A tale of defeat and bitterness

‘For a brief interval he had no questions to answer, no justifications to proffer, no explanations to make. The contrast with the general tenor of his life is striking. Later years would also bring occasional intervals of deep joy, of triumph, even perhaps of tranquillity, but his life as a whole was to be an almost unbroken tale of defeat and bitterness.’ This is about Charles Fothergill, born 240 years ago today, an ardent naturalist and failed entrepreneur many times over. The comment comes from the introduction to a book of diary notes kept by a still very young Fothergill on returning to his home county to research its natural history.

Fothergill was born into a Quaker family in York, England, on 23 May 1782. He was trained in his father’s business - ivory craft - but developed an early interest in natural history, even publishing a short folio he called Ornithologia Britannica at the age of 17. He travelled to London to become an actor, then tried to secure a commission in the Royal Navy. However, in 1805, he returned to Yorkshire to research a natural and civil history of Yorkshire, and the following year saw him in the Orkney and Shetland islands undertaking another similar idea. He commissioned celebrated engravers to illustrate the works, but only ever managed to published his Essay on the philosophy, study, and use of natural history. In his later 20s, he seems to have squandered an inheritance on racehorse breeding. In 1811, he married Charlotte Nevins and they had two sons. 

Further career attempts followed - studying medicine in Edinburgh, farming on the Isle of Man - before he and his family emigrated to Upper Canada (partly to escape debts). He settled Smith’s Creek (Port Hope) where he opened a general store. He was the first postmaster at Port Hope in 1817; and in 1818, he was appointed justice of the peace in the Newcastle District. He built a distillery at Port Hope and a sawmill and gristmill at Peterborough. However, debts again overwhelmed him, and his properties were seized. In 1821, he was appointed the King’s Printer and moved to York (Toronto). The years that followed were dogged with ill-health, the death of his wife, and schemes that came to naught.

In 1824, he won a seat in the Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada. In parliament, he was critical of the administration and was dismissed as King’s Printer in 1826. He failed to get re-elected in 1830. During the 1830s, he also published An essay descriptive of the quadrupeds of British North America and another paper on the situation of the salmon in Lake Ontario. However, several new business ventures failed, and he died, penniless, in 1840. Wikipedia says he is considered to be Ontario’s first resident ornithologist. Further information is also available from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography and a biography by James I. Baillie Jr. in the Canadian Historical Review.

The University of Toronto Library holds the bulk of Fothergill’s extant papers, including some diaries. Shetland Museum and Archives holds Fothergill’s diary of his 1806 travels there. The Yorkshire Archaeological Society may hold the Yorkshire diary since, in 1984, it published The Diary of Charles Fothergill, 1805: An Itinerary to York, Flamborough and the North-Western Dales of Yorkshire by Paul Romney. The introduction in this latter is available to view online at Academia.

Here are three extracts from that introduction.

‘The document published here is Fothergill’s diary of his adventures as he perambulated the county of Yorkshire between May 1805 and January 1806. It is the record of a young Yorkshire Quaker, of yeoman roots and bourgeois estate, in search of the history, antiquities, folklore, customs and other phenomena, both ‘natural’ and ‘civil’, of his native county. Much of the diary is therefore taken up with jottings relevant to those subjects: accounts of archaeological relics; scraps of local history; notes on economic life, and on local dialect and nomenclature; and, of course, descriptions of flora and fauna - for Fothergill was always a naturalist first and foremost, and above all an ornithologist.’

‘None of the data the diary offers is as interesting as the interplay between the writer’s sensibility and his subject: the past and present of Yorkshire. This interplay creates a whole that exceeds the sum of the parts, conveying to the reader a sense of the time and place which is almost novelistic in its immediacy. Indeed, the diary is almost novelistic in structure; for, as the scene shifts to and fro between York and the Ridings, and scenes of solitude and tranquillity alternate with those of society and bustle, our sense of both narrator and milieu expands, while the plot takes some surprising twists before accelerating gently but perceptibly to its bittersweet climax.’

‘The diary records what was, despite its unsatisfactory epilogue, an idyllic interlude in Fothergill’s life. In the dales he wandered amidst scenery sometimes picturesque, sometimes sublime, in a region to which the name of Fothergill was native. Here was none of the clamour, filth and expense of London, none of the claustrophobia and family strife of York. For a brief interval he had no questions to answer, no justifications to proffer, no explanations to make. The contrast with the general tenor of his life is striking. Later years would also bring occasional intervals of deep joy, of triumph, even perhaps of tranquillity, but his life as a whole was to be an almost unbroken tale of defeat and bitterness.’