Radicals, Reformers And Socialists. From the Fabian Biographical Series. Edited by Michael Katanka with an introduction by Dame Margaret Cole. Charles Knight & Co., £3.80. 

IT WOULD BE POINTLESS to attempt to review the content matter of these pamphlets here reprinted, for they have been in circulation far too long to require critical comment. It is, though, a pity that the editor could not have added some notes correcting some of the more obvious errors which appear in certain of the biographies such as, for example, that Kier Hardie opposed the 1914-18 War, whereas in fact he spoke at army recruitment meetings, details of which have appeared recently in the Socialist Standard. 

This book reprints the pamphlets on Hardie, Paine, Burns (John not Robert), Lovett, Place, Owen and the Webbs, and so has particular value to students of Paine. It is, though, a great pity that the essays on Carlile and Cobbett could not have been included, perhaps instead of those on Hardie and the Webbs, for they complement that on Paine and would have given this volume more of a historical balance. 

Margaret Cole, current President of the Fabian Society and author of the extremely dull and long-winded essay on those greatly over-rated figures Sydney and Beatrice Webb which is reprinted in this volume, contributes an introductory essay mainly concerned with the story behind the publication of the original series. The editor presumably is responsible for the bibliographies, and here, at least in the case of Paine, we discover some very slipshod work indeed. Only one specific Paine title is given, the Penguin edition of Rights of Man, incorrectly given as The Rights of Man. No mention is made of the fact that the four volume Conway edition of Paine’s Works is available only in an expensive German reprint and is not actually a ‘complete collection’. Mention is made of the Fonar edited Complete Writings of Thomas. Paine, which is by far and away the best collection, but not of the fact that it was reprinted in 1969 and is still in print. It is absurd to describe, as the editor does, the Howard Fast edition of The Selected Work (not Works) of Tom Paine and Sydney Hook’s The Essential Thomas Paine as containing ‘all the important works’ of Paine as the former omits not only the highly important Agrarian Justice but all Part 2 of The Age of Reason, while the latter omits The Age of Reason completely!

To damn by implication early biographies of Paine such as those of Rickman, Sherwin and Vale is to display ignorance of their contents, but the mind fairly boggles when we are informed quite blandly that Fast’s scurrilous diatribe on Paine, Citizen Tom Paine (even the abbreviated ‘Tom’ is really an insult) ‘is also of interest”. We are not told for what and so I suggest the trash can. 

I can only hope the other bibliographies were drawn up with more care, but space prohibits examination. It is also a pity that no portraits appear, as the original pamphlets carried one on their covers. One also thinks it sad that the book appeared before the truly splendid new biography of Paine by Audrey Williamson was published. This is essential reading for all students of Paine and his ideas and influence. Reservations apart,however, this is a very welcome book and I look forward to seeing the remaining Fabian biographies in print in due course.

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Of all the radical writers who knew Thomas Paine, the one whose work is among the least known or read today, but whose career was the most Varied and Striking, was Thomas Holcroft: Newmarket stableboy, schoolmaster, actor, playwright, novelist. Paris Correspondent for the Morning Herald, acknowledged mentor of William Godwin, victim of the 1794 treason trials and diarist whose entries for the year 1798 provide a fascinating picture of London celebrities, the frequentors of Debrettes, and rumours about Napoleon then freely proliferating about London.

All the admirers of Paine must know that Holcroft, with William Godwin and Thomas Brandl Hollis, helped to see Rights of Man through the press while Paine was in France and greeted the arrival of the book from the printers with the histrionic and indeed, in its way, prophetic ‘Hey for the New Jerusalem! The Millenium! And peace and eternal beatitude be until the soul of Thomas Paine’. It is less well known that Holcroft, even before Lanthenas whose translation of Part 2 of Rights of Man Bonneville published in Paris in 1792, may have provided the link between Paine and Nicolas de Bonneville that ended in Paine’s lodging with the French editor of Bien Informe for five years, from 1795 until his return to America in 1802.

