Thomas A. Lee
UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS

A LETTER FROM A TEENAGE ACCOUNTING CLERK IN 1846: A HIDDEN VOICE IN A MICRO-HISTORY OF MODERN PUBLIC ACCOUNTANCY

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate use of archival material to access a hidden voice in accounting history and provide social context in the form of a biographical micro-history of public accountancy. The archival material is a letter written in 1846 by a Scottish teenage public accountancy clerk. An analysis of the letter gives insight to the employment and social life of the clerk in mid-19th century Scotland and also identifies a notorious character in Scottish public accountancy. The paper reveals the importance of social connections, religion, communication, and transport to middle-class Victorian Scots and, more generally, reminds accounting historians of the value of hidden voices and micro-histories.

INTRODUCTION

This paper has several unusual features as a study of ac-counting history. It reports a biographical story associated with two genres identified by contemporary historians – hidden voices of ordinary rather than élite individuals in history [e.g., Weick, 2000; Xinran, 2002; Trevino and Francaviglia, 2007] and micro-histories that examine the past on a small and focused scale [e.g., Ginzburg, 1980; Bodanis, 2000; Kurlansky, 2004; Spence, 2007].

The rationale underlying the hidden voices genre is making visible the existence, contribution, and value of men and women who lack the historical characteristics of significant social influence and status.1 Hidden voices reflect the lives of the majority

The hidden voices genre is alternatively classified by historians as history from below or the people’s history [Jordanova, 2000, p. 214]. For a discussion of the notion of history as a voice, see Berkhofer [1995].

Acknowledgments: I am very grateful to the Niven family for permission to access its archive of personal papers and memorabilia. I also thank the paper’s reviewers for their comments, particularly for the suggestion to use the paper to illustrate the idea of a hidden voice in a micro-history of accounting.

of a population, and the genre rejects research focused on élite members of that population [Brecher, 1997]. Non-accounting studies, for example, typically deal with subjects such as women, the working class, and under-developed communities. In contrast in accounting history, biographical studies mainly relate to élite individuals, what Sy and Tinker [2005, p. 49] describe as “a revivalist preoccupation with ‘The Great Men’ of Accounting.”2 Despite this bias, there are recent accounting history studies explicitly associated with hidden voices – e.g., Walker [1998], in relation to domestic household accounting, and Walker [2003, p. 609], with respect to female bookkeepers as “hidden investments” in commerce.3 There are also recent biographical studies that provide a mix of great men and hidden voices in relation to the founders of modern public accountancy associations (Lee, 2006a) and early chartered accountancy immigrants (Lee, 2006b).
Micro-histories ignore the broad sweep of general histories and concentrate instead on specific events or fragments of history. They constitute focused investigations of apparently unimportant historical subjects and are argued to appeal to the general public, be closer to reality, convey personal experience directly, and provide a route to generalization in history [Sziártó, 2002]. In accounting history, with the exception of biographies [Flesher and Flesher, 2003], there are few micro-histories as accounting researchers appear to prefer macro observations of the past. Recent examples of micro-histories in accounting arguably include Lee [1994], Carmona and Gutierrez [2005], and Zeff [2007].

In the case of the current paper, the hidden voice and sub-ject of the micro-history is at the beginning of a professional career before his professional influence had yet to take place. He is Alexander Thomas Niven (ATN) (1830-1918), a 16-year-old public accountancy apprentice clerk from the small market town of Balfron in Stirlingshire. In 1846, he was working in Edinburgh, the capital city of Scotland, and eight years later in 1854, he became the youngest founding member of the first modern professional association of public accountants, the Society of

2 Tyson and Oldroyd [2007, p. 187] dispute the Sy and Tinker critique on the basis of evidence from a review of three accounting history journals between 2001
and 2005.

3 Carnegie et al. [2000, p. 371] is a hidden voice study in which the research is explicitly described as “a response to Walker’s plea for less emphasis on ‘luminary accountants whose fame and fortune merit inclusion in works of biographical reference'” [see also, Walker, 2000, p. 318].

A further unusual feature of the paper is its archival de-pendence on a single primary source that is used deliberately as a gateway to explore other archival and secondary sources. Typically in accounting history, a biographical study is informed by a complex mixture and layering of archival sources. In this case, however, the hidden voice of ATN is found in a personal letter he wrote in 1846 to his father, the Reverend Alexander Niven (1798-1872), Master of Arts (University of St. Andrews 1817) and Church of Scotland minister of Balfron Parish Church from 1825. Alexander Niven, in turn, was the son of the Reverend Alexander Niven (1760-1833), Doctor of Divinity (University of Glasgow), minister of Dunkeld Parish Church in Perthshire from 1793, and chaplain to John Murray (1755-1830), the fourth Duke of Atholl. ATN’s mother was Eliza Brown (1810-1879) who, at the time of his letter, was temporarily resident with her family in Glasgow.

The principal purpose of this paper is to report a hidden voice at an important juncture in the history of modern public accountancy. At the time of writing his letter, ATN was a junior and insignificant employee in a community of 96 public accountancy practitioners. Many of the latter were, eight years later, to form the SAE and trigger a wider professional project that continues today on a global basis. The letter provides insights to the life of a junior accountancy clerk in mid-19th century Scotland and therefore informs its reader about a specific historical time of importance to modern public accountancy and accountants. It also provides its reader with knowledge of the social context in which Scottish public accountants were beginning the asso-ciational phase of their professional project.

Letter writing was an everyday activity and significant means of communication for the Victorian middle class, the 19th century equivalent of e-mail and text messaging. In 1846, individual members of the Niven family associated with ATN’s letter were residing in three Scottish locations – Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Balfron in Stirlingshire. Including its address and greetings, the letter comprises 777 words and is written in black ink using a quill pen. It is part of a small archive acquired by the author from the Niven family in the U.S. during two research projects on founder and immigrant chartered accountants.4
4 A full bibliography relating to these projects is given in Lee [2006a, p. 392, 2006b, p. 153]. ATN’s eldest son, John Ballantine Niven, immigrated to the U.S. in 1898, and his descendents continue to reside on Long Island near New York City.

