The Philosopher and the Actress: Did George Anne Bellamy Influence the Final Edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments?

Adam Smith was a philosopher and scholar whose most exciting adventure seems to have been getting kidnapped by gypsies when a child. One might be surprised to discover that he owned a copy of the tell-​all book of the decade. Politicians, actors, and aristocrats feature in the memoir of actress George Anne Bellamy, Apology (1785). Bellamy seems to have known half of society (the Whig half), and she wasn’t shy about spilling the tea. The dogearing of the pages of Smith’s personal copy suggest that at least one reader savored it.

Scandal was popular reading in the late eighteenth century—Town and Country printed monthly exposés of illicit liaisons, complete with portraits—but Smith’s library contains no publications of that kind, and only two other life-​writings related to actors.

So why would Smith buy Bellamy’s Apology?

Why would he, apparently, dog-​ear certain pages?

Those are two different questions. I suggest that the reason he bought and read Bellamy’s book is different from the reason he dogeared pages. In my book The Practical Morality of Life: Adam Smith, George Anne Bellamy and the Theatre (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), I propose that we consider how reading Bellamy’s Apology may have materially affected Smith’s final and substantial additions to The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). The timing is right, and many of Smith’s additions find a parallel or instantiation in the Apology.

As for why Smith bought the Apology, one probable reason was Bellamy’s anecdotes about Smith’s connections: politicians such as Charles Townshend and Lord Shelburne, Club members such as Samuel Johnson and David Garrick, and friends such as David Hume. Bellamy’s stories were so riveting that periodicals printed excerpts for months. Also, Bellamy’s memoir offers accounts of performing in two theatres in Scotland: the Canongate Theatre in Edinburgh (1762–64) and the Alston Street Theatre in Grahamstown (1764).

In The Wealth of Nations, Smith would favor “giving entire liberty” for theatres to stage performances “without scandal or indecency.” And Smith is very favorable to theatre in his essay on the imitative arts. But at the time, theatres were a matter of controversy. Earlier, in the 1760s, Smith was on a university committee which pressured the magistrates in Glasgow not to allow a playhouse to be established in the city. Records indicate Smith’s concurrence with the university committee against the theatre. Smith’s apparent opposition is puzzling also given his previous comments on the moral benefits of the theatre in TMS (1759).

Earlier still in Glasgow, the Methodist Rev. George Whitefield objected to a makeshift theatre built against a wall of the Bishop’s Palace. A mob destroyed it in 1753. Whitefield was subsequently satirized in a play by Samuel Foote, The Minor (1760), performed in Dublin and London but not in Scotland. The satire may, nonetheless, have inflamed Whitefield supporters against a theatre.

In the early 1760s, some merchants in Glasgow looked to establish a theatre, but opposition, like the university committee which included Smith, impelled them to situate it—the Alston Street Theatre—just outside of Glasgow, in nearby Grahamstown. The committee chose Grahamstown partially because of Bellamy’s recent arrival in Edinburgh. Bellamy, celebrated for her performances in London of roles such as Monimia and Juliet, was popular. However, one of her co-​stars, Tate Wilkinson, offended some spectators by choosing The Minor for his benefit night (he would receive the theatre profits) in early 1764.

Shortly thereafter, Bellamy traveled to Glasgow to perform at the Alston Street Theatre. Just before her troupe arrived, a religious mob burned part of the stage and all of Bellamy’s wardrobe. The townspeople, however, decried the assault. The ladies of Glasgow loaned Bellamy their own clothes, attended her performances, and insisted on guards for Bellamy and her crew. Bellamy played to her audience with performances as Lady Macbeth and the heroine of James Macpherson’s short Comala. Smith was abroad at this time, but pages of this chapter in his copy of the Apology are creased. Perhaps this indicates his interest in Bellamy’s account.

In The Wealth of Nations, Smith criticizes “rigorous and unsocial” sects. Again, he favors liberty to those “who for their own interest would attempt, without scandal or indecency,” diversions such as “dramatic representations and exhibitions.” Such representations expose the “artifices” of those sects (WN 796.12, 796.15, 797.15).

The gossipy element may have attracted Smith to Bellamy’s memoir, but within its pages the reader finds much more than gossip. Bellamy offers not just an account of her own experiences, but a fascinating reflection of her own conduct. There is method in her self-​examination: Bellamy has an eye for the process of moral judgment. Bellamy’s work is not just an autobiographical “life and times.” The full title is Apology for the Life of George Anne Bellamy, Late of Covent-​Garden Theatre and it runs to six volumes. It is a moral contemplation.

Smith had theorized moral judgment in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith invites us to enlarge our ethical character by imagining and entering into the sentiments of a beholder with a view of things wider than ours, with wider knowledge and wider benevolence than ours. Such a beholder, or spectator, concerns himself with the parts of the larger whole that are beyond our own lively concerns and in that way rises in impartiality. Bellamy’s Apology illustrates Smith’s impartial spectator process over the course of an individual’s life at three levels.

