Nicholas Phillipson

by Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life

  Dear Sir

  Among the strange reports, which are every day circulated in this wide town, I heard one to-day so very extraordinary, that I know not how to give credit to it. I was informed that a place of Commissioner of the Customs in Scotland had been given to a Philosopher who for his own glory and for the benefit of mankind had enlightened the world by the most profound and systematic treatise on the great objects of trade and revenue which had ever been published in any age or in any Country. But as I was told at the same time that this Philosopher was my particular friend, I found myself very forcible inclined to believe, what I most sincerely wished and desired.38

  When the appointment was confirmed on 24 January 1778, Smith told Buccleuch that he wished to surrender the annuity of £300 the Duke had been paying him. The Duke refused, saying, as Smith recalled in a letter to a Danish correspondent, ‘that though I had considered what was fit for my own honour, I had not consider’d what was fit for his; and that he never would suffer it to be suspected that he had procured an office for his friend, in order to relieve himself from the burden of such an annuity. My present situation is therefore fully as affluent as I could wish it to be.’39 In the winter of 1778 Smith and his household moved to Panmure House in Edinburgh’s Canongate, a wealthy and celebrated man. It was to be his home for the last twelve years of his life.

  13

  Last Years in Edinburgh 1778–90

  Smith had returned to Edinburgh as an affluent public intellectual with excellent political connections in London and Edinburgh, a man of some political influence who would not be slow in exercising it when he thought it was proper to do so. For his friends among an ageing literati, his return was particularly welcome. They had recently suffered what Robertson called some ‘cruel loppings’, not least being the death of David Hume, and Smith already knew from Hugh Blair that ‘we often flattered our Selves with the prospect of your Settling amongst us in a Station that could be both Creditable and Usefull’ so that Smith could help to help revitalize the city’s intellectual life, a role he was happy to perform.1

  By the late 1770s, the old city was in the middle of the vast and vastly expensive building programme that was designed to turn it into the modern provincial metropolis its literati had long dreamed of. In the Proposals for Carrying on Certain Public Works in the City of Edinburgh of 1752, they had envisaged a city with new public buildings and a new suburb on the far side of the North Loch to provide private housing fit for the middling ranks of a polite and commercial nation. The Royal Exchange, situated in Parliament Square and facing the cathedral, had been completed in 1760 and its upper floor had been leased back to the Crown for £360 p.a. to accommodate the Board of Customs. An enormous Register House to house the nation’s public records had been begun in 1774 and was to be completed in 1788, two years before Smith’s death. The wealthy College of Physicians had built themselves new rooms and a new library in the new town, and an observatory had been erected on Calton Hill. The stinking North Loch had been drained and spanned by an enormous bridge to link the old town to the lands on the far side of the loch on which the new town was being developed.2 There were even grandiose plans afoot to replace the existing squalid university buildings (‘Hae miseriae nostrae’ as William Robertson called them) with a vast new building set in a new academic suburb to the south of the city. It would be approached by a grand avenue leading from the old town and would provide the city’s intellectual life with the institutional focal point it had hitherto lacked. These were all massively expensive developments which had been made possible by the building boom following the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, and had been brought to a sudden halt by the collapse of the Ayr Bank in 1772. Smith must have noticed them with some interest. For one thing, the Duke of Buccleuch owned lands in the city which were being proposed for development, and there is some evidence that he relied on Smith to represent him at appropriate town council meetings.3 For another, Smith had known members of the Adam family since childhood, and these celebrated and energetic architects were involved in every aspect of the city’s architectural development. The Royal Exchange and the Register House were the work of John Adam. Robert Adam was responsible for building a riding school near the university. He also submitted unsuccessful plans for the development of the new town to the north of the city and the grand avenue and academic suburb to the south, but he did win the contract for building the elegant and desirable Charlotte Square and the new university building, which he expected to be his masterpiece.

