Reviews in the British Journal of Canadian Studies

A selection of reviews by Ged Martin in the British Journal of Canadian Studies, the journal of the British Association for Canadian Studies (BACS).

Gerhard P. Bassler - Vikings to U-boats: The German Experience in Newfoundland and Labrador

Gerhard P. Bassler

Vikings to U-boats: The German Experience in Newfoundland and Labrador

Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008.

x + 378 pp. Cloth. £48. ISBN 0-7735-3124-6.

When Gerhard P. Bassler arrived in St John's in 1965, he found a community that proclaimed itself British but drank lager from the local Bavarian Brewery. His search for Newfoundland's German roots, which covers anyone from a German-speaking country, has been a labour of love, pursued without research grants. He argues for a strong German tradition that has curiously slipped under islanders' traditional suspicion of outsiders. True, they were always a minority but, as he argues, in a territory the size of modern-day Germany but with a population of a few hundred thousand, their influence could be considerable. There was a German on Leif's Viking voyage, who insisted that Vinland produced grapes, and another who accompanied Gilbert and identified mineral resources. (Both seem to have been wrong.) Moravian missionaries arrived in Labrador in 1784 and maintained strong links with Germany until the 1920s. Hamburg was a major trading partner throughout the nineteenth century, most of the island's lobster catch was exported to Germany, and Germans could be sharp observers of the local scene. Why has the German element in Newfoundland been discounted? There were never many of them: Bassler identifies about seventy in the three decades prior to 1914. Their activities were concentrated on stage-German activities such as brewing, music, wrestling and maintaining complicated machinery. Some changed their names: Ritter translated to Knight, Behr switched to Bear. A few were not only German but also Jewish, which meant a double whack of prejudice. Above all, the two world wars widened the split between German heritage and Newfoundland's imperial patriotism. The island's strategic location compelled repressive measures against harmless people, although Bassler dismisses the legends of U-boat landings and subversion. This engaging study constitutes a small footnote to Canadian ethnic history, but it makes its point that Newfoundland was a tiny bit multicultural even before its terminal date of 1945.

Deidre Simmons - Keepers of the Record: The History of the Hudson's Bay Company Archives

Deidre Simmons

Keepers of the Record: The History of the Hudson's Bay Company Archives

Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007.

xvi + 360. Cased. ISBN 978-0-7735-3291-5.

Occupying over 3,000 metres of shelf space in the Manitoba Archives, the records of the Hudson's Bay Company constitute one of the largest collections in Canada, and certainly the one spanning the longest period. It is important to remember, as Deidre Simmons explains, that the collection is extensive but not necessarily exhaustive. The Company established its paper trails for its own purposes, not always those of historians. In addition to keeping accounts, good records helped defend the rights conferred by its founding charter of 1670 (challenged as early as 1684) and to resist disaffected employees: even Radisson sued them in 1694. The first minute book dates from 1671, and in the early years the London records were kept in an iron chest and carted around the coffee houses where the directors met. From 1683, Company posts were instructed to keep journals (sometimes lost) which could be used to rebut charges of exploitation of Natives. The Company settled in Fenchurch Street in 1696, but no attempt was made to organise its archives until 1796. The earliest map by an employee dates from 1708, but a cartographer was not appointed until 1778. Lord Selkirk's Red River Settlement added little to the collection, but the 1821 merger with the North-West Company incorporated the written memory of the Montreal traders. The Vancouver Island colony of 1849 and the transfer of sovereignty over Rupertsland in 1869 generated documentation on land sales. By the twentieth century, the Company had become defensive about sitting on possible landmines. The venerable Lord Strathcona himself refused to allow the historian W. Stewart Wallace to conduct a 'fishing expedition' in 1913 (p. 189) and in 1921 restrictions were imposed on Frederick Merk, the historian of Manifest Destiny: the Oregon boundary dispute was still too recent for the Company. Graduate students were still having their notes vetted in the nineteen-fifties. But the Company's 250th anniversary in 1920 underlined the value of its heritage, and soon after the first archivist was hired, partly to supply material for another boundary dispute, this time between Canada and Newfoundland over Labrador. In 1925, there was even an attempt to poach A.G. Doughty from the Public Archives in Ottawa. A cramped search room was made available after the opening of Beaver House in 1926: appropriately, a smell of pelts pervaded the building. In 1974, after the official headquarters had been relocated to Canada, the entire archive was shipped to Winnipeg. Over three centuries, the Company had learned the lessons the hazards of navigation, and the cargo was split into two shiploads as a precaution against loss. Formal ownership was transferred to the Provincial Archives in 1993. The general reader will probably associate this book with the commentary on half-time at a football match, but it has been well researched and tells an important support story about Canadian scholarship.

