Sunday School Education in Upper Canada, 1811-1850

More Than Sunday’s Lessons: Sunday School Education in Upper Canada, 1811-1850

Patricia Kmiec

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Social Justice Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

More Than Sunday’s Lessons: Sunday School Education in Upper Canada, 1811-1850

Patricia Kmiec

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Social Justice Education Ontario Institute For Studies in Education University of Toronto 2015 Abstract Attending Sunday school was an experience shared by most Protestant settler children in Upper Canada. The Sunday school was a local and community institution and its curriculum, pedagogy, and structure varied as each school’s purpose was determined by local needs. The motivations behind Sunday schooling varied and its purpose was never exclusively religious instruction. As a central tenant of

Protestantism, literacy education, particularly reading and spelling, was central to

Sunday school curriculum in this period. Likewise, virtues of Victorian Protestant behavior such as obedience, self-discipline, purity, and charity were reinforced in

Sunday school classrooms and their supporting communities. Broader lessons in socialization and citizenship, particularly British imperial discourses, were prevalent in

Sunday school literature as well as infused in both classroom and extracurricular activities.

Unlike other institutions of the time, Sunday schools were never imposed on

Upper Canadian settlers. Sunday schools emerged as a space created and defined for lay settlers themselves and their involvement was entirely voluntary. Sunday schools

remained at a significant distance from both official church and state structures in this period, allowing Upper Canadians to actively participate at all stages in the development of this mass system of popular schooling. Though a central organization aided Sunday schools across the province, every school had its own local autonomy.

This study documents and analyses how Upper Canadian settlers met their own self-defined educational needs through Sunday schools, both before and beyond mass state-run schooling in the province. It argues that the Sunday school was one avenue through which lay settlers in Upper Canada put the increasingly prevalent ideas of universal popular schooling for children into practice beyond the purview of both the state and the church.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to many people for the support, encouragement, and patience that was necessary for me to complete this project. Elizabeth Smyth was especially generous with her time, ideas, and overall inspiration during this process. I thank

Cecilia Morgan and Ruth Sandwell for their thoughtful comments and gentle suggestions on multiple proposals and drafts. Mark McGowan and Jane Errington were helpful in their role as examiners, and I greatly appreciate their thorough evaluations and feedback. A number of people supported this project when it was just an idea.

David Levine, Paul Axelrod, Sharon Cook, Marilyn Barber, and Beatrice Craig all provided important encouragement that allowed me, and this project, to mature with confidence.

This project was possible through the financial support of the Ontario Graduate

Scholarship, the Department of Social Justice Education, and the Department of

Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning. My students and colleagues in the Department of

Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga and New College, University of Toronto, were also inspiring and encouraging throughout the process, and deserve much thanks. I owe thanks to Marian Press for aiding in my research early on in the process and to the team at OurDigitalWorld.org for their support (and awesome databases!).

The friends and colleagues at OISE that I have had the pleasure of working with over the past six years are too many to name. I am grateful for the friendship of fellow

OISE historians Rose Fine-Meyer and Kate Zankowicz, as well as my many kindred spirits in Philosophy of Education. My friends in the Department of Social Justice

Education shared their passion and intellectual diversity with me, and I am grateful to have belonged to that community.

Finally, I would like to thank my family for their many efforts in trying to understand exactly what this project is about, and supporting me regardless. My partner, Mathieu Brûlé was especially encouraging. I thank him for his patience, reassurance, critical eye, opinions on nineteenth-century religion, and skills as a copy- editor. His help has allowed this project, among other things, to become much stronger than it otherwise would have been.

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgments ...... iv

List of Tables ...... vii

List of Figures ...... viii

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1 “Even Before the Village was Large Enough to Support a Church”: British, American, and Upper Canadian Sunday School Origins ...... 41

Chapter 2 “Differences Would Seem for a Time to be Forgotten”: Sunday Schools as Sites of Interdenominational Cooperation ...... 93

Chapter 3 “Wishing to Have a Box of Books”: Sunday School Libraries and Literacy Education...151

Chapter 4 “Our Little Periodical”: The Missionary and Sabbath School Record and Sunday School Curriculum ...... 190

Chapter 5 “Add Some Fun to Faith”: The Lessons of Sunday School Leisure Activities ...... 237

Conclusion ...... 268

Appendices ...... 281

Bibliography ...... 283

List of Tables

Table 1: Items Issued from the Book Depository of the Canada Sunday School Union………… . 172

Table 2: Recorded Attendance at Sunday Schools, 1828-1830……………………………..…...... 281

Table 3: Denominational Affiliation of Sunday Schools with Reports Submitted to Canadian Sunday School Union 1843……………………………………………………………………...... 282

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List of Figures

Figure 1. Advertisement for Sunday School Library (1849)…………………………………….176

Figure 2. Cover of The Children’s Missionary and Sabbath School Record (1845) ...... 214

Figure 3. Robert Raikes Statue, Queen’s Park…………………………………………………………268

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Introduction

In his collection of autobiographical childhood stories, John Carroll recalls one of his fondest

Sunday school memories:

The hat was passed along the class from the foot to the head; and each boy as it passed him was to put in his hand and take out one of the little billets. The hat came to me last, and there was but one left to take — it was really no choice; but, oh, joyful day to me! When they were unrolled all the rest were blank but mine, and I had drawn the prize! The first Sunday-school prize that I ever heard of being given in the town! […] In crossing the green in front of our house, and coming in sight of those looking from the door, I lifted up my prize and brandished it before their eyes, exclaiming, " I have got the book! I have got the book!" I need not say that my success occasioned great delight to all my friends, but especially to my tender mother[…] It was not a book about religion, strange to say, though obtained from a Sunday-school, and it exerted a beneficial influence on me, of a certain kind, all my life. It was a pretty 18mo., printed on nice clear paper, with a pasteboard cover of a wavy-like design. The title was, "Picture of the Seasons," and the matter a description of spring, summer, autumn, and winter as seen in Old England, adorned with pictures, and illustrated with poetry mostly from Thomson's Seasons. I read the book over and over again to myself and to my friends, particularly to my eldest brother, James, whose sight was so impaired that he could not see to read for himself.1

Carroll, who later became a central figure in Canadian Methodism, was ten years old when he won the prize book from his interdenominational Sunday school in York in 1819, one of the earliest Sunday schools in the province.2 His memories provide a rare glimpse into the informal, and often impromptu, space of a Sunday school classroom. As with most narratives of childhood experiences from the early nineteenth century, personal accounts were rarely

1 John Carroll, My Boy Life, Presented in a Succession of True Stories (Toronto: William Briggs, 1882), 138-140.

2 Judith St. John, Firm Foundations: A Chronicle of Toronto’s Metropolitan United Church and her Methodist Origins, 1795-1984 (Winfield, BC: Wood Lake Books, 1998), 7-8.

2 recorded and very few have survived. While Carroll’s detailed description of his joyful

Sunday school memory is one of a kind, the experience of attending Sunday school was fairly typical. From backwoods communities to elite urban neighbourhoods, attending

Sunday school was an experience that tens of thousands of Upper Canadian children shared.

It is telling, however, that Carroll’s reflections of his most memorable Sunday school experience occurs both within and beyond the school itself. He shared his joy with his friends and mother; he read his prize book to his blind brother; and he discovered the poetry and pictures of the book on his own time. Like all educational environments, Sunday schooling was never intended to be an isolated setting. As an evangelical institution, it was intentionally designed to reach beyond the classroom and spread the Gospel message at home and around the world. But Sunday schools brought more to Upper Canadian families than religious knowledge. As Carroll’s experience illustrates, Sunday schools contributed to accessible book distribution, provided lessons in literacy and literature, facilitated family reading, and provided a space for leisure and community-building. This thesis considers this relationship between lay settlers and their neighbourhood Sunday schools. It problematizes the question of what constituted popular schooling in Upper Canada through an examination of the province’s Sunday schools between 1811 and 1850.

Sunday schools varied greatly across the colony from their emergence in Upper

Canada in the early 1810s. Sunday schools met a number of the religious, educational, and social needs of early settler communities and could be found in rural and more urban areas alike. They taught children of nearly all Protestant denominations Bible lessons, basic literacy, Protestant morality and imparted skills such as memorization, punctuality, and obedience. Through their local Sunday school Upper Canadians engaged in a variety of

3 religious, educational, charitable, and leisure activities. Some provided clothing for poor children in the towns of York and Kingston. Others focused intensely on the rote memorization of Bible verses, or, taught basic reading and spelling along with lessons in nature, geography, and arithmetic. Sunday schools had circulating libraries with books, periodicals, and tracts that were shared among community members. Occasionally, public examinations were held for young Sunday school pupils, and a few schools focused more on encouraging revival-style conversions among even very young children.3 Most Sunday schools had some combination of these purposes and practices.

Though no two Sunday schools were identical, most shared a number of defining characteristics. Almost all served only children, both boys and girls. Sunday schools taught basic reading and spelling along with Bible lessons, and were almost exclusively under lay control. Most schools welcomed pupils of all Protestant denominations and were connected to a broader Sunday school community through local, denominational, or interprovincial voluntary societies. Because various voluntary and missionary organizations provided the basic funds necessary for the establishment of a school, Sunday schools were free for pupils, and relied on the unpaid labour of teachers.

3 Early Canadian revivals are commonly associated with the popular Methodist Camp Meeting. At these camp-meeting revivals, large numbers of participants would experience a spiritual awakening, usually through an intense emotional process and was typically expressed through enthusiastic crying, dancing, singing, shouting, or collapsing. This experience was seen by evangelicals to mark one’s conversion to Christianity. Such public revivalism was limited in Upper Canada by the middle of the nineteenth century as a result of competing theological interpretations of this tenet by various sub-sects of Methodism, as well as to challenge the negative reputation that opponents of Methodism put forth. For more see Todd Webb, Transatlantic Methodists: British Wesleyanism and the Formation of an Evangelical Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ontario and Quebec (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 137-138; Neil Semple, The Lord’s Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 213-225.

By the 1840s, those involved in the Sunday school community had established a formal interprovincial network that surpassed the state system in terms of geographical reach, common curriculum, number of free circulating libraries and volumes in libraries.4

This complex structure developed independently of the state, and with very little formal influence from any church institution. Indeed, Sunday schools, and their organizing bodies, were overwhelmingly established for and by lay women and men, to serve their own families and the families of their local communities. It was the laity who defined and shaped Upper

Canada’s Sunday school system.

Despite the fact that these spaces were identified as “schools,” provided regular access to free instruction to settler children, and taught thousands of young people how to read, they have remained almost entirely ignored in the history of schooling in the province.

By expanding the definition of popular schooling beyond both state schools, and other weekday schools, this study documents and analyzes how settlers identified and met their own self-defined educational needs through Sunday schools, both before and beyond government-run institutions. Given the widespread presence and popularity of this institution along with the absence of both state and clerical authority, the Sunday school serve as a remarkable avenue to explore how Upper Canadians not only understood childhood education, but how they actively engaged in practical efforts to meet these needs. This thesis argues that the Sunday school was one avenue through which lay settlers in Upper Canada put the increasingly prevalent idea of popular schooling into practice.

4 By 1851 the Journal of Education reported that Sunday school libraries made up seventy- eight percent of all public libraries in the province (528 out of 675). These Sunday school libraries contained nearly ten times the number of volumes kept in common school collections contributing over 50,000 items to public circulation. Journal of Education for Upper Canada (January 1851), 12.

Traditionally, historians have identified the origins of popular schooling in Ontario as rooted in the School Act of 1841 and developing under the leadership of key school promoters, particularly Egerton Ryerson. However, recent scholarship has demonstrated that in the half-century leading up to the 1841 Act, settlers were actively engaged in public debates over key questions in education. These findings suggest that the general population supported public education efforts much earlier than previously acknowledged.5 This study builds directly on this argument, yet shifts the focus from questions about popular discourse on education and towards the means through which these ideas about education were put into practice. The analysis provided here seeks to move away from the often-asked question of how lay settlers contributed to the legislative process of establishing state-supported public schooling. Rather, it considers the Sunday school as an additional educational institution through which evolving popular discourses on education and schooling in Upper Canada can be explored through both the establishment of Sunday schools and the regular practices that occurred within these spaces and their supporting communities.

This study demonstrates that Upper Canada Sunday schools were characterized by seven key values, and these make up the themes explored throughout each of the following chapters. These values emerged within in the Sunday school community from its earliest years and contributed to shaping its practice, curriculum, and structure over the nineteenth century. The ways that these particular ideas about education were put in to practice through

Sunday schooling is central to the overall discussion. These themes are: interdenominational

Protestant cooperation, central organization with local autonomy, (perceived) universal

5 Anthoy Di Mascio, The Idea of Popular Schooling in Upper Canada: Print Culture, Public Discourse, and the Demand for Education (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012).

6 access to schooling, shared curriculum, free circulating libraries, the right to basic literacy instruction, and extracurricular community-building. Most of these ideas have been previously attributed to political advocates of state schooling, in particular Ryerson and his

“school promoters”; however, this analysis of the Sunday school as a site of lay-organized community schooling reveals that many of these core values of so-called public schooling, were in fact present before and beyond the emergence of a centralized state system.

Scope and Limitations

This thesis examines the earliest period in Upper Canada’s Sunday school history in order to explore the origins of this institution from the founding of the first schools in 1811 to 1850.

This period was one of much transformation in the colony, and the Sunday school was no exception. Over the nineteenth century, the Sunday school in Upper Canada moved through three main phases of purpose, structure, and practice. Historian Neil Semple aptly describes these phases by explaining that at the beginning of the century Sunday schools were primarily “nonsectarian community organizations run by dedicated lay men and women.” At mid-century, Sunday schools had began to becoming more prevalent as “semi-independent church auxiliaries nurturing the young at arm’s length,” and by the turn of the twentieth century, Sunday schools had developed into “departments of the local churches with highly organized clerical and denominational control.”6

Canadian historians of religion, including Semple, have primarily examined the later phase of the Sunday school’s history, focusing on the period from the last quarter of the nineteenth-century as the Sunday school began to take on its present-day form. Sunday

6 Semple, The Lord’s Dominion, 367.

7 schools that existed prior to 1850 had a number of important features that decreased or disappeared in the last half of the century including lay leadership, authority of the central ecumenical organizations, and an intentionally interdenominational character. These three aspects were closely connected, and it is not surprising that after 1850 as clergy and official church organizations increased in Canada, all three of these elements of Sunday schooling declined. However, these factors are precisely what make the first half of the nineteenth century a particularly unique period in the institution’s history.

From 1823 to the end of the period under study, the majority of Sunday schools in the colony were connected with the Canada Sunday School Union, a central, inter-provincial organization. This organization effectively created a Sunday school system that included both Upper and Lower Canada.7 As a result of the cross-provincial reach of the central organization, reports of the Union make little to no distinction between the provinces, as the

Sunday school community they oversaw was perceived as one system. This thesis is concerned with the area geographically designed as Upper Canada.8

Given that records from the Canada Sunday School Union make up only a portion of the sources consulted here, it was not necessary to structure this analysis around the boundaries defined by the central organization. Moreover, the social, religious, and cultural context of early nineteenth-century Lower Canada was quite distinct from Upper Canada. As

Bruce Curtis demonstrates in his recent study of the evolution of public education in Lower

7 The Canada Sunday School Union occasionally received correspondence from schools in both New Brunswick and Maine in this period, but these regions were not officially considered under its purview.

8 Upper Canada was the official name of the province from 1791 to 1841. Between 1841 and 1867 the province became Canada West: however, both settlers and political leaders continued to refer to it as Upper Canada until 1867 when it became Ontario.

Canada during this period, that province’s unique linguistic, economic, political, and religious makeup shaped the educational development of that province.9 While the system of

Sunday schools in the Canadas made little distinction of provincial borders, any study seeking to analyze the Sunday school’s significance must place this institution within the particular context of each province’s religious and educational culture.

Similarly, this study considers only those Sunday schools that were both run and attended by settler populations. While missionary efforts directed at Aboriginal communities in Upper Canada often included Sunday schooling, these schools had very little in common with those that served settlers. Additionally, missionary Sunday schools, in general, were not connected with the central organizations, and their records tend to be kept with those of missionary associations or missionary departments of particular denominations, which are at some distance from the records of settler Sunday schools. As such, missionary schools for

Aboriginal communities are not considered here. The missionaries and missionary societies discussed throughout this thesis refer to those whose primary efforts were directed at settler populations.

The Sunday schools examined here were part of a cross-denominational Protestant community. This community was primarily, though never exclusively, defined by a common evangelical theology. The most active denominations in the Upper Canadian Sunday school community were Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Anglicans (almost exclusively Low Church Evangelicals), Baptists, and Lutherans. Many Upper Canadians were not members of any church, and some belonged to multiple denominations over their

9 Bruce Curtis, Ruling by Schooling Quebec: Conquest to Liberal Governmentality; A Historical Sociology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012).

9 lifetime. Other denominations that occasionally connected with the central union, or other key aspects of the interdenominational community, are only considered in terms of their connections to the broader Protestant community. These include primarily Quakers and

Universalists. More marginal sects, including Mormons and Mennonites, are not considered here, as they remained were isolated from the general Sunday school community during this period.10 While not part of the Protestant community, it is important to note that Roman

Catholics were considered to be in need of proselytizing by the Protestant majority in Upper

Canada during this period. There are few references to Roman Catholic Sunday schools connecting with both the central and local Sunday school unions, but it is likely that

Protestants ran these schools for Catholic pupils with the purpose of evangelizing. These schools are only considered here when they are explicitly identified as such.

Historiography of Religion and Education in Upper Canada

This thesis connects and contributes to the study of the history of religion and the history of education in English Canada. Given the central role of religion in nineteenth- century schooling, it is not surprising that the literature on Upper Canada’s religious history considers a number of questions related to education. Historians have primarily been concerned with two key areas where religion and education intersected in Upper Canada:

10 The Anabaptists were the main Christian denomination that opposed Sunday schooling on Biblical grounds in this period. Across the United States, many descendants and sub-sects of this community forbade Sunday schooling. However, over the nineteenth century, more modern, or, New Order, branches of the Mennonite Church became increasingly accepting of the practice. Opinions and practices of Upper Canadian Mennonites likely varied on the subject as well. See, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, “Community, Identity and Language Change in North American Anabaptist Communities,” Journal of Sociolinguistics 2, no.3 (October 1998): 375-394.

10 denominational colleges and the emergence of state-funded common schools. What has come to be known as the “University Question,” the political debate surrounding the establishment of a non-denominational state university in Upper Canada, has received a great deal of attention by historians of religion.11 The role of denominational colleges in the province’s intellectual and cultural history has proven to be an even more intriguing question for scholars of nineteenth-century religion. The histories of the denominational colleges in

Upper Canada, as well as the movement towards the first non-denominational university have been well defined in the historiography of English–Canadian Protestantism as historians have considered the intellectual, political, and cultural impact of denominational colleges, identifying the religious tensions between denominations that existed in the nineteenth century, as well as the increasing support for cooperative Protestant educational efforts. 12

While the question of denominational colleges has been a key area of study, the political discussions that took place regarding issues of common schooling have also been of particular interest to historians of religion. Until the 1990s, leading scholars in Canadian religious history often placed the politics surrounding common schooling in the centre of

11 See, for example, John S. Moir, Church and State in Canada West: Three Studies in the Relation of Denominationalism and Nationalism, 1841-1867 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1959); John Webster Grant, A Profusion of Spires : Religion in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988).

12 The connection between denominational colleges and the so-called secularization of Ontario in the late nineteenth-century has been at the centre of much work in this area. See, A.B McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence : Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1979); Ramsay Cook, The Regenerators : Social Criticism in Late Victorian English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985); Marguerite Van Die, An Evangelical Mind : Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839-1918 (Kingston, ON.: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1989); Michael Gauvreau, The Evangelical Century : College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991);); Neil Semple. Faithful Intellect : Samuel S. Nelles and Victoria University (Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005).

11 their discussions of religious pluralism in mid-century Upper Canada.13 The friction between the Anglican Tories and the moderate and reformist Methodists was focus of most scholarship on the political and religious character of Upper Canada, particularly surrounding the Clergy Reserves. Within the historiography of religion in the province, the key players, namely John Strachan and Egerton Ryerson, have been presented as much as educational leaders as clergymen.14 The intellectual, institutional, and political approaches that have been used to study the relationship between religion and education continue to direct the study of religious schooling in Upper Canada. They have been accompanied by work which focuses on denominational studies of education within particular churches, yet the institutional approach has remained central to both types of studies, which place official records, either church or legislative, at the centre of their work.

In the 1990s, the field of Canadian social history connected with the history of religious education in important ways. In particular, historians of religion have contributed much to our understanding of women’s educational experiences in the nineteenth century.

Religious education for women has been defined in the field in a broad sense that has included both formal educational institutions and more informal settings such as women’s organizations. It has been established that in many environments Christian education for women had conflicting consequences of both opportunity and oppression.15 Since the 2000s,

13 Grant, A Profusion of Spires; Moir, Church and State in Canada West; William Westfall, Two Worlds : The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1989).

14 Grant, A Profusion of Spires; Westfall, Two Worlds.

15 Johanna M. Selles, Methodists and Women's Education in Ontario, 1836-1925 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996); Lynne Sorrel Marks, Revivals and Roller Rinks : Religion, Leisure, and Identity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Small-Town Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); Rosemary R. Gagan, A Sensitive Independence :

12 this conclusion has been expanded on, as historians continue to locate sites where women participated, practiced and shared in religious education. These spaces included upper-class benevolent ladies’ societies and the more private aspects of family life.16 By incorporating these types of approaches, historians of religion have demonstrated how religion was an important part of women’s lives, and that various features of women’s lives can been seen as sites of both religion and education.

The influence of social history has expanded our knowledge of religious issues in nineteenth-century English Canada to include more than simply ideas and institutions.

Scholars of women, and other marginalized communities, have demonstrated the possibilities for exploring religious practice, particularly when connected to questions of education and schooling.17 This thesis builds on this field of social history of religion and expands the questions of lay experience to include experiences surrounding children and childhood, an

Canadian Methodist Women Missionaries in Canada and the Orient, 1881-1925. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1992); Sharon A. Cook, "Through Sunshine and Shadow" : The Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Evangelicalism, and Reform in Ontario, 1874-1930 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995); Ruth Compton Brouwer, New Women for God : Canadian Presbyterian Women and India Missions, 1876- 1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990).

16 See, Carmel Nielson Varty, Private Women and the Public Good: Charity and State Formation in Hamilton, Ontario, 1846-93 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014); Nancy Christie, ed. Households of Faith : Family, Gender and Community in Canada, 1760-1969 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002); Marguerite Van Die, Religion, Family and Community in Victorian Canada : The Colbys of Carrollcroft (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005).

17 Perhaps the greatest progress in this area has been on the subject of religion and education through the establishment and experiences of residential schools for Aboriginal communities. See, J.R. Miller, “The State, the Church and Indian Residential schools in Canada,” in Van Die, Religion and Public Life in Caanda: Historical and comparative Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001): 109-129; John S Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999).; J.R. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).

13 area still almost entirely overlooked by Canadian religious historians.18 It also focuses on the first half of the nineteenth century, extending these key questions of religion and lay agency, community building, and socialization into an early time period than the broader historiography considers.

Historiography of Schooling in Upper Canada

Religion was only one aspect of Sunday schooling and questions about the Sunday school as an educational institution are central to this dissertation. The history of education largely emerged within the field of Canadian social history in the 1970s as scholars were concerned with changing patterns in school attendance along with the identity of the children who were attending common schools in the early nineteenth-century. Using a demographic approach Michael Katz laid much of the groundwork for the study of schooling in Upper

Canada. Through a detailed and quantitative analysis of sources such as the census, Katz was able to trace local developments and patterns of schooling with attendance and literacy along with industrialization and the growth of the city.19 His findings highlight not only the importance of education and schooling within early industrialization in Ontario cities, but also the political and social context in which public schooling emerged. Within his studies of demographics and statistics, questions surrounding literacy became an increasingly significant area of analysis. While the field of literacy studies has advanced greatly in recent

18 While adolescents have been included in some work on women’s groups, young children continue to be overlooked in the historiography of social history of religion in Canada. For more on teenage women and religion in nineteenth-century English Canada, see Marks, Revivals and Roller Rinks, 169-188; Cook, Through Sunshine and Shadow, 154-194.

19 Michael B. Katz, “Who Went to School?” in Education and Social Change: Themes from Ontario’s Past, eds Michael B. Katz and Paul Mattingly (New York: New York University Press, 1975): 271-294; Michael B. Katz, The People of Hamilton, Canada West: Family and Class in a Mid- Nineteenth-Century City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975).

14 decades,20 in the 1970s, the focus was almost entirely quantitative and centered around determining literacy rates and their significance in connection to mass schooling efforts.

American scholar Harvey Graff was among the first to consider traditional literacy in

Upper Canada.21 A number of the issues raised in his work sparked other Canadian historians to investigate similar questions, primarily related to why the literacy rate in Upper Canada was comparably quite high.22 Graff’s studies on literacy in Elgin County relied, almost exclusively, on data from the manuscript census. Graff is representative of early scholars of literacy, as he examined who was illiterate and what it meant to be illiterate in early Ontarian society. His methodology was quantitative and demographic as he traces the origins, ethnicity, class, religion and language of those who were illiterate. From his conclusions, it is clear that Upper Canada had a high rate of literacy even before common schooling became widespread. This is perhaps the greatest contribution of Graff’s work on Canadian education, and particularly relevant to this study on early Sunday schools. Additionally, he also demonstrated the effectiveness of using the census as a source for studying literacy in Upper

Canada. Although in many ways Graff’s work on literacy raised more questions than it

20 See, for example, Bruce Curtis, “On Distributed Literacy: Textually Mediated Politics in Colonial Canada.” Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education 44, no. 1 (2008): 233-244; Harvey J. Graff, Literacy Myths, Legacies, & Lessons: New Studies on Literacy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2011); Colin Lankshear, and Michele Knobel. Literacies: Social, Cultural and Historical Perspectives (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).

21 Harvey Graff, “Towards a Meaning: Literacy and Social Structure in Hamilton, Ontario, 1861.” History of Education Quarterly 12, no. 3 (Fall 1972): 411-431. Harvey Graff. “Literacy and Social Structure in Elgin County, Canada West,” Histoire Sociale/Social History, 6 (1973): 25-48

22 R.D. Gidney, “Elementary Education in Upper Canada: A Reassessment,” in Education and Social Change: Themes From Ontario’s Past, eds Michael Katz and Paul H. Mattingly (New York: New York University Press, 1975): 3-27.

15 answered, it was crucial in presenting some of the basic statistics about literacy and placing this issue within the history of education.23

Following these important discussions in the quantifiable significance of early efforts in common schooling, was a shift towards more social concerns. This was taken up, most notably by Alison Prentice in her 1977 monograph The School Promoters. Prentice argues that leaders in the promotion of public education used their position to gain power over lower classes through perpetuating middle-class values through state schooling.24 Prentice provides a more qualitative approach in exploring the development of the public school system in the nineteenth century, through an analysis of the records of Ryerson and his colleagues along with other publications and Department of Public Instruction records.25

The main interpretation of early school promoters’ social control agenda that both

Katz and Prentice presented through their work in the 1970s has undergone much revision since the time of its original publication. Most historians of education currently subscribe to the theory that the development of a centralized, public system was a process that involved the participation of not only political and educational leaders, but also of local citizens who were active in establishing their own schools and school systems. The shift to include the

23 Graff’s dependence on census data has been scrutinized. However, recent scholarship involving more diverse methods and sources have also found evidence of comparably high literacy rates in Upper Canada, suggesting that Graff’s conclusions continue to hold true. This issue is discussed further in Chapter Three. Bruce Curtis, “On the Local Construction of Knowledge: Making up the 1861 Census of the Canadas,” Journal of Historical Sociology 7, no. 4 (1994): 417; Bruce Curtis, The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840-1875 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 205.

24 Alison Prentice, The School Promoters : Education and Social Class in Mid-Nineteenth Century Upper Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977).

25 The Department of Public Instruction became the Department of Education in 1876.

16 contributions of parents, teachers, and other community members in the emergence of public schooling occurred in this field in the early 1980s. As discussed above, much of the work on the history of education in the 1970s brought demographic and quantitative approaches to the history of schooling, and when qualitative and descriptive approaches were used they tended to place the Department of Education, or its most well-known educational leaders, at the centre. By the mid-1980s, however, interest in some of the other participants involved in public schooling increased and became the focus of a number of important studies. The motives for state-supporting schooling and increases in school attendance were revealed as complex and multifaceted involving the roles of gender, language, family economy, and public discourse.26

Similarly, historians of schooling have identified that the move towards public schooling, as seen by both its supporters and public authorities, was not simply to teach the population reading and writing, but that contributing to the development of appropriate citizens became one of, if not the, primary role of public schools. Questions surrounding citizenship education continue to be at the centre of scholarship on schooling in Upper

Canada. Issues of citizenship education became more apparent as historians were not only interested in the official record but also the habits, values, and identities that were shaped through schooling. It is not surprising that much of the scholarship in these areas has identified not only the desired attitudes that public schooling was intended to produce, but

26 R.D. Gidney and D.A Lawr, “Bureaucracy vs Community? The Origins of the Upper Canadian School System.” Journal of Social History 13, no. 3 (Spring 1980): 438-457. R. D. Gidney and W.P.J Millar. “From Voluntarism to State Schooling: The Creation of the Public School System in Ontario,” Canadian Historical Review 66,no. 4 (1985): 443-473; Susan E. Houston and Alison Prentice, Schooling and Scholars in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991).

17 also the many forms of resistance that emerged in reaction to this process of implementing a standard of citizenship. Chad Gaffield’s work on the origins of French-language schooling argues that the plan of assimilation through education intended by (Anglophone) educational leaders did not work because of the communal resistance that was shaped primarily in the family, but to a lesser extent in various agricultural communities and the church. At least some of the knowledge, values, and identities that were intended to assimilate Franco-

Ontarians through public schooling could not stand up against the identity that this community had constructed for itself.27

Similarly, the work of Bruce Curtis has suggested that although resistance took a number of forms over this period, alternatives to public schooling had been subdued by the time compulsory attendance laws were introduced in 1871. Curtis stresses that through public schooling, a particular form of citizenship was developed by the inculcation of habits, attitudes and behaviours within the public school system. The construction of citizenship and subjectivities was highly regulated through the training and monitorial relationship of state- controlled inspectors and teachers.28 Not unlike the work of Gaffield and Curtis, Gidney and

Millar’s Inventing Secondary Education concludes that the implementation of state- schooling at the secondary level was the result of a long process of negotiation between

Ryerson/The Department of Public Instruction and those who were participants in the

27 Chad Gaffield, Language, Schooling, and Cultural Conflict : The Origins of the French- Language Controversy in Ontario (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1987).

28 Bruce Curtis, True Government by Choice Men? : Inspection, Education, and State Formation in Canada West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992).

18 schools, mainly parents.29 Schooling and Scholars in Nineteenth Century Ontario by Susan

Houston and Alison Prentice also followed the growing trend in the 1980s, highlighting individual experiences in schooling along with political decisions and the official formation of the public system. This study intentionally places those involved in the everyday functions of early schooling at the centre of analysis, focusing on students, teachers, parents and community members. The authors demonstrate how an increased centralization and state presence in common schooling shifted both what was taught in schools and how it was taught.30

Most of the scholars of the 1980s and 1990s continued to use the records of the

Department of Public Instruction, yet they compared what was being said there with other published, unpublished, personal and public records. The analysis of the standard

Department of Public Instruction records has also evolved since the 1970s. Social historians have not only looked for what was directly said through these documents, but what was being indirectly said, between the lines, as well as by analyzing what was left out. This bottom-up approach has helped shape the field of the history of education into an important piece of the broader field of Canadian social history. The ongoing discussion over the central control of schools, as opposed to local control, has also led this field to be attentive to local and microhistories, another strength of the existing historiography.

More recently, historians have shifted away from the focus on class and gender to ask broader questions about the meaning of education in nineteenth-century Ontario. Kristen

29 R.D. Gidney and W.P.J Millar, Inventing Secondary Education : The Rise of the High School in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Kingston, ON.: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1990).

30 Houston and Prentice. Schooling and Scholars in Nineteenth-Century Ontario.

McLaren’s work on the segregation of Blacks from early Ontario schools has also challenged the myth that the majority of Black Upper Canadians supported racially segregated schooling.31 Likewise, Hope McLean’s work has broadened our understanding of resistance and control in the education of Aboriginals in Upper Canada by exploring how (Methodist)

Ojibwa leaders established and campaigned in favour of residential schools for their communities before these schools were state-supported.32 Book historian Scott McLaren has recently questioned the sincerity of Ryerson’s anti-American rhetoric on public school textbooks by exploring Ryerson’s role in the cross-border book trade that occurred within the

Episcopal Methodist Church in the early nineteenth century.33

Another important recent study in the field of education in Upper Canada is Anthony

Di Mascio’s 2012 The Idea of Popular Schooling in Upper Canada. Here Di Mascio argues that ideas about popular schooling dominated public discourse in Upper Canada long before the 1841 School Act that is often seen as the origins of modern public schooling. Through an analysis of public debates that arose in the colonial press, Di Mascio identifies public support for popular schooling as early as 1791. Di Mascio’s work marks an important shift away from the state as the centre of the history of schooling and towards the settler population themselves, which is explored through questions surrounding the intellectual origins of

31 Kristen McLaren, “We had no Desire to be set Apart: Forced Segregation of Black Students in Canada West Public Schools and Myths of British Egalitarianism,” Histoire Sociale/Social History 37, no. 73 (2004): 27-50.

32 Hope Maclean, “Ojibwa Participation in Methodist Residential Schools in Upper Canada, 1828-1860,” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 25, no. 1 (2005): 93-137.

33 Scott McLaren, “Anti-British in Every Sense of the Word?: Methodist Preachers, School Libraries, and The Problem of American Books in Upper Canada. 1820-1860,” Historical Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History (2013), 55-76.

20 popular schooling.34 While Di Mascio’s work is effective in demonstrating that ideas and conversations of mass popular schooling for children were present in the first half of the nineteenth century, he keeps the discussion on an entirely discursive level. This current study on Sunday school education in Upper Canada builds on his argument and expands on this question by considering how lay settlers put these ideas of free, universal, mass schooling into practice.

Historiography of The Sunday School in English-Canada

The Sunday school has received some attention from Canadian historians within the fields of education, religion, and women’s history. While these studies have been limited in both their methodologies and scope, they have laid an important foundation for the current study. Allan Greer’s 1975 article “The Sunday Schools of Upper Canada,” remains the most recent study of Sunday schools in the province before 1840. In this article, official records of

Sunday school associations are discussed alongside the public opinions of the Reverends

John Strachan, Egerton Ryerson and Thaddeus Osgood.35 There is no attention given to the women and children who participated in these schools, and very little to lay men. This top- down approach to the study of early Sunday schools provides some understanding of the official instruction that was to be had, but no impression of what was actually practiced.

Historians of religion have also considered the significance of the Sunday school within their particular denominations. By focusing on a the denominational element, these studies have overlooked the important interdenominational Sunday schools that made up the majority of the province’s schools into the second half of the nineteenth century, but also

34 Di Mascio, The Idea of Popular Schooling in Upper Canada.

35 Greer, “The Sunday Schools of Upper Canada.”

21 ignores the central organization, the Canada Sunday School Union, that served the interdenominational community. Among this work is that of historian Neil Semple, who discusses the role of the Methodist Sunday school in the on the changing theological understandings of childhood over the nineteenth century.36 He uses Sunday school books and records from the Methodist Sunday school community to demonstrate how the idea of childhood innocence gradually became the accepted theological interpretation of children’s salvation. Like Greer, Semple uses official, institutional records to draw conclusions about the Sunday school without considering the extent to which these instructions were actually applied.37 The focus on prescriptive sources alone raises many questions about the practice and experience of local Sunday schools which had no obligation to follow the instructions they received. Likewise, a few studies of schooling in Upper Canada have acknowledged the contributions of Sunday schooling as one of many sites of elementary education, yet, these do not provide any analysis of classroom or curricular practices.38

Canadian historians have also given some attention to the role of women within

Protestant Sunday schools. Though this work has almost entirely focused on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some conclusions are relevant here. It is likely that interest in this area resulted from Anne Boylan’s influential work on women’s role in

36 Neil Semple, “’The Nurture and Admonition of the Lord’: Canadian Methodism’s Response to Childhood.” Histoire Sociale/Social History 14, no. 27 (1981): 157-175.

37 A similar approach is used in the discussion of Methodist Sunday schools in Semple’s more recent study on the history of Canadian Methodism. Semple, Lord’s Dominion, 367- 382.

38 Houston and Prentice. Schooling and Scholars in Nineteenth-Century Ontario, 11, 34, 75.; Gidney, “Elementary Education in Upper Canada,”; Paul Axelrod, The Promise of Schooling: Education in Canada, 1800-1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997): 13-15.

22 nineteenth-century American Sunday schools, which highlighted the ways that Sunday schools created a space in which evangelical women could actively participate in creating models of citizenship.39 Sharon Cook’s work on Sunday school education’s connections to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union demonstrates that many of Boylan’s conclusions also hold true for Canada.40

Mary Ann MacFarlane’s study of women in the Sunday schools of the Methodist

Church in Canada at the turn of the twentieth century, focuses on how women were involved in the institutionalization of Sunday schools within that denomination. She concludes that through the various forms of citizenship education that Methodist Sunday schools offered, particularly classes for young women on motherhood and language classes for new immigrants, women were passive tools in the dissemination of patriarchal doctrines of the church.41 Following MacFarlane’s work on women and Sunday schools in the Methodist church is Lucille Marr’s study on women’s Sunday school work in the United Church and its predecessors between 1914-1934. Marr reveals that during this period, Sunday schools played an important part in connecting women members to their congregational and denominational communities. She demonstrates that Sunday school was consistently “a

39 Anne Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790-1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

40 Sharon Anne Cook, “Educating for Temperance: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and Ontario Children, 1880-1916,” Historical Studies in Education 5, no.2 (1993): 251-277. Cook, Through Sunshine and Shadow, 49-53.

41 Mary Anne MacFarlane. “Gender, Doctrine and Pedagogy: Women and ‘Womanhood’ in Methodist Sunday Schools in English-Speaking Canada, 1880 to 1920.” (Ph.D. diss, University of Toronto, 1991).

23 women’s enterprise,” contributing to the limited, yet important, power that women had in their church communities.42

More recently, historians of women and gender have revisited the nineteenth-century

Sunday school. Marilyn Fardig Whiteley gives considerable attention to women’s Sunday school work in her study on the contributions of Canadian Methodist women to the Church, yet her discussion remains almost entirely focused on the last half of the nineteenth century.43 Patricia Dirks begins to explore the role of the Sunday schooling for teenage boys within the changing attitudes of Christian masculinity in the early twentieth century, but keeps any discussion of experiences and practices of this institution to a minimum.44 Susan

Fisher’s recent work explores gender and other aspects of identity in Canadian Sunday

School literature of the First World War.45 These examples of scholarship on the Canadian

Sunday school suggest the potential significance of this institution in terms of religion, socialization, and citizenship education. However, the preference to study this site of schooling within a rigidly denominational approach has limited such research to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

42 Lucille Marr, "Sunday School Teaching: A Women's Enterprise: A Case Study From the Canadian Methodist, Presbyterian and United Church Tradition, 1919-1934." Histoire Sociale/ Social History 26, No. 52 (1993) 329-344.

43 Marilyn Fardig Whiteley, Canadian Methodist Women, 1766-1925: Marys, Marthas and Mothers of Israel (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005): 118-129.

44 Patricia Dirks, “Reinventing Christian Masculinity and Fatherhood: The Canadian Protestant Experience, 1900-1920,” In Nancy Christie, ed. Households of Faith: Family, Gender, and Community in Canada 1760-1969 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002): 290-316.

45 Susan Fisher. Boys and Girls in No Man’s Land: English-Canadian Children and the First World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011).

Sunday Schooling and Ideal Childhood

Sunday schools provide a valuable lens through which to explore dominant attitudes about childhood in the early nineteenth century. While historians of children and childhood in English-Canada have identified common approaches to children’s reform through formal institutions, such as asylums, residential schools and other state and charity efforts, the more casual nature of Sunday schools is useful in revealing broader meanings of childhood.46

Unlike most other educational institutions, the participation of parents, and to a lesser extent children, in Sunday school was a matter of choice. Thus, the widespread support for Sunday schools demonstrates the broad acceptance of the values they were promoting.

The interdenominational, co-educational, and cross-class nature of Upper Canada’s

Sunday schools emerged as an environment in which controversial ideas were intentionally avoided. As Sunday school lessons surrounding religion focused on general principles rather than debatable interpretations, so too did the more implicit lessons in ideal childhood. The notion of ideal childhood that was reinforced through lessons in behaviour, morality, and religious duty represented shared beliefs that crossed the lines of denomination, class, and, for the majority of the period under study, gender. As historians have well demonstrated, familial practices of childrearing and discipline were shaped largely by discourses of

46 See, for example, Russell Smandych, Gordon Dodds and Alvin Esau, eds., Dimensions o f Childhood: Essays on the History o f Children and Youth in Canada (Winnipeg: Legal Research Institute of the University of Manitoba, 1991): Joy Parr, Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869-1924, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994); Andrew Jones and Leonard Rutman, In the Children's Aid: J.J. Kelso and Child Welfare in Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981); Patricia T. Rooke and R.L. Schnell. Discarding the Asylum: From Child Rescue to the Welfare State in English Canada, 1800-1950 (Lanham: University Press of America, 1983).

25 childhood that were shaped by particular class and religious factors.47 However, despite the various popular views on ideal childhood, and often contradictory methods on how to develop such ideals in one’s own children, Upper Canada’s Sunday schools were concerned with providing children with a broad foundation of good behaviour and moral training upon which their families’ own approach could be fully developed. The agreed-upon traits of obedience, punctuality, self-control, generosity, and imperial loyalty were framed within the dominant Protestant discourse. Nonetheless, these characteristics of appropriate childhood were reinforced through Sunday school lessons, literature, and pedagogy, and reveal a great deal about broader social assumptions of childhood at the time.

Situating Sunday Schools within Upper Canadian Society

Upper Canadian settlers were primarily from the United States and Britain. Around

10,000 American loyalists flocked to the province immediately following the Revolutionary

War in the 1780s.48 The period between 1788 and 1812, known as “Late Loyalist migration,” continued to see the population grow as a result of the relocation of Americans who made up the majority of the province’s settler population, which totaled 32,000 in 1800 and just over

60,000 by 1812.49 European settlers did not surpass the American contributions to the population until 1814, when Irish, English, and Scottish immigrants began to settle in much

47 Phillip Greven. The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America. (New York: Knopf, 1977).

48 J. David Wood, “Population Change on an Agricultural Frontier: Upper Canada, 1796 to 1841,” in Patterns of the Past: Interpreting Ontario’s History ed. Roger Hall et al. (Toronto: Dundurn Group, 1996), 56.

49 Wood, “Population Change on an Agricultural Frontier,” 56, 62.

26 larger numbers. This British migration led to an increase in the province’s population of around five to seven percent a year until 1840, when the population reached 425,000.50

While the colonial elite tended to live in York after 1800,51 most settlers lived in much more rural settlements, with varying degrees of accessible resources.52 Settlers in

Upper Canada have been described as a “predominately rural community” and that

“residents’ lives were dictated by the need to clear the land and by the seasonal rhythms of planting, tending, harvesting, and marketing their crops.”53 Locals in the main centres of

York, Kingston, and Niagara had access to increasing conveniences over the first half of the nineteenth century including easy access to taverns, inns, shops, schools, and churches, providing settlers in these areas with some degree of choice in their everyday tasks, work, and leisure. However, most Upper Canadians, even in well-settled rural areas, lived in self- sustaining households, where all members contributed to the everyday labours associated with running such a home. Trips to the nearest town for goods, leisure, or church-related activities became increasingly common over the first half of the nineteenth century for most

Upper Canadians as backwoods settlements developed into established local towns with more local conveniences available.54

50 Wood, “Population Change on an Agricultural Frontier,” 56,62. Elizabeth Jane Errington, Wives and Mothers, Schoolmistresses and Scullery Maids: Working Women in Upper Canada, 1790 -1840 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 6.

51 York became the colony’s capital in 1796.

52 In 1851, only 14 percent of inhabitants dwelling in the thirty-three towns and cities that had one thousand residents. Julia Roberts, In Mixed Company: Taverns and Public Life in Upper Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009), 9.

53 Errington, Wives and Mothers, 7.

54 Ibid., 12.

Social relationships in Upper Canada took various forms. The division between the political elite in major towns and the majority of farming settlers in the rural backwoods was the most evident class distinction. However, from the earliest years of the colony there were

Upper Canadians who placed themselves somewhere in between these two groups, often working as merchants or in other business ventures. The first half of the nineteenth century was a time when social relations were being more clearly defined. The changes in the ethnic makeup of settlers, the expansion of land, along with political and religious movements, created a culture of possibilities, where social positions of various sorts were being negotiated.

Historians have identified some key social beliefs that were widely shared among

Upper Canadians. These include: involvement in political affairs; access to agricultural production, and land ownership, and important connections to family networks both locally and across the Atlantic.55 Over the first half of the century, more broad social goals such as continued imperial success and economic security for their children emerged.56 Education and religion were two avenues through which new attitudes and approaches towards citizenship and childhood were expressed. As the dominant worldview in Upper Canada,

Protestantism shaped, and was shaped by, multiple unique aspects of colonial life. Protestant

Christianity provided the foundation for significant features of Upper Canada including some

55 See Jeffery L. McNairn, The Capacity to Judge: Public Opinion and Deliberative Democracy in Upper Canada, 1791-1854 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); Elizabeth Jane Errington. Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007); Julia Roberts, In Mixed Company.

56 DiMascio, The Idea of Popular Schooling in Upper Canada; Houston and Prentice, Schooling and Scholars in Nineteenth-Century Ontario.

28 of the most popular newspapers, voluntary and social organizations, and educational efforts.

As an institution for children, the Sunday school can provide important insight into the process of socialization that occurred in this space. Perhaps more significantly, the interdenominational community of parents, teachers, and leaders of Sunday school organizations provides a lens through which to explore the complexities of social relationships and shared social goals that were a crucial part of building Upper Canadian society.

Preference in religious worship in Upper Canada was a luxury available to only those who lived in York and Kingston, particularly in the first quarter of the century. While most settlers identified as Protestant Christians, Upper Canadians in rural communities had very limited options for formal religious practice. Itinerant ministers sent by church and missionary organizations provided only occasional formal Sunday services, and even if a township had a minister assigned to it, worship services would alternate between towns leaving weeks, and sometimes months, between visits from the local clergyman.57

Denominational practice was unfeasible in most areas, and settlers met with travelling ministers for Bibles, prayers, and other religious needs, regardless of their affiliation.

Communities regularly came together to share informal religious service in union

(ecumenical) settings to read scripture, pray, and listen to a sermon delivered either from a lay preacher or visiting minister. Most communities lacked both a permanent minister and designated church building until the 1840s. Free Bibles were made available to settlers through various American and British missionary groups, and increasingly through the Upper

Canadian Bible Society in the 1820s and 1830s. This allowed for varying degrees of personal

57 John Webster Grant, A Profusion of Spires: Religion in Nineteenth-Century Ontario, 46-47.

29 and familial religious activity.58 In fact, most religious practices likely occurred in the home, where Bible reading, prayer and worship through song were easily available to even the poorest and most isolated families. As a space that was neither domestic, nor under church authority, the Sunday school serves as an interesting site of shared religious practice. The

Sunday school and its supporting community reveal preferences in religious education that were widespread and commonly understood.

Print Culture and Community Building

This thesis explores not only the institution of the Sunday school, but also the Sunday school community. This community was made up of primarily lay men and women, who, as parents, teachers, organizers, superintendents, or encouraging neighbours, supported Sunday schooling in various ways. The Sunday school community surrounded local schools and was involved in regional, inter-provincial, and international efforts relating to the establishment and development of Sunday schools in their locality and beyond. Significantly, the Sunday school community was also interdenominational, and was made up of lay participants from all of the main Protestant denominations including Methodists, evangelical Anglicans,

Presbyterians, Baptists, and Congregationalists, as well as many smaller sects including

Lutherans, and occasionally Universalists and Quakers.

The settlers who made up this community of Sunday school participants were connected to each other through various forms of print media. Local “secular” newspapers covered Sunday school announcements for local events, the establishment of new schools,

58 John S. Moir, “The Upper Canadian Religious Tradition,” in Profiles of a Province: Studies in the History of Ontario ed. Edith G. Firth, (Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1967), 191.

30 fundraising efforts, and the occasional controversy. The denominational press devoted regular columns to the Sunday school community that included classroom lessons, reports of main organizations and local schools, and both local and international stories about Sunday schooling. The central Canada Sunday School Union had an extensive publishing and distribution network that printed annual reports, periodicals, tracts, and books that disseminated information as well as instruction to all local Sunday schools involved with their organization.

Print media had a central role in the establishment, growth, and success of the Sunday school in Upper Canada. In fact, the emergence of Upper Canada’s mass print culture not only occurred simultaneously with the rise of Sunday schools, but in the first half of the nineteenth century, the two movements were closely intertwined. The printed material that the Sunday school community read, contributed to, published, and distributed, make up the majority of sources consulted for this study. Key theories from the field of book studies have informed this analysis of the connections between print media and the Sunday school community. Establishing the significance of this relationship is essential to identifying how ideas were shared, how practices were promoted and resisted, and how a community of widely scattered settlers with diverse political, religious, and ethnic identities was created and maintained.

Jürgen Habermas’ early work remains central in the study of print culture in the nineteenth century. His study, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An

Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, outlines the connection between the emergence of the popular press in Europe with the origins of what he terms the “public sphere.”

