moved to disrupt his work by issuing fines and resorted to prison terms. The Swedish historian Ulf Ilvar Nilsson observes that from September 1887 to September 1893 Lennstrand was charged seven times for religious offenses and was in total sentenced to fourteen months of imprisonment. Lennstrand's contemporary J. M. Robertson records that Lennstrand was sentenced to three months of prison time in November 1888, to three months for blasphemy in October 1889, and to an additional six months at a sentencing in December 1889, with "a prospect of an additional year or two for more blasphemy." The taking care of Lennstrand's duties on the Fritänkaren fell to an associate, Captain Otto Thomson, during the months of Lennstrand's imprisonment. When Lennstrand's health badly deteriorated, thousands of Swedish Freethought supporters registered their protests. Lennstrand was subsequently released from prison in 1890. Though chiefly influenced by Mill and the political philosophy of 19th-century liberalism, Lennstrand found encouragement from the Social Democrats and offered his own support to the Social Democrats, the universal suffrage campaign, and the labor movement. The Social Democrats' emerging leader Hjalmar Branting was a personal friend whom Lennstrand had encountered behind prison bars in the 1880s, when both were serving sentences as blasphemers. The less enthusiastic party activists expressed a wariness that Lennstrand's attacks on religious groups might drive away support from religious supporters of the Social Democrats. By late summer of 1893 Lennstrand had developed an illness from which he would never manage to recover. He died at a hospital in his native Gävle in 1895. The remains were interred at the family tomb in his native city. Nilsson suggests that the likely cause of Lennstrand's death at 34 was bone necrosis; rumors spread by opponents maintained that God punished him for blasphemous speech by killing him with cancer of the tongue and that he had returned to religion during his dying moments, which Nilsson dismisses as doctors' reports rule out any problem with the oral cavity and witnesses at the side of Lennstrand's deathbed could describe him persevering in his atheistic convictions to the very end. An obituary in George William Foote's The Freethinker hailed him as "one of the founders and martyrs of organised Freethought in Sweden" whose "imprisonment for blasphemy, and subsequent establishment of the Fritankaren, appealed strongly to the sympathies of English Freethinkers," and as a man worthy of remembrance for "his sufferings and for