The Trouble with Tom

by Paul Collins

Well, perhaps the Bns aren't there now, but they were—one could have considered them an additional Per. Detail, I suppose.

  I stroll back down across Bedford Square, dodging a near-invisible nighttime cyclist. This was where the bones wound up, returned to London once again. By 1844 Normandy Farm was failing, and George West forced to hire himself out as a day laborer. He decided to rent a cottage over on Glazier Lane, and with the move and the sorting through all his possessions . . . there they were. He'd been sitting on the box of bones for nine long years. His receivership had ended in 1839, but with no instruction ever given to him, the bones had simply fallen into his own lap: he was stuck with them. It hardly seemed like something he'd want to keep around in his old age.

  Cobbett had always wanted Paine to have a proper burial, after all—even in 1821, when the bones had long become an embarrassment, he announced that "in due time they shall be deposited in a place and in a manner that are suitable to the mind that once animated the body . . . If I should die before this should be accomplished, those will be alive that will perform the sacred duty in my stead." But many of those who had been alive had died within just the past few years. Cobbett's old accomplice Benbow had been thrown in prison for sedition in 1840 and died six months later. Richard Carlile, still living across the street from Bolt Court, died there of bronchitis in 1843, making trouble to the very end; when a clergyman began to read a standard eulogy at his burial, Carlile's family and friends loudly protested against such "priestcraft" and pointedly turned their backs as the insistent reverend finished the service. And as for those Cobbetts still living? Well, Cobbett's son wanted nothing to do with the bones anymore. Didn't even want to talk about them.

  But West recalled Cobbett's old secretary, Ben Tilly, from back when the fellow was at Normandy Farm. He seemed like someone who might get the bones properly buried; and so, in March 1844, West sent the bones down to Tilly at 13 Bedford Square. It was a sensible decision: a few sympathetic souls were still to be found down in this neighborhood. Soon enough after the bones arrived, Carlile's old shopman James Watson came by, wondering what would be done with them. And indeed just on this very square lived Thomas Wakley, Cobbett's old friend from The Lancet. Ben Tilly and Wakley were old acquaintances, and now neighbors as well. Wakley had worked for years in close quarters with Paine's bones; he'd surely know what to do with them. Perhaps they could be donated to science! Why not? Carlile had done it: before his burial, he'd had his body dissected for science, with Lancet witnesses in attendance. And then, too, Wakley had recently been elected Coroner. Yes, if there was a man in London who could dispose of human remains, it was Thomas Wakley.

  But no.

  Tilly . . . Tilly didn't know what to do, redy. He was a happily married, kind, gentle, perhaps indecisive fellow—not like his fire-breathing old boss had been—and with Cobbett gone he'd drifted back into work as an itinerant London tailor. And as to where to put Paine, returned after all these years . . . well . . . He was busy as it was. He was struggling just to get by. In fact, he needed some kind of stool at work, something to park himself on as he pinned up pant legs and chalked inseams. And now on top of everything else he needed a way to guard these bones. Until the idea hit him . . . that nice wooden box they were in . . .

  Why . . . not . . . sit on it?

  I think you'll agree that the sight of people hurled off the top of St. Paul's and sent screaming through the air seems an odd way to benefit London schizophrenics. But that is indeed what they were doing not too long ago here in Queen's Head Passage. It was a charity event, of course: they had a zip wire strung from the cathedral dome and down into the street. But long before all that, this passage was where James Watson kept his bookstore. Tilly was still over on Bedford Square fitting customers with clothing, propping their feet onto a box that—unknown to them—put their toes just inches away from the face of Tom Paine. But Carlile's old shopman kept checking in on the tailor, just to make sure the bones hadn't been lost again. Watson even put out a pamphlet, A Brief Histoy of the Remains of the Late Thomas Paine, and ended it with the simple hope that Tilly would get around to burying Tom.

