The TPHA Cartoon collection offers viewers a vivid journey of how Paine’s public image has morphed over the last 250 years. Although there were some positive portrayals of Paine early on, his many enemies, both in Britain and America, eventually took aim at him with vitriolic, often violent imagery, seeking to defame him and attack his allies to quash his message of representative democracy and reason.

The gallery overflows with 1790s cartoons and sketches attacking Paine that were funded by the British monarchy. Created by famous political cartoonists like James Gillray, James Sayers, and Isaac Cruikshank, these images are often vicious, showing Paine’s execution and torture, or portraying him as a demon or in the form of a variety of beasts.

Curated from the British Museum, the Library of Congress, the American Philosophical Society, the New York Public Library, Truth Seeker magazine, the Musée Carnavalet in Paris, and others, our Paine editorial cartoons gallery is a colorful visual carnival. Although we are adding images on an ongoing basis, at this point we have over 130 Paine cartoons arranged in chronological order, spanning from the earliest we have discovered so far, made in 1777, all the way up to a sample of cartoons from Polyp’s 2022 graphic novel PAINE: a Fantastical Visual Biography.

It is a delight to watch new generations of Paine supporters use political art to resurrect hisimage in counterpoint to the negativity of the 18th century, and, with it, his message. The political cartoons of the Truth Seeker magazine’s Watson Heston are a triumph of pro-Paine advocacy that are perhaps without equal. The 1880s illustrations by Joseph Keppler and Adolph Schwarzmann also reflect the era’s optimism and a changing public image of Paine.

PAINE’S REDEMPTION

By the 20th century, Paine illustrations turned less poisonous. Instead, we see Paine reflected in glory in a fresco by Mexican painter Diego Rivera’s 1933 mural at Rockefeller Center (eventually plastered over by Nelson Rockefeller); a 1938 postage stamp from Poland to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution; and Paine portrayed as Star Trek’s Mr. Spock.

TPHA now hasthe largest collection of Paine cartoons and artwork to be found anywhere. Explore the galleries and the ever-evolving landscape of Paine’s legacy. If you find other political cartoons or images that our missing from our collections, please reach out to share them with us at info@thomaspaine.org.

See the TPHA Cartoon collection now!

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Back in 2020, I was asked by the South Coast Rail Partnership (SCRP) if I could create a poster exhibition about Thomas Paine in the four waiting rooms in Lewes Railway Station. I was keen to tell the story of two men, Thomas Paine and General Gage, Britain’s Commander-in-Chief in North America at the outbreak of the American Revolution. Both had strong links to Lewes, Paine residing here from 1768 to 1774 and the family seat of the Gage family at Firle just five miles east of Lewes. Covid struck and froze the work but I recently suggested that we could mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by resurrecting the project.

The posters were hung in late December 2025, this time badged as a TPHA project with my having recently joined its Board. As I hung the posters, public engagement was immediate! People kept asking questions while I hung them! It was very heartening as I had no idea that it would work at all. The challenge was to give enough information without too much detail. Judging from the initial responses I think we got the right balance.

Here are the posters:

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A Canadian who grew up outside Toronto, I first heard of Thomas Paine very briefly in high school when my Canadian history classes spent as little time as possible on the American Revolution. That was more about the Loyalist expulsion to Canada than the achievement of American independence. 

My next encounter with Paine came about 20 years ago when I applied for my current job as a professor of English at the university in New Rochelle. I had earned my Ph.D. in 18th-century literature, so I was applying for the 18th-century literature job at a university in New Rochelle. I noticed the Thomas Paine Cottage and museum were fairly close to campus. In my job interview, I asked about the relationship between the Paine sites and school. They replied that there was no relationship, and I noted to myself that if I got the job, I would like to try to build that relationship. 

Fast forward to 2009 and the first stirrings for transferring archival materials from the TPHA Memorial Building to the university library. I met Gary Berton then. His knowledge and passion about Paine was contagious. We helped start the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies at Iona and we organized in 2012 the first International Conference of Thomas Paine Studies. 

This was a real watershed for me. In so many ways, it launched me fully into my Thomas Paine research. That conference allowed me to edit New Directions in Thomas Paine Studies (Palgrave, 2016), the collection of essays arising from that conference. 

At that 2012 conference, over lunches and coffee, we began to work and plan for what’s become Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (Princeton, 2026), the six-volume scholarly edition of Paine’s works and correspondence, which will definitively re-write the conventional early-American narratives about Paine. Historians have so much wrong, and we are about to correct the record, which is exactly the original goal of the TPHA. 

I will never forget the day after the conference when I looked at the table of contents in Philip Foner’s two-volume edition of Paine’s works. One section listed Paine’s “songs and poems,” and I knew I had a unique connection to Paine. My academic specialty is poetry, so I decided to write a book on Paine and his poetry, which I’ve done, “The Field of Imagination: Thomas Paine and Eighteenth-Century Poetry” (Virginia, 2019). 

Paine used poetry throughout his life — in print and manuscripts — to explore political ideology as well as human feelings. That’s what makes Paine so interesting, compelling and fascinating to me. 

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By Gary Berton

I had heard Thomas Paine’s name, but Bob Dylan put me on the track of discovering Paine’s profound importance in history. 

Dylan has been the soundtrack of my life. When he sang about Paine in the song, “As I went out One Morning,” on the 1967 John Wesley Harding album, his lyrics stayed with me. 

As I went out one morning 

To breathe the air around Tom Paine’s 

I spied the fairest damsel 

That ever did walk in chains 

I offered her my hand 

She took me by the arm 

I knew that very instant 

She meant to do me harm 

“Depart from me this moment” 

I told her with my voice 

Said she, “But I don’t wish to” 

Said I, “But you have no choice” 

“I beg you, sir”, she pleaded 

From the corners of her mouth 

“I will secretly accept you 

And together we’ll fly south” 

Just then Tom Paine, himself 

Came running from across the field 

Shouting at this lovely girl 

And commanding her to yield 

And as she was letting go her grip 

Up Tom Paine did run “

I’m sorry, sir”, he said to me 

“I’m sorry for what she’s done” 

When I entered graduate school at the University of Toronto, this song was in my head. I pursued studies in the history of political philosophy. I soon realized that Paine was not part of the curriculum, so I left, instead preferring a factory job. But I continued reading and researching Paine. 

For 56 years now, the path is paying off for me by being able to help bring the truth of Paine to the world, as in the form of the new Thomas Paine Collected Works, and by spreading it through the Thomas Paine National Historical Association. Bob Dylan led me to Paine.

