Girard, Philip

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

Histoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXVIII, no 76 (novembre-November 2005)Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 535By the 1880s or 1890s the creation of the transcontinental Dominion, the partial set-tlement of and assertion of control over western Canada, the arrival of railways, andgrowing economic ties to the United States had created quite a different Canada.Indeed, the rather disappointing years from the Riel rebellion to the new prosperity atthe turn of the century begs to be seen as a period of calm, albeit disappointing calm,between two quite dynamic eras.There is another and very broad interpretive issue to be considered. On one sideNelles is writing a primer on Canadian history for a general audience. He says thathe wants his book to give Canadians and travellers “a concise overview” of the basicelements of our history. On the other side, he says explicitly that this is a “personalinterpretation, not a textbook” (p. ix) These comments are somewhat contradictoryand reflect a degree of tension within the book. At times the work is refreshinglyinterpretive and has moments of rhetoric that are both iconoclastic and irreverent.The great hero Wolfe is more or less dismissed. The Winnipeg general strike “setback the organized labour movement in Canada by a generation” (p. 169). Evenechoes of Creightonian distrust of the United States appear from time to time. Atother times it has the characteristics of a text, covering the required facts with mini-mal comment, little anecdote, and fairly routine attention.Most of all, in a personal interpretation of Canadian history, it would have beenrefreshing if Nelles had given us his sense of what Canada is all about. Nelles has acareer of distinguished research and teaching. In these years he, like all of us, hasconfronted the many interpretations, myths, and clichés about our nation. We havebeen called the peaceable kingdom, the great multicultural experiment, the domin-ion of the north, and the conservative reaction to republican excess. We are crato-philes to our neighbour’s cratophobia and we are the helpful fixers, the nation thatwas carpentered rather than forged, and so forth. Comment on these myths and, ulti-mately, on what, aside from change itself, Nelles sees as the essence of Canadawould have taken the author out on a limb, but it would also have added much to thehistory.Broad interpretations invite broad comment. In making mine, however, I do notwant the most fundamental conclusion to be missed. This book is a real success anda valuable contribution to the reworking of Canadian history.Doug OwramUniversity of AlbertaOLIVER, Peter (ed.) — The Conventional Man: The Diaries of Ontario Chief JusticeRobert A. Harrison, 1859–1878. Toronto: University of Toronto Press for theOsgoode Society, 2003. Pp. xii, 644. A social historian running across the title of this volume in a list of new acquisitionswould not likely linger on it more than a second or two, just long enough to decidewhether or not to suppress an incipient yawn. The cover, with its portrait of the portlydiarist in full judicial regalia, quill pen poised to sign some no doubt impenetrable536 Histoire sociale / Social HistoryHistoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXVIII, no 76 (novembre-November 2005)legal document, seems only to confirm the impression gained from the title. On closerinspection, however, the cover contains some visual clues that render the portrait lessthe confident portrayal of an eminent Victorian at the height of his powers, and moreof a Lytton Stracheyesque deconstruction. The painting is a study in sinuosity and dis-order, from the rich folds of the background drapery, to the parchment curling off thejudge’s writing table, to the extravagantly carved S-shaped legs of that table and thecurvaceous chair supporting the judge’s considerable bulk. Beside him, a large booklies carelessly open in an A-shape on the floor, spine in the air, pages awkwardly bentbeneath the weight of the cover, as if thrown down by its user in a fit of petulance.Chief Justice Harrison stares defiantly, impatiently, at the viewer, interrupted, itseems, in the midst of an important task. Unbeknownst to him, much more importantthan any of his official duties, which left no discernible trace to posterity, was themaintenance of his diary. Through it, claims editor Peter Oliver, “we are enabled toenter in an extended way into the intellectual, spiritual, physical and emotional life ofa man who died almost a century and a half ago”, rendering the diary “one of the mostremarkable documents of its type to survive from Victorian Canada” (p. 6). Thisreviewer wholeheartedly agrees with this assessment. The exegesis