  In choosing a place to live Smith was to be mindful of his status as well as the needs of an old and increasingly frail mother. He showed no interest in following Hume’s somewhat iconoclastic path by settling in neoclassical splendour in a new town suburb somewhat remote from the centre of city life. He confessed that he would have preferred a house in George Square, the largest of the residential squares built on the south side of the city and much favoured by the city’s social elite. In the end he opted for Panmure House in the Canongate, once the aristocratic suburb of the city and known for its large houses and gardens and for its newer, more fashionable dwellings; Lord Kames’ house in New Street, like that of Lord Hailes, was much admired for its elegance. Panmure House was a fairly large, architecturally nondescript house built in the late seventeenth century for a Jacobite peer. Overlooking the Calton crags and Hume’s distressingly vulgar tomb, it was in easy reach of the Customs House and the houses of most of his friends. Most important of all it had the inestimable advantage of being next door to the Canongate Church, a matter of no small importance to the devout and increasingly frail Mrs Smith. It was large enough to house Smith, his mother, his cousin Janet Douglas, who had kept house for him in Glasgow, and his nine-year-old cousin and heir David Douglas, whose education he had agreed to supervise. And it was well enough placed and suited to the business of keeping open house every Sunday evening to his friends and the growing number of visitors and cultural tourists who wished to meet him. ‘House magnificent and place fine,’ William Windham commented in 1785 when visiting with Edmund Burke. ‘Felt strongly the impression of a family completely Scotch.’4 One of the first things Smith did was to adorn it with a newly commissioned and observant portrait of the formidable Mrs Smith by a visiting painter, Conrad Metz.

  The office of Commissioner of Customs may have been well-paid and honourable but it was no sinecure. By Smith’s day, there were eight hundred separate acts of parliament affecting customs duties to superintend, endless adjudications to attend to and an entire revenue service to supervise.5 The Board met four days a week throughout the year, breaking only for public holidays and, as Smith commented, it was all too likely that the remaining three days would be interrupted by Board business. The Board itself was small, composed in 1778 of a Senior Commissioner, four Commissioners, a Solicitor and Inspector General, and a Secretary. It seems to have worked amicably enough; Smith probably already knew two fellow-Commissioners, George Clerk Maxwell, a noted agricultural improver who would shortly become a regular member of the Oyster Club, and James Edgar, a dedicated classicist and, like Smith, a member of the Poker Club. He liked the Solicitor and Inspector General Alexander Osborne, who at 6‘6” was said to be the tallest man in Scotland (and built to match). He even took Osborne to a raree show to see two skinny Irish giants who were only a few inches taller than him. He told Henry Mackenzie that the Irishmen scented competition and were not amused.6 No Commissioner could have been more assiduous in attending the Board than Smith. He did not miss a single meeting from 3 February, when he took the oath of office, to 19 March 1782, when he was granted four months’ leave to go to London to work on the next edition of the Wealth of Nations, and probably to check on his health. From July 1782 to 3 January 1787 he only missed twenty-four meetings, six of which were occasioned by his mother’s death. By then, however, his health was failing and his attendance began to tail off.7 All in all it was the attendance record of a Commissioner who took his office seriously and who
understood the importance of maintaining the rules of justice for the security, prosperity and happiness of a nation.

  Given his reputation as an expert on taxation, it would not have been surprising if Smith’s appointment had been regarded by the Treasury as an opportunity for reviewing the workings of the Scottish Customs at the end of the American War. Lord North, and after him the Earl of Shelburne, were deeply concerned with the disastrous state of public finances. The new Lord Advocate Henry Dundas, soon to be in virtual control of Scottish government, was under pressure from the Treasury to improve the rate of return of Scottish tax revenue to London.8 In the end, however, the confused state of Westminster politics at the end of the war ensured that nothing much was done, and although Dundas and Smith seem to have discussed Scottish customs business in London in the spring of 1782, it only resulted in Smith being asked to look into a request by the Convention of Royal Burghs to standardize the fees taken by Customs officers in different parts of Scotland and to place those taken in the firths and estuaries on the same footing as their equivalents in England. Smith did as he was asked, but he did his best to discourage the Treasury from implementing the new table of fees, on the grounds that they would result in a loss of income to the officials concerned and would encourage yet more mercantile corruption.

  Of many Officers the Income may even be so far reduced as to make it difficult for them to subsist suitably to that Rank in the Society which in reason ought to belong to them; The narrowness of their Circumstances may even force many of them into a dependency upon the Merchants which must immediately prove hurtful to the Public Revenue and in the end probably ruinous to the unhappy Persons who may have thus endeavoured to relieve their necessities by accepting of improper Gratuities.

