The Trouble with Tom (10 page)

Pigott the auctioneer was at a bit of a loss. What, exactly, was he supposed to do with this?

Local farmers and collectors poked around in the cold January air at the sorted lots sitting out on the grass of Normandy Farm; here lay the final earthly possessions of William Cobbett. They'd been sitting in the house since last spring; and now Cobbett's eldest son, William Jr., dunned by his father's shopman for a debt, was finally forced to sell off the old man's possessions. It should have been a straightforward estate auction, except . . .

I have never
, the auctioneer informed him,
been a dealer in human flesh
.

It wasn't as if young William hadn't known they were in there. He'd opened the box back in October and, with his father's secretary watching, possessively engraved his own name on Paine's skull and bones. Thomas Paine now had the name of his mortal enemy—
Willam Cobbett
—scratched into his very substance. Admittedly, it may seem odd for any fellow to go around scratching his name into other people's skulls—rather transgressive, you might say—but this was something of a hobby among unsentimental Englishmen. So much so that at the massive bonepile in the Crypt of St. Leonard's over in Hythe, one sexton found it necessary to post this notice to visitors: PLEASE DO NOT WRITE UPON THE SKULLS.

But now the young Cobbett just wanted to get rid of the thing.

I will not sell human bones
, Pigott insisted.

He would, Pigott decided, defer to the legal advice of the Lord Chancellor on whether a body could be used to pay a debt. This problem had come up before; just four years earlier, the head of the debtor's jail in Halifax withheld a body when next of kin wouldn't settle the prisoner's debts. Before that, the body of the Lord of Stirling had been arrested mid-funeral for payment of debts. But there'd long been a popular belief that a dead body could be seized to pay off accounts: back in 1811, when a London bricklayer died slightly in hock to a local carpenter, two collectors showed up and promptly demanded either the money or the body from his family. The deceased's son refused to give the money, whereupon the collectors tossed the expired bricklayer naked onto their cart, hauled him over to his creditor's house, and let the body rot in the basement for a week before dumping it in Bethnal Green.

Indeed, this was not even the first time that the courts had wondered whether Paine's body could be considered legal tender. In 1827,William Benbow—Cobbett's old publisher and an assistant at Paine's exhumation in New York—was himself hauled into court for indebtedness to his printer and his shopman. During the proceedings, a bright idea struck the creditor's attorney.

"Pray have you not got
Tom
Paine's bones in a cellar at your house, for we are informed you have?"

"No," Benbow answered over the snickers in the courtroom, "I have not. But I believe Cobbett has."

"Mr. Heath, if the insolvent has them in his possession," the judge intoned as the court dissolved in derisive laughter, "the assignees can
have
them."

They were, alas for Benbow's creditors, not to be found in his cellar. But here they sat amid Cobbett's furniture, cookware, and papers, forlorn and neglected. By default the bones went to George West, the neighboring farmer now acting as the creditor's receiver. West gained Cobbett's adjoining farm, which was a splendid deal; but while his old neighbor was now buried, the box of bones he'd left were just sitting here. The befuddled farmer let the box sit as he waited for an instruction from the Lord Chancellor on what to do with them. He waited, and waited: no instruction ever came.

What on earth was he supposed to do with a boxful of the villainous Tom Paine?

A couple is sitting nearby on a bench getting pleasantly drunk as evening falls. Nobody is bothering them: Bedford Square is a rather quiet space for the middle of London, a private fenced-off park boxed in by Georgian buildings of respectable brass-plate architecture firms and foreign institutes. As the sun drops below the rooftops around me, I peer into number 13. Leverton House is a vacant building; a chandelier glows in its entranceway, revealing emptied bookcases set into the walls, and an empty interior yawning back into darkness. The sign outside it sounds promising enough.

The Bedford Estates
Work Smart
Centrally Heated
Self-Contained Building
Approx 374.86 sq. m. (4035 sq ft.)

Look up this place with the realtor and you'll find a splendidly refurbished office building with all the mod cons. Here, I'll summarize them for you:

Lease
£120k/yr.
Gas
Cnt Ht; Sec Sys; Cpt, Vc/Data Cble;
Kit; shwr fac; Per. Detaik Tms Pne Bns.

