William Carlile published a book on mathematics but later became a drunkard, deserted the family a few years after his son's birth, and died shortly thereafter.

His mother ran a shop in Lawrence Lane, Ashburton, and was a devout Anglican, providing her children with a strict Christian upbringing.

[1] His interest in politics was kindled first by economic conditions in the winter of 1816, when Carlile was put on short-time work by his employer creating serious problems for the family: "I shared the general distress of 1816 and it was this that opened my eyes."

[2] As a way of making a living he sold radical publications, such as Cobbett’s Political Register and Thomas Wooler’s The Black Dwarf, on the streets of London, often walking "thirty miles for a profit of eighteen pence".

He immersed himself in the literature of religious freethought and wrote his first pamphlet, The Order for the Administration of the Loaves and Fishes, a parody of the Anglican Communion Service.

In order to reach as wide an audience as possible, these first appeared in the Weekly Political Register, then as two-penny pamphlets, and finally as bound volumes.

In 1819, following his publication of Paine’s long-banned The Age of Reason, Carlile was faced by a series of law suits from both the Attorney General and the Society for the Suppression of Vice.

Carlile escaped and was hidden by radical friends before he caught the mail coach to London and published his eyewitness account, giving the first full report of what had happened, in Sherwin's Weekly Political Register of 18 August 1819.

While he was in jail he continued to write articles for The Republican which was now published by Carlile's wife, Jane, and thanks to the publicity it now outsold pro-government newspapers such as The Times.

Carlile's sentence ended in 1823 but he was immediately arrested and returned to prison for not paying his £1,500 fine, so the process continued until he was eventually released on 25 November 1825.

An example of the support he received from around the country is the £1.5.1 sent to him in Dorchester jail by forty working men in the West Yorkshire village of Hunslet, accompanied by a noble letter on behalf of those "few Friends to Truth and Justice".

He argued that "equality between the sexes" should be the objective of all reformers, and in 1826 published Every Woman's Book advocating birth control and the sexual emancipation of women.

[1] Carlile then opened a ramshackle building on the south bank of the River Thames, the Blackfriars Rotunda, and in widespread public unrest in July 1830 this became a gathering place for republicans and atheists.

[citation needed] In 1831, he was jailed, under the charge of seditious libel, given two and a half years for writing an article in support of agricultural labourers campaigning against wage cuts and advising the strikers to regard themselves as being at war with the government.

In 1837 H. Robinson published the results of his later thinking in the book Extraordinary Conversion and Public Declaration of Richard Carlile of London to Christianity.

Large numbers of people attended his funeral in Kensal Green Cemetery on Sunday 26 February 1843, where his sons protested at the Christian burial rite being administered in the common grave he was being buried in – citing that their father had "passed his life in opposition to all priestcraft".