Family Life and Sociability in Upper and Lower Canada, 1780-1870: A View from Diaries and Family Correspondence (review)

This book follows the standard life course of the family by including chapters about courtship and engagement, marriage and married life, childbirth and infancy, and childhood. It then moves beyond the nuclear family to examine various aspects of kinship and community. The primary research is based on a narrow body of material—diaries and family correspondence, some of which has been previously published. The author does not specify the criteria for selection, except to represent as comprehensive a cross-section of society as possible. The principal focus is, nevertheless, on the bourgeois "writing" classes whose letters and diaries, particularly in Upper Canada, have already been much studied.

Given these sources, and the author's balanced but cautious generalizations about such themes as gender spheres, this volume has little new to offer in the general area of family history. Of considerable interest, however, are the sections on the Duvernay and Papineau families, whose extensive correspondence was largely a product of exile in the United States after the suppression of the Rebellions of 1837/38. Although it is hardly surprising that the radical politics and French- Canadian culture of the families in question did not result in family values and relationships that were distinct in any meaningful way from those of their more conservative English-speaking counterparts, this volume's most important contribution is to demonstrate that point in a clear and convincing fashion. A comparison of the family life and sociability of the less privileged sectors of the two societies would have been more useful, but the methodology of this study precluded examination of the largely illiterate French-speaking popular classes. Also, although the book includes references to a number of diaries written by English-speaking rural or small-town women and men, they tend to remain in the background. There is no explicit class analysis.

Analysis in general is sacrificed to descriptive narrative. The author adopted the unorthodox approach of focusing on one family at a time under each thematic heading, resulting in a great deal of thematic repetition and juxtaposition of each family's story. Either an edited volume comprised of two or three of the most important collections, or a more thoroughly digested synthetic study would have been more satisfactory. The main conclusion concerning courtship is that "young people had considerable latitude in choosing a mate and expected love to be the basis of marriage," though "parents were concerned with the choices their children made" (13). The second section finds that parents expressed "mutual concern and love of their children" (13), and the third concludes that "family sociability was seldom restricted to the domestic circle" (14). No one who has perused diaries or personal letters from this era will be surprised by these findings, or find fault with the over-all conclusion that "the family life of the literate classes in the Canadas before 1870 was not located in the narrow private world of the domestic sphere but in a much broader social space shared by people of both genders and all ages" (13).

But this study fails to show that society was evolving rapidly between 1780 and 1870, and that the nature of family and community was different in pre-industrial rural society than it was in industrial urban society. Nor does it indicate that communities of all kinds then, as now, were rife with internal conflict and that relations within many families were far from harmonious. The author might have considered whether dysfunctional families were inclined to exchange or preserve letters, or whether descendants would have been inclined to make them available to historians, in any case. Despite its limitations, Family Life and Sociability provides a good starting point for anyone wishing to pursue further study...