Das Adam Smith 1747 problem

Nota bene: Below is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of my forthcoming book with Salim Rashid, Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics and Society. (Footnotes are below the fold.) Adam Smith left Oxford “for good” in August of 1746,[1] and he eventually “fixed his residence at Edinburgh,”[2] where he began to deliver a series of “freelance lectures on English composition and literary criticism” somewhere in the Athens of the North.[3]But what was the college dropout doing during the span of time between his departure from Oxford in August of 1746 and his move to Edinburgh in 1748? Also, when did Smith make his fateful move to Edinburgh? If it was not until the summer or fall of 1748, a total of two years might be “lost”! Alas, Smith’s biographers are of no help. To begin, all we are told in Dugald Stewart’s Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith is that, “[a]fter a residence at Oxford of seven years” (i.e. July 1740 to August 1746), the young Smith “returned to Kirkcaldy, and…