Thomas Paine (January 29, 1737 – June 8 1809) was an intellectual, scholar, revolutionary, deist and idealist. A radical pamphleteer, Paine anticipated and helped foment the American Revolution through his powerful writings, most notably Common Sense, an incendiary pamphlet advocating independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain. An advocate of liberalism, he outlined his political philosophy in Rights of Man, written both as a reply to Edmund Burke's view of the French Revolution and as a general political philosophy treatise as well as Common Sense, a treatise on the benefits of personal liberty and limited government, in which he considers society a representation of human ideals, and government a necessary evil. Paine was also noteworthy for his support of deism, taking its form in his treatise on religion The Age of Reason, as well as for his eye-witness accounts of both the French and American Revolutions.

Biography

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Paine was born on 29 January, 1737, to impoverished parents: Joseph Paine, a (lapsed) Quaker, and Frances Cocke Paine, an Anglican, in Thetford, Norfolk, in eastern England. His sister Elizabeth died at seven months. Paine, who grew up around farmers and uneducated people, left school at the age of twelve. He was apprenticed to his father, a corset maker, at 13, apparently failing at this as well. At 19, Paine became a merchant seaman, serving a short time before returning to England in April 1759. There he set up a corset shop in Sandwich, Kent. In September of that year, Paine married. Following a move to Margate, his wife Mary Lambert died in 1760.

In July 1761, Paine returned to Thetford where he worked as a supernumerary officer. In December 1762 he became an excise officer in Grantham, Lincolnshire. In August 1764 he was again transferred, this time to Alford, where his salary was £50 a year. On 27 August 1765 Paine was discharged from his post for claiming to have inspected goods when in fact he had only seen the documentation. On July 3, 1766 he wrote a letter to the Board of Excise asking to be reinstated, and the next day the board granted his request to be filled upon vacancy. While waiting for an opening, Paine worked as a staymaker in Diss, Norfolk, and later as a servant (records show he worked for a Mr. Noble of Goodman's Fields and then for a Mr. Gardiner at Kensington). He also applied to become an ordained minister of the Church of England, and according to some accounts he preached in Moorfields.

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