According to Habermas, this sphere materialized because of the communication, particularly

31 participation in rational political debate, which occurred among “the general public” through regularly read newspapers. 59

Benedict Anderson’s work on the origins of nationalism reached similar conclusions.

Anderson identifies an important link between the mass distribution and reading of newspapers with the emergence of common national identities. He suggests that readers were aware of the fact that their experience of reading newspapers was shared with others, within their nation, who read the same issues at the same time, and that this common experience contributed to the importance of an “imagined community” which Anderson places as the foundation to a shared national identity.60

These questions about print culture been applied to the context of Upper Canada.

Jeffrey McNairn’s study The Capacity to Judge: Public Opinion and Deliberative

Democracy in Upper Canada, 1791-1854, engages with Habermas’ theory of the public sphere. In his study of the (primarily secular) press in Upper Canada, McNairn effectively argues that as public opinion emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century, colonial politics developed into a “deliberative democracy” in which the public contributed to political discourse through participating in the political debates that made their way through the press.61 McNairn credits the mass distribution and widespread access to newspapers that occurred in Upper Canada before 1850 with establishing the public sphere and public

59 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).

60 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006).

61 McNairn, The Capacity to Judge.

32 opinion, as defined by Habermas. McNairn chooses not to focus on the religious press in his work, as he supposes that religion created “some of the most divisive issues” among the public. Furthermore, he oversimplifies the debates held in the denominational press as simply appealing “to a particular interpretation of God’s will,” and finds that it “could not count as legitimate participation in the public sphere.”62

This thesis uncovers that the print culture that was at the centre of the Sunday school community had neither of these characteristics that McNairn ascribes to the religious press.

It intentionally excluded any sectarian language or doctrine, and those participating in it, though denominationally diverse, had agreed upon “God’s will” in terms of Sunday schooling. In fact, the religious press in the first half of the century dominated the market for reading, publishing, and literature distribution in the colony, within which Sunday school literature was among the most popular.63 This thesis revisits some of these questions surrounding the emergence of mass print culture and community-building in Upper Canada.

The analysis is framed within the theories of the public sphere, yet is not concerned with the relationship between the public/public opinion and official colonial politics. Rather, the

Sunday school community is conceptualized here as one segment of the public in which print culture created a space where both common discourse and shared identity emerged in a way that enabled settlers across the colony to participate in building an educational system that existed beyond both state and church control.

62 This point is made explicitly in McNairn’s dissertation on the same topic. Jeffrey McNairn, The Capacity to Judge: Public Opinion and Deliberative Democracy in Upper Canada, 1791-1854 (PhD Diss: University of Toronto, 1997), 15.

63 For examples, the Canada Sunday School Union’s non-denominational periodical The Missionary and Sunday School Record reported a circulation of over 3,000 subscribers in the 1840s, this surpassed the most popular literary periodicals of the time. Mary Lu MacDonald, Literature and Society in the Canadas, 1817-1850 (Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 1992).

Sources and Methodology

Much like the schools themselves, records on Upper Canada’s Sunday schools are widely scattered. Very few Sunday schools kept any detailed records, and the rare reports that have survived are often incomplete. Moreover, Sunday schools crossed both denominational and congregational boundaries, leaving only traces of information in official church archives. Nonetheless, given the centrality of print culture to the institution, a number of descriptions of Sunday schooling and records of both the perceived and actual practices that occurred in this often casual space exist in various types of published and unpublished sources. The evidence to support the argument presented in this thesis is derived from an analysis of newspapers, periodicals, and published reports, along with diaries, correspondence, biographies, autobiographies, religious literature, and congregational histories. Approaches from social and cultural history are used in this analysis to identify the main ideas and routine practices of Upper Canadian Sunday schools.

The main sources consulted are those of print media, including more than forty-five local newspapers and religious periodicals. During this period there was also a genre of what is best called a non-denominational press that was of particular importance to the Sunday school community. These included missionary, temperance, and Sunday school periodicals that were published by non-denominational organizations for cross-denominational readership. The majority of these publications are available through the digital collections of

Early Canadiana Online, and OurOntario.ca. Additionally, the Canadian Institute for

Microreproduction has made many colonial publications available at the Archives of Ontario and the Toronto Public Library.

These various forms of regular publications provide extensive information about both general trends within the Sunday school community as well as local varieties. From the earliest years, newspapers and periodicals carried pleas for aid in establishing Sunday school, as well as covering local Sunday school meetings, reprinted reports of major Sunday school organizations, advertised Sunday school books for sale, promoted Sunday school sponsored events, and included lessons and stories to be used in the classroom. Particular attention is given here to the ways that settlers interacted with the press on the issue of Sunday schools, and how they used this form of communication to participate in the Sunday school community both within and beyond their local school.

In addition to the press, the Canada Sunday School Union had its own system of regularly published and widely distributed literature. This was primarily made up of the annual reports of the Union, which, importantly, usually included verbatim letters sent from local schools. These detailed annual reports with prescriptive instruction, meeting minutes, statistical data, and local responses, make up a crucial part of the regular publications that the

Sunday school community were reading, and are examined closely here.

To contextualize the information provided through the press and the publications of the Canada Sunday School Union, a wide range of other primary sources were consulted.

Formal institutions commonly kept track of the number of local Sunday schools in their regions. Among these, the Annual Reports of the Department of Public Instruction for Upper

Canada, minutes of various Methodist and Presbyterian Church meetings, records of the

Upper Canadian Bible Society, and early Methodist circuit reports, have been the most useful in providing statistics on Sunday school, libraries, and books. While many of these reports were reprinted in published periodicals, informal records of these organizations were

35 consulted at Library and Archives Canada, Archives of Ontario, and the United Church

Archives.

Published histories, biographies and autobiographies were analyzed and revealed some of the local details of Upper Canada’s Sunday schools. Church histories, usually written by community historians at the congregational level, remain among the best source for identifying early church life in Upper Canada. These histories, though generally overlooked by academic historians, provided a number of names, places, and experiences, simply not available elsewhere. For this study, more than 100 church histories, of congregations across the province, were consulted at the Canadian Church History Collection at the Western University Archives. Similarly, local histories primarily written by community historians, were also used to identify the conditions in which Sunday schools emerged at the local level. Experiences in Sunday school were occasionally recounted in autobiographies and biographies. While those who have been the subject of such biographies, including John Carroll and William Smart, are often exceptional rather than average settlers, their experiences in Sunday school provide a great deal of insight into the practices of the classroom. Personal memories and reflections in autobiographies also contributed to providing the perspective of the pupils themselves.

A number of archival sources at Library and Archives Canada that discussed the early

Sunday school community were also consulted. Among the most detailed were the diary of

James Nisbit recounting his tour of Upper Canadian Sunday schools on behalf of the Canada

Sunday School Union in 1848. Similarly the diary of William Smart, the founder of

Brockville’s Sunday school in 1811, located at the United Church Archives, was also examined. Material consulted through digital archives included: accounts from missionaries,

36 such as Thaddeus Osgood, the founder of the colony’s first interprovincial Sunday school organization, correspondence between missionaries and the Glasgow Colonial Society, census records, municipal directories, obituaries, and tombstones all of which have provided a great deal of data on teachers and superintendents of Sunday schools, as well as leaders in the organizations.

As a result of the wide range of sources consulted, a few key approaches were used here to determine the social and cultural meaning of Sunday schooling, rather than simply tracing the development of the Sunday school as an institution. Official views of particular churches, and even the Canada Sunday School Union itself, were considered alongside of those of the lay participants. Sources that reveal the opinions and practices of local schools are given considerably more attention than doctrinal guides and sermons. Locating the voices of the laity, whether through their own words or responses to them, is at the centre of this analysis. Similarly, the dominant discourses evident through the press and other literature, have been examined in combination with evidence from the practices of local schools recorded in church histories or archival records. The tensions between practices at the local level and discourse of the Canada Sunday School Union are at the centre of this analysis, as are the divisions between clerical and lay discourse surrounding Sunday schooling.

Importantly, the study of Sunday schools in this period requires an intentional interdenominational and cross-denominational approach to primary sources. In order to best understand the Sunday school community, this study combines an analysis of interdenominational records with those of specific Churches. In the 1820s and 1830s, in particular, records and publications of the Episcopal Methodist Church include details on the state of religion in Upper Canada beyond their own community. This combination of

37 interdenominational records with those of specific Churches is rare in the history of religion in Canada, as studies tend to explore approach one or the other. Perhaps, this contributes to the lack of scholarship on Sunday schools in Upper Canada. However, given the religious role of the Sunday school and the increasing concern that particular Church communities had over interdenominational Sunday schooling in this period, this blending of official church material with that of informal voluntary organizations is a crucial part of this analysis.

Upper Canadian Sunday schools operated neither in unison with, nor independently of other institutions. Though the hundreds of Sunday schools were loosely connected to each other through the interprovincial Sunday School Union, they remained very widely dispersed. Consequently, any investigation of this institution and its surrounding community must be especially far-reaching. Digital archives and methodologies are especially relevant when exploring such a broad subject, as a large numbers of sources can be searched simultaneously. Increasingly, in Canada as well as the United States and Britain, colonial newspapers, periodicals and other published literature has been digitized, providing instant access to this material. For this thesis, thousands of these documents were searched and hundreds of discussions of Sunday schools in Upper Canada were found across publications that reflect that colonial nature of Upper Canadian society. Digitized archives and databases were also used to locate church and local histories as well as census records, and city directories in order to determine key details of some of the most “ordinary” Sunday school workers.

Overall, attention was given to local and lay voices and experiences over centralized, official, and prescriptive instruction, though both are considered throughout. As a result of the analysis of the data gathered from various sources, this thesis documents the relationship

38 between lay settlers and their neighbourhood Sunday schools as a social history, highlighting the voices, practices, and experiences of those who defined the spaces they used for their weekly lessons and beyond.

Terminology

Protestant Sunday schools in Upper Canada were referred to as both “Sunday schools” and “Sabbath Schools” during the period under study. The choice of term usually reflected regional and denominational preferences. Both terms were given to the same institution, and throughout this study, with the exception of direct quotes, “Sunday school” applies to both. All clergymen are identified as Reverend (Rev.) when they are first introduced. This is intended to highlight the distinctions between the words and actions of clergy and those of the laity.

Between 1823 and 1850, an inter-provincial, interdenominational organization was the centre of the Protestant Sunday school community in Upper and Lower Canada. For most of the period under study, this was the Canada Sunday School Union, established in 1836.

However, the Canada Sunday School Union was preceded by the Sunday School Union

Society of Canada, which was founded in 1823 and active until the early 1830s. The two organizations had much of the same leadership and served the same purpose under both names. Because this study uses a thematic rather than chronological approach, in order to avoid confusion, both groups are referred to as the Canada Sunday School Union, as it was under this name that the organization had its longest and greatest success.

Religious denominations are referred to in general terms. During the forty years covered by this study the Methodist and Presbyterian churches experienced several formal

39 and informal divisions, schisms, and unions, with dozens of names emerging for particular sects of dissenting and uniting church communities. For the purpose of clarity, all strands that eventually made up the Methodist Church of Canada in 1884 are identified as

“Methodist,” and those that ultimately joined the Presbyterian Church of Canada in 1875,

“Presbyterian.” Exceptions are made only when theological or geographic distinctions are particularly relevant to the discussion, for example the separate organizational structures of the British Wesleyan Methodist Church and the (American) Episcopal Methodist Church in the 1820s.

Chapters

The major themes of this dissertation are addressed in the following five chapters, each exploring a particular aspect of the Sunday school’s religious, educational, and social function. Chapter One considers the context in which Upper Canadian Sunday schools emerged in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Chapter Two explores the strategies of interdenominational cooperation that existed throughout this period at all levels of Sunday school organization. The approaches of ecumenicalism that various Sunday school participants embraced are considered within the context of the often-sectarian colonial society. Chapter Three examines the Sunday school library, the most important auxiliary of

Upper Canadian Sunday schools, as a site of community education through which free circulating literature reached beyond the classroom and facilitated reading among the broader settler community. Chapter Four returns to the classroom to explore the curriculum of Upper

Canadian Sunday schools. Particular attention is given to the Canada Sunday School Union’s original periodical The Missionary and Sabbath School Record, which, in the 1840s, allowed

40 for hundreds of schools across Upper and Lower Canada to share the same weekly lessons.

Chapter Five brings the extra-curricular element of Sunday schooling into the discussion.

While Sunday school sponsored leisure activities often lacked any religious practice in this period, they were incredibly significant to the community building that was necessary for the success of early Sunday schools. The conclusion reflects on how the Sunday school was transformed in the second half of the nineteenth century from a neighbourhood-run institution to auxiliaries of particular congregations and Churches, changing both the purpose and function of the Sunday school from its original structure.

Chapter One

“Even Before the Village was Large Enough to Support a Church”: The Origins of British, American, and Upper Canadian Sunday Schools

Sunday schools entered Upper Canada much like its settlers: in scattered patterns, with diverse motivations and purposes. They brought ideas and practices from across the

American border and across the Atlantic. Two Sunday schools claimed to be first in the province, both established in 1811, but undated references of children gathering for informal

Sunday lessons in early settlements suggest that identifying the first school of this type may be impossible.1 Nevertheless, when schools began to assign the name Sunday (or Sabbath) school to their weekly meeting of children, they demonstrated an intentional attempt to participate in a growing movement of Protestant education. As such, the history of the

Sunday school in Upper Canada begins in 1811.

Canadian historians have predominantly worked under the assumption that early settlers brought the idea of Sunday schooling from their place of origin.2 While the Sunday

1 For Canadian examples, see Dungannon United Church: 101st Anniversary: Historical Booklet, 1855-1956 (Dungannon ON: Dungannon United Church, 1956), n.p.; S. Silcox, History of St. James’ Church, Stratford, Ontario, Canada from 1840 to 1924: To Commemorate the Consecration of the Church by his Lordship Bishop Williams (Stratford, ON: Stratford Historical Society, 1924), 42; Colborne Street United Church, 1853-1953: One Hundred Years of Christian Service (London, ON: Colborne Street United Church, 1953), 40.

2 This is perhaps best illustrated by the lack of scholarly inquiry into Ontario’s Sunday schools before 1880. The assumption of most major works that discuss Sunday schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is that there was nothing particularly unique about these institutions until that period. See, for example, Mary Anne MacFarlane, “Gender, Doctrine, and Pedagogy: Woman and Womanhood in Methodist Sunday Schools in English Speaking Canada, 1880-1920,” (PhD Diss: University of Toronto, 1992); Lucille Marr, “Sunday School Teaching: A Woman’s Enterprise: A Case Study From the Canadian Methodist, Presbyterian and United Church Tradition, 1919-1934.” Histoire Sociale/ Social History 26 (1993), 329-344; Sharon Anne Cook, “Educating for Temperance: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and Ontario Children, 1880-1916,” Historical Studies in

42 school movements in Britain and the United States had various degrees of influence on the lay and clerical initiatives that took place in Upper Canada, the origins of the province’s

Sunday schools are more complex than simply being transplanted ideas. Settlers in Upper

Canada came from both Europe and the United States, with each group diverse in its religious, ethnic, and political makeup. While in many ways life in the colony was similar to that of Britain and the United States, the physical environment, vast “unsettled” land, and increasingly domestic government, made Upper Canadian culture and society distinct.

Sunday schools began to appear across Upper Canada in the 1810s and 1820s.3 The establishment of these schools tended to follow one of two paths: either local settlers would establish a school, becoming familiar with the institution in their place of origin, or, a school would be established by the Canada Sunday School Union through the work of its travelling agent or its promotional literature. However, these local and central initiatives rarely happened entirely independently. Local schools were usually quick to connect with the

Sunday School Union in order to receive resources, and any school established by the Union was dependent on continued local support in order to survive. In short, Sunday schools emerged in Upper Canada as a result of both local contributions and the work of the Sunday

School Union.

This chapter explores the context and process in which Sunday school emerged in

Upper Canada before 1830. It begins with an overview of the Sunday school’s development

Education 5 (1993): 251-277; Marilyn Fardig Whiteley, Canadian Methodist Women, 1766- 1925: Marys, Marthas and Mothers of Israel (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005), 118-129.

3 Significantly, there was a break in the organization of Sunday schools in the province between 1811 and 1818. This is not surprising as the War of 1812 impacted the lives of most settlers between 1812 and 1814, as well as the few years that followed.

43 in Britain and the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It then investigates how Sunday schools began to emerge in various communities through the work of key local leaders along with the participation and support of the broader settler community. Finally, it considers the role of the Canada Sunday School Union in the rapid spread of Sunday schools across the province in this organization’s first decade, the 1820s.

British and American Origins

Britain is recognized as organizing the first system of Protestant Sunday Schools in the world.4 The significance of the origins of British Sunday schools to Upper Canada lies not only in the invention and global influence of the institution, but also in its cultural and religious colonial connections. Most traditional Sunday school histories credit Robert Raikes, a printer and philanthropist from Gloucester, England, with founding the first Sunday school in the early 1780s.5 Raikes was certainly responsible for bringing the idea of Sunday school education to the general public through the promotion of his schools in his newspaper The

Gloucester Journal, through which he established the earliest networks of Sunday schools in

Gloucester. Historians have noted that similar forms of Protestant religious education for children did exist in Britain and American prior to Raikes’ Sunday schools including John

4 See, for example, Thomas Walter Laqueur, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture, 1780-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 21; Anne Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790-1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 6; Allan Greer, “The Sunday Schools of Upper Canada,” Ontario History 67 (September 1975), 169.

5 Laqueur, Religion and Respectability; Boylan, Sunday School, 6; John Carroll Power, The Rise and Progress of Sunday Schools: A Biography of Robert Raikes and William Fox (New York: Sheldon and Company, 1863); J. Henry Harris, Robert Raikes: The Man who Founded the Sunday School (London: National Sunday School Union, 1900).

Wesley’s missionary lessons in early America,6 and women teaching Bible lessons to local children in their homes before Sunday church service.7 Yet these informal and isolated examples tend to be removed from histories of the Sunday school in Britain, which appropriately consider not only the classroom but also the mass movement surrounding the establishment and promotion of Sunday schools.

While the first self-identified Sunday school, remains unclear, the Sunday school movement in Britain began in the late eighteenth century, with very particular goals. It took shape within the broader philanthropic movement of late eighteenth-century Britain. The

Sunday school movement began in the last quarter of the eighteenth century as upper-class

Britons became increasingly concerned with growing crime rates, and what they considered an expanding class of criminals. Unlike previous generations, who focused on punishment and retribution, reformers in the late eighteenth century were becoming more aware and supportive of efforts in crime prevention. This move towards the prevention of crime, or, perhaps more appropriately described as the prevention of perceived immoral development, led to a rapid emergence of religious and educational charities, aimed largely at working- class children, who were seen as especially impressionable and responsive to improving their character and behaviour.8

Coinciding with this philanthropic movement was an important shift in Protestantism towards evangelicalism that crossed most denominations. Sunday schools were established to

6 Robert W. Lynn and Elliott Wright. The Big Little School: Two Hundred Years of the Sunday School (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 3.

7 Laqueur, Religion and Respectability, 21, 24, 26.

8 Ibid., 2.

45 further the goals of both of these philanthropic and evangelical movements. That is, they were to be sites of basic literacy education and moral reformation of working-class children in order to prevent crime and encourage respectable order and behaviour. At the same time,

Sunday schools also focused on Bible reading, the Gospel message, and usually incorporated prayer and worship, expressing an explicit evangelical purpose.

Sunday schools spread widely across Britain between 1780 and 1830, with over

425,000 pupils in 1818, increasing to more than 800,000 pupils in 1830.9 However rapid the spread of Sunday schools was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they did not have unanimous support and a few minor debates existed over their usefulness.

Objections were made on the basis of opposing teaching secular subjects (mainly reading and spelling) on the Sabbath, and accusations were made that teachers who taught such lessons in

Sunday schools were disrespecting the Sabbath day.10 Others objected to teaching literacy to working-class children at all, arguing that a literate class of workers would lead to an uprising like the recent French Revolution.11 A small number of people, mainly from fringe sects, objected to Sunday schools on Scriptural grounds, arguing that no such schools existed

9 K.D.M Snell, “The Sunday-School Movement in England and Wales: Child Labour, Denominational Control, and Working-Class Culture,” Past and Present 164 (August 1999), 136.

10 Snell, “The Sunday-School Movement,” 129; Laqueur, Religion and Respectability, 137- 145.

11 Laqueur, Religion and Respectability, 126-129; Snell, “The Sunday School Movement,” 136.

46 in the Bible.12 The majority of Britons, of all classes, however, believed that Sunday school education for poor children would benefit society.

Pupils in British Sunday schools were generally coercively recruited, particularly in the institution’s early years. British historians have noted the prominence of Sunday schools established with the help of factory owners for their young workers.13 The strategy of literally gathering children off the street on Sundays was also used in the early years or when a school was established in a new area.14 Once a school was in operation, regular attendance was usually secured by less aggressive means, such as the distribution of prizes, access to the circulating library collection, and accepting newly donated clothing. The opportunity to have free lessons in basic literacy was often enough to encourage working-class parents to send their children to Sunday school. Sunday schools in Britain continued to be aimed towards reforming poor children throughout the nineteenth century. This reputation of the Sunday school as a type of charity was the main reason that most middle and upper class Britons did not send their own children to these institutions.

Another feature of the British Sunday school was the major financial connections between Sunday schools and large philanthropic organizations and campaigns. These mass networks of financial donors allowed Sunday schools to be funded sufficiently to hire paid

12 The Anabaptist community is known for opposing Sunday School education in the nineteenth century on the basis that it was unscriptural and moved the responsibility for religious education outside of the home. For more see Donald Kraybill, Concise Encyclopedia of Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 194.

13 Katrina Honeyman. Child Workers in England, 1780-1820: Parish Apprentices and the Making of the Early Industrial Labour Force (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007), 141.

14 Boylan, Sunday School, 6.

47 teachers. Until at least the middle of the nineteenth century, the majority of British Sunday schools that were connected with major organizations paid their teachers a salary. While there were exceptions of volunteer-run schools, early concern over the quality of education provided in Sunday schools led most managers to hire teachers who were qualified for such paid work.15

British historians have debated the purpose of Sunday schooling in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, focusing on whether the Sunday school was an institution of social control and oppression, established to inculcate upper-class values upon a growing working-class population, or, a site used actively to help strengthen working class consciousness. E.P. Thompson’s landmark 1963 study The Making of the English Working

Class was among the first to raise the issue of Sunday schooling and class relations in

Britain. Thompson briefly discusses religion as a cultural force in the creation of the class- consciousness that defined the working-class. Though Sunday school education remains in the background of Thompson’s analysis, he is quite clear in identifying these schools, particularly those associated with Methodism, as sites of aggressive indoctrination of working-class children. Thompson goes as far as to say that Sunday school education was akin to “religious terrorism,” which exposed its pupils to “psychological atrocities.”16

Thompson’s brief suggestions on class and Sunday schooling were challenged in

1976 with the first major modern study of Britain’s Sunday schools, Religion and

Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working-Class Culture, 1780-1850 by Thomas Laqueur.

15 Laqueur, Religion and Respectability, 92.

16 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 414-415.

Laqueur’s overview analyzes qualitative data from hundreds of Sunday schools across

Britain, as well as statistics from interdenominational Sunday school organizations. His findings point to the continued popularity of Sunday schools in working-class communities, the high number of working-class Sunday school pupils who themselves became teachers, and the contributions of Sunday schools in literacy education for working-class children.

Laqueur argues that these factors, along with the increased authority local communities had over their neighbourhood Sunday school in the early decades of the nineteenth century led to the Sunday school becoming a “relatively autonomous, largely working-class institution.”17

Laqueur concludes that Sunday schools were quickly integrated into the working-class community, and were “one strand of a uniquely working-class cultural constellation.”18

Laqueur’s thesis on the role of Sunday schooling in working-class culture, in turn, has also faced its share of revision. More recent scholars have demonstrated that the role of factory owners in many manufacturing towns’ Sunday schools was much greater than

Laqueur’s work suggests.19 Others have found that before the 1830s, working-class teachers hardly made up the majority, and where they did they were closely supervised by upper-class

Sunday school authorities.20 These debates over control of British Sunday schools have shaped the literature that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s.

17 Laqueur, Religion and Respectability, 63.

18 Ibid., 239.

19 Snell, “The Sunday School Movement in England and Wales,” 137-146; Patrick Joyce, Work, Society, and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 178-9, 246-8.

20 Malcolm Dick, “The Myth of the Working-Class Sunday School” History of Education 9, 1 (1980) 27-41.

K.D.M Snell’s 1999 study, “The Sunday School Movement in England and Wales:

Child Labour, Denominational Control, and Working-Class Culture” provides the most thorough, quantitative analysis of Sunday schools in this period. Snell uses data from the

1851 Census of Religious Worship, which includes figures on Sunday school attendance, to identify common features of Sunday schools in 2,443 parishes, in fifteen counties, across

England and Wales. His findings indicate that Sunday schools were the most prominent and had the highest attendance in areas where there were high rates of child labour, both manufacturing and agricultural. He also found that teachers in these schools came from both working-class and upper-class backgrounds, suggesting that Sunday schools were not entirely dominated by either working-class, or upper-class people. Interestingly, Snell also suggests that denominational loyalty was often a more central goal in the growth of Sunday schools than either social control or working-class community building. While he concludes that it is still appropriate for historians to “see these schools as cultural expressions of the working class, serving key roles in its formation and coming to articulate many of its values,” Snell encourages future scholars to consider denominational control rather than social control as the motivating factor for upper-class Sunday school supporters.21

From nearly fifty years of scholarly inquiry into the role of eighteenth and nineteenth- century Sunday schools in Britain, it is clear that although these institutions served almost exclusively working-class children, the goals, motives, and purposes of the thousands of local Sunday schools were shaped by a range of regional, denominational, and socio-

21 Snell, “The Sunday School Movement in England and Wales,” 146-147; 166.

50 economic factors.22 The diversity of Protestant Sunday schools was wide-ranging, and local teachers, superintendents, and clergymen had various degrees of authority over their schools.

Although one Sunday school could be quite different from the next, the overwhelming majority were almost all part of national networks and central Sunday school organizations.

Like other religious associations at the time, Sunday school organizations provided resources as well as a sense of community and support for their participants. The largest national British Sunday school organization in the nineteenth century was the Sunday School

Union. Established in London in 1803, the Union began primarily as a teachers’ association with the intention “to stimulate and encourage one another, to communicate and improve methods of instruction, and to promote the opening of new schools.”23 By 1812, the Sunday

School Union had established four auxiliary branches and had begun its publishing enterprise. Over the next three decades the Union’s membership, publication efforts, and distribution expanded greatly. In 1820 the Union had a membership of 2,568 schools with

32,337 teachers instructing an estimated 274,845 pupils.24 By 1835 this had grown to 7,842 schools, 110,841 teachers, and 909,618 pupils.25 The Union’s publishing efforts were

22 Very little information is available about Anglican Sunday schools intended for children of their own church. While these would have had a broader class appeal, records rarely distinguish Anglican Sunday schools from other types of education institutions, leaving historians unable to determine their prominence in the nineteenth century.

23 W.H Watson, The History of The Sunday School Union (London: Sunday School Union, 1853), 12, quoted in Laqueur, Religion and Respectability, 37.

24 Laqueur, Religion and Respectability, 38.

25 Anglican Sunday schools generally preferred to affiliate with their own denominational school network, and though a number of local schools and teachers were connected to their Sunday School Union branch society, the majority were not. While statistics on Anglican Sunday schools are scarcer than the interdenominational Sunday School Union, it is estimated that in 1837, Anglican Sunday schools served more than one million pupils, and by

51 equally impressive. In 1825, it had distributed 380,000 publications consisting of spelling books, reading texts, math, and grammar books.26 By 1835, the Union issued more than

534,000 copies of similar publications.27

By the middle of the nineteenth century, British Sunday schools were well established. They had served more than a million working-class children, and produced a network of Sunday school publishing that had widespread success. While national organizations connected schools, control of the school’s operation lay in the hands of its teachers and other local participants. Sunday schools in Britain were an important site of literacy education for working-class children before the establishment of the public system, and they were defined by their focus on basic education for the poor. These philanthropic and education values, so closely connected with Sunday schools in Britain, however, did not survive across the Atlantic, as evangelicalism became the dominant influence in American, and later, British North American, Sunday schools.

The earliest Sunday schools in the United States attempted to follow the British model. Factory owners ran Sunday schools for their children workers in the late eighteenth century, and a handful of such schools, teaching literacy to poor children, were in operation in New England by the turn of the nineteenth century.28 Sunday school supporters quickly established organizations to aid them in the spread and success of these schools. The first

1846 the denomination had more than ten thousand Sunday schools of their own. For more see, Laqueur, Religion and Respectability, 38 -41.

26 Laqueur, Religion and Respectability, 258.

27 Ibid., 256.

28 Boylan, Sunday School, 6.

American Sunday school organization was the First Day Society, established in 1790 by prominent businessmen in Philadelphia, with the intent of creating a network of Sunday schools similar to the British system.29 A few other groups promoting British-style charity

Sunday schools emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century, including the popular

Female Union for the Promotion of Sabbath Schools, founded by mother and daughter

Isabella Graham and Joanne Bethune in New York, 1816.30

Historians have demonstrated that these early efforts to replicate the British-style

Sunday school system in the United States were almost entirely unsuccessful, and that the explosion of nineteenth-century American Sunday schools came not from the influence of the British Sunday school movement, but rather, from the evangelical movement that occurred between 1795 and 1835, known as the Second Great Awakening.31 Consequently, by the 1820s and 1830s, the American Sunday school had become synonymous with the evangelical Sunday schools, rather than the charity or poor school. This important shift away from Sunday school education for the poor and illiterate, and towards Sunday schooling for all children, not only gave American Sunday schools a distinct identity from their British counterparts, but also created an environment in which American Sunday schools could have much wider reach than those in nineteenth-century Britain.

29 Lynn and Wright, The Big Little School, 10.

30 Graham and Bethune have become iconic in the American Sunday school movement. They are remembered for starting many early schools after arriving in the United States from Scotland and bringing their ideas on Sunday school education with them. Lynn and Wright, The Big Little School, 11; Boylan, Sunday School, 9.

31 Lynn and Wright, The Big Little School, xiii; Boylan, Sunday School, 8-9, 20-21.

This environment shaped the attitudes of American evangelicals who believed that children of all classes were in need basic Protestant education to prepare for their religious conversion.32 Church members of all classes sent their children to Sunday schools as an example to the “unsaved”, and any stigma attached to Sunday schools as sites of charity had lost its power in North America by the end of the 1820s.33 The evangelical wave of the

Second Great Awakening provided the theology, and necessary pupils for American Sunday schools, and, it also provided the (unpaid) workforce. Revivalist discourse instructed all new converts to renew their faith. A commitment to a Christian life and the Christian community, were essential aspects of putting evangelical beliefs into practice. The generation that experienced the Second Great Awakening was made up of mostly young evangelicals who became involved en masse in Sunday school work, along with other voluntary efforts.34

Unlike British Sunday schools, which often served to provide a basic elementary education, American Sunday schools, prioritized religious education, though many schools continued to teach basic literacy education as a means to the end of achieving religious salvation. While evangelism was an explicit goal of early Sunday schools, these schools continued to provided opportunities in literacy instruction for many communities whose educational needs were not met elsewhere. Girls, working-class children, and both free and enslaved Blacks were among the most active recipents of literacy education in America’s early Sunday schools.

32 Boylan, Sunday School, 17.

33 Ibid., 17.

34 Ibid., 10.

The evangelical Sunday school movement organized itself quickly. The most prominent Sunday school organization, the American Sunday School Union (ASSU) was founded in Philadelphia in 1824. As an interdenominational association connecting 723 schools in its founding year, its importance to the American Sunday school community cannot be overstated.35 The ASSU was closely connected to other non-denominational religious societies that emerged at the same time including the American Home and

Missionary Society, the American Bible Society, and the American Tract Society. These groups all had similar values, missions, and structures, using a centralized organization to connect local branches of voluntary associations. The success of the Sunday school movement in American was, in large part, a result of the early cooperation of these religious societies.36 The ASSU was very active in establishing Sunday schools in the Western

Frontier, where many newly settled areas had missionaries start up interdenominational

Sunday schools before any church was permanently planted.37

The ASSU had its greatest success in the 1820s and 1830s, as it served as the main connection between Sunday schools across the expanding country. However, the increasing abolition movement in the years leading up to the American Civil War created tension and division with the ASSU. As a cross-denominational union, with members in both the abolitionist North and the slaveholding South, the ASSU remained neutral on the issue of abolition. This stance of neutrality was seen by both sides as non-commitment to either

35 Ibid., 11.

36 Lynn and Wright, The Big Little School, 19; Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 157.

37 Ibid., 36.

55 principle, and, consequently, the ASSU lost a substantial number of members on both sides.38 When the ASSU reemerged after the Civil War, its structure had changed significantly, from not only the upheaval of the war, but also as a result of local churches increasingly become more firmly established with their denominations, and placing Sunday school control under the church’s jurisdiction. The ASSU continued to serve the general community, though it became more focused on teacher training, primarily through organizing Sunday school teachers’ conventions.39

Slavery was not the only issue of contention within the ASSU in the nineteenth century. By the 1840s, evangelicals began to question the basic doctrine surrounding childhood conversion. The details of this theological debate are outlined further in Chapter

Four, as it had significant implications for Canadian Sunday schools as well, but it is important to note here that whether individual Christians believed in the necessity of childhood conversion or a more nurturing approach to Christian education, both sides agreed on the importance of Sunday schooling in children’s religious development.40 Unlike the debate over slavery, very few left the ASSU over the childhood conversion issue, and by the

1850s “Christian Nurture” theology had almost entirely replaced the revivalist, conversion- focused approach to Sunday school education in America.41

While the American Sunday school movement in the nineteenth century, had its share of denominational diversity, along with some intense political and theological debates, many

38 For more see Boylan, Sunday School, 80-84.

39 Ibid., 84-86.

40 Lynn and Wright, The Big Little School, 41.

41 Boylan, Sunday School, 147-149.

56 attributes remained consistent, especially in the earlier period. With the exception of the few early schools, American Sunday schools and their organizations were always dependent on the unpaid labour of the laity. The vast majority of Sunday schools were connected to each other and the broader movement through the ASSU, and particularly through the mass system of publications and distribution of literature made possible through travelling missionaries and agents. However diverse the local conditions, the majority of American

Sunday schools taught the same things: basic reading and writing; the fundamentals of

Protestant Christianity; and general ideas of appropriate Victorian behavior (including punctuality, obedience, order, and self control). All of these lessons were seen as crucial in maintaining social order, and the Sunday school gained support across the country as a site where these ideals were reproduced. Sunday schools were viewed as working alongside, rather than in competition with, public school advocates, and, in general, both public school and Sunday school supporters believed that society would benefit from a populace who received both free, “secular,” weekday schooling, and religiously-motivated Sunday schooling as children.

British and American Sunday schools were both guided by distinct principles in the early nineteenth-century. The rapid industrialization and urbanization of England led to

Sunday schools being defined as one of many charity organizations for the working-class. In contrast, the Second Great Awakening and the increase of informal religious communities in

America, gave these institutions an evangelical and more universal character. Sunday schools in Upper Canada generally followed the American model, but continued to be closely connected to the British Sunday school community until the second half of the nineteenth century. While the influences of the Sunday school movements in both Britain

57 and the United States are evident in Upper Canada, the context in which they emerged was quite distinct. The primarily rural landscape, along with the particular religious, political, and social culture, defined Upper Canada as a colony, and shaped the Sunday schools that its settlers established.

The Emergence of Sunday Schools in Upper Canada

When the first Sunday schools appeared in Upper Canada in 1811, the settler population was around 60,000 and was made up mostly of American loyalists.42 The majority of settlers lived beyond the major towns, in rural households, where farming and other production-related activities dominated their everyday life. Protestantism was the dominant form of religion for Upper Canadians, though religious practice was generally informal. Itinerant ministers and missionaries did their best to lead worship services and meet other spiritual needs of settlers. However, the growing population and expansion of settled land often meant communities only met with a clergyman a few times a year. Lay-run spaces of worship and prayer were particularly important aspects of the religious development of the colony, and Upper Canadians often conducted local prayer meetings, gathered to hear lay preachers, and engaged privately with family members for prayer, Bible reading, and the singing of hymns.

Like other forms of religious services, Sunday schools in Upper Canada before 1850 were informal spaces. They took place in religious meeting-houses, weekday-school

42 J. David Wood. “Population Change on an Agricultural Frontier: Upper Canada, 1796 to 1841,” in Patterns of the Past: Interpreting Ontario’s History ed. Roger Hall et al. (Toronto: Dundurn Group, 1996), 62.

58 classrooms, homes, and barns.43 Sunday school lessons, teachers, and pupils varied greatly as lay settlers gathered what resources they had to meet the religious, educational, and social needs of their local communities.

Congregational historians have noted that church records rarely include details of their Sunday school’s origin. For example, a history of the Colborne Street United Church in

London explains: “the Sunday school was an established organization, though little, if any, record remains of its early years.”44 Most congregational histories make similar observations maintaining that “no light whatever is thrown by our church records on the beginnings of our

Sunday school,” and “hazy memories but no records exist of [the] Sunday school before [the twentieth century].”45 Others, such as the history of the Richmond United Church, have acknowledged this more directly, noting: “there have been no records preserved of early

Sunday School life in the former Methodist Church at Richmond, but if the story could be written it would certainly go back far into the past.”46 This sentiment is typical, as church histories tend to begin at the founding of a congregation or church building, both of which usually emerged after a community Sunday school had been established. While the origins of

43 For examples, see Dungannon United church: 101st Anniversary: Historical Booklet, 1855-1956 (Dungannon ON: Dungannon United Church, 1956); S. Silcox, History of St. James’ Church, Stratford, Ontario, Canada from 1840 to 1924: To Commemorate the Consecration of the Church by his Lordship Bishop Williams (Stratford, ON: Stratford Historical Society, 1924) 42.

44 Colborne Street United Church, 40.

45 Bothwell United Church History (Bothwell, ON: Bothwell Times, 1972), 22; Central United Church Stratford: Centennial History 1845-1945 (Stratford, ON: Central United Church 1945), 35.

46 J. N. Gould, 1850-1960: One Hundredth Anniversary of Richmond United Church (Richmond, ON: Richmond United Church, 1950), 17.

59 most Sunday schools that appeared in Upper Canada before 1820 remain unknown, the few schools whose beginnings can be traced are particularly telling. The following examples detail the founding and founders of four of the earliest Sunday schools in the province. The schools in Brockville and Richmond Hill were founded in 1811 just before the outbreak of the War of 1812, whereas the Sunday schools in York and Niagara, both founded in the late

1810s, followed the war. A close look at the emergence and early years of these four Sunday schools demonstrates some of the different ways that Sunday school were established in

Upper Canada in the 1810s. These schools were always a product of the particular local cultures and communities in which they emerged, yet when considered together, they also highlight some of the common trends and practices in the establishment of early Sunday schools across Upper Canada.

The history of the Sunday school in Upper Canada begins in 1811. The town of

Brockville (Elizabethtown until 1816) claims to be home to the first Sunday school in the province, though it was not the only one founded in the fall of 1811. The Brockville Sunday school was established by the first clergyman in the region, Rev. William Smart. Smart was educated in England and received his clerical education at the interdenominational London

Missionary Society (LMS) before being ordained in the Presbyterian Church of

Scotland.47Smart was recruited by the LMS to fill a request for a minister made by

Presbyterians in the Upper Canadian district of Johnstown, which included Brockville. He

47 Holly S. Seaman, “The Rev. William Smart, Presbyterian Minister of Elizabethtown,” Ontario History 5 (1904), 178; Ruth McKenzie, “William Smart,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, [Vol. X], http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=5271 (Accessed 1 March 2013).

60 arrived in October 1811, just six months after his ordination.48 Though his duties were varied and his district quite large, Smart established a Sunday school almost immediately upon his arrival.49 He had taught Sunday school in England, and must have believed it was a beneficial institution as the founding of the Brockville school was one of his first activities in

Upper Canada. As the first clergyman of any denomination in the region, Smart frequently travelled and preached in many nearby areas. Consequently, Smart’s Brockville Sunday school was almost immediately left in the hands of local layman Adiel Sherwood who served as its first and longtime superintendent and teacher.50

It became common practice for clergymen to hand over control of their Sunday schools to a more permanently settled lay superintendent almost immediately after its founding. In Sherwood, Smart had found a loyal partner to manage his school while he served his large itinerant ministry. Sherwood was born to Loyalist parents who moved to

Upper Canada in 1784. He received a mostly informal education from his father, and served in the military from the age of seventeen. Sherwood was well respected in the community and held many local leadership roles. He was a thirty-two year old common school teacher when he was appointed as superintendent of the Sunday school upon its organization in

1811.51 In addition to his work as a teacher, Sherwood also owned Brockville’s first tavern, and served in a number of public offices including commissioner of peace, deputy clerk of

48 Seaman, “The Rev. William Smart,” 178-9.

49 Ruth McKenzie, “William Smart”; Seaman, “The Rev. William Smart,” 179.

50 Seaman, “The Rev. William Smart,” 122.

51 Ruth McKenzie, “Adiel Sherwood,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, [Vol. X], http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=5262 (Accessed 1 March 2013).

61 the crown, and later, Sherriff of Leeds and Grenville.52 Published obituaries of Sherwood reveal that his Sunday school work was remembered and praised.53 The Home and Foreign

Record of the Canadian Presbyterian Church noted that: “Mr. Sherwood was the first superintendent and teacher [of the Brockville Sunday school], and continued to be so until old age and infirmities disqualified him for its duties. But the chills of old age, at 96 years, did not abate the warmth of his heart for the school of the Sabbath.”54

Sherwood’s commitment to Protestant causes reached far beyond his Sunday school.

He worked closely with Smart in establishing the first Presbyterian Church in the area, and served as president of both the local Bible Society, and Temperance Association.55 He was also an active member of the Religious Tract Society of Upper Canada.56 His connections to these interdenominational religious societies provide insight into the operation of his Sunday school. Both Smart and Sherwood were very active within the Protestant community beyond their particular denomination. The groups they participated in encouraged cooperation and non-sectarian values, and it is likely that under their leadership, the Brockville Sunday school practiced similar values of denominational inclusion rather than exclusion. Little else is

52 William Carniff, The Settlement of Upper Canada (Belleville ON: Mika Silk Screening, 1971) 122.

53 Journal of Education, Province of Ontario 27, no. 4 (April 1874), 62-63.

54 Home and Foreign Record of the Canadian Presbyterian Church 13, no. 6 (June 1874), 160.

55 It is interesting to note that Sherwood was both a tavern owner and later, president of the local temperance association. It was not uncommon for those involved in the sale of liquor to become the most exemplary temperance leaders later in their lives. Sherwood’s close friend and fellow Sunday school superintendent, Billa Flint of Belleville, also fit this model.

56 Carniff, The Settlement of Upper Canada, 122.

62 known about the practices of the Brockville Sunday school in its early years, but by 1831 the

Methodist preacher for the Brockville Circuit reported more than ten active Protestant

Sunday schools with an average of fifty pupils each, suggesting that the work of Sherwood as superintendent of the first school, and Smart as the local clergyman, led to a successful

Sunday school community in Brockville.57

When Smart formed his Sunday school in 1811 with weekly meetings in the

Brockville courthouse, he had no guarantee that anyone would attend. In fact, it was somewhat of a risk for him to take the ideas (and books) from the Sunday school he taught at in England and establish such a school in rural Upper Canada. Among other things, the religious culture and community of his newly settled district that surrounded Brockville was quite distinct from the streets of London that Smart was used to. Although Smart’s resources and ideas, along with Sherwood’s management and leadership, were important, the main factor in the school’s success was the ongoing participation of the pupils. Residents in

Brockville sent their children to the Sunday school from its earliest years and, as one biographer notes, the school “continued without interruption” even through the War of

1812.58 While some have given credit to the Sunday school for inspiring a “pleasing revival of religion” in the area, noting the key role the Sunday school had in fostering a Christian community that had established a Female Bible Society in 1819, and a Missionary Society and Religious Tract society in 1820, such a chain of causation is hard to trace.59 What is evident is that the residents of the Brockville area welcomed this Sunday school, and found

57 Christian Guardian 24 September 1831.

58 William Smart Fonds, Box 1, File 7, 3195, United Church Archives.

59 Ibid.

63 that it met the particular religious needs of their community. It is clear that the ideas and practices Smart brought with him from England were seen by Brockville’s residents as worth supporting.

While Brockville’s Sunday school claims to be the first in Upper Canada, another was also founded in 1811. Richmond Hill’s Sunday school (later the Presbyterian Sunday

School of Richmond Hill) was founded in 1811 by James Miles, a local businessman, and public servant. Miles came to Richmond Hill in 1800 with his family.60 His father, Abner

Miles, had been a successful tavern owner in York before purchasing a large amount of land

North of the city, where he continued as a shopkeeper after arriving in Richmond Hill.61

James Miles, who was Abner’s only son, inherited the businesses and all the land of his father upon his death in 1806.62 Miles remained a bachelor all his life and continued his father’s business, even after serving as a lieutenant in the York militia in 1812. He also held various public positions, including local magistrate and justice of the peace, and performed many religious duties before the town had a permanent clergyman. Miles was also a philanthropist, and donated much of the land he inherited for public use, including Richmond

Hill’s first cemetery, public school, and Presbyterian Church.63

60 G. Elmore Reaman A History of Vaughan Township (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 117.

61 Robert Stamp. Early Days in Richmond Hill: A History of the Community to 1930 (electronic edition), http://edrh.rhpl.richmondhill.on.ca (Accessed 10 January 2013).

62 Ibid.,n.p.

63 Ibid., n.p.

A local history of the region recalls that “even before the village was large enough to support a church,” Miles had organized its first Sunday school.64 Unlike the Sunday school in

Brockville, which was founded by a travelling minister who left the area of his school before long, Miles remained Richmond Hill’s only Sunday school teacher for many years.65 The school was truly Miles’ personal project. It was a space where he could express his leadership and concern for the growing town of Richmond Hill. As the founder and only teacher for many years, every aspect of this local Sunday school was under Miles’ control, yet it was supported by the local community, as residents sent their children in large enough numbers of sustain the school’s progress into the twentieth century.

A detailed history of the Richmond Hill Sunday School, published on its 150th anniversary, along with community histories of the region, provide some insight into what pupils would have experienced in Miles’ Sunday school. The weekly instruction in the

Richmond Hill Sunday school included basic instruction in Christianity accompanied by lessons on reading, spelling, and math, though most classroom activity was based on the

Bible.66 Children learned through rote memorization and recitations, as was common for the time, and all pupils had the chance to receive prizes for their skills. Every student able to recite the Sermon on the Mount and Chapters Fourteen and Fifteen of the Gospel of John

64 Reaman, A History of Vaughan Township, 118.

65 Stamp, Early Days in Richmond Hill.

66 Reamon, A History of Vaughan Township, 118; Stamp, Early Days in Richmond Hill; Mary Dawson, The First 150 Years: The Richmond Hill Presbyterian Sunday School (Richmond Hill: J.E Smith, 1961) n.p.

65 received, from Miles, a New Testament and a handkerchief. The handkerchief was intended to remind students that “cleanliness is next to Godliness.”67

In his role as Sunday school teacher, Miles is remembered not only for his generosity but also for his stern disciplinary practices. Although corporal punishment was condemned in both American and British (and later Canadian) Sunday school communities, Miles frequently used physical punishment in his classroom. He is remembered as using the Bible in his lessons and in his discipline, as “the same book was often used to box a misbehaving lad’s ears.”68 Miles’ discipline was known to have left the classroom when, “on one occasion, it is recorded that a boy darted out of the school to avoid punishment, [Miles] gave chase through the woods for nearly a mile and brought the lad back to punishment and duty.”69 Children who attended Miles’ Sunday school received various sorts of attention, from prizes for good behaviour to physical punishment for breaking the rules. However, the absolute power that Miles had over his pupils was fairly atypical, as most schools the emerged in the decades following the founding of the Richmond Hill Sunday school had a leadership team, including superintendents and teachers, as well as a set of rules of management and order. In the case of the Richmond Hill Sunday School, however, locals continued to send their children to receive instruction from Miles in many of the basics of elementary education regardless of his personal temperament.

Miles donated land and time to both the community Sunday school in 1811 and the

Presbyterian Church in 1821. Importantly, both are remembered as being “used by all

67 Dawson, The First 150 Years, n.p; Stamp, Early Days, n.p.

68 Dawson, The first 150 Years, n.p.

69 Ibid., n.p.

66 denominations in the village.”70 Miles himself was seen as a man who “embraced the welfare of all denominations.” Perhaps an accurate description of many Upper Canadian Christians at the time who had no clearly defined clerical leadership or congregational structure. Miles’ commitment to interdenominational Christian communities extended beyond his Sunday school, and in 1826, he was involved in the founding of the Richmond Hill branch of the

British Foreign Bible Society, an interdenominational organization concerned with the distribution of Bibles to settlers in Upper Canada and other missionary fields.71 Later in his life, Miles became increasingly connected to the Presbyterian Church, and his tombstone identifies him as a Presbyterian elder.72 Although his family before him had no particular religious affiliation, Miles’ connection to Presbyterianism was likely the result of the influence of the community in Richmond Hill, including his friendship with local minister

Rev. William Jenkins, who arrived in the area in 1819 and, with Miles’ support, established the first Presbyterian congregation.73 The example of Miles’ contribution to Sunday school work demonstrates the extent to which lay settlers with the necessary resources could establish and operate such a school independent of any official church or clergy. The Sunday school in Richmond Hill that Miles founded in 1811 was central to the religious, educational,

70 Reamon, A History of Vaughan Township, 116.

71 Ibid., 118.

72 Tombstone of James Miles, Richmond Hill Presbyterian Cemetery, Richmond Hill, Ontario, recorded by Richmond Hill Public Library 2002, http://edrh.rhpl.richmondhill.on.ca/cemeteries/stone.asp?ID=RHPresCem&SID=RHS5.3 (Accessed 5 January 2013).

