238 Years of Common Sense
Friday, January 10, 2014
On January 10, 1776 the great man whose name I misuse on this blog published his famous pamphlet, Common Sense.
It had a powerful effect. General Washington had it distributed to his soldiers. I can imagine them reading it to themselves and to each other. George Trevelyan in his History of the American Revolution wrote
"It would be difficult to name any human composition which has had an effect at once so instant, so extended and so lasting"
That pamphlet is the real inspiration for this blog and the reason I so hubristically use Tom's name. If the internet had existed then, he would probably have blogged it without the aid of Mr R Bell of Philadelphia, especially as being his publisher put Mr Bell at such risk. Tom himself remained safely anonymous at that point.
Common Sense was the pre-digital equivalent of the most successful blog post imaginable. I would be content to have one-millionth part of the good influence on the minds of men it did.
Happy anniversary, Tom.
You could expand on this and write an excellent post.
I agree with you completely on the standards of literacy and life-competence that our parents and grandparents had. Basic education was much more effective.
Our parents and grandparents (I'm in my late 50s) also had much more self-respect for themselves and others.
I grew up in the aspiring working-class. The men were mostly factory workers yet, other than walking or riding their bikes straight home from work they would not have appeared in public dressed the way that many dress now.
They would not swear in the street, or in the presence of women. Of course there were individual trangressions, but these were publicly frowned upon and censured, and consequently rare.
Good behaviour was expected, poverty or lack of affluence was most certainly not an excuse.
Of course there were male environments, including the Public Bar, where things were not genteel. But industrial language confined to environments like that is not greatly harmful.
Is it because people had pride in earning an honest living, even if not a luxurious one?
Partly, but a lot more could be said on this subject I'm sure.
Posted by: James Strong | Saturday, January 11, 2014 at 02:09 PM
We don't have to go back so far. My grandparents - and those of my late wife - wrote beautiful English in elegant handwriting and read books now considered far too difficult for their great grandchildren. This despite - in all but one case - having left school at the earliest possible age to go into manual work or domestic service. My wife's grandfather, a cabin boy on SS Carpathia who helped to pull Titanic survivors (and corpses) out of the water at the age of 13, wrote her beautiful letters when we were together at university.
Not only that but all of them were capable of running a tight household budget and of understanding that indulgences such as gambling could only sensibly be enjoyed from surplus cash. None of them died rich and half of them enjoyed a flutter, but all of them would be horrified by a modern Britain of payday loans and online gambling.
Even more recently, a living relative of mature years attended a secondary modern in a school district where that was not the second but the third tier of secondary education. She was, according to modern educational ideology, a two-time reject and should be completely dispirited in her ignorance, right? Yet she reads poetry for pleasure and is very thoroughly literate.
But by all means lets go back to the 18th Century and consider the - by modern standards - rather weak education enjoyed by Thomas Paine himself. Yet no thinker has written to more powerful effect apart from perhaps Karl Marx.
You are right to draw attention to the register of language the original and best Tom expected his readers to be able to handle. This, despite targeting a mass audience. Expectations have a lot to do with setting a ceiling for (if not a floor beneath) performance, as everyone with practical experience of management knows. But not modern teachers, apparently.
Posted by: Tom | Saturday, January 11, 2014 at 12:08 PM
The wonderful thing about these old books, they are FREE, and really worth reading, if only subject 1 in the original Tom's list-remarks on the English Constitution.
http://gutenberg.org/ebooks/147
I do believe those soldiers of 1776 had better literary and reading skills than a comparable cohort today. We are regressing.
Posted by: Cascadian | Saturday, January 11, 2014 at 01:08 AM