While holding an appointment on his mother's West Indian estate, he braved the fierce resentment of the whole colony by teaching a negro-boy to read; and finally incurred disinheritance rather than draw a livelihood from slave-labour.

This Shelleyan act involved for him the resignation of his intellectual and artistic ambitions; and with the docility characteristic of him, where only his own interests were concerned, he forthwith entered the fairly well-paid but unexciting service of the Bank.
In 1811 he married, and on May 7 of the following year his eldest son, Robert, was born.

His wife was the daughter of a German shipowner, William Wiedemann, who had settled and married at Dundee.

Wiedemann is said to have been an accomplished draughtsman and musician, and his daughter, without herself sharing these gifts, probably passed them on to her son.

Whether she also communicated from her Scottish and German ancestry the "metaphysical" proclivities currently ascribed to him, is a hypothesis absolutely in the air.[1] What is clear is that she was herself intellectually simple and of few ideas, but rich in the temperament, at once nervous and spiritual, which when present in the mother so often becomes genius in the son.