Obscure biography

A book about someone we’d never heard of turns out to be unexpectedly interesting.

Our consultant who has too many books seriously tries to read them.  That sounds like an absurd statement; if he bought a book, wouldn’t it be in order to read it?  And aside from reference works, which are only meant to take bits out of, he does tend to read the volumes he buys.  But he inherited quite a library from his parents and ancestors farther back, chosen (and presumably read) by them, many of which he hasn’t yet gotten around to.

His forebears had good literary taste, so many of the classics are included.  Those are easy to schedule.  Others are clearly from specific classes of a college English major of the mid-20th century, along with her recreational reading.  Some of the authors involved are now forgotten, though almost all are good writers, well worth a look.  Even if their view of the world seems antiquated and narrow nowadays, It’s worthwhile to understand it.

Our consultant’s most recent reading is, at first glance, uninspiring.  It’s the biography of a Congregationalist pastor in rural Maine, 1768-1847.  Certainly he hadn’t the importance of a Churchill or even a contemporary Senator; and Maine was hardly more than partially-settled wilderness in this period.  We can’t count him as a significant influence on world history.  And the unrelenting Calvinist doctrine he followed hardly makes him a sympathetic character to most modern readers.

But history is mostly accomplished by unimportant people.  A view of their lives can illuminate an era in a way impossible for those studying state papers or trade figures.  Of course it helps that this biography is well-written.  By that we mean that not only do the sentences flow freely, but the ideas are presented in an understandable and organized manner, so at the end something is actually retained in the reader’s mind.

What has our consultant gotten so far?  Well, he’s only a bit past halfway through, so final answers must wait.  The main feeling so far is the difficulty of life in the early nineteenth century, the sheer physical labor of making a living when muscle power is the only power at hand.  A second observation is the variety of skills necessary in a rural environment: our pastor was an excellent carpenter, also raising crops and livestock.  Keep in mind that Maine was not (and is not) a fertile place.  Medicine was primitive, and mortality was high; he produced some of his own remedies.

But he was, in addition, a skilled painter.  And he was fluent in Greek, Hebrew, French and Latin.  To us it can appear incongruous, even amazing, for such a multilingual scholar to be reading his texts by firelight.  It gives another picture of early nineteenth-century America.

Then there is the politics of a self-organized township of pioneers.  That in itself is a subject for multiple books; we who have all the legal and social structures of modern life would do well to ponder how these people worked from scratch.

We’re waiting with interest for our consultant’s further reports.