Reading the Diaries of Henry Trent
The Everyday Life of a Canadian Englishman, 1842-1898
2021
J.I. Little
The life of a Victorian man - in London, on Vancouver Island, and in Quebec - experiencing downward social mobility, ill-prepared for quotidian challenges.
The personal journals examined in Reading the Diaries of Henry Trent are not the witty, erudite, and gracefully written exercises that have drawn the attention of most biographers and literary scholars. Prosaic, ungrammatical, and poorly spelled, the fifteen surviving volumes of Henry Trent's hitherto unexamined diaries are nevertheless a treasure for the social and cultural historian. …