About this Item
First edition, of great rarity, with only four other copies traced, the Guildhall Library and Longleat House copies in the UK, the Université de Poitiers copy in France, and in a Sotheby's auction record of 1988. The work is a reply to the anonymous pro-Bank pamphlet Observations on the Bank of England (dated 1695, but must have been published prior to this reply), which had opposed Chamberlen's earlier writings proposing a bank of credit based on land security. Chamberlen dismisses the pamphlet as "a trivial and impertinent account of foreign banks; some bold commendations of the Bank of England, and as confident, and ignorant discommendations of my proposal of land credit". In bitter and aggressive terms, Chamberlen attacks both the author and the newly-established Bank of England, accusing the former of fraudulent claims and duplicity, and the latter of failing to achieve any benefits, and of hoarding the wealth of the nation and consequently exacerbating the shortage of specie. Chamberlen fastidiously goes through and responds to every single paragraph. More broadly, Chamberlen uses his reply to continue to promote his land bank scheme, which he had been promoting in print since 1690. "Landowners would be issued with paper money equivalent to the value of the land they held, in the assumption that, because all paper money corresponded to a piece of land, it would be secure. His plans were mathematically flawed, as he thought that lending could occur on the basis of one hundred times the annual rent of the land, and he was not able to appreciate the inflationary effects. When the alternative measure, the Bank of England, was set up in 1694, other land bank campaigners - such as his friend and adviser John Briscoe - modified their schemes, but Chamberlen remained interested in a pure land bank. By 1699 he had gone into exile, possibly because of debt, settling first in Scotland, where he continued to issue pamphlets offering variations on a land bank and developed a plan to unify England and Scotland, and then in 1705 moving to the Netherlands, where he died after 1720" (ODNB). ESTC R173656; Wing C1886A. Small quarto (203 x 155 mm), pp. 16. Disbound pamphlet, earlier sew-holes in margin, later stitching. Light fox mark to first few leaves, final leaf faintly soiled, a little closely cropped at head, tiny wormholes. Still a very good, well-preserved copy.
Seller Inventory # 135215
Contact seller
Report this item
