Travels in a Cold and Rugged Land: C.H. Farnham’s Quebec Essays in Harper’s Magazine, 1883-89

Abstract

During the 1880s, Charles Haight Farnham published eight articles on Canada in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, seven of which were focussed on Quebec. Appealing to the rising anti-modernist impulse of many of his well-educated readers, Farnham described living examples of what was assumed to be the pre-industrial past in the lower St. Lawrence and Labrador regions. Farnham’s artfully written articles, set mostly in late fall and winter, depict a cold and rugged land, albeit one in which the traditional virtues and community ties of the folk remained intact, and hard-working people led simple, fulfilling lives uncontaminated by materialism and greed. The fact that Farnham chose to travel much of the coastline by canoe also reflected the contemporary middle-class concern with the softening effects of urban life. As a liberal American Protestant, however, Farnham’s anti-modernism was qualified by his repeated criticism of what he viewed as French-Canadian submission to an oppressive and obscurantist Roman Catholic Church.