Monthly Archives: March 2021

Macintosh: a citizen of the world?

Archives départementales de Vaucluse, 2 E Titres de famille 85, “Factures anglaises / 1769–1790”.

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.

Whatever happened to William and Ann?

I have taken a temporary step back from writing in order to take another systematic trawl through the more than 4,000 archival photographs I have in an effort to make sure that I don’t miss anything important when I do return to writing. The difficulty, of course, is knowing what is important and where important information is likely to be. Each time I take such a trawl, I learn new and surprising things, which reinforces the anxiety that I can never understand Macintosh fully unless I read every scrap of paper in his archive—an unrealistic task that would take me another ten years and would drive me to distraction!

One such discovery today was made in the large folder of receipts which offer an always-interesting snapshot into the purchasing habits of Macintosh and his family. One receipt in particular—for ribbons and gloves purchased by Macintosh’s wife, Ann, in 1778—is fascinating for what it reveals about the nature of the relationship between the couple.

Archives départementales de Vaucluse, 2 E Titres de famille 85, “Factures anglaises / 1769–1790”.

At the bottom of the receipt is a short narrative, dated 2 March 1781 and composed at the point at which Macintosh settled the bill. It reveals that he and Ann had, at this point, “been near four years separated, by mutual consent”. I had long suspected this must be the case, but I had never before found direct evidence of the fact (beyond Ann being described as a widow, even before Macintosh’s death). It is helpful to have some evidence of the toll Macintosh’s political activity and global mobility exerted on his family, but I do wonder what other revelatory snippets are still there, waiting to be discovered.