Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale, GCVO, KCB, DL (24 February 1837 - 17 August 1916) was a British diplomat, collector and writer. Nicknamed "Barty", he was the paternal grandfather of the Mitford sisters.Freeman-Mitford was the son of Henry Reveley Mitford (1804-1883) of Exbury House, Exbury, Hampshire and the great-grandson of the historian William Mitford, and was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. While his paternal ancestors were landed gentry, whose holdings had once included Mitford Castle in Northumberland, his mother (Georgiana) Jemima was a daughter of the courtier the 3rd Earl of Ashburnham, with a noble ancestry through the earls of Beverley. His parents separated in 1840 when Redesdale was just three years old, and his mother remarried a Mr. Molyneaux.
The books which have been written of late years about Japan have either been compiled from official records, or have contained the sketchy impressions of passing travelers. Of the inner life of the Japanese the world at large knows but little: their religion, their superstitions, their ways of thought, the hidden springs by which they move -- all these are as yet mysteries. Nor is this to be wondered at. The recent revolution in Japan has wrought changes social as well as political; and it may be that when, in addition to the advance which has already been made, railways and telegraphs shall have connected the principal points of the Land of Sunrise, the old Japanese, such as he was and had been for centuries when we found him eleven short years ago, will have become extinct. . . . -- Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, "Lord Redesdale, G.C.V.O., K.C.B." Formerly Second Secretary to the British Legation in Japan
Mitford was a gifted writer whose descriptions of Japan during the critical time of transition from a feudal to a modern state in the late nineteenth century are a testimony to his narrative skills, accuracy and objective reporting.
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