Because of the particular focus of these projects, the letter has been used previously only to confirm that ATN was a public accountancy apprentice in Edinburgh in 1846 [Lee, 2002, p. 82; Lee, 2006a, p. 286]. By contrast, in this paper, the letter is the focus for revealing a social context to the career of ATN at a specific point of time and for expanding previous accounting studies. As such, it particularly reflects the personal experiences and realities of ATN and provides specific historical pointers to a more general history of modern public accountancy in the 19th century.

The structure of the remainder of the paper is first to place ATN’s letter in the context of previous studies of which it is a part, then to reproduce it, and, finally, to identify and comment on its content. Before proceeding further, however, it is useful to emphasize the importance of letter writing in the 19th century by citing from a well-known, micro-historical study that uses family letters to report on the effects on ordinary people of a large-scale immigration from the U.K. to North America and, by implication, reveals previously hidden voices of “invisible immigrants” [Erickson, 1972, p. 1]:

Manuscripts of emigrant letters constitute a unique historical source material. The act of emigration led many ordinary working people to record their actions and attitudes. From such letters we can gain some knowledge of the inner social history of the nineteenth century, of the motives and ways of looking at their world of people who did not lead armies or governments or business firms….

The letter by ATN to his father falls within the hidden voice research design described by Erickson. In 1846, ATN was an internal migrant from a small market town in the west of Scotland to the nation’s capital on its east coast. Edinburgh in mid-19th century was a major British and European center for traditional professions such as divinity, law, and medicine. Internal migration of this type by middle-class children from rural areas of Scotland was a small but growing feature of the early Edinburgh public accountancy community [Walker, 1988, pp. 108-113]. ATN was at the start of his career in public accountancy in 1846, when public accountants were regarded as a subset of the more prestigious legal profession [Walker, 1988, p. 13]. He had two uncles, Robert William Niven and John Dick Maxwell Niven, who trained as lawyers in Edinburgh [Lee, 2006a, p. 283]. Robert qualified as a Writer to the Signet (1819), but died in 1832.

John was living in Edinburgh in 1846, but had abandoned his legal career due to blindness. ATN was therefore following a family route to a professional career in commerce.

Edinburgh was very different from the market town of Bal-fron where ATN was raised. For example, it had a population of more than 225,000 compared to less than 2,000 for Balfron in 1851. The letter written by ATN is therefore important in its potential to reveal aspects of the inner social history associated with a middle-class, Scottish teenager in 1846. It is dissimilar in nature from letters of the great and the good typically used by social historians – e.g., the letter written a century before by the Edinburgh philosopher David Hume (1711-1777) to the lord provost of Edinburgh in answer to critics of a publication by Hume in 1745 [Mossner and Price, 1967].

CONTEXT

ATN’s biography is part of a larger biographical history of 136 Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen public accountants who founded professional institutions in 1853, 1854, and 1867, respectively [Lee, 2006a, pp. 282-289]. The biography of ATN’s eldest son, John Ballantine Niven (JBN) (1878-1954) (SAE 1893), a co-founder of the public accountancy firm Touche, Niven & Company in the U.S. in 1900, now part of Deloitte Touche, and 1924 president of the American Institute of Accountants, now the American Institute of CPAs, is part of a biographical history of 177 Scottish public accounting immigrants to the U.S. prior to 1914 [Lee, 2006b, pp. 108-112]. In addition, there is a detailed analysis of the careers and influence of ATN and JBN [Lee, 2002]. Some social history is given as background and context in these biographical publications. However, this paper uses the detailed contents of ATN’s letter to reveal more about his family, life-style, career, and profession. In doing so, it emphasizes the importance of apparently trivial archival materials in accounting history research and the need to give the hidden voices of ordi-nary people an opportunity to speak from below in the literature of accounting history.

THE LETTER

The letter written by ATN to his father is dated December 24, 1846, and was discovered by the author in 1998 in a collec-tion of family papers stored by descendents of ATN’s son JBN at the latter’s home in Mill Neck on Long Island near New York. The property is situated immediately adjacent to the former family home of President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919). The full transcript of the letter reads as follows:

Edinburgh, 1 George Street December 24th 1846

My dear Papa,

Your kind letter I got yesterday along with one from Glasgow which enclosed another note from you to Mama for my perusal. I was perfectly surprised to find the Phaeton did not go into Glasgow till Saturday. After all you see you might just have done as I wished you to do, and not left here till the Friday night. I am now very vexed you have been the worse of your trip though, but I trust you will soon be perfectly recovered. I will attend to all your instructions with respect to the almanacs etc. In Mama’s letter she says something about extract of malt. Do you wish me to send a jar to Montrose Street along with them? I have made up my mind to give Marianne Cairns some little thing just now also, for I wish her to see that I feel their kindness to me a little.

I am thinking some Saturday in the beginning of the year to take a 4th class drive to Glasgow in the morning if it won’t put them about at all, and if they could give me a bed, stay till the Monday. If not, return on the Saturday evening. But I don’t wish you to mention this because in the first place I may not do so at all, and in the second if I do, it will be a nice thing to surprise Mama by popping in to breakfast some fine morning. I was sorry to find Aunty and Frederick poor Manny had been ill, but I am glad they are well again. I am very glad indeed that Mr Peddie’s report of your humble servant pleased them all in Glasgow, but oh I am thankful that it has been an almighty Father that has been on my right hand and on my left for the last year. The more good accounts I hear of myself it makes me the more so, for I feel convinced that without Him I could have done nothing. You may perhaps my dearest Father be surprised to hear such a statement from me. I perhaps never said so much about my own feelings to any one before, but I think it right to tell, that these feelings in regard to God’s Providence, I never had till I got my first quarter’s salary. Vanity was and is still too much I fear my besetting sin. I ought to say rather self conceit – but that day I felt it was not my own clever-ness nor anything I can do that made Mr Peddie think I should get £5 instead of £3.15/- and ever since then I have felt more and more that ‘without me you can do nothing.’ I must now draw near a close, though I am already too late for this evening’s Post. I forgot to bring up the Pict.

Times tonight too, so you won’t get it till Saturday. I won’t be able to get Mama written to till the beginning of the week either. You may say when you write. Miss Low would get a parcel from Mrs Murray which she sent up to me to take charge of when I am going west, but as I was not, she was to send it herself. I think Dr Minto will come round a bit now; there has been a regular quarrel between him and Archy at last and he, the latter, is unseated from the foot of the table (!). The Plaid is a delightful thing. I got out a Ticket for the lectures from Mr Peddie. Many thanks for your leave to take a few lessons on dancing. I go to the Cresct. tomorrow you know; on Tuesday to the Mess-ers and on New Year evening to the Millers. These are the invitations I have on hand at present but there will likely be more next week.

