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Agnes Maude Machar

Agnes Maule Machar

Agnes Maule Machar was a child of the manse of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church. One of three children born to the Rev. John Machar and Mrs. J.M Machar, she was much influenced by her father who was renowned for his devotion to pastoral work and commitment to serving his congregation, and her mother who was equally Impressive formative force in her life. She emerges as one of the prominent women in Kingston's history.

Agnes Maule Machar's Strong Presbyterian social conscience was nurtured by her upbringing in a household where learning, intelligent discourse and Christian charity were a lived practice. Her connections with St. Andrew's Church and Queen's University ensured a constant interaction with professors, politicians, poets, novelists, political theorists, and religious leaders. The social circle during her years at the St. Andrew's manse was a rich one: John A. Macdonald used her father's library, Olivia Mowat and Richard Cartwright were visitors, and she hosted such worthies as Canadian poet, Pauline Johnson, and famed British evolutionists, Alfred Russell Wallace. And then there was George Munroe Grant with whom she shared many common interests and affinities of outlook.

During Agnes Machar's formative and productive years, Kingston was a centre of progressive thought, and it had been argued that her emergence as "one of the most gifted intellectuals and social critics in late-nineteenth Canada" owed much to her lived-in world.

Agnes Maule Machar may have been a prominent social activist at the local level, but she was also a multi-faceted woman. An accomplished artist, she painted portraits of Exhibitions where, between 1859 and 1868, she won several prizes for pencil drawings, oil and water colour landscapes, and animal paintings. Furthermore, writing under the nom de plume, "Fidelis", she penned poetry, novels, histories, biographies, children's stories and made her mark in the realm of Canadian arts and letters.

In 1887, one of her poems was rewarded the prize of best composition honouring Queen Victoria's Jubilee. In 1893, she was the only woman among thirteen Canadian authors said to have attained international recognition, and in 1903, she was elected Vice-President of the Canadian Society of Authors. Active in her own community, the early records of the young Kingston Historical Society refer to a meeting on 19 April 1904 at which a motion was passed unanimously, "To consider the advisability of publishing a History of Kingston". At a subsequent meeting of a committee charged to pursue this task, Agnes Machar offered to compile the desired history, an offer that was accepted as "no one member had sufficient leisure to undertake the work".

Four years later, her story of Old Kingston was published and dedicated to the memory of "The Good Men and True Who Built Up Old Kingston; and To All Citizens of To-Day Who Follow Their Traditions and Example".

Agnes Machar was an ardent literary nationalist and her considerable literary productivity ensured her a platform to promote her vision of Canadian society and polity. Her declared mission was that of the public intellectual: "If there is something to be said for the right, a wrong to be redressed, or a warning word uttered, I think that we should always be ready with our pen."

Thus, prompted, Agnes Machar was a tireless advocate of causes that transcended ethereal Christianity and several major themes emerge: social justice; the power of nature; and British imperialism and Canadian patriotism.

…On her death in 1927, the congregation of St. Andrew's mourned the loss of a literary figure, social reformer, nationalist, and conservationist. Rev. John Stephen presided at the funeral of the oldest member of his church, and many of Kingston's prominent citizens gathered to pay their last respects to one "whose loss to the city in which she lived her long and useful life is realized with deep regret."

Brian S. Osborne, Department of Geography, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

As the nineteenth century came to a close, Canadian Presbyterianism was changing. On the one hand, the traditional Christian concern with poverty, intemperance, gambling, political corruption, the "social evil" (the contemporary euphemism for prostitution), child neglect, and the aged continued to be important to a Presbyterian world-view. Increasingly, however, the Presbyterian social agenda focussed less on the moral regeneration of the individual through salvation and placed more emphasis on collective action espoused by a "Social Gospel."

Throughout this period, Kingston’s St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church and Queen's University were central to theological, political, and economic discourses of the improvement of Canadian society. One locally prominent Presbyterian transcended the parochial to attain national reputations: Agnes Maule Machar.

Agnes Maule Machar was one of three children born to the Rev. John Machar and Mrs. J.M. Machar, she was much influenced by her father, who was renowned for his devotion to pastoral work and commitment to serving his congregation, and her mother, who was an equally impressive formative force in her life.

