Love Letters and the Epistolary Form

 

I’ve posted my first draft of Biology and Ambition, the follow up to Threshold Girl and Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, which is finished but not yet posted as this book requires a lot of typing and I’m injured.

 

Biology and Ambition is about Marion Nicholson, a teacher in 1910 and is in epistolary form. Sort of cut and paste for me. Easier on the hands, but not on the brain. It is HARD to edit letters! Very hard. Even if you know your subject backwards and forwards like I do.

 

Threshold Girl is in narrative prose form and is about Marion’s young sister Flora, a college girl in 1911/12.  Diary of a Confirmed Spinster is about her older sister Edith and is a murder/mystery. I play with history here, filling in blanks, missing information with the most audacious explanation.

 

All stories in the School Marms and Suffragettes series are based on the letters of Tighsolas.

 

The ebooks complement each other and are meant to be read together, with Flora’s story first, Edith’s second and Marion’s third.

 

My stories are about teachers in the Edwardian Era, or the Laurier Era in Canada.  But, these letters cover the issues that are relevant to all middle class women, but I add  eugenics, child welfare, suffragettes, etc.

 

The story of the Edwardian or Laurier Middle Class has not been especially well told. Upstairs Downstairs, Downton Abbey etc. like to contrast the rich and the poor and leave out the middle class.  Not enough drama.

 

But the Nicholson family saga is a story that resonates today. The Middle Class never really changes. It’s a class full of people who aspire to be high class but fear falling into the lower class, a much much MUCH easier thing to do, especially in a bad economy. Hence, it’s a nervous class. An antsy class. And as GB Shaw said, it’s a moral class, I mean sanctimonious. The Nicholsons, who are experiencing financial problems, are all these things. They are also terribly fun loving. They want to eek the most out of existence.

 

 

 

 

Lupins and Ideology

A high school class in the 1910 era.

It’s hard to find pictures of elementary school classes.

Anyway, as I write Biology and Ambition, about Montreal teacher Marion Nicholson in 1910, the follow up to Threshold Girl about her sister Flora;s year at Macdonald Teaching College and Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, about her older sister’s life and loves at Westmount Methodist Institute, I have decided to look over some textbooks from the era to see what she was teaching her 3rd and 4th grade students.

It’s not that hard to find. Years ago I found a document at Mcgill  revealing the curriculum of the Montreal Board.

I have a list of recommended text books, from Flora’s Mac portfolio and see they used Ontario Public School texts in their courses.

These texts are online at archive.org

The Hygiene Text is most interesting. Hygiene was a subject taught, although I read that it was basically a ‘free marks’ class – which means it wasn’t really about knowledge but about something else.

Ideology, perhaps. Remember with the age of Purity and the Hygienist movement was quite racist and classist.

The book I have must have been for older classes, middle school perhaps. It has typical topics (see below) and one not so typical. Family Stock. The final chapter is on eugenics! And amazingly it uses the same case study Jukes/Edwards by a Mr. Winslip that Carrie Derick used in her speech to the Montreal Literacy Society in 1910 and that I put in Diary of a Confirmed Spinster.

Now, imagine a child of poverty who just happened to be a good scholar and who got himself or herself through to Middle School or High School on scholarship or something. There he would meet with an official text that says he was ‘inferior’ and destined to remain so, due to genes. He might also be confused by the chapter on housing, that claims that a family home at minimum  should have 1000 sq foot per family member, since he might well live in a two room flat with 8 siblings with no windows or running water.

Now, people might ask what does it serve to bring up these ‘embarrassing’ bits from history. I think it provides a great service.

Because one thing doesn’t change and hasn’t changed over the century: human nature. No doubt, there’s a lot of ‘official blah blah’ today that passes for ‘truth’  that is nothing but ideology. Well, as Homer S says “DUH.”

Well, take Finance Minister Flaherty’s remark the other day ‘that there are no bad jobs.’  If you interpret bad to mean ‘beneath human dignity’ well, then it’s debatable, I guess. Although a question best left to philosophers and kept out of the hands of conniving politicians. If you interpret bad to mean undesirable, dirty, unsafe, disgusting, soul-crushing, stressful, tiring,  stultifyingly boring, not respectable or not respected, or merely not paying enough to raise a family in this day and age, then there’s no debate. The statement is patronizing ideological bunk, coming out of the mouth of a privileged patriarch who thinks he knows best but who is way way WAY out of touch, but who controls the country’s money, our money! You know that Monty Python Sketch. Dennis Moore. Takes from the poor, gives to the rich, Stupid Bitch. I love that skit. What more Lupins?

Also one of my favorite 1909 excerpts. A college undergraduate degree ain’t worth much these days (although it may put a student from a poorer background  in great debt.)  And Flaherty seems to want to help turn the middle class into the working poor, wage slaves by cutting UI which helps people with good jobs keep their good jobs in uncertain times…like today.

 

 

From Educational Foundations June 1909

(A.S. Barnes and Company)

 

Opening to Essay Education-The Economic Side by Will Scott.

 

The state would educate the young in order to make them better citizens; in order to advance civilization. It being desirable that all of its people be good citizens, the state strives to educate the children of all.

