Some
of the most perceptive and significant observations
on the landscape and architecture of what is now southwestern
Ontario are to be found in Winter Studies and Summer
Rambles in Canada (1838) by Anna Jameson (1794-1860).
Based on Jameson’s experiences between December
1836 and September 1837, when she lived in Toronto and
then travelled through Upper Canada and northern Michigan,
Winter Studies and Summer Rambles is especially
interesting from an architextual perspective in the
sections that treat of the period between late June
and late July 1837 when she proceeded “westward”
from Hamilton to Detroit along “[t]he main provincial
mail coach road” (Brown 294), a route that took
her through Brantford, London, and Chatham and permitted
her to make an excursion to visit Colonel Thomas Talbot
on his estate overlooking Lake Erie. Although they are
based on the experiences of only a few weeks, Jameson’s
diary entries of June-July 1837 are the work of the
keen, experienced, and sophisticated observer who had
already published Characteristics of Women
(1832) and Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad
(1834), and who would go on to publish such works as
Memoirs and Essays, Illustrative of Art, Literature,
and Social Morals (1846) and Sacred and Legendary
Art (1848). In concert with two lesser-known accounts
of the same region of Upper Canada from the same decade,
A Tour of North America; Together with a Comprehensive
View of the Canadas and United States (1835) by
Patrick Shirreff (1791-1876) and Views of Canada
and the Colonists, Embracing the Experience of Eight
Years’ Residence (1839) by James B. Brown,
Jameson’s observations of June-July 1837 shed
a bright and revealing light on the assumptions and
mentalities that were in operation at the time when
a large portion of Canada was being shaped, overlaid,
and built up in accordance with British conventions
and preferences. They are a window onto the Britification
and Englishing of southwestern Ontario.
Of
course, the process of making the Canadas over as a
British colony began with the Conquest and gained momentum
with each settler who arrived from the British Isles
and, in the case of the Loyalists and late Loyalists,
the United States. As important in its own way as immigration
to the emerging British-American identity of Upper Canada
was the Englishing of the region that took place in
the early seventeen nineties when John Graves Simcoe
began the process of naming the districts, towns, and
geographical features of Upper Canada roughly in accordance
with their counterparts on a map of England laid sideways
across the region – thus, areas north and east
of Lake Ontario would become Stormont, Northumberland,
and Durham counties and areas to the north and west
of Lake Erie would become Oxford, Kent, and Essex counties.1
On August 16, 1792, the river that the Native peoples
had called Askunesippi and the French had dubbed La
Trenchée (subsequently La Tranche) became the
Thames and a few months later the settlement at its
fork that Simcoe envisaged as the future capital of
the province became New London and, in time, London.
Once put in place (the operative phrase), the potential
of the Englishing process was released and gathered
momentum with a proliferating energy derived from a
powerful mixture of immigrant nostalgia and a desire
among the majority of Upper Canadian settlers and administrators
to create a society that was recognizably and loyally
British. In 1800, the act establishing the London District
named the area around the proposed capital Middlesex
County, and by the eighteen thirties the adjacent bank
of the Thames was the site of the township of Westminster.
“Crossing ‘Westminster Bridge,’ a
little way on the left,” wrote Brown, “we
overlook, from the elevated bank, the wonderfully prosperous
Canadian town of London, so very recently sprung from
the solitudes” (282). By 1842, “‘the
city of stumps’” as it was less flatteringly
known also boasted bridges “dignified with the
names Blackfriars ... and Wellington” (James E.
Alexander 1: 236, 1:42), and in due course it would
have its Covent Garden Market, Oxford Street, Highbury
Avenue, and Mayfair Drive.... To borrow and adapt a
metaphor from the Vancouver novelist Robert Strandquist
(1952- ) surveyors and builders were “wrap[ping]
... [Upper Canada] in the Union Jack” (61) and
thus doing what they could to banish alienation and
displacement from the minds of settlers and potential
immigrants.
Although
in great measure it was of the result of the desire
of Canada’s more-or-less permanent British inhabitants
to recreate a semblance of “home” in the
New World, the imposition of Britishness on the country
was also sanctioned in the nineteenth century by Edward
Gibbon Wakefield’s enormously influential conception
of Britain’s colonies, “not [as] new societies,
but [as] old societies in new places” (329). The
direct application to Canada of Wakefield’s conception
of colonies as “centres of British civilization”
in foreign parts (Knorr 314) in Lord Durham’s
Report on the Affairs of British North America
would have to wait until 1839 but by the time of Jameson’s
visit it had already been fully articulated by Wakefield
in the lengthy essay entitled “The Art of Colonization”
in his England and America: a Comparison of the
Social and Political State of Both Nations (1834).
The more that Britain’s North American colonies
resembled Britain, Wakefield and his followers argued,
the more desirable they would be to British settlers
of all social classes and the less likely they would
be to become Americanized (see Wakefield 327-29, Knorr
312-3, and Durham 162). To these ends (and in the words
of Archbishop Richard Whately in 1832), not just the
poor but people from “all ranks” of society,
including the “most respectable,”should
be encouraged to become colonists so that the social
and political make-up of Canada and other colonies would
be a replica or, as the Labour League put it in a statement
of September 2, 1848, a “facsimile” of the
British Constitution (qtd. in Knorr 311-12). Britain’s
colonies, Sir R.H. Inglis told the House of Commons
in 1843, should be a “miniature representation
of England” (qtd. in Knorr 311).
One
way of gauging the importance and impact of the transference
of names such as London, Middlesex, and Thames to the
towns, districts, and geographical features of Upper
Canada is to recognize in the procedure a parallel to
the cross-domain mapping that George Lakoff, Mark Johnson,
and other cognitive linguists have identified as a fundamental
characteristic of metaphor, a term whose Greek roots
signify the transfer or carrying of something from one
place to another (OED). As is the case with
any metaphor (for example, Romeo’s “Juliet
is the sun”), where a word/concept from a source
domain (“the sun”) is applied to a word/concept
in a target domain (“Juliet”), the mapping
onto a locale in Upper Canada of the name of a locale
in British not only permits and encourages the Canadian
locale to be seen and understood in terms of the British
one, but also sanctions the use of knowledge and experience
of the British locale to give meaning and structure
to the Canadian one. In Metaphors We Live By,
Lakoff and Johnson describe “understanding and
experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another”
as “the essence of metaphor” (5) and in
Conceptual Projection and Middle Spaces and
subsequent essays Giles Fauconnier, Mark Turner, Joseph
E. Grady, Todd Oakley, and Sean Coulson describe a process
of “conceptual integration” or “blending”
whereby material from a source and target combine to
produce a conceptual structure that contains aspects
of both while also possessing an “emergent structure”
or “content” of its own.2
The Upper Canada through which Jameson, Shirreff, and
Brown travelled in the eighteen thirties was an “emergent
structure” produced to a considerable extent by
an activity closely related to the creation of metaphor:
the mapping of a source domain (Britain) conceived as
highly structured and attractive onto a target domain
(Canada) conceived as less ordered and attractive but
having the potential to be transformed both conceptually
and physically into a semblance of the source domain
to which it already bore a sufficient likeness to permit
cross-domain mapping to occur. Shirreff’s remark
that “The letters of [Thames] are invariably pronounced
soft by the inhabitants of the country” around
London, Upper Canada (194) is but one indication of
the fact that the “emergent structure” under
construction in the area was both like and unlike its
British source domain: it was neither Canada nor Britain,
but both of them and other than them, an amalgam and,
as such, unique. When Henry Scadding observes in Toronto
of Old (1873) that “Canadian society in all
its strata has been more or less leavened from England”
(144) his metaphor is entirely apt both in its narrow
sense of a ferment that makes dough rise and in its
broader senses of “permeat[ed] with a transforming
influence” and “mingl[ed] or imbu[ed] with
some … modifying element” (OED).