73John S. Moir, “William Jenkins,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography [Vol. VII], http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=3463 (Accessed 1 March 2013).

67 and social development of the local community in which he was deeply involved until his death in 1844.74

Sunday schools had various degrees of importance and influence in their local communities. Unlike the schools in Brockville and Richmond Hill, which both emerged before the war of 1812, the first Sunday school in York was not established until 1818. This school was affiliated with what became the Metropolitan Methodist Church in Toronto, originally called the York Methodist Sunday School. The school’s presence in York, the province’s capital and the centre of the Canadian Conference of the Methodist Episcopal

Church, placed it among religious activity that was unmatched across the province. From its earliest years, the school served as a model to Sunday schools throughout Upper Canada, as its ideas and example were brought to smaller communities through travelling ministers and the press. From 1830, for example, the Christian Guardian published the rules of the York

Sunday School, to provide instruction to other schools still in their early stages.75 As a result of its wide influence, the York Methodist Sunday School left behind the more detailed records concerning its origins and early years than any other Sunday school in Upper Canada before 1825.

The York Sunday School emerged out of the community of Methodists, mainly

Americans, who migrated to York in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The earliest evidence of Methodists meeting for worship is in 1794, when American minister

74 Stamp, Early Days in Richmond Hill, n.p.

75 Christian Guardian 22 January 1831.

Rev. Elijah Woolsey was assigned to York to establish class meetings,76 and services for

Methodists as part of his itinerancy on the Bay of Quinte circuit.77 Informal meetings and lay-run services were conducted for the growing Methodist population in York, as the few clergymen assigned to Upper Canada before 1812 were scattered and served multiple communities.78 Between 1813 and 1815, the few Methodist meetings that did occur in York decreased greatly, as the war limited actions of American Methodist leaders in particular.79

After the war, and the subsequent increase in immigration to York, Rev. Henry Ryan,

President Elder of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Upper Canada, committed himself to building a Methodist Chapel. The church was built on the south side of King Street, one block from Yonge Street, with the first service occurring in November 1818, before the building was completely finished.80 The Sunday school was established at the same time as the chapel was built, a decision that was likely influenced by the American leadership, which would have been familiar with Sunday schools in the United States. The school opened in the autumn of 1818.81 The location of the York Sunday School, in the middle of one of the

76 Class Meetings were small group gatherings where Methodists met for “group confession, stimulating self-examination, and advancing the quest for salvation and entire sanctification. In North America […] the class meeting became the essential and distinguishing institution of Methodism.” Semple, The Lord’s Dominion, 19.

77 Judith St. John, Firm Foundations: A Chronicle of Toronto’s Metropolitan United Church and her Methodist Origins, 1795-1984 (Winfield, BC: Wood Lake Books, 1998), 9.

78 In 1812, there were 12 Methodist ministers assigned to the entire province of Upper Canada. Grant, A Profusion of Spires, 48.

79 St. John, Firm Foundations, 9.

80 Ibid., 7

81 Ibid., 8.

69 colony’s most developed towns, allowed it to take on a much more formal structure than the majority of Sunday schools in Upper Canada. The space itself was exceptional, as it was large enough to accommodate multiple classes simultaneously. Through its large, supportive community and nearby resources, the school had access to books, slates, and other materials that allowed for diversity in curriculum and instruction.

John Carroll (later Reverend) was a pupil in the York Sunday School in its first years, and recalls the establishment of the school, along with other youthful experiences, in his autobiography My Boy Life.82 Carroll’s family was well connected in the Methodist community in York, and his mother was among the first to hear the news of the opening of the Sunday school. Carroll’s recollections of the experiences of attending the York School provide a rare look into Sunday schooling from the perspective of a pupil, and his excitement at making progress in Sunday school suggests that for many children, success in Sunday schooling could provide an important sense of pride and accomplishment. For example,

Carroll describes his experience moving between the second level of the boys class to the first level in detail,

In those days the practice of going up and down, according as a pupil succeeded or failed, obtained in Sunday-schools just as they do now in secular schools- so I began at the bottom. But the [classroom] questioning still went on, and before the school [day] was over I was at the head of the class. That was supposed to be reward enough for such a little fellow for one day…I had been admitted to the first class.83

82 John Carroll, My Boy Life: Presented in a Succession of True Stories (Toronto: William Briggs, 1882).

83 Ibid., 128.

The organization of the York Sunday School was just as Carroll recalled, with pupils divided into classes based primarily on their reading level, though the advanced classes required a superior knowledge of the Bible. Girls and boys were separated into their own classes, a luxury which the majority of one-room Sunday schools in the province could not afford. The lessons taught varied depending on the level of the class. Caroll notes that, when he began attending the York Sunday school in 1818, his “first lesson was a fragment of a

Bible, a psalm, pasted on a shingle, which I read and committed to memory.”84 Later, as he advanced in the level of his class, theological questions were posed to students who were encouraged to reflect on them with their families outside of Sunday school. This process of debate among and between Sunday school pupils and their families caused a spirit of

“eagerness and expectation, both in and out of the school.”85

Existing records and congregational historians also note the practices of this particular Sunday school. Children attended the York Sunday School every week, from 2 to 4 in the afternoon, following the church service. Once Sunday school began, pupils were given lessons in reading, writing, and spelling, along with religious and Biblical lessons, with the subject varying depending on the literacy level of the class. Most children practiced memorization of Bible verses, yet some were also encouraged to reflect on key theological questions and concepts. The school had a circulating library, and books and tracts were regularly distributed as prizes to the pupils.86 The library likely contained books obtained by travelling missionary Rev. Thaddeus Osgood. These books were most likely from the British

84 Ibid, 135.

85 Ibid, 136.

86 St. John, Firm Foundations, 9.

Sunday School Union, as well as other donations, and included both secular and explicitly religious literature.87 While there is no extensive description of the pupils in the early years of the York Sunday School, the fact that the children were diverse enough to require classes for levels of reading that ranged from illiterate to advanced, suggests that children from various social backgrounds attended. Given the leadership of the school itself, typified by

Jesse Ketchum and Thaddeus Osgood, the pupils were likely not exclusively of Methodist background either.88 York’s Sunday school also benefitted from its place in a highly populated area of the province, where resources were relatively accessible. However, even with such advantages, establishing a Sunday school was not always easy in the early nineteenth century. Settlers in another major town, Niagara, faced many challenges before establishing their first Sunday school in 1819.

The town of Niagara (previously Newark) was a major political and military centre in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. As the province’s capital until 1796,

Niagara was home to some of Upper Canada’s earliest settlers and many influential political leaders. By the turn of the nineteenth century, it had become one of the most important towns in Upper Canada. Although Niagara was very well established in comparison to the more

87 At the time of the founding of the York Sunday school, Osgood was a missionary with the Society for Propagating the Gospel Among Indians and Others in North America, and, the Massachusetts Missionary Society. He later became the key agent of the Canada Sunday School Union.

88 Both Ketchum and Osgood were the founders of the York Sunday school. Although it served a predominantly Methodist community, neither of these men had a particular loyalty to this Church. Osgood as a Congregationalist who was committed to non-denominational missionary work. Ketchum is known for his denominational flexibility, particularly the fact that he belonged to St. James’ Anglican Church, the York Methodist Church, and the Secessionist Presbyterian Church, all in the same decade. Lillian F. Gates, “Jesse Ketchum,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography [vol. IX] http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ketchum_jesse_9E.html.

72 rural settlements in Upper Canada, the community struggled to secure an acceptable permanent minister and church building. Anglican church services were held in government buildings both before and after the arrival of the region’s first clergyman, Rev. Robert

Addison, in 1792.89 Addison was assigned to Upper Canada as a missionary for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), after requesting a missionary appointment following the death of his wife.90

Even with the help of the colonial government, Addison had trouble establishing a congregation with enough support to build a church, as the majority of settlers in the region had Presbyterian or Congregational affiliations. The Anglican population declined further with the move of the province’s capital to York in 1796. Addison’s small Anglican congregation of St. Mark’s managed to build a church building in the first decade of the nineteenth century.91 Though Addison and members of his Anglican congregation were involved in the local Sunday school community in the 1820s, Niagara’s first Sunday school did not emerge under Addison or the SPG. Rather, the first Sunday school was a product of the town’s predominantly lay, Presbyterian community. The efforts of the Presbyterian community in Niagara to establish permanent religious spaces were well-organized by the turn of the nineteenth century. By 1794, Presbyterians in Niagara outnumbered any other

89 H.E. Turner, “Robert Addison,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, [Vol. VI], http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=2727 (Accessed 1 March 2013).

90 Ibid.

91 Ibid.

73 denomination, and in that year they had gathered eighty names of subscribers for financial support to build a Presbyterian church that was completed a few years later.92

Niagara’s unique position in the War of 1812 also shaped its Sunday school history as distinct from the above examples of Brockville and Richmond Hill. While Brockville was the object of a minor raid in the winter of 1813, the town was largely kept intact during the war.93 Richmond Hill had even less involvement in the war. Although they did have a military company affiliated with the York Militia, General Brock allowed those enlisted to return to their farming duties in the spring of 1813 as they had not been needed in the war.94

In Niagara, however, the war had overturned the town.

As the site of a number of battles and raids, the settlers of Niagara were shaken by the

War of 1812. Many of the newly built churches were the target of military attacks as their steeples were often used as sites to watch for approaching troops. The two major church buildings of Niagara, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church and St. Mark’s Anglican Church, were both destroyed by fire during American raids.95 The loss of their church building was not the only struggle faced by the Presbyterian congregation at St. Andrew’s, as they also faced various challenges in keeping a permanent minister. Their first minister, Rev. John

Dunn, arrived in 1793 and ran an itinerant ministry between Niagara and Stamford, but

92 Janet Carnochan, Centennial St. Andrew’s Niagara, 1794-1894 (Toronto: William Briggs, 1895), 16.

93 The raid on Elizabethtown occurred on 7 February 1813 and resulted in one injury and no deaths.

94 Stamp, Early Days in Richmond Hill.

95 Caronochan, Centennial St. Andrew’s Niagara,, 24.

74 abruptly resigned from the ministry in 1796.96 Rev. John Young succeeded Dunn as

Presbyterian minister in the region, only to resign in 1802 because of alleged alcoholism.97

Rev. John Burns took over as minister of St. Andrew’s until 1811, but served only intermittently until Rev. Robert McGill was sent to the congregation by the Glasgow

Colonial society in 1829.98 In short, although economic, political, and military life in Niagara progressed rapidly in the early nineteenth century, the religious community struggled to maintain both their church buildings and a permanent minister.

For these reasons, establishing a Sunday school was not a priority for the settlers in

Niagara until 1819.99 One congregational history recalls that in 1819, “when for some years we have no record of any settled minister- to St. Andrew’s Church belongs the honor of having the first Sunday-school in the town.”100 The Sunday school was established by a group of six church elders who were chosen and directed in their work by travelling ministers Rev. John Burns and Rev. William Smart, the founder of Brockville’s first Sunday school.101 This movement to establish the Niagara school was led by its first superintendent,

John Crooks. Much like James Miles of Richmond Hill, Crooks was a local merchant who

96 E.A. McDougall, “John Dun (Dunn),” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, [Vol. V], http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=2387 (Accessed 1 March 2013).

97 Ibid.

98 H.J Bridgman, “Robert McGill,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography [Vol. VII], http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=4070 (Accessed 1 March 2013).

99 Thomas Melville Bailey, Pillars, Pulpits, and Pews: A History of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, 1794-1994 (Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON: St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, 1994), 18.

100 Carnochan, Centennial St. Andrew’s Niagara, 24.

101 Ibid., 24

75 was very involved in the Christian community and known locally for conducting worship services in the absence of a minister.102

The Sunday school, though founded by lay Presbyterians, served local children of “all denominations,” and remained the only Sunday school in town for much of the 1820s.103

Pupils attended the Sunday school in the early afternoon, and were all invited to attend the

2:30 Presbyterian service that followed. The non-Presbyterian children were especially urged by Crooks to attend the worship service, indicating that Sunday school pupils were not exclusively the children of church-going Presbyterians.104

In 1824, five years after the Sunday school opened, an interdenominational Sunday

School Union Society was established for the region. The purpose, as stated in the society’s published constitution, was “to furnish Books and all the necessary means of establishing & conducting [Sunday schools] in this vicinity.”105 This organization saw great value in Sunday schooling, and committed itself to establishing more Sunday schools in the region. Many of the founders and teachers of the early Presbyterian school were involved in this new Union including Crooks, who served as treasurer and secretary, Addison, Creen, and Heron.106 Most

102 Melville, Pillars, Pulpits, and Pews, 18; Carnochan, Centennial St. Andrew’s Niagara, 25.

103 Carnochan, Centennial St. Andrew’s Niagara, 25.

104 Ibid., 25

105 Sunday School Union Society of Niagara, Constitution and Regulations of the Sunday School Society of Niagara, 1824. F98 MS811 [OA].

106 Ibid.

76 of the men involved in the local union were affiliated with either the Anglican congregation of St. Mark’s or the Presbyterian St. Andrew’s.107

The routines of everyday life, including the economy, religion, education, and social activities of settlers, were quite diverse across the Upper Canada in the 1810s and 1820s.

However, the founding of the first Sunday schools in Brockville, Richmond Hill, York, and

Niagara reveals some interesting patterns. In their early years, each of these Sunday schools practiced denominational inclusion. They welcomed both pupils and teachers of various

Protestant affiliations, and their classroom lessons were broadly based on Biblical principles rather than denominational catechism. The success of these early schools depended not on established church leaders, or even missionaries, but on the work of the lay men who served as superintendents and managers, and the lay men and women who volunteered their time as teachers. Many of these lay Sunday school leaders were involved in their communities in multiple ways, and often had connections to other nondenominational religious societies.

Sunday school lessons focused primarily on the Bible, but more secular subjects including reading, spelling, arithmetic, and even nature, were also included in the broad curriculum.

As the number of Sunday schools across Upper Canada increased in the 1810s and

1820s, local lay teachers and superintendents desired to be connected to each other. Like the men involved in the leadership of the Niagara Sunday School Union, Sunday school supporters across the province wanted to share resources, and encourage the development of more Sunday schools across the province. The founding of the Canada Sunday School Union in 1823 changed the structure of the Sunday school community in Upper (and Lower)

Canada by creating a central organization to connect local schools with the headquarters of

107 Ibid.

77 the Union in Montreal, as well as with each other. While independent local schools still existed after the Union’s founding, the majority of schools, including those just discussed, became affiliated with the organization. The Canada Sunday School Union offered connections between local Sunday schools primarily through the mass circulation of print literature that provided instruction to teachers and superintendents, reports on the successes of schools in various regions, and reading materials for Sunday school classroom and libraries. This network of print culture facilitated a sense of community-building that existed beyond the local level. The history, purpose, and influence of the Canada Sunday School

Union completes the story of Upper Canadian Sunday schools before 1830.

Central Organization

When the Niagara Sunday School Union was established in 1824, it became a local branch of the Canada Sunday School Union (CSSU). The CSSU was organized in 1823 as an auxiliary to the interdenominational British Sunday School Union of London. The Canadian

Union was also interdenominational, as were all of its local branches in Upper Canada. The structure of the CSSU was modeled on other religious societies of the time: a central organization existed for importing, printing and distributing literature, collecting reports, keeping records of its member schools, and connecting local branch societies. All decision- making, in terms of actual practice in a Sunday school’s structure or classroom activity, was delegated to local members or individual schools.

The CSSU was based in Montreal, where its book depository, and later its printing office, were located. Serving Upper and Lower Canada, the CSSU considered its main operation to be supplying literature to Sunday schools, and the majority of its resources were

78 delegated for the importation and distribution of Sunday school books, tracts, and other materials. The extensive book distribution networks established by the CSSU were crucial in the development of Upper Canadian Sunday schools and are discussed at length in Chapters

Three and Four, but the organization had a number of secondary roles in addition to the spread of instructional literature.

Another purpose of the CSSU was to compile statistics and information on the

Sunday schools in operation in the province in order to support their work and provide them with Bibles, and other literature to ensure their continued success. Annual reports were published by the CSSU and included an account of the state of Sunday schools in Upper and

Lower Canada. In the organization’s first decade, travelling agents who worked on behalf of the Union wrote these reports, which included details on the number of Sunday schools and intentions to establish new ones. By the 1840s, superintendents and teachers began to write and submit brief reports updating the CSSU on the successes and challenges of their local

Sunday schools. In many ways, the CSSU reports served as a forum for the Sunday school community to share their experiences, struggles, and ideas with other Sunday schools across the Canadas, as these reports were widely distributed and sent to all affiliated schools. The circulation of these published reports connected schools and branches to each other, provided models of effectively run schools, and demonstrated the success of the Sunday school cause.

Common struggles, such as ineffective teachers and irregular attendance of pupils were also discussed through the CSSU’s published reports.

Along with book distribution and keeping records on affiliated schools, another major objective of the CSSU was to aid in the establishment of new Sunday schools. This was done primarily through the work of travelling agents and, to a much lesser extent, by

79 disseminating instructional literature on how to effectively organize and operate a Sunday school. The first agent of the central Union was Rev. Thaddeus Osgood, who also worked for a number of other colonial religious societies.108 His work as agent of the CSSU involved traveling across Upper and Lower Canada and encouraging the organization of Sunday schools in settling communities.

Even before these duties were made official through his appointment to the central

Union in the early 1820s, Osgood was already actively involved in this task. John Carroll recalls in his autobiography on his youth in York that: “in the autumn of 1818 my dear mother returned one day from a visit to Mr. Ketchum’s, and told us at home that Mr. Osgood had been in town, and that Messrs. [Jesse] Ketchum, [William] Patrick, [Ilugh] Carfra, and

[Thomas] Morrison were going to teach a school every Sunday afternoon in the new

Methodist meeting-house.”109 This description represents Osgood’s work with the central

Union quite accurately. He would visit a town, or newly settled area, meet with religious leaders (usually lay men in this period), and provide them with the necessary recourses, including Bibles and books, to begin operation of a Sunday school. Once this was accomplished, he would then continue onto his next location, leaving the establishment and function of the school in the hands of the lay leaders and community members. In his report to the central Union in 1824, Osgood noted that over the past year he had “travelled upwards of four thousand miles, principally with a view of promoting Sabbath Schools and Bible

108 These included the Committee for Promoting the Education of the Poor in Upper and Lower Canada, and The Society for Propagating the Gospel Among Indians and Others in North America.

109 Carroll, My Boy Life. 134-135.

Classes.”110 He described the work he had done for the CSSU in his travels: “I assembled the people in almost every township, and after preaching and explaining the nature and design of a Sunday School, I procured a committee to be appointed for conducting a school.”111 In

1824 alone, Osgood reported personally coming across twenty-three Sunday schools already in operation in Upper Canada, with “several” more being formed.112

Osgood’s role in the early years of the CSSU was paramount. As a missionary with close connections to both British and American religious societies (and their generous subscribers), Osgood was able to procure financial and material donations to support the

CSSU even when it was in debt.113 In his travels, Osgood personally educated and encouraged hundreds of Sunday school superintendents, teachers, and supporters from the general public on the potential of Sunday school education. He consistently stressed the role of the Sunday school in providing an education that was non-sectarian and included basic

Protestant principles, general Christian morality, and elementary lessons in reading and spelling. Osgood’s personal commitment to promoting inter-denominational cooperation and accessible literacy education was expressed through the CSSU and the local schools he helped found.

The Canada Sunday School Union could not, and did not, assume how to best meet the needs of individual schools. In its annual reports, the CSSU did provide some general

110 Bible classes were Sunday Bible studies for older youth and young adults. SSUSC Report 1824, 12.

111 SSUSC Report, 1824, 12.

112 Ibid., 13.

113 The 1828 Annual Report for the Central Union discussed their financial struggle and debt at some length. Throughout this period, they continued to depend on the generosity of their British subscribers. SSUSC Report 1828, 3-4.

81 advice to its branch societies and affiliated schools on the best means of establishing and running a successful Sunday school. These instructions were always suggestions, and meeting them was never a condition of a school’s membership in the Union. It is likely that some schools followed the advice more strictly than others, but it is clear that the ideal

Sunday schools imagined and promoted by the CSSU were quite distinct from the reality of most schools. The issues of literacy, co-education and other practices demonstrate the local autonomy that Upper Canadian Sunday schools had, as well as the significance that access to resources had in the operation of a local school.

The subjects of instruction demonstrates the range of practices among local schools affiliated with the CSSU. Official instruction from the central Union in 1824 on the issue of teaching secular subjects explained that “[t]o obviate every objection which might otherwise be made to Sunday Schools, as incompatible with the duties of the Lord’s day, the exercises of the scholars on that day should be restricted to reading and spelling, and to learning and repeating catechisms, hymns, portions of Scripture &c.”114 Teachers were further instructed that “spelling and reading are important, as they are the first steps to knowledge: but words are valuable only as they are connected with ideas; it should therefore be the aim of the teacher to impress upon the minds of the children, the sentiments contained in their lessons.”115 Spelling and reading continued to be taught in Sunday schools across Upper

Canada until at least the 1850s, and a number of historians have recognized the role of the

Sunday school in contributing to the high literacy rates in the rural areas of early Upper

114 SSUSC Report 1824 19

115 SSUSC Report 1824, 19.

Canada.116 Approaches to teaching reading and spelling often have followed the instructions put forth by the CSSU, that literacy education only be included within broader lessons on

Christianity and the Bible. However, evidence suggests that to local Sunday school workers, teaching secular subjects in addition to Bible lessons was not entirely off limits. For example, a number of church histories report of their Sunday schools teaching “arithmetic,” and

Carroll’s example of reading a non-religious nature book in Sunday school was not unique, as the Methodist booksellers in Upper Canada included nature books in their Sunday school catalogue until the 1830s.117

There are very few records that kept track of exactly who was attending Sunday schools in Upper Canada in the 1810s and 1820s, and CSSU records reveal more about who the ideal pupil was, rather than who actually attended. Nonetheless, some inferences can be made. The backgrounds of the pupils, both religious and socio-economic, appear to be fairly diverse. The CSSU’s 1824 annual report instructed that all pupils attending Sunday school must come to class “clean and decent,” and that each pupil should bring “at least one parent” with them on their first day.118 These comments suggest that one target population were the children of church members, with at least enough wealth to provide clean clothes and regular bathing. Yet in the same report the Union encouraged using books and tracts as rewards to attract pupils whose parents may not support religious instruction, and thanked local Dorcas

116 See, for example, R.D. Gidney. “Elementary Education in Upper Canada: A Reassessment” In Education and Social Change: Themes from Ontario's Past. eds. Michael B. Katz and Paul H. Mattingly (New York : New York University Press, 1975) 3-27; Scott McLaren. “Books for the Instruction of the Nations: Shared Methodist Print Culture in Upper Canada and the Mid-Atlantic States, 1789-1851,” (PhD Diss. University of Toronto, 2011).

117 Christian Guardian 22 February 1832.

118 SSUSC Report 1824, 17.

Societies119 for providing clothing to distribute to their needy pupils, suggesting that there was some outreach beyond the church community.120

It is clear that Sunday schools designed solely on the principle of charity were extremely rare in Upper Canada, and those that were tended to be short lived. An advertisement in the Kingston Gazette from 1817 describes an early effort to establish a

British charity-style school in Kingston. William Moon, a Methodist school teacher who had recently arrived from England, was seeking donations for the establishment of his Sunday school, which he believed would “chiefly instruct the children of the poor that have not the means or opportunity of getting them instructed.”121 A comment about the “poor children” receiving free clothes was also made in the 1836 report of the Toronto Methodist Sabbath

School Society. These cases, however, were isolated to Kingston and Toronto, and the majority of schools across the province welcomed children of “all classes.”122 In larger schools, such as the Methodist school in York, children were divided for their weekly lessons by according to their level of literacy, which indirectly created segregation between those

119 Dorcas societies in Canada were Christian women’s organizations with the purpose of distributing clothing and other basic items to children in need. The Kingston branch in the 1820s is noted as also “encouraging attendance at Sunday schools and promoting the welfare of needy children.” Errington, Wives and Mothers, 174.

120 SSUSC Report 1824, 20.

121 Kingston Gazette, 9 June 1817, as reprinted in. John George Hodgins, Documentary History of Education in Upper Canada from 1871 to 1876 Vol.1 (Toronto: Warick Bros. and Rutter, 1894-1910), 129.

122 Sunday School Union Society of Niagara, Constitution and Regulations of the Sunday School Society of Niagara, 1824. F98 MS811 [OA]

84 who attended weekday schools and those who did not. Most schools, however, gathered all children in one room, due to limited space and resources.123

It was not only poor children and those who did not have access to other sites of schooling that attended Sunday school. The children of well-off churchgoers, including the children of clergy, were also regular pupils. There is no evidence of parents resisting invitations to send their children, and the coercive tactics used by British Sunday schools to recruit their students were not present in Upper Canada. The evangelical discourse that dominated the Sunday school community encouraged all children to attend, regardless of class. Likewise, there is no evidence of any child being turned away. Of the schools that submitted reports to the Central Union in 1828, the average weekly attendance was of forty- eight pupils, with the largest school reporting 148 pupils and the smallest twenty.124 Though there is no doubt that schools in their early years would have gathered even fewer, when regular attendance was recorded between 1829-1832 it averaged 71.6% of total enrolment, and many schools were closed for the winter months.125

Sunday school attendance was encouraged for both boys and girls, but girls almost always outnumbered and outperformed boys in the classrooms. The 1826 report of the First

Methodist Church in Hamilton is typical in its account of Sunday school attendance for that

123 Thaddeus Osgood, The Canadian Visitor (London: Hamilton and Adams, 1829), 28.

124 SSUSC Report 1828, 8-9.

125 Only a very small sample of the schools that provide data between 1828 and 1832 include the average regular attendance along with the total number of pupils on roll. See Appendix II Table I for the detailed statistics.

85 year, with an enrolment of twenty four girls and twelve boys.126 Other statistics indicate that there were either more girls, or higher achieving girls, in Sunday schools. For example, the

Cobourg Methodist Sunday School reported that in 1831 their pupils recited over 13,000

Bible verses: 5,030 by the male pupils and 8,318 by the girls.127 That same year the

Methodist Sunday school at York had an even greater distinction with their boys reciting

19,151 verses and the girls 33,491, even though they had only one more female class than male.128 Rev. Thomas Brown recalls in his autobiography that he “could never compete with

[his] dear sister” in memorizing scripture for Sunday school.129 Perhaps this discrepancy was a result of the limited educational opportunities girls had elsewhere, allowing girls to be more dedicated to their Sunday school lessons.

In terms of coeducation, the central union recommended in 1824 that classes be segregated and that “children should invariably be instructed by persons of their own-sex

[sic]”130 and “when the school closes let the girls be dismissed first.”131 In practice, children were only segregated in different classes when resources, primarily teachers and space, allowed for it. The York Methodist Sunday School had among the largest enrolment in the province and was one of the few schools in Upper Canada that practiced gender segregation.

126 Calvin Davis, Centennial Souvenir of First Methodist Church, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, 1824-1924 (Hamilton: First Methodist Church, 1924), 27.

127 Christian Guardian 25 July 1831.

128 Christian Guardian 22 January 1831.

129 John McAinsh (ed), Autobiography of Rev. Thos. B. Brown (St. Mary’s, ON: St. Mary’s Journal, 1899), 8.

130 SSUSC Report 1824, 20.

131 Ibid. 9. Italics in original.

In 1831, it reported an enrolment of 136 pupils with 106 “regularly” attending. They were divided into twenty-one classes, ten male and eleven female, each then assigned a level according to reading skill.132 The majority of schools, however, operated in less ideal conditions. In many Sunday schools in this period, pupils shared one room and one teacher.

Brown and his sister, for example, were in the same class.133 Others, in the early years at least, operated with all the students under the instruction of one teacher.134

Although the CSSU referred broadly to Sunday school pupils as “children,” their ages varied.135 Though they were also categorized as unspecified “children and young men” by other religious societies.136 In correspondence between local missionary Rev. John Smith and the Glasgow Colonial Society, Smith describes the pupils in his Carleton Place Sunday school as “generally between the ages of 8 and 15.”137 Various reports of Sunday school public examinations and details of top students reveal children from the same age group.138

132 Christian Guardian 22 Jan 1831.

133 McAinsh (ed), Autobiography of Rev. Thos. B. Brown, 8.

134 The examples discussed earlier of Miles and Sherwood are typical in this regard.

135 SSUSC Report 1824, 20.

136 John Carruthers to Rev. Robert Burns, 27 February 1830. As reprinted in Elizabeth Ann Kerr McDougall, and John S. Moir eds. The Publications of the Champlain Society: Selected Correspondence of the Glasgow Colonial Society, 1825-1840 (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1994), 22.

137 Rev. John Smith to Archibald Young, 21 April 1834. As reprinted in McDougall, and Moir. The Publications of the Champlain Society, 17.

138 For example, a girl aged 12 was noted as the top student of the Hillier Sunday school in 1829. Christian Guardian 19 December 1829.

The CSSU provided some instruction on the best teaching practices in Sunday school, and it was generally understood that a school’s superintendent would find teachers that he believed were acceptable for the school based on local needs and preferences. One rule that all teachers were to follow was the prohibition of corporal punishment. The Central Union instructed in 1824 that: “corporal punishment is so unsuited to the Lord’s day, and to the institution itself, that it should be entirely avoided. Chastisement in a place of worship, and during the service is absolutely intolerable. Persuasion, moderate confinement and fear of shame are preferable modes of punishment.”139 The majority of Sunday schools appear to have followed this advice as they noted their disciplinary measures consisted primarily of restricting library privileges as a consequence of bad behaviour, and awarding prizes for good behaviour.140

Expulsion was also deemed appropriate by the CSSU, which instructed that any pupil

“found guilty of lying, swearing, stealing, fighting or otherwise misbehaving, must be expelled, if after repeated reproof there is not reformation.”141 Despite these instructions, the evangelical principles of inclusion and forgiveness seem to have dominated in practice.

Teachers complained about the “arduous task” of dealing with troublesome students, and often having their tempers “roused” in the Sunday school classroom, yet complete expulsion does not appear to have been practiced in this early period.142

139 SSUSC 1824, 19.

140 See, for example, Carroll, My Boy Life, 136.

141 SSUSC 1824, 18.

142 Christian Guardian 18 March 1830; Dawson, The First 150 years, n.p.

Other Early Sunday Schools

Although by 1830, the majority of Sunday schools in Upper Canada were affiliated in some way with the CSSU, there were some exceptions as a few local schools operated without the aid of the Union. Many schools in more isolated communities established themselves locally before seeking connection with the CSSU. Others waited until they had a designated building and superintendent, or at least a permanent teacher, before reaching out.

The needs of the community along with the knowledge and experience of the Sunday school founder or leaders would determine if and when a school would seek support or assistance from the CSSU.

The most common example of schools not connected to the CSSU were those that were held informally in private homes. A congregational history of Bethel Presbyterian

Church in London recalls that, after losing her husband on the journey across the sea, Mrs.

McPherson arrived in the eleventh concession of London Township and “because she had no means of subsistence started a school and Sunday school in her home.”143 Given the prevalence of private venture weekday schools in this period, it is likely the children who attended McPherson’s Sunday school were recruited to her weekday school from her Sunday school class.144 A similar Sunday school was run by early Methodist settlers of Dungannon,

Huron County. A church history reveals a memory that “the first Sunday school sessions were held in Grandfather Pentland’s new Barn,” referring to the school started by the father

143 Brief Histories of the Churches in the Presbytery of London Ontario, n.p.

144 R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar. “From Voluntarism to State Schooling: The Creation of the Public School System in Ontario.” Canadian Historical Review 66, 4 (1985), 446-449.

89 of Robert Pentland, who arrived in Upper Canada in the 1820s. 145 Other references to

Sunday schools in homes, often taught by women, are common for this period.146

A lack of resources and official building or managers were among the main reasons that schools remained disconnected from the CSSU, but they were not the only factors.

Sunday schools connected with established churches, both Anglican and Presbyterian, occasionally preferred to operate in isolation. For example, Rev. John Strachan’s Sunday

School at St. James’ Church in York, was in operation from as early as 1819, yet it made no official correspondence with the CSSU. While his decision to remain distant from the interdenominational union may appear to be a result of the priority he gave to his own church, it should be noted that in the early years Strachan himself attended and hosted joint meetings between the Anglican and Methodist Sunday schools in York, encouraging their cooperation.147 Throughout its existence, the CSSU had always had Anglican members, though they were typically of a more evangelical leaning than Strachan. Similarly, official correspondence from the Glascow Colonial Society in 1830 inaccurately perceived the CSSU as having a “red hot Arminian Methodist” influence, and discouraged Presbyterian Sunday schools from joining.148 As discussed further in Chapter Two, these types of clerical instructions were usually ignored by local Sunday school workers who continued to participate in the interdenominational community in large numbers. However, at least a few

145 Dungannon United Church, n.p.

146 McAinsh (ed), Autobiography of Rev. Thos. B. Brown, 8, and Silcox,.History of St. James’ Church, 42.

147 Christian Recorder July 1819, 180.

148 John Carruthers to Rev. Robert Burns, 27 February 1830. As reprinted in Selected Correspondence of the Glasgow Colonial Society, 1825-1840, 22.

90 schools, under close clerical supervision, avoided affiliating with the CSSU out of denominational and theological loyalties. Most schools, particularly those under lay authority, welcomed the CSSU and were eager to receive the Bibles, tracts, and other literature it provided to the province’s Sunday schools.

Conclusion

By 1830, hundreds of Sunday schools were in operation in Upper Canada. A few were affiliated with particular congregations, but the vast majority were organized to serve children of particular neighbourhoods or regions, with no reference to denomination or church membership. Unlike Sunday schools in Britain, those in Upper Canada were almost entirely dedicated to universal education. Although class lines were not as clearly defined in

Upper Canada as they were in Britain, the leaders of Upper Canada’s Sunday schools made a point of inviting all boys and girls, whether part of elite society or the poorer classes. In fact, the majority of children who attended Sunday school in this period appear to have fallen somewhere in between, and were representative of the agricultural-focused society that defined most of the province at this time.

The influence of the British Sunday school system was certainly felt in Upper

Canada. The first main organizing body, the CSSU, was modeled after, and closely affiliated with, its British counterpart. The literature it distributed and the donations that kept it running were both primarily from Britain. Missionaries from British religious societies played a key role in establishing early Sunday schools, and shared their knowledge with the lay people who participated in their continued operations. It would be misleading, however, to suggest that the British influence was the primary influence in these schools. The mass arrival of

Loyalists following the American Revolution brought ideas about popular education, and revivalism, that also greatly influenced Upper Canada’s early Sunday schools. Episcopal

Methodists in particular promoted the cause of the Sunday school throughout Upper Canada, and encouraged lay participation among their members that inspired hundreds of settlers to contribute to their local school, and the broader Sunday school movement.

Although the Sunday schools that emerged in Upper Canada between 1811 and 1830 were influenced by Sunday school movements in both Britain and the United States, they were ultimately shaped by the lay Upper Canadian settlers themselves. The local nature of

Sunday schools created a culture of Sunday schooling that was adapted to meet the needs of the scattered, mainly backwoods, communities of Upper Canada. Sunday school founders, superintendents, and teachers in this period were almost exclusively laymen, but the support of lay settlers extended beyond leadership roles. Upper Canadians supported Sunday schools most directly by sending their children, an essential element of any school’s success.

However, parents and community members also made financial donations to emerging

Sunday schools, they read about the progress of schools in local newspapers, and they participated in discussions on Sunday school lessons with their children. Though the particular features of early Sunday schools varied according to the needs of each population, community participation was always central in shaping the practices of individual schools.

Local interests also determined the type of instruction that would be taught in early Upper

Canadian Sunday schools. Most provided basic education in reading, spelling, and occasionally other secular subjects, suggesting that in their early years in the province,

Sunday schools were not exclusively, or even explicitly, religious spaces.

Sunday schools also helped facilitate a significant process of interdenominational

Protestant community building. They connected children, and their parents, to local social communities that were not rigidly denominational and required no membership in any official church. Through the CSSU, scattered Sunday schools could connect with one another. The literature supplied by the Union, including books and magazines, but more significantly, the CSSU’s own reports, circulated across the province as early as 1823. This print media allowed the sense of community shared among Sunday school participants to develop beyond specific local boundaries, as instructions, resources, and stories were shared through their pages. While traveling missionaries like Osgood and Smart, aided in the practical side of establishing and operating a Sunday school, the children, parents, teachers, and superintendents participated in these spaces because they found that these schools served them in ways that no other institutions of the time did. A common understanding of

Protestantism, along with intentional cooperation of members of various branches of

Christianity, was the foundation of the network of Sunday schools that exploded in the 1830s and 1840s.

Chapter Two

“Differences Would Seem for a Time to be Forgotten”: Sunday Schools as Sites of

Interdenominational Cooperation

From neighbourhood schools to inter-provincial organizations, an ecumenical spirit dominated the Sunday school community in Upper Canada from its earliest years. Though a few regions developed Sunday schools with connections to a particular congregation, this structure was the exception, and most cooperated in a network based on common principles of basic Protestantism. In his study of St. Paul’s Anglican Church in London, Ontario, church historian Orlo Miller considers other examples of early cooperation and suggests that

“ecumenicity was not a doctrine of the early settlers so much as it was a necessity.”1 At first glance, this appears to have been the case for Sunday schools as well. A school required a number of resources including teachers, books, Bibles, and space, at the very minimum. In many Upper Canadian communities gathering even the most modest supplies needed to be a communal effort, and establishing denominationally exclusive Sunday schools would have been nearly impossible outside of the major towns of Kingston and York.

Necessity, however, was only one factor in the development of the Sunday school community’s interdenominational approach. Upper Canadian Sunday schools quickly became a substantial cross-denominational network of individuals, families, congregations, and regional communities connected to each other primarily through the publications of the

Canada Sunday School Union. This network was based on a shared understanding of common Protestant principles including literacy, basic Biblical knowledge, and general

1 Orlo Miller, Gargoyles & Gentlemen : A History of St. Paul's Cathedral, London, Ontario, 1834-1964 (Toronto : Ryerson Press, 1966), 12.

Christian morality. Such an inclusive attitude continued long after such cooperation was necessary for the establishment of schools.

This cooperation can be seen not only in shared spaces and common local resources, but also through the system of publication and book distribution, local and interprovincial organizations, and key leaders in Sunday school work from its earliest years. An attitude of ecumenicalism was intentional and effective in the Upper Canadian Sunday school community and is explored in this chapter by tracing the character of local schools, the purpose and organization of central associations, and the individuals involved in all levels of

Sunday school work. Early Sunday schools practiced denominational inclusion, with very little effort to convert pupils to particular sects or become church members, often to the disappointment of the clergy.2 A broad Protestant attitude can be seen in the lessons of

Sunday schools, that included scripture and basic morality, but perhaps more importantly, it can be found in the development of the mainstream Sunday school community.

I. Interdenominational Cooperation in Principle and Practice

Early Ideas of Cooperation

John Webster Grant describes the religiosity of early settlers in Upper Canada as one that “lacked cohesion, being merely the sum of the religious baggage of individual settlers.”3

2 Discussions of conversions that occurred at Sunday schools were extremely rare in this period. For example, between 1830 and 1832 reports in the Christian Guardian of local Sunday schools featured seven schools which counted conversions of pupils compared to the twenty-four schools that counted verses of scripture memorized, as measures of their success. However, even a mention of pupils converted did not necessarily mean that their conversions took place at the school, and it is likely that pupils experienced conversion at nearby revivals. Most schools simply noted the number of pupils who attended in their reports, excluding the issue of conversion entirely.

3 John Webster Grant, A Profusion of Spires: Religion in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 36.

The description is apt even as the population increased over the early nineteenth century, as settlers arrived from the United States and Britain with various backgrounds and diverse relationships with religion. Furthermore, the lack of established religious practices and the pressing needs in newly settled regions put religious activities in the background of everyday life for many newcomers.

The lack of clergy was the most striking challenge among settlers who wished to continue their religious practices in their new colonial home. Most ministers were assigned to the colony as travelling missionaries. They were few in number, and generally assigned to large regions making regular pastoral guidance difficult at best. The absence of clergy and designated religious space led to an increase in religious leadership by laymen (and occasionally women).4 In general there was a lack of structured religious practice that was unlike the regular religious services that most settlers would have been used to in their

American or British places of origin. It was within this context of an informal religious culture combined with a heavily rural and isolated backwoods way of life that a number of interdenominational religious societies and institutions emerged in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Among them Sunday schools and Sunday school unions.

The motivation behind inter-and-non-denominational religious societies that emerged in the early nineteenth century was evangelicalism. Book, Bible, and Tract Societies all developed in Upper Canada to help spread the gospel and to bring Christianity to those settlers who were perceived to be spiritually “destitute.” In Upper Canada in the 1820s,

Christian voluntary organizations included the Upper Canada Religious Tract and Book

4 For more on women’s formal and informal preaching in Upper Canada see, Elizabeth Muir, Petticoats in the Pulpit: The Story of Early Nineteenth-Century Methodist Women Preachers in Upper Canada (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1991).

Society, the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, Upper Canada Bible Society, and many others.5 These organizations had varying degrees of success and the structure and mission often needed to be adjusted from their British origins to suit the Upper Canadian culture of religious diversity.6 These groups brought laymen and clergy together to work with British and American organizations in sharing their Christian faith.7 Bible societies in particular were seen as an especially cooperative effort that emphasized the Protestant principle that salvation could be attained as the result of a Bible alone and that no one should be denied access to the “Good Book”.8

The Canada Sunday School Union (CSSU), established in 1823, was modeled on these societies and developed alongside them. They were all influenced by an interdenominational approach to spreading the basic message of Christianity. The CSSU commonly compared its organizational approach to the period’s popular Bible Societies.9 But interdenominational cooperation in Upper Canada’s Sunday schools was present even before the CSSU was founded.

5 Grant, A Profusion of Spires, 113; Jeffery L. McNairn, The Capacity to Judge: Public Opinion and Deliberative Democracy in Upper Canada, 1791-1854 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 67.

6 For example, the British and Foreign Bible Society was almost exclusively Anglican in its orinal, British model, but in Upper Canada expanded to include inter-denominational auxilaries in 1828. Grant, A Profusion of Spires, 113.

7 Grant, A Profusion of Spires, 106-107.

8 Ibid., 111.

9 CSSU Report 1848, 20.

Cooperation in Early Sunday Schools

In the period before 1840, Sunday schools emerged as neighbourhood and community efforts that served the general population of a particular region. The establishment of the four schools highlighted in Chapter One demonstrates the typical pattern of a school’s beginning before 1820. Either a lay leader or visiting minister would gather up local support, and locate a meeting space, for basic religious (and other) instruction on

Sundays, with all nearby children invited to attend. By 1831, there were more than 120

Sunday schools reported in the published circuit reports of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

Of these schools only two were reported as directly affiliated with a congregation or denomination (both Methodist). The majority of these schools (104) were located outside of the towns of Kingston, York, or Niagara. They ranged in attendance from nineteen to over

150 pupils, suggesting that in these rural schools, even prior to the 1830s, many children from the surrounding area may have attended, regardless of religious affiliation.10 More detailed descriptions of local Sunday schools also suggest this pattern. When the Upper

Canada Gazette printed a report of the newly formed CSSU in 1824 it explained that “every

Sabbath school is expected to consist of children and youths, whose parents belong to different denominations.”11 These interdenominational schools, often called “union schools”, were the most common type of Sunday school in the province for the period before

1850. The CSSU actively encouraged the formation of union schools which operated “not in connection with any particular sect, conducted and composed of those of different creeds, but

10 Selections of the Circuit Reports were reprinted in the Christian Guardian. Christian Guardian 24 September 1831.

11 Upper Canada Gazette 22 July 1824.

98 which differences would seem for a time to be forgotten, in all the absorbing work in which they are engaged.”12

This attitude was dominant across Upper Canada in the 1820s and 1830s with the vast majority of schools following this advice. As late as 1848, reports on Sunday schools across the province explained that, especially in “country” areas, interdenominational schools continued to be widespread, noting that, “in districts not a few, where the population is divided into different denominations, Christian men and women interested in the young, and mindful to ‘work while it is called today,’ have cooperated in this cause with the happiest effect, despite their sectional peculiarities.”13 The CSSU went even further in promotion of the interdenominational schools, insisting that, “the spirit in which they are established and sustained is one which it is our sincere desired to perpetuate and extend. It is the spirit of love which ought to subsist between the children of one family –the subjects of one King.”14

The rhetoric of one family of Christians was especially appealing to the younger generation of evangelicals across denominations as they shared a passion for evangelism and salvation that they believed was lacking in the more traditional, established churches.15

Denominational inclusiveness was a dominant pattern among Sunday schools in the first quarter of the century. By 1830, it was understood that the Sunday school in Upper

Canada was an institution of inter-denominational religious education. In 1830, the

Methodist Christian Guardian explained that,

12 CSSU Report 1844, 24.

13 CSSU Report 1848, 10.

14 CSSU Report 1848, 10.

15 Grant, A Profusion of Spires, 62-63.

the main object of Sabbath Schools is to inform the scholars upon the fundamental principles of Christianity. It is to lay a broad foundation upon which a child may build a structure in his riper years as best accords with his convictions. It has nothing to do with the peculiar doctrines of any branch of the Christian Church, expect as a matter of general information.16

While it may seem odd that the unapologetically Methodist Christian Guardian would suggest that any church doctrine was off-limits, in the context of Sunday school education, it was not. Sunday schools were supported widely; by such a diverse group of Christians because they avoided these potentially controversial (or contradictory) theological issues.

Sunday schools primarily taught basic scripture, key Bible verses through memorization and recitation, and occasionally, share lessons in morality and piety, all the while giving instruction on proper Christian behavior.

Both denominational and more general publications made it clear that the Sunday school was expected to be “entirely auxiliary and supplementary to the sacred and primary relations of the family.”17 Sunday school was never intended to replace the religious education children received at home. In fact, it was seen as strengthening it. For instance, when a child memorized Bible verses in Sunday school it was believed that they would be better prepared to have conversations or lessons about the meaning, or specific interpretation, of those verses with their parents. Though leaders certainly recognized that not all children received such religious instruction at home, Sunday schools were intended to provide a foundation of Christian knowledge to children “of all classes and conditions.” 18 In short,

16 Christian Guardian 27 November 1830.

17 CSSU Report 1848, 20.

18 CSSU Report 1884, 9.

100

Sunday school provided the basic knowledge of scripture, while interpretation was left to be provided by the family or place of worship. Other Sunday school lessons such as reading, spelling, punctuality, rote memorization, were also seen as enhancing the instruction that occurred in the home or at weekday school, allowing all three sites of education to exist with virtually no competition.

The interdenominational orientation was brought to Upper Canadian Sunday schools in large part by the laity, and, as is discussed later in this chapter, their continued participation and leadership demonstrates their commitment to the principle of a interdenominational Protestant community. It was not lay people alone, however, who spread the idea of non-denominational Sunday schools. They were greatly aided through the lifelong work and leadership of Rev. Thaddeus Osgood. Osgood’s role in establishing early Sunday schools, his work with the Sunday School Union, and his role in book distribution, are discussed in Chapter One and Chapter Three. However, as perhaps the most influential figure in the Upper Canadian Sunday school community before 1840, the theological approach that

Osgood brought to Upper Canada’s Sunday schools deserves some discussion here.

Osgood came to Upper Canada from New England in 1807 as a missionary for the non-denominational Society for Propagating the Gospels Among the Indians and Others in

North America. Inspired by the recent wave of revivalism known as the Second Great

Awakening Osgood was committed to evangelicalism without having any loyalty to one particular church. While this attitude was common of missionaries to Upper Canada from both Britain and the United States, what made Osgood unique was that he was as passionate about education as he was about religion. His work always centred around providing basic education to the settlers whose paths he crossed. Osgood was adamant that Sunday school

101 education (as well as his other educational ventures) be provided to all, and that Sunday schools be non-denominational to ensure their universal access.19

Osgood was so committed to non-denominational practice in Sunday schools that on at least one instance he entered the classroom of an Anglican Sunday school and disrupted the lesson to condemn the teaching of Church of England catechism.20 When he was removed from the school, he took to the press to defend his actions. He explained,

The school concerning which I have been censured was first established by myself to be taught on the plan of giving to all denominations equal privileges, but that order of things being interrupted by a gentleman, who had more zeal than prudence, I was requested to use my influence to put the school upon its original place, which I did.21

Osgood was confident that through his actions he was defending his principle value of ecumenicalism, and asked “all to judge for themselves,” whether his behaviour in this case was appropriate. 22 While this incident was the only Sunday school confrontation that appears in the press in this period, it demonstrates not only Osgood’s commitment to interdenominational schools, but also the notion that such a principle would not be comprised easily, among lay Sunday school supporters, and often, the clergy.

As the above example illustrates, there were a few, High Anglicans in large towns in particular, who objected to the idea of the interdenominational Protestantism that Osgood

19 W.P.J. Millar, “The Remarkable Rev. Thaddeus Osgood: A Study in the Evangelical Spirit in the Canadas,” Histoire Sociale/Social History 10 (1977), 59-76.

