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Reviews
Undelivered Letters to Hudson's Bay Company Men on the Northwest Coast of America, 1830–57
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Edited by Judith Hudson Beattie and Helen M. Buss
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University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 2003. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. 512 pages. $85.00 cloth, $34.95 paper (Canadian).
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Reviewed by Barbara Belyea
University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta
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The undelivered letters in this collection were addressed to employees
of the Hudson's Bay Company stationed on the northwest Pacific coast
between 1830 and 1860. Since these men were itinerant workers under
short-term contracts, over two hundred letters failed to reach their
intended recipients and were returned to the HBC's headquarters
in London. Now these private letters from "ordinary people ... have
been delivered to us" (p. 407).
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Judith Hudson Beattie's longstanding interest in the undelivered letters is well served by her matchless knowledge of the HBC Archives. Helen M. Buss contributes a specialization in "life writing." They present the letters in two ways — as annotated documents and as stories overheard, as it were, in what the writers chose to communicate. |
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It is difficult to consider the letter writers simply as "ordinary people," as the editors claim (p. 7). The letters display a range of writing competence that reflects on each writer's gender, class, and region; in fact, the level of literacy could vary within a single family or circle of acquaintance. Many writers were self-conscious about their skills but labored to express themselves, assembling the letter by word and phrase, repeating formulas that were strictly literary, not borrowed from their daily speech. "Dear Sun," wrote the father of a Kentish employee, "With pleshur i Take my pen Too Wright a Line Too you [h]Oping you [h]ave Bean preserved From Dangers so Grat Crosing That Grate Oshing [ocean]" (p. 361). |
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Most writers communicated no more than "home news," usually a catalog of marriages and deaths, always a comment on money or the lack of it. Yet these intensely personal letters, as well as the few that indicate wider interests and awareness, document economic and social movements of the period. A Londoner told his son that "the old Houses in yure street is all pulled Down for the Railway" (p. 217) — indicating the effect on individual lives of a recent invention that, together with steamships, revolutionized transportation during this period. Political events important for social reform were also noted. Letter-writers observed that "the bill of Reform is passed after great resistance from the tory part" (p. 28) and that "thare is great disturbens on acc[oun]t of the reform Bill" (p. 36), made law in 1832. The writers of these letters led precarious lives, and a long period of economic depression meant that they could at best "rub a long from day to day" (p. 377). A letter from Orkney details the seasonal work that kept many families going from year to year. When health and money failed, these people faced misery, years of employment abroad, or emigration. "Thare is nothing new here it is like a toun to let," complained the wife of a ship's carpenter (p. 158). "Any thing would be better than staying in this unfortunate country," wrote an Irishman in 1848 (p. 203). Readiness to leave was fueled not only by hard times at home but also by letters from abroad that told of land in new colonies, adventures in goldfields, and alliances with "black girls." The brother of a laborer at Fort Victoria wrote of strolling by the Deptford docks in 1850: "i see the hudson bay compnay ... ship ... thay told me there was about 100 Fameiley come out in the ship[.] i wish i was one of them" (p. 366). Much has been written about "chain migration"; these letters reveal its first links. |
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The Undelivered Letters collection is compelling for its glimpse into the lives of modest people faced with harsh conditions of estrangement and uncertainty. It also corroborates other fur-trade documents that make only brief and incidental reference to the sailors, laborers, and tradesmen who constituted the vast majority of HBC employees. The collection indicates how technical innovations and political reforms were viewed by the social classes who stood to gain most from them. For these reasons, Undelivered Letters is indispensable for anyone interested in these aspects of nineteenth-century British society and empire. |
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The book's editorial apparatus is an odd mix, however. Although the editors state that their "main aim has been to let the general reader enjoy the flow of the letters, uninterrupted by ... footnotes, while supplying full references for those who wish to pursue further research" (p. 11), the heavy emendations do disturb "the flow of the letters." Beattie's meticulous endnotes on ships, posts, and men set the letters in their HBC context. Records such as the Orkney censuses have been consulted to follow the lives of employees before and after their contact with the company. Yet, almost no information is provided on events and conditions in Britain and Québec that would set the letter-writers in their own contexts. Instead, the letters are embedded in a commentary, composed largely of paraphrase and speculation, designed to let readers feel an "intimacy, an attachment ... to live inside the lives of the correspondents" (p. 407). The commentary encourages a naïve way of reading "so-called naïve accounts" (p. 406) that underestimates their historical specificity. Instead of supporting information, readers must be content with sentimental reiteration of the letters' homespun eloquence. |
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The undelivered letters are indeed transcripts of intimacy, but that intimacy is not ours. We are not the readers to whom these writers directed the thoughts and emotions they had harbored for many months. This misdirection is why, of all the themes running though in the letters, the theme of separation is the most poignant. "Dear love tho I am here I am there," wrote Mary Macdonald to Allan MacIsaac in 1851 (p. 333). The writer's double presence is a rhetorical trick, one that touches us because, like her, we are here, not there. The letters are "delivered to us" as the written trace of a world now past, and their status as signs of the past is their enduring charm. |
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