“Creating a ‘Home Feeling’: The Canadian Reading Camp Association and the Uses of Fiction, 1900-1905.” Labour / Le Travail 76 (fall 2015): 109-32. (original) (raw)
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Creating a “Home Feeling”: The Canadian Reading Camp Association and the Uses of Fiction, 1900–1905
2015
Although the history of Canada ’s oldest adult literacy organization, Frontier College, is of great relevance to labour studies, it has been more or less ignored by this field, largely because of its links to the early 20th-century social gospel movement and because of the difficulty of studying workers’ responses to the association. This article examines the first half-decade of Frontier College (known until 1919 as the Canadian Reading Camp Association) using a variety of methodologies – labour history, cultural and literary history, the history of education, and the history of reading – to understand how culture was used in the service of liberal government in the context of northern Ontario’s lumber camps at the turn of the century. The association’s promotion of literacy via fiction for frontier labourers signalled a new acceptance in Canada of the notion that workers might actually be improved through fiction. Alfred Fitzpatrick, the association’s founder, feared a state that ...
Reading Camps and Travelling Libraries in New Ontario, 1900-1905
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In 1900, the Ontario Department of Education and Alfred Fitzpatrick, who was inspired by Social Gospel ideas, engaged in an experiment to supply books to reading camps for lumber, mining, and railway workers in Northern Ontario. The center-periphery interplay between education officials and Fitzpatrick gave birth to two important adult education agencies: Frontier College and Ontario's travelling library system. Although the Department partially accepted Fitzpatrick's original plan for library extension, he garnered enough public support and employer endorsements to leverage government action on key issues related to a systematic book supply, the reduction of illiteracy, and non-formal adult learning techniques. This paper uses primary sources to examine the differing objectives held by Fitzpatrick and the Department during their initial joint venture prior to the Ontario election of 1905. The study highlights why travelling libraries eventually became a provincial responsibility; as well, it shows Fitzpatrick reshaped his original plans by practical interactions with resource workers that led to new approaches for adult learning at the outset of the 20th century.
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For an Ethic of Discomfort: Studying Canadian Literature(s) from Afar
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