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For more than twenty years, Presbyterian minister Charles Gordon was a fixture on bestseller lists with books such as The Sky Pilot (1899) and The Man from Glengarry (1901). Worth over $1 million in the mid-1910s ($18 million in today’s values), he was one of the first Canadian authors to win international success. Only Lucy Maud Montgomery and Stephen Leacock were in his league.

Gordon wrote as Ralph Connor, an accidental alias. He had originally chosen the pen name Cannor, a contraction of “British Canadian North-West Mission,” an organization for which he was secretary. But a well-meaning telegraph operator assumed this was a mistake, changed the spelling, and then added the first name Ralph for good measure.

In 1902, “Ralph Connor” received a letter from the Massey-Harris Company, manufacturer of the ploughs and tractors that were busy transforming the vast open prairies into farmland. The company wanted to bestow some corporate patronage on Connor in return for a little product placement.

“We desire,” read the letter, “to obtain a love story or storiette with Canada for the background and Massey-Harris Farming Implements interwoven in the theme. … The idea is, first to set the Canadian farms on fire with Ralph Connor’s story, and, secondly, out of the fire to get considerable salvage in the shape of profitable advertising.”

Sky Pilot on a Massey-Harris Plough was never written. But there is much to love about this tale — the fact that one of the first successful Canadian novelists was a church minister, the accident by which he acquired his pen name, and the Babbitt assumption of a tractor-maker that art could be harnessed for propaganda. It is all so Canadian. But is it Canadian culture?

The interplay between artistic creation and identity formation is woven through Jonathan Vance’s A History of Canadian Culture. Vance, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Conflict and Culture in the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario, begins his ambitious survey with the prehistoric relics of First Nations and surviving accounts of aboriginal music, dance, and stories.

He explores the chasm in early colonial societies between the educated (often military) elites, with their masked balls and imported harpsichords, and the labouring (often illiterate) classes who enjoyed singsongs and circuses. As the population increased, governments began to see culture as a useful tool in the inculcation of civic virtues. In 1853, the Reverend Egerton Ryerson produced an astonishingly worthy list of books available for Upper Canadian libraries. One of the livelier titles was Shells and Their Inmates.

From there, Vance takes the story through the gradual evolution of an indigenous architecture and literary culture, the relentless conservatism of Canadian aesthetic taste, and the spasmodic shakeups, such as those provided by the Group of Seven painters and modernist poets in the 1920s.

The last half of the book is dominated by two issues. The first is the explosion of patriotism across Canada in the 1960s and the cultural activities spawned by Confederation’s centenary. The second is the growing role of government as patron and regulator of the arts, as culture came to be seen as a vehicle for nation-building.

The origin of this book was a survey course that Vance taught, and he relied on several research assistants (duly acknowledged) to amass additional material. These factors are both strengths and weaknesses. The book is a vigorous overview of a complicated subject, but too many pages are filled with catalogues of theatre companies, government buildings, artists, libraries, or government agencies.

Inevitably, in such a broad-brush effort, there are windy generalizations (“history demanded that a record be kept of these formative years in Canada’s history”) and surprising gaps. Quebec gets short shrift, especially in the later chapters. And although the author recognizes that “the fundamental relationship is not between culture and nationalism, but culture and identity,” he barely acknowledges that there are at least two, if not several, distinct Canadian identities.

But such criticisms do not detract from the value of a book that tries to make sense of a sprawling subject and includes such wonderful stories as Massey-Harris’s attempt to “buy” Ralph Connor. There is no evidence that the Presbyterian minister ever replied to the offer.

Charlotte Gray