As I mentioned in my last post, I am gearing up for what will be the last substantive empirical section of the book: the chapter (and I hope it remains just one chapter) dealing with the period of Macintosh’s life from his flight from revolutionary Avignon in 1792, through his transformation into an agent of the counter-revolution as part of William Wickham’s spy ring in Switzerland, to his exile and eventual death in Eisenach in 1813.

As with the earlier parts of the book dealing with the Caribbean and India, beginning work on this final section feels a little like starting again from square one, since it means familiarising myself not just with an entirely new cast of characters (brought into Macintosh’s life as a consequence of his restless geographical mobility), but also a new (and very large) literature. While this process is daunting—perhaps inevitably so—it is also a great opportunity to learn.

I was reminded of this fact whilst listening to a recent episode of the wonderful podcast Drafting the Past, which featured an interview with the political scientist Anna O. Law, about her book Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship (2026). Law discussed the work involved in writing history as a non-historian, and particularly the challenges of getting to grips with both the events and the historiography in order to make a contribution to it. I felt very “seen” by her reflections on writing one particular chapter on colonial America:

So, my friend Rachel Sheldon said, you know, for us the past is a foreign country. It really was. So, for an example, the colonial chapter. Oh my god, people, please read my colonial chapter, because it took three years. One chapter took three years. Why did it take three years? Because I did two years of reading just to understand basic information before I was willing to put pen to paper. So, retraining myself as a historian meant I have to read a ton to lay down basic information, whereas a colonial historian would have probably blown through that chapter in a couple of months, not three years.

Although I lack Law’s level of dedication to the task, I entirely sympathise! I just hope this chapter doesn’t take three years.

This week, in preparation for moving on to what will be the final empirical chapter of the book, I visited the Hampshire Record Office in Winchester to consult the correspondence of William Wickham in the vast Wickham family papers. I managed to locate two letters from Macintosh that were new to me and, in transcribing them, was faced with a familiar problem: trying to identify the individuals who were part of the constantly changing cast of characters that constituted his social and political milieux.

Although the group of people that forms the context to our lives necessarily changes across time, as new connections are formed and other fade away, Macintosh’s cosmopolitan mobility had meant that changes in the composition of his networks were often rapid and wholesale. Moving between the Caribbean, India, Britain, France, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, Macintosh met and formed friendships with a vast and shifting cast of characters. It seems that just as I become familiar one group of individuals who populate his correspondence, he is on the move again.

I am currently dealing with Macintosh’s final days in Avignon before his flight to Switzerland (first to Estavayer and then to Bern) and preparing for yet another recomposition of his social circle. Often it is challenging simply to identify the individuals with whom he was interacting, either because of imprecise or shifting orthographies or because they are described on the basis of titles or roles shared by many others. One such that I encountered yesterday was “Young Count de Lentzbourg of Fribourg”. While a scholar of the counter-revolution in Switzerland might have been able to pinpoint this individual quite easily, the task of figuring out who’s who is more challenging when one follow an individual like Macintosh whose geographical mobility transcends specialist disciplinary knowledge.

I won’t recount the long effort and circuitious searching it took to establish that the individual to whom Macintosh was referring was Louis Stanislas Xavier de Lenzbourg (1778–1838). The two met in Bern in the year Xavier—who would go on to pursue a celebrated military career—turned seventeen and was on the lookout for a commission. Xavier is, of course, only one among scores of individuals who formed the backdrop to Macintosh’s new life as an émigré and counter-revolutionary, and I look forward (albeit with some trepidation) to meeting and getting to know this new cast of characters.

For much of the spring, I have been working to understand the social networks that defined Macintosh’s time in Avignon between the mid-1780s and early 1790s. While I have been able to trace many of the individuals whose names appear in his archive, and to understand something of their relationships with Macintosh, there are many whose presence remains obscure (at least to me). For a long time, one such figure was a child, Joseph, who appears in Macintosh’s archive in relation to his death, at the age of two, in 1788. Try as I might, I could not work out why Macintosh had documents relating to Joseph’s death—an invoice of expenses associated with the burial, and a certified extract from the parish register. Sometimes, however, all that is needed is one piece of information for everything suddenly to make sense.

