Thomas Paine

Biography

Early life and education

Paine was born on January 29, 1736 (NS February 9, 1737), in Thetford, Norfolk, England, to Joseph Pain (1708–1787), a tenant farmer and stay-maker, and Frances (née Cocke) Pain. Joseph followed the Quaker faith and Frances was an Anglican. Despite claims that he adopted a new spelling after emigrating to America in 1774, he was already using "Paine" in 1769 while living in Lewes, Sussex.

Paine attended Thetford Grammar School from 1744 to 1749, when schooling in England was not compulsory. At age 13 he began an apprenticeship with his father. After completing his apprenticeship, he attempted to sign onto the 26-gun privateer Terrible, captained by William Death, but was dissuaded by his father. At 19, he served aboard another privateer, King of Prussia. He returned to Britain in 1759, became a master staymaker, and opened a shop in Sandwich, Kent.

Paine married Mary Lambert on September 27, 1759, but his business soon collapsed. Mary became pregnant, and after the couple moved to Margate she went into early labour, and both she and their child died.

In July 1761 he returned to Thetford to work as a supernumerary officer. In December 1762 he became an Excise Officer in Grantham, Lincolnshire, and in August 1764 he transferred to Alford with a salary of £50 per annum. On August 27, 1765, he was dismissed for "claiming to have inspected goods he did not inspect". On July 31, 1766, he petitioned the Board of Excise for reinstatement, which it granted the following day when a vacancy arose. While he waited he resumed corsetmaking.

In 1767, he was appointed to a position in Grampound, Cornwall. Later he asked to leave this post to await a vacancy, and he became a school teacher in London.

On February 19, 1768, he was appointed to Lewes in Sussex, a town with a tradition of opposition to the monarchy and pro-republican sentiments since the revolutionary decades of the 17th century. Here he lived above the 15th-century Bull House, the tobacco shop of Samuel Ollive and Esther Ollive.

Paine first became involved in civic matters when he was based in Lewes. He appears in the Town Book as a member of the Court Leet, the governing body for the town. He was also a member of the parish vestry, an influential local Anglican church group whose responsibilities for parish business would include collecting taxes and tithes to distribute among the poor. On March 26, 1771, at age 34, Paine married Elizabeth Ollive, the daughter of his recently deceased landlord, whose business as a grocer and tobacconist he then entered into.

American Revolution

Paine has a claim to the title The Father of the American Revolution, which rests on his pamphlets, especially Common Sense, which crystallized sentiment for independence in 1776. It was published in Philadelphia on January 10, 1776, and signed anonymously "by an Englishman". It was an immediate success, with Paine estimating it sold 100,000 copies in three months to the two million residents of the 13 colonies. During the course of the American Revolution, one biographer estimated a total of about 500,000 copies were sold, including unauthorized editions. However, some historians dispute these numbers. Paine's original title for the pamphlet was Plain Truth, but Paine's friend, pro-independence advocate Benjamin Rush, suggested Common Sense instead. Finding a printer who was daring enough to commit his print shop to the printing of Common Sense was not easy. At the advice of Rush, Paine commissioned Robert Bell to print his work.

The pamphlet came into circulation in January 1776, after the Revolution had started. It was passed around and often read aloud in taverns, contributing significantly to spreading the idea of republicanism, bolstering enthusiasm for separation from Britain, and encouraging recruitment for the Continental Army. Paine provided a new and convincing argument for independence by advocating a complete break with history. Common Sense is oriented to the future in a way that compels the reader to make an immediate choice. It offers a solution for Americans disgusted with and alarmed at the threat of tyranny.

Paine's attack on monarchy in Common Sense was essentially an attack on King George III. Whereas colonial resentments were originally directed primarily against the king's ministers and Parliament, Paine laid the responsibility firmly at the king's door. Common Sense was the most widely read pamphlet of the American Revolution. It was a clarion call for unity against the corrupt British court, so as to realize America's providential role in providing an asylum for liberty. Written in a direct and lively style, it denounced the decaying despotisms of Europe and pilloried hereditary monarchy as an absurdity. At a time when many still hoped for reconciliation with Britain, Common Sense demonstrated to many the inevitability of separation.

