Lady of the Ice

“‘Now,' said I, ‘is the time for you to exert all your strength.'

‘I am ready,' said she.”

THE LADY OF THE ICE

By James De Mille
Introduction by George L. Parker

Formac Publishing Company Limited
Halifax

Series Editor: Gwendolyn Davies

A taste for reading popular fiction expanded in the nineteenth century with the mass marketing of books and magazines. People read rousing adventure stories aloud at night around the fireside; they bought entertaining romances to read while travelling on trains and curled up with the latest serial novel in their leisure moments. Novelists were important cultural figures, with devotees who eagerly awaited their next work.

Among the many successful popular English language
novelists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were a group of Maritimers who found, in their own education, travel and sense of history, events and characters capable of entertaining readers on both sides of the Atlantic. They emerged from well-established communities that valued education and culture, for women as well as men. Faced with limited publishing opportunities in the Maritimes, successful writers sought magazine and book publishers in the major cultural centres: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, London and sometimes Montreal and Toronto. They often enjoyed much success with readers at home, but the best of these writers found large audiences across Canada and in the United States and Great Britain.

The Formac Fiction Treasures series is aimed at offering contemporary readers access to books that were successful, often huge bestsellers in their time, but which are now little known and often hard to find. The authors and titles selected are chosen first of all as enjoyable to read, and secondly for the light they shine on historical events and on attitudes and views of the culture from which they emerged. These complete original texts reflect values that are sometimes in conflict with those of today: for example, racism is often evident, and bluntly expressed. This collection of novels is offered as a step towards rediscovering a surprisingly diverse and not nearly well enough known popular cultural heritage of the Maritime provinces and of Canada.

On 5 January 1871, the Dalhousie College Gazette reprinted a paragraph from the Toronto Leader about James De Mille's remarkable success in the United States as a writer of popular fiction:
Prof. James De Mill [sic], who won his first fame four years ago by the “Dodge Club” in Harper's is a rapid writer. He is under contract to furnish four serial stories to various magazines in the coming year; it is related that one of his books, “The B.O.W.C.” was finished in six days; and he completed, in six weeks, a manuscript which he sold for $2,000. All this is in addition to his regular occupation as Professor of Dalhousie College, Halifax, and the use of his leisure in preparing a textbook on Rhetoric.
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Between 1865, the year he arrived at Dalhousie, and 1880, the year of his sudden death, James De Mille published some 24 novels. In 1870 alone, he published two novels, The Lady of the Ice and The Cryptogram, as well as three stories for boys in his Brethren of the White Cross (BOWC) series: The “B.O.W.C.”: A Book for Boys, The Boys of Grand Pré School and Lost in the Fog. Although well known in his lifetime, De Mille all but disappeared from public consciousness until the 1969 reprinting of A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, a fantasy-satire that immediately reminded readers of the wit, exciting plot-lines and dramatic suspense of which De Mille was capable. Although one of the most successful Canadian-born popular novelists of his generation, De Mille may well have fallen into neglect in Canada after his death because most of his works, unlike The Lady of the Ice, did not feature Canadian settings and characters.

The Lady of the Ice appeared at a time when Canadian novelists had to write for international audiences to make money. They also faced the problem common to artists in a new society of creating a fictional social context with recognizable characters in a voice that reflected their time and place as North Americans. Thomas Chandler Haliburton commented on this problem in writing The Old Judge (1849), and Henry James observed a similar situation in Nathaniel Hawthorne's career. Up to a point De Mille resolved this, as did the other three authors, by drawing on his own youthful experiences, by utilizing the past in historical novels, and by having North Americans confront Europe.

Quebec City, with its dramatic promontory and romantic history, is the setting for The Lady of the Ice. It was one Canadian landmark familiar to Americans as a tourist destination and through Francis Parkman's histories of the Anglo-French struggles. The novel is a comedy of manners about the garrison society of Quebec that was destined to disappear when the British army withdrew from Canada in 1870–1871, although in the novel the “depletion” of the British colonial presence is blamed on British officers who retire once they find Canadian brides. A peacetime garrison society offered recognizable types of officers and civilians, all engaged in a busy round of gossip and parties. Halifax could offer the same possibilities, but did not have the stunning locale nor the kind of winter required by the plot. Readers of Canadian fiction have always known that winter is the time for courtship, besides serving as a possible metaphor for death and mental confusion. Because he was not attempting a realistic novel saturated with local colour, De Mille made no more than a passing mention of the local French-Canadian townspeople; his garrison characters were an Anglophone community. Even the famous Montmorency Falls, a favourite spot for outings, were merely a stage set.

