Tracing an Archive: The Mackintosh Archive in Familial and Colonial Context

Abstract

This article focuses on the genealogy of the Mackintosh archive, showing how subjects are interpellated through archival networks that span imperial and metropolitan sites, linking people, ideas, knowledge and material resources. By tracing the Mackintosh archive across generations of family members embedded in British imperial society, it shows how archives call forth an individual—Sir James Mackintosh—as a symbol and a site of the interconnections between the patriarchal family, the male-dominated state and the production of cultural imaginaries of belonging. Tracing this archive, it argues that the ‘society’ to which James Mackintosh belonged is both reflected in, and constituted through, the letters and journals that comprise his archive. In form and content, they provide the material evidence for the interconnectedness of social, familial, intellectual and political lives. They function both as fantasies and representations of belonging to a social network—a community—and a constitutive part of the consolidation of that network. The letters and diaries that comprise the Mackintosh Archive bear witness to the formation of a literary elite at the turn of the nineteenth century and the mobility of that elite around European-imperial space. Thus, the Mackintosh Archive illustrates the point, made by an increasing number of imperial and global historians, that ideas and identities were forged through inter-connections across space.

1. Introduction

“Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body”.

(Foucault 1984, p. 83)

Sir James Mackintosh died on the morning of May 30th 1832 in his home in Langham Place, London, a shard of chicken bone lodged in the throat of a body that had been struggling and suffering for years (O’Leary 1989, p. 206). He blamed the Indian climate for shattered health, unfulfilled promise, and thwarted ambition. The path of genius interrupted by the malarial swamps and crowded streets and the petty, political squabbles of the colony—an inhospitable climate for nurturing great manhood. So he faded away, leaving more traces than most but a less resounding legacy than he and his contemporaries had imagined or predicted: two unfinished histories, a Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy (1829), his name on a family grave in Hampstead, a bust on the wall of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and a monument in Whigs’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. With little vigour, his son and son-in-law compiled a memoir—The Memoir of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh—that was published in 1835, a two-volume patchwork of a life roughly stitched together from extracts of letters and diaries (Mackintosh 1835). His History of England, a lifetime project, was rapidly eclipsed by Thomas Babington Macaulay’s work, and his role in legal and parliamentary reform is largely forgotten, overshadowed by names such as Samuel Romilly and Lord John Russell. Ironically, Mackintosh is best remembered for that which he sought most to forget: the Vindiciae Gallicae, a defence of the French Revolution. Published in 1791 in response to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), he deeply regretted having written it and publicly retracted his argument. To date, Patrick O’Leary’s meticulously researched, but slim and somewhat anecdotal, biography of Sir James Mackintosh is the only full-length monograph dedicated to a man who had appeared to his contemporaries as one of “the ablest and most accomplished men of the age” (Hazlitt 1969 quoted in Fisher 2009).

This article is not an attempt to reclaim or instate Mackintosh into the annals of History as a ‘great man’, neither do I offer an explanation for his apparent failure to meet the expectations of his age. Rather, as the quote above from Foucault’s essay, ‘Nietsche, Genealogy, History’ suggests, my aim is to understand the Mackintosh Archive as a layering of documentary survivals that configure and reconfigure the self across time and space. How do disparate papers come together across British imperial space to constitute ‘Sir James Mackintosh’, and what role does family play in the life and afterlife of the subject? This article begins with the premise that the self as a subject emerges from, and is produced by, wider structures of power, structures that are embedded in material and discursive economies. By tracing the Mackintosh Archive, I aim to illustrate how the very survival of this archive is contingent upon familial networks that were themselves the product of imperial careers. The first section examines the passage of the Mackintosh Archive across generations, showing how the very possibilities of historical legibility are tied up with imperial familial networks. The second section examines the anatomy of the archive and the role of letters and diaries in articulating the self before turning, in the third section, to the epistolary relationship between James Mackintosh and his second wife, Catherine (née Allen, 1765–1830) and the gendering of the archive. The final section argues that despite its nominally metropolitan location, the Mackintosh Archive is itself a colonial archive whose story expands our understanding of colonialism as inseparable from family formation. To give some clarity to the very blurry distinction the between subject and object of the archive, I refer to “Sir James Mackintosh” as the product of the archive and “Mackintosh” as a character and writer within the archive.

Mackintosh was born in 1765 into an extended Highland Scottish family who were flung across the British Empire and whose fortunes were tied up with the vagaries of imperial expansion. During his lifetime, Mackintosh witnessed the fallout of revolutions in Europe, North America, South America, and the Caribbean. As a boy in the Highlands of Scotland, he followed Charles James Fox in supporting the claims of the thirteen colonies to independence. He debated the morality of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the Speculative Society whilst a student at Edinburgh University and continued to campaign against slavery throughout his life. Upon graduating with a medical degree in 1787, Mackintosh arrived in London at the height of the trial of Warren Hastings, which challenged the legitimacy of imperial rule in India. As with so many Highlanders, the men in his family fought in imperial wars: his father fought in Ireland, Antigua and Gibraltar, his uncle in North America, and his brother in the Caribbean. Although the majority of the women of the family remained in the Highlands, James’ mother accompanied her husband to Gibraltar and died there in 1778. His maternal family were settler-colonists in South Carolina. With great reluctance and only in middle age, James himself embarked on his own imperial career, spending seven years in India as Recorder of the Court of Bombay. During this time, he documented the changing fortunes of East India Company rule in Maratha-dominated Western India and the day-to-day realities of life as an imperial administrator. The content of the Mackintosh Archive tells this history of ‘imperial careering’, of conquest and dispersal; and yet the form of the archive, in fact its very existence as an archive, is contingent on its ‘return’ to the metropole.

