By Audrey Williamson
(Arising out of the last TPS Bulletin, Summer 1977)
AS ONE OF Paine’s biographers who did point out not only the dangers of the Excise service through public dislike and evasion of the duties (in particular the tea duties), and also the importance of Paine’s continued association with George Lewis Scott in showing his dismissal was not considered as on serious grounds, I welcome George Hindmarches article and most valuable further discoveries. They support my own theory, based also upon research into the Lewes parish records and the New Shoreham by-election of 1770, that Paine’s political and sociological attitudes were already well-formed before he went to America. The revelation of the widespread and semi-official nature of his attempts at Excise reform reinforces this. The evidence is partly circumstantial, but I am sure Mr. Hindmarch is right in his general thesis.
I would disagree with him to some extent on the nature of the English so-called “mob” riots of the 18th century. Hogarth is not a reliable reflector, for his was, like Draohnsonla, a highly conservative and pro-establishment political point of view, as his savage anti-Wilkes cartoons demonstrate. Paine would have got a far fairer view of the North Briton controversy from the local Lewes journal, and must have been personally associated with Wilkes’ lawyer, Sergeant Glynn, in the New Shoreham election. It is even possible he met Wilkes when Wilkes was received with enthusiasm in Lewes on his tour the same year. More research, I believe, is still possible here into Paine’s English life generally.
As for the Gordon Riots of 1780, the exhaustive researches of Professor George Rude (Paris and London in the 18th Century: Studies in Popular Protest) have demonstrated clearly that these were not only anti-Catholic but also political. No lives were taken by the rioters, and some of the houses between those of politically disliked non-Catholics such as Lord Mansfield. The burning of Newgate was at least partly to release political prisoners. Dickens’ description in Barn & Budge of the “sober workmen” drawn into the riots was therefore a true one; and Wilkes, as a magistrate, in helping to put them down lost the support of a number of City aldermen who were politically involved.
One reason for anti-Catholic feeling was the proposed Catholic Relief Bill, In granting civil rights, would make Catholics eligible for tiro army, thus helping to prolong the now unpopular American War. There was also the usual resentment against poor Irish emigrants undercutting wages.
James Betka in his review of Eric Loner’s book, Tom Paine and Revolution in America, is equally wrong in suggesting Hogarth’s notorious Gin Lame illustrates the life of London’s ‘Everyman.’ The dregs of the poor, especially as depicted by the cartoonist, are never representative of the main body even of a working class, and the weavers, tailors and other artisans who formed committees. Throughout the 18th century were, like Paine’s Excise petitions, part of incipient trade unionism, and their protest not always as riotous as the government liked to present.
There is still such that might be learned about influences on Paine while in London as well as Lewes, but Professor Betka’s theory that Paine was largely repeating (or indeed had read) the many sources among political writers he mentions seems to me untenable, and certainly unproved. He denied reading even Locke, and his own style in general is very different from the North Briton, whose scurrilous tone he probably did know well. Basically, although be makes mistakes on the English radical movement (naming Major Cartwright as the most “revolutionary’ of its exponents and not seeming aware of the far more radical Dr. John Jebb), and overstates the case of Paine’s artisan connections as opposed to his middle class ones, I believe Professor Loner is right that Paine did forge a literary style direct enough to reach the people, both American and English, in a way his political theorist or satirist predecessors had never done, some cartoonists accepted. The proof is not only the widespread sale and influence of Common Sense, but the way Rights of Man, far more than the works of any other 18th century writer, penetrated the London revolutionary societies, including the working-class London Corresponding Society, and the later Chartist movement.
The point is Paine was a born writer, with the clarity of expression and picturesque grasp of imagery missing from most writers of political and economic theory, and I suspect Professor Betka’s own prose and economic analyses would have been largely unintelligible to him.
Of course it is true that any writer, in particular a political writer, assimilates and reflects the ideas current in his time; and the influence of those In the 18th century, as I have often pointed out, reached right back to the Levellers and English deists, as well as the French philosophers, Paine’s originality in presenting and developing these ideas, with practical suggestions as to their implementation, and imaginative us of language still remain.
