Tom Paine
The Greatest Exile
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- $48.99
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- $48.99
Publisher Description
First published in 1985. In the late autumn of 1774 at the age of 37 Tom Paine arrived in Philadelphia. Eighteen months later he had established himself as a seminal figure in the Independence movement. It was the start of a career in which he became the first US Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; was outlawed from England by Pitt for the publication of the second part of the Rights of Man; delivered a final plea for the life of Louis XVI in the National Convention of 1794; was imprisoned in the Luxembourg, and sentenced to death by Robespierre. After a sad and lonely death in New Rochelle Cobbett brought back his bones to England: ‘to light a taper for liberty.’
Yet Paine remains a man without a past; a man who seemingly burst on the world scene as a full-blown radical at 37 years of age. No one had attempted to explore and interpret the critical, shaping influences of his early and middle life. Yet such background is crucial to explaining all the rest. Without a clear understanding of his Quaker inheritance; of his childhood years in Thetford; of his early philosophical and political apprenticeship in London; and of the six formative years he spent at Lewes, the later man and his radicalism are totally incomprehensible.
Thus, the author’s objective is to place Paine in his times; to interpret the evolution of his political, social and theological ideas. Paine is little more than a cardboard cut-out moving through history in the majority of biographies that have already been published.
This book sees the world through Paine’s own eyes and provides a human interpretation not only of ‘the Age of Revolution’ but also of ‘the maker of revolutions’ himself. To Napoleon, Paine was the man to whom: ‘a statue in gold should be erected in every town’; to Theodore Roosevelt he was ‘that filthy little atheist’; to Michael Foot: ‘the greatest exile that has ever left England’s shores.’ To understand the thinking of a man who can provoke such reactions, it is necessary to understand both the man and the times through which he lived. This title will be of great interest to students of history, politics, and philosophy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Focusing on the first 37 years of the controversial Englishman's life, before he came to Philadelphia in 1774, British journalist Powell traces the origins of Paine's radical politics. While the biography also encompasses the familiar period of Paine's career, spent fueling the American and French independence movements with his writingswhich led to his being outlawed in England and imprisoned in Francethe author devotes a major portion of his monograph to recreating Paine's backgrounda period of transition Power considers analogous to our own. He depicts the contrasts between private affluence and public squalor which deeply affected Paine's thinking. War service and years as an excise officer in London and the provinces, and his readings of Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau and Burke, further aroused his revolutionary and egalitarian inclinations and led to his emigration to the Colonies under Franklin's auspices. A year after his arrival, Paine wrote Common Sense. Illustrations not seen by PW. December 30