Ghosting history/historicizing the ghost: Time passage in T. C. Haliburton’s The Old Judge

Abstract

This article investigates the representation of time in T. C. Haliburton’s The Old Judge as shaped by the writer’s British North American context as well as his political background and agenda. It pays attention to the manner in which the text prepares the ground for native identity formation by providing a version of Nova Scotia’s recent history that is nonetheless presented as bygone and ancient. In The Old Judge, temporal distance of the past, apart from its richness — both confirmed by the presence of the properly historicized settler ghost — is the condition for cultural distinctiveness, maturity and heritage. Approaching The Old Judge from the perspective of Cynthia Sugars’ Canadian Gothic and Lorenzo Veracini’s settler colonialism, I argue that the text represents the past of the province as curiously extended in time in the Old World fashion, so that it may encompass the stages of cultural development required to gain the Empire’s recognition. Simultaneously, the text’s intricate play with heterochronies suggests that Haliburton’s Nova Scotia contains heterotopic spaces in Foucauldian terms, where the ordinary time passage is necessarily breached for the colony to attain proper legacy and distinct cultural status.

[T]here is in fact no history of Nova Scotia to relate.

(Haliburton, 1824: 38).

There was no literature in the colonies because they had no past.

(Haliburton qtd. in McGee, 1984/1857: 41).

Considering settler-colonial perceptions of the past, it is not surprising that Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796–1865), Nova Scotian historian, politician, writer, and judge, proclaims lack of history while promoting Nova Scotia’s historic heritage of struggle (Taylor, 1985: 110). Or that he affirms a lack of literature, having himself spun Gothic tales of the past whose absence allegedly precludes Nova Scotia’s cultural maturity (Sugars, 2014b: 218). The Old Judge (1849) testifies to his continuous effort to promote the colony’s given historicity, one inescapably shaped by context. This article touches upon Haliburton’s contribution to the broader process of fostering cultural-historical identity in Anglophone Canada, one of not only positioning oneself with regard to history but of historicization, “writ[ing] oneself onto history” (Sugars, 2014a: 52), as well. I am, however, above all interested in his insistence on grounding colonial identity in a recent but nonetheless distant past that would guarantee cultural distinctiveness, maturity, and heritage as well as imperial recognition.

The Old Judge has long been considered an overlooked masterpiece, possibly overshadowed by the famous The Clockmaker series (1836–1840; Morrison, 1984: 67). For V. L. O. Chittick, its political tone, anti-Liberal yet critical of Conservatives, justifies the diminished interest it gained in Canada (1924: 446). It achieved more success in Britain (Davies, 2005: 119), though apparently not enough to prompt Haliburton to write more stories about colonial life (Morrison, 1984: 67). Today, it is considered his key work, which “lays open his politics for inspection like no other book he ever wrote” (Davies, 2005: 116–117). And still, few scholars discuss it (see Sugars, 2014b: 234).

This lack of interest corresponds with the ambivalent attitude of contemporary academia towards Haliburton’s oeuvre. ¹ Generally dismissed as conservative, racist, and misogynistic, Haliburton has nonetheless been productively studied from the perspective of settler colonialism, and his works are still informative as regards the discourses that have shaped the settler-colonial subject in what is today Canada. Originally published in serial form in Fraser’s Magazine between 1846 and 1847, generically hybrid like its predecessor, The Old Judge represents a curious “compendium […] of various folktales and legends of early Nova Scotia” (Sugars, 2014b: 219). These are exchanged, alongside the narrative voice and comments on colonial politics and society, between an English traveller and his upper-class local “guides”, retired Judge Sandford and his nephew Barclay. ² For Cynthia Sugars, the text promotes “an idea of Nova Scotia as relayed through the Judge’s recollections of the colony’s history and culture” (2014b: 219).

I approach Haliburton’s take on Nova Scotian history in “The Tombstones”, “Horse-shoe Cove, or Hufeisen Bucht” I and II, and “The Lone House” chapters from a threefold perspective: of Sugars’ Canadian Gothic, Lorenzo Veracini’s settler colonialism, and Michel Foucault’s heterotopia. According to Sugars, Anglophone-Canadian Gothic writing, instead of representing a troubling past, gothicizes and thus historicizes the land “to make it home(l)y” (Sugars, 2012: 410). Sugars writes: “By peopling the landscape with Gothic spirits, early Canadian writers could appeal to a mirage of memory which established their claim to the place as legitimately ‘theirs’” (2012: 410). From the perspective of settler colonialism, Haliburton’s text internalizes settler-colonial ambiguity, where “home” refers to both Old and New World, and the drive to indigenization — understood as the process of discursively representing the settler as entitled to the land for having the original connection with it, established at the expense of the Indigene, displaced or erased — parallels that of “Neo-European replication” (Veracini, 2010: 21). ³

