Drink in Canada: Historical Essays

Pleasance Crawford is a Canadian landscape and garden-history researcher
and writer, and the editor of Landscape Architectural Review.

These are scholarly essays by historians and social scientists. Each
focuses on a different aspect of drinking alcohol (or abstaining from
same) in 19th- and 20th-century Canada, from coast to coast. As one
reads through the nine essays, a composite picture emerges of the ways
and settings in which Canadian men, women, and children have imbibed; of
the means by which religious, fraternal, and political institutions have
promoted abstinence or temperance; of the roles of individuals such as
Father Charles Chiniquy; and of the broader context of what was
happening elsewhere, especially in the United States and Britain.

Curiously, none of the essays deal with the devastating effects of
alcohol on the Native population, although the comprehensive
bibliography compiled by Pamela McKenzie includes “Alcohol and Native
Canadians” as a subject category. The most immediately affecting essay
is James L. Sturgis’s “‘The Spectre of a Drunkard’s Grave’:
One Family’s Battle with Alcohol in Late Nineteenth-Century Canada.”

This is a well-documented book, with a thick section of notes, a good
index, and the excellent bibliography already mentioned. It is
unfortunate that Cheryl Krasnick Warsh and James Sturgis are missing
from the list of contributors.