Canada: A Portrait in Letters, 1800-2000

by Charlotte Gray

In this rich and diverse collection of two centuries of letters, renowned biographer Charlotte Gray gives us the inside story on how we came to be who we are.As the expression of one person’s thoughts, ideas, and emotions, a letter offers a unique and privileged look at a moment in history. Whether written to a close friend or an entire nation, a letter speaks volumes about the writer and his or her time.This is history in the making, in the fragile moment before it is rendered into an official version, its heroes and villains into two-dimensional puppets. In their letters, those who have been actors in Canada’s defining junctures, along with those who have lived through and been affected by them, offer us familiar historical moments from exciting new perspectives and in frank, intimate, and often unexpected words.Readers will see themselves in this book -- whether the connection is through a letter they might have written themselves, or a letter dating from their mother’s childhoods. And letters penned in the first decades of the nineteenth century, though written in unfamiliar words, will touch the reader with the immediacy and timelessness of the emotions they express -- loneliness, excitement, determination, and pride.In A Portrait in Letters , renowned biographer and popular historian Charlotte Gray weaves together more than two hundred letters written by Canadians, both famous and ordinary. These priceless documents are accompanied by a visual narrative of one hundred illustrations, including maps, sketches, and photographs. Adding her own notes and commentary, Gray creates a captivating portrait of a country, rich in diversity and hope, once a backwater of the British Empire, that has matured to take its place among the world’s cultural and economic leaders.Letters Norman Bethune Sir Robert Borden Emily Carr Sir Winston Churchill Robertson Davies John Diefenbaker Glenn Gould Grey Owl W.L. Mackenzie King Pierre Laporte Margaret Laurence Sir Wilfrid Laurier Sir John A. MacDonald Marshall McLuhan L.M. Montgomery Susanna Moodie Farley Mowat Emily Murphy Lester B. Pearson Louis Riel Tom Thomson Catharine Parr TraillFrom the Hardcover edition.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Canada

536 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Charlotte Gray is one of Canada’s best-known writers, and author of eight acclaimed books of literary non-fiction. Born in Sheffield, England, and educated at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, she began her writing career in England as a magazine editor and newspaper columnist. After coming to Canada in 1979, she worked as a political commentator, book reviewer and magazine columnist before she turned to biography and popular history.

Charlotte's most recent book is Gold Diggers, Striking It Rich in the Klondike. In 2008, Charlotte published Nellie McClung, a short biography of Canada’s leading women’s rights activist in the Penguin Series, Extraordinary Canadians. Her 2006 bestseller, Reluctant Genius: The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell, won the Donald Creighton Award for Ontario History and the City of Ottawa Book Award. It was also nominated for the Nereus Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize, the National Business Book Award and the Trillium Award. Her previous five books, which include Sisters in the Wilderness, The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, Flint & Feather, The Life and Times of E. Pauline Johnson and A Museum Called Canada, were all award-winning bestsellers.

Charlotte appears regularly on radio and television as a political and cultural commentator. In 2004 she was the advocate for Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, for the CBC series: The Greatest Canadian. She has been a judge for several of Canada’s most prestigious literary prizes, including the Giller Prize for Fiction, the Charles Taylor Prize for Non-fiction and the Shaunessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.

Charlotte has been awarded five honorary doctorates, from Mount St. Vincent University, Nova Scotia, the University of Ottawa, Queen’s University, York University and Carleton University.

An Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of History at Carleton University, Charlotte is the 2003 Recipient of the Pierre Berton Award for distinguished achievement in popularizing Canadian history. She is former chair of the board of Canada’s National History Society, which publishes the magazine Canada’s History (formerly The Beaver.) She sits on the boards of the Ottawa International Authors Festival, the Art Canada Institute/Institut de l’Art Canadien, and the Sir Winston Churchill Society of Ottawa. Charlotte is a member of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Charlotte lives in Ottawa with her husband George Anderson, and has three sons.

Reviews

[Sunny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Letters have a magic all on their own… like locks of hair, they encapsulate some essential element of the personality of whoever holds the pen. I can almost hear the writer speak to me, across time and distance

Found this at the thrift store and was intrigued by the idea of reading two hundred years worth of letters that mark the history of this country I find myself living in once again, having left at the ripe age of 5 with no understanding of “Canada” save the pride I felt at singing “O Canada” to assert my very non-American superior Canadianness.