Now dear Papa I must stop. Love to all, large and small. Your ever affectionate son Alexander Niven PS

I wish you could devise any possible excuse for leaving the Tron Church. I go there Sabbath after Sabbath, and I must tell you distinctly I come out vexed and uncomfortable, because I never get any good, and I feel quite vexed almost, when Sunday returns for I feel convinced that every time I enter the church I am just about to waste two hours of the Holy Sabbath. Please to think this seriously over and let me know what you think I ought to do. I could write many things more but I must stop.

ATN 10 of Thursday pm

ATN’s letter is a window on the social fabric of his life as a teenage public accountancy clerk in mid-19th century Edinburgh. Why the letter survived for 161 years is unknown. It is one of a small number written by ATN that are known to exist. The others are personal letters to his son around the time in 1905 when JBN married in the U.S. and ATN could not attend. The reason for the 1846 letter’s survival may be either historical accident or a content that was significant to members of the Niven family in the 19th century. For example, it appears to signal an important transition in ATN’s Christian faith and also mentions a notorious figure in Scottish public accountancy.

More generally, it informs its reader about ATN’s family, friends, and employment, as well as social conditions of the times. Most specifically and despite its relative short length and apparent everyday subject matter, it provides the accounting historian with insights into public accountancy in Victorian Scotland at an employment level not usually examined by researchers. This is not a study of ATN as an influential practitioner in early Scottish public accountancy. Instead, it is a micro-history of a young teenage migrant at the beginning of his professional career.

The following analyses relate to the addresses and family members associated with ATN in 1846, the importance of reli-gion in his life and to most middle-class Scots of the time, his acquaintances other than members of the Niven family (i.e, his social network), his employer the infamous Donald Smith Ped-die, the nature of indentured service in public accountancy in mid-19th century Scotland, and examples of everyday social life in 1846 Edinburgh.

ADDRESSES AND FAMILY MEMBERS

The letter was written by ATN from a prominent Edinburgh address, number 1 George Street. This was a large Georgian townhouse in the rapidly developing New Town of Edinburgh [McKinstry, 2000, pp. 1-18]. The New Town was constructed from a prize-winning design of 1767 by 23-year-old architect James Craig (1744-1795) and represented the residential solu-tion to a considerable health and safety hazard in the Old Town of the city. Building in the New Town began around 1776 at its east end in an area named St. Andrews Square. This first devel-opment phase included the beginnings of George Street, a main thoroughfare that runs west from the Square. Number 1 was the first building on the north side of George Street.

Number 1 George Street in 1846 was the business address of an Edinburgh public accountant, Donald Smith Peddie (1809-1883), and his nephew, John Dick Peddie (1824-1891), who was a well-known architect and member of the Royal Society of Architects (1869) and who became member of Parliament for Kilmarnock Burghs (1880-1885). D.S. Peddie practiced as a public accountant and property manager [Lee, 2006a, pp. 299-302]. His George Street address was also the registered office of the Colonial Life Assurance Company, formed in 1846 to provide life insurance services in the U.K. and India. A member of the board of directors of the Colonial was Archibald Horne (1797-1862), a leading Edinburgh public accountant and landowner, and the actuary and auditor were, respectively, public accountants Wil-liam Thomas Thomson (1813-1883) and Charles Pearson (1803-1884). Next door, at number 3 George Street, Thomson was the manager (chief executive officer) of the Standard Life Assurance Company, then Scotland’s premiere insurance company.

Other accountants publicly recorded in George Street in 1846 include Gilbert Laurie Finlay (1790-1872) at numbers 22 and 130, David Murray (1787-1877) and his son William Murray at number 39, John Green at number 50, John Spence Ogilvy (1805-1876) at number 53, William Moncrieff (1811-1895) and George Murray (1809-1884) at number 59, James Sym at number 68, Archibald Horne and James Jobson Dickson (1811-1891) at number 74, Alexander Ferguson at number 125, and Henry George Watson (1796-1879), James Brown (1786-1864), and Charles Pearson at number 128.5 With the exception of Ferguson, Green, William Murray, and Sym, each of these accountants was involved to some extent in the foundation of the SAE in 1853 and 1854.

ATN’s letter provides clues to the nature of his employment in 1846. As previously mentioned, he was an indentured apprentice of Peddie. The apprenticeship started in 1844 and finished in 1849. Why ATN was apprenticed to Peddie is unknown. However, it is reasonable to assume that it was due to a combination of ministerial connection (i.e., the fathers of both Peddie and ATN were ministers) and family relations through the Dick family of Edinburgh and Perthshire (ATN’s grandmother was a Dick as was Peddie’s sister-in-law) [Lee, 2006a, pp. 282, 300]. Such familial associations were commonplace and important in the early public accountancy community in Edinburgh and, indeed, more widely in the Scottish professions [Walker, 1988, pp. 83-89].

ATN’s apprenticeship would have been an unglamorous af-fair. Sir John Mann [1954, pp. 300-301], a prominent Glasgow chartered accountancy practitioner of the mid-2 0th century recalls his chartered accountant father John Mann’s (1827-1910) description of the Glasgow offices of his apprenticeship at ap-
5 Biographies of Brown, Dickson, Finlay, Horne, Moncreiff, David Murray, George Murray, Ogilvy, Pearson, and Watson can be found in Lee [2006a, pp.88- 96, 119-120, 133-136, 167-170, 263-269, 275-277, 277-279, 290-291, 296-299, 343-
345, respectively].

6 Ferguson and Green are not listed as Edinburgh accountants by Richard Brown [1905]. However, he lists Murray and Sym as practicing in the city from
1843 to 1855 and 1844 to 1850, respectively.

proximately the same time as that of ATN:

Small, homely, rather dingy ‘counting houses’ as they were then called – equipped with high sloping desks and high backless stools. The ‘private’ rooms were well furnished but all were primarily workrooms. The partners and staff lived near their work, the ‘governor’ sometimes in the same building as the office, so that no time was lost in travelling; getting home for meals was easy. This explains why business hours were from 10 till 4, then two hours break, and work again from 6 till 8 – till 2 on Saturdays – and every Saturday. There were no football matches then, although no doubt urgent funerals to attend. Holidays were scarce; both Christmas and New Year’s Day were office working days in the eighteen-fifties.

