Essays on Life by Thomas Mitchell, Farmer

Thomas Mitchell's essays on how to live well were completed in 1913, and reflect a clear mind and a good education, but also confidence about the world and society that were about to be shattered by the First World War. No doubt, some thoughts he expressed would have been impossible to reaffirm five years later. As we commemorate the centenary of terrible and unprecedented conflict, his intelligent voice from the past gives us an insight into how people thought before it and what was lost. This does not mean that Mitchell's ideas are not also an individual's, but it is now the combination of freshness and distance in this previously unpublished prose that makes it so compelling.