On the Tyranny of Kings and America as a Nation of Immigrants
DUNN, Thomas.
A Discourse, delivered in the New Dutch Church, Nassau Street, on Tuesday, the 21st of October, 1794, before the New York Society, for the Information and Assistance of Persons emigrating from foreign Countries. ‘New York, printed, London, re-printed, and sold by Citizen D.I. Eaton, Printer and Bookseller to the supreme Majesty of the People, at the Cock and Swine’, [1794].
8vo, pp. 30; without the half-title; front free endpaper splitting, some duststaining to first and last few leaves, sporadic light foxing, otherwise a clean copy; in old cloth-backed stiff marbled wrappers, a little worn.
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A Discourse, delivered in the New Dutch Church, Nassau Street, on Tuesday, the 21st of October, 1794, before the New York Society, for the Information and Assistance of Persons emigrating from foreign Countries.
First London edition of this heartfelt attack on George III’s England and encomium to America as a nation of immigrants, with reference to Franklin, Washington, and Burke, by an Irish immigrant, the recently arrived cleric Thomas Dunn (?1761 –1833).
Dunn’s Discourse was delivered at New York’s Society for the Information and Assistance of Persons Emigrating from Foreign Countries on 21 October 1794, and is here preceded by an ode in praise of freedom in the face of despotism (recited on the same occasion).
‘The conduct of that despot, Pharaoh, towards the children of Israel, and the conduct of the British government towards this country, bear to each other a remarkable correspondence’, Dunn writes, while praising the United States as ‘an asylum for peace, for liberty, and for religion’.
This edition was printed by the radical London publisher Daniel Isaac Eaton (who had been tried repeatedly for selling radical literature and in 1812 would be imprisoned for selling Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason) following the New York edition of the same year.
ESTC finds six copies of this edition in the US (Boston Athenaeum, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, New York Historical Society, Minnesota, and Newberry), and three in the UK (BL, John Rylands, Trinity St David).
ESTC T115547; Sabin 21325.