'A Pioneer in Everything': Primrose McConnell, 1856-1931

摘要

The nineteenth edition of Primrose McConnell's The Agricultural Notebook was published by Messrs. Blackwell in the summer of 1995. The first edition, written by McConnell himself and published by Crosby Lockwood appeared in 1883. Only Fream's Elementsof Agriculture, first published in 1892 under the auspices of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, with its most recent edition, the seventeenth, now renamed Fream's Principles of Food and Agriculture, appearing in 1992, can claim as long a periodin print as an agricultural textbook. Fream has had his biographer, but apart from a note in recent editions of the Notebook to the effect that he was a tenant farmer of Ongar Park Hall, there has been no biography of McConnell. Yet many of the farmers,advisers, land agents and agricultural students who have kept successive editions of his work on their shelves over more than a century must have wondered who McConnell was, why he wrote his Notebook, what else he did in his lifetime, and how he came to be called 'Primrose'. This article attempts to answer those questions.