A Political Biography Of Thomas Paine. W. A. SPECK. xv & 258pp. Hardbound. London, Pickering & Chatto, 2013. ISBN 13: 9781848930957. £60.00 

For anyone interested in the life and influence of Thomas Paine the appearance of a new biography of him is to be warmly welcomed. Naturally it invites comparison with previous biographical studies, in particular the most recent. It bears out well in relationship to them. What stands out in this new work is its detailed coverage of Paine’s career and his comprehensive treatment of the controversies and issues Paine addressed. 

The author draws attention to the problems encountered by biographers due to the gaps in surviving information about Paine’s early life. To some extent he fills some of these gaps, particularly when it comes to Paine’s years in Lewes, in doing this he has drawn on the research undertaken by a retired excise officer of George Hindmarch, though not uncritically, though approvingly citing his contention that there was no such thing as the Headstrong Club, and that Paine had adopted republicanism – “even revolutionary” views as a consequence of his involvement. Professor Speck’s examination of the years Paine spent in Lewes bring out clearly that further research might well pay dividends. A more plausible explanation for Paine’s conversion to republicanism could have been a degree of resentment at the rejection of his Case of the Officers of Excise, over which he had laboured long and hard, and eventually lost his post with the Excise. His resentment, could well have made him more receptive to republicanism when after moving to the American colonies and there became aware of the discontent amongst the colonists to British government policies in respect of the colonies. His final conversion may well have been events at Lexington and Concord, which prompted Paine to write of rejecting ‘the hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh of England for ever’. I would have liked to see Professor Speck go into the subject in detail. Whatever, Common Sense became not just a rallying point for the colonists but an exposition of republicanism that had an influence internationally. Yet for all his unqualified republicanism he was to oppose the execution of the deposed French king – at his personal cost, and would, but for an accident, or was it?, followed the king to the guillotine. 

Professor Speck refers to Paine’s ability to express himself in a manner readily understood by his targeted readership, artisans, small tradesmen, apprentices and others, an ability that was to alarm the political and religious establishments in England following the publication of Rights of Man which had achieved record sales. Previous Paine biographers have accepted the claim that the first biography of him, written by George Chalmers, who concealed his authorship under the name “Francis Oldys”, which appeared in 1791, had been commissioned and paid by the government, for whom he worked, however, Professor Speck questions the validity of this, and notes that given Chalmers political views [he had fled from the colonies following the outbreak of the revolution] he may have taken it on himself to denounce Paine. The fact that he had access to official papers, as chief clerk to the committee of the Privy Council, he would have had this. 

An example, not cited by Speck, of the alarm generated first by Rights of Man and then by The Age of Reason, can be found in a missive addressed to his clergy by the bishop of London, Beilby Porteus. Writing specifically of Paine’s works he refers to “the meanness of their style, and the homeliness, the plainness, and the gross familiarity of their manner, are all too well adapted to the taste and apprehension of those readers whom they are meant to captivate. This”, he goes on, “is a new (his emphasis) species of infidel writing, recently introduced among us. Hitherto we have had to contend with the Tolands, the Tindals, the Bolingbrokes, and the Humes of the age; men, whose writings could fall only into the hands of a few in the higher ranks of life, and were not likely to make much impression on well- informed and well cultivated minds. But the pieces to which I allude [Rights of Man and The Age of Reason] are addressed to the multitude (again his emphasis), and are most dexterously brought down to the level of their understanding”. He continues in a similar vein calling Paine’s works, “most artful snares” (Beilby Porteus. Tracts on Various Subjects. London, Cadell & Davies, 1807. pp.276-278). 

Ironically, having roundly condemned Paine’s style of writing he called upon his clergy to emulate it in both their writing and sermonising. Perhaps aware they could not, or would not, in 1792 he begged Hannah More to write something in simple words to open the eyes of uneducated people dazed by the words “liberty” and “equality”. Initially she had refused but then agreed, writing her tract, Village Politics, supposedly about a discussion between a country carpenter Will Chip, who was happy with his inferior social status and defended the political and social status quo, and a supporter of Paine’s ideas, who, naturally, ended up agreeing with Chip. This tract is briefly discussed by Professor Speck. 

A Political Biography of Thomas Paine must surely become one of the most important of Paine biographies and deserves a wide readership. It is a detailed overview of Paine’s life and career presented in varying degrees of detail, and written in what is a very readable, almost Paineite style. As well as its nine chapters on Paine and the disputes he became involved in through his writings, many of which retain their relevance and could apply to events and situations today given some minor changes, it also has thirty-four pages of notes, an extensive bibliography and a useful index. One error I noted, the reference to Paine’s Jewish critic David Levi, as being an American, whereas he was English, being by profession a hat-maker turned printer. 

A Political Biography of Thomas Paine is a comprehensive and thoughtful work that deserves to be not only in academic libraries but also those of anyone seriously interested in Thomas Paine. However, its high price is regrettably likely to put it beyond the reach of many students, though the Historical Association has just published an essay on Paine by Professor Speck. Priced at £2.99 it is at the time of writing restricted to Kindle, but hopefully the association will publish it in pamphlet form. 

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La Pensee Politique de Thomas Paine en Contexte: Theorie at Pratique. Carine Lounissi. 894pp. Paris Honore Champion 2012. ISBN: 978 —2-7453-2359-0. £139.06. 

This fundamental contribution to Paine’s political thought, based on a Ph. D thesis at the Sorbonne, deserves to be translated into English so that it becomes available to all Anglophones interested in the subject. Dr Lounissi places his writings in context by examining the literature on which he apparently drew for inspiration, and also by discussing the often hostile reactions that they provoked. 

One can only say that previous political thinkers appear to have influenced Paine because he notoriously cited very few authorities in his publications and insisted that his ideas were original. Thus when critics dismissed Common Sense as being derived from John Locke he denied that he had ever read Two Treatises of Government. There were contemporaries who took him at his word that his political thought was homespun. Edmund Burke declined directly responding to the Rights of Man claiming that Paine had ‘not even a moderate portion of learning of any kind. He has learned the instrumental part of literature, a style, and a method of disposing his ideas, without having ever made a previous preparation of study or thinking—for the use of it’. 

Notwithstanding this, commentators on Paine’s political philosophy have sought to trace it back to previous philosophers. Thus despite his own disclaimer some have insisted that he was influenced by Locke since, even if he did not read his works, Lockean ideas were ‘in the air’, or he absorbed them ‘by osmosis’. Lounissi concludes that, while at first sight Paine’s thought often seems Lockean, on a deeper comparison between them differences emerge. For example both place the origins of government in a contract in which individuals agreed to set one up. Superficially these are similar if not identical models. But on closer examination they have significant differences. Locke accepted any government which was established by the contract — monarchy, aristocracy, democracy or, as he claimed was the case in England, a mixture of these. Paine by contrast denied that the original contract could set up any hereditary form of government since it could not bind future generations. Only a polity in which the people had a voice was legitimate. 

Despite her scepticism Lounissi concludes that Paine’s contractual theory was sown in a Lockean soil. She also finds echoes in Paine of the contractual theories of Algernon Sidney and Rousseau. On the latter she is on firmer ground as Rousseau was one of the writers whom Paine did cite, along with Montesquieu, Voltaire and other philosophes, in Rights of Man. One of Paine’s hostile critics lamented that France had been a ‘generous and gallant nation’ before it was ‘unhappily sophisticated by the late — forged philosophy of ingenious, immoral vagabonds, such as Rousseau and Paine’ As with all direct quotations from English authors Lounissi commendably translates this into French in the text but quotes the original in her footnote on page 185. 

The footnote cites the original in the edition of Political Writings of the 1790s edited by Gregory Claeys, in eight volumes published by Pickering and Chatto in 1995. These publishers have rendered a great service to students of Paine with this publication and also that of Thomas Paine and America 1776 — 1809, published in six volumes in 2009 of which Kenneth Burchell is editor. In her discussion of the reception of Paine’s works Lounissi draws frequently on these collections of contemporary works. 

It might be expected that a French scholar would be more informed about Paine’s career in France than about his activities in America. Dr Lounissi, however, is a specialist in the civilisation of the United States at the University of Rouen, with a particular interest in the history of the early Republic. Her book demonstrates familiarity with politics and political theory on both sides of the Atlantic in the late eighteenth century. Thus she points out that the constitutional arrangements for the United States outlined in Common Sense owed much to Benjamin Franklin’s plan for a union of the colonies spelled out at the Albany Congress of 1754. 

Although his proposals were sketchy, leading some to argue that Paine was more concerned with the negative task of bringing down governments rather than the positive problem of replacing them, Lounissi shows that in America he did contribute to the constitutional debates of the revolutionary era. He was not directly involved in the drafting of the radical constitution for Pennsylvania in 1776. This did not prevent his critics, led by John Adams, from associating him with its provisions for a unicameral legislature elected annually by universal adult male suffrage. He certainly supported it, at least initially, in several publications. Again he had no part in the deliberations at Philadelphia in 1787 which resulted in the American Constitution, being overseas in England at the time. But he did approve it to the point of recommending its adoption by the British. 

Paine did have a direct input into the drafting of the abortive French constitution of 1793, being appointed to the committee chaired by Condorcet charged with drawing it up. Unfortunately, as Lounissi points out, it is impossible to discern precisely what his role in the process was, though she does deduce that parts of the document were influenced by passages in Rights of Man, while the prefatory declaration of rights owed much to Paine too. He also had a say in the debates which resulted in the setting up of the Directory in 1795. Although his contribution to them, mainly objecting to the restriction of the franchise, has been long known, Lounissi’s familiarity with the French sources adds details not available elsewhere. 

She also demonstrates a formidable knowledge of English sources. For example, she places discussion of the welfare proposals in the second part of Rights of Man and in Agrarian Justice in the context of the debate on the poor laws in the late eighteenth century. Her research unearthed an anecdote about Paine unknown to his biographers. Thomas Ruggles, in The History of the Poor published in 1793, recounted how he had recently sat next to Paine at a dinner, who informed him that, when his grandfather was an overseer of the poor at Thetford fifty years before, the poor rate was under £40. Now it was between £300 and £400. “In a short time if this evil is not stopped the friends of liberty will, with the greatest ease, walk over the ruins of the boasted constitution; its fall wants no acceleration from the friends of Gallic freedom.’ To this a gentleman instantly replied ‘Thomas, thy wish is father to the thought’.” 

After discussing Paine’s ideas on poverty and property Lounissi proceeds to investigate his republicanism. She concludes that he was not a republican in the eighteenth — century tradition of the commonwealthmen. These, also known as classical republicans, argued that governments always sought to reduce the liberty of their subjects and that it was the duty of the virtuous citizen to be constantly vigilant to detect attempts to do so and resist them. One method rulers employed to distract citizens from their machinations was to corrupt them, for instance by encouraging trade in luxury goods, which allegedly reduced their will to defend their rights. Classical republicans were therefore opposed to commercial expansion. Paine by contrast welcomed commerce and industry, not only because they stimulated economic growth but also because he believed free trade helped to disseminate ideas of liberty in other areas of human activity. 

