| Administrative History | James Mackintosh was born in Inverness in 1765 and educated at King's College, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh universities. Though he had studied both medicine and arts, he chose to enter politics and the law as a career and in order to pursue these he moved to London. His sympathies were for the Whigs. In 1804 he was posted to India with a knighthood but returned happily in 1812 and became MP for Nairn, a seat he held for twenty years. His continued interest in India allowed him to take the chair of Law and Politics at the East India Company College at Haileybury, but his many posts and responsibilities did not allow him to fulfil his promise as a writer and philosopher. He died in 1832, still in possession of his Nairn constituency. |
| Description | Letter from Sir James Mackintosh, Mardocks, near Ware, to an unknown recipient in which he states that his speeches on criminal law will be published the following week and the report will appear as a pamphlet a month afterwards; the successive publication will make a greater impression on the public than if they were published at the same time; it is desirable that they should be in the hands of all known friends to the cause of intelligent and unprejudiced persons over the country; he wishes there was some means of ensuring their circulation in the proper quarters; the recipient's judgement will allow him to decide who might be the persons who might lend aid in purchasing numbers enough for distribution; following these publications, he intends to revive the subject towards Christmas with an article in the Edinburgh Review and afterwards bring in our bills in the first fortnight of the session [of parliament]; he enquires as to the nature of the distress prevalent among the labouring classes in London and requests some instruction in the subject, 20 July 1819. |