The documents in Macintosh’s archive make it clear that Joseph was about twenty-six months old when he died at the home of his wet nurse, Jeanne Bernard, on 22 November 1788. He was buried the following day in Barbentane, to the southwest of Avignon. The funeral expenses included 2 livres, 5 sols for the priest (Esprit Joubert), 1 livre, 3 sols for candles, and 1 livre, 12 sols for the interment itself.

Joseph’s parents were recorded in the burial register as “le Sieur Teixeira” and “Jeanne Vincent Murring,” described as former residents of the central parish of Saint-Agricol in Avignon. Try as I might, I could not work out the connection with Macintosh until I consulted the couple’s marriage act. They had married in Avignon in the summer of 1785, and the act revealed that Teixeira was from Portugal and Murring from Vienna, and that the former was in the service of the Count of Oyenhausen-Grevenburg. Finally, I had the connection.

In 1788, Macintosh was looking after two of the Count’s children at his home outside Avignon while the Count and Countess were in Portugal. It seems likely that Teixeira and Murring had gone with them, leaving Joseph in the care of a wet nurse in Barbentane. Joseph’s death—which would have been a devastating blow to his parents on their return to Avignon—would have required Macintosh to step in and cover the expenses in the meantime. At the same time, the Count and Countess’s youngest child, Henriqueta, was being cared for by another wet nurse at Macintosh’s home.

While this story may end up as a footnote to a footnote, I find it impossible not to be fascinated by these connections, obligations, and unconsidered lives. If Macintosh deserves to be remembered, then so too does Joseph.

I have noted more than once on this blog that, despite having spent so many years trying to understand Macintosh’s world, there are some elements that remain stubbornly obscure. One such is the identity and role of two women who formed part of Macintosh’s household throughout his time in Avignon and later exile in Switzerland: B. Deleahy and E. Lee. I have long known that these women existed (their names appear often on receipts and invoices, for example), and I was aware that as I grew closer to writing about Macintosh’s time in Avignon I would eventually have to try to figure out who they were and what they were doing in his life.

Both women first appear in Macintosh’s archive in 1782, when they were living in Liège and had assumed—at least in the case of Deleahy—the role of guardian for Macintosh’s youngest daughter, Polly, during an 18-month stay on the Continent. How Macintosh had come to meet these women is currently unclear, as is almost everything else about them.

Following a lead I found in the 1935 book L‘Émigration Francaise dans le Canton de Fribourg (1789–1798), I was able to locate Deleahy and Lee in the Archives de l’Etat de Fribourg, where they appear (alongside Macintosh) in the Rathsmanual of the canton’s Petit Conseil—recent émigrés from France. The entry is extremely revealing; it gives the women’s first names (Bridget and Elizabeth, respectively), their religion (Catholic), and their place of birth (London).

The entry in the Rathsmanual concerns the sisters’ request to take up lodgings with Macintosh and their two servants in Estavayer, on the southern shore of Lake Neuchâtel. The Petit Conseil approved their request, but vetoed one of the servants, who was French. At this time there was a widespread concern that working-class French citizens posed a risk of spreading revolutionary sentiments in Switzerland.

Having Bridget and Elizabeth’s names is a helpful starting point, but there is a great deal more digging to do. I have found a reference to them both in a biography of the German novelist Sophie von La Roche that appears to connect them to the Catholic community of Frankfurt. I can see a new rabbit hole ahead…

Today marks this blog’s 14th birthday. A great deal has happened since my first post in 2012, when I was just beginning to figure out who William Macintosh was and how interesting (and challenging) it might be to piece together the story of his life. Thanks to the largess of the British Academy, I have been working full time on my book since the beginning of September and have managed to make the kind of progress that I know would almost certainly be impossible under other circumstances. As ever, however, there is still a long way to go, but I am beginning to sense a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel (or at least the tunnel that leads to a first complete draft of my book; there will doubtless be another long tunnel that leads to a revised and shortened version suitable to submit to the press!).

