Sense of Their Duty: Middle-Class Formation in Victorian Ontario Towns 9780773568082

Table of contents :
Contents
Tables, Maps, and Illustrations
Preface
Illustrations
Prologue: Approaching the Victorian Middle Class in Canadian History
PART ONE: WORK, AUTHORITY, AND THE MIDDLE CLASS IN VICTORIAN ONTARIO
1 Boosters, Bluster, and Bonding: Enterprise and Middle-Class Formation
2 Honour and Authority: The Professional Middle Class
3 "Getting There": Situating White-Collar Workers
PART TWO: ERECTING A MORAL ORDER, DEVELOPING CLASS COMMUNITY
4 Casting Society: Voluntary Organizations and the Development of Class Community
5 A Community Concern: Victorian Temperance Reform
6 Producing and Reproducing the Middle-Class "Self"
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y

Citation preview

A Sense of Their Duty

Middle-Class Formation in Victorian Ontario Towns

What did it mean to be middle class in late nineteenth-century Ontario? How did the members of the middle class define themselves? Though simple, these questions have escaped the attention of social historians in recent writing about Canada. The Victorian middle class, referred to as the backbone of economic change, the motor of political reform, and the source of one set of moral standards, has eluded systematic study. A Sense of Their Duty corrects this and reconstructs the identities that middle-class Victorians made for themselves in an era of economic change. Industrial change, the expansion of government at all levels, and population growth all contributed to profound alterations in Ontario's social structure between the 1850s and the 1890s. The changing environment created new opportunities, new wealth, and new authority. In urbanizing Ontario, an identifiable and self-identified middle class emerged between the idle rich and the perennial working class. Using the towns of Galt and Goderich as case studies, Andrew Holman shows how middle-class identities were formed at work. He shows how businessmen, professionals, and white-collar workers developed a new sense of authority that extended beyond the workplace. As local electors, members of voluntary associations and reform societies, and breadwinners, middle-class men set standards of proper and expected behavior for themselves and others, standards for respectable behavior that continued to enjoy currency and relevance throughout the twentieth century. ANDREW c. HOLMAN teaches in the Department of History and in the Canadian Studies Program at Bridgewater State College in Bridgewater, Massachusetts.

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A Sense of Their Duty Middle-Class Formation in Victorian Ontario Towns ANDREW C. HOLMAN

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

c McGill-Queen's University Press 2000 ISBN 0-7735-1899-1 (cloth)

Legal deposit first quarter 2000 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Center for Advancement of Research and Teaching, Bridgewater State College. McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for its activities. We also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

Canada Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Holman, Andrew Carl, 1965A sense of their duty: middle-class formation in Victorian Ontario towns Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-1899-1 (bnd) I. Middle class — Ontario — History - I9th century — Case studies. 2. Goderich (Ont.) - Social conditions - I9th century. 3. Galt (Cambridge, Ont.) — Social conditions — I9th century. I. Title. HT690.C3H64 2000 3O5.5'5'0971309034 C99-900671-1

This book was typeset by Typo Litho Composition Inc. in 10.5/13 Garamond.

Contents

Tables, Maps, and Illustrations vii Preface

ix

Illustrations xiii Prologue: Approaching the Victorian Middle Class in Canadian History 3 PART ONE

WORK, AUTHORITY, AND THE MIDDLE CLASS

IN VICTORIAN ONTARIO

19

1 Boosters, Bluster, and Bonding: Enterprise and Middle-Class Formation 28 2 Honour and Authority: The Professional Middle Class 50 3 "Getting There": Situating White-Collar Workers 75 PART TWO

ERECTING A MORAL ORDER,

DEVELOPING CLASS COMMUNITY

97

4 Casting Society: Voluntary Organizations and the Development of Class Community 105 5 A Community Concern: Victorian Temperance Reform 130 6 Producing and Reproducing the Middle-Class "Self" 150

vi

Contents

Epilogue

170

Notes 175 Bibliography Index

239

215

Tables, Maps, and Illustrations

TABLES

1 Professionals in Galt and Goderich, 1871,1881,1891 53 2 White-Collar Workers in Galt and Goderich, 1871, 1881,1891 79 3 Average Ages of White-Collar Workers, Galt and Goderich, 1871,1881,1891 84 4 Marital Status and White-Collar Work (in percentages), Galt and Goderich, 1871,1881,1891 84 5 Household Status and White-Collar Work (in percentages), Galt and Goderich, 1871,1881,1991 85 6 Place of Birth among White-Collar Workers (in percentages), Galt and Goderich, 1871,1881,1891 86 7 Religion and White-Collar Work (in percentages), Galt and Goderich, 1871,1881,1991 193 8 Distribution of Resident Children by Age (in percentages), Galt and Goderich, 1881 209

viii

Tables, Maps, and Illustrations

MAP AND ILLUSTRATIONS

Geographical Location of Galt and Goderich, Canada West/ Ontario xiii Bird's Eye View of Galt, Ontario, 1875 xiv A glimpse of Galt from the Credit Valley Bridge, c.1860 xiv Street plan, town of Goderich, 1879 xv Railway celebration, Goderich Courthouse Square, 1858 xv The Goldie & McCulloch Co. Ltd., Manufacturers of fire and burglar proof safes, c.1880 xvi Industrial workers (c.1890), probably at Goldie & McCulloch xvi Dunham's Drug Store, Goderich

xvii

E. Downing, Boots & Shoes, Goderich

xvii

Goderich lawyer Charles Seager at work, c.1890s xviii Galt Business College, Shorthand Institute and Commercial Training School, c.1880 xviii Sons of Scotland, Goderich

xix

Maitland Lodge No. 112, AF&AM (Masons), Goderich A Victorian family, Goderich

xix

xx

Idealized middle-class homes. Residence of Robert Gibbons, Goderich xxi Idealized middle-class homes. Residence of Archibald Dickson, Goderich xxi A more realistic depiction: The Horace Horton home, Goderich xxii

Preface

This book is about identities and how they changed in late nineteenth-century Ontario among the groups of people who identified themselves and were identified as the middle class. It is a preliminary venture, the "thin end of a wedge," attempting to open a broader discussion about the changing structure and multiple roles of the middle class in Victorian Canada. This book is both remedial and progressive. It considers how the middle class has been regarded and misused as a unit of historical study. It also undertakes an examination of how the middle class came to be and what it meant to be a member of that body in two finite and comparable sites: Galt and Goderich, Ontario, from the 1850s to the 18905. The middle class in these places was composed of real, functioning, and integrated groups of people for whom a collective identity and an identifiable set of values had considerable local meaning and use. This study is a corrective, then, to the lingering characterization of the middle class as an amorphous, even shadowy, collection of overbearing respectables. The book is divided into two parts, each of which has a brief introduction that assesses the issues involved and draws connections between the chapters. Part One examines the structure of the middle class in Gait and Goderich, 1850-91. It discusses how contemporaries constructed their own class scales in this era and how they defined "middle class." For them, occupation was the principal determinant of class status. In short, the middle class included those who worked for a living, but not with their hands, and those who did work with their hands, but also owned their means of production, perhaps employing others. The result was a stratum composed of

x

Preface

three main groups: businessmen, professionals, and white-collar workers. Yet those who fit this description did not automatically form some cohesive class whole. The three chapters in this section examine the composition and behaviour of these occupational groups individually, focusing first on the issues that pushed them to become aware of their similar class positions and second on the strategies they devised to pursue common interests. How middle-class contemporaries defined their stratum, via occupational identities, has one particularly troublesome consequence for examining the middle class as a whole in this era: how can we study the class experience of women? Most married women in the middling ranks, of course, had no classifiable paid occupation, and evidence of their unwaged work is fragmentary. The numbers cited for women in the records on paid occupations are few and, perhaps, unrepresentative. Occupational rank has, in the past thirty years of social history, been considered a central element of social class in nineteenth-century societies, but it remains, at root, a male scale, constructed on the concept of a family economy that revolves around one male breadwinner. As such, it can say very little about women's experience of class formation. The implication for this study is plain. In this book, as in much middle-class historiography to date, the structural distribution of women in the middle class in Gait and Goderich is not examined in detail, though not from oversight. Does this imply that middle-class women are, then, mere appendages to their husbands' and fathers' occupational identities in this study? Were they middle class by association only? No. If women somehow escaped the contemporary structural definition of the middle class, they were not denied a place in the web of respectable types of behaviour and values that the middle class fashioned as their own in this era and that gave meaning to middleclass membership. As activist reformers, as guardians of charity, and as generators of "respectable" ideals, middle-class women exercised their status in ways other than occupational rank. In their construction of behavioural norms and adherence to distinctive clusters of values (discussed in Part Two), middle-class women asserted their social position and cemented intra-class ties. Part Two moves from middle-class structure to behaviour, focusing mainly on the public roles associated with middle-class life in Victorian Ontario: how the middle class, structurally defined, sought to distinguish itself behaviourally from those they identified as the working class and the idle rich. There are a great many ways in which the middle class sought this end; however, in this study the focus is more particular. The chapters in this section examine voluntary organizations and issues surrounding moral order as

xi

Preface

arenas for middle-class behavioural expression. A final chapter shifts focus from the analysis of public behaviour to middle-class values: the importance of the family and the role of cultivating a middle-class sense of self. Taken together, these chapters address the relationship between the formation of class values and local context. In the course of researching and writing this book I have become indebted to a great many institutions and people. I am grateful to the Government of Ontario and the Government of Canada for supporting the 1995 York University dissertation from which much of this book sprang. A number of archivists and librarians were helpful during the research phase of the book: James Quantrell in Cambridge, ON, Pat Hamilton in Goderich, Susan Binnie in Toronto, Susan Hoffmann in Kitchener, Barbara Dailey in Cambridge, MA, Guy St Denis in London, ON, and the staff at Mills Memorial Library at McMaster University, Hamilton. Transforming this project from a thesis into a book was a process made smoother than expected through the advice and suggestions of Nancy Bouchier, Ken Cruikshank, Gordon Darroch, Chad Gaffield, Craig Heron, Peter Oliver, Nicholas Rogers, and Jack Saywell, but especially Susan Houston. The criticism of two anonymous reviewers for McGill-Queen's University Press helped me to put a finer point on the book's final argument. The good guidance and encouragement of Joan McGilvray and John Zucchi and the sharp editorial eye of Robert Lewis helped a great deal, too. All of these individuals are responsible for much of what is good about this book; that which is not, I shoulder alone. In an 1879 letter uncovered in the course of this research, a J.H. Moor reminisced to his friend, Eliza Skimmings, about his recendy deceased sibling. He might just as well have been writing about me. "My brother loved Goderich very much ... He loved to be in Galt... like Goderich, it was in his mind near all the time and he could not... speak about any topic without having it in his speech." Over the past few years, those who have been forced to live with this project as an unavoidable cost of dealing with me are many. My parents, William and Myrna Holman, my brothers and their families, and my friends at McMaster and York were frequent victims. The most patient and indulging, however, has been my wife, Andrea Doty, whose continual encouragement convinced me that this project was a worthwhile endeavour. Finally, this book is dedicated to the memory of a man I loved very much, Reverend Canon Cecil Hayward Roach (1900—92). He was a respected parish rector, a practical joker, and a model grandfather. As his 1926 Bishops University MA thesis on industrialization reveals, he was also, perhaps, the best political economist that never was and an inspiration for writing this book in the first place.

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Geographical location of Galt and Goderich, Canada West/Ontario (Drawn by James Hayes-Bohanan).

Above: Bird's-eye view of Galt, Ontario, 1875 (courtesy of City of Cambridge Archives).

Below. A glimpse of Galt from the Credit Valley Bridge, c.1860 (from James Young, Reminiscences of the Early History of Galt and the Settlement of Dumfries [Toronto: Hunter, Rose, 1880]).

Street plan, town of Goderich, 1879 (Historical Atlas of the County of Huron [Toronto: Belden, 1879], courtesy of the J.J. Talman Regional Collection, D.B. Weldon Library, University of Western Ontario).

Railway celebration, Goderich Courthouse Square, 1858 (from the Collection of the Huron County Museum).

The Goldie & McCulloch Co. Ltd, Manufacturers of fire and burgular proof safes (from map of Galt, c.1880, courtesy of City of Carnbridge Archives)

"As difficult to manage as Mexican mustangs". Industrial workers (c. 1890.), probabaly a Goldie &McCulloch (Courtesy of city CambridgeArchieves.)

Goderich businessmen - "overly cautious and tentative." Dunham's Drug Store, Goderich (courtesy of the J.J. Talman Regional Collection, D.B. Weldon Library, University of Western Ontario).

Capital and labour bound in common cause. E. Downing, Boots & Shoes, Goderich (from the Collection of the Huron County Museum).

Goderich lawyer Charles Seager at work, c. 1890s (from the Collection of the Huron County Museum).

Generating white-collar workers. Galt Business College, Shorthand Institute and Commercial Training School (from map of Galt, c.188o, courtesy of City of Cambridge Archives).

Backbones of social order. Above, Sons of Scotland, Goderich; below Maitland Lodge No. 112. AF&AM (Masons), Goderich (from the Collection of the Huron County Museum).

A Victorian family, Goderich (from the Collection of the Huron County Museum).

Idealized middle-class homes. Residences of Robert Gibbons (above) and Archibald Dickson (below), Goderich, Historical Atlas of the County of Huron [Toronto: Belden, 1879] (Courtesy of the JJ. Talman Regional Collection, D.B. Weldon Library, University of Western Ontario).

