Moonlit Days and Nights

C. Stephen Gray is Toronto-based communications consultant.

This novel describes the urban misadventures of its urbane central
character, Willoughby Tweed, an orphan from Ball’s Falls, Ontario, who
elects to seek his fortune in the Toronto of the 1890s. Willoughby, who
dreads the dull future that inevitably awaits him in Ball’s Falls, has
long been a voracious reader of newspaper and magazine articles on the
leading society and cultural figures in Toronto and New York. Inspired
by his reading habits, Willoughby determines to dedicate his life to
“Self-Creationism”—a unique personal philosophy patterned on a
pantheon of public figures, including Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and,
above all, “La Divine Sarah Bernhardt—Sorceress of the Stage.”

With a small investment, and through the convenience of Eaton’s
mail-order catalogue, Willoughby buys business cards and assumes a new
identity: Reginald Ravenscroft Esq., of New York City. Sporting a
stylish Imperial moustache, Willoughby/Reginald moves into the renowned
Red Parlour Suite of Toronto’s Queens Hotel, convinced that it will
take no time at all to enchant a marriageable woman wealthy enough to
allow him to live henceforth in a suitably lavish style.

Having placed his naive and eccentric hero in this somewhat implausible
position, D.H. Toole assumes the willing suspension of his readers’
disbelief and unravels the account of Willoughby’s big-city adventures
in a manner that is consistently amusing and entertainingly Victorian.