[HARTLIB, Samuel, and John Dury].

Considerations tending to the happy Accomplishment of Englands Reformation in Church and State. Humbly presented to the Piety and Wisdome of the High and Honourable Court of Parliament.

[Colophon: London], Anno 1647. Small 4to., pp. [4], 59, [1], with a drop-head title; a very good, clean copy with generous margins in late nineteenth-century half red morocco and marbled boards; small stab holes at the inner margin where formerly stitched. A number of contemporary (perhaps authorial) manuscript corrections alter the pronoun ‘I’ to ‘We’, asserting the joint authorship. First edition of a novel proposal concerning welfare, education, and the exchange of information. The educationist and projector Samuel Hartlib (1600?-1662), born to a Polish merchant family in Elbing on the Baltic, studied at Brieg, possibly Königsberg, and certainly Cambridge, before settling in London in 1628. He maintained contacts across Europe, lodging the Czech educationist Comenius for nine months in 1641, and as a business entrepreneur, he ‘had a hand in over half the patents for new inventions issued by the English government during the Commonwealth and protectorate period’ (Oxford DNB). He was a friend of Milton, who addressed Of Education (1644) to him.Considerations advocate a comprehensive state welfare system for the poor and a national system of education, complete with ‘Inspectors and Overseers to looke to the Observance of good Orders in this businesse’. There were to be four levels of schooling: ‘The first for the Vulgar, whose life is to be Mechanicall. The second for the Gentry and Nobles, who are to bear Charges in the Commonwealth. The third for Scholars, who are to teach others Humane Arts and Sciences. And the fourth … a Seminary of the Ministery.’The treatise then moves on to propose the establishment of a central information bureau which Hartlib calls an ‘Office of Addresse’ along the lines of that of the philanthropist Théophraste Renaudot in Paris. The Office was to comprise two sections, one for ‘Accommodations’, which was in effect a labour exchange to address the economic effect of the Civil War, and one for ‘Communications’, to exchange ‘Addresses and Informations in matters of Religion, of Learning, and of all Ingenuities’. This second office was to ‘furnish Information … to such as shall desire it … and to maintaine a Correspondency and Learned Trade with all Men of Abilities within and without the Kingdome’. Though no such institutions resulted from this proposal, Hartlib effectively filled the second office himself in his self-appointed role as ‘intelligencer’ to the Protestant elite with his pan-European network of friends and correspondents.As Hartlib’s correspondence reveals, while he provided the Preface to the Considerations, the main body of the text was drafted by Dury, the Calvinist minister and ecumenist he had first met in 1627; Dury had returned to England in 1645 from a long-standing mission to unite the Protestant churches in Europe, here promoted once again, and in the year of publication he was appointed tutor to the younger royal children. He was another friend of Milton, and translated Eikonoklastes into French.Wing H 981; Goldsmiths’ 947; Thomason E.389 (‘May 1647’); Charles Webster (Samuel Hartlib and the Advancement of Learning, 1970).

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