Overview
Remarks on Some Paragraphs in the Fourth Volume of Dr. Blackstone’s Commentaries is a controversial pamphlet by Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), the English Dissenting minister, theologian, political writer, and natural philosopher. It belongs to the polemical literature of religious and civil liberty produced in England in the late 1760s, and it is directed specifically at passages in the fourth and final volume of Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. That fourth volume, subtitled “Of Public Wrongs,” treats criminal law and offenses against the state and against religion; it was in its treatment of religious nonconformity that Blackstone drew Priestley’s objection.
The work is a short prose critique rather than a systematic treatise. In it Priestley, writing as a Protestant Dissenter, challenges the way Blackstone characterized dissent from the established Church of England within the framework of English law. The pamphlet is part of Priestley’s broader campaign, in the same period, on behalf of religious toleration and the rights of Dissenters.
Author and Context
Joseph Priestley was one of the most prominent figures of the English Enlightenment, remembered both for his scientific work (notably his experiments on gases) and for his voluminous writings in theology, education, history, and political theory. He was a committed Rational Dissenter—eventually a Unitarian—and a lifelong advocate of liberty of conscience. Excluded, like other Dissenters, from full participation in national institutions by the religious tests then in force, Priestley repeatedly argued in print for the removal of civil disabilities imposed on those outside the established church.
In the years around the composition of the Remarks, Priestley was actively engaged with questions of government and liberty. His Essay on the First Principles of Government had appeared in 1768, setting out his views on the proper limits of state authority, especially in matters of religion. The critique of Blackstone flows naturally from these concerns.
Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England was published in four volumes between the mid-1760s and 1769 and rapidly became the authoritative exposition of English law. Because it was so influential and so widely read, its formulations carried great weight, and its account of the legal standing of Dissenters was therefore, from Priestley’s standpoint, worth contesting directly and publicly.
Subject and Argument
The heart of Priestley’s Remarks is an objection to Blackstone’s manner of describing Protestant nonconformity. In treating offenses against religion, Blackstone presented the legal position of Dissenters in terms that Priestley found demeaning: the tendency of Blackstone’s account was to treat dissent from the established church as in itself a legal offense, one merely exempted from punishment by the indulgence of the Toleration Act rather than recognized as a matter of natural right. Priestley resisted the implication that Dissenters were, in effect, tolerated wrongdoers whose worship was permitted only by legislative forbearance.
Against this, Priestley argued from principles of religious liberty and freedom of conscience, contending that adherence to a form of worship other than that established by law is not properly a crime at all, and that the language of the law and of its commentators ought not to brand peaceable Dissenters as offenders. The pamphlet thus combines close attention to Blackstone’s particular wording with an appeal to the broader moral and political principles Priestley championed elsewhere.
Reception and Significance
The Remarks provoked a direct response from Blackstone, and the episode became a notable exchange in the debate over the legal and civil status of Dissenters. The controversy also drew in other Dissenting writers concerned with the same passages of the Commentaries, contributing to a wider public discussion of toleration and the rights of nonconformists in the years around 1770.
Within Priestley’s own body of work, the pamphlet is a characteristic product of his early career as a controversialist for civil and religious liberty, standing alongside his other writings of the period on government and toleration. Its lasting significance lies less in any independent influence than in its part in the running debate over Blackstone’s authoritative treatment of religion in English law, and as an example of the vigorous Dissenting response that treatise elicited.
