Come, bright Improvement!: The Literary Societies of Nineteenth-Century Ontario 9781442673137

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Maps
CHAPTER ONE. A Legacy of Literary Culture
CHAPTER TWO. Early Societies in Toronto
CHAPTER THREE. Culture and Conflict in the Western District
CHAPTER FOUR. Circle to Circle
CHAPTER FIVE. The Rise of the Women's Societies
CHAPTER SIX. Literary Study in the Literary Societies
CHAPTER SEVEN. Literary Societies as a Source for History and Theory
Appendix A: Literary and Debating Club Pledge, Hamilton, 1893
Appendix B: Readings and Recitations of the Barrie Literary Society, 1881-1893
Appendix C: Programs of Study of the Browning Club of Toronto, 1897-1905
Literary Societies of Nineteenth-Century Ontario: A Preliminary Resource Guide
Notes
Sources Cited
Illustration Credits
Index

Citation preview

Come, bright Improvement! The Literary Societies of Nineteenth-Century Ontario

This page intentionally left blank

Come, bright Improvement! The Literary Societies of Nineteenth-Century Ontario

Heather Murray

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2002 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-3633-3 (Studies in Book and Print Culture)

Printed on acid-free paper

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Murray, Heather, 1951Come, bright improvement!: the literary societies of nineteenth-century Ontario (Studies in book and print culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-3633-3

1. English literature - Societies, etc. - History - 19th century. 2. Ontario - Intellectual life - 19th century. I. Title. II. Series PN22.A2M87 2002

820'.6'0713

C2001-904009-1

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

To ray mother, Eunice (Futerall) Murray, children's librarian extraordinaire, who taught me to love books

This page intentionally left blank

CONTENTS

Preface: The Immigration of ImpAroAZvement Maps

ix

xvii-xix

CHAPTER ONE A Legacy of Literary Culture CHAPTER TWO Early Societies in Toronto

3 23

CHAPTER THREE Culture and Conflict in the Western District 53 CHAPTER FOUR Circle to Circle

75

CHAPTER FIVE The Rise of the Women's Societies 97 CHAPTER six Literary Study in the Literary Societies CHAPTER SEVEN Literary Societies as a Source for History and Theory 255 Appendix A: Literary and Debating Club Pledge, Hamilton, 1893 171 Appendix B: Readings and Recitations of the Barrie Literary Society, 1881-1893 172 Appendix C: Programs of Study of the Browning Club of Toronto, 1897-1905 175 Literary Societies of Nineteenth-Century Ontario: A Preliminary Resource Guide 183

127

viii Contents Notes

265

Sources Cited Illustration Credits Index

295 317

319

Illustrations follow page 108

PREFACE

THE IMMIGRATION OF IMPROVEMENT

Come, bright Improvement! on the car of Time, And rule the spacious world from clime to clime; Thy handmaid arts shall every wild explore, Trace every wave, and culture every shore. On Erie's bank, where tigers steal along, And the dread Indian chants a dismal song, Where human fiends on midnight errands walk, And bathe in brains the murderous tomahawk There shall the flocks on thymy pasture stray, And shepherds dance at summer's opening day, Each wand'ring genius of the lonely glen Shall start to view the glittering haunts of men; And silence watch, on woodland heights around, The village curfew, as it tolls profound. Thomas Campbell, The Pleasures of Hope (1799)1

Despite several attempts to resuscitate his reputation, the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell is not popular today, although he was both widely published and well known in his own time. The author of many volumes of verse and of biography, a literary critic, and an anthologizer, he was also an educational democrat, involved with Lord Brougham in the founding of the University of London. The sum total of these achievements earned him the honour of a resting place in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. His first long narrative poem, which was to be one of his greatest successes, was The Pleasures of Hope, begun in 1796 when

x

Preface

the poet was only nineteen. Its 1,078 lines were completed and published a few years later; 'the last notable utterance of the eighteenthcentury school in the well-worn heroic couplet' is one critic's flat summation.2 But while Campbell's form was time-honoured, the thoughts and topics were fresh: here are the palette of chiaroscuro contrasts, the sublimity of the wild and the savage, even the wandering solitary 'genius' of an emergent Romanticism. Campbell has transplanted to North America the English village so movingly depicted in Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, whose memorable first line - 'The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day' - is echoed in the tolling of the Village curfew' in Campbell's verse.3 The Pleasures of Hope may be doubly categorized in the genre of the 'prospect' poem: tracing the topography of Erie's shore and delineating the hopeful future of new settlers and settlements. But it is evident from these lines - with their improbable flora and fauna, their fantastic pastoralism, and their invocation of a nightmarish Native savagery that Campbell never actually visited North America. "Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,' he had written in the opening to the poem, a phrase that would prove to be his most enduring (1.7). He idealized the colonies that had provided the family's tobacco-trade fortune, demolished in 1776, and dreamed of emigration. But lack of first-hand knowledge did not hinder the flow of Campbell's pen. The Pleasures of Hope was followed by Gertrude of Wyoming; or, The Pennsylvanian Cottage, a long saga in Spenserian stanzas about the so-called Wyoming Massacre of 1778, whose Pennsylvanian bestiary includes both crocodiles and flamingos.4 This Romantic poet must have been surprised when he was called upon at his London rooms, one day in 1821, by a critic of a rather more realistic inclination. Tekarihogen (Chief John Brant), in England to help the Six Nations secure a clear title to their land grant on the Grand River, made a point of visiting Campbell to protest the slanderous portrayal of his father, Thayendanegea (Chief Joseph Brant) in Gertrude. To his credit, Campbell would note the error in later editions.5 His verse has an evident poetic appeal. But given the dissonance between its imperial imagery and colonial reality, it is striking to find him cited by authors with hard first-hand experience and in works with a distinctly pragmatic purpose. The Pleasures of Hope features signally, for example, in the preface to a book aimed at surveying the resources of Upper Canada and providing advice for prospective immigrants. Authored by Dr Thomas Rolph and published in Dundas in 1836, this was an emigrants' guide bearing the unwieldy title A Brief Account,

Preface xi

Together with Observations, Made during a Visit in the West Indies, and a Tour through the United States of America, in Parts of the Years 1832-3; Together with a Statistical Account of Upper Canada. As a proponent of numerous schemes for assisting the emigration of indigent settlers and, indeed, as a settler himself on the Niagara Escarpment - Rolph would have encountered little in the way of dancing shepherds and thymy meadows. Yet he concludes the preface to A Brief Account by asking his readers to hearken to the 'beautiful and almost prophetic lines of the poet/ which are those from The Pleasures of Hope cited above.6 He has no need to name the poet: while the source of the lines was not immediately apparent to me, he clearly expected the passage to be instantly identifiable by the readers of his own day. Indeed, Campbell's invocatory cry to 'Improvement' would continue to echo throughout nineteenth-century Ontario.7 Thomas Campbell was not the only poet to transport arts or culture to a so-called New World, but he has handled the transition in a novel way, by a skilful and unexpected substitution. Traditionally, and in innumerable poems, it is Phoebus (or Apollo), the god of the Arts, who speeds across the skies in his fiery chariot the Sun, his transit illuminating the mortals below and marking the passage of their days. But in The Pleasures of Hope, Phoebus has been usurped, his place in the car of Time seized by 'Improvement/ upon whom the Muses now attend. (Under this transformation, the 'car of Time' is itself refigured, referring not only to the progression of hours but to the inevitability of progress.) Campbell has raised the homely 'Improvement' to both literal and figurative heights, as it blazes a westering trail from the Old World to the New, simultaneously apostrophized, personified, and deified. This newly elevated 'Improvement' would rule the literary societies that were a prime mechanism for self- and mutual development in the settler cultures of nineteenth-century Canada. This book is about the quest for self- and mutual improvement, through literature, in early Ontario. But the faith in cooperative learning that animated the endeavours of the early participants in literary societies and associated organizations is by no means a thing of the past. In the course of research and writing, I have drawn upon the knowledge, advice, and labours of scores of correspondents and colleagues. While most must be thanked here collectively, many merit an individual acknowledgment (and some receive more specific accreditation in the notes to this book).

xii Preface

Hundreds of correspondents answered my inquiries during an early stage of this research, as I attempted to ascertain the existence of early societies. (When I began, I had heard of only a handful.) I drew on the deep local knowledge of these individuals, many of whom, of their own accord, undertook significant digging on my behalf: Mrs Gladys Arnold, Shirley Barlow, Gladys Beaumont, Quentin Brown, Barbara Burke, Ken Burns, Donald L. Carroll, Margaret Cohoe, Mary Dean, Burton Ford, Margaret Gibson, Mrs Colleen Gildner, Marien Doke Glencoe, Michele Hackstetter, Mrs Thos. J. Hutchinson, Mary Lawrence, Frances McElroy, Blake McGill, Floyd Mclntyre, Mrs Harriet MacKinnon, Iris MacLean, H. Roger Miller, Elizabeth Mitchell, Marian Parker, Joe Radford, Sally Scherer, Munroe Scott, Madeline Simpson, Elizabeth Spicer, Shirley Spragge, Kathy Staples, Ann Symington, Carol Turner, Dr C.E. Walker, Karen Walker (of the Cobourg and District Historical Society), Margaret Watson, Mrs Helene Weaver, Alta Whitfield, Jean Whitfield, Mary Whitwell, and Sylvia Wray. My uncle, John Murray, kindly searched for material in Prince Edward County. I have also benefited especially from the expertise of others, generously shared. Fiona Black passed on information about early libraries. Elizabeth Bloomfield (whose Waterloo and Wellington County bibliographies have been useful sources) provided other material from her research, while Jean Cole shared information about the Peterborough area. John Crossingham supplied useful clues about the history of the Niagara Assembly. Carole Gerson (whose book The Purer Taste provided invaluable context for this study) helped with queries about Sarah Anne Curzon and about the Canadian Literary Club. Dr Florence Gibson shared her comprehensive understanding of Emily Stowe's medical training. Janet Inksetter of Annex Books kept a lookout for books and ephemera, and told me about the Dundas Travel Club. Mary Lu MacDonald searched her files for further evidence of literary societies. Jeffrey McNairn provided the location of the York Literary Society constitution, for which I had been searching in vain, while Val Ross offered to share her sources, and Mary Rubio passed on information about Mechanics' Institute papers. Ruth Swan and Ann Williams of the Ennotville Historical Library arranged for me to see the collection and told me about its history; Alistair Ulson narrated amusing anecdotes about the Eclectic Reading Club. Jane Zavitz-Bond of the Canadian Yearly Meeting Archives shared her extensive knowledge of the Society of Friends in Ontario, lent rare copies of a journal, and put in me touch with Jamie Bycraft.

Preface xiii

I am also indebted to individuals for the use of family papers in their possession. Jamie Bycraft and Ruth Bycraft Zavitz kindly sent me portions of the family's unpublished 'Bycraft Family History' and gave me permission to cite it. Ellen Spears offered the use of the scrapbook and other memorabilia of the Angelica Shakespeare Club (now housed in the County of Grey-Owen Sound Museum). I wish to especially acknowledge the kindness of the late Eila Hopper Ross, former professor of medical illustration at Toronto, who lent me copies of the William Houston letterbooks held by her family and shared vivid memories of her great-uncle and his cultural crusades. The broad-ranging knowledge of colleagues at the University of Toronto often comes in handy for solving research puzzles. Sandra Alston provided information about James Cawdell, and Donna Bennett and Russell Brown alerted me to items concerning contemporary book clubs. Melba Cuddy-Keene and Daniela Janes supplied information on the National Home-Reading Union and the Canadian Home Reading Union respectively. Patricia Fleming kindly advised on illustrative material. Heather Jackson helped to ascertain Robert Jameson's Coleridge connections, and J.R. de J. Jackson provided leads for the Stowey Book Society. Jay Macpherson told me of some fictional treatments of book clubs; Neil Semple helped with Methodist history; Rosemary Sullivan put me in touch with the Twenty Club in Lindsay; Germaine Warkentin provided useful references in book history. I have also benefited, in the 'pilot project' stage of this study, from the research expertise of Anna Sonser, who combed Toronto newspapers for mention of the Toronto Women's Literary Club. This book has involved visits to numerous archives, museums, and public libraries; the hospitality of the staffs of these institutions is impressive, as they labour under expanding masses of data and with decreasing budgets. I have often used the Archives of Ontario, and I thank the staff, in particular Leon Warmski, now retired and missed by many researchers. Numerous interesting hours have been spent in the Baldwin Room at the Toronto Reference Library, and the staff there has been particularly accommodating; I wish to thank them all and Christine Mosser particularly. Other archives and libraries in Toronto and further afield have also provided a warm welcome: the Brock University Archives (with acknowledgment to John Burtniak), the Buxton Museum, the Chatham-Kent Museum (special thanks to Robert Gray), the Chautauqua Institution Archives (and Mrs Alfreda Irwin, June MillerSpann, and Scott Royer), the Corporation of the City of Cambridge

xiv Preface

Archives (and Jim Quantrell), the Dundas Historical Society Museum, the First Unitarian Congregation, Toronto (and Edith Burton), the Flamborough Archives, the Hamilton Public Library Special Collections, the Marsh Collection and Amherstburg Historic Sites Association (and Jennifer MacLeod and Valerie Buckle), the City of Toronto Archives, the Niagara-on-the-Lake Museum (and Bill Severin), the North American Black Historical Museum and Cultural Centre (and Elise HardingDavis), the Ontario Black History Society, the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books (and Leslie McGrath), the Oshawa Museum and Archives, the Peterborough Centennial Museum and Archives (with particular thanks to Jim Leonard), the Simcoe County Archives (and Ellen Millar), the Toronto Theosophical Society, the Bata Library at Trent University, the United Church Archives, the University of Guelph Library, the University of Waterloo Library (and particularly the staff in the Dora Lewis Rare Books Room), the Wellington County Museum and Archives (Bonnie Callen and Karen Walker), the University of Western Ontario J.J. Tallman Regional History Collection (and John Lutman and Theresa Regnier), and the library of Wilfrid Laurier University. I have also benefited from the careful correspondence of many librarians and archivists, among whom I would especially mention the following: Bernice Andrews (Cannington and Area Historical Society Museum), Hilda Andrews (St Marys Museum), Thomas Ballantine (Haliburton Highlands Museum), Carolynn Bart-Riedstra (Stratford Perth Archives), Susan Bennett (Ontario Agricultural Museum), Susan Cox (Philadelphia Museum of Art), Robert Cox (American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia), W. Glen Curnoe (London Public Library), Craig D'Arcy (West Parry Sound District Museum), Lucie Desjardins (University of Ottawa Archives), Todd Gordon (Assiginack Museum), Joan Hyslop (County of Grey-Owen Sound Museum), Alison Lewis (American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia), Elizabeth McNaughton (Doon Heritage Crossroads), Helen Maddock (Lambton County Library), Daphne Mainprize (Stephen Leacock Museum, Orillia), Tracy Marsh (Collingwood Museum), Lisa Miettinen (Norwich and District Archives), Barbara Paterson (Muskoka Pioneer Village), Stewart Renfrew (Queen's University Archives), Jack Schecter (Upper Canada Village), Guy Scott (Ontario Association of Agricultural Societies), Carl Spadoni (McMaster University Archives), Charles Taws (Bowmanville Museum), and Brian Winter (Whitby Archives). I have received a warm welcome and knowledgeable assistance in

Preface xv using the local history collections of the following public library systems: Amherstburg, Bracebridge, Dundas, Gravenhurst, Grimsby, Guelph, Hamilton, Huntsville, Kitchener (special thanks to Susan Hoffman), London, Oakville, Orangeville, Oshawa, Peterborough, and Waterloo. Last and certainly by no means least, I am indebted to many staff members of libraries associated with the University of Toronto, particularly those of Victoria University and Trinity College (and its archivist, Henri Pilon). The Robarts Library's Interlibrary Loan Service has resourcefully located and retrieved many obscure items; I am especially grateful to Jane Lynch for her tenacity. The staff of both the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and the University of Toronto Archives have also been helpful on many occasions; special thanks to archivist Harold Averill for providing many research leads. A number of these institutions have granted permission to cite from their holdings: the Chautauqua Institution Archives, the City of Cambridge Archives, the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library of the University of Toronto, the County of Grey-Owen Sound Museum, and the Simcoe County Archives. Permissions to reproduce photographs are given at the end of the volume. Sections of this work have appeared, in other forms, in articles in Essays on Canadian Writing and Historical Studies in Education /Revue de I'histoire de Veducation. I have also benefited from the comments, criticisms, and research leads offered by audiences to whom I have presented portions of this work: the Arts and Letters Club, the Friends of the Bata Library at Trent University, the Departments of English at both Guelph University and the University of Alberta, Will Straw's Canadian studies seminar at McGill University, and the inaugural conference for the History of the Book in Canada project, coordinated by the Bibliographical Society of Canada. Work-in-progress was also presented to several groups at the University of Toronto: the English Students' Union, the Canadian Studies Students' Union, the Early Canada working group of the Department of History, and members of the History of the Book and Print Culture program. I would also like to acknowledge people who read the manuscript in its entirety and offered a variety of helpful criticisms: David Jolliffe of DePaul University and the three attentive anonymous readers for the University of Toronto Press, the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, and the Manuscript Review Committee of UTP. I am indebted to several people for their contributions to the produc-

xvi

Preface

tion of this book. The maps were undertaken by Byron Moldofsky and Jane Davie of the Cartography Unit, Department of Geography, University of Toronto. David Weatherson kindly took the photograph of the Mackenzie memorial. I was fortunate to have Elizabeth Hulse as a copy editor, as she brought to the manuscript not only her editorial precision but also her intensive knowledge of the print culture of the period. Mary Newberry has been a thorough and inventive indexer. Frances Mundy has carefully steered this book through the production process. I am particularly grateful to Siobhan McMenemy of the University of Toronto Press, who guided this project throughout and whose own reading of the manuscript was especially scrupulous. She has been an ideal academic editor, both encouraging and pragmatic. The research and writing of this manuscript has been aided in material ways. The initial start-up of this project was made possible by a grant and a release-time stipend from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada. The writing was made possible by a further grant and release-time stipend provided by the Connaught Fund at the University of Toronto. Travel to various locations was funded by the Cassady Fund of Trinity College, a General Research Grant from Victoria University, and a General Research Grant from the University of Toronto. A Senate Research Grant from Victoria University enabled the preparation of maps and an index and subvented the costs of photographic illustrations. Last but certainly not least are some debts of a more personal nature. David Galbraith has been a constant source of support, a companion on research trips, and an in-house computer consultant and encyclopedia of socialist and labour history. I have taken Sarah Galbraith-Murray's advice that every book needs to have some pictures. I want to conclude by thanking Anne Marie Van Eesteren and Ann Wilson, who jointly have given me almost fifty years of friendship.

Principal locations of nineteenth-century literary societies (Cartography Office, Department of Geography, University of Toronto)

Spread of literary societies before 1875 (Cartography Office, Department of Geography, University of Toronto)

Spread of literary societies, 1875-1900 (Cartography Office, Department of Geography, University of Toronto)

This page intentionally left blank

Come, bright Improvement! The Literary Societies of Nineteenth-Century Ontario

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER ONE

A LEGACY OF LITERARY CULTURE

Ours is a young and busy country, where much of our time is given up necessarily given up - to the advancement of material prosperity, and where, for the present, at least, Literature, and the elegant Arts, must grow up side by side with the coarse plants of daily necessity, and must depend for their culture, not on the exclusive devotion of time or wealth, but on hours and seasons snatched from the pursuit of worldly interests by intelligent and public-spirited individuals. J.D. Edgar's inaugural address to the Ontario Literary Society (1863)1

The recent boom in book clubs as a social and educational activity has been a pronounced, if somewhat unexpected, development in an era that was predicted to be the dying day of print culture. Many thousands of North Americans find themselves feverishly finishing the month's selection at their desks or on the subway before heading off to their discussion group, held often in a group member's home but sometimes in a library, a church basement, or even a local bar. The meeting format ranges from informal 'book chat/ which slides into general conversation, to a more directed discussion convened by a person with some qualifications as a critic (often a graduate student or underemployed humanities PhD) whose honorarium is paid by the group. Club members may take responsibility for preparing a talk or points for discussion, or the club may choose to use the study guides and other resource materials, such as web sites and videos, made available by publishers who see the book clubs as a prime target for sales.2 The principle of book selection helps to define each group: best-sellers,

4 Come, bright Improvement!

classics, travel, autobiography, women authors, men's movement writing, and works of interest to particular cultural or national constituencies - Black writers or Canadian fiction - are some of the many lines along which groups are constituted. While the book clubs may be classified as a form of adult education or continuing learning, the opportunity for socializing is key to their popularity, particularly for those that meet in private settings and are composed of friends or invited members. Socializing may be either a primary or a secondary aim: some groups restrict refreshments to coffee and tea in order to keep up a serious tone, while others organize gourmet dinners or potluck suppers, or combine the book discussion with other activities such as microbrewery sampling, a lobster supper, country dancing, or - in the case of one Ottawa men's group - some mind-readying games of basketball.3 (Members of the venerable Eclectic Reading Club of Saint John, New Brunswick, first convened in 1869, don formal attire for their meetings, although in recent years women have switched from floor-length evening gowns to cocktail dresses.)4 For women particularly, book-club attendance means clearing the time and psychological space for a 'mental workout/ a sharing of emotional responses, and a visit with like-minded friends: no wonder cultural commentators often refer to book clubs as the latest form of consciousness-raising group. However, while such commentaries often focus on the exponential increase in women's reading clubs, other varieties are to be found: men's groups, mixed-sex clubs, reading circles for children, and intergenerational groupings.5 So pronounced is the book-club phenomenon that the format has spread to other venues and media, the most famous of these being the 'book club' component of Oprah Winfrey's television talk show. Staged like an actual book-group meeting, with invited discussants and a cozy living-room setting, the Winfrey show can boost a featured title to instant bestsellerdom and turn authors into stars. There are now 'book clubs' online, in bookstores, and functioning as consumer focus groups for publishers.6 Colleges, bookstores, and resorts have recently begun to develop 'readers' retreats.'7 Newsletters, magazines, newspapers, and published guides advise readers how to find, establish, and manage successful clubs.8 The widespread popularity of these reading groups has even occasioned a form of 'book-club backlash/ In a newspaper opinion piece titled 'Why I Won't Join the Book Club/ one contributor expressed alarm that reading was becoming another scheduled activity to be

A Legacy of Literary Culture 5

slotted in 'like the trip to the gym and the grocery store'; self-improving readers 'pop' books as they would vitamin tablets. But books 'are not about schedules/ author Stephanie Nolen argues; rather, they are 'about submerging yourself ... about getting lost, about getting consumed/9 Considerable attention was garnered by another article, detailing the darker side of some New York City reading groups. Headlined 'BookClub Lovers Wage a War of Words' when reprinted by the Globe and Mail, it could equally well have been titled 'When Book Clubs Go Bad': 'No longer just friendly social gatherings with a vague continuingeducation agenda, many of today's book groups have become literary pressure cookers, marked by aggressive intellectual one-upmanship and unabashed social skirmishing. In living rooms and bookshops, clubs are frazzling under the stress, giving rise to a whole new profession: the book-group therapist.'10 The clubs that Elaine Daspin describes seem to be functioning as unconsciousness- rather than consciouness-, raising sessions, where competitive readers battle for interpretive supremacy. While book-club therapists may well be confined to the rarefied worlds of the Upper East Side or Long Island, authors of recent bookclub guides reiterate the need to establish common purposes, regular routines, and guidelines for thorough preparation. Clearly, the positives outweigh the pitfalls; book clubs are in demand because they offer individual readers an extra dimension of appreciation and understanding. Yet despite the fact that shared discussion of literary texts is also the foundation of literary study in school, college, and university classrooms, literary theorists and reader-response critics have yet to devote much attention to such shared and synergistic study, instead construing readers as isolates or abstractions. (Studies tend to focus on the emotional responses or cognitive activities of individual readers, or to infer such reactions by examining the properties of a literary text.) But club and classroom participants know.that there is something different, something added, about sharing and discussing literature with other people. What that something is, and how academics might begin to think about it - by reconfiguring reading as a public and social, rather than a private and interior, experience - is one of the running themes of this book. But for now, it is enough to note that, by participating in book clubs, members are also partaking of a cultural, social, and educational tradition which has its roots in the early nineteenth century and which has an unbroken, if sometimes hidden, lineage from that time to our own. In fact, some Ontario groups are direct descendants of those early

6 Come, bright Improvement!

societies. The record for the longest-standing literary society in Ontario probably belongs to the Macaulay Club, a men's group that has continued as a cultural and civic presence in Chatham since 1882. Which club earns the title of the second oldest depends on whether the criteria are strictly 'literary' and whether the history must be uninterrupted. The Baconian Club of London was established in 1885 as a dining and discussion forum for men, and the Twenty Club of Lindsay, a group of professional and business men, first convened in December of 1892; both still meet today. While the Baconians are now primarily a social group, and while the Lindsay organization focuses its discussions on current events and world history, both would have been considered a literary society' in nineteenth-century terms. The Peterborough Fortnightly Club, a men's discussion group, met from 1894 until 1900 and then resumed its activities after a hiatus of twenty years, remaining in continuous operation to this day. The Saturday Club of Kingston, another men's organization, can also trace its roots to the 1890s. There are equally established organizations for women, whose origins follow closely in this chronology. The Tuesday Reading Club of Woodstock has been in continuous operation since 1896; the Dundas Travel Club (a women's book-discussion club, despite its name) was founded in 1897.n Several groups no longer in existence reached their centenaries before disbanding, such as the Women's Literary Club of St Catharines and a sister society to the Tuesday Reading Club in Woodstock called the Saturday Reading Club. These groups achieved that milestone in 1992 and 1996 respectively.12 In addition, while this book concentrates on the independent literary societies, it should be noted that several venerable university 'Lits' remain a lively and continuing presence on campus, such as those of University College and Trinity College, both at the University of Toronto. The oldest of these, the one at University College, dates from 1854; the panelled walls of the college refectory bear the gold-leaf names of each executive slate since the foundation, down to the present year's committee. Members of modern book clubs share more than a history with the early organizations. They face some of the same interpersonal and logistical challenges, steering their societies between the Scylla of quarrelsome members who air their expertise and the Charybdis of unprepared participants who ramble and gossip. They also risk running aground on the shoals of competitive entertaining - of elaborate refreshments and cunningly themed decorations - and from this hazard, too, their predecessors were not exempt. More than one hundred and

A Legacy of Literary Culture 7

fifty years ago, 'supper was the undoing' of one men's club in Goderich, according to local historians Robina and Kathleen Lizars. The intent for this early group was to follow a book exchange among members and then a literary discussion with 'a light supper, which was rigidly ruled to consist of tea, sandwiches and cake.' But on one unfortunate occasion, 'this simple meal was replaced by fowls, jellies, and all manner of delicacies.' As one participant ruefully recalled, 'We thoroughly enjoyed that supper ... But we never met again.'13 Confusingly, for a reader of our day, the early societies were not called 'book clubs/ although the term was in use. A 'book club' meant, quite literally, a group of people who clubbed together to acquire costly books and periodicals or to circulate their private libraries among themselves. (And while there were also a few instances of 'reading societies,' these were for reading only indirectly, as with the Woodstock Reading Society [1835], whose purpose was to found a subscription library.)14 The reading and discussion groups, on the other hand, were most commonly referred to as 'literary societies/ and it is these and related institutions that form the subject of Come, bright Improvement! More specifically, I will be looking at the literary societies of the area known first as Upper Canada, then as Canada West, and finally as Ontario, from the period of 1820 - when the first club was established, as far as I can determine - to the end of the nineteenth century, which saw a development in book clubs (and clubs for women particularly) interestingly analogous to the book-club phenomenon of the 1980s, 1990s, and early twenty-first century. While there are continuities, both direct and indirect, between the societies of a century ago and those of today, there are also significant differences. The literary societies of the nineteeth century characteristically combined with their rhetorical pursuits - reading, composition, declamation, and performance - a range of other cultural activities, such as musical interludes, current-events discussions, and local historical research, not to mention social activities such as picnics and even (for the mixed-sex groups for younger people) courtship.15 Cultural historians interested in the history of musical performance, the development of musical taste, the diffusion of ideas of the fine and practical arts, and the transmission of scientific ideas can find much in these groups of relevance to them. But the concern of this book is to locate these groups in the twin contexts of bibliographic history and literarycritical history - that is, to study groups of readers who in turn were studying texts.

8 Come, bright Improvement!

Thus there are four principles of selection guiding this study. The first is geographic: I had initially intended to look at literary societies in more than the one province, but the number of societies identified for Ontario indicated that a more general study would not be feasible. (Further, the particular patterns of settlement in Ontario allow some interesting forms of demographic analysis of the sedimentation of the literary-society ideal across different segments of the populace.) The terminal date of 1900 roughly reflects the end of a particularly coherent and accelerated period of development and diffusion of new literarysociety models. The (surprising) number of societies occasioned a further restriction to the free-standing societies, rather than those affiliated to schools, churches, or other organizations.16 Last, I have omitted those groups where no literary activity took place. For example, a debating society or even a mock parliament might bear the name of 'literary society/ although its meetings were limited to those activities.17 Sometimes, I found, literary names could be misleading, as with the Dickens Snow Shoe Club (Owen Sound, 1870s), which seemed to have taken from that author only a Pickwickian conviviality.18 And one imagines there was little in the way of sonnet reading in the Shakespeare Rowing Club of Toronto.19 But while reading and discussion featured in all the societies I will be discussing, the literary groups usually took a broader cultural mandate than the more dedicated book clubs of our present day. Exactly how broad it could be is signalled by the names of the Western District Literary, Philosophical and Agricultural Association (Amherstburg, 1842) and the Puslinch Lake Football Club and Literary Society (1888?). But variety added spice even to associations whose mandate was less sweeping, as emblematized by the Olio (Coldstream, 1876), a popular mixed-sex reading group which purportedly took its name from the Spanish word for 'medley.' As early as 1824, an anonymous writer in the Canadian Magazine and Literary Repository of Montreal had contrasted the various strengths and demerits of 'specialized' and 'extensive' literary societies, and had argued in favour of the latter for a colonial society: 'the wider the range of subjects such societies embrace, the more attractive they become to men of genius, and the more widely is their utility diffused/20 Such thinking helps to explain why the birth of a literary society was typically heralded by a pyrotechnic explosion of plans: to develop museums, libraries, and publications; to encourage agricultural and mechanical innovation and the arts; to undertake scientific research. From a later viewpoint, this ambition seems paradoxical: that specialty

A Legacy of Literary Culture 9

was a luxury to be enjoyed only by a well-established society, while grand schemes should be laid by the associations least equipped to carry them out. But the anonymous writer goes on to outline how this variegation in interest and endeavour would result, not in chaotic diffusion, but in a critical mass: By drawing literary men together, and condencing [sic] the results of their labours, they form as it were a focus of knowledge from whence its influence emanates, and diffuses over the whole country. In their intercourse, these men have an opportunity of comparing their sentiments and opinions, and may subject the latter to the ordeal of friendly criticism, so that they go abroad in a more correct form, and assume a degree of polish and embellishment, which they would not otherwise possess. In this manner when a society attains such a height as to give its transactions to the world, they present a congregated mass of knowledge and experience at one view, and in its best possible condition and form.21

Such arguments in favour of an extensive mandate held for much of the century. A varied program would appeal to diverse potential members, encourage liberality of interest and sentiment, permit contrastive and comparative study, and increase the organization's chances of enhancing the state of public knowledge. It would give an intellectual sheen to already educated members and help to fill the gaps where previous learning was wanting. Such a pluralist purpose is specifically stated, for example, in the preamble to the Toronto Women's Literary Club constitution (1877): Whereas a few ladies in the City of Toronto, having felt the need of something to keep alive their interest in mental growth and development, regarding, as they do, that continuous and concentrated effort upon any one course of thought or pursuit of object, has a tendency to cramp and narrow the views, to enfeeble the mind and powers of intellect, they have, this 3rd day of November, 1877, banded themselves together to form an association for intellectual culture, where they can secure a free interchange of thought and feeling upon every subject that pertains to women's higher education, including her moral and physical welfare.22

Yet when women of the 1880s and 1890s mounted their own defences of a broad-ranging curriculum, this would become the subject of critical or comic commentary. What was ambitious and broad-ranging for the

10 Come, bright Improvement!

men was dilettantish and flighty for the women. One may speculate that the rise of more specialized literary societies in the closing decades of the century was in part a reaction against the women's appropriation of a raison d'etre held by the men's societies for some sixty years. In addition to constitutions and statements of purpose, a further clue to the variegated activity of these groups is found in their complex and shifting nomenclature, which was freighted with meanings whose particular valencies changed across the century. 'Literature' and 'literary/ 'culture' and 'cultural,' had intricacies of meaning often obscure to twenty-first-century sensibilities.23 The term 'literature' in nineteenthcentury Canada did not denote (as in its more restricted use today) the genres of poetry, fiction, and drama alone, but included a broad range of non-fictional - but still 'imaginative' and belles-lettristic - writing: essays, history, biography and autobiography, and 'prose of thought' more generally. (In fact, early in the nineteenth century a non-fictional work could well be considered more worthily 'literary' than a novel, the latter genre viewed with some suspicion as sensationalist or morally dubious.) In addition, 'literary' study did not mean reading only, but could include the now lesser practised rhetorical arts of composition, memory work, recitation, debate, and elocution.24 The adjective 'literary' could operate even more broadly than the term 'literature' itself. It could be used to signal the study of writings in the vernacular - that is, non-classical - or of writings that were secular rather than religious. (Early plans for Queen's University, for example, describe it as a 'Literary and Theological Seminary.') While these vernacular or secular writings could include the scientific - Victoria College at Cobourg covered practical and scientific writings in its literature courses of the 1840s - in a somewhat later use, the term 'literary' delineated non-scientific writings and could function as a rough synonym for the liberal arts. More broadly still, it could sometimes be equated with 'culture/ in the sense that a 'literary' man was one who was widely read or erudite. As a result, the term was often deployed for its prestige value, as Carole Gerson has observed in her study of attitudes to fiction in nineteenth-century English Canada. "That the word "literary" connoted distinction is evidenced by the frequency of its appearance in the names of Canadian clubs and social associations throughout the nineteenth century/ notes Gerson. However, she continues, 'as revealed in the surviving records, the existence of an association calling itself "literary" does not necessarily imply significant literary activity or a group of committed readers.'25 Thus while the generic

A Legacy of Literary Culture 11

boundaries of the 'literary' were broader than in our day, and while the term could be stretched to cover a variety of activities and endeavours, 'literary' was also an evaluative term that could function restrictively to assess what was polite, polished, or worthy. Similarly, 'culture' could mean both less and more than it signifies to us today. It meant less than the current anthropologically inflected definition of the term as the field of practices and beliefs of a people, being restricted in the nineteenth century to the mental and moral achievements of individuals and society. But it certainly signified more than our sense of 'culture' as the high-art realm of operas, galleries, and museums, an acquirable - albeit costly - commodity. In the earlier use of the term, culture is not the object of an acquisition but, rather, both the means and the ends of processes of development and improvement in which individuals and groups engage. The controlling images for this process were almost invariably organic, of cultivation and acculturation, pruning and training, as in the words of J.D. Edgar's 1863 inaugural address to the Ontario Literary Society, cited above, where the 'elegant Arts' and the 'coarse plants of daily necessity' must be simultaneously nurtured by the public-spirited individuals of this 'young and busy country.' Even more radically, as in Robert Lachlan's words to the Western District Literary, Philosophical and Agricultural Association, the distinctions between the cultural and practical erode as learning and 'ordinary pursuits and occupations' are inevitably intricated, both necessary to the development of that civilization with which the term 'culture' was often equated. This interdependency was a specific topic of Lachlan's encouraging 1842 address to members of the new society: to be a useful, though unlearned, member of a literary and philosophical society, requires neither the previous qualification of rare literary talents, or great scientific or philosophical acquirements, but simply a sincere love of knowledge and an earnest desire to seek and profit by every opportunity of acquiring information and instruction in the society of those who may be able to impart it... though men of learning may be required to lead the way in the more abstruse and unfrequented paths of research, so intimately [are] science and philosophy in one way or another united and interwoven with the ordinary pursuits and occupations of life, that, in a society aiming at mutual instruction, such as ours is designed to be, it is in the power of almost every reflecting, moderately educated man, to bear a part in the practical illustration of some subject or other, without any

12 Come, bright Improvement! previous pretensions to what is termed classical learning.26 (emphasis Lachlan's)

Major Lachlan's 'Discourse' is potentially confusing to a twenty-firstcentury reader, as this interweaving seems to extend to an interchangeable use of the terms 'literary/ 'philosophical/ and even 'scientific.' But 'philosophical/ to the audience of the Western District group, would not have meant discussions of Kant or even Emerson, having not yet acquired its more specialized meaning (although it was often contraposed to religious thought). The term functioned as a synonym for knowledge or heuristics in a way that is lost to us today. Thus when a society spoke of acquiring 'philosophical apparatus/ for example, it may have been saving up for an orrery - a mechanical model of the solar system - or a collection of shapes for illustrating geometric principles, or even the equipment for chemical experiments. Like 'philosophy/ the term 'science' could function as a general synonym for systematic or non-religious thought; and in indicating orderly or empirical examination of 'nature/ whether external or internal, 'science' could allude to inquiries that we would now consider psychological or even moral. Given these sets of definitions, inhabitants of the Western District would have found nothing unusual in the polymathic combination of literary, philosophical, and agricultural pursuits in their association, and the development of this organization from an earlier Western District Agricultural and Horticultural Society would have seemed a logical progression.27 And conversely, the members of the York Literary and Philosophical Society would not have been surprised to be the auditors for William Tiger' Dunlop's presentation of 'A Paper on Peat Mosses/ a discourse subsequently published in the Canadian Literary Magazine. If 'literature' and 'culture' were terms freighted with social significance, so too were the names for the societies themselves: 'society/ 'club/ and collocated terms such as 'lyceum' and 'athenaeum/ 'Lyceum' provides a particularly interesting example of the ways in which both the denotations and the connotations of such terms can change from decade to decade, often as groups from different social classes tussled over the term. The 'lyceum' in its earliest incarnation was a mutualinstruction group: that is, members with different areas of expertise would be responsible for imparting information and skills to the others. As expert lecturers were imported, the term soon began to denote an organization that sponsored public lectures, and then, in a somewhat

A Legacy of Literary Culture 13

metonymic shift, 'lyceum' came to refer less to the sponsoring organization and instead to the speakers' bureaux that organized the lecturers' circuit tours.28 Many small towns still have a 'Lyceum' movie theatre, the term having been chosen decades ago for its respectability and artistic associations. To make the matter more complicated still, early uses of the term often pick up either or both of the educational and natural resonances of the original lyceum where Aristotle held his perambulatory disquisitions. Thus Charles Fothergill, in his 1835 Proposed Lyceum of Natural History, and the Fine Arts, in the City of Toronto, U.C., selected the term Tyceum' to encompass the public lectures, picture gallery, museum, and instructive botanical gardens he envisaged for his ambitious (and never-realized) institution. By extension, in a more minor set of applications, Tyceum' can mean everything from a series of fine-art lectures to a cabinet of geological specimens. Any such shifts in terms had a shunting, even spinning, effect on the others, as in the exchange between the terms 'athenaeum' and Tyceum.' 'Athenaeum' had been preferred by gentlemen antiquarians and bibliophiles in England and Scotland; but once that term was appropriated in the 1830s by mechanics' and apprentices' institutes, elite groups began to take the name Tyceum' for its classical cachet, although the lyceum movement had been initiated by those very sorts of apprentices and mechanics. By the end of the century, 'athenaeum' was all over the linguistic map. The Toronto Athenaeum Club (1881) was a high-minded group whose members included the social reformer and physician Dr Emily Stowe, editor and educator Graeme Mercer Adam, and the freethinking Yonge Street bookseller Alfred Piddington; the group appears to have been controversial, for its political radicalism, its secularism, or its theosophical tendencies.29 The Athenaeum Club of Toronto, on the other hand, was subdivided into a Beefsteak Club and a Bicycle Club, and it advertised a Turkish Smoking Room (with Turkish Girls'), as well as a minstrel show and 'Freak and Curio Hall' (featuring 'Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy') at its 'Athenaeum Nation Show' of 1897.30 Even terms as seemingly neutral as 'club' and 'society' could occasion controversy by staking out contested social and intellectual terrain: women's groups were both denounced and mocked for taking the term 'club' (which connoted a men's group, often one with a public front) rather than the genteel 'society' or the feminine 'circle/ Thus while the names of organizations may need some glossing at the distance of a hundred years or more, they operated complexly for their own members as indicators of class location, political affiliation, and cultural intent.

