Team Macintosh have just begun the second week of their placement in the Department of Geography. Here, I turn the blog over to Lauren and Ophelia to offer their reflections on their first week as research assistants:

Lauren Muir

Despite thus far having only transcribed a small percentage of William Macintosh’s correspondence, Team Macintosh is undoubtedly making significant progress in revealing several interesting aspects of the late travel writer’s life and adventures.

There are, of course, many challenges in trying to read eighteenth-century handwriting. In addition to the smudges and tears that obscure many of the letters, accurate transcription depends upon having a dictionary to hand and one’s brains engaged. Existing records and transitions, and on-line resources, are searched in the hope of correctly identifying some archaic word, only to find that a random-seeming squiggle is, in fact, the name of an acquaintance of Mr Macintosh or, indeed, a very simple word! Though some words may never be deciphered, a feeling of elation occurs when, having had the entire team staring vacuously at the same apparently indecipherable script for a long time, we finally succeed in identifying a previously unreadable word or phrase.

Whilst ‘transcribing eighteenth-century handwriting’ may not ordinarily be at the top of the list of abilities to include in a CV, there are undoubtedly many other skills that have been, and will be, acquired throughout this placement; we have been provided with an invaluable opportunity in being able to develop our research skills in an academic environment in addition to furthering our analytical abilities, teamwork, and organisational skills. The communications and adventures of William Macintosh are genuinely interesting and the next two weeks of transcription will provide further pieces to slot in a fascinating puzzle that is was his life.

— Lauren

Ophelia King

Having always had a keen interest in history, particularly the period since the Enlightenment, I was very excited when a research opportunity in historical geography arose within Royal Holloway’s Department of Geography, and I quickly set my sights on applying for the position. Now, working alongside an extremely conscientious classmate, Lauren, we both have the lucky opportunity to work closely with many interesting eighteenth-century letters sent to and from a surprisingly unknown Scotsman, William Macintosh.

Upon arriving on our first day, one week ago (and after having navigated a few technical difficulties with IT), we first viewed the letters which we would spend the next three weeks working on. At first glance the papers looked like a beautiful, artistic, calligraphic maze which we had to battle our way through, and, indeed, it was extremely challenging at first to comprehend all the points various individuals were trying to make. But several cups of coffee later, we finally began to master it!

Obviously, some people wrote in a clearer fashion than did others, and probably one of the most frustrating parts of this placement is the fact that if you cannot decipher a word then it will likely forever remain unknown, but that fact has only made us more driven to understand the true meaning of the correspondences between Macintosh and his acquaintances.

After only one week, this experience has allowed me to develop particular skills surrounding, but not limited to, time management and attention to detail in a formal academic research environment, whilst supplementing a key interest in history (and so contributing experience towards a related future career).

I am very grateful to work within Team Macintosh, and alongside Dr Keighren, and contribute to his research about an exceedingly interesting period of history. I am looking forward to seeing what we will discover about William Macintosh over the next two weeks.

— Ophelia

Letter from Macintosh to his son, 17 July 1779. Archives départementales de Vaucluse, 2 E Titres de famille 85, f. 24.

One of the first tasks completed by Lauren and Ophelia (aka Team Macintosh) has been the full transcription of the long letter Macintosh wrote to his son (who we have since learned was adopted) from Madras in 1779, setting out a series of life lessons and providing instructions as to his education and the proper development of his character. The letter, which runs to twenty-five pages, offers a fascinating insight into Macintosh’s views on religion, law, behaviour, dress, hygiene, exercise, deportment, conversation, and almost every aspect of life.

One part of the letter stands out as being particularly interesting: that in which Macintosh provides his son with suggestions about what to read and how to take notes from that reading. Macintosh’s was, clearly, a disciplined approached; he advised his son to “apportion stated times to reading, & be sure never to deviate from them; unless by dint of necessity”. Reading, moreover, was always to go hand-in-hand with writing, and Macintosh was no less specific in guiding his son on how to take notes as he read: “The form may be discretionary in yourself, but the author, page, time, & recital, are material; as well as your own remarks, together with queries for elucidation”.

