The Writings of Thomas Paine, Complete
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text · 1 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~420,000 words · 1,972 passages
Cite this work
- APAThomas Paine. (n.d.). The Writings of Thomas Paine, Complete. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thomas-paine/the-writings-of-thomas-paine-complete
- MLAThomas Paine. "The Writings of Thomas Paine, Complete." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thomas-paine/the-writings-of-thomas-paine-complete.
- ChicagoThomas Paine. The Writings of Thomas Paine, Complete. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thomas-paine/the-writings-of-thomas-paine-complete.
What it is about
All of Paine: Common Sense and The Crisis, written inside the American Revolution; Rights of Man, the reply to Burke; and The Age of Reason, the deist attack on revealed religion.
Context and history
Common Sense appeared in January 1776 and sold tens of thousands of copies within weeks, in a country of two and a half million people: few pamphlets have moved so much so fast. The Age of Reason cost him dearly — he was taken for an atheist when he was defending a God without churches — and he died in 1809 with almost no one at his funeral.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
THOMAS PAINE, in his Will, speaks of this work as The American Crisis, remembering perhaps that a number of political pamphlets had appeared in London, 1775-1776, under general title of "The Crisis." By the blunder of an early English publisher of Paine's writings, one essay in the London "Crisis" was attributed to Paine, and the error has continued to cause confusion. This publisher was D. I. Eaton, who printed as the first number of Paine's "Crisis" an essay taken from the London publication. But his prefatory note says: "Since the printing of this book, the publisher is informed that No. 1, or first Crisis in this publication, is not one of the thirteen which Paine wrote, but a letter previous to them." Unfortunately this correction is sufficiently equivocal to leave on some minds the notion that Paine did write the letter in question, albeit not as a number of his "Crisis "; especially as Eaton's editor unwarrantably appended the signature "C. S.," suggesting "Common Sense." There are, however, no such letters in the London essay, which is signed "Casca." It was published August, 1775, in the form of a letter to General Gage, in answer to his Proclamation concerning the affair at Lexington. It was certainly not written by Paine. It apologizes for the Americans for having, on April 19, at Lexington, made "an attack upon the King's troops from behind walls and lurking holes." The writer asks: "Have not the Americans been driven believe the power of hell to be limited, we must likewise believe that their agents are under some providential control. I shall not now attempt to give all the particulars of our retreat to the Delaware; suffice it for the present to say, that both officers and men, though greatly harassed and fatigued, frequently without rest, covering, or provision, the inevitable consequences of a long retreat, bore it with a manly and martial spirit. All their wishes centred in one, which was, that the country would turn out
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