Campaign for the American Reader: Pg. 69: "The Trouble With Tom"

Paul Collins, who teaches nonfiction at Portland State University, is the author of Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism, Sixpence House, and Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World. His work has appeared in Slate, McSweeney’s, Lingua Franca, The Believer, and Business 2.0.

His latest book is The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and

Times of Thomas Paine, which I asked him to put to the "page 69 test." Here is his reply:

Page 69 happens to start with the central narrative question of the whole book: Where are the bones of Tom Paine? William Cobbett, a hostile biographer of Paine's, had a change of heart years later after... well, actually reading Paine. (Political discourse hasn't changed much, it seems.) Cobbett was always one for odd schemes, and so he dug up Paine and brought him back to England with the notion that the bones would be a great political fundraiser, and that he could erect a grand monument to Tom.

Human remains, it turns out, are not a great fundraising gimmick.

So they sat in Cobbett's attic and were eventually lost at an estate sale. Throughout the 19th century the Times and just about everybody else asked what happened to them, until eventually most people forgot that Paine was even lost. But it was just one of those inquiries that got me started.

Years ago I was browsing an old Victorian magazine and came across a typical letter inquiring about Paine's bones; I didn't think much about the letter until the following week another reader replied saying that he'd seen them... and then named the owner. It was, of all people, a grain merchant in the town of Guildford.

Some had claimed that Paine had been turned into commemorative coat buttons, scattered and roaming the world. The truth was scarcely less weird. Paine's path took me all over both sides of the Atlantic -- I discovered a whole succession of radical reformers had kept the bones (and lost them through death or bankruptcy) -- people involved in everything from abolitionism and birth control to medical reform and voting rights. And so the bones became the maguffin for a journey into forgotten history. Paine's only alive for 30 pages of the book -- it's really about the extraordinary radical freethinkers that he inspired.

As for page 69 itself -- well, as an example of schemes gone awry, colorful figures like Cobbett, and "seemed like a good idea at the time" moments, it's pretty representative of my work. Failure holds a fascination for me as a writer, because it's only inevitable in retrospect, and it often requires just as much ingenuity and effort as success.

Still, I'd rather not be a failure myself -- the irony would be just so exasperating.

Many thanks to Paul for the input.

Read an excerpt from The Trouble With Tom at Amazon.

Paul did this radio interview about The Trouble With Tom.

Alex Butterworth's review in the Observer concluded that "there is much joyous wit and dizzying eclecticism in this playful reminder of Paine's enduring relevance."

"[T]he charm of [Collins'] manner and the originality of his critical intelligence mark this sensitive rendering of Paine's afterlife," wrote Jenny Davidson in the Village Voice review.

The Telegraph (UK) ran two reviews of The Trouble With Tom, one by Brian Dillon and the other by Philip Hoare.

While it has nothing to do with Collins' book, readers interested in Thomas Paine might be interested in John Barrel's savaging review of Christopher Hitchens' Thomas Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’: A Biography.

Paul Collins appears frequently on National Public Radio for segments including "Clement Moore, Anti-Jefferson Pamphleteer," "True Crime from the 1820s: Shades of Capote," and "'Rock Bands' of the Nineteenth Century."

Learn "how a Harvard professor sought signs from ghost world" in this book review by Paul.