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Until his last days Mitchell invariably spoke of the many demands on his time and how busy Philadelphia kept him.As he grew older,he spent more and more time away.There were several other fine doctors at the infirmary,and when he was gone John took responsibility for the family’s extensive private practice and any personal matters that required attention. John was also active in the profession .In 1895,for example,after conducting follow-up studies of the patients treated at Turner’s Lane Hospital during the Civil War,he published the results in Remote Consequences of Injuries of the Nerves and Their Treatment. But overall, his job was to insure that things went smoothly for his father.Many years after Mitchell’s death, John’s wife,Anne,wrote Clements C.Fry,“You are quite right re the closeness of the tie between my husband and his father. I never saw a closer father and son relationship ...although Dr.Mitchell accepted too much self-abnegation on his son’s part, which really prevented a big career for my husband.Of this I can tell you,but not write.”1 If John were sidelined by illness or otherwise called away, it made life difficult for his father. In 1891, when Mitchell traveled to Italy and Switzerland with his wife and daughter, he wrote that he had left home half dead. Anne,“who is as dear to me as a daughter,” had typhoid “virulently,” and John could do no work,“and so I staggered about with the modern old man of the mountain on my back all winter. Now, thank God, she is well, and I am laughing and better.”2 There were several such trips to Great Britain and the Continent during the 1890s, and though Mitchell spent eight weeks in Scotland and England in 1894 without his wife and daughter,they accompanied him on most of these trips.From Rome he wrote,“We go hence after a month of delight,flavoured by the unending hospitality of the most intelligent people in Rome....Society here agreeably 11 winter’s sorrow e 11 Chapter 11_Cervetti 6/27/2012 2:00 PM Page 215 surprises me by its relative simplicity.There is little ostentatious show and even royalty is modest in display.”3 Shopping was a regular part of these trips abroad, especially for Mary and Maria, and Mitchell wrote John,“Mama has plunged recklessly into the shops and—emerged financially drowned. I limited myself to a pair of 150 f. delft vases wh. I send to yr—care—cheap and good.”4 Several of these trips abroad included stops in London to visit Langdon,who was engaged to the actor Marion Lea. A native of Philadelphia, Lea had won fame in London by starring in the first English production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. Her sister Anna Lea Merritt, a painter, also lived in England and was associated with the Pre-Raphaelites.Of course,Marion’s acting career troubled Mitchell and his wife. On one trip Mitchell wrote Wister that they had spent a day rowing and climbing in perfect weather,hoping“to get on easy terms with Marion. I still hold to my conditions; but apart from these, we effected our object and—made I fancy a complete capture. . . . I am free to say, and glad to say that M. has risen very much in my esteem and Mary’s, and that I am much more nearly satisfied than I was.I begin to suspect that,quite apart fr.the stage business, M—may be after all the best kind of wife for L.” Langdon was publishing a book of poetry that his father felt would strike a “fresh note.”When Langdon read some of his plays to Mary, Maria, Marion, and his father, they “were screaming with their weird humour or troubled to tears,—and this latter by a little one act drama of the last day of Gettysburg—the scene being in a quaker farm house.A little spanish one act play kept us all immensely amused.” Mitchell was strongly impressed by Langdon’s intellectual growth,writing that he “is the most interesting man I ever knew, but apart from this he gives me now, as he never did before, a Sense of force in reserve.” Langdon and Marion were to be married in England that winter, and Mitchell concluded,“I trust sometime the question as to M’s continuance on the Stage...

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