The authorship of Sister Peg revisited: a reply to David Raynor’s response to ‘Let Margaret Sleep’

ABSTRACT

In ‘The Authorship of Sister Peg', David Raynor relies on circumstantial evidence, unsubstantiated hypotheses, and subjective analysis in an effort to dispute my article ‘Let Margaret Sleep' and claim the authorship of Sister Peg for David Hume. This reply focusses instead on the large body of documentary and testimonial evidence that has surfaced during the past forty years, which overwhelmingly and convincingly supports the attribution of Sister Peg to Adam Ferguson. New documentary evidence includes Ferguson's emendations in Sir Walter Scott's copy of Sister Peg, an 1809 letter from Ferguson to Alexander Fraser Tytler and Tytler's response to it, and information about the early publishing history of the work – as well as a letter by Hume himself about his preoccupation with another project when Sister Peg was written. While no new contemporary testimonials alleging Hume's authorship have been discovered since the publication of Raynor's edition of Sister Peg in 1982, at least nine contemporary testimonials naming Ferguson as the author are now known. This reply refutes Raynor's attempts to discredit the most famous of these testimonials – the account of Ferguson's authorship in the memoirs of Alexander Carlyle – and shows that the others cannot be reduced to Carlyle’s influence.

KEYWORDS:

• Sister Peg
• Adam Ferguson
• David Hume

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Zubin Meer, John Robertson, and Doris Sher for their comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Autobiography of Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, 1722–1805, ed. John Hill Burton, new ed. (London and Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1910; repr., with an introduction by Richard B. Sher, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1990), 427.

2 See, for example, Joseph Browne, The Gothick Hero: A Poem; Sacred to the Immortal Honour of Charles XII, King of Spain (1707) and Windsor-Castle: A Poem. Inscrib’d to the Immortal Honour of our Most Gracious Sovereign, Anne (1708).

3 Carlyle, Autobiography, 420.

4 In focusing on testimonial and documentary evidence relating to the authorship question, this reply to ASP does not discuss other instances in which Raynor relies on speculation rather than evidence. For example, Raynor’s 1982 edition of Sister Peg identified an important character in the satire, Suck-Fist, as Samuel Johnson. ASP admits that this identification was a mistake but makes an equally unsubstantiated claim by substituting Horace Walpole for Samuel Johnson (ASP, 365). LMS, however, draws on two contemporary keys to the characters in Sister Peg to identify Suck-Fist as Robert Dundas’s uncle, David Watson. This identification not only helps to clarify the meaning of the references to Suck-Fist in Sister Peg but also leads to a clearer understanding of a pamphlet that Watson wrote in support of Dundas, The Principal Heads of a Speech in P_____t, concerning the Scots Militia, which ASP wrongly interprets as an anti-Dundas satire (LMS, 300 and nn. 18–20; ASP, 365 and n. 123). Raynor’s main argument against the contemporary keys – that Watson was not ‘a very learned man’, as Suck-Fist is characterised in Sister Peg (ASP, 381 n. 123) – misses the point: Sister Peg is a satire, and its depiction of Suck-Fist as ‘very learned’ is not to be taken literally.

5 [Alexander Fraser Tytler], Supplement to the Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames (Edinburgh: William Creech and Cadell & Davies, 1809), 18. In the posthumous second edition of his life of Kames (1814), Tytler would identify Ferguson by name (LMS, 333–4).

6 The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 1:335. Emphasis added.

7 Carlyle, Autobiography, 426.

8 John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Alexander Allardyce, 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1888; repr., with an introduction by David J. Brown, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996), 1:334n.; Henry Mackenzie, An Account of the Life and Writings of John Home, Esq. (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1822; repr., with an introduction by Susan Manning, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997), 25. The introduction to Raynor’s edition does not quote Mackenzie’s attribution but cites the page on which it appears.

9 Letters of John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, 1799–1812, ed. Barbara L. H. Horn (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1966), 108. The phrase ‘Lord Elibank and his set’ probably refers to the group of ‘at least ten or a dozen males and females’ who were, according to Carlyle, privy to the secret of Sister Peg’s authorship.

10 The context in which ASP quotes Dalrymple concerns his reference to Ferguson’s mastery of satire and ‘the other powers of writing’. Elsewhere in ASP Raynor repeats the arguments from his edition of Sister Peg about Ferguson being perceived by contemporaries as a poor stylist (ASP, 361). Hume was certainly no admirer of the style of Ferguson’s first major book, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), but, as LMS shows, his was a minority opinion (LMS, 313 n. 84). ASP contends that Hume believed Elizabeth Montagu shared his negative view of Ferguson’s book (ASP, 361), but the Hume letter cited in ASP for this purpose does not support this contention, and a remark in one of Montagu’s letters to Lord Kames – ‘I cannot express to your Lordship the pleasure and delight with which I read this elegant work of Mr Ferguson’ – leaves no doubt that Carlyle was correct when he wrote that ‘Mrs. Montague was highly delighted with “Sister Peg,”’ (to which he added, ‘which Ferguson had written’). Carlyle, Autobiography, 485; Montagu to Kames, 24 May 1767, in [Alexander Fraser Tytler], Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: William Creech and Cadell & Davies, 1807; repr., with an introduction by John Valdimir Price, London: Routledge Thoemmes Press, 1993), 2:51.