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By Gary Berton

Arthur O’Connor, although he inherited an estate and was a member of the Irish Parliament, was an advocate for women’s rights, supported emancipation of Catholics although a Protestant, and independence from England. When he joined the United Irishmen fighting the British occupation of Ireland, he was arrested. 

On his way to prison, he wrote a poem in code. To decipher what he was really saying, here is the code: Take the first line of the first verse, and next the first line of the second verse, the second line of the first verse and then the second line of the second verse, and so alternatively.

“The pomp of courts and pride of kings, 

I prize above all earthly things, 

I love my country but my king 

Above all men his praise I sing; 

The royal banners are display’d, 

And my success the standard aid. 

“I fain would banish far from hence, 

The Rights of Man and Common Sense; 

Confusion to his odious reign, 

That foe to princes, Thomas Paine! 

Defeat and ruin seize the cause 

Of Ireland, its liberties and laws.”

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By Gary Berton

The only reference to Thomas Paine made by Bob Dylan is the 1967 “As I Went Out One Morning”, on the John Wesley Harding album. I started reading Paine after I heard that song. 

However, every analysis I read about the song only confused me. After researching Paine for 50 years, I can shed some light on it. And the reviews of the song are making even less sense now than then. 

The woman in the song is America, and he took responsibility for her. He apologized to her, saying he was “sorry for what she’s done”. This was in the height of the Vietnam War, also the height of the civil rights upsurge. Paine prophesied later in life that if America loses its morals of equality and justice, that it would be a sad day for all of humanity. 

The heart of Paine was equality and justice; he also condemned offensive war as the most heinous crime that can be committed. I commend Dylan for grasping Paine’s essence, and for putting it to use. 

He did a much better job than most historians in that time. 

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By Gary Berton 

Diego Rivera was a famous Mexican artist in the first half of the 20th century. He excelled in large public murals, and also did hundreds of paintings on a smaller scale. He died in 1957 in Mexico City. 

His most controversial project was the mural he created for the Rockefeller Center in New York City. His politics were overlooked by the Rockefeller family (Rivera was a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s), because of his celebrity, but Rivera refused to compromise his politics, and eventually the mural was destroyed rather than be exhibited. The title of the work was Man at the Crossroads, and it depicted workers, with social and political choices visibly represented. When he inserted figures like Lenin and Trotsky, it put an end to the project.

Rivera anticipated that his mural would be destroyed before it could be displayed, which it was. So Rivera had pictures taken, in black and white, of the panels, and the whole mural. He then returned to Mexico and re-created the mural for the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. He renamed it Man, Controller of the Universe. See below: 

As part of the exhibit at the Thomas Paine Memorial Building, we included the panel that depicts the American Revolution. This panel did not become part of Rivera’s final production for Mexico City, as it pertained to the U.S. The only thing that remains of it is the black and white photo. Here is Rivera working on this panel in 1933: 

The panel can be seen at top of this article.

The knowledge that Rivera displays here is impressive. He must have studied Paine to grasp his significance, his close relationship to Franklin (standing next to him), his foundational principle of equality as the basis of his thought (with all the races standing together pointing to Rights of Man), the significance of Crispus Attucks being martyred, and the militant attitude toward a foreign power invading a supposedly weaker country.

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By Gary Berton

The Editorial Board of the Collected Works of Thomas Paine presented an overview of the ongoing project. They presented a picture from the work done to date that Paine had been an active writer for 17 years before coming to America. And he had ties to Benjamin Franklin, then an ambassador to England, from an early date when Paine was just entering adulthood. 

A piece of collaborative research to this claim has been found, which we copy here. The letter reads: 

Ambrose Serle to the Earl of Dartmouth, 

11 June 1777 

My Lord, 

I have the Honor to inclose to Your Lordship two Publications, circulated by the Rebels. One of them, the Crisis, is written by a Mr. Paine, who was brought over hither, some Years ago, by Dr. Franklin, and has been chiefly employed by him, in one Pursuit or other, ever since. He was a Grub street Writer in London, when he fell into the Doctor’s Way; and, by falling into his Principles, was enabled by him to emerge from Obscurity, and to meet with considerable Attentions in this Country. He has nothing to lose, but every thing to hope, from the Establishment of the present rebellious Situation. 

“A Grub Street Writer” was a derogatory term used by the aristocracy against the political writers, and others, of the 18th century, synonymous to “hack writers” living in the poor area around that street. This shows that Paine was actively writing before coming to America. It also shows his close ties to Franklin from that early period. Although he probably didn’t live there, Paine fits the underground Patriotic Whig political writing group in philosophy. The new works being discovered by the Project has confirmed his role as a leading writer close to the Pitt/Shelburne faction long before coming to America. Volume I of the new Collection of his writings will be almost entirely filled with these recently discovered works, and will explain how a writer could produce a brilliant work like Common Sense, after two decades of honing his skills.

A reading by Paulie Wenger

Paulie Wenger was one of the presenters at the Thomas Paine National Historical Association’s Thomas Paine Symposium, June 17, 2022, and he uncovered an unknown freethinker from the mid-19th century, Tamar Davis. She was hounded by the state authorities until she died young in prison. As part of his talk was a poem she wrote on Paine:

The Reformer and Patriot

by Tamar Davis

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By Gary Berton

The following is from Dick Holdstock’s “Again with One Voice”. Dick Holdstock is a well-known singer of traditional British and Sea songs, having played with Allan MacLeod and with his wife Carol Holdstock in several countries. His book Again With One Voice, British Songs of Political Reform, 1768 to 1868 was published in May of 2021.

A song by Joseph Mather, to the tune of God Save the Queen, “showing support for Tom Paine’s Rights of Man and reflecting the republican sentiment immediately understood by working people.” From the mid 1790s, in the face of brutal repression by the British crown. 

God Save the Great Thomas Paine 

God save great Thomas Paine, 

His “Rights of Man” to explain 

To e’ry soul. 

He makes the blind to see, 

What dupes and slaves they be,

And points out liberty 

From pole, to pole.

Thousands cry “church and king” 

That well deserve to swing, 

All must allow; 

Birmingham blush for shame, 

Manchester do the same, 

Infamous is your name, 

Patriot’s vow. 

Pull proud oppressors down, 

Knock off each tyrant’s crown, 

And break his sword; 

Down with aristocracy, 

Set up democracy, 

And from hypocrisy 

Save us good Lord. 

Why should despotic pride 

Usurp on every side?

 Let us be free; 

Grant freedom’s arms success, 

And all her efforts bless 

Plant thro’ the universe Liberty’s tree. 

