Observations - photo 1
Observations - photo 2

Observations

Lot 43
17.01.2024 11:00UTC -05:00
Classic
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$ 8 190
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUSA, New York
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ID 1119218
Lot 43 | Observations
Estimate value
$ 1 500 – 2 500
Observations

Benjamin Franklin and William Clarke, 1755

CLARKE, William (1709-1760) and Benjamin FRANKLIN (1706-1790). Observations on the Late and Present Conduct of the French with regard to their Encroachments upon the British Colonies in North America. Together with Remarks on the Importance of these Colonies to Great Britain. London: John Clarke, 1755.



Containing the first English appearance in print of Franklin’s essay on population growth. This first English edition was published the same year as the Boston first edition. The author was a Massachusetts physician who served as troop surgeon in the Louisbourg expedition, 1745. He here sets forth the claims of the English in their boundary dispute with the French over Acadia. Clarke “argues that the prior discovery by Sebastian Cabot, in 1497, of the coast of a large portion of the continent of North America, and the subsequent grants by English sovereigns of Nova Scotia, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia, with the western limits of the latter three extending to the South Sea, gave the English colonists a full right to the vast region embraced within these limits, and that the French in all their occupation south of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes were intruders” (Church 1002).



Benjamin Franklin’s essay, “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c,” appears on pp. 42-54. In the last two paragraphs of this essay, Franklin veers into disturbing statements idealizing Anglification of the colonies, including an attack on the German population of Pennsylvania, and a reverie on racial exclusion. These paragraphs were excluded from later appearances of the essay. Kress 5427; Lande S501; Sabin 13471.



Octavo (190 x 118mm). (Mild soiling to title-page.) Modern calf-backed boards, red morocco spine label.

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