Reid employed the Jamaican dialect as a springboard for creating a distinctive literary variant and for achieving a greater depth in the English language. Reid was motivated to write "New Day" by his discontentment with how the leaders George William Gordon and Paul Bogle of the Morant Bay Rebellion (1865) were depicted in the foreign press; by reworking as characters in his novel those who had been negatively portrayed as rebels, he aimed to refute what he viewed as unfair misrepresentations of history. The Morant Bay uprising also provided the historical backdrop for a number of works written by Reid's literary counterparts, most notably fellow Jamaican writer Roger Mais. Mais's 1938 play "George William Gordon" also functioned to repair the historical figure Gordon, who had been portrayed as a villain in prevailing narratives of colonialism, as a martyr and hero for Jamaican nationalism.