As to the books Master Macintosh should be reading, only those “distinguished for morality, as well as for elegance of language” were to be considered (and then only with the approval of his preceptor). For Macintosh, histories and political dialogues were the most useful and instructive (“read as few novels & modern romances as possible”, he warned). Instead, Master Macintosh should

Read the Ancient Roman & Grecian Histories—The Histories of Britain, particularly by Hume & Robertson—Bolingbrokes History, but not his other works—Littletons History, & Dialogues—Robertsons History of the Emperor Charles the 5^th. Blackstones Commentaries—Swifts works—Chesterfields Letters—Gibbons’s rise & fall of the Roman Empire…These contain some of the richest English Language in print, & are useful & entertaining.—In the French there are many modern authors of great elegance entertainment & instruction. Telemachus by the Bishop of Cambray. The History of Cyrus—with the translations of the former by Hawkesworth, & the latter by Ramsay.—The Life of Belisarius—All the Abbe Raynals works—some of Voltaires—most of Rousseau’s—Marmontels

Whilst we might reasonably infer that this bibliography reflected Macintosh’s own reading habits and history, it will be interesting to check how many of this titles are present in Macintosh’s private library in Avignon. Are these texts he himself owned, or merely those he thought his son should read?

Ophelia and Lauren engaged in transcription.

The work of Team Macintosh is now officially underway!  On Monday of this week, Lauren Muir and Ophelia King began their three-week stint as Placement Research Assistants in the Department of Geography. Much of the first day was devoted to discussing the workflow process: Lauren and Ophelia each take a first pass at transcribing an image of manuscript material, before swapping over for a phase of verification. The verified transcript is then passed to me for final checking and approval.

Notwithstanding the challenges of reading eighteenth-century handwriting, Lauren and Ophelia have already made great inroads into the correspondence relating to Macintosh’s time in India in the late 1770s and early 1780s. One of Macintosh’s principal correspondents during this time was the Madras civil servant Thomas Lewin (1753–1843), whose gossipy, occasionally poetic letters offer much interest and insight. The portrait below (sold at auction in 2014) shows Lewin at age 30.

Enamel portrait of Thomas Lewin by Johann Heinrich Hurter, 1783.

After more than four years of working alone on this project, I am delighted to announce that I will be joined this summer by two undergraduate research assistants, Ophelia King and Lauren Muir. Ophelia and Lauren each secured highly competitive Department of Geography Placement Research Assistantships, funded by Royal Holloway’s Ignition Fund, that will allow them to work with me for three weeks.

Ophelia and Lauren will primarily be assisting me with the transcription of William Macintosh’s correspondence, particularly material that I photographed in Avignon in 2012. Our focus will fall on Macintosh’s time in Grenada and India with a view to understanding how his experiences of Caribbean politics shaped his engagement with India and the East India Company. Ophelia and Lauren are both joint-honours students, studying between the Department of Geography and the Department of Politics and International Relations.

Welcome, Ophelia and Lauren, to Team Macintosh!

Exactly four years ago, I posted the first entry on this blog: a discussion of William Macintosh’s will. I had a vague suspicion at that point that I was embarking on a long-term project—that the task of recovering Macintosh from the archive would be neither quick nor straightforward. In the intervening years, the “Macintosh project” (as family and colleagues have come to call it) has expanded and become more complex; each discovery leads to new questions and reveals new connections. In some respects, I have spent four years simply trying to define the scope and boundaries of the project, to get some sense of where Macintosh’s influence and significance ended. Part of what has made it difficult to constrain the project’s scope is Macintosh’s mobility—he had after all, as he put it in a letter to George Washington, travelled “over most parts of our Terrestrial Globe”—and his deep involvement with key political debates and the workings of “Legislature, Finance, Colonization, &…Commerce” in a variety of national contexts. Simply put, Macintosh was everywhere, geographically and intellectually, during the last quarter of the eighteenth century; one simply has to scratch the surface to reveal his presence and influence.

At the same time as I have been sketching the limits of the project, I have been attempting to secure funding to support the international archival research that the project—in its full extent—will require. An AHRC Standard Grant application in 2014 met with very supportive reviews and a Grade 5 score (“A proposal that is internationally excellent in all of the following: scholarship, originality, quality, and significance” &c., &c.), but missed out on funding. A Major Grant application to the Bibliographical Society in 2015 met with a similar fate. I am now working up an application to the Leverhulme Trust for a Research Project Grant that I hope will prove that third time’s a charm, but, as all academic researchers are aware, funding is always something of a lottery.

