June Blogpost: A Tale of Two Thomases: Part 1

Thomas Hollis and Thomas Spence were very different men, but as readers of this blog will be aware, I have recently been exploring the lives and works of them both.

Thomas Hollis by Joseph Wilton, marble bust, c.1862. National Portrait Gallery, NPG 6946. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Hollis was born in London on 14 April 1720. His family had made their fortune in the metalworking industry in Yorkshire and had then established a London branch of their cutlery business. Hollis was an only child and was unfortunate in losing most of his close relatives before the age of eighteen. One consequence of this was that by the time he was thirty he was an extremely rich man. Hollis travelled extensively in Europe in the late 1740s and early 1750s before settling in London. Though he briefly toyed with a political career, he soon turned to pursuing politics via other means. Physically, Hollis was described as being over six-feet tall and very strong. He had 'bright brown eyes, a short nose, and laughing mouth' (Colin Bonwick, 'Hollis, Thomas (1720-1774), political propagandist, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 19 May 2025). Hollis retired to his estate in Dorset in 1770, where he died four years later

Profile of Thomas Spence from the Hedley Papers at the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society. Reproduced with kind permission.

Spence was born in Newcastle upon Tyne on 21 June 1750. His father and mother were of Scottish origin and Spence was one of nineteen children. Despite being poor, Spence's father was keen that his sons should learn to read, and by his early twenties Spence was working as a school teacher in Newcastle. He moved to London in early 1788 where he worked as a bookseller for the rest of his life. He produced radical tracts of his own which he sold alongside those by others. The nature of his work got Spence into trouble, and he was arrested on a number of occasions. Physically, Spence was a short man - barely five-feet tall and slightly built. His life-long poverty meant that he was always poorly dressed, and he suffered from both a limp and a speech impediment. Spence was married twice - once in the north east and once in London - but neither marriage was happy. His son William, who moved with him to London, died as a teenager around 1797. Spence himself died in September 1814.

Despite these striking differences in their appearance, backgrounds, and prospects, these two men devoted their lives to very similar activities.

Bern, Universität Bibliothek, ‘Die Hollis-Sammlung’ 64. The Oceana and other works of James Harrington Esq, ed. John Toland (London: A. Millar, 1747). Reproduced with kind permission. Image, Rachel Hammersley, 2025.

Hollis distributed thousands of books to a range of public and university libraries between 1754 and 1774. Some of the books were simply bought by Hollis in London and sent on. Some had gold tooling added to their front cover or spine, others were specially bound for the purpose. In a small number of cases, the edition itself was commissioned by Hollis before being bound and sent. As a bookseller struggling to make a living, Spence disseminated books but was not in a position to give them away for free. Instead, he offered his own variation on Hollis's project in the form of his journal Pigs' Meat which appeared between 1793 and 1795. Here, for the price of just a penny an issue, readers had access to extracts from a range of texts.

There was significant overlap in the works the two men disseminated. Both focused on politics and religion and had a particular interest in the writings of seventeenth-century republicans, as well as in the eighteenth-century commonwealthmen who applied earlier republican ideas to their own circumstances. The importance of these works to Hollis is reflected in his decision to commission new editions of some of these texts - for example Sidney's Discourses - and in the exquisite bindings of the works of Sidney, John Milton, Edmund Ludlow, and James Harrington that he sent abroad. Spence included extracts from works by Sidney and Milton in Pigs' Meat, but it was Harrington who was the most frequently cited author across the three volumes, closely followed by the commonwealthmen John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon.

The title page of the edition of Sidney’s Discourses commissioned by Hollis with the smoke printed image of the pileus at the bottom. The National Library of Scotland: ([Ac]. 1/1.3]). Reproduced with kind permission. Image, Rachel Hammersley, 2022.

The header to Pigs’ Meat.

Hollis's lavish bindings reflect another parallel between the two men: their concern with the appearance - as well as the content - of works, and their use of symbolic images to convey ideas. Hollis claimed that while he did not value bindings himself, he saw the importance of them in rendering texts of interest to others. There appears to have been some truth in this, since the members of the Council of Bern were persuaded to accept Hollis's donation of books because of the beauty of the volumes. The gold tooling that Hollis added to the cover and spines of the volumes he sent had symbolic meaning - the pileus to indicate liberty, the owl for wisdom, and Britannia for works of patriotic value. Sometimes (for example in the case of the Sidney edition commissioned by Hollis) these symbols were also smoke printed onto the page. Once again, Spence's poverty meant he did not have the same opportunities available to him. Yet the pig image used on the title page of the second edition of Pigs' Meat served a similar purpose. Moreover, it too included a pileus or liberty bonnet that closely resembled that used regularly by Hollis.

