Charles Clarke, Pen and Ink Warrior 9780773570153

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Charles Clarke, Pen and Ink Warrior

When Charles Clarke settled in Elora, Ontario, in 1848 he joined the ranks of the province's radical reformers, becoming a vigorous critic of everything in Canada that smacked of the old regime - rank, privilege, and monopoly - and an enthusiastic supporter of everything promised by the new - equity, democracy, and individual opportunity. He played a prominent role in drafting the "Clear Grit" platform of 1851, supporting such ideas as a householder's suffrage, the secret ballot, and representation by population. He later espoused the two great causes of nineteenth-century Anglo-Canadian liberalism: provincial rights in Canada and Irish Home Rule in Britain. Equally involved in local affairs - from the Natural History Society to the Sons of Temperance - Clarke tirelessly promoted the natural beauties of Elora and tried to protect the environment of the Grand River Gorge from the ravages of industry and human carelessness. Using Clarke's journalistic writings, his private diary, and a memoir he wrote in later life, Kenneth Dewar paints a vivid picture of Clarke's evolving sense of himself and his world in an age of profound transformation. KENNETH c. DEWAR is associate professor and chair of the Department of History, Mount Saint Vincent University.

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Charles Clarke, Pen and Ink Warrior Kenneth C. Dewar

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

McGill-Queen's University Press 2002. ISBN 0-773 5-*3 54-5 Legal deposit third quartet 2,002. Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free, and printed with vegetablebased, low voc inks. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for its publishing activities. We also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Dewar, Kenneth C. (Kenneth Cameron), 1944Charles Clarke, pen and ink warrior Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-2354-5 t. Clarke, Charles, 1816-1909. z. Ontario—Politics and government—19th century. 3. Ontario—History—t9 th century. 4. Ontario. Legislative Assembly—Biography. 5. Politicians— Ontario—Biography. I. Title. FC3072.1.056049 2002. FIO58.C56D49 2002

97i.3'o3'o92

Typeset in 10/12 Sabon by True to Type

€2,001-904194-2,

To Marged, Megan, and Helen

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Contents

Illustrations ix Preface xiii i The Falls of the Grand River 3 PART O N E

2. 3 4 5

Hopeful Emigration 25 Victorian Radical 47 Apostle of Refinement 71 The Education of an Optimist PART TWO

6 7 8 9

POLEMICIST

DIARIST

The Great Cow Case 123 Identity and Memory 144 "O, Lovely Elora" 169 Household Savant 202 PART THREE

MEMOIRIST

10 Loyal Party Soldier 11 Looking Backward Epilogue 270 Abbreviations 275 Notes 277 Index 321

235 252

97

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Illustrations

The Grand River Gorge below Elora UGA, Connon Collection, AI 14273

6

Islet Rock 18 George Monro Grant (ed.), Picturesque Canada; the Country as it Was and Is (Toronto: James Clarke, 1883), 471 Clarke with the Cascade 19 UGA, Connon Collection, A267O3Z Charles Clarke, about 1855 WCA, cc, Ph. 732

23

Richard Clarke 26 WCA, cc, Ph. 739 The Stonebow

28

Jane Drury Clarke 31 WCA, cc, Ph. 739 Thomas Cooper AO, CP [rz6-4]

33

The Kirk and Clarke property 49 Historical Atlas of the County of Wellington, Ontario (Toronto: Historical Atlas Publishing Co., 1906) Emma Kent Clarke 75 WCA, cc, Ph. 732

x

George Sheppard AO, CP [F26-4J

Illustrations

107

Charles Clarke, about 1880 121 UGA, Connon Collection, Az6joz$ The Kirk and Clarke general store AO, CP [FZ6-4J

Ad for Kirk and Clarke's store 12,6 Elora Observer, 24 February 1865 The Clarke house and yard 127 AO, [F2.6-4] Ace. 6053, s. 2565 The Volunteer Rifles 134 AO, [pz6-4] Ace. 6053, s. 2573 The Rifles on the Grand River 135 UGA, Connon Collection, AI 14265 Clarke in Rifles uniform 137 AO, [F26-4] Ace. 6053, 1.0.8 Cattle fair in Elora WCA, Ph. 11762

141

Emma Kent Clarke WCA, cc, Ph. 465

151

Jane Kirk

152

AO, [F2.6-4]

Bessie Clarke 154 AO, Ace. 11608, s. 16758 Charles Kirk Clarke WCA, cc, Ph. 458

155

Emma Clarke 159 AO, Ace. 11608, s. 16749

124

Illustrations xi The Clarke girls, 1876 161 AO, [F26-4J Ace. 6053, 2.0 [.] i Dr Joseph Workman WCA, cc, Ph. 452

165

Jane Clarke 189 AO, Ace. 11608, s. 16748 Visitors to the Rocks AO, c 286-1-0-11-27

194

Clarke's garden 199 AO, Ace. 11608, s. 16735 A summer day 200 AO, [F26-4] Ace. 6053, 2.5.3 Rose Ellen Halley Clarke 203 AO, [F26-4] Ace. 6053, i.i Emma, Charley, Floy, and Bessie AO, Ace. 11608, s. 16764

206

Charles Clarke and a grandson 233 UGA, Connon Collection, AI 14284 Speaker of the assembly 239 AO, [F26-4]

Family picnic, about 1890 253 AO, [F26-4J

The "Iron Duke" 263 UGA, Connon Collection, A267OH A family gathering, about 1900 WCA, Ph. 7442 Clarke's funeral procession AO, CP, [F26-4J

269

267

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Preface

On 9 February 1867, Charles Clarke wrote in his diary that he thought the village of Elora, where he made his home in Canada West (soon to be the province of Ontario), would support a good bookstore if one were opened by a "pushing, enterprising man ... an intelligent fellow knowing the difference between 10 cent rubbish and a good novel or other book." A little over a hundred years later, I had the good fortune to discover that Clarke's assessment still held true, though Elora had changed radically in the interim. For a half-dozen years in the late 19705 and early 19805, I ran a book store on Mill Street, once the centre of the village's commercial and industrial ambitions, by my day a magnet for tourists. Craft shops, restaurants, historic buildings, a picturesque riverfront setting, and a certain nostalgia for a greener and simpler past drew thousands of visitors on weekends and holidays. Together with a sizeable local reading public, they enabled a small bookseller to thrive, in defiance of conventional wisdom about the hopeless prospects of retail bookselling in a small community. I was an escapee - temporary, as it turned out - from the academic life, a student and sometime professor of history. I naturally became interested in local history and specifically in Clarke, whose portrait hung in the reading room of Elora's Carnegie Library. I had encountered him before as a bit player in one or two histories of Ontario and Canada, particularly J.M.S. Careless's life of George Brown, the founding editor of the Toronto Globe and a leader of the pre-Confederation Reform party. Clarke showed up there as a sharp-penned critic on Brown's political left, an impatient democrat - a Radical and a Clear Grit, in the terminology of the time - and editor himself of the evocatively named Elora Backwoodsman. The man looking out from the portrait in the library was rather too dignified and benign to fit easily with my image of the defiant young Radical, and when I later returned

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to full-time university teaching I took my curiosity about him with me. I have pursued it, on and off, ever since, discovering along the way his prescience about the local market for books, a tiny link between his life and my own. This biography is the long-maturing fruit of my study. At first, I looked at Clarke mainly as a political thinker, but I gradually came to see him rather as the exemplar of a culture. Partly this shift in perspective grew out of the kind of records he left: a body of journalism scattered irregularly (and sometimes uncertainly) over a long period in a number of local newspapers, but concentrated especially at mid-century, in the years of his early manhood; a diary that began on the eve of his fortieth birthday, in November 1866, and continued with occasional gaps for some twenty years thereafter; and a memoir composed late in life, when he had become something of an elder statesman in a society respectful of its "pioneers" and "old-timers." There was also a fair amount of correspondence, but it was made up almost entirely of letters Clarke received rather than copies of those he sent; and these, while not without interest - indeed, they were the reason why his name has often appeared in studies of others, or of Ontario politics in general - were not substantial or continuous enough, I thought, to form the basis of a conventional political biography. The closing of a well-travelled path sometimes forces one onto another, less well-marked yet offering vistas of fresh interest - to borrow a metaphor from the aesthetic of the picturesque, which shaped so much of Clarke's outlook. I realized that writing of various kinds formed one of his chief occupations and perhaps the main instrument of his self-expression. The polemical journalism of his youth, the daily record of middle age, and the retrospective memoir he wrote as an old man offered points of entry into a life in writing. Other items also turned up: speeches, the minutes of meetings of numerous associations to which he belonged (and of which he was invariably secretary for a time), and pictures of him and his family taken by one of Canada's minor early photographers, Thomas Connon. They opened up ways of seeing Clarke as a representative figure in the making of Victorian Canada, or at least Ontario. This brought me back to the youthful radicalism of the man in the library portrait. How could Clarke have been at once a discontented promoter of change and a typical Victorian gentleman? Was he first radical, then respectable? Or was respectability somehow bound up with his radicalism from the beginning, only modulating into a different key as his radicalism itself moderated with age? There are those who consider the word "Victorian" wrongly applied to nineteenthcentury Canadian society, which was too crude, too raucous, too open, it is said, to be described by a term so suggestive of discipline, restraint,

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xv

and moral improvement.1 Such alternatives, I think, are too simple; societies do not settle into acquired characteristics as into an old overcoat, especially societies caught up in rapid and profound change. This is true of strictly "Victorian" England no less than British North America in the nineteenth century. People divide over interests, passions, and ideals. Clarke typified one strain of thought and action among many, and struggle itself, as well as what he particularly struggled for, marks him out as Victorian. As a result of adopting this approach, I have traced the course of Upper Canadian and Ontario politics in what follows only in so far as it has seemed necessary in order to make sense of Clarke's life. I hope I may have thrown some new light on the notoriously contentious political conflicts of the 18505, and perhaps added a little to our understanding of the 18705 and i88os, but my main purpose has been to offer a series of what might best be called studies in Clarke's intellectual and cultural biography. They focus especially on the purpose, content, and form of his prose writing, and their relation to his lifecourse. A famous historian of Victorian England, G.M. Young, once said of his study of the stages in a man's life, "To the twenties I go for the shaping of ideas not fully disclosed: to the forties for the handling of things already established." I have found Young's dictum helpful in attempting to construct a biography out of Clarke's distinctive literary remains. In focusing particular attention on the form of his prose as well as its contents, I have borne in mind Young's further axiom that "in the nature of things, mankind is divided into transmitters and receivers and a middle group facing both ways at once: and, very often, trying to shake off the domination of the immediate past, and to impose itself on the immediate future."2- Charles Clarke was unquestionably among those in the middle group, and he felt especially keenly the burdens and opportunities of re-orientation.

I would like to acknowledge the expert assistance of archivists and librarians at a number of institutions: the Archives of Ontario, particularly Jim Suderman, Christine Bourolias, and Kate O'Rourke; the Wellington County Archives, particularly Bonnie Callen, former archivist and now director of the Wellington County Museum and Archives, and Karen Wagner, the present archivist; the University of Guelph Archives and Library; the National Archives of Canada, particularly Barbara Wilson for her help with militia records; the National Library; the University of Western Ontario Library, particularly Edward Phelps, former librarian of the Regional Collection; the John

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P. Robarts Library, the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, and the University Archives at the University of Toronto; the Baldwin Room of the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library; the Sigmund Samuel Collection of the Royal Ontario Museum; the Baker Library of the Harvard University Graduate School of Business; the Archives on the History of Canadian Psychiatry and Mental Health Services, Queen Street Mental Health Services, Toronto; Rita Bloch, librarian at the Dundas Public Library; and Sister Juliana Dusel, General Archivist of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Loretto Abbey, Toronto. The librarians and staff of the library at Mount Saint Vincent University have been unfailingly helpful. I am especially grateful to the staff at the Lincolnshire Archives, Lincoln, England, particularly Dr. G.A. Knight, Archives Manager, and Lynda Hotchkiss of the Archives' Genealogical Research Service; and the staff at the Local Studies Library, The Castle, Lincoln, particularly Eleanor Nannestad, Local Studies Librarian. I also appreciate the assistance of Mrs. J.N. Duxbury, Mayor's Secretary, Lincoln, in obtaining information about the Stonebow and Guildhall, and Mr. Joe Cooke, Mayor's Officer (a position once held by Charles Clarke's father), for his guided tour of the Stonebow on my visit in 1995. Richard Steele, a professional genealogist in Farmington Hills, Michigan, searched for records of Rose Clarke's death for me. I could not have managed without the assistance of various people who responded generously to my inquiries. Professor Desmond McHale of the Department of Mathematics, University College Cork, Ireland, biographer of George Boole, kindly provided me a copy of a brief memoir of Boole that Clarke wrote for Boole's sister. Professors Tom Brown of Mount Royal College, George Egerton of the University of British Columbia, Elwood Jones of Trent University, Hereward Senior of McGill University, and Gil Stelter of the University of Guelph all answered queries from out of the blue promptly and helpfully. When I asked the late James J. Talman, former Ontario provincial archivist and chief librarian at the University of Western Ontario, what he remembered of Rose Clarke, he responded in characteristic lively detail; I wish I had known him better. Elora historian Stephen Thorning shared some of his research, as well as his ideas, with me on a number of occasions. In the early stages of my interest in Clarke, Professor J.M.S. Careless offered his encouragement. Dr. Edward H. Clarke of Elmira, New York and his father, Dr. Harold Clarke of Matthews, North Carolina - respectively great-great-grandson and great-grandson of Charles Clarke - graciously assisted me in my efforts (unfortunately unsuccessful) to track down additional family papers. I would also like to thank Beverly Batstone, Sherry McNeil,

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xvii

Mary-lin Tinney, and Trudy Vroegh for their assistance in transcribing documents. The Senate Committee on Research and Publications of Mount Saint Vincent University has awarded me five different research grants since the commencement of this project, which have enabled me to bring it to completion. I am grateful to the committee's hard-working members, to the office of the Director of Research, and to Connie Mason in the university business office for her careful administration of each grant in turn. I acknowledge, as well, the permission of Ontario History, the British Journal of Canadian Studies, and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography to use material in this study that first appeared in different form in their publications. I incurred as heavy debts in writing as I did in research. The greatest of them is to Suzanne Zeller and Gerald Killan, who read the entire manuscript as I sent it to them section by section over quite a few years, and offered invaluable criticism and encouragement throughout. Suzanne also allowed me to read some of her own work on the history of science in manuscript form. The early chapters benefited, as well, from Mark Phillips's sharp editorial pen. My friend and colleague Barnett Richling made innumerable helpful comments in our many conversations about my work on Clarke and his on the anthropologist Diamond Jenness, often in the hospitable environment of the Granite Brewery in Halifax; Pierre Payer, too, offered encouragement. Latterly, two anonymous readers provided just the right mix of approval and criticism to get me through one last revision. At McGill-Queen's University Press, Philip Cercone, executive director and senior editor, expressed an early interest in my manuscript and was generous in offering support and advice. Joan McGilvray, coordinating editor, provided expert guidance through the publishing process, while Olga Domjan - coincidentally an active member of the Elora and Salem Horticultural Society and so a legatee, of sorts, of Charles Clarke's organizational activism - edited the manuscript with scrupulous care and tact. I sincerely thank them all. Finally, my wife, Marged, and my daughters, Megan and Helen, have been enormously patient in bearing with my absorption in this project over many years. I dedicate this book to them.

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Charles Clarke, Pen and Ink Warrior

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CHAPTER ONE

The Falls of the Grand River Elora! how sublime and picturesque, Is thy position on the river Ouse; For there the river's banks and scenery, Appear quite natural and yet grotesque: The frowning cliffs, the rugged steeps and crags, O'erhanging trees, and plants, and flowers fixed in The numerous crevices; all planted there By Him who guides the motions of the earth. Wm., "Elora"1

No place in Ontario appealed to the nineteenth-century Romantic sensibility quite as much as the falls of the Grand River at Elora, in Wellington County. There was Niagara, of course, which was much better known, but the falls on both the Canadian and American sides of the Niagara River were of an entirely different order: awe-inspiring, breath-taking, and more than a little overpowering. As John Howison observed in 182.1, visitors left the neighbourhood of Niagara almost with a sense of relief. No-one would actually want to live there.2 The falls at Elora were on a more human scale, and they aroused more amiable sentiments. Then, as now, they drew sightseers and picnickers, fugitives from the hurried pace of city life more than worshippers in the Temple of Nature. When Charles Clarke first saw them in 1848, he was captivated. At the time, Elora was a tiny backwoods community of some two hundred inhabitants. Its hopes for future growth and prosperity, like those of many villages of Old Ontario, lay in the potential of its waterpower sites: for sawmills, grist mills, flour mills. Clarke came to share those hopes, but it was the natural beauty of the Elora Gorge more than anything else that became the focus of his local sense of place. Time out of mind, the Gorge had been formed by the retreat of the Laurentide ice sheet and by the relentless eroding action of the Grand River as it descended from its upper reaches around Dundalk to the alluvial plains below Paris and Brantford. Irregular walls of exposed dolomitic bedrock rose sharply from the river bottom, reaching heights of twenty to thirty metres. Downstream of the village, the Irvine Creek

4

Charles Clarke

flowed into the Grand from another ravine of comparable scale and texture. Here and there the walls of the Gorge were serrated by ledges and outcroppings, often bearing mature cedars whose tops surmounted the rim of the precipice. Caverns, crevices, and indentations marked its face. The falls themselves were not spectacular, though impressive enough in spring flood. Dropping some twelve metres over a distance of about ninety metres, they traced the curve of the river as it turned slightly westward before bending back in its southerly course to Lake Erie. In their midst stood Islet Rock, an inverted limestone pyramid topped by small cedars, which divided the waters and lent to the prospect of the rushing torrent a distinctive and defiant charm. Today known commonly as the Tooth of Time, it has entranced visitors since the beginnings of European settlement. "Take care they do not, by any means, destroy the effect of the little island," the village's founder, William Gilkison, instructed his local agent in 1833, "it is a great beauty in my eyes."3 And so it was to many who followed. In 1846 Islet Rock figured prominently in Smith's Canadian Gazetteer's brief entry on Elora, already, according to the author, "much visited" for its scenery.4 We have only a partial record of Clarke's initial impressions. He first saw the falls at dusk, he and his stepfather having travelled up from Canboro Township, near the mouth of the Grand, to canvass the possibilities of settlement. Crossing the bridge over the Grand from the south side, they paused at a point where the light of a nearby kiln could be seen reflected in the tumbling waters and the branches of the trees lining the riverbank. The roar of the spring cataract, the dancing light, and the smoke of the kiln fire streaking the sky together created an eerie yet soothing effect that Clarke remembered long afterward. 5 We also know that the first pieces he submitted to the Hamilton Journal and Express, which launched his newspaper career, drew scenes of the Gorge and falls/ None of these early pieces has survived, unfortunately, but there can be little doubt that the prose idyll to the Grand River in full flow that appeared in The Elora Backwoodsman in the spring of 1854, when Clarke was political editor, was his work.7 In this short essay of about a thousand words, placed next to the editorial column on the second page of the four-page sheet, Clarke invited his neighbours to join with him in savouring the natural spectacle at their doorstep. Under the title, "A Peep at Our River," he began in the first person plural, drawing his readers together into a privileged circle of local initiates: "We love the sound of rushing waters," he wrote, "the sigh, the wail, the crash, the roar, the thunder of the cataract." For

The Falls of the Grand River 5

over a week now, they in the village had been offered nature's "wildest and choicest melodies," "her grandest opera," for their own special delight. Eye as well as ear had been gratified, " [f]or the river has been set free, and miles of ice and miniature forests of timber have dashed with one glorious, long-continuing, ever-varying strain and song, down 'the Falls,' into the whirling, struggling, galloping stream below, and wreaths of spray have assumed the graceful forms of the fairy dancers, and evergreens, and hoary limestone, and brown shrubby stems, and pendant icicles, have furnished scenery more redolent of sublimity and beauty than any stage trickery ever dazzled wondering gazers with." Extending his metaphor further, Clarke suggested this spring rite had more than local or even strictly natural significance: "Elorians [sic] have been proud, and justly, of their Canadian Opera House." Where else could such a show be seen, admission free, with Madame Nature as the star? Clarke's own pleasure at the prospect was evident enough in the manner of his expression, as were other dimensions of his personal style and outlook. The essay was a carefully crafted piece of writing, offered for the consumption of the Backwoodsman's subscribers and other readers. Neither naively spontaneous nor transparently descriptive, it drew on well-established conventions that were designed to evoke certain responses in its audience. For almost a century, first in painting and then in poetry and prose, the aesthetics of the picturesque had shaped the way educated people in the North Atlantic world saw and experienced nature. "Sublimity and beauty," to be sure, were the words Clarke used in the passage quoted above, and the picturesque had been distinct in its origins from both beauty and the sublime, but these terms had lost much of their precision over decades of common use. Later in the essay Clarke also described his scene as "romantic," "picturesque," "elevating," and "magnificent." Such a profusion of adjectives should not obscure its essentially picturesque qualities, worth marking because most discussions of Canadian responses to nature have stressed vastness, gloom, and "deep terror," and because Niagara - that other, greater falls - was a veritable mecca of the sublime.8 Clarke deployed the conventions of the picturesque with considerable skill. His elaborate opening metaphor turned the fearsome power and unpredictability of nature to play on the reader's fancy, with images of fairy dancers and "green and brown velvet seats" provided for the comfort of opera-goers. He went on to describe the variety, roughness, and irregularity of the falls and the river's course below, all presented in enough topographical detail to sustain realism, yet framed in a painterly manner to excite the reader's imagination. Here a perpendicular wall of limestone, there a "silvery stream of water leaping

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The Grand River Gorge below Elora

down the moss grown face" of the bank; here a log-jam of cedars, there the "shelly fragments of an otter's feast." "Rocks, cataracts, evergreens, cascades, slopes, rapids, pools and flats alternate with a rapidity and variety scarcely dreamt of by Sir Walter [Scott] in his most prolific imaginings." Contriving to communicate pleasing effect, the prose of the picturesque sought to give pleasure itself. This was not nature waiting to be civilized by development - or "improvement" as it was then called - but nature inviting emotional appreciation and offering moral edification. It was nature as complement to civilization, much as domesticity was complement to business and public affairs. At the same time, as Clarke's gaze turned downriver in the course of the essay, his audience expanded and his intentions became markedly more mundane. He threw down a challenge to the entire province of Upper Canada (that is, to the Upper Canadian half - Canada West - of the United Province of Canada) to come up with a more romantic locale than Elora, always excepting Niagara Falls. He had only begun to catalogue its features, he said; space did not permit him to do more than note the presence of many others - the "giddy heights" of the Irvine Ravine bridge, for example, or the "black depths" of the Devil's Punch Bowl. In any case, he did not wish to torment his "readers at a distance": they would have to come to view these sights for themselves.

The Falls of the Grand River 7

Here was a new audience in the context of a new, distinctly promotional, purpose. The Gorge was an attraction, a potential mecca in its own right, and Clarke, having begun on a note of fanciful delight, felt free to conclude with a forthright appeal for more tourist traffic. "When the hot sun parches our city friends into the mummy state," he urged, "let them remember there is such a nook as Elora, and that it abounds with more of the rejuvenating and life giving principle than the most fashionable American watering place." And now that the Grand had emerged as a marketable object, Clarke enclosed "our river" in quotation marks, by this hint of irony distancing himself ever so slightly from the implication of private possession. There was nothing particularly unusual in such a turning of high feeling to practical account. Romanticism fuelled tourism at Niagara Falls in the early nineteenth century, and Clarke's expectation that a visit to Elora would satisfy a demand for the picturesque among his readers is another example of how cultural and economic forces combined in the making of the modern tourist "industry."? The picturesque may have sought to evoke feeling rather than to stimulate reflection or analysis, but this did not mean it could not also be harnessed to commercial calculation. "[S]uch a nook as Elora" captured perfectly the association in the conventions of the picturesque of nature with sanctuary, while holding out to urban visitors the promise of cool, pleasant relief from the heat and diseases of summer in the city.10 Opportunity for profit encouraged, in turn, a packaging of sights for the viewer, named in such a way - the Devil's Punch Bowl, Lover's Leap - as to hint at the sensation to be anticipated. Clarke brought all of these elements together with telling effect.

