Lot 123
  • 123

Lynch, Thomas, Signer of the Declaration of Independence from South Carolina

Estimate
25,000 - 35,000 USD
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Description

Signature ("Thomas Lynch") on the title-page of Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. The sixth edition (London: Printed for J. Dodsley, 1770)



8vo (8 3/8 x 5 in.; 213 x 127 mm). Title-page browned and lightly stained in upper margin. Contemporary calf, spine gilt with red morocco label, plain endpapers, red edges; rebacked, corners restored.Half brown morocco folding-case.

Provenance

The Dismukes family of Nashville, descendants of Lynch's sister — Goodpasture Book Company, Nashville (letter of description, 3 August 1909) — R. A. Halley, Chicago — Joseph Fields — Carnegie Book Shop —"A Gentleman on the West Coast" (Sotheby's, 23 May 1984, lot 169)

Literature

Joseph Fields,"A Signer and his Signatures, or the Library of Thomas Lynch Jr.," in Harvard Library Bulletin (1960): no. 73

Catalogue Note

A fine example of Lynch's rare autograph, appropriately preserved in Burke's Philosophical Enquiry, which became a virtual textbook for the Signers and other American Revolutionaries (see Fields, "An Eighteenth Century Best Seller," in Autograph Collector's Journal, 1953).

Lynch was the only son of a prosperous rice planter, who sent him to England to receive a classical education; Lynch was the only Signer to attend Eton and Cambridge. He assembled a small gentleman's library, and his ownership signatures in his books have provided the bulk of the known examples of his autograph. In Joseph Fields's census, forty-eight of the eighty-one examples are signatures clipped from title-pages or fly-leaves of his books. Others are entire title-pages that have been excised from their volumes. This is one of the few complete signed books that survive from Lynch's library.

Thomas Lynch Jr. was only twenty-seven when he was elected to the Continental Congress, partly so that he could care for his father who suffered a stroke while serving in Philadelphia as a South Carolina delegate. The son served in Congress from late April until mid-August 1776. On their homeward journey, Lynch Sr. died and Lynch Jr.'s health deteriorated. He retired from public life and was lost at sea in 1779.