PAINE, Thomas, Dissertations on Government, the Affairs of the Bank, and Paper Money, First London Edition (1817)

Dissertations on Government, the Affairs of the Bank, and Paper Money.

London: Printed by W. T. Sherwin, 183, Fleet Street, 1817.

Paine’s 1786 defence of the Bank of North America and attack on paper money, reprinted in London by the radical publisher W. T. Sherwin, apparently its first British printing, stitched and unbound as issued.

54 pp. Preface signed “Thomas Paine” and dated “Philadelphia, Feb. 18, 1786,” the text ending at p. 54 with Paine’s name. Octavo. Stitched, without wrappers, the original thread partly loose. Early ink and pencil shelf marks to the lower corner of the title.

Paine wrote the Dissertations in Philadelphia during a short recess of the Pennsylvania Assembly, which was moving to repeal the charter of the Bank of North America. He had helped launch its predecessor in 1780, when the army was unpaid and the treasury empty, starting a subscription for the troops with $500 of his own salary; when the bank came under attack from those favouring inflation after the war, he rushed to its defence (Gimbel 45). The pamphlet argues that a charter granted by one Assembly is a contract its successors cannot simply cancel, and that paper money issued without backing is a fraud on the public. Signing the preface with the name of Common Sense, Paine declares himself attached to no party. Its republication in London in 1817 belongs to a different struggle. In the year Habeas Corpus was suspended and the reform movement was at its height, Sherwin was issuing Paine’s writings in cheap pamphlet form from 183 Fleet Street. Richard Carlile reissued the work in 1819.

Title page dust soiled, with a stain at the fore edge and a small chip to the outer margin; lightly toned throughout, with occasional spotting. The final page has a band of discolouration along the inner margin, probably from an earlier binding, the pamphlet having been disbound. Text complete and clean.

A London printing of Paine’s defence of the Bank of North America, issued by Sherwin during the reform agitation of 1817, in its original unbound state.