Richard Price facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Richard Price
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Portrait of Dr Richard Price (1784), by Benjamin West
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| Born | 23 February 1723 Tynton, Llangeinor, Glamorgan
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| Died | 19 April 1791 (aged 68) Newington Green, London
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| Known for | Bayes–Price theorem |
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Richard Price FRS (23 February 1723 – 19 April 1791) was a British moral philosopher, Nonconformist minister and mathematician. He was also a political reformer, pamphleteer, active in radical, republican, and liberal causes such as the French and American Revolutions. He was well-connected and fostered communication between many people, including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, Mirabeau and the Marquis de Condorcet. According to the historian John Davies, Price was "the greatest Welsh thinker of all time".
Born in Llangeinor, near Bridgend, Wales, Price spent most of his adult life as minister of Newington Green Unitarian Church, on the then outskirts of London, England. He edited, published and developed the Bayes–Price theorem and the field of actuarial science. He also wrote on issues of demography and finance, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society.
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Early life
Born on 23 February 1723, Richard Price was the son of Rhys Price, a dissenting minister. His mother was Catherine Richards, his father's second wife. Richard was born at Tyn Ton, a farmhouse in the village of Llangeinor, Glamorgan, Wales. He was educated privately, then at Neath and Pen-twyn. He studied under Vavasor Griffiths at Chancefield, Talgarth, Powys.
He then moved to London, where he spent the rest of his life. He studied with John Eames and the dissenting academy in Moorfields, London. Leaving the academy in 1744, Price became chaplain and companion to George Streatfield at Stoke Newington, then a village just north of London. He also held the lectureship at Old Jewry, where Samuel Chandler was minister. Streatfield's death and that of an uncle in 1757 improved Price's circumstances, and on 16 June 1757 he married Sarah Blundell, originally of Belgrave in Leicestershire.
Newington Green congregation
In 1758, Price moved to Newington Green, and took up residence in No. 54 the Green, in the middle of a terrace that was even then a hundred years old. (The building still survives as London's oldest brick terrace, dated 1658.) Price became minister to the Newington Green meeting-house, a church that continues today as Newington Green Unitarian Church. Among the congregation were Samuel Vaughan and his family. Price had Thomas Amory as preaching colleague from 1770.
When, in 1770, Price became morning preacher at the Gravel Pit Chapel in Hackney, he continued his afternoon sermons at Newington Green. He also accepted duties at the meeting house in Old Jewry.
Friends and associates
Newington Green neighbours
A close friend of Price was Thomas Rogers, father of Samuel Rogers, a merchant turned banker who had married into a long-established Dissenting family and lived at No. 56 the Green. More than once, Price and the elder Rogers rode on horseback to Wales. Another was the Rev. James Burgh, author of The Dignity of Human Nature and Thoughts on Education, who opened his Dissenting Academy on the Green in 1750 and sent his pupils to Price's sermons. Price, Rogers, and Burgh formed a dining club, eating at each other's houses in rotation. Price and Rogers joined the Society for Constitutional Information.
Bowood circle
The "Bowood circle" was a group of liberal intellectuals around Lord Shelburne, and named after Bowood House, his seat in Wiltshire. Price met Shelburne in or shortly after 1767, or was introduced by his wife Elizabeth Montagu, a leader of the Blue Stocking intellectual women, after the publication of his Four Dissertations in that year.
In 1771, Price had Shelburne employ Thomas Jervis. Another member of the circle was Benjamin Vaughan. In 1772, Price recruited Joseph Priestley, who came to work for Shelburne as librarian from 1773.
"Club of Honest Whigs"
The group that Benjamin Franklin christened the "Club of Honest Whigs" was an informal dining group around John Canton. It met originally in St Paul's Churchyard, at the London Coffee House; in 1771 it moved to Ludgate Hill. Price and Sir John Pringle were members, as were Priestley and Benjamin Vaughan.
Visitors
At home, or at his church itself, Price was visited by Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine; other American politicians such as Ambassador John Adams, who later became the second president of the United States, and his wife Abigail; and British politicians such as Lord Lyttleton, Earl Stanhope (known as "Citizen Stanhope"), and William Pitt the Elder. He knew also the philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith. Among activists, the prison reformer John Howard counted Price as a close friend; also there were John Horne Tooke, and John and Ann Jebb.