14 Come, bright Improvement!

The names of literary societies do not, however, function as reliable indicators of the actual activities of a particular group, which may have been less, or much more, than literary. Nor do the statements of aims propounded in founding documents such as constitutions and inaugural addresses provide a sure guide to a group's policies and procedures, even after one has attempted to comb out their rhetorical tangles, of which a fair sample is provided by the Reverend Henry Scadding's 1846 valediction to the Toronto Athenaeum: I like to picture to myself the day, when our successors in the ATHENAEUM, - and it may be some of ourselves, - will assemble together in a building of their own; in some grave, dignified apartment, lined round lined high with books; where, ranged aloft along presses of our own dark Canadian walnut, - above tomes of Divinity, Philosophy and Song, - will calmly gaze down the still, death-like busts of their authors, - each wearing that solemn air of unperturbedness and content which might seem to shadow forth the fixedness of place in memories of men, which its illustrious prototype had won.31

And even where grand goals are more clearly propounded, I have found them to have been in the main unrealized or unrealizable, involving idealistic or even impossible plans for libraries and reading rooms, museums and journals, or - in a typically seriated set of images - envisaging the club's modest effort as the spark that will light the torch which in turn will kindle corresponding fires across the land. 'Not only would the lamp of education and the torch of knowledge be ere long found shedding their united genial light over every populous town and thriving village, but penetrating into every sequestered shanty in the lonely winderness!' Major Lachlan had confidently predicted.32 These statements are, however, doubly valuable, both for their airy conjurings of a cultural imaginary and for their sharply experienced sense of cultural lack. Minute books, memoirs, and particularly the local news and social columns of newspapers provide a stronger sense of the more modest organization and actual practices of these groups (although typically boosterish in tone, since such accounts of club meetings were in all probability written by one of the members in attendance). The published accounts of meetings give little sense of controversies within the group, but one need only attempt to track the cycles of splits, dissolutions, and phoenix-like foundings in order to

A Legacy of Literary Culture 15

sense the difficulties in maintaining cultural institutions in a society where the infrastructure was still under construction. And more: for in these minutes (in both what is written and what is between the lines) we find controversies about literature (and its morality), culture (and its utility), and education (and access to it), in which any group was inevitably intricated. While I hope to provide readers with an overview of the literary societies of Ontario at their various stages of development, I also wish to explore these struggles and conflicts in the arena of colonial culture. This emphasis, along with the varying depths of the archival pool, has dictated the choice of groups and the arrangement of material. A literary society, then, was more than a club for readers, a book club in our contemporary sense of the term. Only late in the century would the habit of convening to discuss a shared text, read by all the members, emerge as a common practice, in part because there would rarely be sufficient multiple copies to permit such shared discussion. Nor was it specifically a reading club, although examples of these have been found: in Ottawa late in the century, for example, a group of society women would gather together to read their individual books in companionable silence, and reading aloud continued as a form of entertainment both publicly and in the family sphere for much of the century.33 Nor - to continue this set of negative definitions - was a literary society a writers' organization (such as the later Canadian Authors Association), although members produced their share of essays and talks, and many authors later to become locally or even nationally known used these societies as a first forum, or even a continuing audience, for new materials. (Some societies even managed to produce literary magazines and, in one case, collectively authored a novella. The melodramatic Cora Ingram's Secret, by the Excelsior Literary Society of Binbrook, features two love plots, mistaken identities, a hidden fortune, and an Indian captivity, not to mention roman a clef references to prominent local citizens; members took it in turn to produce chapters.)34 And while some debating groups referred to themselves as literary societies, this was a minor use of the term. A literary society, then, had at its core a variety of 'literary' activities according to the nineteenth-century sense of that term. In other words, it dealt with the rhetorical arts in and of themselves and in relationship to a variety of other cultural or civic pursuits, which could cause a 'literary' society to engage in activities that seem to our eyes only tenuously connected. While this may be

16 Come, bright Improvement!

considered the core definition of a literary society, the shape and function of these associations shifted considerably over time. The arrangement of this book is roughly chronological, in order to explicate the ways in which the literary-society form and function developed throughout the century. In addition, I have attempted to give a sense of some other institutions and practices - circulating and 'social' libraries, 'penny readings' and popular recitations - which contextualize the literary societies in the wider reading culture of their times. The book begins with an account of some of the early societies of York/Toronto and their involvement in the political and cultural complexities of the pre-rebellion years, as the York Mechanics' Institute and the York Literary and Philosophical Society battled for supremacy on the cultural front in 1831. The histories of two other organizations of the 1830s, the Shakspeare Club (sic) and its successor, the Toronto Literary Club, evidence the emergence of a more specifically literary' form of organization.35 Cultural conflict and the relationship between a dedicated 'literary' study and other forms of educational and practical pursuits are also the themes of the next chapter, which considers two organizations in the Western District of the province in the 1840s and 1850s. The Western District Literary, Philosophical and Agricultural Association was an interestingly polymathic society, at least to those of us unaccustomed to having discussions of dactyls and drainage combined; its history is contrasted to that of a Windsor debating society for young African-Canadian men, an organization whose vexed fate also illustrates the urgencies and exigencies of cultural organization in the fugitive Black communities of mid-century. The last quarter of the nineteenth century brought new forms of literary study to Ontario and saw a dramatic rise in participation in these societies; three chapters cover these formats of the closing decades. The striking incursion of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle into Ontario is documented, as more than one hundred circles throughout the province followed the four-year course of higher study set by the Chautauqua Institution in New York State. The fifth chapter deals with the emergence of the mixed-sex and women's societies, beginning with a progressive society for young Quakers, the Olio of Coldstream. Two women's societies of quite different inclinations then appear: the Toronto Women's Literary Club (led by the suffragist Dr Emily Stowe), which combined community activism with its literary study, and the Angelica Shakespeare Club of Owen Sound, which sys-

A Legacy of Literary Culture 17

tematically applied the study of Shakespeare to the lives of its members. A sixth chapter looks at the emergence of a more expressly literary study at the close of the century, tracking the evolution of the Gait Scientific, Historical and Literary Society from an eclectic to a more specialized group of idealist aspirations, and examining the curriculum of a single-author society, the Toronto Browning Club, which was attempting to bring its own work into alignment with scholarship and university study of the day. These cases are presented in a roughly chronological order and were selected to illustrate different stages in the development of literary societies in Ontario. But terms such as 'growth' and 'spread' are appropriate only to a degree and should not suggest a smooth and always inclining trajectory. Interest in the activity was most intense in the 1830s and 1840s and again in the last twenty years of the century. At midcentury, cultural organizers appear to have been more concerned to develop public amenities (such as libraries and concert halls) and grander learned societies (such as the Canadian Institute - now the Royal Canadian Institute - or the Hamilton Association for the Advancement of Literature, Science and Art), although the venerable format of the men's debating society remained popular until the end of the 1870s. Of the more than three hundred societies for which dates of operation are known, a distinct minority were founded at mid-century: twenty were active in the 1850s (with societies established by the Black fugitives accounting for eight of these), another twenty date to the 1860s, and a further nineteen were founded or flourishing in the 1870s. Even then, some of these societies may have been for debate almost solely. Nor was there an even geographic diffusion: the bulk of the societies were located in the south and the west of the province, with proportionately few in the east despite the early settlement of that region (a distribution reflecting, one assumes, the demographics of the immigrants who settled this less desirable land). And while the societies tended to coalesce in sizeable towns at mid-century, the spread of the Chautauqua movement, which provided a program of study and even materials for scattered readers, led to the formation of many circles in smaller villages and rural areas in the 1880s. Other lacks and lumps in the geographic picture may indicate the state of record-keeping in a particular area, in the past and even today: does the large number of known literary and debating societies in the St Marys area reflect the cultural zeal of its inhabitants or just the diligence of local newspaper scribes? And which scenario was the case for Manitoulin, which, with

18 Come, bright Improvement!

two literary societies, a 'literary class/ and a Mechanics' Institute in simultaneous existence in the early 1880s, seems to have had more societies than its early population would warrant? These observations can be offered only provisionally, however, as we await a fuller tally of the Ontario societies. In addition, while the book offers selected societies as representative of different types of study and of models of organization, this focus does not imply that the clubs were simple or static. One apt example of a society in flux is provided by the Barrie Literary Society, founded in 1881, a group that fulfilled a distinctive civic role although restricted to men as members. (Its meetings at the Mechanics' Institute were so crowded that latecomers had to perch on the woodpile, if they could find a seat at all.) Unusually detailed minute books over a twelve-year period from 1881 to 1893 give a (sometimes wryly humorous) group self-portrait and tell a tale of changing ideals and practices.36 The society began with the classically broad rubric of 'cultivation of Literature and Public Speaking/ which at least initially appears to have meant a lengthy debate followed by some recitations to conclude, as was the practice of debating societies in the previous decade. Soon, however, the older members were complaining that the younger men came illprepared to debate and were undisciplined - even, at times, intemperate - once on their feet. This dissatisfaction, combined with the emerging interests of the newer members, would lead to the gradual decentring of debate. Like embattled Rome, a men's literary-society program would characteristically divide into three parts, and so did the Barrie Literary Society. It kept interest high by moving away from the arcane or artificial themes of the past to hot topics of the day, the more local the better: liquorlicensing laws, taxation of church property, the abolition of the Senate, educational policies in Ontario, and the ever-popular question of professions for women. A second part of the program consisted of essays prepared and read by members, and these tended to be more didactic than the debates and often of a historical nature: the history of the Loyalists or of the Children of Peace at Sharon, and the political history of the province. (The debates may have been more prominent at the open public sessions, and essay-reading featured at member-only gatherings, but it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the two types of meetings in the minute books.) A third component of the society's work was the delivery of readings and recitations, which often as not provided a pleasureable close to the program; the Barrie Literary Society

A Legacy of Literary Culture 19

seems to have numbered among its members some avid and accomplished recitationists. Vinegarish criticism dispensed by the society's official 'critic' kept the standards high. It was a tried-and-true formula, but the Barrie Literary Society did not follow it unquestioningly or unfailingly. It debated whether to allow most or all of its meetings to be open to the public, and in March of 1882 it decided to admit women to the open meetings, which were by now public entertainments. (Loose sheets of notes in the minute books suggest that some of the more progressive young men may even have proposed admitting women fully as members.) The group thought about its place in the cultural life of Barrie and asked itself, 'Is Barrie a Literary town and if not how can it be made such?'37 The group experimented with alternative activities, convening for a while as a mock parliament. And it became, over the course of the years, a more expressly literary society,' by the spring of 1883 commencing a series of essays on authors such as Dr Johnson, Burns, and Longfellow. Thomas More, Scott, Carlyle, and recent Canadian poetry would follow, then Tennyson, Byron, Dickens, Macaulay, Goldsmith, and omnibus expeditions: an 'Excursion Through the Realms of Poetry,' 'Recent Fiction,' and 'Critics and Criticism.' Debate topics, too, would take a literary turn: the morality of the stage, the utility of novel reading, and the merits of modern languages versus the classics. In addition, over the twelve-year existence of the group, its readings and recitation pieces also evolved to reflect the sorts of literary interests indicated by the study subjects. While the group would always love those old chestnuts from the literary grove, standard platform pieces gradually gave way to selections with which a modern reader is more likely to be familiar: Arnold, Carlyle, Poe, Tennyson, and the perennially popular Dickens. A listing of the Barrie Literary Society's reading and recitation pieces, which provides an interesting index of popular taste of the period, can be found in appendix B. However, while becoming more focused in its interests, the Barrie society remained an eclectic, vital, irreverent, and entertaining group, judging from the minute books. Its high spirits contrast to the highmindedness of its successor organization, a Literary Union, whose members would exhaustively cover a single author such as Oliver Wendell Holmes (his Americanisms, philosophy, religion, life, and literary qualities) in a single studious meeting.38 The Literary Union's public entertainment in March 1897 - essays on 'Poets of Quebec' and

20 Come, bright Improvement!

Toets of Ontario/ capped by a reading of Bliss Carman's 'Low Tide on Grand Pre' - did not have the drawing power of a debate on women's intellectual inadequacies followed by drolleries from Dickens. This group lacked the Vim' of the Barrie Literary Society, editorialized the Barrie Northern Advance.39 It is a further sign of the cyclical nature of literary-society culture that in 1902 the Advance bemoaned the fact that Barrie had 'no literary societies, either civic or in connection with the schools or churches, nor have we one debating society/ and it called for the revival of such groups.40 Of course, the literary societies did not cease in 1900, as shown by those that continue to the present day. Many societies began with the new century, and a number of these were also long-lived. The Century Club (Toronto, a society for debating and oratory that encouraged poetry and gave short-story awards) and the Ruskin Literary and Debating Society (Toronto) were both founded in 1900; the Century Club stayed the course into the 1950s, and the still-convening Ruskin Literary and Debating Society is currently compiling a centenary history. The Tennyson Club (Picton) began in 1902 and is still in existence today; the Huntsville Literary Club was founded the following year and remained active for fifty-five years.41 The Everton Literary Society (1902), the Winona Literary Society (1905), the Fort Frances Debating Society (1908), the Twentieth Century Literary Club (Chatham, 1908), which continued for more than seventy years, the Lyceum Club (Owen Sound, 1909), the Tuesday Literary Club (Toronto, 1909), which was active for more than fifty years, the Peterborough Shakespeare Club (1912), whose women members are still meeting today, the Buxton Literary Society (1915), the Napanee Musical and Literary Club (1919), and a Jewish 'Reading Circle' (Ottawa, 1922) are some of the many societies that form the beginnings of a bridge from the nineteenth century to our own day.42 This bridge is not a smoothly continuous span: many groups ceased activities or converted their energies to war work during the First World War, and did not reconvene once peace was declared. Although figures for groups after the turn of the century are not available, one would expect a decline in women's participation in accordance with a decreasing availability of domestic servants (a development accelerated by the changing labour demands of the war); women of the more modest strata of the middle class may have found themselves with less time for self-improvement.43 The natural cycles of ambition and attrition through which any group inevitably rolled also took their toll. As

A Legacy of Literary Culture 21

well, the new century brought different models for educational and cultural work, which would supplant the literary-society model to a degree. In urban centres particularly, the early years of the twentieth century produced societies with a more specialized mission, a strong public presence, and their own premises. In Toronto, for example, the Women's Art Association, the Women's Musical Club, the Arts and Letters Club, the Heliconian Club, and the University Women's Club were all founded within a short period of time. All are active today.44 The year 1900 does provide an approximate termination date for a particularly coherent, widespread, and - at the end of the century intense process of development for the literary societies. (By 1897 even the Rat Portage Miner and News could congratulate the local collegiate on finally achieving its 'Lit.')45 To gain a sense of the depth of this development, one need only note that two literary societies, a Chautauqua circle, and a society for arranging the visits of lecturers and elocutionists were operating simultaneously in the small settlement of Coldstream in the middle of the 1880s. Or one can read a day's worth of local social columns in the Woodstock Evening Sentinel-Review, reporting the successes and struggles of societies in Holbrook, Princeton, and Springford. Or one can see a single issue of the Dutton Advance in January 1890 contain three different items, each announcing the formation of a new literary society in a nearby hamlet - Coyne's Corners, Crinan, and Willey's Corners.46 My own research has uncovered twentyfive different literary societies for St Marys (Perth County) and its surrounding villages in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. To attempt to account for the growing popularity of these organizations is part of my purpose here. In examining these societies and their memberships, organization, and practices, my main form of analysis has been social-historical. I have been concerned to establish how people undertook this particular form of educational activity in early Ontario, and why they believed that they and their communities could benefit from it. The concluding chapter, however, is an attempt to make sense of the societies in some more specialized ways, and to align this study with several areas of contemporary scholarship. This chapter relates the societies to current problems in literary historiography, history-of-the-book studies, readerresponse theory, and English literature pedagogy, in order to see how analysis of the literary societies may both draw upon and inflect those areas of study. A concluding 'Resource Guide' provides brief histories and sources of primary and secondary information for approximately

22 Come, bright Improvement!

325 literary societies in the years 1820-1900 - far more than I have been able to cover in the more analytic chapters. I hope to entice others to learn more about these societies and to discover new ones. The local historians to whose knowledge I am indebted have often focused their efforts on genealogy, architectural history, histories of settlement, and the building of a municipal infrastructure. To date, the literary culture of towns, with the exception of libraries, does not seem to have been of much interest for local historians and historical societies, whose efforts have often been directed to describing (and preserving) material culture. Literary historians, on the other hand, have often honed in on texts rather than organizations, on writing rather than reading, and on national or regional patterns of development and distribution rather than the local. I believe that both groups have much to learn, and much to contribute by turning their attention to the culture of small towns and villages of early Canada, and that they have much to gain by working together.

CHAPTER TWO

EARLY SOCIETIES IN TORONTO

Instead of Mechanics' Institutes, Athenaeums, Public Reading Rooms, Apprentices' Libraries, Agricultural and Horticultural Societies, Forums, Literary Clubs, and other Institutions of a similar nature, to delight, instruct and elevate ...we have a motley collection of upstart would-be gentlemen to set us the fashions - a race alike despised and despising the great body of the Canadian people. William Lyon Mackenzie (1827)1 Generally speaking, this is not the time or place for forming new Societies, and every thing with the cant phrase 'literary and scientific,' is sure to stink under the nose in Kingston, as well as in all other sensible places. Daily British Whig (Kingston, 1849)2

The Reverend John Strachan, that future bastion of establishment church and state and school, began his Upper Canadian career on more modest terms. But even while working as a tutor in Kingston in the early settlement years, he had an eye to his own, and Upper Canada's, future. He was optimistic that instruction and its attendant virtues could easily be transplanted to Lake Ontario's northern shore, just as Thomas Campbell, in The Pleasures of Hope, had envisaged 'Improvement' and the handmaid arts having a swift flight to the edges of Lake Erie. Indeed, according to these 'Verses written August 1802 ...' the new terrain - free of the decaying detritus and alluring distractions of an impractical classicism - offered a clear vista for education:

24 Come, bright Improvement! What tho' no columns, busts, or crumbling fanes Exalt the pensive soul to classic strains, What tho' no Nymphs o'er silvan scenes presides, No wat'ry God the rapid river guides, No woodland groves resound Diana's name, Or artless shepherds Pan's protection claim; Here simple nature nobler thoughts inspires And views of grandeur banish low desires. Attend, your country calls. Delay no more To plant instruction on Ontario's shore ... At Kingston, bards may glow with Milton's fire Or seek a calmer bliss from Dryden's lyre; A Bacon, too, may grace some future age, Or Newton reading nature's inmost page.3

Strachan assigned these lines as a recitation piece for two of his students on the occasion of their public examination.4 No doubt the proud parents were flattered by the inference that their sons might be New World Newtons and Miltons if nurtured by the kind of teaching that Strachan could provide. But the task, to 'plant instruction on Ontario's shore/ proved to be distinctly more difficult than the poetic imagination allowed, as Strachan himself would later discover in the course of struggles to found several institutions - and to impede others founded on principles uncongenial to him. The early decades of the nineteenth century, particularly the years surrounding the Rebellion of 1837-8, proved to be a particularly unpropitious time for the founding of new educational enterprises in Upper Canada, as the cultural pioneers themselves were the first to remark. The ebb and flow of settlement, an unstable economy and undeveloped infrastructure, and frequent outbreaks of disease were some inhibiting factors. Paramount, perhaps, were the more pressing concerns of the political sphere in the years surrounding the rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada. Many initiatives for cultural improvement never developed past the stage of resounding resolutions; those that made a tentative beginning suffered from a lack of interest on the part of the Family Compact squirearchy. And as we shall see in the case of the York Literary and Philosophical Society, the patronage of the elite, when they chose to offer it, could be even more suffocating than their neglect. As a result, cultural commentators of the early years write in an

Early Societies in Toronto 25

oddly two-toned way, both enthusiastically forward-looking and morbidly elegiac, gazing into the future over the ruins of past endeavours. In his survey The Canadas in 1841, for example, garrison officer Richard Bonnycastle would attribute to the 'peculiar state of society' the failure of 'various attempts to get up respectable races, and to establish a theatre, and a winter assembly for dancing/ as well as plans 'of a much higher and more useful kind, which have been made by persons attached to science and the arts.'5 (Bonnycastle spoke from experience: a rare example of an officer from modest origins, he was an accomplished artist, antiquarian, and amateur scientist, whose keen interest in education had fuelled involvements with a short-lived art association, a never-realized observatory, and the lyceum scheme of the quixotic Charles Fothergill.) One year later Robert Lachlan would deliver his carrot-and-stick exhortation to the members of the Western District Literary, Philosophical and Agricultural Association, drawing a 'melancholy picture' of the rural settler's 'discreditable state of unaspiring ignorance, ending, not unfrequently, in a feeling of apathetic distaste, if not contempt, for everything in the shape of acquired knowledge/6 He would end with a 'consolatory' sketch of Canada's new literary societies, but (with the exception of the Mechanics' Institutes of Kingston, London, and Toronto) Lachlan had to reach to Lower Canada for his examples, and he could speak only in a rueful footnote of the fate of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Upper Canada: 'somehow or other, this Institution, though of so much promise, has gradually become dormant, if not altogether extinct/7 And progress, where made, was often slow: the ever-optimistic Reverend Henry Scadding presumably intended to hearten the members of the Toronto Athenaeum when he informed them that their book holdings in 1846 already 'exceed[ed] the Royal Library of France in 1364, and the University Library of Oxford in 1300.'8 Yet despite the fizzled-out plans and failures, towns such as York and Kingston could boast a creditable state of cultural development, at least when measured against United States towns of similar size in that period.9 In addition to the many fraternal, benevolent, and agriculturalimprovement associations of the day, the remaining records show thirteen literary societies in the pre-1845 period (and there surely were more), as well as the book clubs and debating societies that predate or parallel them.10 The earliest associations of the nineteenth century were more concerned with sharing or procuring scarce and costly print resources than

26 Come, bright Improvement!

with conducting literary conversation (although such groups may well have undertaken activities that are not recorded, and such discussions may well have taken place, given the literary inclinations and connections of some of the founding members). These were, quite literally, book clubs.11 As early as 1822, the agrarian and educational reformer Robert Gourlay, in his Statistical Account of Upper Canada, noted the spread of such book clubs or 'social libraries.' While educated settlers were 'generally poor, in consequence of the revolution,' Gourlay wrote, and while reading and educational matters had fallen by the wayside, in more recent years '[a] sense of these disadvantages excited desires for surmounting them/ 'Books are procured in considerable numbers. In addition to those with which particular persons and families are supplied, social libraries are introduced in various places; and subscribers at a small expense thus enjoy the benefit of many more volumes than they could individually afford to purchase.'12 The establishment of just such a social library is recorded by Otonabee settler Frances Stewart in the same year as the publication of Gourlay's account. A close friend of Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth and later of author Catharine Parr Traill, who had also moved to the Douro area, she had passed through Cobourg on the way to her new home and noted an interesting educational initiative: 'The people here have a book society among themselves. Each member pays four dollars per annum. The Rev. Mr. Caulay [sic] has lent us some books, a few old indeed, but as we read them again they bring to mind things which happened when we read them first; it is a melancholy pleasure [emphasis Stewart's].'13 Although settled in the bush, Frances Stewart would enjoy unusually good access to printed materials: literary families in Ireland to which she was connected dispatched welcome shipments of books, while Maria Edgeworth not only sent her own novels on publication but used her influence to allow letters and newspapers to be forwarded to the Stewart family through the Colonial Office.14 The journals of Thornhill settler Mary O'Brien (then Capper) give a detailed picture of the difficulties of establishing such a society, both in generating support and in obtaining the desired materials from England. A diary entry in February 1829 records the beginning of her organizational work in partnership with sisters-in-law Mary and Fanny: Mary and I both set to work on our books till dinner & after dinner I promised myself a treat of German ... Mr. Thorne returned to tea & we passed the evening gaily enough ... and we put the finishing stroke to the

Early Societies in Toronto 27 arrangement of our book society, which will now, I believe, proceed forthwith, tho' the books cannot be issued till the autumn. It is in most respects on the plan of the Stowey. Mr. Thorne is to be secretary, with which he is much pleased, tho' he plays modest about it. Our canvass for members is not quite concluded but I believe we have secured 7.15

Born and raised near Glastonbury, England, Mary Gapper clearly was taking as her model the Stowey Book Society, which had been founded by the radically minded tanner (and intimate of S.T. Coleridge) Thomas Poole in Nether Stowey in 1793. The Tory Gapper would not have wished to emulate Poole's reading tastes - political pamphlets and republican writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft were among his early selections - but she must have sensed a workable format that could be adapted to dramatically different circumstances. A men's society at least in origin (women may have been permitted some borrowing privileges if not actual membership), the Stowey Book Society circulated lists of possible purchases from which selections would be chosen by the members. (Consensus could be difficult: not all members shared Poole's inclination for revolutionaries and Romantics.) An annual dinner at a local inn culminated in an auction of older materials to permit fresh acquisitions.16 That Mary Gapper and her sisters-in-law would be attempting a similar organization is evidence of a distinctive, if shortlived, gender shift in the development of libraries in the early century: women would often be the prime movers behind such organizations, although they and the format they favoured would be displaced at mid-century, as men's organizations formulated grander plans for reading rooms and other early forms of civic libraries. The women's efforts to secure patronage for the society continued throughout the winter and spring months, as they travelled on horseback to neighbouring houses: 'I went with M[ary] and Fjanny] to carry the rules of our Book Society to Squire Miles ... He approved the plan but explaining to us that he had already spent many dollars this year in the purchase of Paley's work, Josephus, &c., at the instance of some of his neighbours who were to share the advantages & the expense, he gently declined joining us at present.'17 Their discernible disappointment caused Squire Miles to change his mind, but the struggles continued: 'Mr. Thorne called with the Quarterly Review - we should have had the society's books long since but either his order has been lost or some blunder made as they are not arrived.'18 A further ten months would pass - and Mary O'Brien would

28 Come, bright Improvement!

now be a married woman in a new home - before she could record that they had 'just received a vol. of Heber's life, the first fruits of our book society which has occupied us between whiles/19 O'Brien carried this perseverance to a new settlement in the more remote community of Shanty Bay on Lake Simcoe, writing in 1835 that 'in the evening, we have been making out some rules for a library which we have long projected & which we intend to set in train to-morrow when we expect a good many of our neighbours to meet here for the formation & encouragement of a temperance society.'20 What these observers and diarists are recording is the beginning of the movement from 'intensive' to 'extensive' reading culture in Upper Canada, to use the terms frequently employed by scholars who study the histories of literacy and of reading. Literary historians often argue that, during a period roughly spanning the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the first twenty years of the nineteenth, the characteristic 'common' reader would cease to be engaged in repeated, often lifelong, reading of a limited number of books (the Bible, perhaps other religious tracts or texts, almanacs, and practical treatises of use for farming or crafts). Rather, most readers would begin to peruse a much wider range of materials, both monographic and periodical.21 These terms may be more useful for classifying individual readers than for describing the reading culture of a society as a whole: early York, for example, would simultaneously have had both an educated elite with relatively well stocked personal collections and labourers and farmers for whom access to print materials was severely restricted. Even then, a further caveat is needed: workers and poor farmers may well have had access to more varied and timely texts than their own meagre holdings would suggest, in the form of newspapers, broadsheets, and public readings and performances. And as we can see in the cases of Frances Stewart and Mary O'Brien, 'extensive' readers might well find themselves living in circumstances where their form of reading could not easily be supported. What can be argued with more certainty is that 'extensive' reading became publicly heralded as an advance in this period - praised, defended, and its necessary conditions argued for. The literary societies and related organizations are one manifestation of this transition, but also causal to it, in propagating the benefits of broad reading and facilitating access to books and periodicals. The process was circular: the need of a community to collect and distribute materials grew, as did the widening print demands of its individual members.22 At the same

Early Societies in Toronto 29

time, however, observers of this shift in reading practices could strike a cautionary note, as sounded in this address To the Public' in the first issue of their publication the Victoria Magazine by John Dunbar Moodie and his better-known wife, Susanna Moodie, both also denizens of the Peterborough area.23 They would cast the two types of reading culture as a distinction between 'town' and 'country' readers, the one scanning a greater range of publications for novelty and for information, the other living philosophically in a small circle of book companions. In the town, they wrote, 'a vast deal of information circulates through the mass of the people in the course of their every-day intercourse,' whereas in the country 'the inhabitants acquire their knowledge at longer intervals - not in a continuous stream, as in the towns - and have therefore more time to make it their own by arranging and connecting the detached facts as they reach their minds. Their habits are more solitary, and they are therefore more reflective.' 'It must be admitted,' the Moodies concluded, 'that a little reading with much reflection, is better than much reading with little reflection.'24 But the distinction between 'extensive' and 'intensive' readers could not be aligned with the geographical precision delineated by John and Susanna Moodie. A case study of one rural community's attempt to create the preconditions for extensive reading is provided by the soundly educated settlers of Ennotville (a hamlet just north of Guelph). Unlike the struggling societies described above, the Ennotville Library seems to have received strong support from the beginning. It was - and remains - the cornerstone of its rural community, the last remaining Ontario example of an early-nineteenth-century 'social' library.25 It began with informal exchanges of books among members as early as 1829. A newspaper reporter of the 1920s was able to record a first-hand recollection of the earliest days from 'Mrs Hudson, of Elora, whose mother was one of the members of the early library': she can remember not only the stories her mother told of the beginnings, but has a clear recollection of being sent to change her book. With the brevity with which so often great stories are told, Mrs. Hudson described the scene in the Beattie farmhouse when she and John Beattie read, turn and turn about, to the assembled company, the light of the single candle eked out by the flare from a little torch made of birch bark, the one holding the torch while the other read. By and by the families began to lend books to one another, most of them the treasures they had brought with them from the home across the ocean. Later still - this was about 1847 - each

30 Come, bright Improvement! family contributed one or more volumes and put them in the schoolhouse, which, Mrs. Hudson said, was in the woods at the back of George Cattanach's farm.26 The contents of this original library collection, then called the Lower Nichol Library, can be tracked by means of the copperplate accession numbers carefully inscribed in these earliest volumes, as well as by the bookplates in some of the donated items.27 The 450 volumes of this earliest collection include many works of theology, moral philosophy, history, and practical instruction, and almost one hundred volumes of 'The Family Library.' There is also a healthy sampling of literary authors: Byron, Collins, Cowper, Gray, Johnson, Pope, Scott, Shakespeare, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as poetry collections, Henry Tuckerman's Characteristics of Literature, and a run of the Spectator. The move of the Lower Nichol Library to Ennotville is recorded in a local legend. Purportedly, one (Irish) resident refused to pay the fine for soiling his books after he tumbled into a muddy ditch, insisting that a better location was needed and offering funds for another building. Another (Scottish) settler - inspired, it would seem, by a combination of local loyalty and ethnic rivalry - vowed to best him, on the condition that the one who raised the most funds could declare the new location. With the money raised by this drive, augmented by a grant of £25 from the provincial legislature, the Lower Nichol Library moved in 1856 to the long stone hall that houses it still.28 In the same year, an Ennotville Farmers and Mechanics (sic) Institute was constituted to oversee the library. Its goals were the generic ones of 'the advancement of Literature and the diffusion of useful knowledge/ and topics of religious or political controversy were also, quite characteristically, excluded from consideration, but the founders specified that 'all the instructions delivered, whether by lectures or in classes under its sanction shall be based on the distinct recognition of the Authority of Divine Revelation.'29 Indeed, the Ennotville Library would house a Sunday school for a century and a temperance organization for fifty years, in addition to other civic and social functions. Deciding to remain independent when libraries amalgamated under regional restructuring in 1967, the Ennotville Historical Library (as it is now known) remains the only free-standing public library in the province, in a remarkable continuation of the 'social library' format for more than 150 years.30 While the formation of a social library was a goal for some settlers, less formal methods for sharing rare print resources were also avail-

Early Societies in Toronto 31

able, as Catharine Parr Traill noted in her Backwoods of Canada (1836). The public library at York and the circulating library at Cobourg 'might just as well be on the other side of the Atlantic for any access we can have to them/ she had wryly informed her English relatives, presumably in response to a comment on the latest literary news. Instead, in the settlement 'every settler's library may be called a circulating one, as their books are sure to pass from friend to friend in due rotation/31 However, the existence of exchanges among well-schooled immigrants such as the Traills, Stricklands, and Stewarts should not obscure the fact that ownership of and even access to print materials was severely limited for poorer farmers, labourers, and even skilled workers and artisans. The importance of the Mechanics' Institutes, not only for their members but for the towns in which they were situated, would lie in their provision of an early form of public library service, a function which in many instances overshadowed or even replaced the courses and lectures for which they were originally founded. Even well into the century, poorer settlers and new immigrant groups would continue to club together to share their collections or to purchase prohibitively expensive items such as an Encyclopaedia Britannica. As late as 1886, for example, we find the Germania Society, a group of German settlers in Elmira who pooled their scanty resources of eight books and $36 to form a library.32 In addition to the book clubs, debating societies made their appearance early in the century, although the date of the first cannot be established with any certainty. One well-established group was the Niagara Literary Society (1835?), which, despite its more global title, was a dedicated debating club composed of some sixty young men. The signatories to its published rules and regulations declared themselves 'deeply impressed with a sense of the benefit and utility likely to result, from the organization of a Debating Society at Niagara/33 And indeed, the group appears to have fulfilled its function of preparing young men for public life: early Niagara historian Janet Carnochan spotted among the signatories 'the names of one blamed in the Caroline affair, a noted Q.C., a judge, an eminent horticulturist, a member of a noted family of French origin, one of the fiery young men who threw Mackenzie's type into the bay, a noted merchant, a banker, a captain, a grammar school teacher/34 For men from more modest backgrounds, the debating societies were sometimes the sole route to educational advancement, as demonstrated in the diary entries of the eighteen-year-old autodidact Alexander Bickerton Edmison. A rural schoolmaster in the late 1850s

32 Come, bright Improvement! and barely graduated from school himself, Edmison documents his repeated (and repeatedly unsuccessful) efforts to teach himself Latin and logic, to read Shakespeare and Herodotus, and to trisect a triangle (the failed work of an entire week). His emotional oscillations from resolution to remorse, from lassitude back to fortitude, are affecting even at this distance of time. The debating society of the local Band of Hope provided welcome intellectual sustenance: "The debate on "Napoleon and Wellington" has done me more good than a "Month's Schooling" - it made me a better teacher, a better talker, a better speaker, and a man of more knowledge/ Edmison recorded.35 Canniff Haight, an amateur historian and a memoirist, recalled another debating group, roughly contemporary to the Niagara Literary Society, in his 1885 memoir Country Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago. It gives a wry, yet affectionate, picture of early rhetorical culture in the archetypal 'County of ': Debating classes also met and discussed grave questions, upon such oldfashioned subjects as these: 'Which is the more useful to man, wood or iron?' 'Which affords the greater enjoyment, anticipation or participation?' 'Which was the greater general, Wellington or Napoleon?' Those who were to take part in the discussion were always selected at a previous meeting, so that all that had to be done was to select a chairman and commence the debate. I can give from memory a sample or two of these first attempts. 'Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I rise to make a few remarks on this all important question - ahem - Mr. President, this is the first time I ever tried to speak in public, and unaccustomed as I am to - to - ahem. Ladies and gentlemen, I think our opponents are altogether wrong in arguing that Napoleon was a greater general than Wellington - ahem - I ask you, Mr. President, did Napoleon ever thrash Wellington? Didn't Wellington always thrash him, Mr. President? Didn't he whip him at Waterloo and take him prisoner? and then to say he is a greater general than Wellington - why, Mr. President, he couldn't hold a candle to him. Ladies and Gentlemen, I say that Napoleon wasn't a match for him at all. Wellington licked him every time - and - yes, licked him every time. I can't think of any more, Mr. President, and I will take my seat, Sir, by saying that I'm sure you will decide in our favour from the strong arguments our side has produced.' After listening to such powerful reasoning, some one of the older spectators would ask Mr. President to be allowed to say a few words on some other important question to be debated, and would proceed to air his

Early Societies in Toronto 33 eloquence and instruct the youth on such a topic as this: 'Which is a greater evil, a scolding wife or a smoky chimney?'36

But at the conclusion of his comic account, Haight acknowledged the benefits of such organizations: 'These meetings were generally well attended, and conducted with considerable spirit. If the discussions were not brilliant, and the young debater often lost the thread of his argument - in other words, got things "mixed" - he gained confidence, learned to talk in public, and to take higher flights.'37 James Young, an important proponent of adult education who would preside over the Association of Mechanics' Institutes of Ontario, also looked back affectionately on a backwoods debating society of 1834.38 'Nothing could better illustrate the character of the early settlers of Dumfries/ he observed, 'than efforts at intellectual improvement under such formidable circumstances/39 By the light of burning pine knots when candles were unavailable, the men of Dumfries would debate questions 'characteristic of the time': '(1) Which is the most benefit to mankind, Agriculture or Commerce? (2) Whether it is the profane man or the hypocrite most injury [sic] to society? (3) Which is the most destructive element, fire or water? (4) Whether does wood or iron most benefit mankind? and (5) Would a ship made of iron sink or swim?'40 These brain-teasers would test mental agility and permit comic wit in debate.41 The convivial club also held an annual dinner which was preceded by the group purchase of a sheep, to provide haggis, a roast, and joints of meat; it had to send all the way to Dundas for the oatmeal to make the haggis. The groups were clearly intended to provide young men with both further education and the rhetorical skills necessary for participation in public life. The debating-society template would prove to be an enduring one: the pledge taken by members of the Literary and Debating Club of Hamilton in 1893, for example, (included in the appendices to this book) provides a classic and little-altered list of the benefits that would accrue through 'cultivation of that noblest of all arts, the art of oratory and human expression/ By late in the century, this function was extended to the literary clubs for women. Seeking to make a form of higher education for themselves, women would also use literarysociety meetings to hone their debating skills and to master rules of order and parliamentary procedure. But it was the role of such groups in the moral formation of young men that was the most frequently articulated benefit. The Western Herald, and Farmer's Magazine put the

