PRIESTLEY, Joseph (1733-1804). Discoverer of oxygen.
Fine long unpublished Autograph Letter Signed to his close friend Theophilus Lindsey, 4 pages folio, Northumberland [Pennsylvania], 21 July 1794. The first page headed 'Letter 5', integral address panel with red seal, postmarks and ednorsements (seal cut not affecting the text).
Writing soon after emigrating to America and describing his arduous 130-mile journey from Philadelphia to Northumberland, where he was to set up his permanent home.

'... the last 50 miles we could do nothing better than take a common farmer's waggon, and in this we travelled the roughest roads that you can imagine, and over the steepest mountains ... The two last nights my wife and myself slept in the waggon, the beds in the houses swarming with bugs. The rivers and creeks have as yet no bridges, and much rain having lately fallen, they were so swelled, that we narrowly escaped perishing in one of them. ...'

Priestley had been met in Northumberland by his two sons, Joseph and Harry, who were proposing to start a community near the head of the Susquehanna River for immigrating English liberal dissenters and reformers. Priestley mentions this project in his letter: '... Tomorrow Joseph and Harry set out to pass a month upon [the land], sleeping in the woods, and subsisting as they can, which is not uncommon here. ...' Although the settlement never materialised, the Priestleys were to make their permanent home in Northumberland.

The 60-year-old Priestley also describes at some length his difficulty in adapting to his new situation and his desire to visit friends in England: '... I feel my distance from you more sensibly than I expected ... if the affairs of England should be settled in two or three years, about which time my son's settlement will be ready for me, I shall have an almost irresistible desire to pay you a visit, and spend a year or two with you ... I am too old to bear transplanting; but I may do better before the year be completed. ...'

In a letter to Lindsey written a month earlier from Philadelphia, Priestley had observed that although he was treated with much more respect in America than in England, 'the preachers ... look upon me with dread, and none of them have asked me to preach in their pulpits.' According to the present letter, however, the prospect in Northumberland seemed more promising: 'The people of this town, the Calvinists, are more liberal than any I have yet met with, and the next sunday they have desired me to preach to them. ...'

Priestley's correspondent, Theophilus Lindsey (1723-1808), was a clergyman and theologian who in 1778 (with the support of Priestley and other Unitarian friends) established Essex Street Chapel, the first Unitarian place of worship in England.

Most of the letters from Priestley to Lindsey, including 90 written from America between 1794 and 1803, are held by Dr Williams's Library, London. This letter is not included in Simon Mills' online edition of The Letters of Joseph Priestley to Theophilus Lindsey 1769-1794 (which does not include any of Priestley's letters from America), and is not printed in J.T. Rutt's edition of The Life and Correspondence (1831-32).
[No: 25493]