As
has already been intimated, the effect of cross-domain
mapping on the conceptual and physical construction
of Upper Canada was especially apparent in and around
London. After a visit to the designated site of the
provincial capital in the summer of 1804, Lord Selkirk
noted wryly that “‘the great city of London’”
consisted of little more than “‘a Chippaway
Bark Whigwham,’” but following an influx
of Irish immigrants that began in 1818 under the leadership
of a relative of Colonel Thomas Talbot, the settlement
grew rapidly so that by 1825 it had a population of
1,104 and by 1826 the title of District Town (see Nancy
Z. Tausky and Lynne D. DiStefano 5-10). In the same
act that established London as a district town, the
Legislature appointed a Commission consisting of Talbot
(who was elected its president) to oversee the erection
of a courthouse and jail, the architectural evidence
both of the “judicial process which [was] crucial
to the orderly development of the province” and
of “the moral, social and economic well-being
of the citizenry that supported ... [its] construction”
(Crossman and Johnson 100). That the Courthouse
designed by John Ewart (1788-1856), a Scottish-trained
architect who had moved to Upper Canada some ten years
earlier, took the form of a baronial castle and may
have been loosely modelled on Talbot’s ancestral
home in Ireland reflects the emerging conception and,
indeed, construction of London as a rural version
of Britain’s capital city. Even if it was not
modelled on a particular castle in the British Isles,
the London Courthouse was (and remains) the embodiment
of a gesture of loyalty, not just to the British justice
system, but to the residually feudal social order of
which it was (and is) a pillar. “The jail and
court-house, comprised of one large and stately edifice,
seemed the glory of the towns-people,” Jameson
would record in her diary entry for July 5, 1837. “As
for the style of architecture, I may not attempt to
name or describe it; but a gentleman informed me, in
rather equivocal phrase, that it was “‘somewhat
gothic’” (254). Jameson’s interlocutor
might also have said “somewhat neoclassical,”
for as Nancy Z. Tausky and Lynne D. DiStefano have observed,
several features of the castellated Gothic Courthouse,
including its smooth stucco walls and symmetrical placing
of its windows and towers, recall the work of Robert
Adam (1728-92) and other neoclassicists (29-30). Since
Adam was best known in the early nineteenth century
as the architect of Edinburgh’s New
Town and London’s Charlotte and Fitzroy squares,
the Adamesque aspects of the Courthouse, like its then
increasingly fashionable Gothic elements, bespoke London’s
progressivism as well as its Britishness. No doubt,
Londoners of the decades following the construction
of the Courthouse would have been pleased by Brown’s
description of the “new houses, ... and courthouse,
public square, market-house,” and other evidences
of the “variety of active industry, enterprise,
comfort, and elegance” in their “wonderfully
prosperous Canadian town” as an impressive “New
World scene” in “a prosperous field for
emigration” (282, 284).3
When
Shirreff visited London
in 1835 it possessed few of the amenities that would
enthrall Brown four years later, but it did possess
one distinct advantage – a location of considerable
aesthetic appeal and even greater aesthetic potential
– that had also helped to dictate the architectural
form of the Courthouse of which, Shirreff remarks non-committally,
“the inhabitants feel proud” (180). Although
Shirreff uses the term “beautiful” to describe
the scene that will emerge at “the Forks of the
Thames ... when the forest is a little more cleared
away,” the apter term in the aesthetic terminology
of the day is picturesque: with the removal of more
of the forest, the site of London would possess the
diversity of shapes, colours, and textures, the combination
of natural features and human interest, and the serpentine
river winding from foreground to background the Forks
of the Thames would be reminiscent of the landscape
paintings of Claude Lorraine, Nicholas Poussin, and
their English admirers and adaptors, a group that included
Lancelot “Capability” Brown, who designed
gardens at Stowe, Blenheim, and elsewhere on picturesque
principles, Sir Uvedale Price, who gave magisterial
expression to those principles in his Essay on the
Picturesque (1794-98), and Adam, who applied them
to architectural composition through the concept of
“[m]ovement” or “diversity of form
... in different parts of a building ... to produce
an agreeable and diversified contour” like “hill
and dale, foreground and distance, swelling and sinking,
... in ... landscape” (qtd. in Bolton 1:77). “Capability”
Brown’s inclusion of Gothic structures in some
of his gardens and Price’s endorsement of castles
as “‘the most picturesque habitable
buildings’” are probably sufficient to explain
the choice of a “somewhat gothic”
style for the London Courthouse, but Tausky and DiStefano
argue further that some aspects of the building such
as its octagonal and battlemented towers reflect Adam’s
concept of “[m]ovement” (42-43). Be this
as it may, James B. Brown’s description of the
Forks of the Thames as it was several years after Shirreff’s
visit indicates that the choice of a style approved
by theorists and practitioners of the picturesque aesthetic
would have been generally regarded as appropriate to
the site: London “is very agreeably situated upon
an elevated platform, formed by the two branches ...
of the river Thames ..., which meet in an open valley
... directly beneath the high western point of the town.
A rather pleasant view is had from this point of the
clear and rapid river, winding its course through the
partially-wooded banks, till we lose sight of it curving
into the bushy forest” (282).
Like
Shirreff, Jameson uses the word “beautiful”
in describing the London area (253-54). In her previous
diary entry, however, she uses the more precise term
“picturesque” and the qualities associated
with it to describe the estate
of Colonel Andrew Whalley Light (1779-1856) on the
“winding Thames” near Woodstock, a town
in Oxford County named, of course, for the village near
Blenheim in Oxfordshire:
... the
house of Colonel Light [is] in a situation of superlative
natural beauty, on a rising-ground above the river.
A lawn, tolerably cleared, sloped down to the margin,
while the opposite shore rose clothed in varied woods
which had been managed with great taste, and a feeling
for the picturesque not common here; but the colonel
being himself an accomplished artist accounts for
this. (248)
Like the
London Courthouse, Colonel Light’s house is located
on a “rising ground” where it must be looked
up to and from which it commands a good view of the
river and opposite shore. Perhaps in accordance with
principles of “Capability” Brown’s
disciple Humphry Repton (1752-1818) in his Observations
on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1803)
this shore has been “managed,” not for the
purpose of agricultural “profit,” but for
aesthetic “pleasure” (see 58-61 and 136-41,
and also qtd. in Coates 322). On Colonel Light’s
estate near Woodstock, as at the Forks of the Thames,
a complex process of Britification had taken place that
involves acquisition, naming, construction, planting,
and transplanting on and of the landscape. Both nominatively
and visually a part of Canada was becoming what later
in the century would be called “Nova Britannia”
and included in “the vaster Britain.”4
“The
process of colonization presents analogies to the foundation
of a garden which are highly instructive,” Thomas
Huxley would write in the “Prolegomena”
to Evolution and Ethics (1893):
Suppose
a shipload of English colonists [is] sent to form
a settlement.... They clear away the native vegetation,
extirpate or drive out the animal population, so far
as may be necessary, and take measures to defend themselves
against the re-immigration of either. In their place,
they introduce English grain and fruit trees; English
dogs, sheep, cattle, horses; and English men; in fact,
they set up a new Flora and Fauna
and a new variety of mankind, within the old state
of nature. (76)
Anticipating
Huxley by over fifty years, Thomas Carlyle describes
Canada’s “Forests ... unfelled” and
“boundless Plains and Prairies unbroken with the
plough” as “green desert spaces never yet
made white with corn” (30: 203), a formulation
whose oddly racist hue would surely not have gone unnoticed
by the author of Heart of Darkness, who gives
Marlow an ecstatic vision of the “the seed of
commonwealths, the germs of empires” before he
embarks on a narrative that can be read as an uncovering
of the pathogenic aspects of the word “germ”
(3: 3). Glimpses of human and, in Alfred W. Crosby’s
phrase, “ecological imperialism” at work
were afforded to Jameson when she travelled south from
London to Lake Erie to visit Colonel Talbot, the man
who, more than any other, was responsible for what his
most ardent poetic admirer (and the brother of his chief
surveyor) Adam Hood Burwell (1790-1849) had described
in Talbot Road (1818) as creating for “wild
nature” in the region “a richer, variegated
vest” and “A robe, more pleasing”
(104, 474). The “process of colonization”
may be analogous to “the foundation of a garden”
but in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
it was as likely to be compared with undressing and
re-dressing a “goddess” or “a maiden
in need of the sartorial assistance of her overseers”
(Fabricant 126) in order to make her more beautiful
to English eyes. Joseph Pickering’s brief description
of the site of Talbot’s house in Inquiries
of an Emigrant (1831) is but one of a great many
indications that the Colonel had the patriarchal and
possessive qualities required of such overseers: “[t]he
house ... commands a fine view of the banks
and shore of Lake Erie for twenty miles down, and also
the Colonel’s Creek winding through the
‘flats’ below” (68; emphasis added).
