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Article Excerpt
A particular condition in life: Self-employment and social mobility in mid-Victorian Brantford, Ontario
by David G. Burley, McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal and Kingston, 1994, xii + 309 pp. cloth $39.95 (ISBN 0-7735-1199-7)
Assisting immigration to Upper Canada: The Petworth Project, 1832-1837
by Wendy Cameron and Mary McDougall Maude, McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal and Kingston, 2000, xxiv + 354 pp. cloth $65.00 (ISBN 0-7735-2034-1)
English immigrant voices: Labourer's letters from Upper Canada in the 1830s
edited by Wendy Cameron, Sheila Haines, and Mary McDougall Maude, McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal and Kingston, 2000, Ivi + 471 pp. cloth $65.00 (ISBN 0-7735-2035-X)
A sense of their duty: Middle-class formation in Victorian Ontario towns
by Andrew C. Holman, McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal and Kingston, 2000, xxii + 243 pp. cloth $60.00 (ISBN 0-7735-1899-1)
Making Ontario: Agricultural colonization and landscape re-creation before the railway
by J. David Wood, McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal and Kingston, 2000, xxvii + 205 pp. cloth $55.00 (ISBN 0-7735-1892-4)
Writing to his English relatives in the fall of 1836, William Spencer described the town of Bronte where he had acquired a small parcel of land. It was, he said a new settlement between Toronto and Hamilton, and one that appeared "to be in a flourishing state: there has been 25 dwelling-houses and two large warehouses put up this season." A river ran through it, and in the last four miles of its course, before it entered Lake Ontario, there were rive sawmills and a flour mill; a sixth sawmill was under construction, and though they each produced three thousand feet of boards a day, there was "plenty of work for them all." There was also, by Spencer's account, "plenty of work for every one that will work and good pay". Settlers assisted others who fell into distress, and one and all "could fish and fowl as much as ... [they] pleased", for with "gamekeepers and waterkeepers" unknown, there was "none to make us afraid."
There were powerful messages in this vignette. Upper Canada was a place in rapid transformation, where industry, freedom from restraint, and the kindness of strangers allowed even the unfortunate to put setbacks behind them. If you were here "you would be doing better" Spencer told his parents, though he had lost his wife to typhus lever shortly after their arrival in the new world, and had then spent some years working another's farm for a one-fourth share of its yield. Countless letters home echoed such sentiments through the first half of the nineteenth century. Life was not always a bowl of cherries on this frontier--some of the accounts of hardship and loss are heart-rending. Share John Capelain's grief at the toll of a "very great affliction" visited upon his family by "the Almighty" within days of their arrival in the Huron Tract: "I lost my poor little Mary for the first, then my poor dearest wife, then my two youngest, and little Edmund, all in the space of eight days. And what was more hard for me I was obliged to wrap them up in the rinds of trees and dig holes and put them in myself." Others, less traumatized, nonetheless round themselves forced to adapt...
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