The silver lining of having spent so long working on Macintosh, is that it has become easier to spot the significance of particular items—clues that would have meant virtually nothing to me at the beginning of the project, now jump out at me. This is the case, for example, with the above receipt, the text of which reads
“Received this 5th Day of March 1782 of Mr Thompson the Sum of Seven Pounds Nine Shillings in full for Printing &c a Pamplet [sic] entitled Second Letter to Mr Jenkinson”
I had never heard of this pamphlet before today, but there are some tantalising clues that it may have been written by Macintosh, namely:
1) it was published by John Murray (who also published Macintosh’s Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa the same year);
2) the recipient of the pamphlet’s “letter” was Charles Jenkinson, to whom Macintosh sent a letter the previous year, 1781 (which I have not yet been able to read due to the closure of the British Library);
3) the pamphlet (which I have not yet read because it appears not to have been digitised) was published anonymously, but was signed “A citizen of the world”, an epithet Macintosh often used to describe himself;
4) the “Thompson” referred to in the receipt, may have been William Thomson, who was the Grub Street editor employed to add a literary polish to Macintosh’s Travels.
Clearly this all requires a lot more digging, but it would be wonderful to be able to add another example of a Macintosh-Thomson-Murray collaboration in order to put the production of Travels into wider context.