Well, perhaps the
Bns
aren't there now, but they were—one could have considered them an additional
Per. Detail,
I suppose.

I stroll back down across Bedford Square, dodging a near-invisible nighttime cyclist. This was where the bones wound up, returned to London once again. By 1844 Normandy Farm was failing, and George West forced to hire himself out as a day laborer. He decided to rent a cottage over on Glazier Lane, and with the move and the sorting through all his possessions . . . there they were. He'd been sitting on the box of bones for nine long years. His receivership had ended in 1839, but with no instruction ever given to him, the bones had simply fallen into his own lap: he was stuck with them. It hardly seemed like something he'd want to keep around in his old age.

Cobbett had always wanted Paine to have a proper burial, after all—even in 1821, when the bones had long become an embarrassment, he announced that "in due time they shall be deposited in a place and in a manner that are suitable to the mind that once animated the body . . . If I should die before this should be accomplished, those will be alive that will perform the sacred duty in my stead." But many of those who
had
been alive had died within just the past few years. Cobbett's old accomplice Benbow had been thrown in prison for sedition in 1840 and died six months later. Richard Carlile, still living across the street from Bolt Court, died there of bronchitis in 1843, making trouble to the very end; when a clergyman began to read a standard eulogy at his burial, Carlile's family and friends loudly protested against such "priestcraft" and pointedly turned their backs as the insistent reverend finished the service. And as for those Cobbetts still living? Well, Cobbett's son wanted nothing to do with the bones anymore. Didn't even want to talk about them.

But West recalled Cobbett's old secretary, Ben Tilly, from back when the fellow was at Normandy Farm. He seemed like someone who might get the bones properly buried; and so, in March 1844, West sent the bones down to Tilly at 13 Bedford Square. It was a sensible decision: a few sympathetic souls were still to be found down in this neighborhood. Soon enough after the bones arrived, Carlile's old shopman James Watson came by, wondering what would be done with them. And indeed just on this very square lived Thomas Wakley, Cobbett's old friend from
The Lancet.
Ben Tilly and Wakley were old acquaintances, and now neighbors as well. Wakley had worked for years in close quarters with Paine's bones; he'd surely know what to do with them. Perhaps they could be donated to science! Why not? Carlile had done it: before his burial, he'd had his body dissected for science, with
Lancet
witnesses in attendance. And then, too, Wakley had recently been elected Coroner. Yes, if there was a man in London who could dispose of human remains, it was Thomas Wakley.

But no.

Tilly . . . Tilly didn't know
what
to do, redy. He was a happily married, kind, gentle, perhaps indecisive fellow—not like his fire-breathing old boss had been—and with Cobbett gone he'd drifted back into work as an itinerant London tailor. And as to where to put Paine, returned after all these years . . . well . . . He was busy as it was. He was struggling just to get by. In fact, he needed some kind of stool at work, something to park himself on as he pinned up pant legs and chalked inseams. And now on top of everything else he needed a way to guard these bones. Until the idea hit him . . . that nice wooden box they were in . . .

Why . . . not . . .
sit
on it?

I think you'll agree that the sight of people hurled off the top of St. Paul's and sent screaming through the air seems an odd way to
benefit
London schizophrenics. But that is indeed what they were doing not too long ago here in Queen's Head Passage. It was a charity event, of course: they had a zip wire strung from the cathedral dome and down into the street. But long before all that, this passage was where James Watson kept his bookstore. Tilly was still over on Bedford Square fitting customers with clothing, propping their feet onto a box that—unknown to them—put their toes just inches away from the face of Tom Paine. But Carlile's old shopman kept checking in on the tailor, just to make sure the bones hadn't been lost again. Watson even put out a pamphlet,
A Brief Histoy of the Remains of the Late Thomas Paine
, and ended it with the simple hope that Tilly would get around to burying Tom.

