David Hume in Chicago: A Twentieth-Century Hoax

Abstract This article alleges that two letters attributed to the philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) were forged in the twentieth century. The letters were first published in 1972 and 1973 by Michael Morrisroe, an assistant professor of English in the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, after which they became monuments of conventional scholarship on Hume's life and writings. Both letters are cited without qualification by scholars of Hume's thought in dozens of publications, including Ernest Campbell Mossner's celebrated Life of David Hume (1980), and John Robertson's entry for Hume in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). This article reconstructs the history and transmission of Hume's extant letters and attempts to account for why the forgeries published by Morrisroe were accepted as genuine. It makes a systematic case against the authenticity of the letters, and focuses in particular on the question of whether Hume met the Jansenist homme de lettres Noël-Antoine Pluche (1688–1761) and had access to his library, in Reims, in 1734. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the exposé for modern editorial scholarship and intellectual history.

by Hume's references to "papers" and "manuscripts," or exempted by Hume's stipulation to conserve whatever he had written within the past "five years." The polysemy of the word "suppress"-not strictly synonymous with "destroy"was additionally ambiguous. Were Hume's papers to be conserved by his executors but concealed from public view? Then there was the question of why Hume himself, knowing of his impending death, did not destroy the letters by his own hand. 3 Strahan interpreted these ambiguities as a form of assent to the posthumous publication of Hume's correspondence, and he asked Smith and Home of Ninewells whether he could combine an edition of Hume's My Own Life with selections from Hume's letters. 4 Smith was indignant. Hume's executors, he responded, were instructed to destroy his letters: "I know he always disliked the thought of his letters ever being published." 5 Home of Ninewells, however, was more congenial. He retained his brother's manuscript correspondence and bequeathed it to his second son, David Hume the Younger (1757-1838), who would oversee the publication of his uncle's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in 1779. 6 Hume the Younger would later lead an illustrious career as a judge and legal educator. He was appointed baron of the Exchequer in 1822, and he enjoyed the acquaintance of numerous literati in Scotland and abroad. 7 He would also serve as a dutiful custodian and collector of his uncle's manuscripts, occasionally contacting Hume's correspondents and their legatees for any autograph relics by his kinsman that they happened to possess. 8 In later life, Hume the Younger gifted a small number of these manuscripts to friends as keepsakes, 9 and he sanctioned the publication of several others in literary periodicals. 10 (Edinburgh, 1939(Edinburgh, -1958 material about Hume's life, containing practically every surviving letter that Hume received and dozens that he sent, in the form of drafts, retained copies, or returned originals. 11 At the time of their donation, Hume's papers were regarded by the Society as a burden. Questions surrounded the Society's obligation to limit access to the correspondence, given the apparent implications of Hume's will and its codicil. When the literary journalist John Hill Burton (1809-1881) asked in 1843 to consult the papers for a biography of Hume, a committee was grudgingly convened to assess his intentions. 12 Against this backdrop, a market for Hume's manuscripts was emerging among the cultists of the autograph letter. 13 By 1900, 125 of Hume's autograph letters and manuscripts had been sold by Sotheby's alone. 14 The next century witnessed a remarkable dispersion of Hume's autograph letters into the hands of dozens of collectors throughout the world; the most recent census counts at least 560 letters in at least sixty repositories, outside of the collection preserved by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which is now on deposit in the National Library of Scotland. 15 In lockstep, the publication of Hume's correspondence burgeoned. Between 1766 and 1932, 515 of Hume's letters had appeared in print, extracted from the possession of Hume's addressees or their families and edited for public consumption. 16  Robert Traill (1720-1775), the Aberdeen clergyman and religious controversialist, was sold for the unusually high sum of £40,000. 20 The interest that this letter commands is understandable: Hume is responding to Traill's critique of his essay "Of Miracles" (1748). Yet this interest is amplified by the letter's distinction, among Hume's extant correspondence, as an item of intellectual substance. In prefacing his Letters of David Hume, J. Y. T. Greig anticipated the disappointment of his readers in noting that he had failed to discover any new letters of importance to the interpretation of Hume's philosophy, complementing the famous correspondence between Hume and Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) on Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature or the remarkable exchange between Hume and Gilbert Elliot (1722-1777) on the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. 21 Hume, it seemed, was reluctant to discuss philosophical matters in letters and diffident about the use of letters to chronicle his reading or significant ruminations.