Lounissi also investigates Paine’s credentials as a historian. He announced his intention of writing a three – volume history of the American Revolution and then of giving an historical account of the French Revolution. Neither of these ambitious projects was ever realised. As she observes, Paine had a certain talent for missing rendezvous with historiography. His only major contribution to the history of the American Revolution was an open Letter to Abbe Rayne! objecting to his interpretation of it. Raynal put the quarrel between Britain and the colonies down to a dispute about the right to raise taxes. Paine insisted that the British government all along plotted to provoke the Americans into violent resistance to its measures in order to deprive them of their liberties. 

Paine absorbed what he had so far written on the Revolution in France into the first part of Rights of Man. Just as his account of the American conflict was written to correct Raynal, as Lounissi observes, so that of the French was to put Burke right. She checks Paine’s account of the events he describes and demonstrates that he frequently got them wrong. In summing up his accounts of the two revolutions she concludes that he was more a theorist than a historian of them. 

Paine’s second sojourn in America, following his return from France, is a period of his life that has been frequently skipped over quickly. Yet during his last few years Paine continued to publish quite prolifically. Lounissi and another French scholar, Marc Belissa, are now doing justice to his later works. For as Lounissi points out, even if these publications did not necessarily add new aspects to his thought, they are nevertheless important. Thus his political writings against the Federalists led by John Adams contributed to the debate over whether the ideals of the American Revolution were in danger until they were rescued by Thomas Jefferson. 

After dealing with Paine’s last years Lounissi ends the book with another account of his political activities in France. Thus she goes into detail on his role in the trial of Louis XVI, and publishes three appendices of contributions he made in the debates on the king’s fate. Two of them have not previously appeared in any collection of his writings, while only inaccurate versions of the third were ever published. 

This exhaustive investigation of Paine’s political thought, which covers all his speculative writings except those on religion, is a colossal achievement. Its range is indicated by the bibliography, which takes up sixty five pages. It is a pity that the index is confined to the names of people mentioned in the text, and even then omits some. But a comprehensive index would have made an already lengthy book unwieldy and more expensive. 

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Religion For Atheists. Alain de Botton, London Hamish Hamilton. Hardback ISBN 978-0-241-14477-0 £18.99 

Alain de Botton describes his book as a non-believers’ guide to the uses of religion. Looking at religious practices, he thinks we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in our modern secular society. He looks only at the bathwater, he believes sacramental processes are needed to form the gel of a caring community. At a low level, he fails to notice the squabbles these generate; what happens when flowers are arranged in a church to the dislike of certain parties, and similar issues? 

How can the ‘nice’ bits of religion be separated from their ideologies which have generated fear, hatred and persecution ? Practically all enlightened progress since the Renaissance has been made in the face of opposition by representatives of religion. Paine, and his publishers were no exception. 

Atheism until recently was only admitted with caution. This book comes close on the heels of other publications taking a ‘soft’ approach to atheism; Londoners may note this is akin to waiting for a bus, then several turn up at once! 

In 2008, the English translation of French philosopher Andre Comte-Sponville’s, The book of Atheist Spirituality¹ appeared. This attempted to re-discover a spiritual heritage lost through being too closely intertwined with religion. Comte-Sponville writes, “it is possible to do without religion but not without communion, fidelity or love”. De Botton finds these latter essential qualities found in religion! A third book, Ariane Sherine’s compilation, The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (2009)² was a lighter look at how non-believers can celebrate the winter solstice; it contained contributions from, among the usual suspects, Dawkins and Grayling. Taking a more robust view, Robert Stovold’s, Did Christians steal Christmas? (2007)³ is an historical stance on pagan and more modern origins of the December festival. 

De Botton is a non-believer of Jewish parentage, a multimillionaire, founder of The School of Life’ and proponent of a vast atheist temple. He is often heard on the radio and television. But there is a great deal missing in this book. 

Religion for Atheists is a curious book. The author has nostalgia 

for something he never experienced. But he finds remnants in Jewish, Christian and Buddhist religions which appeal to his sense of community which these faiths provide. I have heard this called ‘belonging’ rather than ‘believing’. At the outset he dismisses debates about the truth of any religion as “the most boring and unproductive question one can ask”. I have been involved in discussions about the existence of god and I’m inclined to agree. There are no answers to convince those of the differing camps. De Botton sees only the good he wants to see in religion. Nineteenth century secularists, Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins might never have existed. In this book we are stuck with the old conventions of BC and AD, not the updated form of BCE and CE. 

The longest chapter deals with education. The author derides too much concentration on grades and exam performance. This may be good; education, education, education was the mantra of New Labour in 1997. What we got was war, war, war. De Botton finds the concentration of book learning in such as John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century at the root of our move from true education. As he has a double-starred first in history at Cambridge, he should know! 

In this book of some 300 pages, there is lots of white space, and also paintings and photographs; some Old Master paintings, albeit only in black & white, enhance the text while other pictures leave the reader wondering as to their significance. The word Islam, and the religion associated with it, get no mention. He loves so much about the rites and rituals; but male circumcision in Judaism and Islam is not included. As this practice is considered barbaric by some, and certainly rarely consensual, it provides further examples of de Botton’s blinkered approach. He admires the spirit of neighbourliness, the joining of congregations for singing, communion and feasting. He extols the way religion brings abasement of monarchs at feet washing ceremonies for the poor and its lack of concern with worldly success or wealth. He should tell that to the Vatican City and those who shunned the ‘occupy’ camp at St Paul’s recently. The tents may have deterred some paying visitors to the Cathedral, but otherwise it was the nearby Starbuck’s customers who were most discomfited! 

So what are we left with? The word secular is used in the sense of non-religious, not the purist definition of separation of church and state touted by the National Secular Society. Humanism, as a positive code of morality without religion or superstitious back-up fails to gain entry. Yet new ways of celebrating a life at time of death, as well as baby naming and weddings are the most common source of knowledge about humanism and the British Humanist Association. These ceremonies without god are on the increase year on year. 

De Botton applauds all the wonderful human gatherings and festivities generated by religious organizations; he also praises the works of humans in music, poetry, art and architecture. True many patrons have been found through religion for the creation of these artefacts. But there are many secular equivalents, and just a few which have been borne out of non-religious ethical groups. In London, Conway Hall is home of the South Place Ethical Society; its roots may have been religious, but it has long dropped the connection to become a centre of humanist thought and action. Above the proscenium in the main hall are proclaimed Shakespeare’s words: ‘To Thine Own Self Be True’. In Leicester is the even older Secular Hall, with statues of Socrates, Owen, Paine, Voltaire and, perhaps surprisingly, Jesus. 

In the nineteenth century Auguste Comte put forward ideas for a Religion of Humanity, with institutions and buildings for ‘secular churches’. This did not succeed; de Botton sees in Comte recognition that humans have a need for religion. Durkheim, one of the founders of sociology, used this as part of his theory about the part religion plays in human ‘camaraderie and solidarity’. De Botton recognises our sense of anomie, but barely accepts attempts to overcome this in the past. 

Visiting cathedrals, ministers and churches are notable aspects of modern pilgrimages, which we call tourism. I think walking into a centuries old country church gives one a feeling for history and the past in a very human way; it has nothing to do with religious observance, it is just somewhere to find a place that has been trodden by forbears and find out about their lives. Before a certain date, all records of birth, marriage and death were in the parish registers. 

In common with some of his generation, de Botton finds Buddhism offers ‘something’ missing from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Even Sam Harris, in his 2004 The End of Faith⁴ veers in this direction; though Harris spoilt it by suggesting Islamic terrorists should be nuked before they get us! 

Apart from the humanist rites of passage mentioned, there is a clear need for this ‘something’ in our lives as non-believers. In the 1960s, with more optimism than we appear to have now, Richard Robinson wrote in An Atheists’s Values⁵: “We need to create and spread symbols and procedures that will confirm our intentions without involving us in intellectual dishonesty. The need is urgent today. For we have as yet no strong ceremonies to confirm our resolve except religious ceremonies., and most of us cannot join in religious ceremonies with a good conscience. When the Titanic went down, people sang ‘Nearer my God, to thee’. When the Gloucester’s were in prison in North Korea they strengthened themselves with religious ceremonies. At present we know no other way to strengthen ourselves in our most testing and tragic times. Yet this way has become dishonest. That is why it is urgent for us to create new ceremonies, through which to find strength in these terrible situations. It is not enough to formulate honest and high ideals. We must also create the ceremonies and the atmosphere that will hold them before us at all times. I have no conception how to do this; but I believe it will be done if we try”. That is the challenge. 

References

1. THE ATHEIST BOOK OF SPIRITUALITY. Andre Comte-Sponville. Bantam 2008 ISBN 978-0-553-81990-8 
2. THE ATHEIST’S GUIDE TO CHRISTMAS. edited by Mane Sherine. Friday Books 2009 ISBN 978-0-00-732281-9 
3. DID CHRISTIANS STEAL CHRISTMAS. R J Stovold. National Secular Society 2007 ISBN 978-0-903753-05-3 
4. THE END OF FAITH. Sam Harris. W W Norton 2004 ISBN 0-743-26809- 1. 
5. AN ATHEISTS VALUES. Richard Robinson, Oxford 1964 ISBN 978-0- 631-159704. 

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In God’s Shadow: Politics In The Hebrew Bible, Michael Walzer, 232 pages hardback, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-18044-2. 

This is a book about a book, and not just any book! The Sepher Torah (Old Testament) remains a Holy Book for three religions. True the Jews set more store by the Biblical commentaries of the Talmud, the Christians by the New Testament, and the Muslims by the Koran, but the Old Testament remains an important weapon in the armoury of religious ideology and the machinations of priesthood. 

Michael Walzer is not a theologian, he admits he has only a schoolboy’s knowledge of ancient Hebrew and a layman’s understanding of the history and archaeology of the ancient world. He is a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and his aim is to examine the ideas about politics, the understandings of government and law that are expressed in the Hebrew bible. 

Israel, he tells us, was founded twice once as a kin group and once as a nation. Both times there were alleged covenants with the god YHWH. Yet the stories of these events were written long after the events not as history but as religious propaganda. The story of the covenant of Abraham with YHWH is an obvious explanation for the replacement of human sacrifice with animal sacrifice much of which was appropriated by the Levite priesthood. 

Walzer accepts that many Jews were in exile in Egypt although not actually employed as slave labourers building the treasure houses of the ruling class. He accepts they were led out by Moses and Aaron and after wandering in the desert set about conquering and stealing the land of their more advanced Canaanite neighbours in the process forging another covenant with YHWH. They were led by a mysterious religious artefact, the Ark of the Covenant supposedly containing the commandments given to Moses, which equally mysteriously vanished just as later the Christian Holy Grail would vanish. 

Archaeology suggests they were marginalised Canaanites who coalesced into twelve tribes and whose priesthood adopted the faith of YHWH. Moses allegedly the faith of what was a Kenite mountain and thunder god when he wed into the tribe in the Land of Midian, Yet the use of the plural Elohim in the first lines of Genesis suggests the Jews were originally polytheists. 