The Romantic appreciation of landscape and the talent for discursive writing evident in Clarke's description of the falls at Elora are suggestive of two of the primary coordinates defining his public and private life. He was a man of refined tastes, of a variety that later generations would regard rather disdainfully as "Victorian," and he was a man of literary ability, especially in a genre - journalistic prose - that critics and historians have largely ignored except for its strictly informational value. He combined the two characteristics with a good measure of self-display, heralding both his respectability and his claim to cultural leadership on the frontier of Upper Canada. If he also showed he had an eye for the main chance, then that was only what was called for in an ambitious backwoods community.

8 Charles Clarke

Clarke called upon a similar blend of aesthetic, moral, and practical considerations when he turned his pen to writing about domestic gardens, which were another form of landscape. Like nature in the wild - according to picturesque theory - gardens were capable of instructing the sentiments and elevating the spirit. Unlike the wild, however, they could not only be pictorialized in their representation in prose, poetry, or painting; they could actually be made to produce a pictorial effect themselves by human design and manipulation of their natural components. Proper domestic landscaping was at once a medium of moral instruction and an index of the advance of civility. In the words of Andrew Jackson Downing, the early nineteenth-century American architect and landscape designer, "So long as men are forced to dwell in log huts and follow a hunter's life, we must not be surprised at lynch law and the use of the bowie knife. But, when smiling lawns and tasteful cottages begin to embellish a country, we know that order and culture are established."11 Clarke himself was an avid gardener and an activist in the cause of horticultural enlightenment. In 1852., he was secretary and treasurer of the recently formed Elora Horticultural Society. The Society's purpose was to encourage people to grow vegetables, fruits, and flowers, to improve their plant varieties and their methods of cultivation, and to do all of this to pleasing and productive effect. Its primary means of accomplishing these aims was sponsoring annual competitions, and Clarke was a frequent entrant and prize-winner, taking the honours in 1852 for the best dozen annuals, the best green beans, the best radishes, and the best long orange carrots.11 In part, these annual exhibitions were social affairs, as Clarke was careful to point out in his report on the autumn show of 1852. The crowd in attendance had been large and "well-dressed," and musical entertainment had been provided free of charge by the village band, adding to what he called, on another occasion, the "rational and elevating pleasures of the day."13 The ladies, he said, had been "pleasantly conspicuous" in their numbers, perhaps encouraged by the offer of free admission. The evening dinner, by contrast, was entirely a men's affair, as indeed was the competition itself. The attendance of "the ladies" as spectators was almost certainly intended to have a socializing effect on the Society's exhibitions; their presence lent to the proceedings a certain refinement, and their "merry laughter" lightened the atmosphere.14 Their exclusion otherwise was one mark among many of the line dividing the masculine world of public affairs from the feminine world of domesticity. The pleasures of society were nevertheless serious ones, integral to rather than separate from the goal of horticultural improvement.

The Falls of the Grand River 9

Together, the social, scientific, and practical aspects of the Elora Horticultural Society's activities served a common civilizing end: to instill a sensitivity to the domestic natural environment much in the way that contemplation of the falls nurtured a heightened appreciation of wilderness beauty. This aim, at any rate, was Clarke's theme when he spoke to the members gathered at Bain's Commercial Hotel for the supper following the spring show of 1858. Elected president that year, he was inaugurating the practice - turning the first sod and digging the first trench, as he put it - of what he hoped would be a regular feature of the Society's meetings: a formal address from the Chair. After a few introductory remarks, in which he noted with somewhat forced drollery that their science had originated when Eve had "pushed her pomological studies a little too far," Clarke read his audience a lecture on the philosophy of horticulture.15 It began with an indictment of colonial horticultural practice. Well-cultivated gardens, he charged, were all too rare in the Canadian countryside, or even in the towns and villages. Choked with weeds and bereft of flowers, such gardens as there were offered no satisfaction to the eye, and in the stunted produce they yielded, little to the stomach and palate. It was actually in the cities that one found evidence of "correct horticultural taste," on the grounds of the merchant's villa or the lot of the tradesman's cottage. The reason was that Canadians were too utilitarian, too concerned for the dollar: "We have yet to learn, to a great extent, that there is something worth living for beyond the mere pleasure of creating actual, material wealth." The Horticultural Society was a kind of school: its mission was to root out carelessness and apathy, and to awaken Canadians to the benefits of horticultural knowledge. The analogy of the school was important to Clarke's argument, calling attention to the didactic function his listeners were called upon to perform in their annual competitions. The garden, he said, was often college to the farm. New crop varieties, drainage methods, fertilizers, and "hints for implements" - one of his own prizes that year had been in the category of Garden Implements - originated more frequently in the brain of the man with the spade than of "him who has whistled after the plough." The result over time had been a vast improvement in the productivity of the soil and in the health and well-being of the people. Equally important was the comparison Clarke made between the role of the horticultural societies and that of their state-supported "twin sisters" in agriculture. He acknowledged that the efforts of the agricultural societies to promote better methods of production were necessary to the progress of farming. Yet, he asked, was it not even

io Charles Clarke more necessary "to arouse that love of order, beauty, and adornment which is as essential to full happiness, but which lies so often downward until developed by outer influences?" The benefits of gardening thus extended far beyond the merely material. The conclusion that obviously followed was that the horticultural societies were equally deserving of state support as the agricultural societies. Clarke called for such support in a tangible shape, and suggested a number of specific uses to which public funds might be put, including the establishment of Model Gardens around the province. He also urged cooperation and joint action among horticultural societies, perhaps in the form of periodic published reports or county-wide exhibitions, since the "gods help those who help themselves." It also followed that members had a role to play, not just in promoting an earlier-maturing gooseberry or a longer-flowering dahlia, but in expanding the horizons of Canadian society beyond the narrow material confines that Clarke had identified at the beginning of his address as the major obstacle to horticultural development. A garden appealed uniquely to the higher senses. For proof, he invited his listeners to peruse the poets, where they would find that "the origins of their sweetest thoughts" lay in the colours and shapes and tastes and odours of a well-tended garden. Who could live, then, amidst a garden's charms "without sharing in the feeling which has inspired our poets, and enriched our literature with its richest gems?" Who could step forth into his garden of an early summer's day "when the dew-drops glisten on the rose ... without an acknowledgement of the softening influences which surround him?" Who could stand at sunset "without a passing thought of Him who planted that garden eastward wherein he made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food?" And who could follow the cycle of plant life "without a vivid realization of the Past, the Present and the Future?" The blessings of the garden, in short, were ultimately cultural, and those who aided in their diffusion were among society's cultural leaders. The posture Clarke adopted in this, as in so many other matters that engaged his attention, was that of the public moralist. It placed him, not on the margin of society or even necessarily in tension with it, but in the advance guard, enjoining forward movement towards a destination that only he and a few others could clearly see, but that would certainly be reached if only those in the main caravan followed the route traced out for them.16 Those following were further persuaded to do so by the assurance that the route was, in any event, only a continuation of the one they had long been travelling; in the case of horticulture, according to Clarke, since a cruder medieval time: "The strong drinks,

The Falls of the Grand River n

the coarse meats, and the rough fighting of the past, have given way to a diet and employment more in accordance with the intellectual advancement of the present." Progress in the past thus gave grounds for optimism about the future. It also marked those who would choose a different route - or simply choose to stop where they were - as peculiarly obstinate or ill-informed. From this position, Clarke sought, among other things, to popularize tastes and attitudes and practices that had formerly been the preserve of the genteel, privileged classes. In this effort, he was a promoter of what the American historian Richard L. Bushman has called "vernacular gentility," the belief among the middle classes of the North Atlantic world - the "smaller merchants and professionals, ordinary well-off farmers, successful artisans, schoolteachers, minor government officials, clerks, shopkeepers, industrial entrepreneurs, and managers" - that they could and should lead a genteel life.17 It took root late in the eighteenth century and spread rapidly in the nineteenth, carried far and wide by such "apostles of refinement" - to use another of Bushman's terms - as Clarke. Socially, it served to distinguish the newly prominent "respectable" classes from their inferiors at a time when traditional hierarchies were dissolving under the impact of economic and demographic change. At the same time, it was also a means of claiming a share of the powers and prerogatives earlier monopolized by a tiny elite; of opening them up, if not to merit, at least to those who would educate themselves in the ways of respectability. Clarke defined this democratic goal as the end of horticultural enlightenment when he recommended to his colleagues that the Elora Horticultural Society develop links with the Mechanics' Institute: "The object of the Horticultural Society is popular refinement," he said; "that of the Mechanics' Institute popular mental progress. Popular refinement is surely popular progress." Not coincidentally, a year previously he had been a leading figure in the organization of the local Mechanics' Institute.

The conception of nature as a repository of feeling expressed in Clarke's descriptions of landscape, whether domestic or wild, was also evident in his promotion of the scientific study and appreciation of nature. Like horticulture, natural history was for him a study in which anyone might engage and by its pursuit refine his sensibilities and lift himself above the common herd. Reflecting in his diary at the beginning of 1867 on the multiplicity of questions faced by the careful observer of patterns in nature (Why was the normal

i2 Charles Clarke

abundance of salmon in the Fraser River periodically interrupted by scarcity? Why were squirrels so numerous at intervals, then suddenly so few?), Clarke affirmed his belief that explanation could be found for all of this, but regretted that "men are too busily engaged in hunting dollars to find it out."18 Important as the answers were, more important still was the hierarchy of values represented by their pursuit. The debt owed by humanity to men such as Audubon and Buffon was far greater, he concluded, than anything due a Baring or a Rothschild. It was this explicit integration of aesthetics, science, morals, and manners that distinguished the Victorian intellectual outlook more than anything else. If, as often has been said, scientific knowledge was widely accessible in the nineteenth century and scientific endeavour widely pursued, it was less because of their intrinsic simplicity than because of their cultural relevance. This was especially true of the "inventory sciences," such as geology, botany, entomology, meteorology, and ornithology. Suzanne Zeller has shown how the practice of sciences such as these helped to "invent" Canada, partly by demonstrating the economic potential of northern North America, partly by offering ways of imagining the new nation.19 Clarke considered the natural environs of Elora ideal for their study, and himself showed an interest in virtually all of them. Their influence was apparent, as Zeller has suggested, in the efforts of men such as Clarke to formulate ways of describing the peculiarly Britannic-American qualities of the Canadian political system: "With British institutions as the stock, a scion from the American constitution has been engrafted upon it, and a beautiful, symmetrical, and blossoming tree, promising abundant fruitfulness, is the legitimate result."M With this phytographic image, Clarke held out to potential English immigrants in 1854 the prospect of a future home familiar in its essentials, yet altered and improved by the democratization of liberty. The study of natural history also offered Clarke additional means of situating himself in the vanguard of progress and of defining the standards of respectability. He showed - at least to his own satisfaction that cultural authority and social position in the modern age derived from intellectual attainments rather than from wealth or inherited privilege. Nor did one need to live in a metropolitan centre, or even a provincial town such as Toronto, to claim authority as an agent of advanced standards: one needed only to demonstrate a knowledge of metropolitan culture and a familiarity with metropolitan habits. Hence the frequent, seemingly casual references to prominent contemporaries in Clarke's articles and speeches, so easily mistaken for mere namedropping, were a rhetorical device familiar to his readers as a means of

The Falls of the Grand River

13

establishing his bona fides. Scenes on the Grand River "scarcely dreamt of by Sir Walter in his most prolific imaginings" suggested not only a superior measure of picturesqueness but also the author's acquaintance with the novels of Walter Scott. Likewise, his references to "a Tyndall, a Huxley, or a Darwin" in his Inaugural Address to the Elora Literary and Scientific Society in November 1879 signalled his awareness of the larger context in which their modest village endeavour was about to be launched.1' Such references were further - then no less than now - a shorthand means of establishing the body of knowledge and symbols shared by author and audience. As indicators of authority they point up the assertiveness and didacticism of Clarke's rhetoric, typical of its time in these respects as in many others. Whether in extolling the beauties of the Gorge or the benefits of horticultural knowledge or the virtues of natural science, or in demanding democratic constitutional reform, he sought to convince less by logical argument than by the weight of accumulated example and the force of reiterated assertion. The Inaugural Address is an excellent illustration of his mode of procedure. Its subject was not really science at all but the cultural significance of science, and Clarke's method was to establish that he saw its significance and that his listeners and readers therefore ought to see it. He began on a characteristic note, though one seemingly remote from either the substance of botany or geology or the cultivation of a taste for the English literary classics. " 'Go Ahead' is the motto of today," he announced. " 'Give us something new' is the characteristic cry of the age. 'Let us have Reform' is the prominent, and by no means to be deprecated clamor of the times." The entire first column and more of the printed pamphlet, some 500 words of the total 4000, were devoted to the general theme of change. Far from being scientifically analytical, the prose was overwrought and excited, or so it seems today. Nothing was said once that could not be said a half-dozen different ways: "Every morning we expect the fall of a ministry, a marriage in high life, the revolution of an empire, a bankruptcy for half a million, a declaration of war, a runaway match, a brutal murder, a blackleg boatrace, a clerical scandal, an absconding defaulter, an Edison invention, or [we reach the end with a sense of relief] some other fresh wonder." And nothing was said by halves: "There is no obstacle too formidable for the engineer, no distance too great for the traveller, no depth too profound for the explorer, no task too herculean for the science-aided laborer." Such profuseness and vehemence did not produce a conclusion to a line of thought so much as an impression on the emotions: society had become obsessed by change.

14

Charles Clarke

The immediate purpose of this opening, both in setting a tone and in sketching a background, soon became apparent. The climate of change - the "hurry, and bustle, and tossing up of everything and everybody, the tremor of the universal shaking" - accounted for the transformation of what had been the Elora Natural History Society into the new Literary and Scientific Society. The former institution had failed to hold people's attention after a brief few years' existence despite the good it had accomplished; the latter represented a fresh start in a wider field of work. It had been jointly initiated by Clarke and his protege, David Boyle, then principal of the Elora Public School and later Ontario provincial archaeologist." Clarke envisioned it as "a pleasant school for adults, a scientific gossip shop": one, moreover, in which neither sex could claim "exclusive right or authority." Fortnightly meetings would continue to emphasize natural history, but discussion would branch out into art, literature, and the social questions of the day. In this way, he hoped, the "general public" would be encouraged to join in the Literary and Scientific Society's activities. The real significance of the theme of change became clear, however, when Clarke came to the two main points of his address, both of which admonished his listeners to approach their endeavours in the proper frame of mind. First and more generally, they were to cultivate an atmosphere in which the free expression of opinion was not just tolerated but encouraged. Theirs was to be a "Liberty Hall": "A mind in chains, a mouth fastened with the padlock of rigid conventionalities, a man or woman intellectually shivering with perpetual fear of Mrs. Grundy, is but a sorry sight." Individuals everywhere, he charged - in Elora as elsewhere - were susceptible to fears of what "they" might say, the more so, paradoxically, in this age of the triumph of public opinion. Clarke hastened to add that, as a general rule, he believed in the will of the majority. But it was not infallible: true progress relied on the free-thinking minority, "constantly engaged in pushing on the slower majority to greater speed, to take another forward step on the road to an ever distant perfection." By fostering the free expression of ideas - within the bounds of common sense and propriety - the Society would assist in the creation of enlightened public opinion and help to ensure that continued change would justify the hopes of forwardthinking people. The spirit of free inquiry was, of course, at the heart of the modern scientific enterprise, and historically the major limitation on its exercise was thought to have been institutionalized religion. Moreover, the greatest scientific question of the day, the validity of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, had aroused widespread fears about its

The Falls of the Grand River

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impact on religious belief.13 Clarke's second message to the members of the Society, therefore, was to remedy any misapprehension they might be under of the meaning of science in its relation to religion. Many people, he said, even the best-intentioned, seemed to think that chemists and palaeontologists and astronomers were dangerous men unfit for admission to polite society, and that all scientists were united in a conspiracy to overthrow Christian belief. Nothing could be further from the truth. Scientists withheld certainty until they knew something for a fact, with the result that they were the least dogmatic of men. Their concern for exact observation and demonstration not only did not conflict with religious belief; it made them the more reverential in the face of the wonders of nature. The more advanced the student of science, the firmer his conviction of the greatness and goodness of God, and the more soundly based than that of the unthinking believer by habit. "Depend upon it," Clarke assured his listeners: scientists were the most devout of believers. The Society's objects, then, were much wider than the "literary and scientific" of its title would suggest. On the one hand, it sought to provide its members "rational amusement" of a winter's evening - and, like the Horticultural Society, to do so in conjunction with like-minded bodies such as the Mechanics' Institute and the Public Museum that David Boyle had established in 1873. On the other hand, it called its members to a high moral purpose: the cause of public enlightenment and popular progress. Taken as a whole, such a set of objects required a spokesman capable of conceiving of the world at large and willing to pronounce on how men and women ought to conduct their lives. In other words, they required a spokesman with a philosophy of life and the self-confidence to propagate its teachings. In assuming such a task, Clarke enlisted in a great cultural enterprise: the re-examination and re-constitution of individual belief and social relations in a time of far-reaching change. It was the magnitude of this task that gave rise, in large part, to the dogmatism and didacticism of the time. Clarke demonstrated in his own realm of middling culture the same earnest manner and oracular pose as the type of high cultural figure designated "the Victorian sage" - such men and women as Carlyle, Eliot, and Arnold. For the sage, the acquisition of wisdom was "somehow an opening of the eyes," if not to a new reality, then to a new way of seeing old things. Less concerned with distinctions than with connections, the sage appealed to the imagination rather like an artist in words, "quickening the reader to a new capacity for experience": "What he has to say is not a matter just of content or narrow paraphrasable meaning, but is transfused by the whole texture of his writing as it constitutes an experience for the

16 Charles Clarke

reader."14 Consciously or not, Clarke imitated the sage in his mode of address. By the manner of his prose as much as by its content, he tried to impress upon his readers and listeners the truth of his own insight. The virtues of distance and detachment associated with objectivity or irony were foreign to his rhetoric, whose intended effect was identification and commitment.

When, at the end of July 1880, the Toronto Globe sent a correspondent up to Elora to report on the completion of the Credit Valley Railway, which had opened several months previously, the reporter, Archibald Blue, placed himself under the guidance of three "savans" (sic) of the village: Clarke, Boyle, and a local high school teacher with an interest in botany. Not surprisingly, half of his subsequent report was devoted to Elora, which he pronounced "one of the Meccas of Ontario [for] the student of nature or the lover of romantic scenery." No doubt Clarke played a large part in leading Blue to this conclusion, and in stimulating his conjecture that the string of five small centres of which Elora was a part - the others being Fergus, Salem, and the now-vanished Kinettles and Aboyne - would one day form a single city, if only Canadians would free themselves of the "anaconda coils" of the National Policy. Blue had found Clarke "a storehouse of literary and scientific knowledge," and Clarke, in turn, noted in his diary that Blue had gone away delighted with what he had seen of Elora's natural attractions.15 In this way, Clarke's view of the Gorge - or what he knew as "the Rocks" - found a wide audience, if only indirectly. It found a wider audience still through an early example of the patriotic coffee-table book, Picturesque Canada; the Country as it Was and Is, edited by the principal of Queen's University, G.M. Grant. The section covering Elora, "From Toronto Westward," was written by J.H. Hunter, who was also the Ontario Inspector of Insurance. Like the Globe reporter, Hunter had been directed to Clarke, who, together with Boyle, spent a long Sunday in early January 1883 showing him around and filling him up with tales of the area's early history. Again, Clarke recorded that Hunter returned to Toronto "charged to the muzzle." Certainly the view of Elora that readers were eventually given, a compound of science and romanticism, was recognizably indebted to Hunter's informants, whom he described as two "enthusiastic local antiquaries."26 The picture they had provided him gave prominence to the area's aboriginal inhabitants, the result presumably of Boyle's budding interest in archaeology and of the discovery three years earlier of wampum

The Falls of the Grand River

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beads in a cave near the Hole in the Rock. The find had given fresh impetus to the search for native artifacts, as well as highly coloured speculation as to their origins: "Did some Indian beauty," asked Hunter, "flying for protection to these natural cloisters, and taking off her now useless and dangerous jewelry, confide to this secure casket the necklaces that had set off her charms at many a moonlight or firelight dance?" Or had it perhaps been some "antique miser"? Z7 Boyle had contributed to this myth-making himself, with his verse rendition of the legend of "Kee-chim-ah-tik," an Ojibwa chief who had rescued an Indian maid from sacrifice, only to prove false to her and in consequence fall victim to a "flinty shaft" from her jealous bow, dispatched from her place of ambush on Islet Rock!2-8 However far-fetched this particular story, the image of Noble Savages roaming amidst sylvan glades and rocky crevices considerably enhanced the picturesque value of Elora's scenery. Hunter also deftly incorporated the vocabulary of age and ruin that was a hallmark of the English picturesque. He compared the seventeenth-century Iroquois invasions of Huronia to the Norman conquest of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066, suggesting that a phrase on early French maps of the Ontario peninsula, nation detruite (which he translated as "tribes exterminated"), evoked the term used in Domesday Book to describe the northern English shires devastated by William the Conqueror, omnia ivasta ("all laid waste"). He described certain natural features in architectural terms evoking other times and places: "rock walls hewn and chiselled by countless winters into pedestal, column, and entablature"; "natural cloisters" offering sanctuary to early missionaries intent on meditation as well as to Indian maidens in flight. At once unspoiled yet touched by a hint of decay, nature described in the picturesque manner offered a sense of melancholy quietude that carried one across the boundaries of time. Accompanied by wood engravings of a half-dozen scenic prospects, which Clarke judged a great success (except for the one of Islet Rock), Hunter's description invited visitors to savour previously secret romantic retreats now made accessible by stairways, walks, and seats. Rail connections enabled travellers from Toronto and other growing urban centres to respond, and they flocked to Elora in the i88os, often on special "PicNic" excursion trains laid on by the railway companies. Clarke often remarked on their numbers, which commonly reached 1000 or 1500 of a summer's afternoon. As late as October 1885, he noted that picnickers were still "doing the Rocks"; it had become "a greater rage than ever."19 He had certainly helped to make it so. Closer to home, Clarke also instructed family and friends in the mysteries and pleasures of Elora's various points of interest: the Indian

18

Charles Clarke

Clarke thought the view of Islet Rock too exaggerated.

