Property and Inequality in Victorian Ontario: Structural Patterns and Cultural Communities in the 1871 Census

Philip Sworden is an assistant professor in the Law and Justice
Department at Laurentian University.

This detailed examination of persons who acquired and owned real
property in “old Ontario” discusses the relationship between
landowning and ethnicity, religion, gender, literacy, and immigration.
The book’s primary source is the Ontario manuscript census of 1871.

Although useful to scholars of late Victorian Ontario, as the first
province-wide analysis of landholding in this era, the book is somewhat
narrow in its perspective. By 1871, Ontario had been in existence for 80
years, and much of the southern half of the province was settled.
Developments associated with the settlement process included government
patronage, absentee landowners, squatters, and land speculation. In
addition, judges had developed much jurisprudence in real property
matters concerning, for example, waste, dower, estoppel, and breach of
covenant for good title. Corporations, banks, and railways also had an
interest in land, as did the Ontario legislature and the new federal
legislature in Ottawa after Confederation. The book’s almost exclusive
focus on the 1871 manuscript census has, perhaps unwittingly, led the
authors to overlook some of the related historical, legal, and political
context, of which the census was only a part. Nevertheless, Property and
Inequality in Victorian Ontario (combined with such sources as
assessment rolls and probate records) is a valuable contribution to the
history of

landholding in late Victorian Ontario.