The Trouble with Tom

by Paul Collins

  But even these debunkers can slip. Holyoake mentions "Amasa Woodsworth," and identifies him as an engineer who lived next door to Paine in his last days. But an examination of the 1810 New York Census Index finds an Amasa Woodworth (no s) living there. This reveals a rather less random pattern of friendships during Paine's final days than one might have previously thought, as Woodworth was involved in the development of Daniel French's oscillating steam engine, which French patented in 1809.

  So much for friends: now for enemies. The first Paine biography, Francis Oldys's Life of Thomas Pain, the Author of The Rights of Man, With a Defense $His Writings (London, 1791), was nothing of the sort: it was written by the scholar George Chalmers under a pseudonym, and very ingeniously mixed diligent research and newly discovered facts (it is to Chalmers that we owe most of our understanding of Paine's early life in Britain) with outright slander. A similar approach was adopted just weeks after Paine's death by James Cheetham for his 1809 biography The Lifeof Thomas Paine. Cheetham and Paine were former colleagues who had turned bitter enemies; Paine was about to sue Cheetham for libel when he died, and Cheetham lost a separate libel suit over this book. But Chee-tham did indeed contact many of Paine's friends and neighbors, and—though his quotations from them are utterly misleading his identtfication of the people and places frequented by Paine remain invaluable. Hostile biographies since then—Cobbett's edition of Oldys, for example, or John Harford's Some Account of the Life;, Death, and Principles of Thomas Paine (1819)-are almost all rehashings of Oldys and Cheetham.

  I suppose you want to know about the drinking.

  Sure, they all do. Whether Tom Paine was a drunk is a perennial concern of biographers. Cheetham made much of this in his hostile biography. Leaving aside whether it matters—since it doesn'e—I would guess that Paine was a social drinker most of his life, but that he did indeed drink heavily in his final years. Considering that he was dying in an age before painkillers, it's hard to see why he shouldn't have drunk heavily. The clearest evidence comes in a letter by Thomas Haynes, dated October 30,1807, and now in the Robert Hunter Correspondence file at the New York Public Library. (Elihu and Mary Palmer's letters about Paine are also in this file.) Haynes makes clear his anger over Cheetham's attacks and his regard for Paine while also noting Paine's drinking. The wording seems to indicate that this was a new development. Unlike Paine's print biographers, all of whom had an ax to grind for or against him, Haynes's letter is both private and by a friend of Paine's and thus far more believable.

  It is also Haynes's letter that notes Walking Stewart's visit to New York City, and the fear that he had drowned in a shipwreck. In fact, Stewart survived and indeed prospered. After a period of poverty—Thomas De Quincey hesitated to visit him at his quarters, because he didn't want the gracious Stewart to feel obliged to offer scarce tea or bread—Stewart won a spectacular legal claim against the Nabob of Arcot in 1813. He recovered aL14,000 award that enabled him to live out his remaining years on Northumberland Street surrounded by a salon of literary and musical friends, and enjoying a massive organ he had installed in his apartment, which was the only instrument capable of blasting through his deafness. Stewart left an extraordinary collection of books and pamphlets in the British Library; my references were largely drawn from the entertainingly odd Revelation of Nature (1794). Stewart's life cries out for a scholar to write his biography, but until then the primary accounts come from The Life and Adventures of the Celebrated Walking Stewart (1822) and particularly the profile in volume I11 of The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey (1890).

  For Paine's other great colorful friend of these years, see Harold E. Dickson's John Wesley Jamis, American Painter 1780-1840: With a Checklist His Works (1949). Jarvis was prolific, and a great many of his paintings turn up with dealers and museums; in fact, the same year Dickson published his book, the long-lost 1806/7 Jarvis portrait of Paine was discovered.

  But Jarvis's cartoon of a Quaker abandoning Paine scarcely hinted at the tensions that Paine's awkward burial request played upon. H. Larry Ingle's Quakers in Conflict: The Hicksite Reformation (1998), Henry Wilbur's The Life and Labors of Elias Hicks (1910), give a sense of how Paine's death came just as modern liberal Quakerism was coalescing, and Walt Whitman's "Notes (Such as They Are) Founded On Elias Hicks" appears in his 1888 newspaper column collection November Bough. Ironically, Elias Hicks also went to an unquiet grave: the Niles Weekly Register of April 10, 1830, reveals that an artist, unsuccessful in asking the Friends to take a death mask of Hicks, secretly exhumed him and made one. The Friends, suspicious when they saw the ground disturbed, dug Hicks up and found bits of plaster still stuck to his hair.