In many respects I am grateful for the project’s extended gestation—it has allowed me to place Macintosh and his work in a much larger context and to become more sure of the significant role he and his book played across three continents. Perhaps more importantly, I find myself just as curious as ever about Macintosh and eager to complete the empirical work that will lay the foundation to the planned monograph, The forgotten radical: William Macintosh and the transnational circulation of seditious print in the Age of Revolution. That said, I do hope that four years from now, I will be a little closer to completion than I am now.

No mean city. The Clyde, Renfrew, and Glasgow beyond.

I was fortunate last week to give a seminar paper on Macintosh to the Human Geography Research Group at the University of Glasgow’s School of Geographical and Earth Sciences. Despite being scheduled against the AAG conference in San Francisco, I was lucky enough to have a large and engaged audience who asked some great questions. It was a nice opportunity to take stock of where I stand now and where the next four years will take the project (notwithstanding the incessant tick of the REF2020 clock).

As a consequence of institutional and national digitisation projects, an increasing number of copies of Travels (in its original, reprinted, and translated forms) are available for consultation on-line. Some of these scans, as I outline below, reveal interesting indications of provenance and ownership history. As new scans become available, I will add them to this post.

[Macintosh, William.] Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa; describing characters, customs, manners, laws, and productions of nature and art: containing various remarks on the political and commercial interests of Great Britain: and delineating, in particular, a new system for the government and improvement of British settlements in the East Indies: begun in the year 1777, and finished in 1781. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1782.

• Volume 1: Google Books scan of Harvard University copy, bearing Ex Libris of Sir Walter Blount, 7th Baronet (1768–1803) and Samuel Bayard Woodward (1787–1850).

• Volume 2: Google Books scan of University of California copy, bearing the inscription “For the private perusal of Captn Blanket [likely John Blankett] / January 1782″.

Inscription to Captain Blanket.

[Macintosh, William.] Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa: describing characters, customs, manners, laws, and productions of nature and art: containing various remarks on the political and commercial interests of Great Britain; and delineating in particular, a new system for the government and improvement of British settlements in the East Indies. 2 vols. Dublin: Charles Lodge, [1785?].

• No open-access digital version of this edition exists. Volume 1 and 2 of the National Library of Ireland’s copy has, however, been scanned under the auspices of Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Part II. This appears to bear the ownership inscription of one Anthony O’Flaherty.

[Macintosh, William.] Remarks on a tour through the different countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa; giving a particular description of the characters, customs, manners and laws of each, with their natural and mechanical productions. The political and commercial interests of the English East India Company are accurately delineated: together with a proposed and well digested system, both for the improvement and better government of their possessions in the quarter. 2 vols. Dublin: J. Jones, 1786.

• Volume 2: Internet Archive scan of University of California copy, bound in a cover bearing the impression of “Celbridge Academy” [which occupied Kildrought House, County Kildare, from 1782 to 1814] and a plate showing the book to have been purchased under the auspices of the “Robert E. Gross Collection“.

Macintosh, William. Des Herrn Mackintosh’s Reisen durch Europa, Asia und Africa, worinnen die Charaktere, Gebräuche, Sitten und Gesetze der Bewohner dieser Länder, nebst den darinnen vorhandenen Natur- und Kunst-Producten beschrieben werden; aus dem Englischen übersetzt, und mit Anmerkungen versehen. Translated by Christian August Wichmann. 2 vols. Leipzig: Friedrich Gotthold Jacobäer, 1785.

• Volume 1 and Volume 2: Münchener Digitalisierungszentrum scan of the Staats- und Stadtbibliothek Augsburg copy, bearing Ex Libris reading “Ex Bibliotheca Collegii Evangelici, Aug. Vindel” [i.e. from the library of an evangelical college in Augsburg, Bavaria].

Ex Libris from library of evangelical college.

• Volume 1 and Volume 2: e-rara.ch scan of Zentralbibliothek Zürich copy.

Macintosh, William. Voyages en Europe, en Asie et en Afrique, contenant la description des mœurs, coutumes, loix, productions, manufactures de ces contrées, & l’etat actuel des possessions angloises dans l’Inde; commencés en 1777, & finis en 1781, par M. Makintosh; suivis des voyages du Colonel Capper, dans les Indes, au travers de l’Egypte & du grand desert, par Suez & par Bassora, en 1779. Traduits de l’Anglois, & accompagnes de notes sur l’original & de cartes géographiques. Translated by Jacques-Pierre Brissot. 2 vols. Paris: Chez Regnault, 1786.