Facts are seditious things 

When they touch courts and kings 

Armies are raised, 

Barracks and bastilles built, 

Innocence charged with guilt, 

Blood most unjustly spilt, 

Gods stand amaz’d. 

Despots may howl and yell, 

Tho’ they’re in League with hell 

They’ll not reign long; 

Satan may lead the van, 

And do the worst he can, 

Paine and his Rights of man 

Shall be my song. 

Dick is now over ninety and is currently playing as a member of Quite Carried Away for the Sacramento English Country Dances twice monthly. He also enjoys singing and recording sea songs as a member of Holdstock, Clegg, and Pratt. They released West Coast Shanties and Sea Songs in July 2025. Find more about Mr. Holdstock at his website: https://dickholdstock.com/

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Tom Paine’s Bones
by C. Bichler
(2009, revised 2018)

This is you,
Tom Paine

this living America
where your bones
no longer rest

I imagine you
laughing
on whatever cosmic plane
you currently inhabit
scissors and tape
stuck in your back pocket
as in some 200-year-old
caricature.

These are tools
for taking the measure
of the world

– of the space between worlds

A circle
of an inch diameter
has the same geometrical properties
as a circle
that would circumscribe the universe.

Do you
take the measure of us
still?

The story of the whale
swallowing Jonah,
though a whale is large enough to do it,
borders greatly on the marvellous;
but it would have approached
nearer
to the idea of a miracle,
if Jonah had swallowed the whale.

I hear the smile
in your voice
I see you
hunched
over desk or drumhead
quill working furiously
muttering to yourself
You pause
you scratch out
rake your fingers
through your hair
bend over the work
and keep going.

The words mock and cajole
abrade
reflect
flash and shimmer
across the distance of time
a universe of thought

deft
like your tailor’s hands.

The flick
of a pen
becomes a fish-tail
almost
too quick
for the eye to follow:

The glide of the smallest fish
in proportion to its bulk
exceeds us in motion
almost beyond comparison
and without
weariness.

These are the known planets
and here
their orbits
each one extending
a bit farther
than the last
one after
another
after another
ripples
in a pond
strings of words
creating new worlds.

You measure
you cut
you fit
and then
–flash of the scratching quill,
gasp of astonishment–
you turn all inside out
the silver blade twists

a final
revolution

In this case,
which may serve for all cases
of miracles,
the matter would
decide itself
as before stated,
namely,
Is it more probable
that a man
should have swallowed a whale,
or told a lie?

They tried to kill you
over and over
dug up your corpse
buried your words
– a cosmic joke.

Your flesh
now broken
is somehow dispersed
through the whole universe
your scattered bones
now stardust

your words
your mind
are the air we breathe
in a sea of voices
transmitted across ether

We know you
without knowing you
This world
is made
of your words
We know nothing
of the void
before

in which you
imagined us

The words spiral outward
never-ending
taking the measure
of centuries

You are still here
with us.

This is you
Tom Paine
this new world
this breathing
pulsing
living world
flesh of your flesh
bone of your bone

We are your body,
you
our soul.

*All quotes (in italics) taken from Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason (1793-94).

***

Afterword: This poem was first drafted in 2009, during my initial discovery of the life and work of Thomas Paine.

I don’t often write poetry. I tend to stumble or fall into it when prose seems inadequate – too unwieldy, too distant, or too analytical for a subject that demands immediate feeling. In this case, the event that provoked me to verse was Paine’s The Age of Reason, a book that thrilled me in ways I could not at first articulate. I was fascinated not just by Paine’s arguments, but his brilliant use of language – and above all by the complex personality revealed in his authorial voice. More compelling than fiction, in many ways Paine’s treatise on religion is still the best “story” I’ve ever read. And given that Paine’s writing, even during the most hard-headed argument, often soars into the poetic, it seemed an obvious and natural choice to integrate his words into the poem.

The title I blatantly stole from Graham Moore’s folksong “Tom Paine’s Bones,” which I encountered through actor/writer Ian Ruskin’s play and film about the life of Paine. I resisted that title at first, not wanting to seem unoriginal — but the poem was insistent. It would be called nothing else. 

Many thanks to my creative writing group at Washtenaw Community College, who offered helpful editing suggestions and encouraged me, at long last, to publish this piece.

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“We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” wrote Thomas Paine in Common Sense, a pamphlet of less than fifty pages, published in January of 1776, months before the Declaration of Independence was drafted. In clear and robust prose, Paine urged his fellow Americans to do the unthinkable, the impossible – to declare themselves an independent nation.

Given the chaos of American politics at the present moment, many of us no doubt long for the power that Paine invokes here – the power of citizens to alter their government – an idea that may seem quaint in the age of Trump, but which is, after all (or used to be), at the heart of American national identity.

That desire to reshape the world for the better is also at the heart of Ian Ruskin’s compelling one-hour drama on the life of Paine, arguably America’s most fervent revolutionary and certainly the most radical of our Founders. The film is returning to public television stations around the country this week, with multiple airings on the World Channel on and around Independence Day. (Where I live, in the Detroit area, Thomas Paine’s To Begin the World Over Again will be shown four times between July 3 and 4. To find airdates where you are, visit The World Channel, thelifeofthomaspaine.org, or web-search the schedule for your local PBS affiliate.)

I discovered Ian Ruskin’s work through his blog-piece: “Why Thomas Paine Matters,” posted to Daily Kos in April of 2012. The article, reflecting on both the importance of Paine’s ideas and the dearth of political truth-telling in America, also contained links to video excerpts from Ruskin’s stage play.

For me, this was a perfectly timed coincidence. I watched in wonder and delight as Thomas Paine came to life on my laptop screen. I had been making a study of Paine and his writings ever since reading The Age of Reason in 2009. (The tale of my acquaintance with Mr. Paine can be found in my own Daily Kos diary from about a year ago.) Ruskin’s pushback against a distorted Tea Party version of American history was grounded in fact, not ideology. Better still, he used Paine’s actual words and ideas to press his case. His characterization immediately struck me as jaw-droppingly right – exactly in line with the man I had glimpsed in countless letters and essays, and in the sarcastic humor and soaring rhetoric of all his major works. I knew I had to see this play. And I really wanted to talk to the man who had written and performed it.

About a week later, I sent an email – a fan letter, really – to Ian Ruskin. Since then I’ve had the privilege of chatting with the playwright several times about the purpose and evolution of his play. I saw it performed in Philadelphia at the American Philosophical Society in 2012, and later helped bring it to an audience at Bowling Green State University, where I was then a graduate student in American Studies. One of the undergraduate students told me afterward how inspired he’d been to see the performance (and that he’d also read The Age of Reason), and I realized that history didn’t have to be oversimplified or whitewashed to connect with non-scholars.

