A Factotum in the Book Trade by Marius Kociejowski;

Author:Marius Kociejowski; [Kociejowski;, Marius]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771964579
Publisher: LightningSource
Published: 2022-03-29T21:15:42+00:00

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While, during the first months of their separation, Charlotte was going through experiences that would forever alter the course of her life the young man who left her was going through various twists and turns that would forever alter his. In order to explain how will require a certain amount of backtracking and also, on the part of the reader, a submission to the curious workings of fate.

Ochterlony was born on February 12, 1758, in pre-Revolutionary America, in Boston, in the very house where, some years later, Paul Revere would pause on his famous ride. (There are, apparently, a number of such places.) His father was in the merchant service. At some point David Sr. fell in with one of London’s underworld figures, Laughlin Macleane, ‘distinguished in his day, it is said, for great abilities and lax morals.’ There is even a school of thought that he might have been the author of the ‘Junius’ letters. An associate of his would later write, ‘If he involved others he only did to them what he did without mercy to himself.’ Macleane’s biographer writes:

He was a scoundrel with a host of faults, but a likeable scoundrel; and his courage was beyond doubt. The key to his character was his stutter. It drove him on, and, at the same time, held him back. Unlike Burke and Wilkes, who could dominate large gatherings with their golden-tongued eloquence, Macleane was almost inarticulate. With such a limiting affliction he had no hope of succeeding in the wider political arena, and so he exercised his talents in the shadows of the underworld.‡

Macleane had gone to America, perhaps to escape his association with a highwayman, his very distant relative James, who was hanged at Tyburn. His biographer notes, ‘People added two and two together and made five.’ In America, in the company of his enormously fat and dumpy wife ‘devoted to a lap-dog of swollen proportions which waddled along in front of her,’ he took up the role of military surgeon and was not a bad one at that. After all, who, back then, needed experience? It was during Macleane’s American period that he borrowed money from Ochterlony’s father. David Sr. died suddenly in 1765 leaving his family almost destitute and Dr. Macleane was seen no more.

Soon after, the young Ochterlony went to England where some years later his mother remarried. He went to work for his stepfather, Sir Isaac Heard, at the Herald’s Office in London although there he could ‘never give his mind to the art and mystery of blazoning coats of arms.’ Somehow he came into touch with Macleane who by now had become Under Secretary of State and First Commissioner for the affairs of the Nuwab of the Carnatic. Although he still did not have the money to discharge his old debt he offered to place the son of his creditor in the service of the above Prince at Madras. Ochterlony, eagerly accepting the offer, was taken for a short time into the Commissioner’s Office in order that he might learn the forms of Indian business.

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