Biography: On the morning of November 21st, 1819, an expectant crowd gathered at Liverpool docks as customs officials inspected cargo from the Hercules, recently arrived from America. All eyes focused on the belongings of a portly, irascible middle-aged man - the Tory-turned-radical William Cobbett. Finally, the excisemen got to a wooden box, which they prised open to reveal a human skull. "There, gentlemen," Cobbett grandly proclaimed, "are the mortal remains of the immortal Thomas Paine."
And that, say most of Paine's biographers, is where the story ends. The bones subsequently disappeared, apparently without trace. Paul Collins set himself the task of finding what happened to them. The result is a book that is as attractively quixotic as it is eccentrically insightful.
Tom Paine is arguably the finest polemicist England has ever produced. Most authors are lucky to write one masterpiece. Paine wrote three: Common Sense (1776), The Rights of Man (1791-2), and The Age of Reason (1793). The most important, Common Sense, was arguably the defining text of the American War of Independence. Benjamin Rush recalled in July 1776 that "its effects were sudden and extensive upon the American mind. It was read by public men, repeated in clubs, spouted in schools, and in one instance, delivered from the pulpit instead of a sermon by a clergyman in Connecticut". Tradition has it that George Washington ordered the pamphlet to be read aloud to the troops on Christmas day before the battle of Trenton.
This made Paine one of America's Founding Fathers. Yet when he died in 1809 he was reviled in the United States. The reason for this transition from hero to zero was the third of those bestselling pamphlets, The Age of Reason. This was a biting attack on Christianity and all formal religions. "All national institutions of churches," Paine wrote, "whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."
Much of God-fearing America turned on him (although his old friend Thomas Jefferson remained true). Crowds booed and jostled him wherever he went. The press caricatured him (unfairly) as an atheist and misrepresented the effects of a stroke in 1806 as proof of alcoholism. New York Quakers even refused Paine's request that he should be buried in their cemetery. Eventually he was interred in a farm field with only six mourners present. Until, that is, Cobbett dug him up.
Paul Collins's account of how Paine's bones ended up scattered across the world is two parts memoir to one part history. We follow the author on his journey to historical sites that are now gay bars, dodgy hotels, gloomy backstreet booksellers and deserted railway stations. Much of the book is a riff on his thoughts about the incongruities that present themselves during these travels.
Take this typical example: "Stand clear of the . . . Doors thud shut on the number 2 express and it roars towards Brooklyn as I make my way through the turnstile and up into a canyon of buildings. Wall Street at night always feels strangely desolate, as any financial district is in its off hours, I suppose: nobody wants to stay here unless they have to. It's hard to imagine, looking at the slumbering mass of law and investment firms, that people used to live around here. [Paine's boarding house] was just a few blocks from here . . ."
Interwoven with this research-memoir are tales featuring a cast of grotesques and oddballs who at various times find themselves in possession of bits of Tom Paine. Take the McNeills of Tivoli in upstate New York, who in 1976 thought they'd discovered his remains whilst laying a new sewer. Imagine that! (as Collins would say) - finding the bones of a Founding Father in the bicentenary year! So what did Mr and Mrs McNeill do on making this discovery? Went ahead with laying the sewage pipe, of course. After all, who'd want the media attention, or, worse, the government turning their farm into a national monument?
The Trouble with Tom is an unconventional, if melancholy, reflection on the indignities that fame can bring even after death. Tom Paine had a very creative brain. Where that brain ends up provides Collins's denouement, which I won't spoil, save to say that an eternity watching daytime TV is a fate most would not wish on one of the great thinkers of the modern age.
The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine By Paul Collins Bloomsbury, 278pp. £12.99
Richard Aldous teaches modern history at UCD. His forthcoming book, The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs Disraeli, will be published by Hutchinson this autumn