Franklin had arrived in Philadelphia from Boston a generation earlier and had worked tirelessly to find a niche for himself as a printer and shopkeeper. Franklin was an assiduous self-improver who acquired the personal habits that would appeal to others, particularly his social superiors. He too brought letters of introduction that he used to cultivate patrons. His only challenge to the inherited, serried ranks that organized families in the Anglo-American world was to outshine everyone else in knowledge, enterprise, and political connections.

The contrast only became more apparent as time passed. Paine failed in business. He did not establish a family, and he remained indifferent to the refined tastes that conferred respectability. He was as voracious a reader as Franklin, self-taught as well in natural philosophy, mathematics, and mechanics, but the driving spirits of Franklin and Paine pointed them in opposite directions. Paine had none of Franklin’s equanimity. Perhaps there was a time when he would have gladly fit in, but the hardships he encountered as a corsetmaker, seaman, collector of the excise, and sometime tutor predisposed him to rage at the privileges and preferential treatment accorded the great men he saw all around him in England. Paine galvanized his considerable talents to tear down the walls that the upper class had raised against ordinary persons. One might have expected the self-made man of the New World to become the agent for radical change, but it was the outcast from the Old World who saw in his adopted home the chance “to build the world anew.”

Paine was a persuasive speaker and vigorous debater. These qualities, always in short supply, had gained him entrance into reform circles in England. How much more in demand were these traits in the colonies, where even the most prominent men and women knew themselves to be cut off from the sophisticated tastes of Europe. One can imagine him, with his quick wit, describing the conversations he partook of in London. Franklin once gave vent to the provincial’s sense of deprivation when he wrote that of all the things he loved about England, “I envy it most its people.” “Why should that petty island,” he asked, “which compared to America, is but like a stepping-stone in a brook, scarce enough of it above water to keep one’s shoes dry; why, I say, should that little island enjoy in almost every neighborhood, more sensible, virtuous, and elegant Minds, than we can collect in ranging two leagues of our vast Forest?”2

Mingling a bit with the “sensible, virtuous, and elegant minds” of Great Britain had given Paine a chance to test through conversation the ideas he gleaned from his readings. Men and women were still grappling with the implications of the revolutionary concept of nature propounded by Sir Isaac Newton, in which cause and effect trumped royal will, religious authority, and popular superstitions. During his youth, Paine had saved all the money he could from his meager income to pay for books, scientific equipment, and entrance fees to scientific lectures. For him, Newton’s brilliance had greatly enhanced the reputation of all human reasoning. Paine crafted reason into a potent weapon to wield against those who insisted that men were too weak to govern themselves, making it likely that the world would continue as it always had. The new science led thinkers to question the assumptions of conservatives. Far from distinct areas, science and politics were inextricably bound up together in Paine’s mind, the former offering hope for reforming the latter.

When talk turned to politics in English taverns and parlors, the much-vaunted British constitution often came up. England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 had led to a constitutional monarchy and a government respectful of the rights of Englishmen, with the king-in-Parliament as the sovereign. French intellectuals, chafing at the arbitrary rule of their kings, carried away from visits to England profound respect for the freedom of speech and protection from arbitrary arrest there. Signs in front of royal palaces—“trespassers will be prosecuted”—captured the difference between a king under the law and an absolute monarch. In England suspected criminals were prosecuted, not thrown into prison without a trial.

European admiration for England’s balanced government of king, nobles, and commons (that is, commoners) complicated matters for opponents of the British government like Paine. They took a much more jaundiced view of the English institutions they were forced to cope with in practice rather than discuss in theory. Aristocratic privileges and restricted access to votes and offices gave the lie to the ideal of commoners’ participation. The fourteenth-century distribution of seats in Parliament, which still prevailed in Paine’s day, gave seats to empty spaces—the “rotten boroughs,” that is, election districts with few inhabitants—while leaving populous new manufacturing cities without representation. All these things rankled with Paine, who viewed England’s government as corrupt and unjust. He did not arrive in the American colonies as an informal ambassador of the mother country, but rather as a bitter critic, as the next few months would reveal.

Paine’s religious background played a part in shaping his radical sensibilities.