  It led one of Shelburne’s friends to report that ‘[Smith] is very well provided for in the customs, where he does not innovate’.9 Innovation was a matter for ministers, not government officials.

  In 1780, Smith told a Danish correspondent, Andreas Holt, ‘I am occupied four days in every Week at the Custom House; during which it is impossible to sit down seriously to any other business: during the other three days too, I am liable to be frequently interrupted by the extraordinary duties of my office, as well as by my own private affairs, and the common duties of society.’10 These, too, were in their way demanding enough. Not only was he meticulous in following local practice by keeping open house on Sunday evenings to his friends, their acquaintances and peripatetics armed with letters of introduction, he, and two old fellow-bachelor friends, Joseph Black and the geologist James Hutton, started a weekly dining club, which met initially in an unobtrusive tavern in the Cowgate. This was the Oyster Club, better known to its members as ‘Adam Smith’s Club’, and it was to become almost as famous in Edinburgh for its conversation as Samuel Johnson’s Club in London, though its style was very different.11 If Johnson was the conversational source of energy in London, the conversation of the three Edinburgh bachelors was regarded as the Oyster Club’s reason for existence. ‘Their conversation was always free,’ Hutton’s biographer John Playfair wrote, ‘often scientific but never didactic or disputatious and this club was much the resort of the strangers who visited Edinburgh from any object connected with art or science; it derived from these an extraordinary degree of variety and interest.’ Hutton’s conversation was characterized by ‘ardour’ and even enthusiasm, Black’s by caution and coolness; indeed, ‘While Dr Black dreaded nothing so much as error … Dr Hutton dreaded nothing so much as ignorance … the one was always afraid of going beyond the truth, and the other of not reaching it.’12 As for Smith, Dugald Stewart recalled, ‘In the society of his friends, he had no disposition to form those qualified conclusions that we admire in his writings; and he generally contented himself with a bold and masterly sketch of the object, from the first point of view in which his temper, or his fancy, presented it.’ This was the conversational practice of a philosopher who could be surprisingly iconoclastic and loved arguing from bold premises which might or might not be susceptible of systematic illustration. As Stewart rather primly put it, ‘it was the fault of his unpremeditated judgments, to be too systematical, and too much in extremes’.13

  It was as a public figure of this sort that Smith lived his last years in Edinburgh and began to generate the mythology that has surrounded him ever since. His friends noted conversation which was as free and easy with those he liked as it had been with his Glasgow students, but smacked of pedagogy to the less sympathetic. His capacity for self-abstraction became a matter of frequent comment. John Kay, a local cartoonist, left two cartoons of Smith, one of which, made in 1787, shows him on his way to the Customs House, totally wrapped in thought, his cane over his shoulder and carrying a bunch of flowers, perhaps as protection against Edinburgh’s notorious and distracting stench.14 That great memorialist and mythmaker Walter Scott reported that

  When walking in the Street, Adam had a manner of talking and laughing to himself, which often attracted the notice and excited the surprise of the passengers. He used himself to mention the ejaculation of an old market-woman, ‘Hegh, sirs’ shaking her head as she uttered it; to which her companion answered, having echoed the compassionate sigh, ‘and he is well put on too!’ expressing their surprise that a decided lunatic, who, from his dress, appeared to be a gentleman, should be permitted to walk abroad.15

  In these last years of his life Smith continued to live in the hope of having enough time to write, but it was not to be. An ex-student, David Callander of Craigforth, told Dugald Stewart that his Edinburgh friends were horrified to learn that ‘he, in some measure gave up his books’ on entering the Customs House and remonstrated with him, presumably because they had expected him to treat the post as a semi-sinecure. Callander went on to allege that Smith had even proposed exchanging his place in the Customs for a pension of lesser value which had just been awarded to an acquaintance, ‘but this was not allowed’.16 Smith himself told Andreas Holt in October 1780 that, ‘The only thing I regret [in my present situation] is the interruptions to my literary pursuits, which the duties of my office necessarily occasion. Several Works which I had projected are likely to go on much more slowly than they otherwise would have done.’17 In 1782 he told Sir Joshua Reynolds that he was ‘about finishing an Essay’ on the imitative arts, but as his theory was still incomplete in 1787, this was over-optimistic.18 In 1785 he was writing to another friend, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, about

  two other great works upon the anvil; the one is a sort of Philosophical History of all the different branches of Literature, of Philosophy, Poetry and Eloquence; the other is a sort of theory and History of Law and Government. The materials of both are in order. But the indolence of old age, tho’ I struggle violently against it, I feel coming fast upon me, and whether I shall ever be able to finish either is extremely uncertain.19

