THOMAS CHANDLER HALIBURTON'S 'MACHINE IN THE GARDEN': APPLYING LEO MARX'S CRITICISM OF AMERICA TO HALIBURTON'S CLOCKMAKER

In a recent symposium, Robert L. McDougall has puzzled over T.C. Haliburton's being a reactionary tory and yet an advocate of technological progress: "How come ... we find this [early nineteenth-century Nova Scotian writer] whose notion of Utopia seems to be an agrarian economy, stable to the point of inertia and supported by an industrious yeomanry benevolently watched over by country squires—how come such a man takes such an interest in building railways and moving things around?"' McDougall believes that Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America may point the way to an answer: and so with Marx in mind, McDougall decides that Haliburton was "not more American but more North American than I had thought him to be," for he takes Haliburton's preoccupation with "technology and communications" to be "American" or "North American." Thus in Haliburton's opening sketch of The Season's Ticket (1860), McDougall sees an American's faith that technology, railways, shipping lanes and harbours can bind the Eastern and Western provinces of British North America together and further (shades of Whitman's "Passage to India") can join them beyond to the East, "China, Japan, the Sandwich Islands, Australia and Hong Kong" (156). But McDougall also points beyond this to the "big" side of Haliburton's toryism: "The vision is of course suffused with Haliburton's imperial ardour: these will be British routes, made safe for com- merce by a great navy" (156).