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The Humanistic Tradition Volume 2: The Early Modern World to the Present 7th Edition – Ebook PDF Version
McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History
martha langford and sandra paikowsky, series editors
Recognizing the need for a better understanding of Canada’s artistic culture both at home and abroad, the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation, through its generous support, makes possible the publication of innovative books that advance our understanding of Canadian art and Canada’s visual and material culture. This series supports and stimulates such scholarship through the publication of original and rigorous peer-reviewed books that make significant contributions to the subject. We welcome submissions from Canadian and international scholars for book-length projects on historical and contemporary Canadian art and visual and material culture, including Native and Inuit art, architecture, photography, craft, design, and museum studies. Studies by Canadian scholars on non-Canadian themes will also be considered.
The Practice of Her Profession
Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism
Susan Butlin
Bringing Art to Life
A Biography of Alan Jarvis
Andrew Horrall
Picturing the Land
Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500 to 1950
Marylin J. McKay
The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada
Edited by Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard
Newfoundland Modern
Architecture in the Smallwood Years, 1949–1972
Robert Mellin
The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas
The Natural History of the New World, Histoire
Naturelle des Indes Occidentales
Edited and with an Introduction by François-Marc Gagnon, Translation by Nancy Senior, Modernization by Réal Ouellet
Museum Pieces
Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums
Ruth B. Phillips
The Allied Arts
Architecture and Craft in Postwar Canada
Sandra Alfoldy
Rethinking Professionalism
Essays on Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970
Edited by Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson
The Official Picture
The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941–1971
Carol Payne
Paul-Émile Borduas
A Critical Biography
François-Marc Gagnon
Translated by Peter Feldstein
On Architecture
Melvin Charney: A Critical Anthology
Edited by Louis Martin
Making Toronto Modern Architecture and Design, 1895–1975
Christopher Armstrong
Negotiations in a Vacant Lot
Studying the Visual in Canada
Edited by Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson
Visibly Canadian
Imaging Collective Identities in the Canadas, 1820–1910
Karen Stanworth
Breaking and Entering
The Contemporary House Cut, Spliced, and Haunted
Edited by Bridget Elliott
Family Ties
Living History in Canadian House Museums
Andrea Terry
Picturing Toronto
Photography and the Making of a Modern City
Sarah Bassnett
Architecture on Ice
A History of the Hockey Arena
Howard Shubert
For Folk’s Sake
Art and Economy in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia
Erin Morton
Spaces and Places for Art
Making Art Institutions in Western Canada, 1912–1990
Anne Whitelaw
Narratives Unfolding
National Art Histories in an Unfinished World
Edited by Martha Langford
Canadian Painters in a Modern World, 1925–1955
Writings and Reconsiderations
Lora Senechal Carney
Sketches from an Unquiet Country
Canadian Graphic Satire, 1840–1940
Edited by Dominic Hardy, Annie Gérin, and Lora Senechal Carney
I’m Not Myself at All
Women, Art, and Subjectivity in Canada
Kristina Huneault
The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography
Encounters in Scotland, Canada, and China
Anthony W. Lee
Tear Gas Epiphanies
Protest, Culture, Museums
Kirsty Robertson
What Was History Painting and What Is It Now?
Edited by Mark Salber Phillips and Jordan Bear
Through Post-Atomic Eyes
Edited by Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian
Jean Paul Riopelle et le mouvement automatiste
François-Marc Gagnon
Jean Paul Riopelle and the Automatiste Movement
François-Marc Gagnon
Translated by Donald Winkler
I Can Only Paint
The Story of Battlefield Artist Mary Riter Hamilton
Irene Gammel
Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America
Material Culture in Motion, c. 1780–1980
Edited by Beverly Lemire, Laura Peers, and Anne Whitelaw
For the Temporary Accommodation of Settlers
Architecture and Immigrant Reception in Canada, 1870–1930
David Monteyne
Women at the Helm
How Jean Sutherland Boggs, Hsio-yen Shih, and Shirley L. Thomson Changed the National Gallery of Canada
Diana Nemiroff
Voluntary Detours
Small-Town and Rural Museums in Alberta
Lianne McTavish
Photogenic Montreal
Activisms and Archives in a Post-industrial City
Edited by Martha Langford and Johanne Sloan
Wendat Women’s Arts
Annette W. de Stecher
Unsettling Canadian Art History
Edited by Erin Morton
Out of School
Information Art and the Toronto School of Communication
Adam Lauder
Jackson’s Wars
A.Y. Jackson, the Birth of the Group of Seven, and the Great War
Douglas Hunter
Out of the Studio
The Photographic Innovations of Charles and John Smeaton at Home and Abroad
John Osborne and Peter Smeaton
out of the studio
The Photographic Innovations of Charles and John Smeaton at Home and Abroad
McGill-Queen’s University Press
Montreal & Kingston | London | Chicago
john osborne and peter smeaton
McGill-Queen’s University Press 2022
isbn 978-0-2280-1205-4 (cloth)
isbn 978-0-2280-1332-7 (epdf)
Legal deposit third quarter 2022
Bibliothèque nationale du Québec
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Out of the studio : the photographic innovations of Charles and John Smeaton at home and abroad / John Osborne and Peter Smeaton.