Paine was not on the whole expressing original ideas in Common Sense, but rather employing rhetoric as a means to arouse resentment of the Crown. To achieve these ends, he pioneered a style of political writing suited to the democratic society he envisioned, with Common Sense serving as a primary example. Part of Paine's work was to render complex ideas intelligible to average readers of the day, with clear, concise writing unlike the formal, learned style favored by many of Paine's contemporaries. Scholars have put forward various explanations to account for its success, including the historic moment, Paine's easy-to-understand style, his democratic ethos, and his use of psychology and ideology.

Later years

Paine remained in France until 1802, returning to the United States only at President Jefferson's invitation. Paine also paid for the passage for Bonneville's wife Marguerite Brazier and the couple's three sons, Benjamin, Louis, and Thomas Bonneville, to whom Paine was godfather. Paine returned to the U.S. in the early stages of the Second Great Awakening and a time of great political partisanship. The Age of Reason gave ample excuse for the religiously devout to dislike him, while the Federalists attacked him for his ideas of government stated in Common Sense, for his association with the French Revolution, and for his friendship with President Jefferson. Also, still fresh in the minds of the public was his Letter to Washington, published six years before his return. This was compounded when his right to vote was denied in New Rochelle on the grounds that Gouverneur Morris did not recognize him as an American and Washington had not aided him.

Brazier took care of Paine at the end of his life and buried him after his death. In his will, Paine left the bulk of his estate to her, including 100 acres (40.5 ha) of his farm so she could maintain and educate Benjamin and his brother Thomas.

Death

On the morning of June 8, 1809, Paine died, aged 72, at 59 Grove Street in Greenwich Village, New York City. Although the original building no longer exists, the present building has a plaque noting that Paine died at this location.

After his death, Paine's body was brought to New Rochelle, but the Quakers would not allow it to be buried in their graveyard as per his last will, so his remains were buried under a walnut tree on his farm. In 1819, English agrarian radical journalist William Cobbett, who in 1793 had published a hostile continuation of Francis Oldys (George Chalmer)'s The Life of Thomas Paine, dug up his bones and transported them back to England with the intention to give Paine a heroic reburial on his native soil, but this never came to pass. The bones were still among Cobbett's effects when he died over fifteen years later but were later lost. There is no confirmed story about what happened to them after that, although various people have claimed throughout the years to own parts of Paine's remains, such as his skull and right hand.

At the time of his death, most American newspapers reprinted Paine's obituary notice from the New York Evening Post that was in turn quoting from The American Citizen, which read in part: "He had lived long, did some good, and much harm". Only six mourners came to his funeral, two of whom were black, most likely freedmen. Months later appeared a hostile biography by James Cheetham, who had admired him since the latter's days as a young radical in Manchester, and who had been friends with Paine for a short time before the two fell out. Many years later the writer and orator Robert G. Ingersoll wrote:

Thomas Paine had passed the legendary limit of life. One by one most of his old friends and acquaintances had deserted him. Maligned on every side, execrated, shunned and abhorred – his virtues denounced as vices – his services forgotten – his character blackened, he preserved the poise and balance of his soul. He was a victim of the people, but his convictions remained unshaken. He was still a soldier in the army of freedom, and still tried to enlighten and civilize those who were impatiently waiting for his death. Even those who loved their enemies hated him, their friend – the friend of the whole world – with all their hearts. On the 8th of June 1809, death came – Death, almost his only friend. At his funeral no pomp, no pageantry, no civic procession, no military display. In a carriage, a woman and her son who had lived on the bounty of the dead – on horseback, a Quaker, the humanity of whose heart dominated the creed of his head – and, following on foot, two negroes filled with gratitude – constituted the funeral cortege of Thomas Paine.

Philosophy

Biographer Eric Foner identifies a utopian thread in Paine's thought, writing: "Through this new language he communicated a new vision – a utopian image of an egalitarian, republican society".

