Townshend of Huron

Dennis Blake is a high-school history teacher with the Halton Board of
Education.

In every Canadian Victorian home resided two staples: a Bible on the
mantel and a portrait of Queen Victoria on the wall. This is the story
of an eminent Victorian, Rev. William A. Townshend, a reformer who drew
reserves of strength from the deep well of his Christian faith. It
chronicles his life, beginning in the late 1880s. His seven-decade
career in the Anglican Church, as a trustee for the London Board of
Education, and as an education reformer is representative of the purest
of Christian social reform tenets.

The biography is uplifting. While the history of “Carlyle’s great
man” has lost its pertinence in professional circles, its
historiographical replacement—social history—too often drifts from
making the individual life meaningful in its historical context.
Statistics and demography can submerge the human personality and shred
the links that can be forged across decades and even centuries by the
recognition of shared human nature. Purdy, a professor in the Faculty of
Education at the University of Western Ontario, grounds this
unpretentious work in a long tradition of biography that, in contrast,
seeks to give meaning to the human endeavor. His chronicle of this
single life is at once modest and profound. Townshend of Huron is a
worthy read that provides insight into the Southern Ontario of a passing
20th century.