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by Edith K. Smith

Source: The Avonlea Traditions Chronicle, Issue No. 22, Winter 1997/8.

Diaries offer young writers a tool to map their world in meaningful ways. In the 1790s, Marjorie, daughter of Sir Walter Scott, kept a diary until her death at eight years, a record showing the influence of her father's genius. In more modern times, L. M. Montgomery, Mercy Ann Coles and Sophia Mary Macnab, each standing "where the brook and river meet," offer teenaged diaries revealing fascinating connections among "good girls," politics and diaries.

L. M. Montgomery claimed distinguished politicians on both branches of her family tree. On her mother's side, her great-grandfather William Macneill served in the P.E.I. House of Assembly from 1814 - 1834, finally leading it as "William the Speaker." He was also Magistrate for Cavendish district, presiding over its judiciary needs. On her father's side she was descended from the Hon. Donald Montgomery whose long devotion to the Island Legislature culminated in a twenty year career in the Canadian Senate.

L. M. Montgomery's transcontinental journey in 1890 accompanied by Grandfather Montgomery may be seen also as a figurative transition from girlhood to young ladyhood. As she sat between Sir John and Lady Macdonald in the railway carriage at Kensington, L. M. Montgomery, like her fictional Anne, was beginning a new epoch in the shadow of the Premier of Canada. Her emphasis on crossing rivers implies her awareness of significant passages in her life. She noted crossing the Northumberland Strait and the St. Lawrence River at Montreal on the new CPR suspension bridge. During her sojourn in her father's home in Prince Albert, her journal entries play themselves out against the broad avenue of the Saskatchewan River.

On her journey back to P.E.I. in September, 1891, she stopped at Ottawa and with Grandfather Montgomery guiding her, she toured Parliament Square and the Senate Chamber. It is touching to visualise the vibrant 16-year-old girl with the active and learned Dominion Senator of 83 years. On leaving Montreal, she mentions the Victoria Bridge and records travelling through Quebec where she saw "the famous Plains of Abraham and the Montmorency Falls" (Sept. 4, 1891). On the Northumberland Strait she wrote up her journal, while feasting her eyes on the "distant green hills" of the Island, from which her long journey to womanhood had begun.

Politics and diary-keeping also involved 16-year-old Mercy Ann Coles, a daughter of George Coles, one of the fathers of Confederation and the first premier of P.E.I. after the province received responsible government in 1851. Mercy Ann (without the "e") accompanied her parents on the trip from Charlottetown to the Conference of October 1864, prior to Confederation in 1867. Like L. M. Montgomery, Mercy Ann kept a trip diary now preserved in the Public Archives of Canada. As her father was also a brewer and merchant as well as politician, Mercy Ann came from a background of wealth and privilege.

At 16 years, Mercy Ann, like L. M. Montgomery, was a lively teenager turning into a young lady. From an official Quebec City function, she reports that as D'Arcy McGee took her into dinner, "before dinner was half over, he got so drunk he was obliged to leave the table." Again, another revealing line laced with wit: "John A. (Macdonald) was to have made a speech but he was tight or had a heart palpitation and could not go on."

This vignette contrasts with L. M. Montgomery's view 27 years later of Sir John as "the great man himself" - "a spry-looking old man not handsome but pleasant-faced." (August 11, 1890)

At a Quebec government ball where 800, including Mercy Ann, were presented to the Governor General, she reported some fashion notes: "Ma wore her grenadine over black silk. I wore my blue silk. There were only two or three trains there."

Continuing her fashion commentary, she reports on the view from her hotel window, that it was raining and "such dumpy, draggled women they have here." On her train trip back to the Island, she saw "beautiful scenery coming through New Hampshire. It was too dark to see the White Mountains. Mr. Tilly helped me admire it.." Apparently Mr. Tilly was "the only beau of the party and with five single ladies he has something to do to keep them all in good humour."

Our third young lady diarist was Sophia Mary Macnab, cherished and privileged second daughter of Sir Allan and Lady Macnab of Dundurn Castle, Hamilton. Thirteen-year-old Sophia wrote her six-month diary in the same year of Hamilton's incorporation as a city, 1846, so that both the city and one of its chief documents have passed their sesquicentennial in 1996.

Sophia's political connections were many: her father was the Honourable Sir Allan Macnab, whom the young Queen Victoria had knighted in 1838 for his part in quelling the Rebellion of 1837. In the British House of Lords, the Duke of Wellington had praised the strategy of Sir Allan as "boy hero" in the Rebellion.

Sir Allan became the Speaker of the combined houses of Upper and Lower Canada, and eventually in 1854 - 56, the Prime Minister of the United Canadas. Heads of Church and State visited at Dundurn, notables such as the Hon. Sir Francis Bond Head, Governor General, and the Lord Bishop of Toronto.

Visits from the young John A. Macdonald, later a crony of Senator Montgomery, as well as a royal visit from the Prince of Wales were recorded in the guest lists at Dundurn.

Dundurn was named after the Macnab clan ancestral seat in Perthshire, Scotland. It is a golden, sand-washed castle with square towers and a porticoed entrance with classical pillars. Set in its beautiful grounds atop Burlington Heights and overlooking Burlington Bay, Dundurn must have seemed a paradise in the years of Sophia's childhood.

Meanwhile, where was Lady Macnab during this time of political prominence? Who played chatelaine for the entertaining in this variation on a "blue castle"? Lady Mary Macnab's portrait, hung in the green dining room of Dundurn, is painted against a dark background, showing a marble-white, elongated face and hands that might have been envisioned by El Greco.