  In describing the past dwellings of Paine in his final days, I was greatly helped by the New York Times archive. There are a number of hints about 309 Bleecker Street; ads for the Lee & Co. window screen company ran throughout the 1850s, a January 29, 1876, article on 'The Birthday of Thomas Paine" identifies it as "a beer and billiard saloon," and the February 28,1930, article "Old Home of Thomas Paine Faces Demolition" features a large AP photo of the old building in its final days. A mortgage notice from June 22, 1933, shows the building as still standing, but I believe it was demolished soon afterward. Of the old newspapers mentioned relating to Paine's death, the United States Gazette for the Country (June 12, 1809) can barely be bothered to mention him; while the Tontine House auction ad can be found on page 4 of the New-York Herald for May 5, 1810.

  Details of the life of Benjamin Lay can be found in Robert Vaux's Memoirs of Benjamin Lay and Ralph Sandiford (1815), and Lydia Marie Child's Memoir of Benjamin Lay: Compiled ji-om Various Sources, published by the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1842. There's also a colorful account of Lay's "fake blood" antics in John Greenleaf Whittier's introduction to the 1871edition of The Journal of John Woolman. Lay is a neglected figure these days, and the man surely warrants a modern biography.

  And finally, for Paine's American beginnings, you can get some of the flavor of the Philadelphia of yore from George Barton's 1925 Little Journeys Around Old Philadeehia and Christopher Morley's 1920 Travels in Philadeehia. Do buy yourself some old prewar editions of Morley: they're charming, and always staggeringly cheap—often priced in the single digits.

  Committed to the Ground

  Cobbett embodied so many contradictory opinions that it's hard to summarize him. Sometimes he wrote for Paine, sometimes against; he fought against child labor and for worker's rights, but was indifferent to slaves and hostile to Jews. There is no lack of venom and ignorance to be found in his work, and yet occasionally he soars far above his peers, as in this speech decrying claims that outlawing child labor would damage the economy:

  Hitherto, we have been told that our navy was the glory of the country, and that our maritime commerce and extensive manufactures were the mainstays of the realm. We have also been told that the land has its share in our greatness, and should be justly considered as the pride and glory of England. The Bank, also, has put in its claim to share in this praise, and has stated that public credit is due to it; but now, a most surprising discovery has been made, namely, that our superiority over other nations is owing to 300,000 little girls in Lancashire.

  Perhaps the best way to understand him is the way so many of his countrymen did, by reading Cobbett's Political Register. The British Library has a bound set, and those interested in the tale of Paine's bones will particularly want to read volume 35, which covers the period of 1819 to 1820. It's easy to find paperback reprints of his amiable Rural Rides (1830) and The American Gardener (1821); but perhaps the best sense of the man can come from editor William Reitzel's The Autobiography of William Cobbett (1947), which cleverly assembles fragments from Cobbett's voluminous writings into a very readable and entertaining "in his own words" autobiography. It goes along quite nicely with Laurence Vulliany's William Cobbett's Rural Rides Revisited (1977), a photo essay which traces Cobbett's footsteps and finds power stations and modern bungalows where farmland on
ce stood, but also finds a surprising number of old vistas still largely unchanged or gently decaying. I'm particularly fond of the photo of a haplessly bashed-up old cast-iron sign on one trailside, sternly warning:

  PERSONS

  THR NG

  ST S

  AT TH

  TELEGRAPHS

  ILL BE

  PROSEC TED

  It would appear that the sign made for excellent target practice.

