Thinking with Both Hands: Sir Daniel Wilson in the Old World and the New

Alexander D. Gregor is director of the Centre for Higher Education
Research and Development at the University of Manitoba and the co-editor
of Postsecondary Education in Canada: The Cultural Agenda.

Thinking with Both Hands represents a welcome restoration of one of
Canada’s leading 19th-century figures. The book, ably edited by
Elizabeth Hulse, is in part a memorial to Marinell Ash, whose premature
death halted her studies of Daniel Wilson. Ash’s work, complemented by
that of 10 contributors, forms part of a comprehensive exploration of
Wilson’s life and career.

Daniel Wilson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1816. After a
remarkable early career in Scotland as a pioneering archeologist, he
moved to Canada in 1853 to become the newly established University of
Toronto’s first professor of English literature and history, and, in
time, one of that institution’s most significant presidents. The
book’s title refers to Wilson’s ambidextrousness and to his belief
that the nurturing of ambidextrousness could result in the equal
flourishing of both hemispheres of the brain, the rational and the
creative. Irrespective of the scientific merit of that assumption,
Wilson made it work, earning the label of “polymath” and achieving
recognition in a variety of fields, including poetry and literary
criticism, watercolor painting, archeology, anthropology, and ethnology.
By treating Wilson’s life as a kind of microcosm, the authors are able
to illustrate the scope and character of 19th-century scholarship, thus
allowing us to understand a period as well as a man. A particularly
useful analysis is made of the “culture of science” in which Wilson
worked.

The book’s 10 chapters offer a balanced picture of Wilson’s life.
Consideration is given to his early life in Scotland and his
archeological work there; to his scholarship in Canada in the fields of
ethnology, human biology, literary criticism, and poetry; and to his
work as an administrator at the University of Toronto. To complete the
portrait, Wilson the man and the artist is considered in two concluding
chapters.

Thinking with Both Hands will be of value to anyone interested in the
intellectual and social development of 19th-century Canada.