Chapter I: His Life

Donald Grant Mitchell, who won literary reputation under the name of ‘Ik Marvel,’ was born at Norwich, Connecticut, on April 12, 1822. He is a son of the Reverend Alfred Mitchell, formerly pastor of the Second Congregational Church of Norwich, and a grandson of Stephen Mix Mitchell, an eminent jurist and member of the Continental Congress. He prepared for college at John Hall’s school at Ellington, and was graduated at Yale in 1841.

Three years of life on a farm for his health gave him a bent towards rural pleasures and occupations. In 1844, still in pursuit of health, he visited England, the Isle of Jersey, France, and Holland. His first book, _Fresh Gleanings, or a New Sheaf from the Old Fields of Continental Europe_ (1847), was the literary fruit of this journey.

Mitchell took up the study of law in New York, but found himself physically unequal to a sedentary life. Moreover, France was on the eve of revolution. The young law student thought it no time to dawdle over Puffendorf, Grotius, and ‘the amiable, aristocratic Blackstone,’ when there was a chance to see history made. He ‘threw Puffendorf, big as he was, into the corner,’ and started for Paris, spent eight months there, saw what he went to see, and described it in his second book, _Battle Summer_ (1850).[61]

His third literary venture was a periodical essay, _The Lorgnette, or Studies of the Town, by an Opera-Goer_. It was published weekly for six months, and sold by Henry Kernot, ‘a small bookseller up Broadway, at the centre of what was then the fashionable shopping region.’ For a time the secret of the authorship was well kept, Kernot being as much in the dark as the public. To divert suspicion from himself, Mitchell thought to bring out in a distant city, and under his own name, something ‘of an entirely different quality and tone’ from _The Lorgnette_. He failed in getting a Boston publisher, and _Reveries of a Bachelor_, the book in question, was published by Baker and Scribner in New York (1850). Its success led to the making of another series of ‘reveries.’ This was _Dream Life_, written in six weeks of the summer and published in the fall of 1851. On these two books ‘Ik Marvel’s’ reputation with the general reading public still rests.

In May, 1853, Mitchell was appointed United States consul at Venice. On the thirty-first of the same month he married Miss Mary F. Pringle, of Charleston, South Carolina, and in June sailed for Italy. The account of his induction into the consular office will be found in _Seven Stories_. A lively and good-humored narrative, it is not to be read without great amusement, together with a feeling of contempt for the shabby way in which our glorious (and sometimes parsimonious) republic used to treat its humbler officials. During the two years of his consulship Mitchell collected materials for a history of the Venetian Republic. The book is still unpublished, and presumably has been long since abandoned.

The days of his public service being at an end, Mitchell returned to America and settled on an estate near New Haven (‘Edgewood’), where since 1855 he has led the life of a man of letters and gentleman farmer. In addition to the books already named, he has published: _Fudge Doings_, 1855; _My Farm of Edgewood_, 1863; _Seven Stories_, 1864; _Wet Days at Edgewood_, 1865; _Doctor Johns_, 1866; _Rural Studies_, 1867;[62] _About Old Story Tellers_, 1877; _The Woodbridge Record_, 1883; _Bound Together_, 1884; _English Lands, Letters, and Kings_, 1889–90; _American Lands and Letters_, 1897.

For a time Mitchell was editor of the ‘Atlantic Almanac’ (1868–69), and for one year (1869) editor of ‘Hearth and Home.’ He served as one of the judges of industrial art at the Centennial Exhibition (1876), and was a United States commissioner at the Paris Exposition of 1878. He has lectured much on literature and art. Yale recognized his achievements in letters by conferring on him, in 1878, the degree of LL. D.

He is one of the most attractive figures of our time, not alone because of his unaffected goodness, his charm of manner, his literary reputation, but because he is the last survivor of a group of writers who in the Fifties made New York famous, and about whose association there still clings a very attractive atmosphere of romance.