LMS cites many other compliments of Ferguson’s style by contemporaries (LMS, 313 n. 84). Here is another, not known to me at the time of writing LMS. It concerns a confrontation in December 1777 between Samuel Johnson and the Anglicised Scot William Rose – a prominent schoolmaster and book reviewer for whom Hume had ‘great Regard’ (Hume to Strahan, November or December 1760, Hume Letters, 1:336) – as recorded in the diary of Johnson’s friend Hester Lynch Thrale: ‘Mr Rose of Hammersmith was contending with Johnson for the Preeminence of the Scots Writers over the English; He set up his Authors … and the other knocked them down like Ninepins: Rose at length – and to make sure of Victory – named Ferguson on Civil Society, & praised the Book for being written in a new manner: I do not says Johnson perceive the Value of this new Manner, it is only, like [Matthew] Buckinger, who had no hands – & so wrote with his Toes’ (Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (Later Mrs. Piozzi), 1776–1809, ed. Katharine C. Balderston, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), 1:196). Note that Rose cites Ferguson’s epigrammatical Essay on the History of Civil Society not only as the ultimate example of superior Scottish style in his battle of the books with Johnson but also as evidence of Ferguson’s having invented a ‘new manner’ of writing. Besides providing further evidence against Raynor’s circumstantial case for the improbability of Ferguson’s authorship of Sister Peg on stylistic grounds, this anecdote lends credibility to the rest of Dalrymple’s testimony.

11 Richard B. Sher, ‘“The Favourite of the Favourite”: John Home, Bute and the Politics of Patriotic Poetry’, in Lord Bute: Essays in Re-interpretation, ed. Karl W. Schweizer (n.p.: Leicester University Press, 1988), 181–212, esp. 194–5.

12 Carlyle, Autobiography, 378, 428. Emphasis added.

13 Ibid., 297. Emphasis added.

14 Ibid., 427.

15 Ibid., 429.

16 Carlyle had Jardine family ties on both his mother’s and father’s sides. His father, whose mother was Jean Jardine, was close with John Jardine’s father Robert, the minister of Lochmaben. Ibid., Prefatory Note, viii, 26, 29n.

17 Mackenzie, Life of Home, 26.

18 See Richard B. Sher, ‘Jardine, John’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (1985; Edinburgh Classic Edition, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 68–70 and passim. According to Carlyle, Jardine (son-in-law of Edinburgh provost George Drummond) was ‘artful’ in politics, 'in other affairs quite trusty', ‘had much sagacity, with great versatility of genius, and a talent for the management of men’, and 'was one of the pleasantest' members of the Moderates' circle, ‘who played delightfully on the unbounded curiosity and dupish simplicity of David Hume’ (Autobiography, 249, 491–2). Writing to Ferguson from France on 9 November 1763, Hume wished for ‘the plain roughness of the Poker, and particularly the sharpness of Dr Jardine’ (Hume Letters, 1:410). After Jardine's sudden death in 1766, Hume wrote to Hugh Blair on 5 June that 'we shall ever regreat the Loss of a very pleasant Companion and of a very friendly honest Man' (ibid., 2:50).

19 Carlyle, Autobiography, 426.

20 [Alexander Carlyle], Plain Reasons for Removing a Certain Great Man from His M_____y’s Presence and Councils For Ever (London, 1759), 10.

21 Carlyle, Autobiography, 439.

22 [Tytler], Supplement, 33–5; D. D. McElroy, ‘The Literary Clubs and Societies of Eighteenth Century Scotland’ (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 1951–52), 651–4.

23 The Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, ed. Vincenzo Merolle, with an introduction by Jane B. Fagg, 2 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1995), 2:513. In the same letter, Ferguson writes of Carlyle: ‘I never knew a more steady friend or more agreable companion’ – language that seems incompatible with Raynor’s hypothesis that Ferguson, for whom honour was an important component of character, deceived Carlyle about the authorship of Sister Peg throughout their lives.

24 In a short life of Joseph Black, submitted to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in April 1801, Ferguson wrote of the Poker: ‘This society formed itself, about the year 1770, upon a principle of zeal for the Militia, and a conviction that there could be no lasting security for the freedom and independence of these islands, but in the valour and patriotism of an armed people. It became known, by some whimsical accident, by the name of the Poker Club.’ (Adam Ferguson, ‘Minutes of the Life and Character of Joseph Black, M.D.’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 5 (1805): Part III, 101–117, quoting 113n.) Over the span of four decades, Ferguson had forgotten the year when the Poker was established, but he had not lost sight of its essential purpose, and his reference to ‘some whimsical accident’ by which the club gained its name was typical of his playful reserve about his own accomplishments in matters of this kind.

25 John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985).

26 The phrase ‘not much concerned’ comes from James Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 546 n. 3.

27 Hume Letters, 2:212 and n. 1.

28 Mackenzie, Life of John Home, 23.

29 Ibid., 123, 154.

30 Mark J. Hill and Mikko Tolonen, ‘A Computational Investigation into the Authorship of Sister Peg’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 54 (2021): 861–85, briefly discussed in LMS, 336.

31 For another unconvincing attempt to use weak circumstantial evidence to refute LMS and establish Hume as the author of Sister Peg, see Spartaco Pupo, ‘Political Satire in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Case of Hume’s “Sister Peg”’, Il Pensiero Storico, no. 10 (2021): 180–208. It is revealing of Pupo’s mode of assessing evidence that he dismisses the testimony of Boswell and Dalrymple in LMS solely because he believes they were ‘undoubtedly “minor”’ figures in the intellectual life of eighteenth-century Scotland (193).