The Drummond Year Book

The Drummond Year Book is a daily reading anthology drawn from the writings of Henry Drummond, the Scottish evangelical biologist and popular speaker. It is one of several similar anthologies that were compiled from Drummond’s work in the years after his early death from cancer in 1897, when his enormous late Victorian popularity made him an obvious candidate for the daily devotional reader format.

The book is arranged as a daily reader, with a short passage from Drummond’s work for each day of the year. The selections are drawn from across his published catalogue, including Natural Law in the Spiritual World, The Greatest Thing in the World, Pax Vobiscum, The Ideal Life, and various of his addresses, lectures, and shorter pieces. The arrangement is partly thematic and partly seasonal.

Drummond’s writing suits the daily reading format unusually well. He was always a writer of strong short paragraphs rather than of long developed arguments, and his characteristic method of taking a small observation or example and turning it into a brief reflection translates naturally into the anthology format. The combination of evolutionary biology and Christian devotion that gave Drummond his particular voice in the late Victorian religious literature is present throughout the selections.

The book runs to about three hundred and seventy pages, one for each day. For readers who want to keep Drummond’s voice in their reading throughout a year, this is the ideal format.