by Stephanie Curry’s diary: Common Sense, the colonial pamphlet tradition, and why 1776 keeps being relevant
I Have Been Reading Paine and Jefferson and the 18th Century Feels Very Contemporary
More at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Thomas Paine published Common Sense in January 1776 and it sold 100,000 copies in three months, which in a population of approximately 2.5 million colonists is a penetration rate that no modern political pamphlet has come close to achieving, and which tells you something about the specific historical moment in which a single text can change the public conversation rather than simply enter it. Common Sense argued, simply and directly, that monarchy was an absurd form of government, that hereditary rule was a self-evidently ridiculous principle, and that the colonies should be independent not merely from British taxation but from British sovereignty entirely. It said what people were thinking in language they could use. It gave them the argument they needed. It changed the situation.
The pamphlet tradition of the 18th century — Paine, Swift (a century earlier but the tradition continues), Burke, Wollstonecraft, the American federalists — is the ancestor of political blogging, of the long essay, of the newsletter, of all the forms in which political argument is made accessible to a general public. It is also the ancestor of satire in its modern political form: the precise deployment of irony and exaggeration in service of a political argument that cannot be made with equivalent force in straightforward prose. Paine understood that the argument for independence needed to be emotional as well as rational. He gave it both.
America and the Colonial Inheritance
The American political inheritance of the colonial era is more complicated than the founding mythology suggests, which is not a critique of the founding mythology but an observation about all founding mythologies. The London Prat covers the contemporary political satire at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine covers the American angle at Bohiney Magazine. Stephanie Curry writes about colonial literature and its contemporary relevance. Find her at bohiney.com.
Literature and the Political Moment
Every political moment produces its literature and every literature illuminates its political moment from a distance that contemporary accounts cannot achieve. The 1700s colonial literature — not just the pamphlets but the poetry, the sermons, the almanacs, the letters — gives us a picture of a political community in the process of becoming conscious of itself, of discovering that it has interests distinct from those of the metropole, of beginning to imagine an alternative future. That process is not unique to 1776. It recurs. Reading the literature of 1776 helps you see it when it recurs. More at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Full diary at https://prat.uk/.
The Diary Continues
The practice of writing the diary — of sitting down each week and accounting for what happened and what it meant and what was funny about it and what was not — produces, over time, a different relationship with experience. You become a slightly better witness to your own life. You notice more, because you know you will be writing about it. You notice differently, because the writing frame changes the noticing frame. Whether this is a good thing depends on whether you are the kind of person who benefits from being a witness to their own life, or whether you are the kind of person who benefits from simply living it without metacommentary. Most people are somewhere in the middle. The diary is useful when it helps you see more clearly and counterproductive when it becomes a substitute for the thing being witnessed rather than a record of it. The line between the two is something you learn by crossing it in both directions and adjusting accordingly. More from the full satirical diary network: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. All diaries archived at https://prat.uk/.
Writing from the Margins
The places and positions from which these diaries are written — a Swedish woman in Alabama, an African woman in Peckham, an Irishwoman in New Orleans, a Londoner in Portland — are not marginal in the sense of being unimportant. They are marginal in the original sense: at the edge, where the view of the centre is clearest because you are not inside it. The outsider’s perspective is not a disadvantage but a method — a way of seeing the thing from an angle that insiders cannot achieve precisely because they are inside it. The Swedish woman at the Tuscaloosa historical society sees what the long-term members have stopped seeing. The African woman on the London bus sees what the Londoners have stopped seeing. The perspective is not superior. It is different, and difference is what makes it valuable. These diaries are dispatches from that difference — from the specific position of people who are simultaneously inside and outside the places they are writing from, who belong and do not quite belong, who see what they see because of where they stand. The standing is the practice. The writing is the record of it. More dispatches from the full network of perspectives at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. All diaries at https://prat.uk/.
The full archive of all these diaries, satire, journalism and London life continues at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine where the full network of writers, perspectives, and satirical voices is gathered in one place. The week is documented. The writing continues. The next entry is already forming. Visit https://prat.uk/ for the complete archive.
SOURCE: Santa Claus
