Nineteenth-century Montreal Research Articles

From Conversation to Contract: The Notary’s Role in Nineteenth-Century Montreal

Whether the subject embraces a family or an empire, the historian attempts to tap the information flow on which its life depended. The notaries of Montreal created and accumulated documents that now constitute a massive archive, accessible but underutilized because of the challenges of search and discovery. As a probe of the source for the 19th-century metropolitan habitat, the authors assembled notarized transactions among the one hundred members of a single lineage whose descendants included five generations of tavern keepers and notaries. The case highlights the responses of the notaries—an information-rich profession—to trends in the urban economy. Since this kindred represents a broader class of rentiers, the findings of the methodological experiment take us to the nexus of urban kinship and urban property.

Female Authorship, Incomplete Archives, and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Montreal: The Case of Rosanna Mullins Leprohon

This article revolves around a case study of Montreal-based, Irish-Canadian author Rosanna Mullins Leprohon (1829-1879) who left behind little to no material archive after her death in 1879. Leprohon’s example serves to highlight the scholarly challenges that inhere in defining Canadian women’s authorship in the nineteenth century. The article is divided into two parts: focussing on the Journal of Education for Lower Canada (Montreal, 1857-1879), the first half argues that Leprohon’s periodical poetry played a greater role than previously understood in defining the terms of her authorship in Confederation-period Montreal. Examining archival documents belonging to her late husband and held in the Fonds Jean-Lukin Leprohon, the second half demonstrates the challenges that inhere in reconstructing women’s authorship through the archives of men-of-letters. Although they may never make up for the absence of private correspondence written in her own voice, Rosanna Leprohon’s periodical poems represent valuable resources for reconstructing the terms of her authorship and visibility in Montreal in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

Andrew Fernando Holmes: Protestantism, Medicine, and Science in Nineteenth-Century Montreal by Richard W. Vaudry

Andrew Fernando Holmes: Protestantism, Medicine, and Science in Nineteenth-Century Montreal by Richard W. Vaudry

Andrew Fernando Holmes: Protestantism, Medicine, and Science in Nineteenth-Century Montreal. By Richard W. Vaudry. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. viii + 390 pp. $80.00 cloth.

Andrew Fernando Holmes: Protestantism, Medicine, and Science in Nineteenth-Century Montreal. By Richard W. Vaudry. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. viii + 390 pp. $80.00 cloth. - Volume 90 Issue 2

Beyond the Old Dichotomies to a New History of Capitalism: An Appreciative Critique of Robert C.H. Sweeny

Robert C.H. Sweeny’s Why Did We Choose to Industrialize? offers readers enlightening quantitative case studies of the socio-economic history of nineteenth-century Montreal, linked by intriguing autobiographical sketches charting the author’s own intellectual journey. In this appreciate critique, I raise questions about the extent to which he has convincingly situated Montreal in the famous matrix of debates among Marxists about the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and suggest that in many respects the book, although convincing in many of its particulars, does not succeed in answering the general question posed by its title. Should debates about capitalism remain trapped in the unresolved (and likely unresolvable) twentieth-century debates pitting agency against structure?

Beyond Brutal Passions: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal by Mary Anne Poutanen

"Beyond Brutal Passions: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal by Mary Anne Poutanen." University of Toronto Quarterly, 86(3), pp. 205–206

Book Review: Beyond Brutal Passions: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal

Book Review: Beyond Brutal Passions: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal

Beyond Brutal Passions: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal by Mary Anne Poutanen

Beyond Brutal Passions: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal by Mary Anne Poutanen

Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History ed. by Patrizia Gentile and Jane Nicholas (review)

