Thomas Spence (1750–1814)

Joan C. Beal, University of Sheffield
September 2024

Thomas Spence (1750–1814) arrived in London sometime between 1788 and 1792, which as we shall see was not a propitious time for someone with his radical views to move to the capital. The ideas for which Spence was to become infamous were formulated in Newcastle upon Tyne in the north of England and his early works were published there.

Spence was born on the Quayside, one of the poorest areas of Newcastle. His father was a netmaker who had moved to Newcastle from Aberdeen and Thomas left school to join his father’s trade at the age of ten. By 1775, when his first publications appeared, Thomas was a schoolteacher, first at his own school on the Quayside, then later that year at Haydon Bridge in Northumberland, and from 1779 to 1787 at St. Anne’s Chapel School in Newcastle. On 8^th November 1775 Spence gave a lecture to the Newcastle Philosophical Society which set out the political principle which he would advocate for the rest of his life and would come to be known as Spence’s Plan: that property in land was the right of every citizen and should not be held privately. At the next meeting, the Society voted to expel Spence for bringing it into disrepute. Their argument was that he had breached the Society’s rules by publishing and selling the lecture without their consent, but it was clear from the account in the Newcastle Chronicle that they also objected to the lecture’s “erroneous and dangerous levelling principles.”

In the same year, Spence published in Newcastle The Grand Repository of the English Language, a pronouncing dictionary in which every word is respelt in a phonemic alphabet of Spence’s own devising. Spence’s motivation in publishing this was to introduce a reformed spelling in order to make it easier for poor people, who could not afford much education, to learn to read. The motivations behind these two publications were linked: Spence believed that literacy was the key to the lower classes becoming enlightened about the injustice of their situation and subsequently radicalised. Spence was later to acknowledge the foundational nature of these two publications:

When I first began to study, I found every art and science a perfect whole. Nothing was in anarchy but language and politics. But both of these I reduced to order, the one by a new alphabet, the other by a new Constitution. (The Important Trial of Thomas Spence London: 1807).

Following the Grand Repository Spence went on to publish in Newcastle The Poor Man’s Advocate (1779), The Real Reading Made Easy (1782), A Supplement to the History of Robinson Crusoe (1782) and The Rights of Man (1783). The last of these was a verse set to the tune of the popular ballad Chevy Chase. His printer in Newcastle was Thomas Saint (fl. ca. 1720–80), whose books included woodcuts by the renowned engraver and naturalist Thomas Bewick (1753–1828), who was a friend of Spence.

There is no record of exactly when or why Spence left Newcastle for London. The entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states that there is “some evidence that he was settled there by 1788,” but gives no details. We know that he had arrived in the capital by 1792, as both Francis Place (1771–1854) and William Hone (1780–1842) record having encountered him in that year. Spence set up a stall in Chancery Lane selling books and a hot drink called saloop, made of hot milk, sugar and sassafras. On May 21^st of that year, a royal proclamation against seditious writings was issued and on November 20^th, the Association for the Preserving of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, more commonly known as the Loyal Association or the Associators, was formed. The term “Levellers” was originally applied to a seventeenth-century group advocating near-universal male suffrage and religious tolerance, but by the eighteenth century it was more broadly applied to anybody promoting greater equality in society. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language defines leveller as “one who destroys superiority; one who endeavours to bring all to the same state of equality” (2^nd edition, 1756). Although Spence’s agrarian socialism had more in common with the Levellers’ rival faction, the Diggers, who, like Spence, advocated common ownership of land, we can see from the report in the Newcastle Chronicle cited above that Spence would have been considered a leveller, and he was certainly a republican. Both these political stances were considered extremely dangerous by the government of the time in the light of events in France following the 1789 revolution.

The main aim of the Loyal Association was to stop the circulation of Thomas Paine’s (1737–1809) The Rights of Man, published in 1791–2. Cheap copies of this work were flooding the market and Spence was one of those selling them. The Loyal Association had armed volunteers and offered rewards for information, and much of the information we have about Spence’s activities in London comes from the records of their spies. Spence’s stall soon became a target, and he was arrested three times in 1792. In The Case of Thomas Spence (1792), Spence writes that he was “surrounded, insulted, and even threatened with his life, and the destruction of his little all” if he did not cease selling The Rights of Man and similar publications. Spence was re-arrested on January 16^th, 1793, and detained in Clerkenwell New Prison until his trial in February, at which he was acquitted on a technicality. In 1793 Spence published a new edition of his lecture to the Newcastle Philosophical Society under the title The Rights of Man as exhibited in a lecture read to the Philosophical Society at Newcastle. In December of that year a true bill was found against him, meaning that a grand jury had decided there was sufficient evidence to proceed with prosecution, for this publication and the first volume of his penny weekly Pigs’ Meat. This latter publication was subtitled Lessons for the Swinish Multitude as a riposte to the infamous description of the common people as such by Edmund Burke (1729/30–1797) in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). The indictments against Spence were thrown out by the Middlesex magistrates, but Spence had received notice to leave his stall by March—apparently his landlord had been persuaded not to renew his tenancy, so in March 1793 Spence opened a shop called The Hive of Liberty at 8, Little Turnstile, Holborn.

At his shop in Holborn, Spence sold and published books and pamphlets, but he also produced and sold tokens, which were coins bearing political slogans. The legislation against seditious writings did not extend to these so they were a practical medium for spreading radical ideas, but they were also profitable as there was something of a craze for collecting tokens at the time. Spence’s tokens made clever use of iconography to get the message across: one of these bears on one side an image of a dog with the slogan “much gratitude brings servitude” and on the other a cat and the words “I among slaves enjoy my freedom.” The cat was an image often invoked by Spence, who noted that a cat would allow itself to be stroked, but not against the grain. Spence’s tokens are known to numismatists and appear for sale in catalogues. There are also several of them, including the one with the cat and dog in the coin collection of the British Museum.

