Children's Voices in Atlantic LIterature and Culture: Essays on Childhood

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta, and
the co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views
of Canada, 1880–1914.

These 14 essays, based on papers presented at the fourth Thomas H.
Raddall Symposium (1994), constitute a judicious blend of historical,
literary, and personal assessments of “the child in Atlantic
Canada”—thereby appealing to a variety of scholarly interests and
reading tastes. Thus, while the fictional heroines and heroes of such
well-known writers as L.M. Montgomery, Norman Duncan, and Kevin Major
receive considerable attention, it is refreshing to read about real
children, either through sociological/historical analyses or personal
reminiscences.

I would go a little further. Some of the so-called “literary”
essays—Muriel Whitaker’s “Missing Fathers: A Developmental Motif
in Some Atlantic Fiction” and John Stockdale’s “The Suitable
Child: Norman Duncan’s Literary Children”—seem quite stale when
compared with such essays as Philip Girard’s “Children, Church,
Migration and Money: Three Tales of Child Custody in Nova Scotia,”
Sheila Andrew’s “The Gauthier Girls: Growing Up on Miscou Island
1841–1847,” and Sharon Myers’s “Revenge and Revolt: The Boys’
Industrial Home of East St. John in the Inter-War Period.” And further
than that, it seems to me that the most readable of the lot are the
personal memoirs: Isabelle Knockwood’s “My Childhood” and Alan
Wilson’s “A Young Maritimer in the 1930s and ’40s.” Perhaps it
is a matter of taste; perhaps the familiarity of the “literary”
studies has bred some contempt; or perhaps, and I choose to believe
this, the lives of real people (children and adults) are often more
interesting than their fictional counterparts. One could wish, in fact,
for a whole book devoted entirely to “real” children, leaving us to
our own opinions regarding the “fictional” ones.