Jane, he says, was so “indomitably violent and illtempered as to make it impossible that any man could live happily with her in a state of marriage.” “[P]ainfully yoked” to her for “eighteen out of the last twenty” years, he passive-aggressively whines that by the end of the marriage he was “entirely neglected, insulted and defied by this woman.” In May 1830 he separated from her by an “open declaration” that was “morally irrevocable,” but he rather loses the high-minded effect by pointing out that he gave her an annuity of £50 pounds.51

With Jane set up as the foil and harridan, Carlile finally gets to the reason for the letter, stating that at first Sharples “joined” him “from political attachment” followed later by “private affection.” Eliza, he explains, was “the sort of companion that I desire through life” because she is “of a good family, well educated,” “respectable,” and “lady like,” a laundry list of Victorian Accomplishments. Outlining the couple’s propriety, he says that she had visited him almost every day for the previous fourteen months, during which she had been “perfectly inoffensive in her conduct.” Then he complains that the “coward” Teague was “rouse[d]” by Sharples’s “virtue and courage” to “insult” her “weakness” as a “woman.” This implies that Sharples’s pride about being pregnant out of wedlock might have caused Teague’s “insult[ing]” ire. It’s important, too, to pay attention to Carlile’s cocky threat: if his request is not approved, he will publish “a picture of the management of this prison as must compel the Court of Aldermen to turn that management inside out.”52

Carlile is just as obstreperous in his letter to Laurie of 18 March 1833, where he appeals to the Lord Mayor to “put a stop to” Teague’s “wicked interference” in “my family affairs, by granting me an order for the admission” of Eliza. The onerous “my” of “family affairs” is reiterated later in the letter when he complains that he is not “at home to rule my own house.” Carlile quickly asserts Sharples’s “spotless reputation” and points up the “injury” to “her health” caused by the “separation.” But it is his reputation that is paramount, for when he explains that he and Sharples were in perfect agreement in “repudiat[ing] the licence of the priest” and “contemn[ing] the priestly ceremony of marriage,” it is his own masculine character that he boasts about. Not “greedy” for “filthy lucre,” he proudly states that he belongs to a “peculiar priesthood,” in which he is “vigilant,” “patient,” not a brawler,” but “apt to teach.”53

In a long tirade to Laurie two weeks prior to Sharples’s confinement, dated 28 March 1833, Carlile blames Eliza for the whole epistolary exchange: “I have received a letter which contains a threat, and I fear it is not an idle one, because it comes from a furious and distracted woman, who has evidently lost her reason, through the outrage that has been committed upon her.”54 A number of Sharples’s letters fit this description; but I suggest that it is probably RC 39, in which she explains how Carlile’s cold approach has made her “destitute, of philosophy.” Suggesting that she had reached a point “bordering on insanity!” she says, “My temples, throb, and beat, and my recollections of what passed, last evening, is just sufficient, to remind me, of my destitution, and my wretchedness.” Lacking sleep and almost delirious, she feels “[F]everish” and “confused,” her mind a “perfect caos” [sic]. Bathetically, she wishes she were “a dog, or a brute” without “finer, or tenderer passion” because then she would have “been spared” the “torture.”55

The strategy of blaming Sharples, first suggested by her, illustrates that her fate is between men; it also bespeaks Carlile’s strong patriarchal bent. Appealing to the Lord Mayor, he describes Eliza’s letter as being “scarcely legible from the state of distraction in which it is written,” thus employing certain stereotypes about women’s hysteria.56 Nevertheless, Carlile’s heightened tone indicates some desperation. While Carlile and Sharples were both self-dramatizing people, they were in a horrendous situation. Admitting that he is powerless to assuage her outraged feelings, Carlile even allows that he had ordered her to stop making demands: “I have done everything that powerful and persuasive writing can do, to allay the feelings of this lady. I have written with commands, with remonstrance and with affection.”57 This may be the same “very ugly letter” Sharples was aggrieved by, in which he had complained of her “bad and ungracious” “manners,” delineating her character as “most unamiable,” “sullen fretful peevish,” “ugly and filthy.” In the same letter, he commanded that “there be no more nonsense!”58

