James Bronterre O'Brien

James Bronterre O'Brien (1805 – 23 December 1864) was an Irish Chartist leader, reformer and journalist.

James O'Brien was born near Granard, County Longford, Ireland in 1804 or 1805. He went to a local church school, where one of his teachers recognised his intellectual abilities and arranged for him to be educated at the progressive Lovell Edgeworth School. In 1822 he proceeded to Trinity College, Dublin, where he won several academic prizes including the Science Gold Medal. After studying law at King's Inns, O'Brien moved to England in 1829 with the intention of becoming a lawyer in London.

In London he joined the Radical Reform Association where he met Henry Hunt, William Cobbett, Henry Hetherington and other leaders of the struggle for universal suffrage. In 1836 he joined the London Working Men's Association.

O'Brien began contributing articles to Henry Hetherington's Poor Man's Guardian. He signed these articles with the pseudonym 'Bronterre' and James O'Brien eventually adopted it as his middle name. He worked very closely with Hetherington and when he was imprisoned for publishing an unstamped newspaper, O'Brien took over the editorship of the Poor Man's Guardian. O'Brien and Hetherington also collaborated on other unstamped newspapers such as The Destructive and the London Dispatch. In 1837 O'Brien began publishing Bronterre's National Reformer. In an attempt to avoid paying stamp duty, the journal included essays rather than 'news items'. During this period, Henry Hetherington and O'Brien led the struggle against the stamp duty and were consistent in their arguments that working people needed cheap newspapers that contained political information.

O'Brien was influenced by the socialist writer, Gracchus Babeuf, who had been executed during the French Revolution. In 1836 O'Brien began publishing translations of Babeuf's work in the Poor Man's Guardian. He also included Filippo Buonarroti's account of Babeuf and the Conspiracy of Equals. O'Brien became fascinated with the history of radicalism and began work on books on the French Revolution and the English Commonwealth. However, the authorities raided his house in 1838 and seized his manuscripts and the projects were never completed.

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