34 Come, bright Improvement!

equation bluntly: 'When a young man has acquired a love of reading, and of course a relish for intellectual pleasures, he has one of the best preservatives against dissipation/42 The Christian Guardian editorialized in 1833 that 'manliness, order, and decorum' would result from young men participating in the 'school of reason' which a well-run debating society should be. Extempore debate should be discouraged; prior study and arrangement of materials should be prized over mere eloquence; the young men should produce and read 'their own written essays, criticisms, or productions/ The Guardian's emphasis on 'written' stresses the need for considered preparation.43 The function of the literary society in dampening and channelling the unruly energies of young men is apparent in J.D. Edgar's address, where he speaks of the literary society as a 'mental gymnasium/ At this point, however, his language is barely restrained: We will find in these pleasures nothing coarse, or degrading, nothing that fills one with satiety from too frequent indulgence, or with after regrets of time misspent... What is more exciting than to share in the throbbings of a young Debater, who, as he nervously begins, feels ready to sink under a sense of his own incapacity, but, as he gradually warms to his subject forgets all this, and those ideas that seemed obscure and doubtful... [are} quickened into life and moulded into form.44

The intent to transfer vital energies into 'civilized' pursuits can scarcely be more apparent than in Edgar's image of the throbbing, quickened, young orator. We may note, in passing, that the question of the relationship of masculinity - or 'gentlemanliness' - to literary study would remain an undercurrent of such discussions for many years. In the mid-1860s, for example, a lengthy debate between 'Senex' and 'Senior' occupied the letters columns of two Peterborough papers, as to whether individuals should be named in newspaper accounts of the Peterborough Literary Club's meetings. Should gentlemen allow their names to appear in print? Should a distinction be made between private meetings and public entertainments? Was it proper to publicly comment on the rhetorical efforts of other club members? And - more pragmatically would employees think it seemly that the names of their clerks were in print, and would those clerks wish their employers to know the amusements that occupied their evenings?45 While the mid-century concern seems to have been over the propriety of these meetings (or their

Early Societies in Toronto 35 reportage), later in the century an additional worry for the literary societies' 'feminizing' effect had appeared. This was a result, no doubt, of the emergence of the many women's literary societies in the period. J. Cawdor Bell's 1892 novel, Two Knapsacks: A Novel of Canadian Summer Life, begins with two dandyish members of the Victoria and Albert Literary Society deciding to head for the open road; their hiking adventures are appealingly bohemian, but the outdoor life makes them into men. However, at the point where Edgar is writing, the use of such societies in channelling masculine energies is at issue. In addition, his unintentionally sexualized description of the processes of composition and delivery suggests that the dangers may lie equally in rhetoric as in the rhetorician. Both the cautions of the Christian Guardian and Edgar's own imagery remind us that the attitude to literary study was not unconditionally positive for much of the century: such study could inflame as well as tame. This ambivalence is to be found even in the discourses of literature's most ardent advocates, and a man of such broad - even scattered - interests as the Reverend Henry Scadding could caution, 'Letters present such a wide, undefined field, that it is a great risk for the mind to plunge out into the midst thereof, without having a very distinct object in view.'46 Rhetorical study could steady and regulate, but itself required regulation. This ambivalence about literary study was, not surprisingly, at its most pronounced in the years surrounding the rebellions, when the debate over the morality of literature was compounded by anxieties over the possible effects of educational enfranchisement. Just as opinion varied as to the impact of literature on the minds and morals of young men, so too there were differing schools of thought as to the political effects of literary societies: would they regulate or revolutionize? Writing at the moment when the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec was first contemplated, one anonymous contributor to the Canadian Magazine and Literary Repository had advocated literary societies as both an agent and an indicator of political stability: 'the establishment of these societies and their flourishing state, is not only a proof of the civilised state of the country, but also furnishes a means of judging the stability of its political condition/ The literary societies were always the first to sink beneath the blows of revolution, the essayist darkly remarked.47 Conversely, the role of literary societies in encouraging divergent views, in spreading new information, and in building a public voice

36 Come, bright Improvement!

was a source of their broad appeal. In his study of the rise of public opinion in early Ontario, historian Jeffrey McNairn has demonstrated that such voluntary organizations not only diffused liberal ideas but perhaps more significantly - were integral to the development of the concept of 'public opinion' and, indeed, the concept of a 'public' as a political entity. In the voluntary societies Upper Canadians grew accustomed to coming together to further common goals; to working with others of different social, occupational, religious, or national backgrounds; to devising and abiding by mutually agreed-upon rules; to discussing topics of common concern; to speaking in front of others; to listening to others with opposing views; and to disagreeing without attacking the speaker, offending others, or trying to mandate uniformity. In voluntary associations people learned and practised the norms of reasoned discussion and mutual respect vital to sustained public deliberation.48

How to integrate such opinion was at the core of the constitutional debates of the 1840s and 1850s; the seed of such discussions was sown by the early literary and fraternal organizations. They would retain this role for later cultural constituencies - working men, African Canadians, and women - seeking enfranchisement. Thus whether conservative, reformist, or unaligned, whether cultural, benevolent, or tendentious, the societies were inevitably permeated with political considerations; such is the case with the literary societies next to be discussed in this chapter. The more-or-less simultaneous foundation of a Literary and Philosophical Society and a Mechanics' Institute in pre-rebellion York indicates the way in which the 'cultural front' suddenly opened in that town, while the Tory takeover of the Literary and Philosophical Society to gain a conservative counterweight to the Mechanics' Institute shows how that front could itself become a battleground. The Shakspeare Club and its successor, the Toronto Literary Club, provide examples of more private, social societies that still found themselves manoeuvring in the heated public atmosphere of the pre-rebellion years. What was the first literary society in York (Toronto) or indeed in Upper Canada? Seniority appears to belong to the York Literary Society (1820, also known as the Literary Society of York), a group of ten young men, some still in school, who came together every second Monday for the

Early Societies in Toronto 37

goal of 'mental improvement.' Although several of the members were men of letters, this group was by all appearances a debating society primarily (with some reading of essays, at least in the later years).49 The sparse evidence for this group suggests that the debates were on matters pertaining to the law (one debate topic concerned 'the liability of a master to an action for damage done by his servant in driving on the wrong side of the road/ for example).50 However, the group merits consideration here as the first appearance of the literary-society model in Upper Canada, as far as can be determined. The members of the York Literary Society were from or would become the fledgling city's elite (Ridouts, Cartwrights, and Baldwins); membership was limited to gentlemen, and those members seem to have been linked by family connections or a shared interest in the practice of law. It is possible that members stayed in the society until they were admitted to the bar, so the society may have been restricted to students and clerks. The torturously complex rules and constitution the members developed show the importance they deeded to rational discussion and orderly governance, but otherwise give little insight into the particularities of the group.51 Only a glimpse remains, in the letters of James Hunter Samson to his friend Robert Baldwin. Samson, now apprenticing in the law at Kingston, has heard some rumours of the York Literary Society: Chewit gives me a very unfavourable discription [sic] of the state of your worshipful society: from his portrait I would consider it very much degenerated: and that the heads thereof did not conduct themselves with due decorum and dignity. But possibly I judge rashly: he may be an unworthy and unruly member. I shall however when I come to York turn radical, and I expect that all loyal and trusty [?] members will unite in lopping excrescences and rooting rottenness from having place in a structure formed with so much deliberation & talent.52

Despite its failings, the York Literary Society served as an inspiration to Samson, and the young men of Kingston decided to follow suit in the spring: 'We have established a society in imitation of yours, called the "Students Society." We have seven members on our Rolls, but seldom more than 4 attending ... Could we establish a correspondence, and could it be beneficial to both or to either society? The head of our Society we term Dictator[?]. We discuss general principles of law and history. Meet once a week/53

38 Come, bright Improvement!

The societies were soon linked as well by membership ties; on their removal to Kingston, both John Cartwright and Robert Cartwright would become members of the Students Society. The dissolution of the Kingston society cannot be dated, but the York society was in existence at least until the end of 1825. Several of its members, such as Robert Baldwin and James Cawdell, would become involved with associations that had more open memberships, wider mandates, and literary inclinations. But the sort of society formed by the young men of York and Kingston had a longer heritage. Their counterparts of 1876 would found the Osgoode Hall Literary and Legal Society. Now responsible for coordinating the professional, social, and athletic activities of law students, producing a yearbook, and dealing with questions pertaining to the welfare of the students, this organization is now called the Legal and Literary Society of Osgoode Hall, the switched terms reflecting the development of its original mandate.54 The York Literary Society and the Students Society are the only two groups to appear on the historian's horizon throughout the 1820s, a clear indication that the priorities of the settlers were focused elsewhere. That two societies should spring up almost simultaneously in 1831 and begin battling for cultural supremacy gives an equally dramatic indication of the ways in which the cultural terrain was now open and ready for contestation. The York Literary and Philosophical Society and the York Mechanics' Institute were founded according to two very different models already developed in England and Scotland. Although literary societies were to be encountered as early as the Elizabethan era, they became more firmly established in the eighteenth century: societies of gentlemen bibliophiles and antiquarians who researched (and in the nineteenth century republished) early English texts and attempted to decipher Anglo-Saxon runes. Some societies, such as the Gentleman's Society of Spalding (1710), which numbered Pope and Swift among its illustrious members, developed in a especially 'literary' direction; others would extend their antiquarian interests into an early form of archaeology or focus on the collection of rare books and manuscripts; still others, such as the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester (1781), would develop more scientific interests. The clubs were elite in both membership and activities: the Roxburghe Club (1812), for example, restricted its membership largely to the House of Lords and was criticized for printing only as many copies of one early text as it had members.

Early Societies in Toronto 39

However, these societies were of intellectual value insofar as they initiated and coordinated inquiry in a number of areas, while their transactions and publications were an important repository for philological, historical, and scientific research.55 Similar societies found a footing in the United States as early as 1726, with the Junto in Philadelphia (of which Benjamin Franklin was a member). The Hartford Wits (1738), the Drone Club (New York, 1792), the Anthology Club (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1805), the Literary Confederacy (New York, 1817), and the Delphians (Baltimore, 1820) were some other early literary societies that featured essay-writing and discussion among their activities.56 A number of the American societies were more 'civic' in their inclinations than were their English counterparts: the Anthology Club, for example, assumed joint editorship of the magazine the Monthly Anthology (thus the name of the society) and established both a public reading room and a library in Cambridge. Despite such initatives, however, the Mechanics' Institute ideal differs markedly, in both mandate and intended membership, from the literary and philosophical society format. As founded under the guidance of reformer George Birkbeck, beginning in London, England, in 1823, the Mechanics' Institutes were envisaged as mutual-instruction societies to which mechanics, and later other working men, were invited to belong. To how great a degree the Mechanics' Institute movement - and indeed, any individual institute - could adhere to this initial ideal would become a narrative running throughout the nineteenth century, in Canada as elsewhere: see-saws for control between members and 'benevolent' employers; between member-focused instruction and external expertise; between demands for a practical versus a liberal education.57 The tale of the York Literary and Philosophical Society and the York Mechanics' Institute is the narrative of the insertion of these two models into a colonial culture and into a heated political atmosphere. The rhetoric of reform (pro and con) made mass education both a desideratum and a danger, variously a force for civic order and a dangerous 'leveller' of social distinctions. A visionary William Lyon Mackenzie had asked his readers in 1829 to 'Imagine a society of 70 or 80 persons of all ages from 15 to 75, of all ranks, from the apprentice mechanic with his leather apron, up to the city bailie or parish minister with his powdered toupee, met together on an entire equality in a large hall full of books and papers, scientific apparatus, chemical tests, models of machinery.'58 But the 'entire equality' of which Mackenzie wrote was a

40 Come, bright Improvement!

vision for some and a spectre for others. Improvement would have an easy flight to York but a bumpy landing. In this saga it is the York (then Toronto) Mechanics' Institute which has both priority and posterity.59 It held its inaugural organizational meeting at the end of December 1830, following by three years the establishment of the first institute in Canada, in St John's - Montreal would be next in 1828 - and coming only seven years after the initial Mechanics' Institute in England. This early foundation is explained largely by the energetic and experienced work of the watchmaker Joseph Bates, who had been a member of the original institute in London; he persuaded the publisher and bookseller James Lesslie to the cause. The Mechanics' Institute attracted a broad band of supporters, drawn largely from trade or the professions (only three of the original forty-five members classified themselves as 'mechanics' on the voting list of 1830).60 The obvious appeal was to men of reform interests, such as Bates, Lesslie, and the physician and lawyer John Rolph. (Lesslie would be jailed for his role in the rebellion, while Rolph would be a political exile in the United States until granted amnesty in 1843.) Such 'self-made men' as Richard Bonnycastle and his fellow officer James FitzGibbon supported the mutual-instruction ideal.61 William Lyon Mackenzie, a close friend and compatriot of James Lesslie, who had been a vociferous proponent of the need for Mechanics' Institutes, was not himself among the founders. There is no evidence for this interesting absence, but a reason may be provided speculatively. Only the year before, Mackenzie had been pre-empted in his efforts to found an agricultural society for York and its environs. The Family Compact, rattled by his vision of a confederation of republican yeomen, reacted swiftly, using as one of its agents the settler Edward O'Brien (husband of the peripatetic circulating-library founder Mary Capper O'Brien). The story of the Agricultural Society for the Home District would presage the fate of the York Literary and Philosophical Society. The elite convened a rival meeting, forcibly ejected Mackenzie from the assembly, laid out an approximation of an English gentlemen's agricultural society, and immediately applied to the lieutenantgovernor for a founding grant (which was awarded, to no one's surprise). Mackenzie's presence, as more prudent Mechanics' Institute heads must have acknowledged, would have been a red flag in any planned organization.62 The Mechanics' Institute did, however, draw liberally minded notables to the cause. Other members whose names are familiar today were

Early Societies in Toronto 41

Robert Baldwin and Jesse Ketchum, who would become, respectively, important constitutional and social reformers. Although women were not admitted to membership, newspaper notices welcomed them to Mechanics' Institutes public lectures, to which they were granted free admission; this appears to be the first inclusion of women in the activities of an Upper Canadian voluntary society. That the doors were opened as widely as possible was signalled through the canny selection of a patron: the provincial receiver general, John Henry Dunn, was a sort of political zebra, a constitutionalist by persuasion and a member of the elite by marriage. In the month following the founding of the York Mechanics' Institute, another organization appeared on the scene. The York Literary and Philosophical Society (also referred to as the Literary and Philosophical Society of Upper Canada) held initial meetings in the new year, with Charles Fothergill, William Rees, and the ubiquitous William Tiger' Dunlop as founding members. Fothergill, who has already appeared in this account, had established a reputation as a natural scientist and illustrator before his emigration to Canada (precipitated not by the lure of Canadian wildlife but by pressing debts from a racehorsebreeding scheme); he was currently trying to secure backing for a transcontinental scientific expedition.63 Physician William Rees, Fothergill's more practical counterpart and supporter, would go on to become a widely known proponent of social, sanitary, and medical reform in Upper Canada, but in early 1831 he was a relative newcomer to York. Dunlop, a physician, journalist, soldier, and Canada Company agent, had gained his nickname from an attempt to expunge the tigers from Saugor Island, India, in the hopes of creating a tourist resort; his other sobriquet would be bestowed by Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1832, where he was described as a 'Blackwoodian Backwoodsman, who can handle a quill as well as a hatchet.'64 He may have been in York in the winter of 1831 in the course of research for his Statistical Sketches of Upper Canada. After several months of preliminary deliberations, the York Literary and Philosophical Society was formally constituted in the summer of 1831. Its goal was nothing less than that of 'investigating the natural and civil history of the Colony and the whole Interior as far as the Pacific and Polar Seas, throughout the Animal, Vegetable and Mineral Kingdoms, also to promote the study of Natural History, Natural Philosophy and the Fine Arts.' (As historian Paul Romney has noted, 'these goals were virtually a compendium of Fothergill's scholarly con-

42 Come, bright Improvement!

cerns' at the time.)65 While ungainly, these aspirations would appear to have an obvious utility; how, then, to account for the refusal of those two Family Compact stalwarts, the Reverend John Strachan and the jurist John Beverley Robinson, to become patrons of the society when asked? Strachan's efforts to encourage education were widely known, and the well-read Robinson (who had been John Strachan's first pupil in Canada and who was present at the original recitation of Strachan's 'Verses') was exceptional among the York governors for his culture and learning, and so surely, provincial philistinism was not to blame. There is, with hindsight, a certain irony in their failure to nurture this venture: Strachan was a close friend of 'Campbell the Poet,' improvement's ardent troubadour, and would take Robinson to meet him only a few years later, at a dinner in the poet's London chambers.66 As Romney suggests, Strachan and Robinson may have been unwilling to affiliate themselves with these newcomers of diverse political opinions and dissenting religious sensibilities, and they may have been wary of the members' social pretensions.67 The organizers could not have been convinced by Robinson's disclaimer that he had 'too much respect for the interests of literature' to undertake the office; nor could they have been pleased by Strachan's less euphemistic refusal to encourage any body that might compete with the planned King's College, of which he was the primary proponent. His rather snappish statement, that the society would not be needed for another hundred years, might have struck a contemporary as odd, given the cleric's poetic plea for culture on Ontario's shore: how else might one nurture those New World Newtons?68 The suspicions of Robinson and Strachan may have had little to do with the educational goals of the society or even the personalities involved, and may simply have reflected a more general wariness of the emergent voluntary organizations and their attempts to channel public opinion outside the narrowly delimited governing structures. They appear to have hoped the new society would wither from neglect. It was surely the initial vigour of the Mechanics' Institute which occasioned their shift in strategy, for these (in many cases radical) reformers would have an unopposed control of the public cultural space if the Literary Society died. The precise mechanisms and machinations by which they achieved their control are now obscured, but by the time the society reconvened in October, Strachan himself had assumed the presidency, with his son-in-law installed as treasurer, and the original membership was largely purged. (The resourceful Fothergill

Early Societies in Toronto 43

would immediately move on to other schemes, while the resilient Dunlop would keep a foot in each camp and continue to lecture to both societies.) The goals proposed in its 1832 'Laws' may seem initially to resemble the society's original purpose, with a statement that the organization was 'instituted for the purpose of promoting Literature and Science, and of Developing the resources of the Colony, by facilitating the communication of any facts or discoveries connected with its civil or natural history, and its general productions.'69 But the society differed markedly in taking as its model the elite gentlemanly literary and philosophical societies of the late eighteenth century. The steep annual membership fee of two guineas would in itself make that point (as would the fact that the fee was calculated in guineas). The society had been shunted from a moderate reform to Tory interest; the opposition between it and the Mechanics' Institute is made starkly clear by an address that would soon be delivered to the institute by one of the society's original members. Speaking to the institute in March of 1832, Tiger' Dunlop had presented a bold explanation for the cycles of history and the fall of nations: the failure of Egypt and India could be attributed to the fact that, 'though great in the Arts and Sciences, their knowledge was not diffused through the body of society but confined rigorously to a part of it.'70 But national greatness was not the result of knowledge alone, however widely distributed; commerce was also needed: 'The Mechanical Arts produce Commerce - Commerce wealth, wealth knowledge; and again, all these principles re-act on each other, and each tends to strengthen and increase the rest.'71 What impresses a twenty-first-century reader as an interesting prefiguration of Marx's German Ideology must have pleased members of a contemporary audience by insisting that their labour was socially foundational. They were aware of the irony that, while they were free to earn, they were not free to learn: in a statement of aims appended to the published version of Dunlop's talk, the members of the institute observed that, while Upper Canada offered the working man a chance to earn his bread and even wealth, 'from the highest luxury, and the most permanent and enduring, the luxury of knowledge, he is debarred.'72 And one hopes they were alert to the deeper irony of being so addressed by an agent of what was undoubtedly the most comprehensive and probably most cut-throat speculative scheme then afoot in the province. Dunlop's speech placed the York Mechanics' Institute in a laudable heritage of efforts to educate the working man. This lineage would

44 Come, bright Improvement!

extend into the future, for the Toronto Mechanics' Institute would remain a formidable cultural presence throughout the century, with its library becoming the core of the present Toronto Public Library system in the 1880s. The same was true in many other towns; some twenty-five institutes would be established in the province by 1853, the movement extended into smaller towns and villages in the next quarter-century.73 (These institutes would have an interestingly complex relationship to literary societies in their environs, dictated by the shifting mandates of the Mechanics' Institutes, which were driven in part by alterations in government policy and funding.74 The institutes would sometimes offer courses in literature, sometimes generate literary societies, and sometimes absorb them - and quite characteristically would offer meeting rooms to literary societies with no premises of their own.) But the early years were difficult for the York Mechanics' Institute, which faltered and almost failed altogether, after an auspicious start. A comment in James Lesslie's diary hints that there may have been direct efforts to sway its supporters: 'The M. institute is viewed with suspicion by some of our gentry & some of its warmest friends seem to be influenced by them,' he wrote in March 1832, the same month as Dunlop's talk: 'The intelligence of the lower classes they and their system would if possible keep under. - their Lord and slave system is not to be grafted upon the people of U.C. and their favorite maxim "Ignorance is Bliss" which was this day defended by one of them shows clearly the principle from which their opposition to the dissemination of knowledge arises.'75 The institute survived only with the concerted efforts of Joseph Bates and James Lesslie, and was more firmly on its feet by 1836, although by then focused on practical and scientific subjects.76 As for the York Literary and Philosophical Society, it soon ceased operations altogether, its intellectual eggs failing to hatch once the Family Compact cuckoos landed in its nest. The flurry of competing activity of the two societies, which generated interest and observation throughout the province, seems to have helped to implant the literary-society ideal in the minds of public-spirited men and to have spurred other forms of cultural and educational activity. In 1833 the Upper Canada College classics master, John Kent, would launch the Canadian Literary Magazine, a polished production that appeared for three issues. The year 1834 would witness the mounting of an impressively large exhibition by the Society of Artists and Amateurs, whose published catalogue provides a valuable record of early artistic activity

Early Societies in Toronto 45

in Ontario.77 In 1835 two visionaries would commence their grand plans. James Martin Cawdell, the treasurer of the Law Society and the author of one of Upper Canada's first verse monographs, was proposing in his literary journal, the Roseharp, the establishment of a Roseharp Patriotic Academy, a literary guild based loosely on the model of the Knights Templar, which would 'encourage and diffuse sentiments of loyal patriotism - a taste for literature, and the fine arts; and by exciting emulation, give energy, and rouse into action, the dormant seeds of genius.'78 Soon thereafter, Charles Fothergill would issue the first of his public calls for the establishment of a 'Lyceum of Natural History, and the Fine Arts, in the City of Toronto,' and would begin trying to assemble land, funds, public and private support, and the rudiments of a museum collection.79 (By 1836 the plans had swelled to encompass departments of phrenology, comparative anatomy, and geology; there were to be galleries for pictures and Native antiquities as well as a lecture hall; visitors would stroll in edifying zoological and botanical gardens.)80 Some more modest, and more successful, proposals resulted in other organizations both within and without Toronto: the 1830s saw the foundation of the Free and Easy Club (Chatham, 1839?), the Hamilton Literary Society (1836?), the Kingston Literary Society (1836?), the Toronto Ethical and Literary Society (1836), and a society in the Bon-Accord settlement north of Elora (1839). Two such groups the Shakspeare Club (Toronto, 1835?) and its successor organization, the Toronto Literary Club (1836) - provide examples of more focused 'literary' groups that nonetheless were engaged, albeit in more subtle ways, with the political conflicts we have seen at work above. About a quarter of an hour too late to be called punctual, the lecturer of the evening arrived, and after skinning (or rather unskinning) himself from his fur habiliments, and making a few recognitions among the audience, produced from his pockets an edition of Shakspere [sic], a gold watch and a pearl-handled penknife, together with a very limited piece of writing paper - all of which assured me that I should not be entertained as I expected; for I went there prepared to hear read from a paper a well digested lecture upon the subject advertised (the various insane characters in Shakspere's plays) instead of which it was quite evident that we were to be treated to some extemporary remarks merely... He commenced with an apology for being late, and another one for not having studied the subject as carefully as he should have done, and after running the gamut of

46 Come, bright Improvement! Shakspere's virtues in the usual manner, at once jumped into the details, by mentioning a great number of characters throughout the poet's writings, each of whom he asserted was insane - the small fry were soon disposed of, but he dwelt much longer upon the sayings and doings of Lear, Lady Constance and Ophelia - in all of his remarks upon these, I coincided with him perfectly, but it was as much as I could do to control my amazement when he stated that Macbeth, Lady Mac and Hamlet were all partially insane - on these points I most respectfully beg to differ with him.81

John Gaisford's account of a meeting of the Montreal Shakspere Club provides a first-hand, if comic, glimpse of such an early society and of colonial Shakespeare study. (On a more serious note, Gaisford would elsewhere credit the exertions of this and other literary societies for the fact that 'Canada is at length emerging from the gloom in which she has so long been shrouded.')82 The Shakspeare Club of Toronto and the Toronto Literary Club, contemporary to the Montreal society and seemingly cast in the same mould, provide further examples of these private clubs for aspiring young professional men, established in Lower and Upper Canada in the pre-rebellion years. While such associations are often less well recorded than those with more public aspirations, the Shakspeare Club and the Toronto Literary Club have left behind some written documents, and their activities were recorded in the diaries of bookstore owner, publisher, and man about town Henry Rowsell, who was centrally involved in both organizations (and indeed, it appears, almost all the other cultural, fraternal, and sporting associations then available to the male inhabitants of Toronto). The exact date of origin of the Shakspeare Club is unknown, but when Rowsell's journal commences in the summer of 1835, the club was already flourishing.83 It had an active membership of up-andcoming young lawyers and clerks, as well as its own premises; Tiger' Dunlop was the president of the club and would soon be replaced by John Kent, the classicist and teaching master at Upper Canada College.84 The Rowsell journal entries indicate that the club met frequently, sometimes weekly, and they give some sense of range of club activities: 'I went this evening to the Shakespeare [sic] Club Meeting and there were about 12 members present. There was a very good discussion upon the question "Were the Dean and Chapter of Westminster justified in refusing burial to the remains of Lord Byron within the

Early Societies in Toronto 47

Abbey"and we decided in the negative.'85 Literary topics were also under discussion at the meeting two weeks later: I went this evening to the Shakespeare [sic] Club Meeting and it was very well attended. We elected J. Kent as President instead of Dr. Dunlop, and Brent and Brough Vice Presidents, in the room of Gilkinson and Kent. Lee read a very good Essay, the Commencement of a Series upon the Male Characters of Shakespeare and then followed an animated debate upon the question 'whether Satirical Writings are beneficial.' Kent summed up most admirably and it was decided in the affirmative. It was proposed by Kent and unanimously agreed, that a handsomely bound copy of the best Edition of Shakespeare's Works should be presented by the Members to J.S. Lee as a mark of the high sense they entertained of his services in the formation and support of the society.86

(As it turned out, however, even a professional bookseller like Rowsell could not circumvent the delays and vagaries of transatlantic book shipments: the handsome present did not arrive for another eight months, by which point the club had long since disbanded; Rowsell's attempts to arrange for a ceremonious presentation fell flat.)87 The wider historical and ethical interests of the club are apparent in the account of the meeting the following Monday, at which 'J. Kent read an admirable Essay on Insanity and Imbecility traced in the Royal Families of Europe. There was a debate upon the question "is a lie ever justifiable," but the arguments were nearly all on the negative side, so they were soon over.'88 Debates on the ethics of usury and of government use of paid informers and on whether the classics were the form of study best suited to moral development followed in ensuing weeks; the club decided, not surprisingly, that lawyers were beneficial to society. The society gave every appearance of being a convivial organization at its banquet at Erskine's Hotel in the new year, at which the attorney general and the mayor were honoured guests. Within weeks, however, it would dissolve - or explode - for reasons which seem to have been the classic combination of personal wrangling and procedural finagling. A crisis was caused by the blackballing of prospective member J.G. Spragge (who would appear to have been an eminently suitable candidate, at that point an attorney and a surrogate judge of the Home District and destined for a career as an eminent jurist). Perhaps this crisis came as a welcome intervention in the logjam of acrimonious

48 Come, bright Improvement!

discussion about club laws which had occupied the preceding month: 'we sat until about 10 o'clock and got about half through the Laws, after a great deal of discussion during which I had no easy job to keep order/ Rowsell had reported. The dissolution of the club in early February was swift, as was the establishment of its successor organization: within the week, the Toronto Literary Club had purchased the Shakspeare Club's furnishings and established itself in rooms over Rowsell's King Street bookshop, with an initial group of twenty-four members. This time, they took the wise step of establishing aims and procedures at the outset, drafting and passing laws in the first few weeks.89 The goal was predictable: the club was 'formed for the advancement of Literature[,] Science and the Fine Arts.' While still a private organization in the sense that members were both invited and elected, the Toronto Literary Club had moved toward a more public status than its predecessor. Its encouragement of cultural development is evidenced by an 1837 announcement of 'a prize of Books of the value of £12 Currency for the best Essay on the following subject: "How far is the Literature of a nation influenced by and indebted to the early superstition of the people?"'90 (This announcement, circulated in newspapers outside Toronto, indicates a romantically inflected interest in both national literary expression and folk cultures.) The club also expanded its base by adding to the category of ordinary members the classes of honorary and associate members (the former was for 'persons distinguished for Literary or Scientific attainment or eminent for public worth,' the latter for men whose vocation or residence required them to be absent for much of the time from Toronto). As well as increasing its membership base, the group demonstrated political acumen by electing Attorney General Robert Jameson as president and inviting Lieutenant-Governor Sir Francis Bond Head to be the patron. Both were men of a certain cultural cachet. Jameson, the estranged husband of well-known author Anna Brownell Jameson, was a boyhood friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's son Hartley and a faint star in the Coleridge-Wordsworth-Southey galaxy; he had revised and introduced an edition of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (which would appear in some eight editions in the nineteenth century).91 Jameson was new to the club, and his election was a snub to the other contender for the presidency, John Kent; nonetheless, Rowsell came to the conclusion that Jameson 'makes a very good president,' and the Patriot and Farmer's Monitor would note the selection with pleasure, since 'the

Early Societies in Toronto 49

literary attainments of this gentleman will shed lustre over the proceedings, and stamp at once its reputation and character.'92 Sir Francis Bond Head's reputation rested largely on his marathon riding adventures in South America, which had resulted in the sobriquet of 'Galloping Head' and a knighthood for demonstrating the military potential of the lasso. But he had also achieved some fame for his travel narratives, Rough Notes Taken during Some Rapid Journeys across the Pampas and among the Andes and Bubbles from the Brunnens of Nassau, as well as for a biography of the African explorer James Bruce and for sketches in the Quarterly Review.93 The defence of popular education made in Bubbles could well have been one of the reasons that Head's posting to Canada was viewed favourably (initially at least) by the reformers, while his literary reputation recommended him to the club; in a sycophantic biographical sketch authored by club member John Kent, Head had been praised for his wish to see 'wholesome instruction imparted to all classes of the community, the cheap elegancies of life universally distributed/ and (in a superb example of selective citation) shown to have been admired by Coleridge himself.94 Despite the mildly liberal inclinations of this new generation of professional men, Chief Justice Robinson and Archdeacon Strachan consented to honorary membership, having learned the hard way the consequences of ignoring literary-society initiatives.95 At this point we can no longer rely on Rowsell's diary for information about the new club; his diary stops in July of 1836, and he appears to have already transferred his interests to the Constitutional Reform Society, whose activities may have seemed more urgent than the tasks of the club library committee to which he had been selected. It is still possible to construct a picture of a typical Monday meeting, however, given the 'Laws of the Club' as well as a memoranda book of debates and topics which has survived. According to its laws, the group was to meet weekly from early Ocober until the end of April, with a rota of members reading essays, to be followed by a debate; the president could also approve other activities, such as readings from Shakespeare, lectures, and scientific papers. The debate topics show a continuing combination of ethical, historical, literary, and legal inclinations: 'Was Milton's character good or bad?' or 'Ought there to be a perpetuity in copyrights?' or 'Should the British government have sanctioned the removal of the Elgin Marbles?'96 Religious and political topics were forbidden, as was the general practice of the day; but this was less a case of gentlemanly etiquette

50 Come, bright Improvement!

(like disdaining the vulgarity of discussing business at one's club) than of adherence to a precedent established by early mutual-instruction societies to ensure that religious or political affiliation could not be a barrier to membership. The ban made special sense during the tumultuous months of the pre-rebellion period; but politics, of course, here as in other groups, had a way of sneaking in the back door, cloaked in discussions of history and coded in arguments over the conduct of battles and the actions of Roman senators. Like other well-educated (or even nominally educated) men of the day, the members of the Toronto Literary Club would have had a wealth of classical citations at their fingertips, and they also would have been trained to see the historical, political, and moral parallels in the empires of different ages. One can imagine, for example, how such a topic as the Tightness of Cromwell's actions, one of the club's recorded subjects, could become a handy allegory for the republican politics of the members' own day. Questions of tyranny and treachery appear to have been especially popular - 'Did Lady Jane Grey deserve death?' and 'Did Calvin instigate the murder of Servetus?' There is an additional sense in which the Toronto Literary Club may be seen to have had a political existence, as signalled by the imprimatur it received from the Tory-supporting Patriot and Farmer's Monitor. The Patriot judged the society 'a nursery ... for the young aspirants to legal or senatorial eminence' and enumerated its 'palpable advantages': The research necessary for informing the understanding of the matter which the tongue may be called on to advocate; the various new views of the social and political condition of the nations of the earth, which will strike the observant eye as it glances over the pages of the philosopher or the historian, in its quest for facts, and data whereon may be erected the peculiar theory which it is the lot of the individual to support or mayhap to create; the system of cool and deliberate ratiocination of accurately balancing facts and opinions, into which, by such a course of inquiry, the mind will gradually be brought, and, above all, the taste for literary pursuits, the wish, the gradually increasing desire to ascend further and further up the stream of knowledge, and of feeling oneself nearer by ever so trifling a space of [sic] the bright foundations of wisdom and science, which it will in all human probability foster or even engender in the nature.97

This rather sententious sentence, which manages never to achieve gram-

Early Societies in Toronto 51

matical completion despite its prolixity, is a poor example of the ratiocination that the editor recommends. But it is perfectly expressive of the anxieties of the pre-rebellion period and of the ways that such political fears can be projected onto the cultural. On the surface, it is a typical, if slightly jumbled, catalogue of the mental and moral benefits seen to accrue from practice of the different stages of rhetoric, from preparation to composition to presentation. But it is also a conservative plea for balance, equanimity, delay, and distantiation from 'theories'; as opposed - one can supply the missing opposite - to the committed, hot, immediate, and politically 'theoretical' speech and writing of the Reformers. Some months, but a political light year, later a February 1838 issue of the Cobourg Star would offer a similar juxtaposition. Although the Star was already crammed with reports of the rebellion's aftermath and vociferous recriminations, the paper chose to publish a further commentary in the form of a 123-quatrain poem titled 'John Gilpin Travestied,' in which the anonymous poet held a wish for the future: And now to Mac there's still one step To end his life of evil; Soon may he take the last long leap, From gibbet to the .98

It was surely no coincidence that 'John Gilpin Travestied' shared the front page of the Star with an 'Address to the Members of the Toronto Literary Club/ in which 'a Gentleman of that City' urged his fellow members to slow and steady progress, to accommodation to circumstance, and to debate conducted in a spirit of moderation, gentlemanliness, and urbanity." Whether or not political strife had been a factor in the dissolution of the original Shakspeare Club, on its reassembly the Toronto Literary Club had emerged not only as a 'public' group but as one with a political identity: the rising generation of young men, ranging from mildly liberal to constitutional reformists, who could still be enlisted in the interests of the Upper Canada status quo. The degree to which the institution of the literary society had become a feature of the cultural landscape of Toronto is illustrated by the emergence of a slightly later organization. The Toronto Tandem Club (1839) was noted - and notorious - in its day for several things. This sleighing

52 Come, bright Improvement!

and tandem club for dashing young men from the Garrison was famous for its daring races and escapades. It appears to have been equally infamous for the excruciating verse narratives that members would compose to commemorate their adventures and to recite at uproarious banquets.100 (Early Toronto historian John Ross Robertson's description of the group as 'Pickwickian' seems particularly apt.)101 The club's members were comically conscious of the contrast between their high jinks and the earnest ethos of utility and improvement of the day, to which one club wag rejoined with the announcement: The Club's become a college. Not driving only is our forte, Another object we support, Promoting useful knowledge.102

The Toronto Tandem Club was surely the first anti-literary society in Upper Canada.

