shy of sharing their knowledge with us, possibly, and perhaps understandably, wishing to retain family privacy.
Comparatively few of his autobiographical ‘facts' have been verified though he does assure us at the beginning of at least one of his autobiographical essays that it contains 'facts not fiction'. The autobiographical paragraphs and snippets scattered throughout his Miscellanies appear to have been honest and candid in so far as his revealed details. There is no reason to doubt anything he has written, anything dishonest, though with his statement that he is a 'self-proclaimed publicist,' one cannot help coming to the conclusion that there are times when he doth protest too much and that some of the details are slightly more supportive of his claims than one would have thought strictly true or indeed necessary. One is often left with more than a slight suspicion that Mesny had a touch of Walter Mitty about him, and in a number of his exploits one suspects he has embellished an already good story. The chapters of this biography on The Early Years, The Pacification of the Miao, and the Later Years, are to all intents and purposes autobiographical, and much of the substance of these chapters may seem to be grandiloquently worded, pompous and stilted. This is because I have transcribed most of the anecdotes written by Mesny in the first person singular into the 'third person' otherwise leaving the narrative as a whole as it was in the Miscellanies to provide the reader with a distinct and palpable feel for his personality.
At least three potted biographies of Mesny have been written, beginning with an entry in Balleine's Biographical Dictionary.2 Later, a piece in The Pilot's first volume (July 1946) which described The (Jersey) Trinity Boy who became a Chinese General, under the general heading of ‘Adventurous Jerseymen.' This was repeated in The Pilot of July 1980. Douglas Ford of the Jersey Museum added a little to Balleine and The Pilot in his 'From Jersey to the Celestial Empire' [undated], and when the Jersey Post Office produced its stamp series in May 1992 commemorating the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Mesny's birth they issued a short piece which added yet more about him. These were all laudatory describing Mesny's adventures and successes without portraying the unromantic and often wretched side to his life. These hyperbolised descriptions occasionally lead to erroneous claims such as the assertion that Mesny always wore Chinese clothes. In practice he wore foreign clothes most of the time and only donned Chinese robes for some fifteen years, when he had his photograph taken with his son and
shy of sharing their knowledge with us, possibly, and perhaps understandably, wishing to retain family privacy.
+
Comparatively few of his autobiographical ‘facts' have been verified though he does assure us at the beginning of at least one of his autobiographical essays that it contains 'facts not fiction. The autobiographical paragraphs and snippets scattered throughout his Miscellanies appear to have been honest and candid in as far as his revealed details. There is no reason to doubt anything he has written, anything dishonest, though with his statement that he is a 'self-proclaimed publicist,' one cannot help coming to the conclusion that there are times when he doth protest too much and that some of the details are slightly more supportive of his claims than one would have thought strictly true or indeed neccessary. One is often left with more than a slight suspicion that Mesny had a touch of Walter Mitty about him, and in a number of his exploits one suspects he has embellished an already good story. The chapters of this biography on The Early Years, The Pacification of the Miao, and the Later Years, are to all intents and purposes autobiographical, and much of the substance of these chapters may seem to be grandiloquently worded, pompous and stilted. This is because I have transcribed most of the anecdotes writen by Mesny in the first person singular' into the 'third person' otherwise leaving the narrative as a whole as it was in the Miscellanies to provide the reader with a distinct and palpable feel for his personality.
At least three potted biographies of Mesny have been written, beginning with an entry in Balleine's Biographical Dictionary.2 Later, a piece in The Pilot's first volume (July 1946] which described The (Jersey) Trinity Boy who became a Chinese General, under the general heading of ‘Adventurous Jerseymen.' This was repeated in The Pilot of July 1980. Douglas Ford of the Jersey Museum added a little to Balleine and the pilot in his 'From Jersey to the Celestial Empire' [undated], and when the Jersey Post Office produced its stamp series in May 1992 commemorating the hundred and fifitieth anniversary of Mesny's birth they issued a short piece which added yet more about him. These were all laudatory describing Mesny's adventures and successes without portraying the unromantic and often wretched side to his life. These hyperbolised descriptions occasionally lead to erroneous claims such as the assertion that Mesny always wore Chinese clothes. In practice he wore foreign clothes most of the time and only donned Chinese robes for some fifteen years, when he had his photograph taken with his son and
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