 

The theory held by the state is also the theory of the individual – so far as other people’s children are concerned. They are to be educated so they will not violate the law – not cross swords with society.  But as to their own children, that is quite a different matter. They should be educated not only to make them good citizens, and not chiefly for that purpose, but to give them an advantage in the struggle for existence.  The object of education for one’s own children is not so much to live better but to get a better living; not so much to do better work but to get better pay….Education gives the individual an advantage in the struggle for existence only when he has more of it than his fellows…From an industrial viewpoint, education is a labor-saving machine, enabling one man to do what ten did before. Like other improvements, it tends to decrease the number of jobs, and thus to sharpen competition and decrease wages.

 

….

Excerpt from School Power: A Pressing Necessity (Frank Tate, Australian Director of Education).

 

We must recognize, that in the struggle for existence, the law of the survival of the fittest applies to nations as to individuals, and that in this struggle for existence there is not only the struggle that results in the open shock of war, but the less obtrusive but no less intense struggle of peace, the struggle for trade supremacy. We must realize too how different modern conditions are from those that obtained even fifty years ago. The history of the past thirty years yields ample evidence that command of markets is to be won by the nation that brings knowledge and training to bear upon the operations of producing and marketing commodities which the world wants.

 

 

Sir Wilfrid in Richmond Wolfe 1891

Sir Wilfrid and wife at the 1908 Quebec Tercentenary. Margaret Nicholson attended the celebrations.

As I write Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to the ebook Threshold Girl I am finding out new information.

I’ve got the story plotted out, and I’ve written key scenes longhand, and I only need for my cervical disks to heal so I can type away. The story is based on the letters of Tighsolas, the letters of middle class Canadian family in Richmond Quebec in 1908-1913.

Now, in Threshold Girl I wrote a line for Flora, the heroine (a college student in 1911/12). She is being teased by a local shopkeeper about her father.  The shopkeeper asks, “Has Monsieur Laurier given your father his job back.” (Her father, Norman, worked on  Laurier’s Transcontinental Railway from 1907-1912, but was fired in 1910 for reasons explained in my ebooks.)

Flora thinks, “As if my father knows Prime Minister Laurier personally.”

But then yesterday I find out this: That Wilfrid Laurier ran as the Liberal Candidate in Richmond Wolfe in 1891! Yikes. He lost by a few votes. He also ran in Quebec East, where he won and became leader of the Opposition, lent his name to a pivotal era in History, and created a vision for Canada that lasted for a century (and my just be dying right now.)

From wikipedia.

Norman was active in Politics at the local level from 1900 to 1910, but did he vote for Laurier in 1891? I doubt it. He probably voted for Local Man Cleveland.

As you can see, J.N. Greenshields ran for the Liberals in the election before and lost. In 1911, he supports the Tories, not liking Reciprocity, which is Free Trade. He is President of a Textile company by then.

A voting list for the 1904 Canadian Federal Election. Norman kept it so he likely was the invigilator.

A little voting promo. The story of this election is told in Threshold Girl

Double Standards

Flora and unknown woman Richmond 1908. Detail of a larger picture on this blog.

Hmm. The 1910 era was pivotal in so many ways, it’s mindboggling.

So, the piano fad peaked in 1910. Why? Well, from what I see, automobiles became the next costly fad, and middle-class families had just so much money to spend.

An expert in the Canadian family told me that the Nicholson Letters were rare in that information like this about the middle class is hard to come by.

The Nicholsons were middle class but called themselves working class. This to me just means they were realists. What is the middle-class? A group of people who work for a living, but who have pretentions to be upper class. Hence the piano craze.

Flora played piano. But she also washed and ironed her own dresses and stoked the fire. (She was proud to do it too.) Marion played piano and she mowed the lawn.

In 1910 the automobile became something middle class men wanted (because rich men had them). Pianos lost their lustre as a status symbol. But gee, there were victrolas bringing music into the home and nickelodeons to visit and car rides were excellent entertainment. So who needed pianos?

So, in my definition, the middle class is the working class with a bit more money and leisure time, but still cogs in the wheel of the economy, subject to its whims. The middle-class aspires to be upper class, not so much with servants and other employees (although some middle class had servants) but with possessions. The middle-class is a consumer class, which is why middle class families seldom rise up into the upper classes, because, whatever their income they spend it. (And these days build debt – a sure way to NEVER become rich.) The Nicholsons (despite being frugal) were greatly in debt. (OK. That’s oversimplifying as there are many barriers between the classes. Old money is better than new money, etc.)

Whatelse characterizes the middle class? A sense of moral superiority. (Hence our love of soap operas and tabloid trash about celebrities with 200 million in the bank, oh my, cheating on their wives.)

In the 1908 letters it is mentioned that a local man is cheating on his wife. Margaret says, “He might as well go and throw himself in the river.’ It is also mentioned, by Norman, that a man they know is petitioning Parliament for a divorce. And, as I wrote in my last blog, a local couple has separated and is ‘breaking up housekeeping’.

In those days, under British law, a man could divorce his wife for infidelity. On the other hand, a woman could not divorce her husband for infidelity, only cruelty. According to the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, women and men at that time ‘had achieved equality’, except in two areas: divorce laws and voting laws.

Many middle class women, like the Nicholsons, Margaret and Norman and daughters, wanted votes for women. Few women were agitating for equal divorce laws. Why this acceptance of one double standard over another? Well, I suspect if you could answer that, mystery of marriages’ true purpose would be uncovered.