I have recently begun work on the book’s tenth chapter, which follows a decade in Macintosh’s life from financial failure in London in 1783, through personal reinvention as a gentleman farmer in the rural hinterland of Avignon and the tragic suicide of his son, to the advent of the French Revolution and the eventual seizure of his property as a bien national. I am looking forward (albeit trepidatiously) to tackling this chapter, since it concerns the period of Macintosh’s life that is currently the most obscure to me. Part of the mystery derives from the fact that most of the archival sources are (understandably) written in French and therefore take me much longer to process and make sense of than English-language sources.

One episode of Macintosh’s time in France that I am particularly looking forward to unravelling is his friendship with Leonor de Almeida Portugal, the poet and painter whom Macintosh knew as the Countess Oyenhausen. Leonor, Marquesa de Alorna, led a fascinating life that rivals Macintosh for interest and intrigue. Indeed, so compelling is her story that it will be coming to Netflix later this year as a six-part Portuguese-language biographical series made by Ukbar Filmes and RTP, with Sara Matos in the lead role.

Looking ahead to next year and this blog’s fifteenth birthday, I should by then have submitted the book manuscript and will be waiting (again with trepidation) for the arrival of the reviewers’ reports. Perhaps then I can start writing the script for the six-part Netflix series!

Today is International Women’s Day and a good time to discuss the forgotten work that went into making the French translation of Macintosh’s Travels, published in Paris as Voyages en Europe, Asie et en Afrique (1786). Although the translation was (and is) typically attributed to Jacques-Pierre Brissot, the reality is rather more complicated and interesting. It has long been known that Brissot’s wife, Félicité, was responsible (either alone or in collaboration with her husband) for a number of translations ordinarily attributed to him. The question of whether Félicité had undertaken, or assisted with, the translation of Macintosh’s book is one that I have only recently been able to answer, thanks to the digitised records of the archive of the Paris book guild, the Chambre syndicale de la librairie et imprimerie de Paris.

In April 1785, Voyages was registered with the guild and subsequently issued with a permission tacite (tacit permission), allowing it to be published and distributed. As part of the registration process, the book’s translator was named. Here, the register took me by surprise: not only was the translation not Brissot’s, it was not Félicité’s either. The real translator was, in fact, Félicité’s teenage sister, Marie-Anne, known in the family as Nancy.

At the time the translation was undertaken (somewhere between the autumn of 1783 and the spring of 1784), Nancy was living in London with her sister and brother-in-law, who had relocated there from France in order to pursue Brissot’s dream of establishing a new literary and philosophical society, the Lycée de Londres. At this time, Brissot was busily engaged in various publishing ventures, including the six-part periodical Tableau de la situation actuelle des Anglois dans les Indes Orientales. Brissot had encountered Macintosh’s book as part of the wider research that supported the composition of the Tableau, and decided at some point in 1783 that a full-scale French translation was required as a supplement of sorts to the Tableau. Félicité, who might ordinarily have performed the literary labour of translation was occupied with a different task: translating and adapting Oliver Goldsmith’s An History of England, in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to his Son (1764), subsequently published in Paris in 1786 as Lettres philosophiques et politiques sur l’histoire de l’Angleterre. The task of translating Travels was, therefore, taken on by Nancy, in the year she turned sixteen.

Travels was a long book (around 150,000 words) and full of references to places and people with whom Nancy was probably unfamiliar. This was not, then, an insignificant undertaking, but it would have been done with the support of Félicité and in close consultation with Brissot, who took on a more editorial role in the production of Voyages—supplementing the book with a preface and footnote commentary, as well as emending the text in some places, expanding it in others, and clarifying it elsewhere. Even with support, Nancy’s task was substantial and challenging, but she clearly possessed the skill and capacity to do it. Brissot would later tell his Swiss publishers, the Société typographique de Neuchâtel, that he was très content with they way the translation had turned out.

Nancy’s subsequent life was eventful, but obscure in the historiography. She went on to marry Edme-Pierre Aublay, lived for a time in Philadelphia, ran a small boarding school (first on Cherry Street in Birmingham and then on Russel Square in London), endured the tragic death of her son, Francis (or François), an undergraduate student at the University of Oxford, corresponded with Joseph Banks, dedicated a book of religious instruction to her grand nephews, Felix and Eugene, invoking their learned grandfather, Jacques-Pierre, found herself one day captivated by the religious writing of Sir Matthew Hale, and died on the rue Saint-Honoré in Paris in December 1839, aged seventy-three. She was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery.

