All Things in Common: A Canadian Family and Its Island Utopia by Ruth Compton Brouwer (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: All Things in Common: A Canadian Family and Its Island Utopia by Ruth Compton Brouwer Beth Moore Milroy Brouwer, Ruth Compton–All Things in Common: A Canadian Family and Its Island Utopia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. 207 p. Two exemplary contributions to Canadian social history stand out in Ruth Compton Brouwer’s All Things in Common. One is her illustration of how several research areas, such as family, religion, migration, land occupation, and rural life are connected to the utopian form of settlement, a type largely absent from Canadian historical research. Those connections are evident in the case she presents of a built utopia in Prince Edward Island (PEI), which incorporates all those areas. She argues for recognizing the relevance of utopian settlements to the country’s social history. Brouwer’s second contribution is to show how a utopian case can be explored sensitively yet dispassionately by a professional historian who is also a descendant of the family at the centre of the story. In this book, readers will find a richly documented and experientially grounded discussion of the Compton community because the author could use records and participants’ insights that would be unavailable to a non-family writer. Brouwer has published widely on Canadian social history. In this instance she uses both her formal training and personal experience to illuminate why and how one of the truly unusual settlements in this country came into being, and what it tells us about utopia and one corner of Canada. The book comprises two parts. Together, they give readers a penetrating history of this built utopia from the gradual articulation of its aim, through its implementation, to the settlement’s eventual dissolution in 1947. Part I provides necessary background starting with a family of Comptons arriving on the eastern seaboard of the United States in the early 1600s. The subsequent century of religious turmoil and revolutionary upheaval provoked a strand of the family to migrate to Atlantic Canada as part of the 1783 wave of United Empire Loyalists. Early on, a theme emerges that will run through the book. This is the resistance on the part of many Comptons to certain social norms related to religion, family, and the organization of labour. For example, unlike most of their relatives and neighbours living in New Jersey, the first Comptons to come to Canada chose not to support the revolutionary aspirations of the American states. Instead, William, Sarah, and their children became destitute refugees in New York and later in Atlantic Canada. Even when it might have served their financial interests to be a little more [End Page 198] conformist, they tenaciously held on to their beliefs in millenarianism and an old style of “godly” Christianity. These Comptons refrained from membership in any institutionalized Christian churches, which, in their view, had lost sight of true Christianity, offering merely a superficial, coddling “Churchianity,” as they called it. Their aim was to hold fast to their interpretation of early Christianity as found in bible passages, including this one: “‘And all that believed were together, and had all things in common’ (Acts 2:44)” (p. 100). When in the late 1820s, a successive generation of Comptons was putting down roots in PEI, they finally found the religious “home” they had long sought. William, Mary, and their children became followers of Donald McDonald, a pastor trained in Scotland who preached a kind of old Scottish Presbyterianism mixed with various idiosyncrasies and millenarianism. The mélange was so distinctive that his adherents were called McDonaldites. When McDonald died in 1867, some of the Compton clan decided to put together their own “unchurched” manner of worshipping God, inspired by their McDonaldite experiences and their own preferences. Throughout Part I, the author references the effects of imperialist practices regarding land and settlement, as well as how the fracturing of Christianity played out in the lives of generations of Comptons in North America. Part II describes the physical and social development of the Compton communal settlement, its maintenance, and evolution. The land they settled on was of questionable ownership with regard not only to the Indigenous Mi’kmaq who, prior to about 1800, used the whole island...