Writing Across the Rural-Urban Divide: The Case of Peter McArthur, 1909-24

Journal of Canadian Studies, Spring 2007 by Crerar, Adam

From 1909 until his death in 1924, Peter McArthur became one of Canada's most popular writers by describing life on his Middlesex County farm in articles for the Toronto Globe and the Farmer's Advocate of London, Ontario. That he was able to appeal to both rural and urban readers is interesting in two respects: it suggests that the lines between the country and the city were considerably more amorphous than contemporary rhetoric has suggested, and it provides an example of anti-modernist writing that gave as much pleasure to the "folk" as it did to the urban middle-class.

De 1909 jusqu'à sa mort en 1924, Peter McArthur devint l'un des écrivains canadiens les plus populaires par les descriptions de sa vie passée à sa ferme du comté de Middlesex, parues dans des articles écrits pour le Globe de Toronto et le Farmer's Advocate de London, en Ontario. Le fait qu'il ait pu plaire à la fois aux lecteurs ruraux et urbains est intéressant et ce, pour deux raisons : ce phénomène suggère que les différences entre la ville et la campagne étaient beaucoup plus floues que la rhétorique contemporaine ne l'avait supposé et fournit également un exemple d'écriture antimoderniste qui a procuré autant de plaisir aux « paysans » qu'à la classe moyenne urbaine.

Like two sides of the same coin, conceptions of "the city" and "the country" have travelled inseparably through western culture, from antiquity to the present day. From one perspective, cities have been seats of government, learning, civilization, and commerce standing in contrast to a backward and unwashed countryside. From another, the country has been the locus of healthy living and untutored virtue, and a food-producing bulwark of social and racial strength against urban centres of corruption, pollution, crime, and sexual deviance. In late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Ontario, this rural-urban dichotomy was particularly strong in the face of contemporary developments in the province. In the daily and farm press, in magazines and at pulpits, in Ottawa and at Queen's Park, people followed the decennial returns of the census and worried about rural depopulation and the province's urbanization. Many farmers' opposition to the conscription of their sons in the First World War prompted further debate, and the election of the United Farmers of Ontario to government in 1919, the first third-party victory in Canadian history, seemed the countryside's ardent response.

Into the breach of a supposedly hardening rural-urban divide, however, we might place a discussion of the life and career of the Canadian writer Peter McArthur. He is now little known-rarely anthologized and no longer considered a part of the national literary canon. His Ontario farm house survives at Doon Heritage Crossroads in Kitchener as an example of a generic "pioneer building" rather than as an opportunity to introduce visitors to someone who was, in fact, one of the most successful and prolific authors of his time. From 1909 until his death in 1924, McArthur wrote more than 1,500 articles for the Toronto Globe and the London-based Fanner's Advocate. Many of these pieces, which combined a whimsical advocacy of rural life with realistic descriptions of activities on a farm, were collected and republished in five books. McArthur was known throughout Ontario and much of Canada, admired by figures ranging from the teetotalling E.G. Drury to the free-loving Bliss Carman, and honoured in 1923 with a volume in the Ryerson Press's Makers of Canadian Literature series. Eighty years after he first encountered it, John Kenneth Galbraith, who grew up on a farm in Elgin County not far from McArthur's, had "vivid memories of the McArthur poetry" and of his father cutting out McArthur's pieces to be "kept, read, and reread" (2000).

What do we make of this literary phenomenon and its meaning for the ruralurban dichotomy of the author's times? Was Peter McArthur a rural or an urban writer? Did he effectively straddle both worlds and, if so, how did he do so? What do his experiences, his work, and the public response to that work mean for our understanding of the Ontario society in which he lived and wrote?1

Peter McArthur was born in 1866 on a farm 35 kilometres southwest of London in Ekfrid township. Following local schooling and a brief stint at the University of Toronto, he made his way to New York City in 1890 to follow his authorial ambitions. Over the next 18 years, McArthur led a very urban existence of mixed fortunes. During his first few years in New York, he achieved a reputation as one of the half-dozen top "paragraphers" in the city's burgeoning publishing industry, producing 25 to 50 humorous pieces a day when he was working. In 1895, McArthur became editor of New York's Truth magazine, where he provided early publishing opportunities for fellow Canadians Carman, Charles G.D. Roberts, and Stephen Leacock. The job's regular salary allowed him to marry Mabel Waters, a native of Niagara-on-the-Lake, but financial security was short-lived. After several more years of freelance writing, McArthur and his family moved to England in 1902, where he wrote in London for periodicals such as Punch and Review of Reviews. The move failed to bolster his career and so-having been "stranded in the Strand," as he later put it-he moved with his family back to New York, and, following further financial failures possibly associated with alcoholism and depression, eventually to his home farm (Van 1890, 7; Atlantic Monthly 1906; Cappon 1930, 25, 214-15; Deacon 1964; Gundy 1981, 52, 54-55, 199, 275, 325; Mount 2005, 10, 55-60; Drury 1966, 61; Lucas 1975, 15-16; Star 1924; Globe 1924).