Assisting Emigration to Upper Canada: The Petworth Project 1832–1837 by Wendy Cameron, Mary McDougall Maude, and: English Immigrant Voices: Labourers= Letters From Upper Canada in the 1830s ed. by Wendy Cameron, Sheila Haines, Mary McDougall Maude (review)

262 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 than to focus on a period which has been slighted by recent scholarship which has shown little interest in considering it seriously on its own merits. Wood turns our attention to a period when the colony has had a bad press. It was the time of the Rebellion and of the Family Compact. We are apt to remember Robert Gourlay and Anna Brownell Jameson, Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill B observers whose critical judgments of the place are famous. Yet Wood=s reader encounters a different mood in the pages of this book. Ontario is for him a place of striving; it is where the energetic and optimistic farmer, preferring to settle in the forest rather than in open areas, is busy girdling, junking, chopping, grubbing, and burning in the process of eliminating the trees to prepare the land for agriculture. When he discusses the nascent social structure of the colony he divides his treatment into categories of social function and dysfunction, thereby assuring that recognition of mechanics= institutes, fraternal associations, and the distribution of patenting accompanies a discussion of alcoholism, poverty, and crime. This book is about progress, a word Wood doesn=t mind invoking. It is about achievements which preceded the railway era, about how the conditions which made the huge investments in such projects as the railways and the creation of a modern society possible. Wood is at pains to demonstrate that the grand program of modernity did not arrive in a society unawares: in some of the finest suggestive writing in the book he shares with the reader something of the expectancy of the period of waiting before the iron horse=s arrival. Wood would have us understand that this society which created the plank road was not unprepared to contemplate its successor. A distinctive feature of this work is Wood=s interest in pattern: he summarizes his discussions in maps showing the distribution of diverse phenomena. Maps display geographic variations of such phenomena as the development of communications, levels of affluence, and incidence of post offices at several different times. The occasional vignette enlivens the text, offering compelling illustrations of the texture of life on the concession line. This book offers an accessible and enjoyable introduction to any reader who is interested in an Ontario characterized by the sound of axes attacking the trees rather than by the whine of semis trucking Toronto=s garbage down the 401. (PETER G. GOHEEN) Wendy Cameron and Mary McDougall Maude. Assisting Emigration to Upper Canada: The Petworth Project 1832B1837 McGill-Queen=s University Press. xvi, 354. $65.00 Wendy Cameron, Sheila Haines and Mary McDougall Maude, editors. HUMANITIES 263 English Immigrant Voices: Labourers= Letters From Upper Canada in the 1830s McGill-Queen=s University Press. lvi, 472. $65.00 In 1831, Thomas Sockett, rector of Petworth Parish in southwest Sussex, proposed to his patron and parishioner Lord Egremont that he lend his support to a scheme to help able-bodied parishioners emigrate to British North America. A year later, the first two ships chartered by the new Petworth Emigration Committee, the Eveline and the Lord Melville, left Portsmouth for Montreal. In these two very fine volumes, Wendy Cameron, Mary McDougall Maude, and Sheila Haines bring together the people, the policies, and the experiences of those who in one way or another were involved in what was a unique and perhaps one of the most successful parish emigration undertakings of the first half of the nineteenth century. Assisting Emigration to Upper Canada presents the project from the perspective of those >who stayed home= and made the decisions about policies and actually made the scheme work. While tens of thousands of Britons crowded onto small, often unseaworthy ships and frequently arrived in America unfit to settle, Thomas Sockett, architect and principal overseer of the Petworth Emigration Committee, was determined that Egremont=s emigrants would have every chance of success. He chose candidates carefully, ensured that the vessels the committee chartered were safe and provided >decent accommodation ,= and sought the assistance of authorities in Upper Canada to help emigrants settle. Over a six-year period, the Petworth Emigration Committee assisted approximately eighteen hundred labourers, artisans...