Most lives have their core, their kernel, the vital centre. We will get to mine in due course, when I’m ready. At the moment I’m dealing with strata.
Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger (1987)
UNTIL HER DYING DAYS, Florence Deeks believed that the history of Dundas County, Ontario, was near the centre of the history of Canada. Several times late in life she sought to recapture her sense of this part of eastern Ontario, where the family had settled and she had been born, by attempting to write novels about its early years. Whether in “The Homestead by the River,” “The County by the River,” or “How Changed the Scene,” the setting was always the same: the area around the town of Morrisburg in the decades after the arrival of the United Empire Loyalists, fleeing their former neighbours in Albany and the Mohawk Valley during and after the American Revolution. “There are many descendants of those United Empire Loyalists now living on these homesteads throughout the country and along the beautiful river, with the traditions of early United Empire Loyalists still clear in their minds,” one of her novels begins.1
For a woman with a strong sense of history, Florence Deeks left remarkably few details about herself or her family. The deepest strata of her life, the earliest and the most important in her development as a woman, went unrecorded, alive only in her memory. The only document in which she provided details about her family background states briefly what can be gleaned from her unpublished novels: that she was born in Morrisburg, a picturesque town on the north side of the St. Lawrence River about ninety miles west of Montreal and only a short distance from Crysler’s Farm, where British and Canadian troops had repulsed an American attack during the War of 1812. “My parents,” she declared proudly, “were descendants of English and United Empire Loyalist ancestors.”2
Indeed they were. Her grandfather, John Deeks of St. Edmunds in England, had served under Wellington during the Peninsular Campaign and was one of the British “Redcoats” wounded on Canadian soil in 1813 at the Battle of Crysler’s Farm. Taken to the home of Major Henry Merkley, a wealthy local landowner, to recuperate, the twenty-five-year-old soldier met Merkley’s daughter Catherine, not yet seventeen. Their courtship quickened with the pace of John’s recovery. The regimental colonel performed the marriage ceremony, and soon they returned with the regiment to France, where their first child was born.
They remained in France for two years, until the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. John purchased his discharge from the army and returned with Catherine to the Williamsburg area of Upper Canada, settling in 1817 on a tract of land given to them by her father. Eleven more children were born to them, three girls and eight boys. One of the boys was Florence’s father, George, born in 1830.
Catherine Melinda Reid, Florence’s mother, was seven years younger than her husband and went by her middle name.3 She was Melinda, a young woman with a mind of her own, and at nineteen she determined that a farmer from Williamsburg, George Deeks, was the man for her. They married in 1856 and took up residence in the nearby town of Morrisburg. Six children followed over the years, and each survived the harsh Upper Canadian winters into adulthood. In the spring of 1871, a government agent recorded the family’s ages when gathering information for the first post-Confederation national census. George was forty-one and Melinda thirty-four. Annie Elizabeth, their first-born, was fourteen; George Samuel and Charles Alexander were twelve and ten, respectively. Florence Amelia, born on September 4, 1864, was seven, followed by her younger brother, John Frederick, who was three years old. Mabel Caroline Louisa would not be born until January 1875 during a family vacation in Europe.4
The family of George and Melinda Deeks was a devout one, listed in the census as Evangelical Lutheran.5 Beginning in 1784, much of the Morrisburg area had been settled by Loyalists with a German Protestant background, bringing with them the founding families of the district, like the Merkleys and the Meikles. One of the first Protestant churches built in Upper Canada was Lutheran, erected in 1789 at Riverside, three miles east.6 By the 1860s, the family had the choice of several local Protestant churches to attend, including Church of England, Presbyterian, and Methodist.
Later in the century the Deeks family would gravitate to the Methodist church, largest and most successful of the Protestant denominations, for its members were as evangelical as they were Lutheran and, like Victorian Methodism itself, they strove for middle-class respectability. But at least into the 1870s the family appears to have worshipped with the Lutherans. It was probably at Melinda’s insistence that the family went to the local Lutheran church, for when asked about her origins by the census-taker she gave “German” as her answer. In matters of religion, the German Protestant side of her parental background prevailed (her mother’s maiden name was Weegar). Florence remembered her childhood as one “spent in a home characterised by Christian teaching and a strong incentive to learning and culture.”7
Amateur histories of Dundas County and of the town of Morrisburg, otherwise so devoted to listing the names of founding families and local boosters, are silent about George Deeks. If he was at all like the son to whom he gave his Christian name he was a thoughtful but quiet man, a person who shunned the glare of public attention and who lived to work. Family lore has it that, in contrast, Melinda was a woman of great force of personality and opinion. It seems, clearly, that this was a family that honoured its patriarchal head but was driven by the energy and will of its matriarch.8 The hand that rocked the Deeks family cradle appears truly to have ruled its world, and would do so for the better part of a century. George inspired his children by dint of example, but it was Melinda who gave direction as well as shape to this Victorian family’s values.
