Collecting Hume: George Chalmers and the Materials of Biography

This article presents a fully annotated, scholarly transcription of George Chalmers's notes on David Hume, preserved in the Laing Collection at the University of Edinburgh Library. Written in an eighteenth-century hand that is, in part, difficult to decipher, the manuscript has never been transcribed in its entirety; previous literature has drawn only on its most legible passages. By rendering the complete text available for the first time, and by identifying many of the individuals, publications, and events to which the notes allude, this article overcomes a long-standing barrier to relevant research. Chalmers (1742–1825) gathered anecdotes and personal testimony relating to Hume in the decades following his death, as part of a biography engaged closely with Scottish political economy. This article argues that these notes should be read not as miscellaneous biographical ephemera but as evidence of the process through which knowledge about Hume was collected, filtered, and transmitted to later biographical authority – most notably E. C. Mossner's Life of David Hume, which uses several of Chalmers's findings without citation. By situating Chalmers within the networks of Scottish political economy wherein he was a participant, the article illuminates how the historical record of Hume's life was assembled after his death.