20 Colonial Advocate 21 June 1827.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

102 preached and practiced.23 In general, the vast majority of the Upper Canada Sunday school community embraced Osgood’s cooperative approach. For example, the Christian community in Belleville had a successful and popular Sunday school, established in 1822.

The school was founded with the help of Osgood and led by a committee made up of

Methodists and Presbyterians who were dedicated to the principle of inclusiveness. When an

Anglican minister attempted to establish a Sunday school exclusive to his own church, using only Church of England Catechism, he was informed “the parents generally have an objection to [denominational] Catechisms.”24 In the 1830s, the Anglican school had fewer than twenty pupils, while the interdenominational school in the community had two hundred.25

Over the 1830s, organized congregations and denominational church bodies in Upper

Canada increased. More clergymen were sent to the province with the hope of fostering particular denominational loyalties among settlers, and there were more Canadian-born clergy of all denominations.26 Yet even as specific church leaders were increasingly claiming

23 The Anglican Church was split over the issue of participation in inter-denominational groups during this period. The debate was complex as divisions were drawn between High and Low Church Anglicans, but also between laypeople and clergy. For more on the tensions within the Anglican Church in Canada at this time, and in particular the ways these tensions affected interdenominational efforts see Curtis Fahey, In His Name: The Anglican Experience in Upper Canada, 1791-1854 (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1991).

24 Lamb, Bridging the Years, 32.

25 Ibid., 32.

26 For more on the desire for Canadian clergy in this period see, Brian J. Fraser, Church, College, and Clergy: a History of Theological Education at Knox College, Toronto, 1844- 1994 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995), 18-42; Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, Christian Churches and Their Peoples, 1840-1965: A Social History of Religion in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 42-43.

103 chapels, congregations, and mission fields for exclusive control of their churches, the majority of Sunday schools remained interdenominational.

This pattern was not unique to Upper Canada. In his study of religion in the Eastern

Townships of Lower Canada, J.I. Little found that there were similar tensions between clerical and lay approaches to Sunday schooling until the middle of the nineteenth century.

He notes that the “[Methodist and Anglican] clergy were largely frustrated in their attempts to encourage exclusivist Sunday schools,” as “local [lay] communities preferred to cooperate with each other in instilling common Christian values in their children.”27 The same frustration was felt by clergy in Upper Canada who were often faced with interdenominational Sunday school communities who had little desire to change their approach. When Anglican minister Rev. Samuel Ardagh arrived in Barrie in 1842, he assumed that as the only permanent minister in the region he would take over as superintendent of the local, interdenominational Sunday school. However, the lay community that ran the school did not agree. A local church history recalls that upon his arrival “there was a Union Sunday School in existence, but he refused to have anything to do with it, as he could not have the control, which he claimed as being the only settled minister.”28 These events were also recorded in his Ardagh’s diary, where he makes it even more clear that “the friends of the Union Sabbath School […] would not permit,” his leadership.29 Ardagh’s example is typical in that clergy often arrived with a particular vision

27 J.I. Little. Borderland Religion: The Emergence of an English-Canadian Identity, 1792- 1852 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); 264-265; 209. 28 May Spry Cheswicke. The History of Trinity Church, Barrie, Ontario, Canada 1835-1935 (Barrie, ON: s.n., 1935), n.p.

29 A Brief Memoir of Rev. Samuel B. Ardagh ed. Samuel J. Boddy (Toronto: Roswell and Hutchinson, 1874), 32.

104 of what their local Sunday school should be, only to be met by lay members of the community who did not welcome the more exclusive and narrow approach to Sunday schooling that ministers often desired.

The lack of denominational affiliation of most Sunday schools is also evident in the published reports. For example, many reports of itinerant Methodist preachers in Upper

Canada were regularly published in the Christian Guardian. Although little detail is given on the Sunday schools listed among other religious institutions in each circuit, these accounts are useful in identifying general patterns of Sunday schools across the province in the 1830s.

For example, the circuit reports published in the Christian Guardian in September 1831 noted the following: “Brockville circuit […] Ten or Twelve Sabbath Schools are established on this circuit, containing from five to six hundred scholars.[...] Kingston Circuit: […]There are nine Sabbath Schools on this circuit, containing about 600 scholars.”30 Such reports were included for all of the circuits of the (American) Methodist Conference, with very little detail on how many of the schools had any real connection with the Methodist Church. These reports included information gathered and presented with no mention of denomination or congregational affiliation, in general Sunday schools continued to be reported, even in the denominational press, as simply neighbourhood Sunday schools.

Exceptions to the Interdenominational Pattern

While the majority of Sunday schools in Upper Canada were not affiliated with any particular denomination, there were important exceptions. Kingston, and York, in particular often had the clerical and congregation support to develop denominational schools in this

30 Christian Guardian 24 September 1831.

105 period. Anglicans, both lay and clergy, were divided on the issue of non-denominational schools. As a result, exclusively Anglican Sunday Schools that taught traditional catechism were present in Upper Canada in this period though they remained very few in comparison to non-denominational schools.31

It was the Methodists who made the most visible effort to establish and organize

Sunday school work within their denomination. Circuit ministers and missionaries of the

American Episcopal Methodist church were involved in founding some of the colony’s earliest Sunday schools, and efforts to extend the denomination’s Sunday school union into

Canada began in the early 1830s. The enthusiasm of both lay and clerical Methodists in

Sunday school work is not surprising given the central role their community played in the

North American revivalism of the early nineteenth century.32

The Sunday School Union of the Canada Conference of the Methodist Episcopal

Church invited local Methodist Sunday schools to join their union through printing its constitution in the Christian Guardian in January 1830.33 It outlined the organization of branch societies, conditions of membership, and details of book distribution. As Scott

31 It is difficult to estimate the number of Anglican Sunday schools in Upper Canada. Historians have noted, however, that there was a divide over Sunday schooling between High and Low Anglicans. Low (evangelical) Anglicans consistently worked with other denominations in union Sunday school efforts throughout this period. High Anglicans made up only a very small portion of the province’s population and would not have had the lay support to establishment many exclusive Sunday schools until 1850s. Alan Hayes, Anglicans in Canada: Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 116; Fahey, In His Name, 256; Clark, Church and Sect, 102-106.

32 For the most thorough discussion of Methodism and revivalism in Upper Canada see, Neil Semple, The Lord’s Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism (Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 1996), 53-147.

33 Christian Guardian 2 January 1830.

106

McLaren explores in his study of the Upper Canadian relationship with the American

Methodist Book Concern, a great deal of the religious literature imported into Upper Canada from the United States before 1840 was distributed to Sunday schools. This Union for the

Canadian Methodist Conference was an official way to connect Upper Canadian Methodists directly to the American publishing centre, and consequently, intentionally keep members in a close relationship to their church’s profitable publishing efforts.34

The pages of the Christian Guardian document that the Methodist’s Sunday School

Union did not really gain momentum beyond the distribution of books until the late 1840s.

Published reports in the Christian Guardian demonstrate that the original strategy of the

Methodist union was not successful, and the few schools that did connect with the union did so directly, rather than forming local auxiliary groups. Over the early 1830s, the Christian

Guardian regularly printed reports of Sunday schools across the province. These consistently included those that were affiliated with the Methodist Union, as well as those that were not.

For example, in May 1833 the Colborne Sabbath School updated the public on the reestablishment of their local school which was possible with the help of the Methodist

Union.35 Yet reports of local schools emerging in Whitby, Hillier, Trafalgar, and various other regions were also published, though they made no mention of any connection to the

Methodist Union or Church.36

34 Scott McLaren. “Books for the Instruction of the Nations: Shared Methodist Print Culture in Upper Canada and the Mid-Atlantic States, 1789-1851,” (PhD Diss. University of Toronto, 2011), 95-150.

35 Christian Guardian 29 May 1833.

36 See, for example, Christian Guardian 30 April 1831; Christian Guardian 2 January 1830; Christian Guardian 4 June 1831.

107

The Methodist community, as represented through the Christian Guardian, embraced interdenominational schools and promoted them widely. The establishment of their own

Union for the encouragement of Sunday schools of their denomination was likely an extension of American tensions between the American Sunday School Union (ASSU) and the Methodist Church, which escalated in the 1830s over the perceived increase in Calvinist doctrine include in the ASSU’s literature.37 In Upper Canada, however, the Christian

Guardian regularly printed various updates on non-Methodist schools. For example, in

January 1830, a report was published describing the Sunday school that met in the Lutheran church in Ernesttown, likely an interdenominational school.38 Other schools had similar relationships with the Methodist Church. The interdenominational school in Belleville was successful until the 1850s when it evolved into a Methodist school by default, as a result of all other denominations in the community establishing their own congregational schools nearby.39 These examples illustrates the support of Canadian Methodists in Sunday schools efforts beyond their own denomination, where they participated and supported interdenominational schools and the CSSU.

While schools in Kingston and York reported regularly to the Methodist Union, an overview of the CSSU and the published reports of Methodist schools in the Christian

Guardian reveals that the vast majority of schools outside these two large towns were

37 This was never an issue in the Canada Sunday School Union, which had from its beginnings an more evangelical base than its American counterpart. McLaren, “Books for the Instruction,” 128; Anne Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 77-80.

38 Christian Guardian 2 Jan 1830.

39 Lamb, Bridging the Years, 37.

108 connected to the interdenominational CSSU, though it is likely that some belonged to both organizations. In 1830, The Christian Guardian explained the system of Sunday school organization in Upper Canada with a brief column on the province’s “Sabbath Schools”. It noted

in the promotion of Sabbath Schools, two plans of operation have been proposed and adopted, and, we believe upon the whole, with equal success. In the one, different denominations of Christians unite in the same society and schools; in the other, while all unite in the object, each pursues that object according to their own peculiar method of thinking, judging, and acting. Each of these modes has its advantages and disadvantages. Where the population is thin, means limited, and religious societies small, an association of various religious bodies is greatly to be preferred. But in places where each denomination and those attached to it, can furnish teachers, books, and children enough to establish and support a respectable school, we think it decidedly preferable for each to labour in its own way.40

While the editors are accurate in their description of the two systems of organization, they greatly overstate the “equal success” of Methodist Sunday schools. Both the number of local

Methodist schools, and the membership of that denomination’s union, did not come near those of the non-denominational union until the end of the 1840s.41

40 This piece had no author, and was probably written by the Christian Guardian’s editor, Egerton Ryerson. Christian Guardian 2 January 1830.

41 While any numbers collected for this period should be considered estimates given the scarcity in detailed records, it is important to note that the Christian Guardian’s editor (Egerton Ryerson) in the early 1830s was also the secretary for the Methodist Sunday School Union, and information published in that newspaper likely matched the official union’s data. In 1832, for example, the Methodist Sunday School Union invited their membership to submit annual reports of which they received (and reprinted) only thirty. In contrast, over the previous eighteen months, the Christian Guardian motioned 132 individual Sunday schools across the province. This suggests the schools connected to the Methodist Union made up less than a quarter of the total numbers of school, even when only Methodist sources are considered. Christian Guardian 13 June 1832.

109

The ideal described above, certainly represents the view of the Guardian’s editors, and the general attitude of the Methodist clergy. They were dedicated to establishing schools that supported the growth of their denomination and the success of their publishing enterprises. The laity, however, does not appear to be as committed to these goals. Published reports reveal that the Methodist Sunday School Union had to repeatedly request Sunday schools to reach out to them and become affiliated members, suggesting that the denomination’s union was not getting the response they had hoped.42 The Canada Sunday

School Union had no published invitations for members but attained their affiliated schools through word of mouth or through their traveling agents. The situation is further complicated by the possibility that local schools may not have identified themselves as Methodist even if they had exclusively Methodist teachers, superintendents or pupils. Given the presence of

American Methodists in many developing regions of the province, it is likely that some schools were Methodist in everything but name, and identified as inclusive and interdenominational as a result of local connections with an agent of the CSSU or under the guidance of a particular lay leader in the community.

As will be discussed later in this chapter, Methodists were largely involved in interdenominational schools as teachers, superintendents, leaders in branch Unions, and general supporters, and there was no particular curriculum or pedagogy that varied between what was taught in interdenominational schools and Methodist schools. In fact, Methodists were one of the largest groups that purchased non-denominational material from the CSSU’s

42 See, for example, Christian Guardian 2 January 1830, Christian Guardian 2 July 1831.

110 book depository well into the 1840s.43 In both cases, memorization and recitation of Bible verses dominated the lessons, with basic reading and spelling exercises also included for those pupils who could not yet read. In addition, Methodists embraced inclusion as the basis of their evangelicalism in nearly all their work and Sunday schools were no exception.44 The culture of revivalism practiced by Methodists dictated that everyone had access to salvation, and turning any child away from Sunday school would have been spiritually unacceptable.

This attitude supported the practice of inclusion in Methodist Sunday schools, which welcomed children with parents of diverse affiliations.

An analysis of reports of the Methodist and Canada Sunday School Unions reveals very few differences between Methodist schools and interdenominational schools. Before

1840 in particular, Methodists were more likely to encourage conversion among their young pupils, but the practice of actually facilitating conversion at Sunday school was very rare. In the thirty reports of schools connected with the Methodist Union printed in the Christian

Guardian in 1832, only five schools mentioned conversions of pupils, though it is likely that these occurred at nearby revival meetings rather than in the Sunday school. 45 In short, there was very little difference in the routines and practices of Sunday schools that identified as

Methodist, and those which had no denominational affiliation. Local conditions and particular priorities of teachers generally created any diversity among early Sunday schools.

43 For example, in 1843 Methodist schools made up more than 20% of the schools reporting to the CSSU, and 31% of denominational schools, surpassing all of the other six denominations. CSSU Report ,1843. See Table 3.

44 Of course, once one became an official member of the Church there were increased obligations to uphold. See Semple, The Lord’s Dominion, 19.

45 Christian Guardian 13 June 1832.

111

Upper Canadian Sunday schools were not operating entirely independently, however, and the

CSSU strongly supported this cooperative approach.

Denominational Cooperation and the Canada Sunday School Union

The founding of the CSSU in 1823 shaped the Sunday school community in Upper

Canada. It promoted the same ecumenical approach to Sunday schooling that was already present in local schools, and encouraged the participation of all Protestant denominations in its work throughout the nineteenth century. In the 1820s, the CSSU’s published statistics reflected the organization’s perspective on the province’s Sunday schools. The data was collected and presented according to region, noting the number of students attending each school and the number of teachers, but rarely acknowledged the religious affiliation of the pupils, teachers, or superintendents.46 The assumption was always that all schools were made up of people with diverse affiliations.

Reports were filled with details on the success of the Sunday school and rarely mentioned any denominational leaning or control. The number of students, teachers, and officers were mentioned in most local reports, as well as any problems the school may have been experiencing. A typical example is the report on a recently organized Sunday school in

Cramahe that read

A School was established in the fourth concession of the Township of Cramahe, in February last, containing thirty children, having a committee of three, a superintendent, secretary, and seven teachers. This school is established in a new Settlement, and like all schools thus situated, experiences

46 An exception is the one mentioned in the statistics of the 1828 report of the CSSU which notes a school in Brockville that was “attached to the Methodist Society,” with no other details on if this school was exclusively Methodist. SSUSC Annual Report 1828, 8.

112

much difficulty in collecting together the children of widely scattered population.47

The CSSU’s advice and instruction were equally inclusive, regularly providing details on discipline, recruitment, and school organization, but never on doctrinal issues. For example, instruction on how to choose a location suggested that the Sunday school “should be in as central a situation as possible; and should be light, airy, and spacious,” and teachers were advised on technique including that “the lessons, particularly in the Bible and

Testament, should be of moderate length, so that the children may be able to retain the ideas.”48 These were general guidelines with no mention of denominational variations in organization, theology, or practice.

By the 1840s, the published reports of the CSSU began to recognize the denominational makeup of its members and affiliated Sunday schools. Before 1840, the

CSSU made very little mention of denominations and generally considered all schools to be identified by their location. Similarly, the Union served as non-denominational, while individuals from various churches participated in the union, these were not noted and such information did not contribute to the work of the union. Once the CSSU began to become more independent from its British parent society in the late 1830s, the recognition of denominations began to occur in the Sunday school community. This is best demonstrated through the organization’s practice, as it consisted of an interdenominational community in two ways. First, the CSSU were direct in welcoming individuals and local schools from all denominations and favouring none. Additionally, it was connected to schools that were both

47 SSUSC Report, 1828, 8.

48 SSUSC Report 1828, 18-19.

113 interdenominational as well as those affiliated with particular denominations. The annual meetings were held in various churches on a rotating basis.49

The CSSU’s constitution demonstrated their support for this cooperation by stating

“it is intended that this society shall embrace members of various Evangelical denominations, and the books put in circulation by it will not interfere with the peculiarities of those denominations.”50 It reinforced this message in annual reports by describing its purpose as to “diffuse the truths of our holy religion, irrespective of denominational peculiarities,” and “to bring the Scriptures to exert their legitimate influence upon the hearts and minds of our children.”51 The CSSU believed that this goal would not be achieved quickly, “nor can it be accomplished by divided counsels and measures.”52 It is important to note that even though denominations begin to enter the conversation more prominently around 1840, more schools remained non-denominational than claimed by any particular denomination. Additionally, the CSSU continued to be committed to ecumenical practice and community. Though a subtle shift was beginning to occur as more Sunday schools were becoming connected to particular congregations, the value of interdenominational cooperation remained central to Sunday school work in the province.

In 1848, James Nisbet (Nisbit), the agent of the CSSU, toured the province on behalf of the union. Nisbet’s detailed account of his four-month tour provides an important glimpse

49 CSSU Report 1843, 5; CSSU Report 1845, v; CSSU Report 1847, v.

50 As in CSSU Report 1846, iii.

51 CSSU Report 1844 12.

52 CSSU Report 1844, 12.

114 into Upper Canada’s Sunday school community.53 Nisbet was a divinity student at the

Presbyterian Knox College, Toronto, when he began his work as agent for the Sunday School

Union.54 This type of work was commonly assigned as part of training for the ministry in

British North America where missionaries were few and there was a great need for men who would work for little more than spiritual rewards. Details of Nisbet’s tour are found both in his official, published reports, and his personal diary. These records provide a detailed and broad snapshot of Sunday schools before 1850 as Nisbet visited twenty-seven cities, towns, and villages, along with a number of scattered “country settlements.”55

Nisbet’s duties as agent were to help establish local branch unions where they were needed, to aid in the creation of new Sunday schools, to recruit subscribers to the CSSU’s monthly periodical The Missionary and Sabbath School Record, and to record the overall status of local schools to report back to the union. His visits followed a typical pattern that consisted of sending the local community notice of his upcoming visit; meeting with a few local clergymen informally, visiting local Sunday schools, visiting with parents and supporters, and often addressing the pupils. The focus of each of his visits was a public meeting to discuss Sunday school work in the area. If no branch union existed in the region, this meeting would be used to encourage the establishment of one. In the cases where there was a branch union, the meeting would be a chance to discuss progress and improvements to

53 James Nisbet Diary, April-September 1848. MG24 J19-34 Vol.1 [LAC]. (Hereafter, Nisbet Diary).

54 CSSU Report 1849, 17.

55 Nisbet listed the areas he visited as: Bytown, Smith Falls, Perth, Brockville, Prescott, Gananoque, Kingston, Belleville, Pciton, Coburg, Peterboro, Port Hope, Oshawa, Toronto, Oakville, Wellington Square, Hamilton, Dundas, Brantford, Woodstock, London, St. Thomas, Stratford, Galt, Guelph, Fergus, & Niagara. Nisbet Diary, 20 September 1848.

115 the school and the union. These meetings included an address from Nisbet and local clergymen on the topic of Sunday schooling, and usually included a financial collection that would be passed on to the CSSU.

In his diary, Nisbet kept note of the men with whom he had formal meetings and usually their denominational affiliation, in each of his stops where he connected with key

Sunday school leaders, primarily clergymen and superintendents. He states in his final report to the Union, “I have conversed with nearly all of the ministers of the different Evangelical denominations, in all these places,”56 and he was quite accurate. Overall, Nisbet mentions working closely with thirty-four men, did not record a denominational affiliation for only eight of them. The remaining twenty-six included ten Methodist (five Wesleyan, three

Episcopal, one New Connexion, and one unspecified), six Presbyterians (three unspecified, one Church of Scotland, one Canadian Church, one United), five Baptists, and five

Congregationalists.

In general, Nisbet was welcomed across the province by all Protestant church communities, but not everyone embraced his visits. Although rare, he occasionally received resistance to his cause. On his 1848 tour, Nisbet reported encountering six men who excused themselves from his meeting and let him know that they could not support or participate in his union efforts. These men, all clergy, were three Wesleyan Methodists, one Anglican, one

Congregationalist, and one United Presbyterian. Their resistance is interesting and raising some important questions about denominational authority and individual agency within the

Sunday school community.

56 Nisbet Diary, 20 September 1848.

116

The first of these men who Nisbet encountered were Wesleyan Methodist clergymen

Revs. Shepherd and Andrews at his first stop in Bytown. Nisbet noted that they were the only ministers in the town who would not have a meeting with him to discuss Sunday schools.

They told Nisbet that they could not meet because “they had no permission from [their church’s] Conference to take part in such a measure.”57 Although Shepherd and Andrews claimed they did not have permission of their church to work with Nisbet, many others of the same denomination cooperated freely. For example, when listing the details of the newly formed local Sunday School Union in Bytown, Nisbet notes that there were committee members from the Wesleyan Methodist Church along with Episcopal Methodists,

Presbyterians, and Congregationalists.58 In fact, across the province, Wesleyan Methodists were among the most eager to work with Nisbet and the CSSU, making up twenty percent of his contacts on the tour, matched only by Baptists and Congregationalists who also each made up twenty percent. In Brockville and Hamilton, Nisbet was welcomed and he preached at a Wesleyan Methodist meeting and was joined by Sunday school supporters and superintendents of the same persuasion in both Kingston and Belleville.59 Yet, when he was in Brantford, Nisbet received the same response as that of Shepherd and Andrews, when a

Wesleyan minister told him that “he could not act in concert with [the Sunday School Union] without an act of conference.”60

57 Nisbet Diary, 6 June 1848.

58 Nisbet Diary, 6 June 1848.

59 Nisbet Diary, 19 June 1848; 5 July 1848; 14 July 1848; 15 August 1848.

60 Nisbet Diary, 21 August 1848.

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The mixed reaction among leaders of denominations to Nisbet’s work was not unique to the Wesleyan Methodists. Overall, however, the Presbyterians and Congregationalists were very inviting to Nisbet, making up more than forty-two percent of those mentioned in his records combined, they too had clergy who were hesitant. When Nisbet was in Brantford, he met Rev. Baker, the minister of the local Congregational Church. While Baker was kind to Nisbet and invited him to preach for his congregation, when it came to the Sunday School

Union he “was very favorable, but matters are not so to warrant a step being taken of a public nature.”61 Likewise, Rev. Drummond, a Presbyterian minister, also from Brantford, was not supportive of Nisbet’s work. Nisbet noted that Drummond had recently arrived from

Scotland and that he “could not see the utility of the [Sunday school] Union, and the advantage to be derived from it.”62

These six exceptions stand in contrast to the thirty-four individuals who worked closely with Nisbet. Additionally, there were more than a hundred supporters of various denominations who are mentioned in general terms in Nisbet’s reports including many parents, teachers, and supporters who attended his meetings and contributed to his cause.

Despite these important exceptions, Nisbet’s diary from his travels in 1848 reveals the support for the interdenominational CSSU from both the laity and the clergy. Clergymen hosted Nisbet in their homes and churches, attended his meetings, subscribed to the Union’s publications, and often became leaders of local union societies or confirmed their connections to the CSSU. Likewise, lay Sunday school workers, particularly superintendents,

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid.

118 were eager to meet with Nisbet and secure their connections and resources.63 Teachers also attended meetings and joined Sunday school committees, though never in the high numbers that Nisbet expected. Other Sunday school supporters, including parents, also contributed to

Nisbet’s work by purchasing his publications, and making other financial contributions to the union.64 Support for Nisbet and the CSSU was widespread across the province and across denominations. Protestants of all affiliations endorsed his efforts as he visited their local schools and communities.

It is equally significant, however, that there were clergy of all major Protestant churches who also opposed his work on denominational grounds. Of the four major denominations (Methodist, Presbyterian, Anglican and Congregational), each had a clergymen who claimed that their Church did not permit such interdenominational organization and efforts, yet others of the same denominations were happy to join in, often taking leadership roles as committee members on local unions. While it was claimed by opponents that church regulations or doctrine forbid such co-operation in Sunday school work, the Upper Canadian Sunday school community was dominated by the value of interdenominational cooperation. Thus any positions that were held in opposition to this work were individual decisions, rather than denominational directive. In some cases, it seems that local factors influenced the level of ecumenical practice in the community, as the

Wesleyan, Congregational, and Presbyterian ministers in Brantford, who all refused to work with Nisbet demonstrate. Nisbet’s account suggests that local and personal factors had a

63 Nisbet Diary, n.d.

64 Nisbet Diary, 22 July 1848; 15 August 1848; 18 August 1848; 25 August 1848.

119 much greater effect on one’s participation in inter-denominational work than denominational instruction or doctrine.

The CSSU remained interdenominational through the 1840s, even as congregations were increasingly establishing and operating their own schools. Laymen and clergymen of different denominations continued to work together in local branches of the Union. They shared resources, including curriculum such as the Missionary and Sabbath School Record which had over 3,000 subscribers.65 They regularly reached out to the CSSU for information and advice on how to best run their local schools.

As the CSSU became the central organization of the Canada Sunday school system over the first half of the nineteenth-century, it increasingly reflected the changing religious culture of Upper Canada. There was an understanding that as a result of growing population, along with wider access to common schools, and an increased autonomy of churches, Sunday schools were moving away from the neighbourhood model of the previous decades and towards a congregational system, with a school for each local church. These changes, however, were still in their infancy in the 1840s, and the majority of Sunday schools in the province continued to serve pupils from any denomination, and whether individual schools were denomination-specific or not they continued to be connected to the central interdenominational organization at both the local and inter-provincial levels. Unlike in the

1820s and 1830s, in the 1840s statistics recorded by the CSSU began to identify denominational schools, and agents like Nisbet recorded the affiliation of almost every person he spoke to on his tour. Additionally, Sunday school publications intended for a general audience included histories and stories from various denominations rather than

65 The Record VI (March 1849), 36.

120 excluding any mention of particular groups. While Upper Canadians were becoming more connected to their local congregations and larger denominations in the 1840s, they were not abandoning interdenominational cooperation when it came to Sunday school work.

Ecumenicalism continued to be a central value of the Sunday school movement.

II. Leaders, Founders, and Teachers: The Sunday School Community

Leaders of Sunday School Organizations

Much like the schools themselves, Sunday school organizations were only as successful as their most active participants. During the first half of the nineteenth century, leadership positions in local and inter-provincial Sunday school unions were consistently held almost exclusively by men. These leaders, managers and committee members were in many ways a homogenous group. They were of British descent. They were successful businessmen and prominent community leaders. They were white and English-speaking.

They had achieved above-average education, and they were actively involved in numerous charitable and philanthropic efforts.

The religious diversity among these men, however, was quite distinct. While, they all identified as Protestant, within this group there were men who aligned with various branches of Christianity with differing degrees of evangelical theology. Presbyterians made up the largest number of leaders in Sunday school organizations in the Canadas, but Methodists and

Baptists were never far behind. Congregationalists, and (usually evangelical) Anglicans were also actively involved in these organizations, but on a significantly smaller scale.

The men who had leadership positions in the CSSU changed little between 1820 and

1850, even when individual roles were replaced, the general character and qualities of the

121 men involved remained consistent. Laymen led the organizations at both the local and interprovincial levels. The organization’s 1824 annual report records only two clergymen in official positions: Osgood, as the union’s travelling agent, and Rev. J. Knowland, a Wesleyan

Methodist minister from Lower Canada, who served as a committee member as well as Chair of the Union’s annual meeting. In contrast, laymen held the twelve other positions, including treasurer, secretary, and ten committee members.66 While clergy often cooperated with the

CSSU, they did not participate at the same level as their lay colleagues. In 1843, the figures are similar with those of the previous two decades with laymen making up twenty of twenty- two leadership roles, and clergymen serving only as secretary and agent of the Union.67

Though, it is important to note, that a handful of clergymen were committed to the cause of

Sunday schools and involved themselves when they could. In 1843, for instance, at least eight clergymen, of various denominations, were present for the organization’s annual meeting.68

Clerical participation was also fairly scarce at the level of local branch societies. The local branch of the Sunday School Union in Niagara featured only one minister, Anglican

Rev. Robert Addison, on its committee of eleven, which was typical in the makeup of local unions.69 As demonstrated by Nisbet’s experience described above, local conditions and personal relations dictated how involved individual clergymen were in their local Sunday

66 SSUSC Report 1824, 3.

67 CSSU Report 1843, 6.

68 Clergymen of Baptist, Congregational, Presbyterian affiliations were all present, along with a few others whose denominations were not identified. CSSU Report 1843, 5-6.

69 Sunday School Union Society of Niagara, Constitution and Regulations of the Sunday School Society of Niagara, 1824. F98 MS811 [AO]

122 schools and Sunday school unions. Overall, however, lay leadership dominated in the official organizations of the Sunday school community.

A team of predominantly lay officers and committee members led the CSSU. For most of this period, this included a Meeting Chair, President, Vice-Presidents, Recording

Secretary, Corresponding Secretary, Treasurer, Depository Manager, along with a committee of around ten men who, along with any clergy present, were allowed to raise motions and vote at the annual meetings. The laymen who filled these positions were prominent figures within their own communities. They were businessmen, merchants, tavern-owners, printers, and public officials. The majority of these men lived and worked in Montreal. Through their work as officers for the Sunday School Union, these men added to their usually lengthy records of philanthropic, civic, and church leadership. It appears that most of these leaders highly valued work in the area of Sunday schooling, as rewards were limited for their time and commitment to the CSSU. The involvement of these men in Sunday school organizations demonstrates the presence of an important community of Christian philanthropy that existed among Upper and Lower Canadians before 1850. While these efforts certainly never matched Britain’s philanthropic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the fact that prominent men were meeting, organizing associations, and actively promoting Sunday schools, suggests that even in the early stages of the developing province, children’s religious and educational upbringing was significant to many.

To be sure, working as a leader of a Sunday school organization had some tangible benefits as well. Through the Union, businessmen would have made connections with other men across Upper and Lower Canada. When J.C. Becket, an established printer in Montreal,

123 served as recording secretary of the CSSU for many years in the 1840s, he no doubt benefited from the name and address of his print shop on the widely distributed publications of the Union. In fact, although much of his work as Recording Secretary was unpaid, he received payment of just over £27 for the printing of the Union’s publications in 1848, allowing his business to financially benefit from his philanthropic involvement.70

For other men, work with the CSSU helped promote their public image. In the case of politicians such as Jesse Ketchum of York or William Patrick of Prescott, the networks developed through Sunday school leadership would have certainly strengthened their public reputations and broadened their social networks.71 Another common pattern was for men to be involved in Sunday school leadership before joining the ministry, as Brantford’s Henry

Wilkes, and traveling agent James Nisbet each were.

Providing access to basic education was a priority for many of the men involved in leadership of Sunday school Unions at this time, and a number of the CSSU’s officers in the early nineteenth century later became prominent in the common school movement in both provinces. A few key examples illustrate this important connection. William Lunn served as treasurer of the CSSU in 1824.72 He was born in England, settled in Kingston in 1820, and moved to Montreal in 1834. In Montreal, Lunn was an original contributor to the Montreal

General Hospital and was an active member of the Montreal Library, the Committee of

70 CSSU Report 1848,18.

71 Lillian F. Gates. “Jesse Ketchum,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, [Vol. IX], http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ketchum_jesse_9E.html (Accessed 1 March 2013); Bruce Hodginss. “William Patrick,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography [Vol. XI], http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/patrick_william_11E.html (Accessed 10 June 2013).

72 SSUSC Report 1824, 3.

124

Trade, and later served as a Justice of the Peace and municipal councilor and alderman. Most of his service, however, was connected to the cause of education. He helped established the

British and Canadian School Society in 1824, and served as the organization’s secretary- treasurer for forty-four years.73 He also served as secretary-treasurer of the Society for the

Advancement of Education and Industry, in the same period.74 Such a pattern was typical of the lay leaders of the CSSU, and others, including Jesse Ketchum, John Frothingham, and

Henry Wilkes, had similar trajectories as their leadership in Sunday school organizations branched into life long philanthropy and activism in the field of education.75

There was also an important connection between the lay leaders of Sunday school unions and other Christian charity work. The men leading the CSSU were particularly active in both denominational and interdenominational efforts in Montreal. Baptist James Milne, for example, was manager of the Union’s book depository in the 1840s.76 At the same time he also served as agent and depository manager for the Montreal Auxiliary Bible Society, recording secretary of the Canadian Baptist Missionary Society, and the Secretary and

Depository Manager of the (Montreal) Religious Tract Society.77 Certainly, it was practical for the manager of the CSSU’s book depository to have connections with other groups such

73 Margaret Gillett. “William Lunn,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, [Vol. XI], http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/lunn_william_11E.html (Accessed 10 June 2013).

74 Ibid.

75 Gerald Tulchinsky. “John Frothingham” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, [Vol. IX], http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/frothingham_john_9E.html (Accessed 10 June 2013); Philippe Sylvain. “Henry Wilkes,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, [Vol. XI] http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/wilkes_henry_11E.html (Accessed 10 June 2013). 76 CSSU Report 1843, 6.

77 Montreal Directory 1843-1844 (Montreal: Lovell and Gibson, 1843), 224-226.

125 as the Bible and Tract Societies, but it was not only Milne whose networks overlapped in this area. The CSSU’s Chairman, J.H Maitland, also served as chairman for Montreal’s Tract

Distribution Society.78 The Union’s vice-President James Orr, was also treasurer of the

Montreal Temperance Society and Secretary of the Montreal Auxiliary Bible Society and the

French Canadian Missionary Society.79 James Court, the CSSU’s corresponding secretary in

1843, also held the position of secretary for the French Canadian Missionary Society and the

Montreal Tract Society.80

The men, predominantly from Montreal, who led the CSSU, were well connected within their own denominations, but, significantly, as their involvement in the organizations described above demonstrates, they were also part of the important interdenominational

Protestant community in Montreal. As Protestants continued to be a minority religious group in the Lower province throughout this period, the necessity of interdenominational cooperation was even greater than in Upper Canada. However, because the Montreal-based men who led the CSSU were so familiar with working in an ecumenical setting, these principles were brought to their work with the interprovincial Sunday School Union where their approach to cooperative Protestant initiatives was encouraged in Upper Canada as well .

The leadership of the CSSU was made up of men who shared a great deal of prominence, respectability, and philanthropy, and they were involved in various religious and educational endeavours. While they had much in common, their particular affiliations varied quite widely, and among them lay loyalties to Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational,

78 Ibid., 226.

79 CSSU Report 1843, 6; Montreal Directory 1843-1844, 224- 226.

80 CSSU Report 1843, 6; Montreal Directory 1843-1844, 224, 226.

126

Anglican, and Baptist Churches. Even though clergy who were critical of the CSSU occasionally claimed otherwise, no one denominational ever made up more than half of the leadership of the CSSU. This allowed an interdenominational Sunday school community to develop over the first half of the nineteenth century.

Superintendents and Local Sunday School Leadership

The officers and committee members of the CSSU were primarily from Montreal, but

Upper Canadians also had a number of leadership roles connected to the Union and membership from the Upper Province was consistently greater than the Lower. In 1843, for example, the Union reported working with more than three times the number of schools in

Upper Canada than in Lower Canada.81 Connections between local Sunday schools and the

CSSU could be made in two key ways. Often, where the number of schools warranted it, a local branch union would be established to serve multiple schools in a particular region. If a branch society did not exist or did not meet regularly, schools could connect directly with the

CSSU.

In either case, leadership at the local level was needed to act on behalf of local schools and their branch societies. Like those involved in the CSSU’s central committee, the leaders at the local level between 1820 and 1850 were also primarily men. One woman,

Susan Greeley, was noted in official CSSU records as a superintendent. She carried on regular correspondence with the CSSU on behalf of the school she founded and managed in the Mount Pleasant area of Brantford Township.82 Another woman, Jane Hayden (Kersop),

81 CSSU Report 1843, 28-31.

82 CSSU Report 1845, 30.

127 is noted in a number of congregational and local histories of being the long-time superintendent of the first Sunday school in Cobourg.83 These two examples, however, are exceptions, and, though women often informally ran their own schools, the title of superintendent was almost always reserved for men.

In the first half of the century, Sunday school superintendents were usually also the founders of their schools. The main exception were those schools which were founded by travelling preachers or missionaries, who left their schools in the hands of lay superintendents once their visit was complete. In communities where a permanent minister was stationed, the clergyman would occasionally take the Sunday school under his care.

These lay, and occasionally clerical, superintendents, made up the managers of branch unions where they existed. These men had a great deal of influence in shaping their local

Sunday schools in Upper Canada. While levels of participation, interests and management style varied widely, some patterns emerge when superintendents are considered together. Of the laymen involved in local leadership, a commitment to both religion (particularly evangelicalism) and access to universal education, dominates their life work.

One example is Tristram Bickle, a successful Methodist druggist who spent most of his life in Hamilton.84 Bickle often acted as a lay preacher whenever an ordained clergyman was unavailable and was committed to church work throughout his life. Upon his arrival in

St. Thomas, Upper Canada, in 1834, he was surprised to find that the community did not

83 Percy L. Climo, Cobourg’s First Sunday School: Founded in 1835 by Mrs. (Rev.) William Hayden. (n.p.: privately printed, n.d.). Cobourg and Distrinct Images, http://images.ourontario.ca/Cobourg/50988/data?n=5 (Accessed June 15, 2014).

84 Census of Canada West, 1851.

128 have a meetinghouse for members of his denomination. He immediately established both a meetinghouse and Sunday school for the community. His school grew “in a short time” to sixty pupils, and when the region was sent a permanent minister a few years later, the clergyman was “surprised and delighted to find preaching established and a Sabbath school,” in the isolated community.85 Bickle then settled in Hamilton, and joined his brother in business as a druggist. He quickly became involved in the Methodist Sunday school in his new town, serving as superintendent from 1840 to 1846, when the school had reported over

200 students and twenty-two teachers.86 In addition to Sunday school leadership, Bickle was involved in his congregational community through leading Methodist class meetings, and

“discharging various other duties in connection with the Church.”87

Although Bickle was a devout Wesleyan, he also participated in inter-denominational efforts, including serving as vice-president of his local Bible society.88 His work in cross- denominational evangelical groups was typical of Sunday school superintendents who were eager to contribute to the distribution of Bibles and Christian knowledge to new settlers. Like

Bickle, the Sunday school superintendent of multiple schools in Whitby Township, Ross

Johnston, also participated in his local Bible Society by serving as its Secretary and

Treasurer.89 Other local superintendents were more interested in education matters, and were

85 “Memorials of Tristram Bickle, Esq.,” The Canadian Methodist Magazine, 4 (5) (November 1876), 444-450.

86Calvin Davis, Centennial Souvenir of First Church, Hamilton, Ontario , 1824-1924 (Hamilton: Centennial Committee, 1925), 130.

87 “Memorials of Tristram Bickle, Esq.” 451.

88 “Mr. Tristram Bickle,” Journal of Education Vol. 28, No. 6 (June, 1875) 92.

89 Bible Society Recorder Vol 1, No.6 (1870). 166.

129 commonly involved in teaching, running their own weekday schools, or serving as school trustees.90

Seneca Ketchum, older brother of Jesse Ketchum the founder of the York Methodist

Sunday School, was another typical superintendent and founder of Sunday schools in Upper

Canada. Seneca was a very devout Anglican, and committed to church work both within and beyond his own denomination. Like other superintendents ,he often took on leadership roles that included lay preaching when no clergyman was present. As a successful tanner in York,

Seneca was well-established financially and had property in that town as well as in rural areas in Mono Township. Seneca also spent time in more isolated areas, where he organized a number of Sunday schools. In 1835, when Anglican missionary Adam Elliot visited the region he noted that Seneca had “formed several Sunday schools, and instructed above a hundred persons.”91 His enthusiasm for leading efforts in outreach and evangelism, however, was not appreciated by all in his faith community, and Strachan and other High Church

90 For example, George Kerr was superintendent of a Sunday school in Perth and also the trustee of that district. CSSU Report 1843, 29; Copies of Correspondence Between the Chief Superintendent of Schools for Upper Canada and Other Persons : on the Subject of Separate Schools (Being a Continuation of the Return Laid Before the House, and Printed on the 17th September, 1852) (Toronto: Lovell and Gibson, 1855), 162.

John Carruthers was a common school teacher and also “assiduously engaged in the formation and carrying on of Sabbath Schools” in the Home and Gore Districts. John Carruthers to Rev. Robert Burns, 27 February 1830 as reprinted in Elizabeth Ann Kerr McDougall, and John S. Moir, The Publications of the Champlain Society: Selected Correspondence of the Glasgow Colonial Society, 1825-1840 (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1994), 21.

91 As quoted in, John Webster Grant. “Seneca Ketchum,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, [Vol. VII], http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ketchum_seneca_7E.html (Accessed 10 June 2013).

130 leaders publicly discouraged the type of lay leadership Seneca practiced.92 Like many evangelical Anglicans, Seneca adhered to general Christian principles and a broad Protestant community, rather than exclusively the practices and traditions of the Anglican Church. This is demonstrated through his lay leadership that reached beyond the Anglican Church particularly in his Sunday school work where, in at least once instance, he led an interdenominational school out of a Methodist meeting house, where he is remembered as occasionally using Presbyterian catechism in his lessons.93

It was laymen like Tristram Bickle and Seneca Ketchum who founded and superintended Sunday schools before 1850, but a few clergymen, from different denominations, were also part of the community of Sunday school superintendents. Among the earliest clerical Sunday school participants to settle in Upper Canada was Rev. William

Bell. Bell arrived in Perth in 1817, immediately following his ordination in the Presbyterian

Church in Scotland.94 Being in his late thirties when he arrived, Bell was older than most of his fellow colonial missionaries, and had more experience in religious instructions and practices that he had been exposed to in Scotland and during his years of education in

England.

Bell’s first efforts upon arriving in Upper Canada, were to establish a congregation and Sunday school in Perth. Bell valued community engagement, and led his congregation in supporting in a Sunday school, Bible class, and temperance societies. He also established

92 Ibid.

93 Ibid.

94 H.J. Bridgman. “ William Bell,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, [Vol. VIII], http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/bell_william_1780_1857_8E.html (Accessed 1 March 2013).

131

Presbyterian congregations in the nearby towns of Lanark, Smith Falls, and Richmond.95 It appears that Bell served as superintendent of his Sunday school for more than thirty years, as he was listed in CSSU records as such until 1845.96 His school was relatively large for the small village, with more than 100 pupils and nine teachers.97

While there are a few other clergymen in this early period who are credited with founding, and even superintending their local Sunday schools, in practice, most ministers were rarely involved in the everyday activities of their schools. Even Rev. William Smart, who was passionate about the Brockville Sunday school he founded, was only visiting it three times a year by 1830.98 Similarly, Rev. Featherstone Olser, an active Sunday school advocate in Simcoe County, notes in his memoirs that he established a number of Sunday schools in his district, but only visited them “once in six months,” except for the few that were near his home, which he visited every three months.99

Unlike the many clergy who rarely had time for their Sunday schools, Bell was not only superintendent in name, but also active as its manager in practice. He was the school’s representative to the CSSU, keeping regular correspondence with them in which he provided reports on the progress of the school.100 Such correspondence was usually completed by lay

95 Ibid.

96 CSSU Report 1845, 32.

97 CSSU Report 1843, 29.

98 Smart, William. Diary 1822-1830. Personal Papers: Box 1 File 7. William Smart Fonds 3195. [UCA].

99 Records of the Lives of Ellen Free Pickton and Fetherstone Lake Olser (Oxford: Privately Printed, 1915), 30.

100 CSSU Report 1843; CSSU Report 1845.

132 teachers on behalf of the superintendent, particularly if the superintendent was a clergyman, but Bell made the Sunday school in his community a priority and was closely involved.

Another interesting example of clerical participation in Sunday school leadership is

Rev. William Patrick of Prescott. Patrick was twenty-three when he entered the Methodist ministry. He was born in Scarborough, Upper Canada, and was educated in New York State in the late 1820s. Although Patrick was assigned to multiple circuits in Upper Canada in

1829, his ministry ended in 1836 as a result of increasing problems with his voice that limited his ability to preach.101 Patrick then settled in Prescott and was a successful businessman as both an owner of a dry goods store and an agent for the Provincial Mutual and General Insurance Company.102 During this time of stability, Patrick took on superintendence of the Prescott Sunday School, which had sixty pupils and eight teachers, and was closely connected to the CSSU.103 While Patrick’s dedication to his Sunday school was demonstrated in the 1840s, by 1851 he had embarked on a career in politics, first as a reform representative in the House of Assembly, and later as mayor of Prescott and town treasurer.104Although Patrick’s career as a travelling minister was cut short, he committed himself to evangelism and continued his Christian work as Sunday school superintendent.

This role, along with his experience in business, he gained a respectable reputation in his community, which allowed him to serve them in various elected civic roles.

101 Hodgins.“William Patrick.”

102 Ibid.

103 CSSU Report 1845, 32.

104 Hodgins, “William Patrick.”

133

The work of Sunday school superintendents varied greatly. Some were leaders in name only; others were active in both their own school and broader organizations. While a number of early superintendents took on all responsibilities in their school including teaching and management, for the most part, Sunday school teachers held a rank of their own.

Sunday School Teachers

Although teachers were an essential part of every Sunday school, they generally remain nameless in records from all levels of organization. A “gentleman” from Woodstock recalls the earliest Sunday school teacher in his town in a letter he wrote to the CSSU in

1842. He explains that the first Sunday school originated when:

A pious family settled in the woods, five miles from Woodstock, the nearest place of worship; on account of a numerous family of young children, the mother could not leave on the Sabbath, but when the father was gone to [the church] meeting, she was in the habit of calling her own children around her, and spending most of the day in giving religious instruction. The children of a few of the nearest neighbours were soon admitted to share with her own the advantage of her pious labours. This becoming known, others applied and were admitted, till, ultimately, her house was opened to the children of the whole settlement.105

The practice of women teaching their own and other children was common in Upper Canada.

These memories, like the Woodstock example, are often hazy, with few details of names or years recorded. Yet when these records are considered together, some patterns emerge of who made up Upper Canada’s community of Sunday school teachers.

The CSSU’s 1843 annual report counted more than 1,300 Sunday school teachers.

However, given the fact that some schools were not connected with the Union, along with many who did not submit reports, it is likely that there were more than 2,000 Sunday school

105 CSSU 1843, 45-46.

134 teachers in Upper and Lower Canada by the 1840s.106 Names of teachers were very rarely recorded for a number of reasons. Sunday school teaching was generally a temporary activity with a very high turnover rate. Certainly, there were some lifelong teachers, but the majority taught in their teens and then left when their careers or family life began to develop. In records of the CSSU, or even regional unions, teachers did not need to be identified, as all communication between the union and the school happened through the school’s superintendent or another representative. While the teachers were usually counted in annual reports of the unions, given the cost of printing in this period, they simply did not have the space, or any particular reason, to list them by name. In local church and congregational records the situation is similar. As Sunday schools in this period were commonly not directly affiliated with a church, church communities tended to provide only an overview of the neighbourhood Sunday school, and limit any details, including teachers.

For many churches before 1850, other aspects of congregational development took priority over Sunday schools in practice and historical records. Church communities in this period were immersed in raising money for church buildings, attracting (and keeping) ministers, and establishing Canadian structures for the organization of their denominations.

These issues overshadow most mentions of Sunday schools in the records, and certainly push any details of Sunday school teachers to the margins. Nonetheless, it is clear that thousands of Upper Canadians served their local communities by volunteering as Sunday school

106 CSSU 1843, 18. This is a low estimate based on the fact that the Central Union noted that their annual statistics represented about half of the schools that they knew existed, also because a number of denominational schools did not connect to the union yet had hundreds of teachers. For example, the Wesleyan Methodist New Connexion church recorded 475 Sunday school teachers in their report for 1852. Minutes of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Conference of the Canadian Wesleyan Methodist New Connexion Church, 1853 (Toronto: Brewer, McPhail & co., 1853), 12.

135 teachers. Although this was seen as temporary work, it was also perceived as respectable and admirable Christian service.

