Free A History of Britain, Volume 3 by Simon Schama

‘friend of Liberty’, would be sympathetic, and had actually sent him a cordial letter from Paris. The
Reflections
disabused him. Gripped by anger and urgency, in just three months Paine produced 40,000 words of Part I of
Rights of Man
(1791), his demolition job on the ‘bleak house of despotism’. Much of it had been said before, by John Milton, Algernon Sidney and, indeed, by Paine himself: the rights of men, including their natural equality as well as individual liberty, are God-given at birth and, since they precede all forms of government, cannot be surrendered to those governments. On the contrary, governments were instituted to protect those rights, and are obeyed on the condition of such protection. But Paine added an extra note of sardonic ridicule at the mere idea of hereditary governments – aristocracies as well as monarchies. To entertain such a notion, much less defer to it, was no less absurd than believing in, say, inherited lines of mathematicians.
    More important than what Paine said, however, was the way in which he said it. His own origins as a maker of stays and corsets in Norfolk, where he had grown up on a bare hill known as ‘The Wilderness’ facing the local gallows and had been taken to Quaker meeting houses, meant that Paine was not among those whom Burke wrote off as radical playboys with more money than morals or sense. Before his burst of fame in America, Paine had known what it had meant to be poor, itinerant, almost entirely self-educated. His real schooling had taken place amidst the bawling arguments of pipe-smoking tavern politicians. The rough-house clamour of American politics had added another string to his crude but powerful bow. And closeness to the language of the inns and the streets served him well in the combat with Burke since he understood, with an almost 20th-century shrewdness, that a battle of ideas was also necessarily a battle of language. Burke had deliberately chosen the most high-pitched vocabulary, alternating between Gothic histrionics when describing (at second hand) lurid scenes of mayhem in France and lordly grandiloquence when lecturing the ‘swinish multitude’ on their richly merited exclusion from public affairs. Paine called those set-piece performances ‘very well calculated for theatrical representation, where facts are manufactured for the sake of show’. In calculated contrast, as if to make Burke’s worst nightmare – the political education of ordinary people – come true, Paine chose to write with aggressive simplicity: ‘As it is my design to make those that can scarcely read understand … I shall therefore avoid every literary ornament and put it in a language as plain as the alphabet.’ Many polite readers who picked up
Rights of Man
were shocked less by the predictable twitting of the monarchy and the aristocratic establishment than by the coarseness of his language. As if anticipating the crinkling of noses and the fluttering of fans, Paine virtually belched his ideas in their faces.
    The swinish multitude ate it up. Joseph Johnson had agreed to publish it in time for George Washington’s birthday on 22 February (the general duly got a copy and thanked Paine). But on the appointed day Johnson, whose shop had already published attacks on Burke, including that of Mary Wollstonecraft, got an uncharacteristic attack of nerves. Paine was forced to shop around for another publisher, and when he found one hired a horse and cart to take the unbound sheets to the new premises. Johnson might well have regretted his panic, for
Rights of Man
sold out briskly and a second printing was needed three days after the first. By May there had been six editions and 50,000 sales of a book that, at three shillings, was not inexpensive. Even with foreign sales (for many copies undoubtedly went to Boston, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin), this made Paine’s work the most colossal best-seller of the 18th century, knocking Burke’s readership into