The Mackintosh Archive comprises eighty folios of letters, diaries and drafts of essays written between 1774 and 1848, which were primarily authored by, or addressed to, Sir James Mackintosh (1765–1832). Like any ‘great’ man, Sir James Mackintosh’s historical subjectivity and agency are constituted in relationship to the preservation of his, overwhelmingly textual, legacy. His story thus begins in death, in the archive, those repositories of fragments that, as Carolyn Steedman notes, are surrounded by silence (Steedman 2001, p. 18). Sir James Mackintosh died at home, exactly twenty years after he returned from Bombay a knighted man, a wealthy man, a man of letters, a Whig parliamentarian, and a gentleman. It took an additional one hundred and sixty-eight years for the flesh-and-blood man to become consolidated as an archive of parchment and ink. Prior to the year 2000, some of Sir James Mackintosh’s official papers existed for public use in various archives, primarily the British Library in London and the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. For the most part, however, his letters and diaries were held in private collections or under the names of other ‘greater’ men. Jane Rendall’s 1972 thesis drew mainly on his extensive published reports and writing and some letters to focus on his political thought and career (Rendall 1972). When Patrick O’Leary wrote Sir James Mackintosh: the Whig Cicero in 1989, the majority of the documents he consulted were in private hands (O’Leary 1989, pp. vii–viii). It was only in 2000, when Sotheby’s prepared to sell the collection to an American university for £96,750 on behalf of the Buxton family, that Mackintosh’s wish that his name would mean something to ‘England and Europe’—a desire thinly veiled In an unpublished autobiography penned from Bombay in 1804—could really be said to have been realized (see Gust 2018). Denied export by the Arts Minister on the grounds that the papers comprised important information for the “study of the intellectual and political life of the nation”, the collection was then purchased by the British Library, selected to be part of “all the world’s knowledge” (Temporary Bar n.d.).1

The Mackintosh Archive is therefore positioned at a very specific juncture of power relations between the intimate and individualized, and the national and the globalized. Having sat for decades in private houses, the collection comes together in and through a global capitalist market. As an object of financial transaction, it accrues value in constitutive relationship to the mystical value of the archive as a symbolic transaction, an inheritance, from one generation to the next (Derrida 1995, pp. 34–37). The desire to make meaning of that bundle of papers accumulates in relationship to growing financial speculation about the worth of its meaning. Arjun Appadurai argues that archives and archiving both represent and construct the desire and aspiration for a collective identity (Appadurai 2003, p. 24). In the case of the Mackintosh Archive, the state’s intervention to prevent the archive from leaving the bounds of the nation-state acts as one more consolidation of the desire for a boundaried, collective national identity. By preventing its emigration to an American university and placing the collection in the British Library instead, the state mediates and shapes the meaning between the nation, the Mackintosh Archive, and Sir James Mackintosh. As one archive placed within a much bigger and more encompassing archive—the national repository, the British Library—the Mackintosh Collection accrues meaning through its physical proximity both to other archives and to London as the capital city of a nation formed through empire. The resituating of the Mackintosh papers from the home of the Buxton family in Essex to the Manuscripts Collection of the British Library thus interpellates Sir James Mackintosh, one hundred and sixty-eight years after his death, as a subject and an actor during a “crucial period of constitutional developments, and Anglo-Scottish, European and colonial relations” (Temporary Bar n.d.).

Archives, Antoinette Burton has argued, constitute historical actors, their material presence “structures access, imposes its own meanings on the evidence contained therein and watches over users both literally and figuratively” (Burton 2005, p. 9; see also Stoler 2009). The resituating of the Mackintosh Archive from the family home to the British Library in London places those bundles of letters, diaries, and essay drafts along a new grid of intelligibility. The archive’s repositioning in the British Library with its nominal accessibility to the British public and to those overseas visitors with the resources to purchase entry into Britain, incorporates them into “all the world’s knowledge”, however partial that ‘world’ may be. Its inclusion in the digital catalogues of archives across Britain takes it from the individual family home into a virtually and physically networked space with pretensions to a global reach. Yet this is not a straightforward passage from the dark and dusty privacy of the domestic sphere into the full glare of public exposure. As Derrida argues for the Freud Archive, the move is from one patriarchal institution to another, both of which occupy a privileged site at the intersection of law and place (Derrida 1995, p. 3). The presence of the Mackintosh Archive is contingent upon belonging to networks of privilege that have the resources to ensure the preservation of his legacy. The gathering together of documents that constitute the archive reflects the gathering together of privileged bodies across space and time. The genealogy of the Mackintosh Archive is thus embedded in the intersecting histories of patriarchal inheritance, family dwellings, and the social, political, and literary world of the British imperial elite.

