History, Politics & Society
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This collection of letters tells the story of Arthur Toulmin Smith, a British engineer who spent his working life in Russia in the years leading up to the First World War. As a young man he rides horseback in the snow in the Caucasus installing the new technology of the time, the telegraph. After a spell managing the Moscow gas works he goes into business with a Russo-German colleague, manufacturing weighing equipment and pipework for fire brigades.
His first wife dies young in childbirth. His daughter, Alice, survives and is happily brought up by second wife, Mina. Through Arthur’s letters home to his scholar sister Lucy, we watch Alice grow up and become independent. Staying with Aunt Lucy in Oxford she meets a young trainee church minister. Will Arthur allow his one daughter to marry on only £200 a year?
The letters throw light on a lesser-known British community abroad, the role the church served as a key centre, even to a non-churchman as Arthur, their comfortable life as ex-pats among, but separate from, Russian society. Arthur’s great grand-daughter, Bessie White, provides a fascinating broader context to his life abroad.
Here's what readers have to say about this book....
What a book! With the publication of Arthur Toulmin Smith's letters, Bessie White presents a work of meticulous research, the fascinating disclosure of what Europe has been, means, and ought to be. Moreover, it shows the values of education, of creativity, and of respect as guiding human principles for the individual - in any society of whatever cultural background. Most of all it leads to seeing family bonds as an obligation beyond national understanding. With the story of her own great-grandfather, Arthur Toulmin Smith, Bessie White tells the life of the Russian grandfather of a British family in Mansfield and that of the British engineer, co-owner of an Anglo-German company, in Moscow at the same time: The sophisticated Englishman in Russia, the Russian patriarch in England. Having lived abroad for many years myself, I highly appreciate this descrription of being "at home" in one civilizaion, but obliged to one's roots, one's family in another. To me, it seems some kind of parable for many sociocultural problems of our time, for the dangers of ignorance, of misleading, yet for the importance of supramational education in order to understnad oneself as well as the other. A wonderful book worthwhile being written and published!
