Catharine Parr Strickland Traill (1802-1899) emigrated from Great Britain to Upper Canada in 1832 with her husband Thomas Traill, a retired army officer. The Backwoods of Canada (1836), Catharine1s epistolary narrative based on her experiences in the country north of Peterborough in the years immediately following her arrival in North America, is an important record of nineteenth-century pioneering and a rich personal memoir of a woman. It has become a foundation work of Canadian Iiterature.
"Oatmeal and the Catechism is the story of emigrants from the Outer Hebrides to Quebec in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Most were crofting families from Lewis who had suffered the severe effects of the potato famine of 1846-51. As a solution to the increasing pressure on landlords and government relief bodies, they were offered free passage to 'Lower Canada' and given land grants in the Eastern Townships. To this day place-names such as Stornoway, Tolsta, Ness and Dell in Canada testify to the strong links these communities kept with their homeland." "In this updated edition of her book Margaret Bennett traces the historical background of emigration and settlement in this part of Canada. By means of recorded interviews with descendants of the original settlers, she builds up a detailed picture not only of the social and religious aspects of their lives, but also of how they set about building a new community in the wilderness. For more than a century people in the Outer Hebrides have been asking what happened to those who left for the New World. Oatmeal and the Catechism answers that question."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
What did you eat for dinner today? Did you make your own cheese? Butcher your own pig? Collect your own eggs? Drink your own home-brewed beer? Shanty bread leavened with hops-yeast, venison and wild rice stew, gingerbread cake with maple sauce, and dandelion coffee – this was an ordinary backwoods meal in Victorian-era Canada. Originally published in 1855, Catharine Parr Traill’s classic The Female Emigrant’s Guide, with its admirable recipes, candid advice, and astute observations about local food sourcing, offers an intimate glimpse into the daily domestic and seasonal routines of settler life. This toolkit for historical cookery, redesigned and annotated in an edition for use in contemporary kitchens, provides readers with the resources to actively use and experiment with recipes from the original Guide. Containing modernized recipes, a measurement conversion chart, and an extensive glossary, this volume also includes discussions of cooking conventions, terms, techniques, and ingredients that contextualize the social attitudes, expectations, and challenges of Traill’s world and the emigrant experience. In a distinctive and witty voice expressing her can-do attitude, Catharine Parr Traill’s The Female Emigrant’s Guide unlocks a wealth of information on historical foodways and culinary exploration.
For most people, the term “root cellar” evokes an image of a brick or stone masonry subterranean structure tunneled into a hillside. These classic root cellars are only one of a number of different types of structures used to preserve root crops, vegetables and fruits over the past 400 years. The other structures include subfloor pits, cooling pits, house cellars, barn cellars, field root pits & trenches, and root houses. Root Cellars in America provides a history of all the structures, discusses their design principles, and details how they were constructed. The text is accompanied by period illustrations from the agricultural literature along with archaeological photographs. There has been a long standing debate whether the stone slab roof and corbelled beehive shaped subterranean structures in northeastern United States are root cellars or Native American ceremonial stone chambers. New research indicates some are root cellars and some are ceremonial chambers. The third edition has a new chapter exploring this topic. Detailed guidance is provided on how to distinguish the two from each other based on differences in their architectural traits.
Robert MacDougall's The Emigrant's Guide to North America, written in Gaelic and published in 1841, attempts to give an accurate picture of Canada. Set up to provide a practical background for Highland Scots coming to Canada, it includes all the information MacDougall feels will be necessary -- including preparation for the trip. The book also serves as a type of travelogue, describing particular sights and sounds found on the way to his ultimate destination, Goderich, in the Huron Tract. This translated work retains the unmistakable speech patterns, images and rhymes of the Gaelic language. Robert MacDougall's quirky, opinionated personality speaks clearly, seeking to dispel some myths about Canada of the time by telling the "truth." This book deserves to be read by a wide audience. "I don't know where else you could find such riches of information and observation, so compactly presented, about this exhilirating and trying time in our past. Or get so fresh a sense of a real man of that time, with his energy and sweeping opinions and flourishing rhetoric. The translator and the editor have done a splendid job." -- Alice Munro>
In her study of the unsuccessful nineteenth-century emigrant, Tamara S. Wagner argues that failed emigration and return drive nineteenth-century writing in English in unexpected, culturally revealing ways. Wagner highlights the hitherto unexplored subgenre of anti-emigration writing that emerged as an important counter-current to a pervasive emigration propaganda machine that was pressing popular fiction into its service. The exportation of characters at the end of a novel indisputably formed a convenient narrative solution that at once mirrored and exaggerated public policies about so-called 'superfluous' or 'redundant' parts of society. Yet the very convenience of such pat endings was increasingly called into question. New starts overseas might not be so easily realizable; emigration destinations failed to live up to the inflated promises of pro-emigration rhetoric; the 'unwanted' might make a surprising reappearance. Wagner juxtaposes representations of emigration in the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Frances Trollope, and Charlotte Yonge with Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian settler fiction by Elizabeth Murray, Clara Cheeseman, and Susanna Moodie, offering a new literary history not just of nineteenth-century migration, but also of transoceanic exchanges and genre formation.