Melinda Deeks had high expectations of her children, and she believed that, while piety led to sanctification, education was the key to success and respectability. She wanted her children to rise in the world. She instructed the children at home and enrolled them in the local school as soon as they were of age. In the year of the 1871 census, all but John, who was only three years old, were pupils. Seven-year-old Florence walked with her brothers and sisters to Morrisburg’s school on Colin Street, a five-classroom brick building with the main floor used as a common school, the second floor as a grammar school (secondary school), and the large basement as a town hall.
Families who sent one or several of their children to provincial grammar schools rather than private schools or academies were usually, like the family of George Deeks, large ones. For them, grammar schools provided an inexpensive and ready means to a good education. This was especially the case in small communities such as Morrisburg, which lacked a variety of educational alternatives. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, few families assumed that their children would be schooled for any prolonged period, and farmers and merchants sent fewer of their children to grammar schools than did the professional classes. Girls attended less frequently than boys.9
Parents like George and Melinda may have wanted all their children to obtain a grammar school education, but very often practical necessities gave boys priority over their sisters. Boys entered the grammar schools at a young age in order to get a quick start on the classics, and they stayed in school longer. In contrast, if they entered grammar school at all, girls enrolled at a later age and for a shorter period of time, usually no more than five years. In fact, daughters of those who saw themselves among the “gentleman” class stayed in school for a shorter period than those of labourers, since they had more opportunities and less need of an education for vocational purposes.10
By the time Florence was old enough to qualify for secondary education, a handsome new building for the upper school had been built on the corner of Second and McKenzie Streets.11 Now designated the Morrisburg Collegiate Institute, it was to prepare students academically for college or university. Provincial regulations instituted in 1865 tied school funding to the number of students studying Latin and Greek, and excluded students not studying the ancient languages from attending grammar schools at all. This largely meant girls. Educational authorities clearly wished to restrict a classical education (and therefore entrance into university) to boys. Girls, it was thought, should attend their own schools and “be taught a curriculum appropriate to woman’s peculiar nature and duties in life.”12
A fire in 1925 destroyed many of the Morrisburg Collegiate Institute’s records, but some survived in private hands. Among them is its Calendar for the year 1910–11, which includes a list of past graduates. Florence Deeks’s name appears in the list of “Senior Leaving Graduates” for 1894. She graduated at the unusual age of thirty.13
Florence Deeks and her sisters, like so many other girls and young women of the day, were very likely required at different points in their youth to interrupt their schooling. Perhaps the fortunes of the Deeks household fluctuated with the harvests and market conditions for produce, and at times the family found it difficult to make ends meet, thereby making it necessary for the Deeks girls to secure paid employment outside the home. It is possible that the educational advancement of Annie, Florence, and Mabel was a sacrifice deemed necessary if the Deeks boys were to succeed in life. Moreover, when Florence was in her mid-teens, around 1880, the acquisition of a secondary school diploma was not a pressing matter for girls unless they were intent on obtaining a teacher’s licence, for Ontario universities had yet to accept a woman student and public attitudes in the province scarcely favoured the idea.
For whatever reasons, Florence postponed completion of her high school education. Besides, she was not seen to be the scholar in the Deeks family. This distinction belonged to her brother George Samuel. Of all their children, it was in his future that the parents of Florence Deeks were to place their heaviest investments.
Victorian Ontario was thousands of miles from the imperial heartland, but the Victorian self-made man, whose moral attributes Samuel Smiles gave definitive expression in his book Self-Help, was a contemporary social type found in abundance on both sides of the Atlantic. Born in 1859, the year Smiles’s book appeared, George Samuel Deeks was to become one of them. Another, in England, was born seven years later. His name was Herbert George Wells.
