Books

Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, and a Letter to Sir Guy Carleton, on the Murder of Captain Huddy, and the intended retaliation on Captain Asgill, of the Guards. London: Daniel Isaac Eaton. The Crisis now commonly known as The American Crisis is the collective name of a series of letters, essays or epistles bolstering those fighting the English written by Thomas Paine during the Revolutionary War. Their significance to the colonists cause cannot be under estimated. (See below.) Originally printed over the course of the American Revolution in pamphlets and newspapers, Daniel Isaac Eaton s collection was originally published in 1788. This volume is of his Second Collected Edition published in 1796. Eaton (1753 1814) was an English radical author, publisher and activist. He was tried eight times for selling radical literature and convicted in 1812 for selling The Age of Reason. (Wikipedia.) He was tried before Lord Ellenborough in the Court of King s Bench, Guildhall, on March 6, 1812. On January 10, 1776, a month before he turned 39, Paine exploded onto the transatlantic stage as the foremost advocate of obtaining liberty for the colonies by fighting the British. Paine himself commented that any literary talent he might have had was buried in me and might ever have continued so, had not the necessity of the times dragged and driven him to write. (The Crisis, No. VIII, �6.) Historians credit Paine s 1776 publication of Common Sense, which he allowed others to reprint, with galvanizing public opinion for independence which led to the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, and the United States becoming an independent non-monarchical nation. Paine s importance to the cause was cemented by the first issue of The Crisis which George Washington had read aloud to the army he commanded. Without Paine s pen, the war might well have been lost almost as soon as it began. As the author of Common Sense (1776), Rights of Man (1791, 1792), Age of Reason (1794), and The [American] Crisis (1776-1783), Paine was far ahead of his times as a political and economic thinker and essayist. His writings fill ten volumes. Paine served in government on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. When the French Revolution went awry he literally almost lost his head to Madam Guillotine. Front and back bindings are cracked inside and slightly on the outside of the back cover, but fully intact. Brown leather is tattered. Nicely printed with all pages intact. Some numbers written in pencil inside front and back covers, but no writing or marks observed on any of the printed except for a marginal notation Thomas Paine with an arrow pointing to him in an engraving. Inside the front cover is both the 1826 signature of George Smith M.D. and a lable with his name. This volume is handsome. * Some have mistakenly labeled Paine a Quaker. His mother was Anglican, his father a Quaker who presumably instilled in Thomas some notions, but he was famously an outspoken unrepentant deist.

The American is a novel by Henry James, originally published as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly in 1876-77 and then as a book in 1877. The novel is an uneasy combination of social comedy and melodrama concerning the misadventures of its eponymous hero, Newman, an essentially good-hearted but rather unsophisticated American businessman who is confronted with the Machiavellian world of Parisian society and its complex codes of honour.