Names: Osborne, John, 1951- author. | Smeaton, Peter, author. Series: McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history.
Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2022019498X | Canadiana (ebook) 2022019503X | isbn 9780228012054 (cloth) | isbn 9780228013327 (epdf)
This book was designed and typeset by studio oneonone in Minion 11/14
Peter Smeaton (1951–2021) in memoriam
Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
1 Origins 3
2 Quebec 18
3 Rome 61
4 Montreal 105 Afterword 145
Appendix 1: Letter from Alexander Smeaton to Australia, 9 October 1853 147
Appendix 2: “An Incident in the Catacombs” 150 Figures 155 Notes 161 Bibliography 179 Index 189
Preface
Since at least the time of Herodotus in the fifth century bce , the writing of history has been thought of as the exposition of a narrative. It is the telling of a story, as the etymology of the word implies, aimed at ensuring that what happened in the past was not lost to those living in the present or the future. And that is first and foremost also the intention of this book: to preserve the story of two important pioneers of photography in Quebec City and Montreal, the brothers Charles and John Smeaton, whose very significant achievements in that field have been all but forgotten. This is their history, a very conscious attempt to stem the encroaching waters of Lethe. But underlying the narrative of their lives and achievements there is another tale, one that is perhaps inconsequential in comparison but which at least some readers may also find interesting, namely the story of how this book came to be written. For without this second narrative, the first quite simply would never have been told.
I first encountered Charles Smeaton (1838–1868) in a rather roundabout manner. As an historian of the material culture of the early Middle Ages, with a specific focus on the city of Rome between the sixth and twelfth centuries, from time to time I made good use of an archive of historical photographs depicting that city’s antiquities, including a number of medieval buildings and their decorations. This collection had been compiled by the English antiquarian John Henry Parker (1806–1884) in the 1860s and early 1870s, and although most of the original glass negatives perished in an 1893 fire, the images are known today from multiple sets of prints, one of which is housed in the British School at Rome, my academic “home” in that city. Parker’s intention was to document ancient and medieval monuments, and their decoration, so that future generations would not have to rely on drawings or engravings, which sometimes lacked
CHA P TER 1
preface
absolute accuracy, due to the mediation of their artists. It was almost as if he had envisaged someone precisely like myself, engaging with this material approximately a century later. As a graduate student writing a doctoral dissertation on the early medieval painting in the excavated “lower church” of San Clemente in Rome, I was excited to find photographs of these murals taken in the years immediately following their rediscovery. These proved to be of exceptional value, given that the excavators in that age had kept no detailed records, and furthermore had paid a local artist to “restore” the medieval frescoes, with the aim of attracting visitors who in turn would contribute to the funding of further excavations. The practice of scientific archaeology was still some decades in the future. A few years later, I turned to the Parker collection again for early images of medieval mural paintings in the Roman catacombs, including one of considerable importance, since the original is no longer physically accessible, and for which the Parker archive photograph thus constitutes a unique record.
In woeful ignorance, I initially assumed that Parker had taken his own pictures, but this error was quickly put to rest when the catalogues of a series of exhibitions of the Parker photographic archive, in Rome and elsewhere, beginning in the decade of the 1980s, included information on the numerous photographers whom Parker had employed for this purpose; and I was more than a little surprised to discover that one in particular, Charles Smeaton, the one who had taken the first pictures in the Roman catacombs, was apparently a canadese (Canadian). These images were not only an important documentary record of the murals in question, but also marked a significant moment in the larger history of photography. The catacomb passages have no natural light of any kind, and Smeaton was the first photographer ever to achieve success in overcoming this significant obstacle. I wondered where in Canada he was from, what had prompted him to come to Rome, and what he had done afterwards, but this remained little more than idle curiosity – until a remarkable series of coincidences in the first decade of the current century.
