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Born in a London sewer in 1794 , the bastard lovechild of Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, Chris was a sickly child. When not suffering from his frequent bouts of Pneumacoccia and Cranfeldt’s Palsy he was enrolled at Edfield Sedgeworth’s Academy for Disquieted Childer, where he was schooled in Polite Discourse, Lip-Stiffening, Fencing, Sexual Hypocrisy and other fine gentlemanly arts.



He won a scholarship to Isis College, Oxford, where he graduated with a double first in Political Science and Moustache Twitching in 1813. It was here that he met the love of his life, Lady Constance Temperer-Rubbling. They wed in secret at the Parish Church of St. Sublime the Ridiculous in Redalmer, Surreyshire in the Spring of 1815. On learning of her marriage to this ‘wretched commoner’ her family discommunicated her and she was compelled to make her living assisting Chris in his editorship of the magazine ‘Muslin-Covered Piano Legs and the men Who Love Them.”, which they ran from their ramshackle flat in Southwark.



Despite critical and political opprobrium the publication was to become highly influential in radical and progressive circles, and lasted for over thirty years, briefly overtaking Dicken’s Household Words in circulation figures for one month in August 1847. During this period Chris and Lady Constance produced two issue, Hermione and Jessop, and an inordinate number of issues of their magazine and related publications and pamphlets. It was the success of one of these pamphlets, ‘Musings on the Conversion to an Enlightened Republic’ published during the riots of 1848, that spurred Chris on to the tragic act that was to prove his undoing.



Eyewitnesses at the unsuccessful assassination attempt on Queen Victoria later in that year would report that an excitable Chris was spotted waving a pistol around frantically while Lady Constance tugged at his sleeve, desperately proclaiming, “Leave it Chris, she’s not worth it.”



After a show trial at the Old Bailey he was sentenced to be taken from this place to another place and thence to another place where he was to be hung from the neck until he was dead. After a few months spent chewing rat droppings in Newgate Nick his neck was finally snapped on the Eighteenth of February 1849.



Lady Constance was found dead, several months later, in a ditch in Deptford. The post-mortem recorded the cause of death as a stroke. Her friends however, insisted that she died of a broken heart. Thankfully neither of them lived long enough to see their two offspring grow up to become members of the Tory party.