BELLERS, John.

£3,250 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

An Epistle to the Quarterly-Meeting of London and Middlesex [drop-head title]. First edition of these proposals for social and educational reform by a Quaker, writer, and cloth merchant lauded by Marx as a "phenomenon in the history of political economy" (quoted in Zepper, p. 87).John Bellers (1654-1725) stands alongside William Penn as a prominent early leader of Quakerism. Much like Penn, he worked extensively on applying Quaker principles to effect social change. In particular, he wrote numerous proposals for colleges to house, train and employ the poor of London, founding a Quaker workhouse at Clerkenwell in 1702. Underpinning much of this was his firm conception of a labour theory of value: as he once proclaimed, Clerkenwell "will make labour and not money, the standard to value all necessaries by" (quoted in ODNB).The Epistle is a collection of short public letters addressed to his brethren in London. The first develops his recommendation that the Clerkenwell workhouse be expanded into a dedicated school, the costs of which would be met by securing part-time employment for many of its pupils. The second considers the wider problems of persuading men to support charity (one key recommendation being to "make the best Use you can of our Work-House or Hospital, for such Poor, which is capable of much greater Improvement, and of a more Universal Service than it is at present" (p. 11).These collegiate proposals won praise from Robert Owen, who had 1,000 copies of an earlier B

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