• 3 • “THE MOST IMPORTANT POLITICAL WRITING OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD”: RARE FIRST ENGLISH EDITION OF DICKINSON’S LETTERS FROM A FARMER, 1768, ONE OF ONLY 500 COPIES 03(FRANKLIN, Benjamin) (DICKINSON, John). Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, To the Inhabitants of the British Colonies. London, 1768. Octavo, modern half red morocco gilt. $12,000 First English edition of the famed revolutionary work by John Dickinson, “Penman of the Revolution,” the work that helped spark repeal of the Stamp Act by calling it “pernicious to freedom,” one of only 500 copies, featuring the first appearance in print of Franklin’s prefatory British Editor to the Reader, not in the same year’s first American edition or the 1774 second English edition, with Franklin calling for restraint, urging Britain to never be “so angry with her colonies as to strike them.” Philadelphia patriot John Dickinson, a leading member of the Continental Congress, authored several of the most important political writings of the Revolution, especially this highly influential Letters from a Farmer, which fundamentally “helped to repeal the Stamp Act” (Langguth, 175). Here Dickinson singles out the 1765 Stamp Act as “pernicious to freedom” and contests “Parliament’s power with greater acuity than any writer had shown before” (Bailyn, 215). With this and his l775 Causes of Taking Up Arms, Dickinson became “known as the ‘Penman of the Revolution’… until 1776 his writings had made him better known by his fellow countrymen than any American except Franklin. His biographer writes: ‘By 1773 Dickinson was recognized as the leading champion of American liberty throughout the colonies… [the Letters are] the most important political writing of the revolutionary period… a critical source to understand if one seeks to comprehend the political thought of the American Revolution'" (Webking, American Revolution, 41-3). When first published anonymously in America in 1768, Dickinson’s Letters immediately «created a sensation… excepting the political essays of Paine, which did not begin to appear until nine years later, none equaled the Farmer's Letters in immediate celebrity and in direct power upon events» (Grolier, American 100:13). This rare first English edition was published “at the insistence” of Benjamin Franklin, then in London (Ford 303). On publication in London, the Monthly Review hailed Dickinson's Letters as “a calm yet full enquiry into the right of the British Parliament to tax the American colonies; the unconstitutional nature of which attempt is maintained in a well-connected chain of close and manly reasoning.” Dickinson’s “12 letters appeared first in the Pennsylvania Chronicle between November 30, 1767 and February 8, 1768» (Adams 54a), and were first issued separately in the virtually unobtainable March 1768 Philadelphia edition. Sabin 20044. Interior generally clean, with scattered light marginal foxing, shallow chipping to top edge of scarce half title. Handsomely bound.
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