Reading the Diaries of Henry Trent: The Everyday Life of a Canadian Englishman, 1842-1898

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.

Henry Trent was born in England in 1826, the son of a British naval officer. When he was still a boy, his f...