About

A digital book edited by Jane Rupert

Dr Henry Wentworth Acland’s mid-nineteenth century letters provide an engaging account of a vibrant period of transition. His first-hand observations encompass not only shifts in imperial relations but the momentum in science and medicine, transport and trade, education and religion.

Sir Henry Wentworth Acland’s Letters

The well-informed, first-hand observations of Dr Henry Wentworth Acland, Oxford Professor of Medicine, were written while travelling in the company of the period’s most eminent politicians just seven years before Confederation and during a critical period of shifting relations with First Nations. His eloquent letters will engage the modern reader through his account of a vibrant period of transition not only in imperial relations but in science and medicine; trade and transport; education and religion.

Contextualization of the Letters

For each letter, contextualized notes animate the context of Acland’s broad-ranging observations and provide a glimpse into the rich background of the observer. For example, Acland’s judgments on lunatic asylums in the Atlantic colonies and Quebec are placed within the context of the period’s new ideal in therapy that lies at the well-springs of modern psychiatric care. His observations on the geology of coal seams in Sydney and his visits to a meteorological observatory in Montreal and the magnetic observatory in Toronto are framed within the context of the coming of age of the sciences as a modern global enterprise. Dates are indicated for the advent of the steam-driven saws in Saint John, New Brunswick, which revolutionized the massive mid-nineteenth century lumber industry, and the steam-operated grain elevators at Sarnia which increased exponentially the production and shipping of grain. The origin and colonial development of the Orange Lodge is traced in the context of the royal party’s encounter with intractable Orangemen at Kingston and Belleville. In general, the many and various people Acland encountered who were part of the fabric of life in 1860 in the British North American Colonies are sketched and identified: the Indigenous people in his portraits, lumbermen, bishops, scientists, physicians, educators, producers of cod liver oil, mining agents, and lieutenant governors.

About Jane Rupert, editor

Ph.D., English, University of Toronto; M.A., Lettres françaises, University of Ottawa

Statement

After teaching French and English in Canadian secondary schools for 25 years, I embarked on a Ph.D. in English at the University of Toronto. My intent was to investigate the philosophic sources of our current failures in education through the lucid thought of the nineteenth-century author, John Henry Newman. In two subsequent scholarly books, I explored the sources of our contemporary crisis in education in its exclusive focus on empirical reason and distinguished between the different ways reason functions in science, literature, and religion. (Uneasy Relations: Reason in Literature & Science from Aristotle to Darwin & Blake, Marquette U. P., 2010; John Henry Newman on the Nature of the Mind, Lexington Books, 2011)

A few years later, I discovered the letters of Henry Wentworth Acland through a footnote. Moved by a hunch about the letters, my new adventure began with a visit to the Sir Henry Wentworth Acland Collection at Library and Archives Canada. Through the voice of Dr Acland, man of science, Oxford professor of medicine, and affable companion on the royal tour of the British North American Colonies in 1860, I was drawn into the texture of life in the colonies in 1860 and to an exploration of  the context of the letters.

Acland’s ancestral home in Devon, the Oxford Museum of Natural Science, founded by Acland, and the Museum of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in London provided insight into the man who wrote the letters. I probed the larger context of growing indigenous grievances exacerbated by shifting relations with the Indian Department that underlie Acland’s portraits of Mi’Maq, Maliseet, Mohawk, and Ojibwa. The letters required an investigation into pioneers in the developing new sciences in connection to his visits to a kersosene manufacture in Saint John, to the Museum of Geology and a meteorological observatory in Montreal, and to the important magnetic observatory in Toronto  Reports on asylums in the Maritime colonies led to an examination of the period’s radical new idea of therapeutic cure. An account of the official royal opening of Montreal’s Victoria Bridge required an exploration of the engineering challenges of ice-floes and reading about the impressively precise prefabrication of the bridge’s 10,000 iron components in Liverpool. Conversations with physicians in Montreal and with bishops in St John’s, encounters with premiers and timber barons, the spectacle of a tight-rope walker in Niagara Falls all called similarly for context. It is my hope that readers will enjoy this excursion into nineteenth-century life and thought with both the excitement and pleasure I experienced in its exploration.

Jane Rupert
Jane Rupert lives in Madoc, Ontario, Canada.