A more realistic depiction: The Horace Horton home, Goderich (from the Collection of the Huron County Museum).

A Sense of Their Duty

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Prologue: Approaching the Victorian Middle Class in Canadian History [Between] the extremes of society, the rich and ... the poor ... [t]here is an intermediate class which has more influence than either of the others. It is the great middle class, including our professional men, our bankers, merchants, storekeepers, farmers, higher artisans ... They constitute the bone and sinew of our Churches, as they do of our country. Methodist Magazine (Toronto) 18901

It is unlikely that Alfred H. Blackeby and Henry W. Ball ever met during their lifetimes, but on 4 May 1881 they probably knew how each other felt. On that day, Blackeby and Ball finished administering their respective parts of the second decennial Dominion Census, Blackeby enumerating one half of the Town of Gait, and Ball, the south end of the Town of Goderich, two medium-sized towns in southern Ontario. These men were not unlike one another: male heads of nuclear-family households. In 1881, Blackeby was a twenty-eight-year-old English-born Baptist toolmaker, and a married father of four; Ball, a forty-two-year-old painter, married, with seven children. Their tasks would have taken them to places they often frequented and to places neither they nor other respectable residents of these two towns would ever have gone. It might have occurred to them that, though they were armed with sharp pencils and discriminating eyes, their efforts could never do full justice to these towns. For their size, Gait and Goderich in the late nineteenth century were remarkably complex places — economically, spatially, and socially. It was in myriad places like these in Victorian Ontario towns small and large, as well as burgeoning industrial cities — that a modern class structure took root. In these places the "extremes of society" developed, the rich and the poor, and, importantly, "that great intermediate class ... the bone and sinew of our country." Location had meaning. Classes reflected the size and character of the local crucibles in which they were concocted.2 The town that Blackeby characterized in figures in April and May 1881 had grown steadily since mid-century. From a population of 2,248 in 1851,

4

A Sense of Their Duty

Gaits residents numbered 3,827 by 1871 and 7,535 by 1891. Behind this population growth, most notably, was the development of local industry; mid-century artisanal endeavours in grist- and timber-milling, weaving, and blacksmithery grew into large, concentrated, industrial manufactories of axes, iron castings, machinery, woollens, flour, and textiles, making the town, a Waterloo County Atlas boasted in 1881, "the most important manufacturing town in Western Ontario." Although Gait acted as a regional service centre for area agriculture well into the 18905, it was industry on which it depended and industry on which it staked its claim to the title "Manchester of Canada."3 If Blackeby's record detailed the importance of industry to the town, it could hardly have related the place's physical beauty. The townsite grew out of the confluence of Mill Creek and the swift-moving Grand River, which divided the town in two and, before 1859 when reliable bridges were constructed, kept communications between the sides to a minimum. The town was bordered on either side of the Grand by two steep slopes. In years to come, Gait would become known as the "valley city," with opulent stone residences lining the upper ridges and terraces. From these places, the wealthy could look across the valley at their counterparts and down below to the industries, merchant shops, and professional orifices situated mostly along Main Street on the east side of the river. Also in their view were the high steeples of the Anglican, the Roman Catholic, and several Presbyterian churches, the most notable of which was Central, on the river's edge in the heart of town. Visible, too, from these heights were the institutions of civil society: the Town Hall and Market, both erected on the east side of the River in 1857; the Central School; and, on a height of land to the northeast, William Tassie's renowned Grammar School, soon to become Gait Collegiate Institute. The sounds of the town resonated between the opposite slopes: the whir of machinery, the town bell, the sound of railway trains that came through regularly on the Great Western (1854) and Grand Trunk (1875) branches that ran parallel to the River on the east and west sides respectively. From below, also, came the smell of coal furnaces, putrid matter from tanneries, and heat generated by the foundries. Beyond the impressive stone houses up top and the humming industry below, Blackeby's rounds took him through a maze of residences and residents — of all shapes and kinds. Below the homes of the wealthy, the middling and poor lived cheek by jowl. As Blackeby's townsman John Beattie Crozier had recalled of the town fifteen years earlier, "here and there ... lived people of drunken, worthless and disreputable lives, who were shunned by their respectable neighbors, and with whom little or no inter-

5

Approaching the Victorian Middle Class

course was possible." The town had changed, of course. Gone by 1881 was most of the Black population, noted locally for its enthusiasm in prayer, its temperance principles, and its hard work; few remained after the American emancipation, and those who left were not replaced. What had not changed was the town's predominantly Scottish character; much of Gait conversed, worshipped, and politicked in a thick Scottish brogue. The English- and Canadian-born were there too, of course; curiously, perhaps, few of the German settlers who dominated Waterloo County generally lived inside the Town boundaries. Gait was as Presbyterian as it was Scottish, and the town's four congregations attested to this fact.4 Goderich, the town that Ball was charged with enumerating, could hardly claim the success that Gait enjoyed. By 1881, it might have struck him that the town's most successful days were coming to a close. A town founded in 1827 as the administrative centre for Canada Company operations in the Huron Tract, it was forced to find its own raison d'etre when the Company's offices were moved, unceremoniously, to Toronto in 1852. Goderich ran, in the 18505 and 6os, on the business from its port and a handful of mills and foundries, and on revenue from its operations as the county seat: court proceedings, land surveying, and the business of the local gaol. In the late i86os, salt-mining and flour-milling grew in importance, but by the mid18705 American tariffs and general recession had conspired to check their progress. By the time Ball commenced his work, Goderich's economy was in decline. From a population of 1,329 in 1851 and 4,564 in 1881, the town's numbers had declined to 3,839 by 1891. One area of commerce that remained healthy, however, was tourism. By the 18705, wealthy travellers from all parts of the United States and Canada were visiting Goderich regularly to take in the Huron air, some establishing summer homes there. The physical geography of Goderich was its main attraction. The town is situated on bluffs overlooking the shore of Lake Huron, immediately south of the Maitland River's mouth. In the days of the Canada Company, Goderich was laid out on a radial street plan, one of only three such plans in the colony. But even by mid-century the harbour was the town's focus and its main street paralleled the Maidand. By the i86os, the arrival of the Buffalo and Lake Huron Railway (1858), the construction of the county courthouse in the centre of the radial pattern, and increased settlement had made the Courthouse "Square" the town's new focus. Merchant shops and professional offices lined the Courthouse Square — an octagonal main street — much as they do today. More than Gait, the wealthy were neighbours to the poor in Goderich; though some splendid homes lined the bluffs along Lake Huron and the Maitland, elsewhere in the town the cottages of labourers were placed

6 A Sense of Their Duty

beside the homes of the respectable. In 1881, Ball would have found Goderich a town divided: the harbour and the shores of the Maidand were busy with longshoremen and sailors, fishermen and merchants, coopers and saltmakers, and there were, in contemporary Victor Lauriston's words, "fishy smells and ... ships coming and going"; the town above was characterized by a decidedly slower pace of commerce and life, one that earned it the oft-repeated description of "sleepy" and its people the label "decidedly conservative." Life in Victorian Goderich, like its physical layout, was orderly. The whole town looked toward the County courthouse, and the County Gaol, to the northeast, was not far away. Sprinkled along the radiating streets were other institutions of order: the Temperance Hall; one church each for the Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Presbyterians, and two for the Methodists; a Mechanics' Institute; the Town Hall; and four ward schools.5 Among these places lived the town's residents: Scots, Irish, English, and Americans. As late as ten years after Ball performed his task, Ojibwa Indians returned to the flats at the mouth of the Maidand River to fish and camp. By then their presence was more a curiosity than accepted fact. Until 1895, several local Scots spoke and worshipped in Gaelic, but unlike Gait no one ethnic group dominated town life, and there was little ethnic rivalry. Goderich townspeople were remarkably accepting: Protestants helped Catholics construct a church, English and Irish helped honour St Andrews Day, and townspeople of all persuasions celebrated both Queen Victoria's birthday and the Fourth of July, the latter constituting a public holiday on several occasions. If Blackeby and Ball had met, their recollections would tell us much more about these towns than do their formal reports to the Dominion Census Bureau. Gait and Goderich differed in many ways, economically, physically, and socially, and these differences supply students of social history with appropriate contexts for examining the community roots of class formation. How these towns differed in the structure, behaviour, and ideas of their respective middling orders reveals a good deal about the nature of class identity and the importance of a sense of place in class formation. The emergence of an industrial capitalist class structure in Canada has been the focus of considerable recent study in Canadian social history, much of which focuses temporally on the mid- and late-Victorian era. Called both the era of the "first industrial revolution" and "Canada's Age of Industry," these forty or so years have been identified by historians of social structural change as a critical period in the development of class disparities, identities, and strategies. By the 18905, the forces of industrialization and urban growth had produced a society that comprised the extremes of wealth

7 Approaching the Victorian Middle Class

and poverty, luxury and want, capital and labour. It was a society, contemporaries recognized, made up of three classes: workers, the wealthy, and the middle class.6 Of the many social historians who have examined the broad structural transformation of Canadian society in this era, most have described its effects on the working class. Virtually no concentrated effort has been made to illuminate perhaps the most novel product of late nineteenth-century economic change — the middle class. The idea of a middle class in Canadian history is by no means new, but its use has lacked clarity. The term "middle class" has most often been employed by historians as a residual category to describe various types of social behaviour in the past. Several historians have identified movements of social reform, like antislavery and public education, with a middle-class constituency. In most instances, however, their studies lack a definition of middle class or of middle-class values, and consequently the term has held little explanatory value. In general, historians have employed the term more as an adjective than a noun, a tendency that betrays a theoretical and conceptual confusion about the identity of the middle class and its meaning in history. There is a need in Canadian history to more clearly conceptualize the structure and ideas of the middle class in the Victorian era before we can credibly characterize certain types of behaviour as motivated by a "middle-class" perspective. This study is a preliminary effort in that direction.7 The formation of a middle class in late nineteenth-century Canada was a process through which people of the middling ranks came to see themselves as a distinctive social structural unit rooted in local socioeconomic realities. In the 18305 and 405, British North American society was agrarian and composed largely of immigrants. Its social structure was in flux; more often than classes, contemporaries spoke of "ranks" or "sorts." Among these were the middling or respectable sorts, who derived their status more from inherited Old World social scales than from colonial realities. In the forty years after 1850, class structure in Canada, in general, and the nature of the middle class, in particular, were transformed. By the 18905, the transition to industrial production, the formation of a Canadian nation-state, and the development of myriad local economies and polities had produced an identifiable and self-identified middle class in Canada whose members derived their identities primarily from local contexts, the kind that Blackeby and Ball knew well. This book is a case study of the process of middle-class formation in Victorian Canada. It takes its cue from and is informed by the important studies on social formation in nineteenth-century Canada that have preceded it in

8 A Sense of Their Duty

the historiography. It bears a similar trajectory, in many ways, to the investigations on nineteenth-century Canada begun in works such as John Weaver s Hamilton (1982), T.W. Acheson's Saint John (1985), Lynne Marks' study of religion and leisure in nineteenth-century Ontario towns (1996), and, perhaps most closely, Robert McDonald's recent work on the social composition of Victorian Vancouver (1996).8 But unlike these, as a study of the middle class, the parameters of my study are narrower and more specific, and should be made plain. First, while the major structural changes in the economy and politics of late nineteenth-century Canada were experienced in some measure by all Canadians, the focus here is on English Canada, in particular Canada West/Ontario, where by far the most dramatic transformation occurred. Second, and perhaps as important, this study examines and compares the process of middle-class formation in two medium-sized towns, Gait and Goderich, Ontario, 1850—91. In rapidly growing towns like these, the process of middle-class formation was consequential and deeply felt in this era. Most medium-sized and small towns in late-Victorian Ontario went from pioneer settlements to bustling, "go-ahead" locales. At the centre of this transformation - as investors, producers, planners, and service-providers - were the middling ranks. In many ways, the transition from countryside to town in this era was a formative process in the making of middle-class Ontario. Omitted from consideration here, then, are the experiences of the middling ranks in other important contexts: rural, French, and urban Canada.9 There is no small difficulty in determining an appropriate point of departure for studying a topic as vast as the middle class in Canadian history. Inevitably, though, a series of questions both historical and historiographical emerge and recur. Why has the middle class not been studied in Canadian history as a "class unto themselves"? What do we mean by the term "middle class"? What kinds of conceptual frameworks or strategies can historians use as guides to better define the middle class as an historical subject? Finally, how did middle-class contemporaries in Victorian Canada see themselves? The treatment of these questions can hardly be catechetical; a great deal more research will be necessary to place the broader study of the middle class in Canadian history on firmer footing. Moreover, this introductory discussion is confined to what might be called the first phase of middle-class formation in Canada, the 18505 to the 18905, roughly the years before a more prominent and forceful middle class began to assert its identity as a mediator between big capital and labour in the era of monopoly capitalism. With this in mind, however, these questions are essential both to understanding the historiographical lacuna of the middle class in Canadian history and to mapping an appropriate approach to the topic.10

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Approaching the Victorian Middle Class