The publication of two previously unknown but substantive letters in 1972-73 was thus a moment of tremendous importance for the scholarship of Hume's life and thought. In the Philological Quarterly and English Studies, the academic Michael Morrisroe recounted his discovery of the letters among the papers of a deceased collector and transcribed each letter with a learned introduction and apparatus. 22 The letters have since entered the standard narrative of Hume's biography and writings, as monuments of Hume's correspondence at two crucial moments in his life: visiting Reims as a young man in 1734, and residing in Paris as a diplomat in 1765. Both letters offer a considerable addition to our knowledge of Hume's intellectual development. The letter of 1734 reveals Hume's interest in the work of George Berkeley (1685-1753) and his acquaintance with Noël-Antoine Pluche (1688-1761), the author of Le spectacle de la nature (1732-1750). The letter of 1765 shows Hume's persistent interest in writing an "ecclesiastical history" and his first steps in procuring the scholarly materials necessary for its composition. The first letter, excerpted at length in the second edition of Mossner's Life of David   24 It is the contention of what follows that both of the letters are forgeries-and that their author was not Hume at all but the perpetrator of a twentieth-century hoax. This suggestion is not new. Published doubts have surrounded the two letters since 1984, as we will see. But the doubts have been expressed too quietly or qualifiedly. The hoax is now so thoroughly embedded in the historiography of Hume's life and writings that scholars no longer realize that they are trafficking in its fabrications.

THE TRANSMISSION OF HUME'S MANUSCRIPTS
In order to substantiate the allegation at the heart of this article, it is important to gain a clearer sense of the range and character of Hume's surviving letters and the conventions that are typically applied to the assessment of their authenticity. There are approximately between 800 and 1,000 known manuscripts in Hume's handwriting, broadly divisible into three categories: letters, non-epistolary documents (checks, receipts), and literature. 25 Letters constitute the bulk of these manuscripts (ca. 650 items), although the total number of extant letters attributable to Hume (ca. 800 items) includes letters in the hands of amanuenses or later copyists, and at least seventy-three letters that have survived on the basis of transcriptions from lost or non-locatable autographs. A recent census of Hume's known letters runs to 796 items, with the following annual distribution: Two aspects of these statistics deserve emphasis: the exiguity of material from Hume's early life (only eighteen letters survive from the years 1711-1740) and the practice of ascribing letters to Hume, notwithstanding the absence of an extant manuscript. These issues have created significant difficulties for the scholarship of Hume's early correspondence, sparking controversies over the dating of fragmentary letters and prising open a space for the intrusion of forgeries and spuria. There are comparable problems in the bibliography of Hume's works, involving the surmised attribution of anonymous publications. In those cases, the allegation of authorship has often turned on Hume's style, 26 suggestive passages in his correspondence, 27 or the controvertible recollection of a memoirist. 28 In the most difficult instance, the attribution to Hume of a pamphlet on the Scottish militia, Sister Peg (1761), scholars have had to contend against Hume's apparent confession that he authored the work himself, in spite of the mass of evidence that has pointed, insistently, to Adam Ferguson (1723-1816). 