Paine's utopianism combined civic republicanism, belief in the inevitability of scientific and social progress and commitment to free markets and liberty generally. The multiple sources of Paine's political theory all pointed to a society based on the common good and individualism. Paine expressed a redemptive futurism or political messianism. Writing that his generation "would appear to the future as the Adam of a new world", Paine exemplified British utopianism.

Later, his encounters with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas made a deep impression. The ability of the Iroquois to live in harmony with nature while achieving a democratic decision-making process helped him refine his thinking on how to organize society.

France and Rights of Man

Back in London by 1787, Paine would become engrossed in the French Revolution that began two years later and decided to travel to France in 1790. Meanwhile, conservative intellectual Edmund Burke launched a counterrevolutionary blast against the French Revolution, entitled Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which strongly appealed to the landed class, and sold 30,000 copies. Paine set out to refute it in his Rights of Man (1791). He wrote it not as a quick pamphlet, but as a long, abstract political tract of 90,000 words which tore apart monarchies and traditional social institutions. On January 31, 1791, he gave the manuscript to publisher Joseph Johnson. A visit by government agents dissuaded Johnson, so Paine gave the book to publisher J. S. Jordan, then went to Paris, on William Blake's advice. He charged three good friends, William Godwin, Thomas Brand Hollis, and Thomas Holcroft, with handling publication details. The book appeared on March 13, 1791, and sold nearly a million copies. It was "eagerly read by reformers, Protestant dissenters, democrats, London craftsmen, and the skilled factory-hands of the new industrial north".

Undeterred by the government campaign to discredit him, Paine issued his Rights of Man, Part the Second, Combining Principle and Practice in February 1792. Detailing a representative government with enumerated social programs to remedy the numbing poverty of commoners through progressive tax measures, Paine went much farther than such contemporaries as James Burgh, Robert Potter, John Scott, John Sinclair or Adam Smith. Radically reduced in price to ensure unprecedented circulation, it was sensational in its impact and gave birth to reform societies. An indictment for seditious libel followed, for both publisher and author, while government agents followed Paine and instigated mobs, hate meetings, and burnings in effigy. A fierce pamphlet war also resulted, in which Paine was defended and assailed in dozens of works. The authorities aimed, with ultimate success, to force Paine out of Great Britain. He was then tried in absentia and found guilty, but he was beyond the reach of British law. The French translation of Rights of Man, Part II was published in April 1792. The translator, François Lanthenas, eliminated the dedication to Lafayette, as he believed Paine thought too highly of Lafayette, who was seen as a royalist sympathizer at the time.

In summer of 1792, he answered the sedition and libel charges thus: "If, to expose the fraud and imposition of monarchy ... to promote universal peace, civilization, and commerce, and to break the chains of political superstition, and raise degraded man to his proper rank; if these things be libellous ... let the name of libeller be engraved on my tomb."

The Age of Reason

Paine was arrested in France on December 28, 1793, following the orders of Vadier. Joel Barlow was unsuccessful in securing Paine's release by circulating a petition among American residents in Paris. He was treated as a political prisoner by the Committee of General Security. Sixteen American citizens were allowed to plead for Paine's release to the convention, yet President Marc-Guillaume Alexis Vadier of the Committee of General Security refused to acknowledge Paine's American citizenship, stating he was an Englishman and therefore a citizen of a country at war with France. Paine protested and claimed that he was a citizen of the U.S. However, Ambassador Morris did not press his claim, and Paine later wrote that Morris had connived at his imprisonment.

Paine narrowly escaped execution. A chalk mark was supposed to be left by the jailer on the door of a cell to denote that the prisoner inside was due to be removed for execution. In Paine's case, the mark had accidentally been made on the inside of his door rather than the outside because the door had been left open when the jailer was making his rounds that day, since Paine had been receiving official visitors. But for this quirk of fate, Paine would have been executed the following morning. He thus survived the few vital days needed to be spared by the fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794).

