‘It is not any amelioration of the conditions of the most miserable that will satisfy us: it is justice to all that we demand. It is not the mere improvement of the social life of our class that we seek, but the abolition of classes and the destruction of those wicked distinctions which have divided the human race into princes and paupers, landlords and labourers, masters and slaves. It is not any patching and cobbling up of the present system we aspire to accomplish, but the annihilation of the system and the substitution, in its stead, of an order of things in which all shall labour and all enjoy, and the happiness of each guarantee the welfare of the entire community’ George Julian Harney, 1850, Red Republican (quoted in ‘Yes Utopia’ by Ron Cook).

George Julian Harney, the son of a seaman, was born in the squalor and misery of Deptford on 17 February, 1817 and died in Richmond, Surrey on 9th December, 1897.