An important early British collection of works by one of the United States’ founding fathers, being an assemblage of later editions of some of Thomas Paine’s writings - including his famed Common Sense and Rights of Man - with a general title page as well as individual title pages as issued. Various American editions of the present work were issued in both 1791 as well as the same year; however, they contained slightly different writings. This edition is the variant English issue that includes a frontispiece portrait of Paine. That a collection of Paine’s works was published in England while he was still alive speaks to Paine’s importance to and place in not only the American Revolutionary period, but also his place in various international affairs of the time, most notably the French Revolution.
This collection of Paine’s works precedes the more well-known British compilation of his works, The Political Works of Thomas Paine (1819), published only ten years after Paine’s death. The present volume was also published before James Carey’s famous two volume compilation of Paine writings, The Works of Thomas Paine, Secretary for Foreign Affairs, to the Congress of the Unites States, in the Late War, the first complete edition of which was published in Philadelphia in 1797.
Comprises: the ninth edition of Common Sense; the ninth edition of Rights of Man, Parts I & II; Letter to Abbe Raynal; Letter to the Earl of Shelburne; Letter on Republicanism; Letter to the Abbe Syeyes; Thoughts on the Peace; Letter to Secretary Dundas; and Letters to Lord Onslow.
Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was the author of two of the most influential pamphlets of the American Revolutionary period: Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis, in fact a series of pamphlets published from 1776 to 1783 during the American Revolutionary War aimed at bolstering support for the Revolution. While he is most famous for these writings, Paine continued to publish various works throughout his life, many reflecting Enlightenment-era ideas concerning human rights, perhaps most famously illustrated in his 1791 publication, The Rights of Man. Though his popularity waned, Paine is nonetheless regarded as a figure central to the founding of the United States.
A charmingly unsophisticated copy with former owners’ signatures to upper pastedown and title page and some contemporary as well as later marginalia (mostly underlinings); untrimmed pages. Boards somewhat rubbed and worn, especially at the extremities. Upper inner joint slightly splitting.
Gimbel CS-67a.
