The core group which went on to form Freedom Press came out of a circle of anarchists with international connections formed around the London-based radical firebrand Charlotte Wilson, a Cambridge-educated writer and public speaker who was in the process of breaking from Fabian Society orthodoxy. Among this founding group were Nikola Chaikovski, Francesco Saverio Merlino, and as of 1886, celebrated anarchist-communist Peter Kropotkin, who had been invited to Britain by Wilson after his release from prison in France in January of that year.