“Social Enjoyment and the Promotion of Arts and Letters”

Abstract

The Pen and Pencil Club of Montreal is one of the numerous associations founded in Montreal at the turn of the twentieth century. In offering its members the opportunity to circulate their work and receive informal feedback from other artists and writers, the club emerges as one of the forces in what Robert Darnton calls the “communications circuit,” one that creates a smaller, iterative circuit joining the author and the reader, the author as reader and the reader as author, before any work reaches the publisher. This article thus examines the workings of the Pen and Pencil Club and its mediating role between production and circulation of written texts. The Club’s members participated in nation‑wide debates on politics, culture, and art, and thus contributed in their own way to the development of a nascent Canadian cultural nationalism, one then communicated through the publication of their works.