Groups would pool their resources in reading societies and subscription societies to purchase a book or journal in common, and frequently read it aloud to one another as was the case with James Wilson. By 1821, Carlile was a declared atheist (having previously been a Deist) and published his "Address to Men of Science", in favour of materialism and education. In the same year Jane Carlile was in turn sentenced to two years imprisonment for seditious libel, and her place as publisher was taken by Richard Carlile's sister, Mary. Within six months she was imprisoned for the same offence. The process was repeated with eight of his shop workers, and over 150 men and women were sent to prison for selling "The Republican". Carlile's sentence ended in 1823 but he was immediately arrested and returned to prison for not paying his £1,500 fine, so the process continued until he was eventually released on 25 November 1825. In the next edition of "The Republican" he expressed the hope that his long confinement would result in the freedom to publish radical political ideas. An example of the support he received from around the country is the £1.5.1 sent to him in Dorchester jail by forty working men in the West Yorkshire village of Hunslet, accompanied by a noble letter on behalf of those "few Friends to Truth and Justice". He then published further journals, "The Lion" which campaigned against child labour and "The Promptor". He argued that "equality between the sexes" should be the objective of all reformers, and in 1826 published "Every Woman's Book" advocating birth control and the sexual emancipation of women. Cobbett denounced this book as "so filthy, so disgusting, so beastly, as to shock even the lewdest men and women". Carlile was an advocate of the Christ myth theory. He did not believe that Jesus existed. He debated Unitarian minister John Relly Beard in "The Republican", 1826. He joined up with the radical and sceptical clergyman Robert Taylor and set out on an "infidel home missionary tour" which reached Cambridge on Thursday 21 May 1829 and caused a considerable upset to the University of Cambridge where a young Charles Darwin was a second-year student. At their meeting in Bolton, Lancashire, Carlile met Eliza Sharples, who was to become his long term mistress. Carlile then opened a ramshackle building on the south bank of the River Thames, the Blackfriars Rotunda, and in widespread public unrest in July 1830 this became a gathering place for republicans and atheists.