ABSTRACT
The daring band met 'in a most obscure public house and in the most secret manner, though watched by the spies of the minister, to toast the immortal memory of Thomas Paine'. Conversely, Paine was conspicuous by his absence from more open, public spaces, notably the mass platform – the large, open-air meetings which established themselves as the hallmark of popular radicalism between 1815 and 1819. But there was another Paine circulating in the years after his death, one that was more fabricated than anything Paine's admirers constructed. Paine, then, was a persona in the early years of the nineteenth century, even if it was non grata. Yet historians of popular radicalism have, largely, downplayed Paine's significance, whose place in the radical pantheon seems less assured than other luminaries such as Henry Hunt and William Cobbett.
