The gables of the Cuthbert house are green not merely to reflect its association with the nearby trees and woods (and, hence, with the actuating spirit that Montgomery, like Wordsworth, believed to inhabit all living things), but also because it represents a past that is as vital as it is enduring. "[T]here it was to this day."

Another literary house that easily meets these criteria is "the Plummer Place" in Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Imperialist (1904), a novel set in a fictionalized Brantford, Ontario at the height of the movement to strengthen Canada’s imperial ties with Britain. Sold to John Murchison at "a dramatic sacrifice" after the financial failure of the grandiose English emigrants whose "large ideas" it embodied, the Plummer Place was

Liminally⁶ located "on the very edge of the town" of Elgin, the Plummer Place stands apart from both urban and rural Ontario— indeed, from its Canadian environment: the product of "a different tradition," it is "in Elgin, but not of it," and when the "wheatfields" that billow sea-like up to its fences in the summer become "cornstacks" in the fall they resemble the tents of a "besieging army" (22). The "plaster Triton" that sits in "the middle of the lawn" exuding a "frayed air of exile from some garden of Italy sloping to the sea" emphasizes the disjunction between the Plummer Place and its Canadian environment, as do the house’s "French windows…cut-glass chandelier, …Italian marble fireplace," and "old fashioned French [wall]paper" (23, 24). A "dignified" and anomalous relic of an earlier and alien mentality, the Plummer Place evidently needs to be naturalized, adapted to its time and place in a manner that respects both its character and its surroundings.

At no point in her description of the Plummer Place does Duncan ignore the fact that the viability, perhaps even the very existence, of such properties depends on the hard work, good will, and prosperity of their owners. But what happens when an old house and its grounds are simply too big or too costly to be maintained by a single family? Three options are possible, each with very different results and ramifications:

One of the most extensive and highly regarded literary treatments of the first and least acceptable of these alternatives appears in the chapter on "The Duke of Kent’s Lodge" with which Thomas Chandler Haliburton begins the third series of The Clockmaker (1840).⁸ The lodge in question—an ornate structure on Bedford Basin near Halifax that came to be known as the Prince’s Lodge— was not "owne[d]" by the Duke of Kent, as Haliburton asserts (Sam Slick 285), but "leased" to him by Lieutenant Governor Sir John Wentworth (MacNutt 297), and it was not merely "the scene of [the Duke’s] munificent hospitalities" (Sam Slick 284), but the residence that he shared with Thérèse-Bernadine Montegnet (Madam de Saint-Laurent), his beloved companion for twenty-seven years prior to his marriage in 1818 to Victoria Mary Louisa, the mother of Queen Victoria. A Burkean Tory bent on strengthening the ties between Britain and Nova Scotia, Haliburton both elides the scandalous history of the Prince’s Lodge and emphasizes its royal associations. It is "the only ruin of any extent in Nova Scotia, and the only spot either associated with royalty, or set apart and consecrated to solitude and decay" (Sam Slick 287). By virtue of "the long and close connection…between them and her illustrious parent," Novascotians "feel a…lively interest in, and a…devoted attachment to," Queen Victoria and "flatter themselves [that] her Majesty…will condescend to regard them as ‘the Queen’s own’" (288). "The Prince’s Lodge" is indeed, as V.L.O. Chittick remarks, a "rhapsody to royalty" (470).

Since the Prince’s Lodge is a visible sign of "the bonds of affection" between Nova Scotia and Britain, its rapid "decay" can only be for Haliburton a dismaying sign of the disintegration of the imperial relationship. This is not stated explicitly in "The Duke of Kent’s Lodge" but it is clearly evident in the elegiac tone of the sketch. Everything about the ruin, from its "tottering fence" to its "silence and desolation," "bespeak a rapid and premature decay…and tell of…the transitory nature of all earthly things" (Sam Slick 284-85). "[M]ost depressing" is the speed with which the wooden lodge had decayed. Unlike the "massive" brick and stone ruins of European "antiquity," which "exhibit the remains of great strength, and though injured and defaced by the slow and almost imperceptible agency of time, promise to continue thus mutilated for ages to come," "a wooden ruin shows rank and rapid decay, concentrates its interest on one family, or one man, and resembles a mangled corpse rather than the monument that covers it. It has no historical importance, no ancestral record. It awakens not the imagination" (285). Of course, Haliburton’s own imaginative response to the "historical" and "ancestral" implications of the Prince’s Lodge have already belied these assertions. Wooden it may be, but in The Clockmaker "the only ruin…in Nova Scotia…associated with royalty" becomes a bleak memento mori, a resonant symbol of the mutability and demise of all earthy things, including "the first and fairest empire in the world" (287).