In March 2015, I was in the audience at the Lillian Theater in Hollywood as To Begin the World Over Again was filmed. The experience was magical. The creative and artistic process was fascinating, of course – but almost as amazing was getting to see how others in that audience absorbed and reacted to a historical figure as someone relevant to their own lives.

Historian Harvey Kaye, one of the many scholars consulted for Ruskin’s Paine project, has observed in his book Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, that we tend to look back to the American Founders in times of national crisis, habitually seekng inspiration in “our revolutionary past at times … when the very purpose and promise of the nation [are] at risk or in doubt.” Paine in particular, according to Kaye, is the embodiment of the American impulse to radicalism. Ruskin’s goal in bringing Paine to the stage (and now the screen) was originally to remedy public perception of a “misunderstood” historical figure and to counter the “complete distortion of Paine’s words and work and beliefs” by entities such as the Tea Party.

Ruskin seems to have found his mission in rescuing historical figures who’ve been misunderstood or have faded from public memory. He began exploring the potential of history-based one-man plays in 2001 with From Wharf Rats to Lords of the Docks, which celebrates the achievements of labor radical Harry Bridges. His next project will take on the life and thought of the inventor Nikola Tesla.

Both the stage and film versions of To Begin the World Over Again capture the turbulence and heartbreak of Thomas Paine’s life, while also exploring his most important ideas – which have shaped American political thought for more than two centuries now.

The film opens with Ruskin as Paine lighting candles on a darkened stage – an apt metaphor for our own political moment. Over the course of an hour, he recounts his tumultuous career – from poverty in England through the upheavals of the American and French Revolutions, to the public declaration of his own non-Christianity in The Age of Reason – an event which led to public censure and neglect in the years before his death in 1809. Along the way, period music and eighteenth-century art (political cartoons and portraits of Paine’s contemporaries), help to flesh out the story and re-create the atmosphere of Paine’s time in all its messiness: its rationalism (for the lucky few), its revolutions, its abject poverty (for the many) and its boisterous and often corrupt politics.

If all of that sounds a little familiar, it should.

The play was called timely by several critics even before the election of 2016. Now, as our nation endures seemingly endless corruption and chaos, meanness and hatred directed at the most vulnerable, and a looming constitutional crisis, Paine’s words and ideas take on a new and urgent relevance.

Far from being a textbook lesson about a lone genius, Ruskin’s film is a believable human drama about patriotism and sacrifice – about the potential cost of idealism, selflessness, and speaking truth to power. As we learn, Paine sacrificed nearly all for his vision of a better, more humane world: intimate love, emotional and financial security, domestic ties to family and country – and many of his closest friendships, whether to death or to ideological disputes. Ever more abandoned and solitary, Paine ages before our eyes in this film. His bitter, late-in-life breaks with George Washington and Samuel Adams are wrenching – for him and for us. His literal appearance as a lone figure on the minimally dressed stage becomes all too symbolically fitting.

Perhaps Ruskin’s most impressive feat here is to provide us a glimpse into the heart and mind of a man whose inner life, even for scholars, remains elusive. Paine was not in the habit of self-disclosure in his writings, most of which are intended to persuade through reason and sheer force of rhetoric. Yet Ruskin somehow gets beneath the surface of the political man, using Paine’s personal correspondence, his religious writings, and the observations of scholars and contemporaries to fill in the knowledge gaps – and by making intuitive leaps as necessary. In interviews, Ruskin cites his own sense of kinship with Paine the immigrant as a factor that informs his interpretation of the character. The deeper Ruskin dives into Paine’s psyche, the more riveting his performance becomes.

In some ways, I am reminded of the musical 1776, one of my personal touchstones to the American Revolution from about the age of about eleven. Like that much longer play, To Begin the World Over Again moves from lightness and bawdy eighteenth-century jokes (Ruskin’s Paine speaks of the similarities of “politics and farting”), to the darker aspects of revolution and its human toll. The excited, almost bubbly Paine that we see in the first half of the film contrasts sharply with the somber character of the second half. It is in the film’s closing moments, when Ruskin’s delivery slows down and Paine becomes reflective, that we see the man worn down to his essentials, a weary soul battered by harsh experience, yet still unwilling to compromise his words or beliefs. As an actor, Ruskin is at his most compelling while revealing Paine’s slow emotional breakdown. The unblinking and up-close eye of the camera makes that decline harrowing. On film (as opposed to the live stage), Paine is literally no longer at arm’s length, and the effect is powerful.

For those who don’t want to wait, the film is currently available to stream at on Amazon Prime and Vimeo. The DVD can be ordered on Amazon or directly from Ruskin’s non-profit.

Thomas Paine not only knew how to rally a resistance movement – he knew the rigors of sustaining one. During the winter of 1777, as Washington’s troops retreated across the frozen Jersies and the American Revolution appeared to be doomed, he wrote the first of his Crisis papers, opening with the line: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” The essay reaches its rhetorical climax in these lines–used by President Obama in his first inaurgual address:

I urge everyone to spare an hour over the July Fourth holiday to take in the story of America’s Founding Radical, a man who, in the most personal way, understood that “it is dearness only that gives every thing its value,” and who fought all of his life for the “celestial article [of] FREEDOM” for every single human being. At a time when America’s founding ideals are being threatened as never before, the voice of Thomas Paine, always ahead of his time, continues to speak powerfully to our own.

Watch Trailer: Thomas Paine’s To Begin the World Over Again

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When I joined the ranks of His Majesty’s Customs & Excise in 1946, I was quickly made aware of the department’s historic literary tradition, led by Geoffrey Chaucer, Adam Smith, Robert Bums and Thomas Paine. But even after nearly 200 years there seemed to be a question mark over the last of these famous men. Paine had twice been dismissed from the service, and was subsequently charged with sedition, prompting his escape to France. Bums, by contrast, appeared to be revered without reserve, though I eventually discovered that during his Excise years he too had found himself in hot water, when some of his writing and activities had called his political loyalty into question. But the two men had much more in common than their time in the service of the Crown. 

There is a substantial academic literature about both Bums and Paine (in the latter case, some of it hostile). Biographies include splendid modem works by Robert Crawford (Bums) and John Keane (Paine), along with a forensic analysis of Burns’ radical tendencies by Liam Mcllvanney. But although both lives have been well chronicled (albeit separately), I hope there may be merit in a short selective account of the most salient features of the common radical ground shared by the two great writers, and its inspiration, a comparison that has attracted scant attention. I will not attempt condensed biographies outside that narrow focus: that would neither be possible, nor necessary. 

