Free The Trouble with Tom by Paul Collins Page B

noted—and to persecute dissenters, the budding philosopher explained, merely created more. "A Tindal produces a Leland," he wrote, "and a Paine calls forth a Watson."
    The government found itself playing a maddening game of Whack-a-Mole: every time they hammered down one bookseller, another would pop up in the next street or the next town. And Carlile himself was gleefully getting into the act again. No longer merely a publisher, he now became a prolific writer. His dispatches were published by an army of volunteers in his weekly newspaper The Republican, and he leaped into the fray of Paine biographers with yet another Life of Thomas Paine to compete with the at least four others now jostling for public attention. Writing over a byline marked "Dorchester Gaol," Carlile shook his head at how Paine's dead bones roamed free, while his living publisher rotted in a jail cell. And it was indeed Paine's own books—and not the many Lives of Paine—that really mattered now. "When an author has passed the bar of nature," Carlile wrote, "it behooves us not to listen to any tales about who he was, or what he did, but to form our judgments of the utility of the man, by the writings he left behind him. Our business is with the spirit or immortal part of the man . . . we have nothing to do with the body that is earthly and corruptible, and passes away into the common mass of regenerating matter."
    Yet the spectacle of Cobbett—"who heaped so much abuse on him, beyond that of all other persons put together"—returning with Paine's bones struck even Carlile as wonderful in its way, as "a volume of retraction, more ample and more convincing than his energetic pen could have produced." Still, he shrugged, he didn't see why anyone else should have much to do with it: "For my own part we have his writings, I should feel indifferent as to what becomes of his bones." But that was not going to be the end of that story—not for Paine, nor for the hidden clockwork rebels within Carlile's bookshop.
    The curse—and sometimes the saving grace—of jail is that it gives endless time to recall one's past, to run it over and over and to ponder what it meant. Sitting in his cell, Carlile found himself drawn to one memory: standing in a bookstall in the Plymouth Dock Market one day in 1812, long before he'd given the faintest thought to radicalism, and noticing a well-dressed maid slipping into the stall to talk in low tones with the bookseller:
    "Pray Mr. — have you got that book for my mistress?" she asked.
    "Yes, my dear," the bookman assured her.
    Coins were produced from her person, and a book from under the counter quietly passed hands. Carlile leaned over to spy on the title as the maid cracked it open: Aristotle's Master-Piece , the title page read. "The girl in question looked up quite cunning," he recalled from his jail cell, "as if she had got a curious prize or a budget of something that she did not know before, and scampered away delighted."
    Carlile ran into the book again in London bookstalls. It proved to be a birth control manual—a bizarre mash of folklore and nonsense that had been around since at least 1766, having gone through scores of illicit editions in port cities. Though a few of its herbal recipes actually did work for inducing miscarriages, it was largely useless—as Carlile snapped, "a mere pack of trash that has a singular name as a smuggled book and, if freely and publicly sold, would not after a time find a customer."
    What kept true information out of the hands of women? Why, the pious local Vice Societies, such as the very one that had put the Carliles in jail. As the years passed and his open-ended jail sentence lengthened—to his full three-year term, then to four, and then five years—in 1825 Carlile penned for the first time an open letter to William Wilberforce, the minister who had spearheaded his prosecution.
    SINNER,
    Is it not odd that I have never addressed a