Loyalist Propaganda and the Scandalous Life of Tom Paine: ‘HypocriticalMonster!’ CORINNA WAGNER Prithee, Tom Paine, why wilt thou meddling be In others Business which concerns not thee; For while thereon thou dost extend thy Career Thou dost at home neglect thy own Affairs.’ In 1792 the newly formed John Reeves Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property Against Republicans and Levellers published a series of popular tracts aimed at countering the pernicious influence of Tom Paine’s zy Rights of zyxwvut Mun. In A Bird in the Hand is Worth Two in the Bush, one labourer announces to his neighbour his decision to scratch his name from his local revolutionary club membership list.2 The honest John Frankly readily identifies the impetus for his political change of heart: he is deeply concerned that his ‘character’will become tarnished through his association with a club president who ‘iscertainly one of Tom Paine’s People’,and, he explains, I don’t like that Paine at all; for as I was waiting in a Gentleman’s Hall for Orders, t’other Day, the Porter gave me, to read, the Life of Thomas Paine. The Gentleman who wrote it gives him a very bad Character: and I have heard since [the author] Parson Oldys knows him very well.3 The best-selling and exceedingly influential biography of Paine, to which Frankly refers, was the product of government propagandist George Chalmers, alias ‘Francis Oldys’.4 Far from knowing him ‘very well’, however, Chalmers had never before set eyes on Paine zyxw - though this did not prevent him from offering his audience an ‘eyewitness’ account of the most intimate details of the revolutionary’s life. The text’s simulated intimacy with its subject’s private life and the way it sought to initiate a conspiratorial relationship with its audience, are important textual features that mark it as both a harbinger and a consequence of a shift in the way politics was debated in the 1790s. Indeed, Chalmers’ text reflected (and encouraged) the growing belief that an individual’spolitical intentions and capabilities could be gauged by how that person conducted his or her private life. A survey of the political literature of I 792-1793 urges Britons to familiarise themselves with those ‘truths’ that lurked beneath the public personae of political upstarts spawned by the British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (zoos), zyxw p.97-115 zyx o BSECS or4r-867x