Preface

This book is a recuperation of an important voice in Canadian literature, a voice that adds to and potentially alters our understanding of the Canadian long poem and the cultural values of Canadian poetry. However, this preface is also personal—it is not possible for me to write about Edward Taylor Fletcher’s works without also telling how I came by them. Fletcher’s commonplace books were passed to me by my grandmother, Beth Fairley (née Latham, formerly Gifford), who had in turn received them from her brother Ralph Latham. The manuscripts were water-damaged, but fortunately the entries were written in a waterproof walnut-coloured ink that preserved the text. Fletcher’s immaculate handwriting and the excerpts from poetry and lectures he had copied fired my young imagination, although the books did not at first reveal whom I was reading, and no one knew their origins. As I later discovered, Fletcher’s library was largely lost, and evidently his youngest son, Cecil, had insisted that his diaries be burned. Fortunately an older son, Sidney, passed those commonplace journals and a handful of other books from his personal library to his own daughter, Marion, who married into the Latham family. Her daughter was my grandmother, who married into the Gifford family that adopted me nearly eight decades after Fletcher’s death. The commonplace books and the few remaining volumes from Fletcher’s personal library are now held in the Special Collections of the McPherson Library at the University of Victoria, and his few surviving manuscripts are in Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa.

The two unpaginated volumes contained entries in several languages, nearly all of which I could not read. Nor did Fletcher’s own name appear in his commonplace books, and it was only when I was in graduate school that I finally identified him as the owner of the books by working backwards from the newspaper clippings, receipts, and one signed bill tucked between the pages. Using this information I could conjecture about the author’s identity, but it was only through the sole personal entry in these books of quotations that I could confirm his identity. Now, with his poetry and essays coming back to the world, that sole entry colours how I (and perhaps readers coming to him through this book) understand everything he would go on to write:

Quebec, 9 June 1869. Nearly twenty-nine years have passed since I made the first extract in this book: the German extract on the Apostle John bears [the] date 9 Dec. 1840 as the day of entry. Since then I have married, have had thirteen children of whom seven have died: and my dear wife died 8th April 1868 (last year): my dear daughter Harriet Alma died 8th Oct. 1868 aged 14.

By identifying Harriet Alma Fletcher who died of typhoid on this date, I could identify her father as Edward Taylor Fletcher. As an indication of his psychology, Fletcher wrote “of whom seven have died” not “of whom six lived,” and this centring of loss mirrors his response to his own experience with cholera and the loss of his mother to the disease in 1834, as recounted in the memoir of his illness in the pandemic. His son Sidney’s memories of his father’s grief in 1868 reflect this as well. Death is everywhere in Fletcher’s writings, and death is the everyday. Survival, health, and joy are the aberrations. This persists across both his published writings and his two surviving commonplace books, which are primarily comprised of his transcriptions of a mixture of poetry and prose, a significant proportion of which are concerned with mortality, presumably a subject that preoccupied him across his life.

Fletcher’s poetry circles these traumas with pestilence, plague, lost children, and mourning as frequent points of reference for sixty more years after his own experience of having cholera as a youth. These encircled sorrows also reveal ways of expressing solidarity or kinship with others through shared experiences of suffering. I completed the initial edits to this project before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. The centrality of illness and death was already clear to me then, but revising the manuscript amidst the fear of COVID-19 has emphasized how endless the bonds of shared suffering can be. Fletcher’s traumatic experience amidst a pandemic gives voice to our shared experiences today. He shows how thin the membrane is that separates our world from his.

Having established Fletcher’s identity, I realized that one of the few extant books in his library had been written by him: Nestorius: A Phantasy, a long poem of fifty-six stanzas. From there, I could locate his other works, as indexed in the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions (CIHM). This in turn led to a graduate student presentation on Fletcher for the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada conference in Saskatoon in 2004. I had intended this to be my only approach to him, but the more I read of his work, the more I recognized that Fletcher had challenged me with something different, with complexities of form and content that distinguished his work from that of his contemporaries in Canada. Before Archibald Lampman’s fluid prosody or Duncan Campbell Scott’s acrimonious wedding of racism and the birth of a national literature, there was Fletcher: working in multiple and diverse languages, and intensely fixated on overlaying many cultures, many languages, many faiths, and many places in his writings. His orientation was towards Britain and his view was openly Romanticist with all the exoticization that implies, but his writing was different in nature from what followed, and its frame of reference was wider. Unlike so many of his Canadian contemporaries, Britain was very much not the centre of his vision.