  None of the old passage is left now, except for the perfect cross-section of the transept and dome of St. Paul's Cathedral that fills one entire end of the street. It's a modern business neighborhood now of workers leaving the BT Building and suits drinking over in the Paternoster pub. But for centuries this was a street of stationers and booksellers. In the 1850s you could find Watson over in number 3, welcoming customers to his stock of radical pamphlets and books. For years he'd lived the simple, ascetic life of a Quaker activist—-running co-op store, sleeping on a sofa in the back room behind his bookstore counter, cooking his own lonely bachelor meals, and printing and binding his publications entirely by himself. He dressed simply and still addressed people with the traditional Quaker thee and thou. But he'd become a little more domestic now, having finally gotten married well into his thirties-his honeymoon was spent in prison for selling The Poor Man's Guardian—and now he and his wife Ellen worked together, printing up Thomas Paine tracts and hand-stitching them. Strolling out of his shop, he'd turn and face the irony of it all: the great looming mass of St. Paul's, home of the largest crypt in Europe. And still Paine went unburied.

  It was money, always money, that shook the bones loose from their owners. First the Cobbetts lost them in a bankruptcy auction to their neighbor George West. Then West, fallen on hard times and moving off his farm, had dumped them into the lap of Ben Tilly. And now . . . well, by 1853 Tilly was broke too. The tailor's employer had gone under and his wife had died: Tilly fell upon hard times, and at length his goods went to an auctioneer over on Rathbone Place. An onlooker in the saleroom might have noticed a curiously familiar face bidding from the crowd-a plainly dressed Quaker, his fingers stained with printer's ink and callused from folding and stitching. Going once . . . Going twice . . . Sold! Down came the hammer. The unassuming gentleman made his way through the crowd, paid for the wooden box, and then disappeared into the crowded streets of London.

  The travels of Thomas Paine, it seemed, might finally be coming to an end. But an ocean away, they were only just beginning.

  THERE

  The Talking Heads

  THERE HE IS !

  The novelist leaned forward and looked over the crowd that packed into a Philadelphia lecture hall. They'd come out on a cold winter night in January 1852, wondering what would come next from the excitable Mr. George Lippard. His hell-raising tale The Quaker City was America's best-selling novel until Uncle Tom's Cabin came along, and it had portrayed their hometown as so wicked that the earth opened up to boil the inhabitants alive: "It withered their eyeballs; it crisped the flesh on their bones, like the bark peeling from the log before the flame." Featuring a murderous pimp who runs a den beneath a desanctified church, his Quaker City played like a nineteenth-century slasher flick: death, destruction, and comeuppance for the horny and greedy. And his book was, Lippard proudly claimed, "more attacked, and more read, than any work of American fiction ever published." When a stage version of this sepia-tone manga was to debut on Chestnut Street, an angry mob shut down the theater before a single performance by threatening to torch the place—a potent threat, given that the mob was led by the mayor.

  But tonight in Philadelphia, the shock novelist had something else on his mind.

  "It is my object, tonight, to do simple justice to a real hero of the American Revolution," he told the hushed crowd. He bid them to cast their imaginations only a few blocks down over the snow-covered streets and rooftops, and deep into the past, back to January 1776; to a man who now had no monument, no memorial in their city, and no friends among their respectable gentry and clergy.

  "Let us look into that garret window," Lippard bid the crowd, "—what do you see there? A rude and neglected room, a little man in a brown coat sitting beside an old table, with scattered sheets of paper all around him, the light of an unsnuffed candle upon his brow, that unfai
ling quill in his hand."

  Lippard—a man who wrote with fire and speed—paused to consider his hero Thomas Paine, whose volcanic writing hid a painfully labored process of composition.

  "Ah, my friends," he continued, "you may talk to me of the sublimity of your battle, whose poetry is bones and skulls: but for me there is no battle so awfully sublime as this one now being fought before our eyes. A poor, neglected author, sitting in his garret—the world, poverty, time, and space, all gone from him . . . Go on, brave author, sitting in a garret alone at this dead hour, go on, on through the silent hours, on, and God's blessings fall like breezes of June upon a damp brow, on and on, for you are writing the thoughts of a nation into birth."