• Volume 1 and Volume 2: scan of Österreichische Nationalbibliothek copy.
• Volume 1 and Volume 2: Gallica scan of Bibliothèque nationale de France copy.
• Volume 1 and Volume 2: Münchener Digitalisierungszentrum scan of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek copy.

Ex Libris of Jean-Baptiste-François Gigot d’Orcy, in the Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon’s copy of Voyages en Europe, en Asie et en Afrique (1786).

I noted in a recent post the value of full text search when it comes to ferreting out obscure references to Macintosh and his work. Google Books is helpful in another way, too: it is occasionally possible to identify the provenance of the books it has scanned and thereby to trace something of their likely readership. This much is true, at least, for one of the copies of the 1786 French translation of Macintosh’s book, Voyages en Europe, en Asie et en Afrique.

The book in question is currently held by the Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon (at shelfmarks 438670 – T. 01 and T. 02), but was previously part of the private library of Jean-Baptiste-François Gigot d’Orcy (1737–1793), an important entomologist who possessed what one contemporary described as “un très-beau Cabinet d’histoire naturelle” in his Paris home. d’Orcy’s role as a patron of natural philosophers (such as Guillaume-Antoine Olivier, 1756–1814) and as a book collector has been detailed on the blog “Histoire de la Bibliophilie“.

d’Orcy’s collection of books, including Voyages en Europe, en Asie et en Afrique, was auctioned off the year after his death. Macintosh’s book was item 1458 in the Catalogue des livres de feu citoyen Gigot d’Orcy (yet, sadly, to be scanned by Google Books).

Macintosh has a habit of falling through the cracks of mainstream historiography; where he appears at all, it is, more often than not, in the footnotes. This apparently marginal position conceals, of course, Macintosh’s contemporary importance, the significance of his writing, and the extent of his social and correspondence networks.

The task of recovering Macintosh from the footnotes cannot straightforwardly be achieved, however, without the option of full text search made possible by Google Books, the HathiTrust Digital Library, and other similar repositories. The ability to search beyond the terms included in a book’s index is hugely valuable and generates the circumstances for serendipitous discovery. One recent such discovery concerned the British politician-cum-spy, William Wickham (1761–1840).

William Wickham (1761–1840).

Wickham’s career progression from magistrate to “Britain’s master spy on the Continent for more than five years during the French Revolutionary wars” is detailed in Michael Durey’s 2009 monograph, William Wickham, master spy: the secret war against the French Revolution. Under instruction from the then Foreign Secretary, Lord Grenville, Wickham was sent to Switzerland in 1794 ostensibly as assistant to the British ambassador. There, however, he executed his covert task of gathering information on the progress of the French Revolution that would assist Britain in its counter-Revolutionary activities. As Durey puts it, Wickham was “creator and head of a small and highly organized secret service unit” and was allocated a significant budget to support these activities. Macintosh was, it appears, one of Wickham’s informants.

Although Macintosh is not named in Durey’s index, he is listed twice in the footnotes regarding letters sent to Wickham in 1795 and 1797. These letters, and possibly many others, are part of the William Wickham Papers, held at the Hampshire Record Office. Although it is not possible to tell from Durey’s book precisely what was contained in Macintosh’s letters, they raise some interesting questions about whether or not Macintosh had a government-sanctioned role as information provider/spy. I have written previously about Macintosh’s apparent connection with Grenville and the existence of a correspondence with Wickham further strengthens that link. Clearly, a visit to the Hampshire Record Office is on order.

Thomas Jefferson by Mather Brown (1786). National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. NPG.99.66.

Until May, the Library of Congress is staging an exhibition—Out of the Ashes: A New Library for Congress and the Nation—to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of its acquisition in 1815 of Thomas Jefferson private library. Jefferson’s library—6,487 volumes strong—was bought (for almost $24,000) to replace an existing collection that had been destroyed by the British during the War of 1812. Sadly, in 1851, a fire destroyed two thirds of the Jefferson collection.

