Charles Clarke: Pen and Ink Warrior

This book is organized in three sections: Polemicist, Diarist, and Memoirist. A biography is only possible because [Charles Clarke] left records of his thinking. The "Reformator" essays and letters could be retrieved from the newspapers. In the twilight of his years he wrote Sixty Years in Upper Canada, with Autobiographical Recollections (1908) a memoir of his provincial political career that doubled as a political history of Ontario. In between, he kept a diary. [Kenneth C. Dewar] decided to write "studies in Clarke's intellectual and cultural biography" (xv). It was not easy to write a biography because so many family papers were not kept. Dewar went to extraordinary effort to recreate the outlines of Clarke's ideas by mining local archives and by tracking the important correspondents. However, as Clarke was so practical and materialistic, should one stress the ideas? It is tempting to believe that every town had its Charles Clarke, and yet one just knows this was an unusual man. Can we really learn much about the bigger landscape by looking at someone who is neither representative nor dominant? Fortunately for Dewar, the answer is yes. Reform, which is at the heart of both the intellectual and cultural worlds he wishes to understand; and those worlds were defined by local and materialistic concerns. Ultimately, Dewar is persuasive on the main points. The book is also interesting for its strategies. Dewar has immersed himself in understanding the things that seemed important to Clarke. Even though the research and writing spanned decades, Dewar has remained sensitive to current historical writing. Quite consciously he strives to see biography as an exploration of self. How does Clarke make sense of himself? Naturally, we would expect to learn how he makes sense of the world around him, and there is plenty of opportunity for that. But Dewar, perhaps aided by the availability of the diaries, wants to know Clarke. This is speculative territory; sometimes sources are read against themselves, and at others observations are converted to conclusions. To what extent was Clarke unusual, typical or representative? We can never know, of course, and yet the biography needs to bridge these options. Take for example the observation, "Few households in Elora can have approached so closely the new bourgeois ideal of refined domesticity" (162). Clarke, Dewar wants to argue, was unusual because he was less authoritarian, less patriarchal. At the same time, he wants to su