  Three times he, George Lippard, had tried to have this man's portrait hung in Independence Hall: and three times he had been denied. Decades before, no church would bury the infidel Paine. Now no city father would recognize him either. 'Who would not sooner be Thomas Paine there before the bar of Jesus," Lippard thundered to the crowd, "with all his virtues and errors about him, than one of those misguided bigots who refused his bones a grave? Think of the charity of Jesus before you answer." And with that stunning challenge, the most controversial novelist in the country ended his lecture.

  A zealous writer on the subject of the Founding Fathers, Lippard had single-handedly created the iconic myth that the Liberty Bell cracked while ringing out news of the Declaration. Now, thanks to Lippard, it was Paine's turn for glory: he flooded back into the market in new editions, and America's most disgracefully neglected Founding Father was recalled from oblivion.

  But up in New York, a much stranger resurrection was transpiring. I had no choice in the matter, claimed one minister from Rochester in the weeks after Lippard's speech. The spirit of the dead man had taken control of the Reverend Charles Hammond: "I would take my pen, and place myself in the attitude of writing, when all thought and care would be wholly abstracted from my mind. As my thoughts vanished, my hand would begin to move, and a word would be written. Then I would know what the word was." Soon customers wandering into the Fowler & Wells bookstore in Manhattan found these very same words published in a clothbound volume. For seventy-five cents, you could hear a dead man talk:

  In the progress of the mind to the unseen world, there is no wonder within the range of human perception, analogous to transition of the spirit in what is called death. I will relate the incidents of my experience . . .

  An unusual promise, to say the least. And even more unusual when you saw the title page:

  Light From the Spirit World

  The Pilgrimage of Thomas Paine

  and others,

  to the Seventh Circle

  in

  the Spirit World.

  Lippard's listeners no longer needed to imagine their Man in the Brown Coat: Thomas Paine had come back from the dead to tell his own story.

  I pace Broadway, imagining the faces staring out from the storefront of Paine's newest publisher. The skulls and plaster busts were arranged in an arc so that as you walked by the window the heads were always gazing out at you, both as you came and went past the store at 308 Broadway. Look up, and you would see the building's weatherbeaten facade, cracking away to reveal bits of plaster and exposed structural ribbing; staring down from above the doorway were two more mighty faces rendered in stone. Along the top of the store, a grand sign proclaimed FOWLER &WELLSP,HRENOLOGISTS &PUBLISHERS.

  It's all gone now. The whole block is gone. The immense wholesale clothier shop of Carter, Kirtland & Company the grand sweeping staircases of the International Hotel, the white marble edifices owned by the Astors—all gone. Birds are crapping on the concrete, and plastic bags are rustling in the puny trees. What was once a thriving block of Broadway is now the Federal Plaza, an airless expanse with the brutalist monolith of the Federal Building at its center. I am utterly alone: even in these paranoid times, there are no security guards to be seen. You could imagine yourself in the empty heart of an emptied city here. Bordering one side of the plaza is a little street sign, looking impotent out here on a lonely Sunday, proclaiming itself AVENUE OF THE STRONGEST.

  But 150 years ago this was an avenue of the weakest—the infirm—the doomed since birth. It was the avenue of the self-doubting and the self-seeking; where concrete bomb barriers stand now, signs once beckoned hypochondriacs inside. But it was also where you'd find America's most expansive poet pondering human destiny, and gazing upon all the varieties of Manhattan humanity. If you cared about changing the world, or simply about buying a grinning cat skull for a shiny quarter—and both pursuits had their fans—then 308 Broadway was where you went.

  I walk across the plaza, trying to imagine where the store's entrance might have been in the 1850s. Skulls here; consultation rooms back there; books over here? But it's hard to picture it now. Nothing here; nothing back there; nothing over here. But I suppose the entrance would have been somewhere right around there. It's entombed under this slab of concrete. You'd push a door open—a little brass bell ringing to announce your entry—and inside the bookshelves and displays would stretch breathtakingly back. Hundreds of plaster heads gazed out of the recesses, their eyes closed and expressions relaxed in the calm of death. Curatorial notes and pamphlets accompanied each.

  Bly, Frederick.Blind, yet with large order and locality he was able to keep a bookstore with success. . . The cast shows very small color, as without sight that organ cannot be cultivated. Died in 1857.

  Hunt, Miss S.Large language, number and order. She would count her stitches when knitting, and her steps when walking.

