Life and Times: Recollections of Eliza Cox Carter

Laurie C.C. Stanley-Blackwell is an associate professor of history at
St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia.

In more traditional histories, the story of Eliza Cox Carter
(1821–1899), sea captain’s wife, homemaker, and unlicensed healer,
would have been fated to oblivion. In this book, the editors have
assembled the fragments of Eliza’s past and revealed the untapped
potential of such sources as women’s diaries, recipes, remedy books,
and material artifacts.

Their biographical sketch of Eliza Cox Carter is disappointingly brief.
They were more creative in their search for sources than in their
interpretation of what they found. Far more illuminating are the two
annotated excerpts from Eliza’s diaries. In these descriptive
extracts, one truly sees Eliza’s world through her eyes. The sea diary
chronicles the voyage with her mariner husband and children to Bombay in
1850–51 vividly evoking the loneliness, monotony, and occasional
adventure of ship travel. The second excerpt, dated autumn 1865, details
the daily routine of farm life on New Brunswick’s Kingston Peninsula.

Baxter and Quigley flesh out their survey of Eliza’s life with
photoessays about some of her surviving personal artifacts and
Carter’s Point House where she resided from 1854 to 1899. The
photographs of her piano, chaise longue, and goffering irons convey a
tangible sense of her material world. The lived reality of
housecleaning, food preparation, textile production, and healing is
evoked by the transcription of her recipe and remedy book. There are
recipes for Lord Fullerton’s Curry powder, Sabastipool Pudding,
Washington Pie, Rail Road Cake, and Indian stew—the very names
resonate with the history of the era. The reader is introduced to the
vocabulary of the 19th-century pharmacopoeia with such staples as
laudanum, pokeroot, bayberry bark, and oil of sassafras. There is also
household lore about boot blacking, dyes, liniments, furniture polish,
and weaving patterns. These practical hints, along with the diaries,
graphically demonstrate the ingenuity bred by self-reliance and the
central importance of women to the rural household economy.

Life and Times is supplemented with a bibliography, glossary,
annotations, and maps as well as photographs that greatly enhance the
reader’s comprehension of Victorian domestic life in Maritime Canada.
This volume is a useful reminder to readers of the shortcomings of
traditional history, with its emphasis on “important events.” The
daily narrative of Eliza’s life focused more on child raising, calving
cows, and rheumatism than on treaties and politics.