The Life of Thomas Paine

Never meet your heroes, they say, and the dictum has seldom been better embodied than in this volume, the first full account of the life of Thomas Paine. Unlike the two hostile biographies published in his lifetime, this one was authored by someone who had known him personally; who had once been his admirer, disciple, and friend. It appears to have been written in a rage, for the Thetford pamphleteer's corpse had hardly gone cold in June 1809 when Cheetham applied quill to paper, bent on breaking down his subject before the maggots had their chance. He managed to complete, proof, and publish the text before the year was out. Since then, Paine has received largely hagiographical treatment, even in Britain, whose government once indicted him for treason, and where he became second only to Guy Fawkes' as the personage most frequently burnt in effigy. Paine's native Thetford, in Norfolk, has seen it fit to put a gilded statue of him, by an American sculptor and in a dramatic pose, on permanent display. The statue in Lewes is equally idealised. At worst he is described euphemistically as having been 'complex'. Cheetham's contemptuous narrative, which presents in haut relief all the negative features of Paine's prickly character, retells every gross anecdote retrievable from memory or from others who had known him, and sets out to record every tut, every eyeroll, and every exasperated sigh Paine might have caused, brings us closer to the man behind the legend, and paints a much more relatable picture of the times in which he lived. This is, at the end of the day, how some contemporaries felt about this nowadays secular saint, and their irritation is as much a historical document as is the admiration of their successors. Vindictive or brutally honest, this is classic 'history from below'.