CHAPTER THREE

CULTURE AND CONFLICT IN THE WESTERN DISTRICT

Ignorance whether in white or black cannot expect to take precedence with education and refinement. You may put forth extraordinary pretensions, and claim extraordinary concessions, yet you will not be able to command regard for the one or respect for the other until you are in a position to enforce your demand by the power of intellect. Dr Anderson Ruffin Abbott, inaugural address to the Chatham Literary Society (1875)1

The literary societies of Ontario, in their earliest manifestations, may seem to the contemporary viewer only incidentally literary or even educational. In the years surrounding the Rebellion of 1837-8, these organizations signified as much by their very existence as through any particulars of their programs. The principles of inclusion - and exclusion - of membership, the regulation of meetings and discussion, and the relationship of the organization to the wider social fabric were issues that involved club members in debate with one another and invoked public praise or condemnation (or both). Even as the educational mandate of these societies and their role in elevation of public knowledge became more firmly defined, questions of membership and regulation continued to be contended. Indeed, as the organizations moved away from the private or invitational model of societies such as the York Literary and Philosophical Society and the Toronto Literary Club, the question of what was a 'public' organization increased in complexity. In the Western District of the province, which was by the 1850s the primary settlement base of fugitives of African descent from

54 Come, bright Improvement!

the United States, this question would take on a new and 'racialized' dimension. The Mechanics' Institutes appear to have been the only cultural organizations of the period that made a deliberate effort to be inclusive of non-white (male) members and to target the fugitive community for public events. At mid-century, for example, the Toronto institute was advertising its winter series in the Provincial Freeman, and the Chatham branch also drew an audience from the surrounding fugitive communities. The noted African-Canadian physician and educational reformer Dr Anderson Ruffin Abbott was a frequent lecturer to the Chatham institute and later a director of the institute in Dundas. Such inclusion may have been been confined to the larger urban institutes or to those that were more pressured or more progressive, however. This chapter tells a somewhat different story, of two literary societies established by two distinct settler populations in the Western District of the province: the Western District Literary, Philosophical and Agricultural Association (Amherstburg, 1842) and a debating society - its exact nomenclature is unknown - established for young men of African descent in nearby Sandwich (now Windsor, 1853?). Each society struggled with the possibilities and limitations of the models for 'mutual instruction' then known to it. Each believed that its efforts would extend beyond the circle of instruction of its members, to ignite a greater public good. And each society manoeuvred very differently in the 'racialized' settlement politics of the Western District. The Western District Literary, Philosophical and Agricultural Association provides an interesting point of contrast to the Toronto Literary Club. Indeed, the two organizations were close contemporaries: a precursor organization, the Western District Agricultural and Horticultural Society, was established the year after the Toronto Literary Club, and they shared a common patron. But there the similarities stop. The Toronto group was composed of urban professionals rather than rural settlers, and it was explicitly restricted in its membership, whereas the Western District association (although an invitational organization) declared itself open to men of all races. The Toronto group was viewed with favour by Tory figures and patrons (although numbering constitutional reformers such as Henry Rowsell among its numbers), while the Western District society was staked out on the side of moderate reform. And where the Toronto Literary Club was broad in its cultural interests, the Western District association was more encompassing still, in its

The Western District 55

transition from a horticultural and agricultural organization to a literary and philosophical club and in its attempts to wrap scholarly and practical knowledge into one package. The society's precursor, the Western District Agricultural and Horticultural Society, was inaugurated at a public meeting at the courthouse in Sandwich in February of 1837.2 Such societies were both common and commonsensical for settlers to quickly establish (the earliest was at Newark, now Niagara-on-the-Lake, in 1792), and the government was now promoting them through the 1830 'Act to Encourage the Establishment of Agricultural Societies in the Several Districts of the Province.' It would award £100 in each of the eight districts if the region's farmers agreed to subscribe £50 annually among themselves; the Western District apparently received its award in 1832.3 The reason for the delay until the first meeting is not known; but once begun, the society commenced plans so ambitious - nothing less than the establishment of a 'great co-operative Agricultural Association' - that it required five executive officers and a steering committee of twenty-four. (The president was Major Robert Lachlan, a resident of Colchester, whose inaugural 'Discourse' has appeared in the introduction to this book; he seemingly chaired every public meeting in the area.) The society intended to encourage agriculture, inspect farms, hold exhibitions, and award prizes; its separate horticultural class would be devoted to the products of the orchard, flower patch, and kitchen garden.4 The president was able to envisage even grander plans in his address to the association, seeing fairs established in towns throughout the district and prizes for everything from breeding stock to straw goods manufacture, from accurate weather diaries to eloquent essays.5 Within a few years, however, the society was fading away. In the spring of 1842 the Western Herald, a Sandwich newspaper, was predicting its imminent demise and by July would announce a meeting to form the 'Western District Philosophical Club/ to convene in the reading room at Amherstburg.6 (Whether the first society dissolved or was converted into the second is difficult to determine.) Two weeks later the Western Herald produced a lengthy account of the founding meeting of what was then called the 'Western District Literary, Philosophical, and Agricultural Club,' which was envisaged most expressly as a society for mutual instruction. Its first resolution, moved by the Reverend George Cheyne and seconded by William R. Wood, laid out the need for independent efforts to supplement government education policies that favoured the needs of the young:

56 Come, bright Improvement! Moved: That it appears to this meeting, that while the head of the Government and the Legislature of the Province are earnestly co-operating in promoting the more general diffusion of Education, by the founding of Universities, and improvements in our common school system, for the benefit of the rising generation, some decided movement should be made by the adult educated part of the community towards demonstrating and illustrating practically the inestimable value of scientific and useful information, in every station of society; and that it is conceived that nothing can tend more to the attainment of this great desideratum than the institution, in the different Districts, of societies aiming at mutual instruction in the various arts and sciences, as well as in the ordinary pursuits of life.7 (emphasis in the original)

In the second and third resolutions the movers determined to establish an 'unpretending association' for social and intellectual fellowship and to incite a greater love of knowledge in the populace. The fourth resolution indicates the degree to which, for these club members, the humanities and the sciences, the philosophical and the pragmatic, were integrated. Resolved: That the diversified range of the said society's researches, like the noble scope of the first British Literary association established in Asia, shall embrace at once 'man and nature/ or in other words 'whatever is performed by the one or produced by the other;' and that the only qualification required in a candidate for admission, shall be a love of knowledge, and a patriotic desire to forward the prosperity of the Province in general, and of the District in particular, by promoting the advancement and diffusion of literary, Philosophical and agricultural knowledge.

(This slightly cryptic reference to the Asiatic Society is more than incidental, as shall be shown in a moment.) The entrance fee was to be set at $2, with the same amount in annual fees; the society would meet quarterly; members were invited to send in papers and to deliver lectures; there would be an annual address by the president. (While it was intended to publish these proceedings in Transactions' of the society, there is no evidence that these ever were issued.)8 Debate was encouraged, especially regarding desired improvements to the district and province or on questions of agriculture or natural history. Members of other literary and philosophical societies in the province were invited to be honorary members, while visitors - 'and ladies to be equally

The Western District 57

as eligible as gentlemen on these occasions'(emphasis in the original) could attend the quarterly meetings as audience members.9 Some accounts in the press of the day provide a progress report on the association's endeavours. A letter to the editor of the Herald by correspondent 'Socius' reported that at its first regular meeting the group had been presented, as a seed for its library collection, with a 'small work on the affinity of the Latin to the Gaelic language, by its author, Dr. Stratton, RN/ and that the president had given an address outlining the benefits of mutual-instruction societies.10 The Chatham Journal's reports of the next two quarterly meetings admitted that there had been some falling off in attendance as a result of 'domestic calamities, unusual sickness, and the previous boisterous weather' for the winter meeting; and even when the weather was finer, an early effort at transmitting culture to the surounding populace, the Reverend Mr Mack's public lecture on 'Mental Philosophy/ had drawn an 'unexpectedly scanty audience.'11 Undeterred, the association determined to act as a clearing house for statistical sketches, geological information, and meteorological reports; the latter was a particular interest of the association's president, who gave addresses to both the Western District association and the earlier agricultural society on the necessity of establishing uniform systems of meteorological observation.12 The association continued to correspond with fellow organizations (including the newly founded Toronto Literary and Historical Society); a reading room committee was struck; plans for an eventual library and museum were discussed. However, none of these offshoot organizations were apparently realized. In some cases, the association's efforts may have been redundant or unnecessary; with a population of less than one thousand, Amherstburg already boasted both a newsroom with reading room, and the Wright and McKenney Circulating Library, which had attracted a large number of subscribers since its installation in the general store the preceding year.13 In other cases - the proposed museum, for example the plans may have been premature or impractical. In the end the achievements of the Western District association were limited, not only in terms of the projects it would undertake but in the degree to which it could cover the fields of inquiry mandated in the association's title. As an agricultural association, the Western District society seems to have been unsuccessful, despite its concern with the resources and the potential of the province, since there was considerable agitation during the period for a dedicated agricultural organization. (In May of 1844 a

58 Come, bright Improvement!

meeting - chaired, of course, by Robert Lachlan - called on the Western District to revive its dormant agricultural association, resulting in the formation of a Colchester Agricultural Club.)14 Of 'literary' study, narrowly defined, there is scant remaining evidence: no plans, for example, for linguistic research or the encouragement of written expression. The association seems to have taken its bearings largely as a 'philosophical' society, if we keep in mind the contemporary equation of the 'philosophical' with the 'scientific.' In addresses to larger and more successful bodies - the Natural History Society of Montreal and the American Association - as well as in the written restrospective of his own career, Lachlan would refer to the Western District association, somewhat apologetically, as both 'limited' and 'local.' Honorary memberships of the early literary societies are an important indication of both the desired intellectual aims and the political inclinations of these organizations. They are signals of what a society deemed to be important and of what it wished to achieve, although they are signals that the historian must read somewhat speculatively. The honorary members of the Western District association were reported in the accounts that appeared in the Chatham Journal. The chief justice seems to have been visiting Amherstburg around the time of the association's foundation, which may have prompted the invitation to John Beverley Robinson (as may have Lachlan's earlier career as a magistrate); while he was a Church of England stalwart and defender of the Clergy Reserves, the teeth of this political lion were no longer sharp. (And Robinson was by now, ironically, something of a patron of literary societies, a member of both the Toronto Literary Club and the illustrious original organization, the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec [1824].) The choice of William Logan was thoroughly in keeping with the desire of the Western District association to explore and exploit the natural resources of the region, for Logan numbered among his many accomplishments an appointment as the first director of the Geological Survey of Canada. The physician William Rees, who had been one of the founders of the York Literary and Philosophical Society and the strongest supporter of Fothergill's attempted lyceum, was a tireless promoter of more practical plans for social, sanitary, and medical reform; in 1841 he was the medical superintendent of the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, which had been established largely at his instigation. Thomas Rolph (whose Brief Account of 1836 has appeared in the preface to this book) was still operating as an emigration agent with a mixed set of political princi-

The Western District 59 pies: he promoted assisted-settlement schemes for poor settlers from England and fought against the deportation of fugitive slaves and in favour of educational assistance for them, but in 1841 he was also advocating the emigration of African Canadians to the plantations of Trinidad. (This scheme, not surprisingly, was greeted coldly in the Black communities where Rolph tried to gain converts, but it would have been viewed with interest by the association's president, who, as we will see, was also concerned with 'problems' of settlement in the Western District.)15 The final honorary member was Major John Richardson, known to us now largely for his frontier gothics, Wacousta and The Canadian Brothers. He had returned to Canada from Europe as rebellion correspondent for the Tory Times of London but was dismissed as his own sympathies began to change; at the time, he was taking an active hand in Upper Canada politics, living in Kingston and publishing the Canadian Loyalist, & Spirit of 1812, which advocated the sorts of reforms proposed in Lord Durham's contentious report. While the Western District association may have been 'limited,' as its own founder was the first to admit, it attempted to span the political spectrum from high Tory to 'practical' reform and to acknowledge literary, journalistic, scientific, judicial, medical, and patriotic accomplishments. No member is as key to the association as Major Lachlan himself, and in the absence of many other records of the society, a biographical account of this shaping figure may help to shed some light on the association. For this, we need to rely largely on information that appears incidentally in his various addresses and petitions and in his bitter tract of 1856, How Patriotic Services Are Rewarded in Canada, an account of hard work and hard luck and a representative saga of the turning of fortune's wheel in the post-rebellion years. Lachlan would come to see his own life narrative in tragic terms, comparing himself to the Roman soldier Belisarius, unjustly dishonoured and forced to beg for bread. According to Lachlan's own accounts, he was born in England and served for twenty-five years in the 17th Regiment, which at one point was posted to India; 'financial reversals' (he refers, somewhat implausibly, to the simultaneous failure of his bankers in India and England) led to emigration to Canada with an already large family. He fought against the rebels in the capacity of colonel in the 1st (Essex) Milita and was involved in the taking of the brigand ship Anne and in actions at Point Pelee. After the rebellion he was made sheriff and served as a magis-

60 Come, bright Improvement!

trate in the Quarter Sessions, positions from which he resigned as a result of a mysterious 'unjustified' accusation in 1839. This charge appears not to have damaged his local reputation (as evidenced by his chairing of the two associations discussed above, as well as his founding of a society to encourage settlement in the Western District), but it may have cast a cloud over his career. Physically unsuited to farming he alludes to a serious accident - Lachlan removed to Montreal at the urging of the then governor general just months before his patron was replaced; he appears to have existed in a limbo of unemployment for five years. During this time he lectured to the Natural History Society of Montreal and became its president, addressed and was affiliated with the Canadian Institute, and wrote analyses of education in Upper Canada and Lower Canada, which were published in the British American Journal of Medical and Physical Sciences and reprinted in monograph form.16 After an unsuccessful attempt to gain employment as an inspector of militia, he scorched his further prospects with published indictments of political favouritism in the colony and moved to the United States, where he continued his social reform and scientific schemes. His home is given as Mount Auburn, Cincinnati, on his published address delivered to the American Association in 1859, in which he was still advocating a system for continental meteorological observation.17 Robert Lachlan, like Charles Fothergill, was a tireless and ultimately ineffectual campaigner for social and cultural change in Upper Canada. He had the same disparate interests and energies, the same penchant for grand and even grandiose schemes, and the same knack of irritating powerful figures. A charitable assessment of Lachlan would note his ceaseless efforts to reform everything from military widows' pensions to emigration policy as a reason why quiescent administrators shunned him; a less complimentary analysis would find in the irascible, even slightly paranoic, tendencies of his later writings a reason for the failure of his schemes. And again like Charles Fothergill - of whom the Reverend Henry Scadding remarked, quite simply, that it was Fothergill's misfortune to have lived too early in Upper Canada - Lachlan may simply have had some good ideas at the wrong time.18 But his failures, like Fothergill's, are a valuable indicator of the degree to which available models of educational and cultural institutions could, and could not, be adapted to this new setting. Lachlan appears to have taken many of his ideas of cultural organization from the Asiatic Society of Bengal, to which he had belonged when stationed in India. The Asiatic Society was a late-eighteenth-century

The Western District 61

transplantation of the literary society' model to India by the lawyer and linguist William Jones, a man of radical principles who was concerned less with imparting European knowledge to the subcontinent than with uncovering and understanding the heritage of older cultures. Although obviously 'Orientalist' in its perspective, the society was admirably non-colonialist for its day, and under Jones's direction it commenced a formidable history of research and publication which continues to the present.19 While the members of Canadian literary societies seem not have realized that the heritage of the Native peoples presented a rich repository of narratives and religious teachings that they would do well to understand, and while the Western District association seems anyway to have had very little in the way of antiquarian interests, such organizations did have the related enterprise of discovering and cataloguing the natural resources of the province, and Major Lachlan would refer to the Asiatic Society as a model of what a Canadian literary or scientific group could accomplish. Further, on the surface, he appears to have shared more than cultural goals with the founder of the Asiatic Society: in his address to the Natural History of Society of Montreal, in which the Asiatic Society is invoked as a model, Lachlan says that the faltering health of the association is a weakness caused by sectarianism. Having lost the opportunity to amalgamate with the Mechanics' Institute, and having been unwilling to join with the francophones, the Natural History Society could thrive only by opening its membership, 'for the liberal Republic of letters knows no narrow distinctions of races, creeds, classes, or political parties/ he emphasized.20 (And for Lachlan, the converse was also true: 'The cause of education is, therefore, the cause of liberty/ he would write in his remarks on education.)21 In the chicken-and-egg goround of reform politics, Lachlan wanted to put education first: any efforts to institute democracy in an uneducated populace would ultimately fail, and political turmoil - even that established in the interests of liberty - would prove to be inimical to the public organization and education which were preconditional for liberty's attainment. '[A] stanchly loyal British Whig, and unswerving practical Reformer/ was Lachlan's description of his own politics.22 To weigh how far these liberal, even Chartist-tinged, principles may have played out in practice, we must turn to some other documents from the Western District. Robert Lachlan, it appears, never resided again in Colchester or in the Western District after his removal to Montreal. But he continued to be concerned with the state of affairs in that area. Identifying himself as

62 Come, bright Improvement!

the holder of former positions of responsibility in the Western District and a 'considerable' landowner, Lachlan in 1850 drew the attention of the Legislative Assembly to the very prejudicial consequences resulting to that remote section of the Province, from the great influx of fugitive slaves, of the worst character, from the neighbouring American States, as not only tending, by their presence, to prevent the introduction of a far more congenial class of agricultural labourers, from the Mother Country, but, by their conduct, to produce a very demoralizing influence, from the fearful amount of crime observed to be committed by them, compared with the great bulk of the inhabitants.23

While disavowing 'any feeling of prejudice against the unfortunate coloured race' and claiming himself as 'the last to close the door of refuge against the accidental, unhappy fugitive from the Land of Bondage/ Lachlan petitioned the Assembly to stop the organizations for assisted settlement, such as the Elgin Association, which had for their purpose the 'obnoxious and objectionable purpose of establishing Negro colonies in the very midst of a British population.'24 Since he refers to earlier representations on the topic, there is no reason to believe that Lachlan's opinion was new to him or a dramatic rescission of an earlier view: would he have been propounding similar beliefs through his role in the Emigrants Society, or even as he expressed the liberal sentiments of his address to the Western District association? While there is insufficient evidence to backdate Lachlan's opinion, his Petition does precede by two years his address to the Natural History Society of Montreal, where he argued for educational liberality. Like the nation to the south, where he would eventually reside, his world of letters could declare itself a republic while denying the franchise to many. At the same time as Major Robert Lachlan lived in Colchester, the settlement was also the home of another social and educational reformer, who had arrived at almost the same time and left only a few years before. Whether Lachlan knew, or cared to know, the Reverend Josiah Henson is something that cannot be determined; but since he would become an opponent of the very sorts of settlement schemes of which Henson was a proponent and a leader, Henson was surely aware, or would become aware, of Lachlan. In 1836 Henson, who had escaped from slavery and had been working for several years as a labourer in

The Western District 63

the Waterloo area, led a small band of settlers to the area north of the town of Colchester, where there had been a Black settlement since 1827 on 'the plains' past the fourth concession. Henson and his fellow settlers rented cleared lots on the McCormick land grant and began to raise tobacco and wheat with the aim of saving money to purchase land as freeholders, and in 1842 the group would leave Colchester and establish the Dawn settlement. Josiah Henson's life would take a dramatic new turn only ten years later, when Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of what is probably the most famous and most influential novel published in the United States in the nineteenth century, declared that she had based much of the action of Uncle Tom's Cabin on Henson's life narrative; this comment was soon extended into the implication that Henson himself was the source of the character of Uncle Tom.25 The first of these claims may well be true; the second is more specious. But it is as the prototype of a fictional character that Henson is largely remembered. (His homestead, preserved today, is known as Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site.) This literary reputation has overshadowed his concrete political contributions, for Henson used his sudden fame as a public platform to speak in the cause of abolition, to raise funds for settlement schemes, and to gather support for educational efforts such as the British American School.26 His demand for a primarily vocational school for African-Canadian boys and girls and young men and women generated controversy in both his own time and since: did Henson underrate the intellectual capabilities of members of his own community, or was he simply alive to the hard realities and restricted possibilities that Black settlers would face? And it may be that his own, not entirely successful, attempts to become lettered had some influence on his educational philosophy. Henson documented in his Life his struggles to achieve literacy when he settled in Canada; a lifetime of frustrations and aspirations coalesce into one key scene. When his twelve-year-old son, Tom, discovered that his father could not read, the Reverend Josiah Henson walked into the woods in an agony of grief and shame. He returned, steeled with resolve: I began immediately to take lessons of Tom, therefore, and followed it up, every evening, by the light of a pine knot, or some hickory bark, which was the only light I could afford. Weeks passed, and my progress was so slow that poor Tom was almost discouraged, and used to drop asleep, sometimes, and whine a little over my dulness, and talk to me very much

64 Come, bright Improvement! as a schoolmaster talks to a stupid boy, till I began to be afraid that my age, my want of practice in looking at such little scratches, the daily fatigue, and the dim light, would be effectual preventives of my ever acquiring the art of reading. But Tom's perseverance and mine conquered at last, and in the course of the winter I did really learn to read a little. It was, and has been ever since, a great comfort to me to have made this acquisition; though it has made me comprehend better the terrible abyss of ignorance in which I had been plunged all my previous life. It made me also feel more deeply and bitterly the oppression under which I had toiled and groaned; but the crushing and cruel nature of which I had not appreciated, till I found out in some slight degree, from what I had been debarred. At the same time it made me more anxious than before to do something for the rescue and elevation of those who were suffering the same evils I had endured, and who did not know how degraded and ignorant they really were.27

As we now suspect, however, Josiah Henson in part euphemized this experience; his own Life is generally believed to have been transcribed with the aid of an amaneunsis, Samuel A. Eliot, a former mayor of Boston. Henson's text, with its faith in the powers of the written word and its fictionalization of the word's attainability, shows, more clearly than the bylaws, minute books, or manifestos of any society, what was really at stake in literary, and literacy education in early Ontario. As a result of his experiences, Henson would become both an organizer of settlements and a proponent of educational enfranchisement. His efforts, however, were not viewed uncritically even in his own community, as witness some of the debates concerning organizations with which he was involved. The British American School at Dawn (now Dresden), established originally by American abolitionists of European descent, was a primarily vocational institution for AfricanCanadian boys and girls, as well as young men and women who still required instruction. Henson would become a director of the institution and then a founder in 1841 of a similar manual-training school, the Wilberforce Educational Institute. These associations generated dissent when some felt that Henson, along with the school founders and directors who shared his views, were denying to Black children the full range of opportunities that their families had risked so much to obtain. The divergent poles of this mid-century debate are represented by the very different mandates of the two educational institutions that shared the name of Wilberforce: while the Wilberforce Educational

The Western District 65

Institute was founded on principles supported by Henson, the Wilberforce Lyceum Educating Society was established 'for the development of the rising generation in education, scientific attainments and other progressions in the English language, as will promote the furtherance of the true religion of God, politeness, and other such genius in our society, as will entitle us to mix more freely in the great crowd of her Majesty's subjects that is befitting a people who love Belle letters [sic] and other such polite literature.'28 The debate over the respective merits of a 'practical' versus a 'literary' education would persist into the century. As late as 1875, when Dr Anderson Ruffin Abbott gave his inaugural address to the Chatham Literary Society, a mixed-sex African-Canadian club, he would incur charges of elitism and of incognizance of the community's more pressing needs. Abbott came from a well-established African-Canadian family early settled in York, and he had received a classical training under the Reverend William King, patron of the Elgin settlement, before attending Knox College and then the Toronto School of Medicine and becoming the first African-Canadian physician to train or to practise in Canada.29 His own family had a history of involvement in important civic initiatives: his mother, Ellen Abbott, was a first president of the Queen Victoria Benevolent Society in 1840, while his father, Wilson Abbott, was a founder of the Provincial Union.30 Anderson Abbott was a man of distinctly literary tastes who would publish as a poet and as a journalist and give public lectures on authors of the day. In his address he would praise the intellect as both the 'noblest part of man's compound nature' and as a part of his 'divine essence.' Therefore development of the intellect was not only a personal moral responsibility but the precondition for political change. In Abbott's comparison of the intellect to the lever of Archimedes, this faculty becomes the mechanism that can move mountains. Such intellectual development could be achieved in three ways: by study and reading, by travel and observation, and by debate, he argued.31 This programmatic address, which reached a wider audience by being published in the Chatham Planet, would attract criticism not only from prejudiced whites sceptical of the intellectual abilities of the Black settlers but from members of his own community who considered his recommendations impractical, even impossible, for all but a small minority. If both time and travel were the necessary underpinnings of a literary education, such an education could be available only to a few. But such tensions were not unique to the fugitive community (al-

66 Come, bright Improvement!

though mass adult illiteracy and the continuing segregation of Black schoolchildren meant that the stakes in the discussion were higher for this particular group). Through magazines, newspapers, and public lectures of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s the same debate recurs. A distinctively 'literary' education may be the underpinning for moral and mental growth, or it may provide a pretext for promiscuous reading whose utility is suspect. Literary societies are, on the one hand, workshops where characters can be forged and arguments tempered; they can be, on the other, nefarious forges for heated words and inflamed opinions. This bifurcated view helps to shed further light on an interesting episode in the development of African-Canadian letters: the precipitate launch by Mary Ann Shadd of her newspaper, the Provincial Freeman, into the fray of settlement and anti-slavery politics of Canada West and into direct competition with the other newspaper aimed at Black and abolitionist readers, the Voice of the Fugitive, edited by Henry Bibb. It has been common to see early African-Ontarian politics as a standoff between the assimilationist or Utopian Shadd and the separatist or pragmatic Henry Bibb, the one preaching the goal of independent selfsufficiency for the former fugitive, the other a proponent of assistedsettlement schemes. While there has been some tendency to overstate their differences, in this particular case the antagonism between Shadd and Bibb was absolute. The movement of the debate onto the terrain of educational policy appears to have drawn some clear demarcations: Mary Miles Bibb and Mary Ann Shadd, both schoolteachers, had diametrically opposed views and practices on the question of whether the Black community should press for government-sponsored schools specifically for their children, or whether educational integration was the ideal to be achieved. (Self-interest may also have been a factor, since both Mary Bibb and Shadd aspired to control of the projected Windsor school.) Indeed, it is likely that the attacks on Shadd in the Voice of the Fugitive came from the pen of the educated Mary Bibb, rather than her less literate husband; recent scholarship on the Black women abolitionists in Canada West has revealed the extent of Mary Bibb's activity both in settlement politics and in the editorial work of that newspaper.32 It is, in part, the differing backgrounds of these players that explain their respective allegiances. Mary Ann Shadd (later Gary), born a free woman and the daughter of a noted abolitionist, had been educated in an integrated Quaker school and had worked as a teacher, before moving to Canada West to assist the streams of fugitives seeking haven

The Western District 67

there. In 1852 she had completed and published A Plea for Emigration; or, Notes of Canada West, a work that combined high rhetoric with practical advice, aimed to convince prospective emigrants of the merits of British North America, to assist them in navigating the economic, legal, and political situation, and to persuade them of the dangers of economic dependency.33 In 1853 she was contemplating the launch of a newspaper to express her views and developing these plans in conjunction with Samuel Ringgold Ward, whose family had escaped from slavery when he was three, and who had himself moved further north to avoid arrest after thwarting the capture of a fugitive. Educated first by Quakers and then at the Presbyterian Knox College in Toronto (where he was a fellow student with Anderson Ruffin Abbott) and ordained a minister, Ward carried an immense reputation as an orator - second only to Frederick Douglass himself, many would say. He was now an executive committee member and a travelling agent of the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada.34 Henry Bibb had also been born into slavery, but had never had the educational advantages seized by both Shadd and Ward. He escaped from slavery as an adult, after multiple and daring attempts to achieve his freedom, and had come to Canada following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. (These travails were told in his Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, which appeared in 1850.)35 Deeply involved with the Refugee Home Society, Bibb was, in addition, the editor of the Voice of the Fugitive; these labours also occupied Mary Miles Bibb, a freed woman from an African-American Quaker family, who was also, like Shadd, a schoolteacher. She had founded a school in Sandwich, but its precarious financial condition was causing her to seek government funding at this time.36 While these individuals had many commonalities of perspective and purpose, in other ways their allegiances were various; in addition, the degree to which they would support, or deplore, any 'elite' educational measures would prove to differ radically. The battle of Henry and Mary Bibb with Mary Ann Shadd had been in progress for some years when it reached its final escalation. Shadd, like Ward, was publicly critical of the refugee assistance organization with which the Bibbs were associated; Henry Bibb (although Mary Bibb was the likely actual author) fired back, accusing Shadd of everything from financial mismanagement of her school to gender impropriety: why was a petticoat-wearer taking such a public political role? Shadd responded in a series of letters to the Voice of the Fugitive, which the paper had the courtesy to

68 Come, bright Improvement!

publish. But civilities ceased, and the charges reached a crescendo when next the Voice accused Shadd and Ward of being accessories - and perhaps even parties - to a murder. And the murder had taken place, according to the account, in a Windsor debating society of which they were the patrons. 'A Deed of Blood' was the headline in the Voice of the Fugitive on 8 March 1853, as the newspaper provided a lurid account of a murder that had indeed occurred four days earlier at an organizational meeting of a debating society (composed, it appears, of young African-Canadian men), among whose members were supporters of Shadd and Ward's prospective newspaper. The exact story is difficult to reconstruct, but it appears that a heckler refused to be silent and challenged the 'sexton/ or order-keeper, of the society, William Burton, to step outside. The two men left the hall, and moments later the sexton lay dead, felled most probably by a blow. The Bibbs rendered their account in inflamed language: this 'Midnight' meeting (as they termed it) was but the latest of the uproarious, uncontrolled - indeed, illegal - meetings which were a certain provocation to violence, they charged. (It seems implausible that the meeting had convened at midnight, and I have found no evidence that such gatherings were prohibited even among the fugitives of the day.) While the details may have been uncertain or exaggerated, the Bibbs' conclusion was unequivocal: responsibility for the death was to be laid squarely on Shadd and Ward. It is unclear from the available accounts whether this organizational meeting was a debut for the society or an open general meeting of an already established group (hence the presence of the unsympathetic heckler), or whether a public meeting had been convened for an additional purpose (such as a fund-raising); the Voice's reference to a series of meetings implies the society had been in operation for some time. It may have been a group that combined educational and social with benevolent activities, or even with abolitionist or Underground Railroad organization; it may have been a forerunner of the later Union Association groups, which would include in their mandate support for Shadd's newspaper. It may, however, have been a dedicated debating society, taking advantage of the training that could be offered by the accomplished rhetorician at its head. (Whatever was the actual case, the Voice strategically positioned the group as a debating society and nothing more.) Although the charge made by the Voice was clearly outrageous, Shadd had occasion to be concerned: clearly, her fitness as a community leader and her morality (as a woman intricated in a young

The Western District 69

men's association) were at stake. In addition, this charge was made during a time of significant backlash against the Black population of southwestern Ontario (Robert Lachlan's petition was but one manifestation), of which the principal rationale was intemperance or lawlessness among the fugitives. ('The prejudice is higher here than any part of Canada/ settler Robert Nelson reported to interviewer Benjamin Drew. 'What two or three bad fellows do, prejudice lays to the whole of us. But ... it has, to my knowledge, been proven that when theft was charged on a colored man, it turned out that a white man did it.')37 The need to clear her own name must have appeared an imperative to Shadd. As a result, the first issue of the Provincial Freeman was rushed into print only two weeks later, despite the professed reluctance of Shadd and Ward to allow their names to appear in the press any longer after such 'a very severe and painful experience.' Shadd lays out the facts of the episode, taking care to distance the unfortunate incident as far as she can from the debating society itself. Her argument is a masterpiece of litotes. The point of the dispute was Very slight,' Shadd tells her readers (and therefore, one infers, it was not essential to the mission of the meeting). The altercation took place outside the hall, and the people within had no idea of what was happening. She even stresses - in a rather odd set of reiterations - how quiet was the exit from the meeting of both the intruder and the sexton; how muted was the murder; how even the discovery of William Burton's body occasioned only quiet and purposeful action. While distancing herself and the society from the event, Shadd confronts Bibb in the most direct of terms: the crime of seeking to live by a 'studied, deliberate misrepresentation of others' is graver than the 'taking of life by violent means,' and more injurious to the peace of the community. Bibb, she concludes, has committed 'moral homicide.'38 After this first volley the Provincial Freeman would not see its next issue for another year, when it would resume publication the following spring in Toronto. Clearly (and as Rosemary Sadlier has observed), the first issue was launched as a public forum for Shadd and Ward's defence.39 One is not persuaded by Shadd's explanation on the occasion that the first number of the Freeman had been brought out to test the waters for potential subscribers. I have found no further traces of this Windsor debating society.40 Perhaps it disbanded as a direct result of the murder or as a result of Bibb's attack; perhaps it lost momentum without the support of its mentor, Samuel Ringgold Ward, who left for England the next month

70 Come, bright Improvement!

on a speaking tour. Perhaps the group reformed as a more private and less noticeable organization. Scant as the evidence is for this organization, it is still possible to place the episode in the more general web of attitudes to literary societies, common to the day. There is no reason to believe that Mary Bibb and Henry Bibb, although less educated than their opposing numbers, were a priori opposed to debating and literary societies; indeed, Mary Bibb would almost immediately found a literary society of her own. But one can also note how easily she and Henry Bibb could mobilize a quite common set of assumptions about the dangers of intemperate extempore speech and the organizations that provided a forum for it, while Shadd in her response could readily allude to counter-arguments that such societies were both moderate and moral. The Voice may also have had an additional concern about organizations that were set up merely for eloquence or entertainment; as they would soon develop, the African-Canadian literary societies would centre mutual aid and political mobilization in their mandates. Indeed, the controversy over whether schools should be founded for the African-Canadian community alone (given the harsh racist realities of Canada West) or whether integration was to be the goal, and whether those schools should continue the sorts of curricula with which newly arrived fugitives were familiar or adopt a more 'British' model, was replicated in this debate over debating. If the debating-society model was an essentially 'British' format that would provide rhetorical tools for cultural assimilation (as was envisaged, for example, by the Wilberforce Lyceum founders), should it be preferred over the more community centred models of cultural and political work developed by African Americans in the northern states? In practice the societies in African-Canadian settlements would come to draw upon both these influences and would combine cultural with civic work. Members of the Chatham Literary Association, for example, experiencing the effects of both segregation and vigilantism in their town in the 1890s, would fight back with the formation of the Kent County Civil Rights League.41 While its contemporary reputation may have been besmirched, the Windsor debating society deserves a place of honour as one of the first organizations yet identified in what was to become a long line of societies operating among inhabitants of African descent in Ontario. Priority, it appears, goes to the Wilberforce Lyceum Educating Society, founded at Cannonsburg (near Colchester) in January of 1850, an organization that has the further distinction of being (as far as can be determined) the first mixed-sex literary society in Ontario and perhaps

The Western District 71

in all of Canada. (It appears, however, that all the officers of the society were men; in addition, fees were differentiated for the two sexes.)42 This mutual-education society worked to acquire basic supplies such as books and writing tablets, and provided strict monitoring of the morality and conduct of its members. In this lineage, we may next place the Windsor debating society; following it there was a rapid growth in literary societies, of which some were for women only and several were mixed-sex. A new addition to the Windsor community came the year after the contretemps with the Windsor Ladies Club (sometimes, it appears, referred to as the Mutual Improvement Society), founded by Mary Bibb in 1854 after the death of her husband.43 This group, according to historian Peggy Bristow, in all probability would have taken the provision of education for Black children as a special part of its mission.44 The Windsor Ladies Club has the additional honour of being the first women's literary society in Ontario and perhaps in all of Canada. (Unlike Euro-Canadian women, who appear to have had no models or sources of inspiration close to hand, Black female immigrants to Canada would already have been familiar with, and may well have participated in, the many educational, benevolent, abolitionist, and literary societies founded by African-American women, beginning in the early 1830s.)45 This club was soon followed by a second women's organization, the Ladies Literary Society of Chatham, founded by Amelia Freeman Shadd, the sister-in-law of Mary Ann Shadd. According to Bristow, it also acted as a benevolent association and, in addition, provided aid to the Provincial Freeman.46 While these are the only mid-century women's literary societies to be identified to date, the large number of organizations established principally for benevolent purposes merits mention; there were, for example, thirteen branches of the True Band in southwestern Ontario by 1856.47 The year 1854 marked the founding of the Provincial Union Association (of which Wilson Abbott was an instigator), designed to 'encourage the rising generation in literary, scientific and mechanical efforts' and to 'promote literature, general intelligence, active benevolence, the principle of universal freedom, and a British union not based on complexional considerations.' Its politics were closely tied to the policies of the Provincial Freeman, which repeatedly published the group's constitution.48 It appears that this association was to meet in its own right but also to act as a 'mother' to other, more local circles. (Indeed, the Chatham society may have been one such satellite, given the similarity of its aims.) The Provincial Union was a mixed-sex group, with the men and

72 Come, bright Improvement!

women meeting both separately and together. The men convened fortnightly and the women on a weekly basis (perhaps because they were engaged in the manufacture of 'useful and elegant' articles); but the members met in common on a monthly basis 'for the purpose of promoting the literary objects specified by recitations of original pieces, reading, debates, &c.,' according to the constitution. In addition, addresses would be given to the membership at its semi-annual meetings. The Young Men's Excelsior Literary Association (1855?), an unnamed debating society or 'lyceum' (1856?), and the Mental and Moral Improvement Society (African) (1859?) were three additional Toronto groups that were operating in the latter half of the decade.49 And in 1857 Amelia Freeman Shadd was proposing a 'programme for improvement' whose followers would pass the winter evenings profitably through attendance at lectures and sermons and in the formation of 'reading circles of not more than twenty members each.'50 Born into a distinguished family of educators and abolitionists, herself Oberlineducated, and with teaching experience at several schools (including a position as instructor in fine arts at Allegheny College), Freeman Shadd would be the force behind a number of educational schemes; she would fund-raise for these by hosting events that were tantalizingly advertised as 'mental feasts.' While little can be known from the available records about the dayto-day workings of these societies, an interesting and unintentionally comic glimpse of one group (and of the ways it was deemed to fall short of the literary-society ideal) is provided by an item in the Provincial Freeman in 1856. The Dumas Literary Society was a mixed-sex organization of young men and women in Chatham; in all probability, the society was named after Alexandre Dumas pere, the famous author of The Count of Monte-Cristo and The Three Musketeers, although the acknowledgment may have been of Alexandre Dumas/z/s, author of The Lady of the Camelias. (The Dumas family was famously proud of its mixed-race heritage, and the elder Dumas was also an ardent supporter of national liberation movements; author and abolitionist Martin Delany, who had penned the novel Blake, or the Huts of America, during his Chatham residency, named a son in the family's honour.)51 But the club's members did not live up to their literary namesake, at least at the meeting visited by a disapproving correspondent for the Freeman. It was all Tove' and little to do with 'literary matters/ the reporter observed. The Freeman wagged its finger at the gossip, flirtation, and foolery (a prank in which a dozing member was wakened by the

The Western District 73

application of a stray cat), and it scolded the reverends and teachers in attendance.52 Clearly, readers of the Freeman were intended to draw a reproachful comparison to the Chatham Mechanics' Institute, whose most recent public event was reported in the same issue: the 'gratified' audience had appeciated the 'instructive' lecture praising the utility of industry and mental cultivation.53 It seems unlikely that the Dumas Literary Society heeded the advice of the Freeman; the results of the society were ephemeral, if pleasurable, while the Chatham Mechanics' Institute remained an important cultural presence for some time. But the Dumas Literary Society provides a valuable instance of the multiple appeal of such groups. For these young men and women of the 1850s (as would later be the case for their European-settler counterparts), chances for amusement, courtship, and public displays of talent were often as alluring as the opportunity for improvement. The 1850s represent a remarkable growth in the literary-society ideal throughout African-Canadian communities; it can safely be assumed that other societies were founded for which evidence is now lost. (The intensity of literary interest at mid-century, at least among the more educated section of the community, is epitomized by a single issue of the Provincial Freeman containing essays on 'Books as Medicine' and The Value of Books,' a piece in praise of scholarship, and a poem by Longfellow.)54 Equally noteworthy is the central role that women played as organizers and members of these societies; more than twenty years would pass before Euro-Canadian women in Ontario would fight for admission to mixed-sex societies and begin to found their own. The literary-society tradition in the African-Canadian community would continue well into the century and beyond. The Amherstburg Literary Association (1880), the Busy Gleanors (sic) of Amherstburg (1887?), the Chatham Literary Association (1890s), the Chatham Literary Society (1870s; which has been noted above), the Chatham Lyceum (1872), the Cheerful Workers (Amherstburg, late 1880s), the Evergreen Society (Chatham, 1870s?), the Frederic (sz'c) Douglass SelfImprovement Club (Amherstburg, late 1890s), and the King Street Literary Society (Amherstburg, 1880s) were further manifestations of the literary-society ideal in the southwestern part of the province.55 The legacy continues into the next century with groups such as the Buxton Literary Society (1915; which also published a short-lived Literary Gazette), the Coloured Literary Association of Toronto (1919), and such noteworthy women's organizations as the Windsor Art and Literary

74 Come, bright Improvement! Club (1915) and the Hour-A-Day Study Clubs established in both Dresden and Windsor in the 1930s.56 As the century progressed, and as the more pressing needs of the newly arrived fugitives were alleviated, the views expressed by Dr Abbott in his inaugural address to the Chatham Literary Society would have found a more receptive audience: An accomplished scholar must push investigations into every channel of human research if he would attain to literary pre-eminence. And there is no more favourable opportunity for utilizing the knowledge that he has garned [sic] in his walks through the fields of literature than is afforded by the Literary Society... This is an age of unprecedented intellectual activity; and any people who are content to slumber in mental inertia may expect to wake far behind in the race of life. Ignorance whether in white or black cannot expect to take precedence with education and refinement. You may put forth extraordinary pretentions, and claim extraordinary concessions, yet you will not be able to command regard for the one or respect for the other until you are in a position to enforce your demand by the power of intellect.57

