In early English Canada, educational journals played a critical role in the creation of an informed reading public, not only instructing school councils and iteachers in the best ways to teach reading and to promote literacy, but also in guiding the reading choices and practices of the adult audiences they addressed. This included, most crucially, the teachers themselves, who for much of the nineteenth century may very well have received an irregular education, and little formal training for the work. This essay surveys more than 160 items devoted to the topics of book selection, literary morality, profitable reading, and the pleasures of books, in nineteenth-century educational journals published in Upper Canada/Canada West/Ontario, tracking the ways the teacher-reader was envisaged in these periodicals, and exhorted to self-culture as moral, emotional, and intellectual preparation for his (and, increasingly, her) vocation.
Edgar-André Montigny, Foisted Upon Government? State Responsibilities, Family Obligations, and the Care of the Dependent Aged in Late Nineteenth-Century Ontario, Montréal & Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997, 220 p. / James G. Snell, The Citizen's Wage. The State and the Elderly in Canada, 1900-1951, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1996, 286 p.