In Mixed Company: Taverns and Public Life in Upper Canada (review)

For far too long, the word tavern has conjured the stale odours of beer and tobacco smoke, the loud voices of drunken men, and a lurking threat of male violence. Julia Roberts wants us to rethink those stereotypes. Like a number of scholars studying taverns in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States in recent years, she forces us to take a much closer look at what was actually going on inside such places, in this case in the colonial era in Upper Canada (roughly the 1790s to the 1850s). In the process she makes us aware of the complexities of their internal life and the relationship to larger dynamics in colonial society outside the tavern door that extend well beyond the narrow issue of alcohol consumption. This is a fascinating book.

One of the greatest pleasures awaiting the reader is how successfully Roberts gives a visual and tactile feeling for the tavern building and its physical contents. By carefully examining old architects’ drawings, sketches and paintings, journals and diaries, and, most imaginatively, estate inventories, she is able to walk us through a typical colonial tavern. The infamous rough-hewn, one-room log structure on the fringes of settlement that British travellers so often complained about was only transitional and not representative. Rather, across southern Ontario, there was a range of similar well-proportioned, multi-roomed structures, from ‘minor houses’ in smaller towns or on back streets up to grander hotels in the bigger cities, which generally shared a basic layout of simple Georgian elegance and practicality. The architecture and frequently fine furnishings defined spaces within all these buildings with particular, specialized functions and thus allowed for a good deal of both social mixing (notably in the bar room) and some social separation (particularly in the parlour and bedrooms). Since the building almost always also incorporated the household of the tavern-keeper and his family, the organization of space also brought plenty of fluidity between the domestic and the public.

Early-nineteenth-century taverns were often the first buildings constructed in communities and remained publicly accessible community centres until more specialized buildings began to appear in most urban centres by the 1840s. The range of public activities that went on within their walls was staggering – auctions, court sessions, municipal meetings, craft workshops, professional consultations, musical entertainment, balls, cockfights, boxing matches, and much more, as well as more informal singing, dancing, storytelling, card-playing, and political debate. For locals, they operated as ‘informal courts of public opinion’ (75), where reputations were made and broken. For travellers, they were practical way stations offering meals and lodging.

And through all this commotion, the bar stayed open. Drinking was certainly not the only reason to enter a tavern, but it lubricated all activities and events. Contrary to later prohibitionist rants, Roberts found little evidence of excessive drunkenness and reports instead that tavern barrooms were usually governed by order, moderate consumption, and informal checks on excess.

Alcohol was in fact the centre of informal socializing in taverns. Here is where Roberts makes her most important contributions. She not only discovers how important a shared drink could be in cementing relationships of all kinds and building social solidarity, but also situates it within the rituals of sociability in the tavern that drew people together, kept some at a distance, or segregated others entirely. This she sees as a form of ‘informal public life’ (5), within which dominant frameworks of gender and race were reinforced, but also opened to flexible adaptation. She tells us that few members of Upper Canada’s heterogeneous population – including First Nations, blacks, and women – were completely excluded from tavern life, but their place was negotiated within the varied spaces inside. The result was ‘mixed company.’

Contemporary commentators found First Nations people entering taverns to conduct important business, but also occasionally to have a quiet drink, apparently without active opposition from other customers. Blacks too entered the social swirl of the barrooms...