A settlers’ homestead, cleared from the bush in Upper Canada, ca. 1800. Pen Pictures of Pioneer Life in Upper Canada, ElectricCanadian.com/pioneer/pen/Chapter 21.htm. Liberty, democracy, and freedom from want, hunger and an oppressive aristocracy were said to prevail among peasants from Europe in the Upper Canada of 1821, but anarchy and doomed democracy were widely predicted. […]
Tag: Social classes
Billiards keep the upper class boys at home
An upstairs billiard room is an effective antidote to athletic sports that “disintegrate family life,” says the Toronto Mail and Empire, September 9, 1905. With athletic sports, “The boys are at baseball matches, the gymnasium, on the road bicycling. They are never at home, except to eat and sleep.” If a man installs “a […]
Scandal when Lady Aberdeen drinks tea with servants
Ishbel Maria Couts Marjoribanks Gordon, Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair, was not governor-general, as Saturday Night states, but possibly it was just that she was considered the power behind the throne. The governor general was her husband, Lord Aberdeen, a social crusader like his wife. Canada’s first aristocratic feminist, Lady Aberdeen (1857-1939) did not […]
Fox hunting on Saskatchewan prairie
The Moosomin Spectator, October 13, 1898, provides an account of fox hunting on the Saskatchewan prairie at Cannington Manor. One rider falls in a well, two tangle with barbed wire, and a lady rider falls in a muddy field. Cannington Manor, 25 miles south of Moosomin, is, at this time, a village of 200 people, the […]
Life in the public library
Toronto’s Mechanics’ Institute, with its lecture, study and library facilities, became the Toronto Public Library in March 1884. It immediately met with “violent opposition manifested against it by an influential section of the city authorities, and the lamentable dissensions among the Library Board,” as reported by contemporary historian C. Pelham Mulvany. It was still […]
Peasants Don’t Doff Hats As Anarchy Foreseen In Doomed Democracy
Liberty, democracy and freedom from want, hunger and an oppressive aristocracy were said to prevail among peasants from Europe in the Upper Canada of 1821. That was just 16 years before the peasants mounted armed rebellions against the ruling aristocracies of the Family Compact in Upper Canada and the Chateau Clique in Lower Canada. […]