culture
Vintage Toronto Ads: Fothergill’s Follies
An unusual 1820s advertisement and the sad story of the man who needed it.
Source: the Colonial Advocate, February 16, 1826.
It’s rare to see an advertisement accompanied by a large image in an early-19th-century newspaper. Ads of the era were usually a narrow column of text that occasionally featured a small illustration—pages from this period resemble a modern classified section more than a collection of eye-grabbing enticements to buy merchandise, return lost horses, or read government bulletins. But the person whose home was up for grabs in today’s ad was embroiled in a controversy at the time that merited an unusual notice.
The Dictionary of Canadian Biography’s entry on Charles Fothergill is blunt about his professional shortcomings:
Fothergill’s career was an unbroken sequence of failures that were largely of his own making. He was well read in both general and scholarly literature but vitiated his promise by espousing projects far beyond his financial, if not his intellectual, means. He bemoaned his lack of patronage in Britain, and in Upper Canada he found it galling to be denied preferment by a clique of officials whom he thought beneath him in both breeding and education. In neither country, though, did he adopt any rational plan to achieve by his own efforts the wealth and leisure he needed for his scholarly projects, and in Upper Canada he squandered his one bite at the cherry of public patronage. His self-destructive risk-taking is probably traceable to an obsessional neurosis akin to that of the compulsive gambler.
Born in England in 1782, Fothergill gained an early reputation as a naturalist and might have led a more successful life had he devoted himself entirely to ornithology. Instead, he immigrated to Upper Canada in 1817 and soon piled up debts via businesses he operated in Peterborough and Port Hope. Fothergill moved to Toronto (then called York) to assume the job of King’s printer in January 1822.
Elected to the colonial assembly to represent Durham County in 1824, Fothergill caused endless grief to Lieutenant-Governor Sir Peregrine Maitland in both his elected and his patronage positions. Originally a loyal Tory supporter of the government, he gradually fell into a leading opposition role and voted with the Reformers in the assembly. By January 1826, Maitland had had enough of both Fothergill’s attacks on government policy and his inefficient, debt-piling operation of the official print. Though fellow Reformer William Lyon Mackenzie was not a personal fan of Fothergill’s, he defended his colleague’s work in improving the quality of the official newspaper, the Upper Canada Gazette. A week after Fothergill got the boot, Mackenzie wrote in the Colonial Advocate that he lost his position due to “his open, candid and independent conduct in the assembly.” Mackenzie saw the dismissal as a warning to other assembly members that “if they exercise the faculty of thinking and speaking, they must succumb to the opinions of the powers that be, or lose their bread.”
At a public meeting on January 24, 1826, prominent Reformers voted to raise funds to financially support Fothergill during this rocky period. We suspect they also decided to help Fothergill sell his home—note Mackenzie’s role in the ad. Fothergill returned to Port Hope, where he once again demonstrated his lack of business acumen. He also gradually alienated his Reformer colleagues in the assembly as his conservative impulses reawakened. He launched an anti-government newspaper, the Palladium, two weeks after the rebellion of 1837, but, as Early Toronto Newspapers 1793-1867 notes, “The paper died a natural death from its publisher’s lack of business sense in 1839.” The final insult came a month after he died penniless in 1840: personal papers and materials he long planned to incorporate into a “Lyceum of Natural History and Fine Arts” went up in flames.
Additional material from the January 12, 1826, and January 26, 1826, editions of the Colonial Advocate.