Reviewed by: Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History ed. by Patrizia Gentile and Jane Nicholas Matthew S. Wiseman Gentile, Patrizia and Jane Nicholas (eds.) – Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Pp. 428. Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History aims, as pointedly noted by editors Patrizia Gentile and Jane Nicholas, “to position the contested body as another category of analysis towards understanding both Canadian history and the nation” (pp. 3). Within this volume is an assortment of essays from well-established and emerging scholars that approach embodiment and body history through the utilization of a diverse methodological kit. Bodies have long intrigued scholars interested in Canadian history, but mostly as abstract vessels through which other topics have been explored. The novel contribution of this collection derives from its engagement with the process of embodiment and materialization of the body, defined not as a conduit for change but as maker (and unmaker) of change itself. Many theorists such as Marcel Mauss, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler provide the analytical framework upon which many of the authors in this volume situate their research. While other approaches differ, each chapter explores fluid conceptualizations of the body and nation in a Canadian context. In part one of three, “Contesting Meaning(s) of Bodies and Nations,” authors investigate the impact of the body and embodiment in the production of knowledge. First amongst a great selection is Kathryn Harvey’s first-hand account of her archival experience as a doctoral student. Harvey’s archival and sensory reading of her subject David Ross McCord’s written and material record fostered in her the understanding that “history is made through bodies, both alive and dead,” and it is therefore the challenge of the historian to bring “somatic awareness” to the process by which bodies experience “every state identified with the human condition” (pp. 32-34). In recognizing the somatic presence of her own body as well as that of her research subject, Harvey’s essay introduces novel and exciting aspects to our understanding of historical objectivity and archival methodology. Barrington Walker and Amy Shaw also deliver interesting examinations, interpreting the body through discourses of race and masculinity respectively, while Gillian Poulter broaches the subject of cultural appropriation in an intriguing essay on Indigenous sports in nineteenth century Montreal. The remaining two parts, “(Re)fashioning the Body” and “Regulating Bodies,” comprise the majority of the volume. In these sections and not unlike the first, authors insert material bodies into their analyses. Essays cover a range of topics, including: representations of the body in fashion (Myra Rutherdale and George Colpitts), art (Pandora Syperek), dance (Allana Lindgren), advertisements (Cheryl Krasnick Warsh and Greg Marquis), and beauty pageants (Mary-Ann Shantz and Tarah Brookfield); as well as bodily regulation of “obese” children (Wendy Mitchinson), medical women (Valerie Minnett), Second World War women (Helen Smith and Pamela Wakewich), the working class (Anne Frances Toews), and postwar working women (Kristina Llewellyn and Bonnie Reilly Schmidt). Positioning the contested body as another category of analysis, these essays explore the ways in which social constructions combine with discourses [End Page 810] of nation in the making and unmaking of bodies, and attempt to demonstrate the role of embodied materialization in the formation of national identities. They also stress, as convincingly pointed out by the editors in the exceptional introduction to this volume, that categories of embodiment like gender, class, race, sexuality, age, and health “shape and define the nation as well as ideas of what the nation is and who is reflected within its often-singular representations” (pp. 10). Mutually cohesive in tone and purpose, each essay contributes to an argumentative framework that challenges conceptualizations of Canada. Defined by Gentile and Nicholas as a mythological “monolithic national community,” the conceptual nation examined in this volume, is imagined and lived largely through the experiences of White, heterosexual, and middle class Canadians (pp. 4). Situated in a colonial context, where embodiment is interpreted through power relations and the mechanisms of imaginary corporeal identifiers, the nation-state and its typified puppeteers bear the brunt of thorough research and potent analyses. The volume is not without its limitations, however. In a...

Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal by Bettina Bradbury (review)

Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal by Bettina Bradbury (review)

Peopling the North American City: Montreal 1840–1900 by Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton

Reviewed by: Peopling the North American City: Montreal 1840–1900 by Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton Dan Horner Olson, Sherry and Patricia Thornton – Peopling the North American City: Montreal 1840–1900. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011. Pp. 544. Historical geographers Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton have been publishing innovative and insightful articles on demographic change in 19th and 20th century Montreal [End Page 251] for over twenty years. Peopling the North American City is their first monograph-length study of the city and it makes a vital contribution not only to the historiography of Montreal and Quebec, but also to the way that historians and geographers conceptualize the relationship between individuals, families, communities and urban space. Olson and Thornton’s study is based on a massive multi-generational sampling that, by mirroring the city’s ethnic composition, creates what the authors refer to as “a miniature Montreal”. The authors use this data set to make numerous inquiries into the economic, cultural, and demographic decisions that Montrealers made during this period. They explore the strategies people employed in their interactions with their families and their communities. By drawing comparisons both between different ethnic communities and across several generations, Olson and Thornton draw complex and nuanced conclusions about how people from a variety of class and ethnic backgrounds reacted to the transformations associated with migration, modernity, and industrialization. The strength of Peopling the North American City is found, ultimately, in the way that Olson and Thornton explore the results of their exhaustive demographic research without losing sight of vital social and cultural factors that might not be immediately visible in the quantitative results of their research. By viewing this time and place through a variety of different lenses, the reader is presented with a perspective that is sometimes messy and complex but, for these very reasons, is utterly captivated. Nineteenth-century Montreal was unique in that its diverse and rapidly growing population consisted of three distinct ethnic communities: British Protestants, Irish Catholics, and French Canadians. Olson and Thornton tease out the way that these three communities established patterns of strategic demographic decisions that were both logical and distinct. Decisions about when to marry and begin having children; about how long to nurse those children and how long to wait before having another; and about how to draw on the resources afforded by the extended kinship networks available to them all helped shape a distinct demographic character for these major ethnic communities. Why, the authors ask, did French Canadian couples marry at a young age? Why did British Protestant women marry older men? Why were families of Irish origin able to escape the numerous epidemic diseases that swept through this industrializing city with fewer casualties than their French Canadian neighbours? The authors do more than simply trace the major and minor demographic differences of these three communities. They push the reader to consider how these decisions were made, and what sort of strategic logic lay behind them. These strategies were shaped not only by the opportunities available to each community – be that in the form of material wealth or proximity to a large and deeply engaged kinship network – but also by the palpable sense of vulnerability that would have nagged at the inhabitants of nineteenth-century Montreal. Olson and Thornton argue that Montreal families at all points along the spectrum of class had to think like capitalists, meaning that in the midst of making crucial and intimate family decisions they needed to provide themselves with a degree of flexibility that would be sufficient for them to navigate the sorts of personal catastrophes that loomed over the residents of the nineteenth-century city. Widowhood, the authors note, was a particularly common experience during this period. Olson and Thornton note the significant portion of households that had been stitched together out of fragments of multiple families faced with the loss of a family [End Page 252] member to disease, workplace mishap, or any of the other misfortunes that threatened nineteenth century Montrealers. They demonstrate, through their careful demographic research, that the contours of the family as an institution were flexible enough to give Montrealers a variety of strategic options to...

Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal by Bettina Bradbury

Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal by Bettina Bradbury

Mortality in late nineteenth-century Montreal: Geographic pathways of contagion

In the City of Montreal, 1881, the presence of three cultural communities with different profiles of economic status makes it possible to observe the way social settings affected survival over a lifetime. Regression models show culturally determined maternal factors dominant for infants, and persistent throughout childhood. For post-neonates, children aged 1–4, and adults aged 15–59 household poverty has a comparable effect. Among adults, a gender penalty differs among the three communities. Models are improved when differentiated by cause of death. Locating households using a GIS reveals high levels of residential segregation by ethnicity and income, spatial correlation of environmental hazards, and constraints on exit from zones of risk, which together produce neighbourhood effects as large as household effects. Attention to groups excluded (foundlings and inmates of institutions) confirms that models limited to full household-level information significantly underestimate the impacts of poverty and exclusion.

Montreal-Glasgow

Edited by Bill Marshall. University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 2005. xiv+262 pp. Pb £15.00. This well-edited volume deals with the culture (in the broadest sense) of two great cities and is divided into several sections: Architecture, History, Literature, Theatre, Film and Television, and Exchanges. The approach is largely but not exclusively comparative. Holly Kinnear shows how personalities involved with both cities were responsible for the impact made on their urban landscapes by the Beaux-Arts movement, and François Dufaux underlines the high proportion of rental accommodation in the shape of multi-family tenement-type buildings to be found in both cities, but notes a number of differences in their architectural conceptions. Alena Prochazka discusses the extent to which major new buildings in Montreal conform to the established character of the city's built environment. Iain Stevenson studies the Canadian Pacific service of passenger liners that linked the two cities for much of the twentieth century, illustrating the chapter with several stunning poster images. The Scottish presence in Montreal is explored in two chapters by Gillian Leitch and Paul-André Linteau, and Harold Bérubé compares major commemorations of their history, during the crises of depression or war, by the two cities as well as by Toronto. The fine arts are represented by Alexandria Pierce's study of Lord Strathcona's art collection in nineteenth-century Montreal. Sébastien Socqué highlights the importance of the writer and politican, André Laurendeau, in integrating Montreal's cosmopolitan and exceptional character into a coherent notion of French Canada. As for literature, Maureen E. Waters explores the Gothic in the urban landscape of the two cities, although her text reads like the synopsis of a much longer work. Jacques Cardinal provides a dense interpretation of Jacques Ferron's novel, Les Confitures de coings, highlighting the political dimension of the work. Jean-François Chassay compares Gaétan Soucy's L'Immaculée Conception (1994) and Andrew O'Hagan's Our Fathers (1999), but the two novels seem too distant, in every sense, to lead to significant insights. Bill Findlay demonstrates how Glasgow audiences were particularly receptive to translations into vernacular Scots, by Martin Bowman and Findlay himself, of plays by Michel Tremblay, because of the continuing tradition of variety theatre in the city. David Hutchison studies the manner in which television drama with a Glasgow context portrays working-class, but rarely middle-class, experience and hence in some sense betrays the complexity of modern Scottish, especially Glaswegian, life. Pierre Véronneau, in a notably well-written text, contrasts the approaches to Montreal of two of French Canada's most significant film directors, Denys Arcand and Charles Binamé, and Bill Marshall's contribution is a well-realized comparison of the work for the cinema of Marc-André Forcier and Peter Mullan. The book concludes with Mark Rowbotham's study of Prestwick's Freeport and Montreal-Mirabel's foreign trade zone, a feature of the two cities likely to be little known outside business circles, and Michel Sarra-Bournet's overview of Montreal's cultural institutions, their history and probable future directions. This is, all in all, a varied and stimulating volume.

