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Adam Smith ALS While Revising “The Wealth of Nations” - A New Discovery Documenting Meeting with Influential Editor
Adam Smith ALS While Revising “The Wealth of Nations” - A New Discovery Documenting Meeting with Influential Editor
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Adam Smith
[n.p.], December 21, 1786
Adam Smith ALS While Revising "The Wealth of Nations" - A New Discovery Documenting Meeting with Influential Editor
ALS

An incredibly rare and important third-person autograph letter signed in full, [n.d.], December 21, 1786. 1p. 4.5" x 3.5". Tipped to a 5.5" x 8.5" sheet which was removed from an extra-illustrated volume concerning the life of poet Lord Byron that was assembled ca. 1890-1910. Overall darkly and clearly penned, with a fine signature within the text. There appears to be a rectangular piece removed from the bottom right. Very good.

Only 193 Adam Smith letters are known, all but a handful in institutions. Smith confessed to his friend David Hume "I am as Lazy a Correspondent as you," but Hume's letters outnumber Smith's by a factor of three or more. In contrast, 1,600 Samuel Johnson letters survive, more than 10,000 George Washington letters are known, and Voltaire wrote more than 20,000 letters.

Of the 193 extant Adam Smith letters, 24 are known only from published sources, leaving just 169 extant manuscript letters, virtually all in institutions. Smith "almost never retained copies of letters sent. And he was not addicted to letter-writing; so that, compared with correspondence of some other notable persons, Smith's letters were rather few and short" (Dickinson).

The most recent sale of a Smith letter was several years ago, where a long, fairly unimportant letter about a student's illness fetched of $43,000. Prior to that our firm sold a letter in 2021 for over $56,000. In fact, Adam Smith is so rare that in the last decade only the two letters mentioned here and just one additional letter have been sold at auction! Correspondence between University Archives and a scholar and editor of "The Adam Smith Journal" at the Adam Smith Project at University of Edinburgh indicates that this letter is not quoted in the standard published edition of Smith's Correspondence, making it even rarer and desirable.

This historically significant handwritten invitation is from Smith to Thomas Christie (1761–1796), a radical political writer and the author of "Letters on the Revolution in France" (London: J. Debrett, 1791) offering a critique of one of the most famous philosophers of the Enlightenment, Edmund Burke. As such, it offers a previously-unseen insight into the intellectual exchanges of the late-18th century as well as direct evidence of a meeting between Smith and Christie, an interaction that no doubt played a pivotal role in shaping radical economic and political discourse at the time, and perhaps influenced Smith's work while drafting a the fifth volume of "The Wealth of Nations" (1786).

Smith writes, full: "Mr. Adam Smith presents his most respectful compliments to Mr. Christie and begs the honour of his company at Breakfast to-morrow morning about nine o'clock / Thursday 21 Dec. 1786".

The setting of this intellectual exchange must be understood within the broader framework of the University of Glasgow, where Smith once served as a professor of moral philosophy, and the Edinburgh intellectual groups the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, both active during Smith's lifetime. These societies were incubators of radical economic and political thought with a focus on the nascent concept of "political economy" coined by Smith. This invitation, therefore, symbolizes more than a simple breakfast—it represents a moment where the father of modern economics engaged with a younger radical thinker in a dynamic intellectual climate.

Smith's correspondent Thomas Christie was the co-founder of the highly influential journal "Analytical Review" and author of "Letters on the Revolution in France" (1791). The other founder of "Analytical Review" was revolutionary publisher Joseph Johnson (1738-1809). Johnson was a friend of Henry Fuseli and William Godwin, and the first publisher of works by numerous radical authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, Maria Edgworth, William Coleridge, Thomas Paine, Joseph Priestley and others. These, and many other independent thinkers of the time gathered around Johnson's dinner table and formed close intellectual relationships.