Holcroft was born in December, 1745, the year Culloden, and was thus almost nine years Paine’s junior Baptised at St. Martine-in-the-Field’s, he was the son of a London shoemaker of somewhat feckless application to his trade, which ended in his becoming a peddler roaming the English countryside, and not helping his fortunes by an enthusiasm for the racecourse which he transmitted to his devoted son…’ The whole scene was like enchantment’, Holcroft wrote in his Memoirs fifty years later of a visit to Nottingham races in 1756 when as a boy of ten he watched a match between two horses, Car less and Atlas, then considered the greater: since Plying Childers (still famous today in books on racing, And a legend of forty years before when the boy Holcroft tasted the delights of the Nottingham course) (Holcroft, Thomas. Life and Memoirs. Edited by E.Colby. 1925.). In 1757 at the age of under twelve, he entered a stable near Newmarket, to whioh:bown his father had been drawn as by a magnet, and in fact the ‘whole of his Memoirs are devoted to his life there (he wrote them virtually on his deathbed, and his life story was continued by William Hazlitt”).

They are of great interest historically to anyone: interested in racing and training methods, especially as in view. of Holcroft’s eventual fame in totally different directions, they are little known in racing circles today, (‘Heavens!, they were really tough in those days. I cannot help wondering what some of our modern horses — or trainers — would think about the sort of methods used’ was a typical comment – from John Oaksey — when I sent a few extracts to one or two racing writers).

It should be explained the toughness: applied to the prolonged-hours (beginning at 2.30am – in summer) of training horses and the style of training details, not to cruelty as such indeed Holoroft, who adored horses all his life, paints a picture of stables and trainers singularly free from bribery and inconsideration, and (a revealing touch from a boy who had known only the life of the eighteenth century poor) he is more enthusiastic about the meals and treatment of the ‘lads’ than are some writers of social conscience in the pages of Sporting Life today. When he fell from a difficult mare he was nursed back to health in the home of his employer with genuine kindness and although he lost his job he soon found an even more celebrated trainer, under whose guidance he became a first-class and valued rider. Once again his enthusiasm points the changed conditions of his life:

‘Now I was warmly clothed, nay, gorgeously, for I was proud of my new livery, and never suspected that there was disgrace in it; I fed voluptuously, not a prince oh earth perhaps with half the appetite, and never-failing relish; and instead of being obliged to drag through the dirt after sluggish, obstinate, and despised among our animals, I was mounted on the noblest that the earth contains, had him under my care, and was borne by him over hill and dale, far outstripping the wings of the wind.’

In the interim he mentions being briefly at the stables housing the thirteen, racing horses owned by the Duke of Grafton, who was the ‘squire’ of Paine’s home town, the ‘rotten borough’ of Thetford, but he gives us no recollections of the young ‘Sporting Duke’, afterwards so-maligned by Junius, and owner of the 1810 Derby winner, Whalebone (possibly named, I have suggested in my biography of Paine, in commemoration of the notorious Thetford staymaker’s son), Holcroft, nevertheless, had brains and vision beyond the scope of his fellow stableboys. While at Newmarket he began to read voraciously, starting with Gulliver’s Travels, and intent on improving his education he went to study in his spare time with a schoolteacher named Langham, who was also the local maker of leather breeches. Langham was so impressed by his quickness that he gave him free lessons, and Holoroft soon outstripped his master. Having a good treble voice and a feeling for music, he also sang in the.choir at one of Newmarket’s two churches (this love of music he retained all his life, and as late as 1784 he took the tenor part in the Handel celebration at Westminster Abbey).

In many ways, Holcroft was never to experience again times as happy and, within their limits, affluent as those at Newmarket. He left in 1760 to follow his ‘rolling stone’ father to London, and perhaps with a sense already of wider and more literate horizons. He had begun by being only horsestruck; he was soon stagestruck too, and although for ten years he scraped a living as a shoemaker and schoolmaster, by, 1770, at the age of twenty-four, he had turned strolling player and was acting in Dublin with the great veteran actor, Charles Macklin, whose fame had been partially eclipsed by David Garrick but who lived to an enormous age, still churning out performances the length and breadth of England and Ireland, including a celebrated ‘Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. It is estimated that he was still acting at well over ninety.