It is a tragic, gallant face whose eyes search the unknown future and whose light was quenched at 33 years. In piety and patience, her saga, chronicled in Sophia's diary, plays out literature's perennial theme of "holy living and holy dying." On the second floor, up the elaborate hanging staircase that ascends from the front reception hall, down a corridor, past the master bedroom, to a room facing uncompromisingly north and east, lay Lady Macnab in the official sickroom, surrounded by the accoutrements of Victorian cures and "physic."

Her daughter Sophia's sweet nature and devotion to her parents shine in the pages of her diary where she touchingly records her young mother's decline. Like L. M. Montgomery's mother at the age of 23, Lady Macnab struggled with consumption, enduring a lexicon of symptoms which included, in Victorian parlance, shakes of the ague, giddiness, flushed cheeks, swollen fingers, fits of coughing, shortness of breath and hollow cheeks.

How were consumptive patients dieted in those days? When her appetite allowed, "Mamma" tasted quail, oysters, snipe, duck, mock turtle soup, beef tea, eggs and Johnny-cake, rice pudding with maple molasses, egg nog, apple pie, and a "tumblerful of beer."

Sophia records a walk to Hamilton market to find a special kind of bun to tempt "dearest Mamma." The cultivation of her conscience and of her diary went hand-in-hand, as both parents encouraged her to keep her diary up, thus giving enhanced significance to domestic details.

To conserve strength, Lady Macnab placed devout faith in her Stuart ancestors' Roman Catholic religion and observed all the rites of Mother church. The castle was mellow with religious tolerance: the Scots Macnabs were High Anglican and husband and wife respected each other's faith. In this intelligent latitude, Sophia and her sisters were bred to young ladyhood.

Sophia's word choice is poignant, creating a diary that touches tender nerves and leaves a haunting touch on the reader's life. She shows that daughters of any age absorb and internalize their mother's pain. Did the small L. M. Montgomery unconsciously absorb the anguish of her mother, Clara Montgomery's last days at Cavendish?

Like Clara, Lady Macnab was deeply loved and tenderly nursed by family members - Clara by her parents and Lady Mary by her sister Sophia (the diarist's namesake) and by Sir Allan's three sisters, Lucy, Hannah and Maria.

How poignantly the diary entries read: Friday Jan. 23, 1846: "During tea I sat with Mamma and read her prayers to her." On Thursday, Feb. 19, "Mamma had walked over to the fireplace and sat in the rocking chair." She calls for the viaticum, for music, and as the candles are lit, for prayers. Monday, March 30 reads: "This is dearest Mamma's birthday. She is of course very melancholy."

Good Friday, April 10 records, "This is a dull morning. About twelve it began to rain. Mamma says she does not remember ever seeing a Good Friday that it did not rain." On Easter Sunday, April 12, the lawns of Dundurn were white with snow.

One day in the first week of May, "Dear Mamma took the last sacrament (Extreme Unction)" after this touching exchange recorded by Sophia: "Once she said to Papa 'Allan will you take [care] of them all but then she said I need not ask you to do that for you have ever done it..' Dear Mamma kissed us all and said to me 'Will you be a good girl and never forget your Mother.'" On Friday, May 8, "Dearest Mamma spoke very little all day, she seemed to be thinking - all the time… During tea I read Mamma her evening prayers."

Lady Macnab, courageous and gallant, actually found the strength within hours of her death to say matter-of-factly to her husband, "Well Allan I think we must adjourn to bed as I am very tired." In simple words, Sophia records her mother's death at 9 p.m., Friday May 8, 1846, "as if she were going to sleep."

For the following two weeks, Sophia's diary falls eloquently silent. On Saturday, May 23 she recalls the immense procession of "people from a great distance and also a great many women Black and White."

Lady Macnab was buried in the family plot at Dundurn called "Inchbuie" after the Macnabs' ancestral resting place in Scotland. The next day the Macnabs attended their church where, after the Victorian fashion, their pew was draped with black.

Exactly two months from the day of Mamma's death, on July 8, 1846, Sophia's diary ends. If, as the saying goes, "Paradise begins with our first breath, heaven with our last," Lady Macnab's life played out that proverb with grace and gallantry.

Nor did her gentle touch end with her death; both Sophia and her little sister Mary Stuart received Mamma's posthumous birthday gifts of matching books "with an inscription written by Papa at Mamma's request."

That same loving Papa would not allow his little girls to remain in the shadows that covered Dundurn. Under immediate pressures of business and government, the "House" about to be "prorogued", he took the children with him by boat to Montreal and on June 13, they viewed Montmorency Falls, to be seen forty-five years later by the teenaged L. M. Montgomery and mentioned in her journal as well as in Sophia's.

On the family's return to Dundurn, there was no mother to greet them. Sophia, however, closes her diary with a Victorian chromo of "dearest Papa" with his girls out in the cherry orchard, their twin white poodles in attendance: "The cherries are ripe enough to eat and the roses are in full bloom, the hay has just been mown and smells so sweet and altogether Dundurn is quite a little paradise in itself." City of Hamilton, Thursday, June 25, 1846.

My first visit to Dundurn was in April 1955, as a little girl in the company of my loving father. Forty years later I returned to tour the castle, remembering how it felt to be a child, and therefore able to hear the voice of Sophia Macnab as she speaks to us, beseechingly and enduringly, from Dundurn.

Edith Smith is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario since 1974. Summers, Edith is Resident Curator at the Lucy Maud Montgomery Heritage Museum in Park Corner, Prince Edward Island.

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