A great account of changing Britian in the 1870's,

Although this is the story of Annle Besant and her fight for womens rights and birth control, it runs along with a parallel of Queen Victorias storyline at the same time not in as great detail but it all and to what is a fascinating tale of the life of the 2 remarkable ladies. The times they lived in so very different to now the life of all females is hard to imagine now. They had rights but nowhere near anything acceptable. There is still a way to go but we have come a very long way since the 1870's

So why 5 stars it's the way the story is told the bravery of Annie is outstanding, its a true story so it's a tale of our history presented with passion and style that is worthy of the time yet without the stuffy suffocating others often use.

I enjoy this and can't but highly recommend it to you.

I found this to be an incredibly well researched and informative book. I enjoyed finding out about Annie Besant and what an incredible force she was.

A fascinating and informative book about an important woman in Brotish history who hS become obscured. Well written and researched. I particularly enjoyed the author's witty asides. Great title too!

A book with a difference. Annie Besant a name that I did not know until I read the book. A lady of the time, who really was the start of the women's right to contraception for todays age.

History abounds in this book and takes you at times on a dark journey of the time. Research that was done for this book is to acknowledged. Excellent piece of writing.

I loved the story of Annie Besant, and struggled to put this down. I had heard of her previously but really enjoyed learning about one of her many achievements in detail. It's such an important story, and gives us another person to thank for our current (threatened) freedoms, which are never given back without a fight.

Meyer gives just enough context for the development of the trial which forms the main focus of A Dirty, Filthy Book, such as who the main players were and what was happening in wider society at the time.

What a brave, heroic person and what a price she paid for it. How many people have heard of Annie Besant, I wonder?

I had not heard of Annie's story until I requested to read this book! Very interesting and inspiring to learn about her life and what she went through.

My thanks to Ebury for an advanced copy of this book for review. I lived for some years in Bow close to the Match Girls’ factory before gentrification and remember the old unofficial plaque commemorating the match girls’ strike and Annie Besant’s part in it.

For the most part, this book concentrates on the fallout from Besant’s decision with Charles Bradlaugh, repeatedly elected M.P. for Northampton and eventually admitted to the Commons as the first atheist MP, to publish Fruits of Philosophy, a birth control manual dealing with the practicalities of enabling a woman’s right to choose whether to become pregnant. They were prosecuted for obscenity in 1877. The author gives us a flavour of those very different times during the trial from newspapers of the day and Queen Victoria’s journals. 45 years before a woman was admitted to the bar, Besant defended herself. Her defence fund was supported by Garibaldi but not Charles Darwin. Nonetheless, she was good at the trial, she was good at public speaking and she had a printing press. There is a lot of information in this part of the book and it is worth a read.

Annie Besant’s life was full of talking, talkers and, in her own case, a good deal of action, mainly on other people’s struggles. After the trial and, to be fair, the enormous personal cost it exacted, she continued to campaign with Bradlaugh, but whereas he, a man from a working class background, eventually gained and was happy to accept establishment recognition, she, a woman from a substantial middle class background but estranged from her abusive vicar husband, met with obstruction and her role in events was consistently effaced.

She did, however, move on from Bradlaugh’s secular reformism to become progressively a Fabian, a socialist and a trade union activist mainly in the East End of London before, bizarrely, turning to theosophy and repudiating much of what she had stood for up until then. She encounters a range of well known figures on this journey and the book is lively and informative, if in need of a fair amount of editing. There are a lot of accidentally repeated parts of sentences and wherever a person’s age is mentioned, the text has withheld the number. Some of the metaphors work and some do not and the reader is jolted from time to time by the style of writing, which is not quite consistent in tone. It’s a readable book, though, on a neglected subject.

Besant’s 40 years in India are not covered in depth in this book. The author says he is not intending to write some sort of hagiography and he does mention that she adopted a child and promoted him as the son of god until the poor lad’s shortcomings became obvious even to her. As she had done all her life, however, she also continued to weigh in on other people’s liberation struggles and, as usual, felt no compunction about declaiming on other cultures through her didactic programmes. She was at one point President of the Indian Congress. It is reasonable to wonder in quite whose interest this was and indeed why she opened so many Freemason lodges all over the British Empire.

Altogether, then, hers is a strange if compelling story. I enjoyed reading about those parts of it brought to life by this author, not least because there are so few new books brought out about radical activists, however ambivalent I may feel about them.

What a woman and I had never heard of her until I saw this book. The writer tells the story very eloquently.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the chance to find out about this incredible woman

This is an important and original book covering a previously ignored and forgotten but important piece of history. The trial of Annie Besant for the impertinence of publishing a book on female contraception. A subject that was taboo in Victorian England.

Impeccably researched and well written the amazing characters at the forefront of this case are brought to life and this is a fascinating read.