Humanist Heritage: No great magic? The afterlife of Thomas Paine

Paul ‘Polyp’ Fitzgerald is a cartoonist, graphic novelist and prop builder based in Manchester, UK. He is a humanist freethinker, and chair of the Peterloo Memorial Campaign. His recently published biography of Thomas Paine is available via paine.org.uk.

To bring the dead to life
Is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead:
Blow on a dead man’s embers
And a live flame will start.
Robert Graves, ‘To Bring the Dead to Life’ in Collected Poems (1938)

Much of history isn’t hard fact: it’s a mass of contradicting, often mutually hostile narratives, a cacophony of competing voices, all clashing wildly.

And so bringing a figure as contested as Thomas Paine back to life, in a graphic novel format, in a genuinely authentic, truthful way, was a fascinating challenge. Huge swathes of the historical narrative about him can’t be trusted: he was battered by wave after wave of hostile propaganda during and after his lifetime, in a way that feels strikingly familiar in the era of hysterical social media vilifications. Several of his biographers were hostile, and funded by his establishment enemies. The most devious of them, George Chalmers, using the pseudonym ‘Francis Oldys’, slyly coated his attacks in a veneer of affability, and to this day is the main source of much of what we think we know about his youth. Moncure Daniel Conway‘s biography The Life of Thomas Paine was written to try and counter such malicious and underhand propaganda.

She was eleven years younger than himself, and a woman of such personableness and purity as to attract men of higher rank and greater delicacy. Pain had, however, gained her affections; and she would have him.
George Chalmers (‘Francis Oldys’)

I’ve always used a ‘verbatim’ style, using only authentic period words, to tell the story of forgotten, repressed or neglected historical events, deliberately including all the voices of the period, particularly those that vividly dispute each other. Not for any timid ‘BBC balance’ reasons (e.g. Peterloo was quite clearly a vicious physical attack against unarmed peaceful pro-democracy reformers) but because propaganda is such a vivid thing to experience on the page, bringing to life the dishonesty, denial, pomposity and callousness of those who tried to hold back progress… often to comical effect.

Reading through original sources is an extremely intense experience. The words of those who are quite clearly lying leap out of the page at you in a very raw, dramatic way, packed with rich layers of character. And I’ve always, as an author, just wanted to get out of the way and directly share that vivid experience with the reader, trusting in their intelligence to interpret the material wisely. It’s deeply patronizing to try and spoon-feed people a pre-digested, ideological edited conclusion. And of course those lying voices are part of the actual story: propaganda always is a part of any political story.

Because the bitterly hostile lies Paine faced were such a huge part of his life, I decided to include a great quantity of them in the narrative: the wall of endless, sour-hearted, vile, repeated slanders being something almost visceral I wanted the reader to have to confront directly. But it then became absolutely crucial to include Conway and others as honest narrators: breaths of debunking, reasonable, and truthful fresh air, ensuring each of the slanders was accompanied by a contrasting ‘voice of reason’. (Though the most hilariously absurd examples of the anti Paine propaganda debunked themselves—like the claim that he used his cat as a sex toy on his wife!).

I have proceeded with a growing conviction that the simple facts, dispassionately told, would prove of importance far wider than Paine’s personality, and find welcome with all students of history.
Moncure Daniel Conway

This caused some anger and controversy amongst those who felt Paine’s story should only be told in a hagiographic way, eliminating the rumours and vilifications that so dominated his life, which, going back to the point of trusting the shrewdness of the reader, I found absurd and patronising. Being told I was ‘slandering Paine all over again’ made the experience an uphill struggle.

An eminent medical gentleman who attended him in France tells me that PAINE’S body was in a state of putrefaction, probably occasioned by drinking brandy, and that so offensive was the stench that issued from it, he could hardly be approached.
James Cheetham

What’s more, I passionately believe using—or distorting historical incidents or personalities as a vehicle for the author’s own political or personal views, while pretending your account is ‘historical’—is a really patronising, arrogant, and dishonest thing to do. Again, not for any pretence at supposed neutrality, but because of a strong belief that the facts always speak for themselves. Truth will out! And if the hero of a biography cannot survive an honest, warts and all telling of their story, then in what way are they a hero?

Paine has been perceived and celebrated by many as a disbelieving scourge and eviscerator of religion, who wanted to destroy all faith. Teddy Roosevelt infamously described him as ‘A filthy little atheist.’

That allegedly secular reputation added another different challenge for me, as a pretty militant atheist, for to my deep surprise when researching him, I found out he believed in a loving creator god, and an afterlife. Paine was a religious man—a deist.

To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead…
Thomas Paine

His superb ‘administering medicine’ quote as I’ve presented it here is the most common version you’ll see skeptics and atheists sharing: but it’s a misleading edit. The last, usually omitted part reads: ‘…like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavouring to convert an atheist by scripture.‘

Paine clearly thought atheism was a negative thing, a dangerous abandonment of ethical norms that would lead to chaos and cruelty, and that belief was part of the intense conflict he had with Robespierre’s regime, who sent him to the guillotine. (His escape from that fate is one of the most extraordinary incidents in his bizarrely dramatic life story.) Robespierre, before he himself fell and was guillotined, to Tom’s disgust, tried to establish an official alternative to religion: his infamous ‘Cult of Reason’.

I felt compelled by honesty to ensure I very fairly reflected Paine’s faith, and it features throughout the narrative, By a fortunate coincidence, doing so also allowed for a much needed, uplifting ending, in contrast to Paine’s sad, troubled, lonely, distressing and humiliating final years before his death on 1809. I decided to clearly and explicitly show him entering heaven! But with what I hope was a subtle twist.

Tom adored science, and astronomy in particular. A large chunk of his infamous ‘anti religion’ book The Age of Reason is an astronomy primer, talking about the vast scale and organization of the solar system, and the cosmos itself. He goes on to argue, in an almost ‘numinous’ way, that although the ‘revealed’ holy books are all a human fraud, the beauty and grace of the universe acted as a real testimony to god’s existence. He’d also spent some of his less political years designing an innovative new ‘bio-mimicry’ bridge.

I’d always planned to end the book with various historical figures citing how huge an influence Tom had been on them: the kind of ‘nearest offer’ atheist version of an afterlife—the one humanists are familiar with. I hope the image is beautiful and positive in its own right, but also ambiguous and nuanced enough to please both the deists and atheists in the audience. Is that heaven he’s entering, or is it just infinity, with his spirit preserved in the minds of those who—myself and I hope you included—remember him and still carry the torch of his ideas.

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No great magic? The afterlife of Thomas Paine

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