Dealing with “the Destitute and the Wretched”: The Protestant House of Industry and Refuge in Nineteenth-Century Montreal

This paper is an examination of the responses of Montreal's anglophone elite to poverty and homelessness. It studies the Montreal Protestant House of Industry and Refuge from its opening in 1863 to 1900. Influenced by the emerging liberal ideology that interpreted charity as moral weakness, the Board of Directors of this private charity imposed a work test to restrict aid and to “reform” recipients, and provided minimal living conditions in its shelters. As they gained experience in relief provision, the Directors grappled with the contradictions raised by their moral condemnation of the unemployed and the reality of unemployment and homelessness. Ultimately, their humanitarianism and Christian spirit prevented them from allowing their fellow citizens to starve on the streets.

The geopolitics of the Irish-Catholic parish in nineteenth-century Montreal

Irish Catholics in nineteenth-century Montreal, as a minority within a larger French-Catholic population, encountered a cultural environment very different from that experienced by their compatriots in most cities of eastern North America. In contrast with the more typical situation in which the majority position of Irish Catholics enabled them to exercise leadership in local Catholic affairs, in Montreal they had to overcome numerous obstacles in order to obtain churches and parishes they could call their own. Diocesan and parish records demonstrate that these struggles, in particular the controversy created by the subdivision of the extensive parish of Notre Dame in the late 1860s were defining events in the formulation of Irish-Catholic ethnic consciousness in Montreal. Constructivist interpretations of ethnicity have drawn attention to the way in which conflictual (and less frequently accommodative) relations among groups contribute to the formation and preservation of ethnicities. Drawing on this approach, it is argued that religious institutions acted as catalysts for debates that encouraged Montreal's Irish Catholics to define themselves in relation to the French-Catholic majority. These debates had an important territorial dimension and ultimately led to the entrenchment of ethnic boundaries in the urban landscape through the creation of separate parishes for the two groups.

Claims on Housing Space in Nineteenth-Century Montreal

Space per person is a fundamental measure of equity in an urban society. From small samples of the Montreal population over the years 1861-1901, we infer substantial improvement in the average dwelling space available per person, but an extreme and persistent inequity in the distribution among households. The housing market remained polarised in terms of class and cultural identity. As crowding diminished, urban density increased, and the problem of working-class housing became, increasingly, one of collective rather than individual space. Families, through networks of kinship and neighbouring, found new ways to exert some control over vital urban micro-spaces. In a continuous, demanding process of adjustment of households to dwellings, the re-structuring of households was a factor as important as their moves from house to house.

Family contexts of fertility and infant survival in nineteenth-century Montreal.

In the cohort of 4000 infants born in Montreal in 1859, the cultural context showed a powerful influence on infant mortality: more French Canadian infants died in their first year than Protestant or Irish Catholic. Socio-economic status shows no effect on infant mortality, although in each cultural community the wealthy had a higher birth rate than the poor. A higher birth rate to French Canadian mothers can be attributed entirely to the larger number of deaths followed by prompt “replacement.” Among mothers whose infants survived twelve months, all three communities show the same median birth intervals, indicative of a high fertility, apparently regulated by breastfeeding. The summer concentration of infant deaths nevertheless points to diarrheal diseases and differences of infant feeding.

Occupations and Residential Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Montreal

Occupations and Residential Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Montreal

Teachers, Gender, and Bureaucratizing School Systems in Nineteenth Century Montreal and Toronto

Central to the rise of the modern state in western societies was the change from private to public schooling; an attendant feature of this shift was the development of bureaucratic modes of school organization. Recent North American studies of these related phenomena, however, present two different interpretations of their evolution. Michael Katz's and David Tyack's studies of nineteenth century American schooling have portrayed the state as the protagonist in the promotion of bureaucratic structures in education, and their arguments have been echoed in Canadian analysis. The state, according to this interpretation, set the pace of educational reform, redefined the nature of parental, communal and religious involvement in the socialization of the young, and provided the framework for the organization of schools along hierarchical and bureaucratic lines.