ABSTRACT
In May 1831, Frances Wright reactivated public memory of the American Revolution with her lectures, published in The Free Enquirer, on revolution. Labelled as 'this female Tom Paine', she interpreted the revolutionary events involving France as a historical opportunity for renewing the spirit of 1776. The first fragment concerns Thomas Paine's early legacy when, during the 1820s, London reformers re-evaluated his political thought and reissued his writings in order to criticise the moderate reform proposal aimed at extending the suffrage only to the middle classes. This first part of Paine's legacy appeared with the sensational political conversion of conservative publicist William Cobbett, who had contributed more than any other to the denigration of Paine in the early American republic. The absolute confidence in the civilisation of commerce that Paine expressed in Common Sense and Rights of Man did not prevent him from denouncing the fabric of inequality that marked English society by blaming the government for poverty and misery.