Theologians
Others acknowledged their debt to Price, such as the Unitarian theologians William Ellery Channing and Theophilus Lindsey. When Lindsey resigned his living and moved to London to create an avowedly Unitarian congregation Price played a role in finding and securing the premises for what became Essex Street Chapel. At the end of the 1770s Price and Lindsey were concerned about the contraction of dissent, at least in the London area. With Andrew Kippis and others, they established the Society for Promoting Knowledge of the Scriptures in 1783.
Price and Priestley took diverging views on morals and metaphysics. In 1778 appeared a published correspondence, A Free Discussion on the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity. Price maintained, in opposition to Priestley, the free agency of man and the unity and immateriality of the human soul. Price's opinions were Arian, Priestley's were Socinian.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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Mary Wollstonecraft moved her fledgling school for girls from Islington to Newington Green in 1784, with patron Mrs Burgh, widow of Price's friend James Burgh. Wollstonecraft, originally an Anglican, attended Price's services, where believers of all kinds were welcomed. The Rational Dissenters appealed to Wollstonecraft: they were hard-working, humane, critical but uncynical, and respectful towards women, and proved kinder to her than her own family. Price is believed to have helped her with money to go to Lisbon, Spain, to see her close friend Fanny Blood.
Wollstonecraft was then unpublished: through Price she met the radical publisher Joseph Johnson. The ideas Wollstonecraft ingested from the sermons at Newington Green pushed her towards a political awakening. She later published A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), a response to Burke's denunciation of the French Revolution and attack on Price; and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), extending Price's arguments about equality to women: Tomalin argues that just as the Dissenters were "excluded as a class from education and civil rights by a lazy-minded majority", so too were women, and the "character defects of both groups" could be attributed to this discrimination. Price appears 14 times in the diary of William Godwin, Wollstonecraft's later husband.
American Revolution
The support Price gave to the colonies of British North America in the American War of Independence made him famous. In early 1776, he published Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America. Sixty thousand copies of this pamphlet were sold within days; and a cheap edition was issued which sold twice as many copies. It commended Shelburne's proposals for the colonies, and attacked the Declaratory Act. Among its critics were Adam Ferguson, William Markham, John Wesley, and Edmund Burke; and Price rapidly became one of the best known men in England. He was presented with the freedom of the city of London, and it is said that his pamphlet had a part in determining the Americans to declare their independence. A second pamphlet on the war with America and the debts of Great Britain, followed in the spring of 1777. Price was a consistent critic of war in general and the corrupting effects of growing government debt.
Price's name became identified with the cause of American independence. Franklin was a close friend; Price corresponded with Turgot; and in the winter of 1778 Price was invited by the Continental Congress to go to America and assist in the financial administration of the states, an offer he turned down. In 1781 he, solely with George Washington, received the degree of Doctor of Laws from Yale College. He preached to crowded congregations, and, when Lord Shelburne became Prime Minister in 1782, he was offered the post of his private secretary. The same year he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1785, Price was elected an international member of the American Philosophical Society.
Price wrote also Observations on the importance of the American Revolution and the means of rendering it a benefit to the World (1784). Well received by Americans, it suggested that the greatest problem facing Congress was its lack of central powers.
Later life
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In 1767 Price received the honorary degree of D.D. from the University of Aberdeen, and in 1769 another from the University of Glasgow. In 1786 Sarah Price died, and there had been no children by the marriage.
In the same year Price with other Dissenters founded Hackney New College. On 19 April 1791 Price died. He was buried at Bunhill Fields, where his funeral sermon was preached by Joseph Priestley.
His extended family included William Morgan, the actuary, and his brother George Cadogan Morgan (1754–1798), dissenting minister and scientist, both sons of Richard Price's sister Sarah by William Morgan, a surgeon of Bridgend, Glamorganshire.
Commemoration
Spray paint and laser cut stencil images of Price created by the artist Stewy were installed on the exterior wall of the John Percival Building at Cardiff University in 2022 in anticipation of the 300th anniversary of Price's birth.
In February 2023, an English Heritage blue plaquein honour of Price was installed on a wall at 54 Newington Green, where he lived, and close to the Newington Green Nonconformist chapel where he was a pastor. The plaque was unveiled by newsreader and journalist Huw Edwards. A series of events to celebrate Price's tercentenary in 2023 have been organised in Llangeinor, his place of birth, around Wales and in London.
See also
- Liberalism
- Contributions to liberal theory
