In 1964, the Thomas Paine Society UK foundation was founded with a goal of promoting a better understanding of the man and his work. The Thomas Paine Society UK became the premier Thomas Paine historical society in the UK. In 2025, the Thomas Paine National Historical Association merged with the Thomas Paine Society UK to form the internationally-focused Thomas Paine Historical Association. This is the 2011 Number 4 Volume 10 edition of the Thomas Paine Society UK Bulletin, published from 1965 to 2013.
Perhaps I might say right here that this is a national loss and a deplorable lack of understanding concerning the man who first proposed and first wrote those impressive words, `the United States of America’. But it is hardly strange.
Anyone who looks at William Hone’s life in the round will discover some failings, notably a lack of a consistent sense of direction. His radical period was short lived, and he had neither the literary genius of Thomas Paine nor Henry Hunt’s rapacity to rouse an audience.
We remember Paine now, as radicals did in the nineteenth century, because he was distinctive — there have been few, if any, English political figures whose republicanism has been so strident and yet who have managed to communicate such a radical ideology (in an English context) to such a wide audience.
