Although often considered a North American writer, Robert Barr is perhaps more accurately placed in context as a British author. He has been identified as one of the "displaced" writers of the nineteenth century by R. G. Moyles in his English-Canadian Literature to 1900 (1976). From the age of four to the age of twenty-six he lived in Canada, developing his individual perspective, though an early review by Arthur Kimball in an 1896 issue of Book Buyer notes and explains Barr's successfully cosmopolitan outlook as that of "a Scotsman by birth, a Canadian by emigration, an Englishman by long residence, and a man of the world by travel."

Robert Barr was born in Glasgow, 16 September 1850, to Jane Watson Barr and Robert Barr. He was the eldest in a family of eight children. They immigrated to Canada in 1854 on a ship called the Mayflower when Robert was four. The family settled in...