Spence’s token with cat and dog
© The Trustees of the British Museum. T.6501. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Spence joined the London Corresponding Society, formed in January 1792 with the aim of agitating for radical reform of Parliament. He was an active member, printing and selling their publications and tickets for their meetings at the Hive of Liberty. The government regarded the LCS as a dangerous and subversive organisation with links to the French revolutionaries and the United Irishmen, who were agitating for representative government in Ireland. On 7^th May 1794, an Act was passed suspending habeas corpus, a principle which had protected citizens from arbitrary detention. The full title of this Act was “an act to empower his Majesty to secure and detain such persons as his Majesty shall suspect are conspiring against his person and government.” On May 12^th and 13^th, twelve leading members of the LCS were arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London on a charge of High Treason. Spence was arrested and detained on May 20^th and a true bill was found against him on October 25^th. Spence was examined by magistrates, but was discharged and released on December 22^nd, when he returned to the Hive of Liberty. Whilst awaiting trial, Spence published a pamphlet entitled The Case of Thomas Spence, Bookseller (1792), with a second edition in 1793 to which was added an account of the case of an Irishman, James Maccurdy, who died in detention on a charge of distributing seditious literature.

In 1797, Spence moved to 9, Oxford Street and also took up a street pitch near the Pantheon on Oxford Street, where he had a handcart from which he sold pamphlets. On May 18^th, 1798, the entire committee of the LCS was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy with the United Irishmen. Spence was arrested the following day, but discharged on May 26^th, as by then he had left the LCS, and no connection could be found between him and the LCS or the United Irishmen. It is not known why or exactly when Spence left the LCS, but there had been many schisms and Division 12, with which Spence was associated, had split from the LCS to form the London Reforming Society in the spring of 1795. Spence would certainly have disagreed with the LCS’s Declaration of Principles in November 1795, in which they distanced themselves from levelling and republicanism. That year, Spence had published The End of Oppression, in which he firmly restated his opposition to private property. Spence went on to publish The Rights of Infants (1797) and The Constitution of a Perfect Commonwealth (1798), before the work that was to lead to his arrest on a charge of seditious libel, The Restorer of Society to its Natural State (1801). The Times reported on April 23^rd, 1801, that Spence was to be tried for “the publication of a malicious and seditious libel respecting the right to property in land.” Between Spence’s first hearing in April and his trial on May 27^th, the Secrecy Committee reported to Parliament seeking an extension to the suspension of habeas corpus. In this report, they explicitly mentioned a group calling themselves Spensonians and quoted from The Restorer. Spence conducted his own trial, published as The Important Trial of Thomas Spence in 1803 in his reformed spelling and in 1807 in conventional orthography. Spence was sentenced on June 20^th to one year in Shrewsbury Jail and a fine of ₤20, equivalent to 133 days’ labour for a skilled tradesman, or approximately ₤1,535 today.

The first edition of The Restorer gives Spence’s address as 3, Great Castle Street Oxford Market. Between his release from prison and his death in 1814, there are records of Spence at various addresses. A pamphlet gives a business address at 15, Princes Street, Soho, a letter is addressed to him at 29 Castle Street and his final publication The Giant Killer (1814) records his address as 71 Castle Street. When in Newcastle, Spence had been an active member of debating societies held in pubs, and he took this idea of convivial political activity to London. A handbill dated 1801 invites those who support “Citizen Spence’s Theory of Society” to “meet frequently, though in ever so small Numbers, in their respective Neighbourhoods, after a free and easy manner […] to converse on the Subject […] and to promote the circulation of Citizen Spence’s Pamphlets.” Spence advocated song as a way of promoting fellowship and solidarity which was less likely to be suppressed. He wrote many political songs, usually to well-known tunes, which were collected and published by Thomas Evans (1763–ca. 1831) as A Humorous Collection of Spence’s Songs (ca. 1807). In this collection, Evans advertised “Spence’s Free and Easy meetings at the Sign of the Fleece, Little Windmill Street” and in his song Spence’s Plan, Mr. Porter refers to meeting Spence at the Swan in New Street Square every Monday night. Porter’s song refers to another method used by Spence’s followers to advertise his Plan: “I spied Spence’s Plan / Wrote up against a wall sir.” Chalking messages on walls was not restricted by the Newspaper Act and it would be difficult for the authorities to trace the perpetrators. There are several contemporary witnesses to slogans such as “Spence’s Plan and Full Bellies” or just “Spence’s Plan,” one of which appears in William Cobbett’s (1763–1835) Weekly Political Register 14^th December 1816: “we have all seen for years past written on walls in and near London the words ‘Spence’s Plan.’”

Spence died of a bowel complaint on September 1^st, 1814. He was buried at St. James’s Burial Ground, Hampstead Road, with two of his favourite tokens placed in the coffin. His coffin was followed by about forty people and preceded by a pair of scales containing equal weights to symbolise justice and white ribbons to represent purity and tokens were handed out to mourners. Cobbett’s reference to chalked slogans in 1816 bears witness to the fact that Spence’s followers continued to spread his message after his death. The Society of Spencean Philanthropists published an address to the public in 1814/15, setting out its rules, programme and meeting places. Four leading members of the Society were tried for High Treason in 1816 and the Act for more effectively preventing seditious meetings and assemblies (57 George III c. 19) prohibited “all societies or clubs calling themselves Spencean or Spencean Philanthropists, and all other societies or clubs, by whatever name or description the same are called or known, who hold and profess or shall hold and profess their objects and doctrines.”