ABSTRACT
Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man was by far the most successful of the many responses that Burke’s Reflections provoked. Part One was published in 1791 at the price of three shillings and sold approximately 50,000 copies in the first year. This pricing was not particularly low (Reflections, for example, cost five shillings) and it would certainly have been beyond the means of most labourers. However, as Olivia Smith notes, ‘Part One was reprinted when Part Two was published in April 1792, both selling at the price of six pence.’1 This pricing greatly concerned the government, who took it as evidence that Paine was attempting to corrupt the lower orders, and a decision was taken to prosecute him.2 Smith argues that ‘An inexpensive price was evidence of the author’s malicious intent because it established that the books were addressed “to the ignorant, to the incredulous, to the desperate”.’3 In Remarks on Mr. Paine’s Pamphlet Called the Rights of Man, which was published in Ireland, the anonymous author makes precisely this connection between low price and intended readership:
There is in this country [Ireland], a description of men, whose principles in politics are republican, and in religion presbyterian, enemies to monarchy in the government, and establishment in the church. – To this body a plausible dilation of their favorite tenets must have been particularly acceptable, and to their ears the bolder tone in which Mr. Paine has sounded the trumpet of innovation, could not but be grateful. In a conviction of this, I find my mind amply satisfied as to the motives of dispersing over the country six-penny pacquets of sedition, for the study of a common people, but lately and scarcely emerging from the darkness of ignorance. – A panegyric upon innovation, a ridicule of establishments, a justification of rebellion, a libel upon the government and religion of their country, are good materials to form a grammar for their infant information, and disinterested instructors have thrown it almost gratuitously into their hands.4
