The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 1 by Lemay J. A. Leo;

Author:Lemay, J. A. Leo;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

A DISSERTATION ON LIBERTY AND NECESSITY

In February 1724/5, the nineteen-year-old Franklin set in type the third edition of William Wollaston’s Religion of Nature Delineated.18 “Some of his Reasonings not appearing to me well-founded, I wrote a little metaphysical Piece, in which I made Remarks on them” (A 43). With Samuel Palmer’s permission, Franklin worked after hours and printed one hundred copies on Palmer’s press. He must have paid Palmer (perhaps in additional labor) for the paper and ink, plus a small fee. A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain appeared about June 1725.19 If ever a pamphlet came from an underground press, it was Franklin’s Dissertation. The title page contained no author, publisher, or bookseller. The dedication to “J. R.” (Franklin’s friend James Ralph) revealed nothing. Who could trace the pamphlet to “J. R.” or to the unknown young printer? In a 9 November 1779 letter to Benjamin Vaughan, Franklin wrote that he gave a few copies to friends, but that “afterwards disliking the piece, as conceiving it might have an ill tendency, I burnt the rest, except one copy, the margin of which was filled with manuscript notes by Lyons, author of the Infallibility of Human Judgment, who was at that time another of my acquaintance in London.” Since at least seven copies of the Dissertation survive (none, unfortunately, with Lyons’s manuscript notes), I doubt he really burned it. Indeed, for seven copies to have survived from one hundred is surprisingly good: it shows that the book was hardly read at the time. Primers and almanacs of the period, though printed in the thousands, survive mainly in unique copies. Moreover, a Dublin reprint (1733) of the pamphlet, which Franklin probably did not know about, is scarcer than the London original.20

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