The Diary of a Country Clergyman, 1848-1851

A.J. Pell is rector of Christ Church in Hope, B.C., editor of the
Canadian Evangelical Review, and an instructor of Liturgy, Anglican
Studies Programme at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia.

This book includes volumes 22 and 23 of James Reid’s 36-volume diary.
The editor has supplemented the diaries, which occupy only 171 pages,
with a lengthy introduction (which includes a chronology of Reid’s
life and maps of the Eastern Townships of Quebec, the area Reid lived in
at the time), biographical sketches of many local people the reader
meets in the diaries, and extensive footnotes. Meticulously researched
and well written, the supplementary material sheds much light on
Reid’s writings.

Born in 1780 and raised in Perthshire, Scotland, Reid was a cleric in
the Church of England in Quebec from his 1815 ordination in Holy Trinity
Cathedral, Quebec, until his death in 1865 in Frelighsburg. The diaries
reveal a man who pursued his ministry with intellectual and physical
vigor. They are full of Reid’s observations of parishioners and
neighbors and his own family, of the affairs of his own parish and the
issues of his diocese. The final entry in volume 23 may end with an
expression of physical fatigue, but only six months earlier Reid had
gone to Trinity Church before dawn to build and tend fires to heat the
building for the 11 a.m. service. With that sort of self-discipline and
attention to detail, it is no wonder that his diaries provide such a
clear picture of life in mid-19th-century rural Quebec.