Prior to its purchase by the British Library, the Mackintosh Archive resided with Dr Margaret Aston (1932–2014), a renowned medieval historian. Although she published under the surname of her first husband, by the time she sold the Mackintosh papers, she was married to Paul Buxton and lived in Chipping Ongar in Essex. Margaret inherited the collection from her father, Edward, the first Lord Bridges (1892–1969), whose own father was Robert Seymour Bridges (1844–1930), poet laureate during the First World War. The Bridges family’s connection to Sir James Mackintosh runs largely through the maternal line—Edward Bridges’ first wife, Catherine Dainthe (1896–1986) was the granddaughter of Frances Farrer (1825–1870, née Erskine), who was the daughter of Maitland (1792–1861, née Mackintosh), the second daughter of James Mackintosh by his first wife, Catherine Stuart (d. 1797). Maitland’s husband, William Erskine (1773–1852), was assistant to Mackintosh in his position as Recorder of the Court of Bombay between 1804 and 1811 and married Maitland in Bombay in 1809 (Prior 2004). Maitland and William Erskine lived much of their later lives in Edinburgh but the marriage of their daughter, Frances, to Thomas Henry Farrer led to the relocation of the Mackintosh Collection to Abinger Hall, Dorking. From there, the papers moved into the possession of two generations of Farrers, Thomas Cecil Farrer and Catherine Dianthe Farrer. The latter’s marriage to Edward Ettingdon Bridges established the collection at Yattendon Manor in Berkshire, where Margaret Aston grew up (Heal 2018).

In addition to the legal ties created by the logic of white, heterosexual reproduction, this group of people shared connections to the British imperial state and to literary production, which spanned the generations. Along the male line of the family tree ran a thread of belonging to the increasingly professionalized sphere of state and civil service, which drew on a small and homogenous elite to man its upper echelons (Lowe 2011, pp. 52–53). Like his father before him, and like Sir James Mackintosh himself, Thomas Henry Farrer studied for the bar at Lincoln’s Inn, having attended Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford (Davis 2004). Credited with being one of the architects of the Board of Trade, T.H. Farrer was part of a class of professionals who would, by the end of the nineteenth century, comprise a bureaucratic elite who ran the machine of liberal-imperial governance. His membership of the Cosmopolitan Club placed him at the centre of the homosocial networks of late-nineteenth-century, metropolitan power (Lubenow 2010, p. 103; Kent 2004). T.H. Farrer’s son and grandson would continue this tradition, with Edward Ettingdon Bridges rising to the head of the civil service after serving as secretary to the cabinet during the Second World War (Chapman 2004). In addition to this ‘professional’ sphere of state, there was another, slightly more gender-inclusive, world of literary, artistic, and intellectual practice that joined these people across the generations. From Margaret Aston’s historical scholarship, this connection went back through to Robert Seymour Bridges, poet laureate, to William Erskine, whose Memoirs of Babur (1826) established him as one of a group of leading oriental scholars in the mid-nineteenth century. The Bridges were connected through both friendship and marriage to some of the leading novelists of the late nineteenth century—Virginia Woolf, Robert Graves, and W.B. Yeats (Phillips 2004; Thompson 1945). Yet their parents’ and grandparents’ generations were no less connected or prolific. On the death of Frances Erskine in 1870, T.H. Farrer married another of Sir James Mackintosh’s grandchildren, Katherine Euphemia (1839–1931), whose sister, Frances Julia (Snow) Wedgwood (1833–1913), was one of the best-known female novelists of the Victorian era. Both Katherine Euphemia and Frances Julia grew up in the company of leading literary figures such as Thomas Babington Macaulay, Thomas Carlyle, and Harriet Martineau, brought together in London by their mother, Frances Wedgwood (1800–1889, née Mackintosh), who hosted a literary salon (see Wedgwood and Wedgwood 1980, pp. 228–40).

Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, intermarriage between relatively small circles of friends and families solidified these professional and artistic networks of primarily white, elite-educated men and women. It was these families that passed on part of the legacy of Sir James Mackintosh, relocating the boxes of letters, diaries, and notebooks from one southern English attic to another as daughters married into different families or sons established new homes. Their familial lives were entangled with the affairs of state, society, and ‘high’ culture, complicating any attempt to neatly demarcate the affairs of the British imperial state from literary production, friendship from family, and professional lives from personal connections. As I discuss below, this entanglement is reflected in the content of the Mackintosh Archive itself, in which the personal, familial, literary, political, and social intersect. More significantly, I argue, the possibility of subjecthood that is constituted through the Mackintosh Archive is reliant on the family. Turning to the ‘anatomy’ of the Mackintosh Archive, I examine these messy entanglements between social, economic, and emotional worlds, showing how they mirror the complex worlds of family and social life.

