An Impartial Hand

In a recent New Yorker article on the history of debtor imprisonment*, Jill Lepore briefly mentions a 1754 Rhode Island imprint titled The Ill Policy and Inhumanity of Imprisoning Insolvent Debtors (Vault, Alden #142). An impassioned appeal for an end to debtors’ prisons, the only title page attribution is to “An Impartial Hand”. (Probably no relation to Learned Hand, Faithful Hand, Disinterested Hand, or any of these Hands.**) The short pamphlet is a mixture of religiously-based admonition (“How just is the Damnation of JUDAS, who for a little MONEY, betrayed Innocent Blood?”) and rational argumentation (“. . . the wise End of all Laws, is the Good of the Society for which such Laws are made. Is it not best therefore, that each Member in Society, should be employed in some useful Occupation . . .”). The author was well ahead of his or her time: as Lepore points out, it would take nearly a hundred more years for the United States to ban debtors’ prisons.

Although the authorship and publishing details are anonymous, it has long been accepted in bibliographies that this is an imprint from James Franklin’s shop in Newport (more about Franklin in an earlier post).

This copy (one of five known) includes evidence of ownership. A bookplate on the front pastedown identifies it as from the “Estate of William P. Sheffield,” most likely the former U.S. Senator from Rhode Island. The title page also includes pen trials (working on that perfect “of”) and the name Mary Marsh[?].

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* Jill Lepore, Annals of Finance, “I.O.U.,” The New Yorker, April 13, 2009, p. 34.

** The English Short Title Catalog lists 59 imprints with “Impartial Hand” as the author. Evan’s Early American Imprints includes A true narrative of a most stupendous trance and vision (requires subscription), written by “An Impartial Hand”. Apparently it was a popular sobriquet.

The Ardent Desire

Picking up on the discussion of broadsides in a previous post, today we’ll highlight another broadside from the collection: The Ardent Desire. No, this isn’t a delayed Valentine’s Day post; instead this broadside deals strictly with religious ardor. Printed in 1728, it is only the fifth item published in the state of Rhode Island*, and it was published by James Franklin, brother of Benjamin and the state’s first printer.

The Dictionary of Literary Biography** describes Franklin as “America’s first crusading editor and first major defender of press freedom,” but this broadside religious poem is not one of his more radical publications. Franklin brought Rhode Island its first press when he moved to Newport from Boston in 1726, and he continued printing there until his death in 1735. (His wife Ann took over after his death and ran the shop for thirteen years before passing it on to her son.) The transfers of location and ownership are evident on the page itself in the ornamental border surrounding the poem. The border is made up of various type ornaments, all of which James had used in Boston and then taken with him when he moved his shop to Newport. The crown and rosette combination in the upper left and right corners, for instance, is first used by James in 1719 in The Isle of Man and then again after the move to Newport in 1728’s Jesus Christ an Example to His Minister. In 1735, the year of James’ death, Ann uses the ornament again in A Brief Essay on the Number Seven; and, finally, James (James’ and Ann’s son) uses them in governmental publications of the 1750s.***

And one more reminder not to miss the opening of the exhibition “Rhode Island in the Time of Lincoln” at 7:00 this evening at the Aldrich House. More information available on the Society’s website.

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* See Alden, Rhode Island Imprints: 1727-1800. New York: Bowker, 1949, #5. Also:

** Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 43: American Newspaper Journalists, 1690-1872. Edited by Perry J. Ashley. The Gale Group, 1985. pp. 212-218. Also see Douglas McMurtrie’s “The Beginning of Printing in Rhode Island,” Americana 39.4 (1935): 607-629.

*** See Reilly, A Dictionary of Colonial American Printers’ Ornaments and Illustrations. Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1975. Numbers 472, 473, 482, 672, 674 and 709. In the entry for the ornament discussed above (no. 709), The Isle of Man is incorrectly listed as a Newport, rather than Boston, publication.