CHAPTER FOUR

CIRCLE TO CIRCLE

Encircling our fair globe, behold a band Of tens of thousands, turning eager eyes To that fair lake, and to that leader wise, Who formed the generous plan, far-reaching, grand. Circle to circle, stretches each a hand, With hope and faith, the student lone replies. And down the ages still the echo flies; No work is lost. There sweeps o'er sea and land The influence of those mystic letters four, From west to east, Ontario to Cathay, What empty hearts are filled. Let us recall Chautauqua's gifts, - Science and Art's rich store, History's bright page, and Poesy's wild ray, Religion purifies and sweetens all. Janet Carnochan, untitled sonnet on the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle (1886)1 My old schoolmaster used to tell me that school was the place where we should learn how to learn! And I see the truth of this every day: there is more learning in the air now-a-days, to the square inch, than there was when I was young. We have it here. My eldest daughter, Arabella, tells me that she - being a member of the Chautauqua Society - is going to take up Greek history during the coming winter. Now what does she want with Greek history? isn't English or Canadian good enough to start with? I know, for a fact, that Arabella can't do a simple problem in arithmetic; and she is worse than I am for spelling. And yet she wants

76 Come, bright Improvement! to study the history of Greece! Great Scott! as though there wasn't enough in the kitchen. I had no objection to her painting on china; although she said it did cost a lot to get it 'fired.' (I'd have fired it for nothing, if she'd let me!) I didn't mind her going in for calisthenics - when my house was like the back tent of a circus, for six months; and I have stood piano practicing as long as any mortal man could. But when 'Bella starts asking me questions - when we have company - about 'caryatids' and 'discoboluses,' and when she has changed the cat's name to 'Aspasia,'and old Rover's to 'Artaxerxes,' then I think it is about time to impress Arabella with the idea that it would be conducive to the attainment of her own happiness were she able to wrestle with matters more intimately connected with her own household affairs. 'Argus/ Gait Weekly Reformer (1892)2

The Chautauqua Institution was one of the many artistic and idealistic enterprises that developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in Upper New York State - the communitarian Oneida colonists, the spiritualists at Lily Dale, and the Roycrof ters, who propounded the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement, for example. But unlike most of its counterparts from this period, Chautauqua is still a thriving organization, a cultural summer camp for adults where the president of the United States may deliver a policy address or an avant-garde composer launch a new opera.3 The institution takes its name from the lake on which its extensive grounds are situated. Gingerbread cottages, stately hotels, and picturesque boarding houses, in a variety of American vernacular architectural styles, line the shady streets, and visitors stroll on well-tended pathways past sites and buildings that echo the vocabulary of late-nineteenth-century learning. There are groves and grottos, amphitheatres and temples, a scale model of the Holy Land, and an octagonal hall designed according to phrenological models of the mind.4 A Canadian connection to Chautauqua is symbolized by the Massey Memorial Organ, donated to the institution in 1907; perhaps the largest outdoor organ in the world, it dominates the 5,000-seat amphitheatre.5 While this current Chautauqua has taken its place among other prestigious music and drama festivals of the eastern United States, for many people - and for Canadians especially - the word 'Chautauqua' is more likely to conjure up images or even memories of the travelling 'tent chautauquas' that roamed the mid- and central United States and Canada (with some incursions into Quebec and the Maritime prov-

Circle to Circle 77

inces) in the 1920s and 1930s. These travelling tent shows brought both culture and entertainment to the masses during tough times; their Canadian history has been traced in detail by Sheilagh Jameson in Chautauqua in Canada.6 The tent chautauquas were an important link in the development of drama and musical performance in Canada and are remembered fondly by their audiences as well: every year the city of Calgary restages a chautauqua at its heritage park. But these events are much later manifestations of the original Chautauqua Institution, which commenced its work in the 1870s. Although it was eventually to occupy a position of undisputed leadership in the movement for adult education in the United States, the Chautauqua Assembly began modestly in 1874 as a summer gathering for Sunday school teachers on the site of a former Methodist camp meeting.7 Under the direction of its visionary founder, the Reverend John H. Vincent, within five years the assembly had developed the Chautauqua College of Liberal Arts and the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle (CLSC), organizations that further mutated in the closing decades of the nineteenth century into a vast cultural enterprise with summer camps, public lecture series, a sizeable publication program, and a book distribution and sales system. Chautauqua pioneered the 'book club' in a new sense of the term - the sale of books by subscription: in fact, it had its own Chautauqua Book-a-Month Reading Circle some years before the founding of its famous imitator, the Bookof-the-Month Club, offering a balanced annual selection of literature, history, travel, and scientific works. (Those with less time and fewer resources, such as errand boys and servant girls, were encouraged to belong to the Spare-Minute Reading Club, which offered twenty-three 'tractlets' for the price of a dollar; and children could join the Young Folks Reading Club, whose offerings were published in the juvenile magazine Wide Awake.)8 Through the mechanism of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, the institution was also the leading proponent of the 'book club' in the sense in which the term is used today, coordinating many thousands of home reading circles that did their work under the organization's guidance. At one point the Chautauqua College pursued university standing, and for a time it offered courses that were accepted by many universities as credit equivalents. (Traces of its reading programs and of its 'college' ambitions can still be seen in the 'Great Books' program initiated at the University of Chicago, for the college's founder, William Harper, later became that university's president.)9 So widely had the Chautauqua movement captured the cultural

78 Come, bright Improvement!

ideals of the late nineteenth century that it became a popular setting for poetry and prose, including the 'Chautauqua Girls' series by the prolific children's writer Tansy/ The influence of the Chautauqua Assembly spread even further with the growth of imitator organizations, referred to as the 'independent chautauquas.'10 Several examples were to be found in Ontario. There was a short-lived attempt to establish an independent at Niagara-onthe-Lake, whose first assembly in the summer of 1887 ran for eleven days and drew five hundred participants, according to a report filed in the Chautauquan. 'The spacious Amphitheatre was decorated with flowers and bunting. The Camp Fire was a great success.'11 In the mornings, educational work was directed by James L. Hughes, the provincial schools inspector, while Sunday school studies occupied the afternoons. Diverse topics such as kindergarten pedagogy, calisthenics, vocal music, elocution, and botany were covered, and university professors were among the invited lecturers, as was Chautauqua founder Bishop Vincent. By the next year, the Chautauquan could announce, "This Assembly has magnificent grounds, a first-class hotel and one of a cheaper character, a number of elegant cottages, and an Auditorium modeled after that at Chautauqua, capable of accommodating four thousand persons.'12 The map of the assembly grounds provides a plan of the intellectual, educational, politicial, and spiritual orientations of the Niagara Assembly. Radiating out from the Chautauqua Amphitheatre are avenues named after Addison, Dickens, Homer, Longfellow, and Mozart, educators Froebel, Vincent, and Wilberforce, theologians Wesley and Wycliffe, and politicians Bryant, Charming, and Gladstone. Avenues and crescents dedicated to Milton, Shakespeare, and Tennyson encircled the perimeter of the grounds, while Ryerson Park lay in a secluded corner. Despite the initial interest, and despite the support provided by the Chautauqua Institution, financial reversals (including the municipality's decision to levy taxes on the property) soon led to the assembly's dissolution. Local historian Janet Carnochan (who served for a time as secretary to the organization and whose sonnet to the Chautauqua circles has been cited above) devoted the 'Closing Words' of her History of Niagara to a fond elegy for the assembly: 'Memories still linger of the lectures given, of the entertainments of Savahbrah from Burma, of the elocution of Professor Clark, particularly one night when giving the magnificent chariot race in Ben Hur,' the Trinity professor himself in a race to deliver the stirring passage over the roar of a passing train. Such

Circle to Circle 79

rhetorical feats have faded; Carnochan concludes with a lyrical description of the rare wildflowers now overrunning the cultivated grounds.13 Even more successful was the longer-lived assembly that was established at Grimsby Park in 1875 and continued until 1905.14 While it could be classed as an 'independent' chautauqua, it can also claim priority, having operated since 1859 as a Methodist camp meeting; indeed, the first tent meeting occurred on the spot in 1846. However, though it predated the Chautauqua movement and (unlike the Niagara Assembly) remained autonomous from it, Grimsby Park also took the United States assembly for a model as it reconstituted itself in 1874. Fiscal difficulties in that year led to a restructuring and the formation of the Ontario Methodist Camp-Ground Company, chaired by Noah Phelps. In the first year, carpenters' gothic cottages replaced the earlier tents, and a railway station and first hotel were opened; more cottages, a grander hotel, a steamer dock, shops and services, tennis courts and picnic grounds, meeting rooms, and a wooden temple based on the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City (although sadly lacking the superb acoustics of the original) would soon follow. The old religious assembly had occupied one week in late August, but the new gathering was eventually to develop a two-month schedule, attracting summerlong residents and day trippers alike, with a wider range of offerings. By 1900 observer Harriet Phelps Youmans would detect no visible trace of the old camp meeting. Instead, visitors enjoying a stroll on the promenade would see 'an up-to-date summer resort of the Chautauqua class, with every facility for innocent and healthy enjoyment and sport. Due regard for the religious and intellectual wants is shown in the preparation of the program, which includes sermons, lectures, concerts and entertainments, classes in elocution and studies in literature.'15 In comparison with its Niagara contemporary, little evidence now remains of the cultural activities at Grimsby Park. Rhetorical studies appear to have occupied a prominent place, however; Yeomans is referring to the classes offered by members of the National Philadelphia School of Elocution and Oratory in the 1890s. The fad for amateur theatricals and recitals in the late nineteenth century created a demand for instruction in elocution and expression. A number of schools grew up to answer this need, many of which were Delsartist in inclination; it appears that the Philadelphia school was also cast in this mould, judging by the 'classical' costumes and stylized gestures of the participants at Grimsby Park. (Indeed, the physical-education department at the Chautauqua Institution in the United States was under the supervision

80 Come, bright Improvement!

of a well-known Delsartist at this time.)16 Originally developed as a system of voice and gestures for actors, Delsarte soon attracted a wider following; it was seen to offer a method for integrating intellectual understanding, emotion, and movement (or mind, spirit, and body) which could help achieve a 'Greek' ideal of self-development. Its study was especially popular among young women, who would also have appreciated the Delsartist insistence on unfettered physical movement.17 Young divinity students and Sunday school teachers were in all probability also taking instruction from the National Philadelphia School teachers at Grimsby Park; elocutionary study in this period created some strange crossings of theology and theatricality, as ministers and deaconesses improved their delivery and interpretational skills under the tutelage of Delsartist thespians.18 But lectures and lessons would soon be replaced by less elevating attractions, when bankruptcy forced a sale of the campground to an entrepreneur in 1905. It remained a popular site for day visitors, with a midway, plays by touring stock companies, and motion pictures (while postcards proclaimed bloomered bathing beauties, rather than togaed maidens, "The Chief Attraction' of Grimsby Park). In the next decades several fires would race through the cottages and the hotel, and the Depression took a further toll; by the thirties the place had a seedy charm, with dance bands playing at the Lakeview Casino. The expropriation of the north end of the park in 1939 for the development of the highway now known as the Queen Elizabeth Way would be the final blow; the few cottages that remain are surrounded by newer developments. But the early days of this 'Chautauqua of Canada' have received several nostalgic, imaginative commemorations. Myrtle Bean's novel Yesteryear at Grimsby Park was serialized in the Grimsby Independent in 1936, while Dorothy Turcotte's Greetings from Grimsby Park captures the flavour of life in the summer colony through a series of fictional letters. A third and later Ontario assembly deserves note, although it appears to have had no formal connection to the original Chautauqua Assembly and was theosophical rather than Methodist in its inclination. In 1921 the newly formed Canadian Chautauqua Association established a Muskoka Assembly on Tobin's Island in Lake Rosseau. Theosophy was an important influence on turn-of-the-century arts in Canada (most famously on painter Lawren Harris), in part because it offered a 'spiritual' program outside the constraints of established religion and in part because it licensed nationalist cultural enterprises by theorizing that a new and advanced 'race' would appear in selected

Circle to Circle 81

areas of North America.19 In keeping with this concept, one of the special mandates of the Muskoka Assembly was the reading and promotion of Canadian literature. Bliss Carman, the critic Katherine Hale, Dorothy Livesay, little-theatre proponent Roy Mitchell, Gilbert Parker, Lome Pierce, E.J. Pratt, Charles G.D. Roberts, and Margaret Marshall Saunders were some of the participants in the assembly's Summer School of Canadian Literature and in its drama programs. The assembly also developed a four-year course of readings with concentration on Canadian literature. But after ten years the Depression brought an end to this important mechanism for the development of Canadian culture.20 The most significant incursion of the Chautauqua ideal into Canada, however, came, not with the attempts to found independent assemblies, but with the establishment of branches of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle started by the American organization.21 The circle (usually called the 'C.L.S.C.,' the 'mystic letters four' of Janet Carnochan's sonnet) was not the first, but it was the most successful of the many North American schemes to provide home-based study and extension courses in the late nineteenth century. By the late 1870s there was a heightened demand for higher education (on the part of women particularly), but it would be another twenty years before universities would take seriously the demands for 'adult' and extension courses. To fill this void, correspondence schools offering programs for individuals and groups were established by a variety of educators and commercial enterprises; of these, the rigorous four-year plan of study developed by the Chautauqua Assembly became a national success and an international model. So swiftly did the CLSC develop that the coordinating group could barely keep pace with the success of its own product, as evidenced by the exponentially increasing numbers of new groups listed in each issue of the Chautauquan and by the amount of logistical turbulence assuaged by the calm and competent correspondence of the circle's secretary, Kate Kimball, who fearlessly took on this formidable task at the age of eighteen. Commencing in 1878, the CLSC developed four-year cycles of study that could be followed by correspondence. While it was possible to undertake the program on an individual basis, CLSC students were encouraged to form a study 'circle'; these met sometimes in private homes, but often in more public locations such as libraries, schools, church halls, or YMCA meeting rooms, and sometimes with the sponsorship of these bodies. While there were considerable variations in the

82 Come, bright Improvement!

four-year cycle over the years, the program could be described as rotating through the history and literature of the United States, England, and Europe; this curriculum was seasoned with selections from Greek and Latin classics in translation, theological readings, and scientific and 'practical' topics. Some substitutions of material were permitted (the Jewish circles would replace the Christian readings; Canadian circles could turn to materials on the past and poetry of their own country), but in other respects the curriculum was highly codified. All students, whether they were novices or near-graduates, would follow the same program in any given year, since the CLSC curriculum was structured cyclically rather than incrementally. Programs of study and required readings were published in the monthly magazine, the Chautauquan, and texts were also made available cheaply through the institution's own publication and distribution program. (So significant were sales to these groups that other publishers vied to have their works recommended, and bookstores could draw customers by advertising that they carried Chautauqua selections.) Examinations were distributed and graded by the central office, and the names of graduates were published in the Chautauquan. While the CLSC courses were designed to serve far-flung and even isolated students, correspondents were encouraged to think of the institution itself as their 'alma mater.' Those who could - and many did - travelled to the assembly grounds for an elaborate convocation ceremony, marching through arches representing Faith, Science, Literature, and Art, with busts of Plato, Socrates, Virgil, Goethe, and Shakespeare solemnly witnessing their achievement. A score of little flower girls strewed petals at the graduates' feet. Chautauqua founder Vincent knew that such ceremonies might appear comic to some, but he judged that sentiment was a strong buttress to educational endeavour; ritual and song could help these scattered students to experience the same 'bond of union' enjoyed by their more privileged college counterparts.22 To this end, the study program of the circles was accompanied by an elaborate system of seals and certificates, badges and banners, orders, leagues, and guilds, which eventually became so ornate that it had to be drastically pruned by the overwhelmed organizers.23 In addition, the founder set aside a portion of the newly purchased grounds for the use of the circles. Called then (and to this day) St Paul's Grove, its central feature was the colonnaded Hall of Philosophy in which the convocation ceremonies took place. While course development, syllabuses, and testing were highly cen-

Circle to Circle 83

tralized, it would be a mistake to see the CLSC as fulfilling the dream of perfectly coordinated education, as in the fantasy of the French school inspector glancing at the clock and knowing that in every corner of France each schoolchild was poised over the same paragraph. Not only were some substitutions of material permitted, but local initiative and innovation were encouraged - one group might develop an interest in scientific experimentation, another a penchant for local history. (Such scholarly endeavours were sometimes coordinated by the central office; in one undertaking, circles collected and forwarded examples of regional folk tales and local dialects.) The production of club newsletters and literary magazines was also a popular project. While the handbook Local Circles: How to Organize and How to Conduct Them advocated lesson summaries, research into unfamiliar allusions, memorization through repetition and drills, and correction of pronunciation as the cornerstones of the pedagogically sound program, it also provided a long list of optional activities. Essays, debates, and round tables; projects involving editing, research, and experimentation; and excursions, the staging of tableaux vivants, and charades with impersonation of famous figures were all recommended to accommodate special interests and to season the routine.24 Groups developed their own study hints, topics, and traditions, and communicated these to 'Miss Kimball' in her capacity as executive secretary of the circles; she, in turn, would transmit excerpts from these letters, and sometimes entire reports, to other circles through the medium of the Chautauquan. Circles also adopted their own distinctive names, emblems, flowers, mottos, symbols, and ceremonies. The combination of a well-developed infrastructure with room for local flexibility was in part responsible for the immediate success of the CLSC More than 8,000 people formally followed the first four-year course of study, and a cumulative total of 180,000 members was reported by 1891; it was estimated that by 1940 three-quarters of a million people had followed the reading scheme, of whom a tenth had reached graduation.25 To look at the rate of growth from a slightly different perspective, it is estimated that 10,000 local reading circles sprang up in the first two decades of the scheme. The CLSC continues as what is by all accounts the oldest surviving book club in the United States, having celebrated its 120th anniversary in 1998.26 Newly refurbished offices the 'Veranda' and a bookstore - serve members who continue to follow a four-year course of readings and to attend lectures at the institution when they can. Like their predecessors of generations ago, readers

84 Come, bright Improvement!

belong to a 'class' with its own name, motto, and emblematic banner; graduates participate in ritualized convocation services and ceremonies; students who advance beyond the normal requirements can become members of the 'Guild of Seven Seals.' Summer visitors to the institution can participate in another form of 'book club/ a course of nine readings (one for each week of the summer program) whose authors come to lecture at Chautauqua. The CLSC's continuity of purpose and practice is visually displayed in Alumni Hall, a rambling wooden structure with broad porches, panelled meeting and garden rooms, and an eclectic collection of wicker and Arts and Crafts furniture. The high walls are covered with class banners, from the fading embroidery and exquisite gold-thread work of lilies and shields in those of groups such as the Pioneers, Tennysonians, and Philomatheans, to the bright quilting and applique representing the most recent classes. Past endeavours are also commemorated in the mosaic floor of the Hall of Philosophy, inlaid with the names and mottos of the graduating classes, where convocations are still celebrated today. This current Hall of Philosophy, built in a 'Greek temple' style, replaced the original wooden structure early in the twentieth century; the trees of St. Paul's Grove have grown to shade its timber roof. Despite the size and longevity of the CLSC, it is difficult to construct the histories of individual circles. Some of the files of the corresponding secretary are held by the Chautauqua Institution Archives, and the 'class' papers are retained at Alumni Hall, but the originals of the reports filed by the circles (either the formal progress reports that circles were requested to complete or the more fulsome informal letters to Kate Kimball) appear to have been destroyed. In addition, the centralization of record-keeping - a published curriculum provided the structure, while examinations and awards measured individual achievement, and regularly filed reports monitored the groups' progress seems to have meant that individual circles did not maintain minute books. (Recording and reading minutes does not appear among the activities recommended in the Local Circles manual.) Newsletters and literary magazines, which may have been single-copy holographic affairs for club circulation only, have rarely survived. Further, although the handbook suggested that circles meet in public places in order to make visible the Chautauqua ideal, many convened in homes and were thus less likely to have their activities noted by local newspapers. Sometimes it is difficult to establish even the identities of the circles, which changed their names, split into sections when over-enrolled, and

Circle to Circle 85

dissolved when a four-year course of study was complete. (Reorganization was a frequent feature of the local circles, since it was common to have members who had joined the circle at different points; balance was obtained through frequent shufflings and recruitments of members.) The documentation difficulties are even more acute for Ontario: the Chautauqua Institution Archives has scanty Canadian material, and only one minute book has been located for Ontario (and no newsletters or magazines).27 Nonetheless, a patchwork of references does permit some reconstruction of the spread of the CLSC into Ontario and the activities of some representative circles. The circles commenced their work in the United States in 1874, and individual Canadian students may well have been enrolled in the course of study in the early years, but it would be the next decade before the circles began to take form in Ontario. By the early 1880s, however, growth was rapid; the volume of correspondence from individuals seeking membership and the need for assistance in the formation of circles led to the appointment of manufacturer Lewis Peake as secretary of 'C.L.S.C. Canadian Branch.' Peake in turn energetically boosted the movement. T am glad to say I shall need more blank applications. The Circle is spreading widely this year and I have already sent out [nearly?] 500 blanks in response to requests/ he wrote to Kate Kimball; the fruit of this labour was a forwarded package of 302 applications.28 A regular flow of letters sending names, fees, and changes of address to the secretary's Buffalo office, and requesting badges and books gives the later reader a sense of the swift spread of circle membership throughout the province: Ailsa Craig and Arva, Beaverton and Burford, Copetown and Curries Crossing, all the way to Yarker and Yelverton - these are some of the locales in the membership applications of 1884, as well as inquiries from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, Quebec, Manitoba, and British Columbia.29 There soon were circle members from Newfoundland to Bella Bella, British Columbia, and throughout the province of Ontario. In addition to enlisting individuals as members, Lewis Peake lent his name and presence to the Niagara Assembly, assisted the formation of local circles, and established connections among the circles and of those circles to the 'alma mater.' The spring of 1885 had him busily preparing the way for a visit by Dr Vincent to Toronto, for example, while in 1890 Peake would be one of the coordinators for the convention of Canadian circles.30 Further, he oversaw the development of texts that could function as alternative selections for Canadian circle members, such as the

86 Come, bright Improvement!

volume of Canadian history and literature which appeared in 1887 under the editorship of Graeme Mercer Adam.31 While Peake does not name the text in his letter to Kate Kimball (and the book does not proclaim itself a Chautauqua circle publication), this was in all probability the book authored by Niagara Assembly director the Reverend W.H. Withrow, An Abridged History of Canada, for which Adam provided 'an Outline History of Canadian Literature/ (The copy of this text in the possession of Victoria University in Toronto has a handwritten listing of study questions for 'CLSC 1887-88' inscribed on its flyleaf.)32 Peake was clearly devoted to the cause, but it must have been frustrating work. Repeated requests for consolidated membership lists, concerns about the duty levied on publications crossing the border, and complaints that the organization was insufficiently accommodating to the interests of Canadian members begin to appear in his correspondence, as they would bedevil the letters of his successors to the post. The controversy over the choice of a replacement for Lewis Peake gives some insight into the politics and the personalities of these early boosters of the Chautauqua movement in Canada. Distant business interests and a spate of ill health meant that Peake must find a successor; the increasingly onerous nature of the task suggested that more than one Canadian secretary might be required. Who should be chosen? And how to divide the territory? Should either of the independent assemblies, at Niagara or at Grimsby Park, become a base for the Canadian circles? Should Canadians play a more significant role in setting the directions of the CLSC? The story is told in a flurry of letters in the autumn of 1892 on the part of Peake, William Houston, and the two prospective secretaries, Jessie Munro of Thorold and J.H. Fryer of Gait. The situation is laid out by Houston (at that time, librarian of the Ontario legislature and a supporter of many cultural causes: he will appear later in this account as both a friend of the Toronto Women's Literary Club and as a proponent of university extension). He writes confidingly to Miss Kimball (who may have visited Houston's own circle a few months earlier).33 Houston is concerned that Lewis Peake's other duties have caused his attention to the CLSC to lag, and he is worried as well by a rumour that Grimsby Park will become the headquarters of the CLSC. Surely the Niagara Assembly, 'which was started mainly to promote Chautauqua methods of culture,' with its closer ties to the mother institution, would be a preferable choice? (Houston's is not a neutral view, since he was also involved in managing the business

Circle to Circle 87

affairs of the Niagara Assembly.)34 He hopes that no decisions will be made at the Chautauqua Assembly meeting prejudicial to Canadian interests. The next month, Houston would propose a Mrs Allen from London, the widow of a Methodist clergyman, for the position, and he would return to his nationalist themes.35 Canadian interests would best be served (and Canadian membership numbers would soar) if a Canadian representative were allowed on the committee that arranges the reading courses. '[W]e still have some people here who are disturbed about the "foreign" origins of the Chautauqua movement and would prefer to ally themselves with the English National Home Reading [sic] Union,' he reported.36 This rhetorical stick was followed by a carrot: Houston himself would be available to serve as a councillor, unless awarded the professorship at Toronto that he has 'some reason to believe' will be his. (And if named to the chair, he will continue nonetheless to forward the aims of the CLSC by devoting himself to the cause of university extension, for which the CLSC has laid the groundwork.)37 Ever optimistic (or opportunistic, depending on the point of view), ever hubristic, and ever the cultural nationalist, Houston failed yet again to secure a university appointment, and he notifies Miss Kimball that his new position as councillor can be announced. He asks for a list of fellow councillors, presumably in order to begin his lobbying work, as well as the names of CLSC graduates in Toronto, to be enlisted in the cause of Chautauqua 'missionary work/38 Parallel letters trace another plot. Having visited Miss Kimball's Buffalo headquarters and been offered a position, Jessie Munro was ignited by missionary zeal and fired off a series of postcards with an urgent litany of questions - indications as much of structural logistical difficulties as of her novitiate status. How will people know that she is secretary, and how is she to know who the members are?39 But when the list was provided, she discovered that J.H. Fryer, presumably the secretary for the western region, had in fact been given her own part of the country, including Niagara and Toronto. What she had been assigned was a most umpromising terrain: Cornwall members had given up their efforts after a year, and Arnprior was so distinctly 'unliterary' that it was impossible to arouse any enthusiasm there. Munro explicitly reminds Miss Kimball that she has refused a position as a college teacher to take up the work, and she implicitly reminds her of the considerable CLSC 'leg work' accomplished by her mother and of the Munro family friendship with Janet Carnochan, a Chautauqua stalwart.40 Is Mr Fryer to be allowed to take over the Chautauqua work in

88 Come, bright Improvement!

Canada? And why is Miss Peake sending out circulars to prospective members when that right is surely hers? Lewis Peake's daughter had begun acting as his deputy when business interests compelled a trip to Montana in the summer. Unable to attend the assembly and unaware that the secretarial appointments had been made, he wrote with his own view of the situation. Certainly, the work was enough to require two secretaries, but Miss Munro (while he considered her a personal friend) lacked enthusiasm for the work and did not reside in the eastern part of the province. His own choice would be J.H. Fryer. Should not Mr Fryer and his own daughter, a Torontonian and a graduate of the CLSC class of '87, share the position? In the letter to follow, Peake writes in 'painful surprise' and is doubly chagrined: he would never have written thus if he had known the decisions were already made. But should he not have had a hand in selecting his successor? Or at least have been allowed to announce the name of his replacement? It is unclear whether Jessie Munro continued her duties in the face of such discouragement.41 But J.H. Fryer pursued the task with vigour, judging by his tidy, even typewritten, letters to Kate Kimball on the letterhead of "The Chautauqua System of Popular Education/ He appears (judging from the number of Teachers Circulars' he ordered) to have relied on school boards and teachers' conferences to help spread the Chautauqua word, and to good effect. But the same difficulties persisted. The amounts allowed him by the circle office are insufficient to cover his costs, let alone to pay the 25 cents per member fee which is the secretary's commission. He suggests in vain that Briggs, the Methodist publishing house in Toronto, be allowed to reprint Chautauqua publications to avoid the complications of shipping and duty; he is disappointed to see, in the most recent issue of the Chautauquan, that the Canadian history materials the journal had undertaken to publish had not appeared. And he still is lacking a full membership list.42 In this saga of complaint and confusion, high hopes, wounded feelings, and long-distance miscommunication, lies the characteristic response of participants in a cultural branch-plant economy. But as was the case with the larger institution, these difficulties are also a sign of the success of the Chautauqua enterprise in Canada, of an infrastructure sagging under an unexpected weight. As the individual members spread, so did the circles, by 1886 as far afield as Wolseley, Saskatechewan, although the greatest concentrations appear to have been in Nova Scotia and Ontario, judging from the news columns of the

Circle to Circle 89

Chautauquan.43 And while the Chautauqua system was not the only one available, it seems to have been overwhelmingly chosen: only one circle following a rival system has so far been identified (the Bay View Reading Club of Amherstburg followed the Bay View plan, developed by the 'independent' of that name in nearby Michigan), and despite William Houston's prediction, no branches of the National Home-Reading Union appear to have been formed in Ontario prior to 1900, although examples exist after that date.44 In Ontario alone, more than 120 CLSC circles have so far been located for the period prior to 1900. It is impossible to estimate what percentage of the actual groups is represented by this finding, but a more certain sense can be gained of their demographics. First of all - and it is a striking feature - the establishment of the literary and scientific circles marks a sudden spread of literary societies from the larger urban centres and well-established towns to much smaller settlements. (A geographic listing of the CLSC circles is contained in the Resource Guide at the conclusion of this volume; a visual illustration of the phenomenon can be found in a comparison of the maps showing the distribution of Ontario societies before and after 1875.) As indicated by Lewis Peake's early membership applications, the CLSC study system had a special appeal to individuals in areas where resources and intellectual companionship were lacking or limited. These pioneers attracted like-minded individuals, and paucity of members was no barrier to formation of a circle; even two or three determined initiates could form partial circles, sometimes referred to as 'arcs' and 'triangles.' (The Local Circles handbook recommended a number from five to twenty as optimal and warned against overlarge and unwieldy groups.) Cities had their share of the Chautauqua circles (five for Hamilton and sixteen for Toronto have so far been found), but Acton, Avonbank, Aylmer, through Malahide and Morrisburg, to Welland, Whitby, and Wingham started circles as well. The circles could succeed in such small communities precisely because those places were often too small or too new to have other cultural amenities: the Chautauqua organization could provide all the structure, support, and materials. The spread of the circles represents a swing of the pendulum back to the smaller, social, more private circles that characterized the literary societies of the early nineteenth century, and away from the grander, public or 'civic' societies of midcentury. The other striking feature of the circles is their gender distribution: as we shall see in the next chapter, even in the late 1880s, women were

90 Come, bright Improvement!

facing prejudice and being rebuffed in their attempts to enter the literary societies already established in Ontario towns. By contrast, the Chautauqua circles were expressly encouraging of women's participation, and the Chautauquan not only featured many articles of interest to women but a large number of articles by women, including prominent American feminists and social reformers such as Frances Willard. Women also occupied some important positions in the institution itself; surely, the coordinating role of Kate Kimball was responsible for making women feel warmly welcomed to the Chautauqua movement. Lists of graduates printed in the Chautauquan indicate that the participants in the circles were women by a large majority (although one should bear in mind that women may have been more eager to complete the course of study and gain a certificate than men such as doctors, lawyers, and clergymen, who often belonged to such circles but already also held university accreditation). The list of the Canadian 'class' of 1886 (which included Janet Carnochan on its rolls) shows that fifty-nine women and fifteen men had completed the four-year course of study.45 Other elements of the demographic composition of the circles are more difficult to ascertain, however. The Chautauqua Institution itself was fond of stressing that members from all walks of life participated in the circles, from university professors and presidents to farmers, rail workers, and manual labourers; a special effort was made to facilitate the establishment of circles in U.S. prisons. Specific cultural groups also formed their own circles; a number of Jewish circles, for example, substituted work on Hebrew literature and history for the religious selections, in the years before the institute abolished the theological readings altogether from the course of study. The archival deposits show that inquiries were received by superintendents for homes for both the blind and the deaf in Ontario, but almost no evidence survives that would yield further demographic information about participants other than their likely religious inclination. Particularly in the early years, the strong Methodist connections appear to have made the circles especially attractive to members of Methodist congregations. While the background is at points indistinct, many groups stand out with especial clarity, as their secretaries reported regularly and in detail to the Chautauquan. Here, for example, is an 1893 meeting of the Pleasant Hour Circle in Brantford and its approaches to Julius Caesar; while perhaps especially systematic, the study session may be taken as characteristic:

Circle to Circle 91 Pleasant Hour Circle of Brantford, Ont., is as large this year as ever, having ten graduates, ten undergraduates and two of the new class; thirteen persons are allied with the circle as local members. In regard to their programs all the exercises are general and of such a nature that the whole circle participates in them, as may be seen from their plan: 1. Quotation. - Every member gives a quotation. Many come provided with several quotations so as to avoid repeating one already given. This gives us about thirty quotations. These are preserved and sometimes published. 2. Fact. - Each member gives some fact in the life of the author or historical character of the evening. Here also most of our members come provided with a number of facts so that repetitions may be avoided. This gives us an admirable review of the life, works, and times of the character selected. 3. Question on the lesson. - Each member brings one or more questions on the week's reading. Thirty questions touch upon the salient points of the week's work and constitute an admirable review. These and the Questions and Answers bring up for discussion the whole week's work. 4. Memoranda review. - At each meeting we take up six questions of the memoranda, discuss what the questions mean and how they should be answered. We try to arrange them so that they will form a kind of review of the work just completed. 5. Our closing responsive exercise is, The Lord bless and keep thee, etc.' This circle's scheme arranged for the year, for the observance of memorial and Shakespearean evenings is very meritorious, and the special programmes forwarded are good indeed. For the celebration of Shakespeare Day the program reads: JULIUS CAESAR EVENING

I.

1. 2. 3. II. 1. 2.

3. 4. III. 1. 2.

Study song -'Break Thou the Bread of Life.' Concert exercise - Chautauqua mottoes. Secretary's report. Quotations from'Julius Caesar.' Discussion. (a) What is the leading thought of the play? (b) Is Brutus a true patriot? (c) What noble characteristics in his wife Portia? Facts about Shakespeare's associates. Music - Chautauqua song. Questions and Answers. Questions suggested by the readings.

