Mrs. Simcoe's Diary.

Terry A. Crowley is a professor of history at the University of Guelph,
and the author of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality.

People love firsts. We not only like winning in competitions, but we are also fascinated with people who are the first to accomplish a feat or the first to meet a new people or explore a new territory.

The attraction of firsts helps to explain continuous publication of the diary of Elizabeth Simcoe, the wife of Ontario’s first Lieutenant-Governor, since it was first brought into print by Toronto journalist John Ross Robertson in 1911. Elizabeth started to keep her diary upon arrival in Canada in 1791, the year before the new colony of Upper Canada (Ontario) was officially inaugurated, and kept writing until her departure in 1796. Her entries concern events and people largely in Niagara-on-the-Lake and Toronto, but comment on Montreal and Quebec City as well.

Elizabeth Simcoe was a well-heeled English gentlewoman who married Colonel John Graves Simcoe. Their task in 1791 was to choose the capital of the new colony split from the old province of Quebec and begin its political and legal institutions. As the number of foreign inhabitants in southern Ontario remained very small, the Simcoes found conditions incomparably rough in contrast to what they had left in England. Elizabeth Simcoe bore up incredibly well and tolerated, without much complaint, living in an elaborate tent called a “canvas house.” There she entertained and was entertained by some of the colony’s wealthiest and most prominent residents, such as the Hamiltons and the Jarvises.

This edition of the Elizabeth Simcoe diary is a facsimile of the 1965 version published by the distinguished Mary Quayle Innis, who in 1966 also edited a book of essays on Canadian women with the title The Clear Spirit. Even the index appears to have been duplicated since the loquacious Hannah Jarvis is only identified in the index as “Mrs. Jarvis”—a convention of Mary Innis’s day now dropped. Canadian literature scholar Michael Gnarowski has added a brief foreword as the volume is situated within the Voyageur Classics series of Dundurn Press.

It is a pity that the presentation of this historic diary was not updated to make it more appealing to a 21st-century audience. Elizabeth Simcoe had a tart tongue, uncommon among women of her day. While the duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt was complimentary to her, she recorded of the nobleman and his party that their “appearance is perfectly democratic and dirty—I dislike them all.” Elizabeth’s comments on southern Ontario’s Indians, the real first settlers, are less trenchant but nonetheless vital to understanding relations between whites and reds. It is at places such as these in the diary that we glimpse the enduring value of Elizabeth Simcoe’s writings and see part of the reason for our interest in firsts.