The Three Thomases coin owned by the author. Image, Rachel Hammersley, 2025.

Both men also conveyed their political messages in metal as well as print. Hollis bought, commissioned, and disseminated medals alongside books. Spence described himself as a 'Dealer in Prints & Coins' and designed his own tokens - including one depicting three Thomases (though sadly Hollis was not one of them). Moreover, while Spence could not afford to give books away, a contemporary claimed that he tossed tokens out of the window and that passers by who picked up a token could then exchange it at his shop for a pamphlet (British Library: Add. MS. 27,808, 184). He also gave away a token free with each copy of the first issue of his final periodical The Giant Killer or, Anti-Landlord.

Despite their differences, then, both Spence and Hollis made extensive efforts to disseminate political ideas to a wide audience. Moreover, they did so because they believed that this would bring wider societal benefits. While there were differences in their political perspectives, they were both committed to ensuring that the public had access to republican ideas and those in support of liberty and rights. This was reflected in the dedication Hollis used in various forms in the works he donated:

Thomas Hollis, an Englishman, a Lover of

Liberty, his Country & its excellent

Constitution as NOBLY restored at the happy

Revolution, is desirous of having the

honor to present Milton's Prose Works to the

Public Library of Harvard College, at

Cambridge in New England.

Pall Mall, oct. 14, 1764 (Bond, p. 135).

An Englishman, a lover of liberty, civil & religious, Citizen of the World, is desirous

of having the honor to present this book to the public library at Berne in

Switzerland.

London jan 1, 1765. (Bern, Universität Bibliothek, 'Die Hollis-Sammlung' 71).

Elsewhere he explained that he sent books on government: 'for, if Government goeth right, ALL goeth right.' (Bond, p. 34).

On the title page to Pigs' Meat, Spence asserted a similar aim. The works collected in the periodical were designed, he explained:

To promote among the Labouring Part of Mankind proper Ideas of their Situation,

of their Importance, and of their Rights. And to convince them That their forlorn

Condition has not been entirely overlooked and forgotten, nor their just Cause

unpleaded, neither by their Maker nor by the best and most enlightened of men in

all Ages. (Thomas Spence, Pigs' Meat, Volume 1. London, 1793, Title page).

There might be a temptation to dismiss both Hollis and Spence as at best naïve and at worst eccentrics or cranks. Yet it is hard to deny that informed citizens are necessary for the preservation of liberty and the successful functioning of democracy. It is especially important to remember this at the present time when education seems to be under threat from all directions - from cuts in school budgets to threats of compulsory redundancies in higher education. I suspect that Hollis and Spence would be appalled.

A Twenty-First-Century Spencean

A photograph from one of my early modern runs. Image by Rachel Hammersley (2005).

As regular readers of this blog will know, I enjoy running. I particularly enjoy running along the seafront near to my home. Not surprisingly it is a popular place to run and I regularly spot the same people out enjoying their own early morning exercise. One of the characters who always makes me smile is the man my daughter and I call 'Tories Out Man'. For weeks in the run up to the 2024 General Election he would run along the seafront wearing a black tee-shirt emblazoned with the words 'Tories Out' in large white letters. On being offered any sign of encouragement from those running in the opposite direction he would smile, raise a clenched fist and shout 'Tories Out'. As I worked on my paper for the Radical North conference that I reported on last month, it struck me that this man is adopting a twenty-first-century example of the kind of methods that Thomas Spence used more than two hundred years ago to disseminate political messages.

An original copy of Spence’s lecture ‘Property in Land Every One’s Right’ from the Hedley papers at the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society. Reproduced with permission.

While living in Newcastle in the 1770s Spence came to the conclusion that the oppression and poverty that he saw around him could be eradicated if the land was owned not by individual landowners but collectively by local residents. In a lecture that he delivered to the Newcastle Philosophical Society on 8th November 1775, he set out his vision for how this plan could be enacted. Each parish would form a corporation, composed of all adult males who had been resident within the parish for at least a year. The corporation would take ownership of the land within the parish, renting out portions of it for cultivation by local residents. The rents paid for use of the land would replace taxes, providing revenue to cover central government charges and to fund local facilities and services. Having composed this potentially transformative plan, Spence was keen to share it in the hope of having it implemented. For the rest of his life, he deployed various means of sharing his land plan with as wide a public as possible.