According to Franklin Charles Palm, the middle decades of the nineteenth century in Canada were host to changes crucial to the country's social structure. These included the establishment of responsible government, the Union of the Canadas and the development of a bureaucracy of public offices, the outlawing of seigneurial tenure, and the settlement of the Clergy Reserves question, each of which contributed to a common outcome. "By these acts the small property owners erected the framework for a potentially powerful bourgeois state ... [DJuring the nineteenth century the middle-class system was firmly established in Canada." Written in 1936, Palm's treatment of Canadian events is notably cursory, but the pages that he devotes to Canada in The Middle Classes, Then and Now are significant if for no other reason than their uniqueness: besides Palm, no historian focused especially on the Victorian Canadian middle class as a class before the 19705, and very few have since. The various reasons for this dearth are rooted in the paths of Canadian historiography and nineteenth-century middle-class ideas and their expression.11 Class analysis in Canadian history, certainly, has overcome the initial resistance put up by traditional historians in the late 19605 and early 19705; few (if any) scholars today would cast the historical study of social class as "too crudely sweeping" or class conflict as "unCanadian." Even so, Canadian historians since then have not pursued the historical study of class with evenness. The dominant concern among social historians in the 19705 and 8os was to unearth and give voice to the past's large numbers of inarticulate, focusing in particular on the working class. The pathbreaking work of new social historians in discovering vibrant working-class cultures of protest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrializing Canada has been one of the principal strengths of social history and remains so despite the recent flowering of research in other important areas of social organization, division, and conflict — among others, gender, ethnicity, and the family. In fact, much of the research on non-class topics in Canadian social history has used workers and their milieux for their subjects of discussion, such that women's work (paid and unpaid), ethnic divisions within the working class, the working-class family economy, and working-class adolescence have dominated the research agenda. The results, though prolific and meaningful, have been less than encouraging for historians of social class interested in topics that fall outside the working-class historiographical canon. The effect, one scholar has noted, "has been that the middle class and, in particular, the very rich, are virtually invisible actors in our past except as subjects of individual biographies."12 Clearly, however, the neglect of the Victorian middle class as a unit of study is a product of more than historiographical myopia. The Canadian

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A Sense of Their Duty

middle class was and is plagued by a problem of definition. It is, to many, intractable: transitory, incohesive, and amorphous. Conceptual difficulty has, perhaps, pushed social historians to examine those bears that are easier to tree. The Victorian middle class was, for many working-class historians, a fleeting stratum: never fully made and decidedly in demise, especially as the process of industrialization unfolded. Thinly veiled in this characterization is a conceptual reliance on the Marxian notion of "proletarianization." The middle class was sandwiched between big capital and labour, and, though some of its members may have identified and shared common lifestyles with the capitalist class, even siding with them in disputes against labour, most of them were destined to be driven into the ranks of labour. As industrial capitalism developed, material resources and real social power were increasingly concentrated in the hands of capitalist entrepreneurs and their huge enterprises, obliterating petty proprietors - artisans and independent commodity producers — the mainstay of the middling ranks.13 In Hamilton, Ontario, Bryan Palmer wrote in 1979, "the post-i853 years saw the relentless erosion of merchant capital ... [T]he business failures of this period were, in reality, the demise of independent commodity producers, often skilled artisans." In this model, Victorian Canada could really have only two perennial social classes, not three.14 Furthermore, the seeming incohesiveness of the Victorian Canadian middle class has dissuaded serious examination. Scholars have not focused on the middle class as an historical unit in the Victorian era because they have, until recently, been unable to unearth much evidence of middle-class "consciousness" in verbal form. Historians of the working-class, in particular, have stressed the need for notional evidence to support observations of social structural cleavages based on occupation and wealth. But it is here that research on the middle class has bogged down. While American social historians have traced mid-century changes in the economic structures of northern cities that reveal empirically the emergence of a middling sort, they have uncovered very litde evidence of an ideology derived directly from the middle class's relationship to a newly changed means of production. The world-view of the nineteenth-century American middle class was paradoxical: at the same time that it sought to refute the significance of growing differences between social classes in society, it also encouraged those in the middling ranks to protect and enhance their own social standing. The challenge for historians, then, has been to identify the culture of a class concerned with openly denying the existence of classes in society. The abstract nature of that task has worked to delay serious study of the middle class in Victorian Canada.15

ii

Approaching the Victorian Middle Class

Beyond these factors, however, there is larger conceptual confusion about what social commentators — then and now - really meant and mean by the term "middle class." It is and was amorphous as a stratum and as an idea and requires more meaningful definition. "There is an inherent vagueness," R.H. Gretton noted seventy-five years ago, in trying to analyze "a stratum which is so lacking in marked characteristics or qualities that it can only be described as lying between two other classes." The term middle class is a negative one and lacks inherent meaning for principally two reasons. First, social scientists have had difficulty defining precisely a stratum whose boundaries have been at all times subject to crumbling and shifting at both ends. Second, the groups that have made up the intermediate stratum since the mid-nineteenth century have been so diverse that it could hardly be characterized as structurally monolithic. In addition to their diversity, middle-class groups have, since 1850, been anything but stable: if the middle class as a whole has expanded since the early years of industrialization, this overall pattern of growth has masked the stagnancy and shrinkage of some of its component parts and led historians to underestimate the expansion of others. The conceptual challenge of studying the middle class is to reconcile the movements of individual "middling" groups with the continuing existence of the constitutional whole over time; or to attempt to answer what Pamela Pilbeam has asked of this stratum — "What is the morphology of a quicksand?" Clearly, no universal definition of the middle class will suffice for all societies, for all times. The middle class, like any class, is an historical subject whose definition has varied according to time and space.16 Happily, these unavoidable problems need not be barriers to the serious study of the Victorian middle class in Canada. There are ways of seeing the middle class as it saw itself. Social scientific methodology and theory have been useful to social historians attempting to define the middle class in particular periods - especially in Europe and America in the nineteenth century. As a result, a number of paths of approach exist as guides for students of the intermediate stratum in history. Three approaches are of particular note: a social stratification approach that relies on objective criteria; a Thompsonian or "socialist humanism" approach; and, finally, Anthony Giddens' model of class "structuration." Each of these models has informed the work of historians, with varying degrees of success. Their differences stem as much from opposing definitions of class itself as from variations in method.17 The first of these models comes from the tradition in sociology called functionalism, which enjoyed currency among American stratification students in the early twentieth century. This school is important as a methodological precursor to the series of social mobility studies prominent in

12 A Sense of Their Duty

American social history in the 19605 and 705. At the most basic level, functionalists saw societies as persistent, cohesive, stable, and generally integrated wholes. They were held together by basic shared values — in nineteenth-century America, for example, by a universal belief in equality and the potential for upward social mobility. Society, moreover, was viewed as a system of interdependent parts, most often expressed in a hierarchy of social classes delineated principally by objective economic variables - for example, wealth, occupation, residential location, or club membership. Class divisions in this view are open to empirical observation and recording: ostensibly, any number of classes can exist in a given society.18 A number of criticisms have been levelled at the work of those students of American stratification committed to a positivist approach to social class. Their work was ahistorical and their "snapshot" views assumed that society was static. Moreover, in defining social strata objectively, they subordinated class as a social category and the idea of consciousness to rather mechanistic indices of status based on occupational rank and economic standing. "[T]he study of social structure became the delineation of stratification rather than the explication of class," Michael Katz wrote in 1981. As such, a middle class became simply another stratum, distinctive only by its position between other strata.19 Despite its narrowness, the clarity and neatness that an objective approach offers has commended it to some recent historians of the middle class. But these studies have not really captured what being "middle class" meant. The danger of defining the middle class solely on objective criteria, as Arno J. Mayer noted a quarter-century ago, is in "creating a self-fulfilling abstraction"; that is, in producing a conception of the middle class that is overly formulaic and unappreciative of the subtleties of power relationships between and within social classes in a given society.20 "The middle class, like any class, does not exist 'ready-made' in reality," Loic Wacquant has written. It is, instead, the product of process, of historical struggle. The second useful conceptual framework rejects the objective way of defining the middle class in history. "Socialist humanism," or the conception of class elucidated by Edward Thompson in his classic treatise, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), lends itself particularly well to study of the middle class (even if this application might have sat less than comfortably with its first articulator). Here, class is not only a structure or a category "but ... something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened in human relationships) ... And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against

13

Approaching the Victorian Middle Class

other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs ... [CJlass is a relationship, and not a thing." Class boundaries did not exist in abstraction. Rather, a system of production - capitalism - distributed people into "class situations" (wage-labourer, salaried professional, capitalist). Class formation itself emerged from conflicts between the interests articulated and "felt" by people within these situations. Here, the middle class, like the wealthy and working classes, exists only as conflict group; it behaves in "class ways" only through collective struggle. In this definition, Wacquant notes, "the middle class has no frontiers other than the historically shifting and disputed ones that are continually produced and transformed by these conflicts."21 But what conflicts? Only a few historians have pointed to evidence from nineteenth-century America that could characterize the middle class as an emerging "conflict group." John Gilkeson's Middle-Class Providence, 1820— 1940, (1986), is a rare example of the application of a Thompsonian conception of class to the intermediate stratum. The result is a rather sweeping, but sound, explication of how the middle class of Providence, Rhode Island, 1820—1940, was historically produced and how, over time, middling sorts reproduced and transformed their class through organization around a series of issues they chose to combat or promote. Voluntary associations were the agencies through which middle-class residents disseminated their values and defended their interests - abolitionist and temperance clubs in the antebellum era, fraternal lodges in the Gilded Age, and consumer associations in the early twentieth century. "Key episodes in the history of the middle classes in Providence highlight the development of middle-class organization and consciousness," Gilkeson writes. "A distinctive version of middleclass consciousness, which set the stable, industrious, sober middle classes of society conspicuously apart from the presumed vices of the rich and the poor and defined for them a superior middle ground, crystallized in moments of cultural conflict."22 Middle-class culture, in this definition, is located in distinctive clusters of values related centrally to the position of middling sorts within a society's system of production. Clearly, with Thompson, the subjective aspects of class are elevated in importance. Objective indicators reveal class situations, not "class." They are, in fact, merely prerequisites for people to act in class ways. Overtly or not, the Thompsonian conception of class has influenced how recent social historians have approached the middle class. But the result has been an imperfect fit. While most have not identified the middle class as a conflict group, many have concentrated on middle-class behaviour or their class ways (in the absence of an overtly expressed ideology) as an

14 A Sense of Their Duty

indicator of middle-class self-definition. By creating distinctive patterns of family organization, gender roles, associational life, and a work ethic, to name a few, the middling interests organized their resources (as individuals and as a class) in ways that allowed them to express their power and exert their influence over the other classes. In doing so, they became a class.23 But is this "non-exhaustive," conflict-oriented conception of the middle class satisfying? Not wholly. Its success has been measurable in identifying middle-class types — the hard-working, church-going, money-saving, familylimiting, suburban, anxious male, and the benevolent, child-centred, religious female — and a litany of "middle-class" behaviours. These studies are important. They have revealed a great deal about the interplay of class, gender, and family form over time and emphasized the centrality of the family economy to middle-class ideals. Their subjective focus, however, has illuminated less well the relationship between broad economic change and class structure in the intermediate stratum and addresses the question of the boundaries of the middle class less clearly than those using objective criteria. Can, then, the middle class exist other than as a static structural category or as a conflict group in the process of being "made"? Yes. A third framework for the historical study of the middle class offers researchers a middle ground between relying on objective or subjective criteria: Anthony Giddens' concept of "structuration." To understand class, according to Giddens, one cannot focus narrowly on one stratum's structure or on the behavioural ways in which one class segment made itself. Class analysis must be more systemic. Economic classes in society are not abstract entities: they exist only in relation to one another. But unlike the classes identified by Marxists (including Thompson) their relations need not be entirely conflictual. How economic classes come into relationship with one another is called structuration: the process whereby economic classes become social entities.24 The degree of class structuration in a society is determined by two factors: "mediate" and "proximate" structuration. By mediate structuration, Giddens means the degree to which social mobility is possible in society. This degree, determined by the relative accessibility of property ownership and education and by the ability to work, reveals how "closed" classes are in a society. Proximate structuration describes how classes are distributed in society by three media: workplace divisions of labour, workplace authority relationships; and patterns of consumption. "Where these relations are consistent within a setting of 'mobility closure,' they reinforce each other and reaffirm the significance of class." In addition, Giddens' model of class formation does not rely heavily on evidence of class consciousness. For classes to exist there must be an awareness of class — a recognition and ac-

15

Approaching the Victorian Middle Class

ceptance of similar attitudes and beliefs - but not necessarily class consciousness. "The difference between class awareness and class consciousness is a fundamental one, because class awareness may take the form of a denial of the existence or reality of classes."25 Giddens' approach provides historians of the middle class with a neatly sectioned program for research. It demands that social historians comprehend overall structural change in the nineteenth-century economy. It also demands that they synthesize or consolidate historical knowledge about social mobility and workplace change completed in the past thirty years and about "cultures of consumption" still ongoing. Finally, it sets aside concern about the necessity of identifying a middle-class consciousness as the key to studying the middle class as a coherent social formation. As importantly, Giddens' approach provides a way around the seemingly intractable conceptual problems cited above. Hardly a transitory stratum, in Giddens' model the middle class in industrializing society is stable and perennial. But it need not be crystallized or consciously cohesive for "class" to exist.26 Giddens' conception of class formation — structuration — is the most appropriate guide for study of the Victorian Canadian middle class and will serve as such in the pages that follow. Its guidance is one of direction rather than formula; however, in history-writing, of course, no theory can be applied in a Procrustean way. Even so, the thrust of examination in this book is informed by the notion of structuration — mediate and proximate. By these measures it assesses just how closed classes became in local societies in Victorian Ontario, and to what extent relationships of authority born in the workplace were broadcast and influential in civil society. "You can't do the job," my father often says, "unless you have the proper tools." This is well and good. But now that we have them, how do we know that the job is worth doing? Do we know that the Victorian middle class in Canada is an entity worth trying to find? Lest we be accused of searching for ghosts, or at least of making a priori assumptions, this question is worthy of some preliminary consideration. In answering this, the views and voices of contemporaries are crucial. They lie at the heart of explaining how a nascent economic category, the middling sorts of the 18305 and 405 became also, by 1890, a social category — the middle class. Throughout the years 1850-90, Canadians and travellers in Canada spoke often about social class; they even spoke about the middle class. However, an important cognitive and discursive transition took place in these years. The middle class about which social commentators spoke in the 18305 and 405 was an ill-defined and importedidea - a "fictive" middle class that had more to do with British bourgeois behavioural norms than with local social