In his letter to Laurie, Carlile outlandishly states that he told Sharples to meet Teague “before the Mansion House and horsewhip him with a lady’s whip.” Suggesting that if he wasn’t a prisoner he would horsewhip them himself, Carlile claims that he told Sharples to horsewhip the “whole Gaol Committee,” if that “would calm her feelings.” Driven to distraction, perhaps, by her own almost suicidal letter, he states that “It is murder itself … and I fear that murder will be the end of it.” Noting that she has been this way for a month because she wanted “one more interview before her accouchement,” it seems that he, a man used to ruling his own home, has given up in the face of Sharples’s overwhelming rage. As he says, “I am calm but I cannot calm this lady. She came to the prison gate in a state of insane distraction on Sunday morning at one clock [sic]. She came again in disguise this morning.”59

Informing Laurie that he had advised Sharples to use a “lady’s whip” minimizes concerns for Sharples’s well-being and intimates that Carlile may be using a wink and a nod between men to share sexist assumptions regarding a pregnant woman’s purported hysteria, assumptions that belittle scrupulous female anger while highlighting Carlile’s cool rationality. Further, the suggestion that Sharples had resorted to appearing in disguise at the jail out of desperation reiterates seamy beliefs about pregnancy causing female insanity. But, if true, it also suggests Sharples’s monumental agency and creativity. Facing confinement (parturition) in a society that seemed to legally, socially, and financially confine women to few options, in this gesture Sharples literally and metaphorically performs and critiques the confining of her confinement under a disguise, as it were, vis-à-vis Carlile’s confinement in a prison.

But there are other layers to the heightened rhetoric. It is unclear if Carlile’s threats were the reason for his early release later in August 1833, or if the Gaol Committee took mercy when Sharples almost died from grave illness after giving birth. In any case, in the 6 April 1833 letter to Paine, within days of Eliza giving birth, Carlile threatened to expose the “debauchery” taking place in the prison. Exclaiming that Teague “has stabbed” his comfort “to the heart” and been its “assassin,” he adds a hypothetical situation to describe what Teague had done to Sharples:

If I had placed myself in the passage of this prison, as I might have done; and if, like a villain or a madman, I had way laid Mrs. Teague and her daughters, called them whores, and knocked them about the passage, to the danger of their lives, it would not have been ‘so atrocious’ an ‘outrage as Mr. Teague has inflicted on me and on my wife.

Carlile reiterates that “I use the word wife,” because “Eliza Sharples is more virtuously and honourably my wife, than Mrs. Teague is the wife of Mr. Teague.”60 As this letter suggests, it is probable that the male jailors and the jailor’s wife sexually harassed and intimidated the pregnant Sharples, perhaps on more than one occasion, a shocking violation that does not receive further discussion in the letters. Equally shocking, though, Carlile views it as a slight to him.

Characteristically awkward in the face of a woman’s emotions, ultimately Carlile handles the impasse philosophically by making his theorizing about the situation his topmost priority. Obsessively he vows that he has done the chivalric thing with Sharples: he has “not deceived her. She has not been deceived. I have not seduced her. She has not been seduced. No marriage was ever better reasoned.” Thus, “We determined” to set “the world a proper example” of what marriage should be. Having patiently “spent three months together, as a betrothment,” only then did they “determin[e]” to marry. Proud of his respectable approach to sexual congress, Carlile states that they “conducted” themselves as “honourably” as possible without “any religious church or persuasion.” As usual he cannot help making it about himself, writing, “I repeat it, Mr. Teague has committed a more atrocious outrage on me than any, that I, by my madness, could have contrived on him, his mastery over that lock and key making the difference.”61

At this point, wearied by the imminent birth of Sharples’s son and by her complaints at not being allowed to see him, Carlile uses the approach Sharples suggested, that is, that Teague had “destroyed”

the health of a virtuous … young married woman, pregnant with her first child. … In the last six weeks of her pregnancy, he has separated such a young woman from the only friend she had in London, on whom she rested for confidence. … He [McTeague] has put her life in danger. She now thinks of nothing but dying: and feels and acts as if she had nothing about her worthy of making of life a care.

Male bravado seeps in after this emotional plea, when he says, “Whatever may happen to the lady, I shall live to be amply revenged of him and his family for their outrage.”62

The last letter in this remarkable exchange between Carlile and his jailors (11 May 1833), the bulk of the letter is about how Sharples had been treated when visiting. Nevertheless, Carlile cannot restrain from quibbles that the times and hours his friends and visitors can see him have changed, trivial matters in light of the fact that Eliza had just given birth followed by grave illness. He does not get to his most important complaint, Sharple’s dire straits, until almost halfway through the letter, where, finally, he vociferates that, “expecting to be hourly in labour,” Sharples had been left “without any assistance.” But characteristically, he rages against the “cold blooded savage monster” Teague for “rous[ing] my manhood” into “resentment.” Obtusely, he protests that Teague may “hunt down this lady of mine to death,” but he himself will have a “sweet moral revenge” as though “this lady” was tangential to his true aims.63

Informing the Gaol Committee regarding the prostitution occurring in the jail may have won Carlile his release; he sputtered that the jailors paraded “all the women prisoners” in front of him so he could “abuse myself with any bad woman” or “prostitute.” He refers to this “debauchery” to make his philosophical point about moral marriage, noting that, “I am denied the society of the respectable woman whom I love, who is morally and virtuously my wife.” Handily, he points up that the “Keeper and the Alderman have strained at the gnat of illicit love, as pure and respectable as love can be” (his moral marriage with Sharples) while “for years the jailors have swallowed the whole camel of drunkenness and debauchery” going on in the jail.64 Hoisting government sanctioned marriage by its own petard, Carlile contrasts state-sponsored prostitution with his so-called right to decree and absolve his own marriages at will. A brilliant rhetorical move, he still seems more intent on winning the debate between republicanism and mainstream praxis than on seeking care for his distressed partner.

When Sharples lost faith in Carlile’s willingness to make her case, she asked was “it impossible” for him to allow her to seek an audience with Teague “before my confinement.” “You know not how this separation presses upon my heart,” she urges, and persists, “Do, do, Richard, if you love me, obtain me an interview. It will reward me for a world of pain, and suffering.”65 In another epistle she begs permission to “intersede” (sic) and “know exactly who is the most authoritative person in this affair to whom I ought to apply.” It is disappointing that she must let him see the letter before sending it and that she asks for “permission” to speak on “my own behalf” to “solicit a note of admission to see you.”66 Nevertheless, though obsequious to Carlile, these letters imply an expectation that he will not oppose her, and she exudes confidence in her ability to persuade government agents to her cause, the rights of pregnant women.

Linking their situation back to her feminist commitments, Sharples reminds Carlile that “I must, and will, be something,” and is “determin[ed]” to be as “noble” as Carlile.67 Abhorring the “degradation to which Christianity [triple underlined] has reduced the female mind,” she sought to obtain for women “those privileges, which the women of old, once enjoyed.”68 Intuiting a feminist understanding of the political and personal labor her pregnancy represented, across a number of letters she aligns her coming “confinement” with Carlile’s prison confinement just as she rightly made much of the possibility that she might die in childbirth. Hence, she uses a rhetoric that illustrates the political work her own body and state of mind had performed during separation from her lover.

Sharples’s letters from this time also show that her destitution illustrated how patriarchal culture punished the unwed mother. For all her belabored assertions about being morally married, to the culture at large she was having the baby out of wedlock, which brought her humiliation and molestation. Aggravating that situation, her so-called “husband” was in prison, and the “separation” from him created an intolerable financial, social, legal, and psychological limbo for her. Likewise, her family of origin had abandoned her when she chose a radical life and she was in dire financial straits, something Carlile was relatively protected from in the safety of prison. Facing the consequences of pregnancy with no safety net, she contends that her confinement is more politically repressive than his confinement in jail and must be seen as a contribution to their republican cause. This is self-dramatizing but certainly no more so than Carlile’s hyperbolic rhetoric.

