Did Toronto Inspire "A Christmas Carol"?
Plus a mysterious sewer entrance, a Victorian spat, and more...
One spring evening 180 years ago, a steamship pulled into Toronto's harbour. That, in itself, wasn't a notable event. The city was booming. Ships were coming and going every day. Even this particular ship was a familiar sight; it made the four-hour crossing from Niagara on a regular schedule. There was no fanfare upon its arrival; no welcome committee was formed. But if the people of Toronto had seen the passenger list, it would have been a very different story. On board that ship was one of history's most famous authors. Charles Dickens had come to town.
This was May 1842. Dickens was still a young man, just 30 years old. But he'd already written Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and The Pickwick Papers. He was a major celebrity by the time he left England with his wife Kate and their maid, setting out across the ocean for a tour of North America. During the first leg of the trip — a three-month voyage across the United States — he was feted and wined and dined, confronted by the true enormity of his international popularity for the first time.
The final leg of the tour would take them through the Canadian colonies. Dickens crossed the border at Niagara, relieved to be back on British soil and awe-struck by the majesty of the falls. (His wife's maid, Anne, was less impressed. "It's nothing but water," she complained, "and there's too much of that.") After a week spent playing the tourist, the author caught a steamship across Lake Ontario, bound for his first big Canadian city.
Toronto was half a century old, still transitioning from its origins as a muddy frontier town into a modern metropolis. It was now home to about 15,000 people and growing all the time. Dickens checked in at the American Hotel (which stood at the corner of Yonge & Front, across the street from where the Hockey Hall of Fame is now) and spent the next two days getting to know the city.
In many ways, he was impressed. "The town itself is full of life and motion, bustle, business, and improvement," he wrote. "The streets are well paved, and lighted with gas; the houses are large and good; the shops excellent. Many of them have a display of goods in their windows, such as may be seen in thriving county towns in England; and there are some which would do no discredit to the metropolis itself." (By which he meant London.) He praised University Avenue, St. James Church and Upper Canada College. He wrote about the founding of King's College, which would eventually become the University of Toronto. And he admired the public realm. "The town is well adapted for wholesome exercise at all seasons, for the footways in the thoroughfares which lie beyond the principal street, are planked like floors, and kept in very good and clean repair."
It was probably more credit than Toronto deserved. When the earliest photographs of the city were taken a decade later, the streets were still a muddy mess. (Installing sidewalks at all had been a wildly controversial initiative; a rowdy public meeting attracted a crowd so angry about the idea of paying taxes that at least one attendee was left dead after the balcony they were stomping on collapsed.) The gas streetlamps Dickens praised were only lit on the darkest nights of the year and run by a private company so incompetent it would soon be driven out of business.
Dickens missed all that. But another one of Toronto's most notorious qualities did catch his attention — and that seems to have been thanks to one of the city's most celebrated residents.
John Beverley Robinson had lived in Toronto since he was a kid, part of the first generation of settlers to grow up here (in the years soon after the British used a fraudulent treaty to seize the land from the Mississaugas). As a young man, he quickly made a name for himself as a successful politician and lawyer. He became the Attorney-General at the age of 21; by the time Dickens arrived, he was the Chief Justice of Upper Canada — the top judge in the colony. He would eventually be rewarded with a noble title: Sir John Beverley Robinson, 1st Baronet, of Toronto.
Robinson already knew Dickens. They'd met around Christmastime a couple of years earlier, seated next to each other during a dinner party in England. They seem to have hit it off that night. "He is a young man," Robinson wrote in his diary, "animated and agreeable." And when the famous author came to Canada, the judge made sure to get in touch.
Exhausted by all the attention he'd received in the United States, Dickens kept a low profile in Toronto. He gave no readings or public speeches here. While all the city's leading citizens left their calling cards for him at his hotel, he seems to have only accepted one invitation: dinner with the Robinsons.
The soiree was held at the judge's stately home, Beverley House. (It stood on the corner of John & Richmond, where the old CityTV building is now.) A banquet was held in honour of the writer and his wife; one newspaper reported that "a large party was invited in the evening to meet the distinguished strangers." But even in the midst of the celebratory atmosphere, it seems as if something went sour.
John Beverley Robinson was a stubbornly conservative man. He was the unofficial leader of a small clique of Tory elites who ran the entire colony in their own interest — a group known as the Family Compact. They wielded enormous power, determined to ensure that Upper Canada remained staunchly British, Protestant and Tory. They controlled the government, the courts, and the public service. And they were willing to fight to keep that power for themselves.
