The Autobiography of Joseph Barker

The Life of Joseph Barker, Written by Himself (1880) is Barker’s fuller autobiography, prepared for publication after his death by John Thomas Barker. Where his Modern Skepticism concentrates on the arc of doubt and return, this volume tells the whole life in greater biographical detail — upbringing, trades, ministry, editorship, controversy, and travels.

Barker’s life spanned an extraordinary range of positions. He began in Methodism, passed through successive religious and political movements, became a prominent secularist editor and lecturer working with well-known freethinkers in Britain and America, and finally returned to Christianity. The autobiography follows that course at length, giving the events and circumstances behind the shifts that his shorter book treats more thematically.

For readers who want the complete portrait rather than the argument alone, this is the companion volume to Modern Skepticism: the same remarkable life, set out in full by the man who lived it and rounded out by his editor.

Our public-domain edition presents Barker’s text in a clean, readable modern format with clear type, and we link to a free source as well.

This is a modern reading edition of The Life of Joseph Barker, Written by Himself, published in London in 1880 and completed by his son John Thomas Barker after his death.

Barker (1806–1875) was born in a Yorkshire weaving village and taught himself to read out of a Bible. He became a Methodist preacher, was expelled for his opinions, founded a sect of his own, drifted through Unitarianism into outright unbelief, and spent years on both sides of the Atlantic as one of the best-known secularist lecturers in the English-speaking world. Then he changed his mind again, and came back. He is unusual among the writers on this shelf in having made the journey twice, and in describing both directions with the same care.

He died in 1875, so the work has been in the public domain everywhere for well over a century.

A note on what we changed. We set this edition from the Internet Archive's scan and the work was mechanical throughout; every rule is written down. The printer sets a running head at the top of each page with the page number beside it, and the scan lifts both into the middle of whatever sentence the page began with — a hundred and sixty-two times. Removing them leaves the page number stuck to the next word, so that "led us to purchase a supply" arrives as "led us to 3purchase": those we ungathered too, and only where what remained was a word this book uses elsewhere. We rejoined the words broken at the end of a line, repaired the letter-shapes this printing loses, and set the chapter titles from the headings the printer put on the page rather than from the table of contents, whose dot leaders the scanner mixes into every title it lists.

What we did not change. We did not rewrite a sentence, modernise a spelling, or remove a passage. Barker is blunt about the men he fell out with, on both sides, and about himself; none of that is softened. The free scan is linked from this book's page.