Haliburton’s choice of settler tactics and positions is impacted specifically by his Tory/imperial political beliefs. Consequently, he constructs a local past/history that legitimizes Nova Scotian present by paralleling the European past — Europe representing the settler’s “originating world” and source of “principal cultural authority” (Lawson, 2004: 158). This past/history is both filled with ghosts about which Gothic stories can be told and chronologically long despite being actually recent, which results in a curious heterochrony. Foucault accounts for heterotopias as “counter-sites […] in which the real sites […] found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (1984: 24). Haliburton’s locations discussed here are such counter-sites; they represent, contest, and invert other settler spaces, allowing time to escape its natural passage, and ancient pasts to arise. Simultaneously, they resemble Foucault’s mirror (1984: 24) — heterotopic in counteracting the assumed reader’s position and yet utopic, in providing ghosts as proofs of historicity. As such, they serve an effective historicization Sugars writes about (2014a, 2014b): firstly by ghosting history, that is providing missing ghost stories, founded upon a carefully crafted version of the past; and secondly, by historicizing the ghost, in the sense of consciously using it to promote the politically desired version of cultural maturity, heritage, and identity.

Such an investment in history appears atypical of settler-colonial discourses. In the US, the attitude towards the past is revolutionary. ⁴ Elsewhere, settler-colonial discourses may represent a colony as necessarily “historyless” (see Veracini, 2007: 271). “Historylessness” is regenerative: it frees the future-oriented settler society of the Old World’s historical-political burden and allows to experiment with new forms of establishment (see Veracini, 2007: 271–272). Yet Haliburton sought the very opposite in The Old Judge.

For Veracini, historylessness serves to discursively legitimize land possession by a narrative of struggle that establishes the settler’s original connection with the land and displaces both the Indigene and other migrants (2007: 274). This tactic is well internalized in The Old Judge, and yet, Haliburton’s typically Anglophone-Canadian structuring of local identity around Britishness precludes dehistoricizing the settler. For Haliburton, extending European civilization to the New World is overtly and politically topical. As Sugars notes, he exemplifies the dominant early Anglophone-Canadian literary trend to substitute the Indigene’s myths with settler ghosts that historicize the land as Anglophone and white (2014a: 110). Thus, The Old Judge legitimizes land possession by both working the land and “prior ownership”, “ancestral connection”, and “aristocratic background”, discursive tropes ineffective elsewhere (Veracini, 2007: 274). ⁵

Settler identity is inherently both frontier and diasporic (Veracini, 2010: 20–21). Settler writers typically promote “the decolonized nation” while abiding by the British standards for the purpose of legitimization (Watts, 2010: 453). So does Haliburton, yet The Old Judge is specific due to its context — Anglophone-Canadian, Nova Scotian, and Tory. The vision of the province it embraces is that of isopolity, in fact typical to all the dominions: “a single political community across separate jurisdictions” (Veracini, 2010: 70). Such a polity strongly affirms both its sovereign rights, grounded in settler status, and a co-defining relationship with imperial commitment, which inescapably entails tensions. ⁶ Simultaneously, it resents sympolity, where the metropole interferes in the local drive to self-govern (Veracini, 2010: 70–72).

Northrop Frye tellingly traces Canada’s cultural pedigree to “Tory opposition to the Whig triumph at the time of the Revolutionary War” (2003: 497). In the nineteenth century, a popular view held that “a mature settler society was necessarily a graded, layered society”, emulating British social order (Cannadine, 2002: 30). British North Americans were particularly dedicated to the idea; for many, the memory of the War of 1812 was much alive and the American democratic, egalitarian system unacceptable (Cannadine, 2002: 29–30). In Nova Scotia, the ideological bond with Britain was particularly strong. ⁷ Moderate reformers resented unequal distribution of rights among the Crown’s subjects, yet desired not separation but a government similar to the government British people had in Britain (Bumsted, 2008: 54). ⁸ Joseph Howe himself ardently supported Empire federalism before and after 1848 (see Martin, 1973). Britain’s diminishing interest in promoting colonial trade and supporting colonial matters financially, alongside the deepening economic and social depression of the 1840s, resulted in the feeling of betrayal and general support for reform (Acheson, 2005). ⁹ Haliburton, though sharing colonial resentment, nonetheless actively opposed the idea of self-government and the Reform movement. Hence his Burkean view of history, emphasizing continuity, tradition, and convention (Godeanu-Kenworthy, 2009: 323). Hence, too, his inability to look towards the Confederate future, particularly dramatic in the context of the 1840s.

Haliburton moved to England after his retirement in 1856, became an MP, and died in 1865, deemed “the last of Tories” (Davies, 2005: 230). A representative of Nova Scotian educated aristocratic elites, grandson of a planter and slaveholder, and judge of the Supreme Court he began his literary carrier by promoting the province’s history (Taylor, 1985). In The Clockmaker, featuring the famous Yankee pedlar, Sam Slick, he advocated close imperial connection and warned fellow colonials against American democracy (Godeanu-Kenworthy, 2009; 2016). As his project apparently failed in the 1840s, Chittick deems The Old Judge “a new Clockmaker written to conform to the changed point of view” (1924: 482), one of resignation.

