Ernest Charles Jones

Dorothy Thompson points out that Jones was born into the landed gentry, became a barrister, and left a large documentary record.

[2] He was the son of a British Army Major named Charles Gustavus Jones, equerry to the Duke of Cumberland, afterwards King of Hanover.

He became a leading figure in the "National Charter Association" in the phase of its decline, together with his friend George Julian Harney, and helped to give the Chartist movement a clearer socialist direction.

Jones, a strident anti-imperialist, has been credited as an influence on Marx's views regarding colonialism, which shifted during the 1850s from seeing imperialism as a progressive, modernising force to regarding it as having a destructive effect on colonised societies: Jones' imprisonment had come about after he had given a speech in east London advocating for the end of British rule in Ireland, and wrote a series of articles in the People's Paper in 1853 expressing the hope that the sepoys of the presidency armies would revolt against Company rule in India, prefiguring the Indian Rebellion of 1857 by four years.

[9] However, Jones was almost the National Charter Association's only public speaker; he was out of sympathy with the other leading Chartists, and soon joined the advanced Radical party.

He produced a number of novels, including The Maid of Warsaw and Woman's Wrongs, also some poems, The Painter of Florence, The Battle Day (1855), The Revolt of Hindostan (1857), and Corayda (1859).