'The propaganda of Robert Owen alone did not convert printer Thomas Frost to socialism: "The poetry of Coleridge and Shelley was stirring within me and making me 'a Chartist and something more'". Frost had been an omnivorous reader since childhood, when he read his grandmother's volumes of The Spectator and The Persian Letters. Most subversive of all were the letters of the second Lord Lyttelton: "The attraction which this book had for me consisted, I believe, in the tinge of scepticism to be found in several of the letters, and in the metaphysical questions argued, lightly and cleverly, in others. I was beginning to assert for myself freedom of thought, and to rebel against custom and convention; and there was naturally much in common between the writer and the reader",'