Letters of Junius
Contributions
- Philip Francis
- author
Related resources
- has translation
- Lettres de Junius, traduites de l'anglois translation has paratext
Summary (extracted citations)
Epigraph: 'Stat Nominis Umbra'.
Notes
Originally published in London by Henry Samson Woodfall.
The publisher (Gueffier) of the French translation incorrectly identifies the author as Thomas [Brand] Hollis in an ad at the back of their translation of Thomas Paine's Le Siècle de la Raison etc. (1794).
The confusion is easy enough to explain. Thomas Hollis (1720–1774) was an English political philosopher, and friend of John Wilkes, who sought to advance the cause of English liberty by circulating appropriate books on government. From 1754 he commissioned the bookseller Andrew Millar to publish works advocating republican government, including John Toland's Life of Milton (1760), Algernon Sidney (1763), Marchamont Nedham (1763), Henry Neville (1763) and John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1764). The books were elegantly bound and tooled with libertarian ornaments such as the liberty cap and owl. He also published writings by American colonists on the Stamp Act crisis.
Initially, the tracts were intended for libraries throughout Britain and continental Europe; later he turned his generosity to America, as a benefactor of American colleges, especially Harvard, sending donations and numerous books.