92 Come, bright Improvement! 3. 4. IV. 1. 2. 3. 4.

Memoranda review. Record. Announcements for next meeting. Class mottoes. Evening hymn. Closing responses.46

Reports in the Chautauquan were designed not only to pass on news but to illustrate practices that other circles might take for their own, as we can see from Kate Kimball's editorializing in the above account. While the orderliness strikes a twenty-first-century viewer as slightly obsessive, we must assume that meetings of the Pleasant Hour Circle were far from boring for their participants; indeed, this taxonomy of procedures holds a key to the group's success. The members of the Pleasant Hour Circle describe themselves as engaged in the pursuit of higher education; clearly, they are structuring their sessions using materials provided by the central organization. At the same time, however, they are accepting the principles of mutual instruction, as shown by the items that members are required to bring to the meetings. They are engaged in a pursuit that appears to them both systematic and synoptic; indeed, the two principles are closely connected, for order permits review and retention, and thus the accretion of knowledge.47 Blessings and responses connect the members' study to a higher purpose and link them as a 'circle' in more than name. And the formulaic nature of the program, the recitation of mottoes, and the recording of their events knit them circle to circle. That even the social evenings of such societies had an improving bent is indicated by an intimate account of an open meeting of the Primrose Circle in Dundas in January of 1898. Despite the fact that '[o]ld winter was in a most ferocious mood and emptied the vials of his wrath on our unoffending heads' as participants made their way to Walnut Cottage, the warm welcome they received 'could not fail to banish all thoughts of his majesty from our mind/ reported the club's respondent. There was an instrumental duet, a roll-call answered with quotations from German or Roman authors, and a welcoming address designed to bring new members into the Chautauqua fold. Two papers dealt entirely with German topics,' one on the social condition of German women and the other a biographical sketch of Frederick the Great. A recitation of Browning's 'Robert of Sicily' followed; between these offerings were more vocal and instrumental presentations. After yet another address

Circle to Circle 93

in praise of the Chautauqua system, members played (what appears to be) a kind of charades called 'Circulating Library/ in which they acted out the characters of books. The 'intellectual feast' concluded with refreshments of a more material nature.48 Lest these earnest examples give the impression that literary activity in the closing decades of the nineteenth-century was relentlessly highminded and high-canonical, we can glance at another popular institution for 'reading' - both more broadly and more literally defined. The 'penny reading/ developed first in England and then exported to Canada, was originally designed to provide a cheap entertainment for working men and women and to lure them from the pleasures of the tavern; one suspects it may have had only a limited appeal. But the practice took hold as a form of club activity and civic entertainment. The penny readings - later to be inflated to 'five cent' and even 'ten cent readings' - were a popular form of public amusement that simultaneously provided a showcase for local elocutionists and thespians, exposed their audiences to a variety of literary works, and raised money for worthy cases. Penny readings could take place either on an occasional basis or more systematically; the Hamilton Readers' Association (1874) was established expressly to stage such entertainments, and its diverse programs were reported in detail in the Hamilton Spectator. For one evening in 1874, according to the Spectator,, there were two recitations 'The Prince's Welcome' and 'Lochell and the Wizard' - as well as a number of readings - 'Horatio Sparkins/ 'Carrying the News to Ghent/ 'Spartacus to the Roman Envoys/ The Chilly Man/ 'Pat and the Owl/ and 'March to Moscow' - and comic and dialogue selections, the whole larded with piano music and vocal solos and duets.49 (A context for this entertainment, and an indicator of the density of local literary culture of the day, is evidenced by notices in the single issue of the Spectator where the Hamilton Readers' Association benefit was announced. Hamiltonians could purchase tickets for a 'Five Cent Reading' hosted by the YMCA or a musical and literary entertainment put on by the Congregational Mutual Improvement Society, plan to attend plays by the Hamilton Dramatic and Literary Club and another amateur troupe, or fight for a seat to hear author the Reverend Charles Kingsley, billed as the 'Dean of Westminster' but better known today as the author of such works as Water Babies; there were also the options of a public lecture on Manitoba or a performance of Mendelssohn.)50 On another occasion, the associa-

94 Come, bright Improvement!

tion repeated most of the selection from its April entertainment, while local orator William Bruce added his own comic 'Jimmy Butler and the Owl/ recounting a meeting that had taken place on a dark night in 1856 in the woods of Ancaster (presumably a rewriting of Tat and the Owl'); the program also included 'an unnamed patriotic composition by a Scotch poet, on the occasion of the entry of H.R.H. the Prince of Wales to the Hamilton Gore' (presumably 'The Prince's Welcome').51 Such literary societies appear to have sprung up in a number of towns spontaneously and almost simultaneously. A Literary Society in Chatham was also developed to stage musical and literary entertainments, of which it hosted four in the winter and spring of 1872. There was a distinct gender division of performative labour in this group, as women gave instrumental and vocal performances but none of the readings; the chair was greeted with applause when he announced the society's intent to correct this imbalance in the next season. At its fourth Town Hall performance, the final one for the year, literary selections included Aytoun's 'Charles Edward at Versailles' (complete with an instructive lecture providing historical background on the bonny prince), a delivery of 'Cardinal Woolsey's apostrophes, from Shakespeare's play of Henry the 8th/ and a reading of 'visions of incidents in the life of Mary, Queen of Scots' (although the candid reviewer felt that the reader's gifts had been better displayed by an earlier performance of 'The One Horse Shay'). A visitor, the president of the Montreal Shakespearian Club, offered 'the well-known piece "Alonso, the brave and the Fair Imogene/" which was followed by a humorous short item, "The Frenchman in Difficulties.' Lytton's 'Cromwell at the Coffin of Charles I' and a selection called The Professors' also followed. On this particular occasion, however, musical offerings appear to have dominated the program. The same issue of the Chatham Weekly Planet reported a more modest entertainment in neighbouring Morpeth, quite clearly a settlement with a predominantly Scottish population: 'a Scottish selection/ Hood's 'A Tale of a Trumpet/ 'a selection from Handy Andy/ 'a Canadian production in verse/ 'an interesting story/ and an excerpt from 'A Cotter's Saturday Night/ as well as favourite Scottish songs and ballads and a clever imitation of bagpipes on the piano, entertained the audience.52 It is sometimes difficult to reconstruct the literary programs of such societies with any degree of exactitude, given the idiomatic nomenclature for widely known pieces, or the generic titles of selections in the account of the Morpeth entertainment, or the invariably holophrastic

Circle to Circle 95

rhetoric of 'accomplished' 'tasteful/ and 'pleasing' readings combined into an 'instructive and amusing' evening at which the audience was invariably 'carried away/ as in the account of the Chatham Literary Society's endeavours. Sandra Gwyn provides a more concrete reconstruction of such an evening in her account of a fund-raising penny reading in Ottawa, which probably took place within a month of the Hamilton occasion. It was organized by Deputy Minister Edmund Meredith, who took a starring role in the proceedings and whose performances were memorable. 'At most Penny Readings/ Gwynn writes, he stole the show, standing in front of the lectern, reciting all the great set pieces that most of the audiece knew well enough to mouth along with him. Thomas Hood's The Bridge of Sighs, for its moralistic pathos, was always a popular favorite. So were Scott's rousing Lochinvar and Ayrton's [sic] Death ofMontrose, Shylock's Ten Thousand Ducats' speech from The Merchant of Venice and Longfellow's King Robert of Sicily. Above all, it was when Meredith paused for effect, cleared his throat dramatically, took a long drink of water, and launched into Horatius at the Bridge by the matchless Macaulay, that a pin could have been heard to drop in the chilly, smelly air of St. Alban's basement.53

Some entertainments could be far less elevated in tone than the Ottawa fund-raiser. 'Well ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you all about our entertainment held on the evening of Friday, Dec. 15,' is the folksy introduction to an exhaustive account of The Locust Literary Entertainment' staged in the Grimsby area in 1895. The doors were open at seven and every nook and corner of the building taken up by eight o'clock. The proceedings were opened by our own string band with Philip Tufford as leader, whose cheerful countenance and happy manner alone filled the meeting with enthusiasm.' An ambitious program followed. Recitations were 'The Inventor's Wife' ('rendered nicely by little Rosa Gulp'), The Green Mountain Justice/ 'A Fruitful Discourse/ and 'The Fourth at Briggsville'; dialogues included 'Arkansas Traveller/ 'Aunt Betsey's Bean/ The Family Fix/ and 'Poor Relations'; there was a reading entitled The Ark and the Flood' and a farce called 'My Turn Next/ as well as songs, duets, and numbers by a string band. 'Our program was enjoyed by all, the length of it being its only drawback/ concluded the reporting of this marathon event.54 (Identifying the recitations and set pieces that amused and affected the audience of the Locust Literary Entertainment is a challenge for the literary historian,

96 Come, bright Improvement!

who will find none of these selections in the Norton Anthology or, indeed, most other literary collections or histories. The scholar of early Canadian taste has to get off her literary high horse and even take a trot on Yankee Doodle's metrical pony.) While such readings were often ad hoc affairs and lacking in cultural pretension, penny readings could also be the by-product of a more expressly literary society. Such was the case, according to Esquesing archivist John Mark Rowe, with the Georgetown Literary Society, formed in 1866 with the express purpose of having 'speakers share literary works with members.' Two years later, however, it opened these proceedings to the public. The penny readings escalated to five-cent readings within a few years (while the local elite paid a dime for the privilege of reserved seating) and took place in the Town Hall. According to Rowe, the 'driving force' behind the penny readings was the new cleric of the Anglican church, the Reverend Henry Capelthwaite Webbe, freshly arrived from England: He knew all about the latest entertainments and he soon had the Georgetown literati planning the opening meeting in the winter of 1868 ... A February presentation offered recitations by Mr. Gain, Mr. McLaren, the school master and Mr. Geddes, the post master. The 'gem' of the evening was apparently a recitation by Charles Kennedy, which brought down the house! In March, the trial scene from Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers was performed by Dr. Starr and Mr. McLaren ... The program was always varied, often including scenes from one Shakespeare play or another. Songs were also interspersed with odd dissertations like 'Ethiopian eccentrics.'55

The names of the recitationists may be obscure and the selections now obsolete, but the penny readings have left a lasting memento in Georgetown. With the proceedings from the Georgetown Literary Society's entertainments, maple saplings were purchased and planted to line the main streets of Georgetown. Many of these venerable trees shade its streets today - if not quite the St Paul's Grove of the Chautauqua Institution, still a symbol of the modest beginnings and grand aspirations of these Canadian readers.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE RISE OF THE WOMEN'S SOCIETIES

When I think of the fruit that has ripened From seeds that were planted then; The youth of the circle, growing To virtuous women and men. When I meet the familiar faces In the various paths of life, From the dreamy vales of the rustic To political whirl and strife. Whatever their occupation In that busy workshop - earth, They are known by the Olio badges Virtue, knowledge and worth. Edgar M. Zavitz, from 'The Olio' (1885)1

In the early twenty-first century, so closely is a 'book club' equated with a 'women's club' that it comes as a surprise to find how few societies for women (either in mixed-sex clubs or on their own terms) there were until relatively late in the nineteenth century. Undoubtedly, private or 'parlour' reading circles existed for which no documentation remains, and opinions and recommendations must have been exchanged informally among friends and family members. But while there were several mixed-sex societies and at least two women-only groups operating in the African-Canadian community at mid-century, Euro-Canadian

98 Come, bright Improvement!

settler women seemed incognizant of such precedents or unable to follow these examples if they were. Neither, it appears, could they implement the models of the 'conversations/ reading parties, and mutual-improvement clubs established in New England by bluestockings and working women alike. Their attempted entry into the men's clubs and the process of forming new ones on other terms would be slow and sometimes arduous. For most of the nineteenth century, Euro-Canadian women could be admitted only to the fringes of men's organizations. As early as the 1830s, the York (and then Toronto) Mechanics' Institute had indicated that women would be 'acccommodated' at public lectures sponsored by the society, while the Western District Association resolved in 1842 to allow women to audit its quarterly public meetings by invitation. In some organizations, such as the Gait Literary Society of the 1860s and 1870s, debates if not meetings were always open to the public, with controversial topics designed to attract a curious audience; ten years later we find the Barrie Literary Club discussing ways to increase female attendance at its entertainments. (The Gait and Barrie groups seem not to have discerned that such popular debate topics as women's intellectual inferiority and women's unsuitability for higher education or the professions may have discouraged them from attending these open meetings, however often the more progressive opinion may have triumphed in the final tally of 'ayes' and 'nays.') Unlike AfricanCanadian women, who often took a leading role in the formation of circles for men and women alike, the aspirants of European descent were permitted to attend occasional soirees or open meetings only in the capacity of spectators and not as club members. By the last quarter of the century, this situation was beginning to occasion considerable dissatisfaction, especially as these organizations not only were mechanisms for further education but maintained a public presence in the towns in which they were located (as acknowledged by their nomenclature as 'civic' clubs). A growing intimation of the value of higher education for women raised interest in these groups, as those who would never be able to attend college or aspire to a degree began to eye the educational resources that lay closer to hand. But for most of the century, any suggestion that women should be admitted to membership would be greeted with outrage: witness the contretemps that followed the address of Annie Denton Cridge to the Chatham Mechanics' Institute in the mid-1850s (a group which during that decade was known for its progressive and inclusive racial politics).

The Rise of the Women's Societies 99

A well-known socialist and an editor of the Van Guard of Richmond, Indiana, 'Mrs. Cridge' unleashed a whirlwind, not through her radical ideas, but by asking why women were not permitted to join literary and scientific societies and, indeed, the very Mechanics' Institute at which she had been invited to speak. According to one commentator, the Chatham newspapers were 'filled with vituperative articles' for days.2 The situation persisted, and it continued to seem both unjust and irrational, as shown by a similar argument made some twenty-five years after Annie Cridge's remarks. A letter from 'Young Lady-Hood' to the Button Advance in 1888 put the case with vigour. Referring to a meeting of the Dutton Literary and Scientific Society at which wouldbe women members were discourteously treated, the author charged the members with betraying the aims of their own organization: With what object was the society organized? I presume any of the members would answer, for mental improvement and instruction in science and literature. This is certainly a laudable object, but the objection to ladies becoming members is not so laudable - not in keeping with the progress in civilization of which such a society is proof. I presume that the gentleman (?) who made the first objection holds to the theory of the inferiority of woman, and thinks her utterly incapable of grasping the ponderous 'logics' and 'graphics' of his discussion ... If this society wishes to exclude women as members let them change its name. Give it some barbarous appellation savouring of those days when woman was little better than a slave.3 (question mark in the original)

'Young Lady-Hood' was surely typical in her high ideals and intellectual aspirations. But mixed-sex clubs often took hold for less-elevated reasons, given the opportunity they provided for intermingling of the sexes. While some societies brought together established professional men and married women, the groups for young people took on a life of their own. Especially when attached to a collegiate or congregation, they provided a combination of moral rectitude and mental rigour that could prove persuasive to even the strictest parent. Of course, the meetings might be more mixed in their activities than their titles would allow, with music, amateur theatricals - and, of course, courtship - on the program, along with essays and elocution. (Indeed, the literary societies were to become so popular among turn-of-the-century young people that some wary elders began to suspect that the literary society was just a 'sparking school.')4

100 Come, bright Improvement!

This mixture is witnessed by the full and lively minute book of the Congregational Mutual Improvement Society in Hamilton, a group that has already appeared briefly in an earlier account of penny readings and related activities: its musical and literary entertainment was competing for audience members with the Hamilton Readers' Association benefit in April 1874.5 Charging modest annual dues of 25 cents, this group, which was established in 1873, aimed for the 'mutual improvement of its members by promoting literary taste & the free interchange of thought and opinion'; but the minutes make clear that the concepts of self- and mutual improvement could operate quite broadly. A characteristic Monday evening meeting would include piano and vocal solos, some choral singing, the reading of essays, the delivery of prepared and impromptu speeches, and occasional debate, as well as the presentation of a 'diary' report (presumably a current events precis). This full evening would conclude at ten o'clock with the singing of the national anthem. The pull was in both scholarly and social directions. The club frequently encouraged its members to home study and initiated 'criticism' sessions of one another's delivery and pronunciation, but they were also fond of hosting 'parlour socials' where the emphasis was on musical offerings. The chance to go on the stage, in however modest a fashion, must have been another attraction for these respectable young men and women of the 1870s. Although they are not recorded in this particular minute book, outings such as picnics and sledding and sleighing parties often rounded out the calendar of groups such as the Congregational society. For some groups, the social and intellectual mandates could prove at times contending rather than always complementary. This situation reading between the lines of its published history - appears to have been the case with the Olio, a wildly successful group founded in Coldstream by young members of the Hicksite branch of the Society of Friends in 1876.6 Taking its name from a Spanish word meaning 'stew' or 'ratatouille' - or such was the slightly fanciful etymology supplied in the club history - the Olio grew from an initial twenty-five members convening in the Zavitz family home to meetings at the Town Hall where more than two hundred were present. The success of the group may be attributed both to the desire for educational improvement that prevailed in this largely Quaker settlement and to its enlightened attitude to women's education and cultural participation: it selected a woman as its first president, twelve years before 'Young Lady-Hood'

The Rise of the Women's Societies 101

wrote her frustrated letter to the Dutton Advance. (Even later in the century the presidency of mixed-sex clubs was almost invariably taken by a man; the Olio was unusual in awarding women such prominence.) The group would be part of a wider movement, as the holding of a Saturday night 'Literary' would become a familiar element in the weekly routine of Quaker boarding schools and colleges. But as witnessed by the numbers that attended the meetings, the club eventually extended far beyond its original founders, to be attended by young people of several religious denominations and to serve the general community.7 It is of interest, too, not only for its longevity but for the way that its members grew with it. The Olio was originally founded - with the active involvement of parents - for youth still attending school, but members retained their allegiance through young adulthood and marriage and as they assumed the new responsibilities of working and family life. The Olio is also unusual in having a published history of its early years (in which author Edgar M. Zavitz includes poetic praise to the Olio, quoted above, as well as a club song). Its later years may be pieced together through some other reminiscences and through reports in the Young Friends' Review (whose literary columns also provide evidence of the Olio's aesthetic inclinations, since club members edited this journal).8 Olio programs had the characteristic mix of readings, recitations, debate, play-acting, musical performance, and the composition of original work. In all probability, however, these Quaker young people avoided novel reading and study, as evidenced by the fact that the library collection which grew from their efforts contained very few works of fiction. Published club essays on Whittier show the members making a case for the intimate connection between goodness and genius in this author, a Quaker and noted abolitionist who also celebrated hearthside virtues.9 The aims of the Olio's founders could have been summarized by a member of a sister society in Bloomfield, who pointed out, There is an intimate connection between literature and all the elements of society, although the lines are often but dimly perceptible. The influence of literature does in itself tend to do good; we are lifted upwards by all that prompts us to meditate.'10 That literature was expected to be both morally and factually instructive is illustrated by a poem authored by club member Edgar Zavitz on 'Autumn Lessons' ('All the seasons teach a different lesson / To the soul that beats in chord with nature') and a response that corrected the poet's scientific understanding. But if it was the action of sunlight and not the frost which caused the turn of

102 Come, bright Improvement!

the leaves, the critic tactfully concluded, 'the metaphor drawn between the leaves in autumn and our life work will appear none the less beautiful/11 For all its seriousness of purpose, however, the group appears to have been a light-hearted one, and many comic moments appear in the accounts: an uproarious debate when it was 'Resolved: that a dirty, good-natured woman is better than a clean, scolding one,' or the laughter that ensued when 'A Young Maid's Lament' was unwittingly delivered as the "The Young Maid's Lemonade' by the meeting's reader. But the standards of work were high, according to the reminiscence of one Coldstream resident, collected by local historian Maxwell McLean: 'The more ambitious members prepared at least two essays for reading at each meeting and talks and discussions were also heard. For two winters they attempted the reading of long narrative poems such as Longfellow's "Hiawatha" and Scott's "Lady of the Lake," but this was not a success for interest lagged long before the reading ended. Differences of opinion as to policy and program planning developed in the winter of 1881-2 and led to some bitterness among the members.'12 Zavitz also alludes to mixed opinion over whether the society should introduce more focused and orderly study. This split of opinion may be referred, if speculatively, to some biographical information about the group's founding members. The original founders of the Olio were young members of the Society of Friends who had a strong desire for intellectual improvement: one need only compare the pious but plain writings in the diary of father Daniel Zavitz (schooled only three months a year when he was a boy in the Niagara District) with the elegant belles-lettrism of his son Edgar and the learned scientific treatises of his son Charles to see the accelerated pace of intellectual attainment in one generation.13 (Edgar would be educated at Swarthmore College and was a versifier of considerable skill; Charles attended and then taught at the Ontario Agricultural College, becoming the first graduate of that institution to gain an honorary Toronto doctorate.) Edgar Zavitz would have been in his last year at the collegiate in Strathroy when the club was formed; returning to Coldstream after four years at Swarthmore, he may have brought some more serious plans for the organization so closely identified with his family, and he may have been dismayed to find that the public entertainments had overshadowed the group's original intents. A compromise appears to have been effected: an account of the club's activities for the winter of 1886-7 shows it veering back and forth between the eclecticism signalled by its name and the

The Rise of the Women's Societies 103

drive to more systematic study. While the most recent meeting had featured a breathtaking 'four readings, six recitations, two essays, three speeches, one dialogue, one piece of music, a criticism of the previous meeting, and a discussion/ the group had devoted one meeting that season to Tennyson and was planning another on Whittier (resulting in the published essays on Whittier noted above).14 New challenges would arise at the end of the decade, as the number of club members swelled to unwieldly proportions; among the logistical problems created was how to stable so many waiting horses. Thus began a series of experiments with the format of the meetings, including a brief attempt to divide the group in half, with individuals attending only alternately.15 A record attendance of 180 at one meeting in a family's home may have been the point at which the group sought quarters in the Town Hall. A rival group, the Philadelphia also sprang up in Coldstream at this time; it is not clear if this was an overflow from the crowded Olio or composed of disaffected members, but the group occasioned some disgruntlement by choosing to meet on the same night of the week as the original organization. Despite only partial success in instigating a more systematic curriculum, Edgar Zavitz remained an active member, penning his charming and affectionate history of the club in 1885. In addition, he and other serious-minded Olio club members funnelled their desires for mutual improvement into a variety of other organizations: the Lobo Lecture Club (1882) was set up 'to bring to the rural community the best lecturers and elocutionists available/ and in 1887 Olio members became the motivating force behind the establishment of a well-organized and thriving library in Coldstream, known as the Lobo Union Library, with some 2,500 titles, which ran on private subscriptions and members' fees until incorporated into the public system some five years later.16 (Members of the Olio would also help to organize one of the first Farmers' Institutes in the province.)17 During the mid-1880s Coldstream also supported a Chautauqua study circle called the Olive Leaf; the existence of five separate societies promoting access to literature and literary education in the space of one small town is an indication of the density of literary culture at the end of the century and of the intensity of interest in this particular community.18 The influence of the Olio also spread beyond Lobo Township through the medium of the Young Friends' Review, a London, Ontario-based journal whose editorship was assumed by Edgar Zavitz and several other club members. A clearing house of opinion and news for progres-

104 Come, bright Improvement!

sive young Friends, the Review also encouraged the formation of literary societies along the lines of the Olio: 'I hope wherever the Review goes it will excite us to more refinement in our pastimes and higher intellectual culture, and, as a means to an end, will establish an "Olio" in every neighbourhood/ the editor envisaged.19 To this end, the Review published news of the Olio and occasional extracts from its proceedings, as well as accounts of the active societies at the Quaker-managed Swarthmore College; the journal also featured 'Select Recitations for Literary Circles' (Whittier, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and James Whitcomb Riley were favourites) and excerpted literary selections ranging from Carlyle's prose to poems taken from Canadian newspapers. Certainly, the influence was felt locally, as the Bloomfield Friends and the Riverside Friends at Ridgeway established literary circles, while the Young Friends' Associations in Arkona and Sparta modelled themselves on the earlier group and included literary discussions as part of their programs.20 It appears that the function of the Olio was gradually subsumed by such smaller associations. Although the society continued in its original form for almost twenty-five years, its large size remained problematic, and it eventually ceded its position to the Lobo Young Friends' Association (a group that remained in existence from 1896 until 1917), which had its own Literature Committee, and to the smaller societies established in sectional schoolhouses after the turn of the century. But the group is still well remembered in Lobo Township. 'The Olio became famed far and wide and many of those who had the good fortune to attend it attribute much of their after success to the opportunity for culture it afforded/ concluded one observer of the group.21 The mixed-sex groups offered some clear advantages for their members. They allowed women of all ages a chance to mix with educated men of the town - pastors, lawyers, teachers, young university graduates - on a footing of intellectual equality and to be part of an organization with a public profile. For younger men and women, the groups provided an opportunity for fun and courtship - small wonder that the younger men defected from the more-established men-only organizations. Reminiscing about the Gait Literary Society, a men's debating and essay-reading group, an 'Ex-Member' recalled an energetic and convivial association which, for all its attractions, could not hold the class of younger members who aspired 'to the dignity of a dress suit' and a chance to socialize. (The Gait society had further tarnished its

The Rise of the Women's Societies 105

already indecorous reputation by causing a fire in borrowed rooms in the Caledonian Hall - smoking and consumption of liquor were the suspected cause.) The sometimes bibulous Gait society could provide the wine but not the women and song: 'It had no ladies and no music, consequently most young men preferred the larger societies which possessed those attractions/ 'Ex-Member' recalled.22 Young women reciprocated this interest, while mixed-sex societies also appealed to older or married women eager to gain a point of purchase on the cultural and civic affairs of their town. The mixed-sex societies soon took hold, their way paved by a changing climate of opinion on the question of 'co-education' in the colleges and universities and by the proactive attitude to women's education taken by the Chautauqua Assembly, which was making its presence felt in Ontario by the early 1880s. And yet there was clearly a need for groups for women alone. The sort of sexism experienced by 'Young Lady-Hood' is the most obvious reason; and on this issue there may have been a generational difference, for while collegiate groups were eager to become integrated and young people's groups to socialize, the established men's groups were more reluctant to change their ways. (The Barrie Literary Club of the 1880s wished women to witness its rhetorical virtuosity and displays of wit, but suggestions to fully admit women seem to have been quickly squashed.) When women were allowed in mixed-sex clubs, their role was often secondary - that is to say, secretarial - while men almost invariably occupied the chair. Not only men but women themselves may have displayed reluctance to change. Despite their shared interests, women members who had never attended college and whose own education may have been sporadic or unsystematic must have found themselves intimidated by lawyers and ministers with letters after their names and Latin words on their tongues. What women needed to know, and wished to know, must sometimes have differed quite markedly from the interests of the male club members. In addition, women were sometimes disadvantaged by lacking the basic skills in public discourse - the niceties of debate, parliamentary procedure, and rules of order - which would allow one to participate with assurance in meetings, whether cultural or political. And last - it is by no means the least - women often hungered for the opportunities for female friendship that a women-only association could allow. The story of the founding of such a women's club, out of a similar complex of reasons, is the tale told by Helen Hooven Santmyer in her

106 Come, bright Improvement!

best-selling novel'... And Ladies of the Club' (1984). This is the epic tale, running to more than 1,400 pages, of a fictional Waynesboro Woman's Club in the mid-western United States from its founding in 1868 to its waning years in the late 1920s. Santmyer describes the women, their friendships, their cultural and civic endeavours, and their intergenerational continuities with both warmth and accuracy; since she published the novel when she was in her nineties, she is describing her own and her mother's generations of clubwomen. Despite the geographic difference, the story that Santmyer tells is consonant with the women's clubs of late-nineteenth-century Ontario; the imaginary Waynesboro group finds real-life counterparts in the Saturday and Tuesday reading clubs of Woodstock, for example. The Saturday club has been documented in a centenary history prepared by Irene Crawford-Siano. In an authorial preface to Reading, 'Kiting and Roses, she notes the persistence of the group over times of radical change: 'from high-button shoes to open-toed sandals,' 'from hand-printed programs to computerized ones,' and from the days when pregnant club members lapsed into 'honorary' standing through several waves of feminism. The group's goals were also enduring, as Crawford-Siano describes them, writing in the collective voice: 'We are women of culture who want to explore the world of music, literature, art and anthropology. We want to learn about ourselves and about others. We want to understand changing social patterns and world events that shape our destiny.'23 This is a classic statement of the women's 'study club' ideal, and it provided a cohering force for the group across more than a century until its disbandment in 1997. The club's more junior counterpart, formed three weeks after the Saturday Reading Club, is still thriving today. Inaugurated to accommodate 'younger minds' - among whom were daughters of the precursor club - the group originally was less formal in its approach to learning, eschewing the assigned essay topics and chaired meeting format of the Saturday club; later, however, it developed the format of essay-reading, group discussion, socializing, and civic reform work which characterized its sister society. While the club membership is no longer composed of young women, the daughters of those daughters and other Woodstock women (among them, holders of graduate degrees) still continue their paper readings and finish with tea from the club's silver service, in a persistence of this nineteenth-century cultural format into the present day.24 Despite the enthusiasm with which women embarked on this new venture, and despite the enduring success of many groups and of the

The Rise of the Women's Societies 107

women's study-club ideal, the first steps for the women's literary societies were often difficult. Their use of the term 'club' was greeted with hostility by men, who viewed 'clubland' as a male terrain and were wary of women's incursions into the public cultural sphere. While the civic goals of the groups could excite suspicion, their more private aspirations could be even more alarming: women's wish to socialize without men aroused deep-seated suspicion, and their desire for selfimprovement and even pleasure generated charges of selfishness. (The men's Fortnightly Club of Woodstock greeted the formation of the new women's clubs with derision, predicting that women lacked the unanimity for club work and that a cat fight would soon result.)25 Last, the 'eclecticism' of study among the groups - their rotation of topics and breadth of program activities - was often seen as a confirmation of female flightiness. Despite the opposition, the women's clubs flourished, and in many forms. This chapter deals with two very different societies, separated by a decade: the feminist Toronto Women's Literary Club (1877), founded by the suffragist-physician Emily Stowe, which followed an eclectic program of literary and political reading combined with civic reform work, and the Angelica Shakespeare Club (1886) of Owen Sound, a more private organization with a focused program of literary study and an even more specialized critical orientation. The afternoon's program consisted of a continuation of her paper on phrenology by the President; a reading by Mrs. Wellington; a very interesting paper on Adelaide Proctor [sic] by Miss Stowe; a song by Miss Gibbs; and a pianoforte selection by Mrs. Mackenzie.26 Mrs. Mackenzie next gave a fine pianoforte selection, "The Angels Dream' and was succeeded by Mrs. Llois [sic], who read Longfellow's 'Robert of Sicily.' Dr. E.H. Stowe delivered a most able and interesting lecture on the eye, illustrated by diagrams and a dissection.27 The reading by Mrs. Shaw of selections from "The Taming of the Shrew' led to enquiries as to what was woman's proper position, which found an answer in an essay by Miss Curzon on 'Our Sphere.'28 WOMEN'S RIGHTS. MAKE WAY FOR LIBERTY. GREAT CACKALATIONS. O.P. DILDOCK VISITS THE WOMAN'S CLUB. Our peripatetic reporter, having learned that some of the ladies, as an offset to the Gentlemen's Club, had organized one of their own (not of the

108 Come, bright Improvement! rolling pin or broom handle persuasion) but of a purely literary nature, determine [sic] to gain admission... The exercises proper were opened by a gushing young maiden of some 39 summers ... after the singing, a tall gaunt female read, through her nasal organ, an essay entitled 'Gain the confidence of your husband and what loose change he may have in his pockets when he leaves them off.'29

These four brief citations give a snapshot of the activities of the Toronto Women's Literary Club, as well as a sample of at least one aspect of the public reaction to it.30 The TWLC (1877) is perhaps the best-known of the nineteenth-century women's literary societies; it has gained this reputation on two counts, one unmerited and the other earned. It has been considered, erroneously, the first women's literary society in Ontario, although that honour goes in all probability to the Windsor Ladies Club (1854), closely followed by the Ladies Literary Society (Chatham, 1850s). The Toronto club, however, could be classified as the first Canadian manifestation of the 'clubwoman' movement initiated in the United States in the years following the Civil War, but even that status is contested by the Hamilton Ladies Literary Club, which long claimed to be the first such group. (It was founded in 1866 or 1867 as an alumnae association and only reformed for more expressly 'literary' purposes later in the century, and definitive evidence is lacking since accounts of its earliest meetings have been lost, but the intensively 'literary' education provided by the Wesleyan [later Hamilton] Ladies College, of which the women were graduates, gives some credence to that claim.) The Toronto Women's Literary Club's more certain claim to originality lies in its role in the women's suffrage movement in Canada, for the group was reconstituted in 1883 as the Canadian Woman's Suffrage Association, the first national suffrage association in the country. While the suffrage activity has been valued by historians of the women's movement, they have displayed some ambivalence about this earlier incarnation, seeing the literary work merely as a preface, or a pretext, for the political organization to follow. This assessment of the club is problematic for two reasons: first, it could be argued that the literary study of the club was a focal, rather than an accessory, activity; and second, throughout the nineteenth century no hard and fast division between 'literary' and 'political' societies could be drawn in the first place. That commentators on the Toronto Women's Literary Club would focus on the group's suffrage activity is understandable, however, since

Holding an olive branch and gazing intently at an open book - of unspecified title - this heroic reader strides along a plowed furrow. William Lyon Mackenzie memorial, Queen's Park, Toronto, sculpted by Walter Allward.

Program for the Burns Centennial Festival, Toronto, 1859. Poets and academics conservative politicians and dedicated radicals, find common ground on this sentimental occasion.

Invitation card for the Burns Centenary Anniversary celebration, Toronto, 1859. Burns's trifold appeal to Canadian readers - as a poet of labour, of domesticity, and of a romanticized political struggle - is apparent from the three illustrations on the card.

Elocutionists from the National Philadelphia School of Oratory stage a scene at Grimsby Park, while bemused little boys y look on.

The men and women of the Amherstburg Home Study Club, followers of the 'Bay View' program promoted by one of the independent Chautauquas, are photographed c. 1900, surrounded by literary, musical, and patriotic items.

This argument from 1894 set the scholarly course of the Angelicans. The Bard seems slightly dwarfed by the figures of Portia (or is it a pioneering undergraduate?) and Beatrice (or an aspiring writer with a quill pen?).

The Angelica Shakespeare Club, Owen Sound, c. 1900. Top row: Miss Margaretta Stephens, Miss Maud Spragge, Miss Annie Stephens, Mrs Armstrong. Centre row: Miss E.A. Spragge, Mrs Christopher Eaton (nee Jaffrey), Mrs John Robinson (nee Spragge), Miss Gordon, Miss Jane Cameron. Front row: Miss Ella Stephens, Mrs Horsey, Mrs. Buchan, Miss Mary Stephens. Interwoven kinship ties and a shared love of Shakespeare bound the members of the 'Seraphic Band.'

The 'Hackley girls/ members of a literary society in Chatham, strike a dramatic pose.

The Rise of the Women's Societies 109

the society is known largely in relation to its founder, whose fame rests in turn on reform achievements. In her own day and by her peers, however, Emily Stowe was viewed as a woman of broad interests and some literary talent and connections, a reputation which further suggests that the literary and educational agenda of the TWLC was far from a warm-up exercise for more serious activity or a smokescreen for more controversial pursuits. Stowe came from a line of educators of many varieties, in a Norwich-district Quaker family known both for its radical sentiments and for its intellectual attainments. As the family scrapbook shows, some members were accomplished amateur versifiers; Stowe's mother, Hannah Lossing Howard (later Stowe), was known for 'a natural love and taste for poetry which under other circumstances and in an older country would undoubtedly have given her a place among the literati'; and a maternal aunt was lauded for being so 'familiar with every line of Shakespeare' that she 'could readily have detected a misquotation, though she had never entered a theatre or seen one of his plays enacted.'31 While Emily Stowe is known to us today largely for her role as Canada's first woman physician and for her suffrage activity, she was also a stylist and rhetorician of power who retained literary interests throughout her life, composing occasional verse and nurturing her friendships with writers such as Pauline Johnson and Sara Jeannette Duncan, both of whom she knew from residence in the Brantford region. In 1877 Stowe attended the fifth annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Women, a congress called to coordinate the many women's study groups that had mushroomed in the United States. Several accounts credit this meeting with providing the inspiration for the TWLC, but Stowe would already have been familiar with some precedents, including the famous 'conversations' conducted by early feminist Margaret Fuller in Elizabeth Peabody's Boston bookshop; she may also have been aware of Peabody's own 'reading parties/ as well as the 'schools' formed by young working women in the Lowell textile mills in the 1830s. Given her interest in abolitionist and social reform movements, she may also have known of the sorts of literary societies that had developed in the Black community in Philadelphia, for example, which combined educational and political work. Most significantly, Dr Clemence Sophia Lozier, founder and president of the women's medical college in New York where Stowe had trained, was also a member of Sorosis, possibly the first and certainly the most influential of this new wave of U.S. women's study clubs. Stowe may

110 Come, bright Improvement!

also have taken an example closer to home, having just completed a circuit of lectures for the Ontario Mechanics' Institutes on the topic of vocations for women. In its organization and activities, the Toronto Women's Literary Club appears to have taken something from all the available models, allowing both the directed discussion of Fuller's 'conversations' and the more structured research, writing, and recitation of the later women's study groups. The club maintained the broad topical focus of the men's literary societies of the 1870s and 1880s, while allowing for invited speakers, as was the Mechanics' Institute practice. Though it had many points in common with the newly emergent women's literary groups in the United States, the Toronto club differed in one important aspect from its sister societies, which tended to move over time from cultural to municipal work, in many cases dropping the cultural work altogether. The TWLC, on the other hand, immediately and effectively combined reform and suffrage work with its literary activities, marking a divergence that would continue between Canadian and mainstream U.S. societies. The Canadian clubs of this period, for women of both European and African descent, would as a rule continue to combine educational and civic work, or - slightly later - would establish literary 'branches' or 'departments' within more practically minded organizations such as the Women's Institutes. Focusing on the literary activities of the TWLC, therefore, does not mean turning a blind eye to its political achievements but, rather, attempting to see how the members of the group tried to integrate their different activities. The group immediately attracted a coterie of public-spirited women, either the wives of professional men or themselves part of this first generation of professional women. The coverage of the club's activities in the Toronto Daily Globe over the years yields a list of some fifty members, visitors, and guests (not counting the sympathetic men who attended the annual open meeting and occasional entertainments). Among the more active and 'literary' members was Sarah Anne Curzon, a woman of letters, a journalist, and a noted amateur historian who would also help to found the Women's Canadian Historical Association and the Women's Art Association. For two years she published a column in the temperance and reform journal the Canada Citizen, which apparently reflected the club's views, and aided the cause of higher education for women with the publication of her play The Sweet Girl Graduate (loosely based on Tennyson's The Princess), a comic account of the attempt of women to gain entrance to University College, Toronto.32

The Rise of the Women's Societies 111

Kingston author Agnes Maule Machar, well known under the patriotic pen-name Fidelis, contributed essays and poetry to be read at meetings. Machar was not alone, for whether in person or by correspondence, 'the best female writers of the day in Canada had contributed valuable papers,' according to Curzon.33 Members with a scientific inclination included Stowe's daughter, Augusta (later Stowe-Gullen), and Jennie Gray (later Wildman), who would become, respectively, a trainee and a staff member at the Ontario Women's Medical College.34 Others on the club roll were active in municipal or other reform work (such as the Toronto Woman's Christian Temperance Union); the characteristically multiple affiliations of clubwomen of the day provided an informal networking system through the mechanism of overlapping memberships, although the club also maintained a more formal correspondence with sister societies in both Canada and the United States. On its formation, the Toronto Women's Literary Club began to meet regularly and in a variety of formats: Thursday meetings in the members' homes, an annual event hosted by Stowe which provided an audit of the group's goals and achievements, and occasional open meetings with men as audience and participants. The occasions were covered in some detail in the Globe, whose accounts were presumably penned by one of the club's own members, and their 'eclecticism' of study quickly becomes apparent (as indicated by the first three newspaper excerpts given above). Poetry and phrenology, songs and suffragism, drama and dissection, present an odd mixture to the modern eye. But such range was quite characteristic of the women's groups of the day, in their attempts to recreate or at least approximate the liberal education from which they were excluded.35 (This first generation of study-club women would have received, for the most part, only a restricted and unsystematic education, and would be prevented by age from attending university once women gained admission. Even Stowe, raised in a progressive Quaker community, had been tutored principally by her mother, and later she was barred from formal medical education in Canada.) Descriptions of women's literary societies as a form of 'higher education' attracted as much derision, as did their defences of a range of topics of study - and their appropriation of the name and public purposes of a masculine term, 'club,' as indicated in the misogynist parody of The Woman's Club' meeting quoted above. In common with the other women's literary and cultural groups, the Toronto club would extend its quest for self-improvement into the larger community. But it differed from its successors both in its ability

112 Come, bright Improvement!

to combine intellectual and political work in a coherent agenda and in the more challenging nature of its efforts for civic improvement. One of the first activities of the TWLC upon formation was a survey of sanitary facilties in the city's shops and factories, where separate accommodation for women was seldom provided. Members would proceed to press for regulated hours and regular rest breaks for factory workers and shop clerks, to work for the municipal franchise for women, and to strategize to gain the admission of women to the provincial university. Working in cooperation with influential Toronto alumnus William Houston (an indefatiguable reformer who would soon become an executive member of the new suffrage association and later an agent for the Chuautauqua movement), the club sent a delegation to university president Daniel Wilson in February 1882. When their appeals failed to move him, they began a double-pronged effort of rallying supprt through the campus newspaper, the Varsity, and collecting signatures for a petition to the provincial legislature. (The 'ladies' club' and its petition campaign were mentioned in Curzon's topical play.)36 On-campus opinion began to shift - the Varsity for a time featured a female student complete with mortarboard on its masthead, before women's actual admission - and the president was eventually overruled with an orderin-council. Both the entry to the provincial university and the municipal franchise were gained after the club had reconstituted itself as a suffrage organization, and it is difficult to ascertain whether the group reformed in the knowledge that a more pointedly political effort would be needed to resolve these issues or whether signs of success had heartened members to take on greater causes. The salient point is that these undertakings were performed by the Toronto Women's Literary Club in its capacity as a literary society: public and private, political and intellectual, were integrated here, as was the goal of the movement for self- and mutual improvement more generally. The mode of organization of some of these disparate activities is illustrated by the programs printed in the 'City News' columns of the Daily Globe. As shown in part by the excerpts above, the programs featured musical selections, both vocal and instrumental, as well as recitations of well-known (and sometimes comic) verse - Longfellow and Tennyson were favourites - and some poetry written by the members themselves. These lighter aspects often bracketed the more serious discussion components, which would be initiated by the reading of literary or topical material or by an essay written by one of the members. A reading of works by and on Ruskin, for example, introduced a

The Rise of the Women's Societies 113

discussion of political utopianism on one occasion, and selections were often chosen from English and United States suffrage journals. While Shakespeare appeared at times in a strictly literary capacity - a reading of As You Like It 'under the management of one of the members, who would explain words and passages, correct faulty pronunciation, and criticize generally' - at other times, gender themes were emphasized. The playwright's focus on relations between the sexes, as well as his repertoire of strong and complex heroines, meant that Shakespearean study was a staple of the club, as it was for most other women's literary groups. Toronto club members themselves produced and read a wide variety of material, from poetry to papers on topical questions and philosophical issues. Histories and biographies of eminent women from classical to contemporary times were a favourite topic, whether writers such as Charlotte Bronte or feminists such as Margaret Fuller or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The 'woman question' was considered from all possible angles - The Enfranchisement of Women,' 'Women's Work/ The Legal Aspect of the Woman Question/ - even a comic piece on 'Men's Rights' and a satirical treatment of The Privileges of Women.' Essays on varied subjects such as early childhood education, Canadian history, and travel considerably expanded the intellectual range of the group's members. This rather disparate range of topics was, however, organized around a set of central thematics: the role of women (historically, in the present day, in the wished-for future, and as illustrated by interesting or exemplary lives), civic improvement (with concentration on health and education, two areas of municipal responsibility with which women were most able to engage), and topics with which women were likely to be un- or under-acquainted (science or foreign travel). From this perspective, then, the activities of the TWLC may be regarded as an attempt to provide regular (albeit compensatory) education for its women members, as well as a method of knitting their 'local' activities into the more 'global' analysis those discussions provided. In a similar way, the emphasis on writing and speaking skills, debate, and the conduct of meetings was intended, quite literally, to prepare women's voices for more public forums. The club's 'curriculum' had considerable strengths; its inadequacies must have been sensed by the women who worked to gain admission to the universities for their daughters. It would be a mistake, however, to see the work of the Toronto Women's Literary Club as lagging behind the studies of men of the day. In fact - to focus here only on the literary component of its study - it