Yet The Old Judge is a complex text, nostalgic for the past while expressing Haliburton’s own feeling of the Empire’s betrayal (Davies, 2005: 114–117). ¹⁰ Haliburton’s settler Self is typically ambiguous and shifting, caught between conflicting systems and discourses (Godeanu-Kenworthy, 2015: 686). Alike The Clockmaker, the work distinguishes sharply between the province and its republican, “ideological Others” (Godeanu-Kenworthy, 2009: 218). And yet, it criticizes imperial as well as local politics, too. ¹¹ Slick speaks Haliburton’s mind when he comments on colonial trade, comparing cutting off colonies to cutting off roots of a tree: “the luxuriance is gone, and gone forever” (1839: 272; emphasis in original); as he says Bluenosers “wont try what they can do” (36; emphasis in original), he is not necessarily stating an outsider’s opinion either. The Old Judge’s characters can similarly voice divergent positions. Thus, the work follows The Clockmaker in triangulating local identity in reference to Britain and the US, and the notion of Britishness, central to that identity, is being reworked to strengthen the province’s position in the Empire and thus eradicate the threat of separation (see Godeanu-Kenworthy, 2015). Rather than resignation, this complexity confirms one more attempt at drawing the metropole’s attention to the province (Davies, 2005: 115) — and at formulating an identity that is both local and imperial. Sugars’ analysis of the work’s utilization of Gothic tropes shows it strove to provide the colony with a distinct and ancient culture, equal with the British one, in continuity with it, and in need of connection, not independence (2014b: 220, 222). Simultaneously, Haliburton also promoted a version of Nova Scotian identity as grounded in distant, though in actual fact recent, past.

My emphasis on this paradoxical time configuration requires clarification. The settler’s Nova Scotia of The Old Judge is far from historyless. Sugars (2014a, 2014b) elaborates on the work’s indigenized, in the sense described above, settler ghosts, as providing the missing history and cultural credentials. For her, Canadian writers perceive the Gothic as a necessary phase in the development of cultural identity, formative by being first indulged and then outgrown; however, lacking long history, Canada is simultaneously too young and too old to undergo it, which she calls the Rip Van Winkle effect (2014a: 63–64). Haliburton’s supernatural is meant to counteract that effect by providing the missing ancientness and cultural richness (Sugars, 2014b; 2014a: 118–119). While I draw on Sugars, I believe the work’s representation of the past goes beyond that, and necessarily. For Rip, time just “jumps”; he is old, but not mature, for he loses the required time. To actually be effective, ancientness needs temporal distance from the present. By European standards, maturation is a lengthy process — a condition barely possible to fulfil in a colony of a short chronology, and yet met through a meticulous time structure in the text.

In Roughing It in the Bush (1852), Susanna Moodie offers a telling comparison of the passage of time in Canada and Europe. In a colony, 16 years are enough to gradually turn a swamp into a modern industrial town, whereas in England the beginnings of settlements go back to “barbarous ages” (Moodie, 1852: 251). While both types of settlement develop in stages, the Canadian one emphasizes pace: time accelerates in the New World. The same happens in The Old Judge, yet the work also highlights stages, which allows it to rhetorically extend chronology. Thus, both the antiquated past and its clear distance from the present work to legitimize the colony’s cultural maturity and identity. The text’s play with time — time lingers or accelerates; artefacts and characters age and perish rapidly or persist, being as if “out of time” — confirms the presence of Foucauldian heterotopic spaces. Therein, the ordinary passage of time is necessarily breached for the colony to attain proper legacy and distinct cultural status that might gain the Empire’s recognition and sustain the national consciousness Haliburton envisaged. ¹² My intention is, thus, to analyse the manner in which the text structures history’s temporal distance and to indicate possible goals and effects.

It is telling that Haliburton began his literary career as a historian. Particularly with An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova-Scotia (1829), his second work, he sought to attract Britain’s attention and gain the economic and military support his generation believed their province deserved, especially after 1776 and 1812 (Taylor, 1985: 104–106). For Taylor, Haliburton’s view of Nova Scotia’s progress as predicated on the settlers utilizing their potential to the fullest and Britain properly recognizing the colony’s contributions set the tone for his generation’s general attitudes of the time (1985: 111). The organization of history in the Account foreshadows that of The Old Judge in its ideological urge to clearly demarcate the present from the past and introduce a European-like chronology. Taylor usefully perceives the Account as “a single drama in four acts” (1985: 119). The first act, comprising the first volume, is a “moral tale” of the “rude past” or “feudal era” of French settlement — a foil for successful British settlement and a warning for Britain against colonial mismanagement. The following, in the second volume, are the golden age of pioneers; the age of modern development, material progress, and decision making as to the future; and the future, thriving on both rich heritage and proper imperial support (Taylor, 1985: 118–120).

Although they were written at different times and in different circumstances, there is a visible continuity between the two works. As the younger Haliburton states of the present, it is no longer any regret that the mistaken perception of the colony’s conditions as unwelcoming discourages emigration: “We do not desire emigration. We require all the unoccupied land in Nova-Scotia, for the expansive growth of our own population” (1829: 359). A local identity, or polity, is already born, shaped by combating hardships and equipped with deep understanding of the province’s character — thus entitled to the land, and indigenized by displacing the Indigene — and hence best suited to direct its own future. Simultaneously, the isopolitical perception of the province emerges, for instance, as Haliburton discards the idea of the colony’s own legislature and promotes participation in the legislature of Britain as sanctioned by custom and experience (1829, Vol. 2: 326).