Bridge, the Cascade, the Hole in the Rock, the Punch Bowl, and so on. Sometimes the effect was immediate and unintentionally comic, as when his brother and sister-in-law by his second marriage are described in his diary as gazing longingly into each other's eyes under the spell of "The Lovers' Nook." At other times it was free of contrived sentiment, as in the keenness of his young son Rickey at the prospect of a "scramble" on the Rocks. Clarke showed off the sights to visitors such as Sir Richard Cartwright when the former Liberal finance minister stood for Centre Wellington in the federal election of i88z, and he shared them with friends such as David Boyle. He welcomed efforts to

The Falls of the Grand River

19

Clarke, second from left, showing off the Cascade in winter

improve accessibility for sightseers, such as the building of the stairs from the little park in the west of the village down to the bottom of the Irvine Ravine, but he lamented the thoughtlessness of picnickers who tore up plants in a misguided quest for ornaments of the wild.30 If, as was suggested earlier, the benefits of learning and refinement and the demands and opportunities of prose writing formed two of the primary coordinates of Clarke's life, a third was surely his attachment to the falls of Elora and "the Rocks" below.

io Charles Clarke In the pages that follow, these three coordinates, along with a fourth, his remembrance of his English origins, will serve as points of orientation in the mapping of Clarke's intellectual universe. The book is organized around each of the three prose genres that Clarke adopted, more or less in turn, as his primary modes of self-expression. We begin, in Part One, with his journalism. Chapter z tells the story of his childhood and schooling in Lincoln, England during the 18303 and early 18405, his first, bold venture into public polemics in the debates over free trade and the repeal of the corn laws, and his emigration to Upper Canada in 1844 and initial settlement in the Niagara District north of Lake Erie. Chapter 3 recounts his family's migration to Elora in 1848 and Clarke's temporary move to Hamilton the following year. There he embarked on the series of newspaper essays, written under the pseudonym of Reformator, that made his name as a radical journalist and laid the groundwork for his subsequent involvement in Reform and Liberal party politics. Returning to Elora in 1850, he threw himself into the organization of local voluntary societies such as those discussed above, established a business in partnership with his stepfather, and joined in starting a local newspaper, The Elora Backwoodsman, which further advanced his journalistic reputation and political influence. These activities form the matter of Chapter 4. At this time Clarke also married and began a family. His wife, Emma Kent, was like himself an English immigrant, and together they had five children: four girls - Jane, Emma, Florence, and Elizabeth - and a boy, Charles Kirk. Part One concludes with an account of Clarke's frustrations with public life. The decade and a half prior to Confederation was an era of fragmentation, fierce conflict, religious strife, and party realignment in the politics of the United Province of Canada, in the face of which Clarke was forced to temper his expectations of imminent radical reform. His opposition in principle to coalition, his conflict with Reform leader George Brown, editor of the Toronto Globe, and his alliance with friend and fellow journalist George Sheppard in the Great Reform Convention of 1859 - in all of which he was unsuccessful in achieving his ends - are taken up in Chapter 5. His parallel involvement in the municipal affairs of Elora and Wellington County during the same period, which he found equally frustrating, is traced in Chapter 6, the opening chapter of Part Two. Chapters 5 and 6 mark Clarke's transition from polemicist to diarist, and attention shifts in Part Two from his journalism to his diary. Chapter 7 begins with a look at diaries in general and Clarke's in particular: what it contained, what he used it for, and what it reveals of his changing state of mind. Among other things, Clarke's diary

The Falls of the Grand River 2.1 offered him a means of recording the pleasure he found in home and family, as well as in antiquarian pursuits, which in turn gave rise to a renewed identification with his Lincoln roots. In 1871 he entered provincial politics - in what was by then the province of Ontario - for the first time as a candidate rather than a backroom organizer, and his victory in the election of that year began a twenty-year stint as a member of the Ontario legislature. Chapter 8 describes his first years as an MPP and the tensions he continued to feel - as manifest in the diary - between his sense of domestic responsibility and his idea of public duty. These were also the years of what has been called "Elora's intellectual awakening," and the chapter examines the debate stirred by Darwinism in the village during the 18705 and Clarke's role in it. It also details the efforts made by Clarke and others to protect the environment of the Grand River and Irvine Creek gorges while promoting them as tourist destinations,31 and concludes with a study of his garden and how it reflected and expressed his ideals of domesticity. The diary serves throughout as a record of information, commentary, and reflection. It continues to be the focus of Chapter 9, which tells of Clarke's second marriage, in 1881 - Emma had died three years earlier - and the disruptive impact of this event on relations between him and his children, all of whom were older than the woman he now married, Rose Halley. Relations between Clarke and Rose, their mutual interests (especially of a literary nature), and the mending of family ties are all taken up in light of the evidence presented in the diary. The chapter also considers the implications of Rose's Irish ethnicity and Roman Catholic religious adherence, which subtly affected Clarke's politics in his support of Irish Home Rule, his nascent republicanism, and his belief in provincial rights, as well as their conjugal relations. The diary ended in 1890, except for a few scattered later entries, and in Part Three we turn to Clarke's third and last major form of self-expression: the memoir he published in 1908, just a year before he died. Chapter 10 discusses his failure to achieve a cabinet post in the government of Premier Oliver Mowat and his compensating success as Speaker of the assembly. In 1890, Clarke was finally rewarded for his long party service with appointment to the position of Clerk of the assembly. Chapter n describes the later decades of his life (for which the evidence is thinnest), and examines the memoir - its themes, structure, generic features, and point of view - as an expression of Clarke's retrospective understanding of the times in which he had lived. Here, as in his journalistic essays and his diary, the particular form, style, and content of the text lead us sometimes inward towards his private thoughts and feelings, sometimes

Z2. Charles Clarke

outward towards a consideration of his public activities. In either direction, we find the world of Victorian Canada opening up in everwidening circles - or such, at least, is the objective of these studies of Clarke's life in writing.

PART O N E

Polemicist

Charles Clarke, about 1855

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CHAPTER TWO

Hopeful Emigration Not a year has elapsed since a string of teams took up, to some scarcely known spot in the wilderness, the goods and chattels of a mercantile clerk, just out from the old country and new to backwoods' experiences ... There is something of the heroic about [these men]. Charles Clarke, 1851'

Charles Clarke left England in April 1844 at the age of seventeen, to join his mother, sister, and stepfather in Upper Canada. They had emigrated the year before, settling on a farm in Canboro Township in the Niagara District. His own departure was prompted by an invitation from one of his uncles to sail to New York with him and his family, and thence to travel north to Canada. This route was often taken by emigrants who had the means to procure passage on ships designed for the purpose of transporting human beings rather than merchantable commodities. In the event, Clarke found himself in the port of Liverpool with £10 in his pocket and a week to wait for the sailing of his uncle's vessel. In order to conserve his meagre savings for his arrival in America, he purchased a cheaper passage on a timber ship, the Superb, which was to leave immediately. The Superb, unfortunately, failed to live up to its name, and the saving proved illusory. After six weeks at sea, Clarke arrived in New York nearly penniless, most of the money remaining after his purchase of a ticket having been expended on the barely palatable provisions dispensed by the captain. Luckily, his uncle arrived at almost the same moment and was able to advance him funds for the last leg of his journey. This much Clarke tells us in his memoirs, Sixty Years in Upper Canada, with Autobiographical Recollections, published in i^oS.1 He also says there, more generally, that many Englishmen of the time emigrated out of frustration with the limited achievements of the Age of Reform and in hopes of improved prosperity: the United States offered promise of a new life, "and multitudes, convinced of this, sought the enlarged opportunity to the man of moderate means which emigration offered."3 We can surmise that he had himself in mind, at least partly, when he made this observation, even though his own destination had not been the United States. Certainly neither he nor his parents were

z6 Polemicist

Richard Clarke, Mayor's Officer of Lincoln

poor. Their economic circumstances and social ambitions, so far as we can tell, fit the pattern of nineteenth-century British emigration that modern historians have uncovered. They were also among a dissident minority, in both religion and politics, who were unhappy with the progress of reform. Clarke had been born in the cathedral city of Lincoln in 1826. His father, Richard Clarke, was Mayor's Officer, which meant, among other things, that he was the city crier and inspector of corn returns. The latter office placed him close to the centre of Lincoln's major economic activity, the trade in agricultural products and the servicing of the needs of the surrounding countryside. Lincolnshire, of which Lincoln was the county town, was one of the most agricultural of England's counties, and wheat and barley were among its leading products, along with sheep, cattle, and potatoes. All sales of grain had to be recorded with the inspector. Products destined for export out of the county went southeast down the Witham River to Boston and "The Wash," then on to London, or northwest along the Fossdyke, an old Roman canal, to the Trent River and the Humber. Some went overland. These exports increased in the early 18305, as the mush-

Hopeful Emigration 2.7

rooming towns of the Industrial Revolution - Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, and others - stimulated demand for wool and grain, and in return sent back coal, hardware, and cotton goods along the inland waterways.4 In Clarke's time, Lincoln itself remained a market town, closely tied in that pre-railway age to the interests, society, and culture of its neighbouring farms and villages. The growth of its small population, gradual in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, more rapid in the 18303 and 18405, was due in large part to rural migration. By 1841, there were just under 14,000 people in Lincoln.5 Clarke's own family roots lay in the countryside, his grandfather on his mother's side having moved to town from Welton le Wold, on the uplands to the east, and his grandparents on his natural father's side having done the same from Waddington and Navenby to the south.6 Visits to the country were a feature of his childhood. In Lincoln, his home was right at the heart of the market area. Born on the annual cattle-fair day, z8 November, he was a special present to his mother, a "fairing," as she later proudly told him.7 Until the time of his father's death, Clarke's birthplace and home was a building called the Stonebow, a name of Scandinavian origin meaning stone arch. 8 Once the principal gate of the medieval city, the Stonebow housed some city offices and the Guildhall. It formed a massive arch across High Street near the bottom of the remarkably steep hill leading to Lincoln Cathedral. On either side of the street were two smaller pedestrian arches. The adjacent stone buildings, the narrowness of the roadway, and the turret of the Church of St. Peter at the Arches, rising just over the rooftops as one looked uphill, evoked memories of an earlier time, not always favourable. When the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne passed through Lincoln in 1857 during his term as us consul in Liverpool, he found the old Stonebow "a gray, time-gnawn, ponderous, shadowy structure, through the dark vista of which you look into the Middle Ages."9 Clarke developed a more sympathetic appreciation of its historical associations as he grew older, despite - or perhaps because of - his transatlantic migration. As a child, however, he was more excited by High Street's bustle. Grocers and drapers, saddlers and cabinet-makers, inns and spirits shops concentrated in the area of the Stonebow and down to the High Bridge across the Witham. In lodgings at the Saracen's Head just downhill of the arch, Hawthorne remarked on the throngs of people who gathered of a Saturday night to buy provisions for the following week and to relax, accompanied by the sounds of street bands, at the liquor merchants' and coffee dealers'.10 It cannot have been very different a

z8

Polemicist

The Stonebow, "a gray, time-gnawn, ponderous, shadowy structure"

decade or so before. Here, too, was the fish market, and close by were other markets, for oats, corn, butter, swine, and sheep. These were all outdoors, which meant that market days - Fridays - brought a crush of farmers and townspeople to the neighbourhood of High Street. In April, the fair lasted an entire week, the sheep, cattle, and horse markets being assigned to different days. As many as 50,000 sheep were sold at the April Fair, again a mark of the age before railways, and a memorable sight for a young boy.11 The liveliness of market day extended along the river bank to Brayford Pool, Lincoln's inland port at the juncture of the Witham and the Fossdyke, where millers, brewers, maltsters, tanners, and other businesses dealing in agricultural products had increased in number. All this commercial development, occurring gradually over several decades, brought about an equally gradual shift in the locus of power in Lincoln from the upper town to the lower town. Physically dominated by the Cathedral, the city had long been politically controlled by what one historian calls the "clerico-medico-legal denizens of the cathedral precincts," while the city's social divisions were manifest in the terms "above hill" and "below hill," the one spoken with resentment, the other with condescension.12 Although this shift was not completed before the end of the nineteenth century, signs of it were already evident in Clarke's day. After the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 introduced elected municipal councils, for example, liberals and radi-

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Z9

cals captured every seat on the Lincoln council in the first elections held under its auspices.13 Social change and political reform were in the air locally, as well as nationally, in the 18305. Many resisted, of course, while others called for a more thoroughgoing transformation. Lincoln was peculiarly polarized in this regard. Never a particularly hospitable environment for liberal ideas, it had been a hotbed of Tory reaction during the French Revolution, while one of its two members of Parliament during most of the period of Clarke's growing up was the notorious Colonel Charles de Laet Waldo Sibthorp, an eccentric, Dickensian figure of pronounced conservative views. A strong defender of the agricultural interest in Parliament, Sibthorp opposed Catholic Emancipation, the Reform Bill of 1831, the New Poor Law of 1834, and municipal reform. Electorally, he relied heavily on the influence of the clergy and on "generous treating."14 To complicate matters for reformers, the protectionist Corn Laws had an almost unassailable status in agriculture-dependent Lincoln, at a time when English liberalism generally was becoming increasingly identified with free trade. Lincoln Whigs had an unusually protectionist hue. Yet the effect of the Corn Laws locally, as elsewhere, was to increase the price of bread, with the result that there were a few who accused farmers and their allies of tyrannizing over labour. During the depression of the early 18405 a number of violent assaults in the countryside were said to have been perpetrated by unemployed workers.15 Little wonder, perhaps, that in the politics of Lincoln the moderate middle was weak. In the judgment of Lord Monson, a liberally-minded local magnate who was disgusted by Colonel Sibthorp and the favour he found among electors, "few places [are] so far behind in real intelligence as Lincoln, either hot tories and bigoted chapter clergy, or else democrats, the sensible men are few."16 Circumstances suggest that Richard Clarke's sympathies may have lain on the radical side of this divide, despite his official position.

The premature death of Charles Clarke's father, in 1835, cast a shadow across an otherwise happy Lincoln childhood. He was only forty-two years old; Charles himself was not yet nine. A long and painful illness brought on by a heart ailment preceded his death and consumed most of the family savings. Clarke was later to feel himself predisposed to heart disease and vulnerable to a similar fate, though quite possibly his anxieties in this regard also reflected a more generalized Victorian morbidity. He was later conscious, as well, of having grown up without the

30 Polemicist

material advantages of many of his associates, though it seems clear that his circumstances were reduced rather than impoverished by his father's death.17 Richard Clarke owned property in Newport, an area on the north edge of Lincoln that was to experience rapid growth in the 18408. In his will, he left it - or rather his real property in toto - in a trust, with instructions that the profits it generated be paid to his wife Jane, provided she maintain and educate their children out of them. At her death, the property was to be sold and the proceeds divided equally between Charles and his sister. The terms of the will prevented the trustee, Jane's brother, from disposing of the Newport property early in 1844 - perhaps in anticipation of Charles's emigration - but its value, £350, was then substantial.18 If the death of his father did not leave the family entirely without resources, Clarke's circumstances had nevertheless suffered a severe blow. So, too, had his future prospects in a society in which ties of kinship and patronage often determined one's advancement. Clarke had also lost a loving father and a "good man"; he was drawn closer, in consequence, to his mother, who now assumed the entire material and emotional burden of raising her two children.19 Jane Clarke, formerly Jane Drury, was two years older than her husband. Her mother, the daughter of a sea-captain, had been abandoned in Lincoln at the age of six; her father, Thomas Drury, had been a woolcomber before moving to the city, where he became keeper of the city gaol. He held the position for almost thirty years until he died, "very highly respected," in 1836.zo Quite possibly, the two families had become acquainted in the line of custodial duty, as Richard Clarke's father was also a gaoler, keeper of the older facility that had been housed in the Stonebow until it was closed for humanitarian reasons in 1809." In her own household Jane Clarke created a warm and secure environment. Clarke later believed that his father had done everything in his power to make his children happy and that he had prized contentment over riches; he believed this even more strongly of his mother. He particularly remembered his birthdays, when, at the age of six or seven, he would return home from school in the fading light of a late November afternoon to find plum cakes she had made especially for him. On those days his mother put him on his best behaviour; she made him feel important. Clarke savoured such moments and sought to provide his own children with similar memories for mature reflection, believing them a superior legacy to mere money, "a few hundred dollars, more or less, to be distributed when Father and Mother are 'mouldering in the grave.'"" Jane was also a woman of determination. Her eldest granddaughter and namesake remembered her many years later as a person "born to

Hopeful Emigration 31

Jane Drury Clarke

command," though not in a repressive way: "[S]he helped those she ruled, for she was one to teach people to be ambitious."Z3 After her husband's death, she exercised her talents on her son's behalf. She pinched and saved in an effort to ensure that he would make his way successfully in the world, and he remained forever grateful. Well he might, one is tempted to say, since the schools she sent him to were run by two lively, assiduous, intelligent young men who were to leave their mark on the intellectual life of nineteenth-century England. The first was Thomas Cooper (1805-92.), who later won renown as a Chartist, poet, and lecturer, and as the author of a widely read autobiography; the second was George Boole (1815-64), who became a leading mathematician and the originator of the Boolean system of logic. Both also appear to have had ties of friendship, not merely of contract, with the Clarke family. Certainly this was true of Boole. This intimacy, together with their progressive political views and their connection with other, like-minded men with whom Charles Clarke also had ties, leads us to wonder whether his father had not been part of their radical circle as it emerged in Lincoln during the 18305. One focal point of the group was the Lincoln Mechanics' Institute, founded in 1833, part of a

32. Polemicist

national movement to educate and uplift skilled tradesmen.14 It would have been natural for men like Cooper and Boole to try to assist the widow of a friend. The precise chronology of Clarke's school attendance is unclear. He was at Boole's boarding school in Potter Gate, Lincoln from the time it opened in the summer of 1840 until early or mid-i84i; before that he was at Boole's academy in Waddington from 1838 to 1840; and before that still, at his day school in Lincoln. His attendance at Cooper's was prior to this and must have ended in 1836, when Cooper became a fulltime correspondent of the Lincoln, Rutland, and Stamford Mercury.^ It is possible, amidst this uncertainty, that Clarke's initial enrolment at Cooper's may have preceded his father's death. In any event, at an earlier period he also attended a Miss Morris's school, where he was "taught his alphabet."16 Although these schools were all of the private venture type rather than the endowed chartered schools that served the upper classes, Clarke received an education superior to that of the vast majority of nineteenth-century English children. Thomas Cooper was a man known today as much for his prodigious feats of self-instruction as for his brief career as a "physical force" Chartist and his subsequent imprisonment. At the age of three he was teaching other children to read. After his father died, his mother moved the two of them to Gainsborough, not far from Lincoln - and the model for George Eliot's village of St. Oggs in The Mill on the Floss - where they lived in poverty for twenty-five years. Cooper took up the craft of shoemaking when he was fifteen but spent every hour away from the last in reading and study. Rising at 3:00 and 4:00 a.m., he read by candlelight and in walks over the surrounding countryside, while every meal, it seems, was taken with book in hand. By his early twenties he had read Gibbon, memorized Paradise Lost, and studied Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, among much else, while managing also to acquire a knowledge of Latin, Hebrew, and French. Ill health forced him to turn to teaching, which then scarcely held the professional standing it now occupies, and he opened a school, first in Gainsborough, then, in 1833, in Lincoln, on High Street not far from the Stonebow. On a visit two years earlier, he had met his future wife, a cousin of George Boole's. Cooper's autodidactic accomplishments, his ardour, and his advanced political views impressed the young Clarke. During the midday recess, while his pupils were at play, Cooper studied Italian with a political refugee from Turin. As he had previously at Gainsborough, he filled the walls of his schoolroom with engravings, prints, and pictures painted by his students. In the corners and on

Hopeful Emigration 33

Thomas Cooper in old age

brackets between the windows, he displayed plaster busts of Milton, Shakespeare, Byron, Cromwell, Caesar, and Homer, fixing on the minds of his students images of the men whose poetry he read aloud and recited from memory, and whose historic exploits he recounted in his lessons. He turned window sills into miniature museums. "I was intent," he said of his scholars at Gainsborough, "on making their school-room their delight," and Clarke testified to his success in doing so at Lincoln/7 Lessons ran from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, with an hour's break at noon, yet the days were never long. Cooper refrained from inculcating his students with his own political beliefs. These could be discerned, nonetheless, in his manner of teaching and his government of the school. The boys - it was a school for boys only - elected a mayor and municipal council, which passed by-laws regulating their conduct, and they participated in courts that tried the minor offences of their fellows. Cooper himself occasionally presided as judge, while his pupils served as counsel, witnesses, and members of the jury. Clarke was too young to play a major role in these institutions of self-government, but they made a strong impression on him. He also remembered learning about different forms of government, in lessons that were "strongly tinctured with the belief that a free republic is infinitely better than an unlimited monarchy."28

34

Polemicist

Whatever influence Cooper exercised in the development of his pupil's political ideas, we should be careful not to see in it too much of the Chartism that Cooper later embraced. It is clear from his autobiography that, though he had read much about the radical workingmen's movement while a journalist in Lincoln, he had never attended a Chartist meeting or even met a Chartist until his move to Leicester in November 1840 to become a reporter with the Leicestershire Mercury. There, the wages and working conditions of the stockingers, so much worse than those of workers in agricultural Lincolnshire, whether urban or rural, shocked Cooper into joining the local Chartist association. He underwent a "conversion," neither his first nor his last.19 By the same token, we should also be wary of seeing Cooper's Lincoln years as merely preliminary to his subsequent ideological development. His conversion was the quicker because he already believed in the program of "root and branch" parliamentary reform from which Chartism, in part, evolved, and had done so since youth. He was a Radical, in other words, before he was a Chartist, and his Radicalism was no secret. This general outlook on the world was reinforced when Clarke moved on to become a pupil of George Boole's. Born in Lincoln in 1815, Boole was ten years younger than Cooper and also a prodigy of self-education. The story was told that once, when barely a child, he went missing, only to be found in the centre of town in frock and pinafore, spelling hard words before a crowd of admirers, who tossed coins in appreciation.30 His father, John Boole, was a shoemaker whose shop was located near St. Peter at the Arches Church. More interested in studying science and mathematics than in practising his trade, his business suffered, forcing George into teaching at the early age of sixteen in order to support the family. The elder Boole recognized his son's genius, however, and gave it every encouragement. When George opened his own school in 1834, in Grammar School Lane, the entire family - mother, father, his younger sister and two brothers - assisted in its running. This first venture of Boole's was a day school, and it lasted until 183 8. At some point Clarke became one of his pupils and found in him a teacher even more dedicated than Cooper. He described Boole in his memoir as a "born teacher," whose classroom was his home and whose duties were a "labor of love."31 This is particularly striking since a colleague at one of Boole's earlier posts had found him so absorbed in his own studies that his patience for the ordinary student with no natural bent for learning was almost nil. On the other hand, when he had a pupil who could appreciate him, he was "a most excellent teacher."31 Boole undoubtedly had perfected his craft in the

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35

interim; otherwise, his school would never have achieved the success it did. It may also be true, however, that Clarke's high regard for him reflected on his own abilities as a student as well as on those of his teacher. Boole's cast of mind was less political than Cooper's, though Clarke thought him a man of "liberal ideas of vast width and depth." 33 Rather, it was academic. Stressing the importance of proper grammar, correct spelling, and legible handwriting, he compiled his own simplified manual of grammar and devised his own dictation exercises. His goal was the eminently practical one of developing clear and fluent composition, but he knew this achievement required a combination of theory and practice. His success was readily apparent, at least in Clarke's case. In teaching arithmetic he adopted a similar approach, avoiding abstraction in the early stages of study, in favour of solving practical problems. "We were taken to the threshold of Mathematics," Clarke remembered, "but mere lads of from 10 to 13, as most of us were, could not be expected to go further." Instead, Boole urged the necessity of mathematical training for the study of mechanics, and its use more generally for strengthening the intellect.34 He also offered instruction in commercial applications and surveying. He made frequent use of maps and globes and, with the assistance of his father, scientific instruments. Clarke spent several memorable Sunday afternoons at the Books', peering keenly through a solar microscope of old Mr Boole's making. On one occasion they used a telescope, also built by John Boole, to project the shadow of a solar eclipse onto a sheet hung in their darkened room.35 In 1838, Boole was invited to take over the management of Waddington Academy, a boarding school where he had taught briefly five years earlier. He accepted, and some of his students followed him, including Clarke, whose family visits had already made him familiar with the village four and a half miles from Lincoln in which the school was located. The fees at Waddington were naturally higher, £26 a year including board, and Clarke may have had some charitable assistance in meeting them. Such aid would explain the frequent references by his friend and correspondent George Hancock to his "blue-jacketed" schoolmate, since a local charity supplied the pupils it supported with a blue coat and cap.36 The student body girls as well as boys - was drawn from the middle class of Lincoln and the surrounding villages. These were happy days for Clarke. The school was rather more spartan than Cooper's had been, though not unhealthily so. The students went for daily walks into the countryside, the boys often with Boole, whose rapt concentration on some problem or other was as

36 Polemicist

likely as not to extend the period of their outdoor recreation beyond its appointed length. The food was simple and the furnishings plain. Clarke disliked sleeping in a dormitory, two to a bed, and must at least occasionally have found the daily round of collegial ablutions, prayers, lessons, and study an ordeal. On the whole, however, he found satisfaction and pleasure at Waddington. Like Cooper, Boole was a thoughtful and diligent schoolmaster. He believed that students should exercise their reason, memory, and imagination in balance with one another, and that teachers should vary their lessons to make demands of each in turn, as well as in combination.' 7 This approach might entail reacting promptly to the opportunities of the moment, as on one summer evening when Boole led Clarke and the entire school up to the top of Waddington Cliff to observe the approach of a thunderstorm. Watch in hand, he calculated the lapse of time between each flash of lightning and peal of thunder, demonstrating for his assembled pupils the- difference in the speed of travel between light and sound as the storm advanced from far-off Nottinghamshire. Clarke, at least, did not forget.'8 Boole's teaching philosophy also meant that he had no use for rote learning, relying instead on the blackboard and trusting, in Clarke's words, "more to our retention of ideas than words."39 This method, of course, made substantial demands on his preparation time, as did his practice of delivering a special lecture every Friday afternoon on a subject chosen by the pupils the previous week and worked up by him in the interim. The boys' preference was for military heroes; his for natural philosophy, optics, electricity, and other topics edifying rather than sensational. Boole was inventive, as well, in extracurricular matters, or at least open to the inventiveness of his pupils. Like Cooper, he held mock courts. There was also a debating society, and a school newspaper called the Waddington Chronicle, on which Clarke and Hancock both worked — "the first (and mayhap, last) Waddington newspaper," Hancock called it.40 Whether this latter was the source of Clarke's journalistic ambitions we may wonder, but it undoubtedly encouraged them, as it did those of Hancock, who went on to find employment as a printer on the London periodical The Watchman.** There were, finally, the holidays. On Saturday afternoons and Wednesdays after 3:00, the boarders were freed from their books to play games and sports, more or less organized - cricket, football, marbles, fox and hounds, paper chase, leapfrog. Clarke was rather disinclined to sports, and Boole was forever retrieving him from the hedgerows, where he would slip away quietly to read. Novels were his particular secret pleasure, and once Boole caught him reading Henry