By the 1880s, Herbert Wells had come a long way in life from his early years in Bromley, a small market town not far south of London. Born on December 21, 1866, he was the third son of a loveless marriage. His father, Joseph, was from a family of gardeners and loved the outdoor life, gardening, and cricket; his mother, Sarah Neal, daughter of an innkeeper, worked as a lady’s maid. The two had met and courted at Up Park, the estate in Sussex where she worked. The maid and the gardener married in 1853, but from the start the match proved a difficult one. Sarah was soon unemployed because she was pregnant; he lost his job through indifference to his work. She recognized that she had fallen beneath her station, and she resented it bitterly. They quarrelled; they considered emigrating to Australia; they lived with relatives of Joseph in Gloucester and Kent. In 1855 they managed to borrow enough money to purchase Atlas House, a small china and dinnerware shop with living quarters, in Bromley. It came with old stock and little trade. It gave Joseph a sense of freedom and Sarah one more source of resentment.14
At home, the father was companionable enough to the children, although he disliked the constrictions placed on his life by Sarah’s pregnancies. They seemed to come so rapidly, one on the heels of another. The mother was constantly depressed and given to self-pity, her energy laid up for her role as domineering matriarch. As an adult, her son Herbert remembered her as a nag, given to “slaps and scoldings,” a woman embittered by her lot. Her “moral harshness,” Wells later wrote, “overshadowed and embittered our adolescence,” and “her passionate mothering … sheltered our childhood.”15 This was not a happy home. Joseph spent as much time as possible away from the atmosphere of Atlas House, often over pints at the Bell parlour or the White Hart.
Bertie Wells was a sickly but precocious child, his mother’s favourite, a little boy who resented attention paid to his older brothers, especially when it came at his expense. His moods ranged from petulance to aggression. Frequent tantrums were the result. His older brother Frank remembered: “Woe betide if toys his highness wanted were denied him.” He would throw objects at his brothers even as he warned them that they had better be easy on him because he was of frail health. As one biography concludes: “At an early age he was learning how to have it both ways.”16
Bertie Wells fell in love with the world of words at the age of seven, when he broke his leg and discovered the joy of reading during the long recuperation that followed. This was one positive contribution his mother made to his life, for early on she taught him his alphabet and encouraged him to read. So, for that matter, had his father, who often brought home books on any manner of subjects from the local lending library. Shortly after Bertie recovered, he was sent to the Bromley Academy on High Street, not far from Atlas House. There he assimilated the attributes of gentility and book learning in equal measure, and he flourished.
By the late 1870s, however, life at Atlas House had reached a point of disintegration. Joseph Wells injured his leg by falling off a ladder, and a life of real poverty, not just of the genteel sort, lay on the horizon. Sarah had had enough. When an unexpected offer of employment as housekeeper to the lady of Up Park arose in 1880, she jumped at it. Joseph remained in Bromley, to rattle around in Atlas House. Fourteen-year-old Bertie would need to leave school and make a life of his own.
Sarah was intent that each of her boys should learn a trade. “Almost as unquestioning as her belief in Our Father and Our Saviour,” Wells later noted, “was her belief in drapers.”17 For Sarah, to work in the textile trade, making fine curtains and clothing, meant to live a respectable life; so she had arranged for Bertie to be apprenticed to one, as his older brothers had been. In this way, his adolescence took Dickensian twists – an apprenticeship at thirteen in Windsor, seventy-hour weeks working for sixpence, sleeping four to a room. But he was an indifferent worker, unrefined in appearance and careless in balancing his accounts. He was soon let go. Adrift, he returned for the winter to his mother and Up Park.
In the stately house he could enjoy the orderly atmosphere of fixed stations in life, a social world without ambiguity – “a complete authentic microcosm … a little working model … of the whole world” as he wanted it to be.18 His mother’s senior rank gave him free range of the estate and access to its library. He took full advantage, reading promiscuously, especially about politics and philosophy. The stately home’s atmosphere of security and books like Paine’s Common Sense and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels more than compensated for his small attic room.
Early in 1881, his mother found Bertie employment at a chemist’s shop in a nearby town; but he knew little Latin, a necessity for dispensing chemicals. So with help from the headmaster of the local grammar school, he began to acquire the language. Since he had little desire to be a purveyor of patent and other medicines, he managed to convince his mother to help support his enrolment as a full-time student. The headmaster, Horace Byatt, quickly recognized this boy’s voracious appetite for learning, and soon Bertie Wells was hard at work at physiology and mathematics, clearly the most promising of the thirty-three students in the school.
Bertie’s hopes were dashed once more when his mother again arranged for him to be apprenticed to a draper, this time in Southsea. To his mind, he was enslaved, condemned to thirteen-hour workdays of mind-numbing drudgery. He spent the next two years there, reading books on the conflict of science and religion and visiting Up Park whenever he could escape. In letters to his mother, he begged to be allowed to break his indentures. At last, near a state of emotional breakdown, he simply walked away from his servitude. He confronted his mother and threatened suicide unless he was allowed to return to school so that he could become a teacher. In the end, his parents capitulated to his demands and his father promised to pay the school’s tuition fees.