Agnes Maule Machar’s strong Presbyterian social conscience was nurtured by her upbringing in a household where learning, intelligent discourse, and Christian charity were a lived practice. Her connections with St. Andrew’s Church and Queen’s University ensured a constant interaction with professors, politicians, poets, novelists, political theorists, and religious leaders. The social circle during her years at the St. Andrew’s manse was a rich one: John A. Macdonald used her father’s library, Oliver Mowat and Richard Cartwright were visitors, and she hosted such worthies as Canadian poet, Pauline Johnston, and famed British evolutionist, Alfred Russell Wallace. And then there was George Munroe Grant with whom she shared many common interests and affinities of outlook. During Agnes Machar’s formative and productive years, Kingston a centre of progressive thought and Ramsay Cooke has argued that her emergence as “one of the most gifted intellectuals and social critics in late-nineteenth Canada” owed much to her lived-in world.

Agnes Maule Machar may have been a prominent social activist at the local level, but she was also a multi-faceted women. An accomplished artist, she painted portraits of her mother and father and submitted her work to the Upper Canadian Provincial Exhibition where, between 1859 and 1868, she won several prizes for pencil drawings, oil and water colour landscapes, and animal paintings. Furthermore, writing under the nom de plume, “Fidelis,” she penned poetry, novels, histories, biographies, children’s stories and made her mark in the realm of Canadian arts and letters. In 1887, one of her poems was awarded the prize for the best composition honouring Queen Victoria's Jubilee, in 1893, she was the only woman among thirteen Canadian authors said to have attained international recognition, and, in 1903, she was elected Vice-President of the Canadian Society of Authors. Agnes Machar was an ardent literary nationalist and her considerable literary productivity ensured her a platform to promote her vision of Canadian society and polity. Her declared mission was that of the public intellectual committed to the redress of grievance and the relief of suffering.

Thus prompted, Agnes Machar was a tireless advocate of causes that transcended ethereal Christianity and several major themes emerge: social justice; British imperialism and Canadian patriotism; and the power of Nature.

Following in her mother’s foot-steps, from 1859-1882, Agnes Maule Machar was in charge of Kingston’s “Widow’s and Orphans’” facility. Indeed, there seemed to be no limit to the causes to which she was committed the bequests stipulated in her will represent an honour roll of her interests: The League of Nations; Kingston Poor Relief Association; Kingston Humane Society; Kingston General Hospital; Kingston Orphans’ Home.

Some sense of her vital presence in the affairs of Kingston may be gathered from her letters to the editor on behalf of the poor and needy. Thus, on 22 January 1900, in the midst of a severe and "mysterious visitation" of what was then referred to as "La Grippe," Miss Machar, on behalf of the "Poor Relief Society," penned a letter to the Kingston Daily News to draw attention to the "present distress among our poorer classes." According to her estimates, some two hundred families were suffering from "want and illness combined" as the epidemic had struck at a time when “the large proportion of our working class has been for some time out of work.” The next day, this appeal prompted a defensive response by the Daily News. While respecting Miss Machar's "motives and veracity," the editor questioned the scale of the problem, and complained that as "these startling accounts of the destitute condition of our poor are wired abroad, an injury is done the city." Miss Machar argued forcefully that there was plenty of evidence of the destitution in the city and charged that "it is cruel both to those who are ill and suffering, and to those who are doing their best to help them, - to say anything that might tend to check needed liberality."

What she would have labelled herself in her day and age is open to question but in word and deed Agnes Machar was a progressive woman. Certainly, she was a member of the National Council of Women, the first Canadian life-member of the International Council of Women, and a constant advocate of women’s rights. For Janice Fiamengo, …[s]he was a feminist, a theological liberal, and a passionate reformer, whose strong convictions prompted her to debate...She was also a tireless supporter of philanthropic causes, one of the many single women of the period who took advantage of the increased opportunities for usefulness offered by church sanctioned social activities.

Indeed, these church sanctions had their limits. One’s mind boggles at what her reaction must have been when her report on the “Junior Mission to India” had to be read by a clergyman on her behalf because, it was “wholly unwarranted by Scripture and the practice of the Church” for a lady’s name to appear in the Assembly Records! One wonders if it were she who queried these arrangements in her own congregation. Was she the anonymous member of the congregation, "A Sister," who raised an interesting conundrum?

