Profile Major Works Resources

Thomas Spence, 1750-1814.


Early English agrarian socialist.

A poor schoolteacher from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, of Scottish descent, Thomas Spence started his career as an advocate of a new system of phonetic spelling.  But Spence's principal claim to fame is his lecture on the "Real Rights of Man" read to the Philosophical Society of Newcastle in 1775, which earned him a brief notoriety.  Echoing Rousseau's essay on inequality, Spence laid out an image of man in a state of nature with common land, identified the claim of private property on land as an injustice and the origins of tyranny.  Spence's system called for the abolition of private property in land, and the adoption of a new communist system of land ownership. He envisaged the formation local parish corporations, which would lay claim to ownership of all land in the district, and allocate it accordingly.  Rent would still be charged, but it would all go to the parish corporation who would invest in improvements and other public works.  In the Spencean utopia, all taxes would be abolished, save for a land tax on the rent collected by the commune.  Spence's lecture got him ejected from the Philosophical Society - ostensibly for printing and distributing the lecture without the Society's consent. 

Spence continued to agitate for land nationalization. He was jailed for a time in 1784 in for exhorting a violent land uprising against landlords.  He moved to London in 1792, where he eked out a living as a bookcart peddlar putting out occasional pamphlets. He edited a small journal, Pig's Meat, reprinting selections from radical writers like William Godwin and Joseph Priestley. He became a member of the London Corresponding Society, supportive of the French Revolution.  Spence was arrested and jailed again for a year for his 1801 tract, deemed seditious by the English authorities.

Spence's followers would form the Society for Spencean Philanthropists.  The Spencean movement would be later overshadowed and displaced by other utopian socialists, like Robert Owen..

 

  

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Major Works of Thomas Spence

  • Property in Land Every One's Right, proved in a lecture read at the Philosophical Society in Newcastle on the 8th of November, 1775,1775 [1792 ed. re-titled The Rights of Man], [4th 1793 ed], [1796 ed re-titled The Meridian Sun of Liberty ] [sp]
  • A Supplement to the History of Robinson Crusoe, being the history of Crusonia, or Robert Crusoe's island, down to the present time, 1782 [sp]
  • The Rights of Man, a poem, 1783
  • (Editor) Pigs' meat; or, lessons for the swinish multitude, 1793-95 [ecco]
  • The End of Oppression, 1795 [dit]
  • The Rights of Infants: or the imperscriptable right of mothers to a share of the elements as is sufficient to enable them to suckle and bring up their young, in a dialogue between the aristocracy and a a mother of children, to which are added strictures on Paine's Agrarian Justice, 1797 [sp]
  • The Constitution of a Perfect Commonwealth, being the French Constitution of 1793, amended and rendered entirely conformable to the whole rights of man, 1798 [dit]
  • The Restorer of Society to its Natural State, 1801 [dit]
  • The Important Trial of Thomas Spence, 1803
  • The Constitution of Spensonia, a country in Fairy Land, situated between Utopia and Oceana, brought from thence by Captain Swallow, 1803 [dit]
  • A Receipt to make a Millennium or Happy World, 1805
  • The Political Works of Thomas Spence, (ed. H. Dickinson), 1982 [dit]

 
HET

 
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Resources on  Thomas Spence

  • The Life, Writings and Principles of Thomas Spence, author of the Spencean System, or Agrarian Equality, by Allen Davenport, 1836 [bk]
  • The Pioneers of Land Reform: Spence, Ogilvie, Paine by Max Beer, 1920 [av]
  • "Thomas Spence", 1887, Monthly Chronicle, p.296
  • "Spence, Thomas" in R.H. Inglis Palgrave, editor, 1894-1899, Dictionary of Political Economy [1918 ed.]
  • "Spence, Thomas" in Leslie Stephen & Stephen Lee, editor, 1885-1901 Dictionary of National Biography [1908-09 ed]
  • "Spence, Thomas" in 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.
  • Thomas Spence website 
  • Wikipedia

 

 
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