On the Record

Ann Muckleston, née Shortt (1808–1905)

Jersey-born daughter of an army-hospital inspector, she married hardware merchant Samuel Muckleston in 1838 and settled in Kingston, ultimately coming to live in Muckleston House on King Street, the double house her husband built with John Watkins in 1843.

Ann was one of the founders of the Protestant Orphans’ Home and, at her death in 1905, the only surviving member of its original committee, and a communicant of St. George’s Cathedral for over sixty-five years — for decades one of the foremost figures in the city’s charitable and parish life.

Emily Muckleston (1851–1941)

One of Ann’s twin daughters, and, following her mother, a lifelong worker in the city’s benevolent organizations — on the board of the Protestant Orphans’ Home and active in poor relief, remembered at her death as a prominent charities worker in Kingston.

Emily spent almost the whole of her long life in the city and outlived all her siblings, dying in 1941 at ninety, at the home of her nieces in Ottawa. She was brought back to the family plot at Cataraqui where she was buried alongside her sister.

Annie Muckleston (1851–1938)

Emily’s twin, baptized at St. George’s Cathedral along with her sister, which she served all her life. She was among the first officers of the Diocesan Woman’s Auxiliary of the Church of England in Canada, for twenty-five years Dorcas secretary of the Cathedral’s Auxiliary, an honorary vice-president of the Diocesan Board, and a life member of the Auxiliary’s Dominion Board — a leading figure in Anglican women’s work in the diocese.

Annie and Emily were thought to be the oldest twin sisters in Canada to be born, raised, and spend their whole lives in one city.

John Shortt Muckleston (1846–1923)

Samuel and Ann’s eldest son, who took over the family hardware firm and served as president of the Kingston Board of Trade before leaving Kingston in the mid-1890s for the West.

He died at Lethbridge, Alberta, in 1923, aged seventy-seven, and was buried in Calgary.

Sir John A. Macdonald (1815–1891)

Born in Glasgow and brought to Kingston as a boy of five, he practised law here before entering politics and becoming Canada’s first prime minister in 1867. By 1875, the year of the diary, the Pacific Scandal had driven him from the premiership and back to his law practice, his political fortunes at their lowest ebb; in Kingston, though, he remained the city’s own.

Macdonald’s legacy carries an added complexity today: his government built the residential school system, and the reckoning with that record has reached his own city — the statue of him in City Park was removed in 2021. Bellevue House, the Kingston villa where he lived in 1848–49, reopened in 2024 with new exhibits that tell his story whole.

Dictionary of Canadian Biography: Sir John A. Macdonald

Eliza Grimason (c. 1821–1916)

Irish-born and long a fixture of the town, on the death of her husband Henry she took over the Grimason House on Princess Street, running it for years as the working heart of Kingston Toryism. It was Macdonald’s unofficial election headquarters, and she among his most steadfast and outspoken supporters — a fierce partisan who, the story goes, could not abide a Grit.

She outlived him by a quarter-century, dying in 1916 amid a great family of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and was buried in the plot beside his at Cataraqui Cemetery, her monument standing taller than his own.

Dr. Michael Sullivan (1838–1915)

Irish-born surgeon and Queen’s anatomy professor who was Mayor of Kingston in 1874–75, the very season of Henry’s diary. He went on to lead the Canadian Medical Association and sit in the Senate.

Wikipedia Entry for Dr. Michael Sullivan

James Richardson (1819–1892)

Irish-born Kingston merchant who founded the grain firm James Richardson & Sons in 1857 and traded from the Commercial Wharf at the foot of Princess Street. A Conservative alderman and friend of Macdonald, he was the founder of a family that would become almost synonymous with Kingston itself.

The Richardsons grew from his grain trade into one of Canada’s great commercial dynasties, and for generations after him they were a byword in the city for commerce, society, and philanthropy — their gifts long a part of Queen’s University, Kingston General Hospital, and the waterfront.

Dictionary of Canadian Biography: James Richardson

Lucretia Gildersleeve (1826–1909)

The diary’s ‘Miss Gildersleeve,’ eldest daughter of Henry Gildersleeve, the shipwright who helped build the Frontenac — the first Canadian steamboat on Lake Ontario, launched in 1816 — and went on to found the Kingston steamboat line that carried the family name. His was one of the great Lake Ontario shipping fortunes, and the Gildersleeves remained foremost in Canadian steamboating for three generations.

Lucretia was mistress of the family mansion at King and Johnson Streets, sat on the committee of the Kingston Orphans’ Home that governed it in 1875, and was a lifelong St. George’s parishioner.

Sir George Airey Kirkpatrick (1841–1899)

Kingston-born lawyer and the county’s Conservative member of Parliament from 1870, later Speaker of the House of Commons and Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario. He inherited the Frontenac County seat from his father, Thomas Kirkpatrick, who had become Kingston’s first mayor in 1838, and was also Frontenac’s first member in the House of Commons after Confederation.

