ABSTRACT
Like nearly everything else associated with him, the retailing of Paine’s life has been contentious. After the Rights of Man appeared, the British government for £500 commissioned a slanderous ‘biography’ of Paine from one ‘Francis Oldys’, a Tory refugee from Maryland and clerk at the Board of Trade and Plantations named George Chalmers. This reached eleven editions within two years, in the process growing (ever more fictionally) from 25 to over 150 pages, and was abstracted, embellished and widely reprinted. 1 In the late 1790s similarly hostile works appeared by, among others, William Cobbett, then a leading anti-Jacobin but soon to convert to radicalism himself. Early in the new century an apostate radical headed in the opposite direction, James Cheetham (‘Cheat ‘Em’ to Paine’s disciples), added another vituperative account. But the Painites retaliated as early as 1793 with brief Impartial Memoirs of Paine and after 1815 several more substantial biographies appeared. Since then Paine’s character has been assailed and defended many times, his vices greatly exaggerated by his enemies, his virtues trumpeted loudly by his friends. Settling the true facts about several events in Paine’s life (his own autobiography having disappeared) remained important until many decades after his death, the last great point of contention being Paine’s supposed death-bed reversion to orthodox Christianity. 2