According to his letter, ATN was writing in the late Thurs-day evening of Christmas Eve in 1846. Gas lighting had been introduced to the eastern end of the New Town in the 1820s by the Edinburgh Gas Light Company, formed in 1817. If number 1 George Street had no gas supply, lighting would have been by oil lamp or candle. ATN would have worked that evening and also the next morning despite its being Christmas Day. ATN ap-pears to have been residing in his master’s office at this time. This arrangement is consistent with an Edinburgh apprentice-ship of 1845 cited by Walker [1988, p. 132] that provided “Bed, Board, washing and clothing” in addition to a salary. It is probable then Peddie was also living at number 1 George Street as this is publicly recorded as his residence in 1846. By 1851, ATN was no longer at number 1 George Street, residing instead as an accountant’s clerk with his younger brother and University of Edinburgh divinity student Thomas Brown William Niven (1834-1914) in a lodging house in nearby Scotland Street. The only other apprentice of Peddie in 1846 was Donald Scott (1830-1898) (SAE 1855), the son of lawyer Andrew Scott (1798-1874), a Writer to the Signet (1823) in Edinburgh.

The reason for ATN writing to his father on Christmas Eve appears to have been the consequence of a necessary splitting up of the Niven family in 1846. As previously stated, his father was the Church of Scotland minister in the small Stirlingshire market and cotton-weaving town of Balfron, and his mother (“Mama” in ATN’s letter) was Eliza Brown, daughter of the Very Reverend Thomas Brown (1776-1847), minister of St. John’s Parish Church in Glasgow (1826-1847) and second moderator of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland (1844). Dr. Brown was one of the leaders with Dr. Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847) of the “Disruption” of 1843 that split the established Church of Scotland into two parts – the Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland [Cheyne, 1993].

Dr. Brown was ill at his Glasgow home in “Montrose Street” (the street mentioned in ATN’s letter) in 1846 and would die there in 1847. The street was then a residential road in the heart of a large city known as the “Second City of the Empire” be-cause of its industrial and commercial prosperity [Oakley, 1946]. The Brown home was situated near the main square of Glasgow where the current University of Strathclyde is located today. As suggested by his letter, ATN’s mother was either visiting or nursing her father, accompanied by her two-year-old son Frederick Charles Niven (1844-1883). ATN’s other brother, Thomas Brown William Niven, was presumably residing with his father at Balfron and is not mentioned in the letter. According to the letter, ATN’s father had visited his son in Edinburgh during the previous week and had problems returning either to Glasgow or Balfron due to the lack of an available stage coach. As now, travel in mid-19th century Scotland, even when between major cities, was not always easy.

Both of ATN’s brothers followed their father and grand-father into the ministry, and therefore ATN’s chosen path in public accountancy differed from the family tradition for eldest sons. The Very Reverend Dr. Thomas Niven, Doctor of Divinity (University of Glasgow), was minister of Pollockshields Parish Church in Glasgow (1876-1914), moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (1906), and husband (1867) of Alice Steuart (1841-1905), a daughter of Lieutenant-General George Mackenzie Steuart (1787-1855), a Stirlingshire landed gentleman. Frederick Niven became minister of North Paisley Parish Church at Paisley in Renfrewshire (1874-1883) and husband (1876) of Elizabeth Josephine McLaren (1849), a daughter of Dr. Malcolm McLaren, a medical practitioner at Johnstone in

8 Dr. Chalmers was the previous minister at St. John’s from 1819 to 1826 and, with the approval of the Town Council of Glasgow, put into practice various finan-cial measures designed to provide relief for the poor of a parish in the center of the city [Cleland, 1820, pp. 206-217]. Dr. Brown continued this work throughout his ministry. The “Disruption” was a rebellion against a previous system of patronage in the Church of Scotland that placed power and influence in the Church among the ruling landowning élite of Scotland.

Renfrewshire. Frederick is the “poor Manny” mentioned by ATN in his letter.

The other relative mentioned in ATN’s letter is “Aunty” who, together with ATN’s brother Frederick, had been ill. Aunty was Eliza Brown (1810-1879), the only daughter of the Very Reverend Brown and his wife Eliza Duncan (1782-1852), a daughter of the Reverend Dr. John Duncan (1741-1814), minister of the Scotch Church in London. The ATN letter therefore is a means of indirectly identifying the predominance of church ministry in the Niven family. His father, uncle, paternal grandfather, and maternal great grandfather were Church of Scotland ministers. Both of his brothers became Church of Scotland ministers, and his maternal grandfather was a Free Church of Scotland minister following the “Disruption” of 1843. His maternal grandfather and a brother were moderators of the General Assembly of their church organizations. For this reason, it is of interest in ATN’s letter to turn to an analysis of its reference to church matters.

CHURCH MATTERS

ATN makes several references in his letter to the spiritual dimension of his young life. According to Devine [1999, p. 364], “religious values continued to remain central to the ethos of Victorian Scotland” at this time, and “there is clear evidence, therefore, that in an era of industrialization and urbanization, religion remained a powerful force in the lives of Scottish people” (p.367). Also as reported by Devine (p. 368), church membership in Scotland probably more than doubled between 1830 and 1914. ATN’s attendance at church services would have been a normal part of his middle-class life in 1846.

Specific statements in ATN’s letter, however, also reveal a “coming out” to his clergyman father with respect to a previ-ously hidden or suppressed faith. The phrases “I am thankful that it has been an almighty Father that has been on my right hand and on my left for the last year,” and “I feel convinced that without Him I could have done nothing” in association with his work for and compensation from his master Peddie may appear strange to an observer from the 21st century. However, it is reasonable to argue that it would have been less surprising to middle-class Scots in 1846. ATN’s thoughts about his Christian faith as part of his professional work, and the later mention in his letter of his church attendance, were not merely the conse-quence of his position as a son, grandson, and great grandson of the manse. ATN was part of a generation where membership and involvement in institutionalized religion would have been expected or even demanded of a professional gentleman. He was an employee in a profession with strong associations to religious bodies in Scotland [Lee, 2006a, p. 39]. In addition, several Scottish church ministers in the mid-19th century, such as Dr. Chalmers, were celebrities of their day, often being the focal point of debates on social matters such as the poor law, education, and public health [Devine, 1999, p. 336]. Church sanctuaries were frequently packed to listen to sermons that were later published. Ministers also published regularly on debated social issues of the day [e.g., Lee, 2006a, pp. 77, 119, 265, 303].