"The Duke of Kent’s Lodge" begins with the hopeful assertion that "[t]he communication by steam between Nova Scotia and England will form a new era in colonial history" (283), but the present and projected condition of the Prince’s Lodge tells a different story. Not only has the "vegetable decomposition" of its wood made it "deformed, gross, and repulsive," but "[t]he forest is…reclaiming its own" so fast that in a "few years…all trace of it will have disappeared for ever" (285). Already in 1828, less than ten years after the Duke of Kent’s death, the eaves of the lodge are full of "luxuriant clover" and "coarse grasses," and its wooden "portico…present[s] a mass of vegetable matter, from which ha[s] sprung up a young and vigorous birch-tree, whose strength and freshness seem…to mock the helpless weakness that nourishe[s] it" (285-86). The near bathetic pathos of these statements and an accompanying note stating that between 1828 and 1840 both "porch and tree…disappeared" (286n.) indicates the depth of Haliburton’s distress at the "relaps[e] into a state of nature" (285) that he found at Prince’s Lodge. What future could there be for the British presence and the imperial connection "in a climate where the living wood grows so rapidly, and the dead decays so soon," where the residence of the "commander-in-chief of the [British] forces in th[e] colony" could so quickly have become the "mouldering" abode of "the ill-omened bat" (286, 184, 287)? Small wonder that in 1856 Haliburton emigrated to England and, as a Tory parliamentarian and pamphleteer, continued to argue "for the development of a colonial empire with an improved communication system" (Cogswell, "Thomas Chandler Haliburton" 355). It is a testament to the political implications of old houses that Haliburton’s imperialist attitudes are as evident in his meditation on the Prince’s Lodge as they are in his addresses to the British Parliament.

During the present century, numerous Canadian writers have meditated on the appearance and significance of old houses, none at greater length than Philip Child and none more memorably than Al Purdy. First published in Toronto in 1951 and twice prescribed as a text for Grade 13 students in Ontario (Bieman 16), Child’s The Victorian House is describes on its dust-jacket as "the poet’s in memoriam to an age that is past and gone" (qtd. in Bieman 16). A Prefatory Note by Child guardedly concedes the element of personal reminiscence in the poem: "[t]he characters and episodes of The Victorian House are invented, not reported from recollection. It is true, however, that the convention of poetry requires an author to dip his pen in the blood of at least one or two slain reticences and to reveal more of himself than, in the prose of life, he would ordinarily disclose ([x]). As Child’s Note intimates, a recurring theme of The Victorian House is the contrast between poetry and prose. Set against the poetry of the narrator, his mother, his father, and a dying friend who possesses a saintly quality of "‘whole-ness’" (30) is the prosaic way of talking and thinking that characterizes the poem’s other principal character, a real-estate developer called "Mr. Hammer" whose "mathematical" interest in the house that he plans to destroy (2, 36) makes him a typical representative of modern materialism—one of the "robot-men with mechanistic souls" who recognize "no thing but things"(16-17) and assess the past only for its commercial potential. "‘Who built this house? And what’s its history?’" Mr. Hammer asks between recording its total number of rooms and explaining his crass reason for wanting to know: "‘In my prospectus of a lot this size / I always write a note on former owners; / Folks like to think that a lot they buy was owned / By solid people and has its little story’" (2). While the narrator makes his way through the house that his father built in 1888 (2), recalling the personal and historical associations of its various rooms ("I sometimes think the walls remember" [5]), Mr. Hammer keeps up a running commentary on the house’s deficiencies that prepares the ground for his final offer:

Anyone who has disposed of their parents’ house through a callous real-estate agent will be especially inclined to dislike Mr. Hammer.

