Recording Secularist Lives

Abstract This article argues that the biographical dictionary was a crucial form through which nineteenth-century secularists conceptualised their own history as a movement that spanned time, place, and class, and envision themselves as part of this multitude. By illuminating how J.M. Wheeler negotiated gender, nationality, and contemporaneity in A Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers of All Ages and Nations (1889), it identifies how biographical compilation—a form commonly associated with nation building—was co-opted for radical ends. In contrast to longer-form secularist (auto)biographies that privileged the individual over the collective, the biographical dictionary did not impose a singular narrative and so enabled freethinkers to navigate a tension at the heart of the secular movement: the desire to work together to effect social change while upholding the right to draw their own conclusions about what constituted freethinking principles and exemplary lives.