of women’s dia-ries is almost a cottage industry in historical circles. Where, however, is the journalintime of a male figure to set aside those penned by women in such profusion? CharlesRitchie and Mackenzie King stand virtually alone on this particular shelf in the libraryof Canadian letters.The tension between the public and the private Harrison displayed in the cover por-trait is amply documented in the diary itself, which provides a rare look at the privateturmoil swirling beneath the public façade of this confident Victorian jurist. Far frombeing a dry record of writs issued, clients defended, and thanks tendered to the deityfor his ever-increasing material and professional success, Harrison’s diary recordsprimarily the highs and lows of his personal life — relations with his wives, children,parents, siblings, in-laws, and friends — along with reflections on his own triumphsand shortcomings, and miscellaneous observations about servants, clergymen, enter-tainments, and daily life in general. There is surprisingly little about politics and pub-lic affairs, and entries about Harrison’s legal work are rather perfunctory, thoughoccasionally spiced with pungent comments on judges and juries. If Harrison is con-ventional in many of his attitudes, as editor Oliver notes, he is seldom uninteresting— though in editing out some 70 per cent of the original for publication Oliver has nodoubt excised most of the tedious bits.Born in 1833 in Montreal to parents who had immigrated to Canada from North-ern Ireland, young Robert moved with his family to Toronto as a child. He excelledat Upper Canada College, took up articles with a law firm at the age of 16, and laterstudied for a degree in civil law at Bishop Strachan’s new University of Trinity Col-lege. One of his principals, John Hawkins Hagarty, later became chief justice of thecourt of Queen’s Bench, reflecting “Harrison’s unerring instinct to attach himself tothe rising stars of the profession” (p. 4). The timing of Harrison’s parents could nothave been better. Their son’s professional horizons expanded with the wheat boomand the relentless proliferation of the railways in mid-century southern Ontario, asToronto and its hinterland experienced rapid commercial development. HarrisonHistoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXVIII, no 76 (novembre-November 2005)Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 537easily straddled the roles of solicitor and advocate, advising large financial institu-tions such as the Royal Canadian Bank but also carrying on a large and diverse liti-gation practice. The railway allowed Harrison to follow the court circuits around theprovince with some ease as he appeared in everything from seduction actions tomurder trials to complex commercial litigation.First, though, Harrison gained invaluable exposure to the inner workings of gov-ernment. Shortly after being called to the bar in 1855, he became chief clerk in theCrown law office — in effect, attorney-general John A. Macdonald’s “first secre-tary”. When the government moved to Quebec in 1859, Harrison moved into privatepractice with the security of having been appointed the attorney-general’s agent inToronto. There he remained until his appointment as chief justice of Ontario in Sep-tember 1875, though he also served one term in the new Canadian parliament (1867–1872). Oliver asserts that Harrison was probably the busiest lawyer in Canada Westin his heyday, with the possible exception of Matthew Crooks Cameron. His brilliantreputation overcame even the obstacle of partisanship: in a highly unusual move, itwas the Liberal government of Alexander Mackenzie that appointed the ConservativeHarrison to the bench. Unfortunately Harrison’s judicial career was cut short afteronly three years: he died in office at the age of 45, apparently of heart disease.The joys and sorrows of family life occupy equal space in Harrison’s diary withhis career. What strikes the reader immediately is the omnipresence of death in theVictorian home. Between the ages of 26 and 32, Harrison endured the deaths of hisparents, two children (one at a year old, one at one week), and his first wife. Withinthis short span of time, as Oliver observes, Harrison “settled prematurely into middleage as a somewhat weary, rather jaded man who had accepted, although not beforeshedding copious tears, many of the harsh realities of nineteenth-century life”(p. 30). Harrison’s siblings were also a source of worry, his sisters because of theirdifficulty in finding acceptable spouses, his brothers because of a failure to settle inacceptable occupations. His sister Ellen had to be packed off to England to save thefamily’s honour after carrying on a notorious affair with a married man while sheherself was married. It is not altogether