Back with Byatt, he flourished as a student-teacher, earning a modest wage while learning. He discovered Plato, read Progress and Poverty by the controversial American land reformer Henry George, and helped other students. All the while, he scrambled to catch up for lost time in his own studies. Before the year was out he had earned several first-class grades and was offered the right to apply for a government scholarship to the Normal School of Science, in Kensington, near the heart of London. He grasped the opportunity and was overjoyed after learning he had won the award. “ ‘Gloria in excelsis mei!’ ” he wrote to his brother Frank. “I have now become a holy, a respectable person entitled to wear a gown … and to call myself an undergraduate of London University.”19
Wells was joyous for more reasons than this. The Normal School of Science in Kensington was the institution inspired and led by T.H. Huxley, popularizer of Darwin’s ideas. By the 1880s, with the age of industry near its apogee, Huxley had become renowned as the “high priest of evolution,” the most energetic advocate of the unlimited possibilities of science. Wells encountered him in a year when Huxley was particularly overburdened with work, tired and in black depression. Still, the great man inspired, and the precocious eighteen-year-old worshipped him, purchasing his most recent writings and attending his lectures on biology and zoology with an eagerness that caught the attention of others and with a mind that appeared to absorb everything around it. During the time he studied under Huxley, Wells caught the master’s essential message. This year, 1885, Wells later wrote, was “beyond all question, the most educational year of my life.”20
After his months under Huxley’s tutelage, however, everything about Wells’s studies seemed anti-climactic. He made a few friends, most notably a fellow student, Richard Gregory, who came from a background even more impoverished than his own. Both young men had caught the progressive spirit of Huxley’s view of modern science and its potential, but Wells’s attention drifted away from academic science and his grades suffered. Physics taught by Professor F. Guthrie paled in comparison to lessons by Huxley, for Guthrie was no Huxley and the discomfort caused by his undiagnosed cancer made him an ineffective teacher. Within the year Wells, by his own recollection, was no longer an “extravagantly greedy and industrious learner” but a “facetious, discontented, restless and tiresome rebel.”21 Depressed and confused, this young man, who had witnessed the polarities of British class structure first-hand at Up Park, found himself drawn to socialism and its politics of class, and to expressions of power in history through the ages.
In sexual matters, his life was no less confused. Like other adolescents, he was given to sexual fantasies about idealized females, and he was ill at ease with the few girls of his own age he met. His parents’ loveless relationship, marked by acrimony and mutual accusation, helped him little in understanding the nature of intimacy. His first physical encounter with a woman, the sister of the owner of his boarding house, was brief and unsatisfying. He left that place to live with his aunt Mary, and there he met her attractive daughter, Isabel Wells. His cousin became the first love of his life, the first woman who took him seriously. She was “the one human being who was conceivable as an actual lover” to this short, underweight, and shabbily dressed young man. Before long the couple became, in Wells’s later words, “passionate allies who would conquer the world together.” Isabel was also a final distraction from his studies, and after failing his examinations in 1887 he left the Normal School of Science.22 His academic career was over, and the unsettled lover soon left for a teaching position at Holt Academy in northern Wales.
The relationship between the immature Wells (still “Bertie” to friends and family) and the naive, trusting Isabel continued during his time at Holt Academy. Yet neither she nor his position met his needs. He detested the academic attitude and the physical surroundings at Holt, and soon became infatuated with the daughter of a local clergyman, Annie Meredith, a schoolteacher with whom, as he put it, he “carried on a brisk and spirited flirtation.”23 Isabel began to drift from his thoughts, as needs overcame commitment – understandable enough, perhaps, in a young and immature man. But in the case of H.G. Wells, this was the first hint at a lifetime of betrayal of those he loved.
In 1880, the year Florence turned sixteen, she bid farewell to her twenty-year-old brother, George. Always an excellent student, he left home for the town of Cobourg, Ontario, and Victoria College, where he entered the bachelor of arts program of the Methodist institution, founded in the 1840s. There he became a brilliant student, excelling especially in mathematics. More than seventy years later, the historian of Victoria College recalled that his scholarly achievement had equalled that of his classmate Lewis Emerson Horning, subsequently appointed to Victoria’s faculty as professor of Germanic languages. At their convocation in 1884 the two young scholars were joint recipients of the Prince of Wales Gold Medal.24
For a time after his graduation, George turned to teaching, quite successfully it appears, although it is not known where or at what level.25 But he had set his sights on a more adventurous future. His ambition, like his energy and his intelligence, refused to accept the restrictive boundaries of the classroom. In the 1880s the future of Canada seemed boundless. Its industrial revolution was well and truly under way, and so was its revolution in transportation. A year after George graduated from university, the Canadian Pacific Railway reached the west coast, and with it came unlimited prospects for success in commerce and industry. Financiers and entrepreneurs made vast fortunes. This was no time for the timid, so George S. Deeks moved west to work in the railway industry. Always good at mathematics, he would try his hand at engineering.