While en route to St.
Thomas through “Talbot country,” Jameson
and her taciturn Scottish driver ascended Bear Hill,
which was so named, the driver informed her, “because
of the number of bears which used to be found [t]here....
It was some time, he said, since a bear had been shot
in the [vicinity] ... but ... last spring one of his
comrades had found a bear’s cub, which ... he
sold ... to a travelling menagerie of wild beasts”
(262, 267).5
After remarking on the “beauty and variety of
the timber trees, intermingled with ... luxurious undergrowth,
and festooned with ... wild grape and flowering creepers”
(all indigenous species), Jameson recorded that, “with
the exception of Queenston heights,” it was “the
highest land [she] had yet stood upon in Canada”
and afforded a panorama of “a boundless sea of
forest, within whose leafy recesses lay hidden as infinite
a variety of life and movement as within the depths
of the ocean” (267-68). Ocean-like though it is,
however, the forest is dotted with “new clearings”
from which rise “wreaths of white smoke”
that hang “suspended in the quiet air” of
the “noontide” and prompt a vision of “the
future ..., with its towns and cities, fields of waving
grain, green lawns and villas, and churches and temples
turret-crowned; and meadows tracked by the frequent
footpath; and railroads, with trains of rich merchandise
steaming along ... ” – a realization of
what exists “already in the sight of Him who ordained
it” (268).6
But, Jameson wonders in an impassioned ensuing paragraph
in which a proto-ecological awareness casts a temporary
shadow over her vision of future progress, “will
it ... be better” when the “forests ...
have fallen beneath the axe” and, in Huxley’s
terms, the “native vegetation” and “animal
population” have been “extirpate[d]”
to “ma[k]e way for restless, erring, suffering
humanity”? Her answer – that it may not
be “better” but it will be “well”
because part of a divinely ordained plan in which “progressive
civilisation” leads to “progressive happiness
[and] progressive approximation to nature and to nature’s
God” – simultaneously evokes the greatest
happiness principle so beloved of Utilitarianism’s
nineteenth-century liberal heirs and echoes Alexander
Pope’s resounding affirmation in the final lines
of Epistle 1 of An Essay on Man that, properly
understood, “All Nature is but Art, ... / All
Chance, Direction, ... / All Discord, Harmony, ... /
All partial Evil, universal Good” (1: 289-92).
When viewed sub speciae aeternitis through
Whig-tinted spectacles, the “partial Evil”
of colonization can be seen as merely a stage in God’s
plan to undo the damage of original sin and to bring
fallen humanity closer to Himself.
“Contemplations
such as these were in [Jameson’s] mind as [she]
descended the Hill of Bears, and proceeded to a beautiful
plain, sometimes richly wooded, [and] sometimes opening
into clearings and cultivated farms, on which were usually
compact farm-houses, each flanked by a barn three times
as large as the house” (268-69).7
They may also have been in her mind as she made her
way to St. Thomas and, thence, to Colonel
Talbot’s house near Port Talbot, observing
on the way that St. Thomas “bears [his] Christian
name” and that the “goodness of the road”
to Port Talbot is “owing to [his] systematic regulations”
(269, 270).8
In the Talbot Settlement, the world is unfolding according
to divine plan. Far from being the misanthrope and misogynist
that she had been led to expect, the Talbot to whom
Jameson accords an entire diary entry (July 10) is a
“courtly,” “hospitable,” and
“courteous” “miracle”-worker
whose graceful manners and aristocratic appearance are
the outward and visible signs of the “grâce
de Dieu” that made “a great man who
... [did] great things” (273, 276, 284). Both
Talbot’s “indifference or even dislike to
female society, and his determination to have no settler
within a certain distance of his own residence”
are explained by Jameson as “the natural result
of certain habits of life acting upon a certain organization”
(284): to the extent that he is the creator and the
product of his environment, he is a living example of
“conceptual blending,” the figure- (and
figural) head of an “emergent structure.”
Jameson’s
enthusiasm for Talbot’s character and achievements
extends to his house and garden. Shirreff describes
“[t]he colonel’s residence ... as a cluster
of mean wooden buildings, consisting of dwelling-houses,
stables, barns, pigsties, and cattle-shades, constructed
and placed seemingly without regard either to convenience
or effect,” but he concludes his unflattering
portrait by praising Talbot himself with references
to transplanted agricultural and decorative species
of plants that resonate strongly with Huxley’s
gardening analogy:
The clay
banks behind the colonel’s house have a barren
and naked appearance, while the lake in front is too
near. The situation, nevertheless, has capabilities
to make a fine place, when taste shall build a habitation.
The garden, which was badly kept, contained some fine
apple and pear trees.... There were a few weeping
willows, the first I saw in Canada, and which raised
the colonel considerably in my estimation, as they
are not, I believe indigenous to this country. (183)
Probably
before Shirreff’s visit in the fall of 1833 and
certainly before Jameson’s in the summer of 1837,
Talbot had moved from a small log cabin to the “long
wooden building, chiefly of rough logs, with a covered
porch running along the south side” that she describes,9
but the house remained surrounded by a “vast variety
of out-buildings, of all imaginable shapes and sizes,
... disposed without the slightest regard to order and
symmetry,” and used, in many cases, “to
shelter ... geese and poultry” (281). In noting
that one of the out-buildings is “the very log-hut
which the Colonel erected for shelter when he ‘first
sat down in the bush’” in 1801, Jameson
identifies a Canadian equivalent of the “remains
of antiquity” and “long-known objects ...
endeared by the remembrance of past events” that
Repton retained or placed in his landscapes as sources
of “Association” and “delight”
(60). Her preceding and ensuing description of the site
and setting of Talbot’s house is picturesque in
vocabulary and in detail: the house stands “on
a bold high cliff overhanging the lake.... Behind [it]
... lies an open tract of land, prettily broken and
varied, where large flocks of sheep and cattle were
feeding – the whole enclosed by beautiful and
luxuriant woods, through which runs [a] little creek
or river” into “a wild woody ravine ...
till it steals into the lake” (281, 280). The
“clear[ing] away of native vegetation” and
the “set[ting] up [of] a new Flora and
Fauna” that Huxley describes have created
a landscape that is “prett[y]” and “beautiful”
precisely to the extent that it is an English scene
in a Canadian setting, a mapping of a source domain
(England) onto a “target domain” (Upper
Canada).