  References to Cobbett and the bones, though hostile and not to be overly trusted, can be found in the Times of London for November 18 and December 22, 1819, and July 13, 1820. For a sense of the graveyard chaos of the era, see Philip Neve's 1790 pamphlet A Narrative of the Disinterment of Milton's Cofin in the Parish Church of st. Giles, Cripplegate (the New York Public Library has a copy); a letter to the April 17,1852, issue of the journal Notes and Queries claims "I have handled one of Milton's ribs . . . One fell to the lot of an old and esteemed friend, and between forty and forty-five years ago, at his house, not many miles from London, I have often examined the said rib-bone." But for a particularly useful annotated firsthand account of medical grave-robbing, read James Blake Bailey's The Dia y of a Resurrectionist (1896).

  It would be an almost hopeless task to compile all the newspaper and pamphlet attacks made on Cobbett during his lifetime, but one of the prime examples, using the side-by-side format to damn Cobbett with his own conflicting opinions, is Cobbett's Gridiron (1822). Of the numerous pamphlets mocking Cobbett and the bones-bear in mind that Cobbett arrived in Liverpool on November 21, so these illustrated satirical pamphlets flooded out within a matter of weeks—two typical examples are Sketches of the Life of Bi14 Cobb and Tommy Pain (1819) and The Real or Constitutional House that Jack Built (1819). The latter is itself one of many ripoffs of a very successful pamphlet published earlier that year by Cobbett's fellow radical William Hone, The Political House That Jack Built, which cleverly used the structure of the children's rhyme to build up an argument against the suspension of habeas corpus and other injustices resulting from Peterloo.

  To get a broad sense of the economic and social pressures building up in Britain prior to Cobbett's arrival with Paine's bones, it's still hard to beat R. J. White's classic study Waterloo to Peterloo (1957), as well as J. H. Plumb's England in the Eighteenth Century (1950); there have been many useful studies before and since, but these remain models of clarity. Paine's essays are available in numerous editions, but M. Beer's 1920 anthology The Pioneers of Land Reform is a particularly useful compilation, as it places Agrarian Justice (1796) in the context of William Ogilvie's Essay on the Right of Property (1781) and William Spence's The Real Rights of Man (1775 / 1793). These make it clear that Paine's thinking, while certainly striking, was part of a wider radical property-theory tradition. Spence, though not mentioned in this book, is a striking protosocialist figure from the era. He and Paine were commonly paired together in the discussions of reform; Conder tokens often show them together, and indeed sometimes hanging together at the gallows.

  For a charming old essay on the very deepest roots of British property laws, see Augustus Jessopp's Studies by a Recluse (1893). Jessopp was one of those eccentric country parsons that Britain once seems to have cornered the market on; a friend of Gothic writer M. R. James and the novelist Angela Thirkell, he wrote about antiquities like a ghost story writer, and ghost stories like an antiquities writer. Those looking for his fiction might want to try Frivola (1896); sadly, and rather like one of his own plots, he became a bit of a ghost in his old age, slowly descending into lonely madness.

  Finally, mention of the notice against writing on skulls can be found in the fourth volume (i.e., Fourth Series) of Frank Buckland's wonderful Curiosities of Natural History (1879), in his essay "Ancestral Skulls." In this same essay he makes an extraordinary suggestion that seems prophetic of modern forensic reconstruction: "I feel convinced that sculptors would do well to practice restoring the features by means of modelling clay to skulls. The student might take a modern African skull, and on it mould the features of a negro; the same with a European or Mongolian specimen, & c."

  The Bone Grubbers

  There are three primary contemporary accounts of the travels of Thomas Paine's bones. Two are by active participants and possessors of Paine's remains. The first is A Brief History of the Remains of the late Thomas Paine, From the Time of Their Disinterment in 1819 by the Late William Cobbett M.P., Down to the Year 1846, which was published in 1847 by James Watson and almost certainly written by him as well—it includes, suitably enough, a substantial list in the back of Paine books published by Watson. Watson's pamphlet ends with the bones still in Tilly's possession; Watson had no inkling of the possible lifting of bones by John Chennell, or indeed of his own eventual ownership of the bones.

  The second account is Moncure Conway's The Adventures of Thomas Paine's Bones, a handwritten manuscript in the archives of the Thomas Paine Historical Association. Conway published two excerpts from this article in The Truth Seeker in June 1902; these fell into obscurity and their existence is not even known to many Paine scholars. Rarer still is the original, more detailed manuscript, which was never seen in its entirety until Kenneth Burchell transcribed it for members of the Thomas Paine Historical Association in their Journal of March 2002. Conway also has a brief commentary on Paine's remains in volume 2 of his Life of Thomas Paine (1892), but this is largely superseded by The Adventures of Thomas Paine's Bones.

