PAINE, Thomas - RICKMAN, Thomas Clio.

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The Life of Thomas Paine, First edition of this sympathetic memoir of Paine by his longtime friend and supporter Thomas Clio Rickman (1761-1834), a fellow radical reformer and poet. "Rickman's name will be forever linked with Paine, for he was to Paine what Boswell was to Johnson" (Keane, p. xvi).Rickman became associated with Paine while the latter was an excise man in Lewes (1768-74) and remained close to him until Paine's death. In the early 1790s Rickman moved in radical circles, wrote lyrics for republican broadsheet songs, and became close to John Horne Tooke and Mary Wollstonecraft. Paine lodged with Rickman while completing the second part of the Rights of Man. To avoid prosecution in Britain for publishing Paine's works, Rickman joined Paine in France in 1792-93."His Life of Thomas Paine, the work for which he is chiefly known, was not a conventional biography, but a series of anecdotes and general meditations on Paine, written with the authority of intimate personal acquaintance. Important features include his refutation of claims that Paine was converted to Christianity on his deathbed, and his attention to Paine's mode of writing. Rickman was one of the first commentators on Paine to understand that his direct and colloquial style was inseparable from his egalitarian arguments" (ODNB).Appended is a bibliography of Paine's works, and of books written and published by Rickman.

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