When Thomas Paine arrived in Philadelphia in November 1774, he was an anonymous and penniless immigrant, who, after years of struggling in England as a staymaker, exciseman, teacher, and storekeeper, had decided to try his luck in the colonies. A year later, with the publication of Common Sense, Paine was the toast of Philadelphia. But Paine's popularity was never entirely uncontested. In fact, it would decline rapidly and not recover by his death thirty-four years later. As the epigraph demonstrates, Sarah Franklin Bache characterized Paine's dwindling reputation aptly in a 1781 letter to her father, Benjamin Franklin: From the outset Paine's public role was intricately linked with controversy; the dispute over Common Sense was only the first of Paine's many public battles during his career as a political writer in America. In 1783, in one of his various pleas for remuneration from the Confederation Congress, Paine recounts his initiation into the public arena in less than enthusiastic terms: “Scarcely had I put my foot into the Country but it was set on fire about my ears.