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37

Fielding's Tom Jones. These discoveries cannot have been too taxing, however, since Boole himself was a less than enthusiastic sportsman, as much a "butter fingers" in cricket, Clarke happily testified, as he was.42 Probably more to his liking were the dramatic and theatrical activities that were also a feature of the holidays. Boole's sister Mary Anne later remembered Clarke's sister Jane, also a pupil at the school, being pulled around the playground in an impromptu chariot, "her head wreathed with flowers, and with a branch in her hand for a sceptre, bowing on all sides to imaginary subjects, a worthy representative of the queen of youth and beauty." Clarke himself, according to Miss Boole, had been a "round faced, smiling, merry boy," the pride of his mother.4^ After Boole's death, she told Clarke that he had been one of her brother's favourite pupils. Certainly the warmth of the greetings that Boole - and Cooper, for that matter - sent to Clarke after his emigration were of the sort that a teacher might reserve for an especially talented and receptive former student.44 These letters were also slightly avuncular in tone, and their messages suggestive of wider familial relations. Both Cooper and Boole sent greetings to other members of Clarke's family, Cooper to his mother and stepfather, Boole to his mother and sister. Boole's, indeed, were from his family as well as himself, and he altered them in writing, changing his closing from "regards" to "love and old remembrances." Mary Anne, writing much later, also sent her love to Clarke's mother, with whom she had often stayed on trips into Lincoln from Waddington, and she asked Clarke to query her for recollections of her own parents. Her mother had attended Clarke's mother at his birth.45 Such references lead one to imagine a circle of friendships underlying Clarke's more formal Lincoln relations. His stepfather, John Lincoln Kirk, was a shoemaker who had once worked for John Boole. His chief Lincoln correspondent during his adult years was William Brooke, a High Street printer and bookseller, to whom John Boole had sent George at the age of ten to be tutored in Latin. Together with the elder Boole, Brooke had been instrumental in starting the Mechanics' Institute.46 All these men shared a common liberalism, shading into radicalism. Some, at least, were Dissenters in religion as well. George Boole was a Unitarian, as was Kirk, and Clarke so identified himself as a young man.47

The kind of influence that Boole may have had in shaping Clarke's intellectual and political outlook is not as immediately apparent as that

3 8 Polemicist of Cooper. The latter's impact may perhaps be judged by a remark of George Hancock's in a letter to Clarke of May 1847, communicating news of home. Hancock had met Cooper in 1845 when, on his release from prison, Cooper had come to London to find a publisher for his epic poem, "The Purgatory of Suicides," which he had composed during his incarceration. Hancock had befriended him and offered him shelter, and the two had become almost like kin, the older man coming to regard the younger as his "adopted nephew." When Hancock discovered that Cooper not only knew Clarke but had been his teacher, he had immediately written his friend to bring him up to date with the fortunes of his former schoolmaster. Now, two years later, he reported briefly that Cooper was "still as Radical as ever."48 In so remarking on Cooper's ideological state, he seemed to be affirming his and Clarke's shared interest in its persistence, and their common acceptance, or at least tolerance, of its substance. The remark was in keeping with the general tenor of Hancock's correspondence with Clarke over the years, in which he often expressed a sympathy for radical reform in Britain and revolution abroad that he clearly understood to be reciprocated. It seems safe to say that one source of this sympathy, on Clarke's side, was Thomas Cooper. Boole did not think systematically about politics; he was a scholar rather than an ideologue. He read quite as much as Cooper, but in those fields that were to lead to his appointment, in 1849, to the first Professorship of Mathematics at the newly established Queen's College in Cork, Ireland. Yet if Boole was not "political" in the narrow sense, he shared fully in the humanitarianism that informed the liberal and radical reform movements of early nineteenth-century England. One indication of this stance was his active membership in the Lincoln Mechanics' Institute. Another was his involvement in the Lincoln Early Closing Association, whose purpose was to shorten the working day so that shop assistants, apprentices, and other workers would have time for their own mental improvement. A third was his participation in the founding of the Lincoln and Lincolnshire Female Penitents' Home, for the shelter and "reclamation" of girls and young women who had fallen into prostitution.49 The latter two endeavours were taken up after Boole returned to Lincoln in 1840 to open a new school, one he would own as well as operate. Whether or not Clarke knew of these specific ventures, the moral concern out of which they arose had been prominent in the teaching philosophy that had guided Boole's administration of Waddington Academy. The prayers and scripture readings that were part of Clarke's daily fare were surely "tinctured" by moral concern as much as Cooper's lessons on government had been by republicanism. It was

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also discernible in the school's system of discipline: Boole would not tolerate cruelty and treated fighting as a punishable offence. At the same time, moral considerations also tempered his judgment of the crime. When Clarke once became involved in a fist fight because of a conflict between two fellow students, the fact that he had done so on behalf of a butcher's son in reaction to the bullying of a social superior went far to mitigate his action in Boole's eyes - or such was Clarke's very strong impression.50 Boole's moral outlook was evident, as well, in the advice he offered the young emigrant embarking on life in the New World. Wherever Clarke went, he warned, he would encounter influences that would draw him off the true path. In England temptation lay in "a too great regard to the distinctions of society," while in America it was to be found in "the too eager pursuit of wealth." Boole urged Clarke to make "the Right the Just and the Fine the unfailing rule" of all his actions, and, while he wished him a happy and prosperous life, he also hoped that he would usefully contribute to the happiness of his fellow creatures.51 This sense of the capacity of individual voluntary action to effect an improvement in the general well-being of society marked a revolution in moral sensibility.51 It lay behind much that was more expressly political in the Radical program, and Clarke's assimilation of it was partly the result of Boole's teaching. We must be cautious, however, in attempting to isolate such influences. The fact that Clarke and Hancock developed their mutual passion for politics under the tutelage of the "non-political" Boole is a reminder that individuals make themselves in the context of a great variety of influences, events, conditions, and circumstances; they are not the creations even of those whom they regard as guides and mentors. It may be that the posture of Cooper and Boole - ardent, unorthodox, confident in the higher truth of their own beliefs - was a stronger influence on Clarke than the particular content of what they taught, and that it was transmitted more through the filial element in their relationship than the pedagogical. This is not to suggest that their beliefs and ideas were unimportant in forming Clarke's, only that we should not expect to find them precisely replicated. Cooper and Boole represented models worthy of emulation and were members of a network of family, friends, and acquaintances who constituted a little universe of possibilities, in which Clarke had to establish himself and find approval. He had to do so, moreover, during a time of unusual upheaval, when people in England were presented with particularly stark political choices, which, to all appearances, had to be made with particular urgency. From 1837 to 1842 the country endured its worst economic

40 Polemicist

depression of the nineteenth century. Lincolnshire was not as seriously affected by the downturn as the more highly industrialized regions, but after a quarter-century of adaptation to industrial development, no part of the country was immune to fluctuations in trade and investment. In the late 18303, excess capacity in cotton and woollen manufacturing, coal mining, and iron production led to a sharp drop in prices and profits accompanied by widespread unemployment. Yet a series of poor harvests, especially in 1838 and 1839, kept food prices high.53 While this was a benefit to those farmers who were able to bring crops to market, it represented a serious hardship to men and women who had lost their jobs, either because of the depression or because mechanization had rendered their traditional skills obsolete. As a result, the "sense of imminent social explosion" that had been present since the Napoleonic Wars was dramatically heightened.54 The most important movements of radical reform that emerged in response were the Anti-Corn Law League, founded in March 1839, with its headquarters in Manchester, and the Chartists, whose program of democratic reform had been adopted the previous August at a national meeting of workingmen's organizations in Birmingham. The first called for the "total and immediate" repeal of the Corn Laws, and thus the opening of domestic markets to foreign grain, the second for a wider assault on the parliamentary and electoral system that underpinned the political strength of the landed interest. For the merchants and manufacturers who were the major backers of the League, the Corn Laws not only kept the price of bread high but also symbolized the -entire system of aristocratic power and privilege, which had barely been breached by the Reform Bill of i83z. The Chartists, for their part, were not opposed to repeal but suspected the League of deliberately distracting attention from further parliamentary reform, without which cheap bread would simply prove a justification for lower wages. Both movements were rooted in the English radical tradition, and both grew, in part, out of dissatisfaction with political leaders who regarded 1832 as the "final" instalment of reform. Of these two alternatives, Charles Clarke opted for the first. The reasons for his choice seem pretty straightforward: the fact that the vested interests of the old order were especially evident in a cathedral city only recently a closed corporation - full of "hot tories and bigoted chapter clergy" - his identification with the commercial interest, and his acceptance of the merits of the argument that repeal would open the gates of social and economic progress. There was an element of romanticism, as well, in his embrace of the League's diagnosis of England's ills. In 1841, with an election on the horizon, the tone of its

Hopeful Emigration 41

campaign shifted away from the "scientific" arguments of political economy to religious and humanitarian grounds for repeal.55 It was this new emphasis - anti-bread tax more than anti-corn law - that the teenaged Clarke took up in his own personal contribution to the torrent of pamphlets, handbills, and tracts with which the campaign was waged. Early in 1841, Clarke was apprenticed to a Lincoln draper, John Norton. Both Boole and his mother had hoped that he would be educated as an usher - a schoolmaster's assistant - and eventually enter Boole's employ, but the prospect of years of preparatory drudgerycaused the impatient Clarke to persuade his mother to release him from this plan and agree instead to his apprenticeship.'6 Under Norton's direction, haberdashery, fancy goods, and retail sales practices took the place of grammar, geography, and history in his education. Like most apprentices in the retail trades, Clarke may have lived for a time on the shop premises and divided his labour between business and domestic duties for his master.57 Certainly this was what he later required of his own shop clerks. His political education probably continued as well. "Calico John" Norton was a well-known Lincoln Radical, one of the founders of the Mechanics' Institute, and a personal friend of the Manchester manufacturers Richard Cobden (1801-65) and John Bright (1811-89), two of the driving forces behind the Anti-Corn Law League.58 Free trade was his gospel, and it is likely that, early in Clarke's apprenticeship, before the souring of their relationship that later occurred, Norton played some role in encouraging Clarke in his foray into pamphleteering. Clarke joined the Anti-Corn Law League and, late in 1841, produced a small work entitled "To Our Young Men," which he had the temerity to send off to Richard Cobden himself.59 Clarke's appeal sought to harness the energy of youth - of which his pamphlet was clearly one expression - to the campaign for repeal. The young, he said, possessed intrinsic qualities that offered the promise of redemption to a political world corrupted by monopoly: their enthusiasm and purity, their "rectitude of character" and "moral vigour," and their natural zest for liberty. Because of such organizations as the Mechanics' Institutes, more young men had acquired more knowledge than ever before. They could train this, he intoned, on "the dark hitherto unfathomable dungeons of ignorance of our modern aristocrats." He pointed to the French and American Revolutions, the Irish Rebellion, and the national resistance movements of Switzerland and Tyrol during the Napoleonic Wars as evidence of youthful capacities for action, though he hastened to add that he had no sympathy for "physical force" movements.

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It was the "moral force" of young men that Clarke sought to invoke, as he went on to enlarge upon the devastation wrought by depression in the manufacturing towns and cities: in Manchester, Stockport, and Rochdale, in Paisley and Glasgow, in Nottingham, Preston, Sheffield, and Birmingham. London, where the ignorant landowners spent their "ill-gotten gains," was less badly off, but the ports - Liverpool, Hull, Bristol - were also in a state of ruin thanks to the collapse of trade. The contrasts he drew between prosperity in the past and poverty in the present, between the potential for productivity and the reality of stagnation, between the just expectations of free Britons and their current wretchedness, were common in Anti-Corn Law protest literature. So too was his effort to distance himself from the idea of violent action, when many feared a Chartist uprising at almost any moment. The historian of the League, Norman McCord, wrote of one of its leaders that "[t]he doctrines of Free Trade were self-evident truths to him and this rather blinded him to the realities of the political situation; he over-estimated the extent to which the question of the Corn Laws could be settled by economic argument and persuasion, and failed to appreciate the strength of the opposition to repeal."60 If this was true of the leadership, it is not surprising to find it in exaggerated form in the enthusiasm of a fifteen-year-old supporter. Clarke scarcely paused to account for the state of desolation that he depicted. Other tracts, lectures, and the League itself, "with its Behemoth might," had done the job for him, he said. They had proven that the Corn Laws were responsible, and that, unless they were repealed, the people would sink into utter destitution and the nation into insignificance. There was as much in this of rhetoric as blind conviction. Clarke was less interested in analysing the "condition of England" than in getting from description to exhortation. What were young men to do? In a word, they were to "Agitate, Agitate, Agitate." This was the lesson of Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847), the Liberator, whose campaigns for Catholic emancipation in the 182.05 and Irish Home Rule in the 18305 were aggressively non-violent in their tactics. O'Connell was one of Clarke's idols. Once, when he passed through Lincoln, Clarke managed to hear him speak, as, on another occasion, he succeeded in catching a glimpse of Cobden and Bright in a moment stolen from his work/1 The instruments of agitation included petitions, processions, and remonstrances. Public meetings could be held, associations formed, debating societies organized. Young men could go among the poor to educate them as to the source of their misery. They could establish a periodical, written by and for their fellow youth, devoted to

Hopeful Emigration 43 repeal. Success only wanted action, Clarke seemed to be saying, and action only wanted motivation. Motivation, in turn, only wanted nobility of sentiment. Successively addressing particular groups of young men - mechanics, capitalists, philanthropists, scholars - Clarke renewed the emotional entreaties of his descriptive passages. "Did you ever see a man die of hunger ... " he asked young mechanics; "did you observe his little children standing around his bed of straw, weeping bitterly in their agony - did you ever see too his wife throw herself on the bosom of her murdered partner and yield up her spirit also[?J" That Clarke himself had ever witnessed scenes like these is as unlikely as that he had ever visited Manchester or Birmingham. The images were means of arousing sentiment. In time, such an appeal would degenerate into the Victorian sentimentality of modern stereotype, but in the hungry 18405 it was an expression of what a contemporary called "the politics which flow from pity."6* Also referred to as "the politics of the gospel," it was the special province of the abolitionist George Thompson, whom Clarke cited in his tract. It spoke to humanitarian feeling. The time had come, Clarke said to "young philanthropists," to shift attention from private charity to public affairs: "[I]t is your duty as persons professing universal love to come forward in the struggle, and so concentrate your whole force as to obtain the immediate and total abolition of the Infamous Bread Tax." The appeal to sentiment rather than interest gave a certain free rein to youthful idealism; it also enabled Clarke to transcend the bounds of class, to include in his audience the farmer, the landowner, the grazier, the tradesman, and "the man of the middle class" - indeed, "the father and the child." So clear was the evil of the "Starvation Impost" that men of "every grade" and "every interest" - the entire political community, in fact - could unite in its overthrow. The "utility" of the "great moral force of young men" lay in its capacity to inspire union. Historians argue about what role the League's moral crusade finally played in bringing about the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, which was occasioned, if not caused, by the failure of the potato crop in Ireland. Clarke's pamphlet, we may safely say, had no effect: Cobden politely returned it. It is nonetheless significant biographically. It shows a young man in the process of formulating his ideology, honing his style, and testing his political capabilities. It suggests that Clarke already understood his world in relation to forces of good and evil, and realized that the good would triumph - if only its guardians could be moved to action. It suggests, above all, that he, like others of his generation, was shaped in his thoughts and feelings

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by the discontents of the crisis years of the late 18305 and early 18405 in Britain/'

Clarke eventually became disenchanted with the drapery business. He may have felt his education had fitted him for a status more elevated than that of a draper's clerk, or he may simply have found the work debilitating. According to one student of the retail trades, "The stunted, sallow, tubercular shop assistant was a reality, not a sentimental creation of Victorian novelists."64 Both reactions can be inferred from George Hancock's response to one of Clarke's descriptions of his new life on a Canadian farm. Reading Clarke's letter, Hancock wrote, he pictured "first, a draper's shop, close, confined, full of sickly-faced assistants and changeable ladies, one of these assistants, talking coaxingly to one of said ladies, endeavouring to dispose of some relic of last year's fashions as a 'novelty' ... smirking, smiling - and being anything but a man." Then, he continued, he saw this same person throw off his too-fancy garb and simpering habits for those of a cheerful, industrious, and intelligent man of the soil. Hancock's response was no doubt coloured by a myth of agrarian bliss, but his light-hearted evocation of a life transformed has about it the verisimilitude of a correspondent's elaboration on news received/5 This was not Hancock's only reference to the confinement of Norton's shop, and it is evident from others that some of Clarke's discontentment was with his employer personally. In 1845, reporting on a visit to Lincoln, Hancock assured Clarke that Norton - his "dearly beloved governor" - had a poor reputation in the city/6 Unhappiness with his situation, hopes for a more manly state of independence, and fears for the future in an economy as yet unsettled were all factors in Clarke's decision to emigrate. Most immediate, of course, was his desire to be re-united with his family. Clarke's mother, his sister, and his stepfather had joined a great overseas migration. The years from 1839 to 1843 were one of the peak periods of English and Scottish emigration in the nineteenth century. It was no accident that they were also years of depression, though in general the individuals and families who were prompted to move were not the pitiable victims of unemployment portrayed by Clarke in his address to the young men of England, but those who had some capital and found their prospects for security and advancement blighted by hard times, John Lincoln Kirk was a shoemaker by trade, and he and Jane Clarke had enough resources between them to purchase an

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improved farm in a settled part of Upper Canada rather than seek out virgin land on the frontier. In another respect, however, they were somewhat unusual. In moving from city to country they ran against the grain of British migration as a whole, which tended the other way.67 This suggests that, like George Hancock, they had in their minds a picture of farming sufficiently attractive to lead them to choose it deliberately as a way of life. The promise of independence that farming offered was also a consideration for Clarke. Early in 1844, he asked Hancock's opinion of migration, though he was careful to say that, so far, his plans were tentative and secret, since he was still bound to Norton by the terms of his indenture. Hancock encouraged him. You only live once, he said in a roundabout sort of way. He would miss Clarke, of course, but if his home were to be thousands of miles distant, at least they could still correspond and he would continue to be a British subject.68 When, having received the offer of company from his uncle, Clarke finally raised the subject with his employer, Norton refused to consider releasing him from his legal obligations, even though the time remaining in his term was only a matter of weeks. At the last minute, Clarke's desires overcame his scruples, and he departed without taking leave either of Norton or of his relatives and friends. Hancock had not expected him to act on his advice so precipitately/9 He landed at Port Robinson on the Welland Canal, on Saturday, zz June, and reached his family's farm near the village of Canboro that evening.70 He stayed there with them for the next four years. At first, they went about their work optimistically. They built a frame house and a shelter that doubled as stable and storage shed, and harvested what Hancock would have called Nature's Bounty from their sixty acres. Nature was not as bounteous in Canboro Township, however, as he imagined. Charlotte Erickson, in studying nineteenth-century American immigrant correspondence, found that farmers who came from urban backgrounds were sustained "at least for a while" by the ideal of agrarian independence they brought with them from home. In time, of those who experienced difficulty, the ones who had gone into farming for the purpose of making a living often gave it up altogether, while those who had invested in land for the purpose of capital gain simply moved on to farm-making elsewhere.71 The Kirks and Clarkes fell into the first category. It soon became apparent that the soil of their farm had been mined of its surface nutrients by previous owners and would require a program of restoration before it would produce anything like a surplus. Their average wheat crop was less than five bushels per acre; their hay was full of thistles and weeds. They could grow potatoes,

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but the clay soil clung so fast to them it had to be chopped away with an axe. Besides, rattlesnakes were a little numerous for complete peace of mind. Years later, describing these conditions to a meeting of teachers, Clarke confessed his failure as an agriculturist - somewhat sheepishly, since he was urging the virtues of the farmer's life even then. The farm had been played out, he said, but it was also true that he had never managed to acquire the knack of driving a straight furrow.72 Farming, moreover, was exhausting work, as he occasionally informed Hancock. But surely it was "a sweet mode of becoming tired," his friend once replied, "and even the very fatigue itself will partake of the healthful exercise by which it is caused - different, I'll be bound, to your feelings on Friday night after the closing of Mr. Norton's shop."73 There must have come a point when Hancock's sunny optimism began to pall, and even Clarke's memories of Norton's to recede. That took a few years, however. In the meantime, the family used various expedients to supplement their cash income and staunch the hemorrhage of their remaining reserves. Clarke looked for jobs off the farm, boarding temporarily in Port Dover, and the family seems for a time to have run a hotel. The latter was doubtless his mother's and sister's responsibility, the taking in of boarders being one of the many ways in which women earned farm income. Selling butter and eggs was another.74 What finally decided the matter was the ague, a malarial fever that sapped the health of many pioneer families. It set in every July on the lower Grand and stayed until snowfall. In 1848, the family decided to leave. None of the Canboro difficulties produced serious doubts about Clarke's original decision to emigrate. In 1846, he was extolling the virtues of Canada and making invidious comparisons with the social and political condition of England in an effort to persuade Hancock to follow his example. Even when it was clear that his first occupational choice had gone wrong, he was waxing enthusiastic on the vastly greater scale of the Canadian landscape, compared to that of home.75 The basic decision had been the right one. Clarke would not return to England, even for a visit. The farm was sold for $800 to a canny Scot. Or not so canny, perhaps: an experienced farmer, he surrendered to the thistles himself a short time later. Their capital liquid once more, the family set off for the village of Elora, a part of the province, Clarke later recalled, where the "ague was unknown and the land was as fertile as any in Upper Canada."76 Only one false start was rare for an immigrant. In this, as in much else, Clarke was fortunate.

