Thomas Holcroft was an English dramatist, miscellanist, poet and translator. He was sympathetic to the early ideas of the French Revolution and helped Thomas Paine to publish the first part of The Rights of Man.

Thomas Paine was an English-born American Founding Father, French Revolutionary, political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary. He authored Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis (1776–1783), two of the most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and he helped to inspire the colonial era patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain. His ideas reflected Enlightenment-era ideals of human rights.