English Immigrant Voices: Labourers' Letters from Upper Canada in the 1830s

Terry A. Crowley is a professor of history at the University of Guelph,
and the former editor of the journal Ontario History. He is the author
of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality and Canadian History to
1967, and the co-author of The College on

This major collection of letters from English immigrants to Upper Canada
(Ontario) during the 1830s provides an invaluable resource for
historians, history teachers, and those interested in the immigrant
experience in Canada. Meticulously edited, beautifully illustrated with
original work, and handsomely produced by McGill-Queen’s University
Press, English Immigrant Voices serves as a model for anyone intending
to publish primary sources about immigration.

Perhaps because we still tend to think in terms of an “English
Canada,” immigration from England has attracted much less genuine
scholarship than that of those groups such as the Irish who are defined
as “ethnic.” In this volume, which is a companion to Wendy
Cameron’s and Mary McDougall Maude’s Assisting Emigration to Upper
Canada: The Petworth Project, 1832–1837 (2000), the editors have
assembled published, archival, and private sources relating to
immigration from the south of England (Sussex, Surrey) to south central
and southwestern Ontario. Since these immigrants stood among the
relatively small number whose passage was assisted, a higher proportion
belonged to the working poor. In a fine introduction, the editors
situate this emigration and discuss the value of the letters that they
reproduce with just the right amount of editorial direction and
additions to guide readers fully. They manage to dissuade me from my
previously held view that historians of 19th-century immigration seldom
capture the viewpoint of the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum
from letters. Some of these people who could only sign their name got
others to write back home for them.

Because the correspondence continues over the decade of the 1830s and
is then followed by additional relevant correspondence and memoirs,
there is less scepticism about the immigrants’ voices simply providing
self-justification for what was a one-way journey with little
expectation of return to the homeland. The editors have had to update
spelling and punctuation but include several pages of transcribed
original manuscript letters to illustrate the difference. An additional
appendix identifies persons, places, and terms. It is difficult not to
commend this useful and impressive volume too highly or to note that it
was generously sponsored by the Reverend Edward Jackman through the
Jackman Foundation.