Hume with a view: a different view of the philosopher

Published on Thursday 21 April 2011 20:20

An exhibition to mark the 300th anniversary of David Hume's birth gives a side to the great philosopher never before put on public display

DAVID HUME is remembered as one of the greatest philosophers in history, but that didn't prevent him arguing with his Edinburgh builder, or boasting of his cooking skills to friends. A tiny but telling new exhibition marking Hume's 300th birthday explores the philosopher's life in the capital, after his birth in a tenement flat off the Royal Mile on 26 April, 1711.

It underlines how his greatest work, A Treatise of Human Nature, went virtually ignored when he published it in his twenties, until he built his reputation after issuing shorter, more readable essays.

But alongside rare editions of Hume's works, documents on public display for the first time range from his angry and argumentative letters – a legal dispute with a builder he blamed for unnecessary repairs to the flat he rented to James Boswell – to a cookery book he probably used for favourite recipes.

Other exhibits include never-shown images of Hume and other important Enlightenment figures, such as a portrait miniature of the philosopher and an ivory sculpture of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Collector and scholar William Zachs has assembled most of the collection on show in a single upstairs room at the Writers' Museum in Edinburgh over the last 20 years. It includes one telling group of letters held in the Edinburgh city archives for two centuries.

First unearthed by a researcher in 2001, but never publicly shown, they record how Hume fought a legal case against a builder he accused of lying about the work on his Old Town flat – and lost, for all his powers of eloquent persuasion.

"He is using his intellect and powers and argumentative skills in a minor dispute because of the principle he feels is in question, to defend a small case," says Zachs.

Hume was being pursued by the builder, Adam Gilles, whom he called Gillies, for a 30-shilling bill for repairs. In the kind of detail horribly familiar from any modern wrangle over a kitchen or extension, Hume in a letter to a solicitor accuses Gilles of lying over unnecessary work. "I could get him punished for meddling with my house, without my authority," he writes loftily, "but I am content that his suit be dismiss'd." It was to no avail.

The Writers' Museum, devoted to the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Burns, and Sir Walter Scott, is a stone's throw from where Hume lived in an adjacent courtyard, Riddle's Court. The exhibition catalogue describes Hume not just as the greatest philosopher writing in the English language but as the first modern British historian, and one of the first Scottish essayists. It notes how in the Treatise, laying out his ideas and attempt to build a "science of man", he sought "to reveal the principles underlying the workings of the human mind and responsible for the reactions and interactions of human beings".

Largely unread and ignored when published, and dismissed as "abstract and unintelligible", the Treatise is now considered his masterpiece, and a central text in the history of Western philosophy.

The exhibition includes the copy that Hume sent to the poet Alexander Pope, another luminary of the 18th century, though it's not clear if they met. Inscribed to Pope, it has 23 annotations in Hume's own hand and is Zachs' personal favourite. A miniature portrait of Hume, now attributed to the Scottish portrait painter Archibald Skirving, a rival of Sir Henry Raeburn, is also on show. There are early copies of his other works, illustrating how he moved to shorter, more readable essays. There is also a copy of Hume's The History of Great Britain.

The work was a bestseller, which he expanded to six volumes, but didn't bring up it to his present day, leaving off at James II – because he was, in his own words, "too old, too fat, too lazy, and too rich". It is shown in both Dutch and French editions.

"Scotland suits my fortune best, and is the seat of my principal friendships; but it is too narrow a place for me," Hume wrote to Adam Smith. Educated from the age of 12 at Edinburgh University, he returned repeatedly to the city after spells of living in England and France, and died there in 1776. "What interests me," said Zachs, an American who has lived in the capital for 25 years, "is looking at Hume in his own time."

The exhibition notes Hume's involvement in what might be considered a former incarnation of the trams project. It includes a pamphlet from his friend, Robert Wallace, promoting a plan to build a bridge over the North Loch in 1760 and connect the Old Town with the New. Built for the initial sum of 10,140, it collapsed four years into the building project and finally reopened at the total cost of 17,354, nearly double the original budget, in 1772.

Hume was also an active member of the Edinburgh Society, set up in 1755 as a branch of the city's Select Society. It offered about 20 prizes, from the best essay in "Polite Letters" and "Sciences" to whisky and beer. A medal featured went to Archibald Campbell for the best porter, or dark ale, brewed in the city.

Zachs's collection of Hume materials is going on show just ahead of a National Library of Scotland exhibit of Hume treasures from its own vast archive. Zachs, who fundraises for the library as chairman of its American friends association, says his personal collection was a "kind of scrap, a small slice" compared to what is available to the public in both city and national holdings.

An expert on the Scottish Enlightenment and the history of Scottish publishing, he has built his private collection gradually from book sales, auctions and the internet. "There is still a lot of nice stuff out there about him that no-one knows about." Hume's life included disappointments, notably his failure to be appointed chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh because of the controversial implication of his ideas for religion. His philosophy suggested that morality was a creation of the human mind for people to interact and live together, rather than God-given.

"What I think this shows is not only the David Hume we know today, if we take a philosophy course. Here we can see how the ideas were packaged, and presented, for people in his own era. The strategy for turning difficult, challenging ideas into understandable ones through shorter essays, which gradually became more complex," he said.

The show might be more appealing to bibliophiles than ordinary punters, but Deidre Brock, the city's culture and leisure convener, says the "terrific new exhibition", which runs until September, offers new insights into "one of Scotland's most revered writers and thinkers".

Zachs's collection includes another example of Hume's activities in Edinburgh, legal papers from a case he supported, which went to the House of Lords, in a bid to stop building developments in Princes Street Gardens which could block views of the Old Town. "It's not an exaggeration to say that Hume was instrumental in preserving those gardens for posterity," he said.

While he has left this out of the exhibition, it does include the first cookbook printed in Edinburgh, A New and Easy Method of Cookery, by Elizabeth Cleland, from 1755. It's a good guess that Hume would have had a copy for his own forays into the kitchen, judging partly from his skill in making "beef and cabbage", and a "sheephead broth".

In a letter in 1769 he boasted of his "great talent for cookery, the science to which I intend to addict the remaining year of my life". "Ye ken I'm no epicure, only a glutton," he is said to have remarked, a phrase that Zachs has used for exhibition fridgemagnets. It was in 1774, however, that Hume wrote to solicitor John Watson asking him to act for him after Gillies' summons for payment, claiming the builder had played him off against his tenant.

"The story is this: I have a house in James's Court which I let to Mr Boswal, advocate," Hume wrote, refering to Samuel Johnson's biographer. "He left it last Whitsunday before the Expiration of his Lease, and let it to Lady Wallace.

"As there was some Plaister broke down in the Kitchin Mrs Boswal, that she might leav things in good Repair, sent for this Gillies, who summons me, in order to throw a little Plaister on the Walls. The Fellow, having thus got into the house, went about teizing Lady Wallace and telling her, that this and the other thing was wrong, and ought to be mended."

While Lady Wallace told Gillies everything was "perfectly right", Hume insisted, Gillies had the "impudence" to come to him and say a stone pavement under the coal bunker needed repairing; he then paved the bunker and white-washed the kitchen, and billed for 30 shillings. His indignant rhetoric, however, failed to carry the day. The bailiffs found Hume liable for one pound, fifteen shillings and one penny, and another fifteen shillings in costs.