  In 1779 or 1780, an old Edinburgh friend, Henry Mackenzie, perhaps realizing that Smith’s time for writing philosophy was over, suggested that he might be interested in using his limited time to contribute to the Mirror, Mackenzie’s immensely successful journal of polite letters. It was a shrewd suggestion. The journal’s ethics were strongly Smithian and two of its regular contributors, William Craig and Robert Cullen, were favourite former pupils, successful lawyers and, like Smith, men with limited time for writing. But Smith refused. ‘He half promised to comply with my request; but afterwards told me he had tried a Paper without Success. “My Manner of Writing, said he, will not do for a Work of that Sort; it runs too much into Deduction and inference.” ’20

  Perhaps the severest blow of all was the death of his mother on 23 May 1784. Throughout his career Smith had relied on the isolation of Kirkcaldy and the domestic world over which his mother presided to make philosophical work possible. If the move to Edinburgh had violated that state of domestically controlled isolation, her death destroyed it. Ramsay of Ochtertye described it as ‘a dreadful shock to his spirits, and made him fancy himself a helpless
forlorn being … In truth the poor man seemed to sorrow as those without hope.’21 His tribute in a letter to Strahan apologizing for a delay in returning proofs was written for a friend who had known his mother for many years and probably understood better than most how completely Smith had depended on her. It is a letter that has already been quoted but is worth repeating here.

  I had just then come from performing the last duty to my poor old Mother; and tho’ the death of a person in the ninetieth year of her age was no doubt an event most agreable to the course of nature; and, therefore, to be foreseen and prepared for; yet I must say to you, what I have said to other people, that the final separation from a person who certainly loved me more than any other person ever did or ever will love me; and whom I certainly loved and respected more than I ever shall either love or respect any other person, I cannot help feeling, even at this hour, as a very heavy stroke upon me. Even in this state of mind, however, it gives me very great concern to hear that there is any failure in your health and spirits. The good weather, I hope, will soon reestablish both in their ordinary vigour. My friends grow very thin in the world, and I do not find that my new ones are likely to supply their place.

  The letter is signed ‘My Dear friend, most faithfully and affectionately ever yours, Adam Smith’.22

  Whatever hopes Smith may have had of realizing his greater philosophical designs, what really mattered was leaving his two great published works in as perfect a state as possible. His most immediate concern was a new edition of the Wealth of Nations. This was partly because his work at the Customs was generating useful illustrative material, partly because its message needed to be sharpened in the light of the catastrophic consequences of the American War of Independence, but mostly because Smith wished to make one final assault on the commercial system. The first edition had been published at the start of a relatively popular war which Britain was expected to win. General Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga in 1777 and the subsequent entry of France and Spain into the conflict had escalated what many were beginning to think of as an unwinnable war fought by an incompetent and corrupt ministry. The fall of Lord North’s government in 1782 was to usher in two years of political turmoil, made all the more disturbing by signs of serious political unrest in the English counties and demands from the Irish parliament for legislative independence from Westminster and free trade with Britain. It led Horace Walpole to exclaim: ‘I shall not be surprised if our whole trinity is dissolved, and if Scotland should demand a dissolution of the Union. Strange if she does not profit of our distress.’23 Politicians of all parties were now faced with questions of the utmost magnitude: the peace treaty with America and the future of Anglo-American relations; the future of Anglo-Irish relations; and, running though it all, the problem of paying for a disastrous war which was dangerously overstretching public finances. Because he was a senior Customs official, a friend of Henry Dundas, Lord North, Lord Shelburne and Edmund Burke, Smith was known, if only by repute, to politicians of different parties who debated these issues and were involved in the intricate political manoeuvres of these two fraught years. Because he was a philosopher who believed profoundly in the importance of stable and regular government for the progress of civilization, he could write in October 1783 of the ill-fated Fox–North Coalition, which included several of his friends,