It is a pity if Professor Betka’s review of some of Loner’s theories prevents Paineites from reading Loner’s book, for it does, for the English reader, present many little-known facts about Paine’s Philadelphia associates and environment that could not but have had sane influence on his attitude and American writings. The references to Paine, as Professor Betka points out, hardly justify his prominent position in the book’s title, but Erik Loner has presented an interesting, well-researched social background picture which cannot be ignored in Paine’s development, any more than his English backgrounds can be ignored.
Professor Betka himself makes an often-repeated but quite unprovable assumption when he says only Paine’s “English enemies” called him “Tom.” Late in the 19th century, a British socialist workman objected to the diminutive as deliberately downgrading Paine’s status as man and writer, and thus seems to have started this myth; but there is evidence at least some friends in his own time used “Tom* affectionately, and indeed it is inconceivable that anyone christened Thomas, at any period in this country, could avoid this.
As my own book on the Pre-Raphaelites, reviewed in the same issue of the Bulletin, points out, although Paine’s works seem to have by-passed later middle class socialist writers such as Ruskin and Carlyle, and William Morris shoved no particular awareness of him, some knowledge of Paine’s works probably reached Morris in the end, through old Chartists who attended his lectures at working class meetings, and through Walter Crane, his Kelmscott Press assistant. Crane had been an apprentice of the Chartist engraver, W.J. Linton, who in 1842 wrote a brief life of Paine.
I cannot agree with J.A. Hadwick that Morris was essentially a “middle-class” socialist: his Marxist dedication was total and he associated with working-class socialists on their own level, in a way that divided him from the Fabians and other intellectuals in the rising Labour movement. Dr. E.P. Thompson and Morris’ latest Marxist biographer, Jack Lindsay, as well as associates of Morris at the time, make this quite clear.
I hope, too, Miss Hadrick in her generous review of my book does not really intend to suggest that I maintain the Pre-Raphaelite mid-Victorian revolt was the first in the world of art. Both my book on Paine and this new one, Artists and Writers in Revolt, mention Blake’s radical rebellion. He was, of course, a major influence on the Pre-Raphaelites, who did much to revive his reputation, as they also revived that of Keats.
Finally, Gordon Hone is wrong to perpetuate the legend that Paine “fled” from England in September, 1792, and was thereafter offered the Calais deputyship in the new French Convention. In fact, as Rickman’s biography and French evidence make clear, Paine was offered four deputyships, of which he chose Calais, and the French government representative Audibert came over to England to accompany him. There is no indication at all that these offers were made to help Paine avoid the December trial, In fact the French districts also voted deputyships to Dr. Joseph Priestley and other known foreign sympathisers with the Revolution. It does appear the English police agents got wind of Paine’s intended departure and naturally tried to stop him; they turned up at Rickman’s house after he had gone.
As I remarked in my biography, Paine, confronted with the French offers, made a sensible choice in accepting in all the circumstances. There is no evidence at all that he would otherwise have attempted to avoid the trial; and indeed later he expressed doubts about the wisdom of his decision, for it did ultimately affect his reputation in England.
With regard to Paine’s imprisonment in the Luxembourg, this was not as a direct result of his voting (with many others) against the execution of Louis XVI but because after the outbreak of war with England all British subjects were incarcerated as enemy aliens (Mary Wollstonecraft’s American lover registered her at the American Embassy as his wife so that she could avoid this). Paine then and later based his appeal on the strong protest that he was no longer a British but an American subject: a fact denied by the then royalist American representative in Paris, Paine’s enemy Gouverneur Morris. When James Monroe succeeded Morris, Paine’s release was soon obtained; but later in America he was once infamously denied the right to vote because he was not, it was claimed, an American citizen!
It is necessary to make this clear because the English claim that Paine was a “traitor” had no substance in Paine’s own mind. He always, after emigration in 1774, looked on himself as an American citizen. Once the War of Independence was ended no other English emigrant who had fought in the War, to my knowledge, was accused of being a “traitor” to his country of origin. But Paine was a dangerous political writer and the ‘traitor” myth is maintained in certain Establishment historical circles to this day, although the official accusation even at his trial was merely of “seditious libel” (i.e. a censorship matter).