The novel begins as the first-person narrator, Lieutenant Alexander Macrorie, explains that the hero of his story will be his best friend, Jack Randolph — what could be more ironically Canadian than this? These junior British officers in the 129th Bobtail Regiment are likeable and good looking but certainly not heroic, even though Macrorie performs a daring feat. We can almost anticipate what will happen because the plot of The Lady of the Ice harkens back to early Roman comedy, in which boy meets girl, boy almost loses girl (and best friend) through mistaking appearance for truth, until the resolution offers the possibility of a better society centring on the protagonists and their spouses. The pleasure is in seeing how De Mille entertains with his parodies of conventional plots, his gentle satire and his linguistic virtuosity.

De Mille gives us an exciting description of a rescue on the ice floes of the St. Lawrence River. The potentially tragic duel in Chapter 31 is a sendup of fictional duels, in which De Mille ridicules outmoded codes of honour. The Fenian attack on Canadian soil after the American Civil War, one of the few contemporary allusions, is treated humorously. More than once De Mille employs a post-modernist technique — always a tool of the comic writer — when Macrorie reminds us this is not a novel, or, as in Chapter 37, when he tells us his situation cannot be neatly resolved as if it were the plot of a novel. Unfortunately, the discussions between Macrorie and O'Halloran on ancient philosophers and modern thinkers, familiar no doubt to his contemporary readers, come off as padded parades of De Mille's classical education. Some parodies of Latin and Greek make sense when read aloud. One comic Latin poem in Chapter 32 is provided with footnotes, themselves a sendup of academic footnotes that explain the obvious and the trivial. More fun is the comic passage about Miss Sissibou.

Throughout the nineteenth century, North American novelists and poets struggled to find a distinctive voice and local speech rhythms that could not be mistaken for an English voice. Haliburton had some success using a New England and Maritime vernacular in The Clockmaker series and in The Old Judge, and this was approved by his English reviewers. But Haliburton did not kick off a literary tradition among later Canadian writers. Walt Whitman and Mark Twain had more success inaugurating a vernacular tradition among American writers. De Mille found that North American voice for his Americans in The Dodge Club, for example, as well as in his boys' stories, and in The Lady of the Ice. Modern readers will respond to the racy and slangy dialogue that reveals De Mille at his best. Listen to Macrorie and Jack; theirs are the speech rhythms of young Canadians, even though they are presented as British officers. Similarly, the sparring between Randolph and Miss Louie is far more engaging than the stiff love dialogues between Macrorie and Marion. O'Halloran's Irish dialect was a standard comic fixture in nineteenth-century literature, although De Mille goes against literary convention by making him a sympathetic and educated Fenian. As a teacher of rhetoric, De Mille could adopt a variety of masks and voices in his novels, from the cool laconic voice of the thrillers to the everyday Canadian voices in this novel.

There was not much in De Mille's background to suggest the level of sprightliness and satire that one finds in his novels. He was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, on 23 August 1833, the son of Nathan De Mill, a prosperous lumber merchant and ship owner, and Elizabeth Budd, both of them of Loyalist descent (James later added the ‘e' to his name). While Elizabeth was remembered as “a charming old lady,”
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Nathan was known as “Cold Water De Mill” for his support of total abstinence. Although there was good literature in the home, Nathan considered novels “the devil's department.”
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Because of his evangelical views, he left the Church of England and took his family into the Baptist church (after his father's death, James was to return to Anglicanism). In 1847, James spent a preparatory year at Horton Academy in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, before entering the Baptist Acadia College, where his father served on the board. James' school experiences in Canada and, later, in the United States, like his sojourn in Europe, would be woven into his novels. James, who may be the character Burt
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in the BOWC series set in the fictionalized Horton, was the leader in the boys' pranks and adventures. After finishing his matriculation year at Acadia (1848–1849), sixteen-year-old James De Mille was ready for a life-changing adventure, a sea voyage arranged to rest his “weak eyes.”
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At a time when European travel was becoming fashionable for middle-class Americans and pre-Confederation Canadians, James and his brother Elisha Budd De Mille toured Britain and Europe for 18 months in 1850–1851. Even getting there was an adventure. In the days before trains connected New Brunswick to Montreal, the young men sailed from Saint John to Boston and took a train from Boston to Burlington, Vermont. From there they boarded a steamer up Lake Champlain to Saint-Jean, Canada East (now Quebec), took the short train trip on Canada's first railway between Saint-Jean and Laprairie, and a ferry across the St. Lawrence River to Montreal. After a brief stay in Montreal, they spent three weeks sightseeing in Quebec City. On 22 August 1850, the day before James' seventeenth birthday, the brothers boarded their father's ship Elizabeth Bentley, bound for Liverpool.

