St George's Cathedral: Two Hundred Years of Community

Eileen Goltz is Public Documents Librarian at Laurentian University.

Compiled to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the construction of the
first St. George’s Anglican Church in Kingston, Ontario, this
collection of 13 essays concerns various aspects of the church’s
history. Each essay has been written by someone knowledgeable in the
subject field, and each is scholarly, researched, and documented. The
editor—a historian with Queen’s University, and a member of St.
George’s parish—has divided the volume into four sections:
“Foreword” (an introduction and explanation); “Traditions” (six
thematic essays); “Traits” (seven essays featuring characters and
episodes in the history of the church); and finally “Afterword”
(wherein current happenings are featured).

Although in the foreword the editor situates this community history
within the larger Ontario history, an awareness of context is not
reflected throughout. The chapters are not connected, and the overall
impression is that while each is concerned with St. George’s to some
degree, each is independent of the others. An editorial introduction to
each chapter might have altered this perception.

Only three of the essays venture into the twentieth century, while
three deal exclusively with the eighteenth, five with the nineteenth,
and two traverse the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There is,
thus, little information presented on the most recent 100 years, and
since many of the essays are concerned with the earliest days of the
church there is much repetition. For example, too many contain
biographies—long or short—of the first clergyman. On a more positive
note, the diagrams, photographs, and line drawings are welcome, and the
endnotes provide the reader with an idea of the research efforts
undertaken by each of the authors.