Author: Paine, Thomas
Biography:
PAINE, Thomas (1737-1809: ODNB)
Although poetry played a negligible part in the career of one of the most successful political pamphleteers of all time, Paine's notoriety meant that any product of his pen was of interest and marketable. He was born in Thetford, the son of Frances (Cocke) and Joseph Pain (sic); his father was a Quaker stay-maker and tenant farmer. Paine is said to have composed at least one poem as a child but his schooling ended when he became his father's apprentice at the age of twelve. After his first wife, Mary Lambert, whom he married in 1759, died in childbirth in 1760, he trained to be an exciseman like her father. He was accepted into the service in 1762. For a short period between posts (1766-8) he taught school in London, but from 1768 to 1774 he settled in Lewes, where he joined a debating club, met his future biographer Thomas "Clio" Rickman (q.v.), and married (1771) Elizabeth Ollive. He wrote his first political pamphlet, calling for better conditions for excisemen, in 1772, but the campaign failed--as did his marriage. In 1774, he was dismissed from the excise service and formally separated from his wife. He was also struggling with debts. He left England to start a new life in America. In Philadelphia he was employed by the Pennsylvania Magazine and became caught up in the movement for American independence. The first of many pamphlets articulating his anti-monarchical democratic views was Common Sense (1775). During the Revolution he was active as a polemicist and field correspondent; his efforts were rewarded with the grant of a farm at New Rochelle NY and a cash payment with which he purchased another property in Bordentown NJ. After the War he turned to a project for a single-span bridge. When it was not taken up in America, he carried his design first to France, where it was promoted by Jefferson and Lafayette in Paris; then to England, where he took out a patent and had a prototype constructed. The French Revolution interrupted negotiations. Paine's pamphlet response to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France was The Rights of Man (1791), followed by a Part Two in 1792. Cheap editions of the work circulated widely in Britain; Jacobin societies sprang up; Paine was charged with seditious libel and fled to France. There he was given honorary French citizenship and made a deputy to the National Convention where, however, his speeches were ineffective: he had little or no French, so they had to be translated, and in any case, by this stage in the Revolution, his views were not radical enough for the Convention. He backed the wrong faction, was imprisoned in December 1793, and was not released until late in 1794 when the American authorities finally intervened on his behalf. Before his incarceration, he had published The Age of Reason, an overt attack on organized religion. After the Peace of Amiens in 1802 he returned to the US but burnt his bridges with pamphlets attacking Washington. He was increasingly frail and impecunious, but he was assisted by friends in New York, where he found lodgings. The wife of a Paris friend, Marguerite de Bonneville, rented a house and cared for him in his final days. In his last will, he left her most of his estate for the education of her sons. The Quakers rejected his request for burial in their grounds, so he asked to be--and was--buried on his New Rochelle farm, but in 1819 William Cobbett (q.v.) disinterred his bones and took them back to Britain, where they were ultimately lost. (ODNB 8 June 2020)