The first piece of serendipity was meeting a remarkable and very knowledgeable historian of photography in Canada, Joan Schwartz, who, when I asked her to tell me about Charles Smeaton, promptly responded that she had never heard of him. This served to pique my innate curiosity, and with the help of one of Joan’s graduate students, Andrea Terry, I slowly began to piece together the story of his early life in Quebec City, and his eventual journey with Parker from London to Rome, where he would make photographic history before succumbing to malaria in March 1868. With the arrival of the Internet and search engines, I was even able to discover the location of Charles’s grave in Rome’s Protestant cemetery. Our preliminary findings were pub-
lished in the art-history journal racar in 2007, and I began to give talks on the subject to both university students and public audiences.
The second wonderful piece of luck was that a notice of one such lecture happened to be spotted by a certain Peter Smeaton, great-grandson of Charles’s younger brother, John Smeaton, and he took the initiative to contact me, asking if I might be interested in seeing the various photograph albums and other documents preserved in the family’s possession. Would I be interested? Readers can easily imagine my response. Shortly thereafter, I met Peter for lunch in Toronto, and we hit it off instantly – with the result that many more lunches and email exchanges would follow in subsequent years. On one memorable occasion Peter even drove to Kingston to attend one of my talks to a history-of-photography class at Queen’s University. The documents in the family “archive” did much to fill in some missing gaps in my knowledge, and also to correct a few errors of fact included in the racar article, for example, demonstrating that Charles had in fact been born in Scotland, and not Quebec, as is stated erroneously on his Roman tombstone. In addition, the photographs, primarily of sites and sights in both Quebec City and Rome, were absolutely fascinating from a variety of perspectives, and clearly merited much more detailed investigation. However, that would require a substantial investment of time and effort, and for many years the requisite time was in exceptionally short supply.
In 2017, I retired from full-time university administration and teaching in order to focus on my many unfinished research projects in Rome, the first of which, a monograph entitled Rome in the Eighth Century: A History in Art, was completed in the autumn of 2019. There were three more “medieval” book projects waiting for attention in my proverbial “pipeline,” and the plan was to spend the spring of 2020 in Rome beginning to write the next one. Of course, fate intervened, in the form of a global pandemic that among much else eliminated the possibility of international travel. Access to Italian archaeological sites, museums, libraries, and archives would be impossible for the foreseeable future, but I remembered that Peter had digitized the entire Smeaton collection of images, and consequently that these could be researched from the comparative comfort of my desk. I suggested to him that perhaps the time had come for us to start work on our much-mooted book, and he responded instantly with an enthusiastic affirmative.
Throughout the summer of 2020, we both spent many pleasant hours combing through books and newspapers, the latter mostly accessible online in digital format; attempting to discover additional Smeaton photographs housed in public museums and archives; and puzzling over the many hundreds of unidentified images from the
family’s own collection, the vast majority of which had been donated to the McCord Museum in Montreal in December 2019. Each day brought new and exciting discoveries, providing a welcome respite from the pandemic, and there were indeed very few on which Peter and I were not in contact by phone, email, or Zoom chat. This project did much to preserve my sanity, and it also brought back memories of a happy time almost half a century ago when I worked for three summers (1973–75) as a researcher in Canadian history for National Historic Parks and Sites.
In addition to the photographs taken by Charles, we also recovered the important role of his younger brother, John (1842–1904), initially in the Quebec City studio, and then subsequently as a pioneer of photogravure in Montreal, where he developed processes for printing photographs in newspapers and magazines without the necessity of creating an engraved copy as an intermediate step. Thus, both brothers have made an important contribution to the technical history of their métier, and richly deserve having their achievements recorded for posterity.
This book is first and foremost a micro-history, in which a wide variety of scraps of evidence are pieced together to create a more complete picture of the lives and oeuvre of the Smeatons. However, it also serves to locate Canadian photography in a much larger international setting, specifically at the very moment of the creation of the new Dominion, and offers evidence of how this medium was being used in a variety of new and unprecedented contexts: for example, to record and communicate contemporary events, and, at a larger level, to assist in the creation of a national identity on the international stage.
