Home Ground and Foreign Territory: Essays on Early Canadian Literature

Judging by Appearances: Thomas Chandler Haliburton and the Ontology of Early Canadian Spirits

Home Ground Final.indd 217 14-03-19 09:54 1 Judging by Appearances: Thomas Chandler Haliburton and the Ontology of Early Canadian Spirits CYNTHIA SUGARS This is my own, my native land. –Thomas Chandler Haliburton, epigraph to An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia Like a phrenologist feeling his way across a cranium, Haliburton probed for the potential of his province. –M. Brook Taylor, “Haliburton as a Historian” (109) Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s 1849 The Old Judge; or, Life in a Colony is a peculiar document. Part novel, part cultural history, part compendium of local politics and legend, part ghost story, the book has proved something of a puzzle to literary scholars, who either emphasize its encapsulation of Haliburton’s reflections on leaving Nova Scotia to settle in England or overlook it altogether in favour of his much more easily accessible “Sam Slick” narratives. The Old Judge is a mongrel of a text—neither satire nor romance, neither novel nor short stories—yet many critics have gestured to its importance as perhaps the greatest and most neglected of Haliburton’s work.1 V. L. O. Chittick states that “For ten persons who have read The Clockmaker not one can be found who has so much as looked into The Old Judge” (487–488). Haliburton’s combination of Nova Scotian localism and British imperialist politics Printed by permission of Cynthia Sugars. Home Ground Final.indd 218 14-03-19 09:54 Cynthia Sugars is part of the problem, particularly from our standpoint today when postcolonial conceptions of home and abroad are often configured as dialectical. It may be more fruitful, however, to situate The Old Judge within a more historically nuanced global purview by considering the author’s transmutation of a British literary form within his highly localized rendition of Nova Scotian colonial life. This context can illuminate a good deal about the motivation and tribulations that undergird the book. This chapter will attempt to bring new perspective to what I believe is indeed Haliburton’s greatest work by undertaking a detailed historical and textual analysis of his adaptation of the Gothic genre for a Nova Scotian/Canadian context. In an 1857 article published in The New Era entitled “A Canadian Literature,” Thomas D’Arcy McGee recounts a speaking tour given by Haliburton: Judge Haliburton, in a lecture lately given in some part of England, said: There was no literature in the colonies because they had no past, no infancy, no youth. They had grown up suddenly, had . . . no castles which had formerly been strong­holds and told tales of rapine and oppression; their rivers had no names; their streams had no legends; they had no fairies, no superstition; their people were plain, hard, matter­of­fact men. As matter­of­fact men, poets were not valued among them, for there could be no poetry where there were no memories. (41–42) Although McGee cited Haliburton’s speech to muster support for the idea of a distinctive Canadian literature, it is curious that Haliburton decries an absence of cultural antiquity that is in fact belied by his own work The Old Judge, a book first published in serial form ten years earlier in 1846–1847, and then in book form in 1849. What is especially striking in Haliburton’s speech is his use of Gothic metaphors to describe what is lacking in the colonies. The colonies lack “castles” that tell “tales of rapine and oppression”; their streams “had no legends . . . no fairies, no superstition.” Of course, the motif of cultural immaturity that Haliburton uses had become a standard trope in depictions of the colonies by this time, particularly via metaphors of absent ghosts and legends; such authors as Catharine Parr Traill and Anna Jameson had invoked the absence of Canadian spirits before he made this speech. Here, however, it is not that the colony is youthful, but rather that it is prematurely aged 218 Home Ground Final.indd 219 14-03-19 09:54 Judging by Appearances 219 (it has “grown up suddenly” without the cultural legacy that age should carry with it). In having no past, the colony is positioned as at once too young and too old, inhabiting a kind of cultural senescence. This Rip Van Winkle effect works to disinherit the colony as it positions it in search of antiquity. In other words, it has passed to prosaic adulthood without the benefit of Gothic...