Parallels can first be found in their origins and upbringing. Both had working class roots in rural surroundings, environments and experience that inevitably conditioned their views. It is unsurprising that both found resonance in the religious and political dissent of the 18th century. 

Paine’s childhood home was close to Thetford gallows and within the purview of the ruling Grafton family. He could not have failed to be aware of the rough justice handed down to the rural poor and the contrasting privilege and power enjoyed by the landed gentry. In Scotland, Bums knew from his own painful experience the penalties of toil and labour, made futile by poverty. Drudgery and hunger racked his body, but they could not vanquish his spirit, his humour, or his innate genius. The result was, to quote Barke, that “his sympathies were for the poor, the oppressed… He hated all manner of cruelty, oppression and the arrogance of privilege and mere wealth.” 

Likewise, both men, as children, were exposed to religious ideology. In Paine’s case direct evidence is limited, but we know at least that his parents belonged to different branches of the Christian faith – his mother to the established church, his father to the dissenting Quaker sect – and that he had regular contact with the teaching of both traditions. Although never an atheist, it appears from his later writings that he was not persuaded by either theology. He said in The Age of Reason: “from the time I was capable of conceiving an idea, and acting upon it by reflection, I either doubted the truth of the Christian system or thought it to be a strange affair.” But more important than the influence of parental indoctrination is the evidence of Paine’s voluntary association with Methodism. There is a record that he heard John Wesley preach on one of his several visits to Thetford. Later, as a 21 year-old, he is said to have preached as a Methodist in both Dover and Sandwich. Eight years later, while in London waiting for an Excise vacancy, he is said to have again turned to occasional preaching. There is even a suggestion in the Oldys biography (repeated by Conway) that Paine sought from the Baptist minister Daniel Noble an introduction to the Bishop of London with a view to ordination. It is certainly reasonable to think that Methodism appealed to Paine. Its preachers were enthusiastic and able to reach out to the common people. They emphasised that Christ died for all, and their message, although concerned with spiritual salvation, was in tune with the 18th century radical aspiration towards equality. Notwithstanding Paine’s later assault upon organised religion and his repudiation of the Bible, Keane’s view “that his moral capacities ultimately had religious roots” is very persuasive. 

Bums was baptized and brought up in the Christian faith. His father William, a strict Calvinist, was committed to his sons’ religious education, though the tone of it was somewhat tempered by the preaching of his parish minister. William Dalrymple was of the Presbyterian persuasion: a moderate, liberal man, antagonistic to divisive sectarianism, zealotry and hypocrisy, concerned to reach out to the poor, and an advocate of amity and love. Although Bums later strayed from his father’s model of piety and virtue 

(particularly in his sexual inclinations: according to Berke he had passionate relationships with many women, productive of fifteen children, six out of wedlock) this early teaching was later reflected in many of his poems. And despite his departure from the constraints of Presbyterian theology, he never relinquished his belief in God. Crawford notices a manual written by Bums’s father addressing some of the fundamental questions of religious belief. One of these not only conditioned his children but, as I will mention later, was also very much in line with Paine’s thinking: 

Q. How shall I evidence to myself that there is a God? 

A. By the works of Creation; for nothing can make itself and this fabrick of nature demonstrates its creator to be possessed of all possible perfection, and for that cause we owe all that we have to him.

Similar parallels apply to the relatively brief formal education of the two writers. At the age of seven, Paine was fortunate to gain a place at Thetford Grammar School, but left when only twelve to serve for the next seven years as an apprentice in his father’s business as a maker of stays. But as a young man, over time, he cultivated the friendship of a number of distinguished men: the Scottish astronomer and instrument maker, James Ferguson, destined to become a Fellow of the Royal Society; the well-known lexicographer and optical instrument maker, Benjamin Martin; the celebrated astronomer and Fellow of the Royal Society, Dr. John Bevis; the writer, Oliver Goldsmith, and crucially the influential Benjamin Franklin, whose support helped Paine to establish himself in America. During his time in London he extended his reading, and met like-minded people who were challenging orthodox theology and the concept of top-down government. He was introduced, as Keane puts it, “to a new culture of political radicalism that rejected throne and altar”, and experienced a long- term conversion to republican democracy.” 

Burns’s first formal education was even shorter, spent between the ages of six and nine in a local school at Alloway Mill, before having to leave to help on his father’s isolated farm at Mount Oliphant. He was, however, fortunate through those years in having a young, inspirational teacher, John Murdoch, who before his departure to Dumfries imparted a thorough grounding in the technicalities of language, with an expectation far wider than was customary for children of such tender years. This, combined with Bums’s voracious and wide-ranging reading, established a literary disposition that would prosper against the grain of physical labour and frugal living on the land. Much credit for that is also due to Bums’s father. Despite the necessity of setting his sons to farming, William Burnes contrived to continue their education at home, conversing with them as adults, and procuring books for them designed both to nurture their faith and spur their imaginations. It was fortunate, too, that in 1772 Murdoch returned to teach at another school in Ayr and was concerned enough to find time to sustain intermittent contact with the Bums brothers in pursuit of their development. Unlike Paine, Bums could not yet add personal acquaintance with leading intellectuals, but he did so at second- hand, gleaning counsel from literature, not least Arthur Masson’s Collection of English Prose and Verse and John Newbury’s anthology of letter-writers of distinguished merit. 

In 1777 the family moved to Lochlea. There, although still committed to hard labour in the fields, Bums was not without friends. As he reached manhood he found particular inspiration among the Masons of Tarbolton, warming to their principles of friendship, benevolence and religious toleration. But the final shaping of Burns’s muse was forged in the depths of adversity. His problems during 1782 to 1784 have been well documented: a business venture that literally disappeared in flames; a breakdown of mind and body; the failing family farm, with the prospect of utter destitution; his father’s legal struggle in the face of a writ of sequestration. Bums’s response, as Crawford puts it, was to write his way out of it. Surrounded by deep recession and gloom across rural Scotland, he fixed upon ideals that would underpin his later poetry: dignity in poverty and admiration for men of independent minds, prepared to reject the lure of wealth and position. In 1783 he began his ‘Commonplace Book’, and gradually his identity as a ploughman gave way to that of a poet and the emergence of his distinctive style and language. By the following year he had come to think that he might be capable of exposing his work to a wider public. And among many strands of his eager imagination were political ideas drawn from his harsh, personal experience that were pointedly radical in their day. 