Robinson had a bloody past. He'd fought in the War of 1812 and, as acting Attorney-General, he'd prosecuted traitors who sided with the American invaders. Eight of the men he tried were condemned to death — hanged and then decapitated; their heads mounted on spikes and paraded through the streets. And in the decades to come, Robinson seems to have considered any who opposed the Family Compact to be cut from the same cloth as those traitors. He was passionately opposed to any Reformers who wanted the colony to be a more democratic place, somewhere the elected representatives of the people couldn't be overruled by Robinson and his friends.
Just five years before Dickens came to Toronto, that political struggle had boiled over into outright violence. The most radical of the Reformers — the old mayor William Lyon Mackenzie — gathered an army of rebels and marched them down Yonge Street looking to overthrow the British colonial government and replace it with a democratic Canadian republic. The uprising was quickly put down, and when two of the captured rebels were put on trial for their lives, it was Chief Justice Robinson who sentenced them to death.
The guestlist for the banquet at Beverley House is bound to have been filled with Robinson's political allies; Dickens must have met many of the most powerful members of the Family Compact. He was surely treated to the story of the rebellion and given an earful of conservative opinions about democratic reform. We know for a fact that during his time in Toronto, he was told about the violence that still occasionally erupted between the two factions.
Just a year before the author's visit, the Reformers had won an important election. And when they paraded down Church Street in celebration, they were attacked by Tory supporters. The thugs of the Orange Order were often used as muscle for the Family Compact. Robinson was a member of the fervently Protestant organization himself (as were most powerful Torontonians, all the way into the 1900s). When an Orangeman fired a gun from the window of a nearby tavern, the driver of one of the Reform candidates' carriages was wounded. A bystander was killed. Eight men were arrested, but in a city where Robinson, the Family Compact and the Orange Order held so much power over the courts, all the suspects went free. No one was convicted of the murder.
Dickens wrote about the bloodshed in a book he published about his trip. Whatever he'd been told at that dinner party, he made it clear he didn't sympathize with the Family Compact. "It is a matter of deep regret that political differences should have run high in this place, and led to most discreditable and disgraceful results," he complained, calling out the Orange Order for particular criticism. In a letter to a friend, he was even more blunt: "The wild and rabid toryism of Toronto, is, I speak seriously, appalling."
It was after only a couple of days here that Charles Dickens caught a steamship out of town and carried on with the rest of his tour. Before long, he was back home in England, where he would soon begin writing his next book. It was published the very next year, just in time for Christmas.
You know the story of A Christmas Carol, of course: the tale of miserly old Ebenezer Scrooge, who hates the poor and the working class nearly as much as he hates the holidays. Dickens drew on many inspirations for his work: his father's time in a debtor's prison, the poverty and suffering he witnessed first-hand in the factories, schools and streets of England; characters from his own life. And in the two centuries since it was published, A Christmas Carol has left some in Toronto wondering whether that party on Richmond Street might have provided a small spark of inspiration as well. "Literary historians have often credited Dickens' visit to Toronto as an inspiration for his writing of A Christmas Carol," Richard Fiennes-Clinton recently suggested, "But did our rabid Tories like Sir John Beverley Robinson… actually inspire the character of Ebenezer Scrooge?"
We'll never know the answer. And even if it is a little bit true, it seems likely those two days in Toronto were just a drop in an ocean of inspiration. But at the very least, it's a delightfully intriguing thought. As I press play on The Muppet Christmas Carol this year, I'll certainly be thinking about the visit Charles Dickens once paid to Toronto. And as Michael Caine mutters "bah humbug," I'll be reminded of what the great Victorian author had to say about our city — and about those who seek to rule over it.
I was first tipped off to the potential connection between the Toronto visit and A Christmas Carol thanks to Richard Fiennes-Clinton, the owner of Muddy York Tours. He recently posted a couple of new lectures on YouTube all about the history of Christmas in Toronto. One is “A History of Eaton’s & The Toronto Santa Claus Parade”, which you can watch here. The other is a more general history of the holiday, but is the one that touches on Dickens’ visit, “Tales of Christmas Past.” You can watch it here.
LAST MINUTE GIFT IDEA…
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QUICK LINKS
The best of everything else that’s new in Toronto’s past…
PORTAL TO THE UNDERWORLD NEWS — Sabrine Gamrot tracks down a sewer cover that may have been installed 130 years ago here, which inspired Eric Sehr to dive into the question of whether it really is that old and how it has survived to the present day:
Click to read the full thread
VICTORIAN SPAT NEWS — A century and a half ago, the founder of the Junction and the founder of High Park had a very public tiff over the future of one of our city’s most beloved green spaces. Hogtown 101 shared the story on Twitter this week.
(Readers of The Toronto Book of Love will know John Howard and his wife Jemima; the tragic, scandalous and grisly story of their marriage gets a chapter. They are both buried beneath a big stone cairn in the park.)
Click to read the full thread.