(Even this aspect of Canadian culture should be scrutinized - a country whose pride is built off yes, their own merits, but mostly, as simply being distinct from another, highly contemptuous counterpart: the U.S. It’s as if Canada is the U.S.’s petulant adolescent teenager who insists on all her differences and betterness yet really is engaged in a petty bitterness that cannot really be explained.)

Anyhow, I have to appreciate Charlotte Gray in full for the life she has illuminated before me in carefully selecting these letters for me to read. I daresay some almost brought me to tears - so much raw emotion that can be scrawled across a page, and from people from all walks of life at that (well, the literate ones…)

I feel overwhelmed looking back at all the pages and pages I saved; all the lives lived and loved ones lost and dreams dangled off of star-studded skies. It is so complex, this emotion and awe of humanity as it struggles to survive and flourish in a new uncharted land. And it is so complex, this undeniable human strength to stand against the tests of the time and make a mark somehow somewhere in your own corner of the world… could there be anything wrong about that all too human pursuit?

Yet we live in an age where Canada Day is called to be Cancelled. We live in a country that was founded without all the voices at the table. We live in a place where we acknowledge everyday that we are using “unceded land” yet cede we do not. Who was this land made for? No one I suppose. Who has the right to call it their own? No one I suppose. Canada has done wrong, of that there is no doubt.

But what of Canadians?

The letters succeeded, I think, in their aim - to show the nuance (how I hate that word now) in the visions and ideals of the people that history likes to bundle into one. Show the friendships between those who we think of as foes, show the minor struggles for justice and freedom that came from all sides. Show the doubt and the fear, the desire to find good but the daily necessities preventing its full conquest. I can only wonder, as I read the stories here of the wars - as the citizen in Canada relays their personal feelings about it - how naive we will all sound to the future when they look at how we ourselves navigated living through these times of overseas bloodshed.

Some letters were particularly astute. I found I was able to glean some seemingly trivial but maybe more signified facts through reading them. For example -

1851: “how good it is to live on the poorest fare, where the mind may apply its immortal powers to the contemplation of the heavens and heavenly things, unawed by the monsters who would tie us to a tree and scourge us in out nakedness”

Slaves were welcomed into Canada with relative warmth and hospitality (in more cases than the U.S.) which I found to be interesting. Racism did and does exist, but I think a key difference in the US versus Canadian imagination is that of the racial divide. The US is very much split on the white versus black dichotomy, still reconciling itself with the guilt of slavery. Canada, on the other hand, is split on the indigenous versus settler dichotomy, still reconciling itself with the guilt of forced imperialism and residential schools. The US, comparatively to Canada, spends much less time dealing with guilt over its Native American treatment. I have never heard of such a strong “Land Back” movement as I do in Canada. Similarly, I do not think BLM exists in the same way here.

One thing I particularly enjoyed was reading about the mixed children, between settler and indigenous parents. They seemed to understand, for the most part, the plight of the country and the tug between honoring those who came before and allowing for those who would come next. Makes me feel more blessed to be of mixed descent myself and to be given a window into the complexities all that comes along with that…

Canadian history does seem to be uplifted with more of a liberal spirit than that of the US and I do wonder how much of that must do with Quebec - the continual presence of clashing cultures and languages meant no one vein of thinking could ever take full force. Or else, Quebec may secede. Is that enough to make a country more tolerant and accepting in its demeanor? One thing is for sure, I never knew how deep the separatist movement ran. Louis Riel is a figure I will need to learn more about. Interesting how French and First Nation liberation movements sometimes went hand in hand…

Founder of Canadian communist party would have the answer: “But if our institutions were built on rational foundations our life would be like a garden in which every tree would have equal space and sunshine”

Ideologically, communism still wins. Practically, not so much.

there were also the Canadians at war. Some of the most heart wrenching, yet most introspective pieces of the collection. One man compared the army to slavery, others simply missed their wives, others spoke of waning loyalty to the British crown…

What of women’s rights? Women could vote in Canada in 1918, two years before in the U.S. in 1923, birth control was becoming accessible. It was empowering to see women become more confident in themselves as time grew on. I do not want to know what these women would feel looking at the likes of JD Vance on the rise in the US

But, not all is rosy. Canada did not accept any Jewish refugees until after WWII ended. Other countries did. I really do wonder at why not. Also, same Japanese camps as in the U.S.