16 A Sense of Their Duty

structural reality. In the 18505 and 6os, Victorian Canadians gradually began to develop a three-class conception of local society consisting of upper, middle, and working classes.27 In Canada, in these years, where virtually all classes were composed of "new men," social divisions rooted in landedness, past military leadership, inherited nobility, or Old World ideas about social place began to lose their relevance. In their stead emerged a conception of society divided, between upper and middle classes, on the bases of wealth, occupational prestige, and idleness; and, between middle and lower classes, by the non-manual/manual work cleavage. Between the rich and the manual workers, the middle class engaged in occupations that encouraged processes of growth, self-identification, and reconstitution — an experience marked, in the words of one 18905 clerk, by a "sense of urgency." Middle-class occupational groups began to define themselves against those below and above them and with reference to their peers. Throughout the social scale, distinctive social types were being cast. By 1890, class divisions were domestic socioeconomic divisions.28 British North Americans and social commentators in the 1840$ and 505 were of two minds in their references to the state of society. On one hand, many of them were eager to champion the new land as a society of equals, unsullied by the oppressive class-system of the Old World. "In England, or France, or any of the states of Europe, if upwards of a million of the working classes had, within a short space of time, and by means hitherto unknown or unthought of, raised themselves to comparative affluence and independence," proclaimed J. Sheridan Hogan's prize-winning 1855 essay, Canada, "their example would be alike a matter of wonder and instruction ... [a]nd this, without exaggeration, is the lesson that may be learned from the industrial history of Canada, but especially of the Upper Province." In the minds of many, Canada was a "poor man's country," a democracy offering success and social mobility to those with sober and industrious habits but limited horizons in the Old World system. "In Canada persevering energy and industry, with sobriety, will overcome all obstacles," Catherine Parr Traill advised in 1854, "and in time will place the very poorest family in a position of substantial comfort that no personal exertions alone could have procured for them elsewhere."29 At the same time, other commentators in this era knew that the promise of an egalitarian society in British North America was chimerical; if and where that kind of democracy existed, it could hardly last very long. Britons, and other immigrants, could scarcely shed their Old World identities that easily. Nor, indeed, did many desire to do so. In fact, the recreation of elements of the Old World social hierarchy was not unsavoury to many and

17 Approaching the Victorian Middle Class

even desirable to some. Even by the i86os, it was clear that the popular debate over the establishment of a domestic landed peerage in British North America had not been wholly exhausted, if Thomas D'Arcy McGee's proposal for a traditional upper chamber had any popular resonance. Later in this period, the knightings of John A. Macdonald and railway baron George Stephen raised again the issue of the possibility of a Canadian aristocracy. By the i86os, however, that possibility had begun to decline in the minds of serious British North Americans and commentators. "I find it difficult," Goldwin Smith wrote in London's The Daily News in 1862, "to soar to the conception of a Canadian peerage, with the Duke of Montreal, the third perhaps from the creation of the title, begging like Belisarius for an obolus, or whistling on a costermonger's cart." "England is a European aristocracy, Canada is an American democracy. "3° However, the absence of an aristocracy in Canada did not make it a democracy of the sort the United States was perceived to be. The degree of levelling in that country, contemporaries believed, had produced a society thoroughly "vulgar," with a social scale too fluid and a social tone too hurried for the tastes of stolid Europeans and new Canadians. Canada was a democracy with ranks, and Canadians were democrats with a firm sense of social place. "There is, perhaps, no error more common, in relation to Canada than the supposition that no social differences or distinctions are recognized among her population," one English emigrant reported back to his countrymen in 1875. It is unquestionably true that in almost every phase of Canadian life, democratic tendencies exhibit themselves ... but it must not be supposed that this principle is incompatible with the existence of those conditions and relationships necessary to the constitution of what, in England, we call good society. The term "equality of the people," is used here in a somewhat restricted and, perhaps, novel sense, and signifies merely an absence of those impassable barriers which the aristocratic element in Great Britain has, unhappily, been the means of erecting between the various classes of her population.31

In this society, an aristocracy-less British society, the identities of the middle and lower ranks followed British travellers in their migrations to Canada. In the 18505 and 6os, Canada inherited a middle class (in name at least) through British immigration. British travel writers in these years encouraged people of the middling ranks to emigrate to Canada, not for the goal of social mobility to some higher rank but for the purpose of consolidating their own precarious, middling social status. In some respects, Canada was seen

i8 A Sense of Their Duty

as an auxiliary British social arena for a new generation of struggling respectables. In Canada, they supposed they could recreate the conditions of middle-class life they had enjoyed in Britain. "[I]n many places in Canada," one colonist, an elder in the Presbyterian church, wrote in an 1849 book of Canadian sketches, "you may find localities where you may enjoy almost as much society, refinement, comfort, and ... luxury, as any family belonging to the middle classes can wish for or expect."32 The major structural changes of the 18705 and 8os (economic depression, industrial production, political nationhood, geographic expansion) began to alter the way Canadians perceived their society. As Canada developed its economic and political independence, Canadians and others began to construct the idea of Canadian society as an entity of its own making - independent from the shaping influences of Britain and the United States and possessing the potential to determine its character and direction for itself. "In the first place," one correspondent to The Week wrote in 1888, "as compared with the old world, we have no ranks or classes. We have no aristocracy. In the old sense of the word, we have hardly an upper class. In the European sense, we hardly have a lower class. We are a middle-class people; and although in every country that class admits of many subdivisions, still there is a greater community of tone of thought among all classes here than in any of the countries of Europe. "33 By 1890, the middle class in Canada had begun to define itself within the context of a domestic economy: externally, as a group apart from the lower and upper classes; internally, as a series of loosely affiliated occupational identities. These identities were, in their principal focus, local products of the social and economic orders of specific and distinctive communities. The outlooks and identities of middle-class individuals (businessmen, professionals, and "white-collar" workers) were connected most closely to those of their neighbours and colleagues and located within the limited cognitive terrain of town or city. If being a "middling sort" in early 18505 Canada referred largely to an Old World identity, by 1890 middle-class identity was a local identity defined by the presence of domestic classes above and below one's station and by the existence of shared, daily experience. The formation of that identity, and the emergence of middle-class structuration in towns like mid-Victorian Gait and Goderich, began at work.

PART ONE

Work, Authority, and the Middle Class in Victorian Ontario

Work in late nineteenth-century Ontario was the yardstick by which ordinary people measured their social worth. The types of work that Ontarians did determined in some way what they could eat and drink, the clothes they had to wear, the neighbourhoods in which they could live, the friends they might keep, and the leisure they might enjoy. Work gave order to daily life. It was a gauge of one's present place in the social order and a commentary on one's future. In many middle-class minds, it was an accurate reflection of moral value and habits. For historians of social class, understanding "work" is an essential beginning. For historians of the middle class, this statement is especially true. The middle class in Victorian Ontario was an entity defined by its work as much as by any other factor. This is a simple, but important, point to consider. In much of the social history of the nineteenth-century North Atlantic world, the middle class are referred to as the authors of a package of moral values, of a series of social prescriptions for others in society, and even of a work ethic, but rarely has reference been made to their actual work. In the twentieth century, a second development has further confused the issue. Since about the 18905, the popular mind has come to equate the middle class with middle income, regardless of how that income was earned. The result has been that the middle class, in history and in present-day society, appears as some amorphous mass, "elusive" to social historians and social commentators alike. In short, any attempt to understand the Victorian definition of middle class must come to terms with Victorian patterns of work because it is at work that the middle class took shape. Work divided society into parts

2,o

Work, Authority, and the Middle Class

comprehensible to nineteenth-century Ontarians. Work gave the middle class internal structure, and it delineated that stratum's upper and lower boundaries. Moreover, work was the most important arena for the development of class awareness and the incubator for a series of occupational identities among non-manual workers, identities that became essential building blocks in the making of local middle-class culture.1 In the minds of Victorian Ontarians, work gave conceptual order to society. The first distinction drawn by this idea of "work-order" was plain: in society, some people worked for a living, some did not. This division was an important one throughout the North Adantic world in the nineteenth century. For a large majority of people in Canada, the United States, and Britain, work was necessary for survival. Those who would not or did not work — the destitute and the idle rich - were located at the extremes of the social order: they were completely dependent on or completely independent of the workings of mainstream society. These groups were labelled moral failures: neither group contributed productive energy or material to the society of which it was a part; both groups drew some support (in the form of alms or financial gain from idle investment and loan interest) from the labour of others. "All men in Canada nowadays follow professions or lead business lives," Lady Jephson stated in her 1897 Canadian Scrap-Book, "and an idle man is looked upon as a moral dwarf."2 Victorian commentators viewed the idle poor as anathema to the proper work ideal, as men and women able but unwilling to support themselves and their children, as anything but "respectable." Many had sympathy for the casual poor, those meanly and randomly struck by depression, disease, or other calamities who, with some encouragement and temporary assistance of food, fuel, or clothes, would shortly be back on their feet. Charity needed to be distributed, but judiciously, and then only in exchange for work. Prolonged assistance or bare "give-outs" helped no one in the end, many believed. "Give 'em shelter in jail, but make 'em work," the Huron Signal instructed philanthropists in the winter of 1877.3 As notable to contemporary commentators were the self-fashioned "gentry" in mid-nineteenth-century North America, those viewed at once both as threats to the social order and as living anachronisms in the new democracy. The suitability of an upper class in British North America was a topic of some debate throughout the nineteenth-century, and the idea of a colonial upper class was not without its advocates.4 Critics, however, were far more numerous. The pursuit of wealth tended to come at the cost of honesty and honour, some moralists held, and with a jettisoning of the work ethic. Moreover, once achieved, wealth and the wealthy were a financial and

2i Work, Authority, and the Middle Class

moral weight on society. Many colonial writers saw Canada as a new social system, distinct from and the opposite of its aristocratic British parent.5 Real or imagined, authentic or pretentions, the wealthy in Victorian Ontario towns and cities fashioned themselves as an upper class on the basis of their wealth, their polish, and their ties to European nobility. Both Gait and Goderich, as early as the 18505, were home to a handful of "idle" rich, perhaps not numerous enough or divorced enough from commerce to constitute in themselves a local gentry class, but wealthy and extravagant enough to distinguish themselves from manual and non-manual workers. In Gait, a string of wealthy families distinguished themselves by their domestic opulence and aversion to community life. Gait's wealthy recluse, William Dickson, Jr, son of the town founder, provided a good example of the self-fashioned local gentry, that noteworthy presence in otherwise rough-hewn, developing colonial towns. Of Dickson, lawyer Adam Ainslie rhymed, somewhat poorly, in 1889: Some six feet three, in his stocking feet A finer man you'd seldom meet, in promenade, or public Street. In dress, address, and carriage, without a single fault Pioneer of North Dumfries, first gentleman in Gait.