HOOLIGAN NEWS — Jamie Bradburn looks back to a soccer match that turned violent near College & Ossington all the way back in 1959… and those who wanted to get rid of the sport altogether. Read more.
DRAG NEWS — On Facebook, the Sunnyside Historical Society shares some old clippings from a 1920s drag show. Read more.
THREATENING TREE NEWS — I’ve recently about Metrolinx’s plans to chop down many of the trees outside Osgoode Hall, at the corner of Queen & University. Last week, a rally was held in an attempt to save them — prompting a piece by Amanda Jerome with a little more history of the site. Read more.
SILVER SCREEN NEWS — …and she pays a visit to the Fox Theatre, which has been projecting movies for the people of the Beaches since the days of silent cinema. Read more. Read more.
HERITAGE RIVER NEWS — Madeleine McDowell has been sharing stories from the history of the Humber for decades. She was a founding member of Heritage Toronto and the Toronto Historical Association (who I can remember serving as my local school trustee when I was kid growing up along the river back in the ’80s and ’90s). The Riverstoryz Newsletter podcast, dedicated to exploring the Humber’s past, got her to share some of those stories in a recent episode. Listen.
BLIZZARD NEWS — Randi Mann remembers the deadly snowstorm that pummelled Toronto back in December of 1944. Read more & listen to the podcast.
MURAL NEWS — Michael L. stumbled across a neat mural in the east end, which I’ve been meaning to share ever since he shared it on Twitter last month:
TORONTO HISTORY EVENTS
CURATOR’S TALK: LEONARD COHEN: EVERYBODY KNOWS
January 20 — 6pm — AGO
“Join exhibition curator and the AGO’s Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Julian Cox for a talk describing his research and exploring the themes of Leonard Cohen: Everybody Knows, a landmark exhibition dedicated to the life and times of iconic Canadian artist Leonard Cohen.”
$10, or $5 for members
LIVING IN INTERESTING TIMES: TWO LOYALIST
January 23 — 7:30pm — Both online & at Lansing United Church — Toronto Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society
“While building out his family tree, Rick Hill was surprised to discover a 3rd great-grandmother who could have boasted that three of her four grandparents were United Empire Loyalists—and she had a Loyalist great-grandfather, too! During the American Revolutionary War, these UEL ancestors—Henry Dennis, his son John, John’s wife Martha (née Brown), and Lawrence Johnson—all fled Pennsylvania. Three of the four made it out of the future USA, first to Nova Scotia, and ultimately to York Township and the Town of York in Upper Canada. Their stories include the Battle of St. Lucia, the Quaker religion, losing a husband at sea, founding a settlement that banned slave masters, shipbuilding in Kingston, ill-starred actions in the War of 1812, a house at the corner of King & Yonge, a Methodist bishop, and the first customer of a new burial ground.”
Free, I believe!
THE LEGACY OF THE SLAVE TRADE IN CANADA
February 2 — 7pm — Gerrard/Ashdale Library
“Author Andrew Hunter presents a reading and conversation about his new book "It Was Dark There All The Time: Sophia Burhen and the Legacy of Slavery in Canada". Joining the author will be Karen Harkins (Toronto Culture Division), Adrienne Shadd (author; "The Underground Railroad: Next Stop, Toronto!") and Charmaine Lurch (artist/educator) as they discuss the book and provide an examination and reflection on the history of chattel slavery and its legacy of racism in Canada.”
Free!
BY THE LIGHT OF THE COAL LAMP: AUTHOR TALK WITH RUTH CAMERON-HOWARD
February 2 — 7pm — Toronto’s First Post Office
“Many people who reside in Toronto share the common experience of growing up in other parts of Canada before they moved to the big city. On the evening of February 2nd, join author Ruth Cameron-Howard in a virtual presentation of her book, “By the Light of the Coal Oil Lamp” as she recounts her experiences of growing up in a rural Saskatchewan town in the 1940s.”
CITY OF TORONTO ARCHIVES: RESOURCES FOR THE GENEALOGIST
February 27 — 7:30pm — Both online & at Lansing United Church — Toronto Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society
“Do you have family tree roots in Toronto? You can discover a lot about a person by researching where they lived. Jessica Algie, from the City of Toronto Archives, will demonstrate, step-by-step, how to find your ancestors in municipal archival records. We’ll start with online resources including maps, city directories and photos, before diving into local tax assessment rolls, which can be treasure troves of information.
“Finally, archivist John Dirks, will give you a sneak peek at an exciting, newly processed collection, Fonds 602, First Unitarian Congregation of Toronto, now available for research at the City of Toronto Archives. This collection is of particular interest to genealogists as it includes vital statistics registers of marriages, child dedications and memorial services.”
Free, I believe!