CHAPTER THREE

Victorian Radical It frequently happens that individuals are more progressive in their views than communities, and that from them communities must take their tone before they can progress. Reformator [Charles Clarke], 1849'

Clarke and Elora were well suited to each other. The founder of the village, William Gilkison (1777-1833), had been a Scots Radical, and his carefully laid-out plan for a city in the wilderness, which was strongly influenced by the Scottish town-planning tradition, was stamped by his political beliefs as well. Among the street names he envisioned were Hume, Cobbett, Mackenzie, Reform, and Radical, the last of which was to mark the main road leading to the river.1 What more fitting municipal lineage might be found for a young man of Charles Clarke's background and disposition? What better symbol of the congruity of British and colonial aspirations: Gilkison the Scot; Joseph Hume and William Cobbett, two founts of English Radicalism; and William Lyon Mackenzie, the leader of the radical wing of Upper Canadian Reform in the 18305 and of rebellion in 1837? What surer sign, indeed, of the relevance of ideas propounded in the journals and debating rooms of metropolitan Britain to the circumstances of backwoods Upper Canada? In the event, Gilkison died in 1833, less than a year after embarking on his promotional scheme. His street names died with him, to be succeeded by others more conventionally patriotic in spirit: Wellington, Waterloo, Victoria, and the like. Even so, hopes for liberal reform continued to mingle with the prospect of financial gain in the minds of Elora developers. After almost a decade's stagnation - whether resulting from mismanagement on the part of Gilkison's sons or more generally from the state of the local economy is uncertain - the village was given a fresh start in the summer of 1842., when a small group of entrepreneurs from the area of nearby Fergus decided to shift the focus of their ambitions downstream to their neighbouring community. Their decision was prompted, at least in part, by the outcome of the Wellington District Council elections held earlier that year, when Reformer Charles Allan had been narrowly defeated by his Conservative opponent, the Fergus developer James Webster. Allan (1801-59), a native

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Scot who had come to Fergus in 1834 to practise his trade as a carpenter and builder, promptly formed a business alliance with two associates and moved to Elora, where the field for both political and economic advancement was more open.3 Operating under the name of Ross and Company, the partners acquired the water privilege at the falls from Gilkison's son, erected a dam across the Grand River, and built a sawmill and grist mill. Just as significant as the mill development itself was their decision to locate on the river's north side. Gilkison's plan, with its squares and crescents and radial lots, had situated the village on the south, and settlement such as it was - had followed suit. Allan and his partners shrewdly recognized the advantages of a more northerly orientation a decade later. From Victoria Street on the south side - Radical no longer! - they built a bridge across the Grand and opened a general store at its north end, inaugurating the development of what was to become the main commercial district of Elora over the next twenty years. They also acquired a large block of land on the north bank, which above the falls slopes gently upward from the water's edge, and proceeded to sell village lots. In 1843, Allan built himself a log house, which still stands today, about two-thirds of the way up the hill.4 In succeeding years the company added an oatmeal mill, a barley mill, a distillery, and a woollen mill, all of which offered both a market to local agricultural settlers and the promise of further expansion to other men of capital. It was undoubtedly this evidence of bustling riverside activity, together with the fact of unsettled townships to the north and their commercial potential, that convinced Clarke and his stepfather that Elora had more than its natural beauty to recommend it. They also took advantage of the company's offer of property at reasonable prices. In 1849, John Lincoln Kirk purchased a lot somewhat to the east of Allan's log house, where the land begins to level off, for £12.5 Here, at the corner of Geddes and Church streets, he saw to the construction of a simple one-and-a-half-storey Georgian cottage, the first brick building in the village north of the river. After inhabiting rented quarters since their arrival, the family moved into their new home, probably in 1850. The house would later become Clarke's own; he occupied it for the rest of his life. It backed onto Church Street, which ran roughly parallel to the river, and sat virtually on the property lines at the corner. The situation took full advantage of the view of the river valley afforded by the height of land. When Kirk purchased the adjoining lot downhill a few years later, and Clarke the two lots immediately to the east, on Princess Street, at around the same time, the four lots together made for a modestly spacious grounds.6 Clarke and his stepfather formed a partnership late in 1850 for the purpose of engaging in general retail trade, and for a time the house served the dual function of residence

Victorian Radical 49

Kirk and Clarke's property comprised Lots 6 and 7 on Church Street between Geddes and Princess.

and workplace, with the store occupying the portion of the main floor facing west onto Geddes.7 In choosing a retail location not only on the newer, north side of town but removed from the commercial district near the river, Kirk and Clarke showed their willingness to gamble on the future direction of growth. The gamble paid off, and eventually the town centre moved yet again, past them even further to the north. The fact that they took the risk in 1850 suggests that their experience in Canboro had taught them something about where opportunity lay in a frontier society. What must have seemed a safe bet at the outset - a cleared farm in a settled district - had proven otherwise, and they were now prepared to be more adventurous. Not that they were reckless. Kirk returned to his

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shoemaker's trade on arriving in Elora and continued to practise it after entering into partnership with Clarke. At the time of the provincial census of 1851, he was employing two apprentices, who were listed as members of the household.8 Prudent calculation was evident, as well, in Clarke's move to Hamilton in 1848, shortly after the family had settled in Elora. "[I]t was deemed advisable," he later reported, that he "should learn more of the business customs of the country."9 Hamilton was a busy Lake Ontario port in 1848, lately incorporated as a city in the aftermath of the mid-decade wheat boom. In those days before railways, when the urban hierarchy of Upper Canada had yet to be fixed, it was still possible to imagine that Hamilton might rival Kingston, London, or even Toronto in commercial eminence. Its hinterland lay mainly to the southwest but touched Berlin (now Kitchener), Guelph, and the Grand River valley to the north as well. William Gilkison's supplier had been a Hamilton merchant, and Clarke had first learned of Elora's attractions from a Hamilton commercial traveller, who had then offered to show him and Kirk the way up from Canboro since he was headed there anyway on business. When the family moved, the road system had taken them via Hamilton, where they had found a Ross and Company teamster to haul their household goods up country.10 It was not surprising, then, that they should look to the city at the head of the lake as a school for business. What was surprising was that, having secured himself employment as an assistant in a Hamilton drug store, Clarke turned his hand to writing a description of the environs of his recently adopted home in Elora, which he sent in anonymously to a local newspaper, the Hamilton Journal and Express, for publication. Perhaps he had time on his hands, for the first time since emigrating, to cultivate his taste for prose composition. Perhaps he was stimulated by his urban milieu as much as by the falls of the Grand River. Perhaps he thought himself capable of greater things: he was, he later said, "ambitious of seeing myself in print."11 His success exceeded his expectations. Not only was the piece printed, but within less than a year Clarke was writing newspaper pieces on major political topics for a provincial audience. By the time he returned to Elora in 1850 he had established a reputation for advanced liberal views that might have been the envy of William Gilkison.

Newspapers in the mid-nineteenth century were not yet a mass medium, though changes in the technology of paper production,

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51

printing, and distribution would soon make them so. Many of them were not even business enterprises, in the sense of being designed primarily for the purpose of earning a return on investment. Instead, they were instruments of political advocacy and local boosterism, often initiated by groups with an interest in either cause, and sustained precariously by subsidies in the form of advertising and printing contracts dispensed by sympathetic governments." They carried commercial advertising as well, together with news, and with what today would be called features - such as the item on Elora submitted by Clarke but their centrepiece was the partisan political essay, addressed to voters rather than consumers.13 Their circulations were limited, and the equipment required to begin publication could be purchased with only a small capital outlay: "My capital," said Josiah Blackburn of the London Free Press, "is felicity of expression."14 One result was that differences in quality and capacity between small-town and city papers were nothing like those that were to emerge in the second half of the nineteenth century between the country weekly and the metropolitan daily press. Easy to start yet risky to maintain, newspapers proliferated, changed hands, and disappeared with startling rapidity. In these circumstances, journalism offered scant prospect of steady employment, and since it seemed to require of its practitioners little more than an ability to read and write, it shared with teaching the faintly disreputable air of an occupation performed by those unqualified to do anything else. The editor-proprietor, however, or editorial contributor, was accorded a certain status in his community, partly because of his role as a political spokesman, partly because editorship was a branch of "letters" as mere reportage was not. 15 The ubiquitous editorial essay required breadth of knowledge, a grasp of rhetoric, and a facility with ideas. It was a genre that commanded interest and respect - not least among other editors. Mediating between the high cultural world of political thought and the interests of local readers, and communicating with one another by exchanging issues of their papers, newspaper editors constituted what one historian has called "the closest equivalent to a national intelligentsia" that Canada had in the mid-nineteenth century.1'' Less alienated from their communities than a strict construction of the term "intelligentsia" would perhaps imply, they nevertheless played a conspicuously intellectual role in a period when the nature of politics itself - its rules, its institutions, its very legitimacy - was in the process of being defined.17 Whether, in sending off his first manuscript, Clarke thought of newspaper writing either as a social opportunity or as an outlet for

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expressing his political beliefs, he quickly found his life in Hamilton and his future in Canada - radically altered as a result of the informal, personal, and improvisatory nature of the colonial press. His piece in the Journal and Express was followed a week later by a notice asking for the author to call in at the paper's office. Clarke responded, and found to his astonishment that the editor, the easy-going Solomon Brega, was going away for two weeks - and would he please take over the paper in Brega's absence!18 Clarke felt quite unprepared for doing so. An avid reader of newspapers, his experience of their production was limited to the Waddington Chronicle of school days. Nevertheless, here was an opportunity not to be passed up. He obtained permission from his employer to spend his evenings in the newspaper business and, on Brega's return, was appointed associate editor. Soon he was showing off his handiwork to George Hancock, who responded with playful deference, "My Dear Mr. Editor."1' The Journal and Express of those years survives today mainly in the form of excerpts found in the columns of other papers. A universal practice among newspapermen of the time, which both lowered costs and demonstrated how widely one's own opinions were shared abroad, was to reprint portions of the editorials of like-minded journals that one received on "exchange." It is impossible to tell now which of the editorials attributed to the Journal and Express originated with Clarke. Was it he, for example, who called Canadian toryism the "impersonation of imbecility, impotent malignity, and miserable peevishness," yet shortly afterwards lamented the prevalence of "ungentlemanly language" in journalistic debate, admonishing his colleagues that, if the newspaper was to become "the instrument of improvement" it had the potential to be, it had to purge itself of vituperation and vindictiveness? Was it his experience of Canboro that lay behind the warning that the "Canada Thistle" of aristocracy would spread "unless the scythe is applied in time, and the salt of public condemnation is applied to the root of the evil"? Probably it was, in both cases, but we can only say with certainty that these were opinions that Clarke did hold, and that his expression of them, or of similar views of a radical liberal bent, was noted beyond the boundaries of Hamilton.20 As a result, his effort to diagnose the ills of the Canadian governing system and prescribe their remedy found a wide audience. Beginning in August 1849, Clarke published a series of essays mapping out a program of far-reaching political and constitutional change. They came out in batches, under the rather portentous Romanesque pseudonym of Reformator: fifteen "Letters from Reformator," sixteen "Tracts for the Times," a half-dozen "Seeds for the Fallow," and a like number of "Thoughts for the People."11 Over a period of

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fourteen months, adding to those just named a handful of separate forays on particular issues, Clarke wrote some fifty Reformator essays, perhaps 70,000 words in all. It was an impressive debut on the provincial scene, a rush of literary output indicative of a young man - he was twenty-two when the series began - who already had the main principles of his thought in order and was both prepared and able to apply them to the public questions of the day when given the opportunity. As the passage from his first "Letter," quoted at the head of this chapter, suggests, he was also armed with the self-sustaining notion of the independent thinker, beholden to no party or interest, showing his readers the way forward. Amidst the political turmoil of 1849, his optimism was not entirely without foundation. The Province of Canada was then at the climax of the implementation of responsible government, division over which had shaped political alignments for much of the 18405. Its achievement had been signalled by the appointment in 1846 of the Earl of Elgin as Governorin-Chief and his arrival the following year. When the elections of 1847-48 returned a majority of Reformers to the House of Assembly, defeat of the Tory-dominated administration had inevitably followed, and in March 1848 Elgin had called on the Lower Canadian Reform leader, Louis Hippolyte LaFontaine (1807-64), to form a government. LaFontaine had done so in partnership with his Upper Canadian ally, Robert Baldwin (1804-58). Elgin's action accorded with British policy and seemed to settle once and for all the questions of whether the advisers of the governor were responsible to him or to the assembly, and whether the governor was bound by the advice of his own ministry, at least in domestic colonial matters, or by that of the British cabinet overseas. Yet the new regime represented more than a long-awaited change in the rules governing executive appointments and responsibility. It implied, as well, the alternation in office of different groups in response to the shifting balance of power in the legislature; in other words, it implied party government and the consequent acceptance of any party thrown up by an assembly majority as legitimately having claim to office. This concept was not yet universally understood or accepted, especially among traditional Tories, who feared that Elgin's appointment of LaFontaine and Baldwin ushered in, not a new governing party, but a new ascendancy/2- Responsible government, then, for all its notoriously gradual introduction, really did represent a political revolution; it signified the birth of a new politics, whose ramifications underlay much of the tumult of 1849. In the background, colouring political events and influencing their course, was the economic dislocation created by Britain's repeal of the

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Corn Laws in 1846 and the hardship caused in many quarters by depressed international trade conditions in 1847-49.23 Many welcomed free trade, including Charles Clarke, who had zealously espoused the cause at home; but others, especially merchants linked through Montreal to protected markets in Liverpool and London, believed the foundation of their livelihood had been undercut by selfinterested imperial politicians. Their sense of betrayal was acute, and it was further intensified by the huge influx of destitute Irish in 1847, fleeing the Great Potato Famine and suffering dreadfully from the conditions of their voyage and the effects of starvation. Their arrival coincided with the onset of the trade slump and strained the resources of charitable organizations and public agencies, leading many to imagine that the British government, having abandoned protection in relief of the famine, was now also abandoning responsibility for its victims, both to the colony's extreme disadvantage. There was a pervasive mood of crisis during the years from 1846 to 1849. At the same time, liberalization of imperial policy and the election of a Reform majority had revived hopes of further reform among radicals whose voices had been silent since the debacle of 1837. They and younger "ultras" were encouraged also by the apparent dawning of a new day in Europe, heralded by revolution on the continent, insurrection in Ireland, and the presentation of the third National Chartists' Petition to the British Parliament in 1848. On hearing the news that the king of France had abdicated, George Hancock sat down immediately to write Clarke. "Vive la republique!" he exclaimed, knowing that he would strike a sympathetic chord. When would there be a "Canuck Revolution"? Had Clarke become a captain yet of the "Independent Volunteers"?14 The combination of resuscitated "Old Reformers" and brash young men committed to democratic radicalism made for a new sense of possibility. It also led Robert Baldwin to fear for the effects of "the extravagant expectations of oversanguine friends."i5 The return to public life of Louis-Joseph Papineau (1786-1871) and William Lyon Mackenzie (1795-1861), under individual and general amnesties, made for an even more volatile mix. Little wonder, then, that Elgin's assent to the Rebellion Losses Act in April 1849 touched off the explosion it did. The bill, perhaps the most famous piece of ordinary legislation in all of Canadian history, provided for compensation to Lower Canadians who had suffered property losses in the uprisings of 1837 and 1838. Though an earlier act had already made similar provision for Upper Canada, Tories were infuriated by the fact, acknowledged by the government, that supporters as well as opponents of the rebellion might enter claims. This surely was proof, if proof were necessary, of a new rebel ascendancy. When

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Elgin refused to reserve or disallow the bill, thus confirming that the governor's role was now to act in such matters on the advice of his ministry, a Tory-led mob stormed the Parliament building and burned it to the ground. A week of rioting and demonstrations followed in Montreal, and to a lesser extent elsewhere. "I confess I did not before know," Elgin wrote the Colonial Secretary, "how thin is the crust of order which covers the anarchical elements that boil and toss beneath our feet."2-6 Worse was to come, as the talk of separation from the empire and annexation to the United States that had been set off by the repeal of the Corn Laws came to a head later in the year with the publication of the Annexation Manifesto. As a newly minted journalist, Clarke was ideally placed to join in the heated public debate about the future of Canada that these events inspired in 1849. In his view, the time was ripe for an extension of reform, not for consolidation; for speeding up, not for slowing down. Just as the Great Reform Bill had been - or ought to have been - a beginning rather than an end, the achievement of responsible government opened the way for constitutional democratization. "I am no Whig," he declared, evoking memories of Lord John Russell assuring the House of Commons in 1832 that the Reform Bill was a "final" measure; "I detest the name of Finality."17 There was no better means than the one at hand for advancing his point of view, since it was the newspaper - along with the schoolhouse, the library, the lecture room, and the debating society - that in his conception of the march of progress had prepared the mass of the people for political rights. Donning the mantle of Reformator, Clarke sent his first Letter to the Toronto Mirror through an intermediary, possibly Dr. Joseph Workman, who later became a leading alienist and Clarke's closest friend/ 8 For some reason, Brega had refused it originally, though he later joined with other papers sympathetic to the left wing of Reform in reprinting it and its successors from the Mirror. The others included the Dundas Warder, the Huron Signal of Goderich, the Eathurst Courier of Perth, and the Long Point Advocate. More systematically than anyone else, Clarke outlined the components and assumptions of the radical program. As he would discover, however, not all of those who shared his posture also shared his principles.

Clarke began somewhat defensively: "I am no revolutionist," he wrote in the first Letter, "no propagandest [sic] - no democrat."19 Yet, however much he felt the need to affirm his respectability, and however necessary it may have seemed to calm fears of extremism in an era of

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revolutionary change, the program he set out was no minor modification of existing practice but a legal and ideological transformation most Canadians of the time were almost certainly unwilling to accept. Though he was no revolutionist, Clarke was certainly a democrat. At the top of his list of needed reforms were a broad extension of the franchise and the introduction of the secret ballot. The first would give the vote to all adult male householders, including farmers who had not yet acquired full deed to their land, boarders, and others who did not meet the property requirements of the existing franchise law. Universal suffrage was preferable, he said, but a household suffrage was practicable: in this way he displayed his realism without compromising his place in the vanguard of opinion. The secret ballot, meanwhile, would protect individual voters from intimidation and cleanse the electoral process of bribery and influence.10 There followed a substantial list of other reforms: reduction of government expenditures, especially the salaries of public officials; registration of voters; abolition of the usury laws, and correction of abuses in the administration of justice; cheap postage and cheap land; the separation of church and state; an increase in the number of seats in the legislature and a reduction of the qualifications of members; election, rather than appointment, of legislative councillors; shorter terms for sheriffs; and the extension of state education. Each Letter in the series took up a particular cause. Some items on the list were held over, while new topics were added as occasion demanded. A reported murder in Toronto prompted an essay on the evils of capital punishment, while an article in the Toronto Globe claiming that American states were more heavily taxed than Canada provoked two Letters arguing the contrary.31 As the series progressed, Clarke's tone became more confident and his position more frankly "ultra." In his eighth and ninth Letters, judging the "public mind" to have grown more receptive to democratic ideas since he had begun, he proposed that a wide variety of local offices - sheriff, Clerk of the Peace, District Superintendent of schools, militia officers, and so on - be made elective. This reform would go far to eliminate the corrupting influence of patronage from politics, it would reduce expenditures, and it would localize power, all in one fell swoop. "I may be met with the accusation of a leaning to republicanism," he allowed, "but this is a sorry method of overturning argument at the nooning of the nineteenth century."'2 Clarke was finding his own voice and attempting to place himself in relation to other participants in an unruly and cacophonous debate. One source of contention was the annexation outcry. Spasmodic in nature and localized in intensity, it nevertheless evoked concerned reactions from all parts of the province and all segments of opinion.

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Its genesis in the business community of anglophone Montreal despite its historical association with radical reform threw normal political alignments temporarily awry. Louis Joseph Papineau joined the Tory industrialist John Redpath in support, while the formerly republican William Lyon Mackenzie, disenchanted by his years of exile in the United States, came out against.33 At the same time, another Old Reformer, Peter Perry (1791-1851), a loyalist democrat of the 18305, returned to politics more or less a republican. Unhappy with the limited constitutional ambitions of the Baldwin-LaFontaine ministry, Perry agreed to stand for election in the Third Riding of York when the sitting member resigned to take up a judicial appointment. On 19 October 1849, in an issue that also carried the Annexation Manifesto from Montreal, the Mirror published an open letter addressed to Perry from Robert Baldwin, calling on him to disavow annexation if he intended to run under the Reform banner. Perry refused, saying he believed union with the United States to be Canada's eventual fate, regardless of the immediate outcome of events.34 Baldwin had to be satisfied with this. The Mirror itself cautioned against dismissing the idea out of hand: the Manifesto, it said, was "the free and natural expression of a great national want." 35 While both Perry and the Mirror may have been more interested in attacking the ministry than in joining the United States, these were difficult waters in which to navigate. Clarke was not an annexationist; if separation from Britain were to occur, he believed independence ought to follow.3* Yet no country better exemplified his democratic ideals than the United States. Its electoral system was egalitarian, its governments were economical, and its public institutions were free of monarchic pomp and pageantry. Canada, according to Clarke, had so far achieved only the shadow of responsible government, America the substance, and the American people were, in consequence, more manly, self-reliant, happy, and prosperous. It was in this structural sense that he referred to government as "that mainspring of all prosperity," and it was on this basis that he declared Canadian institutions would be made, not less British, but "more useful and rational" by democratization.37 This enthusiasm for American democracy was not Clarke's alone, nor did he derive it, in the main, from experience of the United States. Rather, it was a commonplace of British radicalism, characteristic alike of John Stuart Mill, Richard Cobden, and the London Working Men's Association.38 Americanization thus implied no disloyalty for Clarke, and the accusation of republicanism he foresaw in Letter VIII only betrayed the failure of his supposed accuser to recognize the forward movement of the times. In a Journal and Express editorial indicative

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both of his argument from progress and his advancing position, he advised Reformers to shrug off "any charge of 'democracy' ... by remembering that the nineteenth century has nearly run the half of its course. "39 Perry's nomination and subsequent acclamation brought to the fore a second major source of contention: the relationship of the radicals to the Reform ministry and the priority of items on their agenda. The Toronto Examiner, a newspaper owned by Old Reformer James Lesslie and edited by the young turk Charles Lindsey, welcomed Perry's election as a new beginning for genuine reform. In the Examiner's opinion, what it called the "Reform and Progress party" had for too long been stifled by its closeness to the government and was now poised to seize the initiative and even supplant the current Reform leadership.40 The threat of this kind of split in the ranks seriously concerned Baldwin and his colleagues, who had managed to win office only recently, in no small measure because they had succeeded in disciplining a factious following. Their concerns were heightened when the assistant Commissioner of Public Works, Malcolm Cameron (1808-76), resigned. Cameron was another Old Reformer, evidently dissatisfied with his ministerial status, and his resignation was only too obviously calculated to gain personal advantage from the galvanizing effect of Perry's victory. At about the same time - all this came together in early December 1849 - the dissidents began meeting in Toronto at the office of a young lawyer and journalist, William McDougall (182^-1905), to plot strategy. Perry, Cameron, Lesslie, Lindsey, and a few others made up their numbers. The Globe, the leading ministerialist paper, derided them as the "young Canada party" and the "clear grits," the latter term connoting a Simon Pure-ness of purpose and principle inimical to the successful practice of politics. The name stuck, and in January the Examiner, recalling the famous London Times acknowledgement of the Anti-Corn Law League as a power to be reckoned with, announced that the Clear Grit party was now "a great fact."41 Clarke was soon admitted to the councils of the nascent movement, but here too he found he had to chart his way with care. For many, including the Examiner, the touchstone of advanced reform was secularization of the clergy reserves, those lands set aside by the Constitutional Act of 1791 for the maintenance of the "Protestant clergy." For decades they had symbolized the pretensions of the Church of England to ecclesiastical dominance in Upper Canada and, even though revenues from their sale had been shared with other denominations since 1840, radicals believed they ought to be abolished entirely and their proceeds devoted to education and other public

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purposes. The argument for abolition, and for the disendowment at the same time of Anglican rectories established in 1836 under the terms of the Constitutional Act, was not based merely on denominational rivalry or religious prejudice, though it was vulnerable to both. It rested rather on the principle that churches were voluntary associations of worshippers, and that freedom of religion could be assured only where the state provided no support of any kind to churches or religious organizations.42- In mid-nineteenth-century Canada, where many Anglicans were still only reluctantly relinquishing their claims to establishment, where a number of other denominations happily joined in receiving state support, and where in Lower Canada the Roman Catholic Church had certain de facto establishmentarian privileges, voluntaryism was a principle of enormous political potency. Though not all voluntaryists were radicals, all radicals, including Clarke, were voluntaryists. The question was, should secularization be given precedence, or should it be treated as secondary to "organic" reform of the political system? Clarke's position was the latter. "No true Reformer," he wrote in concluding the Letters, "will allow his determination to be distracted by a multiplicity of demands: first gain an extended suffrage, and the ballot, and the battle is won."43 His assumption was that secularization, along with a raft of other necessary reforms, would automatically follow if the popular will were truly represented in the Assembly. From this perspective, the clergy reserves were only one example, albeit the most important, of the privileges and monopolies that sustained a semi-feudal, hierarchic social and political order. Clarke was nervous, as well, of arousing sectarian animosities. The sole essay in the entire Reformator series that he devoted wholly to the relations of church and state was the fourteenth Letter, and it began guardedly, warning that no other issue had ever caused such bitterness of feeling between people. His approach was to set the reserves and rectories in the context of the long march of human history, beginning with the days of wicker gods and stone images, when rulers and priests first discovered that the human consciousness of "some great superior" could be exploited to their mutual advantage. Self-serving though it was, in Clarke's view this union actually redounded to the general interest, so long as the mass of the people remained ignorant and superstitious. The lengthening reach of the human imagination, which "looked to higher and nobler sources of gratification," and the coming of Jesus Christ, who freed men and women of the grosser terrors of primitive religion, were markers on the road of advancing human thought and conduct, but neither altered the habit of authority whereby "the few

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ruled the many thro' [sic] their fears." Clarke concluded in modern times, when the spread of intelligence beyond the narrow limits of a clerical elite decisively removed whatever justification might once have existed for the church-state alliance, exposing it for what it always mainly had been, the primary bulwark of "Abuse and Tyranny."44 Here was a caravan of human progress if ever there was one, and Clarke was in its van - rather far in advance of the main party, to judge by his strikingly secular conception of the nature and function of religious belief. Seen in this light, the relationship of church and state was as much socio-political in significance as religious or ecclesiastical. Union lent support to a "base and spurious aristocracy of presumption," while separation enabled "talent and patriotism" to achieve their rightful place.45 Clarke's goal was to breach the barriers raised by monopoly and privilege. His theological liberalism reinforced his political radicalism in pursuit of this aim, as it would later confirm his opposition to George Brown (i818-80), the anti-American and antidemocratic editor of the Toronto Globe, when the focus of voluntaryist outrage shifted from the Church of England to the Church of Rome in the latter part of 1850. For now, Clarke sought to persuade men such as Lesslie, Perry, and others of the need to give priority to reform of the machinery of government. By February and March of 1850 he could claim to have had some success, but it was still not clear whether organic reform was to pave the way for voluntaryism, or the other way around. Oddly enough, it was Clarke, the theoretician of fundamental reform, who counselled party unity in the early months of 1850, while the proponents of the more modest goal of secularization opted for independent action. In March another by-election was called, this time in the riding of Halton. Its purpose was to confirm the Reform member, John Wetenhall, in his seat. Wetenhall had been appointed to fill Malcolm Cameron's position in the ministry, and the law required that he stand for re-election. In calmer times, this might have been a formality, but Wetenhall now found himself opposed by an independent Reformer - an Old Reformer - named Caleb Hopkins, whose campaign was managed by none other than Cameron himself. An aroused Clear Grit press, scenting blood, joined the fray in hopes of sustaining the momentum of anti-ministerial feeling. The Journal and Express and the Mirror were conspicuous exceptions. A Hamilton rival wondered what had happened to Clarke, usually so vociferous a ministerial critic: had he sold out? 46 The outcome was the defeat of Wetenhall and, in a pathetic coda, his mental breakdown. 47 The Grits found themselves riding a wave of public approval.