  John.A Chinaman, thejrst one seen in America; brought by Dr. Parker, a missionary, in 1839.

  Wilson, George. Colored. Hung at White Plains, NY; July 25, 1856 for the murder of Captain Palmer, of the schooner Endora Imogene, and the alleged murder of the mate, after which he scuttled the vessel at City Island, in Long Island Sound. . . he declined to tell the place of his birth, or given any history of himself We attended the execution, and took the cast of his head.

  Some heads scarcely needed a label: there was Washington's, and over here was Napoleon's. Still others had never borne any name at all: "Excessive Digestion (Name Lost)'' was all one head had to say for itself.

  Here were polished plaster busts of ideal heads—"Varnished Easily Cleanable! Decided Ornamental."—each one dotted and phrenologically notated. Over there were skeletons, "wired and hung, ready for use" for a mere $30; over there were life-sized, gorgeously detailed French anatomical wax mannequins, each filled with a full and uncensored complement of removable organs, painstakingly colored and textured to visceral perfection, yours for a princely $950. And gazing out upon it all in the store was a curiously familiar face. It was the very plaster visage once cast by Jarvis on Paine's deathbed. Wander past it and the pyramidal display of animal skulls, and there were shelves of innumerable books for sale—fifteen-cent copies of Elements of Animal Magnetism and Essay on Wages Showing the Necessity of a Workingman's Tariff; muslin-bound volumes of The Philosophy of Electrical Psychology and Human Rights and Their Political Guaranties; ghostly octavos of Supernal Theology and Thomas Paine's posthumous memoirs.

  I open them up in my hand. Light frm the Spirit World is a pretty odd book, and not least because the Library of Congress dryly lists its author as 'Thomas Paine (Spirit)." Dying, according to—well, let's just call him Toms—turns out to be fairly straightforward stuff: it passes with little fanfare. As he lies in his deathbed in New York City in 1809, the first indication that Paine's number is up is the arrival of an unnamed lost love, a girl who had died when they were both in their youth. "Nothing but the form of marriage was wanting to make us one in the sight of the world," he muses; she leads him from his bedside through the portal of death itself. There he meets William Penn and is reunited with Franklin and Washington; they pass through circle after circle of heavenly purification. Fortunately, readers of Hammond's book have some help in visualizing the seven circles of heaven, sin
ce he includes an illustration of. . . um, seven circles. Within these circles there is endless Socratic dialogue, with Paine confronted by the same issue again and again: whether the violence he helped unleash upon the country was in fact justified.

  "I have seen war," one spirit snaps. "I have seen the causes of war. I never saw a cause of war equal in wrong to the war. No cause, which hitherto has produced war, has ever been so wretched for minds to bear, as the evils of war . . . Thou hast no right to wrong thy neighbor, even though he may be thy enemy." In the afterlife's absolute reckoning of sin, arguments about sovereignty don't hold much currency against the fundamental crime of violence.

  Back in the earthly realm, the corporeal Tom—let us call him Tom,, with subscript to indicate his burial—this Tom fares little better. Toms atches a grave dug for Tom,, while listening in on a philosophical gravedigger: "Ah!"opines the fellow between shovelfuls of dirt. 'There are many who respect the talents of the dead, but few who care for the living." But there is no respect left for Tom,, even in death. His body is stiffening, his corpse cold and unwanted. A clergyman duly mumbles over Tom,, without much enthusiasm, about how "There is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again."

  It had better: publishers would need the paper someday. Toms, the Reverend Hammond claimed, already had a sequel in the works.

  Set down Paine's ghostly tome and walk father back in Fowler &Wells, and a large sign directs you toward the consultation room:

  Phrenology

  Right

  In the Rear

  If anyone sniggered at the wording, it has been politely ignored by history. But a steady stream of customers came in each day, in search of self-knowledge, in search of understanding and hope. For phrenology, as first formulated in the 1790s, claimed that the human brain grew and atrophied with use, and that thought itself was a tangible physical process. Phrenologists carefully mapped which mental functions corresponded with which different parts of the brain and matched them with dozens of physical parameters of the skull.