29 In principle, the attribution of letters and manuscripts should depend on the use of similar canons of evidence-the style and provenance of the item or any corroborative reference to the item in ancillary documentation-alongside the supposedly decisive congruence of the item's handwriting with "incontestable" specimens of Hume's autograph. Yet even handwriting can prove resistant to comparison. The problem is acute in the case of a Hume manuscript sold by Sotheby's in 1988 without a verifiable provenance in its advertisement: a manuscript copy of university lectures on "fluxions" (infinitesimal calculus) given by George Campbell (d. 1766) at the University of Edinburgh in 1726, supposedly transcribed in Hume's "early" handwriting. 30 The absence of a provenance for the manuscript and its postsale exportation to Japan have compounded the more basic challenges facing a scholar wishing to compare the handwriting in the manuscript with specimens from a determinately proximate era-only four of which exist. 31 Other known date of Hume's move to James Court, Edinburgh, by eight years. 33 Notwithstanding these difficulties, Mossner concluded that the manuscript was authentic: the signature resembled Hume's; the direction to William Creech, supposedly in a different hand from the remainder of the letter, was merely the interpolated guesswork of a later collector; and the address, "James Court," agreed with the dating and address in two sets of manuscript memoranda attributed to Hume, in the Huntington Library and the National Library of Scotland (figure 3). 34 Mossner was convinced that Hume's letter had actually been addressed to Andrew Millar (1705-68), Hume's publisher, and transcribed "in the hand of a clerk"-a practice that Hume had never otherwise adopted. 35 In their correspondence, Munby and Mossner had contemplated the possibility that the "Creech letter" was a forgery. Munby confessed that it "would be difficult to see for what purpose such a document could be forged," and Mossner agreed: "The theory of forgery I took, like yourself, little stock in from the beginning." 36 This confidence in the purposelessness of a forgery was understandable. Unlike other forgeries, insinuated into the historical record as jeux d'esprit for the amusement of collectors, or as an arrogation of an author's intellectual authority, the "Creech letter" was neither amusing nor intellectually useful; it referred to matters that were impossible to explicate. In 1979, however, Alan Bell discovered that the  historical memoranda used by Mossner as a form of substantiation for his surmise about the letter were the handiwork of Alexander "Antique" Smith (1859-1913), the prodigious Scottish forger, who had sold several faked manuscripts on the British autograph market in the 1880s and 1890s. 37 On closer inspection, the "Creech letter" was a collateral fake, produced by Smith with the same misdated place of origin ("From my house, James Court") and the same characteristic flaws in handwriting and vocabulary.
Mossner's failure to recognize Smith's work was an explicable lapse when set against the transmission of an otherwise pristine corpus of manuscripts in Hume's handwriting. Unlike other Nachlässe, such as Tobias Smollett's, Hume's was free of demonstrated or alleged forgeries. 38 Instead, when manuscripts in Hume's autograph were discovered, they rarely exhibited the irregularities of a counterfeit or interpolation. 39 In 1958, a letter of 1735 from Hume to James Birch, written from La Flèche, was sold by Goodspeed's Book Shop, Boston, purchased by the University of Texas at Austin, and published by Mossner. 40 The letter provided an invaluable glimpse of Hume's life during the period in which he wrote A Treatise of Human Nature, and it had appeared with an unpublicized provenance in an unusual location. Any skepticism that might have arisen about this immensely important letter could be answered with reference to its unobjectionable content, handwriting, orthography, and paper. In 1963, Tadeusz Characters" (1748). 42 Yet the manuscript was verifiably Hume's, on the same basis as the Goodspeed's letter of 1735: its content, handwriting, orthography, and paper.
