[60] Cary’s Curtis, p. 296.
XVII
Donald Grant Mitchell
REFERENCES:
[H. A. Beers]: ‘Donald G. Mitchell’ in the Cyclopædia of American Biography.
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.