The Paine Burnings of 1792-1793

Abstract

In hundreds of villages and towns in the winter of 1792–3 effigies of Thomas Paine were publicly and ceremonially burned. The sheer scale of the burnings, and the richness and variety of their ceremonial components together constitute the most dramatic expression of English loyalism in the 1790s. On 14 December the Chelmsford Chronicle was reporting that effigies of Paine were being burned ‘in different parts of the country’. Contemporaries then began to grasp the scale of what was happening. On 21 December 1792 the Times announced that ‘effigies of Paine had been burnt in every principal town in the kingdom’. The provincial press was better placed than the Times to report the detail of these gruesome festivities. On 5 January 1793 the Newcastle Chronicle reported that ‘Paine’s effigy has been burnt, shot, hanged, and undergone the greatest marks of popular resentment in most of the towns and villages in this part of the country’. The scale of the burnings continued to fascinate contemporaries. On 19 January the Bath Herald reported: ‘From every part of the surrounding country we have received accounts of the executions still committed on the effigies of Paine’.1 The newspapers simply could not find room to report all the burnings, apologizing that ‘the limits of our paper will not allow us to give a particular detail of the various instances of disrespect to the unworthy object of general abhorrence’.2 In February the rate of the burnings began to slacken. By the end of March the mania for the public burning of effigies of Tom Paine had been exhausted.

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