November 30, 1767-Dated, Complete Issue of The Pennsylvania Chronicle, and Universal Advertiser (Vol. I, Numb. 46), Philadelphia, Printed by William Goddard, Monday, November 30, to Wednesday, December 2, 1767. The First Printing of Letter I of the famous John Dickinson's Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies, Fine.
This complete 2 page issue is printed on one sheet for The Pennsylvania Chronicle, and Universal Advertiser, measuring about 18.5 x 11.5 inches. This issue was printed by William Goddard at Philadelphia, published for the week of Monday, November 30, to Wednesday, December 2, 1767, as Volume I, Number 46. Its front page carries, under the heading "A LETTER FROM A FARMER in Pennsylvania, to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies. LETTER I". This is the first printed appearance of what would become one of the most influential works of political writing in the years before American independence. Marginal outer edges of paper selvedge chipped yet they do not affect any text but for a few letters at the bottom right corner, some soiling and humidity tone, as shown.

The unsigned author, publishing under the pseudonym "A Farmer," was John Dickinson, the Philadelphia lawyer and legislator who had already helped draft the Stamp Act Congress's Declaration of Rights and Resolves in 1765. Writing in response to the Townshend Acts of 1767, Dickinson opens the letter in the persona of a modest, well-read gentleman farmer settled "near the banks of the river Delaware, in the province of Pennsylvania," whose small farm and quiet contentment give his political arguments the disarming authority of an ordinary, disinterested colonist rather than a partisan agitator. Over the eleven letters that would follow across the winter and spring of 1767 and 1768, Dickinson built the case that would come to define the colonial position for the next decade, that Parliament held legitimate authority to regulate imperial trade, but no constitutional power to tax the colonies for revenue without their consent, since taxation without representation struck at the root of English liberty itself. A rare and greatly important historic Colonial newspaper.
The Letters from a Farmer spread with a speed and unanimity of praise almost without precedent in the Colonial press, reprinted within weeks in nearly every American newspaper, then in pamphlet form, and eventually in London (prefaced by Benjamin Franklin), Dublin, and Paris.

They made John Dickinson, whose authorship was an open secret within months, the most famous political writer in America, and supplied the intellectual architecture for the Continental Congress's own later objections to parliamentary taxation. The issue, containing the debut installment as it first reached Philadelphia readers, stands at the very beginning of that chain of influence.