ABSTRACT
“Fathers, Real and Imagined” opens with the events of Bottomley’s childhood, his ties by birth to the circles of London’s leading Radical politicians and his subsequent education at a public orphanage in Birmingham. It describes the birth of socialism in 1830s England, and the part played in that movement by George Jacob Holyoake, Bottomley’s maternal uncle, and the influence of Holyoake’s ideas on Bottomley’s mother Elizabeth. It shows how Bottomley convinced himself that his true father was not William Bottomley, a penniless tailor, but Charles Bradlaugh, the great Radical, Holyoake’s successor and the founder of today’s secular movement.
