Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution

Forty-five years after the Revolution, in an 1821 letter to a friend, Thomas Jefferson commented on the remarkable literary skills of his old friend and sometime political ally, Thomas Paine: “No writer has exceeded Paine in ease and familiarity of style, in perspicuity of expression, happiness of elucidation, and in simple and unassuming language.” Since then, Jefferson's observation about the unique character of Paine's prose has been reiterated time and again by scholars of the Revolution. In his 1976 monograph Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, Eric Foner sums up this most durable critical consensus: “What made Paine unique was that he forged a new political language. He did not simply change the meanings of words, he created a literary style designed to bring his message to the widest possible audience” (xvi). Paine himself recognized the novelty of his approach to political writing. At the beginning of Rights of Man Part II, he explains why his immensely popular response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France had appeared in two parts: “I wished to know the manner in which a work, written in a style of thinking and expression different to what had been customary in England, would be received before I ventured further.” With a style specifically designed to appeal to a wide popular audience, Paine moved away from the dominant tradition of classical rhetoric, which was an integral part of an older exclusionary political discourse, and toward a new psychology of persuasion that would define the newly emergent public sphere.