Within this narrative of discovery, the conceit of Michael Morrisroe's submissions to the Philological Quarterly and English Studies was unremarkable. Two letters by Hume had lain hidden in private collections since the eighteenth century and they were now brought to light by the activities of an inquisitive scholar. In his introductions to both articles, Morrisroe provided an overview of the significance of his discoveries for existing and prospective research on Hume's life and thought. The letter to Millar showed that Hume "actually did begin gathering works on the subject of ecclesiastical history" in 1765, when scholars had otherwise "dismisse[d] the thought entirely." 43 The letter to Ramsay of 1734 reinforced the case against Popkin. Hume refers again to his familiarity with "the Principles of Human Knowledge by Dr Berkeley." 44 Yet where Kozanecki's discovery had shown that Hume was merely familiar with Berkeley's Principles, the letter discovered by Morrisroe referred explicitly to Hume's repeated "reading" of the same work. Unlike Hume's letter of 1737, which had allowed others to quibble over his direct or mediated knowledge of Berkeley's philosophy, 45 this "conclusive proof " was not "rebuttable." 46 In Morrisroe's judgment, his discovery revealed that there could be "no doubt" that Hume had read Berkeley. years since their first appearance, Morrisroe's contributions to eighteenth-century scholarship have attracted a measure of commentary and approbation from several Hume specialists and historians of philosophy. 55 In reporting his discovery of two Hume manuscripts, Morrisroe had every confidence that his claims would be received seriously, as one might expect for a faculty member at a prominent university who had studied under the world's foremost expert on Hume's life and circle and who now served as editor-in-chief of a respectable academic periodical. 56 Questions could be raised about Morrisroe's failure to publish a facsimile of the manuscripts, but this might also be said to have surpassed the reasonable expectations of contemporary peer reviewers or readers. Researchers, as much today as in 1972-73, are not always in a position to arrange for the photographic reproduction of manuscripts, particularly when the request might offend the preferences of a private owner. Other scholars had transcribed Hume's manuscripts in private collections without publishing facsimiles and their practice had not provoked suspicion. In 1962, Mossner himself had published seventeen letters from Hume to Patrick Murray (1703-1778), Lord Elibank, without identifying their owner or location and without photographic evidence in corroboration. 57 Any difficulty surrounding the absence of a facsimile or consultable originals could be obviated by a presumption of Mossner's good faith, particularly when this presumption was combined with a plausible account of the letters' past and present ownership.
In both articles, Morrisroe reported the provenance of his discoveries as follows: purposes. The letter is one of a collection of forty-seven letters by eighteenth-century personages. Sold by the estate through brokerage auction, the present location of the letters is unknown. 58 Letter 2 (English Studies) I am grateful to the late R. H. Miller, esq., administrator de bonis non cum testamento annexo of the estate of P. J. Kelly for permission to make a typescript of the letter. It is my belief that the letter was subsequently purchased for the New York Morris Collection. 59 Where Hume's letters are accessible in public or private collections, their provenance is rarely of significance to the purposes of a researcher. Yet the location of the letters published by Morrisroe and the identity of their owners remain unknown-and the provenances above are the only clues we now possess to the mystery of the letters' fate after 1972-73.
Both are credible provenances: Morrisroe was apprised by a man named Ronald H. Miller that the estate of Patrick J. Kelly of Chicago, Illinois, preserved two letters by Hume; Miller was Kelly's executor, appointed de bonis non cum testamento annexo (that is, on the death of the decedent's original executor); the letters were sold at "brokerage auction" as part of a larger collection of eighteenth-century manuscripts; and one of the letters may subsequently have entered the "Morris Collection" of New York. There are several inferences that can supplement these details. The first is that Kelly had died in Chicago within two or three years of the publication of Morrisroe's article in 1972, or Morrisroe's arrival in Chicago. In Morrisroe's curriculum vitae, dated August 1966 and appended to the typescript of his doctoral dissertation, he notes that he "plan[ned] to reside" in Chicago "upon his graduation from The University of Texas," and he does not refer to a pre-existing connection to Chicago or Illinois. The second inference is that Miller had also died in Chicago, and that he had practiced as an attorney in the state of Illinois-a claim that must arise from Morrisroe's use of the post-nominal courtesy "esq." in reference to Miller. The final inference is that the deaths of Kelly and Miller would have been recorded in probate records in Cook County. It would also be reasonable to assume that Miller's admission to the Bar of Illinois would be recoverable from court or bar records, and-if he were not admitted in Illinois-that his appointment as an executor would be documented in probate proceedings, in accordance with a provision in Illinois state law ca. 1972 requiring the appointment of non-resident executors de bonis non cum testamento annexo to be approved by a probate court. 60 A number of objections could be raised against these inferences. It is possible, for example, that Kelly's estate was subjected to protracted legal wrangling, and that Kelly himself had died decades before 1972. It is possible that Morrisroe's use of "esq." to refer to Miller was an extraneous courtesy rather than a reference to Miller's profession. It is possible that Kelly and Miller had resided in Chicago and died elsewhere; the reportage of their deaths, and the administration of their 58 Morrisroe, Jr., "Did Hume Read Berkeley?," 314n30. 59   These difficulties may be explicable. In addition to the explications mentioned above, it is possible that elements of the provenance were misreported by Morrisroe or intentionally distorted, at the request of Miller or an unnamed third party. Leaving aside either concession, however, the questionable contents of the letters raise significant objections of their own. Both letters are transcribed below, with the addition of superscript capital letters, which will be used for reference in the discussion that follows: It was with mild Surprize that I receiv'd your Letter B dated at B London. I hope that the Business which you C writ of C in the Postscript will be concluded with such Benefits to Both Partys as you expect. It is with an D Abundance of Pleasure D that I contemplate the Success of your E Undertaking E . The Letter F requested of F me is enclos'd.
