James O’Brien, was born in County Longford, Ireland in 1805. O’Brien went to a local church school but 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 Trinty College, Dublin, where he won several academic prizes including the Science Gold Medal. After studying law at King’s Inn, 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 ‘Orator’ 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.
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