The legal action against Bums’s father was decided in his favour in January 1784. By then, however, he was exhausted and ill, dying a few weeks later. Throughout the travails of their lives at Lochlea, Bums and his brother had respected their father dearly. But his death and release from debt, allowed a move to Mossgiel, a new beginning, a freer lifestyle and the burgeoning of Robert’s romantic poetry. 

Quite when Paine moved from personal conviction to written advocacy remains unclear. More than once he insisted that he wrote nothing in England, though appearances suggest otherwise. What is certain is that in January 1775, having overcome a serious illness picked up on the voyage to America, he was taken on as editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine. Articles and poems in this new periodical and in William Bradford’s earlier Pennsylvania Journal appeared anonymously or under pseudonyms, but it is generally accepted that Paine was the author of a number of them, including a broadside against slavery, an exposure of cruelty to animals, and a plea for women’s rights. The battle of Lexington in April 1775 stirred him to give vent to increasingly radical views about British tyranny, and to consider the necessity of using force to secure human liberty. In July 1775 he penned a song Liberty Tree, the final verses of which were unequivocal in their call for revolution: 

But hear, 0 ye swains (`tis a tale most profane).

How all the tyrannical pow’rs,

King, Commons, and Lords, are uniting amain’

To cut down this guardian of ours;

From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms,

Through the land let the sound of it flee:

Let the far and the near all unite with a cheer,

In defense of our Liberty Tree.

In the Journal of October 1775, Paine (as Humanus) followed this with an article headed A Serious Thought in which he reflected on the barbarities wrought by Britain, particularly the importation of negroes for sale. He declared that he would “hesitate not for a moment to believe that the Almighty will finally separate America from Britain”. 

His direct, terse and incisive prose appealed to the common citizen, and found its most positive expression with the publication, in January 1776, of his seminal pamphlet Common Sense. I need not recapitulate the arguments of this famous text, save to notice that its opening pages drew on ingrained tenets of English radicalism, with an insistence on natural rights to liberty and a vision of a new world order. Its impact was, of course, dramatic and a major factor in setting the course in favour of the war of independence. 

Chronologically, Burn’s literary debut came ten years later, with the publication in July 1786 of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (the so-called Kilmarnock edition). Bums was then only 27, some ten years younger than Paine had been at the time of his first Pennsylvania articles. The collection was a chosen, wide-ranging miscellany of 36 poems, verses, songs, odes and dirges, previously written alongside his farming at Mossgiel. One reviewer thought the love poems “execrable”, and most critics regretted that they were written in some measure in “an unknown tongue” which limited their audience to a small circle. But there was general recognition of Bums as “a native genius”. He was seen as the ‘ploughman poet; a phenomenon bursting from the obscurity of poverty and the obstructions of laborious life”. Yet in all this, only two reviewers briefly mentioned occasional “libertine” tendencies, dismissed as regrettable but excusable in the light of his origins. 

In fact, the edition contained three overtly political poems, written shortly before publication: The Twa Dogs, A Dream, and The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer. Like all the other pieces, they pre-dated Burns’s Excise service, and, according to his Preface, had not been “composed with a view to the press°. Nevertheless, one can perhaps detect a note of caution in Bums’s approach. He commonly made a virtue of his low social standing and used the paradox of a simple bard appealing to a refined audience. 

The Twa Dogs is a gem. Briefly, the dogs are represented as friendly observers of the lives of their keepers: one a local dignitary, the other a ploughman. The poem, masterly crafted, contrasts the pleasure-seeking, self-interest and dissipation of the gentry (leaving aside “some exceptions”) with the destitution and toil faced by the poor, who nevertheless, in their respite from labour, find joy in the simple, frugal, common recreations of rural life: 

A countra fellow at the pleugh,

His acre’s till’d, he’s right enough;

A countra girl at her wheel,

Her dizzen’s done, she’s unco weel;

But gentlemen, an’ ladies warst,

Wi’ ev’n down want o’work are curst

They loiter, lounging, lank an’ lazy;

Though deil-haet ails them, yet uneasy:

Their days insipid, dull an’ tasteless;

Their nights unquiet, lang an restless.

A Dream began with a vindicatory preamble:

Thoughts, words and deeds, the Statute blames with reason; But

surely Dreams were ne’re indicted Treason.

Bums went on to pretend that he had fallen asleep after reading Thomas Warton’s Laureate’s Ode for His Majesty’s Birthday, 4 June 1786, and in his dreaming fancy had imagined his own, alternative address. It was a daring device, for whereas Warton’s ode had lavishly flattered George III, Bums’ satire made it clear that he would do no such thing, but instead addressed the king with mock reverence, feigning loyalty while favouring defection, reminding him of the embarrassment of the loss of the American colonies and the failures of his ministers. He hoped that the King might wring corruption’s neck, and reduce the burden of taxation: levied till ‘old Britain’ was fleeced until she had ‘scarce a tester’ (an old Scots silver coin of small value). A cloak of pretended adulation and a representation of being but a humble poet might not normally have been enough to escape dire retribution, but Bums destiny appears somehow to have been charmed. 

The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer was addressed to the Right Honourable and Honourable Scotch representatives in the House of Commons. Bums again began with mock deference: To you a simple Bardie’s prayers are humbly sent. But thereafter his 25 stanzas and postscript of a further seven were unmistakably critical: an ironic blast against the 45 Scottish members, apparently supine in the face of legislation to increase the duties on whisky:

In gath’rin votes you were na slack;

Now stand as tightly by your tack:

Ne’er claw your lug, an’ fidge your back,

An’ hum and haw;

But raise your arm, an’ tell your crack

Before them a’.

He followed this with a swipe at those whose ranks he would shortly join: 

“damn’d excisemen in a bustle”! 

But his main thrust was aimed at the liaison of Scottish and English members, which he clearly saw as an unholy alliance: 

Yon mixtie-maxtie, queer hotch-potch, The Coalition.

An opinion that, albeit in a different context, has a certain resonance today. 

In 1787, though written in 1784, a further political offering appeared in a second expanded edition of Bums’s poems, published in Edinburgh. This was a ballad conveying his thoughts on the American Revolution. Aware that it might be thought “rather heretical”, he had decided not to publish it in the Kilmarnock edition, but later, with the advice of Lord Glencaim and Henry Erskine, caused it to be included in the new edition. Whereas Paine, in 1776, had fomented the war of independence, and throughout had continued to support it in eight issues of The Crisis (the last in April 1783), Bums now reflected, after its conclusion, on the tide of events. Though the facts were no doubt gleaned from other sources, it remains a brilliant and witty summary of the hapless record of Britain’s generals and politicians, remarkable for having been constructed alongside the drudgery of Bums’s ordinary occupation. 