According to the press release that announced the barring of the Mackintosh papers for export, the “recently-discovered collection” represented the third, and implicitly final, section of the Mackintosh Archive (Temporary Bar n.d.). This ‘final’ section, the part that I have focused on most extensively and whose genealogy I document above, can be divided into three relatively distinct groups. The first group comprises folios of letters dated between 1774, when James was nine years old, and 1848, sixteen years after his death. It also includes sixteen journals, primarily written by Mackintosh from Bombay, London, and the Netherlands. Although some letters remain loose-leaf, the majority are bound in large red folios and collected, although not alphabetically, according to the correspondent and roughly according to date. The second section is made up of the notes for Mackintosh’s unfinished and posthumously published History of the Revolution of 1688 (1834). Bound in heavy, marbled notebooks, they are primarily transcripts of historical letters copied from archives in England, Paris, and Rome. These notes were passed on to Thomas Babington Macaulay on James’s death for his own, considerably more successful, five-volume History of England, published in 1848. The final group is more miscellaneous, comprised of a selection of random drafts of essays, notes on lectures, and readings: “Question relating to the population of India, October 1807”; “Notes to a speech (1819) on renewal of grant of commercial monopoly and territorial sovereignty to the East India Company of 1818”; and “Stanzas on the marriage of Captain Graham to Maria Graham”. Some are written in hardcover notebooks, often with vast expanses of pages left blank, while others are loose leaf. There is no apparent internal logic to their physical proximity; their random coming-together reflects, in material form, the many ‘lines of flight’ that pass through and comprise a life.

As a collection of papers comprising disparate themes that stretch from marital disputes to philosophical and political commentaries, from discussions of marriages and sickness to debates over ministerial decisions, the Mackintosh Archive provides historians with a range of sources for intellectual, political, social, cultural, and literary histories of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain and empire. Yet to parse out these themes is to ignore the ways that they constitute each other and the place of the family at the very centre of the formation of ‘Sir James Mackintosh’ as a scholar, judge, and politician. Mackintosh used his letters and journals, particularly those from Bombay, as rehearsals for ‘public’ life as a judge, a politician, and a scholar. Often written in a tone that was scholarly rather than conversational, his letters and journals acted as rehearsals for ideas that would eventually go into published essays on philosophy and history. For example, in his 1811 reflections on Jeremy Bentham’s political philosophy, which he employed and critiqued in equal measure, James stated that, “The predominant error of Benthamism is that nothing is well done which is not done by legal contrivance”.2 He expanded upon this point over the course of his Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy (1822), where he argued against Bentham’s utilitarianism on the grounds that it overlooked the role of selflessness and natural sentiment in the formation of moral doctrine. Mackintosh similarly rehearsed commentaries on his readings of William Robertson’s History of Scotland and David Hume’s History of England that he intended for his own work of England’s history. He also used Robertson’s History, which he admired for its “elegance” and “good sense”, to “give a composed dignity to my address to the grand jury” (Mackintosh [1846] 1857, pp. 157–64).

Letters and journals form the greatest number of documents and the backbone of the Mackintosh Archive. They are postmarked from an enormous range of places, from a small village in Highland Scotland to Gower Street in London, from colonial Bombay to the Cape of Hope. They were written from ships bound for Bombay, from archives in Paris and Italy, from lodgings in London, Norwich, and Bath and from the parlours of country houses. “I sit at my desk placed on the old library steps table fronting the deck”, Mackintosh wrote in 1811 from a ship that had recently set sail for Ceylon from Bombay.3 Whether travelling or staying in one place, letter writers conjured up a world of landscapes and interactions for their readers that connected them across, sometimes vast, geographical space. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the system of delivering letters across Britain was well-developed and the ‘mail coach’ a frequent and relatively reliable mode of sending letters. Over short distances, a letter sent by the Royal Mail could take less than a day to reach its recipient, who paid approximately eight pence for a letter sent from up to fifty miles away (Gregory 1987, p. 135). The Royal Mail was not, of course, unfailingly reliable, especially in bad weather, and its function as a system of state surveillance and censorship meant that the circulation of ideas was far from ‘free’ (Favret 1993, p. 198). Nonetheless, it played an important part in effecting the escalation of literary correspondence and perhaps also literacy in Britain during the long eighteenth century (Whyman 2009; Brant 2006). Outside of Britain, Western Europe, and North America, however, the fate of letters was considerably more unpredictable. In Bombay, private letters to England were received monthly by the Office of the Secretary to Government and sent via Aleppo and Baghdad for the cost of up to seven pagodas.4 Known as the ‘Bussorah Packet’, the much-anticipated letters could take up to six months to reach their destinations. Letters were particularly vulnerable to poor weather, shipwreck, and warfare (see Haggerty 2023, pp. 169–90). “It is evident Basil has written many letters which you have not received”, Anne Montagu wrote to Mackintosh in September 1809.5

