Negotiating Identities in Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century Montreal (review)

In this collection of essays on Montreal between 1820 and 1950, contributing professors and doctoral students from the ‘Montreal History Group’ map the complicated social landscape of what was once Canada’s leading metropolis. Various articles take the reader into cramped homes where black-clad widows stood watching their furniture being sold off, out under the street lamps of the St Paul market where prostitutes embraced their johns, way uptown to the neoclassical balustrades and Grecian urns of Westmount and its cemetery. The spatial organization of the city, the editors observe, benefited some and offered others means of resistance. The articles probe interplays of class, gender, ethnic and occupational identity, exploring hardships as well as forms of agency their subjects possessed. Though academic studies are sometimes as inaccessible as square mile mansions, here we find a scholarly collection that invites perusal by those who merely love Montreal.

The Montreal mosaic is well captured here. Tamara Myers walks us into a house at the corner of Bleury and Parc that in the 1920s housed A. Gold and Sons Jewish clothier, a Balkan greasy spoon, the juvenile court records, and Le Devoir offices. Myers’s article shows how delinquency among Jewish youth became a problem as adherents rose from 811 in 1881 to 45,000 in 1921, with Russians and Romanians swelling the English and German core. The article traces the intersection of ethnic loyalty and the ‘isms’ of the 1930s with an analytical balance that is typical of this collection. Social worker Esther Levitt lost her job for a combination of being ‘a Jew, a Westmounter, a progressive social worker, and a single woman.’ Sylvie Taschereau interviewed French-Canadian, Russian-Jewish, and Italian shopkeeping families to get to the bottom of the thousands of corner stores and groceries so characteristic of Montreal in the first half of the twentieth century. They ran on a modicum of capital and boundless quantities of family labour, at the expense of schooling, better jobs, even a night’s sleep as kids curled up under counters ready to make midnight deliveries. Depression-era men of various backgrounds mounted popular daily theatricals in an experiment that today’s bleak shelters fail to replicate. Fabian socialist and McGill professor Leonard Marsh designed a space where the unemployed were invited to come in out of the cold all day long, get their blisters healed and boots mended, and arrange their own security, sports, and leisure. It worked, but according to authors Anna Shea and Suzanne Morton was too unorthodox for the limited funding and recriminatory views of the time.

Other articles deal with bereavement. Bettina Bradbury adds desiderata to ongoing debates about whether French customary law advantaged women. Her case study of four pre-Confederation widows explores differing outcomes of lingering old regime inheritance practices and the common law, which placed more faith in husbandly discretion and male executors of wills. A delicious piece by Brian Young traces the increasingly arcane, even morbid, preoccupations of the McCord family as Montreal’s industrial take-off passed them by. The family turned their hands to the learned professions, libraries, and (on the distaff side) orphanages and charities. David Ross McCord cherished his collection of James Wolfe memorabilia (an ancestor had fought at Quebec in 1759) but did not manage to produce a son to continue the illustrious family line. The article explores the merging Proustian, Victorian, and Protestant funereal aesthetics that shaped the McCords’ impressive collection of mourning garb, funeral invitations, deathbed accounts, obituaries, and eulogies, not to mention their dedication to the Montreal Mountain cemetery project, which they envisioned as an edifying and ethereal public garden. In a wry closing, Young proffers the possibility that ‘the reader may perhaps prefer the view that the McCords were simply victims of tired genes, empty pockets and anachronizing forms’ effeteness (and) Victorian vanity.’ Then he turns the coin over, asserting that the family sponsored cultural, religious, and social institutions of lasting importance.

Photographs add another dimension...