"He did not mix in public matters," Ainslie recalled. "I think I was his only associate." Others, too, provided locals in Gait with ideas about the lives of the wealthy, like William Ashton, "an Englishman ... of good family," an 18505 cattle breeder, and the builder of "a pretentious Elizabethan home, somewhat after the style of an English manor home"; and Matthew Wilks, who bought an estate near Gait and, over time, increased his farmland to over sixteen hundred acres.6 Gentry status was claimed early in Goderich among the officers of the Canada Company, especially by men like Frederick Widder, Charles Pryor, Captain John Strachan, and Thomas Mercer Jones, son-in-law to Bishop Strachan and a link to the Family Compact. Contemporaries, like editor Thomas McQueen, were outwardly critical of these men in their maladministration of the Company, political corruption, and social pretension. McQueen was particularly outspoken about the incongruence of a self-asserted gentry class living in a frontier town. The titles of his editorials, such as "Are We to Have an Aristocracy?," "Annals of the Corporation," and "The Dead Weight," reveal his concern about the self-fashioning of the local wealthy.7 The movement of the Company's headquarters to Toronto in 1852 shook the foundations of the local gentry; only a few officers remained. But the

22

Work, Authority, and the Middle Class

ideal of a gentry class was kept alive locally in subsequent decades. The town's growth as a summer resort in the i86os drew an annual parade of wealth from other places in British North America and abroad. The arrival of "Baltimore gentleman" Henry Attrill in 1873 signalled a new sort of gentrified immigrant: the southern planter. Attrill came to Goderich from the American South via New York City to mine salt, an enterprise that failed shortly after it started. He purchased an expansive estate, known as "The Ridge," on the north side of the Maidand River and planted it with corn, vineyards, orchards, and fruit bushes. Until his death in 1892 he raised and sold pure bred Durham cattle, sheep, and horses there. "He brought a lot of niggers and mules and his corn cultivating machinery from his southern plantation," Gavin Green recollected of Attrill, and "always drove around the farm with a horse and buggy."8 He lived in Goderich only a few months of the year (wintering in California), but his comings and goings were publicly noted in the local press, and his presence, it seems, was felt. The wealthy in Gait and Goderich were never very far away, physically or cognitively. For most Victorians, wealth and gentry status represented something symbolic as much as a tangible, attainable lifestyle. Workers defined themselves in opposition to the ideal of idle wealth and poverty as much as they did against real self-styled gentlemen and paupers. In doing so, they reproduced in British North America a work ethic as distinctive for its abstract nature as for the zeal with which its proponents professed its necessity. This work ethic was current in Canada throughout the Victorian era, but its meaning changed subdy in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the 18505 and 6os, all kinds of work were equally laudatory and moral, but by the 18705 that conception had been modified. From then on, many contemporaries held aloft the value of non-manual labour, distinguishing it from manual labour and assigning "brain" workers higher status in the work order. Among workers in the 18505 and 6os, the work ethic emerged in the form of a producer ideology steeped in an inherited ascetic, capitalist ethos: the real authors of progress - economic, cultural, and moral - were those members of society who worked for a living at any kind of honest pursuit. Being a worker signified societal membership and a soundness of moral attitude. Work was the symbol of opportunity and the main route to independence and social mobility. As Allan Smith has noted, Victorian Canadians, like their American counterparts, gave credence to the idea that work and selfimprovement could yield economic success. As importandy, even if financial reward were not his yield, the worker could prove his respectability in the process.9

23 Work, Authority, and the Middle Class

The essential unity of purpose among those who worked for a living was a subject of some importance and repetition in popular literature in midnineteenth-century Canada. In the 18505 and 6os, journals such as The Canadian Presbyter and New Dominion Monthly proclaimed industry's intrinsic rewards in articles with titles like "The Morality of Our Country" and "The Rationale of Recreation."10 These were supplemented by a litany of popular poetry, of varying (but generally poor) quality, that joined in the exaltation of work and the community of producers. In Ontario, much of this work appeared in local newspapers as copy from British and American newspapers, though some was locally produced. One such piece, "The Working Man!," appeared in the Signal in May 1871: The noblest men I know on earth Are men whose hands are brown with toil; Who, backed by no ancestral groves, Hew down the wood and till the soil; And win thereby a prouder name Than follows king or warrior's fame. The working men, whate'er the task, Who carve the stone or bear the hod, They bear upon their honest brows The royal stamp, the seal of God; And worthier are their drops of sweat Than diamonds in a coronet. God bless the noble working men, Who rear the cities of the plain, Who dig the mines, who build the ships, And drive the commerce of the main. God bless them! for their toiling hands Have wrought the glory of all lands.11

The producer ideology was replicated in local discourse and deliberation as well. The dozens of new towns that proliferated in Ontario in the second half of the nineteenth century and competed with one another for commerce and industry provided a series of new, local contexts for these ideas. Itinerant lecturers and local debating societies waxed philosophic about topics like "the dignity of labour" and "the effects of wealth on morality" in towns like Gait and Goderich. Newspaper articles and editorials echoed

24 Work, Authority, and the Middle Class

these sentiments. "It is the highest duty, privilege, pleasure, for the greatest men and the whole-souled women ... to work their way thro' life," the Dumfries Reformer stated in August 1862. "We have but two classes, the idle and the industrious," the same organ asserted two years later, "and the latter only discharge all the duties of good citizens."12 These articles stressed repeatedly the unity of labour — all labour — and the intrinsic worth of work. Signal editor W.T. Cox wrote in July 1863: "There have always been those who live luxuriously upon the labors of the majority, and it is lamentable to think how fast this class is increasing. Thousands of young men will follow anything that will fetch 25 c[en]ts rather than work ... to believe in the abominable lie that it is more dignified and honorable to pass through the world with gloved hands than to plod through the dust and mire of honest toil ... Every good man should take care to impress upon those within his influence that there is something Noble in Labor." In 1870, a respectable young Goderich lady's dismissal of a young man's romantic overtures with a glib "he's only a working man" occasioned another column by Cox. "Poor, misguided, silly girl! ... We would adjure our young friends, who desire to be respected and respectable men and women, to be afraid of nothing but vice and mea[n]ness; to embrace any department of honest labor within their reach. "I3 Moreover, in places like Gait and Goderich, the producer ideology could be equated with the actions of real producers themselves; those who exemplified the ideal were exalted, those who contravened it decried. Citizens in Gait were admonished to observe the example of local manufacturers like John Goldie and Hugh McCulloch, or of Peter Hay, who rose from journeyman metalworker to the proprietorship of a local knife works in the i86os. In Goderich, a model was provided by men like dry goods merchant John Detlor, proclaimed by the Signal in 1863 "a self-made man, who pushed his way up from a humble sphere of life" and proved that "through industry, economy and the exercise of intelligence every man in the community may hope to rise."14 The work ideal, it is important to note, was a gendered ideal. On one hand, the ostensible benefits of industry were available to both sexes; "honest labour" knew no work typology. For those few women who worked as entrepreneurs on their own behalves, in partnership with spouse or siblings or as employees, the fruits of hard labour were real and apparent. But most women did not work for wages, salaries, or direct personal profit in Victorian Ontario. The benefits of relentless work for those who toiled "from sun 'til sun" in reproductive and domestic labour were harder to see and appreciate. Work was a public event, the producer ideology of the 18505 and 6os

25

Work, Authority, and the Middle Class

held, and women's domestic labour fell beyond the public gaze. In short, as Daniel Rodgers has argued, the work ethic condemned most women to "celebrated inutility."15 The mid-nineteenth-century idea of society as a community of producers did not die suddenly in the 18705. Some historians have argued that this ideal dominated Canadians' thinking about social order throughout the Victorian period and that a common identity among brain workers and manual workers precluded any development of class feeling. But by the 18705, contemporaries did increasingly understand and appreciate the real and sharp differences that separated manual from non-manual producers, despite the continuing popular celebration of the unity of work and workers. In at least the popular mind, chances for social mobility were on the decline in mid- and late-Victorian Canada, an impression that had important consequences for the prestige of non-manual work. The public school system in Ontario was wrong to propagate the myth of the unity of work and one's potential to rise in society, Goldwin Smith argued in a letter to Lord Mount Stephen as late as 1902. "We cannot all climb over each others heads." The prestige of non-manual work grew, in part, because of a generally perceived closure of one's opportunities to rise.16 Beginning in the 18705, work types became more numerous, clearly distinguishable, specialized, and ordered, a process that owed much to the emergence of new fields of production, the reorganization of work into larger, more segmented units, and the introduction of labour-saving technology into the workplace. In turn, how the world of work was understood and measured by contemporaries also changed. Perhaps the best illustration of this new understanding comes from the portrayal of the universe of work in Ontario in Canadian censuses. Once per decade, from 1851 on, census bureaucrats compiled occupational statistics in aggregate form, thus constructing a list of work types in the province. The statistics reveal changes as seen through the eyes of the first state recorders. Aggregate statistics from the censuses for 1871, 1881, and 1891 portray an occupational structure at once rapidly expanding and in the midst of qualitative change. Census bureaucrats counted 135 separate occupations in Ontario in 1871; 151 in 1881; and 222 in 1891. In a period of twenty years, obsolete occupations disappeared, specializing occupations were divided into two or three separate jobs, and wholly new occupations arose. In Darwinistic fashion, extinction, fission, and genesis occurred simultaneously among Victorian occupations. Accompanying specialization and the birth of novel jobs was a new terminology of work types. By 1891, once multi-functioned clerks had become salesmen and saleswomen, typists, stenographers, and accountants. New fields

26

Work, Authority, and the Middle Class

of industry categorized the once all-purpose engineer as either civil or noncivil, the latter group being further divided into mechanical, mining, and electrical engineers. Importantly, non-manual work constituted an increasing proportion of all kinds of work in Victorian Ontario after 1870, despite growing concerns that its ranks were overcrowded.17 The significance of these changes was not lost on contemporaries exposed to the labour market, census-takers' questions, and popular literature. By the 18705 in Ontario, a new perspective on the work order had begun to emerge, one that drew perceptible lines between manual and non-manual labour. "With the world's progress occupations change," the editor of London, Ontario's The Family Circle noted in September 1883, "and making a living by one's 'head' without ... 'hard work' [has become conceivable] to many ... who know nothing of the toils and struggles of the speculator, merchant and professional man." Others concurred. "There are various forms of human industry, and an infinite variety of employments in our busy world," Rev. M. Harvey wrote in Stewart's Quarterly in October 1870. "I honour," says Carlyle, "the toil-worn craftsman, that with earth-made instruments, laboriously conquers the earth ... Venerable to me is the hard hand, crooked and coarse ..." Let us not, however, forget that there is another class of labourers who are right noble too — nay, nobler than the workers in clay and iron. I mean those who toil, not with hammer and hand, but with pen and tongue and brain ... Thought guides the hand of labour and rules the world ... While, then, we honour the strong-armed material worker, let us reverence more highly the brain-workers the clear, deep thinkers that search out the laws of God's universe ... They toil to give freedom, guidance, happiness to the workers for the daily bread.18

By the 18705 and 8os, the manual/non-manual divide had been replicated in wage scales as well. Systematic wage rates for Ontario in these years are not readily available, and recent research in reconstructing them has focused largely on working-class standards of living. But some fragmentary evidence remains that illustrates how pay differences reinforced the line drawn between manual and non-manual work in the mid-Victorian era. Wage schedules from the Ontario Bureau of Industries' reports for the i88os, for example, are instructive. In 1886, the average yearly earnings in Ontario (men only) were $403.38. The average earnings for some of the most populous and highly-skilled manual occupations did not deviate much from this average: blacksmiths earned $432.25; carpenters $395.70; coopers $366.87; harnessmakers $375.94; stonemasons $382.31; painters $376.70; plasterers $454.21; shoemakers $382.09; tool makers $406.71; and wagon makers $395.21.

27 Work, Authority, and the Middle Class

Significantly, every non-manual occupation listed surpassed both the average wage and almost every wage for a manual occupation. Illustrative are the earnings of bookkeepers ($519.62), male clerks ($423.52,), draughtsmen ($822.50), pattern makers (furniture $443.33; foundry $446.25), reporters ($546.40), salesmen ($418.98), telegraph operators ($536.67), and commercial travellers ($960.00).I9 Moreover, these wage scales present only the bottom rungs of non-manual work; notably absent are the merchants, manufacturers, professionals, and bureaucrats who made up the largest complement of the middle class. When they are taken into account, as they are in an 1878 table of Goderich wages constructed by the resident United States Trade Consul, the contrast is even more apparent. At the upper end of the non-manual scale, Huron County's judge claimed a salary of $6,000 plus fees, the County Registrar $5,000, and bank managers $1,500, for example. Further down, the contrast is still apparent but begins to fade. While bookkeepers earned $625-750 annually, Post Office clerks $375, and accountants $700—900, foundry moulders earned $400 and machinists $350 a year, shoemakers $9 a week, and bricklayers and masons $2 a day. By the 18905, non-manual workers were becoming a distinctive group among all workers, in part because most of them could afford to eat, drink, dress — in short, to live — better than those who worked with their hands.20 The occupational "great divide" that grew between manual and nonmanual labour in the late nineteenth century was a significant determinant of social identity between and among classes. These forms of separation - workers from non-workers, and manual workers from non-manual workers - provided a justification for the development of new, class-based identities in Ontario. The decline of producerism and the idea of non-manual labour as a distinctive category of work and living became the basis for the formation of a local middle class in Gait and Goderich in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As the world of non-manual work was reorganized, three occupational groupings began to stand out to contemporaries as the central pursuits of the middling orders - businessmen, professionals, and white-collar workers. Each group, in these years, developed a distinctive sense of occupational self. Each, moreover, cultivated a sense of authority and independence. Occupational identity among non-manual workers was the building block for the formation of a local middle class. Victorian Ontario towns like Gait and Goderich were local arenas for the confluence of these identities and the making of a middle class.

i Boosters, Bluster, and Bonding: Enterprise and Middle-Class Formation [T]he prosperity of the Town is very much in the hands of our commercial men, [and] they can make [of it] almost what they like. But the whole community, Agricultural, Mechanical, and Professional, have many invaluable interests staked upon the course which the men who set themselves up as the exchangers of commodities may choose to take. Huron Signal, 2 February 1854

The businessmen of small-town Ontario — merchants, manufacturers, and master artisans — were the most numerous, the most prominent, and arguably the most representative members of the middle class in the late nineteenth century. Enterprise was the lifeblood of local communities, and, in the minds of many contemporaries, the state of local production and commerce reflected the character of the community as a whole. In newspaper accounts, county atlas depictions, and city directory summaries throughout the Victorian period, an equation was made between the reputation of a town and how energetic and "pushing" its leading businessmen were. In a significant way, local entrepreneurs in Ontario, 1850—91, were in business together. By the end of the century, local business competition had succeeded in constructing a series of regional urban hierarchies, and entrepreneurs wore their towns' badges of success or failure. It was this context, a local context that reflected each town's regional position, that gave shape to businessmen's collective sense of themselves and their place within an emerging middle class.1 In Canadian business history, two main themes dominate the period of competitive capitalism. Late-Victorian Ontario was host to the "transition": the shift from artisanal production to early industrial manufacture. In latenineteenth-century Ontario, units of production became larger and more centralized, and labour-saving machinery was introduced to speed up production and make products more uniform. In the same era, revolutionary changes in commerce took place. New forms of product supply and distri-