Jefferson, an avid, life-long  book collector considered his library to be “unquestionably the choicest collection of books in the US”. Jefferson added to his collection most enthusiastically while based in Paris (from August 1784 to September 1789) as Congressional representative to Europe. Of his time in that city, Jefferson later recalled that “I devoted every afternoon I was disengaged, for a summer or two, in examining all the principal bookstores, turning over every book with my own hand, and putting by everything which related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable in every science”.

Jefferson’s book hunting was not, however, limited to Paris and continued just as enthusiastically during a visit to London in 1786, particularly so at the shop of the publisher John Stockdale, where Jefferson is reported to have “spent for books four times as much as he paid Mather Brown to paint his portrait [above]”. On his return to Paris, Jefferson wrote to Stockdale to request additional books, including “Mc.Intosh & Capper’s voiages [sic].” (i.e., Macintosh’s Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa (1782) and James Capper’s Observations on the passage to India (1785)). At the same time, Jefferson attempted to obtain a second copy of Travels for his friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, but found to his disappointment that “Mc.Intosh’s [book] is not to be bought, the whole edition being exhausted”.

Jefferson’s copy of Travels was among the 6,487 volumes which comprised the Library of Congresses’s 1815 purchase, but was not, it appears, one that survived the 1851 fire. It is not currently clear whether or not the Marquis de Lafayette ever managed to locate the copy of Travels he desired.

Stockdale, Eric. “John Stockdale, London bookseller and publisher of Adams and Jefferson.” In The libraries, leadership, and legacy of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, edited by Robert C. Baron and Conrad Edick Wright, 41–55. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2010.

One of the unexpected pleasures of maintaining this blog is being contacted by those who have an interest in Macintosh or who are keen to offer their help and guidance in my research on him (I have written previously about meeting one of Macintosh’s descendants, Deirdre Grieve, and of receiving a copy of the second volume of Travels from an Illinois-based book collector, Jeff Armstrong). Last week I received a kind email from the Cromarty-based researcher David Alston, who runs the website Slaves & Highlanders, and who has written on Scottish slavers in Guyana. On Sunday David was kind enough to head out into the snowy fields north of Invergordon to explore and photograph the area around Loch Achnacloich, Macintosh’s ancestral territory.

According to George Macintosh’s Biographical memoir of the late Charles Macintosh (1847), William Macintosh’s father, Lachlan, was tacksman of a farm at “Auchinluich” (or Achnacloich as it is now rendered), part of the estate of Newmore. Writing in the Second (new) statistical account of Scotland (1834–45), the Reverend David Carment, described Achnacloich as a “small but beautiful and secluded glen” dominated by a loch (now a Special Area of Conservation). It is clear that Carment thought Achnacloich uncommon in its beauty, describing the scene thus

At the lake’s eastern extremity, there is a lovely sylvan amphitheatre, from whence a view can be commanded of almost unrivalled majesty. Standing in this sequestered spot, surrounded on three sides by wood, the spectator has immediately before him the quiet lake, bordered by its beautiful fringe of birch and alder, while, to the west, may be seen a wilderness of hills, stretching to an apparently interminable distance, and heaped together in seemingly chaotic confusion, Ben Wyvis with its “diadem of snow” proudly towering above them all.

David’s photographs of the glen, gripped by the chill of winter, offer a glimpse of the beauty Carment described.

Loch Achnacloich. © David Alston, 2016.

Wester Achnacloich Farm. © David Alston, 2016.

Careful research on David’s part shows that there was once a three-storey tower house on the eastern shore of the loch: Achnacloich Castle. The castle is documented (as “Achanacloich”) in Timothy Pont’s map of Tarbet Ness, Easter Ross (c. 1583–96), below, but no visible trace of the original house remains.

Detail from Timothy Pont’s map of Tarbet Ness, Easter Ross (c. 1583–96). © National Library of Scotland, Adv.MS.70.2.10 (Gordon 20).

By the time of William Roy’s Military Survey of Scotland, 1747–1755, there is no evidence of a substantial settlement in Achnacloich, but its proximity to the estate at Newmore (or “Newmor” as it is rendered here), where William Macintosh is reported to have been born, is clear.

Detail from Roy Military Survey of Scotland, 1747–1755. © National Library of Scotland.

I am very grateful to David for taking the time and trouble to visit Achnacloich on my behalf and am once again thankful for the enthusiasm and goodwill which Macintosh seems to generate in others.