Abstract
Thomas Paine was an Englishman, born in Thetford, Norfolk, on 29 January 1737.1 After a varied but unsuccessful career as staymaker teacher, shopkeeper and exciseman, he emigrated to the new world in 1774. During the American war of independence he earned some fame and some reward by his political writings, particularly Common Sense (1776) and The Crisis, a series of articles published between 1776 and 1783. In these writings he already uses most of the ideas that were to reappear in Rights of Man.
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References
For Paine’s life see Aldridge, Man of Reason (1960), and Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine (1892).
See Paine’s Epistle to Quakers,published as an Appendix to the third edition of Common Sense, The Writings, I,121–126.
See FALK, “Thomas Paine, Deist or Quaker?”; and Clark, “An Historical Interpretation of Thomas Paine’s religion.”
Paine was guilty of the not uncommon practice of “stamping,” i.e. passing goods which he had not actually inspected.
Like Paine, Rickman was a radical republican and deist. His children were named “Paine,” “Washington,” “Franklin,” “Rousseau,” “Petarch” and “Volney.”
The offer was, however, refused. See Minute Book of the Society at Public Record Office, London: T.S. 11/962 f. 146.
See such publications as Dulany, Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies (1763); Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies A sserted and Proved (1764); Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1767-1768).
This title covers seventeen papers published by Paine in the Pennsylvania Journal between 1776 and 1784. The Writings, I, 168-380.
See Paine’s letters in Pennsylvania Packet,Dec. 1778; Meng, “The Constitutional Theories of Thomas Paine,” 298-299.
See Paine’s account of this episode in Rights of Man (Ev.), 224, note; The Writings, II, 464, note.
See the Minute Book of the society in the Public Record Office, T.S. 11/961, f. 168.
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© 1963 Springer Science + Business Media B.V.
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Fennessy, R.R. (1963). Thomas Paine: The Man and His Ideas 1737–1790. In: Burke, Paine, and the Rights of Man. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-3637-0_2
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