Holcroft never made much headway as an actor; as with so many with intellectual interests and accomplishments, he was best at characters requiring the assumption of old age or characteristics outside the sweep of emotion which is always a major factor in carrying the really great actor to the top of his profession. But he had taught himself several foreign languages and made an expert study, too, of vocal and instrumental music and it was through this that he at last succeeded, in 1776, in getting an engagement at Drury Lane under Sheridan’s management, at 20 shillings a week. As many of the plays performed had incidental music, he was able to sing in the choruses as well as to play very small parts. Only when Sheridan saw him play a character called Mungo, was he impressed enough to raise his salary to 25 shillings.

Although Holcroft was obviously already interested in writing for the theatre before, Sheridan engaged him as a an actor he had a farce (oddly, to Paineites, called The Crisis) to Mrs. Sheridan to read and his own years of poverty must have got his mind in politically questioning directions, there is little doubt the association with Richard Brinsley Sheridan helped to consolidate both Holcroft’s radical interests and ambitions as a dramatist. ‘Sheridan had been drawn to politics long before he started to write ‘plays’, writes his most recent biographer, and there exists fragments of various political essays which were written at Anna St. Ives, in Holcroft’s own words, was intended ‘to develop (Holcroft’s own spelling) certain general principles by exhibiting imaginary characters’ and to depict ‘the vices and distresses which are generated by the existing institutions of society’. Ibsen or Shaw could not have put it more clearly. Hugh Trevor, a novel in two parts published in 1794 and 1797, continued this doctrinaire philosophy of novel-writing. Crabbe Robinson once wrote that Holcroft’s novels had been a mental introduction to the reception of Godwin’s Political Justice (which, in 1793, could well have been true of Anna St. Ives).

Holoroft was very active in the Constitutional Society, sitting on its committee and at one time edifying its members, but also probably much holding up its business, with a dissertation on the human mind, which continued until the meeting broke. (Brown, P.A. ie French Revolution Histo. a 1918 (republished by Cass, 1965)) He shared with, and indeed perhaps helped to form in Godwin a strong sense of human perfectibility; and with Shaw – at least the Shaw of Back to Methuselah – he believed mind was all-important, and could conquer anything. His mind cast an unconscious shadow on the future in another theatre direction, for in his play The Deserted Daughter, he anticipates Pirandello’s moral theme, in Six Characters in Search of an Author, about a father who encounters his own daughter in a brothel (J.B. Priestley also used it in his play, Johnson Over Jordan). He also had his censorship problems; there was a trying bother over the line in Love’s Frailties, ‘he was bred to the most useless, and often the most worthless, of all professions, that of a gentleman’. Paine would undoubtedly have relished this.

When, in 1794, the Government decided to try and put a stop to the growing revolutionary societies and arrested most of Holcroft’s associates on a treason charge, Holcroft, knowing his turn would come, turned the tables of public sympathy by courageously giving himself up. Thomas Erskine, the great lawyer who had defended Paine in 1792, immediately offered his services free of charge, and Holcroft in fact was never brought to trial. He was released when it became clear to the Government (which had been grossly misled by its spies) that none of the accused could be proved guilty of the charge on any evidence. Holcroft resented his release without official ‘pardon’, as it cast a shadow on his name that he had no means of repudiating, unlike those who had actually been brought into court; and in fact his political enemies so powerfully attacked his works from then on that eventually he took to a pseudonym, thus achieving his only play success thereafter.