Donald Peddie was the son of a minister and became in-volved in church affairs as part of his professional practice. ATN followed this model in his career and was significantly associated with the Church of Scotland in later life [Lee, 2006a, pp. 287-288]. For example, he was ordained as a Church of Scotland elder in his father’s church at the young age of 25 years and was treasurer or secretary of numerous church organizations during his career. This was typical of Scottish chartered accountants of the time [Lee, 2006a, passim]. ATN’s religious beliefs, however, were far from liberal. He was treasurer for many years of the Scottish Reformation Society, a body devoted to “resist the aggressions of Popery.” He also developed an intense dislike of organ music in church even though he played musical instruments and had a sister who was a professional violin teacher in Edinburgh [Hutton, 1928, p. 7].

ATN’s other faith-related comment in his letter is in the postscript and refers to an obvious dissatisfaction with Sunday services at the Tron Kirk or Church in the High Street of the Old Town of Edinburgh. Tron to Scots means a commercial weighing place (e.g., of salt) and the Tron Kirk was commissioned at that place in 1635 by the Town Council of Edinburgh. It was opened in 1647 [Birrell, 1980, pp. 241-242] and, by 1846, was one of the main churches in Edinburgh with two ministers with national reputations as ministerial celebrities. The Reverend Dr. John Hunter (1788-1866) was born in Edinburgh, the son of the Reverend Dr. Andrew Hunter, professor of divinity at the University of Edinburgh. The younger Hunter had been a minister at the Tron from 1832 when he replaced his father. He is described by contemporaries as “far from prepossessing.” The Reverend Dr. Alexander Brunton (1773-1854) was a Tron minister from 1813 when he was also appointed professor of Hebrew and oriental languages at the University of Edinburgh. He became moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1823. He has been described as having a “fine, though somewhat pompous, presence” [Douglas, 1882, p. 27].

In 1846, Drs. Hunter and Brunton were 58 and 73 years of age, respectively and, given the contemporary descriptions, ATN’s comments appear consistent with a typical teenager’s perceptions of an older and apparently more conservative generation. They would not appear out of place today. It is not known why he was attending the Tron Kirk. The most obvious reason is that it was a major church in Edinburgh and likely to have many influential citizens as members. This would be important for a young man intent on a professional career in Edinburgh. Certainly, it is unlikely the reason for his attendance would have been Peddie as the latter belonging to his father’s congregation which was a break-away community from the established Church of Scotland to which ATN belonged. It therefore may be speculated that ATN’s anxiously seeking of advice from his ministerial father indicated the dilemma he was in as a prospective professional accountant in Edinburgh in the mid-19th century. It was expected by his family, employer, and peers that he would benefit spiritually from church attendance but found the whole experience less than satisfying.

SOCIAL NETWORK AND ACTIVITIES

There are other individuals mentioned in ATN’s letter who give some clues about his social network in 1846 Edinburgh.10 He writes of thinking of giving a gift to Marianne Cairns in thanks for kindnesses to him. This lady was the resident do-mestic servant of Dr. John Minto who is also mentioned in the letter. Dr. Minto, doctor of medicine from the University of Jena in Germany, was an accoucheur or obstetrician in Edinburgh who was born in 1804 at Dunkeld in Perthshire, the town in which ATN’s grandfather was minister. The Reverend Niven would almost certainly have baptised Minto. The latter had two sons in Edinburgh whom ATN would have known. Patrick Wood Minto (1840-1914) became a Free Church of Scotland minister at Inverurie in Perthshire (1868-1885) and at the Scotch Church
10 Social networks were an important part of the early Scottish public ac-countancy community [see Lee, 2000]. By the time of the SAE formation in 1854, however, ATN had a relatively small social network within the foundation group compared to other founders [Lee, 2000, p. 46].

in Cannes in France (1885-1914). His brother, “Archy” in ATN’s letter, was Archibald Minto (b. 1823) who, in 1846, was an Edinburgh apothecary or pharmacist. ATN’s comments about “a regular quarrel” and “unseated from the foot of the table” suggest a typical breakdown in relationships within a family with which ATN is familiar.11 The proposed gift to Marianne Cairns further suggests that ATN visited the Minto family regularly. Use of such social connections would have been typical for a young man such as ATN coming from Balfron to Edinburgh. To develop a professional career in commerce, it was essential to network socially.
According to his letter, ATN was to visit the “Cresct.” (Cres-cent) on Christmas Day. The use of the term in such a familiar and similar way to “Montrose Street” earlier in the letter suggests a family-related address. In fact, from a search of the 1846 Edinburgh & Leith Street & Trade Directory, it is probable that the address is number 14 Atholl Crescent, the home in 1846 of lawyer Humphrey Graham (1789-1862), Writer to the Signet (1813), and brother of Frederick Graham (b. 1790) who was ATN’s uncle by marriage. Frederick Graham married ATN’s aunt Marjory Forbes Niven (1809-1880) in 1824. According to Niven family records, Frederick Graham was a former army officer who served at Waterloo (1815) and was later factor to the Duke of Atholl at Dunkeld where ATN’s grandfather ministered.12 By 1846, Graham was living in Edinburgh and held the position of commissary general in the Department of Army.13 It is reasonable to presume that ATN was attending a family function on Christmas Day.

Invitations to visit during the festive period had also been received by ATN from the Messer and Miller families. It is im-possible to identify the Miller family because of the number of Miller families in Edinburgh at the time, but the family of Messer is different as only one is listed in the Edinburgh & Leith Street & Trade Directory of 1846. Adam Messer (1786-1861) from Chain in Berwickshire was residing at 142 Princes Street, the
11A regular quarrel was a term then used to denote a dispute between father and son [Macleod et al., 1999, p. 209]. To be unseated from the foot of the table meant removal from the second most important place at the family dining table.

12 Factor was the term used to denote the individual responsible for the over all management of the Duke’s landed estates. It was therefore a position of some
importance.