This is even more apparent
in Jameson’s descriptions of the contents of Talbot’s
house and garden. The two diary entries devoted to the
Talbot Settlement and its singular overlord, contain
several brief descriptions of the interior of the house
– its “really handsome ... dining-room,”
its “large kitchen with a tremendously hospitable
chimney,” and the “rough log-walls”
of its “library and hall of audience” (281,
273, 285) – that provide ample evidence of Jameson’s
common enough assumption that domestic architecture
and furniture are the mirror of the man. Like Talbot
himself after some thirty-six years in Canada, his house
is a blend of the imported and the local10:
its table and chairs were “cut from the forest
in the midst of which they now stand”; the “hall
or vestibule” of the house contains “sacks
of wheat and piles of sheepskins ... heaped in primitive
fashion”; and its “covered porch”
is decorated with an object that speaks loudly of the
process of extirpation and replacement at the heart
of colonization:
Here I
found suspended, among sundry implements of husbandry,
one of those ferocious animals of the feline kind,
called here the cat-a-mountain, and by some the American
tiger, or panther, which it more resembles. This one,
which had been killed in its attack on the fold or
poultry-yard, was at least four feet in length, and
glared on me from the rafters above, ghastly and horrible.
(273, 281)
The lynx
that Jameson describes has been a target both literally
and metaphorically – literally when it was shot
dead by Talbot or one of his employees to protect the
Settlement’s European fauna and metaphorically
when it was assigned the names of various animals that
it more-or-less “resembles” (“cat-a-mountain”
[or catamount], “tiger,” “panther”).11
Jameson invests it with affective rather than symbolic
power, but “glar[ing]” down “ghastly
and horrible” from the rafters of Talbot’s
porch, it can easily be seen as an admonitory reminder
of all that is being “extirpate[d]” in the
process that Huxley likens to “the foundation
of a garden” – a ghost of wild Nature haunting
the house (the Heideggarian “Raum”
[Poetry, Language, Thought 154]) of its extirpator.
Not surprisingly, that
process is especially apparent in the flora
in the vicinity of Talbot’s house:
He
has sixteen acres of orchard-ground, in which he has
planted and reared with success all the common European
fruits, as apples, pears, plums, cherries, in abundance;
but what delighted me beyond everything else, was
a garden of more than two acres, very neatly laid
out and enclosed, and in which he evidently took exceeding
pride and pleasure; it was the first thing he showed
me after my arrival. It abounds in roses of different
kinds, the cuttings of which he had brought himself
from England in the few visits he had made there....
We sat down on a pretty seat under a tree.... He described
the appearance of the spot when he first came here,
as contrasted with its present appearance.... (282)
As Jameson
recognizes, the acreage around Talbot’s house
has been transformed by transplanted flora
as much for the purposes of “pride and pleasure”
as of “comfort and convenience,” qualities
that Repton ranked beside “picturesque effect”
as “objects of good taste” “in the
neighbourhood of men’s habitation” (56,
and see Kluckert 394). Talbot may have shown Jameson
his garden first because she was a woman, but he may
also have wanted her to feel “at home” and
to appreciate the extent to which his Settlement had
moved beyond the pioneering stage of its development.
As if taking his cue from
Jameson (whose account of Talbot he admits to having
read [see 270]), Brown is extravagant in his praise
of the Colonel’s “residence,” describing
it as “romantic ... beautifully situated ... possessing
greater natural beauties, and more reminding [him] of
the finest seats at home [in Britain], than any [he]
had seen in Canada” (268). When Jameson arrived
at the “approach” to Talbot’s residence,
exhaustion prevented her from appreciating its “graceful
and picturesque” qualities, which, in any case,
were “concealed” by “darkness”
(273). When Brown arrived at the “gateway”
leading to the residence on “a delightful summer
day,” the “spacious noble-looking avenue”
and “the tall, deep, old forest” so impressed
him that “the exquisite imagery of ... portions
of Spenser’s Faëry Queen [sic] flowed on
[his] recollection” and “translated this
far western spot of young Canada into a scene of hallowed
old English ground,” a testament to Talbot’s
powers of Britification that he supports by quoting
passages from the Elizabethan poem in which “‘A
shady grove’” of “‘lofty trees
... heaven’s light did hide’” (1.i.7)
and the “‘angel’s face’”
of “fair Una” “‘made a sunshine
in [a] shady place’” (1.iii.4)
(269). With The Faërie Queene still in
his thoughts, Brown describes the house of the man who
had seen “growing up around him the beginnings
of a new country he had aided so to plant” as
a “humble hermit-dwelling” and then allows
“the flitting fancies of ... imagination [to]
wing ... into the far future” and “present
..., instead of the homely cottage, a magnificent mansion”
with every “detail in keeping with the noble-looking
grounds, and the grandeur of the ... lake” (269-70).
In Talbot’s house and “park” (269),
Brown saw both an extension of England’s romantic
past into Canada and an anticipation of British North
America’s prosperous future, a preliminary carrying
across and forward of the capacity of Britain and her
people to “‘ma[k]e sunshine in [a] shady
place.’”
Brown’s decision
to use poetic descriptions of English landscapes to
express the Englishness of a Canadian scene may also
have been prompted by Jameson. The “Summer Rambles”
section of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles
is preceded by a quotation from Wordsworth’s Excursion,
as are the opening and closing entries in the southwestern
Ontario portion of the diary – the section as
a whole and the entry for June 4 with passages from
Book 4 (“Despondency Corrected”) that treat
of “remembrance” as “a stately gallery
... / ... Of ... pictures” (4: 558-62)
and envisage the forthcoming “ramble” as
a journey into “unpeople’d glens; / And
mountainous retirements, only trod / By devious footsteps
– regions consecrate / To oldest time!”
(4: 513-18), and the entry for July 12 and
13 with a passage from Book 3 (“Despondency”)
that is spoken by the Solitary after a journey to North
America that leaves him full of “disappointment
and disgust” at finding not, as he had hoped,
a “pure archetype of human greatness,” but
“A creature squalid, vengeful, and impure, / Remorseless,
and submissive to no law, / But superstitious fear or
abject sloth” (3: 944-45, 951-55). This
last passage serves as a preface to Jameson’s
observations on the Native peoples of Upper Canada and
the United States whose deplorable circumstances occasion
several pages of commentary, but the previous two refer
primarily to Upper Canada’s European settlers
and the lands that they are in the process of rendering
more “stately” and less “unpeopled.”
Like much else in the diary entries that they preface,
the prefatory passages from The Excursion set
the scene for Jameson’s most ramifying citation
of Wordsworth, the quotation from his sonnet “Composed
upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” that
graces the description of her journey from Port Talbot
towards Chatham (a village named, of course, for the
town in Kent, England):
At
length we emerged from the forest-path into a plain,
through which ran a beautiful river (my old acquaintance
the Thames) “winding at his own sweet will,”
and farm-houses with white walls and green shutters
12 were scattered along
its banks, and cheerful voices were heard, shouts
of boys at play, sounds of labour and of life; and
over all lay the last glow of the sinking sun. How
I blessed the whole scene in my heart!... The first
view of the beautiful little town of Chatham made
my sinking spirits bound like the sight of a friend.
(300)
As a result
of the mapping of the name “Thames” onto
Upper Canada, a Canadian river can evoke a poem about
London, England without either irony or a sense of inappropriateness.
Indeed, it is precisely because Upper Canada is undergoing
appropriation that a quotation from a poem describing
the “Ships, towers, domes, theatres, ... temples
and houses” of Britain’s capital “City”
(Wordsworth 3:38) can be applied with a supposition
of appositeness to the “farm-houses ... of the
little town of Chatham.” Jameson “blesse[s]
the whole scene in [her] heart” and experiences
a sense of elation akin to that generated by “the
sight of a friend” not only because the name of
her “old acquaintance the Thames” resonates
with Wordsworthian experience and emotion, but also
because the houses “scattered along its banks”
are elements in a “very paradise of hope”
(303) that herald the growth of a new city that would
be Canadian and yet English – a Chatham on the
Thames (rather than the Medway, as is its English namesake).