In the diary, Kirkpatrick and his family belong to the King Street society that gathers at the Gildersleeve soirée.

Dictionary of Canadian Biography: Sir George Airey Kirkpatrick

The Carruthers Family

A prosperous Scottish-Presbyterian mercantile family of the city — grocers, wholesalers, and ship-owners led by John Carruthers (pictured).

He built the original Annandale in the 1840s — a villa on Sydenham Street and named for the Scottish district he came from — and was a mainstay of Chalmers Church and of Queen’s. Liberals in a Tory town, they were no strangers to its first rank: John Carruthers three times stood against Sir John A. Macdonald and came within seventeen votes of unseating him. Mrs. Carruthers sat with Lucretia Gildersleeve on the 1875 committee of the Orphans’ Home — that much is record. In the diary, Henry keeps the Carruthers accounts at the Bank, and Mr. Carruthers is among the guests at the Gildersleeve soirée.

Professor John Hugh Mackerras (1832–1880)

Professor of Classics at Queen’s College from 1864, remembered as “the Martyr of Queen’s” for the fundraising tours that saved the university and broke his health.

In the diary he is Henry’s old professor — it is a book returned to Mackerras that puts Henry on the Summerhill path where he first sees Annie Muckleston reading Tennyson.

Queen’s Encyclopedia: John Hugh Mackerras

The Very Rev. James Lyster, LL.D. (1810–1891)

Irish-born clergyman and Trinity College Dublin graduate, formerly Dean of Leighlin, who came to Kingston in 1864 as Dean of Ontario and Rector of St. George’s Cathedral.

He held the post until 1885, presiding over the cathedral throughout the book’s 1870s.

Wikipedia Entry: Dean of Ontario

Major D. T. Irwin (1843–1928)

De la Cherois Thomas Irwin, an Irish-born Royal Artillery officer who had placed fourth in the entire British Army on the Staff College examinations. In 1873 he became Commandant of the School of Gunnery and Officer Commanding “A” Battery at Kingston, the post he held through the book’s 1875.

He rose to be Inspector of Artillery for the Dominion and, in 1883, the first Commanding Officer of the Regiment of Canadian Artillery, building the coastal defences of Victoria along the way. He was made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG), and ranks ever since among the founding “Great Gunners” of the Royal Canadian Artillery.

The Royal Canadian Artillery Museum: D. T. Irwin

Mrs. E. D. Hazeltine

A travelling “clairvoyant physician” who advertised consultations in Ottawa at the time of the book (two dollars a sitting, prescriptions free) — the kind of travelling mystic who would also have visited Kingston. She offered counsel on health and personal affairs as much as any word from the departed — one of many such figures in Victorian Canada, where Spiritualism spread quickly amid the losses of epidemic and war, and where mediumship was among the few callings that let a woman earn a professional fee and travel on her own authority.

In the diary she is the clairvoyant Henry consults in Barriefield; of her origins and her later life, nothing survives.

Miss Dunlop

Mary Dunlop, boarding-house keeper — a daughter of a Wolfe Island family, she kept one of the houses the 1875 city directory listed under its own column of ‘Boarding Houses,’ at 142–144 Wellington, keeping boarders being one of the few respectable livings open to a single or widowed woman. She married in 1880 and gave up the house, though her sisters carried the family’s boarding trade on for decades after.

In the diary Henry lodges with a Miss Dunlop on Gore Street — not Wellington, but very much the same world: the rented room and the place at a landlady’s table that was home to the town’s clerks, students, and shopmen of no property. Hers is the kind of establishment, and she the kind of woman, that gave Kingston’s unattached young men a roof.

Edward John Barker Pense (1848–1910)

Kingston-born grandson of Whig founder Edward John Barker, he joined the Daily British Whig in 1862 and took ownership in 1872, making it the city’s Liberal voice. He was Mayor of Kingston in 1881, a long-serving alderman and school-board chairman, president of the Canadian Press Association, and later the city’s Liberal member in the Ontario legislature.

In the book’s frame it is Pense who, in 1906, recovers Henry’s journal from the Bank of Montreal vault and serialises it in the Whig — the editor’s hand that first brings the diary to light.

Wikipedia Entry: Edward John Barker Pense

W. Rupert Davies (1879–1967)

Welsh-born publisher who bought the Daily British Whig in 1925 and merged it the following year with the Kingston Daily Standard — the city’s Conservative daily — to create the Kingston Whig-Standard. He was appointed to the Senate in 1942 and was the father of the novelist Robertson Davies. His son Arthur built Llynlea in 1963 on the former back terrace of Alwington House — the vanished Government House of Kingston’s capital years.

In the book’s frame it is Davies who reprints the recovered journal in 1941, adding the note that reproduces the torn leaf — the later editor who returns the record to print a second time.

Wikipedia Entry: Rupert Davies