This is understandable considering the local goddess cults were more fun and far more sexy than the rather austere worship of YHWH. In Kabbalah there is a female figure, the Shekinah, who sits on the right hand of God. And in song the Sabbath is depicted as a bride eagerly awaiting the coming of her husband. 

For three hundred years the Jews were ruled by those mysterious figures the Judges, the Bible names twelve of them. Walzer writes that the whole of the Jewish intelligentsia, such as it was, was engaged in arguing about the law. In practice they were deciding what the content of the Sinai covenant should be and also legitimising their own role. Ultimately the Law, like everything else, was God’s. But with anything that in origin is really human there are contradictions and the Talmud refers to the contradictory works of Hillel and Shami as both being “the words of the living God.” 

After the prophet Samuel the failing of the rule of the Judges became obvious and the Jews adopted a monarchy which eventually split into two rival kingdoms, Israel and Judea. These two kingdoms not only fought threatening foreign powers but often fought each other. The Jewish nation had been founded on the genocide of seven Canaanite nations, monotheism being a convenient ideological excuse for this. Polytheism was far more tolerant and multicentric. Now the Jews often found themselves conquered by more powerful, more technically advanced nations, many of them vanishing into the dominant population. Ten of the twelve tribes vanished as did the dynasty of the David kings. Jesus may well have laid claim to this, if he existed at all. 

As Walzer points out the Old Testament starts out as the history of a very dysfunctional family. The struggle continued except that now it is a struggle for a royal inheritance. The common people fade into the distance. 

The Bible has much to say about kingcraft and priestcraft but nothing about democracy or a republic, common terms in ancient Greek politics Not surprisingly Messianism, the hope for future redemption in which a messiah plays a leading role, became popular among the subjugated masses. Jesus either deliberately adopted or was painted into this role. In comparison to the Jewish savages, the Greeks were miles ahead! In political and philosophical terms we owe far more to them than to the Jews of antiquity. 

One may think all this is very ancient history but the past, even the past of a savage tribe of genocide! killers, affects the present. The British monarchy is obviously based on that of ancient Judea which in turn borrowed from the more civilised Egypt. The monarch doubles as head of church and state and on coronation is anointed with oil, the monarchy still commands the armed forces, the Prince of Wales is circumcised according to Jewish ritual and the monarch rules by the Grace of God and is defender of the faith. And there are strong links between Masonry, which sees its roots in the construction of the Temple by Solomon, and the monarchy. And Queen Victoria was a British Israelite, she thought the Anglo-Saxons were descended from a lost tribe. 

As humanity emerged from the long dark night of the Middle Ages, the ideas of religious and monarchical hegemony began to be challenged. Foremost among those doing this important work of demystification and enlightenment was Thomas Paine in his Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, works still full of meaning for today’s troubled world. 

Marxist historians have written about ancient Egypt and Greece. It is high time their incisive dialectical analysis, the materialist conception of history, was fully applied to the ancient Middle East. 

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Bradlaugh Contra Marx, Radicalism And Socialism In The First International. Deborah Lavin. 86pp. Paperback. London, Socialist History Society, 2011. ISBN 9 7809555 13848. £4.00. 

This is a fascinating glimpse into socialist and radical politics in the mid-nineteenth century. On the one hand there is Karl Marx, a Communist and political exile in London, on the other Charles Bradlaugh, who rose from humble origins to become the leading nineteenth century advocate of Secularism and a MP for Northampton. Both were political giants. In his day Bradlaugh was far better known than Marx, although while the National Secular Society, which Bradlaugh founded in 1866 is still going there is nothing of his prolific writings in print.* Although the cheap editions of Marx’s works produced in Moscow are no longer being printed, his work is still being published and in the light of the current economic crisis, his theories hotly debated. 

The First International, albeit short-lived – it lasted less than a decade, was the first attempt by the working class to organise on an international scale. Marx joined almost by accident, being invited to join as a delegate from Germany by Victor Le Lubez, a French exile and close friend of Bradlaugh, who was an active Secularist both in Greenwich and nationally. Marx quickly became a leading figure in the International. 

Ms. Lavin is an undoubted protagonist of Marx and seeks to undermine Bradlaugh as an heroic figure, indeed she rather over eggs the pudding and at times comes near to character assassination if not defamation. She shows that Bradlaugh’s role in the trial of himself and Annie Besant under the Obscene Publications Act for publishing and distributing the birth control pamphlet The Fruits of Philosophy was far less heroic than has been depicted. Besant was related to the Liberal Lord Chancellor, Lord Hatherley, and Ms. Lavin alleges that he used his influence to ensure that Besant and Bradlaugh were not imprisoned. On the other hand, Edward Truelove, a former Chartist and the International’s printer, got four months for distributing the pamphlet.

Ms. Lavin decries Bradlaugh and Besant’s Neo-Malthusianism which was the sole cause of working class poverty as their prolongation in their reproduction. She accuses Besant of giving incorrect information in her birth control pamphlet, The Population Question. She does not mention Dan Chatterton who while working with the rather puritanical Maithusian League, advocated sex for pleasure. 

Ms. Lavin describes Bradlaugh’s role in the struggle over the oaths question, he wanted to affirm his loyalty to Queen Victoria, her heirs and successors rather than swear a religious oath, as more accidentally than deliberately heroic. Bradlaugh was a leading republican, but Ms. Lavin does not address the conflict between Bradlaugh and John De Morgan, a former member of the Cork branch of the International, in the republican movement of the 1870s. 

She writes that Marx’s daughter Laura says that he went to hear Bradlaugh speak in the 1850s and seeing him as a muddleheaded radical possibly capable of reform. In any event, Marx did his utmost to keep professional atheists out of the International, in particular the Holyoake brothers who were opponents of Bradlaugh. Here I think he was wrong, George Holyoake was a pioneer co-operator, when he died nearly four-hundred co- operative societies subscribed to erect a building in his memory. He could have brought many co-operators and Secularists into the International. 

Bradlaugh was a leading member of the Reform League which had been formed in 1866 to advocate the extension of the franchise to more working class men. It staged some of the most militant demonstrations since Chartist times which Ms Lavin compares to the anti-poll tax demonstrations of the 1990s and more recent student demonstrations against rises in tuition fees. During one, demonstrators tore down the railings in Hyde Park and used them to defend themselves from police baton charges. She shows that the leaders of the League were bought by the Liberals to mobilise newly franchised workers behind Gladstone and keep independent working class candidates out of the contest. Although initially opposed by the Liberals, Bradlaugh eventually became an official Liberal Party candidate. 

The first International was wrought with conflict between Marx’s communism, English trade unionists who in essence remained Liberals, followers of the French anarchist Proudhon and supporters of the Russian anarchist Bakunin. All of these came together to support the Paris Commune of 1871, which was drowned in blood by the forces of reaction. Although Bradlaugh was a Freemason and the French masons supported the commune, he opposed it. This led to a fierce clash between him and Bradlaugh in the pages of the Eastern Post. 

The International, however, was in a bad way and by 1872 it was in effect dead. At its Hague conference its general council was moved from London to New York. Bradlaugh now tried to form his own international. From 1877 this was muted in his weekly National Reformer. He had wanted to call the new body The International Workingman’s Association, the original name of the International, but it was decided to call it the International Labour Union. Among its supporters were the Rev. S. Headlam and the anti-socialist trade unionist Edith Simcox, one of the first female delegates to the Trades Union Congress. The ILU began to slip out of Bradlaugh’s control. It supported the cotton workers’ strike against a pay cut and when George Howell attacked Marx, Harriet Law, who had been involved in the original International, offered Marx space to reply in her Secular Chronicle. After that the ILU faded out of existence. 

Marx died in 1883 and the following year Henry Hyndman formed the Democratic Federation. He debated with Bradlaugh and while many seem to think Bradlaugh won, but within months two of the triumvirate which led the NSS, Annie Besant and Edward Aveling, had become socialists. 

Ms. Lavin has long been working on a biography of Aveling and if it is as good as this work is it will be well worth the wait. 

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Where The USA Went Wrong, A Study Of The United States Empire. Joe Hanania. 176pp. Paperback. Privately Published in a limited edition, Nouic, 2011. ISBN 978-2- 9532166-3-9. Text in English. No price given Details from the author at 27, Beausejour, 87330 Nouic, France. 

This perceptive study of political and social developments from the birth of the USA in 1776 up until the Bush administration is a challenging and controversial being an evaluation of the nation’s history and how, as the author sees it, it went wrong and departed from the ideals of some of its founding fathers. 

A former American serviceman but now a French citizen, Joe Hanania has over several years delved deeply into his subject and come up with a work that certainly prompts one to think critically of US policies in the past and the motivation behind them, as also the manner they have impacted upon those currently pursued. 

Thomas Paine looms large in the book, particularly in its first chapter that is devoted to the issues that culminated in the birth of the nation, and the controversies involved then and in the years following. The author shows how a few “leaders” manipulated matters in order to pursue their imperialistic aims in respect of the new born nation. He observes that while the proposed constitution of the USA “looks like a constitution for the people” (his italics), this depends on the interpretation placed upon the meaning of “people”. The authors of the constitution were basically the two dozen people who discussed and concocted it behind locked doors, while most of those who signed it were not even present at the Constitutional Convention, they simply passed it and signed on the dotted line, so to speak. 

Mr. Hanania has harsh words to say of the attitudes prevailing amongst many in the new nation’s political leadership concerning the indigenous native population, the Red Indians, and tellingly cites Washington’s contention that they “have nothing human except the shape. The extension of our settlements will certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to retire, both being beasts of prey though they differ in shape”. This view can, in fact, be traced back to the earliest British colonists who considered them to be sub-human, this despite the assistance rendered at times to the early settlers without which help they would not have survived. The problem with them as far as wealthy slave owning plantation owners like Washington was that the Indians would not readily allow themselves to be enslaved. In Mr. Hanania’s opinion, people such as Washington, Jefferson, Adams and others had a vision of an American empire in mind from the outset, differing here from that of Paine, and maintains that the constitutional convention was actually the beginning of what eventually has become “the US Empire”. 

Where did the USA go wrong, the author asks? He answers this by saying it was when a handful of men were allowed to “pull off what was perhaps the greatest coup d’etat in modern history”. The implication here is that if those who absented themselves had participated in the deliberations what eventually transpired might have been dramatically different. Indeed, one wonders what would have occurred had Paine remained in America instead of allowing himself to be encouraged to leave the young nation for France then England. The people who had urged him to go for the most part detested his popular radicalism and feared his abilities, particularly as a pamphleteer. In the event, he remained in Europe far longer than he had planned and during which time he almost lost his life because of the inactivity to assist him on the part of the American minister in France, Gouvemeur Morris, a wealthy banker and supporter of Silas Deane, whose financial activities Paine had done much to expose, who hated Paine. But then, had he remained, would he ever have written Rights of Man or The Age of Reason, two of the most influential books in political history, and dare it be said, religion? 

The author rounds off “Where the USA Went Wrong” with a biographical appendix on the development of his ideas and the clashes he had with the “powers that be”, particularly amongst the military. which was to lead to him re-evaluating his previous opinions, a process that led ultimately to this interesting and intriguing book.

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The Foots and The Poets, Derek Summers (ed.). London, Jarndyce, 2010, Paperback, 123 pages; ISBN 978-1-900718-75-2. 

Plato wanted poetry banned in his republic. Like many totalitarian reactionaries he saw poetry as essentially subversive. This book shows the relationship between poetry and three generations of a family which if not subversive were at the very least politically radical. 

The first subject is Isaac Foot, the son of a Plymouth carpenter who qualified as a solicitor and became the Liberal MP for Bodmin. An avid reader, he collected 70,000 books. He also admired the Civil War parliamentary Oliver Cromwell and his Latin Secretary, the blind poet John Milton. He founded the Cromwell Association and kept a commonplace book full of quotations from Milton. The book contains several of Milton’s works in poetry and prose although sadly not his poem in praise of the executed regicide Sir Henry Vane. In his biography of his father, written with Alison Highet, Michael records Isaac’s love of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy and R.L. Stevenson. 

The youngest of Isaac’s children was the late Michael Foot MP for Plymouth Devonport and then Ebbw Vale, editor of Tribune and leader of the Labour Party in the 1980s. Michael converted from Liberalism to Socialism when he saw poverty and unemployment in Liverpool where he worked as a shipping clerk. Michael was not only the biographer of Aneurin Bevan but also studies of Byron and Jonathan Swift. 

Another source of inspiration was the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx’s cousin. Heine was not only a poet but also a political philosopher. In his On The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, published in 1834. He maintained that the German philosophical revolution, which culminated in the work of Hegel, was the prelude to a political democratic revolution. Included in the selection of Heine’s writings in the book is his poem / Don’t Believe In Heaven. ” I don’t believe in the devil,/ In Hell or its counterpart:/ I believe in your eyes only/And in your devilish heart.” There is also his celebration of a Luddite-style uprising by the weavers of Silesia.

Michael was also interested in more recent poets, Among them was Adrian Mitchell. When proposed for the position of Poet Laureate, he wrote a poem on why he wanted the monarchy abolished. Mitchell first read his poem To Whom It May Concern (Tell Me Lies About Vietnam) at an anti-war rally in 1964 and revised it to include subsequent conflicts. Other modern poets who interested Michael included Tony Harrison, Derek Walcott and U. A. Fanthorpe, “Her poetry is one of the delights of the age,” said Michael. 

Michael had an interest in the radical essayist William Hazlitt and in the poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth’s sonnet to Milton and his sonnet to Toussaint L’Ouverture, the former slave who overthrew the rule of the French slave owners in Haiti, are included in the book. Wordsworth may seem a strange choice. He at first supported the French revolution, “But Europe at that time was filled with joy/France standing on the top of golden hours/And human nature seeming born again”, but later became reactionary. Some would call him a class traitor. 

The last Foot is Paul, Michael’s nephew, one of the more intelligent and attractive members of the Socialist Workers’ Party. He was another convert from Liberalism to Socialism, Socialism, not of the social-democratic, but of the Trotskyist kind. At public school he met Richard Ingrams, editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye, and wrote for it for several years. For 14 years he wrote for the Daily Mirror and later edited the SWP’s paper Socialist Worker. 

Paul’s hero was the romantic poet Percy Shelly, an atheist who was seen as a precursor of Socialism. Paul wrote two books on Shelly and a number of pamphlets including work on the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the miners’ leader A. J. Cook. The book includes selections from Shelly’s Masque of Anarchy which was inspired by the events in St. Peter’s Field in Manchester. Thousands of radical reformers gathered to listen to Henry Hunt only to be cut down by the sabres of the yeomanry. It calls for resistance by the oppressed and exploited: “Shake your chains to earth like dew/Which in sleep had fallen on you/ Ye are many, they are few.” 

The book contains a useful biography of source books and further reading.

There are those who disparage poetry, who dismiss it a so much romantic waffle, but as this book shows it can excite and inspire the struggles which still need to be fought. 

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“This is no more than a say so of Jonathan Steadfast, who says it because it suits him to say it.” An Enemy to Monopolies and Inconsistencies [Thomas Paine], “Jonathan Steadfast and his Book” in the Mercury [Elisha Babcock], 27 September 1804. 

“As censure is but awkwardly softened by apology, I shall offer you no apology for this letter.” Thomas Paine, Letter to George Washington, 30 July 1796. 

The appearance of a recently published collection of unknown writings by Thomas Paine could not be but of some interest and excitement — certainly on my part and presumably that of other Paine scholars and enthusiasts. When asked by the journal, your reviewer envisioned a brief, and piquant review, perhaps a few paragraphs. No big deal. As it turned out, however, that was not to be. Hazel Burgess’ collection took a great deal of effort to sort out and, to my regret, requires some censure and reproach. This collection fails to live up to its claims and will be, I predict, largely dismissed by careful and knowledgeable Paine historians. Fairness to my fellow Paine readers and colleagues and, indeed, to Hazel Burgess, necessitates at least a reasonable explanation. And that, dear reader, is the manner in which this review grew from three paragraphs into the form presented to you here.¹

Before any words of censure, however, it is important to write something positive. By way of disclosure, the author of this review has known and maintained a cordial acquaintanceship of some years with the editor of this collection, Hazel Burgess. While we have not always agreed, to date we’ve maintained a friendly and collegial relationship. Certainly her DNA research on the purported Paine skull discussed later in this review was and continues to be of great interest to all Paine historians. Second, she gets some things right in this collection. In her editorial notes, Burgess understands that George Chalmers aka Francis Oldys was a paid slanderer and that James Cheetham’s biography of Thomas Paine was a hatchet job. Her work also corrects a minor dating error in Philip Foner’s 1945 The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine. And the collection actually contains some newly published Paine material of genuine scholarly and historical interest. There are, however, two problems. First, a great part of the collection is either already in print, easily obtained. And more problematically, the very small quantity of new Paine material is sandwiched in between a much greater quantity of work that is not of Paine’s authorship.² 

Certainly where absolute proof is not available, questions of historical accuracy necessarily reduce to matters of opinion. Readers of this review will not be left in doubt as to mine. The work reviewed here, however, generally presents itself as unqualified fact and lacks, in my view, the kind of scholarly circumspection found in more valuable and lasting historical studies. The cover, for example; claims that the works in this compendium have “not been seen, either publicly or privately, in over 200 years.” Burgess’ editorial notes go on about her “path to significant discoveries,” the “sweet satisfaction” of seeing “what nobody else has seen in over 200 years,” and her “discovery” that the extant Paine canon is incomplete. All very moving if the claims hold up. But what if they don’t?³ 

The first three items in Burgess’ collection, for example, were all in print at the time she compiled her collection. She writes that the New York Historical Society had already published them at the turn of the last century and claims to be doing a service by reprinting them in this collection for the first time in over a hundred years. She does not write, however, that the 1898 collection is available — by my count — in at least 154 libraries in America and the UK. It is also available in a good quality hardcopy edition that has been in print since 2007. The same work is available, moreover, in a free digitized and fully searchable edition on Google Books. Burgess makes no mention of the contemporary editions — hardcopy or digital — so she was either unaware or omitted to mention them. From the outset, then, Burgess’ bibliographical claims relative to these works appear thin at best and, as we shall see, there are other problems with this “revelatory collection.”⁴

Throughout her editorial comments, Burgess evinces a certain vindictive or condemnatory prejudice against Paine’s character that may cause puzzlement on the part of discerning readers. She acknowledges some of his accomplishments, but misses no chance to belittle his character. Why, for example, does Burgess indulge in the sniping comment at p. 30 that there was “little in the treasury but sufficient for Paine to draw immediately on his salary,” as if Paine’s payment were not authorized by vote of the Pennsylvania Assembly?”⁵ 

In a later chapter, she calls Paine a “turncoat who was definite in his opinion this way or that.”⁶ Or there is her stunning allegation, as we will see later, that Paine was no abolitionist or enemy of slavery, but himself a slave-holder. Readers unfamiliar with Burgess’ background will be at a loss to understand her rancour, but a brief look at the editor’s own history may help to clarify her agenda. 

John Burgess, the husband of the collection’s editor, is one of a great number of persons who have laboured under the illusion — occasionally the delusion, no doubt — that they are direct descendants of Thomas Paine. The difficulty with that proposition is, of course, that Paine had no offspring. While many base their claim on a common historical confusion between our revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine and another man of the same name. John Burgess’ claim is of another sort.⁷ He claims to descend through a bastard offspring of Paine by the wife of one of Paine’s closest friends, the French publisher and editor Nicolas de Bonneville. The rumour began historically with the slanderous attack-biography written by James Cheetham, published the year after Paine’s 1809 death. Cheetham waited until Paine’s decease because he knew very well that Paine would sue him — Paine had threatened it. As events transpired, Cheetham was sued anyway. Madame Bonneville successfully sued Cheetham in a Federalist court so hostile to Paine that the judge defamed him from the bench. The allegation of bastardy was so utterly unfounded and baseless that Madame Bonneville was nevertheless awarded damages. The salient point here is that in order to fit the model of her husband as a “descendant” of Paine, Paine needs to be something of a scoundrel or at least a rascal. 

This whole story took a macabre and startling turn when a skull appeared in a 1988 Sydney, Australia antiques auction; a skull reputed to be the noggin of Thomas Paine.’s The Burgesses hastened to Sidney and managed to purchase the relic from the sympathetic dealer, impressed with Mr. Burgess’ claims of consanguinity. This moment might be said to mark the beginning of Mrs. Burgess’ career as a Paine enthusiast, albeit a somewhat hostile one. She set out to prove her husband’s relationship by comparison of his mitochondrial DNA to that of the skull. Surprise – – there proved to be no demonstrable relationship, but Burgess’ career as a Paine-sceptic was launched, of which the collection here is the latest and most visible so far.⁸ 

Perhaps it is that same enthusiasm to believe the worst that led her to the greatest blunders in this very flawed work of bibliography. The single longest work in the collection — 75 pages of about 200 pages total — is an unsigned 1791 pamphlet entitled Reflections on the Present State of the British Nation by British Common Sense.¹⁰ Burgess’ claim that this work should be accepted into what she calls the “Paine canon” will be rejected by historians and thoughtful readers for at three obvious reasons_ First, the author of this work favoured titled distinctions and wrote that when the present financial crisis ended, then “may we, with safety, return to ceremony, and the etiquette of distinction, rank, and title.”¹¹ The writings of Thomas Paine both before and after this work flatly condemned titles and inherited distinctions and there exists no writing of Paine’s that condones aristocracy. Second, the writer claimed to be a British citizen and spoke of “our own market, or home consumption,” whereas Paine spoke as an American or “citizen of the world,” neither as a British subject in the works before and after the date of the work in question nor in any work subsequent to the American Revolution.¹² This Paine candidate also made prominent and repetitious use of the phrase “Godlike Reason,” a combination of words that appears nowhere else in Paine’s printed works. Nor does the adjective “godlike” itself appear in any other Paine work. And yet the faux-Paine used it four times on a single page, the repetition itself uncharacteristic of Paine’s simple, declarative style. In fact, Paine rarely if ever used any adjective with the word “reason.”¹³ Burgess’ candidate is, moreover, prolix in the extreme — single sentences run over a hundred words.¹⁴ Paine was a master of the simple declarative sentence and a short, sparkling, aphoristic style of Plain English. And again, can anyone but Mrs. Burgess believe that the Thomas Paine who wrote this:

Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man?¹⁵ 

And who himself bore arms against the King of England later regretted his action and opined that “reason abhors dissention?”¹⁶ Reason is the fountainhead of dissent. Was Paine, as Burgess’ writer further claimed, “but little known?”¹⁷ Not at all: Paine was already heralded in his own name on two continents, received, corresponded or boarded with the likes of Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, Thomas Walker, the painter John Trumbull (with whom he lived for a good part of the time) and William Cavendish- Bentinck, 3rd Duke of Portland (Prime Minister in 1783, Home Secretary in 1794, Lord President of the Council later again in 1801 to 1805, and Prime Minister again in 1807 to 1809). Historian David Freeman Hawke noted that Paine’s friend and United States Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson thought him known and respected enough to serve as de facto American representative to the British government for two years after the recall of John Adams.¹⁸ Paine “but little known?” This might perhaps describe him in another dimension of time or on another planet, but not the one in which Paine lived and worked. Burgess claims all this and more with the single longest “discovery” in her rewrite of the Paine canon. 