Fletcher also appeared to advocate for a more open attitude than his contemporaries to the variety of faiths he encountered in Victoria after having retired there. “[N]one having any great preponderance in numbers,” he wrote, “we all get along in peace and harmony” (“Notes from Victoria” 74). This is a natural continuation of his descriptions of Quebec City. While these are not visions to be promulgated uncritically, they do speak to a potentiality prior to the Confederation poets that might have left us with different relations today if they had not been superseded.

Of course, Fletcher is also problematic. He is bound up with the tropes of his time, with the racist Romantic figure of the noble savage, Darwinian teleologies, and the colonial functions of his role as a surveyor, as well as with the strange silence of Indigenous voices in his works—there are only a few deeply suggestive exceptions. However, reading him and learning that the Confederation poets read and admired him, forces a readjustment of our sense of Canadian literature’s heritage, rhetoric, and genealogy. It also forces us to recognize that the diversity and multiculturalism of the 1970s (if not decolonization) were not entirely new but were a rebirth and expansive transformation of something that had already been expressed a century earlier, when a more limited sense of religious, linguistic, and racial diversity prevailed. Today we are not generally satisfied with the multiculturalism of the 1970s, but the sense that nineteenth century Canadian literature may have sought something culturally and linguistically plural opens us to possibilities, or larval potentialities, that expand how we might read Fletcher’s contemporaries.

The challenge of this critical edition remains much the same now as it was when I first ventured to study Fletcher’s writings, even if its ambitions are larger. It remains a tangled knot of material histories, of real artefacts held in private hands, of a temptation to retroactively read a modern “multiculturalism” or “world literature” into a past that had no real sense of the word or employed a very different meaning for “world,” of our contemporary efforts to exceed the politics of representation, and my own aesthetic temptations to value works of stylistic complexity and of a near-modernist sense of tradition and allusion. There was no way to disentangle the material history of Fletcher’s commonplace books and library, both of which flowed through me, from the critical apparatus that I would bring to bear on the material as a reader and editor. It was only through those linguistically diverse journals that I found his other published and forgotten writings, so his linguistic pluralism could not help but shape my understanding since it was the feature most evident from the start and that posed the greatest challenges.

In 2007, I had the opportunity to discuss Fletcher’s long poems written in and (I argue) about British Columbia for the BC Studies Conference at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, an event that had settler colonialism as one of its central themes. Questions from Tk’emlúps te Secwe’pemc Nation Elders in the audience and from community members deeply shaped how I read and then reread Fletcher. This was an uncomfortable situation since I was both personally implicated as a settler who was adopted by Fletcher’s descendants and as a scholar struggling to think through his representations (or the absences) of Indigenous peoples in his works. I remain indebted to that audience and their direct, demanding, urgent, and charitable questions—I carried the draft of this book with me in 2019 to a graciously and informatively hosted tour for university faculty of the Secwépemc Museum built from the former Kamloops Indian Residential School building. I wanted to ensure I kept those questions from more than a decade earlier in my mind, and it was a private sense of thanks. My debt to those questions only grew. Today, as I make the final edits to this project in 2021, the harm caused within that building is again in the public eye on national and international levels, and any reader of this work must recognize that programs of genocide sit parallel to Fletcher’s work as a land surveyor and that his differences from Scott, while meaningful, do not absolve the similarities in their participation in the processes of colonization. The global (pandemic) and the local (genocide) both shape how I reread my reading of Fletcher as this project completed its long path.

With that in mind, recovering Fletcher’s voice should also bring his silences to our attention. He may have sensed some trace of this in his early poem, “Legend of the Isiamagomi” in which “The tide of cultivation rolls along / With ruthless haste, and stern utility / Shall silence soon the low, delicious song / Of the wood-elves” (123). In the poem, that cultivation carries with it a pandemic that nearly claimed Fletcher’s life and took those of his most dearly loved family, and likewise while he abhors that destruction, the Romanticist racism of “wood-elves” exoticizes as it elevates. This shapes how readers will approach him. As will be detailed later, Fletcher is not a nineteenth century backward echo of our terribly slow movement towards reconciliation today, and his philological hierarchies of complexities in languages were not without an easy bridge to racist tropes (that he rejected while remaining proximal to). Reading Fletcher is not an excuse for the colonial histories and racism in Canada today. Nonetheless, at the same time, he appears to have recognized the complexity and nuance of Indigenous languages, which is not typical of the orientalist philologists he read, and which he aligned with the languages for which he held the deepest respect. That is, Fletcher is very much engaged in the kind of hierarchical organization of languages that a creative critic like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o calls to account as a colonial logic to be rejected, as it should and must be rejected, yet at the same time Fletcher does not place the settler languages of English and French at the apex, which makes him differ meaningfully from his contemporaries. It is likewise easy to read (and repudiate) the trope of the “vanishing Indian” in Fletcher’s works, but it is nearly impossible to read it the same way as one would in Scott or many other nineteenth century Canadian writers. Fletcher implicitly aligns his own more Romantic values with a world that is actively damaged by the militant advances of colonization and modernity, a modernity that he also saw as connected with the pandemic disease that nearly took his life, just as it sits in our immediate experiences as readers. In this, he differs significantly from the Confederation poets who followed after him and read him, most especially from Scott.