Reports and publications of the CSSU provide a wealth of information and instruction intended for teachers. Publications by the CSSU commonly outlined the necessary characteristics of Sunday school teachers. Other Christian literature praised the work of

Sunday school teachers and encouraged others to join their esteemed ranks. Articles in the

Christian Guardian reminded their readers that “children expect [Sunday school teachers] to care for their souls.,”107 and included reports of local superintendents thanking their teachers

“for their indefatigable labour in so good a cause.”108 The Canadian Congregational periodical The Harbinger gave similar praise, telling teachers “You are, Sabbath after

Sabbath, sowing the precious seed of divine truth […] earnestly and continuously exhorting to thoughtfulness, consideration, and immediate attention to divine truth.”109

While the religious press portrayed Sunday school teachers as particularly charitable, especially pious, and generally among the most upstanding of a community’s citizens, local reports reveal a somewhat different picture. More common than schools praising the character of their teachers were complaints of the struggle not only to find “suitable” teachers, but to find any teachers at all.110 James Nisbet’s first observation in his summary of his tour of the province’s Sunday schools in 1848 was that there existed “a want of a suitable

107 Christian Guardian 21 November 1829.

108 Christian Guardian 12 February 1831.

109 The Harbinger 15 March 1843.

110 Christian Guardian 25 July 1832; Christian Guardian 13 June 1832.

136 number of proper persons to act as teachers.”111 This was particularly the case in rural areas, though more urban schools had their own concerns as well. The Methodist Sunday school in

York, for example, was among the most successful in the province in terms of enrolment, contributors, and organization. Yet even this school struggled to attract teachers, reporting in

1831 “the committee […] found it a matter of extreme difficulty to obtain teachers who were both capable and willing to engage in this labour of love and usefulness.”112

Despite the shortage in the recommended number of teachers, Sunday schools managed as best they could. As a result of the scarcity of teachers in many areas, Sunday schools often had larger classes than were desired. A school in Perth reported in 1832 that although they had six teachers, it was “far too small a number in proportion to the scholars,” who numbered ninety-six.113 It was even more common, however, for schools to expand their definition of a suitable teacher in order to meet their needs. Publications such as the

Canadian Baptist Magazine were clear in their descriptions that “to be successful, [Sunday school] teachers must be deeply pious—and always pious. Ardent piety is indispensible in a

Sunday school teacher.”114 Yet, given the reality of colonial life, Sunday school supporters more often followed advice similar to that printed in the Christian Guardian, which suggested that “[i]f there are but few pious persons in any district where there are children, but no Sabbath Schools, let them commence the work, if they have to call in the aid of persons, as teachers, who are not pious; if they can find those of good moral character, who

111 Nisbet Diary, n.d.

112 Christian Guardian 12 January 1831.

113 Christian Guardian 13 June 1832.

114 Canadian Baptist Magazine, April 1840. 222. Italics in original.

137 are willing to lend their services.”115 Even “good moral character” proved, at times, to be too much to ask, as a few teachers are remembered as having “forsak[en] their classes” as a result of their “ignorance,” and “sloth.”116 Even religious excitement could lead to problems, as a Sunday school in Belleville realized in 1829, when the teachers had abandoned their duties, and pupils, to attend a nearby revival.117 In general, however, Sunday school teachers volunteered their time as a testament to their faith, and believed strongly in their duty as evangelical Christians to preach the gospel to all who would listen.

Although women are less visible in the historical record than men, it is likely that they made up the majority of Sunday school teachers in this period given their known contributions to such church work.118 Where lists of teachers do exist, the men are identified by name, and women commonly referred to as daughters, sisters, and wives of the men involved. For example, a history of First Methodist Church in Hamilton provides a detailed account of the work of John and Tristram Bickle, who served as the Sunday school’s superintendents in the 1840s. Their sister, however, is remembered for teaching as well as organizing the first Sunday school’s class for very young children and is simply referred to

115 Christian Guardian 21 November 1829. In this context, the term “pious” was meant to suggest one who had experienced conversion and was a member of a church.

116 Christian Guardian 7 May 1831.

117 Lamb, Bridging the Years.

118 See, for example, Carmen Nielson Varty, “A Career in Christian Charity: Women’s Benevolence and the Public Sphere in a Mid-Nineteenth-Century Canadian City,” Women’s History Review 14, 2 (2005), 243-264; Sharon Anne Cook, Through Sunshine and Shadow: The WCTU, Evangelicalism, and Reform in Ontario 1874-1930 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995); Marguerite Van Die, “‘The Marks of a Genuine Revival’: Religion, Social Change, Gender, and Community in Mid-Victorian Brantford, Ontario,” Canadian Historical Review 79, 3 (September 1998), 542-563.

138 as “Miss. Bickle, sister of the superintendent,” with no indication of which of their five sisters she was.119

It was very common for women to be involved in Sunday school work with family members. The Wilkes family of Brantford is one example of a family that worked together in running their local Sunday school. The school was founded in 1828, when Rev. Henry

Wilkes visited his parents in Brantford before travelling to Scotland in preparation for his entry to the Congregational ministry.120 On his visit to Brantford he established the town’s first Sunday school, which practiced inter-denominational inclusion and welcomed all of the town’s children.121 Henry left the school in the hands of a committee made up of officers and teachers. Of the five officers, two were Henry’s brothers: James, and John. Of the seven teachers, one (John) was Henry’s brother, two were his sisters (likely Susan and Ann), and one was his sister-in-law.122 The following year, the school recorded five regular teachers with family members Ann, Susan, John, and James Wilkes holding all but one of the positions.123Children of the family attended the school, but made up only a small number of the fifty-seven pupils who attended the school in its first year.124 While the Wilkes’ Sunday

119 Davis, Centennial Souvenir of First Church, Hamilton, Ontario , 1824-1924, 130. The 1851 Census of Canada West names Susanna, Elizabeth, Mary, Grace, and Johanna, all as sisters of Tristram and John Bickle.

120 Sylvain, “Henry Wilkes.”

121 John Wood, Memoir of Henry Wilkes, D.D., LL.D.; His Life and Times (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887), 45.

122 John Robertson, History of the Brantford Congregational Church, 1820-1920 (Brantford: Renfrew Mercury Print, 1920), 32.

123 Ibid., 33.

124 Ibid., 33.

139 school in Brantford provides the most detailed example of family cooperation between and among Sunday school teachers and managers, this pattern was commonly repeated elsewhere. Among others, Andrew Heron and his daughters taught together in Niagara’s largest Sunday school, and T.M Daly and his sister taught in the same school in Stratford.125

Female teachers included women who were married, unmarried, and widowed. The range of age was also quite wide as young girls could teach within the school they attended, and the wives of clergy and superintendents often continued in Sunday school teaching until their deaths.126 Like the men involved in Sunday school work described above, women teachers belonged to all major denominations with no one church dominating the workforce.

Though family connections were a main way that women found themselves in Sunday school work, it was not the only path to teaching. Anna Beemer of Aylmer followed a typical path, as she is remembered as founding both the first day school and Sunday school in that town.127 A Sunday school in Peel County was noted as having “its origin” in Mrs. Snell and

Mrs. Gardner, and that it “live[d] and flourishe[d] under thier soft and skilful management.”128

Given the scarcity of records on teachers of both Sunday schools and weekday schools in this period, any conclusions about the connections between these two areas of

125 Janet Carnochan, Centennial St. Andrew’s Niagara, 1794-1894 (Toronto: William Briggs, 1895), 25.

126 Percy L. Climo, Cobourg’s First Sunday School: Founded in 1835 by Mrs. (Rev.) William Hayden; and Lamb, Bridging the Years 32-35.

127 Olive Kennedy. Historical Sketch: Baptist Church, Aylmer Ontario, 1816-1966 (Aylmer, ON: Aylmer Baptist Church, 1966).

128 Sunday School Guardian for the Province of Canada 5, no. 7 (November 1850), 80.

140 work are highly speculative. Nonetheless, some comments can be made about the potential relationships, particularly involving women teachers. It is clear that in the second half of the nineteenth century, there was a strong link between Sunday school teaching and common school teaching. Many women taught in Sunday school after marriage prohibited them from paid opportunities, and it was common for young women to teach in Sunday school before or during their preparation for paid teaching work. 129 Neither of these trends, however, are entirely evident in the period before 1850, though it is possible that they occurred. More commonly, however, women were becoming involved in Sunday school teaching along with male family members, who were lay or clerical leaders in religious communities.

In the case of Mrs. MacPherson, the widow who ran both a weekday and Sunday school in early nineteenth-century London, Upper Canada, her efforts in Sunday school work were likely a business strategy as much as charity. Children who attended her Sunday school could have been recruited to attend her weekday school, which probably relied on subscriptions or fees of some sort from the pupils. Given the prevalence of private venture schools in this period, it is likely that this strategy was also used elsewhere in the province by entrepreneurial schoolmasters and mistresses.130

129 For more see: Lucille Marr, “Sunday School Teaching, A Women’s Enterprise: A Case Study From the Canadian Methodist, Presbyterian, and United Church Tradition, 1919-1934,” Histoiore Sociale/Social History 26, 52 (1993), 338; Mary Anne MacFarlane, “Gender, Doctrine, and Pedagogy: Women and Womanhood in Methodist Sunday Schools in English- Speaking Canada, 1880-1920,” (PhD Diss, University of Toronto, 1991); Patricia Kmiec, “Among the Children: Sunday School Teachers and Evangelical Womanhood in Nineteenth- Century Ontario,” (MA Thesis, University of Ottawa, 2008), 14-36.

130 For more on private venture schools in Ontario in this period, see R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar, “From Voluntarism to State Schooling: The Creation of the Public School System in Ontario,” Canadian Historical Review 66, 4 (1985), 446-449.

141

Unlike the few women identified above who were mentioned by name, the identity of the vast majority of Sunday school teachers in Upper Canada before 1850 remain unknown.131 As Kathryn Hamilton rightly notes in her study of Methodist women in Upper

Canada, “women’s accomplishments were rarely singled out or identified beyond ‘usefulness to the church.’”132 This was certainly the case for women who taught Sunday school for the children of settlers. Among whom even the most active teachers, would receive only generic recognition as church service. Other historians of women’s church work have made similar observations, explaining that women made up a significant portion of the teaching force in early Canadian Sunday schools not only because work with children was seen as an appropriate place for women to teach religion, but also because, in general, women were eager to contribute to their local and church communities in this way.133

Though women likely made up the majority, there were also male teachers, many of whom were young, transient and temporary in their service to Sunday school teaching. Men who participated in Sunday school teaching were often noted only in general terms, as their female counterparts were. However, male teachers were more frequently mentioned by name. The historiography of early Ontario has been dominated by stories of men’s

131 Kathryn Hamilton has exhausted the sources where women Sunday school teachers would be identified by name in both Methodist and nondenominational schools in Upper Canada for the first half of the nineteenth century. Of her thorough analysis of church and union records, along with the Methodist and secular press, she locates fewer than a dozen women teachers who were identified by name for the period before 1850. Kathryn Hamilton, “’The Grave Covers us and we are soon Forgotten’: Uncovering the Story of Women in Methodist Education in Upper Canada, 1800-1860,” (MA Thesis: University of Toronto, 1995).

132 Ibid., 48.

133 For example, Grant, A Profusion of Spires, 111. Marilyn Whitely, Canadian Methodist Women, 1755-1925: Marys, Marthas, Mothers in Israel (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005); Mary Anne MacFarlane, “Gender, Doctrine, and Pedagogy.”

142 accomplishments in politics, business, and religion. As a result, references to Sunday school teaching in the first half of the nineteenth century appear primarily in the biographies of prominent men. For example, public education leader Jesse Ketchum was a Sunday school teacher in the 1810s.134 Wesleyan Methodist philanthropist Edward Jackson of Hamilton is remembered as being a dedicated Sunday school teacher before his important contributions to the Wesleyan Female College, and Victoria College.135 Presbyterian John Creighton taught Sunday school in the 1840s, a decade before becoming involved in municipal politics in Kingston, and eventually serving as mayor of that city.136 Andrew Heron, of Niagara, best- known for establishing the first circulating library in the province, was another Sunday school teacher.137

The majority of Sunday school teachers remain unknown to historians. They led more modest lives than the prominent nineteenth-century men who are now recognizable by name.

More likely representations of the typical Sunday school teacher are the examples of David

Goldsmith or Abraham Laziere. Both men are named as teachers in a rare report of the local

Sunday school meeting in Hallowell, likely from the 1830s.138 Like the majority of non-elite

134 Lillian F. Gates, “Jesse Ketchum”;

135 H.P. Gundy, “Edward Jackson,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, [Vol. X], http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/jackson_edward_10E.html (Accessed 10 June 2013).

136 H. Pearson Gundy, “John Creighton,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, [Vol. XI], http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/creighton_john_1817_85_11E.html (Accessed 1 March 2013).

137 Sunday School Union Society of Niagara, Constitution and Regulations of the Sunday School Society of Niagara, 1824. F978 MS881 2 (AO).

138 Sunday School Meeting Minutes, Hallowell Township Sunday School Records, 1829- 1898. F978 MS158 (AO).

143 settlers in Upper Canada, they worked as farmers, and, engaged in Sunday school work with other members of their family.139

Not unlike the superintendents and managers of Sunday schools, teachers were concerned with the educational and religious development of their local community and their colony. They taught Sunday school in what spare time they had, and viewed teaching as important church work. Yet, everyday circumstances, such as illness, poor weather, or extra work on the farm, could also keep them away from their Sunday school appointment. If instruction on the importance of regular attendance and punctuality for teachers is any indication, such challenges often got in the way of Sunday school teacher’s model attendance. Some teachers gathered together and organized teachers’ meetings. Less often, official teachers’ organizations would be established. Such meetings were encouraged strongly by leadership in the CSSU, yet they appear to be very rare, and more of a Bible study for personal spiritual development of the teachers than any formal classroom preparations.

In the 1840s, the CSSU formally recommended monthly teachers’ prayer meetings to all of their affiliated schools. These meetings were intended to be a time of intense prayer where teachers would come together to pray for their own school as well as Sunday schools across the province. Those connected with the CSSU were encouraged to hold this prayer meeting on the second Monday of each month. They suggested a common day to further strengthen the sense of community among Sunday school teachers, as well as to intensify the perceived power of the prayers. Teachers’ response to these meetings was not as great as the

139 1851 Census, Canada West; 1871 Census, Ontario. Lydia Laziere and Thomas Goldsmith are also listed among the schools’ teachers in the same year. Sunday School Meeting Minutes, Hallowell Township Sunday School Records, 1829-1898. F978 MS158 (AO).

144

CSSU had hoped. In 1843, a year after making the recommendation for monthly prayer meetings the CSSU reported: “this important duty and high privilege is very much neglected.

Out of sixty-five [s]chools, the [t]eachers of only nine [s]chools observe the

Monthly…prayer.”140 The number of schools participating in this monthly prayer meeting increased over the 1840s, but never had more than a minority of schools taking part.

Leaders, founders, and superintendents of Sunday schools between 1811 and 1850 were men who were prominent in religious, civil, educational, political, and philanthropic communities. They were seen as respectable, upstanding citizens, and had strong social reputations. These men had similar class, race, and ethnic identities, but the branches of

Protestantism they aligned with were quite diverse. They ranged from devout members of the

Church of England, to young evangelicals within the Presbyterian community, to lay

Methodists of both British and American origins. Men belonging smaller sects, such as the

Congregationalists and Baptists, were also well represented at all levels of Sunday school leadership.

These men were all committed to their denominations and congregations, but they also shared an important commitment to ecumenical efforts in evangelism. The Sunday school was one institution among many, which brought these men together for the common goals of Christian education. Likewise, the teachers who can be identified also came from various denominational affiliations, yet came together with little discord in the Sunday school community.

140 CSSU 1843, 23.

145

Common Ideas and Shared Practice

The men and women who participated in Upper Canadian Sunday schools had diverse affiliations to branches of Christianity with fairly distinct theological, doctrinal, and liturgical orientations. While some level of theological negotiation was needed for this cooperation to be successful, Sunday school work was not seen as comprising any loyalties.

The doctrinal divisions between the dozens of branches of Protestantism that existed in the first half of the nineteenth-century have been thoroughly defined elsewhere.141 What is significant here is that the various sub-sects of the Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational,

Baptist, Anglican, and Lutheran Churches had much more common ground than they did differences. They shared the basic principles of Protestantism: the Bible as the only source of

Christian doctrine; salvation through faith in Christ alone; the centrality of God’s grace in salvation; and, rejection of the Roman Catholic Church and its teachings.

The presence of evangelicalism increased across all Protestant denominations by the end of the eighteenth-century, creating another important common ground based on the universality of salvation. In fact, the evangelical movement led to widening divisions within traditional denominations that made lines between denominations more vague, and among them, more firm. For example, Low Church (evangelical) Anglicans, shared, in many ways, more common practices with their evangelical counterparts in Methodism than with their orthodox, High Church Anglican brethren.142 Similar observations have been made for evangelical Presbyterians, whose revival meetings in Upper Canada in the 1830s, “might as

141 S.D. Clark. Church and Sect in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1948), 90- 172; Grant, A Profusion of Spires, 36-67.

142 Fahey, In His Name, 239-288.

146 easily have been Methodist as Presbyterian.” 143 While similarities among Protestant denominations lay in the foundations of their faith and increasingly evangelical practices, the differences were primarily in ritual, church organization, and state connections. In particular, these distinct features set the Church of England and Scottish Presbyterian Church apart from other religious communities in Upper Canada.

As a number of historians have noted, the established Anglican and Presbyterian

Churches were especially unsuited for the primarily rural population of Upper Canada. The

Anglican Church in particular struggled to attract clergymen to the province, as the educational requirements to fill this role were high. Furthermore, Anglican clergy were much less willing than their Methodist counterparts to toil in the backwoods settlements.144

Consequently, clergy from the established churches were quickly outnumbered by the eager and easily accessible American Methodist preachers whose travelling circuits allowed them to connect with most counties in the province by the 1820s.

For these reasons, High Anglican and Scottish Presbyterian communities were generally limited to the major towns, whereas more evangelical members of these Churches emerged in rural settlements. Many lay members, along with missionaries from these

Churches, were central in establishing various interdenominational associations that developed across rural Upper Canada. Simply put, evangelicalism was better suited for the

Upper Canadian population whose needs were for basic, individual religious practice, rather than the imperial, highly-structured ritual and ceremonial displays that the orthodox traditions of the established Churches had to offer.

143 Clark, Church and Sect in Canada, 162.

144 Ibid., 125. Fahey, In His Name, 219-221.

147

Religious leadership was most commonly provided across Upper Canada by itinerant

Methodist ministers from the United States. These ministers and preachers needed little training and no formal education before being assigned to a Canadian district, which, unlike the Church of England, provided a large pool of potential candidates. The travelling nature of their work covered a large geographic areas, and the Church’s focus on the backwoods and rural settlements allowed the Methodists to connect with many settlers who had no other clerical support available to them.145 A number of missionaries were also sent to the province by various denominational and non-denominational organizations, and many of these men worked similar routes to the American Methodists, but there is no doubt that the Methodists dominated this line of work.

Though Methodism was the most popular general trend in religious practice in Upper

Canada, the population in the early nineteenth century was never especially loyal, particularly when compared to later periods. In his study on the role of religion in the social organization of Upper Canadian society, S.D Clark notes that, “the tendency of many frontier settlers to shift from one religious persuasion to another, differing at times very widely in doctrine and form of church government, reflected the impermanency of religious organization and the willingness of the individual to participate in whatever religious service was available.”146 This religious flexibility has been largely unexplored in the historiography of Upper Canada, yet the popularity of Methodist camp meetings among Presbyterians and

Baptists, suggests that denominational practices were also quite fluid.147 In this context, it is

145 Clark, Church and Sect in Canada, 102-106.

146 Ibid., 167.

147 Ibid., 161-163.

148 not surprising that Sunday schools welcomed pupils, teachers, and leaders from various affiliations as church membership was generally not a requirement for such neighbourhood religious practices.

The prevalence of camp meetings and revivals in Upper Canada also removed the issue of conversion from most Upper Canadian Sunday schools. These public spaces of revival were designated as sites of conversion (or re-dedication) and it is likely that

Methodists preferred their children to experience conversion at a camp meeting or revival where they would be surrounded with others, including a minister or preacher, who could lend support. Thus, Sunday schools were seen by all denominations as preparing children for conversion, rather than facilitate the process. This eliminated any conflict over the best means of conversion or salvation in Sunday schools, as they were expected to be providing a foundation for conversion, rather than the experience itself.

A final reason that cooperation was successful was because the majority of Upper

Canadians were used to participating in communities that crossed denominational boundaries. Even by the 1840s, social and cultural structures had not fully been established in Upper Canada as they had in Britain and the United States. Though some religious groups, including the Quakers and Mennonites, succeeded in establishing isolated communities, most

Upper Canadian settlers recognized that depending on neighbours of various backgrounds was a necessity of comfort, if not survival. Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists,

Congregationalists, and Baptists worked together in their homes and on their farms. They participated collectively in social (and increasingly, political) matters. They shared the same public spaces, and ministers, and usually attended the same religious services and revivals.

They came together to establish common schools, or contribute to the same missionary

149 efforts and Bible societies. In this sense, it was not unusual that theological issues within the shared, cooperative space of the Sunday school were not a major concern.

Conclusion

A key feature of Upper Canadian Sunday schools was their ecumenical nature. The majority of local schools were interdenominational and inclusive. The CSSU was consistently committed to inter-denominational instruction and practice. The intentions of both local schools and central organizations were successful because of the community of participants, and particularly lay leaders, who also believed in this value of cooperation. This principle of interdenominational cooperation was very rarely challenged, and when it was it had its public defenders in men like Thaddeus Osgood and James Nisbet. Certainly, local conditions and personal tensions were present, but the overall community of Sunday school workers and leaders was accommodating, inclusive, and promoted a general Protestantism that intentionally left doctrinal debates outside of its operations.

Denominational loyalties and ecumenical cooperation were negotiated by the individuals and organizations that developed strategies which sacrificed neither. Schools joined both Sunday school unions of their own church and the CSSU. Men worked on efforts that supported their denomination at the same time they contributed to general Christian efforts. Even schools that identified as denomination-specific and taught a particular catechism often joined the CSSU and became part of the broader Protestant community.

Upper Canada’s Sunday school system developed into a mass network of religious education because it was based on common principles of universal access, basic Bible lessons, ideal Christian behaviour, and literacy education. A community of Sunday school

150 supporters was created through the circulation of CSSU publications, which promoted the organization’s firm believe in interdenominational cooperation at every level of Sunday school work from teachers to executive members of the central union. Local schools embraced all teachers who were committed to the cause, and an evangelical attitude of inclusiveness left little room to single out any teachers or students as a result of their particular affiliation. Leaders and teachers understood that Sunday schooling was intended to be a broad foundation for a Christian life. For the most part, all involved agreed that any specific doctrine or catechism was best left to be taught elsewhere.

151

Chapter Three “Wishing to Have a Box of Books”: Sunday School Libraries and Literacy Education

From parents and teachers, to the leaders of the Canadian Sunday School Union,

Upper Canadian Sunday school communities were made up of men and women of diverse

Protestant affiliations. They shared an interest in Sunday schooling based on a common evangelical theology that centred on a universal invitation to salvation. However, an even broader Protestant principle fueled much of their activity: individual and direct access to

Christ through the Bible. The very basis of Protestantism lay on this important connection between faith and literacy. This ideology of Protestant literacy was widespread across Upper

Canada, but it was not the only motivation behind increasing efforts in literacy education.

The intended purpose of literacy education varied among and between clerical and lay Upper

Canadians, though both made teaching children to read a high priority. Improving access to books and other reading material was of central concern in the promotion of literacy education in the rural environment where schools of any kind were scarce and widely scattered. Sunday school libraries met this need in a significant way.

The first formal report on libraries in Upper Canada was published by the Department of Public Instruction in 1849. At this time, the report noted that of the province’s 431 public and school libraries, 360 were run by Sunday schools.1 In the mid-nineteenth century Sunday school libraries outnumbered Mechanics’ Institutes by more than twenty-two to one; 2 yet the

1 Upper Canada, Department of Public Instruction, Annual Report of the Normal, Model, Grammar, and Common Schools in Upper Canada for the Year 1849 (Montreal: Lowell and Gibson, 1849).

2 Upper Canada, Department of Public Instruction, Annual Report of the Normal, Model, Grammar, and Common Schools in Upper Canada for the Year 1850 (Montreal: Lowell and Gibson, 1850).

152 circulating collections of Upper Canada’s Sunday schools remain absent in the history of the province’s libraries. Canadian historians of nineteenth-century libraries and literacy continue to focus on the state-supported predecessors to the contemporary public library, primarily

Mechanics’ Institutes and Common School libraries. This chapter examines Sunday school libraries as one of the earliest, and certainly the most widespread, resource for circulating free reading materials to children and their families in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The discussion covers the origins of Sunday school libraries in Upper Canada, the institutional influences behind them, and the role of these libraries in private reading habits, and literacy education of Upper Canadians.

By examining the competition over the distribution of Sunday school material, the connections to literacy education, and the contrasting purposes of these libraries put forth by the laity and the clergy, this chapter demonstrates two related points. First, children made up an important and active part of the reading public, not only by embracing literacy for themselves, but also by bringing free reading materials home, and engaging in familial reading with their parents and other adult family members. Second, children, with the help of

Sunday school communities, were participants in strategic systems of cultural and religious dissemination from local and international institutions, and the example of the Sunday school library demonstrates how lay people negotiated with the dominant theological discourses to further their own literacy education and reading practices. While the details of colonial reading habits, particularly domestic, familial, and childhood reading, remain cloudy, Sunday school libraries provide one avenue through which the relationship between Upper

Canadians and reading can be traced.

153

Early Reading and Literature Distribution in Upper Canada Upper Canadian settlers had limited access to printed literature before 1830. Yet a few committed individuals and organizations made sure that various Bibles, books, tracts, and newspapers were made available in most towns, as well as the rural backwoods areas of the colony. Religious societies, philanthropists, and newspaper printers all played important roles in promoting literacy in Upper Canada. The distribution patterns they established in the early decades of the nineteenth century provide the context in which Sunday school libraries emerged.

Religious societies and their agents, along with traveling preachers and missionaries were the main distributors of reading material in early nineteenth-century Upper Canada.

British societies included those affiliated with the High Anglican Church, such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), and the Society for the Promotion of Christian

Knowledge (SPCK), as well as non-denominational groups such as the British Foreign Bible

Society (BFBS) and the Religious Tract Society (RTS).3 These groups emerged largely as a result of the philanthropic movement in eighteenth-century Britain and were intended to act as missionary organizations to proselytize to either working-class populations in Britain or non-Christian populations in the mission fields.4 As a result of Upper Canada’s geographically dispersed population and the absence of a clearly defined working-class, the purpose of these organizations shifted upon arrival in colony.

3 Janet Friskney. “Christian Faith in Print,” in Patricia Lockhart Fleming and Gilles Gallichan, eds. History of the Book in Canada, Volume 1: Beginnings to 1840 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004) 138-139.

4 For more on British Philanthropy see, John Riddoch Poynter. Society and Pauperism: English Ideas on Poor Relief, 1795-1834 (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1969).

154

Although these societies continued their missionary work, particularly among indigenous populations, they also promoted their causes, including literacy and Christian education, to the general settler population. Agents of these organizations often set up local branches of the parent societies, and provided settlers with Bibles, tracts and books.5 These

British societies were responsible for bringing religious literature into the homes of many

Upper Canadians, but they did not have a monopoly on the religious book market. Their biggest competition for financial support, and often denominational loyalty, came from the

American Episcopal Methodists.

The American Methodist publishing centre, The Methodist Book Concern (MBC,) found relative success in the Upper Canadian market almost immediately from its establishment in Philadelphia in 1789. As a number of historians have illustrated, Methodist preachers sent from the American Methodist Conference to Upper Canadian circuits depended on the profits made from bookselling for their ministries’ survival.6 As Anson

Green, William Case, and other itinerant Methodist ministers travelled throughout Upper

Canada organizing class meetings, hosting revivals, and establishing congregations, they left a trail of American literature from the MBC with settlers of various denominations.

In the period before 1830, the majority of Upper Canadian settlers, and as will be discussed, Sunday school libraries, received their Bibles, tracts, periodicals, and books from the preachers and agents of both British and American religious societies. While various laws

5 John Webster Grant . A Profusion of Spires : Religion in Nineteenth-Century Ontario. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 56-64.

6 Scott McLaren. “Books for the Instruction of the Nations: Shared Methodist Print Culture in Upper Canada and the Mid-Atlantic States, 1789-1851,” (PhD Diss. University of Toronto, 2011) 110-111; Neil Semple, The Lord’s Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 76.

155 limiting the presence of street peddlers in British North America emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, religious booksellers were exempt, and a loose network to distribute printed religious materials developed. 7 In addition to booksellers, subscription libraries were another way that some Upper Canadians accessed books. The first subscription library in

Upper Canada was established in 1800 in Newark by merchant Andrew Heron and Anglican minister Robert Addison. This library was in operation until 1820.8 Similar subscription libraries were founded in York in 1810, and Kingston in 1812. 9 The patrons of subscription libraries made reading a priority and had the money to pay for the service the library provided. They were located almost exclusively in major towns and served a small group of men with such disposable income.

Stores and presses made up another important element of the book trade in Upper

Canada. General stores in larger towns often had a small selection of books available for purchase. Other common places of business, such as taverns, or hotels, also occasionally sold books to their traveling clients. Between 1810 and 1840, book stores began to emerge with the sole purpose of distributing literature. Although some are noted in Brockville and

7 Yvan Lamonde and Andrea Rotundo, “The Book Trade and Book Stores,” in Patricia Lockhart Fleming and Gilles Gallichan, eds. History of the Book in Canada, Volume 1: Beginnings to 1840 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004) 131.

8 Eric Bow, “The Public Library Movement in Nineteenth-Century Ontario,” Ontario Library Review 66 (1982) 2.

9Karen Smith, “Community Libraries,” Patricia Lockhart Fleming and Gilles Gallichan, eds. History of the Book in Canada, Volume 1: Beginnings to 1840 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004) 146.

156

Cobourg, early examples of book stores are rare, scattered, and leave little evidence of much success until the late 1830s and early 1840s.10

A more popular location for buying and selling books in Upper Canada was the local printer’s office. From the early 1820s, newspapers were increasingly popular in Upper

Canada. Kingston and York in particular had a number of competing presses. These newspaper offices usually became the main printing centres in cities and they printed and sold books to supplement the income generated from the newspaper subscription. The popular Colonial Advocate, and other newspapers, featured advertisements for books for sale in their printing offices.11 Another strategy established by newspaper printers was the reading room. Reading rooms were public spaces where men could come to read the newspapers.

Men involved in voluntary associations, and increasing, political interests used reading rooms to keep informed of local and international politics.12 Taverns often served a similar purpose, for travellers and locals alike, though primarily men, as a place to stop for a drink and a read of local events and politics.13

Mechanics’ Institutes also provided early reading rooms and libraries. These spaces had their origins in Britain in the early nineteenth century for the purpose of providing an avenue for working-class men to participate in self-education. This was done primarily

10 Lamomde et al,, “The Book Trade and Book Stores,” 132.

11 Ibid., 125.

12 John Hare and Jean-Pierre Wallot, “The Business of Printing and Publishing,” in Patricia Lockhart Fleming and Gilles Gallichan, eds. History of the Book in Canada, Volume 1: Beginnings to 1840 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004) 72; and Lamomde et al, “The Book Trade and Book Stores,” 137.

13 Julia Roberts, In Mixed Company: Taverns and Public Life in Upper Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009), 72.

157 through providing free public lectures and free access to reading rooms. In Upper Canada,

Mechanics’ Institutes begin to appear in the 1830s. The first was established in York in 1830 with William Lyon MacKenzie as one of its most prominent advocates. Kingston followed with a Mechanics’ Institute in that city in 1834, Woodstock in 1835, Brantford and Cobourg in 1836, and Hamilton in 1839.14

Upper Canadian men could be found reading in taverns, reading rooms, or their local

Mechanics’ Institute. Others, who had the luxury of purchasing books for their private collections could do so through their local printer, general store, or traveling preacher. It was within this scattered system of book distribution that Sunday school libraries emerged in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. A close look at these sites of reading and lending helps expose not only how children were reading in this early period, but also their families.

Origins of Sunday School Libraries in Upper Canada: 1818-1830

Evidence of the earliest Sunday school libraries begins to appear in various records in

1818. Because of their informal nature, it is impossible to know the first such library, but it is clear that by 1820 the idea of Sunday school libraries had been brought to Upper Canada and had substantial support. During the 1820s a number of such libraries emerged across the province. Sunday school libraries were quite widely dispersed in the period before 1830.

However, the origins of most of the earliest libraries can be traced back to one of two men: the Methodist, Rev. Anson Green and the Congregationalist Rev. Thaddeus Osgood. The

14 Bow, “The Public Library Movement,” 3.

158 records left by these men reveal some of the earliest efforts in establishing Sunday school libraries in Upper Canada.

While Green and Osgood were ministers in different denominations, they were both committed to evangelical revival, improving the moral and religious culture of the colony, and improving access to literacy education and Christian literature. The potential these men, and the organizations backing them, saw in the creation of a Sunday school market for books, tracts, and Bibles certainly met their spiritual goals, but, they likely benefited from the financial gains as well, as most ministers and agents would have been almost entirely dependent on the profits from book sales to fund their ministries.

Rev. Anson Green was a Methodist minister in Upper Canada whose work did much to promote Sunday schools in the province and his writings reveal some of the earliest

Sunday school libraries. Green was a American Methodist who came to Canada at age twenty-one, in 1823, just two years after his personal conversion. While he worked as teacher in Prince Edward County upon his arrival he quickly received his license to preach in

1824 and began his itinerant ministry throughout various rural Upper Canadian circuits.

Green was officially received into the Canadian Conference of the Methodist Episcopal

Church ministry in 1825, ordained as deacon in 1827, and became an Upper Canadian elder in 1830. In many ways, Anson Green was at the centre of the Methodist community in Upper

Canada, at both the institutional and local levels.

When the idea of Sunday school libraries began to take hold in Upper Canada in the

1820s, the Methodist church in the United States had already established a stable market through which they distributed the books, tracts, Bibles, and periodicals printed in their denomination’s publishing house, the MBC. Scott McLaren’s recent study on the Methodist

159 book trade in Upper Canada demonstrates the widespread popularity of the MBC, particularly their periodicals the Christian Advocate and the Methodist Magazine, in the period before Upper Canada’s own Christian Guardian in 1828. McLaren suggests that the

MBC was part of an intentional marketing strategy that connected denominational loyalty with financial support of their publishing house on both sides of the border.15

McLaren’s brief discussion on the Upper Canada’s relationship with Sunday school literature from the MBC helps identify the place of traveling, book-selling preachers, like

Anson Green, within the emergence of Sunday school libraries in Upper Canada:

Methodists, who were more evenly spread across the province than any other denomination, who possessed the largest number of preachers, who had an established system for the distribution of books, and who found in the [Methodist Book] Concern’s periodicals a perennial source of encouragement and new ideas for festering the establishing of Sunday schools, were far better positioned to fill the empty shelves of these libraries than any other group.16

While McLaren perhaps overstates the point by not considering interdenominational groups, such as the Canada Sunday School Union, as legitimate competitors with the Methodist Book

Concern, he is accurate in his assertion that the position of Methodists in this market was certainly favourable.

Anson Green made a number of public requests for Sunday school libraries on behalf of his Upper Canadian circuits in the 1820s. In 1827, for example, the Christian Advocate published an update on the Sunday schools in Green’s Ancaster district. He notes that the recent formation of the (American) Methodist Sabbath School Union had “given a zest to the

15 McLaren, “Books for the Instruction.”

16 Ibid., 137.

160 cause of Sabbath schools on this circuit.”17 He also discusses the increasing support for a local Sunday school library:

Our Sabbath Schools on this circuit have increased, the present year, from two to ten, and all are earnestly wishing to have a box of books deposited in this district, as considerable money is collected for the purpose of establishing Sabbath School libraries. I here send you the reports of three auxiliaries, recently organized on this circuit, together with ten dollars each, which, after deducting the necessary expenses, you will please send back in books.18

As a Methodist preacher, Green chose to furnish his district’s Sunday school libraries with books directly from his denominational press, rather than the interdenominational CSSU.

American Methodist books entered Upper Canada’s Sunday school libraries through Green, and some of his fellow ministers, who were committed to denominational loyalty. The

Sunday school department of the MBC was fairly new when Green made his request, in fact the first advertisement of its catalogue was published in the Christian Advocate in June 1827, the year that Church’s Sunday School Union was established.19

The American Sunday School Union (ASSU) was unquestionably the most popular

Sunday school publisher in nineteenth-century America. The interdenominational group had substantial backing and successfully distributed periodicals, tracts, and books across the country. Historians have noted, however, that there were challenges with the ASSU’s interdenominational model and the Methodists established their own denominational organization and publishing office after they perceived the ASSU become too Calvinist in

17 Christian Advocate 13 July 1827, 178.

18 Ibid., 178.

19 Christian Advocate 18 June 1827, 158.

161 their literature.20 Similar to the Canadian situation, however, it was not uncommon for schools to have connections with both denominational unions and national cross- denominational groups, and would frequently have libraries made up of publications printed from both types of organizations.

In 1827, when Anson Green requested three Sunday school libraries for his Ancaster district, the American Methodist catalogue had twenty-nine books for purchase that were specifically for Sunday schools. The Sunday school collection included books ranging from a twelve-cent tract on the History of Jesus, to a five dollar, three volume set of Wesley’s sermons. With the average price being just under one dollar per item, Green’s libraries would have received about ten volumes each, for his ten dollar purchase.21

Green’s method of purchasing a library was also common for the broader Sunday school community, including the most popular distributor, the CSSU. He left the selection and number of books up to the agent of the affiliated organization. As book depositories became more popular in the 1820s and 1830s, Sunday school libraries were purchased as one item, with the choice of material depended on the availability and quantity of materials in stock. This method of distribution was effective as, with Green’s example, libraries with multiple volumes could be stocked reliably with a single request.

The request for Green’s libraries was featured in his report, which was printed in the

Christian Advocate. Making such an application public was likely a strategic move. Through this brief report and request, Green was not only updating his American co-religionists on the increasing success of his work in Upper Canada, but he was also promoting Sunday school

20 McLaren, “Books for the Instruction,” 128; Boylan, Sunday School, 86.

21 Christian Advocate 8 June 1827, 158.

162 libraries, and the MBC’s new Sunday school collection to his fellow Upper Canadians, both the clergy and laity. Given the popularity of the Christian Advocate in Upper Canada,

Green’s request was probably printed with the intention of providing an ideal example of how to organize and stock a Sunday school library, while supporting the MBC and the

American Methodist Church.

Green continued to establish Sunday schools and libraries throughout his work in

Upper Canada, and beyond the Ancaster circuit. A report published in the Christian

Guardian in 1831 reflects his work in Brockville. He expresses his satisfaction with the

Sunday schools in that area, and announces the thirty-nine dollars raised by the community by stating, “I am happy to state that means have been procured for obtaining the entire library recommended to Sabbath Schools by our Church.”22 The thirty- nine dollars raised suggests that the library of a school with about forty students could be supplied with nearly four times the books and tracts than the Ancaster libraries he furnished four years earlier. It is not indicated whether Green obtained his 1831 library from the MBC, or one of the increasing number of Canadian Methodist publishers, but even in the late 1820s, it appears that the MBC was the preferred source among Methodist clergy.

Along with Green, Thaddeus Osgood also aided in the establishment of Upper

Canada’s Sunday school libraries in the 1810s and 1820s. Osgood left a number of records of his efforts in establishing Sunday school libraries in early Upper Canada, including published records of his travels across the province, formal reports for Sunday school organizations, and public pleas featured in newspapers. When Osgood was sent to the Canadas in 1807 as a missionary for the Society for Propagating the Gospel among Indians and others in North

22 Christian Guardian, 12 February 1831.

163

America, he already had connections with the London Missionary Society and the Religious

Tract Society which supplied him with Bibles and tracts to distribute to early settlers. He was not long into these efforts when he began to become concerned with the problem of illiteracy in the back townships. Once Osgood realized that the books and tracts he was circulating across the province would be of little use if the settlers could not read, he committed his life to providing access to basic education.23

Osgood was not the first to perceive and declare the population of Upper Canada illiterate, and such observations were especially common among his fellow missionaries.

Historians, however, have come to more complex conclusions. The claims of missionaries and preachers, such as Osgood, are often analyzed with a critical view, and have been found to have exaggerated the depravity of their mission fields in order to obtain continued financial support for their cause.24

In Osgood’s case, however, low literacy rates was not simply an issue raised in passing in a plea for support. Rather, his concern for literacy education shaped the course of his own life’s work. After travelling and distributing books for only a few years in Upper and

Lower Canada, he observed the poor reading skills of the population and began a career dedicated to bringing basic education to Upper Canadian settlers. This included not only

Sunday school education, but also systems of monitorial schools, mission schools, infant schools, and the founding of organizations such as the Committee for Promoting the

23 W.P.J. Millar, “The Remarkable Rev. Thaddeus Osgood: A Study in the Evangelical Spirit in the Canadas,” Histoire Sociale/Social History 10 (1977), 62.

24 For a discussion on the complexities of missionary narratives see Myra Rutherdale. Women and the White Man’s God: Gender, and Race in the Canadian Mission Field (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002), 48-49.

164

Education of the Poor in Upper and Lower Canada, and the Society for the Promotion of

Education and Literacy.25

Historians have debated if this perception, that Upper Canadian settlers had very low levels of literacy, was accurate. Historian of religious publishing in early Canada, Janet

Friskney, argues that the low level of reading practices indicates low levels of literacy among the population.26 Similarly, George Parker’s work on the early book trade in Canada suggests that in the first quarter of the nineteenth century not only as there was no reading public, but

“illiteracy was widespread among the poor and farmers.”27

Scholars who have used more traditionally quantitative methods of determining literacy rates in Upper Canada have come to contrasting conclusions to those of Friskney and

Parker. Historian Harvey Graff has studied the census records from Elgin County and

Hamilton and concludes that based on these samples, Upper Canada had high literacy rates even before common schooling was widespread. 28 R.D Gidney continued this line of inquiry in his work which argued that Upper Canadian families did make literacy education a priority and that in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, settlers learned to read through various

25 Miller, “The Remarkable Rev. Thaddeus Osgood,” 64.

26 Friskney, “Christian Faith in Print,” 142.

27 George Parker. The Beginnings of the Book Trade in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985) 19.

28 Harvey J.Graff. “Literacy and Social Structure in Elgin County, Canada West, 1861.” Histoire Sociale/Social History 6 (1973), 25-48.

165 combinations of apprenticeships, home lessons, religious spaces, and scattered common schools. 29

More recent studies, that combine traditional methods of quantifying ‘signature’ literacy with an analysis of reading practices indicate that reading in Upper Canada was quite common, implying the presence of a more literate population than earlier suggested. Scott

McLaren’s work on the Methodist book trade in Upper Canada demonstrates that the population was subscribing to, and reading, American Methodist periodicals in surprisingly large numbers.30 Likewise, Jeffrey McNairn’s study on the emergence of a reading public in the colony also argues that reading was common among early settlers, even suggesting that literacy rates in Upper Canada were higher than in Britain.31

This debate over literacy in Upper Canada demonstrates some of the challenges in exploring historical literacy. While contemporary scholars generally agree that the ability to sign one’s name is not necessarily demonstrative of literacy rates at any given time, more qualitative sources are also proving to be problematic. How Osgood and his contemporaries defined a literate population, may be impossible to determine. Perhaps what remains even more significant are questions surrounding how people were reading, where they learned to read, and what this can reveal about particular cultures and communities. The connections between reading and religious, social and political change, have recently become the focus of

29R.D. Gidney. “Elementary Education in Upper Canada: A Reassessment” In Education and Social Change: Themes from Ontario's Past. eds. Michael B. Katz and Paul H. Mattingly (New York : New York University Press, 1975) 3-27.

30McLaren, “Books for the Instruction,” 26-151.

31 Jeffery McNairn, The Capacity to Judge: Public Opinion and Deliberative Democracy in Upper Canada, 1791-1854 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000) 133.

166 studies on historical literacy and literary culture. Historians are increasingly concerned with how people gave meaning to the act of reading and the ability to read.32

It is clear that the majority of Upper Canadians were participating in various reading habits, yet the need for literacy education that Osgood observed was real to him. Osgood was aware not only of the need for increased avenues of basic education, but also of the public’s desire and support for such educational institutions. When Osgood became travelling agent for the Canada Sunday School Union in 1822, he had already been involved in Sunday school work and book distribution through his missionary activities for nearly a decade. In

1823, Osgood sent an update on a Sunday school he founded in the Niagara region to the

Christian Register. He noted the improvement of the pupils and pressed for the establishment of Sunday school libraries across the province, “Could a small library of books be set up in every town and settlement and made accessible to the children and young people upon condition that all immoral conduct should be carefully avoided and the youth would come together and recite every Sabbath this would have an excellent effect. For the accomplishment of so important an object, it is hoped that Government will be disposed to lend some assistance.”33

His pleas for government support were not ignored. In fact, in 1824, £150 was given to Sunday school libraries from the provincial legislature.34 Although it has been assumed that this money was dispersed through John Strachan to exclusively Anglican Sunday

32 Bruce Curtis, “Beyond Signature Literacy: New Research Directions,” Historical Studies in Education 19, 2 (2007): 1-12.

33 Christian Register 15 February 1823.

34 John George Hodgins, Documentary History of Education in Upper Canada from 1871 to 1876 (Toronto: Warick Bros. and Rutter, 1894-1910), vol.1, 197.

167 schools,35 the connections between the CSSU and its British parent society were very strong, and it is possible that this money was given to the CSSU. State support was rare, however, and was never the main way that early Sunday school libraries were financed. Subscriptions and donations from lay supporters were essential. Osgood collected more than £45 in donations to the CSSU in 1823-1824 from supporters throughout his travels in Upper and

Lower Canada. 36 Others gave at the local level.

Osgood’s connections with various tract and Bible societies helped supply materials to Sunday school libraries. A notice he posted in the Kingston Chronicle in 1820 advertised that “to every Sunday school that has been in operation five months, a dollar’s worth of

Books and Tracts will be given gratis,” after leaving a “variety of small books and useful tracts,” with a local man.37 By 1820, Sunday schools were beginning to develop book collections, used for both shared libraries and classroom lessons.

Osgood’s report on his work as an agent of the CSSU in 1824 is the most revealing about Sunday school libraries before 1830. On his travels through Upper and Lower Canada he reflects, “I assembled the people in almost every township […] I procured a committee to be appointed for conducting a school, and for taking the necessary steps for establishing a

Juvenile Library, which I conceive essential to the permanent support and general utility of each [Sunday] school.” 38 By 1824, much of Osgood’s Sunday school work had moved towards establishing libraries. Given his influence in the CSSU, it is not surprising that the

35 Susan E. Houston and Alison Prentice, Schooling and Scholars in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 40.

36 SSUSC Report, 1824, 16.

37 Kingston Chronicle, 20 October 1820.

38 SSUSC Report, 1824, 12.

168 stated purpose of this organization in the 1820s was not only to encourage and support the founding of Sunday schools, but also to provide them with books.

Early Efforts of the CSSU in Sunday School Libraries The CSSU had a number of strategies for procuring and distributing books and tracts for Sunday school libraries in the 1820s. Material was held in a central depository in

Montreal and distributed based on requests from schools in need of a library or book collection, or, on Osgood’s recommendation. In 1824, the treasurer’s statement of account describes some of the ways that financial support was obtained to purchase the literature they distributed. The largest contribution was a £50 donation from the Kingston Sunday School

Union to purchase books for Sunday schools throughout Upper Canada. More than £48 in

“subscriptions and donations” was collected by raised by Osgood as he travelled Upper and

Lower Canada. They also received individual donations. For example a unnamed “Dr. in

York” donated £25. 39

In the 1820s, books and other published materials were purchased from British organizations. In 1824, both the parent CSSU association and its local branches purchased books. The largest purchase was “£50 sent from Upper Canadian Union [branch] Societies to London Depository for books.” Just over £2 was sent to the Missionary and Religious

Tract Society for “children’s books,” and £1 1s and 8d was spent on “spelling books” from an unnamed source. 40

Much can be gathered from this detailed financial account. The movement towards

Sunday school libraries in Upper Canada was broader than a few local areas. Not only did

39 Ibid., 16.

40 Ibid.,16.

169 the CSSU represent schools from across the Canadas, but local branches of the society, and individual supporters, made intentional efforts to purchase books for libraries beyond their local communities. The connections with British groups are also clear, as the literature that made up the CSSU depository was purchased from religious societies in Britain. There is also evidence of support from the laity, as donations from Osgood’s travels and local unions made up more than half of the financial contributions.

The 1824 report does not include any specific example of Sunday school libraries in

Upper Canada, but it clear from the financial records that some had been established by

Osgood by that point and that people were building book collections for their schools with the help of the CSSU. Four years later in 1828, a few schools submitted reports to the CSSU that included updates on their libraries. The most detailed account is from a school located on the boundary line between Cramahe and Haldimand. This school was attended by forty two children, and it was boastfully noted that the pupils had recited 10,500 verses of scripture at their most recent examination pointing to its success and popularity. This school’s library was also seen as successful, containing 130 volumes.41 Like the Cramahe and Haldimand example, most of the schools affiliated with the CSSU in the early 1820s were started with the help of Osgood, and they tended to be either inter-denominational schools, or, in

Kingston and York, denominational schools that worked closely with local co-operative

Sunday school union branches.

Other Early Sunday School Libraries

Although both Green and Osgood had great influence in the formation of Sunday school libraries in Upper Canada in the 1820s, they did not have complete authority and a

41 SSUSC Report, 1824, 9.

170 number of libraries also emerged without their leadership. For example, a brief report from an anonymous “Gentlemen in Kingston, Upper Canada,” on a school and library in that city appear in The Sabbath School Visitant, a publication of the ASSU in 1825:

There are three other Sunday Schools in this town; and they are generally, I believe, in a flourishing condition […] The books of the library have been considerably read by the teachers and scholars. We continue to receive the ‘Sabbath School Visitant,’ a monthly publication from Utica, a work highly useful to Sabbath Schools.42

While the lack of knowledge of the author’s identity limits the ability to uncover all the details of this library, some speculations are worth noting. It is likely that this school was affiliated with the Kingston branch of the CSSU, as this was an active branch at the time and the knowledge of the surrounding schools noted in the report suggests the author’s involvement in a local union. Even though this library was likely connected to a branch of the CSSU, it is clear that they purchased at least some of their library materials directly from the ASSU, either instead of, or in addition to, the British books supplied by the CSSU.