For all of the above she offers — as near as can be discerned — the slim justification that Paine “proved to be a turncoat, definite in his opinions this way or that,”¹⁹ was proud of his pseudonym “Common Sense”²⁰ and that it was “the name no other would dare assume.”²¹ The first claim is indefensible unless we accept her claim that the work is authentic. Isn’t this post hoc ergo proctor hoc? The second claim, on the other hand, is as indisputable as it is trivial. And the latter claim — central to her argument — is nonsense. Burgess again offers no proof but her mere “say so.” The fact is that other individuals, both in America and England, used the pen name “Common Sense” during Paine’s lifetime. Though scarce in America, the determined researcher will find a few and there are a great many non-Paine appearances of the pseudonym in the periodicals of late eighteenth-century England.²² 

Before closing this unfortunate review, a final word is necessary with respect to Burgess’ claims regarding Thomas Paine and slavery. She believes that Paine owned slaves. Burgess made the claim to this writer back in 2005 sotto voce, in high dudgeon as it were, and when asked for proof, declined and cited a forthcoming book that would “reveal all” to a horrifically shocked scholarly community. Behold the book! Wherein Paine is unmasked as an owner -of man-flesh. Well ..: not exactly. With regard a black man named Joe, a hired man of Paine’s, Burgess claims that “it is highly likely that Joe had been, in earlier years, Paine’s slave.”²³ Her claim would be a matter of some consequence if she bothered to substantiate it, but consistent with the great part of this work, she omitted to do so. Burgess merely cites the letter of Paine to Kitty Nicholson Few where he inquired after “my favourite Sally Morse, my boy Joe, and my horse Button”²⁴ and a reasonably well-known text on the Quakers and slavery in early Pennsylvania and observes that “it would have been unusual for a Philadelphian in his situation, and of his standing, not to have owned some.”²⁵ Burgess then goes through a long speculative ramble based on another letter to an unknown addressee that amounts to zero corroboration for her stunning claim. This is not history. This claim amounts to unsubstantiated calumny or an individual for whom there is adequate evidence to show his detestation of slavery.²⁶ Scholars and simply careful readers will again find nothing here to support her accusation?²⁷

In the main body of this collection, there are approximately 139-140 pages of purported Paine text and just over sixty of editorial commentary for a total of 203 pages. By my count, 55% are either highly doubtful or demonstrably spurious and at least another 12% are already in print in more or less contemporary printings such as Foner, Gimbel, the Morris Papers and Kessinger reprints.²⁸ Burgess claims variously the utility of combining the texts in one place or their benefit for context, but what can be the utility of combining them with an even greater load of spurious texts and inflated, indefensible claims? Ironically, one of the most memorable quotes found in one of the few authentic and authentically new works presented in this collection is one wherein Paine ridicules “Jonathan Steadfast” for relying just on his own “say so.”²⁹ Admittedly, a great deal of historical controversy — as noted earlier — comes down to a “say so.” And like Johathan Steadfast, Burgess frequently says so with little more substantiation than that it suits her to say so.

Endnotes

1. From the short bio of the editor provided in the collection: “Hazel Burgess is an Australian researcher with undergraduate and doctoral degrees from the University of Sydney. She has spent many years searching for the truth behind the public face of Thomas Paine.” The first sentence is interesting for an omission and the second for its claim. Burgess’ degree is in Religious Studies, not history. And her “years searching for the truth behind the public face of Thomas Paine” is precisely the preconceived mindset that colours her work and rather spoils her scholarship, as evidenced by examples presented in this review. 
2. For significant new printings of Paine’s work, see especially Burgess 191 and 199-202. The single page Connecticut piece on p. 191, while interesting and newly printed, is sandwiched between four letters already reprinted in Gimbel and a work at Burgess 192-8 that was simply not written by Paine. The ratio of meat to bun here is characteristic of the entire collection. 
3. An academic advisor strictly enjoined me in the springtime of my scholarly career that the more elevated the claim, the easier the target and farther the fall. 
4. See Silas Deane, The Deane Papers, 1774-1799, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2007, ISBN054830744X, 9780548307441. See also https://books.google.com/books?id=fpQ6AAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq =editions:STANFORD361050265466191tv=onepage&q=&f=false accessed 11 March 2010 or simply search “Silas Deane Papers” on Google Book. 
5. See Burgess, 31-2. As it happens, the purported Paine letter that accompanies her comment is signed “C.S.,” and, while it is written well enough to be Paine, there is nothing either in the text itself or, for that matter, Burgess’ body of scholarship that should have led her publishers or the reader to accept her “say so” that it was written by Paine. It’s interesting to note that the author who signed himself “C.S.” used the word “forsooth.” Time constraints prevented a search of every extant Paine letter, but the term appears In none of Paine’s major works; not once. Even if we ever find that Paine used the word “forsooth, it seems to me that careful scholarship requires that the letter remain in the category of a “possible” Paine work. See Burgess, 35. 
6. Burgess, 146. 
7. Back in the 1990’s, when the author of this review fielded Internet inquiries for the Thomas Paine National Historical Association — an organization since disgraced and fallen upon hard times — it seemed like we received an inquiry a week from people honestly convinced they were all “direct descendants” of Thomas Paine. 
8. See Hazel Burgess, “An Extended History of the Remains of Thomas Paine,” Journal of Radical History, 8:4 (2007), pp. 1-29. 
9. Burgess’ dissertation- for a doctorate in Religious Studies is interesting in this regard, but it is unfortunately sequestered or withheld from public view by the University of Sidney at the request of the student. A letter from Burgess’ dissertation supervisor noted, “Students … may request that they not be made public. Few do …” Few, indeed. I don’t know of another such instance. The practice flies — insofar as I understand it — in the face of both academic tradition and open scholarly inquiry. See Hazel Burgess, “The disownment and reclamation of Thomas Paine: a reappraisal of the “philosophy” of “common sense” (Ph.D thesis, University of Sidney, 2003). The library listing is available at https://opacJibrary.usyd.edu.au/record=b2654935-S4. 
10. See Burgess, 71-146. See also, (anonymous), Reflections on the Present State of the British Nation by British Common Sense (London: James Ridgway, 1791). A second edition was entitled British Common Sense; or, Reflections on the Present State of the British Nation, Recommending a Free, Uninfluenced Representation of the People, on the Grounds of National Utility and National Necessity (London: W. Miller, 1791). 
11. See Burgess, 119. 
12. Ibid., 77 and 82. 
13. Ibid., 79-80. The anonymous author of this work similarly repeats the phrase “wantonly wicked” at pp. 92-3. Another phrase that appears nowhere in any of Paine’s other best-known works. 
14. Burgess, 77-8. 
15. See Thomas Paine, The American Crisis I in Philip Foner, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: Citadel Press, 1945), 1:56. 
16. Burgess, 75. 
17. Ibid. 
18. David Freeman Hawke, Paine (New York: Harper & Rowe), 188. 
19. Burgess, 146. 
20. Burgess, 72. 
21. Burgess, 149.
22. See The Port – Folio (1801-1827) 1:15 (April 11, 1801), 113. Burgess offers this item as part of her collection, but it is not Paine simply because its attitude towards Britain is antithetical to Paine’s, its negative attitude toward the Declaration of Independence, and perhaps even transatlantic transit problems. It would not be surprising if Burgess were the only person in the world to believe that Paine authored it, but then … she appears to have an agenda See Burgess, 174. For other examples of non- Paine uses of the pseudonym, see also Philadelphia Repository and Weekly Register (1800-1805) 3:8 (February 19, 1803), 63; Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (London, England), Tuesday, December 3, 1776, Issue 1282; Public Advertiser (London, England), Friday, December 22, 1775, Issue 14422; Sun (London, England), Saturday, April 20, 1793, Issue 174; Morning Chronicle (London, England), Tuesday, September 10, 1793, Issue 7572; True Briton (1793) (London, England), Thursday, May 2, 1793, Issue 105. There are many more especially in English periodicals of the period. 
23. See Burgess, 61. 
24. See Foner, 2:1275. 
25. Note that this is the same Thomas Paine of whom she wants the reader to believe earlier – and at a time of even greater fame for Paine – that he wrote as one “but little known.” See above note 17. See also Burgess, 218, n.195 where she cites the “brief, general account of slaveholding in Pennsylvania at the time,” Jean R. Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 
26. See my forthcoming “The Infernal Traffic in Negroes’ — Thomas Paine and Antislavery,” part of a collection in review for 2011. 
27. See Burgess, 61-4. 
28. See Philip Foner, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: Citadel Press, 1945); Richard Gimbel, “New Political Writings by Thomas Paine” in The Yale University Library Gazette 30 (1956); Robert Morris, The Papers of Robert Morris, ed. Elizabeth Nuxoll and Mary Gallagher (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1975); and for the Kessinger edition of Deane, see note 4. 
29. See the quotation at the head of this review. 

Copyright Kenneth W. Burchell 2010, All Rights Reserved.

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A summary of the 2010 Eric Paine Memorial Lecture

Two giants dominated English popular radical politics a couple of centuries ago. The two men were William Cobbett (1763-1835) and Henry Hunt (1773-1835). They fought for justice, human rights and a reformed, democratic House of Commons and went to prison because of their beliefs. Both men came from southern England, shared interests in politics and farming and both became fiercely independent MPs for northern constituencies. Hunt was a member of parliament for Preston during the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, while Cobbett sat in the first reformed House of Commons as a member for Oldham. 

The life of William Cobbett is well documented. Raised at the plough in Farnham in Surrey, he became the greatest radical political writer of the early nineteenth century, the man the essayist William Hazlitt called ‘a kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country.’ Cobbett’s Political Register was published weekly from 1802 until his death in 1835 and was read by everybody from presidents, kings and emperors to poets, soldiers and farm labourers. The establishment press or the ‘reptiles’, as he called them, loathed him. Governments plotted to suppress him and all his works that challenged them at every twist and turn. When Cobbett spoke out against the flogging of soldiers in Ely under the guard of German mercenaries, he was charged with seditious libel, found guilty and jailed in Newgate Prison for two years from 1810 to 1812. Many biographies have been written about William Cobbett and he is celebrated today. 

