ABSTRACT
Thomas Paine was born in Thetford, Norfolk, of Quaker parents, in 1737. His father was a corset maker who apprenticed his son to the business. Like Franklin, Paine ran away from home in his late teens, but there the parallel between them diverges. In the next twenty years of his life he worked at a number of occupations — staymaker, excise man, tobacconist, teacher and itinerant preacher — and lived in London, Dover, Sandwich, Diss in Norfolk, London again, and Lewes, Sussex. The timeliness and practical applicability of Paine’s pamphleteering is in no way better illustrated than by his disengagement from American affairs after the Revolution. When the war was over a grateful State of New York granted him a farm near New Rochelle, where he lived for three years designing an iron bridge. After that his active life is more a matter of European history than American.
