Thomas Paine - The Thomas Paine Reader

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This collection first published 1987
19

Collection, introduction and annotation copyright Michael Foot
and Isaac Kramnick, 1987
All rights reserved

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978-0-14-193775-5

In Number VII of his American Crisis, addressed in 1778 To the People of England, Thomas Paine described his feelings on arriving in America four years earlier. An unknown Englishman of thirty-seven undistinguished years, he was plunged into tumultuous Philadelphia:

I happened to come to America a few months before the breaking out of hostilities The world could not then have persuaded me that I should be either a soldier or an author But when the country, into which I had just set my foot, was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir. It was time for every man to stir.

Few men have stirred as much as Paine would in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

Thomas Paine was born in the country town of Thetford, Norfolk, on 29 January 1737. His father, Joseph Paine, was a respected Quaker staymaker, his mother the daughter of an attorney. Tom was raised a Quaker and schooled in the village from his sixth to his thirteenth year. In 1750 he was apprenticed to his fathers shop, where he learned the trade of making womens corsets and inserting their steel or whalebone ribs. He ran away from home at the age of sixteen and went to sea on a merchant ship only to be brought back by his father. Three years later he left Thetford for good.

Staymaking was his trade. In 1757 he turned up in London as a journeyman staymaker and a year later in Dover. He then moved on to the small village of Sandwich on the coast, where he opened a shop of his own. There he met and married, in 1759, Mary Lambert, a maid in service to the local woollen drapers wife. It was a short-lived marriage, for she died the next year. Two years later Paine abandoned staymaking and started a new career as exciseman, a customs official assigned to collect the internal duties levied on beverages, tobacco and other household items. For the next few years he was assigned to Lincolnshire. In 1765 he lost his job because he had stamped goods that he had not, in fact, examined. A one-year return to staymaking in the village of Diss in Norfolk was followed by some months teaching English in London and several more as tutor and itinerant preacher. Paine was reinstated in the Excise Service in 1768 and assigned to Lewes in Sussex, where he remained for the next six years.

Throughout these itinerant years Paine pursued a disciplined regimen of selfeducation. He bought books and scientific equipment from his meagre earnings and attended lectures whenever possible. Having settled down in Lewes at the age of thirtyone, he turned to politics, business and family. He became a regular at the White Hart social club where national and parish politics were the constant topics of conversation. Contemporaries later noted what a joy it was to hear young Tom Paine take on the town officers in debate after a few beers. It was a reputation that would haunt Paine all his life. In addition to politics and drink Paine devoted a good deal of the time left over from his official excise duties to a snuff, tobacco and grocery business. He had little head for business and the shop fared poorly. He also remarried in Lewes. His second wife was the daughter, ten years his junior, of the former owner of his shop. In April 1774 the business failed. The marriage did no better; he and his second wife were permanently separated.

There was one important and enduring achievement in those six years in Lewes, however. Paine found his first cause and he threw himself into it with the same zeal that he would later bring to the American and French revolutions. Excise officers throughout Britain were seeking higher salaries in the 1770s and in 1772 Paine drafted a pamphlet, The Case of the Officers of Excise, to make their case. He went so far as to spend a winter in London distributing copies to Members of Parliament. The cause failed, too, but Paine was in print, and his appetite for social reform had been whetted. The six months in London lost him his job in the excise service, however; he was dismissed in 1774 for having left his post.