"It was not the best of times, it was not the worst of times, it was Ottawa." These words, which open this book, could come from only one pen -- that of a Canadian Dickens.
Few people know that Charles Dickens had a son who served in the North-West Mounted Police in the days when the Canadian West was wild. Those historians who mention his twelve years in the force (1874-1886) dismiss him as a round peg in a square hole, a fat, stammering, slightly deaf, alcoholic Englishman with a tendency to fall off his horse in the course of tense confrontations with Indian warriors (see the Bull Elk incident on page 218).
These recently discovered letters home to England set the record straight, and reveal the true Dickens. Originally written in the hope that a London publisher might be attracted byh a Dickensian account of adventures on the Canadian frontier, the collected letters lay, mysteriously ignored, in a university library, until Eric Nicol found them and brought them forth -- with proper editorial notes -- to dazzle the world.
Not only do these letters tell us much about the Dickens family, even to the point of parodying "Pa's" purple prose, they also tell us a great deal about early Canada as Dickens saw it in Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, and Winnipeg, and in forts all across the Prairies.
Dickens met everyone worth meeting in the West -- including Crowfoot, Gabriel Dumont, Sam Steele, Jerry Potts, and Louis Riel -- and even encountered famous visitors such as Sitting Bull, the Governor General, and Col. Harry Flashman (whom he calls "a humbug"). And while he may have blotted his copy-book surrendering Fort Pitt to Riel's rebels, we learn here that he deserves credit for inspiring the Mounties' Musical Ride and the phrase "a Mountie always gets his man."
Editor Nicol's wonderful skills have brought this man so alive that when we part from Frank Dickens at the end of the book, we do so with the sense of having lost a friend.