Reviewed by Philip Gould | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.2

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Reviewed by Philip Gould | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Philip Gould, Brown University

Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution. By Edward Larkin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 215 pages. $65.00 (cloth).
Thomas Paine is something of the black sheep of the revolutionary founding family. Sure, academics write about Paine's political ideas, but he has not really figured in the popular revival of the revolutionary generation that is taking place in the United States. New biographies of figures such as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and popular histories of the Revolution seem to appear each year, yet Paine—whose pamphlet Common Sense (1776) was arguably the most important piece of writing in the period leading up to independence—is notably absent from the American revolutionary pantheon. This elision has less to do with Paine's radical politics and more to do with his lifelong itinerancy as well as the universal reach of his prose, which make it more difficult to repossess him as a national treasure. The claim at the outset of Common Sense, that "the cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind," might be read as the cornerstone of a national civil religion; alternatively, it may suggest abstract ideals that all but subsume national distinctions.	1
Edward Larkin's impressive study of Paine's literary achievement takes such moments of rhetorical complexity seriously. This book is really the first to assess Paine's place in eighteenth-century print culture by analyzing a broad range of his writings. Its inspiration likely comes from Robert Ferguson's observation that, though Paine scholars often acknowledge the popular appeal of his prose style, they traditionally attend more to the political content than the style of his writing. This lack of attention seems odd, since, as Ferguson notes, "Paine is the only figure in the pantheon of Revolutionary leaders who achieved his place entirely through authorship."¹ With this kind of perspective in mind, Larkin offers historical context and careful rhetorical analysis of well-known writings such as Common Sense, The Rights of Man (1791), and The Age of Reason (1794–95), as well as the less canonical Letter to the Abbé Raynal (1782) and The Letter to George Washington (1796).	2
Larkin begins by considering the outset of Paine's literary career in America as editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine in 1775–76. Though Larkin emphasizes this early work's attempt to unify colonials by imagining American identity, his method nevertheless puts it in a transatlantic context by situating Paine within the historical development of eighteenth-century British and British-American magazines (with particular attention to Edward Cave's Gentleman's Magazine, founded in 1731). Paine thus emerges as an important figure in transatlantic print culture who significantly adapted the magazine genre's democratizing and unifying (Cave's motto for the magazine was "E Pluribus Unum" [27]) possibilities to an American audience increasingly hostile to imperial rule. Larkin would certainly agree with (and includes in his notes) Jack P. Greene's assertion that Paine helped to modernize politics by contributing to "the desacralization of the traditional political order."² But rather than emphasizing, as Greene does, the radical character of American society that helped to change Paine, Larkin argues that Paine rhetorically "invented a public that he could then claim to represent in his writings" (24). Paine's prose style was not simply accessible, as so many have noted, but was meant "to instill a sense of enfranchisement in a popular audience" (7).	. . .

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