Anna Brownell Jameson

Anna Brownell Murphy was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1794. Her father was a painter, who painted miniatures and portraits. They moved to England (Newcastle-upon-Tyne) in 179, and London in 1806.

Until she married at the age of 31, she was a governess, looking after the children of the rich. She and her husband Robert Jameson did not have a happy relationship. They parted ways amicably when he left to become chief justice in Dominica. She stayed in England and became locally famous by writing biography and travel.

Her husband was appointed Attorney General in Upper Canada (today's Ontario, Canada) in 1833. She reluctantly decided to join him in December, 1836, in the provincial capital of Toronto.

She stayed for a winter and a summer. By September, she'd reached a separation agreement with her husband, and left for England. She devoted most of her time after this to the history of art. She wrote several art history and art catalogues. These activities took up the last few decades of her life.

She died in London in 1860.

She was a keen observer of people and events. Her observations of Colonial Canadian society are priceless. She wrote from something of a British upper-class, culturally snobbish position, but she was well-educated and highly articulate, and her observations are nonetheless often very telling. She was happily unreserved about her opinions of local practice and lifestyles. What she wrote says much about Canada at the time, British society in general and about her own remarkable attitudes and beliefs.

Pick up her book. You'll like it.

She wrote about her travels in Upper Canada in the form of a journal to a friend. Some of her notes are fascinating. She recorded many intimate and personal details about life in and around Toronto, small-town Upper Canada and about the personalities with which she came into contact. Here are some brief excerpts from the sections she wrote about early Toronto in her journal, which was called "Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada".

"What may be in summer I cannot tell; they say it is a pretty place. At present its appearance to me, a stranger, is most strangely mean and melancholy. A little ill-built town on low land, at the bottom of a frozen bay with one very ugly church, without tower or steeple; some government offices, built of staring red brick, in the most tasteless, vulgar style imaginable; three feet of snow all around; and the gray, sullen, wintry lake, and the dark gloom of the pine forest bounding the prospect; such seems Toronto to me now.

I did not expect much; but for this I was not prepared. Perhaps no preparation could have prepared me, or softened my present feelings. I will not be unjust if I can help it, nor querulous. If I look into my own heart, I find that it is regret for what I have left and lost-- the absent, not the present-- which throws over all around me a chill, colder than that of the wintry day-- a gloom, deeper than that of the wintry night."

"Toronto is, as a residence, worse and better than other small communities-- worse in so much as it is remote from all the best advantages of a high state of civilization, while it is infected by all its evils, all its follies; and better, because, besides being a small place it is a young place; and in spite of this affectation of looking back, instead of looking up, it must advance-- it may become the thinking head and beating heart of a nation, great, wise, and happy; who knows? And there are moments when, considered under this point of view, it assumes an interest even to me; but at present it is a false position, like that of a youth aping maturity; or rather like that of the little boy in Hogarth's picture, dressed in a long-flapped waistcoat, ruffles, and cocked-hat, crying for bread and butter.

With the interminable forests within half a mile of us-- the haunt of the red man, the wolf, the bear-- with an absolute want of the means of the most ordinary mental and moral development, we have here conventionalism in its more oppressive and ridiculous forms. If I should say, that at present the people here want cultivation, want polish, and the means of acquiring either, that is natural-- is intelligible-- and it were unreasonable to expect it could be otherwise; but if I say they want honesty, you would understand me, they would not; they would imagine that I accused them of false weights and cheating at cards. So far they are "indifferent honest" after a fashion, but never did I hear so little truth, nor find so little mutual benevolence.

And why is it so?-- because in this place, as in other small provincial towns, they live under the principle of fear-- they are afraid of each other, afraid to be themselves; and where there is much fear, there is little love, and less truth.

I was reading this morning (in "the Life of Sir James Mackintosh") of Maria d'Escobar, a Spanish lady, who first brought a few grains of wheat into the city of Lima. For three years she distributed the produce, giving twenty grains to one man, thirty grains to another, and so on-- hence all the corn in Peru.

Is there no one who will bring a few grains of truth to Toronto?"

"Talking this morning of the incidents of last night, several people have attempted to comfort themselves and me too with the assurance, that whatever might be the private loss or suffering, a fire was always a public benefit in Toronto-- a good brick house was sure to arise in the place of a wooden one.

It may be so-- brick houses are better certainly than wooden ones-- safer, too; but as a general argument, I can never bear to think that any public benefit can be based on individual suffering: I hate the doctrine, and am not convinced by the logic. In these days of political economy, it is too much a fashion to consider human beings only in masses.

Wondrous, and vast, and all-important as is this wide frame of human society, with all its components and elements variously blended-- all its maginificent destinies-- is it more important in the sight of God, more fearful, more sublime to contemplate, than that mysterious world of powers, and affections, and aspirations, which we call the human soul?

In what regards government and politics, do we not find the interest of the many sacrificed to the few; while, in all that regards society, the morals and the happiness of individuals are sacrificed to the many? and both are wrong. I can never bring myself to admire a social system, in which the honour, rights, or happiness of any individual, though the meanest, is made to yield to a supposed future or general good. It is a wicked calculation, and it will be found as inexpedient as it is wicked."

Source: Text and introduction of "Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada", by Anna Brownell Jameson. Originally published 1838, London: Saunders and Otley. Reprinted Toronto, 1990: McClelland and Stewart Inc.