Within a decade after graduation, his combination of ambition and skill was much in demand, for he had developed ingenious techniques for laying trackbed in the most inhospitable terrain. As one writer observed, “He went west and in turn conquered the stony crags of the Rockies for the C.P.R. and elsewhere.”26 Deeks proved able to accomplish feats of engineering where other men failed. He became invaluable to railway companies in his role as master of the muskeg, which seemed to be without solid foundation for everyone’s rails but his. Many railways sought his services, and the North American northwest and all of the Canadian north became his terrain. Soon he commanded hefty fees and commissions. He was constantly on the move. Early in the new century, his ambitions not fully met, he began to think about ventures beyond engineering, such as real estate and construction.
Everything that is known about George S. Deeks, particularly in his later life, indicates that he was a dutiful son, dedicated to supporting his family and generous to a fault in the financial help he provided to them. There can be little doubt that as soon as he was in a position to do so, he began to send some of his savings home to Morrisburg. By the 1890s, the elder George Deeks was in his sixties, his strength drained by farm work. Enough money appears to have been sent, and on a regular enough basis, to allow the aging farmer to retire and to take on less onerous work as a clerk in the Fifth Division Court of Dundas County.27
George’s contribution to the family economy, which may well have begun in the 1880s, would also have taken pressure off his sisters to finish their formal education in the local schools. It would have allowed them to pursue their dedication to cultivation and refinement in their own ways and at their own paces. When discussing her early years, Florence spoke of going to a boarding school for girls, although she does not say when or where. “Besides academic work,” she added, “I devoted considerable attention to the study of art and music, and also travelled in Europe and America.”28 Perhaps her generous brother’s new-found affluence made such luxuries possible, delaying the need for a secondary school certificate.
In 1894, at thirty, Florence completed the final courses and examinations necessary to graduate from the Morrisburg Collegiate Institute. After receiving her certificate she took leave of her family at the multicoloured stone Morrisburg railway station, with its two chimneys and its Romanesque windows, and boarded the Grand Trunk train heading west to Toronto. Like her brilliant older brother, she too would enrol in Victoria College. By then it had federated with the University of Toronto, having relocated in 1892 from Cobourg to Toronto and to an imposing new stone building on the northeast edge of Queen’s Park, location of the provincial legislature.
The mid-nineties were an exciting time for most of the students at Victoria College. Fresh breezes filled the air. Everyone had adjusted, after the initial disruption of the move from Cobourg. New faculty and staff appeared, offering new courses of study. Students announced student clubs and associations in almost every issue of Acta Victoriana, their venerable magazine. They created a missionary society in 1894, joining Victoria’s men and women formally in a common activity for the first time since 1880, when Nellie Greenwood arrived in Cobourg as the first female student.29
At Victoria, in the autumn of 1894, Florence enrolled for an arts degree as a “Specialist in Arts – French and German,” a four-year program.30 In addition to her interest in modern languages, including English, she was also drawn to the study of history. Her professor of German was L.E. Horning, George’s rival as Victoria’s gold medallist a decade before and now the college’s distinguished professor of Germanic languages. The affiliation of Victoria with the University of Toronto also made it possible for Florence to study with professors – Maurice Hutton in classics and W.J. Alexander in English, for example – who later became the stuff of academic legend at the University of Toronto.
Hutton and Alexander were proponents of a distinctive fusion of Christian idealism and Arnoldian humanism in the approaches they took to their subjects. Both men taught at the University of Toronto’s “secular” arm, University College, a quarter-mile or so west of Victoria College on the other side of Queen’s Park. W.S. Milner, a professor of classics, taught ancient history there. Modern history was covered by the thirty-four-year-old ecclesiastical historian George M. Wrong, whose remarkable promotion from lecturer to the chair of Canadian history in 1894 would within a year help precipitate an undergraduate student strike that shook the university to its foundations. Professor Wrong, the strike leaders claimed, had received the appointment only because his brother-in-law, Edward Blake, a former premier of Ontario, was the chancellor of the university.
Florence continued her studies for two or more years, but she did not finish her degree. No doubt she admired George’s achievements, but how could she possibly have hoped to equal much less surpass them? From the moment she set foot in the Victoria College building, with the Biblical injunction “The Truth Shall Set You Free” etched in stone over its entrance, she probably felt inadequate, prisoner to her brother’s reputation. To Professor Horning especially, would she ever be other than “George’s sister”?
