58 Facts About Richard Price

Richard Price was a Welsh moral philosopher, Nonconformist minister and mathematician.

Richard Price was a political reformer, pamphleteer, active in radical, republican, and liberal causes such as the French and American Revolutions.

Richard Price was well-connected and fostered communication between many people, including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, Mirabeau and the Marquis de Condorcet.

Richard Price wrote on issues of demography and finance, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Richard Price's mother was Catherine Richards, his father's second wife.

Richard Price was born at Tyn Ton, a farmhouse in the village of Llangeinor, Glamorgan, Wales.

Richard Price was educated privately, then at Neath and Pen-twyn.

Richard Price studied under Vavasor Griffiths at Chancefield, Talgarth, Powys.

Richard Price then moved to London, where he spent the rest of his life.

Richard Price studied with John Eames and the dissenting academy in Moorfields, London.

Richard Price held the lectureship at Old Jewry, where Samuel Chandler was minister.

In 1758 Richard Price moved to Newington Green, and took up residence in No 54 the Green, in the middle of a terrace even then a hundred years old.

When, in 1770, Richard Price became morning preacher at the Gravel Pit Chapel in Hackney, he continued his afternoon sermons at Newington Green.

Richard Price accepted duties at the meeting house in Old Jewry.

Richard 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 1772 Richard Price recruited Joseph Priestley, who came to work for Shelburne as librarian from 1773.

At home, or at his church itself, Richard 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, and William Pitt the Elder.

Richard Price knew the philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith.

When Lindsey resigned his living and moved to London to create an avowedly Unitarian congregation Richard Price played a role in finding and securing the premises for what became Essex Street Chapel.

Richard Price maintained, in opposition to Priestley, the free agency of man and the unity and immateriality of the human soul.

Richard Price is believed to have helped her with money to go to Lisbon to see her close friend Fanny Blood.

Wollstonecraft was then unpublished: through Richard Price she met the radical publisher Joseph Johnson.

Richard Price later published A Vindication of the Rights of Men, a response to Burke's denunciation of the French Revolution and attack on Price; and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 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.

Richard Price appears 14 times in the diary of William Godwin, Wollstonecraft's later husband.

The support Richard Price gave to the colonies of British North America in the American War of Independence made him famous.

Amongst its critics were Adam Ferguson, William Markham, John Wesley, and Edmund Burke; and Richard Price rapidly became one of the best known men in England.

Richard Price 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.

Richard Price was a consistent critic of war in general and the corrupting effects of growing government debt.

Richard Price's name became identified with the cause of American independence.

Franklin was a close friend; Richard Price corresponded with Turgot; and in the winter of 1778 he was invited by the Continental Congress to go to America and assist in the financial administration of the states, an offer he turned down.

Richard Price preached to crowded congregations, and, when Lord Shelburne became Prime Minister in 1782, he was offered the post of his private secretary.

In 1785, Richard Price was elected an international member of the American Philosophical Society.

Richard Price wrote Observations on the importance of the American Revolution and the means of rendering it a benefit to the World.

Richard Price drew a bold parallel between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the French Revolution of 1789, arguing that the former had spread enlightened ideas and paved the way for the second one.

Richard Price exhorted the public to divest themselves of national prejudices and embrace "universal benevolence", a concept of cosmopolitanism that entailed support for the French Revolution and the progress of "enlightened" ideas.

At the dinner of the London Revolution Society that followed, Richard Price suggested that the Society should send an address to the National Assembly in Paris.

In 1786 Sarah Richard Price died, and there had been no children by the marriage.

Richard Price was buried at Bunhill Fields, where his funeral sermon was preached by Joseph Priestley.

Richard Price's extended family included William Morgan, the actuary, and his brother George Cadogan Morgan, dissenting minister and scientist, both sons of Richard Price's sister Sarah by William Morgan, a surgeon of Bridgend, Glamorganshire.

Richard Price rejected traditional Christian notions of original sin and moral punishment, preaching the perfectibility of human nature, and he wrote on theological questions.

Richard Price wrote on finance, economics, probability, and life insurance.

Richard Price was asked to become literary executor of Thomas Bayes the mathematician.

Richard Price edited Bayes's major work An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances, which appeared in Philosophical Transactions, and contains Bayes' Theorem, one of the fundamental results of probability theory.

Richard Price wrote an introduction to the paper which provides some of the philosophical basis of Bayesian statistics.

From about 1766 Richard Price worked with the Society for Equitable Assurances.

Richard Price's views included the detrimental effects of large cities, and the need for some constraints on commerce and movement of population.

In particular Richard Price took an interest in the figures of Franklin and Ezra Stiles on the colonial population in America, thought in some places to be doubling every 22 years.

Richard Price's nephew William Morgan was an actuary, and became manager of the Equitable in 1775.

Richard Price's continuing claim in it on British depopulation was challenged by John Howlett in 1781.

Investigation of actual causes of ill-health began at this period, in a group of radical physicians around Priestley, including Richard Price but centred on the Midlands and north-west: with John Aikin, Matthew Dobson, John Haygarth and Thomas Percival.

Richard Price represented a different tradition, deontological ethics rather than the virtue ethics of Hutcheson, going back to Samuel Clarke and John Balguy.

Philosophically and politically Richard Price had something in common with Thomas Reid.

Richard Price drew, among other sources, on Cicero and Panaetius, and has been labelled a "British Platonist".

Richard Price was widely criticised for that and an absence of interest in civil society.

James Mackintosh wrote that Richard Price was attempting to revive moral obligation.

Richard Price admits that right actions must be "grateful" to us; that, in fact, moral approbation includes both an act of the understanding and an emotion of the heart.

Richard Price wrote Fast-day Sermons, published respectively in 1779 and 1781.

Spray paint and laser cut stencil images of Richard 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 his birth.