Johann Most, whose parody of the Apostles' Creed Stephen echoes in Scylla and Charybdis, was a German-American anarchist who published a newspaper called Freiheit (Freedom), first in London and then in New York. He gained a reputation in Ireland as a defender of the Phoenix Park murders.

Most was born illegitimate in Bavaria in 1846, lost his mother to cholera as a young child, was physically abused by his stepmother and by authorities at school, had a large part of his jaw removed to treat an intractable infection, was expelled from school at age 12 after leading a strike against one of his teachers, became forcibly apprenticed to a bookbinder at the same age, and struggled to make an adult living as a bookbinder and boxmaker. In his early 20s he discovered Karl Marx and became a fervent advocate of revolutionary social democracy. He was imprisoned many times for his inveterate atheism, for other insults to conventional morality, and for advocating the use of dynamite to overthrow the social order. At about age 30 he was exiled from his native land and eventually settled in London, where he founded his newspaper and embraced anarchism.

British authorities sentenced Most to a year and a half of imprisonment for celebrating the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in Russia in 1881. In the spring of 1882, while he was still behind bars, his newspaper published an article approving the murders of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Henry Burke in Phoenix Park, and a new round of prosecutions resulted in two of the paper's compositors being sentenced to long terms at hard labor. After his release in October 1882, Most emigrated to America and began publishing the newspaper in New York City. He was imprisoned three more times in the US, the last of them in 1902 for celebrating the assassination of President McKinley.

The American humor magazine Puck ran an issue in 1885 whose cover showed Most and Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa shocked by becoming victims of sudden unexpected violence themselves, with a caption reading "How Do They Like It Themselves?" The charge of hyprocrisy leveled by this image is somewhat off the mark, however. Gifford says of Most that "His approach––down with everything––included even the pamphlet Down with the Anarchists! (1901), designed to dramatize the impartial universality of his pacifism."

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Johann Most in a photograph ca. 1890. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Cover of the 10 March 1888 issue of Freiheit. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

11 February 1885 cover of Puck magazine, captioned "How Do They Like It Themselves?," showing Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa and Johann Most shocked by violent attacks on themselves. At Most's feet his newspaper Freiheit proclaims, "Dynamite Everybody Herr Most." Source: picryl.com.