There has been only one fly in this ointment, but it is an excessively large one, indeed more like an elephant than a fly. My friend and co-author did not live to see this project to completion, leaving us in April 2021 after a brief illness. His passing has been a terrible blow, especially to his immediate family, but also to the many who were privileged to have known his infectious enthusiasm and his passion for pursuits as varied as travel, ice hockey, and, of course, his own family’s history. Peter Smeaton will be sorely missed, and it is my hope that this book will serve in some small measure as a fitting tribute to his memory.
john osborne
June 2021
Acknowledgments
No author works in isolation, especially when the subject matter falls outside what they would normally consider to be their scholarly “comfort zone.” This book would not have been written without the enthusiastic encouragement and support of three highly knowledgeable friends: Janet Brooke, Jim Burant, and Joan Schwartz. At a time when physical access to libraries and archives was all but impossible due to the coronavirus pandemic, numerous individuals stepped forward to provide prompt and invaluable assistance in checking details, answering queries, and obtaining digital images: Jill Delaney (Library and Archives Canada), Geneviève Déziel (McCord Museum), Alessandra Giovenco (British School at Rome), Véronique Greaves (Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec), Nathalie Mathieu (Library and Archives Canada), Shannon Mooney (Canadian Museum of History), David Park, Adrienne Saint Pierre (Barnum Museum), Hélène Samson (McCord Museum), Beth Saunders (University of Maryland, Baltimore County), and Nathalie Thibault (Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec). For other kindnesses, large and small, we also thank David Osborne, Alison Smeaton, Maureen Smeaton, Andrea Terry, and Malcolm Thurlby. And, finally, the text was enormously improved by the constructive suggestions received from the anonymous readers for McGill-Queen’s University Press, as well as the copy-editing skills of Patricia Kennedy. Our profound gratitude goes out to them all.
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out of the studio
Origins
the early development of photography
Among the many scientific and technical discoveries of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, arguably the most influential in terms of its subsequent impact on global society and culture was the invention of photography. Pictures dominate our modern world, and over the last two centuries, our ability to generate and manipulate images, artificially and digitally, using one frame or many, has transformed human communication, marking the most significant advance in visual culture since Palaeolithic artists first applied mineral pigments to cave walls at sites such as Altamira or Lascaux. There can be few today with any exposure to modern technology who remain unfamiliar with words such as “icon” (from the Greek eikon, meaning “likeness” or “image”) or the more recent neologism “selfie.” We live in a social universe in which images have been rapidly replacing words.
The auspicious year that inaugurated this transformation was 1839. In France, in a presentation to the Académie des Sciences on 7 January, its president, François Arago, revealed the results of years of experiments by the painter, printmaker, and stage-set designer Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851). After an initial collaboration with Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833), Daguerre used silvered copper plates, which, when highly polished and sensitized to light, and later “developed” with mercury vapour, were able to capture and preserve an image. More specific details were provided by Arago later that year.1 In the same month of January 1839, across the channel in London, the scientist and inventor William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) announced his invention of a very different process for “photogenic drawing” at a meeting of the Royal Institution. He employed salted paper, brushed with silver nitrate, which was
CHA P TER 1
then exposed to light until it darkened, producing a “negative” image that could then be made permanent using hyposulphite of soda, and printed as a “positive” using the same process to reverse the tones. Further experimentation by Talbot led to the development of the “calotype,” patented in England in 1841, in which the exposure time was greatly reduced, but the negative image was latent and had to be “developed” with chemicals.2 Although calotypes were considerably less precise in terms of image definition than daguerreotypes, their advantage lay in the ability to produce multiple prints from a single negative.
The next significant development occurred just over a decade later, also in England. Frederick Scott Archer (1813–1857), a sculptor, who had used calotypes to document his own work, became increasingly dissatisfied with the lack of clarity and the requisite exposure times. He experimented with the use of small glass plates instead of paper, and the resulting “wet collodion” process was described in the March 1851 issue of The Chemist. Collodion, a highly flammable mixture of pyroxylin in ether and alcohol, was used to coat the glass, which was then sensitized in a bath of silver nitrate and exposed while still moist. The plate then required “developing” and “fixing,” but produced sharp images that also permitted multiple prints.3 The procedure, which Archer deliberately declined to patent, was laborious, but both inexpensive and reasonably rapid. Furthermore, being in the public domain allowed it to be quickly adopted and improved upon by others, with the result that images made using the wet collodion process, printed on albumen paper (produced commercially from 1851),4 soon replaced daguerreotypes and calotypes as the photographic process of choice.