Not
everything that Jameson encountered before she emerged
for the last time from “the solitary forests of
Canada to be thrown ... into the midst of crowded civilised
life” at Detroit (329) accorded as fully as the
Thames and the Talbot Settlement with her sense of Upper
Canada’s double nature as an extension of England
and a “paradise of hope.” When she observed
the Grand
River “winding [picturesquely] through rich-wooded
flats, with green meadows and cultivated fields,”
on the outskirts of Brantford, she “was involuntarily
reminded of the Thames near Richmond” and remarked
that in both places the scenery is characterized by
“tranquil[ity] and luxuriant beauty,” but,
she quietly adds, the “traveller” in Canada
“can enjoy little of the interest derived from
association, either historical or poetical,” exceptions
being “the memory of General Brock, and some anecdotes”
of the War of 1812 (232).13
On occasion, the associations that Canadian scenes do
engender are far from positive: her sympathetic response
to trees that have been “‘girdled’”
and then burned reminds her of the moralising of the
“‘Fool i’ the Forest’ ... over
the wounded deer” in As You Like It;
a group of Native peoples that she encounters outside
Brantford “remind ... [her] of a group of gipsies
... seen on the borders of Sherwood forest many years
ago”; the “seemingly interminable,”
uncanny “silence,” and “solitude”
of the forests are “either exciting to the fancy,
or oppressive to the spirits” (232, 234, 237).
Despite its size, “the Canadian robin ... resemble[s]
the sweet bird at home” in “plumage and
shape,” but the “untrodden thicket[s]”
beside the appalling roads are home, not just to “flowers
of loveliest dye,” but to the “rattlesnake
and all manner of creeping and living things not pleasant
to encounter, or even think of” (237, 249-50).
While Upper Canada’s
rattlesnakes remain unencountered and its “creeping
and living things” unnamed, other elements of
the province’s environment such as an American
man “deformed, degraded, haggard and inflamed
with filth and inebriety” and a road system in
a deplorable and dangerous state for lack of government
funds receive more than enough detailed attention to
sustain Jameson’s assertion that “as [she]
travel[s] on” she is by turns “enchanted”
and “disgusted” (227, 240, 303). The extensive
commentaries on immigrant women and Native peoples that
intersperse her July diary entries are especially pungent
and poignant. Declining to draw a “pretty and
... romantic picture” of a life of “solitude
and love” in “[a] cottage in the wild woods”
such as that depicted in Thomas Moore’s “Ballad
Stanzas” (1806), she suggests that, for all but
a few emigrant women, the loss of “the early habitual
influences,” and society of their “native
land” is a cause of deep and abiding regret and
discontentment (257, 247-48, 258-59). Shocked by the
disease, poverty, and hopelessness of a Native population
ravaged by tuberculosis and apparently unsuited for
life in the future cities of Upper Canada, she envisages
the Indians as doomed either to “amalgamat[ion]”
(assimilation) or extinction (234, 322, 319-23). In
Jameson’s stark portrayals of emigrant women,
cross-domain mapping produces not metaphor but misery:
transferred from a home to a target domain, women, especially
those of “the better class” (255), become
nostalgic and disconsolate exiles; settled on “reserved
lands” in the target domain, Native peoples are
deprived of all but a portion of the domain that was
from time immemorial the source of their livelihood.14
To be sure, a process of “conceptual blending”
and cultural emergence was at work for both groups,
but at enormous cost, especially to the Native peoples.
In the penultimate paragraph
of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada,
Jameson relays “an account of an Irish emigrant,
a labouring man,” who in seven years rose from
being “houseless and penniless” to being
“the proprietor of a farm of two hundred acres
of cleared and cropped land, on which he could proudly
set his foot, and say ‘It is mine, and my children’s
after me!’” (542). This is the happy ending
towards which Jameson’s narrative moves as it
records and comments on the multi-layered process of
cross-domain mapping and Britification that was at work
in Upper Canada in the mid-eighteen thirties. To her
lasting credit, however, Jameson recorded some of the
negative as well as the positive aspects of the process:
neither as optimistic as Catharine Parr Traill’s
The Backwoods of Canada nor as pessimistic
as Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush
(1852), Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada
is one of the more balanced as well as one of the most
perceptive and significant accounts of the linguistic,
agricultural, architectural, and human aspects of a
part of Canada’s development from “colony
[to] ... country” (Jameson 66).
Annex
Jack Hodgins, Innocent Cities
Shortly
after introducing the Thames River near Woodstock as
“a small but most beautiful stream, winding like
the Isis at Oxford” and shortly before encountering
the river-side estate of Colonel Light, Jameson paid
a visit to the “settlement” of Henry Vansittart
(1777-1843), a retired rear-admiral in the British navy
who had settled in the area in 1834 and encouraged several
“respectable British families to follow,”
and who would come to play an influential part in local
society and business (Dawe 44, 48). What immediately
struck Jameson in June 1837 was the eccentric and outlandish
character of Vansittart’s “house,”
a structure that evoked no European precedents and prompted
comparison with a dwelling place that she would almost
certainly have regarded as primitive in the extreme:
His
house is really a curiosity, and at the first glance
reminded me of an African village – a sort of
Timbuctoo set down in the woods; it is two or three
miles from the high road, in the midst of the forest,
and looked as if a number of log-huts had jostled
against each other by accident, and there stuck fast.
(242)
Such
an oddity – a primitive hut built by a retired
British officer that appears to have materialized haptically
– demands explanation if it is not to compromise
Jameson’s belief in Upper Canada as a site of
progress and Britishness:
The admiral had begun,
I imagine, by erecting, as is usual, a log-house,
while the woods were clearing; then, being in want
of space, he added another, then another and another,
and so on, all of different shapes and sizes, and
full of a seaman’s contrivances – odd
galleries, passages, porticos, corridors, saloons,
cabins and cupboards; so that if the outside reminded
me of an African village, the interior was no less
like that of a man-of-war. (242)
In
the ensuing paragraphs, Vansittart’s ingenious
and exuberantly self-expressive house, its contents,
and its setting are placed ever more firmly within the
pale: its “drawing-room, which occupies an entire
building, is really a noble room”; thanks to the
admiral’s sister, “who has recently spent
some years in Italy,” it is adorned with “pretty
objets of virtù” such as “views of
Rome” and a copy of “Raffaelle’s Vatican”;
and the woods, although “yet close to the house,”
have been cleared for a “fine well-cultivated
garden” and are being further cleared “with
great animation” (243). “[S]trangely picturesque”
as it is, Vansittart’s house can “boast
not only of luxuries and comforts, but cosa altra più
cara, or at least ’piu rara’”
– other things more dear, or at least more scarce
in Upper Canada. Outlandish as it first appears, Vansittart’s
house proves to be an outpost of genteel Britishness.
Part of Jameson’s
description of the house is a frustratingly vague comment
on its heating and ventilation systems:
Around
[the drawing-]room runs a gallery, well lighted with
windows from without, through which there is a constant
circulation of air, keeping the room warm in winter
and cool in summer. The admiral has, besides, so many
ingenious and inexplicable contrivances for warming
and airing his house, that no insurance office will
ensure him upon any terms. (243)
Vansittart’s
“gallery” and other “ingenious and
inexplicable contrivances” are, of course, a response
to the extremes of the Upper Canadian climate, and Jameson’s
description of them a celebration of his resourcefulness.