G I am resolved G before the H post go away H to tell you of the Library to which I am admitted here in Rheims. I was recommended to the Abbé Noel-Antoine Pluche, which most learned man has opened his fine Library to me. It has all I Advantages for Study I and particularly holds an Abundance of Writings of both the French and English along with as complete a J selection J of the Classics as I have seen in one place. It is my Pleasure to read over again today K Locke's Essays K and the L Principles of Human Knowledge by Dr. Berkeley L which are printed in their M original state M and in French copy. I was told by a student from the University who attends to the order of the Library that his Master received new works of Learning & Philosophy from London and Paris each month, and so I shall feel no want of the latest books.
We In phrasing and vocabulary, the letters are prima facie indistinguishable from other products of Hume's pen. Indeed, the addressees, Michael Ramsay and Andrew Millar, Hume's publisher, were recipients of other letters in which Hume adopted similar or identical phrasing. The form of date used in Letter 1 (superscript A), and the phrase "dated at" (B), are identical to Hume's forms and wording in another letter to Ramsay of 12 September 1734. 63 The phrase "writ of " (C) is used only once again in Hume's extant letters, manuscripts, and publications, in a letter to Ramsay of 4 July 1727. 64 The phrase "post go away" (H) also appears only once again, in the aforementioned letter to Ramsay of 12 September 1734. 65 In Letter 2, the phrases "Impertinence & Ill-manners" (P) and "a Bill on Mr Coutts" (S) appear uniquely in a letter to Millar of 14 January 1765. 66 Similarly, the phrase "Lord Hallifax's Office" (N) appears uniquely in a letter to Millar of 4 May 1765. 67 Other phrases appear uniquely in letters to different correspondents: "Abundance of Pleasure" (D) and "Advantages for Study" (I) appear in a letter from Hume to his childhood friend James Birch of 12 September 1734. 68 Then there are the phrases used by Hume on several different occasions: "I am resolved" (G) appears five times in Hume's extant letters, including in a letter to Ramsay of subjects. 71 The effect is of a compelling symmetry between Morrisroe's two letters and Hume's stylistic inclinations. Yet there are also phrases that entirely defy Hume's practices and eighteenth-century conventions in general. The phrase "original state" (M) does not appear in any of Hume's extant letters-and its apparent meaning, in reference to the original language or edition of a publication, is unattested in Hume's manuscripts and publications, and in optical-character-recognition searches of early-modern and eighteenth-century texts. 72 The word "selection" (J) does not appear in any of Hume's extant letters, manuscripts, or publicationsand its apparent meaning, in reference to a number of items ("a selection of the Classics"), instead of the act of "selecting" ("my selection of a book"), is a solecism in English, ca. 1734. The first recorded use of "selection" in reference to a number of items in the Oxford English Dictionary ("selection," 2a) is dated 1805. 73 Quite apart from stylistic considerations, the events described in both letters present several unaccountable divergences from the historical record. Letter 2, in this respect, is less objectionable. It refers directly to a letter to Millar of 4 May 1765, first printed by Burton  letter to Millar of 18 December 1759: "I fancy that I shall be able to put my Account of that Period of English History beyond Controversy. I am glad you have so near a Prospect of a new Edition." 76 Six years later, Hume expresses these sentiments in unusually similar terms (R): "An Account of some Periods in ecclesiastical History might be put beyond Controversy, and if one Volume were successful then the others might be composed: But I do not think it so near a Prospect." Although Hume was prone to the repetition of phrasing in letters sent on the same day and subject, 77 verbatim repetition of multiple phrases after a hiatus of six years is startling. Finally, the fate of Hume's letters to Millar deserves notice: excepting one letter, preserved in the collection of James David Forbes (1809-68) in the University of St. Andrews, every extant letter from Hume to Millar is held within the Royal Society of Edinburgh's Hume bequest, owing-presumably-to the retrieval of the letters from Millar's family by Hume himself or Hume the Younger. 