Blasphemy in Victorian Britain? Foote and the Freethinker
David Nash considers a cause celebre that tested tensions between pious tradition and a 'progressive' age.
In the aftermath of one of the most famous brushes with the religious laws of England, George William Foote concluded by way of a pyrrhic victory that 'Blasphemy is entirely a matter of opinion. What is blasphemy in one country is piety in another. Progress tends to reduce it from a crime to an affair of taste'.
So might the history of blasphemy in Britain be summarised. It is an issue each generation feels confident is dead but it frequently rises to confront British society with questions about its level of tolerance, its attitude to freedom of speech and to minorities. These problems have never been easily solved since the answers emanate not simply from the legal profession but from the beliefs, fears and prejudices of individuals and groups in society. Victorian Britain discovered, just as contemporary society did in the 1970s (with the Gay News trial) and 1980s (with the Salman Rushdie affair), that this forgotten and historically curious offence could, without warning, become a central matter of legal and legislative debate.
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