Date Published:
June 2006

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

The Winning of Canada

A Chronicle of Wolfe

Bibliographical Note

WOLFE is one of the great heroes in countless books of modern British history, by far the greatest hero in the many books about the fight for Canada, and the single hero of four biographies. It was more than a century after his triumphant death before the first of these appeared : The Life of Major-General James Wolfe by Robert Wright. A second Life of Wolfe appeared a generation later, this time in the form of a small volume by A. G. Bradley in the 'English Men of Action' series. The third and fourth biographies were both published in 1909, the year which marked the third jubilee of the Battle of the Plains. One of them, Edward Salmon's General Wolfe, devotes more than the usual perfunctory attention to the important influence of sea-power; but it is a sketch rather than a complete biography, and it is by no means free from error. The other is The Life and Letters of James Wolfe by Beckles Willson.

The histories written with the best knowledge of Wolfe's career in Canada are : the contemporary Journal of the Campaigns in North America by Captain John Knox, Parkman's Montcalm and Wolfe, and The Siege of Quebec and the Battle of the Plains of Abraham by A. G. Doughty and G. W. Parmelee. Knox's two very scarce quarto volumes have been edited by A. G. Doughty for the Champlain Society for republication in 1914. Parkman's work is always excellent. But he wrote before seeing some of the evidence so admirably revealed in Dr Doughty's six volumes, and, like the rest, he failed to understand the real value of the fleet.

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Source: William WOOD, “Bibliographical Note”, in The Winning of Canada. A Chronicle of Wolfe, Toronto, Glasgow, Brook & Company, 1915, 152p., pp. 147-148.