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BASKERVILLE, Peter and Eric W. SAGER, UNWILLING IDLERS: The Urban Unemployed and Their Families in Late Victorian Canada. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 1998, 294pp., $24.95 softcover.
Unemployment has a long history. As Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle wrote of Britain in Chartism one hundred and sixty years ago (1839), "(a) man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun." While unemployment in Britain may well have reached the level of devastation as portrayed by Thomas Carlyle at the time of his writing, the emergence of joblessness as a social problem in Canada only became evident during the late nineteenth century, at the start of Canada's `industrial revolution'.
Unwilling Idlers grew out of a massive multi-year project, led by two prominent Canadian historians Peter Baskerville and Eric Sager, which involved transforming thousands of the 1891 and 1901 census questionnaires into digital data files. The study uses data from a 10% sample of households selected from six Canadian cities: Halifax, Montreal, Hamilton, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and Victoria. The study sample includes a total of 36,221 individuals from the 1891 census and 41,081 individuals from the 1901 census. The result is the most comprehensive microhistorical analysis of unemployment in urban Canada at the turn of the century.
Baskerville and Sager initially set...