Paine was released in November 1794 largely because of the work of the new American ambassador to France, James Monroe, who successfully argued the case for Paine's U.S. citizenship. In July 1795, he was re-admitted into the convention, as were other surviving Girondins. Paine, depressed and ill as a result of his imprisonment, had stayed silent in the period immediately following his release but on July 8, with the encouragement of Lanthenas, he spoke in the convention. Paine was one of only three députés to oppose the adoption of the new 1795 constitution, because it eliminated universal suffrage, which had been proclaimed, at least for men, by the Montagnard Constitution of 1793.

In addition to receiving a British patent for a single-span iron bridge, Paine developed a smokeless candle and worked with inventor John Fitch in developing steam engines.

In 1797, Paine lived in Paris with Nicholas Bonneville and his wife, Marguerite Brazier. As well as Bonneville's other controversial guests, Paine aroused the suspicions of authorities. Bonneville hid the Royalist Antoine Joseph Barruel-Beauvert at his home. Beauvert had been outlawed following the coup of 18 Fructidor on September 4, 1797. Paine believed that the United States under President John Adams had betrayed revolutionary France.

Slavery

Paine was critical of slavery and declared himself to be an abolitionist. As secretary to the Pennsylvania legislature, he helped draft legislation to outlaw Patriot involvement in the international slave trade. Paine's statement, "Man has no property in man", although used by him in Rights of Man to deny the right of any generation to bind future ones, has also been interpreted as an argument against slavery. In the book, Paine also describes his mission, among other things, as to "break the chains of slavery and oppression".

On March 8, 1775, one month after Paine became the editor of The Pennsylvania Magazine, the magazine published an anonymous article titled "African Slavery in America", the first prominent piece in the colonies proposing the emancipation of African-American slaves and the abolition of slavery. Paine is often credited with writing the piece, on the basis of later testimony by Benjamin Rush, cosigner of the Declaration of Independence.

During the American Revolutionary War, the British implemented several policies that allowed fugitive slaves fleeing from American enslavers to find refuge within British lines. Writing in response to these policies, Paine wrote in Common Sense that Britain "hath stirred up the Indians and the Negroes to destroy us". Paine, together with Joel Barlow, unsuccessfully tried to convince President Jefferson not to import the institution of slavery to the territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, suggesting he rather settle it with free Black families and German immigrants.

State funded social programs

In his Rights of Man, Part Second, Paine advocated a comprehensive program of state support for the population to ensure the welfare of society, including state subsidy for poor people, state-financed universal public education, and state-sponsored prenatal care and postnatal care, including state subsidies to families at childbirth. Recognizing that a person's "labor ought to be over" before old age, Paine also called for a state pension to all workers starting at age 50, which would be doubled at age 60.

Agrarian Justice

His last pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, published in the winter of 1795, opposed agrarian law and agrarian monopoly and further developed his ideas in the Rights of Man about how land ownership separated the majority of people from their rightful, natural inheritance and means of independent survival. The U.S. Social Security Administration recognizes Agrarian Justice as the first American proposal for an old-age pension and basic income or citizen's dividend. Per Agrarian Justice:

In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right, and not a charity ... [Government must] create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property. And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age.

In this pamphlet he argued "All accumulation of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came".

Lamb argues that Paine's analysis of property rights marks a distinct contribution to political theory. His theory of property defends a libertarian concern with private ownership that shows an egalitarian commitment. Paine's new justification of property sets him apart from previous theorists such as Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf and John Locke. Lamb says it demonstrates Paine's commitment to foundational liberal values of individual freedom and moral equality. In response to Paine's "Agrarian Justice", Thomas Spence wrote "The Rights of Infants" wherein he argued that Paine's plan was not beneficial to impoverished people because landlords would just keep raising land prices, further enriching themselves rather than giving the commonwealth an equal chance.

Fiat currency

Paine was strongly opposed to fiat money, which he viewed as counterfeiting by the state. He said "The punishment of a member [of a legislature] who should move for such a law ought to be death". As part of his essay Dissertations on Government, etc., published in February 1786, Paine included a scathing condemnation of paper money emphasizing "The pretense for paper money has been, that there was not a sufficiency of gold and silver. This, so far from being a reason for paper emissions, is a reason against them."