78 It is certainly possible that a second letter escaped retrieval or was subsequently removed from the collection, but that such a letter would appear in Chicago in ca. 1972 is more vulnerable to disbelief, especially in the light of its several peculiarities in content and wording, its unverifiable provenance, and its absence from the standard indexes of manuscript sales in North America and the United Kingdom in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 79 In comparison with the deficiencies in Letter 2, the knowledge of which require some familiarity with the arcana of Hume's finances and the posthumous custody of Andrew Millar's letters, those in Letter 1 reveal themselves under brief inspection. Hume refers implausibly to Locke's Essays (K), plural, when he must intend Essay, singular. 80 He reports that he has consulted a French translation of Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge, when a translation into French of Berkeley's Principles was not published until 1889. 81 It could be answered that Hume had blundered in writing "Essays," or that he had erred in referring to a "French copy" of Berkeley's Principles. It could additionally, or alternatively, be answered that Morrisroe faltered in transcription: the unitalicized title of Berkeley's "Principles," in comparison with Locke's "Essays," suggests an absence of fidelity to the manuscript. These counterclaims are, once again, irrefragable. Yet one feature of the letter is impossible to attribute to Hume's misstatements or to Morrisroe's incompetence in transcription. Hume notes explicitly that Noël-Antoine Pluche is a resident of Reims and the owner of a "fine Library" in that city. Hume refers to a meeting with Pluche, in person, "which most learned man has opened his fine Library to me." These statements are either an astounding form of intentional mendacity on Hume's part or they are misinformed fabrications, characteristic of an inept forgery.

REIMS, LÉVESQUE DE POUILLY, AND NOËL-ANTOINE PLUCHE
The association of Hume with Reims arises from the survival of two letters, dated 12 September 1734, one addressed to James Birch and another to Michael Ramsay. The letters are the first surviving evidence of Hume's travels in France between 1734 and 1737, following his departure from Bristol, where he had worked-briefly and with apparent dissatisfaction-for a merchant. Hume's letter to Birch was first printed by Greig in 1932, after its sale by Sotheby's in March 1920. 82 Hume's letter to Ramsay was first printed by Burton in 1846. 83 In both letters, Hume refers to his arrival in Reims and the advice he had received in Paris from Andrew Michael Ramsay (1686-1743), the "Chevalier Ramsay," including a letter of recommendation "to a man"-residing in Reims-"who, they say, is one of the most learned in France." Hume does not identify this "man" and states in both letters that he had yet to meet the "man" in person: "He is just now in the Countrey, so that I have not yet seen him," 84 "the Gentleman is not at present in Town, tho' he will return in a few days." 85 In the letter to Birch, he adds the following qualification: "I promise myself abundance of Pleasure from his Conversation. I must likewise add, that he has a fine Library, so that we shall have all Advantages for Study." In annotating the letter to Ramsay, Burton conjecturally identified the man as Noël-Antoine Pluche, "a native of Reims, the greatest literary ornament of that city," and offered a précis of Pluche's intellectual sympathies: "His promotion in the Church was checked by his partiality for Jansenism. He had the rare merit of uniting to a firm belief in the great truths of Christianity a wide and full toleration of the conscientious opinion of others." 86 In annotating the same letter, Greig rejected Burton's identification of the "man" as Pluche: "the Abbé," Greig noted curtly, "had left Reims before Hume went to France." 87 In the light of Greig's note, identifying Hume's contact in Reims became a matter of significant speculation, as it pertained directly to Hume's intellectual connections and reading during the period in France when he drafted A Treatise of Human Nature-a period about which we know "next to nothing." 88 In 1942, Fernand Baldensperger made a case for identifying the contact as Louis-Jean Lévesque de Pouilly