Frances Hoffman and Ryan Taylor - Much To Be Done: Private Life in Ontario from Victorian Diaries

Frances Hoffman and Ryan Taylor

Much To Be Done: Private Life in Ontario from Victorian Diaries

Toronto: Natural Heritage Books / Dundurn Press, 2007.

vii + 276 + iipp. Paper. ISBN 978-1-55002-772-3.

This is the second edition and third printing of an interesting compilation first published in 1996. Hoffman and Taylor originally intended to produce a collage of material from the diaries of nineteenth-century Ontario (and Upper Canadian) women, but the project also came to embrace six male-authored records that threw light on their womenfolk. Extracts are grouped, with commentary and background material, in chapters dealing with courtship, childbirth, domestic life, cooking, servants, poverty, illness and various social rituals, from tea-drinking to funerals. As so often with diaries, it is not always clear whether they were written for posterity or as a form of dialogue with an inner or subsequent self. Belle Kittredge cried her eyes out after becoming stranded as a wallflower at a dance, either in 1891 or 1892 (the new edition might have resolved the ambiguous date). Years later she re-read the entry, adding in the margin: 'this makes me smile now but I won't tear it out.' (p. 9) The authors treat the Victorian period as a single unit, juxtaposing material from the 'fifties alongside a diary entries that refers to the telephone. Since there was indeed an underlying 'Victorian' culture in English-Canada, this works reasonably well. Occasionally it would be useful to have specific information about the locality, for Ontario is a large province and covered a multitude of sinners. It was intrigued to learn that, in 1850, the Hallen family celebrated Oak-apple Day, marking the restoration of Charles II in 1660 ─ a festival that was on the wane in England. We learn that the Hallen diary, which is much quarried, is in the Simcoe County archives but, although there is a biographical appendix, the location and antecedence of the family remain veiled. (The index omits reference to the entries in the biographical section.) Apart from a handful of quotations from the well-known diary of Agnes Macdonald, second wife of Sir John A., all relating to domestic matters, the material was entirely generated by ordinary people, living unsung but busy lives. My favourite diary snippet was an obituary for a well-loved cat. 'Could open the kitchen door, very tiresome we found that trick especially on a cold winter day.' (p. 191) The book is well illustrated, including a poignant photograph from 1871 of a dead baby, lying as if asleep in his cot. This is a work that will continue to provide charming insights into daily life in nineteenth-century Canada while also providing material for those who study diaries as a form of self-expression and analysis. The new edition notes the death of Ryan Taylor at the early age of 56.

Conny Steenman-Marcuse and Aritha van Herk, eds - Building Liberty: Canada and World peace, 1945-2005

Conny Steenman-Marcuse and Aritha van Herk, eds

Building Liberty: Canada and World peace, 1945-2005

Groningen, Netherlands: Barkhuis Publishing, Canada Cahiers no. 11 of the Association for Canadian Studies in the Netherlands, 2005

Pp. xi + 339. Paper. ISBN 90-77922-059.

Congratulations to the Association for Canadian Studies in the Netherlands on the production of this interesting volume, which has grown out of a conference marking the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. A prefatory letter from H.R.H. Princess Margriet is testimony to the strength of Dutch-Canadian links from that period. The opening paper, by Tobias van Gent, re-examines the Allied assault on Walcheren in 1944. Aritha van Herk asks whether it is possible to be a Dutch-Canadian. Christl Verdun writes about Kryn Taconis, the photojournalist who survived the famine winter of 1944-45 and emigrated to Canada. Ko Colijn asks what a middle-power can do about weapons of mass destruction. Houchang Hassan-Yiri, Hugh B. McCullough and Massimo Robboli consider various aspects of defence and external policy. The collection then doubles back with Doeko Bosscher's analysis of Dutch attitudes to Canadians as wartime liberators. Constantine E. Passaris sees Canadian multiculturalism as a potential economic asset in a global world. An outspoken paper by George Elliott Clarke infuses a Canadian patriotism into a denunciation of violent elements in Canadian writing. Frank Davey provides an account of Earle Birney's wartime service in the Netherlands, and Danielle Schaub discusses wartime trauma in Alan Cumyn's The Sojourn. Janice Kulyk Keefer links the writing of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jew, murdered in Auschwitz, with the work of Naomi Klein. Etty Hillesum's life inspired a series of drawings by Clare Weissman Wilks which illustrate a final section of verse by Keefer, Clarke, Davey and Verdun. This addition to the ACSN Canada Cahiers series constitutes a fine monument to the Canada-Netherlands connection.

