24 
Indiana University Studies 
self was often in the dark; and she was always displeased 
with what she could learn. do not know what you are 
about/' she wrote him in a letter of 1793 addressed to Havre 
and a year later she recorded her hatred of '‘this crooked 
business" in which he was engaged.®^ He is, she says in a 
letter of January, 1795, caught in a whirl of projects which 
will mean the destruction of her happiness. A month later 
she admonished him again: “I turn with affright from the 
sea of trouble you are entering." In more than one letter she 
took occasion to display her aversion for his business associ- 
ates ; she showed impartial dislike for his connections in Eng- 
land and in France.®^ Kegan Paul is apparently responsible 
for the tradition that Imlay was engaged in the lumber trade, 
a conjecture which Paul explained on the ground that “that 
industry had mainly attracted him in America".®® Of Imlay's 
activities in the lumber business in America, I have, however, 
been able to find no trace. Curiously enough, not even Mary's 
letters, written from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark throw 
any light on the nature of his business interest ;* nor is there 
any information on this point to be had from the document 
which he signed on May 19, 1795, appointing Mary, “his best 
friend and wife", to act as his agent in the Scandinavian 
countries.®® 
Something of the general character of American commer- 
cial ventures in France during 1793 and the years immedi- 
ately following is, however, shown in the diplomatic corre- 
spondence of that period. Monroe, who replaced Morris as 
dated New Rochelle, March 20, 1806, and printed in Rickman’s Life of Paine, pp. 
238-242. At the time when Miranda was summoned to Paris for trial (early in 1793 
and not “in the heg'inning of the year 1792’’, as Paine — or Rickman — has it), Thomas 
Christie was, according to Paine, connected with the house of Turnbull and Forbes, which 
“was then in a contract to supply Paris with flour’’: The same letter shows that in 
1791 the headquarters of this Arm were at Devonshire Square, London. It is not im- 
possible that Imlay was in some way connected with Turnbull and Forbes late in 1793 
or in the following years. On the other hand, the little which is known about Imlay’s 
business in the Scandinavian countries points to a venture for which he alone was 
responsible. It is signiflcant, too, that Paine’s letter was written some thirteen years 
after the events he narrates, and at a time when he was nearly seventy years of age. 
Posthumous Works, III, 18. 
Ibid., Ill, 84. 
^SE.g., Ibid., Ill, 138. 
Mary W ollsto'neoraft, p. xxxvii. 
For this document see C.K. Paul’s William Godwin, I, 227-228 ; and E.R. Pennell’s 
Life of Mary Wollstonccraft, pp. 230-231. Mary was directed by this paper to take 
charge, of court proceedings at Gothenburg designed to recover money for Imlay from 
a certain Peter Ellisson. The suit already being directed on Imlay’s behalf by an agent 
named Bachman was to be reinstituted by her. At Copenhagen she was to take charge 
of a cargo of goods belonging to Imlay in the hands of Myberg and Company. 
