1 - Canadian Animal Stories: Charles G. D. Roberts, “Do Seek Their Meat from God” (1892)

Summary

Given the immense preoccupation of the Canadian literary imagination with nature and the wilderness, it is not surprising that some of the earliest protagonists within the Canadian short-story tradition are four-legged, winged, or scaled. Although animals in world literature had featured in fables and fantasies for centuries, it was in Canada where, by the end of the nineteenth century, a radically new and unique literary genre developed: the realistic wild animal story. In contrast to traditional animal narratives, this genuinely Canadian product was based on accurate observation and scientific research and portrayed unsentimentally and with psychological insight the struggle for survival of animals in the Canadian wilderness. Two authors initiated and were largely responsible for this new genre, which came to influence the animal story worldwide: Ernest Thompson Seton (1860–1946) and Sir Charles G. D. Roberts (1860–1943).

Born shortly before Confederation in 1860, Charles George Douglas Roberts grew up in Westcock, New Brunswick. The Tantramar River district, where he spent his boyhood roaming the marshes and forests with, as he claimed, “few interests save those which the forest afforded” (The Watchers of the Trails, viii), would stimulate most of his later writing. At the age of twenty he published his first collection of poems, Orion, and Other Poems (1880), which inspired a generation of poets known as the Confederation Poets. Roberts became a literary figurehead of his time, proving that an indigenous Canadian poetry was possible after all. After graduating from the University of New Brunswick, Roberts temporarily became editor of The Week in Toronto before taking up a professorship in English and French at King's College in Windsor, Nova Scotia, from 1885 to 1895. Abandoning his academic career, since he was determined to work free-lance, Roberts left his wife and four children in 1897 and moved to New York City, where he stayed for ten years. He then lived in Paris, Munich, and London, earning his living by writing animal stories and romances set in his native Canada. On his return to Canada in 1925, Roberts was celebrated as a Canadian literary icon. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1890 and national president of the Canadian Authors’ Association in 1927, he continued to receive awards and was much praised — some critics say over-praised — during his lifetime.