It is not surprising that early Canadian Sunday school libraries subscribed to the

ASSU’s Sabbath School Visitant, as Canadian Sunday school periodicals did not begin regular publication until the 1840s, and the general non-denominational content of the

American publication would have satisfied both interdenominational schools or libraries shared between multiple congregations. The content of Sunday school periodicals, will be discussed fully in the following chapter, but is important to note here that the periodicals of the ASSU tended to include materials for both pupils and teachers. As indicated in the report quoted above, teachers were encouraged to make use of such literature in the library to obtain advice and information on Sunday school teaching. The presence of publications from the

42 Sabbath School Visitant, (April 1825) 2:1, 12.

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ASSU in Upper Canada’s Sunday school libraries reveals the variety of literature in these collections.

The CSSU, various Bible and tract societies, and the MBC, all had a presence in

Upper Canada’s Sunday school libraries, but other publishers, including the ASSU also made their way into the province’s libraries. In the period before 1830, when no Canadian publishers were creating their own Sunday school materials, both British and American literature filled the bookshelves, and book-boxes, of these schools. While Osgood, Green, the

CSSU, and the Methodist Church were largely influential in establishing the spread of

Sunday school libraries, the success of these libraries was dependent not on the work of these leaders, but on the communities of lay people that invested in them. Laywomen and laymen donated not only their time and skill as managers and librarians, or their finances as donors and subscribers, but also their prayers and the continued patronage of themselves and their children. As Sunday school libraries spread rapidly across the province in the period from

1830 to 1850, the motivations of lay communities, and their own goals and uses of Sunday schools libraries became more clear.

The CSSU and Religious Goals of Sunday School Libraries

From its beginnings the CSSU prioritized the distribution of books to Sunday schools and the establishment of Sunday school libraries. The Union developed into a major player in the book market over the 1830s and 1840s. In 1839 the CSSU distributed over 29,210 books, tracts, maps, and Bibles to Sunday schools in Upper and Lower Canada. While 7,434 are categorized specifically as “library books,” it is likely that those in the other categories of

“Bibles,” “Union Questions,” and “Elementary Books” also ended up in libraries.43

43 Ibid., 18.

172

Table 1 Items Issued from the Book Depository of the Canada Sunday School Union 1839-1844 Library Elementary Tracts Bibles Hymn Maps All Other Books Books (English) Books Materials 1839 7,434 3,393 17,690 712 88 75 445 1840 10,329 1,494 9,650 11 96 30 745 1841 8,732 2,588 4,691 75 280 25 1,069 1842 9,908 5,459 2,280 158 742 20 711 1843 6,056 3,011 1,769 136 306 10 478 1844 8,842 3,878 2,350 191 718 10 260 Source: CSSU Annual Report 1843, 18; CSSU Annual Report 1844.

In 1845 the CSSU reflected on the previous decade of its work in supplying free materials to needy Sunday schools noting that “the Society has been enabled since its

[re]organization in 1836 to furnish a gratuitous supply of books to Schools in destitute parts of the country, to the extent of £1,100.”44 By 1843, the CSSU boasted that it had provided

36,312 library books to more than 200 Sunday schools, not including tracts and Bibles.45

Support from the CSSU was not always necessary for establishing a Sunday school library in Upper Canada. Far more libraries existed than those in contact with the CSSU.

Some individuals, both lay and clergy, took it upon themselves to provide the service to their community. For example, in 1845, Susan Greely, a lay superintendent from Haldimand

County, reported to the CSSU that her Sunday school “had no library, except what I have furnished myself, till this summer, when, with a small subscription, we procured a small one.

I have, however, circulated a great many books and tracts of my own, and their influence has been very beneficial.”46 Similarly, a congregational history of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian

44 CSSU Report, 1845, 9.

45 CSSU Report, 1843, 18.

46 CSSU Report, 1845, 17.

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Church in Napier recalls that in, “1840 the union Sunday School at St. Mary’s asked Rev.

Blake for books to read. He gave them books from his own library till he could get some from the Society.”47 A Sunday school in London also noted that in 1844 one of the school’s teachers, John Michie, returned to Scotland, and he left his personal library off 116 volumes to the Sunday school library.48

The CSSU, and other organizations involved in Sunday school libraries often identified their intended purpose, and the goals that they defined for Upper Canada’s Sunday school libraries, but their motives can also be found by the structure of the libraries and the strategies of book distribution that emerged around them. By 1835, prescriptive instruction on why and how to run an effective library was featured in many publications by the CSSU and Sunday School departments of churches, as well as Christian periodicals. When contrasting the official instruction of the CSSU with the details of libraries in local reports, the most common patterns and practices of Upper Canadians emerge.

CSSU reports reveal that the aims of Sunday school libraries were the same as the

Sunday school itself: raising children with religious knowledge, preparing for conversion, and promoting a culture of morality and piety. These goals remained consistent throughout this period. In the CSSU’s 1843 report these aims were identified as it explained that “the acknowledged benefit of Sabbath School instruction, as a means for imparting Scriptural truth to the rising generation, and for laying a good foundation for a moral, pious, useful life,

47 Enna Alberta Field. A History of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Napier and the the Gaelic Settlement. (Strathroy, ON: St. Andrew’s Church, 1964) 8.

48 Almost a Century: St. Andrew’s United Church, London, Canada, 1833-1930 (London, ON: St. Andrew’s United Church, 1930) 30.

174 and a blessed immortality beyond the grave.”49 Personal commitment to faith was not the only goal of Sunday school instruction, evangelism was equally important, and the Sunday school library became a central tool in equipping children for active proselytizing. Libraries were seen as assisting children so that “parents and friends may be brought to a true knowledge of God as the chief good.”50 Children were encouraged to bring library materials home to their families, and the CSSU boasted in 1855 that “by supplying reading of an attractive and safe tendency from the volumes of the libraries […] these schools exert a silent influence on the adult portion of the community.”51

Providing morally appropriate reading material to children was also a main purpose of Sunday school libraries. The CSSU was clear that “the salutary influence of the libraries, directly and indirectly, is usually dwelt upon as promoting a taste for wholesome reading and displacing the books of pernicious and questionable character into wide circulation,”52 and that a Sunday school library “furnishes employment for that leisure which would otherwise expose them to temptation.”53 There are also occasional mentions that opening a library would attract children, and their families, to the Sunday school, and local managers were encouraged to do so for this reason. As early as 1824 the SSUSC proclaimed that “the

49 CSSU Report 1843, 8.

50 SSUSC Report, 1824, 22.

51 CSSU Report, 1855, 10.

52 Ibid., 9.

53 SSUSC Report, 1824, 22.

175 establishment of a library […] will be found a great inducement to the regular attendance and diligent application of the children.”54

Clergy and other leaders of Sunday school organizations were primarily concerned with evangelism, and religious goals in all of their work, and the cause of Sunday school libraries was no exception. Sunday school libraries were promoted through these organizations as solely religious institutions with clear evangelical goals of commitment to

Christian faith, primarily through personal conversion, general morality and piety, and active evangelism in all aspects of their lives. By the 1840s, the basic literacy education that

Thaddeus Osgood had promoted was no longer seen by the leaders in the Sunday school movement as a goal of Sunday school libraries, and spiritual concerns were paramount.

A major challenge that faced the promoters of Sunday school libraries was supplying books across the province, from larger towns to newly settled backwoods communities. As described above, multiple systems of book distribution were established by the mid-1830s, and Sunday school libraries created a market that various organizations had a spiritual and financial stake in. If schools could prove they were in a sufficiently ‘destitute’ community, the CSSU would provide them with a library at no charge. Libraries were also often used in more than one school, and more stable schools donated their old books to needy schools when a new collection was purchased.

54 Ibid., 22-23.

176

Figure 1. Advertisement for American Sunday School Library, The Missionary and Sabbath School Record, August 1849.

177

Until the 1850s, the CSSU depository consisted of books primarily, though not exclusively, from Britain directly ordered through the Religious Tract Society and the

Sunday School Union of London. In 1843, for example, the CSSU spent £ 535 on imports from these two British organizations, compared with only £51 spent on purchases from within Canada.55 The CSSU moved increasingly towards North American publications in the

1850s, with the majority of items in the depository in 1854 being either Canadian or

American Publications.56 The CSSU distributed their materials through general postal service. The stability of the post was unreliable in this period and the CSSU petitioned the government to introduce a “cheap and uniform rate of postage” in 1844, to help further disseminate their literature.57 In the 1850s, these efforts were successful as the CSSU publicly acknowledged the Postmaster General for allowing their official periodical The

Missionary and Sabbath School Record “to go to all parts of Canada free of postage.”58

The Upper Canadian Bible Society also played a role in furnishing Sunday school libraries with books, although their catalogue was limited to Bibles and Testaments. Poor schools with little money could request Bibles from the Bible Society, which prioritized this work in the first half of the nineteenth century.59 Depending on the location and networks, it

55 CSSU Report, 1843, 17.

56 CSSU 1854, p.12

57 Journal of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, 1845, 211.

58 CSSU Report, 1854, 16.

59 The First Report of the Upper Canada Bible Society and Twelfth of the Society’s operations: for the year Ending April 30 1841 (Toronto: Upper Canada Bible Society, 1841) 49.

178 may have been faster for Sunday school organizers to collect a few Bibles from the local

Bible Society than through the CSSU.

The distribution of Sunday school materials was fuelled by both financial and spiritual goals. Although the CSSU was a philanthropic organization, it was dependent on the revenue generated through subscriptions to libraries and the sale of library books. To a much smaller degree, the (Canadian) Methodist Book Room used profits gained from Sunday school literature to continue other denominational print efforts, including the Christian

Guardian. Sunday school libraries were officially under the direction of the CSSU, their local Sunday school union or, in the case of the Church of England, denominational control.

In each case, detailed guidelines were provided on how to operate and manage the library.

While this advice presents the ideal, rather than the reality, it reveals some of the more subtle intentions of the organizations behind Sunday school libraries.

The instructions for running Sunday school libraries were detailed, and they described a highly structured environment. For example, the system of cataloging and lending books was to be precise. The rules of the Church of England on managing a library insisted that:

the Superintendent shall keep a register, with a Catalogue prefixed, which shall show when and to whom each book is lent, and when returned. The book shall be numbered both within and on the cover, beginning with No. 1 and proceeding in regular series till the highest number is reached; the numeration begin simply regulation by the succession in which the books come into hand […] In the catalogue, the number of each book will be placed in a column opposite to the title, and

179

thus, in the Register the entry of the No. lent, alone will be sufficient.60

The rules surrounding the borrowing and returning of books were also intended to promote particular character traits of order and punctuality. In general, items could be borrowed for two weeks, with a maximum of one book or two tracts at a time.61

Some organizations suggested having policy of fining the pupils who were late returning their materials, but it seems that this was rarely enforced and occasionally seen as contrary to the evangelical goals of the library. Most schools simply temporarily removed borrowing privileges from those who had returned their books late until good behavior in the

Sunday school classroom had proven adequate to earn the right to use the library again. 62

The main Sunday school library was limited to use by pupils, teachers, and ‘visitors,’

(likely managers, superintendents of other schools, or agents of the Union).The privileges of pupils, however, could be extended once they had left the school provided that they continue to “manifest a conduct suitable to the instructions” of the school they attended.63 Teachers were also instructed to establish libraries for themselves with teachers’ guides, and other resources. However, this was rarely practiced until the last quarter of the nineteenth century

60Constitution of the Sunday School of St. Mark’s Church, Niagara (Niagara: John Simpson, 1852) 3; and Constitution and Regulations of a Sunday school in Connection with the Sunday School Society for the Diocese in Quebec, 1832, 5-6.

61 Constitution of the Sunday School of St. Mark’s Church, 3.

62 Both the rules and practices of Canadian Sunday school libraries are consistent with what historians have identified in the United States and Australia in this period. See, Laurel Cylde. “Sunday School Libraries in Eastern Australia: The Wesleyan Experience,” Australia Library Journal 35, 4 (November 1988) 172-183; Allen Briggs. “The Sunday School Library in the Nineteenth Century,” The Library Quarterly 31, 2 (April 1961) 166-177.

63 SSUSC Report, 1824, 22.

180 when the literature for teacher training became more prevalent.64 It was common for teachers to read the books in the children’s library, becoming familiar enough to discuss the content with their students in the classroom.

It was always recommended for Sunday schools to assign an individual to the position of librarian which involved monitoring the library’s activities as well as securing appropriate books, although where resources were tight these tasks were often done by a teacher or the superintendent. While most Sunday school books across denominations were distributed by the CSSU, churches continued to stress the importance of monitoring the quality of books in their libraries. The Canadian Baptist Magazine, suggested in 1840 that

“A small library of books selected with care and judgment, is far better than a much larger one, made up of every thing [sic] in the shape or bearing the name of book […] we should introduce no book into the school, until we have read it carefully and thoroughly ourselves and approve of its general character.”65

The rules on how to run a Sunday school library that were published and dispersed among Upper Canadians demonstrate the priorities of Sunday school leaders. The purposes of Sunday school libraries included not only evangelical and religious instruction, but also promoting particular habits of orderliness, obedience, and punctuality.

Sunday school libraries were seen as a market worth investing in and worth competing over. Young readers made an impact on interdenominational philanthropy and on

64 For more on Sunday school teacher training in nineteenth-century Ontario see, Patricia Kmiec. “ ‘Take this Normal Class Idea and Carry it Throughout the Land’: Sunday School Teacher Training in Late Nineteenth-Century Ontario.” Historical Studies in Education 24, 1 (Spring 2012). 195-211.

65 Canadian Baptist Magazine, April 1840.

181 denominational printing. While the adult managers and subscribers were the decision-makers through their choices about how to spend their money, children and youth’s participation in these spaces of public reading made this particular market possible.

The motives of clergy and other leaders in the Sunday school movement to establish libraries were shaped by spiritual concerns. Across evangelical denominations the purpose of libraries was to raise moral, spiritual, knowledgeable, and faithful Christians. In practice however, it was not up to the leaders to define these spaces, and the survival of Sunday school libraries rested on the continued participation of the laity. An analysis of how lay women, men and children defined the purpose of their local Sunday school library sheds light on some of the ways that Upper Canadians made sense of an increasing literary culture.

Lay Experiences with Sunday School Libraries

The annual published reports of the CSSU in the 1840s feature a number of letters from individuals reporting on the state of their Sunday schools. These include requests for libraries, as well as updates on previously received CSSU collections. These reports and letters were almost all written by lay people and describe in some detail who was using their local library, and why. Agents of the CSSU also left formal reports and personal journals that discuss how Sunday school libraries were defined by local communities. These sources reveal the role that these libraries played in various communities across Upper Canada, and the experiences of those who used them.

Each year dozens of local reports were published within the annual report of the

CSSU. A typical example is an 1845 report from the Mount Pleasant Sunday School in the

Gore District: “Our school has been in existence since the year 1819, and the average

182 attendance is now about 44, and 9 teachers […] Our library is in pretty good condition, containing 197 books, but we are much in want of some small books.”66 Libraries in more populated areas were likely to have competing Sunday schools, yet still averaged between

100 and 200 volumes in their libraries. An 1845 report from a Kingston school notes that

“This school has been established about 20 years and now average about 120 scholars and 23 teachers […] our library is in good condition, having last year made an addition of about 100 volumes to it, it has a moral tendency on the scholars, who peruse the books with great interest and profit.”67

Not all reports featured success stories, and each year the CSSU received pleas from schools in need of assistance. A letter from a Sunday School manager in Smith Falls reads

in making out our report, we have to regret that we are unable to give a more satisfactory account of our school, we have difficulties to contend with which are not easily surmounted, the children being young, and belonging to different denominations, and many of them receive no other religious instruction but what they receive at this school. […] Our library contains one hundred volumes, but is no way interesting to the scholars, they being old and very much in use; the children are anxious for books, if we were able to supply them I have no doubt but that they would take more interest in the school.68

The idea that there would be more interest in a Sunday school if it had a library was quite common, and many of the reports indicate that this was usually the case. In 1843, a school from the Oxford District described the benefits of their new library in a letter of thanks to the

66 CSSU Report, 1845, 17.

67 Ibid., 17-18.

68 Ibid., 36.

183

CSSU, “we desire to tender your society our sincere thanks for the very excellent library sent us […] Both young and old read the books and take much interest in them. We find a good library the best inducement that we can hold out to secure attendance of the Sabbath School scholars.”69

It was not only the young pupils whose interest in Sunday schooling increased when a library was established, but their families as well. An 1847 report from Perth notes that

“there is to be observed an increasing interest on the part of parents and guardians, caused, we think, by the increasing interest taken by the Scholars in the books which they get from us weekly to read.”70 Similar observations were reported from Peterborough in 1848, when it was stated that “indeed, the prosperity of the schools depends in a great measure on the efficient state of their libraries.”71 It is evident that a number of people became attracted to these schools only once they began circulating books. While religious instruction in the

Sunday school was available before the establishment of the libraries, religious instruction alone was not enough to attract many to the school. The fact that, where reported, attendance and “interest” in the school increased once a circulating library was available indicates that many Upper Canadians were more interested in accessing free reading materials, than they were in their children receiving strictly religious instruction.

Sunday school libraries not only provided literature to children, but, because of their circulating nature, they also allowed children to bring the material home to share with their families. A number of reports indicate that the lending and reading of books from Sunday

69 CSSU Report, 1843, 40.

70 CSSU Report, 1847, 37.

71 CSSU Report, 1848, 29.

184 school libraries was not limited to children. Comments that “both young and old read the books and take much interest in them,” were quite common. 72 Typically, adult access to the material in Sunday school libraries was facilitated through their children who would bring books home, allowing parents to read independently or, what appears more commonly, for parents and children to read at home together. In the first half of the nineteenth century, this would have been a new experience for most settlers, as access to books was limited, particularly outside of major cities.

Parents were frequently mentioned in local communication with the CSSU in various ways, yet their very presence in these reports reveals an important pattern between Sunday school libraries and family reading habits. Some reports, including one from a Lanark school in 1844, were vague in describing the extent to which parents were using the Sunday school library, stating simply that “the parents likewise have received much benefit from reading the books.”73 Other reports explain that reading was not only beneficial to parents, but was interesting as well. As an 1848 report from Mosa Township notes, at their school, “the books are read with interest by parents and scholars.”74 A more detailed report from a Chatham school in 1847 reveals the popularity such Sunday schools could have in local communities.

“We have an extensive circulation of our books according to our population,” they wrote,

“there is from forty to fifty books in circulation every week, they are eagerly sought after and are to be found in every house in the settlement.”75

72 CSSU Report, 1843, 40.

73 CSSU Report, 1844, 34.

74 CSSU Report 1848, 27.

75 CSSU Report 1845, 37.

185

While specific details on exactly how reading occurred within the home are not easily available, the reports to the CSSU reveal that the system of book distribution and circulation established by the Sunday school community was effective in bringing literature into settlers’ homes where both children and adults participated in reading. Others praised their library for bringing more people to weekly worship as well as Sunday school. A school in Peterborough reported that “the direct good resulting from the Sabbath School and the circulation of the library books is apparent, from the desire awakened for religious information in the families whose children attend the school, and the benefits received by the children induce some to come to the house of God, who in all probability, would not otherwise attend.”76

Along with the spiritual gains, the circulation of materials from Sunday school libraries was also noted as having an important secular influence. The increase in literacy, and reading more generally, was consistently reported from local Sunday school communities. A detailed report from Southwold in 1843, for example, expresses these results, “We think that the library […] is a very valuable acquisition. The scholars are favoured not only with the means of religious instruction afforded them at school, but also with a new book, which may profitably employ their attention and improve their knowledge

[…] In the houses to which our young people belong, there is a lamentable scarcity of good reading. Our excellent little library makes up this want in our neighbourhood in no small degree.”77 Another report from the same year explains similar observations in Sophiasburg,

“the library received at half price from the Canada Sunday School Union, has increased very

76 CSSU Report, 1845, 37.

77 CSSU Report, 1843, 40.

186 much the desire for reading, there is great need for instruction and for the short time that the school has been in existence, there is good ground to hope that it has contributed to the making up of at least a part of the deficiency.”78 Some local teachers and managers credited their Sunday school libraries with improving the English skills in their communities. For example, in North EastHope, Perth County, after receiving books from the CSSU in 1846 they commented that, “ it is pleasing to observe the progress they are making in English reading,” among the several Dutch children in the community.79 While religious and moral improvement were the goals of the leaders behind the development of Sunday school libraries, lay people, both children and adults, used these libraries to access various books for free, for leisurely reading, and to improve literacy and language skills.

The emphasis local lay people were placing on literacy education was also evident to

James Nisbet, an agent for the CSSU, who recorded the details of his mission across the province in 1848 in published reports and an unpublished diary. Following his visits of more than twenty-seven towns and settlements, Nisbet lamented that “more of the mere art of reading is taught in some schools than is really necessary.”80 Nisbet, like many of his fellow clergymen, believed that only very basic reading skills were “necessary,” yet the lay participants in Sunday schools must have thought otherwise. Not only was this perceived unnecessary literacy education occurring in the Sunday school classroom, but also independently through the library.

78 Ibid., 43.

79 CSSU Report, 1847, 33.

80 James Nisbet Diary, 1848. MG24 J19-34 Vol.1. [LAC]

187

When a Sunday school library opened in an Upper Canadian community, whether a city, town or in the backwoods, the intention from the clergy and institutional leadership was to spread religious knowledge, improve morality and encourage spiritual conversion. Once the library was established, however, its children and adults patrons made use of it on their own terms. During this period of evangelical revival, and growing Christian churches, there is no doubt that there was a desire for spiritual improvement and satisfaction among the lay population. However, in contrast to the religious leaders, lay people did not see the purpose of Sunday school libraries as fulfilling solely religious needs, but as a site where cultural and educational needs were met as well. Even as public education was increasingly common towards the middle of the nineteenth century, Sunday school libraries provided basic literacy education to children and adults in Upper Canada, particularly to children who did not regularly attend weekday school.

Multiple systems of distributing Sunday school literature were in place in Upper

Canada by the 1830s, to supply, and to some extent, oversee the province’s Sunday school libraries, with the goal of spiritual revival and financial gain. Lay people, however, became familiar with the Sunday school library network and were able to use these resources to meet their own needs. The evidence indicates that many more users of Sunday school libraries were experiencing literacy education and leisurely reading, than religious conversion.

Conclusion

In his comprehensive study on the history of Methodism in Canada, Neil Semple discusses the Sunday schools that emerged in the first half of the nineteenth-century. He notes that “in Protestant Canada, the secular educational role [of the Sunday school] was

188 relatively quickly displaced by the evangelizing function.”81 A similar point is made in Allan

Greer’s staple piece on Upper Canada’s Sunday schools when he suggests that any secular literacy education that occurred in Sunday schools was “incidental,” rather than intentional.82

These conclusions are based on formal records and reflect instructions from the clergy and CSSU. It is clear that the desire of the clergy was certainly to use these schools, and their related auxiliaries, for religious purposes. The prescriptive literature describes these goals in detail and there is no doubt that Sunday school libraries were intended to be sites of religious rebirth and appropriate moral development for their young pupils. What remains unchallenged by historians of Sunday school education in Canada , however, is the assumption that this instruction represented the reality of how early Canadians were using their Sunday school resources.

Well into the 1850s, Sunday school libraries were almost entirely managed by the laity, and their views are reflected in the reports and letters sent to the CSSU and elsewhere.

When the perspectives of the laity are considered, a broader picture of Sunday school libraries emerges. Many, both children and adults, were using their Sunday school libraries to meet their own needs in an increasingly literate and literary society. These libraries provided the materials that allowed for particular reading cultures to emerge and included domestic, familial reading, as well as communal sites of free public reading and sharing books.

Sunday school libraries facilitated community-building at the local level as children and parents gathered to collect new literature to bring home each week. These libraries also

81 Neil Semple, The Lord’s Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 368.

82 Allan Greer, “The Sunday Schools of Upper Canada,” Ontario History 67 (September 1975),184.

189 helped develop a broader Sunday school community that crossed regional and denominational lines. As the centre of book distribution for the Sunday school community, the CSSU attracted local Sunday school supporters from across the province and created an important network through which literature and ideas could be shared. The early and widespread success of Sunday school libraries demonstrates the role these schools had beyond their classroom lessons.

190

Chapter Four “Our Little Periodical”: The Missionary and Sabbath School Record and Sunday School Curriculum

In 1843, The Children’s Missionary and Sabbath School Record began publication in Montreal introducing the genre of Canadian Sunday school literature to settlers across Upper and Lower Canada. This “little periodical,” as its managers called it, was the first regular publication of the Canada Sunday School Union that was created and printed in the Canadas. It was also the first major Canadian periodical targeted specifically to the Sunday school market.1 It led the way for the dozens of Canadian children’s religious periodicals that emerged by the end of the nineteenth century.2

However innovative its early efforts in Canadian mass publishing, The Record had significant cultural influence as well. For the first time, this periodical made it possible for Sunday schools across Upper and Lower Canada to have a regular, shared curriculum.

Through this publication, the same stories, lessons, letters, and images were shared each month in Sunday schools of various denominational affiliations, in cities and backwoods alike.

Certainly not every Sunday school received The Record, but many did. By 1846 it had more than 3,000 monthly subscribers across Upper and Lower Canada, many of which were Sunday schools who shared their copies with communities of upwards of one

1 A much smaller weekly publication, The Child's Bible Expositor, or, Lessons and Records of the Sunday School, was briefly published out of Toronto between 1841 and 1842. Its content was geared towards Anglicans and was primarily classroom lessons.

2 Among the most popular Sunday school periodicals of the last half of the nineteenth- century were: The Sunday School Guardian for the Province of Canada; The Sunbeam; Sunday School Helper; Happy Days; The Berean Leaf; Canada Sunday School Advocate.

191 hundred children each week.3 The content of The Record was not that different from

British and American publications, in fact, a close analysis of its content reveals that it was made up almost entirely of material directly taken from other sources, a common practice in early evangelical literature. Although little on The Record’s pages dealt with local matters, the fact that Upper Canadians so strongly supported the publication demonstrates the importance that Sunday school participants placed on belonging to a broader community with shared interests.

The popularity of The Record, particularly in its first decade, the 1840s, suggests that Upper Canadians were looking for something more from this publication than the stories and hymns that filled its pages, as these were often available elsewhere.

Historians of print media have demonstrated that part of the desire for common reading that emerged in this period was the result of an increased sense of community among the public. Benedict Anderson notes the centrality of newspapers as shared spaces of common knowledge in the emergence of the “imagined community,” and modern nation- states.4 Although Anderson does not consider Canada in his study, Canadian historians have suggested that similar ideologies and the emergence of a mass reading public in the first half of the nineteenth century led Upper Canadians to create a similar imagined community among their fellow colonists, one that was both connected to the broader

British Empire, yet distinct in its regional and cultural reach.5

3 The Record VI (March 1849), 36; CSSU Report 1846, 10.

4 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006).

5 See, for example, Jeffery L. McNairn, The Capacity to Judge: Public Opinion and Deliberative Democracy in Upper Canada, 1791-1854 (Toronto: University of Toronto

192

Newspapers were the primary means through which Upper Canadians created a shared reading experience, but periodicals also provided a similar sense of community among its often diverse and scattered readers. Children and adults, both in Sunday schools and beyond them, read The Record and formed communities through the shared lessons and information it provided. This chapter examines the role of The Record in

Upper Canadian Sunday schools, including its origins, content, and cultural significance.

The context is set by first discussing Sunday school literature before the 1840s, including uses of the Bible, and publications of the British Religious Tract Society. Next, the goals of The Record are identified, its content analyzed, and its connection to the denominational publishing that followed in the last half of the century is then traced.

Bibles, Tracts, and The Religious Tract Society

Prior to the 1840s, a number of networks connecting to British and American churches and organizations provided Upper Canadian Sunday schools with Bibles, books, tracts, and periodicals for use in the classroom and library. Although this system of book distribution was scattered and the material varied, it was by no means a small collection of literature that spread across the province. Every year, thousands of tracts, chapbooks,6 and magazines, were imported into Upper Canada and distributed through organizations and individuals. A thorough analysis of the wave of mass distribution of religious literature in early nineteenth-century Upper Canada is beyond the scope of this study, but

Press, 2000) and Anthony Di Mascio. The Idea of Popular Schooling: Print Culture, Public Discourse, and the Demand for Education (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2012).

6 Chapbooks were generally slightly longer than tracts ranging from 12-48 small pages. They tended to be folded and held together by simple stitching.

193 future research on the work of local tract, missionary, and Bible societies will likely reveal many details about where Sunday schools fit within the culture of religious print at the time.

The literature that was scattered throughout Upper Canada’s Sunday schools was diverse; however, records from religious societies, financial accounts of Sunday school organizations, published descriptions of classroom activity, advertisements, and announcements in the press all shed light on the types of material that was being read to and by Upper Canadian Sunday school pupils. The Bible was the most commonly used text in Upper Canadian Sunday schools. This is especially true for the period before

1840, when the Sunday school community was still developing their printing and book distribution methods, and access to literature was relatively scarce in many backwoods communities. Bibles, whether purchased or free, were easier to obtain than any other publication, as numerous agents of Bible societies, and missionary organizations devoted themselves to circulating the Bible among the newly settled population.7

British religious organizations, such as the Society for the Promotion of Christian

Knowledge, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and the British and Foreign

Bible Society, all had auxiliaries or agents in Upper Canada who were especially active in donating Bibles to local Sunday schools. For example, by 1840, the Upper Canadian

Bible Society had sixty local branches and depositories that helped provide Bibles to

Sunday schools as well as other communities.8 As early as 1819, Sunday schools were

7 Janet Friskney, “Christian Faith in Print,” in Patricia Lockhart Fleming and Gilles Gallichan, eds. History of the Book in Canada, Volume 1: Beginnings to 1840 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004),139-140.

8 Ibid, 140.

194 receiving free Bibles and Testaments from such organizations. In that year, Kingston’s local Sunday school union expressed its gratitude to the local Bible society through a report published in the Kingston Chronicle: “finally, those most excellent institutions, the

Sunday Schools, would have had some difficulty in being put into immediate operation, were it not that the superabundance of Testaments enabled your committee to supply them with upwards of 100.”9 This sentiment was echoed throughout the province, as the establishment of new Sunday schools was often dependent on the school’s organizer first acquiring a Bible.

Whether received through a donation or purchase, the Bible was the earliest and most consistent shared curriculum among Sunday schools. Uses of the Bible in classroom lessons varied depending on the preference and theology of each school’s teachers and managers. However, both local and Union reports suggest that, from the earliest years to the 1840s, the most common pedagogy used to teach Bible lessons was rote memorization. Historians of Sunday schooling in Britain and the United States have demonstrated that the memorization and recitation techniques practiced in Sunday schools of the early nineteenth century emerged within a context of very particular understandings about children’s intellectual and religious development. Anne Boylan explains that the leaders and supporters of religious education for children believed that mass memorization would “impart incomparable mental discipline,” and promoted the theory that “the child whose mind was stored with Bible verses would have something to think about in idle moments, as well as a source of elegant language for verbal and

9 Kingston Chronicle 22 January 1819.

195 written expression.”10 Furthermore, education based on strict memorization and recitation was also seen as the most appropriate way to encourage particular behaviours, like concentration and self-discipline.11

While there were some minor debates over using more reflection, or question- and-answer techniques in Upper Canadian Sunday schools, the practice of memorization and recitation was the dominant pedagogy of Sunday school classrooms until at least

1840. The details of specific classroom practices in this early period are difficult to identify. However, reports that local schools sent to various Sunday school organizations often included weekly, quarterly, and annual statistics which reveal the extent to which memorization and recitation were used. For example, a Sunday school in East Lake reported in 1830 that, over the previous year, their pupils memorized and recited a total of 16,828 verses.12 This statistic was fairly representative as, in 1832, the West

Hawksebury District Sunday School reported that their forty students recited 11,047

Bible verses, and the Cobourg Methodist Sunday School of thirty-seven pupils recited just over 13,000 verses.13

Individual pupils were also praised for their personal achievements in memorization and recitation. A detailed report on the public examinations, held in a local

Lutheran church, of the pupils of the Sunday school in the fifth concession of Ernestown

10 Anne M. Boylan, Sunday School : The Formation of an American Institution, 1790- 1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 44.

11 Ibid., 44.

12 Christian Guardian 4 September 1830.

13 Christian Guardian 25 July 1832.

196 in 1829 provides a typical example of student performance. Although public examinations were not practiced in the majority of Sunday schools in Upper Canada, the public celebration of the achievements of their best students were not uncommon. The top students were reported as being “three young ladies who recited more than a thousand verses each,” along with five others who recited more than 600 verses. As recognition for their achievements, the pupils were given a Bible or a Testament.14 The Sunday school on the border of Cramahe and Haldimand reported similar success of their pupils’ memorization and recitation skills, noting that although their top pupil recited 5,208 verses of Scripture, “one little boy between 5 and 6 years” had recited more than 3,500.15

Most children who attended Sunday school in this period would have participated in similar routines of Bible memorization.

Bible societies often provided the Bibles and Testaments that were given to pupils as prizes for their performance, although the majority of schools tended to purchase these rewards rather than accept them at no cost. Studies by American and British historians suggest that the practice of giving rewards predated and, in fact, inspired the free library system that emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century.16 In Upper Canada however, Sunday school libraries emerged at the same time as the schools themselves.

Although no major theological debates occurred over awarding prizes in Sunday schools

14 Christian Guardian 2 January 1830.

15 Ibid.

16 Laurel Cylde. “Sunday School Libraries in Eastern Australia: The Wesleyan Experience,” Australia Library Journal 35, 4 (November 1988) 172-183; Allen Briggs. “The Sunday School Library in the Nineteenth Century,” The Library Quarterly 31, 2 (April 1961) 166-177

197 in Upper Canada, as they did elsewhere, only a few schools continued the practice beyond the 1840s.17

Although the Bible was the central book used in all Sunday schools, it was rarely the only text. Tracts, books, and periodicals, provided primarily by the Religious Tract

Society through the Canada Sunday School Union (CSSU), were also commonly used in early Sunday school lessons. Various Sunday school communities in Upper Canada had important relationships with tract societies. Along with the Bibles distributed by the

Missionary and Bibles societies, there is evidence of active distribution by the British

Religious Tract Society (RTS) in the early nineteenth century. While loyalists connected with Sunday schools often brought literature from the American Tract Society, the New

England Tract Society, and the American Sunday School Union, the majority of literature that made its way to Upper Canadian Sunday schools before 1840 came through the RTS.

One way that Sunday schools in large cities received publications from the RTS was through local societies affiliated with the parent society in London. A report of the

Kingston auxiliary to the RTS, for example, reveals that in 1831 this local branch sold

123 items to local Sunday schools.18

Books were not the primary item purchased by Sunday schools. In 1826

Kingston’s Wesleyan Methodist Sabbath School reported spending £1 of their annual

17 The Journal of Education for Upper Canada suggested the potential harms in enticing pupils with prizes in Christian education in general, though this debate did not enter the mainstream Sunday school literature in Canada. Journal of Education for Upper Canada, 3, no. 4 (April, 1850), 52.

18 Kingston Chronicle 24 September 1831.

198 expenditure on a two-year subscription to an unnamed “Sunday school magazine.”19 It is likely that this subscription was for the RTS periodical The Child’s Companion, or

Sunday Scholar’s Reward, which began publication in 1824.20 It would have been unlikely for the British Wesleyan community in Kingston at the time to subscribe to the magazine of the American Sunday School Union, the only other option at the time.

Another early example that suggests Canadian Sunday schools were connected to the RTS is an announcement from the Montreal Bible Society that appeared in the

Christian Register in June 1823. As Montreal was the location of both the Sunday School

Union Society of Canada and its book depository, which served both Lower and Upper

Canada, such details are relevant to both provinces. The Montreal update reported: “We learn with great pleasure, that an excellent supply of books for Sunday schools, has arrived safely from England at the depository of the Sunday School Union.”21 There is little doubt that such “Sunday school books” were published by RTS.

In addition to local societies purchasing directly from the RTS, the CSSU also purchased items on behalf of the smaller, and usually poorer, schools. The CSSU’s 1824 financial report reveals that £2 was sent directly to missionary and religious tract societies in London for books, and upwards of £50 from local unions across the province was sent to the London [Sunday School Union] depository to supply material to schools

19 Kingston Chronicle 17 November 1826.

20 Dennis Butts, “Introduction” in From the Dairyman's Daughter to Worrals of the WAAF : The Religious Tract Society, Lutterworth Press and Children's Literature, ed. Dennis Butts and Pat Garrett (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2006), 10.

21 Christian Register 1 (June 1823) 186.

199 in Upper Canada.22 As the main publisher of Sunday school literature in Britain, RTS material would have filled the majority, if not the entirety, of these two requests.

The RTS continued to supply Canadian Sunday schools with literature through the 1830s. While records from the CSSU for this decade are scarce, by 1840 it is clear that a regular network of distribution had been established between Upper Canadian

Sunday schools and the RTS. An announcement in The Canadian Temperance Advocate in 1840 presents an update on Sunday school books: “the committee of the Canada

Sunday School Union notify, that in addition to their assorted stock of books adapted for

Sunday Schools, a fresh supply of libraries, has just arrived from London […] Each library consists of 101 vols of the most select works, and cost £6 15s sterling. By the liberality of the [Religious] Tract Society, London, this society is enabled to give them for just £3 10s.”23 Through these networks, publications from the RTS became commonplace in Upper Canadian Sunday Schools. The RTS was a mass publishing enterprise, and provided many auxiliary groups in Upper Canada with thousands of publications. For this reason, a full examination of the RTS in Upper Canada, including in Sunday schools, is far too large to examine here. However, a basic overview of the values of the RTS and the general content of its material is necessary in order to understand what Upper Canadians were reading and teaching in their Sunday schools.

22 SSUSC Report, 1824, 16.

23 Canadian Temperance Advocate 5 (Jan 1840), 72.

200

The RTS was established in England in 1799 by George Burder, a leader in the

London Missionary Society.24 The original focus of the RTS was the printing and distribution of religious tracts, but it was not the first mass publisher of this type of religious literature. Writer and philanthropist Hannah More began this trend of mass evangelical publishing with her series of religious tracts known as Cheap Repository

Tracts (CRT), a system which was in operation between 1795 and 1797. Historians continue to debate the extent to which the founding of the RTS was influenced by More’s earlier efforts, as both had similar organizational and publishing structures.25 While

More’s Tracts were incredibly popular in late-eighteenth-century Britain, it is unlikely that much from her collection made it into Upper Canadian Sunday Schools. The height of the CRT’s success was in the last decade of the eighteenth century, before any strong systems of distribution had been established for the mass importation of literature in

Upper Canada. Additionally, the content of More’s tracts was not suited for the scattered and small settler population of Upper Canada, as these tracts were aimed at the poor, working-class people of the industrializing British city, not the rural backwoods of

British North America. Unlike the collection of religious tracts in More’s series, the RTS developed at a time of revival, with values and material relevant to Upper Canadian settlers.

The purpose of the RTS was to spread Christianity through Britain and across the world by way of printing and distributing small, simply written pamphlets. Tracts had

24 Aileen Fyfe, “A Short History of the Religious Tract Society.” In From the Dairyman's Daughter to Worrals of the WAAF, 14.

25 This debate is discussed in various articles in Dennis Butts and Pat Garret, eds, From the Dairyman's Daughter to Worrals of the WAAF.

201 existed for quite some time in Britain, though they had generally served political rather than religious purposes. Evangelicals in the late eighteenth century appropriated this medium for their work believing that tracts could spread the basic principles of

Christianity, even to those with no contact with a church or preacher. Originally, the RTS had a primary interest in targeting the working class, but quickly shifted to serve both working and middle-class readers. This came as a result of an increasing financial necessity to profit from the sale of books and periodicals in order to offset the distribution of free tracts to the poor. Tracts quickly became a preferred tool for evangelicals to spread the gospel for a number of practical reasons: they were inexpensive to print, easy to read with even the most basic literacy skills, and allowed for a continuous cycle of repeated sharing among potential converts.

The RTS was clear in its definition of an appropriate tract, and provided instructions for writers in its first publication. All tracts were to include the gospel message, stressing that salvation was only possible through faith in atonement. Tracts were to be written with extreme clarity, as they needed to not only be easily understood, but impossible to misunderstand. Other key qualities of RTS tracts were simplicity, and light entertainment.26 The RTS published books and periodicals, but the printing and distribution of tracts far surpassed that of any other genre in the first half of the nineteenth century. In its first year of operation, the RTS printed and distributed 200,000 copies of thirty-four tracts. By 1820, they were disseminating more than five million a year from their catalogue of 279 titles.27

26 Fyfe, “A Short History of the Religious Tract Society,” 15.

27 Ibid., 19.

202

RTS publications were accepted by all major Protestant denominations. Like many other religious societies of the time, the RTS was committed to non-sectarian values in both its organization and content. Unlike many of the other evangelical groups of the time, whose supporters were mainly dissenters, the RTS managed to maintain strong favour with members and leaders of the Church of England. In fact, the RTS recruited Anglican writers, many of whom, including Legh Richmond, were among their most popular.28 Likewise, the material the RTS printed was often embraced by children and adults alike, and much was read by both middle and working-class people. The appeal of the RTS was broad and of interest to readers of various ages and denominations because its literature always focused on the central Gospel message.

The RTS system of distribution was the same as most religious societies of the time: local branch societies were responsible for connecting individuals and institutions

(such as Sunday schools) with the parent organization, as well as distributing the materials in their local communities. The RTS also worked with other missionary and religious organizations, including the CSSU, who provided local depositories, subscribers, and agents on their behalf. The RTS is probably the best example of successful management of this structure as it worked through its local auxiliaries to spread millions of publications around the globe.29

28 Ibid., 18.

29 While American tract societies and religious publishing were also major enterprises in the first half of the nineteenth century, these efforts were not as large as the RTS until the second half of the century. See, David Paul Nord. Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

203

It is hard to trace the content of the thousands of RTS tracts that made their way into Upper Canadian Sunday schools, as tracts were never meant to be preserved, and consequently, few have been. The very purpose of religious tracts was for Christians to share them as much as possible, and the process of being passed around, often over generations, leaves little physical evidence for historians two hundreds years later. The most popular of these tracts, however, often did survive, and historians have analyzed the most-widely read stories in the British, American, and colonial contexts.

The most successful tract (also released as a chapbook and bound book) published by the RTS was The Dairyman’s Daughter, and historians have been almost as enthusiastic about this tale as were its contemporary readers.30 Advertisements in the

Upper Canadian press reveal that The Dairyman’s Daughter was common in Sunday school libraries sold in the province, and an overview of this story provides a glimpse into the typical RTS publication.31 The Dairyman’s Daughter was first published by the

RTS in 1814, though its initial printing had been in the (British) Christian Guardian seven years earlier.32 Due to its popularity, the tract was later published by the New

England Tract Society and the American Tract Society, and multiple versions of various

30 See, for example: Dennis Butts and Pat Garrett, eds. From the Dairyman’s Daughter to Warrols of the WAAF.

31 Sunday School Guardian for the Province of Canada 4, no.2 (June 1849); Sunday School Guardian for the Province of Canada 4, No. 4 (September 1849).

32 Alexandra N. Leach. “The Dairyman’s Daughter: : From Yesterday to Today.” In From the Dairyman’s Daughter, 65.

204 lengths were distributed worldwide. Historians estimate that by 1828 more than four million copies had been circulated.33

The Dairyman’s Daughter was written by Rev. Legh Richmond who, significantly, was an Anglican clergyman. Richmond based the story on his personal relationship with a young woman named Elizabeth Wallbridge. The character Elizabeth, a farmgirl who worked in the city as a servant, was always very pious, but she was especially moved by a sermon from her local pastor. As she was bedridden due to illness, she dedicated herself to her spiritual growth, and the story tells of the relationship that developed as the Reverend continued to visit her until her death.34

Although the story of The Dairyman’s Daughter was extraordinarily popular, its content was quite typical of early evangelical publications in general, and the RTS in particular. The basic message was one of piety, salvation, continued devotion to

Christianity, and death. The young woman represented the innocence and purity of

Christianity, yet her death revealed the urgency of acquiring personal salvation. The main character appealed to urban and rural readers, as she was from a farm yet worked as a servant in the city. She connected with working-class men and women as she was a worker herself, yet her story was enjoyed by upper classes as well as this young woman accepted her place in the social order rather than challenge it. Men and women, young and old, all enjoyed the story of Elizabeth and her Reverend friend. Similarly, people of various affiliations embraced The Dairyman’s Daughter. Though Richmond himself was

33Ibid., 68.

34 Legh Richmond. N.d. The Dairyman’s Daughter, Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19615/19615-h/19615-h.htm (Accessed January 5, 2013).

205 an Anglican, and the original edition featured a Church of England funeral service, the tract was published in many forms, often removing any references to particular denominations. She was often seen as an example for adherents of dissenting traditions, including the Methodists. Other RTS tracts and books had very similar themes and stories to The Dairyman’s Daughter. The titles of some of the tracts found in Upper Canadian

Sunday Schools suggest that conversion, youth, death, and evangelism were the subjects of this literature. These themes dominated the RTS’s other publications as well, including their Sunday school periodical The Children’s Companion, or, A Sunday Scholar’s

Reward.35

Along with the Bible, the tracts and books of the RTS were among the earliest examples of shared curriculum among Upper Canadian Sunday schools. Patterns of distribution, and even the tracts themselves, were often scattered, informal, and varied from county to county. These examples of central distribution of common literature demonstrate that there was an early interest in accessing more than just the Bible. By

1840 there was a desire among lay Sunday school communities for easily accessible, reliable, non-denominational literature. When the Canada Sunday School Union began publishing its own material in the 1840s, the demand for a shared Sunday school curriculum had already been established.

35 Kirsten Drotner, English Children and Their Magazines, 1751-1945 (London: Yale University Press, 1988), 49-57.

206

The Children’s Missionary and Sabbath School Record and Canadian Sunday School

Publishing

The Children’s Missionary and Sabbath School Record (from 1845 onwards The

Missionary and Sabbath School Record) was the CSSU’s official periodical for pupils, teachers, and other Sunday school supporters. It began regular publication in January

1844 after publishing and distributing a free prospectus issue in November 1843. As the official publication of the CSSU, The Record made its way into thousands of Sunday

Schools across Upper Canada over the first decade of its publication, including both the schools affiliated with particular denominations, as well as the more common, interdenominational “union” schools.

The Record was the first successful Canadian religious periodical specifically for children. Although the majority of The Record’s content was borrowed from international sources, Canadian readers were aware that it was published in Montreal, funded by the

CSSU, and included some local content in nearly every issue. As previously discussed,

Canadian children were reading American and British literature quite regularly in their

Sunday school classrooms, but in 1844 The Record gave Canadian Sunday schools a periodical of their own. The editors of The Record made it clear that this Canadian

Sunday school periodical was modeled after the Children’s Missionary Record of

Edinburgh, a Presbyterian periodical that was believed to be “better known in Canada than any similar work.”36 The Edinburgh model was a monthly publication by the Church of Scotland beginning in 1839 and continuing as the Juvenile Missionary Record and

Sabbath Scholar’s Magazine from 1852 until 1859.

36 The Record (November 1843) 16.

207

The CSSU’s Record, however, was committed to interdenominational cooperation and content, and although the Church of Scotland’s periodical was its model, the contents of the Canadian Record included stories and reports from all major Protestant denominations. In a similar style to most religious periodicals of the time, The Record featured stories, reports, and letters that were previously published in other periodicals, along with a few local features. Where the original publication of the content is featured,

The Record held true to its interdenominational principles and regularly featured material from publications of quite diverse affiliations including, along with the Church of

Scotland’s Missionary Record of Edinburgh, the American Methodist Magazine and

Sunday School Advocate, the British Wesleyan Juvenile Offering, various publications by the Church of England, as well as interdenominational missionary and tract societies.

However, the origin of most of The Record’s content was anonymous and was likely gathered from an even broader range of religious groups than those noted.

The Record was published in Montreal, the central location of the CSSU, beginning in 1843 and was printed locally throughout the 1840s and 1850s by Montreal printer J.C Beckett. Beckett served on the executive of the CSSU as Recording Secretary and Corresponding Secretary during the 1840s.37 Distribution of The Record occurred through the distribution networks described in Chapter 2. Schools could subscribe directly through the CSSU and receive the monthly publications by post, purchase issues through local booksellers, or through the travelling agents of the CSSU. Sunday schools made up the majority of subscribers, though individual subscriptions were not uncommon. People who did not subscribe or purchase The Record directly had the

37 CSSU Report 1843, 6; CSSU Report 1845, vi; CSSU Report 1847, vi.

208 opportunity to read it in the circulating libraries of Sunday schools across the province, or in the case of Sunday school pupils, in their weekly classroom lessons. Because much of

The Record’s readership came from these shared sites of reading, it is impossible to know the details of the periodical’s actual reach or community of readers. However, the monthly subscription data, which noted over 3,000 monthly subscribers in Upper and

Lower Canada by 1846, and the presence of more than fifteen selling agents in fourteen districts in Upper Canada alone in 1845, suggests that The Record not only had a substantial number of readers, but that its influence reached widely into nearly every settled county of the province.38

The analysis provided here is based on a review of every available issue of The

Record in its first and most influential decade, the 1840s. It begins with the prospectus issue published in November 1843 and continues until December 1850. The 1840s was a significant decade for The Record as during this time it was the only Canadian periodical targeted specifically at Protestant Sunday school children.39 While there are gaps in the collection, most notably between January 1846 and December 1848, the surviving issues reveal that regular publishing and distribution did occur during these years. This analysis considers every story, picture, letter, hymn, and advertisement featured on every page of

The Record between 1843 and 1851. This includes more than 500 features in forty-nine unique issues over a period of seven years.