29

Enterprise and Middle-Class Formation

bution — namely, the department store and mail-order merchandising — began to supplant the traditional position of wholesale merchandising and local retail distribution.2 Neither of these processes, of course, was a smooth, uniform transition; nor did they take root with equal effect in every locale. Ontario towns experienced industrialization and the merchandising revolution in varying measures. Many elements of the nineteenth-century business world, moreover, remained mostly untouched by transformations in industry and commerce. In the era of competitive capitalism, the most common models of enterprise were not the large factory and the department store but local production, retail for local consumption, and the small, family-run business. Gait and Goderich, 1850—91, were entrepreneurial arenas in which many of these elements were in play. Businessmen in these towns had in common a principally local focus, an orientation toward small-scale firms, and a competitive outlook. In other ways they were markedly different. In structure, "character," and collective identity and strategy, the business middle classes of Gait and Goderich took different forms, possessed different strengths, and played different roles in the formation of their respective local middle classes. Structurally, the business sectors of Gait and Goderich in these years could not have been more different. "Gait," Bixby's Industries of Canada remarked in 1890, "has been well named the 'Manchester of Canada,' for its manufactures are many and varied." Manufacturing was the most dynamic sector of the local economy throughout the late Victorian period, although the town also maintained its early position as a regional service and market centre to an agricultural hinterland. The swift-moving Grand River supplied ample power for the earliest manufacturing establishments, and by the mid-i84os Gait was already a place "fast rising into prosperity," boasting grist and saw mills, cloth factories, distilleries, pail and last factories, a brewery, a tannery, and a plethora of artisan shops. The arrival of the Great Western Railway in 1854 fuelled the town's industrial growth by connecting Gait producers with Hamilton, Toronto, Montreal, and various export markets, as well as points west. The arrival of a branch of the Grand Trunk in 1875 and of the Credit Valley Railway in 1879 (by 1883, incorporated into the Canadian Pacific Railway network) exacerbated earlier trends. In the i86os, textiles and machine and tool manufacture surpassed grist- and timbermilling as the most dynamic local sectors.3 Railway connection encouraged Gait entrepreneurs to specialize in manufactures. The number of local industrial establishments grew from seventy-four in 1871 to 162 in 1891, and the amount of capital invested in local manufacturing in the same period nearly tripled. For every mercantile

30

Work, Authority, and the Middle Class

establishment in Gait in 1881, nearly one and one-half manufacturing establishments were in place.4 A few of these became noticed across Canada in the i86os as leaders in industrial production, expansion, and innovation. The most prominent example was the steam-driven Goldie & McCulloch foundry, which produced engines, boilers, safes, and mill-gearing for national and international markets, regularly employing 160 workmen. By the i88os, its workshops occupied a whole town block, 300 by 450 feet and three stories high, and regularly employed over 200 hands. Places like Goldie & McCulloch, however, were clearly exceptional in their mercurial rise. Even by the i88os, the majority of merchants and manufacturers in Gait had operations little bigger and not much more complex than those they had had in the 18505. In Gait, continuity coexisted comfortably with changes in business size and sophistication in these years.5 Continuity, much more than change, characterized the nature of enterprise in Goderich in the forty years before 1891. In the middle decades of the century, Goderich was a regional agricultural centre, a lakeport significant for its budding commercial fishery and shipping trade, and home to a considerable range of artisanal production. In the 18505 and 6os, Goderich seemed poised for economic expansion. Settlers flocked into the Huron Tract, and, W.H. Smith noted in 1852, "as most of these go by Goderich, and ... make purchases in the place ... Goderich merchants are beginning to reap the advantage." The arrival of the Buffalo and Lake Huron Railway in 1858 promised economic success, locals believed, and to honour their bright future they organized a huge celebration attended by the Governor and noteworthy enough to have been reported in the London (England) Illustrated Times. "Goderich is bound to be a stirring place," one townsperson predicted in 1858, "being a terminus."6 Elevated on a bluff and exposed to the lake breeze, Goderich developed a reputation in the 18505 and 6os as a particularly healthful place, and after railway connection was made the town's prospects as a summer resort for respectable travellers looked promising. The discovery of a pure form of salt in Goderich in 1866 added to these predictions hope for an industrial future. Salt mining drew men with capital, like "Baltimore gentleman" Henry Attrill and Montreal flour millers William Ogilvie and Matthew Hutchison. By the mid-iSyos, twelve salt blocks were in operation in Goderich and the immediate area, producing about 2,500 barrels of salt per day. "[T]he discovery of salt," one contemporary noted, "elevated Goderich from the ranks of commonplace country towns ... to a commercial prominence. "7 That prominence, however, was shortlived. By the i88os, economic points of promise for Goderich had begun to collapse on a number of

31

Enterprise and Middle-Class Formation

fronts. Goderich's geographic "natural advantage" turned to disadvantage because the swift-moving Maitland River regularly silted in the Goderich harbour. Local efforts to dredge the harbour proved costly to the town and county and bothersome to the federal government. Moreover, by the i86os the railway, a lifeline for so many towns in Ontario, had begun to drain the life from export trade in Goderich. "The railroad ruined Goderich commercially," Robina and Kathleen Macfarlane Lizars lamented in 1896. "Goderich was the seaport town for Clinton, Seaforth and Stratford — towns then only on the map. The farmers from these places brought in their produce for shipment and dealt at stores. The station at Clinton cut us off from this trade."8 After 1870, the line to Goderich became incorporated into the Grand Trunk, but only as a feeder line to the more pivotal terminus of Sarnia. Similarly, in the lake trade, Goderich lost position to Sarnia and Collingwood, places more strategically located on Lake Huron. Finally, despite gradual growth, manufactures in Goderich never really took off in either the size or scope of their operations. The town's potential boom industries, salt and fishing, were prevented from producing full benefit locally, contemporaries argued, by the reconstruction of tariff walls in the United States after 1866. The number of manufacturing establishments declined from eighty-six in 1871 to fifty-nine in 1891, and the total capital invested in the town remained at an unpromisingly low level throughout these years.9 Despite similar beginnings, enterprise in Gait outstripped its counterpart in Goderich. Business grew faster in Gait than Goderich beginning in the 18705, and especially so in the following decade. Moreover, from mid-century on, industrial production in Gait became concentrated and mechanized, as the increasing levels of capital investment indicate. Goderich's industrial profile, on the other hand, even in 1891, remained more traditionally diffuse and artisanal.10 But why? Were new men with new capital the source of Gait's growth? Was the capital that left Goderich never replaced? The answers to these questions are simple but curious: yes, and no. The profiles of persisters for Gait and Goderich in these years are surprisingly similar. Over two-fifths of the business class remained in each town throughout the decades 1871-81 and 1881—91, and about one-fifth throughout the years 1871—91, figures significantly larger than those recorded for other whole town populations in the Victorian era.11 In this period of emigration in Canada, significant numbers of merchants and especially manufacturers stayed put in Gait and Goderich or returned to take up familiar pursuits after short ventures west. Rates of persistence and transiency, then, do not explain the different degrees of success that the business classes of Gait and Goderich experienced.

32

Work, Authority, and the Middle Class

Beyond persistence, geographic advantage, and transportation, what separated the business communities in these two towns were other, nonstructural factors. Character and circumstance gave unique shape to the thoughts and activities — the occupational identity - of the business classes in Gait and Goderich. In Gait, businessmen pursued their interests collectively and authoritatively, convincingly equating the welfare of the town with the welfare of their individual enterprises. Moreover, Gait businessmen seem to have faced and overcome more challenges to their authority, forging, in the process, a sense of common pursuit. In Goderich, businessmen (both individually and collectively) lacked the verve of their counterparts in Gait. The business classes of Gait and Goderich were distinguished from one another by collective character. In the minds of contemporaries, the state of local economic affairs provided some indication of the character of the business middle class. Journalists and travellers in the Victorian period equated the success or failure of local trade as much with the collective abilities of businessmen as with each town's geographic attributes, available capital, or ready labour supply. How business was done locally helped to define the identities of the local business classes in Gait and Goderich. Victorian commentators gauged the character of local business classes using a vocabulary familar to readers of Samuel Smiles or Horatio Alger. Ideal businessmen were "energetic," "pushing," "close," and "attentive." To be decried were those entrepreneurs who were lazy, "tricky," "arbitary," irresponsible, and recklessly speculative.12 Commentators projected these individual ideals upon whole classes of businessmen, and these descriptions of the character of the local entrepreneurial class gave meaning to membership in its ranks. By these gauges, Gait businessmen measured well. Conversely, the conservatism of Goderich entrepreneurs was seen to hinder development and explain a sleepy local economy. The character of the local business class was a recurrent theme in newspaper editorials throughout the Victorian era. Gait businessmen had ability and seem to have captured the allegiance of the community. Gait businessmen, especially manufacturers, were cast as some of the most progressive entrepreneurs of the era. It was true, commentators admitted, that Gait was blessed with both proximity to markets and natural water power, but only the right sort of businessmen could make them work. "These facilities have been turned to excellent account by an industrious, intelligent, energetic set of men, such as any town may well be proud to number among its foremost citizens," an observer from Toronto's The Liberal remarked in 1875.13 Inasmuch as entrepreneurs' interests and the public interest intersected, Gait businessmen, moreover, were well-supported by their townsmen. In the

33

Enterprise and Middle-Class Formation

Victorian era, the local focus of enterprise produced for some a feeling of common interest in Gait between businessmen and the larger community. " [It is] imperative that we should sustain our own merchants to the utmost of our ability," the Reformer noted in 1858, "as they in all times stand by us." The fortunes of businessmen and the community were seen by some to be inextricable. "The welfare of the community is much dependent on the success of ... all enterprising manufacturers; prosperity and adversity mutually affect them; their losses must to some extent be shared by all, while their gains are never allowed to lie rusting and unproductive in an iron chest, but are so much extra capital wherewith business may be extended, population attracted and society benefitted. "H This allegiance had an important bearing on the form and leadership of the local middle class. Entrepreneurs in Gait were "representative men," models to be emulated and celebrated. Their success in business qualified them as community leaders; their power in the economic arena translated into moral authority and social power in public matters. Their success provided them with an identity worth preserving. It meant something to be an entrepreneur in the "Manchester of Canada." Conversely, Goderich businessmen were depicted by contemporaries as singularly complacent in enterprise and lacking in "public spirit." They were overly cautious and tentative, an impression that did little to inspire confidence in them as a group worth following. The great promise that the town possessed in the 18505 and 6os had become a missed opportunity by the 18705, largely because Goderich businessmen lacked entrepreneurial character. "We are sorry to have to say it," the Huron Signal noted in April 1872, "[b]ut we are fully convinced of the fact that for want of enterprise and business energy the merchants of Goderich, with a few exceptions, will carry off the palm as against any other town or village in Canada."15 More objective and, perhaps, more damning were visitors' comments about the character of local enterprise in Goderich. A correspondent from the St. Louis Daily Times offered a double-edged remark in July 1877: "This town of Goderich is probably the sleepiest and most restful place at present existing on the face of our planet." The author of the town's description in the Historical Atlas of Huron County (1879) noted less than charitably: "if its present aspect is ever to be discarded for that of prosperous activity, we must look to the enterprise of the rising generation to effect the transformation."16 If the character of local entrepreneurs in Gait helped to place its local business class in a position of social strength, in Goderich businessmen were less prominent. There, professionals, not entrepreneurs, were the most respected occupational group and leaders in the formation of a middle class.

