The Other Quebec: Microhistorical Essays on Nineteenth-Century Religion and Society (review)

The Other Quebec is built upon Little’s long and comfortable familiarity with the history of the Eastern Townships in Quebec. Little is the author of several monographs on settlement and colonization in the area and two annotated sets of family letters; his knowledge of the sources provides the depth that is the virtue of a good microhistory. Little describes his work as “window” into the past: His chapters, most of which have been previously published, introduce the mystical mental world of tin peddler Ralph Merry (1798–1863); the fatherly love, and anxiety, of Anglican minister James Reid in the 1830s; the precarious gentility of English immigrant Lucy Peel; and the moral purpose evident in the work of schools inspector Marcus Childs. The particularity of the biographical approach allows the analysis to transcend the local. Merry’s experience of regular infusions of divine love, for example, was the product of New England, as much as the Eastern Townships, and Little’s description will be of interest to all students of religious experience.

Little aims higher, however; he employs the particular “to reveal a much more complicated society than the one depicted through the teleological lens of social control, separate spheres and modernization theories” (9). In large part, he succeeds. The chapters reveal that modernity was not necessarily secular. Chapter 6 describes the carnival-like atmosphere created when the railway brought 9,000 people to the Beebe Adventist Camp meetings in 1878. Marguerite Van Die’s contribution to the collection—a perceptive study of a Christian businessman, Charles Colby (1827–1907)—demonstrates how Henry Ward Beecher’s immanent theology offered stability in a volatile and speculative business climate. The final chapter is a historical “whodunit” involving a Presbyterian minister, the local postmaster, and a purloined sum of money. The identity of the thief remains a mystery, but the process of picking through the clues reveals the shifting balance of civil and religious authority in a rapidly modernizing world.

The revision of separate spheres is less successful; Little’s chapter on Lucy Peel, closely based upon Amanda Vickery’s work on gentlewomen in Georgian England, shares the flaws of Vickery’ s highly contentious work. Vickery has been criticized for misrepresenting, even “wildly caricaturing,” feminist interpretation of the separate spheres. Little argues that “Peel’s journal undermines the easy generalizations many historians have made about the impermeability of the separate spheres” (84). But scholarship today stresses the porosity and mutability, rather than impermeability, of the separate spheres, and his account, particularly the description of Edmund Peel’s attentiveness to his wife during child birth, and his devastation at the loss of their firstborn, might better be seen as a contribution to, rather than a criticism of, contemporary feminist scholarship.

Little’s book offers a richly realized glimpse into lives and moments in the past, demonstrating how religion, as lived and experienced, permeated Canadian society