Immediately after delivering his lecture Spence had it printed, incurring the anger of members of the Philosophical Society who did not want to be publicly associated with Spence's ideas. Another printed version appeared under the title 'The Real Rights of Man' in Spence's Pigs' Meat periodical in 1795. Yet Spence was not content with simply reprinting the lecture, in addition he produced multiple versions of the plan in a variety of written forms. He incorporated it into works of utopian fiction in A Supplement to the History of Robinson Crusoe (Newcastle, 1782), 'The Marine Republic' - which appeared in Pigs' Meat in 1794, and Description of Spensonia (London, 1795). Several of these works also made use of dialogue form to address potential objections to the plan. He also presented his ideas in A Letter from Ralph Hodge, to his Cousin Thomas Bull (London, 1795), which adopted the epistolary form and concluded with a series of questions and answers. In addition he produced two model constitutions The Constitution of a Perfect Commonwealth (London, 1798) and The Constitution of Spensonia (London, 1803), and he printed two accounts of trial proceedings against him - The Case of Thomas Spence (London, 1792) and The Important Trial of Thomas Spence (London, 1803) both of which again served as vehicles for him to disseminate his ideas. Presenting his plan in different forms - and especially using genres like utopian fiction and dialogue that engaged the imagination - was a way of reaching as wide an audience as possible.

Nor did Spence limit himself to texts that were designed to be read. He also wrote songs which again conveyed his ideas, but which could be shared in political meetings and gatherings, making them more accessible to those who were unable to read. The songs were to be sung to familiar tunes such as 'Hearts of Oak' and 'Derry Down'. Some were even set to well-known patriotic tunes including 'Rule Britannia' ('The Progress of Liberty', 1793 and 'The Liberty of the Press', 1794) and, most provocatively, 'God Save the King' ('Rights of Man', 1793). This was a deliberately subversive act - in which Spence filled an establishment vessel (the tune of the national anthem) with his own radical content.

One of Spence’s counter-stamped coins. Image taken from Wikimedia Commons.

Spence performed a similar act of subversion with coins. After his move to London he began counter-stamping coins of the realm. In this case the establishment vessel was a coin bearing the image of the King's head and Spence's radical content was the subversive slogan which would be stamped across it. The example illustrated here shows a coin from the reign of George III that has the phrase 'NO LANDLORDS YOU FOOLS SPENCES PLAN FOREVER' obscuring the King's head.

A Spence token celebrating the Rights of Man owned by the author. Image Rachel Hammersley.

Spence also produced coins or tokens of his own which he was said to toss out into the street, so that local people could pick them up for free and then exchange them at his shop for a pamphlet. Again the tokens generally reflected Spence's ideas, such as the one bearing the slogan 'Man over man he made not lord'. They were also explicitly used to advertise his pamphlets. The reverse of the token just described advertises Spence's Pigs' Meat while another, which depicts two men throwing title deeds onto a bonfire, bears the label 'The End of Oppression' which was the title of another of Spence's works. Spence also used tokens to commemorate his own experience of oppression or that of others - such as John Thelwall and George Gordon - or to comment on current affairs.

It was not only via paper and metal that Spence conveyed his ideas. He etched his slogans wherever he could. In 1780 he visited a former miner known as 'Jack the Blaster' who lived in a cave at Marsden Rock on the coast between South Shields and Sunderland. The cave or grotto still exists and currently houses a bar. 'Jack the Blaster' had apparently gone to live at Marsden Rock having not been able to afford the rent on a more conventional home. Spence claimed that this inspired him to chalk the following words above the hearth:

The bar inside Marsden Grotto. Image by Rachel Hammersley (2022).

Ye landlords vile, whose man’s place mar

Come levy rents here if you can,

Your steward and lawyers I defy

And live with all the Rights of Man.