13 This was a civilian appointment involving overall responsibility for the supply to the North British Army of food, clothing, bedding, animal feedstuffs, and
related matters.

main thoroughfare of the New Town. He was a general medical practitioner, fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edin-burgh (1826), and a medical officer at the Edinburgh Royal Public Dispensary & Vaccine Institution.14 Dr. Messer was married with two daughters and five sons, including two who became doctors. It is not clear what the connection was between ATN and the Messer family, although it is possible because of their medical association that Dr. Messer and Dr. Minto were known to one another.

The ATN letter mentions other possible invitations and implies therefore that, together with the above families, ATN had an active social life in Edinburgh at the age of 16 years. As suggested in connection with Minto, these contacts would typically come through ATN’s family. For example, the Nivens were associated over many decades with several Ayrshire and Perthshire landowning families with Edinburgh roots (particularly, as mentioned previously, that of Dick) [Lee, 2006a, pp.282, 299-300]. ATN’s accounting master also had family connections to Perthshire and the Dick family. The most influential Niven connection, however, was that of ATN’s grandfather as minister at Dunkeld and his association with the Duke of Atholl.

The other individuals in ATN’s letter are more difficult to determine from the public record. The recipient of a parcel was Miss Low and can be identified as Ann Low (b. 1791) from Berwickshire, a long-standing boarder with ATN’s family at Balfron. Mrs. Murray cannot be traced in census records to either the Brown or Niven family. It is possible she was either a domestic servant or a visitor in the Brown household at Glasgow in 1846. Victorian households of professional men in the mid-19th century typically employed a number of domestic servants, and the passage of a parcel to or from Balfron and Glasgow in these circumstances would not have been unusual, particularly because of ATN’s mother’s visit to her father. The Reverend Alexander Niven had five domestic servants at Balfron in 1851 and four in 1861, indicating some degree of prosperity for his family.

ATN’s letter mentions various social activities. The first relates to dancing lessons that his father had given him permis-sion to take. Such lessons would have been a natural part of the

14 The Institution was formed in 1776 by royal charter and typically had 12 medical officers and an average of 12,000 mainly outpatients in the mid-19th century.
15 The dukedom was one of the most senior in Scotland, created in 1703 for the Murray family.

social education of a young man. By 1846, the city had eight dancing teachers resident in the New Town and a number of dancing assemblies or halls [Birrell, 1980, pp. 72-73] at which regular dances took place, typically from 5.00 p.m. to 11.00 p.m. Ladies would be chaperoned or accompanied by servants, and men would attend in evening dress. In ATN’s time, many of these dances took place in the assembly rooms at 54 George Street, a large ballroom opened in 1787, located a short distance from ATN’s workplace and residence.

The second social activity mentioned by ATN relates to his obtaining a “Ticket” from his master Mr. Peddie for “lectures.” Although there is ambiguity in the letter in relation to this mat-ter, in all probability the ticket would have given him admission to a series of evening lectures on scientific and literary matters by leading celebrities of the day. The only publicly recorded office held by Peddie in 1846 that can be related to such lectures is his ordinary directorship of the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh at 54 Hanover Street, located near his office. The Institution was founded in 1846 to provide the public with access to topics of interest in literature, science, and art by means of a popular lecture series, a library, a reading room, a news room, and evening classes. As with dancing classes, attendance by ATN at scientific or literary lectures in 1846 would not have been unusual.

MR. PEDDIE

Arguably, the pivotal character in ATN’s letter is “Mr. Ped-die,” his public accountancy master. This is not just because ATN received a quarterly payment of £5 instead of the contracted £3.15s., a largess for which he would have been grateful. Instead, it is because Peddie later proved to be a notorious fraudster who committed his frauds throughout and beyond the period of ATN’s apprenticeship [Walker, 1996a]. There is no evidence that ATN would have been aware of Peddie’s activities, and it can only be speculated what his reaction must have been in 1882 when his former master’s frauds were discovered, forcing Peddie to flee to Spain and thence to the U.S. before dying at Philadelphia in 1883.

Peddie was university-educated and trained as a lawyer be-fore becoming a founder member of the SAE in 1853 and 1854. He came from a respected family. Indeed, his family background was similar to that of ATN. His paternal grandfather was James Peddie, a parish schoolmaster from Perth in Perthshire, and his father was the Reverend James Peddie (1758-1845), Doctor of Divinity (University of Edinburgh), minister of the United Associate Synod Church at Bristo Street in Edinburgh (1782-1828), and twice moderator of the General Assembly of the United Associate Synod.16 The Reverend Peddie was a founding honorary director in 1812 of one of the most respected insurance companies in Scotland, the Scottish Widows Fund, and author of A Defence of the Associate Synod against the Charge of Sedition (Glasgow: J. Ritchie, 1800) and many other works. He was also a noted philanthropist.

Donald Peddie also had two respected brothers – lawyer James Peddie (1798-1885) was a Writer to the Signet (1819) in Edinburgh, and William Peddie (1805-1898), Doctor of Divinity (University of Edinburgh), followed his father as minister of the United Associate Synod Church at Bristo Street from 1828. He was moderator of the Church’s General Assembly in 1858 and author of Comparison of the System of Religious Establishments with That of Voluntary Churches (Edinburgh, 1835) and Discourses by James Peddie (Edinburgh, 1846). According to Walker [1996a], Donald Peddie’s father was treasurer (1797-1845) of the Friendly Society of Dissenting Ministers, a charitable organization created mainly to assist United Associate Synod ministers. The accounting and administration of the Society was conducted by his accountant son from 1833. The fraud by the latter took place in the early 1840s. Although his brother William replaced his father as the Society’s treasurer in 1845, Donald continued to maintain its accounting records. In 1883, it was discovered that £21,840 of the Society’s £30,940 funds were irrecoverable and a further £4,100 doubtful. Donald had been involved with a German property speculator in Edinburgh, provided him with funds, and facilitated further funds from a firm of lawyers.

Peddie resided at number 1 George Street and also with his mother and two sisters in a large house, Laverock Bank, in the newly developed north Edinburgh district of Trinity. The Peddie neighbors in 1846 included a retired army major, a senior customs and revenue official, the Belgian consul, and John Brown Douglas (1809-1880), Writer to the Signet (1833). The Peddie family employed two female servants and a male gardener in 1851. By 1861, there were five servants at Laverock Bank with Donald and a sister. This degree of affluence is contrary to the instability of his professional practice as noted by Walker [1996a, p. 313]. Peddie’s fraudulent activity was national news and resulted in the SAE removing him from membership and instituting disciplinary processes for its members.

