Osgoode Hall: An Illustrated History (review)

There are as many ways to write history as there are components in the record of events and their perpetrators and publics. John Honsberger, longtime senior partner in a Toronto law firm and distinguished member of the Law Society of Upper Canada, has resurrected an approach to the writing of history, especially prevalent in the later nineteenth century. It is the narrative of institutional governance expressed through the lives of the early professionals of social regulation, the materiality of their symbolic investment of the state through architecture in particular, and the essentially anecdotal dimension of the rituals through which they asserted their public authority. It is history read as intersecting episodes, incidents, and instruments of specific practice regarded as the framework or armature of societal order and value. It is a compendium of data and detail, often sited on fabric and memorial that replicates the weft and warp of the experience of engaged living; what in a ludic recounting of feudal privilege the comedian Peter Sellers – in the guise of an English knight experiencing difficulty in traversing the moat of his castle – described as the 'rich tapestry of life.' In a more serious vein, Honsberger's celebration recovers such Victorian histories of Dominion municipal and legal development as K.W. McKay's 1901 volume on Elgin County, Ontario, The Court Houses of a Century. Honsberger thereby replicates a renewed appreciation for regarding history as the product of individual initiative as much as determining ideology and system. This appreciation of the effect upon events of people and technique corresponds with the interpretation argued by Richard Evans in In Defence of History (1999), even if it is bereft of the insights of postmodern or deconstructivist theories of social and cultural operations.

The title is entirely apposite. This is a history that is a broad recounting of the development of Osgoode Hall since 1829 as a centre of Upper Canadian and Canadian jurisprudence. The growing command exerted by the institution is marked as much through illustrations, of fine quality, and mostly photographed by Kenneth Jarvis, as textual record. That command began parochially but eventually registered federally and even internationally; Canada's distinct confederated system has become an increasingly compelling model in the functional discontents of late modern Atlantic style democracy. The writing is literate, and in many respects an engaging extension of legal brief and judgement. The details of the building, of its denizens and of their self-commemoration, are nicely woven into a broader narrative that effectively deliberates upon architectural convention and political context. Those denizens are granted leave to appear as witnesses to institutional expansion, as exemplified in Honsberger's remarkably vivid relating of the commemoration in 1916 of a plaque to Charles Moss including the words of Rupert Brooke's sonnet 'The Dead' delivered at the end of the service of dedication. What postmodern critical theory would tend to exclude as subsidiary to the larger force of idea and corresponding disciplinary regime proves to be remarkably evocative of the very attitudes and assumptions that always modify ideology and should equally inform theorization.

On the other hand Honsberger supplies, howsoever circumstantially, a remarkable sense of place, more specifically of professionalized public spaces, answering to the arguments about the grounds of social identity articulated by Martin Heidegger. But the essence of place Honsberger articulates is ceremonial. His words, and Jarvis and earlier photographers image, the past through the present spaces of Osgoode Hall. Both constitute a successive perambulation of physical, professional, and pedagogical structuring over time. The current architectural layout and appearance thus introduces a sequence of periodic analyses covering the main phases of development. Similarly the historical narrative draws upon a broad evidentiary base of scholarship ranging from the histories of architecture and the legal profession in Upper Canada to a thorough review of archival documentation. Corroboration comes in a series of appendices, chiefly reciting deeds of commission but with a useful glossary of legal terms, endnotes, select bibliography, and index.

The value of this book resides in its...