Beautiful Joe

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Margaret Marshall Saunders was born in Nova Scotia in 1861 and moved to
Toronto about 1913. When she died in 1947, winner of many literary
prizes and honored with an Order of the British Empire, she was
eulogized in a Globe and Mail editorial and Saturday Night called her
“Canada’s most revered author.” She wrote some two-dozen novels
but is best remembered for Beautiful Joe, published in 1894 and
reputedly the first book by a Canadian to sell more than a million
copies in the author’s lifetime.

Although Saunders’s inspiration came from an incident in Meaford,
Ontario, where a cairn and a historical plaque mark the grave of the
“real” Beautiful Joe (she said the setting was actually Nova
Scotia), this novel takes place in the United States, something the
nationalistic author regretted later. To be eligible for a prize offered
by the American Humane Education Society, she set the tale in Maine.

The story, told in the first person by “Beautiful Joe,” a dog who
is rescued from unspeakable cruelty to live with a minister’s kind
family, is briefly told. Few of the 37 chapters advance the narrative;
most consist of admonitory or moralistic conversations about the
treatment of various creatures. There is a chapter, for instance, on how
to raise chickens humanely; we are even told how mercifully to kill a
worm before impaling it on a fishhook. Such didactic and moralistic
writing will seem to many of today’s readers sentimental to the point
of bathos. Yet for all its preaching about the evil of drink and cruelty
to animals (often so gruesomely described that some subsequent editions
were abridged), this 19th-century novel had many prescient points to
make about the environment—about the natural and economic importance
of songbirds, for instance, in a time when military uniforms were
decorated with feathers (a practice the novel deplores).

For all its cloying prose, the book offers insight into what our
Edwardian ancestors read, and could still, one hopes, have an
educational effect on young readers. As recently as 1993, copies of
Beautiful Joe were being distributed free to public-school students in
some inner-city schools in the United States. The book has long been
unavailable in Canada, and one welcomes the initiative of the Formac
Fiction Treasures series, which “is aimed at offering contemporary
readers access to books that were successful, often huge bestsellers in
their time, but which are now little known and often hard to find.” A
fine introduction is supplied by Gwendolyn Davies of the University of
New Brunswick.