Yet although his fortunes were fading he remained bravely in London among his friends, frequenting Debrett’s (which was virtually a social club as well as booksellers) and recording in his Diary meetings and comments of considerable interest. His visitors in 1798 included Mrs.Reveley (once courted by Godwin and later a friend to his daughter Mary and Shelley in Italy) at a musical evening devoted to Mozart and Haydn; James Barry the painter (whose attractive young self-portrait is in the Tate Gallery close to where I write this); and a child pianist prodigy, John Field, who later became famous in Russia as an antecedent of Chopin in the composing and playing of Nocturnes. Benjamin Disraeli’s father (still calling himself D’Israeli), the painter Richard Wilson, Horne Tooke, Benjamin Franklin, Sir Joseph Banks, James Boswell (‘a pompous egotist, servile, selfish, and cunning’) flit across his canvas, and he pins down Tooke (who turned his coat twice to desert two former allies, John Wilkes and Thomas Paine) like a butterfly with a reference to a discussion of the’misapplication of his powers, the sacrifice of wisdom and virtue to the pitiful triumph of the moment’ (Miss Banks also takes tea with Tooke’s two natural daughters, living with him at Wimbledon and known euphemistically as ‘the Misses Hart’). William Sharpy the engraves of Romney’s portrait of Paine, who had been introduced into the Constitutional Society by Horne Tooke, is shown to be an eccentric believer in the ‘Grand Millenium’s ‘The earthquake is still to happen, and the peaceable, even if uninspired, are all to be saved’, as Holcroft puts it. ‘Last summer he retired to a lonely place…..and there he himself had been absolutely favoured with a revelation, communicating to him personally, beyond all doubt, the revolutions that are immediately to happen’. One can imagine what would have been the reaction to all this the author of The Age of Reason!

At Debrett’s he meets Erskine and records the great lawyer’s opinion that ‘it was wrong to give up agitating the question of reform without doors, i.e. out of the House of Commons. He had before remarked that the people had lost all spirit, which I denied, and, on this occasion, reminded him that the leaders of the people had abandoned them in a cowardly manner, and then had called the people cowards’. He adds that Sir Francis Burdett is inquiring into the number of persons imprisoned on suspicion, and their treatment, meaning to state the particulars to Parliament. (Burdett, a distinguished radical Member of Parliament, four years later, in 1802, joined Rickman in seeing off Paine to America at Le Havre.) Erskine, as a lawyer, has great talents, quick conceptions, acute feelings, and uncommon power over juries, he is far from ranking in the first class’s which in view of Erskine’s offer of his services without fee four years before, seems perhaps a little ungrateful.

It is revealing of the rumours besieging London in 1798 that on 26th July he heard ‘Buonaparte and his whole fleet were taken’ (a rumour which proved wishful thinking) and on 14th. December records ‘the assassination of Buonaparte the subject at Debrett although the next day this, too, ‘was much questioned at Debrett’s’. Among references to other friends or acquaintances of Paine, he reports on 15th, November ‘Johnson the bookseller sent to the King’s bench Prison for selling Wakefield’s pamphlet°, and also ‘Read at Debrett’s, in the papers, the manly behaviour of Tone, tried at Dublin, and cast for high treason’. (Dr. Gilbert Wakefield, a classical scholar, had published a pamphlet replying to one by the bishop of Llandaff on the French Revolution. He was sentenced to imprisonment in the common goal of Dorchester for two years,, and died fourteen weeks after his liberation. Llandaff, who also crossed swords with Paine, had tried in vain to prevent Wakefield’s being prosecuted, ‘thinking the liberty of the press to be the palladium of the Constitution’ (Rae. Wilkes, Sheridan, Fox)) It was the year of the great Irish rebellion of 1798, in which Paine’s friend Lord Edward Fitzgerald also lost his life, and the Irish question, then as now persistently obtrudes.