After two months in Britain, they crossed to the continent. From Paris they took the famous stage-coach route to Marseilles, and thence by ship to northern Italy. In spite of its political instability and travel inconveniences, Italy and, especially, Rome made a deep impression on James. In his notebook James made humorous drawings of people and buildings, and scribbled passages from his favorite poem, Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. These notes provided the basis for his later periodical sketches of Italy and the setting for The Martyr of the Catacombs (1865), Helena's Household (1867), The Dodge Club; or, Italy in 1859 (1869), The Cryptogram (1870) and The Babes in the Wood (1875).
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The brothers visited Venice and Padua, then left northern Italy and passed through Switzerland and Germany and headed towards Paris and London. They returned home in November 1851.

Hardly back in Saint John, James enrolled as a sophomore at another Baptist institution, Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, in January of 1852. He studied the sciences, Greek and Latin, modern languages and rhetoric, and he also read widely in the library at Brown. In the literary and debating club he regaled his friends with comic verses. He filled his notebook with ideas for stories and articles. Among his early contributions to American periodicals was the sketch “Acadie, the Birth-place of Evangeline,” for Putnam's Monthly Magazine. When he graduated with an M.A. in 1854, his friends chose “Jim” to read the class poem, a humorous class history in verse.
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Twenty-one-year-old De Mille thus began his apprenticeship as writer, and two ventures in the next six years would demonstrate that the business world was not for him.

After a brief stint as assistant editor of The Christian Visitor in early 1855, De Mille left Saint John for Cincinnati, Ohio, with two friends, Arthur and Henry Crawley, who were, respectively, the son and nephew of President Edmund Crawley
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of Acadia. De Mille spent the next year sorting the books of the West Columbia Mining and Manufacturing Company, a disastrous speculation in which Acadia, on Crawley's advice, had invested one-third of its endowment fund. In a tragic altercation with hooligans, Henry Crawley was stabbed to death. Dr. Crawley stepped down from Acadia and took over as president of the mining company. Those days in Cincinnati found their way into the novel The Minnehaha Mines,
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which contains his famous comic poem “The Maiden of Passamaquoddy.” De Mille returned to Saint John in 1856 in the middle of an economic crisis gripping the Maritime Provinces. He went into partnership with Hazen Fillmore to conduct the Colonial Book Store, not the most profitable kind of venture in a depression. They imported theological books, text books, sheet music and light reading, and they also offered small reed organs known as melodeons.
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De Mille was not a shopkeeper by inclination and possibly Fillmore was “negligent, or dishonest, or both.”
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He bought out Fillmore in 1859 but soon went bankrupt to the tune of $20,000,
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which took years to pay off. Meanwhile, his prospects as teacher and writer improved.

In 1858, De Mille married Anne Elizabeth Pryor, the daughter of John Pryor, the first president of Acadia.
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This connection may have helped him secure the appointment of professor of classics at Acadia in 1860, but he spent another year in preparation while he found a purchaser for the book store. That same year De Mille contributed numerous stories and articles to The Christian Watchman (1861), a Baptist weekly edited by his brother Budd, a Baptist minister. Here we have a glimpse of De Mille at work:

James would drop in to the book-store, and Budd would ask him for some copy. He would pick up perhaps some wrapping paper, and without looking at the part of his story written last, would dash off a fresh installment of it, keeping up a running conversation all the time, and then, tossing it to his brother ask, “Here, Budd, will that do?”
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At Acadia, De Mille read his lectures quickly and treated his students firmly but not harshly. He and his students conversed in Latin, and this deftness with language is prominent in The Lady of the Ice and other novels. They nicknamed him “Childe Harold,” after his favorite author, and remembered with affection his scholarship and geniality. Herbert Creed recalled pleasant evenings at the De Mille home and observed that unique humour so evident in the novels: