Our Little Life: Dressmaker Meet Cheesemonger

Our Little Life: A Novel of To-Day
J.G. Sime
London: Grant Richards, 1921
394 pages

Jessie Georgina Sime's debut novel begins with a tale of decline. In the eighteen-sixties, the residences at the confluence of O'Neill Street and Drayton Place were amongst the most desirable in Regalia. In the decades that followed, as the city's wealthy gravitated westward, the grand homes became less attractive. At the dawn of a new century they were bought on the cheap by a "Business Woman" who had them divided into small apartments:

The fact of the Buildings having begun life as a cluster of semi-detached dwelling-places explained certain odd constructions in the flats; also the many undesired intimacies—common taps of water on the landings, verandas that belonged to everyone and no one—that the inhabitants so reluctantly shared with one another. The Apartment House was the uncomfortable place it was because when it had been "made over" comfort had been the last thing in anyone's mind.

The Business Woman named the buildings the Penelope Apartments after herself, but soon found them too much to deal with. She signed the buildings over to a French Canadian in exchange a small sum to be followed by yearly payments. The French Canadian promptly flipped the property, thus setting off years of legal squabbling leading to further neglect.

The residents of the Penelope Apartments, known as "Penelopians," include labourers, drunkards, dope sellers, chorus girls, and prostitutes. They're interesting on the whole, but only two are fully drawn. What at first looks to be a novel about disparate and disreputable tenants and their interactions soon centres on the relationship between Katie McGee and Robert Fulton. 

Katie McGee lives in a modest first-storey flat on the Drayton side of the Penelope Apartments. A forty-six-year-old spinster, she makes a living as a dressmaker. Her workdays are spent in the homes of Regalia's upper-middle class, ripping apart last season's gowns so as to make use of the fabrics for the next.

Irish-born, Katie came to Regalia as a child, brought with older sister Mary by their widowed mother. Canada is the only home Katie can remember.

It is a familiar story.

Robert Fulton has a small flat on the third floor of the Penelope Apartments' O'Neill side. His story is less familiar and isn't revealed until fairly late in the novel. An English Cambridge graduate, he has somehow ended up serving at the butter and cheese counter of the Arundel Meat, Grocery, Fruit, Vegetable and Dairy Produce Market. He doesn't enjoy the work:

How Robert hated those prosperous women who came and shopped! How he detested the clipped intimations of their Canadian voices. He loathed their shrillness and their arrogance and their clumsiness of movement (it had taken his labor in the store to show him that women are more clumsy in their movements than men). He hated them from head to foot, and he felt certain that if he could see inside them he would hate them more.

Katie McGee is nothing like the women Robert serves. She'd never be able to afford the market's offerings. The same can be said of Robert. Both earn $1.50 for a day's work, the difference being that dressmaker's employers provide breakfast and lunch.

Their relationship begins in the backstory with an act kindness. Robert saw Katie struggling with a sack of coal for her flat and had insisted on carrying the burden.

Our Little Life is a portrait of a woman and man who would never known one another had they remained overseas. Katie's initial interest in Robert is as a possible partner; we first see her rushing to her flat so as to prepare a meal and herself for his arrival. She is older than Robert, Robert is "younger than his years," but still a girl can hope. A lonely woman drawn to the finer things in life, she looks up to a man who had not only received a fine education, but had once practiced a profession she had wanted for herself.

There is no envy, only awe.

It needs be said that Robert Fulton is nowhere near as interesting as Katie finds him. A bastard (historical definition), he was raised by a kindly woman who'd agreed to take on the task. Robert had wanted for nothing. Well-travelled, Robert chose Canada for his new home. He was provided with a substantial amount of money, which he promptly lost through a poor investment. Robert then looked to support himself as a schoolteacher, but for reasons left unsaid he resigned.

Before befriending Katie, he'd devoted his evenings to setting down his thoughts on immigration with the intent of producing a volume of essays. After befriending Katie, the better part of his evenings are spent in her small flat reading lengthy passages – featured in the novel –  as she listens intently, understanding little, but always ready with a compliment.

