[2][3][4] John Stuart Mill noted in On Liberty that both Truelove and George Jacob Holyoake were rejected as jurymen at the Old Bailey in 1857, for their statements of lack of religious belief.

He became one of the core members of the League who attended regularly, until it stopped meeting formally around 1899, with Thomas Owen Bonser, J. K. Page and William Hammond Reynolds.

[12] The Book-Hunter in London (1895) described Truelove as "agnostic", and as having retired from the High Holborn shop, to which he moved from the Strand, a few years earlier.

After six months Truelove was cautioned by the judge, Lord Chief Justice Campbell, and the matter was closed.

[16][17] In 1878 Truelove was tried for publishing an edition of Robert Dale Owen's work Moral Physiology, and spent four months in Coldbath Fields Prison.

[22][23][24] In legal terms, prosecutions brought during the 1870s, and prompted by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, turned on the application of the Obscene Publications Act 1857.

[27] The background in birth control was that Truelove had first published George Drysdale's The Elements of Social Science; or Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion, an influential pseudonymous text on contraception, in 1855, after Drysdale had had trouble finding a publisher; he also sold contraceptive devices.

[32] Owen's Moral Physiology was an earlier birth control book from 1830, first published in the United States.

[33] Under the title Individual, Family, and National Poverty, a pamphlet version of Drysdale's work was part of the case against Truelove.