The Old Judge repeatedly breaches the natural passage of time. Sugars discusses the fragment: “the country has passed the period of youth and may now be called an old colony” (Haliburton, 1849, Vol. 1: 6). ¹³ The country is old because it has stories that befit senescence (Sugars, 2014a: 116), which means it must have had time to acquire them, that is, experienced proper adulthood. Ageing as a process, rather than senescence itself, is the condition for cultural maturation, and the condition is met: if time just “jumped”, there would be no stories. Yet where is the time stretch necessary for ageing to take place? Another example appears at the onset of “The Witch of Inky Dell” chapter. As Sandford relates,

witches and apparitions have now nearly ceased to honour or alarm us with their company. Forty years ago they were very numerous, and every village and settlement had its ghost or its sorceress. Many well authenticated tales are told of their sayings and doings, and of their marvellous power. (Vol. 2: 261)

The supernatural is nearly extinct in the modern, rational era, the stories of it already catalogued for the sake of preservation. Yet while the Old World Gothic harkens back to the historical one, even if reimagined through the lenses of Gothic revival, the compendium records a retelling of stories that date back to a relatively recent past. Consequently, centuries of cultural development — from the dark ages to the enlightened present — appear compressed within the period of 40 years. Time accelerates rapidly and/or proves extendable so that the required processes of maturation could be realized.

In The Old Judge, chapters typically link the present and the past by first introducing a timely socio-political topic and then providing a story that elaborates on it, told by the Judge or Stephen Richardson. “The Tombstones” begins with Barclay’s grievances, shared by numerous provincials, “who, though warmly attached to British connexion, feel that they are practically excluded from imperial employment and the honours of the empire” (Vol. 1: 100). Clearly, imperial politics frustrate the colony’s isopolitical perception of itself in terms of co-owning the metropolitan core (Veracini, 2010: 70). Embittered at the fate of his deceased brother, a merited but unrewarded and neglected soldier, Barclay gives a lengthy monologue on the hypocrisy and moral corruption represented by the tombstones in the local churchyard. ¹⁴ Notably, the churchyard is one of Foucault’s powerful heterotopias (1984: 26). The Judge responds by recalling Shelbourne, a quasi-deserted Loyalist town in the middle of wilderness — another potential heterotopia — where he once came across a peculiar memorial to a drowned officer. Originally the second instalment of the series, “The Tombstones” exemplifies the peculiar passage of time in the work.

The story represents the past as a gradual progress towards attaining legacy — the foundation for local identity — by discursive indigenization through enduring hardships and building on ruins. The ruins provide the necessary antiquity, but also serve to mark distance in time. Simultaneously, “The Tombstones” draws a disturbing continuity between Nova Scotia’s cultural maturity, confirmed by the tombstones’ moral corruption, and British culture. It also establishes the old Judge as a kind of Rip Van Winkle character — but with a twist.

The (hi)story of Shelbourne illustrates the process of attaining legacy. Founded in 1781, the splendid wooden town “had hardly been erected before it was in a state of decay” (113). As such, it exemplifies the view that colonization is “a weaning process” in which “inexperienced Loyalists” fail (Taylor, 1985: 110). In the Account, the town’s lot is mentioned as resulting from an improper attitude towards subduing wilderness (Haliburton, 1829, Vol. 2: 359). For Haliburton, to own the land one must cultivate it properly before setting a township (1829, Vol. 2: 359). Thus, although numerous and wealthy, Shelbourne’s immigrants do little to confirm their rights as settlers, and soon either move or die. Significantly, the town degenerates into a ruin at a striking pace. Sandford recalls two visits there. During the first, before his retirement, the town has already largely died out due to mischosen location, and he is unable to keep pace with its rapid depopulation: “It was difficult to imagine it was deserted. […] All was new and recent” (Haliburton, 1849, vol. 1: 114). ¹⁵ By the second visit, however, one year before the story’s telling, it has already changed into an almost ancient ruin, inviting excavation, as if entire ages have passed. Hundreds of chimneys, stone-granite cellars, and blackened fireplaces, “[bespeak] the size of the tenement and the means of its owner”, “vaults [speaking] of a generation that had passed away for ever” (114). Those artefacts allow the Judge to deduce the details of the long gone inhabitants’ everyday life, as if he were an archaeologist. Time proves capable of extreme acceleration.

Strikingly, though, the departed generation is Sandford’s very own, few of them actually still living in the town, which also shows time acceleration is selective. Furthermore, though initially presented as largely extinct, Shelbourne is nonetheless inhabited by two thousand new settlers, “all attached to the place, [speaking] confidently of its revival […] and proudly of its former prosperity” (115). It has not only completed the stage of fall but also emerged from it, rich in legacy: “Every spot had its little history” (115). As if hundreds of years have passed, local cultural heritage is gained to be further built upon; in reality, all is attained in about half a century.