This is the novel's great flaw.

The reviewer in the Liverpool Daily Post (14 July 1921) puts it best:

Miss Sime has much to unburden herself of about Canadian conditions and Canadian folk. subjects on which Miss M'Gee is specially voluble, while Robert is writing a book upon them in intervals of leisure from the groceries counter. The novel is long in consequence. We might fairly retitle it "Our Little Life at Great Length." To deny it merit would be unfair to the effect produced by the amazing minutæ of which it is built up. It is not tedious; you may call it a feat of entertaining prolixity.

Our Little Life is set in the final fourteen months of the Great War, a conflict that has a surprisingly small presence. Robert, who had tried to enlist, had been been "turned down":

As he had come away from that rejection he had brought with him a mind torn in two: he had felt relief... and he had felt a miserable sense that he was being forcibly turned back from the only real duty that lay before him. This double attitude of his persisted. Had he been at the War, had he waited in the terrible trenches and rushed over No Man's Land into the German trenches opposite – he would undoubtedly have been miserable. But he could not have been more miserable than he was in the Arundel Store, feeling day after day that he was degradingly safe.

At one point, Robert accompanies Katie to a sort of going away party for Mac, a Penelopian he'd never met:

Robert and Mac looked at one another. Possibly the fact that Mac limped so that he was unable to go back to the front, while Robert had never got even so far as the drill-ground in the Campus may have had something to do with it. Possibly a certain half-bakedness together with the most complete certainty in himself that Mac had may have exasperated Robert unduly: undoubtedly the question that leaped to Mac's mind the instant he set eyes on Robert, "What's he doing here? What's he done for his country?" complicated the situation.

I risk making too much of these brief passages. As with Isabel Ecclestone Mackay's Mist of Morning (1919), read earlier this year, I was paying perhaps too much attention to the march of time.

Our Little Life begins in the late autumn of 1917. The summer of 1918 is very hot. One evening, Robert suggests an outing Summer Park. He's heard customers at his counter talking about how much cooler it is there. They travel by there by streetcar moving first through a through French Canadian neighbourhood, then one populated by Eastern European Jews. Sicilian, Chinese, Syrian, Bulgarian, German, Polish neighbourhoods follow. He treats Katie to a chicken dinner and concert. It is the most magical evening of her little life.

The Armistice is to come, but not before the Spanish Flu.

Trivia I: The city in which Our Little Life takes place is referred to as "Regalia" ninety-seven times in the novel, but the Canadian reader will recognize it as Montreal. The façade slips on page 265:

By the time Beta's body had been brought back to Montreal to be buried and Mrs. Morphy's ground-floor across the court was empty and bare, it was May.

Not to worry, there's no real spoiler in the above.

Trivia II: Midway through Our Little Life, quite unexpectedly, one of Katie's clients presents her with two tickets to a talk by a touring Irish poet was is clearly modeled on W.B. Yeats. Sime first met the poet and dramatist as a girl growing up in Cheswick. In her privately printed memoir Brave Sprits (1952), she writes of  attending the poet's 1903 and 1914 Montreal lectures. 

Trivia III: The climax of the novel takes place on 7 November 1918, the day of the False Peace:

The Hamilton Spectator, 7 November 1917

Object and Access: Bound in blue boards with black type, my copy is the first UK edition. It was purchased in four years ago from bookseller in Arlington, East Sussex. Price: £17.50.

The front free endpaper features mysterious notations:

Any ideas?

The 1921 Grant Richards' British first was joined the same year by editions from F.G. Goodchild (Canadian) and Frederick Stokes (American). It would appear that none received a second printing. As I write, no copies of the 1921 editions are listed for sale online.

The good news is that the novel returned to print in 1994 when it was added to the Tecumseh Press Early Canadian Women Writers series. Used copies are just as uncommon as the Richards, Goodchild and Stokes editions, but you can purchase it today through this link to the publisher.