Letter-writing has been recognized by literary critics and historians as a genre in and of itself, one that letter-writers self-consciously pursued, often in relationship to other literary forms (Earle 1999, pp. 1–11; Stanley 2004). In eighteenth-century Europe, the letter was intended to mirror and complement the ‘polite’ conversation that was learnt and practised in the coffee houses, clubs, and tea rooms of urban Europe. The composition of a letter was ideally meant to be unaffected and ‘natural’, a reflection of the author’s ‘civility’ and education. Behind each letter was a process of learning grammatical rules, literary style, and forms of address, imparted either from the large numbers of published letter-writing books designed to teach those skills or from tutors (see Whyman 2009; Chartier et al. 1997; Bannet 2005). Writing to her future husband in 1797, Catherine Allen (1765–1830) stated, “I shall scribble away as fast as I can in order to make this day’s post without a method or attention to the rules of composition”.6 Yet Catherine’s self-conscious abandoning of “method” or “rules of composition” does suggest that attention to form was the norm of letter writing, so that whilst letters enabled the construction of a specific persona, that construction was no less framed by social and literary conventions than were interactions that were physically embodied. Furthermore, whilst letters often provide the only surviving evidence of social connections and of selves constituted in relationship to others, they were usually borne of the physical absence of, and in some cases a longing for, connection. Inherent to a letter is a sense of separateness, distance, and sometimes isolation from its intended recipient, “do Jimmy write to me something to make me merry for I am fairly out of heart and humour at everything about me”, wrote Robert ‘Bobus’ Smith from Calcutta in 1808.7

The production and circulation of letters during the ‘long’ eighteenth century undermines any notion of the letter as part of a ‘private’ sphere or even as emanating from an individual, authorial ‘self.’ Not only were letters often intended for much wider circulation around family members and friends, but even when addressed to one person, they were not always necessarily composed by one person. To save on postage, one letter was sometimes appended by another, usually shorter note. “Tom began this letter and I shall finish it”, Josiah Wedgwood (junior) wrote to Thomas Chisolm from Edinburgh in December 1786 (Litchfield 1903). Letters were often dictated by the ‘author’ and written in another person’s hand, but they could also be written on behalf of another. Writing to James in the place of her husband, Basil (1770–1851), Anna Montagu (née Skepper, 1773/4–1856) referred to herself in the third person: “To speak generally of your friend, I can say from better authority than the wife’s partiality that he is thought most highly of in that walk of his profession to which he entirely confines himself”.8 Anna’s letter effects a complex manoeuvre of denying an individual self in order to perform the role of a dutiful wife. The letters of Catherine to her husband reveal a structurally similar, albeit emotionally very different, process of configuring what literary scholars have called the ‘epistolary pact’. Turning to the epistolary relationship between them, I argue that this ‘pact’ was both enabling and troubling to the formation of self.

Whether explicitly or implicitly, letters configure and reconfigure relationships; the speaking ‘I’ reaches out to a ‘you’ with an expectation of reciprocity that shapes the nature and meaning of the relationship—what Stanley et al. call the “epistolary pact” (Stanley et al. 2012). This ‘pact’ constructs a specific, epistolary relationship between the writer and the reader, a configuration that is both evidenced and complicated by the letters between Mackintosh and Catherine. Indeed, Catherine and Mackintosh’s relationship begins with the active formation of an epistolary pact. The first of their surviving letters is dated November 1797 and marks Catherine’s positive response to a presumed request, no longer extant, to receive letters. “Your plan of correspondence with me I not only suffer but embrace with the full conviction of receiving much information and pleasure from your letters”.9 Their early courting letters thus explicitly laid out the intention of social intercourse that pre-empted but also subtly assumed eventual sexual intercourse upon marriage. Across thirty years, the consent to receive that began Catherine and Mackintosh’s epistolary relationship remained largely intact. The letters document their interactions with friends, family, and acquaintances whilst apart from each other. They cover topics such as the cost and colour of curtains, reminders to refrain from alcohol and assurances of sobriety, updates on the health of family members, and news of marriages, births, and deaths. In this way, letters both facilitated, constructed, and negotiated a shared life across distance, as well as exhibiting its tensions. Almost entirely reliant upon her husband to secure an income and maintain social status for the whole family, Catherine’s frustration with Mackintosh’s lack of economy and apparent failure to succeed in any one of his projects is reflected in many of her letters. “I keep as closely as I can to my determined plan of economy notwithstanding my numerous guests”, Catherine wrote to her husband during an absence from Bombay in 1808 and insisted he do the same.10

Unlike her husband, who used his letters for everything from local gossip to philosophical musings, in her own, much briefer letters, Catherine was often preoccupied with financial planning and money worries. In one of her first surviving letters to Mackintosh, in 1797, Catherine had reported a conversation with her cousins justifying her decision to marry him: “Your narrow income and your three children, which would have been insuperable objections with me to almost any other many then yourself, were but as dust in the balance against your talents, your disposition and your love for me … I owe to you a better opinion of myself than I ever had before I knew you, I owe to you the proud and endearing consciousness that there is one human creature upon earth whose happiness I have the power of increasing and to which I am perhaps in some sort essentially necessary”.11 Catherine’s justification for marrying Mackintosh drew on the logic of a “companionate” marriage in which the wife absorbed her sense of self into her husband’s. Mackintosh’s own early courting letters in 1797, less than a year after the death of his first wife, Catherine Stuart, in childbirth, also drew on the ideal of a companionate marriage. In the same letter in which he professed his devotion to Catherine Allen, Mackintosh wrote of his first wife’s ability to protect his ‘tranquillity’ from the “afflictions and blows of society”.12 Marriage, for both Catherine and James Mackintosh, was an emotional transaction in which a wife’s duty was to provide the husband with the emotional support and companionship that enabled him to manage the strains of society (Hall and Davidof 1987, p. 322; Barker-Benfield 1992; Hunt 1996, chap. 6).

