A QUEST FOR AN UNRECOGNISED PUBLICATION OF ADAM SMITH
| Date | 01 February 1971 |
| Author | JamesA. Gherity |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9485.1971.tb00977.x |
| Published date | 01 February 1971 |
A
QUEST
FOR
AN UNRECOGNISED
PUBLICATION
OF
ADAM
SMITH
JAMES
A.
GHERITY
IN
a
letter dated
26
April,
1759,
Andrew Millar, Adam Smith’s publisher,
in reporting to Smith
on
the sale of
his
Theory
of
Moral
Sentiments,
says
:
Mr Rose at Kew, whom Rouet knows well, took
25
copies.
.
Mr Rose crops up again
in
a letter written by Smith to William Strahan,
Millar’s associate,
on
December
30.
1760.
The
portion
of
the letter referring
to Rose reads as follows
:
Remember me to Rose. Tell him
I
have
not
forgot what
I
promised
him
but have been exceptionally
hurried.
My
Delay,
I
hope, will occasion him
no
inconveniency:
if
it
does
I
shall be excessively concerned
&
shall order some
papers left
in
England to
be
given to
him.
They are not
what
I
wd
w(ish) them, but
I
had rather lose a little reputa-
tion with the Public as let him suffer by my negligence. It
will
give me infinite pleasure to hear from both him
&
from
you.’
Finally, in another letter to Strahan dated May
22,1783.
Smith writes
:
Remember me to Cadel, to Rose and to Griffith~.~
Scott does not speculate as to the identity of Mr Rose beyond adding
a footnote to the second quotation to suggest that this is, perhaps, the same
person mentioned in the previous quotation. It
is
interesting that Scott,
who went to such great pains to ferret out every other possible detail
of
Smith’s life, should have been
so
unconcerned with
this
one. What
is
even
more interesting is that fact that Scott, and
all
of Adam Smith’s other
biographers and editors. seem to have altogether overlooked the rather plain
implications
of
the second quotation given above. The very fact that Smith
anticipates the possibility that he might ‘lose
a
little reputation with the
Public
’
through the papers that he mentions would seem to imply that these
papers were meant to be published.
The question
of
the identity of Mr Rose relates, then, to more than
an
unimportant incident
in
Smith’s life; instead, it may become the
first
step
in
the discovery of a previously unrecognised publication of Adam Smith.
W.
R.
Scott,
Adam Smith
CIS
Student
and
Professor,
Glasgow,
1937,
p.238.
Ibid.,
pp.
254-55.
Ibid.,
p. 287.
113
8
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