For some years Bums added almost nothing to his political output. To make ends meet, he joined the Excise service as a common gauger, receiving his commission in 1788 and starting work in September 1789. Like myself, a condition of appointment required a pledge of allegiance to the monarch. While his poetic output was undiminished, he was now on the whole careful either to avoid contentious political issues or to try to ensure that controversial material did not appear over his name. 

Not so Paine, who was in Paris during the winter of 1789-90, seeing for himself and documenting the beginnings of the popular revolution. In January 1790 he wrote enthusiastically to his friend Edmund Burke, intimating that the French Revolution was “certainly a forerunner to other revolutions in Europe”. The reaction from Burke, a supporter of the American Revolution, was unexpected. We now know that he had already been mightily disturbed by Dr Richard Price’s address A Discourse of the Love of Our Country, given at the London Revolution Society on 4 November 1789. Rather than welcoming the new revolutionary movement, Burke denounced it in his vitriolic Reflections on the Revolution in France, published on 1 November1790. This drew from Paine his famous response, Rights of Man, published in two parts, brought together in February 1792, drawing inspiration from France and making the case for the government of the people. Despite huge sales (in Britain alone, 200,000 by 1793), public opinion was divided. Those who ached for reform saw the French National Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens as a most desirable model for Britain; many had found in the American Revolution a prospect for change, and in the French uprising a hope that a new politics might flourish in Europe. Whereas Burke, along with the government and entrenched conservative opinion, viewed the events across the Channel with alarm, dreading the possibility of civil resistance and copycat disturbances; the more so as violence and vengeance escalated in Paris. In May 1792 George III issued a Royal Proclamation against sedition, subversion and riot. In September, Paine, indicted to stand trial on a charge of promulgating seditious libel, and under constant harassment, escaped to France. He was, of course, later tried in his absence, found guilty, and vilified by the ruling establishment. 

Burns was undoubtedly aware of the furore created by Paine’s pamphlet, and sympathetic to the reformist view; but also acutely conscious that as a government officer, needing the salary that went with the job, he must not parade his sentiments. He was careful to require that his poems should bear his name only with his agreement. However, on 30 October 1792 this show of neutrality was severely tested. In the newly opened Theatre Royal at Dumfries, with friends, he was in the pit for a performance of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, also attended by some of Scotland’s elite. When at the end of the play God Save the King was called for, there were shouts from the pit for ca ira, the song of the French revolutionaries. Scuffles accompanied the singing of the national anthem, through all of which Exciseman Burns remained in his seat. 

There could be no real doubt as to where Bums’s heart lay. Four weeks later he wrote to Louise Fontenelle, a touring London actress he admired, offering her an ‘occasional address’ to use on her benefit night on 26 November. The Rights of Woman, published anonymously in The Edinburgh Gazetter on 30 November, all too obviously echoed that of Paine’s notorious, inspirational text. Harmlessly, Burns extolled female rights as those of protection, decorum and admiration; far more interesting, however, are the lines with which he topped and tailed his thoughts:

While Europe’s eye is ftx’d on mighty things,

The fate of empires and the fall of kings;

While quacks of State must each produce his plan,

And even children lisp the Rights of Man;

Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention,

The Rights of Woman merit some attention.

When awful Beauty joins with all her charms,

Who is so rash as rise in rebel arms?

But truce with kings, and truce with constitutions,

With bloody armaments and revolutions,

Let Majesty your first attention summon:

Ah! Ca ira! The Majesty of Woman!

As the year drew to its close, and Burns became more confident of what he believed to be the impending triumph of the British reform movement, he was quite unable to restrain his feelings, giving vent to a ballad, Here’s a Health to Them That’s Awa. This unreservedly raised a series of toasts to reformers over the border. Its message was undisguised:

May Liberty meet wi’ success’

May Prudence protect her frae evil!

May tyrants and Tyranny tine i’ the mist

And wander their way to the Devil!

Here’s freedom to them that wad read,

Here’s freedom to them that would write!

There’s nane ever fear’d that the truth should be heard

But they whom the truth would indite!

And wha wad betray old Albion’s right,

May they never eat of her bread!

Sadly, Burns’s optimism was misplaced. Doubts about his loyalty had been brought to the notice of the Excise Commissioners, who promptly launched an inquiry. Learning of the Board’s misgivings, and fearful of the consequences, Burns wrote on 31 December 1792 to one of the Excise commissioners, Robert Graham of Fintry, to assure him that any such allegation was unfounded, in that he was devoutly attached to the British Constitution “on Revolution principles [i.e the 1688 ‘Glorious Revolution’], next after his God”. Remarkably, Graham promptly responded on 5 January to reassure Bums that his job was safe. And, by return, Bums then replied to the specific allegations, admitting that he had at first been an `senthusiastic votary” of the French Revolution, but had altered his sentiments when France came to show her old avidity for conquest. Some writers have judged that the tone of Bums’ letters was contrite, even abject; that effectively he renunciated his reformist stance. This is certainly the feeling they convey on first reading; but Mcllvanney makes a convincing case that on closer analysis there was no apostasy and no apology. 

Yet the detail of all this is perhaps beside the point: it seems obvious that what kept Bums in his job was his high artistic reputation and good standing, based on the fame his poetry, then as now largely focused on its sentimental, urbane and apolitical content. He was fortunate to have a number of friends and supporters in high places, not least Graham; a relationship that may fairly be judged from a ballad of 1790, which opens with the lines: 

Fintry, my stay in worldly strife, 

Friend o’ my Muse, friend o’ my life, 

The brush with authority has attracted microscopic attention, and certainly made Bums anxious for his future. But it must also be seen in the context of explicit violent agitation in France, where, exactly at this time, Paine was in Paris, passionately — but unsuccessfully – seeking to convince his fellow deputies of the National Convention that Louis XVI should be spared the guillotine. 