First, Bellamy writes a series of letters to an imagined correspondent. For this audience, a supposed impartial spectator, Bellamy is constantly (and transparently) adjusting her performance, bringing her tone to the pitch agreeable to her imagined reader. In this sense, her Apology is the literary equivalent of her stage performances. In fact, Letter III presents her birth as her “first entrance on the stage of life,” and she concludes it by promising “subsequent appearances” (I.22).

Second, in recounting her past, the author Bellamy functions as the spectator of her younger self, whom she tries to judge fairly from a distance of time. She acknowledges her own flaws, such as vanity and “precipitancy,” and mercilessly judges the people who ridiculed and betrayed her.

Third, despite being praised as a beautiful young actress, Bellamy recognized her deficiencies as an actress and studiously applied herself to her profession (I.138). Bellamy explains how she did likewise as a human being: she learned to practice self-​judgment in reflecting how others judged her. She used the same process of invoking her inner spectator when slandered by people who did not know her full story. Social conduct is another performance, another art to hone. Her Apology addresses those issues and traces her moral journey for readers.

Bellamy’s book therefore offered a case study of an individual’s moral struggles over the course of a life precisely at the point when Smith began work on his final edition of TMS. In 1789, Smith wrote to his printer-​publisher, Thomas Cadell, that he was immersed in revising, speaking of additions and improvements, including a whole new part, “a practical system of Morality, under the title of the Character of Virtue.” Something inspired Smith to enlargement, and it took him more time than he had expected: “I am very much ashamed of this delay; but the subject has grown upon me” (Corr., 320). Smith’s sixth edition (1790) includes new content on praiseworthiness (Part III), tranquility (Part III), pride and vanity (Part VI), and the limits of Stoicism (Parts III and VII).

In the new material, Smith continues to recognize the importance of society’s judgments, but he (like Bellamy) signals a preference for the “higher tribunal” of the man within the breast, which is “founded altogether in the desire of praise-​worthiness, and in the aversion to blame-​worthiness” (TMS 131.32). When we are misjudged, we feel indignation and pain. Nevertheless, the truly virtuous man persists in behavior that is praiseworthy, just as Bellamy persisted in doing what she felt to be right, whether professionally or personally, despite criticism and libel.

Significantly, both authors foreground the role of tranquility. Bellamy writes that happiness consists in pursuing goodness: “Thou sweet dictator of the human breast, as soon as we lose sight of thee, we forfeit our happiness here as well as hereafter.” She adds, “Come then, thou divine influencer of tranquillity, and restore the daughter of thy folly to thy arms” (VI:74: italics original). In Smith’s copy of Bellamy’s Apology, this section is dog-​eared. And in the sixth edition of TMS, Smith observes that people are supported by the idea that virtue will be rewarded, even “under the perturbation and astonishment of the man within the breast, whom nature has set up as, in this life, the great guardian, not only of his innocence, but of his tranquillity” (TMS 132.33).

Moreover, in his final edition of TMS, Smith follows Bellamy in his reflections on sensibility, particularly “that moderated sensibility to the misfortunes of others” rather than “stoical apathy.” Both prefer writers of sensibility (such as Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne) to Stoics such as Zeno (an example for both) (Bellamy III.147-48; TMS 143.14). Their views did not align completely, but reading the words of Bellamy that Smith read provides a context for what he wrote.

Smith was concerned about how ambition might corrupt our moral sentiments. While he had addressed the desire for wealth in earlier editions of TMS—most famously in the parable of the poor man’s son—Smith expanded his focus in a new chapter at the end of Part I. Here he frames the problem as “the corruption of our moral sentiments, which is occasioned by this disposition to admire the rich and the great, and to despise or neglect persons of poor and mean condition” (TMS 61.1). The issue is not simply working to have more but choosing poorly between “two different roads” to attaining respect: “the one, by the study of wisdom and the practice of virtue; the other, by the acquisition of wealth and greatness” (TMS 62.2).

Smith’s “two different roads” could be seen as a philosophical formulation of Bellamy’s account of her own path and those of her elite connections. Early in her theatrical career, a scandal prompted her to retreat to the country, where she lived peacefully with Quakers. Her mother, however, tempted her to return to the stage, so Bellamy donned her fancy clothes and rejoined the fashionable whirl, striking down the path of “ambition and ostentatious avidity” (TMS 62.2).

Bellamy was driven partly by vanity, such as when she sallied forth in a coach and six to the pleasure resort Tunbridge Wells, where she gambled away everything in her purse but half a guinea (II.99). As Smith observes, the vain man “assumes the equipage and splendid way of living of his superiors” (TMS 64.7). Bellamy struggled with this impulse for decades, illustrating Smith’s repeated warnings that, in adopting the fashions and more dishonorable behaviors of the elite, the vain person reduces herself to “beggary” and “poverty and distress long before the end” of life (TMS 62.7; TMS 256.37).

