Edward Taylor Fletcher (20 May 1817 – 1 February 1897) was a Canadian poet, memoirist, travel writer, essayist, land surveyor, and architect. He resided in
Quebec City,
Montreal, and
Toronto before moving to
British Columbia in his retirement, where he lived in
Victoria and finally
New Westminster. He was a member of the
Literary and Historical Society of Quebec and also served as its librarian and secretary.
Early life and education
Fletcher first arrived in Quebec on 20 October 1827, where he began attending the Reverend Daniel Wilkie's private school, and in 1832 he began studies at the
Séminaire de Québec. He contracted cholera in 1832 during the
1826–1837 cholera pandemic
The second cholera pandemic (1826–1837), also known as the Asiatic cholera pandemic, was a cholera pandemic that reached from India across Western Asia to Europe, Great Britain, and the Americas, as well as east to China and Japan.Note: The s ...
and survived but lost his mother to the disease. On 21 October 1846, he married Henrietta Amelia Lindsay, who was the daughter of William Burns Lindsay Sr. and brother of
William Burns Lindsay Jr.
William Burns Lindsay Jr. (1824–1872) was the first Clerk of the House of Commons of Canada, having served from 1867 to 1872. He served as the last Clerk of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada from 1862 to 1867, after having se ...
, both of whom were clerks of the Legislative Assembly. Together, they had thirteen children, six of whom lived.
Bibliography
Long Poems
* ''The Lost Island (Atlantis)'' (1887)
* ''Nestorius: A Phantasy'' (1892)
Memoirs
* "Notes of a Journey Through the Interior of the Saguenay Country" (1869)
* "Notes of a Voyage to St. Augustine, Labrador" (1882)
* "Notes from Victoria, B.C." (1890)
* "Letter on British Columbia" (1892)
* "Reminiscences of Old Quebec" (1913)
Non-fiction essays
* "Icelandic Poetry" (1844)
* "Songs of the Polish Peasantry" (1844)
* "The Twenty Years Siege of Candia" (1855)
* ''On Language, As Subjective and Objective'' (1857)
* "On Languages as Evincing Special Modes of Thought" (1861)
* "The Lost Island of Atlantis" (1865)
* "On the Secular Change of Magnetic Declination in Canada, from 1790 to 1850" (1865)
* "The Kalevala or National Epos of the Finns" (1869)
* ''Our Lord at Bethany'' (1874)
* "Map-Making in the Middle-Ages" (1878)
* "Crown Land Surveys, P.Q." (1885)
References
External links
Fletcher, Edward Taylorentry at the
Dictionary of Canadian Biography
Fletcher, Edward Taylorentry at ''Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada''
"The world’s extremest borne": West Coast Landscapes and the Poetic Works of Edward Taylor Fletcher Canadian Literature
Of Sunken Islands and Pestilence: Restoring the Voice of Edward Taylor Fletcher to Nineteenth-Century Canadian Literature Athabasca University Press
The Sealed Book of the Future: The Collected Prose of Edward Taylor Fletcher Humanities Commons
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fletcher, Edward Taylor
1817 births
1897 deaths
Canadian male poets
People from Kent (before 1889)
Canadian surveyors
Canadian male essayists
English emigrants to Canada
Canadian travel writers
People from New Westminster
Writers from British Columbia
19th-century Canadian civil servants
19th-century Canadian essayists
19th-century Canadian male writers
19th-century Canadian poets
19th-century Canadian memoirists