But this would be a simplistic response, for as Desmond Pacey and others have recognized (Pacey, Creative Writing 214-17; Duffy; Bieman), Child was a Christian humanist who believed that divine and human love and forgiveness did and should extend to all sinners, even to Judas and his heirs. "Christ has gone down to search the earth / Where Judas’ bones lie low" (54), begins the final stanza of the last poem in The Victorian House, and Other Poems, and in the penultimate section of The Victorian House itself the narrator affirms that Jesus "summoned Judas" as well as "Peter and John to enter" the "Kingdom of Heaven…and bade us all / Whose homes must be a strew of bricks some day, / To come from this our otherness to it" (36). The mercenary companion of a narrator who feels that he is being betrayed and crucified ("[m]y Hammer has come back to nail me down" [20]), Mr. Hammer is also "on his way… / To the Kingdom of Heaven" (36), a fellow pilgrim who must be forgiven and loved by anyone who would truly imitate Christ. That is why at the conclusion of the poem the narrator, though deeply saddened by the loss of his family house and earthly "home," does not condemn Mr. Hammer but, rather, leaves open the possibility that his "new house" will be a manifestation of spiritual renewal—a "new architecture" that incorporates elements of the old house but nevertheless represents "a change of heart" (Auden, Selected Poems 7). It is also why the narrator imagines the "limbs" of the old "apple tree" that he played on as a child to be "[s]tripped for [their] winter sleep" (1, 36). Whether it reawakens in the spring as the narrator’s metaphor implies or yields to the axe as Mr. Hammer’s plans suggest,⁹ the apple must pass through death to rebirth if it is to fulfil its function as a symbol or embodiment of original sin. Almost invariably a condenser for Edenic associations, the topos of the old house and apple tree is assimilated in The Victorian House to a typological scheme in which the painful displacement of the old by the new points towards the redemption of the fallen world.

Many of Purdy’s best-known poems reveal the interest in old houses and related structures that became a notable feature of his work in the early ’sixties, not long after he had settled at Roblin Lake near Ameliasburg on the richly historied north shore of Lake Ontario. In "Remains of an Indian Village" (1962), "the tutelary gods of decay" have ensured that "only great trees" occupy the sites of "the villages of the brown people," whose ghostly presence can nevertheless be conjured by the historical imagination (Collected Poems 36-38). In "The Country North of Belleville" (1965), the same forces have caused farms to revert to forest, leaving "old fences…among the trees" and "a pile of moss-covered stones," which "has lost meaning under a meaningless sky" (61-62). And in "Roblin Mills (II)" (1968), the space occupied by the mill is "empty / even stones are gone where hands were shaken / and walls enclosed laughter" but, like a "black crystal," the nearby millpond provides access to the "manner[s] and custom[s]" of the men, women, and children who "had their being once / and left a place to stand on" (132-33). As the uncharacteristically fantastic figure of the "black crystal" in the most recent of these poems suggests, the disappearance of the material evidences of previous cultures makes it extremely difficult even for those gifted with a powerful historical imagination to generate vivid and meaningful memories of earlier cultures. Where there are at least "dusty roads and old houses," as in Purdy’s Ameliasburg, it is possible to become a woman or man "from another time / walking thru [a] 19th-century village / with a kind of jubilation" (202-03).

A corollary to Purdy’s faith in the historical imagination as a means of reclaiming effaced cultures is his perception of ruined houses and old plantations as the residue of the individual and collective characteristics of their creators. The "small bitter apples" "gone wild and wormy" on the "old apple tree" beside the "ruined stone house" in "Detail" (1968) are more than the remnants of a failed farm and a lost Eden. Tenacious to the degree that in winter they sometimes wear "caps of snow / [and] little golden bells" that associate them with medieval court jesters, they are exquisite and memorable emblems of the stubborn and foolish but joyful and independent people who settled beside "the road / to Trenton" in southeastern Ontario (Collected Poems 113-14). Purdy claims to "make no parable of them," but then proceeds to do precisely that:

Solitary and mute until befriended and articulated by the poet, the "ruined stone house," the "old apple tree," and the "small bitter apples" are emblematic of a vanishing and almost forgotten Canadian culture. As a celebratory elegy, "Detail" gives grounds for both optimism and pessimism about the survival of that culture: on the one hand, its remaining "fruit" is affectionately noticed, imaginatively "fermented," and appreciatively ingested by Purdy and his readers; on the other hand, "even children know better" than to eat the apples in summer, and, in winter, "perhaps none of the other travellers" on the roads to Trenton "looked th[eir] way."