Frederick Vaughan - Viscount Haldane: 'The Wicked Step-father of the Canadian Constitution'

Frederick Vaughan

Viscount Haldane: 'The Wicked Step-father of the Canadian Constitution'

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, for the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2010

Pp. xix + 307. Cased. £42. ISBN 978-1-4426-4237-9.

Richard Burdon Haldane was a British barrister-politician who between 1911 and 1928 shaped the Canadian decisions of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, until 1949 the country's ultimate court of constitutional appeal. Haldane strengthened provincial powers, so earning him Eugene Forsey's sub-titled condemnation. Vaughan believes Haldane's judgements were shaped by his Hegelian philosophy. However, this does not imply a dialectical confrontation, in which Haldane postulated a federalist antithesis to Macdonaldian centralisation, even though Vaughan believes he would have welcomed the post-1982 constitutional synthesis of the Charter Court. Rather, Vaughan stresses Haldane's search for Sittlichkeit, the values system underlying the British North America Act. The problem here is that Hegel is usually seen as glorifying the Prussian State, while Haldane consistently ruled against Ottawa, but Hegel may also be read as rooting political authority in broader social institutions. Although not susceptible of proof, this material might have made a useful journal article. The structure of the book is not easy to grasp, not least because of Vaughan's zigzag chronology. He is weak on British politics, for instance misdating the 1886 Irish Home crisis, bizarrely linking Haldane's 1906 Army reforms to the purchase of officer commissions, a practice he soon notes had been abolished 35 years earlier, and largely missing the significance of Haldane's Liberal Imperialism. Vaughan likes "must have" argumentation. Thus, it would be "passing strange" (p. 144) if an earlier judge, the Scot Watson, had not been influenced by the Scottish home rule movement, a blip that hardly features in textbooks. Haldane "must have known" that Nova Scotia had resisted Confederation although there is "no evidence" that he ever consulted Bluenose tribune Joseph Howe (p. 144). Indeed: Howe died when Haldane was sixteen. Haldane's audience at the 1913 American Bar Association meeting in Montreal "must have" been puzzled by his address (p. 160): the New York Times praised its clarity and it still reads well. A plea for unity of Anglo-Saxon legal thought, Haldane called it "Higher Nationality", a title uncomprehendingly dismissed as "curious" (p. 153). The argument was based not on Hegel but on Rousseau's General Will. Challenged by journalists to defend Canadian appeals to London, Haldane cited its recent umpiring role in "the marriage question". Vaughan scoffs: "why would one expect that a marriage or divorce question could not be heard fairly in the home country ...[?]".(p. 156) It takes him twenty-seven pages to realise that Haldane was talking of a major reference case of 1912 when the Judicial Committee had determined that the Parliament of Canada could not use its section 91 power over marriage or divorce to override Section 92 provincial control of the solemnisation of marriage and so force Quebec to recognise the validity of non-Catholic ceremonies in other provinces. Most unhelpful of all is Vaughan's statement that it is "often forgotten ... that a majority of francophone members" of the Canadian legislature "voted against" Confederation in 1865. Often forgotten because incorrect: the francophone vote was 27-21 in favour.

William Kilbourn - The Firebrand: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Rebellion in Upper Canada

William Kilbourn

The Firebrand: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Rebellion in Upper Canada, with introduction by Ronald Stagg

Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2008.

326 pp. Paper. £13.99 / $24.99. ISBN 978-1-55002-800-3.