Sharples even includes the baby’s movements in utero to extend the metaphor of confinement, saying, “I do assure you that he does not bear imprisonment well, he kicks most unmercifully.”69 In more sober terms, she complains “that I have not engaged one moments comfort since our separation” and then exhorts, “I am [more] a prisoner than you are.”70 She suggests that Carlile should “think of my situation for a moment,” for then he might exclaim, “poor girl, I must make you her happy, her happiness will depend upon me.”71 Even after she has given birth, Sharples is still using confinement to compare with Carlile’s legal imprisonment, asserting that, “I am more a prisoner, than you are, in this our separation. I am quite comfortless, and always miserable.”72 Writing that “When I think of this evil and unjust separation my heart is ready to burst! She reiterates that “I have no other trouble, no other grief” “beyond this.”73

Sharples also expects her partner to take her fears about dying in childbirth seriously. For example, she says that “I am quite lonely, you tell me not to die, I will live if I can, I try to live, but sometimes, I seem to care, very little whether I live, or die.” Encouraging him to imagine if “I do not recover,” she lugubriously ponders where she and her baby should be buried. Though at times she is sanguine about her chances of surviving the birth, Sharples became gloomy as the “time [wa]s drawing nigh,” noting that she would prepare “my last dying speech.”74 On this same theme, she tells him she is “free from bodily pain, altho’ very large, and expecting every day will be my last,” adding the by now chief refrain that “my greatest, pain, and trial, is in our separation.”75 After the baby was born she was “dreadfully ill” and was separated from the child for two weeks: her “life was in danger indeed, I was in as high a state of fever,” as “it was possible for any poor creature to be in and live.” “[M]y sufferings have been great,” she writes again, “greater than your imagination can paint, greater than I can describe,” and “alas! no kind, or soothing voice to cheer or comfort me.”76

By this point her letters describe a form of post-partum depression accompanied by metaphysical breakdown:

what purpose is answered, by my suffering: what has been gained, by reducing me, to so much misery, and, at a time too, when I required something, encouraging, and comforting. The severe fever, I laboured under for seven, or eight days, during which time, I partook of nothing but bread, and water, and never once saw my Infant [sic], was brought on, by anxiety of mind.77

Here Sharples blames the separation from him as well as her confinement in childbirth foe creating a debilitating psychological state. Post-partum depression also manifests as lack of affect for her baby. Writing that, “I cannot bear going out at all, I seem not to care for anything but your society and if I have not that, I want nothing else,” she states that “My Infant, and myself seem, not to belong to any one, I have been weeping all day, and I cannot help it … one day, drags, on after a nother.”78

Carlile reacted with a tin ear, telling her she was “unreasonable” because she had a “fine boy, who requires” “all her “attention!” She responded to his mansplaining that “I know it, and I love him, but then I love you too, Had I you always with me, and my beloved boy away, I should most anxiously wish to see him still. I should have you the same. I have affection for both.”79 Repeatedly she finds herself averring that the source of her trauma is their separation, a part of which is his inability to provide her emotional comfort, and as she sees it is the key symbolic form of confinement debilitating the couple’s ability to pursue their causes.80 Wondering “How long is this cruelty to be enforced” in one letter she asserts that “The separation is all my trouble, nothing is equal to that of being a-part.”81 “Everything else, sinks into nothingness,” she says, in comparison, of “that greatest, of all evils, and troubles”—“my separation.”82

Sharples’s first child died before turning one. Over the next four years, she had three more children with Carlile, and was faced with sheer ongoing poverty, which only seemed to increase after Carlile’s death in 1843. As this paper shows, the couple’s reproductive choices during the first pregnancy illustrate a range of issues crucial to understanding cultural views about marriage and sexuality. Despite publicly supporting birth control, in his private life Carlile exhibited a cavalier attitude when making birth control decisions, leaving the choice to his wives. During Sharples’s first pregnancy he seemed primarily concerned about his incarceration and how Sharples and his jailors undermined his masculinity and respectability. He also made use of Sharples’s desperate situation to theoretically deconstruct mainstream marriage vis-à-vis “moral marriage.” Sharples also made a political choice to model her commitment to moral marriage and republican causes through public display of resistance to state-sponsored marriage and norms about pregnancy and childbirth. Proudly parading and performing her (out of wedlock) pregnant body, in radical feminist actions she voiced the difficulties of “confinement,” separation, and post-partum depression as part of a political campaign to have her condition and situation recognized under the banner of the “Rights of Women.”