Edward Reynolds Pease was an English writer and founding member of the Fabian Society. Pease was born near Bristol, the son of ardent Quakers Thomas Pease (1816-1884) and Susanna Ann Fry (1829-1917; sister of Edward Fry, the judge); he was the sixth of Thomas's 15 children, but Susanna's first, as Thomas had five children from previous marriages. One of his sisters was Marian Pease, a schoolteacher. His father was a wool comber, while his mother belonged to the Fry family, which made chocolate. Edward Pease had his education at home until the age of sixteen, when he traveled to London and was taken under the wing of his brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Hanbury. In the early 1880s, Pease made friends with Frank Podmore, as well as husband and wife Edith Nesbit and Hubert Bland. On January 4, 1884, Podmore's group established the Fabian Society. The death of a wealthy uncle in 1886 resulted in a sizable gift for Pease, allowing him to leave his job at the London Stock Exchange and devote more time to his socialist interests. In 1886, he relocated to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, started working as a cabinetmaker, and established the National Labour Federation, a national general union. However, his attempts to persuade the working class to socialism were fruitless, and he returned to London. In 1888, he traveled to the United States with Sidney Webb and returned to marry Marjory Davidson, a young Scottish schoolteacher.
