Thomas Spence was an English Radical and advocate of the common ownership of land. Spence was one of the leading revolutionaries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He was born in poverty and died the same way, after long periods of imprisonment, in 1814.
Life
Spence left Newcastle for London in 1787. He kept a book-stall in High Holborn. In 1794 he spent seven months in Newgate Gaol on a charge of high treason, and in 1801 he was sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment for seditious libel. He died in London on 8 September 1814.
The threatened enclosure of the common land known as Town Moor in Newcastle in 1771 appears to have been key to Spence's interest in the land question and journey towards ultra-radicalism. His scheme was not for land nationalization but for the establishment of self-contained parochial communities, in which rent paid to the parish should be the only tax of any kind. His ideas and thinking on the subject were shaped by a variety of economic thinkers, including his friend Charles Hall. At the centre of Spence's work was his plan, which argued for:
The end of aristocracy and landlords;
All land should be publicly owned by 'democratic parishes', which should be largely self-governing;
Rents of land in parishes to be shared equally amongst parishioners, as a form of social dividend;
Universal suffrage at both parish level and through a system of deputies elected by parishes to a national senate;
A 'social guarantee' extended to provide income for those unable to work;
The 'rights of infants' to be free from abuse and poverty.
Spence's Plan was first published in his penny pamphlet in 1775. It was re-issued as The RealRights of Man in later editions. It was also reissued by, amongst others, Henry Hyndman under the title of . Spence explored his political and social concepts in a series of books about the fictional Utopian state of Spensonia.
The phrase "rights of man"
Spence may have been the first Englishman to speak of 'the rights of man'. The following recollection, composed in the third person, was written by Spence while he was in prison in London in 1794 on a charge of high treason. Spence was, he wrote, This is in reference to the story of "Jack the Blaster" at Marsden Grotto.
Spelling reform
Spence was a self-taught radical with a deep regard for education as a means to liberation. He pioneered a phonetic script and pronunciation system designed to allow people to learn reading and pronunciation at the same time. He believed that if the correct pronunciation was visible in the spelling, everyone would pronounce English correctly, and the class distinctions carried by language would cease. This would bring a time of equality, peace and plenty: the millennium. He published the first English dictionary with pronunciations and made phonetic versions of many of his pamphlets. Examples of Spence's spelling system can be seen on the .
Spence's angry defence of the rights of children has lost little of its potency. When his was published in 1797 it was ahead of its time. In this essay Spence proposes the introduction of an unconditional basic income to all members of the community. Such allowance shall be financed through the socialization of land and the benefits of the rents received by each municipality. Spence's essay also expresses a clear commitment to the rights of women, although he appears unaware of Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
