Author name: James Thompson Boulton, FBA

James Thompson Boulton, FBA (17 February 1924 – 18 July 2013) was a British academic. He was a leading scholar of eighteenth-century literature and of D. H. Lawrence. He authored several relevant works including, "The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke", "An Unpublished Letter from Paine to Burke", and "Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful". He died on July 19, 2013, aged 89.

A 1793 political cartoon by William Grainger shows Paine standing in a forest scene, the centre of a group of six apes, to whom he holds out his ‘Rights of Man’ – © The Trustees of the British Museum

Tom Paine And The Vulgar Style

James Thompson Boulton, FBA / January 1, 1967

Paine’s rhetorical question brings sharply into focus the difficulty posed by this kind of writing for the literary critic. By normal standards his writing must be rated low, and yet what has been said here should confirm his mastery of techniques appropriate to the occasion.

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