Spence 2

THOMAS SPENCE (1750 - 1814)

The diminutive Spence, who taught elementary English in the Broad Chare, was born on the Newcastle Quayside on 21 June 1750. An acquaintance of Thomas Bewick (q.v.), he probably had some contact with Marat (q.v.) during the latter's visit to Newcastle in 1775, at the short-lived Philosophical Society in Westgate Street, where Spence put forward his scheme for the public ownership of land on 8 November. This caused his ejection from the society, whose members disapproved of its 'levelling' tendencies. James Murray (q.v.), the peppery Newcastle cleric, addressed no fewer than 22 questions to the society, querying the expulsion of his friend.

Thomas Spence met Bewick in Gray's bookbinders, and it was Bewick who cut the steel punches for Spence's phonetic alphabet in which several of his works were published. This scheme is expounded in his Grand Repository of the English Languge (1775). He also taught his new system of reading in his own school in Head of the Side. Bewick and he had a falling-out when the former failed to support Spence over his land nationalisation plans. Spence began:

'If I had been as stout as you are I would have thrashed you.'
'Indeed!' said I, 'it is a great pity you are not.'
'But,' said he, 'there is another way in which I can do the business, and have at you!'
He then produced a pair of cudgels - and to work we fell.

Poor Spence got much the worst of it, but the two remained friends Spence's family attended the High Bridge meeting house, where the Reverend James Murray also became one of Spence's close friends. In 1775, Spence was appointed to the new Free Grammar school in Haydon Bridge, and by April 1779, he was under-master at the Sandgate Chapel School. The Poor Man's Advocate was published in 1779 and he published through T. Saint in Newcastle (6d) his History of Crusonia in 1782. It was probably Bewick who cut the illustration of Crusoe.

Spence's pamphlet, 'The Meridian Sun of Liberty' was hawked around Newcastle and appeared in London in 1793. He had travelled to London in 1792, where he opened a book stall. With the French Revolution in full swing across the Channel, William Pitt and his Lord Chancellor, Eldon, were concerned to stamp out any sign of what was seen as sedition. The days when Eldon had eloped with Bessie Surtees through a first-floor window in Sandhill were long gone; change of any description was anathema to him, and Spence was arrested for selling copies of his Rights of Man. Acquitted, he went on with his perilous trade in handbills and a magazine called Pig's Meat (1793-96), a reference to Edmund Burke's disparaging remark about the swinish multitude. He was imprisoned three times before 1795, arrested in 1798, and in jail again in 1801, where he asked at his trial: 'Must we be debarred from the Pleasures of Imagination also?' - betraying a possible acquaintance with the magnum opus of Mark Akenside (q.v.).

The small Spencean society, reorganised as the Society of Spencean Philanthropists, continued to be a centre for agitation until and beyond Spence's death on 8 September 1814. It was finally suppressed in 1820. Harriet Martineau (q.v.) gives some account of their activities in her England During the Thirty Years Peace. George Canning (1770-1827), the future Tory prime minister, was a witty and effective speaker (and writer) and certainly took Spence's influence seriously in the troubled years after Waterloo. On 29 January 1817, in the House of Commons, he delivered a tremendous denunciation of parliamentary reformers, drawing on a grand rhetoric of storms, whirlwinds and twilight assassins, producing, as proof of all this - Spence's Plan. The House was not impressed. Thomas Love Peacock, in Melincourt, described the 'Spencean chimaera' in entomological terms as something invisible without a powerful microscope, but then having the appearance of a formidable and complicated monster, all bristles, scales and claws, with a 'husk about it like a chestnut'. Spence's thought influenced Robert Owen, and later socialists through him. His basic political plan, developed in a series of pamphlets from 1783 onwards is set out in his Constitution of Spensonia, A Country in Fairyland, situated between Utopia and Oceana brought from thence by Captain Swallow, which came out in three editions in 1803. The epilogue ends endearingly:

For who can tell but the Millennium
May take its rise from my poor Cranium?..