Veracini speaks of settler victimology, “suffering as a strategy for legitimizing […] claims to country” (2007: 274). If American Loyalists fail in claiming wilderness, their successors may establish a local identity by toiling on the land and the ruins. Such an identity is rooted in the history of an unsuccessful attempt to settle; another attempt may be undertaken once a more solid claim to the land is established. Thus, the failure becomes a necessary stage, a prerequisite for success. This contradicts the view that settlers represent simultaneously the beginning and the end of history, the novelty of their establishment precluding history as inescapably entailing guilt, or conflict (Veracini, 2007: 274–275). Or, it confirms that settler colonialism in Nova Scotia, as generally in Canada, has a distinct background. History as conflict — a discursive formation — belongs to Whig interpretations of history (Veracini, 2007: 275), and Haliburton’s is a Tory one. The fact that Shelbourne’s history in the Judge’s story begins with the landing of “pilgrims” rather than Loyalists (115) is notable here, as for Haliburton pilgrims embodied both effective subduing of the land and a necessary connection with the European forefathers (see Godeanu-Kenworthy, 2015: 687–689).

The future of Shelbourne is not certain, but now it has a legacy to build on and a curiously extended yet compressed past to remember. Sandford clearly belongs to a different time-frame. He experiences the impact of time’s passage most acutely in the places from which he has been absent for many years (112). The tour of the province he embarks on in his old age makes him realize he himself is a relic of the past, a representative of a bygone era:

A generation had passed away […] Many whom I had known I could not at first recognise: care, time, and disease, had not been idle. […] I was a stranger among strangers. […] My local interest was the same, but my personal interest had gone, and gone for ever. (111)

The familiar is permanently lost for it has changed, which is further emphasized by the Judge’s depiction of nature: while the people he once knew are generally still alive, only the landscape proves relatable, and especially its immemorial elements such as the moon or the mountains (113). ¹⁶ This, along with the fact that he excavates the ancient ruins of a settlement younger that he himself is, positions him peculiarly out of time.

Sandford’s peculiar time-travel makes him resemble Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle. Both leave a place and return when it has changed beyond recognition, and thus can be seen as ghosts of the past made obsolete by progress. Yet Rip is a troubling ghost, a token of imperial past out of place in the US present, and also a ghost of himself, as, upon return, he is dispossessed of both his British patriarchal and very personal Self (Anolik, 2019: 82): “I’m not myself — I’m somebody else — […] everything’s changed, and I’m changed, and I can’t tell […] who I am!” (Irving, 2012/1819: 14). He also quickly adapts the new liberating American identity (Anolik, 2019: 82). Sandford, by contrast, neither loses his identity nor agrees to change it. His persistence against change alienates him. Read as a ghost, he would be the only ghost haunting Shelbourne — a home(l)y one, a token of history to be remembered and identity to be upheld, according to Sugars’ definition of Canadian Gothic.

From the perspective of Haliburton’s politics, this is exactly what he represents: the Tory memory/history under threat of obliteration. Sandford has a different relationship with time than Rip. His time travel is indeed a travel, not a jump: he revisits the future — a temporality that has moved forward ahead of him — which is still the present, and speaks of the long gone past. His failing recognition of the past in the present reflects Haliburton’s fear of too much history being forgotten while there may be not enough history to claim cultural distinctiveness, the obsessive awareness of “living in history” of which Sugars writes (2014a: 119; emphasis in original). If he is out of place, a representative of a bygone era, then so is the memory he carries. And yet, he does carry it: he wanders across time and space and bestows it upon his listener(s). As a ghost, he does not rest in peace.

Shelbourne’s entire (hi)story contradicts the logic behind Rip’s time jump. Rip moves “from a prolonged adolescence to a comfortable retirement, having skipped most of the stress and inconvenience of adult life” (Crow, 2009: 31). Shelbourne’s founders, Van Winkles of a kind, launch a settlement and hope to immediately enjoy it well established, modern, wealthy, and prosperous — but fail. The stress and inconvenience of adulthood thus emerge as necessary to forge strong settler identity, one tied to a location and entitled to it. ¹⁷

Foucault defines heterotopias based on heterochronies as “linked to slices in time — which is to say that they open onto […] a sort of absolute break with traditional time” (1984: 26). Shelbourne, with its ancient ruins and gradual development compressed into several decades, is such a heterotopia. There, indigenized settler identity is forged and cultural maturity validated with heritage. Yet if discursive indigenization is typically accompanied by Europeanization — and all the more so in Haliburton — then the other process is enabled by another powerful heterotopia, the burial place.

