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.

 

 

New Tighsolas Website

Tighsolas.ca

I finally have received the template for my new and improved http://www.tighsolas.ca/ website. I commissioned a young man with a doctorate in history to do it.

My old website is designed in ‘spaghetti’ fashion, all over the place. Yet it still gets a load of visitors and many teachers use it.

I created that website in 2005 right off the top of my head and then added and added and added pages.

My new http://www.tighsolas.ca/ website, which I will post on http://www.tighsolas.com/ is orderly and self-contained and will have a search capacity. (It irks me when I see people come to my website looking for something that is RIGHT THERE, but they don’t find it.)

Job one is to create collages for the top of the pages and that will take a surge of creativity on my part. I can do it, but I have to be in the right mood.

I like the idea of using lace and pictures and letters, like above,… at least for the homepage..

And I think I will edit the letters down to make them readable.. I’ve already started this process on the 1911 letters… I will also annotate when necessary. (In 2005, I didn’t know enough to be able to annotate, but now I do.)

The young scholar I hired told me what other, more established historians have told me: that the Nicholson Family Letters are something rare and precious.

“Having 50 letters would be good for historians, ” he told me. I have 300 from the 1908-1913 era alone, and about 1000 between 1887 and 1936.

I hope to make this new http://www.tighsolas.ca/ more kid friendly and to integrate the material in the letters with the background information about the era, the fashions, transportation, education, immigration, Westward Ho, etc. The new website’s designer has provided a way for me to do this.

http://www.tighsolas/. ca contains the letters from 1908-1913, when the Nicholson family of Richmond, Quebec was separated by the need to find work.

That era was a pivotal one… in that so many changes happened at just that time.

When I first transcribed and posted the letters online, I used eBay to purchase era magazines for background and I posted some fun articles. They are all in the public domain. But in the following years, a great deal of Canadian material from 1910 came online and I’ve been writing about it on this Flo in the City Blog. (That’s why I have to focus on the material in the letters for this new website. These days, it’s the letters that are the unique aspect of Tighsolas. The background info is available elsewhere.)

So my new http://www.tighsolas.ca/ website will be very Canadian and will focus on an area of investigation given short shrift by historians, The Canadian suffrage movement..or lack of same. And not from the Famous Five point of view… from a new Montreal point of view.

I am also going to focus on the place where ‘education and immigration’ intersects. I’ve written an awful lot about this on this blog…

The Nicholson Girls got jobs in 1910 because so many new Canadians were coming to Montreal.

I want my website to be the best genealogy website ever…

IF I DID GO, I COULDN’T SAY -7th installment

Norman, Margaret, Mrs. Montgomery, Edith and Marion.

I am simply famished, exclaimed Marion the minute they entered the house, by way of the summer kitchen.

Mae scampered up on her light feline feet and took Marion’s bag off her hands. “Welcome to Tighsolas,” she said ironically, as this wasn’t her home.

In stern instructress fashion Marion started doling out the duties: First things first: Flora pump some water at the sink for tea.

Mae, put some sticks in the wood stove and get it to a roar. Flora get some vegetables from the cold storage. Then set the table. How long has this tongue been marinating?

One hour, Flora admitted, because she found it hard to fib to Marion.

1 hour? I think we’ll boil it a bit and then put it in the oven. Fill the large saucepan with some hot water. I was hoping to get to church this evening. Apparently, Jimmy T. is in town for a few days, up from his work at a car factory in the US. I heard he hates the indoor work, being from a farm.

Is he back for good, then?

No,the money is too good. Five dollars a day. And he has no particular skill!

It was late, but still light, when they sat down to eat, a cabbage and onion concoction that was tolerable tasty. Marian said came from the Fannie Farmer Cookbook.

Marion asked Mae for news about her sister and all the Boston Watters and her cousin was happy to fill her in.

Flora, you’ve been rather untalkative this meal, Marion said.

Her little sister shrugged her shoulders. She’d been dreading questions from Marion about how she was doing at school.

But instead Marion said, “I have news. Big news. I have given my notice at Sherbrooke Academy and I will be going to the city in September to work for the Montreal board.

Do father and mother know? asked Flora.

Well, of course, but I wanted to tell you myself.

Mae began peppering Marion with questions.

Where will you be teaching?

At Royal Arthur in Little Burgundy.

Where’s that?

Near St. Henri, below Westmount.

Is it a new school?

Yes, spanking new

What grade will you be teaching?

The first.

And how many students will you have?

Perhaps as many as 50. Double the size of my class this year, but still elementary school

“When you go to Montreal in September, will you go to Dominion Park? Will you see Pauline? Will you go up on the stage and get hypnotized?

As a respectable city teacher, if I did, I could hardly tell you.

