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The Age of George III |
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Thomas Spence, one of nineteen children, was the son of a net-maker and shoemaker from Newcastle upon Tyne. He was taught to read by his father and became a schoolmaster. Spence was inspired to write The Real Rights of Man by a lawsuit between the freemen and corporation of Newcastle over the use of the common land in the town. In the book, he developed "Spencean Philanthropy", whereby
Spence moved to London in December 1792; his personal oddness, bitterness and unsociability - the result of poverty and suffering, ensured that he remained a lonely man. He was arrested almost immediately for selling copies of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man but was acquitted. Spence published and sold tracts, initially from a shop in chancery Lane, then from 8 Little Turnstile, then from 9 Oxford Street and finally he conducted his propaganda from a large, closed barrow that he pushed around the streets. From it, he sold his "Plan", his "IMPORTANT TRIAL OV TOMIS SPENS" and other papers. Spence's peculiar phonetic writing was his attempt to reform spelling.
According to Francis Place, Spence 'was not more than five feet high, very honest, simple, single-minded, who loved mankind, and firmly believed that a time would come when men would be virtuous, wise and happy. He was unpractical in the ways of the world to an extent hardly imaginable'. throughout the 1790s Spence was a source of handbills, chalked notices, broadsheets and a periodical called Pig's Meat (1793-6). Between May and December he was imprisoned under the suspension of Habeas Corpus: he was imprisoned without trial several times. Eventually he was tried and gaoled for writing and publishing a seditious libel, The Restorer of Society to its Natural State (1801). He issued Jacobin tokens during a period of coin shortage.
Spence may be seen as little more than a crank but there is some evidence of 'arming and drilling' connected with his shop, as noted in the 1794 Treason Trials. Spence took up Paine's arguments against hereditary aristocracy and carried them to their conclusion:
We must destroy not only personal and hereditary Lordship, but the cause of them, which is Private Property in Land. The public mind being suitably prepared by reading my little Tracts... a few Contingent Parishes have only to declare the land to be theirs and form a convention of Parochial Delegates. Other adjacent Parishes would ... follow the example, and send also their Delegates and thus would a beautiful and powerful New Republic instantaneously arise in full vigour. The power and re sources of War passing in this manner in a moment into the hands of the People. .. their Tyrants would become weak and harmless. And being ... scalped of their Revenues and the Lands that pro duced them their Power would never more grow to enable them to overturn our Temple of Liberty.
Whether Spence was directly implicated in insurrectionary conspiracy is not clear but he believed in the methods of the underground:
Spence described himself as 'the unfee'd Advocate of the disinherited seed of Adam'. After his death in 1814, the Society of Spencean Philanthropists advocated his reforms. Some members such as Arthur Thistlewood and the Watsons were involved in the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
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Last modified
19 August, 2007
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