34 Work, Authority, and the Middle Class

In structure and character, enterprise in Gait and Goderich, 1850—91, comprised two different worlds. There was, however, a third element contributing to the formation of a business class in these towns: collective identity, or the organization of business interests into coherent, purposeful strategies. The business classes in Gait and Goderich were distinct in the ways they organized collectively for protection and profit. Individualism and competition - the mythic mainstays of nineteenth-century entrepreneurialism - had their limits in practice. Their effects could be too destructive in an economy prone to boom and bust. When necessary, businessmen cast these ideals aside in favour of collectivism and regulated competition. Historians of business in Victorian Canada have examined the emergence of a "protective impulse" among businessmen province- and nation-wide. But the protective impulse was evident among businessmen in local contexts as well, and the efforts of middle-class businessmen to protect their interests against the constraints and challenges inherent to local trade and production is a chapter of business history of considerable import. In Gait and Goderich in the latter half of the nineteenth century, entrepreneurs faced common constraints and formulated collective strategies to deal with the vagaries of business life. One result of these efforts was the emergence of a common identity among local businessmen. The strength of that identity, of course, was neither the same everywhere nor equally salient across the entire era.17 Businessmen in Gait and Goderich faced several common constraints in conducting enterprise in the late nineteenth century. It is possible to conceive of these constraints as comprising two sorts: first, infrequent obstacles that could threaten their success and even their livelihoods; and second, systemic challenges that helped to shape more deeply their collective consciousness as members of the local middle class. The first category of obstacles existed in relatively equal measure for businessmen in Gait and Goderich alike and prompted collective response. The omnipresent threat that fire posed to enterprise in the late nineteenth century pushed local merchants and manufacturers to organize municipal fire brigades and volunteer salvage corps and motivated the purchase of fire insurance from provincial and national companies whose local representatives dotted the provincial map. Burglary posed another, perhaps less menacing, threat, though one that business property owners in the towns were concerned enough about that they called for the public appointment of night watchmen and increased policing service. Concern over the value of American silver currency circulating in Ontario in the i86os also affected Gait and Goderich businessmen. In both towns collective agreements were sought among mer-

35

Enterprise and Middle-Class Formation

chants to ensure that they did not undersell one another by offering different rates of valuation. Finally, peddling, or huckstering, was a periodic nuisance to sedentary merchants in Gait and Goderich who relied upon long-term arrangements for supply and counted on local markets. A similar concern emerged among woollens manufacturers in Gait whose country wool supplies were raided, periodically, by itinerant traders who made their profits by "shopping" raw wool around to interested industrial buyers in different regional towns and cities.18 More central to the emergence of a collective identity among entrepreneurs were systemic constraints in business. Two of these were of particular importance in shaping local class boundaries. Insecurity surrounding the extra-local supply of credit to entrepreneurs helped to create a local bond of sympathy among businessmen and a resentment of external control. As importantly, local entrepreneurs shared a common environment of worker protest: enterpreneurial identity was shaped by local relations between labour and capital. These factors pushed businessmen in Gait and Goderich to organize their interests, formally and informally, as a class. Credit in nineteenth-century Ontario, Michael Katz has written, was a "tissue of connectives ... [involving] elaborate patterns of dependence [within] regions, and indeed ... throughout the Atlantic world."19 In an environment where currency was scarce, credit was a necessary element in the province's early economy. Credit relations were uncertain, and they created a peculiar dynamic between suppliers and recipients. Merchants and manufacturers were the pivotal men; in addition to needing credit to stock their shelves and finance their operations, many were forced to extend credit to their cash-strapped customers. Merchants also faced the threat of absconders and confidence men throughout this period. Businessmen were pinched from both ends, and constantly performed a sort of juggling act to balance the two. But the constraints involved in securing credit and extending it to others helped to foster a sense of common fate among businessmen in a particular locale. Credit relations helped to frame a common perspective among local businessmen in towns like Gait and Goderich in the midVictorian era. Most important in shaping local business identities were the relationships formed between extra-local sources of credit and local merchants, the top half of the credit-supply pyramid in Victorian Ontario. Businessmen in this era had a number of sources of credit at their disposal. Family and private investors and local banks were perhaps the most frequently used of these sources and, unfortunately, the ones about which historians know least. Large wholesale houses were another main source about whose credit

36 Work, Authority, and the Middle Class

networks only fragmentary information survives. The most systematic evidence of nineteenth-century credit comes not from creditors or recipients themselves but from credit-rating agencies like the New York-based Mercantile Agency, which, through its network of local agents, attempted to provide creditors with details of the creditworthiness of every identifiable business firm in North America.20 The criteria for credit supply was altered significantly in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As David G. Burley has shown for Brantford, in the aftermath of the 1857 depression the standards for creditworthiness among businessmen shifted from those based solely on personal character traits (industry, thrift, sobriety, morality) toward those determined by business ability, means, and longevity. In the Mercantile Agency's records for businessmen in Gait and Goderich, this pattern is notable. "JW & Company" of Gait was evaluated in March 1857 simply as "young ... very attentive & cautious & likely to do well. Good for a reasonable sum," but by July 1865 more financial detail had been provided. "Careful close businessmen. Doing a fair business but not losing or gaining much. Show a nominal surplus of say $12000 which, after deducting for contingencies would say is worth $6000 to $8000 all in [the] business." The entry for 1876 mentions nothing about the proprietors' personal character. Personal habits, important to creditors in the 18505, had declined in importance by the following decade for Goderich businessmen as well. General merchants "JVD & Son" were deemed "perfectly good" in 1857, presumably because they were "good businessmen of good character & habits & as honest as the Sun." Conversely, merchant "JW" was noted in 1862 as "fond of a 'bit on the sly' (his wife to use his own expression having pegged out)." "This," the agent was careful to point out, "does not interfere with business," and as "JW" did a large business and had valuable property, he should be "considered abundantly good." Determining creditworthiness was hardly an exact science, especially after the 18505 when the growth of and mobility among business communities made it difficult to accurately depict the strength and likely success of local businessmen.21 Along with credit supply came, in some measure, external control. Extralocal suppliers of loans and goods on credit watched the progress of local merchants, manufacturers, and artisans carefully and could at any time pull the rug out from underneath local enterprise. If, as sometimes occurred, wholesale houses fell unexpectedly, local merchants tied up in their credit fell with them. "We are informed," the Mercantile Agency's local agent reported of "F & R," Gait merchants and woollens manufacturers in 1857, that "they suffered somewhat by the heavy failure of'Holt & Co' of Dundas

37 Enterprise and Middle-Class Formation

some months ago." Even in normal times, taking goods from a wholesaler on credit could mean dependence and subordination in daily business decisions. "WHJ," a Gait dry goods merchant, was reportedly controlled by Buchanan, Harris & Company of Hamilton, which had "no doubt a large stake in him." Another Gait merchant, "CCC," was recorded as a "decent man, but thought to be altogether in BH & Go's hands." In Goderich similar relationships governed the supply of local credit. Merchant "GHP" was in 1861 "indebted to Tyre, Colquhoun & Company, Montreal," a relationship that left his business "under a cloud." "SP," a miller, was in 1862 "paying up ... Waterman & Buell of Albany & Gillespie & Moffatt & Co. of Montreal." Finally, general store owner "WEG," though a "sharp, shrewd, keen business man" with good credit was in 1861 completely in the hands of Buchanan, Harris & Company, "his only creditors."22 The relationship between creditors and local businessmen was manifestly unequal and increasingly impersonal. Businessmen themselves had no means of contributing to this process or influencing their "grade." A corps of anonymous and local credit reporters cast judgment on virtually every entrepreneurs creditworthiness. One result of this dynamic was considerable local resentment towards the pinnacle of the credit pyramid and their agents and the development of an insular, protective attitude among local businessmen. The Mercantile Agency, and other establishments like it, the Reformer noted in 1866, employed underhanded and inefficient methods of securing information on the creditworthiness of local entrepreneurs. "Too much of it, it [was] believed, [was] obtained through a disgraceful home spy system" that produced uneven and unfair impressions. "[T]he institution ... has taken too wide a field for its operations - has taken upon itself more work than it can do and perform well." By 1868, Gait merchants had been enticed to join the Merchants' Protective Union, an alternative creditrating service based upon local businessmen's own reporting of their credit, capital, and trade conditions. But the MPU did not last long, and the regime of secrecy and confidentiality in credit rating survived with the Mercantile Agency into the twentieth century.23 Local entrepreneurs relied on good relations with extra-local credit suppliers, and there were few viable local alternatives. In Goderich, two local loan societies were formed by capitalists in this era. The Huron District Building Society was in existence in the 18405, 505, and 6os, and among its managers were former Canada Company administrators Thomas Mercer Jones and William Bennett Rich. In the late i88os, buoyed by a revival of area investment, the Huron and Bruce Loan and Investment Company was established, managed by one-time saddler, speculator, and mayor Horace

38

Work, Authority, and the Middle Class

Horton. The HBLI lasted into the twentieth century, and a surviving letterbook reveals that, while the majority of its business involved loans for private land purchases, some of its lending went toward entrepreneurial real estate and merchant stock.24 These sources, however, could hardly have provided for all or even most of the needs of the local entrepreneurial community. For many, the frustrations of uncertain, impersonal relations with suppliers of extra-local credit were a necessary constraint to be endured. These relations, however, were important in framing the outlooks of entrepreneurs and emphasizing the local context of their work and common plight. The relations between labour and capital that emerged in Gait and Goderich were just as influential as credit in shaping local business identities. In this realm, the two business communities again parted company. In Gait, 1850-91, increasing plant and workforce sizes and the introduction of labour-saving machinery ushered in the problems of the modern, industrial era. As in other urbanizing and industrializing locales throughout North America, there emerged in Gait a chasm between owners and workers notable for its breadth. As enterprise in manufactures flourished, businessmen in Gait got richer and the socioeconomic distance between them and their employees broadened. "Gait is the wealthiest manufacturing town in the Dominion," one Waterloo County directory noted as early as 1869, "and ... the amount of capital invested in various branches of industry is only exceeded by a few of the larger cities." Even the use of physical space in Gait seemed by 1890 to emphasize real class differences. "Few places in the Dominion of Canada can boast of so favorable a location, and so much natural beauty as the Town of Gait. Situated on the slopes of that lovely valley, through which winds the placid waters of the Grand River, it presents a most striking and picturesque picture to the tourist. Stately homes, shady lawns and magnificent parks and gardens adorn the hills, while below, the hum of machinery, the substantial factories, and the troops of sturdy workmen bear witness to the prosperity and enterprise of its citizens." Above/below, leisure/industry, citizens/workmen: the juxtaposition of capital and labour in late nineteenthcentury Gait was striking indeed.25 The material reality of labouring families in Gait contrasted with that of their employers. "In the town where I was born and brought up," John Beattie Crozier recalled of i86os Gait, "pauperism was unknown, and my only experience of the tramp was the appearance once in several years." Pauperism, perhaps, was unknown in that young town, especially the kind that confronted Crozier when he left Canada for London, England, where he wrote his autobiography in the 18905. But poor there were in Gait - work-

39

Enterprise and Middle-Class Formation

ing poor — whose existences differed greatly from those of their employers, and this difference grew as Gait began its prosperous years in the 18705 and 8os. Workers in Gait, as in other Canadian towns, laboured long hours at insecure and sometimes dangerous jobs for low wages. "A good many girls between fourteen and eighteen years of age are employed," a correspondent to the provincial Bureau of Industries reported on Gait workshops and factories in 1889, "but the greater number of the female workers are over eighteen. Girls are forced to work chiefly on account of the fathers' wages being insufficient to keep the families." In this environment, the respective interests of workers, on one side, and owners, on the other, were acknowledged over time to be different and opposite and were articulated as such. In Gait, 1850—91, the producer ideology periodically gave way to episodes of industrial class conflict that gave shape to a local working-class consciousness and sharpened the local identity among businessmen.16 As early as the 18505, societies of local craftsmen were formed by workers for mutual protection, "charitable interests," and price regulation. Initially, these friendly societies sought amicable relations with employers and believed that presenting employers with "fair and just" (and infrequent) demands displayed reason, honour, and loyalty and ensured the success of their pleas. Employers in the 18505 and 6os were featured guests at workers' social events like the annual "Festival of Gait Operatives," as the Reformer reported in 1867. "[I]t is to be regretted that such meetings are not more frequent, as they would have a tendency to beget and foster those kindly, social feelings which ought to exist between employers and the employed."27 By the late i86os, however, feelings of amity and community had begun to wane. Gait's workforce had become large and anonymous and had outgrown the "personal" labour relations system that governed the earlier era. Between 1871 and 1881, Gait's manufacturing establishments declined in number from seventy-four to seventy-two, but the total number of industrial workers in town increased from 791 to 956, and the average workplace workforce grew from 9.3 to 13.2. By 1891,162 manufacturing establishments employed 1,698 workers; on average, 10.5 per workplace. These figures are deceiving, however. Most firms remained small in scale, with one or two employees, while the largest firms employed several dozen workers at once.28 The expansion of industry in this period brought large numbers of semiand unskilled workers into Gait factories, many of whom had little experience with and stake in the relations of mutual confidence. " [W]e go hand in hand with all classes in endeavoring to procure a just reward for labor," the Reformer portended, but "[w]e are averse to all combinations and unions which are organized for the purpose of depriving employers of the control

4O Work, Authority, and the Middle Class

of their own shops." But control over work and wages was, increasingly, exactly what Gait labourers began to seek. They sought more control as consumers as well. In addition to labour unions, Gait workers founded in 1866 a local Co-operative Society "for the benefit of the working classes" and a Co-operative Store where articles of daily consumption could be purchased for wholesale prices. Concerted and strengthened by their numbers, Gait workers had become by 1870 more militant than conciliatory, more demanders than supplicants.29 Labourers' demands for higher wages, safer conditions, and shorter hours became more urgent and forceful, and labour management more difficult. In the late i86os, Crozier was a clerk in a local foundry, "one of the largest establishments of the kind in the whole Dominion," and a witness to changing postures of capital and labour. "[T]he relations existing between the [workmen] and the foremen of the different shops ... were nearly always strained," he recalled in his autobiography, "and very generally bordering on a state of open antagonism. In some shops the men, wild, insubordinate, and as difficult to manage as Mexican mustangs, were constantly getting out of hand; work was in consequence neglected, and things going from bad to worse ... in the way of ... discipline." This mood affected more than Crozier's workplace. Gait workers took part in several work stoppages after 1870, a few of which were particularly prominent. Gait journeymen tailors struck for higher wages in October 1871, a symbol of the division of labour then beginning to segment that trade. Gait workers from several trades supported the nine-hour day movement in 1872. Thirty-one Gait iron moulders participated in the province-wide strike led by the Iron Moulders' Union for higher wages in 1889, eleven of whom were employed at the Goldie & McCulloch works.30 Militancy among workers in Gait was considerable. If average wage figures serve as a guide, Gait strikes seem to have met with some overall success. Between 1871 and 1881, Gait manufacturers increased their collective annual payroll from $226,843 to $336,274 and on average from $286.78 to $351.75 per worker. By 1891, manufacturers' total payroll had increased to $569,806, but average annual wages had dropped slightly to $335.57. The earliest conflicts may also have served as an object lesson of the potential strength that united workers could wield. By the mid-i88os, the working-class consciousness that emerged in local, craft-specific conflicts in the i86os and 705 had been transformed. By the later decade, working-class organization had begun to envelope all workers regardless of skill and had broadened in scope to an extra-local consciousness. "There is but one organisation," the Gait reporter to the Ontario Bureau of Industries for 1888 noted, "the Knights of Labor."31