The essay also states,

AS to the assumed authority of any Assembly in making paper money, or paper of any kind, a legal tender, or in other language, a compulsive payment, it is a most presumptuous attempt at arbitrary power. There can be no such power in a Republican government: The people have no freedom, and property no security where this practice can be acted: And the Committee who shall bring in a report for this purpose, or the Member who moves for it, and he who seconds it merits impeachment, and sooner or later may expect it.Paine also believed that paper money would create a nation of "stock-jobbers," people who engage in speculative trading, and eventually destroys the nation's morality. Paine explains that this is because the paper money has no real value by itself so the value is contingent on unpredictable forces such as luck and politics. This leads to manipulation of the paper money for profit.

Religious views

Before his arrest and imprisonment in France, knowing that he would probably be arrested and executed, following in the tradition of early 18th-century English Deism, Paine wrote the first part of The Age of Reason (1793–1794). Paine's religious views as expressed in The Age of Reason caused quite a stir in religious society, effectively splitting the religious groups into two major factions: those who wanted church disestablishment, and the Christians who wanted Christianity to continue having a strong social influence.

About his own religious beliefs, Paine wrote in The Age of Reason:

I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.

Though there is no definitive evidence Paine himself was a Freemason, upon his return to America from France he penned "An Essay on the Origin of Free-Masonry" (1803–1805) about Freemasonry being derived from the religion of the ancient Druids. Marguerite de Bonneville published the essay in 1810 after Paine's death, but she chose to omit certain passages from it that were critical of Christianity, most of which were restored in an 1818 printing. In the essay, Paine stated that "the Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the Sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the Sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the Sun." Paine also had a negative attitude toward Judaism. While never describing himself as a Deist, he openly advocated Deism in his writings, and called Deism "the only true religion":The opinions I have advanced ... are the effect of the most clear and long-established conviction that the Bible and the Testament are impositions upon the world, that the fall of man, the account of Jesus Christ being the Son of God, and of his dying to appease the wrath of God, and of salvation, by that strange means, are all fabulous inventions, dishonorable to the wisdom and power of the Almighty; that the only true religion is Deism, by which I then meant, and mean now, the belief of one God, and an imitation of his moral character, or the practice of what are called moral virtues – and that it was upon this only (so far as religion is concerned) that I rested all my hopes of happiness hereafter. So say I now – and so help me God.

Legacy

Historian Jack P. Greene stated:

In a fundamental sense, we are today all Paine's children. It was not the British defeat at Yorktown, but Paine and the new American conception of political society he did so much to popularize in Europe that turned the world upside down.

Harvey J. Kaye wrote that Paine and his pamphlets and catchphrases such as "The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth", "We have it in our power to begin the world over again", and "These are the times that try men's souls" did more than move Americans to declare their independence:

[H]e also imbued the nation they were founding with democratic impulse and aspiration and exceptional – indeed, world-historic – purpose and promise. For 230 years Americans have drawn ideas, inspiration, and encouragement from Paine and his work.

John Stevenson argues that in the early 1790s, numerous radical political societies were formed throughout England and Wales in which Paine's writings provided "a boost to the self-confidence of those seeking to participate in politics for the first time." In its immediate effects, Gary Kates argues, "Paine's vision unified Philadelphia merchants, British artisans, French peasants, Dutch reformers, and radical intellectuals from Boston to Berlin in one great movement."

His writings in the long term inspired philosophic and working-class radicals in Britain and United States. Liberals, libertarians, feminists, democratic socialists, social democrats, anarchists, free thinkers and progressives often claim him as an intellectual ancestor. Paine's critique of institutionalized religion and advocacy of rational thinking influenced many British freethinkers in the 19th and 20th centuries, such as William Cobbett, George Holyoake, Charles Bradlaugh, Christopher Hitchens and Bertrand Russell.

The quote "Lead, follow, or get out of the way" is widely misattributed to Paine. It can be found nowhere in his published works.