Letters were not the only medium through which Catherine and James Mackintosh corresponded. Mackintosh wrote almost every day whenever he and Catherine were apart, sometimes in the form of letters but more frequently in the form of journals that narrate his day-to-day thoughts. These journals—sixteen in total, written between 1801 and 1829—blur the boundaries between journals and letters. The first journal belongs to Catherine Mackintosh and covers barely a month, between June and July 1801. Those few pages are a catalogue of events: visits to the theatre, walks in parks, sisters and friends to dinner, and relentless headaches.13 The remainder of the journals are written by Mackintosh, including an unfinished attempt at an autobiography penned in 1804, ostensibly for his children and friends. The journals document Mackintosh’s day-to-day life whilst in Bombay, in London and travelling around Europe, with comments on his readings, thoughts, social meetings, ideas, and frustrations. Mackintosh’s journals do not conform to the general distinction made between letters as a form of social interaction and journals or diaries as private and introspective. Written as a chronicle of the passage of time, his journals are also an attempt to share his life with his wife, Catherine, and their three children—Fanny, Bessy, and Robert—despite their being apart. Like letters, these journals are dialogical and thus “bestow” a “part of one’s self to the other person”, even if they do not explicitly summon the reader (Stanley 2004, p. 212). Unlike letters, these journals are not framed by names and do not begin with an address or end with expressions of sentiment and a signature. Yet in his references to “you”, Mackintosh gestures to the audience for his journals, pointing to a history of shared contexts and contacts, which differ little from a letter. Thanking Catherine for sending him an account of a dinner with the French novelist and political critic, Madame de Staël (1766–1817), Mackintosh stated, “what an entertaining thing a journal is—with how little trouble to the writer does it amuse distant friends”.14

If, as Liz Stanley states, letters “signify the relationship itself”, then what do these small differences between journals and letters tell us about the relationship being formed? (Stanley 2004, p. 209). Mackintosh’s journals begin only with a place and a date. They situate the writer but not in relationship to a reader. Yet whilst the reader is not directly “called upon” to respond through the act of address, neither is she entirely absent; indeed, her presence and her engagement are assumed throughout the process of writing. In The Autobiographical Subject, Felicity Nussbaum argues that eighteenth-century journals and diaries “produce and reflect an individual who believes she or he is the source and center of meaning”, whilst simultaneously undermining the ideology of a coherent self through the fragmentary and discontinuous form of the journal (Nussbaum 1989, p. 28). Mackintosh’s journals incorporate his implicit reader, his wife and children, into this act of centring the self. His demands for a response are also demands that she and their children acknowledge him as the “source and center of meaning”. Mackintosh continued to direct his journals to Catherine throughout the 1820s, yet her own letters dwindle rapidly after her husband’s return from Bombay. It is possible that her side of the correspondence was destroyed, but James’ refusal, presumably in response to a request that is no longer extant, to live separately from his wife and children suggests that she eschewed him as much in person as in writing.15

Whereas the early courtship letters between Catherine Allen and James Mackintosh articulate the ideal of the companionate marriage, their later letters reveal its breakdown. Despite her claims that a ‘narrow income’ would be no objection, after ten years of marriage to a husband who appeared unable to finish a project, save money, or capitalize upon his intellectual renown, Catherine’s desire to perform wifely duties appears to have waned. Even accounting for the loss or destruction of letters in response, she wrote significantly less than her husband, and by the 1820s almost nothing survives at all. Indeed, her very first letter, dated 1797, references a previous letter with apologies for its brevity—in many ways, Catherine was simply a woman of far fewer words than her endlessly “journalizing” husband.16 Yet, by middle age, Catherine’s silences appear more wilful. “Swift wrote punctually from busy London when he was making and unmaking ministers—I write copiously from barren Bombay”, Mackintosh wrote in 1811, “You give me only a scrap once in two months though you have neither occupations like him nor want of materials like me and though neither he nor I had a Faffy or a Bessy or a Robin to talk about”.17 What are we to make of the comparative lack of Catherine’s epistolary voice, of the silence that increases with the progression of the years? Unlike most archival silences, her absence is marked through the repetitive demands for letters and very occasional apologies for not writing. This is not, however, a breakdown of the “epistolary pact” that began Catherine and James’ relationship, because the terms of that pact lay only in the promise to receive, which Catherine continues to do. In fact, whether conscious or not, Catherine’s silence exposes the dynamic of power inherent to the ideology of the “companionate” marriage in which she is defined as a subject only through her husband. To be “essentially necessary”, is to be, in essence, necessary to the purpose of another, a state that Catherine herself notes gives her a sense of meaning that she had previously lacked. Almost entirely reliant upon her husband for the economic well-being of her family, Catherine’s silence can be understood as the most powerful form of agency available to her.