The monument to the drowned officer, the key artefact in the text, is out of time as well. Apparently “just erected” (116), it actually dates back to 1790. As the Judge calculates, if the officer still lived, “he would have been […] a tottering, decrepit old man like myself, full of years and infirmities” (118–119). He ponders:

would disease have put in its claim, or the battlefield held him as a victim? Was ignominy avoided or honour lost by that event? Would his career in life have been unmarked, or has a name perished that was destined to grace the pages of his country’s history? (119)

Since the officer died young and gloriously, his monument is impervious to decay, unlike the Judge, the other tombstones in the graveyard, and Shelbourne in general. Notably, his (hi)story proves part of the colony’s historical/cultural pedigree. Simultaneously, change, ageing, and physical decay become linked with moral corruption; death spared the officer dishonour as much as prevented bodily deterioration, and this makes his grave stand out (and out of time), in a sharp contrast to the tombstones around it.

Cultural maturity does entail moral corruption. The assumption that Canadian backwoods resist a history of guilt — or a Gothic history — contestable as it is, serves a well-defined purpose. As the settlers inscribe their own ghosts on the terra nullius they thus symbolically possess, the landscape, emptied of its own past, is “gothicize[d] into literary history” (Sugars, 2014a: 62). Settler ghosts “become an index of historical legitimacy that is achieved through the fallen condition of history itself”, and the colonies are “ghosted” precisely because ghosts, implying corruption and guilt, “are associated with history, tradition and culture” (Sugars, 2014a: 61, 62).

Not surprisingly, then, in “The Tombstones”, the child’s grave, the monument, and the colony’s youth are unspoiled. The hypocritical tombstones confirm Nova Scotia’s corruption, and thus certify the colony’s cultural maturity, perhaps even an exaggerated one. As the parent country is morally depraved and hypocritical, so too — refusing its loyal subjects well deserved gratification for service — the colonial hypocrisy and depravation may be traced back over the ocean, and hence the continuity with the Empire is emphasized. It is a bitter one, though. In the context of the reforms of 1840s, mutual hypocrisy threatens with separation.

Carrying memories raises the question of memory’s accuracy, one which is emphasized in the “Horse Shoe-cove; or, Hufeisen Bucht” chapters. Both are set in another provincial heterotopia, a cove at the banks of La Hive, a former French trading post and Native peoples’ burial place. The first chapter concentrates on the cove’s later German owner, Nicholas Spohr, of Lunnenburg, and begins by discussing the structure of Nova Scotian society, dispersed and classless, and thus deprived of a sustaining social bond between members. For Katherine Morrison, it castigates American individualism and real isolation (1984: 63). The second is devoted to the cove’s next owner, the mysterious John Smith.

In the second chapter, the present already emulates the American example and clears the cove of both ancient ruins and local ghosts (Haliburton, 1849, vol. 2: 225–226). The time structure throughout both chapters resembles the one in “The Tombstones”: the referenced past is longer, beginning in 1606, but again both extended and compressed. Appended with relevant dates, the cove’s changing fortunes illustrate Haliburton’s generation’s vision of the beginning of British settlement as the critical point in the province’s history (see Taylor, 1985: 113). The first date given is 1749, the founding of Halifax. The story of Spohr begins and ends around 1777. That of Smith takes place between 1795 and 1799. Read alongside the Account, the two chapters correspond to the second phase of Nova Scotia’s history, pioneering, extending into the third phase, modern development. The Germans of Lunnenburg, persecuting Smith for witchcraft, stand for the superstitious, indigenized folk, conveniently distanced from the reader as the past (see Sugars, 2014b). The story also mentions the quasi-medieval times of unsuccessful French settlement, ¹⁸ and ends in what in 1829 would still be the future, though different from what the younger Haliburton envisioned. The beginnings of the cove as the Native peoples’ burial place are traced back to a time before the European settlement and the recording of history, and may be thus seen as prehistoric. ¹⁹ Thus represented, Nova Scotia’s history, though compressed in the time span of two and a half centuries, proves a worthy match for the British one — albeit in direct threat of erasure.

The chapters also engage with memory in terms of primal scene and screen memory, as discussed by Veracini (2010). Veracini notes that “the disavowal of both a founding violence [towards the Indigene] and of indigenous presences systematically informs settler perception” (2010: 84). Settler communities typically associate the first encounter with other agents of colonialism, seeing themselves as replacing “previous colonial regimes” (Veracini, 2010: 84). Haliburton illustrates this well. In The Clockmaker, the Native people are first displaced by Acadians, and then entirely disavowed by introducing Puritans as having launched settlement on the continent (see Godeanu-Kenworthy, 2015: 688–689). Moreover, the Indigene as a source of authority in reference to which settler identity should be negotiated (see Lawson, 2004) is replaced by the US, the new political power (Godeanu-Kenworthy, 2015: 687). “Horse-shoe Cove” chapters similarly enact disavowal on various levels.