By contrast, the name of Henry Hunt remains relatively unknown, although he was the greatest political speaker of his times. Derisively dubbed ‘Orator’ Hunt by his enemies and, like Cobbett, vilified and demonised by the establishment, Hunt was the darling of the people. When he spoke at mass public meetings, he attracted huge crowds. He was the first member of parliament to win a seat (for Preston in 1830) on a ticket of one man one vote. Hunt was the star speaker at the great reform meetings of Spa Fields in London in 1816/1817 and what went down in history as the Peterloo Massacre on St Peter’s Field in Manchester on 16 August 1819. The meeting had been called to support a reform of parliament and the abolition of the Corn Laws. Five minutes after it began, it was brought to an abrupt stop when the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry slashed their way into the crowds to arrest Hunt and the men standing with him on the platform. In his book, The Casualties of Peterloo, Michael Bush estimated that the action by the yeomanry, which was backed up by the 15th Hussars, resulted in the deaths of at least eighteen people, while the number of those injured exceeded seven hundred. The perpetrators were never brought to justice and it was Hunt and his co-defendants who were jailed. Hunt was given the longest sentence in the worst jail. He spent two and a half years incarcerated in a dank cell in Ilchester Prison in Somerset where he wrote his Memoirs. 

There have been only two biographies of Henry Hunt. Robert Huish published one the year after Hunt’s death. The second was written by John Beichem. He launched his academic career with his outstanding, political biography of Hunt, which was published in 1985. Belchem’s book dispelled the myth of the violent, argumentative, vain demagogue, the man who wilfully opposed the so-called Great Reform Act of 1832. This was the image of Hunt that has been copied and repeated by historians and essayists through the ages. Beichem portrayed a very different Henry Hunt, the Wiltshire farmer who became a democratic radical, established a mass platform for parliamentary reform and who, alone in the House of Commons argued, quite correctly, that the planned reform bill was a cheat and a sham. Sadly, John Belchem’s biography is out of print. 

What nobody has written about in any depth before is the unlikely but very real political partnership and close friendship between William Cobbett and Henry Hunt. Their relationship lasted in one way or another for thirty years until the deaths of both men in 1835 just four months apart. Nobody has charted its course from close friendship to deadly enmity with the various peaks and troughs in between. Quite simply, nobody was looking out for the story. 

It was Hunt who began it. He became a fan of Cobbett as soon as the latter returned in 1800 from his first period of exile in the newly independent America. There, Cobbett had become the most well-known and controversial of writers and he set out to repeat the act in England. When he launched his weekly Political Register in 1802, Hunt became a loyal reader. He described in his Memoirs how he longed to become acquainted with this most celebrated writer of the day. In typical Hunt style, he took the bull by the horns and went up to London to call on Cobbett. His visit took place in 1805. It was not a particularly productive meeting. Both men took a dislike to each other. Hunt described it in detail in his Memoirs: 

As I walked up Parliament Street, I mused upon the sort of being I had just left, and I own that my calculations did not in the slightest degree lead me to suppose that we should ever be upon such friendly terms, and indeed upon such an intimate footing, as we actually were for a number of years afterwards. It appeared to me that at our first meeting we were mutually disgusted with each other; and I left his house with a determination in my own mind never to see a second interview with him. 

Hunt was indeed quite right in his assessment of Cobbett’s reaction. Cobbett was suspicious of Hunt and thought he was a bad character. He especially took exception to the fact that Hunt had left his own wife and was living with the wife of another man. In 1808, Cobbett wrote a private letter to his publisher, John Wright, warning him not to associate with Hunt: 

There is one BEI, the Bristol man. Beware of him! He rides about the country with a whore, the wife of another man, having deserted his own. A sad fellow! Nothing to do with him. 

Much to Cobbett’s fury, this letter was used against Hunt in the Westminster election of 1818 when Cobbett was in self-imposed exile in America. 

Despite the initial mutual mistrust, however, Hunt persevered at forging a relationship and, despite his letter to Wright of 1808, Cobbett responded. The two men joined forces at political county meetings, taking great delight in bashing the system and baiting both the Whigs and the Tories, the Ins and the Outs, as they called them. Against all the odds, Cobbett the conservative radical, wily, experienced and fiercely independent, became the closest of friends with Hunt the democratic radical, ten years younger and totally new to the game. He addressed Hunt in his private letters as ‘my dear Hunt’. It was the highest compliment Cobbett could pay. 

It is difficult to understand how it all happened. Cobbett was a busy and famous man. Hunt was a minor dabbler in county politics. What was the attraction? Cobbett possibly answered that question himself in his writings from exile in America the second time round between 1817-1819 when he explained why he liked Englishmen best. 

The loud voice, the hard squeeze by the hand, the instant assent or dissent, the clamorous joy, the bitter wailing, the ardent friendship, the deadly enmity All these belong to the characters of Englishmen, in whose minds and hearts every feeling exists in the extreme. 

Cobbett could have been describing himself. He was also consciously or unconsciously describing Henry Hunt. In many ways, despite the difference in age and temperament, the men were very similar, passionate and extreme in everything they did and the way they lived their lives. They also enjoyed a similar sense of humour.

It is a puzzle why the depths of their collaboration and friendship have never been explored before. The clues for it are all there. They can be found in Hunt’s Memoirs and Addresses and scattered through the numerous volumes of Cobbett’s Political Registers. The material is available, although it tends to be tucked away in dusty boxes, on scratched microfilm or hidden on obscure shelves in places like the British Library, the Library of Nuffield College, Oxford, universities in the USA and county record offices. The relationship can also be traced in contemporary comments, caricatures, lampoons, squibs and poetry as well as in diaries and letters, including those mainly from Cobbett to Hunt. Only two letters from Hunt to Cobbett survived. I believe they are the last two letters Hunt wrote to his old friend and political partner. They are doubly important because they reveal why Hunt severed relations with Cobbett. As far as I know, the two letters have never been made public before. When the two men finally fell out just before the Reform Act of 1832, the radical press sighed in oblique references and subtle hints that if only the pair could make it up, radical politics would be stronger for it. United we stand, divided we fall. Like all good stories, the story of Cobbett and Hunt is of contemporary significance. 

When the pair did terminally fall out, it was like a nuclear explosion. After all the wonderful things Cobbett did with and wrote about Hunt, it is hard to read the tearing biting insults he repeatedly hurled against him. Hunt was the GREAT LIAR, the great impudent and ignorant oaf, a shuffling hulk and a carcase which only deserved to be whipped and beaten. After Cobbett wrote about Hunt’s ‘hackerings, the stammerings, the bogglings, the blunderings and the cowerings down’ of the ‘Preston cock’ in the Political Register of 12 February 1831, Hunt hit back in a public Address to Cobbett on ‘the Kensington Dunghill’. It was written in extreme bitterness: 

This backbiter of every man that ever was acquainted with him, the calumniator of every one who ever rendered him a service has thought proper to put forth his impotent venom and to level his cowardly and malevolent attack upon me in an address to you, the People of Preston, in his last lying Register, I feel it a duty … to state the reasons that have caused the wretched creature thus to assail me. 

Hunt went on to do so in ghastly detail. 

This was a relationship that was conducted in the full glare of the public. The late Georgian and Regency public feasted on what the one wrote about the other. It was all there in black and white for everybody to read. There was Cobbett’s wife, Nancy, with her violent hatred of Hunt and her fury at her Billy’s friendship with that bad man. There was also Hunt’s long-time mistress, his beloved, beautiful Mrs Vince, illegitimate granddaughter of a baronet and part of the reason for Nancy Cobbett’s hatred. The press used Mrs Vince as a stick with which to beat Hunt. Legitimate tactics or press intrusion into private life? Cobbett stoutly defended Hunt, adding to his wife’s fury. Yet, everybody was able to read what Cobbett thought of men who dumped their wives and women who slept outside the marriage bed when he later published his Advice to Young Men. He was particularly severe about the women: ‘Here is a total want of delicacy; here is, in fact, prostitution,” he wrote. 

Nancy’s attempted suicide — provoked by the renewal of her husband’s collaboration with Hunt — and the separation of Cobbett from his family were also common knowledge, as was the unfounded accusation made by Nancy that her husband had a homosexual relationship with his secretary. Cobbett’s biographers have largely avoided these matters, maybe out of a desire to protect his reputation or because they found them of no significance or because they believed the incidents were part of Cobbett’s private life and off limits. (Both George Spater and Richard Ingrams touched on the subjects.) Yet all these events sprang out of the relationship between William Cobbett and Henry Hunt and are of relevance in understanding what happened. None of it diminishes either of the men. We stand on the sidelines and admire them even more, for the men they were, for their integrity and determination to do what they believed in, and for their achievements. 

These two men inspired generations. Two weeks after Cobbett’s funeral on Saturday, 27 June 1835 in Famham, the town of his birth, the deaths of both men were mourned and commemorated in a letter published in the Poor Man’s Guardian, one of the radical penny press newspapers. The letter positively remembered the two men in the heyday of their political struggle. It was a tribute from those who would help to carry the torch of reform into the future. The letter was written by the Bradford radical, Peter Bussey, one of the future leaders of the Chartist movement. It was very singular, he wrote, that within the space of a few months, they should lose two of the most staunch Reformers this country ever produced — Henry Hunt, the consistent and uncompromising advocate of equal rights, and the Member for Oldham.’ The pair had stood the test for years, braving ‘the storm of Whig and Tory vengeance.’ They fought and conquered the ‘demon-like power’ of Castlereagh, which had oppressed the country. ‘The base minions in power trembled beneath their castigations’, and the people were awoken from their slumbers. Cobbett and Hunt raised their ‘gigantic powers,’ and governments turned pale. 

Two Cocks on the Dunghill is an account of the personal and political relationship between two great men at a crucial time in history. It is set against the backdrop of the aftermath of the French revolution, the wars with France and the fear of a Jacobin- style revolution in England and the demands for a reformed House of Commons. The issues, arguments and emotions resonate today. The questions raised are ever relevant. How should a government fight against a perceived foreign and home threat of ‘Terror’? When, if ever, should human rights be suspended? What role does the press play? How much integrity can there be in politics and at what cost? Two Cocks on the Dunghill is a story about corruption and greed, compassion and morality, of love, hate, jealousy and scandal and how human beings deal with them. It is also about the courage of individuals against an oppressive state and the triumph of will power and determination in adversity. On one thing I am resolved, namely that, unless snatched away very suddenly, I will not die the MUZZLED SLAVE OF THIS THING!’ wrote William Cobbett in the Political Register. He did not, and nor did Henry Hunt. 

Two Cocks on the Dunghill – William Cobbett and Henry Hunt: their friendship, feuds and fights is written by Penny Young and published by Twopenny Press. Copies may be purchased either from a bookseller for £20.00, or direct from the author at: 2, The Old School, South Lopham, Norfolk, IP22 2HT for £15.00, postage and packing included. Please make cheques payable to the Two Penny Press.