114 Come, bright Improvement!

could be argued that the form of literary study of the Toronto club represents some significant areas of innovation over the studies then available in colleges and universities, as well as an ability to combine this newer model with older ones. The club preserved an emphasis on oral skills, which had already largely disappeared from the college curricula and been sidelined to the domain of college 'Lits' and drama societies. Declamation, recitation, elocution, pronunciation, dramatic performance, and the intricacies of parliamentary procedure were central, rather than secondary, to women's clubs (and would sometimes be retained in women's academies, such as the Margaret Eaton School of Literature and Expression, well into the twentieth century). The club also maintained composition as a part of its mandate - expository writing primarily, but some original poetry as well - even as the writing of themes was beginning to decline in importance in the universities (with the exception of essays produced for assignments and exams) and to slide into the domain of little magazines and student journalism. Yet while the TWLC differed from the increasingly specialized University of Toronto in maintaining the inclusive definition of the 'literary' formed earlier in the century, in other ways this women's group anticipated some of directions in which literary study would develop at the provincial university and made some departures uniquely its own.37 Though both the club and the English program at Toronto featured a wide range of genres in their study - fiction, poetry, drama, biography, autobiography, and prose of thought - there were differing principles at work when it came to the selection of individual texts within those generic ranges. Not surprisingly, the club featured woman-authored texts (including suffrage writings and 'current event' accounts of interest to women). 'Prose of thought' and historical writings would also appear on the university curriculum, but the clubwomen departed from its practice by drawing on journalistic writing from newspapers and magazines as a staple for their discussions. With some significant exceptions - notable women from the past and Shakespeare, whose characters and thematics held such relevance for modern women - the authors were in the main more contemporary than those to be encountered in university English courses of the late 1870s. (Browning, Longfellow, Ruskin, and Tennyson are examples of these.) Less historical both in its principles of selection and in its method of study of texts, the Toronto club showed (as far as I can discern) no inclination to a philological analysis of literary works (with the exception of some interest in the study of words), nor did it appear to frame

The Rise of the Women's Societies 115 its examinations by considering literature as primarily a national or 'racial' expression, as was the influential analytic approach of the criticethnologist and professor of English Daniel Wilson, who had added the university presidency to his other duties. Instead, the Toronto club's main interest appears to have been in the ideational content of literature. In this and in the choice of texts studied, its approach anticipated the reformation of studies that would come to Toronto with the appointment of WJ. Alexander to the chair of English in 1889; Alexander brought to the job an interest in contemporary literature and an idealist inclination, and he held in common with club readers a special love for Victorian poetry and the high-minded writings of the Brownings. (He would go on to share this interest, in a more direct way, with members of the Toronto Browning Club.) Alexander also broke with the use of dry historical surveys of literature - the source of bitter complaints by students - in favour of a more direct encounter with literary works. The way in which the Toronto club anticipated this text-based study can be illustrated by comparing its approach to the pass program offered to male undergraduates in 1877, the year of the club's foundation.38 While honours students commenced the study of individual authors somewhat earlier, pass students were confined to surveys of English language and literature (such as Craik's much-loathed History of Literature and Learning in England) and did not prepare actual literary texts until their third year. In contrast, the readers of the TWLC desired a first-hand encounter with texts, viewing them as the unique expression of individuals, their ideals, and their lived experience, whose writings could be applicable to the readers' own lives and work. There is some irony in the fact, however, that the women of the TWLC were pushing for the entry of women to the provincial university - which meant, into the modern languages programs especially - at the very moment when a more specialized literary study would render anachronistic the broad notion of the 'literary' which had enabled the women of the TWLC to integrate their literary and activist inclinations. The literary study of the Toronto Women's Literary Club did not, however, cease with the reformation of that organization. As early as 1881, it had developed a more distinctly literary (and mixed-sex) offshoot, the Toronto Athenaeum Club, among whose members were Dr. Stowe herself and the educator and editor Graeme Mercer Adam; formation of this society was announced at the TWLC fourth annual meeting. Little trace is left of the Toronto Athenaeum, but it appears to have been even more controversial than the mother organization, as

116 Come, bright Improvement!

measured by the fact that one of the TWLC's staunchest members held reservations about it. In an 1881 letter to reporter and reformer Thomas Bengough, Sarah Anne Curzon notes that a recent issue of the Christian Reporter has revealed that Mr Piddington's Yonge Street bookshop stocks works by theosophist Annie Besant and the radical Tom Paine; Piddington is, of course, one of the Toronto Athenaeum's founders. Is Bengough's reluctance to join this new group due to the unorthodox views of some of its members? It is, Curzon writes (whether approvingly or disapprovingly), a 'purely intellectual society.'39 After a few years had passed, both Emily Stowe and Augusta StoweGullen were continuing this iconoclastic literary study with an even faster intellectual set as charter members of the Toronto Theosophical Society in the spring of 1891.40 In this they were joined by other spiritually inclined literari, including businessman and poet Albert Smythe (who would remain a key figure in the Theosophical Society for many decades), the women's suffragist Ethel Day McPherson, and remittance man Algernon Blackwood, then finishing a stint as a rather hapless hack for the Methodist Magazine.41 (Blackwood had come to Canada, at his father's insistence, kitted out with vague plans to be a beekeeper and with copies of Patanjali's Yoga Aphorisms and De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater; despite this inauspicious start, he became an important early experimenter in the genres of supernatural and science fiction writing.)42 The founding members would be joined a few weeks later by the socialist T. Phillips Thompson, then the editor of the Labour Advocate.43 The group convened, usually at Stowe-Gullen's house but sometimes at Emily Stowe's or at painter George Reid's studio in the Arcade building on Yonge Street, for discussions of karma and reincarnation, the Bhagavad-Gita and Madame Blavatsky, with the occasional inclusion of writers displaying theosophic tendencies, such as Tennyson and Whitman.44 By this point, idealist literary study had been taken, quite literally, to unprecedented heights. At first glance, the Angelica Shakespeare Club of Owen Sound would appear to have little in common, except the sex of its members, with the cutting-edge Toronto club. The Toronto club was unequivocally public, involving high-profile women supported by prominent men, engaging in political affairs, hosting open meetings, reporting to the Toronto dailies, and receiving (sometimes unwanted) public scrutiny. The Angelica Shakespeare Club was a small-town group whose fifteen members met modestly in one another's parlours and, it appears, avoided

The Rise of the Women's Societies

117

the limelight, even in the form of public readings, performances, or Shakespearean tableaux. In addition, the two societies were distinct in their educational and civic missions: while the TWLC was eclectic (although integrated) in its study, a decade later the Angelica was deciding to eschew the more general 'reading club' format in favour of this newly emergent model of more focused study; and while the Toronto club undertook significant reform work, the Angelica society's goals appear to have remained educational. The two societies, however, shared the purposes of female friendship and mutual support as well as self-improvement; both relied on Shakespeare's works for the opportunities for literary, elocutionary, historical, and philosophical understanding that the study of any one play could provide. And both attempted to find routes of access for women to some of the advanced knowledge of the day: the Toronto Women's Literary Club quite literally in its work for educational enfranchisement, the Angelica Shakespeare Club in its turning to experts and authorities for intellectual assistance. The Angelica Shakespeare Club held a first organizational meeting in 1886 at the home of one of its Owen Sound club members. 'Some present were in favor of having a club which should be wholly Shakespearian in its character/ recalled an account of that meeting, while 'others again were disinclining to agree to this, and many arguments were adduced both for and against; at length in [sic] a magazine article entitled "Why women should study Shakespeare" was produced and read aloud, the reasoning in which was so valid and conclusive as to convince and decide those who had hitherto [objected or wavered. Shakespeare went by acclamation as it were!'45 Two questions were occupying the prospective members of the soonto-be Angelica Shakespeare Club at their inaugural meeting. The first was whether or not to initiate a reading club of a general nature. As we have seen above, eclecticism of study had come under question, and not only from biased men who saw it as evidence of women's intellectual inconstancy: in the Olio, for example, members had differed as to whether a broadly general program or a systematic study should be followed. In addition, as young women from the middle classes began to receive an improved education - restrictions on collegiate subjects such as Latin were lifted, and a number attended normal schools to train as teachers or even ventured into the colleges and universities this remedial function of a reading group was no longer as relevant. But how, if eclecticism were to be abandoned, should the group be focused?

118 Come, bright Improvement!

This issue appears to have been resolved by the influential article whose argument the prospective group considered at length. 'Why Women Should Study Shakespeare' is, I assume, the article authored by J. Heard which appeared in the cultural journal the Manhattan in June 1884.46 (This does not appear to have been a journal that was widely circulated in Canada, but women interested in Shakespeare culture could have sought out the item after it was noted in the betterknown Shakespeariana of the Shakespeare Society of New York. Its editor accused Heard of lifting material from Professor William Thorn's 'Shakespeare Study for American Women/ which Shakespeariana had published several months before.)47 Many of Heard's arguments are so familiar that one could have reconstructed them even if the actual item had not been located, but he (although it may well be an actual or pseudonymous 'she') is more innovative in linking Shakespeare study to the evolving educational and social needs of the 'new woman' of the late century.48 Heard begins with the usual boilerplate about the Bard, which, in innumerable articles other than Heard's own, goes invariably as follows. Shakespeare (with Homer and Dante) is one of the triumvirate pantheon of poets, for the greatness of his conception, the complexity of his human creations, and his insights into the workings of the human heart. He deals with the highest and most tragic of human aspirations and with the most common and comedic of characters; a creator of memorable and instructive individuals, he is also - and most significantly - the prime poet of a nation (or even of a 'race'). All readers will find in Shakespeare a repository of wise saws and aphorisms; women, especially, will look to the plays' examples of the highest forms of womanhood. While his works have a continuing relevance and universal appeal, their historical allusions and classical citations are instructive for the determined reader. Thus the particular value of Shakespeare for study: since any one play opens questions of etymology, syntax, and prosody, of sources and allusions, of characterization and ethics, then Shakespeare study is a liberal education in itself. (While Heard does not make this point explicitly, one can see the appeal of this idea to groups that wished to have and eat their intellectual cake: Shakespeare study could fulfil both eclectic and focused, liberal and more strictly literary, aims.) Last, Shakespeare study could provide in the vernacular the equivalent to a classical education, hitherto restricted to the elite (and almost invariably male) few. Such is the general case, and Heard treads over much of this well-

The Rise of the Women's Societies 119

worn ground in the opening pages to the article, concluding that women are equally as capable of this higher study as men and would profit from it similarly. But Heard then introduces a more specific set of reasons, to demonstrate that this study could have both purposes and procedures of special relevance to women. Here reference is made to Anna Brownell Jameson and her pioneering 1832 study Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical, and Historical. (The one-time wife of Attorney General Robert Jameson, whom we have seen in his role as president of the Toronto Literary Club, Anna Jameson had visited Toronto in the winter of 1836-7 and recorded her sometimes scathing opinions on its cultural life in her Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada; there is high irony in the fact that this esteemed Shakespeare scholar, an intimate of the Goethe family circle, would have been an unwelcome intruder at a meeting of the Toronto Literary Club or of the predecessor Shakspeare Club.)49 An important early proponent of women's educational and intellectual enfranchisement, Jameson penned a feminist treatise on women's capabilities and how they could best be developed, using female characters from Shakespeare, for - to use the words of her porte-parole, Alda - "not only are they what we could wish to be, or ought to be, but what we persuade ourselves we might be, or would be, under a different and happier state of things, and, perhaps, some time or other, may be.'50 Jameson's work was cited by bluestockings and scholars alike and frequently republished, the late-century editions being released with the more restricted title of Shakespeare's Heroines, presumably to appeal to Shakespeare students and groups. The form of biographical criticism that Jameson inaugurated reached a mid-century apotheosis (or nadir, depending on one's perspective) in Mary Cowden Clarke's The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, a series of fifteen 'biographies' of lives of women characters prior to the events in Shakespeare's plays; part of the enormous appeal of this work was the way that it helped to fill in the profiles of female characters, often much more sketchily drawn than Shakespeare's men. (This work was much mocked by later scholars, but it has many parallels to certain forms of psychoanalytic criticism extant today, in its attempts to provide insight into the characters' motivations.) Jameson, Clarke, and like-minded sister critics were also responsible for highlighting the emotional, even 'feminine/ characteristics of Shakespeare's mind and art, a notion that would culminate in Virginia Woolf's famous assertion in A Room of One's Own - taking Shakespeare as evidence - of the androgyny of the creative mind.51

120 Come, bright Improvement!

In making the case for women's Shakespeare studies, Heard draws on such arguments while updating them. Women of the 1880s are living changed lives in a transitional period; the study of Shakespeare will provide women not only with intellectual preparation for their eventual emancipation, but with models of how this independence and this intellectual development can be combined with the 'feminine qualities of heart' which must be retained even as the feminine sphere is enlarged. Women should keep in mind the 'feminine sweetness and true dignity' of the wise Portia, for example, 'when they go forth to rout old prejudices and established customs/ and they should take the example of Beatrice, whose sharp wit was tempered with courage and faith. The adaptability of Shakespeare's characters as prototypes of late-Victorian womanhood is indicated by the ingenious illustration that accompanies 'Why Women Should Study Shakespeare,' in which two female figures are seated at the feet of a statue of the Bard. On the left is Portia from The Merchant of Venice, who donned a cap and gown to debate the learned men; but she could just as easily be standing for the new generation of 'co-eds' flocking to the colleges and universities of the day. On the right, it appears, is Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing (she may, from her feather, be the indomitable Cordelia from Lear), but she could as well be a young women in leg-of-mutton sleeves, flourishing a fan, a quill pen, or even (fancifully) a feather duster. The mapping of the Elizabethan onto the modern seems clear, but what are we to make of two other features of the illustration? Here Shakespeare the creator is portrayed as a work of art, while his fictional characters are 'real,' and the women at his feet seem twice his size. These reversals are oddly in keeping with the article's conclusion, as J. Heard evisages a future in which some genius woman will be 'the fourth great mind of the world' and in which woman as a sex will 'promote and bring about the moral redemption of the world.'52 Clearly, this article - read aloud at its organizational meeting - was enough to establish the mission of the Shakespeare Club. Once decided on its purpose, the fledgling Angelica society also determined a plan of study. According to the annual progress reports, the usual method was to read aloud one of Shakespeare's plays on an act-by-act basis over the course of a number of meetings, during which the background to the play, characterization, themes, and so forth would be considered; presumably, interpretive questions were raised for particularly difficult scenes. Tragedies, comedies, and history plays appeared in a loose sort of rotation, with some preference given to comedies, and a 'miscellane-

The Rise of the Women's Societies 121

ous day' would follow the completion of a play, during which another author could be read or discussed. In preparation for understanding Shakespeare's plays, secondary works would be read (or reported on by members) in order to shed light on his sources: a 'Life of Caesar' (whose author is not named) accompanied the study of Shakespeare's treatment of that figure, while '[m]any notes and extracts from various works, notably Grant White's "Florentine Arithmetician" added to the interest and also helped to a better understanding of this Great Drama' when members worked through Othello.53 In some other cases, the study of Shakespeare could be complemented comparatively, with Hamlet read in tandem with Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, for example. The goal for the group appears to have been six plays annually, although in their second year of study members were limited to five plays, their final meetings being 'devoted to reading up the best authorities on Shakespeare's life, thus acquiring all the knowledge obtainable of that which has ever been to a large degree enshrouded in mystery. Dowden, Emerson, Carlyle, Coleridge, Brooks and other well known authors were given and listened to with much interest, all agreeing in the main and showing more convincingly than ever the greatness of our beloved poet!'54 Members appear to have worked seriously and methodically, reviewing their lessons after vacations, recording their progress, registering their failures with candour. Too, the annual reports and minutes of this 'Seraphic Association' (as they sometimes referred to the group) provide a touching record of female affiliations - concerns expressed for the ill health of club members or their families, notes of condolences sent, slices of a member's wedding cake served with the meeting's tea. While little evidence is given of the precise questions or topics that members prepared for meetings or of the tenor of the discussions that took place, the Angelica Shakespeare Club did leave a good record of the critics to whom it turned for assistance, which permits further reconstruction of its direction of study. The names of Emerson, Carlyle, and Coleridge are readily recognizable for their other literary achievements, even if their Shakespearean essays are less known today. Edward Dowden, a professor of English at Trinity College, Dublin, published Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875) and Shakspere (1877; the latter is commonly known as his 'Shakspere Primer' because it appeared in Macmillan's Literature Primer series), among many works in a distinguished career spanning forty years of publication. A friend of Whitman, a devotee of Robert Browning, and in later life a propo-

122 Come, bright Improvement! nent of the Irish Literary Renaissance, he would release an important study of Shelley the same year as. the Angelica club commenced its activities. In another entry in its records, the Angelica secretary refers to 'our usual authorities Dowden, Cassell and Knight/ 'Cassell' appears to indicate not an author but the publishing house noteworthy for its primers, home study guides, and cheap reprints, including a 'People's Edition' of Shakespeare which appeared in ten monthly sixpenny instalments. The volume of their production prohibits certain identification of the text the Angelicans used, but Cassell's Shakespeare Tercentenary Pocket Almanac would have been particularly handy for a study group. Charles Knight, a member of the original Shakespeare Society of London of the 1840s, had produced a series of 'cabinet editions' of poetry and plays; given the focus of the Angelica Shakespeare Club and its fascination with Shakespeare's life, the particular work used may well have been Knight's pocket-sized Studies of Shakspere ... Containing a History of Opinion on the Writings of Shakspere; with the Chronology of His Plays. Of these more specialized critics, it is Dowden who occupies a lasting place in the development of Shakespeare criticism, and he would be the most influential for the Angelicans.55 These critics span the century and are themselves diverse in their orientations, but their names show the Angelica group engaged in a form of biographical criticism additional to the study of exemplary female characters as prototypes of women. The enigma of Shakespeare's 'life' haunted nineteenth-century study of the poet, whether academic or popular. In its extreme forms, it took (and takes) the question of whether Shakespeare actually wrote the plays attributed to him (the pretenders being Bacon primarily, but even Elizabeth I, Marlowe, and still in our own day - the Earl of Oxford). Even the 'Stratfordians,' as Shakespeare supporters were sometimes known, were left with a related question: how could Shakespeare's modest life result in works of such grandeur? Scholars, too, looked to the scanty biographical details to help them to establish the chronology and processes of composition of his writings. Shakespeare today is so firmly canonized, his 'greatness' so unquestioned, and his curricular centrality so fixed that it seems odd that loyal readers once felt called upon to defend him; but vindication would describe, in part, the attitude of Shakespeare club members to their 'beloved poet' and the use they could make of the facts that would solve the 'enshrouded mystery' of that life. Avowing or proving the

The Rise of the Women's Societies

123

authentic authorship of Shakespeare's plays allowed one to twist the terms of his sceptics: his modest origins were then viewed as part of the source of his particular 'genius/ a term that meant something quite different from its significance today. Now 'genius' is roughly equated with intelligence or innate mental capacities; one is born a genius. By a post-Romantic nineteenth-century definition, however, the term could denote a person's 'unique spirit/ which could, in turn, be the product of his or her circumstances, experiences, and processes of mental and spiritual development. This Shakespeare, then, is a self-made man, the result of a life lived and of works studied, of struggles and sorrows faced and of obstacles overcome. The critics mentioned above attempted to deal with the 'problem' of Shakespeare's life in their own ways. Coleridge, for example, sketched a Shakespeare whose works showed artistic judgment and skilled symbolics, rather than just a hearty energy. Charles Knight drew a biographical sketch of a poet who achieved artistic growth through education and effort. Of this form of criticism, it was undoubtedly Dowden who was the most broadly influential, not only for the theories but for the ways in which they were popularized: he capitalized on the new vogue for Shakespeare, which was signalled by the foundation of the New Shakspere Society in London in 1874 (Dowden was a vicepresident of the Dublin branch), and he further popularized his work with the widely used 'Primer/ designed to assist study by individuals and groups. Dowden's theories are squarely situated in what must have seemed to many readers an interpretational dilemma: how to reconcile the earthy and prosaic 'realities' of Shakespeare's life and of Elizabethan England with the more 'transcendental' and philosophical achievements of the plays themselves. This was more than a question about the sources of poetic inspiration or the necessary training for poetic achievement. It was also a posing of the question of poetic 'unity/ which Shakspare had nobly failed by eighteenth-century standards: if Shakespeare was able to draw on mundane materials to achieve great ends, combining as he did the 'low' and the 'high/ the comic and the tragic modes, how could he do so without compromising the artistic unity of the work? For Dowden, this tension between the concrete and the abstract, the daily and the divine, actuality and imagination, in the writings reflected a struggle staged in Shakespeare's own mind. Dowden's theory thus provided not only an account of the balance between the comic and the tragic within individual plays and across

124 Come, bright Improvement!

the span of Shakespeare's composition but a master plot of his life, which Dowden describes as a drama in five acts. In Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art he aimed 'to connect the study of Shakespeare's works with an inquiry after the personality of the writer, and to observe, as far as is possible, the growth of his intellect and character in their several stages from youth to full maturity.' The stages of Shakespeare's maturation are keyed to the development of his drama from the early comedies and history plays through the more accomplished comedies, the tragedies, and the closing romances of his career.56 Dowden also attempted to relate Shakespeare's works to the social and intellectual climate (such as theological tendencies and an emergent scientific epistemology) of the time. It is more probable, however, that Shakespeare clubs used the simplified version of the schema provided in the 'Primer,' in which four stages of artistic development are more loosely tied to rather speculative constructions of Shakespeare's life. 'In the workshop/ we see the poet as a youthful experimenter, while in a second stage Shakespeare wrote 'In the world/ as his 'imagination began to lay hold of real life.' During this second stage, we are told, he knew personal sorrow, and he 'ceased to care for tales of mirth and love, for the stir and movement of history, for the pomp of war'; now he began to write his way 'Out of the depths' with the creation of tragic, yet triumphant, figures. 'The tragic gloom and suffering were not, however, to last forever/ and the poet ended 'On the heights' with the great romances of his closing years.57 This theory has been labelled by one commentator 'a Horatio Alger version of Shakespeare's life': the same critic would bemoan, 'It is doubtful that any other exposition so brief has so plagued the history of Shakespeare criticism.'58 But the power of Dowden's work evidences the need that it fulfilled for contemporary readers of Shakespeare, both in defending this artist of humble origins and in defusing an emerging counter-tendency to celebrate Shakespeare as a 'genius' in our more modern sense: superhuman, unique, extreme. While Dowden's 'Primer' may overstress the homely side of Shakespeare, his Shakespeare is a poet, above all, of lived and felt experience. And while his four-stage theory was formulaic, especially in relationship to the more sophisticated developmental theory of Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, the 'Primer' had much to offer the novice Shakespeare student. The simplified scheme allowed a clearer division of the plays by genre, which would facilitate study (as it did in the alternation of genres followed by the Angelica society). The 'Primer'

The Rise of the Women's Societies 125

also guided the student through the thickets of Shakespeare criticism, provided contextual background to the poet's life and times, ordered the plays chronologically according to internal and external evidence, and gave a history of how they had been staged. Citations of the 'Primer' in the Angelica Shakespeare Club records prove that this text was one upon which it relied; in reading Shakespeare conjointly with Goethe, the club was also following a critical direction established by Dowden, who had authored a comparative study of the two authors. Most importantly, however, the 'Primer,' along with the other works studied by the club, allowed members to view Shakespeare not only as an object of knowledge but as a fellow-traveller on the road to improvement. In stressing connections between their own pursuit and the life of the Bard, members of the Angelica Shakespeare Club did not necessarily think themselves - or even their sex - capable of the same achievements. There is nothing to suggest that they believed a female Shakespeare was waiting in the wings, or that they had adopted this imaginary figure as the muse for their study. But they did find in Shakespeare the bases of a liberal and a sentimental education, examples of female accomplishment, and some homely lessons: that the slow path of development could lead to riches and that the details of day-to-day life were fitting matter for the profoundest reflection. The nineteenth-century literary societies are deserving of attention in part because of their persistence into our own day. Divisions between 'colonial' and 'post-colonial' cultural forms and between nineteenthand twentieth-century literature, separations demarcated by the world wars, and periodizations of 'Victorian,' 'modern/ and 'postmodern' all of which operate in the study of Canadian culture and letters - tend to occlude sets of cultural continuities from earlier days to our own. Sometimes the connections are evident, as with the groups whose existence spans a hundred years or more, or they can be more subtle, as in the persistence of rituals and practices. The converse is also true: the literary societies are also noteworthy for the ways they encompassed change, that is, for the ways that they could accommodate and adapt. The Angelica Shakespeare Club, in its methods of study, provides a reflection of critical paradigms in Shakespeare scholarship stretching across a century and a half. In common with many women's Shakespeare clubs, the group embarked on its study with a series of rationales first articulated by Anna Jameson in the early 1830s and developed by

126 Come, bright Improvement!

critics such as Mary Cowden Clarke at mid-century. It then travelled across the early Romantic (Coleridge), idealist (Carlyle), and transcendentalist (Emerson) thinkers of the first half of the nineteenth century and on to the new generation of 'academic' critics of the century's latter half, who were doubly located in the universities and the new scholarly societies. In one of our last glimpses of the group afforded by its scrapbook, the members of this 'Seraphic Association' are boarding a bus en route to the Stratford Festival. Quite a journey.

CHAPTER SIX

LITERARY STUDY IN THE LITERARY SOCIETIES

He drew attention in the opening of his essay to Ruskin's mind as being strong [sic] analytic, his fondness for birds and animals and to the ruling motive in his life that 'People are divinely created for divine ends.'He then showed his versatility as being poet-painter, art critic, professor, Reformer and Idealist. Account of Mr Sloan's presentation to the Gait Scientific, Historical and Literary Society (1898)1 It was Norah's first introduction to Pippa. She was familiar with most of the poets of the century - Tennyson, Whittier, Wordsworth, Longfellow; but with Browning she had scarcely got beyond the outer husk which repels so many, and really only knew one or two of his minor Lyrics. But the new, strenuous, heartsearching note took her captive. Agnes Maule Machar, Roland Graeme, Knight: A Novel for Our Time (1892)2

Throughout this book, my aim has been to identify literary societies in which some degree of literary study was either envisaged or enacted: that is, to study societies which studied texts. They may have done so directly through reading and discussion or in more mediated ways, such as a member's essay on a novel or an author's life. They may have studied in even more attentuated modes, such as the memorization of quotations and the mastery of the basic elements of what we might call 'literary literacy.' Such study was almost invariably embedded in more widely ranging rhetorical or cultural activities, in which it might play a minor or a major part. Even where literary activities were a central concern, however, the

128 Come, bright Improvement!

details are often difficult to discern. In the early societies, 'literary' activities jostled for elbow room in a crowd of naturalist, historical, and scientific enthusiasms, as we have seen. Even with the rise of more focused study groups and single-author appreciation societies, reconstruction remains difficult. Frustratingly, many societies' minute books record the presentation of readings, recitations, and essays without identifying the selection or the topic; the essays and lectures themselves were rarely retained; and minutes or newspaper columns often resort to generic description of an 'interesting' paper followed by a 'lively' discussion. Even where topics of discussion are given (Measure for Measure or a poem by Tennyson, for example), the details of approach and method remain obscure. What, exactly, did these groups wish to know about the texts they were reading? And what, in turn, did these texts give to them? As late-century societies began to approximate more closely the kinds of book clubs we are familiar with today, featuring discussion of a literary text that readers have prepared in advance and perhaps organized by an annual theme or schedule, a more detailed picture of the literary work of the literary societies becomes available, if only because a curriculum of study emerged as eclecticism of interest receded. Such societies saw themselves as creating a systematic 'higher' education, in two senses: they often attempted to bring their own work into alignment with study and criticism as it was conducted in the universities of the day; and they viewed literature as a repository of advanced values and a prophylactic or at least a panacea for the materialism or political malaise of their day. Such groups allow us to compare their activity with the emergent discipline of English studies and to place them in relationship to nineteenth-century idealist thought, both loosely and technically defined.3 In the case of the two societies to be discussed below, these connections were more than incidental. The Gait Scientific, Historical and Literary Society corresponded with figures at the provincial university on the topic of university extension, sponsored the visits of experts and professors to its town, and itself began to develop, at least in the literary section, coherent year-long programs of study. The featured works were, increasingly, those of transcendentalist, idealist, or at least highly moral writers (Emerson, Carlyle, and George Eliot, to give three examples). The Toronto Browning Club developed a focused and systematic course of reading, reports, and discussion topics for its year-long programs, received regular instruction from professors from several

Literary Study in the Literary Societies 129

universities, and set its course according to the scholarly directions developed by the Boston critical journal Poet-Lore. Concentrating on the mind and thought of Browning, it would later extend that direction into analyses of the writings of Emerson and Matthew Arnold. The societies offer, however, some significant differences. The Gait group may well have been the last society in Ontario to be founded on the 'literary and philosophical society' format which had been in currency some fifty years before; its story is in part the narrative of a struggle against a structure that was becoming outmoded. The Toronto Browning Club, on the other hand, looked to both England and the United States in its search for a model that was distinctly modern. In 1904 Sara Jeannette Duncan published The Imperialist, a novel of social manners and political manoeuvres set in the town of 'Elgin' (a thinly fictionalized Brantford) of some twenty years before.4 While the novel centres on the transatlantic adventures of a principled young lawyer who wishes to effect nothing less than Canada's national destiny, readers are equally drawn to the appealing secondary character of his sister, Advena Murchison, a nascent 'new woman' who seeks a destiny of her own. Advena lives in the higher realms: she spoils the spuds while mooning over poetry and falls in love with the equally impractical Reverend Hugh Finlay over a copy of Browning's Sordello. Advena Murchison and Hugh Finlay would have found a circle of soulmates in the Gait Scientific, Historical and Literary Society. This group appears to have been an outgrowth of an earlier Gait Historical and Scientific Society, in existence as early as 1889 and probably confined to men as members. Reorganizing with a broader mandate in April 1891, the eighteen men present made two crucial gestures: they opened the membership to 'any person' and moved to petition the provincial university to establish extension lectures. The new mixedsex group developed 'in connection with the Mechanics' Institute/ which appears to have meant that it met in the institute reading room and could use the display cases for its exhibits. The group laid out as its ambitious objects the 'promotion of scientific and literary culture by discussions, original essays, historical research, and practical work done in the field and in class.' Botanical, geological, and historical sections were commenced, and the possibility left open for 'special branches of Science or Literature.' In achieving these goals, the Gait society was far more successful than most: it appears to have been a well-organized group - and its minute book is nicely detailed - but without the too

130 Come, bright Improvement!

heavy ballast of policies and procedures that swamped some societies. Further, many of its male members had a higher education, holding the degree of BA or BDiv; there was even an MA and (a nineteenth-century rarity) a PhD in the group. Several of the women can be identified as graduates of the Gait Collegiate Institute, a fine school with a 'lit' of its own. The society began to collect local histories and pioneer oral narratives; its botanical section was particularly active, undertaking numerous field trips and publishing a series of monographs on Flora of Gait and Vicinity. While the general meetings featured papers on a variety of topics, the sections also convened separately to pursue their own interests. But the literature section, established six months after the group's foundation, eventually emerged as the strongest and would come to dominate the society. At least some of the members of the literature section had belonged to other organizations which may have served as models. Arthur Wright had been a member of the University College 'Lit' during his time at Toronto and had established credentials as a minor litterateur through publication of several of his loose translations of Horatian odes in the Varsity;; he was now teaching modern languages at the Gait Collegiate Institute. (Wright would become well known in his second career as a newspaper editor: he purchased the Mount Forest Confederate in 1902 and was still editing in his nineties; obituaries referred to him as the 'Dean of Canadian Newspaper Editors.')5 Other university graduates would in all likelihood have had exposure to similar organizations during their college days. Thomas Carscadden, English master at the collegiate and later its much-revered head, was also involved with the Gait Collegiate Institute Literary Society (sometimes the Literary and Musical Society), whose activities, detailed with regularity on the front page of the Gait Reporter, make an interesting counterpoint to those of the more senior society reported in the same source. In gradually focusing its interests, the Gait society was typical of many of the polymathic literary societies throughout the century, which ended up, through either design or default, restricting their interests more narrowly. It was rare that these ambitious organizations were able to cover all the bases laid down in their titles: literary, philosophical, historical, scientific, and art societies, in whatever combination, generally developed along one of their branches while allowing the others to wither. What may appear to the later historian as a gradual and rational concentration of intellectual efforts was probably, for its members, a series of adaptations (both fortuitous and ill-fated) to emerging circum-

Literary Study in the Literary Societies 131

stances - minor trims of sails to meet the shifting winds. The minute books of the Gait society (which include tallyings of the group's achievement in end-of-the-year accounts), supplemented by reports from the Gait Reporter and the Dumfries Reformer, tell the tale. The GSHLS 'promises to prosecute its work with fresh vigour after the holidays/ predicted the Gait Reporter in the autumn of 1891.6 The group began its season with a broad range, as demonstrated by the program of one well-attended September meeting. 'The proceedings were of more than usual interest/ according to the journalistic account: Mr. A. Mcllwraith gave those present the benefit of his valuable experience with the wildflowers of the neighbourhood, entering a strong plea for their preservation. Rev. J.A.R. Dickson, B.D., read his paper 'Gathered Remeniscences [sic] of Dr. Bayne/ sketching the career of Gait's widely known divine, and reciting authentic stories illustrating his character. The Glacial Period in geology was well described by W. Lochhead, B.A.7

A lecture on the history of the Bastille and a public display of stereopticon slides of the Hawaiian Islands were some of the other selections this year. Although the society's continuing natural history interests remained predominant, the literary component was substantial: eight papers on Shakespeare were presented to the general meeting, as well as A.W. Wright's offering on George Eliot's Romola, Dr Moyer's talk on the origins and development of the drama, and an original 'descriptive and philosophical poem' titled 'The Story of the Autumn Maple Leaf by the Reverend Mr Dickson. Robert Murray surveyed both 'Border Poetry' and 'Canadian Song and Ballad.'8 The busy autumn also saw the establishment of the Literature section under Thomas Carscadden. The Gait Reporter noted that other teachers at the collegiate were also actively involved, studying Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and commencing work on Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies; selections from Shakespeare, Ruskin, and Tennyson were read at the study circle's closing meeting in June.9 The innovation was judged a success, and the minutes credited the establishment of separate sections for a boost in the membership to eighty-two. But this segmentation also carried with it a potential cross-purpose to the society's more pluralist perspective. The emerging strength of the new literature section may have been responsible for some unbalancing of the general program in the following years. Scientific papers were scanty in the 1892-3 session, although one paper headed 'Scientific Inquiry' dealt with plants in the Gait

132 Come, bright Improvement!

vicinity, continuing the botanical specialty which was the society's pride.10 Literary papers were presented on the topics of Canadian authors, Renaissance playwright Christopher Marlowe, the 'Jewish element' in Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and the scientific understanding of Tennyson. A paper on the 'Mystery of Life/ inspired by the section's study of Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, was read; the group discussed a public lecture on the topic of 'Conduct and Manners' by Professor William Clark of Trinity which it had sponsored - 'a great literary treat' but a financial failure. The minute book notes that the section met regularly, studying Macbeth and Wordsworth's minor poems, with papers given on the latter. In the 1893-4 season the program followed a similar pattern. An entire evening was devoted to the political thought of Goldwin Smith, according to a report in the Gait Reporter.11 However, the general meeting continued to feel the impact of the Literature section, with papers on 'The Poet Leyden,' 'The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,' the 'Life and Character of Goethe/ and a sketch of the life of Washington Irving. The characterization of Jews in Disraeli's fiction was discussed, as was the theology of Tennyson's In Memoriam, in a paper that brought out clearly 'his agreement with "orthodox" opinion on many vital points.' And Mrs A.M. Oliver read her original poem 'A Good Newspaper' and followed it with some comments on rhyme. In its own meetings the English section pursued a more specialized study of Julius Caesar and In Memoriam. More is evidenced here than sheer dominance of the literary contingent: these years show the emergence of further forms of specialization within the specialization, in both subject matter and approach. The favoured authors were, in the main, those noted for idealist inclinations or the gravity of their ethical or theological thought. The opinions of professional literary critics were solicited and discussed. And a new practice had begun to emerge, which would characterize the literary study clubs of the century's end: rather than coming to meetings ready to learn from the evening's essays, members of the literature section would have prepared a common text on which their discussion would centre. Did the general membership protest against too rich a literary menu? Was a more varied program generated in an attempt to retain - or to attract - members? An interestingly topical series of papers characterized the 1894-5 session: anti-slavery, anti-Semitism, hypnotism, and the book on Cosmic Consciousness authored by Richard Maurice Bucke, who

Literary Study in the Literary Societies 133

had been superintendent of the asylum at London, Ontario, and was an intimate of Walt Whitman; the Gait Reporter also noted a discussion on evolution.12 A.W. Wright continued his inquiry into characterizations of the Jews, this time in the work of Oliver Wendell Holmes; a paper was presented on More's Utopia. In this year, the literature section came under the direction of Wright, as Thomas Carscadden assumed the more onerous duties of the Gait Collegiate headmastership. It was here that literary discussion was concentrated for the year, with studies of Richard II and selections from Browning. A new section was formed for the study of French literature. Paradoxically, this final burst of eclecticism may have signalled the near completion of the Gait Scientific, Historical and Literary Society's transition to a more delimited organization. Botanical and scientific work had by now disappeared from the general program, and scientific topics were treated primarily in the light of their philosophical or social scientific ramifications. Even the topics presented in the general meeting, such as anti-Semitism or 'cosmic consciousness,' could be seen as an extension of the interests and inclinations of the literary devotees into non-literary topics. In all but name, the Gait group would operate for the next four years as a dedicated literary society. This change of direction was much in evidence for the 1895-6 season, for which the only papers in the general program were on the topics of 'Evolution, 'Geology of the Earth,' 'Our Winter Birds,' "The Rainbow/ 'The Jews,' and 'Imitative Mimicry.'13 (The last three could well have been literary papers, but details of the essays are not given.) Three papers on Browning were presented to the meeting, one by Miss Cooey 'showing the beauty and depth of his poems, also the religious feelings throughout his works'; these essays would have complemented the work on Browning undertaken by the study section. Authors James Russell Lowell, George Herbert, and Washington Irving were also examined, and 'A Half Hour with Whittier' was presented. In addition, 'Mr. Barrett gave a well-prepared Essay on "Addison" showing how he raised the literature of his time from the low estate into which it had fallen after the Restoration to the more chaste and elevated position it has since held.' There were additional papers on 'Stewart Cumberland/ 'Reform in Spelling/ 'Myths and Fables/ and 'Crockett.' The society contemplated asking professors from Trinity College in Toronto to address them; the reference presumably included William Clark, who was in demand as a public lecturer on a variety of topics. The minute book for 1896-7 also shows a primarily literary emphasis

