Reflections on the Revolution in France, WITH; Rights of Man Parts I & II WITH; An Answer to Pain’s Rights of Man.

The Burke bound in contemporary tree calf, rubbed, spine ends and corners worn, lower joint split, upper repaired. Internally some spotting but generally very good. Bookplate of James Thomas Murray.

The volume measures 21.5 x 14 x 2.4. Each leaf measures 207 x 130 mm.

The Paine bound in modern Half Sheep with marbled boards. Appendix and advertisement leaf at end, title of Part I and final leaf of Part II soiled, title of Part II stained (with following few leaves) and defective at upper outer corner just touching final letter of first line. Despite the stains the cheap paper remains in good shape, still supple.

The volume measures 21.3 x 12.3 x 2 cm. Each leaf measures: 205 x 115 mm. An uncut copy.

The Adams pamphlet with the original string tie. While complete each page has been trimmed to the text. Good Only

The pamphlet measures: 180 x 122 mm.

Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and H.D. Symonds

Adapted from Wikipedia.

Back in London by 1787, Paine would become engrossed in the French Revolution that began two years later, and decided to travel to France in 1790. Meanwhile, conservative intellectual Edmund Burke launched a counterrevolutionary blast against the French Revolution, entitled Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which strongly appealed to the landed class, and sold 30,000 copies. Paine set out to refute it in his Rights of Man (1791). He wrote it not as a quick pamphlet, but as a long, abstract political tract of 90,000 words which tore apart monarchies and traditional social institutions. On January 31, 1791, he gave the manuscript to publisher Joseph Johnson. A visit by government agents dissuaded Johnson, so Paine gave the book to publisher J. S. Jordan, then went to Paris, on William Blake’s advice. He charged three good friends, William Godwin, Thomas Brand Hollis, and Thomas Holcroft, with handling publication details. The book appeared on March 13, 1791, and sold nearly a million copies. It was “eagerly read by reformers, Protestant dissenters, democrats, London craftsmen, and the skilled factory-hands of the new industrial north”.

Undeterred by the government campaign to discredit him, Paine issued his Rights of Man, Part the Second, Combining Principle and Practice in February 1792. It detailed a representative government with enumerated social programs to remedy the numbing poverty of commoners through progressive tax measures. In order to gain as wide a circulation as possible Paine engaged the bookseller H.D. Symonds to complete the work. Symonds would print both parts in a “cheap” edition. Radically reduced in price to ensure unprecedented circulation, it was sensational in its impact and gave birth to reform societies. An indictment for seditious libel followed, for both publisher and author, while government agents followed Paine and instigated mobs, hate meetings, and burnings in effigy. Symonds would find himself charged with seditious libel and incarcerated in Newgate Prison for publishing Paine’s ‘Rights of Man Part II” for a two-year period, later extended.

A fierce pamphlet war also resulted, in which Paine was defended and assailed in dozens of works, including an early work by John Quincy Adams who was only 26 years old at the time. (Our copy) The authorities aimed, with ultimate success, to chase Paine out of Great Britain. He was then tried in absentia and found guilty, although never executed. The French translation of Rights of Man, Part II was published in April 1792. The translator, François Lanthenas, eliminated the dedication to Lafayette, as he believed Paine thought too highly of Lafayette, who was seen as a royalist sympathizer at the time.

Our copy of “Rights of Man’ is a wonderful un-cut example and survivor of the First Collected Edition, prepared by Paine and published by Symonds in 1792.

It was in this second part, published in 1792, that Paine first used the phrase ‘Age of Reason’.

Henry Delahoy Symonds.

Book and print publisher. fl. 1791-1816.

Monthly Mag. July 1816, Pg. 563:

“Died at Islington, 75, Mr. H.D.Symonds, many years an active and considerable bookseller in Paternoster-row; having a few years since retired in favour of Messrs. Sherwood, Neely and Jones. In the commencement of the crusade against the French Revolution, he suffered four years imprisonment in Newgate, and paid a heavy fine for vending some political pamphlets.”