The Firebrand first published in 1956, and is here reissued in Dundurn's Voyageur Classics series, 'Books That Explore Canada'. Although this biography of 1837 rebel William Lyon Mackenzie was enjoyable to read, I never felt easy with it. This was not, I hope, simply academic snobbery towards its lively style of atmospheric but un-footnoted reconstruction, but rather because William Kilbourn portrayed Mackenzie as a loveable rogue. My reading of Mackenzie's scurrilous newspapers was that he was an unpleasant rabble-rouser, and it was only the far more Himalayan grasping nastiness of the Upper Canada elite that gave him a heroic historical niche. Certainly the rebellion that he attempted to foment in 1837 was irresponsibly conceived and incompetently led. Ronald Stagg's introduction to this new edition solves the mystery of Kilbourn's Mackenzie by focusing firmly upon Kilbourn himself. A 'flamboyant and popular teacher' (p. 10), then at McMaster University and later a pioneer of the humanities programme at York, Kilbourn identified closely with the Liberal Party of Canada. If less than a power-broker, he was more than a groupie, someone with a knack of being present when key events happened, for instance getting in on the ground floor of Trudeaumania. In the mid-fifties, the English-Canadian liberal tradition, whether small- or large-L, had to take account of Mackenzie, both chronologically and causally ─ not least because the Party's apparent status as Canada's natural government was the legacy of the Firebrand's distinctly non-fizzling grandson, William Lyon Mackenzie King. Such Mackenzie biography as existed largely re-hashed the two-volume hagiography produced by his son-in-law, Charles Lindsey, in 1862. Kilbourn had access to, and at one point even quoted, the manuscript of a mildly revisionist study by W.L. LeSueur, but that remained unpublished for sixty years (until 1971) because it was ruthlessly suppressed by Mackenzie King, who cried blasphemy and invoked copyright. It was a new form of Family Compact, just as arrogant as its Upper Canadian forerunner but now stretching across the generations. Within his ebullient limitations, Kilbourn did try to set the record straight. Mackenzie, he cautioned, was not 'a sort of grandfather of Confederation' nor 'a schoolbook cause of all our modern conveniences.' Even if the 'indirect results of his rebellion were basic to the Canadian nation', Mackenzie encountered 'abject and sometimes ludicrous failure', making him 'not the cornerstone but the chief gargoyle' of the country's history (pp. 268-69). It is a classic verdict of 'not guilty but don't do it again', and the Liberal Party of Canada had imbibed the lesson, lauding Mackenzie's memory while utterly rejecting his oppositionist posturing. This is a welcome reissue of a book that tells as much about the hubris that provoked Canadians to elect Diefenbaker in 1957 as it does about the grievances exploited by Mackenzie in 1837.

R.B. Fleming, ed. - The Wartime Letters of Leslie and Cecil Frost 1915-1919

R.B. Fleming, ed.

The Wartime Letters of Leslie and Cecil Frost 1915-1919 (with foreword by Thomas H.B. Symons)

Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007.

xxxvi + 379pp. Cased. ISBN 978-1-55458-000-2.

His twelve years (1949-61) as premier of Canada's largest province won Leslie M. Frost the nickname of 'Old Man Ontario'. But in 1915, he was a nineteen-year old moved by idealistic imperial patriotism to volunteer for the First World War. His eighteen year-old brother Cecil soon followed. They hailed from Orillia, the model for Stephen Leacock's Mariposa: in a thoughtful foreword, T.H.B. Symons suggests that the Frost family provided models for characters in Sunshine Sketches.) Thus we might expect the 170 letters that the brothers wrote home would constitute a Siegfried Sassoon-style account of their descent from innocence to Hell. In fact, the interest (even the charm) of the collection lies in its upbeat tone of wide-eyed wonderment. Partly this was because writers wished to reassure their parents. 'Don't worry about us,' Cecil wrote as their train crossed New Brunswick, 'we are having a first rate trip at the Government's expense.' (p. 81) As the war became a reality, so the brothers became more circumspect about their experiences, with Leslie writing that he intended to 'talk about them when I get home and forget them when I am here.' (p. 218) In 1972, the ex-Premier noted in a memorandum accompanying the correspondence that half his company of 226 Orillia men were wounded and 44 killed. The brothers reached England late in 1916 and spent frustrating months in training, with Leslie protesting in July 1917 that he would be 'heart broken ... if the war ended and I had not been over [to France].' (p. 182) Cecil was more positive: 'Since I joined the army I figure I have learned more than I would have in a couple of years at University.' (pp. 130-31) They crossed to France late in 1917. In March 1918 Leslie was wounded in the leg. 'A good clean bullet wound which will heal splendidly,' an officer reassured the folks back home, but in fact his war was over. Cecil was grazed by a bullet a month before the end of fighting, but quickly returned to his unit as they marched victorious into Mons, where hostilities had begun in 1914. 'You will never realize what it felt like to know the war was over.' (p. 321) The brothers were proud of their military service, which evidently made them feel both Canadian and British. They were critical of Quebec's lack of enthusiasm for the war, condemning the nationalist Henri Bourassa as a 'traitor' (p. 106) and dismissing Laurier as a has-been. But leaving Orillia did at least enable them to meet their francophone fellow-citizens: some 'Frenchies' told Leslie in 1916 'we were damned fools to go to war.' (p. 81) R.B. Fleming contributes a comprehensive introduction and his editorial notes are supportive without being intrusive. An excellent collection, and handsomely produced.

