Date Published:
August 2004

L’Encyclopédie de l’histoire du Québec / The Quebec History Encyclopedia

George MacKinnon (George M.) Wrong

(1860-1948)

Damien-Claude Bélanger

Department of History

McGill University

Historian and clergyman, was born Grovesend, Canada West. He was educated at the universities of Toronto, Oxford, and Berlin. The son of a failed Elgin County farmer, Wrong lived for a time with relatives in Toledo, Ohio. He returned to Canada as a teenager and found employment in a Toronto bookstore. Shortly thereafter, he converted to evangelical Anglicanism. In 1879 he enrolled in theology in the University of Toronto's low-church Wycliffe College and was ordained in the Anglican ministry in 1883. For the next nine years he was a lecturer in history and apologetics at Wycliffe College. His 1886 marriage to Sophia, the daughter of Edward Blake, leader of the Canadian Liberal Party and Chancellor of the University of Toronto, signalled his entry into high society. In 1894 he was appointed professor and head of the University of Toronto's Department of History, a position he would hold until his retirement in 1927. He was one of the founders of the Champlain Society. He also founded, in 1897, the Review of Historical Publications Relating to Canada, and was the founding editor of its successor publication, the Canadian Historical Review, from 1920 to 1927. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1908. From 1914 to 1916 he co-edited the thirty-two-volume Chronicles of Canada Series. An anglophile and an imperialist - he was a founding member of the Round Table movement in Canada -, George M. Wrong played key role in the development of the historical profession in English-speaking Canada. His interest in Canadian-American relations found its expression in two books: The United States and Canada: A Political Study (1921) and Canada and the American Revolution: The Disruption of the First British Empire (1935). He attended the 1935 conference on Canadian-American relations organized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.