Indeed, his techniques and her response to them anticipate
Pete Melby’s and Tom Cathcart’s chapter
on “Shelter Design” in Regenerative
Design Techniques: Practical Applications and Landscape
Design (2002), where they argue that shelters “should
adapt to natural processes” such as “heat
absorption and reflection [and] storage of thermal energy”
“without disrupting them and should contribute
to human health, productivity, and happiness”
(67). An agglomeration of log-houses that contains a
heating and cooling system that defies description,15
that resembles an African village from the outside
and a naval vessel on the inside, and that houses a
retired admiral, his cultivated sister and, Jameson
adds, a source of “astonish[ment]” and scandal
in “the whole neighbourhood ... [and] province”
– “a young, very young wife, of a station
very inferior to [the admiral’s] own” (243)
– may be a “curiosity” and a source
of amusement, but it is also an instance of the creative
and adaptive opportunities provided by life on the margins.
Nevertheless, even as Jameson celebrates Vansittart’s
eccentricity and ingenuity, she betrays a degree of
anxiety about his deviations from society’s norms
and institutions: the marriage of a sixty-year old man
to “a ... very young” woman may indeed be
a cause for concern, as may the presence in their house
of hazardous and therefore uninsurable “contrivances.”
It is a fact worth noting
and pondering that houses as eccentric and ingenious
as Vansittart’s are relatively rare in Canadian
architecture, for to do so not only helps to explain
Jameson’s interest in the structure and its creator,
but also to draw attention to the cultural implications
of the rarity in Canada of buildings such as the new
Ontario
College of Art and Design (see also i)
addition in Toronto (Will Alsop [1947- ]) and the paucity
of clients prepared to commission them. Where are Canada’s
Strawberry Hills, its Falling Waters, its Temple Expiatori
de la Sagrada Familia, its First Church of Christ Scientist,
its Vanna Venturi House, its Centre Pompidou, its Netherlands
National (“Fred and Ginger”) Building? Is
it possible that the absence of such buildings is the
result of artistic and cultural timidity and traditionalism,
a preference for the safe and conventional that was
present in Canada’s colonial beginnings and has
persisted to the present day? Could it be that the stupendously
magnified quintessence of Canadian architecture is Casa
Loma (1911), the homage to Balmoral Castle (1853-56)
that the Toronto-born and trained architect Edward James
Lennox (1855-1933) designed for the financier Sir Henry
Pellat? One writer who might fear so is the Vancouver
Island novelist Jack Hodgins (1938- ), whose Innocent
Cities (1990) is in part a condemnation of an apparent
reluctance even in British Columbia to tolerate anything
but the most conventional artistic and architectural
forms.
Innocent
Cities is set in late nineteenth-century Victoria,
a city in which its architect protagonist, Logan Sumner,
has abandoned his youthful “dream” of designing
and constructing “fabulous buildings” –
“magnificent structures which would be admired
and photographed and later imitated” – in
favour, first of “erect[ing] new structures according
to the designs of others, however uninspired,”
and then of “giving to the buildings [that his
firm] renovate[s] an appearance of having been just
newly erected, by applying new and inexpensive façades
over the old” (18-19). Thanks to the imitative
skills of Sumner Construction,
Houses,
shops, warehouses, even factories ... could put on
the style of any foreign architecture desired, in
the manner of ladies’ fashions, depending on
what books had been recently read, what photographs
admired, what foreign travel just completed. When
a small addition was commissioned by an owner who’d
grown tired of having a residence or business that
looked as though it were situated in Rome, say, or
London, Logan Sumner could make it look as though
the building had just been brought in on a barge from
Madrid, or Dublin, or San Francisco. (19)
Of
a piece with the preference of Victoria’s residents
for the superficial imitativeness that John Ruskin excoriates
with alliterative vigour as “miserable mimicry”
(1: 154n) in The Poetry of Architecture (1840,
1893) is “the great iron church” of St.
John, an edifice whose “cast-iron sections”
were “shipped ... from England ... in pieces to
be reassembled ... – transported ... round the
world, like the religion it represented” (138).
No more were the church’s financers and designers
“able to imagine that there might be competent
builders already living [in Victoria] who could have
designed and erected a church” than they were
“able to anticipate that the drumming of a rain
storm on the iron roof [of St. John’s] ... would
have the effect of entirely drowning out the words shouted
from the pulpit, or than an electric storm would convert
the church into an intolerable chamber of auditory horrors”
(138). So unsuited is the iron church to the climate
of the West Coast that even a mild but prolonged shower
results in water seeping between “the joints in
[its] prefabricated roof” and a “summer
wind off the ocean, howling around its metallic joints,
c[an] cause a soloist to believe the Pacific itself
ha[s] broken in through his ear-drums to go roaring
around in his brain” (138-39). Behind all this
amusing hyperbole, Hodgins is reinforcing his point
that the imitative and imported façades and buildings
that exist to this day in (one of) Canada’s major
cities are the product of a failure of confidence and
a failure of imagination that together have resulted
in buildings that are ludicrous in their colonialism
and their inappropriateness.
Honourable
exceptions to this are rarer in Innocent Cities
than in Victoria itself, but they do exist. Sumner’s
most important client as far as the plot of the novel
goes, the eccentric James Horncastle, has “put
more new faces over old than any other property-owner
in town,” but his Great Blue Heron Hotel resembles
Vansittart’s aggregation of houses in being both
a reflection of its creator’s character and evolving
needs and, at its core, a product of its environment:
When
he sat at his desk in the office of The Great Blue
Heron Hotel, [Horncastle] was surrounded by the successive
layers of his own expanded business – by the
walls of the small log cabin he’d purchased
for his saloon in 1860 upon arriving in the Colony,
by the rooms of the boarding-house he’d constructed
around the saloon,16
by the additional rooms and storeys added for his
first hotel, and finally by the brick exterior of
the grand Blue Heron, which had been inspired by some
provincial hotel in England, but which he was now
in the process of altering once again.... (19)
To
the extent that its innermost “layer” is
one of the “squared-log fish warehouses built
by French-Canadian carpenters in the Hudson’s
Bay fortress” around which Victoria developed
and its newest layer is “likely to include a balcony
above a long verandah, sturdy pillars, and much fancy
fretwork” – that is, to resemble a fashionable
American hotel of the era17
– the architectural narrative of The Great Blue
Heron Hotel is a stor(e)y of diminishing Canadianism.
Yet the onion- and Russian-doll-like building is viewed
very differently by Sumner and by Horncastle’s
sister:
Sumner thought of the
establishment as growing rather in the manner of a
tree, adding continuously to its sequence of interior
rings. Miss Adelina Horncastle took quite another
view: “Imagine a home that is constantly changing!
Nothing is ever considered completed, or even capable
of being completed. It has taught me to see the world
in constant need of being remade – an exhausting,
hopeless task.” (38)
Later
in the novel, Sumner and Horncastle’s other sister
Norah expound the relationship between the Hotel’s
façades and its centre in terms of the “real
building” in the mind of the architect and the
“‘Maker’” at the centre of Creation
(305). Whether construed organically, processurally,
or philosophically, The Great Blue Heron Hotel is a
distinctive product of its creator and its place, a
manifestation of the New World phenomenon of living
and building a dream that can be found elsewhere in
Canada but is especially observable in British Columbia.
The most conspicuous example
of West Coast eccentricity and excess in Innocent
Cities is Sumner’s tombstone, a work-in-progress
that begins as a token of his enduring affection for
his dead wife and gradually becomes a monumental piece
of life writing whose extravagant form scandalizes the
good citizens of Victoria.18
By the latter part of the novel, its “column of
interlocking granite ha[s] grown so tall that it now
seem[s] to have thrust up out of his still-empty grave
like some sort of monstrous fungus” (291). Instead
of allowing the column to continue (and thus to require
“flying buttresses ... to keep it from toppling
across the less ambitious stones, murdering those who
had only come to read”), Sumner has “arranged
to expand out around [it] ..., using archways and terraces
and castellated walls to create a sort of elaborate
palace about the width and breadth of a child’s
room, with words and sentences carved into every side”:
The original [words
of the inscription: “HUSBAND OF JULIA, INCONSOLABLE”]
[are] ... so high now that you might not read them
without stepping back a distance, where you could
see (if your eyesight were good enough) his entire
story tumbling down the varicoloured structure of
moisture-streaming stones: an orphan, a romantic,
a builder filled with impossible dreams, a grieving
widower, a betrayed friend, a broken-hearted lover,
a man of shifting opinions, a man in search of something
he could not even identify himself. Bits of poetry
had been flung at it here and there, as well as snatches
from the Bible. (3, 291)
In
an extravagant reversal of expectations, a tomb has
become the text for an on-going rather than an all-over
narrative: death has yielded to life, completion to
process, closure to open-endedness, convention and tradition
to flamboyance and imagination.