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The disagreement over tactics arose in part from the maverick personalities, ancient enmities, and recent disappointments of the Old Reformers, keen to take their revenge on the ministry and to push it toward secularization. The explanation for Clarke's stance lay in his optimism and his conception of party. He signed off his first series, "Hoping that the Reforms which I have discussed will soon become law, I remain yours, &c."48 Naive though this may have been, it was not pro forma. Clarke believed in the efficacy of rational persuasion and expected his arguments to carry force. He also believed that parties were, above all, vehicles of principles and ideas, and that the party of Reform would win the day because its principles and ideas represented "the cause of the People."49 He began his own career as a party activist at this time, as secretary "pro tern" of the Hamilton Reform Association. Like other radicals after him, he experimented with techniques of party organization in hopes of mobilizing the people in their entirety.50 On the one side, then, were the classic "loose fish" and factions of the formative period of party development, resistant to discipline and suspicious of compromise; on the other was a Utopian rationalist ideal that demanded unity even as it envisioned a transcendence of party in electoral unanimity. Neither, in retrospect, stood much chance of success against the anti-ideological politics of accommodation that was then emerging under the stewardship of the centrist Reformer Francis Hincks (1807-85), power-broker par excellence.^

Reaction to the "Letters from Reformator" must amply have satisfied the vanity that had helped to motivate Clarke's initial overture to the Hamilton Journal and Express. In December, "A Radical Reformer" from Sharon, just north of Toronto, attributed the recent public meetings in his district to the "impulse" imparted by the Letters.52 Commenting on this letter - "A Voice from Sharon" - the Mirror called Reformator's essays "the most valuable productions which have ever emanated from the Press of Canada." Clarke noticed the comment, scribbling on the copy of the paper sent up to Kirk in Elora, "(read this [the editorial] and the letter)."53 Such high praise was doubtless not without a touch of puffery and tells us more about Clarke's impact within the journalistic fraternity than his influence on Canadian voters. Still, the Mirror was equally effusive in welcoming Reformator back after a brief hiatus in his submission of articles for his next series, "Tracts for the Times": "We could better spare Parliament than Reformator."54 If Clarke had differences with some of his Clear Grit allies,

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the exhilaration of thinking he was leading the advance guard must have gone far to make up for them. With the Tracts, which began in the Mirror on i February 1850, Clarke seems to have found his feet. The earlier defensiveness and occasional hesitancy in putting forward ideas disappeared. In an assessment prompted by Reformator's re-appearance, the Dundas Warder commended the "force and vigour" of his language and the "boldness and independence" of his tone, which suggests among other things that success as a political essayist was not just a matter of laying policies before one's readers that met with their approval.55 Clarke's style, in fact, was integral to his method of argumentation, which in turn fortified his message. Style and argument were each an aspect of the particular "signal system" that governed Victorian prose communication, and the Warder's judgment is a measure of how well Clarke's rhetoric - which might strike the present-day reader as florid and bombastic - conformed to its rules and expectations.56 The diction of all of Clarke's polemics was highly figurative. This characteristic of his rhetoric was especially evident in the first instalment of his new series, where he represented the prior importance of democratization to the radical program in structural terms. "Purity of representation" - those measures by which the will of the people would be guaranteed unrestricted control of government - was the base, he wrote, while other reforms were the "superstructure." Universal or household suffrage and the ballot, plus removal of property qualifications for holding public office, together with representation on the basis of population alone: these were "the four cornerstones of the edifice." Religious toleration, freedom of commerce, election of local officials, and so on, were the "walls." Inscribed over the entrance was the motto "Equal Rights." By means of this architectural metaphor Clarke gave coherence, solidity, and a sense of fitness to a set of relations otherwise open to contradiction. "Clever artizans [sic] will be required to erect it," he continued; and, rounding out the image with a hint of another sort of purity, "Patriotism will be the only cement to ensure its stability." Elsewhere in the article, he drew on what was by far his favourite source of imagery: nature and husbandry. "Good fruits are wanting," he said, complaining of the failure of responsible government so far to produce the changes desired by radicals, "because the plough, the harrow, and the sickle have been left untouched. [Reform] supplied the implements of industry, but the husbandmen neglected to go forth to labor." This metaphor was part of an indictment of those, including the current ministry, who had thought there was nothing left to be done once the initial victory had been achieved: "Apathy followed

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energy, and the politician laid down his axe when he had nearly felled the tree; he forgot that an adverse wind might crush him beneath the fallen trunk, and that the log would lie and rot, unless hewn and carved into useful shape."57 Images such as these - verging on conceit - of clearing, sowing, pruning, and cultivating may be found throughout the essays, including the very title of one series (already noted): "Seeds for the Fallow." Their purpose, no doubt, was partly to appeal to an audience of farmers and of townsmen reliant on farm production. They also heightened the effect of any metaphor, which is to endow one object with the qualities or attributes of another, by implying that the thing being compared - Clarke's proposed reform or remedy - was as much a part of the natural order as the thing it was being compared with. In another version of the same idea, Clarke depicted the evolution of government itself as analogous to the emergence of a statue of Liberty from a block of quarried stone, where the final stage, the gradual acknowledgment of the people as the source of all power, was likened to the chiselling and polishing necessary for completion. The hand of the sculptor played the part of the cultivator: "To keep the cutting tool from sinking too slightly here, and too deeply there, is a matter requiring study and calm consideration"; requiring, we can surmise, the guidance of an intellectual such as himself.58 One of Clarke's most common modes of argument, then, was to use a figure of speech in order to associate a proposed reform with something else that carried authority and lent it credence. An allied method was to argue from an established fact. In the second Tract, on the extension of the suffrage, for instance, he noted that a provision of the existing election law prohibited a man from voting in a constituency other than the one in which he was resident, even though he might own property anywhere. Property ownership and the franchise had already been detached. There followed a string of rhetorical questions. If property was the "true exponent of public opinion," why had its rights been impaired? If it no longer formed the basis of electoral power, why not extend the vote to every man? The fact having already been established, in short, Clarke proceeded to demonstrate the absurdity of electoral practices that denied it, and to expose the self-interestedness of those who resisted its recognition and spread.59 American examples served the same function: if a desired reform had no precedent in Canada, one had only to look over the border to New York state. In its use of both figurative language and argument from fact, Clarke's rhetorical practice closely resembled that of the Victorian sages, whose reliance on ethos - the appeal to credibility - over logos - the appeal to reason - was a distinguishing feature of their genre.60

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For all his insistence on the value of rationality, Clarke seldom argued from first principles. Instead, he said to his readers, in effect, "If you will listen to me, a forward-looking but reliable observer, I will show you how the world is really unfolding, and how the protection of vested interests by privilege and monopoly is the only thing that stands in the way of your participating in the world's progress." The same effect was achieved by the practice he adopted in the Tracts of prefacing his articles with quotations from such authors as Junius, Alexis de Tocqueville, Jeremy Bentham, and Thomas Babington Macaulay, as though citing secular scripture. Their authority, like analogy or established fact, served to ground his argument in the concrete rather than the abstract. For example, after quoting Thomas Carlyle to the effect that the inexorability of democracy's advance might be observed by anyone who would "open his eyes on any province of human affairs," Clarke first assured his readers of the authority of Carlyle's testimony, then went on to show its application to Canada/ 1 While sometimes Clarke put forward a proposition, followed by a consideration of arguments for and against, more often he sought in Carlylean manner to open his readers' eyes to reality. Beginning with a problem, he would catalogue its manifestations, attack those interests responsible for its persistence, enumerate the reforms necessary to its solution, and exhort his readers to action. Occasionally, he warned of the dire consequences of inaction, as when he threatened that Canadians would turn to annexation if radical demands were not satisfied/1 This pattern of presentation also recalls the Victorian sages, who typically began by exposing an evil, then traced its source to either their audience or the authorities, warned of the consequences of allowing it to continue, and concluded with a promise of deliverance if only their message were heeded.63 At the same time, there was as much of the utilitarian as the visionary in Clarke. The attraction of Richard Cobden, the Anti-Corn Law leader, was that he was "a man of facts and figures"; the telling point against the royal prerogative was that it was more suited to an age of castles and moats than to the present age of "plain silver dollars and crisp bank notes"; the mass of men were due the franchise, not so much because it was their inalienable right as because the printing press, the library, the schoolhouse, and the pulpit had made them intellectually and morally fit for it.64 The young Clarke was too much the protagonist of modernity to fit neatly into the category of the sage, with its connotations of biblical prophecy and retribution, and its posture, though reformist, of embattled pessimism.65 Nevertheless, his use of the sages' repertoire of rhetorical strategies and devices helps to

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show how he connected with his readers, who were participants with him in the same "signal system," and how his way of arguing his program, if not always the program itself, won their admiration. It is an indication, as well, of journalism's membership in the wider community of literary production, where composition for the workaday writer was very largely a matter of adapting the instruments sanctioned by rhetorical convention to the particular purpose of the moment. The sage-like qualities of Clarke's rhetoric also call attention to the identity he created for himself through the Reformator essays. In his claims to intellectual leadership, in his self-professed capacity to discern the movement of history, and in his aggressive diction, replete with martial metaphors, Clarke projected a robust masculinity of manner, the stylistic parallel of the manliness that followed from full democratic citizenship.66 It was given especially vivid expression in August 1850 in the first of his essays to appear in the Toronto North American, the journal that William McDougall had established earlier in the year to serve as the voice of the Clear Grits. That summer, Clarke broke from the ministry, and from the Mirror as well, though more amicably from the latter than from the former. He began the essay by quoting Pascal on the fate of Galileo: "The Jesuits have obtained a Papal decree condemning Galileo's doctrine about the motion of the Earth. It is all in vain. If the world is really turning round, all mankind together will not be able to keep it from turning, or to keep themselves from turning with it."67 The resistance of the ministry to organic reform, he went on to argue, was no less Jesuitical, no less vain: "As surely as the Earth turns on its axis, the spirit of democracy moves onward." There was more than a hint here of Clarke's own Galilean role, as there was more than a touch of heroism in the persona of Reformator. In this heroic self-conception he gave evidence of the visionary, Romantic side of his temperament, which had figured so largely in the appeal to sentiment of his earlier address to the young men of England. It would strengthen again in the outlook of his maturity. One feature of Clarke's rhetoric remains to be noted: its English idiom. While the American political system represented his ideal and furnished him with numerous examples to demonstrate the utility and practicability of radical reform, the terms in which his argument was embedded were English. When he criticized unequal representation not yet a sectional cry - he wrote of pocket boroughs and Sarums; when he denounced the rule of lawyers and office-holders, he called them an aristocracy of pretence; when he called for popular action, he demanded outside pressure; and when he wrote of political equality in

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the United States itself, he called it - coyly, to be sure - "the 'great fact' of the 'times'."68 This basis for his rhetoric suggests that, whatever might have resulted from the unqualified adoption of Clarke's program of constitutional Americanization, it rested on intellectual suppositions every bit as "British" as those of his liberal and conservative opponents.

For a time, Clarke played journalistic lieutenant to William McDougall's major-general. He mobilized the units of Clear Grit ideological combat while McDougall directed overall strategy - in so far as the heterodox Grits could be persuaded to accept one. Early in August, now back in Elora, Clarke sent the North American editor the first two instalments of a new series, in which he announced his conversion to the need for a new organization, "a firm union of all true friends of the right side." The ministry had forfeited his confidence, he wrote, by their timorous refusal to consider any of the democratic reforms put forward by men such as Peter Perry during the parliamentary session just ended.69 Though "strong in numbers," he added later, they "were lax in principle."70 His change of course required that he find another newspaper outlet, since the Mirror still counselled Reform unity against a greater Tory enemy. McDougall was pleased. He urged Clarke in a letter to take up the idea of a "General Convention," which had been mooted by Perry at the close of the session. Properly managed, McDougall said, it could provide the perfect vehicle for a new democratic platform: "When the ball is fairly let a-going it will roll the country down to the level of a common sense democracy."71 Promotion of the idea also fit in with the explanation McDougall offered North American readers for the Clear Grits' lack of unity: that as spokesmen of the public will, to which a convention would give full voice, they were not bound by the rules of "mere party."72 At the same time, the bulk of McDougall's letter was devoted to an account of his problems as a struggling newspaper proprietor, which gave rise to a proposition couched in rather different terms. He invited Clarke to join him in Toronto, where together they could put the North American "in a commanding position as a paper and the organ of a party." This offer suggests a certain confusion in McDougall's mind between consistency of principle and his own ambitions. Whether the ambivalences of his position were fully evident to Clarke at this time is impossible to say. They were certainly to figure prominently enough in his retrospective judgment: "At times," he recalled in his memoir, McDougall "lacked interest in his associations

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of a political character which made him a doubtful supporter of others, while always a champion of self."73 This, of course, was after McDougall had in his other political adventures earned himself the nickname "Wandering Willie." The convention idea fizzled, but Clarke continued to contribute pieces to the North American, as he did to the Warder, with which he had close relations as well.74 He also assisted McDougall in elaborating a radical platform, which first appeared in the North American on zz November 1850. It adopted a somewhat different ranking of priorities than he had earlier argued for: first came the application of the elective principle to all public offices, now including governor; then purity of representation in its various forms, now including fixed biennial parliaments; followed by full legislative control of public expenditures, retrenchment, law reform, abolition of public pensions, and colonial control of external trade. Ranking aside, it focused on the machinery of government and made no reference at all to the reserves and rectories, an omission that aroused the ire of the Examiner.75 McDougall responded, as Clarke had before, that if the "system" were reformed, measures in support of religious equality would follow. Nevertheless, a plank was added calling for colonial power to amend or repeal any legislation, including imperial, that affected Canada alone - a clear reference to the clergy reserves - while secularization appeared high on the list of specific "Subjects for Immediate Legislation" that was appended to the platform on 17 January i8 51.76 The Examiner's objection was rather more ominous at the end of 1850 than it had been at the beginning. In July, an education bill had been passed which, among other things, had extended the rights of Upper Canadian Roman Catholics to separate schools. At the end of September, the Vatican had proclaimed the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England after a lapse of three hundred years, an action that provoked the so-called "papal aggression" crisis. These events jointly aroused what J.M.S. Careless, in his masterly biography of George Brown, called a voluntaryist "crusade," with the result that the latent denominational bias of Upper Canadian politics surfaced in a decidedly anti-Catholic turn. In Careless's words, they unleashed a "holy war."77 The implications of this development for Reform unity were profound. In August, the Catholic Mirror condemned sectarianism and criticized attacks on the supposed "French masters" of Upper Canada; by the following January it was warning that liberal Catholics would be forced to abandon their political alliance with Protestant Dissenters if the intolerance of the Reform press continued.78 Clarke, for his part,

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regarded "No popery" as a "hideous cry," but there was little he or any other individual could do to stop it.79 The voluntaryist crusade was shortly to gather up the left wing of Reform, as well as some of the centre, under George Brown's truculent leadership. Before it did so, it provided yet another polarity of debate around which reformers could divide. In the meantime, McDougall, busy with the law practice that provided him the securer part of his income, and persuaded of the abilities of his Flora correspondent, asked Clarke if he would not consider giving the North American his "chief attention." More immediately, would he compose "a series of articles on the several planks of our platform beginning with the first"? 80 The eleven articles that resulted one for each plank - appeared in the North American between 3 January and z8 March 1851. Though not strictly part of the Reformator series, since they appeared as editorials without a by-line, the "Planks" were, practically speaking, its culmination, summing up Reformator's main arguments and marshalling them in support of a specific program. One wonders whether Clarke was entirely happy with his new editorial anonymity. Might he have bridled a little when McDougall cavalierly informed him that he had taken some remarks Clarke had sent him and used them as editorial copy, since their views matched "exactly"?81 When McDougall told him, after reporting that the first of the eleven essays had been well received, that if he wished Reformator to "shine forth" again, he might "find topics over and above Editorial for this purpose," was he making a proposal or responding to a query?81 Clarke continued to send material to the North American even after the Planks were completed, but there was undoubtedly less prestige attached to writing anonymous essays to someone else's requirements - even if "exactly matching" one's own - at ten shillings a time, than to being one's own man, leader of the pack. In any event, unbeknownst to their author at the time, the Planks were the conclusion of the Reformator series. At the end of June 1851, Robert Baldwin resigned, and LaFontaine announced his intention to follow suit. Francis Hincks, in pursuit of a new combination of forces that would sustain Reform - and himself - in power, secretly negotiated an agreement with William McDougall that made the North American the official government organ and provided for the inclusion of two Clear Grits in a reorganized cabinet. The two cabinet members were to be Malcolm Cameron and Dr. John Rolph (1793-1870), yet another Reform leader from pre-rebellion days. On 4 July, the North American condemned "unprincipled politicians of the Hincks school"; on 25 July, responding to rumours of the negotiations, it denied giving up all of its

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platform; and on zz August, it acknowledged the truth of the rumours.83 Such reversals were perhaps inevitable in a time of political extremism. Still, it is difficult to imagine that Clarke was entirely pleased to hear news of the agreement in a letter from the master strategist dated 2.6 July. We have "routed" the Hincksites, McDougall wrote. The "Platform" was to be "laid aside as a whole," but its main planks would endure: reserves, retrenchment, and "old reform principles"!84 This development clearly required a tempering of expectations. What had seemed early in 1850 to be the beginnings of a movement had turned out eighteen months later to have been merely a campaign. The political scientist S.J.R. Noel makes a good case for seeing Hincks's "masterful coup" of 1851, rather than the realignment that occurred three years later partly under Hincks's direction, as the turning point in the nineteenth-century history of Canadian politics.85 By co-opting the Clear Grits, Hincks managed not only to negotiate a remaking of the Baldwin-LaFontaine coalition but to recreate the Canadian political system to accommodate the circumstances of religious and ethnic heterogeneity. By a judicious exercise of the broker's art, he marginalized ideology and held at bay what the Mirror once called "politico-religious phrenzy [sic]" as instruments of political competition.86 Professor Noel overlooks the differences between the two - ideology and frenzy - in the sweep of his argument and exaggerates the continuity between the Clear Grits of the early and late 18505. It is true that they were connected by voluntaryism and "Representation by Population," yet the former was only one component of the earlier program and the latter was a democratic electoral principle - "equality of representation" - that George Brown turned to sectionalist and sectarian ends. Distinguishing the two Grit manifestations more unreservedly was the muting in the later period of the radical democratic ideology so vigorously articulated by Clarke. This moderation in policy only adds to Noel's argument, of course, that Hincks's 1851 "coup" also marked the beginning of the end of Grit radicalism. While it is difficult to be certain of Clarke's initial reaction to the "new combination," it cannot have been sympathetic. As Noel says, a little gleefully, Hincks "had taken the Clear Grits, who claimed that they had come to change the rules of the game, and turned them into players of it."87 Clarke must have sensed this personally when, in transmitting the good news, McDougall renewed his invitation to come to Toronto in rather crude terms: "If we get to the top of the heap we can perhaps do for you something more congenial than standing behind the counter."88 This to a man who in his writings expressed a loathing for patronage and sang the praises of "practical men" over office-holders and lawyers.

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Clarke's relations with McDougall cooled. Early in the following year he was still trying to obtain full payment for his editorial labours. McDougall complied, adding that he hoped their political differences would not prevent them from continuing on good terms.89 A further indication of Clarke's reaction was the letter he received in August 1852 from Robert Spence (1811-68), a Reformer from Dundas who was to achieve his own reputation for political intrigue. Obviously responding to some hand-wringing on Clarke's part - "You well remark that it is difficult, politically, to be independent, honest and true" - Spence reassured him that tortuous manoeuvres were often required in politics and need not entail moral hypocrisy. "Hinks [sic] and Rolph will come up on the right side," he said.90 How well this calmed Clarke's misgivings is hard to say. It was certainly a far cry from the advice he had received from George Boole a few years earlier. Be that as it may, whatever setback Clarke experienced was temporary. He had been enamoured of politics since his youth; his friend from school, George Hancock, was always referring to their mutual obsession with it and with literature. If Clarke's fascination with literature was uninterrupted, his absorption in politics survived more than one disillusionment. Re forma tor retired, yet his persona remained linked with Clarke for a long time thereafter, at least among those in the know. In 1864, for example, Luther Holton, one of the leading English-speaking Reformers of Lower Canada, remembered Dr. Joseph Workman introducing Clarke to him as the author of the Reformator letters.91 One suspects that the letters were also behind J.C. Dent's remark, in the Canadian Portrait Gallery of 1881, that Clarke was "a Liberal of the Liberals."»z

CHAPTER FOUR

Apostle of Refinement The writer from whom I have quoted knows, in common with all thinking men, that all human happiness grows with the spread of refinement and learning; that order is more certain where the arts and sciences have greatest sway; and that wealth and prosperity follow in the train of industry directed by intelligence. Reformator [Charles Clarke], 1850'

If the risks of journalism in the mid-nineteenth century lay in proprietorship and the rewards in editorial pronouncement, perhaps the prudent course for the would-be political essayist was to secure his livelihood in some more profitable full-time occupation while pursuing his literary ambitions on the side. In this way, he might derive a measure of the intellectual and social gratification that accrued to the editor as political spokesman and man of letters, without at the same time exposing himself fully to the economic uncertainties of publishing. At the same time, he might find that the status accorded him by virtue of his chosen main line of work - shopkeeping, say - was considerably enhanced by the prestige attached to his literary avocation. In the absence of direct testimony, one cannot be sure that Charles Clarke calculated the pros and cons of journalism in just this way, when in 1850 he considered his future prospects. Some such calculation may be inferred, nevertheless, from his correspondence and circumstances. Certainly, he made a career decision; he undoubtedly was sensitive to his community status; and he did choose, in fact, to enter retail business with his stepfather and practise his journalistic craft in his spare time. Clarke had gone off to Hamilton in the first place, of course, because the family wanted to start a business, which suggests that his partnership with John Kirk in 1850 was no more than the implementation of a plan already agreed upon two years earlier. The idea then had been that they would open a drug store, and Clarke had found employment as a druggist's assistant in Hamilton.1 By the time the articles of copartnership were signed, the nature of their prospective enterprise had expanded to include general merchandise: "buying selling vending and

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retailing all sorts of wares goods and commodities," in the words of the agreement.3 This did not preclude the sale of drugs and patent medicines, which, as we shall see, were featured prominently in the early advertisements of "Kirk and Clarke," at some cost to Clarke's reputation. The agreement also provided for an equal investment of stock by each partner, an equal responsibility for expenses, and a "just and equitable" division of profits. Neither partner was to engage in any other business or trade for his own private benefit: both were to devote their energies wholly to their joint enterprise. The only internal hint that Clarke's mind was not quite made up was a clause providing that the agreement was to last for a term of five years. This may have offered him a way of discharging his earlier family commitment without foreclosing the possibility of a different career; or it may simply have been an acknowledgement on both sides of the trial nature of the venture. In either case, it is clear from other evidence that his newspaper success in Hamilton had opened up other options to him. George Hancock got the impression that Clarke had found his vocation in journalism - and he was not the only one. Kirk's nephew, Alfred, wrote from Lincoln in September 1850 that he was glad to hear that Charles was pleased in "the profession he has chosen," and he looked forward some day to receiving a copy of "Clarke's Times" or "Clarke's Weekly Messenger."< When Clarke returned to Elora, he seemed to have his eyes open for newspaper opportunities. He discussed the possibility of publishing an almanac with Samuel Jones of the Dundas Warder, and even of signing on with Jones as editor of a new daily.5 And there were the invitations William McDougall extended, either to work for him as a legislative reporter or to join him as a partner in running the North American: "You must not think of burying your talents in a country store forever," he wrote in his inimitably condescending manner.6 Even after the "country store" was well under way, and Clarke had joined a group of local investors in establishing The Elora Backwoodsman, he considered buying the Hamilton Canadian early in 1853 and returning to live in the lakehead city. The Canadian had acquired a province-wide reputation as a voice of reform and temperance under the brief editorship of a Scots Radical named Thomas McQueen (1803-61), and it was on offer at a price of £yoo.7 Clarke's interest may have been prompted, in this instance, as much by wounded pride as by professional ambition, since at the time he had just suffered electoral rejection at the hands of local voters. Still, it seems that he did consider a full-time career in journalism, and decided against it. His consciousness of status was that of a young man newly arrived and newly confident of his future. He had emigrated, in part, because