38 CSSU Report 1846, 10.

39 Canadian Methodists established their own Sunday school periodical, with regular publication commencing in 1847.

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The CSSU was clear in identifying the direct goals it had for The Record. The purpose of the publication was noted in the detailed prospectus issue, printed prior to regular publication, as well as in the smaller prospectus of each of the first annual issue.

Three key goals were identified. First, the managers of The Record were committed to the goal of increasing interest in and support for Christian missionary work, particularly in the foreign field. The 1843 prospectus explained this intention and noted that: “one great design of our little [p]eriodical is, by supplying our [r]eaders with Missionary

Intelligence, to excite in their minds an interest in the missionary cause.”40 These efforts of The Record were aimed primarily at children. Although it was desired that the audience be as wide and broad as possible, an unspecific young audience was especially targeted in this plea for missionary excitement. The managers of The Record believed that such a missionary periodical aimed at Sunday school pupils was necessary because:

“[g]eneral principles and general information, seldom interest children, they are beyond their intellectual grasp; the mind has not yet undergone the prepatory [sic] steps that enable it to embrace comprehensive views.”41

In the prospectus issue, the solution to gaining the interest of children was also put forth, and it was stated that “when we speak to [children] of other children,” their attention will be received.42 This idea that children readers would better understand a lesson if it featured young characters was promoted and practiced in The Record as its theological, Biblical, historical, moral, and missionary stories all featured children at the

40 The Record (November 1843), 16.

41 The Record (November 1843), n.p.

42 The Record (November 1843), n.p.

210 centre. Along with increasing interest in missions, a second goal of the CSSU through

The Record was to encourage the religious conversion (or, later, the religious commitment) of its readers. The prospectus noted directly that the “personal sanctification of our readers” was a central goal of the publication. For those children who did not have enough knowledge to be guided through the process of Christian rebirth by The Record alone, it was hoped that circulating copies of the periodical would lead them to a local Sunday school, help with “securing their attendance” to the school, and then “awaken an interest which may result in their eternal salvation.”43

The final clearly stated goal of The Record was to promote an interdenominational Protestant community, particularly within the context of a global missionary movement. Rather than promote one denomination’s work over another, or to limit its content to any one missionary society, The Record from its beginnings, was committed to providing “a panoramic view of all mission stations.”44 Establishing a strong, cross-denominational community of supporters in Canada of foreign missions was a key objective of The Record throughout its circulation.

Increased attendance in Sunday school, personal religious conversion, increased support for foreign missions, and an interdenominational network of supporters in

Canada were all goals of The Record, and stated clearly in their prospectus issue as well as throughout its publication. However, like all literature, more subtle, hegemonic discourses were also being produced and reproduced through this publication. The content analysis that follows reveals some of these implicit messages that were

43 The Record (November 1843), n.p.

44 The Record (November 1843).

211 disseminated through The Record to the thousands of children who studied its pages. The stories, reports, letters, songs, and images, that filled the pages of The Record between

1843 and 1850 reveal much about the changing social relations, theological movements, and imperial discourses that were dominant in Upper Canada in the 1840s. The content of

The Record also reveals how children were expected to fit into the dominant understandings of these issues. The content of The Record fits into the following four overlapping categories: missionary reports and stories; biographies and bible lessons; moral stories for character building; and local reports and information for teachers. Each category will be discussed with key examples highlighted to examine the purpose of this important periodical in mid-nineteenth-century Upper Canada.

The majority of the text that filled The Record’s pages promoted the cause of foreign missionary work. The most detailed of these features were two regular columns:

“Missionary Intelligence” and “Missionary Sketches.” In each monthly issue, the

“Missionary Intelligence” column highlighted an active mission station by providing background information, an update on the current work in the area and the (perceived) success, as well as the occasional letter from a missionary currently posted to that location. This informative piece introduced Upper Canadian readers to mission work in

“Western Africa,” Burma, The West Indies, Polynesia, and India. In 1849, China and

Ceylon were added to the regular rotation of missions reported on in the Missionary

Intelligence column. The reports in this feature were formal and descriptive, focusing on the work of missionaries, rather than their targeted converts. Children were rarely discussed in “Missionary Intelligence,” and the language used in this column suggests its

212 purpose was informative rather than entertaining or emotionally engaging, perhaps indicating an intended audience of older youth and adults.

A similar feature, “Missionary Sketches,” also appeared in nearly every issue. In this column, readers were introduced to the history and current work of particular missionary organizations. Between 1843 and 1850, both British and American groups were featured, including the American Board for Foreign Missions, the Church [of

England] Missionary Society, the Baptist Missionary Society, the Moravians, the

Missions of the Free Church of Scotland, the Wesleyan Missionary Society, and the

London Missionary Society.

The “Missionary Sketches” featured in The Record were in many ways similar to the “Missionary Intelligence” column. Both were informative and descriptive, usually between two and four pages per issue, with the reports often extending over two or three issues. While these features occasionally included a short anecdote, the pieces generally provided detailed descriptions of missionary work in a particular place or by a particular organization without identifying the daily encounters. These columns relied almost entirely on text to educate their readers, and throughout the 1840s, “Missionary Sketches” rarely included images. The lack of images, along with the length and language suggest that these two columns were meant to attract thoughtful, intellectual attention from their readers, rather than the emotional and romantic draw of many of the periodical’s other features.

The second type of missionary material in The Record was the short, anecdotal story. These stories tended to be less than one page in length, though they occasionally were up to four or five pages. Such short missionary stories were frequently accompanied

213 by an image, particularly after 1844. They were consistently written in clear, basic

English, and always had children as the main characters. These missionary stories were intended for a young audience as they were easy to follow, not only for young readers themselves, but also for those who heard them orally, with only the basic comprehension skills.

Children featured prominently in these tales of perceived missionary success, as is indicated by many of their titles, including “Hindoo [sic] Orphans,” “Indian Girl,” “The

Orphan Refugee,” and “Prayer of the Negro Boy”. Orphaned children were the most common characters in these stories, allowing the missionary character to easily fill the role of the child’s spiritual and moral model. Young girls were featured more regularly than boys.45 The structure of this style of missionary story was fairly consistent. The context of the child’s life and culture before missionary contact would introduce the main characters and setting. Next, the positive cultural and spiritual changes that occurred as a result of missionary efforts would be explained. This could include how a Sunday school set up by missionaries taught children to read, descriptions of orphans saved by the orphanages set up at mission stations, or how a spiritual shift from rituals of idolatry to

Christian practices led a community from violence and famine to security and safety. The story concluded by focusing on how the child or children who had once been the target of proselytizing were now young evangelists themselves, demonstrating key characteristics of evangelicalism and piety to their young readers.

45 For more on the feminization of evangelical Christianity and the use of girls in children’s religious literature, see Gillian Avery, Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621-1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 3-118.

214

An important example of this type of missionary narrative is the “Prayer of the

Negro Boy.” The young boy in the story was not only featured in the text itself, but was also depicted in a woodcut image that was used as the cover for each issue in 1845 with the caption “Come over and help us”. (Figure 2)

Figure 2 : Cover of The Record February 1845

215

“The Prayer of the Negro Boy” told the story of the unnamed boy on the cover of

The Record and followed the standard structure described above. It was exceptional only in the fact that, at just under four pages, it was slightly longer than most other stories of this genre. The story begins by describing life in “Africa” in general terms, and quickly moves to explaining the capture of the young title character in a raid of his home village.

The boy was separated from his parents, who remained in Africa, and forced into slavery in the West Indies. Importantly, the reader is reminded that although slavery still existed in many parts of the world, the British Empire had abolished slavery over a decade prior to the publication of this story.

The story continues as the young boy meets a single, male missionary who shares the gospel with him. With the guidance of the missionary, the boy experiences a religious conversion while enslaved. As the boy reflects on his new Christian faith he becomes very concerned for the eternal salvation of his parents who, he fears, will never hear about Christianity as long as they remain in Africa. After this realization the boy begins to pray fervently for his parents to be captured and enslaved just as he is, so that he can share his new faith with them. His earnest and passionate prayers are answered, and he is eventually reunited with his enslaved parents. At the end of the story the lesson for young Canadian readers is made clear when they are asked directly, “Dear children, do you pray?” as the boy in the story did.46

In another typical missionary tale readers are taught is “A Lesson for Those

Children who Never Come to the Sabbath School On Time,” in The Record’s June 1844 issue. The story tells of a missionary who teaches in a local Sunday school on the central-

46 The Record II (March 1845), 35-39.

216 southern Pacific island of Aitutaki. One night, the missionary comes across three young boys (two of whom are identified as orphans) sleeping outside in the bushes in front of the site of the Sunday school. When the missionary teacher asks why they are sleeping there, they reply that they do not want to risk being late for Sunday school the next morning. Following this story, readers are asked to reflect on the young boys and consider “what would they think of latecomers back home?”47 Converted children, such as the slave boy or Sunday school pupils, were used in these stories as examples of how pure Christian faith in a child could be, even within “heathen” cultures. Though the societies in which these children were situated were portrayed as dark and corrupt, it only made the pure hearts of the Christian children appear to shine even more.

A number of literary strategies were used to attract attention and interest in these stories, which then worked in combination with one another to create powerful messages and engage the interest of The Record’s young readers. First, the stories intended to create an emotional attachment between the child reader and the child character. Beyond the religious connection, children reading these stories were provided with multiple other ways through which they could relate to and connect with the children in the stories.

Attendance at a Sunday school, the death of a family member, talking to a Christian preacher, or being separated from parents, were all bonds that reached from the children in the narratives to the children readers.

While some important connections were made between the readers and the newly converted children in the stories, the readers were constantly reminded of the drastic cultural contrast between them and the young targets of missionary efforts. At the same

47 The Record I (June 1844), 92-93.

217 time that readers were encouraged to relate to the characters in the stories, they were also expected to be sympathetic towards them. After all, unlike the adults in non-Christian environments, children were portrayed as innocent victims of the cultures of “idolatry” and “barbaric heathenism” in which they were born. Children in the missionary narratives of The Record provided a face, though rarely a name, to the urgency of the missionary cause. The young readers could thus simultaneously be closely connected to, and drastically distant from, the children across the world who were the objects of aggressive proselytizing.

Literary scholar Kirsten Drotner found that a similar technique was used in the fictional stories of Britain’s nineteenth-century religious periodicals for children. She explains that this strategy of balancing personal connection with distance was used in various (non-missionary) stories of childhood religious conversion to “facilitate the children’s projection of their own fears and anxieties (‘it could be me’) while allowing them to control those fears because of the thematic distance (‘it is not me after all’).”48 In the missionary stories of The Record this distance was even more real, and existed on both a geographical and cultural level. The use of this technique also encouraged two of the primary goals of The Record in their readers: encouraging personal piety and conversion of children, and creating a sense of urgency and interest in foreign mission work. This type of missionary narrative was also intended to be instructional for their readers. Key doctrinal issues and Christian practices were explained in the most simple terms, and as readers followed the children in the stories learning how and why to pray,

48 Drotner, English Children and Their Magazines, 53.

218 convert, and evangelize, they were instructed on how to engage in these practices themselves.

The children in these stories were strategically used as models. Although the converted children in foreign fields were positioned at a literal and theoretical distance from the reader, they were presented as exemplary young Christians for two reasons.

First, because the characters were in environments that so clearly defined good and evil,

Christian and “heathen,” the children were seen as expressing a pure form of Christianity.

In contrast to British and North American Christian culture, in areas that had only recently been introduced to Christianity, their faith was seen as almost more authentic, in that it was guided entirely by basic doctrine rather than debates among and between denominational groups.

Secondly, the example of pious children was used to shame young Canadian people into engaging in very particular behaviours. As the examples of both the prayerful slave boy and the punctual Sunday school pupils demonstrate, readers were directly asked if they themselves were equally pious in their own behaviour. Here, the implicit meaning is clear: if children from perceived “inferior” cultures could behave in a punctual, prayerful, virtuous, and pious manner, then it became even more essential that

(white) children within the British Empire also display these qualities in order to sustain the dominant, and perceived divine, global hierarchy of cultures. In short, if children from cultures that were seen as the most “heathen” and “backwards” could embody the characteristics of ideal Protestant Victorian childhood, it became increasingly necessary for children in British North America to do the same. By creating a context in which even children whose cultures were defined as inferior in every way could (with the help of

219

God) behave according to the Victorian Christian ideal, the writers of this genre of children’s literature made it impossible for children in British cultures to reject or negotiate these same values for themselves.49

The recently converted child with outstanding piety and moral character was not the only way that children were portrayed in the missionary stories of The Record. They were also featured in columns meant to educate both child and adult readers on the foreign cultures where Christian missionaries were stationed. For example, in 1844, nearly every issue featured a regular piece titled “Cruelties to Which the Heathen

Children are Exposed.” This column provided detailed descriptions of alleged cultural practices such as cannibalism, infanticide, widow-burning, human sacrifice, and child sacrifice.50 Readers were informed that these practices were the result of idol worship, and The Record consistently promoted the idea that Christian evangelism was the only solution. These stories of “heathen practices” were most prominent in The Record’s early years, but even in 1849 and 1850, as local issues and teacher-training increasingly took up space on its pages, these descriptions were still regular features.

Reports of these types of cultural practices were not only featured prominently in the front of the publication, usually accompanied by a woodcut image, but they were also

49 A similar strategy was used in the Methodist press, where Aboriginal converts idealized in missionary tales were highlighted in order to reinforce ideal gender roles to their white adult readers. Cecilia Morgan, “Turning Sisters into Strangers? Missionaries and Colonization in Upper Canada,” in Sisters or Strangers: Immigrant, Ethnic and Racialized Women in Canadian History, Franca Iacovetta, Frances Swyripa, and Marlene Epp (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 23-48.

50 The Record (November 1843), 13-14; The Record I (January 1844), 15-16; The Record I (April 1844) 63-65; The Record II (January 1845), 7-9; The Record II (June 1845), 91- 93; The Record VI (August 1849) 87-88.

220 on average two pages in length, slightly longer than the short stories of successful missions and converts. The stories of various cultural practices (both accurate and exaggerated) were intended to attract a sense of urgency generated by a fear of the harms of such non-Christian cultures, particularly to children, but more subtle discourses were also constructed within these descriptions. For example, not all “heathen” cultures were presented as equally deplorable. Natives in Polynesia, for instance, were portrayed in an

1844 issue as “monsters” partaking in “cruel and barbarous practices of cannibalism.”51

Yet the people of Madagascar, that same year, were described as “not savages, but idolaters,” who “will lie, and steal, and cheat, but they are kind to their old parents, and very hospitable to strangers.”52 In general, however, the descriptions of non-Christian cultures were intentionally graphic and frightening. These dramatic scenes were intended to create a sense of urgency in the promotion of foreign mission work, but perhaps even more significantly, they constructed clearly defined distinctions between “civilized” and

“uncivilized” cultures.

These types of stories were part of broader imperial movements that understood various indigenous populations as requiring the intervention of missionaries not only for spiritual aid, but to improve their non-religious cultural practices as well. The communities that were on the receiving end of Christian mission efforts were always depicted as needing the help of missionaries to improve all aspects of their lives, with religion firmly placed at the centre. Given this context of a perceived urgent need for the most ideal religious cultural leadership among indigenous populations around the world,

51 The Record I (May 1844) 77-80.

52 The Record I (August 1844) 125.

221 it is not surprising that the British were consistently promoted as the best suited for this work, as British culture was defined within the Empire as the most civilized, sophisticated and Christian. This message became significantly more powerful as it was disseminated to even the youngest Sunday school children.

The second type of literature found in The Record can be categorized as biography, history, and Bible lessons. These features were intended to be educational and informative. They generally had a quite different tone than the missionary stories discussed above. The biographies, histories and Bible studies were intended for use in the classroom and made up an important part of Sunday school curriculum in general, and

The Record in particular.

The biographies featured in The Record were primarily of missionaries, generally written after their death. In August 1844, a five page biography, “The Life of Rev. John

Campbell,” was featured prominently, beginning on the first page taking up one third of the issue’s content. This biography was described as “a plain and short account of the life of Mr. Campbell, one of the first British Missionaries to [Africa].”53 Campbell’s life was told from his childhood and upbringing, up through to his work as a preacher, and later his life as a missionary. His Christian nature, selflessness and generosity are highlighted throughout. These types of biographies continued throughout the 1840s, and tended to highlight the work of men, though women were occasionally featured.54

Biographies of missionaries provided lessons on how to live an ideal Christian life, and provided insight into the sacrifices and hardships of Christian missionaries. The

53 The Record I (August 1844), 113-118.

54 The Record IV (May, 1849), 57; The Record IV (August 1849), 86.

222 length and serious tone of these biographies reflected their appeal to intellectual and educational interests of their readers. The British background and British loyalty of the subjects were always stressed, and this was a defining characteristic of missionaries in non-British cultures. Victorian Christian traits of piety honesty, devotion, and evangelism were also modeled through The Record’s biographical subjects.

The Record’s young readers were also presented with Biblical characters to model themselves after. The Bible lessons featured key figures prominently. These Bible lessons stressed evangelism in general and encouraged missionary work in particular. Typical examples in this period were lessons on the evangelical work and messages of Paul, or an overview of the “History of Moses.”55 Bible lessons also expanded beyond key characters. For example, the December 1849 issue featured a two page lesson on the food of the Bible. This piece described the various types of food eaten in Biblical times - from

Exodus to the gospels- the agricultural process of these foods, and their methods of preparation. Each description provided the reader with the appropriate Biblical verse where reference to the foods was made.56

The lessons featured in The Record were used in addition to, or in place of, the variety of Sunday school lessons available through the ASSU and denominational booksellers. Many of these other lessons were advertised regularly in The Record, but given this periodical’s widespread distribution, it is unlikely that any published Sunday school lessons had wider circulation than The Record during the 1840s. Bible lessons, also frequently marked as history lessons, were a central part of the CSSU’s educational

55 The Record I (April 1844), 49-51; The Record I (March 1850), 31-32.

56 The Record VI (December 1849), 139-140.

223 strategy. These lessons provided Sunday school teachers with material to bring to their pupils each week. They were always complete with key Biblical verses and consisted of broad Protestant principles rather than sectarian doctrine. The Bible lessons of The

Record were also used beyond the classroom. As circulating libraries were established in

Sunday schools across the province in the first half of the nineteenth century, Sunday school pupils and their families could share The Record’s stories and lessons at home as well.

The biographies and Bible stories in The Record featured examples of key

Protestant beliefs, but always focused on evangelism and mission work. Main characters, who were consistently presented as role models, provided children readers with information as well as examples. While the biographies and Bible stories were not intended to provide a great deal of emotional appeal or excitement in their audience, The

Record had plenty of features with which the reader could connect emotionally, including numerous short moral stories found in the pages of The Record each month.

The short moral tales featured in The Record were similar in style, structure, and content to the tracts and chapbooks distributed by religious societies in the 1810s, 1820s, and 1830s. They were brief and used simple language, yet they were intended to produce internal reflection and response from even the most advanced reader. Unlike the tales of missionaries overseas, or the pious lives of the children they converted, the characters in these moral stories were meant to be representations of the young readers themselves: young children, Christian, and British. They also had families, attended Sunday school, and faced many personal and spiritual challenges.

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While the moral stories consistently promoted evangelical Christianity, they also served two other purposes. The doctrinal message of salvation was taught repeatedly through stories about death, dying, and illness, and lessons on character building, primarily through examples of ideal moral behaviour. The theme of death and dying, both childhood death and the loss of an adult family member, was common in religious literature in the first half of the nineteenth century. Historians of Victorian literature have demonstrated that the topic of death in both fiction and non-fiction for children did not necessarily create an immediate fear in young readers, who would have been quite familiar with real life experiences of death even at an early age.57 In the religious press, including The Record, stories of death, and more importantly the afterlife, were exaggerated and presented in particularly detailed and descriptive patterns.

The main - though not the sole - doctrinal lesson in such stories was the importance of the process of individual conversion. In the early years of The Record, tales about death featured deathbed conversions described in detail, but by 1849 the child’s deathbed conversion had almost entirely disappeared from The Record. This change in the content of the stories reflected broader shifts in theology surrounding childhood conversion in this period. Specifically, this belief within evangelical

Protestantism moved from the necessity of individual conversion in children to a gradual acceptance of “Christian Nurture” theology. That is the belief that if a child is properly raised in a Christian family and community, personal conversion may not be necessary.

57 For more on the use of death in nineteenth-century children’s literature in the American and British context, see Avery, Behold the Child, 42-47; and Drotner, English Children and Their Magazines, 52-58.

225

Canadian historians have not yet traced this theological shift beyond the

Methodist church, but stories in The Record indicate that this movement towards

Christian Nurture theology was also occurring in the broader Christian community. 58

Two stories, “Little Margaret” and “Little Flower,” are representative of the stories published in The Record over the year 1845. They each describe a deathbed scene in which the dying child prays for salvation.59 In contrast, a similar story, “Dying Girl,” featured in 1850, consists of no conversion at all. Instead, the deathbed scene focuses on evangelism and the young girl’s dying wish that her brothers and sisters be sent to Bible school so that they may be “nurtured” as she was.60 Stories of conversions of children through illness, or just before death, flooded the pages of The Record in the first half of the 1840s, but by 1849, conversion came to be portrayed as only required for children

(and adults) in non-Christian cultures or environments where proper Christian nurture did not occur.

Children were not the only ones whose deaths were described in the stories of The

Record. Parents were also featured as experiencing deathbed conversions, usually through the assistance of their pious children. An example is the story “The Praying

Boy,” printed in February 1845. In this story, a young boy prepares his dying mother for eternal life by repeating to her the Biblical passages he had learned in Sunday school. The mother converts as the result of his efforts and knowledge. When children read stories

58Neil Semple, “The Nurture and Admonition of the Lord: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Methodism’s Response to ‘Childhood.’” Histoire Sociale/Social History 14, 27 (1981) 157-175.

59 The Record II (June 1845), 89-91; The Record II (February 1845), 19-24.

60 The Record VII (July 1850), 81.

226 like this they absorbed the message that young children could be used as powerful evangelists if they properly developed their faith in Sunday school. This responsibility was stressed even further when the potential convert was a close family member.

Beyond the images of death and salvation, short moral stories were also used to demonstrate ideal behaviour to young readers. These stories described the key qualities of young Christian boys and girls. Two methods were used in these lessons: they either highlighted the frightening consequences of a child’s bad behaviour, or stressed the rewards of good behaviour. The use of fear in these stories was intended to instruct children on the sever consequences of immoral and dishonest behaviour. These stories included familiar lessons such as “A Lie Cannot be Hid,” featured in the December 1845 issue of The Record, which reminded young children that “God has told us, that all liars shall have their part in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone.”61 Other stories made bad behaviour more personal. For example, “A Little Pharisee,” published in

October 1844, described a young Sunday school pupil who obediently prayed by his bed every morning but “cared little about God and was only saying a prayer […] to make people think he loved to pray.” During this story, children readers were addressed directly and reminded of the Pharisees in the Gospel. They were told that, like the biblical

Pharisees, children who pray without heartfelt conviction are sinners, and “prayers from a heart that loves sin are an abomination to [God].”62

More common than stories with harsh consequences for bad behaviour were those of rewards (both earthly and heavenly) for good behaviour. Various lessons on honesty,

61 The Record II (December 1845), 194-196.

62 The Record I(October 1844), 154-157.

227 piety, Christian devotion, evangelism and general protestant morality were taught through this type of story. “The Choice,” a story featured in The Record’s December 1849 issue, is representative of those that promoted the values of evangelism and respect for the

Bible. In this story, a generous Quaker distributes New Year’s gifts to young workers in

Paris. Each worker is offered a gift of either fifteen francs or a Bible. The first three workers immediately choose the money with no hesitation. The final worker, a fourteen year old young man, reflects on his decision for awhile, ultimately deciding to choose the

Bible for himself and to read to his mother. Then “he took the Bible, opened it, and found between the leaves a gold piece of forty francs,” while the other three workers looked on and “hung down their heads.”63

The themes of “The Choice” were common, as reading and respect for the Bible, and other Christian literature, were important elements of the behaviour and character of

Victorian children. It is not surprising that Christian publications, like The Record, promoted the importance of reading, as they would benefit financially from an increased market of young Christian readers. The story “Dying Gift” also promotes the importance of children sharing the Bible, the book as well as the message. In this story a young girl working in her father’s bookshop meets a man who ridicules the Bible. As the girl becomes ill, her dying wish is for her father to buy that man the “best Bible” in the store.

Once the girl died, the man received the Bible and read it with hesitation, but was ultimately saved by the young girl’s generous request.64 The importance of reading and

63 The Record VI (December 1849), 137.

64 The Record II (November 1845), 182-183.

228 evangelism are stressed here, as even a child sharing the Bible with an adult is seen a having significant results.

More specific behaviours were also praised through the stories of good little children in The Record. The cover story of the April 1845 issue featured a “Memoire of

Marion B.V,” a biographical tribute to an eight year old girl from Montreal who had recently died. Although this lesson was of a young girl’s life, the style and content fit within the moral story genre as her model behaviour and its resulting rewards were the focus. It will be quoted at length here, as it includes a number of the particular ideal qualities expressed throughout The Record.

Marion’s story begins by explaining that “for the first three years of her life she, like other children, shewed[sic] that she inherited a corrupt nature, by sometimes evincing a bad temper, but when she began to seek the Saviour this was quite subdued, and she became remarkably mild and obedient; no child could be more anxious to please.” Her ideal qualities were described further, “Her behaviour in church was always most attentive […] she was more delighted to hear about the Saviour than any other subject […] She was very modest and bashful […] she had made herself much beloved by all who knew her, for her mild and affectionate manner.” It was noted that she would often report the actions of “wicked” children, and “her regard for truth was remarkable.”

The theme of proper reading was also stressed through the story of Marion, as “a very large part of her time had been spent in reading, and she much preferred books that told about the Saviour, to any others, which she used to call, ‘foolish stories.’”65

65 The Record II (November 1845), 182-183.

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Like similar stories of exemplary children, the topics of both death and Sunday school appear in Marion’s example. “On her death bed her sufferings were most acute, and the remedies applied of the most severe kind, but she was the most patient little lamb.

[…] The medical man said that in all his practice, he never saw one so young, bear such sufferings, with so much patience, not a single murmur escaped her lips the whole time.”

Even her love for Sunday school followed Marion to her death. The story told, “the

[Sunday school] library book got for her last Sabbath day by her sister, was in her hand most of the time she was ill, and it was taken from under her pillow after her death.”

After reading the details about Marion’s life, the young readers were asked, “Who does not wish to live and die like Marion?”66 The specific qualities of patience, obedience, humility, modesty, and piety that were expressed through Marion’s story were stressed in a number of similar stories in The Record. Throughout the 1840s, model children were routinely used to demonstrate exactly how to be pious and faithful children.

The main lesson of these moral stories was clear: piety was not optional. If children wanted a good life, and afterlife, for themselves and their families, they would have to behave in very particular ways. The values of obedience, punctuality, honesty, and patience were consistently taught as the core of Victorian childhood. As the pages of

The Record demonstrate, by its publication in 1843, more specific habits were also being promoted: regular attendance at Sunday school, devotion to Christian reading, and personal evangelism all became increasingly included in the set of ideal qualities for children.

66 Ibid., 183.

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Through the moral stories in The Record, children were also taught the importance of financially supporting the foreign missionary cause. Stories of poor, working-class children in Britain making personal sacrifices in order to give to their

Sunday schools’ missionary collections were the most common. These included the stories of a girl who gave up her daily breakfast so she could use the money to join a missionary society; a child who did cleaning and other work around the schoolroom for money to give to missions collections; a young boy who set up a missionary collections box in the corner of the mine where he laboured and brought it to his Sunday school every week; and a young girl who gathered bones from the street in the dark, early mornings to sell for money to give to the Sunday school missionary collection.67 The message in these stories was that there was no excuse for Canadian children to not give to missionary collections as even a very young and very poor child could find ways to contribute if they truly desired to do so. The Record not only promoted the cause of foreign missions, but actively recruited financial and prayerful support from its young audience.

The cause of missions work was promoted in The Record letters and biographies of missionaries, reports of mission stations, and moral stories of children’s generosity.

The publication also encouraged support by tracking, through published accounts of local donations and other efforts, how colonial Sunday schools were contributing to missions.

Beginning in January 1845, local Sunday schools were encouraged in the pages of The

Record to send annual reports on their schools to the CSSU, including information on any missionary contributions. The first published report on Canadian Sunday schools giving

67 The Record II (August 1845), 123.

231 to missions was included in The Record’s March 1845 issue. The brief account reveals some early support of missions work by Canadian Sunday schools. The 1845 report presents the missionary contributions of four Sunday schools, all located in Montreal.

The first school listed was an unspecified Wesleyan Methodist school, which gave £66 to the Wesleyan Mission Society in Britain. Two schools, one Presbyterian and one

Congregational, gave £24 and £51 respectively to the French Canadian Missionary

Society, and another local Presbyterian Sunday school contributed £10 to the Home

Mission of the Presbyterian Church in Canada.68

The next description of Canadian Sunday school missions collection was published in January 1849. Here, The Record printed an update on one particular school to demonstrate the evidence of “missionary zeal” in Canadian Sunday schools. Readers were introduced to a Sunday school in Hamilton, Canada West that had raised £50 over the past year by taking a weekly collection in a “Missionary Box.”69 The funds raised were sent to a mission station in Calcutta, from which the school received a letter of thanks, which was also published in The Record.

As noted, one of the main purposes of The Record was to increase support for foreign missions. However, it is evident from the few reports on local support that interest in this cause was not met with as much ‘zeal’ as the CSSU desired. In fact, when donations to missionary causes were published in 1845, nearly half of the money raised by Montreal’s Sunday schools was directed to mission work within French Canada, a

68 The Record II (March 1845),40-42; The Record VI (December 1849), 140-141; The Record II (November 1845), 184; The Record II (July 1845) 104.

69 The Record VI (January 1849), 9.

232 mission field that was entirely absent from the pages of The Record, where foreign missions dominated. Given that English Protestants living in Lower Canada were a minority in this period, they were living in what could have been perceived as a mission field of its own, making it easier for them to relate to the work of missionaries than of

English Protestants in Upper Canada.70 When this context is considered, it is not surprising that Sunday schools in Lower Canada were more actively collecting financial support for missions than their counterparts in Upper Canada.

Of course it is difficult to know how the missionary stories of The Record affected the Sunday school pupils that read them over the 1840s, as this publication passed through thousands of hands across Upper and Lower Canada. However, the scarcity of local reports from Upper Canada featured in The Record suggests that financial collections and organization of missionary societies were either happening beyond the purview of the CSSU, or were not happening at any significant level at all. Not only was there very little action in terms of raising money for missions in Canadian Sunday schools, but prior to the 1850s, they only evidence of local Sunday schools establishing auxiliary missionary societies or other children’s missions groups was a note in the

CSSU’s 1843 report that stated that out of sixty-five Sunday schools visited by the union’s agent, only ten had affiliated missionary or temperance associations. The lack of children’s support of missionaries through Sunday schools may also suggest that while reading non-denominational missionary reports and stories was common practice,

70 The Census of the Canadas reveals that in 1860 over 83% of the population in Lower Canada was Roman Catholic, and more than 75% of the province’s population was Canadian-born of French origin.

233 donations to mission causes were more often made directly through church-sponsored organizations.71

In contrast, in the last half of the nineteenth century children’s missionary associations or clubs could be found in Sunday schools across the province. While publications such as The Record may have helped to disseminate the mission cause, a tangible commitment to foreign missions was not made by the Upper Canadian laity until the 1860s, when a more permanent clergy and institutional Canadian evangelical churches had the chance to make missions a priority among their congregations.

While The Record itself describes the culture surrounding this publication and the interest in Sunday school mission work in the 1840s, other records also provide insight into its reception. For example, when James Nisbet, an agent of the CSSU, travelled across Upper Canada in 1848 one of his main duties was to procure subscriptions for The

Record. Most of the Sunday schools and communities he visited were already receiving subscriptions, and many of those who were not showed encouraging interest. In

Woodstock, the popularity of The Record was so great that nearly every pupil in the

Sunday school had subscribed to their own copy, and Nisbet had to remind the local agent that issues should not be sent directly to the children to avoid being disappointed with delayed postal service. 72 Children, parents, and teachers across Upper Canada waited anxiously for their monthly copy of The Record, and its cultural impact in the

1840s should not be overlooked. Similar enthusiasm was expressed by Hugh Stephens, a

71 By the 1820s, the Methodists in particular, had a number of affiliated missionary organizations for men and women across Upper Canada.

72 LAC, James Nisbet Diary, April to September 1848, 25 August 1848.

234 lay superintendent of a Sunday school in North East Hope. He noted in a letter to the

CSSU in 1847 that The Record “gives the highest satisfaction to those who have seen and perused it, and is in general preferred to any Record now published.”

However, not all saw this popularity as success. Nisbet notes in his final comments from his tour that he was disappointed in the impact of The Record and that

“not very many schools have [formed] missionary societies […] as I had expected.”73

Nisbet had found that there was still work to be done in both distributing The Record across the province even further, and making a stronger influence in Sunday school missions work.

Conclusion

The Children’s Missionary and Sabbath School Record was the first of many

Canadian periodicals intended for Sunday school children. Only three years after The

Record’s initial printing, the Canadian Wesleyan Methodist Sunday School Guardian began publication in Toronto, and was succeeded by the Canada Sunday School

Advocate, which was published by the same church from 1855 until the early twentieth century. The Canadian Methodist Book and Publishing House also took advantage of the market established by CSSU with their Sunday school periodicals Happy Days (1886-

1906) and The Sunbeam (1880-1906). Canadian Presbyterians subscribed to The Glasgow

Sabbath School Union Magazine from 1850 to the early twentieth century.

During the last half of the nineteenth century, Canadians began to turn to denominational publishers to meet their need for Sunday school literature. From the

1850s onwards, mainline Protestant Churches began to establish themselves as Canadian

73 James Nisbet Diary, 20 September 1848.

235 institutions, with increasingly Canadian-born clergy, professionalized ministry and clearer approaches to children’s outreach and church membership. While historians of denominational publishing in Canada have noted the explosion of literature in the second half of the nineteenth century, they have been less concerned by the role of the readers in establishing the demand for such a market. In fact, as historians continue to place the emergence of religious publishing in Canada solely within these denominational lines, they ignore the important ways that early Canadians of multiple affiliations participated in systems of mass printing, publishing, and distribution beyond the official work of any institutionalized church.

When the CSSU began publishing The Record in 1843, it was not breaking entirely new ground. Upper Canadian Sunday schools had been using a common, albeit informal, curriculum for at least three decades through their Bibles and collections from the RTS. The CSSU’s publication of The Record did not even introduce the format of the periodical into Sunday schools, as many had received British and American series. The publication of The Record, however, did demonstrate that a demand for a Canadian

Sunday school periodical existed, and through their agents, publishers, and subscribers, that demand was met with relative success.

A content analysis of the first decade of The Record has revealed that what motivated the managers of the CSSU to publish such a periodical was not the cause of its success. Few of the readers followed through with their constant recommendations to establish missionary societies in their Sunday schools, or even to take up a collection for the cause. Furthermore, the non-denominational values that the CSSU and The Record prided itself on seemed to be dispensable as people quickly turned to their

236 denominational press for similar periodicals once they became available. But during the

1840s, The Record met the needs of Upper Canadians in ways that were not clearly stated by the periodical’s editors, in that it created a community of readers and provided a broad

Protestant, imperial curriculum.

The community of readers created by The Record was the result of its regular monthly publication, and of the inclusion of updates on local schools. Sunday school children, their parents, and teachers could feel connected to others across the province and in Lower Canada by simply following the same stories, songs, and prayers.

Furthermore, the pages of The Record contained more than basic Bible lessons. Like any school text, this periodical was full of indirect messages, instructing children how to be proper boys and girls within the particular context of the British Empire. The ideas promoted through the missionary lessons in particular gave meaning to the place of the

British Empire and the role that Christianity was to have within it.

This type of citizenship education was not forced upon Upper Canadian Sunday schools; rather, it was a response to the desires of lay participants who conducted them.

While the idea of a shared curriculum based in Christian principles that provided a particular citizenship education to Canadian children is something that historians have credited the state-run public school system for developing, this chapter has demonstrated that these ideas were practiced in other venues as well. Regular publication, systematic distribution, and implicit lessons in ideal childhood and citizenship, existed beyond the state’s system. They were practiced in the Protestant Sunday school system in the 1840s, where they were embraced by lay people who believed these lessons were important for the children in their communities.

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Chapter Five “Add Some Fun to Faith”: The Lessons of Sunday School Leisure Activities

Along with classroom lessons in charity, literacy, and religious instruction, Sunday schools also provided a number of leisure events for their students and supporters to enjoy.

These sites of rest and recreation are an important part of the history of the Sunday school, and of religious history more generally. As historian Lynne Marks explains: “religion and leisure are particularly valuable for exploring questions of identity because they were spheres in which late nineteenth-century Ontarians had the widest latitude of choice about their lives.”1 This was also the case in the mid-nineteenth century. Although children may have had less power than adults in the choices of recreation they engaged in, a close look at the social activities that were common across the province provides important insight into how families chose to spend their leisure time.

The types of social activities hosted by Sunday schools in this period also reveal the more subtle lessons that the Sunday school community was teaching to its young pupils. As a site of popular, regular, engagement of lay women, men, and children, these extra- curricular aspects of Sunday schooling were an important part of a process of socialization, where ideologies of respectability and citizenship were reproduced and reinforced. This chapter explores the most popular Sunday school leisure and social activities: steamboat excursions, tea meetings, and picnics. Though such activities were commonplace across the province by 1850, these types of social events did not appear until the 1830s.

1 Lynne Sorrel Marks, Revivals and Roller Rinks : Religion, Leisure, and Identity in Late- Nineteenth-Century Small-Town Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 5.

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Lay people were not only the participants, but also the key organizers of Sunday school leisure activities during this period. The particular activities and environments they chose for recreation reflect their understandings of the purpose and potential of Sunday school education in their community and in the socialization of children more broadly.

Whether Sunday school pupils and their families were gathered on a steamboat absorbing the landscape of the Great Lakes, or enjoying tea while cheering for the Queen, these rituals were rich with cultural symbols and meaning. The lessons that children absorbed in these social environments were an important part of Sunday school education, and provide significant insight into the widespread support for Sunday schools.

Nature Excursions

By the 1840s, Sunday school students across Upper Canada took part in summer steamboat excursions on their local rivers, harbours, and lakes. This activity was most common in the early 1840s, as by the end of the decade Sunday schools preferred to host most of their social events on land with tea parties and church picnics. Through the specific cultural experiences of riding a steamer through the picturesque landscapes of the St.

Lawrence River or Lake Huron, Sunday school pupils interacted with a uniquely Canadian geography in very particular ways. On these voyages, young Canadians learned how to make sense of the land, the colony, and themselves, through interaction with a natural, outdoor environment. A close look at these common events exposes how these seemingly simple nature trips were also exercises in building a cultural identity.

Steamboat excursions formed part of a new tourism industry that emerged in North

America in the early nineteenth century. Pleasure boat trips in Canada, particularly in the St.

Lawrence, took off in the 1840s, becoming a major tourist attraction gaining attention from

239

European and American visitors. The immediate success of riverboat tours in Upper Canada was closely connected to trends in art, literature, and culture in Europe and the United States at this time. Historian Patricia Jasen has explored this significant interest in Canadian wilderness tourism in the nineteenth century, and explains that “the experience [of riverboat tourism on the St. Lawrence River] was informed by the familiar values of middle-class tourism, much influenced by the romantic movement and its precursors.”2 She further describes that “gliding unimpeded through this wonderland, tourists could dream what dreams they liked, drawing on a shared language of artistic and poetic imagery.”3 It was in this context that tourists flocked to the new outdoor experience of steamboat excursions.

Canadian historians have, however, only recently begun to consider how locals engaged in this new tourist industry and culture that emerged in the 1840s and 1850s.4 The Sunday school daytrip on a steamboat excursion was one way that Upper Canadians participated in the booming tourist industry in the middle of the nineteenth century.

While these Sunday school excursions were intended to be leisure, or, “pleasure” trips, they were also used as a means of raising funds. Nearly all of the announcements examined here identify the purpose of the trip as a way to gain financial support for the host school. For example, an 1841 announcement in Kingston’s Chronicle and Gazette promoted a Sunday school excursion to “Lake on the Mountain,” aboard the “elegant and spacious”

2 Patricia Jasen, “From Nature to Culture: The St. Lawrence River Panorama in Nineteenth- Century Ontario Tourism.” Ontario History 85, 1. (1993) 44.

3 Ibid, 46.

4 J.I. Little, “Scenic Tourism on the Northeast Borderland: Lake Memphremagog’s Steamboat Excursions and Resort Hotels, 1850-1900.” Journal of Historical Geography 35 (2009) 715-742.

240 steamer Brockville. Tickets for the trip were five shillings for adults, which included the passage as well as dinner on board. Children from the hosting Wesleyan Methodist Sunday school rode for free, and children from other Sunday schools were admitted for half the price of an adult ticket.5 Five shillings per adult was the most commonly advertised cost of these excursions. In many cases however, the trip was advertised as “free” to all in the community, with the expectation that unspecified monetary donations would be made to the Sunday school. This method of voluntary donations rather than fixed ticket prices was fairly successful, as “free” steamer excursions to benefit local schools continued until the 1860s.

Announcements in newspapers served as invitations for local Sunday school supporters to join their community Sunday school excursion, which was usually an annual celebration for each school. Occasionally these announcements were followed up with brief commentaries reporting on the success of the event. An analysis of these announcements and reports reveals some important patterns in the practices of these activities. Captains of these steamer ships were often active participants in fundraising efforts. Many donated their services, including their ships, free of charge to Sunday schools wishing to use their excursion as a fundraising activity. Some captains went beyond the donation of their time and steamer by making financial donations to the Sunday school. This was the case with

Captain Sutherland, who gave 2£ 10s, to the Sunday school group he hosted in Queenston in

1848.6

For the captains hosting these Sunday school trips, lending their ships to local schools free of cost could be beneficial to their business, particularly by providing them with free

5 Chronicle & Gazette, 21 August 1841.

6 Argus, 29 Aug 1848.

241 publicity. Advertisements announcing upcoming excursions mentioned the captain and steamers by name, providing them with free advertisement. This helped particular captains and steamers to become known not only to Sunday school supporters, but also to those who read the advertisements and reports of these trips. This type of free advertising would have been quite valuable to the captains in the 1840s and 1850s, as water tourism was just becoming a major industry in Ontario, particularly in areas surrounding the St. Lawrence

River. By the 1850s, excursions on the St. Lawrence River in particular were attracting a large number of American tourists, but locals contributed to the tourist industry as well.7

Although making their services and steamers available to Sunday schools undoubtedly helped give these captains are greater role to play in their local Protestant communities, doing so also provided them with the opportunity to promote their business.

It is hard to determine the actual number of participants of these excursions as the majority of details come from announcements for upcoming trips, rather than reports following up on the actual events. The few records that do include details on attendance note that steamer excursions often attracted more than 100 participants, including children, teachers, and other Sunday school supporters. General invitations to “friends of the Sabbath

School” were often included in the announcement of the event. Both the evangelical nature of the Sunday school community and the fundraising nature of these events led to the extension of open invitations to all who could attend.8 However, despite the open nature of the invitations, it is likely that other factors, such as the price of the tickets, as well as the social regulation of white Protestant social groups at the time, likely limited the accessibility

7 Jasen, “From Nature to Culture.”

8 Chronicle and Gazette, 21 August 1841.

242 of these events to those who financially supported the Sunday school, rather than the parents of all the school’s pupils.

As a result of the outdoor nature of these excursions they were always held in the summer months. They were usually in July or August, though occasionally in June and

September. Weekdays were the most popular time for Sunday schools day trips, with most taking place on Mondays. None appear to have taken place on Fridays. Saturday excursions occurred occasionally, although these were never as common as the weekday trips. Sunday excursions for pleasure were not promoted, as the general Protestant population of Upper

Canada would have found this disrespectful to the Sabbath day. The trips themselves usually lasted the whole day, departing at six or seven in the morning, and returning around sundown. In a few instances, the steamer would ride to a nearby park or other location for a picnic or address, a trip that would take a few hours, rather than the entire day.

The main activity on the excursion was the ride itself and the accompanying tour of the area while onboard. A look at tourist guides published in the mid-nineteenth century describes what sights were to be seen on the types of steamer tours hosted by Sunday schools. In his travel book of the period, John Disturnell describes what one would typically see during a ride on the St. Lawrence River and the Thousand Islands, two common destinations for groups of Sunday school students from Kingston: “During the months of

July and August, pleasure parties from the surrounding country, and strangers from a distance […] enjoy themselves to their heart’s content […] being surrounded by wild and interesting scenery, and invigorating air, not exceeded by any section of the United States or

Canada.9

9 John Disturnell, A Trip Through the Lakes of North America ([s.i]: J. Disturnell, 1857), 258.

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On the Sunday school excursion tours, steamers would generally follow their usual tourist routes, identifying key geographic, nature, and historical points of interest along the way. Jasen’s analysis of tourist guidebooks of the St. Lawrence River from the mid-century explains what a tour would have been like. She notes that: “they laid out an elaborate itinerary of sights, making the most of each passing view, linking natural beauty with historical association wherever possible, always stressing the theme of constant change and variety.”10 Sunday school excursions followed this pattern, noting not only natural landmarks, but historic ones as well. Children on an excursion with the Presbyterian Sunday school in Kingston, for example, learned about the Rebellions of 1837 and 1838 when they passed the Thousand Islands and “visited Kate Johnson, the Queen of the Thousand Isles.”11

These types of tours would have helped children, and accompanying adults, grow acquainted with their often newly settled homes.

Kate Johnson was a key character in many stories told on the St. Lawrence. A tourist guide from 1866 recounts the story of Kate and her father, Bill Johnson, as well as their connection to the Thousand Islands:

These islands, too, have been the scene of thrilling romance. From their great number and labyrinth-like-channels among them, they afforded an admirable retreat for the insurgents in the last Canadian insurrection, as well as for the American sympathizer with them, who, under the questionable name of patriots, sought only to embarrass the British Government. In 1838, a band of men, headed by one Johnson, took refuge among these islands, setting all authorities at defiance, and provided boats with surprising lightness, they committed the most audacious outrages both up and down the river, and baffled all pursuit. The story is told of them, when he was obliged from close pursuit, to separate from his band, his

10 Jasen, “From Nature to Culture,” 53.

11 British Whig 27 September 1844.

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daughter, with a devotedness and courage that was inimitable, supplied him herself with necessaries of life in these solitary retreats, and rowed him in her canoe from one island to another under cover of night.12

Kate Johnson’s “courage” and “devotedness” were given great value by local communities as much as by tourists, as Sunday school children excitedly visited this “Queen” who reigned over a nearby, yet in many ways, distant land. Similar landmarks from the War of 1812 were also included in these types of tours.13

On occasion, an address or lecture would be given while the group had stopped for a picnic or walk. For example, a Wesleyan Methodist group from Kingston in 1841 planned a trip to the Lake on the Mountain where: “the party will disembark, proceed up the mountain, and view the lake, where an address will be delivered, when the party will return to the boat, dine, and return home by sundown.”14 These types of addresses were quite rare, however, and most excursions were focused on engaging with the wilderness.

Some important observations about Sunday school steamer excursions can be made from these existing scattered reports, announcements, and tourist information. It is clear that these events were both popular and successful. In the 1840s, many schools made the steamboat ride a regular annual fundraiser, which indicates that they were profitable events.

At this time, the leadership of Sunday schools was in the hands of lay managers and superintendents. At a time when even the most successful missionaries and itinerant

12 J. Taylor, The Canadian Handbook and Tourist Guide: Giving a Description of Canadian Lake and River Scenery and Places of Historical Interest (Montreal: M. Longmoore & co., 1866), 144.

13 Jasen, “From Nature to Culture,” 53.

14 Chronicle and Gazette. 21 August 1841.

245 ministers in the Canadas were challenged to gather a decent collection from their followers, the commitment demonstrated by the laity in supporting their Sunday schools, as well as the creativity they used to gather continued financial support, are especially striking.15

Evidence of lay leadership continued onto the excursions themselves. In contrast to the Sunday school and church-sponsored events of the 1850s and later, there is no evidence of ministers participating in the steamer excursions of the 1840s. Also absent from the excursions were any explicit religious practices, as these were common pleasure excursions similar to those enjoyed by tourists. Singing of hymns, or public prayers, or stories of missionaries were not part of the event. If any explicit religious rituals did occur on these excursions, they were not advertised or celebrated.

Children also played a particular role on these Sunday school day-trips. Participating in the excursions much in the same way as adults, they were positioned as observers, viewing and exploring the natural world that surrounded them as they travelled through a waterway, or a park. Unlike the Sunday school socials of the late 1840s and onwards, on outdoor excursions, children’s behaviour was not explicitly evaluated, and no element of performance or entertainment was expected from them. On these trips the children were the observers rather than the performers.

Sunday School Tea Meetings

After excursions, the most common Sunday school activity in Upper Canada was the tea meeting. Although tea meetings were much more structured than steamer excursions, they shared a number of common characteristics. Like excursions, tea meetings were held as

15 Grant, A Profusion of Spires, 103-107.

246 both social events and fundraisers. Sunday schools depended on the money raised through tea meetings to improve or sustain their schools, mainly to improve their collections of books and libraries.16 A tea meeting held for a Sunday school in the Township of Chinguacousy in

1850 noted that the purpose of the event was to “[rally] new accessions to the juvenile ranks and books to give them an intellectual treat.”17 The money raised was seen as supplementing the basic treasury of the school. This allowed for these tea meeting socials to be light and celebratory in nature, as no Sunday school would close if funds were not raised. They would simply have fewer “treats” and luxuries.

