Memoirs of a Social Atom

William Edwin Adams (1832-1906), who also wrote as Caractacus, was a chartist, republican, supporter of women's suffrage, and Editor of the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle. He was born in a poor, workingclass family and was mostly self-educated. Adams' first contact with the newspaper industry was at the age of fourteen, when he was apprenticed to the proprietor of the Cheltenham Journal. During his seven years apprenticeship he became involved in the radical politics of the age. By the 1880s, he was finding himself increasingly out of sympathy with emerging trends in socialism. But while laying down his political cudgels he cultivated other interests, such as his campaigns for free libraries and for parks for the people. Apart from his newspaper articles and pamphlets, Adams' importance rests on two books: Our American Cousins (1883) and Memoirs of a Social Atom (1903).