BL Shelfmark 7906.d.5

I will admit that this blog is not the usual Americas fare but when I came across the above item I couldn’t let it go back to the stacks without drawing some attention to it. The author of the book, Sir James Edward Alexander, was a career military man whose life was defined by various tours of duty across the British Empire. Out of all the landscapes he crossed, Alexander seemed particularly taken with Canada, writing about it at length both officially and unofficially. While his works such as L’Acadie; Or, Seven Years’ Explorations in British America (BL Shelfmark 10470.b.3) bare a tone official to the point of ‘stiff upper lip’ parody his writing in Salmon Fishing in Canada is engrossingly lively, whitty and jovial. This is perhaps best evidenced visually by the illustration below.

 

What surprised me most about the book was how timeless it seemed in the context of today’s culture of fishing for leisure. The structure of the book, based around the sharing of facts about Canadian fishing but interspersed with fits of whimsy and some grand fisherman’s tales, would be familiar to many who spend their recreation time on the world’s rivers and lakes today. Discussion ranges across where in British America is best to fish and how to get there – something more challenging than today – while also telling humorous stories invariably involving a clumsy but determined vicar. Of all these topics the one that jumps off the page is a chapter entitled, “What flies are suited to Canada?”, a topic that I would wager is still hotly debated across the variables of season, terrain, wind direction and other vagaries of fishing lore.

Unfortunately, while Lieutenant General Sir Alexander spent a great deal of time and effort writing and illustrating this work, he appears to have neglected to place the illustration I was actually looking for. So, that being the case, I should get back to looking for it and leave you with some for which he did manage to find a home.

[P. J. H.]