134 Come, bright Improvement!

in the general meeting and permits a view of the critical questions that interested the society's members. A.W. Wright presented a resume of Browning's Tippa Passes' and demonstrated 'the influence of Pippa upon the four parties in the play, also the unity of time, place and action and that [sic] conformed to the French drama rather than to the English/14 The Reverend J.B. Duncan sketched the tumultous career of Charlotte Bronte and showed 'how her writings were the experiences of her life and not the creations of her fancy.' In an analysis of The Tempest, James E. Kerr continued the biographical orientation as he 'delineated the characters of Prospero, Miranda and Caliban. Prospero representing Shakespeare in his latter days, Miranda a natural women, and Caliban the most wonderful of Shakespeare's creations.' Kerr also referred to Professor Daniel Wilson's controversial study Caliban: The Missing Link (a work which suggested that Shakespeare presaged many of the insights of evolutionary theory), but whether with disapproval or approval cannot be known. Less detail is given for the other essays presented to the general section: papers on Erasmus and Carlyle; consideration of As You Like It and of the Tudor period, with attention to its drama; discussions of Hugo's Les Miserables and of the question 'What Is Culture?' The English section studied Tennyson's 'The Princess' until Christmas and began the new year with Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. By now the English literature section and the society were virtually synonymous (and, it appears, the scientifically inclined sections had disbanded). Presenters to the general meeting could assume a familiarity with critical principles and even some specific theories (dramatic unity or the work of Daniel Wilson). The general papers and the topics of the study group were interlocked. But the society had become focused in more than its object of study: a specific orientation to questions of aesthetics and culture was also emerging within the group, as suggested by the authors it favoured and by the compatability it sensed in the work of the Reverend Professor William Clark. Clark, now an almost forgotten figure, was a popular public speaker in his day, known - as one observer notes - for his personal charm, the breadth of his sympathies, and his power of address.15 (He has been encountered already in this study, orating, like Demosthenes against the wind, over the roar of a passing train at the Niagara Assembly.) Educated at Aberdeen and Oxford, this Scottish-born philosopher and cleric came to Canada in 1882 and soon assumed the chair in mental and moral philosophy at Trinity College, Toronto. He was the author of theological studies and works of church history but more widely known

Literary Study in the Literary Societies 135

for his literary labours, and when Trinity created a new professorship of English in 1901, Clark would take up that role as well. After heading the humanities section of the Royal Society of Canada, he would assume the society's presidency in 1900. He served as an important cultivator of taste in his day, through the medium of university and popular lectures and through articles in educational journals and in wider-circulation publications such as the Canadian Magazine and the Week. The stars in his citational constellation were Bacon, Carlyle, Kingsley, and Ruskin, and he steered his course according to Tennyson.16 The Reverend William Clark would have held a threefold appeal for the literary members of the Gait society. First, he was a firm defender of the value of books and of the need to incorporate the habit of reading into one's day-to-day life. His view, that reading could help to 'counteract the somewhat excessive practical tendencies of the age and of the land in which we live,' must have been resonant with their own beliefs.17 In publications such as 'Books and Reading' (which reached the eye of educators through the Canada Educational Monthly) he would lay out the principles for choosing worthy texts and for proceeding systematically, while he still exhorted readers to have the courage to develop and follow their own tastes.18 His stand would have been a welcome reinforcement to these adult learners, especially to the collegiate instructors among them. Indeed, Clark elevated the pursuit of knowledge to a noble, even spiritual, pursuit, as he explained to readers of Self Culture, the Chicago-based magazine of the home university movement, then under the editorship of Torontonian (and former Toronto Athenaeum Club member) Graeme Mercer Adam. Propounding his 'Thoughts of Knowledge, Life and Work' in five instalments, Clark explained that the aspiring student first needed to overcome 'moral hindrances' to knowledge: 'there can be little doubt that the most common causes of human ignorance and stupidity are conceit and sloth.' The best preparation, on the other hand, was a 'humble mind' and a 'willingness to labor.' Although Pilgrim's Progress is not named by Clark, this is a Bunyanesque vision: bearing his little bundle and armed with deep humility and a capacity for ardent toil, the student-Christian takes on the wiles of words, the sloughs of speculation, and the pitfalls of what Clark calls 'precipitancy' or premature judgment.19 This tendency to spiritual allegorization pervades his literary-critical scholarship as well, and it may have been a second source of his appeal for the members of the Gait society. In 'Dante and His Age/ for example, writing in a manner reminiscent of Edward Dowden (whose schema

136 Come, bright Improvement!

of life and literary 'stages' was followed by the members of the Angelica Shakespeare Club), Clark would see Dante's life as a progression culminating in the creation of an exemplary individual from whom we can learn 'to despise our own baseness and aspire more eagerly after higher things.'20 (Where such a moral teleology was difficult to construct for a beloved author, such as countryman Robert Burns, Clark would need to engage in some shell-game rearrangements of vices and virtues.)21 He read not only the lives of authors but individual texts themselves as spiritual allegories. As would be expected, he was drawn to authors who lent themselves to this form of explication: Coleridge, Kingsley, and Tennyson, for example.22 But it may be supposed that Clark's views on aesthetics were a source of a further and more specific appeal. In his lengthy essay on 'Literature and Art/ which was serialized in the Canada Educational Monthly the same year as the group contemplated requesting a repeat visit to Gait, he outlined his theories in a more detailed and technical way, commencing this overview of the evolution of church architecture with a lengthy theoretical introduction.23 Beginning with Ruskin's distinction between the 'free' and 'dependent' arts, Clark would outline an essentially Hegelian aesthetic typology, with art forms ranked in an ascending order according to the degree in which they were liberated from the constraints of materiality. Art, in this avowedly Hegelian view, represents the triumph of thought over matter; literature (specifically poetry) receives the highest ranking as the form that approaches most nearly the condition of pure thought or pure signification. Clark's views, then, were anti-materialist in both a marketplace and a technical sense. Staked out on the side of culture against the crude profit motive, he also represented a radically anti-materialist position on questions of culture and aesthetics. If such was the emergent doctrine of the Gait Literary, Historical and Scientific Society, small wonder the researchers and rockhounds felt themselves displaced. While discussion, for the diminished circle of like-minded members that remained, must have been articulate, academic, and advanced, the next year's minutes would confess that only eleven were left of the eighty-two members who had belonged when a number of sections were meeting. The Gait group had become, however unwillingly or unwittingly, a private society. Nonetheless, it maintained a public profile of sorts in the 1897-8 season, purchasing fireplace furnishings for the new reading room and library of the Mechanics' Institute.24 A.W. Wright continued to be fasci-

Literary Study in the Literary Societies 137

nated by 'The Jew in English Literature/ surveying such characterization in Marlowe, Shakespeare, Dickens, Eliot, and Disraeli. 'What Is Culture?' was again discussed, and the so-called English section commenced work on Milton's shorter poems, beginning with 'L'Allegro/ having finished Carlyle's Sartor Resartus in the fall. The 1898-9 minutes evidence only one literary paper at the general meeting (although it cannot be determined whether this represents the final collapse of the general meeting or of the society's recordkeeping). In his essay on Ruskin, Mr Sloan focused on the reformist and idealist tendencies of that author. The essayist divided Ruskin's career into three stages: a formative age, a creative period of art criticism and the defence of the artist Turner, and a closing reflective period devoted to social and educational reform. The literature section worked on Hamlet and decided to read Emerson's 'Essay on Poetry' and Eliot's Silas Marner. Thomas Carscadden advised the section on 'How to Cultivate a Taste for Good Literature/ His sentiments must have been shared by the loyal band: 'we need to acquire a good taste in reading not only for lasting benefits and enjoyment but to overcome the "sordid spirit" of the age/ There now follows a gap of four years in the minute book of the GSHLS. When the minutes resume in 1903, with some of the same members convening in the reading room of the public library, it had the more focused name of 'Literary Society/ The group envisaged a double program: there would be discussion of 'political science' issues, as well as of selected authors and texts (beginning with As You Like It). But the society appears to have ceased forever after an attempted reorganization and a few more meetings. How can we account for the rise and fall of the Gait Scientific, Historical and Literary Society? The establishment of the group was grounded in two interrelated phenomena: the development of mixedsex literary societies and the desire for forms of extension education. In its final form it again was part of a contemporary phenomenon: the rise of the dedicated literary society with a format that begins to approximate the book clubs of today. Whether the literati drove out those with more broadly focused interests or whether they simply had more perseverance as other members drifted away is impossible to determine at this distance of time. But the increasing divergence of the members can be followed through the chronology traced above: the division between the 'scientific' and the 'literary,' between the general and the specialized, between an earlier eclecticism and a newer desire for

138 Come, bright Improvement!

'curriculum/ between mutual instruction and an increased sense of the need for experts, and between a more practical mentality and an idealism or anti-materialism of inclination that was not to the taste of all. Other ideological matters may have been at issue (as one suspects when encountering the 'political science' interest of the reconvened association). And we may simply be witnessing the limits of evolution of the 'literary and philosophical society' model, which had served Ontario society sturdily for more than sixty years. But another question emerges. Why were the reduced numbers caused by the paring of pursuits, not balanced by newer applicants who would share the late-nineteenth-century vogue for literary study? Looking between and beyond the lines of the Gait minute books and newspaper accounts, we can see the incursions of alternative forms of organization which may have had much more to offer the reader and student. The Gait society had continued to press for extension lectures, the 1894-5 minute books showing correspondence with William Houston, in his capacity as president of the Senate of the University of Toronto, on the topic. (Houston's own letters from the period to other correspondents indicate that either the university or the independent organization which was promoting the development of extension may have begun to facilitate such arrangements.)25 Whether such lecturers came to Gait consistently or indeed at all, extension lectures were now a desideratum. There were other new developments that appear to have drawn away some of the members: A.W. Wright, for example, an intellectual cornerstone of the literary section, emerged in this period as an active member of the Modern Language Association of Ontario, a Torontobased scholarly society established to develop new pedagogic methods in the modern languages - which would have included, at the time, the study of English - and to advance literary criticism.26 (Other cultural reformers encountered in this study, such as W.J. Alexander, Janet Carnochan, and William Houston, are on its membership rolls.) A founding member in 1886 who ascended to the presidency ten years later, Wright delivered a number of scholarly papers to the association, some of which had their origins in his work for the Gait society.27 There was local competition as well. The Mechanics' Institute, however hospitable it had been to the society, would have represented a rival presence and a haven for disaffected members. Further, the need for a more materialist orientation to social and cultural questions resulted in the emergence of a 'socialist club/ which began to meet in Gait in 1899.28

Literary Study in the Literary Societies 139

Another speculative piece of the puzzle has been supplied by an earlier chapter. The Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle movement took firm hold in Gait, and it was sufficiently established by May of 1892 that a Chautauqua Union was formed by the Alpha, Central, and Delta Circles.29 With the appointment of Gait resident J.H. Fryer to the position of western secretary to the CLSC in the autumn of that year, Gait became the unofficial capital of the movement in Ontario. Soon he was able to inform the executive secretary, Kate Kimball, of the existence of six circles in that town alone. The numbers, too, were substantial: 'Alpha is doing splendidly. Her membership is now 40 with prospects for more,' he reported in 1895.30 As suggested by the parodic account of the cultural capers of his daughter, penned by Gait Weekly Reformer columnist 'Argus,' which appeared in the introduction to chapter 4, the Chautauqua craze had taken Gait by storm. For young people such as the fictional Arabella, a group bearing the venerable name of 'Scientific, Historical and Literary Society' must have seemed a musty sort of proposition indeed. In her social-reform novel Roland Graeme, Knight, Kingston author Agnes Maule Machar (a corresponding member of the Toronto Women's Literary Club) constructs a Jamesian drawing-room scene, which takes place after a sumptuous dinner at the home of a wealthy factory owner whose workers' demands for fair wages have been the subject of much prandial mirth by some of the diners. After dinner the hostess prevails on the tellingly named Reverend Mr Chillingsworth to 'give us something very nice, to dream on. Suppose you give us something from Browning?' and her daughter, a member of a Browning Club, selects a volume with one of the minister's favourite selections.31 As he embarks, 'in a voice of musical quality and finished elocution,' on Tippa Passes,' Browning's narrative of an episode in the life of a Italian peasant girl, a series of ironies unfolds, for the reader is aware that the reverend gentleman had refused a summons to the sickbed of an impoverished woman only days before. The ailing woman had been tended, however, by one of the drawing-room listeners, the doctor's daughter Norah, who had rushed to aid the woman when her father was called away. Norah has been shocked by her first encounter with the squalor of urban poverty; it is with newly awakened sensibilities that she listens to the words of the poet and not the elocutionary style of the reader, keeping in her 'inward eye' both the little Italian worker of Browning's poem and the poor millhand Lizzie, whom she has recently

140 Come, bright Improvement!

come to know. As the poem draws to a close, Norah glances about the drawing room and wonders whether the listeners are aware of the reallife dramas that are around them, 'as worthy of their sympathy as this one, idealized by the power of the poet/ Despite her familiarity with the poets of her day, Norah has no knowledge of Browning's Tippa'; indeed, 'she had scarcely got beyond the outer husk which repels so many, and really only knew one or two of his minor Lyrics/ But in this transitional scene, Norah is on her way to becoming both a social reformer and a devotee of Browning, captivated by this 'new, strenuous, heart-searching note/ The two causes are closely linked; for 'often as she afterwards read the poem/ we are informed by the narrator, 'she never did so without seeming to see the pathetic picture of Lizzie Mason, side by side with the little dreaming Italian silk-winder/32 Machar's strategic use of Tippa Passes' - the chapter is given that title - has fully prepared the reader to anticipate Norah's eventual love for the principled Roland Graeme (a Knights of Labour supporter and crusading journalist for the Brotherhood) and to squirm in the meantime as the Reverend Mr Chillingsworth circles nearer and nearer with his proposal of marriage. (A contemporary reader would also discern the social satire in the Browning Club allegiance of the industralist's daughter.) For a nineteenth-century reader whose knowledge of Tippa Passes' would be more thorough than all but a Victorian poetry specialist today, the passage from Roland Graeme, Knight clearly flags the central political concerns of the novel, but Machar has also raised, if indirectly, a series of interesting puzzles about poetics. Why, a later reader might query, does this well-read young woman not know more Browning? Why is she familiar with only the minor lyrics? What is the repellent 'husk' of these poems, and what is the 'new note' that they sound? What Machar signals here is the perceived difference of Browning from work that had come before: excitingly, sometimes enigmatically, new in both substance and style. In keeping with this change, the Browning societies that developed at the close of the nineteenth century generated a new type of study, drawing - albeit sometimes at several removes - from a late-nineteenth-century critical arsenal: the interpretive hermeneutics of the biblical 'higher' criticism, the idealist aesthetics of what was loosely referred to as the 'German' school, the forms of textual and historical analysis that had developed along with the study of Old English texts and of Shakespeare (all this, of course, seasoned with the biographical criticism that referred the poetry to

Literary Study in the Literary Societies 141

events in the life of this hero-poet, in particular to his exemplary love and idyllic Italian exile with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, both now, sadly, long passed). In concentrating on one author in this way, the study of the Browning societies was both more focused and more expressly 'academic' than what had come before. While there had been clubs devoted, at least nominally, to single authors earlier in the century, it appears that their activities were not similarly confined: as has been seen, the Toronto Shakspeare Club, for example, was diffuse in its rhetorical pursuits, while the Burns clubs appear to have been more social than intellectual, often a combination of a Caledonian social gathering and a workers' club, where Burns was toasted for his oldcountry sensibilities and his friendly democracy. The Angelica Shakespeare Club, while more 'literary' in its study, was nonetheless an 'amateur' and autodidactic group. The end of the century, however, brought with it the importation of a new and powerful form of literary society, first developed in England largely through the agency of the formidable F.J. Furnivall. Furnivall was one of those Victorian polymathic powerhouses, whose cultural enterprises seem endless and who was still rowing daily on the Thames almost until the day of his death.33 (While his is no longer a household name, readers of today will still be able to form some estimate of his personality, since Furnivall is commonly supposed to have served as the model for the Water Rat in the children's classic The Wind in the Willows.) While he did not invent the concept of the learned society - as we have seen, some forms of bibliographic and antiquarian societies can be traced back to the Renaissance, and gentlemen antiquarians and bibliophiles had established eminent organizations in the eighteenth century - Furnivall was in many ways responsible for both democratizing and deepening such societies, developing a broader range of membership (including women in significant positions) and using the societies as a base for serious scholarly research and publication. These publications would, in a further populist turn, be made widely and cheaply available. (This was an attractive package: Karl Marx and his Shakespeare-loving family, for example, regularly attended meetings of Furnivall's New Shakspere Society.) Furnivall would inaugurate or help to found many groups on various models over a period of twenty years: some, such as the Early English Text Society (1864) and the Ballad Society (1868), were concerned (following the model of groups such as the Roxburghe Club) to locate manuscripts of early English texts and to prepare scholarly editions; others, including

142 Come, bright Improvement!

the New Shakspere Society (1868), the Browning Society (1881), and the Shelley Society (1886), were primarily paper reading and discussion groups; still others, such as the London Shakespeare League, were intended to provide more populist education and entertainments. It was the Browning Society that had the honour of being groundbreaking in one other way as well by appearing to be (although one Ruskin society slightly predated it) the first to apply to a living author the sorts of critical analyses and scholarship that had hitherto been devoted to explicating authors from the past, such as Chaucer or Shakespeare. (The 'Browningites/ as they were commonly known, would sometimes defend their approach by saying that Browning required such criticism, being as unappreciated in his time as Shakespeare was in his.) This modernity of study was part of both the appeal and the notoriety of the Browning Society, a group widely imitated but also broadly mocked. William Peterson's history of the London Browning Society gives amusing details of how consistently the press of the day caricatured the organization and its members: Furvivall himself, cofounder Emily Hickey, and members such as Eleanor Marx, George Bernard Shaw, the symbolist Arthur Symons, and pioneer women's educator Frances Buss.34 Indeed, coverage of the Browning societies in both England and the United States appears to have allowed journalists to mobilize the widest possible array of stereotypes: the Browningites were dreamy aesthetes - or dreary reformers; they were aging spinsters - or new women; they were pious evangelists - or hardened agnostics. In maintaining this rather bifurcated view of Browning culture, the press was not entirely wrong: one of Browning's appeals as well as the source of some anxiety - was the notorious 'obscurity' of his verse, which accommodated a number of different interpretations and a wide band of adherents. But the London group was not the first Browning Society, nor, in a North American context, would it be the most influential, despite the importance of its published Transactions. The growing interest in the poet had already been sensed by Professor Hiram Corson of Cornell, who began a Browning reading group as early as 1877 and assisted Furnivall in forming the London society; the largest and most influential of the North American organizations, the Boston Browning Society, would follow Corson's lead in 1885.35 This group became well known not only as a society in its own right but as a clearing house for criticism and news: the sun to the Browning society planets, it beamed information and interpretation through its own Transactions and, more impor-

Literary Study in the Literary Societies 143

tantly, through the agency of the affiliated journal Poet-Lore: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Shakespeare, Browning, and the Comparative Study of Literature. Poet-Lore appears to have been largely forgotten by scholars. Perhaps because it was produced outside the academy (although over the years, it printed contributions from many academic critics), it has been overlooked in histories of the development of literary criticism in the United States and the development of the discipline of English studies. (The fact that both of its editors were women - Helen A. Clarke and Charlotte Porter - is probably not incidental to this neglect.) Turning now through its heavily acidulated and (it appears, from the dusty overlay) never-consulted pages is a rather melancholy exercise in scholarly memento mori. For subscribers of the late nineteenth century, however, Poet-Lore was excitingly timely and topical: not only a repository of the latest work on Shakespeare and Browning and, increasingly, European authors and an emergent 'modern' literature, but a mechanism by which keen individuals and groups could develop their own paths of study. (Editors Clarke and Porter would continue to develop study guides well into the next century.) In serving a joint market of Browning and Shakespeare societies, Poet-Lore addressed itself to the two primary groups that were aiming to escape from the famous 'eclecticism' of study and to become thorough and systematic in their work. The journal also tightened the connection between the two authors by encouraging comparativist work and illustrating how Browning and the Bard had similarities - or crucial differences - on the grounds of characterization, thematics, and technique. It provided critical articles, study guides, news of societies, and descriptions of programs that had been tried by other clubs; the societies, in turn, used Poet-Lore as a backbone for designing their own programs, essay and discussion topics, and related activities. Such was the case with the Toronto Browning Club, a group that thrived for at least a decade but whose existence is somewhat underdocumented for a such a sizeable and well organized society. Although it produced detailed published programs of study, these have been located for only two years, together with a Browning bibliography prepared for the group by the Toronto Public Library. Other and slightly adjacent documents are needed to flesh out the picture; for the years after 1899, more-abbreviated reports of study suggestions, topics, and speakers appear in the Monthly Calendar of the First Unitarian Church, where the group held its meetings. (The courses of study for the Brown-

144 Come, bright Improvement! ing Club, as detailed in printed programs and in the calendars, are given in detail in appendix C to this book.) We can turn as well to the Browning criticism of Professor W.J. Alexander, who lectured regularly to the group, and to issues of Poet-Lore, which the club appears to have used. Further context is provided by the notebooks of Dr Anderson Ruffin Abbott, who has appeared earlier in this study lecturing to the Chatham Literary Association. (While there is no evidence of his membership in this particular club, Abbott's draft addresses on Browning, comparisons of Browning and Tennyson, and observations on metrics provide a valuable and representative record of Browning culture in Canada.) Notes for one address outline in a particularly well developed way the need for Browning study and the vectors that such study would follow. After addressing himself to the famous question of Browning's 'obscurity/ which draws some readers and discourages others, Abbott attempts a more systematic approach to the problem: This obscurity arises principly [sic] from two causes. In the 1st place he generally adopts the monologue style or in other words he represents the person speaking revealing from his own lips the thoughts feelings & inner workings of his own miTTTd. It is generally in the form of a soliloquy or monologue. It differs in this peculiarity from Shakespeare, who describes men & women as he sees them, tells you what they have said, what they have done, what they wore, how they acted.... Another difficulty with understanding Browning is his peculiarity of interjecting words and phrases which seemly [sic] have no connection with the context. These interpolations are generally caused by interruption in the thread of thought by a remark made by some imaginary or invisible second person. The word or phrase is generally a rejoinder either accepting or rejecting the suggestion. Another difficulty in understanding Browning is the seeming lack of continuity in language. There is an absence of the even flow of rythm [sic] that you find in Tennyson, Whittier, Wadsworth [sic] or Cowper. Browning's poetry seems jerky, spasmodic and seemingly incoherent and disjointed. This arises from his intense mental activity. His thoughts rush in upon him with such impetuosity that he has not time to spare for useless verbiage but expresses in a word or phrase the principal thought, in which, at the same time, is involved many collateral thoughts and ideas, -

Literary Study in the Literary Societies 145 or in other words he uses words which have a world of meaning in themselves. Another cause of the obscurity of Browning's style is that he deals almost solely with those higher aspirations of the soul which bring us into close relation with God, life and immortality. He shows us the divinity of our human nature and unity and oneness with God, the Supreme intelligence.36

Dr Abbott's succinct taxonomy of the impediments to understanding provides a guide to the tasks a group such as the Toronto Browning Club would set itself. Browning is not a poet like Tennyson, Whittier, Cowper or 'Wadsworth' (which could refer equally aptly to Wordsworth or to Longfellow). His difficulty is of a different order both quantitatively and qualitatively. Some works are less penetrable than others; some textual nuts are harder than others to crack; some references or phrases are notoriously suggestive or cryptic. This perceived order of difficulty often dictated the course of study pursued by groups as they moved from shorter works to longer, from lyrics to dramas and dramatic monologues, from earlier works to later, and from appreciation of Browning's thought to analysis of his technique. In this transition they would be aided by the increasing apparatus designed to serve the Browning circles, in a proliferation of journals, published courses of study, guidebooks, reading lists, critical commentaries, biographies, and even a Browning encyclopedia; a group might also begin to move away from the 'mutual instruction' model to a heavier reliance on lectures from Browning experts or from otherwise knowledgeable academics. We can trace some of these transitions even across the few welldocumented years of the Toronto Browning Club, as we see its members struggle with their own purposes and procedures. The exact year in which the club commenced its work cannot be established with certainty, but it probably began in the mid-1890s; there is evidence of its programs as late as 1905. According to a membership list in the 1897-8 program, it was a mixed-sex club with a preponderance of women members (fifty women to nineteen men); one suspects that younger men and women were the core, although married couples and even, it appears, some family groupings also appear on the roll. (The more devoted to study an organization was, and the less it served socializing purposes, the more diverse its membership would tend to be; the societies coordinated by Furnivall, for example, were quite mixed as to

146 Come, bright Improvement!

the gender, age, and even sometimes class of the members.) The Toronto Browning Club's membership appears to have remained steady and even increased, with a peak of eighty-nine on the books in 1904. The club held its meetings every second Wednesday evening between November and May in meeting rooms of the First Unitarian Church on Jarvis Street. (This combination of Browning study with Unitarianism was a common package in the United States, and indeed, the foremost proponent of Browning there was a Unitarian minister and later a lecturer on literature at Chicago, the Reverend Jenkin Lloyd Jones.)37 The Toronto club, however, reiterated that its ranks were open to '[a]ll lovers of Browning in the City' and later, and even more strongly, that it was '[wjholly unsectarian. Invites all lovers of good literature to membership.'38 The first extant program, for the year 1897-8, shows the group proceeding somewhat tentatively, designing a course only for the first half of the year and intending to form a plan of study for its second session after scrutiny of its progress.39 'This year,' announced the 'Prologue' to the course of study, 'the Browning Club will continue its study in a more systematic and thorough-going way. We shall not try to take up the longest or hardest poems, but nevertheless, expect to get the stimulus to thought and feeling which inevitably comes from the simpler and perhaps therefore more forcible works of the poet.'40 While still exploring approaches and arrangements, this club had established a meeting format that it would continue to follow: a paper or lecture, with discussion or (in the case of an invited speaker) questions, and the reading of some selected works. (The term 'reading' can function differently in the programs and announcements of meetings, sometimes indicating the selections that members were expected to prepare in advance and sometimes the material to to be read aloud or recited at the meeting.) In its quest for a more 'systematic' study, the group based its course on one provided by the Reverend W.C. Gannett for a Rochester group in the preceding year; in keeping with this mandate, the 'Prologue' reminded members of the necessity of thorough preparation for meetings and steered them to the best editions and the valuable Transactions of the Boston Browning Society. For all this, the topics seem somewhat unfocused, at least in contrast to later developments in the club's program. To use a distinction common in Browning circles, they were directed to the philosopher Browning rather than the poet Browning - 'Life: Its Meaning and Worth,' 'Death and Immortality,' 'Heroes and Types of Manly Charac-

Literary Study in the Literary Societies 147

ter/ 'Heroines and Types of Womanly Character/ 'Evolution. Man and God/ 'Love Poems/ 'Conscience/ 'Art/ The titles of accompanying papers were equally generic ('Browning's Look at Death and Beyond'), although these may have been vague in order to give some scope to paper presenters whose topics were announced far in the future. Broad though the titles may be, they do allow us to to reconstruct some aspects of the program of study: by focusing on the shorter and, according to the 'Prologue/ the 'simpler' poems, the group was concentrating on the lyrical and love verse, particularly Browning's earlier verse production, and the themes of male-female relationships and the fully realized life. The mode of analysis, one imagines, was largely biographical; the questions were designed to elucidate the poems in some basic ways and to elicit life lessons for club members. 'What are the best thoughts in Rabbi Ben Ezra?' and 'What is the real meaning of The Statue in the Bust?' were two typical study questions for the autumn of 1897. Regrouping for the second half of the year, the Toronto Browning Club had realized that even this modest course of study might have been too ambitious, since the members had not been able to complete the agendas for December and January. A second prologue, to a program brochure issued for the continuation of their study, suggested that the members should not be discouraged by their lack of thoroughness since the field of study upon which they had entered was too great to permit it.41 Rather than systematic coverage, recommended 'Prologue II,' It is the general outlook which we are trying to gain, an understanding of the poets [sic] method of thought and expression, some idea of his 'beauty of style and imagery and his remarkable gift of impersonatification [sic].' We want to see Browning as the many sided poet of life, and if possible get at the key-note of his thought - progress even by means of defeat, success through effort and ideal striving, 'the ultimate harmony of life through lives innumerable.' - all of which say some 'constitute the high water mark of the modern genius' and make Browning the chief poet of the age.42

Both this new prologue and the spring program indicate that the club began to pay at least some attention to Browning's technique. In the spring session, while two evenings were devoted to his 'Poems of Religion' and another to his 'National and Political Feeling/ two meet-

148 Come, bright Improvement!

ings set aside for discussion of the poet's 'Dramatic Pictures' grappled with the sources of his dramatic power and his influence as a dramatist (presumably as a monologist since Browning's actual dramas were the least successful of his productions). 'Browning as a Writer of Poetry' was also considered, and a scholarly conclusion was provided to the session by a lecture, its title unspecified, by Professor W.J. Alexander of University College. Alexander was a ready reference for the club, as indeed he was for the city; the congregation's Monthly Calendars show him lecturing annually to the club as well as to the Sunday evening services.43 A more social conclusion took the form of a May entertainment, presented to the public, of 'Scenes from Browning.' While the Toronto Browning Club may have proceeded somewhat tentatively in the 1897-8 season, its intents were serious and its ambitions scholarly. In 1897 the Toronto Public Library produced and published a thorough bibliography of works of criticism for the club's use.44 And in the next year the organization made the leap to a study of Browning's dramas, which, while not his best works, as the program's introduction admitted, were necessary for a complete understanding of the poet; 'their dramatic and literary, together with their historical interest will amply reward any time or effort spent upon them.'45 This shift was more than a change of genres: the Toronto Browning Club had effected the transition - from the love lyrics and minor philosophical poems to some of Browning's more cumbersome, aesthetically displeasing, and ethically ambiguous works - which would be made by the fictional Norah in her awakening to the moral complexities of modern life. An article in Poet-Lore had argued that this was a necessary third stage in the evolution of any Browningite and, by extension one assumes, of any Browning circle: an early interpretive wrestling with obscurity would give way to a concern with religious and philosophical teachings; at last, the student would turn to Browning the dramatic poet, 'which opens up whole new areas of criticism.' Although the Toronto Browning Club was following stages in critical evolution that Poet-Lore deemed inevitable, it was in all likelihood nudged in this newer direction by the lectures and critical work of Alexander, who was an influential Browning scholar of international reputation. His reknown - and book sales - remained undeservedly limited, however, since copyright restrictions on Browning's poetry prevented the sale in England of his Introduction to the Poetry of Robert Browning, which quoted from the poet copiously. (Unsuccessful in ordering copies for the members of the London Browning Society,

Literary Study in the Literary Societies 149

FJ. Furnivall arranged for two hundred copies of one chapter, 'Analysis of Sordello,' to be privately printed for 'reading and discussion' at a meeting in the autumn of 1889.)46 In his Introduction, published eight years before his first lectures to the Toronto club, Alexander acknowledged the inherent difficulties of Browning's verse: metaphysical, intellectual, unlyrical in both mood and metre, and sometimes cryptic or elliptical, it worked contrary to familiar modes of expression and structure. The puzzled reader was often unsure how to relate parts to the whole since, in depicting the complexities and conflicts of inner 'life' or 'movement,' Browning had abandoned methods of 'organic' construction, such as emplotment. As a result, '[t]he mind, not fully compehending the ideas, must hold them in suspense until the end is reached.'47 Alexander's Introduction, with its lengthy expositions on Browning's life, philosophy, Christianity, and technique and its detailed explications of key passages, is a sophisticated vade mecum for the student or scholar who wishes to understand the poet's style as appropriate to his depiction of spiritual and psychological tensions. At the same time - and as Alexander's own 'Analysis of Sordello' makes abundantly clear - what Browning has to say is of resounding relevance for contemporary men and women. On his analysis, Browning is the supreme poet of the struggle between idealism and pragmatism, between a yearning for higher things and the demands of the daily, best represented in the story of the medieval poet Sordello, who was 'torn asunder by an inward struggle - whether he should persist in his ideal with the hope of ultimately forcing the world to recognize his universal capacities, or plunge himself heartily into actual life, and into such partial realizations as were within his reach.'48 As Sordello - and, it was to be hoped, students of Browning - would learn, though an 'ideal' lies beyond, there is another form of completion to be found in a full immersion in present life and in raising oneself, and others, as far as possible within those 'partial realizations.' While Alexander turned his audience's attention to the complexities and technicalities of Browning's verse, he must also have been addressing the fundamental questions that had compelled his listeners, in the first place, to meet at the Unitarian Church to contemplate this most philosophical of poets. This new emphasis on style and technique entailed some adjustments to the Toronto Browning Club's course of study. First, the overall mode of organization was now on a work-by-work, rather than a thematic, basis, and individual dramas would receive one or even two sessions in their turn. Although reading aloud remained an essential

150 Come, bright Improvement!

portion of the program, key scenes rather than entire works would necessarily be chosen. With these changes came alterations to the club's critical orientation. The more mediated dramas were unsuited to a biographical approach in which the poet's own life provided interpretive clues, and the club had jettisoned the primarily thematic mode of organization that favoured 'philosophical' considerations. Instead, the way was opened for a greater concentration on Browning's dramatic technique. 'Why take the artistic way to prove so much?' was a line from the epilogue to The Ring and the Book which would be used as part of the epilogue to the Toronto Browning Club's 1898-9 program; now the emphasis would be on this 'artistic way.' In generating such new questions and in representing 'as wide a range as possible' of topics in order to approach each drama from a variety of angles, the program designers now turned to discussion and essay topics 'taken from other programs and from the Poet Lore or well known Browning Papers.'49 Questions for the advance preparation of club members were printed in the year's program. These questions are sometimes impressionistic in nature (what is the source of the particular 'charm' of A Blot in the 'Scutcheon?), but often resemble heavy-handed undergraduate examination questions: 'In "Pippa" the vitality and simplicity of the play stand out in vivid relief against the halting action of the other dramas... The scene between Ottima and Sebald is unquestionably the finest single scene in all modern dramatic literature. Indeed, Mr. Henry Clapp has said that he considered the entire play to be the finest dramatic production of modern times.' Do you agree with these estimates?50

These quotations were at times unidentified (and as with examinations, may sometimes have been invented), but often the author and source were given, usually a paper from the Boston Browning Society Transactions or from Poet-Lore. In keeping with the joint emphases of the latter journal, topics relating Browning to Shakespeare were also common, the two dramatists being compared for their use of historical materials, the artificiality or naturalness of their characters, and their dramatic construction: is Strafford an advance over Julius Caesar? can Pippa be viewed as a Shakespearean woman? Not all questions were of this level of difficulty or technicality, and there was a tendency to lapse into matters of plot and character motivation when study guide resources

Literary Study in the Literary Societies 151

were not readily at hand. And the desire to keep the level of discussion high is indicated by the large number of lecturers during the year: the Reverend Dr S.R. Calthorp, president of the Syracuse Browning Club, inaugurated the year's proceedings; Professor Goldwin Smith, Mr James Bain, Professor W.H. Fraser, the Reverend O.H. Hawes (then president of the club), and Professor James Mavor followed; and as usual, Professor W.J. Alexander closed the year's study. One cannot help but contrast this culture of male expertise to the gender distribution of the club's own membership. Clearly, the program was judged a success, and in 1899 the club indicated its intent to continue a program of focused study: this time The Ring and the Book and Paracelsus would occupy the entire year, which was concluded by a public entertainment of 'Songs and Readings from the Poetry of Robert Browning.'51 The group would continue as a Browning study club into the next century and retain the name even when it varied its efforts with a study of Emerson in 1903-4 and of Matthew Arnold in 1904-5. This change of topics appears to have reflected the alteration in focus of Poet-Lore, which was becoming at this time a more general journal of letters. Literary societies create a ruckus at birth which allows us to date their beginnings, but the time and even the cause of their quieter decline and death can be difficult to acertain. Changing tastes, internal dissensions, over-complex procedures, and financial difficulties are possible reasons for the failure of groups, as we have seen; but the paradoxical cause of the Browning Club's decline may have been its ever-rising aspirations. A clue is provided by the programs for the later years, for, beginning in January of 1904 (at the mid-point of the study of Emerson), the overwhelming majority of papers would be presented by professional educators: university professors, collegiate principals, and school inspectors. This would remain the case for the fall study of Arnold, the last months for which the Calendar reported. Although guest lecturers had been a regular feature of the club's programs (and the kindly W.J. Alexander was somewhat of a patron presence for the group), this pattern represents a distinct shift from mutual instruction to reliance on external experts and, one suspects, an alteration from informal discussion to a more stilted question-and-answer format. This development may have resulted from club members' sense of their own limitations in dealing with the complex philosophical components of Browning's poetry; they had stayed in deep intellectual waters when they embarked on their year devoted to Emerson. (It was surely no

152 Come, bright Improvement!

coincidence that the run of experts commenced with Professor Alexander's disquisition on 'Emerson and Carlyle/ both notoriously abstract thinkers and, in Carlyle's case, presenting the further challenge of a dense and sometimes devious prose style.) But in relying progressively on published criticism and on the lectures of university professors in short, by increasingly aligning its study with the university curriculum- the Browning Club was being swept along in a stronger twentieth-century current, in which the study of literature, and the criticism of literature, would become overwhelmingly concentrated in the academy. It may well have been that, in their desire to grapple with the most advanced authors and in their acceptance of the challenge of systematic study, the members of the Browning Club had developed an agenda which stifled the very interests that brought them to their organization in the first place. Another factor would have been at work in the demise of the Browning Club and its precipitate decline (or so it appears) from a membership of almost ninety in its penultimate year. Just as an organization moves through its own cycle, so do the members in their individual lives. Surely a generational element was at work, as the young men and women married, moved, established homes, and transferred their energy and time to businesses and babies. The older participants may have felt the pressure of civic duty or simply the demands of increasing age. Had they learned - as intended of readers by W.J. Alexander and, indeed, by Browning himself - to balance their search for an ideal and for the completion of their 'universal capacities' against the demands of daily life and fulfillment of their own 'partial realizations'? Did the members take with them a love of reading, a zest for discussion, and the elevated principles formed through contact with these idealist authors? One wishes, retrospectively, that they had been able to do so, for such would have been their own aspiration. As we have seen, what underlay participation in literary study in the nineteenth century was a belief in the transferability of its benefits. In the absence of any record of the thoughts and dreams of a Browning Club member - no diary has been found that records the interchange of discussion or an individual struggle with Bordello - we can turn to the notes of Anderson Ruffin Abbott. We see Abbott now at the end of his distinguished career as a superintendent of medical services for the Union forces (in which role he had forged a friendship with Abraham Lincoln), as a physician practising in Toronto, Chatham, and Dundas,

Literary Study in the Literary Societies 153

and as a hospital supervisor in Chicago. He was a lifelong supporter of educational, literary, benevolent, and fraternal societies and numbered among his positions directorships of the Wilberforce Educational Institution and the Dundas Mechanics' Institute. His literary endeavours were many: a writer for Chatham newspapers; a composer of articles for a variety of venues under his own name as well as the noms de plume of Uno, Plutarch, and Ethopie; and a writer of verse (his papers contain a number of poems, including an ode to African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar). Dr Abbott also read and wrote on the authors of his day, as we have seen. Of particular interest is a draft on the topic of Browning as a scientist, an aspect of the poet's work which must have held particular fascination for this medical man of literary inclinations. Evidently notes for an essay or a lecture on Browning, it composes, in its totality, something more: a meditation on the relationship between art and knowledge and between the poetical and 'progress.' Abbott chooses for his starting place Browning's life-affirming attitudes, and his observations, lightly linked, take on an aphoristic quality: Pessimism has no place in his system of philosophy - His optimism is in complete accord with the information he derived from his study of the Sciences - His optimism was always cropping up, and it is not surprising that he should cull illustrations from sciences to illuminate his glowing raphsodies [sic] concerning nature He followed nature into her secret chambers, and [communed?! with her on her deepest phenomena Instead of the fascination of Nature being dispelled by a [mere?] internal knowledge of her laws as revealed in her wealth of grandeur and beauty. His admiration was increased a hundred fold by the emulation of glories before undreamed of - we owe him a debt of gratitude for proving in his own person that poetry is not incompatible with science & that it is quite possible for one to investigate the laws of nature without becoming a sceptic... Definition of Science. What is Science? (True Knowledge of Mind