By 1799 his funds were so depleted that he had to sell his fine collection of pictures and his library (he was a connoisseur of taste in both, and his Diary includes the acquisition of surprising items, such as ‘the bible in Welsh, Polish, Danish and Swedish likewise Novelle di Salernitano (scarce) and other books’). The loss of the library cost him bitter pangs. He left for Hamburg and voluntary exile in Europe until 1802. In Paris, as Professor Aidridge’s researches have recorded, he again met Paine, but in October 1802 he returned to London. (Aldridge, A.O. Man of Reason. The Life of Thomas Paine. Cresset, 1959. It would be interesting to know if he lodged again with Bonneville, with whom Paine was then living) Success eluded him and in 1807 he was forced to sell a new collection of books and pictures. He died in poverty on 23rd, March 1809, the same year as Paine.

His life had been overshadowed by personal tragedies. The first two of his three wives died young, and in 1789, the year which should have been a beacon for all lovers of liberty and equality, his sixteen-year-old eldest son, in some slight family altercation, had run away with £40 and tried to sail on a vessel to America. His anxious father, ready to forgive all, had found the ship through police efforts, but as he was descending to the cabin to fetch his son, the boy threatened to shoot himself if taken. Believing, as most parents would, this was merely adolescent histrionics, Holcroft had continued to descend, only to hear his son fire the pistol. When he reached him the boy was dead. This tragedy shattered his life, and for a year he scarcely went out of doors.

Francis Place, years later on the death of James Stuart Mill, wrote: ‘He was all the time as much of a bright reasoning man as ever he was, reconciled to his fate, brave and calm to an extent which I never before witnessed, except in another old friend, Thomas Holcroft, the day before and the day of his death’. Holcroft, like Sheridan, had known poverty, and like Sheridan at the end he returned to it. Neither man forgot that it is the poor that must help the poor. As Holcroft’s little Song of Gaffer-Gray has it:

‘The poor man alone,

When he hears the poor moan,

Of his morsel a morsel will give,

Well-a-day.’

It was a philosophy Paine, too, understood.

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by Nigel H. Sinnott 

BY THE MIDDLE OF THE 1790’s all Ireland was in a political ferment which had been sparked off as a result of the success of the French Revolution abroad, and at home, the formation by Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-1798) and others, at the end of 1791, of the Society of United Irishmen, which “at its foundation ……stood broadly on the principles of Paine’s Rights of Man (part 1 of which was published in 1791) which work, Tone notes with glee, at once became the ‘Koran of Belfast.” (Jackson, T.A. & Greaves,C.D. (1971) Ireland Her Own London. p.119.) The Society flourished particularly in Dublin and Belfast until it was suppressed (at least officially) in 1794. The following year, 1795, marked the reaction to Irish Jacobinism with the formation of the Orange Order, and was also the occasion of Tone’s leaving Ireland in the hope of obtaining help from the French for an armed uprising against the Dublin Castle authorities.

In the same year, in the city of Cork, an interesting tract was published. It was entitled Letters addressed to the inhabitants of Cork, occasioned by the circulation of a work, entitled, The Age of Reason, &c., in that city. (Cork: printed and sold by J. Haly, King’s Arms, Exchange, 1795). The pamphlet, or small book, was a defence of orthodox (Protestant) Christianity, and we now know the author to have been Thomas Dix Hincks,LL.D., an eminent Presbyterian divine of the day. I do not intend here to discuss the details of Dr. Hincks’ theological arguments, save to say that, to an inexperienced eye, they appear to be typical of scholarly defences of religion in that period. What is interesting is that Dr. Hincks should have felt it necessary to go to print at all, and it is clear on reading the preamble to the letters that The Age of Reason was not merely “circulated” in Cork, but published there. I quote: 

“A work has lately been circulated amongst you with much industry, and, if I have been rightly informed, with considerable success….Had this work been permitted to take the usual course, and only one or two copies of it reached this part of the Kingdom, I should not have thought of troubling you with any remarks, but have trusted to the answers which have been or will be published in other places, and to the many excellent works which have been written in support of the evidences of Revelation. But when some persons, with a zeal which I cannot think laudable, and which perhaps deserves reprehension, have rendered it by their exertions a local publication, and have caused its dispersion amongst those, who from their situation in life, are unable to themselves to see the false reasoning it contains, it is incumbent on those, whose education and course of study have led them to investigate the subject, to endeavour to assist their brethren, and prevent them if possible from forsaking the clear and pleasant streams of Religion, for the muddy and bitter waters of infidelity.” 

