Leicester's Victorian Infidels

Ned will look at Leicester’s early Victorian ‘heretics’ and ‘infidels.’ He traces the history of the irreligious in Leicester from the supporters of Richard Carlile’s ‘seditious’ press, through Robert Owen's socialists to the secularists of the 1850s. The book shows how Leicester's hall of science, the 'Social Institution,' outraged religious opinion.

It looks at how the infidels’ fight for free speech and freedom of conscience was bound up with the wider movement for political reform and the right to vote.

He also examines the conflict between and the Evangelising clergy and local radicals and freethinkers.