INDENTURED ACCOUNTING SERVICE

As previously stated and indicated in his letter, ATN’s ap-prenticeship was with Peddie. However, on the death of his son JBN in 1950, the Touche Niven Bailey & Smart Newsletter (4/1) wrongly stated that ATN came to Edinburgh in 1844 to be an apprentice to an accountant Andrew Prentice and was later Prentice’s partner. There is no record of Andrew Prentice as an accountant in Edinburgh at this time, although ATN was employed in 1850 by Andrew Murray Paterson (1823-1861), a fellow founder member of the SAE in 1854. Paterson resided at Wardie Villa in Trinity close to Peddie at Laverock Bank. ATN’s contracted annual salary of £15 as an apprentice was low in comparison with similar contracts of the time. Walker [1988, p. 130] describes, for example, several contracted sums pre-1855 that averaged £25 annually. Thus, the increase to £20 by Peddie for ATN remained well below this average. However, much depended on the entry fee paid by the father of the apprentice. The entry fee was typically returned by the master to the apprentice as salary over the five-year contract. The contracted sum of £ 15 for ATN therefore suggests an entry fee of five times that amount or £75, apprenticeships typically being for five years.

The author has the indenture contract for ATN’s son JBN, dated November 1, 1887 and registered May 1, 1888 with char-tered accountant David Pearson (SAE 1862), a son of Charles Pearson, one of the SAE founders mentioned previously as working on George Street. It was discharged on December 5, 1892, and signed by ATN as cautioner. The entry fee was £105, providing an average annual salary of £21 over five years. It would therefore appear that ATN’s salary in 1844 was little different from that of his son in 1887. Public accountancy apprenticeships in Scotland in the 19th century were economically advantageous to the contracted masters as they typically had to pay little for the services provided by the apprentice during an extensive training period.

GOODS AND OTHER MATTERS

The ATN letter also provides several insights to everyday matters in the lives of middle-class Scots in 1846. For example, ATN promises to purchase almanacs for his father. These were annual publications containing details on a national, regional, and local basis of past and forthcoming events, significant indi-viduals, organizations, and companies, as well as lists of clergy, lawyers, and military men. In all probability, the purchases would have included the New Edinburgh Almanac & National Repository 1847 (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd). This was published on the day before the date of ATN’s letter and consisted of 552 pages plus a 120-page Advertising List 1847. It cost 5s. Several of the facts reported in this paper have been derived from the 1847 Almanac. There were almanacs for each of the major cities as well as more nationally based publications. They were the mid-19th century equivalents of web-based databases.

The other publication mentioned in ATN’s letter is the “Pict. Times.” The Pictorial Times: A Weekly Journal of News, Literature, Fine Art, and the Drama was a London-based illustrated newspaper, founded in 1843 and published weekly at a cost of 6d. The Pictorial Times was published as a rival to The Illustrated London News, founded in 1842. These publications were examples of 19th century innovation in public communication and contained a mixture of news items (including foreign correspondence), fictional stories, and wood-engraved illustrations (the precursors of photographic illustrations). The Times had a short life as its publication stopped shortly after 1846. In contrast, there were 16 newspapers in Edinburgh in 1846. Eight were published weekly, six bi-weekly, one thrice times a week, and one monthly. This compares with three newspapers today. This city-based provision, as well as ATN’s father’s readership of The Pictorial Times, reflects the extent to which middle-class families such as the Nivens relied on newspapers as a major source of news and comment.

The next item to be mentioned in the letter is a jar of “extract of malt.” This was and remains a multi-vitamin grain product used for a variety of household purposes including hot drinks and beer making. The plaid that ATN received from his father was a length of tartan wool cloth then used as a blanket or bed cover, today part of the ceremonial dress of a pipe band member [Macleod et al., 1999, p. 198]. The need for such a bed cover perhaps reflects the coldness of large Victorian houses in 1846, particularly in winter and in rooms reserved for domestic servants and other employees such as ATN.

The phaeton reported in the letter was a four-wheeled, horse-drawn carriage. It was pulled by either one or two horses with large wheels and strong springs and had a reputation for speed and accidents. There was a commercial version of the carriage that used harder springs and carried mail, passengers, and baggage. It is this type of vehicle to which ATN presum-ably refers. The name phaeton is derived from the Greek for the son of Helios, the sun god, and, in more recent times, has been used as the name for luxury cars manufactured by Chrysler and Volks wagen.

Carriages were a major means of public transport in central Scotland. A coach service between Edinburgh and Glasgow left daily from Princes Street at 9:45 a.m. There was no stage coach service directly to Balfron in 1846 and only a single Saturday service between Balfron and Glasgow. This lack of transport connection lies behind the comment of ATN in his letter about his father’s health and his journey from Edinburgh to Glasgow to visit his wife. Public transport in Scotland in 1846 did not permit easy travel between towns outside the main cities.

ATN also mentions taking a “4th class drive” to Glasgow to visit his mother and her relations there. This would not have been a stage coach journey as there was a single fare for such vehicles. Instead, the journey was by railway train for which there were four classes of fare. In 1839, the Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway Company began to construct a railway line between Edinburgh and Glasgow. It was opened in 1842. By 1846, there were ten trains running daily between Edinburgh and Glasgow, starting at 7:00 a.m. and ending at 10:00 p.m. The journey lasted 90 minutes with three stops for a train carrying first and second-class ticket-holders only. The train took 125 minutes with 11 stops with all four classes of fare aboard. The ticket prices ranged from 8s. for first-class, 6s. for second-class, 3s.10d. for third-class, and 2s.6d. for fourth-class. The fact that ATN was contemplating a fourth-class ticket from Edinburgh to Glasgow is consistent with the low level of his salary because the price comprised more than 7% of his monthly income.

