Crisis

The Crisis. London: for the author, by T.W. Shaw, 21 January 1775–18 May 1776



71 issues in one volume, small folio (11 3/8 x 6 3/4 in.; 289 x 172 mm). Occasional printer's ornaments, caption titles, issues 1–70 plus the unnumbered issue of 9 August 1775; offset from former bookplate on first page, occasional spotting and light browning or soiling, especially on first and last page of some numbers, many numbers formerly folded, contemporary marginalia in pencil and ink. Modern red half-morocco, gilt-stamped title on spine.

Copley bookplate

See Sabin 17516 (noting a different start date but the same imprint); the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, vol. 2, col. 1285 attributes it to "W. Moore?"; S. Poole, The Politics of Regicide in England: 1760-1850 (2000), p. 39

First editions, of this rare weekly periodical, which was reprinted at the same time in America. Published between January 1775 and October 1776, the serial attempted to join Britain and the American colonies in a transatlantic community of protest. It did so more stridently than virtually anything printed either in the colonies or elsewhere in the London press. King George III, his chief ministers, and their supporters in parliament were all fair game for its caustic commentary. The 4 February 1775 number attacked the King, and the House of Lords prosecuted the publisher Samuel Axtell for seditious and treasonable libel against the King, ordering that the paper be burned (though radical crowds tried to extinguish the flames, see Poole).

It condemned their imperial policy as self-destructive and their treatment of the Americans as foolishly shortsighted. It condoned American resistance to what it characterized as tyrannical policies and called on Britons to beware that what began as oppression of the colonies could end up threatening rights on their own side of the Atlantic as well. Even so, the men behind The Crisis hoped for a solution to the problems of empire within it, not outside it, and their ardor for the Patriot cause cooled once Revolutionary Americans declared independence. The serial closed when their differences with American Revolutionaries became too obvious to deny.