A Boy's Cottage Diary, 1904

by Fred Dickinson, Larry Turner (Annotator)

Fred Dickinson's diary opens a window on youth and the world of Ontario lakeland cottages at the beginning of the 20th century.

"The stories we hand down, the diaries we preserve become the fabric of our social history. Young Fred Dickinson's 1904 account of tenting and cottaging is a spirited first-hand sketch of a long-neglected part of our heritage. Larry Turner places the diary within social, historic and geographic contexts giving it wide appeal to history buffs of all ages ...."
- Julie Johnston, award-winning author

136 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Zydny · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was hoping for something else when I chose this book--a bit more charm, perhaps. It would have been nice to see the diary in facsimile with pictures. As a general rule, I am a major fan of annotation (I actually love reading footnotes!) but in this case the noting overshadowed the text to the extent that it dulled the experience of reading it.

I longed to shout in the annotater's ear when he gave a windy explanation of Force as "forcemeat" when, really, Force was a new and very popular breakfast cereal in Ontario (where there was a factory producing it) at the time. The boy who wrote the diary would, undoubtedly, have been very proud to be part of the in-crowd with that, and it was obvious by the boy's writing that he was trying to see himself as a personality. Unfortunately, the annotater/editor of this volume fails to let that shine through. An editor needs to have sympathy for his subject, after all.

This little book had the potential to be something shiny and fun but the editing knocks it flat.