Paine wasn't "working class", he was the son of a skilled artisan and guild member, and became an excise agent - a position that required education and the ability to finance your own housing and transport. He had already written (and re-written) his pamphlet before he ever set foot on the boat to America, and it was as widely circulated here as was possible for something banned from publication, and circulated among workers and free-thinkers via Correspondence Societies etc". I suspect you're mistaking the official publication date - i.e. when it was officially published in the US - with when it was first disseminated, which was IIRC about 1772.
Britain had already had a revolution a century and a quarter before that in America, but like that in America it was a bourgeois revolution - the middle classes rebelling against the rights and demands of kings, and ended up re-establishing many of the same tyrannies it purported to end.
Paine wasn't "run off by a mob", he was "run off" by a legal system loaded in favour of the state that could bring broad charges (usually of sedition/seditious libel) on little or no evidence, at a time when the death penalty was as common here as it is in the USA currently. He went to France and did more fine work.
To compare Tom Paine to Russell Brand is to insult Paine and to elevate Brand to a position he hasn't earned.
Your facts are skewed.
Paine wasn't "working class", he was the son of a skilled artisan and guild member, and became an excise agent - a position that required education and the ability to finance your own housing and transport.
1. Paine was working class if "working class" means working for a living, as opposed to the privileged upper classes.
2. Paine's life in England was marked by repeated failures. He was fired from his job as a an excise tax man, took over his wife's business, went bankrupt, almost ended up in debtors prison.
3. He couldn't afford his own housing, lived with friends and with his wife's family. Why do you think he wrote "The Case of the Officers of Excise" to petition for a pay raise? (the petition ultimately brought him to the attention of Benjamin Franklin, who invited him to come to America and became his benefactor).
4. He had a marginal education, went to Quaker schools until he was 13, couldn't advance beyond that because Quakers where not permitted higher education.
He had already written (and re-written) his pamphlet before he ever set foot on the boat to America... I suspect you're mistaking the official publication date - i.e. when it was officially published in the US - with when it was first disseminated, which was IIRC about 1772.
Wrong.
He didn't begin to write "Common Sense" until late 1775 (published in January 1776), a year after he arrived from England. He wrote it on the urging of Dr. Benjamin Rush, after he came to Rush's attention, when as editor of the Philadelphia Magazine Paine wrote his scathing condemnation of the slave trade, called "African Slavery in America." This brought him into the inner circle of revolutionaries (Samuel and John Adams, among them) who were abolitionists and had pressed for independence. The idea of independence failed to gain traction against the loyalists in the Continental Congress until Paine's pamphlet opened public debate and forced the issue upon them.
Paine wasn't "run off by a mob", he was "run off" by a legal system loaded in favour of the state that could bring broad charges (usually of sedition/seditious libel) on little or no evidence, at a time when the death penalty was as common here as it is in the USA currently. He went to France and did more fine work.
Wrong again.
He was most definitely run off by a mob (after his indictment for treason). They chased him all the way to the docks, where he escaped across the channel. Upon his arrival in France he was greeted by cheering crowds and met by the Mayor of Paris.
The point being, while America and France enthusiastically embraced Paine's revolution against the monarchy, Britain remained loyal to their monarch, and still does to this day.
Talk about being behind the times!
To compare Tom Paine to Russell Brand is to insult Paine and to elevate Brand to a position he hasn't earned.
History will only tell if Brand matches up to Paine, whose achievements were nothing less than extraordinary (with the notable exception of England where he failed to mount a revolution against the monarchy). In the meantime, some comparisons between Paine and Brand are accurate in that both have called for "Revolution," both express ideas in the popular vernacular, both use irreverent humor, both use a medium accessible to all (Paine used pamphlets, Brand uses the Internet), both are reviled for speaking truth to power. If you read the dirt leveled against Thomas Paine the similarities are remarkable. "He's a drunk, he doesn't wash, he stinks, he's uneducated." And most notable of all -- "he fucked a cat..." (I kid you not, they said it about Paine and they say the exact same thing about Brand).
That said, Thomas Paine has been almost completely erased from American history because he's still a threat to the powers-that-be. If Brand can revive some of his ideas and encourage public debate, as he seems to be trying to do, I fully support his efforts and only hope he succeeds.
