Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only €10,99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Essays on Life: by Thomas Mitchell, Farmer
    Essays on Life: by Thomas Mitchell, Farmer
    Essays on Life: by Thomas Mitchell, Farmer
    Ebook83 pages1 hour

    Essays on Life: by Thomas Mitchell, Farmer

    By Thomas Mitchell

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Just before the First World War destroyed a generation and divided Europe for almost a century, a farmer in a remote part of Aberdeenshire sat down at the age forty-three to write his thoughts on how to live a good life. Mitchell had a clear, fresh and effective prose style in Standard English, and was well placed to record the values of his time and his individual take on them. His is now a voice from the past that demands our attention, not necessarily to emulate it but to encourage us to consider what we have lost and what we have gained. The main casualty of the coming war would be an optimism we have never properly regained.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVagabond Voices
    Release dateMay 19, 2014
    ISBN9781908251398
    Essays on Life: by Thomas Mitchell, Farmer
    Author

    Thomas Mitchell

    After continually being told to ‘use his words’ as a child, Thomas Mitchell took that advice on board and ran with it. Since then his words have appeared all over the place, including in TheSydney Morning Herald, Time Out, The Huffington Post, The New York Times and GQ. A full-time writer, Thomas spends his days googling synonyms and trying not to overstay his welcome at the local cafe.

    Read more from Thomas Mitchell

    Related to Essays on Life

    Related ebooks

    Modern History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related categories

    Reviews for Essays on Life

    5/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Essays on Life - Thomas Mitchell

      Essays on life Cover

      Essays on life by

      Thomas Mitchell,

      Farmer

      Vagabond Voices

      Contents

      Cover

      Title Page

      Introduction

      The Art of Living

      The Secret of Success

      The Value of Work

      Thrift

      Education and Its Value

      Friendship

      Charity Advert

      Endnotes

      Copyright

      Essays on life by

      Thomas Mitchell,

      Farmer

      Introduction

      Thomas Mitchell’s world was a more formal one than ours. Formality is primarily about compartmentalisation, so when he sat down to write, he entered a very different mindset from the one he experienced in his working life – and, of course, one very different from our own. It belonged to the last years before the outbreak of a devastating war whose imminence no one could be entirely sure of and whose devastation would then have been unthinkable.

      I am not referring here to the clearer distinction between the written and the spoken word, which was very much there of course, but to the many layers of the barrier that divided his everyday life and the talks he gave to the Mutual Improvement Association of Newburgh in rural Aberdeenshire. The language of the essays is Standard English, but the spoken language would have been Mid Northern Scots, also known now as Doric, and the switch in languages would have been mirrored in the change of subject matter and the more solemn trappings. He travelled the four miles from Mill of Ardo to Newburgh by bicycle, one of the inventions that permitted a greater exchange of ideas and experiences at the time. He dressed in his suit and before his appointment with the lectern he would practise his timing and delivery in an empty barn. The Mutual Improvement Association would have been a society of peers, and part of a self-help tradition, but this was still a formal gathering for a serious purpose.

      In reading this book, we are being introduced only to one particular Thomas Mitchell, and we have very little information on the other Thomas Mitchells. He was a tenant farmer, and his family had been working the farm at Mill of Ardo since 1791 and would continue to do so until 2002, when his son William died (the farm having been bought by the family in 1959). We know from the family that he was a devout man, but these essays are not a devotional work. Indeed, his essays express a strong belief in self-help and free will – very far from Calvin’s predestination.¹ Regular church attendance would have been the norm in rural Scotland at the time – and indeed until a few decades ago. We cannot know if he was also pious, as he keeps religion at arm’s length in his writing. Where he does mention it, it is in passing and suggests that he assumes the reader or listener to be similar religious views. The methodology, however, is that of reasoned argument.

      Before the First World War, tenant farmers paid their rent annually on the same day at the big house, where they were photographed as a group. Having paid his rent to the factor, Mitchell was then paid back some money with which to pay for the laird’s drink, in accordance with some local custom, but one year when he found the landowner in a state of inebriation, he decided that more drink was not advisable and returned the money to the factor. Readers of these essays will not be surprised by this restrained and commonsensical behaviour.

      Born in 1870, Mitchell was a quiet, hardworking man of regular habits, who married late in life, some years after completing this collection of essays. He may have been a witty man, but you won’t find that here. Learning still had something of the sacred about it. We know from the letters of famous writers of the past that it was common practice to keep one’s sense of humour well hidden in serious works. In other words, very little of the nature of Thomas Mitchell transpires from this text. We may imagine him as a rather severe man steeped in the Scottish Presbyterian tradition, but the few photos we have suggest something more varied and complex (photos too can be misleading).

      Where the text and the little biographical information we have meet is on the relationship between work and education, which is a recurring theme. He frequented courses in 1889, 1894 and 1895 on the Principles of Agricultural Science run by the County Council of Aberdeen, and in his prewar essays he wrote, The real value of knowledge consists not in the abundance of knowledge that a man may possess, but in the useful purpose to which that knowledge is devoted.² Again, self-culture by the labour, patience and perseverance which it entails, enlarges the individual intelligence, corrects the temper, and forms manners and habits of thought – all of which render one a more useful and efficient worker in the sphere in which his lot has been cast.³ However he contradicts this pragmatic interpretation of education in the later essays, and provides a more cultural and liberating interpretation of what it is.

      Mitchell kept a study in his small farmhouse and his reading was fairly eclectic, although there appears to be a preponderance of the English seventeenth century and the American nineteenth century. The Americans are not only writers but also role models. They are usually Republican and radical, and everyone was an abolitionist, with the exception of Lincoln who reluctantly passed abolition into law. It was Lincoln who appointed Elihu Burritt to the post of American consul in Birmingham. No doubt Mitchell identified closely with Burritt, who was known as the learned blacksmith. In times of economic hardship, the polyglot Burritt would return to his trade as a blacksmith. His prominence in some of the great international social movements of the nineteenth century was remarkable.

      Mitchell, like everyone else, was an individual, and we cannot take him as a spokesman for social attitudes in rural Aberdeenshire at the turn of the twentieth century. If his studies had taken him in the direction of particular American authors and lives, which he identified with for whatever reason, then he would not presumably be a typical Aberdeenshire farmer.

      There’s certainly something recognisably American about Mitchell’s philosophy: his belief that the free market (not a term he ever uses, because he simply does not see beyond it or perceive the social problems it creates) rewards hard work and benefits both

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1