ANQ, March 22nd, 1998
Many critics have based a claim of friendship between Thomas Paine and Oliver Goldsmith on slender evidence. Paine wrote to Goldsmith for support about improving the salary of excise officers, but there is no evidence Goldsmith made any response to Paine's request. The belief in this friendship has no support. John Keane in his Tom Paine (1995), the most recent Paine biography, repeats a mistake that appears sporadically in Paine scholarship. This mistake is the assumption that a letter from Paine to Oliver Goldsmith marked the beginning of a friendship between the two men. First published in...
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