The need to carry considerable quantities of equipment, in addition to the chemicals required to prepare the plates, and the need to process the latter immediately afterwards, posed a significant challenge for photographers who wished to take pictures outside the immediate setting of their studios. Through the decades of the 1860s and 1870s, various attempts were made to discover a viable “dry plate” process, in which glass plates could be coated well in advance and the solution allowed to dry, but the results were inconsistent, and also necessitated much longer exposure times.5 The significant breakthrough came in September 1871 when a scientist who used microscopic photography in his own research, Richard Leach Maddox (1816–1902), published the results of his experiments, which substituted a gelatine bromide emulsion for collodion. Like Archer, Maddox chose not to patent his process, and this led rapidly to a wide range of improvements. By the end of the decade, pre-coated dry plates were being commercially produced in Britain by firms such as Alfred Hansen’s Britannia Works Company, later to change its name to Ilford.6 This in turn led to the eventual
replacement of plates with roll film, and the invention of the hand-held Kodak camera, by George Eastman (1854–1932) of Rochester, New York, in 1888. 7 Photography was no longer the private preserve of specialists, and a major industry was born.8
Among the first Canadians to experiment with daguerreotypes was Pierre-GustaveGaspard Joly de Lotbinière (1798–1865). In the summer of 1839, the Swiss-born businessman, who in 1828 had married Julie-Christine Chartier de Lotbinière, heiress of the family seigneury on the St Lawrence River southwest of Quebec City, was in Paris on business, and there he was equipped with the necessary apparatus by the Parisian publisher, Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours, before undertaking travels in the autumn of that year in Greece, Egypt, and the Middle East. Joly de Lotbinière is credited with being the first to photograph the Parthenon in Athens and the ancient ruins at Baalbek in Lebanon, among other sites, and a number of these images were subsequently engraved for publication, as there was no process for printing daguerreotypes.9 It did not take long for notices regarding these new ground-breaking experiments in the production of images to appear in a variety of Canadian newspapers,10 and the printed reports were soon followed from Europe by actual imports of the necessary equipment. An English visitor, the chemist and industrialist Hugh Lee Pattinson (1796–1858), may have been the first to undertake daguerreotypes in Canada with his images of Niagara Falls taken in March 1840. 11
Canada has subsequently made a number of important contributions to the history of photography, and has produced many renowned practitioners of the craft, among them William Notman, Yousuf Karsh, Roloff Beny, and most recently Edward Burtynsky, all of whose exploits have been justly celebrated. But two names have been conspicuously absent from studies of the history of photography in Canada: those of Charles Smeaton (1838–1868) (Fig. 1.1) and his younger brother John (1842–1904) (Fig. 1.2), who in 1861 founded Smeaton’s Photographic Gallery in Quebec City.12 This firm played an active role in the visual documentation of the city and its inhabitants in the decade of the 1860s.
But perhaps even more interesting is the contribution made by Charles to the fledgling use of photography as a tool for the documentation of the art, architecture, and archaeology of Europe, and most specifically the painted decorations to be found on the walls of the Roman catacombs. In the winter of 1866–67 he was the first to achieve success in producing images of the murals in those underground spaces, completely devoid of any natural light. These pictures, commissioned by the British antiquarian John Henry Parker, remain today an important visual record of a number of catacomb murals.13 And in the decade of the 1870s, John Smeaton would play an im-
1.1 Portrait of Charles Smeaton.
1.2 Portrait of John Smeaton.
portant role in developing processes for transforming photographs into printed images in newspapers and magazines. This study will survey what can be gleaned about the Smeaton brothers and their contribution to photography in both Canada and Italy, in the hope that they may be included in future lists of those Canadian photographers who have made a difference both at home and abroad.
