Despite its rather awkward title, which might lead a reader to think this new book about the well-documented Notman family is more melodrama than history, Portrait of a Scandal is a solid book thanks to the research and writing skills of its author, Elaine Kalman Naves.
Naves is an award-winning journalist who has published several popular nonfiction books that include The Writers of Montreal and The Storied Streets: Montreal in the Literary Imagination. While doing research for a documentary about internationally known nineteenth-century Canadian photographer William Notman for a CBC Radio Ideas program, she learned about his younger brother Robert, who had been involved in a murder trial. Robert Notman was accused of giving poisonous medicine and forcing a doctor to perform an abortion on Margaret Galbraith, a young woman with whom he had an affair.
The trial began on April 20, 1868, and was reported in all its sordid details by the Montreal Gazette. The newspaper was the primary source Naves used to bring alive the case of the “Queen versus Robert Notman” for present-day readers. She makes use of the case to show how abortion was a reality that was not shunned in Canadian Victorian society but was discussed openly and was as controversial then as it is now.
The Honourable Judge L.T. Drummond’s sentence of ten years in the Kingston Penitentiary for Robert Notman was “breathtakingly harsh,” according to Naves. How he came to serve only a year and a half is not entirely clear, but a lengthy prison term could have destroyed the reputation of his brother William, who was succeeding in his career as a photographer and had opened branches of his studios beyond Montreal into the United States and England.
Naves possesses good descriptive talent, and in few words she creates an odd yet evocative vision of the Montreal Court House on Notre Dame Street where the trial took place: “Beneath a gabled roof, six Ionic columns formed a colonnade supporting a central pediment that jutted out of the cut stone structure like a prominent nose in a heavy featured countenance.”
One of the most interesting chapters recounts how William Notman immigrated to Canada from Scotland as a poor and untrained thirty-year-old and soon developed into a photographer who was sought after by such prominent figures as Sir John A. Macdonald.
Certainly, the many Notman photographs of several main players in this book’s account add value to Portrait of a Scandal. We can gaze at the young “pleasant looking” Robert in his debonair pose leaning on his umbrella, and we can see the attractiveness of his mistress, Margaret Galbraith, who nearly died from the abortion and had to testify at the trial against Robert (though, in a bizarre twist, she would marry him and bear his children, only to be abandoned by him later). There are also photographs of William as a determined-looking young man newly arrived in Montreal and as a contented family man surrounded by his adult sons, who assisted him in his many studios.
In Portrait of a Scandal, Naves documents how the Notmans, all of whom worked in the family business, were loyal to each other and how William rallied around the nefarious Robert during his trial. In his better days, Robert also made a contribution to the now extensive photographic record of “the new Dominion’s cities and countryside, its citizens at work and play,” which is held at Montreal’s McCord Museum.
— Anne Cimon (Read bio)
Anne Cimon is a Montreal poet and freelance journalist.