The Excise inquiry reminded Bums of the dangerous ground of radical poetry. Indeed, with the execution of Louis on the 21 January 1793 and the French declaration of war on Britain on 1 February, the reform movement as a whole was forced to wake up to the perils of open defiance. For the time being the State’s policy was one of such severe repression as to drive radical opposition into hiding. But at the time of the dramatic Scottish sedition trials of August 1793, Bums could no longer contain his feelings. He ventured three poems, based on the legendary heroics of Robert Bruce, all of which carried parallels, for those who could see them, to the then contemporary challenges to Scottish liberty; as Mcllvanney puts it “the tendency to view one struggle for liberty through the optic of another.” The most famous of the three, sent to trusted friends and published anonymously in The Morning Chronicle on 8 May 1794, is Scots Wha Hae, with its stark call to resist “chains and slavery° Unambiguously, through the words of Bruce, it brings the challenge into Burns’ own time – “Now’s the day, and now’s the hour”- and ends with the appeal from the lips of Bruce: 

Lay the proud usurpers lowl 

Tyrants fall in every foe! 

Liberty’s in every blow! 

Let us do, or die! 

Bums followed this up with an Ode for George Washington’s Birthday, comparing the liberty achieved in America with the political suppression imposed from London. Although he could not then openly publicise his views, this clarion call now reveals the strength of his true feelings: 

But come, ye sons of Liberty, 

Columbia’s offspring, brave as free, 

In danger’s hour still flaming in the van, 

Ye know, and dare maintain, the Royalty of Man! 

Here Bums is no longer the humble bard; there can be no mistaking the contemporary relevance of his historical allusions. 

By this time, Paine had written the first part of his passionate but controversial essay The Age of Reason: being an investigation of true and fabulous theology. The astonishing story of how he took up the subject while fearing for his life is too well known to need repetition; indeed the prefaces to the first and second parts of the eventual book, separated by his incarceration in the Luxembourg prison, largely describe the perilous circumstances that attended its completion and survival. The French Revolution had turned sour. The libertarian principles that had marked its beginning had given way to bloody retribution. Paine, whose name was on the death list, had for many years intended to express his opinions on religion, and felt that he now had no time to lose. Part one appeared during February 1794, and part two, expanding his first thoughts, came out in October 1795. Together they presented the reader with a double paradox: firstly, the essays unequivocally repudiated belief in the Bible as the authentic ‘Word of God’, but by no means repudiated God; secondly, though despising the purveyors and apparatus of organised religion, there was also a recognition that the eradication of Christianity in favour of a revolutionary dogma of equality and liberty could lead the French state towards atheism. As Paine explained at the beginning of his first essay: 

The circumstance that has now taken place in France of the total abolition of the whole national order of priesthood, and of everything appertaining to compulsive systems of religion, and compulsive articles of faith, has not only precipitated my intention, but rendered a work of this kind exceedingly necessary, lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true. 

As usual, Paine wrote with clarity and raw honesty, appealing to reason. He saw the Old Testament as “a history of the grossest vices and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales”, and the so-called ‘New’ Testament as being of doubtful provenance, lacking authenticity, heaping hearsay upon hearsay, and replete with irrational, fabulous inventions and contradictions. While not doubting the existence of Jesus Christ, he regarded him as merely “a virtuous and an amiable man”. On a questionable base of “wild and visionary doctrine”, the church had “set up a system of religion very contradictory to the character of the person whose name it bears…a religion of pomp and revenue, in pretended imitation of a person whose life was humility and poverty.” Nor was this type of construction limited to Christianity. Every national church or religion “had established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals”, each with books which they call ‘revelation’, or the word of God. 

Paine’s own belief was simpler. He believed “in one God, and no more” and hoped for happiness beyond this life. He expressed belief in the equality of man, and argued that religious duties consisted of doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy. He saw God as the compassionate creator, evidenced by creation, whose choicest gift was the gift of reason. In the first part of the essay there is a particularly interesting passage: 

That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology. 

Paine’s polemic excited huge interest, reinforcing those of a radical persuasion, but surely making more enemies than friends. Crucially, in Britain, those in gilded positions in the liaison of established church and state chose to see it only as an assault on cherished beliefs and values, a threat to good order and their own positions. Some, who cannot have read the essays, dubbed Paine an atheist. This he emphatically was not, but he undoubtedly provided his opponents with ammunition to confirm in their eyes his reputation as a disreputable trouble-maker. 

Those who had welcomed the French Revolution as the dawn of a new age clung tenaciously to its original thinking in pursuit of liberty. In 1795, Bums, though still employed in the Excise (acting- up as supervisor at Dumfries), and having felt duty-bound to enlist in the Royal Dumfries Volunteers, nevertheless contrived to write his most celebrated political song. Popularly known as A Man’s a Man for a’ that, it first appeared anonymously in the Glasgow Magazine of August 1795. James Barke, in his edition of Bums’ poems and songs, has aptly described it as “the Marseillaise of humanity”. Disparaging the ‘tinsel show” of rank and title, Bums extols the merits of the honest man of independent mind. As others have noticed, the short verses echo the sentiments of Paine’s Rights of Man, while Marilyn Butler has pointed out that the closing lines closely follow the letter and spirit of the revolutionary song ca Ira!: 

Then let us pray that come it may 

(As come it will for a’ that) 

That Sense and Worth o’er a’ the earth 

Shall bear the gree an’ a’ that! 

For a’ that, an’ a’ that, It’s comin yet for a’ that, 

That man to man the world o’er 

Shall brothers be for a’ that 

Paine struggled on until 1809, adding a number of less well-known studies to his archive, and at the last declining an attempt to have him accept Christ as the Son of God. Bums, like Paine, never surrendered his belief in a benevolent God. He died in 1796, still impoverished but a radical exciseman to the last. There is nothing to suggest that the two men ever met, but there may yet be one unremarked final parallel. Another version of The Liberty Tree, although never quite proved to be the work of Bums, bears the hallmarks of his style. Here then, to close, are the last two verses of eleven:

Wi’ plenty o’ sic trees, I trow

The wand would live in peace, man.

The sword would help to mak’ a plough,

The din o’ war wad cease, man,

Like brethren in a common cause,

We’d on each other smile, man:

And equal rights and equal laws

Wad gladden every isle, man.

Wae worth the loon wha wadna eat

Sic halesome, dainty cheer, man!

I’d gie the shoon frae aff my feet

To taste the fruit o’t here, man!

Syne let us pray, Auld England may

Sure plant this far-famed tree, man:

And blythe we’ll sing, and herald the day

That gives us liberty, man.

Sources:

• James Barke (ed.): Poems and Songs of Robert Bums (Collins, 1960)
• James A Mackay: A Biography of Robert Burns (Mainstream, 1992)
• Robert Crawford: The Bard: Robert Burns, a Biography (Pimlico, 2009)
• Liam Mcllvanney: Burns the Radical: Poetry and Politics in Late Eighteenth Century Scotland (Tuckwell Press, 2002)
• And, of course, the works of Paine and Burns referred to in the text.

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