Thomas Spence

21 June] 1750 – 8 September 1814) was an English Radical[1] and advocate of the common ownership of land and a democratic equality of the sexes.

[4] His ideas and thinking on the subject were shaped by a variety of economic thinkers, including his friend Charles Hall.

Spence explored his political and social concepts in a series of books about the fictional utopian state of Spensonia.

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.

His admirers formed a "Society of Spencean Philanthropists," of which some account is given in Harriet Martineau's England During the Thirty Years' Peace.

Members of the Society of Spencean Philanthropists (including Arthur Thistlewood) maintained contacts with United Irish exiles in Paris,[6] notably with the veteran conspirator William Putnam McCabe,[7] and were implicated in the Spa Field riots[8] of 1816 and the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.