To judge by their publications, Canadian writers have not been much interested in the adaptation of single-family dwellings to alternative uses. Perhaps this is to be expected, since the process of gutting, stripping, remodelling, refacing, and extending an old house to make it suitable for a firm of lawyers, doctors, accountants, or undertakers is scarcely one that, in Haliburton’s terms, "awakens…the imagination." Yet as the list of gerunds just used to describe it suggests, the process of adapting an old house to a new purpose is not without its metaphorical and metaphysical implications. Since at least the time of the Roman architect Vetruvius, buildings have been conceived as bodies, an organic analogy now rarely cited as a prescription for ideal architectural proportions, but still residually present in metaphors that ascribe human characteristics to houses and vice versa. "[T]o communicate the vital values of the spirit," "[a]rchitecture…must appear organic like the body," observes Geoffrey Scott in The Architecture of Humanism (1914); "we…transcribe…ourselves into terms of architecture" and "architecture into terms of ourselves" (213). Thus people shut each other out, houses face the street, stairs have feet, towers lean. And, like people, houses may be loved or hated, cherished or demolished, restored or defaced. Almost inevitably, these extremes come into vigorous play during the conversion of an old house to a new purpose, for the process of adaptive transformation usually involves a combination of destruction and construction that touches every aspect of the building, from its bowels to its skin. A critical question, then, becomes what features of the old house will be retained and what parts removed? Will its original character remain, or will it be replaced by a new identity?

Hedged about as it is by metaphorical and metaphysical implications, the metamorphosis of a family home into a business venue is, above all, a political act. If this is not immediately obvious, it may be because neoconservative (or neoliberal) politicians and thinkers have recently been so successful in disseminating their spurious identification of business and family values. The transformation of an actual house into a place of business is as consistent as the fax machine and the cellular telephone with the philosophy that would place a computer—indeed, an office—in every home. Those less sanguine than neoconservatives about housejacking must assess every proposed or completed home-to-business conversion both on its individual merits and in its wider context. When the number of such conversions is very small, attention may safely be focussed primarily on their external appearance, and the business and architects involved assessed on their success or failure in retaining the character of the house while also enhancing its usage, efficiency, and appearance with such things as improved paint, windows, lighting, mechanical systems, and sympathetic additions.

In this restricted context, such architects as John Nicholson of Maholtra Nicholson in London, Ontario may well earn high ratings for the balance that they try to achieve between "historical character and technical advances" (Nicholson). A successful home-to-business conversion that was done over several years by a series of architects, including Maholtra Nicholson, is the building that now contains the offices of Thomson, Fisher, and Bossy Consultants at 477, Waterloo Street in London.

It is the existence, expansion, and proliferation of just such areas in cities like London that raises large social and political issues, for when more than a very few family homes disappear in a particular neighbourhood so, too, do schools, libraries, and other local amenities. Commercial adaptation can conserve individual houses and resuscitate entire areas, but it can also drive the life out of communities and leave in their place the kind of environment in which, especially at night, violent crime against persons and property can thrive. The recent increase throughout Canada of neighbourhood associations, many of them created in the first instance to resist a specific commercial development, attests to the growing recognition that house-conversions can no longer be viewed in isolation but must be seen as part of a domino-effect that can have a devastating impact on a community. Whether priority in the solution of these problems will be given to individual rights or community values will, of course, depend on the political disposition, tenacity, and, ultimately, power of the people involved. It can only be hoped that in the future each and every decision about the fate of an old house will be made in full awareness of its wider implications. With houses and neighbourhoods and cities, as with natural ecosystems, no change should ever be made without regard to its impact on the entire environment.

Despite differences arising from public rather than private ownership, the same aesthetic, political, and ultimately environmental considerations must be brought to bear on houses destined for conversion to government offices. Will the conversion balance history and usage? Will it adversely affect the ecological stability of the community? Some additional considerations will arise, however, when the matter at hand is the selection and treatment of old houses as museums or monuments. Which houses should be chosen for these purposes and how should their conversion be handled? The second of these questions is easier to answer, because the choice of an old house as a museum or monument entails its restoration and preservation as a period piece with only such modifications as are necessary to the fulfilment of this function. Two cases in point are Montgomery’s grandparents’ house in Cavendish (Green Gables) and Haliburton’s house in Windsor, Nova Scotia (Clifton): both have been designated as historic sites, restored to pristine condition, and outfitted with original or period furnishings. Similar treatment has been accorded to the houses of distinguished people elsewhere in Canada—to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s summer home on Campobello Island, New Brunswick,¹⁰ for example, and to Emily Carr’s childhood home in Victoria, B.C.—as well as to houses that fall into the oldest-existing-residence category—the Eldon House in London, for example, and Seven Oaks House in Winnipeg, a building that derives some of its significance from having been built on the site of the 1816 skirmish between the Hudson’s Bay and Northwest companies that became known as the Battle of Seven Oaks.