the origins of the smeaton family
The Scottish parish of Redgorton lies on the west bank of the River Tay, a few kilometres northwest of the city of Perth. In addition to Redgorton itself, the parish comprises five other surrounding villages, including Bridgeton, situated to the south on the River Almond, a tributary of the Tay.14 In May 1834, the Church of Scotland determined that the male heads of families in each parish should be granted the collective power to veto appointments of new ministers, previously the absolute right of landowners, and to facilitate this purpose they compiled lists of the names of the eligible parishioners. The Redgorton rolls for both 1834 and 1835 include an Alexander Smeaton of Bridgeton.15 In Scotland, the formal civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths commenced only in 1855, but prior to that date they were recorded in parish registers. The Redgorton register includes entries for four children born to Alexander and his wife, Helen Robertson: William (b. 28 March 1834), Annie Mary (b. 14 February 1836), Charles (b. 5 April 1838),16 and James (b. 23 April 1840).
Like many other Scots who sought a better life in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the young family emigrated to Canada, arriving in Quebec City on 25 May 1842. 17 Alexander’s name does not appear in the records of the Grosse-Île quarantine station, opened in 1832 and situated some forty-five kilometres downriver, so the family was presumably spared that unpleasant first experience of North America. In Quebec, five more children would be born in subsequent years: John (b. 19 June 1842), David (b. 9 March 1845), Helen (b. 10 January 1847), Alexander (b. 20 June 1848), and Ellen (b. 1850). Sadly, only three of the nine – Annie Mary, Charles, and John –would survive to adulthood.
Quebec City at that time was a lively administrative and commercial centre, almost evenly divided between English- and French-speaking populations, and it served as the principal port for transportation links with Britain, except during the winter, when for months the St Lawrence River was frozen, the thick ice rendering its navigation impossible. A decade later, the advent of the age of steam would shorten the crossing 8 Out of
time considerably: the first steamship to arrive from Liverpool was the ss Genova, on 9 May 1853. 18 Between 1791 and 1841, the city served as the capital of the British colony of Lower Canada, and following the subsequent union with Upper Canada, creating the Province of Canada, it would twice exercise that same role, in the years 1852–56 and again between 1859 and 1866. With its fortress commanding the passage up the river to Montreal and the Great Lakes beyond, Quebec remained the site of the principal military garrison in British North America, until troops were withdrawn in 1871. The Redgorton parish register notes Alexander Smeaton’s occupation as “tailor,” and in the 1841 Scottish census he is recorded as operating a tailor’s shop at nearby Craighead, another village in Redgorton parish, where additionally he employed four others.19 In Quebec he would practise that same trade. In the first year, he rented “three small garret rooms,” using the back entry as a location for business, but in May 1843 he was able to open a proper shop “in the best area in Quebec,”20 presumably at 33 rue Saint-Jean, the address advertised in Alfred Hawkins’s 1844 Quebec Directory and Stranger’s Guide. 21 Rue Saint-Jean was, and still remains today, a major location for commercial activity in the “Upper Town.” At first the endeavour struggled to succeed; and to complicate Alexander’s financial situation, the new establishment was severely damaged by a fire that broke out in a neighbouring property on 15 March 1844. There were also losses of a more personal nature. His mother-in-law, Ann McLeod, died in March 1843, and in 1846 two children, James and David, succumbed to “scarlet fever.” Disease would later claim the lives of two others: his daughter Helen in 1847, the year of the typhus epidemic, and his son Alexander in 1849. His eldest son, William, developed “consumption” (pulmonary tuberculosis), and a great deal of time and money was invested in attempts to get him the necessary medical care. In the autumn of 1853, Helen took William back to Scotland to spare him from the harsh sub-zero temperatures of the Quebec winter,22 but the attempt was not successful, and William died at Dunfermline on 24 April 1854. 23
After a few initial years of struggle, eventually the family’s fortunes turned for the better. Mackay’s Quebec Directory for 1848–9 lists Alexander Smeaton “merchant tailor, 12 Couillard Street, opposite W. Benjamin & Co.,” one of eleven “merchant tailors and clothiers” in the city;24 by the time of the revised 1850 edition, the shop had moved back to what was presumably a more prominent location on rue Saint-Jean.25 On 19 February of that year, their previous residence, a “three storey house and shop, corner of John and Couillard Street, with large back Store and Stables, known as the Checkered House, and at present occupied by Mr. Alex. Smeaton, Merchant Tailor,” was being advertised for a new occupant.26 Finances also now permitted the insertion in the
