Two Such Different Worlds: Edward J. Hedican and Catherine Anne Wilson on Family and Community in Rural Ontario in the Victorian era

Abstract

Two recent volumes from Canada ’ s leading scholarly presses represent the possible futures of rural history as practiced in Canada: Edward J. Hedican, After the Famine. The Irish Family Farm in Eastern Ontario, 1851 – 1881 and Catherine Anne Wilson, Being Neighbours. Cooperative Work and Rural Culture, 1830 – 1960 . Each has implications both direct and indirect for the way that the fi eld of family history deals with central Canadian culture as it moved swiftly from being virtually a contact culture to a fully articulated and dominant capitalistic European society. Yet, when placed side by side, the most recent works of these two scholars could almost come from different planets. The authors have a good deal in common and this needs to be pointed out. A brief discussion on their commonalities is useful, for it forms a plinth that makes it easier to see the dimensions of their divergence. Each author has previously done signi fi cant historical work. E. J. Hedican, a historical ethnogra-pher with a special interest in the Canadian north, published The Ogoki River Guides: Emergent Leadership among the Northern Ojibwa (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1986), a monograph on Ogoki River Guides among the Ojibwa and an expansion and revision of his 1978 McGill University doctoral thesis. He subsequently wrote three books of memoir and of methodological re fl ection. C. A. Wilson, previous to her present volume, published two works that relate to the usually ignored practice of tenancy as one of the tactics adopted in the early stages of New World settlement. Wilson ’ s Tenants in Time: Family Strategies, Land, and Liberalism in Upper Canada, 1799 – 1871 (McGill-Queen ’ s University Press, 2009) is a historiographical depth charge. It is a strong argument for recognizing that the alleged North-American pattern of quick acquisition of free-hold farms in the settlement period was not universal; indeed, it may not even have been predomi-nant. This argument is still not fully assimilated into the social and economic history of the United States and Canada in the nineteenth century. Its publication placed Wilson among the leaders of the new rural