David Center for the American Revolution: "A Colonial Gentleman’s Pastimes on the Brink of a Revolution: Thomas Paine & The Pennsylvania Magazine’s ‘Old Bachelor,’" with Wolfgang Hochbruck

The fifth meeting of the 2021-2022 David Center for the American Revolution Seminar Series will take place on Wednesday, March 16, 2022 at 3:00 p.m. ET on Zoom.

The presenter will be Dr. Wolfgang Hochbruck. Dr. Hochbruck is Professor of North American Philology and Cultural Studies at ALU Freiburg.

He will be presenting a paper titled "A Colonial Gentleman’s Pastimes on the Brink of a Revolution: Thomas Paine & The Pennsylvania Magazine’s ‘Old Bachelor.’"

A description of the paper is below. The paper will be pre-circulated to registered participants in advance of the seminar meeting.

To attend the seminar and to receive a copy of the paper, please register via Zoom. 

The David Center for the American Revolution Seminar serves as a forum for works-in-progress that explore topics in the era of the American Revolution (1750-1820). Questions about the series may be directed to Adrianna Link, Head of Scholarly Programs, at [email protected].

NOTE: Seminars are designed as spaces for sharing ideas and works still in-progress. For this reason, this event will not be recorded.

A Colonial Gentleman’s Pastimes on the Brink of a Revolution: Thomas Paine & The Pennsylvania Magazine’s ‘Old Bachelor’

The 18th c. magazine is “an instrument in the identification and education of a new class of gentlemen” (Larkin 2001, p. 258) not just in Britain, but likewise in the colonies – but not only information and political discussions were conveyed via magazines; there were also lighter moments and mere entertainment. 

Much of this material was pilfered from English sources; however, already by the 1770s, editors like Robert Aitken founded publications like the Pennsylvania Magazine that were supposed to feature articles written by Americans (Larkin 2001, p. 259). For this purpose, Aitken hired recently immigrated Thomas Paine. 

Some facts about Paine’s editorship are fairly well established, others less so. And then there are some not just less well known but actively hidden aspects of Paine’s writing before Common Sense. 

Within a few months, PM attracted fifteen hundred paid subscribers, making it the most widely read magazine published in the New World (Nelson 2006, p.231). Paine’s own contributions to the PM appear, typically for the time, unsigned. Therefore, the quantity and distribution of the material attributable to Paine remains indeterminable, though of course attempts at assigning texts to him have been made. The most common approach in these attempts is to think Paine backwards from Common Sense which he was to publish by the end of the year. Following this logic of a critique of ideologies approach, most of the texts attributed to Paine so far have therefore served in an boomerang function: starting from the Paine of Common Sense, they investigate the text in question for traces the revolutionary linking it back to Common Sense and other writings following this literary and political landmark. This circular logic informs, for instance, Edward Larkin when he states that “it is difficult to imagine Paine writing Common Sense without the experience of editing the Pennsylvania Magazine, and without Common Sense Paine would not have gained the influence that he did.” (Larkin 2001, p. 253). 

Earlier, Eric Foner ascertained that “Paine arrived in America with a unique combination of resentments against the English system of government and opportunities for immediate self-advancement and self-expression.” (Foner 1976, p. 17). From this point of view, Paine’s every move before 1776 becomes a backward projection: science, which Paine was supposedly interested in during his years in England, becomes a “breeding ground for radical politics” (Foner 1976, p. 6), and discussion at taverns and alehouses in London and Lewes were naturally politicized because London and Lewes were supposedly republican centers in the 18th century (Foner 1976, p. 11-12).

As it is, there is still a dearth of certainty about Paine’s life before 1776, and there is a certain logic in the fact the he himself claimed later in his life that he had not written anything before arriving in America. There is, however, agreement now that he published at least one pamphlet in England: The Case of the Officers of Excise (1772), demanding higher wages for excisemen (Foner 1976, p. 14) – a text that does not exactly bear the hallmark of revolutionary republicanism.

Research I conducted in 2019 together with a group of students in the context of a class on the early American Short Story allows the conclusion that Paine’s contributions to the PM extended to the whole range of what that magazine had to offer – from thinly veiled political commentary via science scholarship to typical gentlemen’s banter and comedy. We claim that the ‘Old Bachelor’ series which appeared in eight parts throughout the year 1775 was written alternately by Paine, Francis Hopkinson, and at least one more author who may have been John Witherspoon. Of these three, Hopkinson’s authorship can be ascertained from his own bio-bibliographical statements. Establishing Paine’s authorship is a case of circumstance and corroborating evidence. 

That Paine did not wish to be identified with the author of the Old Bachelor texts later in his life is comprehensible in so far as he himself was constructing his biography forward as well as backwards from Common Sense, and the fact that he wrote colonial gentleman banter at a time when the shots at Lexington and Concord had already been fired would not have matched the image of the arch-republican and revolutionist that he and his followers were aiming at conveying.  

My 2019 class could not and did not establish Paine’s authorship beyond reasonable doubt, and papers written within the framework of the class did not result in publications. The aim of this seminar will therefore be to further advance the scholarship on the subject. Ideally, we will be able to trace the sometimes ambivalent radicalisation process of at least two important protagonist of the American revolution of 1776.

References

Foner, Eric (1976).Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, New York: Oxford UP,1976

Larkin, Edward T. (2005). Inventing an American Public: The Pennsylvania Magazine and Revolutionary American Political Discourse. In Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,22-48 

Nelson, Craig. (2006) "Thomas Paine and the Making of "Common Sense" New England Review 27.3: 228-250