Bellamy’s paramour John Calcraft also pursued the road of ambition, abandoning his wife and betraying his patron, Henry Fox, to gain political power. From the position of a clerk, he rose to army agent and finally a member of parliament. Yet, as Smith warns of the ambitious man, “the honour of his exalted station appears, both in his own eyes, and in those of other people, polluted and defiled by the baseness of the means through which he rose to it” (TMS 65.8).

By October 1769, Calcraft had become the coverboy for corruption, his portrait featured alongside that of his last paramour in Town and Country Magazine’s Tête-​à-​Tête series (1769, 504). As an army agent, he was “Crafterio,” a “vulture” and “military plunderer.” While army veterans struggled, he died with a fortune of £10,000 and the contempt of his contemporaries.

Calcraft and Bellamy were, I submit, among Smith’s inspirations for updating TMS with the entirely new Part VI, “The Character of Virtue.” Smith described this addition to his publisher as “a practical system of Morality.” Divided into three key sections—prudence, beneficence, and self-command—Part VI offers advice relevant to modern readers as well as Smith’s contemporaries.

In section I, Smith focuses on prudence, “the care of the health, of the fortune, of the rank and reputation of the individual” (TMS IV.i.4). Imprudence in relation to fortune featured prominently in contemporary news articles, novels, and memoirs such as Bellamy’s. She was moved to publishing her own Apology to pay massive debts generated by gambling and extravagance, but also sheer inattentiveness. Smith writes sympathetically of “mere imprudence, or the mere want of the capacity to take care of one’s self” as the object of compassion (TMS 216.16).

Bellamy’s errors seem to have gained sympathy due to what one contemporary reviewer called “a wretched birth and education … and the miserable example of such blind guides as her parents.” The role of family is critical in Smith’s new section on “Beneficence,” where he emphasizes the importance of good parenting and contact among siblings. He observes, “a parent without parental tenderness, a child devoid of filial reverence, appear monsters, the objects, not of hatred only, but of horror” (TMS 220.7). Bellamy’s parents were certainly horrors. Her first memory of her mother consisted of being rejected; her father’s home was like “a seraglio” (Bellamy I.27, I.32). She was educated away from them, in a convent in France. In his 1790 additions, Smith specifically condemned sending children off to boarding school; rather, he advised, “let their dwelling be always at home” (222.10).

Examples such as Bellamy’s formed part of the contemporary debate that may have inspired Smith’s reversal of opinion on female education. In The Wealth of Nations, he had declared that nothing in young women’s education was useless (WN 781.47). In his final edition of TMS, Smith did not confine his criticisms of distant education to institutions for young men; he also rejected the education of “young ladies in distant nunneries and boarding schools” (TMS 222.10).

Everyone, Smith insisted, needed to cultivate these virtues, along with self-​command. Critical to this discussion is “vanity,” which appeared seventeen times in the fifth edition of TMS and forty-​one times in the sixth. His world was full of examples, from the unrepentant actor Colley Cibber’s Apology to Bellamy’s account of injuring her hands to make them whiter (VI.72-73). Bellamy anticipates at least one of Smith’s revisions with her insights into people’s motivations behind vanity, including “a wish to render themselves pleasing” (Bellamy II.100). As Smith observes, vanity is associated with many “amiable” virtues, with “humanity, with politeness, with a desire to oblige in all little matters, and sometimes with a real generosity in great ones; a generosity, however which it wishes to display in the most splendid colors” (TMS 259.42). Certainly, Bellamy was generous to those in need—and not shy about talking about it (II.101).

Smith also treats an additional virtue, veracity (Part VII.iv): “It is always mortifying not to be believed, and it is doubly so when we suspect it is because we are supposed to be unworthy of belief” (TMS 336.26). Bellamy’s Apology includes an example of doing just that in unintentionally deceiving Smith’s friend Alexander Wedderburn. Her distress at being thought duplicitous radiates from the page, and the creased corners of this section in Smith’s copy of Bellamy’s Apology suggest his careful attention to this example (V.23).

In situating Smith’s work within broader contexts and reading specific passages that Smith read, we can see how he sought practical solutions to enduring problems: What role (if any) should a government play in relation to public entertainments? How do we develop moral judgment? How do we balance our ambitions with our moral responsibilities? How can we develop the character of virtue? And how do we find tranquility?

In 1790, Smith expounded on virtue as artistic virtuosity, writing of how the wise and virtuous man develops a more exact sense of perfect conduct:

It is tantalizing to think that Smith’s elaboration of virtue drew on Bellamy, who, herself, drew the parallel between performing in a playhouse before a live audience and performing in this world before the “faithful inmate of my breast” (Bellamy V.146).