Firstly, the British succeed Germans and Acadians in their contact with Native peoples. Notably, these are described as hostile because manipulated by the French, and hostilities end with the British Conquest (175–176). ²⁰ Next, positioning the Indigene as prehistoric serves to both affirm the colony’s history and deprive the Native people of their own. The Indigene here represents “a pre-white past” and “pure prehistoricity […] removed from historical necessity” (Goldie, 1989: 148). Prehistory is both pure, preceding the destruction of nature, and illiterate, preceding historical time (Goldie, 1989: 151). The Native people are further displaced by being recast as part of nature (Morrison, 1984: 65). Here, however, Haliburton’s socio-political perspective puts the settler-colonial tactic of perception transfer to a curious use. Perception transfer consists in not registering the presence of Native people, for example by naturalization, which in turn may allow to perceive them as exogenous upon contact — as invading the indigenized settler’s space (Veracini, 2010: 37). The moment of contact is then what Veracini refers to as the primal scene: the moment of memory’s inception, when the illusion of the settler’s nonviolent origin and ownership of the land is disturbed (2010: 87). This moment necessarily entails denial; screen memory is thus the settler’s ability to memorize the colonial past selectively (Veracini, 2010: 90).

Both phenomena occur in the chapters on two levels: the meta-level of the narrative, and Spohr’s story, in which they peculiarly become the cause of the man’s doom. Spohr, a pioneer who discovers and claims the old French settlement in the cove, experiences the primal scene as Native people “invade” his land to bury their dead. Disturbed by the visit, he nonetheless does not recognize the sacred character of the ancient burial place and violates it by clearing ancient trees. The sacrilege is punished by the murder and scalping of his wife and children; Spohr goes mad, dies on their graves, and haunts the cove. The depiction of surrounding nature as he approaches the scene of murder, suddenly changed by the arrival of autumn, indicates that it “knows”, being one with the Indigene, and foretells the tragedy to be witnessed (187). The image of the trees, reflected and inverted in the river, “growing downwards” (188), is particularly telling with regard to how this story incorporates Haliburton’s politics.

Spohr is an opportunist and individualist living in isolation and thriving on chance, and thus holds little actual right to the land. Simultaneously, however, he also violates the connection with the past. As the Native people are already primevalized and naturalized, the connection is not with their past, though. As primal scene and screen memory work also on the text’s meta-level, the burial place becomes a universal symbol of the cove’s history which, in Haliburton’s rendition, begins with European settlers, and, by extension, Europe itself. Thus, Haliburton performs a threefold gesture of displacing the Indigene, ultimately tying them with the natural order of British class society, in which bond and safety are predicated on taking one’s proper place and cherishing the past. The Native people become reconstituted to symbolically serve Haliburton’s politics. Notably, in the second chapter they are friendly with Smith, the cove’s later owner, with whom Sandford sympathizes and who is finally revealed to be English (224). As for Spohr, though he failed to own the land, he becomes part of its history/heritage as a ghost. His story is exactly the story of murder and rapine needed to confirm Canada’s cultural legacy (Sugars, 2014a: 62–63).

Haliburton held an organic view of the Empire (Godeanu-Kenworthy, 2009: 693–694). In The Clockmaker, he writes: “cuttin’ off the colonies is like cutting off the roots of a tree” (1839: 272). The reflected, inverted image of the trees Spohr beholds rowing to the cove indicates that, by clearing the burial ground, he has also uprooted himself. In this, he foreshadows Nova Scotians who will, in several decades, entirely clear the cove in the American fashion, and breach their own connection with the past by forgetting their own roots — white, European, ultimately British, and hence imperial. The American revolutionary view of the past threatens the cove’s ghosts with extinction resulting from historical shortsightedness (Morrison, 1984: 65). With the surge of new settlers, Spohr’s story either becomes an unintelligible palimpsest, dates, names, and events confused, or is simply forgotten (225–226). Consequently, recent history proves obscure and already too distant to be accessible, as if it were ages old. With the progress of reform, the imperial ties are closer and closer to being cut. Once this happens, the legacy of Nova Scotia will prove useless and the colonials will disinherit themselves of their history and Self, both transatlantic and local.

Spohr’s ghost is peculiarly employed in the service of Haliburton’s vision of Nova Scotia’s history to historicize the landscape via haunting. His story is a cautionary tale. Lent’s ghost is more persistent. “The Lone House” chapter, originally opening the Fraser’s series, begins with a description of Nova Scotian winter, beautiful but dangerous, but overall delves into the consequences of isolation in a hostile environment (Morrison, 1984: 65). Thus, it elaborates on the perils of functioning outside of society and, figuratively, the Empire.

The chapter concentrates on an isolated microcosm of society, the Lent family, who own a shore road farm and inn, in a distant part of the province. The place is clearly heterotopic and Gothic: desolate, barren, consisting of rocks, bogs, and a lake resembling “the pool of death” (Haliburton, 1849, vol. 1: 256). John Lent, the founder of the farm, freezes to death in a snow storm half a year before Sandford’s visit. Found and delivered home, he is left in one of the guest rooms. His wife experiences a temporary mental breakdown and cannot bury him until there appear three sailors, miraculously saved from shipwreck. Life continues after the burial, but the widow is haunted by Lent’s ghost, whom she believes to be a protective spirit. She tells the Judge she and her daughters are provided for by God himself, spared illness, hunger, and aided by unspecified “friends” (279–280). In reality, however, they appear to be possessed by wilderness (Morrison, 1984: 66).

