I learned this week that I (along with 92% of other applicants) had been unsuccessful in applying for a particular research fellowship. The scarcity of such fellowships, and the high demand for them, means that applications always represent the very longest of longshots. I was disappointed nevertheless, knowing that the fellowship would have provided the time and focus I need to finish the book. For now, though, I keep on keeping on.

This week also brought more positive things. On Monday I attended a presentation by Margaret Schotte, delivered as part of the Prize Papers Lunch Talks series. Margaret’s paper, “Sailing with the Prince de Conti: Recovering individual stories in the Prize Papers”, told a very interesting story about the seizure of the French ship Prince de Conti during the Seven Years’ War. During her talk, Margaret mentioned a resource that I was totally unaware of: digitised crew and passenger lists from French East India Company ships. These lists were primarily digitised by a volunteer organisation, the Association des Amis du Service Historique de la Défense à Lorient. As soon as Margaret’s talk was finished, I immediately delved into the collection and was able to find Macintosh (albeit transcribed as (“MACINTORF”) in the passenger list for the Brisson, along with his fellow Briton, the Reverend Thomas Yate.

Macintosh (or “MACINTORF”) in the Rôle du Brisson (1778-1780).

These listings are really useful since they give a much fuller picture of the cast of characters within whom Macintosh interacted on the Brisson, some of whom he refers to in Travels by rank or role rather than by name. Being able to connect the two—between text and archive—is potentially very beneficial.

Shortly after Margaret’s talk I discovered, for the fist time, a really interesting podcast, Drafting the Past, that focuses on the art and craft of historical writing. Each episode focuses on the work of one academic and invites them to reflect on the approach they take, practical and conceptual, to writing history. The most recent episode features an interview with Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, discussing his new book, The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It. Since listening to this episode I have been working my way slowly back through earlier episodes, taking inspiration from the stories of all those who have carved out the time and maintained the drive to get their books over the line.

I have written before about the press speculation that followed the shocking and widely publicised suicide of Macintosh’s son, William, in December 1784. Amid the various causes on which the London press speculated, one that had escaped my attention until this week was the possibility that William had been spurned by a lover. According to a report in the London Chronicle (30 December 1784–1 January 1785), William had—on his return from India, where he had acquired a sum of money—”entered into all the fashionable vices of the times”. “During his race of folly,” the Chronicle continued, William “formed a connexion with a Miss Robertson, of the Cyprian order, who no sooner found his circumstances were in the wane, than she bid him adieu for one who was more likely to support her in style”. “This infidelity of his mistress,” the Chronicle concluded, “in great measure led him to commit this rash act; young and inexperienced, he had set his affections upon her, and foolishly concluded he should have a continuance of pleasure and happiness in the arms of a prostitute”.

Framed here as a gendered morality tale, William’s sad fate is seen to be the combined outcome of naivety and deception. It is a story, in the Chronicle‘s telling, that seems to combine the characteristic elements of a morality play: temptation, in the form of alcohol, gambling, and the company of women; a fall, in the form of debt and betrayal; and redemption, of a sort, in the form of a final “fatal act [designed] to save himself from shame, remorse, and upbraidings”. Accurate or not, it was an account that sought to give some logic to what otherwise seemed a tragic and illogical event.

The Miss Robertson, whom the Chronicle casts as the femme fatale in its account, would doubtless have been familiar to contemporary readers of Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies, a catalogue or directory of London’s female sex workers, published annually in the second half of the eighteenth century. Given its ephemeral nature, not all editions of the List have survived, although new copies continue to come to light. Neither the 1784 nor 1785 editions of the List exist in publicly accessible collections, so I may never be able to learn more about the Miss Robertson on whom William “fixed his love, and lavished his fortune”. At the time of his death, the 1785 edition of the List was readying for publication on New Year’s day. Indeed, the day before William was buried at St Paul’s Church in Covent Garden, the Morning Herald carried an advertisement for the new List, copies of which could be had at no. 9 Little Bridges Street, a two-minute walk away on the other side of the piazza.