Since I cannot disentangle my own personal and familial connections from this project, I must instead acknowledge them as influences. The next stage in my work on Fletcher came from teaching him in a Canadian literature course at Simon Fraser University in 2011. The readings for it ranged from female poets in the early nineteenth century (from Carole Gerson and Gwendolyn Davies’s Canadian Poetry) to Elizabeth Smart and Malcolm Lowry in the twentieth. But the most sustained student reactions were to Fletcher’s long poems Nestorius and The Lost Island. Afterwards, Apollonia Felicity Elsted, a student raised amid deep ties to Canadian literature, set Fletcher’s The Lost Island in a letterpress edition (2012), with newly commissioned engravings by Peter Lazarus, which was printed at the Barbarian Press, owned and operated by her parents. This was Fletcher’s first return to print since the posthumous publication, in 1913, of his “Reminiscences of Old Quebec”—a span of almost a century. The eagerness to bring him back to the twenty-first century and to living readers set aside the felicitous nature of waiting for a centenary rebirth.

It was only at this point that I began to consider more seriously the notion of preparing a scholarly recuperation of Fletcher’s works. To fully annotate Fletcher’s complete oeuvre would be both a lifetime’s work in a multitude of languages I do not “possess” but also possibly or even likely an approach that would be harmful to the pleasure of readers, both general and scholarly, including students. Both time and audience dictated a different method, and I have sought to find a balance between the narrative approach a more general readership may appreciate and the sometimes proscriptive interpretations that are helpful to students but that scholars find constricting. Time and readership dictated limitations on annotation and analysis and constrained this collection to Fletcher’s poetry and memoirs. His less accessible non-fiction prose is made available in a parallel document online, hosted by Humanities Commons, and which is cited here a number of times where his critical interests overlap with his creative work—the most obvious instance is his essay on Atlantis and his long poem, but there are several others. Scholars may prefer to access Fletcher’s ancillary works in their original state while students and general readers would likely need such a resource as a guide. For an expert surveyor like Fletcher, it is the difference between a dedicated outdoorsman and a weekend hiker—any rational trail sets its markers for the latter not the former while accommodating both, and hence I have annotated with students in mind.

Fletcher challenges his editor. He works in an abundance of languages, and his writings are deeply allusive to texts in those original languages. In these respects, he can be just as challenging to edit, or even more so, than Pound, Eliot, and H. D. (Hilda Doolittle). Fletcher also published under pseudonyms, at least in the early years of his literary career, which opens the tantalizing possibility that additional examples of his work are in plain view but have yet to be identified as such (see Morgan 1867, 128). It is also clear some of Fletcher’s writings have either been lost entirely or have yet to come to light. Subsequent academics working on early Canadian literature mention his manuscripts, diaries, and publications but without offering citations or other evidence of their existence—clues that have failed to bear fruit even after extensive exploration. Those scholars who first loosely discussed Fletcher are also long dead, such as Mary Markham Brown who identifies his publications under the names “Korah” and “Tabitha.” Their notes are long disposed of, and the sources on which they relied most likely came from private collections. Finding those lost references is a matter of luck and locality, and if those scholars drew on living memory, this is also now lost, or at least it is to me. I have relied on and enjoyed such luck and locality in other more contemporary projects, but that kind of felicitous situation does not exist with Fletcher.

In other words, this book is a beginning and not a terminus, and it carries the intention of provoking rather than resolving or finalizing. These are first not final words—my interpretations are suggestive and should not limit others.

The current edition sets out to annotate Fletcher’s poetry and memoirs in a manner intended to support an undergraduate student reader without freighting the texts with excess commentary that could distract the general reader. Scholars may find the volume overly annotated at times, while students may be left with questions still unanswered. Dating format has been standardized throughout, several spellings have been modernized, and minor changes to punctuation have been silently modernized as well. There is also the difficulty or even the impossibility of locating the original works from which Fletcher quotes, often in his own idiosyncratic translations without citations. Where it is both helpful to readers and possible for me, I have supplied citations to Fletcher’s source materials. I am neither a classicist nor a philologist, so it is certain that other scholars will have much to add and possibly much to critique here. If this volume is quickly deemed insufficient and superseded by new work with many additions, then I will have gladly achieved my goal of provocation as my own voice recedes. But none of those additions or critiques can happen without Fletcher first returning to print here as part of our wider literary heritage.