We know why Adam Smith was in the South of France for most of 1764 and 1765. In summary, the Scottish professor had agreed to tutor a young aristocrat — the soon-to-be 3d Duke of Buccleugh — during the future duke’s “grand tour” of the Continent, and Smith had chosen Toulouse as their center of operations. (For a summary of Smith’s travels in France and Switzerland, see generally chapters 12–14 in Rae 1895, which are available here for free, and for a map and detailed timeline of Smith’s travels in the South of France, see Alcouffe and Massot-Bordenave 2020, xiii–xiv, xviii–xix. See also chapter 13 in Ross 2010.)

And we also know that, in setting off for France, the future father of modern economics and the future duke were following an elite and well-established tradition, for the Grand Tour was a rite of passage of the sons of elite British families as well as the crown jewel of their education. (See, e.g., Cohen 2001, 129; Brodsky-Porges 1981, 178.) But in an enigmatic letter addressed to his friend and mentor David Hume — a letter postmarked from Toulouse and dated 5 July 1764 — Adam Smith refers to a book that he is writing: “The Life which I led at Glasgow was a pleasurable, dissipated life in comparison of that which I lead here at Present. I have begun to write a book in order to pass away the time”. (See Letter #82 in Mossner & Ross 1982.)

What was this lost book? Was it, as most scholars suppose, the great work that would eventually become The Wealth of Nations, or was it something else entirely, perhaps Smith’s extended essay on “Considerations concerning the First Formation of Languages”? As it happens, Smith’s speculations on the origins of language were first published in 1767 in the form of an appendix to the third edition of his Theory of Moral Sentiments (see, e.g., Land 1977, p. 677), less than one year after the Scottish philosopher’s return from France in late 1766!

Note: I will resume my series of Adam Smith mysteries on Monday; in the meantime, the full citations to the scholarly works mentioned in this blog post appear below this 1650 map of Toulouse.

Works Cited

Alcouffe, Alain, and Philippe Massot-Bordenave. 2020. Adam Smith in Toulouse and Occitania: The Unknown Years. Palgrave Macmillan

Brodsky-Porges, Edward. 1981. The Grand Tour: Travel as an Educational Device, 1600–1800. Annals of Tourism Research, 8(2): 171–186.

Cohen, Michèle. 2001. The Grand Tour: Language, National Identity, and Masculinity. Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, 8(2): 129–141.

Land, Stephen K. 1977.  Adam Smith’s ‘Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages. Journal of the History of Ideas, 38(4): 677–690.

Mossner, Ernest C., and Ian Simpson Ross, editors. 1982. The Correspondence of Adam Smith, 2nd edition. Oxford University Press.

Rae, John. 1895. Life of Adam Smith. Macmillan.

Ross, Ian Simpson. 2010. The Life of Adam Smith, 2nd edition. Oxford University Press.