A Biography of Robert Baldwin:

The Morning-Star of Memory

Michael Cross

OUP Canada

448 pages | 8 b/w photos; 2 maps | 152x228mm

978-0-19-544954-9 | Hardback | 20 September 2012

Price: £27.50

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Baldwin courageously led the charge for responsible home government, changing forever the face of Canadian politics.
Author Michael Cross has literally spent decades researching Baldwin's life and times. His developing research influenced the work of other thinkers, including John Ralston Saul.
Baldwin is perhaps one of the most eccentric characters in Canadian politics, in any historical period. The book is a compelling examination of a deep-thinking and highly imaginative psychology, preoccupied with the past and future.
Archival research turned up a host of previously unknown known facts about Baldwin, his contemporaries, and the changing relationship between Canada and Britain.
Cross digs deep into Baldwin's curious mental landscape, exploring the bizarre private life of this exceptional man. Baldwin's eccentric psychology intertwines with the course of Canadian history.
A Canada at once recognizable to readers and also vastly different: the book reveals a world of unfamiliar travel, communications, clothing, and social class.
Includes early maps, portraits, and paintings.
Places Baldwin's life in the context of the tumultuous politics around him, from the War of 1812 to the mass immigration of Irish famine refugees.

The quest for responsible government took place in turbulent times. The "very strange" personality driving this quest, Robert Baldwin, comprises the stuff of narrative so compelling it seems at times less history than novel. Baldwin's intervention in Canadian history was momentous, and in this account history is intertwined with Baldwin's enigmatic private life.

Decades of research by historian Michael Cross has unearthed new insight into this highly complex, troubled, and exceptional man. In Cross's exploration, Baldwin inhabits an intricate emotional world, entangled with reflections on past and future. Cross' narrative flows with elegant non-linearity, reflecting Baldwin's own fluid psychological chronology; the memory of his wife Eliza, who died comparative young, haunted Baldwin's often distressed mental landscape. In fact, the first chapter may contain one of the biggest surprises in any recent historical biography-taking place a month after Baldwin's death.

Even so, the book is full of comedy and charm. Cross is a delightfully polished writer, with a remarkable knack for character. Lord Sydenham is a "coxcomb" and a "rake" in the original sense of the words; Lord Elgin is an "unprepossessing little man" but with "steely determination," "a countenance stern in its frame of iron-grey muttonchops"; Louis LaFontaine is "handsome and charming but irritatingly pretentious." Interactions with the deep thinking and duty-bound Baldwin are at times chaotic collisions of markedly different personalities.

The book covers events such as the War of 1812, the 1841 Union of the Canadas, and mass migration of Irish famine refugees; it also contains a detailed chronology, portraits, maps, and paintings. Here is not just a vision of an unsettled Canada that will take many readers aback, but also an encounter with a fascinating, "very strange" personality whose profound influence changed Canadian history forever.

Readership: General trade, upper-level students in history and political science.

The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.

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A Biography of Robert Baldwin:

The Morning-Star of Memory

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