Jane Errington's latest book explores British and Irish emigrants’ experiences of moving to Upper Canada as revealed in letters, diaries, and, more unusually, “missing friends” advertisements, emphasizing throughout that emigrants thought about and experienced emigration in family and community contexts. The decision to depart, when to go, what to take, how to get there, what it cost, and, briefly, the framework of growing government regulation constitute chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 3 details the vicissitudes of life at sea, providing interesting commentary on shipboard routines, committee management of life in steerage, and the shipboard replication of gender roles and social space, topics explored in an Australian context by Andrew Hassam's Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries by Nineteenth-Century British Emigrants (Manchester, 1994).
Chapter 4 engages with the difficulties of the journey inland; although for a detailed account of travel north from New York, one should consult Caroline Parry's Eleanora's Diary: The Journals of a Canadian Pioneer Girl (Richmond Hill, Ontario, 1994). Immigrants sought assistance from (and occasionally victimized) local aid committees and government agents but also turned to the churches: the “poor book” of St. Peter's Anglican in Brockville, at the Archives of Ontario (MS 7224), records payments to numerous transient immigrants.
Chapter 5 discusses letters as an “emotional lifeline” (136) sustaining transnational communities. Errington attributes the epistolary impulse not, as in David Gerber's Authors of Their Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2006), to deep-seated psychological imperatives as theorized by Erik Erikson and Anthony Giddens but less controversially to “a sense of familial obligation, ongoing business affairs, or just the need to maintain the image of familiar faces and places” (144). She explains the preference for informal alternatives to the postal system, but her proportion of elite letters somewhat undermines her sense of the extent to which writing was circumscribed by costs. The important subject of remittances is enlarged upon in an endnote that remarks on the helpful service provided by the Canada Company; its agents also transmitted letters. Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities provides a convenient introduction to the emigration process but defers to other authors for original perspectives on the sources and for detail on evolving inland communications networks and postal regulations.
What Errington knows about these emigrants derives mostly from their writings. She chooses not to emulate the intense local contextualization that was such a great strength of David Fitzpatrick's Oceans of Consolation (Cork, 1994). Errington visited county record offices to find more letters and read British newspapers to evaluate the range of emigration information they published, rather than to enhance her understanding of individuals’ lives. Yet she laments that “we have no real idea how Joseph Wilson and his family—or the Harts or Peters—fared after they arrived in the colonies. And one wonders whether George Pashley and his family stayed in Cobourg” (160). A brief search of materials at home and online reveals that William Peters, not a Methodist minister but a local preacher, lived twenty-nine years in Canada, dying in Hope Township in 1859. George Pashley, after eighteen years residence in Cobourg, died in 1851 of ship fever, presumably contracted from later immigrants. John Hart, a mill owner in Paisley, became a merchant and bookseller in Perth, dying in 1881; his wife lived to be nearly 100. These details are not “impossible” to find, and evidence for “class, gender, place in the family, and the emigrants’ personal situations” (173) must also be sought beyond the emigrants’ own writings.
Illustrations, too, should be subjected to comment and analysis. A prejudicial 1832 print of a ragged and slatternly couple is captioned “a somewhat satirical depiction of parish emigrants” (41), without suggestion of context, meaning, or relevance. Silent inclusion of Ford Madox Brown's iconic The Last of England misses the opportunity of quoting Brown's commentary, expressive of his views on class and gender: “I have … singled out a couple from the middle classes, high enough through education and refinement to appreciate all they are now giving up. … The husband broods bitterly over blighted hopes. … The young wife's grief is of a less cankerous sort. … The circle of her love moves with her” (Jan Marsh, The Pre-Raphaelites: Their Lives in Letters and Diaries [London, 1996], 69–70).
Parochially assisted emigration was bitterly contested in the public sphere, and emigrant letters were selectively published and fabricated both to promote and discourage the practice. Errington cautions against taking these at face value but at least three times cites The Narrative of Gordon Sellar (88–89, 218), unaware that this is a work of historical fiction by Robert Sellar, the Quebec journalist responsible for the infamous “Famine diary” of Gerald Keegan so often cited as genuine.
Errington acknowledges that her study “relies heavily on the work of [other] scholars,” while “at the same time, it consciously steps out of many of the current debates” (9–10), consigning historiographical discussion to endnotes or the appendix. That there has been less debate about Scottish than Irish emigration will surprise historians who have joined battle with the master narrative of the Clearances or argued for the extension of the concept to the Lowlands. Errington lists works of the new imperial history that explore “how travellers’ accounts were read and understood” (182–83 n. 11), but they have little influenced her approach. Indeed she ends with a parting shot at postcolonial preoccupations: “Certainly, few if any had entered the world of emigration as men and women of empire or with the expectation that they were creating a ‘greater’ Britain and were civilizing the world” (166). Consciously or not, emigrants were agents of empire, remaking the landscape and naturalizing British social systems and class, gender, and racial assumptions. Jane Hart's obituary, after all, concludes that she “took a warm interest in the mission work of the church, especially in India and among the North West Indians” (Perth Courier, 10 May 1907, p. 1, col. 5).
