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By Root 1259 0

time and less money to enjoy many of the new civic amenities—the library and music hall of the Mechanics’ Institute on the corner of Adelaide and Church, built in 1854, or the splendid row of new glass-fronted stores on King Street, offering clothing, dry goods, carpets, curtains, books and boots. Agnes spent the fifteen years of her marriage to Charles Fitzgibbon in the usual Victorian cycle of repeated pregnancies, births and intermittent deaths. Four of the eight children born to Agnes and Charles died before they were ten years old. She had some help from a succession of teenage Irish girls (the only domestic servants that the Fitzgibbons could afford), but she could rarely leave home. There were few opportunities for strolling down King Street’s plank sidewalks, or watching games of cricket at the Old Garrison Reserve during the summer, or ice-boating in the harbour in winter. Most of her excursions were walks in the nearby valley of the Humber River, where the children played on the riverbank and she sketched wildflowers. Her mother had taught Agnes how to paint flower pictures when she was a little girl, and Agnes’s skill had quickly surpassed Susanna’s.

Catharine had always had a close relationship with Agnes; aunt and niece got on much better than mother and daughter. Agnes “was always my own dear child when she was a baby,” Catharine confided to her sister Sarah in England. “I always had her with me when dear Susanna was ill or confined, and she has been like one of my very own daughters all her life and very dear to me she is.” It suited Catharine that Agnes Fitzgibbon lived in Toronto, which was starting to rival Montreal as a centre for Canadian publishing. The Fitzgibbon house on Dundas Street had quickly become her base on her occasional trips to Toronto to hustle publishers, and Catharine would moan to Agnes about their reluctance to take on her manuscript unless she could produce better illustrations.

In 1865, Charles Fitzgibbon died, and thirty-two-year-old Agnes was abruptly widowed, with a family to support. “Having only the proceeds of my husband’s life insurance upon which to feed, clothe and educate them, it was necessary for me to replenish my purse before its contents were exhausted,” she later wrote. But her only salable skill was her dexterity with a paintbrush. She decided to put together a volume of flower illustrations, with text provided by Catharine from her lengthy manuscript.

It was a wildly ambitious project. Agnes’s mother and aunt could have thrown cold water on any hope that such a book would make much money. But when Agnes set her mind to something—whether it was marriage when she was only seventeen, or authorship when she had no experience in the book trade—she usually achieved it. Agnes displayed the same Strickland drive that had kept both her mother and her aunt scribbling during their wretched years in the backwoods. She certainly cut a more impressive figure in publishers’ offices than her aunt, whose country-mouse clothes and eagerness to distribute gingerbread recipes were out of place amongst Toronto’s new entrepreneurial elite.

Agnes began by approaching John Lovell, her mother’s publisher in Montreal, to buy the idea of an illustrated volume of Canadian wildflowers. Lovell was a great champion of the need for a vibrant Canadian publishing industry, and he liked Agnes’s determination that her book should be an exclusively Canadian production. He agreed to be the publisher. Next, Agnes co-ordinated efforts to sign up five hundred subscribers for the proposed volume. At five dollars a volume, it was an expensive proposition, but Agnes bullied all her family, friends and acquaintances into agreeing to buy the book before it was even in print. Then she sketched out the ten illustrations required for Catharine’s text and looked around for a printer who could reproduce them by means of the newly developed process of lithography.

Lithography, perfected by the Munich printer Aloysius Senefelder in 1796, was a popular medium amongst nineteenth-century artists such as Goya and