Myles McSweeney

Myles McSweeney (1814–1881) was an Irish Chartist, mythologist and secularist writer.

McSweeney was born in Northern Ireland but moved to London. He was influenced by the views of Robert Taylor and wrote for the National Reformer and Secular Chronicle.[1]

He was a former Catholic who became anti-Christian.[2] Historian Steven Fielding has described McSweeney as a "leading secularist lecturer in London's proletarian clubland."[3]

McSweeney was an advocate of the Christ myth theory and lectured on the subject.[4] He was known for having reduced "Christ to a Solar Myth".[5] In the 1870s he associated with Charles Bradlaugh.[6]

Selected publications

References
  1. Wheeler, Joseph Mazzini. (1889). A Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers of All Ages and Nations. London: Progressive Publishing Company. p. 215
  2. Shipley, Stan. (1983). Club Life and Socialism in Mid-Victorian London. Journeyman. p. 25
  3. Feilding, Steven. (1993). Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England, 1880-1939. Open University Press. p. 109
  4. Davies, Charles Maurice. (1874). Heterodox London: Or, Phases of Free Thought in the Metropolis. London: Tinsley Brothers. pp. 111-120
  5. Shipley, Stan. (1983). Club Life and Socialism in Mid-Victorian London. Journeyman. p. 37. "Myles McSweeney was an old Chartist who could reduce 'Christ to a Solar Myth' in a 'quaint style' which club members knew and loved. When he died in 1881 subscriptions for his funeral were sent in from all over London."
  6. O'Donoghue, David James. (1912). The Poets of Ireland: A Biographical and Bibliographical Dictionary of Irish Writers of English Verse. Dublin: Figgis & Co. p. 292
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