Thomas Spence

Thomas Spence ( 17508 September 1814) was an English Radical and advocate of the common ownership of land and a democratic equality of the sexes. Spence was one of the leading revolutionaries of the late 18th and early 19th 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, with other members of the London Corresponding Society, 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.
Land reform and Spence's Plan.
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 (wherein the absolute ownership of the land was vested) 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:
Spence's Plan was first published in his penny pamphlet Property in Land Every One's Right in 1775. It was re-issued as "The Real Rights of Man" in later editions. It was also reissued by, amongst others, Henry Hyndman under the title of The Nationalization of the Land in 1795 and 1882.
Spence explored his political and social concepts in a series of books about the fictional Utopian state of Spensonia.
"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 (1775) and made phonetic versions of many of his pamphlets.
Examples of Spence's spelling system can be seen on the pages on English from the Spence Society.
Rights of children.
Spence's angry defence of the rights of children has lost little of its potency. When his The Rights of Infants was published in 1797 (as a response to Thomas Paine's "Agrarian Justice") 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".
Memorial and legacy.
Spence is listed on the Reformers Memorial in Kensal Green Cemetery in London.
His admirers formed a "Society of Spencean Philanthropists," of which some account is given in Harriet Martineau's "England During the Thirty Years' Peace". The African Caribbean activists William Davidson and Robert Wedderburn were drawn to this political group. 
Members of the Society of Spencean Philanthropists (including Arthur Thistlewood) maintained contacts with Irish radicals, and were implicated in the Spa Field riots of 1816 and the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.