Dictionary of Literary Biography on James De Mille
Working at night and very fast, James De Mille wrote over twenty popular novels--"potboilers"--between 1861 and 1877. By day, he was the respected and respectable professor of rhetoric and history at Dalhousie University, Halifax, who taught his classes competently, and was working on a textbook of rhetoric for use in universities. The dichotomy is somewhat disturbing--as disturbing now, in fact, as it was to his colleagues, who barely knew what to make of him, although his students all remembered him with affection. De Mille does not reveal himself easily to the enquiring reader.
According to the best authority available, his tombstone, he was born on 23 August 1833, the third child of the ten born to Elizabeth and Nathan Smith De Mill (the original spelling of the name, which James changed sometime before 1865). His father had helped to found Horton Academy, a Baptist school that prepared boys to go on to university, and it was to Horton that James in due course, was sent. From Horton, De Mille followed his elder brother, Elisha, to Acadia College (now Acadia University). On leaving Acadia in 1850, he was given, at his father's expense, a trip to Europe with Elisha, which Elisha's journal rather primly records. In 1852, on their return, De Mille entered Brown University, from which he graduated in 1854 with an M.A. After several unsettled years, during which he made a business trip to Cincinnati for his father, opened a bookstore (which failed, although the fault was not entirely De Mille's), and married (in 1859) Elizabeth Anne Pryor, he finally found a position that suited him, when he was appointed professor of classics at Acadia.
In 1865 he resigned from Acadia to take up the chair of history and rhetoric at Dalhousie University. He had already started writing his popular fiction, and although some of the novels are still only tentatively dated, it is known that at least one (Andy O'Hara) had appeared in 1861. But it was not until the year of his appointment to Dalhousie that his second book appeared: The Martyr of the Catacombs, a pious tale of the early Christian church. Two years later, a similar novel, Helena's Household , was published in New York. From 1869 to 1875 he published at least one popular novel each year, and sometimes as many as three. His last published fiction during his lifetime was A Castle in Spain (1878).
In 1878 he also published The Elements of Rhetoric, which he had worked on--for eight years, according to his wife--during his daytime avatar as professor of rhetoric. This book was clearly designed for use in his rhetoric class at Dalhousie. By modern criteria it would be classified as a handbook rather than a textbook, since it contains no exercises. In this aspect it agrees with the recollection of De Mille 's pupils, who recalled that the class was given a great deal of theory, but not very many exercises. The range of material on which De Mille draws (not only poetry and fiction but also, for example, history, philosophy, political theory, and oratory) demonstrates in him a wide-ranging and enquiring mind, as well as a lively and intelligent one. The full implications of De Mille's theory of rhetoric, as contrasted with the older texts on rhetoric that The Elements of Rhetoric was designed to supplant, have not yet been fully investigated, but will almost certainly repay investigation.
His most famous novel, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, was ironically itself found in manuscript among his papers after his death and was published anonymously, after some delay, by Harper of New York in 1888. A lively and satirical tale of a marooned sailor in a South Pole utopia, it is sometimes regarded as an early piece of science fiction, in the same light as the early works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. Whatever its source, and however it be classified, it makes good reading today, for it is fast moving, free of pomposity, and full of sharp humor and vitality. The satire of Adam More's sojourn among the Kosekin people is, however, less simple than apparent at first glance. It is true, certainly, that the way of the Kosekin directly reverses the customs of Europe and North America with which De Mille, his narrator, and his readers were all familiar. The Kosekin seek poverty instead of wealth, misery instead of happiness, darkness instead of light, and death instead of life. But they are curiously like westerners in other ways, as Adam finds out when he tries to solve the problem of an offer of marriage from one woman when he has already agreed to marry another. His solution is to suggest that he marry both of them, but bigamy, he discovers, is as immoral among the Kosekin as it is in the western society from which he has come. The land of the Kosekin is not, strictly speaking, a utopia; within their own moral code, they also backslide and have doubts about their values. The net effect of this is to throw into doubt not just western codes of values but the concept of codes of value as such. This is a remarkably subtle notion from a writer who contemptuously dismissed his own fiction as "pot-boilers"--a judgment his contemporaries and critics seem for the most part to have agreed with. In A Strange Manuscript, however, De Mille's social perceptions, imagination, humor, and craftsmanship blend to produce a remarkably engaging tale.
His popular fiction was not a secret among his circle in Halifax, but when he died there in January 1880, at the early age of forty-six, it was as the respected professor of Dalhousie University that he was mourned, not only by his wife and family of three sons and a daughter, but also by his colleagues, students, and many Dalhousie graduates. His importance as a writer rests at the moment on A Strange Manuscript , which is one of the best and most entertaining pieces of social criticism by a Canadian writer of his period.
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