Ramsay Cook and Réal Bélanger, eds. - Canada's Prime Ministers: Macdonald to Trudeau ─ Portraits from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography

Ramsay Cook and Réal Bélanger, eds.

Canada's Prime Ministers: Macdonald to Trudeau ─ Portraits from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.

Pp. xiv + 476. Cloth £48/ paper £22.50. ISBN 08-0209-1733 / 08-0209-1741.

This collection of essays about fifteen prime ministers of Canada is great fun. Seven, up to Laurier, have been published in volumes XII and XIV of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB), while a further seven, down to Diefenbaker, have been available on-line (www.biographi.ca). A final article, on Trudeau, was written for this book. Several essays have undoubtedly become the starting point for the subject's career, notably the entry on John A. Macdonald by J.K. Johnson and Peter Waite. Waite is the author of three other essays, underlining his standing as Canada's pre-eminent political biographer. Canada has been strangely neglectful of its prime ministers. J.J.C. Abbott, rescued by Carman Miller, and Mackenzie Bowell, by Waite, were transient figures but there has been remarkably little biographical coverage of leaders as notable as Tupper, sympathetically handled by Phillip Buckner, or R.B. Bennett (Waite again). Often, the established modern biographer supplies the entry: Waite, yet again, on Thompson, Robert Craig Brown on Borden, Blair Neatby on Mackenzie King, John English on Pearson, Denis Smith on Diefenbaker, while Réal Bélanger (Laurier) and John English (Trudeau) represent work in progress. Elsewhere, specialists in the period provide the interpretation: Ben Forster on Mackenzie, Larry A. Glassford on Meighen, Robert Bothwell on St Laurent. Few generalisations are possible about the office of prime minister: individuals as notable as Thompson and Meighen held it only briefly, while Tupper's ten-week premiership was hardly the pivot of his career. Nor can the essays be used to write a collective biography, since each has been written creatively around its subject rather than on some formulaic basis. Abbott enjoyed playing whist and Bennett liked hot baths, but there is no systematic information about prime-ministerial attitudes to card-playing or cleanliness. But the plus side lies in the delights of detail: we learn that it is sheer legend that Tupper was a womaniser, and that St Laurent insisted on paying rent for 24 Sussex Drive. Although an easy book to read, some of the presentation seems eccentric. The lengthy bibliographies of the DCB have been helpfully cut to a brief tailpiece of Further Reading, but the DCB practices of abbreviating months ("Feb.") and citing the full names of dramatis personae are maintained. The latter can be intimidating, not least because civil servants and historians in particular seem to have accumulated fruity forenames. In a whimsical Introduction, Ramsay Cook refers to "Ward's Law", the observation by political scientist Norman Ward in 1960 that the men who presided over the Canadian national family managed to father very few children of their own. Indeed, one fifth of the subjects lacked a First Lady (Bowell was a widower, King and Bennett bachelors) and few prime-ministerial wives come to life in these essays, although nothing can repress the redoubtable Maryon Pearson. A parallel volume appears in French.

David Staines, ed. with Barbara Nimmo - The Letters of Stephen Leacock

David Staines, ed. with Barbara Nimmo

The Letters of Stephen Leacock

Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 2006

xii + 564 pp. Cloth. ISBN 0-19-540869-1.

