Anglo-Canadian Imperial Relations in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

Rudyard Kipling, who lived from 1865 to 1936, was like Winston Churchill winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and he is particularly famous for his short stories and poems and a literary canon that is associated with covering issues of British imperialism and colonialism, especially accounts of British soldiers. Kipling did manage to capture some political and economic issues of imperial relations, and one successful attempt at this for Anglo-Canadian relations was his poem Our Lady of the Snows, published in The Times (London) on 27 April 1897. The words ‘Daughter am I in my mother’s house, But mistress in my own.’ were carried in the first and final stanzas of the poem and cleverly defined the relationship between Canada and the ‘mother country’, Great Britain, towards the end of the nineteenth century. However, the more particular reason for the poem was Canada’s favoured trade policy with Great Britain and a more obscure border dispute in South America, where Canada favoured Great Britain and support for British Guiana, over that of the United States and Venezuela. French-Canadian Wilfrid Laurier, Prime Minister of Canada from 11 July 1896 to 6 October 1911, was to use the above lines from Kipling’s poem in the Canadian House of Commons on more than one occasion, particularly in discussions on the British Empire and to suggest there was Canadian autonomy in relations with Great Britain.²

‘Daughter am I in my mother’s house, But mistress in my own.’

(Our Lady of the Snows by Rudyard Kipling)¹