I have been unable to trace any surviving copies of this Cork edition of The Age of Reason, but its circulation must have been quite wide enough to worry the devout Dr. Hincks, and, indeed, his Letters ran to a second edition in the following year, retitled, Letters originally addressed to the inhabitants of Cork, in defense of Revealed Religion, occasioned by the circulation of Mr.Paine’s Age of Reason in that city. (By T.D.H.) Second edition with additions, &c. (Cork, 1796) (British Museum Cat Printed Books to 1955. I have not examined this version.)

Despite Dr. Hincks and the Government spy network, however, the illegal United Irishmen continued to spread and flourish. In 1797 we read how a number of Cork militiamen were sentenced to death and executed for taking the United Irishmen’s oath, but only after a local Scottish regiment had refused to carry out the sentence, and a more “loyal” regiment procured for the purpose. (Jackson & Greaves. Loc.cit. p.160.) This same year General Lake “dragooned” Ulster to disarm the people and terrorize the Northern Jacobins into obedience, though this failed to prevent the great risings in Ulster and Leinster in 1798, and the unsuccessful French landing in Bantry Bay later in the same year. In that year, too, Dr.Hincks had another tract published in Cork, which was entitled, aptly enough, On dwelling together in unity, a sermon (on Ps. 133) preached….on….the first of July 1798. (British Museum Cat Printed Books to 1955.)

Thomas Dix Hincks was born in Dublin in 1767, the son of a customs officer, Edward Hincks, who died in 1772. He was educated both in England and in Dublin, intended to read medicine, but decided instead to take Orders. He went to Trinity College, Dublin (? 1784); and Hackney New College (1788). His ministry in Cork lasted from 1790 to 1815, during which time he was ordained (1792), became a salaried officer of the Royal Cork Institute, lectured on chemistry and natural philosophy, ran his own school (1791-1803) and taught at Fermoy Academy, Co. Cork (1815-1821). In 1821 he left the province of Munster for Ulster, where he taught classics in Belfast Academical Institution. He died in Belfast in 1857, and was buried in Killyleagh, Co. Down. A memorial window was subsequently erected to him in Belfast’s First Presbyterian Church. 

Hincks was a varied and adaptable writer; in addition to the works already mentioned he published A Greek-English Lexicon (1831, 1843), edited the Munster Agricultural Journal and several school textbooks. Of his theology, Alexander Gordon says this was “Arian, but he avoided polemics, and was on intimate terms with men of all religious parties.” (Gordon, A. (1882). Hincks, Thomas Dix. Dict. Natl. Biography 9: p.892.) Hincks was awarded his· LL.D. by Glasgow University in 1834. In 1791, the year after he came to Cork, he married Anne Boult (d. 1835), who bore him seven children, of whom five survived him. Of these, two sons achieved particular distinction: Edward Hincks (1792-1866) was a distinguished orientalist, and made major contributions to the decipherment of cuneiform script. Another son, Sir Francis Hincks (1807- 1885) was at various times of his life Premier of Canada (1851), Governor of Barbadoes and the Windward Islands (1855), and Governor of British Guiana (1862). In 1844 he launched a liberal newspaper in Canada, the Montreal Pilot, to promote, amongst other causes, “the secularisation of clergy reserves.” (Moriarty, G.P. (1882). Hincks, Francis Dict. Natl. Biography 9: p.890.) When Premier, however, his tardiness in carrying this measure through resulted in the religious Gavuzzi Riot of 1853. Sir Francis eventually published a book entitled Religious Endowments in Canada in London, in 1869. 

