One of the most infamous phrases of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ‘war of ideas’ was Edmund Burke's characterisation of the people as a ‘swinish multitude’. It was an insult so revealingly contemptuous that those opposed to Burke's views seized on it with glee: men like Thomas Spence, whose periodical One Penny Worth of Pig's Meat: Lessons for the Swinish Multitude (1793–5) cast Burke's insult back in his face. Spence's reputation has oscillated dramatically in the two hundred years since his death in 1814. Having been so influential that an Act of Parliament was passed specifically prohibiting ‘All societies or clubs calling themselves Spencean or Spencean Philanthropists’, and influencing a long line of radicals including the Chartist leaders and Karl Marx, Spence came to be regarded as an eccentric extremist.

It was Harry Dickinson (like Spence, a scion of the North-east of England) who, by producing the first modern edition of Spence's political works in 1982, enabled and perhaps obliged historians to take Spence's ideas seriously. As Dickinson's edition shows, Spence repeatedly deployed Burke's scornful epithet to reveal the inherent self-interest of the landlord class, the object of Spence's ire since his first political writings in the mid- 1770s. What is often forgotten, however, is that Burke's infamous ‘swinish multitude’ barb was used in the context of scholarship and education. ‘Along with its natural protectors and guardians,’ Burke had written, ‘learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.’ In this essay, I want to argue that Spence would have found this particularly provocative. A teacher himself, Spence recognised how important children's education was to social and political renewal. Further, the claim I want to advance here is that his understanding of education's potential was inspired at least in part by his exposure, before his move from Newcastle to London in around 1787, to a surprisingly radical children's literature.

Dickinson's edition included the first modern reprinting of one of Spence's more unusual works, A Supplement to the History of Robinson Crusoe, Being the History of Crusonia, or Robinson Crusoe's Island, Down to the Present Time, published in Newcastle by Thomas Saint in 1782.