The Writings of Thomas Paine
“My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.” — Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1791
In Four Volumes, Volume I · 1894
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York & London
Editor's Introduction
It is now nearly a century since Thomas Paine, in the closing months of his life at his farm at New Rochelle, gathered together such of his manuscripts as remained in his possession and entrusted them to the care of his executor and friend, Madame de Bonneville. From that moment to this, the textual fortunes of his writings have been, in a phrase he might have used himself, the work of accident and partisan editing in roughly equal measure.
The first collected editions, published in London and New York shortly after his death in 1809, were neither complete nor accurate. James Cheetham's 1809 biography, the most widely circulated nineteenth-century account of Paine's life, was libelous in tone and unreliable in fact. The standard "complete" Paine of the mid-century, edited by Calvin Blanchard, omitted whole essays and reprinted the more provocative pamphlets in expurgated form. Until the present edition, no scholarly attempt has been made to bring together everything that may, on the evidence, be safely attributed to Paine's pen, and to print it from the best surviving texts.
The work has been long. I began it in the late 1880s, in the course of preparing my Life of Thomas Paine (Putnam's Sons, 1892), when it became apparent that no satisfactory text of the writings existed and that anyone serious about the subject must first reconstruct the corpus before attempting to interpret it. The edition before the reader is the result of those years of textual labor, conducted at the British Museum, the Bodleian Library, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the American Philosophical Society, and (through the kindness of their custodians) several private collections in England, France, and the United States.
The principles I have followed in establishing the text are those of any responsible scholarly edition. Where Paine's manuscript survives, I have printed from it; where it does not, I have collated the earliest authorised printings against any later editions Paine is known to have supervised. Variant readings of substantive interest are noted at the foot of the page; minor changes of spelling and punctuation are silently regularised to the conventions of the present day, except in those few cases where Paine's original spelling carries argumentative weight (the capitalisation in The American Crisis, for instance, is preserved as the printed pamphlets give it).
Volume I contains the writings of the American Revolution: Common Sense (January 1776), the thirteen Crisis papers (December 1776 through April 1783), Public Good (1780), the Letter to the Abbe Raynal (1782), and the shorter pieces of the war and immediately post-war years.
Volume II contains the two parts of Rights of Man (1791-92), Paine's answer to Burke and the most-read political pamphlet in the English language during the decade of the French Revolution.
Volume III contains the Paris-period writings: the open letters to Sieyes, Dundas, and Onslow; the speeches in the National Convention on the trial of Louis XVI; the Memorial to Monroe (1794), written from the Luxembourg Prison; the Letter to George Washington (1796); and the late pamphlets on finance, government, and economic justice including Agrarian Justice (1797).
Volume IV contains the religious writings: The Age of Reason Parts I and II (1794-95), the Discourse to the Theophilanthropists (1797), the Examination of the Prophecies (1807), and the marginalia and shorter theological pieces of Paine's last decade.
To my colleagues at the British Museum, the Bodleian, the Library of Congress, and the American Philosophical Society, I owe debts of professional courtesy that I cannot here repay in full. To the Bonneville and Carver families, in whose hands the New Rochelle papers passed after Paine's death, I owe the privilege of consulting documents not previously available to scholarship. To Mr. George Putnam, who has supported the project from its beginning, I owe the publishing imprint that has made the work possible.
What is offered here is not a final text. Paine's writing life ran across thirty-five years on three continents; new manuscripts will continue to surface as the great research libraries of England, France, and America catalogue their nineteenth-century accessions. The edition before the reader is the most complete that the present state of the evidence permits. I trust that those who follow will improve on it.
Moncure D. Conway
Brighton, England
October 1894
A note from this archive
The text reproduced above is Conway's editorial introduction to the four-volume Writings of Thomas Paine (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1894-96), the source edition for every work transcribed on this site. We have lightly modernised punctuation and reflowed paragraph breaks for screen reading; we have not altered Conway's wording or the structure of his argument.
The editorial principles Conway describes — collation against the earliest authorised printings, silent regularisation of accidentals, preservation of substantive variants — are the principles we have continued in the digital transcription. Where the Cornell-Conway scans we ingested produced ambiguous OCR, we collated against the cleaner Project Gutenberg releases (PG #147, #3741, #3742, #3743, #31271). Where Paine's original spelling carries argumentative weight, we preserve it. Where modernisation aids the reading, we modernise.
For the technical details of how the corpus was built, see the colophon. For machine-readable editions in TEI P5 XML, BibTeX, RIS, and JSON, see the data and APIs page. For corrections to any text, please write to the editor; we maintain a public errata list of changes made since launch.