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of the opportunities offered by the New World, leaving behind conditions in which his prospects of advancement had seemed uncertain at best. The difficulties of Canboro had dampened his expectations, and he had been encouraged in their revival by his old schoolmaster George Boole. Responding to the news of the family's move to Elora, Boole had counselled perseverance: "On the whole," he judged, remarking on the freedom of newly settled countries from Old World forms and ceremonies, "the life of an emigrant struggling in a rising and prosperous community must be more favourable to a manly independence of character than is the daily life of our crowded cities."8 Now, two years later, Clarke had good reason to think his progress had begun to fulfill the promise of his migration. His friend Hancock marked his transition from a linen draper's assistant to a newspaper editor, fairly bursting with pride on his behalf that he had "so raised [himself] in the social scale."9 Understandably, Clarke was proud himself. His rise was all the more satisfying for having been accomplished in defiance of the old social rules, as he understood them, and in the name of new ones. Clarke's notions of rank and status were rooted in the Old Regime as well as the Old World, according to which the principal division in society - notwithstanding the "rise of the middle class" - was that between the aristocracy and the commons. His Lincoln background was "below hill," as we have seen, and hints of its continuing influence may be found in his immediate circle of family and friends. His mother, whose progressive spirit he greatly admired, resented aristocratic privilege intensely and persisted in expressing her views on the subject long after her emigration.10 Hancock, with whom Clarke shared many attitudes in common, made a revealing comment on social relations in reporting the fatal riding accident that befell Sir Robert Peel, the former British prime minister, in 1850. Impressed, as were so many English workingmen, by the man whose statesmanship had been responsible for the repeal of the Corn Laws, Hancock believed Peel's significance to be as much social as political: "After all, Charlie," he wrote with feeling, "to us of the lower ranks, it is a treat to find one of our number, almost the son of a spinner - elevated really above the titled herd; and to find them thronging to his sick-bed, anxious after his recovery."11 Though heir to a huge cotton fortune, Peel was a commoner, which in Hancock's eyes made him "almost" one of "us." His career was proof that merit, principle, and "manly independence of character" could prevail in public affairs, so long the domain of privilege, interest, and the obligations of patronage. The fact that Peel had also forced his alleged superiors to pay tribute to his success was an added

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source of satisfaction. The rulers, so it seemed, were exchanging places with the ruled. IZ The Canadian counterparts of the British aristocracy were the officeholders and professional men who, in the absence of a landed elite, had long claimed priority in colonial society and the state on the grounds of their gentility. Once described by Chief Justice John Beverley Robinson (1791-1863), their foremost representative, as the natural rulers of Canada, to whom the mass of the people naturally deferred, they comprised, in Robinson's words, "those who possess the advantages of education, and of superior natural intelligence, and of wealth, and of respectable stations in society, whether arising from public employment, or from the exercise of the liberal professions."13 It was these people - commonly referred to then as "gentry," though more familiarly known today by the political epithet "the Family Compact" whom Clarke, in his Reformator essays, called an aristocracy of pretence, and it was against their ideals of balance, gradation, and harmony in society that he put forward his own ideals of equity, democracy, and individual enterprise. He also contested their claim to a monopoly on gentility. In a Hamilton Journal and Express editorial, he argued that the very idea of an aristocracy in a country such as Canada rested on "the false notion that to be genteel, a man must first be professional, and that the 'office' is the grand and proper goal of youthful ambition."14 Here, in the ideal of vernacular gentility, was the social side of Clarke's political radicalism; and here, too, was his own counterclaim to genteel recognition. The gentry's predominance was undoubtedly on the wane by the 18405. The ideal of gentility survived, however, "transmuted but not abandoned" in the social transformation that accompanied the expansion of capitalist commerce and industry in the second half of the nineteenth century.15 Lawyers, doctors, and clergymen? as well as newer aspirants to professional status, continued to appropriate the code of the gentleman for their own occupational identities, if no longer necessarily for the purposes of political hegemony. Clarke may perhaps be excused if, in his zeal to expose pretence, he failed to distinguish the mingled elements of change and continuity in the social transition of which he himself was a part. No-one, he believed, had a monopoly on gentility. Its qualities were attainable by all, through various forms of self-discipline and education. In fact, they had always been to some extent socially unspecified, a cluster of moral and behavioural standards independent of any particular rank in society - "Though he be a lord, he is not a gentleman," insisted one old adage - but in democratizing the gentlemanly ideal, Clarke's goal was to break down old barriers of rank.16

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Emma Kent Clarke as a young woman

At the same time, genteel qualities, once acquired, set a man apart from his un-genteel fellows and helped to create a new indicator of class. It seems highly probable that Clarke considered his journalistic achievements and the learning that underlay them worthy of a popular respect akin to deference, and that this self-image, together with his commitment to the ideals of radicalism, accounted for his continued involvement in editorial production, in combination with retail merchandising. He was not thereby rendered immune to disappointment; if anything, he was made more vulnerable because more of his person was exposed to public judgment. There must have been many, however, such as the assessors for the credit agency R.G. Dun 8c Co., who gave him his due. "A man of superior mind. Best man in 'E'flora]," said one in 1859, concluding a favourable estimation of Kirk and Clarke's commercial reliability; "Clark[e] the smartest man in the country," offered another the following year.17 Such high regard was harder won than Clarke may have anticipated in 1850. Over the course of the decade Clarke established himself not only in retail trade and the village press but also in voluntary societies and local government. He also married, on z June 1852. His nineteen-yearold bride, Emma Kent, was born in Sheffield, England and had emigrated with her family and settled in Haldimand County, not far from

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Canboro. Clarke's acquaintance with Emma may have dated from his time in Canboro, though there is no record of their courtship and precious little of Emma Kent's life and character. Their wedding, in any event, took place in the village of Williamsville on the shore of Lake Erie.18

Edward Lytton Bulwer (1803-73), the popular English novelist and reformer, was a vocal critic of modern materialism in the 18305. "Civilized life," he wrote in 1833, surveying English manners and morals, "with its bustle and action, the momentary and minute objects in which it engages and frets the soul, requires a perpetual stimulus to larger views and higher emotions; and where these are scant and feeble, the standard of opinion settles down to a petty and sordid level."19 The problem, he thought, was that the English had no understanding of the spiritual faculty in human beings, with which the influence of "the low and the mercantile" might be checked. Morality in England was left to religion, while philosophy was still the domain of John Locke, the seventeenth-century empiricist. For guidance, Bulwer directed his readers' attention north to Scotland, where men such as Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid had developed a science of moral philosophy in the early eighteenth century, and where others such as Thomas Chalmers - to whom he dedicated a portion of his book - and Sir James Mackintosh continued to espouse its tenets. According to these Scottish thinkers, the moral sense was innate and the mainspring of benevolent human action. Bulwer urged its cultivation on English writers and legislators, in hopes of uplifting the national character. Bulwer was one of Clarke's literary and political heroes. The year before his book on England was published, in the first general election following passage of the Great Reform Bill, he had won one of Lincoln's two parliamentary seats, breaking the Sibthorpe family monopoly and winning Clarke's lasting admiration. He was among the literary figures to whom George Hancock referred in his correspondence with Clarke, and his books were in Clarke's library. All of this suggests that his writings were one medium through which the ideas and outlook of Scottish moral philosophy - a part of the "Scottish Enlightenment" - were transmitted to Clarke and, through him, to the backwoods of Upper Canada.10 Bulwer's reading of the modern malaise was manifest, in any case, in the associational life into which Clarke entered on his return to Elora in 1850. The Elora Horticultural Society, the Elora Friendly Society for the Suppression of Intemperance, the Sons of Temperance, the Pilkington branch of the Canadian

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Temperance League, and the Elora Mechanics' Institute were all organizations that Clarke joined over the next several years; indeed, he assisted in their creation. Broadly didactic in purpose, they sought optimistically to refine the coarse, to ennoble the low, and to exalt "the standard of opinion," as Bulwer might have said.21 These aims were not very different in substance from those of Clarke's juvenile pamphlet, "To Our Young Men," though they were rather more restrained in tone. Horticultural societies tended to be urban organizations; the fact that Flora's began as early as it did, prompting the formation of sister entities in Guelph and Fergus, owed something to Clarke's influence. He was one of the two chief organizers of the inaugural meeting, held on 19 November 1850 in the Elgin Hotel; the other was Walter Newman (1819-81), an insurance agent and real estate broker who later opened Flora's first private bank.11 Both men were elected to the executive, Clarke as secretary-treasurer, an office he was to occupy at least once in just about every organization he ever belonged to, and Newman as a member of the executive committee, while Charles Allan put his imprimatur on the venture by agreeing to serve as president. In 1851, the executive included, besides these three, a local manufacturer, a surgeon, three other retail merchants, and the village postmaster, all of them young except for Allan, and all of them, in the nature of things, newcomers.13 Their election was probably a formality, its outcome determined beforehand by a small circle of leading men who drew up a slate of candidates. In this way, aspiring local elites often used voluntary associations to assert their cultural identity and affirm their social leadership, as well as to spread a particular message. The message of the Horticultural Society was that the cultivation of private gardens had an improving effect on both the individual -and the community at large. In part, this effect was utilitarian. As Elora historian Stephen Thorning points out, of the three categories of competition in the Society's annual summer and autumn shows - vegetable, fruit, and ornamental - the first was dominant in the early years, at least numerically, and the last only really took over after 1900.z+ Yet this did not necessarily reflect the cultural priorities of the Society. Flowers received special attention, even if there were more prizes for onions, parsnips, and potatoes. "The Floral department of course presented the greatest attraction," reported the Backwoodsman - probably in the person of Clarke - in i85z, "and was evidently the source of much gratification throughout the day." Among the displays were "rare and beautiful" potted plants and "tasteful designs in floral ornaments."25 Cages of sweetly singing birds appeared in the summer show

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of 1854, adding to the effect.16 Here was evidence of the horticultural philosophy Clarke enunciated in his 1858 presidential address, discussed earlier: "The garden is a civilizer in its cultivation of the intellect - in its appeals to the higher senses - in its stimulus to the love of the beautiful."17 The practical and the sentimental sides of gardening were, in any case, complementary. "Whatever adds to the productiveness of the soil," Clarke said in 1858, "increases the national wealth: whatever cultivates the popular taste elevates the character of the people." In either aspect, the value of horticultural activity extended beyond its product. The Society ought to encourage bee-keeping, he suggested in his address, by offering prizes for honey; besides producing a useful and profitable commodity, bees aroused delight by their promise of the approach of blossoms and by their "pleasant hum," and they offered in their economy and industry - and perseverance, cleanliness, and good government - an example worthy of imitation. It was this mode of thought, by which mundane objects and actions were habitually invested with higher moral and emotional meaning, that animated Clarke's reformism, as much as the stake he had in material progress and social stability. Proper feeling, said by the Scots philosophers to nourish virtue, was to be cultivated along with vegetables, fruits, and ornamental flowers. Moral and material improvement was also the ultimate object of the temperance societies in which Clarke became involved at the same time as he was helping to form the Horticultural Society. In their case, the depth of his commitment - or at least its constancy - is uncertain. In youth, he had believed that total abstinence was contrary to good health, while in the second of his presidential talks to the horticulturists, in 1859, he alluded to the fact that he "used to be" a "warm teetotal."18 Only the previous year he had suggested creating a new exhibit category for home-made beverages, in hopes of stimulating the domestic manufacture of "temperance drinks," which would replace inferior commercial varieties. It is possible that there was calculation in his adherence to the temperance cause: it can only have helped in establishing his radical bona fides and may even have been prompted by political ambition. Yet, if Clarke was moved by policy rather than principle, we may doubt whether he would have thought it necessary to join three temperance societies. As for the opinions of his youth, he was not the only one to reverse his position on the dietary necessity of alcohol consumption.19 His initiating role in two of the three societies is readily apparent from their founding records, most of which are in his handwriting. One was the Friendly Society, formed at the beginning of February

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1851; the other was the Pilkington branch of the Canadian Temperance League, which followed two years later.30 In both cases, Clarke was among those attending the inaugural meeting where, as secretary, he recorded the first item of business, the adoption of a constitution. This was a simple document, which laid down basic rules of order, set subscription fees, and created executive offices. It also defined the society's purpose. In the case of the Friendly Society, this was defined as "discouraging, and, if possible, entirely suppressing," the use of intoxicating liquors. The League sought more concretely to obtain passage of a provincial prohibitory liquor law. Like countless other voluntary associations of the time, both societies began by establishing at least the forms of "subscriber democracy," even if the organizers went on to elect familiar men to office.31 Charles Allan became president of the Friendly Society and Walter Newman a member of its managing committee, while Daniel Kribs, a merchant who also served on the executive committee of the Horticultural Society, became president of the Pilkington branch of the League; Clarke was elected secretarytreasurer of both. Memberships grew. The Friendly Society's came to include men from all ranks of the community, particularly its skilled craftsmen, among whom were John Kirk and one of his apprentices. A few women became members as well, including, in the case of the League, Emma Clarke. Yet control was undoubtedly in the hands of the village's businessmen and professionals. Clarke's role in the Sons of Temperance is less clear. At first, he seems to have held aloof, seeing it as a rival to the Friendly Society, and perhaps as too extreme in its goals, but he soon changed his mind. In the summer of 1851 he delivered a long public lecture explaining the movement's aims, extolling its methods, and confessing, by the way, to an earlier ignorance of "Teetotalism."32 He assured his listeners that there was no need to choose between the Sons and the Friendly Society, or between either of them and the Total Abstinence Society, another group more religious in orientation. A person might belong to all three, since they all shared the same objective. Still, the Sons wished to get there "faster," and its organization - as the others must see! - was the most efficient; therefore, he invited the other societies to make the Sons' program their own. Like his later horticultural oration, Clarke's Sons of Temperance lecture was infused with a warmth of spirit and a striving for unity of vision. He began by recounting the society's remarkable history. Begun in New York by sixteen men in 1841, its membership had soared to over half a million in the United States and Canada. Its immediate goal was much more ambitious than that of the "old societies"; it sought not merely abstinence, and not merely abstinence

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from the consumption of spirits, but the prohibition by law of the "manufacture, purchase, sale, and use of all alcoholic or intoxicating beverages." This was what was meant by "teetotalism." Yet the real secret of its success, according to Clarke, lay in its organization. More than simply a temperance society, it offered its members insurance in the event of sickness or death or even, in some of its "Divisions," economic hardship, and it also offered the pleasures of fellowship and "rational amusement" in its frequent meetings. The result was that members were sustained in their commitment both by their desire to protect their stake in the insurance fund and by the attraction of friendly mutual support. The genius of these organizational principles, he explained, lay in their efficiency in harnessing the power of association. The Sons' founders had recognized, better than anyone else in the temperance movement, that human beings tended to act well in acting together. Clarke called this the "associative tendency": "When intelligent and honest men mingle together, liberality of sentiment is insured - the petty views of individuals or cliques are borne down - and almost any difficulty can be overcome." Universal in time and space, it was a tendency "natural to man," even fundamental to the fulfilment of his humanity: "he must seek to please himself by pleasing others" and by joining with them in the performance of great deeds. Human beings had never accomplished so much, whether it was in building the pyramids of ancient Egypt or abolishing slavery in the modern British Empire, as when they had acted in concert. At the same time, as an "essentially good" principle, the associative tendency bore "the mark of Divine origin." This alignment of divine purpose with the disposition of human nature, together with the positing of an individual predilection for good that was in sympathy with the good of all, was further evidence of the influence of Scottish moral philosophy on Clarke's thinking, even if at one or two removes. The Scots held that human beings were moved to act benevolently out of natural love for themselves and for their fellows. They rejected the idea that a doctrine of natural good amounted to a constraint on the sovereignty of God, as well as the notion that helping others was somehow inherently contrary to individual interest.33 In fact, they rejected much of Augustinian and Calvinist theology, from which these ideas were derived, including belief in a fearsome God for whom even the innocent child was tainted by Original Sin, and whose absolute power placed salvation beyond the reach of mere human will. "When religion is unaided by moral science," Bulwer had written, "there is ever a danger, that too much shall be left to the principle of fear."34

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Clarke's agreement was amply apparent in his Sons of Temperance lecture and elsewhere. The Scots' belief in the benevolence of "natural affection" was also discernible in his exposition of the "higher reasons" for joining the Sons, which took up the largest portion of the address. Here Clarke's main theme was the Sons' commitment to the Golden Rule and their faith in the transforming power of brotherly love. Each member, he said, was concerned with not only his own reformation but also that of others; not just with rescuing another from drink but with restoring his entire being: "He arouses his moral feelings to healthy action, and cultivates his intellectual faculties. He instils into him the glorious principles of brotherly love, and teaches him that as a man he has duties extending far beyond the narrow circle of self." The reformed drunkard discovers, as a result, that his own intellect is capable of giving pleasure without the aid of the whiskey bottle, and that his fellow men are capable of genuine kindness. A new moral world is opened to him and, in its train, a physical one as well: "Nature is more blooming to the sober man," said Clarke, "than to the drunkard." Ultimately, then, the objectives of the Sons of Temperance were closely allied to those of horticultural improvement: not only rescue from drink and relief from material distress, but the moral, social, and intellectual elevation of its members and "the promotion of good feeling amongst mankind - a doing away with that petty rivalry and classification which is the curse of civilized society." Clarke's lecture offers a good deal of support for Jan Noel's argument that the temperance movement in British North America changed character at mid-century, shedding much of its earlier religious zeal in favour of a more secular outlook and shifting its emphasis away from voluntary individual reformation to social improvement aided by the legal authority of the state. In what Noel calls its second stage, the movement's leadership was more predominantly urban and middle class than in the first, its goals were more in tune with commercial expansion, and its ideology was more firmly rooted in the secular gospel of progress.35 Yet, as she herself recognizes, the movement was not a monolith. Clarke's outlook appears secular in comparison with that of evangelical Christians, but it was no less genuine in its aspiration to spiritualize the social order. Nor was its conception of spirituality a compromise with the world and therefore a falling away from religion; rather, it drew on a different religious tradition, more humanist in its theology than the evangelicalism that is often taken to be the standard. His adherence to Unitarianism at this time - which he never refers to in the surviving record - might be explained as an attempt to find

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among the theologies of Protestant Dissent a position that would accommodate his moral philosophy.^6 While Clarke fits generally in Noel's two-stage model, in other words, his views accord less easily with the emphasis she finds in the second stage on economic productivity and moral asceticism. Nor do they support the rather sharp contrast she draws, in discussing the social vision of temperance leaders, between a male quest for individual self-improvement and upward mobility and a female "denial of selfish interests and vain distinctions."^ The latter was no less important to Clarke, for whom selflessness was integral to humanity, and equality one of the most worthy of the Sons' principles of organization. The last of the local associations in which Clarke played a leading role during the 18505 was the Elora Mechanics' Institute, founded in 1857. Once again, he attended the inaugural meeting and was elected to the executive committee. His signature was one of eleven on the formal declaration testifying that the new organization fulfilled the requirements for incorporation set out in the provincial act of 1851 governing libraries and mechanics' institutes. This would have qualified it for financial aid, to the tune of about $2.50 per year, if the system of annual grants had not ended in 1858. Like that of its forebears dating back to the first British institute, founded in London in 1823 by Henry Brougham and other radical Whigs, its purpose was "the diffusion of useful knowledge" by such means as the establishment of a reading room and library, the purchase of scientific apparatus, the sponsorship of lectures, and the formation of a debating society.38 Subscriptions were a dollar a year, or fifty cents to those living more than a mile outside the village. This sum entitled one to all the privileges of membership, including admission to the reading room, where one could find, besides the book collection, a good sampling of the contemporary periodical press: the British literary reviews, family magazines such as Chambers's Journal or Charles Dickens' Household Words, the American magazine Harper's Weekly, and provincial papers such as the Toronto Globe and the Guelph Advertiser. Originally intended for the instruction of artisans in science and technology, with resulting practical benefit to themselves and to industry, the mechanics' institutes in both England and Canada had evolved into more generalized instruments of mental and moral improvement aimed at the public at large rather than specifically at the working class.'9 While Clarke left no statement expanding on his understanding of the purposes of the Mechanics' Institute comparable to his presidential address to the Horticultural Society or his lecture on the objectives of the Sons of Temperance, an indication of his pedagogic views

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may be found in a second talk he gave to the Sons in 1851. He was speaking this time in support of a proposal that a portion of each regular meeting be set aside for members to present essays on various subjects, followed by discussion.40 This was an idea, he said, that promised benefits to all concerned, for reasons that must also have played a role in his support of the Mechanics' Institute. The bashfulness to which almost everyone was prone - including himself, he assured his listeners - was an unfortunate check on free and civil debate. Those members who were encouraged to surmount it in the friendly atmosphere of the Division Room would find themselves more confident beyond, less fearful of "being laughed at as stammering, awkward, bashful, stupid boobies" and more capable of giving independent voice to their thoughts. Their success not only would aid the cause of abstinence - in support of which they must all "speak, speak, speak, and write, write, write" - but would assist them more generally in the wider world of politics. Theirs was a day "when men are beginning to feel that they are men, and when the old method of settling differences of opinion by sound knocks, and slashes, and shootings, and tumblings, is giving way to argument and honest expressions of opinion." Practice in speaking before their fellows would prepare them to participate freely in this public discourse of manly civility. Their essays would also be miniature lectures, which would contribute to the "mental culture" of their association. On the one hand, Clarke said, sounding like a modern university professor, nothing was better designed to cultivate one's reflective powers than the discipline of putting one's ideas down on paper. On the other, a lecture demanded of its listeners a concentration they were not always able to sustain in reading, with the result that its contents were more readily absorbed. Everyone, moreover, was capable of coming up with an original idea and thus of instructing others. Only lack of application stood in the way. He impressed on his listeners that God had entrusted each of them with a "peculiar talent," and it was their duty to "God and man" to persevere in its development. They were all capable of working up an instructive lecture on one of the many subjects opened up by the modern advance of knowledge: physical geography, history, electricity, natural philosophy, moral reform, natural history, the customs of nations, and more. Although one of the enticements Clarke offered was the prospect of returning to "school" without the disciplinary constraints of the schoolmaster, we cannot help noting the list's resemblance to Boole's Friday afternoon lectures, without the sensational items favoured by the students. Amusement and edification both had become serious business. Excluded from the list were

84 Polemicist religion and politics, deemed potentially divisive by the by-laws of the Sons. This conception of the capacity of adults to educate themselves, particularly in association with others, and of the benefits that flowed from their doing so, was another face of Clarke's moral philosophy, at once idealist in origin and practical in aspiration. "There is a divine and sacred species of Ambition," to quote Bulwer once more, "which is but another word for Benevolence."41 The Mechanics' Institute must similarly have enlisted Clarke's optimism. More expressly didactic in its design than the other associations to which he belonged, it represented another means of promoting the democratization of genteel habits and values. Certainly, one can imagine few scenes more evocative of the mid-nineteenth-century ideal of popular refinement than the Mechanics' Institute News Room of a winter's evening, "well furnished" and "well warmed," according to the local paper, and lighted by coal oil lamps, its occupants immersed in the latest issue of the Illustrated London News or engaged in a friendly game of chess.4i In contrast with the program of political reform that Clarke put forward as Reformator, his initiatives in the improvement of society and culture appear to have rested more on faith and aspiration than on theory. In politics, his goals were clearly defined, as Were the means of achieving them and the grounds for believing that their achievement would represent progress. Utopian they may have been, but they were part of an internally coherent system of democratic thought, which may help explain why most voters, absorbed by more immediate concerns, were not moved to adopt them as their own. In social and cultural affairs, by comparison, the promotion of good will among men was hardly a specific objective, and its achievement seemed to depend on the proposition that if human beings believed themselves to be good, they would be. The literary historian Walter Houghton called this "moral optimism," and suggested that it led, in the long run, to a greater concern for the quality of men's attitudes that is, to sentimentality - than for the justness or consistency of their actions.43 Yet, Houghton's criticism aside for the moment, a tradition of thought lay behind Clarke's optimism, even if he was less conscious himself of its philosophical premises than he was of the foundations of democratic theory. One might say, in fact, that he had several theories - political, aesthetic, psychological, educational - more or less developed, which all rested on an inchoate understanding of a more comprehensive moral philosophy acquired from school, books, friends, and family. His moral sense, moreover, was an important source of his

