SPOKESMAN BOOKS
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Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation
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Catalogue
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How to Lose a War
The Spokesman, 90
Bruce
Kuklick (Ed), Thomas Paine, Ashgate International Library of Essays
7546
2490 0 £125.00/$250
0747577684
£12.99
Bruce
Kuklick has assembled an extensive collection of essays on Thomas Paine,
beginning with two significant overviews of the literature, which is clearly
growing at a phenomenal speed. There are as many people who pray Tom Paine in
aid as we can count, and the literature of his detractors, from Edmund Burke
on down, would fill a sizeable library. The two bibliographical essays, by A.
Owen Aldridge and Caroline Robbins, offer an adequate taster of this.
Aldridge
points out that we still lack anything approaching a complete edition of Tom
Paine’s works, in spite of the fact that his writing resonates with sharp
clarity. Paine used a number of pseudonyms, one of which echoes the Miltonic
influence which helped to shape his outlook. Comus made his debut in the Pennsylvania
Packet in March 1779, and brought its fire to bear on Governor Morris who
was to become a perennial target.
Caroline
Robbins begins with Paine’s Quaker tradition: ‘Everyone, he wrote, is
finally his own teacher’. He seldom, she says, ‘allowed five minutes to
pass without seeking some improvement’.
Kuklick’s
book treats on six main subject areas: in addition to its survey of the
literature, it includes a section on Paine’s influence on the history of
political thought, and another on Paine and the ideology of Republicanism.
There is a fourth part on the social history of ideas, and a fifth on the
literary quality of Paine’s writings. The book concludes with two stirring
treatments of Paine’s influence on radical history, by Ian Dyck and Harvey
J. Kaye. Kaye endorses the belief that the study of American radicals should
be essential homework for this generation, because it will give heart to the
victims of the erosion of democracy over the recent past.
Amen
to that: but the really essential homework involves the story of where they
failed, and why …
Kuklick
finishes his anthology with a reference to William Cobbett, who began by
sharing an intense dislike, not to say phobia about the revolutionary Paine,
but became a dedicated acolyte, going so far as to dig up Paine’s bones in
the United States and bring them to England, where he hoped they might receive
a more reverent welcome, possibly interment in a mausoleum.
This
story is taken up by Paul Collins, in The Trouble with Tom, which
records ‘the strange afterlife and times of Thomas Paine’. The story of
the loss of Paine’s bones is a complicated one, and it has given rise to a
macabre book, which does not know the answer. But it finishes with a good
question: ‘Where is Tom Paine? Reader, where is he not?’
James Jones
