Glasstry news

I should work up one or two substantial pieces about George Brown before his 200th birthday November 29, but other things interfere.  More correspondence, instead, and another aspect of Victorian moral principles. Apparently this letter exists in George Brown's handwriting, but there is no confirmation it was actually sent,  The intended recipient is thought to have been Malcolm Cameron of Sarnia, lawyer, temperance advocate, Clear Grit radical turned political independent, and a frequent rival of Brown's.  It is published in Careless, Brown of the Globe Vol 1.  Thanks again to Russ Chamberlayne. 27th February, 1857 Globe Office Toronto My dear Sir: It is said here that your mercantile affairs are irretrievably embarrassed, and that you are quite disheartened about it. I yet trust the case may be exaggerated, but fear there is some truth in it. You may doubt it, but I assure you nothing that has happened in a very long time has grieved me more and I have been think...

Did you know this is Canada History Week?  Me either.  Now I do . Historica Canada has some new videos and other info  on the theme Science, Creativity, and Innovation.

A trend in historical writing?  Two of the nominees for the $78,000 Cundill Prize in History this year were cultural histories that combined a biography of a novelist with an exploration of the historical milieu in which they wrote. The winner, announced in Montreal the other night, was Harvard historian Maya Jasanoff for her book, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World . Neither Conrad nor anyone else was thinking about climate change in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when he wrote his most acclaimed novels. But many of the issues he tackled have endured. Conrad, as Jasanoff tells it, was a witness and a participant in globalization. He was a migrant, during a time of mass migration, when a hundred million people were on the move, but before there were closed borders and even official passports. And he witnessed the pushback to globalization, with the emergence of border controls and rising xenophobia, terrorism and the fear of the other. This, just as East Euro...

Ryerson One of my favourite George Brown anecdotes is one I previously published on this blog more than a decade ago:  a revealing moment in the history of Victorian morality: On his sixty-fifth birthday, 8 March 1868, Egerton Ryerson, the founder of Ontario's education system and a man of deep Christian faith, contemplated his mortality. He decided that before his inevitable end he should settle his relationships with all the people he had been in dispute with. At the top of that list was editor and politician George Brown, who, he reflected, was the only person with whom he had had really personal disagreements So he wrote to Brown that day and said, "I wish to assure you of my hearty forgiveness of the personal wrongs I think you have done me in the past�."\ Brown replied the same day. "I am entirely unconscious of any �personal wrong� ever done you by me, and have no thought of receiving forgiveness at your hands." Brown lived another twelve years, Ryerson f...

I deny not that in this protracted contest words were spoken and lines were penned that had been better clothed in more courteous guise.  But when men go to war they are apt to take their gloves off, and assuredly if one side struck hard blows the other was not slow in returning them.... It is the incumbent duty of the reform party, dictated as well by their most cherished principles as by justice, and good policy, that a full share of parliamentary representation according to their numbers, and generous consideration in all public matters, should be awarded to the catholic minority [in Ontario]... This the reform party has done voluntarily, gladly, without condition, although a vast proponderance of the catholic electors will in all probability cast their votes in the coming contest against our candidates and for our opponents.   (George Brown, letter to the Roman Catholic Committee, March 1871, arguing why Catholics should support the Reformers rather than the Conservat...

...if their sensibilities are so nice that what does not suit them must be held as insulting -- they must just be insulted accordingly....   The Globe, Tuesday April 2, 1850 Not much into trigger warnings, the old Globe .