“neither boy nor man”: Transnational Trade Identity in Canada’s Typographical Trade Press, 1860-1900
type: CreativeWork
description: “‘neither boy nor man’: Transnational Trade Identity in Canada’s Typographical Trade Press, 1860-1900” is situated at the intersection of literary, periodical, print historical, and labour studies. Examining the eight printing trade journals produced in central and eastern Canada during the later nineteenth century (Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick), this project contributes a Canadian dimension to extant scholarship on printing trade journals, which has mostly attended to British and American publications. This study of Canadian printers’ trade journals offers important insights for understanding how the Canadian trade was situated as a node within the printing trade’s transnational network. Journeymen hand typesetters working in the Canadian newspaper trade of the later nineteenth century identified various threats to their aristocratic trade identity: apprentices, amateur labourers, and tramp printers; rising literacy rates and the middle-class worker; women; the work of Black, Indigenous, and Chinese compositors; and the introduction of machines in typesetting. Situating these perceived threats within the context of local and transnational/transatlantic histories of printing, I demonstrate how journeymen used narrative, poetry, correspondence, humour, and visual devices as defensive tools to reinforce and protect the trade’s aristocratic labour identity and to associate the work of typesetting with masculinity, skill, superior intelligence, and whiteness. Due to Canada’s position within the British Empire and its proximity to the United States, the exclusionary discourses that Canadian journeymen compositors cultivated and circulated were shaped by both national and transatlantic labour discourses. Further, I argue that these representational strategies were largely misplaced, given that the actual threats of deskilling and technological unemployment resided not with half-trained compositors, women, and other apparent dangers to the trade, but in the structura…
abstract: “‘neither boy nor man’: Transnational Trade Identity in Canada’s Typographical Trade Press, 1860-1900” is situated at the intersection of literary, periodical, print historical, and labour studies. Examining the eight printing trade journals produced in central and eastern Canada during the later nineteenth century (Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick), this project contributes a Canadian dimension to extant scholarship on printing trade journals, which has mostly attended to British and American publications. This study of Canadian printers’ trade journals offers important insights for understanding how the Canadian trade was situated as a node within the printing trade’s transnational network. Journeymen hand typesetters working in the Canadian newspaper trade of the later nineteenth century identified various threats to their aristocratic trade identity: apprentices, amateur labourers, and tramp printers; rising literacy rates and the middle-class worker; women; the work of Black, Indigenous, and Chinese compositors; and the introduction of machines in typesetting. Situating these perceived threats within the context of local and transnational/transatlantic histories of printing, I demonstrate how journeymen used narrative, poetry, correspondence, humour, and visual devices as defensive tools to reinforce and protect the trade’s aristocratic labour identity and to associate the work of typesetting with masculinity, skill, superior intelligence, and whiteness. Due to Canada’s position within the British Empire and its proximity to the United States, the exclusionary discourses that Canadian journeymen compositors cultivated and circulated were shaped by both national and transatlantic labour discourses. Further, I argue that these representational strategies were largely misplaced, given that the actual threats of deskilling and technological unemployment resided not with half-trained compositors, women, and other apparent dangers to the trade, but in the structura…
author: Pelletier, Sarah Francoise
language: en
date published: 2026
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:34:32Z
provider: Carleton University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Carleton University

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14718/45154

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.22215/etd/2026-16997