She loved languages and learning, culture and history, and did her best to meet the demands of her courses and her professors. A decade older than most other students, she must however have felt alienated from the mix of student life – the juvenile initiations of freshmen, the boisterous annual student parties named “the Bob” by college tradition, the crude college songs, the frivolous undergraduate chatter, the scurrying around to classes, the polite but constant joustings in the tug-of-war between the sexes. The Reverend Nathanael Burwash, head of the college, distrusted anything – like the new tennis courts north of the main building – that distracted students from their studies. Florence probably held a similar attitude.
Formal studies at Victoria College served as only part of her higher education. There was much in the burgeoning city of Toronto to attract the approval of a person of genteel British-Canadian upbringing, imbued from childhood with the Victorian values of hard work and earnestness. In every direction, church spires of many religious denominations competed for attention. The city was overwhelmingly drawn from the best racial stock, as it saw itself. More than ninety per cent came from an Anglo-Celtic background. Every day hundreds of new immigrants poured out of the Grand Trunk Railway Station near the waterfront, most from Great Britain although southern and central European faces were increasingly common. Work was plentiful, for by the mid-1890s Toronto had recovered from the end of the transatlantic economic downturn of the past two decades.
The good times had begun. New factories opened daily. Real estate boomed. Builders could scarcely keep up with the demand for new factories and office buildings. Land north of Bloor Street, such as Seaton Village, the Annex, and Yorkville, absorbed by the city in the 1880s, teemed with workmen building handsome brick homes for the swelling middle class. Electric streetcars, introduced in 1894, carried workers to the stores and offices on Yonge, Bay, Queen, and King Streets. Florence Deeks now lived in a world that had been beyond her ken in Morrisburg. However much she loved her hometown and her parents and her brothers and sisters, she needed to expand – her mind, her interests, her vistas, her expectations. Morrisburg held the past she so prized, but Toronto bore the secret to her future.
Florence’s name is absent from the Toronto city directories for the years 1894 through 1896, when she was an undergraduate student at Victoria College. But this is simply an indication of the transient nature of student life. The college did not yet have residences for students, so like other undergraduates she probably lived in one of the city’s many boarding houses for single young men and women. Some of these were indescribably filthy, as the moral reformer C.S. Clark revealed in his lurid 1898 exposé of social conditions and underclasses, Of Toronto the Good.31 Many others, however, like those along the quiet streets of Yorkville, just north of Bloor Street near Yonge Street, offered perfectly respectable rooms for single men and women. She did not live in one for long, for at the end of her second year at university she took up a teaching position with an opportunity to live in residence.
One day in the spring or summer of 1896, Florence walked the short distance north from Victoria College to the handsome new three-storey building that housed the Presbyterian Ladies’ College. The address was 151 Bloor Street West, just off the intersection of Bloor and Avenue Road. Undeveloped fields lay adjacent to the occasional government or university building – the provincial parliament at Queen’s Park to the south, University College in the distance to the southwest with the Anglican Wycliffe College just north of it, the red-stone McMaster University building bulking large on the south side of Bloor, not far to the west. Looking northward from Bloor Street and Avenue Road, the corners punctuated by tall stone columns that served as the base of ornate gas lamps, one could see trees lining the boulevards. A few minutes’ walk north lay open land stretching away for a mile or so to Upper Canada College, the private school catering to the sons of the city’s elite. It, too, was coming within the city’s grasp, for paved and well-lit streets had begun to appear and the area was busy with the din of carpenters’ hammers and horse-drawn supply wagons. City residents were moving north.
Florence had learned that a position was open at the Presbyterian Ladies’ College for an instructor in modern languages. She applied for it and was offered the position, so in the autumn of 1896, although still enrolled as a university student, she became a member of the college staff. It is at this point, apart from the lone appearance of her name in the census of 1871, that she begins to be part of the historical record, to be part of “history.” Her name appears in the 1896–97 Calendar of the college as an instructor in German languages and literature, with “Honour Undergraduate, Toronto University,” listed as her honorific.32 In 1897 her name is listed for the first time in the Toronto City Directory, her address that of the college.
In the summer of 1888, in poor health and separated from Isabel, Herbert Wells left Wales for Up Park, where he spent several months recuperating. Then he returned to London. He was nearly penniless. Over the next year or so he tried tutoring, began to contribute modest pieces to London mass-circulation magazines, took a position teaching in a school in Kilburn, and, with an initial reluctance, renewed his relationship with Isabel. Any future with her meant putting his domestic economy on a firm footing, and with new resolve he completed the courses for his degree in zoology and secured a position as a biology instructor in a tutorial college run by the educator William Briggs that had recently opened in an alley near the Strand. He and Isabel married at the end of October 1891.