Well, you must invite us to a play His Majesty’s, added Flora, who loved sometimes dreamed of being an actress like Sarah Bernhart.
Or a motion picture show.

At a nickelodeon?

No, at the Ouimetoscope, which is a very grand, like His Majesty’s. And very proper.

What part of town is that in?

East, but not as far east as Dominion Park.

Is it near de Bullion Street? Mae asked.

Mae! Flora admonished. What a thing to say!

I don’t know where that street is, Marion answered.

Enough questions, Marion stood up, abruptly, leaned her body forward and pressed her thumbs against the table edge, for a moment she looked strict and imposing, like the school teacher she was.

Her voice, though, was all sisterly fun.

It’s getting dark. Let’s light some lamps and go into the parlour.I’d like to play you a new song I’ve learned. Bring along some of those ginger snaps, would you?

Summertime 1907- and the living is people-oriented

In Tighsolas Garden. Left, Edith Nicholson.Right: May Watters.

Ah. I woke up at 6 and broke the coffee pot half-sleepwalking in the kitchen. I knocked it against the pots and pans I’d left soaking in the sink overnight. There’s a message here somewhere for me.

I feel Chapter 1 (Just a Change of Colour for my book Flo in the City adapted from my Tighsolas website) taking form, although it hasn’t really taken any hard copy or digital form yet. That first sentence is the hardest, right?

Still, I have a tangible sense (oxymoron) that it is about to appear, that I am about to give birth to it.

Anyway, two days ago I went bananas-berzerk trying to remember where I put Marion Nicholson’s 1907 diary,

My husband, Blair, and I turned the garage upside down looking for the little volume. I rummaged (or rampaged) through all of my giant Tupperware bins of Nicholson documents only to find the diary, hours later, in a bin I had brought up months ago and stored behind my big comfy chair in the living room.

In 1906-7, Marion was teaching in Sherbrooke, Quebec and in the summer hanging around Richmond. (She would decide in September to take work with the Montreal Board, a decision likely prompted by the Nicholson’s sudden financial woes.)

She writes: “Ed says it is very crazy to keep this diary but maybe someday I will want to remember what I did and how I spent my 19th year.” Hmm. I bet she never could have guessed this….

In the winter months, the diary details her dating escapades on the skating rink. The usual stuff of teenage love. Men who are too persistent bug her. Men who aren’t persistent enough bug her. There’s a certain G. N. E. she really likes. Sometimes she sounds like Scarlett O’Hara: “Went to a card party and dance at Mrs. Griggs’. Had a grand time. Played cards with Mr. Watson, danced with Mr. Avery, had supper with Mr. Davidson and Mr. Sampson came home with me.” (Marion was very popular, but I wonder if this is because it was still generally believed the Nicholsons were well off.)

The summer months are mostly spent visiting friends and neighbours in Richmond and playing croquet, tennis and attending ice cream socials. Marion goes to church, sometimes twice a day. She goes for ‘drives’ in the countryside to neighbouring towns like Melbourne: that would be in a horse drawn carriage. When the Nicholson women go in a car, it is a big deal and called ‘motoring’. She sometimes plays cards on the verandah with her cousins, the Peplers,who live across the street.

Strolling ‘downtown’ to get the mail also breaks up the long summer day. Dufferin Street, in the ‘posh’ area of town, is but a short distance from downtown Richmond, with its many shops and garrulous, politicaly savvy, French and English shopkeepers. And Marion often walks to the train station to meet friends arriving from the big city or other points in the Eastern Townships. Sometimes she meets her brother Herb, 21, who , it is clear from the diary, gets stir-crazy when back at Tighsolas.

The Town of Richmond exists because it was a key train stop between Montreal, Quebec and Portland, ( think).

Marion sometimes goes ‘berrying’.

When it rains she reads, (Shelley is very favourite poet) plays piano, takes ‘crazy’ pictures, sometimes plays solitaire or mends her stockings or trims a hat.

Marion rarely ever mentions helping her mom cook and clean. (Once or twice all summer.) I think as a ‘working woman’ contributing to the family finances, she was spared much of this domestic drudgery in the summer. A earlier diary entry in the winter (when she was home on the weekend) says “I worked hard as Mother is sick.”

Oh, she did mow the lawn in summer. (Typical of her. She loved to do ‘men’s work’.) And if a neighbour does call, she must stay at home and help entertain her.

Flora, it is mentioned, has some friends over for tea on an August afternoon, as well – and she visits Sherbrooke, the large town not too far away, where Marion teaches. (Her diary mentions getting a bursary in August. I believe teachers were rewarded for good performance.)

The biggest event of Marion’s 1907 summer seems to be when some new born kittens escape a barn and she has to go chase them down. Oh and this: Wednesday, July 3. Lovely day. Lily Lyper nearly murdered. Great excitement.