Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract by Richard Atkinson review – 'genealogy is addictive'

Richard “Rum” Atkinson was an 18th-century adventurer of the kind you might find in a picaresque novel. The youngest son in a line of Westmorland tanners, he became a merchant and profiteer, a director of the East India Company, an MP, an Alderman of the City of London, a disappointed lover, a slave owner, and the posthumous initiator of the most almighty family feud. He is also the five-times great-uncle of the Richard Atkinson who produced this fascinating, exhaustive work of family history. Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract is the story of a morally tangled inheritance, but it is also the story of Richard Atkinson the younger’s obsessive pursuit of Richard Atkinson the elder.

“Genealogy is addictive,” Atkinson admits, “and I was soon hooked.” From the day he discovered his first faded letters, Atkinson became what he calls “a time-travelling commuter”. Unable to have a family of his own, he threw in his lot with the one he already had, and duly discovered a Dickensian array of characters: litigious eccentrics, bone-idle fops, dutiful husbands and angelic nieces, all enjoying the profits of slavery. He also discovered DNA connections to several lines of formerly enslaved people in the Caribbean, one line possibly beginning with “Rum” himself.

As his relatives multiplied and grew ever more mysterious, Atkinson gave up his job as a publisher of cookery books and moved lock, stock and barrel into the 18th century. The result, after a decade of immersive research in archives across the world, is not only a minute examination of his family’s rise and fall, but a ringside view of the Caribbean slave trade and an impeccable guide to the legal and financial world of the Enlightenment.

My guess is that many readers will now find themselves inspired to unlock their own time capsules

“What is Atkinson?” asked the Gazeteer when Richard stood for parliament. His “base trick is grown into a proverb” and “his original obscure name is forgotten”. His nickname was born of an outrageously good deal he negotiated for himself in a government contract to provide Jamaican rum for the British army in the American war of independence. The proverb, “as cheap as Mr Atkinson’s rum”, meant that it wasn’t cheap at all. Rough around the edges, Richard’s manners were sneered at by the gentry; Lady Anne Lindsay, who refused his proposal of marriage even after he transformed her £300 fortune into a whopping £3,475, described him as “walking straight down the throat of the person he talked to”.

Friends with the merchant banker Francis Baring and the prime minister Pitt the Younger, he negotiated his way around every drawing room, every boardroom, every battlefield and every bank. “Time and again,” Atkinson writes, “I would marvel at Richard’s uncanny knack of positioning himself, if not at the epicentre of major events, then extraordinarily close by.” Zelig in a frock-coat, Richard pops up “in a blink-and-you-missed-it kind of way” in Gillray cartoons, legal proceedings, government contracts, footnotes, news articles and hundreds and hundreds of letters. The paperwork that he produced and generated was mind-numbing; it’s no wonder Atkinson had to give up his day job.

His namesake’s death at the age of 48 left Atkinson bereft. “He was such a dynamic personality, such an incurable optimist, and it seemed unthinkable that he would no longer be present in this story.” The narrative accordingly now changes gear as Atkinson explores the fallout from Richard’s will on the second and third generations of the Atkinson family. It seems appropriate, as we enter the 19th century, that the second half of the book should read like the proceedings of Jarndyce v Jarndyce in Dickens’s Bleak House.

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If Richard is Atkinson’s hero, Anne Lindsay is his heroine. The author of the Scots ballad “Auld Robin Gray”, which Wordsworth thought one of the best two ballads of the age, Anne was a woman of unusual abilities. Her sister, Margaret, had married the Nick Leeson of the age, a financier called Alexander Fordyce, whose speculations precipitated the banking crisis of 1772; it was through Fordyce that Richard met Anne, and he devoted himself to her interests for the rest of his life. As ubiquitous as her admirer, Lindsay appears everywhere: we find her entertaining Dr Johnson at dinner, philosophising with David Hume in Edinburgh, and embarking on a European jaunt with Maria Fitzherbert, mistress to the Prince of Wales. When she eventually married, aged 43, Anne went with her much younger husband to live in South Africa. She returned to London as a widow, bringing as her ward her husband’s child by an African servant.

This is an epic tale, but it is moreover an epic piece of research. If the narrative flavour is caught in the author’s zeal, its texture comes from Atkinson’s reckoning with the fact that the ancestor he has grown to love is someone he does not know at all. The book’s appearance during our hiatus could not be better: my guess is that many readers will now find themselves inspired to unlock their own time capsules and slip into another century.

• Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract: The Story of a Tangled Inheritance is published by 4th Estate (RRP £20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.