To return, finally, to Thomas Paine. There can be no doubt that his ideas in the 1790’s (and later) had profound effects upon political thinking among Irish radicals, just as they did among the revolutionaries of France, the United States, and Britain. Both he and Wolfe Tone met in Paris in March 1797 and during the period of the “dragooning” of Ulster and the ’98 Rising, a copy of Paine’s Rights of Man was virtually a death-warrant if found in an Irishman’s pockets. (Equally interesting are unconfirmed, but reliable, accounts of a Gaelic edition of the Rights of Man which circulated in the Scottish Highlands in the 1790’s. If any collector of Paineana can run down a copy of either of the Gaelic Rights of Man, or the Cork edition of The Age of Reason, I would be very pleased to hear of it.) It is interesting to see the spread of Jacobin ideas in the 1790’s from Dublin and Belfast to Cork, where they were ruthlessly suppressed in 1798, and remained more or less dormant until the Tithe War in the 1830’s. During the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) the County was a major theatre in the fighting, and has ever since earned itself the nickname of “Rebel Cork.”

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In 1805, Thomas Paine addressed a tract to the Board of Health of the United States entitled “Of the Cause of the Yellow Fever; And the Means of Preventing it” in places not yet effected with it. In 1807, Clio Rickman printed and published this tract in London, at Upper Mary-le-bone Street, with a foreword to the reader: 

“I publish the following little tract of Thomas Paine’s in England, hoping that it may benefit society, by throwing some light on certain local diseases, even in countries, where it does not so particularly apply, as in America. 

“I know also it will gratify many, to have anything from his pen; and to hear that the Author, though above Seventy, possesses health, fortune, and happiness; and that he is held in the highest estimation amongst the most exalted and best characters in America – That America, which is indebted for almost every blessing she knows to His labours and exertions.” 

Present-day knowledge

AMARYL, or Yellow Fever, also called Yellow Jack because ships carrying crew or passengers with the disease flew a yellow flag, is a disease of Human Beings and some small animals, caused by a virus which is conveyed to man by the bite of a domestic mosquito, Aedes aegypti. 

It was first identified in Barbados in 1647, and is thought to have been taken across the Atlantic in slave ships. It was first described in English by a physician, Hughes, in 1715. There were devastating epidemics in North America in the 18th. century, especially one in Philadelphia in 1793. There was even a small outbreak in the United Kingdom in 1865, in Swansea. 

An attack of the disease, fatal in one in ten, confers. long-lasting immunity, and in areas where the disease is endemic the native population has considerable immunity. 

Viruses as a group of disease carrying agents were not discovered until 1887, and it was not until 1929 that the Yellow Fever virus was identified, although the mosquito Aedes aegypti had been inculpated in 1901. 

Yellow Fever has killed more investigating scientists than any other disease. It is said that the stories of the Flying Dutchman and of the Ancient Mariner are based on a ghost ship abandoned as the crew succumbed to Yellow Fever. 

The historical setting for Paine’s tract is interesting. Philadelphia, ‘as has already been mentioned, was the centre of a serious epedemic in 1793, just about the time that the negro slaves in Haiti began to revolt against their French owners. But it was not until 1801 that Toussaint L’Ouverture was finally victorious in gaining independence. By 1803 Napoleon Bonaparte had become jealous of this ‘Black Napoleon’ and formed a large armada in French, Spanish and Dutch ports under his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc, to sail to the West Indies and subdue the Haitians. However, the Haitians retreated to the mountains and the Yellow Fever destroyed two thirds of the French army, and although the French treacherously managed to abduct Toussaint to France, where he died the following year, Haiti kept its independence. Partly because of this bother, Napoleon sold Louisiana to America for fifteen million dollars in 1803. 

Yellow Fever was to play its part in defeating other European projects in the New World. In 1882, Ferdinand de Lesseps, hoping to repeat his Suez triumph, expended large amounts of shareholders’ money in machinery, labour and bribes, in an attempt to link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at Panama. By 1889, however, the mosquito carrying Yellow Fever and Malaria had defeated him, and ruined his company. 