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radicalism. Houghton is correct in his judgment that benevolence descended into sentimentality in the long run, and presently we will trace its descent in Clarke's own intellectual evolution, but in the midnineteenth century it offered a critical perspective on both the old order and the new. Aristocrats and Tories might claim to rule as gentlemen, but Clarke knew they really did so as bullies, and the alternative vision he offered was of a society domesticated, as it were, to more civil rules of conduct. While he celebrated the modern, especially for the freedom it offered to individual enterprise, he also sought to counter its tendency to crass materialism by encouraging the cultivation of sentiment, just as more conservative Protestant churchmen sought ecclesiastically to affirm the sacred in the midst of increasing secularization.44 Clarke's high idealism was perhaps a mark of his middle-class status; workers tended to be more practical. 45 Yet his belief in the "associative tendency" distanced him intellectually from the narrower individualism of many of his class. Association itself was a creative force at mid-century. The Horticultural Society, the temperance societies, and the Mechanics' Institute did not exhaust Clarke's associational involvements at this time. He was probably a member of the choral and debating societies; he was certainly active in the Reform Association; and he and Walter Newman joined forces again in the summer of 1861, shortly after the beginning of the American Civil War, to organize the founding of a local militia unit, the Elora Volunteer Rifles. 46 These voluntary associations in all their variety were means by which aspiring local leaders attempted to assert authority and establish community in a new backwoods settlement. They were also forums, intermediary between the state and society, in which the rules, practices, and proprieties of public discourse were informally and provisionally agreed upon. They were institutions, that is, of civil society, and just as important in the creation of politics as the laws and conventions of the constitution.47

On the night Clarke spoke to the Sons of Temperance in support of members presenting "miniature lectures," there must have been some in the audience who doubted his sincerity when he confessed to his own bashfulness. Charles Clarke - bashful? We may wonder, in retrospect, whether his youthful presumption did not in fact conceal a measure of insecurity, and whether he did not try just a little too hard to make an impression. Even so, the vocal and opinionated young man that Clarke undoubtedly was in 1851, organizational activist in a

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community of strangers, cannot have appeared bashful to his new neighbours. Some, it is clear, found him downright bumptious. Among them were men with whom he worked closely, suggesting something of the personal tensions that must have accompanied community formation in the colonial era. There was William Mowat, for example, the first printer and editor of The Elora Backwoodsman, the local paper that Clarke helped to found early in i85z. Clarke and eleven others formed The Elora Newspaper, Job Printing and Bookbinding Company, with a projected capital of £2,50, for the purpose of establishing an expressly "Reform" newspaper as well as carrying on the general business of a print shop.48 Charles Allan was one of the shareholders, as was Walter Newman; Allan became president, Newman treasurer, and Clarke secretary. Among the rest were Alexander Watt and James Ross, two of Allan's partners in Ross and Company, and David Foote (1823-91), a plainspoken builder and farmer about the same age as Clarke and of similarly advanced views who was to become a leading local Reformer. 49 Clarke was probably the one responsible for acquiring type and equipment, second-hand, from Robert R. Smiley of the Hamilton Spectator. Despite their political differences - Smiley was a conservative, backer of the Sibthorpian Sir Allan MacNab - they had established relations of mutual respect when Clarke was at the Journal and Express.50 When the first copy of the Backwoodsman came off the press on 3 April 1852, Clarke was the one who accepted it from the hands of Malcolm Cameron, now a Grit cabinet minister, who was present for the occasion. Mowat was hired to be editor and printer but was to share editorial duties - or privileges - with Clarke, whose role found peculiar expression suggestive of his sense of self-importance. It seems that he was given the major responsibility for politics, and that his contributions were to be distinguished in the editorial columns by an asterisk placed at the conclusion of each one. The statement of "Our Politics" that appeared in the first issue, for example, laying down "the broad grounds of liberalism and truth" on which the Backwoodsman proposed to stand, was followed by this discreet but unmistakable mark, as were two other items.51 Such employment of a hieroglyphic editorial by-line was unusual, to say the least, and may help to explain Clarke's difficulties with Mowat, who was nominally in charge. After three issues, at any rate, Clarke's asterisk disappeared and his relations with Mowat deteriorated in a startlingly public manner. One contributing factor was their disagreement over local railway policy. The Pilkington Township Council, of which Allan was reeve,

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proposed to borrow £5000 to buy stock in the Toronto and Guelph Railway in hopes of ensuring that a projected extension of the line north to Lake Huron would pass through Pilkington. This kind of issue bedevilled local politics all over Canada West during the railway mania of the early 18505, as municipalities vied for routes, station stops, and terminuses. Pilkington placed conditions on its investment that the company was unwilling to accept: essentially that the bulk of it would be made only on completion of the line to Guelph. Clarke was opposed to investment on any terms and made his views known in a signed letter to the Backwoodsman. By contrast, the paper itself - Mowat, that is - advised submitting to the company, but chose to do so in language clearly aimed at Clarke: the people, it said, would "not be led by the nose by certain parties who are interested in obstructing this movement. " 5Z An additional personal reference was contained in a rhetorical query as to whether the people would allow themselves to be influenced by "quack medicines." Here was a potent issue of current controversy: fraudulent medical and pharmaceutical practice. Also a thinly veiled criticism of Kirk and Clarke's dispensing of drugs and patent medicines, it must surely have escalated hostilities.53 The following week Clarke wrote another letter, denying that he was editor of the Backwoodsman as many people seemed to think, and affirming somewhat disingenuously that he had no wish to take credit for its editorials, "to strut in borrowed plumes." Only those editorials "marked thus (*)" had been his.54 At the same time, he widened the battlefront by writing in a similar vein to the Dundas Warder. He was prompted to do so by a dispute between the Backwoodsman and the Warder, of a sort not uncommon at the time, over government policy concerning the clergy reserves. The Warder condemned the new ministry for being no more aggressive in pursuing abolition than its predecessor had been, while the Backwoodsman counselled patience: give the ministry a chance, despite suspicions one might harbour of the deviousness of Francis Hincks. Clarke did not disagree with the Backwoodsman's position, which he had actually set down in one of his own editorials; he acknowledged the Warder's "kind" notice of his "literary efforts" and developed his argument at considerable further length. He wanted the Warder to know, however, that he was not the Elora paper's editor, only the author of the asterisked columns. He also wished to affirm his own consistency and independence - "I am no toady to any living man, or set of men" - and, in evidence, he admitted to having written the Reformator letters.55 This was too much for Mowat. Under the header "The Dundas Warder and Mr. Charles Clarke," he took up the reserves question but

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mainly took aim at his erstwhile editorial colleague. The "star" which had previously shone in the pages of his own journal, he wrote, had been sighted recently over Dundas. The asterisk! This mysterious behaviour was difficult to account for, astronomically; perhaps it had been "drawn out of its orbit into the vortex of some larger body, a result which invariably destroys its existence as a separate body." Claiming right of discovery, he named it "Quack," and proceeded to lavish withering sarcasm on Clarke's "confession" to being Reformator, his gratitude for praise of his "literary efforts," and various other exhibitions of patently false modesty.56 In retaliation, Clarke pressed into service the advertising columns of Kirk and Clarke, where he deftly turned Mowat's aspersions back on himself. "Quack-QuackQuack" exclaimed their next banner: "In this age of Quack Doctors, Quack Lawyers, Quack Professors, Quack Editors, and Quack Medicines, it is somewhat difficult to distinguish the difference between the genuine and the sham." The "first-rate article" was to be found at Kirk and Clarke's - as well as pills well suited to the needs of "Backwoodsmen and bilious editors,... perfect stars in the Patent Medicine Way"!57 What must other people have thought? Amusing as all this was, it was in no way edifying. Mowat was fit to be tied. He called Clarke "a vain, contemptible fellow" who sought dishonestly to "sow discord among friends, and disturb a quiet neighborhood."58 Whatever the truth of this accusation, it was not one likely to have been levelled at anyone widely considered to be bashful. It was then followed by another from a different quarter, much more serious in nature, which cast the affair in a whole new light. A local doctor wrote a letter to the Backwoodsman in which he reported having treated a young woman in Peel Township for the effects of ingesting a medicine purchased from Kirk and Clarke; worse, they had prescribed it. The woman had been suffering from the ague, and her brother-in-law had gone to the shop, attracted by its advertising, in search of something to relieve her. There he had been sold what the doctor described as "a powerful preparation of mercury." The unidentified seller had specified the dosage in writing, but had neglected to sign his name, which the doctor took to be clear evidence of intent to evade criminal prosecution in the event of injury. After taking only half the prescribed dosage, the woman had experienced severe swelling in the throat, which caused her acute pain and other effects unpleasant to herself and those looking after her.59 The doctor's outrage did not blind him to the wider implications of the incident. The brother-in-law had been especially taken by Kirk and Clarke's attack on quackery, yet it was they, not the local medical practitioners, who were the real quacks. An italicized reference in the letter

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to the "benevolence" of their intentions hinted, moreover, at other ethical defects. If the charge were true, Clarke was guilty not only of causing a person serious harm in his pursuit of profit, but of gross hypocrisy. The "Quack-Quack" ads disappeared. Two weeks later, the final episode of his dispute with Mowat began, with an item in the Backwoodsman to the effect that Clarke had been characteristically over-zealous in reporting a Sons of Temperance meeting in the Guelph Herald. An exchange with the Herald ensued - typically - in which Mowat made extended reference to the quackery allegation and accused Clarke of not paying his firm's advertising bill. Perhaps having had enough, perhaps thinking he had best take a firm stand on his financial reliability to make up for the damage caused to his moral repute, Clarke threatened to sue The Elora Newspaper, Job Printing and Bookbinding Company if the charge of defaulting on his account was not retracted. The trustees did retract it, and William Mowat resigned, alleging that they had "usurped the editorial management" of the Backwoodsman in doing so.6° The taint of this affair marked Clarke, and an air of brazen defiance hung about him for some time thereafter. It probably meant the difference between victory and defeat, when, at the beginning of the following year, he ran for the Elora seat on the Pilkington Township council. Despite support from a number of leading ratepayers, he came second to David Foote.61 Clarke took the loss badly in this, his first venture into electoral politics. He protested Foote's qualifications, presumably on the grounds that his farm, which lay on the eastern edge of the village, lay beyond the residential boundary. His stepfather John Kirk, moreover, engaged in an unseemly exchange of accusations in the Backwoodsman with Walter Newman. He questioned Newman's impartiality as returning officer, in view of his having signed Foote's requisition. Newman responded pungently that his impartiality was just that of "one who prefers the plain common sense of a practical man, to the empty declamation of a coxcomb." No doubt, he said, the "now rejected of Pilkington" would rise again, as "brass not unfrequently [sic] passes current in this world for sterling coin." He even slipped in a reference to Kirk's "studies of the pharmacopeia." For its part, the Backwoodsman, now in the hands of a man named Francis Frank, disclaimed any responsibility for the opinions expressed in the letters, and urged the necessity of forbearance and civility on the part of everyone concerned/2 At this point, Clarke contemplated a return to Hamilton. His decision to stick it out in Elora may have been made on sober second thought, when things quietened down, or it may have been forced on him by the circumstances of family requirements and capital liquidity.

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Perhaps his strong-minded mother helped him to persist in the face of adversity. Or perhaps it was his new family circumstances that helped to see him through, since his marriage had occurred in the midst of his quarrel with Mowat. Emma's father, James Kent, was a man of evangelical bent, to judge from the advice he proffered the young couple shortly after the wedding: "Life is short and uncertain. Death is sure. Eternity is nearer than we are apt to think. Prepare for death and then we are prepared to live - live the life of the Righteous and then you shall die His Death and have His Reward."63 The only thing certain about this homily is that it was not what sustained Clarke over the subsequent months. The prospect of a happy marriage and a young family is more likely to have done so.

Political parties were another form of association. Politicians, Clarke told the Sons of Temperance in 1851, looked to the "associative tendency" to form parties, just as religious leaders used it to spread their doctrines and philosophers to found their schools of thought.64 He himself believed that his political and constitutional principles would be advanced by party. This was not such an outlandish idea then as it may seem now, when party organization is widely thought to be independent of - if not actually opposed to - the exercise of principle in politics. In the mid-nineteenth century, when the competitive party system was only at the point of formation, parties were hardly recognizable as the modern institutions they have since become. Political labels represented tendencies rather than fixed attachments, and party loyalty was conditioned by personal connections and local ties.65 While individuals identified themselves with these tendencies, they also lined up in Parliament and the press as "ministerialists" and "anti-ministerialists," and sometimes moved from one posture to the other. In these circumstances, it was easy to conceive of party as an instrument of progress, a means of subordinating "personal connections and local ties" to the pursuit of a higher, national ideal. This, at any rate, was Clarke's conception of party. In the spring of 1852, in the first of the Backwoodsman editorials that excited the concern of the Dundas Warder, he called on Reformers to withhold judgment of the Hincks-Morin ministry until it had had a chance to prove itself. They must discipline themselves to the needs of the party, he wrote, if they hoped to achieve success. Parties were a necessity of free government: "Individuals must sacrifice crotchets for the sake of principles, and support an organized party which comes nearest to their views, even when it does not fall in with the

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whole of them." 66 The problem, of course, was to determine at what point a principle became a crotchet: was it simply when it failed to gain majority support? Clarke's entire political life may be seen as a negotiation of the tension between adherence to party, with all its associative power, and adherence to his own principles: from the Halton by-election of early 1850 and the Clear Grit-Hincksite alliance of 1851, through the Reform conventions of the late 18505 led by George Brown, to his long legislative service under the shrewd but firm guidance of Oliver Mowat in the 18705 and i88os. He often dissented and was often disappointed, yet he remained faithful to the party ideal. A second problem, more obvious in retrospect than in the heat of battle, was that the identification of principle, party, and Reform had anti-political overtones. If party discipline constrained wilfulness and idiosyncrasy within, party unity confronted the forces of monopoly, privilege, patronage, and executive prerogative without. It followed that elections were not so much contests between mundane interests or equally credible alternatives as life-and-death struggles between two world-views, the one progressive, the other retrograde. Once victory was achieved, government would be more a matter of administration than of politics; and victory was not really in doubt, at least in the long run, as long as "the people" were free, properly educated, and fully informed. The interests of the electorate, in this view, were assumed to be fundamentally alike, or at least susceptible to intellectual resolution, which was one reason why Clarke and many other Reformers put so much importance on local democracy and preferred decentralization to a strong central government. There was a community of interests at the local level, which became more tenuous and complex in larger jurisdictions - emphatically so in the United Province of Canada - making the essentially administrative model of local democratic governance more difficult to apply/7 All the more reason, then, for a well-organized association of members, not just to prepare for elections but to cultivate fellow feeling and settle ideological differences. Clarke favoured the creation of a permanent party structure, with local branches at the township and village level, intermediate branches for each riding or district, and a provincial headquarters at Toronto or Hamilton. It was a plan not unlike that of the Sons of Temperance, with its pyramid of local, "Grand," and "National" divisions, through which it hoped to achieve "oneness of sentiment" and uniformity of regulation. Clarke even suggested establishing Reform reading rooms. Some of this, at least, must have been in his mind early in 1854, when he joined eleven other men in calling for a meeting of local

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Reformers of all stripes - "Hincksites, Clear Grits and Brownites" - to form a Reform Association for the North Riding of Wellington in anticipation of the next general election.68 The Hincks-Morin ministry was by this time in disarray, pulled apart by scandal and corruption, sectional dissension, and sectarian animosity. The malice born of disappointment was widespread among Reformers, and political realignment was again in the air. Clarke's own frustration with unprincipled politicians was evident in an editorial he wrote for the Backwoodsman, which he was editing once more: "What is to be done then? We will tell you. Stick to measures, and let the men go ... to the deuce."69 Unity - and fellow feeling! - was seldom more urgently required. The usual cast of characters was behind the Elora initiative, including Charles Allan and Walter Newman. At the meeting itself, held on 2. March 1854, Clarke acted as secretary, while George Barron (1803-91), a Clear Grit farmer from the Scots settlement of Bon Accord, just north of the village on the Irvine River, took the chair. In the organization that emerged - the Provisional Central Reform Association for the North Riding of Wellington - Clarke was secretary, while other executive positions were filled by such men as Barron, Allan, David Foote, and James Ross. The original shareholders of the Backwoodsman were prominent among them.70 Unity was an elusive goal, however, even at the local level. Reformers in the neighbouring townships resented Flora's presumption in taking on the task of nominating a candidate to represent them in the next election. Clarke responded by pointing out that the association was "Provisional" only; far from presuming to speak for the riding as a whole, the meeting had struck a committee to consider how best to encourage the formation of township associations. As secretary, he had since been instructed to correspond with Reformers in all the townships, asking them to meet to elect delegates to a convention in Elora at the beginning of June, when a permanent association would be formed and a candidate chosen.71 Still, by their action Elora Reformers had staked a claim to an intermediate position in the organizational pyramid. A rift also appeared in the ranks of the "Elorians" themselves, showing just how unsettled were the rules and practices of party organization, especially in the face of personal rivalries. Sometime early in May a requisition was got up in support of Charles Allan's candidacy for the North Riding; that is, a petition requesting Allan to stand and pledging the support of its signatories. Not only was this an example of politics in the old style; it was seemingly designed to forestall the convention. Not only was it done with Allan's knowledge - or connivance, in the view of the Backwoodsman; it was being circulated by

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another member of the Provisional Association's executive committee, D.M. Lamb, who was also a businessman of some importance, owner of the Elora Foundry. To top it all off, the requisition had been initiated by a Conservative!71 Conventions were a major instrument of unification in Clarke's conception of party, as important as the ballot and universal suffrage were in his theory of electoral representation. To find some of his own allies conspiring to interfere with the convention's democratic will was a serious violation of the new ground rules and a personal affront. There was nothing accidental about their actions. Though purportedly a response to the failure of the township associations to get off the ground, the requisition could not have been clearer in its ideological intent: " [W]e decline fettering you by any pledges - especially as the experience of late years has convinced us that pledges exacted on the hustings afford but little protection to the interests of the people."73 It was an unmistakable rejection of a second major instrument of radical partyism, the platform. Only recently, at the time of the call for a Reform meeting, Clarke had dusted off and revised the platform he had formulated the previous autumn, explicitly in remembrance of the North American platform of 1850. Putting it forward again, in somewhat different form, in the Backwoodsman, he appealed to editors of the country press - the city papers were above taking advice from their small-town colleagues, he said - to do the same. Platforms aroused people to think "more about measures and less about men."7** They also bound a candidate to their terms, rather than leaving him free to judge issues as they arose. Clarke knew already that Allan was less than enamoured of their virtues; indeed, he was "death on platforms," according to George B. Thomson, the Grit editor of the Berlin Telegraph, which had endorsed the Backwoodsman's effort of the fall.75 Yet there was more here than met the eye. Unity was important, to be sure, especially so given the likelihood that the Reform candidate in the coming election would be opposed by the highly objectionable but influential Dr. William Clarke of Guelph, a man who represented everything that Clarke of Elora (who was no relation) detested in politics. He had extensive interests in flour-milling, railways, and roads, the last including the Elora and Saugeen Road, which he had recently taken over from the county, and which he would doubtless exploit to his advantage in an electoral contest, since its purpose was to serve the northern townships. He was an Orangeman who employed the bully-boy tactics for which the order was notorious, and a master of bombast besides.76 During the campaign that ensued he called Clarke, among other things, a "contemptible quack," an obvious

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reminder of the affair of the mercury-laden prescription three years earlier. Clarke responded in kind, naming the doctor "The Dunghill Cock of North Wellington."77 Yet, loathsome as the prospect was of his winning the riding as a result of internal Reform divisions, it does not adequately explain the bitterness surrounding the renegade canvass of electors. No expression was too harsh, wrote Clarke, no language too severe, to describe the duplicity of Allan and his fellow conspirators.78 Behind the differences over principle, strategy, and tactics lay personal animosities and local tensions that are now difficult to reconstruct entirely. Was the infamous drug prescription a factor in Clarke's relations with his allies as well as his foes? Or was the requisition evidence of a wider power struggle, with control of the party at the local level at stake? Perhaps the former helped to colour the latter, for the dispute was not Clarke's alone. Most of the members of the Reform Committees of both Elora and Fergus - including Barren, Foote, and Allan's old partners Alex Watt and James Ross, as well as Clarke denounced the requisition as a "gross breach of faith" in a formal public announcement. At the same time, Clarke thought it necessary to assure the Backwoodsman's readers "at a distance" that there was no crisis in Elora Reform. Every small community had its squabbles, he said, its cliques and parties; they were "the wormwood of everyday village life." No-one should think that these had crept into the Reform Committee. Even those who had always been opposed to Mr. Allan had set their feelings aside, at first, in the interests of the common cause, and would happily have given him their support if he had been legitimately nominated by a convention. Now, of course, they had been freed of their obligations, and the convention would go forward as planned. 79 In this, however, Clarke was wrong. The first attempt to organize permanently in the North Riding foundered on the requisition. No convention was held, though Allan withdrew from the contest. At the last minute, after Clarke and a few others had tried to lure the Dundas journalist Robert Spence to stand as Reform candidate, George Barren's name was put forward.80 If the Backwoodsman's note of desperation on nomination day is any indication, the quarrel had left its mark. No true Reformer, it urged, would support the doctor or neglect to vote on one of the polling days, nor would he allow mere dislike of the Reform candidate to keep him at home: "Principles are of more account at this crisis than men." The appeal was of no avail. William Clarke won handily - "Grog and Blarney, humbug and division, impudence and treachery, money and promises" having done their work, in the paper's partisan explanation.81 William McDougall, with

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whom Clarke's relations had somewhat mended, was equally partisan but more blunt: "I fear you have managed things badly there," he wrote Clarke.81 The internal problems of Reform were not alone responsible for Barren's defeat, but they did show the need for discipline as well as democracy in party affairs. Clarke had once compared the requirements of a party seeking fundamental change to those of an army for sound command, "perfect organization," and "complete unison of action."83 Party, as he conceived it, involved an uneasy union of activism from the bottom up and "generalship" from the top down. The power of association was great, but it needed regulation and direction. It was hardly an accident that Clarke sought to transcend the politics of "personal and local considerations" at the very time when traditional loyalties and dependencies were being harnessed to an alternative conception of party by the emergent Conservative leader, John A. Macdonald (1815-91). Macdonald's system of personal party management, using the enticements of office and influence, became dominant in Canadian politics, perhaps because principle especially the "principles" of religion, language, and section - proved so divisive.84 It was a system that built on the brokerage politics of Francis Hincks, already noted, and its practices were often pressed on Clarke by colleagues bemused by his apparent naivete. "Look out for No. i," a Hamilton friend told him in September 1853; politics was a business of the "quid pro quo."8* Some years later, T.S. Parker, then a former mayor of Guelph and the Reform member for North Wellington, congratulated Clarke on one of his municipal electoral victories, but warned him against "too much reliance on pure, Puritanical and virtuous addresses." He should "learn to smoke," Parker advised, referring to the back rooms of politics; he would find it a "joy forever.'"^ There were also those, however, who shared Clarke's ideological approach to politics and joined with him in mutual support. In the dark days of late 1854, when a new Hincksite alliance had been formed - this time moderate Reformers with Tories instead of Grits David Christie wrote him, lamenting the inconstancy of the previous ministry and declaring them well and justly finished. Christie was one of the original Clear Grits of 1849, an acute Scots farmer of radical outlook. "Let our band be ever so small," he affirmed, emphasizing every word, "we ought to have true men." Several weeks later, Thomson of the Berlin Telegraph wrote Clarke to say that he, Christie, and Michael Foley (iSzo-yo), another journalist of Grit leanings, lately elected in Waterloo North, were coming to Elora for a visit, "as pilgrims in olden times came to the oracles, to consult you."8" This was