Travels and Identities: Elizabeth and Adam Shortt in Europe, 1911 ed. by Peter E. Paul Dembski (review)

In Travels and Identities, Peter Dembski presents the diaries and letters of Adam and Elizabeth Shortt from a 1911 trip to Europe. Adam, then the commissioner of Canada’s civil service, was sent overseas to study European administrative systems. While Adam was on a ‘business mission’ (p. 197), Elizabeth, a medical doctor and feminist activist, accompanied him ‘want[ing] to get away from [preparing] three meals a day & have good meals & freedom from care’ (p. 63).

Dembski provides an introduction and conclusion, introductions to each chapter, and explanatory footnotes. These analytical sections offer insight on travel writing, the contradictions of middle-class formation, and the intersection of intellectual history with family, gender, and cultural histories. The reader learns about Elizabeth’s medical career, her feminist volunteerism, and her struggle to balance the domestic expectations placed on her with her ambitions and career. For Adam, Dembski outlines his career at Queen’s University and his efforts to eliminate patronage. The Shortts’s own writing, however, is the book’s main focus. Each chapter is grouped around a part of the trip and presents their writing with little editorialising.

For readers wanting to immerse themselves in the cultural world of upper-middle-class reformers, it is the letters and diaries themselves that will be of interest. Adam, who wrote with a bureaucrat’s verve and tone, provides less value here. Rarely more than a few sentences long, his entries describe days filled with meetings, debates on politics and administration, and book-collecting. There is a gender component to this focus: Dembski notes that in leaving his children, Adam’s ‘diary displays none of the angst and emotional turmoil in his wife’s writing on the same event’ (p. 65). Elizabeth’s entries are richer and more detailed, making observations on transatlantic feminism, medicine, her recovery from serious eye surgery, architecture, clothes, shopping, art, English and continental breakfasts, regional drinking habits, and often humorous criticisms of behaviour she found off-putting.

Academic audiences might wish for more analysis throughout. At times, stronger links could have been made between the Shortts’s tendency of linking appearance with character and late-Victorian respectability. This is especially relevant to Elizabeth’s fat-shaming of people in Austria and Germany, whom she contrasts with people in England. Intellectual and administrative historians, may similarly want more discussion of the logic of diary writing, and how it fits with Adam’s prodigious book-hunting, archival work, his ‘collector’s mission’ (p. 21), and the rule of paper. Why did the Shortts write? What can their documentation tell us about progressivism and how they saw their place in Canadian history? That Adam later edited a 23-volume encyclopedia, Canada and Its Provinces, suggests that this collector’s mission was linked to his world view. Despite these academic criticisms, this is an enjoyable and insightful book. The Shortts’s writing shows the cultural and domestic lives of early-twentieth-century professionals, highlighting the interests and worries of an ambitious, important, and interesting couple. Buttressing intellectual history with gender analysis and privileging a woman’s point of view are welcome additions to a field and period often dominated by great men.