Nancy’s labour on Voyages would have remained entirely invisible were it not for one line in the registers of the Paris book guild. I’m just glad I found it!

1784 was a particularly unfortunate year in the life of Jacques-Pierre Brissot. It would see him imprisoned twice: once in London (over unpaid printer’s bills) and once Paris (over his alleged involvement in the production of libellous pamphlets). It was also the year that he, possibly in collaboration with his wife, Félicité, completed the French translation of Macintosh’s Travels. In attempting to understand the events of that year, I was curious to know where it was in London that Brissot had been incarcerated. Most secondary sources identify it simply as a “debtors’ prison”, of which there were several in London at the time. Brissot, in his Mémoires, does not specify the name or location of the prison, but notes that, apart from the bars on the window, his surroundings were almost domestic: “I could have believed I was still at home [j’aurais pu me croire encore chez moi].”

The closest to a contemporary source I have been able to find—a brief biography of Brissot, written by Joel Barlow to accompany his 1794 English translation of one of Brissot’s works—is a little more specific, describing the prison as “a lock-up house in Gray’s Inn Lane.”

Although Barlow’s sketch of Brissot’s life has been described as “fanciful” by Robert Darnton in The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982), the specificity of the information with respect to Brissot’s incarceration perhaps lends it some credibility. Rather than a debtors’ prison per se, the lock-up on Gray’s Inn Lane (now Gray’s Inn Road) was a so-called sponging-house (sometimes spunging), where debtors were held temporarily in the expectation that a quick agreement could be reached with their creditors—see Margot Finn,The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (2003), 116–17. This was the case for Brissot, who, thanks to the financial assistance of friends and his mother-in-law, was able to extricate himself after a few days.

If we consider Barlow to be accurate, the lock-up in question was a public house, the Pied Bull (or Py’d or Pyed). In 1786, not long after Brissot’s incarceration, the pub was insured by its then landlord, John Smith. We can, perhaps, suppose that Smith was also in charge at the time of Brissot’s arrest in May 1784. Obviously none of this really matters, and certainly has no particular bearing on Brissot’s translation of Travels, but I am always curious about how we know what we know about the past, and that it seems that, in the context of the first of Brissot’s 1784 imprisonments, what we know (or, at least, what appears in the secondary literature) is a little imprecise. Rather than disappear down that rabbit hole myself (I am sure there are archival records that could definitively identify the site of Brissot’s incarceration), I hope this post might encourage others better placed that me to throw some light on that question.

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I have been trying for some time to understand the journey of one of Macintosh’s letters from George Washington, originally received by him in Avignon in 1788. When, twenty-two years later, Aaron Burr met Macintosh in Eisenach, Burr recorded in his journal that the letter from Washington was “now in the museum at Weimar.”

In late 2024, with the kind assistance of Dominik Hünniger, I traced the letter to the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar. Subsequent investigation revealed that the letter had previously been part of Goethe’s large collection of autographs and, more recently, had been on display a number of times at the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv as one of its archival treasures.

Two questions remained: 1) How did the letter come into Goethe’s possession? and 2) In which museum had it been displayed when Macintosh and Burr discussed it in 1810?

The answer to the first question comes (at least in part) from a letter to Goethe from his secretary-librarian Friedrich Theodor David Kräuter. Dated 28 August 1818, Goethe’s sixty-ninth birthday, Kräuter’s letter enclosed a much-wished-for addition to Goethe’s autograph collection: “the authentic signature of the great liberator of the New World [die beygelegte ächte Unterschrift des großen Befreyers der neuen Welt].” Although Kräuter does not mention Washington by name, it is highly likely that this is who he was referring to. Kräuter goes on to explain that he stumbled upon the letter containing Washington’s signature simply by chance.

Detail of Kräuter’s letter to Goethe. Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, 28/79, Bl 533-534.

