The Diary of A Country Clergyman, 1848–1851 by James Reid (review)

HUMANITIES 255 Lewis=s punishment for including so much sex in The Monk was to be made the victim of two hundred years of lively speculation regarding his own sexuality. Writers of our times feel compelled to discover homosexual inclinations in people who kept their desires secret during times that did not encourage confidences. In chapter 4 Macdonald begins with a firm statement: >Lewis never married, and he left no records of any sexual relationship.= Undeterred by this acknowledgment, Macdonald first finds Lewis to be homosocial, not surprising in a society that separated the sexes from childhood. He assembles a case from Lewis=s smallness of stature, his male friendships, the motifs of forbidden love (all heterosexual) in The Monk to pronounce Lewis, sotto voce, a homosexual. While he never states his conclusion, he assumes it has been stated when, in the next chapter, he comments on the >violence that threatened him as a homosexual.= The assumption informs the rest of the biography. But it is the biography of an enigma and cannot avoid being speculative. We can disagree with some of Macdonald=s conclusions without thinking the less of his book. Although Lewis does not come vividly before our eyes, we close this richly documented book having learned much of the personality and careers of this intense, irascible, puzzling, and capable man. (KENNETH W. GRAHAM) James Reid. The Diary of A Country Clergyman, 1848B1851. Edited by M.E. Reisner McGill-Queen=s University Press. lxxxviii, 394. $65.00 The Reverend James Reid (1780B1865) complained soulfully, and repeatedly , about almost everything and everyone in his life: >It seems I am getting slack in my journal, but what can I do in a life so monotonous. The same thing over and over again every day. No variety no excitement. Nothing to stir up ambition.= Yet he talked to himself in his journal for thirty-six volumes, spanning a fair bit of the fifty years he served as a rural Anglican clergyman in St Armand, Frelighsburg, in the Eastern Townships of Lower Canada. As he aged he wondered repeatedly whether his life had amounted to anything, and he wondered if the bishop in Montreal counted his work worthwhile. Suddenly, at age eighty-three, he burned his life=s project, thirty-two of the thirty-six volumes, and ironically destroyed the very thing which would have brought him lasting fame in his new country of Canada. We can only imagine the significance of his journal were we to possess the whole. The two volumes published in this edition are so compelling, so valuable, and so revelatory of life at the village level in Victorian Lower Canada that it is easy for our depression over the loss of bulk of the journal to surpass his unhappiness with his life. We can only be grateful to M.E. Reisner for giving us her edition of volumes 22 and 23. Reisner has produced an exemplary piece of scholarly editing. She has provided a spotless rendering of the journal text, taken from the originals in 256 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 the archives of the Anglican Diocese of Montreal. As companions to this, she has written a lengthy research essay about Reid and the diary, exhaustive notes, an extensive chronology, a Reid bibliography, and thirtyeight biographies of local people, women and men who appear on Reid=s pages. The book, which arises from her doctoral thesis in English at L=Universit é de Laval, evokes delight again and again by both the attractiveness of the diary and the sheer detailed comprehensiveness of her research. Reid himself, perhaps unwittingly, provides the clue to the extraordinary value of his diary. He read the new book by the Reverend Ernest Hawkins, the international secretary of the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), entitled Annals of the Diocese of Quebec. It recounted the history of the Anglican church in the region. In Reid=s eyes it was worse than worthless B it was untruthful. He accused Hawkins, well meaning as he no doubt was, of depending too much on the reports supplied to the SPG by the bishops, the purpose of which was to solidify the financial...