The epistolary relationship between James and Catherine Mackintosh constructs an alternative relationship of power, in which silence and the refusal to speak become a weapon. Catherine’s silence functions as a refusal to acknowledge the meaning being made, and the relationship configured, through the process of writing. Catherine’s silences reveal how writing, as a performance of self and a process of meaning-making, is always tenuous and fragile. Writing risks rejection, it engenders dispute and refutation. Yet perhaps more profoundly, it risks the lack of resonance, response and repetition through which meaning solidifies, through which subjects are formed and enabled. By refusing to write and share a journal, Catherine denied herself a textual legacy. Yet what form of legacy could she expect for herself anyway beyond that of ‘wife’, framed in relationship to, and subsumed under, her husband’s name? From Emma Darwin’s diaries (née Allen, Catherine’s sister) we know that she, along with Catherine, and her daughter, Fanny, spent a considerable amount of time organizing the library, translating and copying sources for Mackintosh’s intellectual projects (Darwin 1915). None of their work was acknowledged or recognized when The History of England was published in three volumes in 1830 bearing the name ‘Sir James Mackintosh’ as the sole author. During the last ten years of her life, Catherine is barely present in the Mackintosh Archive at all, although from other sources we know that she busied herself in campaigns against animal cruelty that would eventually become the Royal Society for Protection Against Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) (Donald 2019, pp. 66–67). The ‘duties’ that Mackintosh believed were incumbent upon a wife—to offer emotional support and to act as a sounding board for his ideas—were picked up by other women of the family.

From the copious notes on historical and philosophical topics to letters and journals, every part of the Mackintosh Archive was touched and facilitated by the hands of the women members of the Mackintosh family. This is also the case for the many servants who worked in the Mackintosh household, whether in London, Hampshire, or Bombay. They are barely referred to at all, beyond ‘the cook’ or ‘the manservant’, and yet their everyday labour made it possible for members of Mackintosh’s family and extended network to write and share letters and journals, and to read and write books. The absence of servants’ names, voices, and activities in the Mackintosh collections returns us to the relationship between home and household, archive and empire, and to the silences that enable their separation. In this final section, I argue that, despite its position in metropolitan London and its relationship to a ‘private’ individual, his family and friends, the Mackintosh Archive needs to be understood as both an individual, a family, and a colonial archive. Doing so, I argue, exposes the intimacy between British imperial expansion and familial and social networks, as well as its constitutive relationship to nineteenth-century British society.

Although Mackintosh himself felt his residence in Bombay to be the most miserable and probably the least significant part of his life, the seven years that he spent with his family in India generated the largest proportion of the letters and journals that comprise the Mackintosh Archive. This is perhaps unsurprising, as letters were vital for him to maintain a presence in absence, keep open the hope of retaining his sense of himself as a gentleman, and raise his position in society in the hope of gaining a Parliamentary seat. Catherine’s muted presence as recipient (and, implicitly, conveyor) of her husband’s thoughts and feelings, is easily drowned out by the vast number of letters between Mackintosh and his network of male friends and patrons, particularly during his residency in Bombay. This network is encapsulated in the membership of the ‘King of Clubs’, which Mackintosh and his friends established in 1798, one of the many elite, male-only clubs in London, which met monthly at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand. Amongst the King of Clubs’ members were editors of the Edinburgh Review—Frances Horner (1778–1817) and Sydney Smith (1771–1845); key Whig Party peers William Petty, Marquess of Lansdowne (1737–1805) and Henry Richard Vassal-Fox, Lord Holland (1773–1840); legal reformer Samuel Romilly (1757–1818); political economists Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), David Ricardo (1772–1823), and Pierre Etienne Louis Dumont (1759–1829), who edited and translated Jeremy Bentham’s works into French; as well as the art historian Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824), the historian Henry Hallam (1777–1859), the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816), and the poet William Blake (1757–1827).18

The King of Clubs’ register between 1798 and 1816 provides an illustration of the interconnections between the male-dominated worlds of Parliamentary politics, political theory and critique, culture, art, and literature. Amongst the members of the King of Clubs, the majority grew up on the rural English, Scottish, and Irish estates that they had inherited, or would inherit, from their fathers. In some cases, their wealth and livelihoods derived directly from slavery. Henry Vassall-Fox, Lord Holland, for example, inherited the Vassall plantations in Jamaica through his wife, Elizabeth Vassall Fox (Chancellor 1980). Richard ‘Conversation’ Sharp (1759–1835), born in Newfoundland, Canada, worked in London as a business partner with the West Indian slave-holding merchants Boddington and Co (Knapman 2003). The men of the King of Clubs moved constantly around Britain, Europe, India, America, and the Caribbean, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by their wives, children, sisters, and servants. Mackintosh’s co-founder Robert Smith was resident in Calcutta, while George Moore was largely resident in Ireland, and Etienne (“Stephen”) Dumont was originally from Geneva and lived between London, Paris, and Geneva throughout his life. For Mackintosh, as for many of these men, their ties to the empire enabled or consolidated their wealth and social status. In 1808, however, the King of Clubs resolved that members must reside in England19. This rule must surely have added to Mackintosh’s own sense of isolation and exclusion in Bombay. It also acted as a rejection—a figurative, if not literal, cutting—of the deeply embedded links between its members and the expanding imperial world whose profits funded the culture of ‘polite’ sociability, the public sphere, and gentlemanly identity.