surprising to read that, when searching for asecond wife, Harrison rejected one candidate because she had “too many brothersand sisters” (p. 312). Even though Harrison’s second wife was herself an only child,there proved to be ample scope for conflict between her and Harrison’s daughterAnna from his first marriage and with his unmarried sister Sophia, who had run hishousehold after the death of his first wife. For anyone interested in the history of Vic-torian masculinity, sexuality, marriage, courtship, and familial relations, this diary isa goldmine.For those interested in the history of law and the legal profession, the diary is avaluable addition to the existing repertoire of primary sources, but less of a treasurethan it is for social historians. Harrison’s reflections on the judges and juries of hisday are of interest, but his sketchy accounts of many of the thousands of cases inwhich he was involved are not of much value without more information than he tellsus about the underlying proceedings. Probably the diary will be of most use in theshort term in bringing to light cases that have until now slumbered in archivalobscurity, including a number of trials for abortion and seduction. Harrison the law-538 Histoire sociale / Social HistoryHistoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXVIII, no 76 (novembre-November 2005)yer remains a somewhat more shadowy figure in the diary than Harrison the hus-band, father, and brother.Peter Oliver has provided a 120-page introduction that functions both as a biogra-phy of Harrison and as an overview of the major themes of the diary. He has alsoprovided biographical sketches of some of the figures most frequently encounteredin the diary, but has not annotated the text itself except for the very occasional foot-note. Some matters that are puzzling on a first read are clarified in the introduction,but others are not. At a minimum, some indication in the text of the diary as towhere in the introduction certain incidents are explained would have been useful. Imight have preferred a more intrusive style of annotation, but no doubt others willappreciate being able to read the diary “straight up”, without editorial meddling. Thehistorical profession — and, one hopes, some general readers — owe a debt of grat-itude to Harrison’s grand-daughter Barbara Goodfellow for labouriously transcrib-ing the diary over many years, to Peter Oliver for performing “radical surgery” tobring it to publication, and to the Osgoode Society and the University of TorontoPress for publishing this very handsome edition.Philip GirardDalhousie UniversityPÉTRÉ-GRENOUILLEAU, Olivier — Les traites négrières. Essai d’histoire globale.Paris, Gallimard, 2004, 468 p.During the 1980s the late Serge Daget, specialist on the nineteenth-century Frenchslave trade, once predicted that some day historians would finally succeed in synthe-sizing the impressive amount of research published on the history of the slave tradesince the 1960s. Canadian historian David Eltis, with the aid of associates, hasrecently accomplished an important element of this task by providing a detailed sta-tistical breakdown and analysis of the entire transatlantic slave trade and the shipsinvolved in it from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth century (DavidEltis, Steven Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, The Trans-AtlanticSlave Trade: A Database on CD-Rom, Cambridge University Press, 2000). NowOlivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, expert on the financing of the slave trade at the Univer-sité de Bretagne Sud in Lorient, has chosen to build upon this and other research togo one step further. Exploiting the rich historiography published on the slave tradeover the last 50 years — instead of primary sources of which this study is almostdevoid — Pétré-Grenouilleau has provided us with an overview of the world-wideslave trade throughout the ages. In skilfully reading and interpreting the vast com-pendium of publications on the slave trade, he has been able to produce a wide-rang-ing summary and analysis, replete with personal reflections, of the transatlantic,Muslim, and African slave trade from antiquity to the present.Pétré-Grenouilleau’s intent was to write a global and comparative history of theslave trade for both historians and the general reading public that would destroy “themyths and persistent legends” (p. 7) prevailing on the subject. He approaches this

Oliver, Peter (ed.) — The Conventional Man: The Diaries of Ontario Chief Justice Robert A. Harrison: 1859-1878

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Oliver, Peter (ed.) — The Conventional Man: The Diaries of Ontario Chief Justice Robert A. Harrison: 1859-1878

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)