Images of the Fisher Folk in Newfoundland, 1900-1930s

IAN McKAY BEGINSThe Quest of the Folk with a study of an early-20th-century photograph of a people in a fishing community in Nova Scotia.Labelled, "The Simple Life", the picture represented the way that some members of the urban middle class had come to see, describe and think about the rural inhabitants of their province.No longer simply people who lived outside urban areas and fished for a living, these romanticized, idealized fisher Folk came to represent the very essence of Nova Scotia itself.As McKay explains, interest in the Folk developed among the middle classes of Europe and North America in the 19th-and early-20th centuries, a response to modernity and class politics within an increasingly transforming world.The difficulty with this portrayal, McKay argues, is that it turns living people into static types, who live in a world devoid of class conflict, social complexity and ethnic, racial and religious diversity.As well, by defining the quintessential Nova Scotian as a fisher, these creators of the Folk excluded the majority of the province's people.McKay's study offers an opportunity to start looking at the wider interest in the Folk and folklore and its uses in the Atlantic region.In the early-20th century, some urban, middle-class people in Newfoundland were also portraying fishing people as having Folk qualities.1 The Newfoundland Quarterly, a literary and feature magazine founded in 1901, is filled with articles and poems celebrating "our fisher Folk".Frequent contributors included Henry LeMessurier, civil servant and politician, and P.K. Devine, journalist and clerk of the House of Assembly who published one of the first books on Newfoundland folklore.2 Indeed, the actual representations of fisher Folk were quite similar in Nova Scotia and in Newfoundland, and both mixed romanticism, antimodernism and variants of nationalism.The differences, however, lie in the ways that these images were used in the interwar years and the way that these collections of folklore circulated amongst the rural people.I thought I would use this time to talk about the way the fisher Folk were being represented in Newfoundland in this period and give you a brief outline of the growth in the interest in folklore.My purpose is not to provide any definitive explanations for the similarities and differences in these experiences in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, but to suggest that comparisons could enrich our understanding of the experiences of modernity in the Atlantic region.Newfoundland's experience with industrialization was certainly small relative to Nova Scotia's in the early-20th century.A controversial railway, an iron ore mine on Bell Island, a pulp and paper mill in Corner Brook, and some light manufacturing in St. John's represented the bulk of the industrial projects.Despite this record, I would argue that there was an antimodernist element to the interest in the Folk in Newfoundland and that some members of the urban middle class had concerns about the consequences of modernity.In fact, the very decade that saw the emergence of the Newfoundland Quarterly was also a period of vigorous activity by both government

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