The political and the personal: the radicalism of Sophia Chichester and Georgiana Fletcher Welch (Upper-class women radicals and the reform of the marriage laws in Victorian England)

This account of two previously unknown, wealthy, upper-class women explores their patronage of religious and political radicals in the 1830s and 1840s . Strongly committed to reform of the marriage laws, they lived on their Gl oucestershire country estate while supporting with letters and money men wh o tired to reform society through a personal theosophy or political and soc ial ultra-radicalism. Of those they patronised, Richard Carlile, who fought for free thought, birth control and the unstamped press, was the most impo rtant, and for a time they maintained a close friendship with him. Since So phia Chichester and her sister were born into an upper-class family with ma ny aristocratic connections, their radicalism took a very different form fr om that of women like Emma Martin or Eliza Sharples Carlile. Unable to shar e their political or religious views with their family, and distanced by ba ckground from those whose aims they shared, they are unique as upperclass w omen radicals in early Victorian England.