Letters from a Young Emigrant in Manitoba

Norman Schmidt, Ronald A. Wells

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 1981
• eBook ISBN: 9780887550614
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Letters
• Index: Literature

Letters from a Young Emigrant in Manitoba first published in 1883 and long out of print, is one of the best records of Canadian immigrant life. The letters were written by Edward ffolkes, who left England in 1880 to study at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph and later to homestead in southern Manitoba. They describe with rare insight the daily struggles and expectations of an "ordinary" man who had the courage to take up a new life on the frontier.Ronald A. Wells has introduced the volume with a wide-ranging essay on the role of popular knowledge about Canada in Britain and the significant shift of British migration from the United States for Canada at the end of the nineteenth century.This edition has been designed in the style of the original, with the addition of Norman Schmidt's evocative line drawings.

Letters
from a young
emigrant

Letters
from a young emigrant
in Manitoba

Edited and with an Introduction
by Ronald A. Wells

The University of Manitoba Press

© The University of Manitoba Press 1981

Map on endpapers of Manitoba post offices courtesy Public Archives of Canada.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

ffolkes, Edward.

Letters from a young emigrant in Manitoba

Attributed to Edward ffolkes. cf. Peel, 2nd ed., 675.

First published: London: K. Paul, Trench, 1883. ISBN 0-88755-126-2

1. ffolkes, Edward. 2. Frontier and pioneer life — Manitoba.

3. Manitoba — Emigration and immigration — Biography. I. Wells,

Ronald A. (Ronald Albert), 1941-II. Title.

FC3373.1.F49A3 1981 971.27’02’0924

F1063.F49A3 1981C81-091100-0

Contents

Editor’s Introduction

Preface

Introduction

The Letters

Acknowledgements

I WISH to express gratitude to Calvin College, and especially to its Dean, John Vanden Berg, both for encouragement and for financial assistance, which afforded me the opportunity to pursue various aspects of British migration to North America; to the Institute of United States Studies, University of London, where this and other work began; to the library staff of the British Museum; and to my wife Kathleen for all her assistance, both editorial and personal.

Ronald A. Wells

Calvin College

Editor’s Introduction

In 1883, the London publishing house of Kegan Paul, Trench and Company brought out an anonymous little volume entitled Letters From a Young Emigrant in Manitoba. It was part of a burgeoning literature about Canada which appeared in England at the end of the nineteenth century. The author is Edward ffolkes, an English emigrant from Norfolk who had studied agriculture at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph before taking up farming in Manitoba. The letters of ffolkes are among the best records of immigrant life in the Canadian Northwest during the time of that area’s early development. The historical importance of the letters can be best understood when they, like other books about emigration, are viewed in the larger context of, in this case, British emigration to North America.

Maldwyn A. Jones, in an article on British migration in the nineteenth century, suggests future areas of research.¹ He changes the focus from the United States as the receiving country to Britain as the sending country, a focus which must embrace the several countries to which Britons migrated during the nineteenth century.² It would seem less productive to dwell unduly on assimilation in the receiving country, or even to use the terms “emigration” or “immigration.” Rather, it is more useful for historical understanding to speak of “migration” and to investigate “the complete experience of migration from one society to another” — a migration which took place within an “Atlantic economy.”³

In the past, students of migration have tended to emphasize the United States, the “distant magnet” which drew some forty million Europeans to its shores. Indeed, the plethora of scholarship on various aspects of the American story is understandable given the fact that, as Oscar Handlin has noted, “immigrants are American history.”⁴ But as Jones suggests, we know much less than we would like to know about why Europeans migrated. And, when scholars begin to study the European background to migration, they find that the United States assumes its proper place as merely one of many possible destinations for the potential migrant. For British migrants, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia were at least as important as the United States, especially during the thirty-year period centred on the turn of the twentieth century.⁵

One of the most interesting questions about British migration is: why was there such a substantial switch in destination from the United States to Canada, beginning as early as the end of the nineteenth century, and why did the rate accelerate rapidly during the years before the First World War?⁶

I think that we must question the role of emigration agents in influencing choice of destination. Both before Confederation⁷ and after, Canadian agents were only marginally successful in diverting the migration stream from the United States to Canada.⁸ Yet when that stream, at least the one from Britain, did turn in Canada’s favour, it “was as welcome as it was unexpected.”⁹ Government attempts to lure farmers from the United States to the Canadian Northwest, however, appear to have been more successful.¹⁰ What drew Americans to the Canadian West was the same thing which drew Britons: the availability of good land, and, with the coming of the railway, Canadian land was commercially viable. It did not seem to matter whether or not agents were trying to lure migrants to the Canadian West; mi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Letters From a Young Emigrant in Manitoba
• Map 1
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Editor’s Introduction
• Preface
• Introduction
• The Letters
• Afterword
• Map 2
• Titles of related interest