Paine

How one pamphlet infuriated the entire British establishment Long before the in the US, there was the trial of Thomas Paine in England. But in the 1790s, the spectre haunting the British Establishment was republicanism, not socialism.

Today in 1793, John Clare was born in rural Northamptonshire. He emerged from a peasant world to become a national poet, and his poetry was marked by the worsening inequalities and injustices in Britain at the beginning of the industrial age.

It takes a brave person to stand up and back a revolution. Sometimes it takes an even braver one to call out its weaknesses.