Maupassant’s and My Own Ramblings

Dome Centrale 1889 Paris exposition. Italian Modern according to Guy de Maupassant.

I am listening to a travelogue by Guy de Maupassant and it begins with a diatribe about the French Exposition of 1889. He’s fed up, he says, by the sight of the Eiffel Tower, which you can see from anywhere, and which you can see everywhere, made out of every conceivable material in every shop window.

Ah, the modern age. John Berger explains about it in Ways of Seeing.

Maupassant goes on to complain that you can’t get a taxi or a table in a restaurant, because of the crowd that smell of perspiration.

He sees the Exposition as a tribute to the industrial sciences,and a slap in the fact to art, and a sign of a new society, without castes, just the poor and the rich.

He sees the future in the present, like all good artists.

Right now, I am ready to get down to writing the Final Draft of Flo in the City. Thanks to another discovery on the litteratureaudio website, a poem by Victor Hugo about child labourers, I figured out the plot. And I’ve done all the research, too, although yesterday I dug around for examples of health hazards for workers in textile in the era.

My story begins with Flo in her crunch year at High School: she has to read this poem by Hugo and it is difficult. She brings it to the only French girl she knows, an apprentice in the millinery shop, who has trouble reading it herself. But as they decipher the theme of the poem, the girl becomes agitated: for she is French Canadian and many of her relations work in the Dominion Textile factory at Magog. Flo says, “Well, it’s nice that we don’t have such things anymore.”

And then she tells Flora about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, just the week before, about the girls jumping out of windows to their deaths.

And Flora says, what has that got to do with me? Girls in New York. And from foreign parts too. And besides, we at home make our own shirtwaists.

Yes, but do you make the “coton” too, the French girl asks? And then she tells her about the factory at Magog. About the girls who work there. (She would have to work there were it not for the fact her aunt knows the owner of the this millinery shop.. and she can speak English.)

And so Flora is introduced to an aspect of social responsibility not usually reflected on by Presbyterians…who are more concerned with the vanity aspect of women’s dress and not the social costs of this preoccupation.

Ps. Today, I was talking to my brother in law who brought up Flo and said she often spoke of the students at William Lunn. She remarked how the Jewish parents would be upset if their children only got 90′s.

That’s for the final part of Flo in the City, when she is working. She does mention in a 1914 letter that Parent’s Day is a great success, with all the moms and dads coming out wanting to know about Johnny and Sally.

Bits and Pieces… of Flo History

I dug out a plastic grocery bag filled with Nicholson miscellany, really remnants I didn’t know what to do with five years ago.

I was hoping to find something important and relevant to Flo in the City, my work in progress about a girl coming of age in the 1910 era, now that I know so much more about the family.

And sure enough, I did.

Above is a receipt for piano lessons. Flora got lessons in 1910, although they are not mentioned in the letters. (I assumed she did.) and guess who gave it to her, Majory Sutherland, who died suddenly the next year.

I also found an invoice for 1910. the Bell Telephone Company of Canada.

6 months exchange service at 20.00 dollars a year. 10.00. As I have written about in this blog, the Nicholsons rarely used the phone long distance, but did phone for groceries and such.

I also found a pamphlet published in the 20′s about the Church Union debate… It starts out “In 1911 the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Canada asked for a vote of the people on the proposed union with Methodist and Congregationalist Churches. The result was 113000 in favor of union and 50, 753 opposed to union, out of a total membership of 297, 619. The Assembly in 1912 decided ‘that in view of the extent of the minority opposed to union, it was unwise to proceed to consummate the union.’

How interesting. Not quite a democracy, I guess.

And I found a little blue letter in very poor handwriting, from Framingham, July 30, 1923… another document that sheds light on the 1908-1913 Tighsolas Flo in the City Era.

It is from Nathan Coy and he is writing Margaret, telling of his wife’s Marion’s (Mrs. Coy’s) death.

Apparently Margaret had been visiting in Newton, and not been able to visit Mrs. Coy (her name Marion suggests she is one of the Lewis Scots).

Nathan Coy says he took her to Oxford and buried her with her little girl, so she had had a girl who had died.

And then he writes something interesting..”We all mourn for our departed friends but my case seems doubly hard. (He’s been an invalid for years with serious asthma.)

Of course you lost your dear husband (Norman died in 1922) but you have four nice children to comfort you while I have only an insane son who is fast getting worse. I was out to see him last week, but could not make him realize his great loss.

Well, it seems, Chester didn’t have a good end. In 1912 it seems that Mrs. Coy has hopes of him marrying one of the girls, and he does go visit them in Montreal in 1913, but alas… Marion sort of mocks this.. “Chester is the man, these days.”

He lost his mind somewhere. Boy, Mrs. Coy had a sad sad sad life.

And I have a list of the officers of the St. Francis Lodge..C.J.Hill, Margaret’s brother in law, D. M. Rowat, A S Rainbach (bank manager)W. J. Ewing..

W A Moffatt and F E Skinner are part of the finance committee.

And the Reverend Carmichael is on the charitable committee: a bit odd as the Prebyterians were against the Masons…

Dress Freaks circa 1913

I had a ‘brainstorm’ this morning: I decided to add some links from the Montreal Gazette archives to my http://www.tighsolas.ca/ website to further enhance it. (It needs a total revamp, actually). I searched for ‘aeroplane’ ‘suffrage’ and ‘suffragette’ and even ‘women’s fashions’ from the 1908-1913 era. A gem popped up first thing on the women’s fashion search. “Freaky fashions prove women are unfit to vote.”