Reports of successful tea meetings note that the collection of donations between six and ten pounds was common, and that this amount was celebrated in public thanks and acknowledgment. One school noted simply that “the amount of the donation was fair for the assembly,” rather than celebrate the collection, suggesting that some gatherings collected much less than others.18 Similar to nature excursions, funds were raised at tea meetings through the sale of tickets to the event or by hosting a free event with the expectation of voluntary donations. An announcement for an 1845 tea meeting hosted by a Kingston

Sunday school advertised the price of tickets as one shilling.19 The generosity of Sunday school supporters at tea meetings continued to surprise and impress their hosts throughout

16 Sunday School Guardian for the Province of Canada 5, no. 7 (November 1850), 80. The article featured in this issue included various reports of Sunday school tea meetings held that year in the Peel Circuit.

17 Ibid., 80.

18 Ibid., 80; J.E. Sanderson, The First Century of Methodism in Canada (Toronto: William Briggs, 1908), 73.

19 British Whig, 27 May 1845.

247 the decade. In 1850, one report ecstatically notes that even “without tickets of admittance six pounds were found upon the [donation] table!!”20

It is important to note that, whether it was necessary to purchase a ticket to a tea meeting, or if it was advertised as “free”, these events were not meant for everyone in the community to attend. While the same holds true for excursions, the social expectations placed on guests were even higher for those attending a tea meeting. Financial donations were always expected, even at the “free” events. In Upper Canada, religious services were generally provided on a voluntary basis and public support of particular causes, demonstrated through financial support, revealed one’s commitment to Christian ideals. Certainly, if being a public supporter of Sunday schools could strengthen one’s social reputation, the reverse was also true. Sunday school tea meetings in this period were relatively small. The Christian

Mirror reported that a large Sunday school tea meeting in Montreal had more than 200 in attendance, but it appears that these events in Upper Canada did not reach these numbers until the 1850s.21 Given the size, it would have been quite noticeable if an unfamiliar guest attended, even more so if they did not make a public donation to the school.

In addition to being regulated by social expectations of financial contributions, tea meetings were also marked by cultural rituals that defined their space as one of respectability. An analysis of the structure and practices of Sunday school tea meetings reveals the significance of the lessons in respectability that were reinforced through these socials. Sunday school tea meetings were highly structured events that included a full

20 Sunday School Guardian for the Province of Canada 5, no. 7 (November 1850), 80. Emphasis in original.

21 The Christian Mirror 3, 10 (1843), 29.

248 schedule of various activities with entertaining, socializing and educational purposes. A tea meeting hosted jointly by two Sunday schools in Peterborough included a “comfortable tea provided out of doors,” followed by two addresses by local ministers, some “sensible remarks” by one of the Sunday school superintendents, along with singing, marching to a local band, and cheering from the children to conclude the day.22 This schedule was typical, and each aspect of the day involved very particular practices.

Addresses were always a key part of the tea meeting and served a number of purposes. These addresses were always delivered by men and usually included at least one speech by the school’s superintendent. An annual anniversary Sunday school tea meeting in the Brampton Circuit included an address from the current school’s superintendent

Vickerman Holtby. His brother, local businessman Thomas Holtby, also spoke on the future potential of Sunday school education. The event was hosted by the school’s first superintendent, John Sanderson. These well-known local laymen were noted as providing much entertainment as “the scene was so exciting that the talents of the speakers could not but shine.”23

Addresses by laymen were a common feature at tea meetings, but when available, ministers were also invited to address the crowd. The topics of these speeches often focused on the usefulness of the Sunday school in a general sense, and acted as a plea to support the local school. Though most accounts of Sunday school tea parties simply note the name of the ministers who spoke, Rev. William Young’s address at a Sunday school tea meeting on his

Peel circuit received rave reviews. As one person in attendance noted, “he presented one of

22 Sunday School Guardian for the Province of Canada 2, no. 8 (August 1847), 59.

23 Sunday School Guardian for the Province of Canada 5, no. 7 (November 1850), 79.

249 the base cases I ever heard in favour of funds for Sabbath School.”24 As most tea meetings were annual events, school superintendents and officials took the opportunity to present the crowd with the school’s “doings of the year,” as well as “form resolutions and plans for the future” of the school.25 Such information was presented to secure financial support, and to reassure donors of the positive impact of their contribution.

Children were expected to attend these portions of the meeting, as well as its more social and general entertainment elements. In fact, children who were well-behaved during the lectures often received praise, as did their teachers. One report notes: “the children, who gave the absorbing interest, evinced the two fold excellences of diligences of the part of the instructors, and a tractable perception in reference to themselves.”26

Children were not only the audience at tea meetings but were themselves part of the entertainment by reciting poems, scriptures, and, most commonly, singing.27 The performances of the children were expected to demonstrate the success of the school, and they received much praise. One report noted “a melodium well managed, and, the chiming voices of the young ladies and gentlemen in the appropriately selected music, threw the soft and enlivening through the whole of the animating scene.”28 What distinguished the tea meeting from other Sunday school events was the enjoyment of tea and refreshments. While

24 Ibid., 80.

25 Ibid., 80.

26 Ibid., 79.

27 Sunday School Guardian for the Province of Canada 5, no. 7 (November 1850), 79-80; Sunday School Guardian for the Province of Canada 2, no. 8 (August 1847), 59; British Whig, 27 May 1845; Sanderson, The First Century of Methodism in Canada, 48.

28 Sunday School Guardian for the Province of Canada 5, no. 7 (November 1850), 80.

250 other Sunday school socials, usually referred to vaguely as “anniversaries” or “parties,” were increasingly common by 1850, none surpassed the tea meeting in popularity in the 1840s.

The intentional use of tea in this space was not accidental and was closely connected to dominant ideologies of British respectability.

Records reveal very little about the details of the social aspects of these events. Far more was noted on the guest speakers or children’s performances than the table settings or types of refreshments offered. It is clear, however, that a few practices defined the space of the Sunday school tea meeting in particular ways. With the exception of participating in performances, children usually enjoyed all aspects of the tea meeting alongside the adults.

Only one announcement mentioned that children were served tea separately, as it was noted at the end of the invitation to a 7pm tea meeting that “a tea will be given to the children on the afternoon of the same day.”29 However, children did attend the evening meeting as well, as it was announced that, as part of the entertainment, “several appropriate beautiful poems will be recited by the scholars belonging to the school.”30 Boys and girls shared in each aspect of tea meetings, as did the men and women who attended as adult guests. Unlike the private tea parties of the late Victorian period, Sunday school tea socials were by no means a uniquely female space, as businessmen, clergymen, and prominent laymen mingled with the women and children in attendance. When the weather suited, the social parts of the tea meeting would occur outdoors. The trend of children’s Sunday school and church activities taking place in a natural, outdoors environment began with the nature excursions discussed

29 British Whig, 27 May 1845.

30 Ibid.

251 above, and continued through the twentieth century as Sunday school picnics and outdoor festivals became the main site of recreation.31

The choice of a tea social was not accidental. Tea had become a popular drink in the

British Empire over the nineteenth century. Social historians of tea in in the Victorian period have noted the uniqueness of tea drinking (and its related social activities), particularly in regards to class. Woodruff Smith notes that tea drinking, and tea parties in particular, “had class implications, but it was primarily associated with a cultural phenomenon that eventually transcended class distinctions: respectability.”32 He goes on to define respectability as “an assertions of a person’s moral worth as an individual, demonstrated primarily by behavior.”33 As social distinctions were becoming more clearly defined in

Upper Canada in the 1840s, these attributes of respectability became increasingly important.

The study of tea drinking and hosting tea parties became something of a literary genre in nineteenth-century Britain. Manuals and articles instructed women in particular on the precise way to appropriately hold a domestic tea party.34 At least some of those involved in

Sunday school work in Upper Canada would have come across instructions and examples of tea meetings in the British and American periodicals that circulated in the province. In 1845, for instance, the British Sunday School Teachers’ Magazine reprinted a report on a successful tea party. This article explained not only the importance of gathering a Sunday

31 See, for example, Joshua C. Blank. “Pitching, Pies, and Piety: Early Twentieth Century St. Hedwig’s Parish Picnics.” CCHA Historical Studies, 76 (2010) 61-85.

32 Woodruff Smith, “Complications of the Commonplace: Tea, Sugar and Imperialism,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, 2 (1992), 275.

33 Ibid., 274.

34 Keith Walden. “Tea in Toronto and the Liberal Order, 1880-1914.” Canadian Historical Review 93, 1 (March 2012), 1-24.

252 school community around a tea meeting, but the details provided suggest that it was intended to serve as an example of how host a similar event. It described the ideal social:

It was a beautiful sight—our tea meeting of the Sunday scholars. We had some happy hours in decorating our pretty school room. Branches of evergreens covered its walls, from which depended many a cluster of fair and beauteous flowers, in their thousand shapes, and tints, and perfumes, each a miracle of beauty, silently, but triumphantly, proclaiming that man bedecked in all his gay attire is not arrayed like one of these.35 What was expected of children was clearly outlined, as one description of a successful Sunday school tea meeting commented on the behavior of children in attendance:

“How neatly dressed! How well behaved! How joyous and happy they all look!” The girls in the class were especially worthy of notice as they were “all dressed alike in their blue and white striped tippets and aprons. They have laid their bonnets aside, and their smooth shining hair is plainly parted on their foreheads, without curls, plaits, or ribbons.”36 As discussed in

Chapter One, British Sunday schools were intended for working-class children, with explicit exercises in self-improvement that were not as common in Upper Canada’s schools.

However, the element of respectability that was expected of participants in social tea meetings was certainly present.

The language used in announcements for Upper Canadian tea meetings was clear in defining these events as structured and formal affairs. Tea and refreshments were served at

“precisely” the time indicated on the invitation, “suitable addresses” and “sensible remarks” were delivered, and music performed was always “appropriate pieces.”37 These words were

35The Sunday School Teachers’ Magazine and Journal of Education 2 (1845), 463.

36 Ibid., 464.

37 British Whig, 27 May 1845.

253 used to reassure those invited that the event itself would be appropriate, for women and children in particular, but even more broadly, as an exercise in respectability.

This language of Protestant respectability is also demonstrated in accounts of successful tea meetings. A report of an 1850 tea meeting near the Methodist’s Brampton

Circuit notes that: “the liberality of Mrs. Robt Gardner and Mrs. John Snell, gave a rich and varied repast to the young of their warm solicitude, and the benevolence who assembled to aid.” It continued to summarize the day’s tea meeting: “the specimen of culture displayed before our eyes reflected the highest credit upon their correctness and industry.”38 The Rev.

Thomas Demorest, who was passing through the district at the time of the tea meeting, wrote the report. He was so impressed with how the women ran the tea that he concluded his summary of the event by acknowledging that “ladies can be eminently useful [in Sunday school work], even if it be necessary in the superintendency.”39 Certainly, those women involved in the planning of the tea meeting succeeded in impressing the guests at their social.

Women likely had the majority of responsibility for planning and preparing tea meetings. Certainly the role women took in preparing the food for Sunday school socials increased over the 1840s, and by the 1850s women’s connection with preparing food in particular was commonplace. In 1851, The Young Churchman described the efforts put towards a Sunday school social in Kemptville in a typical way: “for many days previous to the one fixed upon for the festival, signs of preparation were seen going forward […] mothers and sisters busily employed in baking cakes, pies, tarts, and other good things.”40 It

38 Sunday School Guardian for the Province of Canada 5, no. 7 (November 1850), 80.

39 Sunday School Guardian for the Province of Canada 5, no. 7 (November 1850), 81.

40 Young Churchman, 1 November 1851.

254 is likely that many women in the 1840s also spent their time preparing food and decorations for Sunday school tea meetings, though it was never exclusively their role at this time.

Other aspects of the tea meeting were intended to be respectable as well. Children were expected to enter and exit in an “excellent order.”41 The entertainment should strive to be “fraught with sound sentiment,”42 and the overall tea “comfortable.”43 The published report of the social tea hosted by Mrs. Gardner and Mrs. Snell describes the ideal of the overall event. There is no doubt that Sunday school organizers across the province aspired to receive such a complementary review noting that all who attended witnessed “a very flattering style, a neat, complete, and finished tea-meeting from beginning to end.”44

There was also an important element of morality involved in the perceived respectability of tea drinking. By the 1840s, self-improvement and self-control became central to appropriate behaviour for respectable Protestant men and women. Children learned the importance of these virtues through religious literature on temperance, charity, and self- sacrifice, including the British and Canadian publications discussed in Chapter Four. Tea was certainly seen as a preferred choice over alcohol consumption; yet more subtle indications of morality were also present at tea meetings. The practice of adding a small amount of sugar to tea increased gradually between the last quarter of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. The addition of sugar to tea was, among other things, a demonstration of

41 Sunday School Guardian for the Province of Canada 2, no. 8 (August 1847), 58.

42 Sunday School Guardian for the Province of Canada 5, no. 7 (November 1850), 80.

43 Sunday School Guardian for the Province of Canada 2, no. 8 (August 1847), 58.

44 Sunday School Guardian for the Province of Canada 5, no. 7 (November 1850), 80.

255 self-control and moral righteousness. Woodruff Smith’s study on the origins of drinking tea with sugar explains that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Britons “taking part in the tea-and-sugar custom showed that one had the self control to consume sugar in a healthy way.”45 Records from Upper Canadian Sunday school tea meetings do not clearly indicate whether or not sugar was added to the tea they consumed; however, it is likely that this practice occurred across the British Empire. The morality and respectability of tea drinking at social tea parties was monitored by fellow participants. One could not over- indulge in tea, and it would never have been permitted to consume coffee or alcohol at these events with their peers in attendance. However, indulging in a teaspoon of sugar was seen as demonstrating one’s well-defined self-control.

The attendance of ministers at Sunday school tea meetings was a noticeable distinction from the earlier social excursion events, where ministers did not participate.

Although tea meetings remained under the control of the laity, they occurred under the close eye of the minister. The 1840s was a period of transition for Upper Canadian Protestantism, as the mainline Churches were establishing themselves as Canadian institutions and expanding their permanent clergy, congregations, and church buildings.46 The increase in clergy, particularly on Methodist circuits, led to a greater involvement of clergy in Sunday schools and Sunday school events. Traveling ministers coordinated their visits to particular regions in order to attend the annual tea meetings. Rev. Demorest’s interest in attending the

Sunday school tea meetings on his circuit is demonstrated through the reports he submitted to the Wesleyan Methodist’s Sunday School Guardian. In the fall of 1850, he summarized three

45 Smith, “Complications of the Commonplace,” 277.

46 Grant, A Profusion of Spires, 153—169.

256

Sunday school tea meetings that he had attended in the previous season throughout his

Brampton circuit. Even though Demorest was not officially connected with any of the affiliated Sunday schools, he was welcomed to their social events, and reported that he enjoyed himself at each of them.

Ministers not only attended, but also spoke at tea meetings, asserting their presence further over the crowd by reinforcing the moral and religious tone of the occasion. The fact that clergymen were in attendance provided an element of regulation and surveillance that did not exist in most of the earlier Sunday school excursions. The presence of ministers at

Sunday school events increased over the nineteenth-century as their place became more permanent and more prominent in the Sunday school community.

Respectability, including appropriate behaviour and ideal morality, were put on display through the propriety of the Sunday school tea meeting. These lessons were directed at and absorbed by the children in attendance. So too were lessons in imperialism. Historian

Mary Heath notes that for the middle class in Victorian Britain, “propriety was everything, and nothing was more proper than a cup of English tea.”47 There were a few connections between British identity, imperialism, and tea that Upper Canadians reinforced through

Sunday school tea meetings as well. The centrality of children’s participation in these events created an appropriate environment where these lessons in imperialism could be taught.

While tea was widely consumed in the colonies, as it was in Britain, its popularity was in part because it was inexpensive and easily imported within the Empire. But there were also other factors involved in its popularity. The purchase and consumption of tea was also

47 Mary Heath, “A Woman’s World: How Afternoon Tea Defined and Hindered Victorian Middle Class Women,” Constructing the Past 13, 1 (2012), 2.

257 patriotic because it supported the important growing market within the British Empire.

Unlike chocolate, wine, or coffee, all of which came from competing markets, colonists could be confident in their choice of tea as a recreational refreshment.48 Upper Canadians would have been aware of this demonstration of support for the Empire. This connection allowed them to remain united with their British homeland, as well as with fellow British colonists across the globe. Drinking tea as a patriotic act also provided a sense of familiarity to Upper Canadian settlers. It is has been well documented that settlement and life in Upper

Canada was often a drastic change for immigrants from Britain who were accustomed to domestic comforts and amenities not available in the rural backwoods environment. The everyday life of a household economy that was shaped around a family farm was quite distinct from the life many settlers left in the growing urban areas of Britain. In particular, familiar leisure and recreational enjoyments were rare in Upper Canada, and something as simple as sharing tea at a Sunday school party could give settlers a chance to reconnect with their Britishness.

Tea drinking, in the ritual of a tea party, also brought the familiar idea of British social status to the province. Upper Canadian settlers, outside of the major towns, had generally abandoned their middle-class routines for a common farming life. In nineteenth- century Britain, social status was something that was well defined and often measured by leisure time and lack of physical labour, particularly for women. However, in the rural setting of Upper Canada, the family relied on all to participate, leaving little time for any leisure, and in particularly, those activities associated with the British upper and middle classes. The Sunday school tea meeting brought the routine of tea drinking to Upper

48 Smith, “Complications of the Commonplace,”277.

258

Canadian settlers, in a way that continued the connections to British respectability, and class.

Given this context, it is not surprising that these events were popular across the province.

Connections to imperialism were evident in other aspects of these events as well. The children at a tea meeting at a Peterborough Sunday school ended their day’s activities by

“giving cheers for the officers of the school […] and the Queen.”49 Whether directly or indirectly, lessons in imperialism were reinforced during these tea parties. Drinking British tea, in a British manner as described in British literature, while celebrating the Queen, made certain ideologies of imperialism present and on display for Sunday school children and the wider community at tea meetings.

This style of social tea meeting was not exclusive to the Sunday school community in the 1840s. Temperance groups, missionary associations, and churches all used similar tea meetings as both fundraising and social activities. A celebratory tea meeting was a community-building event that allowed social engagement in an appropriate and even charitable setting. Through Sunday school tea meetings, local settlers could support their local Sunday school and keep up-to-date on its progress. Sunday school tea meetings were also a space where lessons were taught through practice and routine, beyond the books or classroom.

Historians have noted the popularity of tea parties in the 1880s, when such events were domestic affairs delegated to women in their private homes, before moving to more public tea rooms in the early twentieth century.50 But the church and Sunday school tea parties of the 1840s and 1850s have remained entirely overlooked. Nonetheless, much of

49 Sunday School Guardian for the Province of Canada 2, no. 8 (August 1847), 58.

50 Walden, “Tea in Toronto and the Liberal Order.”

259 what was true about the rituals and practices of the later, private tea parties also held true for the Sunday school socials of the earlier period: respectability was central, decorum and structure were expected, a high moral standard and self-control were on display, and an ideology of imperialism dominated the practice. In Sunday school communities, the presence of children as pupils added an element that was missing from the private ladies’ teas of the turn of the century. Children were expected to learn the habits and behaviours that adults displayed at tea meetings. These exercises became important lessons in citizenship and

Protestant identity.

Sunday School Picnics

In the history of the Sunday school, the Sunday school picnic is the most celebrated leisure activity. Congregational histories and Sunday school anniversary books recount the many pleasures of their annual picnics, though most historians have had little interest in these events before their immense popularity between the 1880s and the early twentieth century.51

Sunday school picnics began in Upper Canada in the 1830s, but this type of social event was rare until the 1850s, when it quickly became the most common extra-curricular Sunday school activity in the province. Two detailed accounts of Sunday school picnics before 1850 exist for Upper Canada. Both of these events were quite large, and it is likely that smaller picnics also occurred. An overview of each of these picnics provides insight into how this practice emerged in Upper Canada.

In the 1830s and 1840s, Sunday school picnics were very similar to the tea meetings discussed above. The defining feature of a picnic was the inclusion of games. Tea was served

51 For example, Joshua C. Blank. “Pitching, Pies, and Piety,”; Lynne Sorrel Marks, Revivals and Roller Rinks.

260 at both picnics and tea meetings, and other activities such as pupils’ performances, refreshments served outdoors, music, and lectures were all shared between the two types of events. The host of a Sunday school picnic in Bond Head, Simcoe County, wrongly estimates in his memoirs that his 1841 picnic “was the first Sunday-school picnic held in Canada,” but it was certainly one of the earliest.52 This picnic was held by Rev. Featherstone Lake Olser, an Anglican clergyman who exclusively served a district of more than 2,000 square miles in the North-Western region of the province. As the only minister in the county, Olser had by

1840 aided in establishing more than twenty-eight Sunday schools, all of which had lay superintendents and teachers, including Olser’s wife Ellen.53 Ellen Olser aided her husband in Sunday school work, and her work was appreciated. When reflecting back on his Sunday school efforts of the 1830s and 1840s, he recalled: “my best school was… conducted entirely by my good wife with such assistance that she could procure, and many children walked six miles to schools and as many back, regardless of weather.”54

Rev. Olser and his wife were known for their commitment to Sunday school work across their large county. They used creative pedagogies in the classroom and encouraged practical strategies for studying scripture, including attaching small testaments to sewing wheels and faming ploughs so pupils could study while they worked.55 Their creativity extended beyond the classroom as they organized the first local picnic with the stated

52 Records of the Lives of Ellen Free Pickton and Featherstone Lake Olser (Oxford: Privately Printed, 1915), 35.

53 Ibid., 32.

54 Ibid., 32.

55 Ibid., 32-33.

261 purpose of “the assembling together of Sunday school children and giving them an annual treat.”56 All of the twenty-eight schools in the region were invited to the picnic, and it was attended by pupils from the twelve schools closest to Bond Head.

A total of 500 children attended the large picnic with around 200 of their “teachers and friends.” The picnic began at 2pm and started with an address, likely by Olser. He then gave the pupils a public examination where each of the “most deserving” children was awarded a prize. The children were then moved to the lawn where “they thoroughly enjoyed the tea and cake provided for them,” under “a booth made of evergreens.”57 The adults had tea and refreshments once the children were finished. After the tea, the children “enjoyed themselves with various games,” and sang some hymns.58

In his account of his first Sunday school picnic, Olser recalls a few other rare details: children brought their own cups for the tea; “three barrels of flour were baked into cakes and bread” in preparation for the event; and many visitors travelled from Toronto and Thornhill to attend.59 While Olser’s picnic was certainly the first in Bond Head, and likely the largest of any Sunday school picnic in Upper Canada before 1850, his was not the first in the province. A widely celebrated Sunday school picnic held in Belleville in 1832 appears to hold this title.

The legacy of the Belleville Sunday school picnic surpasses any surviving historical records, as its erroneous claim of being the first Sunday school picnic in the world, has been

56 Ibid., 34.

57 Ibid., 34-35.

58 Ibid., 35.

59 Ibid., 34-36.

262 celebrated through to the twenty-first century.60 The interdenominational Sunday school in

Belleville, founded in 1822, was one of the earliest in the province. The school was established by a committee of Presbyterian and Methodist men who were inspired after a visit from the agent of the Canada Sunday School Union, Thaddeus Osgood.61 The

Belleville Sunday school operated like many in the 1820s with irregular attendance, unreliable teachers, and generally in the early stages of its organization. A turning point in the Sunday school occurred in 1829, when businessman Billa Flint and his wife, Phoebe, moved from Brockville to Belleville. This couple had been involved in the very successful

Brockville Sunday school run by Adiel Sherwood, and was shocked at the condition of the

Belleville school upon their arrival. A congregational history notes that “they were greatly distressed to find the children running around unsupervised, and learned that some of the teachers had gone off to a field meeting revival service in the countryside.”62 After this experience, the Flints began to help manage the Sunday school, with Billa becoming the school’s Secretary. One of their first changes was to keep the school open year-round.63

Billa Flint was committed to recruiting more children and gave much of his personal time to visiting every home in the town to find new pupils. His efforts were successful as attendance at the school increased after one year of his work, from about sixty pupils to 200.

Among his ongoing ideas to increase interest and attendance in the Belleville Sunday school

60 Gerald E. Boyce, Belleville: A Popular History (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2008), 51.

61 J. William Lamb. Bridging the Years: A History of Bridge Street United/Methodist Church, Belleville, 1815-1990 (Winfield, BC: Woodlake Books, 1990), 23-24.

62 Lamb, Bridging the Years, 31.

63 Ibid., 32.

263 was to “add some fun to faith,” which he did by organizing his first Sunday school picnic in

1832. The details of this early picnic are scarce, but it included a day of “games and races, food and refreshment.”64 The picnic was held on the bank of Moira River, “where there was a pleasant forest of trees for shade.”65 Following the successful picnic, Flint became superintendent of the Belleville Sunday school, a position he held for more than two decades.66

The emergence of Sunday school picnics in the 1830s and 1840s in Upper Canada was the result of work by leaders with particularly keen motivation to attract pupils to

Sunday school, celebrating the success of their schools, and keeping interest in the cause.

Both Olser and Flint (and their wives) brought original ideas to their Sunday school work in the areas of recruitment and pedagogy, so it is was natural that similar creativity was applied to their social events. While both of their early picnics resembled the more popular tea meetings in many ways, they each included the activity of games, an aspect that was not present at tea meetings.

The types of games included at Sunday school picnics are not noted. Olser’s recalls that unspecified “various games” were played outdoors, and Flint’s picnic held “games and races.”67 Historian Nancy Bouchier notes that in the period before confederation, games were

64 Ibid., 32.

65 Ibid., 32-33.

66 There is some disagreement over the amount of time Flint served as superintendent, with historians claiming it was twenty years and other state it was more than thirty. Lamb, Bridging the Years, 33; Larry Turner. “Billa Flint,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, [Vol. XII], http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/flint_billa_12E.html (Accessed 1 March 2014).

67 Lamb, Bridging the Years, 32.

264 common at local holiday events in small-town Upper Canada. These celebrations were similar to Sunday school picnics and included games that were “informally organized, and meaningful only locally, the [games] had simple, unwritten rules […] The rules were informed by local custom and tradition.”68 These games often included various sorts of races, usually separated for girls and boys. These games allowed for open participation and were embraced by many Upper Canadians who had did not have access to upper-class pastimes like cricket, and avoided, for moral reasons, hobbies like racetrack gambling.69

It is likely that the games at Sunday school picnics were also informal and based on local practices and customs. Regardless of the specific games, it is significant that these types of activities were enjoyed at Sunday school events. While nature excursions were meant to be intellectually stimulating, and tea meetings expected to be an exercise in respectability, picnic games allowed for children to express their competitiveness and playfulness in a way that was absent not only from the Sunday school classroom, but from other Sunday school leisure activities.

The personalities of Osler and Flint likely influenced the presence of games at their picnics. They each brought a creativity and passion to their local Sunday school that demonstrated interest and concern for children, but also recognized the importance of celebrating and rewarding children for their successes. Both Osler and Flint saw their Sunday schools as central to their local communities, as religious and social institutions. Sunday school picnics allowed them to meet many of their goals: bringing Upper Canadians of

68 Nancy Barbara Bouchier, For the Love of the Game: Amateur Sport in Small-Town Ontario, 1838-1895 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003), 48.

69 Ibid., 50-51.

265 various denominations together, raising interest and money for Sunday schooling, honoring the top pupils, and encouraging Christian fellowship.

The Sunday school picnics of the 1830s and 1840s represent a unique moment in the history of Christian leisure. During this period, religious activity in Upper Canada was still very much in the hands of the laity. Over the 1850s and 1860s there was an increase in clergy across the province, along with a growing presence of permanent church buildings, more official congregations, and the formal Canadianization of many institutional Churches. These changes all led to much more regulation in Christian leisure. As has been well documented elsewhere, Christian leisure, including Sunday school picnics, became more structured, tasks and activities became segregated by gender, and children’s “frivolous” play increasingly became the subject of much concern. Though Sunday school picnics continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the activities were heavily regulated and attendees were expected to show their ‘Sunday best’ in both their appearance and behaviour. The lack of clergy, and presence of informal games and races, demonstrates that the picnics of the

1830s and 1840s escaped many of these pressures that the later Victorian era would bring.

Although picnics were not as popular as nature excursions or tea meetings in period before 1850, their presence suggests that there was some flexibility in Sunday school leisure activities. As strong and creative leaders, Osler or Flint, shaped the nature of Sunday school socials in particular towns. Games and races were not off-limits, though most Sunday schools preferred to celebrate through more clearly defined rituals of tourism or tea parties.

Sunday school picnics provided guests with appropriate socialization for both the young pupils and adults in attendance. Expectations in behaviour, charity, and morality were certainly present, but so too was the hope that children would have playful fun.

266

Conclusion

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Sunday school leisure activities included steamboat excursions, tea meetings, and picnics. Each of these events were intended to raise support for local Sunday schools, but they also served as important sites of socialization and community building. Before 1850, the presence of clergy at these events was occasional, and their role in the preparations was even more rare. Thus, these sites reflect the ideals of lay Upper Canadians and the lessons taught through these spaces demonstrate the priorities that parents and other community members had for their children’s Sunday school education.

By 1830, Sunday school education was understood to include more than just classroom lessons. Steamer trips taught history, nature, and local tourism. Tea meetings reinforced dominant ideologies of respectability and imperialism. Picnics promoted celebration and play, along with the Christian practices of scripture reading and hymn- singing. These extra-curricular activities made up an important part of the Sunday school experience for young pupils. Their presence also demonstrates that the Sunday school community, made up of both adults and children, believed that education was more than classroom instruction. As an educational space, the Sunday school included lessons in socialization and community building that went beyond the classroom and beyond Sunday afternoon.

Supporters of Sunday schooling created an environment where community could be fostered, connections could be made, and both spiritual and social needs could be fulfilled. A consideration of the leisure spaces of Sunday schools reveals that the education provided through these institutions was intentionally well-rounded, revealing that Upper Canadians wanted more out of their Sunday schools than simple rote instruction on religious principles.

267

The Protestant rigor and regulation that dominated Sunday school picnics and parades in last half of the nineteenth-century was not present before 1850, suggesting that these later practices were a result of the rapid increase in clergy of all denominations and the institutionalization and surveillance of religious communities, and their Sunday schools. In the first half of the century, however, lay Upper Canadians shaped their leisure in quite distinct ways, stressing imperial citizenship and interdenominational community-building.

268

Conclusion

Figure 3. Robert Raikes Statue at Queen’s Park, Toronto, Ontario 2013. Photograph by author.1

On 28 June 1930, the International Council of Religious Education unveiled a statue of

Robert Raikes in Toronto’s Queen’s Park (Figure 3). Space in this park, the grounds of

Ontario’s legislative buildings, is normally reserved for British royalty or outstanding political leaders, though in 1930 Raikes’ presence was welcomed as the Council, along with

Protestants around the world, celebrated the sesquicentennial anniversary of the first

1 The statue was damaged and removed after being hit by a car in November 2013. Jodee Brown, "Collision in Queen’s Park Topples Statue." Toronto Star, November 2, 2013. http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/11/02/collision_in_queens_park_topples_statue.html. [Accessed April 10, 2014].

269

Protestant Sunday school.2 Although Raikes stood tall in Ontario’s capital for more than eighty years, his presence is intriguing. To begin with, he never visited British North

America and his ideas on working-class Sunday schooling were almost unanimously dismissed on this side of the Atlantic in favour of more American-style evangelical schools.

In fact, the Sunday schools of Ontario in 1930 would have likely been unrecognizable to

Raikes. By the turn of the twentieth century, Ontario’s Sunday schools had become firmly established in their present-day form: as auxiliaries of particular congregations; teaching denomination-specific doctrine and catechism; and with no lessons in reading or math.3

This tribute to Raikes reflects the observation made by Anne Boylan in her social history of the American Sunday school that “[a]lthough blessed with many chroniclers, the

Sunday school has had few historians.”4 This sentiment holds especially true for Canada.

While the history of the Sunday school has been frequently recounted in celebratory anniversaries, biographies, and monuments, it has been given only cursory attention by scholars. Consequently, the Sunday schools of Upper Canada have been, and continue to be,

2 This celebration focused on the founding of Raikes’ first Sunday school in Gloucester, England in 1780.

3 For more on the shift to twentieth-century Sunday schools, see Lucille Marr, "Sunday School Teaching: A Women's Enterprise: A Case Study From the Canadian Methodist, Presbyterian and United Church Tradition, 1919-1934." Histoire Sociale/ Social History 26, No. 52 (1993) 329-344; Mary Anne MacFarlane. “Gender, Doctrine and Pedagogy: Women and ‘Womanhood’ in Methodist Sunday Schools in English-Speaking Canada, 1880 to 1920.” (Ph.D. diss, University of Toronto, 1991).

4 Anne Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790-1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 4.

270 romanticized by evangelicals who idealize this period as one where a presumed common

Christianity built the social, political, and religious foundations of the nation.5

As this dissertation has demonstrated, the origins and early years of Sunday schooling in Upper Canada were not only much more complex than such commemorations suggest, but also much more diverse. Analysis of the earliest two Sunday schools in Upper Canada, founded in Brockville and Richmond Hill in 1811, detail what would become the general trend. These schools shared a number of common features: they were run by lay men who were prominent in the community; they claimed no denominational affiliation and welcomed children from all backgrounds; boys and girls attended side-by-side where they were taught reading and other elementary instruction along with exercises in Scriptural memorization.

Other aspects of these early schools varied greatly depending on the local resources and leadership available. Brockville’s school was kept under the eye of Rev. William Smart who became well acquainted with British models of schooling through his education with the

London Missionary Society. The leader of Richmond Hill’s Sunday school, James Miles, on the other hand, was the son of an American-born tavern owner, whose religious affiliations

(if any) remain unknown. Methods of discipline, classroom organization, and length of lessons also varied according to the preferences of the superintendent and the teachers.

In many ways, Sunday schools were a reflection of the local communities in which they emerged. Some towns were made up of settlers who shared a common place of origin, religious denomination, and culture. Others were areas that were home to a mix of

5 A typical example is the website Christianity.ca which reflects on the state of Sunday schools in present-day Canada. In this piece, the author notes that “For many, Sunday school is just a relic of a distant past, a quaint memory of hearing Bible stories, learning memory verses and going to picnics.” “The State of Sunday School.” Christianity.ca, accessed March 1 2014, http://www.christianity.ca/page.aspx?pid=13729.

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Europeans, Loyalists from the United States and increasingly Canadian-born families.

Religious variety was a common feature across the province as a culture of evangelical revival challenged established churches, and missionaries from formal Christian organizations regularly encountered religious practices that took on new forms of church life in formal and informal ways. It was within this context that the Sunday school of Upper

Canada developed. Sunday schools appeared in towns, rural settlements, and backwoods regions. Children gathered in homes, barns, courthouses, and churches. Various types of literature, along with maps and slates, were shared and borrowed across the province. It is clear that there is no one history of Upper Canada’s Sunday schools.

The preceding chapters have traced some of the multiple origins of the Sunday school in Upper Canada, through their organizations, leaders, workers, pupils, communities, and literature. Based on the data analyzed, this study argues the intent, purpose and practices of the Sunday school was much more than a site of religious indoctrination. Rather, it presents the Sunday school as a site of education that included religious instruction along with socialization, elementary and literacy education, community-building, citizenship education, and leisure activity. Of course, these aspects of Sunday schooling often overlapped and intersected among the practices both within and beyond the classroom, allowing the Sunday school to play a significant role in the lives of not only its children pupils, but also on older youth and adults in the broader community. The Sunday school was an early example of free schooling for children that extended across Upper Canada. The system of Sunday schools that developed in the first half of the nineteenth-century demonstrates the desire of lay settlers to provide free schooling to their children, and the children of their neighbourhoods.

While this education was saturated with religious and moral lessons, it provided much more

272 to its pupils as well as the broader community and therefore challenges the dominant notions of what popular, free, and even “public” schooling meant at the time.

Historians have acknowledged that the regular attendance of Upper Canadian children in common schools occurred gradually over the nineteenth century and was a process that involved changes in the family, the economy, and government responsibility.6

Yet, few have been concerned with identifying how Upper Canadians participated in mass schooling before and beyond the state-run common school system. The Sunday school has proven to be an ideal example through which to reconsider the views and priorities that

Upper Canadian settlers held on childhood education. Before 1850 few families were willing to send their sons and daughters to common schools on a regular basis. But most were committed to making elementary instruction, particularly basic literacy, accessible to all children in their community at least one day a week. The Sunday school filled this educational need and was widely supported as settlers sent their children, supported the central union, and volunteered in various positions, to ensure its success.

In many ways, the Sunday school introduced Upper Canadians to a number of ideas that would gain widespread support through common school legislation. Parents and pupils of early nineteenth-century Sunday schools were introduced to classroom practices such as opening prayer, rote memorization, spelling exercises, and strict rules for punctuality. They also engaged with a common curriculum, lending libraries, a hierarchy of teachers and superintendents, and a school system that allowed local authority within an inter-provincial

6 For more on the changes that led to regular common school attendance see: Susan E. Houston and Alison Prentice, Schooling and Scholars in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 199-234 ; Chad Gaffield. “Children, Schooling, and Family Reproduction in Nineteenth-Century Ontario.” Historical Studies in Education 3, no. 2 (1991), 275-284

273 organization that provided resources, guidelines, and leadership to all schools involved. The generation of children who attended Sunday school in the early nineteenth century later became a crucial force in the public movement for free common schooling by the middle of the century.

What was most unique about Protestant Sunday schools in the period before 1850 was the fact that they remained almost exclusively under the control of the laity. As such, the

Sunday school is especially valuable in identifying lay sentiments towards both education and religion as it was rarely under the purview of any particular church. Upper Canadian

Sunday schools were in almost every sense community endeavours. Their leadership was cooperative; their purpose was negotiable; and attendance fluctuated based on demands by those who they served. The values promoted in Sunday schools represented dominant views of both ideal citizenship and childhood. Parents, teachers, and other Sunday school leaders stressed characteristics such as punctuality, self-control, self-improvement, and piety, all within the context of imperial and Protestant superiority. These qualities of citizenship and childhood reflected the common vision Upper Canadians had for the province. From magazines to tea meetings, Sunday schooling reinforced and reproduced these ideals with overwhelming support.

Throughout this period both resources and ideas were shared across Upper Canada as well with their Protestant neighbours in Lower Canada, through the pages of a vast range of literature produced for, and by, the Sunday school community. This print culture was central to the development of a cohesive Sunday school community that reached beyond local regions and across denominational lines. Sunday schools emerged across Upper Canada between the 1810s and 1840s, the same time that print culture rose to mass levels of

274 publication and distribution in the province. The simultaneous development of these two trends was not accidental. The success of Sunday schools across Upper Canada was dependent on the ideas, resources, and instruction shared through widely distributed publications. Some of the most diverse Sunday schools were connected to each other through various forms of print media. Those involved in Sunday school work knew the possibilities of the community that was created through shared print media and they used the printed page in nearly all aspects of their work in establishing, promoting, and operating Sunday schools and their affiliated organizations.

In the 1810s, Upper Canada’s Sunday school community communicated through the

American press, particularly Methodist periodicals, where they sought financial donations, used books, and other forms of support from both lay and clerical readers on both sides of the border. Within Upper Canada, the small colonial press promoted Sunday schools in the growing cities of York and Kingston, providing readers with information on the establishment of these schools and ways to support their expansion across the province. In the 1820s and 1830s, the press exploded in British North America as hundreds of new periodicals and newspapers surfaced with local content for Upper Canadians. The denominational press made up a significant portion of this new market, with regular columns reprinting reports and minutes from Sunday school meetings as well as short lessons to be used in the classroom. The 1820s and 1830s also brought more imported and reprinted material to Upper Canadians as a result of both improved postal service and organizations with various purposes purchasing, selling, and storing these materials. The Canada Sunday

School Union based in Montreal was among the largest of these groups, with its primary

275 purpose defined as distributing free and cheap literature to Sunday schools across Upper and

Lower Canada.

The thousands of books, tracts, and periodicals that the Canada Sunday School Union printed and imported allowed for many Upper Canadians to have access to a wide range of literature, often for the first time, yet the distribution of the organization’s original reports had an even greater significance. The main Union printed and organized the regular publication and distribution of annual reports. These reports were filled with local letters and created an atmosphere in which the Sunday schools scattered across the province could connect with each other. Through this, network important connections were made. For example, participants in Bytown’s Sunday schools could read about the progress of schools in Chatham; campaigns for lower postage and government grants for Sunday school libraries gained support from Upper Canadians in settlements across the province; and Sunday school supporters greeted agents of the Union when they came through on regular tours of the area.

In the 1840s, this network expanded further. With the Canada Sunday School Union’s own periodical reaching more than 3,000 monthly subscribers at its peak, and thousands of imported books and tracts in its main depository, the market for Sunday school literature was wider than ever, and Upper Canadians of all Protestant denominations made use of these resources. It was only by the 1860s, that this inter-denominational market for Sunday school literature began to have competition from the major churches, primarily Methodist publishers, whose Sunday school collections continued to be among their best sellers.

The power that the nineteenth century press had in creating a common identity has been well documented by historians, and the Sunday school community developed on similar terms. Although Upper Canadians supported Sunday schools for various reasons motivated

276 by many combinations of religious convictions and changing attitudes towards literacy education, the community of supporters that made Sunday schooling a priority in their churches, neighbourhoods and families shared their experiences with others across the province through the regular print culture that passed between them. This common print medium was central to the development of Sunday schools in Upper Canada because, unlike their state-supported weekday counterparts, there was no legal authority or state funding to ensure its success. Sunday schools were created by Upper Canadians to serve Upper

Canadians and only succeeded as a result of the continued contributions that lay women, men and children made to their local schools and the broader Sunday school community.

Tracing the history of the informal space of the Sunday school presented some challenges. Attending, and even teaching, Sunday school was such a routine part of life for many Upper Canadians that it did not warrant record keeping in much detail. Much like churchgoing itself, attendance became so commonplace that few took note of the “ordinary” or usual practices that occurred at their Sunday school. Local records of meetings were rarely preserved, and even fewer notes of classroom activity or attendance have survived. Even those formally concerned with either education or religion made little note of Sunday schooling in this period. The various churches that were present in Upper Canada had more pressing concerns in the first half of the nineteenth century such as securing permanent clergymen, establishing meeting houses and congregations, and securing financial support.

Thus, little more than estimates on the number of Sunday schools are mentioned in official church and missionary records. Similarly, the Department of Public Instruction only occasionally counted Sunday schools in its annual reports of all schools and libraries in the province, but generally placed Sunday schools outside of its jurisdiction.

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Perhaps this explains the lack of interest that historians have had in the Sunday school. The historiographies of both Canadian schooling and religion have centred around the well-organized records of official institutions. Whether the Department of Public

Instruction’s Annual Reports and legislative records, or the minutes of annual conferences of various Church bodies, the educational and religious practice that occurred beyond the purview of these institutions remains greatly unexplored.

As a result of the nature its records, the history of the Sunday school in Upper Canada provides an opportunity to probe the educational and religious practices of lay people from their own point of view, rather than the institutions that attempted to regulate them. Such an opportunity points to new directions in methods of research in both areas of study. The increased digitization of newspapers, periodicals, and literature from Upper Canada, United

States, and Britain has allowed for thousands of documents to be scanned to locate discussions on Upper Canadian Sunday schools among diverse, and often unlikely, sources.

Similar digital copies of local and church histories have been mined for similar bits of information. The electronic records of the census, and city directories also provide easily accessible details on early Upper Canadian life. The recent and ongoing emergence of digital archives and tools in these areas has created the opportunity to revisit questions of Upper

Canadian schooling and religion that have been previously deemed impossible to explore.

The Sunday school also demonstrates the possibilities of expanding traditional research models. Upper Canadian religious history has been largely written from a denominational perspective. Studies on the Methodist, Anglican, and Presbyterian Churches are plenty, but there still remain only a few on the areas of social, cultural, and religious life where the members of these churches came together. In the Canadian context,

278 interdenominational associations are seen mainly as a product of the late-nineteenth century, when the so-called Protestant consensus began to dominate the religious sphere.7 However, as the Sunday school illustrates, a narrowly defined denominational lens not only limits our understanding of how Protestants engaged with each other, but also how the values and priorities of the laity could be quite distinct from those of Church leaders. The Sunday school serves as both an example of interdenominational cooperation at the formal level of the

Canada Sunday School Union, as well as at the informal level, of weekly lessons in a shared space. These cooperative spaces of worship and religious practice extend well beyond

Sunday schools, yet often remain invisible when only institutional denominationally segregated records are consulted.

The history of education and schooling in Upper Canada has been limited by similar trends. While state-run schools have received their rightful place in the centre of the province’s educational history, other state institutions have taken the focus from community- run efforts. The most evident example revealed in this study is the Sunday school library.

Although Mechanics Institutes and common school libraries were state-supported in this period, and were the predecessors to public libraries of the late nineteenth century, these institutions have dominated the literature on nineteenth-century libraries even in periods and places where they were outnumbered more than tenfold by their Sunday school counterparts.

This study has challenged this assumption that state-run sites of education were the most significant spaces of formal and informal learning in Upper Canada. After all, there were many types of schooling that were available for free to settlers long before any “public” money was involved.

7 William Westfall, Two Worlds : The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Kingston, ON.: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1989).

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This study has considered the general trends and patterns in the Sunday school history, and has not intended to be inclusive. While an attempt to balance the local experience with the central Canada Sunday School Union was made, many areas of Sunday schooling were overlooked and would be more appropriately analyzed in future studies. The most glaring example is the Sunday schools that were attended by Aboriginal populations in

Upper Canada. These missionary-style schools were quite distinct from those established by lay settlers in both purpose and control. Such Sunday schools were intended to work with other forms of colonizing educational efforts, such as residential schools, and were more formally connected with official church institutions than those schools included here.

Likewise, the Sunday schools that emerged in the 1840s and 1850s in the growing Black settlements of Upper Canada are certainly in need of a study of their own. The political, social, religious, and economic challenges that these communities faced at this time led to

Sunday schools in these areas serving more diverse purposes than those in exclusively white or integrated communities. Future studies on various aspects of literacy and reading would also benefit from considering the Sunday school in their analysis, as would those focusing on

Upper Canadian libraries, periodicals, and book publishing. Such plentiful sources would make for significant future research the area of book history, as Sunday school literature was widely read across the province.

The Sunday school in Upper Canada is an example of a successful exercise in education and religion that existed without the formal support of the state or any church. Of course, it is not the only case where community members defined and met their own educational needs, on their own terms. Both education and religion are made up of a number of practices and routines, some of which take place inside the walls of schools and churches,

280 but many of which extend far beyond. Local communities, families, organizations, and religious groups continue to establish ways to educate their children that work both in collaboration, and in competition, with public schooling. While many historians have traced the history of the public school system in hopes to provide a foundation for our understanding of the current model, other sites of learning such as homeschooling, prison education, apprenticeships, extra-curricular activities, and religious instruction, have equally interesting and significant histories as well, yet continue to be overlooked. Perhaps the commonly understood dichotomies between informal/formal, private/public, religious/secular schooling are more accurate reflections of contemporary ideological boundaries than they are of historical efforts to meet the practical needs of religious, cultural, and literacy instruction.

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Appendices Table 2 Recorded Attendance at Sunday Schools, 1828-1830 Location or Name of School Year Founded Pupils on Regular Record Attendance Hillier Sabbath School 40 25 Crahame and Haldimand Sunday School 50 Ernest Town 5th Concession Sabbath School 30 Methodist Chapel of York 1818 159 125 Rock Church Sunday School of Flamboro 80 60 Richmond Sabbath School 1829 33 Sydney Fourth Concession Sunday School 70 30 Hallowell No. 1 Sunday School 1826 78 Hallowell No. 2 Sabbath School 1829 45 Hallowell No. 3 Sabbath School 60 40 Hallowell No. 4 Sabbath School 1829 35 Glandford Sunday School 50 St. Catharine's Methodist Sunday School 60 40 Belleville (No.1) 1822 150 90 London Sabbath School 1827 80 60 Kitley Harmoney Sabbath School 36 Whitby 7th Concession 20 Whitby 9th Concession 20 Reach 4th concession 19 12 East Lake Sabbath School No. 1 1829 50 East Lake Sabbath School No. 2 1829 45 East Lake Sabbath School No. 3 45 West Lake Sabbath School (East Side) 30 Wellington Sabbath School 1829 40 Pleasant Bay, Hillier 1828 50 40 South Bay 1830 43 Sophiasburg Sunday School No. 1 48 Sophiasburg Sunday School No. 2 1829 25 Green Bush Sabbath School No. 3 1829 60 Ernesttown (4th concession) 1830 42 Ernesttown No. 2 (5th Concession) 54 Lundy's Lane Sabbath School 30 Jerusalem and East Settlement Sabbath School (Ottawa) 108 West Hawksebury District Sabbath School 40 Chatham 74 Chartham no.2 25 Thames Circuit Sabbath School 25 Mississippi Circuit Sabbath School 50 Jackson Street Sabbath School (Lanark) 50 North Gower Sunday School 14 Source: The Christian Guardian (1830); Sunday School Union Society of Canada. Report of the Sunday School Union Society of Canada, 1828.

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Table 3 Denominational Affiliation of Schools with Reports Submitted to Canadian Sunday School Union 1843 Number of Affiliated Percentage (%) Schools Interdenominational 43 40 Methodist 23 20 Presbyterian 20 17 Baptist 9 8 Congregational 1 <1 United Church of Scotland 1 <1 Independent 6 5 Bible Christian 1 <1 None listed/Unclear 11 10 Source: CSSU Annual Report, 1843.

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