Vancouver Island Letters of Edmund Hope Verney, 1862–1865 ed. by Allan Pritchard (review)

Book Reviews 595 reconstructs with great care, and with a full understanding of the evidence, the remarkable development of the late nineteenth century that placed such a vibrant society in British Columbia. · BARRY GOUGH Wilfrid Laurier University Vancouver Island Letters of Edmund Hope Verney, 1862-1865. Edited by ALLAN PRITCHARD. Vancouver: use Press 1996. Pp. viii, 307, illus. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper Allan Pritchard has discovered a remarkably revealing source and used it to create a book that is both useful and interesting. Vancouver Island Letters of Edmund Hope Verney ably introduces the edited letters of a young naval officer posted at Vancouver Island between the turbulent years of 1862 and 1865. In doing so, Vancouver Island Letters makes accessible an archival source that is valuable not only for historians of British Columbia but also for scholars ofnineteenth-century colonialism. Verney was an ambitious young bourgeois Englishman with a seemingly endless desire to confess and impress. He penned regular letters to his father, Sir Harry Verney, retelling the details, foibles, and findings of his life as commander of the naval gunboat Grappler, stationed at Esquimalt. It is these letters that Pritchard discovered housed at the Verney family estate in England. Although Verney's main intention was clearly to please his exacting patriarch, his regular missives unwittingly provide a useful' perspective on social life on Vancouver Island in the l86os. As an important young man about a small colonial town, Verney had unique access to.local institutions of power and influence. An evangelical Christian and general do-gooder, he was a member of the Immigration Board, the Lighthouse Board, the Mechanics' Institute, and a magistrate. He told his father, perhaps ironically: 'I wish no committee to be complete without me' (91). Verney's detailed descriptions of his service work provide many new insights into the inner workings of colonial society in this period. Verney had physical mobility as well influence and connections. In his capacity as a naval commander, he travelled the coast, ferrying white settlers to Comox and Cowichan, visiting the missionary village of Metlakatla, and hounding wanted First Nations people up Bute Inlet~ Throughout his travels, Verney maintained a profound commitment to notions of racial hierarchy and difference. Soon after his arrival, he wrote that 'the natives are hideously ugly and atrociously dirty: their 596 The Canadian Historical Review customs are beastly, manners they have none' (62). In keeping with Victorian evangelicalism, Verney balanced this vitriol with a belief that First Nations people could be improved with appropriate tutelage. Visiting Metlakatla, he commented approvingly that the mission had 'brought some hundreds of the natives from a state of the most degraded barbarism and the blackest heathendom to a state of civilization and outward Christianity which may be quite placed on a par with that of an ordinary English village' (172). Like many other metropolitan observers, Verney also found the white society of colonial British Columbia flawed. Given his military, class, and race background, it is not surprising that Verney's letters are marked by a deep discomfort with the easy sociability, mixed-race social formation, and seeming disorganization of colonial Victoria. He was especially troubled by Governor James Douglas's mixed-blood family and apparent toleration of moral laxity. A 'man who is perhaps living with a woman who is not his wife may be seen in intimate familiar conversation with the Governor,' he raged, adding that as for 'Mrs. Douglas and her daughters~ the less said the better' (84). Verney was similarly disturbed by the rowdy behaviour of the white working-class women who arrived on the 'brideships' of 1862 and 1863. Verney's letters provide a spate of valuable information about both nineteenth-century British Columbia and colonialism. The sizeable introduction, moreover, is well documented, thoughtful, and articulate. Not satisfied with merely detailing the letters' content, Pritchard pays due attention to the conditions under which they were produced. Occasionally, he slips into the autobiographer's trap of explaining his subject's excesses as incidental or attitudinal, deeming Verney's views of Mrs Douglas and her daughters, for instance, 'snobbish and patronizing , if not worse' (35). While they were that, Verney's views, above all, were...