  Rather more mysteriously, in 1908 the anonymous booklet Thomas Paine's Bones and Their Owners appeared; in addition to recounting the facts of the previous pamphlets (and in some cases, reconfirming them by contacting participants who were still alive), it introduces a number of new details about Benjamin Tilly's final days, and reveals Watson's purchase of Paine's bones at Tilly's auction around 1853. The New York Public Library's copy of the booklet is of particular interest, as it apparently reveals the writer's real name Uabez Hunns, of Wood Green, London) and includes annotations in the author's own hand. Though they are largely in agreement anyway, when in doubt I have tended to favor the explanations in Conway and Watson over those by Hunns, since they are known and credible witnesses; nonetheless, Hunns does appear to have been in some position to know the people involved in tracking down Paine. This copy was given to the library by William Van Der Wyde in 1912, who at the time was the president of the Thomas Paine Historical Association. He knew Conway and probably knew Hunns too, since he came into possession of this personally annotated copy.

  In addition to the articles noted for the previous chapter, references to Cobbett and Paine's bones can be found in the Times of London for 29 January 1821, 15 February 1822, 24 July 1822, 31 January 1823,ll October 1823,13 February 1826,28 March 1826,9 May 1826,4 May 1827,25 October 1828,26January 1836,14 June 1836, and 16 November 1836. The publishing activities on Bolt Court can also be glimpsed in the many publishers listed there during the nineteenth century, including the firms W. Tyler, Bensley & Son, Mills Jowett & Mills, and in Rupert Cannon's The Bolt Court Connection: A Histoy of the LCC School of Photoengraving and Lithography: 1893-1949 (1985). The long publishing history of Paternoster Row and Queen's Head Passage can be seen in Samuel Leigh's Leigh's New Picture of London (1819) and The London Book Trades 1775-1800: A Topographical Guide to the Streets (Exeter Working Papers in British Book Trade History, 1980), which is now available online at the Devon County Library's Web site.

  The main account of Carlile for most scholars remains Joel Wiener's Radicalism and Free thought in Nineteenth Century Britain:The Life of Richard Carlile (1983); there's also a very useful account in Theophilia Carlile Campbell's The Batde of the Press, as Told in a Story of the Life of Richard Carlile, by His Daughter (1899)—this can be hard to find, but the New York Public Library has one. See also the chapter on the War of the Shopmen in David Nash's Blasphemy in Modem Britain: 1789 to Present (1999), and in T. A. Jackson's Trials of British Freedom (1968). For an interesting if scattershot account of Carlile
, see Guy Aldred's Richard Carlile, Agitator: His Life and Times (1941); Richard Carlile: His Battle . . . (1917), and Aldred's edition of Carlile's Jail Joumak Prison Thoughts and Other Writings (1942); it's a wartime book, and by a socialist publisher at that, so it's all rather slapped together and chaotic. Nonetheless, it's worth picking up.

  The trials of Carlile and his assistant made up quite a body of literature in the 1820s, much of it published by Carlile himself. Some representative examples can be seen in the Report of the Trial of Mrs. Susannah Wright (1822), and many others are compiled in The Trials with the Defences at Large of Mrs. Jane Carlile, Mary-Anne Carlile, William Holmes, John Barkley, Humphrey Boyle, Joseph Modes, Mrs. Wright, William Tunbridge, James Watson, Willam Campion, Thomas Jeferies, Richard Hassell, Willam Haley, John Clarke, William Cochrane, and Thomas Riley Perry, being the Persons who were Prosecuted for selling the publication of Richard Carlile in various Shops (1825). The tale of the ingenious "puss and mew'' gin-vending machine can be found in Jessica Warner's Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason (2002). John Stuart Mill's account in the July 1824 issue of the Westminster Review was reprinted in 1883—this time, in the wake of the prosecution of freethinker G. W. Foote—under the title J. S. Mil On Blasphemy.