As Catherine Hall has argued for Thomas Babington Macaulay—the successor of Mackintosh’s History—this cutting-off of ‘Britain’ from empire enabled the disturbing otherness of empire to be banished to the margins, whilst Britain’s reliance on the profits of empire was disavowed (Hall 2012, pp. 284–89). To understand the Mackintosh Archive as a colonial archive is to re-seal those links. The colonial archive has largely been assumed to reside in, or relate to, a European colony. Ann Laura Stoler has defined colonial archives as ‘products of state machines’ as well as ‘technologies that bolstered the production of those states themselves’ (Stoler 2002, p. 98). By reading ‘along the archival grain’, Stoler argues, we can understand the ways that colonial governments sought to navigate and direct forms of attachment and knowledge, as well as their failures to grasp the fluid and troublesome worlds over which they sought to rule (Stoler 2009). In this official colonial archive, families are objects of scrutiny and regulation. The Mackintosh Archive, in contrast, is itself a gathering and constituting of ‘the family’ and ‘society’ through the circulation of news, the construction and reiteration of affective ties, and the assumption of unity or, at least, reunification in some place, one day. Yet this, too, is a gathering of knowledge about whereabouts and movements, ideas and identities, and it sits alongside a more formal, ‘colonial’ gathering of information: statistics on the population in Salsette, a survey on Indian languages, the ‘Question of Education in India’.20

Letters between colonial administrators discussing the future of the East India Company further establish the Mackintosh Archive as one that is embedded in imperial affairs and the working-out of colonial rule. However, if these are the types of documents that the British state imagined to be of importance to the ‘study of the intellectual and political life of the nation’, they cannot be separated from the letters and diaries that consolidated networks of family and friendship that these directly colonial records are woven between. Historians are increasingly stating the importance of family and kinship networks to imperial expansion and rule. Using the examples of the Minto and Munro families, Margot Finn has shown how imperial expansion and rule were driven by the promise of great wealth that was often the only means that fathers and brothers had of sustaining wide networks of family, including paying dowries for daughters and sisters that would consolidate their family name. That ‘family name’ also meant policing the boundaries of race and class in a way that was different from, but intersected with, the policies and practices of imperial states (Finn 2011, pp. 100–17). For the Mackintosh family, their departure for Bombay in 1804 may have been necessary to secure their financial stability and fortunes but interwoven with that was Mackintosh’s desire to gain status and recognition as a gentleman, intellectual, and parliamentarian. This ambition was contingent upon his return ‘home’ to Britain, a return that relied on the securing of a pension and agreement to terminate his tenure as Recorder of the Court. In 1810, Catherine Mackintosh returned to England with her three children, Fanny, Bessy, and Robert, to begin the work of lobbying for the pension on behalf of her husband. Just as Mackintosh himself had gained the position of Recorder through the patronage of Canning, Catherine relied on the hospitality and patronage of a network of men who had access to government.

2. Conclusions

In 1810, Catherine wrote to her husband in a jubilant tone: ‘Joy to great Cesar as to grand Mackintosh or what you wish, but you are delivered. I have broken your chains you are free or at best will be so I trust in May next’.21 On his return in 1811, Mackintosh took up a position at Haileybury College before becoming MP for Nairn. For the next twenty-one years, he championed a range of political causes, including Catholic Emancipation, the abolition of slavery, penal and judicial reform in Britain and Australia, and South American independence. Alongside this, he worked on philosophy and history. His Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy was published in 1830, whilst part of his intended magnum opus—a history of England that he had begun in Bombay—was published by Longman in 1830 (Mackintosh 1857). If Mackintosh’s own name was not as renowned or prolific as he had hoped, he did gain recognition through his participation in a wide network of men and women whose access to power enabled them to campaign and lobby for significant social and political change. Mackintosh’s position in relationship to this network, a position that was continued and consolidated across the generations that came after him, enabled and effected the configuration of Sir James Mackintosh as a historical subject. The deep enmeshing of ‘public’ political life, ‘private’ family life, and the entangling of cultural, political, and social worlds ensured the preservation and passage of his legacy down the generations.

The Mackintosh Archive represents one node in a network of archives, a paper trail that spanned imperial and metropolitan sites, linking people, ideas, knowledge, and material resources. It thus calls forth Sir James Mackintosh as a symbol and a site of the interconnections between the patriarchal family, the male-dominated state, and the production of cultural imaginaries of belonging. The ‘society’ to which James Mackintosh belonged is both reflected in and constituted through the letters and journals that comprise his archive. In form and content, they provide material evidence for the interconnectedness of social, familial, and colonial lives. They function both as fantasies and representations of belonging to a social network—a community—and a constitutive part of the consolidation of that network. The letters and diaries that comprise the Mackintosh Archive bear witness to the formation of a social elite at the turn of the nineteenth century and the mobility of that elite around European-imperial space. Thus, the Mackintosh Archive illustrates the point, made by an increasing number of imperial and global historians, that ideas and identities were forged through interconnections across space (see for example: Lester 2006; Lambert and Lester 2006; Laidlaw 2000). Family was integral to the formation, circulation and consolidation of those ideas and identities, and, through the preservation and passage of the material remnants, to their ongoing legacy as archives.