Morrison reads the chapter as Haliburton’s tribute to the woman’s strength (1984: 66). ²¹ Yet Mrs Lent’s persistence in the wilderness is disturbing. Her continuing madness in never openly stated, but appears a more convincing explanation for the ghost’s visitations than the one the chapter overtly offers (279). Her physical condition is poor as she ages rapidly, exhaustion and anxiety turning the young woman into “a staid and care-worn matron” (263). The lack of protection guaranteed by a man’s presence in the household is hinted at when the sailors appear (274–275). The benevolence of the ghost is questionable, too: failing to bury the dead is a sacrilege, and calls for a vengeful presence. Notably, the widow refuses to leave the farm because she does not want to separate from Lent (280). Sandford’s lack of comment on the whole story leaves its interpretation to the reader. Thus, the chapter may be viewed as above all drawing attention to the appalling consequences of isolation.

On a more general level, the heterotopia of the farm is an allegory of an isolated colony. The initial stillness of time, its passage indicated only by the change of seasons (262), recalls a utopic historyless settler situation. Nothing much happens there, except for the older daughters’ departures. Tellingly, they need to leave the heterotopia to start their own families — no society is ever to be formed in it. In the light of Haliburton’s view of society as emulating the British social order, the Lents’ establishment is doomed to failure no matter how hard they work the land because, alone, they have not enough capacity to subdue it. After Lent’s death, caused by the untameable environment, time first lingers morbidly as Mrs Lent refuses to accept her husband is dead. Then, it accelerates rapidly, consuming her youth — which, in the former lengthy period of stagnation, might just as well have been eternal — as if it had to make up for the unspecified number of years without change. When the Judge visits the farm/micro-colony, it has already reached its senescence, and is gradually dissolving into nature, without any future.

Veracini notes that, in the context of such a narrative, “[u]tter failure to operate within an imperial or national sovereignty can […] have disastrous consequences” (2010: 69). Exposure, lack of protection, and diminished capacity may undercut the settler endeavour (Veracini, 2010: 69). From this perspective, the chapter may be read as another cautionary tale — an ultimate warning against leaving the Empire. A colony isolated in a hostile environment, without support and protection, finds itself traumatized, vulnerable, and decaying. Significantly, the location of the farm separates it from Nova Scotia’s tissue. It is not the entire colony that is approaching doom, yet. Simultaneously, the Lents’ story attests to the colony’s cultural maturity, too: the fall of innocence effected by madness and sacrilege confirms bypassing youth and achieving adulthood. Nova Scotia is no longer too young to be sinless; pursuing its own route of cultural progress, it has reached its own dead ends and bred its own ghosts, from which it can now learn.

Godeanu-Kenworthy notes that The Clockmaker represents no stable, coherent Nova Scotian self (2009: 212, 231). The Old Judge, by contrast, has several notable Nova Scotian characters: Sandford, Barclay, and even Richardson, ridiculed yet affirmed (see Sugars: 2014b: 227). All of them represent the self, in its various dimensions — loyal, but embittered, redneck and Gothic, yet discursively indigenized. So do the ghosts discussed here; notably, one of them is the Old Judge himself, still living, the carrier of memory — and history. As Anthony D. Smith remarks, central to nationalism “is the idea that nations exist from time immemorial” (1991: 19). If Nova Scotians do not, The Old Judge provides them with a history that nonetheless extends into prehistoric times, and yet has its polished, gentlemanly pedigree well documented (Haliburton, 1849, vol. 1: 197). Its chronology — illustrated by heterotopic spaces where time both lingers and speeds, recent past becoming distant by whole centuries — parallels that of a European country, even if it has to be necessarily compressed within several decades. What is gained is not only a rich heritage and a sense of ancientness, but also a maturation process that necessarily has to take time in order to be successfully completed.

A stable version of history is a firm foundation for identity formation. Shared memories, symbols, values, and myths — or ghost stories — provide a basis for nationhood (Smith, 1991: 20). It is in this sense that Spohr and Lent represent a Nova Scotian character. They embody the stages of a nation’s history, with its ups and downs — and their stories are didactic. In fact, while The Old Judge is generically hybrid, it could well be considered a romance. Its stories befit one (Haliburton, 1849, vol. 2: 225–226) and, indeed, are romanced: catalogued and preserved by the Englishman, whose very presence undercuts the directness and objectivity of Sandford’s recollections. They are the Gothic tales the province needs to confirm its cultural maturity — and the Gothic inescapably romances the historical period it purports to relate. As such, also, they are to be remembered, their aim to inculcate, and forge a particular version of the self: isopolitical, local but Europeanized, Nova Scotian and British.

The version of history Haliburton promotes is clearly underpinned by his political stance, visible particularly in his appropriation of the Indigene as an avenger of the “natural” British order. Notably, The Old Judge was published at the time when the local politics took a Liberal turn and responsible government was attained. Its isopolitical perspective, the drive to historicize the landscape with indigenized settler ghosts, make it representative of early Anglophone-Canadian writing. Simultaneously, its attitude towards the progress of reform marks it as representing the worldview of the conservative elites of Nova Scotian society. As such, it does, nevertheless, reflect the contemporary discourses and shed light on the powers that impacted the formation of the future Canadian self.