None of the old passage is left now, except for the perfect cross-section of the transept and dome of St. Paul's Cathedral that fills one entire end of the street. It's a modern business neighborhood now of workers leaving the BT Building and suits drinking over in the Paternoster pub. But for centuries this was a street of stationers and booksellers. In the 1850s you could find Watson over in number 3, welcoming customers to his stock of radical pamphlets and books. For years he'd lived the simple, ascetic life of a Quaker activist—-running co-op store, sleeping on a sofa in the back room behind his bookstore counter, cooking his own lonely bachelor meals, and printing and binding his publications entirely by himself. He dressed simply and still addressed people with the traditional Quaker
thee
and
thou
. But he'd become a little more domestic now, having finally gotten married well into his thirties-his honeymoon was spent in prison for selling
The Poor Man's Guardian
—and now he and his wife Ellen worked together, printing up Thomas Paine tracts and hand-stitching them. Strolling out of his shop, he'd turn and face the irony of it all: the great looming mass of St. Paul's, home of the largest crypt in Europe. And still Paine went unburied.

It was money, always money, that shook the bones loose from their owners. First the Cobbetts lost them in a bankruptcy auction to their neighbor George West. Then West, fallen on hard times and moving off his farm, had dumped them into the lap of Ben Tilly. And now . . . well, by 1853
Tilly
was broke too. The tailor's employer had gone under and his wife had died: Tilly fell upon hard times, and at length his goods went to an auctioneer over on Rathbone Place. An onlooker in the saleroom might have noticed a curiously familiar face bidding from the crowd-a plainly dressed Quaker, his fingers stained with printer's ink and callused from folding and stitching.
Going once
. . .
Going twice
. . .
Sold!
Down came the hammer. The unassuming gentleman made his way through the crowd, paid for the wooden box, and then disappeared into the crowded streets of London.

The travels of Thomas Paine, it seemed, might finally be coming to an end. But an ocean away, they were only just beginning.

THERE

The Talking Heads

THERE HE IS !

The novelist leaned forward and looked over the crowd that packed into a Philadelphia lecture hall. They'd come out on a cold winter night in January 1852, wondering what would come next from the excitable Mr. George Lippard. His hell-raising tale
The
Quaker City
was America's best-selling novel until
Uncle Tom's
Cabin
came along, and it had portrayed their hometown as so wicked that the earth opened up to boil the inhabitants alive: "It withered their eyeballs; it crisped the flesh on their bones, like the bark peeling from the log before the flame." Featuring a murderous pimp who runs a den beneath a desanctified church, his
Quaker City
played like a nineteenth-century slasher flick: death, destruction, and comeuppance for the horny and greedy. And his book was, Lippard proudly claimed, "more attacked, and more read, than any work of American fiction ever published." When a stage version of this sepia-tone
manga
was to debut on Chestnut Street, an angry mob shut down the theater before a single performance by threatening to torch the place—a potent threat, given that the mob was led by the mayor.

But tonight in Philadelphia, the shock novelist had something else on his mind.

"It is my object, tonight, to do simple justice to a real hero of the American Revolution," he told the hushed crowd. He bid them to cast their imaginations only a few blocks down over the snow-covered streets and rooftops, and deep into the past, back to January 1776; to a man who now had no monument, no memorial in their city, and no friends among their respectable gentry and clergy.

"Let us look into that garret window," Lippard bid the crowd, "—what do you see there? A rude and neglected room, a little man in a brown coat sitting beside an old table, with scattered sheets of paper all around him, the light of an unsnuffed candle upon his brow, that unfailing quill in his hand."

Lippard—a man who wrote with fire and speed—paused to consider his hero Thomas Paine, whose volcanic writing hid a painfully labored process of composition.

"Ah, my friends," he continued, "you may talk to me of the sublimity of your battle, whose poetry is bones and skulls: but for me there is no battle so awfully sublime as this one now being fought before our eyes. A poor, neglected author, sitting in his garret—the world, poverty, time, and space, all gone from him . . . Go on, brave author, sitting in a garret alone at this dead hour, go on, on through the silent hours, on, and God's blessings fall like breezes of June upon a damp brow, on and on,
for you are writing the thoughts of a nation into birth
."