Further Reading

The standard national study of Irish immigration and settlement is Cecil Houston and W.J. Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement: Pattern, Links, and Letters (Toronto, 1990). It is a major corrective to older studies that over-emphasized government policy and assisted emigration. W.F. Adams, Ireland and Irish Emigration to the New World from 1815 to the Famine (New Haven, Conn., 1932) is, however, still useful. The assault on the old view of Canada’s Irish as mostly urban and Catholic began with Donald Akenson’s The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History (Montreal, 1984). A short introduction is David Wilson’s pamphlet The Irish in Canada (Ottawa, 1989).

Interesting work on Atlantic Canada appears in two collections of articles: P.M. Toner, ed., New Ireland Remembered: Historical Essays on the Irish in New Brunswick (Fredericton, N.B., 1988), and Thomas P. Power, ed., The Irish in Atlantic Canada 1780–1900 (Fredericton, N.B., 1991). The settlement of Ulster Protestants in Truro, Onslow, and Londonderry, Nova Scotia, in the eighteenth century is related at greatest length by J.M. Murphy in The Londonderry Heirs (Middleton, N.S., 1976). For New Brunswick, see P.M. Toner, “The Origins of the New Brunswick Irish,” Canadian Journal of Canadian Studies, vol.23, nos.1–2 (1988), 104–19, and his “The Irish of New Brunswick at Mid Century: The 1851 Census,” in P.M. Toner, ed., New Ireland Remembered, 106–32. The P.E.I. experience is summarized in Edward MacDonald, New Ireland: The Irish on Prince Edward Island (Charlottetown, 1990), while Richard K. MacMaster explores the recruitment of Ulster settlers for eighteenth-century P.E.I. in “Emigrants from Ulster in Prince Edward Island, 1770–1790,” Familia, no.12 (1996), 14–32. With the exception of MacMaster, all the works cited heretofore deal with Catholics as well as Protestants.

Irish settlement patterns in Upper Canada are detailed in Alan Brunger, “The Distribution of Scots and Irish in Upper Canada, 1851–71,” Canadian Geographer, vol.34, no.3 (1990), 250–58. Irish Protestant settlement geography more specifically is discussed in Bruce S. Elliott, “Regionalized Migration and Settlement Patterns of the Irish in Upper Canada,” in Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds, The Untold Story: The Irish in Canada. (Toronto, 1988), vol.1, 308–19. North Tipperary and south Leinster Protestants, mostly in Ontario, are the respective focus of Bruce S. Elliott’s Irish Migrants in the Canada: A New Approach (Montreal, 1988) and “Emigration from South Leinster to Eastern Upper Canada,” Canadian Papers in Rural History, vol.8 (Gananoque, Ont., 1992), 277–305. Elliott further explores Irish settlement in eastern Ontario in his introduction to The McCabe List: Early Irish in the Ottawa Valley (Toronto, 1991), 1–7. Palatines are addressed in Carolyn A. Heald, The Irish Palatines in Ontario: Religion, Ethnicity, and Rural Migration (Gananoque, Ont., 1994), and Catharine A. Wilson’s A New Lease on Life (Montreal, 1993) includes evocative chapters about emigrants from the Ards Peninsula of County Down to Amherst Island near Kingston. On the origins of later immigrants to Canada, see, in addition to Houston and Smyth above, David Fitzpatrick, “Irish Emigration in the Later Nineteenth Century,” Irish Historical Studies, vol.22 (1980–81), 126–143.

Statistical data for the Maritimes is disucssed in J.S. Martell, Immigration to and Emigration from Nova Scotia, 1815–1838 (Halifax, 1942) and Susan L. Morse, “Immigration to Nova Scotia, 1839–1851” (M.A. thesis, Dalhousie University, 1946). Also useful is P.M. Toner, “Denominational Distribution of ‘British’ Ethnic Groups in the Maritimes 1931–1941,” Public Archives of Nova Scotia, MG15, vol.19, no.30, reel 15108.

For statistical overviews of the position of the Irish in the Canadian economy, see A. Gordon Darroch and Michael D. Ornstein, “Ethnicity and Occupational Structure in Canada in 1871: The Vertical Mosaic in Historical Perspective,” Canadian Historical Review, vol.61, no.3 (1980), 305–33; idem, “Ethnicity and Class, Transitions over a Decade: Ontario 1861–1871,” Canadian Historical Association Historical Papers (1984), 111–37; and Peter M. Toner, “Occupation and Ethnicity: The Irish in New Brunswick,” Canadian Ethnic Studies, vol.20, no.3 (1988), 155–165.

Economic adjustment to life in Canada is also the theme of a number of local studies. A comprehensive discussion of Leeds and Lansdowne Township, Ontario, is found in Donald Akenson’s The Irish in Ontario, in which the author argues that the Irish were as successful as anyone else. The examination of Montague Township, which provided additional support for the argument of early arrival in successful rural settlement, was conducted by Glenn Lockwood in “Success and the Doubtful Image of Irish Immigrants in Upper Canada: The Case of Montague Township, 1820–1900,” in O’Driscoll and Reynolds, eds., The Untold Story, vol.1, 319–41. The only book specifically about Irish women’s experience is Sheelagh Conway, The Faraway Hills are Green: Voices of Irish Women in Canada (Toronto, 1992), although it has a contemporary focus and contains comparatively little about Protestant women.

Irish Protestantism in Canada has seldom been the focus of specific studies but Irish Anglicanism is a recurrent theme in the work of Donald Akenson, and Irish contributions to several denominations receive passing mention in John Webster Grant, A Profusion of Spires: Religion in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto, 1988) and Jean Burnet, Ethnic Groups in Upper Canada (Toronto, 1972). A number of older articles by Kenyon, Talman, Schurman, Cooper, and Horrall address the role of Irish Anglicans in the ritualist controversy; they are referenced in Bruce S. Elliott, “Ritualism and the Reformed Episcopal Movement in Ottawa,” Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society, vol.27, no.1 (1985), 18–41. Methodists are the subject of a chapter in Norman W. Taggart, The Irish in World Methodism 1760–1900 (London, 1986). An exceptional group of Reformed Presbyterians in the Maritimes with roots in Irish congregations is the subject of Eldon Hay’s The Chignecto Covenanters: A Regional History of Reformed Presbyterianism in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, 1827–1905 (Montreal, 1996).

There is a large literature on Canadian Orangeism. A primarily political account, but one that argues that the order was essentially a social club, is Hereward Senior’s Orangeism: The Canadian Phase (Toronto, 1972). Cecil Houston and W.J. Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore: A Historical Geography of the Orange Order in Canada (Toronto, 1980), provide information about the actual social functions of the Orange Order and its expansion and subsequent contraction in various parts of the country. Donald Akenson’s fictionalized biography of Ogle Gowan, The Orangeman: The Life and Times of Ogle R. Gowan (Toronto, 1986), portrays the less savoury side of this controversial figure. Gowan’s nemesis, George Benjamin, is the subject of a biography by Sheldon and Judith Godfrey, Burn This Gossip: The True Story of George Benjamin of Belleville, Canada’s First Jewish Member of Parliament, 1857–1863 (Toronto, 1991). The Orange Order maintains an archives in Toronto. Some records of that city’s Irish Protestant Benevolent Society are at the Baldwin Room, Metropolitan Toronto Library.

Aside from some material in the books above, there has been no study of Canadian Irish Protestants in the twentieth century.