Showing posts with label Rivard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rivard. Show all posts

02 December 2025

The Best Canadian Books in English (as of 1925)



One hundred years ago today, the Toronto Globe published a short article about a YMCA book contest. The Association had asked participants to provide a list of "the twelve books in English, which together give the best picture of life and development in Canada." Just how many participated is a mystery. What we do know that these lists of twelve included a total of 108 books by 85 different authors.


The three most common titles were:

The Golden Dog - William Kirby
Maria Chapdelaine - Louis Hémon [trans W.H. Blake]
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town - Stephen Leacock

All three are in print, though I dare say only the Leacock would be recognized by any measurable percentage of YMCA members today.

Seven titles are tied for the fourth position, which suggests limited participation. What follows are the fourth place titles and authors aspresented in the Globe article:

Sam Slick - Judge Haliburton 
Lords of the North - Agnes Laut
Roughing It in the Bush - Susanne Moodie 
Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery
Seats of the Mighty - Sir Gilbert Parker
Chez Nous - Revard

Three observations:

  • Judge Haliburton (Thomas Chandler Haliburton) never published a book titled Sam Slick;
  • "Susanne Moodie" is actually Susanna Moodie;
  • the surname of the man who write Chez Nous is Rivard not "Revard." I have no idea why his first name is absent. 

Chez Nous
Adjutor Rivard [trans W.H. Blake]
Toronto: McClellend & Stewart, 1924
The Globe story does not provide the title of the book that placed eleventh. Given the seven-way tie for fourth place, I suggests there were many.

Judges Dr George H. Locke and Vernon Mackenzie awarded first place to May Knowlton of Montreal for her list of twelve:
The Foreigner - Ralph Connor
The Habitant - Dr Drummond
Flint and Feather - Pauline Johnson
The Golden Dog - William Kirby
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town - Stephen Leacock
Romance of Western Canada - R.G. Macbeth
Montcalm and Wolfe - Francis Parkman
Pioneer of France in the New World - Francis Parkman
Trail of '98 - Robert W. Service
The Prairie Wife - Arthur Stringer
The Life of Sir William Van Horne - Walter Vaughan
No prize is mentioned.

I wonder what the judges would've thought of mine:

There's a good chance that Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, Anne of Green Gables and  Sara Jeanette Duncan's The Imperialist would bump off three, but it's been forty years since I've read any of them.

You don't want to trust that kid's opinions.

Related posts:

Canada's 100 Best Books? 102? 111?



Posted by Brian Busby at 6:30 AM 2 comments
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02 December 2024

The Globe 100 133 of 1924: Hammond's Organ



The Globe 100 was published ten days ago – November 22nd – so this annual look at the newspaper's best book picks of a century past may seem late.

It is not. November is far too early.

The Globe's picks for 1924 were published on December 10th of that year. Eight pages in total, all but one dominated by ads, it was cobbled together by Arts editor M.O. Hammond.

Melvin Ormond Hammond 
It's clear that his heart just wasn't in it. Consider this from Hammond's introduction:
Certain folks like history and biography under the evening lamp. Others – younger and more romantic, perhaps – want poetry. A few ask for essays and fine reading of a reflective type, something different from the cross-word puzzle. Some desire serious studies of a devotional character. Probably the reading preferred by the largest class is fiction.
Ho-hum.

Was the Arts editor behind this dreary headline?


The whole thing makes for exhausting reading, though there is much of interest. For example, the first page features this, which to that time was the greatest recognition of Canada's authors in the annual list:

What's more, only Canadian books feature on the page, beginning with Chez Nous by Adjutor Rivard. 


Chez Nous is listed amongst the works of fiction. I'd been led to believe it is a book of reflection and reminiscence. Archie P. McKishnie's Mates of the Tangle and Yon Toon o' Mine by Logan Weir seem similarly misplaced. I've not read the three, so may be wrong. In fact, I haven't read any of the 1924 Globe picks in Canadian fiction:

La Roux - Johnston Abbott [Edward Montague Ashworth]
The Divine Lady - E. Barrington [L. Adams Beck]
The Master Revenge - H.A. Cody
The Trail of the Conestoga - B. Mabel Dunham
A Sourdough Samaritan - Charles Harrison Gibbons
The Quenchless Light - Agnes C. Laut
The Garden of Folly - Stephen Leacock
 Mates of the Tangle - Archie P. McKishnie
Slag and Gold - Phil H. Moore
Julie Cane - Harvey J. O'Higgins
The Locked Book - Frank L. Packard
Chez Nous - Adjutor Rivard
Jimmy of the Gold Coast - Marshall Saunders
The Smoking Flax - Robert Stead
Lonely O'Malley - Arthur Stringer
The Wayside Cross - Mary E. Waagen
Fireweed - Muriel Watson
Gordon of the Lost Lagoon - Robert Watson
Yon Toon o' Mine - Logan Weir [J.B. Perry]

That's eighteen titles in all – the previous year had only eight! – yet there are absences, the most notable being The Land of Afternoon by Gilbert Knox [Madge Macbeth], the year's grand succès de scandale.


Nearly every year, the Globe errs by including a "new" work that is not new at all. In 1924 it was Lonely O'Malley, a reissue Arthur Stringer's 1905 semi-autobiographical second novel.

Three that made the cut.
What's particularly interesting about the error is that the ever-prolific Stringer published three new novels in 1924 – Empty Hands, Manhandled, and The Story without a Name (the latter two co-authored by Russell Holman ) – the most of any year in his very long career.

Six that didn't.
The list of foreign fiction features all the names one would expect, like Galsworthy, Masefield, and Walpole. This is the one that has really stood the test of time:

Foreigners don't do too well in the 1924 list, contributing just eighty-six titles. Canadian books number forty-seven, more than any previous list. Somehow, Hammond believes there are fewer. He's particularly down on Canadian verse, lamenting that it has been "a rather a slim year in new poetry so far as Canada is concerned;" but then he presents a list of eight titles, seven of which are Canadian:

Canada My Home - Grant Balfour
Dream Tapestries - Louise Morey Bowman
Flower and Flame - John Crichton [N.G. Guthrie]
The New Spoon River - Edgar Lee Masters
Verses for My Friends - Bernard McEvoy
A Book of Verses - Gertrude MacGregor Moffat
White Wings of Dawn - Frances Beatrice Taylor
Eager Footsteps - Anne Elizabeth Wilson

Hammond is far more positive when it comes to Canadian history and biography, recommending titles both familiar (Canadian Federation by Reginald George Trotter) and unfamiliar (Memoirs of Ralph Vansittart by Edward Robert Cameron). I'd forgotten about John Buchan's Lord Minto. As a biography of a past Governor General by a future Governor General, it is probably worth a look, but the book I most want to read is Pioneer Crimes and Punishments in Toronto and the Home District by James Edmund Jones: 

A readable record of early of early methods of administering justice, which shows the progress toward humane treatment made during the past century. The writer, one of Toronto's Police Magistrates readily admits the is room for further improvement.
I'm less likely to read Presbyterian Pioneer Missionaries in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia by Rev Hugh McKellar, D.D.

Continuing on a personal note, what surprised me most about Hammond's list is that I hadn't read one of its forty-seven Canadian titles. A Passage to India, on the other hand...

Nope, haven't read that one either.

In my defence, not one of the forty-seven Canadian titles on the 1924 Globe list is in print today.

No surprise there.

Related posts:




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