Man with a plan.

Kate Feld looks at an exhibition that celebrates the legacy of revolutionary thinker (and influencer to Obama, no less), Thomas Paine

It’s been two hundred years since the death of Thomas Paine, and who better to celebrate his legacy than the Working Class Movement Library, an institution that arguably might not exist had Paine never walked the earth? As Veronica Trick, volunteer co-ordinator at the Library, says, ‘If our Library had a patron saint it’d be Thomas Paine. He’s so much the starting point, both chronologically and ideologically, for working class history’.

The Library has organized the exhibition Thomas Paine: Voice of the Common People, currently on show at Salford Museum and Art Gallery. Payne’s ideas are certainly important enough to merit this kind of attention anytime. But he’s especially relevant at this moment of great upheaval in the realm of ideas, when newspapers are dying, the mainstream media is in freefall and a tribe of bloggers and citizen journalists is rising up to create a new public sphere of comment and discussion. It wasn’t just what Paine wrote but how he published it that solidified his place in history.

His then-unconventional notions about universal suffrage and the importance of reason in ruling the affairs of man were intentionally expressed in simple language that was accessible to all. But Paine’s words failed to move the working classes until he realized that they couldn’t or wouldn’t buy a pricey book like Rights of Man. When he published it as a sixpenny pamphlet, his writing finally reached the readers it was intended for – in a big way. This tactic was a little too successful for the authorities’ liking, even drawing a Royal Proclamation condemning the tract and its dangerous ideas.

Paine’s colourful life, full of hair-raising narrow escapes and bloody bouts of fighting in the American and French Revolutions, makes for fascinating study, and this exhibition explores some of the key experiences that shaped his world view. But, rightfully, his incendiary ideas take centre stage. The exhibition uses political cartoons, contemporary comment and writing about Paine to show their evolution from far-out radical ideas to sober principles that are now almost universally acknowledged as the building blocks of a healthy democracy: free education, state pensions, the abolition of slavery and a written constitution (so, okay, some of us are still working on that last one…).

These books might be in a museum, but dusty and inaccessible they are not. Paine’s words retain a vividness and immediacy, a sense of alarm that rings through them just as clearly two hundred years later. President Barack Obama dipped into Common Sense frequently on the campaign trail, and, in his inaugural address, used this powerful quote from The Crisis to galvanise a country dazed by economic ruin: ‘Let it be told to the future world…that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive…that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.’

Thomas Paine: Voice of the Common People, Salford Museum and Art Gallery. Until 22nd November. Free.

Image: An oil painting of Thomas Paine by Auguste Millière (1880), after an engraving by William Sharp, after a portrait by George Romney (1792)

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