Finally, the letter written by ATN was delivered to his father by the Post Office. This service was much more frequent than that of today. In Edinburgh in 1846, for example, there were five postal deliveries daily. These involved post-box collection and delivery at about the same time. The first delivery started at 7:00 a.m. This was followed by services starting at 10:45 a.m., 1:30 p.m., 3:15 p.m., and 5:15 p.m. Postal rates as now depended on the weight of the package, and there were two postage rates -prepaid and unpaid (to be paid on delivery). The rates ranged from 1d. prepaid and 2d. unpaid for a package less than half an ounce to 2s.8d. prepaid and 5s.4d. unpaid for 16 ounces. The Post Office did not deliver packages of more than 16 ounces. The frequency of service reflects the importance of this means of communication in 1846 to individuals such as ATN and members of his family.

CONCLUSIONS

The previous analyses attempt to demonstrate the diver-sity of information to be derived for historical purposes from a single archival source such as a personal letter. The ATN letter in 1846 reveals professional as well as social insights. The contents of the letter, however, have been related to other primary and secondary sources in order to provide a more complete rendition of hidden voices in a micro-history. This is the essence of archival research, drawing out evidence and information from archival sources and bringing them together with relevant secondary sources to provide a coherent and comprehensible history. The following are offered as conclusions to be drawn from the above analyses.

The analyses reveal the extent to which a relatively innocuous or trivial archival source such as ATN’s personal letter to his father can be used in conjunction with other primary and secondary sources, such as almanacs and directories, to report, at a specific point in time, a detailed history of the people, places, and events associated with an ordinary individual.

The letter and analyses reveal ATN as a young man at the start of his professional career and adult social life. Therefore, the paper is not a typical historical account of a man of influ-ence, power, or prestige. Instead, it represents a hidden voice of history by providing insight to the life of an apprentice clerk working long hours for modest wages, caring about his family and acquaintances, and expressing modesty about his achievements at work and anxiety about his religious experiences.

The ATN letter also reveals a complex social mixture of professional career and employer, family and acquaintances, church and faith, and social activities that is useful in understanding public accountancy and accountants in mid-19th century Scotland. The life of a public accountant such as ATN was not just about his training, practice, and influence as a professional, which is the typical focus in accounting biography. Instead, as suggested in this paper, it was also about social networking within the middle class of a major city with little separation of work, family, and friends. It is not unreasonable to suggest that such networking at 16 years of age would have had a longerterm impact on the professional career of ATN.

There are clues in the letter and the above analyses that indicate ATN’s social life and employment in Edinburgh were influenced by family associations vital to his social network-ing; e.g., his employment as a son of the manse by a son of the manse and social visits to Edinburgh families with direct or indirect connections with the Niven family. In particular, there the letter suggests ATN came from an upper-middle-class Scots family and interacted with other upper-middle-class families. Ministers and doctors were members of traditional professions that had a social status in 1846 commensurate with the upper-middle-class in mid-Victorian Scotland [Walker, 1988, p. 271; see also, Checkland, 1964, pp. 294-295]. More specifically, ATN was part of a church dynasty in the established church in Scotland. He was later to head a public accountancy dynasty that stretched to the U.S. with a son who greatly influenced the early American profession and a grandson who contributed to a major public accountancy firm in more recent times.

ATN worked at number 1 George Street, a street that ap-pears to have been a major location for the Edinburgh public accountancy community in the mid-19th century. Seventeen public accountants provided services in George Street in 1846, and 13 of these men were later invited to join the SAE in 1854.

The letter by ATN reveals his connection to Donald Smith Peddie who was later identified as a significant fraudster. The letter, however, shows Peddie in a more favorable light with regard to the payment of a salary one-third in excess of the contracted amount. The less favorable light is that the contracted sum appeared low by the standards of the time. The significance of Peddie in the early history of modern public accountancy is the impact that his fraud had on a conservative Victorian Britain that effectively created what Perkin [1989, pp. 3-4] describes as a “professional society” based on the “professional ideal” of “trained expertise and selection by merit.” Peddie was the son of a minister and was accused of defrauding an organization intended to provide ministerial pension benefits. The SAE not only expelled Peddie from membership but was the first professional body to institute explicit disciplinary procedures to maintain public confidence in the professional ideal of public accountancy [Walker, 1996a, p. 31].

The influence of religion and the established church in Scotland in 1846 is clear from ATN’s description of his delight at receiving a bonus salary from Peddie and his concern over the lack of spiritual benefit he was receiving from attendance at Sunday service. These aspects of ATN’s life in 1846 provide a relevant background to understanding his attitude and involvement with religious and church matters later in life and, more generally, for understanding public accountancy and public accountants in a Victorian Britain that valued religion and incorporated it into the workplace.

As is the case today, the importance of transport and com-munication in the life of the early Victorians is clear from the ATN letter, whether it was through the availability of a stage coach or railway train, the use of the postal service, or reading a weekly newspaper.

A final feature of the ATN letter that is significant is its po-sitioning chronologically in the personal professional projects of ATN and his son JBN. ATN had a relatively modest career as a public accountant in Edinburgh. He was respected and trained several chartered accountants. However, he is best known historically as the longest surviving founder of the SAE [Lee, 2006a, p. 289]. On the other hand and as previously stated, his son JBN formed Touche, Niven & Company, a predecessor firm of the present-day Deloitte Touche, in 1900 with fellow SAE member George Touche, became president of the American Institute of Accountants in 1924, and was involved in successfully defending the landmark auditing case of Ultramares v Touche in 1931 [Lee, 2006b, pp. 108-112].

These conclusions, based on relevant analyses of a single letter, suggest that, when archival material exists, accounting historians can make considerable use of it, not only to inform accounting history, as in this case with ATN’s public account-ancy apprenticeship, but also to add a social context that creates greater understanding of the historical times as with travel op-tions, postal services, and social activities. In this micro-history, the historical subject of ATN is a hidden voice who, within a social context, adds to existing knowledge of the Scottish public accountancy profession in the mid-19th century.
It is also hoped that this study encourages use of archival materials in private as well as institutional holdings. In this respect, as in the case of ATN and his son JBN, there is considerable benefit to be gained from tracing the ancestors of biographical subjects in order to determine whether there are private archival holdings available for research purposes.17 In this case,

17 Readers interested in an earlier example of this practice in the research of early Scottish public accountants should refer to a study of one of ATN’s contemporaries, George Auldjo Jamieson (1828-1900) (SAE 1854) [Walker, 1996b, p. 9].

a “Google” search identified an address and phone number that led to the Niven family archive.

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