Abraham Lincoln

In 1835, when he was 26 years old, Abraham Lincoln wrote a defense of Paine's deism. A political associate, Samuel Hill, burned the manuscript to save Lincoln's political career. Historian Roy Basler, the editor of Lincoln's papers, said Paine had a strong influence on Lincoln's style:

No other writer of the eighteenth century, with the exception of Jefferson, parallels more closely the temper or gist of Lincoln's later thought. In style, Paine above all others affords the variety of eloquence which, chastened and adapted to Lincoln's own mood, is revealed in Lincoln's formal writings.

Thomas Edison

The inventor Thomas Edison said:

I have always regarded Paine as one of the greatest of all Americans. Never have we had a sounder intelligence in this republic.... It was my good fortune to encounter Thomas Paine's works in my boyhood... it was, indeed, a revelation to me to read that great thinker's views on political and theological subjects. Paine educated me, then, about many matters of which I had never before thought. I remember, very vividly, the flash of enlightenment that shone from Paine's writings, and I recall thinking, at that time, 'What a pity these works are not today the schoolbooks for all children!' My interest in Paine was not satisfied by my first reading of his works. I went back to them time and again, just as I have done since my boyhood days.

South America

In 1811, Venezuelan translator Manuel García de Sena published a book in Philadelphia that consisted mostly of Spanish translations of several of Paine's most important works. The book also included translations of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the U.S. Constitution and the constitutions of five U.S. states.

It subsequently circulated widely in South America and through it Uruguayan national hero José Gervasio Artigas became familiar with and embraced Paine's ideas. In turn, many of Artigas's writings drew directly from Paine's, including the Instructions of 1813, which Uruguayans consider to be one of their country's most important constitutional documents, and was one of the earliest writings to articulate a principled basis for an identity independent of Buenos Aires.

Memorials

The first and longest-standing memorial to Paine is the carved and inscribed 12-foot marble column in New Rochelle, New York, organized and funded by publisher, educator and reformer Gilbert Vale (1791–1866) and raised in 1839 by the American sculptor and architect John Frazee, the Thomas Paine Monument (see image below).

New Rochelle is also the original site of Thomas Paine's Cottage, which along with a 320-acre (130 ha) farm were presented to Paine in 1784 by act of the New York State Legislature for his services in the American Revolution. The same site is the home of the Thomas Paine Memorial Museum.

In the 20th century, Joseph Lewis, longtime president of the Freethinkers of America and an ardent Paine admirer, was instrumental in having larger-than-life-sized statues of Paine erected in each of the three countries with which the revolutionary writer was associated. The first, created by Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum, was erected in the Parc Montsouris, Paris, just before World War II began but not formally dedicated until 1948. It depicts Paine standing before the French National Convention to plead for the life of King Louis XVI. The second, sculpted in 1950 by Georg J. Lober, was erected near Paine's one-time home in Morristown, New Jersey. It shows a seated Paine using a drumhead as a makeshift table. The third, sculpted by Sir Charles Wheeler, President of the Royal Academy, was erected in 1964 in Paine's birthplace, Thetford, England. With a quill pen in his right hand and an inverted copy of The Rights of Man in his left, it occupies a prominent location on King Street. Thomas Paine was ranked No. 34 in the 100 Greatest Britons 2002 extensive Nationwide poll conducted by the BBC.

In popular culture

In 1987, Richard Thomas appeared on stage in Philadelphia and Washington, DC, in the one-man play Citizen Tom Paine (an adaptation of Howard Fast's 1943 novel of the same title), playing Paine "like a star-spangled tiger, ferocious about freedom and ready to savage anyone who stands in his way", in a staging of the play in the bicentennial year of the United States Constitution.

In 1995, the English folk singer Graham Moore released a song called Tom Paine's Bones on an album of the same name. The song has since been covered by a number of other artists, including Dick Gaughan, Grace Petrie, the Finns, The Shee and Trials of Cato.

In 2005, Trevor Griffiths published These are the Times: A Life of Thomas Paine, originally written as a screenplay for Richard Attenborough Productions. Although the film was not made, the play was broadcast as a two-part drama on BBC Radio 4 in 2008, with a repeat in 2012.

In 2009, Paine's life was dramatized in the play Thomas Paine Citizen of the World, produced for the "Tom Paine 200 Celebrations" festival