The union was doomed from the start, for it was one between a woman Wells deemed to be too unresponsive physically, and too little interested in the life of the mind, and a man fuelled by the power of ideas but incapable of commitment. He was divided and confused in his sense of obligation, and so he came to think of her as “the gently firm champion” of all that he felt was suppressing him.33 Romantic love turned to polite endearment, his attention turned to other women, and soon he had again betrayed her, this time with her friend from the photographer’s shop where she worked. He did so in a manner decidedly more calculated than he had in Wales. As he put it later, “I embarked as soon as I was married, upon an enterprising promiscuity. The old love wasn’t at all dead, but I meant now to get in all the minor and incidental love adventures I could.”34 Thus began his career as a serial adulterer.
By the autumn of 1892, his eyes were fixed on one of his students from the college, Amy Catherine Robbins, whose “fragile figure, … very delicate features, very fair hair and very brown eyes” he found alluring. She soon came to symbolize for him the “better companionship” that might be possible in a life without Isabel.35 He believed he loved his wife, but he came to think that he had found a soulmate. In December 1893, he convinced Isabel to accompany him on a weekend trip with Miss Robbins and her mother, and it became obvious – at least to Isabel – that the marriage was seriously compromised.
Perhaps forced to do so by his wife, Wells chose between the two women. He opted for the soulmate, although not before securing counsel and support from Richard Gregory. The two had kept in touch since their student days together at the Normal School of Science, and they remained close friends. Years later, Gregory reminded Wells of the occasion: “You asked me to come to 4 Cumnor Place to see you, and you told me in a walk towards Banstead what you intended to do. I remember very well seeing your trunk in the front room ready … to take with you the following morning.”36 In January 1894, Bertie and Catherine eloped, against the strong objections of Mrs. Robbins, to begin a life together. They married the next year, not long after his divorce from Isabel on the grounds of adultery.
Wells’s career as a writer flourished after his marriage to Catherine in 1894. Life with this self-confident young woman, much more intellectually inclined than Isabel, gave him renewed confidence and energy. He knew that a career as a teacher was not for him. He was too impatient, and it paid too poorly to sustain family life and help support Isabel. The vibrant world of journalism appealed to his restive nature, and he resolved to earn a good living as a freelance writer. Soon he was a regular contributor to the Pall Mall Gazette and Frank Harris’s Saturday Review.
It was a beginning, but freelance work was notoriously unreliable as a basis for family life. Would it be sufficient to sustain him and meet his obligations? He began to write fantastic stories drawn from his interest in science and fuelled by an unbounded imagination. Encouraged by William E. Henley, editor of the New Review, he soon expanded some of these stories to book length.
The immediate result was receipt of a cheque from Henley in the tidy sum of £100 for a story about time travel. It was published as a book by William Heinemann in the summer of 1895. The Time Machine, with its generous press run and promise of a twenty-five per cent royalty, gave the twenty-nine-year-old author a foothold on a secure future. He felt liberated, and his imagination reacted accordingly. Comfortably at ease with Catherine in a small town in Kent, his pen flew furiously across the page and his publishers could scarcely keep up with his pace. By the turn of the century he found himself heralded as a man of genius, an original thinker, the author of a group of highly successful scientific romances that others might be proud to claim as the achievement of a lifetime. The Time Machine was followed in rapid-fire succession by a remarkable series of books: The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Wheels of Chance (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), Thirty Strange Stories (1898), Tales of Space and Time (1899), When the Sleeper Awakes (1899), and other works.
It was an extraordinary feat for a man still in his early thirties. He was an author readers were coming to know as possessing an impressive mind and an astonishing imagination. The books were hugely popular and met with critical acclaim. But his furious pace had taken a heavy toll. In 1897 alone his health failed on at least three occasions. But he was now famous and on the road to financial security.
On the eve of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897, Florence Deeks must have been enormously pleased at the turn her life had taken. The position at the ladies’ college was everything the thirty-three-year-old teacher could have hoped for. Her work would be challenging yet rewarding. She could help shape the academic and moral development of young Christian women not only in the classroom but also, by living in residence, in their private lives. Financial independence meant she was mistress of her own destiny.