Less easy to answer is the question of which houses should be chosen for restoration and preservation as museums and monuments. As the examples just given illustrate, the tendency in the past has been to choose houses that are distinguished by their association with famous people and historical events. Few houses in which Sir John A. Macdonald laid his head or otherwise comported himself have escaped preservation orders or, at least, historical plaques, and the Riel House in Winnipeg has been restored as a monument and museum to Louis Riel because, although he never lived there, his body lay in state for two days in its front room after his execution in November 1885. But not everyone agrees that the famous-men-and-decisive-battle view of history should dictate which old houses are preserved and restored, or even that such decisions should be made by the aesthetic and historical criteria that made museums and monuments of Eldon House and Seven Oaks House. In "Fort Rodd Hill National Historic Park" (1975), the B.C. poet Tom Wayman quietly inveighs against the view of history that makes monuments of imperial fortresses like Fort Rodd outside Victoria while ignoring the houses of Vancouver Island’s working people. The poem begins with a deliberately prosaic account of the Fort’s permutations between its inception in 1878 "during the Russo-Turkish war" and its designation in 1956 as a capital-H "Historic" site (27, 28). It then expresses its central reservations about this process, playing as it does so on the fact that the word "strange" carries the dual meaning of "odd" (or interestingly unusual) and "alien" (or from elsewhere):

The numerous repetitions and parallels in these lines reflect Wayman’s determination to make poetic and memorable a social group whose grim lives and consequent actions brought them into conflict with the Canadian authorities during the First World War and placed them outside the pale of official history and architectural commemoration:

The poem’s final line is perhaps trite, but it has the merit of making explicit Wayman’s desire to bring himself and the reader into sympathetic communion with the ordinary and nameless men and women whose very absence from the official record can serve both as their memorial ("Nothing is their monument") and as a reminder of their collective and multiple meaning ("Now they are gone they do not mean a single thing"). To the extent that it succeeds in commemorating the lives of Vancouver Island’s coalminers and their families despite—indeed, because of—the absence of one of their houses, "Fort Rodd Hill Historic Park" belies Ruskin’s assertion that "we cannot remember without [architecture]" but confirms his conviction that "Poetry and Architecture" are the "two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness" (Seven Lamps 147-48). Sometimes the pen is as mighty as the trowel.

It is worth returning briefly to the observation that houses look old when they are "stained with time" and shadowed with trees in order to appreciate the shortcomings of two related aspects of contemporary architectural practice—namely, the reconstruction with new materials of houses that have been demolished, and the construction in new suburbs of estate (or "monster") houses with period features. About a kilometre as the crow flies from 477, Waterloo Street in London is a grandiose condominium development that takes its name from a house built by a London entrepreneur named Ellis Hyman and subsequently purchased and briefly inhabited by one of the fathers of Ontario Hydro, Sir Adam Beck. To elicit permission to build the Sir Adam Beck Condominiums on land partly occupied by Elliston (as it was originally called), the developers agreed to reconstruct the house elsewhere on the site, a condition that they fulfilled using, not the bricks and woodwork of the original structure, but modern bricks and new wood. The result is a grotesque paradox: an ostensibly old house without the "stain of time," an unnatural excrescence that has less historical character and authenticity than any of the surrounding buildings, including the condominium development itself and its two most conspicuous neighbours—the James A. Harris Funeral Home and the St. Joseph’s Hospital parking garage, the former a clinical adaptation of a late Victorian-style house and the latter a lurid example of nineteen-sixties Modernism.

A couple of kilometres north of the Sir Adam Beck Condominiums lie some of London’s most elevated and exalted examples of the labyrinthine suburbs that burgeoned around Canada’s towns and cities in the ’seventies and the ’eighties. With a building-to-lot ratio that reflects both the greed of the developers and the aspirations of their clientele—which is merely to say, the neoconservative ethos of the decades in which they were built—the houses of these suburbs appear monstrous not just because of their size, but because they are set too close to each other and to the street. Exaggerated upwards and outwards like body builders, they violate the human scale. Bedecked with expensive gadgets and accessories like the cars and children in front of their two- and three-car garages, they proclaim their owners’ material wealth and social success. Distinct from one another in similar ways like hamburger outlets, Benetton shops, and most other manifestations of multinationalism, they attempt to cater simultaneously to a longing for difference and a desire for homogeneity.¹¹ Ruskin’s gloomy analysis of the suburbs of Victorian England in The Seven Lamps of Architecture can be applied with very little modification to the suburbs of neoconservative Canada:

Perhaps time will pardon at least those Canadian planners, developers, and builders who have worked not "loosely" and with an eye on the demands of "one generation only" (Seven Lamps 148), but carefully and with a consciousness of the environment and the future. Certainly, time will eventually stain and shade even the most monstrous houses, and probably make the best of them as productive of historical affection and careful conservation as their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century counterparts.