It is apparent that Thomas Paine, who died in 1809, was not to know the scientific facts nor historical effects of Yellow Fever which are now commonly appreciated, and it is therefore interesting to read again his paper on its cause. It runs to more than 2,500 words, but about a quarter is taken up with an interesting discussion and description of experiments with marsh gas. 

Marsh gas (“Fire-damp”) methane in its pure form, or, as we now know it, natural gas, and draw upon it from the North Sea, has been known for some centuries. Decomposition of organic matter at the bottom of rivers and ponds produces large amounts of impure and often highly inflammable air, and this can be set free by accident or by stirring the mud or exposing it to dry out. 

Paine recounts an extraordinary episode in the autumn of 1783 when, Washington having withdrawn from New York and made his Headquarters at Mrs.Berrians, Rocky Hill, Jersey, it came to their knowledge that the creek under Rocky Hill had a fiery reputation it was said that it could be set alight. Washington knew of this and was interested enough to allow Paine to persuade him to try it. So, on the evening of November the fifth (a pleasant coincidence for the English fire-raiser), with General Lincoln, two aides- de-camp, some soldiers with poles, Washington at one end and Thomas Paine at the other, a scow sailed over the mill-pond on the creek, While the soldiers stirred the bottom of the pond, Washington and Paine held rolls of lighted cartridge paper over the surface of the water. Then, in a style that would please his amateur scientist friends, Priestley and Jefferson, Paine describes and proves that it was gas that was set alight by the illustrious and future President. 

As regards Yellow Fever, Paine notes that it begins and continues in the lowest parts of populous marine towns near the water, especially around wharves. He makes the digression to discuss marsh gas, not because he feels that it is the cause of Yellow Fever, but he puts forward the idea that the gas is injurious to life, especially if it combines with a ‘miasm’ from the low ground newly produced when wharves are built, and that this pernicious vapour from submerged material is responsible for the disease.. 

Because he believes that it is wharf-making that contributes, if it does not actually cause, to fellow Fever, he ends the paper by suggesting new ways of making wharves lengthways along the river banks, and of iron rather than stone to make them cheaper, and that old wharves can be opened up so that the tide can wash in and around the banks of new earth disposing of any injurious vapours. 

Finally: “In taking up and treating this subject, I have considered it as belonging to Natural Philosophy, rather than medicinal art; and therefore say nothing about treatment of the disease, after it takes place; I leave that part to those whose profession it is to study it.” 

Although there is now a very reliable vaccine to prevent Yellow Fever, there is still no treatment except good general nursing. 

The cause we know to be a virus carried in the saliva of a mosquito, and it is only by stringent international regulations that Yellow Fever is confined to a belt roughly 150 North and South of the Equator. 

Thomas Paine’s comments about the disease occurring only where the banks are broken out and flattened to form wharves are entirely in keeping with the facts as we know them, for it is just in these areas that the mosquito finds the type of stagnant water it needs to breed. It is interesting that he uses much the same phrase in describing the site of the occurrence of Yellow Fever as does Sir Patrick Manson in his famous textbook on tropical diseases (6th. edition, 1919) – “The ideal haunt of Yellow Fever is the low-lying, hot, squalid, insanitary district in the neighbourhood of the wharves and docks of large sea-port towns…..a ‘place’ disease.” 

Paine makes a point that the inhabitants of the West Indies and the Indians of America before the arrival of the white man, did not suffer from Yellow Fever, otherwise they would have forsaken the areas. This is quite true for the native population possessing ‘herd’ immunity, developed over the centuries. 

In the Twentieth century, the disease would be prevented from arriving in the States by adequate vaccination and strict control of travellers. And the accumulation of pools of stagnant water close to dwellings and ships would likewise be prevented, or at least sprayed with mosquito killing chemicals. 

The style in which this tract is written, Paine’s accumulation of facts, and his derivation from these of reasonable hypotheses, are entirely in the manner of the good natural scientist of his age.

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