I am a lady member of St. Andrew's Church, and as women are not allowed to speak in the Presbyterian Church, and also as St. Paul says, "Women are to ask their husbands at home if they want information about church matters," what am I to do who have no husband? I find those ladies who have husbands are not any better informed than myself.

If it were not Agnes Machar, there can be no doubt that she sympathised with such progressive views.

Issues such as this were but one part of Agnes Maule Machar’s profound social conscience that prompted her to also challenge the abuses of contemporary capitalism and the associated pathologies of urbanism and industrial life. She was at the forefront of the campaign to apply a revitalised Christianity to a secularising world. No mere rhetorician or theorist, she focussed on the pragmatics of social reform and material progress: temperance, winter works programmes, houses of refuge for the “deserving poor,” coffee-houses, reading rooms, gymnasia, all attracted her endorsement. Thus, in 1895, acting on behalf of the Kingston local of the National Council of Women, she petitioned Kingston City Council to undertake sewer construction, both to improve the health of the community and to provide employment for destitute workers.

Nor did she confine herself to the local. Several of her novels, and especially Roland Graeme, Knight (1892), bruited abroad her radical views and proposed initiatives that went to the heart of contemporary problems through a social gospel. Her fictive constructions were really elaborations of her non-fiction concerns and constituted concrete representations of such abstract radical thought as Henry George’s “Single Tax.” Even the radical Knights of Labour’s strategy of strikes was accepted as a rational reaction: "When there is combination to oppress, there must sometimes be combination to resist oppression." Her attacks upon the circumstances of female labour were decades ahead of her time, arguing that women "are obliged to work more hours than any young woman should be allowed to do, miserably paid, and exposed to petty tyrannies enough to take out of their life any little comfort they might have in it." And she unabashedly spoke out in favour of the tenets of a “Christian socialism":

This is the prospectus of a paper I propose to issue in the interest of our common humanity. It is designed to promote the brotherhood of man, to secure a better feeling between class and class, employer and employed, - a fairer scale of wages and hours for the operative, fuller co-operation between employer and employees and mutual consideration for each other's interests, in short, to propagate that spirit of Christian socialism ...

In all of this, Agnes Maule Machar’s Christianity was at the core of her drive to achieve a reformed social order and a transformed, but not displaced, capitalist society.

As with her contemporaries, George Munro Grant, George R. Parkin, and Andrew Macphail, Agnes Machar’s ideas of political loyalties also accommodated a sense of moral mission. Her advocacy of a Canadian national identity always emphasised connections to the Mother Country, and Canada’s place within the British Empire. Hers was an ardent literary nationalism whose allusions to iconic historical figures and events and celebrations of the sublime beauties of the landscape were blatant emotional prompts for a patriotic love of a Christian Canada. And her view of national unity was an inclusive one. French-Canada’s story was also part of the Canadian national chronicle. She argued for tolerance for Louis Riel and the redress of abuses levelled against French-Canadians. Paradoxically, she did not find this inconsistent with an advocacy of an Anglo-Saxon world-wide mission in which the United States would stand with the British Empire. Nevertheless, in all of this, a love for Canada was to the fore. Her prize-winning poem on the occasion of Queen Victoria's jubilee, entitled "Our Canadian Fatherland," was an unequivocal statement of her view:

Not only was Nature central to Agnes Machar’s “patriotic landscape,” Canada’s natural world was the source of individual and social strength. In her novel, Lucy Raymond, she expresses the essence of her beliefs:

There in that solitary stillness - all the stiller for the confused murmur of soft sounds, and the fresh, sweet breath of the woods perfuming the air - unaccustomed thoughts came into the little girl's mind, - thoughts which in the din and bustle of the city, where the tide of human interests sufficed to fill up her undeveloped mind, had scarcely ever entered it. But here, where the direct works of God alone were around her, her mind was irresistibly drawn towards Him.