Myers Literary Guide:	The North-East
THOMAS SPENCE (1750 - 1814) The diminutive Spence, who taught elementary English in the Broad Chare, was born on the Newcastle Quayside on 21 June 1750. An acquaintance of Thomas Bewick (q.v.), he probably had some contact with Marat (q.v.) during the latter's visit to Newcastle in 1775, at the short-lived Philosophical Society in Westgate Street, where Spence put forward his scheme for the public ownership of land on 8 November. This caused his ejection from the society, whose members disapproved of its 'levelling' tendencies. James Murray (q.v.), the peppery Newcastle cleric, addressed no fewer than 22 questions to the society, querying the expulsion of his friend. Thomas Spence met Bewick in Gray's bookbinders, and it was Bewick who cut the steel punches for Spence's phonetic alphabet in which several of his works were published. This scheme is expounded in his Grand Repository of the English Languge (1775). He also taught his new system of reading in his own school in Head of the Side. Bewick and he had a falling-out when the former failed to support Spence over his land nationalisation plans. Spence began: 'If I had been as stout as you are I would have thrashed you.' 'Indeed!' said I, 'it is a great pity you are not.' 'But,' said he, 'there is another way in which I can do the business, and have at you!' He then produced a pair of cudgels - and to work we fell. Poor Spence got much the worst of it, but the two remained friends Spence's family attended the High Bridge meeting house, where the Reverend James Murray also became one of Spence's close friends. In 1775, Spence was appointed to the new Free Grammar school in Haydon Bridge, and by April 1779, he was under-master at the Sandgate Chapel School. The Poor Man's Advocate was published in 1779 and he published through T. Saint in Newcastle (6d) his History of Crusonia in 1782. It was probably Bewick who cut the illustration of Crusoe. Spence's pamphlet, 'The Meridian Sun of Liberty' was hawked around Newcastle and appeared in London in 1793. He had travelled to London in 1792, where he opened a book stall. With the French Revolution in full swing across the Channel, William Pitt and his Lord Chancellor, Eldon, were concerned to stamp out any sign of what was seen as sedition. The days when Eldon had eloped with Bessie Surtees through a first-floor window in Sandhill were long gone; change of any description was anathema to him, and Spence was arrested for selling copies of his Rights of Man. Acquitted, he went on with his perilous trade in handbills and a magazine called Pig's Meat (1793-96), a reference to Edmund Burke's disparaging remark about the swinish multitude. He was imprisoned three times before 1795, arrested in 1798, and in jail again in 1801, where he asked at his trial: 'Must we be debarred from the Pleasures of Imagination also?' - betraying a possible acquaintance with the magnum opus of Mark Akenside (q.v.). The small Spencean society, reorganised as the Society of Spencean Philanthropists, continued to be a centre for agitation until and beyond Spence's death on 8 September 1814. It was finally suppressed in 1820. Harriet Martineau (q.v.) gives some account of their activities in her England During the Thirty Years Peace. George Canning (1770-1827), the future Tory prime minister, was a witty and effective speaker (and writer) and certainly took Spence's influence seriously in the troubled years after Waterloo. On 29 January 1817, in the House of Commons, he delivered a tremendous denunciation of parliamentary reformers, drawing on a grand rhetoric of storms, whirlwinds and twilight assassins, producing, as proof of all this - Spence's Plan. The House was not impressed. Thomas Love Peacock, in Melincourt, described the 'Spencean chimaera' in entomological terms as something invisible without a powerful microscope, but then having the appearance of a formidable and complicated monster, all bristles, scales and claws, with a 'husk about it like a chestnut'. Spence's thought influenced Robert Owen, and later socialists through him. His basic political plan, developed in a series of pamphlets from 1783 onwards is set out in his Constitution of Spensonia, A Country in Fairyland, situated between Utopia and Oceana brought from thence by Captain Swallow, which came out in three editions in 1803. The epilogue ends endearingly: For who can tell but the Millennium May take its rise from my poor Cranium?..
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