Stephen Leacock's niece, the late Barbara Nimmo, passed her collection of her uncle's letters to the distinguished Leacock scholar, David Staines, who has now published a generous selection. For Leacock, correspondence seems to have been a tiresome half-way house between conversation, at which he excelled, and humorous writing, for which he became famous. Only rarely did he produce an ironic set-piece, such as his missive to a governor of McGill University in 1935 defending a professor who was in hot water for believing in socialism: Leacock gently pointed out that even the imperial cabinet had sometimes included such dangerous people. Since Leacock was not a great letter-writer, long periods of his life are only sketchily covered. In those blessed days, academics did not yearn to retire, and Leacock was devastated when McGill told him to go at 65, but only two short missives attest to his humiliation. Equally predictable is the fact that much of the surviving material relates either to family gossip or dealings with publishers. David Staines has opted for a light editorial touch, principally identifying contacts and episodes relating to the literary world, and the collection will certainly be of primary value for anybody interested in CanLit networks during a formative era. But Leacock's correspondence throws light on his times more generally. In 1907-8 he toured the Empire to argue for a permanent imperial integration. The paradoxical result was that he came to dislike many of its component parts, and his homesickness for Canada is palpable. Voyaging through the punishing heat of the Red Sea, he mocked the affected accents of the British sahibs on their way to India ─ for whom lunch in one hour became 'lench' in 'an ah' ─ and equally found the Australians alien and brash. His comments on the Empire's subject peoples are best left unreported. Other figures from the wider world make brief appearances in his correspondence. Australian prime minister Alfred Deakin appears in 1907, while Winston Churchill is hailed in 1941 as the greatest Englishman since King Alfred. As the results of the 1942 referendum rolled in, Leacock was quick to see that Mackenzie King had effectively blocked conscription for overseas service by revealing the depth of Quebec hostility. There are unidentified allusions, too, to F.H. Underhill writing in Canadian Forum in 1935, and in 1941 to the work of historian Hugh L. Keenleyside. Few of these asides will ignite anybody's PhD thesis, but it seems a pity that they do not feature in the index. But these are minor reservations, typical reviewer's grumbles. Overall, this is a welcome and useful publication, and researchers who have to delve within its pages for their own topics will be rewarded by the repeated glimpses of Leacock's crackling and crusty personality.

Julia Roberts - In Mixed Company: Taverns and Public Life in Upper Canada

Julia Roberts

In Mixed Company: Taverns and Public Life in Upper Canada

Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009), x + 228pp

Cloth. $85.00. ISBN 9780774815758. Paperback. $32.95. ISBN 9780774815765.

Julia Roberts has written an impressive book about an important aspect of Upper Canadian social history. Her achievement is remarkable because there are few comprehensive sources for her study: courts and municipalities have left licensing records, but the fat, subject-specific archival files that historians generally devour for major monographs do not exist. Rather, the tavern permeated public life so that its historical traces must be sought everywhere, and encyclopaedic research is required to track them down. (One measure of this may be found in the book's imaginative and amusing illustrations.) Taverns were a cut above beer shops. They provided food, sometimes surprisingly well cooked, and accommodation, although beds often had to be shared and floors used as dormitories. Seeing them as vital infrastructure, Governor Simcoe built the first taverns in the 1790s. An elite minority, mainly in the cities, called themselves hotels. Others were termed inns and, occasionally, coffee houses. Roberts explores their layout, their regulation and their social and even administrative functions. Even though Upper Canada's population burgeoned, a rough ratio of three such establishments per thousand people was maintained, suggesting that they played a recognised and stable role in colonial society. Roberts shows that they provided social space, even if sometimes segregated, for women, Native people and Blacks. The statistic that 96 percent of licences were awarded to men masks the importance of the tavern as an outlet for female, usually wifely, entrepreneurship. We are introduced to vivid personalities, notably two revealing diarists, Ely Playter, who kept a York (Toronto) tavern in 1801-2, and civil servant Harry Jones, man-about-town in the Kingston forty years later. The sole conceptual fuzziness is the open-ended time period of the study. Effectively, we are left to assume that the tavern era ended when the railways linked the main cities in the mid-1850s, replacing long-distance stagecoach routes. But secondary centres were still hustling for branch lines twenty years later, and their taverns probably continued to operate on established patterns. As Roberts acknowledges, the new railway-inspired luxury hotels, like the Rossin House in Toronto and the Russell House in Ottawa, evolved from the coaching-era tavern. Roberts writes with infectious verve, even if there is a little too much of it in her preface. I first heard her speak on this subject at an Edinburgh Canadian Studies conference in 1999, the year she completed her doctoral thesis. Perhaps the productivity kommissars who infest modern universities have muttered about the decade it has taken for this book to emerge, but its breadth, its vigour, its cogency and its impressively referenced research – much of it evidently fine-honed in classroom dialogue – more than justify the investment of time.