This becomes a constant theme in her oeuvre. A melding of theology and transcendentalism whereby the Divine Creator’s works and the qualities of love, justice, and harmony were revealed through the beauties of the natural world:

Similarly, Agnes Maule Machar’s several poems – "Drifting among the Thousand Islands," "The Happy Islands," "September among the Thousand Islands," and "The Cliff to the Islands"- focused on the Upper St. Lawrence and the Thousand Islands as a place of restoration and communion with Nature.

And it was not only in her manuscripts and canvasses that Miss Machar advanced her ideas about Nature. A plaque at her summer home near the Thousand Islands in Gananoque, reads “Ferncliffe Protection Sanctuary, estab. 1857.” It was here that she spent much of her time reflecting on her views of the world and seeking tranquillity and inspiration. Locals recall that people were free to roam through the surrounding woodlands but were not allowed to pick flowers. Ahead of her time, such conservationist preferences prompted her to campaign for the prohibition of the use of birds’ plumage in women’s hats and the promotion of wilderness parks. Others recall the drama of the frequent visits to local schools of “a tiny, sweet, little old lady, who always carried a frilled parasol and seemed always to wear a little black, flower-trimmed straw hat.”

What emerges from all of this is that Agnes Maule Machar is a major, and much neglected, commentator on Canadian society in the late C19 and early C20. Like Grant, she was another Presbyterian who attained national stature as a social evangelist and nation-builder, her long and full life spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her novels, poems, and essays reflect several contemporary themes at the core of an evolving Canadian consciousness: the place of Canada in the British Empire; a romantic engagement with the Canadian environment; an advocacy of an emerging nativist sensitivity. Located at the centre of a growing intellectual nationalism, the work of Agnes Maule Machar merits further attention as part of the “Canadian Movement.” Certainly, she made a contribution to an emerging Canadian identity at the root of which is what Michael Valpy identified in the Globe and Mail (19 May 2003) as “Canadians’ deep mythological attachment to the beauty of their land, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, collective equity, fairness, justice.”

A century after Agnes Maule Machar’s so-active role in the public places and minds of Kingston and Canada, several material reminders of her presence are imprinted in Kingston’s landscape. First, of course, there is her grave-site in Cataraqui Cemetery. Located close to the obelisk commemorating her father and mother, her headstone reads, Agnes Maule Machar, “Fidelis” (1836-1927), “Only the heart that can bear the burden shall share the joy of the victor’s rest.” It lies within a metre of the grave of Matilda Speers, “Tilly,” her “faithful friend and helper.”

Second, there is Machar House. Miss Machar’s will had stipulated that her executors, apply eight-tenths of the residue of my estate for the founding and maintenance at Kingston, Ontario, of a home for old ladies past earning their own livelihood and without means or with insufficient means for their maintenance, the said home to be called AGNES MAULE MACHAR HOME. "Machar House," a ten-bedroom structure at 164 Earl Street was purchased for $30,000 and, with the help of other donors, from 1932, it functioned as its benefactor wished.

Third, there is Gananoque’s “Machar’s Woods.” At a July 1937 meeting of Gananoque Town Council, it was resolved that “in recognition of the many diverse contributions made by Miss Machar to the town, the small park at the town’s west end commonly known as The Bluffs shall be officially named in future, The Agnes Machar Park.”

Finally, Agnes Maule Machar left her mark in Kingston’s City Hall. To the right of the entrance to “Memorial Hall” and its twelve stained-glass windows is one dedicated to those who served and died in the “Great” War at Sanctuary Wood in June 1916. Donated by Hugh C. Nickle, it represents not a martial scene of masculine heroism in battle but a domestic scene of mother, wife, and children. However, the accompanying verse composed by Agnes Maule Machar is an uncompromising and inspirational patriotic statement:

On her death in 1927, the congregation of St. Andrew’s mourned loss of a literary figure, social reformer, nationalist, and conservationist. Rev. John Stephen presided at the funeral of the oldest member of his church, and many of Kingston’s prominent citizens gathered to pay their last respects to one “whose loss to the city in which she lived her long and useful life is realized with deep regret.” The newspaper report of the event also alluded to the tribute from Ottawa Arts and Letters Club to one who, “for many years has occupied a high place in Canadian literature and who in both her prose and verse has done much to foster in Canadians lofty ideals and a noble patriotism.” Her parents, John and Margaret Machar, would have been proud.