I LOVE IT!!

The main theme of Flo in the City (and my website) focuses around this kind of thing: the trivialization of women’s interests (fashion being a big interest) and how it is used against them.

Of course, women can be their own worst enemies in this respect. Here is the wife of the VP of the US.

“Some women’s dress is not only extreme, it is objectionable. Women would do more good by correcting the dances in our cabarets than going into politics.”

I will CERTAINLY use this article in Flo in the City. In July 1913 Flo is about to embark on her first job, teaching in Griffintown. In May, Edith attends a Suffrage Event and is disappointed when the speaker, a Mrs. Snowdon, advocates peaceful change. A radical suffragist, Edith Nicholson is.

The full article is here

Small Picture, Big Picture,

This is an artifact I have on hand that shows the connection between mundane family affairs and historical events. This train ticket was used in early April, 1912. Norman used it to go home to Richmond for brother in law’s funeral. It is signed by a Mr. Hays, President of the Grand Trunk. Mr. Hays, an American, was the most prominent Montrealer to go down with the Titanic days later. Edith attends his funeral at the American Presbyterian Church.

As I edit my first rough draft of the first year, 1908, of Flo in the City, based on the letters of www.tighsolas.ca, I thought I would enter here a synopsis of the entire book. This is the outline for the story, which comes from real life.

Norm goes away to work on the railway in La Tuque Quebec; Edith gets a job in tiny Radnor Forges, teaching 10 kids; Marion gets a job teaching in the Montreal in impoverished St. Henri teaching 50 kids; Edith returns to the city and gets a job at a private school, French Methodist, in elegant Westmount; Marion and Edith shop for hats at Ogilvy. Herb is caught stealing at the bank where he works; Edith loses her fiance in a fire; Norman goes awol from work and is fired; Norman pays Herb’s way out West, staking him to -yikes- 500 dollars, half a year’s salary, were he working; Norman asks local MP Tobin to get his job with the railway back; Tobin obliges. Norman goes to Ontario. Herb drifts from job to job out West, eventually working for Massey Harris in collection. Flora is accepted at Macdonald College, ‘new teachers with new methods’; the family ‘sews her up’ for school; Flora boards in beautiful Ste Anne de Bellevue, attends classes, masquerades and gets ‘fat’ on soda and cake. Marion gets a raise and reaches for the top. Edith has a falling out with the Methodist principal at her school perhaps over Church Union debate. Margaret worries about getting enough wood to warm the house and to cook with; she attends political rallies and is all for free trade. Laurier loses the free trade election, the family is devastated. (Will Norman lose his job again?) Margaret worries about the bugs eating her potatoes; she tends a relative with typhoid, another with consumption; she feuds with her rich brother-in-law. Her brother dies, her mom dies (so many people dying). After the funerals, she takes a few trips around the Eastern Townships, sometimes by automobile, and joins the Order of the Eastern Star. “Nothing frivolous about it,” she writes. Marion is introduced to a nice man, Mr. Blair. Edith and Marion visit a rich doctor relative, Henry Watters, in Boston in the summer. He must be doing well for he has a Stanley Steamer ! Henry is everything Herb isn’t, successful and devoted to kin.Mr. Blair blows off his old girlfriend “We were never engaged and as for me there was no understanding either” and takes Marion to see Harry Lauder, the Scottish comedian.. Norman is transferred from Cochrane to Hearst and is impressed by the Indian Squaws he sees near his camp, how they can paddle a canoe and wield an axe with a baby on their back. The Titanic sinks. Herb’s debts build, he ignores all responsibility for them. The family almost loses the house. Marion saves the day with the extra money from her raise. (She doesn’t need it, she writes, ironically, because she isn’t going to get married ‘and that’s what girls save for, isn’t it, a trousseau?’)Marion is promised the 7th grade to teach and is sickened when a mere boy out of school is promoted over her and given a much higher salary. Laurier visits the Roundhouse at Cochrane to give a speech, Norm remarks upon it in his diary. Flora gets a class in school in the city (Griffintown) “not a good area of town” says Margaret, and is paid a much lower salary than the male graduate of Macdonald. Edith quits her Academy and goes to live in Richmond with her mom. She attends a local wedding and describes the fashions there. Marion looks – and looks and looks – for an apartment of her own to share with friends, for she hates the way the landlady in her rooming house lords it over her. She lands one on Hutchison with the daughter of an MNA (promising the landlady that her mother is coming to live with her) but she won’t let her obliging beau, Mr. Blair, or “Romeo” help her stoke the furnace. Marion loses the apartment (or choooses to give it up as it is impossible for the four tenants (all teachers) to work AND keep the home running well; she gets engaged to Mr. Blair, despite the fact his parents won’t have any part of it. She writes her dad asking if he can pay for a wedding or dowry. Her dad doesn’t know what to say, he is dead broke. For the first and only time, he questions son Herb’s integrity in a letter. “I hope he hasn’t got any bad habits.” BURN THIS LETTER he writes at the end. Marion and Hugh Blair marry in October, 1913. Hugh’s well off parents do not attend the wedding. Norman spends 30.00 on wedding clothes. 6.65 on a cake