At the end of it all, with all the new thoughts and connections in my head, I cannot help but hear the voice of my baby child self singing “our true North strong and free”. Something about the bitter cold Canadians must face makes them, I feel, at least here, more…. something. It’s hard to describe. But despite my best efforts, I do feel proud to be a Canadian. I cannot hate a country that is built off the hard work of so many innocent people who simply wanted better lives.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is probably one of the most unique records of Canadian history to come across. There are letters of the mundane, and of more import, but it reminded me of how many people lived and shaped Canada. It is very Eurocentric as is mentioned.

[Damaris · Rating 5 out of 5]

When's the last time you picked up a book and it inspired you to change something and/or start implementing something new in your life... and you actually did it?
For me, it was after I finished Canada: A Portrait in Letters. Anyone who knows me knows that I am in love with Charlotte Gray and all her lovely books on Canadian history. But rarely have I read such a compelling nonfiction historical account that inspired me to make a change in my personal life. This book, a collection of several hundred beautiful Canadian letters, is a brilliant anthology that illustrates Canada's brief history through the ones who actually lived it. Not only does the book reflect on the past, it also inspired me to start writing letters in the present. This is a lost art, as Gray reflects in her prologue, but one we should really start to take up once again. It isn't often that a nonfiction book inspires me to make a life-change, but this one sure did! Five stars to Gray, once again.

[Michael Reynolds · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charlotte Gray has given to Canadians a sweet and unique gift: a portrait of us in a compilation of letters drawn from our 19th and 20th centuries.

Suffice it to say that it's the scope of the whole that yields the portrait, and gives you a feel for a country, and not any one letter (though a few are especially telling). There is a rich variety here, from immensely entertaining to rather drab (thankfully but a few), and from quite hilarious to profoundly sad, even haunting. I imagine that the cutting room floor was an agonizing place for Gray. Speaking of, I would be remiss to not mention her introductions to each letter: they are always concise, often compelling, and show careful thought and research. The same can be said for the introductions she has penned for each time period.

My favourite bits: letters coinciding with major historical happenings, letters from parents to children, and letters from pioneers in Upper Canada, among whom I count my own ancestors.

One lesson: reading another's perspective in letter form gives more than inside information. It gives a deeper view that is for relating, for empathy - even if you happen to profoundly disagree with the point of the letter.

This is the third of Charlotte Gray's excellent books that I've read. I have a couple more on my shelf that I can't wait to get into.

[Marissa Harley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is quite unique in its composition and I enjoyed learning about the more "secretive" aspects of our Nation's history. It's an intriguing collection of letters from a range of Canadians that paints quite a picture for each century. I found there was quite a bit of repetition in some sections, where it felt as if the same type of letter was included many times and I found it hardest to read through those. However, there were some part of history that I find more interesting and, therefore, I read those sections much quicker than the others.

Overall, a good book and a great way to learn about Canada outside of the history books and biographies.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

All of Dr. Gray's work is fabulous...but reading letters as primary sources of history certainly makes it come alive! A great way to learn more about our heritage as Canadians.

[Betty Welch · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a way for history to come alive: To read the words of the people who lived it.

[Helene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely book, especially if you enjoy letter format. I am not even a history buff but was nice to get up close and personal glimpses of Canadian History from the point of view of famous people and Joe Public. W

[Willow4 · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting perspective, from a time when people actually put pen to paper, knowing it might be months before the letter was read. I good lesson in what and how people communicated in a different age. They say letter writing is a lost art.

[Vivaval]

The premise of the book is interesting, but once I started reading, it was not as compelling as I hoped it would be. I wasn't able to make it past the first section.

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting primary documents

[Grace Harbour · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love reding letters but it's not for everyone. They are so insightful of the times we lived in. The passion for this great country is sometimes hidden in the words.