Nor
is Sumner’s tombstone only an architectural autobiography:
“[b]y stepping around to the far side” of
it, visitors to the graveyard are “able to read
the latest additions to his still-growing alternative
biography,” his long-standing and increasingly
elaborate fantasy of transforming Victoria into a “great
city of towering splendid buildings” (291, 130):
Following
upon the [construction of] the opera house and the
giant conservatory and the towering cathedral he ha[s]
... demolished all the buildings adjacent to the inner
harbour ... and ... replaced them with a connected
series of waterfront terraces and hanging gardens,
pergolas and caryatides and lancet archways and oriel
windows and soaring towers of vermiculated stone blocks,
places of business and places to eat, museums and
theatres and docking facilities. In that tight space
he ha[s] created a semicircle of brick and timber
and marble and gold-trimmed peaks and plateaus which
... [are] meant to reflect and even compete with the
facing semicircular wall of gigantic foreign blue
mountains that all but surround ... the city. (292)
In
Sumner’s visionary architecture can be recognized
a gigantism that derives from two sources: a desire
to achieve notoriety by realizing a grandiose personal
fantasy and a desire to respond at least adequately
to the surrounding landscape (specifically, the mountains
on the American side of the border). “‘Your
gravestone threatens to rival the pharaohs’,”
remarks one observer, and indeed the inclusion of “hanging
gardens” and “caryatides” in Sumner’s
vision – the former an evocation of one of the
Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the latter of
the columnar female figures of the Erechtheum temple
in the Acropolis – does suggest a desire to surpass
the architectural achievements of the West’s founding
civilizations at the westernmost extremity of the New
World. The Vancouver Island of Innocent Cities
is a place where self-realization on the grandest scale
imaginable seems not only possible, but demanded.
Although
Sumner’s tombstone would be at home in Christian
W. Thomsen’s Visionary Architecture from Babylon
to Virtual Reality, it eventually incurs the opprobrium
of the citizens of Victoria, “thousands”
of whom sign a “petition ... demand[ing] that
city council do something about the offensive piece
of architecture” (404). In the course of deciding
that Sumner be ordered to “demolish his monstrous
stone palace and replace it with a small marker, perfectly
blank, in order to avoid competing with the stones of
the city’s leading families,” opinions are
expressed that convey a vivid sense of the forces that
militate against the creation of a Sagrada Familia in
Canada:
One
councillor, born in London, agreed that it was “more
the sort of grotesque self-congratulating monument
one might expect of a mad wealthy Yankee than something
appropriate to a modest community on British soil.”
At the same time, a councillor who had been born in
New York State found the stone equally inappropriate
on the grounds that he wished the city to become the
sort of place the citizens of the United States expected
to discover when they crossed the line, a city that
imitated Europe in its outer appearance, a city of
dignity, good taste, modesty, and self-control –
in short, as different from home as possible. (404-05)
Differ
as they do in their backgrounds and prejudices, both
the British- and American-born councillors agree that
Victoria should be characterized by “modesty”
– “[m]oderation; freedom from excess or
exaggeration; self-control; ... reserve springing from
an unexaggerated estimate of ... [its] qualities; freedom
from presumption, ostentation, arrogance, or impudence”
(OED). Perish the thought that Victoria’s
buildings might be the outcome of an imaginative architect’s
response to the city’s extraordinary setting.
That the attitudes of
Victoria’s citizens and councillors privilege
the imported over the indigenous as much as the imitative
over the imaginative becomes clear as the account of
the debate over the tombstone continues:
When
the question was raised of whether anyone on the council
had been born, like Logan Sumner, on the island –
or even in the country, or in the colony that preceded
it – there was immediate general agreement that
this was an irrelevant point, since the elected officials
were unanimous in agreeing that such excess of the
individual imagination was both unseemly and uncharacteristic
of the nation to which they now belonged. (405)
Sumner
is duly “required to demolish his ridiculous palace
of fantastical words ... and to replace it with a stone
as small and insignificant as possible, and to promise
to confine himself and his descendants, in his will,
to the simplest historical facts” (405). “‘[A]
modesty ... in keeping with the circumstances of the
man, the character of the city, and indeed the chosen
attributes of the Dominion’” has triumphed,
but not entirely: an economic boom affords Sumner “opportunities
to build some of the buildings ... [he] dreamed of,
though none of them so splendid as [he] dreamt on the
stone,” and, as one of the characters in the novel
observes in a letter to her sister in England, the new
home that he designs for himself and his frequently
absent second wife is as unconventional as their marriage:
He
has built the most peculiar house, not at all in the
fashions favoured by other successful businessmen,
reminiscent of homes in Oxford or Edinburgh or San
Francisco or Rome. This has more in common with the
houses built by the Indians in their villages, its
great roof kept up by a structure of posts and beams
carved from giant trees. He can be certain he will
never discover another like it anywhere else but here,
and I am equally certain that others will be slow
to follow his lead. (407)
Highly
unconventional (and, for most Victorians, unappealing)
in its derivation from indigenous rather than imported
models, Sumner’s “peculiar house”
is not the result of a simple substitution of Native
for imported models; rather, it is an amalgam of indigenous
and European features and materials that addresses its
environment with a confidence born of historical as
well as topographical rootedness:
It stands beyond
the park, along the tops of the cliffs which look
south towards the strait and the Olympic mountains
of Washington Territory. Also within view ... is the
location of the cabin where [Sumner] was born, the
former Pest House, long since burned down. Behind
the house, half-obscured by trees, is an ancient barn
... built by his late uncle, and a small shed once
lived in by his Indian carpenter but long since abandoned
– a funny little house scabbed over with bits
of boards rescued off the shoreline from a shipwreck,
each of them stamped with brand names and other words
which have faded almost completely away in the weather.
(407)
One
of Colonel Talbot’s out-buildings was “the
very log-hut” that he “erected for shelter”
when he arrived in Upper Canada and the interior of
Admiral Vansittart’s house resembled “a
man-of-war.” In Sumner’s case, time and
weather are gradually erasing the evidences and traces
of early European settlement and the merchant-naval
system that helped to sustain it, but memories of both
linger around an emergent structure that is at once
British, Canadian, and neither – a “most
peculiar house” in a British Columbia of
the imagination and of the heart that has more in common
than might initially be supposed with the Upper Canada
whose pioneers and eccentricities Anna Jameson encountered
in the summer of 1837.