The Presbyterian Ladies’ College had opened in 1889 and was incorporated six years later with an advisory council that included Principal William Caven of Knox College as well as other luminaries of the Presbyterian community in the Toronto area. “It had long been felt,” said its Calendar, “that such an institution for the higher education of young women, aiming at thorough intellectual culture, and surrounded by healthy social and religious influences, was urgently needed in the city of Toronto.” The college offered the best of facilities, its “Bloor Street façade being one of the finest in the city from an architectural point of view.” Its grounds were “capacious, extending from Bloor Street to Cumberland Street, and so laid out as to afford ample opportunities for physical recreation.”
The college curriculum offered courses in literature and science that prepared girls for matriculation at standards set by the University of Toronto and for the Junior Leaving High School Examination, the non-professional qualification for second-class public school teachers. In general, its academic course aspired to provide an education equivalent to a good high school or collegiate institute and to separate intellectual culture from mere memory work. Perhaps more important, it reflected the intentions of the founders by seeking “to provide for young women a thorough, practical, and liberal education under the safeguard of pure evangelical Christian principles.”37 The family back home was no doubt pleased that Florence seemed to have found her niche in life, and at such a respectable institution too.
In her first year of teaching at the college, the curriculum was offered by a faculty of eight, led by its principal, the Reverend J.A. Macdonald, who taught English literature, history, and composition. Most courses were taught by women – English, French, Latin, and German language and literature; music; sciences such as anatomy, botany, geology, and chemistry; physiology and hygiene. Some possessed an undergraduate degree; invariably, like Miss F.A. Deeks, they were unmarried. Florence taught German language and literature courses that addressed grammatical questions on prose extracts and translations of English into German and of German into English from texts by various authors. The work was demanding, but since she taught only a handful of the ninety-three students enrolled in the college, there was time enough to continue her own university studies. Then, in late winter of the 1896–97 academic year, her father died.
The death notice for George Deeks was brief, appearing in the Globe on March 5, 1897, probably placed on behalf of the family by Florence herself. He had died suddenly three days earlier, of “apoplexy,” at the age of sixty-seven. The newspaper’s understated words captured the quiet dignity of the man and his family. “The deceased,” went the copy, “was a very much respected citizen of Morrisburg.”38 This was all that needed to be said. The grieving family conferred about its future, and one of the possibilities seems to have been for the family matriarch, Melinda Deeks, to move to Toronto.
Florence continued to teach at the Presbyterian Ladies’ College and to live in residence. By the 1898–99 academic year she had shifted her field of specialty. In that year, still listed as an “Honour Undergraduate, Toronto University,” she was made responsible for offering British, Canadian, and ancient history. She felt more comfortable teaching history than the German language, and she had more students with whom she could share her enthusiasm for the glories of the past.
In 1899 the Toronto City Directory noted for the first time that “Melinda Deeks, widow of George,” had taken up residence in Toronto at 15 Washington Avenue. The new home of Florence’s mother was a two-storey brick attached townhouse on a block-long street on the northern fringes of the University of Toronto campus immediately south of Bloor, running west into Spadina Avenue. Perhaps the faithful and prosperous son George made the move and the purchase of the home possible, but it is just as feasible that the estate of Melinda’s husband met the necessary expenses.
Florence’s brothers Charles and John made their own ways in life, but Annie and Mabel appear to have moved to Toronto when their sixty-two-year-old mother did. Annie was then forty-two, Mabel twenty-four. Their unmarried status meant that a successful brother’s generosity was their sole means to a secure future. The Toronto City Directory is silent about them until the new century, and even then their names appear in some years only to disappear in others. Most likely, the directory simply failed to find them, just as it said nothing about so many others who neither owned property nor paid formal rent.
Early in the new century, for reasons that remain unknown, Florence lost or resigned from her position at the Presbyterian Ladies’ College. By 1903 she too lived with her mother and sisters on Washington Avenue. She was almost forty. Yet there is no evidence that this was a family of diminished means, forced to close ranks in order to economize. In fact the opposite seems to be the case, for in the years after Melinda moved to Toronto, Florence’s circles of acquaintance and her social and cultural activity broadened. Her earliest days in Morrisburg aside, the decade and a half before the Great War of 1914–18 appear to have been the happiest years of her life – a personal renaissance before the encounter with Wells in the pages of Saturday Night magazine would dictate her future.
Her interests were broad, ranging from history through art to music, and she needed to give them expression. “I took up journalistic work,” she wrote years later, “writing chiefly along the lines of art, music, travel, biography and historical sketches.”39 She joined and was very active in a variety of women’s clubs, including the Alumnae Society of Victoria University and the Toronto Women’s Liberal Club, and served as honorary corresponding secretary for the latter. One of her favourite clubs was the Women’s Art Association of Canada.