(Thomas Spence, 'The Rights of Man for

Me', in his Pigs Meat (London, 1794-5),

Volume 3, p. 250)

On this basis Spence claimed to have coined the phrase 'the Rights of Man' more than ten years before it became associated with Thomas Paine. Decades later, Spence's followers were said to have chalked Spencean phrases on the walls around London. The Home Secretary reported that "Spence's Plan and full Bellies", and other similar messages, had appeared "on every wall in London" and in 1816 William Cobbett wrote to Henry Hunt saying:

We have all seen for years past written on walls in and near London the words

'Spence's Plan' and I never knew what it meant until ... I received a pamphlet from

Mr. Evans ... detailing the Plan very fully. (Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. London,

1820, p. 381).

I cannot help but think that had custom-printed tee-shirts been available in Spence's time, he would have had one printed with a suitable slogan and would have worn it (and urged others to do so) on the streets of London and his native North East.

For those wondering what happened to 'Tories Out Man' in the aftermath of the election, I am pleased to say that he is still running along the seafront. When we saw him in December he was wearing a new tee-shirt which read 'Tories Outed, 2024'!

The Swinish Multitude

In his influential and prescient early assessment of the French Revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke revealed his contempt for ordinary people - describing them as a 'swinish multitude' and, in the eyes of some, questioning their right to education. If the natural social hierarchy was challenged, Burke argued - 'learning', together with its natural protectors and guardians the nobility and the clergy would be 'cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude' (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. 8th edition. London, 1791, p. 117). The phrase hit a chord. As this Google Ngram illustrates, there was a huge spike in its usage following the publication of Burke's text, and it continued to be deployed well into the nineteenth century. The popularity and persistence of the phrase prompts several questions. Where did Burke get the idea from? What was the response to it? And why did it continue to be used for so long?

The origins of the phrase can be traced back to the Bible. In the Sermon on the Mount as recorded in Matthew Chapter 7 Verse 6, Jesus declared:

Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet and turn again and rend you (King James Bible).

‘A Swinish Multitude’, by John (‘HB’) Doyle, printed by Alfred Duôte, published by Thomas McLean. Lithograph. 7 October 1835. National Portrait Gallery: NPG D41349. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

The reference not just to pigs, but also to trampling good things under foot, makes clear that this was the source of Burke's phrase (interestingly the conceit also appears in William Langland's poem 'Piers Plowman' and in John Milton's 'Sonnet XII', where the 'hogs' are condemned for failing to properly understand the nature of liberty). Moreover, the notion of 'pearls of wisdom' enhances the connection with learning. Burke's opponents in the 1790s were quick to subvert his jibe and turn it to their advantage.

Early responses simply expressed hostility to Burke's sentiment. As, for example, William Belsham's reference in one of his Essays, philosophical, historical and literary of 1791 and Charlotte Smith's in her novel Desmond. Commenting on the calmness of the French people on the King's return to Paris Lionel Desmond asserts, in a vein that perhaps also alludes and responds to Milton's use of the term:

This will surely convince the world, that the bloody democracy of Mr Burke, is not a combination of the swinish multitude, for the purposes of anarchy, but the association of reasonable beings, who determine to be, and deserve to be, free. (Charlotte Smith, Desmond. A novel, in three volumes. London, 1792, Volume 3, p. 89).

Around the same time there appeared a song entitled 'Burke's Address to the "swinish" Multitude', to be sung to the tune 'Derry, down down', which satirised  Burke's position.

More substantial responses to Burke's argument about learning also began to appear. One of the earliest of these was A reply to Mr Burke's invective by the radical Thomas Cooper. Cooper was defending himself and his associate James Watt against an attack made by Burke in Parliament on 30 April 1792 concerning their presentation to the Jacobins on behalf of the Constitutional Society of Manchester. In the course of his defence, Cooper reflected on the relationship between knowledge and freedom. He condemned Burke for presenting national ignorance as a means of maintaining the position of the privileged orders and called instead for the dissemination of political knowledge so that the people could understand and secure their rights and freedoms:

Thus we find that public Ignorance is the Cement of the far famed Alliance between Church and State; and that Imposture, political and religious, cannot maintain its ground, if Knowledge and Discussion once finds its way among the Swinish Multitude. (Thomas Cooper, A Reply to Mr Burke's Invective. Manchester, 1792, p. 36).

Portrait of Thomas Cooper by Asher Brown Durand, after Charles Cromwell Ingham. Line engraving, 1829. National Portait Gallery: NPG D10570. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

This whole section of Cooper's work was inserted, unacknowledged, into the Address published by the Birmingham Constitutional Society soon after its establishment in November 1792. This is perhaps not surprising since the raison d'etre of these societies was precisely to spread political knowledge, and it was partly the actions of the London Society for Constitutional Information (alongside those of the Revolution Society) that had provoked Burke in the first place.

