Legal historians are deeply divided over the genealogy of the modern concepts of ‘human rights’. Those who trace it back to the eighteenth century typically present a stop-start narrative arc in which, in the English context, the initial interest which was stirred up by the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) was curbed by the Reign of Terror and all but extinguished by the rise of Benthamite utilitarianism, until its resurgence after World War II. Whilst legal historians have begun to challenge this hypothesis, much more needs to be done to uncover the almost forgotten rhetoric of rights in post-Revolutionary and post-Benthamite England. This chapter addresses this by identifying and exploring some of the literary and theological sources of ‘universal’ rights, such as the incipient internationalism of Chartist poetry and the global appeal of the European Bildungsroman which gestured well beyond national boundaries to rights held solely by virtue of being human. Tracing the relationship between literary culture and emergent forms of international law, it will enter conversation with the work of scholars of the legal humanities such as Christopher Warren.