Carr (lower right) about age sixteen, with her sisters(from centre front, clockwise) Alice, Lizzie, Edith, and Clara.
Emily always felt like the black sheep of her family.
1 . Paula Blanchard, The Life of Emily Carr, Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre & Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 1998, p. 129.
Our family had to whiz around Father like a top round its peg.
–Emily Carr, The Book of Small
Emily Carr was born the eighth child in a family of nine. The three older boys all died, so there was a gap of almost twenty years between what she later called “the big family,” of the two oldest girls, Edith and Clara, and the “little family” that consisted of Lizzie, Alice, Emily, and the youngest child, Dick. Dick was always unhealthy and eventually he, too, would die young.
Richard Carr, their father, was born in England. When he made a small fortune as a gold prospector 2
Within a year he set up a thriving business that sold wholesale groceries and liquors on Wharf Street. Nearby, within easy walking distance, he built a splendid new house in fashionable James Bay bordering Beacon Hill Park – a beautiful piece of wild land that overlooked the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
Today, the house at 207 Government Street has been largely restored to how it was in Emily’s day, a handsome yellow two-storey clapboard structure with gracefully arched front windows and a pleasant front porch. For a house of its time it is richly trimmed. From the eaves hang what carpenters call “acorn drops” like long, elegant Christmas balls. From its roof reach up “finials,” like Christmas balls reversed so the effect is the architectural equivalent of a woman wearing her best jewels.
The area in front of the house used to be a large garden that Richard Carr planted to look as much as possible like England. Today, it is a broad drive and parking area. Modern guests are asked to enter the house by the back entrance into what was once the kitchen, but in Emily’s day, a visitor walked up the seven front steps and across the porch to a wide front door whose glass panels looked into the front hallway.
The hallway is not large but is designed to be impressive. Its floor is painted oilcloth, and the walls are wallpaper painted to look like marble. As you stand in the hallway, to your right is the dining room where Emily would later hold art classes for Victoria’s children, and to your left, the parlour where Mrs. Carr and the local ladies sat properly straight-backed for afternoon tea. Throughout the house, tall windows framed by heavy draperies reach almost to the high ceilings. There are lavish mouldings, high baseboards, and heavy mahogany-and-horsehair furniture. Although the family would later be one of the first in Victoria to have electricity installed, above your head in the hallway hangs the original pink kerosene light fixture, suspended by Mr. Carr’s tradesmen from a plaster rosette.
Now go up the stairs. At the top, to your right, is the indoor bathroom installed for Mrs. Carr when she grew sick. On your left are the children’s bedrooms. Up another four stairs and to the right is Mrs. Carr’s bedroom, the one where Emily, her youngest daughter and namesake, was born.
Emily, being “contrary from the start,” was in no hurry. When her mother went into labour it was a cold, stormy day in December. Outside, an icy wind blew, and coal was no doubt steadily poured into the bedroom’s small fireplace. All day the family waited for this stubborn child to come. Finally, at 3:00 a.m. Mr. Carr hurried into his heavy coat and out into the storm to find Nurse Randal, the midwife. The date was December 13, 1871.
Emily’s mother was small, quiet and a little shy with her own children. She had grey eyes like Emily’s, dark hair, and cheeks that Emily always remembered as pink. This was probably the effect of fever, for she was frequently ill and spent days resting in her darkened room, often struggling for breath.
Emily’s father, Richard, was fierce and cranky, and as Victorian men were expected to do, he ruled his large family with a stern eye and an iron temper. When he came home from his store at six o’clock, he strode through the house, frowning if any neighbourhood children or ladies dared still to be visiting. Then he went directly to tend his favourite plant, a huge grapevine that grew on one side of the house. He called the vine Isabella and sometimes Emily thought he doted more on the plant – pruning, pinching and petting it – than he ever did on the human beings inside.
From the time she could talk, Emily was her father’s favourite. He always said she should have been the boy, and he insisted she be with him whenever he was home working in the garden. She passed him bulbs to plant or held the cloth strips he used to tie up Isabella. Every morning Emily walked most of the way into town with him, and every evening she met him to walk him home again.
The family was very religious. There were daily prayers and Bible readings but the most important day of the week was Sunday. On that day, no one worked. By Saturday night the house was polished, Sunday’s food was cooked, and Sunday’s clean clothes pressed and hung out to be aired. All that remained was for the children to be scrubbed. After dinner the big washtub was set in the middle of the kitchen floor and – since there was no running hot water – every kettle and soup pot, including the family wash-boiler, was set to boil. When all the pots were steaming, oldest sister Edith (who the children nicknamed “Dede”) donned her thick white apron, heated the towels, and fetched the brown Windsor soap. Then Mrs. Carr presented each child in turn while Dede scrubbed.
The next morning at 7:00 a.m. precisely, their father woke the children with the announcement, “It’s Sunday, children.” But they could already tell that from the smell of Wright’s coal-tar soap and the camphor in which he stored his very best Sunday clothes.
Sunday was stuffed full of church; there were morning prayers and evening Bible readings, morning Presbyterian service at their father’s church and evening Reformed Episcopal service at their mother’s, with Sunday school (taught by Dede) squeezed in between. At noon, dinner was a cold saddle of mutton roasted the day before in the big oven Richard Carr had brought with him from England – because everything English, he believed, was better than anything Canadian. After dinner, one child was picked to recite the mornings sermon to see how much they remembered. Dede, Lizzie, and Alice always remembered the text. Emily remembered the jokes.
At the very end of the day, Emily struggled to stay awake while her father read a short chapter from Sunday at Home magazine. This was as good as it got because he believed that fairy stories were bad for children.
At school her sisters were all good students, but Emily was often in trouble for not paying attention and for endlessly drawing faces on her fingernails, pinafores, and textbooks. She loved to draw.
One day she stared at the family’s pet dog for a long time. Then she slit open a large
