Reading the Diaries of Henry Trent: The Everyday Life of a Canadian Englishman, 1842–1898 ed. by J.I. Little (review)

Reviewed by: Reading the Diaries of Henry Trent: The Everyday Life of a Canadian Englishman, 1842–1898 ed. by J.I. Little Andrew Holman Little, J.I., ed. – Reading the Diaries of Henry Trent: The Everyday Life of a Canadian Englishman, 1842–1898. Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021. 202 p. No Canadian historian has written more about the complex social and cultural history of Quebec's Eastern Townships than Jack Little, and in this slim volume, he continues to demonstrate his mastery of this intriguing region and its peoples. In Reading the Diaries of Henry Trent, Little traces the life of one man over the final two-thirds of the nineteenth century, from his birth in 1826 until his death in 1906. Born the son of the half-pay officer-emigrant George Norris Trent, Henry Trent moved with his family from Ely, Cambridgeshire, to a 200-acre farm near Drummondville in the St. Francis River valley in 1836, where the senior Trent built an impressive large and thick-walled stone house called Le Manoir Trent, which still stands today as a provincial historic site. There, Henry enjoyed a long boyhood phase marked by a vigorous life of hunting, trapping, and fishing and some efforts at self-improvement (in reading books and writing). Between 1855 and 1864, Trent led a peripatetic existence. He travelled to England and back in 1855 and 1857 and returned to live in England in 1861. Between 1862 and 1864, he joined with a small group of bourgeois London hopefuls travelling to the frontier colony of Vancouver Island to seek riches from the Cariboo gold rush or, at least, some economic success from its related commerce. When that dream faded, Trent returned to his Townships farm in 1864 and married Eliza Caya, a French Canadian Catholic half his age with [End Page 211] whom he had 14 children. Except for one decade (1873–1883), when the family moved to Drummondville, where Eliza opened and ran a general store, Henry spent the rest of his life at Manoir Trent. This book brings to readers the details of curious, atypical, "unremarkable" (p. 12) Canadian life, an anglophone aspiring (but never-quite-getting-there) gentleman outsider who was "out of step" with the times and places where he lived. We know a great deal about him because he left behind 10 volumes of diaries that cover 18 years of his life, from the time he began journaling at 16 years of age until 1898, just a few years before his death. The extent and detail of Trent's accounts provides Little an opportunity to read the patterns of this one life against the rich English- and French-language historiography on Canadian emigration, family cycles and domestic economy, rural industrialization, labour, and masculinities. There is much to recommend this book to social historians, but its biggest accomplishment is, perhaps, curatorial. Despite the richness of detail that diaries present, historians have long struggled with what to do with them, how to assess and convey their contents and historical worth. Some have transcribed, contextualized, and annotated raw diaries, presenting them in a way that reveals their original documentary form; others have intervened more fully, digesting diaries and presenting their contents as a life expressed in themes. Little pursues a third route: breaking his subject's life (and his book's chapters) into male stages of the life cycle—"Boyhood and Youth," "Emerging Manhood," "Manhood," and "Old Age"—using extended excerpts from Henry Trent's diaries to trace a chronological narrative of his life. Little's "reading" is fleshed out with historical details from primary sources and a broad range of pertinent scholarly literatures, evident in the book's footnotes. In doing this, he succeeds in constructing a convincing portrait of a life in parts, each part a portal for assessing what we know about ordinary people in nineteenth-century Canada, and what we do not. Little's distillation of Trent's accounts highlights several important themes that will be familiar to social historians, including masculinity, racial attitudes, and rural economy. In its Boyhood, Youth, and Early Manhood phases, Little avers, Trent's life was marked by a...