An example of the mutual contacts and connections in this group is Christie himself, who in his Letters quoted approvingly from Wollstonecraft and Brooke Boothby and foreshadowed the importance of "the ingenious pen of Mr. [Jeremy] Bentham" (cf. Letters). The importance of Johnson and his publishing house in exposing these writers and shaping the public view of their works cannot be over-emphasized; in fact Joseph Johnson's name appears on several thousand imprints (Gerald Tyson, "Joseph Johnson: A Liberal Publisher," 1979). Johnson's friend John Aikin eulogized him as "the father of the book trade," and he has also been called "the most important publisher in England from 1770 until 1810" for his appreciation and promotion of young writers.

Analytical Review -- published from 1788-1798 -- became the mouthpiece of the radical movement, offering synopses and commentary on radical writers and articles of the time. According to author Catherine Packhan: "Writings reviewed as ‘political economy' in the Analytical Review reveal how the term was used by radical and progressive thinkers as a means for collecting a range of critical perspectives on contemporary society, as well as setting out possible means of improvement. In the eyes of the Analytical Review, political economy offered the prospect of enacting reforms which might increase the happiness of ordinary people, and a means of critiquing existing injustices. (Catherine Packham, "Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy," 2024).

"Analytical Review" did little to disguise its support of the French Revolution, and in that vein Johnson published Christie's most famous work, "Letters on the Revolution in France" in 1791. Written as an answer to Edmund Burke's more conservative work, "Reflections on the Revolution in France" (1790), in it Christie sought to discredit Burke's emphasis on the violence and destruction of the French Revolution, offering a stark contrast based on his own personal experiences of Paris which he claimed Burke never witnessed himself.

(Interestingly, Burke became the whipping-boy of conservatism on both sides of the pond: Christie's friend and correspondent Thomas Paine shared Christie's dismissal of Burke in his "Extract from Letters on the Revolution of France," published the same year as Christie's "Letters." While Christie was more generous in his appraisal of Burke, Paine inveighs against Burke's "minuteness and narrowness of mind…" which propels him to "not attend to the distinction between men and principles, and therefore he does not see that a revolt may take place against the despotism of the latter, while there lies no charge of despotism against the former.")

With its literary pedigree as a joint venture of an important philosopher and seminal publisher, "Analytical Review" had a reach that threatened even the conservative government of William Pitt the Younger. In response, supporters of the government published their own reactionary journal titled "Anti-Jacobin." As its inflammatory name suggests, the journal decried the radicals as "Jacobites," named so after the leaders of The Terror during the French Revolution.

"Analytical Review" was disbanded upon the death of Thomas Christie in 1796, Mary Wollstonecraft (1797) and upon Joseph Johnston's indictment on charges of "seditious libel" (1799) for publishing a pamphlet by the Unitarian minister Gilbert Wakefield. Johnson spent six months in prison and not surprisingly published fewer political pieces from then on.

Smith's meeting with Christie mentioned in this letter was facilitated by another important radical, John Nichols (1745–1826), an influential English printer and editor of the Gentleman's Magazine, a widely respected periodical of the time. Nichols, a known intellectual connector as well as literary biographer, introduced Christie to Smith in August 1786, a mere few months before this letter was written. (Project Gutenberg, The Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. Ernest Campbell, 1977.)

Long after his association with Smith and Christie, Nichols would make his mark on the early-nineteenth century literary world by publishing his life's work as "The Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century" (1812–15, nine volumes). This historic work would be followed by the even more important volume Illustrations of the "Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, consisting of Authentic Memoirs and Original Letters of Eminent Persons," which Nichols began in 1817 and which was completed by his son, John B. Nichols, in 1858.

This item comes with a Certificate from John Reznikoff, a premier authenticator for both major 3rd party authentication services, PSA and JSA (James Spence Authentications), as well as numerous auction houses.

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    Dimensions:
  • 5.5" x 8.5"
    • Artist Name:
  • Adam Smith
    • Medium:
  • ALS<br />

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