In attempting to answer the second unresolved question, I received some very helpful advice from Sabine Schäfer at the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv. She was able to point me towards a source—Goethes “Bildergalerie”: Die Anfänge der Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar (2002)—that details a short-lived museum that was established in 1809 in the Fürstenhaus on Fürstenplatz (now Platz der Demokratie) where the family of Karl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach lived. The four-room museum displayed a variety of artworks and, so it would seem, Macintosh’s letter from Washington.

The museum closed in January 1811 and the paintings (and the letter) were moved to the ducal library. The following year, one of Goethe’s friends and colleagues, Christian Gottlob von Voigt, who, with Goethe, was responsible for overseeing the library, wrote to him to explain that he had long intended to give the Washington letter to Goethe, but had been unable to find it among the chaos of his papers. Months later, Voigt was still unable to locate it.

So, now we know (or can be reasonably confident) that Macintosh’s letter from Washington was on display in the museum in the Fürstenhaus in 1810, that it was subsequently transferred to the ducal library, thereafter was lost or mislaid, then found its way to Kräuter, before becoming a memorable gift for Goethe’s sixty-nineth birthday.

As is often the case with this project, answering one question inevitably raises others. How did the letter come to be in the museum in the first place? Did Macintosh donate it to von Voigt directly? Did he hope that the letter might secure him some social capital? As ever, there is more digging to do!

For more than a dozen years, I have been compiling evidence of the ownership and readership of Macintosh’s book. It is only now, in turning to write about the book’s reception in ernest, and to think in connected ways about who encountered Travels and what they made of it, that the underrepresentation (or what I presume to be the underrepresentation) of women readers becomes particularly obvious. While I have previously identified women who owned the book (like Gustava Eleonora Lindahl [née Gjörwell]) or who sold it (like Catherine Finn), it was only yesterday that—for the first time—I encountered definitive evidence of a woman who actually read it. This was Luise von Göchhausen, chief lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Duchess Anna Amalia, patron of Weimar Classicism.

von Göchhausen read Travels (in English) in 1784, having borrowed a copy of the book from Johann Gottfried Herder in the late summer. Others in Herder’s circle were also queuing up to borrow it, most notably Karl Ludwig von Knebel, to whom Herder promised the book just as soon as it was returned. Although we do not know what von Göchhausen made of the book, her reading is important evidence of the book’s reach and circulation, particularly beyond Germanophone scholars of human difference, who were the principal readers of the 1782 London edition in the German-speaking states. As ever, there is more digging to do, and more stories to be uncovered.

2026 will, with a bit of luck, be the year I finish the book (or, at least, the year I submit the completed manuscript to the Press). I am working towards a Christmas submission deadline, and January therefore marks the beginning of the end of a period of research that has kept me fascinated, compelled, and a little frazzled for at least the last fifteen years. Although I still have some archival and library research to do this year, my main focus is on completing the book’s remaining chapters, of which I have two-and-a-bit long empirical chapters to write, plus the introduction and conclusion.

Since starting a period of research leave in September (praise be to the British Academy for the award of the Donald Winch Fund Fellowship), I have finished the chapter dealing with Macintosh’s experiences in India, and have written two thirds of the chapter dealing with the authorship, reading, reception, and translation of his book. This has been a virtually all-consuming task and I have unfortunately found little time to share work in progress on the blog.

As ever, the process of writing is a combination of analysis and discovery. As much as I refine my understanding of Macintosh’s world in the process of writing, so that world becomes richer and more complex as a result of the connections, realisations, and surprises that inevitably come or are revealed through the process of writing up research. The net effect of this is that the end point of each chapter only ever seems to recede, like the phenomenon of false summits in mountaineering. That is, for me, part of the excitement that comes from research, but it is also a source of anxiety as the thought that I am likely already beyond the contracted word length for the book makes me dread the unpleasant task of cutting that will need to take place in the future.

I began writing in earnest more than five years ago, in November 2020, in a small gap between lockdowns and homeschooling. In many ways, the book has been something of a refuge from a turbulent and upsetting world in that time and while I am very eager to be finished, I suspect I will miss my safe space when the work is finally done. Right, 342 days till Christmas. Let’s crack on.