Around the same time, works began to appear that were presented as being written by 'one of the "Swinish Multitude"'. One of these was entitled A Rod for the Burkites. It was printed in Manchester and perhaps again emerged from the circles around the Constitutional Society. Sonnet for the Fast-Day. To Sancho's Favourite Tune by one of the swinish multitude was another satirical song to the tune 'Derry, down, down'. James Parkinson, writing under the pseudonym Old Hubert, published An Address, to the Hon. Edmund Burke, from the Swinish Multitude in 1793. Parkinson, a successful palaeontologist and surgeon who gave his name to Parkinson's Disease, was also an active radical with a sharp concern for the poor. Parkinson's Address argued that since men are all alike, they must all be swinelike. The difference, then, was between 'Hogs of Quality' who enjoy the luxuries of the stye and the poor swinish multitude who have to work hard to survive and are obstructed at every turn:

Whilst ye are chewing the greatest dainties, and gorging yourselves at troughs filled with the daintiest wash; we, with our numerous train of porkers, are employed, from the rising to the setting sun, to obtain the means of subsistence, by turning up a stray root or two, or perhaps, picking up a few acorns. But, alas! of these we dare not partake, untill, by the laws made by ye Swine of quality, we have first deposited by far the greatest part in the store house of the stye, as rent for the light of heaven and for the air we breathe. (James Parkinson, An Address, to the Hon. Edmund Burke, from the Swinish Multitude. London, 1793, pp. 17-18).

Moreover, Parkinson also argued that keeping the poor ignorant was a deliberate means of keeping them down:

it would be no more than justice, if these lordly Swine would enable us to instruct our young, so that they might be capable of comprehending the innumerable laws which are laid down for their conduct; and which should, they, even through ignorance, transgress, they are sure immediately to be sent to the county pound, or perhaps delivered over to the butcher. (Parkinson, Address, p. 19).

Title page of Spence’s Pigs’ Meat. Philip Robinson Library, Newcastle University. Special Collections: Rare Books (RB 331.04 PIG). Reproduced with kind permission.

A further move by the radicals built on this point. In September 1793 two new periodical publications appeared that again commandeered the porcine language on the part of the poor. Thomas Spence's One Pennyworth of Pigs' Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude was swiftly followed by Daniel Isaac Eaton's Hog's Wash; or, a Salmagundy for Swine (subsequently retitled Politics for the People). These works not only spoke to and on behalf of the so-called 'swinish multitude', as Parkinson had done, but were designed to provide them with useful political knowledge. They offered short extracts from a range of texts that were 'Intended' as Spence explained:

To promote among the Labouring Part of Mankind proper Ideas of their Situation, of their Importance and of their Rights, and to convince them That their forlorn Condition has not been entirely overlooked and forgotten nor their just Cause unpleaded, neither by their Maker nor by the best and most enlightened of Men in all Ages. (Thomas Spence, Pigs' Meat, title page).

Similarly, the full title of Eaton's publication explained that it consisted:

Of the choicest Viands, contributed by the Cooks of the present day, AND of the highest flavoured delicacies, composed by the Caterers of former Ages. (Daniel Isaac Eaton, Hog's Wash, 1793).

Title page of Eaton’s Politics for the People. Philip Robinson Library, Newcastle University. Special Collections: Friends (Friends 336-337). Reproduced with kind permission.

The extracts presented for the enrichment of the swinish multitude were eclectic. They included passages from: popular radical authors of the day such as William Frend, Joel Barlow, and John Thelwall; previous generations of radicals including John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, James Harrington and Algernon Sidney; but also more mainstream authors like Jonathan Swift, John Locke and Samuel Pufendorf. Moreover, the Bible was also a fundamental source for both editors, with quotes from various books of the Old and New Testaments being deployed to demonstrate that God favoured support for, rather than oppression of, the poor.

Though politically they were polar opposites Spence and Eaton endorsed what they saw as Burke's sense of the connection between ignorance and oppression and, therefore, between knowledge and resistance. Their hope was Burke's fear; that by providing the poor with political nourishment - feeding their minds as well as their bodies - they would be led to see and acknowledge both the oppression under which they suffered and the justice of their right to overthrow it. This, it was hoped, would provoke them into action. It did not, of course, but both the hope and the fear remain to this day.