Frustrated by his contemporaries' failure to acknowledge his literary accomplishments, John Richardson argued near the end of his life that Canada, alone among nations, offered no honors to its writers. In a bitter message to future generations, Richardson asks in Eight Years in Canada (1847) "that should a more refined and cultivated taste ever be introduced into the matter-of-fact country in which I have derived my being, its people will decline to do me the honor of placing my name in the list of their 'Authors'. I certainly have no particular ambition to rank among their future 'men of genius', or to share in any posthumous honor they may be disposed to confer upon them." In death as in life, Richardson's wishes have been denied, and he is now honored not only as an important nineteenth-century journalist and historian but also as the major novelist of pre-Confederation Canada and...