Notes
- This
pattern was not consistently followed, however, as
the presence of Cornwall west of Kingston and Perth
County next to Oxford County attest. [back]
-
In addition to Conceptual Projection and Middle
Spaces, see Turner and Fauconnier, “Blending
and Metaphor,” and Grady, Oakley, and Coulson,
“Blending and Metaphor.” As the last succinctly
explain, the phenomenon, “[b]esides inheriting
partial structure from each input space, the blend
develops ‘emergent’ content of its own,
which results from the juxtaposition of elements from
the inputs” (104). [back]
- See
Tausky and DiStefano 46 for the London Courthouse
as a “baronial stronghold [that] showed where
... British subjects should place their confidence:
in the established British system of aristocratic
power and prestige” rather than in the democratic
principles symbolized by “the classical architecture
... across the border.” In his chapter on “The
Castle Style and the First Stirrings of the Gothic
Revival” in The Architecture of Robert and
James Adam (1758-1794), Arthur T. Bolton identifies
Windsor Castle (1824-28) as the “culmination”
of the “castle building movement” (1:
94). [back]
- Alexander
Morris’s Nova Britannia; or, British North
America, Its Extent and Future (1858) was an
influential contribution to the process leading to
Confederation and William Wilfred Campbell’s
Sagas of Vaster Britain (1914) a belated
poetic statement of the imperialism that provided
a vehicle for Canadian nationalism in the years surrounding
the turn of the century. [back]
- The
fact that the hill carries the name of the animals
that were once found in abundance there echoes forward
to the habit of naming suburbs after the flora
and fauna that they displace. [back]
- Jameson
introduces her vision with a reference to “the
Arabian sorcerer of old” from whose eyes “the
present fell like a film” (268), namely, Mirzah,
the fictitious visionary created by Joseph Addison
in The Spectator 159. As this point, Jameson
may be remembering John Howison’s use of “the
Vision of Mirzah” in his Sketches of Upper
Canada (1821) to suggest that the Thousand Islands
area might be proposed as “an asylum for suffering
humanity” (32). [back]
- See
Brian Dawe 25 for an illustration of the sort of house
and barn that Jameson would have encountered. In the
section of Views of a Settlement entitled
“Picture of a Settlement,” Brown provides
a vivid description of the “strikingly novel”
“scene” encountered by a visitor to the
London area: “You find yourself in a large long
opening, or ‘clearance,’ of about a mile
in width, bounded on each side as far as the eye reaches
by the tall dark forest, serving as a kind of bold
magnificent fringe to the more cultivated, yet somewhat
rough-like scene between, with its fields, dotted
with ‘stumps’ frequently, like so many
dark stone boulders scattered over, at distances from
ten to twenty feet apart. And there is the temporary
zig-zag
rail-fences of these square fields. Then almost
close upon each side of the wide road of about sixty
feet, and placed at intervals of a quarter mile or
less, rise the settlers’ farm-houses, with their
huge wooden barns in which they house their grain.
Then there is the primitive, rather rough, unmade
road itself, on which you are travelling ... now admiring
a neat white painted cottage of an enterprising settler,
with its shrubbery and flowers – ... [now] vexed,
on meeting a slovenly-looking log house of some equally
indolent people ...” (259-60). [back]
- Jameson’s
wish that “Kettle Creek” had been “given
... a prettier name” (269) recalls the moments
of bathos that occur in Burwell’s Talbot
Road when such names are at odds with the
poem’s elevated diction, as, for example, in
“Thro’ a broad valley rapid Catfish glides,
– / O’er pebbly beds descend his foamy
tides ...” (55-56). [back]
- Tausky
and DiStefano observe that in 1833, Talbot replaced
his original log cabin “with a larger and more
refined ... [one], possessing many comforts but displaying
the insistently rustic quality that characterized
the clothes and demeanor of its owner” (7).
[back]
- For
a similar blend, see Catharine Parr Traill’s
description of the contents of the house of the Emigrant
Clergyman from Cumberland in The Backwoods of
Canada (1836), a work that may have been known
to Jameson: “the floor of [the little family
sitting-room] was painted after the Yankee fashion....
The dresses of the children were ... the produce of
the farm and their mother’s praiseworthy industry....
Both girls and boys wore moccasins, of their own making”
(220). [back]
- The
“crouching tigers [that] wait their hapless
prey” in the North American woods of Oliver
Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village 355
are perhaps the best-known instance of this phenomenon.
Jameson remarks of the species of thrush named “the
Canadian robin” that it is “as large as
a thrush, but in plumage and shape resembl[es] the
sweet bird at home ‘that wears the scarlet stomacher’,”
a possible allusion to the “Crimson Stomacher”
of Robert Herrick’s “Delight in Disorder“
(41). As Yakov Malkeil observes of similar instances
of (re-)naming, “the early settlers would transfer,
with greater or lesser felicity, the closest available
approximations from the nomenclatural stock familiar
to them from their Old World schooling and experience”
(588). [back]
-
According to John MacTaggart's taxonomy (see Chapter
2: Logs to Riches), these would have been the
houses of people of American origin, possibly Loyalists,
who moved to southwestern Ontario around the turn
of the century because land was plentiful and relatively
inexpensive (see Fred Landon, Western Ontario
and the American Frontier and Chapter
4: Rising and Spreading Villages). [back]
- See
D.M.R. Bentley, Mnemographia
Canadensis 1: 155-57 for a discussion of
Jameson’s observations on the paucity of historical
associations in the landscape of Upper Canada. [back]
-
In the final paragraphs of Winter Studies and
Summer Rambles, Jameson describes emigrants to
Canada who are “unable to adapt themselves to
an entirely new existence” as “unfortunate
... miserable, and truly pitiable” (541). [back]
- Of
course, Vansittart’s system is an application
to architecture of Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics,
which holds that “the direction of energy flow
or transport ... [is] from a region of high energy
toward a region of low energy” and “from
a region of higher temperature to a region of lower
temperature” (Melby and Cathcart 175). In this,
it rests on one of the principles that undergirds
the sustainable designs of the “regenerative
architecture” proposed by John Tillman Lyle
(1934-1998) in the early nineteen nineties and now
gaining increasing acceptance among proponents and
practitioners of green architecture. [back]
- When
Horncastle arrived in Victoria he had “expect[ed]
to find a familiar British flavour” but found
instead “Yankee businessmen agitating for annexation,”
a situation to which he “adjust[ed] quickly
... and put a fake board front on his saloon in the
manner of the California buildings he’d become
accustomed to during the gold-rush days” (36).
[back]
- “‘Round
pillars will look ridiculous,’” Sumner
tells Horncastle; “‘[y]ou aren’t
building a monument after the fashion of Mr. Jefferson’”
(40). [back]
- Sumner’s
tombstone has a parallel in the tower that Cuyler
Goodwill builds in memory of his deceased wife in
Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries (1993),
which was published three years after Innocent
Cities. “[A] dream structure made up of
sorrow mingled with bewilderment,” “‘Goodwill
Tower,’ as it is known in the city [Winnipeg],”
with a gravestone inscribed with his wife’s
“name and dates,” is a “hollow”
and blatantly phallic structure more than “thirty
feet in height” with a protruding “spiral
of cantilevered stones … [that] allow …
him to ascend the steep sides as easily as an insect
or a lizard might scale a wall” (58, 64). With
“stone surfaces” decorated with “elaborate
cipher,” “holy words,” and “the
image of a bird, a flower, a fish, a face, a sun or
moon … [c]upids, mermaids, snakes, leaves, feathers,
vines, bees, cattle, the curve of a rainbox, a texturing
like skin … [it] is a museum of writing forms,
some of which he discovered in the Canadian Farmer’s
Almanac or the Eaton’s catalogue or in
his illustrated Bible” (64). Blakean in its
exuberance, resembling both the Mount of Purgatory
and the Tower of Babel, and decorated with Canadian
as well as general motifs, it is open to construal
as a metaphor of the combination of imported and local
that characterizes Canadian literature and architecture.
Later in the novel, Goodwill’s daughter Daisy
marries into a family whose house is ornamented with
carvings of “intertwined leaves, vines, and
grape clusters [that] are considered a beautiful example
of adapted art nouveau” and Goodwill himself
embarks on the construction of “a miniature
replica” of the “Great Pyramid”
containing “stone from around the world”
and elsewhere in Canada, but the structure goes “out
of plumb” and is left unfinished at his death,
by which time his Tower has been completely destroyed
by “souvenir hunters” (108, 180, 276,
266-67). [back]
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