4i

Enterprise and Middle-Class Formation

The decline of personal labour relations and the development of a local working-class consciousness in Gait was a matter of concern to local merchants and manufacturers, who seem to have clung tightly to the Victorian liberal entrepreneurial perspective that viewed wage labour as a series of individual contracts and the determination of work conditions as wholly a matter of employer control. "Can two persons, — neither of whom, singly, is possessed of a right to hinder me — by uniting, combining, associating, give existence to a conjunct right to do so?," one Christopher Crosscut asked sympathetically in the Reformer in 1853. "I answer decidedly no! ... The thing is naturally and forever impossible. Ev nihilo nihilfit, - is a great fact in the economy of nature. If neither Tom, Dick nor Harry, singly, has a right to hinder me to sell my arsenic, they never can by any possible union, combination, or association, call into existence a conjunct right to hinder me. Even should they multiply themselves a thousand fold, the mighty product of their effort would be three-thousand Nothings, — three thousand times No right to hinder me." Gait employers seem to have held fast to this perspective, even after the Trades Union Act of iS/i.32 Control over the workplace was decidedly not an area of compromise for Gait manufacturers, a fact that emerged in conflicts over work hours, pay, and union recognition. The agitation in 1872 for reducing the workday from ten to nine hours was firmly rejected by Gait industrialists. The experience at Goldie & McCulloch provides one example. In response to the agitation, the owners endorsed a circular from Ontario employers labelling the movement a recipe for decreasing home manufactures and raising the cost of living. In Gait, Goldie & McCulloch demanded that their employees sign yellow-dog contracts denouncing the agitators and pledging not to participate in the movement. When a committee of workers refused on behalf of the majority of foundrymen, the owners locked them out for one week. The issue subsided when the company substituted new, more acceptable shop rules for the contracts and about three-quarters of the workers returned. The ten-hour day, however, remained the norm both there and in other Gait manufactories throughout this period. "In the larger establishments," a Bureau of Industries correspondent noted of Gait workshops in 1889, "the gates are often locked, and there is only one way of getting into or out from the yard, generally past the timekeeper s office." Work discipline, moreover, extended beyond control of employees' hours. Goldie & McCulloch refused to negotiate a wage increase with representatives from the IMU in 1889, but were "perfectly willing to deal with individual men about their pay." When their moulders struck, the foundry owners immediately dismissed them and replaced them with workers brought in from Montreal.33

42. Work, Authority, and the Middle Class

By 1890, working-class organization in Gait had become an unavoidable, sometimes taxing, constraint upon enterprise. The strength of local working-class organization was a fact that Gait manufacturers could not deny, a cost of doing business that sharpened their awareness of the plight of their employees and called into question the producers' ideology. In Goderich, the material differences that separated workers from employers were not less apparent than in Gait. Work in the Goderich port, commercial fishery, and construction trades was largely seasonal, and winter brought hard times for many. Charitable organizations, both permanent and seasonal, attest to this fact. In Goderich, groups such as the Ladies' Benevolent Society served this constituency, and more temporary efforts like annual church Christmas collections helped the local working poor. By the i88os, poverty in Goderich had developed to an extent significant enough to warrant debate in the county and local councils over the need to establish a county House of Industry. Over time, the gap between labourer and owner was becoming wider, a fact that some contemporary commentators believed could be attributed to a new sense of greed and vanity and a willingness among businessmen to take entrepreneurial risks that jeopardized the livelihoods of many in the community beyond themselves. Respectability, not responsibility, was the order of the day among businessmen in Goderich, according to "A Working Man" writing in the Signal in May 1868. [T]hey forget that it is dishonest to contract debts that they can have no means to satisfy; they draw bills on the future and go it blind, no matter who pays the piper; their children must be educated in the highest boarding schools, they must give their champagne suppers; spend their time and money in tap rooms and billiard saloons, [and if their business fails] ... it was the hard times, or because the farmer's wheat got struck with the midge, still they must keep up appearance even at the expense of living dishonest [ly], and although they are not rich, yet they must appear to be so, they must be respectable, though only in the meanest sense in mere vulgar outward show ... men who dare to be dishonest, but do not dare to seem poor ... [T]he pity is not so much for those who fail as for the hundreds of unfortunate families they involve in their ruin.34

Behind the strength of working-class organization in Gait in these years was the consistent expansion of the local economy. In Goderich, economic growth was slower and more sporadic, and it continued to rely on mercantile pursuits and craft-based manufacturing throughout this era. Unlike industrial Gait, the pressures of larger workforces in larger workplaces did not appear in Goderich to any great extent. Between 1871 and 1891 (the years of

43 Enterprise and Middle-Class Formation

Gaits mercurial rise), the number of manufacturing establishments in Goderich declined from eighty-six to fifty-nine, and the total number of manufacturing employees from 429 to 286. Goderich had neither Gait's novel work organization and labour-saving machinery nor its unprecedented numbers of workers under one roof. The average number of employees per workshop rose from 3.8 in 1871 to 4.9 in 1891, a characteristically artisanal size.35 In Goderich, industrialization did not serve as a catalyst of working-class formation before 1891. Labour/employer conflicts in mid-Victorian Goderich were narrow, singleissue, shortlived, and local affairs that did not provide a basis for any crosscraft alliance or extra-local identity. Craft unions in Goderich organized later and had much narrower aims than those in Gait. References to unions in this era are few, and no local public record cites a workers' organization in existence before 1870. Afterwards, the organizations that emerged were craft specific and had almost invariably only one immediate goal - increased wages. "We were all surprised yesterday," the editor of the Signal wrote in June 1870, "to see a strange procession of some 30 men marching down West street... it was a strike of the Coopers. It seems, they want an advance of one cent on each square headed barrel made and two cents on the round heads." Other Goderich strikes were less demonstrative and simply involved the withdrawal of labour. The piece hands in Goderich shoe shops, desiring better wages, "failed to turn up" one day in April 1883 until their demands were met. More problematical, at least in the eyes of one local editor, were longshoremen and trimmers working in the Goderich port. "The longshoremen of Goderich are a very independent class." Offered $1.50 per day to unload a lake vessel in July 1879, and separate spheres, 151,152—5; and voluntary associations, 107 gentlemen. See gentry gentry, 20-2,51,100,101 Gibson, Agnes, 144 Giddens, Anthony, u, 14,15, 171. See also structuration Gilkeson, John, 13 Goderich Band of Hope, 144 Goderich Board of Trade, 467, 48, 87,184; and "bonusing," 47; and Citizens' Railway Committee, 48; and Detroit Convention on Free Trade, 46; and town beautification, 168 Goderich Commercial Academy, 81 Goderich Courthouse, 5, 6,141 Goderich Horticultural Society, 105,108 Goderich Literary Society, 124 Goderich Temperance and Prohibitory League, 146 Goderich Temperance Association, 143 Goldie, John, 24, 88,168,194. See also Goldie & McCulloch Goldie & McCulloch, 30, 40, 41, 88, 89,194 Good Templars, Independent Order of, in Gait 135,142; in Goderich, 135,143 Gough, John B., 140, 143 Graham, Rev. James, 145 Grand Trunk Railway, 4, 29, 163 Great Western Railway, 4, 29, 88 Green, Gavin, 22,178 Gretton, R.H., n Hall, Catherine, 107, in Hamilton, Dr Morgan, 64 Hamilton (Canada West/Ontario), 10, 88,125 Hay, Peter, 24 Hogan, J. Sheridan, 16 Holt, Philip, 168

241

Index

Home Knowledge Association (Goderich), 165 homeopathy. See physicians Horlick, Allan, 77 Horton, Horace, 37-8 huckstering. See peddling Huffman, P.G., 132 Huron and Bruce Loan and Investment Company, 37—8, 87 Huron County House of Industry, 109 Huron District Building Soci-

ety, 37 Huron Gaol (Goderich), 5, 6 Huron Law Association, 56 Huron Medical Association, 64-5 Huron Tract, 30,131 Husband, Dr George Edmund, 61 industrialization, 3, 6—7,10, 28, 173; and class polarization, 38-42; in Gait, 180; in Goderich, 5,180; and whitecollar work, 96; and work order, 25—7 Iron Hall, Order of the, 115, 120 Iron Moulders' Union, 40, 41 Irvine, Rev. Dr Robert, 68 James, Rev. John, 68 Jones, Thomas Mercer, 21, 37 Katz, Michael, 12, 35,176 Kerr, James, 165-6 Klotz, Otto, 118,119,120 Knights of Labor, 40 Knights of the Maccabee, 115 Knights Templar, 108 labour. See working class Ladies' Aid societies, 109—10, 111—14 Ladies' Association in Connection with Miss Macpherson's Boys Home, 112 Ladies' Association in Relief of the Poor (Gait), 112 Ladies' Benevolent Society, 42, 111—3,12°

Ladies' Sewing Circle (Gait), 123 Lancaster, Dr Joseph J., 61 Law Society of Upper Canada, 52' 53' 55> 56,130; and law clerks, 82,192 lawyers, 50—9; in Gait, 50—6; in Goderich, 56—9; and law clerks, 82 literary and debating societies, 121,123-7; and temperance, 133 literary societies. See literary and debating societies Lewis, Edward Norman, 57 Lizars, Robina and Kathleen Macfarlane, 31, 72 Lockwood, David, 90 McAdam, J.T., 78, 91-2 Macara, John, 58-9,192 McCulloch, Hugh 24,168. See also Goldie & McCulloch McDonald, Robert, 8 McDougal, Dr Peter, 64 Mcllwraith, Andrew, 87, 8890,127,194 MacKid, Rev. Alexander, 72,73 McLachlan, William, 134,136 McLean, Dr Thomas E, 64 Macleod, David, 125 McLeod, John M., 65-6,188 McQueen, Thomas, 21 Maine Law. See temperance reform manufacturers. See businessmen manufacturing. See industrialization Marks, Lynne, 8,103 Marwood, George Langdale, 166 masculinity, 107,152-3, 163, 165-6 Mathew, Theobald, 132 Mayer, Arno J., 12 mechanics. &•d municipal elections, 101-3, 196 Stearns, Peter, 98 Strang, Rev. James, 68 structuration, n, 14, 171 Sutherland, Rev. Donald G., 70-1 tariffs, 31, 49,170,182 Tassie, William, 165—6 Tassie Grammar School. See Gait Collegiate Institute temperance halls, 6, 98,132, 135.150 temperance reform, 129,130— 49; and antislavery, 132,134;

and children, 140—3; in Gait, 132,135,141-3,145-7, 204, 206; in Goderich, 132, 135,145—7, 2°4> 2O7; an(i local licensing, 137—8,145, 206; and moral suasion, 136—7,144,147; and prohibition, 136-7,144-7; an(i social class, 136,140,144, 205, 208; and women, 134, 139-44 Templeton-Armstrong, Mrs, 140 Thompson, E.P., 11-14 Thompson, William, 134 tourism (Goderich) 5, Trades Union Act (1872), 41,183 Traill, Catherine Parr, 16,160 Turk, Rev. G.R., 156 unionization. See working class United States Trade Consul, Goderich, 27 United Temperance Association (Gait), 142 United Workmen, Ancient Order of, 115,119 Ure, Rev. Dr Robert, 72—3 "Victorianism," 106 voluntary associations, 98, 105—29. See also charity, fraternalism, self-improvement Wacquant, Loic, 12,13 Wadsworth, H.H., 91 Wallace, William G., 154 Waterloo County House of Industry, 109 Waterloo County Law Association, 55 Waterloo County Medical Association, 63—4 Waterloo County Temperance Association, 146 wealthy. See gentry Weatherald, John, 91 Weaver, John C., 8, 103 Webber, William, 166-7 Western Prohibitory League, 146

243

Index

Westfall, William, 66 White, John, 159 white-collar workers, 27, 75— 96; and collective organization, 90—5; and commercial education, 81-2,192; demography, 83-6; in government, 83; and mechanization 76, 80, 96; mercantile 8082; in the professions, 82. See also women Wilks, Matthew, 21 Willie, Richard, 74 Wilson, Cornelius, 148—9, 208 Wilson, D.D., 146

women, as consumers, 95; in fraternal lodge auxiliaries, 117—18; and municipal elections, 196; and poor relief, 111-14,129> X98; and self-improvement societies, 122-3; and separate spheres doctrine, 98, in, 129,153-5,163; and temperance reform, 139—44; an(l voluntary associations, 107; and white-collar work, 76, 78, 80, 96,195; and work 9, 24, 25. Women's Christian Temperance Union, 142,144

work ethic. See producer ideology working class, 7—10, 38,100; and municipal elections, 103; and unionization 39—44,184

Young, James, 131,148,154,168 Young Men's Christian Association, 121,123—8; and commercial education, 125; in Gait, 81; in Goderich, 73 Young Women's Christian Association, 123—4 Young Women's Christian Temperance Union, 143,144