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Thomas Paine And America, 1776-1809. Edited by Kenneth W. Burchell. 6 volumes. 2496pp. London, Pickering & Chatto, 2009. ISBN-13-9781851969647. £495.00. $875.00 

When Thomas Paine arrived in Philadelphia in 1774 he faced an uncertain future. He was seriously ill from an ailment picked up on the voyage to America, although thanks both to the captain of the ship on which he had travelled, having a cabin to himself, and the letters of introduction he carried from Benjamin Franklin to relatives, he received medical assistance on arrival that led to his. recovery. Because of the actions of the British government in imposing unpopular taxes and what was perceived to be restrictions on trade, there was considerable unrest amongst the populace which was accompanied with a feeling that change was called for. As for Paine himself, his first and most pressing need was to find employment, for although he was given the job of tutoring the sons of some prominent individuals, one of the recommendations in the letters being that he could undertake this as he had been a schoolmaster in London, he was not destined for this, as a chance meeting in a bookshop with one of the two proprietors of the newly established Pennsylvania Magazine, led to an invitation to him to contribute to it and before long he was appointed as its editor, a job in which he proved an outstanding success. 

Paine had some experience of writing as he had been asked when working as an exciseman in Lewes, to draw up a document for presentation to the British parliament setting out the arguments supportive of giving the low paid excisemen an increase in their salaries, only to have the members of parliament refuse to accept it. His Case of the Officers of Excise has been described as the first national trade union manifesto. But it was to have unfortunate consequences for Paine, as the Commissioners of Excise, who had asked him to draw up the appeal, dismissed him following its failure, then his marriage broke down and the shop he ran in Lewes failed. The future for him must have looked exceedingly bleak. However, he had got to know Benjamin Franklin in London, a friendship stemming from their common interest In science, and Franklin suggested to him that he should make a new start by emigrating to Pennsylvania. Paine, who rarely ever appears to have taken note of advice, this time did so. Perhaps the astute Franklin had sensed that he had potential, but it is unlikely that he had any inkling of the impact Paine was destined to make on the political life of the thirteen British colonies in America. 

Although the magazine Paine edited was officially apolitical, this did not prevent him including material that had a political slant, although most of his interest in political and social controversy was given voice to in letters he wrote to newspapers. Paine was no stranger to controversy having served an apprenticeship, so to speak, in the cut and thrust debates at the Headstrong Club that met in Lewes, of which he was a leading member. It is also believed that he was a supporter, if not an active helper, of the radical politician John Wilkes. Thus he would have taken a close interest in the discussions in the coffee houses and taverns of Philadelphia as well as in private gatherings that centred around the disputes with the government in London during which the idea of independence probably cropped up from time to time, for the radical John Cartwright had suggested the idea in one of his works that circulated in the colonies. Then late in 1775 Paine resigned as editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, not a step to be taken lightly for one new to the colony who did not possess private means. This would suggest that something was afoot. 

In January 1776, there appeared on sale in Philadelphia a pamphlet entitled Common Sense, that created a tremendous stir accompanied by much speculation as to the identity of its anonymous author. Written in what might be described as a journalistic style, it marshalled the arguments not just for the colonies becoming independent of Britain but also that their form of government should be republican, a suggestion that went far beyond Major Cartwright’s ideas. Such was the pamphlet’s persuasive impact that there can be little doubt that it prepared the ground for the Declaration of Independence issued by the American Continental Congress on July 4, of the same year. Thus Paine may be said to have been the inspiration for that document, although some Americans have gone further and argued that while he may not have been one of the signatories he was, in effect, its actual author (cf. Joseph Lewis. Thomas Paine, Author of the Declaration of Independence. New York, Freethought Press Association, 1947). Although most historians reject this hypothesis, a far more probable case can be made for some of his ideas having had an input into the Declaration, particularly a clause that had it been included would have banned slavery in America, however, this was eliminated from the final draft because of opposition from plantation owners, bankers and others of that ilk. 

Evidence of how Common Sense swayed opinion in favour of independence is provided by the anonymous author of Civil Prudence, Recommended to the Thirteen United Colonies of North America, which had been written, so the author states, not long after the repeal of the Stamp Act. He had heard of the pamphlet and it’s advocacy of the case for independence, which disturbed him and had led him to conclude it to have been the “the invention of some Tory, to sow discord among the Colonies, and to set our friends in Great-Britain against us”, but once having obtained and read a copy, he underwent a complete change of mind, finding it had given him “a new set of thoughts, and opened a wider door to the flourishing of trade and common wealth, as well as of the due preservation of liberty” than he had ever imagined to be the case. As a consequence he decided to dedicate his own work “To the most excellent Patriot, COMMON SENSE, Defender of natural Right and Liberties of Mankind”. 

In contrast to the opinion expressed by the writer of the foregoing, are the arguments set out in another response. The writer, who describes himself as °An American”, entitled his pamphlet The True Interest of America Impartially Stated in Certain Strictures on a pamphlet entitled Common Sense. As far as he was concerned Common Sense was “one of the most artful, insidious and pernicious pamphlets” he had ever met with, in which the author “gives vent to his own private resentment and ambition”. His “scheme”, the writer believed, would be found to be “shocking to the ears of Americans. The man who penned these hostile sentiments is now known to have been Charles Inglis, a prominent New York cleric and outspoken critic of both independence and republicanism, who left America after the British forces withdrew from New York, though he was later to return to the continent following his appointment as the first Anglican bishop of Nova Scotia in Canada, 

The two pamphlets cited from above are included among the hundred other pieces of varying length reprinted in Thomas Paine and America, making this an important source of contemporary works written in response to those of Thomas Paine, none of which are included. Although the overwhelming majority are American published and written, there are five by British writers, all critical of Paine, included, for, as the editor Kenneth Burchell explains, they had been specifically addressed to an American readership and their known influence was almost exclusively limited to America. Most of the works reprinted are reproduced as facsimiles, each of which has been digitally cleaned to make for easier reading, while the remainder which did not allow for such treatment have been reset. Collectively the six volumes of Thomas Paine and America have in excess of two thousand pages. The organisation is thematic and chronological, with each item being prefaced by a short introductory note presenting relevant information that includes, whenever possible, the identity of those writers who wrote anonymously or used pseudonyms. Some limited bibliographical data is also provided. According to the editor, the criteria employed when it came to selecting works for inclusion was governed by an intention to concentrate on lesser known responses as the better known essays are more easily accessible. As a consequence, many of the works to be found in Thomas Paine and America are reprinted there for the first time since the original dates of their publication, although some have been cited in books on Paine.

The first volume concentrates exclusively on Common Sense, and includes a total of seven works all dated to 1776. The second volume has a threefold division, the first part of which is devoted to the dispute Paine had with Silas Deane, although only two works are reprinted, one a brief letter favourable to Paine and the other the anonymously written Echo from the Temple of Wisdom, thought to be by Deane himself. The second part to the reaction to Rights of Man and reprints sixteen pieces including a sequence of letters published in the press and two poems. One of the more substantial works included is Henry Mackenzie’s, An Answer to Paine’s Rights of Man. The author, a Scottish lawyer who lived in Edinburgh, describes his book as being “addressed to the people of Great Britain”, although no British imprint is currently recorded. The edition reprinted here is that published by William Cobbett in Philadelphia in 1796 when he was living and working there. It includes a hostile dedication to Joseph Priestley written by him as Peter] Porcupine. Priestley, like Paine, had strongly supported the French Revolution and was known for his support of Paine’s political ideology. He had been forced to leave England in 1774 and had settled in Northumberland Town in Pennsylvania. The final part of the volume reprints three replies to The Age of Reason, a theme continued throughout the next three volumes, which is illustrative of the interest in, and controversy aroused by Paine’s book, which prompted Priestley join the many who replied to it, although his An Answer to Mr. Paine’s Age of Reason, that was first written and published in America in 1794, but is not amongst those reprinted. The final volume has a two-fold division, the first part containing six pieces relating to Paine’s public criticism of George Washington for, in his view, not having responded to an appeal he had sent to him requesting that the president, whom he had considered to be a personal friend, use his influence with the French to gain his release following his arrest in Paris in 1793. One of the pieces reprinted here is an anonymously written attack on Paine by William Cobbett. The second part reprints some forty- two pieces published in American newspapers and journals reacting to the news in 1802 that Paine intended to return to the United States having been away for fifteen years. 

Concluding each of the six volumes is a section containing fully detailed and annotated end-notes, while in addition to these, the final volume also has a general index relating to the various reprints but not to editorial matter. An index covering this would have been of value. 

Thomas Paine and America is competently edited by the American Paine scholar Kenneth Burchell, who in the introduction found in the first volume explains the rationale behind the work, stating it to have been the aim to “place a large single collection in the hands of scholars and others concerned with the debates that surrounded Paine and the American Early Republic”, for Paine’s works “were at the centre of the most important debate on democratic principles in history, from which emerged for the first time the full range of recognizably modem political ideologies, ranging from conservatism to Whiggism and liberalism to radicalism”. 

The introduction also has some critical notes appertaining to the first two biographies of Paine, the first of which had been written by George Chalmers, a government employee who concealed the fact by using the pseudonym ‘Francis Oldys, A. M. of the University of Pennsylvania’, his book being entitled, The Life of Thomas Pain (sic), the Author of Rights of Man, With a Defence of his Writings, which was first published in London in 1791 by John Stockdate, and was anything but a “defence”, instead the use of the word sought to lull supporters of Paine to buy the heavily subsidised book in the hope that after reading it they would drop their support for Paine and his radical, republican ideas If that was truly the government’s hope then it cannot be considered a success. Yet, as it contains material on Paine’s early life not available elsewhere, it possesses some value. It is interesting to note that Stockdale also published John Quincy Adams’s An Answer to Pain’s (sic) Rights of Man, which is reprinted in Thomas Paine and America, from the Stockdale edition. John Quincy Adams’ father, also named John, had himself written a response to Paine’s Common Sense, although without mentioning it by name: Thoughts on Government: Applicable to the Present State of the American Colonies. He had been alarmed by amongst the populace for Paine’s proposals, which he considered to be “foolish”, as he records in his diary from which Burchell quotes. Adams considered the ideas in Common Sense to have flowed from what he terms “simple ignorance”, and had been written from a “desire to please the democratic party in Philadelphia”. Nowhere in his pamphlet, which some have seen almost like a monarchical manifesto despite its references to republicanism, does he refer by name to Paine’s pamphlet. Adams’ work can be read in volume one. 

The second biography discussed is that written by James Cheetham, and was published in Philadelphia in 1809, a few months after Paine’s death. Cheetham may be said to have popularised the stories about Paine having been personally dirty, smelly and a drunkard, tales destined to become the stock-in-trade of later critics of Paine that included some scholars, notably Sir Leslie Stephens, although he retracted his comments and apologised after he had been challenged by John M. Robertson. The Cheetham biography has been dubbed as having been the first muckraking work in American literary history. Regarding the ChatmersiOidys biography, in the course of his discussion the editor makes two questionable assertions, the first being that the pseudonym used by Chalmers was ‘Sir Francis Oldys’, but of the many copies I have examined that have been published in both the United States and in Britain, none have prefaced the pseudonym with the title ‘Sir’. The second point is that Chalmers had sought to infer that ‘Oldys’ was a clergyman. Reading copies of the book have certainly not left me with that impression. 

