Eileen Chanin’s book opens with a stylish account of Mitchell’s visit to the Australian International Exhibition in Sydney’s Domain, in 1879, where he encountered John Plummer, the commissioner for the British exhibitions. He was sympathetic to Plummer’s views on New South Wales, which ‘went beyond the self-congratulation then prevailing’. While acknowledging local progress, Mitchell was also conscious of the underbelly, such as unemployment, larrikinism, and poor sanitation. Mitchell believed colonial achievement was based on more than material wealth. He agreed with Sir Henry Parkes that civilisation is only of value to the extent that it elevates the condition of those who live by their labour, and he thought Parkes ought to enact appropriate measures to effect this. In hindsight, Mitchell agreed that the Exhibition ‘was an important milestone for the colony’.

It is a theatrical and memorable opening chapter, which Mitchell, himself a lifelong devotee of the drama, would have relished. However, as with the theatre, this chapter seems to be make-believe. There is no evidence – or none cited by the author that I could find – that supports these assertions of Mitchell visiting the Exhibition, whom he met there and what he thought, with whom he agreed – or what he thought in hindsight.

This book’s flaw is that much of it is predicated on the basis that Mitchell’s ownership of a title indicates agreement with the arguments advanced by its author. I do not dispute that Mitchell read his books; there is evidence for that proposition, as Chanin clearly shows. However, he hardly ever annotated his books, and, in the absence of other evidence of his engagement with their contents, we simply do not know his views.

In Book Life we find sentences such as: ‘His books and pamphlets make it clear that he showed sympathy for society’s misfits’; ‘as a convinced federalist, to judge from the pamphlets and lectures he kept from this time, Mitchell agreed’; ‘Judging from what he read from reformist circles, he was sensitive to questions about inequality and injustice. He must have felt his own privilege as a sizeable landowner.’ ‘Judging from David’s books, from the time, models of intellectual friendships occupied his mind. He read about intellectual friendships like those of essayist Charles Lamb, those within the circle of William Hazlitt, those shared by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and enjoyed by social reformer Frederick Denison Maurice.’ Surely this is not even prima facie evidence for such preoccupation.

Reading the novels of Benjamin Disraeli and Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (even if it does feature the Luddite riots of 1811–12, as Chanin helpfully reminds us), Thomas Carlyle, William Morris, and John Ruskin does not necessarily demonstrate a concern with ‘how to assimilate the masses in society and culture and provide them with opportunity for intellectual growth’. Collecting and reading nineteenth-century English literature was what collectors such as Mitchell did.

‘Of all the books he could have chosen’ to lend to the 1898 exhibition organised by the New South Wales Branch of the Library Association of Australasia, ‘he exhibited titles by Godfrey Higgins, Alexander Lindsay and Robert Brown’. Chanin draws conclusions from this selection. Mitchell exhibited twenty-one books at this exhibition, including Athanasius, Aquinas, a Breeches Bible, Chaucer, and Ben Jonson.

Chanin examines Mitchell’s schoolbook primer and notices that it is well thumbed at Psalm 148. Unfortunately, the book cited is in fact the primer used by that rather irascible surveyor-general Sir Thomas Mitchell. Certainly, it was acquired by D.S. Mitchell, but long after childhood and with a cache of Thomas Mitchell’s papers.

Chanin tells us that Mitchell, as a child, read James Bonwick’s Geography for the Use of Australian Youth (1845). However, evidence other than ownership needs to be considered. The signature in the book is in Mitchell’s mature hand. Secondly, his copy has Angus & Robertson’s bookseller’s ticket, which dates its purchase no earlier than the 1880s, well after Mitchell’s childhood.

Book Life does provide some useful background to the society in which Mitchell moved, and to the book trade and library world of the time. Most importantly, it also includes new research into Mitchell’s family – both the Mitchells and his maternal side, the Scotts. The author rightly describes the influence of Mitchell’s maternal grandmother, with whom the family lived for a time. Augusta Maria Scott was wealthy, educated, and a book collector. Chanin could have mentioned that Augusta gave Mitchell his first known book, a multi-volume edition of the works of Milton, at the age of two years and seven months. It is this sort of information that a close inspection of his books reveals, rather than an insight into his beliefs.

Chanin has unearthed some significant statistics. Mitchell inherited 43,000 acres, mainly in the Hunter Valley. At this time, there were in the colony only eleven people holding freehold land of 40,000 acres or more. Mitchell spent an average of £200 a year with one bookseller alone at a time when the Parliamentary Library’s annual budget was £300. On his death, the net value of his estate was £261,552, of which £154,807 derived from real estate.

The author convincingly scotches the too-long held view that Mitchell was a recluse. Chanin says that Mitchell may have gone to primary school at St Philip’s Grammar School. The inscriptions in two books in his collection prove that he certainly went there in later years, at least in 1850 and 1851, when he was fourteen and fifteen. He went to university the following year. So it is puzzling when Chanin claims that the Rev. John Grylls tutored Mitchell in preparation for university. The authority for Chanin’s statement that Grylls was his tutor is not clear. Chanin further states that Mitchell kept William Nicholas’s pencil drawing of Grylls throughout his life, as ‘a mark of regard’. But we have no evidence as to when Mitchell acquired this drawing, which he would have been likely to acquire in any case, because it was just the sort of material he collected. Chanin says it mattered to Mitchell that he owned a copy of John Shillibeer’s A Narrative of the Briton’s Voyage to Pitcairn’s Island (1817), because ‘Shillibeer had recommended Grylls to Jesus College, Cambridge, to which Grylls matriculated in 1822.’ What is the evidence?

Some sources are misquoted. For example, the author says it is telling that the bookseller James Tyrrell, who knew Mitchell, compared him to John Hill Burton because Burton became Commissioner of Prisons in Scotland. ‘Tyrrell informs us about the social purpose behind Mitchell’s reading. This is why he described Mitchell as “a man after John Hill Burton’s heart”.’ If you look up the reference, this is what Tyrrell says: ‘Mr Mitchell was a man after John Hill Burton’s heart, as he not only collected books, but he read them as well.’

‘Did he have a particular reason to buy eleven volumes of the greyhound racing annual, The Australasian Coursing Calendar (1873–85)?’ Yes, Mitchell was assembling a collection of Australasian publications irrespective of subject. That would be my answer. However, Chanin has another idea: ‘He was known to be a dog-lover.’ This assertion is based on the fact that he once mentioned a correspondent’s dogs in a letter to her – as one might if you were soliciting her family papers. Mitchell did have a pet, but it was not a dog. It was a cockatoo, and we might infer that he was rather fond of this bird, for he commissioned Neville Cayley to paint its portrait. Cayley told him of another cockatoo he had painted – the oldest tame cockatoo in Australia – and Mitchell may have settled for this instead. It is rather emblematic of Mitchell, too: powerful head, emaciated body, all brain and no brawn.

David Scott Mitchell the man remains an enigma.