The Book of Small
THE BOOK OF SMALL
Emily Carr in 1876, at about age five. British Columbia Archives 1-60893
OF SMALL
EMILY CARR
INTRODUCTION BY SARAH ELLIS
Copyright © 2004 by Douglas & McIntyre
Text of
The Book of Small
copyright © 2004 by Yvonne Fisher, Estate of Emily Carr
Introduction copyright © 2004 by Sarah Ellis
04 05 06 07 08 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit
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or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
First published in 1942 by Oxford University Press
Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada
V5T 4S7
www.douglas-mcintyre.com
NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Carr, Emily, 1871â1945
The book of Small/Emily Carr; introduction by Sarah Ellis.
ISBN
1-55365-055-7
1. Carr, Emily, 1871â1945âChildhood and youth. 2. PaintersâCanadaâBiography.
3. Victoria (B.C.)âBiography. I. Title.
ND249.C3A2 2004C
     759.11    Â
C
2003-907411-0
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Carr, Emily, 1871â1945.
The book of Small/Emily Carr; introduction by Sarah Ellis.
p. cm.
Originally published: Toronto; London: Oxford University Press, 1942.
ISBN
1-55365-055-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Carr, Emily, 1871â1945âChildhood and youth.
2. PaintersâCanadaâBiography. I. Title.
ND249.C3A2
2004b     759.11âdc22     2004041416
Editing by Saeko Usukawa
Cover and text design by Ingrid Paulson
Cover painting: Emily Carr, detail from
Broom, Beacon Hill
, 1937,
oil on paper on board, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria 940222br
Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens
Printed on acid-free, forest friendly, 100% post-consumer
recycled paper, processed chlorine-free
Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (
BPIDP
) for our publishing activities.
To Ira Dilworth
INTRODUCTION: SMALL'S WORLD
by Sarah Ellis
HOW LIZZIE WAS SHAMED RIGHT THROUGH
A Little Town and a Little Girl
FROM CARR STREET TO JAMES' BAY
by Sarah Ellis
THE BOOK OF SMALL
has been continuously in print from its first publication in 1942, picking up several generations of readers along its journey. When I was a young teenager, one of my aunts, poised midway between Carr's time and my own, recommended the book to me, and I ate it up. It was exactly my sort of book, containing as it did my two favourite story elementsâgirls getting into scrapes and an olden days setting. When Small doses the chicken or dresses up a starfish or ends up in a saloon, that was as good as Anne dyeing her hair green in
Anne of Green Gables
. That the lore about frocks, horse-drawn carriages and plum puddings should appear in stories located right in my own province of British Columbia was the icing on the cake. I knew first-hand about the density of our west coast forest; I knew what skunk cabbages smelled like. It was as though
The Secret Garden
had been transplanted into my own backyard.
Now I'm at the age that Carr was when she began writing the pieces that became
The Book of Small
. I still enjoy the starfish episode and I'm still intrigued by the mysterious and vaguely illicit-sounding pastime of the “church conversazione,” but I
read the book in a new way, appreciating the art that is involved in writing a memoir and the varied motivations that might lead to such a project.
One reason for the attraction of memoir in middle age is that one begins to see oneself as an observer and potential recorder of the past. One's childhood has become history. When Emily Carr was born, the city of Victoria was only twenty-eight years away from its origins as a Hudson's Bay Company fur-trading post built in 1843. By the time she was writing in her fifties, she saw the city as sadly tamedâno more roadhouse saloons, no more Native canoes in the waters of the Gorge, no more horses, no more dust and a new cemetery where “Victoria's early settlers slept tidily under well mown lawns.”
From our perspective another sixty years on, Carr's unique value as an observer and a recorder of these frontier times lies in her aversion to tidiness and order. Not for her a neat pattern of homogenized, patterned history. Through the point of view of one small noticing child, we are given a portrait of Victoria's early days that has all the quirky details, all the loose ends, all the authenticity of an immediately lived present.
We get reports on medical and dental practices of the period with sketches of the beloved Dr. Helmcken and a much-disliked local dentist. We see streetscapes with cows taking priority on the sidewalks and a caged panther on the verandah of the Colonist Hotel. We see the details behind the facts of history. Infant mortality statistics are a matter of record, but how did families react to these tragedies? In several references to her three dead baby brothers, Small conveys a kind of sombre matter of factness.
The Book of Small
is generally sunny, but Carr avoids the clichés of an idealized childhood. In the garbage dump, Small finds beauty, “wild
rose bushes forcing their blooms up through lidless cook-stoves and skunk cabbages peeping out of bottomless perambulators.” In a Christmas visit downtown, she finds the grotesque. The butcher shop window presents baby pigs, “pink and naked as bathing babies, their cheeks drawn back to make them smile at the red apples which had been forced into their toothless, sucking mouths.”
The tension between British tradition and the realities of the New World is one of the defining themes of Victoria's history. In this one particular life, we see evidence of that tension. Small's childhood is extremely British in many respects. One of the first details she gives us in
The Book of Small
involves prohibitions on Sabbath reading. The limited choice of Sunday reading includes a volume called
The Peep of Day
. Back in England at about the same time, another little girl, called Molly Hughes, was subjected to the same volume. In her memoir,
A London Child of the 1870's
, Hughes describes
Peep'
s content: “It is very insistent and realistic about hell, and apparently there is only one virtue, obedience to parents and kind teachers, which leads of itself to a life of bliss âbeyond the sky.'” Such a world of tradition, obedience and hierarchy is embodied by Small's father. After a roustabout early life of exploration and adventure, Small's father had become a man who built fences and enforced rules. Small describes the defining of their family property with fencesâpainted, tarred and snake.
Just beyond these fences, however, lies the real New World, all the rich variety of Victoria: drunken parties whose noise floats over the hedge, the Chinese vegetable seller, prisoners on a road-building chain gang, urban fixtures such as Fat, Lean and Miss O'Flahty, transient visitors such as Indian families camping on the beach, and all around, the vast dense silent forest. Small senses
the tension between these two worlds. Going on the obligatory Sunday walk around garden, the family plodding joylessly along in single file, she wishes that “our Sunday walk was not quite so much fenced.” She reacts with her own subversive thoughts, putting the potentially oppressive goodness of Sundays in its place by deflating its pretentious holiness: “every Bible and prayerbook in the house was puffing itself out, looking more important every minute.”
Small is often deeply happy in her fenced garden, with the lilies and the cow, with the traditional British parlour games and the tales of the Royal Family. But the image that is most potent is that of Small sticking her head through the prickly hedge to glimpse a wider, wilder world. In the course of that struggle, she records a world already disappearing in her time and dimly remote in ours.
A second reason for writing a memoir in middle age is that one has simply accumulated enough personal history to make one's life a potential source of material. A writer with her feelers out begins to notice some rich narratives very close at hand. As Henry David Thoreau puts it in
Walden
, “I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well.” Discussing the background to her memoir,
An American Childhood
, Annie Dillard expresses a similar idea: “For a private interior life, I've pickedâalmost at randomâmy own.”
To view one's own life as material is the first step toward creating a memoir that is a work of art. Dillard's advice to memoir writers is “to embark upon a memoir for the same reason that you would embark on any other book: to fashion a text.” When I read
The Book of Small
at thirteen, I did not see the fashioning, the shaping, the art. I listened, like Small herself, sitting quietly
and unnoticed on a small stool, half hidden by a tablecloth, eavesdropping on adult reminiscences. As in all good narratives, the artifice was transparent.