Those studying the reaction by Americans to Thomas Paine’s ideas, and, perhaps, to him as an individual, will find the judicious selection of works reprinted herein of immense value. Of course, there are works that one feels should have been included, but where does this process end, another six volumes? It has to be accepted that the selection process for a work of this character must in the last analysis always be subjective and so can never satisfy everyone. For some the cost of the work may seem high, but try finding copies of the originals, assuming it is possible to locate them, but if you manage to do so be prepared for a fright. It is the editor’s hope that Thomas Paine and America will make a substantial contribution to Paine’s bicentenary. I feel it to do so, and congratulate both him and his publisher for having produced so valuable a work. 

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Thomas Paine: In Search Of The Common Good. Edited by Joyce Chumbley & Leo Zonneveld. 144pp. Illustrated Paperback. Nottingham, Spokesman Books, 2009. ISBN 978-0-85124-762-5. £12.00. 

On International Human Rights Day, December 10, 1987, an international group of Paine enthusiasts met at the United Nations in New York under the auspices of the United Nations, in particular its Peace Studies Unit for a colloquium celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Paine. The event was organised by the United Teilhard Trust and the University of Peace (Costa Rica) with support from the Thomas Paine National Historical Association of New Rochelle and the Thomas Paine Society, whose president Michael Foot, gave the first address on ‘Thomas Paine and the Democratic Revolution’. Much of the inspiration for the event had been generated by the late Florence Stapleton, a member of the TPS, and Nat Mills, also deceased, who had created an informal Thomas Paine readers group. The initiative for this publication has been due to the work of Irwin Spiegelman, the president of the Friends of Thomas Paine in the United States. Leo Zonneveld, of the United Teiihard Trust (the reference is to Teithard de Chardin the Jesuit philosopher and palaeontologist), provides an introduction which briefly discussed the various contributions. 

As well as Michael Foot, there were eleven other speakers, Professor Ian Dyck on, ‘Thomas Paine: World Citizen in the Age of Nationalism’. David Branff on, ‘The Forgotten Founding Father: The Impact of Thomas Paine’. Professor Eric Foner on, Thomas Paine and American Radicalism during the American Revolution’. Charles Francisco on, ‘Thomas Paine: A Most Un-Common Man’. Professor Bernard Vincent on, ‘From Social to International Peace: The Realistic Utopias of Thomas Paine’. Clive Phillpot on, ‘In the Footsteps of Thomas Paine’. The Hon. Paul O’Dwyer on, ‘Thomas Paine Never Died’. Professor Sean Wilentz on, ‘Paine’s Legacy. David Henley on, Thomas Paine: An Emerging Portrait’. Robert Muller on, Remarks on the Present State of the World, Inspired by the Philosophy of Thomas Paine’. Professor Zofia Ubiszowska on, The Reality of the Constitutional Vision of Thomas Paine’. This last was read as the Professor was not able to leave Poland. 

I will make no attempt to comment on any of the contributions, to fully appreciate their calls for reading them, it is sufficient to say they contain much that is of great value and it is good that they have been now been put into print thanks to Dr. Chumbley, a TPS member, who transcribed them. 

In addition to the lectures the book is well illustrated with colour photographs taken by Clive Phillpot and others showing the participants, and reprints some of the correspondence that went on in the planning stages. There is also an index. This is a splendid contribution to the Paine bicentenary and the Friends of Thomas Paine in the United States who sponsored it deserve the gratitude of all those interested in Paine and his ideas.

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142 Strand, A Radical Address In Victorian London. Rosemary Ashton. London, Vintage Books. Paperback. ISBN 978 0 712 60696. £9.99. 

This is not a book about Thomas Paine, in fact in the course of its three hundred and eighty-six pages he receives only a single passing mention, which leaves aside whether or not its central character, the publisher and doctor John Chapman, read Paine’s works and like so many of his contemporaries came under their influence. That he may well have been so influenced is suggested by his friendship and association with several freethought publishers, notably G J. Hoiyoake, Hein Hetherington, Edward Truelove and to some extent William Dugdale, although he had abandoned his earlier role as the publisher of radical and freethought books in preference to the more profitable field of Pornography. 

John Chapman was born in Nottingham In 1821, being one of four sons of a prosperous shopkeeper He appears to have developed a desire to become a doctor, as in the case of one of his brothers who had been sent to Edinburgh to study medicine, but John’s ambition came to nought, at least for the time being, for he was apprenticed to a watchmaker in Worksop to learn that trade. In 1839 after completing his apprenticeship he immigrated to Australia, settling in Adelaide where he set up in business sang and repairing watches. However, three years later he returned to England and took up the study of medicine first in London then in Paris. 

But once more Chapman’s ambition was to be thwarted because he became almost by accident, the proprietor of a publishing house. In June 1843 he had married the daughter of a wealthy Nottingham lace manufacturer and having returned to London, presumably to continue with his medical studies, he approached the publisher John Green with a request that he publish a short work to which he had given the long-winded title, Human Nature, A Philosophical Exposition of the Divine Institution of the Reward and Punishment, which obtains in the physical. Intellectual, and MOM/ constitution of Man; with an Introductory essay. To which is added, a series of ethical observations, written during the perusal of the Rev. James lokatineau’s recent work, entitled Endeavours eller the Christian Life’, only to be told by Green that he was giving up publishing. In response, Chapman offered to purchase the firm, doing so with £4,600 of his wife’s money supplemented by a further sum from one of her relatives. Green had specialised in publishing books by Unitarians, being described by Theodore Parker in a letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson as “the Unitarian and Transcendal Bibliopole for all England….”, however, according to the author information about Chapman’s own religious beliefs is vague, although it may be suggested that as he had approached a well known Unitarian publisher to issue his book this might suggest that at the time he held Unitarian opinions. Whatever be the case the study of medicine was put on the back burner and- Chapman entered into a new career as a publisher. Not surprisingly one of the first works published under his imprint was his extremely dreary treatise, though Professor Ashton diplomatically describes it as being ‘earnest, if rather vapid’. 

The Unitarian ethos of Green’s former firm soon disappeared under its new owner who exhibited no hesitation in publishing works by authors critical of Christianity, if not actual unbelievers. These included J. A. Froude’s Nemesis of Faith and Marion Evans’, anonymous translation of The Life of Jesus by D. F. Strauss, which was issued in an attractive three volume set. However, not long before his edition appeared the freethought publisher Henry Hetherington. also based on The Strand, beat him to it by having commenced to publish a translation in parts and this may have had an effect on the viability of Chapman’s edition, for while it caused a lot of interest it does not appear to have been profitable. Evans was destined to become better known as “George Elliot’ but before that she became Chapman’s lover. He went on to publish her translation of another German work, Ludwig Feurbach’s The Essence of Christianity. 

Chapman was continually having financial problems and was facing one when Kali Marx approached him to publish his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Marx had also been suffering from domestic financial difficulties, not for the first time, and was unaware that the same was true at the time in the case of Chapman for he had hoped that he would also discount some of his bills until he received payment from the United States for articles he had written for the New York Daily Tribune. Chapman was forced to turn “Mr. Melte, as he names him, down. Commenting on this Professor Ashton remarks that had he not done so the two ‘might have come into closer and mutually rewarding contact”. In the event Engels bailed Marx out, while wealthy Mends came to Chapman’s assistance, as frequently happened. 

What put Chapman firmly on the literary map was his purchase in 1851 of the radical Westminster Review, which prompted the Church and State Gazette to bemoan the fact that the Review had `fallen into the hands of a publisher’ whose principal writers are known for their unorthodoxy. Professor Ashton, though, takes care to distance her subject from unbelief or close association with working class radicals by describing him as representative of the respectable face of nineteenth century radicalism, and the Review, as being the leading journal of respectable radicalism in Britain. It had been founded in 1824 by Jeremy Bentham and James PAM and soon became an organ for Unitarian thought and opinion. It had always been a loss maker, as Chapman must have known. The two founders, though, being wealthy were able to run the journal as a hobby while ensuring that it only published Ideas they approved of. This was also the case with W. E. Erickson, from whom Chapman purchased the Review. On his part he opened It to a whole range of orthodox and unorthodox radical writers and in doing so built up a stable of able new contributors, several of whom appear to have given him financial support by not taking any fee for the articles. They included J. S. Mill, Viscount Amberley, Bertrand Russell’s father, Herbert Spencer, M. D. Conway. Harriet Martineau, Frederick Harrison, Francis Newman, John Tyndall and T. H. Huxley, who became the journal’s scientific correspondent and championed Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis in its pages. His articles included a particularly important review of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Although Darwin subscribed to the Review he never contributed to its pages, but when certain parties sought to gain control over the journal he was amongst those who rallied to Chapman’s support. 

Eventually Chapman sold his publishing house while retaining ownership of the Review, which he continued to edit after resuming his medical studies, and Professor Ashton traces his progress which culminated in his passing the necessary examinations that resulted in him achieving his long sought ambition. Thus he entered Into the final stage of his varied career. As a doctor he specialised in nervous disorders and became a homeopath, in which field he became a well known practitioner. He wrote a number of medical works and contributed articles on medicine and medical reform to his journal. He also invented what he described as ‘spine-bags’ which used cold and heat to treat certain disorders. Amongst those he treated with them was Charles Darwin. 

According to Professor Ashton, Chapman took every opportunity to publicise his medical ideas and inventions being ‘a determined self-advertiser’ but he also appears to have been unable to establish a viable medical practice in London so he moved to Paris where he set up in practice treating English and American residents, and it was there on November 25, 1894 that he died. His remains were brought back to England and interred at Highgate Cemetery near the graves of `George G H. Lewes, a frequent contributor to the Review, and Karl Marx. There was no religious service but his friend and colleague Dr. C. R. Drysdale, whose opinions on birth control he strongly supported, gave a brief address. It would seem that Chapman had become, in effect, an unbeliever. 

Among other causes Chapman championed in the pages of the Review was that of women’s rights, about which he held very advanced opinions including that they should be enfranchised. On a personal level he was a known womaniser, something he never sought to conceal, unlike so many of his contemporaries who feared the effects on their reputations if their lax morality became public knowledge. Professor Ashton treats his dealings with women in detail in a chapter entitled ‘Chapman’s Radical Women’. 

This book rescues from obscurity a man who played an important role in radicalism in nineteenth century Britain. In many respects reminds me of that other radical publisher Charles Watts, the founder of the Rationalist Press Association, which consciously sought to represent itself as being the respectable public face of freethought in contrast to the impression given by the largely working-class based National Secular Society. While Chapman does not feature in the annals of freethought, he certainly deserves a place in them, even if only a minor one. I learned a lot from this stimulating book which I have no hesitation in recommending. Moreover, unlike so many other books these days it has been published at a price that is affordable. 

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